theunitofcaring

Anonymous asked:

Are you a meninist or MRA?

theunitofcaring answered:

No.

I think there are a lot of valid concerns raised within the men’s rights movement, and aside from those the fact that it exists says some important things about the way men in (mostly) the U.S. today relate to gender and activism and perceived gender inequities.

But I don’t like joining movements unless I agree not just with the official platform but also with the majority of what is done in the movement’s name and with the way the movement is mostly understood by outsiders, and gosh the men’s rights people look awful on that front.

Men’s rights issues that I care about deeply:

Abuse of men isn’t taken seriously. Rape of men isn’t taken seriously. Bullying and belittling and systemic contempt for ‘failed’ men is celebrated as something they deserve. The origin of this might be in patriarchal notions about manliness, but the same underlying attitude towards men is pushed in some contexts under the guise of ‘men are the oppressors’ and reactionary enforcement of the male gender role is still evil when it’s happening in the name of feminism.

There is an extraordinarily high rate of violence against men and incarceration of men (and mistreatment of men in prisons). Men are also much likelier than women to commit suicide. Despite this many mental health resources and most resources for protection from violence are aimed at women. 

Our society does not have a clear idea of what it means to be attracted to women, and whether that can be expressed healthily at all. People attracted to women get hella mixed messages (be assertive! no! that’s creepy! just be yourself! …and you thought then women would fall into your lap? you’re a Nice Guy! hitting on people is objectifying! not hitting on them is entitled!”. This is confusing and terrifying and most advice for the confused and terrified is somewhere between unhelpful and actively damaging. Most of the actually useful practical advice comes from communities steeped in misogyny. 

For certain types of person/ambition/emotional need it’s much easier to be a woman than a man in our society, and it’s very difficult to say ‘my life would be easier if I were a woman’ even when it’s true. This shuts down a lot of discourse about gender nonconformity and the ways men can relate to gendered expectations of them. 

A lot of criticism of men is ableist, fatphobic, classist, etc. and also really hard to respond to, because people tend to round off your response to the nearest Stupid Thing The Idiots Say that has been posted online on one of those websites that thrives on gender politics pageviews. This makes online discussion about gender, which could be important and empowering to many men, instead a minefield for them.

Most people who hold power are men, but most men don’t hold power. And more than that, most men in the U.S. have never experienced a community or social movement that centered their experiences or was motivated by a desire to improve their lives. That is disempowering all by itself, but it’s extra disempowering on top of an insistence that all of society is doing that, an insistence that often shouts over men talking about their lived experiences in a world that definitely didn’t value them.

theunitofcaring

If two wolves and a sheep are deciding what’s for dinner, and one of the wolves comes to the sheep and says “hello, the other wolf over there thinks we should eat you for dinner, but I feel like maybe you don’t deserve to be eaten, and I’d like to learn more about your perspective,” the sheep is unlikely to benefit by responding “stop concern-trolling, you entitled sheep-eating shitlord.”

In the bathroom, I was alarmed to notice a wasp buzzing around the window. My mobility was limited for reasons arising out of my original motivation for going to the bathroom, so I was really hoping that it wouldn’t attack me.

I noticed that it was crawling back and forth around the edge of the window and it occurred to me that it was looking for an escape route through a crack between the window and the window frame. To my knowledge, there are no cracks, and the only way in and out of the bathroom is the door.

The wasp appeared to be executing a hill-climbing algorithm based on the amount of light near the window. Unfortunately, the window-area is an bad local maximum of light.

I’m curious about whether/when the wasp will broaden its search horizon and become willing to push through the darkness that stands between it and the outdoors. What insights might we glean from the wasp about becoming willing to push past bad local maxima and broaden our search horizons?

Compare Leah Libresco’s Avoiding Rape-Adjacent Sex, discussing and advocating yes-means-yes, with Barry Deutsch’s cartoon Affirmative Consent Explained, on the same topic.

I just read Leah’s piece and found it extremely illuminating and convincing, and I felt like I was being cheerfully welcomed aboard a bandwagon that I was happily jumping on. A few weeks ago when I first saw Barry’s cartoon, I felt like I was being beaten over the head with a moral baseball bat; I grudgingly agreed but felt kind of dirty about it, and like the comic was actually repelling me from its thesis before my own reasoning yanked me back to it.

I think the key difference is that Leah acknowledges in a serious way that the policy will have real costs, and argues that its benefits outweigh those costs. Yes, she admits, this policy will forbid a lot of non-rape sex that would have satisfied the preferences of both sex-havers. Though she’s not a consequentialist and doesn’t discuss the issue in consequentialist terms, this acknowledgement sounds to my consequentialist ears very much like an admission that the policy does require a sacrifice of utility. But, she continues, we should do it anyway, because it’s worth making that sacrifice if it means we establish a set of clear boundaries. I agree.

