However, some people seem to slip into these sorts of discussions and take it as a carte blanche to vent their personal grievances with men on the rest of the world. Suddenly gestures of genuine affection become symbols of male oppression, and fatherhood becomes a means of enacting a power fantasy (as per one of the articles that was linked earlier). — Tzeentch

Aye. There's a fine line between tarring proponents of these criticisms with this brush and being frustrated at how people articulate this stuff in general, too. I'm not going to pretend there are just a few "bad apples" who espouse things in this manner, but I will say that everyone who's sick of them tends to keep quiet for obvious reasons. And people are pretty sick of them.

In a similar vein, if you come in with the claim that what those kind of people are espousing is misandry, you end up behaving like one of their tropes. Entitled fucker unwilling to reflect on their position in the place of things. Which is a convenient equilibrium for both sides; you just have to pick your flavour of in-group shibboleth, edgy transgression (with an alleged core of prejudice) or righteous indignation (with an alleged core of insincerity).

Admittedly if you choose neither you end up looking like a wokescold to some and a bigot to others!

I hope it's not rude to lump you both into the same answer, but you touch on similar themes. — Isaac

All good, it's how you manage bees after punching a beehive.

Secondly, there's the whole space-on-the-front-page question. I get that there's some intersectionality with these issues - patriarchy, racism, capitalism - but intersectionality is not what Mirren is promoting (I'm using her here as an example, I don't want to focus too heavily on the details), there's no "...and this is what fuels the oppression of the working class" at the end. Gods, she'd have to swallow a hell of a bitter pill to add that.

...

Women's rights have made amazing progress, we have equality enshrined in some quite powerful laws. Trans activism only really took off a few years ago and already there are laws protecting that group, and social pressure among at least the liberal classes is enormous to accommodate. — Isaac

I don't think we're avoiding (in thread) talk of class oppression, it's just not the central concern here. If you're willing to accept that some kind of feminist analysis is helpful, especially along intersectional/postcolonial lines, and that broadly speaking anti-patriarchy politics is doing Good Things (tm), then there's room to talk about what's to be done. If you're on the "we should be concerned about nothing but international class based geo-politics" boat, that is fair enough. It is a respectable boat. There's another boat, which is the "international class based geo politics would be swell, and so would emancipatory politics in political north countries"... I assume you are also in that boat.

We don't need Helen Mirren to be 'slightly-oppressed' because she shares a chromosome arrangement with victims of FGM, and this is important, because the next most oppressed group to the poor victim of FGM is probably the fucking monster who just carried it out, not some wealthy actress who happens to also have ovaries. — Isaac

That's not the framing I prefer. Do the "make poor people less poor" thing. But there's no guarantee you do change cultural norms in a desired way by making people less poor.

As for the points about hypothetical people stealing oppression points through hypothetical comparisons of injustices - I mean, some people do that. I think in practice people who just chatter about feminism do it. In another context it could easily be construed that I'm claiming current oppression of women in non-genital-mutilating-countries on the basis of some countries being genital-mutilating-countries. But I'm not doing that.

I'm using that to point out that there's a type of social concept which is required to understand and work on these things. Like a demographic. Trying to understand why people act the way they do. As men and women. Around relationships, cohabitation, sex and all that. There're problems. And they're not all addressed by throwing money at them.

If those problems are simultaneously interpersonal and systemic - which they seem to be - then you end up looking at norms and what enables people to act in accordance with them. That's the space this discussion operates in.

Then there's a sub discussion of masculinity in that - how are men expected to behave interpersonally, what problems does this cause, what advantages does it have, what disadvantages does it have - and so on. I also gave the example of a relational problematic in it, of domestic abuse. All of these things are going to tie together in one big normative-demographic clusterfuck.

Ultimately, I think your comments serve as an attempt to flip the table and play a new game. How would you flip the table and play the old one?

I should've done more work to relate the above to masculinity. And in response to @Tzeentch. I do believe it's really reductive to say that men=oppressive and woman=oppressed by fiat. And I have seen people who sometimes behave as if that reduction is true. If you go down that root into analysing socially constructed identity, you end up having to see what is it about masculinity which is violent and oppressive. And try to walk a tightrope between the truism "it's possible for an arbitrary man to be unduly aggressive", the vague statistical generalisation "men are more violent than women", and the broadly seen "direction" of structural oppression - men as a monolith onto women as a monolith.

I'm sure you've both seen that. It's worth complaining about. It's a waste of time.

