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Note: I am against ALL genital mutilation of females, males and intersex. Please don't interpret this post as supporting any of these crimes.

Everything I have posted below is factual; but it's supposed to be ironic and educational - to help folks clear up their confused thinking around this issue. Thanks

Genital Autonomy for all - Intersex, Male & Female


> Are there any pro-circumcision feminists here? If so, why is that your position?

Yes, I'm pro-circumcision. I mean you're talking about female circumcision right?

Like male circumcision, there are plenty of peer reviewed studies that show female circumcision is not a barrier to sexual orgasm and enjoyment. Some studies show that orgasm and enjoyment are reduced; and some show no effect.

You'll often come across members of the medical community saying that FGM has no "health" benefits, and if women have their clitoris amputated, then their sex life comes to an end. Then they say that MGM has lots of "health" benefits and that men's sex life is not affected.

But it's a myth that many women who have suffered FGM are unhappy and cannot have great sex lives. That's why they queue up to have their daughters' circumcised. Plus there are many so-called potential "health benefits" - such as a 50% reduction in HIV/AIDS.

The visible part - the glans clitoris - is only a small part of the whole clitoris. So when a woman suffers partial or total amputation of the external clitoris when undergoing FGM, only a small part of her clitoris is removed. Thus she often can enjoy a full and satisfying sex life.

The truth about the female clitoris

Learn how large the female clitoris is; and how the external glans clitoris is just a small part of it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/28/cliteracy_n_3823983.html
http://womenshealth.about.com/cs/sexuality/a/clitoraltruthin.htm

http://www.amazon.com/The-Clitoral-Truth-Secret-Fingertips/dp/1583224734

Female Circumcision & Health Benefits

"Stallings et al. (2005) reported that, in Tanzanian women,
the risk of HIV among women who had undergone FGC
was roughly half that of women who had not; the association
remained significant after adjusting for region, household
wealth, age, lifetime partners, union status, and recent ulcer."

http://www.iasociety.org/Default.aspx?pageId=11&abstractId=2177677

Note: when it's found that circumcising female genitals reduces HIV/AIDS it's called a "conundrum" rather that a wonderfully exciting "medical" opportunity to reduces HIV/AIDS. This deeply sexist attitude must cease.

"National Bureau of Statistics, Tanzania - 50% reduction in HIV/AIDS in women who have have parts of the genitals amputated:"

http://www.tzonline.org/pdf/femalecircumcisionandhivinfectionintanzania.pdf


"International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology" — a peer reviewed journal of international renown:

Female genital cutting in this group of women did not attenuate sexual feelings:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0528.2002.01550.x/abstract

"The Journal of Sexual Medicine" — a peer reviewed journal of international renown:

Pleasure and orgasm in women with Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17970975

"The New Scientist" (references a medical journal)

Female Circumcision Does Not Reduce Sexual Activity:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2837-female-circumcision-does-not-reduce-sexual-activity.html#.Uml2H2RDtOQ

"Journal of General Internal Medicine" — a peer reviewed journal of international renown:

Female "Circumcision" - African Women Confront American Medicine

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1497147/

Medical benefits of female circumcision: Dr. Haamid al-Ghawaabi

http://islamqa.info/en/ref/45528

"Pediatrics (AAP)" — a peer reviewed journal of international renown:

Genital Cutting Advocated By American Academy Of Pediatrics

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/102/1/153.shortLike male circumcision, there are plenty of peer reviewed studies that show female circumcision is not a barrier to sexual orgasm and enjoyment. Some studies show that orgasm and enjoyment are reduced; and some show no effect.

Genital Autonomy for all - Intersex, Male & Female

That was a pretty disappointing debate for me. Some good points were made, but there seemed to be a lot of hand-waving and naked assertions all around. Which I suppose is understandable, given the time constraints and there being five participants.

