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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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I've asked my gf about this.

  1. Women seem to assume that "in the forest" means "without social consequences, ever". Meaning, they suspect that some significant portion of men do not actually have an innate problem with rape and violence towards women, they simply do not do it most of the time out of fear.

  2. She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.

  3. She also claimed that most wild animals leave you alone if you are not a threat.

I'm pretty sure (3) does not mean you have a high chance of surviving a bear encounter. I would shit my pants and start running away the moment the bear started approaching me, make myself a threat, and get caught and mauled.

And while this may sound crass, I think getting mauled by a bear is worse than rape. I would rather be raped as a man that get mauled by a bear.

She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.

In that case you can ask them the same question again but now where they have a cyanide capsule they can break at anytime to commit suicide if the man/bear starts doing bad stuff to them and they'd rather die. I don't think this would make many of these women switch from bear to man.

2 sounds like nonsense, but 1 and 3 are at least plausible. I think another underdiscussed component of the dress colour of the bear question is that in recent years, the threat of bears seems to have been massively memed up in American outdoorsmanship-adjacent circles, at least based on sheer volume of "this is how to survive a bear encounter" videos that Youtube injects into my feed, the comments on them and the vibes of the 4chan "innawoods" greentext corpus. If you are a host of this meme (which is likely to correlate with being male), you might think of it as common knowledge and not consider the possibility that women responders don't actually think of bears as uniquely threatening (as in some other cultures), instead parsing the answers as saying that from a baseline of your threat level assignment to bears, they think men are worse.

Is there a tangible reason why it's getting memed up?

Something of this form (easy and accessible way of signalling preparedness and baseline belonging to a more aware and professional group) seems to get memed up often enough - the bear safety thing reminds me a lot of the older "trigger discipline" fad, which was characterised by an endless torrent of people who wanted to be adjacent to American gun culture making a show of nitpicking media that depicted characters as keeping their fingers on a firearm's trigger without imminent intention to shoot. The particular choice of subject matter is probably opportunistic.

(Trigger discipline scissor question: "Which of these two situations is more dangerous? Lone woman at frat party with handgun, finger on the trigger to be ready to defend herself at any time / lone woman at frat party, unarmed". The 2A demographic will probably contend that she's more likely to hurt herself in an accidental discharge in the former than to get raped in the latter.)

I dunno man, "which gun is best for bear defense" has been a recurring shitshow thread-meme on basically every gun forum I've encountered since about the 90s -- it's not a new thing. (other than maybe some youtubers have caught on I guess?)

Bears are just a handy stand-in for 'stuff that can kill you in the woods' -- even if in reality it's not much of a threat, it's fun to think/fantasize/argue online about.

So will the average Democrat. I think you’re misjudging the Venn diagram of “people who think rape is common” and “people who hate and fear firearms”.

Then make it a taser or something. I would've thought firearm sentiment to be more who/whom - not that this is actually realistically going to be championed by anyone, but would a "guns for women only" policy be instinctively opposed by most blue tribers?

Take away the firearm, and you might have a scissor, but not one that touches the 2A crowd. It’s along the lines of “believe women”: the scenario is underdetermined, so you have to import either the red- or blue-tribe assumptions. Whichever you choose makes the answer obvious.

The blue-tribe assumption regarding firearms is that most uses are illegitimate. At best, mere ownership makes those illegitimate actions more likely. At worst, expressing support for firearms is announcing intent to commit a crime with one.

This is enough to justify near-total gun control. I think that preempts any instinctive opposition to “guns for women only.”

Also, women really don’t care for guns. Ownership rates are like 3x higher for men. Maybe it’s historical, maybe it’s the masculine love for machinery—we’re way more likely to own guns, let alone commit gun violence.

In the frat house case, neither tribe is going to say the girl is justified in brandishing the gun. If you want to cut on the gender angle, you need a different scenario.

In my experience, women conflate SA with rape claims whilst expanding SA to many things that are very far from rape. Further women obviously are not interested in applying skepticism (generally) to another woman’s claim of rape. No 3 sounds like someone who has internalized bad stats.

Interestingly 1) is basically the conservative Hobbesian view right? That all of civilization is just a skin over our inherent natures. Women it appears are aware of the Leviathian shaped hole, even if they have never heard of Hobbes.

