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If you put a 60-year-old man in the room with an attractive 20-year-old woman, the one with all the power is the young woman. She possesses a quality that motivates every male mammal, sexual charm. Given her age, she has greater cognitive flexibility, resilience, and mate choice. The old male is motivated by something so deep in his nature that it evolved before humanity even walked the earth. But the young woman is motivated by vanity, greed, fame, and self-image. By any serious consideration, the young woman has power over the old man. And her motivations are less excusable as they are conscious and vain. The male motivation exists outside the plane of morality, which is why history’s moral teachers do not say “don’t seduce” but “stay away from any context in which you could seduce or be seduced”. That’s the lever of moral control here, well before you are lead into temptation. (Islam is right about women?)
No one in history really conceived of a level of self-control that would permit you to be alone with an attractive young woman for an extended period of time. The most well-trained monk was still barred from being alone with a nun. The absurdity today stems from the typical mind fallacy. Unhealthy men whose sexual drives are damaged or reduced imbue their lack of vigor onto vigorous men. Men with vitality are often successful and successful men often have vitality. So the lacking man mistakes his impotency for self-control, when in fact he experiences 10% of the impulse that the healthy man experiences. It’s like a starved man and a hungry man deliberating cannibalism — it’s no virtue to abstain from the flesh when you’re merely hungry. So we aren’t criticizing immorality here, we are criticizing health and nature, and in an especially dumb and gross way.
The best solution to solve the social neuroticism: you can no longer accuse a man of rape if you willingly spend time with him alone. This solves a vast amount of rape and the only drawback is that a woman can no longer pretend to have a platonic friendship with a “guy friend”.
I was with you for the power analysis but this is just unhinged. It's not that hard not to rape a woman, even if you are alone with her and you have a lot of vitality.
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Your solution seems utterly incompatible with the way of life of most societies.
Perhaps you think a strong gender segregation like traditional Islam has would be enough to solve the scenario of your uncontrollable men, but it is not.
Even in traditional Islamic countries, I think there is a presumption that men can constrain themselves from rape in some contexts. A man might trust his brother to chaperone his wife without raping her, or his son to chaperone his daughter.
Of course, if we were to excuse rapes of women in voluntary 1-vs-1 situations because real men don't have self-control, why should we stop there? What about chance encounters, they might not be willing, but at least negligent? If we blame women for getting into situations where they are get violently overpowered, should we not also blame them for entrusting themselves to a chaperone who gets overpowered by some rapist? And if you can't trust one man not to rape one woman, why should you be able to trust n men to not coordinate to rape k women?
Also why should only heterosexual rapists get a pass when gay men can get just as horny? The logical conclusion would be that in any gathering, whatever subset of people can violently overpower the others gets to do as they please.
Luckily, your 'vigorous men' who are so high-T that they can not control their impulse to rape whenever a plausible opportunity arises are exceedingly rare today. Even in ancient societies, where being rapey was an adaptive trait, there was doubtlessly a selection for men who were might rape enemy civilians in wartime or slaves, but had enough restraint to not rape their chieftains daughter or a temple virgin.
Today, millions of women and men encounter each other as strangers 1-vs-1 in taxis, while jogging and in countless other settings many million times a day. Almost none of these encounters lead to rape. Empirically, this puts sharp limits on the prevalence of your 'vigorous men' who would rape at every opportunity in the wider world, outside of monasteries and prisons.
Men can resist raping. A woman’s discomfort or scream or admonition or disgust (or any other clear biological signal of disinterest) is an immediate turn off to a normal human male. What is unlikely is if they can resist seducing, which can become rape at the whim of a woman because most seduction does not involve affirmative consent. My rule doesn’t give men a pass to rape; after all, a lot of men are trustworthy. But it establishes a right to seduce (attempt), and it requires women to check who they spend time with alone. We can call it the “Baby it’s cold outside” law. Or the “black and white” law, a play on the fact that so many old black and white movies illustrate seduction with zero consent. The important thing is that it deletes immediately this whole neurotic grey area where a man is either icky or a rapist for seducing a woman in a context with no evidence. It does this by putting the responsibility on women to consider who they spend time with alone.
