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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44929 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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So, mods. Now that you can speak freely, can you spill the beans on what was going on with the reddit admins/AOE? You made some allusions previously but I'd really like to understand what's going on. I have been led to believe that reddit is run by a cabal of terminally online tumblrinas. Surely that can't be right?

Now that you can speak freely, can you spill the beans on what was going on with the reddit admins/AOE?

Who knows, man.

Here's an example post that they removed, with three posts of context:

I remember starting my career a couple of years later with the earnest belief that I might have only two or three years of employment left before the AI apocalypse came for bankers too

Probably the most baffling thing I've ever seen from you.

Now, it appears we mean different things by «bankers». For you it's clerks, probably all white-collared personnel. For me, uh, the ultimate proprietors – and it's clear no AI can replace that.

Okay. You're fine. I get it, you aren't a Nazi.

In America, Nazis do this when referencing Jews. It is very much not our "quotes". But I understand that in your culture putting <> is done in a different also valid manner.

But good God, it looks like an American internet Nazi naming the Jew when referring to <>.

Nazis do (((this)))

But « thiis » is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet

That last one - naming the Guillemet - got removed by the admins.

I've got a small list of such similar posts. We had a post removed for listing some global age-of-consent laws. We had a post removed noting that the 6-million Holocaust death toll is dubious because it's built out of many numbers that, themselves, have been readjusted over time but the overall total has never been questioned. We had a post removed comparing the lifestyle of 1880s black slaves in the US to the sub-Saharan continent and to other contemporaneous instances of slavery. We had a post removed noting some weird sentencing laws involving child porn (and similar weird laws regarding the definition of child porn).

These are all things we want to be able to discuss. If people start just berating their outgroup, well, that's uncool. But this wasn't that! These posts weren't as innocent as the quotation-mark one, I'll acknowledge that, but they're still nowhere near the stereotypical Stormfront screed.

Anyway, eventually they sent us a nastygram saying, paraphrased, we were having too many posts removed and saying that we should do something about it before they had to do something about it. They also said that if we had questions, we should send them over. We wrote up a pretty-well-phrased set of questions, sent it to them, and they just ignored it.

In fairness, they never said they'd answer those questions.

And so that's where we were; "go fix this stuff, our censors are inconsistent and overzealous, and we won't give you any answers regarding what's going on."

From there it's just a matter of time until we get booted.

That last one - naming the Guillemet - got removed by the admins.

This is hilarious, Ilforte's flair approaches unironic reality fast.

(it's «Guillemet» is not an ADL-recognized hate symbol yet on reddit)

Why go to all the trouble? The question reminds me of a thread on Hacker News about Islamic Terrorism. A comment noticing

But this is what's strange with terrorists : they strike me as utterly incompetents. There is so many easy ways to fuck things up, and they always do the inefficient and hard things.

got the response

Every-one thinks that they are the good guy. That isn't just a quirk of psychology, it is also a constraint.

People lives their lives according to different narratives. There is a fire-and-sword Muslim narrative, a quiet-life Muslim narrative, various Western narratives. Some-one living their life according to the fire-and-sword Muslim narrative is a bad guy by many other narratives. But that doesn't liberate them to be a bad guy by their own standards. They still have to be the good guy in their own head.

They have to be the hero, not the ass-hole. They cannot just be a nihilist who wrecks stuff to make things miserable for every-one. There has to be a sense that they are a warrior, fighting bad guys.

Perhaps it is as simple as attacking a cafe where they serve alcohol or a venue where the music is haram, or a business district where they charge interest on loans. I don't really get the inner logic, but I'm sure there is one and it constrains the kind of attacks they can make.

I think that Reddit Admins are just as much constrained by the need to be the good guy in their own head as Islamic Terrorists or any-one else. They must have a reason. They can cope with ignoring that it is fake reason that they manufactured themselves (humans are good at that kind of cope); but they must have one.

If they manufacture reasons, the media and Wikipedia, and the useful idiots, can report the manufactured reason, and what they actually did will get no publicity.

Yep, this is my major gripe with Wikipedia. A many articles, particularly the one on Gamergate, basically get writen and then some smug editor sits on it and reverts any changes that disagree with the media naritive, citing the media consensus rule.

But why go through all the trouble?

I'd imagine just eliminating subreddits isn't ideal, when its possible you can convert them into whatever the rest of Reddit is. Then instead of an exodus, you get to slowly shape the discourse of people you don't like or agree with. Why give up control over your outgroup?

I think some people would have batted an eye; like, part of the reason we were still around is that they weren't just banning subs instantly. If you get too trigger-happy you start driving people away.

We left anyway, but this way they get to say "aha, they left, they weren't booted", and preserve a bit of standing and maybe keep some of the other borderline subs around longer.

German normally uses the Gänsefüßchen, Einführungszeichen or inverted-plus-normal quotation marks, as the Spanish do with their exclamations. Not the guillemet.

@ZorbaTHut explained it (which is to say, there really isn't much more explanation than what we've said before).

My personal opinion is that we probably weren't in as much imminent danger of being banned as many people (including Zorba) believe, but it was inevitable that we would be banned someday. I always watched /r/CultureWarRoundup as a kind of canary, because despite their much smaller footprint, I honestly thought they'd get banned before we would. Their witches are pretty open, and SneerClub definitely knows about them, which means presumably they must get reported fairly frequently.

But I do have two things to contribute which I never would have posted on reddit. First of all, I will confirm that it was indeed Chtorrr who visited us and dropped the "friendly notice" in our mod channel.

And that being said, a few months back there was a "Mod Summit" (via Zoom) to which all subreddit mods were invited. I was the only motte mod who I guess was bored enough to zoom in (I even sent them questions! None of which made it to the queue that got answered, naturally). As you might expect, almost all the talks were about things like "How to build safe communities" and "How to self-care and preserve your mental health while having to deal with all these terrible people," etc.

The most valuable thing I got out of it were screenshots.

Without further comment: https://imgur.com/a/4oIS59D

So here's a thing that I've been sitting on for months.

Chtorrr.

I've never seen this mentioned anywhere, which surprises me, but "Chtorrr" is a pretty obvious reference to a scifi novel series named The War Against the Chtorr. "boy it's funny she named herself after the bad guys" no no, that's not where I'm going with this. Hold your butts.

The War Against The Chtorr is a post-apocalyptic alien invasion novel by David Gerrold, best known for his Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles. I haven't read his stuff in over a decade but I know I loved it as a kid, and I've still got the books in a box somewhere - someday I'll dig that out. The Chtorr series was meant to be the longest thing he'd written, originally a trilogy, then six books; the fifth book has been delayed for literally twenty years, jesus christ get that thing finished already.

The overall plotline . . .

. . . okay I'm going to take a brief diversion. The overall plotline has some cool worldbuilding. One of the past events was the USA went totally world-conquering imperialistic and was defeated soundly, a la Nazi Germany but with less genocide. The USA was put under severe economic sanctions but this turned out to be an even bigger problem for the rest of the world, as the USA was producing pretty much all the world's high-tech equipment. The world grudgingly allowed the USA to continue selling tech, which they did.

Later the aliens arrive and large parts of humanity join the aliens and use human military equipment against the remaining US countries . . . and it turns out that the USA has remote killswitches in literally every chip they'd sold post-sanctions. Which they originally put it in stop anyone deciding to crush the USA, and which is technically now being used for that exact purpose, just nobody expected that "anyone" was going to be aliens.

Anyway. Diversion over.

The overall plotline is that an alien invasion shows up from outer space. This isn't the normal "spaceships and greys with guns" invasion. The Chtorr are some kind of symbiotic hive-mind species, including fungal and worm creatures. There's no particular unified military action taken by them, they just kinda . . . colonize . . . and spread . . . and it's hinted that there's some kind of induct-humans-into-the-hivemind thing going on, and large sections of humanity start giving themselves freely over to the Chtorr menace and it's all very bad.

A big recurring theme here is the collapse of civilization and the dehumanization caused thereby. This series does not pull punches; it is not a stars-and-stripes patriotic fight against the aliens (check out Doc Smith's Lensman series if you're into that, it's gloriously ridiculous), it's a bunch of disorganized guerillas who are trying to stop a force that cannot be stopped while under siege from opportunists and warlords and everything else that you would expect from the fall of humanity.

There's murder. There's rape. There's torture. And there's pedophilia.

One of the plotlines is the main character visits . . . god, I don't remember the details. An orphanage? It turns out that the leader has been raping the kids, and they're like, "aw hell nah" and kill the guy and save the kids to bring back to their town. That night, one of the kids crawls into the main character's sleeping bag and asks to have sex, and the main character is all like "aw hell nah" but the kid is insistent and so the main character basically flees the tent and goes to talk to the group leader.

The group leader says, paraphased,

okay, look. This is an insane situation to be in. But this kid, for the last three years of their life, has been taught that physical intimacy is how you show trust. And while we absolutely need to deal with that, we need to get these kids to safety first, and right now we're in the middle of a forest full of people and animals that want to kill us. If you don't prove to him that you trust him, he'll probably run away - we've seen this happen before - and get eaten. We've seen that happen b efore too.

So maybe you should pray to whatever god you believe in, make whatever penance you think is appropriate, and just do it, quite literally, for the sake of the kid.

Or maybe you shouldn't. Not gonna judge you either way. But make the decision that you can best live with.

Sorry you're dealing with this.

And the main character goes back and has sex with the kid.

(Fade to black, obviously, it doesn't go into detail.)

I just want to reiterate that I'm not making this up.

I actually think this is a really good series overall. It's uncomfortable to read - excruciatingly so - but that's kind of the point, yeah? It's asking what atrocities humans do in a situation like this, it's asking what atrocities are justifiable in this situation. Do I think the main character made the right choice? Fuck, I don't know! But that's great. Seriously, I read this book twenty years ago, it's stuck with me the entire time, I still don't know what the right solution is!

But this is the book that Chtorrr chose to name herself after.

And if David Gerrold was posting The War Against The Chtorr on Reddit, I guarantee that Chtorrr would be banning it.

I don't really have a conclusion here; this entire situation is just ridiculous.

Between this and Amadan's sharing of screenshots, I'm happy to announce Reddit's leadership is exactly what I suspected it was, and that I can think of no greater way to shame them than letting them be precisely what they are.

I did allude to it once by linking to the cover of War Against the Chtorr. I have never read the books, though.

As for that scene: it strikes me as some really fucked up sublimation. Like, "Can I construct a scenario in which fucking a child is actually the right thing to do, and then write it convincingly into my sci fi novel?" is Piers Anthony territory.

That was my assessment as well, when I came across it. The actual alien ecology parts of the books were completely fascinating and deeply compelling, and a lot more of the books had to do with the psychological breakdown of the surviving human populations... but it was all shot through with the sleaziest, grimiest 70s sexual ethics, the sort of sex-positivity that comes with a metaphorical bad combover and a sweaty upper lip. That part in particular was a bridge too far for me, but quite a few of the other parts left me feeling vaguely ill. At maximum charity, some of that might have been the author's intention, but no thanks either way.

Gerrold did develop his writing chops in the seventies.

Maybe that's why he stopped - he knows his style isn't going to be accepted anymore?

Similarly with John Varley's Eight Worlds stories, which had a similar '70s libertarian field; the last one was decades ago.

That screen shot.... LMAO

That's some powerful Doreen Ford energy emanating from them, right there. Oh lordy...

Surely that can't be right?

Why can't that be right? What model of the world precludes it?

I watched from the inside as a major FANG company got taken over, where the culture changed from technical excellence to 'social responsibility' or whatnot. So why shouldn't one expect that Merely Reddit got captured by a social cabal?

It's kinda hard to overstate just how much Reddit culture has changed in the past 10+ years. Prior to the summer of 2015, there were basically no subreddit bans, and /r/ShitRedditSays (the woke/feminist sneer sub) was just known as a few goons sniffing glue in the corner. Hell, in 2012 many defaults temporarily blacklisted all posts to Gawker after Gawker doxed the head moderator of most of the more unseemly NSFW subreddits (including creepshots and the then-recently-banned jailbait)... I highly doubt defaults would take that particular stance nowadays.

Also hey nice to see you here, hopefilly my values can be satisfied in the future.

I'm also quite curious for an uncensored perspective on this. I knew it was bad, but the story below about being site-banned for coloring a pixel in the canvas thing is so far beyond what I knew about it really threw me. I've always pushed back against the ring of Gyges story, but if admins are willing to go that far just because they know no one will ever find out...

What story below, I can't find it?

Anyway, as one of the active participants in the cat thing, usually there are misconceptions going in both directions. First of all, rdrama people weren't entirely innocent since we actually included our site name in the picture eventually, which was a no no even for most benevolent sites and a no no no hell naw for us.

Weird things happened afterwards though. First of all, instead of using the official offensive content removal tool that just erased rectangles Chtorrr and Redtaboo started erasing our site name and then the cat pixel by pixel with no time delay. Worse, Chtorrr was not just erasing it but replacing it with a neighboring chaos chess pattern, both pretending that it's a routine overtake by them and giving them the unfair advantage of placing a pixel every second instead of every five minutes.

Then the next day shit hit the fan all over reddit, and attempts to censor it only added fuel to the fire. Then it went beyond reddit, for example a World of Warcraft streamer Asmongold made a video accusing admins of cheating that got 150,000+ views. Naturally, being on the business end of a pointed crowd of one hundred and fifty thousand angry people was not fun for the admins in question, and again, that's just from one source (but one of the biggest ones). So there was much not entirely unjustified whining about stochastic terrorism from the admin-loving mods.

It also felt kinda surreal for me, I can't really wrap my head over angering 150,000 people. And we didn't actually do this on purpose at all, it's like how people describe Steve Jobs as having a reality warping field around him that would make people to shoot for the stars, apparently we have something like that that makes people act very stupid, we drew our cute cat and admins (and then admin-supporting mods) went full retard in all the worst possible ways and brought it all on themselves.

Anyways, pretty much everyone involved on our side got a very special ban wherein reddit tells you that your password is wrong no matter what. You can still get a reset password link and it seems to work but nope. I actually tried to talk with the support about it, the only thing that came out of it was that they linked me to a page that admitted that it's a thing reddit might do. They also unleashed the full power of ban evasion detection on us, so I still haven't managed to make a working reddit account (though I do have some ideas about it). I don't know if there were any innocents swept along us, I asked mods of /r/cats (we got a recruitment post there!) if they heard any such reports and they said no, but of course it would be hard for a random stonewalled victim to report anything via reddit itself.

Yeah, it's, like, for a day or two your new account seems to work (besides half of the subreddits that flat out shadowban posts from new accounts with low karma making it a bit of a Catch 22) then they shadowban it for real, then you get logged out and can't log in because wrong password.

Response posted!

For what it's worth, I originally thought they got banned for a pretty-innocuous post they made on The Motte. I'm not sure "we went to draw a cartoon cat on Place, so they banned me from the entire site" is better or worse.

Not a mod but can share some insight. The latest AEO activity on Reddit included removing a comment for including the word “groomer”.

The term was being used to describe adults who knowingly and intentionally share sexually explicit content with children against the wishes of the childrens parents.

It gets funnier than that! They started autoremoving posts on /r/doggrooming/, and Chtorrr was too incompetent to realize that she can see the removed post because she's an admin!

https://rdrama.net/post/89433/reddit-is-cracking-down-on-dog (check out Snappy's snapshots)

I have been led to believe that reddit is run by a cabal of terminally online tumblrinas

That isn't too far off from the reality of the situation, to be honest. Almost every large sub is run by a small group of power mods that have a particular viewpoint and are openly hostile to any dissent. They try to take over any sub that isn't run by them, often through shady means; so while they don't really "run reddit" per se, the vast majority of reddit content is filtered through them. The reddit admins tolerate them because they do so much free labor, and their views are generally advertiser friendly, so breaking them up isn't really a worthwhile pursuit.

For Anti-Evil Operations specifically, this should link to the most recent post removed by AEO that they've heavily references as a WTF moment, as at best a violation of the use-mention distinction and at worst actively counterproductive. bsbbtnh's post here is not the sort of thing I'd want to turn the forum into a long-lasting debate on, but in addition to the post's removal claims to have received a week-long suspensions.

Unfortunately, most older AEO activities look like the underlying post have fallen off the API that camas uses for indexing, or the full account was hit in ways that make the posts show up as deleted for camas purposes. The first four AEO actions were in response to a thread about a mass-shooter (I think the Dayton Ohio mass shooter?), which were significantly less controversial at the time, and seem to be in the first category. The oft-reference straight-of-wikipedia 'age of consent' list seems to be in the latter category.

Then there's the incredibly bad blocking implementation, that two years in Reddit still hadn't actually formalized those new 'advocacy of violence' rules that were supposed to be out in two weeks, that the mods were getting admin mails asking if they had any questions and then never responding, so on.

There are rumors on /r/ModSupport that AEO is actually a bot, triggering on single words, and that no humans are overseeing the thing.

One more reason I'd dearly love to see all bots banned from Reddit.

Second this. I'd like to know the details of what was going on between the sub mods and site administration. Just morbid curiosity.

I love the sweet sweet juicy gossip of how horrible my censorious outgroup is.

Yeah definitely interested in hearing more about the "AEO". Afaik there isn't anything substantially juicy though; They were just extremely risk averse and lopsided towards preferring false positives than preventing false negatives.

Also shitting on reddit will give us something to talk about here for now, until more people join.

Yes. Censors are my eternal outgroup.

Here’s a list of the Hugo award winners this year:

  • Best Novel: Arkady Martine

  • Best Novella: Becky Chambers

  • Best Novelette: Suzanne Palmer

  • Best Short Story: Sarah Pinsker

  • Best Series: Seanan McGuire

  • Best Graphic Story: N.K. Jemisin

  • Best Related Work: Jane (Charlie) Anders

  • Best Artist: Rovina Cai

Omitted: Best film/tv series and short/long form editors.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg may never (posthumously) see 9 female justices on the Supreme Court. Perhaps she can rest easier knowing that women more or less swept the Hugos this year. And more or less in 2021. And 2019. And 2018. And almost did in 2017. One has to wonder why modern men are so bad at writing science fiction.

I’ve read virtually all of the books on this list prior to 2019, and my recollection is that they are by and large apolitical. Characterization is often sidelined or nonexistent (I’m looking at you, Asimov), there’s some downright weird...social interactions for lack of a better word (Well, rape my lizard!) and the prose is quite often trash. But where it shines is imagining a society reformed by new technology: a space elevator, FTL travel, psychohistory, nanotech, the metaverse (back when we just called it cyberspace), cyberpunk, biopunk, cypherpunk, spice melange and precognition. The best read like instruction manuals for scientists and entrepreneurs to aspire to, the bad were unapologetically sexist and the worst, presumably, have been lost to time.

Looking at the 2022 Hugo list, I’ve only read Iron Widow (I’ve been on a China kick and a scifi adaptation of Wu Zeitian’s story sounded interesting) and the series by Becky Chambers and Ada Palmer. The former was…unpleasant. Some choice quotes:

I think this whole concept of women being docile and obedient is nothing but wishful thinking. Or why would you put so much effort into lying to us? Into crippling our bodies? Into coercing us with made-up morals you claim are sacred? You insecure men, you’re afraid. You can force us into compliance, but, deep down, you know you can’t force us to truly love and respect you.

Men wants us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds.

How do you take the fight out of half the population and render them willing slaves? You tell them they're meant to do nothing but serve from the minute they're born. You tell them they're weak. You tell them they're prey. You tell them over and over, until it's the only truth they're capable of living.

But I have no faith in love. Love cannot save me. I choose vengeance.

I could keep going, but at a certain point I’d be quoting the entire book. Literally every scene that isn’t her fighting in a mecha is more of the above. The main character getting fucked over by her father. By the men in the military. By her lovers. By her copilot. It’s just not readable unless you’re the one being pandered to. She did take her book jacket photo wearing a cow onesie though, so that was pretty cool. Not that it would ever win an award, but I had a similar reaction to The Powers of the Earth with anti-woke libertarian propaganda, and the hypercapitalist Randian rants in Terry Goodkind.

Where Iron Widow is a blasting foghorn wokening our feminist impulses, Becky Chambers is a bit more laidback. I'm still struck by the aimlessness and victimization of the protagonist who just kind of meanders her way from misadventure to misadventure and whose only (?) skill is polylingualism. There's no overarching goal, no training montage or development, no tech wiz hacker bro. The emphasis is on home, belonging, learning about other cultures and refuting the nasty intolerants who disapprove of human-AI or interspecies-lesbian-human-reptilian-nonmonogamous relationships.

