This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It is... interesting... to see all this discussion about "progressive male role models" given that the progressive memespace has long been, and mostly still is, dominated by gender eliminativists. The elevation of fringe-of-a-fringe transsexual issues to the "cause du jour" has of course introduced irreconcilable metaphysics into the discourse, but coalition building has ever been thus. The philosophical work underpinning extant views on gender goes back over a century, to Nikolay Chernyshevsky's declaration that
and philosophical feminism has been broadly gender-eliminativist pretty much ever since.
All of that to say: progressives can't do "male role models" because progressives are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men. Sure, sure--ask your local progressive, they might very well deny it. But this is the standard motte and bailey that exists between thought leaders and political movements everywhere, the disconnect between political theory and political practice. You can't read feminism without stumbling over gender eliminativism, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. "Eliminate gender" is right up there with "abolish the family" on a list of things progressives explicitly and actually want to accomplish, even if these are things they're willing to compromise on for the moment, for the movement.
And you can't really believe that gender needs to be abolished, while simultaneously believing that anyone needs male role models. At best you might say something like, "well, we have to meet the little troglodytes where they are, so we need some... mannish... role models--but not too mannish! Nothing, you know, toxic, nothing overtly heteronormative..." and you've already lost the plot.
This is just another clear case of progressive dreams running headlong into the unyielding embrace of biological reality. People are incredibly plastic! And yet we are not, apparently, infinitely plastic. "Cultural construction" can do a lot, but it cannot lightly obliterate thousands of years of natural selection.
Talk of "misogyny" simply misses the point, and the problem. The only really committed misogynists I've ever met have been women. The men I know who seem to hate women, very obviously genuinely love women--but are angry that they have been denied access to women, by whatever means and for whatever reason. Sometimes it's literally just their own unrealistic expectations. Sometimes they have been badly mistreated by women. Sometimes they are bewildered by the refusal of women in their lives to behave as women. You cannot use "role models" to train people away from this kind of behavior; heterosexual men denied access to women will never just accept that fact. At best, maybe you build sexbots sufficiently indistinguishable from tradwives or something, allowing biological women to pursue whatever bland "non-binary" life they imagine lies at the end of the eliminativist project, but until those bots can do particularly biological things like have babies, there will still be men who dedicate their lives to finding a woman--and, sometimes, going off the rails when faced with sufficiently brutal failure.
Or so it seems to me. I think the progressive response is probably retrenchment on the idea that, surely, anyone can be taught to be anything, given sufficiently quality teaching methods. ("We just need more government!") But their real goal isn't to make better men, it's to make a world where there are no men, in the sense that the social gender binary has been eradicated. Recruiting masculine role models to achieve that end is flatly contradictory.
They have in Japan.
More options
Context Copy link
Sex bots will never be legal (in the US) for the same reasons prostitution is illegal
Porn is legal, but it almost feels like it was grandfathered in. I can imagine a world where Google search was released in the modern day and every official communication from Alphabet included something about how diligent they are at filtering all "inappropriate content".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So progressivism isn't feminist, it's gynosupremacist. I'm not surprised that obligate misandrists think their enemy thinks exactly as they do with the valence switched; hence the claim that everything a man does is "misogyny", and other misunderstandings where critiques of behavior are not understood to be distinct from critiques of identity.
And this is something progressives/gynosupremacists are on the high side of now. Physical equality between the genders has resulted in a major power imbalance in favor of the one that had to evolve a separate system to compete for resources; it's not a fight men are going to win in the short term seeing as how the weapon that is "200,000 years of sociobiological specialization in getting men to do things on your behalf" is parked right on their doorsteps with very little in the way of counterbalance. The sexes did not evolve co-operatively (and any co-operation that does exist must be defended by mothers for sons, and fathers for daughters; most of the post-1980s lack of male role models is mainly due to women having done away with them- claimed it was "unsafe", if I recall correctly).
