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 -
This forum seems to be missing the biggest actual culture war battleground of the week: The US Hockey Gold Medal team.
For those who haven't heard, the US Men's Hockey Team won the gold medal over Canada, on an overtime goal by Jack Hughes. The team celebrated, the country celebrated, and everything was great, until it wasn't.
Kash Patel was part of the celebration, for some reason. Apparently he's a hockey fan, as I've read he was attending games when Ovechkin was nearing Gretzky's goal record. And then there was a call from Donald Trump to congratulate the team, where he made a joke ("I'll have to invite the women's team, too, or they'll impeach me.")
Of course, the usual suspects have come out of the woodwork to scold then men for being bros.
Jodi Walker called them losers.
The New York Times decided to praise the defector while shaming the victorious Americans.
Mary Clarke says that they failed to meet the cultural moment, and boy is she waging the culture war. Some highlights include reminding us that a black woman won a gold medal in hockey, bemoaning that the NHL is 44% Republican, decrying the hiring of someone accused of and found not guilty of sexual assault, implying his guilt.
Then, finally, she has the gall to say this:
Well, Mary, you are responsible for writing the message of this team, and you are participating in making sure the message you dislike is the one that's getting spread.
For a reasonable take, I always go back to the characteristic machine:
And a quoted response
This really does cut to the core of it. There is a civic ritual, which we can all participate in. Civic in a way that crosses race and sex and religion, or should, at least. But not anymore. We are not allowed to have civic rituals unless they pay obeisance to the cult of multiculturalism, unless they celebrate black women and foreigners and anyone but straight white men.
ETA: Two more posts, more from the fans with substacks and less from the professional pundits:
Don't Let Them Fucking Take It From You
The Sports Exile
This second one really pissed me off, and this quote in particular. Patriotism was abandoned by the left, not weaponized by the right. You left (pun intended). As evidenced by a later paragraph:
"I'm proud to be an American" "Wow, why do you only care about yourself, why don't you care about me?"
They reveal themselves as unamerican at every opportunity.
Wait, that was the misogynistic joke? That’s it? I’m not sure how that’s supposed to be offensive or sexist to anyone.
To quote the video (in the video Trump says this in a joking way, breaking into a chuckle as he mentions the women's team):
To steelman:
I get that you see nothing wrong with it (and I think it is fine too), but that is why some people (like Clarke) find it offensive - and there is an actual conflict between worldviews here, the feminists aren't just mistaken.
is a ridiculous idea. It's like pretending that children's sports is equal to young adults', or that local leagues are equal to world championships. Obviously false, and everyone knows it. Is it really necessary to pretend otherwise?
I'd go further and say that women's sports are often better than men's sports because they can be more fun to watch. No pretending required: I sincerely don't care if the men could beat the women any more than I care that gorillas are stronger than weightlifters. When it comes to sports I'm exclusively interested in whether they are entertaining.
Fair, but it seems to me that women's sports are fun to watch for reasons different from those for which men's sport is watched.
Well it's a mixture. Women's tennis often has more varied and exciting rallies because it's less serve dominated, for example, and see 07mk's view on ultimate frisbee.
That was definitely true during my youth, but I don't think it was true during the Big 3.5 era. The last classic serve-volley player was Tim Henman (who is only considered good because of the total dearth of British tennis talent before he started making semi-finals) and the last classic serve-volley player who actually won things was Sampras. I would say the last great male player whose main weapon was his serve was Roddick.
They made the grass at Wimbledon slower in 2001 to produce a less serve-dominated game, and it worked.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is how I feel about high level ultimate Frisbee. The nature of the sport is that good offense beats good defense, and the men at the top levels are so good that many games have only a handful of turnovers and even fewer breaks (on the order of 5-10 in a game where sum total score is usually around 20-30), which can make it rather boring to watch. "Oh, offense scored again on a full field throw, yawn."
Women at the top levels, are so much worse than the men in not just strength and speed but also finesse and technique, that their games end up having lots more messy points with lots of turnovers, which raises the overall excitement level. Even at the top levels, not many women can throw full field, whereas basically the weakest man in a top team could do it regularly. But I find the women more fun to watch because of that volatility.
Unfortunately, women's ultimate is also less mature than men's, so there are fewer truly elite teams, which means fewer competitive games due to more and greater disparity in team quality.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What are you actually trying to claim here? "Children's sports are not literally the same as young adults'" is a very different claim than "women's sports matter, and should matter, as little as children's sports compared to men's".
Personally, I believe that humans reaching the height of what their bodies can perform does deserve celebration. In that, women's sports are equal to men's sports because exceptional women are still exceptional. Local leagues and children's leagues are transitional, at least in theory, and that's why they are not the same as women's leagues.
