"The non-fungibility of romance"

[tim]

What graydon2 wrote about the non-fungibility of romance is really, really good. As usual, I really like the way he thinks.

Excerpt:

It would be like demanding someone sing a song with you. It would be like demanding someone laugh at your joke. It would be like demanding someone wants to bake cookies with you. These are all excellent things to enjoy mutually with someone else, that lots of people like to do, but that require mutual interest. They are all adjacent to much-more-readily available commodity experiences -- you can sing along to a recording, you can watch a funny film and laugh, you can buy and eat a bag of cookies -- but the mutual version, if you want it, is different. Noticeably different, and completely non-commodity. Every sing-along is its own thing. Sometimes all we can get is the commodity thing. Sometimes it's all we can handle, or all we want. Complaints about "nice guy" behaviour are not complaints about men wanting sex. They're about context.

Of course, a lot of guys do literally demand that people laugh at their jokes. "It was just a joke. Don't be so thin-skinned. Get a sense of humor."

Anyway, I wonder how much consumer capitalism has to do with the idea that if you can pay someone to have sex with you, then you should also be able to pay somebody to have genuine mutual intimacy with you.

Comments

[luinied]

This reminds me of how many people I know who, despite seeming like very sensible people who don't agree with the shit being called out in that post, nevertheless fuckinng love Slate Star fucking Codex. So I think this shared dislike of ours is what's going to push me over the fence towards following Graydon.