I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies. I don’t think there is a principled, objective stance where William Gibson is a better writer than Octavia Butler and it’s not like we read any of these books because the prose and mechanics of the writing are top tier. Perhaps we’re fated to live in our own little cloistered media bubbles that tell us what we like to hear.

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

Probably not. Every time someone picks up the "Don't like it then build your own" gauntlet that's been thrown down, they get deplatformed, smeared, sued, unbanked and destroyed. The mask has slipped. It was never about inclusivity. It was about stealing your toys, smashing them in front of you, and watching you weep.

The mask has slipped. It was never about inclusivity. It was about stealing your toys, smashing them in front of you, and watching you weep.

This is something that anyone interested in Literature has known for awhile, that the "Diversity" agenda was just another tactic in the postmodern Left takeover of the Humanities, that there was no real interest in adding "diverse" authors such as José Saramago, Sei Shonagon, Louise Labe etc etc, but the goal was always the smashing of the 4 Olds and the total ideological takeover of all Lit depts (and outlets).

This is from Mark Bauerlein, who teaches English @ Emory:

"Once the multiculturalists got rid of the old canon, their promise of a richer, fuller curriculum of multiple cultures never materialized. The outcome proves the point. They didn’t want a new and improved humanities curriculum, adding Toni Morrison to Shakespeare, adding wives and mothers to kings and generals in history courses. No, the revolutionaries just wanted to take out the Western/American heritage. The tradition had to go, period. “Diversity” was a dodge, a tactic, a temporary step in the discreditation of the old.

The real goal had already been accomplished, and right in front of us: the demolition of literary tradition, of a Western literary canon and an American literary canon."

/images/16626841365720305.webp

Mod intervention here, I'm afraid. From the rules:

Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.

"As everyone knows . . ."

"I'm sure you all agree that . . ."

We visit this site specifically because we don't all agree, and regardless of how universal you believe knowledge is, I guarantee someone doesn't know it yet. Humans are bad at disagreeing with each other, and starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement. It's a nice rhetorical trick in some situations, but it's against what we're trying to accomplish here.

Please avoid stuff like "this is something that anyone interested in literature has known for a while". Phrase it as an opinion or bring up evidence, don't just insist that everyone agrees with you.

I think this is pessimistic. You can easily get tens of thousands of members for a more quality-based fantasy award. You’ll be shit on, yes, but not deplatformed.

Are there any examples of this happening?

Who are the villians, and perhaps more crucially, why?

Antagonists don't have to be complex, but generally complex antagonists are better than simple ones. An antagonist who thinks they're the hero, antagonists who follow a code, who are conflicted, or who maybe have a point, these are interesting because they give us something to chew on, to interrogate. Still, sometimes an antagonist is simply evil, and that can work too. Not all the time, but sometimes.

But what makes them an antagonist? This leads us fairly quickly to philosophical questions. Have they abandoned virtue or embraced vice? Have they misguided or foolish, making some dreadful moral or ethical mistake? Are they too blind or stubborn to self-correct? There's lots of interesting ways this can go, because what's interesting is that these are the mistakes we are in danger of making ourselves. The story is a mirror for us to reflect upon, a whetstone to sharpen our moral instincts into something more like durable principles.

A less interesting way, though, is to assert that they are the antagonist because they are a Bad Person, and they do harmful things because that is what Bad People do. This is especially pernicious when the author clearly believes that Bad People really exist in significant numbers, and is building their story as an extended sermon on why you should hate them in real life. This attitude does not, generally speaking, help us to sharpen our moral instincts, but to deaden them. Reflexive moral certainty is not the apex of the soul, but arguably its nadir.

I think the above is pretty general. Where it gets specific is that Progressive media doing the above is absurdly widespread and prominent, to the point that it is probably inescapable. I don't remember much that I read in the old days that worked this way, as straight-up advocacy for bigotry. That really does seem to be a... novel innovation.

As for the Hugos themselves, the problem you're pointing to was identified years ago, and people of good conscience tried to do something about it. They were crushed, leaving the field to bad-faith actors of both tribes. Actions have consequences.

A less interesting way, though, is to assert that they are the antagonist because they are a Bad Person, and they do harmful things because that is what Bad People do. This is especially pernicious when the author clearly believes that Bad People really exist in significant numbers, and is building their story as an extended sermon on why you should hate them in real life. This attitude does not, generally speaking, help us to sharpen our moral instincts, but to deaden them. Reflexive moral certainty is not the apex of the soul, but arguably its nadir.

I think the above is pretty general. Where it gets specific is that Progressive media doing the above is absurdly widespread and prominent, to the point that it is probably inescapable. I don't remember much that I read in the old days that worked this way, as straight-up advocacy for bigotry. That really does seem to be a... novel innovation.

Diana Moon Glampers, steelwoman extraordinaire, would like a word. As would Emperor Jagang and his group of nihilistic-rapist-socialists who literally hate life and beauty. The infantile POTUS in powers of the earth as well, whose name escapes me.

I think you're conflating two issues, which I suppose I did in OP as well. Not every book on that list is like Iron Widow. Octavia Butler and NK Jemisin have both written fantastic books that I've enjoyed; Parable of the Sower in particular is amusingly pro-2A and nevertheless popular. But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.

The second issue is that some books are indeed political dumpster fires. But as I said, I'm not convinced that progressives have a monopoly on publishing trashy media.

As for the Hugos themselves, the problem you're pointing to was identified years ago, and people of good conscience tried to do something about it. They were crushed, leaving the field to bad-faith actors of both tribes. Actions have consequences.

It's hard to imagine Vox Day as a person of good conscience, although I sympathized with the sad puppies. I'm not sure I would trust any of the groups to recommend me books at this point, which is surprising given how consistently good the awards were from the 1960s all the way through the early 2010s.

Diana Moon Glampers, steelwoman extraordinaire, would like a word.

Glampers makes the world a worse place because she has made a mistake: she values equality over human flourishing to an unreasonable degree. I confess I didn't get far enough into Goodkind to learn much about Emperor Jagang, but from what I did read I'd say his empire made the mistake of accepting immediate, concrete evil in pursuit of nebulous, far-off good; they burn down the flawed present in pursuit of a false dream of a better future, a lesson I think you'd agree remains timely. No idea about powers of the earth, I've never heard of it before.

Both of these examples are reductive; in the case of Glampers, this is because she is from a parable so short that nuance is counterproductive; the whole point of the piece is that equality is not, in fact, a valid terminal goal, that "more equality" can actually be a bad thing in at least one case. In the case of Goodkind's books, the reductiveness is in fact a detriment to the story as a whole. Neither are even close to as reductive as "Men want us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds." Nor to the other examples you provided. That is just straight-up bigotry.

The second issue is that some books are indeed political dumpster fires. But as I said, I'm not convinced that progressives have a monopoly on publishing trashy media.

To a first approximation, monopolies don't exist. I don't think you can actually find examples of the same general combination of notability and reductiveness/bigotry from anything other than progressivism. Quotes like that aimed at women surely exist somewhere, but none of us will ever hear about it because such writing is marginalized quite thoroughly. Meanwhile, this is a Hugo winner.

But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.

I'd say that they aren't selecting for objective quality, but for some combination of author identity, ideological fervor, and nepotism. I don't think they're ever really going to stop. Why would they?

It's hard to imagine Vox Day as a person of good conscience, although I sympathized with the sad puppies.

Yeah, the former was who I had in mind with "bad-faith actors of both tribes." From where I sit, it seems clear to me that the reasonable people left for greener pastures long ago.

Harrison Bergeron is a short story, which is expected to have sketchier characterization than a novel. But also, Diana Moon Glampers wasn't a Bad Person who did Bad Things because that's what Bad People do; she was merely the head enforcer for the government. We don't really know how she got her position or anything like that, but she did Bad Things because that was her job.

The infantile POTUS in powers of the earth as well, whose name escapes me.

"Themba Johnson" (and her understudy, "Linda Haig"), because for whatever the merits of MorlockP's writing might be, subtly isn't one of them. Although 'infantile' probably isn't the right measure for her: the character's point is that she's much smarter than she seems, she just applies that to political ends rather than technical ones. Note that whenever she makes a numeric 'mistake', it's in ways that make much better sound bites than the truth. (I think this is meant to directly contrast with some of the spacer leadership: Javier makes a few similar mistakes, usually related to identifying people or places of origin; that the differences don't matter in physical senses but do show relatively lacking social skills is a theme.)

Although agreed she's more a Clinton expy than any sort of steelman. For sympathetic grounder characters in Powers, you'd probably be better-served by Restivo (who's an 'honorable' soldier, if compromised by his loyalty to his commander), or Matthew. For sympathetic women, there's a pretty wide variety of spacer ladies (and a couple sympathetic young women).

Even as a Clinton expy, she's not exactly evil for evil's sake. The UN and US (correctly!) sees spacers as huge physical threats, in addition to acting as a combination of brain drain and tax shelter, not to mention the unlocked AI that's been using half of the moon as a playpen. These are just drastically different values from those of the spacers, and of most readers.

But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.

There's a "the top-5% women are better than top-% men, whether from socialization or other cause, at sort of the coalition management the voting system runs on". Which I don't think is particularly palatable for Hugos, but it's not the most damning indictment.

But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.

I am a little confused by this sentence. Who do you mean by "the people running the Hugos?" As far as I'm aware the Hugos have always been a popularity contest. Nominees and winners decided by a vote of members of the World Science Fiction Convention. Would you accept a symmetrical argument? That years where men dominated the slate must have been due to the voters judgement that men were better at writing science fiction?

There's a fair amount of evidence that the vote is gamed, has been for some time, and that the people gaming it have shifted heavily toward gaming it for ideological reasons rather than raw nepotism or enforcements of personal aesthetic taste.

Your symmetrical argument is, I think, wrong on the merits, but I'd agree that any critique consisting of "these awards are being assessed poorly" should identify examples of what should have won as a reality check.

I'm sure that they pandered to me in some way. But nothing so crass as "you're a man, so you kick ass, unlike those dumb women". That people can read that shit and genuinely like it baffles me. I used to use the hugo awards to find sci fi worth reading, but now I just don't read it much. Or I read old shit.

That might actually be an enjoyable read. Like a true male power fantasy revved up to 100, just for fun. What books count? Closest I can think of is James Bond and Poldark.

If one were determined to explore this particular road, one possible trail begins with the phrase, "oh, John Ringo, no!" It will take you far, far past James Bond, at least.

Other paths running through the LitRPG genre and similar descendents of the old pulps likewise might be fruitful.

You'd probably need to go to Asia for a real male power fantasy. The harem must grow larger!

Not a book, but the anime series Gurren Lagann. It's like someone said "Hey, what if we made media that actually uses 'the male gaze' and phallic symbolism and 'toxic masculinity' and all that other bullshit that feminists falsely accuse other media of?" And it turns out the result is amazing mecha battles where literal galaxies are being chucked around.

Gor.

Well, maybe for the 40% of men who are into BDSM.

Competence porn is probably a bigger offender.

Well, maybe for the 40% of men who are into BDSM.

I feel like BDSM might cover 20% of men at best where as competence porn must cover 3 quarters at a minimum

Princess of Mars?

Tai-Pan and the Noble House probably count. But they are still not actively misogynistic.

It's important to remember that the Hugo Awards are not awarded by a panel; they're pure popular vote by those who attend Worldcon (or, alternatively, purchasing a "supporting membership" for voting rights for ~$50).

So naturally they tend to reflect the type of person who cares enough a. to attend Worldcon, b. to vote, and c. to make their vote reflective of their politics.

The results speak for themselves. But I do not think they represent some co-ordinated, deliberate attempt to pander.

It's not just the voting itself, it's also the slate, no? Back during the Sad Puppies days, the slates were a major point of contention.

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

I believe that would be the Dragon Awards.

Thanks, I'll take a look.

Iowahawk identified this pattern a while ago for "lefties" as he called them

  1. Identify a respected institution.

  2. kill it.

  3. gut it.

  4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect

To a large extent, I think this isn't even particularly malicious or intentional. The phrase I keep thinking of when I encounter other leftists in CW contexts is "cargo cult." There's just a real lack of understanding of how things work and a deep belief that pantomiming the general behavior of things that did work in the past is how to make things work. One example would be the anti-climate change "strikes" by kids not going to school until They do Something about the Problem. Strikes worked because they were literally workers that company owners needed to literally do stuff so they could literally make money from real customers; kids not going to school doesn't put any such pressure on governments. A more minor but much more common example is calling people "Nazis" as a way to discredit them; Nazis weren't bad because there's something magical about the syllables "nah" and "zee" when put together in order; they were bad because of real things they really did to real people using real guns held by real men.

Likewise, awards like Hugo's aren't prestigious or well-regarded because there's some ceremony and the author gets a fancy statue or whatever; it's because there's some credibility in the institution that chooses the award recipients that provides a sort of promise that the works they selected meet some level of quality that readers value. Handing out awards to people based on sociopolitical preferences doesn't give prestige to those sociopolitical preferences, it just kills the credibility of the awards.

My guess is that this sort of thing is just as common in the right as well, but I just don't see it because I'm a leftist who's mostly exposed to leftist things.

My guess is that this sort of thing is just as common in the right as well, but I just don't see it because I'm a leftist who's mostly exposed to leftist things.

I think this particular failure mode is less common on the right for two reasons: age and tangibility.

For age, there are a couple of relevant saying. "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best", and "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality". I think the general motto of leftism could be summed up as "Why don't we...", while the general motto of conservatism would be "Oh, that's why we don't!" I think just by virtue of being older, conservatives are more likely to have had a relevant personal experience, for example a job that was actually impacted by a strike.

And that ties into the tangibility point. I often see leftists on reddit engaging in cargo cult thinking that seems in the rough ballpark of "Stores are places where food happens, and people have to work at them because billionaires are mean." I think the warehouse workers and stockers who know firsthand what goes into keeping food on those shelves are very unlikely to be politically active enough to be anything-ists. So we have these online discussions that are dominated on that side by people who don't have extensive work experience, and have negligible responsibility experience, in the sense of being the person who has to get the job done no matter what.

It's very easy to confuse cause and effect when you live in a world of words and abstractions and never encounter what Big Yud would call Final Responsibility. Compare that to the plumber in a MAGA hat, who lives every day in a world where the water runs or doesn't by his own ability to manipulate reality.

If you're looking for right-wing examples, replace 'Nazi' with 'socialist' or 'communist'.

While there certainly are right-wing groups and individuals that throw accusations of being a socialist or communist at people they disagree with, I wouldn't say the example is equivalent. The point of calling someone a nazi or a fascist is to draw ire from the public since the words are both nearly universally synonymous with "ideological bully". Calling someone a socialist isn't exactly a head turner for the majority of the public and calling someone a communist is mostly going to draw confused glances at the accuser. From my own observations I'd also say it's significantly more common for leftists to call opponents nazi/fascist in an attempt to discredit them than right-wingers calling their own opponents socialist/communist because it is simply not enough to discredit someone; though I do think it would be just as common if being a socialist were considered culturally taboo as being a nazi.

Perhaps another analogy would be the current craze among (American, somewhat picked up by European) right-wingers at calling their opponents pedophiles (which "groomer" is at least heavily supposed to imply).

Great point, as of late I've noticed a fairly substantial increase in "groomer" rhetoric on twitter, mostly surrounding transgender issues.

One example that comes to mind is people who expect the president to be Christian as some kind of qualification. At one point, maybe that meant something about a man's character if he was running for president and said he was a Christian. But these days, it means nothing except to devalue the label of "Christian".

Boy, those quotes are pure, uncut 100% Columbian projection.

I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies. I don’t think there is a principled, objective stance where William Gibson is a better writer than Octavia Butler and it’s not like we read any of these books because the prose and mechanics of the writing are top tier. Perhaps we’re fated to live in our own little cloistered media bubbles that tell us what we like to hear.

This is a good thing to examine, because I think you're right. My initial reaction to the recent Hugo slates has been similar to yours: it almost feels now like an annual victory parade marching over the bones of all those dead cishetwhite dudes. I've read a few of NK Jemisin's books (bleah) and I tried Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning (it's genuinely speculative and interesting SF, I'll give it that - but it wasn't for me), and I've read a few of Seanan McGuire's books (very YA, fun enough if you like fanfic and the same plot retreaded multiple times) but mostly it just seems like celebratory woke awards.

I never thought I'd become one of those guys who just starts refusing to read books by, as Vox Day puts it, People Who Hate You, but I'm becoming one of those guys.

All that being said, you are right that previous eras just pandered to different demographics. (And bitching about the Hugos, and more worthy books being ignored in favor of books that didn't deserve it, goes back to the first WorldCon.) I mean, I really liked Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle when I was younger, but I've recently reread a few of their books, and besides being cringe and soapboxy in their own way, the writing is just bad. They didn't age well.

I will always think Ringworld (and the whole Known Space series) is a magnificent epic, but Niven and Pournelle are both cranky old bastards who kind of embody the "stale pale male" stereotype, if we're being honest. And lots of other previous nominees and winners have been equally full of wooden characters spouting stilted dialog in service of the author's political theories.

I also read Neuromancer recently. It, too, did not age well. I know that's not the book's fault: it's not entirely fair to judge a book in 2022 that was written about the mindblowing cyberpunk future before the Internet was really a thing. But it's just not that great except as an artifact of its time.

So yes, times have changed, the fandom has changed, old fans don't like it, and I just accept that Hugo nominations no longer mean much to me. For all that people complain that "Nothing good is being published anymore," this is flatly bullshit. There is a vast quantity of new SF&F being published. The problem is not that there's nothing to read, the problem is sifting through the ocean of crap new books to find something you like. For this, we mostly rely now on word of mouth and communities known to recommend things that are good - ironically, the function that publishers and awards used to serve.

I also read Neuromancer recently. It, too, did not age well.

Really? How so?

The Turing police seem fairly prescient, and as time goes on, I think more and more of his general aesthetic loops back to relevance. Print-shoot-repeat and the 3d-printing scene in general feel pretty damn cyberpunk. Give it awhile, and I think we have decent odds of getting there.

The concepts were cool, I just didn't think the writing or the characterization was very good. And like I said, it's not really fair to judge a book for not doing better than any other SF novel in predicting what the near future will look like, but still... coin-op pay phones!

Coin-op payphones granted, there's something to Gibsonian cyberpunk, something between an insight and a thesis, that sets his work apart from the stolid technothrillers of Clancy and company. Something along the lines of "technology is useful, not merely because they have a rock and you have a gun, but because it inherently and intractably complicates the arithmetic of power." His stories are built on a recognition that people are not in control, that our systems reliably fail, that our plans are dismayed, and that far from ameliorating these conditions, technology only accelerates them. This, to me, is a fairly important idea, and I like his stories because he communicates this idea with such force that you feel it in your bones. He does this less with broad plot and character, and more with the nature of the technological ecosystem the characters move through, that the characters and the broad plot serve to illuminate.

Huh -- somebody gave me his most recent book (which is true crap), which prompted me to reread some of the old ones in my library, just to check that I didn't used to be insane. Unfortunately somebody stole my copy of Neuromancer at some point, but the rest of the Sprawl series are still very very good IMO. My recollection at the time is not thinking that they quite measured up to Neuromancer; I'll have to give it another read somehow.

I also had a few of the 1990s-2014 books on hand, and blazed through them; not great but not terrible -- definitely had moments of spirit. I think Trump (or something) broke his brain -- the only reason to read Agency is as a kind of meta-analysis of why the other books seem good but this one is bad. (plotline is pretty standard Gibson) There's significant woke pandering, and I gather he still won't get a Hugo for it on account of wrong gender.

I honestly don't mind "outdated" futures all that much, personally.

I didn't read Neuromancer until the twenty-first century, so maybe my view is skewed, but I doubt it was ever a good story. There is no internal logic to the matrix at all; it's just deus ex machina after deus ex machina. It would have been fine, even more fun, if it had used an internal logic unlike that of real computers; that's part of the charm of cyberpunk. But when everything is arbitrary there can be no dramatic tension.

For atmosphere Neuromancer is unparalleled. As a yarn it isn't that great.

Are there actually many sci-fi books that excel not just at exploring fun sci-fi themes, but at actually delivering good prose and characters? The trend of having only the former is so persistent that I came to assume that having these two at the same time is supremely difficult for some reason, like running out of skill points when creating an RPG character.

