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 -
"Did you lock it?"
A common trait among my social circle used to be that everyone shared an obsession with bicycles. Few of us had or even wanted a car in the city, and having everyone on two wheels made it much easier to roam down our house party itinerary. Between all of us we had a deep well of metis to draw from; everything from which wheels to buy to the easiest way to make derailleur adjustments. We were naturally attached to our steeds and none of us wanted our bicycles to pull a disappearing act, and so we discussed ways to keep safe.
U-locks were ubiquitous and we'd warn each other of the brands that were still susceptible to the infamous pen trick. Some of us of the more paranoid variety installed locking skewers to keep expensive saddles or wheels latched in place. We'd even caution each other to check bolts anchoring bike racks to the ground, since the U-lock was useless if the whole setup could be lifted away. It wasn't possible to reach full immunity but you never need to be the fastest gazelle to escape the cheetah, just faster than the slowest one.
Naturally, if anyone ever suffered the ultimate calamity of having their ride stolen, we would ask if it was locked and how. There was nothing sadistic about our inquiries. Our questions were problem-solving endeavors saturated with sympathy; we wanted to know what went wrong precisely to help others avoid the same fate. Maybe the local thieves discovered some new exploit in our standard security apparatus, or maybe this was just an opportunistic snatch while they left their bike unlocked outside during a quick peek inside.
"If you do X, you're likely to get Y" is the format to an unremarkable factual observation. "If you leave your bike outside unlocked, you're likely to have it stolen" is just reality and, on its own, is a statement that carries no moral judgment. If the victim wasn't previously aware of this correlation, they are now, and are better equipped to evade a rerun.
The parallels to my actual point are probably getting obvious by now.
Kathleen Stock charges right into deconstructing the surprisingly enduring ritual of affixing the "victim-blaming" reprimand to any advice aimed at reducing the risk of sexual assault. Now, in case anyone needs the clarification: I believe that rape is way worse than bicycle theft. Nevertheless the principles at play here remain the same:
Consider the victim of the unattended bike snatch again. Imparting wisdom on the implacable chain of consequences is about the most compassionate thing you could do. They can choose to accept that advice, and if it is sound then they'll be met with the disastrous outcome of...not having their bike stolen. Or they can choose to reject that advice and adhere to the mantra that instead of putting the onus on cyclists not to have their bikes stolen, we should teach thieves not to thieve. In which case, best of luck with completely overhauling the nature of man; here's hoping their bicycle budget rivals the GDP of a small country to withstand the inevitable and wholly predictable hits.
This sensible advice will always founder on the rocks of female sexuality. Women do not want to be safe, they do not want safe men, and if the literature they consume is any clue, practically every "romance" novel has a positively described rape scene in it. Rape is simultaneously a hideous crime and the central sexual fantasy.
Gay guys don't want to catch HIV, but they want to do all the stuff that produces that outcome. Straight dudes don't want to get stabbed by a crazy girlfriend, but they definitely want all the stuff that produces that outcome. We are all enslaved by our own sexuality to a greater or lesser degree. Some people don't have much trouble with it, but it's a reliable failure mode of humanity.
St. Paul was basically right about human sexuality.
Also, more straight guys should dispassionately and stoically accept that they may get stabbed by crazy girlfriends. If they die, they were weak or something and basically take the crazy GFs out of circulation for at least a while. If they live, they've learned valuable lessons. Their suffering was not in vain: it was arguably for the greater good.
More options
Context Copy link
Classic PUA theory states that women want the appearance of danger without personal risk (eg an emotional rollercoaster). They want an intrinsically safe bad boy. Romance novels feed into this by creating a similar 'on rails' 'dangerous' experience.
I don't think women want real danger. They (and this is a very very broad brushstroke here; by 'they' we are probably only talking about a certain type of thrill-seeking girl commonly found in nightlife venues) want the appearance of 'danger' right up to the edge of the cliff where there are actual consequences.
For myself I've got quite a few sexual fantasies that I would never want to attempt in real life. I'm pretty sure that rape fantasies have no impact or subconscious influence on girls actually wanting real life rape.