Which probably aligns with memes where men threaten their daughters prom dates with guns. They believe an 18yo man can't be trusted with their daughter without some fear being involved.

The question is are they right or wrong. I might suggest the large amount of rape during invasion and conflict might point to an underlying truth many men are uncomfortable with.

That more men than we might think would rape when the social order is not there.

Of course that is just a subset of the idea that more of us would murder or commit violence in general in the absence of a restraining force. The state of war of all against all.

"It follows that, in such a condition, every man has a Right to everything--even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural Right of every man to own everything exists, there can be no security to any man--no matter how strong or wise he is."

In a Hobbesian view there may not be a lot of difference between a bear and a human unburdened by societal restraint. We both exist in a state of nature.

Of course the bear is atill stronger and has better natural weapons. Is it better to be hunted by a bear or a human (assuming the human only has what they can cobble togerher in a forest)?

Women it appears are aware of the Leviathian shaped hole, even if they have mever heatd of Hobbes.

An old redpill/manosphere saying was "Men are the real romantics, while women are, at the end of the day, the hardcore realists"

Validity of that statement aside, I think your phrasing is far better and more inclusive of real cultural dynamics.

Of course that is just a subset of the idea that more of us would murder or commit violence in general in the absence of a restraining force. The state of war of all against all.

Is this not self-evidently true? Societies with weaker social/cultural/legal system infrastructure have higher rates of physical violence, SA, etc. There's the infamous (repeated!) studies on Papua New Guinea pointing out how it's Heart of Darkness levels of pain and chaos.

Does this mean that inside the heart of every man is an eager but repressed rapist? Of course not. That's on-its-face wrong. The entire point of well developed social/cultural/legal system development is to leverage the inherent social conformist nature of humans to build broad pro-social patterns of behavior. In fact, those who fail to conform in the extreme are either/both (a) locked up permanently and/or (b) labeled as cognitively malfunctioning. This is a good thing. What could be looked at as "boys will be boys!" behavior to an A.D. 1000 viking is now seen as "criminally insane and unsafe for anything besides lifelong warehousing."

Well if it takes a well developed cultural system to leverage us into not behaving that way, then are we not just repressed rapists? Just ones buried under years of conditioning? Teach men not to rape indeed..

Just to be clear I don't 100% agree with Hobbes here, though I think it is as you say partially true. Just noticing the similarity in positions between somewhat feminist thought and the Hobbesian conservatives.

You're right. And it wasn't lost on me the weird parallel between Hobbes and feminists that emerged when I wrote the response. I can't say I've totally wrapped my own head around it. All of us Trads do say "We need trade values or else society will fall apart." But it's couched heavily with the idea of personal choice; "You can choose to not follow Trad values, but then your life is going to be shitty." I'd contrast that with the progressive concept of culture which is fundamentally authoritarian; "You MUST adhere to the approved cultural norms, or else you are dangerous and will be excluded from society."

"Teach men not to rape" is too far of an extreme because I think the implicit assumption is that men are born with the rape module turned up to 10. I don't think this is the case. Men (and women!) are born with the basic mammalian firmware desires for food, water, shelter, reproductive activity. The duty of society is to teach men and women how to go about fulfilling these fundamental needs in pro-social ways.

Appreciate your comment. One of the better "stop and made me think" situations I've had on here in a while.

the Leviathian shaped hole

I admit to not being enough of a Hlynka scholar. Can someone explain what this actually means?

A related question, who coined the phrase Leviathan-shaped Hock? It's been living in my head since I read it in one of these roundups.

I did, to make fun of them both being a meme at the same time.

Essentially (to my understanding) that people assume our rules and norms are self-enforcing whereas in actuality (as per this theory) without significant effort we would exist in the "state of nature".

So thinking that men would revert to such a state when deprived of the social efforts to repress our base instincts means you are noticing the hole in our current (mostly Western) mindset.

Exactly what it says on the tin. Modern civilization is so successful at hiding the base reality of violence that props it up that it's easy for people to forget it even exists. That we're just animals in a well organized pit.

Though I would argue, here this distance from violence rather manifests in being so delusional that you think a bear isn't a death machine that can eat you alive on a whim if some armed man isn't around to save you.

