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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   25852 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids.

So if everybody got respectable, why was there all the complaining over how Mayor Pete was the wrong kind of gay?

And kink should be at Pride, it's gotten too family-friendly?

And why can't my non-binary queer friends get dates?

We've already rehashed the Drag Queen Story Hour, but now "if you don't bring your minor kids to strip clubs for drag events, you're a bigot"?

Yeah, that sure is respectability-first normie quiet surburban life!

First of all, most of that is very niche online-only stuff that most people haven't heard of. It's not on the same level as the fight over gay marriage and everything that went along with it.

Second of all, half of those are about trans stuff, which proves my point? Trans people are forced into counter-culture, and the trans culture war brings all kinds of weirdness to the front of the Overton Window, including stuff about drag queens who aren't even trans. That's what you can take out of the Overton Window by just not fighitng about trans people anymore.

And for that matter, the first two which are largely about gay people also prove my point? Gay people who are normie and straight-passing become nationally important politicians, gay events like Pride become family-friendly and wholesome, and the people who have a problem with that are relegated to writing think pieces in dying old-media outlets.

Third, see the second half of my reply here, I was talking about the immediate decade-or-so aftermath of the gay marriage fight ending. Yes there will eventually be new fights, you can't win everything forever, but that's doesn't negate the huge wins you actually got at the time.

  • -16

Let me insert here that although I disagree with you, I appreciate your persistence in offering counterpoint and I am not among the downvoters. While I do downvote unnecessarily antagonistic and low-effort posts (including yours at times) I don't think this is either.

Okay, so trans stuff is counter-culture, so please do explain: how did it go from "event hosted in libraries where nobody is forcing you to bring your kids to see it" to "it's in school for kindergarten onwards and you can't opt out"?

'You can take the heat out of this dispute by just giving in, shutting up, and letting the other side do what the hell they want in public spaces that are supposed to be for all' is one solution, certainly, but not one I'm very inclined towards. "Sure, nobody likes slavery, but why are you going on protests about it? Just stay quiet and all this fighting will stop and then it'll be fine!"

how did it go from

It didn't.

Pride become family-friendly and wholesome

Do you have any video of these? I don't know that I've seen any pride events I'd view as wholesome, but I'll accept they may exist somewhere.

Uh, aren't pride parades still full of public nudity and kink and all that jazz, right out on main street?

I mean the example I am responding to here is OP saying that that pride has become too family friendly and people are complaining about that. You can reject that premise if you disagree, but then OP loses it as an example in their own argument, which supports my original position.

They’re not mutually exclusive. You can have a festival of filth and degeneracy that some members of the lgbt community think is still too family friendly. Do I know that this is the case? No, I don’t have much evidence either way- it could be that pride parades are toned down from back in the day, it could be that they aren’t, the complainers could be a fringe view, they could be mainstream. But writing off the possibility out of hand seems like a lack of rigour.

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