This depresses me. You were one of the commenters here I most respected.

Everything can only be a limited view. When feminists talk about the plight of [woman in x situation], one could say they’re neglecting (and by extension marginalizing) all the other pain in the world. When I talk about the plight of certain people (of any gender) who have been burned by certain social justice memes, one can accuse me of the same. It’s not my intention and it seems to be something fundamental to the process of writing an essay at all – ignoring everything not covered by the essay – but I can understand why it would bother you.

I am disappointed to see you go, but I can’t promise there won’t be more like this in the future so I probably don’t have any good arguments to stop you from doing so. All I can say is I continue to try (with good success) to stick to a rule of one or fewer angry post about identity politics a month, and I will always content warn the one per month that is.

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Motte A — goyim: I’m not antisemitic, I’m just opposed to the government of Israel. (Often followed rapidly by a return to criticisms that conflate Israel and Jews.)

Motte B — liberal-but-mindkilled Jew (and some goyim, in the US): I don’t approve of the Netanyahu government, but I support Israel’s right to exist. (Responds with condemnation whenever liberal-and-not-mindkilled Jews suggest actuallyforreals withholding support from the Israeli government when it does something appalling.)

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However, I do think many of your comments here do come across as if written by someone with a great deal of hostility towards feminists. If that’s not what you intend to convey, then it might be of interest and concern to you that it is what you’re conveying. (Or maybe not.)

Well, I think it’s entirely fair to say that I have quite a bit of hostility towards generic feminists in these particular contexts.

For example, I strongly suggest that “if you weren’t evil you wouldn’t need to ask” is a strawman, or perhaps treating a fringe example as if it were the center.

You’re absolutely right, I’ve been using over-the-top summaries. I honestly didn’t think about how that would come across. Sorry about that. I’ll try to be more careful about that. I just assumed people would know what I was talking about instead of taking it literally — the exact mistake I’m criticizing the feminists for. (Of course, I don’t have any moral authority! 😛 )

For now, for “If you weren’t evil, you wouldn’t need to ask”, you can read, “Feminists frequently claim or imply — via the fundamental feminist equivocation — that the correct feminist response to a given situation is obvious. This strongly discourages asking about non-obvious cases, as if you expose yourself as finding it non-obvious, you will be (via the fundamental equivocation) non-feminist and thus evil.” They don’t actually make the claim that if you were a good person you wouldn’t need to ask, because that would be plainly unreasonable. I really shouldn’t have said that they do. Sorry about that.

I agree, but since less-than-ideal-argumentation is, I’m sorry to say, the norm in very nearly all of our society, it seems very strange to complain that feminism in particular is the problem here, or that such attacks drives opposing views out of visible existence. Alas, no one is immune to that sort of attack. Yet somehow opposing views still exist.

This seems to be the point that these things always get stuck on (recall the old argument about feminist statistics). But as I said above: The problem isn’t that the feminist movement has worse norms of argument or worse statistics than whatever other group you care to name. The problem that is particular to the feminist movement is that they are able to screw up the norms of discourse even in places that are full of reasonable people who are supposed to know better. This is what I mean when I talk about “garden subversion”. Perhaps this claim is incorrect, but I don’t think it’s a claim you’ve addressed, instead just talking about whether or not its arguments are worse on the whole.

It seems to me that you no longer have a case that feminism, through “attacks,” unfairly maintains a monopoly on gender issues.

Again, I think we’re looking at different arenas here. Among the general population, absolutely it doesn’t have a monopoly. There are plenty of old-school sexists out there causing problems and the feminist movement is doing good work in fighting them. Here on SSC, where you have neoreactionaries, it certainly doesn’t have a monopoly! My claim is that it has an unfair monopoly (or almost-monopoly) among the population I am used to thinking of as “reasonable people”. I realize that’s a pretty fuzzy demarcation, but, to my mind it’s important and this is a real problem. (Here, Hugh Ristik summed it up as “white middle/upper class educated liberals”, which I think is a bit restrictive — why only white? Was he just hedging, or was there some reason for that I don’t know about? — but hopefully you are getting an idea of the cluster of people I’m pointing out.

Like, you keep talking about activists and political advocacy; I’m talking about people holding discussions ostensibly trying to get at the truth! If to your mind that makes what I’m discussing irrelevant, then, as I said, feel free to ignore me!

What’s wrong with feminists saying “if you want to handle the other side of things, form your own group”?