There's some good work to do though. Like it's worthwhile seeing what it is about men, women, hetero relationships, domestic abuse studying methodology etc that makes domestic violence way more common when it's men on women. There'd be a lot of work to infer anything back from that into an individual's psyche, probably the best you can do is tropes. Like "emotional dysregulation is more likely to be expressed with anger in men" and "anger is more likely to be violent in men than in women". I dunno if those are true, and I'm sure they're contestable, I'm just gesturing at the space of questions.

If you'd taken two tropes like that, you can then start asking identity trope questions, like "what if I put (this type of bloke) in (this type of relationship) with (this type of woman)? What happens to the risk factors?" and you can do that. You put poor uneducated mentally ill people together with histories of crime or substance abuse and the risks for domestic incidents goes way up. Then that's more likely to be violent when it's man on women.

That latter bit maybe needs some explanation, after controlling as much as possible for the material factors. That's the space of reasons this kind of chat can happen in.

And if we start looking at types of values people hold, coping strategies, how they differ across genders, and importantly how they interact with power, you end up in the domain of patriarchy concepts.

I kinda just approach that definitionally, label as "patriarchal" systematic sufferings doled out at least in part on the basis of gender. If they come from norms, call them patriarchal norms, if they come from identities of type X, call them patriarchal X.

I have absolutely no respect for anyone who can't tell the difference, and until the former is sorted, any space wasted on whatever minor inconvenience the latter might have to endure is a travesty — Isaac

It's a point well made, but I imagine you know it's not a good argument by itself. Fundamentally though the interstitial point between "general oppression", like structural stuff, and patriarchy would be whatever norms disenable men and women the world over. Some of that's class, some of that's gender. Like if you think it's fairly shite that abortion is taboo, women aren't politically represented with great frequency in most countries, and female circumcision is a-okay in some places, trying to do something about that is less class-y and more feminist-y.

Even with the poverty porn you posted, you can come at this from a post colonial angle and it starts looking like part of what keeps people poor world over, even on a class level, is patriarchy. There's some room to be intersectional.

Broadly speaking: why not both?

Though I do share your frustration with the degree of performative bile spewed out on the topic. Why, I was called a transphobic incel racist rapist yesterday morning ! Which is a waste of time and spleen that could be better spent doing literally anything else for the group being "protected" by the discourse. I imagine @Tzeentch shares similar frustrations. Though I think it's important to contextualise them away from being a blanket rejection of modern day women's lib. And, hopefully, men's lib.

but rarely, it seems to me, in Anglo philosophy. — Wayfarer

Aye.

It amuses me that we agree on that but for completely opposite reasons. Ah well. Another time!

I could answer but I've already gone way over the line discussing the posting styles of members here. I allowed myself to start this thread for the wider issues it might raise and never intended to get into a back and forth about how people write. I had my reasons for giving in and doing just that, but no more. — Srap Tasmaner

Good call!

↪fdrake You're doing Joshs not @Wayfarer, and they're actually quite different. — Srap Tasmaner

Aw. What did I get wrong?

You respond that positions like "the cat is on the mat" are part of a modern trend of seeing cats as being located on mats, but in the past people used to think of cats as being more likely on armchairs. — Isaac

Also @Wayfarer

I think there is a place for this kind of argument, as a proxy for a much longer essay. I'm just gonna go hard on it to the point of self parody:

The birth of analytic metaphysics placed the meaning of words and their correspondence to the state of things as the essential character of the relationship between thought and being, or action and environment. The problems of metaphysics thus become articulated in terms of the connection between language items and world items. This means their discussion takes its cues from analysing the privileged relation between statements and the world; through the analysis of statements' truth conditions, and what impact ascribing truth to a sentence would have on the sentence's semantic content.

Thus the canonical examples of statements in these problematics; "the cat is on the mat", "the cup is red"; force the adoption of a perspective where factual disputes of the nature of things must accord to the analysis of representative statements whose truth conditions mirror (or fail to mirror) the environmental activities they are articulated in conjunction with.

In that regard, pointing out a mere factual dispute between whether "the cat is on the mat" is true or false constraints the problematics surrounding the relationship of thought and being to orbit around the intuition that the two naturally mirror each other, and that the true order of things is to be found in the form attempts to state the truth take. Rather than the gulf between thing and semantic content.

Thus focussing upon whether the cat is on the mat, as a paradigmatic example of the form of truth seeking dispute, brings with it a set of assumptions that render alternative problematics of the connection between thought and being next to impossible. They cannot be justified in the tacitly demanded terms.

...

And at that point there's just too much. So I do think there's some room for this argument style as an attempt to continually upend the chess board, if you're inclined to do that.

