@p If you see a video in which real, actual women are being extremely dehumanized on camera and your reaction is to make a joke about it, this tells me that you're a dangerous person, as you evidently lack the human emotion called empathy for the women in that video.
It's like seeing a lynching of a black person by KKK members and deciding to make a joke about it. It's like watching a Nazi concentration camp documentary and making a joke about it. Your next move will be to say "this is nowhere as bad" and to mention Godwin's Law.
We're literally talking about a video in which you see nothing other than one body part of a group of women, who have been put into a physically constraining device that exposes no part of their body except for that one sexualized body part sticking out of a hole. (Oh and photos of their faces so the men know who their target is, which I guess adds some sort of thrill? I don't know and I won't think about it too hard.) This is peak dehumanization.
It's to be assumed that the men taking part in this are rapists and sadists, and that the women in question most likely have to suffer routine sexual violence by the men who do this to them for nothing other than entertainment and money. Not even to mention the effect it has on society to produce such material as entertainment. In a larger context, this connects to the endemic of sexual violence and discrimination women have been facing in Japan for who knows how long (probably millennia, much like in other parts of the world), so yes, I've decided to make an analogy between this and white supremacism in the United States and anti-semitism in Nazi Germany, and I'm not backing down from that analogy.
Really, this is fucked up beyond all belief but because it's "lol so absurd" and so common, nobody even sees it. If everything goes well with improvements to women's rights, I very much see society looking back at things like this in 200-300 years and looking down on us as primitive savages like we currently look down on past societies in which human rights were in shambles.
@mewmew >why? I'd assume they're paid actors.
Paid or not, you need to fully dehumanize a person in your mind before you can treat them like that. These are not men who see women as people. They cannot be, or they couldn't have brought themselves to take part in this.
@socjuswiz
Ugh, and the women involved have absolutely no agency themselves, right? Just mindless helpless creatures that need the nearest SJW to decide for them what its acceptable for them. I'd call that the real misogyny.
Yeah seriously, untag, bleh to this whole conversation.
@shebang Oh there's that stupid "agency" meme again. Shift the focus away from the perpetrators and their mindset, onto the the victim who obviously must be liking what's happening to them. After all they chose to do it not because they want the money and they've grown accustomed to being treated a certain way, no, but because they must be genuinely enjoying how they're being treated.
@mewmew Do you honestly not see how dumb of a meme this "agency" nonsense is? Is it that difficult of a concept to understand that some people are desensitized to being treated like a piece of shit because they've grown accustomed to it throughout their lives and because objecting to it will get them into serious trouble? Like is that really so complicated?
@mewmew People cannot consent to being mistreated. For instance, there are laws that make certain contracts between people void because the law deems the conditions of the contact to be incompatible with human rights. E.g. if someone signs a contract saying "I will work for my employer 12 hours a day 7 days a week for a price of 1$ per hour" that's void and the employer is still a criminal if he makes an employer work like that. Now extend this principle outside of law, to our idea of what sort of treatment between humans is acceptable in a civil society and compatible with the basic ethics/morals we want to uphold in society.
(Indeed I think the treatment in that video should be illegal, but I'm first of all making an ethical argument. If we talked about law, there would be pragmatic concerns about the implementation details and blah blah, which is why I keep the focus purely on the ethics/morals first of all.)
@socjuswiz @mewmew @p @alex @realcaseyrollins "People cannot consent to being mistreated"
Sounds boringly vanilla. What about BDSM? I consent to my boyfriend physically abusing me, does that make me a victim of domestic violence? I can't consent to being mistreated, after all.
@Galena I know nothing about you or how your boyfriend treats you. Maybe you are a victim of domestic violence and don't accept it. I'm not the right person to consult if you have actual worries about that.
But insofar you mean to use this as a counter-argument to my perspective, there are two issues:
First of all the women in that video are not here to speak for themselves. As per Occam's Razor, the more likely explanation as to why they took part in that video is that they needed the money, not because they felt comfortable doing it. (People in financial distress are aplenty; women who don't mind being treated like in that video a rarity.)
Secondly, people *accepting* mistreatment is something that obviously happens; the question is whether that constitutes a form of genuine consent that absolves the perpetrator of responsibility. Apart from the employment examples I've given, think of the fact that there are children and young teenagers who "accept" taking part in sexual activity with adults, only to regret it years later. A 14 year-old is not a little child who cant' think for herself or himself. There is no contradiction between respecting teenagers as persons with agency and saying that them "accepting" a relationship with a 30 year-old doesn't absolve him from responsibility for his unethical decision. In the case of a teenager it's the immaturity that makes us see the acceptance as an insufficient form of consent; in cases where there is exchange of money (employment, pornography, prostitution) there is the power imbalance caused by the fact that the person receiving the money might be desperate for it. Further, in cases of women being sexually mistreated, there is the problem that women are often raised with the idea that servitude and/or physical submission to men is normal, and necessary for them to take part in to be a beloved person among men. Call it "female socialization" or the harsher "brainwashing" or whatever you want to call it.
@socjuswiz @mewmew @p @alex @realcaseyrollins So your counter argument to "adults can consent to mistreatment" is "yeah well minors can't"? From what I've seen, everyone is specifically talking about adults. No one was saying minors can consent.
@socjuswiz @mewmew @p @alex @realcaseyrollins So, women are incapable of informed consent, like children? Because of society? Is that your argument?
As for employment law, I don't see the two subjects as being directly comparable. My relationship with my lover and my relationship with my employer are nothing alike.
@Galena People in disempowered situations "consent" to things which they wouldn't if they could afford not to consent. This could be a child who is powerless due to immaturity, a working class person who is powerless due to economic desperation, or a woman who is powerless because she's been taught that refusing submission will get her cast out from society.
Look e.g. at how powerless this porn actress was, despite going on about how she's "her own boss" and so on:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PinkpillFeminism/comments/f2pjnl/messages_from_pornstar_august_ames_to_a_friend/
She was physically abused, coerced under threat of losing payment that she was fine with everything that happened, and committed suicide six weeks later. How many do you think there are who cannot speak out because they don't have any friends they trust? Even this case is nowhere in mainstream media or anything; you have to go to some radical feminist subreddit to find the story.
@mewmew @p @alex @realcaseyrollins