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'Eunuch-maker' case: Male escort jailed for removing man's genitals
To summarize, four gay men are convicted over the illegal surgical removal of one of the men's genitalia, a leg and a nipple. Three were fetishists (including the ringleader, who was the 'victim' of the procedures), one was an escort. The escort subsequently blackmailed the ringleader, and it was this blackmail attempt that resulted in the case coming to the attention of the police and all four men being arrested and charged.
The man who removed the genitals (Byrnes, the escort) was jailed for five years. The man who removed the leg (Crimi-Appleby) was jailed for three years, with his comparatively young (but still adult) age and alleged 'grooming' by the ringleader mitigating factors. The man who removed the nipple (Arnold), and who stole anaesthetic from the hospital where he worked as a nurse, was spared jail with a two-year suspended sentence because his coworkers all agreed he was a really nice guy. The ringleader, Gustavson, the 'victim' of the procedure, will be sentenced in March.
There are a number of interesting CW-related issues in this case.
I. The "nullification" fetish
With the exception of the escort, all the men involved in the case belonged to a niche fetish revolving around becoming eunuchs. Interestingly (and unlike many other niche sexual fetishes, eg. those involving sexual cannibalism), nullification actually spans both gay and trans subcultures and might actually be a predominantly trans subculture. In fact, a moderate number of fetishists I found online appeared to be natal women (ie. FtM), although most who actually carried out illegal body modification are of course men (removing the breasts and the entire vagina/clitoris presumably being beyond the capabilities of backroom amateur surgeons, plus greater male risk-taking etc).
Among trans people, 'nullification' is often the desired goal of non-binary 'truscum' (those who believe that you need to be dysphoric to be trans, but more generally 'hardcore' transgender activists who despise those they consider cis identifying as trans for 'clout'). (Reddit thread) By this logic, while a 'cure' for males who want to be women is vaginoplasty, and for females who want to be men is phalloplasty, for a 'non-binary' dysphoric individual, these are unsuitable, since the whole point is to be 'between' genders. Nullification to Ken Doll status is sometimes seen as a goal. It also isn't actually illegal, and at least some years ago (again, according to reddit) there were American doctors willing to perform it.
In this case, the men involved do not seem to have been trans. Instead, they were participants in the 'eunuch' fetish subculture among gay men, where participants are known as 'eunuchs', 'nullies' or 'smoothies' respectively. Beyond eunuch communities themselves, one of the major sources of information about the subculture comes from TERFs, who are uniquely hostile towards eunuchs among gay men, because they (typically lesbian women) see them as - alongside transwomen - the vanguard of inserting fetishes into the 'LGB' movement they once held dear. Here, for example, is a long takedown of Gustavson by Canadian TERF website Reduxx.
Of course, Gustavson didn't only remove his genitalia but his leg, too, something that would likely classify him as suffering from 'Body integrity disorder', a partially-recognized psychological condition. Again, some patients, even in the UK, have had healthy limbs surgically removed, although this was highly controversial and the practice was largely discontinued. In Australia, a surgeon sought ethical advice about a similar case in 2017; this medical ethics article covers a similar case of a man with a lifelong goal of having a leg amputated, but who was unable to find a doctor willing to perform the surgery.
A core goal of eunuch fetishists is to have their fetish classified as a gender identity, which would allow them much easier access to surgery. It is this that drew the ire of the TERFs, who generally dislike sadomasochistic gay male fetishes but aren't particularly focused upon them. This creates an interesting dynamic - for the TERFs, the association between eunuch fetishists and trans activists allows them to criticize the latter by association, while for Gustavson (who took a leading role in both Norwegian and British pride organizations), association with the 'mainstream' trans movement created the opportunity for a medical embrace of the subculture.
[One last interesting (although less relevant) question remains about the eunuch fetish, namely that nullification would seemingly remove sexual desire, which would seem to be important to a fetishist. This journal article hints at an interesting theory, that gay men live in such a non-monogamous and non-commital romantic landscape that nullification often serves as a fantasy involving the eunuch sacrificing their sexuality to win a dyadic, deep bond with another man (who requests it of them), for life.]
II. Consent and the nature of surgery
The statement by the prosecutor in this case ("consent is not a defence to the illegal surgical procedures the men willingly took part in to remove their ringleader's penis, leg and nipple, in non-sterile and on occasion life-threatening circumstances") is interesting because it does not clearly state whether the issue was the mutilation or the legality thereof. Certainly much of the case appeared reliant on footage (or descriptions of it) of the procedure, the fact that it was sold on a fetish site, and the fact that the participants were physically healthy individuals with no need to perform the procedures. The body horror aspect of the case was a major feature of the prosecution's case, and even the press release seeks to create empathy for the police and prosecutors who had to watch and work with the footage and other evidence.
