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User ID: 2225
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1yr ago
Wow, that's even worse than I thought. It makes me even more glad I'm not involved anymore.
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1yr ago
I mean, that perspective is certainly important and present. There are lots of icons like that (and always have been; I think there are icons of Jesus looking like a Roman in the catacombs)! But I'm not convinced it was an overwhelming consensus across time and space (we're talking about probably more than 1900 years of practice over vast swaths of territory, not just medieval Europe).
My general sense is that people who hold to perspective (2) don't think that these icons are not real icons, just that they aren't ideal. This often applies to other aspects of iconography too; there's a lot of formal and informal rules about how icons are "supposed" to be painted in various Orthodox traditions, for instance, and a lot of people are somewhat uneasy with the "realistic" (western) style of many post-Peter-the-Great Russian icons.
Icons are interesting because they combine the symbolic and the representational; they depict people or events, but usually in a way that is symbolic and does not literally represent what happened. So "the icon is not a photograph, it is supposed to convey certain truths and should be painted in whatever way does that best" and "these are real people, you can't just make them look however you like" are both highly defensible, and have been defended. I'm inclined to the first one myself: we don't always have a good idea what the subjects looked like anyway, recognizability is more important than accuracy, and symbolism in e.g. clothing is uncontroversially more important than realism anyway.
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1yr ago
You mentioned icons; let's talk about actual icons. Specifically, Christian iconography.
When Christianity spreads to another culture (as it has been continuously doing since the beginning), it faces a problem: how do you represent the major figures, including Christ and the saints? You can take two different approaches here:
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Icons are representative, not realistic. So you can (and should) adapt iconography to the ethnic and cultural makeup of the people using them in order to make them more relatable and less foreign. Hence you have black, white, Chinese, etc. icons of Jesus, Mary, and so on.
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Icons are representations of real people, so they should picture them as they actually are (as best as we can tell). This entails that Jesus, Mary, the apostles, and so on look eastern-Mediterranean, since that's how they actually looked; if people want icons that look like them, well, there are plenty of saints actually from their ethnicity, or will be soon enough.
Both perspectives are defensible, but if you have perspective (1) you'd be wrong to say that people with perspective (2) are just being racist or ethnocentric.
Now, of course, neither Aragorn nor any other character in Lord of the Rings is a real person. But people frequently have perspective (2) about source material that they are attached to, and I don't think they're entirely wrong!
PS: What amounts to good iconography, especially as it relates to these two perspectives, is apparently a great way to get some scissor statements in Orthodox Christian communities. Is this picture a valid/good icon, or not? Context for those who aren't familiar: this picture is a classic Orthodox icon design, with the Theotokos (Mary) and infant Jesus (the angels are Michael on the left and Gabriel on the right). It's also got all the iconographic writing which is necessary to make something an icon: the "ΜΡ ΘΥ" (which stands for the first and last letters in the Greek for "Mother of God") above her halo, and "ΙC ΧC" (the C's are lunate sigmas; it stands for "Jesus Christ") near the Christ child, and even the "ο ων" (Greek ""He who is", referring to the name for God) on his halo. The problem? It's in a cutesy anime style. (The artist did get the colors wrong; usually Mary has a red outer garment (for holiness) and a blue inner one (for humanity). But it's possible it's imitating a non-standard icon, since those rules are not quite universal.)
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1yr ago
Because Hasbro decided that they could make lots of money by having standalone card sets based on random other fantasy IP. The main "multiverse" is still its own setting with no crossover, AFAIK.
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1yr ago
Honestly seeing that card makes me glad I quit playing Magic entirely five years ago, and it has little to do with making Aragorn black (which is stupid and jarring exactly because it makes no sense for reasons already outlined). The card's art is bad (nothing new for Magic, but at least the bad art used to be kind of quirky), the card name is stupid, the flavor makes no sense (the war is basically over when they get married, and they don't fight together), the mechanics are completely uninspired and have little sensible connection to the flavor, and the whole "let's make a boring cash-grab set based on random other fantasy IP" ...ugh. About the only thing that makes sense about the card is the color.
