I've got a new feature almost ready to go. I'm pretty stoked about this one because I've been wanting it for quite literally years, but it was never possible on Reddit.
Hey, guess what? We're not on Reddit!
But before I continue, I want to temper expectations. This is a prototype of a first revision of an experimental feature. It is not going to look impressive; it is not going to be impressive. There's a lot of work left to do.
The feature is currently live on our perpetually-running dev site. Log in, click any thread, and go look below the Comment Preview. You'll see a quokka in a suit asking you for help. (His name is Quincy.) Click the cute li'l guy and you'll be asked to rate three comments. Do so, and click Submit. Thank you! Your reward is another picture of Quincy and a sense of satisfaction.
So, uh . . . . what?
Okay, lemme explain.
This is the first part of a feature that I'm calling Volunteering. Once in a while, the site is going to prompt you to help out, and if you volunteer, it'll give you a few minutes of work to do. Right now this is going to be "read some comments and say if they're good or not". Later this might include stuff like "compare two comments and tell me if one of them is better", or "read a comment, then try to come up with a catchy headline for it".
These are intentionally small, and they're entirely optional. You can ignore it altogether if you like.
I'm hoping these can end up being the backbone of a new improved moderation system.
Isn't this just voting, but fancy?
You'd think so! But there are critical differences.
First, you do not choose the things to judge. The system chooses the things it wants you to judge. You are not presented with thousands of comments and asked to vote on the ones you think are important, no, you are given (at the moment) three specific comments and information is requested of you.
This means that I don't need to worry about disproportionate votecount on popular comments. Nor do I need to worry about any kind of vote-brigading, or people deciding to downvote everything that a user has posted. The system gets only the feedback it asks for. This is a pull system; the system pulls information from the userbase in exactly the quantities it wants instead of the userbase shoving possibly-unwanted information at the scoring systems.
Second, you can be only as influential as the system lets you. On the dev site you can volunteer as often as you want for testing purposes, but on the live site, you're going to - for now - be limited to once every 20 hours. I'll probably change this a lot, but nevertheless, if the system decides you've contributed enough, it'll thank you kindly and then cut you off. Do you want to spend all day volunteering in order to influence the community deeply? Too bad! Not allowed.
But this goes deeper than it sounds. Part of having the system prompt you is that not all prompts will be the system attempting to get actionable info from you. Some of the prompts will be the system trying to compare your choices against a reference, and the system will then use this comparison to figure out how much to trust your decisions.
That reference, of course, is the mods.
I've previously referred to this as the Megaphone system or the Amplifier system. One of our devs called it a "force multiplier". I think this gets across the core of what I'm aiming for. The goal here is not majority-rules, it's not fully decentralized moderation. It's finding people who generally agree with the mods and then quietly harnessing them to handle the easy moderation cases.
(We have a lot of easy moderation cases.)
There's another important point here. The mods are only human and we make mistakes. My hope is that we can get enough volunteer help to provide significantly more individual decisions than the mods can, and my hope is that the combined efforts of several people who don't quite agree with the mods in all cases is still going to be more reliable than any single mod. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if there's people out there who are better at judging posts than our mods are! It's just hard to find you; some of you may not even comment, and you're pretty undiscoverable right now, but you will certainly get a chance to volunteer!
Also, this will hopefully improve turnaround time a lot. I'm tired of filtered comments taking hours to get approved! I'm tired of really bad comments sticking around for half a day! There are many people constantly commenting and voting, and if I can get a few minutes of help from people now and then, we can handle those rapidly instead of having to wait for a mod to be around.
Wow! You get all of this, with absolutely no downsides or concerns!
Well, hold on.
The big concern here is that virtually nobody has ever done this before. The closest model I have is Slashdot's metamoderation system. Besides that, I'm flying blind.
I also have to make sure this isn't exploitable. The worst-case scenario is people being able to use this to let specific bad comments through. I really want to avoid that, and I've got ideas on how to avoid it, but it's going to take work on my part to sort out the details.
And there's probably issues that I'm not even thinking of. Again: flying blind. If you think of issues, bring 'em up; if you see issues, definitely bring 'em up.
Oh man! So, all this stuff is going to be running real soon, right?
Nope.
First I need some data to work off. Full disclosure: all the current system does is collect data, then ignore it.
But it is collecting data, and as soon as I've got some data, I'll be working on the next segment.
This is the first step towards having a platform that's actually better-moderated than the current brand of highly-centralized sites. I don't know if it'll work, but I think it will.
Please go test it out on the dev site, report issues, and when it shows up here (probably in a few days) click the button roughly daily and spend a few minutes on it. Your time will not be wasted.
Blocking
Right now this site's block feature works much the same as Reddit's. But I want to change that, because it sucks.
My current proposal is:
-
If you block someone, you will no longer see their comments, receive PMs from them, or be notified if they reply to your comments.
-
This does not stop them from seeing your comments, nor does it stop them from replying to your comments.
-
If they attempt to reply to your comment, it will include the note "This user has blocked you. You are still welcome to reply, but your replies will be held to a stricter standard of civility."
-
This note is accurate and we will do so.
That's the entire proposed feature. Feedback welcome!
User Flair and Usernames
We're going to start cracking down a bit on hyperpartisan or antagonistic user flair. Basically, if we'd hit you with a warning for putting it in a comment, we'll hit you with a warning for putting it in your flair. If anyone has a really good reason for us to not do this, now's the time to mention it!
Same goes for usernames. On this site, you can actually change your display username, and we're just leaving that in place. So we'll tell you to change your name if we have to. Extra for usernames: don't use a misleading or easily-confused username, okay? If it looks like you're masquerading as an existing well-known user, just stop it.
I'm currently assuming that both of these fall under our existing ruleset and don't need new rules applied. If you disagree strongly, let me know.
The Usual Stuff
Give feedback! Tell me how you're doing? Do you have questions? Do you have comments? This is the place for them!
Are you a coder and want to help out? We have a lot of work to do - come join the dev discord.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
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An intensive deep dive into what remain the Pinnacle of the real time strategy genre, and why I believe it might just be the greatest spectator game every created and most strategically interesting game that currently has an active community.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Submission statement: Anthropologist William Buckner discusses the social purposes and methods of duelling in various societies.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Submission statement: Misha Saul writes about how fathers love their daughters. With examples from the Sopranos, Disney movies and the Talmud.
I suppose some part of the love of daughters must be wrapped up in the feminine. That is, after all, the defining line between daughters and sons.
The love of daughters may be the purest form of love of woman possible: desexualised, a man can appreciate the feminine in all its splendour, unmarred by lust. Gentle. Soft. Loving. Fiery.
A father’s love of his daughter mirrors a boy’s love of his mother. But the love of his mother is the water a boy swims in — as a forever-presence, it’s sometimes harder to appreciate. But a daughter is a new thing that arrives in the flush of adulthood.
Daughters bring out what is best in a man: he provides where she needs him, he protects where she is vulnerable, he dotes where she is playful.
A daughter is the confluence of everything a man needs in life: relevance and love. What greater need is there than to provide and protect your baby girl? And she is the first woman after his mother to love him unconditionally from the get go. But well before the feeling of being loved melts him — when she is two or three or four and tells him she loves him and kisses him — he discovers another feeling of love. The pleasure in loving. The simple pleasure in being near her, silly with her, holding her. Your wife may be the love of your life but that love is bound up with the banalities and duties of marriage and the strictures of covenant. A daughter is a strange, angelic extension of you. A beating heart outside your chest.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
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Recruiting for a cause.
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Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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This is part 3 of a 3 part review. Part 1 Part 2
Autogynephilia and sexuality
The relationship between autogynephilia and other parts of the autogynephile's sexuality are varied. Lawrence spends a lot of time on this, but I don't find it particularly interesting or enlightening in most respects, so I'll just leave you with a few key points.
Since autogynephilia appears to be a misfiring version of heterosexuality, it unsurprisingly coexists with it; however, it also competes with it in various ways. In different people, the following are all possible:
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Normal heterosexuality is present most of the time, except during an autogynephilic "episode"; autogynephilic feelings are ended by orgasm.
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Normal heterosexuality and autogynephilia coexist, with soft rather than sharp boundaries, or some blending. Autogynephilic feelings may go away temporarily while falling in love with a woman.
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As (1), but autogynephilia is dominant and only temporarily goes away after orgasm.
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Normal heterosexual attraction to women exists, but orgasm is only possible while having an autogynephilic fantasy.
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Romantic attraction to women exists, but only autogynephilic fantasies/behaviors are sexually arousing.
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Complete absence of romantic or sexual attraction to anyone except a female version of oneself.
I wasn't able to get a good sense of how common each of these was except that the last was relatively rarer, and the first wouldn't be common among MtF transsexuals since they would be less likely to transistion.
Autogynephilic transsexuals' interpretations of autogynephilia
While a frankly shocking number of respondents (selection bias?) expressed that their autogynephilic sexual feelings were the dominant factor in their transition or desire for transition, most respondents, while acknowledging their autogynephilia, gave it an alternative interpretation or attributed to it a lower degree of significance.
Some of these alternative interpretations are present in the discourse, and seem to represent an attempt to rationalize the reality of autogynephilia in the context of the prevailing dogma of the transgender movement. Lawrence catalogues and argues against these briefly; since they are probably of interest I'll summarize them here.
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Autogynephilia is a symptom, not a cause, of transsexualism. This is the idea that gender dysphoria precedes autogynephilia, and that autogynephilia is a somehow a response to the female gender identity or to gender dysphoria, such as an escapist fantasy. This position is contradicted by the evidence that autogynephilia generally precedes the female gender identity, and doesn't explain why the fantasy of becoming female is so erotic.
