Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
My impression, admittedly mostly from outside this forum, is that a lot of people complaining about the vilification of men don't actually want to do anything about it. They want other people (often feminists) to do it for them. I jumped to conclusions regarding your own posture and apologize. Good on you for living your beliefs.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Can you clarify how you intend to "shut that off" and "do the opposite" in a way that doesn't entail coercion?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think the way this is usually handled is by defining the contours of the right such that they are not in conflict. I also think this is collapsing all morality into a rights based framework that I'm not sure I (or liberalism) are obliged to. People can do things that are immoral but which they still have a right to do.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Ok. Even through a lens of self-sabotage I think people are almost never justified in coercing someone else to do something because, in the judgment of the individual doing the coercing, it would be in the coerced individuals best interest.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Then I encourage you to do this! Call out sexist conspiracies against men in your life. Push back on people who go on about pay gaps like you would a 911 truther. Are you under the impression it was never difficult for any woman to advocate for the range of social changes they have advocated for and achieved?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The idea that women don't want to be sexually harassed because they become sexually stimulated is an idea that's absurd on its face. Accurate flair I guess.
Frankly, comments like this decrease my sympathy for men who have issues getting a relationship substantially. It seems little different from the incel fantasizing about the "day of the rope". The sexless men will rise up! And take what's theirs! And all the Chads and Staceys who have wronged them will get whats coming to them! Yawn.
SO there is a certain...manner of speaking that certain men adapt when talking about thing that are difficult, or challenging, or make them feel a feeling that they dislike etc. They want to position themselves as a serious intellectual but also someone who is wrestling with some kind of inner demons, making them even more intelligent and mysterious. it is particularly pronounced when they are trying to position their own pain or discomfort as the most important thing in the world while using very flowery language, the kind one might find in an overwrought fantasy novel.
Overworked vocabulary? Centering their feelings? Thinking they are smarter than they are? Can you imagine Rastling Majere from Dragonlace saying exactly those words?
Dying Wizard.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I'm curious where you perceive their being a conflict between men and women's rights within a liberal framework.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
They seem like the result of fairly organic social phenomena to me, but I confess I had not heard of "black girl magic" until this comment.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I'm saying that, if we go strictly by what liberalism allows, there's no solution to those "problems" either.
I agree, in the sense it would be just as immoral for those groups to employ various coercive measures to get others to form relationships with them.
But, imo, the sort of utter obtuseness about even the basic fact - let alone the solution - that OP is decrying is imo not that common in those cases when discussing with progressive liberals . They face the problems and can't seem to stop talking about them, even if many think solutions have to be slower (e.g. via "education", that great liberal panacea) since liberalism does place constraints.
Sure, I don't disagree that liberals are often more sensitive to issues impacting historically marginalized groups.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It could be less acceptable than it currently is to casually vilify men.
I probably agree.
I have a suspicion that women are over-exposed to media and memes that shit on men for cheap hurrahs, and the young ones in particular never actually get the firsthand experience of men that might justify the shitty attitude; the equivalent would be a bunch of 16-year-old boys who think their female classmates plan to marry them then divorce them and take away their money and children that they don't actually have.
I think this is plausible. Certainly I've met (and even been) the latter kind of person.
But women aren't magnetically, viscerally attracted to men the way men are to women, and women also dictate what status IS; if you tell women that men are low-status simply for being men, they'll believe it, and enforce it, and then be confused as to where all the "good men" are.
Citation needed.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Perhaps I've missed them, but I've never seen anyone here propose any laws that take away women's rights to choose their sexual partners.
Fair enough, I'm not sure I've seen it so explicitly here but I feel like plenty of people have Darkly Hinted in that direction.
To be more succinct, we offer women a social/legal/political responses to remedy problems that arise due to their inability to create a particular interpersonal relationship. We don't offer men a social/legal/political responses to remedy problems that arise due to their inability to create a particular interpersonal relationship.
What are the responses we offer to women? Outlawing gender based discrimination in pay? That seems... fine to me? Again, I'm open to hearing what kinds of responses we should offer to men, but the people oft complaining about this seem light on actionable solutions.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
If it's only the outcome of online dating/social media norms, you could regulate their negative characteristics. If it's porn and vidya, same.
What does "regulat[ing] [the] negative characteristics" for dating, social norms, porn, or video games look like in a way that is compatible with liberalism?
