> \u00a0[same \u201cless anger toward the left\u201d anon] Even more speculatively, it seems like you\u2019re less sympathetic toward the Right than you were, set, a year or so ago, less in the sense that you now back the actual agenda of the Left than that you briefly expected that the Right\u2019s pushback would take a form more compatible with your own preferences than it has. Any of this onto something? [2/2]
You\u2019re seeing something real but you\u2019re not seeing it right.
If I\u2019m more sanguine about the culture wars lately it\u2019s because the wave already broke. In 2015 I was saying the other side walked off a cliff and just hadn\u2019t looked down yet, well by now they\u2019ve looked down.
And on the one hand meep meep, motherfucker, on the other hand this means the dumbest and gone-too-far stuff is gonna be coming in the other direction now as the backlash sets in.
Like, what\u2019s the last time the cultural \u201cleft\u201d tried to sieze new territory, and not just struggle to hold the line? MeToo? At the time I called it as feminism biting the hand that fed/off more than it could chew, and yeah, by all reports the \u201ctargets\u201d there are being welcomed back and people notice that they were still viable all along, meanwhile the supporters are getting blackballed as risks.
(Meanwhile, the Republican supremes are expected to rule that no, protections against sex discrimination do not just imply protections for sexual/gender minorities, and wouldn\u2019t you know it most \u201csexual harassment\u201d law is leveraged out from similar implications.)
The next step in the culture war is just to make people realize this is already happening, the woke order\u2019s plummeting, and all the stuff that\u2019s been growing underground poised to benefit from their fall is going the other way.
I point out Stupidpol stuff to draw attention to how the new young avant garde in pretty much every subculture - even explicitly leftist ones - is increasingly anti-woke, and the invention of a typology - \u201cradlib\u201d, \u201cwokescold\u201d \u2013 by which their rivals don\u2019t even have to be refuted, just identified, mocked, and dismissed.
I point out how all the woke take factories are exhausting their funders\u2019 patience, pivoting to video and selling out to Bryan Goldberg (who made his name by founding a women\u2019s vertical that wasn\u2019t shrill feminist, an online Cosmo when everyone was trying to build an online Sassy), and how meanwhile the hot rising thing is a bro site with an editorial line somewhere between rape culture-tolerant and -positive.
I point out how not so much opposed but underneath consent culture there\u2019s a flourishing ecosystem of Fsub kink as lifestyle (which was the other side in the \u201880s feminist sex wars, after all) and the rising smartphone generation grew up with \u201ccatering to the male pornographic gaze\u201d as a popular hobby.
And I\u2019m not just wishcasting here, even the perceptive people on the \u201cother side\u201d have noticed this \u2013 Sady Doyle\u2019s looking back over \u201900-\u201910s internet feminism and wondering if it even changed anything deeper than superficial fashion that will cycle back before too long (subtext here is she was a half-step behind the Marcotte/Valenti/McEwan coterie and tbh a better writer/thinker/intersectionalist but now she\u2019s in upstate New York scrambling for enough child care to crank out work for lower-and-lower-profile outlets; if you\u2019ve read her work long enough you know she\u2019s acutely aware of how in the 80s second-wave feminism and radical feminists weren\u2019t so much defeated as just\u2026 gave up on and left to wither.)
Like, \u201cthis too shall pass\u201d, y\u2019know? It\u2019s passing. Which doesn\u2019t mean the stuff that takes it down or replaces it won\u2019t be dumb and fucked up. To the extent I had identified with the \u201ccultural left\u201d to begin with it was cause I came of age in the 90s after the \u201880s backlash had run through and the reigning \u201ccultural right\u201d was pretty dumb and fucked up. Weirdly sour in a sunny time, in retrospect I realize they were trying to drive a stake through the \u201870s so hard it never got up again and that excess probably did buy me some more time of comfort, but could get counterproductive too, you know if these are the guys trying to maintain their hegemony through suppressing left voices\u2026
Plus honestly yeah I was invested in the fun-for-all ideal of Horny 90s Secular Culture as it portrayed itself, and if more modern revelations are that it was premised on hierarchies of power\u2026 Well, at some level I\u2019m \u201cohhh, hierarchies of power, so THAT\u2019S how you create the good times, they should\u2019ve told us, no wonder we\u2019ve been fucking it up\u201d. But I\u2019m still eagerly receptive to plans to bring things closer to the ideal, or at least avoid some of the worst failure modes and rig the hierarchies right by going in eyes-open.
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