By itself, absolutely nothing. I’m just saying it’s inconsistent to both say that others should form their own groups, and demand that those other groups do things the feminists’ way! (Of course, you would say that they don’t do the latter, and I don’t really want to argue about this right now.)

Are you aware that Hugh’s essay was part of an ongoing discussion he was having with me and some other folks at my blog?

Ha, yes, I’d forgotten that!

As I said to Hugh back then, feminism is not an all-powerful god, with limitless resources, perfect foreknowledge, and responsibility for all outcomes. Relationships are confusing and so are boundaries; it is not within feminism’s ability to define those boundaries in a way that avoids all subjectivity and confusion in all circumstances.

As I’ve said elsewhere: You’re absolutely right that it can’t do that, and as such it shouldn’t have responsibility for all outcomes, but with its unfair monopoly, responsibility naturally attaches to it.

Feminism isn’t to blame for the problems of “shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed” men (the quoted phrase is Hugh’s). I think those men, due to being shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed, naturally find and cling to excuses to not put themselves (ourselves) forward and to not take risks. If the shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed man in question is a feminist (or was raised by feminists), maybe he’ll think “I can’t say ‘may I kiss you?‘ because that would be harassment”; but if that same man was a Christian, he’d be thinking “I can’t say ‘may I kiss you?’ because Jesus wouldn’t want me to.”

OK, so you’ve found a third option! Honestly arguing that there is in fact not a problem, rather than dismissing the possibility out of hand.

If you could show me strong empirical evidence demonstrating that the incidence of men being “shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed” has increased in lockstep with feminism, I’d find that interesting, although we’d still have to figure out a way to distinguish causation from correlation, of course.

Inside view vs. outside view, eh? I really do not have the time to go searching for such evidence, and have to wonder whether it presently exists, so I think we’re both just going to walk away unconvinced here.

But, lacking such evidence, your argument just isn’t persuasive. Men who can’t find love because they (we) are “shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed” are hardly a new phenomenon; think of movies like “Marty,” or think of Charlie Brown and the red-headed girl. Heck, think of Christian in the 1898 play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” who despite his great beauty was crippled by shyness when speaking to a woman he was attracted to. This problem was around before feminism and was common enough to be a recognizable stock character in literature. If there’s any “good reason” to think feminism has made it worse, I haven’t seen it.

Well, if you can argue by example, so can I! How about Scott’s 3rd meditation? Where he explicitly says he was getting better until he encountered feminist discussion on the subject? (I’d use my own example, but that’s less clear-cut, I suppose.)

Edit: OK, on rereading, you weren’t really arguing by example. Oops. Regardless, just as you’d want to see outside-view evidence that it has made things worse, I’d want to see outside-view evidence that it hasn’t, because there seems to me to be a pretty clear qualitative difference between simple shyness and the guilt and paranoia-filled double-binds that feminism presents. But like I said, I think we’re just both going to walk away unconvinced here. Now, I think I could make a better case that feminism has made the problem harder to fix, but this is long enough already, I’ll do that perhaps later in a separate comment.

The ones asking me to survey my friends about the nitty gritty details of how they met their sweeties, and report back the details to y’all? Yeah, I’m not gonna do that.

OK. No problem.

However, I’m also certain that some such men have had their problems made easier by feminism. I don’t see any way to objectively determine that one is larger than the other.

If our only options were “feminism or no feminism”, you’d have a good point! But, like, why can’t we modify feminism so as to get the good parts and shed the bad parts? I’d like to see a better feminism, one I can once again proudly (rather than heavily conditionally) endorse!

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If there’s a better alternative to saying it bluntly and not saying it at all, I’d like to hear it.

Honestly? I’m a bit uncertain, and I’m thinking now I might just be going after the wrong thing here. I mean I think it is possible to be more fine-grained by considering people’s reactions. And perhaps importantly to just give a standard “be aware of variation, don’t be afraid to use common sense, etc.” But, I don’t know, maybe I was just wrong there.

Like, all this is a lot of responsibility to impose on these people, a lot of whom are just making offhanded comments, you know? I think the right solution is to un-screw-up the meta-level and dispel the air of moral authority.

Such a claim is so plainly ridiculous that it’s easy to reject if you haven’t accepted it already. They may not put it in such easily identifiable terms, so figuring out that they’re doing that may not be easy, but once you do figure it out, their incorrectness is obvious.

Yes, the hard part is noticing that there’s a problem once you’ve already swallowed it all!

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