A woman’s bother-in-law is not considered eligible mahram in traditional Islam, so a woman cannot spend time alone with her husband’s brother. (I must once again sincerely ask: is Islam right about women?)
For chance public encounters, yeah, people don’t even assume their wives and girlfriends outside, so that’s obviously not an issue.
Okay, this seems more reasonable.
But it is also not very different from how rape laws used to work in western society.
Basically, the central rape case (not involving drugs) would be "he said, she said". Because criminal law operates on the principle "in dubio pro reo", the testimony of the victim is probably not to secure a conviction on its own. Audio or video evidence, third party testimony or physical marks of a struggle can all tip that balance, of course.
Every day, countless men try to seduce women. Most of the time, the woman in question makes it clear that they are not interested, escalating appropriately until he gets the message. Sometimes, she fails to do so, and sometimes he does not take no for an answer, which are the cases where rape cases stem from. And sometimes she might actually consent.
Unlike traditional Islam, I have no problem with (explicitly or otherwise) consenting adults having sex. Nor do I model the median adult woman as being a sex-crazed maniac who loses all her agency and will drop her pants the moment some stranger touches her arm.
As a straight guy, the thought "what if some gay person manages to seduce me and assfucks me, I better keep away from seductive (but non-rapey) gay men just to be sure" had not even occurred to me, because I am sure I would make my displeasure known at any attempt.
Sometimes, some people might pre-commit to not undertake some action, and intentionally avoid situations which would weaken their committment. If you want to stay sober, it is probably not a good idea to go to a party with a lot of booze. If you want not to have sex with a person X to whom you are mutually attracted, it is probably not a good idea to visit them to watch a romantic comedy. But again, the 'bad' outcome you want to avoid is a matter of personal preference, not criminal law.
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In Islam, you are only supposed to trust her immediate blood-relations; a woman's father, brothers, and sons can all be safely assumed to not want to fuck her, nor is she likely to want to fuck them. Brothers-in-law are not included, for good reason; there is no biological reason stopping your brother from having sex with your wife, so you don't even give them the chance. Cousins are right out, given that they are permissible marriage partners.
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It's fascinating to me that you interpret anything a man might do as merely obeying ancient biological imperatives over which he has no control, while anything a woman might do is basically women being evil whores with full awareness and control over what they're doing.
Yeah, (straight) men find young women hot and fuckable, and for as long as there has been civilization (and contrary to what some Bronze Age Gor fetishists), even in the most restrictive societies where women were basically chattel (which was not, in fact, most of them), there was still some expectation that men can control wanting to fuck any young woman they can get their hands on, even if she doesn't happen to be property of the king.
Really now.
Male motivation does not exist "outside the plane of morality." Morality is what you use to govern yourself and how you act on your motivations.
I am very confident that I could spend any amount of time alone with an attractive young woman and still not try to fuck her. And yes, I am a straight male with a normal, healthy sex drive.
I mean, if you're talking about "literally the last people on Earth stranded on a desert island" or "trapped in a rocket ship hurtling off into the void forever".... well, maybe I'd at least make a play, but I remain confident that if she said no, I could avoid, you know, becoming a rapist.
Or you could treat men as moral agents.
A man can be reasonably expected to be up to no good towards any woman not outside of his immediate family, and indeed that is the norm everywhere in the world except in the West and very recently. Both men, young and old, who really should know better have again and again been tripped up by biological impulse. Indeed, feminism of a certain wave tarnishes the entire sex as morally culpable.
Because most men can be manipulated with sex, women who do so are rightfully shamed. Because it is a obvious weakness that takes incredible reserves of willpower and fortitude to resist, but trivially little effort to tempt. You say 'be moral' as if it is a meaningful statement. But even with direct financial and reputational incentives to not fool around, men do it anyway. You are ignoring the biological reality of the procreative urge.
