domain:web.law.duke.edu
Terracotta
just now
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about? Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between.
I don't know, she seemed pretty clear to me. Here's the key passage that answers your specific question:
Today, women are invited to succeed, but only as women; to claim rights, but only through the vocabulary of identity.
Regardless of norms in the family or on dates, earlier-wave feminists wanted to not be judged by their gender in the marketplace, in professional and political life. The idea was, as you correctly identify, for a female engineer to be perceived by her colleagues as an engineer first and not "hey, tits!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth."
The author seems to be arguing that the modern left has replaced that interaction with "hey, diversity points!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth." Either way, the individual woman is reduced to a passive carrier of purely instrumental value for somebody else, and (critically) not in ways she herself chosen. She doesn't get to say "my competent engineering, which I've worked hard to develop, is the value I offer the world," because the people around her have already decided that her key value is either (a) tits or (b) decorative diversity points, neither of which redound to her personal credit or are in her control. That's what I take to be her point about self-authorship still being out of reach.
Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate".
Yes, this matches how I read her argument. Although re: the intrinsic value of the male body... this is something I never quite understood about the whole female-privilege "men have to be human doings, women get to be human beings" meme. If a man longs to be passively valued for the fuckable parts of his body, by people he doesn't especially want to fuck, it seems like that should be trivially achievable by hanging out in more gay men's spaces. I'd imagine a comparable range of male body types would be admired there, and pretty young men could get nearly the same mileage a pretty young woman could get. Maybe the target audience is not quite as large, but there are easily identified locales where you'd have solid odds of finding someone appreciative. In complete seriousness, when guys complain that it would be so nice to have a body with intrinsic value in others' eyes, why do they not explore the many places where this is already true?
gattsuru
8m ago
Right now the primary obstacle is that it costs $300 a month to run.
I'm... not sure this is true. I was able to get Companions running for a couple short prompts on my phone without any active subscription. Higher usage is supposed to be locked behind SuperGrok (30 USD/month), and I did get delays on free level. SuperGrok Heavy doesn't advertise any Companion-focused capabilities, instead emphasizing the Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy 'supersmart' LLMs.
((Which makes sense; most workflows I can imagine are closer to a couple nVidia 4090s, rather than the nightmare-mode power that the bigger LLM models can do. It's weird to have text be more expensive than video, for once, but compare WAN local to deepseek local, and maybe it's not as goofy.))
Conversely, I think it's going to be very interestin whether Grok gets booted from the IOS store.
guajalote
10m ago
I am skeptical of using LLMs to critique your writing if you are already a good writer. LLMs are not good writers in my experience, and I have a hard time imagining their critiques will be helpful if you're not making basic mistakes. Can you give any examples of truly useful writing feedback you've received?
Tiber727
19m ago
Trans activists turn this on its head by actively reifying the ancillary gender roles and arbitrary social expectations, particularly those assigned to female people. Rather than claiming "you are a woman, therefore you have to wear skirts and pink clothing", they claim "I like wearing skirts and pink clothing, therefore I am a woman". They thereby reduce the status of "woman" to the ancillary, contingent gender role, the very thing the radical feminists are seeking to abolish. Radical feminists want to deprecate the ancillary, contingent gender roles altogether; trans activists want to elevate them above all else. Perhaps these goals aren't quite antithetical but they certainly aren't aligned with one another.
This is somewhat right, but misses that there's a weird way they are able to internally square the circle, even though it's externally baffling. And that is that gender has a near-infinite number of possible meanings and takes on whichever actual meaning it needs to at the moment. Skirts and liking pink are part of the female gender role, but not necessarily because not all women like them, and some men like them. Wanting to cut off your dick is a sign that you are trans, but not all trans people want to change their body. I've even brought up the point that "if sex is your body and gender is your mind, why is getting surgery called "gender affirmation surgery" if it's changing your body?" and was told that breasts are "gendered." Which is ironic when you consider that they often complain that "woke" means too many things.
There's gender identity, gender identity, gender performance, etc. and new permutations will be added as needed. Simply put, they want society to not impose patterns onto people. They want people to be able to choose any number of these and impose society to engage with these in whatever way the individual wants, and without any of the negative impositions.
hydroacetylene
24m ago
Dogs aren’t really like a human child. They can’t talk, for one.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
26m ago
Or American. It's not an ethnicity, and even Native Americans can be ambiguous.
gattsuru
31m ago
You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation?
Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while.
It's got some other complications going on; even at the free tier, there's a certain level of Animal Crossing going on when you return to the 'companion' mode. I don't think that's devastating yet -- the real place where this goes off the rail isn't going to be when this is more human-like, but when it becomes easier to handle interactions with other humans through it -- but it's a step down a road that has a lot of skulls.
The more clear-headed I think just don't think that the actions needed to stop the boats, and the fight with the blob that it would require, are worth it.
This requires indigenous young men to go out and shoot the people on the boats. They'll stop coming once they know it's a death sentence.
Europe isn't capable of doing that; its old men, old women, and (to an extent) its young women are all in agreement that indigenous young men should be replaced for [whatever reason]. They'll do anything to avoid raising their station in life because they believe they'll revolt as soon as it does, which is not an unreasonable thing to fear given that's when regime change generally happens.
(Well, Eastern Europe still can, but Eastern Europe is poor enough that the migrants won't stay in the country anyway, so it realistically still falls to the Western Europeans to start stacking bodies if they don't want to be invaded.)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
56m ago
At the same time, they're not exactly keen on having tens of thousands of young men who are, at best, drains on the welfare state and, at worse, serious criminals, coming to the country. Especially with the papers carefully documenting every landing.
What's the evidence for this?
The Foreign Service is who runs State (leaving aside the whole appointee issue). I don't know what the downsizing breakdown was. But that's not what we've been arguing.
You need to understand that monetary comp is but one thing people look for in their careers. And that many ambitious and highly capable people optimize for something other than wealth in their utility function. The IQ -> Income correlation is positive, but weaker than merely "smart people do things to make more money." Salespeople, for example, can be talented and wealthy from hard work and charisma, more than being "very capable" in the same dimensions as a biologist making far less money researching some fly.
Inasmuch as the FSOT is g-loaded at all you're getting pretty smart people into the Foreign Service. But you're also getting ideologically self-selected people. Same general issue as much of academia and teaching and government at large.
The funny thing about this is how much of US diplomacy is not carried out by career diplomats. Dang appointees.
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