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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I’m not sure I’m understanding the mythology of the Gallup survey. It sounds like if you ID as some form of gay, you can choose multiple versions of gay, but if you’re heterosexual you can only choose heterosexual and nothing else. Depending on how they count the results, it seems like you could end up counting a person who IDs as a transsexual lesbian asexual three times (once as trans, once as lesbian, and once as asexual) which would obviously inflate the number of people IDing as some form of LGBT.
Sounds much more plausible to me that a purple teletubby wearing a handbag caused this.
Kidding aside I also think the Gallop survey is picking up a big uptick in women who don’t identity as “straight”, but have only dated men. For example girl makes out with another girl at a bar would previously be considered straight still but now she checks bi.
Skip that whole last sentence. The median woman we picture being bisexual is hot, practicing, able to get both men and women as she pleases and having done so regularly.
The modal woman who publicly flags as bisexual seems to be fat, an "unfuckable mess" (RIP Silvio) who isn't hooking up with anyone at all, and the median bisexual woman almost certainly hasn't had her tongue on a woman's mouth (let alone her clit) in the past year, and often never has and never will.
Bisexuality among women is the most faked identity, while also when genuine being one of the toughest to carry.
Can you expand more on that? That is interesting. I've known a few openly bi (and practicing) women; there are some mental health issues there but a lot of them have their stuff together...most are either thin or overweight, some obese but none morbidly obese.
Roughly what region do you live in/are drawing your conclusions from?
East Coast American PMC. Drawing my conclusions from having loved mainly bisexual women for my entire adult life. Not for any particular reason, things just sorta happened that way. The last few times I run into another one, she'll be amazed that I am "fluent in queer girl."
Bi women are treated as experience dispensers by a lot of people. They're assumed to be constantly available and up for it, to be targeted for threesomes or for "experimentation" by otherwise straight women, while simultaneously being derided by Lesbians/WLW as crypto-straights who don't count when it comes time to hand out social standing in LGBTQWERTY spaces. Being openly bi is kind of a pure loser if you were happy to begin with, you get attention you probably didn't want/need, while also being derided. From a marketing perspective you're better off saying you're primarily a lesbian but make exceptions as desired, or that you're straight and just sleep with women when the opportunity comes up.
Which is why loudly bi women are so often unattractive, people who are most vocally part of any deviant sexual community are often those who are hoping that standing in the community will get them laid. I've seen the same thing in poly and in BDSM communities IRL, ugly people who are constantly going on about "the rules" and "the community" and resent the hell out of hot people who break those rules successfully. In the hope of enforcing rules that will force women to sleep with them.
That is interesting indeed. Bi men are assumed gay and women aren't all that attracted to them...while bi women get treated like experience dispensers. I suppose that might be why bi people have worse outcomes than gay and straight ones. I suppose that being openly bi might be an honest, expensive signal that you're able to withstand the slings and arrows.
Based on my personal experience - a lot of bi friends - I've seen a lot of attractive openly bi women. However, more than a few have significant mental-health issues, or had had them in the past but had overcome them. There's a disproportionate number of queer young people in local psych wards.
That, too, is interesting. There's more than a few fat, awkward, nerdy men in BDSM circles, although I would suspect that most of them have the sense to not openly talk about their involvement in BDSM. If you're unattractive enough, the fact that you're interested in sex or relationships at all is fundamentally transgressive, outside of perhaps certain niche communities. I guess that if you're just barely attractive enough to be allowed to be openly interested in sex and relationships, you might join a BDSM community or talk about being openly bi as an attention-grabbing strategy.
Isn't this sometimes seen as creepy, transgressive, or just bullshit? I suppose that women can get away with this a lot easier than men can...but even then, why isn't this kind of behavior just seen as sanctimonious and puritanical? Also more than a little bit gross: the 5'3" guy in the BDSM circle, or the 300lb woman, should damn well know that they are being allowed to both participate and express interest in people by their community. Generally speaking, I see publicly representing oneself as anything other than a celibate monk or nun who's dedicated their life to something prosocial as a privilege, not a right, granted by the community. Something like the flirting/sexual version of a driver's license...most people can get them, but a small percentage can't or shouldn't, and nobody's pitching a fit that blind or epileptic people can't drive.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How many people here are "unfuckable messes" and would be comfortable being made a subject like this?
Well, if this is how Angela Merkel is spending her retirement I'd apologize to her because that seems a little personal and reminding her of what must have been a rough and frustrating moment.
Otherwise, it seems no more out of line or turning a person into a subject than referring to homosexuality as unhealthy, or to a religion as obviously false, or to various varieties of wokeness as, well, all the things that we refer to Wokeness as. And let's not even get started on HBD.
That said, if anyone actually approached me and said "I don't like you using terms like unfuckable because I'm unfuckable" I'd feel really bad for them. That's like saying "Don't use the term stupid, because I'm stupid." You have to be really down bad to instantly identify with generic negative comments that way. One should read that another person is ugly or stupid and think "yup, there are people like that, but I'm not one of them." That's a normal level of self esteem.
