site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33054 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The decline of the Literary Bloke: "In featuring just four men, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists confirms what we already knew: the literary male has become terminally uncool."

Just some scattered thoughts.

The Great Literary Man is no longer the role model he once was. The seemingly eternal trajectory outlined by Woolf has been broken. The statistics are drearily familiar. Fewer men read literary novels and fewer men write them. Men are increasingly absent from prize shortlists and publishers’ fiction catalogues. Today’s release of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists – a once-a-decade snapshot of literary talent – bottles the trend. Four of the 20 on the list are men. That’s the lowest in the list’s 40-year history. In its first year, 1983, the Granta list featured only six women.

It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers. You don't even need to reach for the more subtle types of criticisms that revisionists make of the traditional canon: "yeah, I know like you feel you were just judging works solely on literary merit, and you just so happened to collect a list of 100 deserving authors where 99 of them are men, but actually you were being driven by subconscious patriarchal bias and you need to escape from your historically ossified perspective and so on and so forth". What's going on now in the publishing industry is far more overt: "it's time to hand the reins over to women, period". In such a cultural context, how could a list of the "20 best young British novelists" be taken as unbiased evidence of anything?

The irrelevance of male literary fiction has something to do with “cool”. A few years ago Megan Nolan noted – with as much accuracy as Woolf on these men in Mrs Dalloway – that it might be “inherently less cool” to be a male novelist these days. Male writers, she continued, were missing a “cool, sexy, gunslinger” movement to look up to. All correct.

It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books. When was the last time a literary fiction author of either gender captured the imaginations of millions of people the way Hajime Isayama did? The literary novel is not eternal (many will argue that historically speaking, it's a relatively recent invention) and it is not inherently superior to other narrative art forms.

The decline of male literary fiction is not down to a feminist conspiracy in publishing houses

Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.

...

It's not a conspiracy if they just tell you what they're doing!

The most understanding account of male literary ambition was written by a woman.

There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways. There are plenty of things in the male experience that have no natural analogue in the female experience, same as the reverse.

Women purchase a lot more fiction than men, a trend that goes back at least to the early 90s and precedes the dominance of female authors in the market. The share of female authors in general ticked sharply upwards starting in the 70s but only cracked 50% in the last couple of years. Why this is I'm not sure. When I was in high school a couple of years ago all the girls read for fun but few boys did. Men tend to read non-fiction a lot more than fiction but even there I think women read a bit more.

Women also fantasize to fiction.

I know 1 guy who actively prefers reading + fantasizing over porn. I know a ton of women who never saw the appeal of porn, and purely go off scenarios in their own head.

It's an entire industry the size all porn on the internet, that is contained purely within fiction novels for women.

I know 1 guy who actively prefers reading + fantasizing over porn.

I've always been puzzled by the notion that pornography is something to masturbate to seemingly as its own end and (by extension) the people who claim to do this. While I understand that PornHub's analytics is censored, I'm willing to believe that its logs for time spent per visit are accurate, which is (experimentally) about the time it takes for the anecdotally-average man to find something then jack it to orgasm.

(I wonder how long the average AO3/Wattpad visit is?)

It's an entire industry the size all porn on the internet, that is contained purely within fiction novels for women.

Comiket (and assuming it's representative of the (both ero and not) manga industry, the industry itself) is also majority female, and Japan is sufficiently outside the woke orbit that this is probably a natural equilibrium. For reference, this festival is a celebration of fan work, but quite a bit more commercial than any other Western country would tolerate (their rights-holders either can't or won't take action against it, as they also know full well that that's where its future talent comes from; you don't get 50 Shades of Gray if Twilight fanfiction is sufficiently criminal).

I would argue that hentai (mostly manga, though some anime can count as well) and VNs are a much better balance between the visual and the emotional; being hyper-real makes it possible to engineer specific facial expressions and scenes in a way you can't do as well with real actors (the ones who can are Hollywood A-listers and a bit too expensive for even the well-heeled porn studios... well, other than Stallone anyway).

You can hit both needs at once provided you're competent enough at drawing and take at least some time to establish characterization, or at least that's how I've observed it to work for me. It's not like you can't just "borrow" characters from another franchise and get all that characterization for free if you don't want to do it yourself, which is partially the reason why slashfic is so successful- and because it's drawn, you not only get something to see, but it's superstimulus at the same time since you can make sure your characters look good (they don't even have to be human) and properly expressive from every angle, and the stuff you have them do doesn't even need to be anatomically possible.

I'm not going to argue that H-manga is the pinnacle of storytelling by any means (though there are a few that most certainly are; Katawa Shoujo is probably the best example but there are many others) but what little there usually is still beats "lemon-stealing whores".

I've always been puzzled by the notion that pornography is something to masturbate to seemingly as its own end and (by extension) the people who claim to do this.

I'm confused by what you mean here, can you elaborate?

I'm not going to argue that H-manga is the pinnacle of storytelling by any means

It's not, but works like Subahibi are really interesting. More interesting than a lot of what gets published today.

I'm confused by what you mean here, can you elaborate?

This is "I masturbate while watching porn". Even though I'm told this is generally how most men use pornography, I find this incredibly strange.

More interesting than a lot of what gets published today.

Yeah, I agree; I think the VN as "novel, but a bunch of other stuff happens too outside of the specific text" really goes a long way to improving on raw text. It also happens to be something that AI image generation (and a suitably uncensored LLM) is already capable of, which likely hasn't gone unnoticed by some of the more niche startups and hopefully they get big before they get targeted by the usual suspects.

deleted

Like this.

Maybe TMI, but now you know (of) at least one other guy, being me. I have always found erotica more exciting than pornography (it used to genuinely annoy me as a teenager how hard it was to find porn with actual plot). That makes sense though because I've always considered myself to have a more feminine kind of mind in a lot of ways. I used to write a ton of fanfiction in HS, and as mentioned above a supermajority of fanfic writers are female. I was in a few fandoms where just about every single other fan I interacted with was a girl.

That's really interesting. I am not sure if that supports my anecdotes or balances it out ahaha. Either way, useful nuance.

I bet it makes for more creative love making. Porn is creatively bankrupt.

There is literary fiction whose readership is heavily tilted toward men. Think Pynchon, DFW, etc. Heavy, pretentious, ponderous tomes whose reading indicates some kind of status achievement. I think with less certainty that some literary journals (namely n+1) are also more heavily subscribed to by men.

Those have fallen out of fashion, though, to the point where it's a meme that having Infinite Jest on your bookshelf is a literary red flag for potential dates.

Women buy more fiction: "We must cater to women, they are our natural market"

Men buy more fiction: "We must cater to women, they are an untapped/underserved market"

And your reference for women purchasing a lot more fiction than men?

While little publicized and hard to document, it is a widely held belief in the book business that more women buy books than men -- perhaps as much as 70 or 80 percent of fiction.

So, at least in 1997, they didn't even know. It was just a "widely held belief" that couldn't be documented.

In fact, that same reference makes the case that, if there is such an effect, it's push rather than pull -- publishers are refusing works which appeal to men:

Last fall Matt Bialer, a book agent at William Morris, sent publishers the latest manuscript by Ed Gorman, the author of 17 works of fiction, primarily suspense novels that have had steady, if not spectacular sales. But Mr. Gorman's newest, ''The Poker Club,'' which is about four card-playing professional men who accidentally kill an intruder and see their lives unravel, was turned down flat by nearly a dozen houses.

''People said it was a good story but it was too male-oriented,'' Mr. Bialer said. ''They said it needed a stronger female protagonist.''

Every set of hard numbers I've ever seen suggest the same thing. I chose that article from the 90s to show that it's an old trend.

See numbers here for 2015, on pages 71 - 72.

Also dovetails with my personal experience so I don't really have trouble believing it. If it was a matter of being pushed out by a market that caters to women, there's plenty of older stuff men could read, but while I know girls that like to read older stuff I can't remember the last time I met a guy who reads Hemingway or Bierce for fun. Men IME have different hobbies.

