Appreciate how the opponents poked through only and exactly enough to get nominal control that sets them up for Damocles seats
The new abortion rights spokesmen: Dudes, dads, and plumbers
by deconstitutionalizing abortion, Dobbs has returned it to the world of electoral politics where women’s rights matter less than men’s votes, and to the extent the political culture reflexes to preserve abortion access it will do so by becoming less feminist and more bro-y
So politico-culturally, we’re not at a stable equilibrium rn or even particularly headed towards one, we’re just killing time while things atrophy from friction (and new ones coalesce offscreen?) Which means don’t take it as total free license but I’m not sure anything we do really matters to anything for this next bit
The world’s not perfect yet, but to the extent I see dumb stuff go by I’m usually like “well, headed for a fall that way” or even “hey, you know you could play a good game of ‘let’s you and he fight’ with this” these days
This is how it happens. I’ve been saying for a while that the next turn involves a revalorization of inegalitarian sexuality, this is part of it coming together.
The ‘90s Clintonian Silver Age was about taking a pause to reenchant American normalcy by #including the 60s… and it took. Standing up for post-counterculture cultural norms is now authentic American conservatism.
At the same time, the '80s had intervened. You had the cultural backlash, “family values” reassertion of child-protectiveness, you saw the Supreme Court invent the idea of “child pornography” as a category their last decades didn’t leave constitutionally protected, also the “campus rape crisis”, Take Back The Night, the broader almost proto-2010s original “political correctness” culture and canon wars PCU riffed on.
And in reaction to that, as a threat environment to be navigated if not particularly a change of heart to be internalized, the '90s didn’t push the presumed-sexual-access-to-inferiors line. Maybe even postured against it, y'know, Ben Affleck in Mallrats, who’s trying to fuck the girlfriend in a very painful place that’s not the back seat of a Volkswagen, would-totally-fuck-high-schoolers bad guy of the first movie where Kevin Smith was working for Harvey Weinstein from jump…
And yes, Weinstein and Hollywood, #MeToo, Epstein and the national elite, hell, Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky, remember that one?, it appears that if the Boomers with a shot gave up on trumpeting it they didn’t on doing it…
How much of “nice guys”, “MRAs”, was about about guys noticing the gap here? “The world you are to inherit is in the rock-and-roll tradition of Woodstock thru '80s keg parties, the men who don’t go into domestic seclusion have a steady stream of satisfying partners, and all of this comes through a vernacular popularization of second-wave feminism!” Okay, but the last doesn’t really produce the prior.
(“Woodstock '99 was a rape fest!” well okay '94 seemed better, but by modern standards how much enthusiastic consent really was there in the mud of '69?)
Gone Girl I keep coming back to, but the book was really about the gap, about it collapsing on men in a way that was, if extreme in its particulars, rooted in the way it largely would in the 2010s.
But the thing is, “oh no these cads publicly mouthed feminist support while sexbezzling in private, now that that support has pumped feminism up enough they’re no longer safe!” has a parallel waiting, among the people who grew up with 90s culture. “Oh no feminism mouthed pro-sex Sixtiesism while building towards Puritanism in private! But now that we’ve been pumped up for counterculture sex-positivity… ::cracks knuckles::”
Like, what, they wouldn’t? Go read those responses OP referenced.
Add that to the way yammering about pedos and grooming marks you for avoiding by anyone worthwhile as a chud or at least anti now…
Also add the back-to-the-city thing. '80s teens-and-malls “suburbs” were really like, the San Fernando Valley, or Long Island, or relatively close-in Chicagoland. Now, in the parent-chauffeured exurbs the few outside adults an adolescent might get involved with are like, “sports coach” and “youth pastor” so I’m not sure exactly how a return to unsupervised intergenerational mixing would affect things, but it’s a change.
As rough as this has been the silver lining is discovering the old, more sensitive, more pessimistic high-anxiety personality also thinks we’ve turned a corner from the 2010s and sensors are green now
::the New Deal marginalization of conservatism has finally fallen through::
Leftist youth with only a secondhand sense of the 20th century: oh no! Well we used to have a pretty strong antifascist consensus, it’s 80 years old but I’m sure it’s still got some juice in it, I’ll just frame Republicans as fascist!
::the WWII-era antifascist consensus has finally fallen through::
Leftist youth with only a secondhand sense of the 20th century: oh no!
