LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
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User ID: 657
I strongly agree with RandomRanger's recommendation of The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
But to go in a slightly different direction, part of the issue is that Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn't neatly match on to the left-right divide in Western politics.
Israel has elements that appeals to both the right and the left. Israel is a relatively liberal democracy when compared to its neighbours, and for progressives, Israel has the most advanced LGBT rights within the Middle East. Broad elements of both the left and right sympathise the history of Jewish oppression and the horror of the Holocaust. More cynically, charges of anti-semitism have staying power on both the right and the left. The Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism that often accompanies local opposition to Israel are often opposed by both the right and left. For some of the religious right, Israel is seen as sacred. Some on both sides of the aisle might support Israel as a purely pragmatic foreign policy move to have a powerful ally in the region.
Similarly support for Palestine, or opposition to Israel (they are largely conflated), has elements that that can appeal to both the right and left, though it is generally more left-coded. Liberals support Palestinians for human rights reasons, while the hard left/socialist types see an oppressed class that need to be liberated, and oppose Israel for its association with US imperialism. The right is more complicated. The more isolationist, anti-MIC and/or libertarian right sometimes oppose Israel because it represents US interventionism, the worst excesses of US foreign policy and aid, and globalism in general. This is even more true for the right outside of the US who may oppose the US-Israel relationship for a whole host of reasons. And if we want to go there, there is also the anti-semitic far-right who oppose Israel for obvious reasons. Again, some on both sides might also support Palestine/oppose Israel for what they see as pragmatic reasons too - it antagonises many Muslim/Arab nations in the region, is a drain on US finances, and is worsening conflicts in the Middle East.
Complications will obviously arise when people try to map what is at its core a ethno-religious conflict between two groups on the other side of the world to Western politics. It doesn't really map at all! My sense is that Western support for either Israel or Palestine is far more driven by political convenience than any real principled ideological stance.
Are Pets Replacing Kids?
I have noticed a growing trend of people talking about their pets like children, and pet owners being increasing referred to as parents, mother or fathers of their pets, and the pets as children. Often this goes as far as to referring to multiple pets being referred to as siblings, or even pets referred to siblings of actual children. For examples on social media, you can look at asinine "feel good" animal related YouTube channels like "The Dodo". I'm hardly the first to comment on the phenomenon, a quick internet search for "furbabies" turns up countless articles. However, while most media coverage on this phenomena is playful and positive, my intuition has long been that this isn't just a harmless, fun phenomenon, but rather these 'parents' are really using these pets as a substitute for children. Perhaps attempting to fulfil an unrealised, subconscious need to raise offspring in a social environment hostile to the raising of actual, real human children.
Like any good researcher, I set out to find information to support my prior assumptions. I looked at U.S. data mostly for its abundance, however the overall quality of data is pretty poor, it's particularly hard to find reliable data on the historic rates of pet ownership and data relating to the pet industry going back further than 30 years or so ago.
Based on the APPA's APPA National Pet Owners Survey, the percentage of households with a pet has increased from 56% in 1988 to 70% in 2020. In absolute numbers, the number of pet cats and dogs increased from 108 million in 1996 to 188 million in 2022. But it is not simply the number of pets that are relevant, but the relationship owners have with the pet. Perhaps the most shocking statistic I saw was the growth of the pet industry. The US pet industry has grown from $53 billion in 2012 (~$68 billion adjusted for inflation), to $124 billion in 2021, the industry doubling in size in just a decade! A near doubling also occurred in the prior decade too. The growth has been driven in large part by the increased demand for luxury pet products. The US fertility rate dropped from 1.91 to 1.66 from 2012 to 2020 during this time. By comparison, the US baby products industry was worth $29 billion in 2022. Some (unreliable) survey data says that three-quarters of US pet owners consider their pets 'furbabies'. It should be noted that Millennials slightly overrepresented in many of these pet statistics. US pet owners are also more likely to be female (60%).
Now onto my speculation on the issue. Despite a lot of hand-wringing over the economic costs being the major driver behind young adults not having kids, those same young adults seem to be willing buy a pet and spend significant sums on them, treating them as a pseudo-child. Perhaps a pet is still a cheaper alternative than a child, but in my opinion the economic argument still doesn't hold up. As I like to point out, the fertility rate of the US was higher during the Great Depression, the worst economic period in modern history, than it is today. So the social factors must be playing a greater role, something that has been discussed quite extensively on theMotte in the past so I won't go into detail here. To summarise briefly, but technology, contraception, sexual liberation, feminism, the two-income trap and modernity generally may all have played some role. But humans are still ultimately biological and social creatures, and I think there is likely some innate driver to engage in parental (maternalistic/paternalistic), childrearing behaviours, for both men and women, but particularly women. When social pressure and event stigma prevent people from having children, they have substituted in the closest available, non-stigmatised alternative, pets. What I think is troubling is what will be the long-term consequences of using pets as surrogate children, because pets are not, in fact, children. Using pets as surrogate children is possibly contributing to the fertility crisis, providing a band-aid solution to the unrealised desire of childrearing. Children, as actual thinking humans, can form meaningful relationships with their parents and others, and contribute to community in ways that pets can obviously not provide. Thus furbabies may be accelerating the atomisation of society. When parents enter their elder years, they can rely on the support of their adult children to help. Children will also ultimately provide net economic utility to society, where as pets, as much people might love them, do not.
