This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Are Republicans shamelessly sexually-humiliating their opponents enough to win this election?
I’ve long held the belief that the opposite of slut-shaming is incel-shaming. A woman's reputation is damaged if she sleeps around, but a man's reputation is damaged if he is deemed a weird incel who can’t get laid. Recently, the Democrats launched a “weird incel" attacking strategy against JD Vance. Tim Walz alluded to a fabricated story about JD Vance fucking a couch in his first speech as VP. This is wholly fabricated: the origin is a twitter user who made up a paragraph from Vance's book, something easily checked. But the meme was astroturfed regardless, and Walz shamelessly referenced it in his first speech. Last night, 5 of the top 10 default posts on Reddit’s /r/All were references to Waltz’s remark.
The strategy is in line with the Democrat push to label Trump “weird”. But it actually seems to cross a line. It is bullying in an especially purified form. It’s the sort of thing you would hear in a middle school, where a bully ostracizes a student by making up a story wholecloth and having his friends repeat it. The bully knows the accusation is false, but the point is to say it confidently and shamelessly where others can hear it and join the ostracizion to protect their reputation. There’s talk about Trump being a “bully”, but nothing he has said has come close to the shameless slander against Vance. Calling Hillary “crooked” is par for the course of political messaging and doesn’t actually impact her reputation. Making fun of McCain for being captured as a PoW also doesn’t really affect McCain’s reputation, and if anything harms Trump’s. Trump usually exaggerates something true, but the attack against Vance is wholly false in origin.
I checked in on the incels over at 4chan to see what were saying about this. And I actually found an insightful analysis:
It can also be noted that the attack against Vance has an element of sexual harassment. What would our “cultural elites” (D) say if Republicans went all-in on a story about Kamala Harris violating the intern’s Oval Office laundry machine? Or that she used a priceless piece of White House memorabilia as a dildo without cleaning it off after? This would just be shameless sexual harassment, right? But so is the official DNC strategy against Vance. It’s harassment for the purpose of humiliating someone sexually to change voter perception via shame response.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few days. The short answer is, no, Republicans are not shamelessly sexually humiliating their opponents enough to win the election. The long answer is, it’s not enough simply to sexually humiliate one’s opponents, one must imply that one’s opponents have something to gain from giving up or switching sides. The subtext of the “these guys are just weird” campaign is that if you young man simply stop trying to police women’s sexual behavior, you too can get laid. Consider the following:
“Since #TamponTim is trending I'll point out that in high school, any boy who casually was like "Oh you got ur period? I stashed a pad from the bathroom in my backpack in case one of my friends needed it" -- that boy would be king stud. That boy would be drowning in prom invites.”
This woman is a “gender and society” columnist at the Washington Post. The message is clear; submit to power [ours] and you will get pussy. What is the Republican message to young women? Become based or you will grow into a childless cat lady? That could work, but it is inherently a multi-step argument. Frankly, conservative media just isn’t good enough to get across a message that complex.
Kind of off-topic, but what the hell is that columnist smoking!? No, a boy who goes "don't worry, I have pads just in case my friends need one" would not be drowning in prom invites. He would be relentlessly mocked and ostracized for that behavior. The only scenario in which it would perhaps go the boy's way is if he was hot, in which case he doesn't need to do that to attract girls anyway. Just an absolutely bizarre take that makes me wonder what the heck the writer is even thinking.
Women mostly have no clue what sexually interests them and don't have the language to describe it other than vibes ("I just didn't feel a spark, you know?") and so you should assume that any time they give romantic advice to men they're just saying something they'd find useful or pro-social without being able to consider whether that's something that would really interest them in a man. I'm rarely one to make sweeping generalizations about the dating world, but even women I really like and respect for their thoughtfulness and honesty in other areas of their life seem totally incapable of describing their real romantic interests. It's the closest thing to a universal I've found.
I've searched for it dozens of times, including opening up old laptops and pouring over their browser histories, but I can't find it.
"It" was a blog that a FtM (that's chick-to-dude) transitioner was keeping about their ... transition. It was well written, deeply personal, and absolutely without trans ideology talking points or vibes. It was a wonderful example of an honest seeming person without any sort of ideology-induced hangups. It was incredibly and (unfortunately) uniquely informative.
The author shares one story about either beginning or hitting a major increase in the hormone replacement process. He's excited that he's going to start feeling testosterone-y like all other dudes. The week this starts, he's driving to work in traffic and someone cuts him off. He reports that, all of a sudden, he has a full blown panic attack and has to pull over to try to calm down. Perhaps the hormone replacement process has a high variance early period? Maybe he jacked up the dosage? Hmm, concerning.
I should note here that the author writes about going to a trans support group in his city. They help each other with the process as the different members are at different stages.
The author relates how he shares this panic attack incident to his group. There's an odd silence and some chuckling from some of the FtM's further along. People share knowing looks. Finally, one of them pipes up and says, "Dude .... you got "guy angry" for the first time." In a wonderful moment of self-awareness, the author writes about how he (when he was a she) never came close to appreciating what true male rage felt like. Even when "she" was 10/10 steamin' mad for some reason, it never came close to .... How a dude feels in Tuesday morning traffic when some asshole cuts him off.
I hope this jogs the memory of someone else who can point to that blog. There was a lot of good knowledge in there.