Should I have a daughter, my fatherly advice to her will not include "even if you become the best of all women in X, this won't matter in the slightest because male boys are still going to be better than you" or whatever argument against female sports is common those days. You're welcome to tell your daughters otherwise, of course.
Should you have a daughter you would do her a disservice to imply anything other than women's sports are not the same as men's sports. They are unequal(biologically), and that's fine.
More options
Context Copy link
As stated, this is a fine and consistent view (professional sports is ultimately about entertaining the fans, so it is up to the fans to decide what is entertaining), and the standard one I hear in defence of women's sports.
But do you actually believe this as stated? If we look at Olympic medalists in the men's 100m sprint, all 33 of the Gold/Silver/Bronzes since 1984 have been Black (the closest exception being Marcell Jacobs, who is Black x White) And looking even further, the remainder have been White.
If the committee were to split the 100m into a Black, White, and Other Race category (with the Black category in practice being the open category, and the White category open to any non-Black), would you consider a winner worthy of celebration? It is still true that an exceptional (amongst non-(Black/White)s) runner is exceptional.
And even more generally - many people's physical peaks will vary based on genetics (but in ways that don't count as an actual disability, e.g. a healthy man who cannot put on muscle very well) - would you also consider them reaching their respective peaks as not only worthy of celebration (I'm happy with celebrating it) but of deserving a special segregated category (that is treated as equal to the open category) with its own parallel medals?
I'm guessing that you don't (certainly, this is an unpopular view amongst women's sports defenders as a whole) - so I'm not sure how to defend women's sports (and disabled sports) without somehow privileging the genetic shortcoming (vis-a-vis physical sports) of XX chromosomes (and the various genetic defects that count as medical disabilities) over any other kind of shortcoming.
And I don't think it is a bad thing to privilege XX-having (women really are special in the big picture of society) - but I don't think it makes sense in the generalised abstract "everyone should be celebrated for reaching their full potential" way you seem to be gesturing towards.
I do privilege the XX-having as a segregated category.
I'll try to explain with an example. Suppose the human species is split into two fantasy races - one is 9ft tall on average, and the other 3ft tall (with all the commeasurate differences in peak ability). Assuming that we've found an equilibrium in society in most things, rather than fighting forever fantasy race wars or a genocide/utter subjugation of one by the other, it makes perfect sense to me that we would have a 9-footer league in sports and a 3-footer league, and the 3-footer league would be treated as "real sports", rather than being dismissed by all of society as insignificant simply because 9-footers can run sprints thrice as fast.
Now, if you look at sports cynically, then genes determine what your peak is, genes determine how tenacious you are, parents and infrastructure determine how much you're railroaded into professional sports, and political lobbying determines what kind of supplements are considered legitimate as opposed to doping.
Once you choose to not look at sports cynically, then splitting the Real Sports into two leagues based on two groups, where:
appears to be both a minimal subdivision and a necessary one, if one is to promote general admiration for one's physical form in society. Things such as black people being slightly more represented among peak runners or white people being slightly more represented among peak [stereotypically white-dominating sport] do not appear to warrant further splitting.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm claiming that men's sports and women's sports are not "equal". Not that the latter "doesn't matter in the slightest".
I tell my daughter to to as many sports as she likes, to any level she can achieve, and the more she does the better. I don't tell her that regardless of her actual abilities, her performance and/or the interest of spectators will be in any sense "equal" to that of any given others.
When your constitution says "all people shall be equal before the law", do you feel compelled to say "but they're not, why must we pretend otherwise"?
Honestly, yes. I think we're well past some nebulous "equality" being a useful social fiction, and well into it having become the object of a socially debilitating cult.
When "equality before the law" meant "there are no longer hereditary aristocrats for whom a separete code of laws applies", it was useful. When it is taken to mean "the legislature is not to distinguish between races, genders or religions", then at least that's actionable. But when "the law" is a ten-million-pages nightmare of exceptions, intentional and accidental loopholes, carveouts, special interests, favored and disfavored groups, discretionary budgets and authorities wielded in suspiciously un-equal ways, and a wide array of impossible impositions on an uncooperative reality, then good riddance. The fiction is entirely at odds with the facts.
I know it's a very important word to many people, but yes, absolutely, when someone tells me that different people are equal, then I feel very strongly compelled to ask "IN WHAT SENSE?".
More options
Context Copy link
I kinda do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, actually; if they get taken seriously maybe more [women] will show up to compete, which has downstream positive social effects in the long term. More value for people who Do The Thing means the population at large is more interested in Doing The Thing and sends a message we value Those Who Show Up. To the extent you want women to Show Up, this is important.
