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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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I agree that it would be great if we had a society that called guys like that degenerate whoremongers. But what we actually have is one that celebrates "BPD whore behavior," and actively encourages young women to follow that script in relationships (see literally all advice column and lit fic for women from the '10s).

And we don't even condemn the whoremongering. We celebrate men for it until he ages into the Weinstein zone where imagining him holding their leash makes fangirls ick instead of tingle, then retroactively mob him for it.

It's not a coincidence that Gaiman was one of the last metoo targets, and it wasn't his fame protecting him; far more famous men got hit, and his sphere of leftist YA fantasy lit nerddom was ground zero for it. It's just that he only recently aged out of the schlick zone and became a target

(see literally all advice column and lit fic for women from the '10s).

I am genuinely curious, since advice columns aren't my thing and I'm fairly sure I wouldn't even be looking for the right ones. Could you please provide what you would consider three archetypical examples from the era?

"when having an affair is an act of self care," (it's a way for women to take back her patriarchal restrictions that have been put on us), "cheating on my husband made me a better mother," "cheating on the sisterhood: infidelity and feminism" (a third wave feminist take focuses on the individual woman and her rights to sexual pleasure), "what open marriage taught one man about feminism" (that it should be women who choose, not men, even the men they're married to)

That's four I remember off the top of my head focusing entirely on the "whore" part, but there's lots more content for the BPD bit.

I remember that at least two, possibly three, of those were specifically articles of the same Guardian writer.