Overall, another illustration of 'folks talking past on another'. — Wayfarer

Fair enough. :up:

So what flaming hoops did I fail to jump through? — Wayfarer

Maybe none! I think I saw you construe @apokrisis as being an idealist through that remark? Or was it just that the thinkers they reference might be construed as such? There could be an inherent idealism in construing the fundamental units of reality as sign-systems, but it isn't clear to me that you demonstrate that. Or that you sought to demonstrate it. Just kinda left hanging! Hard to tell whether what you said is intended as a counterpoint, an attempt to contextualise apo's remarks as part of the history of idealism or a claim that apo's an idealist for an unspecified reason.

Yeah, that's not bad. I've figured out what philosophy really is dozens of times, but I'm starting to think you can just not do that. — Srap Tasmaner

Aye. I think if you found philosophy's essence, there would still remain a distinction between the found essence and the essence finding thought process. And in that regard the relation between those two would essentially remain unspecified. You end up equating philosophy with (inquiry+critical thought+reflective writing) in search of specifying its method, while simultaneously emptying its concept of content due to the variety of auspices it becomes equated to.

Always a view, never of anything. But that perspective comes from fetishising its essence, rather than the essence of philosophy (screw you Wittgenstein).

Less abstractly, I don't think there's any reason to believe philosophy behaves differently to sport. Which has no essence or method.

That’s up to you. — Wayfarer

It's not though. That goes against the norms of reason we usually follow in argument. If you are making a counterclaim or counterargument, you should be able to explain how it undermines your opponent's point. In that regard, what specific claim does your appeal to the history of ideas undermine? What force makes your claim need to be addressed on pain of being unreasonable?

The only guess I have is that you seek to portray an opponent's conclusion as a contingent event of thought; which it is, their thought just happened as part of the history of ideas. Nevertheless a claim can be a necessary consequence of another through rules of reasoning. In essence, "that's just your opinion man" vs "that's an opinion".

Do they think that an attack on patriarchy is an attack on males by females? — Amity

I see there being two tendencies which result in this impression, one which is silly and unjust and one which is worth considering. The first tendency is equating feminism with man hating. Which is silly. And unjust.

The second tendency is that there is a habit, especially in online discourse, to essentialise minor/largely irrelevant misconduct and thus make someone a living symbol of all that is bad with (enemy of your choice). When that's allied with reactionary/conservative/prejudiced viewpoints it gets called grievance politics. The same dynamic happens to individuals who say the wrong thing in left spaces. Especially online. Mark Fisher wrote a highly controversial piece on this tendency in 2008, Exiting the Vampire Castle. It's worth a read.

Because the second tendency may be nebulous - I've seen someone be branded an incel, predator through online rumours and be ostracised in person for it. It was almost all knee jerk misinterpretation, and a hefty chunk of inopportune phrasing. It is still more justified, and on a smaller scale, than what happened to Contrapoints (and her case studies) in this video here. Worth a watch!

Again, your experience is more extensive than mine. Where did you come across this behaviour? — Amity

As a positive example: I've heard of a man identifying as a feminist who was chair of a disability, diversity inclusion initiative in a company. He was multiply disabled and pretty educated on disability rights, but he was pretty bad at treating women with the same respect.

That's not quite "part of an activist movement". I could find you a paper polling feminist activist groups about this attitude if you like, but it would be some effort. People worry about it. For good reasons I think, men who are feminists still aren't women, and so aren't subject to precisely the same flavours of oppression (even if sources of them may be the same). For that reason, the kind of political activity a feminist man would suggest/find adequate could (arguably) be seen as suspect due to the guy being a man and not having the right standpoint on society to guide what should be done. (See The Effeminist Manifesto for an extreme example of that perspective). Like maybe you wouldn't want a CEO deciding how much capital gains tax they pay...

Where things, I think, get dicey is if you grant that men have unique vectors of oppression from patriarchy and try to organise men to fight them in solidarity with feminists. Some of that might be against, what might be called, "the emotional objectification of men" - the kind of thing that excuses men's suffering in war, our predominance among the homeless, and what can be the emotional core (so to speak) of being expected to be an ideal protector/caretaker - a limitless, stoic repository of material support.

I like to think that feminists have done great work in uprooting interpersonal norms that subjugate women. I think as @unenlightened wrote elsewhere, "patriarchy is dying". My perspective on it is that patriarchy is dying for women (which is great!) but it's currently dying less for men (boo!). A large part of that comes from there not being anti-patriarchy men's political organisations, and some of that large part comes from that addressing "men's issues" in feminist spaces is either a hard sell or justifiably seen as entitlement and entryism.