Yes, as long as you don't define "good prose and characters" in the literary fashion of "long turgid writing that fails to advance the plot because the plot isn't actually the point, it's all about relationships". Asimov gets a lot of hate, but he was an absolute master of spare prose. As for his characterization, he saved it for the robots.

That's unfair. Donovan, Powell and Calvin all get pretty decent characterization in iRobot. Calvin more than the rest as part of the framing device.

Well, at the risk of this turning into a SF&F recommendation thread (I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but would probably be better for Friday Fun Threads):

Ursula Le Guin really was quite a good writer, though most of her books are bit too slow and contemplative for me. But The Dispossessed does a really splendid job of contrasting a futuristic socialist society with a futuristic capitalist society in a way that genuinely feels like "What if?" and not "This is a pointed allegory." (As opposed to Those Who Walk Away from Omelas and other stories she did write as pointed allegories.)

Peter Watts and Neal Stephenson are two authors whose strength isn't in their prose, but they deliver really slammin' ideas with competent writing.

Ken Liu is pretty woke, but I've still found his writing to be very good.

Daniel Abraham (half of the team that wrote The Expanse series) is quite good; I like his epic fantasy series as well. Likewise Adrian Tchaikovsky, who has a rare ability to write equally good sci-fi and fantasy.

I have many others, but obviously it's going to be subjective. I can enjoy books that tell a good story even when I think writing is mediocre at best (looking at you, Brandon Sanderson), but yes, there are sci-fi authors who actually pay attention to the craft of writing, not just storytelling and worldbuilding.

Those Who Walk Away from Omelas

I've seen a take that particular story was sort of ...very thinly allegorical.

That is, that it was about the attitude of SF fandom in its day to child abuse.

It was a pretty interesting community, as there was a huge controversy when angry fans tried to get child molester* excluded from a con.

*see: https://breendoggle.fandom.com/wiki/Breendoggle_Wiki

Orson Scott Card managed to deliver both in parts of his Ender’s Game series, but it’s assuredly not super hard sci-fi. And hard sci-fi in general doesn’t do prose and characters great because that’s not the focus.

Most things by Peter Watts, if you can handle the pitch-black nihilism. Blindsight in particular is very, very good.

Maybe I'm a poor judge of prose and character, but Lem had some good novels, Peace On Earth, and Solaris of course.

I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies.

No. I think you can only reach this conclusion by essentially obliterating the notion of "quality" when it comes to fiction. This is something implicitly supported by woke fiction producers/critics who explicitly use "(imagined) downstream effects on how humans behave in society" as the measure of quality, but I don't think this is a reasonable position. There's no objective measure of "quality" in fiction, but it doesn't then follow that it's completely subjective and merely a question of who's being pandered to.

I would say that if there is no objective measure of quality, it does necessarily follow that quality is subjective. That's how the definitions of the words work, really.

I would say that if there is no objective measure of quality, it does necessarily follow that quality is subjective.

No—there are plenty of things for which there exists no adequate measure, but that are still objective facts. We can't objectively measure the size of the universe—it's way, way beyond our capacity, light cones notwithstanding—but it is still an obvious objective fact that it's really big.

Likewise it's pretty obvious that, say, 'clarity of writing' or 'passion' can't be objectively measured in any way that makes sense, but they do objectively exist. To deny this is to be philosophically lost in something like moral relativism. And while I admit that it's completely valid to say that meaning and quality are entirely subjective, I don't think it's true nor is it a particularly interesting worldview.

but it doesn't then follow that it's completely subjective and merely a question of who's being pandered to.

"completely subjective" is redundant. A thing is either objective or subjective. There's no such thing as "partially objective", that makes it subjective.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. If it is true, I'm pretty sure it would imply that objectivity doesn't exist, which isn't exactly helpful since it seems to collapse the whole discussion into an argument over semantics.

Why would it imply that objectivity doesn't exist?

because perfect objectivity doesn't seem accessable to humans. Anything that passes through our brains picks up subjectivity along the way. At the same time, people can be more or less objective in their thinking, and the two seem like they can mix in a great many ways. If you use subjective judgement to select objective elements, or vice versa, what do you have?

OK, I want to understand your perspective a little better. At this point, it's completely uncontroversially established science that speed is fundamentally subjective. Albert Einstein theorized as such, and experiment after experiment has proven him right on this point. According to your perspective, does it then follow that speed is completely subjective and, as such, whether or not a cheetah is faster than me when running on an African prairie is a completely subjective matter, one open to interpretation with no objectivity whatsoever?

To get away from a question of science, it's also pretty well established that "quality in being a soccer player" is subjective. We can use stats to get close to objectivity, but those stats are also largely determined by the player's teammates and opponents that stats can't get us all the way there. Does it then follow that the question of who is better at soccer, Lionel Messi or 07mk, a completely subjective one, with no way of determining a right answer other than just what answer appeals to whom the most?

I don’t think there is a principled, objective stance where William Gibson is a better writer than Octavia Butler

There isn't a principled, objective, stance for every pair of authors you are comparing, but there is for some. You can't really say whether eating at McDonalds is better than Burger King, but they're both better than eating sewage.

There's also the problem that if you're choosing authors by wokeness, you're inherently going to have things which are bad by other standards, because those things are no longer your top priority. You may occasionally get lucky and find a good one anyway by chance, but you're no longer really selecting much for it.

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

https://www.dragoncon.org/awards/2022-dragon-award-ballot/

The 2022 con is over but they haven't announced the winners yet as far as I know.

I wish they had short stories and novellas in Dragon! It seems like Dragon is also essentially a democratic process for people willing to jump through the hoops. I would say I am overall very impressed by the various sci fi awards to more or less consistently award extremely high quality books over the years despite just being popularity contests.

Literally every scene that isn’t her fighting in a mecha is more of the above. The main character getting fucked over by her father. By the men in the military. By her lovers. By her copilot. It’s just not readable unless you’re the one being pandered to. She did take her book jacket photo wearing a cow onesie though, so that was pretty cool.

From the same site:

I’m a 20-something first-gen immigrant from small-town China who was raised by the Internet.

This explains most of this. Especially the last part, obviously.

I'm sure this is a recurring phenomenon. If you're from a culture that is more or less (so far) unaffected by the ongoing global Woke Cultural Revolution, and, as an angry Millennial, you decide that the traditions of your people are actually the source of all your personal misery and thus, although sustaining your ancestors through centuries, are worthy of erasure and oblivion, your most obvious option is to emigrate to the West and try outdoing even the local SJWs, logically using your immigrant background to basically promote yourself as some sort of heroic fugitive. I'm pretty sure you can find thousands, or God knows how many, such people from China, Russia, Central Europe etc. (I suppose it's a lot trickier to manage this if you're from Africa and/or a Muslim country, because any criticism of such cultures is potential grounds for cancellation.)

Also, I'm sure that getting treated badly by the men you sexually select, and then interpreting that as average and universal male behavior, is pretty much the usual life experience of the average liberal Millennial woman at this point. If you utterly lack the simple ability to elicit long-term commitment from men you find eligible, which is something most women have clearly mastered for hundreds of thousands of years, this is how you normally end up, which, in turn, means that such literature will resonate with you.

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

I'd be interested in just a variant of this awards convention that isn't crap.

You can do really interesting things with an aimless and actless protagonist -- historically, Gulliver's Travels or The Time Machine, but my favorite example is the excellent Kino's Journey series. Chambers flubs not because the Wayfarers series lacks a goal, but for the same reasons the (much less conventionally woke and much more conventionally 'plotted') The Wrong Stars does: there's just not enough tension. Not that it needs to be high-stakes: both stories are, in the same way that Dragon Ball Z is high-stakes. But they have less actual conflict between what characters want and what they're doing than a Sesame Street episode, fewer drawing questions than Haibane Renmai or the average litRPG.

"Bots of the Lost Ark" is stronger in that there's at least something there -- you don't know why any of this is happening or who these people are, and you kinda want to -- but the characters aren't coherent enough to feel like it's important or urgent rather than author fiat. The best I can say about "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather" is that it's interestingly experimental and has a clever 'twist'? But in addition to the experiment sucking, the format just doesn't drive you to care about the gotcha until you're almost three-quarters of the way through, and the best it does for theme is a self-referential 'oh, but maybe themes are mixed' footnote.

Never Say You Can't Survive is... not science-fiction or fantasy, or even really fiction. It's half how-to-write, half self-help book. Which isn't the worst example of unrelated junk that's been put forward for Best Related Work, with some of this year's pieces edging on the onanistic. That's not just a matter of philosophical or political disagreement: “How Twitter can ruin a life” is closer to my views, but it's still very much a writing-about-a-real-world-news-about-sci-fi-writing thing rather than actually Related. But still a long-standing problem. And while I'm not the target audience for podcasts, this doesn't really impress.

But you could do some really fascinating stuff with these pieces, and with the exception of Never Say, it'd be a editing change, rather than a deep change of scope or theme. It just doesn't seem important, any more, in the same way that Tor's not really an editing service to the limited extent it once was.

((There are some Hugo Awards that were serviceable or even good. I don't think I'd have voted for Desolation Called Peace, but it's pretty enjoyable a read. I'd rather Fan Writer go to media writers rather than infrastructure ones, but the WorldCon voters as a whole have long-favored infrastructure and Buhlert has more than paid her dues on that matter. Dune both goes without saying and isn't another godsdamned Doctor Who episode. Lee Moyer is an amazing artist in general, and the small gods project showed that off a lot even if the actual works were incredibly shallow. I've got mixed feelings on Jemesin's writing for the same reasons I don't like Bojack Horseman, but I've heard Far Sector's not bad for a Green Lantern series.))

I'm also generally unhappy about the repeats. A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace aren't awful, as much as the latter had a little too much overlap in one of its twists with Ender's Game. But especially good competition like Project Hail Mary or Black Water Sister, it feels at best like it's a symptom of block voting for the same authors to repeat.

A Memory Called Empire (…) [isn’t] awful, (…)

Is it not? I heard similar sentiment from someone whom I respect, and I started reading it without prejudice (I don’t follow who wins Hugo anymore, so I didn’t know who the author is). Wow was I disappointed. Constant mulling on the protagonist’s emotional state really made me queasy, but when the main character casually shared the most important secret of her culture to some freshly, randomly met guys, it was too stupid to continue.

can I at least have my own awards convention

This is the rub, of course. The woke memeplex grows by entryism and as such treats gatekeeping as an attack. You'd be lucky to get an independent book review site that rates books on explicitly non-woke grounds, but I doubt even that is feasible. (if anyone knows of one, please let me know) Even if it managed to avoid DDOS and doxxing and deplatforming campaigns, you're still left with a userbase of three principled libertarians and a zillion witches.

I dont know how to solve this one, other than 'read books from before 2010' and 'wait for the culture to change again to something less specifically hostile to this one thing'.

Other than, possibly, having a The Motte book review club.

The problem with every attempt I've seen at "explicitly non-woke reviews" is that they just end up pushing right-wing authors because non-woke.

So like, I enjoy Larry Correia and Tom Kratman and John Ringo and John C. Wright, but of those guys, only Wright is what I'd call a literary stylist, and he's hardly innocent of didactic writing.

Thoughts on Blaine Pardoe?

Haven't read him, had to Google him. He writes BattleTech tie-in novels? I played some BattleTech back in the day, but was never interested enough in the lore to read the books.

He wrote some of the bigger novels, IIRC. He's a big part of the Clans storyline.

I noticed the same thing, and was considering making a post. At this point, just assume that the Hugos are entirely a bluecheck award.

More interestingly, it really stood out in the /fantasy discussion that no one was willing to point out the near total sweep by the ladies. It's kind of eerie, to see something that blatant just go unremarked. I thought about pointing it out, but I expected I would just get the comment deleted and a mod warning.

I was under the impression that the most popular sci-fi was by-and-large written by straight white males who are, if not necessarily MAGA republicans, then at least very politically incorrect(eg, John Ringo, Orson Scott Card, David Weber). Is it any real surprise that with that backdrop there is an impetus for the wokes to try to promote already woke stuff as a replacement whether or not it makes any sense?

I was under the impression that the most popular sci-fi was by-and-large written by straight white males who are, if not necessarily MAGA republicans, then at least very politically incorrect

If we count Hispanic men and conservative leaning black women as "white" and "male" yes. Remember that this is the beef that instigated the whole "sad puppy" affair. The original complaint was that the alleged concern was never about diversity, it was crushing dissent and the competition, and I feel that history has vindicated that position. In essence the whole Hugo controversy from 2013 - 2016 can be summed up as the board of directors at Tor and Del Rey looking to get the Baen crowd canceled for not being woke enough. They may have succeeded, but the cancellation does not seemed to have hurt Baen's sales. Turns out that there is a market for old fashioned (IE "unwoke") pulp fiction and Baen has been happy to fill it.

I don’t have much difficulty wrapping my head around a Hispanic white.

I was unaware of the black women in sci-fi thing.

the most famous example I know is Octavia Butler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler

Plenty of sf classics were written by leftists though? Gibson, arguably the father of cyberpunk, is even woke now.

I'm not even sure what baseline you could pick that would make your proposition true. Straight white men are already a pretty unwoke demo.

But I don't know the numbers, you may be right that conservatives are very overrepresented in sf classics.

I don't think Ringo or Weber are particularly popular? The current bestselling sci-fi book published in the last year is Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith, per Publishers Weekly (Adam Christopher). Behind that, Becky Chambers and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are shipping the most volume for non-star wars sci-fi properties published in the last year. This hardly seems like there is a lot of volume on new books from 'politically incorrect' white male authors. Closest thing is maybe Ernest Cline with Ready Player Two last year?

As most producers and consumers of fiction now are women, by a fair margin, I don't find this too surprising.

Why would you use the current demographics of the industry as evidence about the past demographics of the industry when the topic is the changing demographics of the industry?

I'm not making any contention about the past demographics of the industry. Tired claims of entryism or institutional capture depend on there being a mismatch against revealed consumer preferences. Said mismatch does not exist.

The post you were replying to was about the past demographics of the industry. Are you claiming that Sci fi has never been dominated by white men?

Also "tired", particularly without any evidence behind it or even an explanation of what you think specifically is tired, is consensus building. And data from after the entryism is not revealed consumer preference, so I would appreciate it if you could define those terms so I know what you mean.

This is a claim that really needs evidence. For example, you've cited volume, but didn't mention any hard numbers.

Here it is copied from the PW letter, units are for the four-week period ending 22-7-30 (I have removed titles not published in the last 12 months):

| Title                         | Author               | Publication Date | Units  |

|-------------------------------|----------------------|------------------|--------|

| Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith | Adam Christopher     | Jun 2022         | 11,409 |

| A Prayer for the Crown-Shy    | Becky Chambers       | Jul 2022         | 6,009  |

| Star Wars: Brotherhood        | Mike Chen            | May 2022         | 5,747  |

| The Daughter of Doctor Moreau | Silvia Moreno-Garcia | Jul 2022         | 5,731  |

PW would be pulling from NPD Bookscan like everyone else, but unfortunately I don't have access to them

In year 3 of women dominating the awards I remember there was an article bragging about it:

The Verge: Women swept the Hugo Awards — again

Unsurprisingly, I haven't seen a similar article for the 3 subsequent years. Here is a comment I made about it at the time.

As that comment mentions, in 2013 submissions to Tor UK around 78% of science fiction authors, 67% of "Historical/epic/high-fantasy" authors, and 43% of "Urban fantasy/paranormal romance" authors were male. So the difference between the last 6 years of Hugo nominees/winners and the demographics of the field are even more dramatic. Though it's possible the demographics of the field itself has shifted dramatically since then, especially given the various anecdotal reports of overt discrimination in the publishing industry. (I don't know how much the increased viability of self-publishing might ameliorate this.) But I suspect that if there was a way to get more recent data (does somewhere like Amazon/Goodreads have enough scrapable demographic data on authors?) men would still be writing the majority of the science fiction.

One way to steelman this is to consider that it's a natural process of art returning to its ancestral roots – in a more professional, more specialized world. What worth are visionary utopias conjured by writers (or dramas pointing at some possible utopian outcome)? We have experts, activists and politicians and special services, also payment processors and investors and the rest of the market for that; it's blatantly undemocratic to aid some weird Idea Guy in using his verbal skill to disseminate his non-vetoed ideas, no doubt introducing harmful biases and potentially exposing us to existential risks. Words are power; power ought not to be wielded irresponsibly.

What use are stories, then? Palatable consumable vessels to reinforce ideology which was developed by people trained in ideological domains; warning of evil, reminding us of the attraction of good. Stories are stylized allegories, parables, and myths of the tribe, but the tribe's ethos does not originate in the stories. Imagine if we allowed speechwriters to engineer state or corporate policy, spin doctors to decide the ultimate direction of the spin – preposterous. It's only proper show of humility for an author to simply wrap the approved, taught doctrine from the pulpit in prettier words or images. Perhaps women are naturally better at this than men by such an extent (whereas men are better at autistic daydreaming; though men used to make okay moralist writers). But even if not, this job's not so hard that we'd lose a lot of value by using the award ceremony itself to make the same point as award-winning works.

To group trivial identitarian narcissism together with exploration of group-specific abstract aesthetics under the label of pandering is to make pandering uselessly broad a concept – unless we indulge in some mental gymnastics to define a group that is being pandered to in the latter case. Maybe your group is people who think they don't need social sanction to peddle their homegrown visions for society. Here's a dangerous one.

I read Iron Widow, and it was even worse than you describe.

The protagonist doesn't merely blast aggressive feminism, she engages in outright evil, monstrous actions - she kills her entire family, including a brother who was seemingly innocent. She kills some minor characters who acted against her despite the fact that their sole motivation is that their children were held hostage. And, she kills an antagonist (who, granted, did some pretty terrible things) by personally torturing him to death.

None of these actions trouble her in the least.

The pattern seems to be that outside of the protagonists, the entire world is divided into innocent victims (none of whom, it must be noted, get any real characterization) and evil oppressors, who have no rights and are entitled to no moral consideration. This is the worldview that leads to genocide.

Have I mentioned that this book is in the 'YA' category, so nominally aimed at teenagers?

The troubling thing, in my mind, is how a work with such an abhorrent worldview gets so much approval - it's been nominated for multiple awards, it's on the NYT best-seller list, and highly rated on goodreads. That tells me that either there's a large segment of the public that has no problem with it, or that the tastemakers are actively pushing it. I don't think either possibility is a good sign.

What exactly does it mean to pander? If we reduce it to making a product that appeals to some subset of the audience, writing good books is just pandering to people who have good taste.

I don't think the shift in awards is just a matter of "pandering" to a different audience. The Left Hand of Darkness is actually pretty similar in terms of themes and political orientation to a lot of the crap that won this year and it won both the Hugo and Nebula best novel awards 50 years ago.

It is true that the writing and character development are weak points in a lot of sci-fi classics, but it's not like these new winners are any better in that regard.

A lot of institutions are doing this now. Rhodes Scholars was heavily female.

Somewhat related AEI conferences are requiring masks. But claim they don’t discriminate by politics or race or a bunch of other things.

At this point (no proof they work) wearing a masks is about as repugnant a thing a Republican can. You are basically excluding from your event economists who represent the views of half the population. It’s no different than forcing a Hindu to eat beef.

Terry Goodkind.

Terry Goodkind's life is interesting. He began writing in mid-life without any otherwise demonstrable talent. Nowadays it's more of the opposite, in that top performers start early or are identified early in life.

I feel like your post is mixing apples and oranges, or at the very least painting with too broad a brush. You mention that the list of hugo + nebula winning novels are (in your opinion/recollection) apolitical but then you talk about novels that are just nominated for the hugo award. IMO, there are pollical books on that list (e.g. forever war, left hand of darkness, The Dispossessed) and I'm sure there are plenty of others if you actually looked at nominees instead of just novels that are popular enough to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards.

That said, there was a relatively apolitical scientific focused book on the nominees list Project_Hail_Mary, why not just read that?

There have always been political books on the list, but they weren't quite as common, and when they did appear, they had a variety of political opinions, not just all woke--the current diverse Hugos lack actual diversity.

What's stopping you from writing under a female sounding pseudonym?

I'm not sure if you're referencing this intentionally but some male writers did do something like this and it was quite controversial. I had just searched out the first article I could find on the subject without much care to the content besides that it got the basic details right and man is it a funny read. It tries to thread the needle on why publishing under a male sounding pseudonym to target a male dominated audience is good and empowering but publishing under a female pseudonym to captured a female dominated audience is bad and cannot be legitimized. The idea that people shouldn't judge books by their author's genitals is not addressed.

