site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33535 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There is a lot of erotica on AO3 that's clearly written by men (as opposed to erotica that's clearly written by women)

Really? Like there's some I guess. But the amount of homosexual male shipping that goes on there... it's like a phallic Straits of Malacca, a lilac Panama Canal, an LGBT Suez. Most men really are not interested in homosexual relationships, most men don't tag things with 'angst'.

I did an experiment a while ago, looking for the most popular HP fics on AO3 and the most popular fics on FFN. Nearly all of the AO3 ones were about relationships (often gay), most of the FFN ones were about events.

Gay male fiction may be written by gay men as well as women?

Gay male fiction may be written by gay men as well as women?

It's easy to tell. They are very different. Gay erotic fiction written by gay men for gay men resembles straight porn; 20% setup, 80% graphic sex. Gay erotic fiction written by women for women resembles straight romance novels; 99 pages of melodrama for 1 page of fucking. There are other tells (e.g. the female obsession with dark and broody bad boys).

Gay male fiction tends to look more like Dominated by Doug than the weepy softboy melodrama on AO3.

Sure but is that what's going on here? Are gay men known for how much they write about gay relationships in Harry Potter or Kpop? Or is it women?

Incidentally, these works tend to be catered towards the female gaze, and gay men often find M/M fanfiction alien or offputting.

Similarly with bara and yaoi in Japan, though this is by no means a physical law. BL is famously written by women for women.

Depends on what tags you search.

If you search M/M then yeah that’s obviously mostly by and for women. But if you search F/F or femdom there’s plenty that’s for the male gaze.

At least in 2013, F/F was mostly written and read by women, and its not even close.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17018478/chapters/40009467

It's probably shifted since since in 2013 AO3 really was the niche site catering a lot to m/m porn whereas FFN had the broader appeal. Is there more recent equivalent data?

I don’t have any hard data (though I feel sure it exists and will see if I can dig it up later) but going off of anecdotal experience I would be utterly shocked if the demographics of f/f fic writers and readers was less than 80% female and even that would be low-balling.

The only type of fanfic where I expect male writers are probably significantly represented is out and out zero-plot smut and even that is probably more like 65/35 female/male than 50/50.

You can take this exercise even further. Read back to the prior comment in this thread.

It seems somewhat accepted around here that a lot of career path differences are based on "men like to work with things, women like to work with people". Video games are way better at representing interactions between "things" than novels are, both "things" as physical objects to shoot and explode and strategic management of mechanistic systems. I don't think games are actually that good at representing complex social interaction between individuals, because of the cost of producing the visuals and dialogue for each branching path they really can't get that complex. It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels. This is of course describing the centers of different bell curves and not to suggest that there are no women interested in strategy games and no men who like Jane Austen novels.

Now picture a subgenre of speculative fiction filled with obsessive worldbuilding, detailed demographics and alien physiology and gender roles of the type you might find in the chunkiest of doorstopper fantasy or science fiction novels. But rather, an alternative universe that can be added to any existing property or even stand on its own merit, with as many variations on the precise details of that world as there are authors. And the entire purpose of this worldbuilding is to codify interactions between people, sort them into groups, and then have them engage in insane amounts of fetish-laden sex.

It has to be written mainly by and for men, surely?

Nope. It's omegaverse.

This is the popularity of ships in HP:

Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter (59398)

Sirius Black/Remus Lupin (38850)

Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy (23983)

James Potter/Lily Evans Potter (22265)

Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley (18572)

Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley (15385)

Harry Potter/Severus Snape (15320)

Regulus Black/James Potter (7394)

Hermione Granger/Severus Snape (7273)

Hermione Granger/Harry Potter (6807)

The majority is gay and I'd bet that most of the rest are very female. Men don't really conceive of Hermione/Draco relationships as being natural or plausible, let alone Hermione/Snape. Harry getting a harem of hot Slytherin girls is more plausible. Overall:

M/M (181841)

F/M (146346)

Other fandoms are considerably gayer. My Hero Academia for instance:

M/M (141877)

F/M (64209)

Marvel:

M/M (264404)

F/M (182454

Real Person fiction:

M/M (345459)

Gen (100487)

Kpop is even more homosexual than that, as you might expect. Even Minecraft somehow has 30,000 M/M stories and 7,000 F/M stories. I shudder to think of what's going on in there. I conclude that AO3 is a female dominated site, obsessed with male homosexuals.

Even Minecraft somehow has 30,000 M/M stories and 7,000 F/M stories. I shudder to think of what's going on in there.

I think a lot of those are also real person fiction, focusing on popular Minecraft streamers (such as Dream and the people he played with).

Yeah, this is a fandom universal and has been for ages.

The most popular ship in the Star Wars fandom is Kylo Ren/Rey which is probably not surprising, everybody loves a broody bad boy. But by far second most popular is to ship Kylo Ren and Domhall Gleeson’s minor supporting villain Hux. It is many times more popular than say, Finn/Rey or Poe/Rey (that is, the female lead of the sequel trilogy and the male leads) with some 11,000 fics vs 2,000 or so for each of the latter two.

Another piece of fandom lore relates to Supernatural. The show was clearly meant to be a “guys’ show.” If you’re unfamiliar, it follows two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who drive around the country killing monsters/ghosts/demons and sleeping with beautiful women. However the fandom it cultivated turned out to be overwhelmingly female. And for a while anyways, they overwhelmingly shipped the two brothers (‘Wincest’). The writers tried valiantly time and time again to introduce female love interests for the brothers only for each to suffer the vicious wrath of the fandom (sometimes up to harassing the actresses that played them) and be shortly written out one after the other.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats