Race and gender goes here! Things that are not race and gender go elsewhere!
Already banned people person stays banned, but this comment thread is unmoderated and you can say whatever horrible or boring shit you like without me interfering. Read at your own risk.
I now chant the magic comment-summoning incantation: Elevatorgate! Elevatorgate! Elevatorgate!
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Question: Is (higher average) female passivity socialised or inborn or a mixture?
Proceed to flame-war
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A mixture, of course.
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I’ve always had a theory that people (and probably animals generally) have an evolved tendency to keep track of when those around them are bigger and stronger or smaller and weaker, and to be less aggressive in the former and more aggressive in the latter case (tracking its likelyhood of a conflict going well, of course). And in humans, something that you do more often tends to become a habit, and if people like you are doing it, it’ll be reinforced by the usual imitation mechanisms, etc. I wonder how much of the greater aggressiveness of male humans is due to this, combined with males being generally bigger and stronger.
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Almost certainly at least partially socialized, since there are large obvious forces trying to socialize females to be passive, and it would be astonishing if those forces had no effect whatsoever.
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Not that I really doubt you there, but could you please elaborate on what these forces are?
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Not an exhaustive list, but:
* disparities in what sort of roles/personalities are depicted in male and female characters in media (tv, movies, etc.)
* differences in how children are treated by parents and teachers
* stereotypes of certain professions as male or female
* explicit sexism from conservatives
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Testosterone increases aggression and risk-taking. (experimentally, in both men and women.)
Also, women are pretty much always going to be more cautious because they are smaller and more likely to lose a fistfight. Confidence even in non-violent situations is pretty correlated with size/strength.
Plus, we have social conventions (probably extrapolated from the size/strength difference) that women *ought* to be more docile and conciliatory. Culture has not caught up to a world with guns, let alone a world with low violence.
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I’d be astounded if evolutionary pressures related to mating strategies had nothing to do with it. If women keep their heads down and are passive they will almost certainly have several children; no matter what they do they can never have more than, say, a dozen or so kids. If men keep their heads down and are passive their chance their chance of reproducing is probably much lower than a similarly passive woman, if men win the status/power sweepstakes they can have dozens of kids or even more, and relatives can as well. Genghis Khan had thousands of descendants it seems.
Of course this is all dependent on social arrangements, post law-and-order mass society plus contraception the equation has changed somewhat. But during the period of agricultural empires it seems like it would have been particularly true.
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Not to mention that passivity, like most personality characteristics, is very highly heritable, and therefore subject to selection pressure.
It could be sexual selection, of course — it’s possible that men prefer passivity in women, and have essentially bred them for it. But that raises the question of why men would have such a preference in the first place, and why women wouldn’t have the same one; any explanation I can think of seems ad hoc.
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Everytime I think I understand Social Justice 101, the rules change. Check out the third commercial in this promo for “Dear White People”
Two black guys talk about how “You can’t trust these hoes.” When a white guy agrees that the “hoes” are not to be trusted, the black guys are outraged. Only black men are allowed to call women “hoes”, you see. I’m really curious now: what are gendered slurs are black men allowed to use?
Also, apparently the use-mention distinction doesn’t apply to the n-word anymore. When white guy says “I just thought I couldn’t say nig-OH GOD!” he gets slapped. Apparently the half-mention (mention, not use!) of the n-word followed by immediate contrition justifies simple assault?
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Assault is always justified because Cisgendered males always deserve it.
Besides…
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Black men shouldn’t be calling black women hoes either. That’s the joke. And thus, the racism insurance doesn’t come into effect until the following repartee.
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Wait, so “Nice Guys” are a banned topic, but Elevatorgate is not? 😛
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Unmoderated! You can talk about whatever boring or shitty topics you like, or even Nice Guys, which is both. 😛
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I don’t actually have anything to say at the moment! It just seemed odd especially since the two are pretty related.
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Hm, I hope “unmoderated thread” doesn’t mean “if I post a comment that gets caught in the spam filter awaiting moderation” it will never get through! 😛
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…and wow I screwed up the quotation marks there… I guess “unmoderated” means I can also make contentless comments like this!
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One common (and strong) anti-HBD argument is that someone’s ancestry may be correlated with the environment that they experience, so just correlating ancestry with individual characteristics won’t isolate the causal effect of ancestry. For example, different races obviously live in very different places with very different histories, so naively tabulating racial discrepancies won’t tell us whether the cause is genetic. You can’t just control for the environment, because the environment is too complicated to be fully measured.
However, there’s a very simple-seeming way to get around this: just control for the parents’ ancestry. If your mother is 50% A and 50% B, and your father is the same, that doesn’t mean that you’re 50/50 as well, since inheritance is somewhat random – you could easily be 45/55 or 55/45. This variation in inheritance is essentially a natural experiment – if 55/45 people with 50/50 parents are taller than 45/55 people with 50/50 parents, we know that the difference in ancestry is random, so we can be very confident that population A is actually genetically taller than population B (at least in the current range of environments).
I get why anti-HBD people don’t bring up this idea, but why do so few pro-HBD people talk about it? They seem more confident, and the more confident you are the more you benefit from definitively testing your claim.
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They do talk about it, relatively frequently. Razib Khan. Human Varieties . Charles Murray’s also proposed a stud, though I can’t find the link at the moment. The issue is that it’s politically nearly impossible to get funding for such a study.
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He’s proposed a study, rather. Although proposing a stud would be an interesting contribution to a gender debate.
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How do you determine if someone is 45/55 vs. 55/45? Are you sequencing people’s genomes? Looking for correlation between e.g. skin color and height? If the latter, how do you know that e.g. skin color isn’t affected by the environment?
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Yes, you must do some form of genetic testing. This idea relies on the fact that the genes of the people being studied are independent of their environment given their parents’ genes – so by controlling for their parents’ genes, you also control for all unobserved environmental differences.
It breaks down if genes are being directly selected for in some way – maybe poor nutrition is much more likely to kill 45/55 people than 55/45 people, so 55/45 people are overrepresented among people in worse environments, and it falsely looks like being 55/45 causes you to be short. But in developed countries where young people rarely die, this is unlikely to be a problem.
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There could still be fertility/miscarriage effects; I vaguely remember reading that a large fraction of conceptions end in natural miscarriage.
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Why would miscarriage rates depend on the child’s race?
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In the U.S., miscarriage is significantly more common with African-American mothers. As for why, could be poor prenatal care, poor prenatal nutrition, maternal drug and alcohol use, stress…likely a combination of some of the above.
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@caryatis I meant miscarriage rates that depend on the child’s race even controlling for the parent’s race – for example, if more-black children of black mothers were more likely to be miscarried than less-black ones.
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It’s generally prudent to assume until proven otherwise that any two variables might be correlated. (That’s why controlled randomized trials are so important.)
As to possible mechanisms, the child might be more or less vulnerable to various prenatal-environmental risks.
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How people look affects how they’re treated, so if you want to tease out the effects of genes, you’re still going to have to take appearance into account.
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Racial admixture does provide an interesting natural experiment that could be used to tease apart the nature and nurture of racial differences. This has been often discussed and studied by HBD people. The data are generally consistent with HBD theory but causal inferences are not as straightforward as you suggest. Stronger inferences are possible with certain study designs but so far this research has not been done.
Here’s an overview of this issue by Jason Malloy: http://humanvarieties.org/2013/03/29/cryptic-admixture-mixed-race-siblings-social-outcomes/
From the same blog, here’s a review of associations between admixture and socioeconomic status in the Americas: http://humanvarieties.org/2014/10/03/is-there-no-population-genetic-support-for-a-racial-hereditarian-hypothesis/ The results are highly consistent with HBD theory, but other explanations are possible.
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Miscarriage rates vary by ethnicity in certain environments. The Spanish, for example, in high altitude locations in South America, due to adaptation (or the lack of it) of the placenta compared to the indigenous population.
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Actually, you do get exactly 50% of your genome from each parent, so this won’t work …
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Ok, scratch that, you were talking about two first-generation mixed race parents, which would work, but is so restrictive that you’d get a vanishingly small sample size …
I seem to recall a study of African Americans showing a correlation between percentage of black ancestry and intelligence, which is close to what you’re talking about…
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@Nomophilos, I recall a study of African Americans detecting no correlation between percentage of African ancestry and intelligence. Either there are conflicting studies, or one of us is misremembering (probably there are conflicting studies; there so often are).
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@Protagoras: “I recall a study of African Americans detecting no correlation between percentage of African ancestry and intelligence.”
Please, share. Or as they use to say: “Links or didn’t happen!”. As I recall, Charles Murray asked for a study just like this, but was disappointed that nobody seemed to have the cojones needed for such an endeavor.
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@Anônimo: See pages 3-5 here for a quick summary.
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@Nomophilos It doesn’t have to be first generation parents – any mixed-race parents would work, even if only one parent was mixed. First-generation 50/50 parents would give you the most statistical power, though, since their children vary more in ancestry than the children of more-than-first-generation 50/50 parents.
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@Wulfrickson They were determining ancestry from blood types, since DNA sequencing was not available back then. The ancestry of mixed-race people can’t be determined accurately from a small number of genes, because there are tens of recombination events per meiosis. For first-generation mixed-race parents, that’s tens of regions of genome that independently have A or B ancestry. Even if a blood group gene had a frequency of 100% in A and 0% in B, knowing a child’s blood group gene would only tell you about the ancestry of that region – less than 10% of the genome. Modern genetic tests can do much better, of course.
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Protagoras: Wulfrickson found a paper that lists a few studies if you’re interested, which probably includes those I heard about; so it seems there are studies showing a link between IQ and skin color (which is itself correlated to percentage of African ancestry), and others studies showing no link between IQ and blood groups with different distributions in Europe and Africa, so in conclusion, conflicting studies, all of which seem somewhat inconclusive (skin color may be a proxy for the makeup of ancestry, but it also triggers different social behaviors). So I probably read a recap from HBD site who presented things a bit too positively …
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I’ll bite, let’s trash this thread. This is with quite a lot of tongue-in-the-cheek.
The invocation refers to another nice example of the (ab)use of social justice frameworks to promote one’s status, eliminate concurrents and indulge in sadistic behavior freely. As is typical is such cases :
1) the first targets of the power-grabbers were people with low relative social status,
2) the voices of the always present loud assholes where used to paint with a large brush any dissenter/critic
3) the careful observer will have noticed a sudden change in professed opinions and practices to fit the narrative of the crisis created.
1 is key to feel the waters. Do not worry about punching down, because 2 will allow you to claim large-scale harassment (which may very well be true, but being attacked by assholes does not mean you are right). That might cost you, but you will gain strong allies willfully blind to your abuse. You would think that you need to be subtle for 3, especially if there is a lot of evidence that you just changed your mind, but the allies acquired in step 2 will paint anyone pointing at the evidence as being part of the harassers (and it will be easy, because indeed some will be).
Any comparison with other, older or more recent, crises involving SJ frameworks is of course completely accidental.
(I am a horrible person)
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That may be tongue in cheek, but it also works seriously.
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I assume you are discussing the Requires Hate = Winterfox = Benjanun recent thing. Making that assumption, the problem is that most of the heavy punching down and extreme abuse of others was done as Winterfox, a completely separate identity that people never knew was Requires Hate.
Requires Hate became famous by attacking a Nebula Award winner, in a way that made a lot of people go, “Well, kinda, yeah.” So, the link from 1 to 2 to 3 is broken by the different identities.
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About Elevatorgate and other similar controversies:
Lots of people express amazement at how immense the blow-up is compared to the thing that started it (See Scott’s “my failed attempt to ask this one woman out is literally a bigger deal than the all-powerful creator of the universe” remarks), but I think I’ve figured it out.
With these gates, the original event almost always isn’t a gigantic deal. Their immense drama-causing potential comes from hitting an issue that pits two large groups mostly unaware of each other’s existence against each other.
Thing happens. Two groups that aren’t really on each other’s radar disagree on Thing. But then, the disagreeing people on the other side become a more tempting target than the original thing. And more people join in. It’s autocatalytic, in a sense. Yelling at the other group causes more people in the other group to join in the fray. And then it goes nuclear.
Put another way, if Elevatorgate hadn’t happened, there would have been some other issue that would have caused a blow-up within atheism, pertaining to women, since it had been brewing for some time, but it wasn’t on most people’s radars.
Are there examples of these autocatalytic drama bombs outside of politics and social justice? I’d love to see them.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair is the historical example that comes most readily to mind. Of course the conviction and imprisonment of a low-level army officer is a rather more significant starting point than being obnoxious/tactless in an elevator, but the ensuing disproportionate scandal shook the whole country, sparked some fatal riots, and delineated divisions in French society that would last for decades. I’m not sure whether this counts as “outside politics” (indeed I think the process you described could almost pass for a definition of “identity politics”), but it’s rather far from tumblr social justice.
Squinting a bit more, the Protestant Reformation, or most other religious schisms, look kind of like what you describe. The differences in doctrine at issue often seem insignificant to an external or modern observer, but catalyse conflict between two groups that turn out to have a lot of other things to differ about, leading to disproportionate bloodshed and political shifts.
Also maybe the Newton-Leibniz priority dispute, which inhibited scientific/mathematical cooperation between Britain and continental Europe for a century? But that seems like even more of a stretch.
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Yeah! That’s a good example.
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If we’re doing religious conflicts, then the way that monophysitism exposed the split between Greek-speaking and Afro-Asiatic speaking (Syriac and Coptic, primarily) peoples at pretty much exactly the moment that Latin-speaking dominance faded with the end of the Western Roman Empire seems like a really good example.
Both Greeks and Egyptians (primarily, but also Syriac-speakers in the Levant) had interacted primarily with Romans. Suddenly the Romans (in the sense of Latin-speakers from Rome, not citizens of the Roman Empire who still called themselves Ρωμαίοι until 1453) had disappeared and the Greeks and Egyptians had to deal directly with each other.
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The Dreyfus Affair had a degree of linguistic precision that is sadly lacking in, say, le affaire de les reproductively viable worker ants.* The main battle line of course was between the Drefusards and the Anti-Dreyfusards, who were basically the equivalent of the Blue Tribe and Red Tribe of 19th century France. But they also made a distinction between Dreyfusards and Dreyfusistes — contrasting the ones who were in it for the larger culture war and the ones who were genuinely interested in Alfred Dreyfus personally.
I suspect it would be useful for clearer analysis to draw such distinctions in modern controversies as well.
*I’m not going to go plug this into Google translate just so the rest of you who don’t speak French either have to as well.
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Oooh, thank you for introducing me to the word “autocatalytic”. I’m going to use that one.
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There’s a possible way to test this theory. Look at Rebecca Watson’s blogging pre-Elevatorgate.
You’d be looking for conflicts or debates in the comments that can be seen as along the same lines as Elevatorgate itself. Not finding them wouldn’t prove anything either way, but finding them would prove that the two sides were at least somewhat aware of each other.
Basically. I can think of two hypothoises:
1) The two groups were previously there but were unaware of each other. Then they noticed each other and Elevatorgate.
2) The two groups were previously aware of each other, and were in low level conflict. Eventually one of these many low level conflicts caused enough drama in a short space of time to hit critical mass, then Elevatorgate.
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I know exactly what you mean, having been something of a follower of the atheist blog community in general before Elevatorgate happened (at which point I pretty much left in a huff).
What was very noticeable was *just how friendly* a lot of the warring parties had been right up until the explosion. Jen McCreight was on ridiculously good terms with several people who within a few short days would be considered her mortal enemies. I strongly remember a long, in-depth discussion between PZ Myers and TheAmazingAtheist of YouTube fame about the relative merits and issues with Myers’ nailing of communion wafers. The discussion wasn’t just civil, it was a discussion between allies on the merits of specific tactics.
All that said, I don’t think that this is a question of two bodies existing unaware of each other. I think this is a question of one body lying quiescent within the larger group until a trigger event catalyses them to attack. Since SJ tactics invariably seem to involve denouncing anyone who doesn’t fervently side with them as being The Enemy, it doesn’t really need to be a situation with two sides; SJWs are more than capable of creating another side from nothing with no assistance needed.
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Speaking as someone who watched that whole thing go down, and not only that, switched from one “side” to the other, that sounds about right. While I think there are ideological differences here at play (egalitarian vs. non-egalitarian..I switched sides when I realized that was the divide and it wasn’t pro-woman vs. anti-woman like I thought) I actually don’t think that was the main dividing point.
I believe that there was a few middling bloggers who thought that a culture war would be progressive for everybody involved and decided to trigger it. (And no, I don’t consider Watson or Myers among them) That adopting the “call-out culture” SRS style Feminism would work wonders for the atheist/skeptic movement. That’s my feeling on the whole thing looking back.
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From a podcast about the Dreyfuss affair, it may not be groups who were unaware of each other– the precipitating incident made people aware that they had strong opinions about something they hadn’t thought about before, and that people within their group didn’t share those opinions.
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I’ve recently noticed that it seems like Scott Alexander frequently fails to apply the principle of charity and use steelmanning when talking about feminist arguments– the discussion of feminist discourses about Nice Guys in “Radicalizing the Romanceless” is one example. This seems kind of strange, particularly since he uses these rules when dealing with neoreaction, communism, and the motherfucking Time Cube. Am I diagnosing this correctly? And is Scott aware of this issue?
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Scott is, to the best of my knowledge, at least somewhat aware of this and provides an explanation here (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/).
TL;DR, since it’s a Scott-length post: Scott had some bad personal experiences with SJ/feminism so he, as a human being, is somewhat biased as a result
(Ozy, if it’s wrong of me to mention this here, feel free to nuke this post)
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As I said above, the thread is unmoderated, go wild. 🙂 And I’m not sure why I’d object to a scottpost link regardless.
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semi-relatedly, would it be possible to add an edit function to comments?
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Oh, I’ve read this essay of his too. What confuses me is that Scott, recognizing this trigger, hasn’t changed his writing about feminism, when either doing something to address his cognitive biases or recognizing that it’s an emotional bad place for him and just not writing about it anymore would be much more consistent with his discursive and epistemological ethics.
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Surely he shows alot of his posts to Ozy. I’m not sure what else he can really do. It also probably doesn’t help that his posts skewering social justice/feminism are uniformly super popular. I personally sort of think Scott should just accept what fate has handed him and stop feeling bad his anti-SJ arguments happen to be so strong and popular among greys. Though of course he should be trying his best not to be unfair, but if he already dating Ozy (and I think Alicorn?) idk what else eh is supposed to do.
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Not writing about something because you’re aware you’re biased about it would result in rationalists becoming significantly less likely to write anything at all the better they became at the practice of rationality. This doesn’t seem like an good situation to me.
In addition, for my part I think Scott’s gone out of his way to steelman and apply the principle of charity. Several of his posts give feminist discourse more credit than it deserves, and there is one post in particular that is very clearly an attempt at steelmanning feminism and SJ as a whole: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/ .
Besides that, though, I can help but feel that this (now multiple times repeated) suggestion that Scott is more vicious towards feminism is something of a canard by people who like his writing but don’t want to have to deal with Good Person A being associated with Not Liking Good Thing B. Quite aside from the affect heuristic issues involved (which should give anyone pause, frankly) I feel like he dealt with it perfectly well in http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ , which remains my favourite post of his, narrowly beating out Meditations on Moloch. In short, being in favour of a specific set of beliefs and against shitty tactics used in aid of those beliefs is not a contradictory position.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting equality and yet being sick to the back teeth of shitty statistics, unpleasant social tactics and frankly awful behaviour in the supposed name of it. One of the few good things about having a bias and being aware of it is that it helps protect you from halo effects surrounding the subject of your bias. I think that’s valuable and should be treasured.
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The problem with this argument is that Scott frequently fails to follow his own rules of civility when discussing feminists– even when he’s making arguments that mostly agree with them! For example, in the Anti-Reactionary FAQ (a highly progressive document), he refers to “the sane 30% of feminists” fairly often. If you consider the range of people who identify as feminist in real life rather than the hundred or so most vocal people on tumblr, far more than 30% are sane. And he doesn’t use that sort of rhetoric when dealing with neoreactionaries or people who favor Soviet-style communism– who are working from much more insane premises– or even when talking about other social justice people (like the ones who advocate for gay or trans rights, or against racism). This sort of rhetoric violates the sort of civility that Scott wants to promote, violates the principle of charity (since it misrepresents a significant group of people), and it makes it harder for him to communicate with people who otherwise agree with him. I suspect that Scott would be able to better satisfy his values by being more careful about being charitable with his rhetoric as well as his arguments.
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Wasn’t Radicalising the Romanceless specifically about how that response looks to the people reading it – and so a charitable view should be avoided in favour of the average (for lack of a better word, mode average btw) view?
Just a response to your example and not your general point.
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Well, I’d rather Scott were in this conversation than not. The reason is this: this is a real issue and people are going to talk about it and (many) geek dudes are not going to read some hard pro-feminist thing, but they will read Scott. If they are not reading Scott, cuz they want to read about this stuff, they will read someone else. Most of the “someone elses” are terrible.
Short version: Scott may be the best on this issue that a “manosphere” dude is willing to read.
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Hm — my take on this is more or less the opposite, that Scott is the best on the issue that an SJer would be willing to read!
I think to explain this, a bit of personal background is helpful: I’m coming from a different segment of geeks, deep within the “blue tribe”. (Like, I used to read PZ Myers all the time.) Where of course you’re a feminist (and agree with whatever they say, despite them disagreeing with each other) because, I mean, you’re not a barbarian, are you? Where the SJer tactics of casting everyone who is even considering disagreeing with them as evil works. And, like, at some level you know something isn’t right here, there’s definitely a lot of doublethink — but you’re not a misogynist, are you?
I get the impression from his writing Scott’s background is similar. To my knowledge the first time he really openly said anything against feminism is his Meditations series[0], and, like, it really shows there. You don’t end up in feminist double-binds, you don’t end up with feminist paralysis, if you are not a feminist! And he seems to have really expected that to blow up in his face.
(…and now I’ve found myself directly on a normally-forbidden topic. Yay open thread!)
So I give Scott a lot of credit, because he is, like, personally responsible for me finally being willing to say “No, this largely doesn’t make sense! I refuse to be guilted with equivocations anymore!”
Because I mean sure, there are other people pointing out the holes in feminism, but most of them are awful. Like either they’re MRAs, who’ve taken all the awful parts of feminism and just reversed the genders, or they’re the “manosphere” sort who are basically just old-school sexists. And in the latter case, the things they disapprove of about feminism are likely to be the things I approve of about it! I mean those aren’t really people that I agree with at all. And even when I encountered Hugh Ristik, who I think is actually really good, and seems to also be coming from a similar position and had similar complaints to what I was thinking, I still wasn’t willing to make that jump and say “maybe something is wrong here”, because he wasn’t close enough, I couldn’t be entirely certain that he was on the right side here.
But Scott had built up credibility as a smart, reasonable, blue-triber, and it was evident he really cared about the ethical dilemmas the feminists brought up. So when he said “to hell with it!” I was willing to follow.
…hence, as I say above, the best on the matter that an SJer would be willing to read.
So if I had to guess as to why Scott isn’t very charitable to feminism, I’d say — because he implicitly assumes, correctly or not, that you’re coming from a similar “blue tribe” background, that you’ve been drenched in feminism your whole life, and you don’t need to hear any more arguments for it, you could recite them in your sleep[3]. He’s the one reversing the advice you’d normally hear.
[0]Archive link to 4th Meditation, for those reading this for the first time, as it is kind of crucial but got taken down (but I asked and he said it’s OK to link to it).
[3]The neoreactionaries seem to also largely be “blue tribe” in background — they’re apostates, not foreigners. Or as Ozy likes to put it, they’re “Satanist progressives”.
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Thanks for this comment! These considerations made me reconsider, and I’ve revised my beliefs– now I think that Scott should continue to write about issues related to gender sometimes, but just be extra-careful to follow his own rules about charity and civility.
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As a feminist, I wish people wouldn’t cede the term ‘feminist’ to the SJ types. Or for that matter, the word ‘justice’.
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I’m mostly Assyrian and therefore fall in the ‘white’ bucket of America’s racial classification system. I’m perceived as white, benefit from a lack of racial profiling, et cetera. But I keep hearing from SJWs that white people never suffer from racism, which is becoming irritating for some of the following reasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Assyrians_by_ISIL
As an experiment, I’m going to start conspicuously identifying as Assyrian whenever I talk with SJWs. I’m guessing being pattern-matched as a member of a victimized (read: non-European) group will make things much easier.
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But I keep hearing from SJWs that white people never suffer from racism…
My usual response to that sort of thing is “try selling that to the Jews and the Kulaks”.
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There is actually serious debate over whether Jewish people count as “White” among – let’s stick with “among people who care who counts as “White”.”
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ISIL is an oppressive group, but it oppresses in the name of an anti-West and anti-European ideology and is hated by the traditional enemies of the SJ movement. So I doubt that being a member of a group oppressed by ISIL will give you much street cred among the SJs.
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The SJW concept of racism also usually involves the claim that only white people can carry out acts of racism. As the vast majority of thousands of European young people who have gone to join ISIL are not considered white in Europe (and wouldn’t consider themselves to be so), their travelling to other countries to carry out genocidal acts against other ethnic groups presumably isn’t racist according to SJ definitions.
In fact none of the current emergency genocide situations globally – Iraq, Nigeria, Myanmar, Central African Republic and Somalia are racist under the SJ definition.
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> The SJW concept of racism also usually involves the claim that only white people can carry out acts of racism.
That is either a weak man or straw man. I struggle to believe anyone remotely credible would say that with the meaning you imply.
The dominant group in an area will be the one who does the oppressing and enforces their social norms (see the Han chinese). I suspect when “only white people can be racist” is used its used implicitly in an American context to mean that members of an oppressed/less powerful group having negative opinions/actions towards members of teh more powerful group is less of a big deal as they dont have institutional power behind them.
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Hard as it is to believe, many people do say this. I remember having a conversation as a graduate student with a black and quasi-Marxist fellow student of mine. He finally agreed that it was logically possible for non-whites to be racist, but maintained that as an empirical fact he knew of no instances.
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There are definitely two camps on this. The first explicitly argue that white supremacy exists globally and is the only form of racism; bigotry exists between ethnic or tribal groups but is not the same thing as racism. I’m not sure who would be considered remotely credible in SJ circles, but plenty of people do explicitly say it.
The second group mean it only within and American/European/Australian context, but they generally say that POC can’t be racist to anyone, not just can’t be racist to white people. I think there are two problems with the second group:
1. They frequently fail to distinguish between the two positions. So will talk about POC uniting against racism to mean all people globally who are not white and how they should be uniting against white supremacy, despite many ethnic conflicts not being about white supremacy.
2. SJW (and indeed many other people) believe that small actions, statements, attitudes and behaviours are a large part of what creates systemic racism. SJW also claim the statements etc of POC (or European equivalent terms) cannot be racist in America/Europe/Australia as the system of the country they are in is white supremacist.
So how does that work with ISIL? If a POC undergraduate is sat at their desk talking to a friend in private in the UK about killing Assyrians, Yazidi or similar is that not part of systemic racism because that student doesn’t have white privilege in the UK? What about if they talk about murder in an online ISIL supporting group, to members who are in Syria and Iraq? Is this systemic racism yet or still just POC voicing their anger against the West’s imperialistic values, who white people should sit down and listen to, avoid tone policing, accept the anger of? What about when they with thousands of others have crossed Europe and are buying guns in Turkey to carry out genocide in Syria and Iraq? Is this systemic racism yet? Turkey is still in Europe. Is it the point at which they actually enter Syria or Iraq? Having left Europe, are their statements and actions now systemic racism? Or what about if as a Mandaean, you leave persecution in Iraq, and are then persecuted by the same ethnic groups in Australia? Were they racist in Iraq but now it is happening in Australia it is no longer racism?
If you can write something on the Internet and it be read by people all over the world, and if thousands of young people can leave Europe relatively cheaply and easily to join genocidal groups elsewhere, it cannot be the case that the creation or perpetuation of systemic racism sits neatly within national borders.
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An example quote, from Judith H. Katz. This would be a credible example of the view that POC cannot be racist to anyone if they are in a white supremacist country:
“…there’s an alternate and widely-used definition of racism that goes like this: We’re all prejudiced, because we grow up in a racist culture and we inherit those prejudices. But racism is a system of institutional, systemic oppression, and in order to be racist, you need both the prejudice + the power to affect people. By that definition, which a lot of progressives share, PoC (people of color) can’t be racist, because they don’t have any reinforcement from that institutionalized power. We may hold individual racist ideas and thoughts, but we only have the power to do damage with our actions in the rare, brief contexts where our other privileges temporarily override color privilege.”
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I’m afraid it’s not a weak man at all. When an SJW says that only whites can be racist because of institutional and context and history, if you point out other countries where, e.g., the Han Chinese oppress the Tibetans, they will not say that they were only talking about America. They will most likely answer with insults, to the effect that you’re racist for even thinking of questioning them; they may tell you about a global history of colonialism (as if seeing your relatives raped and murdered is less bad because at least it’s not Columbus’s doing), or else blame any bad behavior on the part of non-whites on white people setting a bad example.
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Why does it matter if racism is defined as something only white people can do? Surely we can say that x group oppressing y group is *bad* without using the magic word “racism.”
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It matters because of the emotional weight of the word “racism”. It’s like saying “I may have killed him without justification, but I didn’t murder him.”
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Because racial discrimination, racism, racially motivated hate crime and other similar words and phrases are all based on an internationally agreed definition which international human rights law is based on. As such, most people use that definition or something very similar to it when they use the word racism, and are usually subject to laws using the same definition. It is bizarre and perverse to use the same group of words to define something different, and then call everyone else ignorant for not doing the same.
And if SJW really think that racism means just stuff that white people do, why don’t they start a campaign aimed at the UN and similar organisations to change the meaning (resulting in a removal of human rights protections to many people) rather than going around lecturing individuals on the Internet about how they should ‘educate themselves.’
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@ Audrey
Because racial discrimination, racism, racially motivated hate crime and other similar words and phrases are all based on an internationally agreed definition which international human rights law is based on.
Advice on finding that would be very valuable.
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Caryatis –
It matters because it always matters when one particular group in society attempt to push a non-central definition of terms so that they can control the framing of the debate regarding their issues. This isn’t just legally dubious and generally annoying, it’s actively corrosive to anyone who doesn’t actively agree with that group and should always be fought against.
Examples from the other side – “welfare” (shifted to mean social contract/social insurance benefits), “socialism” (shifted to mean literally anything left wing at all, including things Overtonned in the last few years) , “working families” (now refers to middle-class curtain twitchers rather than actual working-class families, at least in the UK) and so on.
