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 -
I've been asked by a mod to repost this here, so here goes!
What Is The Problem With Women?
We've often discussed, and it seems we will continue to discuss, what is going on in the Battle of the Sexes. I have to hold my hands up and admit that very often in such dispatches, I am the one defending women and criticising the behaviour and the attitudes of men.
But it is also undeniable that some women are fudging stupid. Or at the very least, so it appears. We've argued over "women prefer the Bad Boys to the Nice Guys" but there comes a point where it seems to be sheer self-destruction at work, because how could anyone stick with a guy like the one in this story?
So, to do justice to the gentlemen here with whom I have argued, here is the sorry story of a woman who apparently had not a brain in her head. Her family warned her off, her friends warned her off, even on a first date she knew this was a bad idea - and she still ended up marrying him and having two children with him while he was irresponsible, controlling, and abusive.
Why? I can't explain it to you in any way that makes sense. Even she doesn't know why, looking back. There are some hints that, in line with theories of such behaviour, she was drawn (for whatever reason) to abusive men, like a typical victim who keeps going back to the same kind of relationship after getting out of the last one. But as to what was at work here, who knows? I can't imagine any evo-psych explanation for this that makes any sense at all, not even the "women evolved to tolerate rape because women who resisted rape got murdered when the barbarian horde over-ran the village and killed all the men and took all the women" kind of thing.
An Irish divorce story.
It gets worse from there, until finally she won't put up with it anymore and leaves. Why she didn't run a mile after the first date, I have no explanation. This is a stupid (and indeed, dangerous) choice she made of her own free (so it seems) will. Nobody was urging or forcing her to take up with this guy, indeed it was the opposite. She had plenty of chances, and plenty of warning signs. She got pregnant, of her own accord again, (I strongly suspect the first pregnancy was the usual hope around 'a baby will fix this' and the second time, what, she had no access to contraception? highly unlikely) and brought two kids into an unstable situation where the father had no interest in contributing to the family. It was only when things finally became intolerable that she left.
And I genuinely, honestly can't blame men or The Patriarchy or anything else for this. The guy in question was a shithead but she knew that from the immediate start. There's nothing in her story, as told, about her family pressuring her to get married or settle down with anyone, much less this guy. She did it all herself.
You and every one else in this discussion really need to read up on insecure attachment (from childhood). It's typically the explanation when people do "totally unexplainable!!!" unwise relationship things over and over.
More options
Context Copy link
Let me tell the skeleton of a similar story about a good friend of mine. He's a bright guy, pharmacist by trade, musically inclined. Got hooked up with a real psycho. Not "omg my ex is craaaazy", real-deal double digit involuntary commitments, full bore diagnosed and sentenced bipolar. She's cute but not that cute, a solid 6 or 7 on a good day, kinda mousy. The kind of girl who ruins every event she attends by having a very public meltdown, taking bizarre offense to everyone and everything, and clinging to my buddy like he's the only white man and they're on safari.
Nobody liked this bitch, not his friends, not his family, not one single person in his life, and we told him. Luckily he dumped her after a couple months. We threw him a party on the theme of "ding dong, the witch is dead". We got him set up with new dates. They were back together in a month. They would break up and get back together a dozen or so times over the next five years. They had a kid, a lawsuit over custody and child support. Then they got back together, had another kid, got married. Then they separated, got back together, lasted a few more years before getting divorced and what does my genius friend do?
Knocks her up one more time after the divorce was filed.
Now he has to pay her mortgage and see this woman twice a week for the next twelve years, eighteen from when they split.
You can try to suss some deep social thing from this, but my guy had options. He had warnings, blatant and flashing. He was sane and smart enough to understand, he wasn't tricked or coerced. He had other women interested. Some part of her crazy just matched up right with his crazy and he couldn't stop going back to her. He had to be getting something out of it, I figure.
People are bad at relationships, and a lot of us are lying to ourselves about what we actually want and are actually willing to tolerate. I don't think that's an indictment of any higher organization than the people inside the relationship. That said, I think our social models of lifelong partnerships are pretty stunted in popular culture.
More options
Context Copy link
I will forward an evo-psych explanation that I have found somewhat compelling, while letting you take the opportunity to remember that evo-psych arguments are far less specific or empirically validated than anyone would like:
In the ancestral environment (by which I mean from pre-history to last Tuesday), it was unfortunately common for intergroup violence to culminate in the slaughter of all the men on the losing side, and the lamentation of their women (who were often taken captive and put to reproductive toil, with modern norms of consent not a concern for anyone involved).
Picture yourself as a woman, of reproductive age. You have just been taken captive by Ugg, who has only just finished cleaning his club of the blood and brains that originated from your husband (Grug) and your father and brother (Ooga and Booga respectively). Ugg has, if he's being polite, told you that he's going to take you as his wife. If he is less polite, you have already been raped. Neolithic cavemen or victorious pillagers are not known to be polite, but I do not wish to slander them unnecessarily.
You have very few choices in the matter. Active or passive refusal or disobedience will likely only result you in being beaten +- raped. There is no one in a position to help, and you do not necessarily even think that your fate is morally incorrect or unjust (if you're the introspective type, you might remember the story of how Ooga met Mrs. Ooga, your mother. The circumstances were not that different, even if it feels awful to be on the receiving end.).
If you submit, your odds of going from a glorified concubine or sex slave to a genuine wife (with whatever degree of protection and in-group endorsement that implies) goes up. If you demonstrate enjoyment and do your best to make Ugg happy, he might genuinely grow fond of you, which he is unlikely to do if you fight back. You may end up pregnant with his child (you have little choice in the matter), and a caring husband and father is a better one than one that holds you in contempt. You close your eyes and think of the Dogger Bank (this story predates the formation of the English channel).
Your story is not unique. I have already mentioned the tale of Mrs. Ooga, your mother. This might be the fate of your daughter, and is almost certainly the fate of many of your distant female descendants.
The thing about evolutionary selection pressures is that they do not necessarily act in the direction anyone likes, or endorses on reflection. Another fact about human cognition and social roles is that it easier to feel a certain emotion than it is to consistently fake it. Less cognitively taxing, in the sense that feeling good about your buddies and expressing it naturally is a better signal than smiling at a boss you don't particularly like. The best lies are the ones you internalize, and come to believe sincerely to a degree that no longer feels like lying. It might well no longer even be a lie, it is your honest reaction and desire, even if that is for something others might consider torment.
What are we selecting for? Women, who when in a situation where they perceive that their welfare and wellbeing (and that of their offspring) hinges on staying in the good graces of a male partner: put up, shut up, and genuinely like the abuse, in a seemingly paradoxical yet very true sense. Stockholm syndrome could be adaptive, if your only options are making the best of the city's shitty weather without an opportunity to leave.
