A Meditation on Mutually Assured Destruction
by MugaSofer
I
From The Sixth Meditation on Superweapons, by Scott Alexander:
Suppose you were a Jew in old-timey Eastern Europe. The big news story is about a Jewish man who killed a Christian child. As far as you can tell the story is true. It’s just disappointing that everyone who tells it is describing it as “A Jew killed a Christian kid today”. You don’t want to make a big deal over this, because no one is saying anything objectionable like “And so all Jews are evil”. Besides you’d hate to inject identity politics into this obvious tragedy. It just sort of makes you uncomfortable.
I know a guy who feels uncomfortable with Scott’s writing.
He enjoys, and agrees with, most of Scott’s essays. They’re both useful, and informative. We often discuss things Scott has written on, and make use of concepts Scott has invented or popularized.
And yet.
The other day, we were discussing feminism, and men’s attitudes toward it. We had been looking at a survey that suggested many men – an alarmingly high number – both gave the “correct” definition of feminism (“equality”) and endorsed the statement “men cannot be feminists”. Almost as many men believed “feminism” meant “equality, agreed men could be feminists, and yet were not feminists themselves.
(This was a local, informal study, BTW.)
I mentioned something useful Scott wrote that seemed relevant. But my friend, I learned, had grown somewhat uneasy with Scott’s arguments.
When he read Scott’s recent essay, Untitled – which I rather liked, and said so – something didn’t seem right to my friend. Something, in fact, which he’d noticed a great deal in Scott’s writing.
But also, there was this:
Some Jews are rich, therefore all Jews are rich, therefore all Jews are privileged, therefore no Jew could be oppressed in any way, therefore Jews are the oppressors.
And much the same is true of nerds. In fact, have you noticed actual nerds and actual Jews tend to be the same people?
[…]
And this is why it’s distressing to see the same things people have always said about Jews get applied to nerds. They’re this weird separate group with their own culture who don’t join in the reindeer games of normal society. They dress weird and talk weird. They’re conventionally unattractive and have too much facial hair. But worst of all, they have thechutzpah to do all that and also be successful. Having been excluded from all of the popular jobs, they end up in the unpopular but lucrative jobs, for which they get called greedy parasites in the Jews’ case, and “the most useless and deficient individuals in society” in the case of the feminist article on nerds I referenced earlier.
[…]
So let me specify what I am obviously not saying. I am not saying nerds have it “just as bad as Jews in WWII Germany” or any nonsense like that. I am not saying that prejudice against nerds is literally motivated by occult anti-Semitism, or accusing anyone of being anti-Semitic.
I am saying that whatever structural oppression means, it should be about structure. And the structure society uses to marginalize and belittle nerds is very similar to a multi-purpose structure society has used to belittle weird groups in the past with catastrophic results.
Now, my friend knows Scott wasn’t saying saying nerds have it “just as bad as Jews in WWII Germany” or any nonsense like that. In fact, look above:
… let me specify what I am obviously not saying. I am not saying nerds have it “just as bad as Jews in WWII Germany” or any nonsense like that.
And yet, he seems to be going out of his way to include “Feminism” and “Nazi Germany” together in his sentences.
Why?
It’s not because they’re a good counterexample for “nerds are rich Silicon valley CEOs, you think they’re not privileged?” It’s an actual argument, not just the kind of “your argument proves too much” one-liner Scott is famous for. What is he saying?
the same things people have always said about Jews get applied to nerds. They’re this weird separate group with their own culture who don’t join in the reindeer games of normal society. They dress weird and talk weird. They’re conventionally unattractive and have too much facial hair. But worst of all, they have the chutzpah to do all that and also be successful. Having been excluded from all of the popular jobs, they end up in the unpopular but lucrative jobs, for which they get called greedy parasites in the Jews’ case, and “the most useless and deficient individuals in society” in the case of the feminist article on nerds I referenced earlier.
[…]
There is a well-known, dangerous form of oppression that works just fine when the group involved have the same skin color as the rest of society, the same sex as the rest of society, and in many cases are totally indistinguishable from the rest of society except to themselves. It works by taking a group of unattractive, socially excluded people, mocking them, accusing them of being out to violate women, then denying that there could possibly be any problem with these attacks because they include rich people who dominate a specific industry.