Some points of contention for me:

• Economy of sex. I understand the attraction of modelling sex and relationships on a societal scale in economic terms, but I'm not convinced that we can draw any meaningful conclusions about the motivations of individual participants from these models. Women say they're not happy with the dating scene, and so do men, so there's definitely something wrong. But who's the consumer in this case and what is the product? The video hedged that women want sex too, and then proceeded to cast men as more or less unilateral "consumers". Women, on the other hand were cast as sole (or main) "consumers" of relationships and emotional connection. This seemed wholly unfair to either sex, and really bothered me.
  
  
• I found the bit about porn and how it affects women's behaviour and men's expectations to be, again, ridiculously one-sided and very shallow. Our evolving understanding of sexuality is a result of continuous discourse on what stimulates us, how we process pleasure and what forms of engagement are societally permissible. To a large extent I'd argue that porn is a reflection of this evolution, and not the principal driver of it. Casting women as receptors of social influence, and men as projectors is again a disservice to us all. This, coming from a man who is fairly vanilla sexually, and has been friends with very open women for most of his life. I'd say that some women seem to be quite enthusiastic givers to receptive males.
  
  
• Stay at home dads. I agreed with quite a few points made about what stands in the way of it, but couldn't identify with either the pro or anti-SAHD positions expressed in this video. On the one hand I found the shrink's dismissal of it poorly justified. On the other, I think that fully supported fatherhood shares all the problems that motherhood has, and perhaps a few more. Are women today raised in a way that would make them feel responsible for the continued well-being of their husband? A majority of divorces are initiated by women, so would it be a a good bet for a man to hedge his future on a stable relationship? Going beyond the economic factors, the panel completely missed the opportunity to talk about what expectations are to be put on housekeeper husbands. In her research on women and shame Brene Brown found that perfection in housekeeping is a powerful shaming strategy used against women. And in my experience many women have ridiculously high expectations of, say, cleaning around the house, order etc. Most guys are much more tolerant of messiness. Do we start inflicting the same shame on men, so that women will be happy to keep a stay at home husband? How about free time? There is a lot of negativity towards women who'll spend their time at home watching daytime TV, but at it's nothing compared to "He's a gamer deadbeat, drop his ass and find a real man".
  
  Anyway, thanks for linking to this /u/schnuffs. I hope it starts an interesting debate here. Before I leave, here's an interesting article about masculinity by a guy who used to be heavily invested in the PUA community, but has moved away from it, and gives dating/relationship advice from a slightly different perspective these days. I'd be interested to read what FeMRA debates has to say about it.

This will be the third such large-scale social transition.

The first was from foraging to agriculture - humans had to transition from hunting game/foraging and working relatively few hours to working the soil and working many hours.

Then the industrial transition describe here.

The lives of agricultural and industrial people look utterly alien to foraging people. (Arguably, the story of genesis is an allegory about the transition to agriculture). For example, from Scott Alexander's review of Empire of the Summer Moon:

> So there was a bit of traffic back and forth between America and Comancheria in the 19th century. White people being captured and raised by Comanches. The captives being recaptured years later and taken back into normal white society. Indians being defeated and settled on reservations and taught to adopt white lifestyles. And throughout the book's description of these events, there was one constant:

>All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.

>There was much to like about tribal life. The men had no jobs except to occasionally hunt some buffalo and if they felt courageous to go to war. The women did have jobs like cooking and preparing buffalo, but they still seemed to be getting off easy compared to the white pioneer women or, for that matter, women today. The whole culture was nomadic, basically riding horses wherever they wanted through the vast open plains without any property or buildings or walls. And everyone was amazingly good at what they did; the Comanche men were probably the best archers and horsemen in the history of history, and even women and children had wilderness survival and tracking skills that put even the best white frontiersmen to shame. It sounds like a life of leisure, strong traditions, excellence, and enjoyment of nature, and it doesn't surprise me that people liked it better than the awful white frontier life of backbreaking farming and endless religious sermons.

However idyllic the word "artisan" seems, it's nowhere near as idyllic as the prospect of living like a foraging person is.

