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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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‘Preaches virtue in public but realises they can get away with vice privately’ is pretty much the classic definition of hypocrisy though.

I do question how much of this is 'intentional' predatory behavior where they disguise their intent in order to lure young women in by appearing 'safe' to be around and able to offer sexual mentorship, vs. just an incidental outcome of modern social mores contradicting more basic instinctual drives.

From an external perspective those are pretty much the same thing. I think you’re right in at least some cases, but that sounds awfully like those men are deluding themselves into believing what’s convenient to believe at any given moment.

If they do it once and are horrified that they fell to temptation, okay. But otherwise they implicitly know that what they say about how men and women interact is a lie, and they are choosing not to think about it too hard, all the while coming down heavily on other men.

I think one can end up constructing a mostly cohesive internal narrative where the context of what they're preaching as social norms and the context of what you're doing in individual interaction can be considered different enough that there's no actual contradiction of words and behavior.

For a very rough example, you can imagine someone who is a staunch anti-gambling advocate, campaigns hard to keep gambling and similar vices out of their town and state, to keep kids from engaging in gambling activities, etc. And yet takes their yearly trip to Vegas and goes on a moderate gambling spree while there, and justifies in on the idea that it's fine to do gambling when you go to Las Vegas but you are still against its spread and consider it, overall, a social ill.

Its worth noting that the reason the problem exists is because women often won't be publicly honest about what they actually find attractive and actually want from males when interacting with them.

Its the collision of female-driven social standards with the female-driven desire to get high status males to give them attention. Hard to satisfy both at once, where attractive males give attention to women but only within the (boring) socially permissible ways.

Okay, that's oversimplifying, but if you frame it like that, a famous man who is preaching the female-preferred social standards AND engaging in the female-preferred behaviors when dealing with a romantic partner is still being consistent as to the female perspective.

because women often won't be publicly honest about what they actually find attractive and actually want from males when interacting with them.

But if that's true, and our hypothetical feminist knows it's true, then he has to choose between being honest vs. being a black-and-white 'if she doesn't say yes, she's saying no' feminist. If you believe that women sometimes want men to be a little pushy, you cannot reasonably call for men to be punished for trying it on with a girl they legitimately think is into them. In practice, these people are hypocrites. They act as if the world is one way in public, they act entirely differently in private, and they profit.

a famous man who is preaching the female-preferred social standards AND engaging in the female-preferred behaviors when dealing with a romantic partner is still being consistent as to the female perspective.

If you're intending this as an explanation for why a woman being pursued by a feminist celebrity doesn't smell a rat, fair enough. You may well be right. But the man is still a lying hypocrite.