… he’s constructing a reference class.
This is a reference class – a category, a handy box to place things in – that includes two examples: “these feminists I quoted” and “these Nazis I quoted”.
It includes something definitely bad, and your oppenant’s arguments. But what use is this category? What predictions does it make, beyond “badness”?
There’s a name for this. Scott named it. It’s called the Worst Argument in the World.
My friend called it “Godwinning“, and he stopped reading the article.
II
Still, the Jew thing is beside the point, right?
The actual point of the article stands? The other arguments, and the point that Jews are an important counterexample to the idea that “Some nerds are rich, therefore all nerds are rich, therefore all nerds are privileged, therefore no nerd could be oppressed in any way, therefore nerds are the oppressors.”
Even if Scott, understandably frustrated, devoted a little more space than necessary to comparing his opponents to Nazis; shouldn’t we steelman it, pay attention to the strongest version of his argument?
Maybe.
Let’s talk about the correct definition of Feminism.
Feminism doesn’t mean “equality”, except when used between feminists, discussing what would be the “feminist” response to something. Feminism is a movement, and a political ideology. Feminism is a thing people identify as.
It is, in fact, a tribe.
Now: suppose you’re a feminist on the internet. The big news story is about a group of SJWs who said they hated men. As far as you can tell the story is true. It’s just disappointing that everyone who tells it is describing it as “These crazy feminists”. You don’t want to make a big deal over this, because no one is saying anything objectionable like “And so all Feminists are evil” – sure, the people who hate feminists are, but they’re no more credible than conspiracy theorists who think the latest news story proves the government caused 9/11. Besides, it’s important to make sure people know this person is wrong and completely beyond the pale.
The next day you see a popular blogger has written a post on how feminists were awful to him, and sent him death threats, and made vaguely racist and ableist comments. This sort of thing happens a lot on the internet, and you certainly feel for him. It seems kind of pedantic to interrupt every conversation with “But also a lot of feminists have been receiving death threats, and even though a disproportionate number of the people who sent them to you were feminists, that doesn’t mean the feminists are disproportionately active in sending these messages compared to their numbers.” So again you stay uncomfortable.
The next day you hear people complain about the awful SJWs who are ruining politics and oppressing free speech. You understand that really, free speech and and discourse are important topics. On the other hand, when people start talking about “Political Correctness” and “the need to protect men from Feminists” and “rules to stop SJWs from interfering here”, you just feel worried, even though you personally are not doing any horrible stuff and maybe they even have good reasons for phrasing it that way.
Then the next day, you get in an argument with your co-worker. It’s the sort of thing that happens a lot – he was rude to you, and when you complained he started going on about his “rights” and “freedom” and other high-minded things you know he wouldn’t give a damn about at any other time. He takes you aside and tells you you’d better just give up, admit he is in the right, and apologize to him – because if the conflict escalated everyone would take his side because you’re well-known for being a feminist (and a woman, I guess, in this scenario, because Stereotypes.) And everyone knows that Feminists hate men and are basically bullying self-absorbed conversation-ruining free-speech-silencing scum.
Is he right?
Well, that depends on where you’re having the conversation.
III
Scott would argue that feminists are building a superweapon to attack him. And he’s right, actually. But this isn’t the superweapon.
Neither is this:
Pick any attempt to shame people into conforming with gender roles, and you’ll find self-identified feminists leading the way. Transgender people? Feminists led the effort to stigmatize them and often still do. Discrimination against sex workers? Led by feminists. Against kinky people? Feminists again. People who have too much sex, or the wrong kind of sex? Feminists are among the jeering crowd, telling them they’re self-objectifying or reinforcing the patriarchy or whatever else they want to say. Male victims of domestic violence? It’s feminists fighting against acknowledging and helping them.
Yes, many feminists have been on both sides of these issues, and there have been good feminists tirelessly working against the bad feminists. Indeed, right now there are feminists who are telling the other feminists to lay off the nerd-shaming. My girlfriend is one of them. But that’s kind of my point. There are feminists on both sides of a lot of issues, including the important ones.
