I had this argument a week or two ago with some TW who objected to a comment I tweeted noting how much the movement had been influenced by sexual fetishism, and likely driven by porn, since 'transgender porn' is one of the highest-rated search terms on porn sites. This guy, of course, complained that I was making them all look like sexua…
I had this argument a week or two ago with some TW who objected to a comment I tweeted noting how much the movement had been influenced by sexual fetishism, and likely driven by porn, since 'transgender porn' is one of the highest-rated search terms on porn sites. This guy, of course, complained that I was making them all look like sexual predators.So I pointed out that they had a clear growing sexual predator problem, not because transwomen are sexual predators, but because a too-tolerant left, in the holy name of 'inclusivity', refuses to acknowledge that transwomen are men under the clothes, and sexual predators who were never trans before are taking advantage of it. And if they keep trying to sweep it under the rug like the Catholic Church has done for decades, they run the risk of developing the same well-deserved reputation the Church has.
Celine is right that most groups don't want to push back against their own miscreants, and yeah, it's hard. But *I* do. I push back at feminists who are misandrist, who unconsciously collaborate with and enable sexual predators by not reporting, and who perpetuate female victimhood by refusing to challenge themselves and each other (I have especially been critical of feminists for not taking a harder stance against domestic violence and who refuse to acknowledge that bad, abusive marriages happen because women make decisions every step along the way to allow the abuse.
We *have* to hold our own to account, and I'd love to see black people hold BLM to account - if black lives are so important, why do they only focus on the tiny percentage who are killed by white cops and not all the black lives destroyed every year by other black lives? Why can't they fight against *both*? They've brought a much-needed discussion about police power and the need to rein in their very worst excesses, but BLM is living a lie as long as they make it clear most black lives *don't* matter.
You never see them on the news in Toronto consoling a mother whose son was just gunned down - because it's almost never by police.
The trans community also needs to call out its sexual predators and stop acting like a bunch of entitled dicks. Women need protection from male bodies and what they call 'transphobia' is actually, as you note, fear of rape. The movement has less to do now with people living with GD (still a very tiny percentage) but is now infused with a suspicious amount of men trying to validate their sexual fetishes, and get women to go along with it (I just had this experience recently with a recent ex-friend, a loss of a long-term friendship directly linked to pornography and his particular fetish).
"I'd love to see black people hold BLM to account - if black lives are so important, why do they only focus on the tiny percentage who are killed by white cops and not all the black lives destroyed every year by other black lives?"
There are several black people making this point though. Ahmaud Arbery's father pointed out that "all lives matter" during the press conference after his son's killers were convicted (I thought Al Sharpton was going to have a seizure😄)! Loury, McWhorter, Hughes, the parents of children who have been killed by gun violence, they're speaking about it. "Abolish the police" is just an easier rallying cry for progressives than "what exactly is happening in some black communities?"
Trans activism is similar. "Trans women are women" is easier for progressives to wrap their heads around than "what exactly do we mean when we say 'trans woman'?" The problem is, it's infinitely harder to find trans people, and almost impossible to find trans *women,* speaking out publicly against the AGP men and predators hiding under their umbrella. Detransitioners are speaking up in larger numbers, which is important. But as you say, it's still not the same as somebody from within the community acknowledging the problems.
Asking difficult questions is always going to be less popular than bleating out "woke" slogans. And yes, the pushback is rough. But BLM did noticeable harm to race relations. And trans activism is doing even more damage to perceptions of trans people.
I hafta admit, I'm finding it real difficult to have compassion for trans people. I *fully* understand that I'm not supposed to judge people by the minority. Yeah, every group has bad apples.
But here's the thing. What You have is *actions* done by the visible people in that group. Thus, Trans Rights *Activists.* These are being done in the *name* of that group. And these are the people who are *allowed* to represent the trans movement.
And heretics who don't believe in those actions are not only being excommunicated but possibly losing their livelihoods. And straight people who don't believe?
It's not really a case of *bad apples.* It's that the *barrel* we see and hear every day is rotten to the *core.*
The problem I have is an emotional one. The viciousness of the excommunications and firings of those who disagree with the TRA sure *feels* like it's inherent feature of the group. And I dunno. I'm not sure I'll be able to improve my views as long as the TRAs are allowed to speak and do "violence" in the name of, presumably, the majority of trans people.
"The problem I have is an emotional one. The viciousness of the excommunications and firings of those who disagree with the TRA sure *feels* like it's inherent feature of the group."
Yeah, I think this is a pretty widespread problem. This issue stirs up a lot of emotion precisely because of the vitriol and intimidation tactics levelled against anybody, however reasonable, who questions the orthodoxy.
I think maybe it's helpful for me to have been on the opposite side the fence during the "racial reckoning." I saw very clearly how the "antiracists" didn't speak for black people at all. And that's why I felt it was so important to speak up against them. I'm encouraging trans people to do the same precisely because I know how important it is to have people from within the community speak up.
But I've spoken to lots of trans people who are nothing like the crazies. And gender ideology has captured people's sanity to an even greater degree than the "racial reckoning" did. I understand why they're struggling to speak up. But they're out there. Debbie Hayton, Buck Angel, Blair White, Scott Newgent, there are trans people pushing back.
It's why I don't go to 'feminist marches'. I may support whatever they're protesting but I don't want to be seen at a march where perpetually aggrieved perma-victims spew misandry and gender theory propaganda to encourage young women to not take responsibility for themselves. I esp don't want to be seen around 'pussy hats'. Dumbest feminist protest ever: The 'Slut Walk' about 12 years ago. I got out of bed early and raced to *not* go down there for that one :)
I know Loury & McWhorter speak out against it, I listen to them both on Glenn's show. I may have missed some of the other reactions. I'm glad to hear more black people are holding each other to account. How many are actually speaking out about the damage BLM has done? I'll bet BLM will have ZERO to say about the recent shooting of three U of VA black students - by a fellow black student. When I read the first news story I could tell it wasn't a racist/mass shooting thing and I thought, "I'll bet it was a black guy who did this." Sure 'nuff...
I'm quite sure transwomen/activists will never criticize the abusers in their own communities because, frankly, one thing I've learned in the last year is that men will always rally around fetishism, even if it's not theirs (because theirs could be the *next* target). And there appear to be rather a lot of fetishists in the trans movement. In fact, how a social media anonymous 'transwoman' reacts to criticisms of 'cotton ceiling' predators & pervs who want to parade their dick around in front of women in women's-only spaces is how you can tell you're dealing with a man, not a woman. It's much, much harder to change one's male thinking than it is to change one's clothes or hairstyle.
The corollary to cis-het men is 'male feminism ends at the penis'. Feminism is fine as long as it doesn't threaten male sexual pleasure. Which is how one can test one's male friends feminism: Start talking about sex trafficking in porn, and see how much pushback/resistance you get, and disavowals of any knowledge of how prevalent it is on their fave porn sites. And they may well be ignorant of it, but they're definitely not interested in learning more.
It'll make them feel more like a perv the next time they're on YouPorn.
"I'll bet BLM will have ZERO to say about the recent shooting of three U of VA black students - by a fellow black student."
While there were/are good people doing good work in local chapters, BLM the organisation is a scam. And don't seem to be saying much of anything now that they're being investigated for all those missing donations, no? They took advantage of all the race hysteria and got nice and rich and now there's no money to be made they're gone. Helping black people was never really on their agenda.
I think you're painting men with an extremely broad brush there. Yes, men like porn. I don't think there's much room for argument on that. But I think that's a long way from being an endorsement of sex trafficking, no? There are lots of women working in the sex industry and making very good livings from it entirely of their own free will. That said though, I am interested in learning more, so if you have any resources, I'd be very interested to read them.
With trans people too, there are certainly a lot of fetishists in the outward facing segments of the community. But I still think the main reason reasonable trans people don't speak up is fear. I know so many people and have heard so many more stories of people, trans or not, who have been cowed into silence in their workplaces or their friend groups. Most people simply can't handle the inevitable blowback.