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Houseboatonstyx, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination is here:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/CERD/Pages/CERDIndex.aspx
The original Convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination is here:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CERD.aspx
Particurlary important to all other work on this is:
1. In this Convention, the term “racial discrimination” shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.
The recommendation on racist hate speech is here:
http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CERD/C/GC/35&Lang=en
There are also reports to the committee on individual countries, that have links from the committee’s page. Recent ones include Estonia (mostly about issues around white ethnic groups who are minorities in Estonia) and Japan (mostly about issues around Asian ethnic groups who are minorities in Japan).
The word ‘racist’ refers to behaviour that is considered racial discrimination, not just to behaviour that is part of ‘racism’ under the sociological definition.
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@Audrey. Thank you very much for the UN links.
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I have discovered an argument against libertarianism that I find more compelling than any other I’ve seen. An argument not even described in Scott’s anti-libertarian FAQ (well, he comes close in related points, but none of them are starkly communicated). I was inspired by this article: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.138.3468&rep=rep1&type=pdf which I can only cite in this thread because of it’s race content. Scroll down to page 29, the section titled “Harming the Less Intelligent: Living Daily with Reality” for the meat of the supporting evidence.
A significant minority of people are simply not smart enough to survive in a Libertarian society, and there is no way to change this with current technology.
In a strongly libertarian society, people would have a plethora of choices to make, and a huge number of them would be simply incapable of making good ones. I find it ironic that traditional progressives would be unable to even make this argument, despite the fact that it’s very powerful. Of course, counterarguments could be mounted (e.g. that the world would be dramatically simplified thanks to the incentives of private enterprise to get business vs. the incentives of bureaucracy of keeping things complex), but because the whole topic was is so mind-murdering-and-burying-in-a-shallow-grave-in-the-desert-with-its-mind-spouse-and-mind-children, we will never benefit from the discussion.
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My (textbook libertarian) reply is that even if people would be better off being protected from their own choices, you can’t ensure that government will tend to provide useful protection as opposed to oppression and corruption.
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I agree that this is true in general, but the next question is whether there have been cases where large groups of people were usefully protected from their own choices with unusually little oppression and corruption, and if so what was going right. I don’t know the answer, though I do have the impression that unusually healthy cultures can do an unusually good or at least less-awful job of this.
Also, it’s really important that people not let this policy judgment bias them against the factual prediction that people will make bad choices. (This is the Ur Example of Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided.)
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If you can’t manage to compare ticket prices or read an expiration date consistently why is society obliged to keep you around in the first place?
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Your assumption is “low literacy level = stupid”, which is not necessarily the case. Having been involved (tangentially, as clerical worker) with adult literacy provision there are various reasons for low literacy.
(1) The level you are assuming everyone is operating at: learning difficulties, low range of intelligence
(2) Poor or no schooling. Yes, a lot of people are able to successfully function even with low literacy, which happened not because they’re stupid but because for whatever reason, they didn’t get the benefits of education. Our organisation ran workplace literacy programmes, where manual workers could (via their employer) come to weekly classes to improve literacy. These groups could include people on the lower end of the ‘normal range of IQ, but also included people who were married, had their own homes, behaved and looked indistinguishable from anyone else, but had poor literacy.
Not being able to read an expiration date does not mean you CAN’T read it because you’re too stupid to understand, it may be that you were never taught how to read dates. Or your class was so big that the slower learners slipped through the cracks and never caught up (and as you go through the education system, you fall further and further behind). Or you had to leave school at fourteen and get a job.
Why is society obligated to keep these kinds of people around in the first place? What, you mean people like my mother? Who was certainly not stupid, who was offered a job in the laboratory at her place of work as a promotion from the factory floor but turned it down because of her own concerns about lack of education? Who was so worried about her writing and spelling that routinely she had me, at nine years of age, write letters and fill in forms for her?
Because she had received very little schooling, and that of the most wretched, brutal kind, in the Irish national school system of the 30s?
Yes, obviously she should have been put down like a mangy dog once she couldn’t confidently fill in a bank deposit slip.
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Basic human decency. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think anybody deserves to die or to have an unhappy life, even if they are really abominably stupid.
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Thanks for posting about the adult literacy program.
I’ve been proposing for a while that adult literacy should be a high-priority project, and every time I’ve brought it up, I’ve been told that there’s no point– the reason there are adults who can’t read or can’t read well is because they’re incapable of learning. This never seemed plausible to me, but i didn’t look into it. Now I have some evidence that adult literacy improvement on a grand scale at least makes sense as possibly making the world better.
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@fuinseoig: Did your organization track the adults to ensure that the effects of your adult literacy program persisted in the long term? The Education Realist once described his experience teaching low ability kids math. At first, he thought the reason they were struggling was because they had never been taught math well, so he rolled up his sleeves and covered the basics, and for a while the kids seemed to be doing real progress. But then he tried to cover more material, and the kids forgot all about the old material as soon as he stopped covering it. Turns out the kids simply weren’t intelligent enough.
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@fuinseoig,
Look if you want to trade inspirational anecdotes I can play along. My father had quite a bit of trouble learning to read and never went to college due to his severe dyslexia, not to mention being a poor immigrant raised by a single mother in one of the worst neighborhoods of the city at the peak of it’s crime wave. He worked his ass off to teach himself, and though he’s still not quite as proficient as I am he easily makes the top decile.
But the thing about these anecdotes, fun as they are, is that they miss the central point: it doesn’t matter why you don’t have the skills, what matters is that you don’t have them. That has consequences, and trying to fob those consequences off onto the rest of society through explicit redistribution or regulations only makes them more of a problem.
If you want to go ask for donations to your literacy program or petition banks to simplify the language on their contracts, well you can certainly count on me to pay and sign on the line. But don’t bring the government or society into the mix; charity isn’t either of their jobs, and that shows in their abyssmal performance.
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This is not an argument against libertarianism. To the extent that you are concerned with how nice life is for stupid people, it is an argument against complexity in any society. Also, as you mention most libertarians think that a libertarian society would be much easier to deal with for stupid people. I think they are right about this.
However, you are correct in a broader sense. HBD is quite corrosive to the left in general, with libertarianism being one strain of the left. Egalitarianism is the heart of leftism. HBD is an assertion of indelible natural inequality. Once you believe it, there are several aspects of libertarianism that become harder to maintain. Most particularly, most libertarians are open borders true believers, under the tacit assumption that all potential immigrants are equal. They’re not… Or take “racism”, meaning those mysterious things white people do that cause blacks to fail in a myriad of ways. What if there is no “racism”, just different distributions of genes for intelligence and conscientiousness?… Well, you’re off the left reservation there.
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There have been (more) libertarian societies in the past though, with less literacy and education. How did the stupid survive? They relied on tradition, family, and leaders to tell them what to do. Social networks were often much tighter in the past, and having others to tell you whom to marry, whether and when to have kids, what job to do, and what to do with your money can be good for those not competent to manage their own lives.
With regard to literacy specifically, how do people survive in countries where they don’t speak the language? They get friends or family members to translate, interpret, or fill in forms for them.
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When I think “libertarianism” I don’t think “tradition, family and leaders to tell people what to do”. Maybe past social conditions could be described as libertarian in the sense that the state was weaker, but that’s where the similarity with the globalist, atomized techno-commercial libertarianism we have today ends. It dissolves traditional social networks on contact.
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ckp, I think you have a quite idiosyncratic definition of libertarianism if you believe we are currently living in a libertarian system.
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Postulating that 100% of people are incapable of rational thought and will make bad decisions, this percentage is not decreased by designating some subset to steal their money and make their decisions for them.
It is not enough to prove that people make bad choices. You must also show that the people who actually work in government would make better choices, and significantly better ones, since it’s going to cost us over half our income, forever.
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There are good arguments that a libertarian society would be simpler (government creates plenty of complexity) and that government would do worse at making choices for people. But my true rejection is that this is only a problem for utilitarian justifications for libertarianism, and there are plenty of non-utilitarian arguments for libertarianism. As Mill said (despite being a utilitarian), “That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.” If someone is going to misuse their freedom to harm themselves, that’s bad, but that’s not a sufficient justification to not let others peacefully do whatever they want.
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This is a consideration. I often get the impression that libertarianism is strongly suited to the kind of people who become libertarian.
Potential solution: pay for a private beaureaucracy (Is that spelt right?)/ decision-making entity, like some people and many companies use for tax forms.
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Where are you going to get the money for paying them, though?
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After having just finished reading Scott’s “Social Justice and Words, Words, Words” post and thinking it would be funny to respond to one of the comments about “the average fratboy” not reading Scott’s blog, I found that the comments are closed, and seeing how his open thread bans discussion of gender topics etc. I guess I’ll dump my thoughts here.
I’d probably fall under the aforementioned “frat boy” pejorative, but this depends entirely on each individual’s definition of what a “frat boy” is. If “being physically active (going to the gym regularly), being successful with women, and not being socially awkward” qualifies a young white male under the frat stereotype then color me eggshell and call me birdshit. What struck me as odd (and kind of humorous) about that specific thread was the amount of people self-identifying as stereotypical nerdy neckbeards who are unsuccessful with women, and while it was probably stupid of me to expect the commentariat of places like LW or Scott’s blog to be filled with jocks, it still doesn’t cease to amaze me how some people can be so unaware of why they might not be successful.
Take for example Scott’s relationship with Ozy (this entire post is kind of an open invitation for either Scott or Ozy or both to jump in, so I’m literally fishing for a response here). Being a doctor of psychiatric medicine, Scott is relatively successful and high status, but:
-his self-description as “asexual”
-the fact that his “girlfriend”* is a camwhore
-his general writing style** and willingness to concede referring to his female “girlfriend”* using some asinine special-snowflake personal pronoun
suggests to me that he engages in significantly “beta” behaviour (and I hate using that term because the PUA designation of “alpha” and “beta” is an extreme simplification of an extremely complicated social dynamic [humans are not wolves], and the PUA / MRA / neoreactionary crowd has plenty of its own problems [unironic Bible-thumping not among the least of said problems] which make them just as distasteful, if not moreso, than some of the SJW shit I accidentally come into contact with). I’m rarely in real-life contact with the kind of people who make up the commentariat of SSC or LW, but you have to understand why it’s amusing for me to see a bunch of self-professed “nerds” engaging in white-knight behaviour in the comments section and then genuinely wonder why women react in a hostile fashion when they’re approached by said nerds in real life. My reaction to such sob-stories is usually “Get good?”, and I realize that this is a glaring example of what SJWs refer to as “privilege” considering I’m a relatively attractive and fit white male who has never had to deal with accusations of being a creepy neckbeard, but maybe this is the heart of the issue that SJWs have: the world is unfair. Life is unfair. SJWs regularly conflate “ought” with “is”, or at the very least they rely heavily on appeals to emotion, and if I don’t find your moral argument convincing, what more is there fore me to say than simply “I don’t care?” You can’t change your looks, but you can (to an extent) change how physically fit you are and how socially awkward/non-awkward you are. Offering up the advice to be a little less socially awkward and a little more Machiavellian may be bunk advice considering it’s coming from someone for whom these things are second nature (you can argue that I’m “privileged” in this regard). But my response is “So what”? Make do with what you have. You should focus on the things you can improve.
Tangentially, here’s a question for Ozy: why the adverse reaction to someone who would refer to you as a “she” based on your biological sex? I don’t care about “gender”, whatever that even means to the people here (as it often changes depending on who you’re talking to), I care about which chromosomes you have. You could self-identify as a unicorn, and you’re free to do that, but I’m not going to start referring to you as a unicorn. This might come off as “douchey” or “privileged” or “insensitive” or whatever, but I’m genuinely curious and I’m asking you here because you seem to be one of the only reasonable SJW-ish types I’ve come across.
* I’m putting the word “girlfriend” in quotations not because I’m doubtful about whether or not Ozy is a girl (based on her concession of being biologically female, she is a girl), but rather because I’m doubtful whether or not Scott’s relationship with Ozy could even be referred to as a relationship in the “boyfriend/girlfriend” sense. Scott identifies as asexual, and if the case is that no physical intimacy is happening between the two, I would hesitate to call it a “relationship” just as I would hesitate to call a long-distance “relationsip” over the internet a relationship. But I digress.
** I came to SSC from TLP and initially found Scott’s writing to be very interesting, but the more articles I read by him the more I started to find him annoying; his use of certain kinds of incredibly emotional and feminine meme-language common to the SJW-sphere (“NO NO NO NO”, “You don’t get to ___”, certain and overblown usages of the word “fuck”, etc.) is extremely silly to me, and the aforementioned acquiescence to the use of SJW pronouns (what the fuck is a zir?) kind of turned me off. This isn’t an attempt to guilt-trip you or a call for you to stop doing what you’re doing, I’m just giving my honest opinion, and the difference between a reasonable human being and a rabid SJW is I won’t attempt to ruin your social life just because I find your mode of discourse distasteful.
This rant is scattered, disorganized, and borderline incoherent, but I hope it starts up an interesting discussion. I hope I didn’t “trigger” anyone, but then again I don’t really care about providing trigger warnings (aka “spoilers for reality”, but that’s a discussion for another day), so you get what you get.
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It’s nice to see this perspective once in a while.
But basically I disagree with it. You seem to be taking the point of view “don’t accommodate people’s feelings, if they’re unhappy they can suck it”, and I think it would be a happier world if we *did* try to promote happiness. E.g. making Ozy happy results in a smiling Ozy, which is cute and makes me vicariously happy, so why the hell wouldn’t you do it?
I don’t believe in appeasing people who are endlessly demanding, but Ozy is *not*, zie is a basically reasonable person, so…be nice? Like, don’t be CooperateBot, but don’t defect unnecessarily either.
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Good comment generally, though I have one big criticism of it.
As someone who has both gone from extreme social awkwardness to being fairly good with women and gone from morbid obesity to being fairly trim / muscular, you seem to be missing two key necessities for self improvement to work which are not obvious from the outside.
Firstly, you need self awareness. The human mind is capable of denying even very severe problems, which means many people who need to improve are simply unaware of the fact and believe they are already fine. The comments you mentioned should make that fact obvious.
Secondly, you need a roadmap. Saying ‘develop dark triad traits’ is like saying ‘eat well and exercise regularly’, in that a person who needs the advice in either case almost necessarily lacks the basic knowledge to put it into practice.This is incidentally why I generally direct people to specific diet/exercise/game resources instead.
In my view the SSC audience isn’t lazy or entitled so much as just plain ignorant on this issue, not realizing the extent of the problem or seeing the solution sitting in front of them. Ideological biases against PUA exacerbate the situation of course.
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Specific resources are useful.
I’m surprised there aren’t many people around here working on methods for psychological self-modification in beneficial ways — maybe because it requires a great deal of person-specific knowledge if you want to do it on a level other than providing common tools that we’re generally likely to have strong mental barriers against? (there’s a post somewhere on http://yearlycider.wordpress.com/ about this, reason as memetic immune system, something along those lines)
And for the probably-common special cases (for example, childhood environment not conducive to socialization resulting in lack of social skills that gets read as a mental disorder, which brings about the belief that it’s an incurable condition, which both stabilizes the lack of social skills [making them nigh-impossible to address] and is itself ‘sticky’ for reasons I’m too tired to explain here because twelve hours of Ruby but if anyone cares hit me with a stick on Twitter and I’ll write a followup at some point), there are some other things going on (aforementioned), some of which I think will interact poorly with memes associated with ‘our'(?) phyle (overtrust in psychology as accurate descriptor of the world, analytic mindset sucking brain cycles into perpetuating self-fulfilling prophecies, etc.) and make it even harder to…
…I understand why thinking-work people are stereotyped as being terrible at writing now, this is a lot harder after coding all day
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I’m what PUA would call a “natural” (largely wasted on me, I’m incredibly monogamous), and I find much PUA pretty distasteful in how it preys on the insecurities of unattractive men to feed them false ideas about women-as-a-monolith. Sure, finding a strategy that works on a specific group that exists and using it on that group is better than flailing aimlessly, but it’s still a very narrow slice of humanity, and just being physically attractive gives you access to a much wider slice without any effort besides not being actively repulsive. (I’m sorry. If I could become unattractive to anyone besides my girlfriend and distribute the attractiveness to one of you, I would.)
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Being called “she” hurts. Even in a strictly biological sense, it is a reminder of the extremely painful fact that I have a female physical sex. Besides, I do not trust random strangers to not mean anything social by it, particularly not random strangers who are observably gender-policing me and my boyfriend in the very same comment. If you want to know why it hurts, well, the origins of social dysphoria is an interesting question which has unfortunately no settled science on it yet, and the answer will probably be something like “in utero my brain got a dose of testosterone at the wrong time.”
Life is unfair. I would like to make life less unfair. I think unfairness is a bad thing. Part of that is being like “hey, did you guys realize that life is unfair and we should fix it”; part of that is providing support for people who are hurting; part of that is punishing people who do things that are unfair, such as by saying “if you call someone a neckbeard you’re a bad person.”
Your definition of “relationship” is very puzzling, as it suggests that there are many married couples with children who do not have relationships. Using that definition of relationship also implies a creepy level of societal concern about people’s consensual sex lives.
I did, in fact, say this thread is unmoderated, but if you are going to be poking your head in other threads be aware that if you call me “she” I will ban you.
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Thanks for the responses. Considering what you said I suppose it’s not that big of a deal to extend you the courtesy of referring to you by your preferred pronoun. In case I don’t post here again, take care!
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I don’t know if it makes you feel better, but when I read your blog in 2012ish I unconsciously gendered you as “possibly-gay male” or something similar. However, I honestly don’t understand why “girlfriend” is OK but female pronouns aren’t. (and I don’t expect to, or really want an explanation, people get to have weird preferences like that.)
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I tried to self-modify out of as many of my gender-related word preferences as possible, so as not to cause an undue burden on people I interact with. The “gendered pronouns make me feel sad” bit causes me significant distress and won’t go away.
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Ooh, that reminds me. Ozy, as universally-acknowledged Social Justice Person Who Isn’t Terrible:
You mention “social dysphoria” here. What do you think of the theory that it’s based on mundane status/signalling/respect concerns?
I’m a cis, straight guy. And yet, when I used to be read as female quite regularly (I’ve always worn my hair very long), I would occasionally (maybe once a month?) encounter someone who would passionately argue with me that no, I was mistaken/lying, I was a girl.
This is *incredibly frustrating*. Not being misread, exactly – I knew full well that wearing my hair long would confuse some people, and I was fine with that – but the fact that people would seriously go with their one-second analysis of my appearance in the face of my repeatedly-stated, better informed opinion. To my face! There’s a basic lack of respect involved there.
But it’s quite possible that trans.genderqueer people have something else going on, beyond merely being in a socially-vulnerable position – I wouldn’t know. It’s also very possible that I was mistaken about my reasons for objecting, and I’m just not cis-by-default.
Still, does the fact that people who deliberately misgender you are being rude and status-lowering toward you seem like a plausible explanation, subjectively?
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…Where? I haven’t had a haircut in seven years and that has never happened to me.
(then again, 6’4″, so)
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Ireland. But, to be clear, this was *mostly* only a thing before I really went through puberty.
High-pitched voice + long hair is probably more to blame than nationality. There’s no such thing as male-cued clothing, so a flat-chested kid basically only has hairstyle from a distance.
(Then again, I ran into a girl last year who was *convinced* I was female, despite the fact that I had a beard and basically towered over her. I assume she still thinks that to this day. So maybe this is just a local thing.)
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Cold, I’m fairly confused by your comment because a great deal of your argument seems like it can be generalized as “People shouldn’t be unhappy about things they can’t change/aren’t currently trying to change.” I.e. Ozy shouldn’t be unhappy about being misgendered because lots of people are going to do it anyway, unattractive people shouldn’t be unhappy that dating is difficult because it’s unlikely to get easier for them. This seems to me like at least a big a conflation of ought/is as the kind you seem to find so frustrating coming from Less Wrong or SJ circles. People are naturally going to be upset about things that are unfair, and responding to that frustration and hurt with, “Well, but you shouldn’t be” is kind of out of touch with reality.
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You’re correct in identifying my argument as a subjective moral one (“you ought to do this because of this”), and really the best anyone can hope for in an argument about “ought” is that someone finds your emotional appeal compelling. In any case I was only trying to offer some advice and I even acknowledge that said advice might be bunk and coming from a place of privilege. Someone above correctly pointed out that it would be better to offer ideas for a specific track of improvement (“do this training program or this diet”) over the more general advice of “Go to the gym”, but it would be kind of difficult to offer something specific without knowing more about that person’s specific situation, and coming on here and pretending to know what’s best for each individual would be presumptuous of me, hence the more broad advice to get fit and improve social skills if you don’t happen to be conventionally attractive.
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Hm, but most of your argument seems to be not about what people should or shouldn’t do, but about what they should or shouldn’t feel. For instance, you’ve said that people who are physically unattractive in a way that they can’t change should just not focus on that, or that non binary people should stop being upset when they are misgendered (in fact, based on your description of being annoyed that Scott uses non binary pronouns for Ozy, you seem to have been arguing that people should actively try to misgender non binary people…but I see you’ve retracted that thought upthread, so I won’t pursue it further), and you seem to have also implied that you think that people who have triggers should stop feeling upset by their triggers.
These aren’t things that people can do; they’re arguments about the way people ought to be and feel, and you seem to have arrived at that point by assuming that other people’s behavior is immutable (all people are always going to misgender trans people, and it’s impossible to convince them otherwise, all people are always going view gender non-conforming men, and it’s impossible to convince them otherwise). Which seems fairly backwards to me.
As for the quality of the actual advice…yeah. I don’t think most fat people are going to read “Have you tried going to the gym?” and find it revolutionary.
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That should be, “view gender non-conforming with disdain,” above, and I should proofread before I post.
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@Bem:
>based on your description of being annoyed that Scott uses non binary pronouns for Ozy, you seem to have been arguing that people should actively try to misgender non binary people
For the record, I also found it annoying. He wasn’t just using the new pronouns for Ozy, he was using them instead of “they” – which involves actively damaging our shared systems for discussing nonbinary or otherwise gender-unclear individuals in order to give out SJ signals.
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I’m also unclear what Scott and I could do to not be special snowflakes, because presumably if we said “we are a platonic partnership; that means that we live together, talk more to each other than we do to other people, snuggle, provide each other emotional support, and are considering the possibility of marrying and having children” you would be like “isn’t that just boyfriend/girlfriend? special snowflake!” (If that’s not true, points for consistency.)
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I suppose it would come down entirely to a matter of definitions, which is really the crux of a lot of SJW arguments: a semantics game. I won’t deny you or Scott the ability to refer to yourselves as being in a relationship; if that’s how you see yourselves, then you’re in a relationship and nobody should tell you otherwise. My only point was that I wouldn’t necessarily call a platonic partnership a “relationship” in the strict sexual boyfriend/girlfriend sense, but whether or not I would call it that has no bearing on you and Scott, so more power to you.
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If it is a relationship, it’s certainly a noncentral example of one. Whether it’s not a relationship, or whether it is one that is noncentral, is just a matter of semantics, but in either case, you are limited in your ability to make statements that equally apply to it and to central examples of relationships.
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Except for the marriage and procreation part (which is only in the future for Ozy and Scott anyways), my relationship with my opposite sex platonic best friend is exactly like that (live together, talk more to each other than we do to other people, snuggle, provide each other emotional support), and neither I nor she nor any observer would dream of labeling us a boyfriend/girlfriend couple; if they did, we’d quickly correct them by pointing out that she and I have never had sex, experience zero sexual tension, are not sexually jealous of each other and are free to enter sexual relationships with others (all things that as far as I can tell are true of Ozy and Scott) and therefore we are not a romantic couple, but merely best friends.
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If you think about it with the triangular theory of love, a relationship is romantic if passion is present. While sexual jealousy, possessiveness, and desire are common traits of passion, you can still have an emotion reasonably describable by that category without those traits– thinking about someone a lot, your heart beating fast when they enter the room, idealization, excitement, romantic fantasies, etc.
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If “being physically active (going to the gym regularly), being successful with women, and not being socially awkward” qualifies a young white male under the frat stereotype
It was my understanding that what qualifies someone as a fratboy is not the traits above, but rather being an ignorant pain in the hole, which you certainly seem to live down to with your remarks about asexuality and “special snowflake pronouns”.
So I suppose you are a fratboy.
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I think you’re right to point out people at LW have certain…peculiarities which may bias their judgments. Looking at the 2013 LW survey…vast majority male, largely single and childless, largely young (40% students and more than half live with parents or roommates). Incredibly high rates of atheism, polyamory and weird gender stuff compared to the general population.
Now, being weird and young doesn’t mean they’re wrong. I am tempted to think, well, once some of these people grow up they will have better social skills, once they get real jobs they will realize that off the internet they can’t get away with insisting on pronouns other than he or she, and once they have committed, non-long-distance relationships they will realize the value of monogamy. But, I can’t prove that.
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Commitment and non-monogamy aren’t mutually exclusive. (Anecdata: I am in a committed short-distance non-monogamous relationship.)
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I think young people in weaker (uncommitted or long-distance) relationships are more likely to be poly. Being experienced with relationships and having a really good relationship push toward monogamy.
That is not to say that you can’t be the exception. Fine with me, if that has any weight.
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“Being experienced with relationships and having a really good relationship push toward monogamy.”
I’m not sure to what extent the latter part is true. Having a really good relationship tends towards continuing the relationship, so it pushes towards standard monogamy in the sense that it pushes away from singledom, “sleeping around”, and serial monogamy. On the other hand, having a really good relationship entails good, open communication, which means that if the people involved are open to or want to be in a polyamorous relationship, it’s easier for them to talk about it, instead of hiding that desire as they would if the relationship were less good.
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“once they have committed, non-long-distance relationships they will realize the value of monogamy”
I had two committed, short-distance and long-lasting (2+ years each) monogamous relationships before becoming polyamorous. Now I have multiple close, committed short-distance relationships, and a few casual relationships.
Having tried both monogamy and polyamory, I feel much more fulfilled and happy in poly relationships, and I certainly don’t feel like I’ve made any concessions in terms of closeness or commitment.
What do you see as the value of monogamy? (I’m not a poly supremacist — while I don’t think monogamy has any value for me personally, I also don’t believe that my preferences generalize to everyone. But I’m curious why you think that poly people in committed, short-distance relationships are likely to become monogamous.)
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Since we’re swapping personal stories, I didn’t always see the value of monogamy. When I was in mediocre or less committed relationships, monogamy seemed like a burden. I wasn’t satisfied with the person I was with, so I was very tempted by potential relationships with others. But now that I’m in a great, committed relationship, preserving that relationship is the most important thing. I still have passing crushes on other people, but they seem a lot less important. I can still have friendships with people other than my spouse, so why would I jeopardize the marriage just for the sake of a little extra sex?
Another part of it is that young people are less likely to have real jobs. When I hear about people who have say, two primary partners and a couple on the side, I think, wow, this person has too much free time. A typical person with a demanding job is lucky to find time for one partner–not to mention people who have children. Of course, it’s fine with me if someone chooses to spend less time on work and more time on sex, as long as they can support themselves. But you can’t optimize career and maximize number of sexual relationships at the same time.
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Sarah Constantin and Andrew Rettek are poly, and they both have startups, plus Sarah is getting a PhD in math from Yale. So existence proof of people with demanding jobs who continue to be poly. 🙂
I suspect that some of it is that additional polyamorous partners funge against nonromantic/nonsexual friends, and some of it is that secondary relationships take less time than a lot of mono people predict (because they’ve only ever had primaries), and some of it is that Andrew and Sarah are mutants with six hours in the day more than everyone else.
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A third set of pronouns would be useful in many contexts. For one thing, if a sentence already has a ‘he’ and a ‘she’, then a ‘zie’ shows there are three people in the sentence. I like ‘zie’, ‘zis’, ‘zim’ because the ‘-r’ ending, elegant as it is, can be either object or possessive.
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Now that Ozy has explained to you in polite detail why calling them “she” hurts them, you are willing to stop doing so. It seems extraordinarily imprudent to demand that people provide explanations of private details that are often painful to think or talk about, to demonstrably hostile strangers, before you accept their “don’t do that, it hurts me” claims.
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Wow Ozy, you get the nicest commenters…
I think the simplest response to this:
“I don’t care about “gender”, whatever that even means to the people here (as it often changes depending on who you’re talking to), I care about which chromosomes you have.”
and its variants is (while it’s tempting to simply ask why we should care what it is that you care about) to ask, ‘Well *why* do you care about chromosomes?’
It can’t be linguistic prescriptivism, because gendered pronouns existed before we knew about chromosomes, so ‘she’ can’t ever have been defined as ‘pronoun for someone with XX chromosomes’. In fact, I bet in ye olden days, anyone born with pseudohermaphroditism (which they would have lacked the means to detect) was consistently referred to by the pronoun matching their physical appearance and social role.
So, on pure linguistics, it seems that ‘she’ and ‘he’ have always been pronouns for someone who looks like, dresses like, and is socially treated as ‘male’ or ‘female’.
Which means that pronouns have *never* been about biological sex, and have *always* been about gender.
At which point, insisting that they go on biological sex can’t even be excused as old-fashioned prescriptivist pedantry – it’s *just wrong*. Now obviously, it could be a mistake by someone who just doesn’t know much about language. But it also seems like the sort of belief or alief that is likely to be more easily picked up by someone who already dislikes trans people. It certainly clusters with ‘dislikes trans people’, ‘weird biological determinism ideas concerning gender’ and ‘manosphere memes’.
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A word can be intended to refer to things with the same underlying essence even when the nature of that essence is undiscovered, unknown, or misunderstood. On “pure linguistics,” the theory that “she” means “pronoun for someone with XX chromosomes” may or may not be right; it depends on whether “having XX chromosomes” is a plausible candidate for the intended essence. But it’s much more likely than that “she” means “pronoun for someone who looks like, dresses like, and is socially treated as ‘female.'” Words intended to refer to superficial appearances are far less common than words intended to refer to the underlying realities that we almost always believe to exist. Which has nothing to do with what to call Ozy, call zir what doesn’t cause zie distress, obviously. But this is a bad argument, and as a philosopher bad arguments distress me.
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In general, women with CAIS tend to be called “she”, even though they have XY chromosomes, so chromosomes is an unlikely candidate. For that matter, no one seems particularly driven to use neopronouns for people with Klinefelter’s or Turner’s or other conditions that leave one with a different set of chromosomes, much less to give all females a karyotype to see if they’re actually XXX (women with XXX chromosomes are indistinguishable from XX women).
I suspect the actual answer is that “she” is meant to refer to the cluster “socially treated as female, identifies as female, assigned female at birth, XX chromosomes, vagina, estrogen-dominant system, etc. etc.”, which all go together in approximately 98.5% of cases, and no one really planned for the other 1.5% when they were designing the language (particularly since English pronoun use developed before we had the technology to let trans people transition or discover a lot of intersex cases). That said, it seems like trans-inclusive people mostly seem to go by identity, while trans-exclusive people seem to go by initial birth assignment (i.e. that poor guy who got reassigned to a girl after a botched circumcision is ‘he’, CAIS patients are ‘she’, trans women are ‘he’).