This selection pressure and the resulting trait is, of course, clearly not absolute. There are plenty of women who, at least in a modern Western context, will leave an abusive relationship, or seek help from third parties. I dare say that is most women. I think that is not incompatible with my thesis, because evolution often reaches a stable equilibrium with a variety of different traits, some of which are adaptive in certain contexts and not others, but neither of which strictly dominate.
You might just have been an exceptionally unlucky woman. Perhaps the modal woman in your reference group would stand up to an abusive partner. Perhaps they would marshal their blood-kin to step in on their behalf, perhaps they would rely on social shaming. In that situation, having a spine and protecting yourself is compatible with your genes spreading, but in some cases, you must sacrifice the spine to save your life.
Many factors and traits exhibit this phenomenon. Why are there any short men in a world where height is almost always rewarded, even in the distant past? Because height comes at the cost of health, you might starve to death because of the additional baseline metabolic requirements. Sometimes, the Short Kings win and spawn more short kings and queens. Why is every man not an "alpha" male (a term I use as a convenient shorthand, not an endorsement), despite those traits often being attractive? Well, because sometimes being a submissive, obedient man in service to a greater power was beneficial, from the perspective of your genes, perhaps your memes in the context of group selection. Our selection pressures are reduced, but not nonexistent today, so it is easy to forget the time when evolution was more aggressive about quality control (and with a very bottomline take on what constitutes quality, which rarely acknowledges customer satisfaction).
My point is, most of the people reading this take for granted a society with robust social safety nets for battered women. Cultural norms that make them expressly deserving of sympathy and care. This is true in India, but perhaps not in Afghanistan (though even such a patriarchal society might have brothers and fathers stepping in, perhaps because they see it as their patriarchal duty to do so). But there's no dedicated women's shelter around for most of recorded history. Sometimes you must learn to eat shit, say you enjoy the taste, and then, through selection pressures over long eons, end up liking the taste. Unironically. Maybe enthusiastically, albeit with shame. Despite people stopping by and asking "are you okay hun, you know you can just stop, right?" and meaning it.
This explains many things: battered women. Girls who like a domineering and assertive husband. The women who have asked me to choke them, slap them, spit on them, or leave handprints. And those who do not (not that I mind particularly, at least if it doesn't have any serious risk of bodily harm).
Your body and your instincts can be awfully out of date for the environment you find yourself in. You might know that being fired from your job or being ghosted by a date doesn't matter, in the strict sense, but you still feel awful about it. You might spiral into depression or have a breakdown. This is because these were matters of life and death (and sex) for your ancestors. Your genes do try to adapt your phenotype to the environment you find yourself in, but they are very out of their depth.
The usual arguments about superstimuli like porn or calorie dense foods has a corollary: some stimuli today are not as meaningful or compelling as they would be to your ancestors (losing a job, rejection, as I've already said), but were very very bad for you in the past, to the point that your body and mind is primed to panic.
Just to be very clear: this is not a claim about all women, probably not even most women. I do not think that they're all hiding rape fantasies, or that those who do express their fantasies are necessarily cover for a sincere desire to be abused or raped. Or that they would secretly like it, if actual rape happened to them. Explaining something is not the same as condoning it. Evo-psych arguments are notoriously susceptible to overfitting. Judge accordingly.
Yeah, this reminds me of a woman I met early one morning when I was waiting for the train for work. She had her whole life packed up in a big suitcase, and was sobbing. I felt bad for her, and asked her if everything was alright, and she started telling me her life story of going from one abusive boyfriend to another. Unfortunately, my train arrived and I had to leave her there, but I do sometimes wonder if some women don't have instincts that laser focus towards guys who will abuse them.
Makes me think of Scott's old Radicalizing the Romanceless post from 2014, and the character of Henry who shows up in Scott's hospital after beating his fifth wife, an enduring pattern for him. Which causes Scott to muse:
I think it is highly plausible that some subset of women have been "messed up" in some evopsych way that isn't super compatible with modern society, but I'm not sure what the best thing to do about it is. Letting people keep making mistakes that their biology tricks them into seems cruel, but being too paternalistic also seems to have serious downsides.
Some women absolutely do (and the men have laser focus on women likely to put up with such abuse). Dalrymple has made a career writing about them. Talk to any cop, prosecutor, or defense attorney, and they can also confirm this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not really. See the Trojan women. They're not going back to be wives, even secondary wives; they're going to be household slaves (and if young/attractive enough, bed slaves as well).
Where that did happen was with the Sabine women, because (1) the Romans had no other women back home to be legitimate wives and (2) certainly after being raped (in the sense of "carried off" and also in the sexual sense) the Sabine women had little choice but to make the best of it with their new husbands. The Sabines did attack Rome to regain their wives and daughters, but the returned women would not have had good lives back home. The unmarried girls likely couldn't ever find husbands, and the married women would have found themselves put aside.
Look at one entire sub-plot in the Mahabharata, where a princess who has been carried off in an abduction marriage and manages to convince the abductor to let her go (who was, in fact, seeking wives for his half-brothers) on the grounds that she was engaged/pre-contracted to another man and loved him.
What happens next? Boyfriend dumps her on the grounds that she's been formally taken as another man's wife. She tries to get various warriors to take up her cause but they all refuse due to fear of the original guy, and eventually she gains the boon that in her next life she will be born as a man and kill him.
That's not "lie back and think of England and you have a good chance of being Mrs. Ugg", because that's not generally how it went.
There is a very good reason why I said the odds of a more favorable outcome go up, rather than making a stronger, deterministic claim in the passage you quoted.
"Good behavior" or submission is no guarantee of good treatment, but I think it is fair to say that it helps on the margin. The typical man coming home with a looted woman does not have three more waiting at home, the maths is unlikely to work that way. The way that royalty treats their new concubines is not representative of the average. My understanding is that even for the Sabine women, the typical Roman kidnapper only got the one, but correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't specifically checked, though this is mostly because I doubt a clear-cut answer is easily available. Even when the kidnapper/victor is successful enough to have multiple female captives, I do not think it is an unjustified leap in logic to think that compliance and feigned/real affection would improve material circumstances on the margin. If your new "husband" has three docile wives already, do you think anyone is going to treat you better for being uppity?
