domain:npr.org
georgioz
6d ago
I think that you are correct but it is also a broader cultural change that is path dependent. The institution of marriage is unrecognizable to what it was in the past, shaming no longer works and family support is not there. Also in the past the situation was symmetric - being put together man who had quarrelsome wife who constantly created drama and conflict with neighbor was terrible for a man with no way out either. Even if he made all the money it is not as if he could just have a parallel life not supporting his family without massive reputational damage to the extent of destruction. Plus the wife also had family and brothers or uncles and so forth - deadbeat man could end up in a very sorry state if he overstepped his bounds and did not fulfil his family duties.
A similar phenomenon came to be after the advent of the pill. If a young men impregnated a young women, everybody knew that he was responsible to marry her shotgun wedding style. After invention of the pill and access to abortion, suddenly it was all on woman. Are you pregnant? Then it is your fault for not taking pill properly, but you can go and have abortion. You still want a baby? Okay, feel free to be a single mom while the man just leaves and does what he wants.
So yes, maybe women being "independent" and doing some clerical work for government with no husband and no kid is the next best thing in current reality where all the norms are obliterated. But it does not mean it is actually good for them or the society.
AvocadoPanic
6d ago
Certainly. It's also likely a proxy for 'class'.
To @crushedoranges question then, I don't believe harlots would lead with their pornography credentials unless their targets are similarly credentialed. Any sex industry involvement is a disqualifyer for many men seeking a wife.
I think attraction to physical characteristics plays a role it can be more subtle than simply having two breasts are like two fawns, twins of the gazelle grazing among the lilies...
There had been 'research' that purported to show men ranked women as more attractive when the women's faces looked more like the men. In my own experience n=1 this is true. Though I did not notice / realize until several other people, friends, family drew my attention to the similarities. Then I saw it too.
If you believe in patriarchy then motherhood was the only way to actually have any prestige. If you mothered successful sons, then you earned status of clan matriarch basically for free due to them. There is a reason why mother-in-law is such a hated archetype especially by women - she achieved the status via motherhood and the bride is there to serve her. There is nothing more dangerous than clan matriarch - some man inappropriately touched some other female as attested by this highly respected matriarch of family? The men of the clan will make sure to defend the honor of the family while the matriarch is sipping her tea on the porch.
Modern women are the ones absolutely fucked. If shit hits the fan, all they can do is call the cops who will ignore them or rant on social media into the void as they are getting robbed by predators. There is nothing more sad, pathetic and useless than childless and bitter old woman.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
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.
sun_the_second
6d ago
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.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
6d ago
FWIW, I was raised (catholic) christian, found his remark about God mostly being referred as Father weird & didn't recognize his Mormonism since it's not very common in Europe. I would have preferred if he had been specific.
Botond173
6d ago
When I think of wokeness, I think of the great cultural turn around 2010 - 2015... Hanania has no explanation for this.
Liberal disappointment in Obama seems to explain most if it, I think. OWS and the Tea Party can be interpreted as repercussions from this.
SlowBoy
6d ago
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.
HaroldWilson
6d ago
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.
KingOfTheBailey
6d ago
I've heard this called a "preference cascade", and I think I first heard it on the Timur Kuran episode of The Portal podcast.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
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.
sun_the_second
6d ago
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.
Tophattingson
6d ago
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.
NullHypothesis
6d ago
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.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
6d ago
Ok that sounds amazing. I need to find this book.
Tophattingson
6d ago
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.
No_one
6d ago
I doubt he’s consciously repeating what they want him to though.
I think you're not serious.
His followers are effectively a horde of shit-flinging monkeys, a staple of jokes "name the jew" types. He sometimes says sensible things, and then tars them by 'jokingly' talking about holocaust denial, which while might be attractive to lower IQ Americans incapable of understanding human nature, is laughable to people with more experience or people who lived in the region, like Europeans.
Yeah, there's a remote possibility that his ego doesn't prevent him from just fading away, changing his name and not harming his cause, but I rather think he's playing a role for the FBI because they need him to play a role.
Botond173
6d ago
There was also a similar though more serious scandal in California back in 1993 around the so-called Spur Posse.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
6d ago
Can anyone here who had an overall happy experience during their primary and secondary schooling comment as to what your experience was like? What type of schools did you attend? How were your relationships with your teachers and peers? How involved were your parents in your schooling?
