This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
As long as someone's weirdness is contained within highly sanity hazardous 'art' or roleplay which is kept out of the public eye, nobody cares. And I don't think that's actually true - e.g. the stereotype of AGPs who transitioned isn't that they were particularly weird, but that they are conceited jerks, which is probably related to having been able to convince themselves that they should do it.
There's also a reason why people are afraid and avoid trans 'women'. People who are as quick to take offense as any 16th century aristocrat and are one mental health crisis away from a breakdown are somewhat ..more problematic.
I'd not make that claim at all. Why do you say so?
We are going to find out in a few years when it's going to be possible to get something smart to laboriously check the entire content of e.g. fictionmania, or archiveofourown or other porn sites that have a lot of that shit, and tell us what kind of characters there, what's the action, themes. We'll know then.
I agree that it's completely fucked up and quite confusing, as I note from observing some hobbyist researchers trying to make sense out of it all.
However, one thing is certain - broadly speaking, the people involved, judging by their 'artistic' output are nothing like 'a mind trapped in a body of the opposite sex'. Perhaps a few (~10%), but generally absolutely not.
Internet has vastly complicated the picture by letting people have access to complicated sexual fantasies. Simple ones don't do it anymore. These days even housewives have heard about the weird pests strangely interested in menstruation products, etc.
.. and why is the research of low quality ?
Perhaps it is because anyone sane avoids the field and rather does something else. Only a masochist would who look at what has happened to people who didn't appease the nutty activists like Andrea James and decided "I'm going to do solid research on this weird phenomenon and risk getting very online single-minded obsessives angry at me".
Modulo trolls, to an extent, but my point's less about whether people care and how well the model describes reality. I don't think Blanchardian theory needs to explain a guy who fetishizes getting knocked up in the vagina or having their skull literally fucked, for one example (eg Kyrosh for an artist who draws well and isn't gory). But once you explain why he doesn't think himself as -- and isn't even comfortable in -- trans spaces with the phrase "aren't deluded enough", it either needs a big asterisk or it needs an explanation.
Yeah, that's fair. If the claim behind Blanchard's typology was to separate transwomen into Drama Queens and people who picked names starting with "A"... well, it wouldn't be completely without controversy, since drama queens and you'd need an inclusive and, but it'd mirror a lot of complaints inside the community.
Largely because Blanchard's typology is categorical and admits few exceptions, to the point where Bailey takes reporting errors as evidence that all exceptions are reporting error. In this environment, existence proof is enough, and I've got more than a couple cases there. It's hard to think of something more autogynophilic, in either the trans or not-trans sense, as something like XChange... but that it's present at all is something Blanchard and especially Bailey specifically reject as part of the typology.
I'm willing to accept a predilection toward it, and probably a pretty strong one, though even there I think it wouldn't be as strong as Blanchard's original dataset would point, if only for selection reasons. If you want to get into it, I'd further expect trans-focused porn is more sub-focused and more likely to have surgical or blood-oriented aspects than average. But that's retreating pretty far from Blanchard's typology.
It's that totalizing aspect that makes Blanchard's typology such an awkward fit, and it's not just a problem on the autogynophilia side. I'd compare Strype with Accelo for an example of people who'd be very easy to make a predictive analysis from the "discomfort with own body" sense, and give very wrong guesses in more than one direction even assuming Strype is autogynophilic (for the sake of your eyeballs, I'll avoid linking to then-his-now-her excellent gay smut). Accelo's emphasize on a femmy version of themselves getting railed by named and developed characters of both genders but favoring men is not unusual either among cis gay men or clearly and conventionally androphillic trans women.
The archetypes Blanchard's talking about exist, and may well have actually been extremely uncommon in Blanchard's original datasets, given the nature of selection there -- I'm not calling his work any more fraudy than other social science of the time -- but even in his original datasets he was throwing out 10%+ as lizardman constant. There were justifiable reasons to do so at the time, but in the modern era you can get a much deeper and far more direct glimpse at unvarnished fringes of human sexuality and it just doesn't seem to fit nearly as well.
I'm not particularly sold on that model, either, and I'm not even sure it's considered likely or even acceptable to voice inside a lot of the modern trans movement; if you want some deeper evidence against I can give it. But I think you need to do a lot more to prove one theory than to disprove another.
Yeah, that's fair, and I've spoken up against that aspect in the past in trans-friendly environments. The bizarre emphasis on disagreement-as-suicide-baiting doesn't do the movement favors, and the immediate jump to threats does even less.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link