Regardless of the reason, however, the interpersonal norms that "make men men" are dying in some sense, but those expectations of traditional male conduct still show up interpersonally quite often. Like I imagine they do for women.

But it is nice, nowadays, to be able to hug the blokes at an old man bar while commiserating about the state of the world. So I think the rot in our souls is being excised regardless.

Also @Amity. This is personal reflection upon Moliere's excellent points.

But in real life most people who aren't familiar with feminism think that a man calling themselves a feminist is trying to get sex — Moliere

Yes. And I've met several who believe men calling themselves feminists is an inherently entryist ploy to subvert women's institutions and discourse.

the expression as a kind of virtue signal for partners rather than a serious political or philosophical commitment with a whole body of thought behind it. — Moliere

Yes. And also in my experience this is generally what it is (for men and women). Expressing feminist views is a hobby, living by them isn't. And requires considerably more effort. I'm thinking on the spot here, but I can think of two different flavours of "personal is political" struggles. The first would be when a societal norm imposes itself upon a person (or group), the second would be when a person has internalised a norm and it's become egosyntonic.

To contrast, consider a hetero couple raising a child. Childcare costs are so expensive they can price out median income families. Because men tend to be in better paying jobs/roles than women, it can make financial sense for the woman to quit her job and take on the societal role of a tradwife, despite it being one with considerably less financial and social capital. The couple's beliefs won't let them avoid the costs that this devil's choice presents them.

But what if the norms traditional household become the couple's desires over time. And all their passionate, and maybe even virtuous, beliefs were annihilated by the merciless logic of capital and patriarchy. Who they were has been replaced by who they needed to be, moral convictions be damned. Capital and patriarchy go hand in hand. To work against this, it would be to psychically reimagine yourself and live by another set of values. To find profound discomfort in your own life. It is a hard sell.

That's a transition from finding oneself profoundly alienated from society due to intellectual convictions, to largely feeling in accordance with due to practical necessities. No matter how strong a belief is, it doesn't cut it.

There can also be a reflexive pathologisation of women who choose to live more traditionally in patriarchy-critical spaces. Something must be wrong with you if you want to live unjustly. I don't find that a fair judgement btw.

It's relatively common place to have "the personal is political" discussions about housework sharing, it's less common to have these discussions about the psychosexual aspects of patriarchy. People libidinally invest in these norms as much as they socially enforce them. Fantasies of submission to masculine authority, fantasies of being that man, thinking about how consent works in a long term relationship.

Luckily the latter, interpersonal kind of "feminist praxis" can be engaged in without the norms of society crushing you. So long as a space of relative equality can be created between men and women, these things can be talked about and acted upon. In the conditions where that cannot happen readily - a workplace, a boardroom, a hiring decision -, you need advocacy and collective action. That's why ideas are never enough by themselves.

And also, unfortunately, why things are slower to change than any right minded human being would like.

Have you written anything? Apart from on here... — Amity

Boring essays and technical reports.

Do you think Daly would appreciate having a gender-neutral pronoun applied to her? — Amity

She probably wouldn't, no. I think there's something in Gyn/Ecology to that effect. "They" as an attempt at gender neutrality = a psyop to cover up men as the default subject = erasure of women's erasure.

So, you were drawn to the book...because you already have a strong interest in gender theory and language and theology? Or just because.

Personally? I read a lot of that stuff.

Daly sounds like someone that should have a thread of her own! Touches all the hot spots. — Amity

Yes. And she'll be in the 70s radical feminist transphobe dumpster fire too, probably.

Questions were raised as to what is 'Masculinity' or a 'Real Man' as opposed to what? — Amity

Is this the right question? For "real man" it makes sense to think of what a non-real man would be, a fake man or whatever. But there's nothing essential to being a man that would define it in opposition to another category, right? If the quality of being a man means you've got an antipodal (set of qualities) to another category (like woman, boy...), what places a man in an antipodal relationships with that other category needs examined. It might be a "coming of age" for the opposition of boy and man, it might be a gender stereotype for the opposition of man and women, who knows.

I'd rather say that being a man commits someone to no essential qualities - social, biological, performative. We know it can't be willies, chromosomes, cologne, assertiveness, violence or detached cognitive styles since you can remove each from a man and they stay identifiable as a man. Nor does it commit someone to special virtues - things which are virtues for men are virtues for people in general. All that there is to being a man is counting as one... you might call this no-man-ilism (nomanilism).