At the same time, as discussed above, 'body integrity disorder' surgeries have been performed without legal challenge in the UK, gender reassignment is legal, and (as I say) there is some evidence that nullification procedures have been performed legally (in very, very small numbers) by doctors in Anglo countries like the US, UK and Australia. And the statement does leave open the door that the main issue the Crown has is that Gustavson was 'operated' on illegally, not the nature of the operation. One wonders whether the sentences would have been as strict if the participants had been transwomen waiting for a gender reassignment surgery slot, but it is the UK so it's hard to say.
There are arguably legitimate reasons why consent isn't the central factor in whether a surgical procedure is legal. The primary one is, of course, that blanket legalization would lead to the poor or desperate being taken advantage of by untrained surgeons who might mutilate them in horrific and costly ways, perhaps for life. Society has (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-myth-of-consensual-sex)[decided] that the cost of allowing consensual unlicensed surgery is great enough that it ought to be outlawed. The medical profession (or cartel, or guild, depending on perception) is then given a valuable monopoly on licensing surgeons in exchange for minimum standards of training and therefore supposedly quality.
But if a surgeon refuses to perform a nullification surgery on a gay man (for legal or personal reasons) but is happy to perform similarly invasive surgery desired for similar reasons on a transwoman, are we really just saying (as the TERFs argue) that some fetish-driven lobbying campaigns are more successful than others?
III. On the welfare hustle
Man, this case really has it all. Buried in the article is this line:
Illegal surgery, especially in a welfare state, is costly. Gustavson went to hospital immediately after each of his major illegal procedures (which he set up and organized), where he required additional treatment (he claimed, it's suggested, that he mutilated himself on these occasions). This was paid for by the state and therefore the taxpayer. The issue of cost (which ultimately falls upon taxpayers or insured people) is also rarely discussed in relation to legal gender reassignment, even though vaginoplasty and phalloplasty require lifelong treatment and upkeep, regular visits with doctors, and (as with transition generally) lifelong use of prescription drugs.
The amputation of the leg, though, adds an additional dimension. When he returned home a disabled man, Gustavson was entitled to disability welfare, which he duly claimed. Few (particularly in a relatively rich country in which jobs are pretty easy to come by) are likely to amputate a limb to claim welfare, but other options (like severe mental illness) are more viable:
Society doesn't seem capable of managing this level of defection (or, alternatively, is just willing to swallow the cost). And while amputating a limb or making up a fake mental illness might be clear-cut, what about other self-inflicted conditions, like smoking or drug related illnesses? Is the purpose of welfare to support the deserving poor (like those born with disabilities through no fault of their own, widows raising children, and perhaps the elderly who never made enough to save for retirement), or is it to provide a minimum standard of living for everyone, no matter how objectionable? When Gustavson is released from his (likely) prison sentence, he will be able to continue claiming disability welfare as a wheelchair-bound person. Is that right?
Society has a level of structural unemployment of around 5%, so from a pragmatic perspective if society is designed in such a way that by design a large number of people are going to be structurally without jobs they should also not risk starving to death in the process? If some degree of unemployment is desirable then ensuring the people who are made unemployed don't starve to death in the process just kind of makes sense.
I looked into this a bit - the "ideal level of employment is 3-5%" comes up a lot but I didn't track it back to a primary source. My understanding is that this is meant to refer to 'frictional' employment rather than 'structural' employment. That is, at any given time 3-5% of people should be temporarily looking for new jobs which they then find, to keep job markets liquid. 'Structural' employment, referring to people who are permanently jobless, is unavoidable in practice but not desired.
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/unemployment-rate
https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/fdi-drivers/why-low-unemployment-rates-are-a-bad-thing/
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There is no such design. Furthermore, structural employment includes those who have made themselves unemployable, such as those who decided dropping out of school to do drugs full time was a good idea.
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Because of course they would never try to put the public on the hook for their own medical fetishes. It is rather insulting how clearly many lesbians physically fetishize men while denying they have any attraction to them. "I'm not sexually attracted to men." "Then why do you insist you have the right to sexual reproduction via a man's sperm?"
I don’t think gay men who use surrogates are secretly sexually attracted to women.
Gay men who use surrogates, assuming they are the sperm donors, are engaging in a sexual act (sexual reproduction) with a woman. Similarly, lesbians who use sperm donors to get pregnant are engaging in a sexual act (sexual reproduction) with a man. What's the difference between wanting to engage in a sexual act with a member of the opposite sex and being sexually attracted to them?
