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Paging @2rafa, but I share a similar meta-hurdle with her that prevents me from getting too worked up about these cases, or at least tempers my emotional reaction to this kind of injustice.
I can objectively agree with you about the apparent stretching of judicial reasonability, the fear of impossible to defend against, the growing assumption of guilt until proven innocent, and the clear threat of these ideological kangaroocifixions creeping into other aspects of crime-and-justice that might actually threaten me. And I can agree about the campus-rape crisis from a few years back, and more recently Me-Too, etc.
Nothing that follows, dismisses the abstract principled disagreement with these judicial outcomes.
However, I can only laugh at the ideological blindspot from the 'liberal' crowd at these kinds of outrage-at-sex-scandal-outrage. The Motte is the same population, intimately familiar with the I never thought the leopard would eat my face meme, no?
These solution here is not to hook-up, not to have causal sex, not to get drunk and fuck people you're not married to. This is all a bunch of liberals pissed that we couldn't stop the ride somewhere between 1/2 and 9/10ths down the slope. Boo-hoo.
Maybe the progressive's impulse that there's something wrong with a lecherous 31 year old celebrity fucking a 16 year old, their inclination to beleive the legitimacy of her later feelings that she was prey-on and harmed, or their belief that going to a party and fucking drunk people, whether or not you are drunk is an excerise in poor judgement, aren't wrong. Maybe the progressive's judicial response is warped and fucked up, but maybe it's because the people who came before them tore down all the scaffolding and vandalized all the blueprints for a functional paradigm, and those same people are all outraged that those who came after aren't happy standing exposed shivering in the wreckage and be told all about their fReEdOm.
From where I stand, everything MeToo is people trying to put a roof back over their head, while the same people who tore down their original house criticise them for not enjoying the fresh air, and the people who built the original house are too busy tell them they're rebuilding it wrong, instead of telling the wreckers to fuck off.
Eh, I don't find this argument persuasive. I highly doubt the vast majority of supporters of the MeToo movement would be caught dead agreeing with any sort of 'sex negativity.' It's really about women wanting to have their cake and eat it to.
The way these sexual assault and rape proceedings are going, we are hurtling towards a world where young women get to become intoxicated at parties and fuck around as much as they want. But then if a man they slept with (or presumably could've slept with) ever does something they don't like, they can bring the full force of the law against them. Even 20 years later.
Yes conservative courting norms and laws were created to prevent this exact thing, but I'm not sure most mainstream progressives are able to think of anything labeled 'conservative' in a positive light. It's quite strange but the modern media landscape really has made a world where people see a group labeled 'enemy' enough times and they get to a point where they just literally cannot fathom that that group has anything beneficial going on.
The point is that MeToo represents an organic rebellion by a lot of women against the excesses of the sexual revolution, whether they consciously realise it or not (and most, as you suggest, do not). Is it often misguided, does it often harm innocents, does it broadly fail to present viable alternatives, is it still trapped inside liberal ideology? Of course - it represents a dynamic rage, it is largely impotent, those supporting it have little understanding of the real material causes of their suffering.
But, as @iprayiam3 says, that does not mean it is insincere. And so-called conservatives who spend their time defending lotharios and cads are essentially liberals on this issue, no different to those defending ‘drag queen story hour’ or teenage transition. No, some things are bad. Young women raised in a climate of total sexual liberalism are rebelling with the only words they have, in the only way they can. They’re not going to become “trad” overnight, they have no understanding of what that is, they were raised without religion, they are surrounded by a media environment that means they don’t have any real understanding of what reversing it would mean. Still, they know the present situation is untenable.
Just how deep does that lack of understanding run? Do these women actually still not realize that trying to outdo one another in pandering to the short-term sexual proclivities of the top 5% of men will never get them the one thing they really crave, which is the attention and devotion of a worthy man?
Have you met people of average intelligence, let alone the half who fall below the midpoint? The people we most often make fun of here are midwits already in the 90th+ percentile. Expecting average people, especially average young people, to accurately diagnose the complexities of the sexual marketplace is overambitious. They may be aware of their place relative to others, but their collective role in the machine isn’t going to be derived by the average 17 year old.
And in any case, there’s a defection issue here. The average 18 year old boy in modern secular France (for example) isn’t going to wait until marriage to have sex. A girl his age has no power over him, if she tells him she wants to wait, he’ll go fuck someone else who has not fully considered the reality of gender relations and concluded that promiscuity is counterproductive for women. She is left with two choices if she commits to this path. First, she could become a tradcath (or maybe Muslim), which presumably as say a secular Parisian (maybe not even of Catholic background) would involve abandoning the culture in which she was raised and wholesale LARPing to join a completely different largely rural subculture and belief system that will be suspicious of a young single person without a family history in the SSPX or whatever. Secondly, she could find a secular French boy so romantically unsuccessful or unconfident that he is willing to agree to the terms despite living in a promiscuous society. Of course, that young man is likely so shy that he’ll never even make a move, and may otherwise be extremely awkward, stunted or ugly (by which I don’t mean “not the top 5%”, but “in the bottom 10%”).
So in reality, the girl usually has to put out if she wants a relationship [that may lead to marriage] with an average young man in her league of class/education/looks.
Hold up. These are completely different scenarios. Why did you just move the goalposts?
I’m saying that defection from modern sexual culture isn’t a viable solution for most young women in the West even if they thought of it, which they probably wouldn’t. How is that not relevant?
They’re not pandering to the “top 5%” but to the average young man their age, who grew up in the same post-sexual-revolution culture and so is not usually going to accept a single young woman telling him to wait for her.
Again, hold up.
You and @iprayiam3 are specifically discussing the reactions of women supposedly used and abused by Danny Masterson and Russell Brand and, I presume, similar male celebrities and lotharios, i.e. the top 5% of men, not by average young man their age. You're claiming this is the understandable and sincere female reaction to the undesired consequences of the sexual revolution.
In your comment above, you seem to be implying that a modern Western woman putting out in the framework of a long-term relationship on the path to marriage is somehow also an example of promiscuity. I think even on this forum most people would find that interpretation highly dubious.
Stop with the consensus building.
I think the point you're missing here is that 2rafa isn't arguing this is a rational, logical, well thought out strategy by these young women. She's trying to give you an idea of why, from a hidden incentives standpoint, young western women are pushed to act in these ways.
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