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Much more relevant evidence, Ozy. To be clear, I wasn’t defending the XX chromosome account, just attacking the bad argument that it couldn’t be what “she” originally meant because the word was around before we knew what chromosomes were. There also does seem to be a general bias in language toward treating traits that are seen as somehow more “fundamental” as more important parts of the cluster determining meaning, and so for privileging biological details in living things, but as your examples suggest, it may be more complicated in the case of gender, for whatever reason.
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“the PUA designation of “alpha” and “beta” is an extreme simplification of an extremely complicated social dynamic [humans are not wolves]”
Neither are wolves, in point of fact. They exhibit a much stronger hierarchy in vaguely-inhumane captivity than in the wild, probably because of stress; which is what caused the myth.
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Do Social justice really believe that “marginalized groups” are never or extremely rarely privileged in any important set of interactions. This is what many of them seem to say but I kind of find it hard to believe. Here is the context that is making me think of this:
On SCC a commentator mentioned that he felt his workplace was becoming increasingly SJ politicized and intolerant of people with different views. People he was friends with even explicitly said things like “I would veto any job applicant who posted on less wrong for lack of fitting the culture.” Of course the sCC poster also posted on less wrong.
VeronicaD (who is female) said that if she had overheard this she would have said she posts on lesswrong and start laughing about the situation. Obviously it would have been very kind of her to defuse this issue. But the naive interpretation of these events is that she felt able to say she posts on less wrong without fear because she is female and there “oppressed.” Hence SJ types are much less likely to attack her unless she really steps out of line (though as the sci-fi author stuff shows every group can be a victim of SJW bullying).
I did not directly ask her but maybe she would admit in sufficiently SJ circles she is over white men in important way (maybe she is dis-advantaged in other ways however but thats not important to my question). In this case freedom to admit to non-PC interests. But certainly many people would deny a woman could be privileged over a white man in any important social situation. Do they really believe this?
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I think, assuming she does think she’s safe because she’s female, she’s wrong. The only way to be safe is to be “right-thinking”. (If she doesn’t think she’s safe, then it’s just admirable courage to step in and confront them.)
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Hi!
So here is what I think: there are certainly spaces where my identity gives me a huge advantage, but there are soooooo many where it does not. Plus the number of people who are fully-feminist aware (by my standards) is pretty low, so even blue tribe folks can get shit wrong and dump micro-aggressions on me. Regarding “power over,” it’s complicated. I work for big-tech, so things are pretty bureaucratic here. Plus we are making a huge drive for diversity, which I am certain has helped me. But my company is still 85% male engineers, with plenty of clueless man-jerks to deal with in the day-to-day.
(For example, one thing no one thinks about is all the extra time women and minorities put into showing up on panels or recruitment drives or “meet and greets”. I enjoy these things, but for my employer to show a diverse face, which we all want, we have to do five times the work of the men.)
Regarding this risk the SJ types will turn on me, good grief everyone is turning on everyone else pretty much all the time. That said, I’m in a good place in the “hierarchy”. I know the right people. They respect me. I also have a good sense when to walk away from a fight.
Plus, I for-realz believe in the main SJ tenets, and where I don’t I know to back away. (I simply DO NOT TALK ABOUT POST-COLONIALISM.)
I believe in harm reduction, in helping people who are hurting, in giving safe harbor. I fucking hate pile-on culture and speak against it when I can. As does Julia Serano. As does Katherine Cross. Many of us do. That doesn’t me we compromise our feminism. The opposite.
I defend nerds. I remind my side to chose their targets with care, to remember our own principles: no body shaming, no virgin shaming, which is no better than slut-shaming. Nor should we condemn a person because they have a crappy role within capitalism. Thus there is nothing wrong with living in your parent’s basement.
I generally avoid the “nerds-as-autistic” conversation. No one wants to hear it. So I chose other ways.
I critique nerd masculinity, and indeed I think it is a mess. It hurts everyone.
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Frantz Fanon is worth reading whether you end up agreeing with him or hurling him with great force, IMO.
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>clueless man-jerks
Not sure how typical this is, but I read this as you conflating “men” and “jerks” for a second, and was quite taken aback before I realized you almost certainly mean “men who are jerks” (rather than the – very surprising, from you – “men/jerks, like there’s any difference lol”.)
Might be worth avoiding, considering how easily some people pattern-match “feminist” into “misandrist”. Also, this gives me a chance to namecheck “noticing my confusion”, so that’s nice.
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>People he was friends with even explicitly said things like “I would veto any job applicant who posted on less wrong for lack of fitting the culture.”
This is really shocking to me. Does LW really have such a diabolical offline reputation?!?
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This is hilarious. Job applications are vetoed for infinite and arbitrary reasons millions of times per day all around the world. You people (nerds and feminists) flip from infants to tyrants all up and down this thread.
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@gene: ??? I have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s not like I’m really worried about being turned down for a job due to my forum participation (which would be super dumb on a number of different levels), I’m just surprised that Less Wrong has such a bad rap out there.
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“You people”
… huh. I guess we do have that kind of reputation.
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Hypothetically, if there were significant (let’s say four standard deviations) discrepancies between races and/or genders in something important like intelligence or morality, substantiated by sufficiently good science*, then what would be the morally and ethically right thing to do with this information?
* randomized, controlled, large sample size, widely replicated by researchers who strongly believe the opposite, etc.
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Stop pretending that people are equal, lay down some rules sufficient to let superior people be free and inferior people be supervised or jailed for criminal deviation as necessary (ie fair and equitable but harsh and unapologetic law). Allow police, employers, and neighbours to use Bayesian reasoning on people (currently illegal). Do something about unjustified racism in such a way as to not just cause more problems (I have no idea how to do this structurally, except segregation, which is imperfect, but at least protects from direct oppression (currently illegal)). Allow people to create locally governed spaces that can try different local solutions. eg allow organic segregation to protect superiors from inferior criminality, and protect inferiors from superior racism (currently illegal).
If sufficiently inferior and sufficiently distinct, treat as inferior species, having the rights of animals. Integrated law only necessary to the extent that there is important overlap between populations.
The result may or may not end up being genocide, but it would be fair genocide, where everyone is given opportunity to thrive if capable, and the scum of the superiors is culled as well (modulo social racism influencing ability to thrive) (genocide because, lacking subsidy, the inferiors may be unable to thrive and reproduce in civilization. Just as Whites, currently taxed all to hell to subsidize underclass, and chased out of inner cities, find it difficult to reproduce). Like it or not, any fertility gradient along any phenotype axis is morally indistinguishable from genocide. Unavoidable.
Sufficiently robust racism is indistinguishable from genetics, so might have to take the “ok, there are racial differences we can’t do anything about” angle on racism as well. That is, ignore it, and just lay down fair law.
The underlying meta point here is to construct the law to automatically and emergently take measurements of reality (who is actually *being* scum vs who looks like scum) and explore alternative solutions, without having to indirect through (ideologically corruptible, non-omnipotent) centralized social science professors and legislators. Spontaneous order, sortof.
(This position came out of some such hypothetical discussions where outright genocide was very much on the table, and rejected for practical, rather than moral, reasons. IOW, you can be assured that this is not filtered to be politically correct)
(I’ve found that outright rejection of moral posturing as legitimate argumentative form, that is, refusing to condemn someone for merely being evil, is a very compelling position that allows much more rational discussion of eg genocide. The result usually being that something was either less evil or more stupid than you thought.)
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We’d have to exterminate the emotional cripples first.
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*scribbles furiously in little black book*
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Active genocide has a lot more evil externalities than gradual, non-forced genocide. They are not morally equivalent.
Suicide is not morally equivalent to murder.
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@drethelin.
Ok. Genocide is a bad word for law-and-order-induced inability to reproduce.
I wonder what we do at that point in the future when humans are largely obsolete. Uplifting, if possible, hopefully.
@multiheaded
Why u mad, tho?
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I think the biggest effect would be to stop viewing every difference in outcome as a sign of discrimination.
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Bury it in a time capsule. Outcome for a few researchers: find another subject. Positive outcome for a lot of people: avoid a lot of people on all sides getting upset. For science, some relevant data might get lost, but the whole subject could be revived in later decades after current conflicts have cooled; if released now, there would be such a fuss that the whole subject might be tainted, suppressed, and never revived.
Currently there isn’t enough agreement on what ‘intelligence’ is, and whether it can be measured without confusion by cultural factors. ‘Morality’ might be measured by crime statistics etc, but those too may be culturally influenced. So we’d be poking around in a dark room for a black cat that isn’t even there, but poking a lot of people who are there and may start fighting each other, with the scientists caught in the middle.
/ Steps back to anticipate replies such as “So you want to [insert deontological ad hominem with implications of negative virtue”. /
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Allocate higher educational resources to the populations that need it more. Like with what we do with disability on a smaller scale.
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Except “educational resources” don’t do little to nothing to improve intelligence or morality. See Scott’s graduation speech.
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Instead of lowering the requirements for getting accepted into Ivy League, why not give special ‘bring them up to speed’ remedial education so they could pass the regular requirements.
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1. try to find out if anything can be done to increase intelligence, so people who choose to can take supplements or something to be smarter. (we should be doing this regardless.)
2. worry less about meritocratic institutions (jobs, universities) having uneven racial makeup. (worry if they are *more* unequal than the stats on intelligence would predict, which they probably would be.)
3. racial hatred is still bad, in the same way that hating people with low IQs is bad.
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One tempting answer is to just treat everyone like an individual, and accept the fact that some populations will have dramatically different results from other populations, but it doesn’t work, because it requires to ignore the fact that group membership confers a ridiculously large amount of evidence about people, which has practical consequences.
For example, let’s say one group is four standard deviations better than another group at handling alcohol; the former can treat it as a harmless social lubricant on weekend gatherings, while the latter has vast portions of its population drunk before midday and struggling to hold a minimum wage job. The really obvious, humane, and practical solution is to ban alcohol from the second group and keep it legal for the first group. But it’s not a solution the principled individualist stance above allows.
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I think you’re dismissing the liberal tradition a bit cavalierly. It’s possible to have a ridiculously large amount of evidence about someone based on their group membership, but commit to not letting that evidence bias your assumptions by, for instance, creating preferential laws. That’s the entire idea of “equality” as (classical) liberals understand it, and if it doesn’t work perfectly, it nonetheless seems to be working pretty well.
The biggest point I’d make about potential evidence of heritable group differences is that the “heritable” part doesn’t matter. We already know there are group differences, and the question of whether they are transmitted by genes, culture, or mysterious alien rays from the Moon, simply is not germane to the pragmatic questions of politics and individual interaction.
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Nice rhetoric, but what’s the actual solution to the hypothetical alcohol scenario? Default to non-banning and watch a population of people harm themselves and others with freedom they are simply not equipped to handle (how many innocent people would get run over by drunk drivers from the affected group)? Default to banning and have a much harder and more expensive enforcement problem, along with unnecessary harm to and resentment from a population to whom alcohol is a harmless diversion? Some other, more complicated and fragile selection criteria, with associated expenses and bureaucratic growth?
Consider the analogy to the agent of consent or the age of majority. We all know there are some fifteen-year-old kids who are more mature than some twenty-five-year-old men will ever be, and yet we accept that someone’s age confers powerful evidence of their maturity, and consider a threshold based on age to be a simple, practical solution for deciding who gets what privileges and responsibilities.
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As an underage Irishman, and thus doubly the target of this, I feel compelled to chime in here.
I don’t think that solution is anywhere near as effective as you think it is.
Seriously. Everyone decides they’re the fifteen-year-old who is totally mature enough, and circumvents the law.
Said law immediately – within a generation – loses it’s psychological impact, in a way roughly analogous to attitudes to Prohibition or marijuana. Kids simply don’t view underage drinking as a crime.
Conventional wisdom is that the “system” in France – where underage drinkers try wine occasionally, find it’s not ideal for them, and drink very little as a result – is the actual best solution; but we can’t implement it here for cultural reasons. No idea if that’s true, though.
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Clearly, the problem there is not with the solution, but with the fact that the solution is not actually enforced. Start with a public whipping for a first offense and work your way up to hanging. See if the law remains ignored.
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You know, there is a limit on how strongly you can punish something the people doesn’t believe should be punished at all before the people get mad and start having a rebellion.
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If you start actually enforcing the law, either you end up being able to keep the law or you don’t. Either way you’ve escaped the awful situation where you have an unenforced law on the books – which is, in practice, a law that gets enforced against whoever law enforcement don’t like today.
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(1) Four standard deviations is a lot. In real life *maybe* you’d get that between Bushmen and Ashkenazi Jews, although clearly IQ tests of the former should be taken with a grain of salt. The African American-white American IQ gap is only one standard deviation.
(2) Stop trying to ensure equal outcomes for people with unequal IQs and levels of ability, whether in terms of income, etc., or in terms of representation in various kinds of jobs.
(3) Study how to better educate and integrate into society low IQ individuals. Sort children in school based on ability so that lower IQ children and higher IQ children can get more specialized teaching better suited to their needs.
(4) Recognize that lower IQ individuals tend to not flourish as well as higher IQ individuals with socially progressive norms (e.g., governing sex and the family). Encourage family formation, discourage out of wedlock births, etc.
(5) Love and respect everyone, regardless of intelligence.
(In fact, all of these seem to me to be good ideas quite regardless of whether racial differences in intelligence are genetic, environmental, or what have you.)
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Four is a big overstatement. A standard deviation in IQ is 15 IQ points, by definition.
Ashkenazi Jews have IQ’s about a standard deviation above the U.S. mean, or a 115 IQ. (http://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf)
The black-white IQ gap, (as measured by Jensen, who is a big proponent of racial IQ differences) is also a standard deviation, or 15 IQ points.
If the most HBD-ish psychometric researchers are right, the racial variation in IQ between the “highest” and “lowest” ethnic groups is maybe two standard deviations.
Not four. Four is a LOT. Four is 60 IQ points. Four is the difference between a smart guy (130 or so) and the threshold of intellectual disability (70). There is no ethnic group composed entirely of 130-IQ people, and there is no ethnic group composed entirely of intellectually disabled people.
If you want to talk about “how should the very smart treat the very stupid and vice versa”, i.e. ethics at a distance of 60 IQ points, then race is not the relevant frame, it’s actually more of a disability-politics question.
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There are a lot of people who believe that the average IQ in Africa is under 80.
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I picked four because it seems like about what Classical Racism would predict. That is, if you look at modern leftist stereotypes of nineteenth-century racist stereotypes of black vs. white intelligence, it looks like they were alleging about four sigmas of disparity.
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@Nancy: I’m pretty sure it /has/ been measured as such, but it is hardly difficult to come up with reasons why those measurements might not be accurate.
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The black-white IQ gap, (as measured by Jensen, who is a big proponent of racial IQ differences) is also a standard deviation, or 15 IQ points.
This is the IQ gap between black and white Americans. African IQ tends to be measured at around 70, and certain tribal groups, like the Bushmen, at around 60. See for example this map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AverageIQ-Map-World.png
So there is almost a 4-SD gap from Bushmen to Ashkenazi Jews, if you believe those numbers. But IQ scores for third world countries should be taken with very heavy grains of salt. Language barriers almost certainly lower scores, and I’m not sure the Bushmen that people like Lynn would have tested would even understand how to take an IQ test.
Also, Jensen taught us that 70 IQ does not mean the same thing for blacks as for whites. He found that 70 IQ blacks tended to function much better than 70 IQ whites, because (he conjectured) the whites at that level tend to have lots of other problems as well, whereas for the blacks this is just normal variation in intelligence. So when you see that average African IQ is 70 you should not be thinking of this as mapping to an intellectually disabled person
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So, I’m suspicious of IQ measurements in non-industrialized countries, but granted, I don’t know much about that literature.
All the IQ tests I know about involve solving abstract puzzles, on a piece of paper, for an authority figure. This experience is familiar to anyone who has had formal schooling or had a desk job. It might be completely *unfamiliar* for someone in a non-industrialized society who spends most of their time farming, hunting, or making things with their hands. That might explain why people in non-industrialized countries would have low IQs compared to their overall competence in getting through life. (and might also explain the worldwide urban/rural IQ gap.)
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I think we’re in broad agreement. I do think it’s plausible that mean African IQ is lower than African-American IQ. I read a paper some time ago (by Jensen, I think) that estimated that mean African IQ would probably be around 77 if not for language barriers in administering tests. Such an estimate doesn’t seem too surprising from either a genetic or environmentalist perspective: African-Americans tend to both have some white admixture and better nutrition/more wealth/better education/etc. than black Africans.
I would also note that while I think that IQ is real and important, IQ is less important in less industrialized and more traditional societies. A Bushman, for example, has many skills pertinent to living a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle, even if he would not do well in a society like ours. And I am sure that my comparatively high IQ would not help me much were I dropped off in the Kalahari desert.
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Nothing too different from what should be done now. Affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws in general would probably be politically easier to abolish, but I think they should be abolished regardless, so that doesn’t matter. In general, though, whatever the difference is between average racial IQs, we’re already living it.
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This thread has not delivered nearly as much horrible stuff as I felt was promised.
Okay here’s something horrible to talk about: terms of opprobrium for people who are on “the other sex’s side” in gender-oriented debates (chill girl, internalized misogynist, mangina, white knight): do they have an useful function?
My initial impulse is “no,” and I always cringe a bit when I see them. I feel like if they disappeared from discourse (spontaneously, not through censorship or language policing, etc), discourse would be improved.
Any bold contrarians want to defend them, though?
I’d be hesitant to say that the phenomena they purport to describe don’t exist at all. There are some women who do hold misogynistic views. There are also probably (although this harder to say, since it deals with motives, not clearly states views) some people who try to ingratiate themselves to the opposite sex by endorsing perspectives favorable to them.
The fact that these terms might be true in their implications perhaps 5% of the time their use doesn’t seem like enough to justify them to me, but anyone have a different perspective?
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It’s an interesting question.
My first response was “not all of the things you mention are the same”, but then I thought about it a little more and I realised that they are, fundamentally, identical. Each one of them is effectively a term meaning “I do not believe your motivations are what you (explicitly or implicitly) claim they are.”
As to whether that’s acceptable… I’m a little unsure. I don’t think I agree about your percentage of accuracy uses, but that’s quite likely because of definitional differences. To me, those terms mean the following:
“Chill Girl” : A woman who denies the incidence of sexism and misogyny, specifically to men, in order to gain favour from men (“be seen as one of the guys”, etc).
“Internalized Misogynist”: A woman who denies the existence of sexism and misogyny in general due to having previously inculcated sexist/misogynistic perspectives (and who thus considers them normal).
“Mangina”: A man whose agreement with feminism is caused by his own pronounced lack of masculinity.
“White Knight”: A man who professes feminist beliefs as part of a deliberate act in which he presents himself as the protector of women and in doing so enhances his own masculinity.
I think the first and last share a lot in common, along with the middle two. “Chill Girl” and “White Knight” are both statements of false agency; that whatever the target is doing is done with intent, deliberately or otherwise, to produce an affect response in members of the opposite sex. (While this is often interpreted as sexual, it doesn’t really have to be.)
On the other hand, “Internalized Misogyny” and “Mangina” are both statements of null agency, presenting the target as not knowing “the truth” and simply being led along. “Internalized Misogyny” is slightly worse, as it presents the woman in question as being entirely lacking in agency, completely subservient to the misogynist beliefs with which she was brought up, while “Mangina” is more along the lines of a straightforward negative status claim – “you’re only favouring women because you’re not a real man”. It’s still counter-agency, as it presents the target as a subject, but it’s not quite as bad as “Internalized Misogyny” in that it doesn’t utterly negate the target’s own volition.
So we have two that are accusations that the target is a liar, and two that are accusations that the target has no agency of their own. I’d suggest that the middle two, “Mangina” and “Internalized Misogynist” should be abandoned entirely as being inherently dehumanising status-claim bullshit.
But the first and last are more interesting, because calling someone a liar is a truth claim, and I am loath to reject a truth claim regardless of the circumstances. But like any truth claim, it should be dependent on the existence of evidence. So, my take would be that “Chill Girl” should be acceptable iff there is evidence of opinions differing strongly with and without the presence of men, and “White Knight” should be acceptable iff there is evidence that the target does not hold feminist principles except where they allow him to position himself as a protector of women.
These are tough evidentiary standards, I admit, but then these are strong claims.
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Very very excellent comment!
Back when I still commented on SSC, I said something to the effect of how absurd it is that misogynists customarily hate on outspoken male feminists for ostensibly refusing to perform masculinity and embracing femininity (“mangina”)…
…while an actual huge flaw of many male feminists is that “white knighting” and conspicious displays of stoic self-sarcifice, etc are, in effect, reinforcing machismo, toxic masculinity and generally deepen the gender divide, the skewed distriubtion of agency and harm gender non-conforming men.
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My own candidate for the Worst Argument in the World, pace Scott and the noncentral fallacy, is the false-consciousness argument. It’s the worst not because it’s the most fallacious — it is sometimes (very rarely) both true and justified — but because it’s the most seductive and the most dangerous.
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Yep, false consciousness is an awful argument. I mean, I think “internalized misogyny” is a useful concept for some people as far as personal reflection about gender, but when it’s used in argument it seems to almost entirely boil down to, “I don’t have to consider why you might think the things you do or engage with your arguments because you aren’t really a person.”
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Don’t forget libertarians. The Kochites who profess to be advocates of universal liberty as a smokescreen for a will to power and domination, and the nerds and tea party losers who cluelessly believe they’ll thrive in a state of nature as free agents or as henchmen for the top dogs.
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@multiheaded: #badideasfromfrenchpoets
Really, whose idiot idea was it to write all that courtly nonsense into masculinity? It doesn’t even work. It does the exact opposite of working.
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>I’d suggest that the middle two, “Mangina” and “Internalized Misogynist” should be abandoned entirely as being inherently dehumanising status-claim bullshit.
As someone who is apparently a “mangina” – that means male pro-feminist person? TIL – I am really, really loath to give up “internalized misogyny” and it’s cousin, “internalized racism”. They both strike me as attempts to prevent the stereotypical SJW nonsense of “I’m oppressed, therefore my opinion on oppression must be correct” actually occurring in mainstream circles.
Also, I’m personally pretty sure that almost equal numbers of “oppressed” groups are as much a part of said oppression as the “oppressor” groups. See, for example, all those studies showing black people associate whiteness with positive attributes. So giving that up would involve essentially sacrificing (what I believe to be) the correct model of the world, in order to avoid … um, “denying people agency”?
Also, I’m not really sure why this form of “dehumanising” people is inherently worse than literally every other example of assuming people are biased/mistaken. Everyone on earth is in a constant state of assuming other people disagree with them for reasons other than “the truth”; otherwise, they would agree with that person. Heck, I’m a theist, for Pete’s sake, I get that all the time here.
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If sexism is a universal trait, then “internalised misogyny” is a meaningless term being presented only to attempt to negate someone else’s argument by claiming it has been caused by the existence of said universal sexism. This may or may not be true, but adding the word “internalized ” is entirely unnecessary.
If sexism is not a universal trait, then the situation is even worse. Now, you’re presenting someone else as being driven by a set of biases that you can’t even prove exists, let alone is the basis for someone’s argument.
Either way, you’re presenting the other side of the argument as not being the source of their own argument. This is fundamentally different from strategic equivocations like “chill girl” or “white knight”. Telling someone that their argument is not of their own volition is significantly worse than accusing someone of using icky strategies.
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>If sexism is a universal trait, then “internalised misogyny” is a meaningless term being presented only to attempt to negate someone else’s argument by claiming it has been caused by the existence of said universal sexism.
That doesn’t negate an argument, outside of SJ circles that have gone full-on echo chamber. It just counters the claim that they must be right about feminism because female.
And again, everyone tells everyone that their argument is “not of their own volition”, if “motivated by various biases” counts as “not of their own volition”. If you’re not allowed to do that, you’re basically giving up on rationality entirely.
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I would object to not having a word for “internalized misogyny” because sometimes *I’ve* internalized misogyny and I would like a word for the experience “I feel bad for being sexually promiscuous even though I do not believe it is wrong to be sexually promiscuous.”
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Well, assuming you felt the need to call it misogyny at all (this could be entirely explained by cultural sex-negative attitudes), all you have to do is call it “misogyny”. Your awareness of it negates the premise of “internalization”.
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…no, it doesn’t? I mean, I can believe something on one level and not believe it on another level, that is how minds work?
In fact, I almost never see someone refer to internalized misogyny (or internalized transphobia, internalized homophobia, etc.) in a context other than “I am hurting myself by believing Thing” (or, sometimes, “I was hurting myself by believing Thing” or “it is okay! you don’t have to hurt yourself by believing thing! uwu”).
And internalized slut-shaming is just an example; I could have also used “girly things are terrible and gross and I am not allowed to like them”, etc.
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I also would like to keep internalized misogyny as a term, but it seems like there is a difference between acknowledging that you yourself have internalized sexist ideas and arguing that another person only believes what they believe (or acts the way they act) because of the same?
I have seen people talk about internalized misogyny in the context you’re describing, and I think that this use of the term is good and productive, but I’ve also seen it used to dehumanize other people (e.g. the idea that, say, submissive women are only interested in BDSM because they’ve internalized ideas about female subservience and inferiority, or women who have casual sex are only doing so because they’ve internalized ideas about how women should be sexually available to men), and I think that this latter use is really harmful (and often kind of misogynistic).
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I can only state my strong disagreement with your premise. I’ll point to the existence of #notyourshield and the response it garnered as evidence that cases beyond those you describe exist in significant numbers.
I maintain that there is no purpose to the term “internalized misogyny” if it is not to present a false-consciousness argument. When you find yourself thinking anti-woman thoughts? That’s misogyny (or, arguably, some degree of bleed from whatever degree of dysphoria you suffer, assuming you do). When you find yourself thinking anti-trans thoughts? That’s transphobia. It doesn’t need to be any more than that.
To put it more personally – I occasionally find myself having issues with my own bisexuality and the pressures it places upon my marriage. But I don’t consider those issues to be “internalized homophobia”, they’re just homophobic aliefs. Society is full of them. There’s nothing particularly special about them just because I’m the one having them, and I’d be especially aggrieved if someone used the existence or potential existence of them to attempt to negate my arguments on the basis of “internalized homophobia”.
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Zorgon, I’m not sure if you’re disagreeing with me or Ozy based on the threaded replies, but I think that you and I, at least, are largely in agreement. I would have said that when used to refer to one’s own thoughts, “internalized misogyny/homophobia” and “misogynist/homophobic aliefs” were essentially synonymous. I mean, when I’ve heard people talk about internalized misogyny in an introspective way (and I agree that it can also be used as an attack), it’s usually in the context of “I don’t consciously believe this/don’t want to believe this/didn’t realize I believed this, but I can see that it’s still affecting the way that I feel and behave despite my best efforts.” Which seems to line up pretty well with the concept of an alief? The major difference, to my mind, is that most non-rationalists aren’t familiar with the term “alief,” and aren’t likely to use it.
I’m also less than confident that, if misogynist alief became the term of choice, people wouldn’t just start arguing, “Your argument is terrible because it’s based on misogynist aliefs!”
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I was responding to Ozy, sorry Bem. We responded at almost the same time 🙂
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But also, I’m only using the term “alief” because I’m talking to… well… you lot. What I suggested was not “misogynistic alief”, but “misogyny”. Much the same as my internal whining anti-my-own-queerness impulse is just “homophobia”.
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Zorgon, I think part of the reason people don’t want to describe it as just “misogyny” is that, well, they are not misogynists and don’t want to think of themselves as such. “misogynistic alief” works fine though.
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I think many women’s attitude does not rise to the level of ‘internalized misogyny’ or even ‘misogyny’ — ‘sexism’ would be more like it. Misogyny means, or meant, hatred and ill will toward women. Sexism was often intended benign, even affectionate, protective, near to gallantry; seeing women as incapable of certain things and needing to be shielded or served. A woman can feel herself this way, sometimes with good reason, as most of us don’t have the training or toughness men learn.
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@bem:
>I’ve also seen it used to dehumanize other people (e.g. the idea that, say, submissive women are only interested in BDSM because they’ve internalized ideas about female subservience and inferiority
Ah, I kind of believe that?
I mean, there’s got to be a reason subs are so much more common in women than men; and by an astounding coincidence, we live in a society pushing exactly that framework for sex.
Does this make me a bad person, in your estimation? (Honestly asking – I’m sufficiently squicked by high-end BSDM that I might be biased.)
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I’m submissive and a person who could have reasonably internalized misogyny and I believe that the reason women are more likely to be submissive is having internalized ideas about female inferiority.
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Consider this.
If women are for some reason inherently (ie not purely socially) biased towards a submissive sexual role, then pursuing the submissive role is likely to be of high value to most women.
If women are for some reason purely socially biased towards a submissive sexual role, then pursuing the submissive role is likely to be of high value to most women.
While the submissive female sex role may or may not be a cultural construct, what is certain is that the idea that a submissive female sex role is a negative trait is *definitely* a cultural construct and one which I would suggest is limited to quite a narrow minority of the population.
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MugaSofer-
Nope, I don’t think you’re a bad person! I also, in fact, think that the reason female submissives outnumber female dominants in so many circles is probably because our society really frames female submissiveness as the ideal kind of sexuality! But I also think that that idea becomes dehumanizing when used by anti-BDSM activists to advance the argument that submissive women a) can’t meaningfully consent to BDSM play or sex because they are acting on internalized negative ideas about women, and b) don’t actually get meaningful sexual enjoyment out of BDSM and are engaging in it *purely* because of self-hatred or internalized misogyny. It’s kind of a tricky question, but I think that it’s possible to acknowledge that socialization pretty probably plays a role in female submissiveness, without also erasing submissive women’s agency.
I feel like this is kind of a good example of what I was saying above in terms of useful/non-useful usages of “internalized misogyny.” There are definitely gendered cultural norms that affect people at very deep levels, like sexuality, which they might not be immediately conscious of. It’s good to be able to talk about this. It’s not good to use this as evidence that anyone who has internalized these social roles is somehow a non-agent.
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Aha!
Bem, I think those people are assuming that (submissive?) BSDM preferences are very rare, and women are biased toward making the (wrong) choice of being submissive for cultural reasons.
Now, this betrays a deep misunderstanding of how sexual preferences work, with paraphilias and kinks and all that. It does seem like a good framework for other things, though – for example, job choices. Indeed, one could say it’s almost the central thesis of feminism that people make the wrong choices because they’re biased by our culture’s gender roles.