Men like Martínez, Díaz, and Mercero have had their time in the spotlight and the thousands of real Carmen Molas are simply waiting in the wings.

So that's the plan? Individuals are to be sacrificed to balance the demographic scales? Rarely do I see this stated so baldly.

I ended up late with this post, with the topic being discussed on the late subreddit, but hey, let's bring it here and pretend it's original.

A lot of fiction uses the same character arc, which is called the positive character arc in the business or the hero's journey by Joseph Cambell:

  • the hero had a tragic event in the past

  • the hero has a flaw because of this event

  • the hero answers a call to adventure

  • the hero tries using the flawed approach and keeps failing

  • the hero reluctantly tries using the correct approach as a tool

  • the hero finally has some initial success, but the flaw bites him in the ass and he almost loses everything

  • the hero has a cathartic experience, rejects the flaw and adopts the right approach

  • the hero righteously wields the right approach and overcomes the opposition

This kind of arc is omnipresent: you see it in capeshit, it child-friendly comedies with Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy, in Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks cartoons.

What I've noticed is that modern heroines do not follow the same arc. On the surface, it follows the same beats:

  • the heroine had a tragic event in the past

  • the heroine thinks she has a flaw because of this event

  • the heroine answers a call to adventure

  • the heroine lets herself be held back and keeps failing

  • the heroine tries letting herself go and starts succeeding

  • the heroine finally has some initial success, but the tragic event comes back and she almost loses everything

  • the heroine has a cathartic experience, rejects the tragic event and embraces her full power

  • the heroine righteously wields her full power and overcomes the opposition

When I look at this version of the heroine's journey, which I have tried to express in the most charitable terms, it does still look a lot like the hero's journey. Yes, the flaw being thinking you have a flaw is a weird one, but it's still a flaw. The heroine still overcomes it and the adversity, what's wrong with this arc?

I think it's the duality of the flaw that is missing. In the beginning of the hero's journey the tragic event is in the past. The hero is one with the flaw. He might not be living in the best possible world, like Shrek or Earl from Up!, but everything he has he has achieved with the flaw. The flaw is not pure weakness. You can reasonably construct a reverse story, a story of downfall or corruption:

  • the hero is pure

  • the hero answers a call of seduction

  • the hero tries using the righteous approach and keeps failing

  • the hero reluctantly tries using the flawed approach as a tool

  • the hero finally has some initial success, but his idealism bites him in the ass and he almost loses everything

  • the hero has a traumatic experience and embraces the flaw

  • the hero wields the flaw and obtains a victory that he learns all too late is hollow

You cannot do this with the heroine's journey, the reverse heroine's journey is just gaslighting that ends with a mental breakdown. The hero goes down and up in his journey (and up and down in his reverse journey), the heroine just goes up and up, there's no moral lesson beyond "don't let yourself be trod upon".

the heroine thinks she has a flaw because of this event

That's one of the prime characteristics of a Mary Sue. The author's not willing to create an actual flaw for the character, so it's "I blame myself for this thing I'm not responsible for", "I don't realize how awesome I am", "other people don't realize how awesome I am", etc.

Yeah. Or the author includes characteristics that should be considered flaws, but it turns out that its not the character that has to change or improve, oh no, everyone else just had to recognize their greatness/accept them just the way they are. Everyone else had to change don't you know.

Its that failure to include change or growth since that would require acknowledging that a flaw existed that rubs me the wrong way about characters like Rey Skywalker or Captain Marvel, perhaps above and beyond the failure to make them struggle.

The hero's journey typically starts with the "character vs self conflict", while the heroine's journey you describe is more like "character vs society."

The hero has to overcome some internal conflict before they can succeed in their other conflicts. But a heroine seems to not be overcoming her own internal conflict, but instead figuring out that her internal conflict is actually something imposed on them by society's stereotypes of women. Hell, the heroine's journey may be better parsed as "character vs (character vs self)."

There are movies where the heroine follows the hero's journey. Romantic films are big on them. The internal conflict is typically about which guy to pick, the trauma is some crap relationship from years ago. Lifetime/Hallmark movies do a lot of this, too. You'll see some big city lawyer (female) who has to go and close a deal on some property development in a beautiful small town. She goes and meets a handsome guy, usually they get off on the wrong foot. And he happens to run a failing business, which just happens to be the one she's there to buy. He bitches about how horrible the property developer is, but he has no choice but to sell. She hides that she's working for them. Internal struggle, people find out, everyone hates her, she realizes she loves the dude and hates her job, she quits her job and manages to save the failing business. Happy ending.

Anyways, what I hate in many Hollywood movies is that the female lead doesn't have the initial struggle at all. The story is basically reduced down to just the main conflict, but we go through the motions like there's a character vs character conflict. Instead this is basically just targeted at the audience, it's a "character vs (audience vs society)" conflict or something. Like we're supposed to expect her to fail, to struggle, but she doesn't. Our expectations, as they say, are subverted. And we're bigots if we think that the character should have struggled. Really what we're seeking is for the character to grow. If our heroine happened to meet the enemy at the beginning, it'd be a short film rather than a feature.

I've felt many recent female characters are basically written like one-dimensional villains, but they happen to always win.

I've felt many recent female characters are basically written like one-dimensional villains, but they happen to always win.

This would be really interesting to unpack just because we could make the point that there are many female villains who are actually well-rounded characters because they have some tragic flaw (usually related to their reasons for being a villain) AND they act in an agentic fashion. Indeed they'd have to, or else the plot wouldn't happen! So they don't end up shortchanged in the character department like a female heroine might be.

And then discuss the point that Disney has recently started making films that examine their (female) villain characters and given them backstory... in a way that tends to explain or justify their flaws that led to villainy as not really their fault. In the process arguably making them less interesting.

Somehow I doubt we're going to get a Gaston movie that explains that his extreme narcissism and borderline obsession with Belle is the result of a traumatic childhood that drove him to be an extremely competitive perfectionist or something.

The man must realize a lesson of humility where he confronts his inner darkness/weakness/emptiness, the heroine must realize the truth of her inner light/power/fullness.

This coincides with the Western cultural understanding of men as inherently agentic and women as inherently unagentic. This also coincides with the pagan understanding of the act of sex as weakening men and strengthening women.

I have not watched any drag shows (besides Rocky Horror Picture Show, Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and that one episode of My Little Pony), but I am putting together pieces of a puzzle I haven’t seen: in a drag show storyline, the drag queen empowers the heroine to find, embrace, and perform her inner light/power/fullness.

One of the fascinating things about season 1 of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is that the friendship between the two focus ponies of the episode is treated by the story structure as the hero, and both ponies involved must own the errors they made before the friendship is restored and the “hero” “wins”. In particular, the Rarity/Applejack sleepover episode and the Rarity/Fluttershy fashion model episode.

This coincides with the Western cultural understanding of men as inherently agentic and women as inherently unagentic.

Is this a 'Western cultural understanding'? I imagine this is a pretty universal phenomenon, found in virtually all other cultures too. And even modern woke feminist media, which is ostensibly trying to deconstruct/criticise Western cultural traditions ends up reproducing the same thing (without realising it?), which is half the reason woke media sucks, because more often then not the female heroine has no agency despite the story pretending like she does.

I mean it's been more than a century and men are still trying to figure out whether it was a good idea to let women out of the kitchen. So the roots are definitely deep. Almost no culture in the world is considered sociologically matriarchal, so in majority cases the men are the decision makers so again that would bias the world view towards men as agents and women as inherently unagentic.

However there is another alternative system that does arise in certain cultural time periods. Generally during the warrior class in high levels of activity time periods. Such that often the men would go to war and the women would be the home care takers along with handling finances and the family business or their family part of the feudal estate. In these instances women are decision makers and are well versed in financial matters.

It is my belief that if industrialization had not taken place, then this would likely have been the final outcome of gender roles. A woman respected within her own sphere of influence as a well educated and skilled person but still within a societal expectation of her area of expertise being a woman's role.

So it would be akin to all men being soldiers, and all women being real estate agents as a firm rule or something along those lines separating certain skilled jobs as for women, and others for men, both being respected.

This is probably much pithier than it should be, but perhaps "equal rights means equal wrongs." That is: I think an important key to writing a good female character (any character, of course, but right now it seems most salient here) is to let her make mistakes, and let them be her own fault. Agency has its downsides as well as its upsides (with power comes responsibility, culpability, blame.)

But this runs into a problem: basically any given flaw can be construed as a harmful stereotype by someone motivated to find such things. Characters belonging to demographics that have many defenders are much riskier to write for public consumption than are characters that belong to demographics that don't.

I've recently been blown away by Better Call Saul and specifically how compelling the character of Kim Wexler felt in that it so completely ridiculed 99% of recently written female lead characters.

And yeah it seems it just comes down to this, Kim actually has character development, her entire arc revolves around a real struggle with honesty and playing with the truth, which is thematically appropriate for a lawyer show, and she actually has a legitimate hard time with failures and losses, and falls and trials before she can redeem herself in whatever ways she still can.

In other words, she's actually human and not mere propaganda as Orwell would put it.

Notice that Kim is also a very competent lawyer and likeable person, and this is recognized and remarked upon by almost everyone that encounters her.

If that was all there was to her then she'd be Mary Sue-ish. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with depicting your characters as competent and well-liked! That's not the issue! First it helps that you show their competence rather than having everyone else gush about it, and second they have to struggle with actual problems and even make mistakes, even if said struggles and mistakes are invisible to all but the audience.

I loved that in BCS the only people that knew Kim's personal struggles and demons was herself and Jimmy (and us, the viewers), as far as everyone else was concerned Kim never did anything wrong and rarely made mistakes.

One thing I loved about Kim was a sort of "uncanny valley" about her that made her so close to being a Mary Sue and appear as one to so many characters within the show. It was to the extent that even I as an audience member who got to watch her darker parts felt confused as to why someone like her was with someone like Jimmy, and I had to constantly remind myself that she really wasn't the perfect hyper-competent well-put-together lawyer that her image made her out to be. Her flaws were huge and significant for the impact it had on so many lives, but also subtle due to her presentation, which I suppose was a common theme with most of the main characters in that show.

The problem is that every female lauded by the culture war people hero is a Mary Sue.

Think of it - Ripley, Vasquez, Sarah Connor, Charlie's angels, Red Sonja, Geena Davis, Every synthia rothrock heroine are largely forgotten.

And that makes for meh cultural artifacts.

I think that lately we have been sold the feminist journey which boils down to - you are perfect, everything bad that happens to you is outside worlds fault.

Vasquez is a side character. Neither Ripley nor Sarah Connor are Mary Sues.

That is what I say - the action heroines if the past - that were liked and sometimes adored by the male audience were not May Sues. And they went the way of the dodo. The current crop - let's say after Capitan Marvel all are.

Geena Davis

The actress?

Couldn't be bothered to remember her roles, but she did had a knack for playing badasses.

Your heroine version of heroine's journey definitely fits Captain Marvel movie. Now I had some discussions around Galadriel character in latest Rings of Power TV show. Some people defend it as hero's journey:

  • Galadriel had her brother die tragically

  • Galadriel is now raging and obsessed with revenge which is her flaw

  • Galadriel listens to the call for adventure to find Sauron and enact her revenge on him at all costs. And she has success finding various clues about him

  • Galadriel is too hardcore, pushing everybody away from her due to her single-minded focus on revenge, this is her flaw

Now there are some not so subtle hints that the character of Halbrand is the Sauron and he will use her rage to actually enact his plan. Which will cause Galadriel to almost lose everything. Then she gets rid of the flaw, gives up the whole "warrior Guyladriel" shit and becomes protector/enchantress Galadriel from the books. Now I'd actually love this arc, although I would definitely had it described differently. It would be good if in prologue Galadriel was not warrior-princess but more measured wise woman. Only death of her brother driving her to embrace the flaw.

Another potential version of this character arc using your heroine arc:

  • Galadriel is the bestest ever: the wisest, fairest, smartest and best warrior out there. She is pure

  • Galadriel will have her wings clipped in some future episode, maybe being tricked by Halbrand/Sauron and other male characters who will be successful at putting her down.

  • Galadriel will fail to attain as much success as before with this tactic.

  • Galadriel will be in the end forced to use actual force to save hobbits and other main characters. Only to be chastized for it so she returns to her pacific ways

  • Saurons takes advantage and kills loads of people - including weakling men that held her down

  • Galadriel is pissed, picks up her sword and decapitates sauron Arya Stark style in 5 seconds

  • All the men who offered any criticism will bend their knees to her and proclaim her as the true Elven Warlord for the end of times

  • The End

I am actually "looking forward" to seeing where the show moves with her story.

I would agree that "I am only fighting as a warrior because of my rage and I should be doing something else that I have more honest motives for" counts as a flawed heroine. But my confidence that a major American producer these days would have such a plot is close to zero.

Do Brontë, Woolf and Austen usually have female protagonists that follow the hero’s journey, or the heroine’s journey? I’m trying to think back to what I remember about Gossip Girls… it may be that there’s a gendered difference in what men and women want to consume. The new heroine’s journey might be building upon an earlier form, as a new variation of the damsel in distress motif. She’s saved not from a charming ideal man but from her own self-actuallyization and capitalist-individualist empowerment. I’m really not familiar enough with female protagonists in women’s literature, but lots of the Disney protagonists have the old motif.

Jane Eyre is an interesting case. It's Edward Rochester who undergoes the hero's journey in the novel, while the eponymous girl has a flat character arc in Thornfield Hall and beyond: she leaves Lowood School a fully-formed character.

We just watched Queen's Gambit (which we hadn't seen before), and in it, Beth Harmon goes through a process which is indicated here to be the traditional hero's journey. She has a very obvious flaw (addiction to drugs and alcohol, also somewhat autistic way to treat other people), gets some success due to the drugs helping her visualize chess games but blows important games due to the drink, and in the end beats the Soviet world champion by consciously learning to stay away from drugs and alcohol and trusting the Power of Friendship.

Despite this, I've seen her being called a Mary Sue in some online comments, despite not fulfilling obvious characteristics (she has obvious flaws, she might be naturally talented but also works very hard to get where she's at, she doesn't sleep with handsome men but with weird chess nerds), which makes me think that this term really often gets just applied at women who are generally portrayed as talented and able main characters (I mean, if we get a chess series, of course it's going to be about a chess genius and not just some average-to-good chess player).

Every single female character in anything will be called a Mary Sue by someone on the internet, it's a sub-variant of Godwin's Law. There's a decently-sized contingent of internetizens that are just as retarded as the average twitter or reddit leftist calling everything white supremacist, just for the other side.

Also, Mary Sue has drifted a bit. I think that now a colloquial definition of Mary Sue might be "A character that the story treats with favoritism that runs counter to the audience's sense of narrative consistency." The most blatant, elemental mary sues are self-indulgent; they're meant to appeal to the writer, and to no one else. Reading a story about a Mary Sue is like someone inviting you over for sex, but it turns out to just be them wanking then asking "was it good for you too?"

It's slightly unfortunate that every Woman Protagonist Achieving Something That A Man Told Her She Couldnt Do is now called a Mary Sue or Feminist Propaganda or whatever; my sympathy is limited because the feminist propagandists have been pushing Mary Sues for years and saying anyone who doesn't like self-indulgently-written characters just hates women.

In the new Predator movie, I honestly can't tell whether the main character was intended to be a Strong Female Role Model Who Everyone Is Mean To For No Reason, Which Is Why They All Deserved To Die, or a mildly-abrasive tomboy Final Girl. It doesn't help that the scenes in the film intended to show how smart and observant she is instead imply the viewer is an idiot who needs everything spelled out to them. I think of her as Not-Funny Aubrey Plaza.

Your hypothesis has some parallels to commentary on modern villains by YouTube movie reviewer the Critical Drinker. He concludes that writers are often forced into this kind of arc by conventions that won’t let the heroine be portrayed at a disadvantage to a male antagonist.

Is it more common to have a classic hero’s journey when the heroine faces a villainess?

There seems to be something deeply, almost perversely self-centered about the heroine's story. I used to have trouble differentiating the quintessential Mary Sue who just needs to believe in herself, from the popular Male Action Hero, who is already amazing at everything he tries to do, and whose flaws usually don't impact the story much at all. What I've realized is that the heroine's story is so much more focused on an internal reality, whereas the hero's story is very external and is focused on his impact on the world.

Generally a male action hero will use clever tricks to beat enemies, engaging in lots of shootouts, manipulations, reconnaissance, etc.. Q female action hero will do the same, but the focus will be on her, how cool she is while she's doing it, how hot she is even though she doesn't wear makeup, how unflappable she is in a dangerous situation.

These are generalizations of course, with plenty of exceptions. I think the key is to remember that even though the heroine's journey looks similar on the surface, really the whole external world is just being used to reveal things about the main character. Some level of inner character development and some level of external accomplishments are good, but heroes and heroines often occupy the extremes on either side when usually the middle is better.

Could this not be explained by the vastly different lived-experience of man and woman?

These stories exist within a culture, with moral lessons addressing current social ills.

The heroine thinks there is a flaw. And that thought was put into her head (and the heads of other women) by an oppressive patriarchal society.

The tragic event -- it is not one specific event that happened to the heroine, but rather a continuous and systemic oppressive event that happens to all women everywhere.

As such, the heroine's story addresses a societal issue, rather than an individual one

That's a thought I've had as well. Maybe the heroine's journey is the way it is because of the fact that women are different from men. Struggle for women is different from struggle for men.

When I go through a breakup or a death or a struggle, as a man, I deal with it. I sit in the pain, I learn about myself and the world. But I also am likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors. My experience is such that I am forced to grapple with the thing on it's own, on my own. Often with a great deal of examination of why I'm shitty, how I contributed to said bad thing.

When women I know go through a bad thing, they call upon their network, they have endless supporters (even if said supporters are superficial and transactional), but they have their support that insists they are great and the thing is actually horrible and not their fault. Women struggling involves them calling upon their vast social network of mostly female supporters. There isn't a concept of loneliness in one's shittiness for any women I know.

The heroine's journey simply resonates with women, and men think it's asinine. Women probably don't resonate with the hero's journey in the same way that men do either.

Whether one or the other is more or less "good" depends on the audience.

I think this is onto something but also missing a key step. The "lived-experience" that a flaw that that a woman thinks she has but is actually reflective of a continuous and systemic oppressive event is in itself a narrative that is taught to many women (and men) who then go on to write characters that reflect the narrative that's been taught to them about their lives.

Spoilers follow for House of the Dragon, you've been warned.

HOTD is based on an era of Targaryen history called the Dance of the Dragons, which is a civil war between rival claimants for the Iron Throne - one side led by Rhaenyra Targaryen, and the other by her half-brother Aegon Targaryen. The gist of it is that Rhaenyra, whose mother died when she was young, was King Viserys I Targaryen's only child for a long time, and he made her his heir because otherwise the throne would have gone to his thoroughly unsuitable brother Daemon, a prideful man with a violent and sadistic streak. But then Viserys remarried and had a son, Aegon, with his second wife Alicent Hightower. Now there was another male claimant to the throne - the king's own son, no less. Many began to say that Aegon was the rightful heir, in keeping with the traditional male-preference primogeniture of Westeros, but Viserys refused to change the succession. When Viserys finally died, Aegon had no personal interest in contesting Rhaenyra's succession, but his councilors persuaded him - not without some merit - that his life would be in peril if Rhaenyra ascended the throne, as she was now being advised by her uncle Daemon, and Daemon would likely seek to have Aegon killed since lords discontented with Rhaenyra's rule might try to use him to undermine her. So Aegon declared his claim in King's Landing while Rhaenyra was away on Dragonstone; the two summoned their allies, armies and dragons, and war began.

At the outset I have low expectations for this series because it's based on a sidebook by GRRM called Fire & Blood, which is written as a historical account and rather shallower in perspective than ASOIAF proper, so the source material is somewhat thin. But aside from that, what I do respect in GRRM's writing is his ability to write events, character motivations, and interactions that follow the internal logic of the time and setting. Westeros is a patriarchal feudal culture, so Rhaenyra's claim to the throne would be sketchy without considerable support from the nobility. GRRM writes characters and dialogue that follow that logic, highlight Viserys's weakness in failing to foresee and prevent the looming conflict, without wasting time scoffing about the backwardness of the setting from his 21st century liberal perspective. The quality of the writing near the end of GOT, and interviews given by the writers of HOTD, leave me with no reason to believe that HOTD will be anything other than a simple-minded morality tale about sexism and misogyny, since modern writing rooms seem to be full of people who believe the internal logic of the setting is inherently illegitimate if it doesn't conform to the Democratic Party's policy platform. In the lore, the king has to take the views and biases of his lords into account, as he depends on them for soldiers, taxes and support; on the show, we're bound to get a lot of speeches about how the sexist lords should shut up and do as the crown says, Time's Up.