Quoth Robin Hanson from the introduction to The Age of Em:

> Like most of your kind, you probably feel superior to your ancestors. Oh, you don't blame them for learning what they were taught. But you'd shudder to hear of many of your distant farmer ancestors' habits and attitudes on sanitation, sex, marriage, gender, religion, slavery, war, bosses, inequality, nature, conformity, and family obligations. And you'd also shudder to hear of many habits and attitudes of your even more ancient forager ancestors. Yes, you admit that lacking your wealth your ancestors couldn't copy some of you habits. Even so, you tend to think that humanity has learned that your ways are better. That is, you believe in social and moral progress.

> The problem is, the future will probably hold new kinds of people. Your descendants' habits and attitudes are likely to differ from yours by as much as yours differ from your ancestors. If you understood just how different your ancestors were, you'd realize that you should expect your descendants to seem quite stranger. Historical fiction misleads you, showing your ancestors as more modern than they were. Science fiction similarly misleads you about your descendants.

(If you want to feel both of these things at once, try reading science fiction written in the '50's)

Point of all this: we can't look to the past as a guide to how we'll be in the future.

I hate typing out a long comment and not getting a reply, and you made some good points, which I'd like to respond to. Since I'm middle-aged and male, I have a unique perspective on this issue, and I also want to share that. First one, then the other.
 
First and foremost, despite being married to the love of my life, whom I have known for over a decade, and who has allowed me to be "plugged in" to a social network of peers who I would not have the pleasure of spending time with otherwise, I am incredibly lonely. I don't think I'm alone on this...I think most people who spend time on message boards and platforms like this are. You posited that the article says It's dangerous for a man to reveal his vulnerability in this regard. Well, I'm not worried about consequences here or elsewhere, and I think this point misses the mark a bit.
 
Being lonely often drives you to behavior that increases loneliness. I read this first in this excellent book. The article says this, too: you are more self-conscious at social gatherings because you think that people don't like you. Kanye West said it better in song. Put simply people who fail to make connections with others tend to be very good at not making those connections. I think this is because they become needy, which is an extremely unattractive quality, especially if you are male.
 
You wondered if shut-ins were isolated because of poor health, and I think your emphasis on "which way the causal arrow points" misses something very important: people who have risk factors for poor health tend to be in better health than those who are socially isolated. Malcolm Gladwell's "The Outliers" starts with a neat anecdote to illustrate this point: an epidemiological study of transplanted Italian immigrants shows that they have almost no history of heart disease. Several hypotheses are tested, but none of them hold up. Do they exercise more? Nope...and they smoke like chiminies. Do they eat better? Their diet consists of fatty foods and pastries. Is there anything exceptional about them? Yes...they kept their language and culture intact by spending time together. Gladwell is trying to make a different point here (that outliers can be instructive in challenging how we think about success), but I think the example is illustrative, just the same.
 
Lastly, I want to quibble a bit about how you receive the author' s argument that loneliness is due to "poor socialization." You may not have a strong opinion on this, so if I'm putting words in your mouth, it is not intentional. I'm trying to tease out a larger point and I think I'm going to approach it by talking about some of my experiences below.

***

This is the part where I talk about my experience. It is going to contain a few asterisks points that I won't elaborate on, unless you or someone else has questions. It also serves as a handy list of "reasons I will never work at Google."
 
Now then:

• In my experience, women tend to form closer and more intimate relationships than men. (That is, the women in my peer group are much closer than the men.) I have no idea why this is, and I'm not really interested in the reasons. I'm happy for them, even if I wish I was closer to my male peers in my social circle.
  
  
• In my experience, the women in my peer group have much more turbulent and drama-ridden relationships. I know two women who are not talking to each other, and no one knows why. When it comes down to it, I have a lot of qualities that make me unlikable, and that probably allow me to sabotage the friendships I would hope to form, thus giving me a measure of control over something that I know I can't control. I'm sure at least some of the men in my peer group have said unkind things about me...and yet, I so don't care. The guys are all civil in a way that, if you picture us like robotic Stepford husbands, would be unnerving.
  
