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welcome to the cspam feminism thread this is a safe place where we discuss gender issues like why it sucks to be a woman and also why it sucks to be a man and also why it sucks to be anything in between as there are no true feminists please do not get hung up on defining what the word actually means if you think an argument being framed as feminist is stupid say its stupid if you think its smart say its smart dont trust labels only your posts
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Nov 17, 2021 23:07
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its whatever you want it to be friend the threads are a reflection of our collective souls not an opportunity to tether ourselves to outdated binaries
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Nov 18, 2021 05:44
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vyelkin posted:I wonder if this thread passes the Bechdel Test by only ever talking about male sexism feminists by definition can never pass the bechdel test how ironic
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Nov 19, 2021 08:25
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i admire your restraint when it comes to self harm
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Nov 19, 2021 18:32
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third wave feminism was cool because it was mostly talking about what second wave feminism got wrong but fourth wave feminism sucks balls because its just the worst parts of both
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Nov 19, 2021 21:39
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why did we need an alternative version of incel thats also a racial epithet whose idea was this
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Nov 21, 2021 05:33
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https://twitter.com/CBSMornings/status/1462050498379460609
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Nov 21, 2021 08:41
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https://mobile.twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1462759297465692162
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Nov 23, 2021 05:14
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https://mobile.twitter.com/taderfxt/status/1463489149013430277
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Nov 26, 2021 05:44
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https://mobile.twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1463725597113339904
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Nov 26, 2021 23:55
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https://mobile.twitter.com/HJoyceGender/status/1464704480872652801
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Nov 28, 2021 08:08
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true or false drag is blackface for transpeople
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Nov 28, 2021 19:12
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https://mobile.twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1465013401613221903
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Nov 30, 2021 01:20
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i wonder sometimes what i would do with unlimited wealth and influence and just cant parse yelling about transpeople on the internet and giving flowers to marilyn manson as a good use of my time like i could do that right now if i felt like it
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Dec 13, 2021 20:12
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under what circumstances would a person ever need this app its very existence seems to imply that its difficult to tell the difference between a cis and a trans woman which kind of sounds like the opposite of terf ideology
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Dec 14, 2021 07:08
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in pure theory terms the question of whether gender is innate or culturally imposed has been around about as long as the concept of gender itself terfdom is what you get when you decide gender is innate but tied inextricably to the biology of sexual organs ironically terfs are actually closer to the transpeople they hate than other feminists theory wise as the ones who think gender is culturally imposed have no reason to give a poo poo if someone decides they want to identify as another completely arbitrary societal gender construct
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Dec 14, 2021 16:16
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could it be that the patriarchy is based on hierarchical power structures rather than physical biology and that genitalia is irrelevant to the forces that oppress women? no it is the transpeople who are wrong
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Dec 15, 2021 09:14
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you could replace transpeople there with third wave feminists and still be accurate in regards to the second wave btw
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Dec 15, 2021 09:15
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yes if its facing forward if its facing backwards youre just a tomboy
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Dec 19, 2021 03:01
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https://mobile.twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1545527960425431042
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Jul 9, 2022 14:04
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https://mobile.twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1546843671626235908 https://mobile.twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1546843938581086209
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Jul 12, 2022 20:37
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https://i.imgur.com/fp9vqhh.mp4 ive never been a fan of this particular kind of feminist rhetoric because this is the logical endpoint and its a legit terrible message to send to stupid young people that they can be a great single parent as long as they try hard enough
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Jul 27, 2022 21:49
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https://mobile.twitter.com/nytimes/status/1559285244045496321
