Open Thread! Race and gender goes here. Things which are not race and gender go elsewhere.
The thread is unmoderated. Read at your own risk.
We have gone one (1) thread without a proposal of genocide.
Open Thread #4: Race the Music
04 Thursday Dec 2014
Posted in open thread
On a 1-5 Likert scale, rate your agreement with the following statement: HBD bloggers are putting vulnerable groups at risk for no better reason than they enjoy the frisson occasioned by being politically incorrect.
(FWIW, my rating for this statement is 2: I don’t think HBD puts people at much risk at all, but some people do strike me as being provocative for the hell of it.)
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I don’t really read the HBD-o-sphere, but it doesn’t seem impossible that it’s too heterogeneous to answer that question. The ones who are most intentionally provocative are likely to succeed in making themselves central examples, though.
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Note: I meant heterogeneity of motives, not actual genes. I expect it’s basically a whole bunch of white people plus Jayman on that dimension.
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One East Asian (don’t know the specific ethnicity) on twitter and in comment sections, and a number of nonwhites who do actual HBD research but don’t blog.
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I think it’s closer to a romanticized view of truth, more like.
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How so?
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An example of something which the stupider and the smarter class of Marxists will tar with the hated name ‘bourgeoise’.
I don’t think that as many of them get a rush out of being un-PC. But I do think that they have a romanticized view of finding the Truth, having the Truth On Their Side or being On The Side Of The Truth.
“Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted” might be a more pragmatic way of approaching this sort of thing.
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Those are two different statements. Enjoying the frisson of political incorrectness, 5. Actually putting people at risk, 1.
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Yes, those are my thoughts as well.
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I’d say 4,5 and 1,5. They have certainly caused a few non-“white” individuals considerable emotional distress.
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Could you explain what you mean by “putting vulnerable groups at risk”?
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Presumably something like encouraging bright young libertarian types not to support more open immigration.
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4
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The people those bloggers put the most at risk are their readers, since they propagate views that can alienate you from your family and get you fired from your job. Any other effects are possible, but it’s unclear what the direction would be, since they’re doing certain causes no favors by associated themselves with them.
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It’s a 1. I basically hate believing in HBD, but the alternative is to believe that all inequality is due to evil white men really conspiring to keep minorities and women down. And that belief has all kinds of nasty practical implications. If the left were willing to leave well enough alone, and not try to punish whites for every bad thing that happens to minorities, only jerks would write about HBD.
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I basically hate believing in HBD, but the alternative is to believe that all inequality is due to evil white men really conspiring to keep minorities and women down.
This does not actually exhaust the hypothesis space. Not even if you don’t take “conspiring” literally.
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“This does not actually exhaust the hypothesis space.”
Yeah, I expected that objection with this rigorously logical commentariat, but it’s shorthand; you can replace “conspiring” with any causality that involves poor outcomes for minorities/women not being the product of natural differences. Unless the supposed causality is accurate (as it sometimes is), then structuring society around the assumption that the causality is accurate will cause havoc.
So, keeping blacks out of medical school on the plainly inaccurate assumption that no black person is qualified for medical school is a very bad thing. But distorting the education system and spending untold billions or trillions to “close the gap” between white and black students on the dogmatic assumption that any gap must be due to discrimination or racial economic inequities, because it couldn’t POSSIBLY be inborn racial differences, is likewise very bad.
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But distorting the education system and spending untold billions or trillions to “close the gap” between white and black students on the dogmatic assumption that any gap must be due to discrimination or racial economic inequities, because it couldn’t POSSIBLY be inborn racial differences, is likewise very bad.
I’m willing to allow for some differences on purely theoretical grounds. But even if you accept that, it doesn’t follow that genetics is the onlydifference, a conclusion one might also come to by noticing that efforts to close the gap have, in fact, partially closed the gap
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“I’m willing to allow for some differences on purely theoretical grounds.”
That’s very reasonable of you! It’s also not far from my own position or that of “The Bell Curve,” and it’s enough to get you branded a racist by most of the media. You can see how people end up being radicalized…
“But even if you accept that, it doesn’t follow that genetics is the only difference”
I doubt any of the HBD bloggers contend this. None of the blogs I read contend that.
Your chart shows that from the mid-70s, not even a decade after MLK was killed, until the late 80s, which is when I entered a majority-minority elementary school, blacks made substantial progress in comparison to whites, then the gap actually worsens slightly up to the present. I would not be surprised to find that the initial improvement is what happens when you remove genuine discrimination, and the remaining gap is something like the natural outcome. We know that efforts to “close the gap” did not cease in 1988. They’ve been a huge failure, and a distraction from what should be an effort to raise all boats.
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There are plenty of “natural” explanations that involve neither massive racial genetic differences nor white people being exceptionally evil. (Wouldn’t that, in itself, be a massive racial genetic difference?) For instance, one can believe that European cultures became dominant for reasons of historical contingency, such as the Jared Diamond geographical-axes-and-domestic-animal-distribution argument. Or the Civ 5 argument, as I like to call it.
I’d also point out that “genuine discrimination” is not limited to simple interpersonal racism. We have an educational system that is very obviously discriminatory — black schools tend to be inferior to white schools on all kinds of objective measures external to student performance, such as class sizes and quality of materials — without anyone exhibiting obvious bigotry. All it takes is the natural tendency of people to cluster along racial lines plus large historical differences in wealth distribution. Those things are, at least in theory, correctable via deliberate collective action. No one’s disagreeing it is a hard problem!
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“We have an educational system that is very obviously discriminatory — black schools tend to be inferior to white schools on all kinds of objective measures external to student performance, such as class sizes and quality of materials — without anyone exhibiting obvious bigotry. All it takes is the natural tendency of people to cluster along racial lines plus large historical differences in wealth distribution.”
Washington DC’s mostly-black schools spend three times as much per pupil as Utah’s mostly-white schools:
http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/21/which-places-spent-most-per-student-on-education/
Care to make a bet how they compare for student outcomes? Of course, there are cultural factors. No doubt if a white couple from suburban Utah adopted a black child from inner city DC, environmental factors would make a big difference for that kid.
But even there, black kids from households making more than $200,000 score the same on the SAT as white kids from households making about $20,000.
http://www.jbhe.com/latest/index012209_p.html
Hard to blame that on clustering or “historical differences in wealth distribution.”
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Don’t public schools have to spend disproportionate amounts of money on special-ed kids? I’d image there are more of them in DC than in Utah, especially as the DC middle class decamped for the suburbs decades ago. (The black middle class, too: Prince George’s County is 63% black and has a median household income 40% above the national median.) Also, DC is hardly a model of clean, efficient government, so I’d question how much of that money actually makes it to the students.
Also, income != wealth, and racial wealth inequality is a lot starker than racial income inequality – i.e. given a random black and white person making the same salary, the black person is likely to have less money in the bank and less valuable possessions than the white person. (See here for more.)
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The black-white score gap, which is pretty much everywhere you look, cannot be explained by idiosyncratic factors relating to DC and Utah. That was just the starkest example.
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2 is about right.
It’s important to distinguish between “they have no better reason” and “there is no better reason.” You would expect people who write about controversial topics to enjoy its frisson, especially if they aren’t getting paid. You would probably expect this to be a more powerful motivator than any abstract belief in the expected good to derived from more people agreeing with you. You would end up condemning HBD bloggers on the grounds that they are humans and humans are fundamentally bad. I mean, we are, but still.
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> We have gone one (1) thread without a proposal of genocide.
CRUSH ALL HUMAN !
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Ozy, back in Consent as a Felt Sense you wrote:
I didn’t pay attention to this the first time through, but on a reread it seems very strange to me. I literally cannot think of any way in which I would treat someone “as a rape survivor” that did not involve punishing the perpetrator. Perhaps if I were their therapist there would be, but I’m not a therapist and neither are most of us. Certainly I’ll be careful about triggers if they ask me to be, but no differently than I would someone with the same triggers for some other reason. (I would not be careful about potential triggers unasked, because I think the odds of annoying them with tiptoeing are higher than the odds of successfully guessing what the triggers are.)
So I’m confused. Can you expound on your experience? (Other people with similar experience are also invited.)
I strongly suspect that this disconnect has the potential to be a major inferential gap, and explains a large part of why discussions of rape and rape response tend to be unproductive.
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Well, emotional support is a big one. A lot of times people want to talk about their experiences. It can help to have someone else reality-check you on things like “does it make sense for me to be upset about this?” or “is this a reasonable thing to ask my new partner?” I and a lot of my friends tend to be very prone to introspection and processing our emotions, and so it can be like “well, I think I act like X because I was raped, what do you think?” And sometimes it just comes up over the course of casual conversation– “oh, I’m having a bad day today because it’s the anniversary of my rape”.
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I found this statement extremely surprising. Well, it would make sense to me if the alleged rapist was my friend, and I had decide whether to “punish” em by withdrawing my friendship. But that’s not true in the general case, right?
To my mind, the role of a friend or even of a sympathetic stranger is much closer to the role of a therapist than that of a police officer / prosecutor / judge, jury and executioner. Do you have a different intuition?
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[I’m not a rape survivor, although I have been sexually assaulted in lesser ways. Take this for what it is worth.]
I once wrote a story about a rape survivor, which ultimately I chose not to publish. But anyway, well along in the narrative our hero is at a party where she is flirting with a girl she likes. (Our hero is a shy but wonderful lesbian.) While talking to the target of her hopes and dreams, our hero mentions her rape. But instead of a thoughtful conversation with a fellow woman about something hard, what happens is this: an attention-hogging party-bro overhears, and like all those of his kind he immediately interrupts and wants to talk about her rape. Cuz, seriously! He cannot believe that happened!
“Did they catch the guys?” he asked. “I hope they caught them.”
Which fucking sucks and is precisely the wrong thing to say to this character at this time. Perhaps at some other time. Perhaps for some other survivor. But this girl does not *even want to think about her assailants*. Hers was stranger rape. Those men are out of her life. But she is here and she is processing and she wants to talk to this woman about it, cuz to her *this woman* matters, not the party-bro.
(Sorry party-bros. I’m sure you’ll find someone else to talk to.)
So anyway, your fixation on punishment reminded me of this.
Maybe this will provide insight. Maybe not.
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(This is also for Nita)
I think I understand where you’re coming from, but I think that you need to understand this from the man’s perspective too. Your use of the term “party-bro” makes it sound like you don’t think this is worthy of consideration. If so, you’re wrong.
Much ink has been spilled to the effect that men tend to go into fixit-mode when they should be providing emotional support, and try to drag women into fixit-mode as well when fixing is neither feasible nor timely. Whether men should try to do better, women should at least notice that men really, really like to go into fixit-mode, and if you want to work effectively with us you want to work around this, rather than against it.
To a man, here’s what we see: you have just reported that scouts from the Hill Tribe, our mortal enemy, have been sighted in our hunting grounds. This is a serious problem the tribe’s warriors need to deal with immediately. Our lives are at stake. However, you won’t help us track down the scouts. You insist that you’re so traumatized by the sight of the scouts that we need to help (or at least let) you process your feelings about having seen the scout before we can form a search party. When we try to tell you this can wait, you insist that the scouts don’t really matter. Your feelings matter. How can you warriors be so insensitive?
Obviously, if we were real warriors we’d slap you and tell you to deal with what WE think is the problem now, and what you think is the problem later (realistically, we’re going to feel better once we’ve killed the scouts, and we’ll just assume you do to, probably forgetting that you had a problem altogether). Unfortunately, we’ve been civilized, so we just sit there feeling this weird mixture of fear, shock, anger, and disbelief. What the hell is wrong with you, woman? The tribe is in danger!
You may say that as a woman who has actually traumatized by an actual bad thing, your feelings matter more than a man who merely heard about it. This is a nonstarter for all sorts of reasons. The welfare of the whole community matters more than your personal feelings. We all know this. This is why we punish rapists even if they really, really like to commit rape.
Here are some ways you can demonstrate that you take the concerns of the men of the tribe seriously:
1. Do not mention it around men unless you are okay with them going into fixit-mode, or you have somehow determined that they won’t (e.g. I am wearing my “survivor ally” armband or some shit).
2. If you do are going to mention it around men, be prepared to explain why fixing is not possible or not desirable or both. We will want to know why. We will have difficulty resisting the temptation to ask probing questions, if we understand why this might be a temptation to be resisted at all. Remember: deep down we think the Hill Tribe is going to kill us all in our sleep if we ignore this.
3. Frame the need to provide emotional support as fixing the problem. Tell the men emotionally vulnerable people are more likely to get raped again or something. Be creative.
4. Try not to be so dismissive of fixit-mode. We’re that way for sound evolutionary reasons. And it’s part of the solution too.
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I’m sorry, Airgap, but I don’t find your argument persuasive. Regardless of our evolutionary history, adult people today are expected to consider the consequences of their actions and override their knee-jerk emotional response if necessary and possible.
Also:
Obviously, you’re free to daydream whatever scenarios you like, but do you have to drag your fantasies into a polite discussion?
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Like seriously dude, your cavemen fantasies are just silly. Grow up and get modern.
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Literally nothing I do in helping my partner involves punching the perpetrator in the face. The closest to “punishment” I’ve ever done is told him to leave her alone (he had this fixation with finding an excuse to be near her and starring intermittently).
Most of what I do is just emotional support. Helping her through nightmares, being as careful as I can be about her boundaries (you should respect boundaries anyway, but with her and survivors in general, well, CONSTANT VIGILANCE), assuaging her self doubt regarding her boundaries, etc. A lot of it isn’t really specific to rape victims. Mostly it’s just accepting that it happened, and adjusting your behaviour as you would for someone who had been through some major trauma. It’s person specific, of course, but you wouldn’t, for instance, tell a car crash survivor to “get over” their anxiety about driving. That would be insensitive and crass, and more importantly it implicitly denies the possibility that what happened to them would warrant such worry.
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I’m interested in what a leftwing analogue to Neoreaction would look like and it seems several people have been toying with the idea. So, what would it take as fundamental, how would it differ from existing leftist philosophies, what weird ideas from tech or sociology or whatever would it crib, etc.?
(I’m personally interested in something like Scott’s critique of “civilizational incompetence” as he puts it, but I think it’s broader than that, i.e. explicitly planned social order is always going to fail. I’m interested in how stable, successful, and conducive to flourishing social orders not planned from above can be. I’m curious what consequences that has for society and esp. the family and the economy. I like some of what I’ve heard coming out of socialism, anarchism, and so on, and I’m fond of mutualism. Of course I don’t know how leftist any of that really is, and I really, really think it ought to be saying more in response to feminism and all. So take all that with a grain of salt.)
What’s your take?
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I think it’d be more or less a fusion of several existing branches of leftism. Machiavellian-Gramscian-Alinskyite class struggle politics; partly essentialist and partly constructionist radical feminism drawing from Dworkin and Firestone; loosely Marxian, not-so-cheerful view of history; left-libertarian economics; generally resembling libertarian thought in the ways parallel to NRx.
…conveniently enough, I’ve just described many of my views.
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Doesn’t it sort of validate some of the NRx complaints to say “left-NRx would look like the current left”?
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It’s not really the “current” left any more than (NRx favourite) Samuel T. Francis is the current right.
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You might want to look at Marilyn Waring’s work. It is a feminist approach which includes a lot on the household and the economy:
http://www.marilynwaring.com
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I think a really cool example is Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. In many ways it’s reactionary because it wants to try to turn back time on perceived recent missteps – in industrial farming, in mass media, in social life.
But then again, internet reactionists are in many ways a literary genre, and McKibben’s book doesn’t fall into that genre – one would have to rewrite it with more daring edginess, and more effort to sound deeply wise.
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This is one of those paleo vs. neo things. The original UR crowd didn’t try to sound deeply wise; they tried to sound like people who’d seen things and who knew what they were talking about — there’s a difference — and left the tone of deep wisdom to Don Colacho.
I’m not sure when that changed. There’s probably a difference between Foseti-era and Xenosystems-era. (Yes, this is a decline narrative. Moldbug and Foseti weren’t so stupid as to try to give themselves a name, and no one even reads Foseti anymore, never mind that he’s far superior to the people who run around trying to have original ideas instead of reviewing books and waiting until they’ve observed things.)
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No links, but I can give my own thoughts. I think that social struggle is inevitable, that true harmony is not to be found, that the tensions between tribal identity and individuality are deeply subtle, that sexuality and gender are likewise deeply subtle, and that attempts to make this stuff *legible* to analysis are doomed to failure. Political systems built from such analyses will fuck up and hurt people in just the same way that bridges built according to wildly incorrect principles tend to fall down.
Entropy always wins.
