"Rand in effect projected her own female sexuality – in which attraction is based on an overall judgment of the entirety of the mind and personality of a potential partner — onto men"
A real pioneer in this respect! This is the story of the last 15 years of pop culture.
Despite what Richard and many people want to believe, women are not attracted to "personality" and I don't think Ayn Rand was any different in this regard, at most it is bonus to the things they are actually biologically attracted to, similar to how men's sexuality works. Women actually care about looks and youth even more than men in some circumstances.
This seems like an oversimplification in the other direction. In truth it's always both.Women and men are both attracted to personality and looks. This attraction is often synergistic, I've had the experience of thinking a woman physically unremarkable upon meeting her, but finding her utterly gorgeous after I've gotten to know her.
The question isn't whether women are attracted to looks or personality. It's if the average woman is attracted to the same ratio of them as the average man. I think it probably is true that women give personality more weight, on average, than men do. But that doesn't mean they don't give looks any weight, or that there aren't exceptional women out there.
No, personality does not create attraction for either men and women, most people who say otherwise are delusional or virtue signaling (often the latter, especially in the case of women). I am not saying you are but I doubt you'd find an obese ugly woman attractive after getting to know her unless you have some strange fetishes. Women do care a lot about looks, and while there is the aspect of wealth and status it doesn't much nowadays in developed countries compared to before unless you are in the top 10% of socioeconomic status, making looks the most important factor in men's sex and dating success. We need to acknowledge the biological realities of human sexuality, even if they are unfair and amoral, much like how we had to acknowledge the biological realities of IQ.
As it happens I do find obese and ugly women attractive after getting to know them, providing that they are interesting and nice people. Unattractiveness is like a mild poison that you build up resistance to the more frequently you are exposed to it. If you spend enough time with a person with a charming and interesting personality, all the things that are gross about them will lose importance relative to what is charming about them.
I know that this is not the result of a fetish because if I do not know someone at all the attraction I feel towards them is much more conventional and based on them being conventionally attractive. Additionally, it isn't like them being unattractive is a plus. If they were conventionally attractive and charming that would be even better.
She was kind of a right-wing feminist in a lot of weird ways. The insistence on doing your own thing, the belief women should act like men and men thought like women...
Ayn Rand’s ethics is badly needed as a counterweight to the worst tendencies of almost all other ethics. It arose from a deep understanding of an anti-human regime, and having her voice in your head sometimes is a way to keep your life from being an anti-human regime. Great post.
Yeah, there are very few people on the right who can claim to be philosophers, activists, and authors at the same time, so even if she's sort of so-so at each one the field's kind of small. And she took a pretty rare tack in defending egoism. Not that it really works if everyone does it but it's at least interesting to see what such a philosophy would look like.
yet if you look at soviet propaganda they valorize the workers! rand-thought actually has the same values as communism, they just disagree on who the moochers and leeches are.
Ok, but Rand would also say the workers are only effective when they follow the superior architects, entrepreneurs, titans of industry and capitalists. This wasn't workers running the factories. This was hierarchy and everyone follow the superior people to create things.
The stock answer to this is that blue-collar work in a capitalist society is only degrading because of capitalist exploitation of the proletariat, and would cease to be so if the proletariat owned the means of production. Suffice to say I am sceptical.
There are also certain strains of socialist/communist thought that think a post-work, post-scarcity communist society is inevitable and desirable.
>This is one of those Rand scenes that are so unashamedly over the top that they become enjoyable.
This is something I thought throughout "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". It's something of a guilty pleasure, reading a book where all of the characters are so one-dimensional, the heroes flawless and the villains so thoroughly wicked with no redeeming qualities to speak of. They're like Disney movies, and wouldn't be half as entertaining if the characters were more rounded and complex.
Did I read a different version of "Atlas Shrugged" from everyone else? The version I read was about two people who (at least for the first half) were too blinded by their autistic obsessions to realize they were wasting their time trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, and that it would be better for everyone if they just stopped trying to prove themselves to people who will hate them no matter what they do. This isn't a creative reinterpretation or anything, it's a point spelled out explicitly within the novel itself. I have no idea who these "flawless heroes" everyone keeps talking about are.
