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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Why would it change the social dynamics? The suggestion that men would start living in fear was always a bogeyman.

Anyway, the Trump/Carroll lawsuit probably counts.

"The suggestion that men would start living in fear was always a bogeyman."

Can it be a mere boogeyman if it's an explicit progressive goal? Here's Ezra Klein's infamous statement on the matter:

"No Means No” has created a world where women are afraid. To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid.

For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it’s written on if some of the critics’ fears come true.

Klein doesn't make policy, of course, but the people that read him do. His writing is deep inside the progressive Overton window (and when he steps outside it, it's usually because he's making more right-coded points), so I'm inclined to think something close to his vision animates the people writing sexual harassment legislation and policies.

You can make the argument that they have been ineffective or argue that these efforts are unnecessary to make men fearful, like Ozy Brennan did, but that's a big project. To be fair, making the positive claim would be a big project too, to establish that efforts to create a world where men are afraid were effective. But those efforts were not phantasmal.

Meanwhile, half of young men between the ages of 18-25 say they have never approached women for dates in person.

It did change the social dynamics. It's just that nobody with power cares about what it did change.

I’d be willing to bet

in person

is doing most of the heavy lifting there. But there’s plenty of possible confounders. The existence of dating apps, sure, but also the general rise of social media, the ubiquity of smartphones, and the overall economic situation.

If this is the data you have in mind, I think it’s supposed to come from here. That author specifically denies that MeToo is at fault, though I find his justification shaky; his theory of generational risk aversion is compatible with an increased threat.

But I digress. None of his data shows change over time. Without that, I don’t think you can suggest cause and effect.

That's the one I had in mind. But fair enough, it doesn't prove the causal link.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment, they stopped approaching because of a combination of apps allowing for a lower-fear experience (walking up to a girl with her friend is scary, on the apps you only match with people who have already expressed some interest in you) and the entire rest of society’s distraction mechanisms, like tiktok and video games, making people less interested in real life.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment

The beauty of the whole system is that you now suffer the consequences even without even ever being arrested. A woman can make a social media post about you and you get all of the social stigma of being guilty without any of the due process. Most people who suffer from this are simply thankful that only their social life, career, or both were destroyed and that they aren't in jail.

That's not quite my experience but I may know too many people whose lives have been destroyed by lies, surely we can test this?

How many otherwise attractive, charming, confident and single young straight men with good social skills (ie not social anxiety) do you know who chose remain celibate for fear they’ll commit a MeToo?

That some megachads still approach women does not mean this phenomenon -- men being afraid to approach women for fear of serious consequences -- does not exist. If the point of the whole movement was just to stiffen up the filters so that women only receive approaches from megachads... well, mission fucking accomplished.

At least three, more if you loosen the criteria. One of em is a boxer whose brother did years in prison after being accused of raping a girl he never met.

But it's only my own sample of course.

How was he convicted of raping a girl he never met? In almost every false rape conviction the sex was consensual, without a rape kit/DNA match at all it’s almost impossible to get a conviction without witnesses or very compelling circumstantial evidence. How were charges brought if there was zero evidence he ever encountered her?

I should say jail, not prison. He wasn't convicted (that I know of). There was no possibility of bail and justice is excruciatingly slow.

In France detention without conviction can last up to three years depending on the severity of the crime you're accused of.

Not familiar with the details of the case I will say, there may have been some circumstantial evidence, I know he did get his way in the end.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment

Who said anything about being arrested?

Your explanation for why apps are lower-fear is exactly why they'd be a shield against metoo.

Fear of reporting vs. fear of rejection.

But sure, both are probably less threatening on dating apps. That’s just not enough to show causation, or even a trend.

Yeah, but "fear of being reported" does not boil down to being reported to the police. When MeToo was at it's peak, we've had progressives unrinonically argue that no one should ever hit on a woman at work, to the utter shock and horror of our local Europeans, for whom it's it would imply lowering the birthrate from "dangerously low" to "extinction level".

Sure. The study IGI was looking at said HR complaints were ~half of reports. Police rarely came into it.

I’m saying I expect MeToo takes a distant back seat compared to the traditional dating woes of insecurity and embarrassment.

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