Race and gender goes here. Other stuff goes elsewhere.
The thread is unmoderated. Read at your own risk. (Yes, that means you can make motte-and-bailey comparisons. >.<) Banned commenters may comment but they have to wait for me to dig them out of spam.
We have gone three (3) threads without a proposal of genocide.
Though we know we should be wary,
Still we venture someplace scary.
Tropes and values we debate —
Gamergate, Gamergate, Gamergate!
This is the GamerGate subthread, continued from OT#5.
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Oops. I overlooked this post and wrote a new top level post with gamergate links.
Not the end of the world I suppose :)
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Oh! And I was just going to invite you over here from the previous thread :)
Thanks for your comments so far, by the way — I was hoping to find a few respectable opponents of Sarkeesian & McIntosh around here.
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Question 1: Do “political” opinions, such as opinions about the portrayal of certain groups, have a place in game reviews?
Forlorn Hopes said:
Of course. But to some people, the tropes and themes used by a game is a factor in that decision. I get the impression that many opponents of “political” criticism view politics as some alien thing that evil people pretend to care about.
Secondly, as games are becoming a more mature and more important medium, they are taken more seriously. And people do apply cultural and political criticism to older, more “serious” media like books and film — all the time! But, if I wrote a blog post complaining that both major female characters of Interstellar get stereotypically hysterical, I wouldn’t expect to receive rape threats from the fans of Christopher Nolan (I haven’t tried it, though — I could be off base).
Question 2: Is arguing against the use of certain tropes harmful to games?
I’m also in favour of diversity :) From watching the Tropes vs Women series, it seems that some tropes are rather overused, and it would be nice if game developers came up with something different a bit more often. Also, I perceived the videos as a message addressed to game developers and gamers (“hey, could we do less of X, and more of Y?”), not to the general public (“ban this evil stuff!”). They don’t look much like the anti-gay-marriage ad sponsored by Brendan Eich, for instance.
Question 3: Can tropes be harmful?
I don’t think games cause violence. But can they influence unconscious beliefs? That seems pretty plausible.
Yes, that would be a bad game from a mainstream Christian perspective.
But I had a different kind of impact in mind — you know those silly cleaning supply ads aimed at housewives, where the husband is portrayed as a bumbling oaf who can’t be trusted to do anything right? Now, imagine growing up in a world where 80% of all stories — in books, comics, movies, TV series, ads, games — don’t have any competent male characters. A little boy in that world might come to believe that only women should ever attempt to do anything, since men are too dumb to do things right. Or else, if he questions that unfair stereotype, he’ll have to conclude that many other people either consider it true or simply don’t care.
Question 4: Is it possible to satisfy the critics of game tropes without creating a dystopia?
I don’t think it’s a choice between a) implementing every suggestion voiced by every critic or b) declaring all critics The Enemy of All Games and Gamers Forever.
Why can’t we let the people who dislike a trope present their views, and then let the fans of the trope (if any) defend it with reasonable arguments? What’s wrong with opening a dialogue about these things?
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Re: question 4.
It seems like discussion surrounding this question goes off the rails at about the same place that discussions of free speech often go off the rails. Namely, people mistake criticism of a particular trope for calling for that trope to be banned forever, in the same way that people often mistake disagreement with a certain form of expression and/or political position for advocating that the contentious speech should literally be illegal.
It seems perfectly possible to point out that a particular trope is overused/boring/likely to alienate a significant portion of people who would otherwise be interested in playing the game, without this being a call for the Imaginary Gaming Quality Control Board to immediately ban all games that contain said trope. But this seems kind of counterintuitive to me. Certain kinds of criticism can be used to shut down creativity, sure, but it’s equally possible for criticism to point out new ideas or ways of approaching the material that haven’t been tried before.
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(re: Question 1) The common argument is that since criticism of tropes is much more subjective than criticism of framerate, resolution, animation quality and gameplay, they shouldn’t impact core game ratings. However, that doesn’t mean games shouldn’t be evaluated on multiple axes.
Christ Centered Gamer is a perfect example: they rate games on a game mechanics scale and a Christianity scale. So despite their ideological slant, they’re able to recognize (and award a high score to) a game’s core mechanics while also slamming it for blasphemy, satanism and depictions of pre-marital sex.
If games are going to be judged on new hard-to-quantify axes, like their depiction of privilege, sexism, etc, that’s fine: just add a second number to the bottom of the review. Don’t try to judge ideology and technical merit on the same scale.
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“people mistake criticism of a particular trope for calling for that trope to be banned forever,”
People don’t have to be calling for bans for such criticism to be a problem. The typical situation is that there’s a trope which legitimately happens, but also either can happen by chance, or is vague enough that a lot of things can fit it, or both. This means that the only way to avoid criticism is not only to not deliberately use the trope, but also to retreat from even creating a normal work.
This may be easier to understand with an example. Suppose some group complains about damsels in distress. This sounds like a reasonable complaint; there are, after all, lots of damsels in distress in works. But it *also* means that
— anyone who wants to not have his works be slammed as sexist can’t just be egalitarian with respect to who is in distress. To avoid being called a sexist pig, he has to bend over backwards to make *only* men be in distress. Equality will merely result in being called a sexist half the time.
— if the standard for considering a character to be a “damsel in distress” is loose enough, it becomes a way for the SJWs to call any work they want sexist, merely by selective complaints. (And they may or may not consciously notice that they are applying the standards much more loosely to works they don’t like.)
Of course, this is not limited to games and can be a problem with all sorts of works.
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–> “If the standard for considering a character to be a ‘damsel in distress’ is loose enough, it becomes a way for SJWs to call any work they want sexist, merely by selective complaints.”
Sure. But the penalty here, as I understand it, is, “some people on the internet called your work sexist, possibly unfairly.” Games developers, and creators of all kinds, have been dealing with people on the internet claiming that their gameplay was boring/their graphics were bad/their plots were boring, possibly unfairly, since the invention of reviews, so I’m honestly confused why some people are in arms about this specific type of criticism.
Like, obviously when you get a situation where people are being doxxed or harassed or whatever over perceived sexism in games, that’s toxic and unacceptable, but that also seems to me to be well outside the realm of actual criticism, and the solution isn’t to condemn criticism, but to condemn the behaviors that are actually unacceptable. (Likewise, if you see standards being unfairly applied by critics, you might condemn the critics’ intellectual dishonesty.)
(Tangentially: what I think you could argue persuasively is that widespread acceptance of this type of broad-strokes criticism tends to make inexperienced creators–usually people who are just starting out with ideas for stories or games–feel anxious about their portrayals of gender, race, etc, possibly to the point of paralysis about how to include these things in their works. I think that this is something that observably happens, and I’m not quite sure what the best way to fix it is. It seems to me like a lot of the criticism of the criticism of sexism in games is equivocating between wanting to talk about the effect of criticism on actual games production, and the effect of internalizing the belief that you are sexist and sexists are evil on people who are just starting out as creators. And maybe these should be two separate conversations.)
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Do gamers consider political criticism to be evil and alien? Evil no, alien probably. It’s only natural that it will appear alien when nearly all political criticism of games comes from a different worldview. Imagine if all the political criticism of art you read was written by right wing bible belt conservatives; maybe you wouldn’t be against political criticism but you’d think it was weird.
(I’m making the assumption that you’re some form of left wing)
And yeah, some people do care about tropes and themes when buying a game. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is more a historical accident than anything, games journalism that used to cater to the non-political buyer became political; which left them with a vocal fanbase wanting the old way back. Well that and the response to this reasonable request has typically been quite condensing.
I have no idea where that condensation comes from. I’d guess it’s blue tribe games reviewers trying to signal tribal loyalty extra hard to escape the stigma of video games and be accepted by mainstream blue tribe. Then again it might just that there’s a bunch of high status people whit smug attitudes setting the tone. I don’t really know much, except that Ben Kuchera is incompetent (google his views on Tetris if you feel like a laugh)
I think what you’re looking at is probably just a messy transition period until the two communities cut ties and retreat into their own spaces – that’s already happening tribe moving towards youtube, arguably the single most influential reviewer for PC games is Total Biscuit who’s politically quite grey tribe. It’s a shame really, it’s a big lost opportunity for blue and grey to have discussions.
I think that if your blog post reached far enough you probably would get rape threats. Heck, just today there was a report about death threats from fans of the Kim Kardashian game – that’s about as far from the gamer culture as you can get.
However I think there’s two reasons why books and film aren’t quite a fair comparison.
1) Book and film criticism comes from a verity of different viewpoints. Most people who’re interested can find criticism from their tribe to read, and you’re relatively unlikely to accidentally stumble on criticism that overtly or implicitly insults your tribe’s values.
2) This is the big one: The Jack Thompson Reflex. There have been genuine attempts to censor gaming as a whole in most gamers lifetime, I remember reading about Jack Thompson, being opposed to him was part of my childhood identity. Anything that says that a game or a trope can be morally bad will trigger the Jack Thompson Reflex. Though as I said in my last post, it’s not just people accidentally touching a nerve, they were explicitly defending censorship.
In my opinion any gaming critic who doesn’t understand that is defacto incompetent. Sure you can argue that the reflex is outdated or wrong and that tropes can be inherently bad. I’ll disagree with you but it’s a reasonable thing to debate. But I think that before you criticise a culture/a culture’s cultural artificats you really should make the effort to understand that culture first; and that if you just look at it through the lenses of your own culture and sneer at everyone who looks at it from the native culture’s point of view you’ll end up creating something like gamergate.
Sure. Gamers have been arguing for that for years, we just did it our way.
It’s in a quantum state of being both. I would describe it with the following parable: A priest preaches to the choir every Saturday, then one day an atheist organisation decides they should expose themselves to a different point of view. However the priest has no knowledge of how to talk to atheists and recites one of his usual sermons.
I think that Anita’s did intend her videos to be for an audience of gamers and game developers, but she’s got absolutely no idea how gamers think or how to talk to them. Therefore it gives a strong impression of someone outside the community talking to people outside the community. Jack Thompson Reflex. And because this point is too important not to make at every oppotunity. The Feminist Frequency team has made tweets which are “ban this evil stuff!”.
Burden of proof’s on you :)
I’m not really qualified to interpret psychology studies, if you find some maybe try them over at Slate Star Codex.
Last thread your phrasing said that the trope can be bad even if it’s just one game ;)
Anyway; Like I said earlier gamers have been calling for diversity and better writing for a long time. However we’ve been doing it our way, by promoting the creation of more stuff we like and never ever saying the stuff we don’t like is morally wrong. Case in point – Kickstarter, the moment we had an opportunity to vote with our wallets millions went into generas considered commercially unviable.
Gamers and feminists both want diversity and if the feminists critiquing games took the time to understand how our culture worked instead of just poking the triggers we wouldn’t have this huge fight over something that we 95% agree on anyway.
From my point of view it’s my side that’s willing to open a dialogue – and I’m strongly pro dialogue while also acknowledging that if you want to initiate a dialogue with another culture you really should understand it’s values first.
Actually, I issue you a friendly challenge: find a single example of Anita debating her critics? I haven’t found one yet.
The trolls and nutcases you see attacking Anita are being used as a Weak Man (thanks for coining that Scott) in place of actual debate. Not just by Anita but also by gaming journalists. If there was debate to being with there probably would never have been any gamergate.
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Now to reply to the people who replied while I was composing that lengthy reply.
@bem
I considered that for a while, but then in December we had two incidents of genuine attempted censorship and the people who were “criticising a trope without calling for it to be banned” started turning around en mass and supporting the censorship. There’s links in the previous open thread.
@'(){:;}’ echo wat (@voidfraction)
That’s the common gamergate talking point – though I think the fact that Christ Centered Gamer openly acknowledge the fact that their Christian viewpoint is just one viewpoint and respect different opinions is just as much of a reason why gamergate likes them so much.
@bem – second post
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to compare being called sexist to people saying your plot is boring. Your last paragraph is illuminating on this, you generally don’t get people genuinely afraid to the point of paralysis that their work might be called boring.
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@Forlorn Hopes-
Do you have the links available? It’s likely to take me some time to read through the comments on the previous thread, which I wasn’t following at the time.
If people are equivocating between criticism of games (or media in general) and outright supporting censorship, that seems remarkably short-sighted. But it still doesn’t follow to me that criticism that doesn’t advocate censorship is a bad thing. Or are you just arguing that a lot more people are actually explicitly supporting censorship than a reasonable person who hasn’t been following the minutiae of the debate might assume?
Don’t you get people paralyzed by the idea that their plot is boring? My direct experience is in writing, not games, but people being paralyzed by the idea that their work is unoriginal and cliched seems fairly common over here.
But, for the sake of argument, I’ll accept that your point is true, and the anxiety that people feel about being accused of being sexist is qualitatively different from anxiety about making things that are boring. What should we do about it? One option, I suppose, is to declare that people should politely not mention when they think things are sexist, for fear of causing others distress. This seems to me like a bad solution (also it ignores the problem that many people also find encountering sexism distressing, and it’s pretty impossible to optimize for both of these preferences).
My knee-jerk reaction re: other possible solutions looks something like: encourage open dialogues about sexism (or, you know, whatever a given critic’s pet topic is), discourage ad hominem attacks and harassment, whichever side of the aisle they’re coming from, and promote more complex arguments, because it seems like a lot of people have internalized “X thing that you like/made is sexist” to mean, “You, personally, are deliberately being evil,” and that’s really not helping anyone get what they want. But my solution still basically looks like, “People should discuss this openly, preferably while being civil to each other,”* and I get the feeling that your proposed solution is maybe somewhat different?
*also, making this actually happen is frequently a problem with any two conflicting schools of criticism, so it’s not necessarily extremely realistic. My preference is pretty generally for fewer restrictions on speech, so I’m going to tend to be in favor of letting people keep talking even if they’re being assholes.
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“it seems like a lot of people have internalized “X thing that you like/made is sexist” to mean, “You, personally, are deliberately being evil,” and that’s really not helping anyone get what they want.”
I don’t think the message is usually “anyone who does this is intrinsically evil”. But it often is “anyone who does this, and then doesn’t obey me, is intrinsically evil”. If someone calls your work boring, tells you to change it, and you say “screw you, I’m keeping it as it is, I don’t have to to pay attention to anything you’re saying”, that’s acceptable. If someone calls your work sexist, tells you to change it, and you give the same response, *then* you’re evil.
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“for the sake of argument, I’ll accept that your point is true, and the anxiety that people feel about being accused of being sexist is qualitatively different from anxiety about making things that are boring. What should we do about it”
If I go around claiming that some movie is boring because it has a hero in it and heroes are boring, nobody will treat that as a condemnation of the work in general and everyone will recognize that it is based on one particular person’s tastes. But if I go around saying that some work is sexist because a woman is killed in it, and works which kill women are sexist, huge numbers of people will use that to condemn the work, particularly if I respond “that’s only your opinion; me, I like it this way”.
Actually giving accusations of “that’s sexist” only as much credence as accusations of “that’s boring” is something we certainly can do, and try to get others to do.
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(Please ignore the pronouns in that. Obviously it doesn’t make sense for “I” to refer both to the author and the critic in the same sentence. I wish we could edit posts here.)
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Huh. It seems like we have different baselines about what people’s probable reactions to accusations of sexism are? Because to me, “This work is sexist because a woman is killed in it,” minus other argument, sounds like a statement that I could pretty easily ignore as not credible, and for you, it sounds like it isn’t.
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@bem
Here’s the links I had last thread – they’re specifically about FeministFrequency because that’s the context it came up in last thread but there not the only one who supported censorship.
These need context: Some were after Target Australia pulled GTA from it’s shelves and others were after steam temporally pulled Hatred. I’d strongly suggest doing a ctrl-f for these links on the previous thread to get the full context.
[1]https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/540442294483042304
[2]https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/545130387031068672
[3]https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/525781140943011841
[4]https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/525793436025118721
[5]http://imgur.com/CbeLKkV,lsGMdwy#0
I agree it really does seem short sighted, yet it turned out everyone was right to be suspicious.
Maybe it’s because supporting censorship is controversial and people don’t notice the reasonable criticisms.
Maybe the only people interested in critiquing games at all are fans – who say nice things – and people who have a real chip on their shoulder – who’re pro censorship.
I don’t know. But short sighted people can see clearly for (to mix metaphors) an arbitarialy defined period of time called “the short term”. That viewpoint will probably go away after non-censorous and competent critics arrive on the scene and gain prominence.
Until then, it’s a cultural value that’s formed by and vindicated by history. You don’t have to like it, but if you want to critique games I recommend not poking the trigger.
To me it seems obvious.
Calling someone a sexist genuinely hurts poeple. Hurting people is wrong in most circumstances. So don’t do it unless what they’ve written or programmed is so bad that hurting them is a lesser evil than not criticising them.
Besides, I think there’s a lot more value in having a discussion on “what to do” instead of “what not to do”. Discussing the bad stuff and why it’s bad is less useful than discussing the good stuff and what everyone can do to copy it. For starters, it’s easier to follow advice that says “do x” than piece dozens of different “don’t to x” and see what’s left.
Gamers criticised games for being uncreative for years and got absolutely nowhere, kickstarting games and supporting creative indie devs worked wonders.
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@bem
Here’s a petition with 48,809 signatures saying exactly that, it was successful too and got a game removed from a store.
https://www.change.org/p/target-withdraw-grand-theft-auto-5-this-sickening-game-encourages-players-to-commit-sexual-violence-and-kill-women
In GTAV there is not one single woman who the player is required to kill: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/12/11/you-dont-have-to-kill-prostitutes-in-gta-v/
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Forlorn Hope:
Just to clarify, do you object to the act of petitioning Target not to carry an offensive work; regardless of how offensive the work actually is?
Or do you think that such a petition can be legitimate if the work is genuinely offensive, but you deny that GTA5 is genuinely offensive?
* * *
The petition you linked doesn’t claim “exactly” that “this work is sexist because a woman is killed in it.”
Rather, it says things like this:
“It’s a game that encourages players to murder women for entertainment. The incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get ‘health’ points […]
“This misogynistic GTA 5 literally makes a game of bashing, killing and horrific violence against women. It also links sexual arousal and violence.”
So, contrary to your claim, they’re not saying that GTA5 is sexist because at some point in the game a female character dies. Rather, they are saying that it is misogynistic because the game uses in-game rewards to encourage players to bash, kill and abuse multiple female characters.
That seems like a reasonable argument to me, unless GTA5 actually presents male and female characters identically.
You note that in GTA5, players aren’t “required” to kill the female characters. But the petition never claims that players are required to kill the female characters. You’re dodging their argument, not answering it.
(I also wonder if this is an argument that actually makes a difference to you. Suppose there were a few female characters who had to be killed in order to win a game – would you really approve of a petition like this targeting such a game?)
The petition goes on:
“We have firsthand experience of this kind of sexual violence. It haunts us, and we’ve been trying to rebuild our lives ever since. Just knowing that women are being portrayed as deserving to be sexually used by men and potentially murdered for sport and pleasure – to see this violence that we lived through turned into a form of entertainments is sickening and causes us great pain and harm.”
This strikes me as being extremely similar to claims that have been made against feminism by Scott Aaronson and others: Party A is saying to Party B, “the things you are saying causes us great pain and harm,” and party B therefore should either shut up or at least stop saying those things.
The petition also makes some empirical claims that games like GTA5 encourage real-world violence against either women in general, or against female prostitutes in particular. I doubt that these empirical claims can be backed up with real evidence.
* * *
People have a free speech right to ask Target not to carry a particular work. Target has a free speech right to choose not to carry a particular work.
I’m very distressed by things like the anti-Orson Scott Card petitions, because those seemed like a blacklist – “because this person has stated a political opinion I disagree with, he should not be able to make a living.” Blacklists are anti-free speech, because they are an attempt to create an atmosphere of fear and retribution for speech.
However, I’m not convinced that objecting to a particular work because one finds that particular work offensive falls into the same category. In fact, saying that people cannot or should not object to a work they find offensive, seems itself an anti-free-speech attitude.
(Note: I am using “free speech” in a broad sense, not in a legal sense.)
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” to me, “This work is sexist because a woman is killed in it,” minus other argument, sounds like a statement that I could pretty easily ignore as not credible”
You are obviously not familiar with the Women in Refrigerators list. It’s receded into the mists of time somewhat, but people still talk about it occasionally. You can have a man and a woman killed at the same time, from the same cause, doing the same sort of thing and the woman still goes in the list. And that list is taken utterly seriously.
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I’m no one important, just a random gamer; but, FWIW, here is my take on the questionnaire:
> Question 1: Do “political” opinions, such as opinions about the portrayal of certain groups, have a place in game reviews?
Absolutely, but they need to be very strongly segregated into their own section (apparently, this is what Christ Centered Gamer is doing). The reason for this is that we humans are incredibly bad at separating the following two statements: a). “this game expresses political opinions I personally disagree with”, b). “this game does not express a sufficient number of political opinions that I agree with”, and c). “this game expresses political opinions that are objectively evil”. The confusion between these three statements is what usually leads to mass censorship. We have seen it happen to books, comics, movies, and we have seen some attempts to censor games, as well (in case of e.g. GTA, successful attempts). Censorship can severely damage or even destroy an art form. As gamers, we happen to care about games as an art form, hence we are more concerned about games censorship than most other people.
> Question 2: Is arguing against the use of certain tropes harmful to games?
Yes. More generally, arguing for suppression of certain tropes is harmful to any medium, because it reduces the palette options that creators have access to when they craft works in that medium. On the other hand, arguing in favor of more tropes is usually good, for the same reason — which is why I would support statements such as, “we need more games with main characters who are female”, but oppose statements such as, “we need fewer games with damsels in distress”. In general, the correct answer to the problem of “there is not enough art promoting the values I like” is always “make more art”, not “influence or outright coerce other people to stop producing their art”.
> Question 3: Can tropes be harmful?
In theory, yes. But who decides what is harmful ? From your perspective, the answer is, “I do, Christians do not”. From their perspective, the answer is “we do, Nita does not”. Until we can all agree on who is the ultimate arbiter of what is harmful, the answer is, once again, “go ahead and make a great game that promotes your views”, and not “tell other people to stop making games that promote their views” — because, in the absence of the Morality Oracle, the second option leads us to a world where no one can express any opinion at all.
> Question 4: Is it possible to satisfy the critics of game tropes without creating a dystopia? Why can’t we let the people who dislike a trope present their views, and then let the fans of the trope (if any) defend it with reasonable arguments? What’s wrong with opening a dialogue about these things?
There’s nothing wrong with it, and we are having such a dialogue right now ! However, what happens when critics present their views, and we have a reasonable debate, and the critics fail to convince their opponents ? What’s the next step ?
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Yeah, I agree that supporting or crowd funding stuff that people would like to see made is more likely to produce creativity than isolated criticism.
Where I disagree is this:
>Calling someone a sexist genuinely hurts poeple. Hurting people is wrong in most circumstances. So don’t do it unless what they’ve written or programmed is so bad that hurting them is a lesser evil than not criticising them.
Experiencing sexism also hurts people. We could argue for a long time about what level of sexism, exactly, hurts people more than being accused of sexism (accurately or inaccurately), but the probable result of this policy seems to be to a) put the burden of proof on people who have been hurt by sexism to justify how much they’ve been hurt before it becomes acceptable to say anything about it, and b) promote a general culture where people cannot say that they’ve been hurt for fear of causing harm to others. This seems like a bad outcome to me.
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@Jiro-
Eh, I’ve heard of Women in Refrigerators, but I didn’t realize that someone was keeping a running list of every woman ever killed in a piece of media. I thought that it was more making a point about a general trend, though, where women tend to be killed to motivate the male character to do something specific, and then stay dead, while men tend to be killed onscreen (on…page?) as the culmination of their own story arc, and then improbably turn up alive later. Which seems to me to be a slightly different point than “a woman was killed in this work,” and also pretty clearly a case where the issue is overuse of a trope that wouldn’t be particularly terrible in isolation.
But if the criteria for inclusion is literally, “a woman was killed in this work,” then I stand by my assertion that that does not seem like a plausible demonstration of sexism.
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It was a running list of women in comics for a while, but it’s quieted down by now. I don’t think it was ever extended to all media. However, you do still see characters being referred to as “women in refrigerators” in any media on the grounds that they are female and that they were killed for plot purposes.
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> Question 1: Do “political” opinions, such as opinions about the portrayal of certain groups, have a place in game reviews?
Briefly scanning the comments here, and a ctrl+f finds no hits for “metacritic”, which tells me an important part of this conversation might be invisible to outsiders.
Metacritic is a review aggregation system that has a great deal of penetration in the video games market. It collects and averages review scores from across the field of Games Journalism, gives a (weighted) average of the score, and then publishes that averaged score and links to all the reviews. I check it every time I’m about to purchase a game I don’t know much about. Metacritic refuses to describe the actual process they use for calculating the scores since that would make it much easier for developers to corrupt the system, but it’s well-known that “big name” journalists are given more weight than small fry.
Metacritic cuts two ways. First, there’s the obvious consumer impact. I’m much less likely to buy a game with a 7.5 on metacritic than I am a game with a 9.5. It is generally believed in the industry that metacritic ratings have afairly direct correlation to sales.
Second, for this very reason, metacritic ratings are used as a contract variable within the games industry itself. “if your game receives an 8.5 or higher metacritic rating, your studio will be paid a bonus of suchandsuch millions.” That bonus money can easily be the difference between making another game, and everyone getting fired and the studio shutting down.
If you are a “big time” games journalist, you have a measurable amount of power over whether studios survive. If you are colluding with other journalists in private to shape your reviews along an ideological axis, that power is magnified greatly. If you are colluding in private to make sure that the journalist pool ITSELF conforms to an ideological axis, the magnification is itself magnified.
As a dev, I do not want to live in a world where my success or failure hinges on conforming to the ideological bias of a small clique living in san fran.
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” men tend to be killed onscreen (on…page?) as the culmination of their own story arc, and then improbably turn up alive later.”
Or, y’know, by the hundreds as nameless mooks to be overcome by the hero.
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Is that a bad thing?
To me that just sounds like another form of innocent until proven guilty, I’m all in favour of that.
Besides, even if they can prove how much they’ve been hurt. I’m not sure that should be a justification for hurting others in return.
Take my previous example of a radical cleric who’s genuinely harmed by positive depictions of homosexuality. Should he have the right to hurt someone with powerful social accusations because they wrote a positive gay charachter? Obviously not, so why is it any different when someone we agree with is making the accusation?
I guess what it comes down to is that what hurts someone in a work of media is very personal. If you make a moral principle to avoid harm and apply it fairly there’s almost no art left – even the standard mantra of “punch up” is ridiculously Ameria-centric.
The only practical solution is for everyone to take responsibility for their safety and avoid the stuff that will hurt them. I mean, the most obvious example of harm I can think of is a kid having nightmares after watching a horror film – but we didn’t ban horror, we just put age ratings on it.
@anonymousCoward
The reason I don’t bring up meta critic is because I don’t consider it a game reviewers responsibility to adjust their review because of meta critic.
That said, meta critic must die.
P.S. One of my comments is currently in moderation. It was a response too
And linked to a successful petition to ban GTA5 from Target Australia because there is the potential for a women to be killed in it. Which is an even broader standard than “a woman is killed in it”
(There is absolutely zero requirement for the player to kill women in GTA5)
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To “hurt someone with powerful social accusations” means to criticize them, correct?
With the exception of libel laws (narrowly defined), yes, they should have that right. To say otherwise is to be in favor of censorship.
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I’m referring to criticisms that due to our cultural context have a powerful negative effect on a person’s reputation, and often also on their self esteem.
Criticism like “your plot was cliche” wouldn’t do it. “Your book was racist” would.
Note also that I was replying to bem. bem has graciously agreed to accept, for sake of argument, my point that there’s a qualitative difference between accusations of poor plot and accusations of *isms. My posts should be read in that context.
All that said you absolutely do have a right to make those criticisms and I will strongly defend that. However I also think it’s virtuous not to make them. Just like you have a right to insult someone’s physical appearance, but you shouldn’t do that either.
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Well this is weird, my post got out of moderation (that’s good) but somehow Ampersands reply has appeared above several posts created before it (that’s weird). Anyway I should respond :)
I’m against the act of petitioning regardless of how offensive a work is. Though my real complaint is that Target agreed with the petition – I’m happy to politely disagree with anyone calling for censorship, when they actually get censorship that’s worrying.
While the claim isn’t “exactly” that, if you understand GTA5 it really does come down to the fact that GTA5 includes women.
There is no difference at all in how you can interact with male and female characters in GTA; prostitutes do have a unique mechanic that allows you to be a consensual non-abusive and paying customer for increases to your health but that’s the only difference.
The only ways GTA5 could have satisfied the criteria in that petition is to either not include women at all, make women indestructible, or introduce some unique female only mechanic to punish players for violence against women.
But what GTA5 actually did, just included women and treated them near identically to men, is apparently “sexist”. That’s why I think it’s a fair example to present to bem of how little you need to do before a video game is accused of sexism.
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Forlorn Hope:
I just searched for some screenshots of prostitutes in GTA5, and as far as I can all or nearly all prostitute characters in GTA5 present as women. So in that sense, it’s not true that “there is no difference at all” between how you can interact with male and female characters, since (if I understand it correctly) prostitutes are not identical to other NPCs. This is particularly relevant because if you read the petition, it specifically talks about the way female prostitutes (not just women) are used in GTA5 gameplay.
So this is a game in which an aspect of gameplay is picking up prostitutes. If you pay them for sex, you get health back, and then if you murder the prostitute you can get the money you just paid back. This is clearly an aspect of the game that some GTA5 players enjoy, since it’s easy to search and find videos that players have made of their avatars having sex with and then beating or murdering prostitute characters.
GTA5 could have included women pedestrians (of all ages and sizes and dressed in clothing as realistic as what male pedestrians wear) but no prostitutes. Then the game would have been treating male and female characters alike.
But instead, there’s a virtually all female class of characters, and the game is programmed in a way to make it entertaining and beneficial to players to have sex with them and then murder them. (Although you can also murder random male pedestrians, that doesn’t give you the health benefits of having sex with and murdering a prostitute in GTA5, correct?) And although no player is forced by the game to kill prostitutes, the producers of the game designed and programmed the game to make that an entertaining and beneficial choice for players. Correct?
Finally, GTA5 programmers, from what I can see, have clearly made some deliberately unrealistic choices – for instance, they’ve decided not to have any child pedestrians. That’s a legitimate choice, but I wanted to point out that we can’t say “they HAD to do [X], because not doing [X] would not have been realistic.” The designers are clearly willing to make creative choices that conflict with realism.
So I don’t think your description of GTA5 is fair or objective. From what I can tell, the game is designed in a way so that a major class of NPCs is presented as all female, and there are special rules for interacting with that class. The game was also programmed with the expectation that many players would have fun by having sex with and then murdering in-game prostitutes.
That does seem misogynistic to me. And pretending that the game doesn’t present women and men at all differently seems unreasonable.
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The only difference between a prostitute NPC and a regular NPC is the ability to have consensual sex with them and regain health in exchange for money. That’s the only one.
Every act of violence a player can commit upon prostitutes they can commit upon male NPCs. The is no specific reward for killing a prostitute, just the exact same same reward players will get for killing male or female non-prostitute NPCs.
What you are saying is that the addition of the ability to have consensual sex with prostitutes as a paying client is enough to turn GTA from non-misogynistic into misogynistic.
I’m sorry but that’s just ridiculous.
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>To me that just sounds like another form of innocent until proven guilty, I’m all in favour of that.
>Besides, even if they can prove how much they’ve been hurt. I’m not sure that should be a justification for hurting others in return.
>Take my previous example of a radical cleric who’s genuinely harmed by positive depictions of homosexuality. Should he have the right to hurt someone with powerful social accusations because they wrote a positive gay charachter? Obviously not, so why is it any different when someone we agree with is making the accusation?
But, see, if we take seriously the premise that sexism hurts people (I hope that this is something you are willing to do), then this argument seems to boil down to, “It is better for people to hurt others by being sexist and face no opposition to doing this than it is for people to draw attention to the fact that their actions hurt others, because doing so might cause them pain.”
I can understand the moral argument that it is preferable to turn the other cheek when someone hurts you than to retaliate, but I really can’t support it when it’s taken to the point of “You should avoid ever talking about things that hurt you, for fear of injuring the person doing the harm.”
As for your point about the radical cleric, my answer depends on what you mean by “powerful social accusations,” the definition of which is not entirely clear to me. If, by “powerful social accusations,” you mean, say, harassment, targeting people at work and trying to get them fired, then I am against these practices and think that they’re clearly unvirtuous. I am also against them when feminists do them.
If, by “powerful social accusations,” you mean, should the cleric be allowed to address his audience, whether in his congregation or on the Internet, and explain how he perceives the depictions of gay characters in media to be harmful, and how these depictions hurt him, then…yes, I think he should have the right to do this? I will not agree with the content of what he says, but I still think he should have the right to say it.
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You seem to be saying that it’s ridiculous to think that small differences in rules can have significant consequences for how gameplay works in practice.
I can’t imagine anyone who has ever designed a game agreeing with that. That’s what makes designing games so fascinating, after all – that even very small changes can alter gameplay and incentives significantly.
If there is a class of NPCs who are all women who walk around in skimpy clothes, and players can pay to have sex with them and regain health, and then players can murder them so they get free health rather than paying for it, then the result in gameplay is a game in which players are rewarded with free health points for having sex with and murdering “sexy” female NPCs.
If you’re not evil willing to admit that, then you’re not willing to have an honest discussion.
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Aaargh! “Even willing,” not “evil willing.” Sheesh. Sorry ’bout that.
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In Crusader Kings 2, you are rewarded for killing your wife (and discarding your concubines if your religion is fine with this type of behavior) as soon as they are over 35 (more children = more alliances, and each time you marry you get money or prestige). Divorcing them is an hassle, you need the pope to be fond of you if you are catholic. If you are playing a female ruler (unlikely except if you carefully play to avoid having male heirs), there is no incentive to go on a husband-killing spree (except to get the “Black Widow” achievement, of course).
What changes are needed to make Ck2 not be a ‘murder-your-wife simulator’? (pet name of the game among a few of the Paradox forum members)
(Wastelands 2 as prostitutes of both sexes. I have to check if you get your money back if you kill them after buying their services, but I’m on the wrong OS to test that right now, sorry)
Bonus!
Dwarf Fortress!
Don’t read the following if you like cats a lot.
At some earlier point in the development of Dwarf Fortress, baby animals were giving the same amount of leather and bones as adult ones. Due to the high reproduction rate of cats, you could have a good and stable economy selling kitten leather bracelets decorated with kitten polished bones to human traders. You just needed to bring 2 cats with you at the start of the game, which was extremely cheap.
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CK2 actually bothers me, though not the bit you mention. It’s a seriously bad thing to have an unmarried ruler, since rulers add half their spouses’ stats to their effective stats, so on average being married amounts to a 50% stat boost. And it’s impossible for older women to get married. So if you have an older woman ruling, and her husband dies, your kingdom is just crippled until she also dies. That one bothers me particularly because it doesn’t even have a shred of realism; rich widows were extremely popular marriage prospects for penniless younger sons and such.
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I think people have a right to create, and to play, deliberately offensive games, including deliberately misogynistic games and deliberately “yay kitten killing” games (although it sounds like in the case of Dwarf Fortress it was just one of those hilarious accidents that sometimes happens).
I also think it’s possible to love playing a game like GTA5 and be on the whole someone who is not a misogynist, who is anti-sexism, or a feminist, or whatever. We are large, we contain multitudes.
But I think it’s sort of pathetic to create, or be a fan of, a deliberately offensive game, but whine and complain that it’s unfaaaaaaiir when people get offended by the game. Or to try and deny that the game is what it is.
That said, I’m still not sure that I approve of petitions to remove a particular offensive work from store shelves. I’m still thinking about that one.
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The whole “rewards you for having sex with prostitutes then murdering them” thing is ridiculous on the level at which its being argued. The “reward” for murdering them as opposed to just having sex with them is de minimus. Its less than a hundred bucks in a game where anything meaningful starts in the thousands. And money in that game literally grows on trees. I mean, in stores. And basically everywhere.
No one is going into GTA V, learning how to play, and thinking, “Oh, I’d better murder this prostitute after I have sex with her, because financial incentives, yo.”
