u/SobeksFavourite

A text I find really interesting for the era is Shulgi B, where the languages he lists are Elamite, Sumerian, Meluhhan, Amorite and Subartian. Notably, Akkadian is not mentioned at all, which raises the question of whether the label at the time would've applied to a national identity, to the specific dynasty of Sargon, or to the city of Agade. Moreover, would the people we know as Akkadians have been considered black headed people during the EDP?

Before the time of Sargon, was there any label that would've refered to the Semitic peoples north of Nippur? As far as I understand, they seem to have been culturally very similar to the Sumerians, as opposed to the situation at Ebla (where the temple was a much weaker institution). Then, where did the title of King of Sumer and Akkad come from? By the time it appeared there had to be at least some notion of there being two distinct societies which had been united, but I'm not sure that framing would've made a lot of sense centuries prior.

Of course, the case of the Akkadians is a very strong contrast to how the Amorites were viewed in Mesopotamian history. The narrative of Hammurabi's dynasty definitely did rely on them being entrusted with divine kingship, expressed in the patronage of local Mesopotamian institutions, but at least these Mesopotamian institutions did exist in contrast to the tribal style of leadership seen to the West. I'm not sure any such dynamic could've applied to the earlier Akkadians outside the ruling dynasty (which brings us back to the question: was anyone outside the ruling dynasty considered to be an Akkadian?)

One last related question regards how later Mesopotamians would've understood the period of coexistence between both populations. I doubt the people of the Iron Age would've considered themselves to have been descended from the people who replaced the Sumerians, but did that mean they believed Sumerian people disappeared at some point? This even brings up the question of metalinguistical awareness: could they have imagined Sumerian having once been a living vernacular? I'm aware of the narrative of the confusion of tongues, but I'm less certain that was the explanation they would've given for why people no longer spoke Sumerian.

"We may have grown older and wiser, but very few of us go on to question that script. For years, I believed I was having good sex, and for the most part, I was. Most of the sex I was having felt physically good. I cared about the people I slept with, and they cared about me. Our sex was by all means mutual and reciprocally pleasurable. But I also spent astonishing amounts of time watching myself. Like I was a fly on the wall during sex, I was looking down at my body. How do I look? Is he enjoying this? Should I arch my back more? Do I seem enthusiastic enough? Should I moan louder? I was simultaneously participating in sex and directing it from somewhere above my own body."

Most of you will probably have noticed my recent change of flair. As I've stated before, I am not against any sort of attraction (I remain, in fact, exclusively attracted to women), nor even against acting on it with a consenting partner of an appropriate age.

What I am to dispel is the label of heterosexuality®. Labels serve us to bundle together things that have a reason to be classed as such. For instance, we know what a eating utensil is in relation to the shared function it has with other members of its class: eating. There is an implicit acknowledgement when you refer to a fork as such that it belongs together with a knife.

In the context of heterosexuality, even people who do not subscribe to our beliefs shall acknowledge that it refers to two completely different forms of attraction. Why are people who are attracted to women bundled together with people who are (allegedly) attracted to men? The fact that such a label exists is an acknowledgement that these two orientations belong together.

There are social reasons for this, of course. Our society, in fact, is so thoroughly structured around the assumption that these two forms of attraction are reciprocal and natural that we have several movements against the imposition of heterosexuality as a normative structure. Regardless of their efforts, our society still tends to hold that people should be generally assumed heterosexual until proven otherwise.

This brings us to Andrea Dworkin's critique: when our economic systems, our media, our legal frameworks, and our interpersonal communities are all fundamentally structured heterosexuality, the concept of consent becomes little more than a rubber-stamp. It is undeniable that, throughout history, heterosexuality has managed to subsist out of such institutional support. Consent does not exist in a vacuum. The notion that a woman saying "yes" to a man is expressing her autonomous desire, instead of merely doing an act of intutional compliance, is one that requires you to believe in heterosexuality®.

In recent decades, we've seen several attempts that, acknowledging the above, seek to salvalge heterosexuality into a "fairer" institution. I believe such attempts to be fundamentally misguided. The best known promoter is probably bell hooks, who diagnosed the issue as a failure of men to shed our patriachal conditioning and properly engage in "love." This is, frankly, a theoretical bait-and-switch. It simply brings up "bad male behavior" to pretend like heterosexuality is a natural, albeit poorly implemented, system.

I take issue with the suggestion that a genuine female desire exists underneath the existing structural issues, waiting to be liberated by emotionally intelligent men. Dworkin already covered this: when consent is layered so deeply beneath institutional and social coercion, we simply cannot point to an observable female desire for men. What we call female heterosexuality is not an independent, innate orientation that mirrors how men feel, but instead an imitation driven by millennia of comphet.

This brings us back to why the label of heterosexuality® is not just inaccurate, but actively harmful. The label bundles disparate behaviours together to push the notion that they belong together. It takes the very real, observable attraction that most men have for women and pairs it with the comphet-mediated imitation women tend to make. The latter form of "heterosexuality" is a performance that exists exclusively in reference to the very real attraction most men feel.

Female heterosexuality only acquires meaning from pretending that we observe two sides of the same coin. Maintaining the label only makes us complicit in validating a mirage. Heterosexuality interprets women's responses to male desire as a genuine orientation of the same kind,only to sustain the illusion that both behaviours make a natural pairing.

I found this article in my suggestions and decided to give it a try. I didn't know what to expect, but I'm not at all surprised by its contents.

The first thing that should stick out from the story as you read is just how many autogynephilic performances the author is making: shaving, wearing lingerie, etc. She only saw Lade as a prop through whom to feel heterosexual.

Lo and behold, she doesn't orgasm, because she actually wasn't into him. She simply didn't tell him what she expected of sex, because she only wanted the sex to mean she was heterosexual. It failed miserably.

Nobody should be fooled by women describing how attracted to men they are, unless they have strong proof. The outcome will very likely be her simply not being able to orgasm and then blaming women not going after men on the orgasm gap. It's women who are to blame for the orgasm due to how often they have sex with men they're not attracted to.

It honestly feels so much like everything that's happening. You have the chuds (Pharisees) and groypers (Zealots) against the spread of Hellenism. Not to mention the debates on neocolonialism and the erosion of sovereignty by NGOs being strongly reminiscent of debates on Roman political power.

A straight male friend was really struggling to understand comphet. Fwiw we dated in high school back in the early 2000's. He could not wrap his head around how I was able to date him and love him when I was young, and love and be with my ex husband for over 20 years. He questioned me being an "actual" lesbian because I enjoyed sex and wasn't "traumatized" by it. He's not homophobic, he's an ally, but has only known people who knew they were gay since childhood. He genuinly couldn't understand. I'm seeing this come up a lot as a way to invalidate late bloomers and I was able to give him an analogy that made it finally click in his brain how comphet works. He's a foodie but I feel like this could work for anyone. I asked him "Do you still like baby food?" He just said "what?" and looked at me confused so I elaborated... "Do you still enjoy baby food? The unseasoned jars of single ingredient puree you ate as a baby." He laughed and said no because he's an adult. I said it wasn't that he was an adult, it's that he was exposed to something different. Something better. If no one weened him off baby food and he grew up with messages that the spicy foods he currently loves were gross and wrong/immoral he wouldn't have expanded his palate. He would maybe still be a 43 year old enjoying pureed sweet potatoes because those were the best he could get in his situation and not everyone is willing to starve. But imagine he finally tried his current favorite dish and experienced a life changing moment. How could he ever go back and eat baby food again? Me finally getting to experience a relationship with a woman is the same thing. I could never go back. The thought of going back to a man makes me cringe. I asked him how would the idea of going back to eating unseasoned pureed chicken again make you feel. He basically cringed at the thought and it finally clicked for him at that point. If you know anyone struggling to understand this analogy could potentially help. I was inspired by an episode of A League of Their Own where she compared sex with her husband to warm bread but sex with her female teammate to pizza. I just needed to make it less bi and more fully lesbian.

Hi guys, GyrosEnjoyer (AKA Ego73) here. Yes, the guy who first started discussing autogynephilia here.

I closed my account around the time PPD banned discussions around comphet. My main reason for wanting to leave reddit was the deterioration of all of the main subs I used to interact with. PPD was the last one standing, and I simply felt like I had no reason to stick around anymore. But I still kept checking out what was happening here, and I can hardly recognise anything of what this community used to be.

Remember back when we were discussing solutions here a year ago? My favourite one were male selective abortions to alter our sex ratio. None of that is here either, and I do want to change that. These last few weeks, chadsexuality truthers have been parroting blackpill points without pushback, and that is the last straw for me. This kind of rhetoric about the top 10% of men only serves to pit men against each others instead of discussing the problem at hand. I honestly wish we could create a community that will bring the chads in. They do not benefit from the system either. But what worried me the most was seeing many of the men here also displaying comphet themselves, being mostly concerned about women never loving them. It is, in fact, extremely easy for even a mediocre man to trigger a woman's comphet. And honestly, I think this should serve to examine just how large this contingent of comphet-afflicted men is. Getting them to come to terms with it might not even the ratio between straight men and women, but it would at least be something.

Reading feminist literature, I've also been thinking about more solutions we should be discussing. Chief among them, dismantling heterosexuality. By this I don't mean straight-to-gay conversion therapy (though that's certainly something I look forward to), but challenging heterosexuality as an institution. That is, the idea that it is the same for us to be attracted to women as the pale imitation of it that most women perform. Female "heterosexuality" is a second degree performance, whose legitimacy only exists insofar as we keep pretending male attraction towards women can be reciprocated the same way male attraction towards men can. This is a radical idea, and I'd much rather see this being discussed than whatever the blackpillers ard saying about chad. Comphet benefits no one, not us, not chad and, according to feminists, not the women affected by it either.

There have also been personal reasons for closing my account, as my new job has been sucking up more of my time. But honestly, I figured since I'd mostly be hanging out on this sub only (plus another one where I get guys requesting my dick pics on my DMs), that shouldn't be much of an issue. Speaking of my job, I think a female coworker might be into me for real. On previous occasions where women seemed interest, I had inadvertently done something to awaken their comphet, but I really fail to think of anything I might've done this time, so it might actually be true. Two guys from the same company (one of them is the CEO) also seem to be into me, so it's not like any of that disproves the premise of this sub. I definitely can't say anything for certain, but the difference between the number of men and women who are attracted to men might not be that large.