That said, I believe in observation, thoughtfulness, humility, and harm reduction. We will make policy. It will be imperfect, but it can be better than what we have now, if we listen and measure (when we can listen and measure), and if those hurt fight hard enough and if thoughtful allies help along the way. Over time more people thrive, even if not everyone is happy with all they get.
And now those people make noise, and we keep turning the crank.
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I don’t understand the sense in which you want an analog to a rightist movement on the left. Can you explain that more? All that stuff you have in parentheses just sounds like it is fairly standard leftist thought. If the analog is to “extremist”, then that stuff does not seem to fit the bill.
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veronica: not that I’m specifically *too* opposed (except on the analysis part, the difference between “only instinctive analysis” and “a Good Enough analysis” can be qualitative, a phase change, IMO), but all in all that’s like… the exact, polar opposite of NRx!
P.S.: I find that I *totally* disagree with the discourse of “allyship” as it exists in today’s SJ, and think that it needs to be recentered along Machiavellian lines. Here, a thing about that, rather well put by a horrible mean person:
http://unquietpirate.tumblr.com/post/48474772116/iamwhateveryoubelieve-the-men-who-care-about
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@multi — Consider these two things.
The first is this: There is this thing that happens when CompSci/Machine-Learning/Physics/large-scale-modeling people look at society, which maybe a lot of us don’t quite notice cuz we live inside it. But compare this with more traditional ways to think about society. For a long time feminists (and others) have talked about issues *systemically*. However, the intellectual tools they had to think about *systems* were quite limited. But now we have a generation of thinkers who work on large, complex systems in their day job, systems they can manipulate and control in a way that a social scientist never could. From this they have built a vocabulary.
For example (to reference something said here recently), feminists seem to talk about patriarchy as if it were a deliberate thing. In fact, they often talk about it as if it has a mind of its own, its own motives and goals, its own ability to plot. *The Patriarchy* — you could poke it with a stick!
This is obviously rubbish. However, I think they are on to something. I think they are observing and naming a real social process, of which they lack the conceptual tools to properly discuss. *We* have better tools. We can talk of “attractors,” self-sustaining patterns of social organization that have no *mind*, but are the product of individual actors following programming they learn from the system itself.
Both we and the traditional feminists are naming the same thing, but *our sub-tribe* has better tools to talk about it.
That’s the first part. The second is this: I sense a growing impatience with the failures of metaethics, a sense that the mind projection fallacy [1] combined with (non terrible approaches to) evopsych really has to change entirely how we think about ethics.
Which, this program is hardly complete and even now folks on LW and SCC desperately try to rescue some foundations for ethics. However, to my view these attempts never quite work, which gives us something we might call “post-ethical understanding,” a notion that “ethics” is a property of agents within the system and not of the system itself. There is no outside view.
Which is psychologically uncomfortable, perhaps psychologically *impossible*, at least to hold these ideas in a sustained way, so people invent false ideas to make peace with it. I do this. You do this. We all do this. Can we say one falsehood is better than the next? Maybe not, but we can look at how the falsehoods act within the system, learn from that, and choose.
(This is old-hat to postmodernist [2]. However, the postmodernists were some of the most muddled thinkers the world has yet produced. These ideas must be rescued from them.)
When we apply these ideas to society, certain styles of conversation take place. I think NRx emerges from this zeitgeist, even if they take it into a really horrible direction. The left, however, has not entirely caught up, certainly not the wider left. It happens in bits and pieces, little ways. I’m not the only trans feminist who reads LW.
I think my views emerge from this space. As a trans woman I basically *need* the left, particularly the social justice left, to have any hope of a decent life. But I also *want* good science and smart policy and deep ideas that are true. Plus transhumanism, should we achieve it, would be really nice.
So, if you assume this zeitgeist as a baseline and look at how the NRx diverge from others within it, then yes, my ideas seem its polar opposite. However, if you *do not* assume this zeitgeist as a baseline, note that NRx happens within it, and then look at how a left can also emerge in this space, then you get to where I am going.
And honestly, is this not the only part of NRx that we would *want* to copy? The rest is small-minded hateful crap.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/oi/mind_projection_fallacy/
[2] I mean postmodernism in its broader sense
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I don’t think I understand NRx well enough to grasp your question, as well as the proposed answers — would you mind clarifying ? What are some of the key features of NRx that the left-wing version would also contain ?
I don’t really understand NRx, so from my perspective, NRx is driven primarily by an explicit rejection of every single left-wing principle, coupled with some sort of a weird nostalgia for the age of absolute despots that never really existed in reality. I realize this is probably an uncharitable perception, but still, it’s all I’ve got.
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I’m looking for something noticeably very different from the mainstream, which borrows creatively from the new thought on its side (Scott defines that extensionally in Right is the New Left as “Jonathan Haidt, Bowling Alone, time discounting, public choice theory, the Hajnal line, contract law, Ross Douthat, incentives, polycentric anything, unschooling, exit rights”) as well as out of left field (e.g. if it unapologetically borrowed from Hindu eschatology or something), and is willing to productively engage with people even weirder (cough, NRx with Lesswrong…).
I can’t find the right words to put this in, but basically I’m looking for something that would be to the left as NRx is to the right rather than any sort of analogue in its policy proposals or anything.
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Where are you drawing the line for “new thought”? Maybe I’m just ignorant, but it doesn’t seem that there has been a whole lot of influential, new ideas from the left in the last 20-25 years. The left just seems to be pushing for acceptance of their ideas from the eighties and earlier (which isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, mind you).
For example, pretty much everything Multithreaded listed in response to you has already been around for decades or longer.
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I think Communism might be something close to what you’re looking for. By “Communism” I don’t mean, “Soviet-style dictatorship”, but rather something like, “total elimination of the concept of private property”.
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It depends on which aspect of NRx you want to replicate, how you want to replicate it, and what you think are the defining characteristics of the right and the left. If you want to replicate the extremely far right nature of NRx, by replacing right with left, and you think the defining quality is equality/hierarchy, then it seems like communism is basically the equivalent. If you want to replicate the far-reaching utopian nature and you think that time (past vs. future, Cthulhu swims left)) is the defining characteristic, then you have plenty of options. Raikoth would count, by this definition. If you want the general spirit of NRx as a movement, but as a leftist ideology, I don’t know enough about the depths of leftist thought to tell. I think this is what Multiheaded was going for, so that’s probably closer than anything I could come up with.
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If you want contrarian leftism, I think one starting point could be to reject The Cathedral.
A lot of new left thought is is actually quite reactionary in many ways; advocating ethnonationalism and communitarianism, romanticist environmentalism, anti-materialism and “spirituality”, Luddism, traditionalism, religious apologia, anti-social engineering, etc. Social justice can get nasty but its really just the tip of the iceberg as to how far the modern left can be reactionary. Reject this and you get something at first similar to old left intellectualism. Then start applying modern ideas and experiences, rationalism, transhumanism, a highly cynical view of society and power, preparation for upcoming automation revolution, some ideas from Bostrom and Scott’s Moloch post, and some ideas taken from reactionaries and twisted for a different values system, and you could get something sort of like a leftist equivalent to neoreaction.
I bring this up as a starting point because I arrived at my unorthodox version of left wing politics* by essentially rejecting the modern left zeitgeist, what I would later hear called “The Cathedral”, as reactionary.
*They are not all that strange, I often agree with Multi. But its definitely very different from mainstream “leftism”. My ideology is still not fully formed and is in the works.
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Oh yeah, and you could also try to incorporate some form of market socialism for extra irony.
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Small correction: The Cathedral isn’t the zeitgeist, it is institutions that promulgate the zeitgeist.
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It depends. Which left?
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Also, read Lasch.
Or pay attention the next time people like me and graaaaaagh talk about the Old Left.
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Can we just say that whatever the subtleties of Lasch are, he and many other old leftists were just hard-right on gender? Seriously, neither us leftists nor the other side need to pretend that reactionary/Catholic critiques of gender politics under liberal capitalism have anything to do with the Left, even when there’s something valuable in them. Saying “Women are a vulnerable class who need to be protected” does not in itself move one an inch left on gender.
P.S.: a good article regarding the anti-capitalist pseudo-leftist gender discourse, and generally the misogyny of the political left.
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-man-child/
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Oh, so gender has supplanted class as the defining issue of the left? That’s interesting. I wonder how that happened.
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I’ve always thought of NRx, especially Moldbug, as basically being a rightwing equivalent of leftist ‘critical theory.’ Not proposing specific policies as much as critiquing the underlying functioning of the system.
So the idea that there could be a leftwing counterpart to a rightwing counterpart to a leftwing thing is quite weird to me.
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Two open threads ago on SSC, I posted a comment describing what I consider to be a common fallacy:
I then proceeded to give a non-controversial example which I think is sort of clumsy. Actually, I think what I have described can be better used to explain some of what is going on behind a lot of gender-related discussions. The Patriarchy (phenomenon X) is often assumed to be entirely beneficial to men and entirely detrimental to women. Thus, many MRAs and other anti-feminists more or less deny the existence of The Patriarchy because they correctly observe certain inequalities in favor of women. Meanwhile, some feminists deny any type of societal unfairness towards men because they believe in the existence of The Patriarchy. Both are wrong in my opinion: The Patriarchy (as the term seems to be casually understood) was never a deliberate attempt by men to elevate themselves at the expense of women, but rather, a naturally occurring phenomenon which is detrimental to men in a number of ways as well.
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I don’t endorse this essay, but it talks about patriarchy as a spontaneous order.
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I think it’s quite a stretch to call Patriarchy natural, when strongly Patriarchal societies produce so much propaganda on the subject.
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I tend to believe that the initial causes of Patriarchy are natural, while it’s perpetuated somewhat by deliberate propoganda issued by those who enjoy the status quo.
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By that logic, markets aren’t natural because there’s so much pro-market, libertarian propaganda out there.
When people try to stamp out spontaneous order, you shouldn’t be surprised when those who liked the spontaneous order fight back.
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But markets aren’t natural. The reason that first the European economy and then the world economy experienced explosive growth in the modern era is that they started doing capitalism on a large scale, when they had been doing very little of it before. And go back to sufficiently primitive societies, and there isn’t much that’s market like at all. Markets had to be invented, and in order for them to function at all well, a powerful enforcement regime has to be introduced to keep the thieves and con men under control and give them any chance of working reasonably (the rise of markets coincided with the rise of more powerful and intrusive governments, and not by coincidence).
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Please delete last comment, I had a problem with the commenting system.
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If by “feminists” you mean those mean people on Twitter that shout “neckbeard” a lot, then I guess you’re right. But the feminism I follow is well aware that patriarchy screws over some men, and that some women learn to negotiate it and do very well. This is *old hat* within feminism.
Which you won’t encounter much if you look for a bunch of women furious about gamergate or whatever.
Find better feminists.
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“Find better feminists” might be a perfectly *morally ok* piece of advice for us to give, but morality, as Scott said long ago, must live in the world. How would they *know* (or care) to find better feminists after exposure to all the bullshit on social media?
Moreover, what about the disconnect/motte-and-bailey where nasty people on social media use the nice, true words of activists and academics about what feminism really is, then turn around and practice their nastiness with occasionally name-dropping “intersectionality” and “inclusivity”?
I’ve seen some anti-cop anarchists raise a beautifully concise answer to the usual “Some cops are Good!” whenever there is another police-related outrage. The “good” cops always, inevitably, keep utterly silent and don’t distance themselves from the dangerous ones. So that makes them complicit. I fear that by the same standard, the personally decent feminists who don’t care about providing the cover of a good movement to ableists, sexists, abuse apologists, pharisaical “anti-imperialists”, etc. become effectively complicit.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we all need to step up and actively police the feminist identity. It’s the only way I see to make more progress on the issues.
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Being part of gamergate has given me a much greater sympathy for feminists who see their movement’s image being increasingly skewed by tumblr.
While on a practical level I think policing the feminist identity would probably help the movement, assuming it can be done, I no longer think that feminists should be expected to police their movement before their points are listened too.
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I don’t spend much time in the dark recesses of tumblr or the feminist blogosphere. Most of my impressions of feminists are based on my many SJ-oriented friends, the authors of the types of articles they post on Facebook, and friends of friends that I see participating in Facebook arguments underneath said articles. And indeed, most of the feminists I encounter are reasonable to acknowledge or even make a point of the fact that patriarchy can hurt men too. I identify as somewhat of a “Patriarchy hurts men too!” feminist myself. I have no doubt that there’s no shortage of feminists out there on the internet who really refuse to ever acknowledge a single inequality in favor of women, but this is generally not true of the feminists I know.
The kind of thing I do encounter is feminists denying particular disadvantages and vulnerabilities that men experience in some situations with arguments that boil down to “But… Patriarchy!” The more outspoken among them may, for instance, revolve their argument around the contention that the only correct lense with which to view the world is the model in which Patriarchy influences everything, so how could such-and-such behavior possibly be unfair to men. I admit that I have trouble coming up with easy-to-explain examples of this, and in some cases I may be misinterpreting their rhetoric.
At any rate, this is why I thought it best to use the quantifier “some”, as in “some feminists deny any type of societal unfairness towards men…” in my comment above. Although I see now that maybe I wasn’t properly conveying what I just described in the above paragraph.
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It’s not “often assumed to be so” — as Veronica said, if you dig deeper into feminism, there is plenty of discussion surrounding the ways gender roles are an obstacle to men’s happiness and self-determination.
You may be confusing acknowledgment of the hierarchical dimension to the construction of gender with believing all men always benefit from it. That’s common, but unwarranted.
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Is “Patriarchy” the same sort of fake causality as “phlogiston?” Many feminists seem to claim that Patriarchy is the cause of our gender-related woes, much like alchemists claimed that phlogiston was the cause of fire. Patriarchy also seems not to make any predictions in advance. Even if we take the prediction to be “society systematically devalues women,” this wouldn’t predict things like disproportionate maleness of the homeless population and male domestic violence victims being taken seriously. It appears, like phlogiston, to be retrofitted to the data. “Because of Patriarchy!” seems to be exactly the same kind of fake explanation as “Because of phlogiston!” It’s unfalsifiable and tells me nothing that I didn’t already know before. Thoughts?
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You’re right that patriarchy is not used as a coherent, falsifiable concept by anyone these days. As a former (male) Gender Studies major, briefly, in another life, I only know of two thinkers who used patriarchy as anything like a developed concept. Catherine MacKinnon basically crudely transposed Marxist ideas of class onto gender, while Marx’s collaborator Engels posited patriarchy as a byproduct of socio-economic organization starting with “primitive” societies, using state of the art anthropology – circa 1880.
Now, implicitly, no one really believes in patriarchy except as a byproduct of sexism, which is viewed moralistically as something that can lurk in our subconscious but can be defeated by the ever-vigilant. To our sjw friends as well as many others, sexism is like an infectious meme which can be used by White Males to oppress, but which also can infect the “oppressed.” Patriarchy then just gets used to refer to men’s power, which does explain why so many feminist references to The Patriarchy are half-ironic.
The problem is that not having a well-developed idea of patriarchy is a symptom of the broader problem that feminists (and sjw’s in general) can’t clearly define the equality that they’re seeking, because they also can’t clearly define the problems that they’re fighting against. What would constitute full gender equality? Could we just have political and corporate quotas for women, ensuring proportional representation? Would that be the end of The Patriarchy? I highly doubt feminists would call it a day at that point.
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[snark]
I doubt feminists would call it a day at *any* point, as it would render their continued activism useless and destroy part of their identity.
[/snark]
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And that’s another think I dislike about feminism: a dearth of measurable goals. I get that they want to destroy, for example, the rape culture; but what would that look like ?
If I say that I want to “destroy poverty”, I might quantify it as, “over 99% of the population having access to a living space of at least X ft^2/person, meals totaling no less than Y calories/day/person, Z medical procedures/year/person not exceeding a total cost of W, etc.”. Formulating the problem like this helps me decide where to invest my efforts, and to measure which of my strategies are bearing fruit.
But whenever I ask feminists what “ending rape culture” would look like, the answer is usually something like “when you stop being such a sexist pig”. This is unequivocally true, but uninformative.
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The obvious way to quantify it is “no more than Q rapes a year.”
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@ozymandias:
> The obvious way to quantify it is “no more than Q rapes a year.”
That’s what I would’ve said too (other than adding “per capita” ), but when I suggested this, I was told that they are trying to stop rape culture, and actual rapes are just one aspect of rape culture, and not even the most important aspect at that.
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I’d consider rape culture destroyed if rape, as measured by best-practices surveys designed to measure rape prevalence, became as uncommon as being hit by lightning. (About 1 in 6250 Americans are hit by lightning sometime in their lives, according to Wikipedia).
