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To be honest, I think you’re spot on the nose with women(or at least a subset thereof) not having any way to describe unwanted attention beyond sexual harassment. Feminism has reduced thinking about the ethics of sexual relationships to a consent binary which leads to redefining lots of things as consent issues, so women who want to complain about more typical bad behavior have to frame it as somehow leading up to rape. Which is ridiculous, obviously, for a lot of these cases.
Good point, except it's probably not feminism but a natural effect of male status differentiation in the presence of women and their observable reactions (yes, "hello, human resources?!" meme), recreating low-class school social dynamics.
I think this is a major source of differences in attitude – in this thread and elsewhere – toward mixed workspaces and generally the idea of adding women to environments where they were historically absent. People who believe that it's an unalloyed good since you can meet your soulmate or something are, probably, just not ugly; for less lucky ones (and who are also not exceptional in some way), flirting in the workspace is a non-starter, so they just lose the possibility to make a living without humiliation. When one looks up blackpill content on the distribution of attractiveness and growing proportion of sexless men, and non-infrequent incel-type assessments like this one on Quora –
– it's hard not to come away with the feeling «holy shit, tens of millions of guys are forced into a lifetime of being severely bullied». It's the kind of thing non-targets aren't prone to notice or connect to external factors (did you care that they were suicidal losers in your school?) so it may be arbitrarily intense. Even if it's an exaggeration based on insecurity and not an accurate stereotype, the very fact that there exists strong social pressure to dismiss it as a delusion is telling. There's no «lived experience» clause for ugly men.
And contrariwise, it may be the case that the incessant wringing of hands about sexism and harassment, and demand for National Incel Strategy, generalized tyranny, censorship, surveillance etc are products of many women being unable to remove uggos from their life, developing chronic stress and fear, and growing desperately violent as a result (in their own passive-aggressive socially manipulative manner).
We may underestimate how much gendered animosity the society contains at the margins; and the consensus about its direction is very likely wrong.
I mean, these guys are essentially clueless spergs. The Human Resources meme depicts a guy doing something that is, at best, crossing the line a bit. Hot guy gets away with it, fat ugly guy is busted. Fat ugly guy should have known long before he got to the workplace that he can't do the shit that Adonis gets away with. We see it in lots of aspects of life...the rich guy gets off because he can afford a great lawyer, the poor guy gets railroaded.
It would probably be a lot easier and simpler if we just were more explicit about expecting unattractive people to be celibate for life and take some kind of prosocial job that didn't mesh well with family life, like truck driving or travel nursing.
The vast majority of "unattractive people" aren't celibate. Look out in the US. Yes, maybe a very specific brand of unattractive person who works in a specific industry and who works in a specific area of the country might be out of luck, but there's lots of ugly people of both genders getting laid. Usually by each other.
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I've argued before that the cross-gender animosity is not only at the margins but is borderline mainstream (Most young guys I know follow and like Andrew Tate, social media comment sections are much more adversarial than they used to be, from both sides ). Which to me seems like a rather recent development.
Of course there's no way to quantify this, but you can tell which way the cultural/psychological wind is blowing if your eyes and ears are open enough.
Unfortunately, significant amounts of ink were spilled on the post defending myself of accusations of being an incel or whatever against discussing the central thrust of the post which I meant to be the worsening relations gaining enough mass to be noticeable in mainstream forums.
I'd love to hear what you have to say about this topic. Maybe consider an effort post?
I think the thing about Tate and co, is that they represent what essentially is an aspirational culture these days. Represent isn't exactly the correct word, but I'm not sure how else to put it. But I think they're reflecting a view based on a certain "Social Media Yuppie" perspective that's coming out of a few large cities, frankly, London is the biggest example here I think. Where they're wrong of course, is that the SM Yuppie mentality, isn't as common outside of these places as these people think. But that doesn't mean that it's not influential either. I do think there's reasons why people see this as pretty much the peak of attainable status right now.
And I think people do see traits of SM Yuppie culture "bleed out", and I think there's a reaction to it.
I've always argued that the manosphere as a whole (and it's a bunch of different parts and I acknowledge that) should be more focused on teaching people to avoid red flags. And I understand avoiding these red flags are tough, because again, these are relatively high-status baddies we're talking about here. But still...you don't want to deal with the narcissistic traits here. Just say no. It's not worth the headache. But educating men about potential red flags has always been seen as misogynistic by people who well...promote and sell those flags, giving them out to women to be honest.
And then there's the concern that this SM Yuppie culture will be picked up on by your partner in an existing relationship. What do you do then?
Anyway, I think largely that's what this is all about. I think you can avoid it if you want to, especially if you recognize status pressures and try your best to avoid them. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy or without cost.
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Yeah, that's kind of a keen observation, and a really bitter pill to swallow. The exact mechanism here is that they are offended that (they think) a low-status male believes he has a chance with them. In their mind, that means he thinks they are low status too. That's where the insult comes from. In reality the man probably has not thought about it all that deeply, or indeed at all. This is high-neurotic behaviour.