The other CW aspect of it is the casting of House Velaryon, led by Lord Corlys Velaryon. In the lore, the Velaryons are close allies of the Targaryens, as they are the only other Valyrian house in Westeros. The Velaryons and Targaryens have intermarried extensively over the centuries to keep the Valyrian bloodlines pure. On the show, the Velaryons are played by black people, while the Targaryens are all white. The Velaryons even make it a point to repeatedly stress how pure their Valyrian blood is and how far back they go, all the way to Old Valyria before it was destroyed.

ASOIAF is a story that obsesses over genealogy and phenotypes. How characters look, and how different they look from certain other characters, is an actual casus belli in the lore.

  1. The most well-known example is Ned Stark going over 300 years of Baratheon genealogy, observing that Baratheon children always have black hair no matter the coloring of the non-Baratheon parent, and realizing that the blonde Joffrey cannot be Robert Baratheon's son. HOTD throws that out of the window in Episode 1 by giving Rhaenys Targaryen, who is Corlys Velaryon's wife and the daughter of Aemon Targaryen and Jocelyn Baratheon, the standard silver hair of Valyrians even though it's actually an important plot point that she had black hair. Not only did GRRM make note of this in the lore, he retconned an earlier short story he wrote where Rhaenys had silver hair because he realized it would contradict Baratheons always having black hair.

  2. In the story that HOTD is based on, Rhaenyra Targaryen is engaged to Corlys's son Laenor Velaryon, to fortify her claim to the throne by bringing the two Valyrian houses together in marriage. Laenor turns out to be a cross-dressing homosexual who cannot consummate the marriage, and Rhaenyra cuckolds him by sleeping with one of her bodyguards, Ser Harwin Strong, and passing off Strong's children as Laenor's. Notably Rhaenyra and Laenor are both Valyrians with silver hair and violet eyes, but Rhaenyra's children all come out with the brown hair and eyes of the Strong family, naturally leading to (accurate) rumors that they are bastards. The phenotype of Rhaenyra's bastards actually undermines her claim to the throne because her rival Alicent consistently produces Valyrian-looking children with her husband Viserys, leading several lords to decide that Alicent's bloodline should be the true ruling dynasty. Rhaenyra even makes it a capital offense to question the parentage of her children, going so far as to execute Corlys's brother Vaemond when he objects to the obvious cuckolding of his nephew, and Corlys is forced to watch her place her bastards in a position to inherit his family's title and fortune.

  3. Decades after the events of HOTD, King Daeron II Targaryen brings Dorne into the Seven Kingdoms by marrying the Dornish princess Myriah Martell. Daeron and Myriah's eldest son, the crown prince Baelor, is noted to have inherited his mother's dark hair and eyes, leading Daeron's critics (among them many of the Dornishmen's traditional rivals and enemies in the Reach and Stormlands) to claim that the future king is more Martell than Targaryen. Daeron's perceived weakness and favoritism towards the Dornish leads these critics to support the rival claim of Daeron's half-brother Daemon Blackfyre, whose phenotype is noted as contributing to his support, as not only does he have the traditional Valyrian traits of silver hair and purple eyes, he is said to be the spitting image of Aegon the Conqueror himself.

A common defense of raceswapping characters like this is that it "doesn't affect the story", but if any story was going to be affected by this, it would be ASOIAF. The lore is very unambiguous on the subject - Valyrians have pale skin, silver-blonde hair, and blue-purple eyes. It's a point of pride for them and an indication that their Valyrian blood is strong - these people are unabashedly racial supremacists. Members of House Velaryon are repeatedly stated to possess these traits, and they use it as a justification for their close ties to the ruling Targaryens and all the power and prestige that accompanies those ties. It's ludicrous for the show to keep those elements of Valyrian racial supremacy and blood purity obsession while making the Velaryons black, with the black Velaryons even proposing marriage to the Targaryen king on the grounds that it would "keep the bloodline pure". It's like an aborted attempt at an Americanization of Valyria - "Valyrian isn't a race, it's a culture/idea/Constitution!" - but it doesn't work because Valyrians are obsessed with their race in the lore, and removing that takes away a major part of their characters. It's plainly just bowing to the diversity obsession, but no one wants to actually say so - instead you get everyone reciting this nonsense about how "actually it works with the lore" and "even if it doesn't work with the lore, it doesn't change anything in the story".

GRRM actually has an old blog post where he discusses an idea he once had about making the Targaryens, who conquered Westeros, a dynasty of black people ruling a white continent. He said he ultimately decided against it because it would be problematic, since many of the Targaryens were corrupt, evil and/or insane - in other words, if you're going to write about black people in positions of power, they can only be paragons of virtue as per the cultural-political imperatives of our time. Hard to fault GRRM for that, since it's an accurate assessment of the culture: ask not what the black mayors of Jackson have been doing for the last 30 years, ask instead what the white governors of Mississippi have done.

The best comparison to this I can think of where race/ethnicity affects the story is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There was an article a year or two ago about a group of students boycotting a university production of it because they cast a white girl as Esmeralda. In the actual book (not the Disney movie) a group of gypsies swap Quasimodo for Esmeralda when she's an infant. Esmeralda's mother is ethnically French. Many years later she runs into Esmeralda and rages against her because she sees her as one of the gypsies that kidnapped her daughter. One of the major points is that she is despising her own daughter, her own flesh and blood, due to ethnic hatred.

There's a lot of beautiful things that have been lost or utterly ruined in the SJW quest to brownwash and blackwash the world of literature.

One of my normie acquaintances was a big GoT enjoyer, but Season 8 was such crap that even he had to admit it, more or less. Now he's sucked into the HotD hype and he's adamant that this time it won't turn into crap, "because the source material is there for the whole series and it's great". LOL

I despise normies.

I'm not interested in GoT, ASOIAF or this new show but since the creator is still alive, and apparently happy with the race-swapping, it's legitimate. Sure, it contradicts canon, but he can change canon if he likes! (I don't have much regard left for GRRM as a writer, by this point, and I've always resented his throwaway line about "I always wanted to know what was the tax basis of Gondor. Yeah, that was what the show really needed for a better season 8 - a coherent economic policy). And the point that this is based on a complete book so there is a beginning, middle and end to the story is a good one.

What they're doing with Rings of Power does annoy me. I don't care that much about Tar-Míriel being race swapped, because at least they have a human character played by a human, and looking approximately as you would expect royalty to look. I'm more annoyed about the black Elf and black Dwarf not on racism grounds, but because they've been jammed in there with no attempt at providing a backstory or reason for why they are a different race to others of their species that we see. Where are the other black Elves and black Dwarves? And the media interviews about giving prominent roles to BIPOC are all flannel, because these are not really important characters. They didn't make Durin IV black, they didn't make Celebrimbor black. So the big names and important main characters are all white, still. You can't get much whiter than Galadriel unless you go albino, or that weird Morgoth priest/priestess Eminem look-a-like. But we have a couple of invented original characters, plus background general Númenorean citizens, who are Hispanic or black or Asian, so that ticks off the DEI checkboxes. Actually, now I think of it, that Haradrim village or on the borders of Harad where Bronwyn (new invented human character) and Arondir (our new invented mixed-race Elf) are making cow-eyes at each other should be a hell of a lot browner than it seems to be on screen - again, a lot of white guys so far as I saw. That was a place that could legitimately have been all brown faces, but they dodged on that one, I wonder why? A village of brown-skinned people would fit beautifully with their anti-colonialist, anti-racist theme: "Sure, our ancestors fought on the side of the Big Bad, but that wasn't our fault and it's not right to blame us for the past! Why are we living under military oversight/occupancy by white Elves?"

And since Tolkien is safely dead, and Christopher Tolkien is safely dead, and the estate is happy to take the money and run, they can get away with this.

I don't know if this is acceptably charitable, but is there any other interpretation outside of they just think we're stupid? They reskinned a character into a black skinned person, despite centuries of intermarrying Targaryens. Do they think that the desire for representation means that people are going to pointedly not think about the elephant in the room, in a show whose opening credits is a blood soaked family tree?

Who doesn't understand what's going on here?

They think "our audience is not going to be all book nerds, it'll be people who watched GoT last time and want to watch another show set in that world". Same with Rings of Power: they are looking to pull in a general audience not familiar with the canon and who don't care about it, but will remember the last hit TV show/movies and are willing to watch a high fantasy epic and pay for the privilege.

So if people complain the casting is not canon-compliant, they have the easy defence of "That's racism!" and get sympathy points for being attacked by trolls and bigots.

The blatantness is part of the power play. I remind myself it is a TV show, I really should just relax, but getting people to sign up for stupid lies and pretend they are not is not a bug, it is a feature.

Do they think that the desire for representation means that people are going to pointedly not think about the elephant in the room

Yes.

This is what people miss when they try to poke holes in stuff like gender identity; they don't care.

The master value is "equity" or "helping the downpressed"/"owning the oppressors" (defined as white men usually). So they are much less sensitive to claims of contradiction, illogic or irrationality.

In fact; they've already set the groundwork for treating the focus on logic as a mere contingent product of a certain sort of Western civilization or worse: not even just contingent (something can be true and our method for getting to it contingent) but always fraudulent and a cover for power.

Therefore their illogic in the service of helping oppressors is not inferior but of the same level, and actually better cause it's beneficial to an oppressed class.

Whenever I've seen a leftist hunted to ground on some of this stuff the final move is to always shrug their hands and go "well, it's helping the right people and it's all socially constructed anyway so I don't really care".

this makes the plot point about rhaenyra chopping off the heads of everyone pointing out the obvious fact that laenor velaryon is not the father of her kids even funnier, at least

also is there a way to add spoiler text?

Thanks for the writeup, I didn't know much of this backstory.

I forgot that Rhaenys Targaryen was in the ancestry of Robert (pretty importantly because she's the source of his claim to the iron throne).

I found them jarring just because of the Valyrian supremacy that fills the lore.

I get why the show would want to do that, but I wish they'd picked a different character maybe the Martells.

Robert's ancestral claim to the Iron Throne was based on a much closer relation - his grandmother Rhaelle Targaryen, who was Aegon V's daughter and married Ormund Baratheon.

Re race. They changed the valyrian pure bloodedness to being mostly hair color. The black velaryons all have silver hair too.

While scientifically this is a different genetics than our own world and yes they definitely reconned the baratheon black hair, I think the show runners have done an admirable job keeping the core plot alive while drawing in more woke modern audiences.

Who knows, maybe Laenor will turn out to be LGBTQIA+ and Rhaenyra will cuck him?

It's ludicrous for the show to keep those elements of Valyrian racial supremacy and blood purity obsession while making the Velaryons black, with the black Velaryons even proposing marriage to the Targaryen king on the grounds that it would "keep the bloodline pure".

In a show in which fire breathing dragons exist, is it really so impossible that race might be defined differently than how we define race? Or that skin color might be irrelevant to how they perceive pure bloodlines? Or that the affinity between the Valyrians and the Velaryons traces to a mythical past in which the progenitors of each allied to oust some malefactor, and that "purity" is defined as descent from one of those two heroes. Far from being "ludicrous," it is trivially easy to imagine a world in which is makes perfect sense.

He said he ultimately decided against it because it would be problematic, since many of the Targaryens were corrupt, evil and/or insane - in other words, if you're going to write about black people in positions of power, they can only be paragons of virtue

That inference is both logically and empirically incorrect. Logically, the statement, "I do not want to portray all the black characters as evil or insane" does not imply, "therefore, all black characters must be paragons of virtue." Empirically, there are tons of shows -- The Wire and Empire leap to mind -- in which black characters in position of power are not paragons of virtue

Far from being "ludicrous," it is trivially easy to imagine a world in which is makes perfect sense.

It's possible to imagine such a world, it would just be a completely different world. The lore explanation for why the Valyrians have their very particular look is that they were an isolated population that interbred heavily and their uncommon features are the result of unusual mutations becoming widespread in the population. They define race the same way we do. If you want to just throw out the lore so that you can cast black people, all you have to do is say that. Instead they want to pretend this is an insignificant deviation from the lore. Why piss in my ears and insist that it's raining?

That inference is both logically and empirically incorrect. Logically, the statement, "I do not want to portray all the black characters as evil or insane" does not imply, "therefore, all black characters must be paragons of virtue." Empirically, there are tons of shows -- The Wire and Empire leap to mind -- in which black characters in position of power are not paragons of virtue

To clarify, not all the Targaryens were evil or insane, and in fact most of them weren't. But the ones who were evil or insane were rapists, murderers, malicious degenerates and psychopaths, and GRRM didn't feel comfortable letting any of those characters be black.

Boise Pride cancels "Drag Kids" event after a number of sponsors withdrew, with a predictable dose of corporate doublespeak.

I have a lot of thoughts about this, but what is actually bothering me most right now is the coverage. Particularly this gem:

Several opponents of the festival on social media repeatedly referred to supporters as “groomers” – a nod to the unfounded QAnon conspiracy theory that Democrats and the elite run an underground pedophilic, satanic, sex cult.

As far as I can tell, this is a publicly-funded news organization actively spreading outright disinformation--FUD, really--about the term "groomer." It reminds me of when "cultural Marxism" became an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" practically overnight (no big deal, the term "critical theory" recaptured the energy). It reminds me of the sudden fluidity of online dictionary definitions every time a Democrat politician tells an obvious lie. It reminds me of Clarence Thomas being referred to by Harry Reid as a white man.

"Groomer" is effective rhetoric, so I can understand why certain groups want it killed. But like... how is "Drag Kids" even remotely plausibly not grooming? Some of the talking points I see floating on Twitter are, like, "What about child beauty pageants?" But this moves me not a single iota--I hate child beauty pageants for exactly the same reason. It's weird! It's creepy! Or to put it in less emotionally-charged terms: it's not something kids do, when they grow up in loving, healthy, stable environments. At best it's a symptom of deeper troubles; at worst, it's a direct cause of some of those troubles. I mean, yes, emotional and physical and sexual abuse, but also just long term psychological problems. Have you seen the stats on child movie stars? Olympic athletes? I don't think it's necessarily fair to insist that we strip away the culture war angles entirely, but if I'm steelmanning "Drag Kids" the best I can come up with is "this is a new manifestation of an old and widespread form of child abuse, namely, using children for adult entertainment, often by putting inappropriate pressure on them to participate." Are we really going to say Hollywood isn't rife with child abuse? (Hmm, they're also mostly Democrats...) And when someone says "Drag Kids is sexualizing children" only to be met with "no, you're making it sexual, you right-wing pervert, we're just having silly fun"--it's maddening. Like, really? I'm supposed to believe that you're putting your kid in a leather thong for silly fun? Be serious. If that's not grooming, nothing is.

Am I ranting? This feels pretty ranty. But I do have a serious question. What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language? How should I react, if not with ranting, to a transparent attempt to tar people who clearly want to protect children from manifest harms as mere conspiracy theorists? I am a bit old school, I learned to hate the phrase "think of the children" before many of you were born, but surely sometimes we do, in fact, need to protect children. Not incorporating child-sexualizing events into our civic religion seems like a pretty obvious way to do that.

And, I suppose, someone will point out that Boise Pride's "Drag Kids" grooming hour did indeed get canceled! The system works! The subtext there being--what am I complaining about? Well, in brief, I'm still complaining about the news coverage, which has very big "Republicans pounce" energy. I would like to be able to seriously criticize that sort of thing without actively culture warring, but I don't feel like I have a lot of good mistake-theory tools to respond with. Maybe that's the point, I guess--to try to maneuver people into a position where they feel sheepish for acting like an "aggressor" in the face of kids having "silly fun." Which seems, to me, like an especially evil way of being a conflict theorist.

I'm steelmanning "Drag Kids" the best I can come up with is "this is a new manifestation of an old and widespread form of child abuse, namely, using children for adult entertainment

I'm not fan of drag kids but is this honestly the best steelman you can come up with? This is not a moral failure but one of creativity. Is it really so hard for you to believe some people have swallowed the lgbt+ narrative whole? These papers are bothering to print it and many people are quite credulous to their dictates. You think it's more likely that this many parents are abusing their children than that they genuinely have bought the meme that this is a totally harmless opportunity for their children to explore their indentities in a a manner they've been assured is harmless.

You think it's more likely that this many parents are abusing their children than that they genuinely have bought the meme that this is a totally harmless opportunity for their children to explore their indentities in a a manner they've been assured is harmless.

I should maybe have been clearer that it was the organizer's and advocate's positions I was thinking of, there. I mean, it's not like we haven't seen this in other cultures. Sure, some credulous fool is always going to be a True Believer. I'm just not sure it counts as a steelman to say "oh, I understand--those people are just stupid."

An actual steelman is that kid drag is like a fun costume contest for people who believe that breaking gender stereotypes around dress or expression is a worthwhile activity and that it can be a healthy way for kids to express parts of themselves they might not otherwise be able to. It's like theatre. This would be versus the traditional, competitive, demanding "child beauty pageants" that are about judging the worth of a child on their appearance and talents. Kid drag would be in stark contrast to this, where everyone is celebrated no matter what they look like or what they do.

You can disagree with these kids and say they don't actually know what they're feeling, or they're brainwashed, or whatever, but maybe... it actually can be a nice experience for some kids.

Sure, I can see how overly-zealous activists parents could use kid drag to force their 6-year-old boy to express his "divine feminine" side, but I honestly have no idea what the ratio of kids with leftists parents who are exposed to the idea and want to do it versus the activist abuser parents forcing their kids is.

You're missing half of it. Which is that news organizations have given up any semblance of objectivity and have gone to full-on conclusory statements in their reporting. That is, "...the unfounded QAnon conspiracy theory...".

What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language?

To discard mistake theory as erroneous.

It's also a lie. One needs not be a QAnon believer at all in order to think of these people as child groomers.

To discard mistake theory as erroneous.

It's not about being right or wrong, it's about finding a way to live in the world with others. I don't want to discard mistake theory; life is more pleasant when I can find ways to make it work.

But I admit my aspirational thinking doesn't necessarily make you wrong.

Be serious. If that's not grooming, nothing is.

It isn't. Grooming in the context of CSE means to try to position a child so that you can have sexual contact of one sort or another with them. If you convince a child to wear a thong via drugs or alcohol or love bombing or manipulation so that you can have sex with them, or derive sexual enjoyment from watching them, this would be grooming. If you did so for any other reason it really shouldn't be called grooming. It's probably a terrible idea and might open your child up to positions where OTHER people can take advantage or derive the sexual pleasure talked about earlier, but it isn't grooming in this context.

Just like having your child take part in beauty pageants (as you mentioned) where they dress up as adults, might wear swimwear etc, wear make up, is not grooming unless it is with the intention of taking advantage of them sexually. In both cases you may well find such activities attract predators and this is a real risk, but the mothers of these sexualized girls are not groomers either. Living out some strange projected idea of success and acceptance through their own kids? Sure. Depriving them of a healthy childhood? Almost certainly. Guilty of some kind of emotional abuse? There is a good chance. But those things aren't grooming as used in the context of CSE which is the link that the rhetoric is trying to make.

It's a rhetorical weapon, building off of visceral dislike for these behaviors. Just like calling right wingers Nazis. The vast majority of right wingers, voters, politicians et all are not Nazis. The vast majority of parents and organizers of Drag events or child beauty pageants are not groomers.

I used to work with social workers and dealt with and wrote reports on some CSE cases, including Rotherham et al, the people grooming kids in those situations were doing so, to literally rape them and then often prostitute them. So no, neither child beauty pageants or drag kids stuff are in and of themselves grooming, without that intent. Stupid and possibly psychologically damaging yes. Grooming no. There is a gap in between. Just like there is a gap in between "I don't like illegal immigration" and "I hate the Jews".

It's entirely understandable for it to be used in the normal context, it is an effective weapon. I'd certainly if I were still a political advisor be advocating for Republicans to use it as an attack strategy. I am a little disappointed it seems to be getting traction here. The behaviors can be bad without being actual child grooming. A mother who has her child wear make up, takes bikini pictures of her in suggestive poses and the like in order to offer her to her new boyfriend (a real case) is a groomer. A mother who does all the same things because she things it's progressive or because it will let her child experience new things or because she wants to live out her glory days vicariously is not. It is still probably a terrible idea regardless.

