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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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So I've been spending some time on the radfem pipeline. It's been my opinion for some time that radical feminists, like Marxists, are correct on their analysis of their subjects, with no regard to one might think about their solutions. Take the topic of promiscuity; a trait that was historically seen as far more taboo in women that it was in men. Double standards?

The argument is that the male desire seeks virgin wives and prostitutes. The whores will provide sexual release without reproduction and emotional investment to minimise the demand on men’s resources. On the other hand, virgin wives are meant to provide both sexual and reproductive services but exclusively to him so that his resources and labour are spent on his family and progeny alone. While relations with promiscuous women are intended to be secretive and secondary. Essentially, they play the role of sexual garbage collectors who clear the excesses when no one's watching. This is especially true for fighting men, who are separated from their families for extended periods in foreign places and under hard conditions. They miss female company, they seek comfort, relief from loneliness, sexual desire, and recreation. War-like conditions create a huge demand for such promiscuous women, who either seek financial reward in exchange, or security, or both. And so, when a woman has multiple partners, she is slotted into the whore sub-class automatically. This sub-class doesn't demand respect or commitment, they knows their place and that they're not likely to move up the ladder, and so they're viewed as the lowest value women. And in an age before industrialisation when paternity tests weren't even a twinkle in anyone's eyes, and of constant conflict and strife, such promiscuous women with kids especially would lose out of the support structure. Perhaps these standards did make sense in this period. But what role do such standards play now, in ultra societies like the West, with large populations, high levels of specialisation, divisions of labour, lasting peace and advances in medicine? The breakdown of families comes to mind, which is of course for a myriad reasons, to a point where families are becoming far too expensive to sustain. We still have sufficient demographics and functional infrastructure and institutions to keep civilisation alive, even if we reach SK levels of atomisation.

So here's where I'm less certain; will decadence necessarily mean decline? Or maybe we'll just draw out the inevitable and decline will come very slowly, say over a few centuries? Should we turn to traditional norms to reverse this trend? If so, how can traditional norms become tenable enough to be a potential solution?

Radfems are wrong not only about men, they're also wrong about pretty much the entirety of gender relations and how it operates currently and historically. But I am used to seeing this kind of thing, at this point. It seems to be a general trend even among heterodox communities and the anti-woke that the ideological precepts of their opposition that they're most likely to accept (comparatively speaking) are the feminist ones, which is evident in the utterly bizarre conservative-TERF allyship that seems to be going on at the moment. There's also a similarity in the moral typecasting that feminists and conservatives (and many other people, too) engage in - to them, men are a by default "degenerate" group who need to be reined in and obligated to provide protection to the women around them, and women are a group deserving of special protections. They differ on many things, but on these fundamental perceptions I don't see any difference at all. Even the blank-slatist intersectionalists who believe that men engage in bad behaviour simply because of patriarchal norms still fundamentally engage in the same knee-jerk moral typecasting, they just attribute it to a different cause to make it fit with their blank-slatism.

It seems that if the community isn't an explicitly anti-feminist community (and sometimes even if it is), there's going to be an instinctual legitimacy assigned to feminist claims that doesn't get assigned to any other woke factions because they align with certain entrenched preconceptions and moral judgements that the other woke factions do not appeal to. Any group which is purportedly dedicated to "protecting women" tends to immediately align with most people's sensibilities. No matter how objectionable the rhetoric they churn out is, a base-level feeling of agreement with some of their precepts still seems to exist. There is something profoundly instinctual about the women-are-wonderful effect that makes it exist in most political factions, and it seems to me that any ideology that espouses these base talking points will always have some level of congruence with our knee-jerk beliefs that automatically confers upon it a huge advantage regardless of its validity.

Almost all sexual violence is committed by young men.

Years ago, I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t really the case. Maybe historically?

(Note the three- to four-fold difference between lifetime female-victim rape rates and male-victim made-to-penetrate rates, which I would consider “large majority” but not quite “almost all”, and how the 12-month male-victim made-to-penetrate rates are actually higher than female-victim rape rates, comparing table 3.1 to 3.5.

There isn’t a breakdown for 12-month assaults by sex of perpetrator, but if we wanted to use the lifetime rates of perpetration (as shown in tables 3.4 and 3.8) to adjust the 12-month victimization rates so we only include cross-sex victimization, it only makes the rates of victimization between M->F and F->M almost exactly comparable.

I was extremely surprised by this when I dug it up and looked at the stats. I recall that I couldn’t seem to do the same for the 2015 and 2018 reports, because they seem to have removed the 12-month rates and/or the perpetrator sex breakdown. I recall also wanting to find similar statistics for other countries, but that was more difficult, so I gave up.

So for some reason male perpetration has gone down over decades, but female perpetration has gone up, so much so that the sexes are raping each other at similar rates (at least in the US)!

Even given that I might’ve fucked up this very simple analysis, the rates of victimization alone are very different from what we expect from the zeitgeist.)

Yep, I was wondering if I should tackle this topic in my comment but decided it was already lengthy enough as it was and wanted to refrain from unceremoniously burying them in data from the outset. I'm glad someone else brought it up though.

There's not only the NISVS, either, there's other corroborating data which indicates that women are no angels when it comes to sexual offending. For example, here is a 2012 research paper using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's nationally representative National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC, 2001-02). It found in a sample of 43,000 adults little difference in the sex of selfreported sexual perpetrators. Of those who affirmed that they had “ever force[d] someone to have sex … against their will,” 43.6% were female and 56.4% were male.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-012-9943-5