Interesting Links for 19-06-2018
Jun. 19th, 2018 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- ‘Like’ is an infix now, which is un-like-believably innovative
- (tags: language )
- YouTube videos without ads are coming to the UK. For only £12 per month. (I think not)
- (tags: YouTube advertising business )
- Two (satirical) sequels to GATTACA
- (tags: genetics education success funny satire movies )
- Grandma’s trauma – a critical appraisal of the evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans
- (tags: epigenetics genetics )
- Why being left-handed matters for mental health treatment
- (tags: brain )
- War on cannabis ‘comprehensively and irreversibly lost’, William Hague says
- (tags: Conservatives marijuana uk law )
- The Perverse Incentives Helping Incels Thrive at Tech Companies
- (tags: misogyny Technology )
- Speech by Michel Barnier about European Arrest Warrants, police cooperation, and Brexit
- (tags: uk europe law crime police )
- Canada's House of Commons votes to legalise recreational cannabis
- (tags: marijuana legalisation canada )
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- epigenetics,
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- genetics,
- language,
- law,
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- misogyny,
- movies,
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no subject
Date: 2018-06-19 12:27 pm (UTC)"Incel" seems to be undergoing a semantic shift, from "involuntarily celibate person (of any gender and political opinion)" to "involuntarily celibate man with misogynistic attitudes". (This is a shame, because the former filled a useful semantic gap, and you can't even get around it by using "involuntarily celibate" in full to mean the former, because its connotations have been tainted by the pejorative sense.) As such, when she tweets “CEOs of big tech companies: You almost certainly have incels as employees. What are you going to do about it?” it's not surprising if some people take it in the former sense.
There has always been a tendency for popular, sexually successful people to bully unpopular, sexually unsuccessful people. (And of course many of the people doing this bullying are themselves misogynists: the kind who reduce women to a means of measuring their own and other men's worth by how much "pussy" they can "get".) Shaming of "incels" - especially when it involves equivocation over which sense of incel is meant - reinforces this tendency, and allows it to hide under a respectable progressive veneer of anti-misogyny.
There is also a tendency for sexually successful people to assume that if someone else isn't getting any, it must be their fault. Incel-shaming totally reinforces this as well: person X is celibate, and not by choice, therefore they must be an evil incel, and it's no wonder no one wants to sleep with them.
This kind of rhetoric makes all long-term single men targets of suspicion and fear through no fault of their own (ironically, just like they were during the era of gay panic).
It's also very ironic that Pao says "Any conversation that values one group of people less than others is inappropriate for the workplace ... We cannot allow employees to mobilize identity-based intolerance, much less against their own coworkers" when she is mobilising intolerance not against a set of attitudes but against a group of people, a group defined by an aspect of their identity which by definition they are unable to change.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 04:00 pm (UTC)It's not unprecdented for some community or movement to become dominated by a certain category of people, but to go ahead and use the name of the wider group to refer to the subcategory is stereotyping.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 03:49 am (UTC)The incels themselves reject the idea that it's not about women denying them sex, or that women aren't the issue in their celibacy - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/19/incels-why-jack-peterson-left-elliot-rodger
Yes, there's a cadre of non-misogynist self-identifying incels, but many of them are driven out by the community they try to join (see what happens when any women try to join incel communities, for example).
no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 01:24 pm (UTC)I had the opposite quandary -- why people outside that community then started to adopt that term. Embracing it seemed to validate it as a category, and to validate the idea that those toxic communities were the natural representatives of the category, even if people were saying it only to condemn it. And also, when people deliberately blurred the boundaries, they were deliberately spreading the justified ire against toxic resentful people to include anyone who was romantically unsuccessful whether they fit that box or not. I felt like, the core message of "don't be like people who self-identify as incels" was so good, I wasn't sure if it was harmful to quibble with the boundaries[1].
[1] (For I think sometimes you shouldn't quibble, someone ranting about "men", it's clear that they're talking about a common but not universal tendency in men, and correcting them is likely taking away from a valid grievance. Whereas conflating 'people of race X' and 'criminals' we absolutely should resist, even if for some people do experience a strong correlation.)
no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 02:10 pm (UTC)Out of interest, would you say the same thing but replacing 'women' with men? If not, why not?
no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 12:42 pm (UTC)(I do think it would be better to always be precise, but I think complaining about the 'unmarked' majority is more ok in a way other generalisations aren't.)
Although, I'm not sure I have everything right, I'm open to hear counter-arguments if they're not dismissive.
(I might point to exceptions like "men are bad caregivers" which do cause harm, or "men can't do housework/relationship work/etc" which are bad for non-men as much as men, although I've also heard emphatic arguments that there shouldn't be exceptions.)
no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 06:01 pm (UTC)I was pretty sure about what your answer was going to be, I just wondered whether you would justify it by (a) claiming that there were no common but not universal tendencies in women, (b) claiming that there are no valid grievances about such tendencies in women, or (c) bringing in another criterion to distinguish between when you should and shouldn't quibble about valid grievances based on common, but not universal tendencies.
I was pretty sure you wouldn't got for (a), I wondered if you might go for (b), but you chose (c) instead. Noted.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-23 10:16 am (UTC)