A good friend of mine has been "stepford wives"-ed now she's doing a masters at a music theatre school and is being exposed to the dogma on a daily basis. She came straight out and admitted that she just really wants to be liked and saw how somebody very early on was ostracised for making a really mild comment. So she tells all the right lies and convinces herself that it's fine because "it doesn't really affect my daily life" and I bet there are countless others doing the same thing.
Yeah, BLM is keeping a very low profile now that they're being investigated for missing funds :) Apparently part of the hard work of antiracism includes living in a nice house with a studio to create your mix tapes or whatever :)
"I think you're painting men with an extremely broad brush there. Yes, men like porn. I don't think there's much room for argument on that. But I think that's a long way from being an endorsement of sex trafficking, no?"
It's not that they endorse sex trafficking, it's that they discover they may be inadvertantly supporting it if what I say about it is true. As to the pervasiveness of porn and men, I was surprised to learn last year just how pervasive it is, even before the pandemic, but it shot up way after that. I got into the research because the guy I was seeing last year got very defensive when I happened to mention sex trafficking & porn and he got all pissy about it - that was how I realized he watched porn (which we talked about) and then it got me curious as to its effect on men and relationships (not good, and when a man asks "Do you do anal?" he almost certainly got that idea from porn).
Medium's younger female writers have written a lot about the availability of porn and how it's making young men more violent, and sex less good for women.
"There are lots of women working in the sex industry and making very good livings from it entirely of their own free will. That said though, I am interested in learning more, so if you have any resources, I'd be very interested to read them."
That's exactly what other men say to me! :) I'll tell you what I tell them: Type sex trafficking youporn pornhub into Google and the first ten results will give you plenty of reliable information right there. Those are the top two porn sites and they're famously into sex trafficked videos - not that they actively seek them, they just don't work hard to remove them. Or genuine rape videos or clearly underage girls.
As for women who 'enjoy' sex work, I imagine there are some who do like it but I've read others argue very few women really like doing it no matter what they say, and that calling it 'sex work' dresses it up and makes it sound more voluntary than it is. There's a high degree of sex trafficking in prostitution as well as porn and sometimes a woman sucks dick for money because it's the only skill she has. So, it's not 'trafficking' but it's not truly voluntary either, and it's the sort of thing men don't like to talk or think about.
I didn't say they *enjoyed* it. From what I've heard, sex work is pretty unfulfilling for men and women. I said that lots of women do it of their own free will, drawing the line between sex work and sex trafficking.
But there's no such thing as a woman whose only skill is sucking dick for money. That's a pretty awful thing to say!😅 If they're not being forced to do it, that means they're doing it because it's easier/pays better than the alternatives. Which, minus the penises, is the position most people find themselves in. Very few people work "truly voluntarily."
But yeah, after replying I thought you'd probably tell me to go look it up myself. 😁 I will. I genuinely hadn't heard that sex trafficking was an issue within the porn industry.
p.s. the idea that men only like anal or other sexual activities because of porn is one of those easy stereotypes that some feminists like to assert about men. But it's really not true. Anal sex predates porn you know! For what it's worth, my first time doing it was at 16 with a girl who wanted to try it.
One of the great tragedies of male/female dynamics is that women spend too much time learning about men from other women. And men spend too much time learning about women from other men. And in both cases, the "teachers" don't usually think very highly of the opposite sex.
"But there's no such thing as a woman whose only skill is sucking dick for money. That's a pretty awful thing to say!😅"
They might well have no other alternative if they're young. If they're runaways and have never had a job, and can't get one waitressing (which might not pay enough). They often fall in with pimps & traffickers because they're vulnerable and scared and have no idea how they're going to find/buy their next meal.
As for anal, yeah, it's been around forever but I can tell you I NEVER had men ask for anal until maybe the last several years. Apparently anal (esp rough, violent anal) is quite popular on porn sites. Porn is also responsible for the high level of violence in sex young women are reporting - I learned that from Medium's female writers who were asking what was up with the sudden choking, hitting, and near-rape that came from out of the blue.
"One of the great tragedies of male/female dynamics is that women spend too much time learning about men from other women." Actually, I'll bet far more women try to learn about and understand men more than men ever. do. Where are all the self-help books for men on how to have better relationships? The only ones I've ever seen are how to get laid better - like The Game (actually a very good book, and written with a sympathetic eye toward women). There are tons of self-books for women on how to understand men better but almost nothing in the reverse. I can tell you after twenty years of trying to find a partner that men are still ridiculously clueless about women. I used to ask on dating sites when men complained they couldn't get women to pay attention to them. "Have you ever Googled on what women want? On how to write a good profile? Post a good profile picture? What they're looking for on dating sites?" No. No. No. No. I wrote a whole series about this for Medium called Adventures In Mid-Life Dating. About how men made, said, and did the stupidest things while drowning in an *ocean* of information about women, what women want, and how to talk to women.
I've written books by men, and read articles by men, hung around the Ask Men website for awhile, followed The Good Men Project, and had my fave male writers on Medium who wrote sympathetically about men from a male perspective, and non-hostile to women. I learned a lot from them.
While not all women do this - Medium is rife with misandrists and feminazis - I feel pretty comfortable in stating that overall, I think women attempt to understand men more than men ever do women.
" If they're runaways and have never had a job, and can't get one waitressing (which might not pay enough)."
Yeah, but you're describing a pretty tiny, extreme group of people here, no? And then there's the question of what paying "enough" is. There are young male runaways too, more of them in fact, who don't have the option of sucking dick for money.
I'm not trying to trivialise what these people go through, obviously nobody makes those kinds of decision lightly, but I don't really buy into the "she had no choice but to be a sex worker" narrative in any case where the woman isn't being directly coerced.
As for the effort made to understand the other sex, I think part of the problem is that people, and yes, I guess it might be more often women who do this, believe that it's possible to "understand" the opposite sex. This idea, whether it's men or women who have it, is immediately reductive.
A group that comprises half the planet is obviously not a monolith. So what works for one man or woman is not necessarily going to work for the next. Some women love anal, some don't. Some men do, some don't. Some men love it when women stomp on their balls! Sex is weird.
I'm not denying that porn is warping some men's notion of sex. It definitely is. I'm saying that the idea that porn is responsible for kinkiness amongst men *and women* in general is probably simplistic. And I guess that unless you want men who only have sex in the missionary position, I'm not sure what they should do but ask. If they don't take no for an answer, that's a completely different issue.
What I see missing from both sides is an effort to truly just see the opposite sex as people. To give each other the benefit of the doubt, to have the same degree of empathy as they do for their own sex, to refuse to let the worst members of that sex, or their worst dating experiences, tarnish the entire group.
How do you think it would go down if I wrote a dating series about how women did and said the stupidest things? Or that women should just do the things I imagine men want (which would really just be the things *I* want) if they want more dating success? Do you think men and women would have similar experiences on dating sites when it comes to the effort made to get matches or start/maintain interactions if men just used better profile pictures?
Both men and women extend too little charity to the opposite sex. And make the mistake of thinking that because they see the worst of men/women in their dating lives, men/women are the worst. Women are awful too sometimes. I promise you.😅
Actually, sucking dick IS a viable 'option' for the male runaway - the world is full of men who will pay for a blowjob and it doesn't always matter if it's from a man as long as no one knows. IOW, male hustlers aren't only for gay men - but straight men on the 'down low' or who just don't care who sucks their dick.
I'm not arguing women who 'choose' sex work are trafficked or coerced - just that sometimes it's the only real option for them. I'd love to see an end to sex work, or perhaps legally permitted but highly regulated. With options for people to get training in other skills so they don't have to do this shit. Interestingly, Obama tried to do something like this - with no attention, AFAIK, to sex work - one of his first attempted actions in office was to pass something that would have made it easier for people in poverty circumstances to go to community college. Guess what collection of Congressfucks shot it down?
As for anal, I've never met a woman yet that said she likes it (not that I've taken a scientific poll!), well maybe one that I can think of, and she'd be too freaky even for Rick James, LOL. Most want nothing to do with it. According to the book on dating apps I read last year, a lot of the violence and freakiness young people are engaging in they get from watching porn as sex ed (because parents STILL aren't talking to their kids about this!) A guy the author was involved with argued that the women in the porn videos he watched *liked* rough, physically hurtful sex and the author argued it didn't. "Women WANT this!" he said. "They ask for it on dating apps!" And he proved it by scrolling through profiles in which the women said they wanted rough sex, they like being raped, etc. The author noted that they'll say what they think guys will hear to get them to like them (which I can totally buy as a woman, and as a human being who knows men do the same thing). Then she pulled up a porn video of a woman being choked and pointed out, "She's not enjoying it. Look at her face. Look at the *tears in her eyes*. She's not enjoying this!"