Even within living memory in the West, it is hardly uncommon to hear of women who deplore their abusive husbands but are forced to stay by them because of the financial ruin or social opprobium they would face after separation. Situations like that even happen today, though not nearly as often when Western culture (and much of the world) has tighter welfare nets and feels the duty/need to intervene.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This woman who likely never understood the dating landscape and never ''came into her own'' felt like she had lost the ability to steer the wheel of her own ship and got desperate. There is an element of searching for structure and direction in abuse and mistreatment when one feels like they aren't fit to maintain their own proforma, which for a multitude of reasons most women will end up succumbing to. For the neophyte in the alien territories of heterosexual unions, the dangerous man is best kept close, for evil can't strike you down if you manage to somehow keep it close by (think of the Wattpad Mafia boss fantasy), the victim woman's inertia attracts the abusive man's intensity, the willing pit finds the meteoroid that will crash into it. The man also seem to have brought social capital, in her mind, it likely went somewhat like this; the forlorn maiden at the end of her supposed bloom has been chosen by the ''Life of the Party'' social butterfly of a man who has so many options, yet went for this lucky girl. Lots of ways this likely made perfect rational sense in her mind, with the actual abuse not completely unexpected but part of her internally fantasized prophecy, one that is built on the idea of perpetual doom and gloom, and also one that she likely will never admit to, out loud. This still isn't a complete loss, except for the psychologie torture, though part of me wonders if she would simply fill that pit inside her regardless of what life configuration she would have wounded up in, if not for this. This of course isn't condoning the real abuse she likely dealt with, I am merely attempting to understand why she did what she did, despite the gut instinct telling her not to.
More options
Context Copy link
The idea that the human ancestral environment was like this always seems like a mere just-so story to me. It seems sensible in our setting to believe that those who live in a state of nature outside of the reach of civilisation will behave in this way, because this is what we observe about people who live like that, but people who live outside of civilisation in the modern world are not a representative sample, and could easily have been selected for the sort of rapist anarchic tendencies you describe.
An explanation that requires much less in the way of assumptions about male/female relations in the age of Grug is that in a slightly more violent, slightly more anarchic society, the same guy who is an asshole to you is more likely to be good at being an asshole for you, in a setting where being an asshole is a good way to win competitions for limited resources. That would also explain the anecdotal evidence that women from slightly more violent and anarchic modern societies like Russia, the Levant or just about anywhere in Africa show a more pronounced preference for "bad boys" who may also be violent to them, over nice guys who will be continuously sweet and wont to get beaten up and robbed by the "bad boys" in those countries. In fact, Ireland as of 20 years ago probably also belongs in that list?
I am not claiming that this is a universal experience. I am only claiming that situations like this can and do happen, including in well documented histories as well at present, in the parts of the world that can be impolitely but accurately be described as shitholes. And we know the past was much more violent than the present, or the fact that far fewer men passed on their lineage than women did, or the recent evidence that Neanderthal-Cro Magnon crossbreeding usually involved Neanderthal men and CM women. I wonder why.
You don't even need the maximal "consent to rape or die" version. Even the ability to tolerate and ameliorate flawed men who are otherwise good providers is adaptive. As you've noted, societal norms didn't even switch to condemning such behavior till well within living memory.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's worth pointing out that one of the most genetically successful women in history was Genghis Khan's mother who was bride-kidnapped roughly 1000 years ago.
There is no end of nuance I could add, but this is a good point. I might as well mention that it's very common for the traits and tendencies expressed by genes to vary according to the sex of the organism that receives them (even if this is not an absolute either). The same genes on a different sex chromosome can do different things. So Genghis might well have had a submissive mother, while the same genes might not have manifested in him but might have in his daughters or sisters (or have been outcompeted by the tendencies from his paternal lineage).
The same goes for Ugg and Bride of Ugg. She might hate being raped and enslaved. But her sons might well be perfectly happy to do the raping and enslaving, propagating her genes as well. The question, which requires a lot of empirical grounding to answer, is which tendency wins out overall. But there isn't a unique winner at the very least, we observe a lot of diversity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not really sure why the need for outrage or correction on anything here. Yeah personal lesson for the woman in the story, warning story for those that listen. We can find plenty of stories in reverse where men marry women they shouldn't (for varied and numerous different reasons). Again, personal lesson for the man in the story, warning story for those that listen.
Both are to blame on some levels, whether that's personal responsibility to not be a shit person, or personal responsibility to stay away from shit people.
Maybe the meta question is: why are you, specifically, elevated by this story that you feel there is a need for some kind of discussion and solution?
More options
Context Copy link
When Rihanna dropped one of the biggest tracks in her career in 2011 and EDM was sonically reaching its peak, I was too young to see what a toxic relationship the MV was about.
In the midst of that unholy symphony of emotional turmoil, tears, and self destruction, it's the search for those brief moments of euphoria that really keeps one going. The song makes me feel so empty in a way most mainstream billboard top 100s never do. Can't say I've been there myself, but it does give me a glimpse of what it feels like. Unfortunately, we're never stopping anyone from making bad calls and trying to intervene excessively probably makes it worse and gives them incentive to rebel.
More options
Context Copy link
Reading that - Can you define how the women made a bad decision? She felt her biological clock ticking. Is he a drunk but intelligent? Good athleticism? It sounds like she got two kids out of it. I have a person in my family who had two kids with a person with some drug issues at 19. She now has two adult kids with jobs and grandkids. Nothing in your excerpt says this women failed. Plenty of highly intelligent 40 year old cat ladies now exists in the first world. Who really fails the 110 IQ NYT reading cat lady or the 100 IQ who married a semi-fuckup with grandkids?
Drunk who slapped her around, lived off her money while not giving a penny towards upkeep of the house and his kids, isolated her from family and friends and was big dreamer who couldn't follow through. He seems to have had a shallow, facile charm that impressed people on the surface level until they got to know him better.
She should have walked away the first time he hit her, even before they were married, but she didn't. That's what I don't understand, but it seems to happen. Women will put up with shit and explain it away. Maybe it was partly her pride (she didn't want to admit her family were right about him) but that's a very weak excuse when put against "for years he controlled me, hit me, abused me verbally, wasn't a husband and father".
That’s what she says after what sounds like talking to a therapist. Sorry if I’m not a believer in trust every women especially ones who talked to a therapists.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a common enough phenomenon that it's essentially a cliche both in fiction and IRL. I know someone who's living in a household with a man like this right now. The husband stays at home all day watching TV, barely doing any housekeeping while the wife, who needs dialysis 2x a week, is doing manual labor to support the family and their 2 teenage kids. He hits her sometimes (no idea how often) and also hits their housemate's dog sometimes. The kids reportedly often complain to the mother, but the mother is also the biggest defender of him and will apparently never every blame him for anything or put any responsibilities on him.
It's certainly a curious phenomenon, because the biggest cliche is probably that women will put up with a lot of abuse and other negatives from a man if he's rich/high status enough. But this man is neither. One time, they reportedly got into a fight and he was kicked out of the house, and he had to come back begging later than night, because not a single one of his "friends" was willing to lend him a couch or floor space that night. He used to have jobs but kept getting kicked out for insubordination and bad attitude. He reportedly used to have a coke habit that is not fully gone. Status can be hard to ascertain and context-dependent, but for this guy, it's hard to imagine a realistic context in which he is anything but quite low status.
