Important clarification/FAQ
I am not calling to coddle or excuse the behavior of bigoted men in any way!
I am calling to be kind and understanding to young men (often ages 10-20) who are very manipulable and succeptible to the massive anti feminist propaganda machine. Hope this clarifies that very important distinction. :)
Very good comments that express key points:
- Detailed summary of the situation if you're wondering what's going on
- The rhetorical value of the bear hypothetical and what this means for you
- One example of why the long-term rhetorical value of the hypothetical is poor, in the context of intersectionality
- What does disenfranchisement mean in this context?
- The importance of not asking women to tone down their expressions of fear and frustration
- "But why can't they just say it nicely?"
- The importance of participation in kindness toward young men, specifically outside the context of people speaking their experiences
Edit: This post has now been removed and restored twice. I want to encourage you all:
Be decent to one another
I think this post is a valuable thing given the current state of the Fediverse, please don't fuck it up for us by being toxic in the comments.
It wouldn't work, unless it was pretty heavily moderated a la askhistorians, or what have you. You'd probably just get like, AITA level nuance shit, where people drone on about like, things that are "common sense", or commonly accepted talking points that have the pretense of nuance, but none of the actual weight. Maybe just like, mild centrism.
The thing about valuable, nuanced thought is that it's mildly chafing in that it's foreign and novel, introduces something new into the mix, but not so chafing that it's impossible to accept from the current POV. Social media operates in contextually eliminating extremes, when you automate it all, you either get a system where people only push around stuff that's highly agreeable, or stuff that's extremely disagreeable. Nuance is basically anathema to automated online spaces.
I mean something that satire gets pretty rightfully dogged for a lot of the time, as a schtick, is a lack of nuanced understanding of an issue. Like south park's manbearpig schtick, or maybe like, I dunno, borat. Idiocracy. Office space, maybe, dunno, haven't seen that one, don't know too much satire. Tropic thunder, I guess, right. None of these are really nuanced portrayals of what they're satirizing, because to do so is kind of antithetical to the genre.
Ah, yeah, I see. I think if you're going for that, the satire has to be more well-calculated than most tends to be. It can't just be like, an extreme portrayal of opinions, because then you'll either Poe's law yourself into getting people that agree, or you'll offend perhaps a target audience that needs their mind changed. I think I have noticed that I have had more success trying to kind of like, find a gap there, and then turn it around. Shitting in the street is likely to get you arrested sort of thing, if done as protest, RIP modern diogenes. But filling a cup with your own spit and then drinking it, that's very weird, not something that anyone can really verbalize any logical opposition to, and is offensive. I don't have any like, good political illustrations of that kind of satire, but, I'd go with something along those lines, something that can very obviously point out a flaw.
Yeah see the problem with the first two examples you came up with is that I can count a lot of people I've interacted with that believe that shit. Maybe I need to get new friend groups, but it's really hard to avoid poe's law online, because you can find basically anyone who will believe any random shit you come up with, if you try hard enough. There aren't any strawmen online anymore, there's just viewpoints. Weaponized apathy is pretty good though I like that one. Going to a protest and just like bringing a grill and being like "I just want to grill for god's sake". You've arrived at the function to grill but also to be apathetic in public where people will see your apathy, very nice, very absurd.
Ooh, new strat I just remembered exists that might solve this issue a little bit, self-contradictory satire. It gets everyone really mad, but also it's impossible to conceptualize of what's actually being said without putting in a little bit of thought to actually sus out what's happening there. Being a pro-life fundamentalist christian that thinks of life as happening at conception, but also being early term pro-abortion and pro stem cell research, pro-test tube babies, pro-genetic modification. God creates the man at conception, and we are trying to act more in the image of god, it's only right to toy with life in the same way, maybe. I dunno, just spitballing, but maybe something like that could work as a satire. A satire of nothing, a satire of someone that doesn't exist, I guess. A satire of everyone, total hypothetical.