Fair point. I'd add the qualifier that the verbal shaming of certain men as a way of intentionally disadvantaging them was normally directed at those men who refused to live up to society's ideals or just ignored those for whatever reason instead of failing through no fault of their own. Maybe I'm too much of an idealist in this regard, but I'd say this is how it normally went.
Botond173
12hr ago
I decided to share my theory (if we can call it that) about the origin of the ‘incel’ slur. I’m not claiming it’s terribly original or anything but I welcome your feedback about it because it’s a pure culture war phenomenon in my view and I wonder if my theory is sound.
To start with the obvious, pretty much every human community that ever existed have had concepts of the feminine and masculine as collections of desirable traits. This entails that men and women who refuse to live up to these ideals are disadvantaged in various ways. One way is social shaming. Again, let’s leave it that here; I’m aware that I could go off on dozens of tangents here and add dozens of qualifiers and interpretations to make my argument nuanced and elaborate, but I want to keep this concise.
One way to shame unmasculine men is to use the slur ‘nerd’ on them. This was the norm for a long time in Anglo-Saxon societies, and it sort of made sense. After all, nerds are interested in things and machines, not humans, who are anything but machines. The traits that make you a nerd, especially a hard-working and employable one, are exactly the traits that are useless, detrimental even, if you want to be a socially savvy, sexually successful cool guy. If you’re too boneheaded to correctly read the carefully calculated, covert signals women send out to you to indicate sexual interest without coming off to their social circle as dirty sluts, you’re not a real man. Especially if you’re also not interested in playing team sports etc.
At some point though, the Third(?) Industrial Revolution happens, and the computerization of science and the economy is in full swing. The men most disposed to become computer scientists and programmers happen to be nerds. Before that, programming used to be seen a lowly, dull desk job, basically not different from being a secretary, and a significant chunk of programmers were single women as a result. But now, society starts believing that learning to code is a secure path to having a high-paying career and the American Dream. It seems that only the sky is the limit in the digital revolution and the booming online sector. Young women come to realize that calling undesirable men ‘nerds’ just comes across as dumb and baseless to most people.
However, none of this means, of course, that unattractive male traits just disappeared, or that society is open to abandoning social shaming as a tool of controlling men. In fact, due to an unfortunate combination of the unintended(?) long-term consequences of feminist messaging and socially harmful, pathological trends like online porn addiction, endocrine disruptors, sedentary lifestyles, social atomization, the disappearance of male rites of passage and male bonding rituals etc., it seems that a growing segment of men are socially illiterate, repulsive and dull skinnyfat manchildren. Women no longer want to dismiss them as nerds, but they definitely want to dismiss them as…something.
At this point, due to online trends, society discovers the ‘incel’ term, and just starts using it as a replacement of ‘nerd’, basically. Later, online journos discover that the term was actually invented by some Canadian female college student 20 years earlier who was a romantic failure and started a long-defunct online message board for other college women in the same situation, who applied the term to themselves, not as a slur, and definitely not as something that conveys anti-feminist views etc., but all this is long forgotten and nobody cares anymore, so it doesn’t matter. Fast forward a few years, and it becomes normal for leftist women and their male ‘allies’ to dismiss anyone and everyone as ‘incel’, even married men with children as long as they come across as sufficiently deplorable to the average feminist.
Botond173
2d ago
"Upper Volta with rockets" was the phrase coined (possibly by a British journalist) in the 80s
It was actually coined by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
Botond173
3d ago
Blacks have lost trust in whites ever since the colonial era's blatant racism
The linked Metapolitics... post actually goes into detail about this.
Botond173
3d ago
A couple of points.
The entry rather dubiously calls Hajnal a Holocaust survivor and strident anti-fascist. The Wikipedia entry on him certainly includes nothing about his supposed anti-fascist activism, and says this:
In 1936 his parents left Nazi Germany, and placed him in a Quaker school in the Dutch countryside while they arranged to settle in Britain. In 1937, John was reunited with his parents in London, where he attended University College School, Hampstead.
Also, stating that “his theory has been warmly received and heavily promoted by Neo-Nazis, and the alt-right”, and citing as proof an 1983(!) essay from a scientific journal, which is obviously inaccessible without a subscription and whatnot, plus a 2020 monography without page numbers included, is rather suspect.
The last part of the entry entitled “Precursor to theory” is pure nonsense. The idea that a man had great ideological influence on genocidal Nazi policies in occupied Eastern European lands, even though he was a mere infantry captain of the Wehrmacht, serving on the Eastern Front until getting wounded in 1944, and was thus barred from taking his nominal seat as professor of some newly-founded Nazi university (that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry in English), which would be the sole potential basis for even calling him a Nazi ideologist/theoretician (other than the sociology articles he wrote before, which apparently all focus on Jewish influence in Poland, the Baltics etc., which has scarcely anything to do with the concept of the Hajnal Line), is hardly anything but ideologically motivated baseless garbage.
But anyway, merging the existing Wiki entry on the Hajnal Line, which I’m sure existed at some point, with this particular one, which admittedly cites lots of demographic data but is needlessly verbose in my view, and pointedly fails to go into a similar level of detail about Eastern European patterns, is definitely suspect.
Botond173
3d ago
So I read the "The Metapolitics..." article that is linked and while I can agree with its arguments largely, I found this part:
But when a white person has kids with a black person the kids will almost always see themselves as black. This isn’t “the cultural legacy of the One Drop Rule,” it’s the obvious fact that black people have much more dominant genes than everyone else.
...which strikes me as kind of pseudo-scientific nonsense.