I personally find the whole phenomenon of pets as surrogate children disgusting or fundamentally morally wrong on a deep, visceral level. It feels so unnatural and perverse to me. I do love animals, including pets I have had in the past, but I would never dream of treating them remotely as people or children. As pessimistic as this is, my instinct that the rise of furbabies is hyper-representative of the cultural, social and moral decline of the West, and is strongly associated with the fertility crisis and the demographic collapse many Western or developed states are or will experience.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Perhaps this was the tradition at some point, but given that rates of pet ownership and pet spending have increased, while fertility has decreased, it's likely that this tradition becoming irrelevant and is not driving this change.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
That doesn't conflict with what I was saying at all. My point was that it's unlikely that it's simply economic factors this is the primary driver of the long term decrease in fertility. Urbanisation may well be the primary driver, though I might aid that cities aren't magical, the causal effect will have to be how cities affect community/social roles and how that impacts fertility, which is pretty much what I was saying.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
I admit causation is hard to prove. It's not like you can really just ask someone "hey, are you using your pet to fulfil you subconscious desire to have a child?" and get a genuine answer.
I think the key difference is that it is not simply pet ownership rates that have increased, but how people treat those pets, spending more on them (there are some ridiculous pet products now, like pet wet wipes) and pampering them like you would a human. My point was never to argue that pet ownership is causing a drop in fertility, but rather pet ownership, and treating pets like kids, is a reaction to low fertility rates.
I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false
Everyone believes they are making the world a better place, or at least not make it a worse place, a tiny tiny minority of literally psychotic individuals notwithstanding. No one believes themselves to be the villain of their own story. Progressive actors in this sense are unremarkable. Even those who just like 'dunking' and being hostile to conservatives would have rationalised their own actions. I think many of these people you are talking about truly believe that they are fighting against genuine 'evil'. That doesn't mean they are justified, only terribly mistaken. Unless you're a firm believer in absolute moral relativism I suppose.
What is quite unique about the (Critical) SJ movement is an almost unprecedented degree of black-and-white thinking, which is baked into the ideology. There is no room for compromise or forgiveness, it is totalising. The ideology fosters an extreme lack of self-reflection and introspection (e.g. labelling any one questioning the ideology of 'epistemic pushback'). This has really only been on this scale (not counting cults) by its predecessor ideology, Marxism, and its rival, Fascism. For something like this to emerge from a modern liberal democratic society should be deeply troubling. Even the Crusaders admired Saladin.
The non-SJ people who follow the SJ movement just do so not only because it's the path of least resistance in most cases, but also because the average person thinks very little about why they do the things they do, say the things they say, or believe the things they believe. Most people just take things at face value, something that has been taken advantage of by the SJ movement and fostered by its culture of lack of introspection.
I have yet to see anyone at least on the Motte that we need really high fertility rates, like 6 kids a family or whatever. The concern is mostly that the fertility rate in essentially the entire developed world a significant portion of the developing world is below the replacement rate of 2.1. The fertility rate doesn't need to be high, it just needs to be higher of around 2-3 kids a family.
Any lower than the replacement rate and your population will begin to shrink, and ultimately without any increase future in the fertility rate, your society will go extinct. The future belongs to those who show up. You can try mitigate this with some level of immigration, but this is only a stop-gap measure, and not a solution for two reasons. First, immigration in sufficient numbers will replace the existing society, especially in the context of low fertility rates. This applies regardless of whether you're on the side of nature or nurture. The immigrant population's ethnic makeup will be different to that of the native population if you're on the side of nature, and the immigrant population's culture will supplant or at least substantially alter the native culture if you're on the side of nurture. Contemporary politics is hostile to the idea of true assimilation anyway, and even if it wasn't, it's unlikely to possibly assimilate immigrants fast enough to match the halving of the native population per generation. Immigration has a whole range of problems that I won't get into here, but it's not fairing particularly well for many countries in Europe, and other nations like South Korea and Japan, it's not really a realistic option. Secondly, you can't rely on immigration forever. Because the fertility rates are also dropping in other countries. The other countries that immigrants are coming from will experience or have already experienced a drop in fertility rate below replacement. Virtually the only part of the world that well above the replacement rate is sub-Saharan Africa. But eventually the fertility shredder will come for them too, and soon the whole of humanity will be slowly withering away.
But wait you say! There's too many people on the planet anyway! So what if we shrink our population for a couple generations anyway? Just accepting this argument on its face for now (I don't actually), you're not actually solving the issue, merely delaying it and hoping in a couple of generations it will resolve itself. Why would this trend reverse? The only way this trend "reverses" is that the sub-populations with extremely high fertility rates (Amish, ultra-orthodox Jews, hyper-tradCaths) basically take over the population (and somehow themselves don't get subjected to the same forces of low fertility). Maybe you're an anti-natalist, a nihilist and you don't really care what the future holds for humanity assuming there is even a future. But you must at least understand that some people might actually care.
