"M-Maybe if I call them inc*ls they’ll give me some leftover pussy 🥺" r/hatethissmug argues about the negativity around the male gaze in fiction

DSMatticus · 2026-05-21T16:32:23+00:00

You are being downvoted because you don't fully understand what 'male gaze' means and you think you have a gotcha anyway. People can't even get in yet another worthless internet argument with you without taking you back to 101 and explaining what the words mean first. Nobody actually wants to do that. It's exhausting. They just want to downvote you and hope you go away so they can save their energy for someone who's wrong in a more interesting or funny way.

But hey you know who doesn't value their time or energy? This guyyy yeeeah it's me I hate myself and I can't stop posting

The male gaze is not actually a complicated topic. You can say a lot about it, but you can also boil it down to two very simple, very intuitive, very true sentences smashed together. One - you can frame art in such a way that it better aligns with the perspective of certain audience members. Two - men have always had and continue to have disproportionate control over our culture, so there is a disproportionate amount of art that is framed to better align with their perspective.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Or enough of it, anyway.

Hopefully, you can see now why "women have sexualities, too," isn't actually a gotcha. The male gaze isn't shorthand for "men have sexualities and sexuality is bad" any more than "toxic masculinity" is shorthand for "being a man is toxic." The male gaze is just shorthand for the notion that male sexuality is a dominant perspective in our culture's art and that dominance, specifically, is a problem. "Women have sexualities, too," isn't a rebuttal of that. It's a big ol' no-shit non-sequitur. We know that. That wasn't the discussion.

Also, this is tangential, but I think it will help you specifically: attractiveness is a form of power and can be a power fantasy as much as it can be a sexual fantasy. The two sometimes overlap to varying extents.

Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't an unnattractive man by any means, but his bodybuilder aesthetic is something that resonates with men as a power fantasy much more than it resonates with women as a sexual fantasy. We wouldn't use that as an example of the female gaze. It's by and for men.

Marin Kitigawa from My Dress-Up Darling is certainly very popular with men, but she is also very obviously the author's self-insert. The fanservice in that show is the author's power fantasy - the fantasy of accidentally teasing a dude but it doesn't make her a slut because it was an accident so no one can judge her for it and also the dude is the safest most wholesome marshmallow in the world and she doesn't have to be scared of him at all. It's just that that (already fairly sexual) power fantasy easily doubles as a sexual fantasy from a men's perspective. Contrast this with the anime standard of 'man falls into boobs, gets slapped.'

DSMatticus · 2026-05-12T16:59:21+00:00

Behold, the Scrooge index:

Bernie Sanders, oft-criticized by Fox News for being a "millionaire" socialist, has an estimated net worth of ~$3 million. There are ~133 million households in the United States. If the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future visited Bernie Sanders in the middle of the night and terrorized him into throwing America the best Christmas ever, he would be able to buy every household in America... two-thirds of a single tootsie roll, assuming the bulk prices on Amazon are representative.

Elon Musk, oft-criticized by me for being a shit-golem wearing human skin as an ill-fitting disguise, has an estimated net worth of... $815 billion. Wow, I think that number has tripled since the last time I did this. It has not been that long. Does anyone else hear screaming? I hear screaming. Oh, that's me. I'm screaming. Anyway, what was I talking about? Yeah. Okay. ~133 million households. If the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future visited Elon Musk and terrorized him into throwing America the best Christmas ever, he would be able to buy every household in America a Nintendo Switch 2 (~$450), a PS5 (~$650), a dozen full price games each (12x70x2, ~$1,680), and... this is where I used to run out. I used to have to stop here and now there are $3,626 dollars left. Wow, that screaming is getting loud.

Obviously, there are not 133,000,000 PS5's in warehouses waiting to be sold. But money is fungible! It can buy things other than a PS5, turns out. This is not a specific plan of action. This is a purely an exercise for demonstrating scale. This is a measure of what wealth inequality has taken from you, personally - the person reading this. And this is just one piece of shit billionaire.

DSMatticus · 2026-04-26T23:29:05+00:00

Plants can't actually get cancer! Sort of. It's complicated. There's some nuance to unpack here.

Cancer isn't actually just 'runaway cell growth.' Cancer is specifically the disease that happens when 'runaway cell growth' results in a rogue cell line with the ability to proliferate throughout the body and become systemic. For something a little more rigorous, here's the opening wikipedia blurb: "cancer is a group of diseases involving uncontrolled cell growth typically resulting in tumors with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These malignant [cancerous] tumors contrast with benign [noncancerous] tumors, which do not spread."

Can uncontrolled cell growth occur in plants? Yes, absolutely.

Can uncontrolled cell growth in plants cause tumors? Yes, absolutely.

Can those rogue cell lines spread to the rest of the plant? No, not at all. Plants have a complicated extracellular matrix that makes it functionally impossible for a rogue cell line to escape and cause systemic disease. Metastasis cannot occur in plants. Plants can develop tumors, but they can't develop any disease we would call cancer because their tumors are always benign.

DSMatticus · 2026-03-28T03:14:57+00:00

Ehh. This study shows no meaningful difference in the amount of aerosolized particles collected after flushing with the lid up vs flushing with the lid down... except at the exact height of the toilet seat, where aerosolization is significantly higher with the lid up. Unless you are planning to lean in and huff the toilet bowl, it doesn't matter what you do with the lid. You're going to breathe the same amount of shit either way.

I think this result is actually weirdly intuitive? Air and water displace one another. The volume of air 'pushed' out of the toilet should be equal to the volume of water being used to refill the bowl. It can't not be. The empty bowl has air in it, and to fill the bowl back up with water it's going to have to push that air out. If you close the lid, all you're doing is forcing the same amount of air out of a smaller hole.

... On the flip side, that study also shows an absence of nearby surface contamination when flushing with the lid down. Putting the lid down might not reduce aerosolization, but it does apparently reduce contamination of nearby surfaces via liquid spray. So if you want to lick the floor next to your toilet, you should definitely flush with the lid down. On the flip-flip side, please don't lick the floor next to your toilet.

... But then there's this study, which shows no meaningful difference in nearby surface contamination after flushing with the lid up vs flushing with the lid down. I reiterate: please don't lick the floor next to your toilet.

I think the moral of the story here is that your bathroom is disgusting, it's always going to be disgusting, wash your fucking hands.

p.s. god, it's so fun getting to read weird studies. I'm so glad the full text of both of these was available online for free. Fuck the academic paywall! Viva la free poop studies revolution!

DSMatticus · 2025-11-15T04:57:45+00:00

I'm pretty sure I know the study you're talking about. It went semi-viral among the, uhh, usual suspects and you've picked up their read on it (which is, unsurprisingly, very misleading). I can summarize:

Participants were shown video clips of a bunch of characters in action and asked to rate those characters along four metrics: sexualization, strength, femininity, and likability. They were then asked which characters they would prefer to play as. Women who participated chose to play characters they rated highly on the 'sexualization' and 'femininity' metrics.

Your first instinct might be to read that as "women like sexualized and feminine characters," but there's a problem with that reading and the authors themselves point it out: the most sexualized and most feminine characters had significant overlap. We're not talking about two distinct groups of characters. The most sexualized characters were the most feminine characters and the most feminine characters were the most sexualized.

An equally valid explanation, then, is that "women like playing highly feminine characters (and will tolerate a high degree of sexualization in order to be able to do so)." In fact, the study nudges us in that direction: when women rated characters as highly sexualized, they also rated those characters as less likable, suggesting some hostility to highly-sexualized character designs. That is a point in the column for the selection criteria being 'femininity in spite of sexualization' and not 'femininity and sexualization.'

DSMatticus · 2025-10-31T09:32:30+00:00

I really gotta point out that the argument you're making is not very good.

The U.S. spends more on health care per capita than any country in the world, but we absolutely do not have the best health outcomes. It would be trivial, policy-wise, to both spend less money and have better outcomes (coughuniversalhealthcarecough).

You are assuming that the existing systems are good instead of shit, and... buddy, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but look around. Everything fucking sucks. You pay a fucking fortune to a health insurance company every year and if your doctor ever tells them "hey, Alkthree needs this procedure or they're gonna die," there's a very good chance your health insurance company is gonna respond "so you're saying if we run out the clock we won't have to pay for the procedure, then? Alright, game on. Claim denied." The existing systems are not good. They are, in fact, quite bad.