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Autogynephilia can't be part of the reason for desire to be female because nonsexual desires preceded puberty. Lawrence appeals to the fact that sexual feelings can and often do start before puberty, including in many of the transsexuals cited in the book, as a counterargument, as well as to the unreliability of memory and testimony in such cases. I don't think this is a knock-down argument against the second part of the statement, but at any rate the first part just doesn't follow.
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Autogynephila is just the sexualization of childhood cross-gender wishes (for coincidental or idiosyncratic reasons). Lawrence's response here seems to be bewilderment, and I'm inclined to agree; these reasons seem like so many just-so stories, many of which are bizzare in their leaps of logic.
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Autogynephilia can't be the reason for transition, because it feels incidental / something else seems more important. But while the direct motivations might not be autogynephilia, this ignores the role that autogynephilia likely played in the development of the more immediate reasons.
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Autogynephilia is just part of normal female sexuality. This one shows up a lot, due to a couple of studies which seemed to find autogynephilia in natal women. I recall that Scott drew a similar conclusion from a question on one of his SSC reader surveys. The problem with those studies (and Scott's has a similar issue), according to Lawrence (p 176), is that they do not
adequately differentiate between being aroused by wearing sexually provocative clothing or by imagining that potential romantic partners might find one attractive (which some natal women apparently do experience) and being sexually aroused simply by the idea that one is a woman or has a woman’s body (which natal women arguably rarely or never experience).
- Transsexualism is due to a feminized brain in a male body. This is of course one of the "standard" theories, but makes no sense in the context of autogynephilic transsexuals who are within the normal-male distribution in everything except for wanting to be feminine.
Non-transsexual autogynephiles
Lawrence devotes a chapter to the testimonies of the of non-transsexual autogynephiles who responded to the survey. With a few exceptions (such as the people who just wanted to have breasts, but nothing else) they were very similar to those of the transsexuals, only somewhat less so. The primary distinguishing factor is that they had not made the decision to transition, for various reasons. This is further evidence for Lawrence's conclusion (which really ought to be the default one) that autogynephilic transsexualism, autogynephilia in heterosexual men, and fetishistic transvestism are all regions in the same general cluster ("part of a spectrum" as they say), differing by degree and specifics more than kind.
Lawrence talks about clinical implications
At the end of the book we come to Lawrence's suggestions for what can and should be done in clinical care. Given that Lawrence is an advocate of Blanchard's theories and thus not in good graces with the trans activists, perhaps you can guess what they are...
I'll spare you the tedious scrolling. Yeah, it's a trick question. Here are a few things Lawrence proposes:
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Transition (including SRS) is a good way to manage the gender dysphoria associated with autogynephilic transsexualism.
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Cross-sex hormones are a good way of both giving men with less severe autogynephilia some of what they want (feminization) while also reducing their libido and thus (sometimes) the intensity of their autogynephilia.
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Autogynephilia should be destigmatized, and presented according to Lawrence's theory that it is a sexual orientation and not just a paraphilia.
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Puberty blockers in adolescence should be used more for autogynephilic boys, so that if they decide to transition they can have more feminine bodies and do so at an early enough age that they don't have baggage.
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Autogynephilic adolescents should be given an environment supportive of things like cross-dressing, so that they can develop cross-gender identities more quickly and so be comfortable with (and eligible for) transition at an earlier age.
I'm afraid I disagree on all counts. (Well, I'm not exactly happy with the stigmatization part, but given the other items I suspect I don't envision the same sort of destigmatization that Lawrence does.) I guess the difference is that Lawrence is transsexual and thinks that it's a good thing, whereas I'm not and don't.
Also from this section, I can't resist quoting the following related, and rather incisive, bit about the attitudes of the trans activists and the associated medical industry (p 209):
Thirty or 40 years ago, mental health professionals who specialized in treating gender identity problems used to argue that paraphilic men—autogynephiles—who sought sex reassignment were not acceptable candidates because they were not genuinely transsexual. Nowadays, their successors seemingly want to argue that paraphilic men—autogynephiles—who seek sex reassignment have become acceptable candidates because they are not genuinely paraphilic!
My own final thoughts on autogynephilia
As I indicated early on, I think that autogynephilia is both real (personal experience is hard to deny on this one) and likely to be a key driver for a good fraction -- probably half in the eighties and a substantially higher proportion now -- of MtF transitions. Lawrence persuasively argues that autogynephilia is deeply tied up with the feelings (cross-gender wishes and identity, gender dysphoria, and so on) that lead to transition even when it is not the consciously-experienced primary motivation. But I disagree somewhat with the overall picture Lawrence paints.
Lawrence's model seems to be the following:
(Male heterosexual + ETLE) -> (autogynephilia) -> (cross-gender wishes and behaviors) -> (cross-gender identity and gender dysphoria)
where autogynephilia is understood in the "sexual orientation" sense that includes both overt lust but also some kind of romantic attraction to the feminized image of oneself and some sort of pair-bonding to that feminized self.
I'm skeptical about both "erotic target location error" and "autogynephilia as sexual orientation". The first honestly sounds quite a bit like "dormitive potency" (it's an unenlightening description, not an explanation) and the second seems like it doesn't quite cover the right territory. It seems to me that the model is stuck in a worldview where the explicitly sexual elements of things are the most basic and real, and everything else is just accretions around that.
My model is somewhat more complicated, but the gist is that the core thing is a whole complex of self-reinforcing desires all around the theme of "desire to be female/feminine", of which autogynephilia proper (the sexual arousal) is a very important part, but not necessarily more fundamental than the rest. Hence we see some people for whom the autogynephilia-proper seems to exist almost as an afterthought, or is even felt to be fundamentally undesirable (maybe because it spoils the "purity" of the rest of the fantasy), and others for whom it is almost the whole thing, as well as different times and places of emergence of various aspects of the desire, with sometimes the sexual preceding and sometimes succeeding cross-gender wishes. That is, the cross-gender wishes are at the same fundamental level as the sexual desire, and are mutually reinforcing with it, rather than being a simple consequence of it. I also disfavor ETLE as an description of what's gone wrong. I think that normal heterosexual desires-for femininity, including, of course, the purely sexual/lust part, "bleeding into" an abnormal desire-to-be female/feminine, is a more helpful way to think of it. But that may be mostly a difference in philosophical disposition.
Responding to Questions
I'm willing to answer questions in the comments. This includes questions about my own experience, if you think they'd be enlightening (I kept my experience out of the review itself since (a) I'm not transsexual, and (b) it seemed a bit too much like navel-gazing).
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Podcast Addict, and RSS.
In this episode, we discuss gayness.
Participants: Yassine, TracingWoodgrains, Sultan, Shakesneer.
Links:
Ezra Klein Interviews Dan Savage (New York Times)
Stonewall: A Butch Too Far (An Historian Goes to the Movies)
Mattachine Society (Wikipedia)
3 Differences Between the Terms 'Gay' and 'Queer' (Everyday Feminism)
Exploring HIV Transmission Rates (Healthline)
Boys Beware (PBS)
Recorded 2023-02-02 | Uploaded 2023-02-28
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
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Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
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On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
This is part 1 of a 3 part review. Part 2 Part 3
What is this?
This is a review of Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism by Dr. Anne Lawrence (2013).
The subject is enmeshed in a bunch of culture war, but since this is a book review outside the CW thread, I will try to keep culture war heat out of it. Please do the same in the comments.
What is the book about?
This book is about autogynephilia. If you don't know what that is, I'll explain below; you can also read @drmanhattan16's description in this review of a book on the history of transgenderism. The book engages with various studies in the literature, but is primarily a synthesis of testimonials from MtF transsexuals with autogynephilia, aiming to describe and understand the phenomenon and its role in gender dysphoria and transsexualism.
Who is the author of this book? Who are you?
The author of the book is Dr. Anne Lawrence, a now-retired psychologist, sexologist, and (per Wikipedia) former anaesthesiologist. Lawrence also happens to be an autogynephilic MtF transsexual.
I am a thirtysomething man who suffered from autogynephilia for much of his life, beginning in adolescence (arguably earlier, depending on what you count). You might quibble about the past tense, according to the same theory that a former drunkard is still an alcoholic no matter how long he's been sober. At any rate I do not consider myself trans and live a normal life without any of the behaviors typically associated with autogynephilia.
The point is that both the author and reviewer of this book have personal experience of the thing under study, albeit from quite different perspectives.
Why do you keep using the word "transsexual"?
To avoid wading into culture war issues or getting into the weeds of definitions, I'm going to use the terminology and definitions that are used in the book -- with one exception. Lawrence uses "homosexual" in the context of MtF transsexuals who are exclusively sexually attracted to men. Regardless of your culture war position, this is in today's context very confusing, so I'm going to call these individuals exclusively androphilic.
Should I read the book?
I am going to recommend that you not read the full book, unless one of the following applies:
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You are a doctor, psychologist, or therapist who might see patients for gender- or sex-related issues.
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You personally suffer from autogynephilia, and want to try to understand your condition better. I give this particular suggestion with some trepidation; you might find some of the content of the book to be something of an infohazard.
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You think someone you care for (spouse, child, etc.) may suffer from autogynephilia.
This is not because the book is a bad book. It's just that reading about other people's paraphilias is really not a healthy thing to do and you will probably find it unpleasant and gross.
Introduction: Blanchard's typology and autogynephilia
In the 1980s, psychologist Ray Blanchard discovered that a lot of patients seeking MtF transition did not fit the standard picture of especially feminine men who had since early childhood considered themselves to "really be" female and were sexually attracted to men, but were instead basically the opposite on all counts except for their extreme desire to transition. What would drive them to this? He discovered that many of them exhibited sexual arousal at fantasies of themselves as women: what he came to term autogynephilia.
