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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   36644 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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It seems that the vibe has definitely shifted in politics and general social spaces, as many folks last week commented on here. People are more open to using language that used to be termed offensive, right-wing political statements are more in vogue, etc.

I'm curious specifically what all of this means for feminism, and the gender war subset of the larger Culture War. I saw an interesting piece which blew up on X lately, that, in discussing the Neil Gaiman situation, argues:

Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich's behavior (including the "it was wonderful" text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that's just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I'm more interested in what happens to women when they're cast in this role of society's unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world's adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can't have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn't mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

Now many linkers and commentators on X are basically arguing - why yes, women don't have agency, and that's why most cultures have reflected that in law and social practice. I think this sort of smugly satisfied mocking of women is in quite poor taste, and not likely to be productive, but there is a deeper point in there. Unfortunately it seems that, even after decades of propaganda, rewriting of tons of laws, giving women voting power, dismantling "oppressive" cultural structures like religion, etc. etc., we still as a society are not able to treat women as adults with agency, and consequences for their actions.

Now a progressive might come in and say - ok, fine we do still struggle with this issue, but hey, it's because of bad social programming! Just give us another 100 years and we will totally hold women responsible just like men, we promise!

That has basically been the progressive line to justify going further and further to the left with social and legal programs. Problem for them is, with the vibe shift I mentioned earlier, I think that argument is running out of steam. The average person no longer seems to be convinced that this is just a cultural problem which will go away.

So, where do we go from here? Do you think feminism will actually be rolled back in a meaningful way? I'm skeptical myself, but I'm also skeptical we will magically start holding women accountable. Not sure what happens next...

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements.

The one obvious and crucial difference is that all those examples are forms of written, signed agreements with detailed rights and responsibilities of the signing parties, effecting penalties in case of breach of contract etc. In the current year, trying to regulate human mating would be seen as an enormously icky idea and would never fly.

See, as someone who is actually quite fond of women- but not delusional- this is quite sad. Getting taken advantage of happens whenever women aren’t protected, either because no one cares or because of recognizing their ‘autonomy’ or whatever.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the greatest opponents of any potential measure to introduce contractual agreements in the realm of heterosexual mating would be women.

There is a figure you sometimes see, the ‘abortion bro’. He is strongly pro-choice because, although he doesn’t care overmuch about women’s freedom or health, he definitely does not want to wind up a dad by accident. He’ll make arguments along the lines of ‘what if your girlfriend got pregnant- see that’s why it’s important to protect women’s reproductive rights’. Some of them will talk about the need to firmly tell partners interested in keeping the baby that paying for an abortion will be the last help they ever get, and they’re going no contact afterwards regardless of her decision.

For obvious reasons, this figure is not allowed to headline pro-choice rallies. But you find them on Reddit, sometimes IRL, and occasionally in op-Ed’s in lowbrow newspapers. But they definitely exist. I suspect they’re much more common than women who actually want low commitment relationships.

Men have identical happiness whether married or cohabiting- women are far happier married. Women are nearly four times as likely to say they want to save sex for marriage as men are- and by relationship progression, men get their way. The median woman has socially-conservative-in-practice preferences for relationships and sex; in fact feminists generally do too. They’re just unable to advocate for themselves effectively in the face of men’s preferences. And that is the reason for patriarchy. We don’t tell children to stick up for themselves against adults and expect them to do it, at least not well. There are frameworks for dealing with relationships between adults and children- teachers have extensive rules governing how they relate to students, for example. Likewise you can’t reasonably expect an unprotected woman to not be at the mercy of whatever man is around.

Yes, the people most offended by this are women. I have no doubt that the feminist will answer with ‘that’s NOT true’ or some variant thereof and the abortion bro will answer with ‘not my problem they’re like that’. But a typical woman flourishes better with couverture than as femme sole.

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