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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24733 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.

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.

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