Blanchard described two types of MtF transsexuals:
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The first group fit the standard picture. Feminine from an early age, they "behaved like girls, identified with girls, and frequently proclaimed themselves to be girls". They hade female-typical interests, hobbies, and occupations, usually cross-dressed openly since childhood, and were exclusively sexually attracted to men.
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The second group were basically mostly-normal men, except for their intense desire to be women and their autogynephilia, and some behaviors associated with the autogynephilia.
He proposed that this typology was essentially complete, and that the autogynephilia in the second group was their ultimate (though perhaps not conscious) motivating factor for transition.
Now, this complete binary classification was probably not justified by his original data. A small fraction (15%) of the people who reported being exclusively androphilic also reported symptoms of autogynephilia; a larger fraction (27%) of the non-exclusively-androphilic group did not. Further studies seemed to support a strong, but not complete association.
As for autogynephilia being not merely a symptom, but the cause, of the autogynephilic transsexuals' desire to transition, Blanchard proposed that autogynephilia was a paraphilia, resulting from an "Erotic Target Location Error" (ETLE). Essentially, these people had a normal heterosexual male orientation, but something went wrong (as it does) and these men located the sexually desired feminine object in themselves, instead of (or in addition to) in others. This erotic desire led to all the other wishes, feelings, and behaviors associated with transsexuality.
Needless to say, this theory wasn't, and isn't, popular. Nobody likes to hear that their core desires and a major part of their identity might be due to a paraphilia -- even aside from the stigma of having a paraphilia. And nobody likes to be associated with, well, perverts -- at best it's bad optics for the movement. Plus, a lot of the noisiest proponents of the theory definitely take the line that "this proves trans people are just gross perverts". In addition, the theory was rather sweeping (exactly these two types), and the data seemed not to fully support the clean bifurcation, at least not without assuming that people were lying or very mistaken about their self-reports; similarly, these self-reports usually denied the putative etiology of their condition. So the theory had additional unpleasant implications about the reliability of the transsexuals' testimony. Whether or not it was true, the theory was going to provoke a lot of backlash.
Is Blanchard's typology true?
Well, the book really isn't about arguing whether Blanchard's typology is true, but about describing the nature of autogynephilia, so...
Oh, screw it. It's true. At least to a first approximation. Maybe there are some exceptions to the two-type categorization, but if so they are rare. Maybe the simple etiological description for how autogynephilia is the full cause of transgender ideation and gender dysphoria in the autogynephiles is wrong, but it's more right than the other major hypotheses on offer.
About the fact that some of the non-exclusively-androphilic transsexuals reported no sexual arousal around, say, cross-dressing? Well, it turns out that psychologists have a way of figuring out if a male is aroused by something. Yeah. You check if they get hard ("penile tumescence"). It turns out that most of them were, in fact, aroused by imagining cross-dressing. Blanchard and Lawrence think this is not preverication, but because the these people are honestly not fully aware of it.
For the other error type -- (reportedly) exclusively-androphilic MtF transsexuals who reported autogynephilia -- Lawrence has another explanation, which we'll get to later. (Besides the obvious "they lied about being exclusively-androphilic," for which there is some evidence in that some people have admitted to doing just that to get past gatekeeping.)
Finally, the etiological part. So what if all of these MtF transsexuals have autogynephilia -- couldn't this be irrelevant? Maybe it's a result rather than a cause of their feminine identity, maybe it's something of an epiphenomenon, or maybe it's just normal female sexuality? Autogynephilic transsexuals have proposed all these things. But we'll see (Lawrence has a chapter on this later on) that these are mostly not good explanations.
Why should I care about a tiny number of people?
Because it's not a tiny number of people. It's hard to draw conclusions about prevalence, but Lawrence estimates about 3% or more for any form or amount of autogynephilia, and that severe and persistent autogynephilia affects "probably fewer than 1% of men and perhaps fewer than 0.1%" (I interpret that as a vague confidence interval).
Lawrence also estimates that about one-half to two-thirds of transsexuals are autogynephilic. But this is based on data from the 1980s through 2000s. With the explosion of transgender identification since then, and the apparent collapse of the old gatekeeping regime which disproportionately excluded them, I expect the group of MtF autogynephilic transsexuals -- both as a fraction of the population and as a fraction of the people undergoing medical treatment (hormones and/or SRS) -- to be much larger now.
So it's all really "just a fetish"?
Sort of, but not really. There's more to the autogynephilia thing than just getting off. Lawrence thinks of it as more of a sexual orientation, complete with impacts on romantic love, pair bonding, and so on, than purely a paraphilia. I don't think that's the best lens, but it's apparent that what's going on is a whole complex of things, of which the paraphilia proper is a (larger or smaller) part. If you want a pithy-but-accurate statement, you could do worse than Lawrence's formulation: people with autogynephilia are "men who love women and want to become what they love".
Perhaps unfortunately, reading this book (or this review) may create the impression that it is pretty much just a paraphilia, because the sexual element is the focus of the book. And the sexual element is pretty important to the phenomenon! It's just not the whole story.
Getting Narratives
So what do transsexuals with autogynephilia have to say about themselves?
Lawrence obtained a few hundred extensive, anonymous narratives, and classified them. From the book (p 41):
I considered informants to be transsexual if they (a) identified themselves as such or described the severe gender dysphoria (discomfort with anatomic sex or gender role) or pronounced cross-gender identity (desire to be female, live as a woman, or undergo SRS) that are typical of MtF transsexualism; (b) stated that they were using hormones to feminize their bodies (with one exception noted below), were living full-time in female role, or had been approved for SRS (implying both of the former), or (c) stated that they had completed SRS.
After elimination of irrelevant and fabricated stories and deduplication, Lawrence had narratives from 249 transsexuals and 52 non- (or not-clearly-) transsexuals. All of them reported autogynephilia (that was in the call for submissions); many of them, however, rejected the accompanying theory or denied that their autogynephilia was as significant as Blanchard's theory implies.
Unreliable Narrators
Lawrence is well aware that individual narratives are unreliable, especially when there is no way to cross-check their stories. One major source of this unreliability is bias towards a socially-preferred or consistent narrative; as Lawrence says (p 44):
Several clinicians who have worked extensively with MtF transsexuals have reported that their clients tend to consciously or unconsciously distort their histories to conform to the picture of “classic” MtF transsexualism. A classic MtF transsexual is one “who has felt and acted feminine from earliest childhood, has never been sexually aroused by women’s apparel, and is romantically inclined toward males”
Lawrence also provides some choice quotes from earlier papers to this effect; from one in 1959:
A wishful falsification of memory takes place, the patients begin to recall and misinterpret various insignificant incidents in their childhood, till they finally firmly believe that "ever since I can remember, I always wanted to be a woman.”
from one in 1972:
[One patient] when first seen reported his transexual feelings to be of recent origin; 9 months later he was reporting them as starting much earlier in his life.
and from another in 1974:
the patient quite subtly alters, shades, rationalizes, denies, represses, forgets, etc., in a compelling rush to embrace the diagnosis of transsexualism.
Lawrence makes it clear that this is the general pattern of bias one should expect, and that narratives that do not fit the pattern of "classic transsexualism" should be seen as "reluctant testimony", something of a declaration against interest, and are more likely to be accurate.
In this, as in other places in this book, I find that I agree with Lawrence's conclusions while being vaguely uncomfortable with what seems to be bad epistemic practice. Every datum that goes against Lawrence's narrative is explained away, and every datum that confirms it is accepted without much question. I'd prefer to see comments along the lines of "this seems like evidence against the theory, but I think the evidence for is just better on balance" or "this would support the theory, but I am nonetheless skeptical of it". This isn't supposed to be a pop-science book, you can just admit it when the evidence is not totally one-sided!
I'm in this picture and I (don't) like it
Lawrence reports that the respondents often had very strong reactions to encountering the concept of autogynephilia. Some respondents described it as relevatory, or said that it offered increased insight into their experience. Others expressed gratitude for being able to talk about the erotic aspect of their experience. Some expressed relief at finding a concept that described them, when they had felt uncomfortable with not matching the standard descriptions, or crazy for being transsexual while not matching those descriptions. Many expressed a sense of finally not feeling alone in their experience.
Not all reactions were positive. A number of people expressed discovering the concept to be true of them as difficult; it had uncomfortable implications. And there were the people who talked about others' reactions: being shamed for their feelings, often by other trans people, hiding information from gatekeepers in order to pursue SRS, and so on.
Respondents also had varying perspectives about their autogynephilia's role in their transition, ranging from full affirmation of the centrality of sex to their decision, to placing it as one among several motives, to denial of its importance, to introspective descriptions of how their initial sexual feelings had grown to something more broad over time.
Some of them hated their autogynephilic sexual arousal, despite being aware of it. It spoils the fantasy, since there's hardly a clearer symbol of maleness than an erection.
I'm not sure why Lawrence places the chapter on these reactions before the analysis of the respondents' experiences of autogynephilia itself. Its presence here highlights one of the frustrating things about this book, though probably it was inevitable: everything seems to be all tangled up together, developments and etiology and motivations and fantasies and actions and reactions, and it's hard to know how to form a structured analysis or narrative.
In the next part we'll look at the development of autogynephilia and at what kinds of things autogynephiles are doing and fantasizing about.
