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Sorry for the 100th "Feminism is corrupting the youth" post on this website, but this short article was really something
https://www.elle.com/life-love/a62231356/best-friend-from-polyamory/
Written by a woman to extol the value of female friendship as better than the fickle and emotionally damaging heterosexual relationships to which so many of us are accustomed.
The article begins deftly (or dishonestly, depending on your disposition) with the author drizzling her thoughts and emotions onto the page after discovering her man cheating. Only after this framing of hurt emotions does she reveal that they were in an open relationship.
She reveals that after spending her 20s working in journalism she wanted to move to South America to find herself or achieve inner peace. He wanted to stay in the USA (presumably to avoid becoming a professional hobo, more on that later). As a compromise (?) he suggested they open their relationship. She agrees seemingly without objection, but adds the caveat that they share a don't ask don't tell policy.
The framing doesn't even have the sensible presentation of "I didn't want to be in an open relationship, but I was afraid of losing him and he forced me" or something, she is even convinced by progressive literature.
The author further reveals not raising concerns to her boyfriend, but instead the depths of her anxiety and worry. She begins online stalking him (Obsessing might be more appropriate), checking his social media profiles for any change, and eventually finds him interacting and posting photos with the "other woman" Ari.
There are then some rah-rah girl power moments touched upon:
She also has a sit down chat with Ari about her now ex boyfriend
It's not laid out, but you can imagine the dialogue where they spend an afternoon talking about how terrible he was, and the psycic toll he inflicted upon the author. The phrasing “totally cool with everything” is obviously meant to remind a reader of the shitty boyfriend they had that would give half truths and lie about these types of things. However in this situation he is being truthful, as far as he knew they were in a working open relationship. I don't want to paint with too wide a brush, but it's shocking how people allow themselves to become caricatures. As far as I can tell she is fitting the crazy ex girlfriend to a tee. She was upset with their arrangement, didn't tell him about the problems she had, and then would tell anyone who will listen how about how he cheated infront of her or something, and holds him responsible for not reading her mind. From his perspective it's unlikely he did anything wrong (Deciding to open up your relationship could reasonably fit here in and of itself, but it's very likely that he and his entire social circle consider that action acceptable or even laudable), and he's presented as an abuser or liar.
The most obvious irony here is how she wrote an entire article to tell us about how the girl friendship is more meaningful than her old boyfriend and her's, but it's clear to anyone who read it that she had much more thought and feeling for Him than for Her. Even the ending misses the point:
This gets at the heart of the point I'm trying to make. The progressive argument here is one where a person enterered into a bad situation entirely of their own choosing, has deluded themselves about how they really feel, and is now lashing out at the closest "Fucking White Male." Even the pictures the editor chose oozes this belief, kitschy 1930s and 1940s domestic life shots that are often used to hint at a rebellious or sinister undertones for the women involved, is entirely contrived. The last sentence has this attempted-catharsis of silencing the man and letting the women speak (Louder for those in the back queen), but in this entire article we don't get anything from his viewpoint except for 1 sentence in scare quotes. The person calling JD Vance weird for being married with kids and a steady job is deeply unhappy, anxious, contradictory, and packed into a 13 person house in San Fransisco while they hop from job to continent to relationship. They believe that this is ideal and empowering, and something the man has done in this situation has created the ills in their life.
If you pay close enough attention to people, you can very often spot a point in the conversation where things begin to shift to them telling on themselves, behind a foil of projecting their own issues out onto the world and everyone else in an attempt to conceal their misery or embarrassment in front of you.
Women will do this all the time. I can't tell you how many women going into their 30s that I've met, who attack men for not shacking up with women their own age and dating younger. What they won't tell you is that these men 'did' try dating women their own age... When they themselves were in their 20s... When you get turned down by your peers enough, eventually you get out of the pool to go swim in other waters. And so women attacking men their age for their own refusal to give them a chance, reveals nothing illogical about the mating game itself, but rather the paradoxes these women live by in their own personal lives and the problems that are of their own making.
