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 -
Quoth the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership:
Is Trump actually going to try to do it? Probably not. If he does, will it actually be upheld? Almost certainly not. But it has been proposed by somebody.
Ok, yes, "somebody" has proposed it. Just not, you know, Trump, or Vance, or any official Republican platform.
Besides, from the context, it sounds like theyre mostly talking about showing trans stuff to kids? I dont think "educators and public librarians" really show a lot of porn. I know the schools have slipped but i dont think its quite that bad yet...
They don't show "a lot" of porn to kids in public schools. But they sometimes show a little. Like in the book Gender Queer which has been "banned" from many school libraries. It is, among other things, a book of gay cartoon porn.
I would reframe the wave of book "bans" as a wave of parents realizing that a bit of cartoon porn has slipped into the school library and asking that their tax dollars and public institutions not be used to distribute these materials to children.
More options
Context Copy link
For some reason I haven't quite been able to fathom, a lot of conservatives consider "exposing kids to transgender ideology" and "sexualising children" to be basically the same thing. This is presumably why they're combined here. But they are clearly hostile to pornography itself as well.
While it's possible to present trans-related issues in a mature-as-in-serious rather than mature-as-in-adult or mature-as-in-Garth-Ennis sense, it's really hard to do so with enough detail to be a meaningful discussion instead of a handful of fuzzy buzzwords.
People like LoTT focus on pieces where there's explicit sex- or sex-like stuff (eg masturbation, performing oral sex on a dildo/prothesis), generally because they are more immediately uncomfortable to viewers, and less charitably in the hope they'll get censored to demonstrate how prurient such pieces are. But it's pretty common to see works that, if not quite so explicit, still delve deep into matters of sex and sexuality, even if they're aimed at early- or mid-teens audiences, or feature primary characters well under 18.
I've pointed to Venus Envy before, as one of the few insights to the trans-internal view of things in 2004-ish, but it's also a webcomic that opens with a 16-year-old's 'tuck' failure, and goes on to upskirt a (cis male) crossdresser of mumblemumble age to point out that he wasn't getting aroused. Serano's Excluded is a well-regarded feminist work in progressive circles, and it also spends a pretty sizable period of time on the "penis issue" of Michigan's Womyn Festival.
That's not a problem specific to trans stuff: I've mentioned Blue Is The Warmest Color before as a work that seems well-regarded and also starts with a 15-year-old lesbian's first sexual relationships, and I've named a few writers before who do excellent furry gay-themed works that are also difficult to discuss publicly because they also include outright porn, come from authors who've written outright porn in the same series, or just involve a lot of sex-related stuff. But despite the gay-themed literature being more fundamentally tied to attraction, it's as common in trans-focused stuff.
The counterargument is that, icky as it might be to adults, (most) teenagers run into this stuff themselves, and in other non-LGBT fiction. Media joking about awkward boners or weird sex toys exist, Catcher in the Rye has a lengthy section with a teenager trying to solicit a prostitute, Pern has its dragon-orgies (and we don't talk about the It novel). "What's the age of the main character in this coming-of-age-story" happens so much because most people don't wait til 18, and while not all of that story has to be about sex, a lot of people for a lot of cultures it is.
The counter-counterargument is that a lot of the socialcons aren't happy to expose younger teens to those works (and don't think it's healthy), either. They did protest American Pie and the entire sex comedy genre, did want steep age requirements for it, and don't particularly like the inclusion of Catcher in the Rye, either. To the extent that they don't care about Pern, it's because they weren't aware of it. They believe, with reason, that even if they try to keep their kids from exposure to this stuff, it is very likely individuals outside of their control will.
((Harder social-cons will argue that trans discussions are necessarily tied to sexual behaviors, either as an axiom or as a way to distinguish from 'simple' crossdress, where LGB works can conceivably treat romance as nothing more than kissing on the cheek (though they often don't like any of those either).))
The underlying theories are more esoteric, and I'm not sure I can give them a full explanation, but:
This is the one that I really don't get.
The irony is, as ex-trans myself I'm strongly-inclined to believe that the conservatives are right about iatrogenic GID and thus about trans-awareness among kids being a catastrophe. I think that argument is strong enough on its own without introducing sexual pearl-clutching - and I'm mostly on team "exposing kids to sex is NBD*; we did it for millennia without issues", so in fact when I'm claiming a disequivalence I'm saying trans-messaging is worse than sexualising kids outside of specific abuse cases.