At that point, the discussion turns entirely on norms of expression, aesthetic styles, and the social status those both afford people. Only particular norms and social conditions would enable an opposition between a man and between another category. Like people get antsy around people who "count as men" using "women's" bathrooms, even though those people often don't "count as men" in most social circumstances. Having erectile dysfunction might make you not "count as a man", various things. The social, the biological and the aesthetic all intermingle here into an inexhaustible clusterfuck of overlapping criteria and milieux. And in that regard, no one is going to complain about a bloke using a men's bathroom if they need to use viagra to get it up... The traits which sometimes count as being necessary for masculinity activate at different times, and in that regard even what is essentially excluded from manhood is contextually volatile.

@apokrisis@wonderer1

I've deleted that exchange. Kindly desist.

'm wondering how you came to know her and her work. — Amity

I found their book in a charity shop. The pun in the title made me pick it up. The prose kept me reading it.

How on earth is using a term like 'witch' liberatory? Because there is no longer the threat of male persecution? Nevertheless, it still has negative connotations. Who wants to be called a 'hag'? — Amity

She uses the term, in that book, as a myth making+historical exercise. Roughly, part of the story around witches is that they were killed for their heretical knowledge. Which was false, as there was no magic. Daly turns that around, witches were indeed holders and sustainers of heretical knowledge - their status in society let them see the contours of oppression all women face. So she sees the witch as a mythical and real figure, as a woman who undermines the oppressive structures of society through wise action. It's a new flavour of womanhood, for her!

The book is also feminist theology, some of it comes from confronting highly conservative Catholic theologians and priests at various conferences with this material. Affirming the value of witches in that context, I think, is a delicious rhetorical move.

Oh yeah, I am that flirty, bewitching female. Males succumb to the sprinkling of my magical prowess. Driven to lust and beyond. And so it is, the female has the power. For all of 15 minutes. — Amity

That's part of the story, yeah. We both know it's not true, even when it feels true!

I must say that I find it ironic that discussions about the essence of masculinity - or its absence - tend to orbit around the effect masculinity has on women through patriarchy. The cynic in me sees this as an internalisation of the men=active/women=passive dichotomy within feminist discourse. Of course the essence of men is the effect they have on women, despite that being a resentful/misogynist trope! And it's ultimately reductive.

Not saying you are doing this by the way, just that these discussion tend to terminate in the discussion of patriarchy, not the space criticising it opens up for men and women. A book like Connell's "Masculinities" takes this extra step for men, do you know of any which conceive of a a new femininity after patriarchy? Or find the seeds of a new femininity like Daly does?

An interesting transformation from 'lady' to 'crone'. Do any of the labels apply? — Amity

It was a nod to Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology, she calls middle aged and up women that make their own sets of norms "crones", especially if they criticise or re-evaluate patriarchy.

Initially, I thought you were having a bit of a laugh. — Amity

I try to make my jokes serious on here.

Not sure whether the intention was to subvert 'patriarchal feminine sexuality' - whatever that is. — Amity

I'm sure you know what it is if you've flirted with blokes before and felt like you were following a script. Every time one ought to do something for one's partner because it just seems right, a norm is at work.

The dynamic at play in the scene is a "chase" phase, where a man courts a woman and/or a woman invites a man to court her. She positions herself as an object of desire in an attempt to oblige the man to take her up on the offer, and he does what he can to keep the offer for the chase ongoing. It's in that dynamic that "no", rejection, denigration to keep someone at arm's length are all standard moves of the game.

Sally positions herself as an object of desire through the orgasm fake, and simultaneously denigrates Harry's sexual dalliances as trivial. What he has is construed as bad, and she shows him what he's missing. That equates herself as an object of desire with what Harry is lacking - sexual fidelity with her. It's an invitation to chase for the "something more" of a committed relationship.

Harry clearly gets turned on, and denigrated.

Is it the expectation that a woman isn't a woman unless she is married and has kids? — Amity

That's the final level. If you imagine desire as a process that ends in a woman being a housewife with kids, and the norms which guide her there - make her desire that - that's a norm in patriarchy. Or at least proximal to one. It cuts deeper than the end point though, how people flirt, what people's sexual expectations are. This affects what people desire and why; like wanting men being tall to fit in a "protector" role ("I just like tall men!"), or women being polite and supportive ("She just makes me feel at home!").

Perhaps a prime example of the masculine - wanting to 'sow his wild oats' before a settled monogamy with all-important kids. — Amity

Indeed. And he's using that trope, that he's capable of it to denigrate what Sally's got to offer (what she wants to happen). That's shame and creation of desire. She blows it out of the park by showing him that he could have mindblowing mega sex with her through how hot she fakes the orgasm. While making it also a fake. Shame, creation of desire etc.

