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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34513 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Who is "we"? By what mechanism do you propose to stop this "we" from digging?

By whatever mechanism feminism has used to advocate for women and criticize every piece of media that doesn't adhere to feminist values. "this is a sexist conspiracy theory against men" should be a biting criticism that is taken seriously. People who whinge on about pay gaps should be looked at like 911 truthers.

Then I encourage you to do this! Call out sexist conspiracies against men in your life. Push back on people who go on about pay gaps like you would a 911 truther. Are you under the impression it was never difficult for any woman to advocate for the range of social changes they have advocated for and achieved?

I do. And I'm sure those early feminists had to enduring sneering pestering like this as well. What even is your angle here?

My impression, admittedly mostly from outside this forum, is that a lot of people complaining about the vilification of men don't actually want to do anything about it. They want other people (often feminists) to do it for them. I jumped to conclusions regarding your own posture and apologize. Good on you for living your beliefs.

I would say most of them can't do anything about it other than complain about it bitterly on the internet. They speak about any of this under their real name there is a very real risk of losing your job and getting smeared by highly online zealots and spineless employers worried about losing face.

From my limited engagement in this space which is themotte and some subreddits threads I stumbled upon through culture war discussions is feminists or progressives will do their very best to put down any discussion that actually touch on men's issues as sexist, patriarchal, racist, authoritarian, fascist, supremacist,... you can go on and on.

The few spaces that seem to be greenlighted like /r/menslib are utterly useless in covering issues that most men actually worry about. Discussion on gender issues will involve points that are not very charitable to men... and women which feminists and progressives can't seem to handle with their binary oppressor/oppressed mindset.

Well feminism is a large cultural force right now and it in most cases is pushing in the opposite direction. I can stand up for men in my life and against misconceptions but for the world I think we should live in the entity that is feminism does need to either change or be opposed. Whether that's because a critical mass of people like me are able to change the relationship society has with feminism as a concept and thus in a ship of theseus manner starts producing memes that offer young men a dignified place in society or because some other entity slays it is to be seen. It is still Goliath in the gender meme world and it is going to dominate discussions.

It could be less acceptable than it currently is to casually vilify men.

I have a suspicion that women are over-exposed to media and memes that shit on men for cheap hurrahs, and the young ones in particular never actually get the firsthand experience of men that might justify the shitty attitude; the equivalent would be a bunch of 16-year-old boys who think their female classmates plan to marry them then divorce them and take away their money and children that they don't actually have.

But women aren't magnetically, viscerally attracted to men the way men are to women, and women also dictate what status IS; if you tell women that men are low-status simply for being men, they'll believe it, and enforce it, and then be confused as to where all the "good men" are.

Surely any epidemic of male sexlessness is due more to (examples, not my claims) internet-caused loneliness, a lack of organized IRL cross-sex socialization for dating, or more general social changes rather than explicit 'casual vilification' of men. The TRP people don't even claim that more women don't want sex from men, because that's visibly false.

It could be less acceptable than it currently is to casually vilify men.

I probably agree.

I have a suspicion that women are over-exposed to media and memes that shit on men for cheap hurrahs, and the young ones in particular never actually get the firsthand experience of men that might justify the shitty attitude; the equivalent would be a bunch of 16-year-old boys who think their female classmates plan to marry them then divorce them and take away their money and children that they don't actually have.

I think this is plausible. Certainly I've met (and even been) the latter kind of person.

But women aren't magnetically, viscerally attracted to men the way men are to women, and women also dictate what status IS; if you tell women that men are low-status simply for being men, they'll believe it, and enforce it, and then be confused as to where all the "good men" are.

Citation needed.

Citation needed.

The last time you made this request, and have it answered, you ghosted the poster (@anti_dan) who put it in the effort.

How does any of the data in that post demonstrate that "women aren't magnetically, viscerally attracted to men"?

What mechanism led to the promulgation of ideas like "black girl magic" or that men should "shut up and listen"?

They seem like the result of fairly organic social phenomena to me, but I confess I had not heard of "black girl magic" until this comment.

  • -13

An organic phenomenon in circles of varying levels of progressiveness that is exported via mass media to circles that find it distinctly inorganic - because it's practically an alien signal from a foreign reality that doesn't reflect or align with theirs. And you may have noticed that a sizable part of our culture war is spilling-over resentment towards and reassesment of these memes; either due to being fed up with them to the point of dropping politeness or in some cases betrayed by what they feel were implicit lies sold through them.

Like, half (if not most!) of the argument around these issues is that critics find them largely inorganic and astroturfed! And all you can do is serially post strings of words amounting to:

"OK, but so what?"

"OK, but what could you even do?"

"OK, but like, doing anything would be coercive, no?"

You remind me of a friend who talks this way whenever we have a political discussion that trails into something he's either plainly uninterested in or (frankly) unable to seriously defend a pet position of his - his tack of course totally changing when, say, the conversation turns to Roe v Wade. He's a great guy, pretty sharp, makes a good debate partner to keep me on my toes, and so I look past that stuff.

This is just boring and low effort.

Caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses). They are inserted into practices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. They ‘recognize’ the existing state of affairs (das Bestehende), that ‘it really is true that it is so and not otherwise’, and that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, etc.

Their concrete, material behaviour is simply the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘Amen – So be it’.

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