Future societies will look back on economics as a kind of foolish male mysticism, and Marçal’s book anticipates the tone of their laughter.
Decided to read the article being quoted. The article itself is fine, but it makes the book sound very unappealing.
We actually mentioned “GDP doesn’t cover unpaid within-household labor” and “GDP is weird about natural resources” in econ class, and this was a 1-semester Econ For Normal People class.
“Is that what humans are: Homo Economicus?” No? That’s a name that’s different from “Homo sapiens” for a reason.
I dislike the idea that my gender is fundamentally linked to collectivism and dependency. If this is what it means to be female, then send me testosterone pls.
The obvious solution is to abolish marriage as an institution where some people are expected to perform labor without compensation, and all other such institutions as well. Every worker deserves their reward, in whatever means of exchange they agree to with the person who benefits from their work.
And the book sounds sexist and gender-essentializing and while probably taking apart some stuff that needs to be taken apart, also grotesquely mischaracterizes a lot of stuff. It is also misgendering me as a “man” to which I will take exceptional levels of offense to.
Another article about it doesn’t help. Straw everywhere. Sounds like sneer culture. It seems to be approximately getting at the root of the problem (the working woman doesn’t get her pay because reasons) and shies off from the obvious implications (eradicate reasons, have the value-creators receive their pay) in favor of something vague which I’m worried would end up being “let’s use the state apparatus of violence to hurt promethea because money don’t real and economy don’t matter”.
There always seem to be undertones of “introduce mandatory maternal leave and make the ~employers~ pay for it” because what women need is totally a violently enforced structure making it economically rational to discriminate. But wait rationality don’t real so that’s why ~just commanding~ people to pay workers who don’t work will obviously work and it’s not like such laws have created a situation where asking people whether they are planning to have children is illegal and thus employers just discriminate indiscriminately against anyone who’s younger than 40 and looks like they might have a uterus.
A lot of people go all “Youth rights is all about stupid white kids who wish they were oppressed” but I don’t think anyone could honestly deny that minors have a lot of serious limitations to their freedoms and their parents are often allowed and encouraged to treat them as property and even hit them, as long as they don’t do it too much.
But they don’t even try to deny that minors are legally and socially treated worse than adults. They just say that it’s a good thing for them to be treated that way, or at least that parents have a right to do it because they take care of the bills (imagine if someone tried that excuse for abusing their wife or something instead).
This is the same pattern I see with fatphobia. People’s objection isn’t that fat people aren’t oppressed, they just think that they deserve it or that it’s for their own good.
Actual Misandry seems to have this too. “Yes, men deserve to have violent emotionally repressed lives and be treaten as disposable.”
This is interesting, because I’m picking a pattern which suggests that “group X is treated badly” receives either “yes, so what” if people consider it okay and deserved, and “not true” if people consider it not okay (dat just world bias); for example, the “lol male tears” kind of feminists usually try to establish constructs explaining it away (”dat privilege tho” or “that’s a men-on-men problem”) instead of outright saying “yes that’s how it should be”, or how really few people are willing to go on record saying that the traditional targets of anti-discrimination efforts should be discriminated against while a lot of people are really invested in arguing that the discrimination doesn’t exist.
Extrapolating from that, if youth rights and anti-fatphobia got more popular people would start thinking they already are treated equally. There’s probably a slight connection mechanism to reality in the sense that popularizing youth rights wouldn’t work so well because of laws explicitly making the oppression obvious as it would be nigh-impossible to claim minors are equal with a straight face (although people totally would try anyway).
And this might also explain why nominal legal equality is so popular while trying to do anything about the substantial problems (non-violently; even when leaving state action out of this it still applies very strongly) gets a pushback. People who don’t want things to be improved can gather around de jure equality and claim it fixes everything while leaving de facto oppression and biases untouched. (Once again, even the male tears feminists tend to oppose conscription.)
[content warning: misandry, misogyny, violence against penises, abuse] The comments of my last post contained several people who were like “Ozy, you are excusing feminists! You would never write a post like this about MRAs!” To which I say: challenge fucking accepted. As far as I can tell, the genre of “two dozen out-of-context quotes without sources or anything” is not particularly popular among…
This is important and brilliant. Only a movement that has been hardened by the fires of truth in the crucible of accountability deserves to reign over the future.
Also, while it’s slightly off-topic I really appreciated these gems of rhetoric:
that an all-female comedy festival is exclusionary of men certainly seems prima facie plausible, but perhaps falls victim to the objection that all-male comedy festivals already exist, they are just not labeled as such.
While feminist sexism and rape apologism is shameful and “about as bad as the rest of society” is not exactly something to brag about, I do think that’s important to note.
