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Comment by GavinMcG | Hacker News Reader

> the gatekeepers of the bedroom

There is no way this can be true. Sex takes two consenting people; there is no "gate" to be unequally "kept" because both parties have autonomy.

Trying to shift to "social scales" to escape the central role of autonomy is a nifty trick. But casting individual bedroom decisions as a matter of social equality is to presume a degree of entitlement in the bedroom. After all, we're entitled to be treated equally, right?

By governments? Yes. By our managers at work? Yes. By those who we desire? No, not at all.

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"Trying to shift to "social scales" to escape the central role of autonomy is a nifty trick."

I don't understand this comment. Isn't feminism addressing an issue at social scale, often in areas that include autonomy? Even looking at marriage, you are expected to treat each other fairly.

There are absolutely places where the social scale is relevant: places where one is entitled to equal treatment.

Incels mistakenly think that the bedroom is one of these places, and that they are entitled to an equal amount of sexual attention as some other man. Thus the "gatekeepers" language when there is no gate.

The social-scale concerns are totally appropriate when it comes to how we construct masculinity and what male attractiveness requires, and feminists are by and large interested in that conversation.

I saw the gatekeeper comment as being more related to the natural processes of diamorphic species. Take for example your statement below. This very much implies a "gate" and that women are making choices to keep that gate closed for some men. Just because a person is not entitled to what is behind that gate, doesn't make that gate less real. If anything, it enforces the analogy in the fact that gates do exist in real life to keep out those who are not entitled to what lies beyond them.

"Incels mistakenly think that the bedroom is one of these places, and that they are entitled to an equal amount of sexual attention as some other man."

The proof is that men aren't described as gatekeepers, even though just like women, they choose to have sex with certain people, and not with others.

The "gate" you're talking about uncontroversially belongs to each individual in the form of their bodily autonomy. Yet women are uniquely cast as "keeping out" certain people. That's not a matter of dimorphism: that's a matter of mens' bodily autonomy being assumed, and womens' being up for debate.

In other words: for the sake of argument, sure, there's a gate. But only women are viewed as gatekeepers, as though keeping others out undermines equality, rather than being part-and-parcel of having the equal autonomy to choose one's partners.

Gatekeeping is relevant only when there is scarcity. If there is a pair of people (A, B) where A's desire for sex is three times bigger than B's, then although both A and B have full bodily autonomy (that nobody disputes), in practice only B would be a gatekeeper, as sex for A is scarce, while sex for B is plentiful (relative to their desires).

The same argument could be generalized to society. If one gender has on average much higher desire for sex, then the second gender would be considered gatekeepers in practice, as for members of the first the gate is much more selective that for the members of the second gender (due to scarcity difference). That is completely unrelated to equality or bodily autonomy, which is granted to both.

Exactly, which gets back to the actual underlying dynamic: the accusation of gatekeeping only makes sense on a societal level, not an individual one, and can only be turned into an equality issue if one (silently) shifts back to the perspective of an individual who believes they are entitled to an equal amount of sex.

This is a common and disingenuous misconstrual of the argument. It isn't about feeling entitled to sex, it's about making access to sex more evenly distributed across society, for both genders. Not because of entitlement, but because of better overall happiness for both genders.

You are talking about a movement which on its face is about social equality, but refuses to acknowledge that is explicitly engineering norms which are already creating oppressive social inequality. You clearly have disdain for them but whether you want to admit it or not, "incels" are a low status social class, and if they are the way they are because of the efforts of others then by modern progressive logic they are oppressed - by feminists. The refusal to even acknowledge the possibility that this could be happening is a form of disenfranchisement, and is inevitable when your entire worldview is based on a false oppressor/oppressed binary, which is the essence of modern feminism (progressivism really).

So, to be clear, you believe it is axiomatic that one must internalize rape-desire to observe or discuss obvious consequences of sexual reproduction under selective pressure?

Thank you for this comment and the ones preceding it. This comment section is scary and I appreciate your lucidity.

It's interesting that the concept of bodily autonomy doesn't extend to the male not wanting his body to engage in a lifetime of forced labor when the female's bodily autonomy extends to carrying an irrational pregnancy to term, though, isn't it?

One might even go to say that there are very real systemic and social inequities which have nothing at all to do with your rape fixation...

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