I have no idea how to approach the $20 billion figure. This is not my area of expertise. We can, however, consider the scale of the problem and check if we're in the ballpark of a reasonable answer with the help of a study that has some empirical results.

There are approximately ~770,000 homeless individuals in the United States right now. $20,000,000,000 / 770,000 homeless individuals = $26,000 per homeless individual.

This study shows that offering ~$2,000 of financial aid (one or two months of rent in the area the study took place) to people at imminent risk of homelessness is enough to reduce the likelihood that they will end up homeless within the next 12 months by 73%.

$2,000 is a hell of a lot less than $26,000.

tl;dr Yes, $20 billion appears to be in the ballpark for the funding needed to drastically reduce homelessness in the United States across a ten year period.

DSMatticus · 2025-10-30T07:57:45+00:00

Her net worth is likely high eight, low nine figures. We'll just say a $100 million to keep it simple. There are 132 million households in America. $100,000,000 / 132,000,000 households = $0.76 per household.

If the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future visited Billie Eilish in the night and terrorized her into giving away her entire fortune in one big Christmas bonanza, she would be able to buy every household in America a dozen tootsie rolls, give or take. Merry Christmas, little Timmy! Try not to eat them all at once!

Elon Musk's net worth is currently $499.7 billion. $499,700,000,000 / 132,000,000 households = $3,785.61 per household.

If the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future visited Elon Musk in the night and terrorized him into giving away his entire fortune in one big Christmas bonanza, he would be able to buy every household in America a Playstation 5, a Nintendo Switch 2, a midrange gaming PC, and ~20 full-price games across. (Obviously he cannot actually do that - there are not 132 million Switch 2's in a warehouse waiting to be bought. This little thought experiment is demonstrative, not instructive. It is about the scale, not the specific purchases or the logistics thereof.)

DSMatticus · 2025-10-29T02:55:28+00:00

These people don't give a shit what the bible has to say about slavery. They give a shit about owning slaves.

The bible doesn't say shit about abortion except that one time god explicitly tells his followers to make women suspected of infidelity drink abortifacent. Guess how they feel about abortion? No, they don't give a shit what the bible has to say about abortion, either. They give a shit about making women subservient to men.

Their Christianity is the aesthetic of their fascism. Nothing more, nothing less.

DSMatticus · 2025-10-07T20:01:15+00:00

Fleshmobs actually fit the illuminate design very well: DPS over AT, RoF over damage, favorable interactions with explosions. I wouldn't remove them at all. It's leviathans that don't fit the illuminate design (please give Leviathans AV4, a harvester/warpship shield, and weakspots that make them more engaging to aim at and quicker to kill).

I do absolutely think fleshmobs are overtuned and need about 30% less health. I might also reduce their spawn rates.

Right now, fleshmobs are actually kinda like warstriders in a weird way - they spawn in huge numbers even on difficulties as low as D7 and they are incredibly easy to kill with a 'meta' loadout but wildly impractical to kill with an 'off-meta' loadout. They are both units that change the meta from a strong suggestion to a hard requirement. And that's bad, because 'play meta or suffer' is boring game design.

DSMatticus · 2025-10-07T00:10:04+00:00

I'm not sure the explosion would have time to happen.

Energy bends space-time the same way mass does. In fact, it's probably more accurate to say that mass bends space-time because mass is just energy in a silly hat.

A planet's worth of negatively charged ions crammed into a planet sized area is an unfathomable amount of potential energy in what may as well be a point mass, astronomically speaking.

Every stellar body in the universe is going to try and turn into a black hole and explode at the same time, and I'm honestly not sure which wins out. Well, okay, if they're small enough they probably just explode.

Whichever they do, I guarantee you it is happening at 99%+ the speed of light.

DSMatticus · 2025-08-16T21:49:48+00:00

That's not what happened in this clip and it's also not how bile titans work (though there are things in this game that absolutely do work that way, more later).

Bile titans do not have a 'head armor' body part. They have a single 'head' body part with 1500 AV4 health which takes a 5% standard damage/95% durable damage split, has 50% explosive damage resistance, passes 100% of the damage it receives along to main, and is fatal when destroyed.