Thoroughlygruntled
6d ago
I still don't unserstand. Is this some sort of absurdist zoomer meme humor I'm just not going to get? What about the random word salad of buzz words being slightly off makes it funny? It reads to me like an AI attempting to riff off the "don't dead open inside" meme without understanding that it's a visual gag.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
If the weather seemed especially treif/haram this weekend, it is probably due to all these flying pigs. The guardian published an article on antisemitism in the US student protests which actually tries to be somewhat balanced.
They acknowledge that there have been unambiguous incidents of antisemitism.
Then there are gems like this:
“There is a distinction between being unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. It’s very notable to see the discourse around this issue because the right in this country that’s been talking about woke culture, and how young people are snowflakes, are suddenly adopting this narrative around safety, which is really a narrative around comfort,” he said.
“People do not have a right to feel comfortable in their ideas. This is a university. This is a place to challenge people’s ideas. Discomfort is not the same thing as danger.”
Of course, if issue one is "a work of literature containing rape" and issue two is "an Israeli student encountering protesters who say stuff like 'Zionists don’t deserve to live', I have my own ideas which of these I would classify as "making one feel uncomfortable" versus "making one feel genuinely unsafe".
Even so, Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish American political scientist who is a strong critic of Israel, advised the protesters to reconsider the use of slogans that can be used against them. Finkelstein went to Columbia to praise the students for raising public consciousness about the Palestinian cause but he advised them “to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message”.
[...]
Once Finkelstein has finished speaking, a protester took the microphone and led a chant of “from the river to the sea”.
I think that this illustrates nicely how most of the protesters are in it for the signaling value. This is not uncommon, after all, many things we do are mostly for the signaling value. My own position that Israel should do more to minimize civilian casualties while they crush Hamas is probably something a majority of US voters could get behind, but boy is it lackluster from a signaling point of view. A student protester expressing this opinion would not get any respect for their bravery from their peers. On the other hand, calling for an intifada might be utterly devastating to the aims of the protests, but it will earn the one expressing it a lot of respect for being so brave and likely get them laid.
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."
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
6d ago
I broke 1000 pages on War and Peace. I'm going to dump my thoughts about Tolstoy afterward, the way he plays with the question of what is real and what is fake, the concept of society and the layers of power and importance, are fascinating.
My tablet book for boring public meetings is Stranger in a Strange Land. I commented a couple months ago about how after reading Dune I suddenly realized half of A Song of Ice and Fire was ripped off from Dune. Now I'm reading Stranger in a Strange Land and realizing that half of Dune is a straight rip from Heinlein. A specially trained Psychic young man who founds a religion, along with his loyal Water-Brothers, to overthrow a corrupt and sclerotic government. For the most part though, the book is rendered a historical artifact by how it was written. It's set in the near future, and we've reached Mars, but is filled with Mad Men era businessmen and Chandler-esque gumshoe reporters calling secretaries 'Toots.'
Fascinating factoid from the introduction by Heinlein's wife: the germ of the story came from a SciFi magazine Time Travel gag issue, a fan wrote a letter to the editor where he said he had traveled through time and seen next year's issue and here were the Authors and the Titles of their pieces. So the magazine contacted the authors and asked them to write a short piece with that title. Heinlein and his wife dreamed up the outline of Stranger and it expanded until it morphed into a novel, he wrote something else for the magazine.
I also have my old copy of Shogun sitting on my nightstand, between the series and a friend reading it I'm looking up and referencing passages constantly.
On audiobook, I'm listening to Numero Zero by Umberto Eco. It feels at halfway mostly a shorter version of Foucault's Pendulum, with the same theme of the fake accidentally becoming real, so if you like Eco but want something short and punchy it's great. I adore Eco, so even a knockoff is worth it. Sort of like Hemingway with The Old Man and the Sea vs The Undefeated. It's got everything I love about Eco: it's fun and light, easy to enjoy, while also having a ton of depth and intelligence to it. I'd highly recommend it.
Request: a while back someone on here was reading a long book and posting a series about it on Irish history around the IRA and the Easter Rising, what was the book? I can't remember.
I agree. She’s welcome to return at any time, but I imagine she might be too proud for that. If she doesn’t return, it’ll be a deep loss to the forum.
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