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Ah yes, the old "I'm throwing away my entire life and moving far, far away. What? You won't come with me? What? You don't want to commit to this fiction of a relationship that I'M running away from? How dare you do this to me."
I don't know what the fuck is in the water. But in my 20's I literally dated 3 women in a row that tried to pull this shit. I was happy, had friends, a career, was a part of my local martial arts community. I'd date a woman about a year, and they'd pull what I only now recognize was a shit test. Leave absolutely everything, because they randomly decided they wanted to live in South Carolina, or Florida, or Colorado, or Georgia. No, they didn't have a job lined up. But they had a best girl friend who lived there and it sounds so fun.
Every time "If you want to go, we can break up and you can go. I'm not giving up my career, my friends and my community." The first one treated me like I was some enormous asshole for this. The second realized how this would make her look, so instead she (probably) faked a severe mental illness and created this whole fiction about how I was abusing her. All our mutuals were scared of her once all was said and done, and she'd fictionalize events they were there for and knew to be false. The third complained to the end of our days that I didn't "let" her move.
A more homely buddy of mine has only had two relationships, and one of them pulled the same move on him. Up and moved to bumfuck nowhere corn state for seemingly no reason, and dragged him through months of anxious long term relationship before "they" just faded away. Then she moved back. The relationship was dead as a doornail though.
I blame romantic comedies. That shits worse than weebs who think Anime is real.
I’m firmly of the persuasion that in all honesty you absolutely shouldn’t move with a person that you’re not full on engaged to. And personally I think you make a clean break of it as quite often LDRs are more theoretical than real without a very strong and exclusive relationship (AKA actually engaged with ring and date).
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Nothing wrong with being the 100th post on a subject. On the other hand,
It looks like you read a trashy article and then attached your own impression of the author’s politics. Please don’t leave it at that next time.
I can understand why you may have that impression, but I would suggest that a normal reading of this post is not complaining about the outgroup. The phrase "attached (my) own impression" is very dangerous, as a weasel phrase to me it sort of is a catch all for nearly all writing that isn't a technical drawing of a patent. The Wealth of Nations and Meditations and Persuasion are all the author's own impression. I think what I did was argue that the narrative structure of the article itself reveals something about the headspace and disposition of the author which is contrary to the apparent point being made.
Similarly, I think that a novel psychological breakdown of a historical figure through a new lens would be appropriate and engaging enough for this forum, even if all the thesis pointed to was "Yes, he is a bad guy." Perhaps you disagree.
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I will sound like a broken record, but a low-effort top post (and this isn't one!) should be fine as long as it sparks interesting discussion. Exempli gratia.
There is a genuine conflict of interest here between moderators and users of the forum. It is much easier to mod a forum like The Schism that has very low post volume but makes up for it(?) in post quality. This is what the current policy is pushing us towards and I'd posit it's one of the major reasons the weekly thread comment count is down to what? a thousand?
Bring back the link repository!
No.
No, there is a conflict of interest here between the moderators and what some users of the forum would like.
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I am also sounding like a broken record, but people often miss the point of the rule against bare links:
Interesting discussion is why we are here. Dictating the particular topic of discussion is a privilege and a benefit that we like see awarded to those who also bring interesting discussion.
Certain things can generate interesting discussions without actually being interesting discussions.
Low effort bare links are one of those things. Posting things that amount to "Can you believe what Those People did this week?" is another one of those things. Recruiting for a cause is one of those things. A brand new major news item is one of those things.
It is in fact not hard at all to generate interesting discussions when you try and make the main purpose of a forum be a place that allows for discussion. Getting other people to generate a discussion here is not hard. Writing quality stuff that other people want to read is hard. We are not trying to reward generating a discussion, we are trying to reward people that make the effort to write quality stuff.
One of the few levers we have for that is saying that 'only people that are trying to do the hard thing of writing quality stuff get to pick the topic for discussion'.
Or in cases where there is definitely going to be discussion about a major news item, but maybe only one threads worth, there is some value in being the first poster because you get to set the tone and focus of the discussion. We would again rather award someone with an effortful and thoughtful take on the issue than the first person to copy and paste the link from X.