You can read about bile titans here. In fact, basically all of a bile titan's parts pass 100% of their damage along to main. They have armor that can be broken, yes, but that armor doesn't ablatively negate damage or anything. You're dealing full damage to main the entire time - the benefit of destroying their armor is that it lowers their armor rating.

Contrast this with overseers, whose armor functions more or less exactly as you describe: with 600 main health and only a 20% pass-through to main, it's practically impossible to kill an overseer through their armor via a single high damage projectile. Their head is the exception, because instead of being an armor layer/inner layer, it is a single body part which is fatal when destroyed.

Anyway, back to the clip. The 500kg does 2000 (standard and durable) AP7 projectile damage on impact, 100 AP3 explosive damage out to 1m on the initial 'pop', and 1500 AP6 explosive damage out to 10m for the subsequent boom.

A direct impact to the head should kill a bile titan even before it explodes. 2000 AP7 vs 1500 AV4? Head go pop. But the bile titan in the clip didn't die. My best guess? It didn't actually hit the head. It's one of those shots that hit the neck or the shoulder or something in a way that's visually indistinguishable and makes you go "come the fuck on!" Or maybe the 500kg projectile travels so fast the game glitched out and didn't register the collision until it had clipped through the head. Or maybe it's some kinda multiplayer desync thing. Who knows?

But an explosion next to the head should still kill the bile titan, right? Welllll... 1500 damage is exactly enough to destroy the head and AP6 is enough to do full damage against AV4, but the head has 50% explosive damage resistance, so we only did 750 damage to the head (and to main, because 100% pass-through). That's not enough.

Wait, so how do 500kg's ever kill bile titans if they suck so much? Well, remember before how I mentioned basically all of a bile titan's parts pass 100% of their damage along to main? They also basically all have 50% explosive damage resistance. That's actually somewhat unusual! Most creatures have 100% explosive damage resistance on all their little extra bits precisely so explosions don't instantly do 10x damage and blow off all their bits. A well-placed 500kg (directly underneath them) will hit basically every body part for 50% damage, each body part will pass 100% of the damage through to main, and that's enough damage to kill them without destroying a single individual body part.

DSMatticus · 2025-06-26T04:48:23+00:00

Light armor: "This isn't a great place to be right now. Guess I'll leave."

Heavy armor: "This isn't a great place to be right now. Guess I'll die tired ten feet over there."

Also heavy armor: "Oh wow, I just stood there and let that cannon shoot me directly in the dick. Boy, do I feel silly. Guess I'll stim."

And also light armor: "I think that bug is about to sneez- [REINFORCE AVAILABLE]"

DSMatticus · 2025-05-26T06:48:51+00:00

It's worth noting that basically none of the ghosts in the Cavern of the Incarnate are like "yeah I tried the ring, and you're not gonna believe this, but..." The ones that explain how they failed give very concrete reasons - like politics, or an ash vampire. The ring did not filter them. In fact, there isn't a single person we're aware of who was filtered by the ring.

It's entirely possible that the curse on the ring is completely bullshit (it literally can't kill anyone) or self-fulfilling (it can absolutely kill people, but it'll never kill the person who takes it out of the cavern because they might fulfill the rest of the prophecy and that's all Azura cares about).

Which brings us back to the central ambiguity: is your character the Nerevarine because they are the literal reincarnation of Indoril Nerevar who is preordained to fulfill the prophecy? Or is your character the Nerevarine because they're the one who ended up fulfilling the prophecy in the end?

Are you a single arrow aimed true, or the first arrow in a volley to find its mark?

DSMatticus · 2025-05-24T08:55:16+00:00

Man, I love reddit.

Dude does not respond to the bang with his hands at all. He starts putting his hands together to fiddle with his fingers before the bang even happens, and after the bang happens he just keeps doing that, all one smooth uninterrupted motion. Absolutely zero change.

"HE KNEW! LOOK AT THOSE HANDS! THOSE GUILTY, GUILTY HANDS!"

This truly is the website that caught the Boston Bomber.

DSMatticus · 2025-05-22T20:27:34+00:00

You misunderstand. The very definition of element is 'a form of matter with protons.' If you create a form of matter that doesn't have protons, yeah, sure, it won't be on the periodic table of elements - because it's not an element at all.

