FWIW my sister and I distinguish two types of attraction. Forgive me, we came up with this when we were v young but itâs still useful: âpotentialâ and âexecution.â My male family members have no idea what we are talking about:
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âPotentialâ is like how attractive are they in a photograph, like a drivers license or while sleeping or something, where you canât see any expressiveness or personality.
âExecutionâ is the opposite, how attractive they are based on animation/expressiveness/personality
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this is interesting! remember reading some stuff a while back about how when asked to rate empirical attractiveness men rating women tend to have more consistent inter-rater agreement than women rating men do. maybe women put more weight on the execution side then men?
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maybe the reliance on pictures is an inherent disadvantage for men on apps since you can only show off the potential side and have no way to show off execution abilities
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yes
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been really enjoying people riffing off of this topic, here's my own riff: the internet is a feminine medium and dating apps structurally can't showcase masculine qualities on masculine terms twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/stâŚ
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twitter is a much better dating app than any actual dating app, for everyone i think but especially for straight men; you can actually display your personality interactively, offer genuine social proof, etc.
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hm, so by this logic twitter is twitter more masculine than the rest of the internet? or just more masculine than dating sites?
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seems more masculine to me. i think part of is is about constraints. part of streotypical masculinity is being willing to ignore/disregard social constraints. you can't do that well in constrained apps like dating apps. but twitter is unstructured enough to allow it.
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yes i think twitter has more affordances for displays of healthy masculinity than dating apps but itâs still not super great, e.g. itâs very disembodied by default, people mostly donât post video of themselves so you donât get to hear their voices or see their bodies in motion
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the kind of masculinity that is like chopping down trees to build a house or w/e is hard to display. it would also be weird to post a video of you doing that yourself; almost have to have someone else do it for you
it's a catch-22. actual masculinity is not performative, but you can't put it on twitter (or any social media) without being performative
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i guess the trick is to hang out with people who like to candidly post vids of (and tag you) you being masculine without your knowledge?
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