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Aug 15, 2022 23:45
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https://mobile.twitter.com/petersavodnik/status/1560989103004340224
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Aug 22, 2022 01:24
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were literally going through the exact same trends of cultural rot that destroyed sex in japanese culture but no one is willing to acknowledge thats whats going on because lol hentai tentacle rape has been a thing for so long the entire concept has completely ethnicized
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Aug 22, 2022 03:52
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Tjadeth posted:not to blame men for everything, the hilarious thing about all of this is that despite your anecdote sounding basically misandrist this is the kind of crap incels and mras complain about all the time they think its incredible that women are only ever able to find men like this when they would never do poo poo like this and cant grasp why anyone would even want to do poo poo like this whats going on is that our dating culture is profoundly hosed up and actively working against helping people find what they want but no one can actually say this because its a canard of modern feminism that the only men who cant get sex are the bad ones who dont deserve it and everything is so divorced from actual theory at this point that no ones even noticed that this is literally toxic masculinity
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Aug 22, 2022 17:53
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loquacius posted:I really don't want to join this conversation per se but "when did you stop beating your wife" is a famous example of a loaded question in that it is impossible to answer without admitting that one has beaten one's wife, and almost definitely not an accusation in context of ITT hey everybody look at this rear end in a top hat hes mansplaining
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Aug 23, 2022 05:08
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it rules that liberals think us tankies are the doomers when the philosophical construct they live their lives around assumes that most people are irredeemable shitheads
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Aug 24, 2022 19:13
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ive been reading the case against the sexual revolution by the woman discussed in the tweet that promoted pages of discussion and its pretty interesting i just read a chapter that argued the only thing mainstream bdsm acceptance has accomplished is make it much easier for abusive men to maim rape or even murder women and claim as a defense that they were engaging in consensual sex acts
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Aug 27, 2022 03:20
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https://mobile.twitter.com/nytimes/status/1563175726467416064
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Aug 28, 2022 17:00
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https://mobile.twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1565039321052315649
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Aug 31, 2022 22:13
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https://mobile.twitter.com/BritMartinez/status/1565528155909144576
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Sep 4, 2022 02:58
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https://mobile.twitter.com/BritMartinez/status/1566227545514704896
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Sep 4, 2022 19:43
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tokin opposition posted:Ideally nobody should have a sex drive imo you jest but chastity for men used to be a major first wave feminist ideal they thought such social pressures were the best guard against rape and sexual assault thankfully technology encouraged us to make women more slutty instead thus solving the problem once and for all
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Sep 5, 2022 05:35
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https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1576303653690171392
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Oct 2, 2022 03:32
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https://twitter.com/Jezebel/status/1577707586409099264 thread title plz
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Oct 5, 2022 18:41
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for extra fun interpret mermaids to refer to the race of fantasy creatures rather than the charity
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Oct 7, 2022 06:42
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tokin opposition posted:She's right but I'm not sure "lol you can't afford sex workers in your own country" is the way I'd frame this tbh. is it even true that they cant afford sex workers in their own country? even if sex workers overseas cost less on the individual level youre still on the hook for foreign travel fees its always been my impression that the main financial benefit of being a sexpat as opposed to a local creep is the lower rent not that any of them would ever admit this when they can just make racist comments about asian women being demure that white feminists just accept uncritically as true because they have very unrealistic ideas about how sex work actually functions in the west since the predominant image is the sex loving independent contractor in nice hotel rooms and not the drug addict who will give you a blow job for twenty bucks
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Oct 13, 2022 21:18