The scene may as well be:
Harry: "What you want isn't good for me, what can you offer?"
Sally flusters.
Sally: "What I have is mindblowing, and your bad choices so far preclude it"
Harry flusters.

Is it that the quip supplied by Crystal is only about the desire for an orgasm, or even a simulation? — Amity

I get the impression that she's had a long life and really wants to have, or have had, what Sally has just shown. I interpret it like she really wants to be sexually satisfied but life in general, relationships included, haven't done it. Or I dunno maybe she just got horny hearing a beautiful woman convincingly orgasm.

Is it surprising that a woman of a certain age ( a 'crone' ?!) still has sexual drives/needs? — Amity

To me? No. I think people like to forget middle aged people are often horny as hell. I think what you said comes into it - "beauty fades" more for women (or so it's seen). Though "MILF" and "Cougar" are always popular search terms on porn sites. Motherhood and spinsterhood are also sexually objectified, equality!

I guess I should've made more effort to link this to the theme of masculinity in the thread. So when I was talking about "female dignity", I meant the norm which makes sense of Sally's indignation that Harry would leave his sexual partners before the morning. It's a sign of (what's seen as) insufficient fidelity to one's sexual partner, and simultaneously rendering sex too casual.

Harry is also playing into this. Harry is boasting about how easy it is for him to find women to play into the same desirability-through-shame flirting strategy Sally is. He could be seen to devalue any potential partner if the norm above was seen as operative. That devaluation operates on the same norms that enable Sally's castigation, and it inspires her to position herself as an object of Harry's desire.

What's particularly patriarchal about this is the combination of eroticism, mutual denigration, plausible deniability and fidelity. They're both not saying quite what they mean; since their mutual attraction is suppressed. They'll nevertheless flirt through saying things that undermine the other's gender role in a romantic relationship (marked by replaceability for women/and fakeness for men). Then that denigration allows the mutual recognition of desire - Sally's flirty cake eating and Harry's look of lustful respect.

What makes this a good example of eroticism between patriarchal gender identities is as follows; they both use their expected gender role perfectly. None of the moves make sense unless Harry and Sally both feel intimately that sexual fidelity and commitment morally bind them in any relationship; this provides the ability for those norms to shame and anger. Then we have the eroticism in the scene coming from inflicting those norms "playfully" - with anger, in responsive shame, with sexual desire - toward the other. All desire in that scene is articulated in terms of those norms and their imposition. Tellingly, what allows their desire to emerge is the shame of being seen to transgress those norms - when in fact they've simply posited that those norms apply to the other.

Basically that movie wouldn't make much sense if it was set in a polycule. Would be over in about 15 minutes.

"Yes!" x15 - con accelerando e crescendo...until release...and then... — Amity

I enjoy that scene. Here are altogether too many words about it.

The scene is ultimately conservative, except for the lady at the end. What prompts the whole dialogue is Harry's perceived transgression of female dignity, where female dignity is equated to the role of a traditional housewife. Sally's using the norm in order to undermine Harry's self esteem, out of jealousy, due to her repressed desire for Harry's romantic love, and simultaneously set her own pleasure up as the object of Harry's desire. Harry in turn is visibly flustered but attempting to repress the simultaneous shame and desire. In that regard it embodies the whole "dance" of patriarchal feminine sexuality, rather than subverting it.

Whatever subversion there is in the scene is only Sally's... vocalisation... of the shame/desire bind patriarchal sexuality demands of both of them - she ain't supposed to be that direct about it. Which opens up an interesting space of merely aesthetic adherence to post-patriarchal norms of eroticism and romance, while in fact embodying them. Like radical feminist couples defaulting to patriarchal splits of household labour when times get tough, women letting men "put them on their front again", and men expecting it. The patriarchal generation of desire tends to prove stronger, psychogenically, than transgression against it.

The crone at the end lampshades that dynamic - she's an anonymous middle aged woman. She simultaneously expresses a desire for genuine satisfaction, but it's directed toward the mere emulation of satisfaction. She instead will receive lunch, off screen.

I blame fdrake - the mad, male mod for increasing the momentum of 'The Fight of the Butterflies'. — Amity

Any thread on masculinity is incomplete without authoritarian jouissance.

@universeness @apokrisis - 'mon, be civil.

Hey @Christoff Montnielsensons, welcome to the forum. Writing an OP like that makes your thread very difficult to engage with, please see the site guidelines here and the how to write an OP guidelines here. While we don't usually write OPs of that described calibre, there are useful tips in there to make your post engaging.

Here are several things that make it difficult to engage with your post; your readers won't know what Rule One is, how it relates to trespass, Christianity, the payed train platform or the promises.

Doing what you can to make an OP an argument, or at least a thorough train of thought, makes it easier to engage with. The same guidelines hold for interjections in discussions; try to relate to what your discussion partners are saying! For example, is there a relationship between the "payed train" and @Metaphysician Undercover's reference to "infringement"?

You know of any other authors that combine traditions and sources like Brassier? It's a lot of fun to see the Patricia Churchland next to Meillassoux.

Is it a paradox or is it an inconsistency in what domain expressions quantify over?

1 ) Event X has occurred at time u in Alice's reference frame.
2 ) Event X has occurred at time v in Bob's reference frame.
Plus:
ROS ) u isn't necessarily equal to v.

There isn't any ambiguity there. Or a contradiction. There would be a contradiction if you add:

3 ) All events have a unique time of occurrence.

Or a variant like:

4 ) Every event's outcome is fixed at some time t.

Both ( 3 ) and ( 4 ) go against the "relativity of simultaneity" concept. The unique time of occurrence in ( 3 ) fixes a time in all reference frames (thus necessary equality), which contradicts relativity of simultaneity. The fixed time in ( 4 ) does the same, as it is unique (thus necessary equality).

That uniqueness isn't of a numerical value, since 2 is always 2, that uniqueness construes each event as indexed by a unique time in a shared index set. Relativising time, as an index set of events, to a reference frame is a core posit of special relativity. The "paradox" is just premise smuggling through ambiguous phrasing. ( 1 ) and ( 2 ) quantify within a reference frame's set of time points, 3 and 4 quantify over both index sets.

Edit: or alternatively, it provides a neat demolition of our pre-theoretical space and time intuitions. They don't represent how nature really works.

Keep it civil you lot. @Judaka @universeness

@ "T Clark" also works I think. Remove the space between the @ and the first ".

@T Clark

Been on a nihilism kick recently.

Conspiracy Against the Human Race - Thomas Ligotti
The Trouble With Being Born - Emil Cioran
Nihil Unbound - Ray Brassier

Bunch of papers by Metzinger.

Finally got around to studying Sellars' "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man", a fantastic read. Very demystifying.

Closing this again.

There are many cases where admitting you are in the wrong is advantageous, especially to people close to you. I agree, and often the stakes of these cases are fairly low, so one can afford to be honest. — Judaka

Glad we largely see eye to eye. It's kinda cathartic!

How much of performed morality do you think arises in adversarial contexts vs collaborative ones? By performed morality I mean expressing judgements of what is right/wrong, providing feedback on people's actions, opening yourself to criticism, being reciprocal with an intimate and so on...

What are you saying makes it better? — Judaka

A general principle that informed decisions are better ones. And that this requires accurate presentation of information. If I've shat on someone I don't want to describe it like giving them flowers.

I admire one who acts like this, and I sometimes think people are overly frightened of giving even an inch. Won't tolerate the slightest admission of guilt in any regard, and thus, refuse to "own" any wrongdoing. The entire process of moral judgement seems fixed upon this initial wrongdoing, the attempt to characterise something, for instance, as malicious or deserved makes up the dispute.

Yes. She who comes out of a conflict scenario least covered in shit counts as clean.

Ultimately, to do as you suggest can only work so long as one doesn't instantly lose control of the narrative by admitting any guilt. While I admire it, isn't it generally smarter to obfuscate or contest instead?

It's more likely to get you what you want in the moment, yeah. Trying to act as if "the way of things", "justice" or "propriety" are on your side helps make your side win. So yes, more strategic for many interpersonal goals. Except...

Surely, one should at least calculate the chances of whether their reasoning will be accepted? There are no assurances against the repercussions one would want to avoid after providing a justification. Success might just depend on an ability to be convincing.

success in intimate relationships/friendships maybe. Saying what it was, exactly, but respectfully is required for those. They're less oppositional, right? Having the dominant narrative doesn't matter when the game isn't to dominate.

Banned @Andrew4Handel for consistently evangelising borderline hate speech. This is after two formal warnings and in-thread interventions.

To me, the essential problem here is that one can't admit something is immoral and do it anyway. As if that actually stops anyone, it just means one must come up with justifications. — Judaka

:up:

This frustrates me no end. People judge things as immoral (evil) when they're merely uncomfortable with those things. People are whimsically cruel many times per day. People lie and distort their lives to portray themselves as central characters within them. The act of morally condemning or supporting an act contains an essential confabulation - the declaration that what we ought see has happened has indeed happened, and thus we ought judge it in the manner asserted.

I think it's better to own doing something you know is wrong, and own the moral certainty that's needed in justifying your actions post hoc.

"You hit me!" "You had it coming!" vs
"You hit me!" "Yes! I felt uncomfortable and at the time decided that punching you would let me control you by inflicting pain!"

But...

My second point is that people shouldn't aim to solve contradictions in their views when it comes to morality because you'll just end up believing the lies you create. The absurd moral epiphanies people have to think of just to morally justify a belief formed for personal or political reasons. If you're just going to use mental gymnastics to morally justify your belief, why even bother? Just acknowledge the environment is coercive and unreasonable and make up a lie instead. You'll only end up having a completely nonsensical and incoherent worldview otherwise. — Judaka

I don't know if making life choices or designing institutions to follow principles follows the above logic of confabulation in the same way; maybe you can really play the game of optimising justice without confabulation on the large scale. Like asserting that it would be better for no one to die of poverty or preventable disease. The act of declaring that one might give me moral brownie points (TM), it can nevertheless be a true statement.

I see this as a difference in the interpersonal performance of morality; which is a fountain of confabulations. And the considered implementation of it; in which good in principle goals are relevant.

I admit my response is largely based on what he was saying about 30 years ago. So maybe he applies the simplifying logic of dichotomies and symmetry breaking to brain architecture now? — apokrisis

I'm quite sure you have different concerns!

hese are modelling constructs. What there is instead is a running habit of discrimination where we are continually dividing our phenomenal existence along those lines. At every scale of biological and neurological being, from metabolism, to immunology, to feet acting on ground, we are having to decide what is self, what is other. — apokrisis

I read Metzinger as saying essentially this. Up to and including the self/world distinction as a bodily modelling process with environmental feedbacks.

So no sense of self or knowledge of the world needs to be genetically baked in. A baby’s neurology will self-organise around the central idea that there is the part of the world that is the handled, and the part of its world which is thus the handler. — apokrisis

I don't know what Metzinger says about psychogenesis, though it would surprise me if he believed the self is "genetically baked in" - considering his minimal phenomenal selfhood idea doesn't contain a self as usually construed. And specifically, tonic alertness is construed as an essential component (and precursor of) what we'd normally construe as a self - which is the autonomous cortical feedback of that blooming, buzzing confusion of impulses and reflexes.

This assumes that the 'representational capacity' is indeed part of its 'material constitution', when it is the nature of representational capacity, and whether this can be explained in terms of material constitution, which is at issue! — Wayfarer

I hadn't meant "material constitution" in a substantial sense. Just something the thing does. Like walking. Do you think it would be evidence for consciousness (something like a sufficient condition), even if it doesn't behave like a screen (something like a necessary condition)?

I mean, it doesn't seem fit for purpose in undermining fundamentalism and female genital mutilation; these might be better undermined by variant interpretations of scripture. — Jamal

Perhaps a better strategy.

But being strongly critical of politically ascendent religion is not the same as being critical of belief in God as such — Jamal

It helps though. I had a friend in Iran, there is a sizeable anti-theist anarchist black metal scene there. There'd be no way of mobilising that demographic with alternative interpretations of scripture.

But yeah. Anti-theists and anti-fundamentalists are good bedfellows.

On the other hand, even in those circumstances, I can't really see how militant atheism would be either effective or necessary, since for most Muslims, their religion is just what gives shape and meaning to their lives at the ordinary everyday level. It's a luxury for me to say it, but it still looks to me like religion as such is not the problem, but the social and geopolitical situation in which religious divisions take on greater significance than otherwise. — Jamal

Religion's an enabler of those prejudices though innit. Not in the abstract. But would the world have had Qutub without an amenable Islamic ideology? I doubt it. Female genital mutilation without the religious practices that mandate it? I also doubt it.

Being strongly critical of politically ascendent religion is an attempt to create a liberal notion of freedom, which must be affirmed to make more radical freedom possible. IMO anyway.

If that’s true that’s interesting. Between Chomsky’s comments and a number of lectures/debates I’ve watched, and some SEP reading. — Mikie

As for him being an academic of status: I mean he gets invited for lecture series, teaches a popular lecture course at the European Graduate School, is prolific. I think he gets used in media studies courses as well - I remember him coming up in a lecture series I watched on that years ago. He does turn up in courses.

Also, if you believe Google scholar's citation count, Zizek's book "Violence" has 7 times the citations of Chalmer's paper "The Hard Problem of Consciousness". He's definitely worth a read.