I dunno; judging by how they vote, teaching young men to work against their interests is pretty effective, actually.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with @To_Mandalay. I think the “misogyny = hating women” definition allows for all kinds of weaseling around what exactly ‘hate’ means, kind of like how “homophobia” always gets debated by people who don’t like gay men who declare that they’re “not scared” of homosexuals in the way that the literal meaning of phobia colloquially implies if you don’t also use the other meaning of aversion etc. It’s a boring semantic debate.
I also agree with you that a substantial proportion of people who have a fundamental problem with women are women, because the way that women’s intra-gender social organization works involves a strict, often unspoken hierarchy of labor, deference and gestures of status that a substantial minority of women find impossible to accept and which then leads to issues with women in general.
But there are many male misogynists. And it’s no more obvious - as Mandalay says - than among gay man, where there are some men who like women and who spend a lot of time with women, have predominantly female friends etc, and some men (and I’ve known a number) who have nothing to do with women, are entirely uninterested in them, and openly consider them lesser - indeed contemptible - in almost every way imaginable.
In straight men this is typically subsumed by the fundamental biological impulse to fuck, to have children, to raise a family. But it does slip out. Often it’s relatively mild (most misogynists don’t ‘hate’ women, hence the comparison to x-phobia), but it’s things like whether a guy likes talking to his wife or whether they spend dinner sitting on their phones, whether a man is genuinely interested in conversation with women, that kind of thing. I find I can tell a lot of the time.
Likewise I have met many women who were genuine misandrists. Mostly, though, they’re not chubby lesbian radfems; they’re hot, skinny BPD chicks, and men love them until they get burned.
To some extent I'm sorry I mentioned it, because I don't seem to have communicated what I was thinking with sufficient clarity. It is kind of like the debates about homophobia not being about fear, insofar as both words often misdiagnose the problem at hand, sometimes in ways that result in exactly the kind of fumbling non-solutions under discussion. What you and Mandalay are describing really is more like "gynephobia," particularly with some of the gay men I've known over the years. And what makes that more than a "boring semantic debate" is that you don't see gay men going on misogynistic murder sprees, so using the same word to describe the disdainful gay man and the seething incel looks like more than a merely semantic mistake.
This is where I probably should have said more: I don't object to the word "misogyny" in the sense that I don't think many of these men do hate women, such that the word is semantically appropriate. I was only trying to note that it is the kind of hate that is born of desire, not the kind of hate that is born of disdain--because once you notice that, you realize that you can't stop incel-style misogyny by teaching them to like women more. That's not the problem! The problem is that they do like women! If they didn't like women, they wouldn't hate women.
The contempt you describe is, I think, mostly separate from either the gynephobia of certain gay men or the misogyny of the isolated and unloved. Such men seem to follow the old Aristotelian style of viewing women and children as simply less than human (I can't think of a single example of the kind of man you describe who was contemptuous of women but not children--YMMV!). I don't think it would be a mistake to think of this as a species of sexism, but neither do I think it is merely a "boring semantic debate" to suggest that misogyny doesn't capture the phenomenon as well.
But, maybe it is just a boring semantic debate, and attempting to use different words to describe the different kinds of problems individual men have with women generally is a distraction. Certainly it was not the substance of my point; what I was mostly interested in pointing out is that gender eliminativists aren't in a position to provide "masculine" role models to anyone.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is certainly directional truth to this, but I think that you are going too far. Certainly, some progressives are fundamentally opposed to existence of men. But there are also progressives who barely care about gender issues at all and focus on other things like race. There are also dirtbag leftists who self-identify as progressives and are certainly progressives in that they want Bernie Sanders-style politics, but are fine with masculinity. I guess you could say that those are not real progressives, but then your statement just becomes the tautological "progressives who are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men".
To me that does not seem like it is necessarily actual love. A man can enjoy eating fish and be angry that he does not have access to fish, yet without loving fish in any way other than for their taste. Which is a sort of love I guess, but it's not the kind of love that, say, friends feel for each other. In any case, I think that the idea of loving an entire gender doesn't really make sense. I like certain women, I dislike others. I think it would be strange to feel an emotion like love for all women.