Let's say you want to fix up a length of road. There are various strategies for this. Traditionally, you would perform a "resurfacing": mill away two or three inches of the existing asphalt, and replace it with the same thickness of new asphalt (of a type prescribed by the pavement experts—not all asphalt is the same). However, such a project carries with it certain extra costs, such as the federally-imposed requirement of upgrading all the pedestrian curb ramps in accordance with the ADA standards. In recent years, resurfacing has been largely displaced by "pavement preservation"—the application of a thin layer of asphalt (1 inch or less) directly on top of an existing surface that still is in reasonably good condition. For example (making some numbers up because I'm not a pavement expert), instead of doing a resurfacing every ten years, you might do a resurfacing in year 0, then pavement preservations in years 5, 10, and 15, and restart the cycle with another resurfacing in year 20, resulting in cost savings over years 0–19 in comparison to just doing resurfacings in year 0, year 10, and year 20. (It is being rumored that the asphalt industry now has gotten angry that roadway organizations aren't ordering as much asphalt, and is spinning up its lobbyists to promote a return to resurfacing, so pavement preservation may fall by the wayside in the future.)
So, anyway, let's say you want to "preserve" the pavement on a particular stretch of road—or, rather, the pavement experts in your organization have decided that this particular stretch of road should receive a particular preservation treatment, and they tell your bosses to design the project, and your bosses assign the work to you (the roadway engineer). What's the first step? Getting a survey of the area? No—the first step is getting the jurisdiction maps, to see which roads are actually the responsibility of your organization. You (the reader) already know that public roads in the United States are variously designated as municipal, county, or state roads. ("State", "US", and "Interstate" highways all count as state designation. US and Interstate highways are not owned by the federal government, but a project on a state road can be paid for by the feds if the road is in the National Highway System, or if the state government receives a one-time grant through the Surface Transportation Block Grant program. The state also gives grants to its subordinate county and municipal governments.) What you probably don't already know is that, very often, the jurisdiction does not match the designation. When a state-designated road intersects a county- or municipal-designated road, the state government usually will assume jurisdiction over the entire intersection, including any ramps or jughandles, and sometimes extending several hundred feet up the nominally county-owned road. (This can get very complicated when a state road that's controlled by the Department of Transportation, a state road that's controlled by a different organ of the state government (such as a toll-road authority or an interstate port authority), a county road, and a municipal road all meet in a single interchange.) So you (the roadway engineer) need to check your organization's archive of jurisdiction maps, to see exactly what the extent of the paving will be. Maybe the pavement experts told you to pave county roads X and Y, but it turns out that state road B will chop a few hundred feet out of your project where it intersects road X, and on the other hand municipal road N that runs between roads X and Y was signed over to county jurisdiction back in 1965, and you've also got to deal with some negligible pieces of municipal roads Q and R that intersect road Y. (And, of course, it's possible that the jurisdiction map is missing from the archive. In such a case, you can do nothing but take your best guess.)
What's the next step? The next step is to get a detailed map of the road where the work will be proposed, called "topo" (short for "topographic survey") in the jargon of the field. Ideally, a professional survey was performed for a resurfacing project five years ago, and the electronic files still are in your organization's database (or can be requisitioned from the consultant that designed the project), so you can just make some minor modifications to those files and go on your merry way. More likely, however, no professional electronic survey has been done (maybe the last project that was done on this road was a generic "maintenance and resurfacing" project that used no formal construction plans at all), and your organization isn't going to shell out the cash for a new survey for the sake of a mere pavement-preservation project. Therefore, what do you have to do? That's right. You, the roadway engineer, will have to MANUALLY draw the ENTIRETY of the multiple-mile project yourself—using as a basis either ten-year-old, one-bit-per-pixel scans of fifty- or seventy-year-old "as-built" plans of past resurfacing/reconstruction/original-construction projects, or (if no as-builts are available, which is somewhat unusual but definitely not impossible) dozens of Google Earth screenshots. This can take several weeks just by itself (I can say from extremely painful experience).
But that's not all. Topo alone is not sufficient for laying out construction plans. You also need the baseline—the set of lines and circular arcs that defines precisely where on the 2D plane the highway is located. (Earth's surface is 3D, but each state has at least one "state plane" for survey purposes.) Ideally, a baseline is included with the topo from the five-year-old resurfacing project. If there's no electronic baseline, then the second-best option is that, when the road was originally constructed fifty or seventy years ago, dozens of "monuments" were installed alongside it, and your in-house surveyors can uncover those monuments (find them with a metal detector and literally dig them up from where they've been buried by eroded soil) and get GPS coordinates for them, and you can relate those coordinates back to the as-built's "tie sheets", which are likely to have (1) all the bearings and radii, but (2) either (a) no coordinates or (b) coordinates in an outdated coordinate system that (i) can be manually copied into your CAD software, floating unmoored in the 2D plane, but (ii) cannot easily be converted to the current coordinate system and fixed in their proper place. (Converting between coordinate systems isn't just a matter of translation and rotation. There also is complicated scaling involved. I once tried to convert between coordinate systems using ArcGIS, and ended up with nothing but egg on my face and a shamefully inaccurate set of baselines. But maybe that's a me problem.) More likely, however, you have tie sheets, but the monuments were destroyed and not replaced when the roadway was widened thirty years ago, or no monuments ever were installed in the first place. What is a humble roadway engineer to do in such a circumstance? The closest thing to a monument—something that's very unlikely to have been moved since the roadway was constructed—is a drainage inlet on the side of the road. Therefore, the engineer is forced to use a few dozen inlets as ersatz monuments, send out his in-house surveyors to get GPS coordinates for them all, and manhandle the baseline from the as-built tie sheets (which, again, is just floating unmoored in the 2D plane at this point) to match those coordinates as closely as possible. (If it's a divided highway, don't forget that your organization's policy probably requires you to draw one baseline for each direction. And don't forget to draw baselines for all the ramps as well. This can get pretty annoying, especially when there's a typo in the as-built tie sheet from year 1985 and you need to figure out what's wrong by comparing it with the actual angle of the road.)
What's next? Can we start drawing the proposed work now? No, we can't. Now the engineer must draw the typical sections of the road. The typical sections are just slices of the roadway—not just the surface (lane widths, and the sideways slopes necessary for proper drainage), but also the materials that make up the subsurface (surface course, intermediate course, base course, subbase, the hundred-year-old concrete road that seventy years ago was paved over rather than being "rubblized" into subbase…). Ideally, the limits of your project perfectly match the limits of an old as-built, and you can redraw the typical sections from that raster as-built in vector format with minimal changes. More likely, however, this roadway was drastically reconstructed piecemeal in half a dozen different projects over the years, and the as-builts from those old projects are like puzzle pieces that you must fit together while keeping in mind that some have been partially overwritten by others. (And don't think that you can skip this step just because you're doing a project where the contractor won't interact with the subsurface at all! Even pavement-preservation jobs require typical sections to be included. My current, unusually-large project may end up with as many as seventy different typical sections, which could take up something like 15 or 20 sheets. My bosses are hoping that we'll be able to get their bosses to update the procedures for pavement-preservation jobs so I don't have to spend a week or two drawing all this stuff that the contractor will have no use for.)
Now for temporary traffic control. On a pavement-preservation project, this isn't too bad. Since slathering a thin slurry of bituminous material onto the pavement is a one-night job (the road can be opened to traffic on the following morning), responsibility for determining temporary detour routes falls on the contractor rather than on the designer—and, let me tell you, drawing a detour route for each of the dozen ramps on a project, including a list of all the signs that need to be installed for each detour, is a very tedious task. However, even without detour routes, the designer still needs to go through his organization's list of standard traffic-control details and estimate how many drums, cones, barricades, and square feet of temporary construction signage the contractor will need to employ. (Most contractors will just reuse the equipment that they already have and bid something like one dollar per unit for each of these items, but we are not allowed to make such assumptions in our cost estimates—it's full price for everything.) Even on a pavement-preservation project, you may still need to draw a nonstandard traffic-control detail if the bigwigs who drew the standard details failed to take into account a particular situation, like a ramp or a roundabout. (Oh, you thought something as commonplace as closing a ramp for overnight paving would be in the standard traffic-control details? Well, you thought wrong.)
Finally, we can start figuring out the quantities of the proposed work. Asphalt? No, not yet! I'm talking about the (permanent) pavement markings. You've got to compile a spreadsheet listing every single stripe segment in the entire project—white or yellow; four-inch or eight-inch (or six-inch on Interstate highways); broken (colloquially called dashed), solid, or double solid (or broken on one side and solid on the other side, or that newfangled dotted)—including any upgrades that need to be done (e. g., changing the line along an auxiliary lane from broken to dotted). And don't forget the RPMs (raised pavement markers—those little shiny things that your headlamps highlight when it's raining), with different spacings in different places! And the rumble strips (not just in the outside shoulder, but also in the centerline, or in the inside shoulder if it's wide enough)! And the "markings" (made of a different material than "stripes" proper, thermoplastic rather than epoxy—e. g., 8-inch crosswalk lines, 24-inch stop lines, and "← ONLY" at intersections)! And the separate pay items for removal of the existing pavement markings before the pavement treatment can be applied, and for the application of temporary pavement markings during construction!! (My current project's stripe calculation spreadsheet has around 800 rows, but this project is unusually large. My previous project's spreadsheet had around 200 rows, and my spreadsheet for the project before that had around 300 rows. All three projects are/were pavement preservation.) Oh, and don't forget—three paragraphs ago you drew all the road edges from as-builts. You need to draw all the existing pavement markings as well. (They normally would be picked up in the survey, but this part of the survey technically isn't included in the same "topo" file, since it's shown only on the striping sheets, not on the construction sheets. Or maybe I'm just being too pedantic.) I hope you're proficient with your CAD software's offset tool!