The research is still in the process of studying the influence of porn on other aspects of culture, but what I've been finding myself after getting interested in the porn influence last year is bolstered by the stories of women younger than I on Medium who told insane stories about dating life that I didn't experience in the pre-Internet days. They complained that porn was responsible for the rise in misogyny overall, and that too has been validated by my own research so far.
Sometimes we don't know why we like what we like. My ex last year liked a particular type of sex that I didn't find abhorrent or degrading, just not very interesting. But he loved it, and he had another related fetish, that I'm pretty sure came from porn. Let's remember what normalized oral sex for 'nice' couples: Deepthroat.
My 'freaky' friend was bisexual and admitted once she wasn't sure if she really was, or if she had been induced into it in college when she had college counselors and class speakers keep emphasizing over and over again, "It's okay if you're gay or bisexual! It's okay! It's okay! It's okay!" She said after awhile she sort of started thinking that it was maybe what she was *supposed* to be...she said this in what I consider to be a very candid, honest moment.
If you wrote a dating series about dumb shit women say and do, I agree, it would not go down well, but I would totally read it! I used to watch for articles like that on Medium, and I knew which male writers were non-misogynist. I wanted to know what women did and said that men didn't understand or like, and why. What mistakes might *we* be making? When I was in my forties and undergoing my Angry Drunken Bitch years there were dynamics going on at the time that I didn't know about, some that were women-blameworthy, some men-blameworthy, and others blameless - like finding out many years later how different men's and women's headspaces are in the late thirties (when my ex and I split up) and the forties, and how we don't come together again until the fifties (which I can see, but, unfortunately, men are still doing and saying some remarkably dumb shit, and I ding them for this because the truth isn't just Out There, it's right in front of their faces, but they never bother to Google anything.
They would never go into a business meeting, especially a competitive one, not having researched their opponents, or just be educated on what they'd need to know to accomplish their objectives, yet they bumble around on dating sites making the same mistakes with everyone and wondering why they get ignored so much (because you get tired of them expecting you to ask the same basic questions over and over because they're too lazy to fill out a profile). If women are doing as seriously dumb shit as men are doing - and I'm sympathetic to legitimate male grievance - please, let me know where I may learn more! Since I'm still persona non grata there, and I understand the new guy Tony thus far doesn't seem inclined to deal with the social justice extremists. I hope he can do better than Evvie did.
We'll never learn to get along until we understand each other. It'll take balls for men to write honestly and sympathetically to women about what they're doing wrong. It's what I do when I criticize feminism - I have to be willing to take some shit for what I write, and I think I've lost a few friends over my personal responsibilty, power feminist mindset. Just as you piss off victim antiracists who can't stand you suggesting that white people aren't devils and that antiracists are sometimes part of the problem.
"Actually, sucking dick IS a viable 'option' for the male runaway"
😅Okay, we're talking about a *reeeeally* small group of people now. If this is what you're basing the idea that some women can't do anything but suck dick on, we'll probably just have to agree to disagree. I don't think we can pretend this is the path that most runaways go down. Male or female. But especially male.
And while I think prostitution (and particularly the men who use prostitues), is truly gross, I don't see any clear argument to end sex work. A lot more should be done to make sure the people engaging in it are safe and doing of their own free will. But as long as those conditions are met, my feelings are irrelevant. We can't inflict our morality on other people. That ends badly pretty much every time.
Again, I'm not arguing that porn doesn't have an impact on culture or on the sexual behaviour of men *and women.* I'm saying that porn is far from the only explanation for a particular fetish. Do you think, for example, men have foot fetishes because of porn? Or do they watch foot fetish porn because they have foot fetishes?
I've met lots of women who were into anal. Who requested it even though I'm broadly indifferent to it. And quite a few who were into *really* rough sex. Some, so rough it would shock you. This last category certainly wasn't a majority, but not a trivial number. All we have are our anecdotes, but I'm pretty sure I've slept with more women that you have.😄
As for my series on the mistakes women make, I've mentioned quite a few of them here. It's a mistake for women to pathologise men's sexuality or to assume that we're all porn addicts. It's a mistake to assume that because you don't like something sexually, "women" don't like it. It's a mistake to treat men as if we're a monolith (this is a really big one that I see in various forms all the time). It's a mistake to forget that men are just people and treat them with the same compassion and offer them the same benefit of the doubt that you do other women. It's a mistake to allow your worst dating experiences to colour your perception of all men.
Men make exactly these mistakes with women, of course. But I think one mistake that is often made by women is failing to really consider how different dating is for men. I hear "advice" from women all the time that men should follow. But many women don't have any real understanding of what it's like to date as a man if you're not in the top ~10% of attractiveness. They assume that the experience is somewhat similar and it's really not. In all kinds of ways. If you have fifteen minutes to spare, I'd highly recommend this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTIbHIsIYw).
Not sure how really small the male runaway professional dick-suckers are, guys need money too, but I don't have the stats on that. I'd suspect it's somewhere north of 'reaaaaally small' but I don't know how much.
I don't see a good argument for ending sex work either, I've read books by women who seemed to really enjoy it and the Happy Hooker claimed she loved being paid to have sex. Hey, we get paid for use of our brains or hands or feet or whatever, why not our sex organs? I just want it to be a viable, at least somewhat more respectable profession, *regulated*, with protections for the women and the potential for arrest for any johns who get out of hand. I also want to see it taxed.
And I want to see better options for helping people to learn job skills that don't involve sex if that's not what floats their boat. I.e., desperate.
For the women you knew who liked really rough sex, anal, etc., I wonder (to myself, you don't have to answer this, it's personal) how old they were and whether they grew up with porn and had their tastes as shaped by what they thought sex was supposed to be. In the Dating Inferno book I read, the author pointed out the profiles claiming they like it rough et al may be because they say what it takes to get guys to like them. I think I mentioned that before but I can't remember. MADBS (Middle-Aged Dumb Blonde Syndrome ;) You may not even know that answer yourself.
I'm just going to reply to the video for now, the rest of it later when I have more time (I don't disagree with you much). WOW! That was an awesome, eye-opening video! I just bookmarked it so I can go back and read the comments to better understand the men's perspective. I was on Tinder for about a half a day when it first launched and I uninstalled it because it was a HUGE energy suck on my mobile. Before I did I checked to see who had swiped on me and it was like fucking EVERYBODY. And I was a 49-year-old woman, perhaps the oldest on the site. And I was getting all these young guys. Now, I *can* get younger men, and I'm not averse to that, but not guys under 30. Like guys in their mid-to-late twenties had wiped I don't know, whichever way was a match. And I was like, seriously? Are you fucking kidding me? And I realized they were just swiping right, I think it was, on everyone. I figured they were just maximizing their opps to get laid and I'm not sure I wasn't wrong; Tinder has notoriously been a hookup app, and I think that was the one Nancy Jo Sales used in her book on dating apps I read (turned it into a great Medium article that got some claps and comments). She is a year younger than I and like me, still pretty decent-looking for her age.
Now I'm beginning to understand the 'throwing spaghetti at the wall' thing you always seem to get from guys. I wonder - maybe someone else can answer this? - how much you really can put on your profile. Good photos are always helpful, but when I've been on dating apps (I never went back to Tinder because of its rep) I've always been aggravated by the lack of anything else - just the basic questions answered about looks - hair colour, eye colour, height, weight - and nothing about who they are, what they like, what they're looking for. It's a bummer because I *do* want to know that stuff. And I know guys don't read profiles because many have said they don't, esp when I said, "You'd know the answer to that if you'd read my profile." "I don't read profiles." I tried making my profiles really funny to encourage them to read, and that helped a bit, also it showed my sass and personality, but I also would stick something really weird but non-threatening in it that they would surely comment on ("Do you really have a pet gila monster?" "No, I just wanted to see who actually read that far!")