You know what transgender people, sex workers; people who have too much sex, or the wrong kind of sex, or kinky sex; victims of domestic violence, and nerds … well, you know what they all have in common?
They were unpopular before feminism.
And that’s the problem, really. That’s what my friend pointed out, and what I realized had been bothering me the whole time. Scott mentions how everyone who posts about this topic gets a lot of messages from people saying “that’s ME!”, and he’s clearly correct, because many of these comments are visible to the public. I’ve seen them. But you know what the most common type seems to be?
“Yes, I experienced this, but it had nothing to do with feminism.”
Let’s look at the insults Scott shows us, that exemplify “feminist shaming tactics”:
Whether we’re “mouth-breathers”, “pimpled”, “scrawny”, “blubbery”, “sperglord”, “neckbeard”, “virgins”, “living in our parents’ basements”, “man-children” or whatever the insult du jour is, it’s always, always, ALWAYS a self-identified feminist saying it. Sometimes they say it obliquely, referring to a subgroup like “bronies” or “atheists” or “fedoras” while making sure everyone else in nerddom knows it’s about them too.
Do any of these strike you as particularly feminist terms?
Because I hang out with a lot of feminists, but I also read a lot of anti-feminist things. And I seem to see a heck of theses terms there. These are not feminist terms; they’re just terms.
But hey, it’s still important, right? Even if it’s not just feminists doing this, they need to stop, right? Shouldn’t feminism be fighting gendered stereotyping and policing, wherever it may be found?
Well, yeah, actually.
But … well, Scott is a better writer than I am:
Sometimes I read feminist blogs. A common experience is that by the end of the article I am enraged and want to make a snarky comment, so I re-read the essay to pick out the juiciest quotes to tear apart. I re-read it and I re-read it again and eventually I find that everything it says is both factually true and morally unobjectionable. They very rarely say anything silly like “And therefore all men, even the ones who aren’t actively committing this offense I’m arguing against, are evil”, and it’s usually not even particularly implied. I feel like the Jew in the story above, who admits that it’s really bad the Jewish guy killed the Christian child, and would hate to say, like a jerk, that Christians aren’t allowed to talk about it.
Scott put it right at the top of the post: this is a ten-thousand word rant about feminism. Not about nerds. Not about bullying. About feminism.
And Scott writes a lot of those.
IV
Is this justified?
I said earlier that Scott is right when he worries feminists are building a superweapon to attack him, and I meant it, too. Modern social justice is increasingly defined, not by their compassion for the victims, but by their rejection of the “oppressors” – and the oppressors don’t exist.
Sexism exists. Racism exists. Many, many other forms of discrimination and stereotyping exist – among them all those attacks on transgender people, sex workers; people who have too much sex, or the wrong kind of sex, or kinky sex; victims of domestic violence, and nerds we mentioned earlier.
It’s easy to demonstrate that women and minorities are, for example, turned down far more often when they submit identical resumes … by both men and women, of all races.
And that’s the problem. Sexism, racism; homophobia and transphobia and every other horrible little stereotype … these are all real problems, real “oppression”. But this oppression is mediated by society, not a separate class of “oppressors” But by attacking the “oppressors”; the “privileged” (and yes, privilege is real); those who aren’t members of those oppressed groups – in short, people like the Scotts and me and the friend who started this essay, white straight cismales – we are not solving the problem. We’re just creating a class of people who think that feminism means “equality”, yet men can’t be feminists, because “equality” means fighting men.
And then Scott and I look around and find we’re the “bad guy”, and everyone knows people like you are racist misogynistic scumbags.
(Although, actually, you know, I’ve never had serious or indeed mild trouble with people telling me to shut up because I’m one of Them … but Scott Alexander has. Serious trouble, quite beyond internet arguments. These things happen. I’m a lucky, lucky guy.)
So if you find yourself looking down the barrel of a superweapon, what do you do? What do you do, when one tribe is gathering strength to attack you, and you’re looking defenceless? Are we justified in building anti-feminist, anti-social-justice superweapons?
