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"Responsible" is a weird thing to say. I don't think it has zero contribution, but I think it's pretty far downstream. The causal chain all starts with the idea that it's possible to do any of this and like it. This is what causes people to make the sissy hypno porn, and what causes people to watch the sissy hypno porn.
"Social Contagion" has some implications of negative affect because it implies a disease. I think reasonable people can disagree on whether queerness is a disease based on what they've experienced. (though I think... people are wrong if they think it's innately bad, because my experiences indicate that it doesn't have to be.) But the property of ideas spreading and causing the people who see them to consider them as possibilities? That's just memetics and culture. I think reasonable people should agree that queerness is subject to those forces.
So I do think, "cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom" are enough to move the idea of transness from 'unthinkable' to 'thinkable'. And that's part of the process. It does have an effect. Obviously trans people need their existence to be 'thinkable' and not 'unthinkable', so it's completely understandable why they would be for that. But if you really think of transness as a memetic disease- then it's understandable why you would want it to remain 'unthinkable' for as long as possible and then dissuaded.
Oh, I completely agree with you. It’s part of it, but I think it’s the lesser part of it. The bigger part of it is young people becoming disaffected with their romantic and personal lives and pursuing transition as a result, and in my opinion porn and porn culture is part of it. Maybe I’m too much of a TERF to see past that, though!
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True, although in fairness we have several terms for the concept of "coming to believe X because people around you believe X" and none of them as far as I'm aware have positive affect. TRAs would hardly react more positively if the spike in FTMs was attributed to "peer pressure", "groupthink" or "radicalization". Everyone wants to think of himself as the master of his own destiny and beliefs, and reacts with understandable offense when someone says otherwise (even if they're right; even if the beliefs he's arrived at are harmless, good or pro-social ones).
Some of them do have a positive affect. "Becoming Cultured" is an example. "Learning Manners" is an example. "Education" is an example.
Of course we have reasons why we think the things we're transmitting are good and not 'just' peer pressure, but so do the TRAs obviously.
I think "learning", "becoming" and "education" are describing a directed process in which the subject is an active participant, which make them therefore distinct concepts from the other terms, which portray the subject as weak and impressionable for falling victim to it. This may just be a matter of emphasis (or even a Russell conjugation). I take your point.
I can see the connotation you're pointing at but I don't think it alone makes for a fine line that really cleaves reality at the joints. You can 'just say no' to drugs in the prototypical peer pressure case. Doing a cigarette with your friends requires you to take the cigarette and ask your friend how you smoke it. (Or watch and learn.) You can't always 'just say no' to education. Most children end up in school whether they want to be or not. So Peer Pressure is also Learning, Education is also Indoctrination.
I think the affect is actually doing a lot more work than that. 'Kids are smoking cigarettes because of peer pressure' is literal, but you wouldn't say 'education is indoctrination' unless you're being edgy, because the affect is also shorthand. In this case a shorthand for- 'we shouldn't let kids smoke cigarettes but they are, and its spreading.'
I think how we use affect in 2 dimensional ways really can be quite important, because its holding information. In order to figure out whether we should let kids smoke you have to think about a whole bunch of questions. "Is the person wise enough to discern the good from the bad? Are they being exploited? Will this actually help them? Is this actually necessary to society? Will they retroactively endorse it after they're done? Does the fact that they want to do it matter?"
But you don't need to do all that math every time smoking comes up, you can cache the optimal policy result dynamic programming style as a single affect bit. Letting kids smoke=bad.
And this saves a ton of processing power.
... I feel like I've dipped a toe into a whole other world of implications just now, where thinking through your beliefs can be a cost and asking you to examine your beliefs can be enemy action. It's a tangential insight that just occurred to me that I need to think about so I don't want to go off on it but... this model feels like it sticks to a lot of things that happen in human culture war.
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