That said, regarding hate... I think that we generally hate that which has power over us. You are right to point out that much male hatred of women is fundamentally driven by the man wanting women, which means that women have power over him, but not being able to get them. The kind of misogyny that is fundamentally driven by, say, thinking that women are boring, useless, or weak is fairly rare. There is a parallel there to racism in that I think the majority of white anti-black racism in the modern West is not the old-school Southern plantation owner's kind of racism that is based on thinking that blacks are inferior - rather, it is based on dislike of various ways in which some blacks have power over the person who hates... such as through street crime, selective hiring practices driven by wokism, making fun of white people in the media, etc.
Or is this even “misogyny”?
A lot of “misogyny” is just holding women up to the standards that you would expect out of a man, under the paradigm that women have the same rights and status as men, and that women are just as strong and independent as men.
The median woman is boring relative to the median man, much less the 90th percentile or so woman vs. the 90th percentile man (given tail effects) in terms of worldliness, funniness, interestingness. Many women and men would agree, regardless of their political orientation.
Women are physically weak. I don’t think it’s something that needs to be re-litigated here. But also perhaps mentally weak, in terms of being more subject to crying randomly, Stockholm Syndrome, being more prone to social trends, memes, preselection and female mate-choice copying. Women tend to be less agentic and more passive.
Women can be more useful in certain contexts. However, in a lot of contexts, they’re also quite useless. For example, screaming “STOP” or “STAHP” but doing nothing is a common feature in fight and/or crime videos on a worldwide basis. A lot of times, they’re but exacerbating the situation with their histrionics. Pointing it out is trite nowadays, like pointing out that there are clouds when it’s raining.
In a similar vein, children might be boring, useless, weak. Yet, men would hardly be regarded as mis-children-ists if they viewed children as such. In concept-space, women are tilted toward children relative to men, when it comes to standards and expectations.
I am not saying that thinking that women are boring, useless, or weak on average is necessarily misogyny, although of course thinking that literally all women are boring, useless, or weak would be misogyny. I am just saying that thinking that women are boring, useless, or weak on average can in some cases inspire misogyny.
That's fair.
Although I would add, conversely, misogyny (in the strict sense of hating women for being women) can in many cases inspire thinking that women are necessarily boring, useless, and/or weak just because they're women (where "weak" is probably the... weakest... part of the statement, as women are almost always indeed physically weaker than men, and in many cases psychologically, as well).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it goes back a bit further than that....
More options
Context Copy link
The people feminists describe as misogynists are usually not men who hate women but men who women find repellent; almost exactly the opposite thing. But there are real male misogynists; the bitter divorcee stereotype isn't without real examples, and some chaddish types hold women in contempt because they are able to manipulate them into bed so easily. I knew one guy who was actually both. Of course divorcees are not really looking for role models, and even young chaddish types aren't likely to accept role models who aren't also chaddish (it's not like they don't know they have it good!), so this seems doomed to failure.
For the men that women find repellent, none of these people are actually looking to help them and they damn well know it, so that ain't going to work either. If it did, it would make the problem worse (because imitating the role models provided wouldn't solve their problem).
More options
Context Copy link
It's not impossible to hate someone you want to fuck. My experience is that a minority of men do in fact hate women, insofar as they have visceral contempt for the interests, behaviors, habits, and mannerisms of women, and if you zapped these men with a ray that made them gay or asexual they would never interact with another woman again if they could help it. My experience is also that women are much freer with casual "men suck" and "I hate men" talk but women who actually walk the walk and really seem to hate men on a gut level are rarer than the reverse.
I love women and it’s far more than just wanting to Fuck.
If you made me gay or asexual I do not see any reason to ever talk to a women again. I can barely think of any women with any capability to be interesting. There are no female Elon Musks. No female econ writers I’ve ever read. The only fintwit personality I follow ended up being tran. Ruxandro Teslo is the only female writer I’ve found that has said interesting things. Jane Fraser is the only female executive I know of who seems to be talented. I feel like I’ve looked for smart females they are just very hard to find. When you remove the female energy and traits there just aren’t many doing anything.
I don’t believe I’m discriminating and setting a higher bar for female writers and thought leaders but it seems statistically significant of the two twitter “females” I found worth a follow on Twitter one ended up being a man.
One of these things - well, here we go again.
I wouldn't take a man as a spouse/romantic partner if you gave him to me in a box with a ribbon on the top. But I do talk to men anyway - I'm on here with youse guys, ain't I? 😀
More options
Context Copy link
There is nothing more beautiful than watching a commenter lay out a considered plan to capture the Bailey only to have a reply that is ostensibly on his side of the debate shit all over it in real time.
More options
Context Copy link
It doesn't sound like you like women that much beyond wanting to fuck them.
I've always liked hanging out with girls, even (or especially, since it can get weird otherwise) ones I'm not sexually attracted to. I'm not really bothered by the dearth of female CEOS or substack pundits.
You just go too far saying men would have to hate women.
A simple thought experiment for me is if I were the coolest guy in the world and anyone who I wanted to be my friend would gladly be my friend and I then I got to pick 5-10 people as my crew all the people I would choose would be male.
Now if I lowered the standards to those who would be my friend as I am now and not picking from my betters a few women would make the cut.
Out of curiosity, what kind of hypothetical friends are you thinking about? No need to be specific.
I find that I can't recall any person I'd want to talk to who's currently "too cool" for me.
I thought about this but if I created my crew it would be something like Elon Musks, Michael Jordan, Milton Friedman, MBS, Milei. Visionary people with a lot of accomplishments.
As in Mohammed bin Salman? He sounds very wealthy and not particularly interesting, possibly convinced easily by idea-guys, and rather thuggish. Certainly not someone I’d choose to hang out with if I could pick anyone in the world.
Need a trust fund kid in the group. I’ve also gained respect for Saudi political history and building a stable society in the Arab world. MBS has also been aggressive on reform from the day he started. He fills a rich kid spot but I also think he likely has some interesting ideas and strategies.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I know you're just giving a fantasy scenario, but that doesn't sound like a "crew." They'd all have huge egos and would fight like crazy on who gets to be the leader. Not to mention they mostly have totally different interests and skills. They'd probably just leave and go their own way. Wouldn't you rather have friends that would stick with you?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not so sure that the progressive agenda is to remove gender. There is a lot of progressive effort to promote female role models and that doesn't seem consistent with removing gender unless the goal was to promote female role models that would influence women to act more like men.
Any discussion of the progressive agenda is going to be confounded by the fact that a) there is no pope of progressivism, empowered to speak on behalf of progressives or set doctrine progressives must adhere to in order to be proper progressives b) not everyone is even referring to the same groups of people when they talk about progressives (elected officials like the CPC make an obvious standard, since they actually represent millions of people and have a hand in making laws, but they're usually not going to be avant-garde as academics/activists/pseudonymous bloggers).
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, you're not obligated to agree with me, but I did provide a fair bit of evidence you don't appear to have actually gone over.
Female role models, yes. Feminine role models, no, at least not qua feminine role models.
I included the links I did quite deliberately; the Louise Antony interview concludes with her commentary that she supports the transsexual movement to the extent that it undermines the gender binary. To add to that, Sally Haslanger has written that "when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race)." Any time you see the phrase "eliminate gender inequality" you are looking at words that mean "eliminate gender differences" which is functionally equivalent to "eliminate gender"--because if all genders are identical, then there is only one gender, and since gender exists to distinguish different things, collapsing gender into socially identical constructs collapses gender entirely.
I also found this blog which agrees that
The article goes on to note that some feminists think that gender can't be abolished in every possible way, but even this is marked as "unfortunate":
Feminism, as I said, has been broadly gender eliminativist for more than a century, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. It's not a selling point! It's not something you're likely to hear from a Democrat politician any time soon--any more than you will hear them say "abolish the family." But it is one of the core values of the whole movement, something that informs every other action, even actions by people (most people!) who have no idea that the point and purpose of their activism was written long ago. As Keynes observed:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link