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 -
Wow, those graphs are physically difficult to parse- in fact I'd actually say they're actively harmful to a proper understanding of the data. A "plain reading" (at least to me) of that data suggests 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 12 boys have been sexually penetrated in an unwanted manner before the age of 12, which isn't passing the sniff test given, if I remember correctly, prevalence of sexual contact by 12 is about 5%, or 1 in 20. So I doubt I'm reading the graph correctly, but there's no way to derive the total context or get a scale of the proportions involved relative to all respondents.
I think this is ignoring the obvious-to-me confounder that becoming non-cis can cause them to become a victim of sexual assault [or reinterpret themselves as such] where they hadn't necessarily considered themselves as such before. This can also happen to cisgendered people, and women more than men for reasons that have to do with an asymmetric biological incentive to claim abuse for social or financial stability or gain (it's very popular to do this and makes headlines when it happens re: #MeToo, also, internal narratives matter to people re: 2rafa's comment below).
Well, no, if you grew up poor, 2 things are likely true for kid-you:
Which means you're more likely to be "propositioned", and less likely to feel you have the power to pull back before it happens, and apparently this decreases monotonically by wealth level (outside of the 'elite' answers, whose error bars are very large- though I can believe this becomes truer for elite children simply because the chance for catastrophe in that scenario becomes large/taking 'no' for an answer and being driven enough to take risk kind of selects you out of the 'elite' group, obviously).
Also, and perhaps most importantly, we don't actually hear the first question: what's abuse? The analysis buries "indicates that they might be the most enthusiastic participants" in there, which suggests the question of "abuse" wasn't worded properly (i.e. in the legal sense, not the objective 'it was unwanted' sense- and I'd expect a survey designer who claims to value childhood autonomy to know better), which is a massive deal, especially when it comes to drawing conclusions on the last question.
Perhaps the second set of data will be more illuminating, though I'm not holding my breath on this one. If the base question/premise is bad, the analysis won't get better.
Can the "was sexually assaulted in the sense of the Aella survey but didn't classify it as 'sexual contact' for the purpose of the other one" set be discounted? I can imagine that the latter survey was framed in a way that suggested consensual or at least peer encounters.
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is just reporting bias-- CSA victims are probably more likely to share and respond to this survey. I don't think that's an issue with respect to Aella's analysis because she's specifically interested in cross-response correlations rather than the headline numbers.
The confounder definitely exists-- we have plenty of other surveys showing non-cis people are more vulnerable to sexual assault-- but the data for this survey contradicts any notion that this is primary. If this was the primary confounder, then we should expect to see a much larger difference between response rates of cis vs non-cis people comparing between the 0-12 vs 13-18 age groups, since the coming-out rate is WAY higher in later adolescence than childhood and pre-teen-hood. Instead, the difference in response rates remain very similar. Plausibly there's still some "wierd kid" confounding factor because the kids who become non-cis are never normal even before transitioning... (the one kid I know that transitioned had previously shown me furry porn in the cafeteria because we were both bronies... and had some pretty solid taste, honestly, ngl.) That gets right back into the question of what exactly makes these kids weird, however.
You say this like you're going to provide a counterargument and then propose two factors that seem extremely likely to increase anxiety and depression.
I made a typo in my OP. Fixed it, so my second bullet point reads:
I do think it's likely that the difference in sexual assault rates between cis and non-cis people is partially (though probably not totally) due to differences in specifically reporting rates. I don't actually think we need an explicit definition for what constitutes as 'abuse' though-- it would be sufficiently interesting to find that non-cis people adopt inclusive definitions of abuse at a higher rate, or are more likely to re-interpret invents in a negative way.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link