V
This rule of “never let anyone build a conceptual superweapon that might get used against you” seems to be the impetus behind a lot of social justice movements. For example, it’s eye-rollingly annoying whenever the Council on American – Islamic Relations condemns a news report on the latest terrorist atrocity for making too big a deal that the terrorists were Islamic (what? this bombing just killed however many people, and all you can think of to get upset about is that the newspaper mentioned the guy screamed ‘Allahu akbar’ first?), but I interpret their actions as trying to prevent the construction of a conceptual superweapon against Islam (or possibly to dismantle one that already exists). Like the Jew whose best option would have been to attack potentially anti-Jewish statements even when they were reasonable in context, CAIR can’t just trust that no one will use the anti-Muslim sentiment against non-threatening Muslims. As long as there are stupid little trivial disputes between Muslims and non-Muslims over anything at all, that giant anti-Muslim superweapon sitting in the corner is just too tempting to refuse.
Scott is not the only anti-feminist (believe it or not.)
So … yeah. It’s late and I’m tired. You just get a bullet point. Scott is not the only anti-feminist in existence, and they have access to anti-feminist superweapons too. Them man-hating lesbians tryin’ to pretend sex you regret in the morning is “rape”, and all that.
Scott is not the only person out there who objects to something he calls “feminism”.
Even if you are going to use – let’s be clear here: a glaring generalization about how Feminists sure do [thing that everyone does] a lot, huh? – in order to fight Bad Things present in feminism; even if it’s only used to target unfair generalizations about other groups; it can be and, empirically, is used to attack feminism of every kind.
(In other news, I only ever hear people mention Nice Guys in the same breath as complaints about feminism. I Wonder Why. Yes, feminists do talk about it, but not nearly as much as anti-feminists do. And … *sigh* … yes, the same goes for Dworkin, no need to point that out in the comments every damn time, people.)
Now the feminists would say that I too have a superweapon called “patriarchy”, and that they’re just continuing the arms race. This is true, but it doesn’t lead to a stable state like what the guns rights advocates claim would happen if everyone had guns where we would all be super-polite because nobody wants to offend a guy who’s probably packing heat. It leads to something more like a postapocalyptic anarchy where everyone has guns and we’re all shooting each other. If there’s a conflict between a man and a woman, and the people involved happen to be old-fashioned patriarchalist types, then the man will automatically win and everyone will hate the woman for being a slut or a bitch or whatever. If there’s a conflict between a man and a woman, and the people involved happen to be feminists who are familiar with the memeplex and all its pattern-matching suggests, then the woman will probably win and everyone will hate the man for being a creep or a bigot or whatever. At no point does everyone become respectful and say “Hey, we’re all reasonable people with superweapons, let’s judge this case on its merits instead of pattern-matching to the closest atrocity committed by someone of the same gender”.
It also seems to me that the patriarchy is sort of an accident, where men ruled because they were big and strong and couldn’t imagine doing otherwise and their values just sort of coalesced over time, and the struggle seems to be getting them to realize it’s there. Whereas the feminists know all about discourse and power relations and so on and are quite gung ho about it and they’re staying up late at night reading books with titles like How To Build A Much Deadlier Superweapon (I assume this book exists and is written by Nikola Tesla).
I’m all for mutual superweapon disarmament, but I’m not sure I like the whole mutually assured destruction thing as much. My history, and I think the history of a lot of people who are liberal and pro-choice and so on and so forth but really wary of feminism and social justice – is that we spent our college years totally supporting social justice and helping out in the superweapon factories because it’s our duty to fight rape and racism and so on and since we were nice respectful people obviously the superweapon would never be used on us. Then we got in some kind of trivial disagreement with a woman or a minority or someone, or we didn’t want to go far enough. Then they turned the superweapon on us, and it was kind of a moment of “wait, this was sort of the plan all along, wasn’t it?”
Pseudonym Writes 
“I only ever hear people mention Nice Guys in the same breath as complaints about feminism. I Wonder Why. ”
Because you don’t listen to the enormous number of feminists who frequently complain about Nice Guys, often affixing a “tm” to the end of those two words.