I just read a text exchange in which a guy tried to flirt with a stranger on Facebook by sending her a picture of his penis. The woman responded by ridiculing him, sending him lots of pictures of other men’s penises to demonstrate how horrible it is to receive dick pics, and suggesting that his dick was small and diseased. He got angry, and asked to end the conversation, which she didn’t do. Then he asked her not to share the conversation, and she posted the whole thing publicly, along with his name. Now it’s on my news feed because lots of people are reading it and finding it hilarious.
I hope I’m not the only one who thinks this is tragic.
The perception of dick pics as disgusting, low status, and worthy of ridicule is part of the larger perception of sexuality as shameful. I would much, much rather live in a culture where I sometimes received unwanted images of strangers’ genitals as part of clumsy flirting than to live in a culture where being open about sexuality is about as safe as making violent threats.
I would love to live in the nearby world where “you’re cute, wanna see my dick/vulva?” is a polite way of finding out whether an attractive stranger feels like sharing a casual online sexual interaction. The man’s actions in this exchange make me feel a lot more like I live in that world than do the woman’s.
I recognize that, given we *don’t* live in that world, *and* that the world we do live in includes a lot of people who feel women should be grateful for male attention and never allowed to protect themselves let alone retaliate, dick pics are often (usually?) more of a harmful spam tactic than a kind of benign if inept way of flirting.
I think it’s a good idea to discourage spamming people, and also to discourage treating women as if they have no right to refuse sexual advances.
But please, please, do not confuse strategic choice of social norms with the rush of a cheap status-boost. Do not play along with the game where we all punish each other for having bodies in the context of Christian purity and original sin.
So I gave my take on it:
The boy in question may not, himself, have realized he was performing an aggressive move. He may have just been emulating a move that he saw as successful, because when aggressive men make that move they often *are* successful.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
If you’re making some fedora-wearing neckbeard cry delicious man-tears, if you’re viciously shaming some size 0 fetish model for promoting unhealthy body standards, if you’re screaming at some transgirl for “invading your safe space” and “not being a real woman”, if you’re savaging some internet pundit for using “transgirl” because they haven’t kept up with the lingo-of-the-week… you’re almost certainly attacking someone who’s probably been hurt worse by the Patriarchy than you have.
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
The conclusion only makes sense if we assume that structural and institutional power are virtually the only forms of power that exist.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
…
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
…
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
…
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
This grosses me out more than I can properly articulate. The idea that if you ever “win” a social conflict that you’re really the bad guy is gross as all hell. The idea let’s virtually anyone off the hook. Were you successfully criticized for your behaviour? Congratulations, your detractor is a bully abusing their superior social power against poor meek little you. You fire a woman for getting pregnant, and she succesfully sued you and damaged your business’ reputation? What an abuse of power, you poor little thing. You harrass someone online and they actually stand up to you? You shouldn’t have to stand for such mistreatment. Were you cruel to a friend, and now less people want to hang out with you? You’re the real victim here.
This is the weaponization of the pretense of meekness. It’s the whine of particularly nasty members of the religious right, who complain, in naked envy of Saudi Arabia’s ability to persecute “deviants,” that their detractors would never be so critical of militant islam.
So yes, it feels fucking fantastic.
None of this is to say that anything in the name of ‘winning’ a social conflict is acceptable, or that one cannot be disprortionate, excessive, or sadistic and cruel towards others in response to mistreatment, or that what you’ve identified as mistreatment is accurately described as such. Nuance, proportionality, and compassion are excellent virtues. But it is vastly unjustified to cast ‘winners of social conflict’ as nearly equivalent to abusers of social power attacking the weak in place of the strong.
I don’t think dick-pic-sender’s name should have been released to the internet at large. Large, diffuse groups on the internet are personally removed from the situation, are frequently full of unprincipled people, and the individuals involved frequently feel like a snowflake in an avalanche. Consequently the people involved are often ignorant or apathetic of the scale of harm they as a group are causing, which can quickly become vastly improportionate to scale of the harm to which the group is responding.
I do think it’d be entirely fair game to show the messages to people within dick-pic-sender’s social group. It’s fair for the people in your life to know how you treat others, and I don’t think you necessarily deserve privacy when you treat someone poorly through unsolicited messages (IANAL, but I think the law generally agrees as well).
And for the love of fucking god I wish people would stop defending people like dick-pic-sender by trying to cast them as weak, bumbling little angels. Aside from the fact that there’s not much justification for it: you can mistreat the strong. You can be cruel to anyone. If you’re gonna argue that excessive responses, cruelty, and internet mobs are bad, do it because those things are bad in principle, not because they’re being used against a particular victim class you wanna defend.
op’s post is like the ultimate example of everything i find foul about the lesswronger worldview
even though the lesswrongers claim to be against “toxic sj,” in reality they just subscribe to a twisted backwards grotesque parody of the most misapplied sj identity politics, except in their version the primary “marginalized community” which they must fight for and protect at all costs is “dudes who are experiencing consequences for being shitty to other people.”
and notice the whining about “the actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them”- any sensible person would decide that the solution would be to fight to make it more difficult for aggressive men to mistreat people, but op seems to be implying that instead, we should try to make it should be easier for less aggressive men to mistreat people. it’s completely backwards and awful tbh.
also, i’m really grossed out by op comparing the backlash that the dickpic sender received to the harassment and mistreatment that trans women and eating disordered women receive. especially appalling is the implication that the dickpic sender has been hurt by the patriarchy on a level comparable to the harm the patriarchy does to trans women and eating disordered women. this is ludicrous, standing up to a sexual harasser isn’t comparable to bullying marginalized women, fuck off.