*Unfortunately, it's pretty well-known by this point that trauma is a self-fulfilling prophecy; if society assumes people will be traumatised by X, they will often be traumatised by feeling abnormal over not being traumatised. The proper place to break that is with society, though.
The reason I think trans-messaging is worse, and [also, to answer your earlier question] why I think it's a way for women to sexually abuse children (mostly boys, but it affects girls too), is that it's an intentional failure to teach constructive sexual behavior for what are ultimately sexist/sexual reasons.
"Men are so evil that to remove their inherent threat to women they should either [become a reasonable approximation of a woman, sexually-speaking] castrate themselves to remove that threat or only focus their sexual energy on men" is what I believe the trans-ally's motte to be, because that is the way feminism-laundered-misandry works. Which is why it's important to start impressing those messages upon kids early- most kids think sex is just fucking gross [right up until they don't] and the youth who have discovered they want it should be selectively denied knowledge of (and discouraged from, even simply by downplaying) healthy straight sex lest they grow up seeking it instead. If you encourage gay sex (and any of the other
I Can't Believe It's Not Pussy"healthier alternatives") the hope is that you get less demand for straight sex, so women are "forced" to have it less and can get a better deal for the sex they choose to have.The obvious problem with this is that you've both broken down the pipeline to turn boys into the kinds of men the average woman will actually like, and made it so that they don't exhibit the characteristics that they want. Many women want to be the only woman in the relationship (and so do many men) to the point you might as well consider someone who doesn't half-trans anyway (a label they will not be particularly happy with for other reasons but which describes their outlooks, especially on sex and gender roles, quite accurately).
The problem with misandrist-feminist thought is that it ignores the fact that sex is frequently constructive, and everyone who has good sex will point this out, even those who were legal-fiction-raped (exhibit A: '70s-'80s band groupies). And if you want to have constructive sex the sexes need to be working correctly and how much of a big deal the average person thinks sex even is needs to be correctly calibrated (just as it was in the pre-AIDS time; and I'd argue the reason people could even feasibly call sex child-friendly at that time)- so men need space to develop as men and not constantly be told they're defective women (which is what trans ideology as a logical outgrowth of misandry-feminism is designed to do), and as a second-order consequence half-trans women need to not constantly be told they're defective men ("tomboy erasure").
And since what you should be traumatized by is itself an Overton Window thing, you can conveniently become retroactively traumatized years later, especially if that trauma is politically convenient.
I had a misandrist mother, and the dysphoria started going away shortly after I ran away from her. Trust me, you don't need to sell me on misandrist abuse being terrible.
But you're really stretching the definition of "sexual" abuse here. Sexist, yes, obviously, but you really have to squint to get to sexual.
A lack of active and/or claimed sexual intent doesn't mean it isn't sexual abuse.
Then again, I do agree that "sexual abuse" is not something that has a particularly coherent definition (since most of the time the definition is weaponized; if sex isn't special, rape is neither meaningfully nor mechanically distinct from other kinds of battery).
So I'm willing to concede it's mostly just bog-standard emotional abuse, but then, why are we permitting that on an industrial scale again?
Preaching to the choir, lad. As I said upthread, I think this kind of poison is worse than showing kids porn (physical molestation is more complicated because there are staggeringly-huge variations in child outcomes from that). I just like to keep definitions straight, and to not have weird buckets that contain things with little relation to one another.
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
Huh. I never knew I was a hard socon, because that seems obvious on the level of water being wet.
The path of development that socons prefer being the latter. I don't think it's difficult to unpack why- you just have to invert one of the things you said.
Axiom 0: Socon texts (come to think of it, are there any non-Christian socons?) tend to be pretty clear that most deviant sexual behavior is both "natural" and more attractive than non-deviant behavior on its face, to the point where it's more strict on restricting what everyone else considers non-deviant behavior (i.e. Catholics and contraception). If it wasn't, not only would there not be warnings about it, but nobody would do anything else.
Axiom 1: Men and women are different and play different social roles; men are designed and suited to be at the head of a household and women are not.
All of their viewpoints are downstream from this and emerge as you combine other starting conditions.