This is generally how I frame this issue. I eventually learned my lesson but early on I was aghast at how many women I dated were enthusiastically into being choked, slapped, thrown around, hair pulled, called degrading names, etc etc but usually only after enough comfort and safety is established. At that point they basically get the best of both worlds: the male aggression and violence they find so alluring, but without any actual danger.
Yep. Human sexuality - IMO - is pretty disgusting. That goes for both men and women. To deal with it is to endure this disgust for bonding or for the glory of the next generation. This is admirable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is absurd to infer that women want a thing to be done to them because they read fiction about it being done to other people.
The "other people" it happens to is always an audience surrogate for the female reader to self-insert into, in the same way the ordinary high school student at the center of a harem anime exists for male viewers to relate to.
Sure, in a fantasy where they are in control and can stop at any time. Actual rape is not like that!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That statement is totally true, but it isn't just "reading fiction about it being done to other people". Is it absurd to infer that men want to have sex because they frequently masturbate to videos of other men having sex? Women don't just read fiction about this, they actively enjoy it, create it and seek it out. Hell, they frequently talk about how much they enjoy it in public! The inference gets a lot less absurd when you look at the real world context here, and you can even use this knowledge to make accurate predictions about women's preferences (i.e. they prefer it when men do not ask them for explicit consent for every single physical escalation).
I feel like it is important to note that "it" here is still fiction! I play video games that involve killing dozens or hundreds of people. I enjoy it, I seek it out, I talk about how much I enjoy it in public. Can we infer I want to kill or would enjoy killing dozens or hundreds of people on that basis?
I encourage you to ask any women you know if they would enjoy being raped and report back how it goes.
I can absolutely infer that there's a significant portion of the male population that enjoy war, violence, combat and competition, even to the point of lethality. Given that I know absolutely nothing else about you (maybe you're ex-special forces and have in fact killed lots of people before), the idea that you would enjoy or get some kind of pleasure out of a lethal competition is actually a reasonable inference. It won't be totally accurate, but we're talking about inference here rather than divine revelation - "this is likely" is just fine for that particular bar, and the inference gets more accurate the more information you volunteer about yourself.
I've spoken to multiple women who actively told me that it was a sexual fantasy of theirs and asked me to be more "rapey" with them. Maybe my proclivities just lead to me encountering more women of a certain type, but c'est la vie. But as for the actual question you'd have to get a lot more specific, because asking whether they would enjoy being raped is like asking if they'd enjoy eating food - the precise details do in fact matter. And in my experience, people do actually want to experience their sexual fantasies, even if they would prefer/only do so in a matter that doesn't have severe consequences for the rest of their life. Hell, there are women who actually set up and arrange "consensual non-con" orgies in the rationalist community.
Your boyfriend being sexually aggressive in bed is obviously absurdly different to being raped by a stranger you’ve never met. The latter involves a core component of fear that the former doesn’t. There are a handful of Bay Area weirdos who arrange polyamorous orgies for programmers, yes.
The average woman would find it pretty easy to have aggressive, anonymous (and therefore zero blowback) sex with a large number of male strangers on an extremely regular basis and yet the vast, vast majority don’t.
If you say “they want it without the risk and fear and horror” [which are inherent to violent rape] then you have literally ceased to describe violent rape. So the point is void either way.
The military is always looking for recruits, and for those with a more lethal view of blood sport there’s always Ukraine. Again, the obvious difference between Call of Duty and real life is that in the former, there is no real fear. That makes it a useful analogy. By contrast, the male porn analogy is not useful because we know that most men would fuck anything. The same isn’t true for women.
And for those of a more introverted or solitary bent...or for those that don't have the stomach for the moral injury of war...there's always the trackless wilderness of Alaska in late winter.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Can you clarify what a "reasonable inference" is here? At least in my case it's definitely false.
Sure, what I'm saying is P(wants to be raped | has rape fantasies) is, like, < 0.0001. A very small fraction of women who have rape fantasies would actually enjoy being raped.