Does the pithy dismissal 'do better?' form on your lips?
Testosterone is one hell of a drug. Traditional societies know this as a truth of which our modern ones fervently deny. Don't be alone with strange men! Don't even create the temptation! Because the inevitable will happen, no matter how moral they are. Don't put your hand on the stove. Don't put your dick into an hole smaller than its circumference. Obvious best practice to avoid harm, ignored for egalitarianism. Well, in this case, our ancestors really did know better. They knew better than to moralize the whole business and focused on outcomes.
If you do not believe you are capable of controlling yourself, I will not argue with you. But you should not typical-mind yourself into believing that no man can resist fucking a woman if he thinks he can get away with it. If this were true, there would be almost zero fidelitous married men in the modern age, and rape would be much more common than it is.
We are subject to many primal urges. Greed, lust, gluttony, pride, etc. Maybe lust is the strongest, I don't know, but yes, "be moral" is actually the response to those asking "How can you expect me to resist temptation?" "Lock the temptation away and keep it tightly controlled" is not.
Yes, men can be manipulated with sex, and women can be manipulated with promises and threats, and I agree that the current state of affairs (driven heavily by modern feminism) is not healthy, but "retvrn to treating women as property" is immoral, impractical, and frankly, ahistorical.
You misunderstand me.
In many workplaces, there are requirements to wear steel-toed shoes to prevent crush injuries to the toes. Not because there is an inherent moral judgement involved, or that we are all clumsy idiots, but that we are obliged to laws of nature that do not care for our reasons or intentions at all.
If people didn't have accidents, then we wouldn't need PPE. To extend this analogy, if all men were gentlemen and kept their marriage vows, we wouldn't need laws and customs to prevent rape. I am of an ideology that reasonable concessions for safety can be made at the price of liberty. If, indeed, a woman can go into the public space with the reasonable expectation that she not compromise herself then we can take her at her word when she claims that she has an unwanted suitor.
I don't think I do. You think "I couldn't help banging a pretty young girl/pressuring her into having sex with me" is equivalent to "I couldn't prevent something from falling on my head."
Your behavior, unlike gravity, is something over which you have control. Traditionally, we punish people who are unable to control themselves, we do not blame whatever triggered their lack of control.
And if no one was violent or greedy, we wouldn't need laws against assault, murder, theft, etc.
Sure. Most people believe that, but where we set that on the sliding scale between "absolute freedom" and "absolute safety" is pretty important.
And here is the sticking point. What, to you, is a "reasonable expectation that she not compromise herself"? What is "compromising herself"? Showing too much skin? Smiling? Appearing in public without a male chaperone? Voluntarily entering a room alone with a man (which, according to others in this thread, means he should thereupon have the legal right to rape her)?
Even back in Ye Good Old Days of whichever century you think was the height of sexual propriety, the rules for a woman in, say *Victorian England were quite different from the rules for a woman in, say, modern Afghanistan, and what with the "Islam is right about women" memes I am not encouraged that you want to place essentially all responsibility on women to not tempt men.
* Fun fact, the Victorians were actually stricter than previous generations. Even the Regency era, about which Jane Austen wrote, allowed women much more freedom to socialize and appear in public, hence several of her novels showing her heroines going to parties and thus being placed in compromising situations. Yet even writing in the 19th century, Jane Austen, hardly a modern feminist, was able to view both men and women as having both agency and responsibility with more nuance than our "Make women property" advocates seem to.
You don't need to go back to the Victorian era. You can talk to people who live in your country right now as to functioning rules of propriety. (The Pence rule is quite illustrative.) It is a reciprocal responsibility. Is it prudish? Is it backwards? Perhaps. But compared to the current state of being, which you recommend assigning moral valence and blame, which has brought about untold chaos and perhaps the permanent alienation of the sexes from one another, it is indeed perferrable, less our societies reap the fate of South Korea and the country dies out in three generations.
I prefer axiomatic rules that do not assign culpability or blame rather than wading into the hazy morass of he said, she said. Perhaps that's the autism speaking. Let it be stated this way. Rather than women being property of paterfamilias, she is keenly aware of the possession of her chastity and virtue is indeed a valuable thing that she injures at her own peril. And we have a word for a man who would do her harm, we call them cads, decievers, rapists.
And if she decides to associate with disreputable men, she cannot cry foul that she was taken advantage of. She knew perfectly what she was in for! You, who put so much value into judging men morally, don't say anything about this particular stained flower of Gaiman: who willingly had an affair with a married man. What do you make of her morals, who made herself a slave of this celebrity sex pest?
If she is a feminist, she should own up to her own actions, and if she is not, she ruined herself of her own volition, against the advice of men who actually care for her. As much as you dislike this worldview, it makes sense and is internally consistant. I am completely uninterested in adjudicating individual blame and responsibility because I have no need to. Both of them are in the wrong, and thusly the matters is beneath public interest.
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This is complete bullshit. While "The most well-trained monk was still barred from being alone with a nun." type of rules exist because people designing such institution have seen fit to avoid obvious temptations, this temptations can be in fact resisted.
Are you serious? This rule as you propose is blatantly idiotic, starting from fact that fathers occasionally have daughters.
But yes, also in cases you likely intended: yes, you can stay with attractive girl, alone, and do not rape her. I have honestly no idea why you think it is impossible.
Outside the church it was also a rule that young people of separate genders do not spend time alone, so the idea was not limited to that institution. Re: the church, if monks believed that they could overcome temptation, surely “avoid obvious temptation” would no longer be necessary? In any case, I think this a typical mind problem. And the problem is exacerbated as lifestyle differences and health increase between elite men and the rest. I am not like Neil Gaiman or Donald Trump but I would hazard a guess that their lifestyle is higher testosterone than the typical Twitter feminist pundit. Socially dominant people have higher testosterone, they are healthier, they are probably less likely to use pornography, they are preselected to ruthlessly pursue social rewards (including women — especially women). I think it’s impossible to conclude it can be resisted unless you’ve been there, and our ancestors who have been there and done that seem to believe it can’t be resisted — hence rules. I can imagine resisting from the comfort of my desk right now but that’s just that, imagining. I am not a tired Neil Straightman returning home from a stressful interview to find a nanny in my bath begging to be spanked (per texts). I can easily imagine that being irresistible and I have a third of their vitality, sorry.
This isn’t remotely similar, humans also evolve to not find their kin attractive. I think through scent? But yeah, just don’t pull a Woody Allen. Or an Errol Musk.
What is your explanation for masturbation being taboo for most of history instead of being considered a mildly effective release valve for good Christian men who don't want to accidentally sin? After all, many observe the correlation between the sexlessness of our society and the rise of habitual porn use.
What it looks like to me is that a significant portion of "high testosterone man literally cannot resist the temptation of pussy" is male status propaganda. It's not that a powerful man alone with a woman (or a less powerful man alone with a low-status woman) fucked her because he thought/knew he could escape consequences, it's that he couldn't resist because he's just so vital. It's not that a single man wouldn't masturbate because it was low status to do something a man with pussy on tap wouldn't have to do, it's that he was too high T for it to work. And so on.
I agree that between a 60 year old man and a 20 year old woman, she has leverage. Not mind control. "He literally could not resist his ancient instincts" is fake, it's just that resisting ancient instincts is very hard and most men don't consciously want to, in a situation where they can be indulged.
I know that in the Catholic tradition, masturbation was seen as a “worse” sin than going to a prostitute because a prostitute was closer to what God intended than masturbation (which lacked the woman part of sex). Aquinas and Augustine defended the legality of prostitution because without it lust would topple society. I know the Taoists believed that if you masturbated you lost vital energy, and so did the Victorians. Not sure about other cultures.