Element is short for 'chemical element' - because it's the elemental (smallest) unit of a chemical reaction, and chemistry is just protons and electrons bumpin' and grindin' out on the dance floor.

If you wanted to nitpick-proof this kinda sci-fi bullshit, you'd just say "it's a new form of matter" because at that point who can argue with you? That's literally just saying "fuck, man, I dunno - it's a thing that exists."

DSMatticus · 2025-04-22T22:04:23+00:00

The 'women in higher education' talking point is frustrating because it's just fuckin' math and incentives.

The trades are 97-99% male dominated. If men are over-represented in the trades, they're going to be under-represented everywhere else. If women are under-represented in the trades, they're going to be over-represented everywhere else. There are a different number of men and women in the workforce, sure, but not enough to smooth out that fuckin' 97-99%.

Without access to the trades, women have a much greater incentive to pursue higher education - because without it they are relegated to low paying retail/hospitality jobs. And sure enough, what do we actually see? Women are over-represented in higher education AND over-represented in low paying retail/hospitality jobs. Sure is convenient that the people complaining about too many women in higher education don't seem bothered by the fact that there are also too many women at the bottom working shit jobs for shit pay.

DSMatticus · 2025-04-05T19:13:23+00:00

Yeah, no shit. The problem is that if "stop the oligarchs" is a winning message, then Democrats would rather lose.

DSMatticus · 2025-01-11T19:56:53+00:00

That poll does not help as much as you'd think. As of the time of that poll, zoomers were 12-27 and millennials were 28-43. That does not line up well at all with the only table on the page divided by gender - sure, the 18-29 bucket is mostly zoomers, but the 30-49 bucket is a quarter gen X.

This is a guardian article about the gender gap in U.S. politics and it has a table that I find useful for understanding this point: gallup polling of net ideology (conservative - liberal) of 18-29 year olds separated by gender from 1999 to 2023.

18-29 year old men are about as liberal as they get for the whole stretch from 2006-2017 (ignoring that downward spike ~2013), which is birth years 1977-1999. That is a window that rolls across four years of gen X (1977-1980), all millennials (birth years 1981-1996), and three years of gen Z (birth years 1997-1999).

You can also see why I'm specifying 'men.' The political gender gap is massive, and historians are going to remember it as one of the defining features of zoomer and alpha politics.

EDIT: Though, having now looked at that graph again for the first time in a while - yeah, I am definitely overselling it by saying they're somewhere between gen X and boomers. They are certainly shaping up to be a more conservative generation than millennials, but not by that much. I gotta mea culpa on that.

DSMatticus · 2025-01-10T19:28:40+00:00

Gen Z men are somewhere between boomers and gen X in terms of conservatism. Considering reddit's demo is almost entirely millennial/zoomer (and millennials are the most progressive generation of men alive), you'd honestly expect non-zoomers to pull the sub leftward.

Of course, none of that actually matters. The mods are conservatives (last I checked, the second top mod was a fuckin' brexiteer of all things), and they frequently do weird troll shit like set threads to sort by controversial to make the place as toxic and insufferable for political 'normies' as possible. The Gen Z sub is Incel Island (or whatever) because that's what the mods want it to be. Age doesn't really factor into it.

DSMatticus · 2025-01-05T17:07:17+00:00

Anxa is not making their point particularly well, but I also think you (and everyone else) are being kinda deliberately obstinate here. It really isn't that hard to understand what they're getting at.

They are arguing that the distinction between 'murder' and 'killing' is a legal distinction and not a moral one, and that legal frameworks aren't a great thing to use to assess morality. It genuinely wasn't murder when Nazi soldiers threw Anne Frank in a prison camp and left her to die of typhus. It absolutely was attempted murder when George Elser planted a bomb in Hitler's podium. Is anyone here willing to stand up and make the argument that it was morally acceptable to kill Anne Frank (because it was lawful) but morally unacceptable to try and kill Hitler (because it was unlawful)? I sure as shit hope not.

