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 -
Where's the harm in teenage boys faking nudes of a 13 year old girl without her knowledge or consent, indeed very much against her consent?
Well gosh gee whiz, why on earth are women such picky, fussy, hypergamous trollops who don't want to marry just plain ordinary guys? No wonder we need to force these women into marrying normal men who think nudes of 13 year old girls are just fine! Why is anyone getting het-up about this? Men like nubile women, young means fertile, and if she's old enough to bleed she's old enough to breed, right?
The boys are just doing what boys do! Boys are gonna be interested in girls of their own age! Boys will be looking at porn, and porn is fine and normal and in fact is good for society since it reduces rape and sex offending crimes (citation needed, of course!)
I know, I know: Amadan is going to hammer me for using sarcasm. But how else am I to react to "how is the girl harmed by this?" unless I get really angry and abusive, in which case I'm still going to get the mod hammer.
There is a lot of daylight between "it's not okay to make nude deep fakes of 13 year old girls" and "an individual was harmed when that deep fake was made," and even more from that to "someone should be sent to prison about it." None of these things actually imply the others.
More options
Context Copy link
Sigh. Yes. Come on, you're just trying to be provocative and you knew you were going to get reported.
It's not the sarcasm that's the problem. It's that you (and I mean you specifically) can make an intelligent and cogent argument for why this is bad behavior that should be discouraged. And you can even be (a little) snarky about it. But when you layer on the "gosh gee whiz"s and straw men obviously directed at the person you are responding to, of course you're dialing up the antagonism in a way that doesn't actually lead to productive engagement. You're just trying to say "You're a shitty human being unworthy of a respectful reply" without using those words.
The "big yikes not a good look chief" millennial slop has ruined online discourse because it feels so good to get off those snide, snarky little burns but it absolutely destroys any hope of good faith dialog. Do you want to talk to people and maybe enlist their sympathy and get them to see your side of things, or do you just want to score little zingers?
The sarcasm is to prevent me going nuclear with abusive language. "So, okay, just shut up, you don't need to comment on this".
Yeah, that would work - if we didn't have guys posting about 13 year old girls in this fashion. I used to be a 13 year old girl. I can't be coolly objective and removed when it comes to stuff like this, because God Almighty if we can't even preserve some few rags of compassion towards children, what the hell are we doing even trying to keep this society going? Let it burn down. Let the TFR crater. Nothing is going to be missed.
Then be nuclear with abusive language and do eat ban. At least you will have made your point clearly for once.
Remember that the next time Amadan bans me, Southkraut. If I go down, I'm taking you with me! 🤣
I don't want to ban you.
But if the Jews on the Motte can cope with all the Joo-posters saying "The Holocaust didn't happen and it's good that it did," you can cope with some misogyny without losing it every time.
More options
Context Copy link
Honestly I'd prefer if you just adopted some more sang-froid, didn't treat this place as a twitter/discord/reddit meme-and-karma pit, and consequently don't get banned.
I mean, I too have my buttons and step out of line when they get pushed. Nobody here is an automaton (I hope). But this whole place works to any good only when people try their damndest not to chimp out, do get slapped when they do, and the largest part of our business gets done with some actual charity. Skirting the rules to fly as close to shit-flinging monkeydom as possible but just short of getting banned is just plain not productive.
You can make reasonable posts. You sometimes do. But eyeballing it, at least half of your output is antagonistic. And that part is worse than useless. Would it kill you to give us more of the other part? The one where you bring in views that are rare on the Motte, and don't make it a snarking contest?
More options
Context Copy link
You may as well post animal porn and go out in a blaze of glory, because your complete inability to refrain from embarrassing emotional outbursts every time a post rubs you the wrong way means you're doomed regardless.
I liked the guy calling me "middle-aged". Oh no, I've lived past early adulthood, how embarrassing! We all know women should die the minute they're not hot by male standards, which seems to be "over 13 because fake porn of 13 year old girls is hot and normal".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You mean girl children, right? Because compassion towards boy children is notably absent, and contempt is its substitute.
No, I mean everyone. I think those boys would be the better of a few slaps on the legs from their parents, but that is for their good, not because they had the temerity to offend against a female.
I don't think it's good for boy children that we seemingly are to expect that at the age of 13 they will already develop a porn habit, which is right, normal and good.
More options
Context Copy link
In this case the boy children in question did something very bad.
