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 -
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