The pavement markings are only the most important part of the "incidental work" that surrounds a pavement-preservation project. Less important, but still needing to be done, is the inspection (typically via Google Street View) of all the drainage inlets that sit in or alongside the pavement within the project limits. If you're a bicyclist, you may be aware that, over the past few decades, the slotted grates that will catch your front tire and flip you over the handlebars have been gradually replaced with "bicycle-safe grates", which replace the long, wide slots with smaller holes. This process still is ongoing. Additionally, sometimes the "curb piece" of an inlet that's embedded in the curb has incurred damage after too many tractor-trailers ran over it, and needs to be replaced. There are the environmental regulations: a curb piece whose mouth is taller than two inches allows too much debris to enter waterways, and must be replaced with one that has a smaller mouth. There are concerns received from the maintenance experts: Way back when the aforementioned environmental regulations were instituted, people didn't want to go to the trouble of replacing all those zillions of curb pieces, so instead they tried affixing a little slotted faceplate to the front of the curb piece in order to cover up the overlarge mouth. It turned out, though, that these faceplates tend to catch on snow plows, so now any curb piece that received that treatment needs to be replaced in its entirety anyway. And, finally, there are the rare occasions where the concrete box underneath the grate appears to be broken (as evidenced by a suspiciously low grate elevation), requiring the entire inlet to be replaced. (And some non-inlet incidental work: the designer should take a field visit on the day after heavy rain, and check for any ponding that can be fixed with some localized milling and paving.)
At long last, we can draw the proposed asphalt. This step is relatively simple, as are the steps of (1) referencing everything into the actual plan sheets, (2) labeling all the proposed work on the construction and striping sheets, and (3) summing up the quantities and plugging them into the (somewhat finicky) estimation software… Wait a minute—did I say it was simple? No! No, you've got to run everything past more environmental regulations! Increasing the elevation of the roadway by just half an inch requires the project to be reviewed for flooding. Some pavement-preservation treatments (thankfully including the one that's being used on my current, oversized project) are thinner than half an inch—but others are not. So now you have to wait for the environmental consultant to review your work. Somehow, the in-house environmental experts who coordinate this review are understaffed even though they've got their thumb in every pie, so your project probably will be delayed by a month or two past its originally-scheduled submission date. And, after all this rigmarole, the environmental experts will tell you to mill down one or two arbitrary 500-foot segments of road by an extra inch, and that'll be that. Also, don't forget to mill underneath any overhead structures, in order to maintain the existing clearance—not just bridges, but also sign structures. I hope you didn't forget to draw the sign structures into your topo file! They probably aren't included in the roadway as-builts that you were looking at before, because structural stuff is done separately, so it's back to Google Earth screenshots for you. And also-also you've got to do a little bit of milling wherever your new pavement meets old pavement (at intersections and at ramp terminals), in order to avoid a sudden change in elevation (also known as a bump). And also-also-also you need to mill along the curb, because otherwise you'll change the drainage characteristics of the roadway. And finally don't forget to ask the electronics experts about any electronic stuff that's embedded in the road—you can't mill over it without replacing the whole system afterward. (But maybe the electronics experts want it to be replaced as part of the same project, since you're already working in the area.)
After that, it passes out of your hands and into the hands of the bigwigs who do pencil-pushing stuff like drawing up the tentative construction schedule, compiling the construction specifications (the standard boilerplate, a bunch of lines that need to be filled in by the designer, special stuff that the pavement or environmental or structural experts think need to be added, affirmative-action requirements from the "affirmative-action experts", construction-office requirements from the construction experts, etc.), and making the final electronic submission to the bigger wigs (the project manager, the in-house reviewers, and I think some kind of FHWA review).
For the xianxia fans: 哭笑不得 (I don't know whether I should laugh or cry). For the zoomers: 😂.
This is part 2 of a 3 part review. Part 1 Part 3
How it all starts
Cross-gender fantasies in autogynephiles can start anywhere between early childhood and the onset of puberty; Lawrence reports that most of the respondents who specified an age of onset indicated a start between 4 and 6 years old, although this is likely due in part to selection bias (those with later age of onset are less likely to specify it, since the timing wouldn't seem as significant). Explicitly erotic feelings often started later, usually by puberty, though some reports also indicated an erotic aspect to the fantasies even in early childhood.
Expression of a fundamentally erotic fantasy prior to puberty sounds rather odd to modern Americans, but this is because our culture has a strong belief in childhood innocence -- a defense against bad actors like molesters, maybe, but not exactly accurate. Boys as young as toddlers get erections, and frequently displays of emotion associated with their eventual sexual orientation are present in early childhood.
At any rate, many respondents engaged in cross-dressing from an early age, and a good number of them reported erotic feelings from it then, though for others they did not start -- or were not remembered as such -- until later.
We maybe shouldn't read too much into occasional cross-dressing or cross-gender wishes at a young age, though. Lawrence points out that non-erotic cross-dressing or occasional wishes to be the opposite sex are fairly common, quoting studies that found these in several percent (varying by age) of preadolescent boys. Still, when these behaviors are erotic, that probably means something; several respondents mentioned masturbating to fantasies or while cross-dressing at as young as 6 (!) years old.
Lawrence notes that the existence of cross-gender fantasies and cross-dressing doesn't indicate consistent and persistent cross-gender wishes or a persistent cross-gender identity in childhood; indeed one narrative reports these from 4-6 years old, followed by a relative cessation in late childhood until it came back in full erotic force at puberty. This is a quite different pattern than the "classic" MtF presentation which includes consistent cross-gender wishes starting in early childhood.
What about cross-gender behaviors, such as playing with girl's toys, a choice of female friends, and so on? Here the data is more muddy. Partially this is because the normal range of male behavior is quite wide, many ordinary boys occasionally play with girl's toys, or prefer girls over boys as friends. Lawrence also cites a study which (p 82)
found that “preferring girls’ games and toys as a child” was one of the most frequent areas in which MtF transsexuals reported having lied to or misled their psychotherapists
So studies based on self-reported preferences should be taken with a grain of salt. The data seem equivocal; it's possible that autogynephilic MtF transsexuals are more likely than other boys to exhibit cross-gender behaviors as children, but it's also possible that the distribution is in reality much like the distribution for ordinary boys, and the prevalence of later in life reports to the contrary are mostly due to misremebering and misinterpretation of memories.
Many of Lawrence's respondents explicitly denied having female-typical interests in childhood; oddly, at least one of them still seemed to interpret his experience as evidence that he wasn't male enough; quoting Lawrence at length (p 83):
It is surprising that a boy who became cadet lieutenant-colonel at his military high school and was an avid water-skier and cross-country runner would conclude he was “not successfully masculine” simply because he was not proficient at baseball. Green (2008) observed that MtF transsexuals sometimes hold stereotyped views of masculinity and femininity and are apt to conclude that, if they deviate from the masculine stereotype in any way, they cannot really be men. Green gave the example of a gender dysphoric patient who concluded he was transsexual in part because he was not interested in cars and football. Although Green makes an important point, another explanation might be that autogynephilic men who are unremarkably masculine but experience a strong and seemingly inexplicable desire to be female might be eager to find evidence, however insubstantial, of psychological femininity or unmasculinity that would help them make sense of their cross-gender wishes.
Along similar lines, a number of other respondents described some instances of feminine interests and behaviors, but with no indication that these were common or persistent, about which Lawrence says (p 85):
In my clinical practice, I not uncommonly elicit histories like these from nonhomosexual gender dysphoric male patients. In many cases, the feminine behaviors in question turn out to be a few isolated and unrepresentative episodes (e.g., “For a time my closest playmate was a girl”—for 2 months one summer; “When I was 6, I used to play with dolls”—on three or four separate occasions). These isolated episodes of feminine behavior nevertheless feel quite meaningful to the men who experienced them. I almost never get the sense that these patients are trying to mislead me by portraying these childhood episodes as more representative than they genuinely are. Instead, I believe that these patients are desperately trying to make sense of their powerful cross-gender wishes and are grasping at straws in an effort to find evidence of childhood femininity that might help to explain their adult feelings.
I think that Lawrence is exactly correct here. Memories are, more than we would like, malleable things, and there is a lot of internal pressure to make sense of the powerful feelings involved. It probably takes an unusual level of commitment to the truth to not make mountains out of relative molehills in such cases.
An interlude about self-descriptions
Lawrence takes some space to discuss how the respondents processed the standard "woman trapped in a man's body" framing in light of their autogynephilia. Some asserted that that expression fit them, others adopted the "man trapped in a man's body" variation (Lawrence published a shorter piece with the same title as the book, and some of the respondents had read it); still others tried other variations or denied that the (original) expression fit them without providing an alternative.
I didn't find all this particularly interesting, except for the following quote from one respondent (p 88):
The best phrase to describe my belief about myself is that “I desire (or need) to be a woman with all my heart, in every way,” as opposed to feeling “I have always been a woman.”
Keep that one in your back pocket. I suspect it's the key to this whole mess.
Autogynephilia over a lifetime
The vast majority of autogynephilic MtF transsexual/transgender people (Lawrence here uses both terms, to include those who don't have an intent to fullly transition, I think) express that their autogynephilia has continued during their entire adult life. This is not great news to people who might expect that they will "just grow out of it" (though I will note that the fraction of people who don't report lifetime persistence is nonzero). Lawrence adduces this as evidence for the autogynephilia-as-sexual-orientation hypotheses, though I'm not sure it's really evidence for that over it being "just" a paraphilia.
Perhaps surprisingly, a large fraction of MtF transsexuals who had undergone SRS also reported continuing autogynephilia, and some of them reported that feminization fantasies (about becoming female) were necessary for them to acheive orgasm. Others said that contemplating their own body was now sexually arousing. Some respondents also reported a lessening or cessation of autogynephilic fantasy after transition, but people also frequently reported a lessening of their sex drive in general, so it's kind of hard to tell what's going on.