Everything else you write is about as intellectually dishonest as that.
>Everything else you write is about as intellectually dishonest as that.
Ouch. Care to point out some other examples? I’m always interested in criticism.
>Because you don’t listen to the enormous number of feminists who frequently complain about Nice Guys, often affixing a “tm” to the end of those two words.
Yeah, it’s possible I’m in a self-selected bubble. It’s also possible that Scott is in a bubble, of course, but still. I’m not sure how to deal with this.
On the other hand, I think my point there – that “demonizes male sexuality” is part of a common stereotype of Feminists, and talk of “Nice Guys(tm)” is an extremely common talking point among anti-feminists online to play into that – still holds?
I mean, “black people are violent” is definitely part of anti-black-people superweapons, and there are also a bunch of black people in prison for violent crimes that people employing that superweapon can point to. Those are true at the same time. What matters is the attempt to turn this into a generalization, a Superweapon that can target any black person, right?
Similarly, there are definitely nerds who are overweight, wear fedoras, and have a sort of love-hate relationship with women; what’s bad is that, in our society, we’re making it easier for people who disagree with any nerd to just call them a neckbeard, mock them for a bit, and call it a day.
That’s the whole idea of Superweapons, isn’t it? That you can create this thing that lets you attack anyone in a group, by pointing to – real! – Bad Things that have actually happened, and it’s impossible to fight the pattern that’s being formed because every individual thing actually happened and was actually bad (for reasons unrelated to their group membership.)
I think OP’s last sentence is unfair, but he’s correct that you’re dead wrong on that quote. Jezebel, for example, is the 234th most popular website in the United States, and 927th globally. It is also a constant source of everything bad about feminism (hence Scott’s frequent inclusion of Jezebel quotes in his post). Obviously, I’m in my own filter bubble as well—we all are—but from where I’m sitting, the seedier aspects of feminism are among the most popular and influential.
Since you want general constructive criticism: overall, I enjoyed reading this post, but I completely lost track of the point you were trying to make in the last few paragraphs. It’s late here too and I am also tired, so that may be partially on me, but I think you could have been more clear there.
Also, I’m not really sure it’s fair (charitable?) to call Scott an “anti-feminist;” at least not without defining that term very precisely beforehand, because it is pretty loaded.
Also, a citation for the survey you were discussing would be great, because asking the right questions very precisely is of paramount importance when it comes to anything political. I think it’s totally possible to be a man, not be a misogynist, believe that feminism is about equality, and still believe that men can’t be feminists. Why? Because plenty of feminists (usually of the Jezebel/Amanda Marcotte variety) say that men can’t be feminists.
(Also I want to note that the above is not a view I hold myself; I’m just saying that I think it’s plausible without indicating misogyny.)
The final quote is great, except the final line “wait, this was sort of the plan all along, wasn’t it?” – He’s just written an entire essay on giving people, particularly your opponents, the benefit of the doubt. I would say that the less pleasant feminist groups that I interact with regularly use the “nice guy” analogy pretty freely, but again, different bubbles.
“Them man-hating lesbians tryin’ to pretend sex you regret in the morning is “rape”, and all that.” – I disagree that there’s a superweapon at work there, because in this case you’re dealing with someone that I don’t think you want to debate? Superweapons only work when they can be used to shut down debates, and the type of “anti-feminist” your describing there is just a misogynist.
I still identify as a feminist, but I do run into actual superweapons from time to time, where I am still interested in having a debate/conversation with someone that holds a different position from me. Most recently I’ve run into the racist pattern matching when arguing in favour of Charlie Hebdo being allowed to print pictures of Mohammed and I get shut down pretty immediately. If I find myself talking to someone that holds the view “women are more likely to falsely accuse someone of rape than actually be raped” I’m too busy throwing up in my mouth to want to continue the conversation, which may be how some feminists feel when I say that I’m uncomfortable with being unable to make arguments about feminism while being male.
