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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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From a legal standpoint, what is the theory for the 'harm' caused in this instance. And to whom?

Liability of any kind usually rests on the idea that someone's interests were injured and in need of redress.

We are able to statutorily 'create' interests (the Americans with Disabilities Act did this, for instance) but I think we'd smack into 1A issues trying to make it completely illegal to post manipulated images of people who... are already posting images of themselves online.

Most obvious angle is copyright/IP, but they're still sorting that out for AI works.

I'd kinda love for them to go at it from the obscenity angle. Because that would also suggest that the women posting thirst traps are doing something wrong too.

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.

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I know, I know: Amadan is going to hammer me for using sarcasm.

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.

if we can't even preserve some few rags of compassion towards children

You mean girl children, right? Because compassion towards boy children is notably absent, and contempt is its substitute.

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

inviting others to join her

if she organised a group beating. Which, on reading, she did:

She hit him a second time. Then, the principal said, the girl asked aloud: “Why am I the only one doing this?” Two classmates hit the boy, the principal said, before the 13-year-old climbed over a seat and punched and stomped on him.

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.

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:

  1. We put exactly the same burdens on men and women, and expect the same behaviour from them both. I don't think this is wise, because of innate differences and consequent disparate impact, but it's fair.
  2. We decide that men and women have different natures, and thus should play divergent roles to at least some degree, but try to keep the burden somewhat fair. Both men and women are punished for poor behaviour and/or failing to fulfill their role.
  3. We are paternalists and decide that men are stronger and women weaker and more delicate. Men are given more burdens but are also given more power, respect and rewards. This applies at the bottom of society as well as at the top. Women defer to men.

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.