In Middle-Earth there's very little to do with (ordinary human) races. The humans, elves, hobbits, dwarves (and, of course, the orcs and various monsters) are all quite different, but they don't at all map onto race-as-we-know-it, and it would be, uh, pretty racist to try to make them match human races. You might be able to pull a Brandon Sanderson and make the elves be East-Asian but extra tall, but even that is questionable. (You could just race-swap the whole setting en masse and have everyone be the same non-white race, and that would be better, but it still misses that the setting is a fundamentally European mythology.) The problem is that while race (as it actually exists) is a non-issue*, genealogy is definitely not (as you point out), so you can't just have random people be random races.
*There's the well-known exception that the Haradrim are called "swarthy" at one point. But this definitely doesn't make them black and doesn't seem to have much to do with mapping to race-as-it-exists; they're just darker-skinned since they live in sunnier climes further south. If anything, the picture is of North Africans: the Haradrim invading with their Mumakil are probably intended to evoke the Carthaginians under Hannibal, and the Corsairs of Umbar, the Barbary Pirates. And going a bit further afield, the shrunken Gondor holding out against Mordor has shades of the Eastern Roman Empire against the Turks. But again, using race to represent this is a bad idea, not least because these resemblances are just evocative, not allegorical and definitely not intended to reflect on real-world races!
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1yr ago
That's fair. I have the impression/intuition that getting casual sex would, to an extent, trade off against finding a wife; so my thought was that there might be a substantial number of men who would prioritize the "find a wife" side of the tradeoff to the extent that they are (relatively) uninterested in casual sex, even if they didn't find it particularly immoral. But maybe this is not the case. I fully admit that I am an unusual case here (I'm in the increasingly tiny minority that didn't have sex at all until getting married) and don't have a good sense of these things.
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1yr ago
So, in the CWR thread there was an exchange where @2rafa got a bit piled on for claiming that most men don't have lots of casual sex not because they can't, but because they don't particularly want to compared to competing activities. I'm not interested in relitigating the conversation, but the following bit struck me (conversation massively snipped for the relevant parts):
From @2rafa:
Because most men do, in fact, show a revealed preference for long term relationships. [...] I think most men who don't pursue sleeping with huge numbers of women don't do so because they don't want to, not because they can't.
And from @Amadan:
[Y]our rather touchingly naive view that down deep we're all just looking for our waifu is not really true. [...] But most men who don't do it [have sex with large numbers of women], unless they have strong religious or other reasons not to, absolutely would do it if they had the ability.
Now admittedly I am one of the people with "strong religious ... reasons not to", but this strikes me as off somehow? I mean, sure, most men have some level of desire to have lots of sex with different women, but people have lots of desires, and just because they have a desire doesn't mean they'd preferentially fulfill it, especially if it competes with other ones.
Which leads to my question. What fraction of men (say, in their twenties) are better described as (a) "looking for [their] waifu" - i.e. want to find a good wife (and then, presumably, also have lots of sex with her), with little serious interest in casual sex, or (b) "absolutely would [have lots of casual sex] if they had the ability"?
For (heterosexual) men, which is/was more true of you? For anyone, what fraction of men do you think are are "team find a wife" vs "team casual sex"?
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1yr ago
Nope, not that one. I was thinking of this one which was posted on /r/rational some years back.
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1yr ago
Lawrence's book has a "terminology and definitions" section
You are absolutely right and I should have referred to that first. My bad.
May I ask why not?
Because many of these people are doing things (cross-dressing, usually) which are already seen as shameful, with no pretense of being forced to; plus, doing feminine things is only socially shameful for men, but the desire in question is to be/become a woman. But I've gotten some firsthand pushback on this so probably I was typical-minding here.