But putting aside the longer term (though not that long) consequences of a low fertility on a culture's survivability, there are some really practical reasons why you need a higher fertility rate. A stable, productive economy needs young workers to actually do stuff. With a fertility rate of one, that means for every 4 grandparents, they will only have one grandchild to support them. This is no feasible. It doesn't matter how much money the elderly will saved from their lifetime of childlessness, if there's no one to actually pay to care for them, it doesn't matter. A society with is mostly elderly is a decaying and dying society. There WILL be civil unrest when one young person is expected to provide for four elderly people (through the state). To use an extreme example, the fertility rate of South Korea is by some estimates below 0.9 (!). This means there will be almost 5 elderly people for every young worker (2 generations) in South Korea if this trend continues. This is an absolute disaster. Already we're seeing the consequences to Japan and South Korea, and more counties will follow. It's only going to get worse. I should also add in national debt. National debt is taken on with the expectation that the economy will grow and the state will inevitably pay off this debt from the growth. But shrinking population means a shrinking economy, and the debt will only ever grow. Young people will be saddled with an increasingly unpayable debt given to them by the previous generations. Not having children is basically a free rider problem. You're expecting someone else's kid to care for you and pay of the national debt in the future. Suppose if no one chose to have kids anymore, then who would be left to actually do anything? We'd just be a dystopia of elderly people, Children of Men style. Humanity doomed to die off.
On to the things that are harder to quantify or definitely prove - I think the drop in fertility rate and the rise of childless and single child families is not social healthy, and is generally bring misery. The direction causality between between the atomisation of society and low fertility rates is uncertain, it's probably a feedback loop with many other related factors at play. We are facing a crisis of meaning and community in the West, and I think this has been driven in large part by the destruction of the family. Young adults may be happy to leave a hedonistic life free of familial responsibility in their youth, but when the reach their 40s and 50s, loneliness will and has hit them hard. It's incredibly short sighted and yes, based on instant gratification. They're the farmer who has eaten their seed corn and has nothing to harvest for the future. It's hard for me to take your suggestion that childlessness is just the result of innate preferences when this is an incredibly recent phenomenon, it hasn't been this way for the entirety of human history up into this point. It also make no sense evolutionarily that our innate biological preferences is to not have children (some people are argued that we are wired to have sex, not raise children, but this still makes little sense to me, because we are a K reproductive strategy species, not an r). Additionally, we live in an age of unprecedented information, ideology and propaganda. I don't believe or one second that say, feminist ideology hasn't had an impact on fertility rates.
I'll just leave by linking to some older comments of mine discussing various elements of this issue in more detail.
On the Hostility of Modernity to Childrearing and its Consequences
There's also discussion from this same CW thread which I won't bother linking, as you seem to have read it already.
It's not a secret I have a strong dislike of radical feminism and its theory, to put it mildly. The feminist theory of 'patriarchy' (I know other people like to use patriarchy to mean other things) is wrong, and this includes the idea that men are 'default degenerates'. I guess I also am disagreeing with many other commenters here too, but in a milder form.
Men are not inherently degenerate. Men are inherently risk-takers, driven and ambitious compared to women. Men need a proactive 'purpose' in a way women do not. Part of this is the male social role - masculinity is determined by a man's ability to protect and provide, but of course there is a innate biological element to it. This drive that men have can go in any number of directions, good or bad, productive or degenerate. But given that humans are, on average, pro-social creatures that generally prefer to cooperate, this drive tends towards good and productive. If the natural state of men is degenerate, then how does civilisation exist? Given that men literally built civilisation, at the very least in the literal physical sense.
The problem arises when society fails to provide young men at large with a pro-social way to harness their drive, which has to indicate a systematic failure with society, given that I believe the natural tendency is to be pro-social. If men can't be or aren't allowed to proactive within the society, they will 'degenerate'. Men need a sense of identity, a sense of community, a family, to channel their efforts into something productive. Without those things, they're going to just lash out and/or become 'degenerate'. That energy has to go somewhere. The crisis of masculinity is exactly when society fails to provides those things. There is an oft used proverb of dubious "African" origin which describes men pretty well here - the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. It should really not be surprising that the men who are the most 'degenerate' historically have been men who have existed on the fringes of society.
I think men are violent by only insofar that men are agentic. I don't think it's really possible to separate men's propensity towards violence from their tendency to exert agency in other ways and in other parts of societies. Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women. It is the same drive that causes men to commit violence that also causes them to compete with other man for status, climb the corporate ladder, engage in physical labour. So it is not so much that men are violent per se, but rather that men are and expected to be agentic beings which necessarily includes the domain of violence.
This argument misses the point that the only way for a population to compete with those orthodox religious groups is to emulate those groups in the ways that are relevant to boosting birth rates.
They don't have to emulate their hyper fertility rates. They simply just needs to main a fertility rate above the replacement rate. In your whole response you also completely ignore the major point that you actually need above a fertility rate above 2.1 for humanity to survive. I'm sure eventually the human population will eventually shrink to a point where civilisation as we know it collapses, and they rise again, but I don't exactly see that as a positive. Or we can hope the robots bail us out, but that might actually cause the extinction of humans one way or another.
