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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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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.

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.

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).

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!

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?

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 encourage you to ask any women you know if they would enjoy being raped and report back how it goes.

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 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 encourage you to ask any women you know if they would enjoy being raped and report back how it goes.

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.

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 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.

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.

Whenever we hear a story of a lad engaging in some atrocity in a fantasy realm, I remind my wife that 'little boys have a little evil in them' (and then omit how many times I myself have exterminated whole species in Stellaris).