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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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People are drawn to that beauty and the imagination of it. “I want to be her” is common among women too. It’s common because the experience is unique, impossible to replicate, impossible to learn, impossible to buy (unless you’re very, very close and can finish the job with cosmetic surgery in your mid teens). And that impossibility of attainment (if you’re not already there) is true for men and women alike. A lot of autogynephilia that transwomen experience seems, to me, to be this almost gender-neutral impulse.

This seems very analogous to a similar and mirrored phenomenon I've been noticing in a non-trans context. Which is, feminists looking at the lives of extremely successful men and ascertaining that but for the patriarchy keeping them down, women could all live lives like those 99th percentile men. When, in fact, the lives of a 99th percentile man is just as out of reach for basically every man as it is for every woman.

One particularly acute example of this I saw recently was in the show Velma - which I haven't watched but watched this clip of - which involved the title character, an Indian-American girl, dressing up as a man and immediately being considered attractive by all the women in school while doing gross things like burping or eating garbage, getting a job over a woman by handing in a paper scribble resume saying "I'm male," winning an art competition over a woman who painted an intricate beautiful painting by rubbing "his" butt over some paint and then over some canvas, and immediately being listened to when taking over a stage during a dance party to order people to go home. The idea that a short, chubby, effeminate Indian boy would enjoy such social/professional advantages in such settings is... something I would consider delusional at best, and the delusion is understandable if the thinking is that every man goes through life like a 99th percentile man.

More broadly, these just seem like the Apex Fallacy.