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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4489 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Slightly meta question: In the replies to my post in the most recent CW thread, @IGI-111 recommended the monograph Men Trapped in Men's Bodies by Anne Lawrence. So I found an electronic copy online and read it.

Would anyone be interested in reading a multi-part book review / summary of the book? I thought it might be interesting so I started working on one, and am about halfway done with a draft (4k words so far), but it occurs to me that there's not a lot of point in finishing it if people are tired of the topic.

Related: for the mods, if there was interest and I completed it, would it be appropriate to post it in its own thread(s), like @drmanhattan16's recent review? I think I can keep the overt culture war out of the review, but the topic itself is, well...

Related: for the mods, if there was interest and I completed it, would it be appropriate to post it in its own thread(s), like @drmanhattan16's recent review? I think I can keep the overt culture war out of the review, but the topic itself is, well...

Yes, book reviews are fine as separate threads.

Thanks! I posted my review Part 1 Part 2 Part 3, though I think the new poster gremlins may have eaten them (I can't see them from the front page when not logged in). Let me know if I did anything wrong.

To the meta point, I had been thinking it might be nice to have a thread for media reviews, perhaps weekly or monthly or something. The idea being, any sort of media, whether books, TV shows, movies, video games, whatever, which may be of interest to the community, but perhaps not quite enough to justify a thread of it's own, and not seeming to quite belong in any of the other regular threads.

Agreed, but for now we can just put it in one of the weekly threads and see how much traction it gets. The what are you reading? threads get a good few replies.

I’d be interested in reading a review.

I tried to find reviews of this book, but the one I read all the way through was on Lorelei’s Substack. It gives a feminist’s perspective on AGP as the force behind the trans movement, through the sheer motivating power of the male sex drive.

I come away from her post more decided than ever that drag queen storytime is an existential threat to civilization. No other paraphilia is exercised in front of children and lauded by politicians, unless one is willing to describe weddings as an exercise of paraphilia.

No other paraphilia is exercised in front of children and lauded by politicians

Female exhibitionism, and female power fetishes in general. Feminists have convinced the western world that it is sexist to not let them exercise their fetishes.

How so?

You can argue that, I don't know, Catwoman is exercising a BSDM paraphilia. But then you'd have to compare the overwhelming number of films selling some form of sex appeal. Forget Jabba's palace, Princess Leia's stay on the Death Star was suggestive as hell. Look at the pre-PG13 era to see how many of those were marketed for kids.

The romance genre has plenty of catering to women's libidos, but usually in the complete opposite direction--dominant or animalistic men (or vampires, or whatever). Meanwhile, I'm not sure that exhibitionism has made it mainstream at all. Tricky to search for examples, though...

How so?

Modesty, or rather the lack thereof. I believe there exist a significant number of women who "get off" on their ability to cause men to desire them. They behave and dress in ways that exploit men's sexual arousal to gain power over them. A SFW example of this are shirts like this, purposely designed to draw attention to sexual characteristics (breasts in this case) and then shame the viewer for being drawn to them. It is particularly egregious in the context of trans women and drag queens, as they are simply behaving the way many cis-women do normally, but people are threatened by amab behaving that way.

But then you'd have to compare the overwhelming number of films selling some form of sex appeal.

No, that is orthogonal to my argument. Sexualization can be used in many different ways.

The romance genre has plenty of catering to women's libidos, but usually in the complete opposite direction--dominant or animalistic men (or vampires, or whatever).

“Men’s greatest weakness is their façade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their façade of weakness.” The man's "dominance" in the romance genre is entirely performative. It is there merely to remove the responsibility of the woman for what happens, because women aren't supposed to want sex. He is still doing exactly what she wants him to.

Reading that review/reaction was a bit weird, because while I see where she's coming from (not only is reading about fetishes gross, but a lot of these people do seem to admit to sexist or objectifying attitudes towards women), it really feels like she's somehow getting the causality backwards. While I can't be sure for every case, I strongly suspect that most of these people's specific sexual fantasies of humiliation/sexism/etc are downstream of the memes of sexism in the culture (I hesitate to say "sexist memes", because while some of them are indicative of sexism, others are probably due to the broadcasting of "look at all this sexism women experience" from feminists).

That is, the causal chain runs from the cultural memes (sexist or about sexism) to the sexist fantasies, because what's ground-level arousing/desired is being a woman, and that's what these people either (a) think being a woman is like, or (b) think is proof or evidence of being a woman. If other things were culturally available as "the essence of being a woman", that's probably what they'd fantasize about instead. Whereas Lorelei seems to think that the source of the sexism in these fantasies is in these people's male sex drive, because she thinks that the male sex drive is the source of the sexism in the culture?

Re: drag queen story hour; I'm agreed these are terrible. Though weren't drag queens originally a subculture of gay men, not transvestic fetishists? I'm not familiar with any of the groups involved, so I may be mistaken -- or maybe it's not the same people anymore now?

Edit: Also, does that mean you'd be interested in reading a review, or no?

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