  
• I've given some thought into why I'm not able to form closer friendships with the men in my group, and my admitted lack of social graces aside, I noticed something: they all work very hard at being devoted and loving partners to the women in their lives. As a married guy, I can say that no one prepares you for the sheer amount of work involved in initiating and maintaining a relationship. All of is worth it, though. Put simply, I don't care what other men think of me. I care what the women in my peer group think of me quite a bit. I hope you find that comforting or sweet, but I only care what you think if you don't have a Y chromosome.
  
  
• (Here I am responding to the last point above.) The feminist movement has been around long enough that it's effects on how men are socialized simply cannot be ignored. The author here seems to argue that "not enough" is being done or that what is being done is not working and must be changed. But I was encouraged to show my feelings growing up, and so have most men in the Western world been. So why so many male loners? This is just a guess, but if you are going to make it as a guy, you need to have a thick skin and be able to live with not getting what you want. You will be expected to pursue it, and no one will let you think that your failures belong to anyone other than you. If this seems like a broadside to the concept of "privilege," it isn't...that concept itself ignores the fact that there are few desirable traits among men that make a small percentage of men successful, and the rest of us are losers. I think It's nice to that someone wants to pay attention to us losers, but...well, we can't all be winners. Some of us have to find other ways to get our needs met. On that note, if you read any of this, thank you!
  
  
• Sorry, one last note: men don't get to have as many intimate relationships as we'd like, but there is something laudable about male friendship that I want to bring up: with all of my male friends who I have known past and present, if I reach out to them and they respond, we will pick up right where we left off, as if there hasn't been a break in communication. There is no animosity aimed at whoever broke off contact, and we are genuinely interested in each other's lives. I was trying to describe male friendship in my mind, and this scene from "The Town," which properly presents loyalty instead of no-drama, but which also shows how a lot of guy friends conduct their dealings with other men as if they were on the same wavelength, without any need for explanation:
  
  >Doug MacRay: I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.
  >James Coughlin: ...Whose car are we gonna' take?
  
  

>A constitution prevents certan laws from being written and invalidates certain laws (generally very new ones, the first time their application is appealed up to the highest court). What it does not do is induce the passing of new laws.

I gave you an example with Canada where the SCC compelled parliament to write new legislation concerning assisted suicide. They also compelled government to write legislation concerning prostitution. Governing from the Bench is an academic book by professor Emmett Macfarlane about the role that the SCC and the courts in general play in legislation and governance in Canada.

Beyond that, norms can be a prohibition on certain actions or behaviors. Striking down legal restrictions in line with social norms is just as much changing a law as writing new legislation.

>Laws are written by elected representatives, those elected because they reflect the norms of the country. The intention is that any law passed reflects the norms of that country.

That's certainly the idea in theory, but it doesn't always work out like that. Access to political institutions and representatives is a huge and often forgotten factor. A 10 year study by two political scientists found that upwards of 90% of new legislation in municipal, state, and federal legislative bodies benefited those in the top 10% of wealth, providing some evidence for a theory in political science and sociology known as elite theory. Elite theory holds that pluralistic democracy is either a utopian folly or can't be realized within a capitalist system where those in positions of economic privilege and power can exert a large amount of control over the legislative and policy decisions of governments.

But even if you reject that wholesale, depending on the political structure that's being dealt with. For example, Canada has a parliamentary political system with three major parties. A minority government may very well compromise with the third place party and present and pass legislation against certain social norms in order to ensure that third party's vote. Or the opposite might happen. In Canada a majority government may only have a plurality of the popular vote but a majority of the seats in the HoC. That means that they are able to pass legislation unopposed (due to strong party loyalty) that could very well be against collective beliefs and values of a majority of the populace.

There are more ways than that. Access to representatives and political institutions can be exceptionally useful for unpopular legislative changes, which can be done through lobbying. The role of funding and campaign financing has the potential to present a conflict of interest for politicians. The list goes on and on.

>A constitution is a force against change. It might prevent a law being written despite being reflective of the country's norms but it cannot create a law that contradicts them.

But it is changing the law, which is what this whole debate has been about. It's not just about writing laws, it's about changing them.