Do two wrongs make a right? Is it possible that the response to something bad is also bad? Do you think seeing pictures of genitals is worse than being publicly shamed? Do you think that male genitals are inherently evil and shameful?
The lesswronger mindset is that you must /update/ your beliefs about an individual based on evidence. That means after you hear additional information about a straight dude, you won’t continue to use your straight-line prior. You should
already you’re assuming that it was “wrong” to publicly shame the dickpic sender. tsk tsk.
Is it possible that the response to something bad is also bad?
certainly. but the op wasn’t just trying to claim the response was excessive, but also attempted to cast the pickpic sender as a persecuted innocent. which is absurd.
Do you think seeing pictures of genitals is worse than being publicly shamed?
sending a naked picture to someone is pretty clearly a sexual act, and performing a sexual act with someone without their permission is indeed many times worse than public shaming.
Do you think that male genitals are inherently evil and shameful?
no, i think performing a sexual act with someone without their permission is inherently evil and shameful.
The lesswronger mindset is that you must /update/ your beliefs about an
individual based on evidence. That means after you hear additional
information about a straight dude, you won’t continue to use your
straight-line prior. You should(swap! (*belief* 'straight-dude-g359) bayes-update new-evidence)
what possible additional information would make me decide the dickpic sender was actually an okay dude.
i….. i hate this. i hate this so much.
Thank you for your explanation. The last bit was in response to your framing of the situation as a between-group conflict and the lesswrongers taking a side. The problem is that there are ways to draw the line (hyperplane?) based on meta-level or object-level criteria, but even if you draw it right through the original culprit, you will sound like you are endorsing either sexual harassment or online hate mobs.
I understand you better now. I kind of assumed that you were a utilitarian. For a virtue or deontological ethics-ist your stance makes more sense. Or even an old-fashioned randian objectivist who thinks you forfeit your rights when you break the social contract, which I assume is an unfortunate accident.
thinking that people have a right to tell other people when they’ve been mistreated by someone isn’t incompatible with a utilitarian viewpoint. especially if one believes- as i do- that the beneficial deterrent effect of the punishment outweighs the harm caused to the dickpic sender. people are less likely to mistreat others if they know that the person they mistreat might inform other people. furthermore the dickpic sender will be less likely to act that way in the future.
i don’t think the dickpic sender “forfeited their rights”- it doesn’t remove any of his rights that people think negatively of him because of how he treats people. i’m not saying he should be killed or thrown in jail or whatever- but people he’s mistreated have a right to speak about it.
This means that dick pic sender would still deserve to have his name circulated as a terrible person if dick pic receiver had replied “what a beautiful penis you have” and then posted the screenshots by accident.
Our society with its expectations of masculinity on the other hand /rewards/ boundary-pushing when it works and punishes only when it fails.
Edit: Dick pic receiver has the right to post receipts. I am more critical of third parties; public shaming when it comes to victims posting receipts is a-ok. The victim is not the person who is punching down, the hypothetical internet person who reblogs the clear name of the guy might be.
i don’t buy this at all. i don’t buy that more masculine dudes get rewarded for sending unsolicited dickpics. i buy perhaps that more masculine dudes are more likely to get away with crossing peoples boundaries, because of the implicit threat of violence they can credibly maintain, but this idea that they’re getting rewarded for it is absurd. (as is the implication that this is unfair primarily to the less
masculine men who can’t get away with disrespecting peoples boundaries,
rather than unfair to the people the more masculine dudes get away with mistreating)
in the incredibly unlikely event of an unsolicited dickpic which was positively received (which i seriously doubt even exists), and the screenshot being posted by accident, then yes, i people who found out about that would still have the right to evaluate that action and for it to affect how they think of the person who sent the picture.
oh hey, i just saw the exchange which this whole thing is about: [link]
so just to clarify, THIS is the dude who OP and the-grey-tribe are casting as a poor gentle victim who only experienced backlash because he wasn’t masculine enough to get away with it, and had he been more “alpha” or whatever he would have been “rewarded” for disrespecting peoples boundaries:
lmaooooooooooo okay
Holy shit!
By the way, that woman’s “edits” are a thing of sublime hilarity.
I think the original argument still holds very well. When one is winning, it means the adversary is losing, and that usually kind of inevitably means one’s own side is stronger than the adversary’s in that specific battle. Sometimes people gathering together power to beat up on those who violate important rules can be useful to enforce those rules (just like cops are supposed to arrest people who do physical violence, and we don’t tell them to stop the instant they gain the upper hand), but they should never forget the simple fact that if they’re winning, they are the stronger side.
If people consistently remembered this one weird trick, it would probably help reduce toxic forms of sj by several dozen percentage points. Shifting the mindset from “I’m lashing out at the Oppressor and thus anything is justifiable” to “I’m using my contextual power to beat up on someone with less contextual power and my actions need to take that into account or otherwise I’ll just be a bully” would force people to keep in mind that with great contextual power comes great contextual responsibility and sometimes people need to even restrain themselves.
no, i don’t buy this. there are better ways to establish a sense of proportion and restraint in sj than to adopt a self-defeating ideology that any success in a social conflict is a sign that your opponent is actually an innocent misunderstood victim.
no, someone isn’t inherently the stronger side if they win. sometimes the underdog successfully stands up for themselves, and that doesn’t automatically mean they have structural power. dickpic sender didn’t suddenly become an underdog the moment someone stood up to him.
and there’s this whole framework here- “It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate
aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying
structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being
aggressive”- which is clearly just the discredited 4chan “alpha/beta male” framework with a fresh coat of paint.
and i mean, it’s appalling to use the logic of “but the ~alpha males~ get away with it!” to defend this kind of behavior anyways, but why, why, why, of all people, is James McRippedBro here being assumed to be a “less aggressive” “beta” male when literally every indicator suggests the exact opposite.
No, you’re misunderstanding my argument and this is calling for a reductio.
Let’s say Fallon Fox is catcalled by some rich white cis guy who has very much structural power over her. She proceeds to beat him up. I think there needs to be a way to describe the type of power Fallon has in the situation where she’s beating up the guy. If we are not able to say that she has a certain type of contextual power which is very much defined by the fact that she is indeed kicking his ass (in this case it’s the fact that she’s a skilled MMA fighter and the random guy is not), we are missing something epistemically important.
Similarly, in the social realm there is something which is the equivalent of “who is able to kick whose ass” and which isn’t a 1:1 match to structural power or anything like that.
If Fallon were to beat up the guy very badly, we wouldn’t listen to protestations that “he was still white and cis and rich and thus he still had all the power in the situation” because we would be missing something very important. Sometimes beating a guy up very badly might be warranted (such as in self-defense against assault or attempted murder), but it doesn’t make it any less true that the guy got beaten up, and that factor which led to his upbeatenness is relevant for the considerations, because in some situations That Factor ends up outweighing other considerations. If you beat someone up for having $5000 more in their bank account than you, their economic structural power over you is far less relevant than the fact that you beat them up. And that’s what I’m arguing; that if people don’t recognize when they’re beating up someone they might do exactly that thing except socially.
And empirically, even though this particular instance is most likely not an example of that thing, it nonetheless happens. I know because I have personally done it precisely because I wasn’t keeping myself aware of the presence of this factor and it’s quite embarrassing and shameful in hindsight and people should not do the same mistakes.
I just read a text exchange in which a guy tried to flirt with a stranger on Facebook by sending her a picture of his penis. The woman responded by ridiculing him, sending him lots of pictures of other men’s penises to demonstrate how horrible it is to receive dick pics, and suggesting that his dick was small and diseased. He got angry, and asked to end the conversation, which she didn’t do. Then he asked her not to share the conversation, and she posted the whole thing publicly, along with his name. Now it’s on my news feed because lots of people are reading it and finding it hilarious.
I hope I’m not the only one who thinks this is tragic.
The perception of dick pics as disgusting, low status, and worthy of ridicule is part of the larger perception of sexuality as shameful. I would much, much rather live in a culture where I sometimes received unwanted images of strangers’ genitals as part of clumsy flirting than to live in a culture where being open about sexuality is about as safe as making violent threats.
I would love to live in the nearby world where “you’re cute, wanna see my dick/vulva?” is a polite way of finding out whether an attractive stranger feels like sharing a casual online sexual interaction. The man’s actions in this exchange make me feel a lot more like I live in that world than do the woman’s.
I recognize that, given we *don’t* live in that world, *and* that the world we do live in includes a lot of people who feel women should be grateful for male attention and never allowed to protect themselves let alone retaliate, dick pics are often (usually?) more of a harmful spam tactic than a kind of benign if inept way of flirting.
I think it’s a good idea to discourage spamming people, and also to discourage treating women as if they have no right to refuse sexual advances.
But please, please, do not confuse strategic choice of social norms with the rush of a cheap status-boost. Do not play along with the game where we all punish each other for having bodies in the context of Christian purity and original sin.