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So I read a short article over at Feminist Critics[1] that argues that common arguments against gamergate could also apply to feminim.
For example, the idea that if a supporter of gamergate doesn’t denounce harrsment they’re complicit; could also be applied to feminis. For example if a feminist doesn’t denounce TERFs they’re complicit.
Personally I think that there’s some large differences between how the movements are structured which affect how valid these criticisms are; but supporting gamergate has actually given me a lot more sympathy for feminists. I look back at some of the accusations of motte and bailey tactics applied to feminism as a whole and think “oh, so this is what it looks like from the other side”.
[1]http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2014/10/22/things-that-are-not-consistent-noh/
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Agreed on most points, with the caveat that I don’t believe that there is a significant movement engaged in false-flagging feminism. YMMV.
From an anti-anti-gamergate perspective, most of Gamergate has been engaged in motte and bailey tactics from the outset. The standard response to people saying “you demonise anyone who disagrees with you as an SJW!” is to retreat to the motte and say “no, it’s about games journalism”. Then, once the heat is off, it’s back off to the bailey at 8chan to post “DEM SJWs, EH?!” threads.
BUT, and this is quite a big one, that bailey is not organised harassment of people who disagree with them, nor is it the collection of social superweapons to use against enemies. Antis and SJWs alike engage in both, hence my position; I don’t so much support GG as oppose their enemies.
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Well, there was the “free bleeding” meme from 4chan, but apparently they steelmanned, because it was picked up and promoted by several feminist sites. It’s relatively difficult to satirize feminism, because there just aren’t that many positions available that aren’t already occupied by real feminists. Genocide of 90% of all males? Check. Genocide of all males? Check. All heterosexual sex is rape? Big check. Women should never get prison terms, no matter the crime, because being 7% of the jailed population means women are “disproportionately affected”? Check.
We need a new Mencken.
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@Zogon — Near as I can tell there have been a fair amount of “socks”, which in this context means white cis-dudes (or whatever) pretending to be women and/or minorities. In fact, this plan was the genesis of #notyourshield, stated openly on the -chans, who have a long history of this kind of shit. It is a strategy of theirs. The motives are obvious.
That said, it seems clear that some #notyourshield folks are for-realz what they say.
I have no idea the percentages. I have no confidence in my ability to distinguish the groups — particularly when talking about minorities. (I’m white.)
Anyway, I generally do not engage with the Gaters. I don’t go into their mentions. If they come into mine, I block them and get on with my life.
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Regarding #notyourshield – being one of the first-generation “what, why the hell are you people defending an abuser” types I was around in the most vague sense for the genesis of #notyourshield.
My memory was of a mixture of black and female 4chan anons wanting to strongly push back against the people claiming GGers were all white men. (Thing is, of course, it’s almost entirely impossible to know what race/gender/etc people on the chans are, due to their anonymity culture.) If you have evidence to the contrary, I’d be interested in seeing it, not least since I keep hearing this “#notyourshield are sockpuppets” claim and it doesn’t tally with my experiences.
In addition, I am pretty sure you’re aware of just how incredibly everything-ist it is to assume a group of PoC, women, gay and trans people must be n-chan sockpuppets because they disagree with SJWs on Twitter. This is not by way of an accusation, it just kinda needs saying.
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I can’t find it now, but I recall seeing some screencaps of 4chan with specific instructions of what identities to adopt and how to act. There was the predictable back and forth and complete horribleness. Add to this their track record with the #endfathersday crap. Point is, they have a track record.
Which sucks for everyone.
That said, Justine Tunney exists. It’s not as if there are no horrible women and minorities.
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Nope. I was there – a number of black and female anons were deeply unhappy with the way they were being ignored and belittled in the discussion and someone suggested the hashtag as a way to strike back.
Whether it was then co-opted by others (as seems to have been the case from some of the IRC caps) is both irrelevant and kind of inevitable. There are bad actors all over this situation, GNAA not least amongst them.
In the meantime, the delightful anti-GG bunch managed to get the (very definitely non-white) original user of the #notyourshield hashtag fired from his job.
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In the meantime, the delightful anti-GG bunch managed to get the (very definitely non-white) original user of the #notyourshield hashtag fired from his job.
Link?
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I notice blockquote doesn’t quite work. So we will have to imagine its presence.
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Veronica – Here’s the original tweet from Polar Roller Aka J. J. Miller.
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@zorgon — That doesn’t give a lot of information.
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On the ethics mott and the SJW bailey – to me the two are intertwined. I believe that the SJW mindset promotes ideas that are directly opposed to ethical journalism. E.G. the SPJ Code of Ethics says “Support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.” while anti-gamergate has accused people of harassment simply for interviewing people from gamergate.
All that said, I agree with you. There are gamergaters who use ethics as a mott and social justice warriors as a bailey. It is rather annoying when people argue for your side badly, but that’s life I suppose.
As for notyourshield. I think that the existence of some socks (I’m sure they’re some, it’s a big hashtag) is being used as an excuse to justify silencing minority voices. That’s just outright wrong. Who cares what percentage are socks? There is solid proof, proof, that that a non-negligible (hell, one person is non-negligible) number of women and minorities in notyourshield. Attempting to silence them, silence anyone, is wrong. Attempting to silence minorities while claiming to be for social justice is both hypocritical and wrong. You can disagree, but not silence.
And that’s before you get to the really racist stuff I’ve seen tweeted at people in notyourshield.
Oh – and here’s a link where the origonal user says he was fired: http://gamergate.me/2014/10/notyourshield-uprising/
(different avatar because I got my own email wrong)
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One guy once suggested that people pretend to be women and minorities – this was a random post mostly ignored by gamergate, most of whom I think haven’t heard of it, but was screencapped and retweeted widely by the opposition.
I have seen exactly one case of someone believably accused of being a sockpuppet (in another screencap widely retweet by the opposition), but maybe fifty cases of people being accused and proving their identity (these feel like good “burns” and were naturally widely retweeted within gamergate, but after a while it actually became routine ), out of many more who spintaneously sent pictures and videos. Women and minorities are a very large and very vocal part of the movement. I don’t think sockpuppets make even 1% of it.
If I was just occasionally looking from the outside I’m sure it’d be hard to believe just *how much* of the narrative is simply false, but it really is, and this may just be the most important aspect of gamergate. It… it just wasn’t ever about women at all.
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Radish finally updated “Cosmic Horror”
http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/cosmic-horror/#jewish-questions
and thread isn’t nearly enough flamewar-y yet so,
The Jews: Threat, or Menace?
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I swear that’s 99% longwinded quotations. Tl;DR?
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“All my political enemies are Jewish! Coincidence? I think not!”
I mean, there is a story to be to told about Jews being overrepresented on the Left. For chrissake, even Lenin was part-Jewish. But they’re also overrepresented on the Right.
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also, I like how Lovecraft is all “Jews are awful but it’s okay to reproduce with them, just not to be influenced by their culture.” (He married a Jew.)
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My TLDR for that would be: “Lovecraft was right about everything.”
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Quick heads up – one of my replies is apparently “awaiting moderation”. Given you’re not moderating this topic thread, I’m guessing the two links in it have tripped some spam-catching code.
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Into any discussion of race and sex I always like to toss the idea of the cultural/genetic vortex. I view this as a better explanation than straight evopsych for most sex and race differences, because it works on a much shorter timeline. This allows for drastic changes over tens or hundreds of years, rather than tens of thousands.
Basically, think of it as a feedback loop between the values of a culture and the genetics of its members. Those attributes which are valued as high status will be selected for by other higher status people, leading to greater influence of people with that trait later on. These attributes can be selected for seemingly at random.
I use myself as an example. I hit puberty in the grunge era, and so was far more successful sexually than I would have been five years before or after. The prevailing cultural winds were just far kinder to depressive, quiet, intellectual types with no talent for fashion or entertainment for a few years. One would expect a tiny effect in the offspring born of couples who met during those years.
If, however, the cultural norms change over the longer term, they can have a strong effect relatively quickly. I have quite a number of good friends who are current or former Amish, and they have their own genetic traits. You can spot them in a crowd if you are familiar with the physical characteristics. This is a relatively closed community self-selected over time for religious dogma and community values, and these combine over time to produce a distinct appearance and likely other genetically linked differences. And this over only a hundred and fifty years.
So, when one talks about (lets take the perennial favorite) say, race and IQ, this is a way of viewing the results. Those cultures which value attributes such as study habits and intellectualism will select for them over time, creating a genetic basis when there was not one originally. Those cultures which more value athletic prowess will select for that. Of course, in every society, culture is selective for a million of these attributes, some in direct conflict with each other. And cultures can be bigger or smaller than races, so the picture gets really confused.
The optimistic point is that just because Race A is a half standard deviation down in Attribute B, it is not necessarily permanent. This can change relatively quickly with the culture. The pessimistic point is that we can’t reliably change culture on purpose.
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The 10,000 Year Explosion is basically this + actual genetic data. The authors are fairly well known in the HBD scene, though obviously most people there have less sophisticated views.
The main problem with the optimistic view is that the timescale is on the order of centuries or even millenia depending on the traits you’re looking for. Even if it were politically viable this would be the work of a dynasty rather than a political movement.
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Not necessarily. although it does help. I began a study a couple years back of the Meiji Restoration era of Japanese history, and while I have many years to go, the results were staggering. Japan, alone of all nations subjugated by imperialist powers, reversed its own course and became a world power within fifty years. This is the power of culture. I have no data for this, but I’d lay solid cash that the average IQ in Japan was distinctly below average at the beginning of this process. It’s a standard deviation higher now, and has been for some time. At the absolute outside, a hundred years and under many different governments. It is true that it took drastic monarchy, militarism and toxic imperialism to get there, but it is possible.
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Japan is a spectacularly poor example.
Japan circa Commodore Perry had been an empire with a Chinese-style civil service (albiet a poor knock off) for centuries and had a European-style warrior aristocracy for the better part of a millenium. Before they embraced isolation they were capable of reverse engineering and surpassing Dutch musket technology shortly after it’s introduction, and even through it they produced quite a bit of top-shelf philosophy and art. They certainly impressed the Jesuits if nothing else.
The Japanese might not have had terribly impressive technology but there is no evidence that they were less intelligent than contemporary Chinese or Europeans, which puts them head and shoulders above most of the world’s peoples.
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Crackpot gender theory #1:
There is a position (represented by 70’s feminists, e.g. Germaine Greer, Joanna Russ) that a lot of what we call “femininity” in Western contemporary society is just plain *bad*; that women in the absence of sexism would be a lot more “socially gender-neutral” (wear overalls, speak frankly and matter-of-factly, not flirt or simper, etc) while still identifying as female in the biological sense (bear children, enjoy having female bodies).
This intuition is behind questions like “can I wear lipstick and be a feminist?” There used to be people who legitimately thought “no, in a post-sexism society there would be no makeup.”
I basically never see that attitude among the feminists I’ve encountered on the internet. I also rarely see old-fashioned butch lesbians (of the type affectionately rendered in “Dykes to Watch Out For”) in the younger generation. I’ve never met anyone my own age or younger who wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress, for instance.
My crackpot theory is that in the past few decades society has somehow made it more unacceptable for women to be “unfeminine” — today, being tomboyish has an anti-feminist connotation, whereas in the past, the (negative) stereotype of a feminist was that she *was* tomboyish/masculine/lesbian.
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Someone mentioned “toxic masculinity” upthread and I kind of had to restrain the urge to throw things at them.
I think the reason why gender-neutrality as a “good thing” for women died out in feminism is pretty straightforward: It’s a very hard sell. When trying to persuade women to fight against gender roles, it’s much easier to do so by anathematizing the male “role” and lauding the female “role” (at least in their manifestations, if not outright) than it is to decry both as unnecessary.
So, if you want to sell feminism to gender-role-following affluent women (who via financial and social capital represent the most useful demographic to pursue), you need to yell “YAY BEING A STRONG INDEPENDENT BUT STILL FEMININE WOMAN! BOO HISS AWFUL MASCULINE MEN!” as loud as you can in as many places as you can while wearing a placard marked “feminism”.
That this somewhat exaggeratedly describes the public persona of movement feminism for the last 20 years or so is not, I suggest, an accident.
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I’m curious why you dislike the idea of toxic masculinity? I mean, I can guess, but I don’t know how accurate I’d be.
I also think that while there’s some truth to this comment, it’s a little bit oversimplified. In particular, I think one reason the sort of NYTimes/Sheryl Sandberg/have-a-good-job-and-wear-lipstick-and-have-babies-et-cetera feminism you’re talking about has been so publicly successful is that it kind of sort of promotes female empowerment without really disrupting the status quo. Like, yes, gender-conforming affluent women get the satisfaction of being totally empowered without having to stop being gender non-conforming (thus escaping the social opprobrium that usually comes with breaking gender roles), but gender-conforming affluent men also get the promise that their partners or probable future partners are going to both contribute income to the family *and* do the lion’s share of childrearing, while still making an effort to look conventionally attractive and feminine, and businesses both get a bigger pool of workers to draw from, and the chance to sell a lot of stuff to women who are concerned about fitting into their appropriate gender role, *and* the chance to attach Empowerment/Girl Power/etc label to things and sell even more stuff. All of which makes this kind of feminism appealing to the people with the most reach to promote it.
(This is still pretty oversimplified, I think. For instance, I think that this is far from the only public face of feminism in the two decades, and there are several different kinds of feminism that have a lot of reach among certain populations, for various reasons.)
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Well, at the risk of confirming your suspicions, here’s my thinking regarding the concept of “toxic masculinity”.
There are elements of gender roles in society which are rather obviously sub-optimal for a very large number of people of those genders within it. This isn’t really difficult to demonstrate, and arguably an awful lot of time and effort has gone into demonstrating just that. Non-gender-role-conforming people seem to like studying exactly how their gender roles fail, for reasons which should be fairly obvious.
But when approaching this subject with the general public, there is a problem. Most people who currently conform to their gender roles have “agreeing with their gender role” as part of that role. Thus the situation inverts; we go from a whole bunch of non-conforming individuals who are predisposed to like the idea of damaging gender roles to a whole bunch of people who are actively disposed against it.
So how to resolve that problem? One way is to tackle it head-on, but that risks backlash.
Another, more potentially viable approach is to atomise the gender roles in question, present them to the public, and denounce the ones that seem to have less traction. And this is what I think has happened.
See, it’s very easy to disparage the cultural mores associated with masculinity. After all, we already know that men are much more strongly disposed to consider women as “in-group” than they are men, and that women likewise hold automatic preference for women (Rudman and Goodwin, 2004, annoyingly unavailable in public, summarised well in this wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%80%9CWomen_are_wonderful%E2%80%9D_effect ). All you have to do is focus on those “other” men, the BAD MEN WHO DO BAD THINGS.
And over the past 30 years I feel like I’ve seen feminist campaigners try most different approaches to breaking down gender roles, and “Bad men are bad, you’re not one of those Bad Men who hurt Defenceless Women are you?” seems to be one of the few that holds significant traction amongst men.
But now we have a problem. See, for this particular part of the breaking-down-gender-roles story to make sense in the greater context of gender studies, we need some specific set of shibboleths regarding the specific and independently notable Special Badness of this particular bit of gender roles. Otherwise it’d be obvious that this is just selective reporting for the sake of popularity.
So instead of “toxic gender roles affecting everyone”, we’ve now narrowed it down to “toxic masculinity”, which is gender studies code for “BAD MEN DOING BAD THINGS”. We can’t talk about toxic femininity, as no-one of either binary gender wants to hear about how their in-group (see above) is full of BAD WOMEN DOING BAD THINGS. We can only refer to it in passing, using oblique phrases like “internalized misogyny” and so on.
Unfortunately, this has the added effect of completely ignoring those elements of male gender roles that are not BAD MEN DOING BAD THINGS, and all elements of female gender roles that aren’t currently politically inconvenient. And given that one of those elements is the aforementioned in-group Halo Effect for women, it becomes a self-sustaining issue.
I’m against sub-optimal gender roles in general. I’m against the inability of men to publicly emote, and I’m against the stigma against male virginity, and I’m against the intense stigma against long-term single men, and I’m against the pressure for men to take high-risk jobs, and I’m against the overwhelming pressure to act as provider and protector to other human beings who should damn well be able to act as provider and protector for themselves. I’m also strongly against the gender role that men should always protect women, physically and politically, in complete contradiction of the fundamental premise of the beliefs that a lot of male feminists purport to believe.
I’m also against the gender roles that state that women not only should be able to demand men act as provider and protector, but that they *must* do so; I’m against the gender roles that state that a woman’s only relevant status is as a mother and wife, and I’m against the gender roles that state that a woman must engage in status games that would never be acceptable from a man in the place of actual personal achievement. (There’s plenty more too, I’m just getting kind of tired of lists.)
TL;DR version: I’m against toxic masculinity because I believe gender roles are in general rather toxic and just focusing on men’s negative gender roles because it’s an easy sell is casually sexist and the people doing it should be ashamed of themselves.
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Agree, basically.
There is a strong “don’t be conventionally masculine!” pressure in feminist circles, with very little “if your genuine gender identity is masculine, then go ahead and embrace your true self!” I think that’s basically always been there (I can’t think of a historical feminist, except the occasional maverick like Camille Paglia, who truly embraced machismo.) And maybe there’s reason for this — a movement whose tenets include “men tend to oppress women” is going to be at least a *little* slanted against men and maleness, and that might not be entirely unreasonable. (If I worked in a battered women’s shelter, for instance, I’d probably have some biases against men.)
What I see as new is a drift away from “gender-neutral-ness” towards overt femininity. Feminism is *pinker* than it used to be.
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Zorgon, thanks for responding. Rereading my comment above, I think I came off as sort of suspicious of your motives for being uncomfortable with “toxic masculinity,” which was not what I was intending to imply. My guess was going to be, basically, “toxic masculinity doesn’t translate well to broad audiences/is easily co-opted by people who want to talk about how men in general are terrible, instead of about how gender roles hurt men as well as women.” But I didn’t want to put words in your mouth, and I also assumed you could probably make your point better than I could.
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This is so true. Do they even make action movies featuring virile male characters anymore?
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…and pop-culture femininity tries to co-opt aspects of masculinity. Weren’t there a bunch of think-pieces lauding Ke$ha for basically being a frat boy? #soprogressive #sobrave
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Crackpottier follow-up:
There is a “Heterosexual Female Life Plan” (which basically means: have sex and long-term relationships with men, bear children, spend a lot of time on child-rearing and other domestic responsibilities) and a “Heterosexual Male Life Plan” (have sex and long-term relationships with women, father children, spend most of your time on “work” which is not child-rearing.)
Most women actively prefer the HFLP, most men actively prefer the HMLP, but there are minorities who don’t. (The celibate, loners, and asexuals; LGBT people; bohemians who don’t want to settle down; women who are very driven by a mission other than motherhood; etc). Let’s call these people “sociosexual dissenters.”
Feminist, gay rights, and related movements have frequently have an element of “support freedom for sociosexual dissenters!” But as feminism becomes mainstream, it begins to reflect the composition of the female population, which is mostly *not* sociosexual dissenters.
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Similarly, the gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s hardly contemplated the idea of “gay marriage” — not because they didn’t believe in equal rights, but because marriage was not the province of sociosexual dissenters.
I have an older gay friend whose attitude is, “Why the hell would gay people want to get married?” It honestly bewilders him.
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I agree on a “gay culture” level during that period.
That said, I met a couple in their 70s at a dinner years ago who had been together since their teens, immediately post-war. They were not only incredibly sweet, but impossibly happy at seeing the possibility of being able to finally formalise their relationship.
This is a couple who had gotten together during the era when being gay was an offence with a prison term, and had lived to see the day they could marry. It was heartwarming in the extreme, and I don’t know how many others like them are out there, but honestly I kinda feel like the whole gay marriage movement would be worth it *just for those two*.
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I think there has always been this division in feminism and it is not crackpotty! There is a chapter in Little Tales of Misogyny (Patricia Highsmith in the seventies) where at a feminist meeting your HFLP women and your sociosexual dissent women end up having a physical fight over the issues you mention. In Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman she discusses the two strands of feminism quite warmly.
Things like wages for housework were seventies feminist campaigns about the HLFP group, and have in some sense been won in many European countries through tax credits and long periods of paid maternity leave. Much of feminism in developing countries is about issues of motherhood.
I don’t think it is particularly a new thing am unsure if the focus on the HFLP group has increased. It is probably true that feminism has become more ‘pinkified’ in some countries, perhaps because certain groups of women tend to have children later. I’d speculate that has brought back a pinkified ‘spinster’ role -( a spinner of thread) hence the resurgence of crafts, sewing, knitting, cupcake making, focus on clothes and so on, largely done by women with no kids wishing to create a feminine identity without motherhood.
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Examples?
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“Not like other girls”/”chill girl”
“femmephobia”
“internalized misogyny”
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http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/11/zuckerberg-explains-gray-t-shirts-sounds-sexist.html
Mark Zuckerberg says he wears plain gray t-shirts because he doesn’t want to be distracted from his work by fashion. New York Magazine calls this sexist, because fashion is a typically female concern.
This is a standard example of “you must be interested in/ value feminine things, or else you’re sexist.”
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Everything you say needs to have “on the internet” appended to it. Visit America sometime. Abhor football and country music and hunting? Frightened to speak to working class service workers? Ashamed of your latent attraction to the men who’ve always dominated you? You have a problem with masculinity. Defending it on the internet is what you’re into. Battling it out with feminists for who gets to be assistant to the masters of the universe is your deal.
What we’re seeing here is passive men, nerds, and masculine women, feminists, engaged in a dogfight for second place in the game of life. Masculine men and feminine women are forming pair bonds like they always have.
Carry on with your war for the consolation prize…
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But wait, I have a relatively high status job and an amazing wife. This is the “consolation prize”?
Can I have more “consolation” please?
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I gotta get me some of this 20:20 mind-reading shiz. I wonder, gene, if I buy your book will I also be able to tell the marital, sexuality and career status of people on the Internet based solely on the things they talk about in comment sections? You should monetize that.
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Additionally, if we imagine that some people who would have identified as butch lesbians / tomboys during first-wave feminism now identify as trans-masculine or trans men: some kinds of feminist strongly dislike those people.
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Oh wow that t-shirt thing is hilarious. The irony of whoever wrote that calling someone a sexist…
I’ve actually twice seen people accuse Science of being sexist because, essentially, its not “girly” enough. Because everyone knows that women are all emotional and can’t do cold heartless logic and reason /s. Never-mind that if all women were woolly headed romantics they would be bad at science, I would just like to point out how completely misogynistic such a statement is (its just like old style sexism with the positive and negative connotations flipped). One of these times was from a random guy on the internet, but the other was from some postmodernist feminist academic.
Yeah I know that that is an unrepresentative opinion, I just though it was really funny.
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Seems to me feminism have become less judgmental over the years (“choice feminism”). The mainstream view is that it’s not acceptable to criticize women’s choices to embrace conventional femininity, whether that’s wearing lipstick or a dress, being an unemployed housewife, or staying in an abusive relationship. So the incentive for women to shun conventional femininity to show they are proper feminists is less–they can act exactly like non-feminist women and still be free to claim to be feminists.
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I’m sure some of this is true, but I still wonder where all the women who said “I hate that frilly stuff!” went.
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Yeah, I view it as a moderately recent (90s-and-later) development which is partly a reaction to the mainstream characterization of feminists as masculine, partly a backlash to “anti-girly” attitudes within feminist circles. Performative femininity had to be rejected by one generation of feminists before it could be reclaimed by the next — witness the reclamation of knitting, quilting, and baking.
For what it’s worth, I know quite a few women of my generation (late 20s to mid 30s) who are aggressively nongirly, myself included. (But it’s easier for us to be aggressively nongirly and also like knitting or Hello Kitty, I think, than it was in the 70s-80s).
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I’m sure some of this is true, but I still wonder where all the women who said “I hate that frilly stuff!” went.
How old would they be by now? At a certain age and BMI, comfortable dresses are more comfortable than tight levis.
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they can act exactly like non-feminist women and still be free to claim to be feminists.
Feminist is as feminist votes. And donates, and hires, and supports women in whatever they want to do.
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houseboatonstyx, so if you vote and donate feminist, you can be a feminist regardless of what you do with your life? I don’t agree. Women, like men, sometimes make terrible choices, and part of the duty of a feminist is to criticize those terrible choices and make good choices in her own life.
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YES. Why can’t people just do what they want to do, rather than worrying about whether it conforms with stereotype, or that you have internalised anything.
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If in the past few decades society has made it less acceptable for women to be “unfeminine”, and feminists responded by going along with it, then sounds to me like they’re pretty terrible at feminism! Personally I think your “crackpottier” theory is the less crackpotty of the two.
But yeah, thank you for bringing this up. (Also yay for the other commenters on this thread.) That sort of aggressively-gender-neutral is certainly the sort of feminism I picked up in my pre-internet childhood (though I grew up in the 90s, mind you), and the kind I’m still inclined to support today.
Like as I understood it, a lot of the point of feminism was “men are hogging all the good stuff, let’s get in on that”. And of course gender roles means both sides are confined, but, y’know, one side is rather more confined, pushed further from neutral; so you would expect that if both sides were free to optimize as they pleased, taking the best parts of both (or of whatever), then while each would become more like the other, women would move more in the direction of men than men would move in the direction of women.
And it’s really weird to see feminists embracing their old enemy (hell, the old enemy), the masculine default. Well, no, OK, they’re not doing that — but they’re doing something scarily like it. That is to say: One way of making sense of the default is “there is masculinity and there is femininity, but our society is sexist and regards the former as default”. But another way is “Our society is sexist and regards masculine as default, so gender roles confine women more strongly than men, since they have to stay away from neutral, wherease men don’t”. Suppose the latter is the case but you look at it the former way. Then you’ll start painting neutral things as masculine and reinforcing the problem! Like as a male nerd, I find it very messed up and kind of scary that we’re now being grouped in with the frat boys. They’re the masculine ones, we’re the aggressivley neutral ones!
It also strikes me as odd that there seems to be this assumption in the SJ-sphere that trans people and gender-non-conforming people have naturally aligned interests, often even lumping them together (“trans*”); whereas as far as I can tell, their interests are pretty naturally opposed to one another! Because, as best I can tell, the former generally want to make things more gendered, the latter normally want to make things less gendered. Which is why I’m pretty wary of existing trans-friendly feminism; I am not at all convinced that the end state they want is one I would support. I know Ozy claims it is possible to make trans-friendly gender-abolitionism make sense, and I’d certainly like for that to be the case, but I’m pretty far from convinced. But that’s a different post, and this is long enough…
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On this: “Like as a male nerd, I find it very messed up and kind of scary that we’re now being grouped in with the frat boys.”
I think it’s more complicated. First off, here “frat boys” can be taken to mean “douchey guys who are horrible to women.” Which, look, no one is saying nerd guys are literally in fraternities. (Except of course some are, but never mind; that isn’t the point.) They’re saying the shitty things frat-dudes do nerds do also.
Which probably is not totally correct, but it’s not totally wrong either. Nerd gals have been talking about crappy treatment from nerd guys nearly forever. Some of this shit is really bad.
And when nerd men rant about nerd women (who are called fake, mind you!), they seem to truly resent us, something about our so-called “power.” But what is that power? Is it real?
Okay look, I’ve seen this power, at least attempts at it. I’ve seen kinda-cute-but-not-hot girls enter nerd space and go full queen bee.
Thing is, nerd guys, many of them, FUCKING HATE THIS. It gets toxic fast.
And look, the power we women supposedly have — what is it exactly?
I mean, it’s maybe complicated in some ways. But maybe it’s not really complicated at all.
The thing behind it all: you want to fuck us and we get to say no.
This is the central issue, a painful, messed up, tragic stew of terrible. But there it is.
It gets tricky, of course. Thing is, some women learn to play the game. It is not her power over you, per se, it is how the culture gets structured. It is what we can get other dudes to do.
But on the other hand, why are we the trophies for your dumb status games?
In her new book Laurie Penny talks about this. I’m paraphrasing, but she says, I did not ask for this power, nor am I leading you around by your boner, so you don’t get to hate me for it.
Regarding nerd abuse, it sucks. Let’s fix it (she says knowing that won’t happen anytime soon).
So look, a few miles short of nerd abuse are some real critiques of nerd masculinity. For example, when a subculture fetishizes violent muscle guys who put women in their place — well, we get to look side-eyed at that. I can probably find a hundred 4chan posts where nerd guys post ridiculously violent hate fantasies featuring ludicrous portrayals of testosterone overload.
Which fine, there is a place for dumb fantasies. I have plenty of my own. But this stuff tends to cycle, and I don’t think these men have good boundaries. This stuff spreads and creates a culture that is toxic to women.
(And look, the fact that these men are very often, in their real lives, not at all successful at masculinity is hard to ignore. Which does not justify anyone mocking them. But nor is it an excuse for the worst behavior.)
This predates the Internet, back when there was no 4chan, nor a Jezebel. The Internet just let it bloom into a full measure of terrible.
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If “nerd” is to have any meaning more specific than just “anyone who calls themself a nerd”, then there must be such a thing as a fake one. So the mere fact that some women are called fake nerds doesn’t mean misogyny. Maybe they really are fake nerds, after all.
I would suggest that being a nerd has at least some connection to social disapproval. A nerd may not be a complete outcast, but there is, at a minimum, the idea that the nerd does some things without caring whether they are popular or not.
Someone who expresses interest in nerdly pursuits specifically to become popular then, shouldn’t count as a nerd. And it so happens that given gender roles in our society, the range of things that a woman can do to become more popular (particularly among the opposite-sex portion of the audience) is much wider than the range of things a man can do, so fake nerds will tend to be female.
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There are definitely strong feminist arguments against “trans” gender ideology (see Sheila Jeffreys). If you ask me, gender is not that important, and those who think it is (whether because they want to switch to a new gender, make up their on gender, or just adhere passionately to the gender role they were born into) are all wrong. It’s the 5-year-old who says she wants to be a boy so she can be a race-car driver.
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It pretty close to established medical fact that transsexuals need cross sex hormones, which is to say, HRT is pretty much the only thing that stops their despair. If gender goes away, or is rendered socially unimportant — but how do you do that? — transsexuals will still need hormones. They will still need to switch to the other side of our great dimorphic divide. This does not change according to your gender theory.
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Jiro,
I don’t think you’ll have much luck claiming ownership of the word. Nor do I think you’ll have much luck claiming ownership of nerd-spaces. If nerd-stuff becomes cool, which clearly it has, then you won’t have much luck keeping those things to yourself.
Plenty of nerds, including me, seem quite happy to see nerd culture open up. Plenty of us like having a spectrum of cool people. How will you stop us?