Four Types of Autogynephilia
Following Blanchard, Lawrence divides the actions and fantasies typical to autogynephilia into four types:
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Transvestic autogynephilia: Erotic cross-dressing, basically. Lawrence's contention is that "transvestic fetishism" in the old sense is in most cases a subtype or expression of autogynephilia.
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Anatomic autogynephilia: Fantasies/actions having to do with having female anatomic features. Typical examples include: breasts, genitalia, body structure, facial structure, soft skin, etc.
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Physiologic autogynephilia: Fantasies/actions having to do with female physiological functions. Examples include pregnancy and breastfeeding, but also more unusual fantasies like menstruation.
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Behavioral autogynephilia: Fantasies/actions having to do with engaging in (stereotypically) feminine behaviors. This can cover pretty much anything, and in some of the accounts of this you can see some pretty sexist underlying assumptions, honestly. One particularly important type of behavioral autogynephilia is the "act or fantasy of engaging in sexual activity with a man as a woman", which Lawrence thinks is particularly significant for interpreting data and in a clinical setting.
These are not mutually exclusive (e.g. cross-dressing could also be behavioral, or as an aid to anatomic fantasy, etc) and they frequently co-occur (all are present to an extent in most of the transsexual survey respondents). It's important to also note that autogynephilic behavior can consist of pure fantasies, actions, or both.
Lawrence goes on to give details of each of these types; we'll hit just a few of the highlights.
Transvestic Autogynephilia
Lawrence says that transvestic autogynephilia is the most prevalent type, and that "almost all autogynephilic males probably experience it". The first part is probably true if Lawrence is correct that almost all fetishistic cross-dressing is just a species of autogynephilia. I'm not so sure about the second part.
Transvestic autogynephilia can center around almost any type(s) of feminine clothing. There's the stereotypical one, of course: clothes that men find sexually attractive when worn by women: lingerie or high-heels, for instance. There's women's clothes that are associated with key parts of femal anatomy, such as panties (the number of respondents that talked about wearing panties is crazy) and bras. But this can also include ordinary and unremarkable women's clothing.
The reasons that these men cross-dress can vary a bit also. We can group into roughly five categories (these are mine, from reading the examples; Lawrence doesn't explicitly categorize like this):
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Because it's arousing, with no reference as to why.
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Because it helps to imagine oneself as a woman, and that is arousing.
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Because it is exciting, pleasurable, or "comfortable" as such, but with no conscious experience of sexual arousal (Lawrence thinks that this is usually due to low-grade sexual arousal that the cross-dresser is unaware of).
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Because it facilitates female-typical behavior.
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As (2), but not necessarily experienced as arousing.
There's some clear overlap between these, and between cross-dressing and other manifestations of autogynephilia as well.
Anatomic Autogynephila
According to Blanchard and Lawrence, although transvestic autogynephilia is more common, anatomic autogynephilia is (perhaps understandably) the one most associated with gender dysphoria and the desire for SRS.
The two big ones here are having breasts and having female (external) genitalia. Testimony after testimony reports a strong desire for breasts and female genitals, and often intense sexual arousal at fantasizing about having them. Of course, having female genitals mean not having male genitals, so many respondents report sexual excitement at the idea (or fact!) of the removal of their male genitalia, and frequently become uncomfortable with the continued existence of their penis and/or testes. We can see how the positive desire to have a female body leads to the negative body-associated dysphoria popularly associated with transsexualism.
There's also some weird cases. Some men expressed a strong desire for a female body, even to the point of seeking SRS, but no desire to be female in any other way. Others (Lawrence did not count these as transsexuals) went as far as to use feminizing hormones to develop breasts, but had no interest in having female genitalia. (You might call them boob men.)
Physiologic Autogynephilia
Some people have pregnancy or lactation fetishes. Some autogynephiles have pregnancy or lactation fetishes about themselves. This manifestation of autogynephilia is probably the least common, but it is present. It seems pregnancy and breastfeeding were the most common fantasies, here, but menstruation fantasies were also present. Some people reported also taking actions to act out or pretend to enact their fantasies, such as stuffing a pillow to pretend (to themselves) to be pregnant, or urinating on sanitary pads.
While the specifics seem weird, the origin seems (to me) to be clear: these people are obsessed with having female experiences, and what experiences are more quintessentially female than ones associated with reproduction?
("But wait," I hear you saying. "Isn't there another important experience associated with reproduction?" We'll get to that.)
Behavioral Autogynephilia
This manifestation of autogynephilia has to do with engaging in "feminine behaviors", as understood by the autogynephile, of course. Sometimes these are explicitly erotic, other times, they are part of the general program of fantasizing about being a woman.
Examples include: having a feminine voice, using a feminine name, tossing one's hair, being "one of the girls", being in a women's locker room or restroom without sexual overtones (yes, multiple people reported sexual arousal at the thought of not having sexual arousal), having to sit/squat to urinate, acting sexy, taking birth control pills, getting manicures, and so on.
There's a lot of crossover with the other categories, especially transvestism (wearing women's clothes, especially in public, is a behavior).
Of particular public interest here is the bathroom/locker room thing. It's safe to say that there probably are some trans people who are getting horny about using the women's bathroom or locker room, but the reason they do it is not to ogle or engage in predatory behavior, but because it makes them feel like a woman (and that makes them horny). You can decide for yourself whether that makes it better or not. (To respond to the inevitable, yes, there are also predators that are using the trans-bathroom-thing as cover. I have no idea how much overlap they have with trans people.)
And then there is the ultimate female behavior, which also touches on female anatomy and physiology.
Sex with men
Here we have the autogynephilic sexual fantasy as it touches on fantasizing about sex. Sexual behavioral autogynephilia is pretty common, and one common form of it involves the fantasy of (as a woman, this is important) having sex with men. From one perspective this is very odd -- autogynephilia is, presumably, due to a malfunctioning heterosexual male sexuality, and heterosexual men are not exactly well known for fantasizing about having sex with men.
Nevertheless, it is explicable, and its explanation has some pretty important implications. The explanation is this: what autogynephiles have is a desire to be female, and what is more quintessentially female than enacting the female role in reproduction? Add this to the fact that the desire is sexual, and it is unsurprising that "being a woman having sex with a man" is a potent fantasy. It hits all the high points: female anatomy, female physiology (reproduction), female behavior, and, of course, sex.
The only problem is that (with possibly a few exceptions) they aren't actually attracted to men.
Lawrence spends a lot of time describing how the autogynephilic transsexuals surveyed dealt with this, and drawing out the implications. Some of this analysis goes back to Blanchard (who is cited here). I'll give the quick summary.
Many of these fantasies (and actions, when autogynephilic MtF transsexuals do have sex with men) involve an explicit desire to be validated as being "real women", being desirable, and other ways in which it proves femininity and enables other aspects of female experience.
Most of these fantasies seem to involve a "faceless" (that word was literally present in many testimonies) man, not a particular individual, or any particular imagined male attributes. This allows the fantasizer to enact "having sex with a man as a woman" without having to deal with the the fact that they are not actually attracted to men. Many people reported that they found the idea of sex with a man to be exciting, but only when they were also fantasizing about being a woman or otherwise inhabiting a female role; they found the idea repulsive otherwise.
Many of the autogynephilic MtF transsexuals report that their sexuality changed, from exclusively attracted to women to bisexual or even exclusively androphilic as part of or after their transition. All I have to say about that is that if they are right about some of the reasons they gave, society gave up on gay conversion therapy too soon.
Lawrence suggests that a better question than the standard of asking whether someone is sexually attracted to men or to women is to ask who the first person they fell in love with is, or whether they habitually fall in love with men (respectively boys for adolescents) or women (resp. girls). Lawrence observed that only one of the respondents here claimed to fall in love with men, despite many claims of orientation change or sexual fantasies involving men, and speculates that a real androphilic sexual orientation among autogynephilic MtF transsexuals is extremely rare.
This lends some credence to the explanation that Blanchard gave of the puzzle that many autogynephiles report, across a number of studies, that they are either bisexual or exclusively androphilic. Some of this might be lying, but more likely it is reporting of autogynephilic sexual fantasy of being a woman having sex with a man as sexual attraction to men. They are both about sex, and there's some powerful internal pressure to adopt the narrative that says "it's because you're a (normal) woman".
A funny tidbit is the stories some of these people tell to explain their (pre-transition) attraction to, and sexual behaviors with, women (marriages with children are not uncommon). Lawrence quotes several who attributed it to "internalized homophobia". Suuuure.
In the final part of this review, we'll look at how autogynephilia interacts with other parts of sexuality, and what all this means: to the autogynephilic transsexuals themselves, to non-transsexual autogynephiles, and to everyone else.
On this day five years ago, Scott made a list of graded predictions for how the next five years would pan out. How did he do?
He correctly predicted that Democrats would win the presidency in 2020. He correctly predicted that the UK would leave the EU and that no other country would vote to leave. He seemed under the impression that Ted Cruz would rise up to take Trump's mantle, but to my mind the only person in the Republican party who has a meaningful chance of opposing Trump is DeSantis. I think a lot of the technological predictions were too optimistic (specifically the bits about space travel and self-driving vehicles) but I don't work in tech and amn't really qualified to comment.
Near the end of the article, in a self-deprecating moment, he predicts with 80% confidence that "Whatever the most important trend of the next five years is, I totally miss it". To my mind, the most significant "trend" (or "event") of the last five years was Covid, and I think he actually did okay on this front: the second-last section of the article is a section on global existential risks:
Global existential risks will hopefully not be a big part of the 2018-2023 period. If they are, it will be because somebody did something incredibly stupid or awful with infectious diseases. Even a small scare with this will provoke a massive response, which will be implemented in a panic and with all the finesse of post-9/11 America determining airport security.