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1yr ago
I don't understand this. In my mind, the entire point of the forced feminization fantasy is avoiding the shame in wanting it rather than it being itself shameful, while you seem to be claiming the opposite?
I am either slightly confused or expressed myself confusingly (or both). I'll get back to you if I think of a better way of explaining what I meant.
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1yr ago
I mean, progressivism is post-Christian, it didn't develop in a vacuum. Or, to quote G.K. Chesterton:
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
He was writing over 100 years ago, but progressivism has been around for a while.
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1yr ago
You can't conserve an idea if you don't conserve a people, that's my argument. Civilization is not an idea, it's a people.
To which the obvious solution is: let the people consist of those who embrace the idea. Which is exactly what the Christian Church did, by the way: "There is no Jew or Greek..."; and also "church fathers", "ancestors in the faith".
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1yr ago
Your comment made me think: there's an essay here, somewhere, about how grand scope secondary world fantasy is a fundamentally Christian impulse. It allows one to imagine things that are facially inconsistent with Christianity but elucidate it. I think that it's no accident that Tolkien was a Catholic.
Whereas most fantasy (I except traditional faerie-stories, slightly[*]) stories set in the real world are at best uncomfortable from a Christian perspective, because Christianity itself is a thing in the real world and you have to fit that in somehow. Does anyone remember that old HPMOR meta-fanfic with the wizard-Christians? I felt that, as really awkward as it was, it was more honest than the original HP in that way.
[*] Obviously many faerie-stories have a pre-Christian origin and skate by on that. But people tried to wrestle with these things in ways that would make moderns very uncomfortable; IIRC there are some stories about Irish saints converting faeries to Christianity...
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1yr ago
Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other.
Which implies that left vs right politics are fundamentally post-Christian.
Drawing this out a bit further: I believe you are right that the alt-right and woke left are, in many ways, cut from the same cloth. But the "red tribe," even the overtly religious part, is just as much a product of modernity and is in many ways post-Christian in outlook, despite the Christian trappings.
I rather think this is a bad thing.
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1yr ago
Not that I can recall. I got a little of the usual crap from peers about being a nerd instead of a masculine/athletic type, but that's not at all the same thing, and they didn't know about any of my more feminine interests (I only had a few -- overall I was within normal "nerd" range). My family didn't care, but then I never did anything like cross-dressing, it was all stuff like "interested in cooking and sewing and likes pretty colors" which hardly counts when there's also "interested in math and computers and likes video games" going on even more prominently.
I just don't get forced feminization fantasies, so maybe the reason I don't find plausible is actually correct but I just don't understand other people's psychology. My fantasy was always either undergoing a magical transformation willingly, or having been female all along (i.e. including imagining a different childhood/puberty). I didn't think the thing I wanted was shameful (although wanting it was, hence why I didn't share it), just impossible. And why would I imagine something unpleasant if there was a pleasant version?
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1yr ago
Since MtF and FtM are largely different phenomena:
MtF: 1. this seems to pick out the wrong set of people. There are lots of men who seem to believe that women have better lives, and even some who are unhappy enough that they go to very dark places (e.g. incels) but they don't seem to be the ones lining up to be trans. 2. Autogynephilia is a thing, and it would be deeply weird if a condition that is uncommon in the general population but very common among trans people didn't have anything to do with transitioning. 3. A lot of MtF trans people have been willing to go through some really hard stuff (extensive medical treatments) and have blown up their objectively good lives as men in order to try to become women; I suppose you could consider them to be extra deluded, but that doesn't seem to be a parsimonious explanation.
FtM: Here that explanation is somewhat plausible for some of the short-hair-and-guy's-clothes-enby types or for the people who want to get pregnant but still have people pretend they are men, but in general it doesn't seem to work. We have a long history of women pretending to be men in order to enter men's spaces, get more respect, or engage in male-only activities: everything from women taking male pen names, to Mulan (yes, a folktale/myth, but still) or the women who pretended to be men so they could become doctors, up to at least one female Christian saint who pretended to be a man in order to enter a particular monastery. But they appear to be in a totally different category than the girls who want to cut off their breasts, who seem more like the extreme end of "girl is uncomfortable with her body because puberty" intersecting with the pro-trans social environment, and not particularly concerned with e.g. earning more money.
