gemmaem
1yr ago
Well, since you can't even explain what power it is that women have that you're complaining about, I suppose there is no substance here for me to argue with. You've made one vague gesture towards @2rafa's list of admirably gender-neutral constraints while simultaneously declaring it, understandably, "too hardcore."
You can't even really articulate the premise on which your misogyny rests, let alone substantiate it.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Power of women specifically is the power to tank any political project they don't like (say, one increasing men's rights) and shut down a discussion they don't favor (say, one casting women in unflattering light) with a gratuitous refusal to compromise or engage in good faith;
Still a bit light on the details. Are you too afraid of my mean-girl power to explain which men's rights women are taking away, or would you be willing to elaborate?
As for "casting women in an unflattering light," well, your premise that women are too mean and irrational to be allowed to participate in politics certainly does that! And I suppose you will claim that any counterargument that I make is merely an appeal to "women are wonderful." But I think my conduct speaks for itself, to any reasonable observer. Your accusation of habitual bad-faith argumentation on my part is unfounded.
gemmaem
1yr ago
As I understand it, the claim is that women are so powerful that they have turned into little dictators who go around making unreasonable demands. This requires substantiation. What kind of unreasonable demands? So far I've been given "shut down any political project they don't like." That's a strong claim. There are, in fact, many existing political projects that women are more against than in favour of that have not been shut down.
You've given me a second claim, that "criticizing women as a group is so verboten that any and all of it is taken with utmost offense." It is true that claims about women are policed more strongly than claims about men. However, women are not unique in this regard. Claims about black people are policed more strongly than claims about white people, for example. So it does not make sense to attribute this to women's overwhelming manipulative dictatorial power. It has more to do with the fact that there is a historical pattern of unfair mischaracterisation of women that was bad enough that it gave rise to a movement dedicated to correcting it.
None of what I have been given substantiates the claim that I was initially criticizing -- namely, that women are "queens by political fiat" in any real sense of social or political power. We are not. It is obvious that we are not.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I do, in fact, generally respect exhaustion in my argumentative partners, you're not wrong about that. Unfortunately, in this case, you've made any number of statements that require answers. You accuse me of sneering, but you've been sneering at me this whole time, and suggesting taking away rights far more fundamental than a right to single-sex spaces. As for catty sniping, you're full of catty sniping! "I love the indignation here," you write. "And thanks for another illustration," you continue. It's true that I'm not spelling out my own object level ideas; I'm asking you to spell yours out because you keep leveling accusations at women that honestly seem far more true of you. Perhaps if you were better at engaging with women in good faith, you'd get more good faith in return.
gemmaem
8mo ago
But his posts and blog comments very much did encourage racism. This is not a close call, whether Hanania says it himself or not.
gemmaem
11mo ago
I see that Team "My outgroup is cartoonishly stupid/evil and has no useful motivations or genuine concerns that I might need to take into account" continues to be very popular around here.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I have, indeed, been strictly informed that it is not that women ought to be stripped of the right to vote but that it should not have been given to them in the first place in the way that it was. Reluctant pragmatic acceptance of my rights is obviously not as reassuring as actual support for them would be, but that is where that conversation stands.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Gosh, people are writing pop songs that are power fantasies! Sometimes they even write them about women. What is the world coming to?
Come on, there's no substance here.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Thanks to @gattsuru for important context. Given that I've made such a fuss about defining what was actually said, I should probably also give a response on the subject! Apologies if it's not quite what you were looking for, however.
I don't personally like this, as a general definition of transphobia. One response I've seen to the complaint that we're "not allowed to distinguish between trans women and other women" is that of course you can make that distinction. There's even an adjective for it: trans women. This is ... fair, but in my view it entails certain things. One of these is that people should be allowed to decide that they are not romantically or sexually attracted to trans women as a class, if that's really how they feel. This is a really personal topic, and asking people to rearrange their innermost feelings is a much stronger request than just asking them to rearrange their language and/or manners. Give people some space, and if they're not going out of their way to be hurtful to you, then don't threaten them on a subject that's as personal as this.
