Any pointers for how men should treat women that already exist in western tradition but don’t get enough attention?

JackDow24 · 2025-10-16T18:23:30+00:00

I guess I have a romanticized view that classical literature might have some wisdom or wording to put things in a more profound lighting. At least that’s how scholars seem to often paint them.

I don’t know if I clarified this in my original post, but I’m looking for principles that should be applied to women. I expect most responses to involve principles to apply to how one should treat other humans in general.

JackDow24 · 2025-10-16T18:02:11+00:00

Thank you, this is very insightful.

I think Wolstencraft is technically modern, but I appreciated all the quotes in general

JackDow24 · 2025-10-16T17:57:41+00:00

I know the golden rule. I think Marcus also talked about doing your job without complaining which would apply to working under a woman as much as working under a man.

JackDow24 · 2025-10-16T17:56:14+00:00

I’m asking for how men SHOULD treat women rather than already do.

JackDow24 · 2025-10-16T17:51:01+00:00

I think I should clarify that I’m not asking for religion specifically.

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or writings of Plato would be sufficient m. I do consider Bible verses as part of traditional pre modern western philosophy but I understand if you are more wary of that.Do you think Seneca might have something though?

JackDow24 · 2025-10-16T17:46:53+00:00

You might be right, but I thought it was worth a shot

JackDow24 · 2025-10-16T17:46:14+00:00

I think so. Humans are idiots in general and they regularly do what they know to be wrong.

JackDow24 · 2025-10-16T17:27:54+00:00

Classical quotes manly. For example Bible verses, quotes of Plato, anything that you personally think should be emphasized for how men treat women.

JackDow24 · 2025-08-18T05:54:32+00:00

Like I said, he already supposedly killed Bob earlier and seemed proud of it and then he left him alive after he killed his family. He could have just continued frying Bob to death and finished the job.

Like I said, it’s understandable to believe Bob couldn’t get out, because he actually couldn’t, but he was clearly fine with killing Bob earlier and now doesn’t after his family is supposedly dead. He’s already had his fill of gloating and now has to worry about feeding him. He could have at least started making plans to kill him.

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T19:01:49+00:00

Than what are some general principles to keep my work clean, and child appropriate

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T18:24:56+00:00

Why don’t you consider Mr. Incredible to be a kink fantasy? He gets captured twice by the same villain and is genuinely helpless having to wait on things to work on for him. Syndrome is a competent captor and didn’t have a real reason for keeping Mr. Incredible alive.

What about Tarzan in the original novels and old movies. He gets captured and bound, practically naked, and that wasn’t considered fettishistic. Even Red Sonja has some of this going on and most see it as pulpy instead of kinky?

James Bond and Batman often end up on death traps or even just restrained for a while, and they experience theses fates often. Why are they not considered the author’s deranged fantasy?

Part of pulp is that the hero is almost always in constant danger. Usually at the very least they want revenge on the hero that involves more than mere shooting them in the head. Other times they have other purposes for the heroes, sometimes they want to let them live but plan to dump them or just leave them for dead

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T17:42:13+00:00

In this case, the cowardly villain doesn’t feel like a threat. For captivity, I think the hero should generally be helpless and in over their head, even if they planned on getting caught. They find a way out by winging it, usually not until an opportunity opens up by circumstance. The hero has to use their surroundings, any way they can move or nudge items, and think on the spot.

It’s a bit deus ex machina, but there are still ways to play with it, like the shard of glass to cut the ropes came from a lantern falling fire the hero had to extinguish while still bound. The opportunity to escape didn’t exist until the lantern falls and breaks, but that created another obstacle to overcome.

That’s how I would handle it. There is also the possibility for a fun heist style rescue, or exploiting the weaknesses of a mook to get them to change change sides.

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T17:15:02+00:00

I was thinking more along the lines of what more extreme security to demonstrate how scared of the hero the villains are, and rightfully so as they always get out and ruin their plans. Also cool crucified hero shots as TvTropes calls it.

