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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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Women might be able to recognize that different people have different preferences. HereAndGone might not have a moral objection to fanservice in anime, which is indicated by "it's fine." But she and other women can dislike it. Some people might really like eating oysters and that's fine, no moral objection to eating oysters. But don't expect me to be comfortable sitting at a table with people slurping them down.

I don't know why people here see a contradiction here.

The shaming is the contradiction.

You might not like oysters, or want to watch people eating them, but presumably you won't make a point of letting oyster-enjoyers know how gross you think they are.

I mean, if it came up in a conversation and I was BFFs enough or rude enough...

It's a moot point for me because my personal beliefs is that it is indeed immoral to be immodest and to tempt others to unchastity. But I don't see a contradiction between "I think it's disgusting and don't like people who engage in the practice, but I don't find it immoral and it's fine for people in my society to engage in this practice."

But it hardly really ends there. Forget oysters, take homosexuality.

I think it's disgusting and don't like people who engage in the practice, but I don't find it immoral and it's fine for people in my society to engage in this practice.

That statement will not be taken kindly in polite society. But it's socially permissible to shame and police straight men for liking straight male gaze oriented content, and as a result, police the content itself.

You dislike immodesty and porn in general, that's fine, but practically there really is no difference when you say "it's fine" and in the breath attempt to shame someone out of watching porn. Your words and vibes don't match, is the point.

Edit: Sorry, groggy typing. Edited many times.

That statement will not be taken kindly in polite society.

That is a fairly recent phenomenon. 20 years ago you'd be free to say something like that about homosexuality without any problems or logical contradictions detected. It's actually historically odd that we are able to suppress those kind of statements now for homosexuality and I don't know if it will last.

My expectations for activities engaged in by arbitrary people are looser than my expectations for my friends', which are looser than my expectations for my wife's and kids', which are looser than my expectations for things I do together with my kids or my friends, which are looser than my expectations for things I do with my wife. None of these distinctions is a contradiction; they're the proper liberal way to thread the needle between "nobody should care about my preferences" self-abnegation versus "everybody should care about my preferences all the time" totalitarian attitudes.

It's totally reasonable to say that it's fine for a show to be made, either fine or not fine for your SO to want to watch it themselves, and yet not fine for your SO to pick it for the both of you to watch together. My wife likes phở bò with tripe and I like sushi with wasabi, and that's all great, but neither of us would ever order our favorite for the other one too, and if we did make a similar mistake out of ignorance then we'd talk about it, not to say that one of us thinks the other is gross, but to clarify what about the food we think is gross to us (e.g. I still like phở without tripe, she still likes seared tuna without wasabi) so a similar mistake doesn't happen again.

Yeah, like not to belabor this too much, because I am not personally an oyster-enjoyer, literally or figuratively. But the point I was making is not that oysters are perfectly fine and no one should complain about them or find them disgusting, but that I find it dishonest to claim you consider oysters a perfectly fine thing to enjoy, just not for you, yet make it clear in your reactions that that is not actually how you feel.