>The rarity of referendums and (in some places) requirement for more than a simple majority are further forces against change. They mean that norms must swing even further before certain aspects of the law will change.

But referendums aren't the norm for most legislative, legal, and political issues. Pointing to the fact that they exist does not in any way undermine or rebut anything that I've said at all.

I think that's probably the quote that influenced Jung to come up with his anima and animus concepts. I can't really comment on the animus idea, but anima-projection as described in this book is a fairly accurate representation of the ways that I've crushed on people in the past- and the concept of projection itself as something not necessarily to be avoided but rather understood to better get in touch with parts of yourself that you might not access on a day to day basis was useful to me.

Nietzche and Jung were basically talking about how the norms of romantic love shape masculine psychology. "Romantic Love" as a cultural institution is heteronormative (not to say that love is exclusively heterosexual, but non-hetero practitioners of love have had to map their own experiences without cultural guides for a long time)- so rescuing that quote might be difficult. At least, it's not something I, as a heterosexual, feel qualified to do- and Robert Johnson (the jungian scholar whose book I just referenced) was himself a gay man who loved jung but seemed to advocate a departure from romantic love for everyone, rather than trying to figure out ways to refine theories of projection for non heteros.

> I'm unable to even try to get a diagnosis. Yes, try to get.

You won't actually be able to get a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (AS), it doesn't exist anymore. AS was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in May 2013, I covered some of this in a reply to the post on WHO removing some gender based disorders from the ICD.

In Australia the removal of AS has led to people who would be otherwise diagnosed with AS be diagnosed as having social communication disorder. As social communication disorder isn't recognised as an autism spectrum disorder, there isn't any funding or additional support available to those diagnosed as having it.

> Oh and, the HUGE absence of resources for aspies over 18. It's as if the system assumes it's a "kid thing" and that you either die as a kid (like a lot of orphan diseases) or that symptoms no longer exist as adults.

As someone who wasn't diagnosed with AS until I was 30, this is a big issue. While I am successsfully able to manage without needing professional support, there are aother people I know who can't.

That said, there are a lot of good books and other resources out there. Two that I have found invaluable are Tony Attwood's The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome and Ashley Stanford's Asperger Syndrome and Long-Term Relationships. Being a partner and parent with AS has it's challenges but being a good partner and great father is well worth the effort.

For a more light hearted look at things, David Finch's The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man's Quest to Be a Better Husband is a great autobiography which I also learned a great deal from.

If you have any questions or want someone to talk to, you just need to ask.

Sorry, I was getting kind of burned out on this sub (and reddit in general) for a while, and skipped out on this conversation, but I didn't mean to leave you hanging on all of this.

>Might be I dont know, do you have a source for that? How large was the difference?

I'm not aware of any study that addressed it at all (although some research addressed in this book seems to imply it,) but I wasn't trying to raise specific points of data I'm aware of which firmly establish cultural influence on IQ. I'd stepped back to questioning what sort of evidence might be persuasive to you. The discussion might not be resolvable with the pool of data we already have access to, but we should at least be able to address whether we have realistic expectations about what the data should show in the event of either hypothesis being true.

>Something with very large effect size, best a very quick improvement correlated with adoption of another culture (eg a religion that spreads) while controling for genetic replacement. If germany became islamic without the population being replaced and suddenly test scores rise to heaven or dank down in the low 80s it would definitely be worth looking into.

This doesn't strike me as a reasonable threshold to expect the evidence to reach in the event that the hypothesis of IQ having a significant cultural element is true. It's very, very difficult to dramatically change cultures so quickly. Is Germany became Islamic without major adjustment of demographics (already unlikely,) it would be an expression of Islam which bore heavy influence from existing German culture.

This is not to say that if cultural influences on IQ are real, we shouldn't expect to see IQ changes at all in response to cultural changes. But cultural influence on IQ being real doesn't mean rapid alterations with large effect sizes any more than evolution being real means rapid macroscopic alteration of species.

