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 -
Going to come in handy for the 2 women on the Motte, thanks for the insight.
Sarcasm aside, do you not realize that you making statements like that is exactly his point? That you can harness social shaming as a tool even in a place like a motte without raising too many eyebrows, and such statements are toxic to honest discourse to the nth degree. Be honest, you know you being a woman has nothing to do with how he is engaging in this conversation, if anything if you read @DaseindustriesLtd's other comments on other topics, he is holding back his punches. So why add in that little snide at all if not for shaming purposes? Do you seriously think "has women franchisement gone too far" is too spicy relative to the other things the motte discusses?
I hate to say it, but a lot of women are so used to using harnessing shame to win arguments that they don't even know when they are doing it (or that you can win arguments any other way) [1]. Your statement can roughly be translated to;
" Oh sweetie, no wonder you are having girl troubles, You don't even know how to talk to girls! just say your please and thank yous and you will get a girlfriend in no time" exact same thing as "Perhaps if you were better at engaging with women in good faith, you'd get more good faith in return." in the context of this conversation.
And there you did it. You poisoned the well, now unless one has the eye of Horus he will slightly doubt everything he (Daes) says because maybe you know what, he kinda might just suck with girls and is taking it all out on the internet. Maybe everything he is saying is just incel jibber jabber.
You are non-stop trying to shame him ala "can you guys believe this, he is being mean to girls!" over and over again. And if you can't realize that after being told explicitly, I don't know what to say. But do be careful of wielding weapons, lest they be wielded against you.
Here's some unsolicited advice. You can <argue for/against the point> instead of < arguing for the point as a woman>, the latter will automatically guarantee you hostility. Why? Because the latter is often a failsafe warning sign that shaming will be used if the discussion turns sideways and everyone who has their senses tuned after years of internet usage will pattern match regardless of the ground truth and get in a preemptive strike.
[1] FYI, even the most vilest of online incels or whatsoever woman-hating group you can conjure up not are really hostile to women when interacting with them. But they are hostile to "bitches", i.e women who are so used to arguing "as a woman" that they are gobsmacked by the notion that they might get hostility for reasons other than being a woman, i.e for being annoying/histrionic/naggy/whatever. Men get hostility all the fucking time from other men, but I suppose when you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
I do agree with Dasein on the substance and I do agree with your assessment above, but to be entirely fair, one's identity is a valid thing to mention when registering offense at something that is insulting to said identity. The reason it feels alien to many men is probably because they are used to the demonisation.
"As a man, I feel unsafe when you cast us in the role of perpetual oppressors" said no man ever.
More options
Context Copy link
Dase has made his opinion of women very clear, on multiple occasions. He thinks we are liars. He thinks we are mean. He thinks we habitually act in bad faith.
The style of sneering at female commenters personally that he is employing in this thread is very obviously coloured by his broader opinions.
I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be allowed. I decided not to let it -- and the sneering alongside it -- go unchallenged.
I meant it, sincerely. Good faith works best as a two way street. That's just a fact of human interaction.
I've been on the Motte since it was the Culture War Thread. I'm one of the left-most people here. I've never flamed out. I've garnered two mod notes over six years; never a ban. I stay for the charity, when I can get it; I stay to be challenged and to see views I wouldn't otherwise see. Sometimes, I admit, I stay for the fight. But I always argue in good faith, even when it leaves me vulnerable. If you can't access that side of me, you're not trying very hard.
So you are committing the same NAXALT/AXALT fallacy that he claimed women are more prone to making. I.e not understanding distributions.
Yes, he could have avoided this by prepending "most" to his "women are X" clause or "more X than Y", but only a bad faith interpretation (or abject misunderstanding) facilitates that confusion.
I think one of the issues here is that criticizing women as a group is so verboten that any and all of it is taken with utmost offense. Consider "men are more aggressive than women", that is true. Consider "men are more boneheaded than women", also true. Not all men and all women, but those statements can be said without invoking the wrath of the male gender or anyone batting an eyelid at all. However when you levy an equal accusation at women, let's say being susceptible to NAXALT/AXALT fallacies, all hell breaks lose? How is that any worse than being aggresive or boneheaded?
As for sneering female commentators, The one female commentator brought it on herself coming in guns blazing with sneers out of the gate. You just entered the mud bath.
I wasn't the one to insinuate that you are operating in bad faith but you are refusing to face head-on the meat of his criticisms and instead hiding behind the fact that they were said in an unsavory tone.
Why don't you actually challenge the criticisms instead of bringing weak sarcastic platitudes or diverting the discussion to the tone of the conversation?
As I understand it, the claim is that women are so powerful that they have turned into little dictators who go around making unreasonable demands. This requires substantiation. What kind of unreasonable demands? So far I've been given "shut down any political project they don't like." That's a strong claim. There are, in fact, many existing political projects that women are more against than in favour of that have not been shut down.
