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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Well, if I'm honest part of my judgement is based on simply my experience of watching firsthand the Spanish-language videos, and my personal judgement of who to believe, but also there are two videos of different angles (which I saw but now can't find clean zoomed out links of because googling for original videos is a fucking horrible experience) that don't seem to support any real conversation between them. But it's also possible they had the conversation he claimed but she thought it would be a cheek kiss or a head kiss or something so it's not like any reasonable person is going to expect grabbing your whole head and planting a full on kiss on the lips in that situation?

I don't know how it comes across in my clumsy translation but all of his apologies were basically linked grammatically with some other excuse or with a connotation of "I have to" rather than "I want to". It's kind of the apology equivalent of being passive-aggressive.

So you think she didn't think it was a big deal except he said she said yes and that made it a big deal, because she was ok with the non consensual kiss but not ok with him claiming it was consensual, so after days of silence she released a statement denouncing the nonconsensual kiss?

That's pretty much right. She was fine being like, a little mistreated for the sake of not distracting from an awesome victory and celebrations. But when it morphed into a huge and deliberate misrepresentation, and him being so belligerent about it all, she felt she had to say something. My reading of her comments focuses on how she thinks it's more about him lacking respect for others than the actual vulnerability or any harm from the act itself. That Rubiales has created a "manipulative culture". And she realized that staying silent, rather than being a noble act, is in fact sending a message of impunity for bad actors to other women who might find themselves in similar situations. That's perfectly in keeping with for example the Wednesday release with the union, where she seems more interested in improving overall player conditions and a general sense of justice and being respected than an extraction of a specific punishment.

Because if there were true respect between the players and Rubiales, a kiss like that would be unthinkable.

Because if there were true respect between the players and Rubiales, a kiss like that would be unthinkable.

I know next to nothing about the situation or the people involved. For all I know you're absolutely right about Rubiales, and he's an absolute creep. I'm actually quite inclined to believe that, as my opinion on people in elite positions tends to be rather low, but this single sentence made me do a hard-format and wipe everything you said prior to it from my mind.

To say that I disagree would be the understatement of the year, it's stuff like this that makes me believe progressivism is downright inhumane, and it's goal is to maximize human misery. Even granting you every other premise, and accepting your version of the events, this sentence is completely wrong. There's nothing unthinkable about a kiss like that, and there's no way it contradicts respect, even if it was unwanted and was the wrong thing to do. If there's warm blood running through your veins, you should at least be able to see a possible non-disrespectful reason for his actions.

There is an axiom in certain strains of Western feminism that male lust is inherently dehumanizing. That the male (lustful) gaze objectifies any and all women towards whom it is directed.

This academic paradigm has filtered out to the masses in various forms. Young men have all been exposed to the message that their sexual desires are in some way problematic and expressing them to women is in some way harmful to those women. "It is disrespectful to have any sexual desire for your female colleagues." is an unsurprising belief to come out of that environment. It obviously isn't a true belief, sexual desire and respect aren't actually linked in our psyche that way, but it's probably a useful belief in the post metoo era.