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How Social Status Works

The article Women Explained by Hitori (a female) explains how social status works in just 2560 words.

It's in the Revelation eBook by Mystery and Lovedrop, and also reposted on the web in a few places. You can read it on Reddit for free. (The formatting is worse than in the book, but is readable.) It was originally posted to the old PUA forum community, probably roughly around the year 2000.

The beginning tells us:

Chicks act at all times to gain and maintain social status. This is more important to them than getting laid.

Then it explains social status in four sections:

  1. Qualities of High Status People
  2. Qualities of Low Status People
  3. You Gain Status When
  4. You Lose Status When

Read, analyze, discuss below.


Elliot Temple on February 11, 2021

Messages (6)

If you wanna analyze modern social dynamics with a Gen Z slant, this comment thread has *so much*:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/m0mr60/helloooo_i_cosplayed_lumine_im_really_proud_of_ha/

Example:

> .......???? I’m literally autistic hello???? You literally do not know me. U are a stranger. I strongly heavily implore to shut tf up atp u cannot tell me that I’m not autistic....you deadass do not know me. Pls shut thee absolute fuck up lmaooooo

This is one of many comments by OP asserting she's laughing her ass off and entertained by the haters, and not bothered. She also says they are tryhard when she's the one posting the most. People seem to just directly assert things with social meaning like that they aren't putting effort in and it's so utterly transparent and I don't understand how it's a thing.


curi at 7:21 PM on March 8, 2021 | #1 | reply | quote

https://www.tiktok.com/@afrococoapuffs/video/6934817610085305606

255k likes

#unbothered at the end. then why u making the video?

main point: it's 2 sentences repeated for 60 seconds.

ppl like stuff with so little to think about. they like songs with few words too.

also, she's responding to actual, blatantly-racist comments from idiotic assholes. those are a real thing :(

btw no one complains when white girls dress up as asian anime girls.


curi at 7:43 PM on March 8, 2021 | #2 | reply | quote

#1 One of the reasons the reddit cosplayer is getting hate actually is related to race, but not how she thinks. White and asian girls who do bad cosplays don't get upvotes and don't get much attention, which means not much hate. They don't make the front page until they get better at it. It's similar to how black people have higher dropout rates in elite universities due to affirmative action letting them in when they have worse grades.


Anonymous at 7:49 PM on March 8, 2021 | #3 | reply | quote

It used to be, if you said "I'm not mad", people would generally still think you were mad (or upset, bothered, non-calm, etc.)

But now people are like "lmao" or "#unbothered" – which basically means "I'm not mad" – and it gets treated differently?

There's something I don't understand.

Some people on the opposing side seem to ignore it and then talk like it wasn't said, rather than directly contradicting it. I'm not sure if people are actually being fooled. But I don't see it directly challenged much. Maybe it's just part of the broader trend against directly challenging or disagreeing with others, and that enables more brazen lying even though people do recognize the lying.

A lot of people write "lmao" at the end of lots of stuff when it's an obvious lie.

Maybe it's related somewhat to relativism. There is no objective truth so it's just who can hold frame better (= more congruently maintain their framing of what's going on). And people's strategies for holding frame are coming to rely less on connections to reality.

Some high status, popular, socially calibrated people put on an obviously-fake show of being unbothered, being entertained, laughing their asses off, saying they don't care, etc. It's in pop songs in various forms. Celebs do it not just Gen Z people on social media. Is that just about the gullibility of the masses when dealing with assertions?

But if you don't care, why are you responding to it? In many cases it's such obvious lying, isn't it?


curi at 12:33 AM on March 9, 2021 | #4 | reply | quote

> It used to be, if you said "I'm not mad", people would generally still think you were mad (or upset, bothered, non-calm, etc.)

> But now people are like "lmao" or "#unbothered" – which basically means "I'm not mad" – and it gets treated differently?

> There's something I don't understand.

I have a guess, though I haven't examined a bunch of cases, so it's a very tentative guess. Maybe "lmao" would typically come up in a context like:

"you mad?"

"i'm not mad lmao"

whereas "#unbothered" seems like a claim the mad person would bring up themselves regarding whether they are bothered or not, initially, before someone else brings that issue up. So if the mad person is bringing up the issue of whether they are mad first, maybe that gives them some kind of social first mover advantage, and if other people challenge the unbothered claim they have to be careful and do it skillfully or they might look reactive (or worse yet "autistic" if they go into detail about why the person is actually mad)


Anonymous at 5:54 AM on March 9, 2021 | #5 | reply | quote

Oh yeah, things like "lmao" are not direct reactions which helps. Even if someone says "you mad?" you can reply "i guess they don't teach that 2+2=4 in your school distract lmao" (replace 2+2=4 with the actual debate topic) and the "lmao" is not read as a direct response to the question, even though the question is about mood and "lmao" indicates mood. ("lmao" also indicates aggressive mocking – saying the other person is ridiculous enough to laugh at – so the dual meaning helps give plausible deniability and reduce reactivity, in addition to it not responding directly. of course laughing at someone is a reaction of sorts, but that's commonly a high status reaction that isn't seen as effort).


curi at 9:27 AM on March 9, 2021 | #6 | reply | quote

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