PicoBlog

I suppose I have to get around to making a Substack account now. I hope the new name isnt confusing. Since I havent found any posting guidelines, Ill do the same as on the sub, hope thats fine.

I think this post is a great illustration of what makes even not-particularly-aggressive feminism offputting to ousiders.

>Partly, it was hard just to keep engaging as an outsider without falling afoul of community norms. I quickly gave up on ever understanding the contested boundaries of the rule set.

Well, that certainly is a good start if you want to be given a fair hearing. It might be good to know though that *very* few long term commenters got through without being modded occasionally.

>To this day, if you wish, you can click through and see his [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/7qk2bq/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_15/dsyi6os/), with 65 upvotes, and my response, which sits on 13 upvotes. And, uh, that is what it was like to be a feminist on the Culture War Thread.

I read that exchange and it seemed quite different from your description to me. Lets go through your comment there:

>I think I can stay calm for more than a few sentences, now.

This by itself almost ensures you wont get voted high. It comes across very arrogant. See, you choose to tell us that youre angry. So you think that this is relevant information for us. What precisely are we supposed to do with it? Well, the social purpose of expressing anger is to sanction. So presumably, we should stop what makes you angry. In a forum for people of all beliefs arguing about what makes them angry at each other, this obviously cant be done without favouritism.

As a side note, a man would know not to say this, because for them its also treated as a joke if they do it in real life. A little demonstration of those "female powers of evincing sympathy" that you doubt further down.

>Unfortunately, the true nature of the discussion is less fun. The #metoo conversation is not a negotiation between men wanting pleasure and women wanting pleasure. It's between men wanting pleasure and women wanting to avoid pain.

Im sure you will find mens pain at stake as well if you think a bit, especially relevant to the next point:

>You've outlined two conflicting priorities here: you want there to be social constraints on the type and intensity of negative reactions that women are allowed to show, but you also don't understand why a woman would restrain the type and intensity of her negative reactions to something that her date does to her.

Reading the two passages above that, we see that his hypothetical dude asks the girl for various assurances that she wont sick the X on him. He also advises the woman to just leave the date. Even going along with the social contraints thinking, that seems like a pretty wide gap to hit. Really though, I think the idea behind "she shoudve just left" is that leaving isnt a signal in need of interpretation by the guy. It is unilaterally ending the interaction, and your misinterpretation certainly supports the idea that "women dont realise they can do that". And how is calling your friends at Jezebel a signal to him to stop? As forceful as it is, it cant be a signal if he wont know before the evening is over.

In summary, the apprent contradiction between their comments seems to come from you applying a really badly fitting frame. Ill also note that when I curated Quality Contributions, i did not care if the poster was hypocritical about their thesis elsewhere, though Im not sure it ever came up. Curation is in the interest of the reader first. So much for that subtopic.

>This excuse for not engaging with a more defensible position that you hate was so popular, on the Thread, that some of its denizens developed new versions of it.

A long time ago, a wrote a [post](https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/c30htp/meta_miasma_and_eternal_september/) about moderation policy, and the only adopted suggestion was a rule "When responding to the perceived positions of someone else, make sure to also adress what was literally said". TBH I dont think anything came off this, I had forgotten about it, but I present it as proof that this happened to the other side as well. I mean of course the lefties shot back with the distributed-motte-and-bailey accusation - its not exactly hard to do.

In conclusion, you have high expectations for how you want to be treated, in part reasonable ideals of niceness and in part excessive opinion of yourself, and youre very quick to conclude that a failure to meet them is about you, your sex, your ideology.

So this was reading mostly past the point of the post, but thats necessary for the argument. I also have a bit of an ordinary response:

>Mind you, I thought I wasn’t claiming anything of the sort. I took it as axiomatic that “being privileged doesn’t mean you’ve never suffered” and I thought that caveat was enough. It wasn’t.

If your beliefs imply something, then the practices based on them can often be in accordance with it, even if you dont know or deny the implication. (Should there be a word for this? I propose "committment".) The difficulty in detecting this is that theres nothing thats using the implied thing, that you could find when combing through you thoughts - you have to realise that the implication does in fact follow and how, and then you can check if it applies to what youre doing. This is why I tend to treat positions as more formalistic than they might be intended.

Edit: How do I do links properly? Google isnt helpful.

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