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Ampersand: Do you believe in arson culture? Because the arson rate is a lot higher than the rate of being struck by lightning. I think there are cultural factors which increase the prevalence of rape, but even if you figured out what those were and removed them, rape would still be a lot more common than lightning strikes.
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It would be very difficult to measure “rape culture”, but I think it’s clear that reducing rape culture is instrumental to reducing rape. Rape culture is merely (a label for) an obstacle to this goal. Indeed, I think it’s usually defined as “all those cultural factors causing rape” – as distinct from non-cultural factors, like the existence of psychopaths, or basic human psychology and power dynamics.
If people are trying to reduce “rape culture” rather than actual rape, it’s a lost purpose. Your only thought should be to cut your opponent, etc.
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You’re right that patriarchy is not used as a coherent, falsifiable concept by anyone these days.
Not true! It’s used by some anti-feminists as a reference to their idealized conception of gender relations. The general idea seems to be that the West, or some section of it, lived in something much like a patriarchal society until sometime in the 50s or 60, when feminism successfully overthrew the patriarchy, and caused all sorts of other bad things, too. Patriarchy is something they want to restore.
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Patriarchy theory is one of the things I most dislike about contemporary feminism, for pretty much exactly the reasons you enumerated: it is unfalsifiable, seems to be fitted to the data rather predicting the data, and more broadly, seems like a very nebulous concept. I admit that I am not extremely well-read on feminist literature, but there seems to be no agreement about what the causes patriarchy, the nature of its mechanisms, the effects of patriarchy on men, or what a non-patriarchal society would look like. Furthermore, it’s one of those things that doesn’t even seem to be open to discussion among many (most?) feminists: if you don’t accept patriarchy theory, then STFU and go away.
If anyone can provide a good overview of patriarchy which addresses these things, I remain open to having my view changed. (Or, well, I try to. I admit that I have some bias in this area for a number of reasons, some of them similar to Scott Alexander’s as listed in “A Response To Apophemi.”)
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Do you think there ever was Patriarchy in any previous society?
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That depends on precisely what you mean by patriarchy, because as I said, one of my primary complaints about the theory is that it’s extremely nebulous and is blamed for everything from the wage gap, to rape, to objectification of women, to unrealistic beauty standards, to American foreign policy… I am not trying to create a straw-feminist here, but I really have seen all of these things. And, as I said, I have repeatedly asked for a comprehensive and specific definition of patriarchy, and I have yet to see one. (The phrase “it’s not my job to educate you, shitlord!” comes to mind.)
But to answer your question, if by patriarchy you simply mean (to quote meaninglessmoniker below) a “[g]eneral factor of male-dominant gender inequality,” then yes, absolutely, I believe that has existed in probably every society in the past and still exists in probably most societies today. Similarly, if your definition of feminism is “someone who believes all genders deserve complete equity in all aspects of life,” then I am very feminist.
But I feel like both of those definitions, particularly the one for patriarchy, are mottes on a huge bailey of outrageous claims.
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The Patriarchy hypothesis does make predictions, though. Look at all the quantifiable ways men are advantaged over women. Now look across regions, time periods, and social groups: do they mostly have a statistically significant positive correlation? Then either they cause one another, or there is some general factor of men-advantaged-over-women-ness that we might call the Patriarchy causing all of them. In most feminist arguments,if you replace “Patriarchy” with “General factor of male-dominant gender inequality”, the argument still means approximately the same thing.One could also hypothesize a general factor of female-dominant gender inequality in other domains, but the evidence here seems a lot spottier, and a lot of it seems to be sneakily connected to the general factor of male-dominant gender inequality or else to other kinds of General Factors of Oppression combined with the fact that women are seen as less of a threat.
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> Look at all the quantifiable ways men are advantaged over women.
That is actually a good point: what are some of these ways, and what are the numbers ? The only one I know of is the wage gap (which tends to shrink dramatically when you control for confounders, but nonetheless still exists), but are there others ? One thing (out of many) that I dislike about the feminist narrative is that they seem to discard quantifiable metrics in favor of personal experience — but it is entirely possible that I’ve only ever been exposed to terrible Internet feminists, and not the rigorous mainstream ones.
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While it may be true that there is a general factor of male dominance, that’s not how I typically see it used. Maybe I’m just seeing bad internet pop-feminism, but people will occasionally say things like “Partriarchy causes gender ineuality!” which, if we use your definition of Patriarchy, translates to “Gender inequality causes gender inequality!”
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That seems like a motte to me, in that most of the times ‘the Patriarchy’ in invoked are of the form “X does not happen because , X happens because of the patriarchy.” Particularly, in my experience this is one of those times that discussion in person looks the same as discussion on Tumblr. Particularly I’m thinking of things like this post. It’s basically just claiming that all bad things related to gender in any way are part of the patriarchy without any underlying explanation to connect them, and that’s at best specious and at worst deliberately lying.
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But that general factor could be anything. It could be “Women are physically smaller than men.” It could be “Women are forced by biology to put enormous personal resources into childbearing.” Or the current favorite, “Women tend to form small, strongly-associated social networks, while men form wide but weakly-associated ones, and the latter is an advantage in societies with division of labor.”
It makes no sense to describe any of those causal factors as “patriarchy”. The effect of them could well be patriarchy, but we’re trying to explain something, not just name it, right?
I think the practical intent of invoking “patriarchy theory”, ninety percent of the time, is to obscure, or even formally deny, any causal factor of gender inequality other than “men are big ol’ meanies”.
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> One thing (out of many) that I dislike about the feminist narrative is that they seem to discard quantifiable metrics in favor of personal experience
And the next step is discarding all personal experience that does not fit the narrative. Starting with almost all men’s experience.
If they only discarded all quantifiable metrics but kept all personal experience, at least we would have a nice mosaic of “how different people perceive the world”. But now we only get how some people perceive the world.
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“Patriarchy” is an easy and heuristic way of describing any number of the causal factors for male dominance. It’s a description of what those causal factors has led to, and if you don’t think there are numbers behind it, I’ll direct you to entire shelves of books on sociology from a feminist bent.
What led to patriarchy is likely complex and difficult to verify. While I agree that there isn’t enough discussions on the origins of patriarchy, 1) those discussions DO exist and 2) in the practical, political business of granting women gender equality, those discussions aren’t a terribly practical way of spending one’s time.
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I, like Robin Hanson, find it very difficult to even sign the “overall male/female privilege level.” There a ton of factors on both sides and its very hard to determine the magnitudes of each factor. See this: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/07/break-it-down.html
I personally think both men and women are disadvantaged in a huge number of situations. And even in situations where one gender is normally favored mant members of that gender will still be screwed over badly. So there is alot of work for society to do in order to correct gender imbalances. But I am not personally sure which gender is, on average, currently favored (probably men but I really don’t know).
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Well, this isn’t something you can quantify. It’s impossible to give values for these sorts of things. But I do think how one estimates it really does reveal a lot about one’s worldview. It can also ensure that people use language that coincides with their worldview in order to ensure people really get what they’re trying to say.
I would estimate that I think that generally women are a bit more disadvantaged in society. If I were to guesstimate quantify it, I would say something like 60-40. However, there are some big assumptions being made there. Basically, I’m heavily weighing the most popular criteria in our society (wealth power, etc.), criteria that I actually don’t either follow or desire myself. So I generally say I “lean” feminist in that way. That said, ask me that question in 10 years and I’ll probably give you a different answer.
The point of all this, is that I think too often language is used which implies something like a 90-10 split or even a 100-0 split. That’s part of the problem with the term “patriarchy”, as it implies something much more one sided than actually exists. The other part of the problem is that it HEAVILY implies strictly male responsibility/control which is something that’s very problematic. One thing that’s common in this sort of “bad feminism” is that women are often taken out of the equation for solutions, because to leave them in the equation is victim blaming.
So it’s problematic that good, knowledgeable feminists use language that reinforces bad feminist ideas and concepts. Patriarchy, the term, is certainly part of it, but by no means is it the whole story.
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I won’t claim that I can get patriarchy to make testable predictions, but what if you think of patriarchy as the social structures built around patriarchs having control over the lives (and particularly sexualities) of their wives and daughters? I think that under that framework, women not under the protection of a family structure – or women who are in that structure and not being protected by it – get seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, while men don’t so much.
I’d also note that patriarchy isn’t rule by men, but specifically by patriarchs. Even if you’re a man, you’re not necessarily on the winning side of the patriarchy unless you have status and power; and you can have status and power as a woman even in an extreme patriarchy, it’s just that you have to get them through being the wife or daughter of somebody important. (One benign bit of patriarchy is how people joke about the “first gentleman” in the White House if a woman president is elected; it is still a bit funny and weird to think of a man getting status through his more powerful wife rather than the reverse.)
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The motte of SJ feminism: a man does not necessarily have direct power himself, but is still privileged over a woman in the exact similar circumstances, and thus likely better off than her. (I completely agree.)
The bailey of (#NotAll) SJ: a highly popular blogger claims to be horribly oppressed by men (who might indeed be specific and unpleasant individuals) whom she simultaneously codes as disabled, non-neurotypical and uneducated; this double claim in turn serves to associate actual political opposition with said low-status people.
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(not going to link to any horrible feminist blog posts, but here’s a raw stream of this kind of thing by the rank and file of SJ)
https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/neckbeards
CW: ableism, oppositional sexism, just random cruelty.
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My avatar even *looks* kinda neckbeard-y!
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This dynamic is real, but keep in mind it is a *dynamic* and there are plenty of truly terrible nerds. Which is to say, just cuz a guy is socially disadvantaged does not mean that he *isn’t* a completely terrible chan troll. Cuz sometimes he is. Sometimes the ugly goes all the way to the bone.
Scott argued a bit ago that this all started with the “Niceguy” stuff, and thus it’s really-kinda feminism’s fault, reaping what you sow. But he’s got it wrong. The Niceguy stuff was indeed broken and hella abusive, but *terrible nerds* predate that by quite a lot. I recall real-old conversations on rec.games.frp.advocacy where women roleplayers complained about the terrible shit they received from nerdy male roleplayers. The whole “they all friendzone me so I hate girls” shit was alive and well back then.
(When I was in school folks called it “just friends” instead of “freindzone”. Same shit different name. I remember things like guys ragging girls who got raped by terrible guys, cuz those girls would not date *them*. Shit was fucked up.)
(On the other hand, these girls often did make terrible relationship choices. But there is a really obvious difference between *criticism* and *resentment*.)
This stuff is all worse now, cuz Internet.
Anyway, my point is, even if by magic we convince all the feminists to stop ragging “neckbeards” and “fedoras”, shitty dysfunctional guys will continue to be terrible to vulnerable girls and the cycle will just start anew. So you need to look at both sides, otherwise you’re just feeding the dynamic instead of fighting it.
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Patriarchy just refers to feminist understanding of the social system. Saying X is caused by a social system is fairly meaningless until the person starts to explain causes, mechanisms and outcomes of a particular aspect in detail.
I would like to understand the systemic nature of the rise of SJW. The general response hasn’t been either to police it or for other feminists to distance themselves from it only when it gets bad. It seems like people from all kinds of groups are actively avoiding coming into contact with it all the time, because it is scary.
I don’t agree with Multiheaded’s motte for SJ feminism. The concept of privilege is usually damaging, and is up there with tone policing for being a nonsensical concept to apply. Both would seem to be part of the systemic nature of SJW culture.
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A large part of it is the rise of social media…this has caused a dramatic increase in the value…both real and perceived…of social capital. As such, it’s kind of triggered this sort of “rat race” of sorts where people are trying to attract as much of that to them in the best way they can. And there’s a wide variety of ways to do that…”SJW-dom” is just one way…it just happens to be a very effective way as it can take advantage of cultural/social trends in our society.
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Veronica: I completely agree about all the terrible nerd bullshit, and in no way seek to provide excuses for it. *Especially* seeing how one is often a nerd, suffers from this dynamic and yet turns out just fine. There’s just zero fucking excuse for the 4chan types at all.
But.. that’s not exactly relevant? Like, turn that around and substitute “SJ Twitter” for “neckbeards”… there’s a lot of awfulness over there, but would you doubt that if people could get social points for railing against SJ Twitter, they’d primarily target women of color on Twitter, and introduce a lot of coded language aimed at them that would *ostensibly* be about toxicity in social media?
Audrey: I disagree, “privilege” is a totally valid if not *always* the most relevant concept, and its abuse is going to be a footnote in the annals of history; let someone else hash it out.
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@multi — Wait! Isn’t this exactly what is happening when the anti-SJW types go after the Tumblr weird-kids? How much fun to mock a trans person? Or a furry? Or (I hesitate to say) a dreaded “special snowflake”? How many *chan threads do you think I can find where angry nerd-bros take turns finding more horrible things to say about people like you and me?
And turning back the clock, these nerd bros may rage against women-in-general, but the girls-who-paid-the-price were the rape survivors speaking up, or the nerd girls trying to find a place at the game store, or the fat, weirdo, loner girls browsing Slashdot and feeling horrible about themselves, cuz there is little an angry fat nerd hates more than a sad fat girl. (Projection much? Self loathing much?)
I’m surprised you suggested this as a “what if”? Dude, this is here already. Has been forever.
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Veronica, I don’t often say that, but you think too poorly of me. I didn’t mention abject misogyny because it’s indeed WORSE than the kind of thing I’m talking about, because directly aligned with a more pervasive dynamic! Misogyny is the name of the game and in a Molochean way it infests everything unless you implement systemic measures against it.
I was just saying, maybe talk a little bit about the not-most-awful things too, how some of them are like other things and how maybe that structural similarity is kind of important to notice and account for?
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This is somewhat offtopic, but is “special snowflake” some sort of a technical term ? I always thought it meant, “a loud self-absorbed person who demands that every conversation should be about him/her/etc.”, but perhaps I was wrong ?
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Multiheaded, I mean that I disagree with the concept because it conflates luxuries with basic human rights by grouping them both together as ‘privilege.’ I think those two concepts should always have a clear distinction drawn between them.
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@Audrey
>I would like to understand the systemic nature of the rise of SJW.
I’ve actually been debating this via email for the last month or so with an acquaintance. The acquaintance is an English professor, so some of the explanations for terms might seem rather elementary; I was trying to keep him up to speed with ideas native to the internet culture. Here’s an excerpt related to your question, for what it’s worth:
“Hooks can be identified in her discussions of these topics as a radical feminist because of her arguments that the system itself is corrupt and that achieving equality in such a system is neither possible nor desirable. She promotes instead a complete transformation of society and all of its institutions as a result of protracted struggle, envisioning a life-affirming, peaceful tomorrow.” <via wikipedia.
Karl Marx has a theory. He thinks society is corrupt, disordered, unsustainable. Revolution is inevitable. He spends a lifetime laying out a complex political philosophy filled with subtle, nuanced principles that delicately balance a host of conflicting issues. He's only human, so in some places, he's vague and uncertain. The Bolsheviks are convinced he has the truth, and so they implement the revolution he predicted. As they're struggling to bring about the "life affirming, peaceful tomorrow" part, the going gets hard, and many in the leadership differ on how they should proceed. Trotsky has one interpretation of Marx, Bukharin has another. Stalin pays lip-service to Marxism, deals in straight power concepts, and buries them both along with twenty million others. Stalin wins.
Switch the names and you have the Reign of Terror, or McCarthyism in the US. This is not a new story. The Social Justice community you are looking at is Marx, full of theory and nuance. The Social Justice community I am looking at is Stalin, and concerns itself mainly with winning.
Dawkins coined the term Meme to highlight how ideas very literally have a life of their own. Memes can have fitness, in the Darwinian sense. Simplicity and usefulness are probably the two most "fit" traits a meme can have. Bell Hooks' version of Social Justice is full of nuance and subtlety, which make it less simple, and it at least attempts fairness and honesty, which make it less useful. There's another version of social justice where all the subtlety and the nuance are smoothed over, and the fairness and honesty are streamlined out, and what's left is a lean, mean, winning machine. This winning version is actually a failure mode of the Bell Hooks Doctrine, in that failure in the teaching or practice of Bell Hooks results in winning being propagated instead. Bell Hooks is native to Academia, where artificial conditions hamper but do not eliminate winning. Once the memes spread outside the structure of academia, winning out-competes Bell Hooks by a very wide margin. Since it also is much more effective at actually changing things, and since both share premises and goals, there is little incentive for Bell Hooks to oppose winning and many reasons to cooperate. Cooperation vastly increases the fitness of both relative to competing memes, and so a symbiotic relationship forms. At some point, it is reasonable to ask if the remaining Bell Hooks version is anything but protective coloration for its atavistic progeny.