For those who deal with CSE, and hopefully for us here, that is a distinction worth making.

It isn't. Grooming in the context of CSE means to try to position a child so that you can have sexual contact of one sort or another with them. If you convince a child to wear a thong via drugs or alcohol or love bombing or manipulation so that you can have sex with them, or derive sexual enjoyment from watching them, this would be grooming. If you did so for any other reason it really shouldn't be called grooming. It's probably a terrible idea and might open your child up to positions where OTHER people can take advantage or derive the sexual pleasure talked about earlier, but it isn't grooming in this context.

I don't think I agree with this. If a mother is, e.g., using psychological pressure on her child to tolerate her boyfriend's sexual abuse out of a sense of loyalty or even fear of the boyfriend, I would still characterize that as a central example of "grooming".

Sure as I said: "A mother who has her child wear make up, takes bikini pictures of her in suggestive poses and the like in order to offer her to her new boyfriend (a real case) is a groomer."

Replace the you or someone else can have sexual contact in the first sentence. If your goal is not for someone to derive sexual pleasure (yourself or another person) then it isn't grooming. otherwise people putting pictures of kids in the bath on Facebook, that someone then masturbates over is a groomer. They may be unwise, but that isn't the same thing.

Sure as I said: "A mother who has her child wear make up, takes bikini pictures of her in suggestive poses and the like in order to offer her to her new boyfriend (a real case) is a groomer."

Okay, take it another step back. The mother does all that same stuff, but doesn't have a specific boyfriend to offer her to. Instead, she does all the same things, because her social group praises her for doing it. Grooming or not?

It seems to me that shaping a child's sexuality in unhealthy ways that make them easier to prey on is the essence of grooming, and whether it's done on behalf of a specific person or just for the community of predators in general doesn't really change why that shaping is harmful or objectionable.

In your original example, the mother doesn't actually tell the kid that she's doing these things to get the kid to have sex with her boyfriend. Yet we consider these things harmful, even if the sex with the boyfriend doesn't happen, which is why we made a word for the "lowering kid's defenses to sexual exploitation" in the first place. The effect on the kid is the whole point.

Okay, take it another step back. The mother does all that same stuff, but doesn't have a specific boyfriend to offer her to. Instead, she does all the same things, because her social group praises her for doing it. Grooming or not?

Nope. If she doesn't have the intent of sexual contact from her child to someone else it is not grooming. She isn't preparing them for predators, she is behaving in ways that incidentally some predators like. Those are very different things. Like teaching your 12 yo daughter to wax her legs is in some way preparing them for adult grooming (in the other sense) norms but that doesn't mean you are doing it so that your daughter will attract predators who like underage girls. Will some sexual predators prefer her hairless? Most likely. But that isn't the goal. She isn't doing it FOR the community of predators, she is doing it for her own reasons AND the community of predators might like it. The fact that might increase risks should be a consideration IMHO but it shouldn't be called grooming (in the CSE sense). If I polish my expensive watch so it shines beautifully, then walk down a dark alley and get mugged for it, I may be stupid, but unless I intended for the watch to be stolen I am not grooming my watch for theft.

Otherwise grooming becomes so wide that its meaning is essentially lost. Which isn't normally an issue, except in that it might muddy the waters for agencies and people who want to prevent "real" CSE. Child grooming is a real and serious problem, that results in the abuse of many children in ways that will often impact them for life. If one wants to oppose Drag Kids or child beauty pageants because they do expose kids unnecessarily to risks because of people who do target those communities, I think that is fair and reasonable. But using groomer for the organizers and parents is a rhetorical smear. Which is fine in the proper context, as a politician it would be a weapon that would be hard to ignore. But I do think here we should be more nuanced.

Because if we can't be more nuanced than bloody politicians what are we even for?

I think your 'grooming' may be a term of art at which point the authorities have a reasonable likelihood of success legally when they intervene.

The local townspeople and I likly have a lower threshold for grooming as our actions may be more likely to be extra-judicial.

Should we add Hawaiian Teacher to the same list of terms as Chinese Robbers?

Because the irony here is that this guy had gone on Twitter doing the whole "why do you accuse us of being groomers?" bit before the story of him being arrested for child porn and allegedly having sex with a 13 year old student broke. So "LGBT stuff is not grooming", while it may be correct in the vast majority of cases, does fall flat there.

Yes, both people who groom and those who do not will deny they are. Most people who deny it will not be, some who do will.

How overt and specific must the behavior be to be grooming?

Getting the kids and parents to self-select to participate in their further indoctrination to lifestyle with poor outcomes doesn't exactly seem like not grooming.

It's on par with many adult homosexual adolescent boy grooming scenarios. Often neither sees it as grooming. They've common interests and the boy is an old soul, mature for his age. The drag kids show itself may not be grooming, but it's where all the groomers hang out, and the behavior is normalized.

It won't help there's a group claiming of course this isn't grooming, it's just pride and fun. Indoctrination into the community makes it easier to fiddle the kid later. That it's done with a guise of community pride, rather than prostitution is to many a distinction without a difference. Though I could see an argument that the pederast homosocial relationship is 'better' than being prostituted, murdered and served as kebab.

It's all fun until a groomer tempts you with word too large.

A mother who does all the same things because ... or because she wants to live out her glory days vicariously is not

Isn't vicariously experiencing sexual activities via your child rather explicitly using them for your own sexual pleasure?

Not unless you think the mothers are getting sexual pleasure from it, which does not appear to be the case in my experience. They focus on the pretty almost doll part I think.

I do think they are getting sexual pleasure from it, and further that it is not recognized as sexual specifically due to the sexist notion that women are pure. It is much the same as an exhibition fetish in my mind, but leeching off the attention directed at their daughters rather than at themselves.

but leeching off the attention directed at their daughters rather than at themselves.

This is actually kind of odd to me; I thought that the entire point of Pride was to go around dressed in some horrifically-ugly fashion and get attention that way. After all, everyone else there is doing that (the ones that are attractive, by contrast, were too busy actually having sex to attend).

Seems like a lot of work to get your kid to do that, who (if they aren't naturally on board with it) will probably at least temporarily resent you for parading them around for a day through the freak show where people say uncomfortable things to you while you wear an uncomfortable, poorly-fitting outfit (drag expression is not generally satisfied with "go to the clothes store and choose the distaff/spear counterpart of what you're currently wearing" and is generally as flamboyant as possible on purpose). Bonus points for boys made to sit still while you paint their faces far past the point of female sexual superstimulus (at least, I'm pretty sure that's why the stereotypical drag outfit has eye shadow rings the size of shiners and lips that make intentionally racist caricatures seem modest by comparison).

That's a lot of effort, cajoling, complaining, and whining to deal with just to get one's rocks off for a day per year; as such, while I'm sure there are some people that are into that simply because that's a constant to anything, the people who are taking their kids like that are likely doing it as a political statement in the same way taking your kids to abortion protests is.

I hate to say what is probably obvious, but I do have some insight as a resident of the Blue Bubble with many gay friends etc etc: but at least in my neck of the woods once any remotely tribal signifier is invoked (in this case "Drag") it just becomes pure confirmation bias all the way down.

Once anyone on Team Blue hears one of their tribal signifiers (and of course same goes for Team Red) I can immediately see their brains twisting to come up with any possible "hey, move along nothing to see here" defense.

The usual suspects are: it's just kids playing dress up having fun; it's just something you heard on Fox; Drag isn't sexual; or the old favorite, you sound like a Republican.

Sorry I guess I don't see a mistake theory way around this. After the whole Don't Say Gay thing, which was so drenched in Big Lie propaganda, Drag Kids is just another tribal shibboleth, and this is when the cerebrum gets bypassed for the amygdala.

What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language?

I’ve been using “so-called” to call my opponents liars when they abuse language: so-called comprehensive immigration reform, so-called fact-checkers and journalists complaining about people using “groomers” to describe drag organizers putting little kids in leather thongs, so-called diversity of all-Black, all-Hispanic, or all-woman groups, and so on. It’s a tight little rhetorical trick which doesn’t sound like whining, acknowledges their words without accepting them, puts the burden of “well, actually” explaining on the other side, and blunts the edges of their words.

But like... how is "Drag Kids" even remotely plausibly not grooming

Because at least 95% of people who do "drag kid" shows do not, personally, want to molest the children involved. It may be 'grooming' in the sense that it's grooming to put a kid in violin classes or to 'groom a successor' for a company. It isn't grooming in the sense of manipulating a child into being sexually available. And the latter is a sense, and implication, that the term 'groomer' is primarily used for. Both may, in fact, be bad - just in crucially different ways.

This kind of rhetoric isn't useful, because it just distracts people from what causes kids to become trans, or gay, or whatever. "teachers / drag queens grooming them into being trans/gay/whatever" ... is not a common cause. Maybe /r/egg_irl is.

Same for calling it "child abuse". Child abuse usually means either beating or having sex, or sometimes 'severe psychological neglect'. Having a male kid get in a dress and dance - which can, still, be perverted, degenerate, and disgusting - isn't really child abuse in that sense at all, and calling it so is just distracting people with vaguely relevant but mostly meaningless assertions.

Is taking a child to a strip club abusive? Is encouraging a 9 year old girl to get up on the stage and twerk around the pole while grown men throw dollars at her abusive?

We might quibble over the term "abusive", but does anyone want to argue this is an appropriate activity for a child?

Tier 1: Some children of both genders would like to wear clothes and accessories traditionally associated with the other gender. This has been widespread for a long time, or at least I've ready many stories of parents coming home to their young boys dressed up in their mother's pearls. I dressed up as a woman for halloween in grade 6, one or two people did it most years. I'm pretty sure there's a picture floating around somewhere of me wearing my mother's heels, necklace and TMNT pyjamas, although I was too young to remember it.

Tier 2: We should tolerate such behavior. Rationally, there's nothing wrong harmful about men wearing dresses and makeup or women wearing overalls or suits. Even historically, fashion trends have been ephemeral and men wearing foppish or feminine clothes has come and gone.

Tier 3: We should provide a supportive environment for people who feel this way. People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.

Tier 4 (going to have to try and model this one): Sexual attraction is the ultimate form of acceptance/'passing.' The way we can best support/validate trans or gay children is to validate their attractiveness to the other sex...? Someone would have to explain this one to me as well.

Thing is, most events I've seen are somewhere between 1-3. It's likely that had the event happened, some children wearing makeup, wigs and dresses would have walked across a stage and been applauded and told they were beautiful, brave members of society with bright futures as the 'twerking with stripper poles and dollar bills' seems to have been the vast minority of such events. Mr. Burns immediately dialed it up to 10 the least charitable take and I respect his intelligence too much to think that he's doing anything other than culture warring, but maybe my expectations of someone living in a red bubble are unfair.

For the record, I get off the train somewhere between 3 and 4. If I had to guess I'd say that the worst excesses of #4 are driven by hyper-liberal moms thrilled that their children are brave culture revolutionaries rather than pedophile groomers, but I confess I'm not very close with people in those circles. The closest thing I've seen is parents pushing feminine toys on their boy-tots, only to be heartbroken that they want to play with monster trucks.

I think there's a lot more involved there, when we consider the realm of "obvious and predicable next steps". One of the common gotchas I see coming back from leftwingers is to point out that children's beauty pageants are similarly creepy, objectifying, etc. But this is firmly in the category of "not the rebuttal you think it is", because I've heard mountains of scathing criticism of child beauty pageants for exactly those reasons. And while I doubt Honey Boo Boo's mom is trying to rape any kids, it's a common refrain that the adult male judges at these events look like a portfolio of "caught with 56 terabytes of CP" mugshots.

The point at which we normalize kid drag shows, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those events.

The point at which we normalize teachers having confidential sex talks with kids, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those professions.

Church leaders, boy scouts, sports coaches, karate instructors, tutors, etc, etc. We've spent decades building up a corpus of best practices to ward off the opportunities for people to take advantage of kids. If you want to validate a child as trans, it seems very obvious that you can do that in ways that don't sexualize nine year olds, or otherwise trigger Youth Protection Red Flags. Demanding that vast corpus of best practices be set aside because "bigotry or something" is wildly suspicious. Even the people who aren't doing anything directly wrong, who would never do anything directly wrong, have a responsibility to be aware of how they might be enabling other people who are and will.

Tier 4 (going to have to try and model this one): Sexual attraction is the ultimate form of acceptance/'passing.' The way we can best support/validate trans or gay children is to validate their attractiveness to the other sex...? Someone would have to explain this one to me as well.

I think the steelman for this is 'sexual attraction' isn't really a coherent category, and a lot of things that social conservatives put into the 'sexual attraction' bin don't actually seem like central examples of what people are actually objecting to, but rather parts of t2 that just have additional cognitive loading.

The internally-used example here is something like the Jessica Rabbit: a style of dress and presentation that's charged... but not actually doing anything. Putting on thick lipstick and a sparkly dress isn't playing hide-the-sausage more than Rabbit playing pattycake was; to the extent the former is sexual and the latter isn't, it's because we've assigned a whole lot of identifiers-for-being-female-socially as sexualized (probably by a mix of taboos and mode expectations?) . But these same things remain as identifiers-for-being-socially-female, separately, and it's pretty common for trans people to glom onto them in that role, in ways that can exist separately from the sexual attraction (although sometimes it doesn't!).

There's a plausible argument that we don't get appalled over the same stuff when done outside of this specific culture-war context. Letting a pre-teen (cis) girl dress in gaudy costumes and make a mess with lipstick might get you shunned, but it's not going to turn into national news, and if we're talking your own kids, probably not get CPS called on you. We don't pass out prison sentences to everyone who lets a kid use an insufficiently-filtered internet connection. At the extreme object level, the serious harms caused by seeing someone's dick through their panties got Ace Ventura a PG-13 rating, and I'm not sure it was actually about that; RuPaul's Drag Race usually nets a TV-14 for broadcast. Or for non-sexual drag, Eddie Izzard probably isn't appropriate for pre-teens, but that's more because of the cursing than the dress.

This is a broader problem for the L, G, and B spheres, too (as well as fandom): it's not uncommon to see people worry about whether Pride parades allow under-18s, which makes sense in the context of Folsom Street Fair... but most parades aren't that, and the complaint remains. The nearest Pride for my situation's most adult situation is the rampant alcoholism, but that's shared with the nearest Nascar event, too.

((This is further complicated because a lot of advocates from either direction aren't aware how limited their understanding is, even as they're motioning about limitations in understanding. Progressives point to various young-teen or pre-teen beauty contests, except these are also things that the vast majority of socons find appalling, as naraburns points out. Conservatives point to endless twerkfests... but it's not like these are some unheard-of thing in straight culture. "Penis inspection day" is and was a regular joke on reddit and tumblr in relationship to trans politics, derived from an older UrbanDictionary meme, but it was also not an uncommon thing for schools to have either full-time staff nurses or contracted doctors who'd perform physicals in bulk, including the turn-your-head-and-cough bit, although this has thankfully fallen out of favor.))

The opposing steelman against is that just because something varies by culture and time doesn't mean we have to accept it in this culture and time, and you have to draw lines in the sand somewhere, and that socons have (sometimes even honestly!) drawn lines well before these points in the past.

Don't have much to say in response, but thank you for sharing your thoughts.

People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.

What if they identify as White?

Then you should be shamed and excluded from the Hugo awards.

This is mostly how I model this and a good writeup on it. A minor nitpick that I find important:

People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.

I don't think this is something that should be elevated to an identity. or more specifically identity is a strange concept in general. Do you remember the hubbub about disabled person vs person with a disability? Disabled person is considered bad because it raises the disability to the level of identity while person with disability is preferred because it doesn't. The way someone dresses is about as surface level as it gets, while I agree it shouldn't be something discriminated against and it would be better if no one cared when men wore dresses. This is all of course suspiciously similar to the other culture war rail, transgenderism. What's the actual blue tribe model of the separation of cross dressers/drag queens and transwomen?

What's the actual blue tribe model of the separation of cross dressers/drag queens and transwomen?

Um, not sure if you were genuinely asking me as I assume you know at least as much as I do, but I can try in the event that you were.

I had straight male-presenting friends who would come to social dances wearing a dress or skirt and it was just a superficial thing independent of their gender identity as you mention above. Others were non-binary/queer and would do the same but it seemed more meaningful to them as their exterior gender presentation was matching their interior identity, although superficially it may not have looked that different from the outside.

Seems to get back to the classical tension between (some) non-binary folk who want to end the gender binary and trans people who find the gender binary affirming. Maybe someone, somewhere has squared that circle but I'm unaware.

Too many things being conflated here; your Tier 1 example is very non-central to what we're actually talking about. Getting into your mother's jewellery box in the privacy of your own home is quite conceptually different from being invited to be dressed up by a third party in public and cheered by strangers, at least to me. In addition, doing it out of boredom is different than doing it habitually out of some deeper desire.

Tier 3: We should provide a supportive environment for people who feel this way. People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.

For the record, this is where I get off; it is never, ever my duty to validate anyone.

Too many things being conflated here; your Tier 1 example is very non-central to what we're actually talking about. Getting into your mother's jewellery box in the privacy of your own home is quite conceptually different from being invited to be dressed up by a third party in public and cheered by strangers, at least to me. In addition, doing it out of boredom is different than doing it habitually out of some deeper desire.

Maybe tier was a poor descriptor and it was more a train of thought or logical chain. I think 'children haven't been inculcated with our social constructs of who should wear what' is the least controversial and easiest to accept, even if it is a far cry from trans pre-teens.

For the record, this is where I get off; it is never, ever my duty to validate anyone.

If you'll forgive my assumptions about your gender and relationship status, do you ever feel like it's your duty to tell your wife that she's beautiful? Your child that they're smart or talented, your coworker that they aren't completely useless, your friends that They're Totally Right and their partner is being unreasonable?

We're constantly validating other people, often times even in the face of what (we see as) the truth - it's the lubricant that keeps the gears of social interaction turning. It costs me next to nothing to call someone by their chosen pronouns or accept their choice of clothes, and seems important to them, so why not? You can link Picard counting lights, 1984, or clips from They Live, but the truth is people pick and choose whom to validate all the time.

A lot of these child drag events seem to be number four.

Sure, they’re tacky and not plausibly seductive, but everyone knows the context of throwing money at a dancer onstage, or what ‘it’s not gonna lick itself’ means. Well, except probably the child drag stars.

And having kids act out a simulacra of adult sexualization, even in a tacky and ritualized manner, should make us all uncomfortable.

My argument is, essentially, that "abusive" has no more content than "bad", and attempts to smuggle in unproven connotations.

Taking a child to a strip club is not 'abusive' in any sense aside from the extent to which a child going to a strip club is bad. If I had, at age 9, gone to a strip club - I'd expect that not to matter at all. Same for drag shows!

Also, the average 12yo will have seen several dozen naked women on the internet, so something drag queens is an ineffective way to prevent children seeing sexualized stuff.

but does anyone want to argue this is an appropriate activity for a child?

This is just argument-by-appeal-to-social-taboo. Nobody wants to argue it, because the very concept is disgusting. Why don't you make the argument against it instead? And why do many arguments in this area sound like this - vague references to badness?

This is just argument-by-appeal-to-social-taboo.

It may help to think of it as "argument by Chesterton's fence". Before you can reject it, you must understand why it's there.

My argument is, essentially, that "abusive" has no more content than "bad", and attempts to smuggle in unproven connotations.

"Abusive" means "bad thing done to someone by someone else who has power over them". I am not convinced that "teachers have power over children" is an unproven connotation.

It may help to think of it as "argument by Chesterton's fence". Before you can reject it, you must understand why it's there.

The argument already is rejected by society as a whole, though. "That fence was there 50 years ago" isn't enough. You'd need to convince people to adopt it again. And if you can't provide a good argument for why it should be there, even if they do put it back, it'll be in the wrong place. The field has changed a lot!

Again, I'm clearly not arguing for trans stuff here, I just want people to make some form of useful argument arguments at all.

In another area, I often argue something like - school isolates children from depth, doesn't allow them to explore and take useful actions for innately-desired goals, and has one spend the majority of time when one's learning just doing rote, uninteresting exercises and taking orders from teachers who want you to complete the exercises and avoid anything too painful or complicated. This means they have no idea how to do anything useful, and their instincts for doing so are perverted or dulled, destroying the depths of human experience. Now, if I wanted to convince someone of that, I could - 1) write a long piece with examples, connections, to make the point in a detailed way, explain exactly what harms come from this, why it exists, etc. Or - I could say "school is child abuse school is bad doing bad things to children is bad you are hurting children that is evil it is bad very bad not okay", and then just repeat that a bunch of times. The former - probably better than the latter.