With that said, I don't think your particular complaint has much weight, here. If "there are in fact zero transwomen who are indistinguishable from women with a womb," then a person could simply respond that, well, feminine phenotypes are really important to me, and if I meet a trans woman who reaches my standards on that point, then, sure, I might be open to dating her if other aspects were in alignment, hooray, congratulations to me on my non-transphobia, problem solved.
I will also say that, on a subreddit, it's highly likely that the subject of "Would you date a trans woman?" doesn't come up in the practical sense. People aren't actually meeting partners there. Instead, the subject is much more likely to only be mentioned in conjunction with statements that are transphobic like "trans women are ugly" or "trans women are likely to be predatory." I can see this being a useful place to draw the line, for discussion purposes. I still don't think it's a good rule, because it will bleed out into situations that do involve actual dating, and that's not good for respecting people's preferences. But I can understand why, on a subreddit, the immediate concerns of the community might lead people to draw lines that are optimized for the specific online context.
gemmaem
1yr ago
If there are existing rules posts by subreddit mods that say this, then OP should have posted one of them! Then calling it a post "explaining the rules of the subreddit" would not have been a lie, and we could have had this conversation on a sound, truthful basis.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Thank you so much!
This makes me pretty unimpressed with OP. For one thing, this isn't a post "explaining the rules of the subreddit," as OP claims. It's an opinion from an ordinary user. It's also preceded by several important caveats that make it less inflammatory than if it had started from the place where OP begins their quote. Also, it's from nine years ago -- how far did they have to dig in order to find something they could quote out of context in order to make it sound suitably threatening?
@KingKong, I don't think you posted this in good faith. You omitted important context. You didn't provide a link so people could check. And you lied about what the post actually was.
You should be ashamed. The culture war is hot enough without misrepresenting things deliberately in order to cause drama.
gemmaem
1yr ago
To respond to your edits (which I think you ought to have marked as such, out of courtesy, given that I had already replied):
Does "unfortunately it's illegal because teachers and kids sharing porn would be a Powerful tool for social justice" count? Or "porn is good for kids, but only if it's Queer and Addresses Gender Inequities"?
Like, I just want you to acknowledge here that these "social justice in porn studies" academics only have a problem with kids being given porn if they think it's the wrong kind of cisnormative porn.
First of all, I would appreciate knowing what this quote is from. You've said nothing about where you found it, or who said it.
Second of all, it is still not clear to me that it is saying what you say it is saying. "Porn can be helpful in these ways and harmful in these other ways" is very far from an unqualified endorsement. The fact that the person who wrote this (whoever they are) reaches first for a social justice critique of porn is not actually evidence that they think porn is always good for children when it doesn't have those issues, or that children should be given it when they are not choosing to access it on their own.
In particular, I think there may be something important being said here:
This interrogation would not rule out explicit critiques of misogynistic, homophobic or racist tropes within pornography, but might also offer the capacity to open up critically productive conversations about the boundaries between adult sexual knowledge and young people’s sexual learning; and the ways popular and institutional discourses define particular forms of sexuality, sexual identity, and sex/gender expression as ‘legitimate’ (or ‘illegitimate’) know-ledge for young people.
It's not clear from your quote what "productive conversations" would consist of, but I can see two potentially sympathetic things being alluded to here. One of these -- from my second bolded section -- is the lack of access children might have to non-pornographic information about LGBTQ topics. Children sometimes turn to porn because they don't have alternate sources of information, and this can be particularly true when topics like homosexuality and trans identities are deemed off limits for them. Rather than castigating them for turning to porn for information in that situation, it might indeed be helpful to leave room for a productive conversation about what information they are looking for.