But in the general case it holds up. I cannot imagine this level of outrage if a boy were being bullied (or suffering equivalent psychic damage) by girls. Ultimately girls get compassion and boys get told to man up and/or shut up - I am honestly surprised they expelled the girl in this case and I wonder if it has anything to do with
if she organised a group beating. Which, on reading, she did:
If the genders were reversed, the boy doing the beating would get a lot worse than a temporary expulsion.
Well duh, 'you can just harass our daughters who did nothing wrong and followed the respectability rules in place in our society' resembles no historical society that has ever existed. Including in very patriarchal ones; what do you think the Taliban would have done to these boys?
There is a reason that, despite being skeptical of things like the 19th amendment, women's financial independence, women in pants, etc, I do not align myself with the faction on the motte which spits out spicy takes on women and then retreats to 'but but double standard! Boys just have to take it!' yeah, they do. Aside from the politically correct but very obvious fact that the statement 'men and boys are stronger than women and girls' does not need qualification(it applies psychologically as well as physically), you, uh, know what women do when they spend their girlhood being bullied and harassed by whatever boys want to do so? It generally looks like radical feminism; the breakdown in family formation in Latin America precedes the hyper-woke feminist wave in the region(and also the area's drop in TFR- these women appear to have retained conservative family values longer than their menfolk). Getting outraged about girls being abused and harassed with no recourse, far more outraged than in the case of boys, is a normal and healthy thing to do.
Yes, if a group of older girls doctored innocuous photos of a thirteen year old boy to be NSFW and started sharing them, this would be a bad thing and deserve to be punished. I am confident that you will not be able to find an example of this happening(you will, of course, be able to find examples of teenaged boys voluntarily sending NSFW content of themselves to young ladies who don't particularly want to receive any). The asymmetry of the sexes goes both ways. You can call be patronizing, but I'm not wrong.
A group of girls in my high school were literally sharing real pictures of me nude as a child, family photos taken by my parents when I was in preschool, laughing while making lewd comments about my penis every time they saw me. They were never punished for it, nor were the pictures confiscated by teachers or other adults outside school. I was told to just ignore their harassment. "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words [pictures] will never hurt me." I can only imagine things have gotten worse now that digital images makes sharing so much easier.
Girls become sexually aware much earlier than boys, while they are still on-par with or even stronger than the boys, and sexually harass them mercilessly until the boys reach puberty and the trend reverses. The vast majority of men and boys who sexually assault/harass women were themselves victimized as children. Maybe if we took a little care for protecting them when they were vulnerable, they wouldn't lash out later in life. Maybe, if we taught them by our protective actions of them that such behavior is wrong, they would believe us. But no, we instead simply say "It's different" when women and girls do it to boys, tell them to treat women the same as men, and wonder why such victimized boys don't give a shit about victimizing girls in turn.
More options
Context Copy link
I think I should state a clear position rather than just responding.
Fairness, and broad equality of burdens, is important to me. This means I'm somewhat happy to go with any one of:
To my mind we live in a society that nominally believes in equality (1) but rewards womens' hurt feelings with all possible aid plus harsh coercion/punishment for men, and rewards the difficulties of men or even physical violence towards them with contempt. What makes me very angry is when traditionalists, on the Motte or elsewhere, shrug and say, 'well, we might advocate for (2) or (3) but in the current political climate, all we can do is make sure that men hold up their side of the bargain and women will have to do their own". In practice this means that traditionalists will happily pile onto men with the rest of society, and then make awkward faces and back off whenever women do something that these traditionalists are supposed to be against. Self-declared traditionalists become indistinguishable from the most sadistic of man-hating feminists.
By contrast, I and at least some of the 'double-standard' Mottizens advocate for (2) or (3) but acknowledge that for now we are supposed to be living in (1) and demand to be treated fairly by that standard.
To return to the object at hand, I am quite happy with punishing the boy for bad behaviour, just not giving them a violent beating. Likewise, I think the girl should be punished for instigating a violent beating for a boy who had not actually physically harmed her and also "punching and stomping" them. Likewise, since I believe men and women are different (2) I doubt that you will find this exact scenario reversed but there are plenty of cases where girls gleefully ruin a boy's reputation and make him miserable for fun and I think that they should be punished just like the boy in this scenario.
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
More options
Context Copy link
If I (and I mean me specifically) am unable to make intelligent and cogent arguments, will that be seen as a mitigating circumstance when moderating my comments?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your logic suggests that you'd have no objection if a 13 year old girl published nudes with knowledge and consent.
Is that true?
Is consent the defining factor here?
I just want something on record.
I think 13 year olds should not be sending nudes to anyone. However, as a society, we seem to have decided sex is for everyone and we all should start the younger, the better. Romeo and Juliet laws because aw, statutory rape is such a condemnatory charge! it ruins your life (if you're the guy fucking the younger girl)!
So if we're going to say "okay, yeah, 13 year olds can have boyfriends/girlfriends" (instead of "What? No, you are too damn young! Wait a minimum of another three years before even thinking about dating!") and if we're going to say "hey, sex is a beautiful, natural, instinct that everyone has a right to engage in, and once you hit puberty you're old enough to make up your own mind" (even setting aside the "well ackshully in Classical times 13 year old girls were routinely married to 30 year old men, this is why I am not an ephebophile/why women should be married off as young as possible by their fathers picking a husband for them" set), then at least let it be in the context of a relationship, where she knows and consents to giving her boyfriend nude photos.
I still think it's a very bad idea because it's highly likely the first thing the boy will do, regardless of how he swears he'll only keep them to himself, is share them around with his friends. But at least then it's a decision, even if it's a bad decision, made by the girl. The consequences there are the punishment: yes, you can't trust men when they swear fidelity, yes men are only after one thing, yes you now have a reputation for being a slut, yes more people than you ever wanted to know now know what you look like naked (and maybe even trying to strike sexy poses), yes this is your fault as well. Learn the hard lesson and don't do anything this stupid the next time.
Fake photos of her that the creator pretends are real, that she sent him, that he's fucking her, that she's easy, hey guys have a look, you could get a piece of this whore - yeah, she is perfectly entitled to punch him in the face for that.
And so it sounds like we're worried about something other than a child's consent being present or not.
And of course, you're seemingly expecting that the female side of the equation isn't going to be mature and wise enough to make good decisions here and thus is not blameworthy.
But you get young guys, who are similarly immature and unwise, and you expect them to behave with maximum propriety, and if they do not, then they should expect immediate and swift reprisal. I don't see why leniency due to inexperience and immaturity absolves one but not the other.
If we think kids engaging in uninhibited sexual activity is bad, and, in that vein, that sharing nudes is bad, I simply suggest that we are concerned for reasons orthogonal to 'consent' and should thus apply rules that restrict all the parties' behaviors, possibly for their own good, regardless of who did or did not agree.
I think 13 year olds are not mature enough to make good decisions. If a 13 year old gets convinced to provide nude photos, they've been taken advantage of. It doesn't matter if they're a girl or a boy.
Where it's pardoned, as seems to be the case here, that "haw, haw; of course 13 year old boys are horndogs, of course they want naked photos of girls, what harm did they do?" that's equally bad. I'm not saying "excuse the girl", I'm saying "the girl in this case did not do anything wrong yet she is being punished for it".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would mostly agree with this. Its just another example in the long list of examples why the consent standard when applied to sexuality and sexual interactions is more or less useless.
I don't think it is useless, but man, people do not seem to really know what they mean when they say "consent." Worse still, they don't really know what they mean when they say they "consent" to some activity.
Sex in particular, the emotional valence of the moment, and the intensity, can shift by the minute. Then, reassessed after the act, someone may decide that some particular part of it they 'agreed' to in the moment was actually a violation.
That is one of the main problems with consent as a standard. It does not hold up under any of the hard cases.
And with sex IN PARTICULAR, there is no reasonable way to go back and assess whether it was validly given or not or whether the lines were crossed. I noticed this issue in law school. "Wait, how the f@&k do you establish evidence for lack of consent when it all happens behind closed doors?"
Unless you film the whole interaction and that opens up the whole can of worms that we're discussing.
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
So, back in high school, someone made a fake photo of me and posted it in a classroom. It wasn't a nude, but it was political, depicting me as Stalin, as I was an outspoken socialist. I was outraged ("the photoshop is not even accurate! I'm a TROTSKYIST!"), and it definitely hurt my feelings and hurt me socially. Pretty clear case of bullying, but, in retrospect, it was pretty hilarious and a useful learning experience. Should that kid have been punished?
I don't think so, and I suspect you don't either (though I'm curious if my suspicion is right). Which shifts the question to, what is the difference between a nonsexual representation and a sexual one? I think, to many people who don't see harm, harm categorically isn't something that can be done with an image or words--sticks and stones can break my bones etc. If people start physically attacking someone, or destroying their property, in response, there is harm, but the harm originates from the physical act, not the instigating image. The introduction of a sexual element doesn't change this. (I'm speaking here in terms of conceptual framework, not legal definitions.)