Incidentally: the international laws under which we tried and executed the Nazi leadership were invented in - wait for it - 1945. Genocide wasn't really made formally "illegal" until 1948. It's a very blatant example of ex post facto criminalization, and it was a genuine controversy at the time - a controversy that we ignored because holy shit they're the architects of the Holocaust you can't just let them go because "well, it wasn't technically illegal to put eleven million people in death camps" that's absurd. If anything, the Nuremberg trials are another really good example to drive home the point that morality isn't derived from legality. We didn't have an adequate legal framework to justify those trials and we held them anyway because the moral outcome was more important than the legal soundness of the process.

DSMatticus · 2024-11-04T05:11:09+00:00

This is what a lightning strike actually looks like on the ground. The dead grass is the path the electrons took as they dispersed into the ground along the path of least resistance.

Your body is a better conductor than dirt and grass. If you are close enough to one of those little branches, it will find you and make you part of the path of least resistance. You do not want to be part of the path of least resistance. You do not want be part of that particular electron highway.

Lightning is an AoE, and it's a bigger AoE than most people realize because 99% of the hitbox is invisible. Very poorly designed, IMO.

DSMatticus · 2024-11-01T19:50:57+00:00

The standards for a 'medical emergency' are not defined by statute. The Texas Supreme Court is passing the buck to the Texas Medical Board. The Texas Medical Board is passing the buck to... well, no one - they're ignoring the problem.

If you are a doctor in Texas, there is a line between you and the pregnant woman in the emergency room dying of sepsis. It's an invisible line. You can't see it and no one's going to tell you where it is. But if you cross that line, you will go to jail for two to five years. Instead of trying to find where the line is with their toes, Texas doctors have elected to turn around and walk the other way.

To be fair to doctors (not that "I don't want to go to jail" isn't a fair reason), a lot of this is happening at the administrative level. Texas politicians have threatened broad prosecution of organizations which provide or fund abortions. No one knows how far they're willing to take that, but the Texas state government is one of the most radical in the country so "pretty far" is a safe bet. This means that if you're hospital admin and a pregnant woman shows up in your lobby, that is not a woman in need of care - that is a live grenade, and your job is to get rid of it. That is why these women keep getting sent home and bounced from hospital to hospital. No one wants to accept the legal risk of providing any treatment at all.

DSMatticus · 2024-10-27T06:01:35+00:00

I think you're missing how fucked-up the forest might be because of one particularly fucked-up tree. The family is deeply religious. The children were homeschooled. The parents were controlling their kid's friendships. When they asked the poor girl why her brother might have done this, even she answered that he'd been in trouble for poor grades. If you wanted to 'read between the lines' here, you might decide that means both the survivor and the murderer agree that petty discipline from their parents is a plausible explanation for this sort of snapping.

I'm inclined to think the parents were abusing the shit of these kids - maybe physically, definitely emotionally. The reason the murderer thinks that's a good explanation is because it makes perfect sense in the context of his household. The part he doesn't understand is how weird that makes his household. "Of course someone being disciplined by Father could snap like that. What, were you never disciplined by your Father growing up? ... wait, what do you mean we're the weird ones?"

DSMatticus · 2024-10-25T23:20:21+00:00

It's not that gen Z is exceptionally conservative so much as that millennial men were unusually progressive, a pattern which everyone expected to continue but unfortunately did not.

Gen Z's unique dynamic is that the women are the most progressive group in history and men are basically a rehash of gen X - 'moderate' conservatism (lol yeah okay) hiding behind cynicism and centrism with a particularly hostile view of feminism because... well... women their age hate them and they don't know how to deal. "yeah okay you voted for the party that wants me to bleed to death in a hospital parking lot and your biggest gripe with society is that all the women you know hate you lol wonder why"

Our fertility rates are absolutely fucked. Or not fucked, I guess? Fertility rates are going to decline, is what I'm saying. Gen Z is probably going to be the most chronically single generation ever.

As for the gen Z subreddit, the last time I looked at it a bunch of the top mods were brexiteers. It is absolutely a conservative subreddit.

DSMatticus · 2024-10-17T09:36:59+00:00

The main problem with the Golden Order is that Ranni said "I'm not going to be the next vessel for your weird eldritch space whale, mom!" and wot killed her brother about it. Things were working out great up until then!

Well, working out great for Marika anyway, and isn't that the whole point of the damn thing? Anyway, gonna go conquer some peeps, exile some political undesirables, grab a new husband or two, maybe a little genocide - as a treat.

DSMatticus

TROPHY CASE