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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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Fair points all around. Some nitpicks:

But they do bear out my general impression that less-than-princely sexual behavior from men is far more common than false allegations from women.

Oh I bet. But that was not the question. The question was whether the current social regime leads to more or less "less than princely behavioor" by men. And that very much depends on what we compare the current situation with. I would hazard the guess that the current risk-reward structure results in much less inappropriate behavior than any other after the sexual revolution.

Two caveats though. One is that what is commonly regarded as inappropriate behaviour has shifted dramatically. This might result in more women feeling victimised than ever before, especially since we started to hand out social and professional rewards for victimhood.

The other is that the punishment for missteps is affecting the behaviour of those least likely to misstep much more than those who simply don't care. The inappropriate-behaviour-per-social-interaction counter may actually go up as a result as the shy and gentle nerds stop trying and the Chads keep on chadding as before.

Even if this is so, the nuclear powers quickly realized that nukes are not an automatic win condition for any given conflict. They do not allow you to order other countries around at will, nor even to credibly deter low-level bad behavior, because everybody knows you'd have to be insane to drop them over anything less than an existential threat.

I'd say there's a fair share of recreational use over fairly trivial matters. Of course, it will be mostly the sociopaths running around using that weapon while those who truly need it to defend themselves will hesitate to use it. As always.

But my sense of the numbers is that the majority of truly inappropriate incidents never result in serious consequences, and only a tiny percentage of miscommunications/bad sex/jiltings result in retaliatory false accusations. Obviously we don't have hard data on this, nor will we get any. But it seems fair to say that a young man's likelihood of having his life torpedoed by a false accusation is similar to a young woman's likelihood of attracting a serious stalker or abuser. Those people are out there and genuinely dangerous, and as I said, they warp the risk calculation for the whole landscape. But just as I try to remind women that, "Hey, you sound a little hysterical when you use the Yorkshire Ripper to justify why you don't walk the dog after ten in your gated community," I'd ask that men try to keep a sense of proportion about the power dynamics here as well.

Well said.

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