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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26098 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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Australian boys make spreadsheet of girls attractiveness, national media, federal minister and state premier rush to condemn them. I'm pretty surprised this got any media attention, doesn't it seem trivial? This all happened on some discord server, it's not like they were parading it around. Does anyone think this would happen in their country?

It reportedly ranked female students from "wifeys", "cuties", "mid", "object", and "get out" to "unrapeable".

The school flagged notifying police about the list and looking into whether using the term "unrapeable" constitutes a threat, The Age reported.

I can't see how 'unrapeable' could possibly be a threat. Saying someone is vulnerable could be a threat, calling someone invulnerable is not... OK it's very rude, suspend the ringleaders - do police need to be involved? There's a certain level of hysteria here, you get the sense that the male principal fears for his job unless he takes this as seriously as humanly possible.

Allan said her thoughts are with the young women, who have received counselling at Yarra Valley Grammar.

It would be pretty crushing to be labelled unrapeable or 'get out' by your male peers, though I don't see how a counsellor could help.

Context: Australian media and govt have been panicking about male-on-female violence for a few weeks now. We recently had a mass stabbing by a mentally ill man, who targeted mostly women. Accordingly, male on female violence has increased statistically and the government has thrown a lot of money at various NGOs.

The Yarra Valley Grammar incident comes as the federal government last week announced nearly $1 billion of funding towards tackling violence against women, which has been labelled a "crisis" of "epidemic" proportions.

Additionally, there has been a lot of concern about Tate corrupting the minds of the youth. So this lets the media hit two talking points at the same time.

Merry said Yarra Valley Grammar holds "respectful relationship" classes but because of mixed messages on social media, "young boys get it wrong".

A related matter - youtuber argues that ranking women's attractiveness upsets the Byzantine system of female intrasexual competition, where every queen is praised as a 10/10 regardless of ugliness. I found the video pretty decent albeit a few minutes longer than it needed to be. It features the infamous Gorlock the Destroyer claiming to be a 10/10 (sarcastically?), which does make you think. There might be something to it - ranking women by attractiveness seems more dangerous than one might naively imagine.

In the male-dominated patriarchal society of the distant past, accusing men of being bastards or having incorrect lineage was a very serious matter. Legitimacy and preventing cuckoldry was deeply important to men, it informed the whole structure of European politics, inheritance and succession. Perhaps in the emerging future it's female sexual dynamics that will take priority and we'll see more of this kind of thing.

Premier (woman): "This pattern of violence against women — not only does the act of violence have to stop, but these displays of disrespecting women. Like, it's just disgraceful."

Lèse-majesté: an offence or defamation against the dignity of a ruling head of state or of the state itself.

Wasn't this how Facebook was conceived initially?

A related matter - youtuber argues that ranking women's attractiveness upsets the Byzantine system of female intrasexual competition, where every queen is praised as a 10/10 regardless of ugliness. I found the video pretty decent albeit a few minutes longer than it needed to be. It features the infamous Gorlock the Destroyer claiming to be a 10/10 (sarcastically?), which does make you think. There might be something to it - ranking women by attractiveness seems more dangerous than one might naively imagine.

In the male-dominated patriarchal society of the distant past, accusing men of being bastards or having incorrect lineage was a very serious matter. Legitimacy and preventing cuckoldry was deeply important to men, it informed the whole structure of European politics, inheritance and succession. Perhaps in the emerging future it's female sexual dynamics that will take priority and we'll see more of this kind of thing.

I'm not sure it's as complicated as that. Observing girls from a distance and sexually commenting on them is pretty archetypical "creep" behaviour in most people's minds. You could remove the ranking element - these guys could have been compiling a list of all the girls who they fantasise over and dream of naked - and the reaction would still probably have been "eww" from most of the girls involved (unless the guys were particularly good-looking or had high social status). Throw in the concept of some of these girls being "un/rapable", the dominance of progressive ideology in schools and the media, how easily this can be framed in terms of the widespread panic about the influence of people like Tate, and maybe a slow news week, and I'm not surprised this event got picked up in the media.

I think you're getting at an important point. People don't like to think that others are doing things to them mentally. We make a compromise - don't make your thoughts other people's problems. If you want to masturbate to a classmate, you can't be stopped, just don't tell them you did that.

We make a compromise - don't make your thoughts other people's problems.

Of course, the pronoun/trans thing is a deliberate and willful violation of that compromise.

(That the faction most supportive of breaking that compromise in that way is apoplectic when anyone else does it is... illustrative.)

The appropriate analogy would be "don't tell a trans person you don't think they're the gender they claim to be", not "don't tell people their evaluation of your sex doesn't match what you say it is".

"don't tell a trans person you don't think they're the gender they claim to be"

No, this is more "you can think you're [opposite gender] in your own head/in private, but there's no valid reason to do that in public outside of wanting to make it someone else's problem".

Going out and screaming "it's ma'am" in people's faces and insisting that "because I think I'm a woman, that means I get to be classed as one in their sporting events" are, in my opinion, central examples of "making your thoughts other peoples' problems", and is as intentionally destructive/disruptive as publicly announcing you're using hot-or-not on people when they interact with you. (Same thing with casual racism/sexism/ageism, come to think of it.)

Why is this more offensive than ranking people according to academic or athletic ability? Why is this considered offensive, but describing an individual woman's attractiveness is not? Why is putting multiple women onto a single list to compare them worse?

I find this somewhat baffling. There are numerous references to violence against women and sexual assault in the article as though the connection, which I cannot identify, were totally obvious. As fast as I can see, this list is totally innocent and their right to freedom of speech gives them the right to do this.

What’s different in this instance is the systemization of it. Sure, everybody knows men find women varying levels of attractive, but I think keeping a logbook of all the women you know and their rating would generally be considered ‘freak behavior’. (Think of Don Giovanni.)

There are many things that are not inherently bad, but signal some maladaption, and they often involve specifically codifying vague norms. If you found out a friend keeps a ranked spreadsheet of everybody he knows, and writes down his judgements of all their actions, that would be understandably off putting. Sure, it’s something we all do unconsciously, but the very act of making it explicit causes problems.

The connection to sexual violence likely comes from the ‘unrapable’ label. It’s clearly implying that the boys are contemplating the ‘rape-ability’ of their classmates. Even if it is an edgy joke, it’s absolutely unacceptable from a school’s (and likely parents’) perspective. The same spreadsheet ranking them from 1-10 would still warrant action by the school, but likely wouldn’t reach national news levels.

Sure, it’s something we all do unconsciously, but the very act of making it explicit causes problems.

Like what? I agree that it's weird, but I don't see anything wrong with it.

Because it prevents you from having a normal social connection. That type of thing is best mediated through interpersonal contact, because that’s how we evolved to deal with it.

It’s one of the reasons people behave radically differently online than they would in person.

Same reason why women can denigrate men based on their height but men can't judge a woman based on her weight, even though one is a mutable characteristic and the other is immutable.

For a woman, a lot of her social status and worth does stem from her appearance. To insult a woman's appearance, or to even rank her lower relative to her peers in terms of attractiveness, is to denigrate her very existence. Their looks determine who they get to date, who becomes friends with them, and how people treat them. A woman's academic or athletic ability relative to her peers is not as important since women aren't competing with each other on the basis of academics or athletics, especially when it comes to the dating market. Also, women are more neurotic and take these things more personally than a man would. A man that complains women call him ugly would be labeled a loser and an incel. A woman complaining is a victim that needs protection, and being a victim (only for women and minorities) gives you social brownie points nowadays.

Notice it's not really men pushing against this sort of ranking, it's mostly women. The only men that do are male feminists or men who have to criticize in lieu of reputation harm.

Why is this more offensive than ranking people according to academic or athletic ability?

Because all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

their right to freedom of speech

Australia recognizes no such right. Also, the people who made the list are generally recognized as subhumans [due to their age], so nobody's expecting them to have rights in the first place- the hysterics are because lists like that are hard evidence the brainwashing campaigns were ineffective.

Don't all countries with legal systems based on the English common law have freedom of speech?

In Australia we have 18C. Speech is free so long as you're not racist. Plus we have pretty aggressive anti-defamation laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_18C_of_the_Racial_Discrimination_Act_1975

English law doesn't even recognize that concept; the US's notion of protecting it was a reaction to it being non-existent.

Later nations gesture vaguely at the concept, but if it's in their law, it's always explicitly prefaced with "unless we really don't want to".

That's not true. There was a debate in the US over even including the bill of rights because those rights were considered to already exist and it was worried that including it would imply rights not listed did not exist.

In Canada, our Charter of Rights explicitly lists "freedom of expression", but there was also a law passed earlier recognizing an already existing "freedom of speech" and there are court rulings stating that this already existed as a quasi-constitutional right emerging from English common law.

In Canada, our Charter of Rights explicitly lists "freedom of expression"

S. 1 of the CCRF is the explicit "everything after this section is functionally meaningless" part. It's difficult to miss, being at the top and all. And if that wasn't enough, there's S. 33 (which normally gets used for provincial vs. federal slapfights).

and it was worried that including it would imply rights not listed did not exist.

Well, given how they treat the rights that are listed...

What I'm saying is not true is your assertion that the US's notion of protecting freedom of speech was a reaction to it being non-existent.

English law does recognize the concept, since it’s part of the ECHR which is British law. But the ECHR does caveat hate speech, dangerous speech and so on.

But the ECHR does caveat hate speech, dangerous speech and so on

Yes, that's what "no right to free speech" means.

Sure, but that isn’t no understanding of free expression, it’s just a different one. For most of the history of the US states had various laws banning various kinds of speech, so did the federal government during the wars. Absolute free speech is a 20th century interpretation of the first amendment.

Fun fact - women are way way more critical of other women's appearance than men. In men's category waist, normal weight, clear skin - and you are stable 7. I had some of my female circle declare a 20 year old, tall, blonde, cute, normal weight, nice ass, blue eyed, B-C cup that I was interested in as completely unattractive because of her - wait for it - slightly bigger than average nose. She was also very nice/polite and smart.

And they will tell me that we are objectifying women. Yeah right.

That’s partially because women are more neurotic and partially because they’re competing for men. Men can be pretty harsh on each other and themselves if they’re neurotic and insecure about attracting women, see incel forums obsessing over shoulder to hip ratios and canthal tilt and jawline mewing and cheekbones.

Like men, women often misjudge what the other sex is attracted to (for example most men prefer women who have thicker hourglass bodies, like Sydney Sweeney or Christina Hendricks, to rail thin models, and most women prefer a guy with lower bf% to a roided beefcake type), but I don’t think most women are delusional enough to think a 20 year old skinny tall blue-eyed blonde woman unattractive to men.

To be fair, canthal tilt is a really big deal (and yes mine is that of a god).

most women prefer a guy with lower bf% to a roided beefcake type

Since "low bf%" and "roided beefcake" are not mutually exclusive, this is an interesting view into the female view of men.

By roided I don’t just mean bodybuilder physique, I also mean the distended stomach, like what Joe Rogan has which people say is a result of steroid use. Muscles help but they’re not a significant factor as long as he’s neither skinny fat nor actual fat. Henry Cavill is hot because he’s tall and has a great face, if he had the physique of a runner or something it would make minimal difference, that was my point.

The pot bellies are a result of HGH abuse.

Henry Cavill is hot because he’s tall and has a great face, if he had the physique of a runner or something it would make minimal difference, that was my point.

I don't think this is true. He's got a large, wide frame that he'd continue to have even if he had a runner's physique, and women like large frames. If he was about a foot wide in the shoulders nobody would think he's attractive.

John Hamm is a good example of this. He's a handsome guy and looks good in a suit because he's got a large frame. His actual physique is similar to a sack of potatoes, but it just doesn't matter (yes, it never even began for framecels).

Both Hamm and Cavill are "face attractive" hall of famers, as well.

I agree with everything said about frame size. Add in above average height (that mythical 6' barrier). With those basic ingredients, your next step is building a social status and generally signalling competence and potential (good career, respected by beers, etc.) There are interesting memes that float around the gym-bro internet (these are my people) the hint at the enduring loneliness even after years of "looksmaxxing." Lots of this is tongue-in-cheek, however, the hinted at truth is that, beyond a basic level of fitness, you hit diminishing returns quickly save for those women who really geek out over biceps or something. Especially as you round 30, you need to have all of the "longer term" attributes going as well - career, social life, etc.

But then there are the likes of Cavill and Hamm. These dudes won the genetic lottery. Hamm is notorious for his dad bod. But his face is so epically GOAT'ed (as the kids say) that I think he's largely responsible for the phenomenon of women saying they like dad bods. Think about it - it's not so much a woman saying she wants a dad bod as saying "If he looks like John Hamm, I don't care about him going to the gym." Pretty girl privilege is real, but I also believe that four-standard-deviations-of-handsome privilege is also real for men. I mean, that's the whole plot of John Hamm on 30 rock

you know what they say: in America, first you get the frame, then you get the respect of your beers, then you get the women.

Lots of this is tongue-in-cheek, however, the hinted at truth is that, beyond a basic level of fitness, you hit diminishing returns quickly save for those women who really geek out over biceps or something

This is a better stated version of what I was trying to say.

Yeah I agree, broad shoulders are important too.

Adolescent boys doing something awful and insensitive(and it was) is not a major news story, so I think this is being promoted to fit the narrative.

We see the same thing in the US with anything that can be spun as anti black or police brutality.

If the major objective of a system is to protect the interests of the powerful people that lead the system, then it is logical to say that a feminist society exists to protect the interests of women, and that means protecting them from one of the worst sins, the attack against the faux-equalitarian women's morality system.

It is all longhouse, all way down.

No. It implies that any girl rated higher on the list might receive consideration for rape by someone.

(But in reality, it's just used because "fuck" has lost all its sting, so "unfuckable" is no longer edgy enough)

I would wager that the point of this story is to shame Australian men in such a way that they fear male camaraderie. The story creates a fearful negative association with male solidarity, as when men get together they often discuss women. If men in a Western country decided to form male-only groups, this poses a problem to feminism — which then poses a problem to globalism and progressivism. The act of men getting together to judge women would greatly reduce feminism, promiscuity, all sorts of things, which may be seen as problematic.

Anyway, if Australia wanted to tackle gender violence, they need to do something about their aboriginal problem, because they are “32x more likely to be hospitalized due to family violence”. Next they would want to study their Somalian population, and possibly reduce all migration from that country. After that, eliminating alcohol culture would be the best big step.

The Australian govt is great at doing things with Indigenous issues, there's no shortage of activity! Only results fail. We shuffle the welfare system around from time to time. Cashless to non-cashless benefits and back again, trying to lower the drunkenness and violence. Every so often we put down a youth curfew in horrible places like Alice Springs and the Northern Territory. When the Right was feeling brave they tried a big crackdown. When Left were feeling brave, they tried for a referendum to enshrine indigenous legal bodies in the constitution. Nothing worked, though I'm sure many public sector jobs were created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Territory_National_Emergency_Response

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Australian_Indigenous_Voice_referendum

My annoyance with some of the other issues here aside, what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime? Men killing women seems to have basically two main categories - partner violence and random violence from serial killers or impulsive psychopaths. The latter variety is about as looked down on and prosecuted as reasonably possible and the only thing you can really do to go even farther is being quicker to lock up psychopaths and never let them out of institutions. Partner violence could maybe be addressed by being quicker to lock up men found guilty of these sorts of violence. I quite literally cannot imagine that a more scold-heavy culture would improve either of these.

If you want to lock up obviously violent men, that's fine, the broader right will probably be happy to work with you on that. Be prepared for the usual socioeconomic splits though - this is mostly not actually a problem of posh teenagers snapping and killing their girlfriends. If you're not willing to lock up violent people, there is pretty much nothing else that's going to have any meaningful effect.

My annoyance with some of the other issues here aside, what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime?

It makes sense if you hold to the belief in strict blank-slateism.

My annoyance with some of the other issues here aside, what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime?

It's classic anxiety behaviour. When one is worried about X, but doing something about X seems hopeless, then worry about Y instead, provided Y seems X-ish and it seems like progress on Y is more optimistic. Politicians are under pressure to do something about women being murdered. This is something, and it's "kinda about" women being murdered, or at least violence against women, or at least implied violence against women, or at least violent words about women, or at least nasty words about women. By the supposed transitivity of "aboutness", that's about women being murdered.

what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime?

Their response, if you could get down to the heart of the matter, would be: the thought that everything is stuck like this forever, that nothing will ever change, is too much to bear. So we have to believe that more education and more feminism and more shaming will fix all the problems, for the sake of our own sanity.

The response and escalation of this whole thing is completely disproportionate and seems to be part of the recent 'Violence against Women' moral panic.

Frankly I find it pretty disgusting that the politicians and media have used this to get some easy free points at the expense of minors. Meanwhile kids are running around stabbing people and it doesn't draw the same level of vitriol that these boys did for their poor choice of category names for their ranking system.

Edit: Two of the boys have now been expelled. Can't really blame the principal once it exploded in national media, but I think this should have been a suspension at worst.

Another aspect of Australian life in which feminist ideology is given an outsized influence is this list of video games banned there, which doesn't cover even all cases of questionable Australian censorship authorities decisions. Atelier Totori was in other jurisdictions given at most a T rating, was in Australia rated as 18+, with the justification famously being "High Impact Sexual Violence". Some are RC'd due Australia's drug prohibition extending to fiction, but others for depiction of apperence of minor sexuality. Determination of who "appears to be, a child under 18" is subjective and fraught with many issues including racial bias, as a 25 old Anglo is on average more visually and vocally distinct from a 15 year old Anglo, than a 25 year old East Asian is from a 15 year old East Asian. Anime artstyle compounds this problem as it has less age indicators than a realistic one, meaning that if one determined to get a game or anime banned, it is harder to find evidence characters are of age.

Hilariously there have even been cases of works of art intended to viewed by women, such as "otome" games, deemed to be offensive to what is thought to be an interest of women as a class, Refused Classification and thus banned.

Further evidence of its feminist alignment is the censorship of materials of adult materials, featuring confirmed adults, if by some arbitrary criterion they are deemed to look too young. Why is this evidence? Because men do but women do not place a premium on youthful features.

As for the alleged mass murder of women epidemic in Australia: in 2022 and 2023 (ignore the irrelevant graph which depicts only a subset of homicides, look at the table) 168 men and 72 women were murdered there. "World Ends, Women Most Affected" doesn't capture the extent of pro-women bias in what is deemed relevant by the media, at least this (obviously ficticious) headline implies both men and women were harmed in equal measure, the present scare takes the less victimized gender and makes it the primary victim.

From the article, it is clear that the rate of both men and women being murdered by intimate partners has decreased by a factor of about two since the 1990s.

To be sure, of the 0.45 Non-Indigenous women killed per 100k, 0.32 are killed by an intimate partner, who is very likely to be male. I am not sure what could be done about that, though. Encourage more women to join gangs so that they are more likely to be killed in gang warfare, like presumably the males (for whom the murder rate is twice as high, but only with a small fraction being perpetrated by intimate partners)?

In general, the price we pay for freedom is that sometimes people elect to do bad stuff with it. In theory, we could save a few women's lives by outlawing heterosexual relationships or locking up all men. In practice, that would not be worth it on a QALY basis.

If being murdered is among the ten leading causes of death, then we could consider talking about an epidemic. Traffic deaths are between four and five per 100k. We should roughly care five times as much about that than we care about murders (which should still not be a lot).

Also, Indigenous women are murdered at six times the rate of their non-Indigenous peers!!111 Should the intersectionist woke crowd be all over that fact?

You’ve blocked me, so I don’t expect a response, but how is not wanting underaged girls depicted sexually in video games a “feminist” thing?

Think back 10, 20, and 30 years and recall that this has a never been a partisan issue, let alone a predominantly leftist demand.

I admit to having never played Atelier Totori and have only played about 10 minutes of Atelier Sophie, but I'd be very surprised if any Atelier game had "high impact sexual violence"...

It absolutely is a leftist demand, but it only applies to things that aren't western. Anime style can only be attractive to people who are pedophiles. Therefore anyone attempting to be attractive in anime style is appealing to pedophiles. When I think back 10-20-30 years nobody would give a shit about this at all. Sailor Moon would be re-edited for American audiences now with more modest clothing and all sexual innuendo changed to say "pickles... .. ... farthead" or whatever they change many modern japanese translations to say.

Because it doesn't matter it's just a videogame or an anime and only children watch those and if you watch or play them you're a child and probably a pedophile if you enjoy anything not western.

This is a huge vibe I get from literally anyone trying to crusade against "underaged girls" being exploited in the videogames. Of course they'd never say that but every other aspect of their political and cultural bent is left, they just happen to also think that underage anime girls presents some kind of major moral issue because they're fighting pedophiles.

Not many people gave a shit about trying to censor American Beauty and those that did certainly aren't the same people that give a shit about a 100% more tame anime visual novel coming out now that will get rejected from steam while "Hitler rapes all the milfs" will be sold without problem. A japanese visual novel will get rejected from steam for an underage girl wearing a towel for a scene but a western visual novel about underage siblings engaging in incest and cannibalism, that's fine, the art style isn't even anime. Or even outside of mainly sexual content something like the Witcher or Cyberpunk is fine for twitch but I can guarantee if the characters were anime-looking it would be banned, or maybe if they were simply produced outside of the western-okay-to-be-sexual sphere and anime-looking is just a happenstance.

Sure there are some hardliners that don't want any sexuality in anything and will side with the crusaders but the crusaders are faux fighting pedophilia and they're almost entirely left wing. Why? I don't know in either case but the only people that I've encountered that care and are happy when steam bans a visual novel that has like a two second scene of an "underage" girl in her underwear are all left wing, to the point that it's most of their commentary on reddit dedicated to it.

When I think back 10-20-30 years nobody would give a shit about this at all. Sailor Moon would be re-edited for American audiences now with more modest clothing

You are unfamiliar with Sailor Moon censorship. And they actually did edit the art during the transformation sequences.

a western visual novel about underage siblings engaging in incest and cannibalism

If you’re talking about ‘ The Coffin of Andy and Leyley’, then the two title characters aren’t minors. They’re both in their twenties.

So, are 99% of the "underage" anime girls.

It’s not a game where they have a warning “all these characters are over 18” despite being set in highschool.

Not only is their age stated during the course of the story, they are shown being spoken to as if they’re adults by their own parents. When they visit their parent’s home, the mum makes it clear she doesn’t either of them to move back in.

Their design IMO doesn’t strike me as appearing obviously underage. Based on the art style they look like young adults to me.

When they visit their parent’s home, the mum makes it clear she doesn’t either of them to move back in.

In non-Anglo countries people leave their nest later. In Poland, on average, if the mum expected they would back in, it would merely mean they are under 27.4. A test which expects such autonomy from characters to consider them adults, would have a high false negative rate when applied to media not produced in the Anglo cultural milieu.

This ties to my point that "perceived to be a minor" is culturally dependent and subjective.

Huh? The point is that they’d have to at least be legal adults for the mum to be saying that. The reason the mum wants them to fuck off is cause the daughter is a fucking psycho who the mum doesn't want to be around. It doesn’t really matter if they come from a culture where they normally kick their kids out at 18 or 30.

Yeah, and it shouldn't matter either way. If you think it's important to tease apart the minutiae of this example in defense of something that is clearly not pornography then I'll take this conversational detour as an agreement that people deciding that things need to be censored or banned based on a passing familiarity with the content should be ignored.

Maybe you're thinking of some particular subset that I'm not, but not that I've seen? Anime loves high-school, so a lot of characters are 16-18, and a fair number are 13-15 too. Reddit famously once (temporarily) banned subreddit mod holofan4life for posting a picture of Kaguya from the romantic-comedy Kaguya-sama in a bikini. (Presumably for "sexualizing minors" either because she's 16 at the beginning of the show or because her breasts aren't big enough.) Outside the school settings ages still tend to be pretty young and often feel like they were chosen at random, Yoko Littner is canonically 14, though it's not mentioned in the show. I'm less familiar with videogames but I think a lot of visual novels have school settings, and the characters in the aforementioned Atelier Totori range from 13-17.

Of course, the same is true for whole swaths of western media, like the teen sex comedy genre of movies, or teen dramas, both of which can have outright sex-scenes without anyone of note screaming about how that makes them "child porn". Some media from SJW-adjacent people will engage in the ridiculous business of deliberately writing characters to be 18+ because they believe it would otherwise be immoral to depict them sexually, but it's still not a mainstream taboo. Now, I think SJWs would probably go after those if they could get away with it (and probably have something to do with there being less teen sex comedies nowadays, though mostly for other reasons), but they're too obviously mainstream to act like they're doing something weird. Anime-style media is an easier target because any free-floating feeling of weirdness can be converted into talk about how something feels "creepy" for "sexualizing minors", without consciously thinking about how the same standards would apply to western media that doesn't feel "creepy".

My experience with this, mainly, are games that are refused from steam without explanation. This happens every few months and sometimes the people in them are children in a towel or underwear but sometimes there's absolutely no one underage in them at all. The tinfoil theory is there's someone that approves games on steam that thinks all anime games are pedophilic in nature. Maybe that's true or not there are quite a few people that are always commenting about how happy they are that steam is trying to put a stop to this stuff and they're always "SJW" when I look at their profiles. They do seem to think that even when the age is changed that it is simply a fig leaf like the little girl who is a 500 year old dragon. Which, to me, suggests that it doesn't matter what their age actually is because they think something drawn underage is underage. Though how they can tell the difference between a 17 and 18 year old anime girl is unknown to me.

The tinfoil theory is there's someone that approves games on steam that thinks all anime games are pedophilic in nature.

Per one of the VN translation companies, there does seem to be one particular reviewer ("Mary") who is disproportionately involved in visual novels that get rejected.

This arbitrariness in the enforcement of the acceptance guidelines combines with Steam's policy of not allowing edited re-submissions means that the process for publishing or translating an 18+ game on Steam looks like this:

  1. Do all of the work on your game to create the finished product
  2. Submit the finished game to Steam and hope that it doesn't get rejected, because if it does you're locked out of that market for this particular game unless you're a really big name that has enough influence to get an exception to the "no re-submissions" policy

Yes, I've heard about examples like that as well where the characters aren't even underage and there isn't even any real justification for calling them underage, and obviously they are a particularly telling example of the censor's mindset. (I'm reminded of how Patreon will periodically go after anime-style porn, like this pornographic animation of Hex Maniac, based on criteria that would include anything in an anime art style.) But I wouldn't call those cases the vast majority, a lot of censored visual novels are high-school romances and the like. It's just that standard is unjustifiable as well.

Looking at actual legal policy passed by politicians, the principle piece of legislation seems to be the PROTECT Act, which, among many other things

Prohibits computer-generated child pornography when "(B) such visual depiction is a computer image or computer-generated image that is, or appears virtually indistinguishable from that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct"; (as amended by 1466A for Section 2256(8)(B) of title 18, United States Code).

Okay fine, but that act includes lots of other provisions. Fine, how about the previous Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996? I literally cannot find a record of a vote (if that sounds impossible, please, somebody show me up). I can, however, find the court case that ruled it unconstitutional.

The majority had 3 Republican justices (Kennedy, Stevens, Souter), and 2 Democrat (Ginsburg, Breyer), and one concurrence (Thomas (R)).

I find these examples more convincing than your vibes and lived experience, so I'll reiterate: being against virtual child pornography sees bipartisan support.

You're arguing about something that nobody was even asking about. The people that care about "underage" character in videogames have nothing to do with court cases. I honestly don't even understand how you even make that connection with what I said and someone talking about Australian games that are classified "poorly" or refused classification and court cases/laws from the United States. I'll trust my vibes over your info that is not about anything either I or the above comment were talking about.

Yes, I consider actual legislation passed to be more relevant than your vibes, simply because I never consider vibes relevant. A poll demonstrating that Republicans think virtual child pornography should be legal would certainly be even better.

Yes, the fact that I'm citing American legislation is off topic to what some@ was talking about, but it's perfectly on topic as a response to your comment, which discussed American audiences, an American film, and generic redditors, but never mentioned Australia.

To be clear, I wasn't passing on "vibes" that was your word I repeated and should have put quotes around. I was telling you that people interested in this moral crusade are left leaning based on my experience. Though, now, I entirely understand why that other person blocked you because you argue in bad faith by continually misrepresenting others' words to "win" an argument. No, the legislation that deals with child pornography has absolutely nothing to do with videogames that may or may not portray a child or child-looking adults as having anything sexually related at all as being the equivalent of pornography. Nobody is actually talking about pornography but you because you don't understand what we're talking about or are actually trying to misrepresent what we're talking about. The entire crux here is shit like "that anime girl's 17 and wearing thigh high boots, this is clearly sexualizing minors" even people that want to stamp this stuff out don't actually refer to it as pornography.

not wanting underaged girls depicted sexually in video games

That's the motte.

You don't want women to get raped as a result of wearing immodest clothing, do you?

I'm confused -- whose stance are you attacking?

I'm illustrating the motte-and-bailey by analogy.

"I don't want CP in video games" is the motte. "This particular censorship is desirable, at a minimum" is the bailey.

I think that the issue with "unrapeable" is that it is not a tag that was applied to all of the classmates, the implication being 'the primary thing that keeps us from raping people (apart from strategic concerns regarding law enforcement) is people being ugly'.

If the boys had rated their classmates on a scale of one to ten, this would still be in poor taste imho (as it would be if the genders were reversed, like in that South Park episode), but probably not make national news.

Also, the one-dimensional scale of female attractiveness is certainly an oversimplification. Looking at porn categories, I think it is safe to say that while there is a common axis of attractiveness, there is is also a lot of variation in preference among men.

Finally, your physical attractiveness should mostly matter in so far as your goal is to bang all your classmates or find a partner who prefers a high status mate to underline their own status among their peers, neither of which sound like very worthwhile goals.

it would be if the genders were reversed, like in that South Park episode

You don't think many teenage girls rank male classmates?

I remember ranking boys in terms of cuteness (albeit ordinally rather than quantitatively) being a repeat conversation among some girls from age about 11 onwards. How else can you work out which boys you can date without getting bullied?

If the boys had rated their classmates on a scale of one to ten, this would still be in poor taste imho

Why is it in bad taste for men to rate women's attractiveness?

It is bad taste for any group whose primary purpose is not a dating pool to systematically rate the hotness of that pool, no matter the gender.

These lists tend to become common knowledge, and some people will end up on the bottom part of the list or being rated an average of 1.3 out of ten (but people -- especially people going through puberty -- might also be uncomfortable being rated really high). If the victim had actually asked to be rated, this would be different, but in all likelihood, they do not prefer an supposedly objective (it's a number! numbers don't lie!) rating of their hotness to become common knowledge.

The outcome of these lists is not so different from writing "X is an ugly pig" on the blackboard. As that is bullying, I would classify creating such lists as at least likely to lead to bullying.

Writing "X is an ugly pig" on the blackboard is writing it where X is likely to see it. The list was private and only exposed to the public by the authorities.

Men like discussing who is hot. There is no expectation that everything you say in a private or semi-private space becomes public. Your argument becomes close to saying that ranking any human attribute is in bad taste, because someone ends up at the bottom, which is bullying.

If the victim

People discussing whether you're hot (or ugly) does not make you a victim.

I think the bad-tasteness of it depends on the group size. Three people can keep a secret (if two of them are dead) and all that. If three boys want to spend their time fantasizing about their classmates, that is very different than if three quarters of the class participate in the ranking, in my mind. (I don't know what the participation rate for that spreadsheet thing was, I am trying to make a general point.)

I don't think having rankings is necessarily bad taste. I am fine with men ranking porn stars (or participants of a dating show) by their hotness, or athletes by their speeds, or competitive eaters by how many burgers they can eat, or students by how well they did on their last math test (even though I would prefer to just tell everyone their outcome and the overall statistics in that case). In all these cases, the ranking is kind of relevant to the job. Don't want to be judged by your genitals? Then don't become a porn star.

I agree that not every inappropriate ranking implies bullying and victimization. If the bottom of the list gets rated a 4/10, the whole endeavor would still be slightly ill-advised, but victim-free. (Some feminists might disagree with me here, whatever.) If half the class coordinates to agree on an 1/10 rating for one classmate especially based on politics and this strongly influences how they subsequently treat them, that would be bullying.

Your argument becomes close to saying that ranking any human attribute is in bad taste, because someone ends up at the bottom, which is bullying.

It's been awhile since I was in elementary school, back in the previous century, but even that far back, the whole "self esteem" program we were subjected to pretty much endorsed something like this — you're great just the way you are, nobody is better or worse than anyone else, everybody's equally special in their own way ("which is another way of saying nobody is," to quote Dash Parr), everybody gets a participation trophy.

It's the "equity" mindset, the moral axiom that fairness demands equal outcomes for everyone; the same thinking that, when applied to identity groups, creates our "disparate impact" regime. And to many of its defenders, whether it's true, or even if it's a "noble lie," it's the only thing holding back horrific oppression. After all, you know who else once thought some people were better than others, back in mid-century Germany?

One of the cringiest faux pas of my lifetime was rating every single female classmate in my 7th grade yearbook. Which was then found and passed around.

There was something deeply distasteful about a mid bro such as myself a) exhibiting how thirsty I was for some of my female friends b) quantitatively showing how unattractive I found others. Even for children this was a bit of a bridge too far, I didn't recover socially from it until 9th grade.

Since then I've migrated to a more progressive, binary system in which women are either a 1 or a 0. There's not as much fidelity but it leads to richer conversations about attractiveness anyway.

It is funny, though, how when it comes to ranking attractiveness women are so vicious and unrealistic compared to men.

I also have a far less charitable reading of "unrapeable" than OP - I think it's obvious that it means someone is too ugly to rape. This is still just dumb kids getting together to say stupid and hateful shit because they have underdeveloped EQ. This has been happening since forever, and it's not a sign of some endemic issue in Australian society. Fuck Marry Kill is a classic game.

Why is it in bad taste for men to rate women's attractiveness?

It has been my experience that if you show (straight) men a group of women (across anything from a IRL social situation to just a set of headshots), they can pretty reliably sort them quickly by their own metrics of attractiveness. The rankings probably won't be identical, and they could change with interaction, but I bet at any given point most men, even those not looking for partners, are at least aware of who they find the most attractive woman in any given room.

But it's also generally verboten to discuss the rankings themselves in mixed contexts, and even most of the time in male spaces. But I have occasionally been party to discussion of rankings of celebrities. I would be curious of (straight) women think similarly, but I have no real information to go on.

I think your last paragraph gets to the heart of the matter. Attractiveness is tied very tightly to status, particularly for women. When men are ranking women's attractiveness, their rankings are pretty close to openly articulating the status rankings of the women in question - ranking someone last in a group is basically the same thing as just outright saying, "I think she's a loser and not worthy of the same respect as the other women". When this is done with people are members of a near-group (or worse still, a friend-group), it's a fairly aggressive action to take. On the flip side, this is why ranking celebrities can be fun even in a mixed-gender group - no one has to be personally invested in it in the same way. Of course, everyone basically knows where they stand anyway, but it's rude to say it outright! If you had a group of guys where one buddy was unathletic and low-income, everyone in the room would know he's low status, but it's still a dick move to explicitly point it out.

This gets at the heart of it. It's not that it's unusual to rate people by attractiveness, as everyone does that implicitly if not outright explicitly. But people still don't like that it occurs, and some people will be rated lower which when combined with humanity's natural "MUST PROTECT WOMEN" impulse creates situations like this, where an entire country explodes at the very normal behavior of some random adolescent boys.

We ought to interpret “unrapeable” more charitably as “even a driven (evil/damned) rapist would pass up the opportunity because of how ugly she is”. There is no indication that the boys have formed some some crypto-pro-rapist organization which hides their aspirations by including the word “unrapeable”. That is too uncharitable to consider. It’s like, if I say I wouldn’t eat your cooking even if I’m starving, I am not making a positive value claim about the state of being starved.

In the feminist mindset, rape is an expression of power, not an act of lust, and hence it is quite disconnected with a woman's attractiveness.

In the feminist mindset, rape is an expression of power, not an act of lust, and hence it is quite disconnected with a woman's attractiveness.

Yeah but like, they're wrong.

rape is an expression of power, not an act of lust

You know I used to think this was nonsense (along with its stronger and more generalized form, "sex for men is about power rather than lust"), but the more time I spend thinking about the way that different men conceive of and relate to sex, the more I start to think there's some truth for it.

If you look at any of the "redpilled manosphere" guys - Rollo, Andrew Tate, Fresh & Fit, anyone in that milieu - I think it's clear that they view women first and foremost as an economic resource to be managed and optimized, and the pleasure that they derive from their own status as an "alpha" is more central than the pleasure that they derive from the woman's body itself. In fact a man completely losing himself in the thrall of pleasure while in the presence of a woman would be viewed with suspicion - he's a simp, he's unmanly, he doesn't know how to control himself, etc.

I think it's true of how some men think of sexually relating to women. Also some women: a lot of romance novels are explicitly about emotionally subjugating a powerful man, with a "he gets down on his knees and begs" scene being a very common trope of the genre. Not so much "civilizing a bad boy into a mature man" as "having control over a bad boy".

IIRC, romance novels are disproportionately read by middle-aged women and AFAIK Tatism appeals to low status/young men. Two of the bottom feeder groups of their respective sexes, who fantasise about debased devotion of a partner in the absence of perceived opportunities for healthy romantic fulfillment. The equivalent submissive pathologies are femdom pornography for men and rape fantasies for women, both of which seem to be largely a matter of despair at forming a mutually loving connection.

but probably not make national news.

Wasn't there a case of someone merely rating classmates making national news? I have a dim memory of such. At a university iirc.

Context: Australian media and govt have been panicking about male-on-female violence for a few weeks now. We recently had a mass stabbing by a mentally ill man, who targeted mostly women. Accordingly, male on female violence has increased statistically and the government has thrown a lot of money at various NGOs.

They are going to use the tragedy to push through vaguely linked changes that they wanted to do anyway. The UK saw the same pattern happen when the government used the murder of David Amess by an Islamist to push laws seeking to censor social media even though this is completely unrelated to the circumstances of the murder.

The majority of murder victims in Australia (and most if not all other countries) are male. But men are treated as disposable, so that doesn't matter.

School children ranking each other on attractiveness is nothing new. Not sure about Australia but here in the states ranking people based on attractiveness made it's way around the news as well previously. As the article points out, this had been happening for as long as people can remember and many people have had personal experiences going across both sexes. Heck, even I had the misfortune of finding out what some girls rated my attractiveness back during high school.

It's just yet another opportunity to bash on men and to push the women are victim narrative that seems to become ever more prevalent.

Interestingly enough /r/TwoXChromosome had a thread on that news and most responses seem responsible: https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/b68zn2/teen_boys_rated_their_female_classmates_based_on/

The responses that seem to say the attractive rating between teens is problematic are actually downvoted.

That being said, this was 5 years ago. I wonder if the average user/demographic has shifted enough that the responses would be different today. There is another post on /r/melbourne about the exact article you linked to: https://old.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/1ckq7hp/private_school_boys_suspended_after_absolutely/

It's a different subreddit so I would expect TwoXChromosome to be more sympathetic to the girls, yet the responses on this more recent story seem to be more full of outrage.

Melbourne is rather leftist and conformist by Australian standards, it's reasonable that they're more feminist than US feminists.

This came up during "the voice" referendum too, which proved to Australian reddit that they live in an irredeemably white supremacist dystopia. It's actually more off the deep end than most of the US city subs.

There was also a similar though more serious scandal in California back in 1993 around the so-called Spur Posse.

Women carry around a nagging anxiety that their own existential authenticity is always in doubt; there is an unresolvable neurosis over the possibility of being reduced to a mere biological function. The fear is that all the rhetoric about girl bosses and shatter-prone glass ceilings and a more egalitarian future really is, at the end of the day, just rhetoric, no matter how many Emmy Noethers and Angela Merkels and Jane Austens dot the pages of our history books.

A man may be a scoundrel and an outcast and a criminal, but at least these are proper symbolic roles - they require the attribution of human agency. If your identity is fully coextensive with the biological function of reproduction, then the worry is that this makes one more object than human - more like the scaffolding that supports the stage, rather than a proper player in the drama.

This is why the threat of "objectification" carries such a sharp sting. I would be so bold as to speculate that this is, in some sense, a trans-historical feature of femininity as such - the division between the human as rational agent and the human as embodied biological organism almost demands a group of people who fall on the wrong side of the divide - and therefore cannot be assuaged by any amount of empirical evidence that women are in fact capable of leading much the same types of lives and engaging in the same sorts of intellectual pursuits as men are.

Calling a specific subsection of women unrapeable is a pretty clear implication that you consider other subsections acceptable to rape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule#Proving_the_existence_of_the_rule

It's not rocket science. Sure, it would't hold up in a decent court, but "acktchyually I said I wouldn't even rape her, why are you upset" isn't fooling anyone.

  • -13

"Unrapeable" doesn't mean "morally unacceptable to rape". It means "unattractive even to rapists". The implication is that the others on the list would be attractive to rapists, but not that the writer would rape them personally.

Calling a specific subsection of women unrapeable is a pretty clear implication that you consider other subsections acceptable to rape

What does "clear" mean here? Reliable? Or subjectively persuasive?

I also think you're probably wrong about the semantics. "Raping Jane is impossible because she's so ugly" doesn't ordinarily imply that "Raping Sally is permissible because she's attractive." That's conflating two different types of modality: moral permissibility and practical possibility.

I think there's an interesting "The Dress" style divide in how this statement is perceived that's basically determined by your belief about whether these boys would rape someone [if they could get away with it]. There's probably a genuine divide between a large number of men who wouldn't and can't conceive that the median man would, and a large number of men who would and can't conceive that the median man sincerely wouldn't, and they are prevented from sizing up each other in part by the circumstance that signalling needs create large sets of those who are in one group but claim to be in the other.

Depending on whether you are a believer that rape is widely accepted (and here the belief about others really seems to matter more than whether you would do it yourself), "unrapeable" sounds either like "I wouldn't take this one for free" (but I would take the others for free - free stuff is good!) or "this wouldn't get stolen if it were left out" (it's not like I'm a thief, but it's so bad that it's beneath even outgroup bad people like thieves).

(I tried and failed to find a realistic instance of something like "the dogs wouldn't eat you if you were thrown to them" being used as an insult, so I have to settle for the weaker point that a hypothetical insult of that type would not be taken as an endorsement of cannibalism.)

Not at all; it's an implication that you consider other subsections vulnerable to rape, that is, desirable. "Unrapeable" says "not even with zero effort or consequences would she get any".

If you're rating on a spectrum, you get "I would put effort into getting laid with this person" as the higher tier, but then there's a tier of "sure, would fuck if an opportunity arose". That's the "rape" tier; it's not saying you want to engage in rape, but that rape is the obvious-to-come-to-mind situation in which their attractiveness would overcome the thus-lowered effort barrier. If there was a rapist in the room, they would rape this person. They would not rape the lower tier - unrapeable - because it would be actively unenjoyable, net negative even if free. "Thanks, I'd rather masturbate."

A less edgy schoolyard way to phrase the same thing is "would pay to fuck", "would fuck if you paid me" and "not even if you paid me."

"not even with zero effort or consequences would she get any"

We can rephrase this in this context simply as "unable to induce an erection".

Calling dog-kidney pie "inedible" is a clear implication that you consider other preparations of dog meat acceptable to eat.

They're children. Maybe some children somewhere are capable of rape, but treating a group of posh high school boys as if they were seriously contemplating violent rape is laughable on the part of the Australian establishment.

The argument was incomplete. It's not the use of unrapeable in isolation that's making the threat. It's the contrast between that section and the other sections. If you made a tier list of food, put dog-kidney pie in "inedible" and all the other dog meats in the other not-inedible sections, it would imply you consider other preparations of dog meat acceptable to eat.

To draw up a situation where the courts would find someone at fault for doing like this, consider a Mafia boss writing a list containing categories like "deal with soon" and "not to be killed" and handing it to a made man. Then, a few weeks later, some of the people under "deal with soon" are dead. This would be evidence connecting the boss to the crime, even though the literal interpretation of the list is that it never listed anyone to be killed, only those to not be killed.

but treating a group of posh high school boys as if they were seriously contemplating violent rape

The reason it should fail is because the threat is non-credible, and being done in private, couldn't have been used to coerce anyone.

You can treat them as if they'd made an overly spicy joke, and they'll wear it as a mark of pride. Or you can put them through the wringer so they'll think better next time. I don't think the second option is more laughable.

  • -13

Think better of what? Edgy offensive teenage jokes? Is this something you think society can or should stomp out?

Obviously they do. Like how is this even a question at this point? By revealed preferences they care about it more than murder. Look at the reaction to the frat bro who dared make fun of a lizzo cosplayer vs the literal Hamas militia.

Or you can put them through the wringer so they'll think better next time.

I'm not too sure it works like that.

It does. Force works for everything, if you can apply enough force. Treat someone who makes a joke as if they're a violent criminal, and they will think making jokes makes you a violent criminal. Brainwashing works.

Well if you had a ranked tier list of dog meat preparations, of which 'inedible' was the lowest rung, that would pretty clearly indicate that those above that rank were edible. In fact it would be necessarily true, as anything that wasn't edible would by definition be in the inedible tier.

"Unrapeable" could just as easily mean "they're so ugly even a rapist wouldn't bother," as it could "they're so ugly I wouldn't rape them". There's not really an equivalent for "inedible", so the comparison is lacking.

Please stick to a single account.

I have multiple? I lost track.

Understood, carry on.

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