That being said, on a different, more worthwhile level- which apparently will never be reached because feminists arguing with ‘gaters about media criticism is literally a clash between the two groups of people on the planet least equipped to have that conversation- there’s a legitimate point to be made.
Think about wiffle ball bats. Nothing about a wiffle ball bat encourages hitting your brother in the head. It doesn’t give you points for doing that. It doesn’t give points at all. It doesn’t advertise itself as “that toy you can use to hit your brother in the head.” Nothing tells you to do this.
And yet a lot of brothers end up getting hit in the head with wiffle ball bats. Weird, huh?
The reality is that hitting your brother in the head with a wiffle ball bat is fun for a lot of kids. So a lot of kids do it. And if it weren’t for that specific kind of fun, well, wiffle ball bats would be a lot less popular of a toy. That opportunity is a huge draw! So much so that there’s an entire genre of children’s toy that could probably be fairly labeled “Toys that adults give you while pretending you won’t use them to hit your brother in the head, but you totally will, and that’s nearly the only reason you want it.”
GTA V is in a similar category. It doesn’t REALLY tell you to murder prostitutes. The financial “reward” isn’t influencing your behavior. It just… lets you do it. And it knows that you (for some function of “you”) will enjoy murdering prostitutes. And it knows that a reasonable-enough-to-matter portion of its sales and its popularity is driven by the fact that you can do things of that nature in-game.
Once you get to that level, the argument becomes like… like saying that Skyrim doesn’t reward you for going evil and murdering every adult in Whiterun, then laughing at the orphans. Because obviously it doesn’t “reward” you- you lose quest options, vendors, all kinds of useful things. There’s literally no meaningful, measurable benefit. The items in people’s pockets? Who cares, that’s nowhere near what you lose, and you can get random loot literally anywhere.
But… you get the joy of murdering everyone in Whiterun, which must be a reward, because people keep doing it. In fact, if you want proof that the reward isn’t the issue, notice that people who kill everyone in Whiterun usually save their game first, then reload later. The incentive isn’t the point, they’re literally interested in the experience in spite of the results, not because of them.
So, honestly, I don’t know how we should think about a game like GTA V. But I do know that there’s something going on here, somewhere between the game designers, the game itself, and the player base, and that there’s some room to be creeped out by it.
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Patrick: Good point. Early on I talked about the fun aspect of it (“The game was also programmed with the expectation that many players would have fun by having sex with and then murdering in-game prostitutes”), but then I got distracted into talking about the in-game rewards, which I shouldn’t have. As you say, it’s besides the point.
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@bem
I’m definitely willing to accept that sexism such as paying women less for the same work or assuming that women aren’t competent hurts people.
But I don’t think that creating a work of art, even something ridiculously sexist like the Gor novels, actually hurts people unless they choose to read it.
I mean anything which will have a noticeable and negative effect on the target’s reputation or the target’s self image.
And again, I’m not talking about whether anyone should or shouldn’t be aloud. I’m talking about whether it’s virtuous to remain quiet.
No, I’m saying that you should judge it by what the change actually was, not what the results of the change was.
In this particular case the change was “prostitutes now exist and apart from the ability to hire their services they’re treated identically to every other NPC”, it is not misogynistic to include prostitutes in a work.
For the record I have in fact published two games – I won’t say what they are though to avoid linking this account to my real identity, they’re the opposite of famous though.
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While there is some room to be creped out by it, I’m not but it’s a personal emotional reaction, I won’t judge. I would say that there’s no room to accuse the developers or the game itself of – I guess misanthropy in your Skyrim example.
“Fails to prevent players from doing X” is just too low a standard to accuse a game/developers of any ism.
I fully accept that GTA is offensive. I disagree that it’s misogynistic since it treats men and women roughly as badly as each other.
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Maybe it’s just me, but if the issue is GTA5 rather than the broader question, it seems a bit odd to spend so much time on the question on whether the open-world aspects are misogynistic when the story is, as far as I can tell, pretty openly misogynistic! (But the broader question is certainly interesting.)
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““Fails to prevent players from doing X” is just too low a standard to accuse a game/developers of any ism.”
You sure that’s what this is about?
So I (dimly) remember a court case we (briefly) studied in law school. The gist was this- the case dated from back when few people had telephones, and this guy had a business where people could contract for a sort of old-school receptionist service. Messages could be left at his company, and the intended recipient, his client, could pick the message up. Think of it kind of like a private PO Box.
Sounds completely legit, right?
So it turns out that the a HUGE percentage of his clients were prostitutes, and he was probably fully aware of this fact (I think he said he wasn’t, but he’d have had to have been a moron not to realize). He didn’t advertise that he was offering a service for prostitutes, and there were certainly non-prostitutes who used his service. It just so happened that he offered a completely neutral, non-prostitution related service that was EXTREMELY convenient and useful for prostitutes, up to the point where they were the only reason he was financially viable, and he operated his business knowing full well that was the case.
The question was, could this guy be prosecuted for conspiracy?
I don’t know if prosecuting him was fair or unfair. But I do know that he wasn’t just “fail[ing] to prevent [clients] from doing X.” He knew full well that he was benefiting from X, and that he needed X to happen, and that X was crucial to his ability to make a buck.
Any moral criticism- OR DEFENSE- of this guy needs to acknowledge that all of those things are true. Because moral theories that require the denial of truths are worthless, by definition.
Games like GTA V are in the same boat. The authors aren’t just “failing to prevent” you from murdering prostitutes. They are selling a game to people in which murdering prostitutes is, for some, part of the draw. They know they’re doing that. It is a not-insubstantial part of their business model to sell that experience to those who want it.
The world is full of this sort of thing. Disposable pager companies know that a not-insubstantial part of their business model is to cater to drug dealers. The manufacturers of dirt cheap handguns know the same thing. Casinos know that they are marketing to gambling addicts. Bars know that some of their clients are, or are becoming, alcoholics.
This kid I knew in high school brought like six bottles of cough syrup to the counter of a locally owned corner store. The owner told him never to come back. Then rang up the purchase, cuz rent ain’t free. Why did the kid choose that store? Because other kids had done the same thing.
HBO publishes “movies” that are just barely not-porn enough to be free in hotels.
None of this is an accident. As someone who has literally been part of the machinery that makes similar stuff happen, let me repeat, None of this. Is. An accident.
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@Nita:I’m also in favour of diversity :) From watching the Tropes vs Women series, it seems that some tropes are rather overused, and it would be nice if game developers came up with something different a bit more often.
See, I have a problem with the concept of “overused.” It might have made sense at one point, when tribes were small, literacy was rare, and there were only so many songs that the skald could memorize. But there are so many games out there already, and could be so many more if people discontented with existing games would learn to code and write their own, or hire others (by supporting their kickstarters) to do it for them. There is no need to measurably reduce the number of games with “overused” tropes in them in order to have more games without those tropes than an individual can possibly play through. So why point to games with “overused” tropes and say “these tropes are so overused, why do people keep using them!?” instead of saying “here are some tropes that I feel like could use some love. Anyone wanna start a collaborative project!?”
Now, it’s true, AAA games are a far more limited commodity than games generally. But if the implicit argument is that big game companies owe it women to produce more high-budget, sleek-graphics games that cater to them, that seems awfully, well . . . entitled. Nobody owes you* games, much less shiny ones. If you want them, make them. They’ll probably be better anyway.
Now, imagine growing up in a world where 80% of all stories — in books, comics, movies, TV series, ads, games — don’t have any competent male characters. A little boy in that world might come to believe that only women should ever attempt to do anything, since men are too dumb to do things right.
Why, when 20% of stories tell him otherwise?
Or else, if he questions that unfair stereotype, he’ll have to conclude that many other people either consider it true or simply don’t care.
Many, sure. But clearly not all—otherwise where is the remaining 20% coming from? (Moreover, why should he be bothered by those who merely don’t care?) And why should he care about “many?” Most people are crap. All you really need, in terms of people who truly believe in you, is one boss (or, better yet, an independent source of income—but one boss is more likely), one spouse, a handful of friends, and perhaps a slightly larger handful of activity partners if your recreational activity of choice requires a sizeable number of people. Other people, all you really need from them is for them not to actually attack you.
*General you, not you, Nita, specifically.
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” The authors aren’t just “failing to prevent” you from murdering prostitutes. They are selling a game to people in which murdering prostitutes is, for some, part of the draw. They know they’re doing that. It is a not-insubstantial part of their business model to sell that experience to those who want it.”
By this reasoning if they didn’t have prostitutes, but some people bought the game to murder the female NPCs, and the authors knew it, that would be as sexist. That’s ridiculous.
Also, if I write a word processor instead of a game, and I know that users of the word processor will disproportionately write fanfic that abuses the male characters (which is actually true, since most fanfiction writers are female), and I know this, I’m guilty of both sexism and copyright violation.
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@jiro- I didn’t say either of those things. In fact, I disclaimed that conclusion.
But even accepting your silly hypotheticals, lets say that you DID write a word processor, and you DO know that a huge percentage of your word processor sales will be to women who write misandrist fan fiction, and you DO know that your word processor would be a questionably viable product were it not for their misandrist fan fiction, and knowing these things you elect to create it and put it on the market. Under those admittedly silly hypothetical assumptions, I think it would be cowardice to claim that you have nothing to do with the results of your word processor’s existence.
Or to put it another way- if your conclusion is accepted, then any time a GTA V designer feels pride at having entertained millions of customers, he didn’t deserve that good feeling. Who does he think he is, feeling responsible for the predictable and in fact predicted effects of his professional work? He has no right to that. Under your point of view.
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@patrick : I am sympathetic to the argument in one form. I have long argued, for instance, that the alcohol industry is and will always be evil, because if a brewery owner could magically sober up the 5% heaviest drinkers of their customers, they could immediately say goodbye to some 50% of their profits – and that’s not even counting the indirect effects (we have strong reason to believe that if the heaviest drinkers suddenly sobered up, consumption would decrease dramatically among moderate drinkers too).
But having opportunities in computer games is just not like that. I am convinced very few people buy GTA in order to live out serious fantasies about hurting women. If the GTA people could push a button and just straighten up these people’s minds, I’m sure that they would lose very little money over it.
But let’s entertain the notion for a moment, that there are a lot of people who buy GTA to live out their nasty fantasies. If you extend it to all sort of bad boy gangster fantasies, I’m slightly more willing to entertain that (although actually, I think that films like “The Usual Suspects” or “Reservoir Dogs” do far more to romanticize criminal brutality than any game ever could). Even if that were true, should we call Rockstar evil? Hold them “accountable” by denouncing it, banning it, or ostracizing people who play it?
I’d say no! Not unless it actually causes people to be brutal criminals. What goes on in people’s minds is no big deal unless it leads to actions, and if playing GTA has any direct effect, it is tiny.
If the gaming industry has anything to answer for, it’s more about addicting people, and making them spend more they can afford on smurf coins or whatever. The casual game industry has far more to answer for than the enthusiast game industry.
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“…and you DO know that your word processor would be a questionably viable product were it not for their misandrist fan fiction”
Which breaks the usefulness of this analogy for discussing GTA. Are you seriously suggesting that GTA would be questionably viable without the ability to kill prostitutes?
Of course this is a catch-22. If the product wouldn’t be viable without it, it’s sexist because it depends on something sexist. If the product would be viable without it, it’s sexist because you put it in and you don’t need to.
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>But I don’t think that creating a work of art, even something ridiculously sexist like the Gor novels, actually hurts people unless they choose to read it.
>I mean anything which will have a noticeable and negative effect on the target’s reputation or the target’s self image.
>And again, I’m not talking about whether anyone should or shouldn’t be aloud. I’m talking about whether it’s virtuous to remain quiet.
Yes, this is a large part of the problem I have with your argument. If a work of art does not hurt people unless they choose to read it, then criticism also does not hurt people unless they choose to read it. Criticism is, in fact, presumably less costly to avoid, since an artwork may have one specific element you find hurtful, and others that you like, while a critic whose opinions you disagree with and find hurtful is probably someone you’re not going to find much redeeming value in reading anyway.
Yet the solution you’ve presented is that people who are hurt by tropes that appear in art should simply avoid those artworks, but that it’s unfair to ask people to avoid reading criticism that upsets them.
I think you are equivocating somewhat between “what is virtuous” and “what is allowed.” Your question about the cleric did specifically ask whether he has a right to speech that I would find offensive. But I think I did make it fairly clear in my previous reply that I don’t agree that saying nothing when something is harming you is unilaterally virtuous.
I also feel like you are kind of implicitly denying that themes in a work of art (or sexist cultural ideas generally) can hurt people’s self-image in the same way that you are arguing that being called sexist can. I mean, you’ve carefully restricted your definition of “harm caused by sexism” to “women being paid less and people assuming that women are not competent,” which is a much, much narrower field of harm than the one you want to stake out for being called sexist.
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Criticism cannot be avoided because criticism leads to other people taking action and that can’t be avoided. You can’t “avoid” being censored. Nor can you “avoid” a reduction in sales caused by the mob believing questionable accusations about your work.
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I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. The guy in this example wasn’t prosecuted for prostitution or even for pimping. He was prosecuted for an entirely separate offence: Conspiracy.
However GTA’s portrayal of prostitutes is being directly accused of being misogynistic. If you want to make that accusation you need something more direct – you need to demonstrate that GTA either was designed to encourage players to target prostitutes or that GTA portrays violence against prostitutes in a positive light. Neither of which are true.
Now I’m more than happy to have a debate about whether there can be such a thing as “Conspiracy to enjoy misogynistic art” but that’s an entirely separate debate to the one we’re having right now – which weather GTAV is in of itself misogynistic. I’d like to stick to that topic for now.
Absolutely wrong.
For example, if someone criticises you of sexism loudly in a public forum and your friends or co-workers read it then they might decide to avoid you out of disgust. That would be harm, a lot of harm.
The entire reason I say it can be virtuous to withhold criticism but I don’t say that about art is because criticism can hurt you even if you choose to avoid it. That’s why I mentioned “negative effect on a person’s reputation”
Did I? I can’t find that, if I did ask if he had the right to speech then something went wrong between my brain and my fingers.
I am explicitly and only talking about criticism that (I believe; or am saying can as a hypothetical) has the perpetual to harm someone’s reputation and/or self esteem.
If that’s implicit then let me make it explicit.
I think that there can be a direct causal link between criticism and harm. Person X calls person Y a Zist -> Person Y’s social circle shuns him: Person Y us harmed.
I don’t think you can make that kind of link between person X reading Gor and person Y being harmed.
(Person X reading Gor and Person X being harmed, sure. It might be a PTSD trigger.)
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Transphobic media portrayals hurt me very much. In some sense, they hurt me immeasurably. They destroyed perhaps 1/3 of my life.
They did this by lying to me, by lying to those in the culture around me. People, including me, believed those portrayals, as we had nothing else available. Such people knew no one who was trans. But they were intensely curious about trans lives, and while in principle people may desire to know the truth, in practice they consumed only the most sensationalist and degrading hogwash.
Cis people saw trans people as an opportunity. They realized that public preoccupations with transgressive sexuality would make us the ideal vehicles for their own fantastical nonsense. So we get *Myra Breckenridge* and *Silence of the Lambs*, rank nonsense created by ignorant cis people to sell their own banal ideas.
And when trans people were allowed media access, it was only to tell the story that the cisgendered writer, producer, or editor wished to share. Some trans people, naturally, were willing to stand up and tell the desired story. Those who told different stories were ignored. So we get the racy “tell all” book with all the predictable sequences of “always knowing” and childhood cross dressing and compulsory heterosexuality. We learn how she felt the first time she put on makeup or a hyper-feminine floral dress. But we never hear that she might be a dyke or might prefer jeans and a tee shirt or that some days she’s just too fucking tired to put on makeup as she heads out the door.
It was all a lie, and while I knew what I felt so deeply, I could not see myself in those stories. I had no idea that salvation was for me one hormone prescription away.
For years and years.
It is better now. The Internet lets us talk back. We can inform people about what is real in our lives and what is not real. We can publicly object to the false messages, show the banality of cis preoccupations with us. We are not your vehicle, but real people with real lives. If you share falsehoods about us, we will shout out that you have lied.
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@Patrick – “Games like GTA V are in the same boat. The authors aren’t just “failing to prevent” you from murdering prostitutes. They are selling a game to people in which murdering prostitutes is, for some, part of the draw.”
For context purposes, have you personally played a GTA game and drew the conclusion from your experience that violence against women could be a significant part of the draw for, lets say, a hypothetical misogynist player?
if so, could you describe the mechanics that make violence against women in a GTA game significantly attractive to our hypothetical misogynist?
Ampersand, could you weigh in on this as well?
To define “significant part of the draw”, let’s postulate a hypothetical platformer game where the main player character is female, and she plays various “hurt” and “death” animations when running into enemies or environmental hazards. A really dedicated misogynist might play the game intentionally running into hazards because he enjoys seeing a women be harmed. Likewise in chess, a player might conceivably sacrifice their queen for no advantage because they want to see the “inferior female piece” captured/killed. In both chess and our hypothetical platformer, I would hope we could agree that this behavior should not be described as “part of the draw”.
What is it about the mechanics of GTA that makes it different from these two examples?
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@veronica d
I agree with everything you said. Getting false ideas about who you are goes right alongside PTSD triggers as a way read/watching art can hurt you.
And while it hasn’t come up in this topic before, I also agree that being unable to find art that you can relate too is harmful.
@anonymousCoward
You might want to pick a stronger example ;) in both cases the answer could be “you control the female”.
A chess player who sacrifices the opportunity for check-mate in order to take the Queen because ” they want to see the “inferior female piece” captured/killed.” might be a better example.
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@ Forlorn Hopes – I don’t see how “you control the female” changes things significantly. Your example works just as well though, because it seems that the interaction between game mechanics and the player’s motivations is what’s in question here. In my examples and yours, the player is projecting meta-objectives onto the game that are not supported by the fundamental design. If this is still a problem the developer needs to fix, the only really workable solution is to eliminate female characters entirely.
If, on the other hand, projected meta-objectives aren’t the developer’s problem, then either GTA encourages sexist behavior from a mechanical standpoint, or it doesn’t. If it does, we should be able to identify the specific problematic mechanics.
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anonymous coward wrote :”if so, could you describe the mechanics that make violence against women in a GTA game significantly attractive to our hypothetical misogynist?”
Yes, I have played these games. I am a gamer. I can probably throw down on gamer-ness with… basically everyone on earth? The only restriction I should note is that I overwhelmingly- not exclusively but overwhelmingly- play PC games.
As for your question: The mechanics that make violence against women in a GTA game significantly attractive to people who enjoy violence against women is that there are women and you are violent to them.
What are you expecting?
I have also played Saints Row games. What are the mechanics that make it fun to run around the street naked beating up cops with a six foot dildo? Well, there are cops, see, and you have a giant dildo, and you hit the cops with the dildo? I don’t know what else there is to explain.
If you can’t have fun unless something goes “Ding!” and awards you +1 point, sandbox games aren’t for you.
Jiro wrote: “Of course this is a catch-22. If the product wouldn’t be viable without it, it’s sexist because it depends on something sexist. If the product would be viable without it, it’s sexist because you put it in and you don’t need to.”
I didn’t say the game was sexist. I said that there was a thing going on that matters. A thing that happened. A company made a sandbox game in which you can reenact crimes in order to sell it to people who want to reenact crimes. Part of the crimes you can reenact are crimes against women, specifically, having sex with prostitutes and then murdering them. People buy the game for the fun of doing this, and then do it.
You seem to be under some bizarre impression that if this gives ampersand ammunition for making the case that the game is sexist, this all sort of retroactively stops having happened. I’m not obliged to offer an “out” by which a game designer can avoid criticism.
I wrote a lot here, and then deleted it. It was mostly about how the “you can’t blame people for known but unintended consequences of their actions” argument you are making is destroying western civilization, and how I, as a lawyer, am in a position to watch people destroy themselves while using it, and I HATE HATE HATE it with the fires of a thousand suns. But there’s no point in making this into a broader philosophical debate. So the not-very-TLDR on a much longer post…
You seem to think I’m carrying water for the “GTA V is sexist” camp. I’m not. I don’t care. I think its a stupid framework anyway.
I’m just in favor of media criticism that isn’t completely incompetent and worthless.
Your defense, and that of others in this thread, is incompetent. It relies on pretending that things that did happen somehow didn’t, because its not fair or something. Well, reality doesn’t care.
You want to see a competent defense of GTA V? Watch. I wrote this in one shot without edits.
“GTA V is a sandbox game that recreates a particular genre of TV show or movie. It is populated with characters who match the tropes of those shows, and who engage in activities similar to those from the mimicked genre. It is also a sandbox game. In many games, the importance, the emotional salience, of a character’s actions comes in large part from the fact that the player could have chosen otherwise. Sandbox games are the pinnacle of this particular combination of gameplay and organic story. Every time the player in a police chase swerves to avoid or to hit a pedestrian is a time that the player chose to do something they didn’t have to do. This is what makes the experience engaging and meaningful to the player. The more broadly this freedom is given to the player, the better. Situations where the logic of the game suggest that the player should be able to do something, but they can’t because the game was coded to stop them, break immersion and diminish this effect. Now certainly there are players who will use the broad freedom given to them in GTA V to do sexist things. But to stop them we would either have to specifically code certain NPCs to be impossible to harm, which would damage immersion and reduce player freedom by forcing the player to treat them in a particular way, or we would have to not make a game at all within this particular genre. The former would damage the game as art, and the latter is an unreasonable request.
Done. That isn’t even hard! I just said the things that are actually the real life reason why the game is the way it is!
Now obviously ampersand is probably not going to be satisfied by this. So if you’re not going to be happy unless you have a knock down argument that you can cram down his throat, I guess you’re out of luck. But welcome to adulthood! Sometimes we disagree about what is reasonable. You’ll have to get used to it if you want to live here.
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vintermann wrote: “But let’s entertain the notion for a moment, that there are a lot of people who buy GTA to live out their nasty fantasies. If you extend it to all sort of bad boy gangster fantasies, I’m slightly more willing to entertain that (although actually, I think that films like “The Usual Suspects” or “Reservoir Dogs” do far more to romanticize criminal brutality than any game ever could). Even if that were true, should we call Rockstar evil? Hold them “accountable” by denouncing it, banning it, or ostracizing people who play it?
I’d say no! Not unless it actually causes people to be brutal criminals. What goes on in people’s minds is no big deal unless it leads to actions, and if playing GTA has any direct effect, it is tiny.”
I’m not in this for calling people evil. I’m in this for acknowledging what happens and how the world works, and having opinions about games that aren’t distorted by wishful thinking or rosy glasses.
If someone uses true facts to call Rockstar evil, I’m not going to say that the true facts aren’t true in order to defend Rockstar. And I think its pretty clearly true that they intentionally created and profited from a sandbox game where part of the draw is doing awful things with total freedom, which includes sexist things. That’s… kind of their thing? Like, that’s literally the whole point of Rockstar as a studio.
In the post above I wrote a simple defense of Rockstar and GTA V that acknowledges what they do, and explains why someone might be ok with it. I think its a reasonable approximation of where I stand, for now. The important part of it, for me, is that it acknowledges the truth, THEN makes a moral claim. Instead of starting from a moral position, and then trying to retroactively invent truths to justify it. It listens to the criticism, and offers a defense that balances the criticism against points in GTA V’s favor. Which is how I think this is supposed to be done.
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That’s a strawman.
I’m not saying that you can’t blame GTA V for known but unintended consequences. I’m saying I’m saying that GTA V is not sexist or misogynistic even after you take unintended consequences into account.
I think anonymousCoward is saying the same, but I’ll let them speak for themselves.
If we’re talking about the game itself then you have to point to some mechanic in how prostitutes are portrayed (we’re still talking about the prostitutes aren’t we?) that is sexist.
If we’re talking about the developers then I’ll repeat the point I made in a previous reply to you:
Just as the guy running the phone reception service in your example was accused of conspiracy and not prostitution or pimping. It’s inappropriate to accuse Rockstar of sexism or misogyny unless you can present what was happening inside their heads as evidence. Instead you need to accuse them of some sort of “conspiracy to enable mysogony”. Even if they’re guilty of that they’re still innocent of “actual mysogony”
But as I said at the time, I’m happy to have that debate about “conspiracy to enable misogyny”, but right now we’re in the middle of a debate about “is GTA V / Rockstar sexist?” I’d like to stay on that topic for now.
We are having a debate about whether GTA V is sexist. This defence is completely off topic.
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Fine. Then the answer is “If your construction of what ‘sexist’ is categorically excludes things like the creation of a sandbox toy designed, in part, knowing that the sandbox would include sexist fantasies and knowing that this would be a part of what it was used for, then your construction of what ‘sexist’ is makes your point of view on this subject worthy of mockery and derision, and beneath what should be considered valid media criticism. If this is what gamergate stands for, then the sooner gamers destroy it and salt the earth, the better, because you aren’t even engaging with GTA V as a piece of art, which seems like the bare minimum that someone needs to do to enter the conversation. Your position is literally worse than that of the feminists, because they’re engaged in valid media criticism gone wrong because of a political agenda, and you’re not even engaged in valid media criticism.”
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Prove it.
Demonstrate that your definition of sexism is better than mine.
I’m saying that a work of art has innate qualities that exist independently of any one viewer or critic’s interpretation; and in the case of video games, independently of how any individual player chooses to play.
Using a non-GTA example simply because it’s a clearer example thanks to the use of a scoring system.
The Hitman games explicitly discourage you from killing civilians by inflicting a permanent penalty to your score[1].
An individual player/critic can say “In my personal opinion the fun of committing mass murder outweighed the score penalty”
However any player/critic who says “Hitman intentionally encouraged me to kill civilians” is objectively wrong. Whether you look at it from authorial intent or by analysing the game mechanics you arrive at the same conclusion: Hitman discourages you from killing civilians.
When I’m critiquing a game I start by looking at those innate characteristics, because that’s the part of the artwork that everyone has in common.
Does it have good characters, well before you get to personal opinions you can ask questions like “do the characters have depth, or are they walking cliches?” or “is the character’s portrayal consistent, or do they have sudden unexplained personality shifts?”. “Do the characters grow as the plot progresses, or does their personality remain static”?
Is GTA V’s portrayal of prostitutes sexist. Well before you get to personal opinions you can ask questions like “are players specifically encouraged to hurt prostitutes?” or “do players have any means to inflict harm that only work on prostitutes?”.
[1]http://uk.ign.com/wikis/hitman-absolution/Scoring_Guide
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I wrote, “That said, I’m still not sure that I approve of petitions to remove a particular offensive work from store shelves. I’m still thinking about that one.”
Having thought about it, I’ve decided I’m anti- this petition. Here’s what I was thinking, that made me doubt:
1) It’s not a blacklist. It’s not saying, in effect, “Orson Scott Card should never work in his field again because of something he once said,” it’s saying “this particular product sucks and is offensive.” The former obviously has an uncomfortable affinity with McCarthyism, the latter less so.
2) Consumers have a free speech right to say “Target, don’t carry this.” Target has a free speech right to choose not to carry a particular game on their shelves.
3) The harm here seems very minimal. GTA5 is one of the best-known games ever, Rockstar won’t be put out of business by this, and GTA fans will easily be able to find places willing to sell them a copy. It seems that all the petition could do is redirect money away from Target and to other retail outlets.
But in the end, although of course a petition asking Target not to carry a particular work of art should be legal (free speech and all that), it’s still wrong to support or sign such a petition, imo.
1) Something doesn’t have to be as bad as the blacklist to still be bad.
2) Even though it wasn’t successful, the mechanism of the petition was still an attempt to make GTA5 unavailable – to shut someone up. It was an attempt to use the power of the pocketbook to pressure a retailer into refusing to carry a work of art because of that art’s message.
That tactic stops short of full-on police state censorship, but it’s still an attempt to limit free speech. It’s one that people should refuse to use.
3) It’s true that the harm to GTA5 or Rockstar is minimal. But, obviously, if the tactic is accepted as legitimate then it can and will be used against smaller, more vulnerable producers.
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“I didn’t say the game was sexist.”
‘This game is sexist’ and ‘they are knowingly appealing to sexism as part of their business model’ are, in practice, a distinction without a difference, because those accusations will lead to identical problems for the game and its creators.
“Your defense, and that of others in this thread, is incompetent. It relies on pretending that things that did happen somehow didn’t, because its not fair or something. ”
I think that claiming by analogy that GTA V would not be financially viable without being able to kill prostiututes counts as something that really didn’t happen.
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@Ampersand Your answer on the minimal harm is arguably true for GTA5 (if we ignore not being carried in a large stone-and-mortar chain), but it is not true for small companies like the one producing Hatred. Your (second) point 3 is what already happens.
For company-wide risks, see also the comments about Metacritic by anonymousCoward. The fear is that if you do not adhere to the social standards of a small number of critics, you may have to close shop.
Speaking of minimal harm on a more personal level, Stardock’s CEO Brad Wardell might not agree with you. Receiving death threats on you and your family is not minimal harm.
See also the nature of the pressure on Divinity to change the cover. From the artist :
“A bare belly was for some enough a trigger to send our company enough hate and threatening mails to persuade my boss to ask me to change the cover. I did, but did so reluctantly. Disagreeing wholeheartedly with the claim of the artwork being sexistic, the better half of me decided to meet “offended-by-design” people somewhere in the middle.”
(I’m arguing against the threats and hatemail, I actually like the new cover better)
Worst thing? The PR of the company to say they made the change after receiving constructive criticism…
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Closing my tag, sorry about that.
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@veronica: Were transphobic media portrayals the primary problem in your life experience, or the lack of trans-positive media portrayals? That is, would your life have been better if there had been no media portrayals of transwomen at all, or if there had been both positive and negative portrayals?
And the reason I ask is that a lot of my antipathy toward Sarkeesian and similar figures is that they seem to be so focused on (a) criticizing existing companies for using “bad” or “overused” tropes or, at best (b) demanding that existing companies make games that use “better” tropes instead of (c) saying “these are the tropes we’d like to see in games, how do we get together and make games that feature these tropes?”
This is one thing I absolutely love about (the parts I’ve seen of) the OSR movement* in tabletop roleplaying: There’s a real ethos that says “Yeah, third edition sucked, fourth edition was worse, and fifth edition, while not as bad, is still superheroic crap**. So? We have the OGL, and that lets us make retroclones, and that lets us write whatever sort of modules we want for them. Our games are gonna be awesome, and sucks to be you if you decide to keep paying through the nose for Wizbro crap instead of looking around for the good stuff.”
*Other than Pundit and his crowd, to the extent that they’re OSR, which I’m uncertain of.
**As a player, I’m actually alright with 5e (though I’d still rather play a retroclone or one of Vincent Baker’s games). I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to run it, though.
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Patrick wrote:
““Every time the player in a police chase swerves to avoid or to hit a pedestrian is a time that the player chose to do something they didn’t have to do. This is what makes the experience engaging and meaningful to the player.”
#notallplayers
When I played GTA – an earlier version, I’ve never played GTA5 – I actually found the freedom to explore the world, and to be as anti-social as possible while exploring – including things like swerving to hit a pedestrian I might have otherwise missed – was a lot of what made the experience engaging. There’s a joy in pretending to be an awful person doing awful things and experiencing no consequences (well, other than shoot-outs with the cops), all while doing no real-world harm.
I really don’t think I’m the only one. In fact, I’m pretty sure the game was designed in part to be entertaining for players who enjoy pretending to be monsters for a while.
“The more broadly this freedom is given to the player, the better. Situations where the logic of the game suggest that the player should be able to do something, but they can’t because the game was coded to stop them, break immersion and diminish this effect.”
The game designers could also just not code in such situations in the first place. The complete lack of children in GTA was a choice made, I suspect, because the game designers decided that it would be tasteless to allow players to kill children, but making children invulnerable would broken the immersion effect. So they just skipped having children at all. They could have done the same with prostitutes (which weren’t part of the original GTA game); or they could have made all prostitutes well-armed and immensely dangerous to attack (which there are plenty of examples of in the genre – Sin City, for example).
More to the point, I don’t buy the “it was technically difficult to avoid sexism, therefore the game isn’t sexist” argument. Because it’s really just a defense of the designers’ intentions. But I don’t care about an artists intentions; I just care about what the finished work is like.
Furthermore, although we’re talking about the prostitutes because someone linked a petition, it’s not like that the only thing sexist about this game. As Carolyn Petit said, “it’s deeply frustrating that, while its central and supporting male characters are flawed and complex characters, with a few extremely minor exceptions (such as the aforementioned optional getaway driver), GTA V has little room for women except to portray them as strippers, prostitutes, long-suffering wives, humorless girlfriends and goofy, new-age feminists we’re meant to laugh at.”
The prostitutes would be one thing if they were part of a world in which no characters had any range; or if they were part of the world where both male and female characters could be found as mulch-dimensional characters (including playable charactters, ideally, since GTA5 has multiple playable characters) and as stock NPCs. But in GTA5, only men get to be the multi-dimensional characters with interesting stories. And that isn’t inherent to the genre.
So yeah, I’m not convinced that GTA5 isn’t sexist. But I do find your argument a lot better than others I’ve seen in this thread, fwiw.
(But to be clear – not for you, but for other readers here – I’m not saying GTA5 should be censored or banned. I’m not saying that GTA5’s creators are bad people. I’m not saying that if you enjoy playing GTA5, you’re a bad person or a misogynist. I’m just saying the game is sexist, just like a zillion other pieces of media – including many that I’m a fan of – are.)
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@thirqual:
Yes, I agree that “it is not true for small companies.” I just said that, in the exact same comment you’re responding to. I am agreeing with you, on this point.
“For company-wide risks, see also the comments about Metacritic by anonymousCoward. The fear is that if you do not adhere to the social standards of a small number of critics, you may have to close shop.”
And therefore a petition that Metacritic pays no attention to at all is wrong? That makes no sense. Did you even read my comment? Did you see the part where I said I was specifically discussing a petition?
That aside, your point seems like anti-marketplace whining to me. “Waaah! Waaaah! I don’t get any guarantee that my work will be popular and make money! Critics I don’t like are permitted to become influential through normal market mechanisms! That’s unfaaaaiiiirrrr! WAAAAH!”
Am I missing something?
Speaking of minimal harm on a more personal level, Stardock’s CEO Brad Wardell might not agree with you. Receiving death threats on you and your family is not minimal harm.
He received death threats because of the petition I was discussing?
See also the nature of the pressure on Divinity to change the cover. From the artist :
“A bare belly was for some enough a trigger to send our company enough hate and threatening mails to persuade my boss to ask me to change the cover. I did, but did so reluctantly.
Again, how was this caused by the petition to remove GTA5 from Target?
That aside, “threats” is an ambiguous word. If someone actually said that they’d physically harm the artist or his family, or the publishers, etc,., obviously that’s horribly wrong AND attempted censorship. I’m against that, just as I’m sure you’re against the threats of physical harm many feminist critics of video games have received.
But in the context of the essay you linked to, it appears that by “threats” he meant that journalists had allegedly said that the game might not be covered if his belly-dancer artwork wasn’t changed.
I frankly doubt he’s telling the truth – or, if he is, I doubt whoever told him that was telling the truth.
Because his story makes no sense.
He claimed that he was talking about “common behavior” in the comics and gaming industries. And yet, comics and games featuring T&A artwork remain extremely common, and are covered by journalists all the time. If critics commonly refuse to review works with T&A artwork, then why does reality look like it does?
Furthermore, I’m a professional comic book creator. I know a shitload of other pro comics people. And yet, I’ve NEVER heard about a journalist telling a creator or a company that they’ll refuse to cover a comic unless a piece of promotional artwork is changed. So how common could it be?
(I HAVE heard of critics saying they prefer to cover games that have the elements they like in them, including diversity, etc. But that’s not the same as a threat, and characterizing it as a threat would be dishonest.)
What does seem to have happened is that a lot of fans thought – correctly, in my opinion – that his first version of the art looked silly instead of kick-ass, which is a big problem for a crowd-funded game that has to listen to what fans say. So they changed the artwork (but the bikini look is still an option players can choose in-game). That doesn’t seem so horrible to me. It’s not censorship for a company to respond to fan reactions.
