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 -
On the purely linguistic side of the Minneapolis shooting (which looks as a totally intentional assassination by ICE to me) and the media reports on it. Does anyone, like me, feel puzzled from the naturalness and ease that media use when they talk about (the unjustly and brutally killed) Renee Good's "wife"? It's the same strange feeling I get when I read the online discussions on the PLURIBUS tv series and the first episode in which the female protagonist's "wife" is killed. What I find strange is the absolute nonchalance that is used in media to describe the partner of a woman as her "wife". The grumpy conservative in me would like to say: "No, no, no! She is a partner. She is a significant other. She is a lover. She is everything but she isn't a "wife". The word "wife" has a very different meaning!". Of course this is a tiny minority position: I understand that the zeitgeist, today, has completely normalized the use of the word "wife" to describe a woman who is sentimentally joined with another woman. But still I find a sense of uneasiness when I hear such uses of the "wife" word...
This feels close enough to trolling and one of your few previous posts was also trolling. And this gives off alt account vibes. Permaban, unless other mods care to speak on your behalf.
It's clearly trolling IMO. Obvious enough that people shouldn't be replying to it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The gay marriage debate was always built around forcing society to give gay unions as much respect and reverence as regular marriage. It's stolen valour. If they want those unions to be respected then they should prove it through example that they are serious partnerships meant to last for life. They know about the instability and promiscuity rife in gay relationships and the big question marks hanging over child rearing by gay parents, but want you to ignore all that because there are laws telling you to do so. You're meant to pretend its the same as an institution with more than 4000 years of history behind it.
Edit: Should make it clear I'm all for equal legal rights in gay unions. I'm just against calling it marriage.
I think this is a mistake. Marriage is about conferring status to a couple who will copulate. It should only happen in the context of a serious relationship but the primary thing is child rearing.
Giving the same status to people who a priori cannot procreate ignores the telos of marriage and lowers the status of procreation.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, that's the point that social conservatives want to resist, no?
(I am deliberately making no further comment on the OP and definitely no comment on ICE or immigration. I am mainly just refreshed to have a good old-fashioned debate about marriage and sexuality, as if it were the early 2010s again.)
Obviously the point of using wife/wife or husband/husband language by default, and of getting everybody to use the word 'marriage' to include registered same-sex couples by default, is to cement the idea that these are the same as traditional marriage. The endgame of the movement for same-sex marriage was the idea that same-sex couples are, as much as is possible, literally the same as opposite-sex couples, and therefore should be treated the same way - in law, yes, but also in language and in social recognition. I can't begrudge a progressive for holding that position, but at the same time, I don't think you can begrudge a social conservative taking the opposite position.
A social conservative, given their position on marriage, has an entirely understandable desire to clearly disambiguate same-sex relationships (even vowed, legally-recognised same-sex relationships) from marriage. The government can say "we call these same-sex partnerships marriage", but the social conservative position is that the government is simply wrong. The government can pass a law calling a deer a horse, but that doesn't make it so; marriage is no different. The conservative would then feel a moral obligation to stick to using language that they understand to be truthful. It's no different to somebody here stubbornly referring to Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as 'he', no matter what Jenner's official papers say.
More options
Context Copy link
Tongue in cheekly, I'm not taking gay marriage seriously until your wife takes the kids and starts milking you for a percentage of your salary.
More options
Context Copy link
OP is talking about a lesbian relationship. Lesbian relationships tend to be monogamous and serious. They report lower infidelity rates than straight marriages and have a predisposition towards commitment.
By your standard, why shouldn't lesbian relationships qualify for marriage status ?
Because marriage is between a man and a woman straight up. Happy for them to have equal legal protection.
More options
Context Copy link
Don't they also have staggeringly high rates of domestic abuse? Though it wouldn't shock me if that were just an artifact of women being more likely to report domestic abuse and thereby the two-women relationship being more likely to report it.
I thought that this was an artifact of how the survey supposedly finding this was conducted, ie. they asked about domestic general in general, during a woman's lifetime, and then this was represented as abuse within current relationship, ignoring cases where women turn towards exclusively dating women in part because they've been with so many abusive men in the past.
More options
Context Copy link
Even wiki seems to suggest that experience of intimate partner violence goes gay men (26%) < straight men (29%) < straight women (35%) < bisexual men (37%) < lesbians (43%) < bisexual women (61%).
That's an odd, relatively unintuitive result, to me. Men are usually established to be more physically violent than women, which would suggest that relationships with men in them ought to be the most violent. It sounds like, though, male-male relationships are the least violent, and female-female the most. The gap between straight women and straight men is perhaps attributable to men being more violent, but then what's going on with lesbians?
