site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27690 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

A week ago, in the context of a discussion on some NYT article, @2rafa commented that “there is an unstated (on the progressive side) premise among all people that casual sex is a bad deal for women and devalues or dishonors them in some way”. It generated a few replies but basically no further discussion, even though I’m sure it’s worthy of further discussion, and here’s why: as far as I’m aware, it’s certainly not the case that progressives had this attitude from the beginning of the Sexual Revolution, which is what the context is here. Obviously they used to have a different view in general, but sometime along the way, they changed their minds, because things turned sour, essentially.

Before continuing I think it’s important to qualify, as 2rafa also did, that other ideological groups also share this basic view, but the two main differences are that right-wingers tend to state this view openly, whereas progs are usually reluctant to do so, and that they do so on religious and moralistic grounds, whereas progs concentrate on women’s individual long-term interests, not on any other considerations.

So anyway, I said to myself: surely these people, being progressives, believe that the Sexual Revolution, while a laudable event, went haywire at some point, and didn’t bear the fruits it was supposed to. And I can tell that this is a relatively widespread view, because I can see it expressed in various online venues all the time, not just this forum.

What went wrong then? What did the Sexual Revolution basically promise to average progressive women, and why did that turn out to be a lie?

I’d argue that the more or less unstated promise of the Sexual Revolution to young single women was that: a) they will be sexually free without inviting social shame i.e. normalized sexual experimentation and promiscuity on their part will not have an unfavorable long-term effect on men’s attitudes towards them, and women will not sexually shame one another anymore b) they will be able to leave their constrictive gender roles to the extent they see fit, but this will not lead to social issues and anomie because men will be willing to fill those roles instead i.e. men will have no problem becoming stay-at-home dads, nurses, kindergarteners, doing housework etc.

And none of that turned out to be true.

Am I correct in this assessment?

The big idea of sex-positive feminism is that women should be able to pursue sexual pleasure in the same way men do (ignoring the fact that men who pursued sexual pleasure freely were considered rakes and being shot by the girl's father or brother was a real risk). From this perspective, the sexual revolution has failed because women are not in fact getting off on the casual sex they have been liberated to have - the "orgasm gap". The Big Lie of the Sexual Revolution was that women were leaving a lot of sexual pleasure on the table pre-Revolution by abstaining from casual sex. At a marginally more cynical level, it was that the average 20-something woman was leaving a truly humungous amount of sexual pleasure on the table, because she could get X amount of casual sex if she wasn't sexually repressed, and a man getting X amount of casual sex was a superstud.

If you can't admit that men and women are different in ways which mean that normal women were never going to get off on the kinds of casual sex available in a competitive sexual marketplace, then the cope is to blame men for being selfish and inconsiderate in bed. This is a big part of why the "campus rape crisis" and related debates about sexual ethics are so insane - the mischief the sex-positive feminists actually want to deal with is poor technical performance in the bedroom, but the only language they have to deal with it is consent.

Religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists both agree that casual sex in the society that exists is inherently degrading to women, that women should choose not to engage in it, and that men should be punished for engaging in it. Their inability to admit that they are allies on this point was a running joke among libertarians and sex-positive feminists since at least the 1990s - I first came across it in PJ O'Rourke's 1994 book All the Trouble in the Word

Religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists both agree that casual sex in the society that exists is inherently degrading to women, that women should choose not to engage in it, and that men should be punished for engaging in it. Their inability to admit that they are allies on this point was a running joke among libertarians and sex-positive feminists since at least the 1990s

Didn't that unholy alliance get going in the 1970s?

Very possibly - I wasn't around.

Religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists both agree that casual sex in the society that exists is inherently degrading to women, that women should choose not to engage in it, and that men should be punished for engaging in it.

A problem here is that the religious conservatives who are allowed to speak in mainstream outlets under their real name have to make concessions to feminism in order to not get cancelled. So they have to argue that the real problem with feminism is that men will take advantage of women. They have trouble arguing directly that hooking up is a sin for women, a sin that many women will indulge in if allowed, and that women must be policed too, and not just men. However, these conservatives who making the socially acceptable right-wing argument, aren't actually accurately representing what the typical right-wing conservative man actually deep-down believes.

This is similar to the "Democrats are the real racists" trope that mainstream conservatives (at the National Review, etc.) get trapped in. To avoid cancellation, they can't just argue that affirmative action is bad because it is bad for whites. They have to make the argument that affirmative action is bad because it is actually bad for black people, because of "mismatch" or the "soft bigotry of low expectations" or because it won't prepare blacks for the "real world." Ultimately, these arguments do not work (the left can just extend affirmative action entirely through a person's career) and the conservative ends up just ceding the moral high ground to the left.

A problem here is that the religious conservatives who are allowed to speak in mainstream outlets under their real name have to make concessions to feminism in order to not get cancelled. So they have to argue that the real problem with feminism is that men will take advantage of women.

To be fair, that's been the Catholic Church's stated position for opposing birth control since the 1960s. See below the relevant section of Pope Paul VI's Humane Vitae:

.17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

I agree with them too. I used to work in university dorms. It was always the guys on the look out and pushing the issue. Stranger assaults were always guys too. Birth control further enables the worst behavior in men.

