Love Hurts
persuasion.community
persuasion.community
#MeToo was born out of people being abused and raped due to a culture that gave power to men who were beyond question. Change that culture and maybe we can go back to just having a bit of fun.
You're describing power within an industry, not our culture. You are for no reason attributing the action of a few to many. Which is sexist.
The change is the corruption is visible now that the internet is a thing. The making of the democratic sausage has always been a disgusting process.
The point is that it isn't a few men. If you listen to women most of them have accounts of how they've been harassed in some way. A recent (2018) survey[1] found that 81% of women had experienced verbal sexual harassment, and 27% reported physical sexual assault. That is not "a few" men giving the rest a bad name. Also it is not sexist to point it out.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/21/587671849...
But I remember reading that rapes are similar. One person is doing it multiple times till he get caught.
But I think it is very possible like you said that a few can impact a lot of women by just repeated behavior. Somehow I hope so at least.
Sorry but this stats does not support your claim...? If the stats phrasing was "81% of men had conducted" it would support your claim, but experienced doesn't in any way means that every woman that experienced harassment experienced it from one unique male each time (which is probably the least likely implication of all).
It is sexist to point it out, just at it is racist to point to incarceration rate (weighted by population) of blacks to call a black person more prone to disobedience. (or male incarceration rate, for that matter) It is a classical classroom example case of misrepresentation of statistic to make discriminatory remark, or shift the blame to a group.
That's not the claim I was making though. What I said was that we don't know if it's a minority of men who are harassing women. The stats don't tell us that. The assertion that it's very few men doesn't really hold water though, simply because women everywhere report the same experiences. Consequently there are men everywhere who are harassing women.
It is a classical classroom example case of misrepresentation of statistic to make discriminatory remark, or shift the blame to a group.
I'm not misrepresenting the statistics. I'm saying that the statistics tell us there's a massive problem with sexual harassment of women and we don't know if that's from a minority or a majority of men. You're not using the statistics when you say it's a minority of men. You're making an unfounded and unproven assumption.
I would hope that it's not a majority of men, but whether it's 1%, or 5%, or 25% of men isn't something I'd like to even guess at. My partner tells me that it's far closer to 25% than 1% though, and I believe her.
The assumption that we've got no evidence and therefore we'll go with your partner's estimate is unlikely to carry the debate. That is why people are calling your comment sexist. [No argument -> could be 25% of men!] is a sexist position. Plus this is a forum flooded of men so that flaw there will be spotted pretty quickly.
We should not confuse perpetrators and victims.
From the several hundreds of men I know as friends, class mates, colleagues, I have never experienced a single one cat calling, groping, grooming or doing worse kinds of sexual harassment. In hundreds of parties and thousands of work situations, I've never seen it. Not even once.
I've seen both men and women circulating sexually charged jokes or telling such jokes in work environments, and I've seen both men and women comment on each others looks or hitting on each other, both when it was wanted and unwanted. But that's it.
Yes, that's just my anecdotes, but it seems far more likely to me that we are talking about a small percentage of men doing it all the time than most men doing it sometimes.
> and the idea of consent shouldn't be overused and watered down to apply to every difficult situation
I got the impression that's what the article was doing. That was my main issue, it seems to take consent and MeToo and frame it in a very juvenile manner, contextualized with teenagers getting to know their sexuality and first experimenting not sure about what they want, like or how to act. Where consent and MeToo is about preventing serious sexual abuse, not dealing with a breakup or an ackward kiss.
Maybe if you hang out in the twitter sphere you get a distorted view, but some of the real implications around consent are things like: It's not consensual if one person is blacked out drunk.
I mean just read one of the brochure like this one: https://mcckc.edu/images/ac/counseling/whatisconsent.jpg
Now go back to the article, and where is the part discussing: "Consent cannot be given through physical violence or threat"
The problem is, how are we even at a place where a brochure on consent needs an entire section to explain this? That's what the MeToo movement at least from my impression was about, it's like, hey reality check, more women then you know experience really ridiculous abuse, and we're not talking about their boyfriend cheating on them.
I think it is because some of men who used implied threat of physical violence pretended they are completely unaware of what was going on. And that was treated as serious argument. See, they were just poor naive beings unaware of the situation (despite being highly charizmatic and fully socially aware in other situations).
So, everyone is getting that brochure now.
Sweden for example out of a dozen countries who have passed these laws.
The removal of the 'forced' part of rape means it's entirely consent now. If you didn't have explicit consent in some form of proof. You are now a rapist. You never threatened, coerced or used force of any kind; the other person never resisted at any time.
Innocent until proven guilty is gone. You must prove you got explicit consent. Which lets be realistic, you don't have that. Nobody is signing a contract or equivalent before sex. You are now a rapist.
Which is why Rape has increased something like 400% in Sweden. Why do you think the Swedish men are such rapists?