This is equivocation between two different meanings of the word "sexual". One is "having to do with gamete mixing", the other is "having to do with orgasms". "Sexual attraction" is firmly in the "orgasms" side of the dichotomy, and sperm donation on the "gamete mixing" side.
Orgasms are only sexual because they can result in gamete mixing. If you remove that, what's to differentiate them from any other form of physical activity? Why should they be considered special?
There is a sense in which that is true. However, on the level of evolved human psychology, it is orgasms which are the fundamental drive with intrinsic rewards that facilitates pair-bonding, and so in that sense it is also exactly backwards: gamete mixing is only "sexual" because it happens to be a common side effect of one of the typical ways to seek orgasms with a partner. Why should gamete mixing be considered special, compared to blood transfusions?
I'm not arguing it should be. I'm asking why other people consider sexual orientation to be some sacred piece of their identity that needs to be special-cased in law, but then carefully define sexual orientation to only consider a subset of acts that can be considered sexual. If it is all about physical intimacy rather than sexual reproduction, why is it not romantic orientation?
Because the physical intimacy is the part that has the psychological drives attached to it. "Sexual orientation" is explicitly about the psychological drives. That's what they care about protecting.
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Tabooing the phrase “sexual act,” there are two obviously distinct clusters. Reproduction is not the same thing as intercourse, even though one can follow from the other. I can say I would like to eat a nice meal without personally being the one to cook it.
Clarification: In this metaphor is a woman having your child the chef and you are the... eater of the baby?
Yes.
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One cannot taboo the phrase "sexual act", as it is entwined with the phrase "sexual orientation". If we limit the definition of "sexual orientation" to non-reproductive acts, why should "sexual orientation" be treated specially as a protected category?
Some terms and phrases mean a variety of very different things. We're clearly experiencing that here, so in an effort to resuscitate clear communication, let's stop using that term and instead plainly say the particular definition of it you actually mean.
Or "taboo" it as lesswrong posters would say.
"How can lesbians want to [get an egg fertilized by donated sperm] if they don't also want to [get fucked by] men?"
The point seems rather trivial now.
Yes, I know how the community uses the word "taboo" in this situation.
Does it?
"How can [people who claim to not be attracted to men strongly enough to have created an identity around it that is legally protected more strongly than nearly any other] want to get pregnant if getting pregnant requires [the participation of a man] to fertilize their eggs?"
Your question is just trivial. Lesbians can have participation of men in many aspects of life. So long as they aren't also having sex with them, then they're still lesbians and not in some contradictory way.
Also, isn't their identity based on mutual attraction to women? Is this reframing gayness as a negative rejection of the opposite sex?
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By taboo I mean use a different, more clear phrase for what you want to describe. Break out what you mean by "sexual act," because it seems obvious to me that there are lots of "sexual acts" that are not procreation, and lots of sex-adjacent concepts--like personal hygiene, puberty, or romantic poetry--which are not well described as "sexual acts." The category is confused. Find a different way to describe it, and you'll have an answer to your question.
I'm not trying to restrict "sexual acts" to only those that involve procreation though. I'm asking why procreative acts, which I believe should be central to the category, have been so thoroughly excised from it by others. What makes intercourse so important that it should completely push out everything else, and even that it should be expanded to cover things beyond PiV intercourse? To my eyes, the only plausible answer is that the people who did so are guilty of using self-motivated reasoning to gerrymander the definition to ensure they can have their cake and eat it too.
No, I really won't. My confusion stems precisely from the definition of the category sexual because we consider sexual things to be special. Sexual assault is considered a worse offence than plain assault. Sexual harassment is considered a worse offence than plain harassment. Sexual orientation is similarly a legally protected category in much of the West. Somehow I'm displaying sexual entitlement by looking at a woman who chose to dress provocatively, but a woman isn't when she claims a right to be impregnated by people she's "not sexually attracted to" though? What kind of backwards definition is that?
EDIT: Grammar.
Thanks, I think I follow you.
If procreation has been excised from the category, where’s the contradiction? The gay man who wants to procreate doesn’t have to feel or do any of the other signifiers of “sexual acts.” No courtship, no tingly feelings, no intercourse. At least not with a woman. Given how much human motivation stems from one or another of those desires, his lack of them makes for a meaningful category.
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Hence the other user with your sexual software package has the (absolutely defensible) answer of "and that's why they should never be allowed near the levers of sociopolitical power ever again".
The reason this definition remains stuck like this is mainly because of the socioeconomic effects described here- in short, the amount of economic opportunity for men-as-population is the check and balance against the social interests of women-as-population. Which is how some other commentators come to the conclusion "well, there must be too many men, female hypergamy means the ideal male:female sex ratio is 1:[some higher number]"- noticing the trees, but not the forest, of there not being enough economic opportunity available of the type for which men have the biological advantage to restore a more objectively equitable sociopolitical balance.