There is a massive space between discussing solutions or giving empathy to people struggling and wanting to pass a "incels can enslave women" law.
I agree, but somehow I rarely see things in this space proposed and much more often see the "we need to take away women's rights" kind of solution.
But that runs afoul of the "nobody is owed a relationship" perspective; why is it that women who can't find the partners they want are given sympathy, but men who can't find the partners they want are monstrous?
I'm not sure I understand. I can be, and often am, sympathetic to men who have trouble finding someone to date them. Being sympathetic to someone in such a situation is quite distinct from thinking that this is a problem that demands a social or legal or political response. Where that sympathy ends is where those individuals advocate violating liberal principles to get what they want. I suspect women generally get more sympathy with their inability to find a partner because they are less likely to promote forcing society to provide one for them as a solution. Certainly less likely than similarly situated men are.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Who is "we"? By what mechanism do you propose to stop this "we" from digging?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I would be interested in hearing what your proposals to "fix it" are. I think the reason few to no people offer solutions to the issue is that there are not any solutions people operating in a broadly liberal framework would find permissible.
From my own liberal perspective, nobody is owed a girlfriend, or relationship. If you (or a lot of young men) are unable to get someone you want to be in a relationship with to also want to be in a relationship with you, that's a you problem. Relationship formation is that good old double coincidence of wants. It's not enough that you want to be in a relationship with someone, you need to find someone who also wants to have a relationship with you.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It is not clear to me why the "intent" of the people who enacted the laws is of any relevance, or even how such an "intent" could be discerned, or how you would even prove the whole set of lawmakers were of one uniform "intent" in passing the law. What if some of the lawmakers who voted for the HEROES act did intend it be used in situations like this? As the late great Antonin Scalia wrote:
Well, they owe [fidelity to the text], first of all, because we are governed by what the legislators enacted, not by the purposes they had in mind. When what they enacted diverges from what the intended, it is the former that controls.
But secondly, even if you think that our laws mean not what the legislature enacted but what the legislators intended, there is no way to tell what they intended except the text. Nothing but the text has received the approval of the majority of the legislature and of the President, assuming that he signed it rather than vetoed it and had it passed over his veto. Nothing but the text reflects the legislature's full purpose.
...
We are governed by the laws that the Members of Congress enact, not their unenacted intentions. And if they said "up" when they meant "down" and you could prove by the testimony of 100 bishops that that's what they meant, I would still say, too bad. Again, we are governed by laws, and what the law says is what the laws mean.
As to the Major Questions Doctrine, it seems about as blatant a judicial power grab as any in the Supreme Court's history.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Is anyone here even against something like a really strongly socially enforced monogamy?
Conditional on the details, but based on the way I hear it talked about in this thread I think I would be.
Just sure the other gender wouldn't go for it?
Forget the other gender. All available data suggests my gender wouldn't go for it.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Maybe it is my cultural milieu but my impression is basically every culture you list ("Emo, scene, hipster, goth, metal head, jock, nerd, car guy, metrosexual") all still exist. I think it is likely some marginal people who may have become members of those groups didn't because of that mockery, but my impression is certainly not that these cultures are totally failing to attract new members. Searching for things like "#goth" or "#emo" on TikTok bring up videos with collectively billions of views. Most of those videos seem, at a glance, to be people in the appropriate subculture rather than being mocked as well. It is also not clear to me that "being trans" is more like "being goth" or "being emo" as compared to "being gay."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think this distinguishing between, say, the brute facts (or underlying reality) of some phenomena X and a socio-cultural narrative about X is exactly what Hacking is trying to get at with his distinction. Further in the paper he writes of autism:
Now let’s try out A and B for high-functioning autism:
A. There were no high-functioning autists in 1950; there were many in 2000.
B. In 1950 this was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way, they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in this way; but in 2000 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.
As I said, A in my view is true for multiple personality. But it is absolutely false for high-functioning autism. It is almost as absurd as saying that autism did not exist before 1943, when Kanner introduced the name. But B, I believe, is true. Before 1950, maybe even before 1975, high-functioning autism was not a way to be a person. There probably were a few individuals who were regarded as retarded and worse, who recovered, retaining the kinds of foible that high-functioning autistic people have today. But people didn’t experience themselves in this way, they didn’t interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in the way they do now.
