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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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i think feminism has largely devolved into a framework intended exclusively to generate rationalizations with maximal agility whose function is to perpetuate emotionally salient narratives of victimhood. initially, there was a grave need for feminism and the transgressions were obvious. but i suspect that as time went on and feminists racked up wins, the transgressions they were fighting against became less grave and less emotionally salient. but because emotional salience and the perception of victimhood are the key drivers of activism, there was a crisis that threatened to undermine the movement’s emotional salience. and the response was to sort of retreat into the nebulous and abstract world of academia which allowed the construction of approaches that could sustain the emotional salience of the movement by not having to be grounded in reality.

  • -27

This is pretty low effort for a top level post. If you want to start a thread about how feminism is now useless, please go to more effort than posting a shower thought.

I recommend you put a little more effort into your writing. It’s a little too dense, you could pepper in some examples of what the words you are taking for granted mean for clarity.

Currently it comes across as more of a cocky hot take declaration with a mic drop, (in my opinion)

Can you give examples of what you call emotional salience, both in past feminism and in the presence?

what i mean by emotional salience is something that stands out and resonates emotionally. like going from abortion is no longer federally protected to the rights of women are being attacked is transforming that into something more emotionally salient.

Wasn’t it always primarily about victimhood? Maybe one could argue it was justified historically but my understanding of the history of feminism is “it is unfair we are not treated equally.”

I'd say that there are more and less pernicious forms of the victimhood mentality. Some forms of victimhood really are short lived and resolvable, others are so vaguely defined that the mentality seems to shift from a victim seeking redress for grievances in order to end their victimisation, to someone looking for greivances in order to justify their ongoing victimhood.

In a society with no collective identity this is inevitable. There isn't a sense of the country being one big family with people fighting for the common good, instead countries are viewed as a legal platform and a market administrated by a government. In many ways it isn't too different from Iraq, a plot of land which arbitrarily became a country. Within this arbitrary zone the obvious winning strategy is to form a group and promote your group's special interest. That may be feminism, it may be more money to the military industrial complex, lower taxes for wall street, more money for Israel, extra spending on infrastructure in the place you live etc depending on what group you belong to. The society is a nothing more than a shopping mall and people want to benefit themselves.

The US is largely government by a legal system and the legal system is has as one of its primary duties to defend victims. For lawyers and judges, having grievances is hold the aces. In previous societies claiming noble birth and belonging to the main ethnic/religious group would have provided one with benefits. In a society that has equality before the law combined with a society largely run by lawyers whose job it is to compensate victims people are going to perpetually try to gain maximal victim status.

One thing that was interesting to me is that most of my classmates in law school seemed primarily motivated by who was weaker. That is, justice was delivering benefit to the weaker party at the expense of the stronger party.

To me, Justice was about punishing the wrong doer regardless of whether they were stronger or weaker.

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