Meanwhile, the Red Sonja comic book – which he gave as an example of a character that can’t be done nowadays – has been embraced by feminist comic book fans – because the writer has found a way to give the character (chain mail bikini and all) a fresh and exciting spin, rather than just treating the character like a walking pinup.
There are some people who do wildly original, creative work that can’t find a foothold in the marketplace, and I have sympathy for those folks. But that’s not what went on here. He did generic cookie-cutter artwork that ended up looking cliched and stupid, the fans didn’t like it, and rather than standing up for his principles he changed the artwork. What about this is supposed to make me feel sorry for him, or feel that he’s been censored in any way?
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I was not talking about the petition, but about minimal harm from accusation of sexism, which is a point you have argued for several times. I should have made that clearer.
You have obviously not understood the problem with Metacritic. See the uninformed coverage of Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures for the relevance of cultural context in judging a product. It of course goes the other way, uninformed French critics are writing stupid articles about American and Japanese comics all the time, with the difference that US critics have a huge impact on Metascores.
Interesting that you do not feel the threats to Bradwell are not relevant if they are not due to the petition, or that you feel the artist of Divinity lied. Or the “as I’m sure you’re”. I do not tolerate people defending threats, silencing, doxing and violence, and I find the allusion disgusting.
For the roleplaying games industry, check out the last edition of D&D. I talked about it earlier on the comments on this blog. I fail to see why self-censorship is not problematic, but that may very well be due to cultural bias. I also disagree with him, in the sense that computer games are subject to a higher scrutiny than comics are. Your example of Red Sonja is perfect, let’s contrast with the criticism of Triss in the Witcher series.
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Before you use Red Sonja as an example of a character who was embraced by feminists despite containing elements that supposedly can’t be done nowadays, be aware that the new 2014 version of Sonja reduces or eliminates those elements. http://www.comicvine.com/red-sonja/4005-2439 And to make matters come full circle, the comic is written by the woman responsible for Women in Reffrigerators.
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I was responding to an essay which was complaining about activists “Condemning Red Sonja for being scantily clad.” What I wrote was ” the writer has found a way to give the character (chain mail bikini and all) a fresh and exciting spin.” So what I said was both true, and on-target as a response to that essay.
You’re right, of course, that there have been changes to the character; characters always change in some ways when there’s a reboot. In Sonja’s case, her origin is no longer rooted in gang rape, and now she gets to have lots of hot sex. So I guess fans of gang rape, and of women being forbidden to have sex, will be disappointed.
(In the old version, for folks who don’t know, Sonja had to agree to never, ever have sex unless it was with a man who had defeated her in combat, or else she’d lose all her powers.)
And yes, Gail Simone coined “women in refrigerators.” Although like a lot of terms, it’s been misused sometimes, in its original conception – as a critique of the trope of killing off female characters so that a male character can suffer attractive man-pain – it was on target.
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“in its original conception – as a critique of the trope of killing off female characters so that a male character can suffer attractive man-pain – it was on target.”
In its original conception, to be eligible for the “women in refrigerators” list, a character just had to have been female, and killed. No allowance was made for whether male characters are also killed (as I pointed out above, you could have two characters of opposite sex die at the same time from the same cause and the woman still goes on the list), or any other such considerations. And the list certainly does not require any particular purpose for the death, even though it was promoted as such. The list even contains an example of a woman who got a breast tumor, which amounts to feminists raising men’s consciousness about women’s problems and then calling the men sexist for actually writing stories based on that raised consciousness. I also like the entry for “husband killed twice” (I guess it doesn’t matter whether men or women have to be killed for the woman to count).
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(To people wondering how a dead character can lose two husbands, I was of course being too generous by even saying the female character had to be killed. Actually, she just had to have something bad happen to her to go on the list.)
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@osberend
It was both, of course. And yes, if enough positive portrayals existed, the negative portrayals would be diminished in force.
And *today* we are so fucking far from that place that it ain’t even.
Keep in mind that cultural critique serves two purposes. One is to point out how negative portrayals can be hurtful, which is particularly bad when the targets of the misrepresentation are a vulnerable population. The second, which is just as important, is to show how the media *reflects* harmful social attitudes. It gives us an entryway to talk about problematic aspects of the broader culture.
For example, what does the popularity of the manic pixie dreamgirl trope tell us about the emotional yearnings of men? Is it healthy? How should women think about this, about their expect role in the structure?
In Laurie Penny’s new book, she talks about how she responded to the MPDG trope. As a whip-smart adorable geek-girl, she was able to play the role. And it worked. (No surprise!) But ultimately she found it stifling.
These are unrealistic expectations of romance. People need to talk about that. The trope gives us the tools to do so.
Sarkeesian has worked VERY FUCKING HARD to not sound like she is “demanding” change, sufficiently hard that in my view those who fail to see this are keeping their eyes closed tight. That charge is off base.
She certainly wants to see fewer such tropes. Likewise, she would like to see them replaced by more thoughtful and sophisticated narrative elements. Which, yes I totally agree.
Criticizing her for a “how do we do this together” discourse seems weird to me. Of course she says that. What else should she say as a fair-minded, good-faith person who wants to bring about change?
“Let’s talk about this and figure out how to do it.”
I mean, duh. Next you will criticize her for liking kittens.
Myself, I’d love to see a broad change in the kinds of media we consume, this on both sides of the cycle. I want to change the media, insofar as it effects us, and I want to change the underlying culture, reflected by the media, cuz obviously.
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@veronica d
Again I find myself agreeing, but if I may present; not so much a dissenting view, but an agreement from a different perspective.
What stood out to me in your previous post on this thread was you talking about how cisgendered people completely controlled the media portrayal of transgendered people – and only let trans people speak if they supported the narrative that the “gatekeepers” wished to tell.
This stood out to me because, well #notyourshield looks like the exact same situation.
And it also makes a neat example for why I don’t like call out culture. I think that if criticism ever reaches the point where artists are self censoring out of fear, and they are[1], it will be the gatekeepers who ultimately control who has the power to call people out.
I don’t know if that actually was the case back the, but I would like to know so I’m going to ask you: Was there something like call outs back then, and did it target trans people who spoke out against that narrative?
But I do know it’s the case now; no matter how loudly or eloquently people of colour inside gamergate call out white game journalists, no one listens. But when they’re called out, (usually as a group) people listen to the call out.
So basically. I see the ability to call out as another form of gatekeeping. People with social power get to decide who gets to speak and who is silenced. It’s nowhere near as effective as owning the printing presses – but it’s the same principle.
So that’s why I’m against call outs. I want everyone – including both trans people and #notyourshield – to be able to tell their stories without gatekeepers getting in the way.
[1]http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanCreighton/20130101/184227/White_as_a_Sheet.php
I have no objection to people talking about the trope or criticising it.
But when we get to the point where someone who wants to use that trope feels afraid too we have a problem.
Or we’re looking at her twitter feed and the twitter feed of her producer / co-writer ;)
(Does supporting censorship make you de-facto demanding change? I’m going on the assumption that it does).
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To a fair degree, call out culture could not exist before the Internet.
The media stuff I am discussing largely predates our current Twitter/Facebook culture. It was different then. A small number of people owned the American narrative. They no longer do. This is good.
On the other hand, we have Twitter pile-ons. I don’t like those, but I don’t want to go back either.
I think you have to at least consider that the people in #notyourshield are completely misguided and they are being rejected on the merits of the case. For example, I believe that. There is a difference between *marginalized* and *marginal*. Gamergate is corrupt to its core.
For trans people, an important part of our struggle is not only that we were voiceless, but also that we were correct about our lives. Truth matters.
For Sarkeesian, I judge the content of her videos. Considering the degree that her Twitter life is a constant state of hyper abusive nightmare fuel, I kinda assume she will occasionally vent in non-constructive ways.
I’ve said “die cis scum” a few time. I don’t really feel that way, but sometimes I just need to say it. Deal.
I once saw Sarkeesian tweet that she was ending all video games until gamers shaped up. I don’t think she was being serious, but I get how she needed to say that.
Plus she doesn’t have to be right all the time to be a valuable critic. Much of her analysis is dead-on correct. Her videos are solid works of criticism.
GTA is a fucked up mess. The sex workers are there for very ugly reasons. If you are a person who likes that shit, you need to ask yourself why.
In my world, I have dear friends who are sex workers, like street walking trannies who give blowjobs to randoms in their cars. Turns out none of my close friends have been murdered yet, but sooner or later for sure. So, you know, the whitebread middle class chucklefucks who play this game and get off killing a hooker — fuck those guys. What turds.
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I did consider that, and I concluded that if they were being rejected on their merits then people would responded by trying to refute their points instead of trying to erase their identities.
Everyone needs to vent sometimes, but I don’t think tweets like https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/540442294483042304 are venting.
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This should teach me to rely on memory – virtually everything I’ve said about “Women in Refrigerators” on this thread has been wrong. (I was mixing it up with “women in refrigerator syndrome,” a later expression derived from the earlier expression, according to Wikipedia).
In any case, Simone’s original conception and rational can be read here.
” Several respondents mentioned that male superheroes ALSO get beat up, cut up, and killed up-an undeniable truth, I say. However, it’s my feeling that a) the percentages are off. If there are only 50 major female superheroes, and 40 of them get killed/maimed/depowered, then that’s more significant numerically than if 40 male characters get killed, since there are many times more of them total.
And b) I can’t quite shake the feeling that male characters tend to die differently than female ones. The male characters seem to die nobly, as heroes, most often, whereas it’s not uncommon, as in Katma Tui’s case, for a male character to just come home and find her butchered in the kitchen. There are exceptions for both sexes, of course, but shock value seems to be a major motivator in the superchick deaths more often than not.
It got me to wondering, honestly, why it was OK, or even encouraged somewhat, to kill women, more than men, statistically. “
If what she was trying to get at was overall percentages, rather than critiques of individual plotlines, then it makes sense to include a woman who was killed with her husband. And there are certainly individual entries on the list you could rightly nit-pick. But you seem to be refusing to engage, at all, with Simone’s actual point.
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@Forlorn Hopes — I 100% agree with that tweet. In fact, I cannot imagine the objection.
How are we supposed to bring about desired change? The way activism works is you change public perception sufficiently such that those in power are motivated to listen. We say, “These games suck and are hurtful and we are going to keep saying that. Plus don’t you *want* to create more thoughtful, sophisticated games. There is a place in the world for the crass and the banal, but what sort of person do you want to be?”
This is normal public discourse available to everyone — including BTW #gamergate, who freely use similar tactics. Like, the Intel thing.
(The difference being the values of GG are largely sexist and horrible. These are object level difference.)
(I know we nerds love us some meta, but the object level matters.)
Furthermore, this is not censorship or calls to “ban” games. Market pressures still exist. The gamers who want murder/rape porn still have their wallets and companies will surely step up to fill that need. What we want is a shift in balance, a change of what is “mainstream”.
(As an aside, I was worried you would find some tweet where Sarkeesian said something deeply shitty and I’d have to do my “well, you know, even our idols have flaws” thing. Which, it happens. Laurie Penny, for example, has a few zingers, things she said that she should have thought more about. But *this*. Oh man, is that the worst you got?)
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Could you link to an actual example of Sarkeesian supporting censorship?
Earlier in this discussion, you included these five links:
[1]https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/540442294483042304
[2]https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/545130387031068672
[3]https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/525781140943011841
[4]https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/525793436025118721
[5]http://imgur.com/CbeLKkV,lsGMdwy#0
Not one of them is an actual example of Sarkeesian supporting censorship. So I guess you’re talking about something else. Could you provide a link to that, please?
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And on the “erasing #notyourshield” thing.
Myself, I never engaged with them, mostly because I didn’t see the point. Simply put, to me it didn’t matter if some number of minorities were pro-GG. There are many people in the world. No doubt such people will exist.
Look, there are trans women who are pro-TERF. Strange things happen.
That said, I think the SJ crowd had good reason to be *suspicious* of #notyourshield, namely that the -chans have a history of false flags and “pretending to be-“, so assuming that they would be up to their old tricks was not irrational. The -chans poison everything. GG is poison from the -chans.
Anyway, the suspicion of #notyourshield largely turned out to be mistaken. So, that happened. It’s unfortunate. But GG remains a sexist cesspool and the fact some minorities were part of that is sad but unremarkable.
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“It’s my feeling that X” is not proof of X.
Following “I can’t quite shake the feeling that” by “It got me to wondering, honestly, why it was OK, or even encouraged somewhat, to do X, statistically” is dishonest (or shows a lack of knowledge of what statistically means).
As a rationale, it is strikingly not rational. That holds even if her last sentence is true (my comic culture is lacking, but it seems to me her assertion is correct).
It’s the same problem with Sarkeesian videos, in fact. Non sequitur is still a problem if some of your conclusions are correct.
I must say I’m amused by this: “GTA is a fucked up mess. The sex workers are there for very ugly reasons. If you are a person who likes that shit, you need to ask yourself why.” considering the previous posts in that thread. One might ask if Ampersand would care to comment in light of this:
“When I played GTA – an earlier version, I’ve never played GTA5 – I actually found the freedom to explore the world, and to be as anti-social as possible while exploring – including things like swerving to hit a pedestrian I might have otherwise missed – was a lot of what made the experience engaging. There’s a joy in pretending to be an awful person doing awful things and experiencing no consequences (well, other than shoot-outs with the cops), all while doing no real-world harm.”
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Fair enough, I did post it without context because the point I was making at the time was merely “this tweet does not appear to be something you say to vent and later feel doesn’t really reflect your view”.
And this tweet really needs context to explain why it’s objectionable: The “policies and practices” that tweet refers to is target deciding to stop selling GTA V. That’s why he specifically says “not censorship”. Basically, I object to it because he’s defending an act of censorship.
What definition of censorship are you using? Mine is attempting to prevent information from being transmitted or attempting to destroy preserved information.
Target was transmitting information, some poeple didn’t like that information and requested that the transmission cease. As censorship goes, it has to rank among the least effective in all of history, however it was censorship nevertheless.
The attempt to censor Hatred (which Johnathan McIntosh also supported), however had the potential to be an extreemly successful act of censorship. Steam is an monopoly and Destructive Creations have no other retail partnerships. Even if they did, Steam is a monopoly so censoring it there will be a huge blow to any store.
Fortunately Gabe himself intervened and now I can choose to ignore Hatred instead of someone else choosing for me.
Burden of proof’s on you.
Why would I want to do that? We’re talking about censorship not Anita in general.
Of course I’ve seen bad stuff, mostly from McIntosh (I suspect the official twitter has a PR person, McIntosh clearly doesn’t). But… why would I want to bring it up? It’s not relevant for this.
To the best of my knowledge neither Anita or McIntosh have ever outright said “I support censorship”. It’s my personal judgement from their twitter that they do support it, but have the political savvy to avoid ever being explicit.
Tweets [1] and [2] are the most direct – since that’s him expressing direct support for target deciding to censor GTA 5 in [1]; and disappointment that Valve chose not to censor Hatred on Steam in [2]. Incidently steam is a monopoly in the PC marketplace – being banned from Steam will kill all but the most visible games. If you aren’t AAA and you aren’t on steam, you’re dead in the PC gaming market.
Tweets [3][4][5] work together as a set. [3] & [4] link “toxic masculinity” to school shootings. Tweet [5] links “toxic masculinity” to video games. This creates an, admittedly indirect, link between school shootings and video games. That’s been a favourite tactic of just about every activist trying to ban video games; including Jack Thompson himself.
It’s not proof even in my own opinion. But it’s enough for me to believe that if the government decided tomorrow to ban all copies of GTA they’d be happy about it.
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I’m going to make that last sentence stronger. It’s enough for me to believe that if the government started debating tomorrow whether they should ban all copies of GTA they’d try to push the government towards issuing a ban.
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Reposting my comment on reductio ad 4chanium because it is highly relevant.
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Forlorn Hopes, would you also say these are examples of attempted censorship or blacklisting?
https://www.change.org/p/dice-remove-anita-sarkeesian-from-mirror-s-edge-2-game-development
http://wiki.gamergate.me/index.php?title=Projects:Operation_Disrespectful_Nod
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“If what she was trying to get at was overall percentages, rather than critiques of individual plotlines, then it makes sense to include a woman who was killed with her husband.”
You’re mixing up two of my complaints about the list. One was that women can get treated the same way as men (down to being killed at the same point and for the same reason) and still get on the list. The other was that a woman was put on the list because she had husbands killed, which is nonsense because it means that having women killed to motivate men is sexist against women and having men killed to motivate women is still sexist against women. In the second example the women was still alive.
“And there are certainly individual entries on the list you could rightly nit-pick. But you seem to be refusing to engage, at all, with Simone’s actual point.”
Simone’s list was a Gish Gallop (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop ) which is when someone produces a long list of poor quality arguments knowing that nobody has the time to refute them all. The best you can do for that is to pick a couple of bad examples and refute them. And her “actual point” depended on the legitimacy of the individual examples; that percentage is made up of a long list of individual examples and if each example is bad, so is the statement about percentages.
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I approve of that comment. For the record I am not, and have never been, a poster on 4chan, 8chan, or any other chan like board. I’m a native of forums more than anything else.
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Uh, you mentioned something about a “burden of proof” above. Funny how that works.
On Steam and all of that, I can only speak for myself, but were I a gamer I would not be happy with a small number of companies having this kind of control of the market. People have a right to be unhappy about that.
On the other hand, if the major players in the industry choose to stop distributing murder porn, I am okay with that.
There is a meta argument to be had, but the object level matters. For example, *Hatred* is shallow, crass garbage. If I ran a company I would not want that in my catalog.
On the other hand, I fully support the rights of fans to dislike that and go elsewhere. Modern computers are (to a fair degree) general turing machines. The APIs for the graphics subsystems are public. You can distribute games yourselves.
“But the marketplace…”
It’s not my fault the market is like it is. But I would encourage any major game companies to steer away from that kind of stuff. Let the scum fester in the dark corners. On the other hand, companies want to make money. Some fans want these games. The companies have to weigh these concerns.
I get to have my voice. You get to have yours. They get to decide. See how that works? This is a cultural argument. Disagreement is normal.
“You insulted my game!”
Well, I guess so. If you like that stuff, then you like some awful shit. You should think about what this means. (Please notice I am not *telling you* what it means. No really, I’m not. But I think it means *something*. You should explore that.)
I think freedom is really important, but I get freedom also. Like, I can say “OMG that’s horrible what the fuck?”
Okay, so back to Sarkeesian, what if you are correct that she wants government censorship? Well, that would mean I disagree with her on something. Which, no big. I would then say, “Hey, Anita believes something that is a bad idea. I disagree with her. We shouldn’t do that thing.”
She wouldn’t be the first person I disagreed with but who I otherwise find worth listening to. Her videos are pretty good, even if *literally everything else* about her is terrible. (Which you’ve actually done nothing to demonstrate.)
Oh, and she and Jonathan McIntosh are, as near as I can tell, different human beings. They work together, but that does not mean they have a singular-hive-mind.
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You’re right that the object level matters.
Does the fact that Hatred can be acquired from the same store as your other games harm people?
Does the fact other people will acquire Hatred from the same store as you harm people?
The answer to both is no. So sure, there can be object level differences but Hatred hasn’t crossed The Line in which object level differences becomes more important (or even as important) as meta level differences.
Cedric Cisgender and Tristen Transgender both get to have their voice. They get to decide, however They are all cisgender, and so they can relate to Cedric and only publish his voice.
Tristen can buy his own printing press and distribute his book himself. However the state of the market makes it very hard for independent publishers to get noticed.
His book festers in the dark corners, and no other trans people know it exists.
That’s a _bad_ thing.
=======================
You want to bring up object level discussions. Fine, I agree with you that on an object level hatred is icky and and a book presenting an authentic transgender experience is not. Now start by convincing me that the object level difference actually matters.
Thus far your object level criticism basically says “it’s icky”, you haven’t demonstrated that banishing it to dark corners will actually prevent any harm.
Meanwhile the meta level discussion does matter, history has shown it. When people start saying that there’s an object level difference between two works of art and that means one should be banned; its the minority viewpoints that get thrown on a bonfire – funially enough the majority/the elite are in control over the conversation over what actually is object level bad.
So you want to talk object level? Don’t just say there’s an object level difference. Convince me it matters more than the meta level.
Good I’m glad you disagree.
…because I’m not trying to demonstrate that she’s a terrible person.
I’m saying that people dislike her because they consider her videos to be a motte* and censorship to be the bailee – and my evidence is to demonstrate that that’s a reasonable belief, even if not an proven one.
*And most mottes are good and unobjectionable, like you say about her videos.
Removing Anita from mirrors edge 2; yes I would.
Operation Disrespectful Nod is more of a grey area. When you advertise you’re creating a deal “you increase the sales of my product and I’ll give you money”.
And associations with negative things do decrease sales. If Coca-Cola advertised with magazines dedicated to “curing homosexuality” or some nonsense then LGBT people would feel disgusted and drink pepsi instead.
If Coca-Cola genuinely didn’t know that then it would be a nice thing to do for the LGBT community to write them a letter, and give Coca-Cola a chance to apologise and win back their custom.
Do the gamers writing emails genuinely feel strongly enough about how they were treated to boycott companies that advertise on those magazines? Is Gawker’s pro bullying stupidity going to disgust enough people to make advertising with them a bad idea?
I don’t actually know. Like I said it’s a grey area, I’m playing it safe and not participating in Disrespectful nod.
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1) Everything is political in a sense, but we place certain things beyond the bounds of ‘politics’. The alternative is to have everything that is noticed be constantly criticized — which not even the “the personal is political” people seem willing to do, given their rhetorical use of “basic human decency”, which is itself political and culturally/historically contingent and so on.
Do cultural and political criticism apply to games in the same way as they do to books and film? The safer position to take here is to say no — most attempts at ‘art games’ result in games that fail as games, that sacrifice gameplay in favor of nominally interactive stump-oration. The difference between games and other media is that games are interactive — and more interactive than, say, a choose-your-own-adventure storybook. Games, unlike CYOA books (or Passage or dys4ia) have identifiable gameplay, which, at its best, can cause a state of immersion that can rival those found in (often lowbrow and unartistic) books. Rejecting the criticism will produce better games: more immersive, with better gameplay.
But this is the true position, for the same reason. Cultural and political criticism can’t account for gameplay. Imagine using the same exact methods for movies that you would use for books! — focusing on word choice and ignoring the visuals, because books have no visuals.
(Yes, illustrated books, but CYOA books. The two cases are probably analogous.)
There’s too much potential in the medium to allow it to be restrained in that way. Seiklus is better than Passage or dys4ia, because it’s better at being a game.
2) There’s “something different” — expanding the searchspace in general — and then there’s “something different in this particular politically-motivated way”. Of course there will frequently be political motives for that exploration, but they shouldn’t all be aligned in the exact same direction, which seems to be what feminists want.
Now, when it comes to gender, I’m retrograde enough to be out of alignment with the ’50s ideal. (My grandmother was a sharpshooter. If the country had been invaded, she would’ve gone to war. I say this not to argue against the differentiation of genders in general, but against the still-assumed ideal of the housewife — peppy, stupid, confined, and useless.) Instead of producing more art-game garbage, maybe they should go off and work on a Seiklus clone with a female main character.
3) No shit they can. My father forbade me from watching the Simpsons or South Park because he said they glorified stupidity. He was right and I’ll do the same thing with my children.
4) “Should we consciously subordinate art to politics?” The question answers itself, no?
—-
It’s a call to stop using the trope, and it focuses on the stigmatization and cessation of a certain type of speech, rather than the provision of alternatives. If they would frame themselves as just advocating new ideas or ways of approaching the material, the reaction would probably be different.
But they won’t, for the same reasons that Futurism never came to this country. (Yet.)
Isn’t their point that ideology is a part of technical merit?
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My 2¢: I’m convinced that the amount of harassment, violent language and threats used by and against the vaguely-defined and leaderless gamergate and anti-gamergate movements are roughly equivalent. But since GG has been labelled as right wing & are seen as the outgroup in lefty circles, only the harassment they perpetrate gets significant coverage.
– A journalist (Milo Yiannopoulos) associated with GG was sent packages containing dead animals, syringes and (oddly) toilet paper.
– A lawyer (Mike Cernovich) associated with GG had his home address posted along with police contact forms, which was justifiably viewed as an attempt at Swatting.
– And then there are the usual attempts to dox people and get them fired for being associated with GG (not for any threatening or obscene behavior on their part, just association with a political movement) and the barely-coherent threats and insults that make up the Internet’s background radiation.
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I follow forums affiliated with both sides, and that’s my intuition as well based on the complaints I’ve seen them log.
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“Significant coverage” is so usefully vague, of course. If one points to publicity of anti-GG incidents, that can be dismissed as ‘significant’ while reports of harassment by GG supporters are always deemed ‘significant’.
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The closest thing I can think of to actual statistics is a twitter user called @The_Nimbus who analysed 100 tweets a day for 100 days.
Obviously not a perfect sample, for one thing it only covered twitter, and I haven’t looked closely at his methodogy. But here’s his results – https://twitter.com/The_Nimbus_/status/553610466618929152 and the methodology and raw data is linked.
Gamergate was less harassing.
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Interesting. A remarkable 30% of the tweets about GamerGate were actually on-topic.
I’m not being sarcastic. I find it remarkable it was that high of a percentage.
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“But since GG has been labelled as right wing & are seen as the outgroup in lefty circles, only the harassment they perpetrate gets significant coverage.”
So Fox News, The Daily Caller, The National Review, Breitbart, etc etc etc, don’t exist?
There are plenty of right-wing news outlets.
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Sure, but not ones with much reason to care about GG, other than maybe to recruit. The point was that GG was labeled conservative rather than being conservative. Both GG’s and anti-GG’s demographics skew heavily liberal, but the anti-GGs are the more politically active liberals.
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Is gamergate still a going concern? Seems to be in its death throes, at least.
My take on it has been the same since the beginning:
1. Political criticism of games is fine, as long as the critic is up-front about it. Same as any other medium.
2. The trade press being figuratively or literally in bed with games developers is not fine.
3. Zoe Quinn is an abusive and terrible person. Anita Sarkeesian and Jonathan Mcintosh are extremely silly people, taking advantage of other silly people. Hey, it’s the American Way. None of this justifies any kind of harassment or abuse against them!
4. Gamers are right to be concerned that gaming is being unduly influenced by the prudish and politically correct sensibilities of a tiny minority of the people who actually play games, and a much larger number who don’t.
5. None of the above really matters, because a bunch of gaming nerds had approximately the same chance against the juggernaut of online feminism as we’d have had against SEAL Team Six.
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Somewhere in the metaphorical gamergate headquarters we have a sign saying “It is zero days since someone accused gamergate of being dead”. We haven’t updated that sign in months :)
That said, whether or not gamergate is a concern, if the underlying issues aren’t dealt with we’ll see another flair up in… 2 years probably.
Though against the juggernaut we’ve had quite a few important successes. We got the FTC to issue advice about native advertisement that led to changes, quite a few sites published or updated ethics polices, Brad Wardell got some apologies (that’s a hugely important one). Gawker lost 7 figures of revenue.
The Fine Young Capitalists got funded, which I think one of the most important ones. I don’t know the full story of what happened between them and Zoe; but as far as I’m concerned their idea was the single most effective bit of activism I’ve ever seen for getting more women into game development – and if we support stuff like that we might replace fauxtivism with actual progress.
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Hey, there’s a similar sign about the death of feminism in our metaphorical headquarters! We haven’t had to update it in decades. :-)
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I tried to like this post and then remembered I wasn’t on tumblr.
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Thanks! Er… Wait, you don’t see the little “like” star below each comment?
Is that just a hallucination on my part?
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…there’s a like star?
… … … … …
there’s a like star! Gosh! This is what happens when I never look at the front end of my blog, I guess.
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Yeah, GG is still going, it got an infusion as recently as today. Someone leaked the transcript of Eron Gjoni’s count hearing (the one where he was forbidden from saying anything further about Zoe Quinn) and Zoe wrote at least one post in response. Prompting at least one follower of her to go “why are they still doing this to my friend”?
I had a thought about that, which I thought I could express as a generally useful rule:
If your friend was in a dramatic breakup/divorce and both they and the ex make extraordinary claims about the other ones’ (lack of) character, don’t just jump unconditionally to their side. Sure, you may think you know them. But you probably don’t know them as well as someone who’s lived with them.
Maybe if they’ve been your best friend for years, you can risk jumping to the conclusion that they’re the victim.
That rule concerns only what conclusions you can jump to on the basis of character. It does not rule out coming to any other conclusion by looking at the claims (say, 10000 word blog posts) and see what holds up. But if you aren’t willing to do that, you need to withhold judgment.
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I think that it’s ok to jump to your friends side. The harm you’ll do to your friend by expressing doubt probably outweighs the harm you’d do to their ex.
Now this changes when you’re a stranger on the internet. Because while a single stranger on the internet probably won’t be able to do much harm (usually, there’s some creative and vicious people out there). If 100 people each think “but I’m just one guy” suddenly you have a mob.
It also changes if your a widely read journalist, a law enforcement official, a judge, etc. Those professions wield powers that the average person does not, and they also have professional codes of ethics that should be sufficient if their friend comes to them with extraordinary claims about the ex’s (lack of) character.
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@Forlorn Hopes, this isn’t just theoretical for me. I’ve been in that situation, and I’d much rather that most people withhold judgement, than that her circles jumping to her side and my circles jumping to my side.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if someone doesn’t want that, if someone craves loyalty from people who know them less than their ex did, then that’s a red flag.
No, of course you don’t have to shout in my face that you doubt my account. But if I am a reasonable person (and I am), you know (and I know that you know) that my account may not be entirely objective, and you don’t know me quite well enough to tell.
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Reposting this from OT #5 (where it was a belated response to this:
@Nita: Regarding Sarkeesian, I’ll see what I can dig up at some point. I’ll want to make sure I’m in the right place emotionally first, and also that I have the time. I’ll probably post that to whatever Open Thread is current at the time, if that’s cool with you.
2.a One of Zak’s points, which I agree with totally, is that it is your job as an adult human to exercise extreme and unusual care in letting things shape your thinking when it comes to how you treat other people. So I may think I’ve shrugged off the effect of an Audi ad, but actually be influenced to buy an Audi next time I’m car shopping, and that’s okay! Not ideal, but it’s life. But it’s my job to be far more careful about, say, how I let a political ad influence my views on gay rights. It’s not that media’s ability to influence people is weak, it’s just that in can be overcome, and it’s a profound moral failing not to do so when it’s wrong, which means that if you don’t, you’re probably profoundly immoral to begin with.
2.b You’re a consequentialist, right? If so, this is probably one of those areas where, bar one of us having a conversion experience, we’re just never going to see eye-to-eye.
2.c I feel like someone who is thin-skinned enough that this hurts them in a meaningful way (maybe bar some extreme cases, but that’s not what must of the fighting is over) is someone who needs to focus their efforts on toughening themselves up, not on softening the world to suit them. But that’s probably another thing stemming from a difference in basic moral outlook.
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Future Open Thread is fine — as you can see, it’s already a monster of a topic in this one, and I’m still catching up.
(2a) On heroically resisting cultural influence
That’s an admirable principle. What should we do if someone either fails to take care, or fails to take a sufficient amount of care, because they innocently underestimate the effects? What should we do if most people end up mistreating others (after all, most people do underestimate the effects)?
According to you, we can conclude that most people are “profoundly immoral” (hmm, sounds a bit like Christianity)… And then what?
(2b) On consequentialism
My opinion of consequentialism is that it’s intractable in the general case in practice — after all, we can’t see into the future — but obviously right in principle. If you knew, with absolute certainty, that the consequences of action A would be better than those of action B, would you still choose B if it better matched your ideas of rights and duties?
(2c) On growing a thicker skin
Well, if being respected by your peers doesn’t matter to you at all, you must be a very unusual person indeed.
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That’s an admirable principle. What should we do if someone either fails to take care, or fails to take a sufficient amount of care, because they innocently underestimate the effects?
Point out there errors. Argue with them, remonstrate with them, show flaws in their reasoning, demonstrate counter-examples.
What should we do if most people end up mistreating others (after all, most people do underestimate the effects)?
Argue with, punish, and/or incapacitate them, as appropriate.
(hmm, sounds a bit like Christianity)
Sort of! It is rather elitist, on the basis of character. One crucial difference from Christianity (apart from, I suppose, Pelagianism) is the idea that (most) people can shape their own character to make it better, if they choose to do so.
If you knew, with absolute certainty, that the consequences of action A would be better than those of action B, would you still choose B if it better matched your ideas of rights and duties?
Perhaps not in all cases (I’ve admitted elsewhere that it’s possible that there is some consequentialist element in my moral intuitions), but in general: Yes. Fiat justitia, ruat caelum. (A motto often presented as deontological, but it works in an aretaic framework as well.)
Well, if being respected by your peers doesn’t matter to you at all, you must be a very unusual person indeed.
Being respected by my peers generally would be desirable, but its absence is not a cause for serious suffering. I know my own quality, and if people scorn me who ought to praise me, then that just reveals their quality, and why should I be bothered by the scorn of rabble? Conversely, if people praise me where I ought to be scorned (certainly, I know myself to be flawed in some serious ways), then that just shows that they have either low standards or a poor estimation of my character; why then would their praise reassure me?
It is distinctly likely that this attitude is in part a result of not ever (at least, that I can recall) having had the esteem of a majority of my peers, except in regards to my intelligence. However, the recognition that it is motivated does not lead me to conclude that it is wrong.
Now, on the other hand, to not have the esteem of those particular individuals whom one respects and admires is another matter—although, again, one might take that lack of esteem into consideration when deciding whether one really ought to respect and admire them after all. And to be utterly bereft of friends is a miserable state indeed. But it seems to me that that is not what it is at stake. Again: Someone must be consuming the 20% of media that includes positive depictions, right?
Moreover, it seems to me that “I enjoy works of fiction in which the only characters belonging to group X are portrayed as [incompetent/stupid/little more than sex on legs/whatever]” and “I think that people of group X are universally [whatever]” are two very different positions. I enjoy plenty of media that does not conform to my own moral or empirical judgments. For me to be deeply hurt by someone else enjoying fiction that portrays people-like-me poorly would be silly.
Now, I think it’s perfectly reasonable, if you note that someone else enjoys such fiction, to inquire as to their thoughts about the content that you view as problematic. For example, if I learned that a friend regarded [a specific Changeling: the Lost adventure whose name I can’t recall that is deeply fucked up about autism] as super-awesome, I might ask them about their thoughts on that adventure’s portrayal of autism, given that related beliefs held by actual people justify a lot of abuse. But if their answer was “sure, it’s fucked to actually believe that, but as a fictional premise, it makes for some really interesting gameplay,” that would seem to me to be perfectly reasonable. I’d still be a bit disturbed by the adventure itself, which actually (IIRC) pretty clearly states that “autistic” implies [shit that is not implied by that at all], which is a bit different from most of the “overused trope” issues, but I wouldn’t be hurt by their enjoyment of it.
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Since my last post on statistical analysis of gamergate seemed to be popular here’s another.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2014/12/29/editorial-gamergate-political-attitudes-part-1-movement-right-wing
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2014/12/30/gamergate-political-attitudes-part-two-old-liberals-vs-new-progressives
I think the second one is perhaps one of the most useful articles about gamergate in general.
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Nice analysis, but I’m not sure I buy the story of GamerGate supporters being a part of “the left”, then moving away from it.
My hypothesis is that most of them have always had the (lazy-libertarian?) attitude of “don’t you dare touch my entertainment!”. So, to those who try to neatly split people into “right” and “left”, they seem leftist when conservatives criticize games, and rightist when feminists do.
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I agree with that hypothosis. However I’d add that Cultural Libertarians / Gray Tribe, whatever you want to call them have always agreed with the left on things like gay marriage, equal rights for all races and sexes.
So in the past when the Right’s “moral majority” was the source of censorship and authoritarianism so Blue and Grey tribe aligned perfectly. Now that Blue is trying it’s hand at authoritarianism the divisions between Blue and Grey actually matter.
I think that’s what the analysis was saying too.
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The way “don’t you dare touch my entertainment!” looks from the inside is “you claim to be in favor of social justice, and yet you focus your efforts on enforcing ideological purity in video games? I doubt your commitment to good and suspect this is an excuse to gain social capital by smearing the community to which I belong as misogynist.”