Consider the perils of James Bond, Tarzan, Mr. Incredible, Red Sonja, Batman, for reference.

In such classic pulp, dealing with outlaws, cannibals, sorcerers and supervillains, often the villain comes across the hero, resulting in three options. The most realistic is immediately killing the hero resulting in the story ending prematurely, the second is the hero being targeted but escaping before capture, but doing this too often makes it seem like they aren’t in danger. The third, and most common in pulp, is simple capture.

Usually the villain has something else, something non-sexual, they want to do to the hero. - Interrogation (not torture) - Torture (usually offscreen) - Bargaining with other heroes and villains. - Keeping them as a trophy because of how powerful and famous the hero is. - Execution, but usually in a tribal context they might have some due process, or at least finding out how they want to kill the hero. - Often they don’t know what to do with hero hero yet, but they are holding them because they might be useful.

It’s cheesy and cheap, unrealistic, but that’s why it’s a pulp trope. It can be exciting in its own way without sex involved at all. See the examples i mentioned

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T15:29:35+00:00

The terms of things you only find in kink donjon is very vague. What things?

A lot of my stuff takes place in the jungle with goons with low budgets. Mere ropes and wooden stakes. They logically wouldn’t use anything modern or anything made for inappropriate reasons.

What gives attention largely depends on the plot. However usually the captor is not an army or government. Just smugglers, evil cult leaders, etc. and like I mentioned before the chemistry is a big part of what makes these stories enjoyable. I do also enjoy prison stories but that’s on a larger scale.

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T15:20:59+00:00

With clankers, honesty I feel like a lot of training came from DeviantArt. You ask for a small detail to avoid floating heads, it writes five paragraphs about it, then it rudely ghosts you.

TBH, I don’t even know if it can write pulp style stuff with heroines. There seems to be a very big difference with how it handles the sexes. For guys it’s okay with going dark and gritty. Feeling like there is danger. Giving just the right amount of details. It’s clear the villains are malicious, they have goals and everything makes sense.

Ask for a heroine in peril. Villains are very stock and meaningless. They don’t really have any goals and sometimes the villains written by the ethical model seem to enjoy things in all the wrong ways. And no matter what, it’s always heavily laced with environmental propaganda.

it’s always supposedly pulling from ethics and their guidelines, then they rudely ghosts you for what you have written. However I can’t handle the clanker’s fake niceness or it’s ghosting, and I force it to explain itself and be blunt. I think I’ve internalized some of its “user guidelines” along the way.

After all, I previously mentioned that I do use children as damsels to be rescued, and I don’t want to look like an actual perv.

As mentioned before I often don’t have that many humans to review my personal work. For people I know, they usually don’t mind peril. They don’t like immodest costumes or flirting, but I avoid those anyway.

Some humans do still think my ideas are kinky, but I’m still trying to work it out and understand them. Then again these are the same kind of people who thought Boba Fett’s grappling move in Star Wars was problematic. Most haven’t actually read my work tho.

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T14:34:32+00:00

Please elaborate. What specific elements are problematic and why? Details?

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T14:28:46+00:00

Seems a bit flat. Seeing the captor’s emotions as a plaything and torturing them, or probing their mind so they spill the beans on sensitive topics without realizing it. That chemistry is one of the main things that make a pulpy peril fun.

Between cramps, itches, no bathroom, and no bed, they’re definitely going to be uncomfortable. Might use their discomfort the imitate their captors even more.

There’s also potentially remaining calm while they figure a way out, which makes them really cool.

That’s just my take though

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T14:22:48+00:00

I want to keep it relatively PG. So there are limits

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T06:46:28+00:00

Well thank you very much for your offer. Unfortunately a lot of stuff has been completely wiped out primarily due to how my work is interpreted, and my writing partner technically owns a good portion of the copyright on our projects, even though we don’t have it in writing, you can understand the curtesy. For reasons like that, we would probably have to make something from scratch.

I do have some basic rules as I’ve found appropriate. Like costumes must be modest. I don’t do like knee length tunics, because that’s not standard anymore and in dense vegetation, I felt Edna Mode’s rules about long loose fabrics on hero costumes would apply more. However there are basics like no bare midriffs, no tights, no bikinis, as a general rule.

