site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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.

you’ll find that this role is largely filled by isekai power fantasy stories

I mean, it is now. I think CGDCT kind of ran its course through the late '00s but things were less polarized back then.

I don’t think that it’s possible to have male utopia without competition, and when you have competition, you gotta have losers.

It's not possible to have female utopia without this either, but women express that differently than men do. You kind of have to go beyond male and female to tolerate more than one winner in either case.

Another less charitable possibility (which I also relate to) is that men who enjoy CGDCT are men who have “dropped out” of seeing themselves as viable competitors. The idea of competition itself is repulsive.

Interesting; actually, that reminds me of something.

which is more healthily expressed in sports series where you can share victory with your beloved teammates and friends

The only gender-swapped CGDCT series, Free!, is about a sport that isn't really competitive in this way.

presumably by a sense of voyeurism inherent to the genre.

No, I think it's because a zero-shot response to the genre is "wow, this has definitely got to be for people attracted to little girls".

It's not possible to have female utopia without this either

I don’t disagree — but whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, so Lord knows I’m not gonna try and pretend that I know enough to speak about women. A fortiori, I don’t know what kinds of series women watch, although I suppose that this does match up with my intuitions regarding otome games (e.g. replace the bumbling male foil with the unlikeable villainess rival).

Interesting; actually, that reminds me of something.

Man, that’s a fascinating writeup. Although that one reply seems to call into question the extent to which this is universal.

The only gender-swapped CGDCT series, Free!, is about a sport that isn't really competitive in this way.

Yeah, but men aren’t watching Free! from what I understand. (Now, if the idea is that female-targeted gender-swappped CGDCT exhibits this same “lack of competitiveness” as normal male-targeted CGDCT (which, interestingly, is often written by women), then that’s an interesting cross-gender commonality.)

No, I think it's because a zero-shot response to the genre is "wow, this has definitely got to be for people attracted to little girls".

Tomayto, tomahto.

Yeah, but men aren’t watching Free! from what I understand. (Now, if the idea is that female-targeted gender-swappped CGDCT exhibits this same “lack of competitiveness” as normal male-targeted CGDCT (which, interestingly, is often written by women), then that’s an interesting cross-gender commonality.)

I never heard of Free! before, but from looking it up it seems to be a standard sports anime with massive amounts of yaoi baiting. They do the sports seriously, but it's got a bunch of cute, lean guys posing shirtless.. that's for the yaoi fangirls. They seems to like their seme/uke dominance battles. (But I don't think this is some big truth about All Women, it's just one weird niche community)

They also have "Axis Powers Hetalia," which, despite ostensibly being about war, doesn't really have any serious fighting and is much more "Cute Boys Doing Cute things." Or "Daily Lives of Highschool Boys," which is just a parody of the whole genre.

Now, if the idea is that female-targeted gender-swappped CGDCT exhibits this same “lack of competitiveness” as normal male-targeted CGDCT (which, interestingly, is often written by women), then that’s an interesting cross-gender commonality.

That's the claim, anyway. The closest thing I can think of is "Yuri on Ice" which is, as far as I'm aware, not that- it would be interesting to see who the modal Free! watcher is.

Although that one reply seems to call into question the extent to which this is universal.

Yeah, it's almost like a strict identarian view of sexuality isn't useful when evaluating relationship dynamics or the worthfulness of those that happen to like body type X or Y (and the replies that assume that was about identarian sexuality and assumed the post was an attack on their worthfulness are... missing the point a little, I feel).

Tomayto, tomahto.

The old understandings of gender and sexuality are the correct ones; identarianism is just blank-slatism but for sexuality instead, both were originally born from a desire to fix the cultural contexts about the worthfulness of the non-default ones, and both are wrong in the same ways.