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@AnonymousCoward — Brilliant summary. I’d maybe add a couple points:
1. Movements based around uncontroversial but low-content/low-commitment concepts like “social justice” (I think LW parlance calls these “applause lights”) are uniquely vulnerable to being taken over by predatory, Stalin-esque psychopaths. They are essentially giving the wolves a ready-to-wear sheep suit.
2. Movements originating in academia are uniquely vulnerable to becoming more about prestige, status signaling and social capital than any kind of real-world effectiveness. This has long been recognized as a problem for left-wing activism in particular.
SJWism appears to be suffering from both of these problems. It has periodic outbreaks of extremely nasty predatory behavior (e.g. Requires Hate), and it’s a hothouse environment that has no real accomplishments to its name other than getting people fired/socially ostracized over dumb jokes, and probably never will.
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” predatory, Stalin-esque psychopaths”
As a Russian, could you please not? Especially when you probably don’t know much about Stalinist rule, the mechanisms of Stalinist terror and so on. Draw a parallel with, I don’t know, some Protestant sect leader or something.
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Yikes, I certainly didn’t mean to imply anything against Russians! Nor to imply that mere internet hatemongers are in any way comparable to him. I apologize if I offended.
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FWIW, I was actually born in the USSR, and while I find the phrase “predatory, Stalin-esque psychopaths” quite hyperbolic, I do not think it is offensive. I’m not trying to imply “let’s all say things that make multiheaded uncomfortable”, but rather “yeah, there exists at least one Russian who agrees with you”.
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Patriarchy in the anthropological sense of societies were men dominate the political, economic, and religious sphere is real . Patriarchy in the sense of evil men deliberately conspiring against women because their evil is pseudo scientific nonsense. Unfortunately the later is more popular because people are prone to confusing cause and effect and anthropomorphizing evil. The most compelling explanation for patriarchy I’ve seen was initially gender roles in prehistoric societies were useful and even just but society changes faster than cultural norms do. So even as gender roles have become increasingly unnecessary and impractical people cling to them because they are what’s familiar.
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You don’t think it is possible for patriarchy to “overhang” after utility was ever useful .ir natural? For instance, it took until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century for women to get the vote and access to higher education. Society had been non hunter gatherer fir a li g time at that stage. And when those rights were achieved, there had been many previous attempts when allmale colleges and governments refused them,
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What makes you think that? Of course, conspiracy theories are irresistible to some, so at least a few dozen people must actually believe that. But personally, I don’t recall ever seeing that view expressed, not even by the most beyond-the-pale radfem types.
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@ 1Z “You don’t think it is possible for patriarchy to “overhang” after utility was ever useful .ir natural?”
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Maybe I worded it poorly. But people 1. Are prone to believing in stereotypes. 2. Prone to believing things they are already believe and 3. Are really susceptible to peer pressure. So as I see it it’s inevitable for cultural change to lag behind legal, technological, economic, and political change.
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@ Nita
You’ve probably been to different radfem sites than I have. I’ve seen radfems who proudly refer to themselves as “Male essentialist” and this philosophy seems to consist of idea that. Female gender stereotypes are false and Male gender stereotypes are true. Followed by conspiratorial arguments about how heterosexuality is really trauma bonding.
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@ MegaEmolga
I have seen “men are essentially worse” (for “women are essentially worse”, see /r/TheRedPill and such), and I have seen that arguments that individual men are motivated to support the patriarchy (everyone is self-interested, just ask Robin Hanson). But I haven’t seen the idea of “men deliberately conspiring against women”.
It seems that anyone who starts using a Grand Social Theory of Everything, especially one that includes “false consciousness”-like explanations — such as “signalling”, “status games” or “internalized oppression” — can end up detached from reality.
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Do feminists use patriarchy in explanatory contexts that much? I mostly hear it used merely as a way of pointing to (perceived) patterns of deeply-embedded misogyny. That is, “patriarchy” less as an overarching force that causes institutional sexism and more as the mereological sum of all existing institutional sexism.
I do think “rape culture” is more akin to phlogiston, because people actually draw causal arrows to and from it, e.g., claims that making rape jokes contributes to rape culture, which in turn contributes to actual rape or at least harming victims in some way. Which in itself is fine, but what makes it phlogiston-like is that “rape culture” is defined so broadly (viz. http://www.shakesville.com/2009/10/rape-culture-101.html) that it no longer makes no sense to treat it as a single node on the causal graph. If rape culture exists, for example, it’d be hard to argue that rape-themed pornography isn’t part of it, but the latter might turn out to actively reduce rape by providing an outlet for would-be rapists.
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There seems to be a spike in ableist rhetoric and ideology amongst feminists. I used to identify as a feminist, but this has given me pause. I’m starting to think someone needs to do what “womanism” is for black women for neuro-atypical/nerd/oddball/badbrains/etc. people.
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Our gracious host has already been doing what zie can, and I’m proud to have put in some small effort too! Scott even noticed me! (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/16/five-case-studies-on-politicization/ part VI)
http://multiheaded1793.tumblr.com/tagged/about-teh-menz
http://multiheaded1793.tumblr.com/tagged/ableism
– occasionally I say a few words along these lines.
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One conversation with Ozy: http://ozymandias271.tumblr.com/post/99699925673/multiheaded1793-ozymandias271
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It might just be paranoia but it seems to me that the whole discourse around “creepiness” is basically a way to attack people for being neuro-atypical.
There is a huge difference between knowingly ignoring someone else’s wants (sexual harassment, stalking, etc.) and simply acting in a way that triggers people creep-o-meter. “Creepy” is used to conflate the two. But the former is actual bad behavior while the latter is… well not anything really, It’s a form of prejudice by the accuser. You can’t really blame people for having such feelings, they do not control them (I admit to being “creeped out” by people before). But we shouldn’t act as if it is the “creeps” fault either, or that they are doing anything wrong.
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I can’t tell whether the man standing too close to me (or making overly personal comments, or whatever) is doing so because he intentionally wants to make me uncomfortable, because he lacks an understanding of how close you’re supposed to stand to people, or because he is aware of how close you’re supposed to stand to people but doesn’t really care. In all but a few special social contexts, I have no obligation or ability to figure it out and it is perfectly appropriate for me to prefer to not be around him and to act on this. I am not going to attempt to “control” that feeling. That feeling is useful and important and it helps keep me safe.
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Emily: oh dear, why did you have to go and make this about race?
:trollface:
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There’s this kind of hostility one can sense in (some) dudes, this thing simmering down deep, a lingering resentment.
I don’t much care if a person *likes* me. That’s cool. What bugs me is what if they keep getting close, making it awkward, turning the knob, building scenarios in their mind — and just fucking STARING AT ME OMG! I don’t care about your boner. Don’t make it my problem. I just want to play MtG over here at this table with these guys who don’t creep me out.
Look, these guys are not the same as the *guys on the subway*. The guys on the subway literally terrify me, cuz high-octane creep fuel. They leer, lick their lips, say the most awful things. And I’m stuck on a train car with them between point A and B.
I ‘specially love when they make a point of getting off at my stop, when it’s kinda-sorta obvious that they are only getting off here cuz I’m getting off here. (You can tell.) Fun fun fun.
And trust me, my tranny milkshake brings all the creeps to my yard. Around me the subway creeps get bold.
I love heels. I wear sneakers so I can run.
But back to the nerds. Look, before you say, well gosh, veronica, you just wanna rag on weird neuro-atypical people, please keep in mind I AM A WEIRD NEURO-ATYPICAL PERSON.
But like, say I’m at game night and like there are 100 dudes there and 10 girls. And like, some percentage of these guys have bad-boners and get off on disrespecting women — cuz some guys do (#notallmen). Those who do make it a point. So I have to deal with *that*. Then maybe lonely guy wants me and I don’t want him but there he is lingering, and still lingering, and still lingering, and I FUCKING KNOW IT’S HARD I’M A TRANSGENDER NERD AND THAT LITERALLY USED TO BE ME. And really you kinda wanna hit him with a cluebat and say, “Don’t be *that guy* cuz no one likes *that guy*.”
He should probably read “the game” or something, ‘cept he’ll prolly still strike out and then he’ll turn into bad-boner disrespectful guy. It’s really sad and unpleasant.
So what do you think we should do about it? I’m pretty sure the average Jezebel article does not help.
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God, that’s just viscerally awful. (Not to imply that I’ve never listened to women describe this before.)
I’m really, terribly, *terribly* sorry. I sympathize to the fullest extent.
(I’d offer hugs but, y’know.)
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@veronica d:
This may be just my naive perspective talking, but as far as I understand, certain people just don’t understand subtle social cues. So, you may be sending off all kinds of bad vibes, but they don’t have an antenna to receive them. Thus, in relatively safe settings such as the M:tG toruney, it might indeed be helpful to “hit them with a cluebat” by explicitly voicing your discomfort.
This approach won’t help with subway creeps, IMO nothing short of a Tazer will work on those.
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Thanks @Multi.
@Bugmaster — It’s super awkward and I’m not exactly a master of social graces either. And honestly, if a woman calls the guy out where others can hear it will be hella humiliating to him, and not in the vague sense that others can sense it and kinda know he’s being “creepy guy” but in the sense that *a woman just shut him down publicly*. That would be *really bad*.
Plus look, maybe I don’t really know the guy that well and taking him aside for a talk-to is not really something I can do. I mean, first off that builds a status structure I’m super uncomfortable with. I’m lecturing, and fuck that I cannot even imagine. I don’t want that kind of power. I did not ask for it.
Keep in mind there is something weird in thinking I should have perfect social aplomb while he gets to be a complete social mess.
I get to be a mess too!
Plus it’s weird to put this stuff on the woman and not the man. Which, we are all naked apes sketching out our brief lives and we should be kind to each other. But there is an imbalance. When there is a small number of socially awkward women and a large number of socially awkward men and the women are responsible for keeping the social stuff working then — well, feminists call this “emotional labor.” It’s a *thing*.
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@Veronica: You are practicing so much empathy for men who are making you feel bad.
I used to be involved in (nerdy) social spaces where men would say things to me that made me uncomfortable and touch me in ways that made me uncomfortable. I tried to make it work, I really did. And if I could go back in time and tell my earlier self “screw that, find better people and places,” I would. Because it took various truly bad things happening to me for me to get the heck out of those spaces. Captain Awkward in particular has helped me place some of my own experiences in some context. I recommend her blog. I lost some friends and some events. I was sad about that. But not going to places where I feel uncomfortable (and I have learned that uncomfortable can turn into unsafe really quickly) has been a very good decision for me.
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@emily — I will never apologize for practicing empathy. And it’s easy for me to empathize with fat nerdy guy — cuz my history.
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(And for some reason that posted before I finished my thoughts.)
Anyway, empathy good. Like, almost always.
Thing is, sad boner guy is awkward, but usually pretty harmless. Which, there are boundaries and if he crosses those boundaries you have every right to respond. And yes, the guys in the famous Captain Awkward article had issues and the women were right to not want to be around them, especially “touch you while you’re sleeping guy.”
Fuck that guy. Predator.
But “touch you while you’re sleeping guy” is not the *central example* of an awkward creepy nerd.
Regarding sad-panda guy, there is a difference between not wanting him over for game-night-among-close-friends, when he cannot stop being THAT GUY, and publicly mocking him at some bigger event. But the discourse has gone beyond “he needs to let up and can we stop inviting him cuz he cannot get clues” to a place more like “loser neckbeards don’t deserve to get laid cuz they they’re all sick aspie freaks” (as if we’re not!)
Like, to channel Scott, there is a motte and bailey here. The motte is Scalzi’s *How not to be a creep* article. The bailey is dudes who began terrified of women becoming even more terrified of women cuz they know they’re maybe a bit creepy from time to time and now they cannot even.
These are not the subway creeps.
But on the other hand, it ain’t my job to fix them.
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I would have a hard time coming up with a context in which public mocking was the appropriate response to anything. I am with you on that.
But, yes, exactly: not your job to fix them.
And I am less confident than you are that I can tell the difference between sad-panda guy and predator guy. Because I’ve seen sad-panda guy become predator-guy real fast. And my experience has been that the social space which doesn’t care about sad panda guy making me uncomfortable is, not coincidentally, the social space that doesn’t care about predator guy (who may turn out to be the same guy!) assaulting me (and will invite him back after he does it.) So I have decided that my discomfort is ample reason to not be in a place. If you can tell the difference better than I can between safe and not-safe, your analysis may be different.
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@veronica d:
> Plus it’s weird to put this stuff on the woman and not the man.
Right, I’m not trying to say that it is your responsibility as a woman to lecture people; I understand that the emotional cost can quickly mount up. However, in this specific case (awkward guy standing next to you), I don’t think there’s any other solution. He can’t pick up on subtle cues, so if you don’t tell him how uncomfortable his behavior makes you feel, he won’t know.
I understand that the standard feminist answer to this is, “stop exercising your male privilege, it is not a woman’s job to educate you, it is yours”. And in the grand scheme of things, I agree; the world would be a much better place if there were no awkward men in it, or where other non-awkward men policed the awkward ones. And if you want to build such a world, in empathetic ways that do not involve demonizing the entire male half of humanity or public shaming, then you should do it. However, doing so will not address this specific situation that you described.
To put it another way, I am concerned with practical consequences, not with virtue ethics. And I’m not saying that lecturing that guy is objectively the best solution, either; there are others. For example, as Emily suggests, you could leave and never come back. I personally would be sad if every woman took that option in every situation, because IMO voluntary segregation of this sort would diminish all of our lives, but obviously it’s not my call.
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So out of curiosity sparked by the Facebook real names policy thing, I recently looked into California’s name change rules (not that they matter to me personally, if I wanted to try to change my legal name I would have to deal with Germany’s benighted rules [content note: German]), and I was sort of grimly bemused by this checkbox on form NC-100:
6. [_] This petition seeks to conform petitioner’s name to his or her gender identity.
Oh California, you’ve come a long way, but I hope you didn’t think you were done with this “political correctness” thing now, did you?
Social justice activists: can you please continue to beat society over the head so that at some point it will realize that the best way to be inclusive is not to try to enumerate all the genders that a person could possibly be, thank you, there’s a dear.
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As far as I can tell, that checkbox only exists to tell whether or not the change of legal name is being done as part of a sex transition. What exactly is the problem with that? Is it the “his or her”?
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Yes
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To be fair, this “his/her” nonsense was actually quite popular as the Official Feminist Alternative to the generic “his”. This … was stupid. But nonetheless.
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Yeah, totally! The reason I was motivated to post this wasn’t because I think this form is a particularly despicable form of discrimination or anything, but precisely because it’s the result of two separate attempts to do things right.
I’m happy they have the box! (There’s an actually good reason for there being a box, rather than having a name change because of gender identity just be yet another form of name change: normally you have to publish notice of a name change in a newspaper, I think as an additional safeguard to prevent people from using name changes to make themselves harder to track by debtors etc., but in the gender identity case you don’t have to do that, presumably because somebody realized / was told about how this would not be a good thing to do to certain trans people.)
I also think the non-generic “his or her”, though bad, is probably better on average than the broken-generic “his”, though I’m not entirely sure; and whether or not it is, I think almost all of the people who pushed for it did so for reasons I approve of.
So it seems particularly ironic (and sad) that in the context of this form, the “his or her” thing is at least hurtful and potentially harmful (if it makes non-binary name changes less likely to be accepted, which I’m not sure it does, or if it creates the perception that this is the case, which seems pretty likely).
I’m not saying that this would have been easy to fix by the person who wrote the text, because I expect that they have to use the standard conventions for legal writing. Rather, I’m saying that it’s an example of how these conventions are bad and I want society to change so that everybody agrees that legal texts are supposed to use generic “they”, the way everybody agrees today that they aren’t supposed to use broken-generic “he”!
(BTW, while I’m making things explicit I left implicit in my original comment: the “thank you, there’s a dear” was meant as self-deprecating irony, because I want this to happen but am not actually going to do the activism myself.)
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I’m actually not even sure whether I’d prefer if legal paperwork used “they” or if it used “she/he/they”. Especially if in less formal contexts, everybody used “they” as a generic neutral pronoun, which seems likely since I think few people are going to use “she/he/they” in casual conversation. I approve of non-gendered pronouns, but I also approve of visibility, it would be great to have a bit of both.
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Are jokes about Gingers, remnants of anti-Irish sentiment?
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The difficulty with answering that question is that the group most commonly associated with anti-Irishness are the British, and Britain also has a high percentage of red heads. there has been a lot of immigration of Irish people into Britain (10% of the population have at least one Irish grandparent). It could be that lots of British people have red hair because they are of recent Irish descent, or it could be that red hair was already a common trait there anyway. If the latter is true, then prejudice against red heads shouldn’t be connected to anti-Irishness.
