Fabricati Diem Pvnc

(I'm holding your hand while i say this)

You might be right.

You might have opinions that you feel have veered off into unacceptable territory. You might have come to feminism with a "fuck all men, we should start treating them like shit, see how they like it" mentality. You might have come to anti-christian nationalism with a "christianity is so patriarchal and imperialistic, anyone who practices it hates me and i hate them" mentality. You might have come to environmentalism with a "there are too many people on this planet, we need a new plague" mentality.

You might have noticed your opinions slipping further and further into radicalization but you might also feel like you started on that path from a genuinely good place and you've had only the best of intentions.

But (and this is the part you need to internalize), it is not too late to course correct.

Whenever I worry that my desire to make a better world has led me to accept opinions, beliefs, rhetoric etc. that I don't actually agree with, I take a step back and ask myself three questions:

First, am I assuming that other people are not people in the exact same way that I'm a person?

The root of all evil is the incredibly tempting tendency to treat other people like they're not exactly as much of a person as you are. So take a beat and ask yourself if you're treating them like they are.

(This can go in both directions by the way! Treating someone like they're less than a person is obviously harmful and dehumanizing but treating them like they're more than a person can lead to objectification, tokenization, and more. Not good stuff.)

Second, am I thinking from a place of love or hate?

The saying "you have to love the oppressed more than you hate the oppressor" will untangle you from so many impossible ethical dilemmas, I promise you.

And third, am I putting my anger somewhere useful?

This is actually a two part question because the first step is asking yourself, "Am I directing my anger towards the person or institution I am actually mad at?" If the answer is no, then you are effectively yelling at a Walmart employee about how evil the Walmart corporation is and expecting them to be able to do something about that.

Then you move onto the actual question, "Am I putting my anger somewhere useful?" If the extent of your civic engagement is getting into fights on social media, I can assure you the answer is no.

So for example...

Let's say you are a girl in your early-mid 20s. You learned about feminism from your friends and maybe a teacher or professor or two and you've accepted the fact that patriarchy is real and harmful to women but you find yourself repeatedly thinking "Ugh, I wish all men could just fuck off and die. I should be able to treat them exactly as terribly as women have been treated since the beginning of time."

This is an understandable thought. I see how you got there. Misogyny is incredibly exhausting to deal with, many men have done exactly zero work to become less misogynistic, and living your life with the crushing weight of "a significant portion of the world's population do not think of me as a full and autonomous person" is very very difficult.

So what do we do about it? What is our response.

Here is where we pause and ask the questions.

First, am I assuming that other people are not people in the exact same way that I am a person?

Am I treating "men" like a monolith in the same way that misogynists treat "women" like a monolith? Yes? Okay then what's the reality? (Hint: it is always more complex than you first think).

For me, the reality is that "men" includes my best friend from college who loves me and the world so much he's spent 12 years learning about feminism and gender theory just so he could be a better person, a better friend. It includes Brennan Lee Mulligan (and Lou Wilson and Zac Oyama and more) who prove to me that it is possible to be a public figure without promoting toxic masculinity. It includes my favorite professor who still checks in on me and my career, even years after I stopped being his student. It includes trans men I want to celebrate and love, both for their trans-ness and their maleness. It includes so many men whom I love and who love me. Which brings us to....

Second, am I thinking from a place of love or hate?

When I have the knee-jerk thought "I wish all men would just fuck off and die" what am I actually saying? I'm saying I wish the world were safer and kinder and better for women. I'm saying I want women to live the lives they want to live, regardless of whatever a hateful man might think about it. I'm saying I want a higher quality of life for women.

And so....

Third, am I putting my anger somewhere useful?

Do I actually think all men should die? Do I think men should be violently eradicated from the planet?

No, that's ridiculous and not useful at all and certainly not coming from a place of love.

So instead I'll ask myself "How can I make my anger work for me?"

Well, what do women need to have a higher quality of life? They need to be paid a fair wage, they need access to high-quality health care, they need subsidized childcare and birth control and abortions and education. So those are the things I will fight for. Those are the things I will talk about.

My dog not 5 minutes later:

Precious Moist, my greatest artwork to this day

I actually don't agree that this is why purity culture doesn't work because having been inside of that culture: it does not require hate (meaning an intention to inflict harm). It only requires a lack of humility.

Purity culture makes one basic assumption: that people have the right to judge each other and inflict punishment unilaterally based on that judgement. This doesn't require hate, indeed it relies on love. When you love someone it is natural to be afraid if you see them making a bad decision. Your instinct is going to be to control them so they don't make the bad decision. If the person is walking in front of an oncoming bus, this is of course just fine. But our brains don't have different pathways for processing "my daughter is about to be hit by a bus" and "my daughter is likely to be raped".

