site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 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.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

One of the ways in which sex differences are real and important is in regards to paedophilia. Male paedophilia is a much bigger problem than female paedophilia in terms of both how prevalent it is and in terms of how harmful it is. Using female pronouns for a male paedophile rhetorically downplays the seriousness of the situation.

Language comes with connotations, which are neither explicit nor objectively necessary inferences. Nonetheless spreading those connotations and that framing is the first step in winning a broader argument, which is why you get so many fights over what language to use.

Using female pronouns for a male paedophile rhetorically downplays the seriousness of the situation.

I don't agree. I think that at least nominally, pro-pronoun people would consider it serious regardless of the pedophile's sex. Obviously, there are the usual caveats (humans can think one thing and feel another, etc.).

pro-pronoun people would consider it serious regardless of the pedophile's sex

Maybe so, but when the average person hears "Sarah is a paedophile - she has openly admitted to a sexual interest in children", they make a number of reasonable assumptions:

  1. It is impossible for Sarah to penetrate a child with a sexual organ.
  2. It is impossible for Sarah to impregnate a pubescent child.
  3. It is effectively impossible for Sarah to transmit a sexually transmitted infection to a child.
  4. While Sarah will be able to physically overpower a prepubescent child or a pubescent female, she will have a much harder time physically overpowering a pubescent male.

These assumptions are true of female paedophiles. These assumptions may not be (likely are not) true of Sarah Nyberg.

Until the average person has fully internalised the idea that the pronouns a given person uses are wholly uncorrelated with their sex, affirming Nyberg's transgender identity carries with it the unavoidable side effect of downplaying the risk Nyberg poses to young children in the mind of the average listener. It's undeniably true that an adult female molesting a small girl is bound to be deeply distressing for the victim, but there's still a vast qualitative difference between that scenario and the scenario in which an adult male physically overpowers a small girl, penetrates her with his penis, infects her with an STD and possibly impregnates her.

but there's still a vast qualitative difference between that scenario and the scenario in which an adult male physically overpowers a small girl, penetrates her with his penis, infects her with an STD and possibly impregnates her.

I concur, but this sounds to me like an attempt to ensure Nyberg isn't allowed to escape the instinctive feelings associated with male pedophiles. Which is a goal you have to actually declare, otherwise I'm going to assume you don't think people's feelings should decide how pedos of either sex are treated.

I concur, but this sounds to me like an attempt to ensure Nyberg isn't allowed to escape the instinctive feelings associated with male pedophiles.

In an extremely literal reading of this statement, it's trivially true: Nyberg is a male (i.e. biologically sexed male) paedophile, and it is appropriate to treat Nyberg the same way any other member of that group would be treated owing to their membership within.

I'm not really talking about "feelings" so much as risk calculus. All other things being equal, parents are right to be more distrustful of a male stranger than a female, both in terms of probability (how likely is a male stranger to sexually assault my child compared to a female stranger?) and impact (in the event that a male stranger sexually assaults my child, how much harm can they do to them/are they likely to do to them?). It would be profoundly unwise for a parent to leave their children alone with any self-declared paedophile regardless of sex, but it's a simple factual assertion that male paedophiles are more likely to act on their urges than female, and can cause far more harm (quantitatively and qualitatively) than female paedophiles. No child in human history has been impregnated by a female paedophile, and the number of children who have contracted sexually transmitted infections as a result of being abused by female paedophiles must be vanishingly small, if not literally zero. Even though female paedophiles are just as capable of severely injuring or killing prepubescent children as are male paedophiles, I feel extremely confident in asserting that the number of children severely injured or killed as a result of being assaulted by a female paedophile is a fraction of the equivalent number for male paedophiles. In some kind of weird trolley problem situation in which a parent is forced to leave their pubescent female child alone with one of two paedophiles, and the only thing the parent knew about the paedophiles in question is that one is male and the other is female, leaving the child with the female paedophile would be the rational choice.

If I knew for a fact that Nyberg had undergone gender reassignment surgery and no longer had a functioning penis and testicles, I think it would be appropriate to treat Nyberg with the same contempt and wariness afforded female paedophiles (which is still a distinctly lower amount of contempt and wariness than that afforded to male) - being bereft of male reproductive organs significantly (but not entirely) changes the risk calculus. If Nyberg has not undergone gender reassignment surgery, then the risk calculus for Nyberg is the same as for any other male paedophile, and Nyberg's declared gender identity is an irrelevant fact about her which doesn't factor into the risk calculus at all (any more than Nyberg's taste in music or preference for strawberries over blueberries would). If someone presented me with very strong evidence that the offending patterns for trans women were more similar to cis women than cis men, that might persuade me to adjust my risk calculus regardless of whether Nyberg had medically transitioned or not - however, all evidence I've seen to date has demonstrated the opposite, that trans people commit criminal offenses at the rate we would expect based on their natal sex.

otherwise I'm going to assume you don't think people's feelings should decide how pedos of either sex are treated.

I'm not really sure what this means. Treated by whom? By the state? By the courts?