Anyway - I apply a similar view on male versus female sexual drive. It's definitely a difference in kind. It's been highlighted hundreds of times that men watch porn and women read trashy novels that end up at a sexual encounter but with a lot of very cringey situational foreplay. The male fantasy is the act itself, the female fantasy is the journey to the act. It is, however, also a difference in degree. I believe women when they say they get "super duper horny." I believe that, in their own framework of horny intensity judgement, they are at 10/10 Would Fck Again. But how does this compare to a male arousal rubric? I submit that female "10/10 Would Fck Again" is near equivalent to "Popped a bone watching that new Shakira music video on mute while at the airport bar." I'm having a little bit of fun here, so please don't try to nuke me on the rough comparison.
None of this should be taken as a judgement in validity, value, or worthiness of either male/female anger/arousal. Any moron who tells a woman, "oh, you're just girl angry, it's not that big of a deal" deserves whatever kitchen implement is launched at his head. And any idiot who tells his date, "No, but, like, I really want to fuck" deserves his future session of sullen, very alone rage masturbation.
The anger story brought to mind a conversation I had with my partner.
Like apparently all women nowadays, my girlfriend is fascinated by true crime. She studied biochemistry and works in a lab, so she's especially interested in the forensic side of criminal investigation, particularly genetic genaeology which has certain similarities to the genetics work she does. I'm always hearing about the new cases Othram solved that week. Her parents think she should go into forensic science and they're dead right.
I've actually come to enjoy watching true crime documentaries with her, though I prefer ones that focus on the process of investigation (mystery plots are the most universally popular type of story).
But I have to confess I find them hard to watch sometimes. Not because I find the crimes too gruesome, but because inevitably hearing about the depravity and cruelty of some of the most evil criminals -- brutal rapists, killers of elderly people, child murderers, torturers, serial killers -- fills me with intense and uncontrollable rage and a desire to get medieval on some asses.
I wonder sometimes if the reason women are so interested in true crime, and men aren't as much, isn't something to do with women, but something to do with men. Perhaps for one segment of men, true crime is simply too real, too close to their own lives of organized crime or petty violence, to be an enjoyable escape. And then, for another group -- and I include myself in this one -- it is so morally outrageous to consider the gravity of the kind of lurid crimes that get discussed in the true crime community that they're filled not with curiosity but with rage. Women get to see crime as something foreign, not something they'd ever get involved in, and perhaps are spared the sort of great vengeance and furious anger that characterizes the male response to horrific acts. Perhaps this also goes to explain the gender difference in support for the death penalty.
It happened that we finished watching one of these documentaries, and I found it particularly enraging (a man abducted a woman at gunpoint and forced her to pretend to enjoy being raped by him on camera) and we were discussing the particulars of the case and how the police investigated the abduction. I mentioned that one of the big differences between feminists and conservatives on the issue of rape doesn't concern whether it's wrong or not (they both condemn it) but what society should do about it. Feminists are often focused on the needs of the victim -- believe all women, we need more social support, we need to reduce stigma, we need police to be more receptive to rape victims -- while conservatives who comment on the issue of rape often discuss it in terms of what needs to be done to punish the perpetrators: death penalty for forcible rape, longer prison sentences, harsher punishments.
And we realized at that moment why there was such a big disagreement between men and women about criminal justice. Women are concerned about victims, men about perpetrators. It's not that men lack compassion for victims of horrific crimes or that women lack a desire for penal justice, but rather that the emotional reactions of men and women and their subsequent actions reflect different priorities. And both, you might note, reflect the traditional social roles of men and women: men protecting the tribe from physical violence, women ensuring that all members of the tribe have their needs met.
Adding your thoughts about male anger into the mix offers a compelling explanation of how that process works, and perhaps why men experience such a strong emotional desire to exact punishment that women often don't seem to understand.
Great post. A few underformed thoughts;
I think there's a direct line of similarity between your Victim/Perpetrator dichotomy and the oft lampooned "Men want to offer solutions to your problems / women just want to be heard and listened too about their problems."
I don't know if your Self-Awarewolf second paragraph was intentional. You recognize that your disgust with the brutality of some of these crimes triggers in you a desire to ... commit brutal crimes. The feeling isn't wrong. I'd say most emotionally healthy men who read about Dahmer, Bundy etc. probably have some similar thoughts. It's just an interesting pot-calling-the-kettle-black-while-looking-in-the-mirror situation.
I think there's also a difference in intuitive understanding of subjects here. Women emote so heavily with the True Crime victims because women intuitively understand sexualization. Most women can tell very specific stories about hitting puberty and then starting to get leering stares, "friendly" attention from male strangers etc. On the other hand, I believe men have an intuition in understanding physical violence. Let me reiterate I said understanding not desire for. A common ritual for adolescent boys is their first fight. From 16-24, a lot of a guy's free time is taken up with physical violence related subjects - being on a sports team, going to the gym, perhaps joining the military etc.
It would make sense, then, that the respective sexes 'default' to their intuition when faced with True Crime like scenarios. Women relate and emote to the other woman in the story and their sexualized victimization. Men tap into their male rage and physical violence reserves in a (vain) effort to go out and do something about it.
A lot of women’s interest in True Crime is just good old fashioned female hybristophilia.
Reading or watching a show about men killing people is titillating for women like watching the aforementioned Shakira thot around in a music video is titillating for men. See, for example, women finding themselves attracted to Bill Hader after watching his eponymous character killing people in Barry, when they weren’t before.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link