The obvious reason those kids will see themselves as black is that the Spanish/Hispanic (and, I guess, French/Francophone) cultural sphere, unlike the North American Anglo-Saxon one, includes the concepts of mestizo and mulatto, and accordingly lacks the legal concept of the white race as the separate and dominant racial group, which originates from Virginia in the late 17th Century, as far as I know. It has everything to do with the cultural legacy of the One Drop Rule. Those kids, if born in Britain, France or Spain etc., will not see themselves as nonwhite, because their societies lack the concept of whiteness as an identity.
I find it a bit odd that while John Hajnal has a (concise but detailed) Wikipedia entry, but the Hajnal Line as a concept, in fact, does not, and instead redirects to an entry seemingly arbitrarily entitled "Western European marriage pattern", which appears to have been put together by leftist activists. This applies even more to the entry on Werner Conze, which it links to.
I also find it very odd that Hajnal has no entries in either German, Hungarian or Hebrew on Wikipedia, even though he was the son of Hungarian Jews who moved to Weimar Germany.
On a related note, I find it odd that nuptiality as such has no Wikipedia entry at all, and only has a very short and imprecise entry in online dictionaries. I'm no scholar, but as far as I know, the scientific definition of nuptiality as a concept in demographic studies is the rate of fertile women within a population. As such, the nuptiality rate and its projected change is absolutely crucial to the demographic future of any society.
Botond173
15d ago
Drugs are no big deal, the whole war on drugs thing is right wing conservative Republican freakout
designed to tyrannize innocent BIPOC, of course.
Botond173
16d ago
Are you saying that you expect such attitudes to be more common in a society that allows for frequent sex and drugs?
Yes. In a society where drug use isn't normalized/tolerated, it's not a common pastime to ply women with drugs in order to manipulate them into sex. It will only remain a rare, isolated occurrence. The same applies to binge-drinking. Also, in a society where extramarital sex is not normalized/tolerated, the general consensus among men will be that only a small minority of women are available for casual sex, so pressuring/manipulating them into having casual sex will not be a common pastime.
Botond173
17d ago
Such attitudes are broadly predictable in a society that normalizes both drug use and premarital sex, and where the proportion of women engaging in casual sex reaches a critical mass, so to speak.
Botond173
17d ago
Isn't sex education, whether it's done efficiently or not, mainly about 1. contraceptives 2. pregnancy 3. periods 4. STDs? Covering just those four subjects is enough of a daunting task in itself, I'm sure. This notion that sex education needs to mostly focus on proper norms of consent has to be a rather recent phenomenon, mostly confined to feminist activist circles.
Botond173
17d ago
The notion that average women are routinely mansplained by mainstream society that walking in busy parks in broad daylight is to be avoided is preposterous. If, however, the argument is generally about the potential threat posed by mentally ill / drug-addicted aggressive homeless and vagrants, then I'd say that's a different kettle of fish, with all the political baggage that entails.
Botond173
18d ago
It's in quotes because it's not victim blaming. The idea that any argument other than the one that men need to be taught not to rape is essentially victim blaming i.e. accusing women of inviting rape upon themselves is dishonest and nonsensical. Yes, you should not have to be vigilant about getting roofied. There should be no social context where that is advisable. But there still is.
And why is feminist messaging clearly needed when it's not reaching the rapists? I'm all ears.
Botond173
18d ago
Whenever the subject of feminist narratives comes up on this forum, one of the recurring arguments is that feminist messaging is ineffective, self-defeating even, the usual reason being given that it doesn’t reach the men it’s supposed to reach, and only reaches men who don’t need feminist messages in the first place because they’re pretty much acculturated in a feminist milieu anyway. (I know all this doesn’t necessarily sound fair or unbiased, but let’s ignore that for a moment.)
The most fitting example of this that is usually mentioned is the message that “we need to teach men not to rape”, which is supposedly a favorite of feminist activists on college campuses, corporate HR boards and elsewhere. Apparently they promote essentially the same idea as a great tool to combat sexual assault and harassment.
I don’t think I need to explain in detail why this argument sounds so dumb to the average man. Even when I come up with the most benevolent interpretation of this tactic that I can think of, it still seems misguided and, well, dumb. But then it occurred to me: the message makes 100% sense if we start from the assumption that modern feminists, eager to right cultural wrongs of the past that they perceive, really want to make sure their messaging never ever entails even a hint of the notion that women need to exercise any level of agency in order to avoid rape, assault or harassment of any type i.e. avoid bad men, because in all cases that would be “victim blaming” and horrific etc.
From that perspective, it all makes sense, sort of. Am I correct, or is there something else going on as well?
Botond173
23d ago
I guess the popularity of such trends will inevitably grow when home office work becomes normalized, for example.
Botond173
24d ago
Thanks, that was an interesting read. Funny how that Knox story reinforces any prejudice one might have about Italy.
Botond173
24d ago
My observation isn't about hybristophilia per se. It's broadly that a demographic largely secluded from the daily reality of societal violence and brutality is prone to consuming media content in general (not just true crime related stuff) that is exceedingly violent and pathological.
Botond173
24d ago
True Crime is popular predominantly among women because it is popular predominantly among women, the content creators are designing their products around their female audience.
Sorry but that explains nothing.
Botond173
24d ago
Hence "women are so scared of being raped or murdered that they consume true crime content as a coping strategy" or whatever.
I also assume they love reading and hearing about cold cases from decades ago, because it serves to reinforce their view that Western patriarchy was always a brutal hellscape where rape victims were basically the punching bags of society etc.
Botond173
24d ago
It seems that the final part of your comment is lost. Anyway, yeah, I can accept the argument about old wives' tales and gossiping, as Latin American societies are less individualistic and more family-focused.
Exactly. I was about to point that out, but I wasn't sure if the OP is referring to E.R.
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