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And the English stereotype is that redheads are Scottish, not Irish.
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It seems to me that ginger jokes have proliferated in recent years, possibly due to displacement of a natural desire to poke fun at the appearance of an “other” that nowadays can’t be expressed toward any non-white group.
In case it’s not clear, I don’t favor making fun of anyone’s appearance.
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I thought South Park popularized it. As an American, I’d never even heard the term before the Ginger Kids episode came on.
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This seems like an appropraite time to ask.
For those of us who’s only real exposure to feminism is Gamergate – could you (Ozy) do a 101. Explaining what kind of feminist Anita et al are, how that kind of femnism fits into the big picture. Etc.
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Black Feminist Thought, Yes Means Yes, Feminism Is For Everybody, Whipping Girl, and Dworkin’s Woman Hating so you know what radical feminism actually is.
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Jeez, I haven’t read any of those besides Feminism Is For Everybody. I need to catch up on some contemporary feminist thought, I guess.
Is Against Our Will not popular anymore? I think that was the most impressive feminist book I’ve read, although I largely disagreed with its conclusions.
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To be fair, I’ve only skimmed Yes Means Yes, as you can mostly get it through osmosis from feminist blogs.
Whipping Girl is completely mandatory.
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(not saying that Yes Means Yes is bad or boring in any sense)
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thank you very much!
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I’d add to Ozy’s list “The Gender Knot” by Allan Johnson. It’s very feminism 101, with a slight bias towards radical feminism, so I don’t agree with Johnson about everything. But perhaps because Johnson is a man, he does a decent job of anticipating and addressing objections that male readers in particular are likely to come up with.
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Suggested reading order: 3 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1 -> 5
(Haven’t read Black Feminist Thought yet.)
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I wanted to post this over at SSC, but I guess it involves gender so I’m doing it here. I thought the reactions to Rolling Stone’s UVA rape story were very interesting from a blue tribe vs. red tribe perspective. Blue tribe outlets seemed to say things like “this is not surprising or interesting at all, fraternities are terrible, rich white people are terrible, let’s completely eliminate the fraternity system”. Red tribe outlets all pretty much dismissed the story as probably false.
My own reaction was different. I didn’t doubt that the story was true, because I didn’t think someone would just make the story up, and the events described seemed to leave no room for interpretation. I thought it was the most shocking, appalling, incomprehensible thing to have happened. I am currently a college student in a fraternity, also at a fairly prestigious school, and there is absolutely no way I can picture something like that happening here. Of course sexual assault happens, there are creepy evil dudes out there. But what the Rolling Stone article is describing is systematic, pre-mediated rape on a mass scale. The article implies that this was part of an initiation ritual, which would mean that every single brother of Phi Kappa Psi is a rapist.
How was this idea first conceived, and how did everyone involved think “yes, that is an okay thing to do”? In my fraternity, we have vigorous debate over whether or not to make Facebook events for our unregistered parties because we don’t want to get in trouble. How is no one worried at all about getting caught doing this? How are the men not worried about their future? Did any pledges refuse to do this and walk out of the fraternity? I feel like most people probably would, right? These are educated, intelligent, low-impulsivity people. I am of the impression that a sizeable amount of people are okay with rape if it is “gray area” and not described as such. But this is as clear-cut of a crime as it gets. Would these people also murder if it meant access into the fraternity? Who is that susceptible to peer pressure? And are the brothers of the fraternity at all worried that there will be a whistleblower? How would they justify these acts to themselves?
Then I read some of the red-tribe stuff casting veracity on the story and I think I agree now. There are a few big holes. If this is an initiation ritual, it must happen once a semester, and therefore there must be other victims: where are they? The article mentions the event as happening four weeks into the semester, but I looked on UVA’s calender and while classes start in late august, fall rush apparently does not start until late september, so there is no way they would have pledges. Even if the date was wrong by three weeks or so, I feel like if you have to rape to be initiated into a fraternity, it would be a sort of “final act of loyalty” at the end of the semester, and not occur right at the beginning of pledging. “Hey, welcome to the fraternity, now go rape someone”. The victim apparently walked downstairs with blood all over her clothes while the party was still happening and no one said anything.
If you read the story with this in mind, it starts to seem almost cartoonish in how much it appeals to all the right blue-tribe narratives.
If this is really made up, then this is an uniquely bold move on the part of the blue tribe. Essentially every brother and alumni of that chapter is going to be stigmatized as a rapist now. Many lives will be affected by this story.
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This case was a great example of the Blues’ unique ability to piss me off, despite the fact that I agree with them on the majority of policy questions. That Rolling Stone article was an awful, irresponsible, disgusting piece of pseudo-journalism that should get a reporter fired from the Daily Mail, let alone any real news outlet. As its flaws became clear, the typical Blue response was “don’t let mere facts get in the way of the truth” — their problem with the story was not that it was a practically unresearched hit piece, but that it might give the Reds a wedge to argue against dismantling fraternities! This New Republic article had me foaming at the mouth: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120465/uva-gang-rape-story-what-make-rolling-stones-mistakes
Honestly, when I read things like that, I start to wonder whether I’ve cast my lot with the wrong side. I value gender equality. I value rape prevention. But I also value intellectual honesty, fairness, and civility. Why does it increasingly feel like modern liberalism is forcing me to choose between those values?
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I agree with the Blues on the majority of policy questions as well, if not “Bluer” so to speak on many of them. (Although on some things I’m more moderate). It’s not so much that I feel like modern liberalism is forcing me to choose between those values, that I feel that I’m simply not on the same page as people who value social/political capital more than I do.
I mean, I feel that I’m to the ‘Bluer” on this issue. I think that binge drinking is a big problem in our society and is a massive chunk of this problem with rape/sexual assault. And I’m not blaming the victim here, I’m actually blaming the perpetrator, who is probably too drunk him/herself to realize the lack of meaningful consent. But, very few people actually want to talk about that, or anything we can do about that.
But many people feel like it’s enough to “raise awareness” on its own. And in that case, the reality in this case doesn’t matter, all that matters is the awareness. The idea that in the end it might actually be counter-productive is irrelevent. People got to raise the flag and that’s what mattered more than anything.
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Go read some Marginal Revolution comments for a taste of the other side’s awfulness.
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There are people on both sides (all sides?) who get full points for intellectual honesty. But there is no side that is intellectually honest because of how sides work.
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@multi I was seriously bummed the first and only time I read the comments on Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen deserves a better class of commenter.
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Follow-up: the story is collapsing before our eyes.
The Rolling Stone partially retracts ¹,
The Washington Post digs hard and finds many discrepancies ²,
The fraternity releases a statement contradicting key parts of the accusations ³
And a Jezebel writer apologizes for insulting the first critics ⁴.
What an awful, awful mess.
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I am a brother of a different chapter of phi kappa psi, and I promise you that there is no such aspect to any initiation. If this was a systemic, institutionalized thing (which I am in no epistemic position to comment on the likelyhood of), it was such for this chapter, not the national organization. Our national organization actually makes public everything that happens before initiation. And there are no secret aspects of the pledging process, because that would involve telling fraternity secrets to nonbrothers.
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There was a very similar scandal at a Japanese university back in 2003, though, which did result in not just convictions but also significant permanent changes to the rape laws in that country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Free
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There have been a number of questions raised about the specific events of the Rolling Stone article, but there have been other high-profile cases that are better-documented. Someone else has already raised the Super Free convictions in Japan, but the Steubenville and 2009 Richmond cases are probably more relevant to Westerners.
They show some structural differences — emphasis on inebriated or drugged victims, often less force — which is part of why the Red tribe has been skeptical of the UVA allegations, but they’re illustrative none-the-less. The exact details vary with location and social class, but you generally see the following traits :
* The aggressors are usually inebriated, whether from alcohol or other drugs. Regardless of their normal impulse control, at the time of the assault they’d score in the bottom decile.
* There’s usually some strong social infrastructure between the rapists, often an ‘incriminating’ one. The higher-profile the individuals involved, the greater the tendency for the group to act in as a whole in gradually intensifying aggression until anyone intending to defect would have to sink themselves with the rest.
* From social media posts by the perpetrators, there’s a lot of contextualizing behavior. This is probably what most feminists mean in the strong-definition version of rape culture, but it’s also probably worth nothing that it’s pretty far from what’s considered acceptable behavior by most people.
I’m also not sure the Rolling Stone article meant the alleged rapes were a generalized part of hazing for the fraternity, or if there was a hazing and only the individuals alleged to be involved used rape as a hazing technique.
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Careful not to read too much here. Several “blue tribe” publications have taken their distances or otherwise criticized the RS or Erdely herself for the article and their behavior since. Perhaps most notably Slate, at this point.
Bad actors are going to try to use this story. Authoritarians can see the usefulness of progressive activism and will use whatever works for their purposes. Activists themselves will let their biases blind them, and/or choose to reject doubts because of the danger they think it might cause to their chosen cause (Small piece by Frederic de Boer about how this is unlikely to help relevant here, because linking to SSC or LW here would be cheating).
It is certainly healthy to be more critical of our friends that we are of our opponents, but you may not be paying enough attention to the Daily Mail’s failures. This comment is, IMO, a good example of why it is useful to read newspapers and blogs by people from the other places on the political map, including people that are not the best, brightest or fairest of their groups, just to see the typical fallacies, rhetorical devices, over-used anecdotal “data”, and so on. And then come back to the publications more aligned with where you choose to cast your lot and try to find the same mistakes (and then maybe try to find who is probably committing those willfully to manipulate you).
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That should have been an answer to stillnotking, sorry.
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You’re right, of course, and the deBoer piece is bang on the money… but I notice he and I agree this is a large, pervasive problem on the left, not a few isolated bad actors.
Is the right any better? It seems like it is, although this could well be bias, since I do tend to read only the smartest Red columnists, and not waste my time with the rabble-rousing Birthers and such. Lately, I’ve seen even the cream of the Blues writing terrible nonsense, like the Klein article on affirmative consent that deBoer criticizes.
Eh. I doubt I’m actually capable of flipping a switch and turning into a conservative, anyway. Men make their own ideology, but we do not make it just as we please.
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I’ll never get tired of plugging this guy. Chris Dillow! The *real*, old-world Red – our Red – under a grey cloak! He *hates* bullshit! At times I so wish he was dictator for life.
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/
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Ozy, I know I’m being a shitlord who goes around looking for SJ things to feel pissed off about…
…but why the hell is the “body positivity” tag on tumblr 95+% female with a handful of fairly good-looking dudes posting selfies, and more importantly, why does nobody in the tag comment on that fact?
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s/female/non-masculine
(checked my nonexistent cis privilege)
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I have never met a straight male who explicitly supports the body positive movement. I am not trying to insult straight men but the body positive movement just does not seem to be as culturally accepted in male circles. I do not really know why.
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I am a straight white cis-patriarch, but I might support the body positive movement if I knew what it was :-(
Is it just a bunch of people posting selfies on Twitter, or what ?
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Er, I meant, on Tumblr. Some form of social media. Get off my lawn.
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*Swaggers in*
Attraction triggers for us cis-males are mostly based on physical appearance, and thus to support the body-positive movement would be to deny what we find attractive. (I believe that this holds for both straight men and most gay men.) Why this is depends on who you want to listen to. The evopsych perspective is that we have evolved to find physical indicators of fertility and health attractive, as healthy women give birth to healthy kids. The feminist perspective probably involves social conditioning, such that dating of people with certain body-types is socially stigmatized as low status.
In the same way that straight males don’t support the body-positive movement,.you hardly see straight females supporting the MGTOW movement. Self-interest.
The straight-male perspective goes further, however, because increasingly, modern feminists appear to want to demonize the natural male attraction and mate selection process. I wouldn’t marry a party girl, but if I voice my opinion, feminists would call this “slut-shaming”. I wouldn’t date someone who isn’t attractive to me, but if I admit that my attraction to women is physical, I’m “shallow”. I wouldn’t commit to a woman who isn’t submissive to me (submission being one the major tells that a woman is truly in love), but this makes me an “oppressive shitlord”. (Snark) My bad, I’ll shut up and check my cis-het male privilege.(/snark)
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Cismale says that for straight males “to support the body-positive movement would be to deny what we find attractive”.
But if it’s true that gay men are much more likely than straight men to support the body positive movement, then this disproves what “cismale” poster says.
Gay males are usually very much attracted by thin people and so by supporting such a movement they are “denying” what they themselves find attractive.
So maybe the answer lies in turning that statement around.
It isn’t that people who want thin partners refuse to support “body positivity”.
It’s that only people who are afraid to become fat and sexually unappealing have a reason to support it.
Straight men don’t have a reason to support it or even emotionally understand the problem because even if they are fat, they can still get laid.
Whereas gay males and straight women lose their sexual attractiveness when they become fat.
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Bugmaster: Body positivity is basically the part of SJ that says “everyone should be able to love their bodies, no matter what they look like! People should stop being mean to people who look different than they look!” It is very closely connected to anti-fatphobia and health at every size activism.
cis-male: The reaction of pretty much every woman I’ve talked to about MGTOW is either “I totally support this movement. Misogynists should totally not interact with women ever again, that sounds great” or “wait, so it’s lesbian separatism without the part where you get laid? That is a terrible way to run a movement.” So straight women seem broadly supportive. :P
I am pretty sure no one cares about whether you date people you’re not attracted to. They do care that you shouldn’t call people ugly, because that’s mean, and you shouldn’t say that all men agree with you about what’s attractive, because that’s obviously not true.
In general, a lot of people seem to interpret members of desexualized groups going “it is mean to call us ugly and say that no one wants to have sex with us” as saying “YOU MUST HAVE SEX WITH US NOW”, and I wish they would stop doing that, because it’s actually important to talk about the former thing.
I think you might have better success not being called an oppressive shitlord if you don’t say that submission is the one major tell that a woman is really in love. No one cares about your 24/7 BDSM, dude, just don’t assume your kink is everyone’s.
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That being said, what, exactly, does body acceptance mean? If it means being nice to fat people, sure. If it means pretending that they look good, or pretending that being in shape isn’t an essential component of looking good (that is sexually appealing), then sorry, I can’t do this in good faith – I can’t bring to myself to pretend that fat is beautiful – it would be a lie.
Thin is what I, like the great majority of straight males, find attractive, and this can’t be changed.
So, if I explore my own feeling and my motivations for not being with the fat acceptance movement, they match what “cismale” says – I don’t support the movement because I’m attracted to thin women, although I have previously rationalized this by saying that thin is healthy and the fat acceptance thing sounds like it encourages not being healthy.
Which makes me wonder how gay males can support such a movement. Do pro-body acceptance gay men pretend that fat is beautiful, against what most likely must be their own innate feelings of what really is beautiful?
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Well: If I went about saying “If it means being nice to thin people, sure. If it means pretending that they look good, or pretending that having curves isn’t an essential component of looking good (that is sexually appealing), then sorry, I can’t do this in good faith – I can’t bring to myself to pretend that thin is beautiful – it would be a lie,” I think you would quite sensibly point out that just because I happen to be totally uninterested in girls with a normal or underweight BMI doesn’t mean everyone is uninterested, and that at the very least I ought to consider using I language.
I’m also not sure that attraction can’t be changed– like, for many people it can’t, and it is certainly not a moral requirement for anyone to be attracted to anyone, but lots of people have become more attracted to people with different body shapes after they started participating in body-positive communities. But that’s more of a happy side effect than a general goal, I think.
It is true that some of my interest in body positive activism is a selfish desire for more girls I’m attracted to to wear tight clothes and bikinis.
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Oh, ozy clarified my doubts but I hadn’t seen their post when I posted.
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@cismale: That may be true for you, but it’s far from universal amongst straight cis men. What men find physically attractive of course varies quite a bit, but also I know of straight cis men having happy relationships with women they do not find physically attractive (but who manage to be desirable in other ways).
Obviously there are lots of cis men who prefer dominant women as partners, and cis men I know generally consider “sluttiness” an attractive trait; I wonder if you’re just trolling about those.
@stargirlprincess: I’m also not sure what the “body positive movement” is. Men presumably have an easier time on average than women feeling at least somewhat positive about their bodies within mainstream culture and so have less need for specific memes encouraging this?
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I think it’s common for straight men to think that attraction is pretty deterministic. For many, it would seem to go directly against their interests, and they might not see it as plausible that women would treat fatness as acceptable. Also, a lot of straight men consider fatness intrinsically bad and would not engage at a level higher than “dehumnanizing fat people is bad”.