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Sex work is legal in Australia. The depressing part is that it’s not hard to come up with sensible laws, but we Americans won’t go there. And yes, when I was in Oz, I lived about a six minute walk from Kings Cross, Australia’s most notorious sex district. I would walk through there at least once a day, including at night and never felt unsafe or even uncomfortable (although you did watch your wallet in any busy part of Sydney; there was a fair bit of pick pocketing). And in keeping, high priced real estate was hard by in my ‘hood, Potts Point, and Elizabeth Bay. Here, Hallie Lieberman describes how a supposed war on child porn and sex trafficking is a Trojan horse for a campaign to find new ways to criminalize and restrict sex work. For instance: Sex trafficking and consensual sex work are one and the same, according to the NCOSE [National Center on Sexual Exploitation], which stated in a 2017 amicus brief that “the majority of prostituted persons should be classified as victims of sex trafficking”. An ‘anti-trafficking’ US law that has been accused of endangering sex workers faces a crucial hearing this week. The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA/SESTA), which became law in 2018, claims to hold websites liable for promoting or facilitating prostitution or sex trafficking. But critics say it has actually increased trafficking, as well as threatening sex workers and free speech. Under the law, a website can be sued if a user discusses prostitution or sex trafficking – and the site’s owner can be sentenced to up to 25 years in prison. This means some platforms have introduced bans on all content relating to sex work. Former sex worker and sex-trafficking survivor Justice Rivera told openDemocracy that this is “pushing people to more risky forms of work, like full-service sex work, or something that’s on the street”. Woodhull Freedom Foundation, an organisation that defends sexual freedom as a fundamental right, first sued the federal government over the law in June 2018. The foundation argued that FOSTA/SESTA violates the first amendment, which protects freedom of speech. But a court dismissed the case months later, ruling that Woodhull and its co-plaintiffs, Human Rights Watch and online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, had no legal standing. This decision was overturned by the Court of Appeals in January 2020, and last March a court ruled in the government’s favour. Woodhull is now appealing that decision, and the Court of Appeals will hear the case on 11 January. A 2020 study of the effects of FOSTA/SESTA found that 72.5% of sex workers had faced economic instability since the law’s introduction. In San Francisco, the number of street-based sex workers tripled in 2018 and there was a 170% increase in human trafficking cases. CBS said both spikes appeared “to be connected to the federal shutdown of sex-for-sale websites”. This increased hardship is because websites that sex workers previously advertised on have been shut down, including Craigslist personals, as have websites that were used to verify clients’ identities. Similarly, in July 2018, police in Indianapolis admitted they were having more trouble finding sex trafficking victims because sites used by pimps have been taken down. Sex workers’ groups say they were not given a chance to present their views on FOSTA-SESTA before it became law. Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade group, told openDemocracy that “the adult industry would love to work with the government to find solutions”. In passing the legislation, Congress also overlooked a letter from US assistant attorney general Stephen E Boyd, who raised a “serious constitutional concern” over the fact that FOSTA/SESTA retroactively criminalises actions that weren’t illegal when committed. Boyd also warned the law would make it harder to prosecute traffickers. Police in Indianapolis admitted they were having more trouble finding sex trafficking victims as a result of the law Woodhull’s lawyer, Lawrence Walters, told openDemocracy that those backing the legislation, including several Christian groups, realised that “online adult entertainment is constitutionally protected, so they weren’t going to convince Congress to censor that”. He continued: “But if they created these enormous penalties for anything associated with that kind of content… that’s an awfully good way to get porn off of the internet.” The result has created a loophole in the Communications Decency Act, which shields websites from being liable for what users post. Walters says this has had a chilling effect on free speech, with social media giants moving to ban all sex work-related content. Only a few cases have been brought under FOSTA/SESTA, with only one criminal conviction so far. The owner of CityXGuide, where thousands of sex workers advertised, was in November sentenced to eight years in prison and ordered to forfeit $15m in assets after two teenage trafficking victims were identified on the site. A case has also been brought against Twitter, by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and two teenagers. The co-plaintiffs say the site initially failed to remove a tweet sharing a video of a 13- and 14-year-old engaged in sexual activity. The case has not yet been settled, with Twitter arguing that it cannot remove all such content immediately due to the “sheer volume” of tweets posted every day and that FOSTA/SESTA applies only to “openly malicious actors”. Staff at Woodhull are worried that their website could be subject to the law for discussing sex workers’ rights. Among the most influential groups to lobby for FOSTA/SESTA were Exodus Cry and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, both of which have links to anti-abortion and anti-LGBTIQ causes. Exodus Cry is a California-based Christian non-profit advocacy organisation, which claims to “fight for the freedom of all sex trafficking victims” and seeks the abolition of the commercial sex industry, including online pornography and strip clubs. The organisation was founded in 2008 by Benjamin Nolot, who tweeted in 2013 that “abortion is largely about finding a ‘solution’ for irresponsible gratuitous recreational sex, not ‘women’s rights’.” In an email to openDemocracy, Exodus Cry’s former director of abolition and founder of TraffickingHub (a campaign created by Exodus Cry) and the Justice Defense Fund, Laila Mickelwait said that the organisation is not ‘anti-porn’. She said: “I do want to note and clarify that not I, nor the Traffickinghub movement, nor the Justice Defense Fund, are ‘anti-porn’. Rather, we aim exclusively to stop criminal nonconsensual content such as child abuse, rape, sex trafficking and illegal image-based sexual abuse.” However, Exodus Cry’s data has previously been found to be unreliable. In 2012 it claimed – falsely – that 300,000 children in the US are at risk of being trafficked, or that on average girls get into prostitution at 13 or 14 years old, also a debunked claim. Data on trafficking is often incorrect or exaggerated. In 2015, Republican congresswoman Ann Wagner wrongly claimed that human trafficking is a $9.5bn industry in the US, and in 2018 Democrat congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee claimed there were 79,000 victims of sex trafficking in Texas, likely to be an inflated figure given the National Human Trafficking Hotline identified 1,001 cases in the state that year. Justice Rivera, who helped to collect data for a group that supports FOSTA-SESTA, which she asked openDemocracy not to name, says the methodology used by some anti-trafficking groups is flawed. “Anyone I encountered, we had to count as a victim of trafficking. It didn’t matter if I was just seeing them on the street and they were doing sex work, or they were homeless youth. “If I encountered them, checkmark, they’re a victim of trafficking – so we can keep getting our funding. And that’s the whole field,” said Rivera, who later resigned from the organisation. Exodus Cry is indeed well-funded, receiving more than $2.5m in donations in 2021, including from prominent Christian foundations, according to filings to the Internal Revenue Service. It also received $117,300 in government grants. Similarly, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) received $4.8m last year, including $204,392 in government grants. Like Exodus Cry, the NCOSE – formerly known as Morality in Media – is a conservative non-profit with anti-exploitation and anti-pornography aims, which successfully lobbied Visa and Mastercard to block payments using their cards on pornography website PornHub. Sex trafficking and consensual sex work are one and the same, according to the NCOSE, which stated in a 2017 amicus brief that “the majority of prostituted persons should be classified as victims of sex trafficking”. Patrick A Trueman, the NCOSE’s leader, is a former obscenity chief at the Department of Justice. Trueman has also worked for the American Family Association and the Family Research Council, both of which are designated anti-LGBTIQ hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. NCOSE’s CEO Dawn Hawkins believes fighting porn is a “calling from God” spurred from her time proselytising for the Mormon church in Hungary, while its board chairman, Ron DeHaas, is president and co-founder of Covenant Eyes, a company that produces pornography-monitoring software primarily for a Christian audience. Another board member, political scientist Hadley Arkes, has said that gay conversion therapy proves that homosexuality is unnatural. In an email to openDemocracy, the NCOSE said it is “nonpartisan and nonsectarian because the fight for human dignity knows no political or religious boundaries”. It added: “NCOSE came under new leadership in 2010 and rejects any hateful speech or conduct toward LGBT+ or other marginalised groups.” Leo Vice, a Taiwan-born adult performer, started making porn full-time when he was laid off from his job in the video game industry during the pandemic. When PornHub stopped accepting major credit cards for its premium memberships in early 2021, following Visa and MasterCard’s withdrawal, Vice, like many in the industry, turned to another outlet: OnlyFans. He told openDemocracy: “That kind of became the replacement for people. But the way OnlyFans works, it still doesn’t have the same level of reach the way Pornhub does.” Soon, OnlyFans became a target of the NCOSE, which urged the Department of Justice to take action against the site and pressured credit card companies to stop allowing payments to the site. More than 100 members of Congress sent a letter to attorney general Merrick Garland on 10 August 2021, asking him to investigate the site. Ten days later, OnlyFans announced it would remove sexual material from the site – a decision it reversed the following week after widespread backlash. “When they started attacking OnlyFans with the same playbook, a lot of the performers were able to get in front of it,” Vice said. Critics “were able to paint the picture of Pornhub as an evil corporation, where they weren’t able to do the same thing for OnlyFans because we as performers were humanised.” Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition isn’t surprised by the fight against the commercial sex industry. He explained: “Porn is by nature political… because it challenges the family, challenges heteronormative views, challenges our ideas of gender.” These groups’ leverage doesn’t come from influence and money alone, he said, but also the shame associated with porn. “There are not people in Congress who are willing to stand up and say porn is a perfectly fine piece of entertainment,” Stabile explained. “You’re not going to have Joe Biden say, ‘Oh, it’s fine to jerk off’… So they … allow the demagogues to really control the conversation.” The fight against porn is not just about porn or sex, according to Ricci Joy Levy, president and co-founder of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. Sex is the target because it’s an easy one. “When we see this level of censorship, the only speech that will be left will be government speech, which is what we see in fascist countries,” said Levy. She and Stabile said that anti-porn laws, anti-trans and book-banning laws are all connected. The NCOSE wants to restrict what children can read, with EBSCO (a database of educational materials for school children) and the American Library Association previously featuring in its annual ‘Dirty Dozen’ lists of “mainstream entities for facilitating, enabling, and even profiting from sexual abuse and exploitation”. Politicians in Utah, Texas and Florida have already been banning LGBTIQ+ books that they deem pornographic in public schools. Lawmakers are also equating discussions of transgender identity in schools with pornography. Legislating on sex is not just happening in the US. Levy mentioned the new Indonesian law that criminalises sex outside of marriage. “You can’t look at this across the whole world and say, this is just about adult entertainment. It’s about controlling our bodies, our personal autonomy,” she said. Vice agrees. “We keep painting a picture of how perverse and horrible porn is and how it’s destroying Western society. But let’s look at some of those places [that restrict porn] like Saudi Arabia, and let’s see how equal and free people are in these places. It doesn’t exactly seem like getting rid of porn makes people free over there, you know?”
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Jan 13, 2023 01:33
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Soccer Moms are giving way to Single Woke Females – the new “SWFs” – as one of the most potent voting blocs in American politics. Unmarried women without children have been moving toward the Democratic Party for several years, but the 2022 midterms may have been their electoral coming-out party as they proved the chief break on the predicted Republican wave. While married men and women as well as unmarried men broke for the GOP, CNN exit polls found that 68% of unmarried women voted for Democrats. The Supreme Court’s August decision overturning Roe v. Wade was certainly a special factor in the midterms, but longer-term trends show that single, childless women are joining African Americans as the Democrats’ most reliable supporters. Their power is growing thanks to the demographic winds. The number of never married women has grown from about 20% in 1950 to over 30% in 2022, while the percentage of married women has declined from almost 70% in 1950 to under 50% today. Overall, the percentage of married households with children has declined from 37% in 1976 to 21% today. A new Institute for Family Studies analysis of 2020 Census data found that one in six women do not have children by the time they reach the end of their childbearing years, up from one in ten in 1990. Single adult women now total some 42 million, comparable to the key African American voting bloc (46 million), while vastly larger than key groups like labor union members (14 million) or college students (20 million). The Pew Research Center notes that since 1960, single-person households in the United States have grown from 13% to 27% (2019). Many, particularly women, are not all that keen on finding a partner. Pew recently found that “men are far more likely than women to be on the dating market: 61% of single men say they are currently looking for a relationship or dates, compared with 38% of single women.” There’s clearly far less stigma attached to being single and unpartnered. Single women today have many impressive role models of unattached, childless women who have succeeded on their own – like Taylor Swift and much of the U.S. women’s soccer team. This phenomenon is not confined to the United States. Marriage and birthrates have fallen in much of the world, including Europe and Japan. Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, columnist Emma John observed that, “Singleness is no longer to be sneered at. Never marrying or taking a long-term partner is increasingly seen as a valid choice.” The rise of SWFs – a twist on the personal ad abbreviation for single white female – is one of the great untold stories of American politics. Distinct from divorced women or widows, these largely Gen Z and Millennial voters share a sense of collective identity and progressive ideology that sets them apart from older women. More likely to live in urban centers and to support progressive policies, they are a driving force in the Democratic party’s and the nation’s shift to the left. One paradox, however: Democrats depend ever more on women defined in the strict biological sense while much of the party’s progressive wing embraces the blurred and flexible gender boundaries of its identity politics. Attitudes are what most distinguish single women from other voters. An American Enterprise Institute survey shows that married men and women are far more likely than unmarried females to think women are well-treated or equally treated. As they grow in numbers, these discontented younger single women are developing something of a group consciousness. Nearly two-thirds of women under 30, for example, see what happens to other women as critical to their own lives; among women over 50, this mindset shrinks to less than half. This perception of linked fate stands in contrast to survey results regarding single men, who report that they are increasingly disconnected from each other while women bond more closely. This is not a temporary phenomenon, and it is much bigger than the bohemian movements of the past. There is even a sense in which women are redefining families, and themselves, by choosing to neither get married nor have offspring. The key driver of these attitudes may be universities, where feminist ideology often holds powerful sway. Women now predominate on college campuses. In the late 1960s they were about 39% of college graduates; now they are about 59%. The percentage of full-time female professors has risen dramatically; at the full professor level the percentage has grown by roughly one-third. Women now earn more than half of advanced degrees, not only in education but health and medical sciences, and are making great strides in engineering and law. With this growth, a feminist agenda has become increasingly de rigueur in colleges. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of women’s and gender studies degrees in the United States has increased by more than 300% since 1990, and in 2015, there were more than 2,000 degrees conferred. There are widespread movements to establish women’s centers almost everywhere, even as men are abandoning college and university life in record numbers, and those who remain are hit with messaging about behavior and status from diversity, equity, and inclusion offices along with various student life offices that regularly call them toxic, aggressive, and born misogynists. More recently, anti-family attitudes have become more pronounced. “Queer studies” often advocate replacing the “nuclear family” with some form of collectivized childrearing. Progressive groups like Black Lives Matter made their opposition to the nuclear family a part of their basic original platform, even though evidence shows family breakdown has hurt African American boys most of all. While both