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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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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.

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?

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.

physical molestation is more complicated

I'll stick to calling this "emotional molestation", then. The typical mind appears to me to equate "sexual abuse" to "physical molestation", and this just isn't that (which is why it flies under their radars and why attempts to equate female public school teachers to physical molesters are all wrong and thus fail). Nobody has any words for it so they can't even recognize it happens, and the people who can recognize it don't have any words for it.

because there are staggeringly-huge variations

What a revelation, human beings like having sex with people they find sufficiently attractive but don't like being raped or feeling raped after the fact if the relationship falls apart in certain ways (and calling it 'physical molestation' is the equivalent of 'automatically assuming she screamed by default' where that defines the difference between rape and fornication). Couldn't have seen that one coming at all.

I think this kind of poison is worse than showing kids porn

I think the porn the emotional molesters favor (Gender Queer, Flamer, etc.) is the distaff counterpart to the rape-porn that certain tend to complain about "giving men harmful ideas, and giving women harmful ideas that that's what men want".

Just make porn where they actually give a shit about each other to the point the sex is superfluous rather than it just being a human fleshlight with extra steps. Though, because sex isn't supposed to be constructive (it's all just conquer/submit or getting off on the selection process), how would anyone ever come up with or be satisfied with that or just using it as a way to smuggle in those baser instincts?

(And honestly, what the fuck? There used to be that understanding that the sexes interacted in this way except for the people that didn't, the people that didn't published their findings, and then the people that did just took the fragments that told them what they wanted to say, and not only preferred to use them as weapons but weren't even able to understand that's what they were doing. Guess things never change, three cheers for nobody, and may God have mercy on our souls.)