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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Whenever the subject of feminist narratives comes up on this forum, one of the recurring arguments is that feminist messaging is ineffective, self-defeating even, the usual reason being given that it doesn’t reach the men it’s supposed to reach, and only reaches men who don’t need feminist messages in the first place because they’re pretty much acculturated in a feminist milieu anyway. (I know all this doesn’t necessarily sound fair or unbiased, but let’s ignore that for a moment.)
The most fitting example of this that is usually mentioned is the message that “we need to teach men not to rape”, which is supposedly a favorite of feminist activists on college campuses, corporate HR boards and elsewhere. Apparently they promote essentially the same idea as a great tool to combat sexual assault and harassment.
I don’t think I need to explain in detail why this argument sounds so dumb to the average man. Even when I come up with the most benevolent interpretation of this tactic that I can think of, it still seems misguided and, well, dumb. But then it occurred to me: the message makes 100% sense if we start from the assumption that modern feminists, eager to right cultural wrongs of the past that they perceive, really want to make sure their messaging never ever entails even a hint of the notion that women need to exercise any level of agency in order to avoid rape, assault or harassment of any type i.e. avoid bad men, because in all cases that would be “victim blaming” and horrific etc.
From that perspective, it all makes sense, sort of. Am I correct, or is there something else going on as well?
You're missing at least one thing that's going on - some rapes (or at least rape-adjacent behavior) are genuinely dissimilar to other crimes in the lack of mens rea from the perpetrator. The canonical example is a guy that takes a girl that's obviously blitzed out of her mind upstairs at a party. Sure, you can provide the admonishment that she shouldn't have gotten so drunk in the first place and you're going to be correct, but it's also plausible that it's feasible to shift the culture around hooking up with very drunk girls from it being funny to it being socially unacceptable. You're not going to convince Ted Bundy to not rape with a social awareness campaign, but you might convince some men that it would be a bad thing to take advantage of a girl that doesn't have her wits about her.
There are many objections to the above that can be offered, but my impression is that this is the type of thing that "teach men not to rape" is referring to.
You're probably right. But I dislike this behavior of expanding the definition of rape. At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else. Not something someone could do by accident. Mens rea was almost definitely necessary for a rape to occur.
Expanding this definition makes it so that people who probably haven't done anything that terrible or didn't intend to do anything that terrible, and maybe made a bad decision now are lumped in with violent psychopaths. It also takes away nuance from language. It may have also had the effect that you're positing, too, of making people less likely to hook up with drunk girls.
It is common to focus on the most extreme and most rare version of a problem as a rhetorical tactic to avoid addressing the most commons forms of the problem that actually affect the most people.
15 years ago no one though Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein were committing 'real' rape, so why bother raising a fuss over it? And AFAIK (IANAL), what we now call marital rape was legal across the country until the 1970s.
The expanding definition is a necessary step in actually confronting and preventing bad behavior.
I am also a high-decoupler (ie autist) who likes words to have crisp, unambiguous, and unchanging definitions. But I also acknowledge that words are actually just tools that we invent to help us get things we want, and these type of shifting and ambiguous definitions are very often a result of someone tuning the language to accomplish something important and valuable.
Sneaking in new definitions while still maintaining the previous emotional attachments of those definitions is necessary? In rationalist communities, I think we have words for things like this, such as motte and bailey. And I think that most of us are in agreement that such tactics are sneaky and underhanded, and make it unnecessary difficult to argue against, and very easy to turn into mob mentality and moral panics.
Yup, those are absolutely some of the very strong and important reasons for not doing that.
In this case, one of the countervailing reasons for doing it is, in theory, preventing or getting justice for very very large numbers of sexual assaults.
That's the tough reality of being a consequentialist, you can't just give one persuasive reason why something is bad and therefore decide not to do it, you have to actually ask what the full positive and negative consequences are and try to make a balanced judgement.
I'm not even claiming that the balance trivially obviously falls on the side of distorting the language in this case, I'm just saying an argument that doesn't weigh the intended benefits against the expected costs isn't really saying anything.
That's horribly short sighted from a consequentialist perspective, and not particularly rational to indicate that short term gains are worth degrading the value of truth and language. Just because you can't see the immediate negative consequences, or they're obscured, doesn't mean that they're not there. All of this lowering the sanity waterline is to blame for all the horribly contentious political strife going on, and increasing divide. If there's a civil war that happens, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that this sort of sophistry is not an insignificant factor.
Furthermore, I doubt most of the people who actually are promoting this sophistry would actually be okay with other people doing it as well. Saying "it's okay when we do it" isn't exactly a good look, or anything I think people should be aspiring to do.
So I agree that if we lived in a perfectly rational world where no one ever did linguistic maneuvers like this ever and instead all language was maximally precise and informative, because having perfectly accurate information is what let everyone engage in sophisticated and dispassionate object-level debates about the empirical outcomes of different policy proposals to find the utilitarian optimal approach, then the first person to do something like this would be breaking a sacred trust and destroying a public good and committing a grave sin.
But we very, very, very, very, very... ... very, very, very, very much do not live in a world like that.
So given the fallen world we already live in, it's not clear how much marginal damage the 92,252nd instance of that happening does past the marginal damage done by the 92,251st instance.
It would certainly be better if everyone did it less, and I am actually an active proponent of doing it less in many contexts.
But it's not obviously clear that the utilitarian optimal policy is to be an extremist about never doing it ever, when it's already a standard tactic that everyone uses and not using it puts the other things you value at a severe rhetorical disadvantage, and when the marginal damage of one more case is mitigated by all the other case.
It's certainly not right to be a selective extremist about it, where you notice and call out whenever your opponents do it, but turn a blind eye when your side does it ('abortion is murder' much?).
As for 'the people doing it would object to the other side doing it'.... yeah, obviously. That's exactly what an isolated demand for rigor is, people do it all the time to fight their opponents, that's exactly what this instance of calling it out and objecting to it is. That's kind of my point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link