Thread by @lndian_Bronson

Sure, VR stuff is goofy and niche...NOW

But in 2021 attractive young women who aren't pizza faced arcade nerds make great money playing videogames for people to watch, and thousands more watch more prototypical teams take home millions from a billions of dollars esports industry

https://twitter.com/kentbye/status/1459928190671982601

Maybe the framing of pretty women vs. nerds is "problematic"

I'm just calling it as I see it. In 1970 people spending lots of time on computers were fugly dorks. By 2010 the hottest status symbol for hot girls was an iphone. Gaming and crypto have gone the same way, even faster.

Like a gentrifying neighborhood, racing, etc., it's fair to say the presence of women, particularly attractive young women, signals something isn't just being 'commodified', but coming into it's own, becoming part of human culture, literally perpetuated in reproductive adjacency.

Probably the best signal of a thing's importance is a flock of young women wanting to be seen as associated with it. A neighborhood is trendy, a style in fashion, a restaurant hip, a *man* high status, iff so.

I think 'fugly dorks' (whom I love) get hung up/bitter about this

Often, radically divergent, interesting, powerful things come at great personal cost/risk or were in some sense a retreat from the mainstream - I'm not describing anything new here, you can find endless essays on product-market-fit and how niche fandoms get "corporatized"

Here is the best diagram on it:

https://twitter.com/Cronikeys/status/1459983687458689032

But I don't think it's a mistake *pretty young women* are the sine qua non "community is ruined!" types

Consider the 'gastronomic societies' of San Sebastian, Spain, where every man is a chef, and the best chefs work in the many Michellin⭐restaurants:

For long time, it was just dudes who got together to cook, drink, and bullshit. Women were not permitted.

I must stress, these were literally kitchens where women were not allowed.

The exact, complete, total opposite of "women belong in the kitchen":

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Txoko#His…

explorepartsunknown.com/san-sebastian/…

Anything cool, interesting (or dangerous), energetic, and authoritative men do, women (especially young, smart, ambitious women) want to be a part of eventually.

I will not even attempt to explain what it is like being a micro-niche internet rw e-celeb.

I think there are two basic attitudes you can have to this:

1. Crappy misogyny; "women ruin everything/just want attention"

2. Valorization of men's essential nature; "Dudes Rock"

1. does not need any explanation or further digital ink spilt

you know exactly what I mean

I think 2 (that particular phrase has become common recently, there's also "boys will be boys") gets at something fundamental about human nature/how to evaluate cultural trends:

How does culture get transmitted? In one sense, it's vertical; your first teachers are your mother and father:

Babies make very particular sounds, little more than exercising the vocal cords and mouths simultaneously beyond singular gutteral noises:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_…

What are your earliest memories? In the dim haze beyond last week, ten years ago, things fortified by pictures or home video, you might recall a blanket, a family trip. I think about my parents faces encouraging me to climb down the (very, very steep, by the way😤) stairs at home

But what are your keenest memories in youth? Your most powerful memories? I think for most of us, if these aren't traumatic (sorry to those for whom this is so), they're awkward, or maybe fondly remembered for how awkward they are; asking a girl out, a first kiss, prom, etc.

The other way culture is transmitted is horizontally, in the dance of peer groups we have from youth to young adulthood, with men and women sizing one another up for friendship and competition, in their own, charming (sometimes vicious!) ways.

For there to be genuine transmittance, you must close the loop; kids! When men have truly created something civilizationally important where there was nothing, women bless that with 'entryism'

Sorry female followers: I think this implies a certain definitiveness to 'dudes rock',

Sorry male followers; I think this also implies a certain *deserved* level of ruination to things that men do but that pretty young women are completely uninterested in (they're interested in guns and crypto in 2021 btw)

without creating reproductive opportunities, it won't last

At least, in principle. Obviously, not everyone is a reproductively healthy heterosexual man or woman, but, those are the people new humans who bear culture do come from.