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The rules are ambiguous as to which thread should be used for culture war related/adjacent small questions, but I'll take a guess that the mods would prefer questioners err on the side of the culture war roundup, so I'll ask this here:
How much of the "Michelle Obama is transgender" conspiracy theory is genuine vs trolling? And, among those who genuinely believe it, what are the proposed explanations/is there a consensus for the Obama daughters' parentage? Adoption would be too difficult to cover up, but so would Michelle being transgender, to begin with, so I suppose that's not a great threat to the theory. If the full amendment history of the relevant section of Illinois legal code is available online, finding it would require more effort than I care to make, but "the exception that implies the rule" indicates that it was the Illinois Gestational Surrogacy Act enacted in 2005 that allowed pre-birth orders for putting intended mothers on Illinois birth certificates:
"Birthers" didn't hesitate to demand the release of Barrack Obama's own birth certificate - what about his daughters' birth certificates? (Or is the conspiracy theory all trolling or are those who genuinely believe it the kinds of people who wouldn't consider even its immediate implications or ...?)
I’ve found that people who believe this usually change their mind when it’s pointed out that she had political connections and Barack needed them, plus she was ugly enough to do whatever he wanted.
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The Michelle Obama trans thing is a good example of the trade-offs that social liberalisation impose.
Like, back in the late 2000s, when Michelle Obama was not any more popular on the American right than today, I don't recall anyone proposing that she was trans, simply because "trans" was not on most people's radar.
Michelle Obama, and millions of other mannish-looking women, have been negatively impacted by trans liberation. Trans liberation has brought it into the realm of the thinkable, the reasonable, that any given mannish woman or petite man could in fact be biologically not their presenting gender. What previously would have been only a cruel, childish insinuation now has to be... seriously considered?
30 years ago, in a workplace, if someone had suggested that Sandra with the square shoulders, or Sarah with the sharp brow, was in fact a transsexual - this would just straightforwardly be a (fireable) insult. Now though, the same woman can be concern-trolled and made insecure by ostensible tolerance.
It's as though, in a future which continues leftward socially, we were to see emancipation of incest and "motherfucker?" become a polite and reasonable query.
I really feel for these mannish girls. When I was a teenager, I went out with a beautiful girl who nonetheless had kind of a square jaw - more square than mine anyway. She was terribly insecure generally (like most teenaged girls?) and I happened across an old photo of the pair of us in my parents' house yesterday and thought, damn, the way the shadow falls on our faces there - a 2020s teen might well read this pretty 2000s girl as actually trans
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
But actually there clearly is, or at least, it's reasonable that even an otherwise orthodoxly liberal young woman might not want to be read by strangers (potential romantic partners particularly) as MtF. There is a certain harm imposed by this.
The general public is no good at Bayes - there are quite a lot more mannish-looking women around than there are genuine MtFs. Yet now young people, even when looking at old photos from the twentieth century, are apparently having their trans-radars ping on like pictures of dowdy kitchen maids and 1940s housewives
An interesting point to consider in the utilitarian calculus of trans liberation
The concern over mannish girls being concern trolled en masse with no recourse looks like concern trolling to me. If the Obama transpiracy is anything to go by, cruel childish insinuation is quite bad at masking itself.
From what I see, young men that look a bit gay have not been smothered by concern trolls who insinuate they're actually gay and do it so cleverly that they can't be rebuked. Those are the benefits of a culture that promotes accepting people as who they say they are.
This is generally how ex-women are created (tomboy erasure). Some ex-men are created this way as well (there's a reason guys with long hair tend to be either effeminate or real tough with little in between)- the symptoms can take a while to show up, but they eventually do.
What do you think this is, the '70s? And that was only because the culture had no choice.
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I'd say the main trade-off to our contemporary Western settlement on The Gay Question is that it has cast in suspicion huge swathes of male friendship, more than it has caused effete men to have a particularly harder time than they would have otherwise
It's a commonplace observation that male friendship outside the West can look pretty gay to modern Western eyes. Men holding hands, openly prioritising male relationships ahead of their romantic one with a woman, openly declaring love for one another, a warmth and intimacy that seems gay as hell to me, frankly, as a typical Western man.
It's also a commonplace observation that there's a crisis of loneliness in the West, more acutely among men, and downstream increases in depression, misery, suicidality and addiction and all the rest.
I don't think these two facts are unrelated, and I think that's quite a heavy burden that all Western men, and the women that like them, have borne for the ostensible liberation of our irrepressibly-gay brothers
To add to this in a different direction, there's the issue of malicious ambiguity and suggestion.
I was once at a viewing of Y Tu Mama Tabien at a campus "art house" while in college. I was there because the girl I was trying to sleep with was there and I was more than willing to sit through that mindless nonsense if it meant appearing "deep" and "thoughtful" to her.
As I remember it, during the movie's climax, the female lead has sex with both of the male leads (consecutively, not concurrently) and then, for some reason, the two male leads have a homosexual encounter. The two male leads, up until this point, are pretty typical - albeit Mexican - BroDudes. So, it's kind of an abrupt and hamfisted tranisition. I think it's supposed to be a message about the "blurry lines" between male bonding and homosexual acts? I don't know. There was a similar vibe around the whole Brokeback Mountain thing (which, funnily enough, was completely and obviously rehashed by The Power of the Dog - which one a bunch of awards).
In the "discussion" that followed the viewing of the movie, some freshman of ambiguous gender and obvious lack of ability related an emotional and oh so brave personal anecdote about "experimenting" with his childhood best friend before matriculating to college. He told us, the captivated audience, that although he is definitely straight, it was still an amazing and tender experience.
I thought the speaker was probably gay as hell - Not That There's Anything Wrong With That (TM).
Looking back on these various movies and the "discussion" that followed Y Tu Mama Tambien in particular, I think there's some level of subtle support for homosexual activity among straight men that can accompany otherwise anodyne discussions about gay people / culture etc. I can't put my finger on the reason for this. I think it's far short of hardcore grooming (as it mostly occurs in adult groups, for one). Perhaps it's just a "personal expression" thread pulled too far. Maybe light-grade fetishism? Sexualize virtue signaling on the part of practitioners? Again, I'm not certain about the why but I am closer to certain that it does happen.
Reasonable people can assert, "Suggestion isn't coercion. It's not like these people are forcing you to commit sexual acts of any orientation!" Which is true. But consider the social repercussions your average DudeBro might face if he were to go around casually chortling, "I dunno, Stacy, maybe you should go get naked with Brenda and just kinda see what happens. Could be pretty fun!" Or, as another comparison, change the independent variable from sexual orientation to race - "Yooooo! You gotta go try asian P*ssy!" or "Jewish guys always lay pipe well" -- all received outrage would be more than expected.
Yet, as that clip from Atlanta points out, the de-facto response from The Party of Science (TM) is "sexuality is a spectrum you can really do whatever you want." It's not coercion, it's support so subtle that it's eternally deniable, but there is a there there.
I believe the Roman word for this behavior was 'insidias'. Female-type anti-social behavior is generally difficult to punish on an individual level; that's why the average human society seeks to punish it pre-emptively.
Yeah, that's what the priests, teachers, and scoutmasters of years gone by said too, arguably even accurately. How'd that work out for them?
It's all over the schools. The "conservatives" have the right of it- it is a destructive thing- they just don't have the tools to describe it properly (which is why the tendency of its proponents to intentionally play stupid evolved in the first place).
It's just the distaff counterpart to that ass-slapping and casual harassment the '70s (and before) were famous for [which is what your counterexamples pattern match to]. Either both of them are OK, or neither are.
Thanks! This actually aided my understanding.
Would it be your opinion, then, that the hard-to-define behavior patterns I described, and you expanded, actually do fall on a contiuum that includes outright grooming? That is, they are different in magnitude, but not in kind.
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I recently rewatched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was reminded of how much people were claiming that Samwise was obviously in love with Frodo, rather than that they had a fraternal love for each other as friends, which I saw a bunch in the 2010s. Watching it again now, I can kinda see it that way if I squint, but it definitely strikes me as the modern audience projecting something onto what was likely something inspired by the type of brotherhood that someone like Tolkien probably experienced among men in the early 20th century.
Of course, to a lot of the types of people who see homosexuality in Lord of the Rings, that's just proof that a huge proportion of the men back then were actually in-the-closet homosexuals who just couldn't express their inner innate homosexuality due to the repressive society in which they resided.
That's actually a really great example of what I meant yeah
Of course, the motivation for a lot of retro-homo-spotters is more often a fervent desire to see boys kiss than homophobic revulsion at same
These are generally all women. Men are attractive to the average woman, so 2 of them kissing is even more attractive.
These are generally all men. Men are not attractive to the average man, so 2 of them kissing is even less attractive.
Compare/contrast the generally-positive male reaction to lesbianism, though it's overall tilted a bit towards positive on lesbianism and negative on gayness because women are (correctly) perceived by both genders to be, on average, more aesthetically pleasing than men.
This is, I believe, a part of why races of people that are less sexually dimorphic than the average have a better cultural relationship with gayness.
Women love to claim this because reasons, but we know from the pornography available and popular at that time that this is... uh, not exactly true.
Woman here. I find nothing arousing about men kissing. Women who are into gay anime do exist but this is far from universal.
I find myself in the weird position of introducing Yaoi to the Motte. Or, not actually introducing, because a lot of Mottizens are far more acquainted with Japanese pop culture than I.
Yaoi, for those who do not want to click:
I have known some (Japanese) girls in the past who were into this genre. They were without exception very feminine in appearance, often wearing frilly dresses, a good deal of makeup, etc. The one girl I asked about this type manga explained that the love expressed was "pure," whatever that means. I have no further insight.
Edit: I disagree with the Wikipedia pronunciation of this term, as Japanese has no stress on syllables, so it should be something more like YAH OH EE. But then I could be wrong because I don't know if I've ever heard it pronounced.
Edit 2: See also Shojou manga
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Oh boy, ‘faggy’ or ‘gay-looking’ men absolutely have it bad. It’s just 1) no one cares about the problems of low status men and 2) not in polite company.
They have solved this in Japan by creating musical dance groups and cultivating hundreds of thousands of screaming female fans.
Even ignoring cultural differences in what is considered 'faggy' or 'gay-looking', you are mostly talking about men who happen to otherwise be extremely conventionally attractive (including personality traits like confidence and gregariousness). I don't think that generalizes well to the larger group.
There is a certain fey demeanor in many of the young guys who join these bands, which one cannot directly relate to physical weakness--they go through extremely rigorous training or, in some cases, vetting because they've applied to an agency, to reach a level of dance skill that is deemed acceptable. I would, in most cases, disagree that many of these guys are what you are calling conventionally attractive (at least physically) unless you are including in that net the conventional attractiveness of the feminine.
I once grew my hair out long, because I was young and influenced by films at the time. My buddy used to look at me and say: "Never go to prison."
There's a prettyboy look to the boybands that is not masculine, and is decidedly, at least in my view, more feminine. And as I say, it's not just the make-up, it's their way of laughing (covering their mouths, a very female gesture in Japan), of moving as they walk with what is clearly an affected swagger that has more in common with actresses in Takarazuka who are pretending to be men than an actual man. There's a particular gesture of using one's hand to lightly brush away one's bangs or forelock from the eyes that I have noticed common in these guys, that is to me very marked as female (the guy gesture would be to run the hand through the hair straight back and clear the bangs, not wipe them with one hand very delicately, as if parting a bead curtain.)
