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 -
Of course these lotharios are doing something bad, should they not have consequences?
I agree that castration is dumb. But what’s wrong with seduction laws?
Well, women are actively giving Lothario what he wants. It's not like women should be considered incapable of assessing their own risk or bearing the consequences of their own decisions, and it's often trivially easy to identify a cad - they barely even need to hide that fact. Personally I think that if women decide to play with fire, it should come as no surprise once they get burned. You did a stupid thing and had unrealistic expectations of a man you probably already knew wasn't looking for the same thing you were, learn from it and grow.
Perhaps seduction laws make some level of sense within a traditionalist sexual/moral framework, but right now, we don't live in that world. We live under a bizarre marriage of Victorian era morality and female sexual liberation that is the schizophrenic brainchild of modern gender feminism. Most people are somehow still capable of harbouring the traditional idea that female sexuality is a Big Deal and must be guarded closely; that any woman who feels violated (by her own free choices, mind you) is an agency-less victim who should have the ability to shift responsibility onto the man and obtain restitution of some form from the one "responsible", while somehow also holding the liberal idea that women are agents who can freely make whatever sexual choices they want without outside constraint or any personal responsibility to safeguard their own virtue. All the choice, without any of the responsibility.
Men and society have no ability to police women, despite the fact that once the sex they assented to does not result in what they want, it is the responsibility of society - whether that be the men around them, or society as a whole - to intervene on their behalf. Historically this would've been a woman's father beating the daylights out of the man in question and forcing a shotgun wedding, today it comes in the form of public cancellation and blacklisting of the man as a predator and objectifier of women. In effect, this means that men are policed, whereas women aren't even expected to accept the consequences of their own behaviour. Introducing seduction laws into this clusterfuck makes the situation even more unbalanced, not less.
At the very least it should go either way - sexual liberation or sexual traditionalism. But we fall short of even that basic standard at the moment. Right now many people's moral evaluations are incoherently structured around what would be most convenient for women, switching between traditionalism and liberation in a way that allows them to maximise the benefits women extract while minimising judgement and stigma, and that is something I do object to. It needs to be consistent.
Eh, the case for sexual traditionalism is pretty strong.
No one has every died from being too horny. If this were the case, men would have an expected and maximum lifespan of 16 years.
Men commit the overwhelming majority of murders and violence crime. The are, generally, three broad reasons for this; money/currency (including drugs), respect or prestige, and access or exclusive access to women.
The near human universal antipathy towards prostitution is largely based in concerns for a) health and b) preventing the breakup of families due to infidelity. I know it may come as a shock, but our hundreds of millions of illiterate agricultural ancestors weren't actually involved in a highly ideological effort to "own women's bodies and sexual agency" -- they didn't want creepy-crawlies in their pants, and also knew that Uncle Nimrod was one seriously horny dude.
Won't pay it much attention here but; pregnancy and abortion.
Simply put, sexual hyper-liberalization is obviously high risk for society. Risk, even when high, isn't inherently bad, but one then has to weigh it against the other side of the equation; reward.
And what is the real reward for sexual liberalization? I mean this genuinely as a question, not a rhetorical device. The most common responses I have heard or seen fall into a bucket of fuzzy, highly emotional self-justifications; "People should be able to express themselves however they want" , "sexual agency is a necessary requirement for personal liberty" (I don't know what that means) , "people have a right to love whoever they want to love." None of this is very concrete and side steps the entire risk-reward framework.
I also haven't seen much in the way of good faith or realistic discussions of the downsides of a return to sexual traditionalism. The Handmaids Tale LARPing is, hilariously, just a publicly accessible BDSM fantasy. Sexual traditionalism wouldn't mean women couldn't vote or drive or have "real jobs" (read: high status wordcel jobs). I can see slut shaming becoming a little more prevalent but my thought there is that it still absolutely exists, but is just done in layers-upon-layers of backhanded compliments and covert communication styles instead of out in the open.
Does it? "Not having a fundamental moral right infringed upon" is a kind of reward, surely. You may as well ask why a traditionalist sexual mores shouldn't simply shoot all transgressors without a trial. I'm sure a practical argument could be constructed on why such a policy would be detrimental to society along some tangible metric, but that's not why any sensible person will immediately reject such a proposal with horror: it's because they feel that killing people is, all else being equal, morally wrong. This isn't "concrete" and it "side-steps the risk-reward framework", but all the same, you can't have a real conversation about the issue without bringing it up.
In the same way, as a true liberal, I feel it is, all else being equal, axiomatically, fairly wrong to prevent people from doing whatever the hell they want; and doubly wrong to force them to do things they don't want to do. Society naturally has to mandate a little bit of each to keep itself running, but that's a trade-off from the word go, and you should only add more restrictions and duties with the understanding that you are doing harm to your citizens with each new bylaw by infringing upon those basic rights, so the payoff had better be damn good. Traditional sexual norms include a fair bit of forcing women to do things they don't want to do, and positively enormous amounts of preventing people of both sexes from doing things they want to do. There's an enormous penalty in the "cons" column on that basis alone, and in a world where STDs and unwanted pregnancies are under control, the fuzzier benefits just don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of making up for it. It's like asking what kind of subtle improvement to demographic statistics would be worth mandating that people whack themselves in the knee with a hammer every morning.
I want to sincerely thank you for creating such a succinct illustration of why liberalism always fails within its own framework.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Gonna go off on a tangent here that's unrelated to what you were trying to say, but I'm just going to point out that this is largely down to their risk taking and greater aggressiveness within the public sphere, which also means that they are responsible for the overwhelming majority of acts of heroism (men are 90% of those who have received the Carnegie Hero Medal, for example). Of course, the negative aspects of these traits always get discussed so much more than the positive ones, and by virtually every political group in existence. Wonder why. Then there's also the reality of violence-by-proxy by women, which is yet another thing that fuels male-perpetrated violence. I wrote a longer comment about all of that here.
I wasn't so much advocating sexual liberalisation or disparaging sexual traditionalism as much as I was simply pointing out that if we're accepting a sexual framework, we need to fully accept all of its consequences. Sexual traditionalism doesn't just mean "shotgun weddings for men" and "penalties for cads for having deflowered a woman": it also means stigmatising and penalising women who have premarital sex or tart themselves up inappropriately or use sex/intimacy to wheedle money out of men, granting the men around them the power to vet and police who they can go out with (since they will have to defend any breach of their honour), and placing responsibilities on both husband and wife in a marriage to put out and provide sex to their spouse. The responsibility for maintaining a pro-social scenario was not placed only on one party.
Note I don't consider this to be the Handmaid's Tale either. I very much agree with you that that's basically feminist oppression porn and an unhinged caricature of traditional sexual mores which borders on the fantastical. I think all of these traditional strictures are just a consequence of accepting that entire framework of looking at things, and I don't like how we've basically adopted a chimera of sexual liberalism and traditionalism, having accepted only the parts of both worldviews that benefit women while discarding all the bits that may inconvenience them. Within this current context, I won't accept any more sexual strictures being placed on men; the system is already engineered to give women maximal choice while displacing maximal accountability onto men. If we're advocating a traditional society, the obligations of women that made it make sense need to be enforced. We need to pick a lane and stick with it, instead of relying on women's tears to help us shape our approach to everything regardless of how conflicted and schizophrenic things get.
What makes you think I have a problem with any of that?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link