Rosencrantz2
5d ago
What can I say, I just want to starve on a dying planet in the arms of my loved ones, instead of having to eat or be eaten by them.
(In reality most of the time I am personally extremely unconfident about whether AI, low fertility or climate change will in the long-run hasten or put off the demise of our species, so actual existential continuity tends to fade into the background of my thinking on most issues.)
Also, yes, you are right, heat death is not actually certain.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Classically, catcalling is a builder who is with his mates, not by himself. It's done for the mates to strengthen the group and give them the small stroke of pointing out a hot woman to look at or whose reaction to be amused by.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Human extinction is 100% inevitable. Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.
Btw I think extinction rebellion is named that because of mass wildlife extinctions rather than human extinction.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Well the jogging stark naked guy is probably crazy. Even if not though, streaking is way more wholesome than flashing!
As you say though all this is quite culture relative and I often think about how a woman willing to ditch the head scarf in a very repressive country is doing something that must feel brazen to her and read as overtly sexual to men around her.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Yeah, this might be true and if they could keep their cat calling within their section of society maybe that would be okay? But not very practicable if we're talking about whistling at strangers.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
The interesting thing about social norms and equilibria though is that they interact strongly with intentions. In other words, whereas in the past catcallers may well have reasonably intended flattery, nowadays (arguably), they can't possibly think that because it's been made so clear to them that their attention is unwelcome.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
As you allude to, there's a 'reasonable person' standard. Someone could flash a woman hoping the woman would be excited by the sight of some random unexpected genitals in their eyeline. But that's unreasonable. A reasonable person would understand that they are more likely to cause upset, so the only reasonable intention we can impute is a malign one.
With catcalling, it seems to me pretty unreasonable in 2025 to imagine catcalling might be welcome, so even if a given catcaller wishfully thinks it will be taken as flattery, British society has (arguably) reached a point where the only response to this is 'Give me a break, pal'. Among my own male friends, certainly, I would flatly disbelieve one of them who said they thought catcalled women liked it and they were doing it to flatter them. I'd tell them, 'Really? Or do you get off on upsetting them, because that's what you're mostly doing.'
With the walking in a string bikini example, depending on the location I think this would very possibly be done with mischievous intent. Except at a beach though I think that's a pretty strong example. Tight leggings or bare midriff is more likely the disputed case and I think a woman dressed thus would be within her rights to say to someone offended, 'I wasn't thinking of you at all'.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
Perhaps but we are talking about UK culture, which I am part of, and so I do feel fairly comfortable telling a British religious person this. Moreover there's a gradient of feelings where some religious people will be upset about even having to see parts of a woman's face or hair, and in this extreme case I don't feel too many qualms about telling them they need to get over their feelings. Perhaps that's the same in reverse as a catcaller telling a woman she needs to get over her objections to catcalling, but so be it.
I'm not sure I see how catcalling "actively get[s] into someone's space," which is why I noted that provided the 18 arrests were made for actual assault rather than mere catcalling, there's less to complain about here. The realm of "offensive speech" and unwilling audiences is a fascinating one for legal theorists precisely because what counts as "invading" someone's "space" in public is really tricky. Our bodies are an easy place to draw a line: unwanted physical contact is bad! Our senses are much more complicated. How is dressing provocatively any different from speaking provocatively, from the perspective of the unwilling audience? Are our ears more important than our eyes, somehow? "You can just look away!"--or--"you can just plug your ears!" There seem to be a lot of unstated assumptions in the assertion that there is a "significant" difference between catcalling and parading around in provocative clothing.
For sure there's a theoretical debate to be had which I think is perhaps too laborious to really get into here, but part of that debate would need to get into questions of intent. The catcaller is manifestly trying to get a specific woman's attention and prevent her from going about her business undisturbed. The skimpily dressed woman may also be trying to distract a given man. But we actually don't know, and most of the time cannot know, if she is or not merely from the fact of her dress. It's just harder to establish an intent to impinge on a specific individual to the woman in this case than the man. If she actively flashes a body part at a specific man, we would have established an intent towards that particular person, and in that case, the woman's act is similarly invasive as catcalling – maybe even if another woman is showing a similar amount of skin as a matter of course, but not pushing it specifically towards a given unconsenting man. Innocence is not merely in what is shown but how it's shown.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Women dressing in form-fitting or revealing clothing and parading themselves in full view of the public is something that some men find "alarming" or "distressing." You can see the result of laws that seek to minimize that distress.
Can you elaborate on this bit? I guess I can imagine being of a puritan mindset where I would want to suppress feelings of being attracted out of shame, or out of a strong moral view on female virtue, and therefore would prefer form-fitting clothing be kept away from me wherever possible. Is that where you're going with this, or something else?
Setting the legal debate aside (I find myself not too sure of my views on what the laws should be in this area), I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass, and a fairly significant difference between actively getting into someone's space by catcalling them and just being seen by them as you go about your own business.