In other words the horror of purity culture for women is not that it causes their fathers to hate them, but that it weaponizes their fathers' genuine love against them. It traps them inside a golden cage whose bars are made from the love of the men in their lives. The father who tells his daughter she must cover her shoulders or she can't go to the dance is not intending to harm her, he is genuinely worried that she will be hurt. But he is still blaming the wrong person and he is acting from a biased perspective about what is good for her. He is still within a culture that teaches him her protests should be ignored, that says if she does not obey him it indicates malice on her part (rather than fighting for her own liberty-gotta love how men are able to understand this concept when it's men versus states but not when it's women versus men). It may not be easy for him to understand that he is wrong, even if he genuinely loves her with all his heart.

And more generally than just sexual morality: it is arrogance which is the main problem rather than hate. People are quick to heap condemnation on others even for the kind of trivial mistakes that all of us make frequently. The vitriol directed at Timothee Chalamet recently comes to mind. I did ballet for thirteen years of my life and his comment was genuinely offensive, but which of us has not said something that sounded fine in our head only to realize we'd accidentally insulted some group of people? It's arrogant to get outraged at him as if this wasn't a common and perfectly understandable mistake to make. Particularly since I am quite sure that most of the people criticizing him would not handle this situation half as well as he did. Immediately realizing you fucked up and admiting to it on live television is a courageous thing to do.

I don't think that "genuinely worried that she will be hurt" is the takeaway here. Fathers who act like that are worried about the prospect that THEY THEMSELVES will be hurt -- by shame. One possibility is that nothing bad will happen to her, but other men will look at her as consumable being OR that these other will look at her and judge her father based on her appearance because he "let her out of the house like that". These men frequently see their daughters as property, so when their property is "violated", that feels like an insult or a strike has been made against them directly, and they're disgusted and revolted. It's akin to how you might feel if someone looked you straight in the eyes and peed on your childhood teddy bear -- disgust, revulsion, horror, betrayal.

Except (in their mind) this "precious belonging" let it happen, possibly even (gasp) ENCOURAGED it to happen with those scandalously uncovered shoulders -- and so his rage and judgment at the perceived insult done to him becomes directed at her instead. For this type of man, his daughter's safety and well-being never crosses his mind -- it is only his own feelings of disgust, revulsion, and shame. In the worst-case scenario, daughters may even be kicked out and disowned, because cutting her out of his life entirely is "easier" than living with and being forced to face a reminder of the bad feelings. The disgust is not coming from a place of love for her -- it's coming from a need to protect himself and save face. If she doesn't get kicked out, then she may be physically or verbally abused -- because externalizing the disgust reaction onto a different person makes it easier to deal with. Again, that's not love. That's not genuine worry for another person. That's obsessive self-protection and defensiveness that's gotten hideously warped and twisted.

"When you love someone it is natural to be afraid if you see them making a bad decision. Your instinct is going to be to control them so they don't make the bad decision."

Sure, this accounts for some behaviors in purity culture, but only the intramural ones -- that is, where one member inside a group is interacting with a fellow insider (someone they "love" -- like family members or two people in a church congregation). The moment that Person B does something that others them to Person A (the one locked into purity culture), Person B stops being part of the in-group. At first this causes the type of anxiety and control attempts that you mention, but the more the behavior continues, the more Person B moves further and further towards the line of acceptability and eventually is ejected into the out-group. And if Person B was never part of the in-group to begin with, then Person A assumes there was no reason to love them at all, and they are valid and worthy target of hate, disgust, revulsion, shaming, and judgment. Which goes right back to what teaboot was saying at the beginning.

When you're in school, the cognitive tasks are there for the explicit purpose of being brain exercises. It's weightlifting. It is FOR building your mental muscles and making you a stronger thinker and planner. "Offloading the cognitive tasks", then, is just Not Doing The Weightlifting. What happens when you pay for your gym membership and just stand around messing around on your phone? Nothing. Nothing happens. Just money leaving your wallet. Nothing else.

Using AI is a short term pleasure that is going to fuck you over in the long term, and by the time you realize that you didn't build the necessary muscles you need for the cognitive tasks required of your ACTUAL JOB (or, like, adult life in general), it's going to be too late to do anything about it... except going back and doing the real work all over again to get you up to speed.

Laypeople (and also a concerning number of scientists) have often got the idea that unethical human experimentation is some sort of ultra-effective super science that would fix all the disease and discover all of the medicine and we only don't do it because it isn't nice (see: every science fiction show ever). No! Jumping straight from abstract theory to human trials is a terrible way to do science. It produces incoherent results and useless observations and nonsensical conclusions. We have pages and pages of historical precedent demonstrating this.

And lots of people have got the idea that totalitarianism is some sort of magic super-government that does all the government stuff really effectively abd efficiently and we only don't do it because it isn't nice. No!!!! "Let's put one idiot in charge and do whatever dumb shit they say" is the worst way to organize any project at all, let alone an economy and a political machine. Fascist regimes are models of corruption, waste, and inefficiency.