site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So what was Women's Movement, and all the people who supported it then? Just unwitting pawns of Big Sexual Entertainment, too stupid to see their strings being pulled by Hugh Hefner and Hollywood? I don't buy it. Even if Hefner and co did contribute to it (which they did to some small degree), these women and feminists did still have agency. It's also just begging the question of why did women accept the Sexual Liberation narrative, when women had long been the sexual moral arbitrators? Why wasn't Hefner and co suppressed like in any other moral panic that women are so capable of? If you want to attribute it to something than other feminism itself, you're better off looking at birth control, domestic technologies and other technologies in the postwar era.

How about ‘true sexual liberation has been tried at least to some extent, and is inherently exploitative of women (and children), under pretty much any economic system’?

I was making a humorous reference to the 'true communism has never been tried'. Many contemporary radical feminists will still support the notion of a 'sexually liberated society' in the same way communists will support the idea of a communist utopia. The joke being that communism has been tried and failed, and similarly that sexual liberation has been tried and failed. But it doesn't stop the radical feminists continually idealising how next time ("real" sexual liberation) will work.

The women's movement and sexual liberation movements were separate movements, even if parts of them were at times connected and at other times different parts were counterposed to each other. (Many) women accepted the sexual liberation narrative for the same reason many men did: because they wanted to have sex. Some of these women called themselves feminist and others didn't.

Some of these women called themselves feminist and others didn't.

So how many called themselves feminist, how many anti-feminist, and how many rejected to orient themselves on this axis?

Because for any policy, no matter how closely it is associated with some ideology, there were those that wouldn't identify themselves with that ideology, and some that did identify with it, but opposed that policy.

Thus rendering, by your reasoning, any statement that implies a correlation exists between support for X and idenfying as Y, false.