That doesn't mean that the school shouldn't do anything about the boys--schools can and should regulate behavior above and beyond the minimal standard of harm. But the idea that actual physical violence should be punished less than images and words is weird to me, especially when school administrators had no actual evidence of the images.
You're a guy. Twenty years later, someone is not going to drag up that fake nude of you and use it as evidence that you are a lying, cheating, cock-carousel riding whore who wants a share of an alpha, will settle for a beta to support you and then cuck him with that alpha, try to pawn another's man children off on that beta as his own, and are a prime example of why women should not be allowed to vote, attend higher education, or be permitted out of the house by their father until the day to marry the man picked out for you by him, and then you will spend all your days in that house under the rule of your husband.
(Those are some of the highlights from the commentary around 'how to solve the TFR problem/why aren't women dating men/what can we do about the lonely, sexless men who can't get a wife' on here, so far as I've gathered them).
More options
Context Copy link
The difference is that a video of you as Stalin is obviously a joke. Do you think you would have felt the same if instead they showed a video of you masturbating on a television in the classroom?
I would have felt very differently: I would have cared much less, quite honestly. "Oh, someone's a weirdo, anyone whose opinion of me changes because of it isn't worth caring about." And I'm not sure that making the AI-generated nude clearly a fake joke (giving her purple skin or whatever) would change anyone's opinions. I think the crux of the matter is that it's a sexual image, and we cordon off sexuality as requiring unique, almost spiritual protections around it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What is the legal harm here, is the question that @faceh asked. Mind you I disagree with faceh, I think the harm here is pretty obvious even from a legal point of view since defamation per se usually covers allegations of sexual misconduct in as well (but as I said elsewhere I'm not a legal expert here and could be completely wrong). Please try to respond to the argument faceh is actually making instead of devolving into mocking and sarcasm.
Okay, so I burned down faceh's house and broke faceh's legs and stole all faceh's money in their bank account, but what is the legal harm here? Was any harm even done if there's no legal harm?
I mean, I can run you through the entire philosophical underpinnings of the Anglo Legal Tradition that explains the "harms" that, e.g. physically damaging a person's body, or removing funds they 'earned' without their permission, or demolishing objects that belong to them entail.
I did go to school for that after all.
But somehow I think you'd be nonplussed.
I'm not nonplussed. I can recognise "heh heh my chance to be an edgelord" when I see it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not to mansplain your own violent revenge fantasy back to you—but you do know that as a middle aged woman, an attempt at breaking @faceh's legs would almost certainly result in a reverse uno card getting quickly played against you? Or for that matter, such an attempt against any man in this thread who you wish to "[go] nuclear" on for being insufficiently reverential toward girls and women, but especially against one with an MMA background.
Granted, perhaps the hidden premise is that he's already cooked like Anakin by the housefire but with legs still intact before the knee-breaking. Either way, what a curious toughgal LARP.
Didn't we have a distinction between rhetorical leg-breaking and actual leg-breaking on here when it came to comments? Anyway, no of course I can't physically break his legs. But it's a hypothetical: we all recognise the harm done by physical violence, nobody would attempt to defend it by "but is it legal offence, is legal harm done?"
Same with shaming and humiliating a minor child by producing lewd and fake images of her. If you really need "but is it legal harm, otherwise it doesn't count", then I submit you are not part of civilised human society.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Legally, you committed several clear and well established crimes (arson, battery, theft) that caused clear and well established harm, both in the legal and moral sense (loss of the house, medical bills for the legs, loss of the money in the account).
Faceh never argued that there was never any moral harm, and I doubt he believes that there wasn't any. But what was done in the article doesn't clearly and neatly fit under any existing legal framework like revenge porn laws and defamation laws. I (and others) think it likely falls under defamation, but other legal precedents like Fallwell v. Hustler make that unclear so we'd likely need some court cases or new statutes to establish a clear precedent.
So instead of being snarky and sarcastic to faceh, you could make an argument like "I think this behavior falls under [existing legal framework] because X" or "I don't think it fits under existing legal frameworks but legislatures could make it illegal without running afoul of [the first amendment/existing precedent/whatever] because X." It really isn't hard, you're just choosing to react with snark and sarcasm instead of an actual argument.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link