Maybe this cliche comes from the intersection of men who are huge losers like this who are also somehow ridiculously good in bed or something? I honestly have little idea what's going on.
It cuts against the theory of absolute female mate-status-optimization, but sometimes women meet a man in just the right situation and just the right time where he does appear high-status and confident, and they make a real love connection and she locks onto him as worthy and hers despite any evidence of his low status. Falling in love with someone just does that to people.
This seems to happen more often for women from lower-class backgrounds, where, say, a middle class guy who nonetheless sucks might be perceived as higher status in a durable way that’s not amenable to correction based on behavior. I guess what’s in her head is that she got her prince, and now she needs to hold onto him.
But you really can’t eliminate the power of an actual love-connection from this — maybe he’s abusive and doesn’t contribute anything, but when they go on a date he looks her deep in the eyes and tells her she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, or has a sense of humor that lines up perfectly with hers. The lows might be low but the highs might be really high, for reasons beyond just “good in bed.” The guy who hits her might also be the only person who’s ever made her feel truly seen in some particular way, which might be fake and manipulative but might also be strikingly real (because people are complicated messes and evil coexists with good). It’s hard to overstate how powerful that can be.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I love comments like these that turn the entirety of Judge Judy-style Conservative Inc. on its head. The loudmouth baby mama with four kids by three abusive men who can't hold down a job is the societal winner; that is, in the competition with the childless professional with a good head on her shoulder. She managed to reproduce, did she not? Case closed.
Any woman can manage to reproduce; it is the easiest thing in the world. The hard thing for women is to reproduce with a reliable provider who is willing to commit to her and her children.
Women reproduce by default. Men have to actually work for it.
More options
Context Copy link
Does it? The red state model ("become an adult by marrying and reproducing in your mid-20s while going to church and getting educated and growing into adulthood together with your spouse and orient your life around the creation of families") is quite overtly at odds with the blue state model ("once you've finished all your degrees, postdocs, and residencies, and gotten a house, possibly demonstrate your success as a fully formed adult by marrying and having a child or two, if that's your thing")... and I think it's pretty clear that neither of the two models mentioned in the grandparent comment really align with the red state model (which I'll take to be kind of modal conservative - I read a great public policy using this frame a decade or so ago). However, of the two, I think the common conservative argument would probably be that the person who had kids needed better character formation and community formation (as did the men in her life), and so the outcome was obviously a tragedy, but otherwise parts of the story were directionally correct - in fact, loudly shaming and scolding wrong-headed or trashy behavior, in both men and women, is seen as part of trying to restore the authority of those older community norms and restore public moral discipline. Meanwhile, the 110 IQ NYT reading 40 year old cat lady, by that value system, is much more alien and, worse, is part of an alternate arrogant very powerful system that functionally denies sin / the authority of healthy human tradition (and families as a bedrock of society) in promoting that blue state model.
I recognize that there are also libertarians / business conservatives who, in their heart of hearts, probably think that woman should have been neutered or spayed for the good of society. But, at least from the windows in I see, I think many normy conservatives would be sympathetic to the above analysis.
More options
Context Copy link
First she’s white and not black. So it’s not ghetto kids running around as wildings. She says she had a job and supported the kids. No welfare kids here.
The article doesn’t even sound like he did anything that bad. One fight over how many years of making two kids and being married? He kicked her a few times while sleeping. Sometimes said mean things to her. He went out drinking with the boys sometimes. No mention of even drugs.
In ten years of marriage (sounds like around that) he had a few faults and probably underemployed. I have seen far worse marriages that produced successful offspring.
No, what he used to do was hit or kick her while she was asleep, then when she woke up panicked and scared, it was all "oh gosh, I had a nightmare". Controlling her and conditioning her that what he did wasn't abusive. Sneaky, nasty stuff.
Do you have very good reason to believe that he was lying? I've obviously not been there, but it is not very uncommon to see parasomnias like REM-sleep where there really is unconscious acting out or uncontrolled muscle movement. All I am saying is that his claims are not prima facie false, if there's more evidence that suggests he genuinely was a sneaky abuser, that's fair (but it is possible for someone to be both a bad person and also physically sick, disease rarely cares about moral valence).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, the conservative realizes this and wants to change it by changing incentives.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's unsurprising that some women are like this, after all human psychology is very diverse. I wouldn't necessarily say that it indicates any problem with women as a group. Even if it's true that women tend to be drawn do men like this, which I'm not sure of but is certainly possible, that doesn't mean that the average woman acts on it, at least not to the extent of your story. Men too are often drawn to volatile and dangerous women, though probably not to the same degree as women are drawn to volatile and dangerous men. The femme fatale archetype and the "hot BPD girl" archetype exist for a reason. It's just that in real life unlike in the movies, such women usually don't use the kind of physical violence that would be dangerous to the average man.
... I'm in recovery. It's going well so far, though I have my fingers crossed.
More options
Context Copy link
Real life femme fatales just chew you up and spit you out with a sort of effortless finality, rather than the theatrical Hollywood BDSM violence. The emotional disorientation of her "victim" IMO is far more damaging than the contrived (kinky) physical force. She's a master manipulator and enjoys immense social advantage over the man, so he loses his confidence and intensity around her, and bends to her whims out of fear of backlash. Emotional abuse is simply not as visibly obvious as physical violence.
If you are speaking from personal experience, I'd be curious to know more. Of course, I don't want to pry to the point of encouraging doxxing.
Ha I wish (almost!)
I'm mostly speaking secondhand, years of noticing recurring patterns in real life and fictional relationships that appeared healthy but looking back, really wasn't. Typically, there is some level of mutual initial attraction and maybe even care. But the femme fatale operates on her own internal logic. She's deliberately ambiguous, discloses very little, presses all the right buttons to disarm him, encourages him to do her bidding, and withdraws... but not completely! She enjoys her power in the dynamic. On the other hand, the guy is reorganising everything around her rhythms. Waiting for reply texts and reading meaning into every small gesture and before you know it, he's lost his confidence and initiative around her. She gaslights him at every moment she can, threatens him, constantly reminds him of all the things she's done for him, refuses to acknowledge his qualities unless it is calculated and given precisely when needed to drive in another command, or jab at his intellect. He becomes almost childlike, and that dependency leaves him vulnerable. He begins subconsciously seeking her permission to have an opinion or even think for himself. He might tell himself it's a challenge and not slow poisoning. He pretends he's emotionally detached when really he's over-tolerating. He'll see the door yet feel obligated to choose her over and over again. He refuses to see the trauma building up from the mismatched levels of attachment and when he does, he's reorganised his entire personality so thoroughly that no one (including himself) can recognise him anymore, nor who he used to be.
But because none of the signs are immediately evident to an outsider, they'll simply think she's wearing the pants and he's laidback.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Will you accept an even less rigorous, non-falsifiable, ad-hoc explanation in its place? If so, here's my framework for understanding this stuff.
An instrumental goal for any evolved brain is: "Figure out what the heck is going on, figure out your place in it, figure out what you need to do."
For social animals, this gets refined into: "Figure out the Narrative, figure out your place in the story, comport to that role."
The Narrative started (probably) as a way of coordinating individual hunter-gatherers into a single super-organism. To do that, there needed to be a shared "thing that we are doing", with roles assigned within that story. Leaders who could enforce that Narrative (e.g. with violence) ended up being more successful than ones who couldn't; non-leaders who could quickly and adeptly take their role in the Narrative ended up being more successful than ones who couldn't. So I imagine humans have a really deeply ingrained goal of "figure out your role in this story and follow it".
Chuck in some standard sex-based differences around appetite for risk. If you're a middle-of-the-pack male, it might be genetically worth it to try out the high-risk Narrative "I should be king"; less so for his female equivalent, who will be genetically "safer" in following the dominant Narrative around her.
If all of this is true: then people will generally be susceptible to things that hijack the Narrative-identifying mechanism. Women will tend to be more susceptible to attacks that strongly and bluntly overpower the dominant Narrative; men will tend to be more susceptible to Lady-Macbeth-type "you should be king" attacks that provide a risky status-enhancing alternative Narrative.
Some loosely associated stuff that might support this:
Connecting this back to, y'know, your actual point: there are people, usually men, who instinctively broadcast an aura of "this is what we're doing". It's typically unselfconscious and unaware of even the possibility that this isn't actually the thing we're doing. It's just happening. When they do this, it seems to activate that ancestral Narrative-seeking DNA. People fall into their roles. It's like picking up a kitten by its nape.
(This kind of attitude is easily mistaken for confidence, and I reckon is a big part of why men are told "just be confident!" when dating.)
If I can add another layer of evopsych to my tower of unsubstantiated claims: if women are generally looking to find the dominant Narrative and comport to their role in that story, then there's a huge selection pressure for men who can trigger those dominant-Narrative identifiers. But if these identifiers are too legible, then lots of men are going to consciously cultivate them; so there's a pressure for the identifiers to become illegible (or hard to fake). So you can end up with men who aren't good, or even good-looking, or even any other legible markers of sexual success -- but they have this illegible way of making people go "yes, we're doing what this guy wants".
... so, yeah, when encountering people like this, some women are going to make superficially inexplicable decisions that probably felt completely right from the inside. A million years of evolutionary optimisation is a hell of an opponent.
I said up front that this was non-rigorous and non-falsifiable, so naturally I will not be accepting criticism at this time.
Yeah, but everyone around was telling her "he's bad news" and she knew it by demonstration when for the first date he turned up drunk, then on a later date slapped her. She kept quashing her doubts up to the point of marriage, then after marriage she still didn't or couldn't bring herself to leave. She was afraid of him, afraid that he'd kill her.
That's not "figure out your place in the narrative and fit into it", that's "this is how you end up a story on the six o'clock news", though in this case it wasn't the woman's partner who set her on fire, it was because disgruntled drug dealers were trying to get her partner. There are men who do threaten to set their ex-partners on fire.
More options
Context Copy link
From your description, I'm having a hard time imagining how "this is the thing we're doing" might differ from confidence. What is confidence, if not protecting the idea that you have a specific goal in mind and you know you're able to accomplish it?
Here's a few related concepts:
All of these could reasonably be called "confidence". I'm not staking any kind of linguistic claim, where the thing I'm pointing at is definitionally some distinct thing from confidence.
The distinction I'm making is this. Informal uses of "confidence" (particularly in the context of male dating advice) are a blend of 1-4, maybe with a sprinkle of 5 and 6. It's usually an internal thing. A lot of "just be confident!" advice is about being comfortable with yourself and accepting outcomes -- it's not about controlling the Narrative.
For example: a manservant might be very confident in their role (i.e. they feel non-anxious, they're competent and know it, they're unflappable in the face of failure) -- but they wouldn't generally be someone who projects "this is the thing we're doing".
You've never met a really good manservant then!
I mean I'm not @grandburdensomecount or @2rafa I don't have a valet. But I've definitely interacted with people in service roles who gave off that "this is what we're doing" vibe. Barbers and waiters come to mind. Mechanics as well.
A really confident barber tells you what you want to do with your hair, informs you that this is how we do things in this shop. Yes you want to trim your eyebrows let me do that quick. No you can't cut your hair that way it will look gay. Now sit back while I do the massage with the vibrating glove from 1950.
There's a whole trope older than dirt of the strong willed servant who dominates his weak master, by his sheer frame.
PG Wodehouse wrote of this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I get it, thanks for clarifying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Modern society is quite good at shaming certain crude sexual impulses commonly expressed in men, whilst romanticizing and encouraging the kind of sexual expression often exhibited by women. With few expectations of self control when it comes to how women should behave around men, it only makes sense that some would make terrible choices driven by impulse rather than intellect.
Men are taught to contain their sexual desire from the moment they enter puberty. I might feel a strong force pulling me to stare mesmerized at the cleavage of my female classmates, but if I entertain it, I will be ridiculed and shamed. I am taught quite clearly that just because I have a crush on someone, I should not expect her to like me back. It is sometimes necessary to suppress my natural, sexual desires. Simply being attracted to someone does not mean I should pursue them.
And with this last point, I think, lies the issue. Any young girl who is crude in the way that men are crude, is also likely to be ridiculed and shamed. However, no one teaches women that feeling attracted or turned on is not necessarily a good reason to try and have sex. Instead, women are told to express their sexuality in whatever way feels best in the moment. Wear the slutty close, grind on strangers in the club, and by all means pursue that bad boy who you like so much. Repressing your sexuality is unhealthy and connected to ideas of patriarchs wanting women to be nothing more than stay-at-home baby makers. If you feel a crush you are encouraged to go for it. If you feel attracted to someone, then why not have sex with them? It is great fun for both parties!
When women are encouraged to just give in to their impulses like that, it is no wonder that a portion of them end up in bad relationships. I would imagine that beside all his obvious flaws, the ex in question simply turned her on. He knew what buttons to push to make her want him, and she just gave into temptation like she always had.
I don’t think this is true, it’s just that female sexuality is policed by other women more than men in ways that men mostly notice or participate in.
That is also what I have been told by women, so it is probably true. But the direction that they influence each other in matters a lot. If they encourage the behavior I describe, or police those who value self control and long term planning, then my point still stands.
At least in my experience, women are the first to claim that sex is not a big deal and discourage anything that shames promiscuity or a lack of self control.
I think a better counter is that it is easy to find examples of men who ended up in abusive relationships, when they really ought to have known better. So perhaps this is not a woman-specific issue, but rather just that some people lack self control and think with their genitals.
I would argue though, that women sure seem to complain a lot more about landing in abusive relationships than men do, so clearly there is some kind of gendered thing going on here.
I think many men have adopted the whole stereotypical male ego "I'm tough and ready for anything" mentality so much that the idea that they are being abused by a woman in a relationship doesn't even occur to them. After all, they see women as weak and nonthreatening. So abuse might be happening, but they lack the cognitive symbols that would allow them to actually conceptualize it as abuse.
And of those that can conceptualize it as abuse, they can't communicate that effectively.
To provide a concrete example, this is why the first label a traditionalist reaches for is "pedophilia" when [female] teachers teach 7 year olds they're transgender- and it's also why normies find that claim completely incoherent.
Ironically, to formulate effective cognitive symbols in that way, you have to think like [and value yourself as] a woman [would]. And I don't think many men really want to do that, and so with the choice they have they choose not to think at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Men have less sympathy for other men in abusive relationships than women do for other women in them. The extent to which that is real or performative and the extent to which it matters are both debatable, but I think that seems at least to me to be the obvious truth.
More options
Context Copy link
My intuitive guess is that this is due to there being a mismatch in how much women rationally expect their complaints to have positive impact in their lives versus how much men rationally expect such. But I'm not sure how much is that versus more women being in abusive relationships or women tending to be in abusive relationships that are more violent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm a gender-realist but I honestly think that the situations you've desrcibed are caused less by women making worse decisions than men and more by the fact that men are stronger and more violent. A man in a relationship with a mentally unstable woman is less likely to experience physical abuse/murder than the other way around. It's easy to say that it's silly of women not to bear these sorts of dangers in mind when picking partners but the simple reality is that it's very hard not to have sex with someone you're attracted to, and if women were as strong and violent as men I think we'd see just as many of these stories where the man is the victim.
Do you know of a (trustworthy – that's the hard part) source for stats on this? My recollection is that women are more likely to lash out physically, but men are more likely to do injury, but women are more likely to use weapons. But I don't remember my source, and I find most sources on the issue to be at least a little questionable.
More options
Context Copy link
Hey now, I do this every single day, and not just once, but like a million times a day. It's not that hard.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Each of these has an interesting linguistic feature; a double first personalism (non-technical term that I just invented).
"I" and "my" x 2
"I" and "I" x 1
My theory is that this is a way to create a kind of double wall against personal responsibility. It's not that this woman failed to use good judgement. No, her "gut" knew at one point. Then again, at another point, her "head" was elsewhere (suggesting that in her hear of heart (or gut of guts?) she know what was going on.
Even in the slightly different "I suppose I must have been desperate" she didn't phrase it as "I was desperate" but that this other "I" in the past was the one doing the desperate-ing.
People sometimes say things like "I was a much different person back then." Mostly it's a term of art that simply means "I've changed a lot." That's fine. But there are some people out there who literally think in terms of full personality / character / existence do-overs and alterations.
I don't think this woman sees herself, today, as having willingly gone out with a guy who slapped her and was a fall down drunk. I think, in her mind's eye, she sees that as having happened to someone else and that she - the today she- now, somehow, has to face the consequences for that poor other woman.
Which should scare you even more because it means she has internalized, perhaps, zero of these lessons.
@2rafa has excellent comment here that, I believe, makes a very similar point. A woman who flaunted her ability to get the attention of much older men, several years later, attests that she was more or less human trafficked against her will. How could such cognitive dissonance occur? Well, when you no longer see you then as continuous to you now and create a whole other character in the story, it gets much easier.
The Last Psychiatrist made this point before. If you get into the mental habit of blaming your mistakes on outside circumstances, of saying that "somebody else" had too much to drink and made a fool of themselves – eventually it becomes impossible for you to feel responsible for your positive achievements as well.
Really? But we all know, or know of, losers who manage to shake off responsibility for bad stuff but embrace responsibility for good stuff.
True, some people are better at compartmentalization than others. But I'm not talking about the more general case of a boss who takes credit for his subordinates' hard work while blaming them when his projects don't go according to plan. I'm talking specifically about people who develop the defense mechanism of referring to nasty things they did as if they were committed by a third party.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I find it really quite interesting in that a story about a really terrible abusive man, the question posed is "what is wrong with women?" for her mistake of being with him. Should we just treat guys like they don't have any agency or something, and it's all up to the women to treat men like dangerous wild animals? And it's the women's failure when they don't treat men like apes incapable of change?
Like yes, it's obviously a dumb thing to do but if we were to blame the entire categories for the behavior of one person in them, why can't we blame men equally for his abusive behavior as you do women for her dumb behavior?
Generally I'm the one going to bat for women against all the "bitches be ridin' the cock carousel and friendzoning the decent guys" commentary on here, but in the interests of fairness I had to acknowledge that women too do have agency and make shitty choices.
This woman walked, with full knowledge, into that situation. She put herself in it. She got pregnant twice, and that too was by her own volition - you don't just happen to get pregnant, especially if as in the second time they were barely having sex. Her family warned her off this guy, her friend warned her off, she had bad experiences when dating him - and she still went right ahead and got married, had kids, moved abroad, supported the family with her money, until eventually she finally got to the point where her fear motivated her to end the marriage.
Nobody was tricking her, forcing her, or trying to persuade her she was mistaken about this guy. It was all her own bad choices and her own agency. That's the story. That's the question: "what was wrong with her that she deliberately closed her eyes and jumped off that cliff?"
More options
Context Copy link
I agree that it's an interesting question. And I think the answer is pretty straightforward: We are CONSTANTLY hearing that that there is something wrong with men; that men need to be taught to be more respectful to women; that policies need to be put in place to keep men in line; and so on. Obviously I agree with some of these efforts, although to a large extent society has gone overboard. At the same time, comparatively little attention is paid to the female side of the equation.
Here's an analogy: Pretty much everyone agrees that scammers are bad news and society and policymakers should take steps to cut down on the number of scams. One aspect of this, of course, is prosecuting scammers. Another aspect of this is educating people to look for the warning signs of scams; to hang up on suspicious callers; and so on.
Ok, now suppose Grandma Jane keeps almost falling for scams. It's gotten to the point where she walks into her bank and the branch manager steps out to tell her not to wire any money to India. Under those circumstances, it's reasonable to ask "what's wrong with Grandma Jane?" Doing so does not mean scammers "don't have agency." Rather, it's reasonable to look at both sides of the equation, so to speak.