I guess Francisco d'Anconia was basically perfect in every away, and some might consider him to be a third main hero, but when people call the other two lead heroes "flawless", I have to assume they either haven't read the book or don't know what that word means.
As a teenager halfway through Atlas Shrugged, I find it extremely inspiring. I'm not a fan of many of Rand's ideas, but I find myself with twice the amount of ambition and drive after reading this book.
There are some books which I read, and I promptly forget about after a few days. There are other books where I feel changed after reading them. I go about my day-to-day interactions differently. I take a different approach to my life. From small habits to big goals. Atlas Shrugged has been one of these books for me.
Glad you mentioned Rand’s take on kids from the Atlas excerpt;
“They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice”
That section always stuck with me. I always wanted to care for my kids myself. Years down the line I am, and I enjoy it.
It’s not a sentiment that’s commonly shared though, not when feminism has women convinced that to feel of value we have to have a monetary value attached to our time.
I think there are lots of mothers like the ones Rand describes, just making their own independent Gulches, all the while getting messages from society that it’s a burdensome sacrifice, or messages from religion that such burdensome sacrifice is altruistic. Where is the assured ownership and noble revelation?
Capitalism needs a moral defence, but the kind of motherhood she described does too.
Whenever you see a girl boss bragging about her career as making her a better catch, we should stop calling that Cultural Marxism, and start calling it Cultural Randianism. I don't find this behavior more silly than offensive, but I wonder if sexuality was a source of the kind of "inner conflict" she describes as leading to depression.
If Randian can be described as Nietzschean, then I think she is in good company with Camille Paglia. Whereas Rand believed it was necessary to be a moral absolutist in personal heroism and courage, Paglia had a wider view, which included masochistic tendencies as artistically valuable.
The Randian view of life, which is to take things to their utmost, to try your best, and to never give up, seems almost religious to me. I don't say that as a criticism, but as a compliment. If one is an atheist, I think it is better to worship one's self than to claim otherwise -- to pretend false humility as an atheist seems even more offensive to God than to boldly reject him!
It's a good point--girlboss feminism is a lot closer to Rand than Marx, and is now in bad odor with the intersectional types for exactly that reason.
It's funny you mention that, though, because what I get from reading that passage is that Ayn Rand was *definitely* a sub. Hypermasculine women tend to either go the feminist route and attack men (more common and you have a lot more moral support these days) or the quasi-trad route and go looking for even *more* masculine men. If evo psych had been around it might have done her some good.
The original Satanists (LaVey and so on) held a similar view. LaVey didn't end well, and perhaps there's a lesson in that, though he spent a lot of energy trying to 'own the Christians'.
I was focusing on the part where Richard mentions her extolling the "heroic" women as the most attractive. Sexually, the rape-kink is certainly submissive. It's definitely a contradiction.
People are like that. Quite a few girlboss ladies are subs in bed. Ask me how I know. ;)
One of the better woo-woo books I read (low bar I know) was Jean Shinoda Bolen's Goddesses in Every Woman, which once you strip out the sillier Jungian stuff is an interesting use of Greek mythology to describe female personality types. (She tried to write a sequel about men without a male author, which went about as well as you'd expect.) Rand is pretty much the archetypical Athena--masculine, goes for an even more masculine man. Bolen leans left, so she dislikes her, but if they're willing to learn feminine presentation it can be an effective life strategy.
A girl boss' career does make her a better catch. Men usually won't give it nearly the same weight as she does, but it certainly doesn't hurt. It's cool to be with someone who has initiative and has achieved things.
It's possible that for certain men, but net overall, no, it is a net negative in the dating market as a whole. This is reflected in fertility data and marriage success data, where the higher a woman's income is, the less emotional security and satisfaction both partners experience. You can anecdotally state your personal preference, which is fine, but I'm asking for data about average people, not particular cases.
The romance in Rand's stories are surprisingly very standard female romance stories, as unique as the stories are in other aspects. If you read any of the romance stories, whether novels or movies or anime or whatever, that are targetted at women, they follow a similar pattern. The woman is a relatively normal person, but has lots of determination and grit that lets them succeed through some very difficult trials. This makes one to two men fall desperately in love in her, and the men will be truly spectacular people. Billionaire CEOs, or grand dark wizards, or the genius heir apparent of a monarchy, whatever. Possibly one will be evil. Then those men will pursue her, and even if she tries to turn them down, they'll keep pursuing her and she'll fall in love with one eventually.
Male romance stories follow a different pattern. Usually the man, while sometimes he does impressive things, gets the girl by being a nice guy. Being a nice guy can vary between saying nice things to protecting the romance interest from an assault.
One thing I find interesting is that in Japan there are male versions of the standard "female romance story." They feature ordinary men with grit and determination who wind up having truly spectacular women falling for them. My favorite example is probably an animated series called Tenchi Muyo, in which a milquetoast young man finds himself the romantic target of various science fiction archetype woman (i.e. a space pirate, mad scientist, space princess, space cop, etc.) I don't know why that culture has been more willing to invert that trope than western culture has.
You consistently write "with regards to" or similar phrases rather than "with regard to". I read almost all of what you so prolifically write, and each "regards to" is a mental speed bump for me. Yes, that usage is now quite popular, but it is ignorant usage. It is not found in the ODE nor its NOAD cousin nor the American Heritage. The latter's Usage Note says, "*Regard* is traditionally used in the singular in the phrase *in regard* (not *in regards) to*.
I'm also reminded of a quote from René Guénon, who said that with all their intellectual work, philosophers typically only demonstrate the limitations of their mentality.
I think it's worth pointing out that the central point of what she's saying is that rationality should govern choices made in your own self interest. I'm sure most of us have seen and know guys who have followed simple physical attraction while blinding themselves to real character flaws - a lot of this is just inexperience.
The point is that now, if I met a physically attractive but obviously crazy woman, I would *not* pursue her or want to. What would flood my mind is not how much I would enjoy the sex from an attractive woman, but all the problems that I know could ensue - from pregnancy, to her crazy exs, to her neediness, to threats to my work and peace of mind. I know that it would not be in my self interest to chance all the negative consequences from a night out with someone like that.
I don't think Rand’s personal relationship was "Objectivism". I believe what it was, was her attempt to apply rationality to her goals by pursuing values she believe made sense - the best *any* of us could do. And like Richard pointed out she said, reality was the ultimate judge - and I don't know, but I believe she would admit it didn't turn out well for her in the end in this particular situation. Rand doesn't claim that our self interested, rational pursuits guarantee happiness- but that is the best we can do, it is how we work (our nature as humans). Obviously failure is possible. But I look at it is essentially a positive philosophy; this is the *only* way one can win at life.
"...is that the idea that internal contradictions lead to unhappiness is likely to be true for an unusually honest and moral person."
The catch here is that when people are in the act of antisocial behavior, they rarely believe they are in contradiction with themself. When someone is caught in a robbery, they often excuse it because they had to feed their kids or some other noble goal.
The pain of internal contradiction isn't usually "I can't believe I'm lying", it's "I'm realizing my past behaviors were not warranted. Now I'm sad about my past, but worse, my internal compass doesn't give me direction for the future."
Atlas Shrugged very much anticipated the world we live in today were trains are running off the track and airplanes are crashing and kids are taught in school to think using feelings and taught that capitalism is evil. She predicted that when a society turns against Aristotelian logic and reason, dire consequences would occur. In her book, Return of The Primitive she talks about how the 1960s anti-rationalism would also produce societal decay, which we've also seen. I think if Ayn Rand were teleported from her era to today and saw furries walking around and transwomen and stickers on posts saying "convert the golf courses to sex parks" she would say, yep I wrote about that in 1971 about how when a society rejects Aristotle and Apollo (reason and logic and order) and embraces Dionysian emotion über allies you get this insanity and decay.
I think when Rand wrote don't be a loser she meant be true to yourself. If your dad was a railroad magnate and trained you to be that too but you hated the idea and wanted to just write poetry or be a chef or something you would be a winner according to Rand as you were not living what she called a second-hand life. She was influenced mostly by Aristotle but also by Nietzsche and thus one main idea is to be true to yourself and not to the "herd" or social norms imposed on you.
I think you might be misunderstanding Ayn Rand’s view of selfishness. She wouldn't say you have to accept you are selfish. She rejected the Adam Smith view that people automatically act in their self-interest. She didn’t think people are necessarily selfish (psychological egoism), but that they ought to be selfish (ethical egoism). In her use of the term, selfishness is an achievement and essentially synonymous with self-actualization. She didn't use "self-interest" (or "rationality") the way economists do.
You’re absolutely spot on, though, in your critique of her views on sex and male desire in particular. It reminds me of a scene in Atlas Shrugged that perfectly encapsulates your point on how Rand projected her female sexuality onto the men she admired: in a flashback when Dagny and Francisco were teens, she asks him what he likes most about her and he responds by... pointing at the logo of her future railroad company (or something in the same vein, I'm just recalling from memory). I can't speak for other men but, as someone who shares your taste in women, I personally had a bit of trouble relating to Francisco here.
"Rand in effect projected her own female sexuality – in which attraction is based on an overall judgment of the entirety of the mind and personality of a potential partner — onto men"
A real pioneer in this respect! This is the story of the last 15 years of pop culture.
Despite what Richard and many people want to believe, women are not attracted to "personality" and I don't think Ayn Rand was any different in this regard, at most it is bonus to the things they are actually biologically attracted to, similar to how men's sexuality works. Women actually care about looks and youth even more than men in some circumstances.
This seems like an oversimplification in the other direction. In truth it's always both.Women and men are both attracted to personality and looks. This attraction is often synergistic, I've had the experience of thinking a woman physically unremarkable upon meeting her, but finding her utterly gorgeous after I've gotten to know her.
The question isn't whether women are attracted to looks or personality. It's if the average woman is attracted to the same ratio of them as the average man. I think it probably is true that women give personality more weight, on average, than men do. But that doesn't mean they don't give looks any weight, or that there aren't exceptional women out there.
No, personality does not create attraction for either men and women, most people who say otherwise are delusional or virtue signaling (often the latter, especially in the case of women). I am not saying you are but I doubt you'd find an obese ugly woman attractive after getting to know her unless you have some strange fetishes. Women do care a lot about looks, and while there is the aspect of wealth and status it doesn't much nowadays in developed countries compared to before unless you are in the top 10% of socioeconomic status, making looks the most important factor in men's sex and dating success. We need to acknowledge the biological realities of human sexuality, even if they are unfair and amoral, much like how we had to acknowledge the biological realities of IQ.
As it happens I do find obese and ugly women attractive after getting to know them, providing that they are interesting and nice people. Unattractiveness is like a mild poison that you build up resistance to the more frequently you are exposed to it. If you spend enough time with a person with a charming and interesting personality, all the things that are gross about them will lose importance relative to what is charming about them.
I know that this is not the result of a fetish because if I do not know someone at all the attraction I feel towards them is much more conventional and based on them being conventionally attractive. Additionally, it isn't like them being unattractive is a plus. If they were conventionally attractive and charming that would be even better.
I think women like men with money and power. Including ugly men and older men.
She was kind of a right-wing feminist in a lot of weird ways. The insistence on doing your own thing, the belief women should act like men and men thought like women...
Ayn Rand’s ethics is badly needed as a counterweight to the worst tendencies of almost all other ethics. It arose from a deep understanding of an anti-human regime, and having her voice in your head sometimes is a way to keep your life from being an anti-human regime. Great post.
Yeah, there are very few people on the right who can claim to be philosophers, activists, and authors at the same time, so even if she's sort of so-so at each one the field's kind of small. And she took a pretty rare tack in defending egoism. Not that it really works if everyone does it but it's at least interesting to see what such a philosophy would look like.
To leftists who detest markets, blue-collar work is inherently degrading.
And yet, under socialism/communism, every worker would be reduced to a blue-collar worker.
yet if you look at soviet propaganda they valorize the workers! rand-thought actually has the same values as communism, they just disagree on who the moochers and leeches are.
Ok, but Rand would also say the workers are only effective when they follow the superior architects, entrepreneurs, titans of industry and capitalists. This wasn't workers running the factories. This was hierarchy and everyone follow the superior people to create things.
The stock answer to this is that blue-collar work in a capitalist society is only degrading because of capitalist exploitation of the proletariat, and would cease to be so if the proletariat owned the means of production. Suffice to say I am sceptical.
There are also certain strains of socialist/communist thought that think a post-work, post-scarcity communist society is inevitable and desirable.
>This is one of those Rand scenes that are so unashamedly over the top that they become enjoyable.
This is something I thought throughout "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". It's something of a guilty pleasure, reading a book where all of the characters are so one-dimensional, the heroes flawless and the villains so thoroughly wicked with no redeeming qualities to speak of. They're like Disney movies, and wouldn't be half as entertaining if the characters were more rounded and complex.
Did I read a different version of "Atlas Shrugged" from everyone else? The version I read was about two people who (at least for the first half) were too blinded by their autistic obsessions to realize they were wasting their time trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, and that it would be better for everyone if they just stopped trying to prove themselves to people who will hate them no matter what they do. This isn't a creative reinterpretation or anything, it's a point spelled out explicitly within the novel itself. I have no idea who these "flawless heroes" everyone keeps talking about are.
I guess Francisco d'Anconia was basically perfect in every away, and some might consider him to be a third main hero, but when people call the other two lead heroes "flawless", I have to assume they either haven't read the book or don't know what that word means.
Yes, but the whole novel is about how society literally falls apart when it stops following the superior people who create things.
As a teenager halfway through Atlas Shrugged, I find it extremely inspiring. I'm not a fan of many of Rand's ideas, but I find myself with twice the amount of ambition and drive after reading this book.
There are some books which I read, and I promptly forget about after a few days. There are other books where I feel changed after reading them. I go about my day-to-day interactions differently. I take a different approach to my life. From small habits to big goals. Atlas Shrugged has been one of these books for me.
Glad you mentioned Rand’s take on kids from the Atlas excerpt;
“They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice”
That section always stuck with me. I always wanted to care for my kids myself. Years down the line I am, and I enjoy it.
It’s not a sentiment that’s commonly shared though, not when feminism has women convinced that to feel of value we have to have a monetary value attached to our time.
I think there are lots of mothers like the ones Rand describes, just making their own independent Gulches, all the while getting messages from society that it’s a burdensome sacrifice, or messages from religion that such burdensome sacrifice is altruistic. Where is the assured ownership and noble revelation?
Capitalism needs a moral defence, but the kind of motherhood she described does too.
Has anyone come across anything in that realm?
there was a recent talk by greg salmieri(including some of his own experiences as a new father), on parenthood and the role of self-interest. https://youtu.be/-_rBpGm-fME?list=PLqsoWxJ-qmMsRyS80jqR1E8sr7Ci3MYzH
Whenever you see a girl boss bragging about her career as making her a better catch, we should stop calling that Cultural Marxism, and start calling it Cultural Randianism. I don't find this behavior more silly than offensive, but I wonder if sexuality was a source of the kind of "inner conflict" she describes as leading to depression.
If Randian can be described as Nietzschean, then I think she is in good company with Camille Paglia. Whereas Rand believed it was necessary to be a moral absolutist in personal heroism and courage, Paglia had a wider view, which included masochistic tendencies as artistically valuable.
The Randian view of life, which is to take things to their utmost, to try your best, and to never give up, seems almost religious to me. I don't say that as a criticism, but as a compliment. If one is an atheist, I think it is better to worship one's self than to claim otherwise -- to pretend false humility as an atheist seems even more offensive to God than to boldly reject him!
It's a good point--girlboss feminism is a lot closer to Rand than Marx, and is now in bad odor with the intersectional types for exactly that reason.
It's funny you mention that, though, because what I get from reading that passage is that Ayn Rand was *definitely* a sub. Hypermasculine women tend to either go the feminist route and attack men (more common and you have a lot more moral support these days) or the quasi-trad route and go looking for even *more* masculine men. If evo psych had been around it might have done her some good.
The original Satanists (LaVey and so on) held a similar view. LaVey didn't end well, and perhaps there's a lesson in that, though he spent a lot of energy trying to 'own the Christians'.
I was focusing on the part where Richard mentions her extolling the "heroic" women as the most attractive. Sexually, the rape-kink is certainly submissive. It's definitely a contradiction.
People are like that. Quite a few girlboss ladies are subs in bed. Ask me how I know. ;)
One of the better woo-woo books I read (low bar I know) was Jean Shinoda Bolen's Goddesses in Every Woman, which once you strip out the sillier Jungian stuff is an interesting use of Greek mythology to describe female personality types. (She tried to write a sequel about men without a male author, which went about as well as you'd expect.) Rand is pretty much the archetypical Athena--masculine, goes for an even more masculine man. Bolen leans left, so she dislikes her, but if they're willing to learn feminine presentation it can be an effective life strategy.
A girl boss' career does make her a better catch. Men usually won't give it nearly the same weight as she does, but it certainly doesn't hurt. It's cool to be with someone who has initiative and has achieved things.
It's possible that for certain men, but net overall, no, it is a net negative in the dating market as a whole. This is reflected in fertility data and marriage success data, where the higher a woman's income is, the less emotional security and satisfaction both partners experience. You can anecdotally state your personal preference, which is fine, but I'm asking for data about average people, not particular cases.
The romance in Rand's stories are surprisingly very standard female romance stories, as unique as the stories are in other aspects. If you read any of the romance stories, whether novels or movies or anime or whatever, that are targetted at women, they follow a similar pattern. The woman is a relatively normal person, but has lots of determination and grit that lets them succeed through some very difficult trials. This makes one to two men fall desperately in love in her, and the men will be truly spectacular people. Billionaire CEOs, or grand dark wizards, or the genius heir apparent of a monarchy, whatever. Possibly one will be evil. Then those men will pursue her, and even if she tries to turn them down, they'll keep pursuing her and she'll fall in love with one eventually.
Male romance stories follow a different pattern. Usually the man, while sometimes he does impressive things, gets the girl by being a nice guy. Being a nice guy can vary between saying nice things to protecting the romance interest from an assault.
Right. Cinderella=low-status woman gets high-status man.
Super Mario or other quest story=low-status man gets high-status woman.
One thing I find interesting is that in Japan there are male versions of the standard "female romance story." They feature ordinary men with grit and determination who wind up having truly spectacular women falling for them. My favorite example is probably an animated series called Tenchi Muyo, in which a milquetoast young man finds himself the romantic target of various science fiction archetype woman (i.e. a space pirate, mad scientist, space princess, space cop, etc.) I don't know why that culture has been more willing to invert that trope than western culture has.
You consistently write "with regards to" or similar phrases rather than "with regard to". I read almost all of what you so prolifically write, and each "regards to" is a mental speed bump for me. Yes, that usage is now quite popular, but it is ignorant usage. It is not found in the ODE nor its NOAD cousin nor the American Heritage. The latter's Usage Note says, "*Regard* is traditionally used in the singular in the phrase *in regard* (not *in regards) to*.