Alternatively: “You claim to be focused on misogyny in popular culture, yet your first target is video games and not rappers or professional athletes? I suspect you have chosen to target minor offenders with little social capital over major offenders with large amounts of social capital”
I’m sympathetic to both these views.
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“So in the past when the Right’s “moral majority” was the source of censorship and authoritarianism so Blue and Grey tribe aligned perfectly. Now that Blue is trying it’s hand at authoritarianism the divisions between Blue and Grey actually matter. ”
Dingdingding, been seeing this more and more.
The recent reactions to the Charlie Hobdo cartoons (not so much the controversy, the content of the cartoons themselves) is another mirror of this, as is the blue identification with ‘hard atheism’ of Dawkins/Hitchens/Maher/Harris variety in the mid-late 00s while casting them as pure bigots now. Perhaps it’s a BIT more complicated than that, but I think this is similar symptom.
Also, potential tangent: while criticizing Charlie Hobdo’s work as racist is fair (if arguable, in my view), some of the editorials that cast them in the same league as the French far-right are borderline shitting on their legacy.
fuck gawker in other words
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…Anita Sarkeesian’s “first target” was films and television shows. She made a series of videos about sexist tropes in those, and then, having finished that project, she moved on to the same project for video games.
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@Nita – “Nice analysis, but I’m not sure I buy the story of GamerGate supporters being a part of “the left”, then moving away from it.”
This was pretty much my experience, for the reasons ForlornHopes lays out. I thought I was blue, turns out I was actually grey. Of course, when I thought I was blue, I supported a lot of blue ideas instinctively. Now that I’ve been sorted out, I’m a lot more hostile to those same ideas than I was previously. Sorting out the greys does not strengthen the blue tribe.
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“So in the past when the Right’s “moral majority” was the source of censorship and authoritarianism so Blue and Grey tribe aligned perfectly. Now that Blue is trying it’s hand at authoritarianism the divisions between Blue and Grey actually matter. ”
Dingdingding, been seeing this more and more.
The recent reactions to the Charlie Hobdo cartoons (not so much the controversy, the content of the cartoons themselves) is another mirror of this, as is the blue identification with ‘hard atheism’ of Dawkins/Hitchens/Maher/Harris variety in the mid-late 00s while casting them as pure bigots now. Perhaps it’s a BIT more complicated than that, but I think this is similar symptom.
Also, potential tangent: while criticizing Charlie Hobdo’s work as racist is fair (if arguable, in my view), some of the editorials that cast them in the same league as the French far-right are borderline shitting on their legacy.
In other words Gawker sucks.
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@voidfraction
Have you considered the possibility that the feminists who criticize video games are, by and large, gamers who are sick of sexism in video games?
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@anonymous coward – “Have you considered the possibility that the feminists who criticize video games are, by and large, gamers who are sick of sexism in video games?”
…I think we can lay that one to rest.
also, apologies for stealing your name, fellow anon.
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NAMBLA argues that non-coercive sexual contact between children and adults is typically non-traumatic, and that studies finding that adult/child relationships are traumatic are confounded because they group coercive sex with non-coercive sex. They’ve also argued that the criminal justice system often traumatizes children who’ve had sexual contact with adults by convincing them to be ashamed of what happened, and repeatedly telling them it was traumatic. I’m not convinced, but it sounds plasuble. I’d like to discuss these ideas without being yelled at for even considering them.
http://nambla.org/psychol.html
For the record, I’d like to state that I am not attracted to children. Even if I were to judge it to be ethically acceptable to have sex with children, I still wouldn’t. Ethics aside, it’s just totally unappealing. My only concern is that maybe what we’re doing now is hurting kids worse than some alternative methods of handling this sort of thing.
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On a whim I once read a book by a psychologist who did a study with adults who had had sexual contact with adults when they were children. The theme she found was that the most damage came from other adults panicking when they found out and not from the contact itself.
It upsets me how strong the taboo is against discussing pedophiles (in the strict sense of being attracted to children) with any semblance of mercy or attempt at understanding. Sex offender laws in the US are a barbaric, cowardly rejection of evidence in favor of a moral panic. I don’t have a “side” in what should be done, per se, but I want to see us get to a point where we can at least work toward a coherent set of policies that aren’t motivated by fear and revenge.
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I don’t suppose you remember the title of that book, because it seems very strange to suggest that if a five-year-old is beaten and raped by an adult mostly have been OK if other grownups were just chill about it. But then it probably depends on what is meant by ‘sexual contact’ and ‘panicking'; it is obviously very traumatic for a child if, say, his parents ‘panic’ by trying to make him feel at fault so he doesn’t embarrass them (or the perpetrator) by telling others.
I don’t really think that the solution to overblown, grandstanding laws about Protecting The Children is to run as fast in the other direction to say that maybe pedophilia wouldn’t be so bad if we weren’t, like, uptight about it. Attitudes like that are why Roman Polanski got a slap on the wrist and his victim was blamed.
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First of all, you’re attributing positions to me that I don’t hold. Please stop doing that.
Second, I don’t remember the title. This was a few years ago and I was killing time in a bookstore while I waited for a bus. It was a very slim volume, white with an image of an unfolded paper chain of children on the cover, but beyond that I couldn’t tell you. I wish I could find it again, too.
Third: No, the descriptions included were not of children who had been beaten and raped. I hesitate to use the coercive/noncoercive terminology Anon is using, but the incidents described would fall into noncoercive under what I’m imagining their criteria would be. The parental reactions were not to try and cover it up, or to blame the children: they just made it clear through their expressions and their questions that this was a VERY BAD THING THAT HAD HAPPENED, which the adults in the study remembered being much more upsetting than being asked to – for example – touch a penis, which they were more curious about than anything.
Fourth: Where did I say anything about running in the other direction? I’m concerned about how we talk about the issue and specifically said that I don’t side with any particular policy outside of rage at how we do things now.
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>I don’t suppose you remember the title of that book, because it seems very strange to suggest that if a five-year-old is beaten and raped by an adult mostly have been OK if other grownups were just chill about it.
To play devil’s advocate: it makes perfect sense that horrific early-life trauma could be much less harmful to an individual if everyone would just avoid the topic and let the mental mechanism of repression suppress the harmful memories as evolution intended. (assigning intent to evolution: -5 points, but I believe this is the exact purpose of repression as an evolved mechanism)
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I don’t suppose you remember the title of that book
I haven’t read it, but I think the book they are thinking of is “The Trauma Myth”
http://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Myth-Sexual-Children-Aftermath/dp/046501688X
(And I’m impressed that they correctly remembered the paper chain of children on the cover!)
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Yes, that’s the right one! You’re brilliant!
Have you read it? If so, what are your thoughts? As I said I only picked it up in a bookstore and so didn’t have the opportunity to read it too critically.
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This seems like a reasonably plausible hypothesis, and the anecdata I have heard support it somewhat but obviously the selection effects are *unreal*. One avenue that seems easy to attack: what’s the state of knowledge on trauma created by post-facto therapy/attention? That could tell us a lot about the plausibility of the hypothesis.
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That’s like saying “embezzling the money set aside for a kid’s college education isn’t traumatic, it’s convincing the kid that he really needed the money and that he would be much worse off without it, that is traumatic.” That’s sort of true, and you could argue that if someone cleaned out a six year old’s future college bank account, you shouldn’t immediately tell him that something bad was done to him. But it does miss the point.
Because a kid is a kid, he might not understand that some harms done to him are harms. Certainly, you could make a case for not telling him that he has been harmed until later. But the harm is ultimately caused by the person who did it, not by the person who made the kid aware that he was harmed. And when you do make the kid aware that he was harmed, there are many factors to consider, not just reduction of trauma. The trauma isn’t your fault just because you explained things to the kid at a point that doesn’t minimize the trauma.
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It might call for explaining things to kids in a different way.
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Please can you clarify your definition of ‘harm’.
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Your arguments aren’t bad, but already assume it’s a harm, which misses the point. The embezzling is thievery. The sex is… what? That’s the question.
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I think that the assumption of harm comes from the fact that we usually consider having sex with someone without their consent to be a form of harm. Children can’t meaningfully consent to sex with adults for a variety of reasons.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that children will always experience sexual contact with adults as traumatic. It does mean that sex between children and adults isn’t ethically acceptable even if the child is not traumatized.
For another (potentially much more upsetting) comparison: imagine that someone is raped while unconscious. On waking up in the morning, they have no reason to suspect that they have been raped. Assuming they never find out, have they been harmed?
(My answer to this question, you can probably guess, is yes, this is a form of harm, even if the person never finds out.)
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“This doesn’t necessarily mean that children will always experience sexual contact with adults as traumatic. It does mean that sex between children and adults isn’t ethically acceptable even if the child is not traumatized.”
This is an important distinction. An action can be wrong for someone to commit even if the other party isn’t harmed by it.
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“This is an important distinction. An action can be wrong for someone to commit even if the other party isn’t harmed by it.”
Harm and traumatization aren’t the same thing. Imagine the kid whose college fund was embezzled when he was 6. Do you seriously claim that that action is wrong but has not harmed him?
(And if you claim “he’s only harmed at the point where he tries to use the missing college fund,” I would then ask who is doing the harm–the person who tells the kid the fund is gone or the person who took it?)
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There can be degrees of harm caused by identical actions, including those that functionally equal none. Embezzling the entirety of someone’s college fund isn’t on the same scale as embezzling a small amount of it, for example, even though embezzling is wrong in both cases.
I’m offering an argument against child molestation, in case you missed that.
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“For another (potentially much more upsetting) comparison: imagine that someone is raped while unconscious. On waking up in the morning, they have no reason to suspect that they have been raped. Assuming they never find out, have they been harmed?”
Are you leaving things out of this story? Like they don’t wind up with an std. No one else finds out and then mis-treats them for some reason?
If someone never finds out they were raped. And the rape does not have some other tangible negative effect then of course they weren’t harmed. Saying they were harmed seems to suggest some sort of magical thinking.
Of course raping them was still wrong. Since the odds of raping them causing harm to the person or someone else (their friends/etc) was quite high. But unless you add more to the story the person who was raped was not harmed at all.
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What if I make it known that when I die, I want a large portion of my fortune to go to a lavish, expensive funeral. My survivors decide fuck that noise and toss me in a ditch, pocketing the money. Is that wrong? Have I been harmed?
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Of course you cannot be harmed by actions that occur after your death. The action is however still probably wrong. For one this action may still hurt the still living who hear about it. Perhaps by making them angry or making them less secure that their own wishes will be carried out. Doing this sort of thing may also have “virtue ethics” style effects. Once you are in the business of ignoring your promises to gain money you may go further down the road.
But this doesn’t change the fact that you cannot hurt dead people.
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@bem: The question is really “what is meaningful consent?” Because children certainly can voluntarily agree to have sexual contact with adults, which differentiates the best possible adult-child sexual contact scenario from the rape of an unconscious individual, where there is no agreement at all. We just don’t treat that agreement as constituting meaningful consent.
But . . . why? And as far as I can tell, the only real reason is that we think that children are likely to suffer psychological harm from such contact later, even if they’re perfectly happy with it at the time. And empirically, that seems to be true, at least some of the time.
But if the only reason that that’s true is precisely because we don’t regard the child’s consent as valid, and therefore frame the contact as exploitation, then we’ve created the very evil we’re trying to prevent.
I want to be clear: Unlike my arguments about drunk sex, I am not arguing that we definitely should regard non-coercive sexual contact between adults and children as consensual. But I do think there are deep flaws in the usual arguments for why we should not, and I’m not entirel sure they’re fixable.
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osberend-
No, the reason we don’t (okay, the reason I don’t–some people probably do think the way you’ve described) accept children’s voluntary agreement to have sex with adults as consent is the same reason we don’t accept a prisoner’s voluntary agreement to have sex with a prison guard as consent (yes, I am stealing Ozy’s metaphor from further down. Their entire response is basically what I was going to write here). Adults have enough power over children that it’s reasonable to assume that a child who says yes to an adult’s offer of sex is doing so for fear of reprisal, not out of genuine consent.
This is why, for instance, some states have Romeo and Juliet laws–if both participants in the sex are underage, the power differential is not an issue. This is also why, say, teachers having sex with their students, etc, is usually frowned upon even if the student clearly initiated the relationship.
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@bem: But if the student initiated the relationship, how is it plausible (bar unusual cases like BPD-induced paranoia attacks) that the student is acting out of fear of retaliation?
More broadly, let’s start making precise distinctions. First, as shorthand, let’s use “pedosex” to mean “deliberate sexual contact between an adult and a “child” in the sense of someone who is prepubescent but post-toddler—an elementary schooler, roughly.” Let’s define “freely agree to X” to mean “understand what X entails in a basic, physical sense, and agree to do X because of anticipated benefit from engaging in X (e.g. physical pleasure, satisfaction of curiosity, “acting grown-up like a teenager,” etc.) rather than anticipated harm from not engaging in X (e.g. being punished, being injured, having people not love/like you, being seen as a “baby,” etc.).” Then it seems to me that there are basically four anti-pedosex assertions one could make, as regards consent specifically:
1. Strong assertion: It is impossible for a child to freely agree to pedosex,
2. Moderate assertion 1: A child can freely agree to pedosex, but that agreement should not be regarded as meaningful consent. Even if the child enjoys (or is merely bored by) the experience at the time, their rights have been violated.
3. Moderate assertion 2: Although a child can freely agree to pedosex, it is impossible for the adult they are engaging in it with to know that this is the case, hence engaging in pedosex (as an adult) is always making a choice to possibly commit an assault.
4. Weak assertion: Although a child can freely agree to pedosex, it is also possible for a child to be coerced in ways that are realistically indistinguishable from free agreement to an outside observer.
(4) seems to me to be reasonable, while (1) is absurd (children are curious, children like pleasure, children want to seem grownup, etc.). I am massively dubious about (3)—children, in my experience, say no to perfectly reasonable commands from adults all the damn time, so it seems unlikely that a suitably framed mild proposal or request, in an otherwise healthy emotional context, would automatically cause a child who doesn’t want to comply to feel that they must.
I am uncertain (philosophically) about (2)—I am leery of rejecting it, but I do absolutely and unreservedly its analogue that applies to developmentally disabled adults, and I am not sure how that is consistent with an acceptance of (2) for children.
I think it may also be helpful, for the purposes of this discussion, to focus on pedosex of a form that seems maximally likely to be agreeable to the child—since this discussion is occurring against a background assumption that all pedosex is intrinsically bad, even a conclusion that a very small fraction of pedosex is not intrinsically bad would be major unexpected result. Therefore, how about we start by focusing on unreciprocated oral sex performed by the adult on the child*?
In this context, what is your take on (1)-(4)?
*I am not interested in children sexually, but I would happily perform unreciprocated oral sex on my own partners-of-interest (adult women), as opposed to not having sex with them at all, so I don’t think this is an entirely unrealistic scenario.
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I tend to agree with your analysis, Osberend. I would further note that your 4 is probably sufficient to justify the present illegal status of adult/child sex (given that any benefits of legalizing it would seem fairly small, avoiding the substantial risks entailed by issue 4 seems sufficient to justify forgoing those benefits).
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As a matter of law, that might be correct—my libertarian side is uncomfortable with it, but my libertarian side is also pretty damn uncomfortable with child rape. I do wonder if it wouldn’t be better to instead have a rather strong rebuttable presumption that the sex was non-consensual, rather than treating it as being so by definition.
The main theoretical benefit of legalizing it would seem to not so much in the legality per se as in the associated framing, i.e. as noted above, even if the experience is not intrinsically traumatizing, the child may experience trauma as a result of adults framing it as “this horrible thing that was done to you, exploiting your trust and destroying your innocence.” Because (empirically) some adults will engage in pedosex whether it’s legal or not. Also, some portion of the psychological abuse perpetrated by existing child molesters seems to be driven by the need for secrecy—which, let’s be clear, does not justify, excuse or mitigate it! But would some of them do otherwise if they could be open about what they were doing, provided that it was consensual?
So the questions (there’s not just one) become:
1. How much total trauma from pedosex that would happen anyway would be removed by legalization and associated shifts in social norms?
2. How much total trauma from pedosex that would happen anyway would be aggravated by legalization and associated shifts in social norms?
3. How much additional traumatic pedosex would occur as a result of (predators exploiting) legalization and associated shifts in social norms?
All three of these questions seem to have non-obvious answers to me, even for a given program of legalization.
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osberend: while children say ‘no’ all the time, they also say ‘yes’ all the time. It’s not as if they say ‘no’ because they always err in the direction of refusal–it’s entirely possible that they would say ‘no’ to ‘clean your room’ and still be vulnerable to pressure to say ‘yes’ to sex.
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Osberend: I suggest you read Lawrence Lessig’s account of when he was counsel for a boy who had been statutory raped at the elite choir they were in, when they were both kids.
The interesting thing is that Lessig was abused too, but “handled” it much better than the guy he was lawyer for (obviously: Lessig is a highly respected law professor, the other guy was was struggling with issues following the abuse) Although at the time, Lessig had not considered what was done to him as abuse, when looking at his choir mate he realized he had dodged a bullet.
(I don’t know the policy for links, but search for nymag Lessig choir to read his story).
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I think 1-3 are false. But 4 is a sufficient justification for keeping sex between adults and children illegal. Also I would be interested in knowing what percentage of children who freely desired sex with adults wind up regretting it later. Of course I cannot get that number in any reasonably way.
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@Jiro: I agree, which is why I said that (4) seems reasonable to me. But “it is possible to harmfully pressure a child into sex without directly threatening them” does not imply “it is impossible to approach a child for sex without harmfully pressuring them.”
@vintermann: I’ll take a look at that and share my thoughts when I get the chance.
@stargirlprincess: That is approximately my thinking, although I’m still not convinced that a strong but rebuttable presumption of coercion wouldn’t be a better idea.
But note that even just rejecting 1-3 implies that we are (as a society) telling some children who have not been abused that they have been, some of whom undoubtedly will believe it, and suffer unnecessary trauma as a result. That almost certainly inflates the percentage you’re interested in (as am I) substantially; I would like to know both what it is, and what it would be in the absence of societal messages of “your trust was exploited and your innocence violated.”
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@vintermann: That story is deeply fucked. But I notice two things:
1. There was no element of voluntary agreement. There was grooming and manipulation that was intended to prevent the boys from actively protesting, and perhaps even to convince them to view the experience positively, but I don’t see a single event described there where the adult made the slightest attempt to insure that this was what the kid wanted.
2. Reading the description of Lessig’s experience, it doesn’t sound like he thought it was good at the time, or even all right, just that it was something he “could handle.”
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If you’d enjoy seeing a similar argument fleshed out and applied to literary, media, and cultural criticism, I highly recommend James Kincaid’s _Erotic Innocence_.
One editorial review from amazon has a decent nickel summary:
“…by employing Victorian and Freudian ideas our society has simultaneously idealized and eroticized images of children and youth. Citing examples from the tabloids, celebrity trials, and popular movies starring children, the author explains society’s need for horrors such as ritual abuse, “kiddie porn,” and accusations against clergy and day care workers. Preoccupation with this misguided sexuality allows the public to ignore the poverty, neglect, malnutrition, and poor education that constitute true child abuse. Kincaid suggests abandoning the Gothic model and acknowledging that erotic feelings are a normal part of life that rational adults can control.”
Kincaid’s a really gifted and funny writer, which defused a lot of my discomfort at reading a book that argues that we moderns take child molesting too seriously.
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I would be somewhat surprised if this wasn’t true, actually, as sex doesn’t have some magical property that makes it harmful to children and children only.
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Sex without meaningful consent is harmful to everyone. It’s the fact that they are children that makes them incapable of giving meaningful consent. (except in edge cases such as small age differences in states that don’t have a Romeo and Juliet rule).
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To elaborate on Jiro’s point: Think about the example of a prisoner and a prison guard. Even if a prisoner doesn’t want to have sex with a prison guard, the guard has the ability to throw them into solitary (i.e. torture them), etc. So the prisoner has to say ‘yes’, so their ‘yes’ provides no information about whether they actually want sex. Similarly, adults are almost always in a tremendous position of power over children, so children’s yeses to sex provide no information about whether they want it.
In addition, most children find sex weird and disgusting and don’t want it; of those who experience sexual desire (including myself as an eight-year-old), pretty much all of them are not ready to have sex. So we can assume that any random child that says ‘yes’ to sex, in fact, doesn’t want sex and is being raped.
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(Huh, comments can’t nest deeper?)
I get what you’re saying, but consider, for example, a rich and poor person. Should they not be allowed to have a relationship with sex, either? I wouldn’t frame it as “being raped” if one wouldn’t call the that rape too.
I’d say that banning sex with children is a good idea because the position of power that can be easily abused means that banning it is probably a net positive. But I think that society’s lack of acknowledgment of it being anything other than horrifically traumatic is harmful.
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anony: An individual adult has significantly more power over an individual child than an individual rich person has over an individual poor person, and children are much much much less likely to desire sex with adults than poor people are with rich people.
Comments don’t nest deeper because if they do they comments get very very narrow and hard to read.
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I was sexually abused as a child but nobody ever found out about it for various reasons. I did not enjoy the experience, and was moderately scared by it, but much less so than I was of being smacked as punishment or wetting myself in public. In short it was an unpleasant experience, but not unimaginably so and certainly not the worst thing that happened to me during that time: getting bullied at school was far more traumatic. The fact is that as a child a lot of scary stuff happens that you don’t really understand, and most of the time you just roll with it.
So their claim seems plausible, although that doesn’t mean that sex with children should be decriminalised. I consider myself lucky to have avoided having crowds of adults telling me how traumatised I must be and encouraging a victim mentality. Anyone who has watched a child react to injury knows how important the reactions of those around them to how they feel about their wounds.
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Just to expand briefly: it seems likely that much of the harm caused by rape is the sense of violating intimacy. If you lack a well developed sense of sexual/romantic intimacy then it lacks an element to distinguish it from other cases of physical violence or coercion. Why isn’t rape the same as a punch in the face? For children, it may well be.
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1260&context=bglj
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I blame the “people who find young people hot” community for all the loli on fan service sites. I go on a FT site and am enjoying looking at Erza or Natsu/Grey and then I run into sexualized Wendy pictures. This just ruins everything as she is 12. This is a serious problem with reading any site that involves hot anime people :(.
Besides my animosity toward the community for ruining my fanservice sites I mostly suspend judgement. Given the extreme level of mindkill aound the topic I find it plausible society is overcriminalizng relations between adults and “children” to an extreme degree. But I have no idea what a sane policy would look like. And I really don’t know how I would find reliable decent research on the topic even if I tried. Even Warren Farrel failed me. I assume dhe would be pretty ok since he wrote basically the only sane Mens Rights Book. But he went too far in the other direction and his research seemed really biased in favor of adult/children relations (mostly he leaned way too heavily on the testimony of father who had sexual contact with their daughters).
Since I don’ know of any reliable sources of information I cannot really judge. Unless the child involved is very young. I personally find the whole thing really unappealing though. It is pretty interesting it seems oddly accepted in the “hot anime characters picture” community. Despite being super hated everywhere else.
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While were talking about pedophiles…
(for the record, I am not one and am pretty squicked out by the idea)
Actual child porn involves harming actual children in its making and is not OK. But that animated/written/drawn child porn is not only illegal but grounds for ruining someone’s entire life, and sexual attraction to children is considered grounds for being a complete monster in of itself, is extremely messed up.
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There is a lot of normative discourse replacing the role of positive evaluation which usually indicates a fair amount of cognitive manipulation that routes around the ability to acknowledge simple facts and distinctions on the issue of sexual relationships between legal minors and adults. Certain distinctions cannot be brought up and acknowledged without someone recognizing you are about to argue against the status quo concerning social conceptions of consent and parental involvement in the sexuality of their offspring. In general, I am of the opinion that a lot of discourse concerning pedophilia is fundamentally motivated by a misandrist prejudice against male sexuality.
One of the more problematic elements of modern rhetoric is the conflation of attraction to pre-pubescent children with attraction to pubescent and relatively post-pubescent legal minors. The human brain did not evolve to feel attraction to an individual if and only if that individual happens to have resided on the earth for the duration of at least exactly 18 revolutions around Sol: rather, it evolved to feel attraction to individuals of the opposite sex that express sexual fertility (among other features). Yet a 30 year old man who expresses attraction to a female of 17 years and 364 days is consigned to the same label as a 30 year old man who expresses attraction to a female of 5 years.
Likewise, between different jurisdictions the age of legal majority is different. Is there something particular about American females that they require an additional 2 years of growth than Canadian females before they can engage in sexual intercourse without becoming traumatized? Again, the present discourse obfuscates this element.
Further, there is clear and abundant evidence that individuals, male and female, below the age of majority feel sexual attraction towards adults. 14 year old boys routinely masturbate to images and video of adult women, and would very quickly “consent,” were they allowed to, to sexual intercourse with a female of more than 18 years. Everyone seems fine with admitting that male minors are not traumatized by sexual experience with adult women in the case that he wasn’t coerced (to suspend briefly the idea that being under 18 somehow eliminates the possibility of being able to provide reasonable consent). Yet the complete opposite sentiment is found when the sexes are reversed. This seems to indicate we conceive of male and female sexuality very differently, no matter what other feminist platitudes about female empowerment or equality we might give lip service to. We seem to believe that male minors are more capable of granting consent than female minors, in practice if not in theory.
As to the question of whether minors would or should feel traumatized by a sexual experience with an adult, again there is a lot of inappropriate conflation. Like any activity, it is possible for an individual to regret their behavior later, perhaps even to experience a great deal of anxiety and shame about it. This alone doesn’t make the said activity wrong: I remember some awfully embarrassing things I did when I was 14 and feel regret over them, but that doesn’t make what occurred wrong per se. Contrariwise, a lack of negative feeling following some particular experience doesn’t demonstrate it is valid or licit of itself. I suspect that in a lot of cases involving sexual contact between adult males and post-pubescent female minors, most cases of trauma experienced or felt by the females takes place because they sense that society would say they are abnormal if they don’t. Switching sexes, post-pubescent male minors are more likely to brag about their sexual conquest of what is formally off-limits. Again, this attitude seems continuous with our practical, if not theoretical, opinion concerning the differences between male and female sexuality.
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“Everyone seems fine with admitting that male minors are not traumatized by sexual experience with adult women in the case that he wasn’t coerced (to suspend briefly the idea that being under 18 somehow eliminates the possibility of being able to provide reasonable consent).”
Are you kidding? That’s like saying, 100 years ago, “everyone agrees that married women are not traumatized when sexually abused by their husbands”. The “everyone” who “agrees” on such a thing is justifying rape and abuse and should not be listened to.
“I remember some awfully embarrassing things I did when I was 14 and feel regret over them, but that doesn’t make what occurred wrong per se.”
Sex is important to humans, psychologically and socially, in a way which makes regret over sex at 14 not like regret on cheating on your exam.
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Did you start hosting these just so you’d be able to come up with punning titles for them?
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“We have gone three (3) threads without a proposal of genocide.”
Did Ozy miss that I made a proposal of genocide in the Orson Scott Card thread? (Where it was on-topic; I was arguing that it was okay for Ender to commit genocide.) Or do open threads count separately from other threads? (Or is the statement of there being no proposal of genocide part of the rerun, so it doesn’t matter if anyone makes one now?)
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I hate to be speciesist, but killing alien races is xenocide, at the very least within the Enderverse and arguably within English. So, your proposal, although certainly admirably bloody-minded, was not really genocide. Please reframe it with real people as the unlucky targets.
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I don’t live in the Enderverse. Furthermore, it had already been referred to as genocide in the article being referenced.
(I also think it’s stupid to refer to Russian astronauts as “cosmonauts”, if you must know. And I don’t refer to gay marriage as “garriage” in order to use a different word for it.)
Since I clearly advocated genocide, the counter ought to be reset.
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I am keeping track of how many open threads we’ve gone without a proposal of genocide in order to discourage people from genocide encouragement.
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That seems like a dangerous game. For one thing, there is a certain perverse temptation (at least for me, and probably for some others) to encourage genocide just to reset the counter. Second, it means that everyone enters each open thread with the idea of genocide-advocacy in the forefront of their mind. When you’ve just been reminded of the existence of hammers, things tend to look a lot more like nails.
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So far, it seems to have primed everyone to have meta arguments about what counts as resetting the counter, which is fine by me.
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The amusing part here, though, is that I made the proposal of genocide legitimately and on-topic, in a context where it makes sense to support genocide without being a horrible evil person (indeed, in almost the only context where it does make sense). The fact that it happens to reset your counter is a sidenote.
Still, it does reset your counter, unless you want to exclude non-open threads from the counter (in which case, *these* posts still should reset your counter.)
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Hoo boy. So in the wake of Charlie Hebdo, I’ve been seeing a lot of statistics about Muslims’ opinions on things like Sharia law, the killing of apostates, and women’s rights. Some of them look pretty scary, like the percent that support the death penalty for apostasy (13% in the LOWEST region studied). This is from a Pew study, which I understand would usually be pretty reliable. I want to know if there’s something I’m missing here. Do Christians/Jews/Hindus etc. in the same regions/situations have similar beliefs? Are there caveats or mistranslations I’m unaware of? Does Pew have some kind of agenda? Or are the islamaphobes right?
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I don’t have time to look in detail, but you can search through questions on Pew’s Global Attitude Project http://www.pewglobal.org/question-search/
There’s also the World Values Survey http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp
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My general assumption is that the Middle East is a terrible place full of people who think terrible things. I find I’m not often surprised.
Christians were the same a few centuries ago. (At which time of course, Islam was a far more enlightened culture … so it goes).
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I don’t see how Islam has been an “enlightened” culture at any time since the Golden Age (and I’ve read some things that cast doubt on even that …)
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He might mean “more enlightened than the Christians of that period,” which is arguably reasonable at a few points in time, particularly if you forget about the Byzantines.
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You shouldn’t actually assume that the Middle East is full of people who think terrible things. That’s like saying that you don’t know anything about creationism or evolution, but you’re pretty sure they’re all a bunch of biased researchers who use ideology to decide whether humans came from apes.
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And/or it’s mainly signaling; but yes, a minimum of 13% sounds scary.
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Exceptions are not hard to find, but broadly speaking, Muslims are pretty terrible.
(Resisting temptation. Resisting temptation.)
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I don’t know much about christianity/ judaism, but islam has an explicit rule that is very hard to get around regarding dwath penatly for apostasy. (the best counterargument i’ve heard is that apostasy meant treason and just converting to a different religion wouldn’t be enough to require death penalty, although that is not very convincing). it’s like if you asked about punishing people who eat pork, you would expect it to be much worse in jewish and islamic areas than christian areas because those two religions are explicitly anti-eating pork. (although i don’t hink there are actual punishments for eating pork in either the same way there is for apostasy in islam).
as an ex muslim, islamophobes do have a bunch of valid points about stuff that is actually part of islam, which ‘liberals’ tend to deny completely without research on the sole basis that ‘a racist said it therefore it’s wrong’. it feels incredibly icky to have to defend far right people on specific points when i don’t want to encourage them, but it’s hard to avoid it when all the people on the left seem to be sticking their heads in the sand and hiding behind ‘they’re just taking the quran out of context, even though i haven’t actually studied it’.
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This phenomenon drives me so fucking nuts, not only on Islam, but also on immigration restriction (as in, any meaningful immigration restriction. At all.), various feminist overreaches, idiotic gun-control measures*, and [redacted]**. It’s especially fun when leftists. having made X taboo among liberals even though it’s perfectly consistent with liberalism, then demand of the handful of remaining self-identified liberals who support X “how can you endorse that right-wing garbage and claim to be a liberal!?”
*As a response to Sandy Hook, we must reinstate a ban on some-guns-but-not-actually-any-that-were-used-at-Sandy-Hook!
**[redacted] is suitable for the open thread, but if I decide I want to argue with probably literally every other person here about it, I’ll make a new top-level comment.
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Also, I haven’t read the whole Qur’an yet, but I dare say I’ve read far more (in translation, admittedly) than its average liberal defender, and ye gods!
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As I mentioned over on LW, there’s a lot of problems with those numbers, and not just that the lowest percent support cited for that penalty is in fact 4% (Kazakhstan) rather than 13% (a number that doesn’t actually appear in the results).
Plus those numbers are percentages among Muslims who’re in favor of nationalizing sharia law, not all Muslims. The regions least in favor of executing apostates tend to also be the regions least enthused about sharia, so for example Muslims in a region like Kyrgyzstan (cited as 14%) would actually have only about a 5% chance of wanting to kill people who leave the religion — well under Lizardman’s constant, and probably not far over what you’d get if you asked American Christians the same question.
The numbers do get a lot scarier once you look at the Arab nations, though.
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Michael Shermer did the right thing in a recent tweet and also shared the data on the percentage of Muslims favoring enshrining sharia by region:
– South Asia 84%
– SE Asia 77%
– Middle East and North Africa 74%
– Sub-Saharan Africa 64%
– SE Europe 18%
– Central Asia 12% (fuck yeah communism!)
His tweet here
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Thinking about the issue of Nice Guys (TM), nerds, etc., I am reminded of this video, which seemed fairly on-target to me:
Basically, the thesis is that women use the word “creepy” to refer to sexual advances by men whom they find unattractive. Certainly, this is not to say that there is no such thing as a legitimately creepy sexual advance, but the point is, if you would be flattered and pleased were a hot guy to do it, then you shouldn’t feel sexually victimized when an ugly guy does the same thing. You may not welcome it, but you shouldn’t view it as abusive or wrong.
The idea that women would be repulsed by sexual advances from unattractive men seems to make sense from an evolutionary biology standpoint (though I think that standpoint is prone to overly broad application), in that being hit on by an undesirable guy could lower a woman’s “stock” in the eyes of others, who might think he has a chance with her if she does not strongly rebuff him. Not saying that this is the case with all Nice Guys (TM) or other rejected nerds, some of whom may legitimately be entitled jerks, but it seems like it may be what’s happening in some cases, or what’s underlying much of the move to vilify the nerds.
Related, and maybe even more controversial (?), is my solution to this: legalize prostitution. It’s just a fact that there are a large percentage of guys, especially when they are young, immature, and not established, who simply aren’t attractive to many women at all, and who lack the social skills to be suave and overcome the fact that they may be ugly and broke. Once they are thirty, have clear skin, and a good job, suddenly women will be interested in them, but that is a long time to wait when most men hit their peak of sexual desire somewhere between 14 and 20.
Besides the fact that prostitutes should have the freedom to do what they want with their own bodies, I think legalizing and making prostitution safe and reasonably socially acceptable again would do a lot to solve this problem (and it’s not just frustrated 16 year-olds, it’s also your 60-year old widower with no desire to begin dating again). It seems it would also be good for heterosexual women, because, if sex were relatively easy to buy, one would have a more reasonable expectation that any man “courting” you wasn’t just in it for the sex. Even married couples might prefer that their partner just occasionally pay for a little variety rather than have an emotionally-involved and secretive affair.
The only respect in which anyone seems to lose by legalizing prostitution is that it might lower the “market demand” for female sexual favors were they easier to come by. And I think this is the real reason some women hate prostitutes: not because they’re selling sex, but because they’re selling it too cheap. But I think most people can agree that if everybody wins except sexually manipulative people, it is a good thing.
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I would abandon the market approach to sex, if I were you. It’s mostly rubbish.
I’m totally onboard with legalizing prostitution, though. It would make prostitutes a lot less vulnerable to trafficking and to victimization in general.
Thing is, not everyone likes that. Some people want to victimize prostitutes. Some people make money by victimizing prostitutes. And some people, for their own religious or philosophical reason, just like the idea of people getting “punished” for having “too much” sex.
And of course there are people with other reasons for opposing prostitution. For example like a sincere (but I think mistaken) belief that it’ll just lead to more victimization. Or a belief that God will actually punish society through miracles if it allows prostitution.
So “lowering the market demand” for female sexual favors isn’t the only reason people would oppose legalization.
PS: Not all prostitution involves male clients and female workers.
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Devil’s advocate: it is morally acceptable for someone to have different reactions to any particular action based on context or the appearance of the person speaking. Unattractive people should know better than to make advances on women whose league they are not in.