What I see happening is this: Many nerds have embraced diversity. Many have not. Those who have not seem embarked on a strategy of making nerd-spaces as toxic as possible, so only they remain atop the ash heap.
How’s that working out?
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veronica: Do you think that there is some definition of a nerd other than just “anyone who calls themselves one”?
If the answer is “yes”, then you’ve already agreed that there is such a thing as a fake nerd. We’re just arguing about exactly where the boundary is.
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@Jiro — Words don’t work that way: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/
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veronica: That example shows that you can use words to mean different things depending on what traits you’re interested in. You can reasonably claim that you are using the word “nerd” in a different way than someone else, and that therefore their determination of “fake nerd” is wrong. But what you can’t do is claim that there is no such thing as a fake nerd *at all*. By using your own definition, you’ve only changed *what* it means to be a fake nerd, you haven’t completely eliminated the possibility of such a thing.
If you think their definition of “nerd” is wrong, then tell me what yours is. We can then determine, based on it, whether the people referred to are fake nerds.
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@Jiro — Thing is, I’ve never particularly needed a bright line definition of nerd, largely because I’ve never felt the need to police the border. If you do, then so it goes. But understand this: these are motivated choices, and people are going to look at what you do and try to figure out why.
And while we cannot read minds, we can look at patterns. For example, if there is a sizable number of romantically unsuccessful male nerds who dismiss pretty cosplay women as “fake geek girls” (when they are not assumed to be “booth babes”), then yeah, we’re going to notice that pattern.
But more, we can fit this in with what else we know. This pattern is not isolated. In fact, as I said before, this has been going on forever, but the Internet has let it go tribal. No longer is it a few unhappy men in a crowded convention hall, where most people can negotiate the space well enough. Now these men find each other on the -chans and reinforce the bitterness they feel.
While at the same time geek girls gather on their own forums and talk about how much it sucks to get a lot of hate dumped on them from lonely dudes.
And this sucks and the cycle is terrible — and I am well aware of how horrible my side can be. (You know, with the “fat loser neckbeard” stuff. Which fuck that. It’s needlessly hurtful.)
Okay, so look, it seems to me you are very invested in your right to call some geeks “fake.” Why? I mean, for you personally, why?
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@veronica d:
>The thing behind it all: you want to fuck us and we get to say no.
This is the central issue, a painful, messed up, tragic stew of terrible. But there it is.
To be clear: I think many guys view “women” as having a near-supernatural power to make people want to fuck them. Thus, using said power on someone and then saying “no” is unethical. The objection is not to the saying no, it’s to *being attractive.*
That this is both staggeringly misogynistic and also a clear form of internalized misandry should go without saying, but there you are.
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veronica: I think the “social disapproval” definition is sufficient to explain this pattern. Cosplaying in order to show off your body and get positive attention is the opposite of social disapproval.
I think you are reaching to explain this as sexism when there is a much more obvious explanation. It’s not because nerds react badly to sex appeal, it’s that using your sex appeal is inherently non-nerd. And in our society, it is mostly women who can use sex appeal like this, so it is mostly women that will get called fake nerds.
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Well, my definition of nerd does not contain “unsexy” as an essential element. I know plenty of sexy nerds. I know adorably sexy MIT grads who write software and play boardgames. I know a sexy-as-all-hell autistic woman who will ramble on and on about comic books as long as you let her — in totes sexy way. I know nerd kinksters, nerd burlesque geeks, nerds who put on miniskirts and go to clubs.
Myself, I try to be sexy. I succeed to a degree.
Oh, btw, why do you consider sexiness a disqualification for nerdhood? That is a curious thing to believe.
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It’s not *sexiness* that’s a disqualification for being a nerd, it’s *using your sexiness to become popular* that is, and it’s not because of sexiness per se, it’s because deliberately doing *anything* to become popular is a disqualification for being a nerd.
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I’ve known nerds who e.g. learned Arduino for nerd cred, and were quite open about it.
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But why though?
I mean, seriously, high school was ages ago. Now days the jocks serve me lunch. And I use my looks as much as I can, which yay for me.
Then again, I’m a software engineer who works on a 1mil LOC program written half in C++ and half in Common Lisp. And I’m neuro-diverse. And I love math!
Like, I fucking love math.
Come on, I have nerd-cred to bank.
But on the other hand, I also like to dance, feel pretty, and kiss people. And I like others who do the same. And anime is nerdy-as-anything, and what better way to be a femme nerd than dress up as a character you like and be as pretty as you wanna.
Seriously, your version of nerd-hood is fucking dismal. And nerds-like-me got as much say on this as nerds-like-you.
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You love math for its own sake, You don’t love math mainly because loving math will make people fawn over you.
Also, there’s a difference between being appreciated for your skills and being appreciated for your physical attributes.
“I have nerd-cred to bank… I also like to dance, feel pretty, and kiss people.”
In other words, you do nerdly things and non-nerdly things. Which is fine. Being a nerd doesn’t have to mean you like math and do nothing else. But if your *only* claim to being a nerd was that you’re pretty and kiss people, you would be seen as a fake, and I won’t blame anyone for doing so.
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This is very strange to me because the kind of nerd I’m most used to is fandom, and fandom runs entirely on people seeking social approval. You write 100k of in-depth exploration of Magneto’s and Professor X’s dynamic, or draw gorgeous Avatar the Last Airbender fanart, or spend days working on your Jack Frost cosplay, to a large degree because people will say nice things about you for doing it. You’re seeking social approval from fellow nerds, sure, but you’re still seeking social approval.
Also, a lot of the iconic and recognizable female characters in nerd culture dress in really ‘sexy’ ways, so if you’re a girl and you don’t want to crossplay, your nonsexy options are pretty limited. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that she’s dressing up sexily because she wants to show off how sexy she is, rather than because it’s a character she likes.
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I don’t think fandom in the fanfic sense and traditional nerd fandom have very much in common at all, to be honest.
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I think many of you are taking a narrow view. I recall hanging with the cool gothy kids in the 80’s doing this kinda mix between LARPing and tabletop gaming. We played vampires.
This was ages before the White Wolf craze.
And look, even then there were differences between, for example, all male role playing groups compared to mixed-gender groups, and there was a clear pecking order at the game store, and even then there was “queen bee” stuff — which look, I get it, but these were high school girls — and there were some folks who were just hopeless socially, and others who figured out how to make it work, at least well enough. Being attractive helped a lot (cuz things are unfair!)
And yes, even then, there was nerd-misogyny, and “she won’t fuck my anyway” was an oft used justification for being a jerk.
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Let me change gears a bit. I understand the need for a place like Wizchan. I mean, as an outsider the place looks unhealthy as fuck. Seriously, I think those dudes are cycling on their damage and getting damaged more.
But on the other hand, it is not my place. It is for male virgins unable to function under capitalism. I get that. So I stay away.
But those dudes do not own all of nerd culture. Neither do you. Nor do any of us own video games (as a whole), roleplaying, anime, on and on. We all get our space on the convention floor.
I’ve been here forever. It’s mine too. And I’m a feminist.
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Ozy: There was a social competition within your area of interest, but you chose that area in the first place because it interested you for mainly non-social reasons. Someone who would otherwise have little interest in writing essays about Magneto won’t think “I bet if I write a 100K essay I can get those X-Men fans to praise me to high heaven” and go about doing it.)
Furthermore, any praise you get from that 100K Magneto essay is based entirely on the merit of your work, at least in theory. The attention gained by putting on a costume has a large component of getting praised because you look pretty, and that is *not* based on the merit of your work.
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Oh look, a clueless rejection of feminine gender expression.
Have you ever hung with a serious cosplayer?
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But seriously tho, there is this thing where feminine is regarded a frivolous, but masculine things are seen as serious business. Which is hogwash.
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veronica: That is not true. It’s not because it’s feminine; men would be equally accused of being fake if they did similar things; it’s just that in our society, it is very hard for men to do similar things.
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In the context of anime/comic conventions, it seems easy enough for men to do the same sort of things. It would be interesting to looks at the criteria used to evaluate male cosplayers. Are they judged simply based on the technical skill demonstrated by their costumes (merit), or does physical attractiveness play a major role as well?
It’s easier for men to bypass the physical part of the contest by donning cloaks, armor, etc. Still, it’s hard to imagine that physical appearance doesn’t matter when it comes to more revealing costumes (ex: Solid Snake’s sneaksuit). Whether nerds admit it or not, almost all of our male heroes are either ripped and hyper-masculine or thin and gorgeous.
Basically, it seems easier for male nerds to opt-out of being judged based on their looks then their female counterparts. Women’s only real way out seems to be to veil themselves in the bulky/loose clothing of male characters.
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@clockwork marx — Well, speaking myself I rather adore the hot bishi boys.
Which makes me a terrible old cougar and now I’m going to sit in the corner and think about what I’ve done.
And I think men-in-general find it easier to opt-out of being judged on their look, not just nerd men. That said, men cannot completely opt-opt. It still happens.
In fact, I think how men respond to this has much to do with this discourse.
===============
@jiro — “Feminine” does not mean “things only women do.” Instead, it means “things culturally associated with women.” In our culture, this usually includes (among many thing) a heavy investment in one’s comportment, clothing, and grooming. (By which I mean stuff like pretty clothes and makeup.)
Of course, men can do these things. I know plenty who do. However, when they do, they are often punished by other men. So, in fact, you point supports mine. In fact, your point is a textbook example of femme-phobia.
But look, I feel as if you are dodging my points. I don’t want to talk about what is wrong with cosplay women. What I want to ask is why you want to draw your boundaries at that point? What is your experience that leads you to this position?
As I said, your approach to nerd-identity is a motivated choice. What in your experience is motivating this? Try using phrases such as “I try X with person Y and then Z happens and that makes me feel Q.”
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It’s not about opting out, it’s about opting in.
You don’t want to be judged based on your looks. But the fact remains that some other people *do*. They *intentionally* try to get themselves judged on their looks rather than mainly on their skill. Those are the people being called fake nerds here. And those people are women, because it’s much easier for women to do that than men.
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I love to dress pretty and go out. I don’t cosplay. Not my scene. But I wear nice clothes to work and if I go to a convention or whatever I’m gonna look darn good.
Well as good as I can. I’m middle aged. (I can still pull off a short skirt, if I wear stockings. I have bright purple hair.)
But anyway, the point is, I try.
Why does this bother you? Am I a fake nerd?
I think the cosplay folks are mega.
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The motivation behind policing and other negative reactions to “fake nerds” seems similar to that behind policing and other negative reactions to “cultural appropriation”. In both cases I don’t think policing makes sense unless the appropriation is thoughtless/tasteless to the point of being an insulting mockery, but I think I can sort of understand where people who complain about each are coming from.
(Another somewhat comparable dynamic is the reaction by loyal followers of a sports team to “fair-weather fans”. Also none of the above should be taken to imply equivalence in magnitude of the relevant impacts, merely similarity in kind.)
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Saying that cosplayers are judged only or mainly on having good looks is like saying actors are judged only or mainly on having good looks. Yes, looks help a lot, but there’s also a tremendous amount of work and skill involved.
For the most part, the people whose approval cosplayers most crave is other cosplayers. The people they want approval from can tell the difference between good fit and bad fit; can tell the difference between storebought and handmade; can tell the difference between a difficult and an easy cosplay. Sure, being conventionally attractive makes a big difference and people enjoy looking good; but for the social approval most cosplayers want, skill and effort matter a lot.
Also, when I attend comic-con, I see plenty of male cosplayers there, in part, to show off how great they look in spandex. Some years there’s a trend for cosplaying heroes who have just been in a terrible fight – i.e., playing Superman with 70% of his costume torn off, the better to show off more skin. If the standards Jiro were advocating were applied fairly, there’d be just as much bitterness and “fake nerd” rejection of these guys.
I know a lot of female cartoonists – comic book professionals who have nerd cred pouring out of their ink bottles – who have been questioned by skeptics seeking to out the fake nerds. I’ve never heard of that happening to a male cartoonist. Sexism seems like the simplest and most likely explanation.
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Yeah, so, some parts of that comment were not very well thought-out…
Brief notes: When I said “nerd” I was naturally thinking very blue nerd, because, well, that’s where I’m from, that’s what I’m used to, and I think those are a different sort than the ones you’re complaining about (though I’ve certainly encountered those too). Not necessarily in any “inherent” sense, just different environments yield different results. Sorry for inclarity.
But since this discussion now exists: My intuition/archetype/core example of “nerd” to a large extent agrees with Jiro — i.e., substance over style, an insistence on proving themselves through the quality of their work, a disdain for appearances and status games and those who would care about them. An attitude of “I’m slovenly because I care about things that matter,” that people who focus on appearances (their own or others) are what prevents progress. I’m not sure I really have anything constructive to add to this discussion, but I’m just kind of surprised you don’t recognize this concept.
…actually I had a much longer comment here about why I’m wary of the whole notion of “femmephobia” but I don’t really feel like starting a huge fight at the moment so I’ll save it for later. 😛 Instead I’d just like to note that I kind of made a mistake in my initial comment in that it implied that everything ordinarily considered masculine or feminine is bad, and unsurprisingly I don’t actually think that’s the case, because that would be condemning a hell of a lot of pretty obviously not-bad things. (Eg: Dresses.) But I’m not presently convinced that there isn’t a lot of badness wrapped into the usual notion of femininity and it does bother me how much feminism has embraced it. (Also for bringing back the whole notion of “feminine” and “masculine” at all, instead of going whole hog “There is no such thing as masculine or feminine, only what sexists think of as masculine or feminine!”, which to me seems obviously the correct approach, but that’s a different issue.) Apologies for not really arguing this right now.
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“If the standards Jiro were advocating were applied fairly, there’d be just as much bitterness and “fake nerd” rejection of these guys.”
Do such people claim to be nerds? (And who says there is not, for the subset of such people who claim to be nerds?)
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Yes, Superman cosplayers at ComicCon are nerds. Is there anyone who thinks that they aren’t? And can you provide a citation of someone fake-nerd policing them? If that is common, it should be easy to find.
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@Jiro — The sort of nerd you describe certainly exists. However, nerd spaces have always contained a variety of people, some of who entirely fit that profile, but many who do not. These are their spaces also.
And perhaps you will not invite them to join the private weekly RPG night back at your house. Fair enough. Your group gets to self-select. But at a public convention? You owe everyone basic courtesy, and cosplay is certainly part of contemporary nerd culture, even if your friends didn’t do it back when you were in high school.
So if some adorbz woman wearing elf ears sits across from you to play MtG, then you should be friendly, polite, and play the game. Be a good sport whether you win or lose.
Obviously.
(Also, do we want to address the fact that the actual language is usually “fake geek girl” rather than “fake nerd girl”? Myself, I never found the distinction that interesting.)
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“And can you provide a citation of someone fake-nerd policing them? If that is common, it should be easy to find.”
It’s *not* common. Given the different ways men and women are treated by society (and the fact that men’s sexuality is more visual than women’s), a male character’s body contributes much less to why people admire his costume than a female character’s body to hers, even if the character has prominent muscles. So men won’t, in general, cosplay to get attention for their body.
Incidentally, googling up “fake nerd” brings up, on the first two pages:
— One genuine criticism of fake nerds, by a girl: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarabrown/2012/03/26/dear-fake-geek-girls-please-go-away/ (and which names a fake male nerd)
— One gender-neutral Ubran Dictionary reference
— *Eighteen* pages which sarcastically or otherwise denied the existence of fake nerds.
Accusations of being a fake nerd aren’t common. It’s just that “look at those misogynists who complain about fake nerds nerds” is a big boogeyman, making it seem common.
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Reproductively viable female worker ants have a curious habit.
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I wasn’t able to view your link, but here’s an interesting behavior I learned about from the Wikipedia article: they physically mutilate their peers in order to make those peers ugly and therefore reproductively nonviable.
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A quote from the Google books link:
“Or consider the gamergate ants, whose females capture a male and snip off his genitals during copulation. They discard the male’s body, but his severed genitals continue to fertilize for an hour.”
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Man, that coincidence of naming is the ripest thing /ever/ for extended-metaphor riffing. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more already.
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As a way of reducing inequality: how about encouraging the rich to have a lot of children, and the poor to have few? It’s not a particularly original idea, but I don’t see why it isn’t more popular, surely most people would agree that 1) reducing inequality is good, 2) this would reduce inequality over a few generations (or even in this generation if you consider the cost of children).
There doesn’t even seem to be a name for that, apart from “Eugenics”, which would only be one side effect…
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I don’t think there exists a mechanism by which you can “encourage” the rich to do anything (short of cutting of their heads en-masse, that is, which usually ends up as a net-negative solution). Being rich means having all of the power.
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Encouraging, not forcing! Incentives exist, and work. They can be tricky to get right (see how Singapore’s struggling to raise it’s birthrate…) but it’s at least a worthy goal.
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Condition some tax cuts on having lots of children. They have to admit the income exists to get the tax cut on it, so they’re probably paying the same amount of tax anyway, but you’re encouraging them.
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You can encourage rich people to have large families by publishing articles about wonderful rich families who have lots of children. Include information about how expensive it is to raise lots of children when you’re rich, so that a large family is clearly a status symbol.
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Nancy: I’m not sure that’ll particularly encourage the rich, something around taxes or inheritance or property would probably be more effective, there are plenty of possibilities, some might even work!
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@po8crq:
Rich people are ultimately the ones who design the tax policy, so if they don’t want to have lots of children, they are not going to condition their tax cuts on that metric.
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>Rich people are ultimately the ones who design the tax policy
Well there’s your problem.
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For encouraging rich people to have more children, make it easier to employ nannies. Make less paperwork and liability for all domestic help, and less worry about someone’s immigration status.
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Has anyone ever investigated whether the experience of American blacks has produced genetic differences from other blacks in Africa and around the world? American blacks are descendants of slaves, who were the people who the African rulers decided to sell to slavers. These were probably people who were not very well-liked in their communities, who could not defend themselves, who had transgressed or otherwise pissed off the ruler. Then there was selection for surviving the Middle Passage. This would probably have selected the most physically healthy people, which might be correlated or anticorrelated with other traits. Then there were two hundred years of slavery. The people who were psychologically fragile would not have made it, which is also correlated or anticorrelated with other traits. And was there deliberate breeding of slaves? What factors determined which slaves did or did not marry? As Ozy says on this blog, breeding for one trait will change the frequency of other traits in unhealthy ways.
Some results found in studies of American blacks do not replicate in other black populations. This could be cultural. But this might also be because there are genetic differences.
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there was a particularly bad argument I read about surviving the middle passage, in that it would have selected for heightened salt retention and is supposedly still visible in american blacks today. problem is, a single selective event like that has very little power to do anything, so that alone will have caused very little difference between american blacks and the rest of africans.
I’ll be damned if I can remember the author of it though.
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My off-the-cuff reaction is that systematic genetic differences between African-Americans and black Africans for the kinds of reasons you cite are unlikely, for several reasons:
– It seems unlikely to me that slaveowners would have had enough time and power to have much of an effect on genetics of African-Americans by selective breeding.
– Slaving practices were not monolothic, so the kinds of people who might have been sold as slaves in one community might not have been very different from those sold as slaves elsewhere.
– Slaveowners tended to try to have slaves brought over from different places, so that they didn’t know each other or speak a common language, thus making rebellion less likely. So any genetic differences in one group (either from the crossing or from before that) that were not shared by other groups would be swamped.
That said, most African-Americans have some white admixture, and so that would plausibly influence various systematic differences between African-Americans and black Africans.
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Gender is socially constructed. Granted.
Leftist types seem to take this fact as license to constructing whatever kind of gender identity they wish for themselves, but I must confess that despite some familiarity with the literature I have not seen any response to the claim that, yes, it may be a construct, but this does not constitute a license and the optimal gender constructs which promote social stability will, as evidenced by social evolution, tend to be the traditional form.
If I might put the argument succinctly: a house is a construct, but there are still certain traits and functions I would prefer my house to have, such as a roof, walls, a door, windows, and so on, with variation accounting for local environment but with the purpose of providing a constructed environment hospitable to my human preferences. The same may be said for gender; there is a role gender constructs play in society, and whatever the preferences we as a society should want from gender constructs, those are the types we should tend to conform to and instill in others.
With respect to the utility of promoting certain gender roles and stigmatizing others, gender roles might be thought a kind of public good. The more people tend to conform to their sexually attuned gender, the easier this makes it for others to know how to act around them and what expectations they can hold as to their behavior, promoting pro-social behavior, civic engagement, and most importantly, the formation of families and childbearing.
It may be admitted that some individuals will find it more difficult to conform to socially expected gender roles than others, but this does not seem to mean we must destroy gender roles; after all, there are certain other expectations society expects of us, and it doesn’t accommodate the atypical, e.g. kleptomaniacs or violent schizophrenics; these individuals we readily recognize as dysfunctional, and provide help intended to mitigate the destructive consequences of these deviant psychologies at the expense of their liberty or even comforts.
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The obvious difference is that kleptomaniacs and violent people (schizophrenics or not) cause easily demonstrable harm. Gender non-conforming people don’t do anything analogous – there’s no reason why being non-conforming should be any less pro-social than conforming.
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Sure, if you believe that human society evolved over time at complete random with regard to gender roles.
There’s an old definition of a liberal as a person who, when he sees a gate in the road, demands it be removed immediately, as there is no conceivable reason for a gate there. A conservative wants to know why the gate is there before making any decision on it.
Societal cohesion, communitarianism etc. are powerful forces. And yes, roles restrict us, but they can also provide meaning, mitigate our worst impulses and provide true heroism. We in America too often denigrate this as restrictive. Think Japan after the Tsunami, and compare to Katrina. In each instance the government response was less than stellar and was exacerbated by private business. In one you got the complete societal collapse of a major city with rampant looting and political recriminations, civil rights violations and the lot. In the other you had virtually no crime, an orderly evacuation and the elderly volunteering to clean up hazardous areas so that younger, stronger people wouldn’t get cancer.
I can’t tell you distinctly what gender roles do for society, but their ubiquity around the world makes me cautious about urging people to scrap them prematurely.
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The term of art around here is “Chesterton’s Fence.”
And it is perfectly plausible to argue that gender roles are a product of (primarily) the reality that women will spend most of their lives pregnant or breastfeeding, and (secondarily) differences such as men’s greater physical strength, making it rational to socialize the two sexes into different roles. Since it is no longer true that women will spend most of their lives pregnant or breastfeeding, socialization is less efficient. It does seem empirically true that birth control and gender egalitarianism are correlated.
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It is a mistake to see something being widespread and take the prior that it should be preserved unless it can be demonstrated otherwise. People have believed in all kinds of foolish things throughout the course of human history, and we’re better off now that we’re getting rid of them. Of course, something being old doesn’t necessarily mean it’s foolish, but to regard it with deference is status quo bias.
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“Easily demonstrable harm.” Fair enough, although I’m not sure “easily demonstrable harm” is the only reason to promote/stigmatize a behavior.
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It seems to me that Chesterton’s Fence actually applies in reverse here. If you encounter feminists attempting to dismantle a fence, but you don’t know why, you shouldn’t assume they’re doing it for nonexistent/random reasons.
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But you also shouldn’t assume they’re doing it for the *right* reasons.
Because people get things wrong, all the damn time. That you would say “some of the time” and I would say “most of the time” for this particular group doesn’t change that fact.
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“There’s an old definition of a liberal as a person who, when he sees a gate in the road, demands it be removed immediately, as there is no conceivable reason for a gate there. A conservative wants to know why the gate is there before making any decision on it. “
In my personal experience, a conservative is someone who, when he sees a gate in the road whose stakes have been staked through me, impaling me, causing me to writhe in pain and bleed, says “hold on now, let’s stop and think. Does this person deserve to stop being impaled? Probably he did something that makes him deserve impalement.”
Then the conservative’s friend the anti-feminist (and/or MRA) says “oh, fuck that mangina, he definitely deserves it.”
Then, when the liberals and feminists try to live the fence that’s impaling me and some others off of us, the conservatives cry “well, how do you know that fence isn’t doing something important?”
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Yep. It really is like that for a lot of us.
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There are alot of problems with Chesterton’s fence anyways (most of them involve Moloch and His dark machinations- why did every society treat women horribly? Because it improved competitiveness in the pre-industrial era), but in this particular example the most obvious flaw with it is that half the population was prevented from attending the fence-building committee and subsequent fence-maintenance committees all this time, so whatever purpose it once served probably did not take into account their considerations.
Ampersand, as far as I can tell the MRM is actually split into traditionalist and liberal wings. The former is as you describe, but the later would probably gladly help the Feminists lift the fence off you as they argue with them over whether it is acceptable to blame men as a whole for this damn fence being here when they clearly are trying to move it. (In many ways liberal MRAs are basically heretical feminists).
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I don’t think the liberal MRAs would be happy to help the feminists; they hate feminists and seem to believe the majority of gender issues men currently face were created by feminism. (Seriously, go look at the men’s rights reddit– they talk about some important issues, like rape and DV, but a lot of it is ‘feminists say Thing and we don’t like Thing!’)
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And if you encounter any faction doing anything, even if you think you know why, you should figure out which phyle it benefits, what the people who came up with the idea of doing it thought it would do, and which phyle they would want to give victories over which other phyles to.
(Note that, in practice, men and women of the same phyle tend not to be too far apart. The gap for abortion is what, ten points? Ten points is nothing like ethnic warfare.)
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@Ozy
My exposure to MRAs has often been on relatively intellectual places so my sample of them is probably very biased, but then 90% of the advocates of any mainstream -ish ideology are going to be terrible. The impression I’ve gotten of liberal MRAs is basically Feminism of men, with all the same vices and virtues that come with that. I was aware of the animosity between Feminism and MRAs, What I was trying to indicate is that they actually have fairly similar goals despite hating each other. But now that I think about it the … metaphor?… was actually very flawed because IRL the animosity actually is enough to prevent them from working together against their shared enemy (gender traditionalists), and it gave an unbalanced positive view of the MRAs over the Feminists when I actually think Feminists are more often right (but both are still often wrong).
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So I was part of the LW community for a little while just before the Tumblr transgender trend got going, and now that I’m back I’ve remembered to be baffled from an epistemological perspective. How exactly is “gender identity” a useful concept? What does it describe other than itself? You’re just supposed to pick whatever gender you like. This explains a lot about why gender identity is psychologically appealing, particularly to demographics often lacking in self-determination, but what does it MEAN?
Obviously, biological sex is “different from gender”, which means almost nobody talking about gender in this sense spends a lot of time talking about biological sex, except to occasionally engage in intersex tokenization. This practice is disproportionately harmful to both intersex people and whatever you’d like to call biologically female people, whose endemic medical maladies are ignored whether by the anti-female establishment or by activists due to the surrounding language’s cissexist quality. A particularly pathetic case is the petition, which got literally less than 1% the amount of signatures, for endometriosis (a chronic pain illness of the female reproductive organs) to be recognized as a disability and receive SSI. Of course, petitions are not productive, but at least there was a concrete purpose. This petition was running at the same time as the “recognize nonbinary genders” petition, which of course went above and beyond the threshold thanks to supporters’ ardent ballot-stuffing. What the hell was that supposed to accomplish other than the tautological distress about a discordant gender marker? Wouldn’t that achievement even be antithetical to marriage equality in states where marriage is defined as one man and one woman???
I think most people would agree with a maxim like “act however you want, regardless of gender, as long as you do not cause demonstrable harm”. Why can’t gender just continue describing a legitimate biological category, albeit maybe a deformity-broadened or body-modded one, and er’ll work towards resolving gender-related obstacles to desired lifestyle? To me, the process of identifying with new genders just seems like addressing the economy with new denominations of monopoly money. I respect my peers enough to avoid shouting in their faces “THIS IS STUPID AND YOU’RE STUPID FOR DOING IT” and I don’t want to interfere with individuals who find the activity psychologically pleasing. (I’d really prefer responders refrain from “ignore the stupid special snowflakes”.) but I’ve racked my brain for years now and haven’t found a rational explanation for why this ideology would be productive, especially compared to promoting acceptance of gender non-conformity.
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Being referred to with a binary gender makes me sad. I do not have a good explanation of why that is. I suspect that when there is an explanation, it will turn out to be something like “I got a dose of testosterone in the womb at the wrong time,” which I understand is probably quite unsatisfying for a lot of people.
If you prefer, I can say that I am acting however I want, regardless of gender, and not causing demonstrable harm. “However I want” includes refusing to interact with people who call me gendered pronouns.
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I am totally in favor of Do Not Hurt Ozys Feelings as a policy. Any quibbles about alleged irrationality or inconvenience always come second to the goal of making people less sad.
Though, if the goal is for as few people as possible to be sad about their pronouns, doesn’t it seem a little counterproductive to actively encourage the questioning of gender identity? Until the relatively distant goal of neopronoun acceptance is realized, users of neopronouns become more and more alienated from their conservative cissexist communities of origin, which wouldn’t be so bad except that gender identity subcultures have been shown to be hotbeds of self harm as well as abuse of vulnerable members.
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But I wasn’t not sad about my pronouns before I questioned my gender identity. I was sad about my gender pronouns and I had no idea what was going on. This is true of a lot of trans people, and is perhaps why we tend to be fairly evangelist about transition. If I hadn’t met a nonbinary person, I would have had no idea and would have continued to be mysteriously upset about nothing for decades, perhaps the rest of my life.
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Wouldn’t it be great, though, if people who are sad about their pronouns or gender identity could get treatment and stop feeling sad about it? You probably don’t mean that you literally “refuse to interact with” people who use the “wrong” pronoun, but it seems so incredibly limiting.
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Yes, I do. The only people who deliberately use the wrong pronoun (mistakes happen) whom I’ve interacted with since coming out are my parents, relatives of people I’m dating, and people at various shitty jobs I’ve worked. It turns out a lot of people are very nice when I am like “actually, I’m nonbinary, please use gender-neutral pronouns for me”– although God alone knows what they conclude ‘nonbinary’ means. 🙂
I support the option of that treatment being available, of course, because I support complete morphological freedom, but I would not personally choose to alter my preferences about what gender people see me as and I strongly oppose mandatory treatment or social pressure into treatment (as I do for all psychiatric treatments)– again, because I support complete morphological freedom.
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“Any quibbles about alleged irrationality or inconvenience always come second to the goal of making people less sad.”
If you really believe that, that doesn’t just apply to Ozy, and as someone said elsewhere, it gives people an incentive to self-modify to become utility monsters.
Or to use an economic analogy, if you subsidize something, you get more of it. Subsidizing outrage by giving in to it breeds more outrage. This may not specifically apply to Ozy, but it applies enough of the time that it is foolish to have a general policy of “making people less sad is always more important than inconvenience”.
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Actually, now that I think about it, I could sketch out an argument for people who could get by without using neopronouns using neopronouns.
