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 -
It amuses me how many people still think there's support in the LGBT community to normalize pedophilia, given that community used to be significantly more supportive of pedophilia and has been backpedaling on it for decades. What they want to normalize is child sexuality, not creepy adults exploiting it. It's no different than the feminist argument against modesty: women [children] should be free to do what they want without men [pedophiles] sexualizing them for it. Hence Cuties.
As one of the few people who actually bothered to watch Cuties, this may be the perception of how that movie fits into the culture, but it's not apt. The movie is extremely critical of sexualized cultures that young girls inherit from their confusing adult influences. Yes, it also leans into an uncomfortably sensationalistic depiction of that sexualization, and I'm sure it will be found on many unsavory hard drives, but that's not its messaging.
I'm not sure whether you are agreeing with me or misunderstanding me, so I'll clarify why I said 'Hence Cuties'. The behavior of the girls in the movie is intended as part of an exploration and critique of women's experiences. Critics of the film argue that the movie is morally bad because of how the girls are portrayed while supporters argue there is nothing wrong with the movie itself and that it is instead viewers (eg, "pedophiles") who interpret it in a titillating context who are morally in the wrong. That is, women should be free to make a movie about their experiences without men coming along and sexualizing it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Counterpoints:
You can be "amused" by this all you like. Beyond a certain point, acting as if people concerned about the pro-paedophilia contingent of LGBTQ+ activism are just tilting at windmills strikes me as gaslighting.
There's a big issue that needs better policing, self- or other-wise, but I'd caution some of these examples aren't particularly good ones. In particular, the actual proposal from Tatchell was :
That is, essentially a Romeo and Juliet law. There are some good arguments against these laws: there's a lot of potential for abuse with a lot of the covered age ranges, even within same-age relationships in these age ranges, there are pragmatic arguments against people this age having even safe and consensual sex, and far more than the general sphere this subject is especially vulnerable to the Murder-Ghandi problem.
But they are extremely far from the central case for pedophilia.
More options
Context Copy link
Actually the scary part is that the LGBT movement has more or less flipped the stranger danger on its head. What’s being normalized is keep the parents out of the loop and almost presenting parents as “the enemy of their children,” and normalizing structures in society that actually work against parents being able to find out where their kids are and what they’re doing online (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.calculator.vault.hider&hl=en_US) for a quick example, is an app that exists strictly to hide apps (and thus online communication with strange adults and other potentially dangerous behavior). Schools have been very open — to the point of creating policies forbidding disclosure without the child’s permission— of helping children of varying ages, down to elementary school, hide sexual secrets from their parents.
I was a kid in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I can remember the fear parents had of the internet being available to kids — because they might talk to strangers. We were warned, repeatedly, not to talk to anyone online we didn’t know in person. There were hysterical news reports about Pictochat on the Nintendo DS — because it enabled a child to talk to a strange adult without notifying their parents (even though you had to share information in person first). And obviously there was the stranger danger stuff where any adults who took a particular interest in children were to be reported to your parents immediately, and adults were not taking any of it lightly.
Obviously, this was overkill, but the switch is mind boggling to me. We’ve gone from a fear that an adult might be talking to a kid without parents knowing about it to treating the very idea that parents might want to keep other adults from talking to their kindergartners about sex without their knowledge or consent— including not informing them about what the child is saying about his/her sexuality— as the default position.
Obviously, this is the part pedophiles like more than anything else. Kids now take it as a given that parents are not to be told about their sexuality. That sexual thoughts and feelings are not to be talked about with the parents who know them best. That loving adults want to help you with your sexuality and that in order to do that keep it a secret from your parents. Which almost every advocate group trying to prevent child sexual abuse says is one of the common occurrences in child sexual abuse (https://rainn.org/articles/talking-your-kids-about-sexual-assault) the child is made to keep secrets and often fears punishment if they tell. Now, we teach that exact thing in every classroom in the country and don’t see the irony.
Not the only thing that was in the current year flipped without anyone caring and even noticing.
