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I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
I don't really think there is any solution until the generic Dem voter decides Dems have finally gone too far left and stop voting for them. Hard to imagine what point that would be though given we have currently got an admin trying to jail political dissidents and opponents along with the multitude of pro-Hamas marches.
I mean they need a reasonable offramp and Trump isn't that. This is why the Democrats have, correctly, zeroed in on the strategy of just pointing out the wild stuff Trump does and not talking about much else. If the republicans want to be the party of normal they need to actually take up that mantel.
I'm definitely very interested in how the next election without Trump being involved will end up going. Shame it couldn't have been this one.
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I used to think this was possible. However in a local argument with a normie democrat arguing about those evil Republicans trying to ban books, I showed them images of Gender Queer, and the page where the kid is giving another kid a blowjob, and asked them point black if they honestly thought that belonged in middle schools.
They doubled down. Didn't shake them one iota.
I think you under estimate the DNC's ability to lead their voters where ever they want them to go.
In fairness, I just looked it up, and it's a strap-on.
Anyway, to your point.
I would find this pretty outrageous, but my default state is to be generally annoyed or outraged when our teenager tells us what he's learning about in public school. Be it economics, math or sex stuff.
WTF. I know this is besides the point, but I find that worse than just a blowjob for an illustration in a middle school book. Like, a blowjob at least serves a direct purpose of sexual pleasure due to the actual physical stimulation; a blowjob on a strap-on is only pleasurable from the psychological thrill of the act, at least assuming the giver isn't Linda Lovelace. To enjoy it requires getting into a certain headspace that's quite different from enjoying a blowjob, which is only requires the physiology (though the psychological pleasure isn't insignificant).
Looking back, it is absolutely shocking that Demolition Man absolutely nailed this is how female/feminized/progressive sexual pleasure works.
"Getting a blow-job but using a strap-on" is, I think, nearly the ultimate expression of this, and how hilariously it misses the point of what sexual contact is even supposed to be. It's all the cerebral pleasure of
masturbationsex but none of the risk [that the "active/top" partner does something that you don't like; pattern matching to "this sexual encounter might end in pregnancy"] or the unprettiness (lots of bodies and the operative body parts are actually kind of ugly, and fluids are messy and smelly and dangerous due to what they can do).To that end, maybe it's exactly the sort of thing that should be in schools- the problem with men (and traditionalists more generally) is that they do not even understand how female sexuality works much less understand how or why they must combat the toxic parts, and here they are, in their full (in)glory, for them to know the mind of their [class]-enemy. Of course, pornography extolling the virtues of the toxic parts of male sexuality would also need to be available in equal measure; have to present both sides of the argument to represent it fairly, after all (if that's too offensive, removing the porn altogether would be a reasonable compromise).
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Well, she (he?) ends up not enjoying it. It's actually written on that same page.
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Seems like a wash to me. I could easily see someone arguing the opposite, and it seems to me that it's an explicit sex act either way.
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Remember, in real time conversations people are going to put on the spot. Either agree that this is bad, or double down. And given that giving even an inch on something that has been sold to them as a moral imperative which only hateful book burning nazis could possibly endorse, giving that inch is a big ask, and very few people will be willing to do that on the spot. That doesn't mean that you didn't put a crack in the wall and move them a little closer to being willing to admit that maybe the very worst stuff is not appropriate in schools, even if you hateful book burners are wrong about 90% of it.
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This anecdote brought back memories to my own middle school sex ed in 8th grade in a very small hippie school (50-60 students per grade) in Cambridge, MA in the late 90s. We were taught using some illustrated book that had explicit drawn illustrations of adolescents (around our age at the time, i.e. preteens) nude and also actively experimenting with their own bodies. I don't remember if masturbation or orgasm were explicitly shown, though I recall at least one picture of a girl using a mirror to look at her genitals and of a boy with an erection.