I don’t really know where I was going with this
[…] you would. So I recommend Nothing Is Mere for a summary of the situation and Muga Sofer’s essay on anti-feminist superweapons (which probably took a couple thousand words out of this post by itself, thanks […]
I’ve finally gotten around to reading this in depth, and I’m confused:
>>> “It’s not because they’re a good counterexample for ‘nerds are rich Silicon valley CEOs, you think they’re not privileged?’ It’s an actual argument, not just the kind of ‘your argument proves too much’ one-liner Scott is famous for. What is he saying?”
I *was* going for Proving Too Much with this. In Proving Too Much, you point out how an opponent’s argument is isomorphic to a terrible argument we all disagree with.
I was definitely going for “nerds dominate programming, therefore they can’t be oppressed” being isomorphic to “Jews dominate banking, therefore they can’t be oppressed.”
I realize that dragging in Nazis never helps, but I thought that the conjunction of “they dominate an industry” + “they’re after our women” + “they dress weird and talk weird” + “they feel greedy and entitled” was very close to the Nazi situation and not close enough to any other situation to make it work. So I decided it was a necessary evil.
>>> “But what use is this category? What predictions does it make, beyond badness?”
I’m making a moral argument. The moral work it does is to provide a counterexample to “These people cannot possibly be oppressed, because they have good jobs.” It takes one intuition we’re all very sure about – that Jews can be oppressed even when many are rich – then demonstrates that if we accept that, we have to accept the similar claim that nerds can be oppressed even when they are rich.
This isn’t my personal sneaky trick, it’s one of the most popular methods in all of philosophy. Consider for example Judith Thompson’s famous “parasitic violinist” argument, in which she takes an intuition we supposedly all agree on – it’s okay to detach the violinist – and then demonstrates that if we accept that, we have to accept that abortion is okay.
Or take Peter Singer’s “child in a pond” argument, in which he takes an intuition we supposedly all agree on – you’re morally obligated to save a child drowning in a nearby pond – and then demonstrates that if we accept that, we have to accept an obligation towards effective altruism.
Or take the trolley problem. It takes an intuition many people agree on – it’s morally permissible to pull the lever – and the tries to demonstrate that if we accept that, we have to accept it’s permissible to push the fat man.
The difference between all of these and Worst Argument In The World is that instead of compressing them into a word, we’re building the similarity piece by piece and exposing our entire reasoning. If there is something different about the parasitic violinist and the fetus, the whole scenario is sketched out there before you and you merely need to interject “But the difference is that you consented to sex before having the fetus, but you didn’t consent to having the violinist attached” or whatever.
In fact, I could accuse you of doing the same thing. You’re taking my Jew argument, and the Worst Argument In The World (which we already all dislike) and building a reference class containing the two of them! Clearly you’re trying to WAITW me!
I think a better move would be to admit that not all analogies are necessarily WAITW. In that case, I think I did my homework in making the analogy explicit and not trying to build a “reference class” any more than I had to for my real argument.
I think your part II is what I’m trying to get at when I talk about weak-manning. You talk about a scenario where feminists aren’t overrepresented in harassment, etc, compared to their numbers in the population. I don’t think we live in this scenario. At the very least, I am claiming there are certain forms of meanness with which being a feminist is *highly correlated*, that a scatterplot of intensity of feminist belief vs. nerd-shaming or whatever other bad behavior we’re worried about will not just look like random dots. If that’s true, then the strongest complaint you can levy is that I’m weak-manning feminism – ie focusing on some bad feminists (who really are bad) but in a way that does unfair damage to the rest of the movement.
But I analyze this situation really carefully in my “Weak Men Are Superweapons” post. I admit that there’s an equivalence between weak men and superweapons, but I make sure to specify:
“So the one problem is that people have a right not to have unfair below-the-belt tactics used to discredit them without ever responding to their real arguments. And the other problem is that victims of nonrepresentative members of a group have the right to complain, even though those complaints will unfairly rebound upon the other members of that group.”