So I gave my take on it:
The boy in question may not, himself, have realized he was performing an aggressive move. He may have just been emulating a move that he saw as successful, because when aggressive men make that move they often *are* successful.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
If you’re making some fedora-wearing neckbeard cry delicious man-tears, if you’re viciously shaming some size 0 fetish model for promoting unhealthy body standards, if you’re screaming at some transgirl for “invading your safe space” and “not being a real woman”, if you’re savaging some internet pundit for using “transgirl” because they haven’t kept up with the lingo-of-the-week… you’re almost certainly attacking someone who’s probably been hurt worse by the Patriarchy than you have.
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
The conclusion only makes sense if we assume that structural and institutional power are virtually the only forms of power that exist.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
…
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
…
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
…
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
This grosses me out more than I can properly articulate. The idea that if you ever “win” a social conflict that you’re really the bad guy is gross as all hell. The idea let’s virtually anyone off the hook. Were you successfully criticized for your behaviour? Congratulations, your detractor is a bully abusing their superior social power against poor meek little you. You fire a woman for getting pregnant, and she succesfully sued you and damaged your business’ reputation? What an abuse of power, you poor little thing. You harrass someone online and they actually stand up to you? You shouldn’t have to stand for such mistreatment. Were you cruel to a friend, and now less people want to hang out with you? You’re the real victim here.
This is the weaponization of the pretense of meekness. It’s the whine of particularly nasty members of the religious right, who complain, in naked envy of Saudi Arabia’s ability to persecute “deviants,” that their detractors would never be so critical of militant islam.
So yes, it feels fucking fantastic.
None of this is to say that anything in the name of ‘winning’ a social conflict is acceptable, or that one cannot be disprortionate, excessive, or sadistic and cruel towards others in response to mistreatment, or that what you’ve identified as mistreatment is accurately described as such. Nuance, proportionality, and compassion are excellent virtues. But it is vastly unjustified to cast ‘winners of social conflict’ as nearly equivalent to abusers of social power attacking the weak in place of the strong.
I don’t think dick-pic-sender’s name should have been released to the internet at large. Large, diffuse groups on the internet are personally removed from the situation, are frequently full of unprincipled people, and the individuals involved frequently feel like a snowflake in an avalanche. Consequently the people involved are often ignorant or apathetic of the scale of harm they as a group are causing, which can quickly become vastly improportionate to scale of the harm to which the group is responding.
I do think it’d be entirely fair game to show the messages to people within dick-pic-sender’s social group. It’s fair for the people in your life to know how you treat others, and I don’t think you necessarily deserve privacy when you treat someone poorly through unsolicited messages (IANAL, but I think the law generally agrees as well).
And for the love of fucking god I wish people would stop defending people like dick-pic-sender by trying to cast them as weak, bumbling little angels. Aside from the fact that there’s not much justification for it: you can mistreat the strong. You can be cruel to anyone. If you’re gonna argue that excessive responses, cruelty, and internet mobs are bad, do it because those things are bad in principle, not because they’re being used against a particular victim class you wanna defend.
op’s post is like the ultimate example of everything i find foul about the lesswronger worldview
even though the lesswrongers claim to be against “toxic sj,” in reality they just subscribe to a twisted backwards grotesque parody of the most misapplied sj identity politics, except in their version the primary “marginalized community” which they must fight for and protect at all costs is “dudes who are experiencing consequences for being shitty to other people.”
and notice the whining about “the actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them”- any sensible person would decide that the solution would be to fight to make it more difficult for aggressive men to mistreat people, but op seems to be implying that instead, we should try to make it should be easier for less aggressive men to mistreat people. it’s completely backwards and awful tbh.
also, i’m really grossed out by op comparing the backlash that the dickpic sender received to the harassment and mistreatment that trans women and eating disordered women receive. especially appalling is the implication that the dickpic sender has been hurt by the patriarchy on a level comparable to the harm the patriarchy does to trans women and eating disordered women. this is ludicrous, standing up to a sexual harasser isn’t comparable to bullying marginalized women, fuck off.
Do two wrongs make a right? Is it possible that the response to something bad is also bad? Do you think seeing pictures of genitals is worse than being publicly shamed? Do you think that male genitals are inherently evil and shameful?
The lesswronger mindset is that you must /update/ your beliefs about an individual based on evidence. That means after you hear additional information about a straight dude, you won’t continue to use your straight-line prior. You should
already you’re assuming that it was “wrong” to publicly shame the dickpic sender. tsk tsk.
Is it possible that the response to something bad is also bad?
certainly. but the op wasn’t just trying to claim the response was excessive, but also attempted to cast the pickpic sender as a persecuted innocent. which is absurd.
Do you think seeing pictures of genitals is worse than being publicly shamed?
sending a naked picture to someone is pretty clearly a sexual act, and performing a sexual act with someone without their permission is indeed many times worse than public shaming.
