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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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ideological schizophrenia within Feminism

I think it's better understood as "the Junior Anti-Sex League wearing a rotting skinsuit of sex positivity", which is why feminism for the last 10+ years has been very concerned with promoting everything-but-straight-sex.

The problem with doing that is that eventually, you run out of road and have to get more extreme to still be considered sex-positive, which is why they've pivoted to things like valorizing the castrated (i.e. transgenderism) and ensuring that, provided you pass a paper bag test, the age of consent does not apply to you.

Was Sex Positivity ever actually workable, or did culture war dynamics aid in sweeping its contradictions under the carpet for a decade or two? "Skinsuit" implies that there was something alive and worthwhile inside that skin in the first place. Does it seem to you that this was the case?

It seems to me that Horny Liberalism was never actually going to work long-term. Sex is not, in fact, harmless fun; it simply has too many consequences, physical and psychological, for it to be treated as such. Those consequences can be hidden for a time, but they build up and sooner or later they demand a reckoning. For that matter, it seems likely to me that the same is true for LGBTQ2A+; the reckoning will come, sooner or later.

Was Sex Positivity ever actually workable, or did culture war dynamics aid in sweeping its contradictions under the carpet for a decade or two?

The latter. It "worked" for a small group of elite men, who could use their celebrity star power to reel in an endless series of naive young women (or teenagers), bang them, and cast them aside. Their wealth and social status shields them from most of the worst consequences. Huge boost for them over the days of Victorian England, when even a celebrity aristocrat like Lord Byron faced the risk of a lynch mob from his scandalous actions.

But its not going to work- it cant work- for the average male. There's not enough women to go around for wvery guy to get groupies, and women aren't going to be attracted to the average guy compared to the celebrities she sees on TV. The women who do sleep with those celebrities often end up psychologally scarred from the encounter. Or in the extreme case, trafficked to Epstein's island or something similiar.

[I hope this is at least somehow coherent. If I had more time I'd compose a post that has more of a condensed point.]

Sex is not, in fact, harmless fun; it simply has too many consequences, physical and psychological, for it to be treated as such.

Sex is harmless fun so long as you're a man liberal. Most people are not men liberal, a lot of people resent the fact they're not men liberal, and the gender role of men social role of liberals is to make devotion to them not degrading (a role in which they have failed as is in their nature to do, and something that "well, the man brings home so much money that I can deal with the occasional mistress standards of living are increasing so quickly that even spaces free of all that liberalism are enhanced by accepting that the sanctity of the commons is diminished by their presence").

The Sexual Revolution made it possible for a lot of women to enjoy being men liberals too. Technology and antibiotics brought the risks of straight sex to an all-time low; so women on the margins (with a slightly higher risk tolerance) could reasonably expect to get more action without getting knocked up. Which is good [citation needed]. It helped marriages in all sorts of ways, too; you could actually have a healthy marital sex life without having so many children that you couldn't fit them all in the station wagon.

And then the '80s came and the places you could meet people all died. And a turbo-STD came out as a death sentence. And the economic golden age ended, so the social stakes went higher (to the point where the non-liberals were once again empowered to whip out their purity boners and fuck up everything). In short, sexual liberalism stopped being affordable; it recovered slightly in the '90s and '00s only to take a dive [suspiciously coincident with the rise of ZIRP economics, now that I think about it].

Do I think it was worthwhile to encourage high-value transgender liberated people (as in, people who are liberals inside but unable to come out of the closet for various sociopolitical/socioeconomic reasons)? Yes, because I think that when people who can do that get to do that, it makes them happier and thus more productive (and considering the people who can do that tend to be of high value more generally- one only need look at how many furries in tech there are- keeping them happy has far more value than keeping an angry wokescold happy and therefore that wokescold should be oppressed by having to suffer the existence of furries). People who are able to act like children/liberals/mistake theorists all day are more innovative than those who have to act as adults/in self-defense/conflict theory; that's why tech startups outcompete large firms. And so on. (If men must toil, they might as well maximize return on investment while they're at it.)

[I do admit this is more 'feelings' than anything else; I haven't measured workplace productivity across free and non-free societies and I'm not even sure you can given different starting conditions. I have noticed that most people who migrate from less liberal nations to more liberal ones tend to be unusually productive, though.]

So yeah, I think there is value in having less friction in sexual relationships (because the negative consequences are less salient, you can disengage from a relationship that goes south much easier), and the need to fuck defensively is net-negative for the enrichment of a class of person who does not actually create anything (while they do tend to spawn 200 pounds of cat food upon death that's not intentional on their part). Especially if we can encourage the people who eventually might end up in the unproductive class to not even consider it.

For that matter, it seems likely to me that the same is true for LGBTQ2A+

I'm honestly not sure how their position follows. I think that the only thing that's going to do them in is some unforseen upheaval that puts them in the same company as the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts (i.e. they fall out of favor with old women while old women are in power), and because they're an excuse for old women to wield power through weaponized tolerance, well...

sweeping its contradictions under the carpet

I think the problem with liberalism/childishness is that it's an emergent property of a society (enabled by its wealth) and not a coherent means of political organization (mainly because once they can organize they're too busy enjoying the fruits to plan long-term). If it was able to do this, it wouldn't be liberal, it would be something else.

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