I feel like this paragraph evinces a misunderstanding of what is bad about rape. Rape is not bad because rapists are rough or sexually aggressive. Plenty of women enjoy those things in a consensual setting. Rape is bad because of the lack of consent, the loss of control, and uncertainty about what is going to happen. Even in CNC scenarios the parties have generally agreed in advance what is going to happen, who is going to be involved (and how), and should have a safeword to call the whole thing off if it gets too intense.
Making a reasonable judgement in line with pre-existing knowledge and information. If I know that you're male, I can infer that you have higher grip strength than the median woman. Of course there's a chance you lost both of your hands in a tragic boating accident and had them replaced with hooks and hence have zero grip strength at all, but absent that information the prior inference is still understandable.
I think that this depends on the circumstances, in the same sense as "I like to eat food" does not mean that I would enjoy being forced to eat a giant bowl of virgin boy eggs with a side of gutter oil. There are absolutely women who would actually enjoy being raped if it matched up to their fantasies. Again, maybe the women I've encountered are non-representative outliers, but it matches up with the studies I've seen on the topic. And more than the studies...ever had a look at AO3 or what's popular on there?
I'm not trying to claim that rape is a good thing or that it isn't bad - but people want and enjoy things that are bad and bad for them all the time. But more importantly, I don't really care about answering the question "is rape bad" - I'm fairly certain that question has been settled already. The question at hand is whether or not some women would enjoy rape, and I responded because I've had several women tell me that yes, they would. I think heroin is a terrible drug that has awful consequences, but that doesn't mean I have to pretend that nobody would ever want to do it when plenty of people make it clear that actually they would seek out and use it.
That said, if seriously challenged on this topic I'm going to retreat to the feminist definition of rape (all heterosexual sex under "patriarchy") and wave a victory flag from high atop the motte.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Addendum to this - I would wager that the games @Gillitrut enjoys involve killing people that damned well have it coming, or at least are legitimate targets for violence within the context of whatever character is being played. The gameified version will probably be amped up and more extreme than plausible real-life situations, but at the core of the game is a fantasy that a lot of men really do find pretty cool and would find satisfaction in accomplishing in real-life. I'm going to play some XCOM at some point today, and while I don't actually want aliens to invade Earth so I can lead a rebel group and kick their ass, I have to confess that I think it would be pretty badass if I led a rebel group kicking alien ass. Likewise for actions taken in Cyberpunk, RDR2, and others.
Perhaps the correct inference is more directional than literal. In games and fantasies, we can amp up something that we feel a bit of an urge for to a comically high level, tearing apart corpo mercenaries with cybernetic gorilla arms, which probably isn't something that many of us would want in real-life, but the basic urge to do violence against evildoers is actually quite common.
Your inference is incorrect. In fact, sometimes in these games I'll make a quicksave and just go on a rampage murdering innocent people. Do you think I'm some aspiring mass murderer now? What does this fact tell you about my proclivity to killing actually innocent people?
This is one of the strangest things my wife and I disagree about. When I play a sandbox computer game, one of the things I will try fairly early on is going on a violent spree and seeing what happens (normally along the lines of "the city guards come and beat your puny low-level arse"). My wife is horrified by this. My son is getting into minecraft, and when he said "I spawned all these villagers so I could throw them into the lava" my wife came to me and said we needed to do something about his developing violent streak, and I insisted that violence against computer sprites didn't count.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a real thing, but there is context to this. I myself have had a few women attempt to provoke me into.. lets call it encouraged non-consensual behaviour. Even then, they are choosing the man they are doing it with and when they are doing it. They are looking for an 'on rails' experience and at worst the verisimilitude of rape, but not actual rape. Not walk down an alley and get your clothes torn off by gangbangers rape. Not 'guy I don't know who enters the room while I'm high or passed out' rape. Even the borderline girls.
I could see some women choose poorly or encourage/flirt/provoke clumsily, leading to a 'date rape' situation by someone without self control, social sense or who ranks too high in the dark triad, but that would be a rare exception and still wouldn't be a 'I want rape'. I'm not excusing 'regret rape' or buyers remorse either. Just saying girls don't want real rape.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You are being uncharitable, and what is more, you are incredulous. The number, of course, is 57%*
*on the high end. 31% is the lower bound.
and that is the first link I found for 'women rape fantasy percentage'. Do you... not look up public studies on the internet for things you would like to know, or do you prefer to remain blissfully unaware?
“Rape fantasy” if you go by the actual associated smut that women read is:
‘Some extremely handsome, rich, single (very important) and charming man falls for me in seconds and is so obsessed by how incredibly beautiful I am compared to any other woman that he has to have me, takes me by surprise, attends to my pleasure and falls instantly in obsessive love with me afterwards while begging me to forgive him for his transgression, showering me in affection and gifts, worshipping at my feet and being utterly loyal to me until I give in and marry him’.
Please describe (tagging @JTarrou to answer too) where this corresponds to anything more than, well, pretty much zero actual cases of rape in the real world?
More options
Context Copy link
I can't believe this needs to be said but people fantasizing about something and people actually wanting that thing to happen are different. Incest porn is a very common genre of porn, for example, but I am skeptical the people who watch it would actually want to fuck their family members (I certainly don't). People have fantasies about all kinds of things they don't actually want to do.
Yeah. I corresponded online with /u/rhirhirolls from Reddit during the spring and summer of 2017. She'd had sex with her father after lengthy family discussion with her parents; at the time she maintained she was fine. She wrote the most eloquent and most revolting defense of incest I ever read. Not an unintelligent individual.
More options
Context Copy link
If you give someone a holodeck card their fantasies give you probabilities about what they're going to do with it. The fantasy is different from reality in that you can choose which parts of the scenario you want and can explore them safely.
At the end of the day, what they actually find out they want probably remains aesthetically horrifying to naïve sensibilities.
More options
Context Copy link
Incest Porn's a weird one, since arguably a lot of the stepcest stuff has come out of it being exceedingly affordable and practical to create versus other content of a similar level of taboo. A standard porn shoot can become an incest shoot with the addition of 5 lines of dialogue, without requiring sourcing actors who are either physically outliers or willing to do dangerous and/or weird acts.
Sure, but my point is that inferring that people wanted to fuck their step siblings by their consumption of such porn would be a bad inference. Feel free to exclude stepcest porn. What fraction of women who watch daddy/daughter porn want to fuck their fathers? What fraction of men who watch daddy/daughter porn want to fuck their daughters? I think the percentage is very low in both cases.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I must ask: how the hell does one look up public studies for these things, then, whatever the topic? I don't think going to Google (or even DuckDuckGo) and asking "how many women have rape fantasies" would be such a hot place to start.
I ask because I'm starting to suspect that, despite my education, I was never really taught how to research anything.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=rape+sexual+fantasy+statistics&btnG=
You just have to use the right search engine and look up the sources of what you find.
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
Do you have any source re: rape in romance novels? I know it’s a stereotype, I know it’s popular; they’re called “bodice rippers” for a reason. But I’d be interested in seeing any stats on the matter. I’m sure someone has done a detailed survey of erotica.
Anyway, I remain skeptical that “wanting safe men” would be a prophylactic. Out of the stereotypical risky decisions—provocative dress, heavy drinking, walking home alone—which would you say are calculated to attract dangerous men? From where I’m standing, they’re not so targeted. The desire for fun and attention is not very specific. Hence why men choose very similar things, despite not generally trying to bait in strong, threatening dudes.
They ain't called "bodice unlacers".
More options
Context Copy link
I don't have anything handy, no, and I'm packing for a fishing trip early tomorrow morning, so I won't be looking for one any time soon. If anyone can show that rape is rare in by female for female erotic fiction, I'll withdraw my assertion based on nothing more than the dozen or so that I've read.
Fair enough. Enjoy the trip.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would not defend the original claim without some considerable caveats, but my wife is a romance novel enjoyer, and the male love interests really, really do not practice affirmative consent, in a way that has heavy overlap with the definitional games that are commonly played, ie equivocating "sexual assault" with "rape", where the former covers "unwanted" touching, kissing etc. A lot of what happens would be grounds for criminal charges, not to speak of cancelation.
Eh.
There really ought to be some sort of large-scale survey, but romance novels have often seemed like a notable blind spot in the general discourse of feminism. It wouldn't surprise me if no one ever has bothered to look.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link