This sort of thing comes in waves as this balance adjusts following economic conditions- rather interestingly, the more economic opportunity exists for men-as-population as compared to women-as-population, the more the sexual balance is tilted away from the interests of women-as-population (employees seek minimum workload and maximum wage from their employers- for women, because the only thing they bring to the table for/as compared to men-as-population is beauty and youth, we should expect a society where women are more powerful relative to men to purposefully de-emphasize those qualities, and demonize attraction to them- so instead of a 40 year old man being able to afford a 15 or 25 year old wife, he'll have to settle for a barely-fertile, past-prime, bitter 35 year old instead, and we should observe men younger than that to be priced out of the market entirely, and judging by trends in the average age of marriage, they are).
This is why women-as-population love drag queen story hour, want shitty porn VNs in schools, and pretend that (absurdly ugly) men can be women too, why they believe that all men who might dare to interact with children is a predator, why they love the Science that claims "actually, you're not a human being until 25" as an excuse to argue it should be illegal to have sex with anyone under that age. It is why the claim traditionalists make about progressives "enabling pedophilia" does not logically follow.
And it is the reason women, who may not necessarily behave like women in aggregate do, won't meaningfully be concerned about changing things that are in their sociobiological interest (or in other words, "why feminists claims to believe in fairness between the sexes, but in reality will never work towards that").
Why did you even pick this fight, anyway? "Lesbians want kids so they go to the place where the cells that make them are", sure, but "and that means they're fetishizing men" doesn't logically follow from that claim. Or maybe I'm missing some dimension to "resource exists, human being wants access to resource to do Y".
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Thanks for the post, I've adjusted my prior on being an expert in degenerate shit, for better or for worse I still have a long way to go. Every day we stray further from God's light.
Serious question - how is a "fetish" different from a sexual preference or whatever you call, uh, the mechanism by which someone can experience arousal/attraction? Is it like, a preference is broadly categorical maybe specifying other broad traits like race or build (I am attracted to %gender% of %body_type%) while a fetish is more narrow and
ickyspecific (I am attracted to %gender% which have %some_trait% or do %some_thing%)?Is it just Russell all the way down, in the vein of "I am biologically attracted to men - you are gay - he is a disgusting faggot"?
Seems to be the read for me too, but there's too much space for mental gymnastics here, the ambiguousness of the actual "offense" is probably deliberate.
A distinction I often see made online, though I'll admit this might be like The Simpsons Jealousy vs Envy distinction (that is to say, not actually a distinction consistent with current or historical use), is that a fetish is required for arousal/climax while a kink is not.
So someone who gets off on feet would have a foot kink, someone who needs feet to get off would have a foot fetish.
I thought it was the other way around. a fetish was something unusually specific and arrousing, and a kink was the same but obligatory. "kink" like a kink in a hose, a blockage, an obstruction, something you have to work around.
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Would this suggest that someone having multiple different fetishes would need all of them present to get off?
It would more likely suggest to me that those aren't their actual fetishes, but are merely triggers for a deeper fetish. For instance, a person who gets off on being peed on may have a piss fetish or they may have a humiliation fetish (or some other fetish) that being peed on happens to trigger.
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It would explain how deep the e.g. doujinshi iceberg goes.
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I think one could argue they would still be fetishes if the person has, say, 3 and they need at least 1 of the 3 at any given time but not necessarily all 3 at once.
Though if someone has 99 and they need just 1 at any time, it could surely just be rounded off to just not liking vanilla sex.
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I'm all for radical morphological freedom, and happen to be libertarian enough to not even be against people without sufficient training or common sense dabbling in the fine arts of cutting things off a human body. If everyone involved consents, why should
Jesusthe UK Government object?Though I would certainly advocate for making that numpty ineligible for welfare of any form, he quite literally lacks a leg to stand on. Welfare should be a safety net, not an opportunity to try bungie-jumping without a cord while expecting it to catch you.
In other words, I demand people get the right to be stupid, even if I find it painful, as long as they avoid imposing externalities on everyone else, or remove that option from them by refusing to give them free money.
Thankfully, the proportion of people willing to go to such lengths solely for the purposes of being a free loader are so tiny they make Lizardman's Constant look like Godzilla, so it's not a particularly pressing matter. But we're not a Full Automated Luxury Space Communism (yet, and the sexuality should be optional), and these idiots should not get to benefit from skimming off the top of other humans earnestly burning their finite lifespans doing productive work. They can sit around and get paid for it when we all have no choice in the matter.