I wonder if more niche-oriented sites are better for men who aren't Ryan Reynolds (who frankly I think is nice-looking but I honestly don't think I'd swipe right on him if I saw someone like him on an app, he's not all that and a bag of chips). I've considered it myself, to try and eliminate a lot of the dross. Lately I've been wondering if there are guys who are minimalist I could meet as I'm nearing retirement and won't have tons of money to retire on but I don't need tons, I lead a simple life and aren't much materialistic and have already done a lot of my traveling - which is a lot more expensive now.
This really is worth delving into more. I'm off for the next two days as I do sales work and all my campaigns are US-based and I'm looking forward to the four-day weekend, having done Thanksgiving this past weekend with my bro and his fam. Tomorrow morning the comments of that video will be my breakfast reading, just as the video was this morning. Thanks for this fantastic look into what it's like for men. Wow. Just Wow!
"I know so many people and have heard so many more stories of people, trans or not, who have been cowed into silence in their workplaces"
Mixed feelings about this. On the one hand there is no doubt in my mind that the workplace was the frontline of gay political advancement; it was hard to maintain the monolithic hatred of a reviled minority when you work with one who you can't help but note is an OK guy.
But. Nobody pretends to be gay to get attention, who would? And as I have said many times the great majority of "trans" are fakes, they are not gender dysphoric and when "trans" becomes unremarkable they will find another way to keep themselves at the center of attention.
Watch this; you can ignore the framing by the Black Conservative, the only thing he gets right is noting that "they" is plural, but listen to the girl and her ready recitation of "misgendered" and "my gender identity" and "correct pronouns."
I take pains to distinguish the authentically transgendered from the "trans" like this idiotic person and while I am supportive of the former I have had it up to where my hairline used to be with the latter.
If I were at work and someone was putting "he/him" in an email signature, I would raise a stink about it. That shit isn't what we work for.
"Mixed feelings about this. On the one hand there is no doubt in my mind that the workplace was the frontline of gay political advancement"
Yeah, the problem isn't trans inclusion. Having more people meet trans people is a good thing. Just as, as you say, having more people meet gay people was a good thing.
The key difference, the reason I hate it when trans people compare themselves to gay people or black people, is that gay people and black people weren't asking for anything,. You didn't have to change the words you used, you didn't have to lie about biology, you just had to interact with that person on a human level.
It's all the stuff behind that, which you're absolutely not allowed to talk about, that's the issue. Refusing to put pronouns in your bio will get you in real hassle in some companies. It's stuff like that that's ridiculous. Gay people never required companywide behavioural changes.
Right now impressions of "trans" people are being made by those people with all the demands and the instantaneous accusations of "transphobia" who make such nuisances of themselves.
Well, before people like me who came to work candid about being gay but without the facial hair statements, sadomasochism gear, and cock rings, impressions of gay people were set by bondage buddies with faces like armpits who put on that horrid voice when others walked by.
So, yes, meeting some "trans" coworkers who didn't spend half their time in HR whining about being "misgendered" might do some good.
Because I doubt many companies are doing cartwheels about having employees like the girl in the video.
Any company that insisted I have a pronoun pair in my bio could have my resignation, But I haven't worked onsite since mid 2010 and never will again.
"Nobody pretends to be gay to get attention, who would?" Political/advantageous "lesbians". The (usually hot) women who claim to be 'lesbians', maybe even live the lie for awhile, to be 'cool' progressives, or to 'smash the patriarchy', shock their parents & the authority figures in their lives. I don't know if young women are doing that as much now, I saw it when I was younger and being gay was less mainstream and acceptable.
I had a friend who was a 'bullshit lesbian' for awhile, although I think for her it was less political - it was because men were frustrating for her (she was overweight and not very attractive, mostly because she didn't smile, she was quite pretty when she did, which wasn't much) and because she seemed never to outgrow the finding-your-identity thing. She announced she was 'coming out' about being gay at some point after her divorce, having claimed to be bisexual for years. I'd known her since the mid-80s and I thought, "There's no way she's gay, or even bisexual. She likes dick too much!" She had one or two gay relationships while she was going through her 'gay phase' and now she's remarried. To a guy.
I do everything I can manage to avoid reading anything about celebrities so this is new to me. I had never heard of "Kanye West" before a few weeks ago.
There was a time when claiming bisexuality was fashionable; didn't last long, and Lou Reed put an end to it by noting that you aren't gay if you don't like to suck dick.
I like people who don't smile. Unless they have a reason; The Smile came out of TV advertising and if you look at yearbook photos from high schools you won't see a lot of vacuous grins before 1955 or so.
I only read celebrity news if there's something interesting about the person. I never had much of an opinion on the actress Anne Hathaway - always liked her, but wouldn't describe myself as a 'fan' - until I read an article about a speech she gave a few weeks ago where she spoke candidly about how it felt and what she did in the aftermath of being subjected to a bizarre hate campaign on Twitter. She wasn't 'canceled', she hadn't done anything wrong now or thirty years ago, people just started hating on her. I paid attention because I'm interested in the mechanics of social media hatred and how we can fight 'cancel culture' and I wrote an article about her on Vocal as I found her speech and her growth out of it impressive. She's an example of a woman who took back her power and didn't allow the bitches to grind her down (and it appears to be mostly women hating on her - figures). Kanye West is a bit interesting now because he's kind of like Trump, except much smarter and he actually earned his billions honestly, rather than through breaking every real estate law in New York. I called him the Black Trump (wouldn't be surprised if he runs for President one day) until the rise of Herschel Walker, the new Black Trump who's as dumb as Donald.
Well said. There is yet another benefit of any group calling out the bad behavior of their own. I am completely bored and question the objectivity of anyone who is blind to their own tribe's warts. Those that call out their own are pretty much the only people I believe and that have outsized influence on getting me to consider points of view I would not ordinarily. Only those with credibility to criticize their own tribe are real to me, and I suspect I am not alone.
"I am completely bored and question the objectivity of anyone who is blind to their own tribe's warts"
A thousand times this. Also people who talk about "the other side" as if the worst members of that group represent the whole of it. It's such a waste of time to focus entirely on what is usually a minority of nutcases when talking about solving problems.
Not all of us belong to tribes. I try hard not to. As part of the tribe sloppily called "the left" I am supposed to celebrate diversity and gender ideology. I think about 90% of individualism is conceit and I have talked my head off over the "trans" thing.
When I came out as gay my tribal behavior lasted about three weeks.
If folks want to influence those not already in their tribe, they would do well to appear objective and examined within their beliefs. I can't tell you how many times I have 'shut off' authors who generously castigate 'the other side' while finding no fault in their own. Boring. Insincere. Biased. Emotions-only with no logical backing. The world, I hope, will belong more and more to those with more honesty.
SteveQJ has this honesty. And sometimes? he wraps that more difficult point for some into the end of his writings after establishing that objective credibility throughout the first 80%. It is a beautiful thing.
The curse of the 21st century is that people appropriate words and give them a different meaning. "Woke" is now associated with the people you speak of. In its early use it was spot on. The origin best as I can tell:
It turns out that woke is simple enough. From the liner notes of "Lead Belly the Folkway Years":
“When I come in a train, I stop in Las Vegas.
This white fellow was with me. He sat down and
I thought it was all right. Man taps me on the
shoulder and says, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve
colored.’ And I says ‘Oh, no you don’t?’ and he
says, ‘No.’ And that white fellow got up too. We
ain’t got to eat in Las Vegas. So many places like
that. I just feel sorry for them people. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐚𝐢𝐧’𝐭
𝐰𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐮𝐩 𝐲𝐞𝐭.”
Lead Belly's woke, as the article points out, has morphed into something else.
I wish my reading queue wasn't so stacked. That looks like it might be an interesting read.
As for meaning being fluid, that is a curse. A quote from a worthwhile Medium author:
If you can simply appropriate a term and claim you have identified into a group, while inventing your own parameters as you go — there is no group." -Alison Tennent, the Celtic Chameleon
I had this argument a week or two ago with some TW who objected to a comment I tweeted noting how much the movement had been influenced by sexual fetishism, and likely driven by porn, since 'transgender porn' is one of the highest-rated search terms on porn sites. This guy, of course, complained that I was making them all look like sexual predators.So I pointed out that they had a clear growing sexual predator problem, not because transwomen are sexual predators, but because a too-tolerant left, in the holy name of 'inclusivity', refuses to acknowledge that transwomen are men under the clothes, and sexual predators who were never trans before are taking advantage of it. And if they keep trying to sweep it under the rug like the Catholic Church has done for decades, they run the risk of developing the same well-deserved reputation the Church has.
Celine is right that most groups don't want to push back against their own miscreants, and yeah, it's hard. But *I* do. I push back at feminists who are misandrist, who unconsciously collaborate with and enable sexual predators by not reporting, and who perpetuate female victimhood by refusing to challenge themselves and each other (I have especially been critical of feminists for not taking a harder stance against domestic violence and who refuse to acknowledge that bad, abusive marriages happen because women make decisions every step along the way to allow the abuse.
We *have* to hold our own to account, and I'd love to see black people hold BLM to account - if black lives are so important, why do they only focus on the tiny percentage who are killed by white cops and not all the black lives destroyed every year by other black lives? Why can't they fight against *both*? They've brought a much-needed discussion about police power and the need to rein in their very worst excesses, but BLM is living a lie as long as they make it clear most black lives *don't* matter.
You never see them on the news in Toronto consoling a mother whose son was just gunned down - because it's almost never by police.
The trans community also needs to call out its sexual predators and stop acting like a bunch of entitled dicks. Women need protection from male bodies and what they call 'transphobia' is actually, as you note, fear of rape. The movement has less to do now with people living with GD (still a very tiny percentage) but is now infused with a suspicious amount of men trying to validate their sexual fetishes, and get women to go along with it (I just had this experience recently with a recent ex-friend, a loss of a long-term friendship directly linked to pornography and his particular fetish).
"I'd love to see black people hold BLM to account - if black lives are so important, why do they only focus on the tiny percentage who are killed by white cops and not all the black lives destroyed every year by other black lives?"
There are several black people making this point though. Ahmaud Arbery's father pointed out that "all lives matter" during the press conference after his son's killers were convicted (I thought Al Sharpton was going to have a seizure😄)! Loury, McWhorter, Hughes, the parents of children who have been killed by gun violence, they're speaking about it. "Abolish the police" is just an easier rallying cry for progressives than "what exactly is happening in some black communities?"
Trans activism is similar. "Trans women are women" is easier for progressives to wrap their heads around than "what exactly do we mean when we say 'trans woman'?" The problem is, it's infinitely harder to find trans people, and almost impossible to find trans *women,* speaking out publicly against the AGP men and predators hiding under their umbrella. Detransitioners are speaking up in larger numbers, which is important. But as you say, it's still not the same as somebody from within the community acknowledging the problems.
Asking difficult questions is always going to be less popular than bleating out "woke" slogans. And yes, the pushback is rough. But BLM did noticeable harm to race relations. And trans activism is doing even more damage to perceptions of trans people.
Thank You for this article and comments, Steve.
I hafta admit, I'm finding it real difficult to have compassion for trans people. I *fully* understand that I'm not supposed to judge people by the minority. Yeah, every group has bad apples.
But here's the thing. What You have is *actions* done by the visible people in that group. Thus, Trans Rights *Activists.* These are being done in the *name* of that group. And these are the people who are *allowed* to represent the trans movement.
And heretics who don't believe in those actions are not only being excommunicated but possibly losing their livelihoods. And straight people who don't believe?
It's not really a case of *bad apples.* It's that the *barrel* we see and hear every day is rotten to the *core.*
The problem I have is an emotional one. The viciousness of the excommunications and firings of those who disagree with the TRA sure *feels* like it's inherent feature of the group. And I dunno. I'm not sure I'll be able to improve my views as long as the TRAs are allowed to speak and do "violence" in the name of, presumably, the majority of trans people.
Obviously, that's just me.
"The problem I have is an emotional one. The viciousness of the excommunications and firings of those who disagree with the TRA sure *feels* like it's inherent feature of the group."
Yeah, I think this is a pretty widespread problem. This issue stirs up a lot of emotion precisely because of the vitriol and intimidation tactics levelled against anybody, however reasonable, who questions the orthodoxy.
I think maybe it's helpful for me to have been on the opposite side the fence during the "racial reckoning." I saw very clearly how the "antiracists" didn't speak for black people at all. And that's why I felt it was so important to speak up against them. I'm encouraging trans people to do the same precisely because I know how important it is to have people from within the community speak up.
But I've spoken to lots of trans people who are nothing like the crazies. And gender ideology has captured people's sanity to an even greater degree than the "racial reckoning" did. I understand why they're struggling to speak up. But they're out there. Debbie Hayton, Buck Angel, Blair White, Scott Newgent, there are trans people pushing back.
It's why I don't go to 'feminist marches'. I may support whatever they're protesting but I don't want to be seen at a march where perpetually aggrieved perma-victims spew misandry and gender theory propaganda to encourage young women to not take responsibility for themselves. I esp don't want to be seen around 'pussy hats'. Dumbest feminist protest ever: The 'Slut Walk' about 12 years ago. I got out of bed early and raced to *not* go down there for that one :)
Thank You, Steve. I'll keep that in mind.
> "I'm encouraging trans people to do the same precisely because I know how important it is to have people from within the community speak up."
Keep up the good work. Because if they don't speak up, the loudest will rule the day, right?
I know Loury & McWhorter speak out against it, I listen to them both on Glenn's show. I may have missed some of the other reactions. I'm glad to hear more black people are holding each other to account. How many are actually speaking out about the damage BLM has done? I'll bet BLM will have ZERO to say about the recent shooting of three U of VA black students - by a fellow black student. When I read the first news story I could tell it wasn't a racist/mass shooting thing and I thought, "I'll bet it was a black guy who did this." Sure 'nuff...
I'm quite sure transwomen/activists will never criticize the abusers in their own communities because, frankly, one thing I've learned in the last year is that men will always rally around fetishism, even if it's not theirs (because theirs could be the *next* target). And there appear to be rather a lot of fetishists in the trans movement. In fact, how a social media anonymous 'transwoman' reacts to criticisms of 'cotton ceiling' predators & pervs who want to parade their dick around in front of women in women's-only spaces is how you can tell you're dealing with a man, not a woman. It's much, much harder to change one's male thinking than it is to change one's clothes or hairstyle.
The corollary to cis-het men is 'male feminism ends at the penis'. Feminism is fine as long as it doesn't threaten male sexual pleasure. Which is how one can test one's male friends feminism: Start talking about sex trafficking in porn, and see how much pushback/resistance you get, and disavowals of any knowledge of how prevalent it is on their fave porn sites. And they may well be ignorant of it, but they're definitely not interested in learning more.
It'll make them feel more like a perv the next time they're on YouPorn.
"I'll bet BLM will have ZERO to say about the recent shooting of three U of VA black students - by a fellow black student."
While there were/are good people doing good work in local chapters, BLM the organisation is a scam. And don't seem to be saying much of anything now that they're being investigated for all those missing donations, no? They took advantage of all the race hysteria and got nice and rich and now there's no money to be made they're gone. Helping black people was never really on their agenda.
I think you're painting men with an extremely broad brush there. Yes, men like porn. I don't think there's much room for argument on that. But I think that's a long way from being an endorsement of sex trafficking, no? There are lots of women working in the sex industry and making very good livings from it entirely of their own free will. That said though, I am interested in learning more, so if you have any resources, I'd be very interested to read them.
With trans people too, there are certainly a lot of fetishists in the outward facing segments of the community. But I still think the main reason reasonable trans people don't speak up is fear. I know so many people and have heard so many more stories of people, trans or not, who have been cowed into silence in their workplaces or their friend groups. Most people simply can't handle the inevitable blowback.
A good friend of mine has been "stepford wives"-ed now she's doing a masters at a music theatre school and is being exposed to the dogma on a daily basis. She came straight out and admitted that she just really wants to be liked and saw how somebody very early on was ostracised for making a really mild comment. So she tells all the right lies and convinces herself that it's fine because "it doesn't really affect my daily life" and I bet there are countless others doing the same thing.
