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 think that my statement is at least technically true, because "it is harder to sex id clothed persons than nude persons" should hardly be controversial.
Now, you could claim that it is only true in that technically sense, as in "it is more reliable to tell apples from oranges through genome analysis than it is to tell them apart through looking at them" -- which would be technically true if there is some weird apple where eyeball id is less than 100% accurate, but functionally false, because nobody is ever likely to encounter that counterexample in the wild, and insisting on running every fruit through PCR is utterly pointless from telling apples from oranges.
For pre-pubescent kids, I do not think that it is particularly easy to tell their sex absent social norms ("boys have short hair and wear blue clothes with dinosaurs, girls have long hair and wear pink clothes with unicorns").
I will grant you that after puberty, most people can reliably pass for their sex even without social cues. Voice register alone probably suffices. I will also grant you that societies can eliminate most adversarial examples by simply punishing trying to pass as a sex you were not assigned at birth by stoning: if I see a bearded Taliban gunman, I do not really have to check the inside of his pants to know what genitals he will have. It is technically possible that it is a trans-man on T, but I would expect there to be less than one such instance in all of Afghanistan.
In freer societies, people are allowed to pass as the other sex/gender, or not prominently display their beard or breasts to the world and thereby sort themselves into one of the categories.
It might be that the rest of the world is much better at id-ing sex in Western adults than I am. Perhaps the rest of you have basically a built-in millimeter wave scanner and I am just to autistic to notice. I mostly rely on secondary sexual characteristics (which can easily be acquired through HRT, or even faked through props) and social conventions.
Luckily, there is very little reason for me to know the sex of a random person in the street. The only exception would be "can we produce offspring together" (which of course also hinges on other factors). I am a member of a K-selected species, the number of times a trans-woman has tricked me into courting by pretending that she could bear my children has been exactly zero. In practice, "could we beget viable children?" is rarely the first thing on my mind when I encounter a person in the street.
The way I see it, genders have their origins in traditional sex-based roles in societies, but I do not think that it needs to stay that way. Things evolve. Ridley Scott is obviously not a mounted warrior aristocrat. To my knowledge he does not maintain any warhorses or plate armor, does not have a fief granted to him, does not follow the code of chivalry and has never been seen leading a cavalry charge against the enemies of his liege. Yet he is a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire.
Still, I am totally fine with saying "he got a knighthood". In case there is any confusion, I can use the term GBE and everyone will know what kind of knight he is. In 1100CE this would never have been possible, but today cavalry has been obsolete in warfare for a century, so we can repurpose the term.
Human females were mostly reduced to their reproductive capability in earlier societies. This seems obvious from the quaint custom of referring to them as either Miss (eligible) or Mrs (married). (There was probably a third category of woman who had sex before marriage and was therefore ineligible to bear heirs, but I doubt there was a honorific for that role.)
Today, society has recognized that human females can also contribute in other ways than making babies. Very few people are interested in whether an unmarried woman who has her uterus removed for medical reasons should be called Miss or Mrs. Granted, gestation still happens in vivo, so the bearing of children is not yet as obsolete a concept as shock cavalry, but much less important than it was 100 years ago.
a "technically true" statement that has no bearing on reality has no value
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link