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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Radfems are wrong not only about men, they're also wrong about pretty much the entirety of gender relations and how it operates currently and historically. But I am used to seeing this kind of thing, at this point. It seems to be a general trend even among heterodox communities and the anti-woke that the ideological precepts of their opposition that they're most likely to accept (comparatively speaking) are the feminist ones, which is evident in the utterly bizarre conservative-TERF allyship that seems to be going on at the moment. There's also a similarity in the moral typecasting that feminists and conservatives (and many other people, too) engage in - to them, men are a by default "degenerate" group who need to be reined in and obligated to provide protection to the women around them, and women are a group deserving of special protections. They differ on many things, but on these fundamental perceptions I don't see any difference at all. Even the blank-slatist intersectionalists who believe that men engage in bad behaviour simply because of patriarchal norms still fundamentally engage in the same knee-jerk moral typecasting, they just attribute it to a different cause to make it fit with their blank-slatism.

It seems that if the community isn't an explicitly anti-feminist community (and sometimes even if it is), there's going to be an instinctual legitimacy assigned to feminist claims that doesn't get assigned to any other woke factions because they align with certain entrenched preconceptions and moral judgements that the other woke factions do not appeal to. Any group which is purportedly dedicated to "protecting women" tends to immediately align with most people's sensibilities. No matter how objectionable the rhetoric they churn out is, a base-level feeling of agreement with some of their precepts still seems to exist. There is something profoundly instinctual about the women-are-wonderful effect that makes it exist in most political factions, and it seems to me that any ideology that espouses these base talking points will always have some level of congruence with our knee-jerk beliefs that automatically confers upon it a huge advantage regardless of its validity.

The tradcon-terf alliance really isn't that weird- tradcons have numbers(compared to terfs) and terfs have institutional respectability(compared to tradcons), and they both have a similar goal(tell trans people to pound sand because their interests aren't important). And both of them are historically willing to align with groups they don't like very much to accomplish goals. And terfs judge correctly that tradcons have far less ability to pose an existential threat to them compared to wokes, while tradcons correctly judge that terfs are too abrasive and fractious to actually consolidate power.

Almost all sexual violence is committed by young men.

Years ago, I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t really the case. Maybe historically?

(Note the three- to four-fold difference between lifetime female-victim rape rates and male-victim made-to-penetrate rates, which I would consider “large majority” but not quite “almost all”, and how the 12-month male-victim made-to-penetrate rates are actually higher than female-victim rape rates, comparing table 3.1 to 3.5.

There isn’t a breakdown for 12-month assaults by sex of perpetrator, but if we wanted to use the lifetime rates of perpetration (as shown in tables 3.4 and 3.8) to adjust the 12-month victimization rates so we only include cross-sex victimization, it only makes the rates of victimization between M->F and F->M almost exactly comparable.

I was extremely surprised by this when I dug it up and looked at the stats. I recall that I couldn’t seem to do the same for the 2015 and 2018 reports, because they seem to have removed the 12-month rates and/or the perpetrator sex breakdown. I recall also wanting to find similar statistics for other countries, but that was more difficult, so I gave up.

So for some reason male perpetration has gone down over decades, but female perpetration has gone up, so much so that the sexes are raping each other at similar rates (at least in the US)!

Even given that I might’ve fucked up this very simple analysis, the rates of victimization alone are very different from what we expect from the zeitgeist.)

Yep, I was wondering if I should tackle this topic in my comment but decided it was already lengthy enough as it was and wanted to refrain from unceremoniously burying them in data from the outset. I'm glad someone else brought it up though.

There's not only the NISVS, either, there's other corroborating data which indicates that women are no angels when it comes to sexual offending. For example, here is a 2012 research paper using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's nationally representative National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC, 2001-02). It found in a sample of 43,000 adults little difference in the sex of selfreported sexual perpetrators. Of those who affirmed that they had “ever force[d] someone to have sex … against their will,” 43.6% were female and 56.4% were male.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-012-9943-5

Young men commit the vast majority of violent crime in every population on earth.

And are we going to acknowledge the flip side of this, too? I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.

Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599

"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."

In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.

"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."

Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full

"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."

I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund

This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=AsgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA210&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=nine%20out%20of%20every%2010&f=false

"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235720134_Who_are_the_Heroes_Characteristics_of_People_Who_Rescue_Others#:%7E:text=It%20was%20found%20that%20males,%2C%20violence%20and%20traffic%20accidents

When it comes to men there's very much a misleading tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of their tendency towards public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.

And also the next problem with your point is that it basically ignores the role women play in creating violence. Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women. And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.