>Yeah, we would, but we do not because we do not know of any. That is kinda my point. The ones we know about are not trivial- having a schoolwhere they teach you to read and count probably helps a lot. After that improvements are very hard to come by afaik.

I'm not arguing in favor of cultural influences on IQ because I think adjusting culture is a convenient lever for creating improvements in IQ. Deliberately creating significant alterations in culture is incredibly difficult, so it would be a hard lever to use even if a huge proportion of all variation in IQ were cultural. I'm arguing in favor of cultural influences on IQ because I think the weight of evidence favors it.

> Do you have any evidence that it was feminists who are responsible for the greater knowledge of female sexuality, instead of say, pornographers, or people like Alfred Kinsey?

I think feminism paved the way for our current understanding of female sexuality in a way that pornographers or Alfred Kinsey could not because it brought real female perspectives into the mix for the first time. It's impossible to understand your own sexual organs and desires as a woman when everything you're exposed to is filtered through a heterosexual male lens. Watching porn doesn't teach you shit about sex, and it gives you a skewed perspective of your own sexuality. Over the last 25 or so years, with the onslaught of sex positive feminism, women and girls can talk about their sexuality for the first time without the risk of becoming pariahs. Having a female perspective for the first time in history has drastically changed the sexual landscape.

I should note that there can be a big difference between feminist literature that discusses female sexuality and literature for women that discusses female sexuality. I would not recommend Cosmopolitan Magazine as a resource for young girls. My (sex positive feminist) mother subscribed me to New Moon instead of Cosmo when I was growing up and that gave me perspective that often differed from my female friends who were subscribed to Cosmo. I also grew up with the feminist gURL.com websites for girls. I was a little too old for their sex ed book for girls when it came out, but I definitely think it shaped girls' understanding of their bodies. Jessica Valenti is definitely relevant to this conversation as well—I read The Purity Myth when I was in college, but I think it's an invaluable resource for young girls who are dealing with slut shaming and confusion about their virginity (which is definitely a feminist issue). The website Scarleteen is a sex positive feminist sex ed resource for teenagers that also comes to mind.

These examples don't prove my conjecture that sex positive feminist resources for girls have shaped our current understanding of female sexuality, but I will say this: if you barred a girl's access to these resources and only allowed her knowledge of sexuality to be shaped by porn, popular media, and science, she wouldn't have any close to a decent understanding of her body and sexuality. An alternative lens with which to view these things is necessary and increased access to that lens in recent years has contributed to a completely different understanding of sex.

I was viewed in the past few years as a lunatic for comparing SJWs to Hitler Youth.
I must be the crazy one.
Hitler's Children is a great 5 part documentary film, accurately mirroring our times. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2359085/
Hitler got the youth to rebel against the older people, with bat wielding gangs of youth. The secret truth is finally out. Thank you BBC .
''Eighty-two percent of German boys and girls between the ages of ten and eighteen belonged to Hitlerjugend--Hitler Youth--or one of its affiliates by the time membership became fully compulsory in 1939. These adolescents were recognized by the SS, an exclusive cadre of Nazi zealots, as a source of future recruits to its own elite ranks, which were made up largely of men under the age of thirty. In this book, Gerhard Rempel examines the special relationship that developed between these two most youthful and dynamic branches of the National Socialist movement and concludes that the coalition gave nazism much of its passionate energy and contributed greatly to its initial political and military success.''
'' Rempel center his analysis of the HJ-SS relationship on two branches of the Hitler Youth. The first of these, the Patrol Service, was established as a juvenile police force to pursue ideological and social deviants, political opponents, and non-conformists within the HJ and among German youth at large. Under SS influence, however, membership in the organization became a preliminary apprenticeship for boys who would go on to be agents and soldiers in such SS-controlled units as the Gestapo and Death's Head Formations. ''
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Children-Hitler-Youth-SS/dp/0807842990

Edit: In 1920, Adolf Hitler, authorized the formation of a Youth League of the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) based upon the principles of an earlier German youth group known as as the Wandervögel. The Wandervögel (translated as "Migratory Bird") were the German equivalent of the Boy Scouts of America and the World Organization of the Scout Movement.
Wandervögel members had an idealistic, romantic notion of the past, yearning for simpler days when people lived off the land. Wandervögel members distinguished themselves by wearing shorts and hiking boots rather than the starched shirts and creased trousers of the middle class. They believed in the importance of rediscovering nature without any modern conveniences. They sang old German folk songs around the campfire and greeting each other by saying "Heil."
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/hitleryouth.html
https://www.nationalholocaustcentre.net/the-league-of-german-girls
https://www.plu.edu/archives/hitler-youth-materials/
Edit: permanently banned for this comment from this sub. See ya!

Super well written and useful post. Thank you. Saved.

I've also read Brene Browns thoughts on this and it's pretty clear that shaming is one of the most powerful ways of breaking someone down. If you're a man, or woman reading this and feeling shame about yourself, your personality, looks, interests, ideas, sexuallity etc.. I highly recommend reading Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. Not only will this teach, relieve and inspire you te be kinder to yourself but also to others. I'm a man who would never read new-age books like this but got it recommended and it's one of the most important books in my life.

Now back to the subject: Yes, shaming does not work and just like women revolted against being shamed for voicing their concerns, so will men.

Actually, I have read all her other works! And I like the first four books of the series she wrote (the first book of that series was her first book) a lot more than I like Uprooted. Though I do really like Uprooted! Her one previous series is military SF (well, military fantasy)/alternate history--it's set in the Napoleonic era (early 19th century) where, besides the Navy, there's also the Aerial Corps, consisting of crew-manned dragons. Books 1-4 are AWESOME. (Book 5 is interesting and good, Books 6 and 7 are okay, not great--Book 8, which is the last book in the series, is coming out sometime this year.)

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

Tangential, but on-point. I'm reading this currently. There's a chapter in there about the topic of how various organizations consider eligibility to compete in the women's divisions of various sports. Pretty fascinating stuff. Illustrates your point about the danger of discussions around sex classification - Maria Martinez-Patino from Spain, Caster Semenya from South Africa, and so forth. On the other hand, it also reinforces my point that the differences we have codified as 'sex,' however precisely or imprecisely, do have meaningful objective impacts that we need to come to grips with on their own terms.

Having your identity challenged is not cool. Ms. Martinez-Patino was evidently informed by the Spanish Athletic Federation in 1986, "you are not a woman" after being excluded from the Olympic team. That's horrible to put it mildly. Your ambitions are crushed, your identity is challenged, and an allegation of cheating is hanging over your head, all unwarranted (she was later re-instated, if you're unfamiliar with the story...but by then her training had gone on hiatus for a year while she fought it out and she missed qualifying for the '88 Olympics).

On the other hand, you have to stop and consider why we have women's exclusive competitions to begin with. Just to zero in on CAIS...according to Epstein's book, the prevalence of it in the general population is something like 1 in 50,000. But in the top tiers of women's athletics, the prevalence is something like 1 in 400. There is something real, meaningful, and deeply biological there. The goal of having women's sports to is to attempt to recognize objective a priori reality, and still empower sport, with it's implicit importance of a level playing field. I mentioned this book before in a different thread. I don't know what to say about the topic other than "I'm glad I'm not the person who has to decide how to handle those decisions." Because it sure doesn't look like there's a way to be right, just, and compassionate all at the same time.

I recommend the book.

> As I never seen any feminist say anything good about masculinity

Do you think you might be overgeneralizing here just a little bit? <cough, rules of the sub, cough>

Perhaps there is some truth to this in that feminists generally would argue that anybody can have any trait, and thus calling certain traits masculine isn't helpful. But toxic masculinity definitely refers to an extreme expression of masculinity that is, well, toxic. One of my favorite authors, Junot Diaz, won a Pullitzer for describing this type of machismo, in fact, describing it so convincingly a lot of readers believe he's celebrating it rather than condemning it (I'd disagree).

You don't think feminists like, say, Ned Stark? He was a pretty archetypal manly, manly good man's man.