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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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Is this a full blown victim blaming in the most influential printed medium by decorated feminist? Or am I overreacting?

New York Times: There’s a sentence in the new book that I was curious about, and this goes back to the questions about the trickiness of generalizing and of using a certain kind of rhetorical style: You’re discussing the rarity of false accusations of date rape, and you write, I’m paraphrasing, that there are mentally ill or damaged women who will make those kinds of accusations, and the only thing a young guy can do is not have sex with damaged or mentally ill women. That’s a bit of a flip way of addressing that problem, isn’t it?

Caitlin Moran: That’s possibly my most overt piece of feminism. Obviously #NotAllMen, but I have experienced enough men where the thing at a party is that you’re hunting for the girl on the edge of the pack who’s a bit drunk, bit needy. I can remember dads telling their sons in pubs where I come from, “Crazy bitches are always the best [expletive].” It’s just saying to men as a kind and loving mother with some wisdom that if there’s a woman who is mentally ill, disturbed or needy or unhappy or really drunk at a party, leave her alone. The last thing she needs is a penis. If she’s an upset, needy person and you [expletive] her and then the rumor starts going around school, she might need to, for the defense of her reputation, say, “He raped me.” You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing.

nytimes.com: https://archive.ph/tZn3B#selection-457.82-457.95

How is this different from "You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing by flirting with that guy wearing that dress"?

As others have noted, the sexual revolution is slowly being reversed, even though the proponents of this reversal (mostly) don’t understand what they’re doing. Before the sexual revolution, if you ‘improperly seduced’ (‘took advantage of’) a girl of reasonable social standing and this behavior was revealed (by her or others), you’d answer to her male relatives. Now you will answer to the government (this in itself is not a new phenomenon, the same shift from responsibility of the tribe to responsibility of the state has happened with welfare, policing, consumer fraud protection etc).

In the end, it is likely that some arrangement between men and women will be reached. Until then, Moran is right to warn men that the age of unimpeded sexual libertinism and rockstars fucking their 15 year old groupies without social sanction has drawn to a close.

rockstars fucking their 15 year old groupies without social sanction has drawn to a close.

Strawman.

In the end, it is likely that some arrangement between men and women will be reached

Western men had zero negotiation power in that respect for at least two decades. The only fight there is is between young hot girls and old or ugly women about the price of sex that women should expect to extract.

Why do you think western men have zero negotiating power? A majority of western men, including many 30th and 99th percentile men, are happy with current arrangements (because they get to have sex with women sooner without risk of social sanction). Elite men were instrumental in driving the sexual revolution. If the interests of men and women suddenly rapidly diverged, we would come to a compromise. In practice though, if 80% of men suddenly came to believe sex before marriage was bad, whatever caused that would also cause like 70% of women to believe sex before marraige was bad, so there wouldn't be that much of a problem.

In the end, it is likely that some arrangement between men and women will be reached.

Agreed. It's going to be different, given:

  1. Washing machines, broadly defined as readily available labor-saving home appliances that essentially eat electricity and shit household tasks.
  2. Birth control, broadly defined - the Pill, sure, but also condoms.
  3. Modern medicine: antibiotics, effective treatment for STIs, perhaps even AIDS treatment and prophylaxis.

A question: could the Sexual Revolution have happened in a world without penicillin? What would have happened to sexual mores and norms had AIDS remained as deadly as it had been in the early 1980s...and if there was no effective or reliable test for it?

As others have noted, the sexual revolution is slowly being reversed

Anything but. We're not witnessing the "reverse-engineering traditional sexual norms". They're reverse-engineering the half where men are 100% responsible for everything that happens before, during, and after sex. That's it.

Notice that there's no restrictions on women or power over them by men being "rediscovered". It's just the parts where men are responsible for everything.

This doesn't really contribute to the conversation imo. I agree with the direction, but it's mostly just 'boo outgroup'. They're reverse engineering a small part where men are responsible if they have sex with women who are too drunk to make good decisions. Not everything! Everything would be something like 'if you have sex with any woman you have to marry her'.

You are correct. Consider that Megan Fox and E Ratajkowski are now examples of feminism. Making men to lust for you is now considered empowering. So this is not a reversal of sexual revolution for both genders.

It's just the parts where men are responsible for everything.

As @PierreMenard says,

As they have always been.

To follow it up slightly differently, the prior equilibrium still had men being responsible for everything, but the rules were much much clearer. She didn't put a ring on your finger? Not acceptable, dude, and you clearly and obviously know it. People decided to destroy these rules and the equilibrium with them. Some would say that a few intentionally destroyed these rules so as to exploit their high status and multiply their own sexual partners. There was a brief window of hope where proponents thought they could formulate a new equilibrium around a different solitary rule: consent. Setting aside a philosophical discussion of whether this actually does the thing we want it to do from a theoretical perspective, it has been tried for a few decades now and found desperately wanting. As @Walterodim points out, this is the last gasp of hope by its proponents to patch over the glaring issues. I think it likely that this will be double and triple downed on, to ever higher levels of absurdity and oppression, but it will eventually topple under the weight of its inherent contradictions. Is it likely that it'll collapse back to the prior equilibrium, which had proven relatively stable for thousands of years? Probably not. But it will likely collapse to some other equilibrium. These sorts of revolutions are a bit unpredictable when they finally come crashing down, so it's too difficult to call whether the new equilibrium will continue trying to retain the feature where men are responsible for everything or whether that feature will actually be weakened for the first time in search of something new.

I think it likely that this will be double and triple downed on, to ever higher levels of absurdity and oppression, but it will eventually topple under the weight of its inherent contradictions.

See also - age gap discourse and the evident belief that 22-year-old women are basically children when it comes to romantic decision-making. Frankly, I can't even disagree with the underlying claim, but failing to articulate the actual concerns coherently results in recursively weird commentary on how immoral it is for a 30-something man to sleep with women that just graduated college. People can't say, "it's a dirty trick because you know she actually wants commitment, you cad", so we wind up with discussion of power dynamics that doesn't make any sense if you believe that the women involved are actual adults.

It seems like this accusation gets thrown at men providing commitment more often than at men who hookup and leave, though.

It's just the parts where men are responsible for everything.

As they have always been. Now it's up to men to let women fall hard. Find a good woman, have many children and teach every single one of them not to be promiscuous. Tell your sons to beware of promiscuous women, the general atmosphere of city life and so on.

Feminists will either have 0 or few children that they will have trouble raising on their own or with cowardly, weak feminist men.

You don't need to do anything to give these women their just reward, they will find it on their own.

Easier said than done. I for one don't live in a religious enclave and I don't have the wealth to isolate my child from the world without it turning sour. Or maybe there are good ways to accomplish this that I am unaware of.

Well I don't have teenagers yet so I can't tell whether any of my efforts will bear fruits.

Ideally you would homeschool and keep them in a more traditional environment. It may all be for naught in the end anyway. I don't think it's possible to keep up the efforts without a religious conviction that this is what God intends you to do.

From an individual point-of-view, it may be more beneficial to fully embrace the world and its mores and go where 'Progress' says you should be going without looking back. Embracing 'white boy summer' might catch you syphilis or a fentanyl OD but maybe not.

Tragedy might just as likely strike the god-fearing Christian. Perhaps it will be easier for them to recover thanks to the virtues imbued in them by the tradition, but they may still end up in objectively worse circumstances, from a strictly worldly perspective.

Feminism should not be an issue to the modern godless man. They just need to learn to play it like an Andrew Tate or a Trump. The moral rejection of the sexual revolution and its consequences can only be downstream of religion, not whatever ideology is currently wearing the skin of Christian civilization.

I've actually come up with a name for this. I kinda had to because I'm seeing it more and more these days, and it's more aggressive than ever. I call it "Dark Femme". It's basically this mix of traditional and modern gender norms that always benefit one direction, and frankly, is often incoherent.

I'm just going to put my two cents here, just to make it easy. I do think there's something to avoiding the crazy. However, let me say this. I've seen a lot lately, discussion about it's not actually "All Men" and maybe women should have some agency and responsibility for recognizing and avoiding red flags. And people do not react well to this at all.

Frankly, this Dark Femme culture wants the toxicity and excitement of the red flags, but in a safe controlled way. One of the first things I said when I abandoned Progressive politics (before it was even really a thing TBH) was that I rejected the "theme park" expectations that society be made into a super-safe but still exciting place that caters to people's wants and desires in a perfect way tailored for them. It's just not possible.

So yeah. Don't stick your dick in crazy seems like good advice. But that advice doesn't go down well at all when it's coming back around.

I've actually come up with a name for this. I kinda had to because I'm seeing it more and more these days, and it's more aggressive than ever. I call it "Dark Femme". It's basically this mix of traditional and modern gender norms that always benefit one direction, and frankly, is often incoherent.

I've seen it beautifully summed up on the A Voice for Men website:

Feminists promote gender equality, as long as it benefits women. Anti-feminists promote gender inequality, as long as it benefits women.

In the end, it is likely that some arrangement between men and women will be reached.

Yes- this arrangement tends, from the perspective of the man, to begin thus:

"She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."

It is not an accident that Orwell managed to predict what the (emergent) tenor among young-men-as-class-interest would be when set against a small group of older men and a much larger group of young women in permanent bureaucratic control of a post-industrial country. The only reason this prediction is 40 years late is because the socio-economic effects of winning WW2 really did delay 1984 by that much.

Before the sexual revolution, if you ‘improperly seduced’ (‘took advantage of’) a girl of reasonable social standing and this behavior was revealed (by her or others), you’d answer to her male relatives. Now you will answer to the government (this in itself is not a new phenomenon, the same shift from responsibility of the tribe to responsibility of the state has happened with welfare, policing, consumer fraud protection etc).

Moreover, answering to the government on charges of ‘improper seduction’ isn’t new either- almost every state in the US at one point had, and some still have, laws against seduction with false promises to marry, for example.

Before the sexual revolution, if you ‘improperly seduced’ (‘took advantage of’) a girl of reasonable social standing and this behavior was revealed (by her or others), you’d answer to her male relatives. Now you will answer to the government (this in itself is not a new phenomenon, the same shift from responsibility of the tribe to responsibility of the state has happened with welfare, policing, consumer fraud protection etc).

The difference here is that the government is expected to be neutral between all its subjects while her male relatives are expected to be biased in favour of the woman. Equality before the law is fundamental to how modern societies are expected to function (and this is one of the few good sorts of equality there are), and the choices here are to either break that or come up with a settlement that the woman who got "taken advantage of" by and large wouldn't be happy with, as half the consequences would fall on her shoulders. There is no similar presumption (nor should there be) that private citizens are expected to treat random strangers as equal to their own family members.

I think this is hopium. The OP is more like a shift in posture to maintain balance while continuing the march of progress. The people saying this still support porn, casual sex, that it's good to never marry if you don't feel like it, and have on average below 2 children per woman. That one of the many ways to cast women as exploited by men also casts some casual sex as bad doesn't really affect the overall trend. Caitlin is more "sex-positive" than many earlier radical feminists.

The people saying this still support porn, casual sex, that it's good to never marry if you don't feel like it, and have on average below 2 children per woman.

Of course they say these things. It’s like Hanania notes, America’s most liberal upper middle class progressives are also one of the most likely groups to get married, stay married, have children within a marriage etc all while arguing for social liberalism for themselves and everyone else.

In practice modern #MeToo feminism amounts to an assertion that casual sex exploits women by many feminists, and an attempt to enforce sexually conservative mores by randomly punishing men who sexually exploit young women in grubby, but perhaps not previously illegal (or at least not widely punished) ways.

Obviously these people aren’t going to lose all their convictions overnight. They’re still feminists. They’re not suddenly going to go full trad and declare all women who sleep around whores or whatever Twitter read types would like. But it amounts to an organic partial rejection of the status quo in a way that will only grow over time.

It feels like you're conflating situations here. Are you suggesting two intoxicated people having sex is "unimpeded sexual libertinism"? It's certainly only comparable to rock stars fucking 15 year olds in the most uncharitable view.

I’m saying that Moran’s imploring “don’t stick your dick in crazy, you might get falsely accused of rape” is - in effect - saying “be very careful around casual sex”. Obviously one night stands are sexual libertinism, sure.

That is an inherently sexually conservative message, even if it perhaps unfairly places the burden of avoiding promiscuity on men.

One-night stands are one thing, but arguably a different thing. The one-night-stand is never intended to extend past the morning. Drunk coupling isn't always the same. I'd argue, like Seinfeld, that alcohol actually is what brings a lot of people together.

Men the world over know the saying "Don't stick your dick in crazy," as you are aware. It's not something we need to be told by Moran. What she seems to be saying is that men are predators, that the women who have sex with them are the weak and wounded. Otherwise presumably why would they be doing so? I take issue with this.

Or, more to the point, we are none of us particularly rational when it comes to sex--or, perhaps we can be, but only when imagining it from afar, as we are doing now.

Of course I live in a dramatically different universe as far as sexual mores go. I am not sure what's going on in the US. Less and less do I recognize it as a place I understand at any depth.

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