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1yr ago
I agree that the line is blurry. I think that Lawrence thinks of a sexual orientation as having emotional/romantic aspects, whereas a paraphilia would just have the facially-sexual ones; so sexual orientation is about love+lust, but paraphilia is just lust. In practice I think this is more a matter of respectability.
This is an interesting point about loss of agency. One thing I didn't touch on in this review but that came up in the book is that apparently a decent chunk of the sexual feminization fantasies of autogynephiles are forced feminization fantasies. That wasn't the case for me, and I just figured that it was an intersection with the (common) BDSM paraphilia, but you may be onto something about the attractiveness of passivity for someone who is always (expected to be) responsible. Or maybe it's more of a thing where lack of agency is seen as feminine, and therefore desired? (I don't think the common theory -- usually offered to explain rape fantasies -- that lack of agency gives the fantasizer an excuse to not be morally or socially culpable for their actions is at all plausible here.)
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1yr ago
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1yr ago
Reading that review/reaction was a bit weird, because while I see where she's coming from (not only is reading about fetishes gross, but a lot of these people do seem to admit to sexist or objectifying attitudes towards women), it really feels like she's somehow getting the causality backwards. While I can't be sure for every case, I strongly suspect that most of these people's specific sexual fantasies of humiliation/sexism/etc are downstream of the memes of sexism in the culture (I hesitate to say "sexist memes", because while some of them are indicative of sexism, others are probably due to the broadcasting of "look at all this sexism women experience" from feminists).
That is, the causal chain runs from the cultural memes (sexist or about sexism) to the sexist fantasies, because what's ground-level arousing/desired is being a woman, and that's what these people either (a) think being a woman is like, or (b) think is proof or evidence of being a woman. If other things were culturally available as "the essence of being a woman", that's probably what they'd fantasize about instead. Whereas Lorelei seems to think that the source of the sexism in these fantasies is in these people's male sex drive, because she thinks that the male sex drive is the source of the sexism in the culture?
Re: drag queen story hour; I'm agreed these are terrible. Though weren't drag queens originally a subculture of gay men, not transvestic fetishists? I'm not familiar with any of the groups involved, so I may be mistaken -- or maybe it's not the same people anymore now?
Edit: Also, does that mean you'd be interested in reading a review, or no?
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1yr ago
Slightly meta question: In the replies to my post in the most recent CW thread, @IGI-111 recommended the monograph Men Trapped in Men's Bodies by Anne Lawrence. So I found an electronic copy online and read it.
Would anyone be interested in reading a multi-part book review / summary of the book? I thought it might be interesting so I started working on one, and am about halfway done with a draft (4k words so far), but it occurs to me that there's not a lot of point in finishing it if people are tired of the topic.
Related: for the mods, if there was interest and I completed it, would it be appropriate to post it in its own thread(s), like @drmanhattan16's recent review? I think I can keep the overt culture war out of the review, but the topic itself is, well...
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1yr ago
I have no idea, and we aren't really asking that question to transitioners. Detransitioners often talk about things like that, but they are a particular subset of people, and if nothing else subject to the same biases that eg Ex-Mormon or Ex-Muslim forums are subject to.
Not only are we not asking, the question is so politically fraught we probably couldn't get good answers anyway.
I can recall, though not cite offhand, numerous examples of trans people in writing and in real life telling me what feeling like "not a man" and "not a woman" felt like. And it always involved some kind of assumption that because I am a man I strongly feel a constant sense of being a masculine stereotype.
