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Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post. Feel free to speculate in the comment section about this person’s identity!
What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?
I tend to follow the norms of calm, reasoned discussion, since that’s more effective at finding truth than the alternative. On the SJ side, it’s said that being able to discuss certain issues calmly is a sign of privilege. Maybe, but that’s no reason to abandon these norms. Commonsensically, we caution ourselves against rash decisions, acknowledge that we don’t think as clearly in moments of passion, etc, and we should apply the same standards here. Otherwise, the winner would be whoever shouts loudest or claims the most pain, which isn’t conducive to the pursuit of truth. Understandably, this is difficult for people for whom these issues are close to their hearts, but we don’t want to intellectually capitulate to those who claim that their experiences give them overriding moral authority.
While intellectual detachment is a good, it’s only one among many, and not necessarily the right one for everyone to pursue given the tradeoffs. The idea is not that everyone is obligated to be calm all the time, but that venting and intellectual discussion should be as separated from each other as possible, and the former shouldn’t be seen as a substitute for, participation in, or an appropriate response to the latter.
Another part of my favored discourse norms is a presumption in favor of participants’ ability to reason. This sounds abstract, but it cashes out to letting people draw their own conclusions from the evidence, and discussing what should be done based on it. In contrast, SJ tends to not only presume that privileged people don’t know what kinds of bigotry/discrimination oppressed people face (not that objectionable of a norm on its own), but also that privilege strongly inhibits one’s ability to even reason about those kinds of experiences. Oppressed people are held not only to have special evidence, but also special authority to judge what should be done about the issue in general. As above, accepting it would be intellectual capitulation.
What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?
I don’t think there’s one true reason I reject SJ, it’s more of a combination of various objections to the ideology and the movement. But here are two of them that seem relatively central, though they don’t apply to all SJers.
First, SJ wants to highlight and preserve the salience of certain kinds of difference. I’ll list some examples. I saw an article recently about whether Peter Thiel could really be gay given his political views – not doubting his attraction to men, but suggesting that being gay was about more than that, that it’s a political and cultural identity. Some SJers focus on race instead, taking the position that a world in which race is no more salient than eye color would erase many people’s identities. Amazingly, colorblindness is seen as something to be opposed: the standard position is that it denies currently existing racial dynamics, but SJ also objects to it as a goal. The same applies to culture – “dissolving” culture into clusters of associated individual practices to be examined, adopted, rejected, or criticized is seen as imperialism, cultural appropriation (supposedly bad), or assimilation (also bad). In general, SJ seems to want to preserve the groups of the status quo, and only to change their relative status and inter-group relations.
This separation inhibits the individuality of people in currently marginalized groups. If SJ succeeds, they wouldn’t be discriminated against for whatever traits put them in those groups, but they’d still be expected to be Members of a Group, with all the pressure and limitation that entails. Instead, I want to include “them” in our concept of “us” – to let oppressed people enjoy the freedom of choice that SJ currently ascribes to straight white men, and eventually for the traits that currently mark them for oppression to be on people’s minds as little as possible.
Second, SJ subscribes to a zero-sum view of inter-group relations. While some SJers profess that men are hurt by patriarchy too, relatively few act like they believe it. The standard line is that men benefit from sexism, whites benefit from racism, and so on, and SJ is coming to destroy their privilege. When people hear it, they think that SJ is trying to make them worse off, and they oppose it more than they would’ve otherwise. But it’s not just a strategic concern – many SJers really seem to think that whites/men/etc are getting a considerable benefit from current structures. Even if the success of the SJ ideology wouldn’t actually make privileged people worse off, SJers think it should, so they see bringing down the privileged as getting closer to a state of justice, which creates actual conflict. But to some degree it also seems to be inherent to the ideology, maybe an inheritance from Marxism.
This contributes to a number of other problems. For example, SJ discourse – someone who’s trying to keep their portion of a fixed pie isn’t going to engage in good faith. Instead of engaging men by demonstrating how current social norms hurt them, SJ portrays the defense of patriarchy to be in men’s interest, and is biased towards interpreting men’s behavior as motivated by that incentive. It incentivizes loyalty to the oppressed ingroup (because they share your interests) instead of cooperating with privileged outgroup members. And so on.