Angelic rejoinder: of course having different reactions is acceptable. However, a reaction of offense, fear, or hatred is unlikely to be a naturally immutable one. Such reactions are harmful to those at the receiving end of them and deter moderately attractive men from asking out women. Consequently, such reactions should be discouraged. Additionally, allowing such reactions to be socially acceptable creates room for the exploitation of ambiguities in ways that favor women unfairly.
Even if such reactions are justified however, they should at least not share a label with behaviors that are legitimately dangerous to women.
Confusion: there’s more to the story than that video discusses. Certain women use the “creep” label almost eagerly. Being seen as the object of desire of a dangerous or disturbed individual is seen as a social boon. This is paradoxical to me, as I would expect women to want to make it seem as though they are desired by high status partners rather than by low status ones. What’s going on here?
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Devil’s advocate: you are underestimating the negative consequences that being asked out by someone unattractive has on a woman. Women who respond to unwanted advances with belittlement do so as part of a precommitment strategy to avoid such situations. Recall that women tend to be choosier than men in selecting partners. The outrage precommitment is costly in each specific instance, but pays for itself by preventing bad scenarios from occurring through the deterring of unwanted advances.
By crude use of priors, this analysis would seem to apply only to the top tier of attractive women. This is largely true. However, this dynamic creates an incentive for women who are almost as attractive as these top tier women to pretend that they have an outrage precommitment, though they presumably fake rather selectively. Classic countersignalling. This resolves your earlier confusion.
Conclusion: people are responding to incentives in ways that are largely rational for their own individual circumstances but that damage the wellbeing of the overall group. A classic failure of coordinated group action. Absent a relationship czar, things will continue to remain the same. This problem does not seem solvable.
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Well, I doubt prostitution would have much of an effect on the nice guy experience.
Case in point: I live in a country where prostitution is currently legal, and there are plenty of miserable and frustrated nice guys around (I used to be one, in fact). It seems that what they are missing in their lives is primarily love, not sex, and as established in the works J. Lennon et.al, money can’t buy you love.
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Should moderately attractive men have a reasonable assessment of their own attractiveness and chances, and only ask out moderately attractive women?
Frankly, I’m getting tired of the implicit woman-blaming in this topic. “How dare women be fussy about men approaching them when they’re not Alpha Top 0.1% Supermodel Nobel Prize Winning Billionaires themselves!”
Can we agree that people – both male and female – are attracted to very attractive people (well, duh) and, given a choice, would prefer to be with a very attractive person over a not so attractive person? And that people – both male and female – over-estimate their own attractiveness and/or chances of pulling that fit bird/bloke?
I’m straight cis female. I am not, nor have I ever been, sexually/romantically attracted to one of my own gender. I judge on an aesthetic viewpoint. And in situations (such as recently where I was in the pool called up for jury service) when I’ve been (discreetly, I hope) eyeballing my fellow humans, my opinon was that out of the men, disappointingly few were what I’d consider attractive (not movie-star quality, average or a little higher) – only one guy ‘dinged my bell’. While out of the women, several were strikingly pretty and the majority were average or a little higher attractive.
To sum up: if men can want attractive women without this being a cause for blame or some kind of convoluted strategy, but rather ‘this is nature’, then please do the same courtesy to women: they’re not implementing a shaming strategy to deliberately chase off low-status men; like men, they are attracted to the attractive and that’s ‘how nature works’.
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I was addressing the accusation of “creepiness” specifically, and similar situations. I was not claiming that all forms of rejection are motivated by social signalling. You have misread my ideas. I am frustrated and feel slightly hurt that you would make such a mistake, I dislike being accused of being a terrible person. Please apologize.
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Youtube is currently broken for me, so I’m commenting without having watched the video – sorry about that.
“…if you would be flattered and pleased were a hot guy to do it, then you shouldn’t feel sexually victimized when an ugly guy does the same thing. You may not welcome it, but you shouldn’t view it as abusive or wrong.”
I think this usually isn’t realistic. Because in most cases, being “creepy” is a matter of ignoring,or being unaware of, social cues. So by definition, a guy a woman is attracted to, and a guy a woman isn’t attracted to, aren’t doing the same thing.
Let’s imagine that Patty is approached by Charlie and by Linus. Patty thinks that Charlie is yucky but Linus is yummy.
EXAMPLE 1: Linus approaches Patty and says “hi there.” Patty turns towards him, swinging her hair, smiles up at him, and says “well, hello.” They chat a bit, Patty leaning towards Linus. There is a moment of accidental contact that they both allow to linger. Linus puts his hand on Patty’s arm, stroking it slightly, and Patty responds warmly, leaning into the arm.
EXAMPLE 2: Charlie approaches Patty and says “hi there.” Patty glances towards him without turning to face him, and says “uh, yeah, hi,” with a low-wattage “just being polite” smile. They chat a bit, Patty keeps on looking away from Charlie, and says things like “well, nice talking to you, but I should find my friend now,” but Charlie keeps on talking. There is a moment of accidental contact that Patty immediately pulls away from. Charlie puts his hand on Patty’s arm, stroking it slightly, and Patty says “get off me! Stop being creepy!”
Although the literal actions taken by Linus and Charlie in the two examples are identical, in context the two have acted very differently. Linus listened to Patty’s signals (not creepy); Charlie either failed to see the signals, or saw them but ignored them (creepy). So it’s fair to call Charlie’s actions creepy, imo.
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Please disambiguate: Is Charlie creepy in either case, or only if he saw but ignored Patty’s nonverbal signals?
If he is creepy in either case, then there exist people (and I am one of them) who can only be non-creepy by refraining from all human contact. This is not necessarily an unreasonable position, but it does mean that certain disabled people either have to accept a life of solitude, or accept that they are creeps by nature, or learn to disregard creep-shaming (which would lessen the effectiveness of creep-shaming against creepy people).
If he is only creepy in the latter case, and we assume that Patty is a good person who does not wish to creep-shame the non-creepy, then she has to be able to reliably determine Charlie’s neurological character at a glance, which would be unreasonable to expect of her, or refrain from using creep-shaming altogether (unless she knows Charlie well enough to be relatively sure that he is aware of what he is doing, of course), which renders creep-shaming difficult to use ethically.
Anecdotally: Most of the times I have been called creepy have been in situations where I had no direct interaction with (or interest in) the person who called me creepy – for instance, I was called “the creepy guy in the corner” for frequently sitting alone in a café with my laptop. Needless to say, I left and stopped coming there, as I do not want to make women fearful or uncomfortable. I have also been told that it is “creepy” that I avoid eye contact.
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Moebius, your story about leaving the cafe because someone called you creepy is heart-breaking. If you’re sitting in the corner minding your own business then it’s nobody else’s place to say that you’re doing it wrong! From what you’ve described, it sounds like the person who called you creepy was just being rude. You have my sympathy.
I also think there’s some confusion here about the meaning of the word creepy. As I understand it, in social situations, creepy means ‘pushing the boudaries of what is socially acceptable’. It’s applied to things like eye-contact because there is a socially acceptable amount of eye contact to make: staring is rude, but avoiding all eye contact is also unusual. There is a normal amount of eye-contact but no-one can quantify how much counts as normal: so it’s vague and feeling-based. However, it is highly unlikely that you can make a woman fearful by being creeping in this context.
Some women are fearful of creepiness in sexual contexts because sexual predators are looking for easy victims, and one way to see whether a person is exploitable is by testing their boundaries: if she lets him break the small conventions then she might let him break larger rules.
This really should only apply in sexual contexts of flirting or hitting on people; because being creepy in a non-sexual context – especially in a context where you’re not even interacting with anyone, just sitting alone! – doesn’t effect them at all!
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Pluviann,
I avoid eye contact for a very simple reason: If I am looking someone in the eyes while they are talking to me, then I cannot understand what they are saying. I hear the words, but my brain fails to properly form them into sentences.
I have a rather ambivalent opinion about creep-shaming, because it seems to refer to (at least) two completely different things. When discussed in a feminist context, it typically refers to a (completely and obviously justifiable) means of nonviolently enforcing women’s personal boundaries. But the way I actually see it used, in my daily life, is more often than not a way of telling people off for being non-neurotypical in public.
Conflating these two things has caused me a considerable amount of anguish: I read on the Internet that being called creepy is a sign that a woman thinks you are a sexual predator and is legitimacy protecting her personal boundaries, and in my daily life I get called creepy for looking weird, fidgeting and avoiding eye contact. So what am I to conclude?
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I think it’s a really tricky subject. There are pelnty of men who are neurotypical and who behave in a creepy manner because they want to pressure women. I think women should be free to speak out about this behaviour and make it clear that they don’t like it. It would be good if they could do this without also comdemning the non-neurotypical, but I’m not sure how. I’m not even sure how easy it is for the average woman to tell the difference between someone who is non-neurotypical and someone who isn’t in this context.
I am very much of the opinion that should not be afraid that looking weird, fidgeting and avoiding eye contact will signal to a woman that you are a sexual predator in general situations. This only applies in situations that could be sexual, like trying to hit on a stranger in a public place or trying to initiate dates and romance. It does not, and should not, apply to things like drinking coffee alone. That’s what I would conclude. And even then I think that the behaviours you’re describing do not particulary suggest ‘sexually threatening’ which is much more likely to include things like: standing too close, touching and not letting the conversation end gracefully when she makes it clear that it’s over. In general, behaviours which are threatening-creepy are behaviours which involve trying to force greater intimacy than is appropriate or welcome, rather than just ‘different’. YMMV, I think it’s tricky.
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It is a tricky subject. I know that such men exist (and, just to be absolutely clear, non-neurotypical men can also be have sinister motivations), and inasmuch as the “creep” attack gives women a way to speak out against their boundary violations, it is a good thing. I agree with Ampersand that the given form of opposition to it (that takes the form that it is “unfair” that something is regarded as creepy if done by an unattractive man, but all right or even desirable if done by an attractive man) is simplistic to the point of being disingenuous. Because, as he correctly points out, context really is everything. If a friend of mine decides to give me a hug, then I am likely to be all right with it; if a stranger does exactly the same thing, then I am going to feel hugely uncomfortable about it. Also to be perfectly clear, if I am violating someone’s boundaries, I want to be told, because more likely than not I have no idea that I am doing something wrong (because I am very likely to miss any nonverbal signs of discomfort), and I do not want to violate other people’s boundaries.
So. A definition: A creepy person is someone who violates others’ boundaries, and who is therefore, for good reason, perceived as a potential sexual predator, and calling someone out as creepy is a means of nonviolently policing personal boundaries. This is how I usually see the term used in discussions on feminism, and because it is obviously good to be able to communicate this, it is completely reasonable for such a word to exist.
And yet, it is exactly in those situations that I have been called creepy. I know many other non-neurotypical people who have exactly the same experience. This means that, given the definition from before (the one typically used in feminist discussions), then my mere presence in public spaces is regarded as sexually threatening by women since I get called creepy without making any kinds of advances at all. Back when I was single, I never flirted. I never touch strangers (I hate touch), and I keep as much space between myself and other people as I can (I get very uncomfortable when others are close to me). If anything, as far as I understand, I am generally signalling rejection of intimacy, not forcing intimacy. I get called “creepy” for avoiding eye contact, which, as far as I get from what I read and what people tell me, is the opposite of signalling a sexual advance.
(by the way, my native tongue has no word for “creepy”, in either sense, so people just use the English word.)
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Moebius:
I wrote (emphasis added) “Charlie either failed to see the signals, or saw them but ignored them (creepy). So it’s fair to call Charlie’s actions creepy, imo.”
In the particular scenario I described, Charlie’s actions are creepy. That’s not the same as saying Charlie himself is creepy.
“If he is creepy in either case, then there exist people (and I am one of them) who can only be non-creepy by refraining from all human contact.”
Why? Charlie insisted on talking to a woman who he wasn’t at all required to talk to (in contrast to a situation like a restaurant where you are effectively required to to the staff), and purposely reached out and stroked her arm, which was the specific act that caused her to say he was being creepy. (Note that she did NOT have that response to her accidental contact with Charlie).
So instead of resolving “I must refrain from all human contact,” why don’t you resolve “I am not going to purposely stroke any part of a stranger’s body unless they have unambiguously said I can”? I think that would be a more proportional response to the argument and scenario I posted, and would keep you completely safe from acting the way Charlie did.
(And since in a follow-up comment you said that you “hate touch,” it seems to me that you can avoid acting like Charlie did without having to refrain from behavior that you would otherwise want to do.)
Discussing your question more generally, I would not say that Charlie who cannot recognize social cues is a creep; I would say that there is a danger that he will unintentionally act in creepy ways. As such, Charlie should be cautious in some situations. It doesn’t appear to me that you have any lack of caution, however, so i don’t think “I need to be more cautious” is something you should be thinking.
It’s like lacking a skill set. Imagine that Lucy and Schroeder are both doing life drawings. Lucy is better at drawing, and doesn’t need to do much of an underdrawing to keep her proportions correct. Schroeder isn’t as skilled, so he has to do a careful underdrawing to make sure his proportions are correct.
I’m not good at reading social signals, at all. So if I want to kiss someone and think it might be an appropriate situation, I have to ask “I’d like to kiss you. Would you like that?” Another person, who is better at this stuff than me, might be able to read the signals correctly and not need to ask verbally. That’s unfair, I guess, but that not everyone has identical abilities is an unfairness that we have to live with.
* * *
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who calls you creepy because you’re sitting in a corner minding your own business is being an asshole. Fuck what they say. Seriously.
I’m really fat. My life is full of strangers who look at me and judge me, and a few of them even get verbal about it. The only way I have to survive life is to realize that they are assholes and to hell with them. I have a moral right to exist in public space, and so do you, and if anyone calls either of us a nasty name merely because we’re existing in public space, then they’re the ones who are the wrongdoers, not us.
Emotionally, it can be hard to hold on to that. I’m not saying that remembering that we are in the right, and we have the right to exist in public, is always easy. It’s not always easy. But it is true.
* * *
“ A definition: A creepy person is someone who violates others’ boundaries, and who is therefore, for good reason, perceived as a potential sexual predator, and calling someone out as creepy is a means of nonviolently policing personal boundaries.”
That seems like a solid definition to me.
But then you write:
“This means that, given the definition from before (the one typically used in feminist discussions), then my mere presence in public spaces is regarded as sexually threatening by women since I get called creepy without making any kinds of advances at all.”
No, by the definition we’re using, you can only be creepy if you violate other’s boundaries. That is a necessary part of the definition, and cannot be skipped.
If someone calls you creepy merely because you exist in a public space, then they are mistaken. If you’re not violating someone’s boundaries in some way, then you’re not being creepy by the definition we’re using. (Which seems to me to be a reasonable definition.)
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Ampersand:
What I reacted to was that, at the end of your example, Patty said to Charlie that he was being creepy. But I can see that that is probably not fair; you never stated that Patty’s position on that was the same as yours. You are also right that Charlie was talking to a woman he did not have to talk to (which, if in fact he is unable to read nonverbal signals, he probably should refrain from), and that my solution – to refrain from human contact – is disproportionate.
But I think you misunderstand why that, from my position, is a reasonable conclusion, and I will try to explain why. It does rest on an unfounded assumption in the specific case of the example, namely that I assumed that if Charlie is in fact unable to read body language, then he is also probably someone who looks weird and fidgets a lot and avoids eye contact and flaps his hands and rocks (those traits do strongly correlate, but assuming them was probably wrong on my part. Hey, I also get to do typical mind fallacies every now and then).
As I said, I avoid touch. I never flirted, when I was single. I maintain a rather wide personal space whenever I can. I avoid eye contact. From what I understand, nearly all my signalling is the opposite of signalling sexual aggression. And I still get called creepy — in fact, the lacking eye contact is specifically singled-out as a creep trait. I do not think I can be more cautious without formally declaring my allegiance to the plant kingdom; I am a near-asexual introvert with social anxiety issues who hates touch.
What I am saying is that if “that guy is creepy” is equivalent to “that guy is violating my sexual boundaries” (which it would be by the definition you agreed to), then from the fact that I get called creepy just for being present, it logically follows that some women feel that my presence violates their boundaries. I do not want to contribute to an environment that is sexually hostile to women, so what am I to do? The way I personally experience “creepy” being used about me implies that my presence is the boundary violation.
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@moebius, Ampersand: [content warning: Strong rejection of common feminist memes and urging of others to do the same. Discussion of rape, including false accusations. Confirmation of pejorative labels, with rejection of the norms that make them pejorative.]
I think the problem here is that “violates a woman’s boundaries” is a shitty standard, because some women have ridiculous boundaries*. A better standard would be “violates a woman’s legitimate boundaries.”
Because frankly, I think it’s true that moebius’s presence violated the boundaries of the women who called him creepy, insofar as they had a boundary of “no obvious NATs are allowed to be in my presence.” It’s just that that boundary is not legitimate.
moebius, I am really sorry if you’re twitching right now. I know that last paragraph is the sort of thing that’s upsetting to contemplate agreeing with for people who’ve been subjected to feminist brainwashing. (And if the above did trigger a bad emotional state, I’d urge you to consider stopping here, because it’s going to get worse. tl;dr: Nothing you did was wrong.) But why? Why is “some women have illegitimate boundaries** that men have no obligation to respect” so shocking of a statement?
And I think the real answer is that a lot of women are insecure in their belief that their boundaries are legitimate (even the ones that are), and so they try to avoid having to defend the legitimacy of their specific boundaries by signing on to a general doctrine that all women’s boundaries are legitimate, period.
In a way, “creepy” is this doctrine put into practice: Really, if Charlie was actually crossing legitimate boundaries, Patty has no need to describe him as “creepy.” She can say “get off of me! I didn’t give you permission to touch me, much less stroke my arm! Stop being an asshole!” And when she’s talking to Marcie later, she can say “Chuck is such an asshole. He kept talking after I said I had to go***, and then, after he bumped into me and I pulled back, he started deliberately stroking my arm! What the fuck!?”
But maybe Patty isn’t confident that Marcie will agree that Charlie was wrong to do what he did. Maybe she’s worried that her boundaries are too strict, and Marcie will laugh at her for them. So instead, she calls Charlie “creepy,” confident that Marcie will agree that “creepiness” is bad, since she doesn’t want her own boundaries violated.
And this means that the use of “creepy” is crap! Because Patty can do the exact same thing, and get the same response, if Chuck just came up and said hi, and she felt that by doing so, he was being uppity, since she is way out of his league. And not only does this hurt guys whose “creepiness” is perfectly reasonable, it also hurts women whose legitimate boundaries are seriously crossed, and who fall back on “creepy” because it’s easier and emotionally safer. Because there’s no reason for others to believe the violation was anything serious, if all they know is that it was “creeping.”
Incidentally, I think that this same phenomenon is in play with maximalist definitions of sexual assault. Women who I either am fairly certain or outright know have actually been raped while drunk have nevertheless gotten personally (not just politically) upset at my assertion that drunkness not does invalidate otherwise valid consent. Why? And the best guess that I can come up with is this: If drunk sex can be consensual, then they have to persuade others (and themselves!) that the particular sex that was done to them wasn’t. And because some of the bullshit rape culture narratives that they consciously reject are still rolling around in the back of their heads, that’s hard to do, even though it’s perfectly correct. But if all drunk sex is rape, and they were drunk, then that settles it. No further justification needed.
Same thing for advance consent, for emotional pressure, and on, and on, and on. Same thing (even more broadly) for the idea that one should never question a woman’s claim that she was raped, no matter what. If a claim can be questioned, then the particulars of what happened to them matter, and that’s a burden even for some women whose particulars really do add up to rape.
But again, this comes at a cost. Most strikingly, it comes at a cost to men who are falsely accused following sex that was actually consensual, or men who limit themselves sexually for fear of false accusation—or even for fear of the accusation being true, if they’ve succubed to feminist brainwashing. But there is also a cost for real victims. Because if a woman says “I was drunk and he raped me,” even if I’m certain that she believes what she’s saying, I don’t know for sure that it’s true. And unless she volunteers further information, I’ll never know.
And sure, I’ll default to reacting in most ways as if it’s true, because it seems to me, from what I know, that that’s substantially more likely than not. But is my sense of what ought to be done with her “assailant” affected by that uncertainty? Absolutely. And it should be.
Don’t accept overbroad standards that hurt both innocent “perpetrators” and real victims. Reject “creepy,” “drunk sex is rape,” “consent can’t be given in advance,” “believe women,” and all other memes that try to cover for women’s insecurity about their boundaries by declaring all boundaries to be legitimate.
Don’t touch people without their consent, don’t make or escalate sexual contact without (affirmative, unambiguous, uncoerced, and applicable) consent, and don’t keep talking to someone who has unambiguously asked you not too. And if anyone still gives you shit? Tell them to go to hell!
So yeah, moebius, you probably were being “creepy.” But you weren’t being wrong.
*And some lack boundaries that they should have, and get taken advantage of as a result, but that’s not mostly what’s at issue here.
**Which is not to say that all of their boundaries are illegitimate; even prudes and assholes have a right not to be raped, for example.
***Side note: I’m guilty of this one at times (with everyone, not just women), and it’s something I should work on, but it amazes me the extent to which people (but especially women) don’t just go if they really need to leave.
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The primary point of the video is just to point out a kind of hypocrisy in some women’s judgment of the romantic interest of men they find unattractive. That is, there’s nothing wrong with a woman rebuffing the advances of any particular man for any particular reason, but it does seem wrong to pass a moral judgment about a man’s character, perhaps even viewing him as a potential sexual predator, simply because he had the temerity to show sexual interest despite being unattractive.
That is, it is perfectly normal to be pleased when an attractive, suave guy sidles up to you and displeased or annoyed when an unattractive, awkward guy sidles up to you, but it seems not reasonable, in the absence of other evidence, to ascribe more nefarious motives to awkward guy (to assume he feels “entitled,” that he is engaging in objectification, etc.), just because he is awkward. Awkward guy thinks he is doing the same thing he has seen women respond positively to when suave guy does it, though he is probably failing to actually replicate suave guy’s performance in some way.
I certainly don’t mean to say that there is no such thing as a legitimate complaint of “creepiness,” and you make a good point about the possibility that nerds, not known for their ability to read subtle cues, may very well, in some cases, create uncomfortable situations by not noticing that, for example, a woman’s body language is communicating that she doesn’t want him getting closer.
I am just bringing this up in response to the whole “aren’t Nice Guys (TM) so awful for feeling entitled to the love and sexual attention of women” thing by pointing out that, in many cases, Nice Guys’ attitudes may be no different from, or even better than, that of average suave guy, who is not accused of feeling entitled, etc., yet there is a tendency to ascribe sinister motives to Nice Guy, seemingly simply because he is unattractive.
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Moebius – I think context is the key here. The word creepy means different things in different contexts. It usually always falls under some definition of ‘socially unacceptable in small, hard-to-quantify ways’. I think when you read about creepiness on feminist websites you should always add the tag in your mind ‘-in potentially sexual or flirtatious situtations’. It is reasonable for a woman to fear bad intentions from a man being creepy when he hits on her – it is not reasonable for women to fear that you are a sexual predator if your genreal behaviour is creepy, especially if you are not interacting with her directly.
It’s best to see it as two different kinds of creepy, as if the word has two definitions. In the context of flirting and romance creepy can equal threatening. In the context of everyday mundane interactions it cannot and should not be interpreted that way, and you do not need to fear that you are intimidating any nearby women.
Osberend is right that there are going to be some small percent of women who are unreasonably fearful and who have unreasonable boundaries. It is their responsibility to get therapy or help with their fears. It is emphatically not your responsibility to stop existing in public.
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Osberend: I will write an answer to your post later. It merits more thinking on my part.
Pluviann:
On John Scalzi’s blog, there is a helpful “incomplete guide to not creeping”. Its particular points are things that I pretty much follow “naturally” without really making any special effort to: I hate touch, so I do not touch. I get extremely uncomfortable with close proximity, so I avoid close proximity. From a purely selfish point of view, I sort of wish more women would follow these rules too; when I get my personal boundaries violated, it is nearly always by women who want to touch me (although this is probably because men touching each other is a minor cultural taboo). I should probably be better at enforcing those, but A) I am not sure how to do so in a socially acceptable manner, B) I usually just panic and go into deer-in-headlights mode and am unable to do much of anything until after the fact, and C) for various reasons to do with my background, I have problems even thinking in the terms “a woman violated my personal boundaries” — although I rationally know this to be wrong, my hindbrain thinks boundary violations are something men do to women.
But if you read the comments on Scalzi’s blog, what am I to make of statements like this:
In other words, it is perfectly possible to be creepy (in the “potential sex predator” sense, given that the commenter explicitly refers to rape and sexual assault), even when doing innocent things. If I were to blame the women (by saying they are unreasonably fearful and have unreasonable boundaries), then how is that not hugely disrespectful towards them?
It is not something that is a huge personal problem to me anymore. I live a fairly restricted social life, so the situation rarely comes up for me anymore. It sort of bugs me that it is probably likely that my co-workers more likely than not find me creepy, but since nobody has ever raised it at work, I try to not worry about it. But I know that I am not the only non-neurotypical person who routinely gets called creepy for existing in public.
Re-reading the thread, perhaps my initial intuition (which I apparently forgot as the thread went on) was right: “Creepy” refers to two completely different things, one when discussed in a feminist context, another when people use it to express their revulsion with non-neurotypical people. In that case, it is probably just a sad coincidence that the word for “revulsion towards violation of sexual boundaries” and “revulsion towards stereotypically non-neurotypical behaviour” is the same word.
Which, even if it is a coincidence, is actually kinda shitty if you think about it.
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I suspect that your initial intuition (which I agree with) is correct and creepy does refer to two completely different things. One is used in feminist contexts to mean revulsion towards violation of sexual boundaries, and one is used to mean revulsion towards non-typical behaviour. I’ve left out ‘neuro’ in ‘neurotypical’ because I think there’s not enough awareness of what non-neurotypical behaviour is – I think most people just see it is ‘odd’ behaviour because they don’t understand it. They don’t even know that they’re being prejudiced against non-neurotypical people because they don’t know that’s what they’re seeing.
I think there is a reason why creepy is the word used in both contexts. In both contexts someone is pushing the boundaries of what is socially acceptable, but in both cases there are no explicit rules about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. It’s all based on feelings, which are vague and unquantifiable.
With regards to John Scalzi: I am reminded of Scott’s post All Debates are Bravery Debates. John Scalzi is not talking to you. John Scalzi is talking to an imaginery dude who needs to stop getting into people’s personal space and stop making bad sexual jokes to strangers. John Scalzi is talking to an asshole who doesn’t care about other people’s feelings – and that guy is not you. When he says ‘this is incomplete and doesn’t cover every contigency’ he means that it doesn’t cover you.
Scalzi, and all of his commentators, are talking about people hitting on strangers at conventions. So even when the commentator says, ‘You can be creepy when doing innocent things’ they mean ‘you can be creepy while doing innocent things while hitting on a stranger in a public’. That commentator, like John Scalzi, is talking to an asshole. That commentator is not talking to you. The asshole in question is doing inappropriate things and then excusing it with, ‘Hey, it’s totally innocent. I was just being friendly.’ You, when you go for coffee and sit alone in the corner, are not pretending to be innocent. You actually are innocent!
If a woman was genuinely afraid of you when you were just drinking coffee and bothering nobody, then it would not be disrespectful to say she was wrong. It would be a fair assessment that maybe she needed to get some therapy to help her overcome her excessive fears.
So I would say don’t worry about your office mates secretly thinking you’re creepy. People who know you, who understand how you behave, don’t have to guess or fear at what your motivation might be. They have the evidence of your actions over time to show that you are a good guy.
ps. I’m sorry that women touch you without your consent :(
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Pluviann,
A few points, in random order.
I say this with the utmost respect, for you have been nothing but kind to me in this discussion, but I am not sure you understand the psychology of this – otherwise, it is just me being bad at reading you at the moment, in which case I apologize; I have felt spectacularly shitty today and am really not functioning at full capacity. I think you can see the deterioration of my mental capabilities throughout the day by tracing this thread; I came in ready to defend my conviction that “creep” has two completely different meanings and that conflating them leads to harm and anguish; I end up making a logical argument in favour of said harm and anguish, in favour of socially isolating myself and declaring my support to the idea that the term “creep” must be obeyed, without question, no matter the context and no matter how trivial the violation that caused it.
This should tell you something about how powerful a tool that term is, at least against me (I know, anecdotally, that at least some others feel similarly about it). It directly led me to stop frequenting a place I liked, and where I had a collection of fond memories. It has been a large factor in how I have structured my life outside of home, so as to lessen the chance that anybody gets creeped out. Is this an overreaction? It very likely is, but I have been taught, in no uncertain terms, that if you do something that makes a woman feel uncomfortable, you change your behaviour, full stop. I am not sure you understand how powerful this is. As an example, you write – and I assume that since you write it, you find it completely sensible:
But to me, this sentence borders on the absurd. Because for one, if a woman was creeped out by me, then obviously I was not “bothering nobody”, I was bothering her, even if just by being present. Is it reasonable for a person to be creeped out by someone who just sits in a corner drinking coffee, stimming and reading on a laptop screen? Perhaps, but I cannot see how that is even relevant; a woman’s boundaries were violated, how can that not be wrong of me? On one level I can see the sense in what you are saying (that by “bothering” you probably mean “annoying by directly interacting with”, etc.), but on another, you might as well be telling me that the planet Neptune is constructed entirely out of soy.
As for women touching me without consent: I hate it (touch is physically painful to me unless I have time to prepare myself for it), but at one point it occurred to me that at least it indicates that at least they probably do not think I am creepy.
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Pluviann, continued:
Just to be absolutely sure: When I say “I am not sure you understand the psychology of this”, I am not accusing you of being stupid or ignorant, merely that it seems to me that you do not understand what is going on inside my head. I apologize if my original wording seemed rude or condescending.
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@moebius: [content warning: Continuing to argue for your rights. If you’re in a place where other people defending your rights to you will (paradoxically) only hurt you more, feel free to leave this one for later, or never.]
No pressure with regards to my previous post; take your time. I do want to give my thoughts on your subsequent posts though:
On John Scalzi’s blog, there is a helpful “incomplete guide to not creeping”.
Taken at face value, a lot of it is crap. Maybe it’s useful crap, when addressing guys who have way too much unjustified sense of entitlement and poor critical thinking skills, in the same way that Ayn Rand’s writings may be useful crap for people who have way too much guilt over doing anything self-interested and poor critical thinking skills. But it’s still crap, and even if it’s useful for its target audience, you’re not its target audience. The heart of its crappiness is right in the second paragraph:
BZZT! No! Wrong! A’s reactions to B’s behavior do not define B’s behavior, much less B’s personal characteristics. Only B’s behavior itself does that.
There’s more bullshit in the rest of the essay, but that right there should be enough to tell you that anything contained in that essay, or in a comment agreeing with that essay, should be taken with a whole truckload of salt.
If I were to blame the women (by saying they are unreasonably fearful and have unreasonable boundaries), then how is that not hugely disrespectful towards them?
Because her boundaries are unreasonable. You’d have (I’m sure) no problem recognizing this if it were a man calling a woman a creep while she was sitting in the corner minding her own business. The same applies in reverse.
That’s a mantra you might want to consider meditating on for a while, if doing so is not harmful to you psychologically*: The same applies in reverse. What is wrong for a man to demand of a woman is wrong for a woman to demand of a man. Period.
[. . .] This should tell you something about how powerful a tool that term is, at least against me (I know, anecdotally, that at least some others feel similarly about it).
I apologize if my previous comment played a role in making things harder for you. Would it help you if I were to stop commenting on this subthread?
It directly led me to stop frequenting a place I liked, and where I had a collection of fond memories.
That’s really awful. I’m sorry** that you were in a place where you felt the need to do that. I hope that, one day, you’ll reach a place where that sort of reaction feels as alien to you as it does to me.
I have been taught, in no uncertain terms, that if you do something that makes a woman feel uncomfortable, you change your behaviour, full stop.
That is a bad standard. I am sorry that you have internalized it.
I cannot see how that is even relevant; a woman’s boundaries were violated, how can that not be wrong of me?
Because you are also a human being, with the full rights thereof.
Feminists who want to gain recruits often describe feminism*** as “the radical notion that women are people.” That’s the definition they give to potential recruits, when they’re putting their best foot forward. So the best possible case for “feminism” is to define the feminist agenda as “women are people.” Well so are men. Whatever rights a woman has, you have too.
Whatever rights a woman has, you have too.
*And even then I’d recommend trying to get to the point where you can with the help of a therapist. If your therapist tells you that that’s not a point you should be trying to get to, fire them and get a new one.
**Lamenting, not apologetic.
***Somewhat dubiously, if we’re talking about the real-world feminist movement.
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Osberend,
First of all, thank you for putting in the effort to write those two very long and detailed and thoughtful comments. I am not in 100% agreement with you, but you make some good points. My having felt spectacularly shitty the last couple of days has had nothing to do with you or your posts in particular; it is just that I get into a quite bad mental state when I start reflecting on being creepy.
One of the very first things I said in this thread was that I feel ambivalent about “creepy”. This has to do with a conflict of lived experience and principles. In the course of my life, I have been called “creep” or “creepy” at least six times (that I know of; it is possible that people have also called me that when I was not around to hear it, but that would be beside the point here). I have, to my knowledge, touched a woman who did not want to be touched exactly once. And the overlap between these situations is exactly zero.
You see, in the latter situation, what had happened was that a peripheral friend of mine had just had a rather awful experience, and was sobbing and so clearly feeling terrible that even I could tell, and I wanted to try to comfort her. Feeling rather clueless about what to do, I defied my general dislike of touch and put my hand on her shoulder (this is a thing I have seen people do when comforting each other). She stood there for a few seconds, and then she politely but firmly told me that she really did not want to be touched at that particular point in time. So I removed my hand and apologized, she told me it was all right, and then we talked about the things that were bothering her before going our separate ways. I realized, after the fact, while recalling the situation, that I think she might have tensed her muscles when I touched her shoulder, and that could have been an attempt to signal to me nonverbally (and, of course, being who I am, I felt kind of shitty about not noticing that before it was too late). But the point is, the only time, to my knowledge, where I have touched a woman who did not want to be touched, “creep” was not invoked. The times where I have been called a creep, on the other hand, were exclusively, as far as I can tell, about me being rather obviously autistic in public. I have been called it once for being the creepy guy in the corner with the laptop, three times for not being able to make eye contact correctly, one time for stimming and having tics while trying to keep down an anxiety attack on a bus, and one time for looking as if I was staring at someone (whereas I was actually lost in thought, and had not even noticed that a stranger had sat in front of me – this was also on a bus).
In other words, in my purely personal experience, “creep” is an ableist slur.
To that side of my inner conflict, this discussion is extremely, ridiculously, stupendously frustrating, because a lot of people who I know are aligned with social justice are defending and promoting the use of an ableist slur. By way of a terrible analogy (and before everybody goes Scott Aaronson on me, please: I do not think this analogy is perfect, but it is the best I can come up with in an attempt to communicate how this side of my internal conflict feels), I feel rather as if I am among a number of white people discussing how the use of [racist slur] is a useful tool to prevent [ethnic minority] from committing crimes. It seems absurd. Do these people not know how much that word fucking hurts? I just spent two days feeling like absolute shit just for thinking about my experiences with being a creep, damn it. This side of me also speculates (and is probably wrong) that one of the reasons “creep” shames the neurotypical is the same reason that [homophobic slur] shames the heterosexual; it is telling them that they are similar to people largely and unfairly despised in society.
But there also is another side: In stark contrast to my personal experience as a male, women in this thread (and elsewhere on the net) are saying that it is in fact a very useful and important word, because it is used by women as a nonviolent means to drive off unwanted sexual advances and personal boundary violations by horrible people. Having a way to do that is a great thing! Women have a right to enforce their personal boundaries. And as Veronica says: “Creep” works. It does! I can personally testify to that. Again: I just spent two days feeling like shit thinking about the times that it was used about me.
But when creep-shaming gets a false positive, what happens is that a disabled man feels shitty. When it gets a false negative, on the other hand, what happens is that a woman gets her personal boundaries violated. The latter, it seems to me, is clearly the worse outcome. And for the word to have the power it needs, men ought to take it seriously. This is precisely what I do. I am not even sure I have much of a choice in that matter; given my socialization, being called a creep triggers a rather visceral reaction of shame and guilt, a sense that I am wrong and have done wrong. This is what “creep” is supposed to do, as far as I understand.