If adults [pick your favorite definition, though socons naturally prefer the legal one] can barely handle sex, obviously it's going to fuck up and confuse someone who isn't an adult even harder- "traumatized" is useful language to describe this. As a steelman, see the 5th and 6th paragraph of this; a socon would say that clearly, seeing the porn derailed his expression of his natural social role and his sexual interests, and I'm not even sure I disagree with that
Suppression of expressions of deviant sexual behavior will encourage more non-deviant outcomes and push the marginal case over the edge (all experimentation is tempting you slide back towards that local maximum, and "normalization" is doing the equivalent of putting a slide on a slippery slope- just like it is for everyone else, kissing is less bad than sex, but it's still bad if it occurs homo-sexually because [see axiom 0])
Age-gating is the compromise position if they can't ban it outright- "train up a child the way he should go", and all that- and there are ultimately practical limits to what you can and cannot prevent your adult-aged child from doing (but that's what social pressure, and making that age-gate as high as is practical, are for; those trying to bring the age-gate down- the groomers- are a problem because, among other things, they're chipping away at that compromise)
Neither can the socons, who will say it's "just the way it is". The socons that can explain it are by definition not socons.
I think so, although it probably requires a broader definition of socon than Christians would often use. There's a lot of Indian conservative culture that, while not perfectly overlapping for what it things the Golden Path is, still shares a large agreement on what the common 'degenerate' forms are. Sikh religious doctrine actually have more overlap than most people expect, modulo the underpants, to the point where a lot of Westerners flinch pretty hard when finding out. And Islam and Mormon (though Mormons consider themselves Christian) groups have their own versions.
This varies a bit depending on who you're talking with and what 'deviant' behavior. Monogamy (and avoiding sex before marriage) is one thing that clearly follows the path you line out. On the other hand, condoms are, rather infamously, something very few people develop kinks for (and when they do, it's often in contexts Catholics wouldn't want anyway) or enjoy. No matter how the longer-term personal benefits, there's a lot of reason that there's so much 'wrap it up' encouragement. Religious takes on male homosexuality are closer to your position, but Borderer views often devolve into it being at best easy (uh, for the top), but not particularly attractive or desirable except in the no-other-port-in-a-storm-but-a-goat sorta way, and there's a small faction of often-agnostic or atheist socons that give very sad tales about how porn caused them to downslide from vanilla straight sex into a series of perversion they'd never had even glimpsed at years before. And very few people get accidentally slide into a dress, makeup, and set of high heels without some external examples beforehand, or into a fursuit.
But I do admit these are just difference in framing: the line between superstimulus and temptation is a matter of view. Nobody likes condoms, but they like being pregnant or paying child support even less; as a bi furry I'll absolutely say that there's a lot of surprisingly benefits to both.
It's not so much "having a kink for condoms" and more "condoms enable you to have consequence-free sex which is bad because
something something natural lawyou might discover that consequence-free sex means the relationship with your spouse is dominated by sex for the sake of sex than for other more productive reasons".This isn't really a position I hold natively; my views on sex/uality are a lot simpler than average (since they kind of avoid the question entirely), especially because...
...being one of those people gives some [from what I can tell] unique advantages for introspection about those sorts of things. (Communicating that introspection effectively is an entirely different story, though.)
Fair, and sorry for wrongly attaching the position to you.
To be fair, I did successfully hold that position for many years until I fully realized (or rather, had it pointed out to me) that I was, in fact, faking it.
(Which is kind of the problem when I simulate the standard traditionalist or progressive viewpoints, because to re-derive them I have to start with "first, assume self-interest, then" in places it's not "supposed" to belong.)
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
Why they do it, and why it doesn't work.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, it reads exactly like the stock Boomer-trad (or progressive) complaints about it. Narcissism of small differences may be viewed by replacing 'transgender ideology' with 'violence towards women' in the first sentence.
It's a general loser of a proposition and 20th century anti-porn views/laws (including "just restrict the ages") are likely to lose Republicans more male voters than an ad by the other side that calls them creeps will (since all men have heard that one before and have slowly figured out they should ignore that particular complaint).
This is only half true with the shitty-Tumblr-tier picture books, the occasional novel that has a sex scene in it, and teachers being in such a rush to get to proselytizing the virtues of gay sex that they forget the overwhelming majority of second grade boys aren't generally in much of a hurry to try this for reasons that are obvious to anyone who remembers second grade (many, I believe, forget on purpose).