So that’s why it was seen as wrong to masturbate. But did you mean, “why didn’t they become overwhelmed with a desire to masturbate?” Those weren’t pornographied times. You could go months without seeing a woman’s ankles. As for today, I just think high status men have a habit of not masturbating because they are instead fixated on social rewards, like the attention of women, as a primary driver of their elite behavior. If you had two Gaimans and one of them “release valves” himself every night, but the other looks forward to the attention of women acquired through his writings, the latter is going to be be motivated to write harder and faster. So top performing men in a given domain are IMO likely to just not use pornography or masturbate, though I am conjecturing here.
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Monks are expected to believe that they are the worst of sinners and are unusually corruptible as a form of humility. Making rules like this for themselves is thus expected, and does not necessarily mean that the medieval or renaissance church believes men find sexual temptation impossible to resist.
Fine. How about the ever-clairvoyant Saint Bernard, that absolute dog, Dante’s final guide in the highest heaven —
Remember that the Divine Comedy is a piece of fiction written as a political polemic by someone who was famously sexually frustrated. If Twitter existed in 14th century Italy, he would have been relentlessly mocked as an incel (yes, I know he married and had children, but that's not the way he presents himself in his work). I would take Dante's pronouncements on desire and sexual morality with a grain of salt.
I don’t know how many layers of celestial trolling we have ascended, but (1) that’s a real passage by Bernard, (2) I am situating Bernard in his historical significance, being Dante’s final guide, (3) the Comedy being a creative work does not deny its significance but heightens it, (4) the Comedy is considered one of the greatest works of Catholic writing, (5) it was not written as a political polemic, though it includes aspects of polemic, (6) he had children, ergo was not frustrated, (7) you are probably misunderstanding his relationship with a possibly fictitious Beatrice, (8) I do not care if he was a “misogynistic incel” as this would simply place him in even more legendary creative company.
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You are conflating "obvious temptation" with "temptation impossible to resist". It is not the same thing.
And your rule would legalize paedophilia.
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We could achieve much the same effect by simply saying that a man has no legal defense against an allegation of rape if he chose to spend time with the woman alone, but I presume that would not please you in the same way.
The sexual revolution is over, you can’t fuck unlimited numbers of young groupies and not risk getting MeToo’d anymore. Oh well, it’s not an issue that affects 99.9% of not extremely rich or famous men and I don’t consider it a huge tragedy that this deleterious state of affairs is ending.
The historical status quo was that 'she consented' wasn't normally a defense against rape charges- seduction was still a crime. OTOH raping a prostitute wasn't usually a serious crime.
So we see, historically, societies in which spending time alone with women opened you up to legal liabilities, but in which not having had sex with a woman you'd spent time alone with was a defense against accusations and different women were afforded different levels of protection under the law, with virgins given the most protection and prostitutes the least. Fornication was de facto criminalized.
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My rule is preferable because male sexuality is the aggressive risk-taking sexuality. This is evidenced by history and ape studies. Because male sexuality involves more risk-taking, your rule allows women to victimize men by continually inviting men alone who will take the risk. (Men are more likely to meet strange women than vice versa, more likely to swipe on dating apps, etc). My rule makes sense according to human nature: women take less risks and seek for fewer mates and are more cautious, so are less likely to be tricked into being victimized. Your rule gives women even more power, my rule equalizes the power of the genders by requiring the careful gender to expend due care. Ultimately what we want is less total sum victimization and stress. I think every sophisticated civilization from the Middle East to Europe and Asia abided by a rule like this: when determining rape they would consider the conduct of the woman.
Well, inform the millions of years of biological equipment that cause the dominant man to be dominant that it needs to turn off its evolutionary engine. That’s the issue. The sexual instinct is stronger and older than the shame instinct. If you devise an unnatural standard you are going to find a lot of violations to the standard. Yelling and shaming a man for doing what a man is designed to do (procure consent of fertile woman, seduce) is ill-conceived. It just makes everyone more stressed. A simple rule can delete that stress efficiently without burdening the legal system.