Yeah. That's what I'm getting at here. And to address the follow-up comment, no it's not victim-blaming. Dousing yourself in barbecue sauce and jumping into a pool full of piranha is not an action where, if someone says "why the hell did you do something this stupid?", it is blaming the victim.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, that's called "victim blaming", and here's your obligatory apoplexy about how this means little girls will now get raped because they clearly wanted it.
The right way to deal with that is just to ignore it. Men are slowly learning to do that, but it's not an instinctual thing for them to do, so it's going to take another few decades for them to evolve far enough to have a healthy response to this.
Turns out that the feminist cliche about men not being sufficiently evolved for modern civilization was true, after all!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Impossible to change 80 IQ loutish drunks, possible to change 105 IQ neurotic liberal woman. Latter only requires slight social engineering, former requires dystopian levels of authoritarianism to correct.
just because she left the man does not signal that her IQ is average. maybe she's 85 IQ.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Teach rapists not to rape."
No one is defending or excusing this man's behaviour. I think the point of OP's framing is that his behaviour doesn't require much explanation: everyone understands that some people are abusive, controlling and drink too much. What is surprising, and hence which does require explanation, is why someone would get into a relationship with someone like that of their own volition, and why she would stay with him long past the point it was obvious he had no intention or desire to change his behaviour.
Which actually is rather strange. After all, if "everyone understands" that some people are just abusive, controlling drunks, then why doesn't "everyone understand" that some people are just insanely attracted/attached to dangerous men? The latter is just as much psychological trait as the former.
Well, it's a sort of first-order/second-order problem. Why do people drink too much? Addiction pathways in the brain. Why are people violent and abusive? Testosterone + a strategic understanding that this can be an effective way of getting what you want, in certain contexts. Why are some people controlling? See previous point + evo-psych explanations for jealousy and mate-guarding behaviour.
These explanations are straightforward and uncomplicated. But a statement like "some women are attracted to men they know to be abusive and controlling" is counterintuitive – it contradicts a basic understanding of human instinct rooted in self-preservation. It's so counterintuitive that feminists spent decades flat out denying it ("of course women don't go for assholes – if they did, you'd have a girlfriend" etc.). We notice we are confused, and attempt to explain this surprising observation about human nature.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Teach rapists not to rape" should apply equally here to women who make dumb or awful decisions, that you're not gonna be able to improve their dumb decisions, unless we take the claim that women in general are expected to have more agency as true and thus improving stupid women's ability to stay away from abusers is more effective than improving abusive men.
As the gal in the story tells it, he has fallen prey to vice and she to folly.
I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that it is easier to address folly than vice. But even if it isn't, it would be unsurprising if the two had very different explanations. And, for many vices, the temptation is obvious even to us who disapprove.
That said, there are two possibilities that could make them parallel in an interesting way. One is that her folly is motivated by vice; this is very plausible, and it would be easy to explain why the narrator left it out. The other is that her motive for folly is obvious to some distaff Mottizens in ways it isn't to other Mottizens of either sex; in that case it would be helpful to spell it out for us.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think much of the modern gender wars rhetoric is aimed at such a goal. The modern manosphere types going on the Whatever podcast to talk at young women and call them stupid It's not about fixing women but telling men to recognize women as being the equivalent of a 'rapist'.
And if we're being honest, there's not much to argue against that from any self aware feminist perspective. 'Teach men not to rape' was never intended to teach men not to rape. It was just a hostile gender based expression directed at men by the most sheltered and privileged women on earth.
More options
Context Copy link
It's not that her decision is more dumb or more awful, or that she's expected to have more agency, it's that it's dumb and awful in a more self-destructive way, so we'd hope to be able to skip the step where we figure out what incentive is supposed to prompt the use of that agency. The man here is obviously in vastly greater need of improvement, but "Wouldn't you like to not get to abuse anybody, not get to control anybody, and not get to be a drunk?" seems like a harder sell, at least for the type of person for whom it's applicable, than "Wouldn't you like to not get abused, not get controlled, and not get stuck with a drunk?"
More options
Context Copy link
Are you not even a little bit curious as to why women voluntarily get into relationships with men they know to be abusive and untrustworthy?
Why some women do? Sure, but bit of a motte and bailey to go from gender war "why are women so dumb" discourse (without acknowledging the same logic used on men would imply they're all brutes) to "this is just about understanding why some abuse victims fall into the abuse"
Fine, why some women. I've never even suggested this is true of all women so please don't put words in my mouth.
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 don't see any indication that anyone is excusing this abusive man's behavior. The question is, why did this woman decide to stay with him despite all the obvious red flags and the red marks that followed? That's an entirely separate question from, was this man being a bad person in his decision to physically abuse this woman? Which isn't really asked nor answered in that comment and is, actually, pretty much irrelevant to the particular topic the comment raises.
More options
Context Copy link
It is a women's failure when they do not exhibit agency in situations such as this. I don't find "but what about how terrible the man is" a valuable contribution to the conversation here. It has been made clear enough that he's terrible; the question currently discussed is not how to reform such men, but how to reform such women.
For such men, we have the justice system, which unfortunately has to require someone to report wrongdoings and the wrongdoings to be provable (usually) before a punishment is issued.
But if the men can't be reformed why should we expect that the women can unless we're saying women have higher agency?
The men are being reformed; we have plenty of coercive systems in place to punish men who behave like the man in the story. The men who keep doing it are the ones who decided that the benefits of being abusive outweigh the costs or are simply lucky enough not to get caught. If someone's benefiting from their current status, they're not going to be amenable to reformation, and that's an entirely reasonable position to take for such people (as such, we use coercion and deadly force, but, again, there always will inevitably be people who avoid detection or capture). These men have agency; they're rationally using that agency to escape our reformation attempts.
The asymmetry here is that the woman in this story clearly was, by her own judgment, not getting benefits commensurate to the costs. It'd be reasonable for someone like that to be amenable to reformation such that she doesn't choose to stay in such a situation, and an agentic woman who has unwillingness to do so would be a peculiar thing that, at least on its surface, seems unreasonable, which raises questions.
More options
Context Copy link
That's a bit of a sleight of hand.
What do you mean by "the men"? 99% of men have already been reformed (usually preemptively), because 99% of men are not crazy, evil manipulators. (Same goes for women)
There will always be a tiny minority of men (and women) who are evil manipulators. I guess you can always point at the male portion of that cohort and go, "why aren't we reforming these people? Is it because men are low agency? (troll face)" -- if you choose to ignore that you're sampling the worst of one gender, because the better people have already been reformed.
... meanwhile, what's the percentage of women who experience some version of the OP, where they make self-damaging choices? 50%, maybe? I don't know, but it's definitely an order of magnitude greater than the percentage of men or women who are crazy, evil manipulators.