I wonder if that assumption is more likely to be a cause or an effect. By which I mean, you've observed a certain misconception in your trans acquaintances about what it's like to be a normal man; how do we tell the difference between the chain (have this misconception) -> (think they fail at being a man) -> (want to be a woman) -> (trans), vs the chain (want to be a woman) -> (trans) + (reinterpret ordinary experiences as evidence for transness) -> (implicit misconception)? Not saying you're wrong, just the second seems more intuitively plausible to me and I'm not sure how one would tell.
I think this problem is much bigger and harder to deal with than a "medical illness" answer; this is a society wide phenomenon experienced by most people, transitioners are just those at the bottom of the fragility/mental stability totem poll who slide off into the strange.
Ah, I see what you mean. It's an easier problem only for the narrow question of "how hard is it to deal with trans ideation once you are intervening in someone's life", but a broad social problem is much harder to fix than a few people with mental illness.
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1yr ago
I guess I don't see how this has much to do with what I'm saying. The post I was originally responding to suggested:
And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts
as a way to dissuade these people from transitioning. In other words, tell people with autogynephilia that they are disgusting and should go away, which seems both cruel and unlikely to work. I'm proposing compassion instead, because I don't want these people to end up deciding they are trans, I want them to get help.
For whatever it's worth I have little love for the trans lobby and am pretty incensed at all the propagandizing and abuse of state power to enforce their ideology. I just happen to think that many, probably most, trans individuals are also victims here, in much the same way that lonely people who get targeted by lovebombing and join a cult are.
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1yr ago
Are you referring to trans activists, the "visible perverts", or to the "disordered desires" group? Granted there is overlap, of course, but I think it's the first two groups who are doing the damage. A lot of the third group doesn't (or doesn't yet) even consider themselves trans! If you want them to not get eaten by the trans meme, you've got to provide some kind of compassionate support. Because when the options are suffer in solitude, get shamed and ridiculed, or listen to the seductive whispers telling them that they can satisfy their desires and join a group that will continually affirm them, it takes a pretty strong will to not pick the third option.
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1yr ago
I think it's a small proportion but I also think that unfortunately they are the loudest and most visible and most online.
It seems we differ in our estimates here. Maybe it would help to draw a distinction between, let's say, people with disordered sexual desires (in which group I would include any autogynephilia in natal males), and people who are "visible perverts" (you know about them because they do perverted things in public or are publicly loud about their proclivities). I agree that the latter group is rare and unrepresentative of trans people, and it's crazy that the trans lobby doesn't want to get rid of them (probably this is downstream of "pride" stuff). I think, though, that the former group includes probably the majority of MtF trans individuals as well as a decent percentage of men who don't transition. This is probably not usually acknowledged because it's perceived as unflattering to trans people, and to be fair the people loudly crowing about how "it's just a fetish" are being cruel and are not helping the matter.
I think we ought to have some charity even for the "visible perverts" crowd; they need it even if they don't deserve it -- but what I'm really referring to here is the other group. Right now all they are hearing is either total silence, "Eww, you pervert", or "That means you're really a woman deep down! You must be trans!" I think there is a need for counseling, along the lines of "So, you know how you really really want to be female? And how you find that idea sexually arousing, too? Yeah, that's a thing; it's something a bit wrong with you, but it doesn't mean either that you are disgusting or that you are 'really' a woman or should try to become one. Let's try to help you figure out how to deal with your feelings."
Ah, good catch there -- it does seem to be an exact imitation of that icon.
In the East, the liturgical color for Marian feasts is blue, and it's definitely the color most associated with her. I'm not enough of an expert to speculate on the history, but while the red-over-blue in icons of Mary is standard in the East, it is not universal (I think the Hagia Sophia famously has some icons which just use blue -- and indeed the source icon is Byzantine) so I guess I was wrong on that being the artist's error. There's some relation with the fact that Christ is generally depicted with a blue outer garment and red inner garment. I was just now trying to verify about the symbolism and found that there's some... disagreement... on exactly what symbolizes what.
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