With respectful regards,
brec (Steve Brecher}
Rand is pretty much this meme about "coherent philosophical thought":
https://img.ifunny.co/images/88110a523eccf83cc6f1910af58bdf8f17b44ac3bdd1b104d487a47fe9eda4bb_1.webp
I'm also reminded of a quote from René Guénon, who said that with all their intellectual work, philosophers typically only demonstrate the limitations of their mentality.
I think it's worth pointing out that the central point of what she's saying is that rationality should govern choices made in your own self interest. I'm sure most of us have seen and know guys who have followed simple physical attraction while blinding themselves to real character flaws - a lot of this is just inexperience.
The point is that now, if I met a physically attractive but obviously crazy woman, I would *not* pursue her or want to. What would flood my mind is not how much I would enjoy the sex from an attractive woman, but all the problems that I know could ensue - from pregnancy, to her crazy exs, to her neediness, to threats to my work and peace of mind. I know that it would not be in my self interest to chance all the negative consequences from a night out with someone like that.
I don't think Rand’s personal relationship was "Objectivism". I believe what it was, was her attempt to apply rationality to her goals by pursuing values she believe made sense - the best *any* of us could do. And like Richard pointed out she said, reality was the ultimate judge - and I don't know, but I believe she would admit it didn't turn out well for her in the end in this particular situation. Rand doesn't claim that our self interested, rational pursuits guarantee happiness- but that is the best we can do, it is how we work (our nature as humans). Obviously failure is possible. But I look at it is essentially a positive philosophy; this is the *only* way one can win at life.
"...is that the idea that internal contradictions lead to unhappiness is likely to be true for an unusually honest and moral person."
The catch here is that when people are in the act of antisocial behavior, they rarely believe they are in contradiction with themself. When someone is caught in a robbery, they often excuse it because they had to feed their kids or some other noble goal.
The pain of internal contradiction isn't usually "I can't believe I'm lying", it's "I'm realizing my past behaviors were not warranted. Now I'm sad about my past, but worse, my internal compass doesn't give me direction for the future."
Atlas Shrugged very much anticipated the world we live in today were trains are running off the track and airplanes are crashing and kids are taught in school to think using feelings and taught that capitalism is evil. She predicted that when a society turns against Aristotelian logic and reason, dire consequences would occur. In her book, Return of The Primitive she talks about how the 1960s anti-rationalism would also produce societal decay, which we've also seen. I think if Ayn Rand were teleported from her era to today and saw furries walking around and transwomen and stickers on posts saying "convert the golf courses to sex parks" she would say, yep I wrote about that in 1971 about how when a society rejects Aristotle and Apollo (reason and logic and order) and embraces Dionysian emotion über allies you get this insanity and decay.
I think when Rand wrote don't be a loser she meant be true to yourself. If your dad was a railroad magnate and trained you to be that too but you hated the idea and wanted to just write poetry or be a chef or something you would be a winner according to Rand as you were not living what she called a second-hand life. She was influenced mostly by Aristotle but also by Nietzsche and thus one main idea is to be true to yourself and not to the "herd" or social norms imposed on you.
I think you might be misunderstanding Ayn Rand’s view of selfishness. She wouldn't say you have to accept you are selfish. She rejected the Adam Smith view that people automatically act in their self-interest. She didn’t think people are necessarily selfish (psychological egoism), but that they ought to be selfish (ethical egoism). In her use of the term, selfishness is an achievement and essentially synonymous with self-actualization. She didn't use "self-interest" (or "rationality") the way economists do.
You’re absolutely spot on, though, in your critique of her views on sex and male desire in particular. It reminds me of a scene in Atlas Shrugged that perfectly encapsulates your point on how Rand projected her female sexuality onto the men she admired: in a flashback when Dagny and Francisco were teens, she asks him what he likes most about her and he responds by... pointing at the logo of her future railroad company (or something in the same vein, I'm just recalling from memory). I can't speak for other men but, as someone who shares your taste in women, I personally had a bit of trouble relating to Francisco here.
I really wish John Oliver had immigrated to another country which he could subject to smug criticism on a comedy show. Like China or Russia.