As for gayness, there was a scandal a few years ago regarding one of the main companies that produces these bangs, alleging that the owner/mastermind--who had perhaps conveniently died four years earlier--had forced young boys into sexual acts with him. He obviously never faced any prison time or trial because he was dead, and to me at least this was less of a scandal than a revelation of an obvious process that had been covered up for years. The man who had arguably begun the boyband trend in Japan by manufacturing many such groups had been cultivating, if not the actual members of the groups (but maybe also those guys) but applicants, as his personal catamites.
To your point that these guys demonstrate gregariousness and confidence, I concede. At least in public or in publicized interviews they're pretty happy and, cough, gay. <-- Note that in this interview, with the group named "King & Prince" when there were several members (all but two have "retired") they are dressed in more traditionally masculine clothes than what you often see.
A final thought: Despite my distaste for these bands I've noticed almost all the guys have enviably really deep speaking voices.
What women find attractive in men /= what men think women find attractive in men.
To be sure. I'm simply expressing my own distaste, not projecting on women. Many times I've seen dudes way different than I am and suspected, "well he wouldn't be looking or acting like that if it weren't getting him laid somehow."
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I was really thinking about more gender neutral signifiers of conventional attractiveness--eg, facial symmetry, straight teeth, etc--than specifically masculine or feminine ones. For example, consider the three stereotypically "gay-looking" burglars from Survive Style 5+. I don't think it is very controversial to say that the pretty boys you linked are more conventionally attractive than Yoshiyuki's character, even when judging by masculine standards. As for feminine mannerisms, I think some kinds of performative femininity in men should be considered masculine because it is puffery that signals confidence and fitness rather than signaling weakness or true vulnerability.
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Apparently you are either blind or living in a very different bubble than me, as I see this quite a bit and know a number of men who definitely have felt smothered by such insinuations.
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There are those odd particular clips of Michelle. I think her masculinity, Joan Rivers' "timely" death, and the combination of categorical disbelief ("even faker and gayer . . . ") in the establishment and the easy dunk makes it work equally well for the genuine skeptic and the troll. But leave it to Steve Sailer of all people to make what I've found as the most interesting observation:
(The siblings.)
And worth including, though you can just see it in the link, is this thoughtful response:
Here I'd follow this up with "I still wouldn't put it past them," but that's epistemically always betting on black. Sailer's observation is useful, I cite it now in the two or three times I've seen this come up since.
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My guess is that some men get so used to the hyperfeminine women the media constantly throws at us that a normal looking older woman looks masculine to them. Kind of like thinking a woman must have a genetic deformity because her eyes are so much smaller than the eyes of anime girls.
Ehh... I would just say that some women have 'High T' masculine faces with strong/longer jawlines and non-neotenous features.
The PUA community back in the day (using its particular brand of phrenology) generally ascribed these women to having more dominant personalities, higher sex drive and a higher predisposition to infidelity.
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It's a funny theory, but I see memes where apparently every liberal politician's wife (except Hillary Clinton) is a tranny. Macron, Obama, Chuck Schumer (who's wife is very unfortunate looking), other random liberals I've never heard of. I even saw one random "uno reverse" meme trying to say Melania Trump was transgender.
Frankly the plurality of these memes kind of disproves all of them. One high profile liberal married to a transgender woman I could believe. Virtually all of them? Are there even that many middle aged transwomen that would have transitioned 20-30 years ago?
Holy Jesus, you weren't kidding.
This has been one of my top "obviously I know its conspiracy theory bullshit, but, hey, let's have fun" topics for years. The insane angular face, little media engagement beyond released statements. Trump's historical preference for 1980s style Big Buxom Blondes (BBBs).
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There are accounts (some notable Finnish ones here and here linking to a lot of foreign accounts of the like) that seemingly argue that basically every famous person, including historical ones, is transgender. (Including claiming that famous trans persons are double trans.) It could be a bit, but to me it smacks of actual crazy in a way that goes far beyond even a persistent bit.
