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What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?
Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?
Two of the answers are obvious:
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."
So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?
(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)
I mean what do you actually think your side 'winning' looks like?
People stop thinking 'trans' is a thing and it's illegal to call someone by different pronouns than they were born with?
We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?
We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?
Or just 'everyone thinks the leftists of that period in history were being kind of histrionic and weird and that the right from that period in history were less bad than everyone thought, and that's what history books say, but everything else about society is mostly the same'?
Because the latter is certainly possible, sure, but I wouldn't call it SJ's 'losing'. If everything they wanted to change about society stays changed but the future thinks that 'feminist fail compilation' videos are funny, then ok, that's an acceptable cost.
Sen. McCarthy is depicted as a villain today, but he won. 'Communist' is still an insult in 90% of American contexts, and capitalist realism is treated as a fundamental facet of reality rather than being a philosophy or ideology at all. Something like that could easily happen to the SJ/woke movement, and that's about what it would look like.
But if you think we're going to roll back the actual changes to society, most of that means taking away rights or privileges or respect or acknowledgement or etc. from people who have spent a long hard time and earning it, and trying to do that ussually involves a lot of kicking and screaming and destruction. Frankly I don't find it likely that we'll move in that direction while we're still a liberal democracy, and if we're not then there's more important changes going on to worry about.
People stop thinking 'trans' is an identity and instead an unfortunate mental illness. Relatedly, mental illnesses generally are viewed as undesirable, both practically and socially.
I would settle with characters roughly in proportion to population, as opposed to the gross over-representation of minorities we see today. In particular, race-swapping characters and even historical figures would require justification beyond "representation matters". Media that appeals to characteristically male fantasies should be permitted to exist on its own terms without its creators being subject to harassing accusations of sexism.
We agree that differences exist and that unequal outcome is not itself proof of discrimination. We explicitly reject equal outcomes as a reasonable policy goal.
And media that appeals to female fantasies of submission. Was just listening to a podcast about Three Days of the Condor, about half of which was moaning about the hostage-to-lover plot thread. Some women find that kind of thing of exciting; can we stop shaming lurid fictional fantasies of all stripes?
If you want the latter to happen, you need women fighting for it, not men advocating for it, and claiming that women want it. Even if it's true.
You need women writing it, is the thing.
Like, there's plenty of great media about female submission that women love, it's mostly written by women and explores the internality of the women characters and represents their emotional journey in dignified and relatable way.
When men write it, the woman is ussually just a sexy lamp that falls in love with the male lead as a reward for him completing his character arc or w/e. That's not the same thing.
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