As I understand it, it's the assertion that whenever someone identifies a societal problem and begins asking "why is it like this? what can we do about it" the answer is that the identified problem arises from something we ought to already be aware of; base human nature.

The solution (what Hlynka used to point to as the piece that would fit into the "Leviathan Shaped Hole") is often some mix of traditional cultural values, a stronger executive within the state Apparatus, more rigidly defined social roles for men/women/minorities/majorities. I'll admit that on this last part, I could be a little wrong as Hlynka's writing was often a little impenetrable.

I hope I'm close enough here.

In war, aren’t you selecting for people who are already murdering people? War is different from just the state of nature.

Well Hobbes believes the natural state is war of all against all. So the idea here is that everyone is really such a killer if left to our own devices. And war (or other catastrophes) just removes the oversight we would normally fear.

I think Hobbes is wrong. Most of the time most people are like hobbits. State of war is the oddity; not the normal.

Both Rousseau and Hobbes are wrong. There has never really been a thing such as the state of nature in the anthropological history of man, we were never perfect individuals, we were always individuals living in communities.

Man isn't inherently good or bad. He's both, has always been both and will always be both.

The point that Hobbes makes that this common Shire existence exists because there is a sovereign to monopolize violence and enact justice is still a potent one though.

The saga era Iceland didn’t really have a sovereign and it wasn’t super dystopian for the era

She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.

Something's not adding up here.

Suppose we have a rape victim who says this. Then, regarding the time she was raped, she would prefer it if she had died instead.

But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now. But she doesn't - she chooses to keep living instead. So it seems that her revealed preference is that she actually doesn't want to have died back then, because she rejects the necessary consequences of that choice.

I certainly believe there are fates worse than death. But I also think that in the majority of cases where people say "rape is worse than death", it's just hyperbolic social signalling rather than a genuinely held conviction.

Suppose we have a rape victim who says this. Then, regarding the time she was raped, she would prefer it if she had died instead. But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now. But she doesn't - she chooses to keep living instead. So it seems that her revealed preference is that she actually doesn't want to have died back then, because she rejects the necessary consequences of that choice.

You're missing something. There are three separate states being talked about here.

(1) the anguish of mentally-anticipating the pain of being raped.

(2) the in-the-moment physical experience of being raped.

(3) the mental anguish experienced in the wake of being raped, through recollections, PTSD, etc.

Each of these three is a separate experience, all tied to the concept of "being raped." A rape victim who says they wish the had died instead of being raped may well be saying that, now knowing what (2) and (3) are like, she would have preferred to never go through them and die instead without having had those experiences. But, having gone through them, dying now would not retroactively alleviate the anguish that has been already experienced.

But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now.

Regardless of whether your conclusion is right, it doesn't follow from this argument. Even to someone for whom rape is worse than death, rape+death can be (and likely is) still worse than rape-without-death.

hyperbolic social signalling

I want to believe this, but I didn't even expect the "bear" answer to be popular in the context of signalling, so I'm clearly not modeling people correctly ... if there are people who would answer "bear" as some weird rhetorical point, couldn't there be people who would decide "bear" in real life too? I'm imagining a woman hiking alone in a canyon (unprepared for any sort of combat), when a male hiker catching up to her shouts that the park rangers got a report of a bear further down the trail ... but I'm trying to imagine the woman then breaking into a run away from the man and toward the bear, and I just can't seem to do it, not without adding a bunch of assumptions that weren't in the viral question.

I think it's pretty difficult to construct a realistic hypothetical on which to test intuitions. Yours doesn't really work because the woman is choosing between an actual man and a report of a bear (by the man), which is a very different comparison.

That's a very good point ... but doesn't that flaw make my man-vs-potential-bear scenario as favorable as possible toward not choosing "man"? If we imagine instead that our hiker first saw the bear herself and turned around, and then encountered a man in between her and the trailhead, it feels even wilder to imagine her turning around a second time and taking her chances with the actual-bear after all.

that flaw make my man-vs-potential-bear scenario as favorable as possible toward not choosing "man"

Yes, that was my concern, I can definitely imagine a woman coming to the conclusion that a man making that claim was trying to trick her and steering clear. But I think your updated hypothetical is better, and I agree that very few if any would run towards the bear. A sight of an actual bear would act on someone at an instinctual level in a way that the word "bear" in a Twitter poll would not.

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