- Bioengineering project kills at least five people: 20%
- …at least five thousand people: 5%
Whether you think those two predictions cames to pass naturally depends where you sit on the lab leak hypothesis.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:
Quality Contributions to the Motte
Contributions for the week of January 30, 2023
Rowliphobia
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of February 6, 2023
Who Teaches the Teachers?
@gog:
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of February 13, 2023
Babies Everywhere
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of February 20, 2023
Battle of the Sexes
Battle of the Genders
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of February 27, 2023
spoilers, y’all
This movie is a story for sale to the general public, in which the protagonist hunts for a story to sell to the general public. He learns the deep and abiding value of stories, and then loses all faith in stories sold to the general public. It’s a bit like The Last Psychiatrist listened to Shit Town while swiping on Tinder, then roasted everyone responsible through the medium of film. One reviewer called it “egotistical and grandiose” and accused the filmmaker of “undersell[ing] his characters, and belittl[ing] his audience.”
Y’all might enjoy it as much as I did.
Aspiring podcaster Ben Manalowitz yearns to be “a voice,” an intoner of wise observations on modern America. He is not a man with an idea desperate for a microphone. He is a man with a microphone desperate for an idea. In a casual chat with his friend who runs a podcasting network, he pitches his grand social theory about - I don’t remember.
She says no one cares about your theories. Tell them a story.
Unfortunately, Ben is barren ground for stories, because he is the kind of person who has friendships like this:
Ben Manalowitz: Do you ever wonder, if you did find something deeper with somebody, if that would somehow be more meaningful?
John: I do, sometimes. Like right now, I'm casually dating, like, six or seven different women. But I do wonder, deep down, what it would be like to seriously date two or three.
One night, mid-hookup, Ben gets a phone call from a stranger with a Southern accent who tearfully breaks the news that, “Abby is dead.”
Abby who? Ben roots through his contacts and finds an “Abby Texas,” a fling whom he barely remembers.
The stranger, Abby’s brother Ty, is under the impression that Ben is Abby’s devastated boyfriend. “She talked about you all the time.” He pressures Ben into flying to Abilene, Texas for the funeral.
There, Ben discovers Abby's death has been ruled an accidental overdose, but Ty is convinced it was foul play, possibly involving local drug dealers. Ty wants Ben’s help avenging her, because, “We were the men in her life.”
Suddenly, Ben has a story. It’s about dumb hicks living in denial of their own dysfunction, inventing conspiracies to make themselves feel better. He sets out to make his breakout hit podcast. He plans to call it “Dead White Girl.”
From there, the movie plays out kind of like a thread here on The Motte. It serves up hot takes which are doused by cooler ones, only for another to flare up. Conflicting evidence makes a mess everywhere. A highly educated, heterodox man strolls in and out, communicating solely through hypnotically eloquent insight porn.
The movie makes an effort not to idealize or demonize either its pretentious East Coast elites or its rubes in flyover country. It presents both as having their little shibboleths. In one scene, Mr. Insight Porn admits he went to school “in New Haven.” Ben admits that he went to school “in Boston.” This little exchange nicely mirrors the recurring “Bless your hearts.” (It would have been better if the movie hadn’t explicitly translated the latter.)
The movie does rely on predictable fish out of water comedy, but its funniest moments play with stereotypes. In one scene, Abby’s teen sisters tell Ben that, “We’re not really a gun family.” They only have… a long list of rifles, shotguns, and handguns, including the kids’ personal sidearms. The girls are baffled by the suggestion that this might be cause for concern.
Literary fellow that he is, Ben explains, “There’s this playwright, Anton Chekhov, and he says that if there’s a gun in Act One of a play - “
“There’s no guns in any one of his plays I can think of,” says the overweight sister in the leopard print pants. “Cherry Orchard, no. Uncle Vanya, no - ”
“I’m not actually that familiar with his plays,” Ben says impatiently, before steering back to his point.
Of all the guns introduced in Act One of the film, none is fired by the Texans.
Vengeance is, fundamentally, a murder mystery, and I honestly loved that this storyline was ultimately played straight. Ben makes a hilariously milquetoast vow to Abby’s family that he will identify her killer and achieve justice through podcasting: “I will find this person or this generalized societal force, and I will define it. I'll define it.” But he truly does investigate. He truly does find the killer. In the end, her death is exactly what he believed it was, but it is also exactly what her brother wanted to believe. After all the irony and ego-puncturing, we get the traditional, unironic satisfaction of rough justice.
The movie wants to be about so many things: the yawning social emptiness of endless freedom, choice, and atomization; our various self-medications for the resulting tedium and emotional starvation; the meaning achieved through narrative; the immortality achieved through leaving a record of one’s existence; the empathy but also the dehumanization of seeing other people as characters; our acute vulnerability when we become characters to the general public. It’s a lot to pack into a fish out of water murder mystery comedy. Many viewers will find it pretentious, unfocused, and shallow. Probably it is. The denouement strains the suspension cables of disbelief, and for some they’ll snap.
But I like this egotistical and grandiose movie. And I laughed really hard at this:
Ty Shaw: [Abilene, Texas] is the most, uh, wretched, godforsaken stretch of land on the face of the earth. And I'd never leave.
Ben Manalowitz: Yeah. That's how I feel about Twitter.
[Originally posted on Singal-Minded back in October & now unlocked. Sorry for telling the normies about this place!]
It's an homage to a philosophical pitfall, but the name is also thematically fitting. It conjures up a besieged underdog, a den of miscreants, an isolated outpost, or just immovable stubbornness.
It's The Motte.
This is an obscure internet community wedded to a kinky aspiration --- that it is possible to have enlightening civil conversations about desperately contentious topics. Previously a subreddit, it finally made the exodus to its own independent space following mounting problems with Reddit's increasingly arbitrary and censorious content policies. The Motte is meant as the proverbial gun-free zone of internet discussion. So long as everyone follows strict rules and decorum, they may talk and argue about anything. At its best, it is the platonic ideal of the coffeehouse salon. This tiny corner of the internet has had an outsize influence on my life and yet despite that, I've always struggled to describe it to others succinctly.
In order to do so, I'll have to explain medieval fortification history briefly. Picture a stone tower, sitting pretty on a hill. It may be cramped and unpleasant, but it's safe. Likely impenetrable to any invasion. This is the motte. One cannot live on a diet of stone fortification alone, and so immediately surrounding the motte is the bailey --- the enclosed village serving as the economic engine for the entire enterprise. The bailey's comparative sprawl is what makes it more desirable to live in, and also what makes it more vulnerable, as it can be feasibly fortified only by a dug ditch or wooden palisade. So you hang out in the bailey as much as possible until a marauding band of soldiers threatens your entire existence and forces your retreat up the hill, into the motte. Bailey in the streets, motte in the event of cataclysmic danger, as the kids might say.
We don't have a lot of real-life mottes and baileys these days, but we do have a rhetorical analogy that is very useful: the motte-and-bailey fallacy. Someone bold enough to assert something as inane as "astrology is real" (bailey) might, when challenged, retreat to the infinitely more anodyne "all I meant by astrology being real is that natural forces like celestial bodies might have an effect on human lives" (motte), and who can argue against that? Once the tarot-skeptical challenger gives up on charging up the rampart, the challenged can peek from behind the gate and slink back to the spacious comforts of the bailey, free to expound on the impact of Mercury in retrograde or whatever without any pesky interruptions. Once you recognize this sleazy bait-and-switch, you'll spot it everywhere around you. Other examples are motte: common-sense gun control; bailey: Ban all civilian firearm ownership. Or motte: addressing climate change; bailey: Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. On and on.
Back to the history of my favorite online community: In the beginning, before The Motte was The Motte, they were the Rationalists (a.k.a. "rat-sphere" or just "rats"). These are a bunch of painfully earnest and lovable nerds unusually mindful about good epistemological hygiene.
Across their odyssey, they gather around various Schelling points, with the blog-cum-encyclopedia LessWrong as one of their most prominent congregation points. Whatever hurdles to logical reasoning (confirmation bias, availability heuristic, or motivated reasoning, to name very few) that you can come up with are guaranteed already to be extensively cataloged within its exquisitely maintained database.
It is understandably suspicious when a group names itself after what is presumed to be a universally lauded value, but you can see evidence of this commitment in practice. My favorite vignette to illustrate the humility and intellectual curiosity of the rat-sphere happened when I attended my first meetup and overheard a conversation that started with "Okay, let's assume that ISIS is correct... " with the audience just calmly nodding along, listening intently.
Even if you don't know about the rats, you may have heard of the psychiatrist and writer Scott Alexander. His blog remains a popular caravanserai stop within the rat-sphere. While his writing output is prodigious in both volume of text and topical scope (everything from mythological fiction of Zeus evading a celestial amount of child-support obligations to a literature review of antidepressant medication), what consistently drew the most attention and heat to his platform were his essays on culture war topics, perennial classics like Meditations on Moloch or I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup to name a select few.
Culture wars are best understood as issues that are generally materially irrelevant, yet are viciously fought over as proxy skirmishes in a battle over society's values. (Consider how much ink is spilled over drag queen story hours.) But something can be both materially irrelevant and fun. And inevitably, like flies to shit, people were most drawn to the juiciest of topics --- the proverbial manure furnaces that generated the brightest of flames. Scott *tried *to keep all this energy contained to a dedicated Culture War Thread on his blog's subreddit, but the problem was that it worked *too well *in encouraging unusually intelligent and cogent articulations of "unthinkable" positions. In part because Scott has made some enemies over the years, and said enemies have eagerly sought opportunities to demonize him as his star has risen, the internet peanut gallery frequently (and disingenuously) attributed the most controversial opinions on the subreddit to Scott himself. This in turn directed ire at the host for "platforming" the miasma. And so in early 2019, Scott emancipated the thread, and a crew of volunteers forked the idea away onto its own subreddit and beatified it with its new name: r/TheMotte.