Historically seduction of a woman was literally considered a crime, unless she was already the town bicycle. 'She consented' wasn't a defense. Pre-first sexual revolution courting, with the calling cards and chaperones, worked fine before the invention of the telephone.
And today, should "she consented" happens to be an effective defense in a similar case (as pointed out downthread, this is basically the Jian Ghomeshi case all over again), the laws will be changed so that it can't be considered a defense (as they were after his exoneration).
Seems like nothing changed after all.
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Seduction laws were much more specific, no? They were applied in cases of misrepresentation or pregnancy usually
https://time.com/5776805/seduction-law-history/
I agree courting works fine.
So having sex with a virgin was only a crime if you misrepresented your intentions or buttered her up first? This seems like it covers most cases. Certainly most cases in which the man is later accused.
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A rule that stated that a woman who happened to be alone with a man (say because her car broke down and someone stopped to help, or because she was the only customer in a store run by a man) had no recourse if she was raped by him? I’m not aware of that being a common policy in most trad civilizations.
In any case, in the example in the OP, the woman arrived at Gaiman’s house having been hired by his (essentially) wife as a babysitter, only to find he was the only person in the house. I do not sympathize with her and don’t think he’s guilty of a crime, but her mere presence in his home ought hardly to have given him the right to rape her.
And yet monogamy exists and functions, at least mostly and in many cases for many years. Sexual instincts can be tamed by civilization, that is arguably the point. Civilization is about tempering and overcoming the biological imperative, almost any kind of savagery and barbarism can be justified by your logic here. ‘Dominant men’ succeed every day in remaining faithful, it is no impossible expectation to believe they can hold themselves back from fucking groupies. I have seen it done.
“Happened to be alone” is an exceptional case, not a normative case. So such an exceptional case is unique and would need to be considered uniquely. The rule in traditional societies, from what I recall reading, is that no one would believe a woman regarding rape if the woman by her own volition went off to meet a man. I’m not sure what’s up with the specific nanny allegations. According to Twitter the alleged texted him “I think you need to give me a huge spanking very soon. I'm fucking desperate for my master." So there is more to the story than “happened to be alone”. It certainly throws a wench into the allegations.
It only ever functioned when there were strict rules about gender mingling. That’s my point. Does it function well today? I don’t know, divorce stats don’t look good. I know that kings were quite promiscuous in European history, because they had the power to override gender mingling rules.
Hard disagree. But it’s interesting that we may have found a key point of divergence. I think civilization is about orienting, redirecting, confining and filtering our instincts. This is probably not very Christian of me, but I do not actually believe that you can overcome the sexual urge except with limited Herculean cognitive effort. The monks had to keep themselves away from women, after all, and yet even Peter Abelard fell for Heloise. The monks would fast and rejoice in their self-control but really their low caloric intake reduce the sexual drive.
Gates, Musk, Bezos, Trump… I really don’t know. I think the ones who succeed are the ones who eschew any context where temptation may arise.
Too great to ignore, lol
I'm glad you pointed it out; I might had missed it otherwise.
That could be the greatest pun or Freudian slip I've ever seen.
We had “esprit de corpse” crop up here some time ago.
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It would please me fine, but it's notable that attempting to comply with such rules unilaterally has been argued, both by the media, by Blue Tribe social consensus, and even by prominent members of the Motte, to be icky deplorable sexism that should never be tolerated. The reaction to the Pence Rule both in the broader culture and among commenters here was another of the incidents that convinced me that peace between Reds and Blues is impossible.
Pence was attacked for the Pence rule because he was Red, not because of the rule. You could frame the Pence rule in a completely NYT-opinion-column appropriate way and I personally know many libs who follow and extol that rule in their own lives.
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The presumption of innocence favors disqualifying accusations over disqualifying defenses.
Thankfully, nybbs, this pesky but minor issue—if it’s an issue at all—can be easily resolved by simply codifying into law the custom of eschewing presumption of innocence when the accuser or alleged victim is female and the accused is male with regard to any alleged crime in general, legal or social. Well, a white male at least.
I’ll go ahead and close the ticket.
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It’s not disqualifying the defense, it’s invalidating it as conceptually possible and certainly relevant, much in the same way that ‘interference’ with a young woman was once socially unacceptable regardless of what she may or may not have thought about it.
Invalidating it is disqualifying it.
We don't live in that conservative world any more where young women (at least of sufficient social class) are put up on a pedestal for good or for ill. We're not getting it back. If it were to somehow come back it would have to come as a package, including young women being denied (by chaperones, by men, by other women, all endorsed by society) the opportunity to be alone with men. If you want young women to be protected as fragile flowers of feminity, they will also have to accept that the protection will often feel stifling and will absolutely deny them opportunities, freedom, and agency.
This only works until we get outbred and replaced by a more Gnon-compliant civilization, like the Muslims are taking over Europe.
What can't go on forever, won't. One way or the other, women will lose their freedom, because no civilization with free women can reproduce.
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Maybe I'm just outing myself as a sexually enervated low-T guy but I honestly don’t relate to this at all. When young women act flirty with me in any vaguely work-related contexts, I generally find it quite annoying, like they’re trying to trick me into extending professional favours to them. Maybe when I was a horn-dog 20-something I would have reacted differently, but these days the most important women in my life are my wife, mother, and daughter, and I channel my energy into building my assets, progressing my career, and working on our home. Perhaps I just haven’t been tempted very strongly but I remember feeling utter contempt in grad school for the older male professors who were in the thrall of pretty female students and did them favours and I very strongly imprinted on not becoming that sort of guy.
What?! Surely young women would never do that.
Perhaps you should give yourself a little more credit; some of them were/are probably legitimately attracted to you because of the *clutches pearls* power imbalance given you were/are an authority figure. You’re married, even better. Thus, you might be more attractive to young women than you think.
High T and finding young women annoying to deal with are certainly not mutually exclusive. Hence the constant joking (or not-so-joking) remarks by those in online bodybuilding spaces about Upping the Tren until they find men fuckable.
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I don't think you're outing yourself as anything. The premise that sexual urges are just too strong to control is bullshit. Men can, and do, control their sexual desires, even if they are very strong.
This is my experience too, but there's been a lot of discussion lately about typical mind fallacy. Trans people supposedly feel their gender directly, and I have no such experience. I'm not being flippant here, there is some possibility that it's just the case that we're missing out on some kind of widespread experience that many other men have. Like that theory from a while back that bronze aged stories about conversing with gods wasn't metaphor but the actual felt experience of the people involved.
I feel like it depends on the context and how hard they go.
While I really struggle to understand the professors enthralled by light flirting or the guys that did women's homework for barely even that, I do feel like people might not appreciate how hard it can be to say no when you're directly sexually propositioned by someone young and attractive in a context where sex clearly is an option and you're drunk.
It is clearly possible to control these urges but I don't think it's easy. I don't think it's typical minding going on here as much as it's an experience that many people have not had (or only very rarely and not as intensely) and therefore cannot fairly evaluate the difficulty of.
"And you're drunk" is a hell of a caveat. Self-control is strategy. Internal emotional strategy and external material strategy. Self control is about having the experience required to avoid and/or mitigate mind-controlling influences in situations where their effects may be catastrophic.
I don't think this is easy either to be clear. Right Action is teleological. Results oriented. The unwise are always going to make myopic mistakes in the process of learning their lessons, and all new humans start out unwise.
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I think that typical minding is a real thing for sure. The unfortunate problem is, it doesn't tell you much useful in cases like this. Perhaps most men really are possessed of sex drives so strong that it is literally beyond their control, as @coffee_enjoyer claims. On the other hand, perhaps that's just an excuse for bad behavior, as I claim. While both could be true for different individuals, they can't both be true as a rule of thumb for the population.
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