Even more jarring is transformation of people who were preaching "violence bad! guns bad! self defense bad! human life sacred under any circumstances!" into avid flag waving patriots "glory to ukraine! glory to heroes! death to orcs! no surrender, no step back! throw the moskal to the shark!", without even bothering to justify this abrupt change of their principles.
(yes I know there were never any "principles" involved, but it is still jarring)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ten years ago liberals would have sworn to you that Sista Soulja style "whiteness is the devil" rhetoric was dead and gone, and would never come back.
And now we know that they were deliberately hiding and nurturing it for over two decades, bringing it out of the closest at the first possible opportunity. When a group treats all interactions as tactical engagements to shift the overton window, that's exactly what happens: the quiet part stays quiet, until a memo goes out and suddenly the absurd strawman extremist position is once again party doctrine.
So we already have one example of an extreme leftist position that was pushed out of the overton window only to return far stronger than before, apparently with the assistance of liberals with a no-enemies-to-the-left policy. Why will this be any different?
There's also the point that only heterosexual age-gap relationships seem to disgust progressives. 8 year old boys in stripper dresses getting cash tucked into their panties by adult men is a library activity, while girls getting married at 17 has been made a crime. This means we're a lot closer to the days of the Berlin adoption agencies giving boys to paedophiles than you'd think from the rhetoric about "predatory (straight) men"
The usual argument for abolishing the AoC is about individual freedom. That's very much not an extreme leftist position; it's an extreme liberal position - a libertine position.
SJ is sometimes called "the successor ideology" because it grew out of liberal culture but is not liberal itself. The direction you go from moderate liberalism to get to SJ is at an obtuse angle with the direction you'd have to go to get to abolishing the AoC. And I say that as someone who wants to lower the AoC.
Does SJ memory-hole stories about gay molestors and occasionally enable them*? Yes. That's because they're optimising too hard on "accept gay people" - to quote B5, "conspiracies of silence because the larger ideals have to be protected". It's not because they actually support child molestation in and of itself.
*The conservative media amplifies this for the exact same reason the SJ media suppresses it i.e. it is highly politically inconvenient for the Blue Tribe narrative. It's not actually as common as reading conservative media would lead you to believe.
Which variety of child sexual abuse? The sort where two men adopt / foster boys they abuse and sometimes produce pornography with or the sort where homosexual men will invite teen boys that are 'old souls' to pool parties for leering, letchery, drug use, and also sometimes pornography production?
I find both unacceptable. I suspect the latter is more common than the former. I also suspect the latter is more acceptable in the letch community.
How common does conservative media lead people to believe it is? I'm certain there are unreported instances of both occurring this weekend. Given the current year acceptance of alphabetism, isn't it likely there's more of this abuse now than anytime in the last 40 years?
What I said was that SJers enabling gay molestors is not as common as conservative media would have you believe.
Haven't they enabled all they've failed to call to account?
Arguably they've enabled all the molesters the SJ activism has camouflaged or hidden. SJ work to normalize homosexuals has enabled a non-zero number of molesters.
I understand not all homosexuals offend. In the same way 'not all men'.
I'm saying that "SJer spots gay molestor, doesn't report it to authorities because doesn't want to appear homophobic" is a real thing but not nearly as common as conservative media would have you believe (though much more common than SJ media would have you believe), in both cases because it's highly politically inconvenient for SJ.
"SJ journalist hears about gay molestor being arrested, doesn't report on it to the public", that's basically standard practice. But this isn't as directly harmful; the molestor is in jail whether or not we know about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A gay teen boy going to a gay pool party in a Speedo where lots of gay non-teens will offer him alcohol and feel him up is bad and creepy, for the same reasons that a heterosexual teen girl going to a pool party in a string bikini where adult men will give her alcohol and feel her up is bad and creepy. But neither are pedophilia and most people find it hard to get worked up about the former happening to someone else’s son, just like they would find it hard to get worked up about someone else’s son going to a cougar pool party in a Speedo where adult women will let him drink and feel him up. I suspect that the first scenario is more common than the other two combined, possibly by a very large margin, but it’s not something that conservative media dwells on a lot.
