site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As @raggedy_anthem says below, the sexual revolution was mainly about sexual freedom for men, and any consequences - positive or negative - for women weren't something its proponents cared much about.

Do you have any pieces of evidence to back this up? I've always known sexual liberation to have sprung forth from women's liberation movements as a means of freeing women's sexuality from the heel of men's control, and all the sources I can find seem to support this. It seems to require some justification to suppose that, despite the sexual revolution happening coincident with women's liberation and promoted by a lot of the same people that it's actually men who did it.

I mean, I've long suspected that something like this would happen—backed by seemingly naked reasoning that since it's benefiting men at the expense of women (it isn't—we're just blind to social costs to men in general), that it must have therefore been perpetrated by them. And, like, not all feminists were thrilled about it. It's exactly what I imagined while doomdreaming in English 3 all those years ago, which is weird.

Some men, and I think this is in part behind some of the 'incel' subculture or identity, have seemingly realized that the sexual revolution's free for all buffet clearly often applies primarily to the highest status/most attractive men in a kind of highly unequal romantic economy. But that doesn't mean they didn't 'want it'.

You have never set foot in or read any thinking generated by any incel community—please stop spreading misinformation about what they believe. They have been unambiguously skeptical about the sexual liberation and its consequences for reasons similar if not identical to yours for over a decade now—far before it became a borderline mainstream curiosity—back when they were a nameless, nascent subculture on r9k 1.0. I don't know how long you've been woke on this, but chances are good that's longer than you.

Anyways, while I'm feeling so goddamn ahead of the curve, I'll share my next prophecy: I see little skirmishes going on right now between fringe groups on Twitter about pornography use and how comparable it is to sexual promiscuity in terms of how debasing to one's sexual purity it is. This argument is the future. Right-wingers don't yet know it, but in the coming years they will be joining forces with feminists on this topic. As sexual mores continue to tighten here in straightsville and monogamy becomes more in vogue again, pristine male virgins will start to wonder aloud why they are being asked so expectantly why they aren't hitching it with ran-through born again virgins. Since for many cultural reasons we can't turn the clocks back to virginity being a female-only phenomenon, we'll be in need of a modern, horse-driven-car-frame solution, which this false equivocation offers.

"You defected too, anon."

While (many) women obviously enjoy sex, a cursory glance at even the smuttiest romance fiction easily leads to the conclusion that simply having sex, even with a very attractive man, is not really the attraction for women in the way the inverse is for men. [...] Most young women are not, even 50 years after the sexual revolution, fantasising about fucking around, which is pretty telling.

I simply don't understand how it's possible to persist this belief in a post-Fifty Shades world. Then again, it's become clear to me how impossible it is to dislodge highly load-bearing beliefs with facts, even it's something like the best selling book ever written by human hands. I'd say "excluding religious texts", but it's unclear to me that Fifty Shades of Gray isn't the religious text for the female sexual id. I suppose it's easy for me to see it that way, because I was never burdened with the Female Sexual Purity myth. You see, my secondary stomping grounds as a curious teenager was Tumblr, and if you knew where to look (which I did), you could hear what teenage girls were saying when they thought no one was listening.

And let me tell you, it's rather difficult to maintain an image of girls being somehow "less sexual" or even "more pure" by the time you're not even surprised any more to stumble across a thread with dozens of them waxing licentious about all the ways in which they would love to let fictional video game villain Sephiroth Ragnarok destroy their pussy. I was well aware at the time that a lot of this was essentially femmechismo—girls' locker room talk—but we've never let such considerations get in the way of how we perceive boys and men.

What wasn't as clear to me at the time was how universal this sort of thing actually was and is—but then, of course, Shades happened.

Right-wingers don't yet know it, but in the coming years they will be joining forces with feminists on this topic.

They already have - there was an unholy alliance between radfems and religious conservatives against porn.

I've seen them agree that it's bad, I haven't yet seen them agree that watching porn is like being sexually promiscuous.

They get married in the Shades series, which seems to support the theory that a woman’s fantasy includes marriage.

They weren't married before or after all the fucking they did in the first novel, which is the one that sold so well.