Using “they” for a single, known person is inconvenient because it’s unfamiliar. If people were used to using “they”, then it would be unconscious and invisible, the same way “said” or “the” or, indeed, “she” and “he” are. (If you don’t support standardizing on ‘they’, pick your favorite novel pronoun.) However, there is a certain population of people like me who get significant harm from being referred to with the binary pronouns. Either we use binary pronouns (harming us) or we use nonbinary pronouns (harming others through inconvenience). Obligate nonbinaries are also a relatively small group, perhaps one in a thousand people, perhaps less. However, if we expand use of neopronouns to include, as it were, facultative nonbinaries– people with mild social dysphoria, who could get by without neopronouns but are happier using them– then we could expand to perhaps one percent of the population, a large enough group that everyone has met a nonbinary and is used to using the pronouns. (There is a problem that one can usually tell whether someone is male or female at first glance, but not whether someone is nonbinary– presumably one would have to come up with signifiers of nonbinary status so you could tell at a glance.) That way, I have my pronouns respected and no one experiences any inconvenience.
Alternately, gender neutral pronouns for everyone, which given my gender abolitionist sympathies I’m all for.
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When facebook added “custom” genders (their term), I was all set to change my preferred pronoun to “they”. But you can’t do that unless you use a custom gender, and despite being a text box in their UI, you are limited to one of their pre-approved options. (This UI offends me as a web developer.)
Waiting for the option to pick “none of your damn business” as my gender. I’m male, but (general) you really shouldn’t care.
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Using “they” for a single, known person is inconvenient because it’s unfamiliar.
The singular “they” isn’t inconvenient because it’s unfamiliar, it’s inconvenient because it causes miscues in both conversation and in writing. Example:
“Hey, where’s Ozy?”
“They went to the store.”
“Ozy and Scott went to the store?”
“No, just Ozy.”
“Who went with Ozy, then?”
“Nobody did.”
*sigh*
After much thought, as crotchety as I get at putting made-up pronouns into the language, I have come to the conclusion that at least they facilitate clear communication better than the singular “they.” The political power grab affects me less on a daily basis than muddled communication, so I’ll take the lesser of the evils.
(Side note: Ozy, IIRC, you once said somewhere that for those of us who are of the “pox on both their houses” sort, the use of “he/his” in referring to you is suboptimal, but acceptable. Am I remembering that correctly?)
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SFaik the ‘zie’ set came with feminism of the 1970s or so, from women who didn’t like the ‘he’ default. ‘Zie’ didn’t specifiy a trans or otherwise unusual person, but anyone. So may we need four or more sets now, one for trans etc, one for anyone, as well as he and she? I guess not, if ‘they’ works for all of these.
Data point – ‘they’ works for me in many contexts, but in some it throws me; I have no idea which person or persons it refers to. Traditionally, “They told him that she would be arriving later” lets us know that there are at least three people in this sentence, and one is ‘he’ and one is ‘she’ and two others are somehow linked. When a following sentence has a ‘he’ or ‘she’ we know that the second ‘he’ is probably the same person as the first ‘he’. But “They told them that they would be arriving later” — blanks me out. So I’d slip up and fall into ‘he’ and ‘she’ and sound rude unintentionally.
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Demonstrating harm is not trivial, and may become a contentious debate in itself. One could confine it to obvious harm, but that’s probably too narrow; I guess I’d go with allowing people to do what they want absent either obvious harm or a track record of abusing the privilege (I think the risk of people making themselves hypersensitive to exploit the victim role is greatly exaggerated, but not non-existent). Note that my interest in discussing general principles doesn’t mean I think “be nice to Ozy” is debateable, that should be a no-brainer. The only question is what general principles it might connect to.
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As I said I’m super in favor of making Ozy happy by using the pronouns zie prefers, regardless of whether a socalled good explanation can be generated.
To me, the gender identity community is actively silencing discussions of biological sex and that is harmful, particularly when biological sex is the criterion used by adversaries. Another example is the refusal to support ENDA until it caters to gender identity, rather than allow relief for homosexual and bisexual people asap. And of course there is the issue of allowing MTF rapists into women only spaces but the SJ community insists this has literally never happened as opposed to admittting the victims of isolated scumbags like Christine Harbrook are acceptable collateral damage
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Surely you could simply have an anti-rapist policy? Is there any evidence that trans women are more likely to rape than cis women?
We tried trans-exclusive ENDA and it didn’t pass either. Besides, transgender people also experience workplace discrimination, possibly at a higher rate than LGB people.
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To be clear about my own position, I suspect that some of the factions in the gender identity community you refer to, 1angelette, would meet my standards for having “a track record of abusing the privilege.”
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Christine Harbrook? Google isn’t helping here.
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@zorgon I apologize for miswriting Christopher Hambrook on mobile
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Wow, Christopher Hambrook is a weird case. I don’t think I’ve seen the trans community deny someone’s gender identity on the basis of them Being A Bad Person so blatantly before.
There are essentially two coinciding narratives that seem to be going on there:
Narrative A – “Trans women are really men with dresses on, so they’re all basically potential rapists and should be kept away from women because they have yucky penises”
Narrative B – “Trans women are women, and women don’t assault people, therefore this trans woman must have been a man pretending to be trans to get access to vulnerable women.”
Both of these are entirely dependent on a very specific set of beliefs to even get started. If we acknowledge that women assault and rape people at a vastly higher rate than anyone is remotely willing to admit, and that trans women are really women, then suddenly the situation becomes “a woman gained access to a shelter full of vulnerable individuals without anyone actually bothering to check if she had a history of violent or sexual assault”. Which may not be comfortable for some feminists to read, but is what actually happened in this case.
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@1angelette — The fact is, we do not know exactly what gender identity is, but the people who work in the field mostly agree it is a real thing deeply felt. Its origins are probably pre-natal, probably hormonal; we cannot be sure. In patients with gender identity disorders, there seem to be two related components.
The first is how the patient relates to their own body, a property once called “psychological sex” — which is a deep and persistent sense of what kind of body one should have. We know little about this, except that over the long term it leads to anxiety, depression, and often suicide. Nothing treats it, except hormone therapy and (for some patient) various surgeries.
The second property is a persistent desire to live socially as the opposite sex. This desire is hard to explain to those who do not experience it. Perhaps it is a “bare fact” of the gendered brain, the way these people are. I do not know. Neither (I expect) do you. However, patients with this condition seem to thrive in an environment of acceptance.
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Oh and let me add, what I wrong here describes gender identity from a strictly binary perspective, which is more traditional from a transsexual perspective. I do not mean to invalidate non-binary identities, although I do not claim to understand them fully.
That said, once you can see gender identity as a psychological fact of the brain, then it does not require too much imagination to think that for some people, their gender identity could land somewhere in between.
But then more, we do not need to map this to a one dimensional space. Perhaps it is even more complicated.
To me this seems plausible. Do we really think that gender identity should related to just to one cluster of neurons in the brain, which develop entirely in one shot? Seems unlikely. If trans-stuff is brain-stuff, and I believe it is, then stuff can perhaps zig and zag in many ways, both pre- and post-natal.
Gender might be enormously complex, which would be awesome.
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I mean “ what I wrote here…”
Ozy, PLEASE, an edit function! We are good, decent, honest people, but some of us make dumb mistakes. Let us fix our writing!
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I did mean in my comment to specifically question nonbinary identities. Although I am skeptical of the literature in this area (considering the active PROMOTION of neurosexism rather than OPPOSITION), at the very least binary transsexual people are using words to express something that makes sense; in this case female or male can have a practical working definition as “person who finds this particular body the most satisfying”, though this definition does run into issues c.f. http://glosswatch.com/2014/04/20/beauty-and-the-cis/
What I really don’t understand, though… What would be “awesome” about gender being enormously complex? Biological gender is a hierarchical caste system, after all; historically, caste systems with a higher number of gradations have been MORE narrowing and restrictive and oppressive, not less. Once you acknowledge gender is caste, the leap to “gender abolitionism” is very short, and I personally would promote that policy except it is so easily misconstrued that I usually don’t bother. As sniffnoy has said, trans ideology seems directly antithetical to the fight for acceptance of gender non-conformity.
Because that’s the other thing – how can we trust these experiments when there is not a widespread environment of acceptance for gender non-conforming people? There is no control-group, “does this pink-wearing DMAB child prefer to be called he or she”. It’s more like, “does this pink-wearing DMAB child prefer constantly being harrassed and ignored and beaten for mere clothing bad for ~he~, or being considered an average ~she~child”.
Sheesh, wordpress is a lot less convenient than I remembered. An edit function is one thing, but for Christ’s sake, how can a cogent discussion be conducted if all replies are cut off at the third level of nesting?
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But that is not all that gender is. Certainly it is a part of gender, and a part that is worth opposing, but the other parts of gender, such as presentation and pronouns, are not essentially oppression based.
Unless you insist they are, but that is a theoretic position that you must defend.
(If this is a language fight, a thing like “By gender I mean this,” then fine. But that ain’t what I mean by gender. And I don’t think it matches exactly what trans people experience when they talk about gender. But thing is, I don’t do language fights. They’re boring. Read this: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human%27s_Guide_to_Words)
Myself, I find gender mysterious — not in a sense of woo, but in the sense that brains are weird and that brain-stuff and social-stuff push back and forth and almost never have obvious causality. I cannot point to a simple structure and say, look, that is why female and feminine are correlated, nor masculine and male. I can look at hormones, and yeah, they do stuff, but they do not do all the stuff.
But I know this, the answer, “It’s just society, yo!” is almost certainly wrong. I find the totalizing discourse we get from the radfems to be pretty broken and hurtful to trans people. In fact, I suspect it would be hurtful to everyone, if the radfems had any actual power. Gender is part of us, a source of delight. This is certainly true in the here and now. Would it be true in queer utopia? I think so. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to see the TERF queer utopia: http://destroyedforcomfort.com/2014/04/19/gender-abolitionist-crotchless-pantsuit-mandate/
(And yes, a Rani link seems a fair response to a Glosswitch link.)
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Does anyone have any good theories on why a lot of countries which are on average more conservative on gender roles etc have had female presidents / heads of state, (eg Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Liberia, CAR, Malawi) while many western states with arguably more liberal approaches to gender haven’t?
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In many of the cases I’m aware of, the female heads of state were widows or daughters of previous heads of state. Perhaps taking family connections more seriously is a stronger force in conservative societies than taking gender more seriously (and in the case of widows, perhaps the tendency to see wives as extensions of their husbands actually favors them in this instance).
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Letter to the editor from an AU:
“Ozymandias271,
In light of your recent policy change to ban discussion of genocide on your blog, it’s simply no longer worth reading. The meat of the content is just too difficult to wank to without proposals to:
* Castrate the male sex.
* Make black people supreme lords of the earth and transition all white men.
* Force all men into slave labor on distant worlds
* Skew the gender ratio to ten women for every one man
* Put women back in the kitchen where they belong and re-strengthen marriage contracts so that rape and abuse are de facto legal
* Brainwash everybody into Christianity
* Genocide all trannies and other ’emotional cripples’
I am very disappointed to see otherwise good pornography go in this direction, I hope you will be back to your old self soon.
Sincerely,
– A concerned reader”
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(what the heck is an AU?)
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Alternate universe.
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Thread split to address a side point.
srconstantin said:
You’ve missed my particular hangup with the HMLP, which is I’d like to spend a significantly higher portion of my time on child-rearing than I am allowed. (Ugh. Post-divorce, this is even worse. I’ll try to reflect my pre-divorce position here.) My wife would regularly complain that she spend most of her day socializing with the children and didn’t have any time to interact with adults. My response was: I will trade you in a heartbeat. Get a job and I’ll quit mine, and you can spend most of your day with other adults. She was never actually interested in taking me up on the offer…
You also see in this in the bizarre dad-praise when you take the kids to the park/show up for their events. Other people will tell you what a great parent you are. If I’m so great just for being here, what about the other 300 people in this (loud) school gymnasium? Sheesh.
Anyway, I’d really like some liberation from the gender role of “provider” that lets me get more participation in parenting.
(Not sure how much of this is society, and how much is my abusive ex-wife’s gatekeeping. Would also be interested to see if I am typical-mind-fallacy-ing here.)
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Yeah, this is why nrx seems like a very poor approach to this rather economic labor distribution problem. Its one thing to describe a set of mandatory tasks independent of whether people wanna do them, but why not let individual people do the tasks that make them happiest? Are you afraid that the distribution of preferences is too different from the distribution of tasks? Because that sounds a lot like flat out admitting that housework is this oppressive burden men force onto females.
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Because biology. You are not a special snowflake. If you stay at home taking care of the kids while your wife is out earning the moolah, pretty soon her attraction to you will evaporate.
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What about all the stay-at-home moms who also report that their attraction to their breadwinning husbands has evaporated? Are they exempt from biology?
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@bem: I never said not being a stay-at-home dad was the be-all and end-all of married game. It’s just about the minimum you should do, and if you only do that but mess up everything else, it’s perfectly possible for your wife to lose her attraction to you regardless.
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@jaimeastorga: Was there really a need to bring in the idea of “special snowflakes” here?
Regardless, from my (admittedly limited) knowledge of game it seems pretty easy to reframe “I stay at home all day and raise the next generation, while you work to bring me money” as the high-status option.
If your response to “I want to spend time with my kids” is “better become a useless, pussywhipped maid” then the problem is you, not biology. And game-wise, your wife is probably sleeping with the pool guy.
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jaimeastorga –
My point, while flippantly made (insisting that “As a father, I’d like to spend more time taking care of my kids” is a special snowflake position will get that reaction), was that to argue that women’s attraction to their partners is primarily based on their partner’s ability to bring home money–and, furthermore, that this situation is an immutable biological fact!–is a gross misrepresentation of biology. I can’t imagine that you have anything resembling evidence that all wives whose husbands stay at home have lost attraction to them (and it would be difficult to take do a controlled survey anyway, since a large percentage of stay-at-home husbands are at home because of, say, chronic illness, which tends to take a toll on attraction anyway). I think that you’re extrapolating, and you’re basing your guesses off of a bad understanding of the science of sexuality.
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@jaimeastorga2000, the preference-to-work and preference-to-caretake on the part of the spouses should be discussed long prior to marriage let alone prior to childbirth. If you’re seriously concerned that your wife would find another man in the workplace instead of cooped up at home, that’s indicative of your own insecurity more than anything else
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Yes, because people are both perfectly self-aware and perfectly honest.
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Have a partial core dump about SJ/RH/BS:
I believe that SJ is an emotionally abusive effort to deal with real social problems– *my* problem is that I’ve read enough SJ to be infected with some of the emotionally abusive parts, and I’m interested in how other people have found a way to deal with it.
If you want to tell me that I shouldn’t have let myself be affected by SJ, you can– it’s an unmoderated thread. However, if you do post something like that, take it as given that I think you’re an inconsiderate and sloppy reader.
There are two primary bullying techniques that I don’t think I’ve seen discussed much. One is that a bully attacks, and then mocks their victim for having a normal reaction to having been attacked.
The other, which takes an ideological framework, is to define some basic human trait as shameful, but somehow not get around to applying that standard to high status people. Some subcultures in the Catholic Church do this with sexual desire.
However, there’s something even more universal than sexual desire, and that’s ignorance. SJ’s made ignorance of what they were suffering into grounds for attack. Meanwhile, their ignorance either didn’t exist or didn’t matter because they were suffering so much. They developed an elaborate system of not hearing about the damage they caused.
So, RH/BS– I was reading Laura Mixon’s major post on the subject, and it seemed to me that the comments were trending towards only caring about the damage done to sf writers who were women of color. This struck me as a bad development– she attacked them disproportionately, but she was hurting all sorts of people.
Then I read this, a very unhappy statement that discussion of the problem was being taken over by white people.
I interpreted it as saying that the only virtuous path for me was to pretend I don’t exist. How much do I need to care about that group of women sf writers of color? Am I reading more in than was said? To get back to the beginning of this comment, has anyone else had to deal with this sort of internal effort to figure out what’;s good?
Unless something has changed recently, the discussion has in fact been handed over to the female writers of color.
I’m expecting the RH/BS problem to hit the mainstream media fairly soon.
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I hang out in social justice places, and I very rarely feel like people are inclined to dismiss or want to silence me because I’m white, or male. Thus, I’m curious as to why some others seem to have such different experiences. I suppose I have other kinds of privilege; I’m an academic, which can give me a certain amount of status in some situations. I’m arrogant and so perhaps inclined to assume that vague comments about how people who resemble me in some ways are talking too much couldn’t really mean me as well, since my comments are obviously so much more insightful than the comments of those other guys. I am also (at least when it comes to debates) thick-skinned, and so perhaps more prone than some to dismiss subtle (or not so subtle) hints that some people in a discussion don’t welcome me. But I don’t feel like I have a full understanding of the phenomenon.
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Please disambiguate: Does “I’ve read enough SJ to be infected with some of the emotionally abusive parts” mean that you find yourself acting in an emotionally abusive manner, or that you have been hurt/damaged by the emotional abusive parts (or both)?
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I immediately understood it as both, but I’m generalizing from my own experience there. I can’t speak for the parent commenter, but learned responses to abuse often mirror the abuse they’re responding to.
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An attempt to actually reply:
Dealing with being damaged by emotional abuse from the SJ community:
I wish I could give a good answer. I spent my youth and part of my childhood in a context heavy on identity politics that identified me as the enemy, and have hated myself for the particular identity categories for virtually my entire life. Getting into the internet social justice community exacerbated these things, but did not start them. I had a spectacular psychological breakdown after first engaging with that community (leaving me socially isolated and jobless for some time) a few years ago, but am in a substantially better place now. I still hate myself for things outside of my own control, which I recognize as a wrong thing to do, but have not figured out a way to fix it.
I think the best I have done for myself in my attempt to heal from that emotional damage has been completely and totally disengaging from internet social media, where it is basically impossible to not constantly be reminded of emotionally abusive SJ tactics. As long as I use Facebook etc., my daily life involves so many doses of it that I am not necessarily ready to deal with that I spend all my time in a state of low-level alert. Blogs are not quite as bad; with blogs I *know* what I am getting myself into. Checking Facebook to contact a family member or see what some friend is up to and being greeted by long and abusive and terrible discussions is worse.
Apart from attempting to avoid having anything to do with them (which, for me, has unfortunately also required withdrawing from some non-directly-SJ-related hobbies), I think it is a good idea to try to identify which thought patterns come from your own critical mind and which come from abusive messages. This is what I am currently trying to learn. If others have insisted on defining your identity for you, then you must learn to take it back. This is also something I am still struggling with, and I do not have any good concrete techniques to use.
What *has* worked for me has been aforementioned disengagement and focusing on other things that have nothing to do with SJ. This has had unintended fringe benefits; I am currently in the best physical shape of my life; exercising and cooking healthy and good food have been some of the things I have taken to doing that help take my mind off SJ matters.
My girlfriend has suggested that I try to write critically about SJ matters, in terms of the actual disagreements I have with the movement’s methods and ideology (when I am thinking properly, and not in a depressive and self-loathing pit). This thought terrifies me. I still think it is probably a good idea, because the primary psychological damage I have taken seems to be (apart from the extreme self-hatred) the fact that I have trouble assessing certain aspects of SJ rhetoric critically (instead taking it all in “raw and uncut”, so to speak), and it would probably be good to try re-applying critical thought to SJ theory and practice one careful step at a time, until my thoughts about these things end up feeling like “me” and not other people’s talking repeated inside my head. I should probably not do so publicly, though. Being “rewarded” for my efforts with a mobbing would probably have my ape-brain learning all the wrong lessons from it.
I have tried reading blogs that are critical of SJ without being against the goals of SJ. This is actually one of the reasons I read SSC.
Dealing with having become emotionally abusive one’s self:
I honestly don’t know. I don’t think I have become emotionally abusive, and in general I tend to turn these things inwards, inflicting harm upon myself instead of lashing out against others.
But my self-awareness might not be the best, and perhaps I tend towards passive forms of abusive behaviour without realizing. I have been told sometimes that self-harm is a form of abuse towards others because others have to look at the results which causes them to feel terrible; if you agree with that definition then I probably count as emotionally abusive.
In that case, I have no idea what to do about it, and would also appreciate any suggestions.
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All of what Moebius has said seems like good advice.
My general experience of people who feel hurt by social justice is that they care about the issues but find the bullying and divisive nature of it both disturbing to watch and that it creeps into their own thought processes.
The main social justice concepts that I have found to create a lack of compassion towards others if I employ them are privilege, justifiable anger, not being responsible for educating others and the idea that ignorance of others lives comes from privilege. I have found different ways to approach issues of equality and have dropped these.
The most positive thing I have found to deal with it if you are still going to be online a lot is to have online friends from other countries. Once I started following people on Tumblr who were from a range of other countries, I started to learn more about their countries and their totally different approaches to how we go about approaching equality and diversity. That makes it very apparent that what gets called ‘social justice’ online is just one way of caring about stuff, and there are other ways of discussing it that are not about hating other people.
I’m not sure any of that is helpful to say, but I think that people feeling both distressed by social justice and/or feeling that picking parts of it up are making them a less good person are very common.
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Audrey:
I cared about these issues long before I first engaged with the internet social justice movement; in my youth I was a pro-feminist / feminist ally / whatever men who sympathize with feminism are supposed to call themselves this week, and participated in lots of offline activism in that regard (although “activism” admittedly often meant “sitting around in meetings with gender-separated speaking lists, drinking coffee and discussing why patriarchy is terrible”). I also participated in anti-racist activism (which was often considerably more activist), and at one point had the great honour of being sent death threats by snailmail by a Nazi party.
While I must admit that certain things in that part of my life was definitely harmful to me, there was not really much direct bullying. Before engaging with online SJ I had not seen progressive people engaging in direct bullying tactics, though, and certainly not the constant telling people to kill themselves that seems to be popular in online SJ (another thing that frightens me about online SJ, actually, given that I am clinically depressive and have actual suicide attempts behind me *and* have trouble recognizing which things I am allowed to disagree with and which things).
I definitely think online SJ has a tendency to create a lack of compassion. I have empathy issues myself, but try to *think* about other people in a compassionate manner even if I have trouble with the feelings involved. However, I think this is not a problem of SJ in particular, but of a certain style of identity politics in general. Online SJ exacerbates it, it seems, but I think that has to do with the culture of the Internet (where mob justice, death threats and suicide admonitions are considerably more common than they are offline).
I agree that online SJ is a rather culturally specific phenomenon, it seems to me to be specifically founded in American liberalism. However, in my experience, it seems to have partially supplanted other left-wing and civil rights-oriented movements in other countries and other political traditions; in Denmark – where I live – it seems that large parts of the left wing has more or less entirely adopted the SJ framework and has thrown out the formerly mostly socialist framework. The rhetoric, correspondingly, has largely turned from talking about solidarity to talking about hating people, and analyses that deal with privilege have largely supplanted ones that deal with rights.
Also, having friends from many countries does not seem to help a lot when they are all talking about US issues and positioning themselves according to US political traditions (my friends list included mostly Danish, British, Dutch, Australian and American people, though, so perhaps I should have gotten to know people from even more countries — although I unfortunately do not make friends easily).
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Moebius, thanks for your reply. I find your last two paragraphs very worrying. I doubt it is because you don’t know enough people; it is more likely your experiences are representative of SJ type concepts taking over in other countries.
When I look at organisations that carry out a lot of activist work, it doesn’t feel at all like SJ has taken over. SJ feels to me as if involves a lot of young people, and I worry if that is the case, will this group eventually take over aid agencies, campaign groups, charities, voluntary sector organisations? That is what really concerns me, because I feel that most human rights work and practical care of excluded groups will be very much damaged by it.
I hope that this is not the case and that aid agencies and campaign groups continue to be staffed by people with a very different perspective, and that online there will be more blogs and writing that offer an alternative to SJ so that an alternative set of ideas begins to develop.
I agree with what you say about SSC, but I also think that SSC is great because the writing has a kind of anthropological quality. For example, I have a better understanding of why a group of men in the US feel a certain way due to High school experiences, because Scott explains it with no expectation of prior knowledge. And that is what makes it convincing and the opposite of SJ. SSC treats a degree of cultural ignorance about other experiences and countries (including the US) as normal, rather than an example of privilege.
Thanks for talking about your experiences, and I hope you do write about your opinions as you have a lot if insight, but understand the desire not to if it is the expense of your own well being.
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I may have been emotionally abusive as the result of SJ– I blew up a friendship which had been becoming increasingly annoying. I’m sure I would have handled things more gently if I hadn’t been affected by SJ, and I certainly wouldn’t have taken “but I didn’t mean any harm” as a signal for me to attack harder.
Most of the affect has been on me, though. For example, microagreesion analysis has been a disaster. Feel a little bad about something? Have a set of tools for concluding that whatever someone said that made you feel bad must be the result of culpable malice, ignorance, or lack of concern.
During racefail, SJs would say, “You want a set of rules so you’ll know how not to hurt us or make us angry? Black people under Jim Crow didn’t get rules.”
Having had at least an intermediate course in assuming the worst, I’m inclined to conclude that SJs want to enforce Jim Crow against whites. The good news is that poc aren’t a coherent power block, most poc aren’t SJ’s, and SJ’s are fairly bad at organizing. That last may not be stable.
Another aspect is taking violent implications of language very seriously, for example, not using “lynch mob” casually. I’ve gotten so cautious about that sort of thing that I don’t feel like I’m a native speaker of English any more.
I was actually shocked by RH’s language, not so much from it’s nastiness, as that I thought SJ’s had norms against talking like that.
A piece of bad emotional hygiene at my end is that I’m very apt to amplify negative emotions– I think the underlying premise is that if I’m not really angry and really hurt, the way I feel doesn’t matter. SJ has given me plenty to stew about. What if I like the wrong book? What if I fail to like enough of the right books? I hate those people. I must be a very bad person. (This is fear and anger more than guilt.) I hope I never try to be a good person again– it gives other people too much of a handle on me.
I detest how my beloved and faintly disreputable hobby of reading science fiction has been turned into a tool of social uplift.
When I heard a news story about how awful it was that the proportion of poc voters had dropped slightly in the recent US election, my reaction was that obviously the best thing I could have done was to not vote.
I do get the impression that a lot of SJs would rather have a world without white people, but since they can’t get that, they’ll do what they can to convince white people that they ought to make themselves invisible.
I don’t remember invitations to suicide from racefail– maybe I just wasn’t in that part of the neighborhood (I mostly followed it on livejournal), or maybe the language has gotten nastier.
I believe without evidence that SJ has led to suicides. Considering how hard racefail hit me– and I was past 50, have a social circle outside SJ, suffer from mild to moderate depression (rather than the really bad stuff), and didn’t have progressivism as my political identity, I shudder to think was that stuff could do someone who was more vulnerable.
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nancy:
I also read science fiction. I used to dabble in writing some (poorly 😛 ), but given the events of racefail I decided that I am never *ever* going to either publish or self-publish any of the things I made. So my little science fiction universe (semihard sf, set entirely in our solar system, mostly involving factions of posthumans) now entirely lives in a bunch of text files on my computer, where I will continue enjoying developing ideas, even though I honestly would not ever dare releasing it to the wider world. SJ involvement in sf has convinced me that there is no way to get it right. If any of my writing involved other identity categories than white men, then it is problematic appropriation of other identities that I have no business trying to express. If it *does not* involve other identity categories than white men, then it is erasure of other identities and *exactly* as problematic. I do have a faction of nonbiologicals that I could ostensibly write stories about, although I am fairly certain that the fact that they have no meaningful concept of gender and race can easily be interpreted as something onerous too.
What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
Microaggressions: Given that I belong almost exclusively to the evil identity groups (except for being disabled, which many SJs only pay lip service to anyway), I have been taught that microaggressions do not apply to me. I am fairly certain that I would perceive them everywhere if I belonged to an identity group that was supposed to do so. I have trouble imagining other people’s intentions, though, so perhaps it would not have made too much of a difference.
By the way, because I am not American, in many SJ discussions there are lots of references I miss. My home country does have an abominable history of slavery, although quite different from the US one: The Danish *traded in* slaves during the era of American colonization, but it was actually illegal to *keep* slaves in Denmark (…but not in its Carribbean colonies). This means that the current population of black people in Denmark are not usually the descendants of Danish-kept slaves, but are typically descendants of immigrants and refugees who left African countries relatively recently. They *are* subjected to various kinds of very nasty racism, but the context is generally more one of xenophobia than one of slave owner mentality, as is generally the context of European racism.
(going further back, Danish Vikings kept lots of slaves/thralls, but nearly all of those were white — Viking raids usually targeted European countries. This means that most modern native Danes are descended from both slaves *and* slaveowners.)
This means that quite a lot of the SJ rhetoric about racism is very difficult to apply meaningfully to the actual racism I see around me day-to-day.
When you write:
“What if I like the wrong book? What if I fail to like enough of the right books? I hate those people. I must be a very bad person. (This is fear and anger more than guilt.)”
I think I understand exactly what you mean. I think about those things too, all the time, when reading science fiction. I do not feel particularly angry (it is an emotion I have trouble perceiving in myself; to the extent that when I was younger I thought I was incapable of becoming angry), but I am very, very much afraid.
However,
“I hope I never try to be a good person again– it gives other people too much of a handle on me.”
I still want to be a good person, but I want to be one on *my* terms. Not anybody else’s. Due to fear I adapted my entire ethical framework to fit SJ, which meant that I was trying to think about ethics in terms that weren’t *mine*; I compared things in terms of a consequentialist analysis I barely even *understood*, and so I found myself saying and doing things that felt *wrong* because they didn’t work in *my* ethics. This led to a terrible cognitive dissonance, of thinking things were right and wrong at the same time.
Unfortunately I cannot get more concrete, but I think it is probably a good idea to think long and hard about what being a good person means to *you*, rather than adopting someone else’s framework (if that is what you did – I did, and it was immensely harmful).
“When I heard a news story about how awful it was that the proportion of poc voters had dropped slightly in the recent US election, my reaction was that obviously the best thing I could have done was to not vote.”
When I read the Schrödinger’s Rapist article, I imposed a curfew upon myself, reasoning that if my presence in public caused women to fear being raped, it would be better for humanity if I avoided going outside in the evenings. I also felt terrible about holding a job in software development due to the gender disparity, and often thought I should quit — one man less in that field would mean ever so slightly better gender representation.
“I do get the impression that a lot of SJs would rather have a world without white people, but since they can’t get that, they’ll do what they can to convince white people that they ought to make themselves invisible.”
Most of the SJ people I know *are* white, but then, I live in a different context from yours. I have sometimes gotten the equivalent impression as regards gender, though. I have known SJ people who outright said so — perhaps they were joking, I am not good at detecting sarcasm.
“Considering how hard racefail hit me– and I was past 50, have a social circle outside SJ, suffer from mild to moderate depression (rather than the really bad stuff), and didn’t have progressivism as my political identity, I shudder to think was that stuff could do someone who was more vulnerable.”
I’m mid-30’s, white, male, autistic, have few friends and most of those I had were various degrees of SJ, have major depressive disorder and am a socialist.
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nancy, continued:
Earlier this year, I went to my first roleplaying game convention. I have played pen-and-paper RPGs since I was a child (albeit in later years I drifted out of the hobby due to a lack of friends to play RPGs with), and had always wanted to go to a con, but I have trouble with large groups of people, so I have stayed away. My girlfriend has a calming influence on me, though, and since she is a huge RPG nerd I decided to go with her.
I had a *fantastic* time.
So I decided to write a scenario for next year’s con. I had an interesting setting idea (it involved a tiny population of sapient but pre-technological late-Cretaceous dromaeosaurids) and was nerding out on some ideas for informal game mechanics suitable for a con when the newly-elected scenario panel made their first announcement.
They wanted to “break with the 30-something male white heterosexual nerd”.
Concluding that my contribution would thus be hugely problematic, I deleted all my notes.
(This made my girlfriend, who had enjoyed sharing thoughts and ideas about worldbuilding with me, very sad. Of this I am ashamed.)
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As for being infected, a couple of times, once in real life with a close person, in haste I’ve found myself saying “That’s privilege” or “Intent doesn’t matter.” I think both of those were justified and I could have explained it better if given time.
My “That’s privilege” meant “What you’re recommending doesn’t apply to people who might lose their jobs for speaking out.” My “Intent doesn’t matter” meant that ends don’t justify means. But both times, speaking SJ sure didn’t help the conversation.
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On microaggressions: Thing is, if you’re a white-cis-het-dude growing up as a white-cis-het-dude (along with being middle class, able-bodies, neurotypical, etc.), then I think it might be difficult for you to say, “Well, my microaggressions are just the same as theirs.”
Which, maybe they are. But how do you know?
I think there is a category of people who can have perspective on this: late-transitioning transgender people, by which I mean those who didn’t figure out they were trans until their late 20’s (or after).
I’m thinking mostly of trans women here. But ask trans men also.
But anyway, these are people who grew up as “straight guys,” except they probably had all kinds of gender stuff going on they did not understand.
There are patterns. These people often end up loners and very nerdy. They usually like women, but have a hard time dating. They are frequently neuro-atypical.
Short version: they face a lot of the same social pressures that cis nerds face.
Then they transition. They seldom quite pass.
Ask them, “Hey, how do you compare the hard times you faced while presenting male versus what you now face? What are the social pressures like? The prejudice? The microaggressoins?”
Now, here’s the deal: the stuff you face as a male nerd is probably kinda similar to what they faced, ‘cept you’re not dealing with the gender stuff. (But actually I think a lot of nerds are dealing with some kind of gender stuff. Which doesn’t mean their trans exactly.)
Such people are worth listening to.
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Veronica:
I have known three people that fit that description — highly nerdy, neuro-atypical non-heterosexual transpeople. I have discussed gender topics with all three (although only briefly with one; he hates talking about gender politics, finding the entire subject “useless and depressing” (to use his own term, albeit translated to English) and therefore preferring to avoid it. So we usually discussed Star Wars, ancient weapons and heavy metal bands instead. I wish I had his sense of self-preservation. I also miss him terribly; we drifted apart for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.)
However, what the two of them who *did* want to discuss that subject at length have told me was precisely *opposite* to the common SJ narrative. They both reported *less* pressure and *fewer* attacks after they transitioned (both are transwomen) which meant I had trouble knowing if I was supposed to listen to what they actually *said* to me or whether I was supposed to denounce what they said as false consciousness — actually, one of them *has* been accused of just that, by some SJ people she knows offline. One of those two has turned aggressively apolitical because she is tired of conservative people thinking she has no right to exist and progressive people using her as a “political bargaining token”, to use her own term. The other would sometimes say that she wished *I* was trans, because transitioning could probably solve some of my personal troubles as it had solved hers.
(note: I do not think they are a representative sample of nerdy transpeople, but they *are* exactly 100% of the transpeople I have been friends with.)
By the way, I did not grow up “middle class, able-bodied, neurotypical”, and my sexuality has been a huge source of confusion for me for my entire life (and it isn’t until well into my thirties that I have finally had occasion to associate it with something non-terrible).
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Fair enough. I know many trans women who have quite a different experience.
But then, if your friends are Danish, well, my understanding is Norther EU is waaaaaaaay better about this stuff than the US. So that probably factors in.
Regarding you, yeah, it’s kinda obvious you’re NAT — not that I’m gonna diagnose you or anything. But yeah.
The SJ crowd (broadly defined) has done a terrible job relating to male nerds. I think there are reasons for this — not good reasons, but just “this is how things are” reasons — namely that SJ is first and foremost a feminist movement and the male nerd, as an identity, doesn’t relate all that well to women.
Honestly, I think a lot of male nerds are very angry at women and this causes all kinds of crap.
Plus, yeah, we have Jezebel and “The Nice Guys of OkC” and all kinds of fat-shaming and virgin-shaming.
Blah.
But the point is, the “who do I get to date” question is freaking explosive. (Google “cotton ceiling” if you want to see an example that has nothing to do with nerds. But be warned, it’s depressing.)
And so we have two groups who don’t have much social power and are kinda pissed about it and the only people they can take it out on are the other group and boom.
I think it’s going to get better. I know it seems weird to say that with GG shitting all over everything. But it just feels that way to me.
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Veronica:
You would hardly need to diagnose me, a psychiatrist already did some years ago. I also grew up with an unrelated respiratory disability that severely limited me as a child, but fortunately (and through lots of medication and physical training as well as fortune), that does not affect me much anymore. It did when I was growing up though; it made me even *more* socially isolated, and also meant I had no ability to run away from people who wanted to beat me up.
When I was younger, I thought feminists and male nerds were natural allies. I mean, it makes sense (if you have no idea about how identity politics works). Male nerds tend to be terrible at performing their assigned gender role and tend to have a history of being subjected to physical violence by males and ridicule by females for this reason, whereas (most) feminists think assigned gender roles are a terrible idea that should be abolished. An *obvious* case of converging interest, right?
And yet, my personal experience has been that the *nastiest* nerd-shaming I have received in my adult life has been by feminists. Before I engaged with SJ online, there had been a little of it in the offline feminist activist community I participated in, but it was mostly more or less harmless — mostly people made light-hearted fun about me not having any sex, me rambling on about subjects nobody cared about, me committing some stupid social faux pas; pretty ordinary stuff and nothing too harmful (what was harmful in that environment was me taking a literal-minded reading of some of the more radical rhetoric and literature, and believing I was not allowed to disagree; this was a thought pattern that caused much psychological (and some self-inflicted physical) damage, but this is hardly the fault of anyone but me and my own poor comprehension skills and self-hatred issues).
But the degree of anti-male-nerd hatred I have seen by some feminists *online* has been worse even than what I went through in high school and elementary school (although I think that is for the simple reason that adults are better at going for the sensitive spots, so to speak, than children and teenagers are, not because feminists are more anti-nerd than popular people are). I think you are right that it has to do with power; particularly because I have also seen both feminists and nerds picking on other very-low-status people.
Scott linked to a Tumblr, once, which said something along the lines of: “Not all feminists hate non-neurotypical, disabled or non-gender-conforming men. Yes all non-neurotypical, disabled or non-gender-conforming men have been targeted by feminists as an object of hatred”. I would be very careful about saying anything (or, at least, anything non-tautological) about “all” members of any large and diverse group, but I *am* such a man (I hate using that term about myself
) and I have known many others.
I am not sure why some nerds hate feminists. Perhaps it is because they have had bad experiences with women, and project this upon all women (I did not, but I grew up among feminists, and was bullied by both males and females anyway). I know some nerds think feminists want to take away the few spaces nerds have where they are allowed to suck at social interaction (because some nerds have told me precisely that).
Just to make sure you understand me: *I* do not think that feminists want to do this, but I know that *the belief* that feminists want to do this is at least one reason why some nerds are angry or afraid of feminists. And while I do not think there is that intent; I can sort of understand them, with an atmosphere where saying or doing something (whether deliberately or not) that offends someone means running the risk of being flamed, bullied and told to commit suicide. This is one of the reason I have withdrawn from socially practicing my nerd hobbies, instead pursuing them in a more solitary manner — I *know* that I am poor at understanding what offends and what does not, and I *know* that offending a SJ activist means running a huge risk of being mobbed or bullied, which I am very poorly equipped to deal with.
I am not sure what you mean about “who gets to date who” and what that has to do with this, though.
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moebius — Thank for writing that. It is very thoughtful.
The “who gets to date who” is referencing my observation that many male geeks are deeply hostile to women, and I believe this comes from resentment, which comes from their own romantic failures.
Which, near as I can tell does not apply to you at all. But I think it is part of the zeitgeist and has much to do with this conflict.
If you look back on the history of the various nerd-feminism conflicts, so many were over who gets to ask who out and under which circumstances. The “Nice Guy” thing and elevatorgate were explicitly about this, but I think it is a constant subtext.
In fact, today on Twitter I witnessed a “spat” between a woman and a male nerd over this very topic. In went like this: a woman told a story about being approached by a man outside, alone, after dark, while wearing headphones. He caught up with her, tapped her shoulder. She was terrified.
He tried to ask her out. She said she has a boyfriend.
She doesn’t have a boyfriend. In fact, she’s gay. But she felt really super-frightened, so she gave the boyfriend excuse.
Which, the boyfriend excuse is a thing, which is generally regarded a safer by women, probably for very terrible reasons. In our experiences it is one of the few things that gets a man to leave us alone. (The other, which works in social spaces, is to call him a “creep.”)
Anyway, according to her story, the man was shitty about it.
Later she felt crappy about giving the boyfriend excuse, not that she thinks she was wrong to be afraid, nor to do what she needed to do to stay safe, but instead, she felt that it diminished her, that she had to, in her own words, “make herself small.”
After she posted this, a male nerd mocked her. He said, “Oh, like getting asked out must be terrible.”
For her it was. And he is an insensitive jerk.
According to his Twitter profile picture he is a large man with extensive, unkempt facial hair.
So that.
Okay, look, this exact dynamic plays out again and again. And then again. And then again. It will happen tomorrow. And more. Never ending. It’s really broken.
And guys like you get caught in the crossfire.
(BTW, I think this is totally separate from the race stuff in SF fandom. I really know very little about that.)
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Mobeus:
“I used to dabble in writing some (poorly 😛 ), but given the events of racefail I decided that I am never *ever* going to either publish or self-publish any of the things I made. So my little science fiction universe (semihard sf, set entirely in our solar system, mostly involving factions of posthumans) now entirely lives in a bunch of text files on my computer, where I will continue enjoying developing ideas, even though I honestly would not ever dare releasing it to the wider world. SJ involvement in sf has convinced me that there is no way to get it right. If any of my writing involved other identity categories than white men, then it is problematic appropriation of other identities that I have no business trying to express. If it *does not* involve other identity categories than white men, then it is erasure of other identities and *exactly* as problematic. I do have a faction of nonbiologicals that I could ostensibly write stories about, although I am fairly certain that the fact that they have no meaningful concept of gender and race can easily be interpreted as something onerous too.”
“What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
I’m a male nerd who is a feminist, and who has been fortunate in my interactions with feminists (my experience is that although some feminists are assholes, most are decent, and when I was growing up / a young man it is was ONLY feminists who told me I could be terrible at being a boy AND be a worthwhile person).
I don’t say that to deny your experiences, but to provide a contrasting experience.
Regarding what you wrote about why SJ involvement in SF has kept you from publishing or self-publishing, however: It would be one thing if you were saying that you can’t publish because you’ll receive tons of death threats, which uniquely come from SJ, and that’s just too traumatizing to deal with.
But it in the above passage, you’re saying you can’t publish because if you publish SJs might criticize your work. That’s unreasonable. Being criticized is part of being a professional or aspiring writer (or any form of artist). If you can’t stand criticism, then you lack an ability which is a requirement for this job. I don’t deny that hurts to have an ambition you lack the ability to perform. But to criticize SJ because you can’t stand your work being criticized is unfair.
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I suspect mobeus is not afraid that his work will face thoughtful critique. Instead, I think he is afraid he will personally face character assassination.
Which is really sad, since the callous jerkwads, who manifestly are misogynistic douches, are not afraid to publish. I’ve never seen Heartiste go, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t hit send.”
Sigh fucking sigh.
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Evidently I cannot spell moebius. I fail at math geek. I shall commence my period of shame.
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Ampersand:
Veronica is right.
There is a difference between “you wrote something I think is sexist” and “you *are* a sexist” — and an even bigger difference between both of those and an assortment of “you are a sexist neckbearded shitlord who deserves to die; go kill yourself”-variations sent by dozens of people; there have been lots of the latter reactions towards people where I barely understood where the sexism (or racism, for that matter) *was*.
It is the SJ tendency (which is not unique to SJ activists, but – as several others in this thread have noted – it *is* something some of them do) to not criticize *works*, but to attack and bully *people*, sometimes due to interpretations that I barely *understand*, that I have trouble dealing with.
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Veronica, virtually all the things Moebius described in the passage I responded to were criticisms of the work, not character assassination. If he meant what you said, then he meant something very different from what he wrote.
Once at a convention, a retailer came up to me with a signed copy of my first book, which he had displayed at his store. Someone – I think it’s fair to guess, either a radical feminist or a sock-puppeting MRA – had written below my signature “this man funds rape porn” or something to that effect. I’d say that was character assassination. (I gave the retailer a new copy of my book).
That’s not something new to the world. A quarter-century ago, a comics pro friend of mine, referring to the unhinged anger a small minority of comics fans have when they don’t like the work creators do with their favorite characters, said “no one goes to hell for a bad inking job.” If you have a professional career in a field with a passionate fandom, you know what he’s talking about. But I’m not going to blame all fandom for a tiny minority of fans who lack boundaries. And I’m not going to blame all feminism for the asshole who defaced my book.
This is not something unique to SJ. I know (but will not name, because I don’t want them targeted, but if you need more detail email me privately) someone who has been (at least for now) driven out of writing because of the criticism from anti-SJ people. That’s incredibly sad, but I’m not going to say that anti-SJ criticism in general is to blame (although I do blame those who make personal attacks). And I’m not going to blame all anti-SJ people for it.
Negative responses – mostly legitimate criticism, but also some personal attacks – are things that happen. They are mitigated by the (vastly larger) number of positive responses. Being able to handle such responses is, unfortunately, a requirement of what you have to be able to do to be a writer or an artist.
I’d really like a kinder world, where people could feel that they can put their work out in public and never ever face anything worse than constructive criticism of the work, even though critics are free to say what they want. But I can’t imagine how such a world could be brought about.
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I think the thing that gives SJ criticism its special edge isn’t the nastiness or the quantity, it’s that it’s tied to moral standards that almost make sense.
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Moebius, we cross-posted, but I think my reply to Veronica can mostly stand as a reply to you. In addition:
1) What you are now saying you meant, is radically different from what you wrote that I responded to.
2) Although I try very hard to maintain the distinction you mentioned – saying “what you wrote is sexist,” not “you’re sexist,” etc – in practice, the person whose work (or argument or policy) is being criticized very, very frequently will not notice or acknowledge that I’ve made that distinction, and will instead walk away convinced that I attacked them personally.
3) Of course the neckbeard attack and similar attacks are disgusting and appalling (and also bigoted in a huge variety of ways – sexist, anti-fat, etc). All I can say is, if you’re convinced your work has worth, then I would really encourage you to try and do what everyone else does – publish and do the best you can to withstand the haters. But I recognize that maybe that’s not possible for you, and I’m sorry if that’s the case.
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@Ampersand — Check your privilege dude.
(But seriously, really do.)
@moebius — I hope someday you’re able to publish your stuff.
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Veronica, could you please be more specific?
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You are showing a basic lack of understanding of moebius’s situation and his fears. An anecdote such as, “Oh, this one time someone wrote something crappy in my book” is a rather different experience from the kind of relentless mental assault we see these days. You sound like the 4chan bro who says, “Oh, hey, I got a death threat once,” and thinking that compares to what Anita Sarkeesian has gone through, or that she might need his “Oh I just blow it off” advice, when she no doubt has a thousand times the experience dealing than he ever will.
Except in this case the tribes are reverse. But so what?
Furthermore, you show a lack of understanding of how neurodiverse people often cannot deal with social stresses the same way NT people can. That it was easy for you does not imply it will be easy for him. He knows his abilities to negotiate social difficulties in ways we do not. If he says, “The kind of relentless attacks I see folks get for stuff like this is not something I could handle” — well, I believe him.
I’m not sure if I could take the full bore — regardless of which tribe throws it.
And I’m a fucking badass.
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Veronica, almost every word you wrote about what you assume I (haven’t) been through is ignorant and wrong. The vast majority of responses to my comics have been positive; but in another context, I’ve experienced precisely “the kind of relentless mental assault we see these days.” I don’t owe you your biography in order to participate in this dialog, and please don’t assume you know my life story.
Also, I didn’t disbelieve Moebius (as I wrote, “I recognize that maybe that’s not possible for you, and I’m sorry if that’s the case”).
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Obviously, when I wrote “I don’t owe you your biography,” I intended to write “I don’t owe you my biography.” Le sigh.
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For the record, I did not notice that Ampersand was acting in any way where any “privilege” was being demonstrated.
Which, unfortunately, sort of underscores my point.
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I feel this subthread has turned kind of unfriendly, and that’s partly my fault. I apologize. I’m particularly disappointed because I’ve really enjoyed Veronica’s and Moebius’ comments here.
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@Ampersand — It’s all good.
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(also a braindump without a particular moral)
The confusing thing about the RH/BS is that lots of the discussion happens within the SJ mindspace. The toxic mentality drilled into a large part of fandom by Racefail and its fallout never went away. RH was so incredibly vile (and so hostile towards POC writers and fans – otherwise the story would’ve looked very differently) that she stood out with a kind of squared toxicity within that toxic field. She was an SJW’s SJW, if you will. Now she’s being denounced, but many people who denounce her do not see that as any occasion to shed or even critically examine the SJ mindspace. Thus you get thing like “only WOC should discuss RH”, the usual intense guilt-tripping about the “incredible whiteness” of SF, the casual assumption that RH’s abuse of white writers/fans does not matter and does not merit comment, etc.
My outlook on this may be biased by the accident of what I personally witnessed, but I have a clear vision of Racefail’09 as the genesis of SJ of today. I was there for Racefail, and that was the first time I saw many different epistemic and behavioral techniques tried out in public and coalesced together into what 5 years later is unmistakeably identifiable as the SJW mindset.
In the original thread about RH/BS, one or two clearheaded contributors pointed out that from the “SJ is wonderful” perspective, which they shared, RH is particularly unfortunate, since it’s difficult to ignore the fact that she was able to thrive in a large part because of the SJ atmosphere around her widely shared by other people (non-sociopaths). You can take that value-neutral observation further in two different directions. One might say something like “SJ is of course wonderful and essential, but it does have a weakness, an acute susceptibility to RH-like abuse, and we must be vigilant against that”. That is somewhat better than the more common “RH only sinned insofar as she went against WOC”, and I suspect it’s the best one can hope from SJ mindspace. The other direction, which I would go to, is something like “SJ is inherently toxic, and RH is merely a very bright-burning example. It’s impossible to stay true to the guiding principle of today’s SJ and get rid of RH-like behavior”.
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Racefail?
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RaceFail
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Might it be useful to find out how to teach people how to be less prejudiced? (My only idea is to turn implicit association testing into a video game– I hope there’s something better.)
It seems to me that SJ is based on punishing people for appearing to be prejudiced and hoping that they’ll teach themselves.
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It’s much easier to teach people to game the game. I can produce any result you like on an “implicit association” task. It’s not bloody difficult. We can’t even use the standard ones any more because the lab rats for most psych research are Psych 100 students, who all know about IA tasks and bias the results.
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Hey, Ozy’s blog is already getting comment threads with replies in the hundreds! Can we have some sort of “new comment” indicator, like SSC’s green boxes? 🙂
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This is interesting, and the thing I’m actually posting here to discuss:
This is popular, but relevant:
This is none of these things, but it amuses me:
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Oh, I got these links over at the forums on http://leftoversoup.com/
Which is very rationailist-y and liberal and I bet many people here would like.
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Also, the third link is supposed to be this:
Darnit. Is there any possibility we’re going to get an edit button, Ozy?
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Did you intend a different video at the end there? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEAC7nl5n2g
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Ha, ninja’d.
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I don’t know if anyone is still reading this thread, but since Ozy has made comments about Gamergate that reference the initial allegations that female person B abused male person A, I think this request goes here:
There’s a discussion on Wikipedia on Jimbo Wales’ talk page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales ) which started with Jimbo inviting pro-Gamergate people to post suggestions for the Wikipedia article about Gamergate on http://gamergate.wikia.com/wiki/Proposed_Wikipedia_Entry .
I looked at it. All reference to these initial allegations is missing.
Could someone who knows what references to add please add it?
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(To clarify: It seems that the original blog about B is referenced. However, nowhere is it mentioned that it contains allegations of abuse by B.)
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It doesn’t contain allegations of abuse, because Gjoni didn’t consider himself an abuse victim at the time the post was written.
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This is the one most people (including Eron) point to, written by a decidedly SJ type: http://theflounce.com/harassment-abuse-apologism-sanitizing-abuse-social-justice-spheres/
(they also have a video series about it: http://youtu.be/n_UKErD0uGQ?list=UUY5Kk0xLaKmeCWqHbQc3ByQ)
Also referenced here: http://gganalysis.blogspot.com
From things wikipedia would consider reliable sources, I think the closest that mention would be Cathy Young’s on RCP and Reason:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/10/09/the_gender_games_sex_lies_and_videogames_124244.html
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/10/21/the_gender_games_part_2_videogames_meet_feminism_124375.html
http://reason.com/archives/2014/11/01/misandry-in-the-gamergate-controversy
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So, there’s been a thread here about internalized misogyny. I thought that was a good discussion, but I’m afraid I’m a little behind of the class. I still need someone to explain to me what “misogyny” actually means. More honestly: does it mean anything anymore?
See, Merriam Webster gives only “a hatred of women”. Fine, that makes sense. But if that’s what it is, then I’ve seen it maybe five times in my entire life, all on the internet, pointed by someone else (i.e., the same way I’ve seen balloon fetishists and actual flat-earthers). But this is five times out of the several hundred times the internet has told me something was misogynistic that had absolutely nothing to do with this definition. So that’s not it.
Wiktionary says “Hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women”, which is extraordinarily broader. So much that the vast majority of instances of this definition would not be included in the older, more central one. This one is much closer to what I’ve been seeing. What do we call the version of The Worst Argument in the World when the noncentral example doesn’t even fit the definition at all? Because my take on it is that this happened so much that the meaning actually expanded to include this usage in some dictionaries, so the word is now merely Worst Argument in the World’ed as usual.
But this is *still* not it. Half the time I see it the best translation honestly looks like “this person doesn’t agree with my gender politics”.
But commenters on SSC actually use the damned word (Scott doesn’t, apparently, except ironically or in quotes) – what do you mean by it?
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“Misogyny” has become like “racism” and “rape”. They used to mean real things which were horrible. Now they just mean any speech or action which can be interpreted, tortured and construed to mean that a person is guilty of thoughtcrime. Which is unfortunate, because we need those concepts. They still exist and adversely affect many people. But you can’t find the signal for the noise these days.
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For the more sympathetic explanation of the current usage of misogyny:
To be honest, most of the usages of misogyny that I see today aren’t substantially different from the way that one would use sexism. The major difference in usage that I see is that “misogyny” is used slightly more often to talk about specific ideas/people/statements, and sexism is used slightly more often to talk about structural ideas (this isn’t an absolute rule, though). One potential reason that misogyny may have taken on this usage is that it’s an easy way of specifying that one is talking about sexism that hurts women, specifically.
A lot of people are going to disagree on what, exactly, does or doesn’t qualify as misogynistic, because people have a lot of trouble agreeing on what does or doesn’t qualify as “sexism that hurts women.”
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Julia Serano uses “oppositional sexism” to refer to “men do X and women do Y” and “misogyny” to refer to “…and Y is the bad one.” This is a really nice distinction to make but in practice if you use “misogyny” to mean that thing no one will understand what you’re talking about.
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I thought “…and Y is the bad one” is “traditional sexism”, which she was contrasting to “oppositional sexism.”
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Right. the problem with saying “term X has come to mean Y” is that denies what the speaker is actually trying to say. You might disagree with them. You might think their social models are wrong, but unless you are willing understand the structure of their social model and what that term means within it, then you cannot really engage with them in good faith.
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This is what I’m trying to do here…
I notice that I usually understand “misogyny” as tribal signalling and/or an emotional marker with little semantic content. I also think this is at least close to correct half the time *I* see it.
I also have a periodical urge to point out that there’s no way this or that thing is an example of actual *hatred of women*, which usually feels like it would be missing the point.
But the only place I hang out that’s frequented by more sophisticated SJ people is SSC (I’ve been taking a look at Ozy’s too, it looks pretty good. I’ll try to catch up). So I came here to get a non-straw explanation of it.
(if it helps to situate me: the only two people whose descriptions of gender issues have made me go “yes, that’s exactly right” were Scott and Hugh Ristik, though I haven’t read much of the latter outside LessWrong)
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I would suggest you at least try to read some women on the topic.
I like Julia Serano a lot. She’s pretty focused on trans stuff. But despite that her models of gender, sex, and sexism are very well thought out. (I personally think this is because she was a scientist before she was a feminist, so she manages to stay out of the post-modern rabbit hole. Plus she’s just a darn good writer.)
Laurie Penny’s new book is really good [1]. She’s politically hard left, so there’s that. But her notions of gender relations seem to come from a positive place. If you work in technology, Cate Huston’s blog [2] is one of the better feminist spots. She links to a lot of stuff.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KS7ZT1A?btkr=1
[2] http://www.catehuston.com/blog/
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Well, “at least try” was not very charitable, and by “some women” I think you mean “some feminists”, which is really not the same thing. There are many women I like writing about this, but probably not the ones you mean (people like CH Sommers, Cathy Young, Ashe Schow, etc., occasional commenters like Harriet Hall, or the too rare analysis by Katja Grace or Megan McArdle).
A scientist who stays out of postmodernist is a great introduction, so I intend to take a better look at Julia Serano when I have more time, although trans issues are not a focus for me right now.
(No, not tech, my field is law. But I just read, let’s see, 9 posts on Cate Huston’s. I… I think they show some of my biggest problems with feminism. I see many things (events, problems) asserted without evidence as being gendered, things I take as grave misreadings of the intentions and sentiments of (mostly but not only) men, and the use of that unholy duo “mansplain” + “privilege”, possibly the words most actively harmful to discourse in human language today – and which do make it look like engaging would be unpleasant and unproductive)
—-
So… In provisional conclusion, I agree with Tarrou above on the word’s use on Twitter and Tumblr, and also with Bem above and MugaSofer below on its apparent current definition. But “discrimination” and even “prejudice” *is* a vast expansion from “hatred” and even “dislike”, and people do conflate the two meanings very often, which is a very unproductive state of affairs.
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The thing most worth understanding about “mansplain” is how quickly the term took off among women. It was this nearly instant shout of “OMG! that!”
Which does not mean it has been an effective rhetorical tool. On the other hand, it’s a real thing. It manifests as boorishness. But there is a very real phenomena where men are expected to speak and women are expected to listen (unless the conversation is about frivolous things). This is pretty easy to measure in classroom and business environments, at least the raw numbers of who speaks, who interrupts, who gets interrupted.
What is difficult to empirically measure is what women must do to negotiate this space, which is much of what is good on Huston’s blog. She writes field notes for women in tech.
Let me ask, in your personal experience, how often are you talking to another man about business stuff when a woman interrupts you? Furthermore, how often does she ignore your obvious discomfort, your annoyance, and then proceed to take over the conversation?
I mean, you say you work in law. If there is any class of women who could pull this off routinely it would be lawyers, but I bet it’s pretty rare nonetheless.
Happens to me all the fucking time! OMG! And we smile and play along cuz interrupting the jerk would offend him and then we have to deal with that!
These days I give the other woman a knowing smile and then go kinda laugh at the guy after he goes away. Which is probably a less-than-ideal coping strategy, but gendered conversation dynamics are huge.
BTW, have you read the original article: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175584/
I find the part in the middle where she talks about mansplaining and the Iraq war to be — well — kinda over-the-top, but it remains a classic.
“Yes, guys like this pick on other men’s books too, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.”
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It’s also kinda fun to eavesdrop on hetero couples on (what appear to be) first dates. When you do, notice how often the man will take the role “super smart explainer” and how often the women plays the “smiling, supportive listener.” I bet the women knows tons of stuff the man does not, which might be very interesting to hear, but that is not the role she has learned to play. Moreover, it is the role he expects her to play. He will be very annoyed if she does not.
I literally cannot play that role. It just totally never learned it. So, well, first dates with me are, uh, well, awkward.
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And let me add!
(I know, three posts in a row. I’m terrible.)
(I grant everyone temporary SJW-permission to accuse me of woman-splaining. Cuz it would be funny.)
Okay, so the thing is, you might notice women doing this more. If you think you do, I suggest you observe more closely, and (if you can) to actually count.
(Okay, I probably wouldn’t count either. But anyway…)
Thing is, for many of us it seems very natural for men to project confidence. It seems very unnatural for women to do so. If they do, it appears “pushy” or “bitchy”. So then the women stands out. We notice, despite the fact she’s doing the exact sort of thing we admire from men.
Which is really fucked up. So be skeptical of your casual observations. Really observe what happens.
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(lawyers in the context of a case are more or less forced to act and speak in an unnatural way, that resembles politicians in campaign. I haven’t noticed a difference between men and women in this, and when not working they’re just normal people)
Well, look at you asked me to do: I should run a memory search for instances of women acting to me like the stereotypical “mansplainer”. If I don’t find any I suppose the hypothesis will be considered confirmed. But if I *do* find some I should be suspicious of the result and check again, really carefully, because women displaying confidence stand out and I might be overcounting that. The bias is clear, isn’t it?
And suppose I really find none. This thought process would still not have been any more scientific, or conductive to finding the truth, than those observations that end in “women, amirite?”.
But my initial reaction was “why are you asking me this, why didn’t you ask if *men* have done that to me?”. If the idea is that only men do this, and only to women, then we should show that men act like this towards women but not men, and women not at all.
As it happens, I did come up with examples of both men and women acting like this to me (more men, but I won’t pretend this is exact by stating numbers), plus occasions people may have thought *I* was doing it (a lot more often to men, because of the sorts of subjects different groups of friends tend to talk about, but also women), though it’s hard to tell. Am I doing it now? I don’t know.