If you are right about Scalzi’s target audience, then that piece seems completely useless, because that particular target audience, it seems to me, is by its very nature not likely to read such an article, much less take it seriously if they do.
I like your “mantra” that if something is wrong for a man to do to a woman, then it is also wrong for a woman to do to a man. If I had internalized it, then I would have saved myself quite a lot of pain, and perhaps been able to avoid a number of rather terrible experiences – and here, I am not referring to being called a creep, but … well, I know you read what I wrote to Ampersand in the last open thread. Instead, I used stupid mantras about power differentials to try to convince myself that those things were all right when done to me. And now, here I am, a part of me just clawing to call bullshit on your suggested mantra because of … well, power differentials.
I sort of miss back when I usually just thought about these things in terms of “certain things are wrong for humans to do to other humans”, as opposed to having to try to fit everything into a gender calculus. I suck at understanding gender relations.
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Moebius, I am sorry for any part that I’ve played in taxing your mental capacities and making you feel shitty – especially for putting you on the back foot so that you ended up defending the position that you didn’t necessarily agree with.
Yes, I think you’re right that the psychology of your position is something that I haven’t quite grasped yet. The fact that non-neurotypical people and nerds have been caught in the cross-fire between feminists and assholes is new to me, and it is highly vexing. I cannot see a way out of this bind, but I am going to think about it.
You have been polite and thoughtful, so please don’t feel that I’m insulted in anyway by your pointing out what I haven’t grasped.
I do agree with osberend and you that it could be best for you to think in terms of ‘humans’ rather than trying to include a gender calculus. Especially if attempts at gender calculus are having a negative impact on your mental and emotional health.
If you do want to consider power differentials that I strongly believe that you should factor in the huge disadvantage that non-neurotypical people face – which seems to me to be possibly large than the gender difference. I realise from you previous comment that it is very difficult for you to give yourself the same consideration that you extend to women and that this is the part of what I have failed to grasp – so please ignore this if it is unhelpful and frustrating for you.
There is no need to continue if this conversation is proving detrimental to you.
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Pluviann,
You have nothing to apologize for. You have been nothing but kind to me in this discussion, and if anybody (apart, arguably, from myself) is to blame for making me feel shitty about being called creepy, it would be the people who called me creepy. You have done nothing wrong. This is a sensitive subject for me, and I engaged it knowing the risks. I feel somewhat better now, though.
I came in wanting to make the point that “creep” has collateral damage, and that it plays a completely different role in my life (as I explained to osberend, the only way I have ever seen it used is as an ableist slur, not as a nonviolent self-defense technique), and after a very short time, I found myself defending an absurd implication of the cocktail of “always listen to women” and “creep = sexual predator”, and a number of even more absurd corollaries thereof. This is also not your fault; you never tricked me into defending any of these (they are obviously not your positions, and you probably have no wish to see me essentially make the case against my own human rights). It has to do with a dysfunctional “fallback mode” in my thinking, and I am fairly sure I know where it started. Osberend referred to it as “feminist brainwashing”, which is perhaps a bit too blunt and imprecise, but I do sometimes lapse into modes of thinking that are clearly self-destructive and that I learned from feminist activism.
Veering offtopic for a while, but this is an open thread: In the comment I linked to above, I initially posited that feminism has “harmed” me. I would like to elaborate on that, because that particular long ramble ended up being about how I had been “harmed” (which may be a too strong word), but only touched briefly on what the harm was. I mentioned that after I left feminist activism, I had developed severe problems relating to women. I had; I had grown absurdly terrified of causing offense of any kind, and would regard even the most ridiculous trivialities as huge unforgivable transgressions. I have wasted a significant portion of my life obsessing over how everything from my tone of voice to my taste in literature was probably a huge misogynist affront to women. I put up with all sorts of hurtful behaviour (up to and including violence of various kinds against me) from certain women, because I could always come up with all sorts ridiculous bullshit justifications for why it was not really wrong. And yet, for all that, the harm I feel worst about is the damage to my ethics and my ability to think independently. The ethics I used to follow would never accept that someone would have anything even resembling a duty to withdraw from public life because somebody – anybody – took offense over their appearance. If I posited that idea to young me, he would probably ask me how I could ever come to find such a bunch of fascist nonsense even remotely ethically palatable (before realizing that current me = future him, and then proceeding to lament the hair loss he had in store). I miss thinking primarily in terms of what is most right as opposed to what is least likely to cause offense (an especially dysfunctional mode of thinking for me in particular, because my mental model of what may or may not cause offense in other people is extremely inaccurate, on neurological grounds).
As for power differentials: You may be right that disability may, in certain cases, involve more disadvantage than gender, but I hope you understand that part of me finds that an almost unthinkable thought (what, are you now telling me that Saturn is also made out of soy?). I hope the following dose of snark is not too offensive: Gender is the most fundamental of all oppressions! I know this to be true because a number of people who hurt me said so, and I think they will probably hurt me some more if I disagree.
I knew that this conversation would be dangerous territory, but I went into it anyway. None of your fault; I am at least technically a grown man. I hope that I can chip away at the dysfunctional bits of my thinking, and I hope actually having these conversations can help me with that. But I also hope that you have gotten something out of it. I am glad that you say that it got you thinking and that you learned about another perspective on “creep”. I wish there was some way to employ it without causing collateral damage, but there probably is not.
However, one of the things I want to thank you for is that you have acknowledged and been consistently respectful towards the collateral damage. I mean, paraphrasing a commenter on Scott Aaronson’s blog, it is better to say “we had to nuke the city to contain the zombie virus outbreak; we have the blood of innocents on our hands, but it was better than letting the zombie virus get out” than to say “well, those people in the city were probably total jerks, or we would not have nuked them”.
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Argh. I neglected to close my link tag properly.
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Pluviann,
An afterthought has been brewing in my head today. It has to do with nerds and feminism.
For the rest of this comment, please read “nerds” as a shorthand for “male nerds”, unless otherwise is explicitly noted — female nerds exist, obviously (and most of those I have known have been extraordinarily awesome people), but I would think that any issues they might have with feminism come from a very different perspective. Likewise, read “feminist” as a shorthand for “female feminist” — I do not know if the “can men be feminists?” debate is still raging, but whether it is or not, pro-feminist men / allies are also likely to have a different perspective from female feminists.
You write:
I found it completely puzzling how this could be new to anyone, but in a sense, it is actually heartening that it is, because it gives an explanation to something I have wondered about. To me, it seems to be the exact mirror image of a phenomenon on “the other side”: In “Untitled”, Scott Alexander argues that nerds are generally highly scrupulous, soft-spoken, untitled and mostly pro-feminist men who not only respect women’s boundaries and want to avoid bothering women, but are disproportionately likely to do so to a pathological, self-destructive, paranoid extreme. This is also my experience.
And yet, it seems to me that nearly every feminist has a collection of horror stories involving extremely unpleasant misogynist nerds with no respect for women’s boundaries or agency as human beings.
On the other hand, you find yourself surprised that nerds and non-neurotypical people are being harmed by feminist rhetoric and are being singled out for bullying by some feminists. And yet, lots and lots of nerds and non-neurotypical people have exactly that experience. Scott Aaronson, Scott Alexander, me. Multiheaded, who once said:
“#NotAllFeminists hate non-neurotypical, disabled or gender non-conforming men. #YesAllMen who are non-neurotypical, disabled or gender non-conforming have been targeted by a feminist as an object of hatred.”
In nerd circles, being bullied and hated by feminists seems to be about as ubiquitous as being harassed by nerds is in feminist circles.
And yet, here we are, with Scott Alexander saying that nerds are especially unlikely to be misogynist assholes, and with you finding yourself surprised that feminists harm nerds. I do not think either of you are lying. Rather, I think this is because the cross-fire you mention is not actually coming from a battle being fought between feminists and assholes, but between assholes and assholes.
What I mean to say is that I am reasonably certain that most feminists are not ableist bullies, but a nerd or a nonneurotypical person is disproportionately likely to notice those who are. Similarly, most nerds are not misogynist assholes, but a feminist is disproportionately likely to notice those who are. Ableist bullies will pick on nerds, and misogynist assholes will pick on feminists, and thus their actions will get noticed by their victims (against whom they are directed) than by their friends and allies. However, they are much less likely to be noticed by their friends, who may not even know that they are behaving like assholes. And since there is effectively no barrier to entry to calling one’s self a nerd or a feminist, it is also entirely possible that Scott A legitimately knows no misogynist asshole nerds, and you legitimately do not know any ableist bully feminists.
When I was young and naïve, I thought feminists and nerds were basically natural allies. Nerds are typically terrible at performing the dominant male gender role. They tend to be insecure, awkward, bookwormish and poor at or disinterested in most of the performance of macho culture. Such nerds are precisely the kind of men that get called “manginas” and “omega males” by the nastier denizens of the manosphere. Feminists are by and large against gender roles, so it stands to reason that feminists would be uniquely sympathetic to this particular segment of men. And yet, lots of nerds get bullied by feminists, and these bullies will even single out gender nonperformance as a parameter for bullying. When I was in high school, one of the most vocal anti-nerd and ableist bullies I had to deal with was a highly outspoken feminist who delighted especially in picking on me for, of all things, being a socially awkward virgin loser with no romantic success. She would also sometimes put a pseudofeminist spin on this by indicating that the likes of me were virgins because women could sense our inherent misogyny. And this was before I encountered any of the feminist anti-nerd vitriol on the Internet.
One might make the case that she was a hypocrite or that she had betrayed feminist values, but what I do know is that she was a bully. Why did she choose an unpopular, weak, disabled nerd to pick on? Not for any ideological reason, I think (although she could make a half-assed and frankly ridiculous speech about how computer obsession was part of the patriarchy), but because all bullies are cowards; this is a fundamental part of the nature of bullies. They will never pick on anybody capable of putting up a fight, they pick on the weakest, most unpopular low-status victim they can find, and they will use any means at their disposal, even ones they pay lip service to resenting. But picking on low-status people is a bully characteristic, not a feminist one. In other words, bullies can be feminists, just like misogynists can be nerds. And, unsurprisingly, feminist bullies will use rhetorical ammunition manufactured by feminism, and in the resulting carnage, a bully attack thus becomes indistinguishable from a feminist attack.
This indicates to me that peace is not unachievable. It might even suggest some preliminary pieces of a strategy.
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Fight back, goddammit! The gender calculus is wrong! You aren’t going to meet a single woman that deserves that level of respect. No one deserves that level of respect. If Alan Turing rose from the grave and showed up on your doorstep for a cup of tea, he wouldn’t deserve that level of respect. Women are just as callous, just as hateful, and just as stupid as men. You have no more obligation to listen to a woman than she has to listen to you.
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I also live in a country where prostitution is legal (although associated activities like street-walking, curb-crawling, pimping, brothels are not) and we have creeps here just like everywhere. When I get into conversations online with guys who complain that they can’t get laid (and who get angry at women for rejecting them) I usually suggest going to a prostitute and the most common response is that they shouldn’t have to pay for it – they deserve to be loved for themselves. So I am not convinced that more prostitution will reduce the number of angry young single men.
Do you have any statistics about the age that people acheive peak attractiveness? OKcupid suggests that men are usually attracted to 18-year-olds and women are usually attracted to people the same age as them. This fits with my anecdotal evidence that when I was a teenage girl I was attracted to teenage boys. Justin Beiber has a career because teenage girls love him (I mean, what else could it be?). In the UK the median age for first sexual experience is 16 for girls and boys, so it doesn’t seem like teenage boys are universally repulsive and failing to get laid compared to girls.
I don’t understand what you mean by prostitution lowering the market demand for female sexual favours. I don’t know any women who expect to profit from ‘sexual favours’. I’m also not sure what a sexual favour is? I mean, I understand historically that sex was seen as something women did for men, but surely most people expect sex to be a mutually fulfilling activity and not a favour that the woman does for the man? Is this an American thing?
Regarding the attractive/unattractiveness of guys. Could this just be the halo effect? We know that attractive people, men and women, get away with everything: lying cheating, stealing, more than ugly people. It makes sense that they would also get away with rude advances.
How much does unattractive mean ‘ugly’ and how much does it mean ‘socially oblivious’? I hope I wouldn’t be too harsh on someone for being ugly, but I’ve certainly snapped at people in my time for wholy inappropriate advance (eg. in the street when I am on my way to work and don’t have time to stop; in the library because goddammit man this is the silent zone!).
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I’m curious: in your country, is patronizing a prostitute considered a relatively socially acceptable thing to do? Because I get the sense that in most places, even where technically legal, there is still something of a stigma and a “yuck” factor attached in a way that was not true in, say, premodern and early modern East Asia (where patronizing fancy prostitutes was a pretty respectable thing to do).
I do think, in many, maybe even most cases, lonely, awkward men really are missing love, as opposed to sex. That said, as someone who has had many close female friends, I would say that, probably for almost all men, myself included, the number of women who would be happy to be emotionally close to them, even engaging in non-sexual touching (aka clothed cuddling), is much larger than the number of women who want to have sex with them. Therefore, though there may be no perfect substitute for the full intimacy and acceptance of a sexual relationship with a loving partner, it also seems conceivable that, were his sexual needs met elsewhere, many a lonely man could be reasonably happy with close female “cuddle” friends.
I certainly don’t think prostitution is going to solve everybody’s problems on this score, but it seems to me it could help in a lot of significant ways: those men who really are just out for sex will not bother women as much (though obviously it won’t eliminate it entirely, as you found); awkward men who don’t even know how to be physically close with a woman can get some “practice”; and those men who are just truly unattractive to most women do not have to live without that kind of physical intimacy, which, while it’s not everything, is still important for most peoples’ mental health in its own right.
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I’m UK based, official statisitics say that about 8% of men have visited a prostitute (nearly half as much as the USA, and less than Sweden, which is interesting because it suggests that legality is not the main factor in driving or preventing prostitution) – but personally I don’t know anyone who admits to it. I suspect that it’s quite unacceptable in most social circles.
WRT men ‘bothering women’, it really depends on their motivation. If men are driven by sexual frustration to bother women, then yes, wide-spread prostitution could help reduce that. If they are driven by egotism or some warped interpretation of what’s ‘manly’ then it won’t stop them. TBH, I don’t imagine that the guy who hissed at me in the street yesterday was expecting to get laid – I think he just enjoyed making me uncomfortable and would do it no matter the state of prostitution.
I am very sympathetic to the idea that people who are unable to get relationships for one reason or another should have their needs met. I suspect that they will only make up a small number of customers, though.
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Ugh. That girl reminds me of some Christians with arguments like “I used to do drugs, steal, lie and be an all-round horrible person, but then I found Jesus and got better — therefore, you too must convert to Christianity!”. Only, in her case it’s GirlWritesWhat or some other activist(s) instead of Jesus.
I think the overuse of “creepy” by some girls (like the one lecturing us in the video) has rendered the word vague and unhelpful. I think the word “creepy” is inherently problematic because it conflates the subjective experience of feeling “creeped out” with the ethical judgement of someone’s actions. But watching this video is like being lectured on sexual harassment by a reformed “Neanderthal ass-grabber” who assumes that all men are just like him.
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The word “creep” is an important tool and women are not going to give it up. Ami Anglewings lays out why here.
Myself, I find her position sadly adversarial. However, my experience with men convinces me that this is sometimes needed. Which is to say, this is a term that ends goodwill. Once it is deploy, conversation is over. However, sometimes we are right to end conversation. Sometimes we are right to slam the door.
Two other posts are important here:
http://realsocialskills.org/post/77287409108/about-creepy-guys
http://realsocialskills.org/post/79661763197/clueless-creepiness-vs-skillful-creepiness
It is possible for someone to be *wrong* when calling someone a creep. Likewise, it is possible for the term to be abusive, as Moebius has shown above. But predatory men exist, and they will use every trick at their disposal to manipulate social convention to their advantage. One such trick is to not only question our boundaries, but to question our very right to draw our own boundaries, to reach our own conclusions, to see through the bullshit. This is an expression of social power. It should be no surprise that we use what power we have.
It sucks, but this is how the world works.
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I completely agree, which is why I draw the conclusions that I do.
If a woman calls me a creep, then she is telling me that I have violated her boundaries, and I must act accordingly.
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@moebius — Actually, in *your* case, if a woman calls you a creep there is a good chance she is being unfair, as you seem the sort of man who has an overabundance of caution. There is nothing wrong with being weird-in-public.
Keep in mind that a sizable number of cis women find my presence in the restroom creepy. This is transphobic and they are wrong.
“Creep” is not automatically correct. However, “creep” is an important tool and people who dismiss “creep shaming” in general are wrong. Women need “creep”.
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The problem with the word “creep” is that (supposedly) what people want to discourage are forms of behavior, such as not respecting boundaries. But “creep” is rarely used as a verb. It’s used as a noun or an adjective (creepy); in either case it subtly suggests the problem is not a set pf behaviors but an inherent characteristic of the target. It’s pretty much inevitable at that point that it’s going to be misused.
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What I get from that post, which I think sums up the pro-using-“creep” mentality rather nicely, is “I want a superweapon that unanswerably ends a conversation . . . and labels the man involved as being in the wrong.” That’s immensely, ridiculously bullshit.
That’s not to say that a way to unanswerably end a conversation is bad, without it being an automatic “I win!” button, but there’s already a perfectly good one of those available: “This conversation is over,” and then either refusing to answer further statements, and only answering with repetition of the same: “This conversation is over.”
When a woman says that that’s not enough, what that looks like to me is “it’s not enough to be able to definitively end a conversation; I need a way to automatically make that end a victory.” And that’s wrong.
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Osberend, are you female?
I ask because you seem to be saying that Ami is wrong when she says “nothing else works.” You’re saying “actually, there’s something else that works just as well for making the guy stop.” (Although you then immediately acknowledge that it won’t stop some guys).
I don’t know if you’re speaking from personal experiences of being a woman who is being hit on by a persistent guy who won’t go away, or not.
I’m not saying that men can’t offer opinions, of course. I am saying that this is the sort of question in which I think personal experience may be more accurate than ivory-tower theorizing.
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@Ampersand: I am male.
I’m not necessarily contending that “This conversation is over” is equally effective at getting a guy to go away as “Buzz off, creep,” although I’m not convinced that Ami has evidence to the contrary, as she doesn’t discuss that sort of approach* at all, and I haven’t observed any other women using or discussing it either. I am, however, contending that it is (more or less by definition) equally effective at ending the conversation.
This does, admittedly, rest on my beliefs (which seem logical, but are unsupported by direct evidence . . . but so far as know, the same is true of their converses) that (a) in the absence of a conversation, men who are not ready to escalate to assault will eventually go away (at least to the extent that guys who are dismissed as creeps go away, which from my understanding is not totally), and (b) a man who is ready to escalate to assault as a result of being told “this conversation is over” will be at least as ready to escalate to assault over being called a creep.
I’m not saying that men can’t offer opinions, of course.
Which puts several steps above a lot of SJ folks.
I am saying that this is the sort of question in which I think personal experience may be more accurate than ivory-tower theorizing.
Certainly, if there actually is personal experience. But it’s been my observation that women (and men) frequently say “I need to do X; nothing else works” in situations where they haven’t tried some very obvious alternatives to X.
*Not those literal words, necessarily, just the approach of declaring the conversation finished and resolutely refusing to allow it be restarted.
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First, different women are different. For example, the tools that Michelle Obama has to bush off unwanted advances from randoms are probably quite different from mine. For example, she has the Secret Service. I have my imaginary friends.
So let us consider Ami. Okay, so don’t know her personally, but I’ve read her blog enough that I get some idea of her deal. For one, she is a very pretty Asian geek girl who lives in a white country. This comes with all kinds of fucked up baggage. She is physically “smallish”, which has more baggage. She is a trans girl who kinda passes. That is the metric-fuckton-mega-baggage. Men, in particular geeky men, will lay all kinds of meanings on her that have nothing to do with the real-Ami-on-the-inside. Plus, she’s kinda prickly. She doesn’t wanna be your dreamgirl.
(I hope I am not misrepresenting her here. This is my impression.)
From her post:
One of the fun parts of such conversations is when it becomes literally impossible to deny a charge. For example, do nerdy men “rules lawyer.”
Use an elaborate argument to prove you don’t!
(Obvious meta is obvious.)
Okay, so “rules lawyering” is kinda baked in to geek culture. I do it. You do it. We all do it. I shall officially declare it is an essential part of nerd-dom and it ain’t going away.
(I enjoy an argument about “who would win in a fight” as much as the next girl, say Sailor Moon versus Haruhi Suzumiya! *ding* *ding* *ding* FIGHT!)
But to rules lawyer your unwanted sexual attention? Nope. Bzzt. Not okay.
Okay, so then her post goes on to *specify* the shit men do. And yes, men do those things. “Persistent guy” is real.
(In my experience, I do not encounter persistent guy in geek spaces. I encounter him on the subway platform or the tranny bar. But then, I’m a six foot middle aged woman who wears short skirts. Geeks have no idea what to do with me. Ami is a young, pretty Asian girl. I have no reason to doubt her persistent-guy creeps are geek-space people.)
“But every single nerd I know is super shy and awkward.”
Well, I guess we can argue over what “nerd” means, but that ain’t the point. If you think there is a shortage of rando manga fans drunk on PUA nonsense, you’re living in a cave.
So yeah, the only way to get rid of these guys is to be literally *rude*. But go read the two Real Social Skills posts again. These men *force you to be rude*, and then they use their social skills to manipulate the terms of politeness to make you (the woman) the bitch.
Yes, Scott Aaronson Exists. Our Moebius exists. (And bless you guys, you are fine.)
We are talking about different guys.
So indeed, “creep” is a power play. It’s all status all the way down. It is the master stroke. We need it for the randos, cuz we also lack social skills and we suck at the game and anyway the game is stacked against women — and YES IT IS!
Most men are not shy, awkward nerds. And women are given *a place*. And our single-only power is to say no.
Think about how fucked up that is.
Oh, and I guess we can lead you around by your boners. Some women do that. Kinda sucks, but it ain’t like we picked this role.
But for myself, I ain’t the type to (deliberately) lead a dude around by his boner. I doubt Ami is either. We don’t want that shit.
So, “OMG this guy is creeping me out. GO AWAY!”
It works.
(BTW, I’ve only done this once. Actually, I didn’t literally use the word “creep”, but I went into full status-destruction mode against a random. He was a guy on the subway platform who had decided I was a sex worker, and I guess getting rejected by a tranny sex worker on a subway platform was TOO MUCH TO BEAR. So he fucking wouldn’t stop and he got pissy about it.
I won’t say what I said to the guy, except to say it was pretty bad. I used the master’s tools. But the fucker had it coming.)
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So there’s trans women who believe they have a place in the feminist movement and are understandably offended by the idea that they were socialized male, and there are trans women TERFs who believe they were socialized male and are offended that other trans women want a place in the feminist movement, but is there a thede of trans women who believe they absorbed some male socialization and are very apologetic about that but still think they have a place in feminism? Because I want to join that thede.
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Why would anyone be apologetic about absorbing male socialization? Performing specific harmful acts cause by that socialization, sure, but that’s a far different matter.
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It’s my understanding that redfems believe men have been socialized to dominate conversations, talk over other people and prioritise their own needs at the expense of others, while women are socialised to give way and wait their turn. So the theory is that if a trans-women has been socialised as a male, then she will have picked up this habit of dominating. If she then enters a feminist space she will act like a man, dominating the conversation and ensuring that it’s all about what she cares about, once again relegating women to second place.
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It would seem obvious that the appropriate response to this situation would be to criticize the actual behavior, i.e. “dominating the conversation”*, not its assumed cause, i.e. “male socialization.
*Which IME often just means volunteering to speak when no one else is doing so, which I think is entirely reasonable, and leads to better efficiency; male socialization in this respect strikes me as distinctly better than female socialization, albeit perhaps a little too far in the other direction.
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Radfems hate men. Therefore, they tend to reject anyone who shows any indication of manliness. Many trans women seek to extinguish any perceptible indication of manliness in themselves. Acceptance by radfems would be evidence of success. Some trans women capitulate, endorse the misandrist radfem memeplex, and become apologetic about male socialization. Others refuse to negotiate with terrorists, rail against the TERFs, and attempt to deny radfems their monopoly on feminine analysis/advocacy/gatekeeping.
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I believe that I personally have a certain degree of male socialization, but which was strongly influenced by my genderfail. I have place in feminism.
Of course, some trans women experience very little male socialization. We are varied, with perhaps a different distribution than cis women, but spread over the same basic space.
I have met AFAB women who seem to rather effortlessly adopt a “male-like” social identity, certainly with more ease than I ever could. Which does not mean they did not face social stigma. Of course they did. But the point is, their journey is as different from a “typical” cis woman’s as is mine. But we are all women. We all have a place in feminism.
The “trans women have male socialization” argument is of course a double standard. If we are confident and speak proudly, we are “male” (even as feminists encourage such behavior in women). If we are shy and reticent, we are mocking hyper-femininity and damaging “womanhood”. It’s bullshit.
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When I try to picture political divides that haven’t happened yet, a big one that I see coming what happens when science finally isolates the cause(s) of things like homosexuality, autism, etc. Since this suggests the possibility of correcting or inoculating these things prenatally, (assuming they aren’t caused by infection) I expect a split on the left between a “diversity” side that opposes altering conditions that where the harm is at least partially failure of accommodation by the broader society, and an “optimization” side that doesn’t really see that distinction as particularly important.
I don’t think that’s really treading new ground. But it occurred to me today, that in response to accusations by the “diversity” side that you can’t both be truly accepting of currently existing gays/autistics/etc. and in favor of preventing the future existence of more such individuals, the “optimization” side has a ready counter:
Pretty much everyone would support inoculation against being born transgendered, including existing transgendered people. I expect most, given a choice between a)altering people so that no one was ever born transgendered again or b)altering society, so that there was no prejudice against reassignment, would choose (a).
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Nah. I pick the science fiction society where people change sex as they wish over the science fiction society where nobody ever wants to.
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Hell yes, I am 100% on board with The Culture! As soon as the science is good enough (so probably not in our lifetime) my boyfriend and I are totally going to swap sides!
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II think you and Pluviann are misunderstanding both the choice I am posing and the Culture.
I’m not suggesting the choice you would make in an ideal world (which the Culture basically is). I’m suggesting the choice you would make in the likely actual world one generation from now, where reassignment is not a painless/riskless process, and post-op bodies do not work exactly like being born the “correct gender”.
But beyond that — the Culture *has* eliminated Trans-ness!
If you are gender-by-default, the fact that people take regular gender-switching for granted might not seem worthy of note. But for those of us who are not gender-by-default, it certainly looks like the Culture has weeded out trans-ness — by weeding out strong gender identification completely.
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@Protagoras: It seems to me like transness, at least as its commonly understood, implies dysphoria (or at disconnect), not mere other-preference. (Self-indulgent self-description and speculation follows.)
I (somewhat tentatively) identify as a cismale autogynephile (in a non-pathological sense—which I realize is not how the term’s inventor intended it). I’m attracted to women, everyone wants to be attractive, and I care more (in general, not just as regards sex) about my standards than anyone else’s, so why wouldn’t I be attracted to the idea of being a woman. And I sometimes do wonder, when I’m feeling dysphoric about other things*, if I would have been happier, overall, if I had been born with two X chromosomes, but otherwise as I am. And I do get a thrill that is partly sexual, but partly (I think) not, from wearing panties.
But . . . I don’t think of myself as a woman, nor do I really want to become one, as opposed to maybe simply be one. (And maybe not. A massively different hormonal balance would affect my brain in ways that I can’t really predict, not to mention all the intrinsic (e.g. menstruation) and extrinsic (e.g. sexism) hassles of being female. And the autogynephilia thing only really works if I remained attracted to women, in which case my theoretical dating pool would shrink significantly.) I have a full beard; present quite masculine (by preference), apart from my unimpressive muscles; and don’t feel any dysphoria about my sex except maybe to a limited extent when I’m feeling dysphoric about my everything. Some of my sexual fantasies have a female “viewpoint character,” but probably fewer than have a male one..
So if I were given access to an EGS-style transformation gun (I don’t know about Culture tech, but I suspect the same would apply), I would definitely push the button and try it out. And I might very well decide to stay, most or all of the time. But I still don’t think I’m really trans in the relevant sense. Maybe your sense is different.
So let’s ask a modified question: Would you favor “curing” anyone who would not be able to live comfortably in their birth sex (and associated gender, assuming a 1-1 matching of major sexes and genders in the future in question).
*I’m reminded a bit of the character of Buffalo Bill as I understood it (in terms of the dynamic involved, not of my general characteristics; also, for me, this is transient, not continuous): It’s not fundamentally that he hates his maleness, but that he hates himself, wants to be other than he is, and projects that sense onto his sex because it’s an obvious way in which he could be drastically different.
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Matthew, I am still learning about trans issues, so I may have completely misunderstood, but I was under the impression that trans people identify strongly with one gender (usually the gender that they weren’t born with). If we had the perfect-transition technology of The Culture then trans-women would immediately transition to women and never transition back. Likewise, cis-women who strongly identified as women would never transition. I suppose The Culture has eliminated trans-people as an idenitifiable class, because it has eliminated the ability and reason to bother distinguishing between cis and trans people, but I don’t see that it has eliminated ‘people-who-strongly-idenitify-with-one-gender-regardless-of-gender-assigned-at-birth’. I think in the Culture there will be plenty of people who never transition, regardless of how easy it is.
That being said, if all we have is next-generation transition technology which is painful, risky and doesn’t give exact results then I would not do it. I don’t identify strongly as a woman, but I’ve never felt that I ought to be a man. So I’m comfortable enough where I am now to hold out for perfect-tech.
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A minor point about the Culture.
It is trivially easy for biological Culture citizens to change sex; they can do so at will, by performing a relatively simple concentration exercise, which causes their brains to emit some tailored hormones that start the process. The full body reconfiguration process takes about a year, and will even produce fully functioning reproductive organs. The norm, in fact, is that over the course of their lives, an average Culture citizen will mother one child and father another. We are never given any hard numbers as to how many people never “transition” (Culture sex change is, as I understand it, quite different from the transitioning of a modern trans person, because the Culture has no sense of static gender norms), but we do know that they are a minority — Jernau Morat Gurgeh, the lead character in “The Player of Games”, explicitly mentions that he is regarded as a bit of an oddity because he identifies so strongly with his male sex that he never wanted to change it. There is no reference to anybody being an asshole towards him about this, though. Dysphoria is never treated in any of Banks’ Culture works, but as Pluviann said, I would guess that a biological Culture citizen who feels very bad about the sex he or she was born with would probably just change it — they gain the ability to in adolescence.
So I guess you can say that the Culture has “eliminated” transness by making it a useless distinction; more or less everybody changes sex a few times during their lives, and people generally do not identify strongly with their configuration of sex organs. It has “eliminated” many identities in the same way (as is probably to be expected from a post-scarcity society), and possibly the most meaningful identity Culture citizens have amongst each other is biological vs. machine.
When I was younger, I wanted nothing more than to have a full gender nullification — not only do I not identify strongly with my gender, I used to hate it very strongly and wanted to disassociate myself from it. I never felt that I ought to be a woman, though, I just wished I was not-a-man. That was mostly due to a strong feeling of guilt over things men have done to women, not directly due to any body dysphoria issues (although I did come to hate my sex characteristics too — but, again, I never felt that it was not my body or that my body was wrong, I just hated it). If I lived in the Culture (which is an extremely egalitarian society), I would most likely not have had such a feeling of guilt, and I think I would probably follow Culture norm and change sex several times for fun & curiosity.
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Pretty much everyone would support inoculation against being born transgendered, including existing transgendered people
Given my limited exposure to the politics of the movment on Tumblr, I dispute this.
what happens when science finally isolates the cause(s) of things like homosexuality, autism, etc. Since this suggests the possibility of correcting or inoculating these things prenatally, (assuming they aren’t caused by infection)
What I am grimly anticipating, with a certain dark amusement, is the skin and hair flying in the “pro-choice” movement over this. A woman has the absolute right over her bodily autonomy! Get your rosaries off my ovaries! Abortion on demand at any stage for any or no reason other than I want one!
How will this stack up against “prenatal scans shows my foetus is gay/autistic/some other condition I find undesirable so I want it aborted”? Since in the U.K. it is permissible to abort a foetus with cleft lip and palate, and abortions on “quality of life” (if the child is born it will suffer from being not ‘normal’ due to the physical or mental disability; as well as pain, sickness and other disruptions to health, the parents worry that when they are not able to care for the child it will suffer emotionally, so better not to let it be born) and sex-selective terminations are acceptable, why not terminate your neurodivergent/intersexed/transgender foetus?
Will the same people who fully support absolute abortion rights support those when it comes to “we want to abort people like you because we consider your life is not worth living, and it’s unfeasible to expect society to change to accommodate you and your needs”?
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I don’t see the problem. I can believe that something should be legal, and simultaneously believe that certain applications of that something are immoral.
So I believe that free speech should be legal, but I also think advocating for Nazism is morally wrong, even though it should be legal.
Similarly, I believe that abortion should be legal, but I also think selective abortion to eliminate future (trans people/fat people/gay people/etc) is morally wrong, even though it should be legal.
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Ampersand, in the case of selective abortion of gay, trans, or fat fetuses, is it the selective part you find immoral, or the abortion part? That is, I’m guessing you don’t find abortion immoral in all cases, such as when it is necessary to preserve the health of the mother, but perhaps you find it immoral in frivolous cases, such as to prevent having a fat baby? Though it does seem to me that the real moral question in most abortion cases is whether or not the fetus is considered a full person; if they are, then it’s wrong to abort them for any reason other than maybe to save the life of the mother; if they aren’t then it’s seemingly morally okay to abort them for any reason, including not wanting a gay baby.
More importantly, if there were a simple, safe way to “cure” the gayness, transness, or fatness of the fetus without aborting it, would you consider that immoral? To me it does not seem immoral, though one can imagine a future in which parents who intentionally DON’T “cure” some aspect of their fetus would be considered abusive, and I think that is also too far (though it does seem immoral to me to reject a procedure that could, for example, safely eliminate a severe birth defect, just because it’s “unnatural,” or what have you).
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Onyomi:
Ampersand, in the case of selective abortion of gay, trans, or fat fetuses, is it the selective part you find immoral, or the abortion part?
I don’t actually find any individual abortion immoral, unless we’re talking about a completely optional abortion that happens after the 7th month (which is to say, an abortion that virtually never happens in real life).
I would find a trend of abortion intended to wipe out minority groups – be it trans, fat, gays, asexuals, whatever – to be a mix of immoral and tragic. I think we’re better off having a variety of peoples.
More importantly, if there were a simple, safe way to “cure” the gayness, transness, or fatness of the fetus without aborting it, would you consider that immoral?
Yes, in exactly the same way I’d consider selective abortion for those same purposes to be immoral. It’s not the abortion that bothers me; it’s the possibility of wiping out a minority group for no good reason.
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Fucking curebies.
No, I don’t support eliminating trans people at all.
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I don’t support eliminating trans people at all.
I can’t tell whether the sneaking in of connotations here is intentional or not, but to me, “eliminating trans people” pretty clearly has a connotation of hunting down currently existing trans people, which was not the point of the grandparent.
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Isn’t SRS a “cure,” just a less efficient one? Hell, isn’t the same true (at a still greater level of inefficiency, though also at a lower level of risk, cost, and irreversibility) for, let’s say, binding?
If someone is fated to be born with a mismatch between sex and instinctive gender identity, fixing the sex to match the identity is as much a cure as fixing the identity to match the sex. Given the choice between (choose one or all as applicable: regular hormone injections, surgery, uncomfortable clothing) and genetic engineering, why would anyone prefer the former?
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Yes, I am surprised you would not support “curing” trans people, if it could be done in the womb (either by flipping some hormonal switch to make their mind match their biological gender, or by somehow switching their biological gender to match the mental state). The reason being that, if I understand correctly, most trans people consider their biological gender to be a problem? That is, what they want is to achieve a match between “outside” and “inside,” no? Like, for example, most trans women feel that, on the inside they ARE just women, not that they are a separate category called “trans woman,” no? (though I understand there may be exceptions as with Ozy’s non-binary case, which I have to admit I don’t fully understand).
