Hi Ryan,
thanks for your E-mail.
On Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:13:41 -0700 Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 3/24/13 6:32 AM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
And all that while not depriving themselves of sexuality and sexiness among members of the appropriate sexes (MOTAS), in part because being sexually attractive (and naturally - not only physically) is indicative of competence and values, rather than the opposite as was sometimes implied recently.
You had me up until this point. How is being sexually attractive indicative of competence and values? By this logic, only Miss/Mr. Universe winners should run for President.
<A bit of a guy/celebrity/sex talk here - proceed with care and please don't ban me>
Well, this is a bit polarising. First of all, I'm not a big fan of beauty pagants like that, in part because a lot of the really attractive (and honest) girls and boys know better than to enroll, and in part because the judging there can be extremely tainted. Instead of judging by beauty alone, you judge by "personality", and a lot of other silly stuff, which yields something incredibly weird.
Anyway, there are more measures to being sexually attractive than taking first place at a silly "competitive" contest, and not every Alpha Female or Alpha Male would be a suitable president or governor or even mayor or boss or whatever. Would http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall be a good president? Would http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Grimmie ? Would http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Lawrence ? (They are all American and as far as I know - were born on American soil) They have all achieved tremendous things by now (the latter two despite their youth and despite being female), but it takes more than that.
And speaking for myself, I would rather have either Ms. Grimmie or Ms. Lawrence as my girlfriend (and I think most truly competent men like me would too) than the winner of Miss Universe, which I daresay I proudly admit I don't recall the name of any of the recent ones, and never cared too to see it). And for the record, I've seen and met women who were far more beautiful than both Grimmie and J. Lawrence, but that doesn't make them any less attractive, simply because when choosing a significant other, I care about much more than looks (despite the typical stereotype about men).
Anyway, what I'm trying to say? Thing is there's more than just looks that can make you attractive and that includes your skills. It may seem farfetched, but having had a conversation with my cousins' cousin (who is a very cute female, and not a software developer) about various stuff, I ended up mentioning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shlomif/Freecell_Solver , which is a solver for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCell and other solitaire games, and she went on to ask me about its general algorithm and its evolution (which made me feel important and coveted).[Freecell]
The whole thing of "you need to love me for who I am" is ridiculous, because a sexually attractive person is competent, has achieved quite a lot since he matured, and will likely achieve more (and probably at a bigger capacity) in the future. I'm not attracted to Christina Grimmie because of her looks, as much as I am because of her wonderful singing, her great videos, her honesty and humility in conveying her whereabouts, thoughts, feelings, strengths and faults; her relentness quest to improve herself and her work from her earlier videos; her positive and effective way of marketing herself; and her kindness and support of fellow musicians and artists who are either not as successful as her (at least not yet), or who are more mainstream (at least for now - ;-)). And she only turned 19 recently, at which age, back in 5 May 1996, I only graduated out of high school, worked at a few low-paying jobs as a software developer, and didn't finish writing the more permanent draft of my first serious story ( http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/TheEnemy/ if you must know. ), which I haven't published online for many years, and didn't even have any web site at any location. And the only videos I published by now on YouTube were two screen recordings of Freecell deals getting solved automatically, while reusing Creative Commons music as the background (here - http://www.youtube.com/user/ShlomiFish/videos?view=0 - one of them got 3,003 views and 5 likes, and two comments from a friend, which I'm still content with.).
Thing is: I don't want to get involved with females who are 100% my fan girls or groupies (and probably not very competent), but rather with women who are competent on their own right, and have a lot for me to look up to, admire - and find attractive.
Of course, different men (and women) find different women attractive. I was much more attracted to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_Summers on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer_%28TV_series%29 than I was to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Rosenberg , but many men and women whom I talked with seem to have found her more attractive. (And retrospectively, I can say that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_%28Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer%29 was purely awesome. ) Similarly, I at first believed that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milady_de_Winter was what Neo-Tech calls a "mystic" or "neocheater", a person who is lazy, incompetent, destructive and pitiful, similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Nemo or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra , until I realised that despite being the typical antagonist / "bad girl" - she was part of the ultimate good in the story and was sexy, resourceful, and intelligent - sort of like Faith only in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Musketeers .
( It's too bad many authors and writers of fiction wish their antagonists bad luck and make them die or get out of sight by various means, and I hope I didn't duplicate this mistake in my own stories, where the antagonists end up living happily. )
Similarly, I mostly perceived http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Joan_Hart as "cute" rather than "hot" or "sexy", based on the characters she portrayed, but someone I talked with on IRC said she was "a hottie".
Of course, my perceptions are subject to change. I recall a fellow female student I studied with in the Technion who had a cute face, wore glasses, kept her hair in a pony tail, and tended to wear something similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OshKosh_B%27Gosh , and in general had what I call the tomboy look, and whom I perceived as cute rather than sexy. However, after she agreed on her and me becoming partners for a course about algorithms, she turned out to be competent in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science and also was able to competently cope with my inability to contribute to our last homework sheet ( due to a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomania ). This made me quite attracted to her, and then the semester luckily ended, in part because she was off limits to me due to the fact that she: 1. Already had a boyfriend, and 2. Smoked cigarettes.
I hope you get my wave, and sorry for the stream of consciousness.
What I was trying to say is that: 1. Sexual attractiveness is indicative of competence. 2. Sexual attractiveness is a function of much more than looks for most men like me. 3. Some men may consider physical looks important for a relationship (like me). Other men can see past that (and good for them). 4. There are many sexy heroes and heroines and they vary in their fitness and abilities for various tasks. [Abilities] 5. Those who win some beauty "race-for-the-1st-place", such as Miss Universe, are not likely to be the most competent, or even most coveted, females or males around (so-called "Alpha females" and "Alpha males"), just like most of the lauretes of Nobel prizes in physics, did not win some silly physics contest (and there were something like ten Nobel prize lauretes who all came from a few classes in two high schools in Budapest, Hungary.)
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
<Footnotes> [Freecell] I explain why Freecell has been big business in Israel here: http://blogs.perl.org/users/shlomi_fish/2013/03/ann-my-transition-from-softw...
Quoting:
<quote> Some people told me that my solver for Freecell and other solitaire games, simply called Freecell Solver is useless, but it's not - it's just a niche program. And I received hundreds of E-mails about it. Furthermore, given that Freecell is (or used to be) a big phenomenon in Israel, where many boys and girls starting from 18 found themselves playing it on the Israeli military computers out of boredom, then the fact that I have written a solver for it, has impressed many people I talked with or met, including some attractive (both physically and intellectually) young ladies (or what people may refer to as "hot chicks"), and they ended up asking me about how it was written, and which algorithms it employed.
So Freecell Solver was one of my most successful programs, not despite being a niche program, but because of it. Niche programs own. Not only that, but niche everything is great. Many people whom I referred to my stories helped themselves to the screenplay Star Trek: "We, the Living Dead" because it contained Star Trek in the name, and because there are quite a few fans of the Star Trek franchise and worlds. </Footnotes> </quote>
[Abilities] I can write very well, and am a good software developer, and capable at maths, and have many other skills. But I'm not likely to win a martial arts fight against a competent martial artist, and I'm not sure I will make a good boss, prime minister of Israel, governor of New York and/or California, or president of the United States (but I'll be happy to consult for competent men who will fill this position), and it will take me a lot of time and effort to record even a half-decent video on YouTube. In Dumas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Musketeers , Louis XIII delegates the task of actually managing France to his prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, not because Louis XIII was not a good and competent man, but because he knew that Richelieu was better for that task.
</Footnotes>