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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I don't know if being able marry is the baseline for "success" in a relationship.

Good, me neither, never said that. I don't know how I can make my point any clearer. I'm not saying that every man who gets married is in a successful relationship. My first comment directly mentioned men who beat their wives - surely you don't think a physically abusive marriage is my idea of "success"? My point is that incels and romantically frustrated men are complaining about a chronic inability to attract women, and this is not a problem which married men suffer from.

There is nothing that would make be believe a woman dating a sexist man is happy and fulfilled

Okay well if there's literally nothing that could convince you, then we're dealing with a religious belief, not a political or philosophical one.

I think you are lying about how much you respect the women you are dating.

What does "respect" look like to you? I think ultimately what you're doing is falling for the oldest logical fallacy in feminism. The normative belief "I believe that women should have the same rights as men" does not presuppose the factual belief "I think men and women's brains are alike in every way (and any observed differences in behaviour, temperament or personality traits are solely attributable to social influence)". So when you're asserting that I don't "respect" my girlfriend, I think what you're really asserting is that I don't believe male and female brains are alike in every way. Cards on the table: I don't (although I do believe women should have the same rights as men). If a precondition of genuinely respecting women means believing (or pretending to believe) that female brains are exactly the same as male, then I guess I don't respect women, although I don't really understand why. No one thinks that a precondition of respecting Japanese people means pretending that Japanese people are exactly as tall as Swedes.

"So you're saying female brains are worse than male" - nope, never said that. I said different. There are certain traits in which I think men tend to perform better than women, and other traits in which I think women tend to perform better than men. There are other differences which can't really be mapped onto a "better" or "worse" hierarchy: men tend to be more interested in abstract systems and women tend to be more interested in interpersonal relationships, and I wouldn't say that one of these is "better" or "worse" than the other.

And let's leave gender aside from this for a minute: you keep talking about a partner that "sees them as lesser" or similar phrasing. Are you claiming that a mutually respectful relationship is one in which the two partners believe that they are equally skilled in all domains? Such a relationship doesn't exist and never has: it's a category with zero members. In every relationship, one person will be the better cook, or be funnier, or have better social skills, or be better with money, or will be more even-tempered. If you're conflating "a relationship in which one person believes they are better than the other in certain respects" with "abusive relationship", then I'm sorry to say that all romantic relationships in all of human history have been, are and will be abusive.

Women are not a monolithic them any more than men are.

True, but the fact that every member of a set is different doesn't mean that it's impossible to make accurate generalisations about that set, and it's weird that you get so offended when people do so. For example: men are all different, we are not a monolith. Nonetheless, the statement "men are more aggressive than women" (or "men tend to be more aggressive than women" or "men are more prone to aggression than women") is inarguably true. I am not insulted by this statement, even though it's a generalisation about a set of which I am (through no fault of my own) a member. I know that the generalisation isn't true of me personally, even though it is true of the set of which I am a member. In this thread you've repeatedly made the non sequitur that a man who says "women aren't as funny as men" therefore believes that he, personally, is funnier than you personally. But that logic doesn't follow: the statement doesn't imply that interpretation. Hell, the statement "men are more aggressive than women" is true even if asserted by a violent woman (say, Aileen Wuornos) to a non-violent man.

[As an aside: I expect I'm likely to be misinterpreted here, so I'm emphatically not claiming that "men are funnier than women" is as obviously true an assertion as "men are more aggressive than women". My point is that the statement "men are funnier than women" does not imply that literally every man is funnier than literally every woman, or that every man is funny, or that no woman is funny. Those readings of the original statement are just as much non sequiturs as interpreting the statement "men are more aggressive than women" to mean "literally every man is more aggressive than every woman" or "every man is violent" or "no woman is violent".)

Now: is a woman who (accurately) asserts "men are more prone to aggression than women" therefore a "sexist" who "sees her husband as lesser"? Is she obliged to believe (or pretend to believe) that men and women are equally aggressive, in order to protect her husband's feelings? I don't think so. If a man got really bent out of shape every time his wife made this inarguably true assertion and interpreted it to mean that his wife was accusing him personally of being aggressive, I would think he was a thin-skinned numerically illiterate narcissist.