"Abusive" means "bad thing done to someone by someone else who has power over them". I am not convinced that "teachers have power over children" is an unproven connotation.

Yet, when a teacher gives a kid an undeserved bad grade, that is a "bad thing", yet isn't "child abuse". The thing debated isn't "teachers have power", the thing debated is how bad sex ed/drag story hours are.

The argument already is rejected by society as a whole, though.

If it was, it would not be necessary to hide these things from parents.

The thing debated isn't "teachers have power", the thing debated is how bad sex ed/drag story hours are.

You claimed that "abusive" meant nothing more than "bad". This isn't true. It is a specific subclass of bad. Pointing out that it doesn't mean all bad things within that subclass does not change this.

You claimed that "abusive" meant nothing more than "bad". This isn't true. It is a specific subclass of bad

I mean, does it mean anything more than "very bad act done to vulnerable group"?

If it was, it would not be necessary to hide these things from parents.

It isn't necessary to hide it [specifically, drag and gay people, not children doing drag] from most parents!

It isn't grooming in the sense of manipulating a child into being sexually available.

Sure it is--the act itself makes the child sexually available, not for intercourse per se but for lewd interactions with the adult audience. You might as well say that strip bars aren't sexual. The act of Drag Kids itself is sex abuse per se--the same way that exposing children to pornography is sex abuse per se, even if you never lay a hand on them. I think I could probably have been a bit clearer about the way I framed this, but your problem here is you're engaging in amphiboly between participants, parents, and organizers. Do the kids think they're being made sexually available? Likely they don't understand the full implications of what they're involved in, which is an alarm bell all on its own. Do some parents think it's just silly fun? Probably--people are stupid like that. But Pride events have always, until recently, been chock full of sexualization. Wrapping kids up into that is sexualization per se, whether or not anyone gets physically assaulted.

Sure, it isn't literally grooming. But it's a metaphor that points out the similarities--it has children being pushed into sexual things by adults.

And I rarely see criticism saying "It's not grooming, it's just adults treating children sexually, so call it something else". Usually, when someone says that it shouldn't be called grooming, they're trying to deny that it's sexual or inappropriate at all.

If you really object to "grooming" because it's inaccurate, but you aren't just doing this to keep people from having a way to talk about it at all, you should suggest something people can call it instead, without being too euphemistic. I can't think of anything; any phrase that fits would be as objectionable as "grooming".

If you really object to "grooming" because it's inaccurate, but you aren't just doing this to keep people from having a way to talk about it at all, you should suggest something people can call it instead, without being too euphemistic. I can't think of anything; any phrase that fits would be as objectionable as "grooming".

Well, if it's not 'grooming', it's bad because it's trans, queer, gay, etc, it takes senses and desires that are effective at finding the best mates and having children with them and perverts them into meaningless noise. It's just as bad when children see it as adults. If it's fine for adults to see, and - let's say - nobody's almost naked, then it's probably fine for children too.

It's a very obvious argument, but not one conservatives agree with!

If it's fine for adults to see, and - let's say - nobody's almost naked, then it's probably fine for children too.

This is absurd. The idea that children shouldn't be exposed to or participate in sexual material, even sexual material which doesn't involve naked people, is widespread.

See my other comments - everyone is aware the "idea is widespread", but can you justify it independently of that? Kids seeing a drag show ... whatever. Why does it matter that much? If them seeing sexual material is a problem, television shows or internet advertisements or porn websites are much much much worse. Someone seeing a drag show, in practice, doesn't seem to have much impact!

That 95% of people who do drag kid shows are enabling and providing cover for the 5% who do want to molest kids doesn't seem a great argument in favor of drag kid shows.

Also even the groomers see themselves as the heroes of their stories. They're welcoming the kids into the community or whatever the current euphemism is.

yeah but then this isn't different from any other community where a small percent are pedos.

Not sure I'd class 5% pedos as a small percent. I think of small percentages as winning the lottery, being struck by lightning and dying, being healthly 18 - 49 and dying of Covid.

Nor does the 5% pedos really address the larger cohort of homosexual men for which this sort of grooming behavior is normalized towards adolescents, pederastry. The behavior covered by some of the accusations against Kevin Spacey or the descriptions of George Takei losing his virginity at 13 to an attractive older man.

Many other communities that work with youth have specific proscribed safe-guarding policies in place to prevent inappropriate conduct. Parent volunteers in schools, scoutmasters, etc. are subjected to criminal background checks and frequently attend training on safeguarding vulnerable populations.

5% was a totally arbitrary number. Is there any evidence the rate of pedophilia or abuse among dragperformers is higher than that among a general population?

Drag performers specifically, I don't anticipate much data. That pederastry is not uncommon among homosexuals is fairly widely discussed.

A recent example; https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/20980

That while homosexuals are not more likely to offend, offenders are more likely to be homosexual has been discussed in the literature. The majority of the studies I've seen focus on pedophilia, rather than hebephilia or ephebophilia.

They did bring it on themselves. Whatever your own personal opinion on Drag Kids, publicising that the act would include kids as young as eleven is handing your opponents a weapon, and would probably make ordinary people go "Hang on a minute there":

https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/08/idaho-drag-kids-700x420.png

"Bring drag to the younger generation? Uh, how young, exactly?" "Oh, eleven!" Even corporate sponsors are likely to turn a little sheepish about having their names associated with that.

Some of the talking points I see floating on Twitter are, like, "What about child beauty pageants?" But this moves me not a single iota--I hate child beauty pageants for exactly the same reason. It's weird! It's creepy! Or to put it in less emotionally-charged terms: it's not something kids do, when they grow up in loving, healthy, stable environments. At best it's a symptom of deeper troubles; at worst, it's a direct cause of some of those troubles.

I suspect both phenomena are largely fueled by gullible single mothers.

What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language?

Assume Prisoner's Dilemma rules where you saw the other player pushed the "defect" button right in front of you?

But really, they only have two options, and one of them is praising murderism (i.e. it's blatantly sexual, but that's fine). And sure, you can punish them for being part of the tribe that poisoned the well with safetyism for everything that isn't their pet project, but they have the power and incentive to deflect and deflect they shall.

That said, the mistake-theory approach to drag kids, and its ultimate steelman, is "safetyism isn't all it's cracked up to be, take risks once in a while", which is why I (and I suspect this is probably close to the political center) actually have a difficult time outright condemning it under those rules. Put another way, I have legitimately no idea how "It's not going to lick itself" is supposed to seduce anyone capable of understanding what that phrase means.

If grooming is the intent, it's clearly not particularly effective, and isn't going to work on a straight viewer regardless. In fact, the Junior Anti-Sex League is incapable of grooming straight kids, and even gay kids should be beyond their reach for the same reasons; that would require attractive teenage same-sex participants, and as far as I'm aware, Pride has a shortage of them. (Nudists are basically never the people anyone actually wants to see nude.)

often by putting inappropriate pressure on them to participate

Every Boomer that I know talks about their parents sending them to music lessons where the teacher would whack your hands if you did it wrong. Now their children are doing the same thing to their grandchildren, except this time they leer at you and grab your ass instead. And while I would prefer this not happen to anyone, I can accept it not being anything more than surface-level harmful, and it's better for kids that suffer this to recognize that their authority figures put them into an uncomfortable situation for political reasons and update how much they trust authority accordingly.

And when someone says "Drag Kids is sexualizing children" only to be met with "no, you're making it sexual, you right-wing pervert, we're just having silly fun"--it's maddening. Like, really? I'm supposed to believe that you're putting your kid in a leather thong for silly fun? Be serious. If that's not grooming, nothing is.

To be fair, I don't think this is an accurate summary of what's usually going on with all these events. The Boise 2022 Pride Guide doesn't have much information on what Drag Kids was actually going to revolve around, but a follow-up "Drag Story Hour" references Kenni The Doll, which... I'm not a fan of the makeup and not going to try to figure out what's going on under any clothing, but it's not looking like leather thongs or most adult entertainer 'wear' (there are two other entertainers, but I can't find any clear images or references to them).

I'm not saying that leather thongs (or too-sheer, or too-short, or otherwise too-revealing clothes) never happen! But whether or not it's a central case for drag as a class, I think a categorical opposition to the topic needs to handle cases like Eddie Izzard, who isn't appropriate for kids, but in a British comedic swearing sense, rather than anyone getting aroused by it, or find a meaningful way to separate them.

And I'm not sure the latter option is solvable, exactly. "I don't want to know, and don't want to need to know, about your underwear" is absolutely a reasonable norm, and one I share and support, and I think you can get a very wide section of the American populace behind. As the discussion becomes more about "this style of dress is inappropriate" or "this style of dance is inappropriate", though, I think that level of agreement gets a lot harder.

For a less culture-war-centric example, the furry fandom gets a lot of askance looks for people who fursuit in public, especially where kids might see. After all, people have sex in (something that kinda looks like) those! Well, ok, bringing a murrsuit body anywhere near public is one of the ways to reliably get nuked by everyone else in the fandom, but just because people haven't had sex in that particular suit doesn't make it less sexualized. For example, there are some (very nice!) fursuits with very thick thighs and incredibly fluffy tails and highly pronounced toe beans. Which absolutely can be fetishized in actually-sexual ways, but are also things people just think are cool.

((Though to extend the metaphor, this doesn't make it ethically mandatory to permit: both for practical reasons and for credit card processor ones, there's a lot of restrictions on under-18 fursuiting, many not explicitly written down.))

The fandom's largely managed to set and evolve some norms around here (don't use murrsuit bodies for anything public or mixed-use private, full suits should cover as much skin as viable, partial suits that don't cover all skin should be worn with fairly concealing clothing, UncleKage will murder ban you if you turn into a PR debacle), but note that this is the fandom. Normies who run into the issue don't just come up with a different answer; normies come up with different answers from each other.

And I don't think we have enough culture-wide communication to really build or even discuss normie-wide norms, anymore.

It is pretty rant-y. Speak plainly, and maybe don't try to sneak assertions that Democrats are into child abuse.

I think all of the following are more or less true:

  • "Grooming" is a real, terrible thing that should be prevented

  • Any event which gets children dressing provocatively on stage is going to appeal to actual pedophiles

  • QAnon does not have a monopoly on the term "groomer," and it's irresponsible for the news to imply they do

  • QAnon is correlated with using "groomer" as a general-LGBT slur

So the FUD about "groomer" is part of a battle over one of those strategic abuses of language. Q et al. would like to apply it to things which are definitely not child abuse, like telling students that homosexuality exists. LGBT supporters would like it to remain very selective. Yes, this does involve a false alarm/sensitivity tradeoff. No, I'm not convinced that Q is rationally setting the threshold--not when the rhetoric is so useful.

I don't know where you're getting news of "leather thongs," and I don't really want to go looking. I could imagine a perfectly chaste drag show which is purely about affirming the participants, about announcing pride rather than erasing it. Of course, that's not in line with historical use of drag, and I would expect provocative content from Boise's performance. That's a pretty damn good reason to keep kids out of it. Are supporters secret MAPs trying to get their rocks off? Or are they mistaken, and genuinely have a horrible blindspot for how pedophiles would get value out of their show?

The mistake-theory approach is not to wage war over the term "groomer." It's to convince supporters that their action is wrong and dangerous. You should be able to do this without relying on a single rhetorical flourish.

To be clear, a lot of the stuff getting called ‘grooming’ does actually raise worrying grooming red flags- fostering secrets from a child’s parents is like thing #1 I was taught to watch out for when I took mandatory reporter training- even if the term is way overused. I was also unaware that Chris Rufo and libs of TikTok were Qanon.

I agree that there’s a better way to point that out, but culture war dynamics being what they are, it was going to go like ‘so you’re calling LGBT+ educators groomers!’ ‘Yes’ regardless of how well the initial critique was phrased.

No idea who Chris Rufo is, but I actually did think LoTT was explicitly pro-Q. Outgroup homogeneity bias in action, perhaps.

I don’t like being in a position where I’m perceived as defending actual groomers either. That’s the whole point of using the term as a portable motte and bailey, and it’s why LGBT advocates are so against it. If nara is serious about looking for the mistake-theory response, it’s to avoid the name-calling and make outcome-specific criticisms like “this will enable pedophiles.” I’d like to think that would be better received than proclaiming defenders want to abuse children.

Chris Rufo is the activist behind the anti-CRT push in Virginia that arguably got Youngkin elected. He has also been majorly involved in pushing the groomer/radical trans activists in our schools thing.

I could imagine a perfectly chaste drag show which is purely about affirming the participants, about announcing pride rather than erasing it.

Maybe it's a boy scouts thing, but I see a drag show for kids more like a Summer Camp skit gone too far than anything about LGBT rights or whatever. Frankly, I could see having boys and girls dress up as and mock each other as stereotypes being a very normal, traditional activity.

Well, there's the famous kid Desmond Is Amazing, who was out there as a Drag Kid performing in shows aged 10, having first been noticed at the NYC Pride Parade when he was 8.

He (or rather they, the pronoun they now go by) is 15 now, which is at least a bit older. A true veteran of the scene at that age. May God have mercy on all our souls.

This is not harmless playing dress-up or the kind of cross-dressing for things like Hallowe'en which were traditional practices. I have to think that the parents (or at least the mother) was heavily involved in encouraging the kid along this path and bringing him out to these kinds of events and arranging the publicity around it. I would indeed be more inclined to call it pimping, but if grooming is forbidden, I suppose that is even worse.

See also: Rudy Giuliani and Trump.

Culture is weird.

LGBT rights and covid vaccines are the two issues that the left has no tolerance for dissenters, much more than other issues. I dunno why this is. These are the major third rail issues. Vox Day for example had his blogspot banned after a decade of otherwise non-stop attacking of the left, including even borderline antisemitic stuff and the whole SFWA controversy, only because of posts critical of the Covid vaccine. That was the final breaking point.

Locally, when vaccine mandates first became a topic for discussion here, the first group to absolutely gun hardest for vaccine mandates and use the harshest rhetoric against antivaxxers were Finnish centre-righters, both in the media and in the political sphere. At least outside the US, I'd say the COVID vaccine thing was above all an example of centrist authoritarianism uniting "responsible technocrats" both in the centre-left and the centre-right, rather than specifically a left-wing thing.

I am going to give very controversial opinions now. Tighten seatbelts:

  1. The modern day social system allows women to be both too young to be responsibly in sexual relationships with older men till the age of 25 ( Leonardo di Caprio is blamed for ditching his 25 year old girlfriends even though he has been doing it often enough it's not even a surprise anymore. Zero expectation from people that the gf also chose to be with him knowing his history.)while also at the same time constantly claiming sexual maturity to make her own decisions when it suits her. So now as an adult male you start off with don't have sex with anyone younger than 18, but then the rules start changing to any woman younger than 25 is too young if you are an old man it's always going to be the equivalent of grooming, along with the fact that depending on who you are talking to at the moment the rule is being arbitrarily changed.

  2. This shift in the social contract multiple times within a person's life makes them more likely to not even take previous social contracts seriously. The thought process can be they already keep trying to raise the social age of consent every year, maybe they were bullshitting about below 18 being too young as well. So now we have two groups of people trying to tear apart the sexual consent and individual responsibility social contract in opposite directions.

  3. Based on this years data, it turns out that it is almost impossible to stop Gay men from having sex. Taking into account the sexual assault accusation and jailing rates for Trans women, it also appears that transwomen have an equal or even higher libido than gay men along with a far higher ratio of criminal records relating to sexual crimes. Within LGBT communities there also seems to be an unspoken rule about how they are far more loose with what the age of consent is supposed to be. All of these statements are based on my limited knowledge of the LGBT community over the years. I started out as a genuine ally by the way.

  4. Trans people are the more extreme elements of the LGBT community which is already more loose with their rules and attitudes regarding the age of consent when compared to hetero groups. ( Supposedly). So it comes as little surprise that a noticeable segment of the trans community has no problem with sexualizing minors.

  5. There is an additional element of transgerderism actually initially being about mental illnesses, along with the fact that transgender groups have a comparatively very high number of autistic people. Autistic people as per my knowledge are already pretty disconnected from general social norms, on top of that now they are going through additional mental health issues relating to gender identity, meanwhile having the libido of at the very least the average individual of their biological gender, while at the same time being at the bottom of the barrel in terms of who is willing to have sex with them. At the end of the day all these factors taken together should come as no surprise that a segment of trans women would be more than willing to get sex wherever they can and however they can irrespective of general legal and social norms of society around them.

In conclusion - Hide yo kids from the aunt with a dick unless you can at a very personal level 100% vouch for them.

The quote you produced is disinformation all right for the "it's a QAnon reference" framing, but referring to people running "drag kids" events as "groomers" does seem like a serious accusation that deserves a bit more justification than the pointing and invoking of disgust reflexes that it is. The standard interpretation of "grooming", as I understand it, is gradual manipulation of the underage and otherwise mentally inadequate with the purpose of normalising the idea that they will be sexually abused or exploited by their adult handlers. I doubt that most people running or supporting those events are doing so with the intention of entering sexual relations with the kids that attend them themselves (and if "encouraging the target enter sexual relations I want to see more of with someone else" is sufficient to meet the definition of grooming, then it seems that a lot of things in our culture since times immemorial would count!), and if their right-wing detractors believe otherwise, the burden of proof surely should be on them. If they detractors do believe that all these progressives are actually in it because they hope to have sex with the ten year olds that they are teaching about drag queens and non-binary gender, protestations to the contrary and seemingly low rate of such sex actually happening notwithstanding, then yes, they are in fact entertaining a conspiracy theory (as there would need to be a conspiracy to conceal widespread pedophilic tendencies and/or actions).

(edit: Per something I found out downthread, there is in fact a legal definition of grooming in the US, which markedly does not cover "introducing children to icky and widely taken to be age-inappropriate sexual activity" on its own)

It reminds me of when "cultural Marxism" became an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory"

Seems like a good riddance to me, because the term was a massive footbullet. The term "cultural marxists" will be resolved correctly by (1) people on your side already and (2) actual cultural marxists, who are in the know about the academic definition drift of "Marxism"; to everyone else, and in particular garden-variety classical liberals who really ought to have been enlisted in the anti-woke coalition much earlier, it just looks like holding up a sign like "actually the main issue I have with my outgroup is that they are dirty commies who want to put limitations on megacorps".

"Cultural Marxism" seemed like a perfect label to me. My immediate reaction to the phrase, which I'm not sure is wrong, was that it took Marx's theory of class conflict, and applied it to cultural conflict. That was it's obvious, plain reading to me.

Well, how close to the American Right are your political sympathies? There's a whole cluster of memes that primes people like me towards the interpretation I suggested, but they are all fairly left-associated: US right-wingers are approximately seen as the tribe of Big Tobacco/scammy door-to-door salesmen/pouring toxins into the environment/exorbitant medical bills on the one hand and Jesus Camp and creationism in school on the other, and perceived to immediately decry any attempt to make the US more like a "normal civilised European country" in those regards as creeping communism.

(To be clear, I'm well aware of your definition and think it makes sense - after all, that's basically how the academic drivers of the ideology interpret it themselves. It's just that I really don't think the optics work, because for a lot of would-be allies "fighting against Marxism" sounds like standard code for "fighting against a large number of things that I strongly wish for")

that it took Marx's theory of class conflict, and applied it to cultural conflict

What does this mean? It's not marx was the first person to come up with "different cultural groups have conflicts". What specifically from "marx's theory of class conflict" is present in today's cultural conflict that wasn't in any other cultural conflict?

Now, of course they are related in that both are progressive. But the "marxism" part is a total distraction, "gender ideology" is about as marxist as a republican is

It's really hard for me to believe you don't know what it means. it's not 2010 anymore.

Yes, Cultural Marxists didn't come up with

"different cultural groups have conflicts" because Marx didn't come up with "different economic groups have conflicts"

What specifically from "marx's theory of class conflict" is present in today's cultural conflict that wasn't in any other cultural conflict?

The idea that we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

The idea that we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

This is the point - both are progressive, in that both want to liberate the tired masses or oppressed people. But the idea that's specifically "marxist class conflict", as opposed to generic progressivism / universalism, is misleading.

No it's not.

MLKs "I have a dream" is generic progressivism.

"Girls can do whatever boys can" feminism is generic progressivism.

"Racism = prejudice + power", and "patriarchy" are Cultural Marxism.

Clearly "i have a dream" and "girls can freaking do everything" are more wholesome than "racism = prejudice + power". Marxism, however, isn't when you suggest a particular group of people are bad, or that a particular group have to be fought against, or that one particular group is harming another particular group. It isn't even when you do that in a left-wing way. Was the french revolution culturally marxist?

So, what specifically about "racismprejudicepower" and "patriarchy" are more like marxist / class conflict than a generic mix of "progressive" and "not wholesome"?

Marxism, however, isn't when you suggest a particular group of people are bad,

Yeah, because like I already said, Marxism is when you suggest we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

I gave you a definition, and I gave you examples proving this is not about generic progressivism. Why do you keep claiming that it is?

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This reminds me of endless discussions around the term woke which was first adopted by woke crowd as a positive label and suddenly overnight it turned into right-wing slur "somehow". As for cultural Marxism, this was also something adopted by the left. Just one example, in this paper named Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain. And from the "praises" of the paper it is obvious that Cultural Marxism term was viewed at the time in positive light. Here is one example:

“Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain fills an especially acute need in the contemporary reassessment of the social roots and cultural contexts of avant-garde academic movements. . . . Dworkin assembles a convincing historical narrative of how a seemingly provisional reaction to the crisis of British welfare capitalism in the post-war period developed into a coherent and compelling subtradition of European Marxist social theory. . . . Dworkin’s new study manages to both creatively historicize a familiar—yet often misunderstood—recent academic and political formation as well as raise pressing methodological questions that cross the major disciplines of the human sciences.” — Alex Benchimol , Thesis Eleven

Cultural Marxism itself is a cornerstone of Western Marxism, a branch distinct from Marxism-Leninism. It has to be understood that Marxism itself is by definition not static but dialectical philosophy that "evolves" until socialism leads into utopia - that is the "permanent revolution" concept: as soon as powers at be settle down creating their own power structures with their own contradictions, the revolutionary wheel has to turn again to revolt in order to resolve those contradictions. As soon as history uses the revolutionaries to move forward into progress, it discards them.

Specific cultural part was developed especially by Antonio Gramsci, who investigated why revolutions in late 1910s and early 1920ies failed in the west. His conclusion was that the main obstacle was so called cultural hegemony. He focused on the dialectical opposition of so called base/infrastructure vs superstructure in cultural and not only economic production. It is culture created by superstructure that reproduces capitalism and gives rise to so called "structure" to society. And in accordance with Marxist ideology the society reproduces the structural ideas, which create the society which create the idea and so forth. You may have heard of some of those "structures" and related theories - that were developed by later Critical Marxist or Identaritarian Marxists - here in CW thread: patriarchy, white supremacy, cisheteronormativity and so forth. That is the relevance of Cultural Marxism to gender.

It's not marx was the first person to come up with "different cultural groups have conflicts".

But people in academic fields like sociology or gender studies who use terms like "Cultural Marxism" or "Conflict Theory" tend to talk as if he did, or as if he formalized it somehow. Presumably because of a tendency towards a narrative where sociology is an advancing discipline of people building on prior ideas, coupled with Marxism having high status in academia (especially at the time) so people wanted to portray their own work as a descendant of it. Here's the second Google result if you search "conflict theory":

Understanding Conflict Theory

Conflict theory states that tensions and conflicts arise when resources, status, and power are unevenly distributed between groups in society and that these conflicts become the engine for social change. In this context, power can be understood as control of material resources and accumulated wealth, control of politics and the institutions that make up society, and one's social status relative to others (determined not just by class but by race, gender, sexuality, culture, and religion, among other things).

Conflict theory originated in the work of Karl Marx, who focused on the causes and consequences of class conflict between the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production and the capitalists) and the proletariat (the working class and the poor). Focusing on the economic, social, and political implications of the rise of capitalism in Europe, Marx theorized that this system, premised on the existence of a powerful minority class (the bourgeoisie) and an oppressed majority class (the proletariat), created class conflict because the interests of the two were at odds, and resources were unjustly distributed among them.

And then, the narrative goes, others built on Marx's insight by extending this idea to other groups:

Many social theorists have built on Marx's conflict theory to bolster it, grow it, and refine it over the years. Explaining why Marx's theory of revolution did not manifest in his lifetime, Italian scholar and activist Antonio Gramsci argued that the power of ideology was stronger than Marx had realized and that more work needed to be done to overcome cultural hegemony, or rule through common sense. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, critical theorists who were part of The Frankfurt School, focused their work on how the rise of mass culture--mass produced art, music, and media--contributed to the maintenance of cultural hegemony. More recently, C. Wright Mills drew on conflict theory to describe the rise of a tiny "power elite" composed of military, economic, and political figures who have ruled America from the mid-twentieth century.

Many others have drawn on conflict theory to develop other types of theory within the social sciences, including feminist theory, critical race theory, postmodern and postcolonial theory, queer theory, post-structural theory, and theories of globalization and world systems. So, while initially conflict theory described class conflicts specifically, it has lent itself over the years to studies of how other kinds of conflicts, like those premised on race, gender, sexuality, religion, culture, and nationality, among others, are a part of contemporary social structures, and how they affect our lives.

The standard interpretation of "grooming", as I understand it, is gradual manipulation of the underage and otherwise mentally inadequate with the purpose of normalising the idea that they will be sexually abused or exploited by their adult handlers

I commented on this a bit up the chain, but it bears repeating--I regard putting children in skimpy clothing and throwing money at them while they dance as sexual exploitation per se. You don't have to touch a child to sexually abuse them; in most jurisdictions, just exposing them to pornography counts. Participation in "family friendly" Drag Kids is grooming toward participation in more sexualized drag events. To my eyes, this is a comfortable fit for the term "grooming."

This is at least a very noncentral example of sexual exploitation, and by implication of grooming. The modal example that the term evokes, and that makes it work as a rhetorical superweapon, is something along the lines of "kid is made to watch as parents engage in 'swinging' and eventually 'invited' to participate" or recently "40 year old creep baits kids on Roblox into sending him nudes and eventually convinces them to meet up offline, keeping it a secret from their parents". If you can have "sexual exploitation" without the "exploiter" deriving a direct personal sexual benefit from it, then the tropey staple chill grandpa who tells the kids of a straight-laced household where in the attic to find the porn stash of his youth is also a groomer.

I understand that "groomer" is an effective rhetorical weapon, but I really don't think it lives up to the standards of discussion we were supposed to be striving for as a community.

In A Brave New World there is a comment about encouraging kids to play sexual games with each other as a normal part of schooling. Would you consider this grooming, even though the adults performing the encouragement are not the ones getting sexual pleasure? Would an adult standing over two five year olds, helping them get undressed, telling them where to put their hands on the other, be grooming?

I think most people regard any outside encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex to be a Bad Thing, and the more severe and direct examples ought to be criminal. Absent any other criminal terminology, people use the word Grooming, regardless of who is getting sexual pleasure.

And yes, technically any adult helping any kid gain access to porn is grooming. Even the cool grandpa and the old fashioned magazines. It is illegal to show porn to minors. Do people forget this?

In A Brave New World there is a comment about encouraging kids to play sexual games with each other as a normal part of schooling. Would you consider this grooming, even though the adults performing the encouragement are not the ones getting sexual pleasure? Would an adult standing over two five year olds, helping them get undressed, telling them where to put their hands on the other, be grooming?

Not if it's not for their own pleasure, as I see it. I've seen something like this rule mentioned in the past in the context of advice for parents who are unsure if it's socially acceptable to do this thing or another (I think the example was "father applying lotion on female baby") - formulated as "if you do it for the kid, it's okay, if you do it for yourself, it's not".

I think most people regard any outside encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex to be a Bad Thing, and the more severe and direct examples ought to be criminal. Absent any other criminal terminology, people use the word Grooming, regardless of who is getting sexual pleasure.

No, I don't think it's standard to use the word "grooming" for this, and before the current CW battle, I've not seen it used outside of the contexts I mentioned. This was even though culture warring about "encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex" is something that has been going on for decades now.

And yes, technically any adult helping any kid gain access to porn is grooming.

"Technically" according to what technicality exactly?

It is illegal to show porn to minors. Do people forget this?

How is that a pertinent argument? It is also illegal to not pay your taxes, but that doesn't mean that tax evasion is an instance of grooming.

How is that a pertinent argument?

You are the one who brought up a grandpa showing pornography to minors as if it was something socially accepted and reasonable.

"Harmful to minor" laws prohibit showing obscenity to minors. Because it is considered harmful in and of itself. Showing pornography to minors normalizes sexual behaviors and is often used in the process of grooming.

Abusers may also show the victim pornography or discuss sexual topics with them, to introduce the idea of sexual contact.

Child advocacy groups consider showing pornography to minors as sexual abuse itself.

If someone shows a minor porn and is arrested and accused of grooming, how do they prove that they had no intention of sexually abusing the minor (when the action itself is considered sexual abuse)? Outside of education, which the law allows for, showing porn to minors will be considered grooming behavior.

You are the one who brought up a grandpa showing pornography to minors as if it was something socially accepted and reasonable.

Yes, it came up in a popular comic, which is probably as good an n=1 argument for it having been considered a reasonably common thing by some nontrivial set of people in the past as it gets.

The rest

There is no mention of "grooming" in the "harmful to minor laws" article you linked, nor in the "child advocacy groups" one. Conversely, the "abusers may also show..." article does not argue that each of the things mentioned on their own already amount to "grooming". Just because something is often used in the process of grooming does not mean that it amounts to grooming: Discord DMs and more generally one-on-one chats are also frequently used in the process of grooming, but most people would not use this to conclude that DMing a minor constitutes grooming.

Outside of education, which the law allows for, showing porn to minors will be considered grooming behavior.

By whom? I think this is what Wikipedia calls "weasel words". I looked this up, and it turns up that there is actually a legal definition of grooming in the US, which does not appear to cover showing porn to minors as written:

(a) Whoever knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual to travel in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or Possession of the United States, to engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

(b) Whoever, using the mail or any facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, or within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual who has not attained the age of 18 years, to engage in prostitution or any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title and imprisoned not less than 10 years or for life

Whoever, using the mail or any facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, or within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual who has not attained the age of 18 years, to engage in prostitution or any sexual activity

Is masturbating to pornography not sexual activity any more? And showing porn to kids is something "for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense?"

To your wider point that the Right has begun using the word grooming in wider and wider contexts, they are not the first to consider the similarities between grooming and political radicalization. Grooming itself is a broader word with multiple meanings - grooming a young politician for a higher office for example. It is not weird or purely waging a conflict for the word grooming to be used to describe persuasion, enticement, or cohesion to ingrain in children sexual politics their parents would not approve of (which is what schools are accused of.)

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there is in fact a legal definition of grooming in the US

That website is awful and looks like it was written by non-native speakers and definitely not lawyers. There may indeed be a legal definition of grooming in the US, but that website is not it. The citations in that article refer to anti-trafficking laws and, being Federal laws, require crossing a state line to be enforceable. It says nothing about grooming as anyone here has used the term.

ms. Have you seen the stats on child movie stars? Olympic athletes?

No mention of the control group. Yeah, some child stars have mental problems as adults, but without a control group it's not like we can draw moral guidance from this . Celebrities, rich people may have fucked up personal lives, but so do plenty of normal people, too.

Celebrities, rich people may have fucked up personal lives, but so do plenty of normal people, too.

Totally! But why? Are you suggesting it's all just a toss of the dice? Or do you think it's possible to identify patterns of behavior that correlate with undesirable outcomes? In this case there is no control group, partly because wide scale human experimentation is impracticable, immoral, or both. Unless we decide to tacitly approve of it for whatever reason... as we appear to have done in this case, in spite of what seem to me clear risks.

I think it's pretty myopic to accuse those who defend/ignore the "drag kids" thing of being conflict theorists, while ignoring how the entire "groomer" label is a conflict theory superweapon being deployed by the conflict-theory part of the right. Were I an American leftist who'd never took a step inside a drag club, or even a Pride parade, my thought process would be something like "I will only disavow this when you stop painting me with the same brush. Otherwise, if you're going to keep implying I'm part of it, well, then I'm part of it. If the penalty for surrendering is death, and the penalty for losing the battle is death..."

Well, but this is the very question I'm asking. What's the appropriate approach, when the truth itself is a memetic superweapon? "Taboo your words" is supposed to be a way to increase clarity--to say, "alright, that word is clearly a sticking point, what if we describe it another way?" If dropping the word "groomer" would get us closer to putting an end to grooming behaviors, I'd be on board with that. But it doesn't seem like dropping "groomer" would win a single step forward in that battle. Rather, it seems like the attempt to tar "groomer" as conspiratorial thinking is an attack on some people's ability to express the problem clearly.

The word "groomer" literally someone engaging in behavior meant to prepare child for rape or molestation. Whatever one thinks of drag child pageants, we would need much, much more evidence that this is indeed their intent to declare the use of this accusation as "the truth itself".

I'm not sure this is right; there's an (older?) sense of the word in which an older person develops a (non-sexual) relationship with a younger (too young to consent) person, and then scoops them up for a sexual relationship once they turn 18. (or whatever)

So the drag-queen thing can be viewed in a similar way; get children who are too young for sexual purposes inculcated into your personal fetish, which will increase the supply of adults for you (and yours) to sexually exploit down the road; "stochastic grooming," if you will.

Well, the current most prominent media usage I can remember is references to the British (Pakistani) grooming scandal, which specifically included adult men grooming girls for molestation right here and now.

But even beyond that, it's still something where even you are saying "can be viewed"; one could indeed concot a scenario where that happens, or theoretize that this is the end goal, but that's still not enough to pronounce it as "the truth itself" without a lot more evidence of that actually happening.

What is the end goal of DQSH/Fabulous Drag Kids then?

Their stated end goal is increasing LGBTQ+ positivity. Considering that polls have shown that at least the acceptance of basic trans identity claims has gone down in recent years, it's questionable how well it is succeeding, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not enough to pronounce - once again - the "truth itself" that actual end goal is grooming them for sex.

Interesting that the LGB part of things doesn't seem to have much to do with the drag aspect -- yes drag is a gay subculture, but in today's context it seems to be mostly about increasing 'T' positivity. "Grooming kids to accept trans people as potential sexual partners" is not the farthest thing from "increasing trans-positivity".

If LGB positivity is part of the goal, why aren't story hours with ordinary gay people? (as such)

I'm not personally hung up on the 'groomer' label, but can see where people are coming from with it; I also don't think 'trans-positivity' is a very positive thing for kids to be learning.

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NPR told me Trump was 'groomed' by Putin. It just reveals what a bad-faith farce this debate is. NOW we need to have sensitive conversation about when it's kosher to use the word?

What I'm talking about is that when you aim a nuke at Washington DC because that's where all the warmongers of Pentagon and the alphabet sunglasses people sit and they did deserve as much, don't be surprised that the entire USA unites behind the warmongers of Pentagon.

It isn't the word that is the sticking point for me, but its usage (and association with its usage elsewhere) as a broad brush to smear my ingroup with.

The entire reason 'nuclear weapons' are being deployed is because all others have seemingly failed. This never even becomes an issue in this timeline if the SocJus left had demonstrated any capacity to police its own and smoke out harmful ideologies amongst its ranks; if some figures of authority actually put their foot down and declared that this stuff is a bright red line that will not be crossed.

Instead, the Left just Presses X to Doubt and dismisses all criticism as conspiracy mongering, with mainstream support. And when their opponents start getting a little too mean, the Left says "Whoah buddy, I'd love to resolve this, but I don't think I can when you're this hot and bothered! Come back when you've cooled off!".

I see no reason why anybody should drop "groomer" from their lexicon in the face of this willful intransigence.

SocJus left do police their own. That their opponents are not satisfied by the criteria of what SocJus left constitutes potentially harmful is expected. But the more they cry "wolf!" in the forest when there is no wolf to point at, the less I trust their judgment.

Socially acceptable minimum age for sexual remarks has only been rising and socially acceptable age gaps have only been shrinking in the SocJus left-dominated society as far as I see. This is not a society that is exceptionally prone to molesting of minors.

SocJus left do police their own.

Trivially, no, they don't. Policing your own isn't something you have to do when you have power- that's what "power" means. Power means that even when a member of your group is credibly accused of actual grooming, you can simply erase the people who call you that (this is described downthread) regardless of whether or not it's true.

socially acceptable age gaps have only been shrinking in the SocJus left-dominated society

This is only really true for older man-younger woman relationships, though. Laws accounting for "underage sex" tend to be very barely liberalizing; where there are exceptions for straight relationships across or under the boundary they're slowly being expanded to cover gay ones as well (California is a recent example of this)- you'd expect these things to be equally criminalized if the laws were tightening rather than the reverse, though the movement is barely significant.

Revealed preferences of SocJus (or more properly, third-wave feminism in general) are that the movement is primarily concerned with looting men for the benefit of women, so you'd expect them to become a sort of Junior Anti-Sex League. Men want younger women, older women want (older) men to be restricted to picking amongst them instead of being able to use their resources to impress the young women, and will leverage their political power to that end.

As far as men fucking men goes... well, gay men are a fargroup of women, and a minority of the population, so it makes logical sense for feminist women's anti-sex objectives to be couched using its former underdog-coded pro-sex views as a skinsuit. And sure, maybe it does mean an increase in men having sex with boys, but boys are just future men, so any collateral damage that arises from that is acceptable.

The Right is absolutely correct to pounce on this, even though it probably only arises as a natural consequence, and their blind spot (being that they don't actually consider anyone failing a paper bag test, in this case 'being 18', to be a human being) prevents them from mounting a proper defense. So, "groomer" it is...

Trivially, no, they don't. Policing your own isn't something you have to do when you have power- that's what "power" means. Power means that even when a member of your group is credibly accused of actual grooming, you can simply erase the people who call you that (this is described downthread) regardless of whether or not it's true.

Trivially, yes, they do, since I do not see a shortage of people in the left being slammed for, among other things, grooming. Perhaps they aren't real leftists?

Has there been any policing done by your in-group on this issue? What I mean by this is, has anyone inside the progressive caucus reported or made sure the kids of these kind of events weren't abused or is there a in-group watchgroup that does this?

Rather than drawing attention the groomers directly, perhaps a targeted prevention approach directed at those most at risk for grooming.

What would an updated version of this educational film be like?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fTn7ALbLYPI

Conversely, I think the reason it's such a potent rhetorical weapon is that it comes pre-targeted. The cases where I see it being deployed are instances of people specifically organizing or supporting things where the accusation is plausible. No one is firing the weapon at, e.g. union organizers, or workplace feminism writers. It always comes up in circumstances of sex stuff targeted at children.

Like most every superweapon, it looks plausible from the outside. I guarantee the LGBT community can give you a laundry list of reasons why it shouldn't apply in a given case. Drag shows are definitely one of the harder ones to defend, though.

I think the Florida bill is the most salient example, and it's also one of the worst-targeted.

Not very many people target ordinary honest Joe workers on the right specifically as "Nazis". Yet when they instead vaguely wave at the Red Tribe with the Nazi sign, I can see why the honest Joes shy away from them.

In some very red spaces on the front lines of the culture war, it was basically decided “if they call you a nazi, call them a groomer.” This escalation was intended not to change minds or win hearts, but to turn the rhetorical tables on “yes, all Republicans” posters.

are you refering to the roman salute, or the OK hand symbol?

Referring to a metaphorical piece of cardboard with "This is a Nazi ->" on it.

How do you feel about the Catholic church? I'm confident Catholicism has resulted in more child sex abuse than any "Drag Kids" event. I think quite likely more than Hollywood! Or maybe the Boy Scouts would be a better comparison.

How do you feel about the Catholic church?

Well... I'm not Catholic, so you could say I have some disagreements with them for sure.

I'm confident Catholicism has resulted in more child sex abuse than any "Drag Kids" event. I think quite likely more than Hollywood!

In raw numbers, maybe. Per capita? I doubt it. It's astonishingly difficult to get reliable numbers on this sort of thing, of course, but every time I've tried, I've failed to find any evidence that the Catholic church leads to child abuse at greater rates than, say, public schools.

Anyway this feels like a similar gotcha to the child beauty pageants. Yes, there are other forms of child abuse--that justifies this one?

No, but do you call those other groups groomers? Do you characterize their actions as grooming when it has resulted in (at least alleged) tens of thousands of kids being sexually abused?

My point is that the "groomer" label seems to be reserved, in political discourse, almost solely for LGBT people and it's use seems quite disconnected from the actual frequency of child sexual abuse.


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