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Comment by xyzzy21 | Hacker News Reader

The feminist left is convinced that humans are PURE Tabula Rasa and that NOTHING is biological - everything is either a choice or it's a social construct.

Far too many straight people have bought into this nonsense - thinking that men and women are 100% identical, which is not based in science (at all) but in ideology via indoctrination and bullying.

You have to become "red-pilled" (which is primarily a rediscover that there are biological sex differences and they affect behavior) to realize this today as a straight male.

Women only have an incentive to think about it otherwise when they hit the fertility wall and it's (often) too late.

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While I agree on the gist of what you're saying, and I've found the same agreement among "normal women" - that is regular people IRL outside the Twitter echo chamber - there is a politicised left v right tone to your post which irks me the wrong way and is absolutely unnecessary.

The world is more complex than woke left vs redpilled right that most propaganda on the Internet would have you believe.

> The world is more complex than woke left vs redpilled right

As another gay man chiming in, it’s totally my experience that in the self-described queer/woke circles I traffic in it’s almost exclusively the lefties that have morphed into insufferable moral-binary authoritarians.

As a younger person, it seems like it used to be that LGBT people were on the margins of society and since they had a unique vantage and couldn’t care - they were able to say the things that couldn’t be said.

But now it’s the complete opposite, and queer people are precisely the first ones to tell you what can’t be said.

Is that really true or is it a "straw woman" argument? Can you recommend a feminist left person who can explain this position, because it seems outlandish to me that someone could think there weren't biological differences. What about testosterone and estrogen?

Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Lierre Keith and Michele Wallace.

These are a few names of Radical Feminist thinkers who ascribe to the view that gender is a "fashionable concept" or the concept of femininity is "ritualized submission."

http://meetinggroundonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/GE...

Are a few 'Radical Feminist thinkers' the same thing as 'the feminist left'?

No, not really. If anything the opposite view (uncharitably, that men are all doomed by their biology) is not uncommon either.

And of course most feminists (FWIW I consider myself one) are not tabula rasa types. Very few people worth taking seriously believe that literally, these days. The evidence is overwhelmingly against the idea.

More often you'll hear something like that the slight male tendency towards asserting dominance and impulsive behaviour compared to women is just that, slight. And that it is greatly amplified by culture and socialization. (And well, this is probably true to some degree?)

One can, of course, believe the sexes are somewhat different on average, while believing in their equal value, ability and merit in all the things that are actually important.

I mean the labels "left" and "right" themselves are to describe binary leaning aka "radical". Normal people would "lean left" on some issues and "right" on some others, to varying degrees, hence would not be so easily identified as such.

Ok, great thx, I can begin to get a handle on it. I don't see it addressing biology, but I can start here.

Honestly this is like you asked a question about introductory reading about leftism and someone handed you the Little Red Book. This is among the most divisive, vocal minority, and inside baseball texts produced by leftist feminism in the past decade.

If you're genuinely interested in an introduction to the idea of femininity / the female as a social construction actually within the main leftist/feminist discourse I recommend Julia Serrano's Whipping Girl, or if you really want something controversial Andrea Long Chu's Females: A Concern. And yes, in those case you will find xyzzy21's and AndrewKemendo's claims are strawmen.

Get this TERF shit outta here, there's no alliance between them and the modern feminist left people associate with Twitter/Tumblr and love to complain about.

He's saying women don't have agency until they hear their clock going off. It's misogynist gibberish.

You can call it that.

But both data and research and confirm that.

Also there is plenty of anecdotal evidence especially in IT of highly successful career women that would drop everything just to have have children.

I don’t think very many people actually believe this in the real world. Even in my left-leaning bubble, just about everyone recognises that there are obvious flaws in much of the logic present by many internet feminists.

I want to believe you're right. There seems, however, to be a disconnect between what "most people think" and policies being enacted in Western cultures. The policies, especially in the education of children, seem to be aligning against such reality and in favor of the assertion of zero distinctions between biological gender. This disconnect is apparent in legislation and regulation as well.

To today's unlucky 1000: there used to be(at least the main one was shut down) a Reddit group /r/theredpill that basically argues that violence and exploitation are healthy parts of relationships, characterized by such phrases as "swallowing the (red)pill" or "instigate isolate escalate". Just so you know when to run.

The expression comes from “the matrix” movie, and to just about everyone outside a small Reddit circle, has a well established meaning that does not include violence or exploitation in any possible way.

Yes and no. "Take the red pill" comes from the Matrix, but the adjective "redpilled" is associated with a particular political and ideological fringe which started on Reddit's /r/TheRedPill, from which descended the various incel subreddits, MGTOW, etc. - to be fair, it wasn't that negative initially, just a bit questionable, but as it happens these days the place became more and more politicised, radical, hating women, and associated with the American far right and emotionally stunted angry teenagers.

Except when it comes to sexual orientation. Then its set in stone from conception.

> The feminist left

“The”.

Based on my experience — I know plenty of feminists and lefties, and my ex is a literal self-described “eat the rich” revolutionary communist — “The feminist left” is about a coherent a group as, say, Scorpios.

For example, I don’t know anyone who believes human minds are blank slates, and the last time I even discussed the topic was 20 years ago in my philosophy A-level.

This is one of the best summaries of this thought process I have read.

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