I'd rather us die as TheMotte then live on to just become a crappy version of every other social media platform out there.
Often when some interesting news break, I check here to see what intelligent contrarians have to say about it. I see nothing, type out a quick top-level post, delete it, and go elsewhere to check on discussion not even half as interesting as it would have been here.
As I said, there is a genuine conflict of interest here. The mods have an interest in this place becoming more like The Schism, posters and lurkers benefit from more discussion. We have argued this point ad nauseam and the chances that I will convince you at this point are very, very small. But arguing that a Bare Link Repository wouldn't be Motte-like when this has been a feature of the Reddit thread for ages and was also commonly seen on the SSC comment section is not a valid argument.
Its news you find interesting. But if others find it boring or distracting then a conversation about it doesn't add to their enjoyment of the site. For example I am interested in tech news but very uninterested in foreign policy. The whole war in Gaza is less interesting to me than Amazon's return to office policy. If this thread was 10 times bigger with the same quality writing but all about foreign policy then it would be no better for me.
We don't have unlimited people producing unlimited content like X does. Every time I read your complaints that seems to be a built in assumption, that the lack of top level content holds people back from the total amount they post. I just don't see it personally. I'm limited in how much quality content I can write. Probably only a few good comments a day.
I would love to have more people here posting more quality content. If we as mods got overwhelmed with moderating we would add more moderators as we've done in the past. An unlimited amount of low quality content is useless.
I don't buy your point that it is a conflict of interest. As a user I also hate low quality content, because it's crap that I have to filter through to get to the good stuff. X and Facebook and YouTube are all unusable to me. Too much crap, not enough gold. And I'm only a user on those websites, not a moderator.
If we draw a line between The Schism and Facebook, there is a world of difference between the latter and where we are now. But if you want to get an idea of what The Motte would look like with less stringent top post requirements, you don't need to go to social media. You can just look at... The Motte back when it had less stringent top post requirements (and, not coincidentally, a lot more engagement).
Look, I know this is a lost cause. But I wish you guys would at least acknowledge the point about low effort top posts leading to high effort comments.
Lots of things were different back then. We were on reddit and the culture war was red hot and banned in a bunch of other places. And there are also places like culturewarroundup that allow bare links and they are far deader than theschism. If anything the comparison suggests theschism strategy is a better viable long-term option. Neither us or them can compete with X in terms of sheer content of bare links and subjects being discussed. But we can compete on enforcing some minimum quality standards.
I feel like I've never disagreed with this point. I might have even said somewhere that it is easy for bad quality comments to generate good discussion. But I also feel it suggests that you are entirely missing the point I am making.
I think our actual disagreement is on the effect of permissive top level comments. You seem to think it's positive sum. I think it is neutral sum, or possibly a little negative sum.
We are generally getting a similar number of high quality comments each month. And that amount is limited by the number of users.
The people that write quality comments have told me before that they like having their comments read and discussed. I also share that preference. Its rare for me to want to type out a quality comment that is just going to get buried and read by only one person.
The place where you get the most attention and discussion is at the top level. That attention is limited by how many top level comments are above you, and how recently that thing has been discussed. Bare links fill up the top comment slots and bury posts faster. And you can easily get your topic sniped before you finish writing a quality comment.
I don't even understand your mechanism for how permissive top comments increase the number of quality comments. I understand how it increases total comments, but that isn't something I care about.
We seem to have different models of how quality posts come about.
You seem to think that quality posters treat this as a publishing platform akin to Substack. They have a couple of quality posts in them over a given timeframe and they choose to publish them on The Motte. Your job is to prevent these posts from being dilluted by low effort posts and give them a more prominent position.
My model is a different one: quality posts happen because a poster gets inspired by an ongoing discussion. They see something that touches upon one of their areas of expertise and they get triggered into writing an effort post. But there needs to be a discussion happening in the first place! You don't get Socrates' take on the ideal city before Cephalus, Polemarchus, and even Thrasymachus had their say first. The more discussion, the higher the chances someone will read something they have something to write about.
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Correct—this isn’t a low-effort top post. There was clearly effort put into adding commentary, and I actually think it’s rather well-written.
It is also a pure expression of “look what those people did!”
Effort is not enough. There is a separate failure mode where a low-charity top post sparks uninteresting discussion. On Reddit, this was called a circlejerk. I gave the OP a mild warning in hopes of avoiding our own little slice of hivemind.
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A lot of women (of a more progressive bent) have a complex about how much the approval and company of men actually matters to them. A shocking number of young women are trying to force themselves to become lesbian or bisexual because "a man shouldn't be the most important thing in your life", even though they have no sexual attraction to women at all.
The ironic thing is that women's dependence on men is nothing compared to men's dependence on women! I don't think that women are really capable of understanding the reality distortion field that emanates from every non-ugly woman, and the effects that said field has on straight men.
What is old is new again. Not quite political lesbianism. But close enough.
Poor actual lesbians who want actual sexual relationships with other women rather than performative anti-man statements.
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My own experience with men and women who are in their 30s or 40s and single is remarkably consistent: men can talk about whatever mundane bullshit and usually hone in on one topic autistically for the night, but every single woman will at one point bring up their current dating situation even if we were not talking about it at all or were meant to be talking about something else.
I'm not the one who asks! I'm the unfuckable married friend, but that apparently makes me One Of The Girls and a sounding board for their current Life Situation. I wanted to hear about their fucking startup or their moms health or whatever, not their struggle with Hinge and their absolute failure to click with any girls on the apps.
Political lesbianism is advertised as an easy way for girls to avoid confronting the reality of their rapidly declining age-correlated attractiveness in the heterosexual dating market, but that doesn't change the fact that dating women is HARD for men or women. Liking tits isn't enough to be lesbian, you have to like spending time with a women with the background prospect of sex being present somewhere, and that just shorts their decision making heuristics.
It may be entirely possible for humans to exist without pair bonding or meaningful relationships. There may be men and women both decrying the necessity of relationship building to begin with, but the ratio of women versus men trying desperately to force themselves to be gay is noticably disproportionate. Simply replacing dicks with clits isn't quite the easy solution to socialized expectations generated by their own gender.
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Yeah, the article doesn't pass the Bechdel test. That's par for the course for Elle, if I correctly remember my brief interest in popular women's mags during my teenage years. The articles (such as they were, between pictures of simpering semi-nudes) alternated between how-to-get-your-man and you-don't-need-a-man-(but-you-do-need-these-shoes).
This isn't feminism in any meaningful sense of the word. Any decent feminist (or someone passing the ideological Turing test for one) would recognize this as an instance of internalized heteronormative cisgender patriarchy, and those more atuned to the zeitgeist would also spot the glaring colonialist paternalism.
(Weirdly enough, I think I can actually defend all those terms as they apply to the OP's summary of the article. I have no desire to read the article, because musings of a woman who realizes that an open relationship isn't so great lacks any element of surprise.)
I'd agree that it would probably not fit into any of probably dozens of strains of academic feminism. However I think it was Louise Perry or somebody of that thought who half-jokingly defined the practical, Elle style of modern feminism which actually fits:
Women can do X and its opposite and if you criticize anything, then the defense of both simultaneously contradictory positions is feminism. As an example, women can be soldiers and our army will be strengthened by it - which is feminism. But at the same time women should be not compelled or even shamed into military service, or even subject to same physical standards and that is also feminism.
I think there is grain of truth in there, feminism in current day-and-age is mostly a tool of how to prevent any semblance of judgement for whatever behavior women engage in.
High school or so was the first time I was exposed to the "a feminist is someone who wants equal rights for men and women" definition - published in the school paper. I am a proud feminist in public because I behave in the manner expected of me. But, since in truth I am not a feminist, it begs for defining: what really is a feminist?
It is a definition's strength that proponents and opponents agree on it, so "women wanting to take everything from men and step all over them" is probably off the table.
Feminism is raising women's status.
I think this properly distinguishes how the term is actually used, and gets to the heart of disagreement. I saw a post on twitter a couple days ago, but can't find it. It was saying that more and more young men growing up have lived their entire lives being told the world meant for them put them in charge (and that's problematic) and to not believe their lying eyes (scholarships, or that most boys' authority figures are their female teacher)
It's not feminism, it's gynosupremacy. Just as destructive as racism, comes from the same place as racism, the practitioners are the same personality types. The social dynamics are the same as what allowed racism to exist in the first place.
The feminists are trivially correct: discrimination is power + privilege. It's why their entire movement is built around denying the obvious truth (that it applies to them)- and I can't reduce it any more than that, nor have I ever heard a correct refutation of that point (other than "but androsupremacists also exist").
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The word "empowering" no longer means anything, if it ever did. Women raising their children is empowering; women getting abortions is also empowering. Women posting thirst traps on social media is empowering; women posting deliberately unflattering selfies to combat "toxic social media beauty standards" is also empowering. Women putting their career ahead of other things in their life is empowering; women deliberately refusing career opportunities in order to focus on their "mental health" and practise "self-care" is also empowering.
If a woman does it, it's empowering - except (for some reason) daring to suggest that a person with a penis isn't a woman, or that Hamas squaddies raping Israeli women is bad.
Aside from abortion, what if we change this whole statement from women to men?
"Men raising their children is empowering." "Men posting thirst traps on social media is empowering." "Men deliberately refusing career opportunities in order to focus on their 'mental health' and promote 'self-care' is empowering"
Etc.
Does the word "empowering" still mean nothing if the genders are reversed?
Feminism is a memeplex that functions as a tool to let women do whatever they want to do and be shielded from the negative consequences of those actions. That is the common thread that binds all the different feminisms together. Calling something empowering is to demand that a woman doing that thing should not have to face any trade-offs for doing it and/or should receive resources to reduce the cost and to increase the benefit of doing it. A man doing something can't possibly be empowering. That's a category mistake.
As for the post you are responding to: Complaining that this tool elevates different types of action means you do not understand its nature.
"So a hammer is for building things but then also for smashing those same things? How does that make sense?"
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This side steps the larger point.
"Empowering feminism" lets women run away with some of their base instincts without consequence. Yes, I'm talking about sex. No, I'm not talking about normie casual sex. I mean the fact that "feminists" say that stripping, OnlyFans, and prostitution are "empowering" for women. This is plain insanity.
Society has taken about 2000 years to get a real handle on policing men's base instincts. If you're a dude who immediately defaults to physical violence on a daily basis to solve your problems, you are not "empowering yourself" you are "entering a plea." You are - and should be - recognized to be an anti-social criminal who can't be trusted in society.
An interesting thing to do is to ask women in your life (friends and families, this isn't flirtatious talk) when they became aware that they had some measure of sexual influence over men. Then answer is going to be around puberty. From that time forward, most women known they could use that power but generally that they ought not to for trivial things or with deceitful intent. Again, most women are smart and morally competent.
The corollary for men is when they became aware that physical violence, or its implication, would be a part of their daily life. Again, the answer is somewhere around puberty. Again again (again?) Most men do not walk around everyday eager to throw down for minor displays of disrespect - but we're aware of it in our heads.
These two domains - sex and physical violence - inform a lot of intersexual dynamics. In the West, the closest thing we have to a societal consensus is "men shouldn't use violence to resolve disputes." There's maybe some folks who want to bring back mutual combat and honor duels, but that's hyper fringe. We do not have anything close to consensus on female sexuality. In fact, a lot of the "discourse" is inherently contradictory, changes rapidly with perspective, context, and circumstance, and is often motivated more by emotional self-preservation than a society first mindset. Hence "feminism is whatever women do" or, more to the point, "feminism is unquestionably supporting anything that women do."
Should we enforce female sexual behavior in the same criminal justice construct as male physical violence? No, because there are some categorical differences; male physical violence can result in immediate loss of life and it is coercive in that it does not take two party consent for it to happen most times. Female sexuality won't kill you right away and, although female-on-male rape does happen, it is nowhere near as frequent and occurs in drastically different circumstances as male-on-female rape. Women who use sex are mostly using it with willing partners. Generally speaking, women who do use sexuality for deceitful and manipulative purposes use it as part of a larger game of deceit and exploitation. Men who use physical violence are mostly engaged in a singular immediate conflict with unambiguous resolution.
And when you can't, or have great difficulty enforcing behaviors in a criminal justice construct, you (that is, society) resorts to cultural and social regulation. The above topline post on University of Alabama sororities does a great job illustrating this. To those girls, to be ostracized by their sorority sisters for being "too provocative" at a party is a fate equivalent to a 4 year prison sentence. Making a value judgement that this sort of voluntary in-group policing is "oppressive" is really just a rejection of that value system overall. You might see it that way, but the participants in it might see it another way, perhaps even beneficial to them ... or their society.
To tie this thing off and get back to the comment I was responding to - "empowering" in the feminism context is meaningless because there is not only no clear criteria for when to use it, it is applied to anything and everything even when self-contradictory. It also, sneakily, reveals that being empowered - which one would presume to mean having power - is the ultimate goal. That's in no way a marxist dialectic right, right?
I think its interesting you draw a parallel between violence and sex. "Women have sexual power over men, and they know it" is the bog-standard water I live in, and if pressed to provide a parallel for men, I'm not sure I would have thought violence. (To be fair, I wasn't given very much time to think about it).
It reminds me of something I posted over on Scott's new blog, although it didn't get much engagement because I do not fit into Scott's comment demographic as much anymore. Reposted for convenience:
Introspecting -- at no point during puberty did I ever become aware of myself as a "violent being" (to appropriate the term "sexual being"), and even today I don't think I've ever used threat of violence as a bargaining chip. I suspect the same is true for the stereotypical incel-type. I think I agree with your taxonomy.
Thanks!
It's definitely "harder" to see because Men, in the west, are taught that violence is almost never appropriate outside of self-defense situations*. There's also the decline of violence adjacent physical work - most pointedly agricultural work. If you're working with various kinds of livestock larger than a chicken, you're going to spend time literally coercing a living thing with your physical will (we don't negotiate with
terroristsheifers!). But that's the kind of thing I meant when gesturing towards men and puberty. It would be odd and bad if most guys came online at 13,14,15 with the thought of "Oh, I can go kick somebody's ass now!" But I still think guys at that age think, "Hmm...I can like, do stuff with my body"More options
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Tangentially, would you say that for a man to train in BJJ, or boxing, or firearms is empowering?
I don't disagree with the various criticisms of feminism and its habitual maneuvering to wriggle out of apportioning some responsiblity for women's choices to women themselves. But the motte of empowerment is simply that these decisions that women make are now made by choice. Being obliged or pressured to take a job, or have kids, or get a divorce, or pose naked isn't empowering. Being allowed the choice to do those things is where the claim of empowerment comes from.
It's not meaningless. It's just that it's only trivially meaningful. Women have been empowered to choose what they do where previously they weren't (or weren't seen/believed to do so). Being empowered to vote doesn't mean you have the same power as the winner of the election, but it's better than having no say at all. The confusion is that empowerment is spoken of as if it were akin to exercising power itself rather than exercising a limited choice. "Girl power!"... to choose between working a hundred hours for one boss or working one hour for a hundred bosses. Either way you're going to work.
Yes. Also working out and becoming fit. A man's brain works better with these things.
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I've never seen a cis man being praised in those terms for the latter two.
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Yes, it still means nothing. It's just that very few men would even use the word, or have those experiences described in such a way in pop media.
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There may be an ideal form of feminism tucked away in a corner somewhere in the Platonic realm but if it is, its shadow is nowhere to be found in the material world. Feminism is whatever most benefits the woman doing the feministing in any given situation.
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