Do publishers really cater to men? Or do they have imprints that minimally cater to men in ways that people who aren’t men think won’t give men harmful notions? For example, I have some French comic adaptations of Conan stories that are amazing. They’re full of action, adventure and excitement. The original short stories are also included, as if daring the reader to find fault with their adaptation. I have heard that modern domestic comic productions of Conan are less intense by comparison.

The preceding text was fed through my sensitivity reader.

If you say "I have some..." and "I have heard that..." and the text was written by ChatGPT, you are lying unless you personally actually have some or have heard.

For clarity. I type how I normally type. Then I copy and paste it into ChatGPT and ask it "Can you rephrase this to be less offensive". Sometimes it defaults to "They author believes..." and I have to ask it again, specifying to rephrase it in the first person. Most of the changes are subtle IMHO. I really have those Conan comics, I have really read them, I have really heard domestic Conan comics are weak sauce compared to them.

The preceding text was fed through my sensitivity reader.

This is obnoxious. Stop it.

Stop doing it, or stop saying I'm doing it?

Sigh. Both?

We have already modded people for using ChatGPT to write posts without announcing they were doing this. It's disingenuous and not speaking clearly.

OTOH, this schtick where you pretend that golly-wolly you just don't know how to write words that won't randomly "trigger" people anymore is also disingenuous and obnoxious.

(If you think I'm being harsh, you should read the reports. Nobody is impressed by this routine, dude.)

Realistically, if your "sensitivity reader" is good enough not to be obvious, I am not going to play "spot the AI," so sure, go ahead and have ChatGPT rewrite your posts for you and treat it like a proofreading pass, minus the passive-aggressive "sensitivity reader" bitching.

That said, come off it.

(If you think I'm being harsh, you should read the reports. Nobody is impressed by this routine, dude.)

I'm unconcerned with impressing anyone. Have any reports been for language, being uncharitable or combative? No? Then I consider it a resounding success.

More comments

stop saying you're doing it. that's much more off-putting than idiosyncrasies of speech.

[EDIT] - I think the mods have dinged people before for having GPT write their posts for them and not announcing it. On the other hand, it seems to me that if you're going to pass every post through it, just declare that you're doing this from now on, and then everyone will know it without having to be told.

To what extent could the difference be carried by erotica? It is widely believed that men prefer visual titillation and women prefer narrative. New media that proliferated since the '90s has much more of an advantage over books in the former than the latter domain, so it would stand to reason that more men who were at least partially in it for the porn jumped ship to the internet. I still remember being annoyed that the semi-trashy criminal fiction I read as a teenager always had to include an ill-fitting gratuitous graphic sex scene, so the proposition that it matters for large swathes of the audience seems not too far-fetched.

(...or perhaps the "men are more visual" thing extends to entertainment beyond the explicitly pornographic. Do men also prefer videos of {violence, heroism, drama} over written stories about them more than women do?)

...or perhaps the "men are more visual" thing extends to entertainment beyond the explicitly pornographic. Do men also prefer videos of {violence, heroism, drama} over written stories about them more than women do?

I have difficulty getting into the mind of the modal male here. For porn I typically prefer words over images. Words simply allow you to explore a broader and more nuanced range of concepts.

Ultimately both words and images have their place though (for both sexual and non-sexual topics) and I wouldn't say that one is "superior" to the other in a global sense.

Yeah, but not like words on a page. Its different if it's actual audio.

I have a feeling they were into the former far more than the latter..

And that's leaving aside the lack of availability of video pornography during Playboy's heyday.

Women seem to use Tumblr a lot, which had a lot of porn back in the day.

Interestingly, the surge in female sexlessness corresponds exactly to the 2018 Tumblr porn ban. This has to be a coincidence right? There’s no way it’s as simple as “femcels stopped having sex as soon as they stopped being turned on by hardcore porn on their social media feed,” is it?

There’s no way it’s as simple as “femcels stopped having sex as soon as they stopped being turned on by hardcore porn on their social media feed,” is it?

Simple sanity check: does the number of femcels match the number of regular unique tumblr users?

Also: doesn't it correspond more to COVID?

Probably part of it. Romance has always been the biggest seller in mass-market fiction by far, something like 50% of all units sold yearly are romance. I think the trend holds across most genres though.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats