Epistemic status: Speculation. An unholy union of evo psych, introspection, random stuff I happen to observe & hear about, and thinking. Done on a highly charged topic. Caveat emptor!
Feel like the very beginning of this is not completely crazy (I’ve also thought in the past that straight people often perform “attractiveness” more for the approval of their same-sex friends) but it seems to kind of jump off the evo-psych deep end after that, lol
Also you can’t build a bunch of assumptions about “we should organize society this way” while ignoring the existence of LGBT people, and then go “yeah I know I ignored them but it simplified my analysis.” Like yeah it simplifies the analysis to ignore a bunch of stuff that actually exists in reality, but… then that means maybe your conclusions about how to structure society are wrong??
edit: also this quote is choice:
I don’t know if this really happens. But even if not, the fiction does a great job of highlighting the dynamic I’m thinking of.
I’m not convinced this person has had any kind of social interaction beyond making purchases in years. I’m equally convinced this person has lived infinite lives in their head with every female service that made the mistake of smiling.
I recognize I’ve been very cis/hetero normative here. I liken this to removing friction from physics. There’s no such thing as actually frictionless physics in the real world (as far as I know)… but friction is derived from principles that are easier to see from the imagined frictionless case.
Okay so in order to explain how the world works you have to remove gay people because the principles are only visible if you remove gay people. Or if you have gay people this whole theory seems like a house of cards?
Heard a joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s cheerful. Says life is enjoyable and pleasant. Says he feels just fine in an unthreatening world. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. The great clown Sneerclub is in town tonight. Go see him. That should fuck you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor… I am the Torment Nexus.” Good joke.
But… I mean, think of a bakery of all (straight) men.
Then think of the same bakery, but it’s all (straight) women.
Then imagine the same bakery, but it’s mixed sex.
Can you see what happens?
no, not really. bakeries you say?
Even if there’s no attraction going on in the last case, the fact that there could be dramatically changes the unspoken dynamics. It’s just not as stable as the other two.
Things like… if a man notices a female coworker struggling with a flour sifter, and he comes in one day with a device he purchased to help her out… it raises questions that just wouldn’t have arisen if the two coworkers had been the same sex.
oh. ok. flour sifters, man, yeah, those things are crazy.
Dude had to specify everyone was straight to get this because yeah in the real world anyone could be attracted to anyone and yeah. Make everyone gay and the situation reverses.
also, if you do this in a bakery you’ll probably get written up for violating food service regulations cause you brought in a random consumer-grade prep item that could’ve easily contaminated everything with bacteria or allergens. plus if you procure the item through work, everyone gets to use it instead of just you and the coworker you’re trying to fuck on top of a birthday cake???
but “I got written up for an obvious health code violation” hits a lot different from “woe is men, everything is sexual harassment now”
I just can’t get over the “struggling with a flour sifter” bit. Like … what’s there to struggle with? What accessory would help a person locked in combat with a flour sifter? Another flour sifter, to intimidate the first with the knowledge that it can be replaced?
felt like it started off relatively normal, gradually got weirder and more reactionary, and then the bakery bit was where it was clear this dude is from another planet. imagine a bakery… but with both men and women in it. imagine the roiling, all consuming sexual tension. fuck! we can’t handle this
@sc_griffith It's true. The bakery just down the road has both male and female staff and it's really pretty inconvenient that every time I go in I have to ask if they'd mind taking a quick break from the constant fucking in order to serve me. And don't mention the time I asked if they had "a couple of nice floury baps for me".
I don't know, I worked at a Dunkin' Donuts when they still did baking in store, and there were male and female employees. I'm not saying there was NO fucking going on, but I wasn't lucky enough to witness any let alone participate.
Wouldn’t a Hallmark movie be about a young woman from the big city who finds love and fulfillment when she has to return to her small hometown and manage the local bakery, including the wacky antics of its mixed-sex staff?
There’s one guy she immediately doesn’t like. He has broad shoulders and dark stubble and he doesn’t trust her big city ways. “You don’t understand how we do things out here in Pastryton,” he tells her, when she demands the staff wear hairnets and stop making out over the macarons display. Then one day, he sees her struggling with the flour sifter and…
“Hey,” Blakeston said, “thought you could use a hand.” Rachel looked up from the flour sifter and her eyes widened. Blakeston was holding a large, complicated looking assemblage of tubes, with fans over one end. Could it be…
“You have a flour sifting accessory?” Rachel asked, her voice stunned. “Those are impossible to find!”
“I know,” Blakeston said, “it took weeks to find this one and another few weeks to fix it up. I just couldn’t see you struggling with the old flour sifter day after day. Here, I’ll set it up.” Rachel moved aside and Blakeston stepped in, straining as he pushed the assemblage into her flour sifter. His strong muscles glistened under the skin of his forearms. How have I never noticed that before? Rachel thought.
Blakeston stood up, assemblage complete, and turned the crank once - just once. The fans whirred, the tubes rattled, and just like that, the flour was sifted.