Also, I think men’s attractiveness is somewhat different — rather than the Strive to be Thin, there’s the Adonis Complex, but “don’t lump people into ugly” may seem more resonable than “treat people as if they had achieved this difficult and honorable acheivement”.
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Also it’s a bad idea to shame fat people, not because being fat isn’t unhealthy which it clearly is, but because people should really stop doing self-destructive diets that bring zero permanent benefits and actually harm their health.
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@stargirlprincess: I’m also not sure what the “body positive movement” is. Men presumably have an easier time on average than women feeling at least somewhat positive about their bodies within mainstream culture and so have less need for specific memes encouraging this?
Fat men have an easier time than fat women (I think I even read somewhere that juries are more likely to convict fat women than thin women, but not more likely to convict fat men than thin men).
That doesn’t mean men have it easy, however. Try going to the beach when you have a heavily hairy back sometime, for example. Also, extremely short men are penalized relative to tall men far more than short women are relative to tall women (or the other way around). And say, women being really flat-chested is visible to the public is visible in a way that men have a micropenis is not, but I’m pretty confident in hypothesizing that the latter is much worse for positive self-image.
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@ozymandias:
Thanks, that clears things up a bit, however, I disagree with your last point.
If it is ok to say, “I personally am only attracted to skinny women”, then surely it is also ok to say, “I personally am only attracted to submissive women”. Unless, of course, cismale meant to say something like “women who are not submissive are objectively not in love”, in which case he is factually wrong; but I got the sense that he was merely expressing his personal preference, not making a blanket statement like that.
That said, despite being a cis-straight white heteropatriarch, I do agree with some of the goals of the body-positive movement (based on your presentation of them), though not with all of them:
* “People should stop being mean to people who look different”: this is a no-brainer, obviously people should stop that, and in fact it would be nice if people stopped being mean in general.
* “Everyone should be able to love their bodies, no matter what they look like”: I’m not sure how this differs from saying, “everyone should love their bodies period”, or the even stronger statement, “your body is fine just the way it is”. In many cases this is objectively not true. For example, I personally am fat, and this has created all kinds of health problems for me. I do not want to love my body unconditionally; I want to be able to dislike it, so that I can change it. And I want doctors to retain the ability to say, “your weight is a health issue that you need to address”, as mine did. Note that this is not the same thing as saying, “you are ugly and do not deserve any respect”. Stating an objective fact does not automatically entail passing judgement.
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I see (or imagine?) a sharp difference between “body positivity” and “health at every size”. I see the former mostly being about not shaming people for what could be out of their control. In contrast I’ve read activists of the second making empirical claims that are wildly incorrect. The name itself seems to be making a claim that is erroneous (both too light and too heavy are cause for higher mortality and morbidity, noting recent developments showing that waist-to-hips ratio may be better indicator than sheer weight though).
However (and it’s a big however):
– “ideal female bodies” presented are often below the too-light limit (worse offender, fashion)
(- to a lesser degree, “ideal male bodies” are, in the last 20 years, often too lean to be sustainable in the long term)
– MOST IMPORTANTLY, for women, the social cost for being fat/overweight begins below what is recognized as harmful
– we have evidence of some variations in both male and female ideal bodies (fatter for women in the 19th century, variations in the amount of muscle/fat fashionable for men during history)
– apparently, (on average) women think that men prefer thinner bodies that what men actually (say they) prefer (by 10-15 pounds).
So I end up supporting body positivity and gritting my teeth most often when I encounter “health at every size”.
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IDK, I think it’s certainly possible to steelman HAES. Like… we know that diets don’t work for most people. But no one has suggested that eating your vegetables, not eating much sugar or processed food, and exercising regularly are any less good for fat people than they are for thin people. And it really dispirits people when they go on a diet, just to gain the weight back, and can make it hard for them to keep to their healthier habits. So tactically it makes sense to shift from “try to lose weight” to “exercise regularly and eat real food, not too much, mostly plants, and let the weight chips fall where they may.”
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You’ll have no debate from me on that front. Diets are, on average, absolutely terrible at fixing weight problems, and great at creating eating disorders. Part of it is certainly due to trying to lose a lot of weight as fast as possible, and when the goal is reached going back to the previous eating regimen. But with a smaller muscle mass, possibly lower base rate metabolism independently of muscle mass and probably cravings for all you sacrificed during your diet.
“Exercise regularly and eat real food, not too much, mostly plants, and let the weight chips fall where they may” is probably a good tactic, but it is much more charitable than any steelman of HAES claims I would make.
(Exercise is great. Function first, looks seconds for me)
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@ozymandias:
That isn’t steely enough for me. I completely agree with you regarding diets and exercise. However:
a). Some people are overweight to the point where it actively endangers their near-term survival (I knew one such person, they are better now). If you tell them to “let the weight chips fall where they may”, as opposed to “seek medical intervention immediately”, then you are… well, not killing them exactly, but not doing them any favors, either. Granted, I am not sure how common this sort of obesity is, so maybe I’m just over-generalizing from one example.
b). If there existed a magic pill that would bring my weight down to normal, I’d take it (assuming no massive side-effects, of course). If I had another fat friend, I’d advise my friend to take the pill, too. However, if I were convinced that my body is HAES, then I probably would ignore the pill; this would not, IMO, be a rational choice. In our current world, such a pill does not exist, but people should be (and are) trying to create it. To the extent that HAES has a chilling effect on such efforts, HAES is harmful.
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“I have never met a straight male who explicitly supports the body positive movement. I am not trying to insult straight men but the body positive movement just does not seem to be as culturally accepted in male circles. I do not really know why.
For what it’s worth: Hi, I’m Barry! I’m pretty much a straight male. I support the body positive movement, and I support HAES as well. Nice to meet you.
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Ozymandias said: “If it means being nice to thin people, sure. If it means pretending that they look good, or pretending that having curves isn’t an essential component of looking good (that is sexually appealing), then sorry, I can’t do this in good faith – I can’t bring to myself to pretend that thin is beautiful – it would be a lie,”
My first answer would be that obviously, there is a huge difference between being the rule and being the exception. Most people who are attracted to women, prefer thin ones. Therefore you can’t say those lines in the same way that I would say the same lines with fat/thin reversed.
In addition, there’s a huge problem here, which is that there are different kinds of fat. I don’t know whether the women you are attracted to, would be considered all that “fat” or repulsive by me or most straight men.
The word itself you chose, “curvy”, suggests that you and I might be using different criteria of “fat”.
To make an example – Robin Lawley and Jennie Runk are known as “curvy” models, but they are as thin as any model, in the sense that they don’t carry anything excessive around her belly. However, their BMI’s are higher than that of most models. In fact the concept itself of BMI is very misleading. So is the idea of “weight”.
Not only there are different kinds of body so a given BMI doesn’t tell you the proportion of fat in someone, even more importantly there are different types of fat – subcutaneous, visceral, intramuscular – and they can be distributed in different parts of the body. You can find, floating around, a lot of pseudo-medical-dietetic talk that the most unhealthy type of fat is belly fat. That matches the intuitions of most straight men – the most unattractive fat is belly fat. However that is exactly the kind of fat that conceals the curves, and thus the word “curvy” implies that you don’t have much of it, at least relative to T&A mass – so possibly your tastes aren’t so extremely different from mine or those of most straight men after all.
Since the most unhealthy kind of fat is also the least sexually attractive kind, I think it makes sense that that’s the kind we mean by default when we say just “fat”.
It goes without saying that fat people are potentially wonderful human beings with as much inherent dignity as anyone. And I think that shaming them has bad consequences such as making them starve themselves unhealthily, and that horrible people such as Roissy, who apparently rants all the time about how disgusting fat women are, are, well, horrible.
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Well: Have you ever tried to come up with a positive way to describe fat people sexually? “Curves” is basically the option you have. I am attracted to the average person posting in the fatspo/fatshion/body positivity tags, and I actually think belly fat is among the most attractive traits a girl can have. (And it is clearly a curve, it is just a curve outward rather than a curve inward.)
I just… think it’s very strange to refer to people as “not sexually attractive” without saying to whom, as if it is a trait of them and not a trait of the people observing them. It’s like calling someone “a friend.” To whom?
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Alright maybe to say “as thin as any model” was an exaggeration, scratch that. But I hope my point gets across.
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Can’t you edit your own posts like you do in Slatestarcodex?
I mentioned two “curvy” models, and thinking again, the second one actually is kinda fat; I hadn’t looked at her closely. It seems wasteful to take up space in the comments for such trivial remarks, but I hate it when I feel I wrote something mistaken.
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Jennie Runk is fat, but I hadn’t looked at her when I made the comment, I had only looked at Robin Lawley.
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This is a difficult issue, because there is a fine line — maybe not even a line — between HAES/body positivity and just lying to people. In fact, many proponents of both seem to explicitly endorse lying to people. How does one reliably distinguish between “correcting for harmful social attitudes” and “giving people false impressions that are likely to be harmful upon contact with reality”?
I guess what I’m saying is that, while I certainly have no problem with Ozy’s steelman versions, what I have read of the actual HAES movement in particular is very far from those, and IMO quite harmful. For instance, they frequently claim that being fat is only unhealthy because it correlates with harmful attempts at traditional dieting. This is a falsehood on par with claiming that smoking is only bad because it correlates with asbestos exposure.
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Stillnotking: I don’t think it’s “lying” to say something that one believes to be true but you (stillnotking) disagree with. And I don’t think there’s any call to say that HAES or body positivity (not interchangeable terms, although the groups overlap) proponents are typically liars.
The HAES movement folks I’ve read do not claim that “being fat is only unhealthy because it correlates with harmful attempts at traditional dieting.”
(I have frequently seen HAES people argue that weight-loss dieting is a confounding factor which is often not accounted for in studies showing negative effects of being fat, but that’s substantively different from what you just said.)
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I’m aware they are not the same thing; sorry if my comment was unclear on that point. I don’t have a lot to say about body positivity except that I agree it’s wrong to be mean to people one finds unattractive.
As far as HAES — the actual book Health At Every Size says “Fat isn’t the problem. Dieting is the problem.” That isn’t a paraphrase — it’s the tagline of the book. There is a difference between pointing out actual misconceptions (such as that it’s unhealthy to be slightly “overweight”) and making grandiose, controversial, and utterly false claims. Presumably one difference is that the latter sells more books.
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Oh this conversation!
Everyone gets caught up in *some wrong thing* some bodypos person has said and then want to tear down the whole movement. Stop that shit. You can be skeptical of some of the messed up edges of bodypos, but the core movement is hella important for some people and society is waaaaaaaaay unbalanced against them.
It is important to tell the truth. It is also important to add your voice where it is needed and not where it compounds harm.
Body positivity in a nutshell:
1. Maybe you cannot control your attractions, but you can control *how you talk about them*. Do you actually need to *point out explicitly* that you don’t like fat girls? As if they do not hear that enough? Can’t you just keep it to yourself, and if a fat person messages you on OK Cupid, just politely decline? Why not?
2. How you talk about attractions broadly affects how others experience their attractions. For example, there is a broad sense that fat women are low status. Furthermore, there is a broad sense that *the men who date them* are therefore lesser men. This shit is totally real and REALLY FUCKING OBVIOUS as in I can find probably hundreds of links of men mocking other men for dating fat girls. Like with no effort. But why mock people this way? Clearly some men do like fat women. Why not just accept this as natural human variation and *encourage it*, even if you do not share the attraction?
3. Where does your attraction come from? It’s probably super complex, but if you notice your attractions happen to mirror broad social structures, which differ from structures in the past, you might suppose that society has influenced your attractions. Perhaps if you change your social environment your attractions might change. Would this be a bad thing?
4. And if you do find yourself attracted to fat women, but your social group is full of shitheads who would mock you for that, what do you do? What kind of social group do you want?
5. Even outside of *overt* abuse, there are all kinds of subtle things people do that hurt fat people. For example, even if you would never mock your friend who dates a fat girl, perhaps you kinda *without saying it* let him know you think it’s kinda messed up. Like, maybe you are a bit embarrassed to be seen with them so you sometime you don’t invite them to cool things, where you might invite them if she was skinny and hot, cuz you care about how people think about *you*, and you’re playing the status game one step removed.
Fat people can sense this. They see the lives of thin people and then compare the own lives, and all the little stuff adds up. Plus then the guy who *is* attracted to a fat girls decides to move on from her to a skinny girl, cuz then he’ll seem cooler and get invited to more cool parties.
This is the internalized stuff. It’s hard to deal with. But deal with it. It matters.
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Stillnotking:
1. What Veronica D. just wrote.
2. That’s not a tagline (although the Amazon page layout can make it look that way), it’s a line of text from the middle of the back cover. Read in context, I don’t think you can fairly assume that it means “being fat is only unhealthy because it correlates with harmful attempts at traditional dieting.”
You’re doing a motte and bailey. The motte is your claim that HAES says that the “only” reason for correlation between fat and bad health is the correlation with traditional dieting, an extreme statement that I doubt anyone of significance within HAES has ever said. So you retreat to your bailey, which is that the back cover copy of a book is full of vague hyperbolic sentences.
3. If the use of hyperbolic language on back covers is proof that an entire movement is dishonest, then there must not be a single honest movement on earth, so it doesn’t make sense to single out HAES as unusually dishonest.
I think most people, however, understand that it is the nature of the genre that back cover text is a bit hyperbolic and unclear – the goal of back cover text is to be provocative and intriguing, not to clearly spell out arguments. For that reason, it’s necessary to consult the actual content of a book to know what arguments the book makes.
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@veronica d:
I completely and wholeheartedly agree with everything you said. However, it really looks to me like all the good things you said are completely orthogonal to HAES; and I personally disagree with HAES as it has been described here (for the reasons I mentioned). Naturally, if the description is wrong and HAES views are a lot less extreme than that, I might agree with them too.
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@ozymandias:
> Have you ever tried to come up with a positive way to describe fat people sexually? “Curves” is basically the option you have.
Of come on, there are lots more options than that — at least, there are for women, though probably not for men. Off the top of my head, I can come up with “voluptuous”, “rubenesque”, “full-figured”, arguably “plump”, and my recent favorite example from PoE, “ample”.
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@Ampersand: I have not read the book and almost certainly won’t, but I will assume the author’s HuffPo article promoting it is a fair summary of its arguments: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-bacon-phd-ma-ma/health-at-every-size_b_1314339.html
I don’t think I’m being too unfair here. For instance, she makes the specific, unambiguous claim that obese people have “similar longevity” to those with normal weight, while linking to a study that estimates over 100,000 excess deaths from obesity in the year 2000 alone. Am I reading that wrong? The less specific ones, like “fat stigma is more dangerous than fat”, are merely absurd, and I won’t argue them because I literally can’t. I don’t know what “more dangerous” can possibly mean in that context, and her link is broken. One assumes “fat stigma” rarely provokes thin people to murder.
Her point that permanently losing weight is very difficult is well-taken, but that doesn’t imply it’s perfectly healthy to be obese. Leukemia can’t be cured by sheer force of will either, but no one tries to pretend it isn’t bad for you. HAES programs may improve some people’s health and quality of life over a traditional dieting regimen, but that also has no bearing on an assessment of HAES factual claims (I recall a good deal of similar discussion at SSC about Alcoholics Anonymous).
My considered opinion is that HAES is a deliberate, if well-intentioned, effort to deny the serious health risks of obesity. Any criticism is, of course, welcome.
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@Well: Thank you for your comment, and I think you are spot on. On further reflection, the experience of my gay friends is not really applicable, since there is virtually no body-positivity movement where I live.
Most of my other examples still hold from your perspective. There is a body-positive movement, an anti-slut-shaming movement, and a ban-bossy movement. I don’t know about their inclusion of males, but what they all have in common is that they seek to reduce stigma upon women for things that would reduce their traditional attractiveness as long-term partners to hetero men. Is the body-positive movement unique in its lack of straight males? Do any movements exist to reduce stigma on men? Why?
@oxy: I brought these up because they are examples of how my real-life bisexual feminist friends reacted to me during a conversation about what we were attracted to. One friend-of-a-friend went so far as to seek me out later and call me a “future child abuser”, because she heard through the grapevine that my gf (now fiance) is submissive to me. I haven’t been a feminist since.
It seems you have a strong association between “submissive” and BDSM. I don’t do that.
In a relationship, submission is a deference to one’s significant other’s decisions: trust in their leadership. There are words for when a non-leading SO seeks to undermine or rejects the other’s leadership: “nagging” and “sass”.
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In consideration of my second comment, two small points occured to me.
1. The body-positive movement is unique among the anti-stigma movements in that it has to reject not just stigma, but also health claims. What if shaming or de-normalizing obesity improves average health? This has the potential to either legitimize or delegitimize the body-positive movement on utilitarian grounds. (Although frankly I don’t think anyone other than doctors sees the issue this way.)