Do you think that male genitals are inherently evil and shameful?
no, i think performing a sexual act with someone without their permission is inherently evil and shameful.
The lesswronger mindset is that you must /update/ your beliefs about an
individual based on evidence. That means after you hear additional
information about a straight dude, you won’t continue to use your
straight-line prior. You should(swap! (*belief* 'straight-dude-g359) bayes-update new-evidence)
what possible additional information would make me decide the dickpic sender was actually an okay dude.
i….. i hate this. i hate this so much.
Thank you for your explanation. The last bit was in response to your framing of the situation as a between-group conflict and the lesswrongers taking a side. The problem is that there are ways to draw the line (hyperplane?) based on meta-level or object-level criteria, but even if you draw it right through the original culprit, you will sound like you are endorsing either sexual harassment or online hate mobs.
I understand you better now. I kind of assumed that you were a utilitarian. For a virtue or deontological ethics-ist your stance makes more sense. Or even an old-fashioned randian objectivist who thinks you forfeit your rights when you break the social contract, which I assume is an unfortunate accident.
thinking that people have a right to tell other people when they’ve been mistreated by someone isn’t incompatible with a utilitarian viewpoint. especially if one believes- as i do- that the beneficial deterrent effect of the punishment outweighs the harm caused to the dickpic sender. people are less likely to mistreat others if they know that the person they mistreat might inform other people. furthermore the dickpic sender will be less likely to act that way in the future.
i don’t think the dickpic sender “forfeited their rights”- it doesn’t remove any of his rights that people think negatively of him because of how he treats people. i’m not saying he should be killed or thrown in jail or whatever- but people he’s mistreated have a right to speak about it.
This means that dick pic sender would still deserve to have his name circulated as a terrible person if dick pic receiver had replied “what a beautiful penis you have” and then posted the screenshots by accident.
Our society with its expectations of masculinity on the other hand /rewards/ boundary-pushing when it works and punishes only when it fails.
Edit: Dick pic receiver has the right to post receipts. I am more critical of third parties; public shaming when it comes to victims posting receipts is a-ok. The victim is not the person who is punching down, the hypothetical internet person who reblogs the clear name of the guy might be.
i don’t buy this at all. i don’t buy that more masculine dudes get rewarded for sending unsolicited dickpics. i buy perhaps that more masculine dudes are more likely to get away with crossing peoples boundaries, because of the implicit threat of violence they can credibly maintain, but this idea that they’re getting rewarded for it is absurd. (as is the implication that this is unfair primarily to the less
masculine men who can’t get away with disrespecting peoples boundaries,
rather than unfair to the people the more masculine dudes get away with mistreating)
in the incredibly unlikely event of an unsolicited dickpic which was positively received (which i seriously doubt even exists), and the screenshot being posted by accident, then yes, i people who found out about that would still have the right to evaluate that action and for it to affect how they think of the person who sent the picture.
oh hey, i just saw the exchange which this whole thing is about: [link]
so just to clarify, THIS is the dude who OP and the-grey-tribe are casting as a poor gentle victim who only experienced backlash because he wasn’t masculine enough to get away with it, and had he been more “alpha” or whatever he would have been “rewarded” for disrespecting peoples boundaries:
lmaooooooooooo okay
Holy shit!
By the way, that woman’s “edits” are a thing of sublime hilarity.
I think the original argument still holds very well. When one is winning, it means the adversary is losing, and that usually kind of inevitably means one’s own side is stronger than the adversary’s in that specific battle. Sometimes people gathering together power to beat up on those who violate important rules can be useful to enforce those rules (just like cops are supposed to arrest people who do physical violence, and we don’t tell them to stop the instant they gain the upper hand), but they should never forget the simple fact that if they’re winning, they are the stronger side.
If people consistently remembered this one weird trick, it would probably help reduce toxic forms of sj by several dozen percentage points. Shifting the mindset from “I’m lashing out at the Oppressor and thus anything is justifiable” to “I’m using my contextual power to beat up on someone with less contextual power and my actions need to take that into account or otherwise I’ll just be a bully” would force people to keep in mind that with great contextual power comes great contextual responsibility and sometimes people need to even restrain themselves.
I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.
But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.
There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.
Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?
Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].
Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.
Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.
So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?
All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.
Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.
And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.
Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).
Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.
In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).
It seems a bit disingenuous to keep slicing and dicing the demographics until you come up with an obscure enough one where their rate is higher than average. Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me look a bit askance.
How does the murder rate of TWoC compare to, say, illegal immigrant east Asian sex workers in the US? Or just US based sex workers in general? For a variety of reasons, trans women are more likely to be sex workers than cis women are. What happens if we control for that?