This seems different from homosexuality, autism, and a number of other such phenomena, because “wishing you could be attracted to the opposite sex” is not an inherent part of homosexuality, and “wishing you were neurotypical” is not part of the definition of autism.
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Like, in some sense, isn’t gender reassignment surgery a “cure” for trans-ness, in that it is an attempt to make the body match the mental self-perception? If that same goal of “fit” between mind and body could be achieved in vitro, why would that be a bad thing? Unless you find that there is some value in the trans-ness itself–that for some people being a trans woman or a trans man is an identity distinct from that of a woman or man, and worthy of being preserved for its own sake (which it very well, may be, though that’s not how I’ve previously understood trans-ness).
*To be perfectly clear, I am not at all supporting “curing” existing trans people with therapy or what have you.
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I’m glad I’m trans. Being trans is awesome.
Sure, I have to put up with some shitty people, but fuck them. I’m awesome. My friends are awesome. Girldick is sexy as fuck.
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Okay, that is interesting. I kind of thought that being a trans woman was, in some ways different from being just a woman. There are certainly people who are attracted specifically to girldick, which I guess may mean some would rather keep their organs as is, but switch outward identification.
Is this common? I mean, is it common to be trans but not to want surgery, even assuming the surgery were safe and cheap? I was under the impression that for some trans women, for example, having a penis felt “wrong.”
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It’s complicated.
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My thoughts on this
I’m not really sure what the point of eliminating homosexuality would even be now that first world western countries are close to the point of accepting it (at the very least it would be a waste of resources), so I’m going to stick with the autism example.
First off, I am extremely against any attempt to “cure” existing people of autism/Aspergers, especially if it actually worked, which I see as philosophically equivalent to murder. And parents who try and “cure” autistic/Aspie children are horrible, horrible people.
I don’t really have any strong moral objection to individual neurotype-selective abortion. I don’t think parents are under any obligation to have such children if they don’t want to, though I would say you really should avoid parenthood entirely if that difference is enough to make or break the deal for you, because there is a lot more stuff that could happen. However I think it would probably be a bad thing to eliminate autism/Aspergers from society, because I think increasing the “autisticness” of society would actually probably be a good thing. In practice I suppose that might mean necessitating a ban on neurotype prenatal testing, at least for now. Which I guess makes me a reverse eugenicist :P
I seem to be pretty unusual in my total lack of care for group survival beyond the individuals in that group though. The objection that immediately came to my mind when people on this blog were half-jokingly discussing not creating any more men and reproducing with biotech instead was not “oh no there will not be any more people in the same category as me” but “won’t that be worse for hetero/bi women though?”.
(for the record, I am an Aspie. Which explains that last part pretty well)
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Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this.
These discussions about eugenics tend to ignore the possibility of technology immortalizing some of the people in the category in question before it can be eugenecized (that’s not a word) away. Which is really a minor detail because they would end up a tiny portion of the population and it would still be (allegedly) reducing harm said to be caused by the condition in question, but it would make it so you couldn’t actually eliminate the trait in question (well you could, but then you’d be, you know, a monster).
Also, just for clarification, I do not see autism as harmful beyond society’s response to it (in a perfectly accommodating world, where would the disutility even be coming from?).
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On that subject: There are multiple people who claimed on the LW survey to be autistics signed up for cryopreservation. I consider this to be a very comforting fact, because even if a technologically-advanced future accidentally eradicates autism through prenatal testing, there’s still going to be some autistic people around.
I think there’s some disutility associated with having trouble identifying faces and emotions, but I also think there’s some disutility associated with being a trichromat and not a tetrachromat. Besides, consumer products beat me at face recognition about 5 years ago, so I’m sure someone will write a face/emotion recognition app for Google Glass sometime, and then I can just use that.
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I have a good friend who is gay, not religious, and seemingly pretty well-adjusted and not self-loathing or anything, yet he still says that if he could have flipped a switch and been straight, he would have. Now presumably a lot of that is because society makes it harder to be gay, but I think it’s also that he just doesn’t see his sexuality as some fundamental part of his identity, as, for that matter, I do not, and, given the choice, he’d rather the more convenient option.
I am a man who is attracted to women, and I find that convenient, because society is currently very accepting of that sort of relationship, and it makes it possible to have children who are a genetic mixture of myself and the person I’m attracted to. That said, I do not see my attraction to women as some sort of fundamental aspect of my personality. If I were to wake up gay, I would be unhappy, but only because of the loss of the various conveniences mentioned above (and the need to break up with my girlfriend), but not because I’d feel I’d become a fundamentally different person.
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Also, just from a numerical standpoint, in a population of a given size, homosexuals have far fewer potential partners to choose from than heterosexuals, because they make up a far smaller portion of the population. In principle, one could get around this by making almost everyone gay, but that seems unlikely.
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Man, it feels good to be bisexual.
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In response to both you and ninecarpals; if I had the option to become bisexual, I would take it. From an optimization standpoint I’m not sure why you would ever support the creation of monosexuals (I say this as a straight dude). It’s just so inefficient to have arbitrary restrictions on who you’re attracted to. The ONLY advantage to being straight (versus bi) is not having to deal with the current stigma against homosexual activity.
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TL;DR: Autistics must stall for time to win acceptance before prenatal tests occur, prenatal tests could have negative effects on NT populations, I have no clue what trans people want with regards to future trans people, and curebie arguments prove way too much. (Scrupulosity CW on that last set of arguments, seen after paragraph 4).
Ugh, this. The one major (read: non-AI-related) issue on which I end up siding rather firmly against technological developments that lots of people in my political coalition endorse. My opinion is that we’ve got to delay the development of a prenatal autism test long enough to change societal opinions with regards to autism, or us autistics end up going the same way that Down Syndrome went. I refer to this scenario as “grassroots eugenics”, because it would lead to eugenic results without coordination or any individual deciding they wanted to eradicate autism.
Aside: if you have a prenatal test with lots of false positives, you lose a lot of important genetic diversity. If you have one with lots of false negatives, the autistic kids born to parents who wanted to abort are going to have a really awful time. If you spend lots of research time and money to get a test with hardly any false positives or negatives, you end up dealing with diminishing returns. (Not that I have a problem with people spending an extra decade trying to reduce false results, because it gives us autistics time to work, and to try and be charismatic and persuasive, which is not exactly our strength.)
I’ll just let the trans people make a recommendation about whether or not trans-ness should be eradicated, and error on the side of being mildly against eradication in the meantime.
Finally, curebies are seriously terrible. The tradeoffs they are willing to make for rather questionable goals are unreasonable.
To the “you don’t know what you’re missing” argument: Anyone who thinks expanding my capabilities is a moral imperative strong enough to override dissent had better be using every bit of sensory-expansion biohacking tech available, regardless of how invasive it is (implanted magnets, the compass anklet thing, that vitamin trial that’s trying to expand human vision into the IR range) because otherwise they’re just hypocrites.
Heck, I’ll listen to a pro-cure argument from someone who has so much as used non-invasive, fully reversible sensory improvement technology that has upgraded them beyond their baseline (restoring lost functionality through glasses and hearing aids doesn’t count), even though a cure would be extremely invasive and irreversible.
To the “it’s a moral imperative to contribute as much to society as possible” argument: If you’re an EA who took the Giving What We Can pledge, you still aren’t meeting this criterion, but I’ll hear an argument along those lines from one of you, because you are at least getting your money reasonably close to your mouth. Everyone else: If what you really mean is “you should contribute to society exactly to this point, but after that it’s optional”, please explain why your point, which you conveniently located behind you and ahead of the average autistic, is natural. And don’t tell me that it’s about being independent from societal support, unless you actually live on a boat in international waters, which still leaves you with some societal support, but at least you’re trying.
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Here’s a question for everyone. What’s your views on the following hypothesis: “The fight between ‘sex-positive’ and ‘sex-negative’ feminism is a conflict between the blue tribe and the grey tribe?”
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It fails to account for political tribalism outside a US context, where “blue tribe”, “red tribe” and “grey tribe” are not necessarily well-defined or the main political modes of thought.
(also: In my home country, the farthest-left socialist party (with parliamentary representation, that is) recently voted on its policy towards criminalization of prostitution. The anti-criminalization side won by one vote. Far-left socialists, by and large, belong to the same political tribe.)
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I’m not aware of any feminism that calls itself ‘sex-negative’? I’m guessing you mean feminists who are against prostitution and sexual objectification in general? I think they can fall into conservative, liberal, progressive or radical feminism since it’s a pretty standard position to take.
I take it you’re assigned ‘sex-positive’ to the grey tribe? In that respect I think you pretty much right. In as much as the grey tribe is the tribe of ‘the absolute minimum number of possible laws and rules should be applied’ and being opposed to prostitution means making laws against it (or in a softer form, having lots of regulation).
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https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/
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Thank you! That’s very interesting. I should have remembered that everything exists somewhere on the internet!
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Hi Ozy, I read a link from the Nothing Is Mere blog to your post on times it’s good to express physical or romantic desire, http://ozymandias271.tumblr.com/post/96001119743/since-you-appear-to-have-a-lot-of-insight
It was a good read especially in the context Scott Aaronson brought up of only being told things not to do. Also it seems a lot more human, like the rules a person might choose for themselves, rather than the rules an institution would give people in an attempt to completely eliminate risk.
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Seconded! I found the same page the same way, and also wanted to repost it to signal boost it.
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There are currently around as many Algerians in France as there were Pieds-Noirs in Algeria, but the former is not called “colonization” while the latter is. Why?
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Power relationships. The French dominated Algeria’s government and economy, after taking political control and land by force. In France, French people still control the government and most economic institutions, and Algerians are a relatively poor and politically weak minority, who came to the country because the French government allowed them to, without any use of force.
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That’s more an “imperialism” thing than colonization, in my opinion. As a counterpoint, the Anglo-Scotch ancestors of modern white Texans were invited to Texas by the Mexican government, but we have no qualms about calling that “colonization”.
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Although they were invited in, the circumstances were such that settling in the area did lead to them getting lots of political power.
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You might not have any qualms about calling it colonization, but I certainly wouldn’t.
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Because the French population in Algeria was established there through military conquest and subjugation of the indigenous population, whereas the converse is not true for the current Algerian population in France.
Is this some kind of trick question?
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As far as I am aware the Algerians in France do not run the government and economy.
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Does anybody want to talk about the possibility of an ethical rehabilitation of the whole ‘pride’ thing wrt majority (or “majority”) demographics? I’ve seen it split into pride as Yay I Did A Thing, as underdog integrity, and as mere arrogance, but this trichotomy imo sorta highlighted how a non-oppressed group could have group pride without it being type 3.
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I think this is unlikely to be successful with regard to immutable characteristics (e.g. race, or more broadly bloodline descent), but might be possible with regards to correlated mutable characteristics. So, far example, I wouldn’t describe myself as having “white pride,” but I would describe myself as having (culturally) “Western pride.” The key difference is that someone who isn’t “Western” can become (by my standards) at least partially “Western” by assimilating to Western culture, and their children,(if raised within that culture and identifying with it) will be completely Western from birth, but someone who isn’t white cannot become white, nor can they have white children*.
Similarly, I don’t really have “straight pride” but I do have . . . whatever the opposite of “queer pride” as distinct from “gay pride” is, I guess. I want to marry someone** who has my preferred sex-and-gender and shares similar life goals, find stable jobs in our respective fields that allow us to live in the same house without either of us having an excessive commute, raise children, send them to college, and grow old together. And I not only believe that’s a perfectly good set of aspirations, but that most of a society ought to have, even if it’s perfectly viable for a few outliers to do differently.
*Well, unless they the other parent is white and the dominant racial system is hyperdescent. But I don’t live in Brazil.
**Or in principle someones. I don’t think that “poly” is intrinsically antithetical to what am describing, nor is “kinky,” “gender-variant,” etc.
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The word ‘pride’ is so loaded that it might be impossible to rehabilitate. But I think we could totally encourage a kind of mindful enjoyment.
Often, when I’m walking to work, I’ll take a moment to enjoy the sunshine and the fact that it’s a really nice day. I’m not dengrating other days, or people who live elsewhere. Instead, I’m making a point to savor something that’s pleasant.
Stuff like ‘hometown pride’ seems pretty similar to me. I’m not taking ‘pride’ in the sense of personal accomplishment. The sentiment is much closer to consciously noting, “this place is nice” and maybe focusing on specifically nice features.
You could extend the sentiment to stuff like ethicnic or cultural heritage. Every cultures should have /some/ features that could be mindfully enjoyed.
To some extent, this might not even need rehabilitation. Presidents have been declaring ‘Irish History Month’ every year for decades, and no one seems to have objected.
We could even view holidays like Labor Day, the 4th of July or Thanksgiving as being about ‘cultural pride’. A town parade on any of these days seems to amount to people deliberately noticing all the local organizations that the community has fostered.
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I don’t really have good feelings about Black Pride or Gay Pride or being proud of being a woman. Encouraging tribalism seems like a bad idea to me. Both politically and socially (tribalism leads to socially excluding people on the basis of traits they obviously cannot change. This is very hurtful.)
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I largely agree with this as regards truly immutable traits. I do think, however, that tribalism on the basis of mutable traits is possible, and is up to a point socially useful. Finding where that point is, and not reifying mutable traits into immutable ones . . . those are the tricky bits.
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I don’t really have good feelings about Black Pride or Gay Pride or being proud of being a woman. Encouraging tribalism seems like a bad idea to me. Both politically and socially (tribalism leads to socially excluding people on the basis of traits they obviously cannot change. This is very hurtful.)
But Black pride and Gay pride were both responses to social exclusion (and things much worse than social exclusion), not the original source of social exclusion. Blaming gay pride for social exclusion is a lot like blaming the person who just got beat up by a mob for participating in a fight.
In my view, society is full of messages which tell members of marginalized groups that they suck and they’re unworthy of happiness or respect or love. “Black pride” and “Gay pride” and “Fat pride” and all the other marginalized-group-prides are self-defense movements; they are a way for oppressed groups to tell themselves “we don’t suck. We are worthwhile humans.” I don’t see why anyone would oppose that.
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@Ampersand: Because “I have X pride” is (pretty naturally, I should say) taken as meaning “I am X, and being X is something to be proud of.” And being black or gay* . . . isn’t. Neither is being white or straight.
Black lack-of-shame and gay lack-of-shame are both perfectly sensible, but pride isn’t just the negation of shame, but its opposite.
*Fat and lean are more complicated, and both could legitimate potentially be sources of pride under the right circumstances.
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>(tribalism leads to socially excluding people on the basis of traits they obviously cannot change. This is very hurtful.)
feature not a bug
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Osberend:
Why should I care about that?
It’s a political slogan. There is a technical sense in which the words in the slogan are untrue.
And you know what? “Hot dogs” aren’t always hot and (ideally) aren’t made of dogs. So what?
In practice, the overwhelming use of “gay pride” and “black pride” is to combat unjustified shaming and hatred inflicted on people in marginalized groups. It seems to me that should be what matters most.
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@ckp: Of course. The question is whether it’s a misfeature.
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I don’t really have good feelings about Black Pride or Gay Pride or being proud of being a woman. Encouraging tribalism seems like a bad idea to me. Both politically and socially (tribalism leads to socially excluding people on the basis of traits they obviously cannot change. This is very hurtful.)
Are there really a lot of white people who feel hurt because they aren’t part of Black pride?
And, is this hurt larger and more significant than the kind of hurt “Black pride” is intended to mitigate?
(Similar questions apply regarding straight people excluded from “Gay pride.”)
feature not a bug
Evidence?
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I think there are a substantial number of straight people who bothered by the fact that gay people (and sexual minorities more generally) are allowed to have “gay pride” celebrations, and the Left is cool with that, but suggesting a “straight pride” celebration will get you tarred as a homophobe.
And there really isn’t a straight equivalent to Pride, at least not for men. And that’s actually pretty shitty.
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“Are there really a lot of white people who feel hurt because they aren’t part of Black pride?
And, is this hurt larger and more significant than the kind of hurt “Black pride” is intended to mitigate?
(Similar questions apply regarding straight people excluded from “Gay pride.”)”
I personally have felt hurt due to exclusion due to trans-pride and trans-only spaces. I imagine though my experience is pretty rare. White people feeling excluded due to black solidarity seems like its rather common. There are alot of cultural spaces considered “black” that have a large amount of white participants. I honestly have no estimate on how common it is for straight people to feel hurt due to exclusion from gay spaces. Though I and lots of other bi-sexual people report feeling excluded from the lbgt community.
I don’t know of any way to measure how “large” or “significant” someone’s hurt is. So I am not going to pretend like they can. I can only really talk about how widespread hurt is. In terms of widespread I happily concede the types of hurt X-pride is intended to mitigate is more common.
I am not convinced X-pride is necessary to solve the problems it was intended to solve. Though maybe the X-pride are needed idk. But even if they are needed I still would not have good feelings about them. I think prisons are needed. But I find the idea of throwing a human in a cage is really creepy. X-pride movements don’t creep me out like prisons do. But I am never going to actually feel good about systematically treating people differently based on their sexuality or race. Even if maybe this needs to be done.
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Like literally what the fuck?
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@veronics
Responding to someone claim to have been hurt (for whatever reason) with such snark is not really ok. And clearly signals talking to you is very emotionally unsafe.
You have interesting posts. But I am not even moderately interested in talking to you about this topic.
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sorry cannot edit. Meant to write @Veronica
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My 3 cents:
1) I think there are some positive qualities that are often associated with almost every group, so I think it is *possible* to have pride in a healthy way in your heritage no matter what it is.
2) I think it’s possible for pride movements to harm both the people in them and the people outside them, even if the proud group is disadvantages and doing it as a defense mechanism. (I’ll skip specific examples for 1 and 2, but if anyone wants to discuss, let me know).
3) With that said, it’s easier to do harm if you’re in a dominant position than if you’re not, so I don’t have any problem saying that dominant people should be extra careful. But even people who are generally oppressed can find themselves in a situation where they’re hurting someone else, and/or themself, so it’s good to act with some kindness and take a self-inventory when you can.
IMHO, of course.
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@veronica: I don’t know whether any of these possibilities is applicable in stargirlprincesses’s case, but here are my thoughts on some ways that such hurt can occur (at least two of which I have experienced myself, although not with trans spaces specifically). Note that in all three cases, I am describing how events and group dynamics appear to an outsider/member of a “privileged” demographic, and more specifically to me. I recognize that they may not accurately represent what is actually going on. Also, none of this is arguing that there aren’t good reasons for trans-only (or more generally X-only) spaces to exist, or even necessarily that those reasons don’t outweigh the hurt caused. But it is giving some thoughts about “literally what the fuck” might motivate someone to feel real pain over them.
1. Pride events, among other things, are an opportunity to go and express one’s sexuality and/or gender, in public, in the most unrestricted way possible, and be praised for doing so by members of one’s community. For people who feel like they have to keep those things in check, in order to be viewed as socially acceptable by the people around them (which includes people from all demographics, including straight cismales), that can look like a beautiful opportunity for release. To be told “No, this is for us, not for you. You’re not oppressed in the same way,” even if it has elements of truth, can be painful. This is even more true for someone who is a real ally, who may feel a sense of betrayal over not receiving the kind of support and validation that they have given.
Personally, I have related feelings with respect to general attitudes about talking about sexual practices and desires among progressive circles with respect to gender: If a woman is not afraid to bluntly approach men for sex, she’s liberated, and if she talks openly about her vibrator use, she’s shattering taboos. If I were to be unafraid to bluntly approach women for sex, I’d be a “harassing creep,” and if I were to talk openly about my toy use, I’d be “some sort of fetishistic [and possibly still harassing] weirdo.” Yes, that’s a reaction to “broader cultural trends.” But no one actually lives in “Western culture,” they live in little variant pockets thereof. In the social circles I actually live in, a woman being truly open about her desires will be more validated than I would, we all know it, and yet her act will be viewed as more “brave.”
2. Pride events are, among other things, awesome parties, and ones that some participants are super invested in. If an ally has one or more trans friends who are vocally psyched about an upcoming pride event, I think it’s understandable that they would want to be a part of this awesome party that their friend(s) are excited over (whose political ends they support!), and feel hurt at being excluded.
I can’t think of any instances of similar dynamics around pride events in my own life, but I absolutely can around non-sociopolitical parties.
3. There’s a thing that groups that are numerical minorities and/or “oppressed” groups seem to frequently do where they form little self-conscious communities that are open to anyone of the defining group. Geeks certainly do this, but I think less consciously (and therefore less thoroughly), because there isn’t a sociopolitical movement behind it. And frequently, these communities present themselves (accurately or otherwise) as offering sympathy and support to their members, not only with respect to experiences of group oppression, but with respect to everything else as well. For someone who, for one reason or another, doesn’t have a lot of social support, the idea of having a community that you can just . . . step into, and people will support you, because we’re alike, and we’re all in this together, and you can’t let the bastards grind you down . . . can be so achingly beautiful, and to be told that no, no matter how much you support the goals of that community, you can never actually be a part of it can hurt.
I’ve read a lot of descriptions of shit that geeky women and women in STEM fields have gone through. And I’ve read a lot of descriptions of mutual support, and have both experience and seen discussion of the additional admiration that women get for being geeks, or for being really good at math/hard science/computer science beyond what men get for the same (from other geek women and from geek men worth knowing, not from non-geeks). And I realize that the latter is a reaction to the former. But still, with my personality, with my strengths and weaknesses . . . if I could take the package deal (ignoring the other aspects of being a woman, just looking at the interaction term for “woman” and “geek”), I would.
And quite possibly, having taken that deal, I’d regret it. And maybe the communities in question are frequently dysfunctional, and Pride isn’t actually that great unless it stands in stark contrast to the crappiness of how people treat your sexuality/gender in other contexts. I don’t know. But the pain of an experience depends on the thoughts and perspectives of the person experiencing it, not on reality as such.
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Isn’t all-sexualities Pride literally just Folsom?
Also, I’m pretty sure most Pride events are ally-inclusive.
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…Seriously? You could call it a pansexual event (in the BDSM mixed gender meaning), but there’s no way in hell Folsom’s straight. I hate to ask this, but do you go to Folsom? There are volunteer squads whose designated job is breaking up groups having sex in the street, the vast majority of which are all male, and that’s just the tip of it.
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I called it an all-sexualities event! (Well, I called it ‘straight’, and then I reconsidered it and edited it, as I, Ozy Frantz, Lord of the Blog, am the only person with an edit button.) And, no, I’ve never gone to Folsom, unfortunately.
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Thank you for the clarification. I didn’t see your edit, as I was posting from mobile.
Folsom is a funny example to use because in San Francisco, *Pride* is straighter, in the sense that there’s a higher percentage of straight people out to party. (The afterparty in the Castro is a big deal because it doesn’t attract straight participants like Pride does, which is held in front of city hall, right next to several train stations.) Folsom, on the other hand, is so dominated by gay men that there’s a designated space staked out only for women.
Also, you should totally come to Folsom at least once in your life. There are stations where you can get flogged for free by experts, plus some incredible artists and really sweet entertainment acts. Oh, and lots of naked pretty people, some of whom are wearing bridles or have butt plug tails in.
Folsom is awesome.
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@osberend — You’re kinda widening the lens here. For example, perhaps women are allowed to be more open about sex, but that is a separate issue from trans-only spaces.
I get the desire for instant, effortless community.
Except it ain’t instant and it ain’t effortless. For example, one of our *better* trans-only social groups around here is run by a little coterie of super-attractive Mean Girls.
Like, actual Mean Girls who could have literally come from central casting for a movie about a socially dysfunctional high school. They play the trope better than the actual Mean Girls I knew in my actual school.
It’s pretty amusing to watch. They are funny. Plus, they are (to be honest) pretty attractive and that’s nice to be around. But I would not describe this as a welcoming space. (A few of the nerdier trans gals, including me, kinda make fun of them among ourselves. Cuz OMG!)
But X-only spaces are different from the X-community. For example, most queer events are pretty open and surely you can come. Like, I went to a gay leather boy fetish event the other night. I’m not gay. I’m not a leather boy. But it’s at a bar and anyone can come. You could come.
(The reason I was there is my g/f works security and I wanted to hang with her. Plus I know the DJ.)
Anyway, it’s a lovely crowd with a cool vibe. A lot of queer events are like that.
On the other hand, would you fit in? I dunno. What would you *do*? (Mostly I danced and flirted with the dudes. Gay dudes can teach a master class in flirting.)
But our trans-only spaces, *those* we need. They matter a lot. You have no idea.
You cannot come. You cannot be part of that community. This is not *exclusion*, it’s simple logic. The community exists *because* we are an embattled minority. It forms by virtue of our general social exclusion. If we open it, then the community vanishes, and once again we are alone and wandering a hostile world without support.
(It took me a long time to even find good face-to-face trans social groups in my area, at least ones that worked for me. This ain’t trivial.)
(I’ve gone to events where I was a total wallflower. Are you a nerd now? You’ll be a nerd in an X-only space. The “cool kids” are the same everywhere. Some trans women are as smug as they are beautiful.)
Let me add, there is one complication: if you are dating a trans person. So yeah, that can be an issue. If this happens, your partner will probably include you in some community things, but not others. That’s life. Deal.
(I’m involved with a local women’s-only BDSM group. It’s really nice. We hold private parties. There are two kinds of parties. One type is women-only. The other type is “all gender”. Only women can join the group, but they can invite their male partners to the all gender parties, which is kinda cool. I enjoy both types of party. They both fill a role.)
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Boston pride is open to everyone. In fact, most queer gatherings are. Are you cis-het but still wanna come to a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell event, fine, just show up. Rock your consistent-with-birth-assignment gender. Kiss your opposite-sex partner. It’s all good.
On the other hand, I’m kinda wanting to start a trans-only writing group here, cuz our local queer-centered writing group has a TERF problem. So there is that. Honestly, if some cis person gets crappy about that, as if there is an overabundance of trans writing groups that are crowding out all the cis-default writing groups — I mean, what the fuck? I can’t even.
What are we even talking about here?
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https://pseudonymwrites.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/a-meditation-on-mutually-assured-destruction/
*sigh*
So … I wrote a thing. In which I do a complete 180 regarding scott’s “Untitled” post. I now think it is Bad, and indeed would describe myself as disagreeing with it and even condemning it.
In unrelated news, I now understand why Scott tags poss like this “things I will regret writing”. Yay.
I’m going to bed, and may the world be less shitty in the morning.
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Without fully agreeing or disagreeing with your post (I lean toward disagree, but acknowledge that a meaningful point is being made), I think that part of the problem here is partial-but-not-complete pillarization.
What I mean is that I don’t interact with raving misogynists much. I know they’re out there, hell I can see the damage they’ve done on people in my life. But I rarely read their writing, speak to them, etc. And so when I see feminists fighting someone else within the spheres that I move in, odds are the the feminists (a) are at least partially in the wrong and (b) have more power. So I’m in favor of taking them down a peg.
But, as you have noted, the pillars are leaky, and the weapons we build in self-defense may be used by others outside of my pillar, some of whom hate feminists and are worse then them.
At the same time, I think this leaky pillar effect is part of why some feminists tend to be such assholes as well: They know that “the enemy” is horrible, because news and memes leak in from outside the pillar. But when they look around for the enemy, they mostly see other people within their own social circles, other those immediately adjacent, who mostly aren’t that bad. But they know the enemy is out there, and horrible, so they identify the most hostile looking people they see as the enemy and go at them with all guns blazing.
I’m not really sure what to do about this.
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I think that post could have used a summarising conclusion. I think you were saying:
Scott is making posts that accurately describe and criticise a certain kind of feminist, but because his articles are eloquently written and widely read it will become used as a weapon by anyone who wishes to attack feminists – even the “good feminists” who don’t deserve to be attacked or fit the criticisms that Scott’s making.
Is that accurate?
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Attacking feminists is hard enough even when justified, so hard that if you give the attack the extra handicap of not being justified, I doubt it would do anything.
I also suspect that most misogynists don’t like nerds, the scrupulous, or people who show emotional weakness very much, so this kind of attack won’t appeal to them anyway.
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Is attacking feminists hard?
*taps microphone, clears throat*
Attention: I disagree with many of modern feminism’s popular assumptions and almost all of its shibboleths, in execution if not in their ideal form! In addition, I think that feminism has a structural problem in which it’s embraced internal community values too strongly, so that it has become natural that the loudest voices pillorying people seen as enemies of the community will become popular, even if they do so in ways clearly contradictory to the generally accepted ideals of feminism!
OK, that was a mouthful, but it wasn’t hard. On the other hand, I both don’t really identify as a feminist*, and I don’t really feel at risk of being attacked for making such statements. (Or for providing aid and comfort to other groups I don’t identify with. But just in case; any of you out there who are raring to read that and go “See? Gender equality is stupid! Robert said so!”? Don’t do that.)
Although it might seem presumptuous, can I offer a general recommendation? I make a point of seeking out Far Mode people, especially Far Mode people who have hate and contempt for people like me, and read their material (generally in small doses, except for things like the antisemitism which is comfortably distant for me). It’s rarely pleasant, but sometimes I find out that the people everyone is saying are mindless evil have something to say worth listening to (even if I have to screen out large amounts of bad arguments and hateful nonsense), and even when I don’t, it’s a really helpful level-setting. I mean, I understand that there are people out there who would strongly disagree with my above heavily-qualified attack, and who’d want to shame me and make me not feel comfortable posting similar things in the future. And that’s not OK, not by any means…but those people don’t even crack my top 10 list of groups on the internet with whom I disagree and who wish me harm for my beliefs. So I personally don’t worry about ’em.
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The connotation in normal speech of saying that it is hard to do something is often that it’s hard to do it *successfully*.
You can attack feminists all you want, but it’s hard to affect on them, anyone’s perception of them, or anything they do in the name of feminism. I’m pretty sure your paragraph above won’t do that.
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Fair enough. Attack, in its common parlance, does not carry any implication of success, so I can see where we got our crossed signals there.
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Claims about what you can do often carry an implication of success. If I told you it was hard to write a novel, it would be stupid to reply “just type whatever comes into your head”, because “it is hard to write a novel” implies “it is hard to write a novel of reasonable quality”.
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That is an amusing example, if you look at some of the self-published electronic books available.
But ‘attack’ is just a claim of taking aggressive action. I’m pretty sure that everyone would agree that charging a main battle tank with a claymore (sword, not mine) is an aggressive action, and that under rules of engagement which require you to be under attack to return fire, that the charger would be a valid target; I think it’s also pretty well established that the sword-wielder has little chance of actually damaging the tank.
“Attack” does not fail to encompass “Attack ineffectively”. Plus, simply writing stuff about one group or another almost never changes people’s opinions directly anyways. You could just as well say that it’s impossible to attack Nazis online, because nothing bad you could write about Nazis would make people think any less of them.
This is a kind of odd side discussion for me, because I don’t have much of a problem with the Untitled post myself. I just think that if we’re going to discuss the moral hazard of providing rhetorical weapons for or against any particular side, that there are many areas (including here!) where people are free to make (well-reasoned, non-abusive, etc.) attacks against pretty much any ideological group, and likewise that there are other areas where even the most monolithic and unassailable groups are denigrated and degraded.
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If someone tells you “you can’t attack a tank with a sword”, it would be missing the point to reply “sure you can, the attack just wouldn’t be effective”. The statement “you can’t attack a tank with a sword” means “you can’t usefully attack a tank with a sword”.
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I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on the vocab here, since it seems to me that calling someone running at you and attempting to stab you not an attack is diluting the word well past the point of uselessness. If you’re saying “You can’t attack a tank with a sword.” and you are confronted with someone stabbing your tank with a sword, it’s incumbent on you to recognize “OK, that thing I said was not literally true.”
In fairness, I have been quoted as saying “Of course we can fight City Hall! It’s made of wood and we have fire!”, so I freely admit my own assumptions of standard meaning are not universal.
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Saying “you can’t attack a tank with a sword” is not calling it not-an-attack. You are again looking at literal words and ignoring connotation. Although the literal words seem to call it not-an attack, the connotation is that it is an ineffective attack, not that it falls out of the category of “attack”.
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>I think you were saying:
>Scott is making posts that accurately describe and criticise a certain kind of feminist, but because his articles are eloquently written and widely read it will become used as a weapon by anyone who wishes to attack feminists – even the “good feminists” who don’t deserve to be attacked or fit the criticisms that Scott’s making.
A bit more general than that. I think Scott was employing a number of tactics he (correctly) criticizes other people, especially Social-Justice types, for using.
(But yes; #NotAllFeminists!)
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I notice that Arthur Chu has responded to the whole Scott Aaronson thing. I don’t have time to pick it apart now, but my first impression is that it’s the most reasonable dissenting response I’ve seen so far.
Thoughts?
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Ignoring the details for a moment, but I think the *actual* most reasonable dissenting response I’ve seen so far has been Jordan Ellenberg’s.
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I hadn’t seen Ellenberg’s response (coincidentally, I’m currently at a large-scale math conference and saw Dr. Ellenberg in passing earlier today — wish I had the nerve to approach him and try to engage in conversation about his blog posts!) I do think his arguments are a bit more compelling and thought-provoking. On the other hand, I’ll give Arthur Chu some credit for at least trying to sympathize with Aaronson’s state of mind, while Ellenberg just tried to portray it as illogical. I think both are sort of sidestepping Aaronson’s main point.
Incidentally, I’m sorry if linking to Chu’s article upset people. I’m certainly no fan of Chu myself, and although I’m not convinced that this particular article exemplified the combative tactics he has defended in the past, I can understand why many people don’t want to read him.
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I found 23chaos criticism correct. Chu’s article is full of misrepresentations (and outright lies about what Scott Aaronson wrote). In light of his previous statements, how confident are you that the misrepresentations are not deliberate?
(I’m deliberately avoiding LW-speech here)
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This apparently didn’t get posted because it consisted of nothing but links, so let’s try again. There were responses to this on Scott’s blog:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/09/ot12-openness-to-threadxperience/#comment-172827
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/09/ot12-openness-to-threadxperience/#comment-172832
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This post only appeared for me after I published mine, sorry for the duplicate.
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I have refrained from reading it for now (I do not have the required Zen at the moment, nor do I have the time to deal with a breakdown if it is as bad as I fear it is), because Chu put an inadvertent content warning in the summary: “Here’s what he meant”, in my experience, tends to be either “ablesplaining” (for lack of a less inflammatory term), or a dose of the “now I will dictate to you what is actually going on inside your head” move that tends to induce a rather terrible state of mind in me (because I will typically end up believing it uncritically & without reservation, and thus consider myself a terrible human being that deserves to be unceremoniously thrown into the fires of Mount Doom before lunch).
But it seems that, unlike Laurie Penny, he at least engaged with the “feeling like a monster” part, which makes me interested, because I spent most of my youth feeling like a monster for reasons similar to Aaronson’s.
Can someone give a brief recap?
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Okay, I hadn’t noticed the subtitle on the first readthrough, and I have to agree that “here’s what he meant” is offensive in pretty much any context.
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Chu put an inadvertent content warning in the summary: “Here’s what he meant”,
This is a tangential nit-pick, but it’s generally not safe to assume that titles and subtitles are written by the writer. They are frequently written by the editor, and the editor typically does not need the writer’s approval on the headline.
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Brief recap: men’s issues are not affected by anything Structural and hence do not deserve attention. Have some personal responsibility, you lazy depressed whiny fa-… ~~~dude~~~.
Disgusting and distressing.
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It, and the awful reactions to it on reddit, has finally spurred me to identify as anti-SJ. As in, I’m still a pretty hardline feminist, but I’m not “critical” of SJ culture and discourse and norms anymore, I’m against them.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Feminism/duplicates/2s040s/the_plight_of_the_bitter_nerd_why_so_many_awkward/
This fucking deluded, self-congratulating callousness and cruelty gets me. Nothing that celebrates and expects and rewards it is “justice”.
P.S.: yes, “ablesplaining” so much, but as I’ve said, I think this whole framework of reified identities and fetishized appeals to “lived experience” is too corrupt to be salvaged. We have to find another way to capture its stated aims.