The Intercept had an article “Elephant in the Zoom” that would be right up your alley
Yeah. Glad I don’t have anything riding on liberal advocacy these days
The Johnny Depp–Amber Heard Verdict Is Chilling
During closing arguments in the defamation trial between Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard, one of Heard’s attorneys, Benjamin Rottenborn, described a series of Catch-22s that often ensnare women who, like Heard, accuse their partners of domestic violence. “If you didn’t take pictures, it didn’t happen; if you did take pictures, they’re fake,” he said. “If you didn’t tell your friends, you’re lying; and if you did tell your friends, they’re part of the hoax. If you didn’t seek medical treatment, you weren’t injured; if you did seek medical treatment, you’re crazy.”
I mean it strikes me that people’s issues with Heard aren’t so much that, put in a no-win situation, she didn’t win, but that she was even trying to win, that as she continued in the relationship she acted in ways that weren’t even attempts to get what she wanted in the relationship, but set herself up in a better position to portray the relationship to others afterwards – including but not limited to in court – in a way that won their sympathy and advanced her overall position in life to which the relationship was just one aspect (presumably, in expectation of it ending – it’s unclear what she could do with documentation of abuse in a world where the semipublic relationship continued)
It strikes me that this – conducting your life for the sake of winning public sympathy battles after the fact – might be the real of-the-moment thing the culture is publicly condemning here.
Also like, if Tim Burton’s muse and Marilyn Manson turn out to be critical to the courtroom theatre of the culture war I’m gonna have to re-evaluate mallgoths some
It’s uneven but I noticed it first across Portland Twitter and then more generally, the biggest problems are taking morale hits and dropping off
Wait, about TikTok and the Depp trial, I just realized…
The Zoomers were in school in the ‘10s. Grew up under “cancel culture”. A girl who manipulates systems of “justice” and “accountability” to get her way is their stock image of a villain.
And with POTC Depp was an icon of childhood memories from the Before Time. Even pretty feminist under the old dispensation, “girls can be swashbuckling heroes too”
And but for as long as they’ve known they know the crybullies are evil, but the Adult World props up their schemes. But TikTok is a Zoomer preserve, they can speak their truth there and it’s accepted, even hegemonic. What a thrill!
The Zoomers have joined the culture war as playable characters and their first move is to drive a stake through the '10s
I KNEW we just had to hold in there
I KNEW it
A form of government where only cis men and pre-op transwomen get to vote and FTM post-op voting is a live culture war topic between the parties, huh?
Yeah we'll put that in the next anthology I guess. Maybe Korea will get that unhinged by 2050 and it'll look prophetic.
yeah, sure
Re: Culture wars over plural marriage, yeah, the prospect of that + Hordes of Futureless Young Men is enough to make me go 'not fucking worth it, one spouse per customer, the Civil Rights Bus stops at Transhuman Station.
Wait so you’re on board with stuff up to the frontier now but that would be too much for you?
!!! That’s a promising sign, that’s how it works!
[ @sadoeconomist ]
Modern nonmonogamy isn’t the same thing as traditional polygyny, polyandry is part of the deal as well, each horde of futureless young men can share a girlfriend/khaleesi
Yeah I’m not betting civilization on that given how rare it is historically compared to traditional polygyny, and I know you will never, ever agree to any sort of security mechanism such as “for every polygynous marriage there must be a corresponding polyandrous marriage.”
Restless young men is one of those things correlated with civil disorder, like this is textbook political science taught in university political science classes, here’s an article from The Economist, even.
There’s no point having an incel uprising for this, and trying to make it work the other way by increasing the number of women will screw up the neurotype distribution.
We can revisit the matter once bodies and sexualities are more mutable.
“For every polygynous marriage there must be a corresponding polyandrous marriage” I think you just accidentally invented the greatest fanfiction trope ever.
“I know a guy who wants to marry his three weed-smoking girlfriends and so to help him out we all need to pretend to be married, and there’s only one bed’
Anyway every anti-poly argument has a corresponding anti-gay argument and the restless young men thing reminds me of the once-extremely-common argument that allowing homosexuality would destroy civilization by catastrophically lowering birthrates and that’s why the government has a legitimate interest in suppressing it by force. As though 100% of the population would become gay immediately once it was legally allowed. Did you notice your implication here that most monogamously married women would actually prefer to become Chad Thundercock’s nth wife instead of staying married to their beta soyboy husbands? I feel like if that were true it’d be a stronger argument for polyamory than anything else I could come up with.