Part of it may be that women are just more likely to report violence, yes. Another may be different patterns in forming relationships - as the commenter one post up notes, lesbians are the demographic most likely to commit to a relationship early, whereas gay men are the slowest. Perhaps lesbians are therefore more likely to get into a foolish or inadvisable relationship, run on to the rocks, and end up facing violence? Sexual culture more generally may play a role - you might expect more promiscuous groups to encounter more violence, but that's counter-intuitive with gay men, by reputation the most promiscuous group, encountering the least. And something very disturbing seems to be happening with bisexual women.
Different types of violence may count differently - my understanding is that while men are more likely to be physically violent, women are usually more likely to be emotionally abusive, so if emotional or lifestyle abuse counts as violence on that study, that might be raising the figure? However, the wiki page I linked says 43.8% of lesbians reported "physical violence, stalking, or rape", and even with only two-thirds of that being exclusively female perpetrators, that's still pretty bad. Even if we consider the possibility that lesbians who have dated men are victims of male-originated violence at disproportionately high rates, female-on-lesbian violence is still unusually high.
I don't have enough to state a conclusion here, and I'm naturally somewhat skeptical of the way Wikipedia frames these results. So I'll just say that I don't know what's going on with sexual orientation and domestic violence. These figures are striking enough that it sure looks like orientation is a factor, but it's nothing so clear as "men/women/straights/gays are more violent".
I worked as a bouncer through college and for a few years afterwards. I took a lot of shifts at the nearby LGBT+ night club as the pay was better and it was not any worse than anywhere else, though the dangers were...different. I made a lot of friends there too. I can't help with stats on this stuff at all, but I can share the sort-of popular, tribal understanding of these things from within part of the community. Its well understood within the LGB community that lesbians are hitters. They were also the most likely to attack the bar staff by a wide margin. In fact I'm pretty confident that all of the people we had to call the police on were lesbians, they were definitely all women, some could have been bi. On the subject of bisexuals, they are often looked down upon by the Ls and Gs. I'm talking about people who actually experience genuine attraction to both sexes that they have acted on and continue to pursue, not self ID bisexuals who are straight in practice. They are seen as unreliable, undependable sex-addicts who lie constantly. Some parts of the community have significant anti-bisexual bias to the point of not allowing them in some clubs/events at all.
More options
Context Copy link
I'd argue against this theory of men being more violent than women. They are more damaging if they are violent and they are less prone to injuries if assaulted by women, but it does not mean that women are not violent. You know, the how can she slap effect, when man using self defense is still the first one to be neutralized. You can easily show this on stats where men are not in the picture. For instance when it comes to abuse of children in their care, then mothers are far more abusive than fathers and the disparity is even larger if they are not biological parent of the child. The same goes when it comes to abuse of patients by nurses and many other cases when women can safely inflict physical abuse without risk of being confronted by men, including extreme ones like female Nazi concentration camp guards like Irma Grese, the Hyena of Auschwitz. So of course if they try the usual slapping and violent outburst shenanigans in same sex relationship, it does not fly as well especially as both of them can act as weak victims in front of the police.
In general, I think that women are actually much more callous and not at all the exemplars of fairer gender as they are portraited to be in women are wonderful reality distortion. If by any chance women could overpower men in violent confrontation, I think that they would be far, far more vicious and uncaring toward them.
Also, men who do have the most capacity to inflict damaging violence - taller, stronger, richer (easier to get away with it) - are ironically the most desired. "Short king" is still a backhanded "compliment". The evolutionary desire for superior genetics offset the fear of potential violence, I suppose.
More options
Context Copy link
Those appear to be absolute figures - isn't an alternative explanation that single mothers are simply much more common than single fathers? Statista for 2024 gives us 15,720,000 single mother households versus 7,214,000 single father.
So if we have 189,635 cases of an abusive mother, and 125,493 with an abusive father, then that works out to 1.2% of single mother households being abusive, and 1.7% of single father households. That would seem to track with the stereotype of men being more violent.
I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.
Where did you find information that this data is only about single parent households? In fact there is even better data in there, where women are more abusive compared to men if they are non-parent in the household by factor of almost 6.
Women are way worse and my claim is that their violence is vastly underreported. We see these things only in extreme cases with violence against children and of course in same-sex relationships where there is no bias against men.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
See my sibling comment.