Given that, a book with sexually explicit illustrations of preteens being used for sex ed today doesn't really surprise me. What I do find interesting is that, as best as I can remember, there was no actual hardcore sex between two people depicted in the book we used, and it also didn't cover sexual acts that were purely for pleasure, like blowjobs (I recall being amused when one girl complained that the book didn't teach us anything about anal sex). These seem like significant changes compared to what I was taught, and I'm honestly not sure what I think about it.
I'm curious, though, would the books that I was taught be more acceptable to you than Gender Queer, based on the way I described them, or would you consider those to also be inappropriate for teaching sex to middle schoolers?
Unsure, but only because the line of what you may or may not remember is the bright flashing line I'm concerned about. You don't remember if masturbation or orgasm were explicitly shown, and those would be the exact sorts of things I wouldn't want in a middle school sex talk. The middle school sex talk I remember was focused entirely on anatomy and puberty.
I do recall the 9th grade sex ed stuff we got from our PE teacher. It rode an entertaining line between being casual and professional. But once again, from what I remember, it was very focused on STD and pregnancy prevention. How to pleasure, the morality (for or against) of seeking pleasure, etc was omitted entirely from the conversation. Which once again, feels like a fair line to me. I don't understand how much closer you could get to grooming than literally instructing middle schoolers how to give good head.
I'm curious, was this a private small hippie school, or a public school in a very small, open minded town?
This was a private school, located in (what I as an adult now recognize as) a quite wealthy neighborhood in Cambridge, MA. FWIW, I do recall we were specifically encourage to masturbate for health reasons (specifically no STD & no pregnancy - any other benefits such as pleasure or whatever weren't mentioned IIRC), but I don't think any actual explicit instructions were provided, either orally or visually.
Your line does seem reasonable, but it also does seem like one that's hard to maintain from the current hegemonic belief that pregnancy and bonding with a partner are merely a couple of optional consequences one can freely choose to get or not from sex. That mostly just leaves the pleasure portion, and not covering that, along with the many now-mainstream techniques for accomplishing those, would leave a big gaping hole in the education that the internet can rush to fill (less of an issue in the 90s).
This belief is less hegemonic than it probably seems from a deep blue tribe perspective; plenty of people who don’t go to church every Sunday, fornicate and use contraceptives think that casual sex is morally wrong and people having sex should be prepared for the possibility of having a kid.
And I think that’s the rub; you point to a hippie-dippy private school, but public schools holding that same attitude of ‘of course we’re going to teach your kids progressive sexual ideas, it’s too hard not to’ is a problem because these are supposedly neutral institutions that are funded with taxpayer dollars partly on the basis of that supposed neutrality. If public schools are actually a vehicle for pushing blue tribe attitudes that’s a problem, and I suspect that sex Ed isn’t the only example of this.
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I'm sorry, but this whole section reads, to me, like "Yeah, you're right, but I don't care." How is anyone supposed to push back against the "hegemonic belief that pregnancy and bonding with a partner are merely a couple of optional consequences one can freely choose to get or not from sex" when that worldview is baked into compulsory education you must send your children to? That's people's entire bugbear with supposedly public institutions not acting in a neutral manner that the entire public can agree on. All you've done, to refute my reasonable argument, is fall back on some sort of learned helplessness towards the problems that my enemy tribe have created.
No. Just no.
Well, I don't care about the state of sex ed in America in the most literal sense of the term - I have nothing in my life that would be affected positively or negatively based on what these sex ed policies are. If I had children of my own, I would care, and if I thought my own future would be affected meaningfully by the next generation of adults being taught the pleasure of sexual acts in explicit ways, I would care, but I don't see how it would.
I would certainly prefer it that kids today were taught sex in ways even more conservatively than I was taught, but that's just my own aesthetic preferences, along with some empathy I have towards those kids, who I feel sorry for to some extent due to the world we created for them. But it's not my responsibility to care about these kids, and their sexual well-being ultimately doesn't affect my life all that much.
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