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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   27798 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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Continuing on with The Motte's theme of the week, the Australian Federal Government has given the online dating industry a year to implement a 'voluntary' code of conduct in the face of 'online sexual violence' or presumably face regulation.

This ultimatum seems to be motivated by “An investigation by the Australian Institute of Criminology last year found three-quarters of online daters had been subject to some kind of online sexual violence in the past five years.”

Finding the referenced report 'Dating App Facilitated Sexual Violence' (their term, not mine) seems to include amongst other acts:

  • Pressured the respondent to give them information about their location or their schedule
  • Continued to contact the respondent even after they told them they were not interested in having a relationship with them
  • Pressured the respondent verbally to perform unwanted sexual acts (eg making promises, lying, repeatedly asking or insisting etc)
  • Sent the respondent an unwanted sexually explicit message
  • Sent the respondent an unwanted sexually explicit photo or video of themselves
  • Pressured the respondent to meet them in person when they did not want to
This would include dick pics or non-consensual sexually explicit language sent through a dating app, along with other mundane dating activity. The march to broaden the definition of sexual violence to include 'making women uncomfortable' continues.

Australia, is usually a follower of countries like Canada and the UK when it comes to these sorts of policies, but it does occasionally become the first mover when there is the chance of getting a cheap political win (and to seem like it is doing something in the face of more serious issues such as the housing crisis).

The linked news article is kind of buried down the state news media's front page and references the federal government's karen social services minister who has previously worked on 'cyber safety' committees. There is a fair chance this is a complete nothing burger that will blow over and is just the govt making noises rather than actually intending to follow through, but time will tell.

I'm so sick of the word "violence" being used in this figurative manner. Pestering someone with messages when they've made it abundantly clear that they're not interested - call it "harassment" if you like, or even "cyberstalking" if you must. It's certainly not "violence".

It was bad enough when it was just woke academics and activists (but I repeat myself) describing the act of someone disagreeing with you or calling you by the wrong pronouns as "violent" - now it's making its way into legislation too.

It makes sense to me. It's a useful abstraction of the word for a world where all evil is perpetuated via the 'rules of the game'. but we continue to see the consequences of that evil. The issue is there are still people killing each other with knives in some places, so the overlap is confusing.

https://quillette.com/2019/02/14/the-boy-who-inflated-the-concept-of-wolf/

Paragraphs 2-4 are particularly relevant.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/

A few months ago, a friend confessed that she had abused her boyfriend. I was shocked, because this friend is one of the kindest and gentlest people I know. I probed for details. She told me that sometimes she needed her boyfriend to do some favor for her, and he wouldn’t, so she would cry – not as an attempt to manipulate him, just because she was sad. She counted this as abuse, because her definition of “abuse” is “something that makes your partner feel bad about setting boundaries”. And when she cried, that made her boyfriend feel guilty about his boundary that he wasn’t going to do the favor.

We argued for a while about whether this was a good definition of abuse (it isn’t). But I had a bigger objection: this definition was so broad that everyone has committed abuse at some point.

...when everyone is an abuser, nobody’s an abuser.

Right now, if I hear that someone is an serial abuser, I would be less likely to date them, or I might warn my friends away from them, or I might try not to support them socially. The world is divided into distinct categories – abuser and non-abuser – and which category someone is in gives you useful information about that person’s character. I’m not saying that every abuser is an awful person who is 100% defined by their misdeeds and can never be redeemed. But I think the category contains useful information about a person’s character and likely future actions.

But if everyone used my friend’s definition, and we acknowledged that everybody is an abuser – the category stops being informative. “John is an abuser”. So what? Doesn’t mean you should worry about John, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t date John, doesn’t even mean you shouldn’t set your single friends up on blind dates with John. It just means John is a human. Maybe he cries sometimes. So what?

Broadening the definition of “abuser” this far doesn’t help fight abuse or make anybody nicer. It just removes a useful word from the English language. I can still eventually warn someone that John is cruel or violent toward people close to him. I just have to circumlocute around the word “abuser”, in order to find some other word or phrase that hasn’t been rendered meaningless.

Nagging someone on Tinder to meet you for a drink may be obnoxious or irritating, but I don't think it has anything meaningfully in common with stabbing someone. The idea that if a guy nags a woman on Tinder to meet for a drink, and another man violently rapes a woman at knifepoint, both women are therefore victims of sexual violence - well, I just find that preposterous and insulting. To be a real concept, "violence" has to mean more than just "inconsiderate behaviour".

Violence does have a real meaning in this abstraction. It's the antitheses of alignment. Anyway I agree it's early to extend the word like that, and I suppose if you had your way we'd use a new word? But the implication that we extend the old cultural unacceptability to the new concept here is intentional.

I think everyone here knows that and this is precisely what they do not want to do yes?

If I drop something on the floor indoors, but I say “I dropped it on the ground,” everyone knows what I mean.

If then I say of my childhood, “Every night I went to sleep on the cold, hard ground,” but a moment’s research shows that I slept indoors, in a middle class household in a bed, it would be obvious hyperbole or straight-up lying, depending on how charitable my listeners decided to be. If I said it was a metaphor, perhaps some people might consider it a valid part of the class war against the ultra-rich.

If then I play the role of an activist, defining anyone who sleeps on less than a queen size mattress to be sleeping on the ground, and defend it not as a metaphor but an abstraction, anyone who is poor enough to actually be forced to sleep on the floor and anyone homeless who sleeps on the ground would rightfully be angry at me for minimizing their struggles by putting my meager suffering at the same level of theirs.

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