The solution to the debt problem is for the government to not spend in a way that accrues debt.
The debt already exists! It was accrued by the earlier, now increasingly childless generations! The national debt of the US is currently $30 trillion. Who is expected to pay off that debt exactly? An increasingly smaller cohort of children, presumably. And god forbid when the Social Security system collapses because less and less people are paying into it while the growing elderly withdraws. And this still doesn't acknowledge the fact that you still need young workers in your society to do stuff like literally, physically. It doesn't matter if you're a retiree with a large amount of savings. If you're like South Korea, you simply won't have enough labour when one young worker has to do enough labour to support the needs of 5 elderly people and themselves. It's unsustainable. In 50 years or so, a lot of old people are going to be fucked. The state based social services will collapse if nothing changes. The only elderly people who will get support will be those who have grandkids who will personally and direct support them.
If everyone stops having kids, there is probably a good reason for that, and having a society full of only elderly people is not their biggest problem.
It's already happening! South Korea's population is going shrink by more than half in a single generation! Is that not concerning to you?
Then wouldn't the solution to this be to spread the message that not having kids causes loneliness later in life.
Yes, please! Except how do you actually propose to implement this solution? Because right now, people, particularly young women are told the exact opposite. What do you think the feminist messaging is, exactly? That their career is way more important than their family. Family is only something to worry about when after you've built your career, it's low priority if it's something to care about at all. The message should be that having a family is fulfilling and full of meaning! Now, if only there was some way to package this messaging in a system of beliefs that is easily absorbed by people... Maybe there is actually some truth in religious traditions and traditional ways of living more generally.
You know, the part of the issue is that there is the assumption, which is largely present in your own comments, that having family is a lesser path, that it's not something worth of admiration or celebration and it's even low status. At best, it's completely value neutral. People can just have a family if they want to I guess, whatever. No, I say. Having a family is a moral and social good. It is literally is the foundation for humanity and society and what makes life worth living. The alternative is hedonistic nihilism which is what I think we're heading towards. Being a mother or (gasp!) housewife is seen as a lesser, oppressive choice than becoming a 9-5 desk slave.
There has been at least one other society in history that has had the same trends, which is late roman society. The reason this is a recent phenomenon is because in the past, religious and cultural pressure prevented people from deciding for themselves whether they want sex to bring about babies for them.
Great, the one example that you managed to list was a society that was just about to collapse. Not exactly a confidence booster.
Also, I hate to do this, but unironically 'we live in a society'. Humans are social creatures by nature. There is no, and never will be some hyper libertine rationalist utopia where people are free from any and all cultural pressures. Society is made up of social institutions, which will always exert social pressures. 'Social pressures' is such a negative way of framing this. It is just as true that people find meaning, purpose and improvement in their social groups and community, which necessarily includes conformity and pressure to conform to that community in order to be part of it. There is social pressure for people to receive an education, is this a bad or oppressive thing? The issue is that 'social pressures' need to be oriented in such a way to produce good, moral and meaningful outcomes.
Of course it has, but I don't see the problem, if people were convinced by feminist ideology, there is probably a good reason they were.
This is a terrible argument. "I don't see the problem, if people were convinced by Fascist ideology, there is probably a good reason they were."
You also bring in a terrible double standard. People being convinced by religion is bad and oppressive, but people being convinced by feminist ideology is good and organic.
I'll leave you with a final question - if our current social paradigm eventually results in the extinction of humanity or at the very least a collapse of civilisation because of the lack of fertility, are you content to let things remain the way they are? Would you be okay with some limits or 'social pressure' on people if it means stopping the collapse?
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Indigenous land usage (here I take to mean reservations and the like) has resulted in some serious issues in how it is current functions in many countries. This is mainly because they tend to take a really wishy-washy middle of the road solution where the native reservations are both simultaneously mostly autonomous but also theoretically subject to federal law, and receive significant federal funding and support. The delineation of authority and responsibility is really poorly defined, especially in the context of contemporary politics where any serious federal government involvement is seen as highly circumspect and often gets accusations of colonialism.
Many of the issues with this system is exemplified with 'First Nations' politics in Canada. Many of the Indian reservations in Canada have huge problems, including persistent problem with clean drinking water. The Canadian government provides funding to the reservations for their water infrastructure, which is then largely managed by the reservation itself. The problem is that many of the 'First Nations' governments are heavily corrupt and very little of the money actually ends up doing what is supposed to. They also heavily resist any audits of their financials. So the end result is that the Canadian government continues to funnel money into reservations with no oversight, then get blamed for the water problems in the reservations and accused of racism/discrimination, or they can step in forcefully and manage it from top-down, in which case they will be accused of overriding the autonomy of 'First Nations' and accused of racism/discrimination. A similar situation also occurs with the high rates of child abuse in these communities - don't intervene and get blamed for not doing enough to help native children, or remove these kids from abusive homes then get accused of cultural genocide.