Alcohol and a grope, likely undersells it. Many would feature hard drugs and sexual assault, the Bryan Singer senario.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A big difference is that an adult can understand that flaunting sexuality can and often does make you appear as a sexual object to other people. An adult woman understands that going out in a string bikini is going to attract sexual attention and she knows to keep it to places where she wants that kind of attention. Children don’t understand sexuality that way, and don’t understand the consequences of being sexually attractive to adults. A woman knows that walking down a street alone at night dressed to highlight her sexuality increases the risk of rape. So women generally reserve their “looking sexy” times to going out on the town with other adults she trusts. To a child, it’s just dress up, and they don’t really understand that you can’t just put on a sexy top without attracting sexual attention from others or understanding the implications of attracting that sexual attention. They just want to play dress up barbie.
That is the status quo they are fighting against though. In their ideal world, "flaunting sexuality" wouldn't make you appear as a sexual object to other people unless you intend it to. The fact that it does today is seen as a problem and rather than putting the onus on women/children to not flaunt their sexuality, they prefer to put the onus on the men/pedophiles to not perceive them doing so as sexual.
The trouble is that such a thing is impossible. The sex drive is one of the strongest biological drives except maybe food. To ask a person to not notice a person displaying secondary sex characteristics is to ask a hungry crowd to not notice a plate full of hamburgers. That’s just not how biology works.
Adults like to tell themselves that other people shouldn’t notice their sexual displays, but unless the person has very little real-world experience, they understand perfectly well that people don’t actually work the way they want to believe they do. And so while most adults have learned to mouth those platitudes in polite company. But those same people are absolutely not behaving as if they believe that. No business allows overly sexy clothes in the workplace because it’s a distraction. No woman wears skimpy clothing casually to places like the post office or the grocery store.
And again, kids and for that matter adults with autism or other learning disabilities don’t necessarily pick up on this. To a ten year old, if grownups are telling them it’s okay to dress in a sexual manner and that “the adults won’t see you that way” that’s about the end of it. They don’t get that people lie out of a need to formally maintain the narratives they hold dear.
I think that most people are capable of showing restraint; strong emphasis on "most". You also have shit like burkas and Victorians being aroused by women's ankles...and on the other hand, you've got hippies at Burning Man running around buckass naked and calling it good.
Victorians also had porn and it wasn't confined to ankles. There's a lot of post-Victorian bashing of their immediate predecessors that gets repeated in pop culture as "how it was" and it's not necessarily so (as the song goes). You probably wouldn't have much chance of seeing a woman's ankles in ordinary life as women wore boots in the daytime, so seeing ankles would be confined to intimate moments, and that's where the prospect of prurience comes in. The swimsuit covers of Sports Illustrated are not simply showing off female athleticism, after all. In this NSFW article, you can see a postcard of two women with a man, one of the women is wearing boots, and it's not their ankles they are showing off.
Besides, the era of full nudes in art (much debated) isn't swooning over ankles alone.
More options
Context Copy link
Only the naive and the autistic make somone else's restraint core to thier own identify.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If the position is that people shouldn't perceive others flaunting their sexuality as a sexual display, then I'm not sure what kind of sensible argument there is to be had. I don't even think anyone actually believes that.
This is one of those arguments that is useful in some contexts but will be immediately abandoned in others. It's not a principle or rule, but a tool that is brought out to achieve a particular job and then shelved when it's no longer useful.
In the next breath, we'll be told how it doesn't matter what the speaker meant but rather how it was perceived by the listener that made if offensive.
With this degree of incoherence, it worries me even more that they're pushing sexuality on children, because there is no principle holding that back from going in any direction with it. It's like introducing an uncontrollable pitbull to a room full of toddlers. Sure, he might just play gently with the children, or he might not. Better to keep him from the children in the first place.