So as a victim of potentially nonrepresentative members of the feminist group, I am claiming my right to complain. I’ve always insisted I had it, even when I was dispassionately analyzing the situation in the abstract, and now that I find the situation is concrete, I continue to claim I have it. I’ve tried to make it clear I’m not insulting all feminists, but I’ve also tried to make it clear I maintain the right to criticize the bad ones without them being able to constantly hold me hostage by using the good ones as a shield. I kind of snark about this in Radicalizing The Romanceless, when I say:
“We will now perform an ancient and traditional Slate Star Codex ritual, where I point out something I don’t like about feminism, then everyone tells me in the comments that no feminist would ever do that and it’s a dirty rotten straw man, then I link to two thousand five hundred examples of feminists doing exactly that, then everyone in the comments No-True-Scotsmans me by saying that that doesn’t count and those people aren’t representative of feminists, then I find two thousand five hundred more examples of the most prominent and well-respected feminists around saying exactly the same thing, then my commenters tell me that they don’t count either and the only true feminist lives in the Platonic Realm and expresses herself through patterns of dewdrops on the leaves in autumn and everything she says is unspeakably kind and beautiful and any time I try to make a point about feminism using examples from anyone other than her I am a dirty rotten motivated-arguer trying to weak-man the movement for my personal gain.”
No offense, but you kind of seem to be doing exactly that.
>>> “You know what transgender people, sex workers; people who have too much sex, or the wrong kind of sex, or kinky sex; victims of domestic violence, and nerds … well, you know what they all have in common? They were unpopular before feminism.”
So what? To continue your least favorite analogy, Jews were unpopular before the Nazis. That doesn’t mean the Nazis didn’t have it out for Jews especially badly. Most nasty groups work precisely by taking pre-existing prejudices and then enforcing them with special glee.
In my experience, people saying “I experienced this but it had nothing to do with feminism” is NOT the most common type of comment. Maybe for some reason all of these ended up in my inbox rather than on the page, but I remember a lot of comments that said exactly “Yes, this happened to me, and I also notice it was mostly feminists.”
I agree that Platonic feminism and the word “neckbeard” have little in common. But I think there is a certain very large tribal overlap between these two groups. Nydwracu attributes this to SomethingAwful and its effects.
Like, Platonic feminism and leftism don’t necessarily have anything in common, we can imagine a world where feminism is considered a conservative principle (rape and harassment are crimes, conservatives hate crimes, maybe they could even exploit a race/class angle) but it’s fair to say that real feminists are usually leftist. I think there’s a cluster of social justice/Tumblr/SomethingAwful/whatever people where feminism and neckbeard-shaming do intersect unusually often, and even some feminists agree with me.
I agree this cluster is not 100% of feminists, but like I said above, I reserve the right to complain about a sub-100% group of people, especially if I make it clear that’s what I’m doing, which I carefully do.
Overall this is an interesting attempt to hoist me with my own petard, but I think it fails. I really *do* try to watch myself and have some principles, even if maybe I can’t express them very well.
“I’m making a moral argument. The moral work it does is to provide a counterexample to “These people cannot possibly be oppressed, because they have good jobs.” It takes one intuition we’re all very sure about – that Jews can be oppressed even when many are rich – then demonstrates that if we accept that, we have to accept the similar claim that nerds can be oppressed even when they are rich.”
Well …
You said “some people say nerds can’t be oppressed, because many of them are rich. But many Jews are (and were) rich, and everyone agrees that they were still pretty darn oppressed.” And this is a good argument that I agree with (seriously, thank you for pointing this out.)
But then you said “and also the ways Jews and Nerds are oppressed has a bunch of superficial similarities”, and finished up with “in conclusion, there is A Way Seemingly-Privileged People Are Oppressed, and both Nazis and Feminism are examples of this artificial reference class I have just now constructed.” And that seems like the conclusion of that section?
Like, you acknowledge that they don’t share the salient features (death camps) that make the Nazis into History’s Greatest Monsters(tm), so it seems like the only work pointing out all those superficial similarities and constructing that reference class is doing is to sneak in negative connotations that surround Nazis.
“I think your part II is what I’m trying to get at when I talk about weak-manning. You talk about a scenario where feminists aren’t overrepresented in harassment, etc, compared to their numbers in the population. I don’t think we live in this scenario. At the very least, I am claiming there are certain forms of meanness with which being a feminist is *highly correlated*, that a scatterplot of intensity of feminist belief vs. nerd-shaming or whatever other bad behavior we’re worried about will not just look like random dots. If that’s true, then the strongest complaint you can levy is that I’m weak-manning feminism – ie focusing on some bad feminists (who really are bad) but in a way that does unfair damage to the rest of the movement.”
But you never provided any evidence for this. Just Feminists behaving in much the same horrible way that I see everyone else behaving, and then the vague implication that this is … because they’re Feminists? Why?
“In my experience, people saying “I experienced this but it had nothing to do with feminism” is NOT the most common type of comment. Maybe for some reason all of these ended up in my inbox rather than on the page, but I remember a lot of comments that said exactly “Yes, this happened to me, and I also notice it was mostly feminists.”
… hum.
That’s a really good point. We’re looking at different datasets, with different things filtering who decides to comment.
I admit, I experienced a (much, much weaker) version of this, and it didn’t feel like it had anything to do with feminism. And Aaronson definitely got comments saying “the same happened to me, but it had nothing to do with feminism.” But … yeah, it’s entirely possible that this is coming almost entirely from feminists, and it’s simply invisible to me.
… or it could be the other way around, maybe, I’m not sure how to test this. Some sort of survey, perhaps. It’s possible I’ve been generalizing a bit too much from my own experiences here.
I still think the fact that something predated the movement is important, though. It shows us where to attack the problem at the root; and I think the root here is “society”, not “feminism”, just like the root of sexism is “society”, not “men”. If feminism disappeared tomorrow, it would not solve the problem; just like if the Nazis had never existed, Jews would still have been oppressed, even if there was no Holocaust.
“then my commenters tell me that they don’t count either and the only true feminist lives in the Platonic Realm and expresses herself through patterns of dewdrops on the leaves in autumn and everything she says is unspeakably kind and beautiful and any time I try to make a point about feminism using examples from anyone other than her I am a dirty rotten motivated-arguer trying to weak-man the movement for my personal gain.””
No offense, but you kind of seem to be doing exactly that.”
I realize it may not be the clearest, but I think I’m not saying that at all.
In part IV, I quickly outline my biggest problem with feminism-the-movement. Throughout the essay, I mention problems you have pointed out in feminism-the-movement. I think the Perfect Platonic Feminist, whose policies I support, is communicating them almost entirely via toxic memes that corrupt everyone who hears them, and this is a really big problem.
And I’m accusing you – in this one angry essay – of being almost as bad as feminists.
“But … yeah, it’s entirely possible that this is coming almost entirely from feminists, and it’s simply invisible to me.”
… or it could be the other way around, maybe, I’m not sure how to test this. Some sort of survey, perhaps. It’s possible I’ve been generalizing a bit too much from my own experiences here.”
As I mentioned in my previous comment, I really don’t think you have to look very far to sort this one out. Just as an example, look at all of the quotes from popular feminist websites that Scott cites in “Radicalizing the Romanceless.” You can’t possibly think that their positions have nothing to do with feminism, or that they’re not influential in their dissemination of those positions.
At any rate, I don’t even think this is a particularly important point, because as Scott said:
“I agree this cluster is not 100% of feminists, but like I said above, I reserve the right to complain about a sub-100% group of people, especially if I make it clear that’s what I’m doing, which I carefully do.“
I like this essay, and it is the thing which has most made me update towards your position. Thank you. That said, I want to address a small thing from in there, which I think is important, easily overlooked, and also the only thing here I know much about: sex work.
It is true that there were lots of people who disapproved of sex work before feminism came around. The thing is, that is no longer relevant. Globally, there are only two movements dedicated to making sex worker’s lives worse: evangelical Christians (and sometimes other Abrahamites) and feminists. There are quite a few feminist NGOs which work tirelessly in their quest to make sex worker’s lives worse, and also some Christian NGOs, and frequently they convince governments to work with them on this project, and •nobody else does this•. I have seen many feminist criticisms of Christianity as a moral source. Why should that not apply here just as well?