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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Some MRAs are conflict theorists. They believe that relations between the sexes are fundamentally a negotiation, and that women have more bargaining power which makes the negotiations leonine. These MRAs believe that feminism is in fact good for women in at least the short term, and as such they don't see a point in what you advocate - they think everyone already knows the facts, and their difference with female feminists is simply that they happen to be self-interested men instead of self-interested women.

"Angry screeds about sexism" are an attempt by these people to increase men's bargaining power by unionising men, much as they perceive feminism as unionising women (and male feminists as scab workers begging for scraps).

Even within the conflict-theory frame, there are other ways to increase men's relative bargaining power. Unfortunately, most of them are "run away screaming" levels of horrible. Banning smartphones is the most prosocial one I can think of, by a very long way, and I'm not even sure it'd work (certainly, their introduction brought women onto the Internet in huge numbers and thus enabled instant feminist shame mobs, but it's not super-clear whether removing smartphones now would cause those women to log off or merely to buy PCs).

(There are definitely mistake-theory MRAs as well, though, and some who are a bit of both.)

I would not disagree that some MRAs have a view of gender relations that resembles conflict theory (but as you already noted, many MRAs are also mistake theorists or are a blend of both). However, in contextualising this viewpoint it's necessary to note that the predominant feminist view of gender relations is itself an antagonistic one (patriarchy theory), it arose much earlier than MRAs, and much of feminist political activism is informed by this idea. And when you stand in opposition to conflict theorists, you need to understand that they believe they are at war and will treat it as such. Perhaps their belief is mistaken, but through their actions they have created a dynamic that's fundamentally indistinguishable from what you'd see if conflict theory was true.

In other words, the funny thing about conflict theory is that it’s self-fulfilling, to some degree. Once it is believed by enough people and acted upon, conflict theory frameworks then actually become a somewhat correct framework to view the world through, regardless of the prior validity of the theory. So when the primary lobbying group that purportedly works on behalf of women is essentially treating gender relations in this way and actually getting what they want, I do believe that does indeed introduce a strong aspect of conflict to the relationship, and I think the "conflict theorist MRAs" are simply perceiving this fact. Gender relations might not inherently be one of conflict, but in the current environment, they have gained a distinct shade of antagonism wherein one side seeks to incessantly improve the position of "team woman" in some shockingly zero-sum ways, and while they do feed into the gender hostility as well it's clear that the conflict-theorist MRAs were not the primary progenitors of this antagonism. The way I see it, a large part of the purpose of their rhetoric and activism is to create some kind of necessary counterbalance to trends they didn't start, and they're doing this without benefits such as the backing of institutions.

Once again, I don't like how things are going and find the entire thing to be almost excruciatingly tiring at this point, but once someone starts a memetic arms race (and I do indeed place the blame primarily on feminists for instigating that arms race) it's almost impossible to stop.

I think I mostly agree with your position on the fundamentals. I left my post as conditional as it was for a few reasons, including but not limited to:

  1. it wasn't necessary to argue the truth of the premises to get TheDag to understand the logic

  2. I'm too close to the feminism/MRA issue, as both a victim of misandrist child abuse and a 30-year-old virgin, to be confident in my objectivity

  3. I'm trying to follow something like that Doctor Who quote "I help where I can; I will not fight", and arguing the fundamentals would be wading into the Culture War for real (if you go through my posts you'll see that while they're not always taken as such, most of my CW posts at least technically stick to clarifications).

I think nuclear war's fairly likely inside the next few years, and I think there's a significant (if small) chance of AI X-catastrophe by the end of the decade. So a) CW issues feel trivial by comparison, b) raising the temperature of the CW worsens both of those risks because it weakens the West, c) if we do have a nuclear war, a substantial chunk of the Blue Tribe is going to literally die in a fire and the SJ movement is probably going to collapse in on itself, so opposing them now feels at least somewhat moot. Luke 12:20 and the Warcraft 3 introduction convey my attitude pretty well.

And to come full circle, this means I kinda do agree with TheDag on high-temperature actions being a bad idea right now even if I mostly agree with you on who's at fault (and even if I'm too much of a deontologist to actively oppose people fighting for ideals I sympathise with).