The system should go in either direction, I don't really have a strong preference which. Either 1) the native reservations should be given more autonomy from the federal government and become all-but-independent, with little support or control from the Federal government, managing their own affairs (then don't get blamed when shit goes bad), or 2) they should be given no special legal status and be subject to the exact same laws, oversight and status as every other Canadian (well, Québécois weird legal system is a discussion for another time). The middle half-arsed solution currently creates a lot of ambiguity and opportunities for abuse. For 1) I'm thinking something akin to the British Overseas Territories, or France's weird setup with New Caledonia.
One major problem that hasn't been mentioned yet with the idea that "rape is about power, not sex" is that this ignores, or deliberately downplays the fact that men and women actually commit rape at fairly comparable rates. Part of the motivation behind conceptualising rape as about power was to use rape as part of the ideological framework of feminist patriarchy theory - that men, and only men, commit rape, and do so as a tool of power to subjugate and oppress women. The violent 'enforcement mechanism' of patriarchy. Of course, this falls apart if you acknowledge the reality that women can and do commit rape against men in non-insignificant numbers.
The CDC periodically conducts and releases data on the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. In the latest report on data from 2016/2017, 2.3% of women reported being raped in the last 12 months. In the same report, 0.3% of men reported being raped during the last 12 months. Case closed, right? Women get raped significantly more than men. No, because there is a significant slight of hand going on. The NISVS uses a specific definition of rape:
Rape is any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes when the victim was too drunk, high, drugged or passed out and unable to consent.
Men who are made to penetrate a woman are excluded from this definition of rape. Instead they are listed under a far more innocuous sounding category of 'made to penetrate'. 1.3% of men reported being made to penetrate in the last 12 months. In other words, what most people commonly understand as being rape (that is, nonconsensual sex). In some years, men have even reported a high rate of made-to-penetrate than women have of rape (e.g. in 2011, men reported 1.7% made-to-penetrate in the last 12 months, women reported 1.6% rape in the last 12 months). However, this has not prevented dishonest or ignorant actors constantly taking the 'rape' statistics of men and women at face value and comparing them to one another to make generalised statements.
(Note - there are plenty of other ways to dissect the CDC data, and as a generally speaking the numbers are probably inflated across the board compared to reality. I will also add that these male and female victimisation rates are not even considering the fact that men are far less likely to conceptualise an experience as 'rape' or sexual assault, while women are far more likely to do so.)
Why does the CDC use what is apparently such a biased and misleading definition of rape and made-to-penetrate. Because the CDC's definitions and research were and are heavily influenced by Mary P. Koss, one of, if not the leading researcher on sexual assault and rape, and feminist. Koss has served as a long-term advisor to the CDC, and the CDC has pretty much adopted Koss' definition of rape wholesale. Koss essentially believes that men can't be raped, and that it would be inappropriate to call men who are raped, as raped:
"Although consideration of male victims is within the scope of the legal statutes, it is important to restrict the term rape to instances where male victims were penetrated by offenders. It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman." (Koss 1993 Detecting the Scope of Rape)
Phung: "Dr. Koss says one of the main reasons the definition does not include men being forced to penetrate women is because of emotional trauma, or lack thereof."
Koss: "How do they react to rape. If you look at this group of men who identify themselves as rape victims raped by women you'll find that their shame is not similar to women, their level of injury is not similar to women and their penetration experience is not similar to what women are reporting."
Later:
Phung: "So I am actually speaking to someone right now. his story is that he was drugged, he was unconscious and when he awoke a woman was on top of him with his penis inserted inside her vagina, and for him that was traumatizing."
Koss: "Yeah."
Phung: "If he was drugged what would that be called?"
Koss: "What would I call it? I would call it 'unwanted contact'."
Phung: "Just 'unwanted contact' period?"
Dr. Koss: "Yeah."
Koss has been involved with advising many other prominent organisations like the FBI, the WHO and World Bank. Koss is also the origin of other feminist sexual assault and rape myths, including the claim that 1 in 4 college women have been raped, using extremely poor and biased research methods.
Koss may be just one (highly influential) person, but the bias in the conceptualisation and reporting of rape as exclusively or near-exclusively a men-on-women crime is much greater than that. In many jurisdictions, it is legally impossible for a woman to rape a man. This is because the laws in many countries or states specifically define rape as a crime that only a man can commit against a woman. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 in England and Wales defines rape in a similar way to the CDC, where rape is the nonconsensual penetration of the victim by the offender's penis. In India (Section 375 Indian Penal Code), rape is a crime explicitly defined as a crime that a man commits against a women. In the US, it varies state by state, some being better than others. In practice, some of these jurisdictions prosecute women-on-men rape (made-to-penetrate) under sexual assault laws, but even when they are theoretically equivalent to rape prosecution 'under a different name', they still often carry far less social sigma and often lesser sentencing guidelines. 'Sexual assault' sounds less heinous than 'rape'.
So in conclusion, rape is not only not about power, but it's also not exclusively a male perpetrated crime. However, there are significant social and legal barriers to recognising the reality of rape and the existence of male victims and female perpetrators. It's easy to think of rape as only something men do when institutions and society at large have explicitly defined rape as only something men can do, and then this is used to dishonestly support false narratives around sexual relations.
The wording (doubtless there are many) I recall is, "a system of gender roles which is harmful to men and women" or some such. Some might say that this definition smuggles in a claim: that gender roles are harmful.
This is not very representative of the feminist definition, at least of the academic kind which forms the basis of patriarchy theory. I'm sure you can find a street feminist to offer such a definition though.
The most robust concise definition of patriarchy I've seen offered by a feminist, which I believe essentialises the concept for feminism as a whole quite well is the one offered by Sylvia Walby in Theorising Patriarchy (1989): "a series of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women." This really does encapsulate what feminism, all feminism, means by patriarchy at least at a basic level. Often bits and pieces are tacked onto it later, often to band-aid or cover-up over issues with their theory (e.g. "patriarchy hurts men too"). Walby's work on patriarchy is pretty foundational to feminist academia today, even though in some sense she was just formalising a lot of threads that existed previously.
You see, a man who is motivated by sex is simply not committing rape as a matter of definition.
The radical feminists make no distinction. They see the male sexuality as inherently linked to violence and oppression against women, and therefore basically all sex between a man and a woman is men raping women. Catharine McKinnon's Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989):
Male dominance is sexual [in the context of sexuality]. Meaning: men in particular, if not men alone, sexualize hierarchy; gender is one. As much a sexual theory of gender as a gendered theory of sex, this is the theory of sexuality that has grown out of consciousness raising in the women's movement.
Male power takes the social form of what men as a gender want sexually, which centers on power itself, as socially defined. Masculinity is having it; femininity is not having it.
Male sexuality is apparently activated by violence against women and expresses itself in violence against women to a significant extent.
A theory of sexuality becomes feminist to the extent it treats sexuality as a social construct of male power: defined by men, forced on women, and constitutive in the meaning of gender. Such an approach centers feminism on the perspective of the subordination of women to men as it identifies sex-that is, the sexuality of dominance and submission-as crucial, as a fundamental, as on some level definitive, in that process. Feminist theory becomes a project of analyzing that situation in order to face it for what it is, in order to change it.
The major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.
The later, more contemporary intersectional feminists tempered or moderate this perspective, but ultimately they are cut from the same cloth and you can see the same principles underlying it, even if they're supposedly 'sex-positive' (that is, male sexuality, or male sexuality under patriarchy is linked to the need to dominate, and therefore oppress women). For example, bell hooks' Feminism is for Everybody (2000, but still extremely popular in contemporary feminist circles):
Many women and men still consider male sexual performance to be determined solely by whether or not the penis is hard and erections are maintained. This notion of male performance is tied to sexist thinking. While men must let go of the sexist assumption that female sexuality exists to serve and satisfy their needs.
Similarly, feminism did not create the concept of patriarchal societies... So, clearly, the concept of patriarchy is not unique to feminism.
I always feel like an broken record saying this, but this entirely depends on what one means by 'patriarchy'. It's a word that's been used, misused and abused to death. Based on what else you said, I understand what you said to mean that 'patriarchy' as the feminists describe has always existed, feminists merely created the descriptive theory (that is, merely described what already existed). Although this is undercut by 'the concept of patriarchy is not unique to feminism', which is true in the strict sense, but the feminist theory of patriarchy, which is what you are describing, is unique to feminism.
The term 'patriarchy' to describe social structures was first used by Max Weber in his posthumously published The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947), in which he provides an extremely narrow definition of patriarchy, basically describing a system of household organisation and inheritance - almost a synonym for 'patrilineal'. This was purely descriptive, and contains none of the connotations and normative judgements implicit in the feminist definition. The term 'patriarchy' specifically was introduced into the feminist lexicon by Kate Millet in Sexual Politics in 1970, though the general idea if not in name existed in feminism before then.
I disagree with you when you say "feminism did not create the concept of patriarchal societies", because the feminist conception of patriarchy does not and did not exist, and is purely a product of feminist historical revisionism (that is, a myth) constructed to support their political project. To be specific, I am referring to the feminist understanding of the relationship of the sexes as being one of where men oppress women. In other words, that "the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman." I have written extensively about this in the past on the old subreddit and elsewhere, but just to highlight two really quite prominent examples of this myth-making:
We have known for quite a long time that there is gender parity in domestic violence (and rape too for that matter) but this has been suppressed in large part by feminist activism and feminist theory. Many historical claims about domestic violence similarly turn out to myths, for example the oft repeated claim that men used to be able to beat their wives with impunity is a myth, and appears to originate William Blackstone's 18th Century Commentaries on the Laws of England in which he claims (via a unspecified colleague as a source) that men used to be able to do just that - before adding that this had changed under the enlightened reign of Charles II, obviously having a political motivation to describe the pre-Restoration era (and thus Cromwell's rule) as savage and barbarous compared to the present. Decrying how your outgroup treats women poorly to make them look bad and yourself good is a tactic as old as time.
The issue of women's suffrage is far more complicated than as present by feminists or 'common knowledge' generally. It was never an issue of men against women, or men oppressing women. In fact, for much of the history of the suffragette movement, men were actually more progressive on the issue than women themselves were, and the anti-suffragette movement was led by women and was far more popular than the suffragette movement until well into the 20th century. The early suffragettes hilariously often stated that they didn't want women to vote on the issue of their own suffrage for this very reason. The anti-suffragettes had some interesting arguments, and far stronger than the strawmen arguments they are often presented as having. To summarise their arguments extremely briefly (the link provides more detail), they saw their role (as women) in society as unique, distinct and different to that of men, but their role was no less important, influential or yes, powerful as that of men.
The issue of women's suffrage in some sense encapsulates the issue with historical judgements about the relationship between men and women history. The playbook is something like: identify something that we highly value in our present society and ideology (the right to vote), compare the historical society to our present society in this regard (women didn't have the right to vote), then condemn the historical society for failing to live up to our modern morals and sensibilities (women couldn't vote because men were oppressing women - evil). There is very little attempt to address the past on its own terms, that there might be practical and understandable, if not good, reasons for the way the things operated in the past. This is particularly true of the sexes. Women have never been oppressed en masse as described in feminist patriarchy theory. Men and women simply valued different things in the past and had different roles - maleness was highly valued in male roles, and femaleness was highly valued in female roles, one was not necessarily better than the other. The history of the sexes has always been primarily one of cooperation and yes, affection. This obviously comes with the caveat that yes, you can find specific instances of where both women and men have suffered injustices, but this not part of a universal and timeless 'patriarchy'.
The feminist definition of patriarchy includes oppression as a core part of it. Patriarchy isn't just 'more men in political office', it's a society of, for and by men that oppresses women (for the record, the feminist view is that 'more men in political office' necessarily results in the oppression of women).
I disagree with the feminists quite a lot with what gender norms and structures exist in the past. The feminist says that the female role was one of submission that had no power. I say no, the female role actually did have wield significant power and influence, and their own form of status.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
As I said in another thread, the most robust concise definition I've seen is from Sylvia Walby in Theorising Patriarchy (1989): "a series of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women."
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
It's not even 'deep-state'. It's basically just how the EU functions. The European Commission is made up almost entirely of career bureaucrats (who are largely social left-of-centre neoliberal types). The Commissioners themselves are basically unelected appointees from the member states, and while nominally they're subjected to an approval vote from the European Parliament, it's really just rubberstamping.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Race/gender/sexuality messaging is not nearly as prominent
It's becoming more and more prominent such as the European Commission's Anti-Racism Action Plan 2020-2025. Feminism/"gender equality" has always been a core component of EU social messaging.
It is partially an importation of American progressivism, albeit adapted to local conditions.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
This is the first time I've encountered Paolo Freire
I don't have anything really substantial to add but Paolo Freire has been insanely influential. From some sources he is the the most, or at least one of the most highly cited scholars in the humanities. His influence is at least as large as Foucault in the academy, but the impact has probably been larger on society as a whole because pedagogy and education theory has a much more immediate and direct consequences on society, and his ideas are oriented towards 'praxis' and spread and filter down easily. Google Scholar has Pedagogy of the Oppressed at over 100000 citations (!!!) which as best I can tell, is the third most cited work on the site.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Yes, and I'm saying it is becoming more and more prominent and is on track to becoming front and centre.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
I don't disagree with what you are saying but you can easily come away with an alternative conclusion - that this demonstrates the average young woman's privilege in our society.
You could easily analogise this situation to a young ignorant rakish noble who isn't aware that he is at the mercy of peasant rabble potentially rising up to kill him, until one day he he is confronted by an angry mob he has to defuse because he raised taxes too high. But the noble is still in the privileged positon, we shouldn't pity him.
Similarly a young woman who remains remarkably ignorant about reality about the differences between men and women enjoys a similar privilege. The fact that a young woman can go decades without a single man even daring to demonstrating a modium of physical strength against her (or even for her) shows how much social power she has.
I agree with your general point - that most people don't say extreme things and most people who say extreme things don't act on it.
But the problem is the everything is indicating there is a breakdown of the relationship between the sexes, extreme rhetoric or not. Increasing rates (and somewhat assymetric) of sexlessness, lower and delayed marriage, increasing rates of divorce (which are overwhelmingly initiated by women). If we are willing to looking media and culture we are increasingly getting stuff like 'where are all the good men gone' published in mainstream media.
Really, it seems obvious to me that the sexes are coming apart and it's making everyone unhappy. I don't think it's unreasable to that 'TikTok rhetoric' is just a symptom of that.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Yes, it was hard on women who did want to talk about politics and philosophy and not about cake recipes or knitting scarves for the poor, hence the label of bluestocking, but it also gave both sexes a breathing space where they could cluster around their own interests.
If they wanted to do that they could just join one of the numerous female political groups - temperance and abolitionism vome to mind e.g. Women's Christian Temperance Union. Of course, despite obviously engaging in political activity, they are rarely if ever described as 'political' clubs or organisations even today, often described in terms of the social or moral. Politics has acquired a broader meaning in contemporary society ('personal is political') but historically mostly just meant explicit partisans politics reflecting parliament. The idea that women weren't engaged politically in the broad meaning is a myth that won't die. They just did it via different means and largely seperate from men, which is keeping in with the theme of this thread.
To your first point, I would say it's an category error to group rape in with violent crime in general. Rape (against women) is really given a special status by society at large separate from other forms of crime. Rape is considered so heinous that even hardened criminals (i.e. the people actually committing violent crimes) find it shameful and disgusting. Rapists are routinely targeted within prison and beaten or otherwise attacked to the point often have to be removed from the general population. Rapist is as about low status as you can get in virtually every culture or subculture, including the criminal. Additionally, when men do commit violent crimes, they mostly target other men, and generally try to avoid victimising women. Even male robbers and muggers who otherwise proudly boast about their crimes are extremely reluctant to mention victimising women, only men, and those that do are ashamed of it and/or insist that they normally only target men. Lastly, the stereotype of violent rape in a dark alley by a stranger is extremely rare. The vast majority of rapes are 'non-violent', that is to say, they mostly occur between at least acquaintances where (especially) coercion, intoxication and dubious consent (i.e. social manipulation) are the modes of rape, which women are just as capable of men.
To your second point, I would first say that while I generally agree with your point that men have a higher sexual drive than men, it's not like women are completely dissimilar and don't have a sex drive, I don't think the difference is that big. But the real issue is how men's 'sexual agency' exists in context with society at large. Both men and women have it drilled into them that men have high libidos ('they always want it') and women are more prudish in general. Whether this reflects an underlying truth or not is immaterial here - the point is that this is the social context people operate in. For this reason, men have it drilled into them they have to seek women's approval (consent) for sex and generally have a greater responsibility for having 'ethical' sex for lack of a better term. This is ramped up to 11 in the current culture where 'consent training' for men is everywhere where men have to learn how to seek consent from women. Little to none expected of women inversely to seek the consent of men however - men are always up for it. Besides, men are physically stronger than women, so they can just stop her, right? Which conveniently ignores that rape is mostly committed through social coercion and manipulation which is just as applicable for women raping men, and a man who uses too much physical force against women is in a whole other world of trouble. Basically, society has always put great effort into enculturating men 'not to rape' (that is, seek respectful sexual interaction with women), while if anything we do the opposite with women.
Having heard and read quite a number of stories of male victims of female rapists, one of the most common themes among the stories is that the female rapists often are completely unaware that they are raping their male victim. They are so unaware of the fact that maybe their male victim doesn't want to have sex that the fact they could be raping them doesn't enter their minds (something that is much hard for similar men/male rapists to believe, but it does happen). A typical story is something like the man goes to a party, gets drunk, passes out/goes to sleep, wakes up a few hours later to find a woman having sex with him. He may avoid saying no and forcing her off him because he doesn't want to offend her, or he's personally accepted the narrative that men want sex (i.e. he blames himself the same way many female victims of rape do). Even if he does say no, he often won't resort to physical force, because men know that using physical force/violence against women regardless of circumstance is a big no-no. In the more malicious cases that do exist, the female rapist will often tell the male victim that she will publicly accuse him of raping her if he doesn't have sex with her. In the aftermath of the rape, the female victim often fails to conceptualise what she did as rape even well after the fact, and the man also struggles to conceptualise it as rape, even if he is traumatised by it. If he does tell his friends (both men and women), by and large they won't believe it was rape and that he actually wanted it, something that is much much less likely to happen under similar circumstances with a female victim. Which ultimately leads into one of the issues about trying to quantify rates of rape - men are far less likely to conceptualise a rape as rape, while women are far more like to do so.
As to the reliability of the CDC study, I will say that the CDC is pretty much the best, large-scale data available on sexual assault and rape. The issue is fundamentally hard to quantify by its nature and does rely heavily on self-reporting victimisation data. As I said in the original post, my suspicion is that numbers are probably inflated across the board - self-victimisation reports often have a false positive bias. I will say that this these numbers fit in line with the data that shows that domestic violence has gender symmerty. To go back to your first point a bit, interpersonal/relational violence (that is, violence against people you have a personal relationship with) is distinct from violent crime/violence committed against strangers/'the public'. By all indications, women seem to use interpersonal violence as least as much as men, and perhaps even more, while men commit the majority of stranger violence. This fits into my hypothesis that most violent crime being committed by men is strongly tied to the fact that men are both expected to be and are more agentic in public. Men often commit violence on behalf of women, or share the benefits of violent crime with women.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
It still speaks to motivation though - the Americans have been happy to threaten NS2 in the past and does not benefit from its existence.
Much of that isn't particularly relevant to the narrative being told in LotR. And the feminine archetype doesn't mean she's perfectly good or moral either, that's not what I was talking about. Her desire to to preserve Lothlorien is completely keeping in with her theme of purity, and definitely has aspects of the shadow.
Absolutely, in the context of the narrative of Lord of the Rings, she absolutely does represent femininity. That is not mutually exclusive with other, religious themes.
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