It's perfectly reasonable for us to go "hey, why are large numbers of women having this bad experience?" without having to go "men are the problem". But yeah, raising the slightest spectre of women possibly not being perfect is never going to go down well.
Agreed.
By analogy, if the local police distribute a flyer advising people how to secure their homes from burglaries, (generally) nobody says "hey, wait a second, why are we focusing on the victims here?"
If Grandma Jane keeps falling for tech support scammers in India, it's reasonable to ask what's wrong and how can we educate her to make her more resistant to scammers.
Yeah, I think that's the problem. It's more or less taboo to say something unflattering about women as a group. You can sometimes get away with it if you throw in some criticism of men as a group.
More options
Context Copy link
I would say 80% of men, not 99%
And I feel like if such a thing as consequence free existed, 50%
What are your equivalent percentages for women?
Also: the idea that 50% of men would be crazy manipulators in the absence of social consequences invites one of two replies, depending on your gender:
If legal and social consequences to some actions disappeared today I would still have my own habits and conscience. If I was brought up in an environment where legal and social consequences to some actions did not exist, then I would have likely had different habits.
More options
Context Copy link
Note that manipulators very frequently don't recognize their own behavior as manipulative, so the absence of social consequences is also an absence of social feedback.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Two assumptions:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Depart from the realm of the rational and into the magical kingdom of narrative for a moment.
Imagine you're a woman with 105 IQ, hyped up on romantasy slop and feminist empowerment and blank slatism, what have you. The bad boy gives you the tingles, but it's not his fault that he's bad - it's society/his parents/mental illness/the patriarchy/capitalism. You, oh enlightened Liberal Woman, can heal him with your soothing therapy speak and magic vagina. Go out there and make yourself a martyr on an 80 IQ thug with no self control! I can fix him! You go girl!
Many such cases.
I think of young women's reaction to e.g. the character Jesse from Breaking Bad and feel your comment is spot-on.
More options
Context Copy link
The Hollywood actor Barry Keoghan by all accounts had a very difficult upbringing: drug addict mother who died when he was 12, spent years in foster care. He was in a romantic relationship with the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter, but they broke up, with her apparently no longer being able to tolerate his drunkenness and loutishness. Her song "Please Please Please" consists of Carpenter pleading with an unspecified lover not to get drunk and embarrass himself (and Carpenter, by extension) at a public event. Keoghan, naturally, features in the song's music video. One of the most interesting lyrics in the song is the below:
As an Irishman who likes a drink and who has made a drunken tit of himself on plenty of occasions, I bristled at Carpenter's claim that Keoghan might have defended his bad behaviour on the grounds that he's Irish. Being Irish is not a blank cheque to get falling-down drunk and embarrass your girlfriend. But I wonder if, when Keoghan said this to Carpenter, he wasn't just telling her what she wanted to hear. No doubt she's "done the work", she understands that the body keeps the score, she knows that everybody has trauma. Keoghan knew all of this. So they go to a party, Keoghan has too much to drink and makes a fool of himself, Carpenter has to carry him home, and the next morning she gives him a bollocking for having embarrassed her. Eager for her to get off his back, Keoghan gives her some bullshit pop-psychological explanation for his bad behaviour, when the truth of the matter is more prosaic: he's a drunken lout. Carpenter is mollified by this, nodding safely while Keoghan knocks back his hair-of-the-dog. Rinse and repeat.
I wonder how many physically abusive men, when "apologizing" to their wives for their most recent outburst, have excused their behaviour with exaggerated or invented claims of being victims of abuse themselves. I wonder if abusive men even deliberately/unconsciously seek out gullible or suicidally empathetic women who'll be more susceptible to these kinds of rationalisations.
Tangentially related: so many convicted child molesters purport to have been molested as children that it's a cliché. But I read an article once (must see if I can track it down) that found that, when you hook convicted child molesters up to a polygraph, the proportion who claim to have been molested as children plummets. Polygraphs, as we know, do not detect if someone is lying: they test proxies for that like heart rate and sweating, but there are lots of reasons a person might be nervous other than lying. But many people believe that polygraphs are literal lie detectors, so connecting someone to one is an effective countermeasure if you want to be sure they're telling the truth.
I don't know the answers to these questions, but I couldn't help but read your comment and be intensely reminded of my father. Both my parents grew up and lived in Korea until after I was born, and the culture in Korea in the 70s-80s when they were dating and then married was certainly very very permissive of physically abusive husbands (it was only very permissive in the 90s). But that's not the part that reminds me, it's that whenever my father beat my mother, he would excuse it to her that this was just a result of the upbringing he had in his family (his father beat his mother quite a lot worse than he beat my mother, by all accounts), that he was trying his best to escape it (they were/are both second-wave feminists, which was a movement that, AFAICT from my mother, was quite popular in Korea during that time).
I haven't watched the show, but I heard that there's a scene in The Last of Us Season 2 where there's a flashback to Joel's father Lalo Salamanca explaining roughly the same thing to him while or after beating him and his brother, that his father beat him really really bad, but he only beat them really bad, and they'll go on to beat their sons only kinda bad, or something. So I get the sense that this is at least common enough to be a cliche or stereotype, and it matches my anecdotal experience.
My father's 2nd wife was also Korean and even less agentic than my mother by my judgment and also suffered quite a lot of beatings from him, which at least somewhat anecdotally points in the direction of such men seeking out such women who are ready to be victimized.
Interesting. Are you Korean?
I used to be, but I'm American now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think I've seen this idea before, but written this way, it feels more clarifying to me. This seems like the female version of men who've grown up being told the same things either going to inceldom and/or attempting to date women without considering his own physical attraction to her. That this mirrors so closely things I've seen a lot IRL on the male side makes me feel like your last sentence is likely true.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Jesus, that's bleak.
More options
Context Copy link
People make stupid choices all the time. Often, the reasons are very much human and understandable, even if they’re bad. Someone might be lonely, the other person might be very attractive or charming, they might enjoy the attention.
Society does try to help some people not make very poor choices. Most people are not libertarians or anarcho-capitalists; that’s why indentured servitude, selling many narcotics, gambling, and prostitution are regulated or banned in most jurisdictions. Still, there must be some freedom. The freedom to make a bad choice in terms of partner is probably one of them.
I think gloating is poor form in these cases.
I generally agree, but I think it's worth keeping in mind that society is constantly dumping on men in various ways. One way this is done is by making it very easy for a woman to get her male partner into legal hot water by accusing him of domestic violence. Another way is that if a man publicly complains about women choosing violent men when he himself is non-violent and desperately single, he can expect to be mocked, ridiculed, gaslit, and invalidated.
So there is a limit on how much sympathy I have for women who make these kinds of choices.
More options
Context Copy link
But telling these stories is still important as a warning to others not to repeat them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link