What would change my mind? First, what wouldn’t change my mind: appeals to the badness of oppression. Doubts about how poorly oppressed people are treated isn’t one of my central objections. SJers could be completely right about it and I’d still be anti-SJ. One thing that could actually change my mind is being persuaded that SJ mainly wants to achieve the same goals I do, and that they’re right about the means, e.g. that inter-group equality must come before the dissolution of groups. The second problem is harder – if I were convinced that SJ isn’t mainly committed to a zero-sum view, I’d view it more positively, but on the other hand, if I were persuaded that SJ is right about inter-group relations being zero-sum, then I’d become more anti-SJ, because then they’d really be my enemies.
Explain Gamergate.
I haven’t been watching the controversy too closely, but there are a couple of points of interest.
First, the defense of Zoe Quinn by anti-Gamergate. While I’d expect a movement to protect its own members by default, SJ claims to be strongly opposed to abuse, so their failure here is more disappointing. Part of the problem is that it was abuse of a man by a woman, which isn’t taken as seriously. This is because of patriarchal social norms (men are supposed to be powerful and women weak, so what can a woman do to a man?), but SJ seems to have mentally substituted “anti-patriarchal” with “pro-woman”, and this is one case in which the two diverge.
Second, the conflation of sexist gamers and traditional gaming. To be fair to anti-Gamergate, there really are a lot of openly sexist gamers. But it’s become a rallying standard for changing the culture of gaming in general, not only to expel the sexists from it, but the nerds in general, to clean it up to be acceptable to the mainstream and in line with SJ cultural standards. You don’t have to be a sexist to be against that.
As for the controversy itself, I’ll just say that if you want to find something negative about either side in the culture war, you don’t have to look too hard.
Fisher said:
One thing this emphasizes that I hadn’t really thought too much about vis-a-vis “anti-SJ” is the idea of compartmentalization, that intellectual discourse is something separable from other kinds of discourse. In retrospect, this would be a natural assumption for someone who rejects “the personal is political.” For them, the personal is personal and separable from the political. Once you have that mindset, the idea that various oppressive systems saturate absolutely everything would seem ridiculous.
Sincere.
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sniffnoy said:
I mean, as someone who would basically entirely endorse the piece above–
The personal being political, systems of oppression saturating everything — if we accept these premises, this makes this sort of compartmentalization more difficult, but it also makes it all the more necessary. These are difficult problems — but you can only solve hard problems if you can get the correct answer. If you do not enforce this separation, you do not get the correct answer and you do not take effective strategic action; rather, your movement gets taken over by ingroup/outgroup politics and charismatic deceivers interested only in their own advancement. Which is exactly what has (predictably) happened. From the sensors, to the engine of decision, to the actuators, back to the sensors; break any step, and you blind yourself and sabotage your ability to self-correct.
(SJ is quite valuable when it points out things others had overlooked. Not so much when it insists we all accept its particular interpretation of this data.)
If existing intellectual discourse has problems, the thing to do is solve those problems. If it is truly unsalveagable, the thing to do is to bud off a new space where hard problems can be addressed calmly and analytically. Or burn down the old one and start a fresh copy, but don’t forget that second step. If instead you just give up and say “It’s unsalvageable, no point in attempting to enforce any separation,” you will only be going back to the bad old days; no improvement can result this way. Without serious measures to ward off ingroup/outgroup politics and related failure modes, the most you can do about “systems of oppression” is, as the author above says, reshuffle who’s on the losing end. Because fundamentally there is only one system of oppression — the ingroup and the orthodox vs. the outgroup and the heterodox, and if you do not enforce separations that reduce its ability to act, it will sabotage your attempts to work against it.
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dantobias (@dantobias) said:
This seems to be a reasonable statement of the sort of pro-individualist “anti-SJ” I espouse myself, so I’ll vote it as sincere.
There do seem to be a lot of essays on both sides that advocate “calm, reasoned discussion” norms; the pro-SJ ones just feel compelled to add a qualification that they don’t think this should be enforced on “marginalized” people, because that wouldn’t be “fair”. There’s not too much representation from the group of people who adopt an overtly shrill tone themselves, though you can find them abundantly all over the Internet.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
This one strongly fits the pattern of a liberal who doesn’t agree with the dogma or condone the tactics of SJ. I see nothing to indicate it isn’t real.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Yesterday: SJ is too gender abolitionist (and this is bad because gender has value)
Today: “In general, SJ seems to want to preserve the groups of the status quo, and only to change their relative status and inter-group relations.”
😛
This isn’t really a criticism since obviously these were written by different people, and both are reasonable critiques of certain parts of SJ. I’m just amused. (And I do think “identifying with a group of this sort has value” and “the salience of these characteristics is oppressive” are both basically true and this needs to be balanced somehow.)
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sniffnoy said:
I mean, yesterday’s was (at least purportedly, though I voted real) by a neoreactionary, so…
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Oh I think I meant the day before then, sorry.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
I think the reason for this is the old radfem position on gender, that it’s totally a social construct, that nature is nothing and nature is everything, is not really compatible with being inclusive to tans people. So as trans issues have come more to the forefront SJ positions on gender are forced to evolve.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
ugh, “nature is nothing and nurture is everything”
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I don’t think that’s true. It’s possible that in a different society gender wouldn’t be a thing and also that society would be better, but also trans people currently exist and are much happier when people accept their self-identification so we should do that.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
I guess you’re right that they’re not entirely incompatible, but they are at least in tension.
[cw: TERFism, these are other peoples views as I understand them, not mine]
If you believe gender should be abolished, then someone who transitions from one gender to another is someone who is participating in and condoning the gender system, not someone who’s resisting and dismantling it.
If you believe nature-is-everything than a trans person who says they were “born this way” is lying or deluded, because they were born as a baby, not as any gender.
Under the above assumptions, a transwoman looks a lot like a biological male who was raised as a man, who therefore is a man, who benefits from patriarchy and male privilege, who is now attempting to appropriate the status of a woman, without actually having the experience of a woman.
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Glen Raphael said:
Those two views aren’t as opposed as they appear, as I’m pretty sure by groups the “today” writer is thinking about race much more than gender. SJ is weirdly inconsistent between how it handles those two flavors of group. Some SJers do want to abolish gender, but none want to abolish race.
A standard SJ position on gender is to accept however anyone chooses to self-identify. One can without criticism adopt aspects of any gender; for self-description one is free to pick from a wide range of labels including “none”. But trying to self identify as not having a race or affiliating with or adopting aspects of the “wrong” race makes people angry. White people choosing to act black might be “cultural appropriation” and black people having to act white might be “erasure” but a man acting like a woman or the reverse has (within SJ) no equivalent negative terminology. Claiming to be nongender is often (in some flavors of SJ) praiseworthy whereas claiming to have no race is either mock-worthy (if they appear white) or blame/criticism-worthy if they appear nonwhite).
SJ wants to preserve the racial groups of the status quo, which is a problem for those of us who aspire to colorblindness and think assimilation and “appropriation” are awesome. But when it comes to gender groups, it’s…more complicated than that.
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Murphy said:
It also comes up re: disability.
Since there’s existing cultures built around various disabilities many SJ people view any set of steps that would lead to those cultures shrinking or ceasing to exist as bad.
If tomorrow someone came up with a pill or other treatment to prevent infants going blind or deaf or to grant sight to the blind or hearing to the deaf you’d think the general response would be “Wow, this is jesus level stuff”
But if you have the premise that destruction or reduction of a culture is bad no matter how it gets destroyed or reduced, including the individuals involved simply not wanting to or having no reason to join it any more then any set of steps which lead to that, including this:
are inherently bad.
To people who don’t hold that as a premise, who are willing to see cultures die peacefully when almost everyone involved benefits it looks nuts.
People are literally declaring that little Timmy should have medical treatment withheld from him because while being deaf, blind and paralysed might mean him missing out on experiences personally it would be really terrible for deaf-blind-quadraplegic culture if they lost the steady flow of new deaf-blind-quadraplegic child members and ending that flow would basically constitute genocide.
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philosoraptorjeff said:
Thanks for helping me articulate a thing I’ve often noticed but had a hard time putting into words. Namely, the odd sense that when SJ people *say* there’s no such thing as race, as they often do, (citing at second- or third-hand various biological findings that might be better summarized as “our concept of race is oversimplified”), that they’re being disingenuous, as they act about the least like people who sincerely believe that of anyone I can think of.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
@philosoraptorjeff
I think it’s more that SJ sees race as a *sociological* fact. For gender, the source of truth is how you feel about your own gender; for race, the source of truth is mostly how people perceive you (and sort of also what family/culture you come from). So if you claim that you have no race, you’re pretending that you’re outside the sociological system of race, which no one really is.
What gender one is perceived as is of course important too. But I think given the actual reality of how important defining one’s own gender is to a lot of people, it makes sense to prioritize the “self-identification” definition of gender. There’s just not a similar thing of “race dysphoria”, etc.
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Glen Raphael said:
@tcheasdfjkl
philosoraptorjeff said:
@tcheasdfjkl
Well, yes. I don’t see how you’re disagreeing with me.
SJ people I know will frequently post those memes of Bill Nye denying race exists, in an obviously approving manner, or even say in their own voices “there’s no such thing as race”. But then the exact same people turn around and do, or at least endorse, all the things Glen talked about – behaviour that would make no sense if they sincerely believed there was no such thing as race.
“Race is a purely sociological fact” is in no way the same claim as “race isn’t a fact at all”, especially given that they clearly think it’s a *really really important* sociological fact. Yet the same people can be regularly seen endorsing, or even actively making, both of these completely incompatible claims, sometimes on the same day. If they mean race isn’t biological, that’s what they should say! (That’s probably wrong too, but it’s, by their own lights, nowhere near as wrong as claiming it doesn’t exist at all.)
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Aapje said:
@Glen Raphael
I try not to use ‘race,’ as most of us are mutts (and constantly evolving)*. For example, Obama is only ‘black’ in a cultural sense, genetically he has genes from different ethnic groups.
*Early 20th century researchers had the same issue where they tried to find racially pure examples, yet found huge differences between people within ethnic groups.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
@philosoraptorjeff
It’s pretty clear to me that when people say “race doesn’t exist” they’re talking about biological facts. I see your objection that what they’re actually saying is ambiguous, but to me that’s an issue of imprecise wording rather than any actual contradiction.
@Glen Raphael
I apologize if I’m misrepresenting your feelings, but my impression is that the feelings you describe are probably on the severe end for discomfort about race but on the rather mild end for gender dysphoria. As in, lots of people have more severe gender dysphoria than that but not a lot of people have feelings of that or greater severity about race.
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Glen Raphael said:
@ tcheasdfjkl
That’s certainly possible, but…how would we know? “race dysphoria” might be all around us, unremarked upon for lack of the right framework in which to complain.
Let’s add a second data point. I had a friend in high school, we’ll call him Joe. Joe’s mother was Chinese and father was Swiss; Joe grew up in Switzerland and then moved here; he has dual citizenship. When interacting with a US bureaucracy, he must check a box. “half-Chinese” isn’t one of the options, nor is “Swiss”. Of the options that ARE available, asking him to pick one is essentially asking: “which parent’s heritage do you feel like denying today – mom or dad?”
How should Joe feel about having to make that choice? Or about being called out for “whitesplaining” or “cultural appropriation” when some third party decides what labeled box to stick him in and then objects to him not conforming to it?
Aren’t there plausibly “lots of people” in that sort of situation? And more of them every day?
My guess as to what’s going on with TERFs is that if you think the most important problem is a conflict between WOMEN and MEN in which WOMEN are being oppressed, anybody who somehow straddles or blurs the line between those two sides is a distraction – it’s easier to define them away than try to shoehorn them into the existing framework. The modern SJ insistence on policing racial distinctions seems similarly motivated…and similarly doomed.
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blacktrance said:
Tomorrow: SJ is bad because it delays the proletarian revolution.
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J. Goard said:
Well, I don’t think I’m alone among ASJs in thinking that many of the most important aspects of gender are strongly innate with a long evolutionary history, whereas the specific differences between ethnic/national/regional cultures are far more ephemeral, nearly entirely learned, and thus more potentially “dissolved” into individualism.
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sniffnoy said:
But that merely bears on the question of what’s easier to dissolve, not whether such a dissolution would be a good thing.
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J. Goard said:
@sniffnoy Indeed. I’m merely suggesting that one person who did approve of such ethnic/cultural dissolution, and another who opposed “gender abolitionism”, aren’t necessarily in conflict.
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memeticengineer said:
This one seems convincing. On the other hand we’re now up to 8 out of 8 being voted real by the majority. Continuing to think “anti-SJ” is too heterogenous a category for anything to seem fake.
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Katelyn Ailuros said:
“Anti-X” is an inherently heterogeneous category for all values of X, I’d think.
If you disagree with just one point of SJ, but disagree with it *really hard*, that’s enough to decide anti-SJ is a good position.
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J. Goard said:
Really, this whole thing is breaking down as an “Intellectual Turing Test”, because so many entries don’t seem to hinge on whether someone has accurately represented a viewpoint very different from their own, but rather whether we think somebody saying reasonable moderate would happen to self-identify with one label over another.
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Aapje said:
I hope the people here don’t mind this semi-off topic post. I read the first chapter by bell hooks’ book on masculinity:
http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/wanted-men-who-love/
My feelings alternated between happiness and frustration. One of the parts that I was happy to read was:
This is pretty much identical to the MRM concept of male disposability, which argues that men are taught that they don’t have inherent value as people, but rather, only deserve recognition for what they achieve and/or do for others. Bell hooks also seems to recognize that women are as guilty of this conditioning as men are. It then logically follows that the solution needs to be different treatment of men by both men and women, to end this conditioning. This is where I get to the frustrating part, as bell hooks ends with:
So the responsibility for change is placed fully on men, which is what I pretty much always see in feminist writing.
I think that this is one of the aspects where feminists and non-feminists get very frustrated with each other. My experience is that in a debate, the feminist debater will sometimes seek to express empathy with the negative aspects of the male gender role, saying such things as ‘the patriarchy hurts men too,’ but when asked for clarification, this ends up meaning that men hurt other men.
This is extremely frustrating to people who have experienced gender role policing by women. To them, the statement doesn’t come across as the intended empathy with men, but rather the opposite: victim blaming. So at this point the non-feminist judges the feminist to be a misandrist and the feminist in turn is confused at the furious reaction.
BTW. This is only one of the many ways in which communication between feminists and non-feminists can break down. These go both ways, there are also ways that non-feminists express themselves that come across very different from intended to most feminists.
PS. There are other aspects that I like & those that I strongly object to in the chapter and the above is not intended as a full review.
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jossedley said:
I haven’t read the book, but the most charitable way to read that quote would be that no one can change anyone else, man or woman. You can help, but everyone has to do it for themselves.
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Aapje said:
I read it the same way and my objection is not that women should be asked to do more to make men change, but rather that women should be asked to change themselves.
Feminists generally has no problem asking men to change for the benefit of women (and men). What I am asking is to do the same the other way: asking women to change for the benefit of men (and women).
IMHO, this is a major blind spot of mainstream feminism and a an important reason why quite a few people feel that feminism is primarily a women’s advocacy movement, rather than an equality movement.
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Nita said:
Do you think it would be more respectful to say, “We must treat men in the following ways in order to re-condition them into better and more liberated people”? That would sound worse to me.
She’s right that you can’t change a person without their own cooperation — at least not with any morally acceptable methods. If you set changing someone as your goal, you’re going to be frustrated, and then you’re going to resent them. So, it’s good to warn people against that in advance.
Additionally, consider that the changes she has in mind probably include not only “stop feeling that you have to act stoic all the time”, but also “stop feeling that using violence against your loved ones is both your right and your duty”.
And consider that, in some of the subcultures she has in mind, men discount women’s opinions at a rather high rate and take normative cues mostly from their male peers. In such communities, a man who changes his behavior because women’s attitudes have changed would risk being mocked and losing friends. (You can even see this on the internet, when people complain that men have become “feminized” and “pussified”.)
But I do take issue with the way she puts women’s responsibilities in terms of “instructing” and “guiding”. Women themselves are still struggling to figure things out, and it would be good to acknowledge that.
What struck me the most about that piece is how strongly her view is influenced by her own experiences with men (e.g., her father). It is that way for most of us, of course, but it often goes unnoticed, so I respect her for being so open about it.
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Aapje said:
We condition everyone anyway, although we use euphemisms like ‘raising kids’ or ‘educating.’ We also condition people simply by rewarding certain behavior socially (up to the choices we make for partners). My issue is more that people (of any gender) should be told: stop conditioning people in very bad ways and instead condition people in good ways.
Perhaps I should take a step back and explain how the world view differs between me and most feminists (both in past tense to side step the debate about the current state of ‘patriarchy’):
The mainstream feminist world view seems to be that patriarchal society was set up to benefit men. So men were privileged above women and any downsides they feel from the patriarchy was minor compared to the benefits they had from it. So they should change to give up their privileges and do more for women. As male disadvantages were due to privileges backfiring, men’s issues will generally be solved as women’s issues are.
My world view is that society was set up to achieve certain goals in general, not privilege one gender over the other. Men and women were forced into sacrificing for each other and for general society, in very regimented ways. There is no objective reason to judge one gender more oppressed than the other and feminist attempts to show this are never more than cherry picking and subjective arguments over which bad things are worse than other bad things. In my view, improving life for women will not automatically solve men’s issues and can even make them worse.
What I see in almost all feminism is a strong focus on making men change and do more for women, which often just reinforces the traditional ‘provider & protector’ role. It can put men in a situation where they are even less allowed to talk about their desires & feelings and are told what to want & feel. IMO, a lot of the fear that men have is that they don’t want to end up like Steve Shives. Some anti-feminists use terms like “feminized”, “pussified” or “cuck,” but essentially they just mean that they don’t want to be controlled by women, which seems like a healthy POV (as people should not be controlling, abusing, etc each other).
Sure, but we shouldn’t ignore that quite often, women are demanding this of men, either explicitly or because they are turned off by men who don’t act like this.
I’ve read a ton of stories that boil down to: ‘I’ve tried to do what feminists ask of me, but I saw women reacting really badly to it, even when they themselves argued for it.’ When men experience this and they don’t see feminism address the part that women play in this dynamic, they often feel lied to by feminism.
I also want to point out that many men are not conditioned that violence against loved ones (and especially women) is OK, but the opposite. This is also a major issue I have with bell hooks chapter, her assumption that the culture of her ‘bubble’ is universal.
But again, the chapter does get closer to an actual understanding than pretty much all academic feminist writings that I’ve seen, so if feminism goes down that path further, feminists and progressive anti-feminists may find common ground eventually.
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Nita said:
Right now, in some places? I agree. Generally, everywhere and at all times? I can’t agree with that.
On some issues, certainly. I think clearer consent norms and less mutual distrust would benefit all decent people, but some changes in child custody laws can benefit mothers and harm fathers, for example.
I’ve never heard of this guy, so you’ll have to explain how he “ended up”. RationalWiki says he gets a lot of harassment for his views — is that what you mean?
I don’t really understand how someone’s unhealthy sexuality directly causes men to be violent. Surely they could try to find a partner with different preferences.
I mean, I understand stuff like shaving your body hair or wearing flattering clothes to be more attractive to your preferred sex. But being abusive? There have to be some internal limits, IMO.
You mentioned above how you don’t like it when people expect men to be providers and protectors by default. Well, I don’t like that either, but I also don’t like this idea of men as mindless beasts that go wherever women’s sexuality leads them, with no ethical opinions of their own.
Of course, being a sexy and decent person is more difficult than being only sexy or only decent. Two different things are harder to optimize for than one thing! But that’s just life.
Well, at least we can agree on this 🙂
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Aapje said:
You shouldn’t put any trust in RationalWiki, they consist mostly of people who got kicked off Wikipedia for being too biased. When people disagree with them or their friends, they call it harassment.
Steve Shives uses bots to block a ton of people from his Twitter, so the ‘I Was #BlockedbySteve’ meme became something of a thing when people found out that they were blocked despite not even knowing about the guy before checking if they were blocked.
Then people found a video of him talking with his wife and they felt really sorry for him. You can see it here (I suggest watching the whole 11 minutes, but you can go to 5:30 to see the video of him with his wife):
Anyway, it’s all YouTube & Twitter drama, but I think that some men do fear being eventually forced into a situation like Shives, where they are made to conform to political correctness that stifles them completely (even on things like not being allowed to like TV shows with male protagonists).
As I said, many men are not conditioned into the extreme violence that bell hooks complains of. However, very few women want a man who won’t stand up for her. Being too emotional means that a man cannot be depended on in a high-stress situation, which is why it is a major turn off for most women if a man does actually open up emotionally. Most men don’t want to increase their chances of remaining single by a huge amount, as they value having a partner highly.
There is also the issue that this conditioning is already taught to children who then bully each other into submission. So by the time they start to date, most men and women already do what is expected. So the people who don’t (mostly intelligent people who are able to recognize and reject the conditioning) end up out of sync with other people.
That’s a big exaggeration of what I said. Furthermore, I think that women are conditioned as much as men. So all people are pushed into a mold. That’s why I said that everyone needs to change.
Most people clearly are very strongly influenced by the culture around them. The idea that people form their ethical opinions based on reasoning is false for most people.
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Aapje said:
I think that this is written by a very reasonable SJ person who wrote down their criticisms of the more extreme SJ people. The main reason is that the entire response is written in SJ jargon. I’d expect an anti-SJ person to use some anti-SJ words.
If it is an anti-SJ, then that person is very, very skilled at communication with moderate SJs.
So: voted pro by an anti
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sniffnoy said:
I don’t think that’s right. Some of these may be SJ criticisms of “more extreme” (I don’t really like that description, see here) SJ, but others are ones I really do not see SJers make. Concern about people falsely claiming to be hurt in order to gain advantage, for instance. Also, it is really really individualist, wanting to dissolve culture. I mean, there are individualist SJers out there (such as our host), but I don’t think I’ve seen them take the individualism part to such an extreme; they generally approve of the notion of “identity”. I would not class anyone saying “fundamentally, groups and identity labels are bad” as an SJer criticizing “more extreme” SJ, I’d class them as an anti-SJ individualist (assuming they’re sincere, obviously)!
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Aapje said:
Isn’t this a key objection by many TERFs against transwomen? That they benefit from both male privilege, yet are shielded from being called out for it?
Anyway, I might be wrong. These anti-SJ responses are hard to classify.
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sniffnoy said:
Not sure whether that’s really the same. But even if it is, being a TERF would I think be a pretty different position from what the author expresses!
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Aapje said:
My point was more that your assertion that concern with fake victimhood is incompatible with pro-SJ standpoints seems incorrect.
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philosoraptorjeff said:
Most SJ people I know would loudly and angrily deny that TERFs count as SJ. Or at the very least, they think TERFS are doing SJ horribly wrong.
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
I voted pro, and am reasonably confident of that, because the author seems to lack anti views that SJs don’t often encounter or argue against. (Compare the NRX ones, which held a bunch of views which few SJ people would encounter but were nonetheless important to their anti stance.)
It seems like this person is an SJ who is writing essentially a caricature of everyone they’re ever argued against.
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a said:
screwed up and voted “anti and i’m anti”, meant to vote “pro and i’m anti”, please rectify in your spreadsheets (not that it matters, pro- are clearly winning a blowout victory in this ITT despite my efforts)
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Walter said:
I remain bad at detecting fake ASJ’s. Sigh. This one sounds totally reasonable as well.
Walter’s ASJ picks
#1: ASJ, unsure
#2: ASJ, certain
#3: ASJ, certain
#4: ASJ, unsure
#5: ASJ, certain
#6: SJ, certain
#7: ASJ, certain
#8: ASJ, unsure
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jdbreck said:
I voted that this is genuine Anti.
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