So Leah, by engaging with the opposition and making an effort to understand how a well-meaning person could disagree, avoids falling into the trap of engaging in a costless analysis.

Barry, on the other hand, just mocks the opposition. I guess I have to admit at this point that my knee-jerk reaction to the idea of affirmative consent was basically the position of the villain in Barry’s comic. I can’t really defend myself for this, except to emphasize that on further reflection I agreed with Barry. But that reflection process was painful and very effortful, and demanded that I look past the fact that I was being actively demonized and fired upon by the “shut up you entitled rapist shitlord” cannon, whereas with Leah I felt like my thoughts were being gently, painlessly, effortlessly guided to the same place.

I liked Leah’s much better than I liked Barry’s, and I think Leah’s has much more potential for effecting good than Barry’s. And Barry is actually regarded as one of the more calm, patient, and charitable luminaries of Internet Social Justice.

To be fair, I’m sure part of this is just the nature of Barry’s medium. It’s a cartoon; the whole point is that it’s punchy and sassy and confrontational. He didn’t set out to pack a thoughtful and comprehensive essay into six panels, so it’s probably not really fair to hold him to that standard. And I think he has written a long of thoughtful and comprehensive essays that I’ve liked.

But I wanted to write about this case because I think it’s a good illustration of a broader issue. I actually feel like I have experiences like this a lot when I consume SJ media - hating the way it makes me feel but ultimately being forced to agree with its underlying point. This seems like a bad approach for SJ to take.

As someone who is mostly sympathetic to SJ’s end goals, I’m saddened by the thought of a person who’s on the fence about the issue reading Barry’s cartoon and being driven away by it, when they could have read Leah’s post and been brought into the fold by it. It’s also frustrating to me that SJ seems very hostile to these flies-honey-vinegar type arguments and tend to respond to them by quickly dismissing them as concern-trolling.

duvallon

http://flybaldies.tumblr.com/post/82553687102/man-thinking-about-that-post-like-social

flybaldies:

man thinking about that post like

social justice warriors are sometimes the leeroy jenkins, they rush right in usually without buffs, without enough equipment, and probably in misguided and counterproductive ways but their hearts are usually in the right place so everyone who rushes in after…

Within this framework, I think I’d consider myself sort of a Social-Justice-NPC-Town-Guardsman, who will fight alongside the Social Justice Party against any invading hordes of goblins or armies of undead, but also intervenes against the Party when they attempt to summarily execute petty thieves in the streets.

duvallon
slatestarscratchpad

http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/99533718466/trigger-warning-pascalian-reasoning-i

slatestarscratchpad:

[trigger warning: Pascalian reasoning]

I understand why Pascal’s Wager is the sort of thing you would want to avoid, but I don’t understand how you can principled-ly avoid it.

Suppose there is an x-risk with a one in a million chance of destroying the world (as estimated by, I dunno, a…

This is not quite the Pascalian feature of UFAI risk that I find objectionable. If it were true that there existed a verifiably nonzero but extremely small probability of an apocalyptic UFAI outcome, everything you say here would be right. The problem is that, to me and probably to many others, no convincing argument has been made that the probability of the apocalyptic outcome is verifiably nonzero. This is also, for me, the key defect of the original Pascal’s Wager.

When people try to convince me of UFAI danger, their arguments end up resting heavily on the idea of unboundedly self-improving AI. Nobody has convinced me that this is possible.

I suppose you could try to overcome this objection by quantifying the probability of the probability of UFAI doom, but at some point down that path it starts to feel like “well, nothing is technically impossible in our quantum universe of probability distributions.” The entire idea of impossibility loses all meaning. When you combine that with naive decision theory and an active imagination about catastrophes, you end up being concerned about infinite not-technically-impossible-but-really-terrible-if-they-happened things. 

Decision theories seem poorly equipped to deal with infinities.

slatestarscratchpad
slatestarscratchpad

http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/98288908581/every-time-i-write-about-something-i-get-comments

slatestarscratchpad:

Every time I write about something I get comments from a bunch of people who have already read about it, and read more about than I have, and are experts in the field, and tell me I’m only grasping towards truths they already explained in their doctoral thesis.

And every time I have to remind…

I suspect that I am like many of Scott’s commenters in that I am just thrilled on the rare occasions when I feel I am able to chime in with something useful. The few times he has written about things that brush up against my narrow domain expertise, I have desperately seized the opportunity to post a comment with some additional analysis, no matter how tangentially related to the matter at hand. In the face of the intimidating breadth of Scott’s knowledge, my comments are just me trying to show everyone that maybe I can be useful after all and could be worth keeping around (and also trying to get senpai to notice me). I obviously can’t speak for the rest of the commentariat, but I suspect that many of the doctoral-thesis-invoking-type comments come from a similar place.

slatestarscratchpad