That said, if you can wade through it (which is difficult as most of the comments here suggest), the take away is good I think, and even moderate. It makes the point that all relationships can be dangerous with respect to the possibility of finding one's heart broken. "Intimacy requires vulnerability; the joy of human connection always comes with the risk of being hurt," and that some people who engage in metoo discourse tend to wrap real power imbalance and consent issues in with things that don't really have that, like the example of Warren Ellis cited here. She argues that some of the rhetoric around metoo has created a culture that treats all relationships as something potentially dangerous, and also critiques some of the rhetoric as being dis-empowering of women.
These are all reasonable critiques I think. Hopefully they won't be lost in the snide tone of the opening.
Being an atheist isn't a personality. Everybody believes and advocates free speech - for themselves. Reasonable debate is a two-way street.
I'm not sure if I agree with their about page though, people are genuinely not as open to persuasion as we wish they could be.
I am frankly curious of what exactly you perceive as "derisive" in the first part of the article (first paragraph?).
I have to say that I subscribe to every single line of this article, which I find well argued and perfectly aligned with my views and concerns.
And I am frankly surprised that anyone can describe it as "difficult to wade through". I find it very clear, simple, and absolutely reasonable even assuming a point of view different from my own.
I can begin by questioning the idea that a "ruined woman" still exists in our society. I married twice and never expected a virgin in either case. I married intelligent and interesting women and I'm much better and richer for that. I wasn't a virgin either, so it'd be unfair to demand that anyway.
Between marriages I noticed the vast power I could have over younger less experienced people. Of course I could manipulate them - I was the experienced and interesting person myself.
And then I realized I was once as naïve as they were and the fact I was a man didn't protect me from being manipulated by others smarter and more experienced than me who got away with what they wanted. Don't get me wrong - I had a lot of fun, but, still, it did hurt and it was wrong to be manipulated.
It's unacceptable to drive a car recklessly without care for pedestrians or other drivers the same way it's unacceptable to have sex recklessly without care for the consequences to others. And, yes, that includes casual sex that's more casual for one of the partners.
Then the framing as "progressive language" and "paternalistic". And then the argument that a "breathtaking range of disappointing male behavior gets swept under the umbrella of MeToo". This is quickly followed by the "certain progressive spaces" bogeyman, which is followed by the familiar "men, dehumanized by a framework that casts their desires as inherently predatory".
It was a lot. We usually see one or two.
The difficulty for me is how can I distinguish between a dog whistle and a statement of authentic opinion. Unless one spends time in constant engagement with this type of rhetoric?
Then it sounds to me there's not going to be enough room for people to really get really close authentically, which is the point of intimacy and relationships.
> Even happy relationships involve moments of discomfort, disappointment, conflict—and even amicable breakups are rarely pain-free. Yet young people are now being taught to expect absolute emotional safety in sex, love and courtship at all times
Doesn't that seem a bit like we're sort of being prepared as a market for perfect AI and virtual reality partners that can be sold to us in future because you know ordinary people are too threatening so we may as well embrace expensive and upgradable perfectly safe AI relationships?
I think this phenomena is a symptom of a larger sort of social malaise where people are becoming less willing to take personal responsibility for their own emotions which I think is a key boundary within relationships.
Just because I feel joy or sadness, doesn't mean someone else did something good or bad. Of course it can overlap and it's important to recognize when you can alternately appreciate or give feedback, and stand up to, people for their behavior which works or doesn't work, but what I think is happening is somehow the zeitgeist discourse is normalizing externalizing, projecting, displacing ... in other words blaming other people for however you're feeling.
Of course this is being misused to try to get power over people by accusing them of doing something wrong just because of an emotion you have... or in some cases even don't have, but you can make it their fault anyway. But I think the consequences are deeper and worse than that... "Infantilizing", as the article says, telling people that they are victims under the guise of empowering them, making us all less capable of dealing with our own internal states and emotions without trying to find someone to blame or displace onto... I mean to me it's a sociological and psychological crisis in the making and I don't really understand how we got here....
But I know that in order to get out of the negative implications of this it's going to be very hard to overcome the attachment of people who are benefiting from this "open season" on blaming others.
The only kind of theory I have about it, aside from considerations about how these phenomena are being used to manipulate the public in some way, is that sort because of postmodernism psychoanalytic notions of blaming your parents for all the issues you grew up with somehow became less popular as traditional notions of family or authority decayed, but people still needed something to fill the gap in other... In other words something to blame their problems on and we're not allowed to blame the media or the state because those groups require for their own preservation that we don't effectively blame them so the only option is we had to find ways to blame each other and some low-hanging fruit there is to blame each other in personal relationships. It's not extremely clear or fleshed out but that's an idea that I have.
but if this momentum can be directed towards demanding that everybody behave a little bit better and with more integrity in relationships not just in the workplace but across the board then I think that's a super positive development but there's certainly seems to be some negative aspects that I think this article talks about interestingly....;):p xx
Is this still the case? It is a stupid convention.