You've given me a second claim, that "criticizing women as a group is so verboten that any and all of it is taken with utmost offense." It is true that claims about women are policed more strongly than claims about men. However, women are not unique in this regard. Claims about black people are policed more strongly than claims about white people, for example. So it does not make sense to attribute this to women's overwhelming manipulative dictatorial power. It has more to do with the fact that there is a historical pattern of unfair mischaracterisation of women that was bad enough that it gave rise to a movement dedicated to correcting it.
None of what I have been given substantiates the claim that I was initially criticizing -- namely, that women are "queens by political fiat" in any real sense of social or political power. We are not. It is obvious that we are not.
You are, indeed, either speaking in bad faith and thus escalate the demand for evidence as if none were provided yet and I'm just waxing lyrical about generalities (ironically validating me further), or so triggered by the sarcastic line about queens (don't you know it's a meme?) as to become unable to recognize the context of those claims.
The context of my claims about power imbalance is that the onus is consistently on men to change in all related topics where it is clear that something must be changed. E.g. when the topic is sexlessness, men must suck it up and adapt to «increased standards» in dating. When the topic is TFR, men must learn to contribute to housework, reduce their sexism (as documented by gorge) and so on.
Out of context, many of those suggestions are not terrible. In context, though, it is bad on a number of levels. Most importanly it is
a) unfair to consistently demand only one side in a democratic society to compromise, especially while presenting the other as devoid of agency and control;
b) plainly tyrannical to suppress explanations which are relatively less demeaning to men and less flattering to women, namely hypergamy with regard to dating and revealed disinterest in having a family or children; and
c) irrational to expect policies and recommendations based on models which are little more than self-serving gaslighting to actually work.
These deficiencies are exactly in line with the petty tyrant framework.
Female preference is taken as the implicit ground truth which must be acknowledged and adapted to; male preference, sometimes completely made-up (in cases where it is impossible to tie the object-level complaint to things men actually, systematically do), is presented as the root problem to be solved. The reason that such a discrepancy in discourse is possible is: shaming of pro-male voices that women collectively engage in, using rhetorics that amount to sneering, and feeling justified due to the aforementioned wishful thinking tendency where their wants and excuses are objective truths.
More options
Context Copy link
That rhetoric might be a little overwrought, but this reminds me of the infrastructure bill in the early Obama years. It was right in the ruin of the housing crisis, and the people losing their jobs where mostly men. Obama had the genuine insight that you weren't going to easily convince all these construction workers to retrain as nurses, and hit on infrastructure as the big topic to get them back to work while preserving their dignity.
And by the time the plan got through Obama's mostly female and gynocentric advisors, most of the "infrastructure" money had been looted for teachers and nurses (mostly-female professions almost totally unaffected by the crisis) and the rest went to environmental impact surveys and such and basically none of it went to any man who had ever touched a shovel.
More options
Context Copy link
Women have a lower threshold for offense, so the excessive policing of language can be more readily layed at their feet than black people's.
Clearly, what is obvious to a feminist is not obvious to the MRA-ish perspective that you find in a place like this. Originally, the discussion was about reproduction, and the unprecedented and total power women currently enjoy over it. 50% gametes, 100% power. This is an example of women getting their way, unimpaired by fairness. My "fundamental right" to decide if and when I become a father is not 'under attack', it is nonexistent .
Anyway, more generally about 'queens by political fiat', I remember this old irascible MRA, you might have known him if you've been in the game long enough (david byron I think), and one of his shticks was to ask feminists: what legal advantage do men enjoy over women? Because there are plenty of laws advantaging women.
More options
Context Copy link
I'll give you one such example, which is more or less what this entire discussion is based on. The [dm]ating market.
Women just about exercise dictatorial demand. This is patently obvious to most men, but this visualization might give a somewhat illustrative example. Notice how most of the space is pink, indicating female advantage. The advantage shifts genders only when the man is 95th percentile. When @FarNearEverywhere speaks of the infamous choosy male she is falling for the apex fallacy given a majority of the male population is at a severe disadvantage, but they are also invisible to women.
More generally, women wield the power to destroy careers with mere accusations of sexual misconduct, men don't have this privilege. This trend more or less applies to any social shaming, men just about cannot wield the weapon of shaming at all, it's almost an exclusively female activity. Men can intimidate and hurt and wield a lot of other weapons but shaming not so much.
Do you think Davis Sabatini would have been fired for sleeping with a coworker if he was a woman?
That is only part of the reason. Women have an ingroup bias and men have an outgroup bias. Humans are biologically hardwired to be more protective towards eggs than sperm because of obvious evolutionary logistical reasons.
Regardless of the reason, is it rational?
Yes, women are not queens. I am not claiming that is a rational statement but I will try to explain where its coming from to bridge some of the inferential distance.
As a young frustrated guy, it certainly feels like they are. When you see all kinds of scholarships for them, programs to get them STEM degrees and jobs, when there are trends such as "Believe all women" and questioning them is tabooed, when an average run-of-the-mill girl can demand her partners to be 6 foot tall, earn 6 figures and have a minimum 6-inch dick when men making even 1/10th of that demand despite them being worthy or not are chastised to hell. When you are told repeatedly that all of society's social ills are because you keep on playing video games or won't take showers and women are not criticized one bit. When NGOs say "Women are the greatest victims of war" despite men being the overwhelming number of casualties, and doesn't get chastised for it. It certainly sometimes feels like the game is rigged against you.