When Rachel got home that night, she didn't check the feed of glitzy Pâtisserie Sophistiqué as she had every night since Diana Moon Clampers had stolen both her dream job & her man. Usually she sobbed over images of flaky, girlish choux pastry arranged by female pâtissières. One awful night there'd been a pic of Diana hoisting an exquisitely feminine mille-feuille—standing with Rachel's ex Logan from their brother boulangerie, hoisting a manly baguette.
I’m only here for the love triangle episodes with the gruff but lovable bakery owner portrayed by Nathan Fillion who’s not yet over the heartbreak of his wife’s passing (crushed by unsifted flour) but I can fix him
As Rachel unlocked the door to Chez Mixte the next day, she felt something different. At first, she couldn’t figure out what. Everything that had appeared antiquated and unsophisticated now had a special glow. She had once looked at pastries like Blake’s orteils de gopher, which had been setting overnight, and thought them no better than animal crackers. Now, they seemed full of animal passion.
For the first time, she picked one up and bit into it. Flaky, and Blake’s cream tasted so good on her tongue. Sweet, but not too sweet. A thought popped into her head. Blake had started posting gym selfies five weeks ago. That was about when he had started looking for a flour sifting accessory. Had he been trying to… impress her?
Rachel's mind raced back to her last day in Manhattan, her sophisticated friends pleading with her not to go. "What's out there for you?" cried Marcie. "Some flannel-wearing mountain man who doesn't know a microplane from a microwave?"
Now Rachel couldn't stop picturing Blake in his favorite flannel shirt, handling the cast iron æbleskiver pan as deftly as if it were made of aluminum, handing a fluffy pastry to little Olive Jones, the orphan in foster care who was peering in the bakery window.
Thinking about Rachel made Blake as hard as a Rubik's Cube. But Rubik's Cubes are only hard if you don't know the trick, and Blake knew the trick. He could solve a Rubik's Cube in 5.9 seconds. It was not the only thing Blake could do in 5.9 seconds, Rachel noted approving.
Blake couldn't stop thinking about Rachel. He wanted to make a life-sized replica of her out of Legos, then take it apart piece by piece and put it back together, making it better. Maybe making her fifteen feet tall and able to shoot lasers out of her eyes. But not hotter. Blake didn't know how to make her any hotter.
Blake was so interested in Rachel cladistically. "If my priors are correct, there's a 98.3% chance you want me," Blake said suggestively. "That's good enough for me."
"Oh yes! I want you with all my gene pool!" she exclaimed. Blake's priors were correct. Her bakery had finally found meaning.
Blake had never felt the way he felt about Rachel about anyone since that time he showed Kayla how to strafe in Purple Heart 2. He still remembered the feel of his big, manly hands gently touching her controller, pressing her buttons expertly. They strafed together all afternoon, gigglingly. He had a manly giggle. But that was before he learned how to really sift flour. It takes a tough man to make flour smooth as silk.
Rachel wanted to make pastries with Blake more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. She didn't know if they would make a big handsome croissant or some cute little danishes, but at this point she didn't care. Her gastronomical clock was ticking.
Just like how in Minecraft if you line two chests up next to each other you make a big chest, Rachel's two breasts lined up perfectly to make a big chest. "She's at the peak of evolutionary fitness!" Blake thought through his masculine flannel hat. It made him proud to be a mammal.
Blake couldn't wait to rip Rachel's bodice. He turned on his computer so that he could Google where the bodice would be located. He wanted to be prepared. It was good that the Internet had finally come to Pastryton.
Suddenly, inspiration hit Blake like a deer hits the grill of a mint condition Chevy on a foggy night. "Boda" was Spanish for wedding. "Bodice" was probably French for wedding-thing. You needed to know a lot of French to be an expert baker. But Blake didn't have a whole lot of other opportunities to use his French in Pastryton. He hoped Rachel would like him using his French on her. All of his French. On her.
Finally, Blake couldn't resist a second more. It was not when he planned it, but he couldn't hold it in any longer. Blake spontaneously popped the question! "Do you like Harry Potter and/or rational thinking? Do you want to be less wrong?"
"Yes!" Rachel cried out with her whole soul. "Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes!" She tackled him and they rolled around for an hour. It was amazing how femininely she could roll and how masculinely he could roll and how perfectly they rolled together, like two ball bearings milled for the same track. They rolled on the thing she had put down on the grass for them to have their picnic upon. Blake wasn't sure whether it was supposed to be a tablecloth or a blanket. The pattern on it looked more like gingham than flannel, but he wasn't an expert. He would have to ask his sister about it. But that could wait for later. When he was done rolling.
Rachel looked essentially identical to almost every other adult female Homo sapiens. There were trivial deviations here and there but everything was clearly within normal parameters. It was a pattern that evolution had programmed Blake to like. And he liked it very much indeed.
Why has my life lead up to being perfectly prepared to write parody Less Wrong romance fiction instead of something... I don't know ... beneficial to humanity?
Yes, and the whole phrasing, combined with the theme and title, typical semantic field of the socalled “schizoposter” (abhorrent euphemism for “bit of a weird nazi”)
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