If one honestly feels that way about oneself, among my friends on the motte, I'd do whatever I could to help them see the most obvious methods of losing some weight and improving their body, their style and grooming. Being hot isn't in reach for everyone, but being an unfuckable mess is a lifestyle choice.
But then, I'm a romantic. I spent half a semester of undergrad trying to set up a female friend of mine with a smoking hot body but severe burn scars on her face, with a blind friend of mine. Match made in heaven.
mixing the personal and political
More options
Context Copy link
Being a mess is definitely part lifestyle choice. So too: some people really are ugly, and know it.
About your female friend: what ultimately happened to her? She reminds me some of my burned friend, to be honest. Did the burns take her sight or cause her any other health issues?
To my knowledge she had no health issues, but we weren't that close, just had some classes together, I never even learned what caused the burns. Really fit, fantastic body. Sometimes I think I should have married a woman like that, with an obvious physical flaw that I think I could have gotten past better than most men. Would have been more efficient than marrying a woman who is, honestly, a lot hotter than she needs to be to keep me around.
What was her personality like? My burned friend was blunt, cynical, bitter, and funny. I'm trying to reconnect with her. At the time - in high school - I'd had (or at least thought I had) a lot of interest from girls. And I was openly disinterested in sex and relationships then, believing I wasn't ready at the time. I would've found her very attractive had she been confident and not cared about the shit she took for being burned. Now, I'd be interested in her as she is...a dozen years have made me more cynical, like she was. I could've gotten past her face then, and could get past her face now - it was the sadness that was a turn-off for me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My own uninformed opinion is that there are a number (how many I wouldn't dare try and put a figure on) of young women (and I mean young, as in mid-teens up) who have absorbed all the Pride flags in the classroom and "LGBT is the bestest thing ever" anti-discrimination stories from whatever books were in the school library as they were kids onwards (I suppose Heather Has Two Mommies is antique nowadays).
And of course, they are fully up on The Problem Is White Cishetnormativity, so they want to be good allies. But that means if they are white cishet themselves, that puts them at the bottom of the stack of the oppressed and cool, and top of the stack of the oppressors and terrible.
They're young, they don't want to be ostracised. So some kind of LGBTQ+ identity gives them some protection in their social circle, and being bi is the easiest way of getting that. They don't need to do anything, just "I kinda think I could kiss a girl" is enough.
I think non-binary is the next wave of this; cut your hair short, dress like a boy (jeans and shirts are unisex anyway) and you don't have to do much more than that to have a protected identity which takes you handily out of the "oppressor" classification and into the "oppressed" one, where all the cool kids are.
I have some sympathy for the young and uncertain who only want to fit in with what the social waters they swim in are demanding. I have not so much for those who make the demands and want to wreck lives if you don't fall into line.
Non-binary is just the logical place for anyone who takes gender theory seriously. If one genuinely believes that Men Be Like and Women Be Like, and that one's choice to do the cultural associations of one or the other indicates one's gender; then one's only options are to identify as non-binary or to act like a complete stereotype. There is no human being I have ever known where I couldn't nitpick a single thing that was weirdly masculine or feminine about them. If you take Gender Theory as a true believer you have no choice. My dad is the very model of a boomer farm kid turned small business owner paterfamilias, he loves the movie The Devil Wears Prada and tries to convince me to watch it every time it's on TV. NB. You're a nice Catholic girl, but do women really argue so stridently on the internet? NB. I can't get through half an hour without doing something NB. Hell, I know Trans people, most of them retain a habit or two from their prior days, NB.
I know this is anecdote rather than data, but the non-binary people I see are those who present as such online, and I'd give a rough estimate that 99% of those are women (because they look like women, no matter if they get the butch haircut) and the remainder are weird men or genuinely unsure could be either male or female.
I do think there is a difference between "I'm NB, that means I'm not male or female, sometimes I'm both, sometimes I'm one or the other" and "George is a big manly lumberjack who is a former Marine and he loves little fluffy kittens"/"Sancha is a girly girl who dresses in pink like her idol, Barbie, and if you ever need your motorbike's engine stripped down she's the one to do it" version of "this person does not adhere 100% to gender stereotypes".
'Non-binary' as in "men inherit traits from their mothers, women inherit traits from their fathers, you can have interests about X but that does not contradict your membership of the sex Y" is natural.
But non-binary as I see it used is all part of the political and '500 genders' thing, where there is a very definite way set out of how you should 'dress like this, act like this, talk like this' about it - at least in the self-reinforcing groups that talk about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's some utility to distinguishing between 'practicing' and 'non-practicing', and there's probably some number of 'socially-bisexual' who wouldn't pull the trigger for anyone short of a movie star dropping naked into their beds, but this framework risks defining a lot of monogamous or virgin bisexuals as 'fakes' in a way that obscures more than it hides. Even from a pure pragmatics perspective, there are a lot of places where it matters even for people I would rather gargle arsenic than see pantless, and that's before problems like "you don't want to see my internet browsing history" or "oh, you had some custom artwork prints framed, can I see them- no?"
((And, conversely, measuring just by activity redefines a lot of actually-gay people into bisexuals or 'straight', even if they absolutely didn't enjoy it and don't plan on trying again and might not have even been able to complete the act.))