The point of intersectionality is to find out the factors that make people suffer. In this case slicing and dicing the demographics has shown that black people tend to suffer extremely high rates of violence, and I don’t think “black people” is a massively obscure demographic (unlike, say, the way the most vulnerable minority is always the individual; the demographic $murdered_trans_woman_X suffered a murder rate of 100,000/100,000 and that’s terrible), nor “black trans women” either. And I don’t think including class in it is a bad thing either, because “what do we do to the murder rate” is a vague question, but “what do we do to the murder rate of poor black people” is a more specific question that is easier to answer.
And such slicing and dicing also reveals new information; in this case I updated as I was expecting the murder rate of TWoC to be higher than it was compared to the murder rate of black men, and thus it seems that being black AMAB is the actual massive risk factor for violence. Intersectional analysis improves epistemic fidelity!
Also, sex workers suffer massive amounts of violence too and that’s not okay and the things that cause it need to be destroyed.
I just read a text exchange in which a guy tried to flirt with a stranger on Facebook by sending her a picture of his penis. The woman responded by ridiculing him, sending him lots of pictures of other men’s penises to demonstrate how horrible it is to receive dick pics, and suggesting that his dick was small and diseased. He got angry, and asked to end the conversation, which she didn’t do. Then he asked her not to share the conversation, and she posted the whole thing publicly, along with his name. Now it’s on my news feed because lots of people are reading it and finding it hilarious.
I hope I’m not the only one who thinks this is tragic.
The perception of dick pics as disgusting, low status, and worthy of ridicule is part of the larger perception of sexuality as shameful. I would much, much rather live in a culture where I sometimes received unwanted images of strangers’ genitals as part of clumsy flirting than to live in a culture where being open about sexuality is about as safe as making violent threats.
I would love to live in the nearby world where “you’re cute, wanna see my dick/vulva?” is a polite way of finding out whether an attractive stranger feels like sharing a casual online sexual interaction. The man’s actions in this exchange make me feel a lot more like I live in that world than do the woman’s.
I recognize that, given we *don’t* live in that world, *and* that the world we do live in includes a lot of people who feel women should be grateful for male attention and never allowed to protect themselves let alone retaliate, dick pics are often (usually?) more of a harmful spam tactic than a kind of benign if inept way of flirting.
I think it’s a good idea to discourage spamming people, and also to discourage treating women as if they have no right to refuse sexual advances.
But please, please, do not confuse strategic choice of social norms with the rush of a cheap status-boost. Do not play along with the game where we all punish each other for having bodies in the context of Christian purity and original sin.
So I gave my take on it:
The boy in question may not, himself, have realized he was performing an aggressive move. He may have just been emulating a move that he saw as successful, because when aggressive men make that move they often *are* successful.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
If you’re making some fedora-wearing neckbeard cry delicious man-tears, if you’re viciously shaming some size 0 fetish model for promoting unhealthy body standards, if you’re screaming at some transgirl for “invading your safe space” and “not being a real woman”, if you’re savaging some internet pundit for using “transgirl” because they haven’t kept up with the lingo-of-the-week… you’re almost certainly attacking someone who’s probably been hurt worse by the Patriarchy than you have.
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
This is a pretty important heuristic.
no, actually…
This is a VERY IMPORTANT HEURISTIC.
However, anyone who sends me unsolicited dick pics will be at my mercy nonetheless. There Will Be Consequences, regardless of one’s position in the hierarchies, because I mostly* don’t want to receive unsolicited dick pics and anyone disregarding my explicit preference on the topic deserves the Consequences, and I believe that it’s more fair if I make these things explicit so a) benign but inept people would know it isn’t okay and b) malign people could not pose as benign but inept people.
(* It has been hypothesized that there might exist a category of people for whom the Consequences and “being at my mercy” would be net positive things, but I will not say explicitly which that category is, because I can’t give people foolproof definitions of when unsolicited dick pics could be okay and thus even ridiculously cute trans girls might end up misunderstanding the boundary and thus causing a net loss of utility when I would have to reject a ridiculously cute trans girl and that would be sad. So anyway even ridiculously cute trans girls please be careful about sending me dick pics and should probably ask first because asking first is a very good side to err on.)
wearing the hijab is a feminist act, not wearing the hijab is a feminist act, having sex is a feminist act, not having sex is a feminist act, getting a job is a feminist act, not getting a job is a feminist act, being strong is a feminist act, being weak is a feminist act,
The thing I want to do is affirming and good. Your behavior, on the other hand!
EDIT: Wait no, your behavior is the behavior of a precious cinnamon roll too good for this world. The problem is THEIR behavior!
It’s as if doing whatever the fuck is true to yourself is a feminist act while subsuming others to an outside normativity is the one act that isn’t…
“Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
“Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
Unprincipled stances on taxation:
“You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
“Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
Surely you can’t define theft without a concept of property, thus you can’t define property in terms of or in opposition to theft.
If you accept a consequentialist position on taxation then the debate is over:
“People would prefer to hang on to things, but there are reasons why we have to take things away from them, for the greater good”.