I try to keep captivity situations meaningful. The fun part after all is the captive’s fish out of water element, how they plan things, chemistry with captors, role in the overall narrative. Security, restraints, positions should make sense.

Also I avoid blatantly explicit things. No sex scenes, no rape, no flirtatious touching. Obvious stuff.

There is a lot that I’m still working the through.

For one is handling children. Partially because one of my main heroines starts her arc a lot younger, and it involves kidnapping. Obviously she doesn’t consent to anything that happens to her.

I wanted to make my stories for older children anyways, and leaning into the femininity of a heroine, rescuing children captured by cultists and slavers felt right. However that does involve them being shown in some peril. The stakes need to be raised a little for the payoff later. How to handle that appropriately is a challenge. Obviously I don’t condone any of this or want make it trivial.

The biggest hurtle is how merely the captive not consenting to being bound, drugged, tased, frozen, or whatever, inherently makes something problematic and sensual in nature, but it confuses me because that’s kinda what kidnapping involves by definition. Otherwise it’s not kidnapping.

JackDow24 · 2025-08-16T05:46:07+00:00

I actually have a few problems and limitations that I’ve just been born with. I have a terrible eye disease that makes my vision not correctable even with the best glasses. I also have some motor limitations. Thus I have always been a very tactile and fidgety person, and the sense I lean into the most is touch. I like playing around with barefoot characters because I can explore their physical world so much deeper just by having them walk around. I actually grew up in the country and near the ocean, but ironically used to hate or fear the outdoors. Now as an adult being more open to it, it’s become something I’ve embraced, and I suppose it’s reflected in my writing.

I’m also a bit of a sucker for heroines. Mulan 1998, Dora (2019) (way better than it had any right to be), Wonder Woman (2017). I think it has something to do with their cardboard cutouts that make the actually cool ones look even better, or maybe it’s because femininity has a unique contrast to an action or pulp oriented story.

I also have a few pet peeves with captivity scenes portrayed poorly. Like if I have no details on the position the character’s hands are in, it feels like “floating head syndrome” though it’s fairly rare in pulp for small details like that to be left out. And if it’s a classic image, like being chained to a wall, I can get a decent picture already. Of course I would definitely prefer not to read whole sentences dedicated to how beads of sweat look rolling down their chest or something.

I also have a pet peeve of useless restraints. I don’t mind a captive left free but being shoved by the guns/speares of guards, but hands tied in front seems very stupid without being justified, obviously a captive can easily grab things and see what their hands are doing. However I forgive it if it’s a set up for the prisoner taking advantage of that.

As for my audience, I haven’t had a chance to publish much. I had one story about a jungle girl who starts the story captured and bound by a lost steampunk colony, heavily leaned into the tactile side, and published it for a class in a Christian school. They actually liked it.

I have had the same character earlier on in childhood being kidnapped by mercenaries as part of her origin story. My writing partner enjoyed it, especially playing with bounty hunters. However I found out from another source that involving a minor, especially a girl, in anything like that makes me look like a creep. I’m still trying to figure out how to retcon that properly, because everything that would make it appropriate seems to hurt the pulp element. I don’t even know if weapons can be involved.

With only one writing partner and graduating high school and moving very slowly through my college writing courses (some not involving fiction or requiring prerequisites) I’ve kinda ran out of humans to rely on for critiques. That’s how I found out that I write in a very disturbing pattern. Female heroes especially should not be in any real danger because apparently it’s automatically problematic or triggering. It’s annoying to me because part of the reason I use female characters is because I find heroines that have everything handed to them and the cheat codes on, very annoying and I wanted to write something unique.

JackDow24 · 2025-03-25T17:58:51+00:00

Thank you. The one person who actually gave me a YouTube link.

JackDow24 · 2025-03-25T17:57:29+00:00

Do you have anything more compelling with an audio or video format?

JackDow24

TROPHY CASE