2. The largest problem with anti-shame movements is that they require limiting free speech. Several body-positive commenters have made the point that the actual body-positive claim is “it is mean to call us ugly and say that no one wants to have sex with us”. So… are we to shame those who are mean? (If so, are we to shame those who are bossy?) If not, why are you calling them mean?
The only consistent actions are to either to admit that you are merely seeking to replace nasty shaming behavior #1 with nasty shaming behavior #2, to immunize yourself to stigma, or to accept stigma as part of our daily lives.
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@cismale: Wait, are you using “submission” to mean the woman giving up (some of) her autonomy to her lover, in a non-reciprocated way? And this is the highest expression of love? D/s is a thing and I’m not going to hate on you for it, but, um, treating not-deferring-to-your-lover’s-will as “sass” or “nagging” sets off some red flags for me.
As for your thoughts on anti-shame campaigns, I think the message
“friendly reminder that fat girls are beautiful and deserve to be loved #fat shaming #body positive”
can be unpacked into three submessages targeted at different people:
(1) for fat girls: “You are good and your body is good.”
(2) for people who are attracted to girls: “Hey, you know that thing where you think anyone who dates a fat girl has ‘settled’ for a less desirable partner? Yeah, not everyone has your preferences. Try not to generalize them, at least not aloud where fat girls can hear? It really hurts to hear that your body is ugly and nobody wants to date you.”
(3) for people who aren’t fat girls: “People casually deny the possibility that fat girls can be attractive. This is wrong and you should stop them.”
(2) is an invitation to consider your own ideas and alter them in the direction of being nicer to people. It can be heard as “Your personal attraction is wrong and should change”, which is (in my opinion) just a watered-down version of what it’s trying to fight. Instead of policing people’s ideas about what constitutes “beautiful”, promoters of this message should emphasize the way these free-floating memes make fat girls feel bad for no obvious good reason, and encourage people to make a special effort to be virtuous in this area. (Related: all debates are bravery debates)
(3) is an exhortation to police others’ speech. This can lead, as you suggest, to shaming people for expressing their preference, but also to more people realizing that their idea of the optimally attractive woman is not a biological and societal universal.
The message “think about your ideas, maybe change them to be better” and the message “these opinions are misguided, make sure to call them out in others” are different messages and produce different effects, even if they’re not always clearly separated.
Also: it’s possible that fat-shaming produces a thinner and thus healthier population. It’s also possible that not fat-shaming produces a happier and thus healthier population. Mental health is important too.
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“The body-positive movement is unique among the anti-stigma movements in that it has to reject not just stigma, but also health claims. What if shaming or de-normalizing obesity improves average health?”
I think you’re implying that if it *doesn’t* improve health, there should be no problem stopping it, and I don’t buy that.
Imagine that no studies have been done in whether telling people to smoke stops them from smoking. And there’s a “smoking-positive movement” that encourages smokers to feel proud of their identity as a smoker and opposes smoking-shaming.
It’s going to be very difficult to find evidence that a *specific* action improves health. Sure, the cumulative effect of anti-smoking measures results in people living longer, but you can’t easily know this on a per-measure basis. Probably nobody’s proven that anti-smoking ads on buses reduce lifespan, so the smoking acceptance movement says “stop using those ads on busses to shame people”. Then they say the same thing about ads on television, or cigarette warnings, or whatever.
If your criteria are “if we can’t prove it improves health, and it might shame people, we need to get rid of it”, then you end up getting rid of most anti-smoking measures piecemeal, because we can’t prove that any specific measure that someone points to is the measure that reduced the deaths, rather than some of the other measures they are not concerned with at the moment.
The same goes for fat acceptance. Reducing obesity improves health. But any specific anti-obesity measure? How are you going to prove that, unless someone by chance did a study of that exact measure? It’s not going to be practical to see if something actually improves health, because the smoking-acceptors and fat-acceptors can always divide-and-conquer the enemy this way.
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Stillnotking:
“For instance, she makes the specific, unambiguous claim that obese people have “similar longevity” to those with normal weight, while linking to a study that estimates over 100,000 excess deaths from obesity in the year 2000 alone. Am I reading that wrong? “
You misstated what Bacon said. Here’s what she wrote:
“Mortality data show “overweight” people, on average, live longest, and moderately “obese” people have similar longevity to those at weights deemed “normal” and advisable.”
You ignored Bacon’s “moderately” modifier. The study Bacon linked to, written by CDC researchers, reported results for two different groups of “obese” people; those with BMIs of 30-<35 (the large majority of obese people), and those with BMIs of 35 or above. (They also reported that the merely "overweight" cohort actually lived longer than the "normal" cohort.)
So did the study find that "moderately obese people have similar longevity to those at weights deemed "normal"?
The study used BMI 18.5-25 as the reference category, and called this the "normal" category. There were three sources of data; one (the oldest and probably least reliable) found that mortality was elevated among the moderately obese compared to the reference group, the middle one found that the two groups had nearly identical morality, and the most recent (and probably most relevant, because it reflects the most current medical practices of the three) showed that the moderately obese actually live slightly longer than the reference group. (See Figure 2 in the study.)
You can quibble with exactly how to sum that up, but saying the two groups have "similar longevity" is well within the range of fairness.
“I don’t know what “more dangerous” can possibly mean in that context, and her link is broken. One assumes “fat stigma” rarely provokes thin people to murder.”
Fat stigma increases stress and self-hatred, factors that are well-known to increase mortality. (See, for example, “Association between psychological distress and mortality: individual participant pooled analysis of 10 prospective cohort studies” in the British Journal of Medicine.) Fat people are also more likely to commit suicide, a connection that plausibly has a lot to do with fat stigma.
That said, what Bacon meant – her link was working when I tried it – is that focusing on fat as the main measure of bodily health encourages people to focus on unproductive, unhealthful behavior (see-saw dieting, self-hatred, etc), while discouraging focus on more healthy and sustainable behaviors, like exercise and eating well.
Bacon does, of course, argue – I think with a great deal of evidence – that the dangers of being fat have been overstated. However, she does not deny that fat can come with health problems, especially for the severely obese. (Admittedly, she doesn’t make this her main focus, but I see no reason she should.)
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Cismale:
“In a relationship, submission is a deference to one’s significant other’s decisions: trust in their leadership. There are words for when a non-leading SO seeks to undermine or rejects the other’s leadership: “nagging” and “sass”.”</i?
I understand that you're talking about in the relationship in general, rather than talking about the sexual aspects in particular.
Do you think that in general it's better, in heterosexual relationships, for the man to be the leader and the woman to practice submission? Or are do you think it's just as good if the woman is leading and the man is submissive?
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@cismale — Clearly you are not a feminist. I mean, there remain men who oppose gender equity and believe in dominance relations *outside* the boundaries of consensual kink. We know men like you exist. It is unsurprising.
Which, I can meander over to Fetlife and browse one of the “Gorean” forums (or whatever) and find guys with names like “AlphaDog69” and “BigDaddyXXX,” and well, mostly they’re silly and we laugh at them. “Twoo doms” — tee hee. But yeah, they exist.
But anyway, whatever you do consensually ain’t my business. But that does not mean I’ll *admire* you. Instead I’ll just shake my head and wait for the women in your life to ask for help.
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If you grant that emotions and aesthetic preferences can function as unconscious strategic devices, it naturally follows that unconscious self-modification toward sexual preferences that are more likely to be fulfillable under the constraint of low notch-acquiring prowess / low status will occur given low status.
If this particular sexual preference is perceived to meet that constraint, well, there you go.
(Note that this assumes that women with fewer options will lower their standards to compensate, which at least the manosphere (in my impression) tries to disagree with while sometimes taking it as a premise anyway.)
(And yes, self-modification of sexual preferences is possible. I’ve done it consciously a few times.)
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I don’t want to email Scott but am curious what recommendation he gave you for BPD that has been helping you. Is it legally okay if you are the one to tell us instead? Or is he concerned that it’s morally wrong to make this idea public?
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Inositol. (I feel pretty okay with this, because it’s not like it’s hard to figure out what I’m taking– just check my tumblr’s drugs tag.)
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I’m now somewhat confused. In an earlier thread on SSC, you said that borderline was a part of your identity that you didn’t want to give up. I assume “treatment” here means “selective suppression of symptoms,” but am not sure which ones.
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It makes me less likely to have dramatic emotional breakdowns, basically.
And inositol still leaves my basic ‘me’ intact and if I stop taking it I will still have emotional breakdowns. (In fact, I skipped it this weekend because I was going to watch Mockingjay and wanted to be sobbing the whole time.)
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I’m glad your second comment made clear that it was the name of a drug, otherwise I’d have spent a long while wondering what internet acronym ‘inositol’ was (in the spirit of imho, ymmv, ianal etc) before the penny dropped :-)
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I was recently in a debate with someone regarding the depiction of men and women in our entertainment media (movies, games, comics, etc.), and he stated that “men and women are treated differently in media, in a manner that is regressive/harmful toward women in particular, and that mistreatment of women has harmful implications beyond those of mistreatment of men”, and I wanted to reply, but there are a few assertions in here and I don’t actually know where to find studies that address them.
Specifically, I want to find studies that address these specific assertions:
– Men and women are treated differently in entertainment media
– The treatment of women in entertainment media is regressive and harmful toward women in particular
– Mistreatment of women is more harmful than mistreatment of men (whether he means in general or just in entertainment media is ambiguous to me)
A point in the right direction would be appreciated, and my apologies if this post is a little out of line for this thread.
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Hard mode for your first dash: without ignoring media from Japan and Korea.
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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DoubleStandard has a really good collection, with copious examples on each point.
Warning: addictive website
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Please, please include comment-collapsing javascript in the comments. I can help with it if you want.
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Is witchwind.wordpress.com real, as in authentically written by someone that believes what they publish? I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t shake a suspicion that it is an elaborate put-on of some kind.
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Yes. She’s deriving a lot of her theory from Mary Daly and Sheila Jeffreys. (I highly recommend reading Mary Daly for pure entertainment value. Trans people are NECROPHILIAC FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTERS, it’s awesome.)
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I guess that’s better than Janice Raymond.
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Her feminist utopia definitely sounds like a parody by… hm, an anti-feminist Objectivist.
http://witchwind.wordpress.com/2014/10/07/utopia-what-would-a-womens-society-look-like/
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Also I read her comments and I feel fucking bad for being amused.
Poor suffering person. Not to be insensitive/patronizing/etc, but is she an abuse survivor?
Let’s cut her some slack, people.
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… Global human extinction in 15 years?
This sounds like a problem for… a cute, heterosexual military scientist lady?
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At SSC, Q wrote:
Q, The conservative guy on TV may have been referring to Mark Regnerus’ study, which is pretty commonly cited by conservatives, and pretty commonly held to be laughably flawed by liberals. Here’s the Wikipedia article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Family_Structures_Study
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Thank You.
I did get so far in my googling, that I found Mark Regnerus and George Alan Rekers (who got embarassed) do exist, but did not see this particular Wikipedia article.
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Not race and gender, but not exactly presentable for the Slate Star codex thread: I have an opportunity to mess with RationalWiki. David Gerard seems to like me. I am taking suggestions for what I should do with this.
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What, you want advice on how to troll people ? Here’s my advice: don’t do it. Be a better person.
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+1
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This is a response from a practical person. I believe you reaction has something to do with observations of the type, like, e.g. that if you tell parents that anti-vaccination arguments are wrong, and explain why, you are on overall worse off than not giving parents such education. Because you just made them aware anti-vaccination claims do exist. Somebody really did such experiment and actually more parents were uncertain if they want to vaccinate their kids after the debunking lecture than before.
The problem is, I already am shaken and would like to get some approximately fair resource.
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I would like some overview of studies pointing one direction and the studies pointing another direction. I would also benefit from the explanation why some are not considered sensible any more by wider public, i.e. what are the methodological flaws, although I understand that opens the door to biases of the author writing the review.
See, I do not even know those studies made by “good guys” which turned out in favor of same sex adoptions. Yes, I can google, and gradually find them one by one, but… There are more controversial topics, for which Wikipedia does give review of research.
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The American Sociological Association produced an amicus brief in 2013 which provided both an overview of the research suggesting that children raised by same-sex and opposite-sex parents have similar outcomes, and argued against the relevance of Regnerus and other studies cited by opponents of same-sex marriage. So that might be part of what you’re looking for. Here’s the link (it’s a pdf document).
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@Ampersand, thanks.
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Out of curiosity, does anyone know of any examples of a feminist lobby pushing through a change to the law to benefit men in an area where men were traditionally disadvantaged?
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Depends on what you mean. I can’t think of any examples of feminists lobbying for men to be allowed to do traditionally female jobs. (Feminism seems to have indirectly helped bring back male nurses as a thing, though. But there wasn’t any lobbying, AFAIK.)
However, feminists have often championed the rights of gay men, and they’ve also been major lobbyists on behalf of family/parental leave, including paternity leave. So there’s that?
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Changing the UCR definition of rape to include men.
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This wasn’t a successful challenge to the law, so maybe it doesn’t count, but NOW submitted an amicus curiæ arguing against the male-only draft when that case was before the Supreme Court.
There’s the 1976 case of Craig v. Boren, which made it illegal for states to have tougher drinking age laws for men than women (as some states did – Oklahoma was the specific state being sued). The winning lawyer in that case was Ruth Ginsburg, who said that the ruling stand for the principle that the “familiar stereotype: the active boy, aggressive and assertive; the passive girl, docile and submissive” was “not fit to be written into law.”
Another Ginsburg case, Moritz v Internal Revenue, was won on the court of appeals level and not taken up by the Supreme Court. In that case, the court overruled laws that made some tax deductions for being caretakers available to women but not to men.
I can’t think of any examples of feminists lobbying for men to be allowed to do traditionally female jobs.
It’s not a law, but of course many feminist actions helped reduce gender segregation in jobs for both sexes. For instance, it’s because of feminist lobbying that newspaper
“help wanted” classified ads are no longer divided into “men wanted” and “women wanted” sections, as they were when I was a kid. And, of course, the anti-discrimination laws outlawing making jobs available to women only or to men only were put in place largely due to feminist lobbying.
Really, nearly all laws that feminists lobby for benefit both sexes, like (as Irenist mentioned) the Family and Medical Leave Act. An act like The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, although it didn’t do nearly enough, probably benefits more women than men (feminist activists like Lovisa Stannow were crucial to that legislation).
Art probably doesn’t count as “lobbying,” but there’s also feminist art projects like “The Mask You Live In” documentary.
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“probably benefits more women than men”…. I meant to write “more men than women.” (Because more men are in prison.)
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Feminist-inspired reduction in the length of mandatory maternity leave in the UK.
[Mandatory in the sense that employers are obliged to allow people to take that time off without sacking them – in some cases the employer has to pay them, but in most cases there is tax-funded statutory maternity pay]
Yes, you’re reading that correctly. Feminists argued for a reduction in maternity leave.
There was a simultaneous increase in the amount of mandatory transferable parental leave, which can be used by either parent, including adoptive parents or parents of a child born by surrogacy.
Part of the purpose of this was to lower the disincentive on employers to employ fertile-age women, since men then become more likely to take parental leave, balancing the incentives for employers. There are plenty of employers who have suggested that they avoid employing/promoting younger women because of concerns about expensive maternity leave – while doing so is, of course, illegal, it’s exceptionally hard to prove.
But the direct benefit to men of paid leave as fathers is much more measurable than the indirect benefit to women of reducing the motherhood penalty.
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I’m wondering whether the arguments about confounders on the sex pay gap are not really statistical arguments at all, but rather arguments about the meaning of pay.
I think that a lot of people – including many of the feminists who write about the pay gap – think of pay as a valuation of the person, not merely of the work they do.
Look how often people argue that nurses or doctors get paid X while CEOs or stock traders get paid 100X or 1000X, but that nurses and doctors are better.
To take one confounder, part-time workers are paid less than full-time workers; they get the same hourly rate, but they get lower pay because they work fewer hours. More women than men are part-timer workers. There’s a proper statistical argument against the confounder (“are women pushed into part-time jobs because they are less likely to get full-time ones”) and a sociological one (“are women choosing to take part-time jobs because of a societal pressure to care for children that is not as strongly applied to men”) – the first generates an employer-oriented solution, the second a societal-attitudes solution.
But I think some people perceive pay as a valuation of the person – that is, if part-time workers are paid less than full-time workers then that implies that they are being valued as lesser people than the full-time people, and they should be valued as equals.
If employers are an abstract force for valuing people and paying them according to their value to society, not a market actor like any other, then the confounders are just the mechanisms by which that improper valuation is created.