I think if Hacking were applying his model to your A and B he'd come to the same conclusion as with autism, that your (A) is false but (B) is true. Whatever phenomena we see with the naked eye that we interpret as being "flying saucers" almost certainly existed before we had the socio-cultural narrative of "flying saucers." I take Hackings point to be that having certain kinds of socio-culutural or medical narratives can both change the way we interpret some observed phenomena (as in the case of autism, or flying saucers) but also can give rise to entirely new phenomena (as in multiple personality disorders).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Highly recommend reading Ian Hacking's Making Up People which was a decade ahead of The Geography of Madness in describing this phenomenon.
Around 1970, there arose a few paradigm cases of strange behaviour similar to phenomena discussed a century earlier and largely forgotten. A few psychiatrists began to diagnose multiple personality. It was rather sensational. More and more unhappy people started manifesting these symptoms. At first they had the symptoms they were expected to have, but then they became more and more bizarre. First, a person had two or three personalities. Within a decade the mean number was 17. This fed back into the diagnoses, and became part of the standard set of symptoms. It became part of the therapy to elicit more and more alters. Psychiatrists cast around for causes, and created a primitive, easily understood pseudo-Freudian aetiology of early sexual abuse, coupled with repressed memories. Knowing this was the cause, the patients obligingly retrieved the memories. More than that, this became a way to be a person. In 1986, I wrote that there could never be ‘split’ bars, analogous to gay bars. In 1991 I went to my first split bar.
This story can be placed in a five-part framework. We have (a) a classification, multiple personality, associated with what at the time was called a ‘disorder’. This kind of person is now a moving target. We have (b) the people, those I call ‘unhappy’, ‘unable to cope’, or whatever relatively non-judgmental term you might prefer. There are (c) institutions, which include clinics, annual meetings of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation, afternoon talkshows on television (Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera made a big thing of multiples, once upon a time), and weekend training programmes for therapists, some of which I attended. There is (d) the knowledge: not justified true belief, once the mantra of analytic philosophers, but knowledge in Popper’s sense of conjectural knowledge, and, more specifically, the presumptions that are taught, disseminated and refined within the context of the institutions. Especially the basic facts (not ‘so-called facts’, or ‘facts’ in scare-quotes): for example, that multiple personality is caused by early sexual abuse, that 5 per cent of the population suffer from it, and the like. There is expert knowledge, the knowledge of the professionals, and there is popular knowledge, shared by a significant part of the interested population. There was a time, partly thanks to those talkshows and other media, when ‘everyone’ believed that multiple personality was caused by early sexual abuse. Finally, there are (e) the experts or professionals who generate (d) the knowledge, judge its validity, and use it in their practice. They work within (c) institutions that guarantee their legitimacy, authenticity and status as experts. They study, try to help, or advise on the control of (b) the people who are (a) classified as of a given kind.
This banal framework can be used for many examples, but roles and weights will be different in every case. There is no reason to suppose that we shall ever tell two identical stories of two different instances of making up people. There is also an obvious complication: there are different schools of thought. In this first instance, there was the multiple movement, a loose alliance of patients, therapists and psychiatric theorists, on the one hand, who believed in this diagnosis and in a certain kind of person, the multiple. There was the larger psychiatric establishment that rejected the diagnosis altogether: a doctor in Ontario, for example, who, when a patient arrives announcing she has multiple personality, demands to be shown her Ontario Health Insurance card (which has a photograph and a name on it) and says: ‘This is the person I am treating, nobody else.’ Thus there are rival frameworks, and reactions and counter-actions between them further contribute to the working out of this kind of person, the multiple personality. If my sceptical colleague convinces his potential patient, she will very probably become a very different kind of person from the one she would have been had she been treated for multiple personality by a believer.
I would argue that the multiple personality of the 1980s was a kind of person previously unknown in the history of the human race. This is a simple idea familiar to novelists, but careful philosophical language is not prepared for it. Pedantry is in order. Distinguish two sentences:
A. There were no multiple personalities in 1955; there were many in 1985.
B. In 1955 this was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way, they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in this way; but in 1985 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.
As I see it, both A and B are true. An enthusiast for what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder will say, however, that A is false, because people with several ‘alter personalities’ undoubtedly existed in 1955, but were not diagnosed. A sceptic will also say that A is false, but for exactly the opposite reason: namely, that multiple personality has always been a specious diagnosis, and there were no real multiples in 1985 either. Statement A leads to heated but pointless debates about the reality of multiple personality, but in my opinion both sceptics and enthusiasts can peacefully agree to B. When I speak of making up people, it is B that I have in mind, and it is through B that the looping effect occurs.
Multiple personality was renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder. But that was more than an act of diagnostic house-cleaning. Symptoms evolve, patients are no longer expected to come with a roster of altogether distinct personalities, and they don’t. This disorder is an example of what in my book Mad Travellers (1998) I called a ‘transient mental illness’. ‘Transient’ not in the sense of affecting a single person for a while and then going away, but in the sense of existing only at a certain time and place. Transient mental illnesses can best be looked at in terms of the ecological niches in which they can appear and thrive. They are easy cases for making up people, precisely because their very transience leads cynics to suspect they are not really real, and so could plausibly be said to be made up.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I am not sure I see how it follows from allowing more speech to the median reaction to trans people being to deny their identity. My impression is most people (myself included) who affirm trans people's identities do so for reasons other than fear of social censure. I am not trans myself but it is also my impression there is no lack of media or content which they can be exposed to that denies their preferred identity, often including quite popular and mainstream publications depending on their location.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
This is based on dating app data and divorce filings.
Can you link me the data? The data I'm aware of for divorces shows upwards of 70% are by mutual consent. And similarly over 70% of men aged 18-30 reported having sex in the last year. That is mathematically impossible with the top 10% of men monopolizing women.
I suppose you could look at it like that, but its a cause of low fertility, and basically every woman who ends up in this situation regrets it.
Citation?
There is substantial polling data that women want more children (in the US) than they end up having, and a large cause of this is early-20s hypergamy loops that result in them not marrying until far too late.
Citation that the "hypergamy loops" are a cause of marrying too late?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I realize at some point this is a question of probabilities but it seems to me all the downsides you list about non-"marriagable" women also apply to "marrigable" women. They can tick off all your boxes and still "divorc[e] him to take the kids and money." Or still be lacking in "loyalty, cooperation, and stability." Even "marriagable" women can "leave whenever she wants."
Yes, because there are obvious reasons why those categories increase the risk associated with giving commitment. Obesity leads to health issues and possible complications in pregnancy. That's a financial, emotional, and eventually health risk. Various mood and psych disorders contribute to marital dysfunction, and likewise increase chances of divorce. If she's a single mother you're going to expend resources raising a kid that isn't yours, with no guarantees that you'll get to have one of your own. AND she's already demonstrated a certain amount of poor judgment if she picked a guy who wouldn't commit and had his kid.
I'm very confident that women also believe they have compelling reasons for having the standards they do.
So a guy can choose to widen his criteria and accept a woman that has certain, I'll use the term 'baggage,' and if it ends up not working out for him, what is he left with?
If a guy marries a woman without any 'baggage' and it ends up not working out for him, what is he left with? I don't see how the woman's prior "marrigability" is relevant to this question.
How much risk is it reasonable for him to accept in exchange for possible upside?
It is up to each of us to decide that for ourselves. On the one hand, if one takes too much risk one may find oneself in a bad relationship. On the other hand, if one is too risk averse they may be without any relationship at all.
"Marriagable" women imply that the risk/reward calculation goes in her favor. There's not going to be as many as factors like this become more prevalent.
This depends entirely on the particular individuals weight of the factors in question.
So why is the marriage rate so low now?
Because increased social, legal, and economic equality mean women are less and less dependent on marriage as an institution to provide for themselves. When you drastically improve people's alternative to X (as has happened for women over the last century with respect to marriage) then fewer of them will choose X.
Your explanation of my actions evinces a quite poor theory of mind on your part.
Sure. I think your analysis of the motivations of the parties involved and the causal forces at work is far too simplistic. Many groups in society have gotten their way by methods other than threatening violence. Similarly the notion that the current crop of young sexually frustrated men would burn down society for not giving them a girlfriend is absurd. Maybe there are some vocal incels/MGTOWs/whatever online that believe something like that but most people, including single sexless men, like society and all the benefits that flow from it. I think a very small percentage (<1) entertain anything like this idea and it will be very difficult for them to convince others to join them.
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