I actually don't know to what extent gender reassignment surgery is covered by the NHS, but at least that sclerotic institution pays lip service to the idea of cost-benefit, if only because it's underfunded. I suspect a proper analysis would rule out gender reassignment via surgery, even for truly hardline or sincere demands, but I haven't done the maths, even using such divorced and clinical figures as QALYs and DALYs.
To me, an ideal outcome would be:
These fools get to perform whatever they like on each other.
The government doesn't throw them in jail, but simply withholds any welfare or further treatment, since the level of pre-meditation and personal desire makes it qualitatively different to say, treating someone who tried to commit suicide because of mental illness.
They figure out how to survive, be it off alms or because lacking a leg doesn't actually kick you out of the workforce, though such a lack of knowledge should make you unemployable in the Knowledge Economy. They probably wouldn't starve to death, not that I would consider that unacceptable.
Mastectomies are difficult enough, I have to clean up after in my day job. Removing the clitoris? Any witch-doctor can do it, and given that female genital mutilation is a thing, do. It's not that hard, and on an unrelated note I had a buddy back in med school who would make cash on the side snipping tips (male) in his living room.
I recently overheard an argument between several Plastic Surgeons and a Psychiatrist where in the surgeons argued that seeking plastic surgery is pathognomonic for body dysmorphia. They asserted that wanting to adjust your own appearance to submit to external (or internal that is informed by external) standards is inherently dysmorphic. It can be relatively harmless in the case of a rhinoplasty, but can be radical as seen here.
I should note that both surgeons seemed very happy to feed the dysmorphia aka Get Paid.
The psychiatrist tried to define what "illness" is and use that angle, but appeared to be on the losing end of the argument.
I haven't thought about this enough to have landed on one side or the other, but I think it is very reasonable to think of this as a sliding scale and a fuzzy one at that.
If we are paying for top and bottom surgery why not this? The conversation on this particular topic is of course very unhealthy, and the people who advocate for dysmorphia treatment are typically allergic to formal analysis and typology on these topics which complicates the matter.
We don't have a good handle of what mental illness and it makes it hard to have a formal judgement as to if this behavior (and others) are okay or not and how to handle them on a legal and financial level.
I stan the psychiatrist here, there are millions of ways in which even the majority of humans wish to "adjust their appearance", from getting haircuts to piercings. Lumping it all together as a manifestation of "body dysmorphia" dilutes it to uselessness, even if you try and restrict it to just those that require surgery. I wager a large fraction of the populace wouldn't say no to free/perceptually safe surgery for even minor cosmetic blemishes, and most don't because of at least the former, as well as general inertia.
I forward the obverse, that I expect a proper cost-analysis that considers DALY and QALY to show that top and bottom surgery don't provide enough benefit to be worth providing, at least as free services through public healthcare systems. I haven't run the numbers myself, nor am I aware of a formal attempt, but that still happens to be my expectation.
Am I against people getting that done, on their own dime? Or surgeons doing them? Not at all. I just don't want general taxpayers, be it through subsidizing the NHS in the UK, or through greater insurance premiums elsewhere, to be the ones footing the bill.
If said hard-nosed analysis did show that the procedure provided net positive QALY (at about the same rate per pound as any normal surgery), then I would accept that as justification for it to be universally available to the dysmorphic. For free (to them, via the NHS or insurance).
Shame said shrink wasn't a Dr. S. A. Sisskind, he'd have rekt them.
But the real one already has excellent essays on the topic, just in case you haven't read these particular ones:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/07/contra-caplan-on-mental-illness/
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kirkegaard-on-evolutionary
While I don't agree with Scott on everything, I lean towards his pragmatic approach here.
"Siskind".
I haven't met Scott in person, so I'm not sure how effective he is in a real-time format, but I should note that this doesn't correlate very well (notice that politicians are typically excellent at quips and real-time debate but uninspired at essay-writing).
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I actually disagree pretty intensely with Scott on most medical adjacent topics (most especially his views on the FDA). I think he's a philosopher and a wise person who happens to work as a physician and not really immersed in the milieu of medicine (likely driven by where he has gotten his training). It's unlikely this impairs his care for the population he chooses to treat, but for the most part he doesn't really act or think like a doctor (granted Psychiatrists often do this).
And sorry, I have thought about mental illness is, just not this body dysmorphia claim (and I can see how the way I wrote that would make that unclear).
In any case, I think if the surgeons had split off signaling from "dysmorphia" it would be easier to agree with them. A piercing or a tattoo is trying to say or express something, even if the latter is "permanent." An adjustment of your body to what you feel like you need to be seems naively dysmorphic. One example thrown out was "if an OnlyFans creator wants a boob job to make more money is that dysmorphia" and it was asserted yes, and I think you are right that greatly erodes whatever dysmorphia is supposed to mean, but still I'm willing to go with "eh, mild end of the scale."
