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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think this is overstated. 'Dressing for yourself' can surely include feeling good when dressed up in public. You are participating in status games, you are expressing yourself, and you are turning heads because you enjoy the feeling of power that it gives you or because you are free of the anxiety of being judged or shamed when you know you're looking your best and your flaws have been minimised. That's markedly different than enjoying turning heads specifically because you want to make men horny. This is the difference between someone who dresses skimpily and whose primary satisfaction from that is attention from men, and someone who is interested in fashion and experiments with things that are orthogonal to basic male attraction (and the latter is a large amount of what people talk about on, say, your average style podcast – they are not always discussing how to be sexier in veiled terms, though they sometimes are, a lot of the time they are discussing trends, novelty and details of a kind that I daresay most men are pretty oblivious to and that are more to do with status, social impression, coolness and craft than sexiness).
I think the analogy for this would be a woman dressing with effort even though she doesn't want sexual attention and might actually be annoyed by it. That's pretty easy to imagine isn't it?
I also think you need to tease out many gradations of possible meaning in the spectrum of dressing for yourself vs dressing for others. I would think the primary meaning is that your objective is to feel good in such contexts that others think you look good or have matched the occasion (a form of female success). This inner feeling is going to be distinct from dressing up instrumentally just because you want e.g. male attention. Now sure there is an extreme interpretation of doing something for yourself that means you would get the pleasant feeling even if no one else can notice. But I don't think that is particularly central natural language usage. If you do carpentry for yourself as a hobby, you might be disillusioned if you were never allowed to give your wooden creations to anyone or show them to anyone. Part of their value lies in the pride you're able to take in showing them. But a lot of it is also in the feeling of mastery you have when working with wood and being able to create the 'kind of thing' that others would value. I think it would still be fair in such a scenario to say you were pursuing carpentry for yourself.
I also think it would be okay for a man to say they were pursuing orgasm for its own sake even though they actually could just get that via porn. (There are different flavours of orgasm only achievable with others.)
As an aside, I think women actually do often dress up by themselves. This is experimentation and practice I guess, but I think they enjoy it loads, from girlhood on.
More options
Context Copy link