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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Basically you're facing impenetrable just-worlding with a touch of refuge in audacity. There's no way it can be that bad therefore it must not be and the people who got screwed must have brought it on themselves.

I think you could look at the existence (or absence) of lobbying groups arguing for either side.

If women were being screwed over by divorce courts, we would expect feminist groups to campaign for their reform, whereas as far as I can tell, most feminist lobbying is to stop reform of the divorce courts. Men's groups campaign for the right to see their children, women's groups campaign against laws that would allow them to do this. Divorced men campaign against permanent alimony, divorced women campaign to keep it.

The very fact that the miniscule and powerless men's rights movement focuses mostly on unfair divorce laws suggests that perhaps they might have some legitimate complaints. After all, even if the law is written in a gender neutral manner doesn't mean it needs to be applied evenly. Hell, two-thirds of divorcing women acknowledge that men are treated unfairly when it comes to child custody. I struggle to think of any woman who is known for losing out from an unfair divorce ruling, and yet multiple men come to mind immediately.

Focusing on stranger violence by men is misleading. When it comes to domestic violence, child abuse and infanticide, there is a much greater balance. Depending on the figures you look at, it is easy to find studies showing that women commit the majority of domestic violence (both reciprocal and non-reciprocal), the majority of child abuse and the majority of infanticide. In addition, lesbian relationships are the most abusive and relationships between gay men are the least abusive, which suggests that men being more violent in general than women is not that relevant when specifically looking at violence within households.

And let's be frank, women's groups oppose men having custody of children because they are reflexively pro-woman. Talking about domestic violence is the best soldier-argument they have, but that doesn't mean it's the most honest. Courts never award custody to known abusers, but that isn't what feminists campaign against. They campaign against laws that allow ordinary, non-abusive men the right to see their children for any meaningful amount of time. These kind of laws exist in countries like France and the Netherlands, and their introduction did not increase family violence. If feminists campaigning against presumption of shared custody laws were really interested in equality or child welfare, they would know this. But as Bryan Caplan points out, their guiding belief is not that men and women should be treated equally by the law (most people believe that), rather, it is the belief that society generally treats men better than women. If men and women are two opposing teams in zero-sum conflict, then any concession to team man is a loss to team woman. Hence, legislation which involves treating men and women equally before the law, which encourages children to have stronger relationships with their fathers and which helps both men and women to not be bound by their gender roles is opposes by activists who supposedly support all these things.

Feminists believe that the ordinary, non-abusive men you speak of are just sneaky abusers making big sad eyes at the judge and denying their crimes. I believe feminists wrong about this, and that they are doing considerable damage by being stupid and wrong. But they are not as willfully evil as you're portraying them.

This is not simply being stupid and wrong. This is not simply being stupid and wrong. Large prominent feminist organizations actively, willfully supporting and celebrating female abusers while completely erasing male victims if not making them out to be the abusers. They seem to justify any violence by women towards men as self-defense and any violence by men towards women as abusive. If you don't see that as willfully evil, I'm not sure what you would see as such.

I am not willing to extend that description to every single feminist who suspects that domestic abuse is rampant and primarily male-on-female, and who therefore resists efforts to change family law in men's favor.

Given the history of domestic violence research (see particularly the section on the harassment of researchers who found evidence of gender symmetry), I do not consider such ignorance to be a very good defense.

My personal understanding of the matter is that this body of evidence and theory is hopelessly biased by the Women Are Wonderful effect, plus all the other cognitive biases that lead us to assign infinite agency to men and none to women

I think it is less biases of agency that are the problem in this case and more biases in the acceptance of harm.

that sufficiently advanced wrongness is indistinguishable from malice. Willful evil, if you will.

I don't think all or possibly even most willfully evil behavior is based in malice. Gross negligence is I think an example of such, and one I think better describes my characterization of feminists in this case. They mostly don't necessarily want to hurt men, they just don't care if men get hurt.

I think a fairer characterization is "stupid and wrong." That seems like the appropriate level of charity to me.

I think that characterization is horribly infantilizing of feminists and is far less charitable than recognizing that they are being willfully evil for two primary reasons. First, doing so is in my mind just another way society doesn't take women seriously. Regardless of my disagreements with them, I don't believe they are stupid. I'd expect the average intelligence of feminists to be above the population average, as it is largely a movement of the well-educated.

Second, I think that this puts "evil" behavior on too high a pedestal, which I don't think is wise. Willfully evil behavior is normal human behavior, not something restricted to evil people. Importantly, how can I expect to recognize and not shy away from acknowledging when I'm being willfully evil to others if I close my eyes to the much easier-to-recognize case of others being willfully evil toward (people like) me? This is perhaps a bastardization of the Catholic teachings I was raised with and turned away from, but I think this ties directly in to the plea in the Lord's prayer to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us"--there can be no forgiveness without acknowledgement.

EDIT: Grammar.