And even if proper research showed men to be more likely to do this (and I’d be very surprised if they turn out to be more likely to do this *to women*), both assertiveness and sensibility to social cues look like the kind of low level stuff I’d expect to be affected more by biology than society.
———————
Sorry, there’s a bit more:
I really need to point out that this is not the way “mansplain” is being used anywhere I usually see it. My charitable reading of the apparent common usage is “speaking over a woman from a position of male privilege”, but a most honest description of how I understand it would be “disagreeing while male”. As evidence of this, I point to fans of this word inventing and using “whitesplain”, which works in this definition but not in yours.
(and again, you say “among women” when it should be “among women – and men – of a certain ideological inclination”)
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I don’t use “mansplaining” because I believe it’s unnecessarily inflammatory, and I’m concerned that it will make some men afraid to speak when they have something useful to say.
There are ways to say that a person is speaking from ignorance, taking up too much time, or whatever, without bringing gender into it.
This being said, I’ve noticed that on NPR call-in shows, it’s only men who lay out a rather obvious groundwork for what they’re saying even though there’s limited time available.
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The thing about mansplaining, and I know I’m not the first to make this observation, is that men ‘mansplain’ to each other all the time. It’s pretty close to the default form of male communication.
The big difference between a guy talking to his friends and mansplaining to an annoyed girl is that the guys friends will cut him off and put their own opinions out there while the girl will just sit there and stew. Now that’s certainly a problem, but it hardly seems fair to blame the man if his conversational partners won’t step up and join in when they have something to say.
Now of course I don’t think women should have to use male conversation norms, any more than the current push towards men using female norms makes sense. One of the benefits of formalized rules of etiquette is to smooth over those gaps, and it’s loss is IMO the reason these conflicts arise to begin with.
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My subjective perception is in agreement with Morgenstern, though I don’t think it’s useful to speak of who to blame.
Yes, “men do that” can’t automatically become “men do that to women”, and much less “… because they think less of women”.
Agree with Nancy on practical effects.
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On this: “Now of course I don’t think women should have to use male conversation norms, any more than the current push towards men using female norms makes sense. One of the benefits of formalized rules of etiquette is to smooth over those gaps, and it’s loss is IMO the reason these conflicts arise to begin with.”
The takeaway I hope you get is this: it is difficult for women to adopt male conversational norms. When we do so, we are punished.
Well, most of us are punished. There are women who can pull this off. It is very interesting to observe them.
But more, I believe it is enjoyable for men to hold forth, to be the speaker, the knower. To my view, this is simply raw status-stuff, both the feeling of having a captivated female audience, plus the status that comes from being seen dominating women. (File this under heteronormative patterns of control.)
Insofar as the gender norms require women to listen wide-eyed and spellbound, only speaking to provide frivolous observations, then women will get targeted by this crap a lot. For the women to reject this is risky. It will lower the status of the man, who will not appreciate it. He will feel diminished. If he has actual power, this can get ugly fast.
Don’t forget to laugh at his jokes!
We talk among ourselves, form strategies to deal with this. Having a name for the thing is great.
Regarding the Twitter-style discourse, the “shut up you mansplainy mansplainer” stuff — yeah, sorry about that. That stuff does not help.
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It’s also non-trivial for men to adopt female norms, though. When you can rely on people saying something when they have something to say, that’s easy – but having to think all the time about whether the other person might have something to say? How does one even find out? And what if you try to given them room to say something and in fact they don’t have anything to say? Awkwardness ensues.
And men who try to adopt female conversational norms and don’t do everything perfectly right also punished: they’re not entertaining enough.
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Veronica, I hope you realize that your analysis of men’s motives here are completely ridiculous. Speaking as a real life reactionary and misogynist who gets extraordinary personal and sexual gratification from dominating women, I can *promise you* that these men who get off on boring female coworkers exist only in the heads of confused feminists.
I also notice you didn’t address the actual point, which was that this isn’t some unique behavior we break out when it’s time to oppress the womenfolk. This is the way male peers speak to one another, because quietly waiting your turn to talk is the best way to ensure you won’t get to say anything. I am unable to state it more plainly than that.
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@Creutzer — The existence of a problem does not imply the existence of a solution. That said, I think there is enormous value for women in naming the things we experience. Likewise, I think there is value in knowing how structural oppression works.
I think it is worthwhile for men to see these things, to consider what they can do. However, to my view this stuff has the greatest value in conversations among women, as we discuss strategies for ourselves. (Likewise similar conversation among minorities, LGBT people, disabled people, etc., etc., etc.)
I do not believe in short-term radical social change. I do believe in an aggressive and relentless search within the natural problem space.
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Veronica, your response surprised me, in that you seem to have *completely ignored* what’s probably the most important point: even to the extent that this is a real, characteristically male behavior, we’re saying it has nothing to do with women.
To me, as a man (who also knows other men), your descriptions of *why* it happens seem to be describing an alien species.
(on the upside, this is close to the optimal example of what I wrote upthread, about the “grave misreadings of the intentions and sentiments of men”, one of the most serious problems of feminism)
(but Morgenstern’s response surprised me even more, I think – I guess I’ve ever met anyone with those preferences)
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Veronica, I didn’t mean to imply you were being naive about there being a solution. I was merely adding another perspective on the problem.
I don’t disagree with you that there is one, even though I’m not quite sure about how correct your generalisations about men’s motives/preferences are. I’m also hesitant to dispute them, though, on typical-mind-fallacy grounds: I don’t like silent people of any gender who don’t actively and without prompting contribute to a conversation, but I could just be atypical.
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Creutzer,
Me neither, but then, I *am* atypical, and I have consistently had so much trouble relating to how feminists commonly describe men’s motives and preferences that I do not think I am a real man at all.
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A possibly amusing story about misunderstanding a man’s motives– I had the misfortune to talk with a man who kept talking about how dangerous he was. He didn’t seem threatening to me– the talk seemed more like self-reassurance to me.
I concluded he was boring (no question there– I consider talk like that irrelevant because I can’t evaluate the truth in any of it) and that he was coming off as cowardly because I’m not physically threatening. (I’m 4’11” and don’t have a background of fighting.)
I mentioned this to a male friend who explained that the boring fellow was talking the way men talk to each other.
Oh. That makes sense, and makes me glad I’m not male.
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Folks, this is about how status works, which is not always conscious. I am not saying that men think to themselves, “I have to dominate this woman, rah!” But they certainly sense how their status relates to hers, and how masculinity is expected to relate to femininity, what it means to hold the attention of a pretty woman, etc. All of this contains patterns of dominance and submission.
We are very smart, but we remain primates.
=======
People seem aware of their status at all times. I expect much of this is unconscious. However, I have noticed something, which I first observed among nerdy men: low status people are often more perceptive of status compared to high status people. Which is perhaps not a surprise. It feels good to be the “it person.” It feels natural. It sucks to be shut out.
I see another pattern: when we talk about the status concerns of nerdy men, most folks on this forum are quite sympathetic. However, when the topic turns to the experiences of women, suddenly there is much skepticism of status.
Funny that.
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Veronica, you were painting a picture where the phenomenon in question is a status assertion of men vis-à-vis women in particular because being high-status relative to a woman feels nice. That is what people were disputing by pointing out that men do that also when talking to each other, and that objection is valid. If men actually get annoyed by women not responding enough, that’s also evidence against the particular picture you paint.
Neither object contradicts the observation that that the behaviour is inherently status-claiming and perceived and felt as such, of course. But that doesn’t mean that the (unconscious, sure) goal is to have a wide-eyed girl listening to you.
I have two observations/speculations that would explain the “pattern” you notice. First, nerdy men as a group are one particular subgroup of men that have it particularly bad status-wise relatively consistently, and in virtue of a particular cluster of features. Women as a whole are not so homogeneous and don’t for a unified group with this particular kind of emergency in the same way. And second, it may be difficult for the men among the readers to empathise with the status concerns of women because status works differently for women and they don’t understand how.
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We are not skeptic of the *experiences* of women. If you tell me you experience something, I’ll believe you.
But that doesn’t mean I will share your interpretations or explanations of the events that generated that experience.
Especially when these interpretations are based on assumptions about men that contradict *my* experiences (feminism sometimes achieves this to an extent that I find it difficult to believe people would find them *even plausible*). For these I would really, really need actual evidence.
The hypothesis-space is large, even counting only those explanations based on primate status seeking, and we’re still talking about a phenomenon that’s neither well defined (by men only? to women only? etc.) nor *even demonstrated* yet.
I also don’t see any reason, at all, why it would be more likely that we are the ones misled by our biases here.
(I do want to write something about “privilege”, that *might* move this forward, but I’ll probably wait for a fresh race and gender thread, this one seems to have cooled down)
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Misogyny means – “means”, it deserves scare quotes – “discriminating against women on the basis of their sex”, in popular parlance.
This is mildly useful, in that it allows one to define “sexism” as “discriminating against anyone on the basis of their sex” and thus differentiate between a postulated social problem (women are discriminated against on the basis of their sex) and other possible forms of sexism, such as “misandry”.
Much like “homophobia”, it once referred to a mental state and is now used to refer to a common form of discriminating-against-people-on-the-basis-of-sexual-orientation. This has resulted in some confusion with the mental state that previously being described, because humans are terrible at words.
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“Wiktionary says “Hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women”, which is extraordinarily broader. So much that the vast majority of instances of this definition would not be included in the older, more central one.”
The word “misogyny” in English was – as far as scholars know – first used in the play “Swetnam the Woman-Hater,” published in 1820 but performed as early as 1818ish. (They spelled it “misogynos.”) Later uses of the word derived from this play. The play, a satirical farce, was written as a response to Joseph Swetnam’s hugely popular 1815 pamphlet The arraignment of lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women. At the play’s climax, a women’s court finds him guilty of “Woman-slander, and defamation.” Slander and defamation, not “hatred.”
My guess is that you wouldn’t say that Swetnam’s pamphlet was an example of “hatred.” He says in his introduction that women have both good and bad in them, and his purpose is to increase the good by criticizing the bad. Most of the pamphlet consists of sexist jokes, often based in the Bible (example: “Moses describeth a woman thus: ‘At the first beginning,’ saith he, ‘a woman was made to be a helper unto man.’ And so they are indeed, for she helpeth to spend and consume that which man painfully getteth.” Ba-da-dum!)
If that sort of sexist joking and attitude is “hatred,” then I can’t imagine that you’ve only seen it a handful of times, as you say. Therefore, my guess is that you’d say it’s not “hatred,” and thus wouldn’t fall under the original definition of misogyny.
But looking at the history shows that misogyny, in its very first use in English, included a much broader meaning than what you’re claiming it originally meant..From the start, the word has been used to refer, not to the extremely rare sentiments of men who openly call for women to be murdered or whatever, but to much more commonplace sexist beliefs found in respectable best-sellers.
References:
The True History of "Misogyny" by Christine E. Hutchins
Swetnam the Woman-Hater – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Well, you could quote the whole paragraph (thanks for the link, btw):
‘Swetnam minces no words in his tirade against women. Chapter 1, “Moses describeth a woman thus: ‘At the first beginning,’ saith he, ‘a woman was made to be a helper unto man.’ And so they are indeed, for she helpeth to spend and consume that which man painfully getteth. He also saith that they were made of the rib of a man, and that their froward [difficult] nature showeth; for a rib is a crooked thing good for nothing else, and women are crooked by nature, for small occasion will cause them to be angry.”‘
That work seems to get a lot closer to “hatred” than you made it seem, and goes well into at least the “dislike” definition (the author of the article you link to apparently agrees).
In any case, I’m more invested in the “central” part of “older, more central meaning” than the “older” part. And there’s no need to look at etimology to show current conflation between meanings, as “hates women” is thrown around explicitly and freely these days, in response to all sorts of disagreement with feminism.
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Moebius, when I was thinking obsessively that I never wanted to want to be a good person ever again, there was partly a desire to pry myself loose from SJs, and partly a way of saying (not to them, since I was too afraid) “See what you’ve done– you’ve made the very idea of virtue repulsive”.
This stuff is hard to write about, not just because it’s emotionally complex (and used to be intense, I seem to be looking at it from the outside at the moment), but because there are so many interrelated ideas that it’s hard to see what to write about.
One angle is that I’m in much better shape now than I was during racefail, and it’s worth trying to figure out what helped. I was going to say time was a factor, but I’ve also tried a bunch of stuff.
There was some actual thinking mixed in with the obsessing. One realization was that there are two kinds of people who will say “You figure out how not to piss me off”, and those two kinds are abusers and people who’ve suffered abuse from someone who just doesn’t get it.
Some of it was from Corinthians 1:13– if there’s no good will, it doesn’t matter how elaborate your intellectual justifications are. One of the things I hate about SJ is that it destroys good will.
One of my friends says that it made a difference when I blew up that friendship– I shocked myself because I’d behaved so much worse than I normally did, and that made me more willing to get some distance from SJ thinking.
I’ve also been doing therapy– mostly a combination of cognitive work and somatic experiencing. I believe that a lot of what’s going on with people is habits which are stabilized by muscle tension– sometimes the muscle tension (and presumably hormones) follows changes in thinking, but sometimes it helps to contact the person through their body rather than through words.
Also, racefail became less awful for a while– instead of “Educate yourself!”, anti-racists had enough time and distance to write explanations of what they were angry about. Mind you, I came to agree with them about the limitations of courtesy. Someone who explained very politely why I should suck up other people’s anger while squelching my own began to look no better than someone who was harsh about it.
veronica d, thanks for recommending Unspeakable Things— just looking at the beginning of the book, which says that status has a lot to do with who is allowed to express anger, was enough to convince me to buy it.
It may have helped that I figured out something of what was going on which made me vulnerable to racefail– my mother dumped a lot of anger and wasn’t willing to tolerate anger coming back at her. I dealt with this by retreating. Eventually, I retreated to science fiction convention fandom, and I fell in love with it. It was the first place where I really felt welcome. Not just tolerated (college was much better than home and school) but where I actually fit in.
And then racefail came along, and fandom wasn’t safe any more. Racefail was people with the same emotional structure as my mother, but much smarter (my mother was ordinary bright, I’d say) and with stronger moral justifications.
I panicked completely. I literally didn’t post anything to my livejournal for months because I had no idea what I could be attacked for. I started posting again, but I didn’t do reviews– after all, mammothfail was evidence of how much you could be attacked for liking the wrong thing.
And it became clearer and clearer that I was a very bad person for not liking anti-racism. They said that they didn’t mean the people they were attacking were bad people, but I decided that it doesn’t matter whether people say they don’t think you’re a bad person as long as they treat you like a bad person.
One of the things that helped break me out of the trance was realizing that I was going low-grade suicidal because I didn’t have the courage to criticize anti-racism in public. I realized I was buying into their premise that this fight was more important than anything else.
Incidentally, something I figured out later was that I was getting above myself. It was possible to be attacked if you weren’t a science fiction writer, but you really had to work very hard to get their attention. How much this was actually fan vs. writer fight is hard for me to analyse, but it was probably a factor.
In the interests of decency, I’ll mention that I really believe racism and sexism are very common and very destructive, and want something better than SJ to deal with them. It’s just that this is where my own personal toes got stomped on.
Someone upthread mentioned that people who are actually working on social problems generally aren’t SJs– yes, I noticed that almost no one in anti-racism etc. seemed to be doing any practical work (doing charity, trying to change government policy, that sort of thing).
More later, if people are interested. This is really an unmanagably large topic. I bet that presenting it as a wiki wouldn’t help, either.
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Thanks for writing this. I have nothing to add but I wanted you to know you were heard.
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Your description of your thought processes (and large parts of your history) is remarkably relatable for me, which is something I only very rarely experience regarding this particular subject.
Thank you for writing it, I imagine it was difficult (as it was for me in the subthread above).
I hope this is not a breach of blog etiquette, but should you want to discuss coping with SJ psychological damage without it being public (I sometimes shut myself up out of fear when on a public forum), feel free to send me mail at moebius@mail-online.dk.
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moebius, I second your girlfriend’s recommendation that you write critically about SJ, but I don’t know how you can get to the point of feeling safe enough to do so. (I’m talking about writing, not publishing.)
One of the awful things about SJ is the way it can get into you– the SJ module in your head becomes your ultimate judge.
It may help to think of it as just a thing that’s going on. It claims to be the fount of truth and virtue, but that’s just its opinion.
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So. Just so people know this is a thing, apparently you can expect to have multi copy-paste your comments onto their Tumblr if they don’t like what you have to say.
http://multiheaded1793.tumblr.com/post/102625202326/this-is-what-notall-neoreactionaries-actually
Yay! Shitty pattern-matching ‘#notall’ memes! That totally contributes to the discussion!
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I am confused about what your objection is? My blog comments are not private. Like, if you say something on Facebook, you can reasonably assume the audience is your Facebook friends, and removing it from that context seems rude and a violation of privacy. But saying something on my blog gives you a potential audience of literally every English-speaking person in the entire world, and so it seems a bit silly to object to someone showing it to a different segment of the potential audience you knew you had when you clicked ‘publish’.
You can think it’s unfair of Multi not to have criticized Nyan in this thread, but I think that Multi’s goal was less to criticize Nyan and more to inform people who might want to interact with Nyan that he is pro-passive-genocide. Besides, quite a lot of people are incapable of civilly and rationally engaging with the notion that the world would be a better place if they didn’t exist, so it seems a bit unreasonable to have that as a general ethical rule.
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This blog comment system is not Tumblr, the expectations are different, the mood and atmosphere are different (thankfully) and I strongly suspect that if people were aware that their comments are likely to be transmitted in other media by other commenters they would probably wish to moderate their statements.
Further, this is more likely to affect moderate members of the community than neoreactionary- or SJ-identified members, I don’t particularly want SJ-identified members of this community posting my comments – complete with a link to my original comment, no less, so I can be suitably hounded – any more than I want neoreactionaries doing so.
I don’t have a Tumblr account. I don’t want to discuss issues with Tumblr. I’m not having this discussion with Tumblr. Nyan did not post his comment on Tumblr. Your posts are advertised on Tumblr, yes, but that’s as overall posts made by you, a very different situation. If someone randomly finds a comment after a Google search and decides to transmit that, I have no issue with it. If someone from this community decides to do so, then I am now engaging with Tumblr as part of this community and I have no intention of doing so. Since there’s a significant non-zero chance that there are others of a similar frame of mind, I’ve decided to make my issues with this as open as I can.
I understand well that this is a public blog. I also understand that communities have their own culture, norms that they generally follow. This is a relatively new community, and I would be much happier if “callout culture” was not a part of those norms just as it is not in similar communities.
As should be clear from the above, my issue is with the act of doing this at all. The content of the comment is *completely bloody irrelevant* as long as it’s not outside of the rules you’ve set down regarding content. I don’t care if he does advocate genocide (not least since Multi does too), his arguments should be engaged on their merits or lack thereof, not broadcast to the Internet at large.
(And that’s all before I even start on the sanctimoniousness of it, or the shitty #notall pattern-matching bullshit.)
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Missing a passage there. I originally had the sentence “In comparison I doubt neoreactionaries much care.” between paragraphs 2 and 3.
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Zorgon: “Further, this is more likely to affect moderate members of the community than neoreactionary- or SJ-identified members,”
While the mere possibility of being quoted could dissuade “moderate members,” that possibility always exists in a public blog, so moderate members should be aware of it and make their decision based on knowledge. (In fact, I suspect that most people are already aware that this possibility exists, and have already factored that possibility into their decision to post comments.)
But as far as likelihood goes, my experience is that people who state conventionally outrageous and offensive opinions in comments, are far more likely to be quoted in other venues for purposes of fostering outrage than people who state moderate opinions in comments are. So in that sense, I would think that people stating support for “genocide” should be more affected by the possibility of being quoted in other venues, compared to “moderates” who presumably have relatively conventional opinions.
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As I noted, there’s a missing sentence there. “In comparison I doubt neoreactionaries much care.”
There is a rather blatant difference between someone picking up on a comment in a public blog and another commenter from that blog actively retransmitting it on social media. One of these things is a phenomenon of the medium being public, the other is a phenomenon of the comment culture. I would appreciate it if people would stop pretending that these are the same thing.
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Zorgon: if Multiheaded, on his tumblr, quoted something from comments here and genuinely engaged in argument with it, would you have as much problem with it? I know I wouldn’t, even if in response tumblr blew up the way it does.
It’s not the actual reposting that stinks here, it’s the way the reposter is role-playing a snitch. He’s not *actually* snitching, the stuff’s public, Nyan probably doesn’t care, etc. etc., but we still find it distasteful.
In this thread, people post their opinions and hypotheticals, including outrageous and vile ones, and reasonably expect to be treated calmly and argued at without excessive moralizing and chess-beating. Multiheaded is like a little kid running to the teacher, “Teacher! Teacher! Bill and Kimblerly from the 8th grare are doing naughty stuff in that closet there!”. That kid, man. Nobody liked the disgusting little prick.
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So Multiheaded fooled you as well. Please, read the context of Nyan’s comment, he is not “pro passive genocide” – the hypothetical world that his comment is couched in does not exist.
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I do, in fact, read comments on my own blog and come to my own opinions. I am not Multiheaded’s puppet. I did read his comment, and context (including that he had previously discussed this issue, that his recommendations are in line with what he espouses generally, and that he does believe in substantial IQ differences between racial groups although not 4 SDs because that’s ridiculous) makes me believe that he was probably accurately describing his own views, in addition to participating in a hypothetical.
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If my comment seemed to imply that I thought you were Multiheaded’s puppet then I apologize. I’ve been tricked after being slightly inattentive, which is very easy to do after reading hundreds of comments – perhaps you are sharper than me.
But do you really think that there was nothing deceptive about posting that quote without context as though Nyan was describing his views about policies in the real world? I’m very surprised you think that the purpose was to warn people against engaging with Nyan rather than to stir up outrage.
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I thought that was out of character for Nyan Sandwich. And wow was that an grossly out of context passage. He was replying to a hypothetical world in which there were two populations neatly separated by a 4 standard deviation gap in intelligence and morality – whatever that means. Ie. not this world.
To quote it out of context is one of the most disgusting tactics I have ever seen on this blog or Scotts, and I’m actually surprised that Multiheaded would engage in tactics that low.
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OK. Here I’m going to actually make the argument: Why trans-friendly gender abolitionism does not appear to make sense to me.
The super-short version:
1. The bad news: Categorizing has consequences. Dividing people into male and female has predictable bad effects.
2. The good news: There are ways to mitigate this effect!
3. The bad news: Trans activists are trying to take away our best tool for mitigating this effect, and the alternatives I’ve heard provided so far are not credible.
Part 1: This is pretty obvious. Sexism has existed since forever. The whole goal here is to get rid of the idea that there is a generally-meaningful distinction between male and female (as opposed to one that is meaningful in particular cases where there’s an actual relevance).
Part 2: There are two parts to this, sort of. Actually there are many parts to this, because this is a hard problem that nobody really knows how to solve at the moment. But, for now, I want to clump a whole bunch of those parts together into one big part which is liberalism. People should be free to do what they want without regard to preassigned roles, etc. You’re all familiar with this part; for our purposes here, as hard as it is, it’s not the interesting part.
The second part is what I’ll call “tethering”. Let’s look at the example Eliezer uses in “Categorizing has consequences” — blood types. Sure, it’s a big thing in Japan, but here in the US it mostly isn’t. But imagine it started catching on. How would you try to counter this? Probably by saying, “No, blood type does not affect your personality, it affects who you can donate blood to and who you can receive blood from, and that is all. It is strictly about blood.” You try to tightly bind it to that one particular notion and prevent it from leaking to anything else.
Similarly, the other prong of the obvious response to sexism is to try to tether the male/female division to purely physiological distinctions. And — here comes the liberalism prong — liberalism tells us that such physiological distinctions are generally irrelevant! It is wrong to discriminate against people based on their birth or body. With these two together, it is easy to claim that the male/female distinction is generally irrelevant.
Part 3: For obvious reasons, trans people are generally opposed to this “tethering” strategy. Unfortunately, the alternatives they’ve presented that I know of do not seem to be credible.
Why is tethering so important? Because otherwise your distinction is going to get polluted, or even replaced, by whatever people happen to silently come up with.
That is to say: “Anyone can declare themselves any gender, and it is important you refer to them as that, but gender has no actual meaning outside of that” is not a stable state. It is, for one thing, confusing. It introduces a distinction, asserts the distinction is important, and then asserts no actual meaning for the distinction. How prepared do you think people are to believe in meaningless distinctions? Categorization has consequences, and most people are not good at noticing confusion — they won’t ask for clarification, they’ll just silently come up with something that makes sense to them. If you do not supply a meaning, one will be supplied for you, and you’re unlikely to approve of it — not that you’ll necessarily notice. Well, OK, here’s one conclusion I expect you’ll silently get a lot of: “Oh, I get it. Women are the ones who do ‘feminine’ things, and men are the ones who do ‘masculine’ things.” Not very feminist, and not gender abolitionist at all!
You can tether your distinction to a meaning which is mostly irrelevant, just like blood type is mostly irrelevant. You cannot tether your distinction to nothing. Otherwise it just comes loose and becomes replaced by brain soup.
(You also cannot tether your distinction to a concept sufficiently far away from how people already think of it, e.g., determining gender on the basis of eye color. Not that trans people would be any happier with that, of course.)
I’m reminded also of a story Mark Rosewater tells, of players new to Magic encountering the card One with Nothing and assuming it must do something other than what it says it does, because why would you ever want to cast a spell that just makes you discard your hand? Older players already have the tether that the card text means exactly what it says (unless there’s errata 😛 ), and some new players might notice their confusion and ask… but for a new player who fails to notice their confusion, you can end up with arbitrary conclusions instead.
So basically, it looks to me like you can tether in trans-unfriendly way, or you can tether in a sexist way (clearly unacceptable)… or you can not tether at all and get sexist brain soup. Another alternative would be nice. What is it?
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This was my way of thinking for a while, but my current suspicion is that an unlimited right to self-definition serves abolitionist ends, even if it presupposes a different ontology.
Suppose that we want to destroy peerage. One way to do this would be to ban anyone from claiming noble titles – everyone is a citoyen(ne) and expected to treat everyone else as that. But giving everyone a right to claim whatever noble title they want, and instituting a norm that if someone claims to be the Prince-Cardinal of Brandenburg then you should acknowledge them as the Prince-Cardinal of Brandenburg (whilst not granting them any legal privileges and immunities, &c.) seems equally destructive – like you say, it makes the term meaningless. On Tumblr you see the efflorescence of increasingly fine gender identities, the logical endpoint of which seems to be putting everyone into their own special category.
(In any event I think the normative concern of trans folks’ immediate survival is more important than any deep concerns about gender ontology, as far as determining how we act goes, but that’s a separate question.)
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I think your argument here relies on a bit of equivocation, in that you’ve snuck some relevantly non-analogous elements into your analogy. Like, sure, “allow anyone to claim any title with no real meaning” would work, but that’s not what we’re seeing, because the “with no real meaning” condition isn’t satisfied.
That is to say: How many cases do you know of of, people who socially transitioned but changed absolutely nothing else, not even their name? The number isn’t zero, and there’s good reason to not do this (e.g. it is entirely understandable to prioritize not getting harassed over proving a point!)… but the fact that this is so close to unheard of — not just as something people don’t do, but as something people don’t even seem to talk about as a concept (OK, I’m probably not the best judge of that, I probably don’t hang around in the right spaces for that)… I don’t think the “with no real meaning” bit is satisfied.
That is to say, rather than “lol look at me I’m a duke, you all better call me ‘your grace’ now hahaha” we’re seeing… well, I don’t know how to make the analogy work, because I don’t really understand it myself. But if all the people suddenly calling themselves gentry also start carrying swords and challenging each other to duels — even though it’s now OK for non-gentry to do so and plenty do[0] — you should start considering the possibility that something has gone wrong somewhere along the way. Although it’s a matter of degree — there’s a number of acceptable intermediate states that eventually lead to “lol look at me I’m a duke”. I just don’t think what we’re seeing with gender is one of them.
[0]Or maybe dueling is banned, rather than permissible for everyone; this is immaterial.
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Well, OK, here’s one conclusion I expect you’ll silently get a lot of: “Oh, I get it. Women are the ones who do ‘feminine’ things, and men are the ones who do ‘masculine’ things.” Not very feminist, and not gender abolitionist at all!
It doesn’t hurt that most trans people, like most non-trans people, already have “feminine/masculine things” quite firmly linked to their conception of sex and gender.
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And not only that, they even say so! It’s kind of a shock to hear someone “blue tribe” say such “backward” things, you know?
Our present host is, of course, an exception, who actually does want to get things to gender-neutral, so, yay! But at present I’m pretty far from convinced that Ozy’s idea of what people should do would, if carried out, actually have the effects they intend, instead of, well, the opposite. Which is why I wrote this…
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Assuming English doesn’t lose gendered pronouns, would you prefer pronouns be assigned on the basis of physical sex, to reinforce tethering, or that people choose whichever pronouns suit them, even if they don’t match their gender?
Would you prefer the norm that people who want to change their physical sex be allowed to, or that people shouldn’t change their physical sex?
Would you prefer to call people who have changed their physical sex members of the sex their body most resembles, or members of their birth sex?
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Well, if English never loses gendered pronouns, then we’ve failed. But in the meantime, the former.
…note that obviously this is not actually workable, because I am largely describing a “throw the trans people under the bus” scenario. (Although not entirely, as you’ll see in a moment, but definitely mostly.) Which obviously I would prefer not to do if there is an alternative where everyone gets what they want, as Ozy maintains there is, but anyway let’s run with the hypothetical for now.
Note of course that not everyone falls cleanly into one sex or another, and if we would stop forcing them into buckets that would be nice. I’d hope for this to speed the general breakdown, but it’s not clear that they’re a large enough population to have much effect.
“Yes” to the first, and “the former, with an important caveat” to the second. As for the first, well, I mean, I’m a transhumanist; of course people should be allowed to have whatever body they please.
As for the second, if you want to really reinforce the idea that body determines male/female, then it has to be current body — otherwise it just leads to “not a real X”, etc., which is exactly what I’m trying to discourage. (Also, this plan is throwing trans people under the bus enough already without then additionally saying “You’re not even allowed to physically transition, so nyah!” I mean, we should be able to do at least as well as Iran, right? 😛 )
The caveat of course is the same as what I said above: why should someone end up as one of the binary sexes at all, if more possibilities are technologically available to them? Why force-classify people? I would hope that eventually the existence of enough people who just don’t fit one or the other very well would be part of what leads to the breakdown of male/female as a socially relevant distinction.
So… I hope that clarifies things?
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