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No, Macron's wife is a grooming pedo which managed to groom herself a president.
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That's because rumors about her being a lesbian have been around since the 90's
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I think this fits well into this thread.
Speaking as someone who frequently talks to multiple right wingers, I get the impression the "Big Mike" meme is actually serious. Every single one of them that mentioned it eagerly brings up new evidence in favor of the theory. It's one of the most annoying memes to me for this reason. Comes across as pointlessly cruel and also pointlessly racist, based on basically nothing. I would probably be similarly annoyed by the Obama birth certificate stuff if I was into politics as much back then.
I dont think that implies theyre serious about it. Or, maybe serious but not literal? Basically, if you need the big guns OP is bringing out, the point is made.
I think it's "I'm not serious but would like to be and use the guise of irony while fishing for the truth."
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I know at least one of them is serious about it because I explicitly asked. The others are generally even more right wing than her. I've had to self censor quite a bit lately.
(I dont mean to argue your experience in person, my experience with this argument was entirely schizo twitter) Wait, do people still talk about this, or has there been some "update" recently?
And, I didnt think of it originally, but you calling it racist is a great example of how it works rethorically. Most onlookers arent gonna know what you mean, it just looks like you call everything racist. And if you do go on to explain... this stereotype of black women being less feminine, I had not heard about before outside this very topic. The version about implictly biased western beauty standards is more common, but also gets into the "nutty demands" territory. Whichever way you roll it, you lose points with those not already in your camp, and it wasnt really necessary to bring it up, either - yet here we go.
It’s been spoken about again more because of popular conservative grifter Candace Owens’ video series alleging that Brigitte Macron is mtf.
this is one of those things that surely can't be true because it requires a vast conspiracy to suppress the truth
Notably, Brigitte macron would have had to disguise himself as a woman decades ago and also be a homosexual groomer. Even if trans, gay, predatory teacher(and even if you don’t think teenaged boys having sex with adults is inherently predatory- let’s face it, most people don’t- I think most people would agree that it is when that adult is his teacher) are overlapping groups, that’s still a series of coincidences. Candace Owens simply went off the tradcath deep end; I expect video series about how Antarctica is actually covered in forests, smoking is good for you, etc in the near term future.
Except, as you yourself have done a good job pointing out, it was the very, very, very online "tradcath" deep end.
I've listened to about half of the SSPX Crisis in the Church Podcast. These are IRL TradCaths who go off the deep end in relation to all sorts of actual theological, doctrinal, and ecclesiastical topics. But it doesn't make for good television. "The Vatican forced Archbishop Lefevbre's hand! He had to do the Econe consecrations!" is a snooze fest from the jump.
Online Tradcaths, being very online and aware of the mechanics of social media, thus decided to release the mixtape of; Flat Earth (Remix), All Them Hoes is Dudes, and (Living in a) Pedophiles Paradise.
I never followed much of Candance Owens' career. A limited background being my caveat, it appears to me she lost some esteem when she went out on her own and has dealt with that poorly.
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There was actually reason to believe that there was something iffy about Obama's birthplace, although at this point it's presumably well-buried enough that we'll never find out exactly what happened there. (Entirely likely that he really was born in Hawaii and the irregularities came from trying to cover up or distract from some other embarrassment.) Michelle being transgender, by contrast, is nonsense, but you're right that lots of schizos seem to be fixated on it; it's like an awful peek into the lumpenprole-right id.
What reason was there to believe that there was something iffy about Obama's birthplace? I don't know if it was public that his parents had a shotgun-courthouse wedding (and that, depending on whether Hawaiian law recognized Obama Sr's Kenyan marriage/claimed divorce, this marriage - and, consequently, Obama Jr - may not have been legitimate), but I don't see how covering that up would create "something iffy" about the record of his birthplace. Also, due to Obama also having jus sanguinis citizenship, him being foreign born wouldn't be disqualifying and there were actual life choices of his to hide, so there would be no point in him participating in a coverup.
There are a lot of things with potentially innocent explanations that are nonetheless in aggregate fishy but can't be investigated because of an early version of what we'd now recognize as the War On Misinformation. Several promotional bios for Obama prior to his presidential campaign state that he was born in Kenya, which was apparently a mistake but one of unclear origin (perhaps Obama or someone close to him was engaging in a foolhardy attempt to inflate his diversity status, a la Warren?). The idea was popular among his family and their community in Kenya, for local pride reasons, and they would claim to remember his birth there (possibly mistaking him for a relative). When Obama did eventually release his birth certificate, it was an easily-tampered-with copy (apparently this is a problem with copy machines in general?) and the bureaucrat who verified it died in a mysterious small plane crash shortly thereafter.
I completely agree that "was Barack Obama ineligible for the presidency" is a narrower target than "was Barack Obama born in Kenya", which is itself a narrower target than "was Barack Obama trying to hide something related to his birth".
Maybe they confused him with his father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr.?
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Oh, right - I'd forgotten about that. My guess is that it was a Hanlon's Razor thing: It was written by someone who should have read his book but hadn't and then quoted by others who also hadn't read his book.
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It's easy to forget that before the Trump fan/TDS dynamic, a prototype of the same was already being sketched in Obama followers vs. what should in hindsight be labelled ODS. In the same way in which Trump inspires his adherents but inspires revulsion and a resulting willingness to cling to any smear that makes this feeling of revulsion rationalisable and communicable in his opponents, everything about Obama also clearly elicited visceral disgust in his detractors, who were then just searching for a justification to allow them to continue modelling themselves as sensible people who believe things for good reasons. Why does this president elicit such antipathy in me? Ah, right. He is not who he claims he is, and can't even legally be the president. He is a foreign deep cover agent and secret lovechild of Malcolm X raised to be the perfect political cult leader. His wife is also a man. No wonder I disliked him so much. I always had a good intuition about people.
The Trump counterpart are stories like Russiagate and piss tapes. Both of these are much more compatible with the smart critic's self-perception than "I am disgusted by his outgroup mannerisms and the idea of being subordinate to someone like that makes my lizard brain convulse". From the outside, both seem like extremely flimsy rationalisations to reject an elected president - like, so what if he does not meet some technical condition? It's a democracy, and more than half of voters voted for him. Even if Obama is foreign-born or Trump has to go to jail or whatever, people hypothetically should have been able to get the same politics by voting for a stand-in who promises to exactly implement the original's policies but is not encumbered by the gotchas, in the style of Thailand politics.
Thats a reasonable idea, but I dont think they could have. Maybe they could now, but I doubt it still. Trump has viable successors, in many ways better then him, but theyre clearly not Trump.
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While Obama was likely a turning point in these dynamics, I think they clearly go back much further. The phrase "[President] Derangement Syndrome" was invented for Bush Derangement Syndrome in 2003, and at the time it was referencing dynamics generally acknowledged to have already existed under Clinton. Reagan and Nixon stand out as facing similar, and it seems entirely likely that Carter got the same at the time and it's just faded in his post-presidency. Johnson? Kennedy? Maybe this is just how people treat presidents.
JFK is today remembered as a mythical ‘good president’, but he had not-otherwise-insane haters too.
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While the specific derangement syndrome indeed originated with W, there was the concept of Clinton crazies before it.
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I was going to say, Hillary was the subject of absurd slander when I was in elementary school. I remember hearing even back then, that Monica was no big deal because you should hear what Hillary does to the men AND THE WOMEN on air force one!
She’s still the subject of absurd slander.
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Wasn't that the era when they had to close down the high school congressional page program because everyone in congress was doing coke and fucking them?
I only remember because one of my friends was in the last batch.
Excuse me what? Is that another rumor or did your friend confirm that was the reason?
Oh no, it's all on Wikipedia.
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