The second sympathetic thing that I might be detecting here -- although I would need more context to be sure -- is this reference to "the boundaries between adult sexual knowledge and young people’s sexual learning." I do wonder if this is trying to say that adult pornographic content is not necessarily a good source of sexual learning, and that it's useful to have a boundary here.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Citation needed. The usual requirement for child diagnosis of gender dysphoria is that the claim to be the other gender is "insistent, consistent and persistent." Your claim that merely saying the words "I am a girl" is taken to imply a stable and permanent identity is contrary to the facts. You are straw-manning your outgroup here.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Well, I would certainly be in favour of also having homeless programs that target men. I agree that there is a fair bit of momentum behind addressing inequities faced by women, and less momentum behind addressing inequities faced by men, and I am definitely open to arguments about which such inequities are particularly important (successful suicide attempts would be another obvious urgent one).
So I agree that there are issues that need addressing, here, but I don't think denying women the vote is likely to be an important step towards that. And although some feminists are threatened by the notion that men might also face inequities, I think the broader public, including women, is generally not inclined to view such things with outrage or bad faith argumentation, so much as an unwarranted level of neglect which we can work to overcome.
gemmaem
1yr ago
she explicitly criticizes dissuading kids from looking at porn in favor of teachers guiding them towards porn that advocates queer bloodplay and Progressive values
A CTRL-F for "blood" in that article you linked leads me to one instance, in a section whose heading is "Pornography as (adult) sex education." As in, for adults. So your summary is definitely inaccurate. I reiterate that this does not appear to be an example of someone advocating that we should show kids porn.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Most of those stories are by adults and for adults. Tumblr's app is rated 17+. AO3 has a box to tick on explicit fanfiction that asks you to confirm that you are over 18. This doesn't prevent younger people from ticking the box, of course, but this is still not the same as deliberately showing porn to kids. Your argument amounts to saying that kids can access porn on the internet, therefore anyone who puts porn on the internet is "showing kids porn." That's a deeply specious mischaracterisation of what is actually going on.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Then by all means make a comparison with something that actually does meet the legal standard for defamation!
gemmaem
8mo ago
It's always worth being accurate about the problem. "Person calls for genocide, and when questioned about it says 'yes, we really mean genocide' and the NYT defends them" is different to "People sing a song about killing another race of people, and when questioned say they are remembering the bad old days of their oppression and do not mean it literally, and the NYT frames the story in a way that deflects condemnation."
When discussing racism on this forum, I always have to be precise about exactly what happened and what did not. Sometimes this is bullshit (e.g. these quibbles about the exact definition of "ethnic cleansing.") However, the general principle of precision over outrage is a good one, and I am certainly not going to lower my standards just because white people are the target in this instance.
as long as stuff like this can be published in broad daylight, I see no reason why what he posted should result in any consequences.
Would this still be true, for you, if he didn't even disavow it? Would you use statements with overtly denied meanings or non-explicit rhetoric with uncertain but potentially disturbing implications as an excuse for allowing overtly harmful explicit policy proposals?
gemmaem
9mo ago
Probably! I still appreciated the question, though. Even with religion, sometimes you can have an interesting conversation with someone who is willing to take these questions seriously.
gemmaem
9mo ago
Many Christians, including some of the more conservative ones, do not believe that every single word of the Bible is the literal word of God. On the contrary, the letters of Paul (for example) are the word of Paul — some of which Paul himself believes to have come from God, and some of which is explicitly given as “I didn’t get this from God but it seems like common sense.”
gemmaem
9mo ago
My usual phrasing is ‘I am preferentially (as opposed to apathetically) cisgender.’ Which means, yeah, I’m cisgender and happy about it. Happy to say so anytime :)
gemmaem
1yr ago
Well, I certainly support sympathy for men and policy measures designed to help men in areas where they are disproportionately struggling, and I am open to the idea of trimming back the power of the state over some facets of our lives. So although I don't believe we actually live in a "gynocentric society," we might well be able to come to an agreement on some individual changes!
Queens of what? Ourselves? The question of whether we are going to gestate an entire baby with all the physical and mental changes that implies?
Well, if you think that you should have control over that, then I think it's pretty clear which of us is the one with unreasonable dictatorial aspirations.
More options
Context Copy link