It's not really that I'm deriding them as fakes, just that I'm deriding them as irrelevant.
If Ferrari is the favorite exotic sports car among those with net worth above $1mm, and Lamborghini is the favorite among those with net worth below $20k, Lambo has many more fans but far fewer customers. And they can pump up their fan numbers among poor people all they want, all they'll sell is a $20 poster not a $200k coupe.
I'm significantly less interested in how people identify, than in how much gay sex is actually being had. If 100 years ago 1% of people identified as gay, but 5% of people engaged in same-sex sexual intercourse in the average year; and today 15% of people identified as some form of gay, but only 3% of people engaged in same-sex sexual intercourse in the average year, I'd call that a decline in homosexuality not an increase.
I'd appreciate if you would explain this, the link just seems to take me to the same joke about Arsenic on Twitter.
I guess that's fair, if not what you said before, although in turn I'm not sure it is irrelevant, unless you really only care about the gay sex. You don't stop being bisexual just if you go a week without sucking a variety of genitals, any more than hets stop being het when they're not in the middle of reproducing, and there's a variety of norms that end up different in bisexual (even socially-bi) places.
And that's assuming that things keep the way they are; there's reason to suspect at least some amount of falling-into-het-relationships as downstream of simple selection effects, which could be less prominent if at least some portion of the newly-bi people are more 'haven't' than 'wouldn't' or 'couldn't'. I've written a bit in the past about spaces that turned high-prevalence bisexual and then had a lot of gay sex precipitate out.
There are a lot of people who have different norms of behavior when solely around people who aren't capable of seeing them as sexually attractive, even if there's no actual interest or chance of interest. Worse, they will become retroactively uncomfortable and consider it a betrayal of trust if they are 'tricked' into doing something outside of the bounds of these norms.
The classical variant of this for a lot of gay and bi guys is public- or semi-public showers, such as in gyms or dorm rooms. Where and when I grew up, it was considered immature or gay to be uncomfortable stripping for these environments. But at least some people also considered Incorrect to strip in front of a gay or bi guy.
((The broader LGBT movement calls this generally homophobic, and sometimes it is, but it's often from people who'd have the exact same objections in front of a heterosexual or bisexual woman other than their wives.))
One solution was for those gay or bi guys to be in the closet: keep your eyes up, think cold day thoughts, get in and out, done; what people don't know can't hurt their feelings. Does not always work out in practice. Another option is to disclose, either explicitly or through very well-known signals. People who aren't comfortable with it can change their behaviors (or make clear that you'll wait until they're out to go in); people who don't care don't even have to notice.
Public- and semi-public showers aren't the most common environment, but they're also not the only such example. It's not uncommon for businesses to put two same-sex coworkers into a single hotel room for conventions or travel (and especially older folks have often uncomfortable behaviors when doing that). I've had friends or coworkers invite me to certain types of 'themed restaurant' once and then when the only pleats I was looking at in the Tilted Kilt were on the host rather than the waitresses, and sometimes that doesn't matter to them a ton, and sometimes it does.
((I have strong reasons to believe there are equivalents for lesbian and bisexual women, but I've only heard them second-hand.))
These issues arise even and sometimes especially with people the gay or bisexual guy isn't actually going to be attracted to, just because the theoretical possibility is enough to matter, whether for "Caeser's wife must be above suspicion" reasons or just because they don't believe it. I've had people who I found absolutely repulsive, either on a physical or personality or both level, that insisted on changing room arrangements after I had to disclose for unrelated matters.
More options
Context Copy link
Why are you interested in how much gay sex is actually being had?
I’m interested simply because I think the push-polling nature of these sorts of surveys may well be detrimental to social health. By pushing the idea that a full 25-30% of all Americans are some form of lgbt, it normalizes it, and thus pushes on the idea that we must find these poor souls before their traditionally minded parents cause trauma. We must push even harder to put normalization in the school system, on TV and in movies and music. If these things are actually rare, if very few people are consistently seeking only or mainly same-sex partners, and very few ever feel true discomfort in their natal sex, than we’re creating a health crisis that will hit the West in fifteen or twenty years when it hits us that these kids can never have children, and that it’s much too late to do anything. For people faking being gay, it comes with menopause in which it hits that particular woman that she can’t get pregnant or have a baby or grandchildren. For trans, it probably will hit around middle age — they will want kids, want to be parents, and that option was foreclosed for them long before they were actually able to decide whether it was something they wanted.
Furthermore, even if demography isn’t destiny in economics, it still is socially. And this means that as we sterilize our young, the future will come to belong to those who didn’t choose that path. And most of them don’t have the same values of freedom, high time preference, educational attainment, or democracy, among other things. This is potentially tragic for civilization itself. The values that created the modern world were taught and propagated by the West. And unless those values continue on, the ability to maintain civilization, let alone improve it will decline.
More options
Context Copy link
It's a far more interesting question than "how many people identify as lgbtqwerty?" in terms of societal moral decline. And the question of "Is our society in moral decline?" is certainly an interesting one.
More options
Context Copy link
I assume it's because that's the revealed preference in sexual partner rather than the declared one?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link