In practice most of the social contract viewpoint comes back to this anyway, as people wouldn’t defend a social contract if they thought it gave bad outcomes.
“The claim that I am not allowed to drive this car due to metaphysical constraints is a claim that belongs to the category of claims that I will punish according to a legal code that is written beneath the char[5] ‘theft’ “
Incidentally, initializing a fixed-buffer non-w charstring is treason.
(Also there is a real difference between “I am taking this from you because somebody else needs it” and “I am taking this from you, as you have agreed to, so don’t welsh on that agreement.” In tumblr parlance, one of these is gaslighting.)
Citizenship is gaslighting.
The Police is Mobsters.
Following you, @shieldfoss, was the right decision.
There’s a reason for it:
The parallels between libertarian and feminist insights are striking. “The state is male in the feminist sense,” MacKinnon argues, in that “the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women” (MacKinnon 1989, Chapter 8 ¶ 11). The libertarian completion of this thought is that the state sees and treats everybody—though not in equal degree—the way men see and treat women. The ideal of a woman’s willing surrender to a benevolent male protector both feeds and is fed by the ideal of the citizenry’s willing surrender to a benevolent governmental protector. “We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors,” Ezra Heywood remarked (McElroy 1991, p. 227); in the same way, libertarians have often described the state as an entity that protects people primarily from harms caused or exacerbated by the state in the first place. Just as, under patriarchy, forced sex is not recognized as real or fully serious rape unless the perpetrator is a stranger rather than one’s husband or boyfriend, so, under statism, governmental coercion is not recognized as real or fully serious tyranny unless it happens under a non-democratic government, a “dictatorship.” The marriage vow, as a rape license, has its parallel in the electoral ballot, as a tyranny license. Those who seek to withhold consent from their country’s governmental apparatus altogether get asked the same question that battered women get asked: “If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?” — the man’s rightful jurisdiction over the home, and the state’s over the country, being taken for granted. It’s always the woman, not the abusive man, who needs to vacate the home (to go where?); it’s likewise the citizen, not the abusive state, that needs to vacate the territory (to go where?).
Despite these parallels, however, many libertarians — libertarian feminists definitely included — seems surprisingly unsympathetic to most of what feminists have to say. (…)
Libertarians are often unimpressed by feminist worries about social norms that disable anything a woman says from counting as declining consent to sexual access, but they are indignant at theories of tacit or hypothetical consent that disable anything a citizen says from counting as declining consent to governmental authority.1 Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them; but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains.
When radical feminists say that male supremacy rests in large part on the fact of rape—as when Susan Brownmiller characterizes rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Against Our Will, p. 15)—libertarians often dismiss this on the grounds that not all men are literal rapists and not all women are literally raped. But when their own Ludwig von Mises says that “government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action,” that it rests “in the last resort” on “the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen,” and that its “essential feature” is “the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning” [HA VI.27.2], libertarians applaud this as a welcome demystification of the state. Libertarians rightly recognize that legally enacted violence is the means by which all rulers keep all citizens in a state of fear, even though not all government functionaries personally beat, kill, or imprison anybody, and even though not all citizens are beaten, killed, or imprisoned; the same interpretive charity towards the radical feminist analysis of rape is not too much to ask.
It’s a strange hill to die on, some weird teacher hand-shaking ritual. But honestly, how much longer are we going to pretend religious teachings that restrict women from touching men even just to shake hands are anything but massively sexist?
Personally I’m conflicted. Not because the religious excuse is tolerable. Because I don’t like the idea of forcing anyone to touch someone they don’t want to or be touched by someone they don’t want to in any situation that isn’t urgently serious. Won’t allow a heimlich is one thing, won’t allow… something as stupid as a handshake? What hill am I willing to die on?
Yeah I’m all for abolishing this mandatory handshake crap, especially if it’s one of those creepy authoritarian rituals meant to symbolize “I am the teacher, you are the pupil, you will prostrate yourself before me and accept my authority.”
Growing up I had some friends who transferred to my school from a private school, and they had to do humiliating shit like that.
But this clearly isn’t about that.
The tricky thing is that neither side is framing it as a matter of individual rights, but as preserving cultural integrity.
Then there’s us steel feminists who actually frame it as a matter of individual rights, bodily autonomy and the right to have whatever boundaries one wishes to have. We might criticize the structures that lead to people having widespread norms of such segregation in their physical contact (but also recognize that it’s not a clear-cut case of “white people’s arbitrary rules are Just Better™”), but the hill we are fully intending to die on is “boundaries matter, respect them no matter how silly you think they are”.
First they came for the muslims and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t want to get labelled a sexism apologist
Then they came for the neurodivergent and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t want to get labelled a creep apologist
Then they came for me, and other people didn’t speak out because we had already established firm precedent that the will of the mob overrides bodily autonomy
