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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28924 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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I think knowing what a woman is is pretty deeply rooted in our biology and no amount of gaslighting and enforced consensus can change that. 1984, famously about the Party's ability to make people say black is white and up is down and war is peace, spent a lot of time describing how much effort went into enforcing these edicts, and the implicit message there (though not the one Orwell was getting at) is that people actually knew the truth, even if they knew better than to say it. Even the most loyal enthusiasts might convince themselves they really believed war was peace and we had always been at war with Oceania, but people would slip because they couldn't actually turn off memory and reason entirely.

So it is even with the most devoted adherents of trans ideology. They tell themselves they really, truly believe trans women are women and "woman" is just an arbitrary socially constructed label. But they don't actually want to fuck a person who clocks as the wrong sex (it's more than just genitals, we all know this). On a deep, instinctual level they recognize the difference. To the degree that they are sincere, they may convince themselves TWAW but they have to work at it to keep their words and behavior in line with what they claim to believe or they will slip up. And I think actually a lot of them are insincere and will ditch TWAW as soon as it is no longer the thing all good progressives believe. You'll see then how attached they really were to this professed lack of difference.

That said, you are right about some things. A lot of unphysical guys who've never done sports or martial arts really don't understand just how significant the physical differences between men and women are. If their last time in physical competition was middle school, they probably knew some girls who were more athletic than a lot of boys and hadn't yet seen just how rapidly that changes once the T hits.

I have to admit to being a nerdy, awkward kid who hated sports in school, and I was one of those guys... until I took up martial arts as an adult. At first I was a little confused that a woman with a higher belt wasn't wiping the mat with me the way more experienced men did, and that in fact I had to be careful not to hurt her. This was, you might say, a little red-pill moment.

Which is, I observe, is exactly what it looks like when a pro-T prog guy tries to write women characters. They write women as men with some shallow "loli Dylan Mulanney" cuteness, because they don't actually have a mental model of "women" as having any differences in mentality, life experiences, preferences, traits, qualities or viewpoints compared to men. "A woman is a dude who spends 12 hours writing spreadsheets about Warhammer 40k battleships and then adds a heart emoji and a tee hee at the end. Don't deadname her, bigot."

You've read John Scalzi, I see.

And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.

TERFs are mostly second wave feminists and very much want to rewrite third wave feminism. Second wavers largely believe that absent the patriarchy, men and women would behave the same, but physical differences are real. Third wavers are the ones who went post-modernist about gender categories.

You've read John Scalzi, I see.

I haven't actually. He never rose high enough on the TBR pile before his antics and personality turned me off. That's not a total dealbreaker for me, but there's a lot of other stuff to read.

But that character trope is a fairly common issue.

I thought Old Man's War wasn't half bad. It's far up from the disgustingly mediocre level of stuff that populates the Hugos these days.

But I don't think Scalzi is ever going to write anything that transcends being formulaic genre fiction. And him not being that great of a character writer probably is a big part of that, never mind the antics.

That said, I don't recommend holding his stuff in the same level of contempt as Martha Wells or something.

All his modern books have the same plot and the same relatively mediocre writing style but they're still fast, enjoyable reads. Grab on the next time you have a 3 hour flight-- they're peak airplane fiction.

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