Because the space was rat-adjacent from the beginning, it had a solid basis to succeed as an oasis of calm. Even with that advantage, the challenge of building a healthy community almost from scratch should not be underestimated. Props to the moderators, who kept the peace with both negative and positive reinforcement. As you might expect in a community dedicated to civil discussion, you could get banned for being unnecessarily antagonistic or for using the subreddit to wage culture war rather than discuss it.
But equally important was the positive reinforcement part of the equation. If anyone's post was particularly good, you would "report" it to the mods as "Actually A Quality Contribution," or AAQC. The mods collected the AAQC and regularly posted roundups. Consider for a moment and appreciate how radical a departure this is from the norm. The internet has developed well-worn pathways from the constant barrage of wildebeest stampeding to the latest outrage groundswell, famishing to feast on its pulped remains. This machine increasingly resembles one purpose-built for injecting the worst, most negative content into our brains every second of every day. And instead here were these dorks, congregating specifically to talk about the most emotionally heated topics du jour, handing out certificates of appreciation and affirmation.
The AAQC roundups were a crucial component of the community, particularly when they unearthed hidden gems that would otherwise have remained buried. Reddit's down/upvote feature is often ab/used as a proxy for dis/agreement (leave it to the rats to create two-factor voting for internet comments), but the mods made sure to highlight thought-provoking posts especially when they disagreed with them.
Part of the draw was just how unassuming it all was. A small handful of people who wandered in happened to already have well-established writing platforms built elsewhere. But by and large, this was an amateur convention attended by relative nobodies. And yet some of my favorite writing ever was posted exclusively in this remote frontier of Reddit.
The highlights are numerous. How about a grocery store security guard talking about his crisis of faith about modern society that happened during a shift? Or the post that forever changed how I viewed Alex Jones by reframing his unusual way of ranting through the prism of epic poetry tradition? Or the philosophy behind The Motte, where Arthur Chu is cast as the villain? Or how people talk past each other when using the word "capitalism"? Or an extended travelogue of Hawaii's unusual racial dynamics? Or this hypothetical conversation between a barbarian and a 7-11 clerk? Or how Warhammer 40k is a superior franchise to Star Wars thanks in part to higher verisimilitude in its depiction of space fascism? Or this effortlessly poetic meditation on Trump's omnipresence? Or an ethnography of the effectiveness of rifle fire across cultures? Or how the movie Fantastic Mr. Fox straddles the trad/furry divide? Or this catalog of challenges facing a Portland police officer? Or this dispatch from an overwhelmed doctor working during India's horrific second COVID-19 wave? Or a technical warning about Apple's ability to spy on its customers? Or why the major scale in music has such broad multicultural appeal? Or a man brought to tears by overwhelming gratitude while shopping at Walmart? Or how the decline of Western civilization can be reflected in the trajectory of a children's cartoon series? Or how RPGs solved a problem by declaring some fantasy races to be inherently evil only to create another issue? Or how about the potential nobility of --- get this --- indiscriminate retributive homicide from the standpoint of a Chinese military officer going on a shooting rampage after his wife died of a forced abortion?
The structure of the community was such that it gained a sort of natural immunity to trolls. The community was primed to take the arguments trolls made seriously, and this meant drafting intimidating walls of text in earnest. And that wouldn't be the end of it, because you could reliably expect the community to obsess and mull over that same topic for weeks on end, churning out thousands of words more in the process. Most bad-faith actors find it impossible to keep up the charade for that long, and it's just Not Fun™ when a troll's potential victim reacts by obliviously submitting immaculately written essays in reply. Consider an example of the type of discourse that gets prompted by something as wild-eyed as the question of "when is it ethical to murder public officials?". The goal of trolling is to incite immediate, reactive anger, and it must've been dispiriting to enter the space solely to cause trouble, and to slink out having encouraged more AAQCs instead. Anyone dumb enough to try a drive-by bait-and-snark quickly found themselves exhausted and overwhelmed.
Places that explicitly herald themselves as an offshoot to the mainstream quickly gain a reputation as a cesspit of right-wing extremists. Setting aside the question of overall political dominance, it remains true that major institutions (media, finance, tech, etc.) are overwhelmingly staffed by liberal-leaning individuals. Conservatives who feel hounded by the major institutions can opt to carve out their own spaces, and yet nearly every attempt to create the "conservative" alternative to social media giants ends up a toxic waste dump (See Voat, Parler, Gab, etc.).
Scott Alexander described this best when he wrote:
The moral of the story is: if you're against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
So it's unsurprising that people have criticized The Motte for being a den of right-wing rogues. For what it's worth, a survey of the community found the modal user to be a libertarian Hillary Clinton voter. But homogeneous thinking is explicitly not the goal here, and the point of the entire enterprise is to have your ideas challenged. Sterilized gruel is the antithesis of critical thinking and the reason why we need places like The Motte.
That's the backstory, and here's how it impacted me personally.
I've always been insatiably curious. But communicating in writing was a momentous struggle for me. Although I coasted through college, writing assignments were virtually the only source of anxiety for me. I once described the writing process as "struggling to take a painful shit." Eking out anything remotely worthwhile was a cataclysmic struggle. I'd stare at a blank page with dread, draft voluminous paragraphs, find myself meandering into gratuitous prose, delete passages until I forgot the point I was making, and then sift through the remaining dessicated husk wondering why anyone would give a fuck. Years ago, before I found my groove in my current job as a public defender, and outside the veil of school-mandated writing, I had ideations of making a living as a writer. A few more of the above-described painful shit sessions conclusively disavowed me of that delusion.
In contrast, though, talking about ideas came naturally to me very early. I was always indefatigable and relentless and confrontational and (with all due humility) easily ran laps around people who had the misfortune of engaging in discussion with me in real life. Few were surprised that I became a lawyer.
My frustrations with writing never sapped my passion for reading, but consuming others' work left me feeling forlorn about my own inadequacy. It was hard for me to admire prominent writers without also feeling pangs of envy. But browsing The Motte only sharpened my frustration because these weren't big-name writers churning out incredible posts --- they were random nobodies. So when it first started, I mostly lurked and did not write much, because I did not believe I had the requisite caliber to contribute anything worthwhile.
I changed my mind about contributing after getting drunk with a friend in the backyard of a bar while a Bernese dog eyed our uneaten sandwiches. My friend (a bona fide socialist) and I got into a passionate but civil discussion about the ideal contours of free speech. The specific disagreement doesn't matter, because that afternoon reminded me how invigorated I feel by in-person discussions. It dawned on me how I could properly contribute to The Motte. A few weeks later I memorialized my pseudonym with a fresh new account, and my immediate goal was to start a podcast. Naturally, it was called The Bailey.
Our release schedule may not be the most reliable, but we have put out 29 episodes so far (for the record, that's more than the hilarious and informative legal podcast ALAB). In between recording episodes, I wrote posts on The Motte, almost as an afterthought. But the point here is that I wanted to start a podcast because I thought my writing sucked.
I always knew I could anticipate some vociferous pushback at The Motte. The pushback was crucial, as it was the whetstone to my rhetoric. I knew that if I were going to do something as foolish as post on The Motte, I had to be loaded for bear. I'd sling the grenade by hitting "post," but the notifications that followed promised some reciprocated shrapnel. All the better.
Posting on a dusty corner of Reddit about some culture war bullshit was obviously very low-stakes, but then a very curious thing happened: People noticed my stuff. I'm only slightly embarrassed to admit how gleeful I was telling my girlfriend that something I wrote was recognized as an AAQC and included in the roundup. And it kept happening, again and again. Eventually I was picked to be one of the moderators (joining veterans like podcast apprentice Tracing Woodgrains) in a process that mirrored how the Venetian Doge was selected. I realized over time just how much of a gargantuan amount of writing I had absent-mindedly accumulated over the years just by posting on The Motte, and so when I started my own Substack almost a year ago, its only purpose was to find a home for that compendium.
I kept writing there for years, obliviously using its space to workshop my writing craft and barely noticing. It wasn't until some of my writing escaped into the wild earlier this year (assisted by a certain sentient fox) and received recognition by the powers that be that I realized how grateful I am for the precious space cultivated here.
I could not have accomplished any of this without The Motte. I owe that space --- especially the jerks who deigned to disagree with me --- so much.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Safety being both a major problem with illicit drugs and a major concern of rationalists, this raised an eyebrow. The simplest explanation is that the people concerned with safety aren't the people using psychedelics and that I underestimated the availability of psychedelics through whatever the normal drug-buying channels are (and perhaps self-experimenters overstate the precision of the doses?), but I'm curious about other possible explanations. Assuming commonality, which I do not take for granted, the two most plausible explanations I came up with were:
Is there a rationalist Bear (preferred name of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, another early psychedelicist who started weird and became extremely weird) out there? As I understand it, synthesizing LSD requires serious know-how and equipment, but there are surely rationalist synthetic chemists and perhaps one is willing and capable.
Dark-web sales and purity testing labs? That meshes with the techno-libertarian side of things, but I have no idea how those labs operate and I'm guessing buying drugs online practically requires you to commit a federal crime in the US, which is a pretty big hazard.
I'm guessing the simplest explanation is the correct one, to the extent that there's a connection between rationalists and psychedelics, in the first place, but if someone actually knows, I'd rather know than guess.
In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?
Primarily relevant to here through the discussion of what people claim to find attractive vs. choose, but also considers various other measures of attractiveness. I dont agree with all these analyses but think its worth posting simply for considering the topic in a lot more detail then Ive previously seen.