But a great many first world women are utterly incapable of not typical-minding, or of empathising with anyone who is very different from themselves. Many women go through life without ever considering the male experience, or even realising that there is one that is separate to the female experience. They simply never need to -- thanks to rampant feminism, society is built and centered almost entirely around the female perspective. (Men are inculcated with the extreme importance of considering the feelings of girls and women almost from the cradle -- women are never told any such thing about men.) So they assume that this interaction must have been thought about as deeply as they consider their own interactions, with all the high-school politics and status gaming that entails.
Because the men in this example don't think about it that deeply, they go away confused and hurt by the reaction. Naturally, they wonder why. They band together with others also wondering why. And those groups slowly, piece by piece, reverse engineer the social mechanics that caused the situation. And this realisation is often terrible for them, because it reveals that there is no escape and it will never get better for them unless they can increase their status. All the fairy tales about true love overcoming all -- the princess and the frog -- that they held onto, were just stories. The real world doesn't work that way. These groups, by the way, are vilified for piecing this together, because the most important thing about the rules is you're not supposed to state them explicitly. Everyone playing is well aware of how utterly vile and two-faced this game is, and dragging that out into the light makes them look bad. Which lowers their status, so it is not acceptable. And so any attempts to lay this all out plainly and explicitly must be railed against.
And because society is, once again, built and centered around female feelings first and foremost, there is no justice to be had. They're branded as toxic and disgusting and entitled for expecting to be able to partake in the same core parts of the human experience as everyone else. "Don't they know their place?!" is the undertone carried throughout all this. Other men go along with this characterisation to win points from the women, because men are taught to please women at all costs from a very young age. There is no brotherhood or solidarity -- why would there be? They're all competing for favour. Men are taught outgroup bias their whole lives.
So while women with ugly friends will stick by them in solidarity and try and inflict them on unsuspecting men on blind dates or whatever (because being the queen bee, the best looking one in your circle of friends raises your status), men are pressured into ditching their ugly friends by women who don't want to be around those types of guys because it lowers her implied social standing to be seen with them. They apply this pressure through accusations of creepiness or malfeasance, as others have noted, typically centered on actions they would tolerate or welcome from higher status men (because attracting high status men means you are high status).
It's social climbing all the way fucking down.
Yes, and there's a broader generalization in that other men may be uncomfortable or find it gross that this man even has a sexuality in the first place; for unattractive people, the only really socially safe thing to do is to work hard at repressing your sexuality and making people believe that you want nothing more than to dedicate your life to something noble and that you are not in a relationship because you are too busy doing that. This is a fig leaf and a polite fiction, but most people will buy that.
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Feminists may overplay "male gaze" theory and the claim that everything is centered around the male perspective, but I think they are not wrong that many women are, in fact, raised exactly the opposite of what you claim, to learn how to cater to men and male preferences. Neither men nor women are a monolith; your description may accurately describe young urban white women raised in a deep blue bubble on a steady diet of anti-male grievance, but it's not the experience of all women in the first world, let alone the entire world. You did qualify this screed with "many" women, but when you then project it onto a claim about society being built and centered around female feelings and "no justice to be had" for men, you're just mirroring the feminists who blame all their negative feelings on men.
As another aspect, men typically have to make multiple approaches for a single success. If only 20% of women have the extreme negative reaction described, that amounts to a significant number of experiences that, to men on the sensitive side of things, are traumatic. Those experiences will play an outsized role in the mental universe of those men and make them overstate how ubiquitous they are.
Awkward approaches are bad and should be reduced as much as possible for the benefit of everyone involved, but they're also correctable and learning is possible with only a slight negative reinforcement. Rhetorically claiming they're rape-adjacent, on the other hand, drives men to extreme positions. Heterosexual men have the obligation to learn to read the room, while heterosexual women have the obligation to respond commensurate with the offense to allow that learning to happen. The issue is that, although the large majority of people of both genders follow this, defectors on both sides make it an unsustainable system.
I agree with all this. Most people learn pretty early that men approach, women get approached. Men take the risk of rejection and humiliation, because the risk for women is an entirely different calculation. You could say all the risk for men comes before they get a "yes," and all the risk for women comes after it.
There's nothing pernicious or oppressive about acknowledging that men are less choosy (for both social and biological reasons) and therefore any woman who wants to get laid probably can, much more easily than a man, but that comes with definite drawbacks on the female side of the equation.
The problem every time these threads get spawned is that the aggrieved men complain only about the disadvantage they perceive (namely, that they can't get laid as easily as they'd like while the women they desire get to pick and choose and aren't punished for it), and won't acknowledge the real risks (not just "feeling bad" or "offended that an ugly guy approached me") that women have to contend with. A lot of them will react to "heterosexual men have the obligation to learn to read the room" the way feminists react to "women should learn to have situational awareness and exercise good judgment in choosing partners" - both get really pissed off at being "victim blamed" for being told that some negative consequences are actually avoidable.
I'm not a fan of the Rebecca Watsons of the world making a big cause out of being approached in an uncomfortable way, or the "defectors" you refer to turning every approach into sexual harassment. But yeah, Elevator Guy should have "read the room" - it is pretty creepy to ask a woman you're alone in an elevator with late at night to "come back to your room for coffee" unless you have been given prior signals that she might be receptive to such a proposition.
I'd also make explicit that I mean here for defectors to include men as well: there's inevitably a guy, if put into a scenario where all the women give gentle negative reinforcement to bad approaches, who will then proceed to aggressively ignore all signs of discomfort and approach any and every woman, and if called out plead ignorance and good intention. Which itself doesn't approach the level of rape, but it makes the setup unsustainable.
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One potential issue here: what is the rate of violence women are intuitively expecting vs the rate at which nerdy tech dudes actually lash out? I would expect a very large discrepancy between "ancestral environment" or "feminist paranoid take" versus "low T nerd convention".
I think the actual physical threat presented by the average nerd hitting on a woman at a convention is very low. That said, while I don't think women should react to every creepy come-on as a rape threat, I don't think they should just be expected to put up with creepy come-ons without protest. Rebecca Watson arguably overreacted, but otoh, she wasn't even trying to get the guy punished, even informally - she just embarrassed him a little.
If women have to put up with ill-conceived come-ons, men can put up with embarrassment for an ill-conceived come-on.
Amadan,
I think that you are a bit obsessed by the question of fairness to the individual, where each side has to suffer equally.
This ignores issues like how inconsistent standards of different women cause an environment where there are no consistent rules for men to obey and they as a result will unavoidably face abuse, unless they abstain from making advances completely.
I'm much more in favor of a society where men and women find a reasonable common ground that they adhere to, even if it is not to the liking of each individual, rather than the false promise that everyone can have their own standards be met and people being taught that abuse is warranted if men do not magically know which standards a specific woman demands of them (where that standard may not even be consistent for that specific woman and certainly not for women as a whole).
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But at that point the "risk" to either party is actually quite symmetrical - some degree of potential unpleasant social experience, either embarrassment or having to awkwardly turn someone down. If we want a situation where men have to face public embarrassment in the form of a public rejection, and women have to endure the annoyance of publicly embarrassing men, well, I might agree to those conditions, but I'm probably not going to think the women are equal.
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Nope, there is no symmetry there. If Watson wanted to shoot the guy down that's entirely her right. People get pissed of at feminists acting like this is some great systemic injustice that Something Must Be Done About, not at women being afraid of being approached somewhere without a clear escape route.
This inverse of this was the many people saying at the time that they understood why he took his shot when in the elevator - it meant he didn’t have to get shot down and potentially embarassed in public. It's not likely that he chose the elevator because of the implication.
Well, but I also agree with that, it's perfectly understandable! But "understandable" doesn't mean it's not a mistake.
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I don't agree. Some men may have the more nuanced take you are proposing, but even in this thread there are men expressing resentment that they're expected to "read the room" and not intentionally put women in an uncomfortable position. Multiple people have denied Watson had any reason at all to be unhappy or uncomfortable; she should have just said "no thanks" and thought nothing more about it. A more stoic mindset would certainly have produced that response, but there aren't many men who are that stoic about being put in uncomfortable situations either.
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I don't think this is bad advice for both sexes.
Again, unironically, this is not bad advice. I know it seems like women are just being paranoid, but there are too many stories about women getting attacked or murdered. When I was younger, I did the stupid thing of "I'm just being paranoid, this guy is harmless" and I was wrong.
Why on earth is it put as "if you can't flirt at work, you are condemned to making a living with humiliation"? If you can't flirt, this is humiliating? Would you consider flirting in a single-sex environment, or are there no ways of being humiliated at work if you're all guys together?
I don't think most women regard ugly men with "looks of disgust" even if the ugly men are not trying to hit on them, so that seems to be proving too much. Work is for work, so be professional and courteous and keep flirting for after-hours. And that's whether you're handsome or not. I think it's not ugly men, I think it's weird people - and women make remarks about other women who are weird or odd as well, I've heard them (hell, they've probably made the same remarks behind my back because I'm weird/odd and socially awkward).
Do your job, keep your head down, and try and find love elsewhere.
First of all, this stuff happens everywhere, not just work. Second of all, this is extremely humiliating to men but I guess we'll never be able to make you empathize with us, so I don't know what to say.
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I mean, you're not wrong that a lot of the things redefined as sexual harassment are just ugly guys doing things that would be well-within-the-pale if their more attractive peers did them. I've got personal stories of being saved from accusations of sexual harassment by virtue of being conventionally attractive, and besides, when has anything ever been as good a deal for unattractive people as it has for attractive ones?
That being said, I still think this specific expression of it is due to feminism. Women in very conservative communities in the west largely don't label unwanted attention as sexual harassment, they just say no, and consider having to occasionally say no a part of life.
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I think people really miss how dehumanizing that is, the idea that you can't do something that other people around you can do. And I'm not even saying it's necessarily wrong that we are that way. But it is going to impact people, no doubt about it.
I mean...women and minorities get The Talk - yep, the one - as teenagers. Why not ugly men, from older guys that they trust? Fathers, uncles, older male friends. Nothing wrong with that.
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