This kind of insane idealism can be worse than malice.
deleted
On Pitbull owners it’s sort of a test for me for stupidity (maybe mean and too hot). It’s either people bad at math, lacking empathy, or just never saw the statistics. While pits going out and hurting/killing a loved one isn’t a gigantic risks it does happen a lot. And you have a ton of other options of mid-sized family pet dog where you don’t run risks your entire family hates you for life because you dog maimed mom it seems like an easy decision. I don’t know the exact probabilities of that happening but removing a .1% chance of that happening for basically free seems like a good deal.
More options
Context Copy link
I think I saw someone go through the dog statistics ages ago, but I'm guessing dog attacks just havent been in the news lately. Wait until the next time there's a high-visibility culture-war adjacent dog bite or police shooting of a dog, and I'm sure it'll be plastered all over the thread.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Roughly 50% of the adult population believe that enough to try and impose policy preferences based on it; this is why the claim of "victim blaming" is effective in the first place. This view skews massively female for obvious reasons.
To be fair to your other point, though, the people who believe this also form a core part of the same demographic that's currently "pushing sexuality on children"- which is also why that claim is a bit incoherent, and perhaps more accurately stated as "treat the young as if they were all women, especially the boys; man bad/foreign/unstable, women good/domestic/stable".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, I don't think they support it. But with the whole "take the T out of LGBT" and the trans push against lesbians (and to a lesser extent gay men) over "genital preferences", I think the older-style lot will find the ground going out from under them. Some variants of the new flag include the intersex symbol, which I think is absurd because intersex is a whole different thing.
No, give the sociologists and pyschologists time to agitate that the term should be MAP not paedophile, and that it should be removed from whatever the latest version of the DSM V is as a disorder (just like getting homosexuality reclassified) and the new cutting-edge understanding will be that they too are an oppressed sexual minority and any hold-outs who go "Fuck no, we don't want paedophiles included!" are being - well, whatever the term for "paedophobia" like "homophobia" and "transphobia" will be.
More options
Context Copy link
The usual argument is that they kicked out NAMBLA et al from the movement in order to gain mainstream acceptance, amd now that they have it and homosexuality has been normalized they are returning to their original goals (and more).
I don’t think it passes the smell test that LGBT people, or the movement, or a representative sampling of the movement’s leaders, or the smoke-filled back room where George Soros, the local Masonic lodge head, and some lizard people decide the aims of the LGBT movement, are pro pedophilia. I think that it’s very defensible to claim that gay male sexual norms around consent, the age thereof, harassment, and the like would be very, very bad to have adopted more widely, and that LGBT leaders have a history of overlooking pedophiles among their supporters alternating with purging them, and that trans activism prioritizes trans stuff over well established institutional knowledge for child protection and that the combination thereof will probably be used as cover for pedophilia at some point, either of the ‘kind of a creep with teenagers’ kind or of the kind this movie is about. I think it’s further fair to say that culture war dynamics might prevent that from getting shut down.
Those two statements seem directly in contradiction to me
Gay male culture seems like a survival of 70’s macho sexually aggressive norms, which includes a lot of having sex with teens being socially acceptable. Obviously that’s a different thing from out and out pedophilia, and it gets treated differently at least when gay men do it(probably more because society doesn’t actually care that much about teenaged boys having sex with adults, even if it’s technically illegal and their parents probably aren’t thrilled, than because LGBT gets special privileges).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So they were all secretly pro-paedophilia but kept it a secret for 30 years? You would think with such an enormous conspiracy there'd be a whistleblower at some point. Surely there are people in LGBT circles who are high-ranking enough that they would be in on it but who don't actually support paedophilia.
I don’t think it works that way. It’s more that the organizations were kicking out NAMBLA over optics not principles, and should those optics no longer be a problem, then they stop policing the ranks for pedophilia.
More options
Context Copy link
The argument usually isn't that there's an explicit conspiracy by the LGBT community, simply that LGBT and pedophilia are natural fellow travellers. And given the enormously higher chance that gays and lesbians were sexually abused as kids and/or had significant inappropriate sexual experiences as a kid*, combined with the higher likelihood of those who were sexually abused as children to themselves become pedophiles**, the basic idea isn't that far fetched.
*: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11501300/
**: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2082860/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link