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Isn't something like nullification a pretty solid indicator of mental illness? FWIW I agree that we should give more sympathy/pity to people who attempt suicide, but I have a hard time identifying the difference.
Maybe the usually higher level of pre-meditation and planning plays a role, but I'd still sympathize more with someone who planned a suicide attempt over months than someone who planned and received a nullification over the course of a day or two.
I can certainly discriminate between different types of mental illness, and have no qualms about doing so.
A BPD art-hoe and a depressed incel are both self-destructive, for no "fault" of their own (as popularly conceived as ethereal metadata not grounded in material properties), but one is far more destructive towards others.
A depressed person often doesn't want to be depressed. Or they feel terrible about being a burden, most of them aren't overdosing on paracetamol to get on welfare when their liver fails (presuming that doesn't kill them). In the UK, they are lucky to have the NHS around to save their ass for free (and me, eventually, though I charge for my services), but they do not undergo dangerous, crippling procedures to indulge a fetish and expect other taxpayers to clean up after them. The closest are the people into self-harm, and razer cuts and burns are nowhere near as expensive to treat, presuming they don't grow out of it.
Many would prefer not to be saved. We insist on saving them. I have mixed feelings on the matter, including extending to euthanasia: suffice to say that if rules and regulations didn't tie my hands, I would let a lot more people who didn't want to live on philosophical grounds kill themselves (presuming it wasn't just pure depression, or at least a form of depression that can be cured/managed to provide an acceptable QOL). Alas, the law and my medical licensing bodies disagree, and I care more about my paycheck than my principles here.
On the other hand, our friend Nullius Maximus here? While I have no way to prove it, I think he was mentally competent to gauge the consequences of his actions, and would likely have not gone through with it if he was left with the burden of fending for himself. And if he had, he wouldn't be newsworthy, just another crazy who killed himself for dubious reasons. Here, his craziness can be presumed to be sly.
That is far worse, as far as I'm concerned. I endorse his ability to do as he pleases. I do not endorse shielding him from the consequences of his actions.
And to be clear it is the BPD art chick causing harm to people around her and the incel silently seething but not hurting anyone.
I would hope that was obvious, but I suppose it's worth clarifying in case someone came away thinking I was making the opposite argument.
Understood. Which is why I'm pointing out that the opposite is actually true. Incels are (to within round off error) harmless. BPD art chicks are very harmful to the unfortunate people drawn into their social sphere.
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I suppose men are more predisposed to criminality, but neither is likely to be harmful to others.
The amount of damage a typical incel can cause is far more bounded than what a reasonably attractive woman with borderline personality disorder can inflict. The overwhelming majority of incels don't go around shooting up schools, they sulk and argue on 4chan. People with BPD are corrosive to the psyche, uncovered flames that draw moths for miles.
You're (were?) a regular on the RSP subreddit, I'm sure you can imagine all the examples you like.
I’m not sure it’s a particularly good argument for the harmlessness of the incels that they congregate on 4chan, one of the most culturally influential websites on the planet, molding the headspaces of countless young men all over the world (some young women as well).
One of the precise risk factors of the incel subculture is that exposure to it seems to convince numerous temporarily virginal 17-year olds (or even younger types) that it’s over, women will only have sex with them if they’re a chiseled sociopathic gigachad, nothing they do can matter since they’re [short/fat/not rich/weak-chinned/Asian/etc], best not even try.
The gynosupremacists/femcels hang out on Twitter. I only see one of those two sites in the news constantly, so I believe the one I continue to hear claimed as a legitimate source by the vast majority of world media is taken a lot more seriously.
And then it is this core demographic that forms the backbone of the education-managerial complex as well as a significant chunk of state bureaucracies. The angry women are, in aggregate, much, much more dangerous than the angry men.
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On a per capita basis? The average incel, be it on 4chan or elsewhere, is largely harmless.
And 4chan has all kinds of mentally ill people, from the humble incel, to schizos, to
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AFAICT, the only reason people look down on their argument is that it denigrates higher status people than them in doing so (ie, women). Remove that and you get a bog standard feminist argument that men shouldn't seek validation from women through sex.
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I thought the implication was that the art-hoe was more dangerous to others. I picture the depressed incel not leaving the basement; the BPD, out keying cars over imagined slights.
That is indeed what I'm getting at. Anyone who disagrees hasn't met enough depressed incels or women with BPD. I have the dubious fortune of knowing plenty of both.
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I don't have much to say but, is any conceivable one time sexual experience worth losing your fucking nuts over?
Like I doubt even having sex with Scarlette Johansson, Ana De Armas and 30 other hot women all at once while on cocaine and heroin and dick pills from Valhalla (they are on some other wordly sex drugs too), would still be worth losing your nuts and a leg. Like wtf.
There's a crazy-sized hole here. I don't think this guy was rationally maximizing utils(well, maybe the hooker who didn't cut any of his parts off); he was a nutjob.
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That's why this is an online photoshopping-images fetish rather than a real-world actually-doing-things fetish (like a lot of internet fetishes), and it makes the news every time someone is actually crazy to try something in real life once every decade or so.
Same with cannibalism and other extreme stuff, you hear a single story once a decade and everyone wants to act like it's the tip of the iceberg, but no, it's really just that one insane dude plus a bunch of fanfiction online.
On the slightly-less-extreme (at least compared to nullification and cannibalism) end of the scale, I sometimes think of that one reddit post by the guy who got into scat porn, hired someone to oblige him and then immediately regretted it.
Out of the small portion of people who actually go through with these fetishes, I wonder how many of them immediately regret bringing them into reality.
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I don't have a particularly good model of this as kink or lifestyle, but I don't think they're looking at it as a sexual experience in the "wow, what a great orgasm" sense, rather than desiring the end state, either as a description for extreme infertility/submissiveness/'nonmasculinity' (when moderated by hormone therapy), or as wanting to reduce sexual desire (in the case of some eunuchs).
(cw: male pain, contrasting)
That said, the lines between those two categories can be vague and complicated.
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Neither. The purpose of welfare is to minimize the cost to broader society from crimes borne out of not having enough(prostitution, shoplifting, unsafe housing, etc). It doesn’t have to do a perfect job of this to be worth the cost; I don’t particularly want a flophouse with broken windows on my street and will pay taxes to put some portion of the people that would otherwise create demand for run down flophouses in apartments instead.
That doesn’t mean everyone is equally deserving, but sometimes paying them to sit in a corner is easier and cheaper than forcing them to contribute. I don’t have to like it, and in fact I don’t, but we as a society don’t have any meaningful way of fixing the problem.
Now that being said, I do think welfare reform to incentivize good behavior and penalize bad behavior is easy to do and a bunch of, uncharitably, pinko do-gooders high on the communist fan fiction that passes for ‘research’ these days are preventing it(charitably, they’re mostly overly credulous and empathetic), or at least would be if our government was capable of doing anything. Lots of people belong in a jail cell, not section 8, welfare programs frequently discourage marriage, anti discrimination laws make it harder to reward good things among the poor, etc.
In this specific case, it sounds like all of these people should somehow be forcibly interned. ‘It’s a fetish’ should not be a defense to ‘you’re obviously insane’.
I think you are wrong about the purpose of the welfare state. The purpose of the welfare state is to mollify the 15% of people who are happy to barely scrape by if it means that they don't have to work. We pathologise personality issues these days, which means being lazy is a mental disorder.
Here's the thing though - the do-gooders were right, but not for the reason they think - it costs about $40k to keep people imprisoned in the US on average, welfare recipients cost much less and they volunteer for it.
Things can have more than one purpose; social housing decreases demand for unsafe and unsanitary living conditions that shit up the commons for lots of ordinary working people who have to share a street with them and makes do gooders and pinkos feel good about themselves for helping poor unfortunates and mollifies the people who care more about not having to be productive than about their standard of living. Presumably, it also helps some people who are poor through no fault of their own, but no one's ever really cared about them so that's more of a happy side effect than an actual goal.
It's also dramatically cheaper than prison, as you note.
prison is very cheap. Cheaper than a welfare state , as it can be done at scale.
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Welfare state doesn't work that way in real life. "Idle hands are devils plaything", also it promotes single motherhood causing increased crime of the kids raised without fathers.
single motherhood probably works better in high trust, high IQ societies.
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It’s not all together clear that welfare users commit crimes at a much higher rate than the working poor, or that there’s enough difference between the two groups to make that distinction. And in practice a lot of these benefits(eg suppressing flophouses) happen regardless.
This is why I specified poor design of the welfare state encouraging bad behavior as a problem, yes.
We can't need a welfare state to prevent violent crime if it actually causes violent crime.
My post was mostly referring to petty crime, prostitution, flophouses, things of that nature. Violent crime is a different kettle of fish and best solved with policing, not any particular economic policy(and welfare doesn’t cause it either; it’s caused by a refusal to punish criminals until they escalate into heinous offenses).
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Completely unrelated to the matter at hand, but did reading “nullification fetish” trigger a mental image of John C. Calhoun dressed in black leather for anyone else?
Somebody needs to make a Victoria 3 mod for this ASAP.
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Castration would have been legal if the gentlemen doing was a medical doctor and did it in an operating room with proper paperwork, right? He should have been charged with practicing medicine without a license.
Hilarious, boy do I have bad news for them.
That's like saying that a murderer is just impersonating a corrections officer because the death penalty exists.
A doctor wouldn't be able to get the proper paperwork for this situation because it's not a medically approved procedure in this context, any more than doctors are allowed to give people chemotherapy for a hangnail. A doctor would have been convicted of the same exact crime.
What evidence do you have that this is the case? What paperwork do you even think is required for a doctor to perform an operation like that?
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People totally can get castrated for gender affirming care purposes in UK. Would-be-eunuchs just must have not assembled a pressure group to get fully included in that scheme.
First of all, they cannot, they can get a different surgery with some similarities. Medical board would not approve what this escort did as gender-affirming care.
Second of all, this was not intended as gender affirming care, see again 'not allowed to treat a hangnail with chemotherapy'.
Specifically, what are the differences that you think exist? Are you sure you're not just splitting hairs?
Again, specifically, what do you think they would not approve? An amatour performing surgery? Obviously. The surgery itself? Something else?
This argument makes no sense. "Not being allowed to treat a hangnail with chemotherapy" has no bearing on whether or not this was gender affirming care or not.
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Wasn't there a long post about two people deep in nullo boards being bigwigs in setting gender affirming care policies here some time ago?
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I didn't waste over a year of my life getting my GMC registration to just let any monkey with a scalpel do it for free. Then again, I hate performing surgeries, so maybe they can have this one, as a treat.
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I don't think it's uncommon for TERFs to dislike gay men, they're men after all, but they tend to dislike transwomen and straight men more.
TERF as a generic term for a woman not on board with trans agenda must be a brilliant psy-op. "Oh, some lady doesn't think that Chris Chan is as much of a woman as her? She must be the reincarnation of Valerie Solanas from Society for Cutting Up Men!".
It's not a generic term, socially conservative people who are both anti-feminist and anti-trans just get called bigots or w/e.
TERF is specifically for people like JK who consider themselves feminists and enlist in 'protect the women' arguments into their anti-trans rhetoric.
As a neutral observer who just thinks it's fun to watch women destroy each other, the existence of TERFs strikes me as intuitively obvious.
If "what is a woman" is a fight worth fighting, women who have fought to advance the causes and benefits of women will see their work undone. They see what power they (believe) they've wrested from the men slipping through their factory-broken, labor-calloused fingers disintegrating, and they don't like it.
If even New-Labour-Government-neutered, "wizards invented magic to disintegrate their own shit" JK has figured it out, the midwits who haven't are really in for a rude awakening.
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JK Rowling is a middle aged rich woman who votes for labor and agitates for women's rights in Iran (far, far away and completely UK regime approved) on twitter. She's extreme only in that she's extremely milquetoast.
Trans-Exclusive Regular Feminist
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In this case if you follow the links in my post I am referring to self-identified actual TERFs.
Psy-oped. There's nothing radical about being TE.
I don’t think you’re using “psy-op” in the same sense as the other commenters.
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That seems to fundamentally misunderstand how words work together? That's like someone linking to an organization for self-identified gay Republicans and someone else replying "There's nothing gay about being a Republican". Yeah, sure, but that doesn't mean there aren't gay Republicans.
People are perfectly capable of being both gay and Republicans and identifying with both those labels, just as they are perfectly capable of being both radical feminists and anti-trans and identifying with both those labels.
What is so radical about those broads then?
Radical Feminism is (and especially was) primarily defined in contrast to Liberal Feminism and Marxist Feminism. While Liberal Feminism is primarily concerned with women gaining equality before the law and Marxist Feminism is primarily concerned with dismantling capitalism (as it sees oppression of women as downstream from exploitation of labor and the ownership of private property), Radical Feminism holds that the oppression of women is part of a broader system of patriarchy where women are dominated by men and that equality cannot be achieved by equality before the law or the dismantling of capitalism as the patriarchal social structures would still remain.
Most modern western Feminists who actually actively call themselves Feminists are in fact Radical Feminists, though they usually identify primarily with one of its offshoots. Think of like how a wide variety of different Christian denominations are still Nicene Christians, despite their other disagreements on matters of theology and identification. Someone specifically identifying themselves as "Nicene Christian" or refusing to get more specific than "Christian" probably tells you they have some theological disagreements with other people who would also be accurately described as "Nicene Christians", but they agree on some key elements.
Arguably a lot of Marxist Feminists are more "Radical" in their beliefs/methods than actual "Radical" Feminists, much like "Gay" Republicans are probably not that much happier (if at all happier) than straight ones.
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They are actual literal radical feminists. They hate trans women because they hate men(which trans women are), not because of anything against gender transition.
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