That is a statement out of frustration, you are not the audience for it, the audience is other men who can relate to the frustration. And the worst part of it all (rhetorically)? You take a massive social hit for pointing any of those things out. Even in a post about how 60% of young men are single and how that is a sign of severe social decay, you clutch your pearls about guys being frustrated at women and lashing out a bit sardonically at the grimness of the situation, it's the lack of empathy.
I probably am sea lioning a bit, it's true. But, on the other hand, it's not actually good for the Motte when it becomes a place for men to lash out in frustration at women with exaggerated claims. You joke that there are about 2 women here, but really, if you want viewpoint diversity, this can't become a space where people are perceived as having the right to complain about a particular subgroup without getting pushback.
For what it's worth, you have my agreement of some of your complaints. "Women are the greatest victims of war" is pretty indefensible. There have been instances in which the social movement against rape and sexual assault has led to deeply unfair outcomes for some of those accused. And, in this context, it is silly to blame men for not being in relationships. If women are "rational" for dating each other or choosing their careers instead, then men are just as "rational" for looking at the hell that is dating apps and deciding to watch porn instead.
The liberal position is that people can "demand" whatever they want out of a partner, provided that they are willing to accept not having a partner if they cannot actually convince such a person to date them. And I think that's a pretty important principle, actually -- that individuals can always opt out of the dating market, if they've decided that it sucks. That women fear coercion in this space is not actually a sign that we are manipulative; our fear is based on a not-too-distant history in which social norms used to make it harder for women to say no to relationships even when they wanted to. If you want to throw away liberalism in this context, because you think it simply isn't sustainable, then it's not illegitimate for people to respond by pointing out that this will create harms of its own.
If we're keeping liberalism, then I think the finger-pointing in both directions has to stop. I think sometimes people point the finger at men because they want to forestall any sort of conversation that might lead to social coercion of women, but I don't think this is actually helpful. Men are also within their rights to opt out if they want to.
Honestly, if you ask me, one reason this problem is hard is that child-rearing just doesn't fit easily into an atomised, market-based society. The strongest incentives are not economic nor directly related to happiness; they happen on the wishy-washy level of fulfillment and even sometimes self-sacrifice. The best ways to support it naturally take place not on the individual level nor the national level but rather on the intermediate, community level.
It's possible that some of the solutions to the problem of finding relationships need to happen on that local level, too. Dating apps suck particularly badly for men, but women don't really seem to love them all that much, either. Rather than berating people for not engaging with the system as it exists, it surely makes more sense to try to reform the system so that better ways of finding partners and starting families start to seem possible for people. That's easier said than done, but better than sitting around arguing about who is to blame.
Neither I nor Dasein suggested politically/legally disenfranchising women, you are arguing against a strawman if you think that is the case.
I'll speak for myself though; Given the parent thread is just a continuation of a conversation that has been going on for a while, I previously talked about my solution not being to take away women's rights (I'm a libertarian and that goes against my political framework anyways), but instead to stop;
Artificially inflating women's social status. And by all means, I do think it is artificially inflated; by subsidizing college degrees that are economically unproductive but female-dominated,
Non-stop feminist rhetoric from just about all facets of society/institutions starting from kindergarten; to stop holding boys back by punishing them in schools, essentially defeminizing schools, Stop with the incessant "yass queeen" girl power rhetoric in just about all media,
The boys drool rhetoric when it comes to every issue.
Assigning social status to college degrees to the point that a professional email sender who makes 40k a year stops thinking that an Electrician who makes 50k a year is beneath her feet,
Women being able to fight for their interests as a class (why does 50% of the population even get to do this? post full enfranchisement), And many more.
You can visit last weeks CW thread to see the entire list of ideas discussed that would deflate the currently presumed inflated female status without taking away any of their rights. Most of the changes proposed are cultural.
Ultimately, I don't think any of these things will work. Hence my doomerist position that there is nothing to be done about male disenfranchisement anyways because we have been psychologically/culturally primed otherwise beyond any fixing (partly thanks to online dating). I repeat, this conversation is not about TFR, it's about the fact that 60% of young men are single.
If you have a potential solution/idea for that problem, I am all ears.
More options
Context Copy link
That's fair but I hope you won't be as quick to assign blame to men when the consequences of those liberal positions come to fruition. More men, especially the Gen Z generation are opting into watching porn instead of the hassles of dating. They're also opting out of society, which by the liberal position is within their rights. The modern educated women is so far detached from the modern male laborer and man that I fear you don't fully understand how much they contribute to the world that you thrive in.
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 feel compelled to point out that @DaseindustriesLtd was probably trying to make a Heideggerian joke with his chosen name.
Thank you for explaining the joke :)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link