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This is surprising and encouraging. I am revising down my estimation of the liklihood that either of us sends the other to the gulag.
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Comments on SSC by 27chaos and an anonymous
A quick reminder of why you should be extremely careful when you read anything by A. Chu:
“In other words, if a fight is important to you, fight nasty. If that means lying, lie. If that means insults, insult. If that means silencing people, silence.”
“I rigorously manage my own thinking and purge myself of dangerous “unthinkable” thoughts — mindkill myself — on a regular basis.”
“The only way to be “fair” is to pick the right side and fight for it.”
Arthur Chu has the reveled truth, and does not feel beholden to fairness, politeness or even honesty to advance his goals. He stated that clearly, read what he writes with this in mind.
The best thing I can say about him is that he does not argue for physical violence like some of his friends, a gold star to him!
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I mentioned before that I have refrained from reading his piece so far. I have work obligations at the moment that prevents me from handling a 2-3 day breakdown, which is what certain kinds of SJ rhetoric can cause for me. And as I said, he put an inadvertent content warning on top: “This is what he means”.
However, since I already knew about those quotes, I implicitly operate with a “content warning: Arthur Chu” when I see his writings pop up.
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I think this post on “Brute Reason” is the most reasonable disagreement with Aaronson’s Comment 171 I’ve read. Or at least, the one that says a lot of stuff I agree with. :-p
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It’s pretty reasonable, but it misrepresents (I don’t think maliciously) Scott in the way he seems to be most commonly misrepresented — it characterizes him as saying “feminists have a positive obligation to help me with my problems”, when what he said was mostly or entirely “feminists actively made my problems worse”.
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There’s a pattern in the Scott A^2 v. Feminism troubles that reminds me of discussions I heard among very well-read libertarians back when I was one. Their perennial debate was “thin” libertarianism versus “thick” libertarianism. Advocates for Thick-L pointed out that there are many good things worth pursuing other than liberty, and that many of these good things (like equality for women!) are mutually supportive with their goal of liberty. Advocates for Thin-L pointed out that pursuing those other things was not their comparative advantage, and that sometimes the movements that developed around those other things would turn against their initial pro-liberty values.
I’m a utilitarian. I suppose there’s some approximately objective moral and aesthetic Good, which would be something like the maximum achievable happiness from people getting what they would want if they were well-informed and sufficiently reflective. But this notion is unusuable in practice, and so we come up with salient moral heuristics that we can get a nicely large segment of society to cooperate on: laws, rights, virtues, etc. Social Justice terminology is a set of such moral heuristics.
Like the Thick-L advocates, in my “Thick-U” mindset I see where SJ terms efficiently and correctly identify important moral features of our society. In particular, racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and similar types of structrual oppression are indeed things that a utilitarian would see as major moral flaws in society with relatively cheap costs of fixing them compared to the benefits of fixing them. Like the Thin-L advocates, in my “Thin-U” mindset I see where SJ terms are misaligned with utilitarian values, and how pursuit of Social Justice War for its own sake, rather than as moral heuristics for utilitarianism, becomes antiutilitarian when SJWers go on to hurt and victimize members of privileged classes.
In that sense, then, I think that feminism is an essential part of any healthy moral outlook. At the same time, I think that feminism as an independent movement slouches toward corruption. Hardcore libertarianism is morally corrupt for the same reasons. The same will happen for any moral heuristic that is not kept in check by other important moral truths.
Perhaps there’s “evaporative cooling” of the feminist, SJW, libertarian, and other such movements. When the moral flaws in society are deep, widespread, and obvious, then getting a broad segment of the population on board with the initial reforms can be done with ordinary moral reasoning. As the reforms achieve successes, people who care less will drop out of the movement, and the remaining activists become, on average, more extreme, meaning more focused on their favorite moral heuristics over against other aspects of morality, and correspondingly more inclined to use specialized moral terminology designed to handle those favorite moral heuristics.
If this line of thinking is true, then persistently controversial moral terminology is a sign of moral corruption.
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[content warning: Discussion, with quotations, of gross distortions of what Scott Aaronson said and believes, and accusations of self-absorption in response to men actually trying to advocate for their own interests at all. Particularly likely to be triggering (and the linked post even more so) for moebius and those with similar triggers.]
In this livejournal post by ginmar, I noticed a phenomenon that I ended up thinking of as reverse kafkatrapping, and I’m wondering if it has an established name. So, classic kafkatrapping works like this:
Reverse kafkatrapping, on the other hand, is arguably even nastier, and works like this:
In the case of Scott Aaronson, as parsed by ginmar and her commenters, this turns
(which ginmar introduces with “No male feminist has these thoughts:”) into
and thence into
and finally
What can we, as individuals or as a movement, do about this. If anything, it’s even worse than regular kafkatrapping, since regular kafkatrapping is a weapon against people who reject your ideology, while reverse kafkatrapping is a weapon against people who accept your ideology, but dare to hope that maybe that acceptance won’t require them to utterly destroy their own lives.
Also, I’m banned from ginmar’s livejournal (under another handle) and I want to respect that. Can someone who isn’t (ideally female- and feminist-identified, but anything is better than nothing) drop by there to point out the grotesque distortions they’re making?
(P.S. If anyone wants the original context for the pull-quotes on rape and theft of food (which even as pull-quotes are pretty obviously standard rationalist “Everyone, including me, agrees that these two are different, but I’d like to better understand why” exploration), do the obvious thing to this link.)
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Huh. Apparently WordPress tries to make broken links unbroken, in a way that’s problematic for my purposes. The full link to do the obvious thing to is: uggcf://jro.nepuvir.bet/jro/20080401041358/uggc://fpbggnnebafba.pbz/oybt/?c=260
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Oh it’s definitely not worth engaging with that. Just back away.
On the other hand, the “I ain’t your princess stuff” is for realz. That part is worth listening to.
I think she is being unfair to Aaronson on the whole, but that rings true. Aaronson really seemed to have little awareness that our hearts also contain lights years.
Okay, so she is half right and half totally fucking wrong and unfair to Aaronson.
She should stay away from his castration thing. That was real pain and anything less than unchecked sympathy is deeply shitty and has no place in my feminism.
The thing about the other century, yeah, Aaronson said that and it was fucked beyond all. It is objectification writ large.
On the other hand, why can’t she fucking spell his name right? Good grief.
Anyway, a few fair points, but mostly garbage.
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I’m . . . not very good at just backing away. I have a pretty severe case of Wrong on the Internet syndrome.
I think she is being unfair to Aaronson on the whole, but that rings true. Aaronson really seemed to have little awareness that our hearts also contain lights years.
Can you elaborate (if you are so inclined)? I didn’t really get that out of the comment that kicked off this shitstorm, and I don’t read Aarronson’s blog regularly, so if I may have missed some signs. Also, his What I believe post seems to contradict that.
She should stay away from his castration thing. That was real pain and anything less than unchecked sympathy is deeply shitty and has no place in my feminism.
Amen.
The thing about the other century, yeah, Aaronson said that and it was fucked beyond all. It is objectification writ large.
I’d agree its fucked, but I think that regarding it as evidence of a view that women aren’t people is excessive. When he talked about how he “would have gotten married at an early age,” my parsing was that he was thinking about marriages that are arranged on both sides, meaning that he would have had no more choice in his bride than she would have had in him. Which . . . is not a great system, I’ve gotta say. But it’s not dehumanizing of women, any more than it is of men.
Also, post twitter-storm, he has added a clarificatory note (one of several)
While that wasn’t in place when the storm started (obviously), as far as I know, it was in place when ginmar made her post, which was pretty recently.
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To be fair, I just went and re-read his original post and actually I didn’t find any big alarm bells about objectification. So I guess, were I a prosecutor, I’d now have to withdraw my case.
(I suppose I could search through the other stuff he has recently posted looking for some evidence, but I think I’ll skip that. My point is not to beat up on Aaronson.)
Okay look, I do think that *most* shy, awkward nerd guys kinda get into this trap, and it would not surprise me if a young Scott Aaronson did, and *let me add*, I don’t mean this as some shitty attack on nerd-dudes. Likewise, I hope I present a different tone from the author of that article. Cuz her tone sucked.
It is this: Many (most?) shy nerd dudes have a very unrealistic understanding of what an actual relationship is like. Instead, they seem to yearn for a magic dreamgirl who is *everything* to them. No woman will be able to fulfill that role.
Okay, so women do this shit also, in our own ways (I say this in a world where romance novels and Twilight and 50 Shades of Garbage exist).
(The 50 Shades thing is actually a problem in the BDSM community, as there is now this endless stream of clueless women coming around looking for their own Christian Grey. These women need guidance.)
I think this is a particular problem for nerds precisely when we look at how unhappy their lack of relationships is making them. On the one hand, we have some men talking to women and relating to them in a human way. These guys seem to do okay. On the other hand, we have these other men *not* talking to women, not relating to them, and instead only relating to imaginary women in their minds. (Or literally 2d anime girls.)
Which okay, if the men are really happy this way, then no prob. Go hug your waifu.
No seriously! Their kink is okay. There will be no judgement from me.
(Judging these men is patriarchy. It is the master’s tools.)
Do whatever you need to do to make your life work. You don’t need anyone’s approval (including mine).
That said! Do these guys want to date *real girls*? I think some do. They must, right? Well if so, what they are doing now is hella counterproductive. I ain’t a waifu. I ain’t a dreamgirl.
(Although I do kinda wish I was a magical girl, like with a cool talking ferret and an awesome mega-pretty goth-loli-femme costume and OMG THAT WOULD BE AMAZING!)
(My gem would be purple.)
But this has nothing to do with beating up Scott Aaronson. This is more just a “Hey nerd dudes, like, is this really what you want?”
There seems to be a really common narrative trope where a total nerdy guy is suddenly attractive to women, like for no particular reason. It is obvious why this is popular. (And yes, same shit happens in Twilight. I get that.) But this is something you grow out of. Better narratives would show the guy *improving himself* and then getting the girl. (And yes, Bella-Fucking-Swan needs to — well, I don’t even know.)
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This sort of “reverse Kafkatrapping” (don’t really like the name) is a huge part of what I’m complaining about when I talk about this sort of thing! Like I keep saying — any attempt at asking for clarification gets taken as a sign that you’re actually the enemy (a “concern troll”).
I mean, at the broadest level — well, you saw the neoreactionaries come out when Scott Aaronson posted “What I believe”, tut-tutting “Don’t bother, Scott; the left always eats its own.” And at the broadest level, that really is the question: Are they right? Can we support feminist principles, while still being allowed to seriously discuss our disagreements, and please not get eaten?
But as for a name — I’m not aware of any, though I’ve seen it any number of times. I don’t think it’s really “reverse” though. If we generalize to the more general situation of “The fact that you are asking for clarification about rule X means that actually you are trying to violate X without getting caught”, though, we could call it something like the anti-clarity trap.
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How about the “Kutak attack”? You know… ‘rules-lawyering’…
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Tangentially related to the Scott Aaronson thing- why don’t we give voluntary chemical castration to cis men? I understand restricting physical castration, given the high likelihood of later regret, but you can stop taking, say, spiro at any time and your hormone levels eventually return to normal. The only permanent effect I’m aware of is gynecomastia. I think a lot of men would choose “you might have tits a little” over “you will constantly agonize over unwanted desires” happily, and not regret their choice later.
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If we start doing that, we also end up making it easy to pressure people into doing that.
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I’ve heard conflicting reports of what happens when you stop taking Spiro. Some say your fertility returns. Some say it does not. I dunno.
Note it can be kinda unhealthy to have low hormone levels, as in your body wants you to have hormones. For trans gals, we replace the T with E (which is pretty wonderful, but maybe not if you are cis).
Spiro makes you pee constantly and leads to a lot of dehydration. It really sucks, more than you think. I fucking hate spiro. I take it cuz I hate being dudely more and the levels of estrogen needed to counteract testosterone are very high and have their own risks.
I took a spiro just now. I’ll be drinking water all day and peeing it out just as fast.
Testosterone is important for building and retaining muscle mass. People on spiro tend to gain body fat and become weaker.
I’m all for hormones on demand. But these things are not risk free.
#####
I guess another thing: Scott Aaronson was operating under the belief that his sexuality was fundamentally corrupt. I believe in the right to self-identify, but I’m not sure if that extends all the way to “corrupt sexuality cuz I wanna have normal hetero sexytimes but I’m a broken icky nerdbro and OMG I should just not have dude juice.”
Which, I’ll say flatly, Aaronson was wrong about this. His sexuality was not corrupt. He was not a broken “icky” man. He had *issues*, but not those issues.
Trans people are correct about our identities, and HRT is the best way to solve our problem. Aaronson was wrong about his sexuality, and Spiro might not have helped all that much. I dunno.
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There must be a better path for these men. This feels like giving up.
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Mmm, a minority of comments do not appear in posting order in some sub-threads on my computer. For example, the last comment by Ozy (search for Folsom0 appearing before the one by Veronica. Is it only for me?
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It is not only for you; what is happening is this: If you reply to a comment at maximum nesting depth (using the “reply” button on the notification you get only if that comment is itself a reply to one of yours), the system treats your comment as nested under it, even though the level of indentation does not increase. Consequently, it appears before other “replies” that are made by replying to its parent.
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Ah, thanks for figuring out how it can occur.
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Chris von Csefalvay, the data scientist who analyzed the #Gamergate hashtag and comcluded “my network analysis is incompatible with the description of #Gamergate as a hate group”, has decided to step away and stop working on this because of the death threats on him and his family. See his article on the subject, and his opinion of people writing autoblockers, here. Although he does not say who the harassment comes from in this article, his and his wife’s tweets and previous messages are pretty clear (80 to 1 ratio in favor of the a-GG crowd).
I’ll be charitable and not say what I think about people claiming there are dozens of violent depiction of rape in video games, media outlets removing comments pointing out this is blatantly false, and people sending yet more death threats to the comment writer.
(note: if the main target were Japanese Visual Novels, you would have a great case! otherwise, for western media, except Custer’s Revenge, 1982, mayyyybe Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem Forever, I have no idea what you are talking about).
(other note: if you want to drag Tomb Raider in this, bear in mind that Rhianna Pratchett is now collaborating with Gail Simone, and that should tell you a lot about false-positives and sensitivity thresholds)
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I dunno. I have no problem with the basic idea of a blocklist. Twitter is a free medium with few controls, and manually blocking large numbers of fairly abusive people can require prohibitive effort. Which is to say, Twitter is pretty impossible to use if you are high profile and cannot afford a staff to manage your account. The person who created the GG-blocker was at some points getting hundreds of mentions, many rather abusive, PER SECOND. She said “fuck this” and built the tool.
(Which, I won’t say she didn’t go out of her way to be controversial. Certainly she did. But the technology *amplifies* the pile-on effect.)
Myself, I’ve been retweeted on a few occasions by high-profile critics, once by a Fox News personality and once by a major celebrity. In each case I had to close my Twitter account for a couple days, just to avoid the onslaught.
From time to time I’ll tweet something, and then a few hours later I’ll notice my phone beeping with mentions from randoms. Which means I got retweeted somewhere. Which means *maybe* an onslaught is coming. Which means maybe *this is the one that ruins my life*. On Twitter, I post my real picture, cuz I want my friends to know me. I use my real name, cuz I am a professional and networking matters. Doxxing me would be trivial.
This is pretty fucking stressful for a tool that should be fun. Preemptively blocking large numbers of rotten people seems a positive good, even if that comes with some false positives.
So I subscribe to a blocklist (namely @TheBlockBot). That probably means some of you cannot Tweet to me. Fine. I do not *owe* anyone an open channel on Twitter. If that is your only way to contact me, then obviously we are not close. If you work in my field and need to get in touch for work stuff, we likely have mutual friends or you can tease out my professional contact.
You know, like how things worked before Twitter.
Calling it a “McCarthyesque blacklist” is laughable hyperbole. If I want to hear from you, I can manually unblock you.
Furthermore, he takes cheap shots at her Perl code. This is not admirable. It was a hacked together simple tool. Its creator never claimed otherwise. The blogger may have the pretense to sound “fair”, but it seems he is not.
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I was conflicted about @TheBlockBot. It could certainly be a useful tool, especially for trans people, but there are also many potential problems, which were identified from the onset by Tim Farley. Interesting tidbits in the comments.
Another critic from Martin Robbins, in VICE. You can get blocked for trivial jokes, even if the rest of your Internet presence is completely inconsistent with you being an asshole.
There are now, according to theblockbot.com, >3300 accounts on level 1, >3700 on level 2, >2400 on level 3 (hi nydwracu :p). People are added manually by the admins, often following requests by users (and often with tweets collected)
Chris von Csefalvay is level 2, by the way.
Other notable (or not) people on various levels of the block list: R. Dawkins, , Russel Blackford, Cathy Young, CH Sommers, iamcuriousblue, Brian Carnell, Miranda Celeste Hale, Sarah Ditum, CC Perez, Lily Cade, uberfeminist. Some I completely understand, some I am a bit confused, especially with the standards for behavior that the creator of the tool deem acceptable (ool0n is one of the most obnoxious person I had the displeasure to read).
Hey, at least they removed Barack Obama from the list! No, I am not joking. Bear in mind that you need to manually unblock someone who gets blocked by the list and then unblocked by the list.
With that in mind, the GG-autoblocker does not work like that, it is way worse. The dev choose 8 persons as prominent in GG, and wrote a script to list all the persons following at least 2 of those 8 persons. No manual intervention, guilt decided by association. The first iteration blocked 15.5k accounts. It was then advertised that this was a list of known harassers. For example by the International Game Developers Alliance, with <a href="https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/536044875251474432"hilarious results (or not). An audio commentary by TotalBiscuit, here.
Let me see, guilt by association, no audit, difficult and time-consuming to correct false positives, and false advertising. Yeah, I’m on Chris’s side on this one.
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I know very well how @TheBlockBot and the GG-autoblocker work, both the technologies and the personalities involved. And I subscribe to TBB at level 2, so I guess that means I have Chris von Csefalvay blocked. Which, I’ll live. So will he.
Farley’s critiques of BB are out of date. Most are either facile or have been addressed.
And you say that blocking Dawkins and CH Sommers is a bad thing? OMG how? They’re terrible and I won’t miss them. And what difference does it make to me? Do I need an open channel to literally every person on Earth? I follow hundreds on Twitter. Hundreds follow me. I see good variety of interesting stuff from interesting people. I do not need to see *everything* from *everyone*.
I lock my door. I wear headphones on the train. I don’t display my phone number emblazoned on my shirt. I get to have some control of who I interact with.
And honestly, unless someone offers some better way to avoid the Twitter mobs, I don’t really care if they like the bot. They aren’t going to maintain my Twitter account for me.
You use the term “guilt by association,” but that is a loaded phrase. To block someone on Twitter says nothing more than you don’t want to see their tweets nor have them see yours, nor do you want to receive notifications from them. This does not prevent them from tweeting to others. It is nothing more than a boundary. I can build any boundary I want on social networks and no one else gets to say boo.
Well, they can, but I will not hear them. Which is a lovely thing. I can control the level of jackassitude I get in my life.
The BB-autoblocker was created as a heuristic, as {unnamed developer} was sick of get piled-on by the GG crowd. And since there were a lot of new sea lions coming from the sea each day, she just got the whole batch at once. And sure, there are some false positives. It was a quick hack and why should {unnamed developer} care if she blocks some randoms?
It only means that those people cannot tweet her. Oh no!
And, well, they also cannot tweet anyone else who *chooses* to sign up. But why would people choose to do that?
Either few people will use the tool or many people will use the tool. If few people use it, then who cares? If many people use it, then perhaps consider that a public vote on the value of gamergate.
If you find yourself getting widely blocked, then suck it up and respect people’s boundaries. They don’t owe you shit on Twitter.
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BTW, does anyone think that Chris von Csefalvay should be unblocked on the bot? Why in particular?
I just looked over his Twitter account and I didn’t see anything too bad. I mean, this seems like a douchey post: https://twitter.com/chrisvcsefalvay/status/556158321519259648
(I suspect there is some vague-tweeting there, tbh.)
And evidently he keeps some very bad company: https://twitter.com/chrisvcsefalvay/status/553957274369404928
I get the sense that he’s the sort of guy who cannot let things go. Like, he’s the sort who gets a bug up his ass about shit. I cannot *show* why I sense this, but I do.
(Which is exactly the sort of person who end up getting into big fights with people like {unnamed developer}.)
Here’s the original storify for this block: https://storify.com/The_Block_Bot/2682780438
Which seems kinda tame, honestly. (Oh but the idea that the bot lacks an audit trail is false.)
In any event, he might belong on level 3 rather than level 2. Convince me.
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This is a selective, uncharitable and borderline dishonest reading of my comment. The selection you’ve done on my list is also showing your bias and what you think I am thinking.
Of the problems Tim Farley identified, only #2 (who are the blockers) has been addressed.
One problem identified in the comments is, as far as I know, no longer true: the block bot does not try to have you banned by mass-reporting accounts added as spam.
You minimize the problems from the GG-autoblocker and do not address its advertisement as a list of known harassers. I think the media coverage of Gamergate is absolutely abysmal, especially with respect to the symmetry of the abusive behaviors.
I also do not write only for you but for other people who might read this thread.
You last sentence is a nice, compact Kafka trap. If you are on the blockbot, of course you must deserve it! It also fails to take into account the problem of calibration. For a similar problem, see the ban of Matt Dillahunty from the Atheism+ forum (or the Martin Robbins article in VICE linked above).
Twitter needs new tools for blocking/muting/ignoring, certainly (TotalBiscuit suggestions on account age filters are interesting, by limiting interactions to only accounts more than a few days old they cut the abuse on their subreddit by a lot. That would also have been great for B. Wu and A. Sarkeesian who got threats and more from burner accounts created for that purpose only). My position is that those two blockbots are not good tools, and are advertised in a dishonest fashion.
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I agree that heuristically identified people shouldn’t be listed as “known harassers”.
At the same time, I agree with Veronica that being blocked by other users on Twitter is not any kind of punishment, insult or limitation of your freedom, so it doesn’t make sense to talk about people “deserving” or “not deserving” it.
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Let’s go through Farley’s list:
1. Unclear rules — True as far as it goes, but so what? Often issues of sexism and abuse are *judgement calls*. No reason to gloss over that fact. The Blockbot is accountable to its subscribers, not to those blocked.
2. Who is in control — This is well documented.
3. There is no audit trail — False. The blocks are archived on Storify.
4. What do the levels mean? — Like #1, this is a judgement call, and it has evolved over time. Level 1 is for the most abusive trolls and aggressive assholes; level 2 is for the middle of the road “most users won’t want to deal with this person,” and level 3 is for generally unpleasant people who otherwise don’t rise to level 2.
All of this in the judgement of the bot operators, the people listed in #2.
Most users block at level 1 or level 2. They can browse the block lists to get a picture of how it works in practice.
5. Blocks have consequences — I suppose, but what are those consequences? To whom? The bot has policies about blocking *members of the communities it serves*, which are discussed among the operators. But for some random tech-bro on Twitter, what are his consequences? He cannot tweet me? The bot serves *my* interests, not his. If he has a legitimate need to get in touch, he can contact a mutual friend or find my work contact.
6. Inappropriate Blocks, Especially for Anyone Unfamiliar with Atheism+ — Any tool such as Blockbot will have some blocks that are controversial, insofar as it is run by people. This is life. If you subscribe to the bot you are balancing some lost opportunities to connect with the enormous advantages it brings.
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On the media coverage of GG, yeah it has problems. On the other hand, I think GG is a cesspit of horrible and I totally don’t blame {unnamed developer} from saying “fuck this” and blocking the whole lot of them. Nor do I mind so much people saying, ”Yeah, she’s right. This is a shitstorm of awful and I don’t want to deal with those rotten people,” and then going ahead and using her tool.
GG-blocker was a small amount of effort that eliminated a ton of nonsense. And for the people “unfairly blocked,” get over it. No one owes you their time on Twitter.
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Further thoughts on #1 and #4, as soon as you give people a precise list of allowed and disallowed actions, they will push against the edges of those rules in complicated ways. It won’t change their agendas or their character. So maybe very precise rules are required to *put people in jail*, but blocking someone on Twitter is not like that.
For example, if we say “you must be polite,” we get sealioning. If we then say “no interrupting other people’s conversations,” we lose our own ability to spontaneously talk to each other in ways that are *not* abusive. If we say “no sealioning,” we gain little as folks will want to rules lawyer what “sealioning” means. Which would be a judgement call. Which is where we are now.
*It runs according to human judgement* is the actual answer. That works for me.
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@Nita: on getting blocked, no debate from me. And there is an obvious need for more blocking/muting/etc tools.
But for the two blockbots, the situation is different as the blocked people are insulted. The current “Note for those coming here when blocked” at the top of the blockbot.com page goes against everything they say or write elsewhere, and in fact self-contradictory.
Original blockbot:
“Level 1 is sparsely populated with “worst of the worst” trolls, plus impersonators and stalkers” (current phrasing)
” Level 2 blocking: these are the abusive subset of anti-feminists, MRAs, or all-round assholes” (old phrasing, from Tim Farley’s post)
“Level2 and Level3 are more subjective, are you really that damaged by some people thinking you are an asshole or annoying?” (current phrasing)
GG blockbot refers to people as idiots and sheeple in the code itself – the code is public and on GitHub, better people than me have commented on it. I’m not going to speak of the language used by the creator and their friends on their social media accounts to qualify the blocked people.
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It’s the use of the blockbot by professional organisations like the IDGA that worries me. Individuals can do whatever they want, a blockbot that checks people’s twitter avatar and blocks them if they’re black. Racist as hell, but they’ve got no obligation to interact with people they dislike.
Once professional organisations endorse blacklisting by political opinion, guilt by association, etc, as a criteria for being the harassers (and yes the IDGA used that word) then you’re looking at grade A McCarthyism.
And the IDGA is an association of software developers and the source was public so they have absolutely no excuse.
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Do you have links to those tweets? I’ve been following Chris von Csefalvay’s data analysis but it never occurred to me to follow his Twitter and I’d be interested in reading them.
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The 80:1 claim here, specifically for death threats. Read also the topost tweet, it will sound familiar to some.
So his wife talking about their interactions with GG and aGG here.
Him talking about ,“dozens of deaths threats, threats to do unspeakable things to my wife”.
(if you go back on his timeline, you can see a shift in attitude around mid-december when he had a vigorous exchange with a certain programmer he does not want to see harassed more, but he still defines himself as not a GG supporter — so do I, btw)
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Link fail on the previous post (not clickable for me), trying again. Or you can search on twitter for “80 from:chrisvcsefalvay”, there are only 3 results when displaying all tweets.
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Thanks.
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As per this comment here goes.
My meta-level convictions are as follows:
The nation state ought to primarily look out for the best interests of its own people in the long term; it should do without harming other nations, but it is under no obligation to devote large amounts of resources to helping other nations*.
So from this conviction, I think that how much and what kind of immigration to allow, is an economic question, does it benefit the nation state in the long term? Benefits to immigrants are not much of a factor in the decision. If they are a factor, those benefits should be discounted by at least 90% **. If we agree there, I can shift this discussion to the empirical question of whether or what kind of immigrants benefit the nation.
*The US foreign aid is on the order of less than 0.5% of the GDP. I might concede that as high as 5% or even 10% might be a sweet spot (so I’m clearly not that nationalistic), but I don’t think that a country spending say 2% of its power helping other nations and 98% on itself should be criticized for being selfish. This isn’t obviously a consequentialist position, but I think it can be defended on consequentialist grounds.
**If you don’t think that benefits to immigrants should be discounted at a steep rate, I think that puts you in very murky waters. If an immigrant causes 100 utils of harm to the nation and receives 150 utils of benefit, should they be let in? If the answer is yes, then we really ought to living on subsistence and giving almost all of our earning away to people who live in very poor countries since money goes a lot farther there. If I stopped renting an apartment and started living on the streets and ate only bread, I could probably pay for 5 people’s rent and food in a really poor country. That would be a net gain in utility in the world, but I don’t think that is the ethically correct choice.
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I think I can accept your premise, albeit shakily.
There are two things that will make this difficult:
For one, I don’t believe in nation states and involuntary wealth redistribution of any sort, and with such stipulations as the basis of my political worldview, there’s obviously no reason why people shouldn’t be allowed to help out ‘immigrants’ regardless what utils they may or may not bring into the picture, and obviously no reason why someone being on one side of an imaginary line should mean they’re treated differently.
For two, I lean more strongly toward the deontological end of the ethical spectrum (not all the way since I’m fairly convinced deontology needs consequentialism and vice versa, in that either ethical system is arbitrary if you don’t factor in thoughts provided by the other), so arguing in utils will probably not be easy for me if you want to continue using that meta-currency. That being said, since you argue against a net gain in utility, you reject utilitarianism, so this may not actually be a point of contention.
Either way, though, I have accepted similar premises before, without prompt, so I think I can share some thoughts, at least, though I can’t promise anything hugely coherent (as mentioned in the other thread, I shy away from trying to convince anyone of my ideas, which conversely means I’m not practised in articulating them). To clarify: I spent a long time in my life basically feeling that immigrants who came into a nation to live on welfare were an acceptable target of disgruntlement for a statist. I still think that to some degree, but by now I’m largely convinced that this doesn’t actually happen, which I understand is basically what you want to talk about.
Does that sound all right to you?
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This isn’t a full response but
Nope, welfare has little to do with my dislike of large amounts of immigration. Essentially what I tried to spell out in the last comment is that if immigrants harmed a country in the long term, then they ought not to be let in even if they benefited (and as a corollary the immigration policy should be such that only immigrants who benefit the nation in the long term should be let in). But it seems we don’t agree to that? What do you think are the conditions are under which immigrants should be allowed in?
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@Alexander:
‘What do you think are the conditions are under which immigrants should be allowed in?’
Within the confines of the rest of the premise? No, yours seems all right. I wasn’t meaning to say welfare is the only way immigrants might potentially harm a state. Sadly you can’t edit comments here like on Scott’s blog (or if you can, I’ve not yet found it), I found a few things I could have worded better when I got back to the comment half an hour later because they can miscommunicate what I mean – though I felt they didn’t warrant a double-post. ‘To clarify’ was meant to clarify on what I meant with ‘I’ve accepted similar premises before’. The emphasis was meant to be on ‘similar’.
I still think we’re on the same page as far as the premise goes. If you’re asking for my opinion in general, I find the notion of ‘allowed in’ a bit hard to grasp. There are others things I can discuss about a culture (for lack of a better term) allowing or disallowing, but whether or not someone wants to join isn’t really something that makes a lot of sense to me. I genuinely think we should probably leave my real opinions out of this. I don’t think this is the time and place to discuss anarchy (which, while it does have ‘immigration’ as long as there are other nation’s borders that can be crossed into it, does not really have any sort of allow-or-disallow framework for the concept).
Either way: What harm are you envisioning? I already know one thing you personally wouldn’t class as such (potential welfare abuse), but I’d be curious about the others. I can think of a few things, but given the risk of sounding like I’m trying to set the stage for your thoughts again, I’d rather leave it up to you. :)
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I don’t want you to argue under premises you don’t believe, I don’t think that will be productive for either of us. And it sounds like I have to back up to why I think that having nation states with borders is a good idea at all. I use the word nationalist here in ways that are a bit unhistoric, but I think modern nationalists would agree with a lot of what I’ve written except for III.
I
I don’t know if you’re a hardcore SSC reader. But if you read Meditations on Moloch, Scott talks a lot about coordination problems. If everyone cooperates, then we are all better off, but if anyone decides to sacrifice the common good for personal gain then the system becomes unstable. I was skeptical of this being a serious problem on the grounds that organisms exist. A bunch of cells working together to form an larger organism that functions well. If Moloch were so all powerful, then during the evolution of multicellular organisms, any cell could have prioritized its own survival throwing everyone into chaos*. But that didn’t happen. Why is that? The answer is group selection. Each organism is a group of cells cooperating and while defection might destroy some (probably most groups in reality), the remaining groups that do successfully cooperate will be the only ones left and they will preserve their cellular machinery and strategies by reproducing this entire organism.
My model of the nation state is like that of an organism. Each nation is like a organism, a mini-laboratoy for testing out different strategies, values and systems. And that only works if nations are allowed to have their own values and systems, including the ability to exclude others. In the long run, via group selection, only the nations that stand the test of time will thrive and humanity will be the better off for it.
II
On the empirical side of things, letting in people that are on average poorer than the members of a nation, makes the nation poorer on average. And it brings with it all of the negatives associated with poverty, increased violence, crime, assault. And those are bad things. If the solution to this is to make poor immigrants not poor, then I and every economist and politician I’m sure, are all ears.
But letting in immigrants that are not poor is also associated with negative externalities. For one thing they come in with different values, culture and politics. Inevitable, the political landscape of the host country shifts in the direction of whoever it lets in. The nation states are no longer the mini-laboratories of the world testing out different ideas – they are all mixed together and we can no longer select for which ideas are working and which ideas aren’t.
Actually its worse than that. Value system 1 might work fine, and Value system 2 might work fine. But mix them together and you could easily end up with a mess. I would argue that is exactly what the US sexual culture is experiencing right now. Conservative sexual norms are not my cup of tea but they seemed to work out fine when people actually wait till they get married. Liberal 21st century sexual norms also seem to work quite well. But halfway sexual norms are the worst where people have sex before marriage and are shamed for it and feel horrible.
III
You may have noticed that I only listed the possible negatives associated with immigration. What about the positives? What about bringing in brilliant immigrants, or immigrants with even better values and ideas that could change the country for the better? What about mixing together values that work _better_ than either one alone?
Well that is a perfectly valid value to have! And in a nationalist world, if that value turns out to make a society more prosperous, then it will thrive. Nations are free to experiment with different immigration policies and the US has done exactly that recruiting only the brightest talent to let into its borders. But we can only test out this value by allowing other nations to experiment with the value of _not_ letting people in en mass. Each country gets to regulate its own immigration policy
IV
This will be the hardest point to sell, but borders aren’t just about values. Ethnicity does play a role. That’s partly because ethnicity and values are intertwined (due to some mix of culture and genetics), but also there is an intrinsic cost to having a multi-ethnic society. When people of different ethnicities live together, they tend to segregate and trust is lowered overall. Politics becomes more influenced by race, and even after hundreds of years (for example see Brazil), there is no unified sense of community. Now just because there is a cost doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be multiethnic societies. If the benefits outweigh the costs then a society with many ethnicities can work. Look at Singapore, it attracts the best and the brightest around Asia and thrives as a result. Because the benefits of having high quality workers outweighs the costs of multiculturalism.
*Sacrificing the common good can be as simple as not cooperating as much as other agents (so they will then cooperate less, to successfully compete with you and the vicious cycle starts), so the system as Scott envisions it is actually quite fragile. A cell that prioritizes its survival just a bit more than other cells is still a potential tumor.
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@Alexander:
I’m sorry, I have to admit I stopped reading your comment near the very start of it.
I don’t want to be mean and I’m not doing you justice with it. I know this. I am just really not interested in a discussion about the necessity nationstates. This is simply not something I want to spend my time with, because I want my views to be tested empirically if at all possible, and the theory of it is genuinely argued better by people that are not me.
The word Scott seems to be missing in Meditations on Moloch (and his Anti-Libertarian FAQ) is ‘market failure’, by the way. There are plenty anarchists that consider it an argument against government, which probably tells you something about the gulf to be bridged here.
Thanks for your thoughts, though.
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Just a tiny remark on your organism analogy:
From the point of view of an single cell, an organism is an absolutely brutal totalitarian state. Any deviants (harmful or not) either commit suicide or get killed by the police.
So, if you assign any value at all to individual rights or freedom, your state should not be exactly like a multicellular organism.
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@pinkgothic
No problem, it was useful for me to put this together in one place.
@Nita
Interesting, but I think that the correct comparison is not between the life of a cell in an organism and a human. But between a cell in a multicellular organism and a single celled organism. From that perspective, multicellular life doesn’t seem so bad. If you’re a bacteria, its kill or be killed, find food or die. In an organism its do your job well and you’ll live for some specified amount of time.
Obviously the analogy breaks down if you take it too far, but that’s not the point of analogies. Insofar as we want to have large human societies/multicellular organisms at all I think they need to be done well.
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