To be fair, that's been the Catholic Church's stated position for opposing birth control since the 1960s. See below the relevant section of Pope Paul VI's Humane Vitae:

Exactly. Since America conquered achieved world hegemony after World War II, the Catholic Church leadership have wanted to avoid cancellation (ie, losing non-profit status, having Catholics being auto-excluded from being members of the bar, being dis-invited from all establishment media, and also Catholics just generally not wanting to seem like fuddy-duddy "bad guys" by the standards of progressive morality, etc. etc.) and so have tried to put a more modern/feminist spin on long-standing teachings. So in the past 60 years, the Catholic Church has emphasized the angle of "we are actually the real feminists because sexual sin is a case of men hurting women,"

The Catholic Church has like a dozen reasons for opposing birth control in the same list, and one of them is ‘women are dumbasses and lots of them will get pregnant anyways, only they’ll be with guys that won’t commit because birth control moves sex earlier in a relationship’. This is a true argument but it is not a feminist framing.

No, the unpopularity of sin/policing rhetoric isn’t due to fear of cancellation. It derives from the general loss in status of religion. Hardline stances are unappealing when people can just…opt out. Go to communities which held on to that status—Salt Lake City, the Bible Belt—and you’ll find that they still have strict rules.

I grew up in the vicinity of Bob Jones. They had no qualms about their strict limits on interaction between the sexes. This is a school which, decades earlier, chose to pay back taxes rather than allow interracial dating.

No, the unpopularity of sin/policing rhetoric isn’t due to fear of cancellation. It derives from the general loss in status of religion.

That's...the same thing.

How do you mean?

I am arguing that religious authorities are pushed into softer stances because of ideological competition. Higher mobility and increased secularity has made it easier to opt out of religious communities and go somewhere you won’t be called a whore, etc. Thus the societies which still have strong prohibitions are those with the most cost to leaving.

I think this is distinct from the concept of cancellation, which to me implies that the authority chooses not to speak for fear of personal consequences, especially sourced from the general public. When BJU maintained their ban on interracial dating, the consequences were tax exemptions and court cases rather than picketing. This was possible because their detractors had almost no leverage over the supporters.

The big idea of sex-positive feminism is that women should be able to pursue sexual pleasure in the same way men do (ignoring the fact that men who pursued sexual pleasure freely were considered rakes and being shot by the girl's father or brother was a real risk).

Yep, the idea that women having sex freely should be something to be celebrated because it's bringing equality in how society sees men vs women sleeping around ingores the fact that regardless of how far back you go, men sleeping around, though punished far less than women sleeping around, was still considered a vice, and the fact that the vice wasn't punished much does not mean that it was not seen as a vice (see gluttony for another example).

You absolutely can't interpolate from there to "women sleeping around is if anything a good thing as they break free from the shackles of patriarchy because in the past men were freely able to do that" (ignoring all the risks etc. that you mentioned men had). Men sleeping around in the past was always seen by society as a bad thing, even if society accepted it as a fact of life that you couldn't do anything about, what sex positive feminism wants for women is something that men as a class never had even under the yoke of the strongest patriarchies.

I'll only add that religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists have rather different things in mind when they speak of the "degradation of women".

They largely agree on what the extremes of "degradation" are and long have. They disagree on what exactly the solution is, both because radfems are unwilling to consider biological (eg. psychological) differences between men and women beyond sex and reproduction, and because trads think the entire genie of modernity and related developments can be viably returned to the bottle.

"Radical feminist" doesn't just mean "strong feminist", it refers to people like Firestone or for a relatively low-key example Greer who root their feminism precisely in biological differences between the sexes (and tend to find current trans ideology repulsive and/or incoherent as a result, thus the TERF abbreviation). It could not be further from the truth to say they are unwilling to consider biological differences. Though it would be nearly as far from the truth to suggest they're a significant part of the "woke" social movement you're deploring.

Why, after courting my girl for a time, I propose to bring her to London to see the sights. I bring her up, take her here and there, giving her plenty to eat and drink–especially drink. I take her to the theatre, and then I contrive it so that she loses her last train. By this time she is very tired, a little dazed with the drink and excitement, and very frightened at being left in town with no friends...

All that is old is new again. Or, more likely, never changed. But it still sticks out to me that this is pretty much identical to one of the contemporary primary modes of induction into prostitution. Maybe substituting meth or crack for alcohol.

True, but that's not what I had in mind.

Religious traditionalists believe that the sexual degradation of young single women spiritually ruins them as prospective wives and mothers, which are their proper roles, plus it brings shame to their entire family, but especially their fathers and brothers.

Sex-negative feminists not only do not believe any of that, they are outraged by anyone even making such points.

the mischief the sex-positive feminists actually want to deal with is poor technical performance in the bedroom, but the only language they have to deal with it is consent.

I don't think this is correct. The "only language they have to deal with it is consent" is a real problem for them, but the idea that, say, MeToo would not have happened if Harvey Weinstein was a better lay strikes me as absurd. I doubt you'd also see misguided attempts to get back at men, if that's what was happening.

Religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists both agree that casual sex in the society that exists is inherently degrading to women, that women should choose not to engage in it, and that men should be punished for engaging in it. Their inability to admit that they are allies on this point was a running joke among libertarians and sex-positive feminists since at least the 1990s - I first came across it in PJ O'Rourke's 1994 book All the Trouble in the Word

Meh. I'm not religious, and only conservative for a very particular definition of conservative, and insert mandatory "there are always some crazies out there" disclaimer, but I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding this perspective that Trads have in common with RadFems. It's not about the act in itself being degrading, it's about it being deeply intimate, and cheapening it is what is degrading.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats