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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.

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.