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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34500 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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So, I was going to respond to the above poster, but I think I'll throw it in here.

I don't think this is actually about women. I think this is something much broader, in that I think models based on monodirectional concepts of power (I.E. "Critical") are all essentially shittests. It's harmful to people who actually take this stuff seriously. (Been there, done that, got the t-shirt) But I don't think it's any different if it's sex/gender or race or sexuality or what have you. It's all essentially the same effect. It punishes people who actually take it seriously, rewards the people who have the super-secret decoder ring that tells you to ignore this stuff (or have the personality to brute force through it).

Truth is, this is my argument against teaching Critical-based ideas in school. I think kids are more susceptible to internalizing these ideas, to significant harm I think. If steps were taken to protect against this, I'd be OK with teaching it as one viewpoint along-side others (I'm a liberal individualist as an example).

But there's no ethical way to live and be an oppressor. And I think because the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy takes up so much oxygen for reasons, it leads to things like this happening, because we're not guiding men down a proper, healthy path.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm happily married, although I got incredibly lucky that I found someone who came after me. But our marriage got a lot better when I started to push the Critical models out of my worldview and started ignoring the inherent shittests.

Who is "we" and what is "guiding" and what is the "proper path"?

The we is society as a whole.

What I would argue, is in the effort to eliminate the male gender role, activists have created this thing where we're not helping men actually succeed the male gender role in a healthy, sustainable way. (Note: Just because I think we're not getting rid of the male gender role doesn't mean I think the same thing about the female gender role. I absolutely do not) That's what we need to do, that's IMO what the guy in this story did wrong. But I also think that so much of this relies on unstated assumptions that IMO are entirely unfair.

I would argue the gender binary is a construct, since the definition of masculinity and femininity are different in certain cultures, like Japan and Korea. Therefore, since it is a construct, it is arbitrary. Therefore, the elimination of the male gender role is a good thing, because it stops men from being bullied and shamed into habits and mannerisms that are not natural to them, since not all men act the same nor have the same preferences.

I don't see how you can say that masculinity is significantly different in Japan or Korea than the West. Societies where men were still considered leaders, fighters, and those who valued the same masculine attributes/virtues as their counterparts in the West (loyalty, strength/competence, aggression, pursuit of women, stoicism, etc.)

There isn't perfect overlap, (e.g. the aesthetics vary significantly), but I don't see how someone can look at something with 90% similarity and say that it is arbitrary because of that 10%.

If these things were actually arbitrary, you should see massive, significant differences from culture to culture. Women in lots of places should be the sexual/romantic aggressors. Men in lots of places should be considered more sensitive. You shouldn't have to go to the other side of the world, find gender norms that are similar in most ways, and say that because they aren't identical, it must all just be arbitrary.

Because the 10% exists at all means an 11% can exist, and therefore a 12%, and so on. Thus, it is not biologically set in stone, and thus men and women who deviate from Western gender norms are not deviants brainwashed by feminism, but simply expressing natural instincts. The culture of social conservatism versus the culture of social progressivism I would argue is so vastly different that, well, you have the existence of transgendered folks fighting against people who think they are mentally ill. The fact that there are trans women who successfully pass in public defeats the argument that women and men have unchanging traits that make them inherently different, as Western gender roles would have one believe.

You say 11% and 12% with the implication that therefore it could be 100%. That doesn't really follow.

There are many things that can vary somewhat from environment, but remain mostly biological. Height would be an obvious example. People can vary in height by 10% based on nutrition while they were growing, but that doesn't mean that it can vary 100% or that it is arbitrary. If you want to argue that gender roles are in a different category, then you need a better argument than that.

The existence of successfully passing trans women does prove it can be 100%, otherwise, every single trans woman, no matter how much surgery they had, would be instantly recognizable as a man due to their mannerisms violating their gender role. But there are trans women who walk around you all the time who you wouldn't know were trans if they didn't tell you.

That doesn't follow either. Gender roles aren't "mannerisms." That just goes back to the 10% aesthetic differences, but if the only difference was how you put one leg over the other, gender roles would hardly even be worth mentioning.

Your posts make me wonder if you even think that gender roles are anything besides the aesthetic portion. That would certainly explain why you think they are entirely relative and arbitrary.

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