That said, if [women as class = feminists] take it for granted and start attacking men because of it- that they're not being honored above and beyond because they didn't realize- or that their mothers (including public surrogates like teachers) failed to impress upon them- that the entire reason they have this league is already the 'above and beyond'?
Then it's OK for men not want to continue that pretense, to not be interested in making the space for them, and more accepting of reminding them more frequently that the deal/concession didn't need to exist.
Which is a shame, because again, to even be a female athlete in these competitions means you have certain qualities that it would honestly be a waste not to hold up as an example, so as always it's the worthy who suffer here.
I can't quite tell if this comment is serious or not, but, taken on its face its a bunch of "ifs" based on a lot of assumptions that obviously are not in evidence.
More options
Context Copy link
That's a load-bearing "maybe" you have there. The same/similar arguments have been made about all sorts of things with poor female representation like STEM and video games. Tons of money and effort have been poured into these outreach efforts (and a lot of outright discrimination against men too) with nothing much to show for it.
Wake me up when an outreach program for more female coal miners gets some serious attention from the mainstream media.
You mean about getting women back to the mines, after the 19th century campaigns to get them out of those?
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe.
Then maybe just, like, don't do that? We can talk about whether the structures allowing/encouraging female participation enable corruption inherently- and indeed, some of them clearly have (academia in particular); but if your answer is "they all do and this is an intractable problem so huge it should never be done", then the natural next question is "then why should men be exempt from this in the organizations that solely permit them/to what degree should they be exempt/what happens when they exceed that exemption"[0]?
That isn't to say that it isn't time to move on from the current system- indeed, it can no longer serve its primary function, and its time has come.
Do you even know what the ultimate objective of these representation programs even were? It wasn't "give privileges to the unworthy and reintroduce 19th-century sexism from the other direction", it's specifically "make sure the worthy do not give up". The tenor of society at the time this issue started to be raised was that this was a somewhat-undue burden on worthy women, so that's how the chips fell.
The liberal experiment has... I hesitate to say "failed", but more that it has run its course and now needs reform, because it in large part stopped being about this and started about being a sociofinancial hand-out to the corrupt and worthless. You can see this in the way progressives argue for men in women's sports- the entire point was to encourage worthy women, not to let [the Establishment] make it all about their political power instead.[1]
The problem with the "experiment" is both that it didn't count on corruption (and you can expect liberals to ignore that angle), and related to that, that it is ultimately incapable of yielding tangible/measurable results. We know that we can't turn a woman into a man[2], but both understand dignity in more or less the same ways, and that's what we're buying for the extra cash. In the end, it doesn't actually matter what the record is (re: Goodhart); but we can encourage the process.
Again, the objective wasn't really even to increase female representation: the problem was to ensure that women who should be participating are not discouraged by the lack of prior participation (or the logic believing in [0] demands). And it did succeed in this, perhaps a bit too well.
[0] Of course, in traditionalism the answer to that question is an axiomatic "because men are better", but this comes with certain other problems that traditionalists have had the last 100 years to answer for. It appears they may have dropped the ball somewhat.
[1] Though I will note that this was all about the liberal Establishment's political power when they set this up; encouraging worthy women was a demonstration and advancement of their political power. This is why progressives call themselves liberals.
[2] And the fact that people are actually trying to do this is perhaps the biggest indicator that the devotion to the measure ate the expected outcome. (That's not all it indicates, but it has something to do with it.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, it really is necessary to pretend otherwise, because if women aren't the same as men, then you might say they shouldn't be doing the things men do (vote, govern, jury).
Why is that necessary to avoid?
Because we don't want women to engage in political violence any more than we want men to do so, and we stand on much firmer ground in condemning such if women have the same avenues to pursue peaceable change.
This presupposes a lot. Negating those presuppositions, one might as well suggest retvrning to the tried and true historical norm of excluding women from politics full stop. Their capacity for violence is so low as to be a non-issue, and there isn't much to condemn.
Arguing from the capacity for political violence gives massively more leverage to men than to women.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A majority of men will find that a rule that excludes all women from voting, governing and performing on jury based on some objective measure of competence will also exclude them. This is usually considered a bad thing by those who support universal male suffrage.
Of course it is not "necessary" to measure the competence objectively when one can rely on such time-tested proxies as "has a penis", "white" or "possesses as much property or more than the person currently arguing in favor of restricting the suffrage", but you get the idea.
In the Anglosphere, very much this. No Anglosphere country had universal male suffrage. (The UK gave women the vote at the same time as non-landowning men in rural constituencies, the US and the Dominions all gave women the vote before men from disfavoured racial groups). The principle that there is a right to vote implies that the right extends to women.
In countries whose democratic tradition stems from the French revolution, universal male suffrage explicitly tied to universal male conscription was the default.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link