Wikipedia is difficult in these topics as there are homophobic people wanting to slam dunk on the outgroup and homophilic sweeping inconvenient truths under the carpet.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think we might have to thank men and their inability to respond in kind to psychological manipulation. Consider the following interaction:
There are two likely outcomes:
No abuse whatsoever.
Bam, a cycle of psychological abuse.
I looked years ago into the studies, but the data is pretty bad. Alcoholism is also the main driver, so I would say there is a big class difference which can be more important. A below average working class couple who binge drink will use violence as conflict resolution more often, regardless if they are homo or hetero.
And while Gay men report lower rates of domestic abuse, there are many kitchen-psychology explanations for that:
See here for a discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskGayMen/comments/1dfkn7z/gay_men_in_relationships_have_the_lowest_rates_of/
And in lesbian relationships higher rate of reporting could be because butch women internalized toxic masculinity. Or the violence rate could be higher but less dangerous and more low key (like disrespecting shoving, instead of beating up into the hospital). Or is it just an artifact of self reporting and women “exaggerating” small slights?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6113571/#B108
Imagine a fifth of all relationships of your friends being build on fear! These numbers are so high though that I am sceptical.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Could be, but also women are statistically higher incidence of cluster B disorders and if you have two women in a relationship you stack that chance. Not sure if significant enough to account for that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ok, if we think ICE is going around calculatedly murdering people- why this one? AFAICT she was one protestor among many. There are many like it, this is the one unfortunate enough to drive her car directly at an ICE agent while being yelled at to stop.
Obviously, this partner isn't her wife; she has a husband, who she ditched out of ideologically induced mental illness. But getting mad over terminology is... well not exactly the most concerning part of this story, or even in the top ten.
One report stated she had a husband, then they divorced (father of her first two kids), a second husband who died (father of her third kid, the one she was allegedly dropping off to school before the protest) and this current partner/wife.
More options
Context Copy link
Also, why do it in front of God and everybody (the shooter was both aware he was being filmed and apparently documenting it himself).
I think on balance if ICE agents wanted to assassinate people they would probably both preplan it (planning planning planning is a big thing in the US military and I think it's trickled down into law enforcement) and carefully control the media exposure around it, to say nothing of their own personal safety.
I would guess OP's position is likely that they are doing stochastic assassinations, or essentially taking any plausible opportunity to shoot people, under the guise of self-defense.
I would guess OP is a troll, actually.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What if she's the partner that stays home and tends to the house though?
More options
Context Copy link
> calls the ICE altercation an "assassination"
> doesn't like when lesbians call eachother "wife"
I'm very curious to see where you fall on the political compass
The Chad Centrist (all four quadrants at the same time)
We need more insane centrists. There is a Lyndon LaRouche shaped hole in the USA; schizo cult leaders with beliefs to offend both sides of the political compass need to run for president more often. The Cynthia McKinney/David Duke antisemitism conference(no, not conference on antisemitism, there is a difference) cannot replace it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is OP's combination of beliefs any weirder than the mainstream US political parties? It sounds like he's a religious conservative who also is skeptical of big government and the police state.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Congratulations on trying to get a fight going. "Just asking questions about the assassination - why are they referring to the murder victim's wife when both parties were women?"
And before that, casually referring to the "totally intentional assassination". This is old school trolling, the black-hearted darkness of the Elder Time, back when men just woke up and chose violence.
If you believe that everything that you don't like is "trolling", I envy you. I would LOVE to be so confident in my epistemic superpowers
I believe that you're an aged-but-empty account that just posted a pparagraph that had incendiary flame-bait for both sides of the American political spectrum.
OTOH, you're throwing off clear ESL flags, so maybe you just genuinely didn't know how Americans would take that. My sincere apologies for accusing you of being a mildly clever member of my culture.
If they're a troll, they could be pretending to be "sorry non-native speaker here, no idea my totally innocent questions would come across like that" for deniability and the lulz (will the dupes swallow this as an excuse? how much can I get away with before the penny drops?)
Besides, dear Iconochasm, let us not be narrow-minded! ESL speakers can be trolls on English-language fora, too!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Didn't want to get no fight going. I just meant to point out that while linguistically and culturally, for my blaming of the use of the "wife" word in such context, I surely seem the over-conservative "red tribe" person, I am actually believing that the ICE shooter is unexcusable for what he did. So my position is a little bit more complex than "purely extra-conservative zealot" as I could seem for my linguistic idiosincracies
You misspelled "idiosyncrasy".