Rosencrantz2
19d ago
Different strokes for different folks but 3/10 sounds pretty absurd to me.
Rosencrantz2
20d ago
Maybe but I definitely remember Lewinsky being villified across the political spectrum, which wouldn't make much sense if she was viewed as a a non-consenting victim by either side. Here's one example from a republican rabbi, as I remember it there was a lot of this sort of thing around: https://observer.com/2014/05/monica-should-apologize-to-hillary/
Rosencrantz2
20d ago
Surely a 90s Republican didn't think Clinton's targets were unable to consent. Rather they thought his affairs were gross, adulterous and disqualifying.
Rosencrantz2
28d ago
Not sure if you are addressing BurdensomeCount but if you re-read my two posts I expressed no attachment or opinion as to this story's truth or falsehood and used 'if it's true' in both posts. I just used BurdensomeCount's post as a jumping off point to share my views about shame in America, which I stand by proudly!
That said, being ashamed of being gullible is in theory a useful emotion/stance, I would maintain.
Rosencrantz2
29d ago
The erosion of shame as an asymmetric weapon is one of the biggest impacts of the Trump presidency; the right will no longer accept being shamed.
This is the problem though. Large parts of the right now won't accept being shamed full stop, by either side. They won't be shamed by the left. And they won't shame themselves. Trump has identified accepting shame of any kind as weakness; I suspect it would be soul death for him to think of himself as having done something wrong or acknowledge contrition. With the regulation that shame provides gone from both directions, nothing can stop awful things being happily written off as costs worth paying in the name of a bigger cause such as lowering immigration.
To my mind a wise right wing person would accept shame for something like this story, if true. They are then welcome to e.g. turn the tables and say it's the left who should be really ashamed for not taking immigration seriously in the first place. That'd be a stronger response, one that keeps shame in play, versus claiming oneself to have moved beyond shame altogether.
Rosencrantz2
29d ago
The erosion of shame as a social force is one of the biggest impacts of the Trump presidencies.
You see pretty often in this forum and in right-wing circles people expressing pride that they have got free of the distorting power of empathy and shame. Elon Musk's claim that empathy is the most dangerous force in society would be the peak example of this phenomenon. As a result of this, they go even beyond biting the bullet of e.g. it being disgraceful that an old man has been wrongly deported. They actually enjoy said bullet like a delicious amuse bouche, and imply that it is a GOOD sign if it's true that he has been deported and that his family wrongly told he was dead, because it implies the administration is acting at speed and focusing on the big picture, not worrying overly about individual liberty.
I'm pretty sure those who embrace this conclusion are making a major strategic mistake that will come back to haunt them. By thinking they can jettison the concept of shame, they are storing it up to be brought down on their asses in much larger quantities later. Shame is not a force humans can, ultimately, live without.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
This is Sarah Champion's method to arrive at 1 million victims: “I extrapolated that Rotherham is a town [of] 200,000 and had 1,400 known victims of CSE [child sexual exploitation] between 1997-2013 and 15% of women report their rape - so scaled up,”
I really don't want to lessen a large number of very serious crimes, but to say that method is seriously flawed would be an understatement.
I am a bit left of centre and can see some truth in this.
I do think a lot of language policing was done by people who didn't really believe it was a huge favour to the downtrodden groups they were defending. They though it was a small, token thing, and many language policers were actually motivated not because they truly believed they were helping a lot, but more by the status points they got as champions of the disadvantaged.
For this reason, yes, I do think they were surprised that people on the right would want a piece of that. In their heart of hearts, they thought the main prize was the high ground, not being a recipient of some meagre linguistic charity.
This para I slightly disagree with
I think to a very large extent left-wing culture in the US was totally unprepared for that kind of jealousy. Because they sort of thought of themselves as underdogs it was really hard to process the idea that right-wing culture contained a ton of people who desperately wanted to be underdogs in the same way, who didn’t view those things as scraps left over by the powerful, but instead thought of it as what power looks like.
Because I don't think language policers did, for the most part, think of themselves as underdogs. On the contrary, they saw themselves as privileged people defending underdogs. And it's something of a tribute to their power that folks on the right wanted some of the same cultural perks bestowed on them.
I would care if they were doing it even on a small scale, unless there was a good reason, but I don't think that particularly implies that bees' suffering matters. I think I'd be aggrieved by anyone buying any cool thing in order to pointlessly destroy it, living or not. And bees are cool.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
But the assertion "I dress up for myself" directly implies that dressing up would be equally enjoyable regardless of whether one has an audience or not.
I think this is overstated. 'Dressing for yourself' can surely include feeling good when dressed up in public. You are participating in status games, you are expressing yourself, and you are turning heads because you enjoy the feeling of power that it gives you or because you are free of the anxiety of being judged or shamed when you know you're looking your best and your flaws have been minimised. That's markedly different than enjoying turning heads specifically because you want to make men horny. This is the difference between someone who dresses skimpily and whose primary satisfaction from that is attention from men, and someone who is interested in fashion and experiments with things that are orthogonal to basic male attraction (and the latter is a large amount of what people talk about on, say, your average style podcast – they are not always discussing how to be sexier in veiled terms, though they sometimes are, a lot of the time they are discussing trends, novelty and details of a kind that I daresay most men are pretty oblivious to and that are more to do with status, social impression, coolness and craft than sexiness).
By way of analogy, if everyone who claimed to be eating food "just for the taste" incidentally happened to be consuming a varied, balanced, nutrient-rich diet and expressed no interest in consuming tasty food with little nutritional value - it would be reasonable to discount their claims that this was their real motivation. Likewise if every male person who claimed to be pursuing orgasm purely for its own sake incidentally happened to only engage in sex acts which were likely to result in procreation (i.e. unprotected vaginal intercourse with nubile fertile ovulating females) and expressed no interest in pleasurable sex acts with little likelihood of procreation resulting. Or moreover, the counterfactual world in which food only tastes good if it's rich in nutrients and tastes disgusting otherwise; or in which orgasms only feel good if they are likely to result in procreation, and feel uncomfortable or painful otherwise.
I think the analogy for this would be a woman dressing with effort even though she doesn't want sexual attention and might actually be annoyed by it. That's pretty easy to imagine isn't it?
I also think you need to tease out many gradations of possible meaning in the spectrum of dressing for yourself vs dressing for others. I would think the primary meaning is that your objective is to feel good in such contexts that others think you look good or have matched the occasion (a form of female success). This inner feeling is going to be distinct from dressing up instrumentally just because you want e.g. male attention. Now sure there is an extreme interpretation of doing something for yourself that means you would get the pleasant feeling even if no one else can notice. But I don't think that is particularly central natural language usage. If you do carpentry for yourself as a hobby, you might be disillusioned if you were never allowed to give your wooden creations to anyone or show them to anyone. Part of their value lies in the pride you're able to take in showing them. But a lot of it is also in the feeling of mastery you have when working with wood and being able to create the 'kind of thing' that others would value. I think it would still be fair in such a scenario to say you were pursuing carpentry for yourself.
I also think it would be okay for a man to say they were pursuing orgasm for its own sake even though they actually could just get that via porn. (There are different flavours of orgasm only achievable with others.)
As an aside, I think women actually do often dress up by themselves. This is experimentation and practice I guess, but I think they enjoy it loads, from girlhood on.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Okay so compare: 'Evolution gave us a brain that enjoys different flavours because it gives us the nutrients to survive." With: 'Anyone who claims they eat food 'just for the taste' is full of shit. They are really doing it to get a proper range of nutrients.'
Or: 'Evolution gave us a brain that feels good during orgasm because it leads to reproduction." With: 'Anyone who claims they seek orgasm just for its own sake is full of shit.'
We find ourselves with the brains and reward systems we have. The good thing about human autonomy is that (in theory) we can often co-opt these systems for other motivations. Is it a neat capability we are in full control of? Absolutely not. But we can still distinguish why we do x from the historical reasons and general reasons for our proclivity to x.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
That's not the crux though, one would expect evolution to give people a brain that feels good when a person looks attractive in public, rather than in private.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
But humans also have brains big enough to create elaborate, usually post-hoc justifications for actions they take, and so they can pretend that dressing and acting in a way that effectively short-circuits the other sex's thought processes (b/c horny) and claim its all solely motivated by self-empowerment.
Is that really hypocritical though? Suppose evolution makes it enjoyable to dress in a way that's sexy to men. Why can't women now take that system of enjoyment nature has given them, and use it to intentionally get enjoyment for themselves with attracting men becoming a side effect? It seems kinda similar to evolution making us like certain flavours to help us get the right range of nutrients. Modern foodies taking that capacity for enjoyment given to us by evolution, and employing it for their own non-survival ends. At least in theory, the original evolutionary cause of the impulse can be acknowledged, but then co-opted.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Gonna disagree, why wouldn't evolution just make it feel good to be attractive, without providing us with its chain of reasoning?
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
"The way I dress/makeup is solely to feel good about myself! That it happens to 90% coincide with what makes men lust after me is completely irrelevant, its not about men's desires!" is the purest cope imaginable.
I don't think it has to be cope. Evolution isn't transparent to us: it is totally plausible that women naturally want to look good without actually 'feeling' the evolutionary reason why it benefits their genes to do so.
It does work but I think to do proper proofreading on an important document, you're going to need to supervise it, feed it your house style etc, and then check all its suggestions, or have someone competent who understands the subject matter do the same. Then you'll probably need to feed all the changes manually into InDesign (an LLM might be integrated into Adobe suite to be fair, I haven't used it lately).
By the time you've done that, maybe you'll have saved some time but I don't see it as that big a deal.
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