married and unmarried women have made impressive gains in the workplace, family status appears to be driving a big cleavage in politics among women. Research shows that having children tends to make one more conservative – critically, divorce does not change this calculus decisively, although it moderates leftism. The AEI 2022 data shows that divorced women – of all age cohorts – tend to be more conservative than liberal. In aggregate, 23% of divorced women are liberal while 31% are conservative – the plurality (38%) are somewhere in the moderate middle. The fault lines, however, run deeper and appear to be generational. The data show that 40% of Millennial women – those born between 1981-1996 – identify as liberal and 20% identify as conservative. For single women of the baby boom generation (born between 1946-1963) the number of liberals drops to 25% and the number of conservative women increases to almost 30%. We are witnessing, as sociologist Daniel Bell noted a half century ago in “The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society,” a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, something fundamentally transforming the foundations of middle-class culture. This echoes what the popular futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970 described as a growing immersion in work at the expense of family life. He envisioned a revolution in marriage that would result in a “streamlined family,” and, if children are in the picture, relying on professional child-raisers. The ideal of long-term marriage would give way, he expected, to more transient relationships and numerous partners at different stages of life. There is a clear economic divergence between married and unmarried women, if for no other reason than that two incomes provide more resources and children present different demands. There are plenty of renting couples and home-owning singles, but married people account for 77% of all homeowners, according to the Center for Politics. Married women tend also to do far better professionally and economically, and their rate of marriage has remained constant while those without spouses have declined by 15% over the past four decades, notes the Brookings Institution. Single-parent households, they find, do far worse. This economic reality impacts political choices. Not part of an economic familial unit, they tend to look to government for help, whether for rent subsidies or direct transfers. The pitch of Democratic presidents as reflected in Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia” and Joe Biden’s “Life of Linda” – narratives that advertised the government’s cradle-to-grave assistance for women – is geared toward women who never marry, with the occasional child-raising addressed not by family resources but government transfers. Critically, unmarried women also tend to be employed heavily in “helping professions” like medical care and teaching, an expanding field even as many traditional male jobs, particularly in manufacturing, construction, and transportation, have disappeared. Whereas high taxes and regulation pose problems in the general economy, women predominate in fields that actually benefit from more government spending. This now includes the once GOP-leaning medical profession, nurses as well as doctors who now lean Democratic. In contrast, heavily male professions like engineers, masons, and police officers tend toward the GOP. These differences are also showing up in backlashes against leftwing education policy, epitomized by such programs as Drag Queen Story Hour for K-12 students. Parents have been at the forefront of movements to replace progressive school board members from Virginia to California. The divisions between married and unmarried women are reenforced and amplified by the geographic divisions in the country – what some call “the big sort”– as Americans increasingly settle into distinct communities of likeminded individuals. Urban centers, for example, are particularly friendly to singles. In virtually all high-income societies, high density today almost always translates into low fertility rates, led by San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Boston. In urban cores like Manhattan, single households constituted nearly 50% of households, according to American Community Survey 2019 data. And with many businesses and cultural opportunities moving away from cities and diffusing and becoming more diverse and family friendly with varied amenities, the polarization between cities and their narrowly left residents and the rest of the nation may increase. According to the recent AEI data, even married women in the Northeast are conservative. This gap, unsurprisingly, widens in the South and Midwest. But the major divides are in terms of type of community. Married women who live in urban settings are evenly split between conservative and liberal, but among single women, just 18% are conservative with 44% liberal (the rest identify as moderate or refused to say). In the suburbs, the key political battleground, 35% of married women are conservative and 22% liberal. For unmarried women, 23% are conservative and 34% are liberal. In rural areas, 42% of married women are conservative compared to 14% liberal while single women divide evenly. Unlike the wave of immigrants or rural migrants who flooded the American metropolises of the early 20th century, urbanites today generally avoid raising large families in cramped and exceedingly expensive spaces. According to analysis by demographer Wendell Cox, households in suburbs and exurbs are roughly four times more likely to have children in their household than residents of the urban core. The lowest birthrates are found in ultra-blue cities and states, magnets largely for singles and the childless. Six years ago the New York Times ran a story headlined “San Francisco Asks: Where Have