Also, trying to get a row started by both left and right by using "assassination" (to rile up the rightwingers) and "wife" (to rile up the leftwingers) in the same comment was a good attempt, but over-ambitious. Stick to one inflammatory statement at a time! Once the initial fire is successfully lit, you can then throw more fuel on the flames later.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How do you propose to describe a woman who has performed particular ceremonies to join herself to another woman, and obtained a certain legal status as a result, which entails certain rights and obligations? I'm not totally unsympathetic to the view you espouse (pun not intended), but substituting "partner" or "lover" wouldn't fit the bill. By Good's "wife" we do not simply mean a woman she loved very much and had sex with, we mean a woman who is legally entitled to her inheritance etc. The terms are not interchangeable.
More options
Context Copy link
I used the the word in some of my comments and later had the thought that I should have used "wife" (with quotes) instead. "Partner" alone without qualification is too vague. "Girlfriend" implies a level of casualness that may or may not be present.
More options
Context Copy link
I am grateful, in Australia, that we have normalised the word 'partner', and media tends to exclusively use that. It's gender-neutral and it covers both married and non-married couples.
It's also an out for people like me, who think that 'wife' implies 'husband', and 'husband' implies 'wife', and therefore is unwilling to use either word in the context of a same-sex partnership.
There is still something lost in translation to partner. It may capture modern secular view of marriage as something akin to business partnership in Family LLC, where both owners have 50% share and which can be ended any time at court, mostly in favor of female shareholder. Which is far from actual sacramental marriage that involves holy vows etc. But I agree. I can be "partner registered by government" in view of outside society and a husband in sacramental marriage with my wife in front of my community.
More options
Context Copy link
The normalization of "partner" also extends to heterosexual couples now, at least among my peers, which I find rather irritating.
Didn't it start off with heterosexual couples, though? People who were co-habiting but not married, especially if they had kids together, getting irritated about being treated as 'lesser' since they weren't married and "boyfriend/girlfriend are terms you use when you're kids, not when you're grown adults living together" and so on? Something the way Ms was adopted - if you use "partner" then that says nothing about your marital status and so you aren't being treated as in a less serious, committed relationship for lack of 'the piece of paper'.
Then using it for gay couples was more natural since they couldn't legally marry at the time, and it was a way of treating them in line with straight couples.
People have moved to using it all the time now, which was one point of contention in the "this is queer erasure" complaint post I saw elsewhere: she's her wife, not just her partner!
More options
Context Copy link
Think that’s a status thing. Wife/husband mean there is someone in this world who was willing to permanently vouch for you which is offensive or lowers the status of people who no one would do that for.
I also think an early sign of the coming fertility crash was eliminating Mrs. and everyone goes with Ms. That made being married with kids as having no special status in society. Having kids is work. Taking away status of having kids took away one of the big benefits of doing that. Women probably even care more about status than men and something as simple as everyone has to call you Mrs. and being above the Ms. in the social hierarchy is big.
Also the word "woman" comes from the Old English word, wífmon. Literally, "wife man," or transliterated as, "wifely person." The word wíf denoted female, reflecting the female social role.
More options
Context Copy link
Does (or did) Mrs have more status? If yes it should have survived and Miss would have been eliminated? The beauty contests are “Miss Universe/World” and I can see older women wanting longer the young/sexy status of their youth and being called Ms.
The rationale was that men get called "Mr." and that indicates nothing about their marital status, whereas women were discriminated against by means of "Are you Miss or Mrs?" So the idea was a general term equivalent to "Mr." for women.
I wasn't too keen on it, but over time I've come around because it is handy, in a work context, where you don't know if Mary Murphy is Mrs. Murphy or Miss Murphy when you're writing an official letter, so a neutral term avoids giving offence. (I tend to get official letters addressed to Mrs. My Surname, seemingly on the basis that a woman my age is surely married, but I've given up trying to get it corrected since I don't want to sound like a Dick Emery sketch).
Ironically, if you like, in previous centuries women were referred to as "Mrs." even if not married, since it was abbreviation of "Mistress" a term of respect/status for older women/women in charge of households/important or high-status women.
I can see how this is annoying.
The annoyance part is my point. It was higher status to be a wife and mother than girl boss and being called Miss was low status above a certain age. This added a lot of pressure to have children so you could take the title of Mrs. which boost the fertility rate. Being called Miss above a certain age was basically being an incel.
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
I feel like the existing "de facto partner" help distinguish between 'wife'/'husband' and 'partner', government mostly just use partner as a result of trying not to discriminate de facto relationship compare to standard marriage
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link