Yeah, BLM is keeping a very low profile now that they're being investigated for missing funds :) Apparently part of the hard work of antiracism includes living in a nice house with a studio to create your mix tapes or whatever :)
"I think you're painting men with an extremely broad brush there. Yes, men like porn. I don't think there's much room for argument on that. But I think that's a long way from being an endorsement of sex trafficking, no?"
It's not that they endorse sex trafficking, it's that they discover they may be inadvertantly supporting it if what I say about it is true. As to the pervasiveness of porn and men, I was surprised to learn last year just how pervasive it is, even before the pandemic, but it shot up way after that. I got into the research because the guy I was seeing last year got very defensive when I happened to mention sex trafficking & porn and he got all pissy about it - that was how I realized he watched porn (which we talked about) and then it got me curious as to its effect on men and relationships (not good, and when a man asks "Do you do anal?" he almost certainly got that idea from porn).
Medium's younger female writers have written a lot about the availability of porn and how it's making young men more violent, and sex less good for women.
"There are lots of women working in the sex industry and making very good livings from it entirely of their own free will. That said though, I am interested in learning more, so if you have any resources, I'd be very interested to read them."
That's exactly what other men say to me! :) I'll tell you what I tell them: Type sex trafficking youporn pornhub into Google and the first ten results will give you plenty of reliable information right there. Those are the top two porn sites and they're famously into sex trafficked videos - not that they actively seek them, they just don't work hard to remove them. Or genuine rape videos or clearly underage girls.
As for women who 'enjoy' sex work, I imagine there are some who do like it but I've read others argue very few women really like doing it no matter what they say, and that calling it 'sex work' dresses it up and makes it sound more voluntary than it is. There's a high degree of sex trafficking in prostitution as well as porn and sometimes a woman sucks dick for money because it's the only skill she has. So, it's not 'trafficking' but it's not truly voluntary either, and it's the sort of thing men don't like to talk or think about.
"As for women who 'enjoy' sex work"
I didn't say they *enjoyed* it. From what I've heard, sex work is pretty unfulfilling for men and women. I said that lots of women do it of their own free will, drawing the line between sex work and sex trafficking.
But there's no such thing as a woman whose only skill is sucking dick for money. That's a pretty awful thing to say!😅 If they're not being forced to do it, that means they're doing it because it's easier/pays better than the alternatives. Which, minus the penises, is the position most people find themselves in. Very few people work "truly voluntarily."
But yeah, after replying I thought you'd probably tell me to go look it up myself. 😁 I will. I genuinely hadn't heard that sex trafficking was an issue within the porn industry.
p.s. the idea that men only like anal or other sexual activities because of porn is one of those easy stereotypes that some feminists like to assert about men. But it's really not true. Anal sex predates porn you know! For what it's worth, my first time doing it was at 16 with a girl who wanted to try it.
One of the great tragedies of male/female dynamics is that women spend too much time learning about men from other women. And men spend too much time learning about women from other men. And in both cases, the "teachers" don't usually think very highly of the opposite sex.
"But there's no such thing as a woman whose only skill is sucking dick for money. That's a pretty awful thing to say!😅"
They might well have no other alternative if they're young. If they're runaways and have never had a job, and can't get one waitressing (which might not pay enough). They often fall in with pimps & traffickers because they're vulnerable and scared and have no idea how they're going to find/buy their next meal.
As for anal, yeah, it's been around forever but I can tell you I NEVER had men ask for anal until maybe the last several years. Apparently anal (esp rough, violent anal) is quite popular on porn sites. Porn is also responsible for the high level of violence in sex young women are reporting - I learned that from Medium's female writers who were asking what was up with the sudden choking, hitting, and near-rape that came from out of the blue.
"One of the great tragedies of male/female dynamics is that women spend too much time learning about men from other women." Actually, I'll bet far more women try to learn about and understand men more than men ever. do. Where are all the self-help books for men on how to have better relationships? The only ones I've ever seen are how to get laid better - like The Game (actually a very good book, and written with a sympathetic eye toward women). There are tons of self-books for women on how to understand men better but almost nothing in the reverse. I can tell you after twenty years of trying to find a partner that men are still ridiculously clueless about women. I used to ask on dating sites when men complained they couldn't get women to pay attention to them. "Have you ever Googled on what women want? On how to write a good profile? Post a good profile picture? What they're looking for on dating sites?" No. No. No. No. I wrote a whole series about this for Medium called Adventures In Mid-Life Dating. About how men made, said, and did the stupidest things while drowning in an *ocean* of information about women, what women want, and how to talk to women.
I've written books by men, and read articles by men, hung around the Ask Men website for awhile, followed The Good Men Project, and had my fave male writers on Medium who wrote sympathetically about men from a male perspective, and non-hostile to women. I learned a lot from them.
While not all women do this - Medium is rife with misandrists and feminazis - I feel pretty comfortable in stating that overall, I think women attempt to understand men more than men ever do women.
" If they're runaways and have never had a job, and can't get one waitressing (which might not pay enough)."
Yeah, but you're describing a pretty tiny, extreme group of people here, no? And then there's the question of what paying "enough" is. There are young male runaways too, more of them in fact, who don't have the option of sucking dick for money.
I'm not trying to trivialise what these people go through, obviously nobody makes those kinds of decision lightly, but I don't really buy into the "she had no choice but to be a sex worker" narrative in any case where the woman isn't being directly coerced.
As for the effort made to understand the other sex, I think part of the problem is that people, and yes, I guess it might be more often women who do this, believe that it's possible to "understand" the opposite sex. This idea, whether it's men or women who have it, is immediately reductive.
A group that comprises half the planet is obviously not a monolith. So what works for one man or woman is not necessarily going to work for the next. Some women love anal, some don't. Some men do, some don't. Some men love it when women stomp on their balls! Sex is weird.
I'm not denying that porn is warping some men's notion of sex. It definitely is. I'm saying that the idea that porn is responsible for kinkiness amongst men *and women* in general is probably simplistic. And I guess that unless you want men who only have sex in the missionary position, I'm not sure what they should do but ask. If they don't take no for an answer, that's a completely different issue.
What I see missing from both sides is an effort to truly just see the opposite sex as people. To give each other the benefit of the doubt, to have the same degree of empathy as they do for their own sex, to refuse to let the worst members of that sex, or their worst dating experiences, tarnish the entire group.
How do you think it would go down if I wrote a dating series about how women did and said the stupidest things? Or that women should just do the things I imagine men want (which would really just be the things *I* want) if they want more dating success? Do you think men and women would have similar experiences on dating sites when it comes to the effort made to get matches or start/maintain interactions if men just used better profile pictures?
Both men and women extend too little charity to the opposite sex. And make the mistake of thinking that because they see the worst of men/women in their dating lives, men/women are the worst. Women are awful too sometimes. I promise you.😅
Actually, sucking dick IS a viable 'option' for the male runaway - the world is full of men who will pay for a blowjob and it doesn't always matter if it's from a man as long as no one knows. IOW, male hustlers aren't only for gay men - but straight men on the 'down low' or who just don't care who sucks their dick.
I'm not arguing women who 'choose' sex work are trafficked or coerced - just that sometimes it's the only real option for them. I'd love to see an end to sex work, or perhaps legally permitted but highly regulated. With options for people to get training in other skills so they don't have to do this shit. Interestingly, Obama tried to do something like this - with no attention, AFAIK, to sex work - one of his first attempted actions in office was to pass something that would have made it easier for people in poverty circumstances to go to community college. Guess what collection of Congressfucks shot it down?
As for anal, I've never met a woman yet that said she likes it (not that I've taken a scientific poll!), well maybe one that I can think of, and she'd be too freaky even for Rick James, LOL. Most want nothing to do with it. According to the book on dating apps I read last year, a lot of the violence and freakiness young people are engaging in they get from watching porn as sex ed (because parents STILL aren't talking to their kids about this!) A guy the author was involved with argued that the women in the porn videos he watched *liked* rough, physically hurtful sex and the author argued it didn't. "Women WANT this!" he said. "They ask for it on dating apps!" And he proved it by scrolling through profiles in which the women said they wanted rough sex, they like being raped, etc. The author noted that they'll say what they think guys will hear to get them to like them (which I can totally buy as a woman, and as a human being who knows men do the same thing). Then she pulled up a porn video of a woman being choked and pointed out, "She's not enjoying it. Look at her face. Look at the *tears in her eyes*. She's not enjoying this!"