They have been unambiguously skeptical about the sexual liberation and its consequences for reasons similar if not identical to yours for over a decade now—far before it became a borderline mainstream curiosity—back when they were a nameless, nascent subculture on r9k 1.0. I don't know how long you've been woke on this, but chances are good that's longer than you.

Yeah I agree, this doesn’t contradict what I’m saying.

What wasn't as clear to me at the time was how universal this sort of thing actually was and is—but then, of course, Shades happened.

You mention this a few times when actually it’s a perfect example of what I’m saying. In Fifty Shades, a plain young woman becomes the obsession of a handsome billionaire who will stop at nothing to make her his. The S&M is merely set dressing on top of this eternal romance plot, which is essentially Cinderella. The franchise of Fifty Shades ends with the main character happily married to Mr Grey and pregnant with their second child lmao, it’s the epitome of what I’m saying.

The telling thing is that smut for women almost never involves a large number of sexual partners for the protagonist. Like Fifty Shades, the fantasy for woman is one man, not many - and almost never more than two in a love triangle. Almost no romance novels involve the protagonist going out and sleeping with many men as the narrative of the book, this isn’t generally appealing to women.

And let me tell you, it's rather difficult to maintain an image of girls being somehow "less sexual" or even "more pure" by the time you're not even surprised any more to stumble across a thread with dozens of them waxing licentious about all the ways in which they would love to let fictional video game villain Sephiroth Ragnarok destroy their pussy.

Yeah, but in most of their fantasies and in the fanfic they read, Sephiroth is in love with them / their boyfriend etc etc etc. They’re not fantasising about getting pumped and dumped by him, they fantasise about him falling in love with them, or with a male stand in for them in the case of Yaoi stuff.

Yeah I agree, this doesn’t contradict what I’m saying.

Sigh.

Some men, and I think this is in part behind some of the 'incel' subculture or identity, have seemingly realized that the sexual revolution's free for all buffet clearly often applies primarily to the highest status/most attractive men in a kind of highly unequal romantic economy. But that doesn't mean they didn't 'want it'. Many Western men (even many people here, I have found) are essentially temporarily embarrassed chads who are merely upset, if they are upset, that they're not on top of the sexual hierarchy of men, not that the sexual hierarchy exists. It is a problem of position for them, rather than one of system.

This is what you said. Incel subculture hasn't "seemingly realized" the consequences of the sexual revolution. They were always aware of it; it was a defining element of their understanding of it since day one.

They absolutely, positively, do not "want it".

They absolutely, positively, do not view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed chads".

They absolutely, positively, are not upset that they are not "on top of the sexual hierarchy, not that the sexual hierarchy exists."

They absolutely, positively, not concerned about "position, rather than the system itself".

It's actually incredible, because while there is a lot of variety in what the communities believe, your accusations represent perhaps the inverse of the positions that actually unite them.

In Fifty Shades, a plain young woman becomes the obsession of a handsome billionaire who will stop at nothing to make her his. The S&M is merely set dressing on top of this eternal romance plot, which is essentially Cinderella.

Are you serious?

Christian Gray is a combo ATM + Sex Robot. If this is the caliber of "romance" men need to match to stop the sexual rat-race you describe, I humbly rest my case.

Yeah, but in most of their fantasies and in the fanfic they read, Sephiroth is in love with them

That's funny, I don't recall reading that part.

they fantasise about him falling in love with them

Yes I am also aware that women do this in addition to fantasizing about getting railed by strongest, fittest men that they can imagine. When men do something like this, it's called a Madonna/Whore complex.

As far as I'm concerned, my view is that the Sexual Revolution was mainly driven by women, not men. It's not something I feel like discussing here in detail right now, but for now I will offer this as food for thought: I find it self-evident that men initiating casual/premarital/extramarital sex with women only becomes socially sanctioned behavior (within limits) if it becomes a socially accepted reality that at least a significant minority of women is down for something like that.

Right, and if you zoom out, you find a near 1:1 correlation with female empowerment leading to libertine sexual values—what with the most male dominated societies on Earth stoning people to death for sex out of wedlock.

This is also difficult to explain if you think Men Did It.