There really isn't a positive vision of dealing with the facts on the ground here; porn is a tool like anything else and it's not going back in the box, so you either evolve a strategy to deal with it or you lose. (Maybe instead of complaining constantly about "but for some reason men want to choke or facial their girlfriends the first time" you develop some messaging to point out that sex is give/take like everything else so that young adults are prepared to have better sex and don't have to pile on so many stakes they put off trying to engage with the opposite sex in a romantic fashion long enough that they become content never having tried? Of course, you also have to not hate the concept of young adults having sex to do that, and you can't be a traditionalist or progressive without hating young adults and sex [both will claim "protection of women and children" as an excuse to hate sex- traditionalists hate it when a young men has sex with a woman they feel should have been theirs, progressives hate it when a young women has sex with a man they feel should have been theirs] so it's definitely too much to ask of them.)
This is an absurd misrepresentation of traditionalist views. Trads are perfectly fine with young adults having sex; we just want them to do it inside of marriage.
From "Sexual Principles" by Free Northerner:
And from "In Support of Early Marriage: Why I Hope Our Daughters Will Be Teen-Aged Brides" by Sunshine Mary:
The unrealistic notion of practicing abstinence through high school, college, and beyond is an idea emblematic of boomer cuckservativism, not traditionalism in any meaningful sense.
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, I suppose it depends on what counts as "traditionalist". You don't have to go back all that far to get to "marriage at 12, please fuck a lot so I can have grandkids".
I'm guessing that this is hyperbole but I'm pretty sure that at least in European societies marriage that young was never very common outside royalty/upper nobility (and usually wasn't consummated until later even in those cases).
Marriage at 16-18, on the other hand, is historically pretty common (though not universal).
Very common, perhaps not, but apparently it took until 1753 for Britain to ban marriages at 14 (boys)/12 (girls) without parental consent, and 1929 to raise the age to 16 unconditionally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, but most of that is out of living memory now (and the edgy people who think we should return to marrying that young tend to be… unusual, to put it politely).
As for me, I see traditionalists as a cluster of people who believe “playing the field is bad and virginity is good because reasons” simply through observing religious Boomers and older.
I couldn't call myself a traditionalist, but isn't the general line that "playing the field is good and virginity is good"? Then the reasons for the former and their implications toward the latter practically name themselves. Date a lot of people before "going steady", and with a little luck you'll probably learn a lot you didn't know about relationships and about your preferences and about how your available choices mesh or don't mesh with you, and hopefully you'll then find a good match to investigate further. Date-and-have-sex-with a lot of people in a world which predates good contraception and antibiotics, and you're basically inviting a plague upon your people, whether because God or just because harsh-economics and STD epidemiology. The reliance upon God for traditionalism today is just because that's the strongest argument left, in a time when "harsh economics" just means that DoorDash is expensive and when even the uncurable STDs are very treatable.
More options
Context Copy link
And to put it impolitely?
Impolitely:
I was asking @ThisIsSin specifically because I didn't want to unload unnecessarily. Principle of Charity, and all that.
I'm less invested in marriage age, but I'm an advocate for dropping the AoC to 13 or 14, and I was considering pointing out that a) there are reasons for wanting this other than "personally wanting to fuck 14-year-olds" (most notably that an AoC after teens start wanting sex incentivises teens to lie about their age in order to trick adults into statutory rape, which is a giant can of worms), b) while some 12-year-olds are prepubescent, early teens are almost always postpubescent and being attracted to them is not actually paedophilia.
Another reason is that teen sex sometimes leads to teen pregnancy, and it's kind of tough for the father to stick around and help the mother if their marriage is illegal and he's going to be arrested. There's a part in Vance's book where he says that his grandparents were 13 and 16 respectively when she first got pregnant, so they had to leave town and lie about her age on the hospital birth certificate to keep him out of jail.
More options
Context Copy link
The people who tend to bring it up every time seem to be more interested in who it lets them take to bed than actually making things better for the average youth. Even if they write books about it, that always seems to leak in somehow.
And yeah, I think one of the large problems with AoC laws as-is are that they don't deal with the ways in which women sexually abuse youth (to the point where they are not-infrequently used to perpetrate that abuse, since they also cover things like having nude selfies of yourself) while at the same time allowing us to pat ourselves on the back for pretending we're doing something real about abuse from a caricature that, while it does occasionally show itself, is completely ineffective at accomplishing its goal (being the "want to help me find my dog?" meme).
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link