The research is still in the process of studying the influence of porn on other aspects of culture, but what I've been finding myself after getting interested in the porn influence last year is bolstered by the stories of women younger than I on Medium who told insane stories about dating life that I didn't experience in the pre-Internet days. They complained that porn was responsible for the rise in misogyny overall, and that too has been validated by my own research so far.
Sometimes we don't know why we like what we like. My ex last year liked a particular type of sex that I didn't find abhorrent or degrading, just not very interesting. But he loved it, and he had another related fetish, that I'm pretty sure came from porn. Let's remember what normalized oral sex for 'nice' couples: Deepthroat.
My 'freaky' friend was bisexual and admitted once she wasn't sure if she really was, or if she had been induced into it in college when she had college counselors and class speakers keep emphasizing over and over again, "It's okay if you're gay or bisexual! It's okay! It's okay! It's okay!" She said after awhile she sort of started thinking that it was maybe what she was *supposed* to be...she said this in what I consider to be a very candid, honest moment.
If you wrote a dating series about dumb shit women say and do, I agree, it would not go down well, but I would totally read it! I used to watch for articles like that on Medium, and I knew which male writers were non-misogynist. I wanted to know what women did and said that men didn't understand or like, and why. What mistakes might *we* be making? When I was in my forties and undergoing my Angry Drunken Bitch years there were dynamics going on at the time that I didn't know about, some that were women-blameworthy, some men-blameworthy, and others blameless - like finding out many years later how different men's and women's headspaces are in the late thirties (when my ex and I split up) and the forties, and how we don't come together again until the fifties (which I can see, but, unfortunately, men are still doing and saying some remarkably dumb shit, and I ding them for this because the truth isn't just Out There, it's right in front of their faces, but they never bother to Google anything.
They would never go into a business meeting, especially a competitive one, not having researched their opponents, or just be educated on what they'd need to know to accomplish their objectives, yet they bumble around on dating sites making the same mistakes with everyone and wondering why they get ignored so much (because you get tired of them expecting you to ask the same basic questions over and over because they're too lazy to fill out a profile). If women are doing as seriously dumb shit as men are doing - and I'm sympathetic to legitimate male grievance - please, let me know where I may learn more! Since I'm still persona non grata there, and I understand the new guy Tony thus far doesn't seem inclined to deal with the social justice extremists. I hope he can do better than Evvie did.
We'll never learn to get along until we understand each other. It'll take balls for men to write honestly and sympathetically to women about what they're doing wrong. It's what I do when I criticize feminism - I have to be willing to take some shit for what I write, and I think I've lost a few friends over my personal responsibilty, power feminist mindset. Just as you piss off victim antiracists who can't stand you suggesting that white people aren't devils and that antiracists are sometimes part of the problem.
"Actually, sucking dick IS a viable 'option' for the male runaway"
😅Okay, we're talking about a *reeeeally* small group of people now. If this is what you're basing the idea that some women can't do anything but suck dick on, we'll probably just have to agree to disagree. I don't think we can pretend this is the path that most runaways go down. Male or female. But especially male.
And while I think prostitution (and particularly the men who use prostitues), is truly gross, I don't see any clear argument to end sex work. A lot more should be done to make sure the people engaging in it are safe and doing of their own free will. But as long as those conditions are met, my feelings are irrelevant. We can't inflict our morality on other people. That ends badly pretty much every time.
Again, I'm not arguing that porn doesn't have an impact on culture or on the sexual behaviour of men *and women.* I'm saying that porn is far from the only explanation for a particular fetish. Do you think, for example, men have foot fetishes because of porn? Or do they watch foot fetish porn because they have foot fetishes?
I've met lots of women who were into anal. Who requested it even though I'm broadly indifferent to it. And quite a few who were into *really* rough sex. Some, so rough it would shock you. This last category certainly wasn't a majority, but not a trivial number. All we have are our anecdotes, but I'm pretty sure I've slept with more women that you have.😄
As for my series on the mistakes women make, I've mentioned quite a few of them here. It's a mistake for women to pathologise men's sexuality or to assume that we're all porn addicts. It's a mistake to assume that because you don't like something sexually, "women" don't like it. It's a mistake to treat men as if we're a monolith (this is a really big one that I see in various forms all the time). It's a mistake to forget that men are just people and treat them with the same compassion and offer them the same benefit of the doubt that you do other women. It's a mistake to allow your worst dating experiences to colour your perception of all men.
Men make exactly these mistakes with women, of course. But I think one mistake that is often made by women is failing to really consider how different dating is for men. I hear "advice" from women all the time that men should follow. But many women don't have any real understanding of what it's like to date as a man if you're not in the top ~10% of attractiveness. They assume that the experience is somewhat similar and it's really not. In all kinds of ways. If you have fifteen minutes to spare, I'd highly recommend this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTIbHIsIYw).
Not sure how really small the male runaway professional dick-suckers are, guys need money too, but I don't have the stats on that. I'd suspect it's somewhere north of 'reaaaaally small' but I don't know how much.
I don't see a good argument for ending sex work either, I've read books by women who seemed to really enjoy it and the Happy Hooker claimed she loved being paid to have sex. Hey, we get paid for use of our brains or hands or feet or whatever, why not our sex organs? I just want it to be a viable, at least somewhat more respectable profession, *regulated*, with protections for the women and the potential for arrest for any johns who get out of hand. I also want to see it taxed.
And I want to see better options for helping people to learn job skills that don't involve sex if that's not what floats their boat. I.e., desperate.
For the women you knew who liked really rough sex, anal, etc., I wonder (to myself, you don't have to answer this, it's personal) how old they were and whether they grew up with porn and had their tastes as shaped by what they thought sex was supposed to be. In the Dating Inferno book I read, the author pointed out the profiles claiming they like it rough et al may be because they say what it takes to get guys to like them. I think I mentioned that before but I can't remember. MADBS (Middle-Aged Dumb Blonde Syndrome ;) You may not even know that answer yourself.
I'm just going to reply to the video for now, the rest of it later when I have more time (I don't disagree with you much). WOW! That was an awesome, eye-opening video! I just bookmarked it so I can go back and read the comments to better understand the men's perspective. I was on Tinder for about a half a day when it first launched and I uninstalled it because it was a HUGE energy suck on my mobile. Before I did I checked to see who had swiped on me and it was like fucking EVERYBODY. And I was a 49-year-old woman, perhaps the oldest on the site. And I was getting all these young guys. Now, I *can* get younger men, and I'm not averse to that, but not guys under 30. Like guys in their mid-to-late twenties had wiped I don't know, whichever way was a match. And I was like, seriously? Are you fucking kidding me? And I realized they were just swiping right, I think it was, on everyone. I figured they were just maximizing their opps to get laid and I'm not sure I wasn't wrong; Tinder has notoriously been a hookup app, and I think that was the one Nancy Jo Sales used in her book on dating apps I read (turned it into a great Medium article that got some claps and comments). She is a year younger than I and like me, still pretty decent-looking for her age.
Now I'm beginning to understand the 'throwing spaghetti at the wall' thing you always seem to get from guys. I wonder - maybe someone else can answer this? - how much you really can put on your profile. Good photos are always helpful, but when I've been on dating apps (I never went back to Tinder because of its rep) I've always been aggravated by the lack of anything else - just the basic questions answered about looks - hair colour, eye colour, height, weight - and nothing about who they are, what they like, what they're looking for. It's a bummer because I *do* want to know that stuff. And I know guys don't read profiles because many have said they don't, esp when I said, "You'd know the answer to that if you'd read my profile." "I don't read profiles." I tried making my profiles really funny to encourage them to read, and that helped a bit, also it showed my sass and personality, but I also would stick something really weird but non-threatening in it that they would surely comment on ("Do you really have a pet gila monster?" "No, I just wanted to see who actually read that far!")
I wonder if more niche-oriented sites are better for men who aren't Ryan Reynolds (who frankly I think is nice-looking but I honestly don't think I'd swipe right on him if I saw someone like him on an app, he's not all that and a bag of chips). I've considered it myself, to try and eliminate a lot of the dross. Lately I've been wondering if there are guys who are minimalist I could meet as I'm nearing retirement and won't have tons of money to retire on but I don't need tons, I lead a simple life and aren't much materialistic and have already done a lot of my traveling - which is a lot more expensive now.
This really is worth delving into more. I'm off for the next two days as I do sales work and all my campaigns are US-based and I'm looking forward to the four-day weekend, having done Thanksgiving this past weekend with my bro and his fam. Tomorrow morning the comments of that video will be my breakfast reading, just as the video was this morning. Thanks for this fantastic look into what it's like for men. Wow. Just Wow!
"I know so many people and have heard so many more stories of people, trans or not, who have been cowed into silence in their workplaces"
Mixed feelings about this. On the one hand there is no doubt in my mind that the workplace was the frontline of gay political advancement; it was hard to maintain the monolithic hatred of a reviled minority when you work with one who you can't help but note is an OK guy.
But. Nobody pretends to be gay to get attention, who would? And as I have said many times the great majority of "trans" are fakes, they are not gender dysphoric and when "trans" becomes unremarkable they will find another way to keep themselves at the center of attention.
Watch this; you can ignore the framing by the Black Conservative, the only thing he gets right is noting that "they" is plural, but listen to the girl and her ready recitation of "misgendered" and "my gender identity" and "correct pronouns."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFjUjSJplfs&t=123s
Would you want to work with her?
I take pains to distinguish the authentically transgendered from the "trans" like this idiotic person and while I am supportive of the former I have had it up to where my hairline used to be with the latter.
If I were at work and someone was putting "he/him" in an email signature, I would raise a stink about it. That shit isn't what we work for.
"Mixed feelings about this. On the one hand there is no doubt in my mind that the workplace was the frontline of gay political advancement"
Yeah, the problem isn't trans inclusion. Having more people meet trans people is a good thing. Just as, as you say, having more people meet gay people was a good thing.
The key difference, the reason I hate it when trans people compare themselves to gay people or black people, is that gay people and black people weren't asking for anything,. You didn't have to change the words you used, you didn't have to lie about biology, you just had to interact with that person on a human level.
It's all the stuff behind that, which you're absolutely not allowed to talk about, that's the issue. Refusing to put pronouns in your bio will get you in real hassle in some companies. It's stuff like that that's ridiculous. Gay people never required companywide behavioural changes.
Right now impressions of "trans" people are being made by those people with all the demands and the instantaneous accusations of "transphobia" who make such nuisances of themselves.
Well, before people like me who came to work candid about being gay but without the facial hair statements, sadomasochism gear, and cock rings, impressions of gay people were set by bondage buddies with faces like armpits who put on that horrid voice when others walked by.
So, yes, meeting some "trans" coworkers who didn't spend half their time in HR whining about being "misgendered" might do some good.
Because I doubt many companies are doing cartwheels about having employees like the girl in the video.
Any company that insisted I have a pronoun pair in my bio could have my resignation, But I haven't worked onsite since mid 2010 and never will again.
My Twitter pronouns are hey/you :)
"Nobody pretends to be gay to get attention, who would?" Political/advantageous "lesbians". The (usually hot) women who claim to be 'lesbians', maybe even live the lie for awhile, to be 'cool' progressives, or to 'smash the patriarchy', shock their parents & the authority figures in their lives. I don't know if young women are doing that as much now, I saw it when I was younger and being gay was less mainstream and acceptable.
I had a friend who was a 'bullshit lesbian' for awhile, although I think for her it was less political - it was because men were frustrating for her (she was overweight and not very attractive, mostly because she didn't smile, she was quite pretty when she did, which wasn't much) and because she seemed never to outgrow the finding-your-identity thing. She announced she was 'coming out' about being gay at some point after her divorce, having claimed to be bisexual for years. I'd known her since the mid-80s and I thought, "There's no way she's gay, or even bisexual. She likes dick too much!" She had one or two gay relationships while she was going through her 'gay phase' and now she's remarried. To a guy.
I do everything I can manage to avoid reading anything about celebrities so this is new to me. I had never heard of "Kanye West" before a few weeks ago.
There was a time when claiming bisexuality was fashionable; didn't last long, and Lou Reed put an end to it by noting that you aren't gay if you don't like to suck dick.
I like people who don't smile. Unless they have a reason; The Smile came out of TV advertising and if you look at yearbook photos from high schools you won't see a lot of vacuous grins before 1955 or so.
I only read celebrity news if there's something interesting about the person. I never had much of an opinion on the actress Anne Hathaway - always liked her, but wouldn't describe myself as a 'fan' - until I read an article about a speech she gave a few weeks ago where she spoke candidly about how it felt and what she did in the aftermath of being subjected to a bizarre hate campaign on Twitter. She wasn't 'canceled', she hadn't done anything wrong now or thirty years ago, people just started hating on her. I paid attention because I'm interested in the mechanics of social media hatred and how we can fight 'cancel culture' and I wrote an article about her on Vocal as I found her speech and her growth out of it impressive. She's an example of a woman who took back her power and didn't allow the bitches to grind her down (and it appears to be mostly women hating on her - figures). Kanye West is a bit interesting now because he's kind of like Trump, except much smarter and he actually earned his billions honestly, rather than through breaking every real estate law in New York. I called him the Black Trump (wouldn't be surprised if he runs for President one day) until the rise of Herschel Walker, the new Black Trump who's as dumb as Donald.
Well said. There is yet another benefit of any group calling out the bad behavior of their own. I am completely bored and question the objectivity of anyone who is blind to their own tribe's warts. Those that call out their own are pretty much the only people I believe and that have outsized influence on getting me to consider points of view I would not ordinarily. Only those with credibility to criticize their own tribe are real to me, and I suspect I am not alone.
"I am completely bored and question the objectivity of anyone who is blind to their own tribe's warts"
A thousand times this. Also people who talk about "the other side" as if the worst members of that group represent the whole of it. It's such a waste of time to focus entirely on what is usually a minority of nutcases when talking about solving problems.
Not all of us belong to tribes. I try hard not to. As part of the tribe sloppily called "the left" I am supposed to celebrate diversity and gender ideology. I think about 90% of individualism is conceit and I have talked my head off over the "trans" thing.
When I came out as gay my tribal behavior lasted about three weeks.
If folks want to influence those not already in their tribe, they would do well to appear objective and examined within their beliefs. I can't tell you how many times I have 'shut off' authors who generously castigate 'the other side' while finding no fault in their own. Boring. Insincere. Biased. Emotions-only with no logical backing. The world, I hope, will belong more and more to those with more honesty.
SteveQJ has this honesty. And sometimes? he wraps that more difficult point for some into the end of his writings after establishing that objective credibility throughout the first 80%. It is a beautiful thing.
You gave me a start. I'm Some Guy on Medium and when I saw a Some Guy writing something I didn't write I forgot where I was for a moment.
The curse of the 21st century is that people appropriate words and give them a different meaning. "Woke" is now associated with the people you speak of. In its early use it was spot on. The origin best as I can tell:
It turns out that woke is simple enough. From the liner notes of "Lead Belly the Folkway Years":
“When I come in a train, I stop in Las Vegas.
This white fellow was with me. He sat down and
I thought it was all right. Man taps me on the
shoulder and says, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve
colored.’ And I says ‘Oh, no you don’t?’ and he
says, ‘No.’ And that white fellow got up too. We
ain’t got to eat in Las Vegas. So many places like
that. I just feel sorry for them people. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐚𝐢𝐧’𝐭
𝐰𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐮𝐩 𝐲𝐞𝐭.”
Lead Belly's woke, as the article points out, has morphed into something else.
I wish my reading queue wasn't so stacked. That looks like it might be an interesting read.
As for meaning being fluid, that is a curse. A quote from a worthwhile Medium author:
If you can simply appropriate a term and claim you have identified into a group, while inventing your own parameters as you go — there is no group." -Alison Tennent, the Celtic Chameleon