All the Children Gone?” and stories abound about the Golden Gate City having the fewest children of all major American cities. Many other major cities lost families with children during the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2021, Manhattan saw a whopping 9.5% decline in the number of children under 5 – and many families are not returning. Some of this reflects policies associated with driving housing prices up more than elsewhere. Like other blue states, California has adopted policies that discourage single family housing favored by married couples with children in favor of dense, usually small urban apartments. Given the political orientation of single women, urban areas can be expected to go further left, while the suburbs, and particularly the exurbs, with their concentrations of married families, will likely shift towards the center and right. In the near future, American politics, both national and local, may turn on the degree to which people remain single, and also whether they decide to have children. Right now, the short run demography favors the Democrats. People are getting married at the lowest rate in American history and the birth rate remains depressed. The longer people stay single, and perhaps never marry, the better things will be for the Democrats. The wild card may be age – specifically whether historic patterns hold and women, like men, tend to become conservative as they get older. This is hard to gauge as the evolution has usually taken in place of the context of marriage and motherhood. Unmarried women, in particular, may hold onto their youthful ideology far longer than those whose lives are transformed by marriage and parenting. In many places, particularly on the coasts, single women have become a politically rising force. Twelve women were elected governor in 2022, a record. Maura Healey’s election as the nation’s first openly lesbian chief executive shows that in states like Massachusetts, once a Catholic conservative bastion culturally, there is enough support for single women in politics to overcome traditional reluctance to elect childless and non-heterosexual candidates. “It’s thrilling to see Maura break down historical obstacles to both women and LGBTQ candidates to lead Massachusetts,” says Janson Wu, executive director of the Boston-based GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders. “It really shows the progress we’ve made as a society, in understanding that what counts is really the quality of the leader and not who they are.” Public policy may have a strong influence on this dynamic. The single, the unattached, and the unmarried are already demanding state provisions to guarantee “affordable” urban housing, more money for transit, and steps toward a guaranteed income for individuals – all of which will, in turn, provide incentives to remain unattached. In contrast, the demands of family-oriented voters may be more focused on economic growth, safety, improving basic education, and ways to save money for their offspring. If the policy preferences of singles become more significant, the United States may have to brace for the kind of long-term demographic decline already evident in Japan and parts of Europe. Some suggest that one possible solution, attractive to some on the left, would be to adopt the “Nordic way” which encourages reproduction (if not marriage) by transferring much of the burden of child-raising from families to the state. Other countries have also adopted pro-birth policies – like free or low-cost childcare, or even cash payments. These schemes have been applied in places as dissimilar as Poland and South Korea, as well as Quebec. But according to United Nations data, all of them, including the Scandinavian states, still suffer well below replacement rate fertility rates. Some women in particular embrace singleness not just as a lifestyle, but a chance to redefine the role of women in society. Author Rebecca Traister, herself married with children, has followed this movement, calling it a “a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications … a wholesale revision of what female life might entail.” “We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration,” she adds, “and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.” The likely best way to overcome the demographic decline may lie instead in boosting the economic prospects of the next generation. This includes steps that could allow for easier purchase of homes or lower cost apartments suitable for families. As Richard Florida, among others, has suggested: Efforts should be made to lower housing prices, which correlates to higher rates of fertility. Reforms that encourage home-based businesses could spark greater fertility rates, as historian Alan Carlson suggested almost two decades ago. The rise of home-based businesses and work, now taking off, offers a unique opportunity for increased family formation. Indeed a recent study by the Federal Reserve of Kansas City suggests that the current rise in remote work could spark a family friendly housing boom, as people can live further away, and spend more time being parents. For that to occur, however, it would require that such housing can be constructed, which would require loosening of regulations that seek to restrain construction both in cities and suburban areas. Ultimately the question remains what kind of society Americans want to have. Historically, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, the family perspective has generally been prevalent and tied intimately to the sense of a common polity. But as the country changes and becomes ever more single and female-influenced, the historical pattern is likely to be challenged and significantly modified.
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Jan 18, 2023 15:41
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