The thing that’s actually causing the violence in South Sudan and ‘polygamous regions of Indonesia’ referenced by what I could read of that paywalled article isn’t polyamory, it’s very clearly sectarian conflict involving a certain religion that coincidentally allows polygyny that university political science textbooks and Economist columnists aren’t legally allowed to blame for anything.
Young men in Western societies who have no prospect of ever possibly having a relationship with any woman typically only cause violence and civil disorder in League of Legends.
Instead of increasing the number of women to deal with this supposed restless young men problem, let’s do the next best thing, let’s randomly select young men to receive thousands of hours of Pornhub sissification hypnosis video training, so that each household in the future will be made up of a man, his harem, and their staff of femboy maids - an extremely stable and harmonious social arrangement, according to anime I have watched.
This suggestion seems stupidly evil. Nonconsensual mental modification (if it worked) would be a crime on the same level as murder (or possibly higher). I don’t think anyone who would even half-jokingly suggest such a thing seems likely to be worth engaging with. (I have blocked sadoeconomist; I would have to be extremely surprised by what they have to say next to make me believe that it could be worth hearing.) Furthermore, the suffering of those who can’t find a partner due to macrosociological effects is real and not OK to mock. In times of economic iniquity it’s often poor men, but in the aftermath of war or plague it can also be women.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that areas with fucked-up, violent gender relations have fucked-up, violent culture more generally, and vice-versa. I believe it’s common for violent young men in e.g. South Sudan to profess the difficulty of obtaining a wife as motivation for their violence; I seriously don’t understand the way of thinking that would deny their stated motivations.
Given that it seems straightforward to draw a line of inference from polygyny -> young men can’t marry -> young men become more violent -> society at large becomes more violent and chaotic, it seems reasonable enough to suggest a ban on polygyny (and therefore polygamy generally, because equality) for social harmony reasons.
@carchasm blocked me over this post; fuck them as well as sadoeconomist, I guess. Kinda bitter to lose someone you’d had positive interactions with, but so it goes, I guess. Maybe I’m too harsh, I don’t know.
New culture war just dropped
Re: Culture wars over plural marriage, yeah, the prospect of that + Hordes of Futureless Young Men is enough to make me go 'not fucking worth it, one spouse per customer, the Civil Rights Bus stops at Transhuman Station.
Wait so you’re on board with stuff up to the frontier now but that would be too much for you?
!!! That’s a promising sign, that’s how it works!
And now,
we resume the ‘90s where we last left off, only with all the spies and booby traps revealed
Calling it: there’s eventually going to be an Atlantic cover article about cancel culture winddown and the cover is going to be an iOS-style dialog box asking “Undo Cancel?”
Parts of Twitter realizing that if they understand trans people as definitionally part of their cultural coalition they’re inviting entryism by types who would have been anime-watching channers in 2007. And like, yeah.
So the guy who shot the shooter has gotten an official nod from the authorities so I don’t see they can hang a bid against armed marching off it, but you see on Twitter them furious that no second amendment patriot is gonna credit him as a good guy with a gun in the right place at the right time.
And that points to the damage this is really gonna do the local still-marchers: the morale hit of realizing that even if it comes to it, to what they’ve been wailing about all along, no one in the broader city or world outside their subculture cares – I see them contrast with that Charlottesville car attack but yeah, that was part of the main plot, about Trump and the alt-right and the white identitarian realignment. And you guys aren’t the main plot anymore.
And the bridge too far was trying to no-platform Something*Awful types out of the furry fandom, that’s perfect. When Trump came down that escalator it was like the ‘80s saw what was happening and sent an avatar to intervene, now it’s the '90s’ turn.
Oh, now that I’m back to mental baseline, no, it wasn’t mania or COVID-brain, it’s just with my usual farseeing that I’m pleased to see the 2010s culture war is settled. A few years of mopping up but the result isn’t in question and the neat thing is I or the good guys aren’t even gonna have to do it, it’s the turn of the ones who indulged them so long to bear the burden.
Friendly reminder my overall guidance this whole time was you should hold on defense in the trench until their wave breaks and it’s time for the counterattack and friends,