If you work for a vast impersonal bureaucracy, where your pay is determined by an impenetrable, seemingly arbitrary system – like working for the federal government, in academia, or in most large corporations (excepting, in all cases, working at the very highest levels) then it’s very easy to see where that belief about employers comes from.
If employers are a judicial system rewarding people according to their personal value, then asking people to look at it from the employers’ perspective isn’t going to help them understand the decisions.
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And then there’s the version of the second one without the pressure: Women are choosing to take part-time jobs because many of them have the option to do so, because society permits women to choose child-rearing instead of work, but society generally does not permit men to do that.
If women are given more options than men, and one of those options is lower paid, then because some women will choose the option, the average pay for women will be lower. It needn’t imply that they are *pressured* to take the low-paid option–the mere fact that they have an option and some will choose it is enough to drag down the average.
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JRM’s Rape and Race Quiz (with scoring):
Q1: Recently, Bill Cosby and the University of Virginia have been caught up in rape scandals. How much merit do the claims against them have?
a) The claims against them are sound. Cosby and the UVA rapists should be excoriated and, if possible, jailed. Those who fail to understand this are part of the rape apologist culture, and should be shunned.
b) The claims against them are uncertain. Without being at the scene, it is impossible to form an opinion.
c) The claims against them are spurious. Feminist rhetoric has poisoned everything, and those screaming rape just don’t care about the facts.
d) I have not followed closely enough to know.
Q2: Recently, two high-profile killings of unarmed black men by white police officers have been in the news. Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed by cops. Were the killings improper?
a) The killings were improper and probably race-based. Both police officers should have been prosecuted for murder or at least some level of criminal homicide. The system’s racism allows racist cops to kill with impunity.
b) The claims against them are uncertain. Without being at the scene, it is impossible to form an opinion.
c) The killings were justified. In each case, the criminal was taken down by police for a crime. Race-baiters want to make it otherwise, but the police must be permitted to do their jobs, whatever the race of the criminal.
d) I have not followed closely enough to know.
SCORING: For each answer of (d), score zero points. If you answered both (d), feel free to continue to use your time wisely.
For each (a)(b) or (c) answer, score -20.
For each question in which you said, “What – seriously, what’s wrong with you? Those cases are factually completely different. In one, the allegations of impropriety are just plainly stronger than the other and the fact that you conflate them makes the questioner a terrible person who is ruining society and you should be ashamed,” score 15 points, with five additional points for each obscenity added.
Table of scores:
-20 to -40: You are a contributor to ruining the internet. Please stop. This is why we can’t have nice things.
-15 to +15: You are a less terrible person than most. Still, try to do better.
+20 or higher: You are not a real person on the internet. You must read Drudge and Gawker until your score goes down or you stroke out.
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I got a score (-5) saying I should do better. I could do better either by swearing more or by doing what you implied is using my time unwisely.
Somehow, I don’t think that’s quite what you were getting at.
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I think we should get more points for (d). Not following these things closely enough to know is I think the right choice.
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In “Five Case Studies On Politicization,” Scott mentions that some feminists consider nerds to be men with an alternate gender performance, rejecting masculine pursuits like sports and typical male beauty standards. Is this something a few people just happen to think or is it actually a Thing? If so, where can I read more on this?
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Well, I don’t think that’s a popular viewpoint amongst feminists. For one thing many things associated with nerds are gendered masculine. Logic, science, math, disinterest in ones appearance are all behaviors society stereotypically associates with men. That being said not all masculinities are treated equal in our society.
Mainstream feminists that attack nerds are picking a safe target. Nerds are considered social outcasts in our society and picking on them and their hobbies allows the mainstream to distance themselves from their own misogyny by projecting it on people they consider weirdos. Your average copy of sports illustrated objectifies women just as much if not more than any comic book. But condemning the former would get you twice as much the backlash as the later.
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Actually, plenty of feminists criticize mainstream media, so the implication that feminists strategically avoid criticizing mainstream entertainment is nonsensical. (NFL?) So is the idea that feminists get LESS backlash by criticizing nerd media (Anita Sarkeesian?)
The reason SOME feminists focus on comics is that we are comics fans. (I don’t know you at all, but I bet I’m much more into comics than you are.) The nerd vs feminist framing is dishonest, because so many nerds ARE feminists.
(That said, the SI swimsuit issue imo is less objectionable than some mainstream comic books. It’s my impression that the SI swimsuit issues don’t pretend to be anything other than leering at nearly-naked conventionally pretty women. Similarly, a comic like “Empowered” owns that it’s primarily about T&A.
(But in many mainstream comics, the companies want the stories and characters to have more gravitas than that. In that context, T&A drawings can feel out of place and can work against the story or the character. What’s wrong with criticizing that?
(Of course, there’s more to SI than the swmsuit issue, and I’ve seen people writing about how SI’s coverage of female athletes can be sexist.)
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“Actually, plenty of feminists criticize mainstream media, so the implication that feminists strategically avoid criticizing mainstream entertainment is nonsensical. (NFL?) So is the idea that feminists get LESS backlash by criticizing nerd media (Anita Sarkeesian?) ”
I know their are feminists discussing mainstream media. But their is a difference between a feminist with a mass media audience and a feminist who is writing for peer reviewed articles or niche blogs targeting other feminists. One has way more public visibility than the other. Nor am I saying that there are no feminist nerds or that feminist shouldn’t criticize nerd media. But I see way more highly visible feminists singling out nerd media than anything else. Which gives me the impression that they are pandering to those people who don’t like nerd media.
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Megaemolga:
That’s extremely vague. Are you open to the idea that what you “see” isn’t actually an objective measurement?
The feminist who has the largest mass media audience I can think of is Ellen of “The Ellen Show,” and the main kind of media she subjects to feminist criticism (parody, in her case) is TV commercials.
The next-biggest I can think of Rachel Maddow, and she’s been all over the NFL story this year, so I don’t think you can accuse her of ignoring mainstream entertainments. She does discuss comics now and then, but she’s also clearly a comics reader and a nerdy person herself.
There’s Melissa Harris-Perry, whose webpage makes it pretty easy to see what she’s been doing stories about on her TV show lately. She’s been talking about football and Cosby a lot, and also critiquing how the news media has covered Ferguson. There’s no recent discussion of either comics or video games.
Maybe I’m forgetting someone, but it seems to me that those are the three feminists with the largest mass media audiences, and all of them criticize mainstream stuff more than nerd stuff.
The feminists who pay the most attention to nerd stuff aren’t on TV; they’re bloggers, like the Mary Sue. And those folks are nerds themselves.
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You have a point there I don’t watch much television anymore so I don’t know whats going on there. Most of the news I get nowadays comes from mainstream news aggregate sites and it’s mostly there were I see the nerd bashing. I’ve read The Mary Sue but I never considered The Mary Sue as nerd bashing. They criticize nerd media for being sexist. But they usually come of as even handed and unbiased. They don’t use terms like “neckbeard” and they don’t accuse all male nerds of being basement dwelling misogynist MRA losers who have never encountered a real women in their life. But their specifically targeting nerds and more specifically targeting female nerds. Their not a general audience websites like Time that’s frequently read by people who aren’t nerds which is what I would consider mainstream.
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I think this emerged from some discussion on Tumblr, and there is some truth to it, by which I mean, you can look at nerd masculinity and see how it differs from jock masculinity and say, “Look, that’s like a different gender expression.” On the other hand, in the SCC thread a number of nerd-identified people said, “Nope, that don’t fit me at all.” And if you look around nerd-space, like among popular video games, you see images of hyper-masculinity being sold, which suggests to me that (some) nerds hunger for a raw masculine expression but cannot quite pull it off.
In other words, they may be fat dudes with beards, but in their dreams they are muscle-guy-power-rah! Crush and kill! And YO they get the bitches!
Which is a bit off-putting to many women, especially when we look at the actual guys.
So it’s like a social train wreck.
######
On the other hand, some dudes love colorful animated ponies.
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This is so obvious that I hate saying it, but it comes down to, “not all nerds are the same.” Not all nerds are male; of male nerds, not all have alternative gender presentations.
But it seems to me that I know a lot of guy nerds who are self-consciously gender-bending in their presentations and/or in their attitudes towards gender. (And some of them, by the way, are “fat guys with beards.”) Not a majority by any means, but enough so it’s a definite “type” that seems familiar to me when I meet someone like that.
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I like how everyone in this 1901 NYTimes article about a 19th-century trans man politician in New York City uses the correct pronoun for him except the reporter, and even they slip into correct gendering in the middle.
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Oh wow, this is simply amazing.
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There was a time when trans dudes got decent press compared to queers in general (using modern language here). But then, something shifted and the media became obsessed w/ trans women and basically ignored trans guys.
Which, trans guys maybe should not complain cuz although we gals got much press it was relentless terrible and maybe being ignored wasn’t so bad. Which, I mean, do they really want their own *Myra Breckinridge* and *Silence of the Lambs*? Cuz I advise against it.
Anyway, It was getting more balanced in recent years, although with Janet Mock and Laverne Cox it seems tides are shifting toward trans gals again.
Naturally both groups bicker and blame endlessly over this, cuz that’s how we roll.
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What is a biologically realistic solution to the problem of the imbalance between men’s and women’s sex drives (the fact that men want to have sex more often and with more partners than women)?
My considerations so far:
– Monogamous marriage: the wife is probably gonna end up having sex way more often than she feels like
– Polygynous marriage: women might *really hate* having to share a man if they both love him; it leaves a whole bunch of low-status men without partners, and hence disgruntled, and hence possibly dangerous (someone exemplified modern Islamic states)
– Encouraging more men to “turn to each other in that case” i.e. become bisexual: ha, not gonna work
– Encouraging women to be more lustful and men to be more chaste: first part might work (women having higher erotic plasticity), second part probably not
– Same as above but with hormones (testosterone): might backfire in ways that I, as a non-doctor, cannot realize — endocrine disorders
– Disregarding the desires of men on this matter: apparently the status quo, mostly okay for most women, seems to make men to turn to compulsive masturbation and porn, and we’d really like an improvement on that
– Disregarding the desires of women on this matter: basically legalizing rape and normalizing sexual harassment and women being pressured/deceived into sex; whoever proposes this is a horrible person
I’m stumped.
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I think increased bisexuality is probably more feasible than you suggest (seems to have been much more common at certain times in history). Also if you’re trying to be comprehensive you should include options like measures to skew the gender ratio at birth, eugenic selection on sex drives, castrating lots of infant males (hey, there’s precedent that other sorts of male genital mutilation are apparently fine), virtual reality porn, increased (possibly subsidised) prostitution, etc.
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You’re a bit late to the party, but I’ll reply anyway.
What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Are you hoping to pick a one-size-fits-all solution and implement it via dictatorial decree? I think your idea of the problem is oversimplified.
It’s not true that every man has a higher sex drive than every woman. Some couples have the opposite issue. Some people are asexual. Some have a higher sex drive than they would prefer. Some are happy to have sex, but can’t or won’t initiate it.
Likewise with your solutions — some people are happy with polyamory, others are strictly monogamous; some have a flexible orientation and libido, others don’t; some want to experiment with various substances, others are wary; some would rather compromise, others would rather break up.
I think the real solution is to provide the information and support individuals need to optimize their lives, and relax some of the legal and social barriers that currently limit their options.
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Most Islamic states are monogamous in practice. Polygynous marriage is allowed, but the rates of it across the Muslim world are, IIRC, something like 3%.
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I believe the problem is traditionally solved by prostitution.
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>– Monogamous marriage: the wife is probably gonna end up having sex way more often than she feels like
How extremely terrible. Whereas the husband will end up working way more than he feels like. How extremely terrible as well!
Monogamy disregards both the natural inclinations of men and women. It’s kinda like sexual socialism; everyone gets a piece of the pie, but isn’t allowed any more, and has to do things they don’t like to get it.
>– Polygynous marriage: women might *really hate* having to share a man if they both love him; it leaves a whole bunch of low-status men without partners, and hence disgruntled, and hence possibly dangerous (someone exemplified modern Islamic states)
Valid concerns.
In addition, it might shift the problem the other way – the man’s wives wanting more sex that he wants to provide – especially with older men.
>– Encouraging more men to “turn to each other in that case” i.e. become bisexual: ha, not gonna work
Indeed. Even if it did work, it would be bred out of the genepool somewhat swiftly.
>– Encouraging women to be more lustful and men to be more chaste: first part might work (women having higher erotic plasticity), second part probably not
How is this different from monogamy? As in, traditional monogamy, where it’s sinful to refuse your spouse’s request for sex.
>– Same as above but with hormones (testosterone): might backfire in ways that I, as a non-doctor, cannot realize — endocrine disorders
Also problematic in that you’re basically having a drug-based society.
>– Disregarding the desires of men on this matter: apparently the status quo, mostly okay for most women, seems to make men to turn to compulsive masturbation and porn, and we’d really like an improvement on that
Mhm.
>– Disregarding the desires of women on this matter: basically legalizing rape and normalizing sexual harassment and women being pressured/deceived into sex; whoever proposes this is a horrible person
Wait, what? Legalizing rape? What? How? Every patriarchal society I’ve heard of considers rape a serious no-no, if not a capital offense.
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Only outside of marriage, though.* So, the actual no-no seems to be not “rape” in the modern sense of “sex without consent”, but in the older senses of “encroaching on another man’s sexual territory” or “rendering another man’s daughter unmarriageable”.
* Bonus activity: Look up your favourite countries on this handy wiki page.
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Hmm. Yes. I suppose if they expand/change the definition of rape, then suddenly you would get rapists where there previously were none. Thanks for the link.
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I was just reading this: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/toys-are-more-divided-by-gender-now-than-they-were-50-years-ago/383556/
which claims that “During the 1980s, gender-neutral advertising receded”
which made me think of this statistic: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp
which shows that CS degree attendance by females peaked in the mid-80s.
Is there some deeper cultural shift going on in the 80s? Is there more evidence of this?
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Possible partial cultural reason: personal computers started being sold in the late 70s and were marketed as boy/guy toys.
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Suppose I say: “I know that Jane says she’s a woman, but in real life she’s a mentally ill man who had her dick chopped off, got breast implants, and pumped herself full of artificial male hormones. This is not the same thing.” I feel this is in the spirit of the truth-absent-malice defense in libel: how would you know if someone is trying to make what they consider a serious point that people ought to agree with, or just piss of some group and their allies? Answer: check if he is polite where possible.
I think Ozy would agree. However, it occurs to me that actual traps might prefer that someone who felt this way say “John” and “he,” for whatever reason. Is this so? Please don’t answer this specific question unless you are an actual trans person or reporting the opinion of one, but otherwise reply.
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You are unlikely to get good answers to comments involving being gratuitously an asshole (viz. ‘traps’)
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“It is precisely because opposing condoms is such a horrendous decision that it makes such a good signal.”
Why do you apparently think that opposing condoms is horrendous?
(I was directed here for general flamewar topics, since it’s not really on-topic of the Toxoplasmosis post, just a digression.)
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That isn’t about race or gender, which are the usual forbidden topics in Scott’s open threads. However, here’s my interpretation:
If your opposition to condoms takes the form of declaring that using condoms is both sinful and useless, and you happen to be a religious authority, the end result is many unwanted pregnancies and, more importantly, STDs — some of which are deadly and incurable. Example: 20th century, the Catholic church, AIDS in Africa.
Since Scott is a utilitarian consequentialist, to him any intentional actions that predictably lead to a lot of human suffering are horrenduous actions.
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Interesting.
How does that argument mesh with conservation of risk? Because I don’t see STDs being a solved problem (in the way that penicilin solved other diseases) even in places where condom use is widespread. STDs are primarily a problem for people who have sex outside of marriage (and those who have sex with people who have sex outside of marriage); the additional sense of security (regardless of how effective it actually is, and how skillful the user is in applying it) seems to encourage people to have even more extramarital sex, thereby spreading STDs even more.
I would definitely like to find some stats of STD prevalence by denomination/lack thereof. Know of anything such?
AIDS in Africa… Africa is Africa. The less said about Africa, the better, IMO.
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AngryDrake: empirically, making condoms more available in a given area does not significantly increase the amount of sex people are having and does significantly increase the fraction of the time people are using condoms. (eg: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447877/ )
So, when you say “the additional sense of security seems to encourage people to have even more extramarital sex”, you are simply incorrect. Your armchair theory disagrees with reality.
“AIDS in Africa… Africa is Africa. The less said about Africa, the better, IMO.”
… why? do you not… care about people in Africa suffering horribly? if so, I fear we may have too much inferential distance to productively converse.
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