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"If you meet the Buddha in the road, slay him." is a somewhat famous statement made to counteract the worship of people rather than the subservience to principles. "Sacred cow" is probably best explained by the excellent resource at https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/309250.html :
> Something too highly regarded to be open to criticism or curtailment.
So the joke was that I disagree; I don't believe there exists a thing that should not be joked about, or a vehicle through which humor should not be conveyed.
@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.
> It's to be assumed that the men taking part in this are rapists and sadists
why? I'd assume they're paid actors.
> 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.
I don't think anyone is thinking of this video as a beautiful work of art.
@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.
Holy shit dude I can't believe you just unironically posted that. How could you possibly be more patronizing towards women?
@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?
@alex @realcaseyrollins Why do you jump to the assumption that women are being treated against their will? Or that they lack the ability to decide what they really want? Seems pretty sexist tbh.
@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.)
The reason that particular type of employer-employee relationship is illegal is because working under those conditions is practically slavery. Doing a particular sexual act, even one that you might find disgusting, is not.
@mewmew Certain types of relationships between adults are already not legal, namely those in which a person is being treated in a way the law regards to be incompatible with human rights. Literally no difference between employment law or any other type of human rights law: certain ways to treat a person are unacceptable and illegal regardless of whether there is "consent" or not, because as a society we've decided that certain things cannot be consented to. If someone ostensibly consents to it, we understand that it's a result of various conditions such as economic desperation, brainwashing, mental illness, simple naivety, or some other thing.
If an employer doesn't make their workers sign an employment contract but instead gets into a polyamorous relationship with all of them in which the main sexual fetish they play out is for the workers to work 16 hours 7 days in bunny outfits and get a weekly allowance from daddy, would that make it okay? After all it's just a bunch of consenting adults living out their sex lives amirite? 🤷♂️
If that sounds really fucking stupid to you, consider the fact that a bunch of women consenting to being treated like in that video sounds really fucking stupid to me. It's not sex, it's dehumanization for entertainment. The only reason it happens and is allowed is because dehumanizing women for fun is currently considered fair game. If we were more enlightened we would see it as a complete absurdity that anyone could ever "consent" to being treated like that.
@socjuswiz @mewmew @p @alex @realcaseyrollins And certain societies have decided that, for example, sex between two men can not be consented to, and outlawed homosexuality. Why should society be allowed to dictate what sexual acts adults can or can't consent to? Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's morally or ethically wrong.
@Galena That's why I'm arguing on the basis of ethics. Laws (should) follow ethics, not the other way around.
Homosexual sex, like heterosexual sex, can be loving, in which case there is no problem with it.
There is no legitimate analogy between homosexual sex and a form of sex in which one person dehumanizes another, unless you see homosexual sex as something that inherently dehumanizes one or more parties taking part in it.
@socjuswiz @mewmew @p @alex @realcaseyrollins And yet some societies view homosexual sex as inherently dehumanizing, and therefore something that should be outlawed.
Why is sex that dehumanizes one of the involved parties inherently wrong? If everyone involved consents to it, where is the issue? Why should you be the arbiter of what sex is good and moral, and what sex is bad, illegal, and unjustifiable?
@Galena Yet homosexual sex is not dehumanizing. So those people are wrong, plain and simple. (I hope you're not a hardcore cultural/moral relativist?)
If you disagree with my statement that what happens in that video is dehumanizing, say so.
If you disagree with my statement that dehumanizing treatment of people should not be tolerated, regardless of whether they "consent", say so.
I think it's the latter? In that case, do you also think people can consent to being killed, enslaved, tortured, etc.? If not, what is it that makes those things not OK despite consent, but the form of dehumanization in that video OK?
@socjuswiz @mewmew @p @alex @realcaseyrollins "If you disagree with my statement that dehumanizing treatment of people should not be tolerated, regardless of whether they "consent", say so."
I do disagree. They can consent to being dehumanized.
"do you also think people can consent to being killed, enslaved, tortured, etc.?"
While I believe all of those things are bad and that no one should consent to them, yes, I do believe that people can consent to those things.
@Galena Well in that case I really hope you eventually change your mind, because people in general don't have nearly as much agency as they think they do, and self-harming habits are extremely common. We're all products of society. (The extreme form of this idea is called "determinism" in which we're all basically machines with no free will who just respond to input from the environment and produce output in the form of "thoughts" and actions that we think we produce out of our free will. I don't go that far, just mentioning it for the sake of food for thought.)
> people in general don't have nearly as much agency as they think they do
Dubious.
> self-harming habits are extremely common.
Do you think you should be allowed to prevent someone from harming themselves?
Is it your right to prevent suicide?
Is it your right to prevent someone from putting cocaine up their nose?
Is it your right to stop someone from smoking?
Is it your right to stop someone from eating too much sugar?
Is it your right to compel them to exercise?
Is it your right to compel them to go to college instead of tending bar?
Where do you draw the line?
> The extreme form of this idea is called "determinism"
The concept of agency is completely independent from the concept of free will.
@p I see this happening whenever I argue with people who defend pornography, prostitution, etc.: they completely shift the debate away from what the men do to the women, and try to focus it entirely on "the choices of the women."
You've just brought this fallacy to its final stage: asking whether "we have a right to stop them even if their choices are bad." The perpetrator has gone completely invisible at this point.
So let me put the focus back where it was meant to be since the beginning: the men who choose to dehumanize the women in question. If you agree that their choices are terrible (perhaps comparable to snorting cocaine?), then I would ask you what you think of the men who encourage (if not coerce) them to do this with the promise of financial benefit.
If we agree that what these women supposedly "choose" to do --and there's a lot of violent coercion in the porn industry, which I haven't even been touching on-- is something that dehumanizes them, then how do you justify a group of men watching and enjoying them doing that, encouraging them to do that, paying them to do that?
Honestly, almost every fucking discussion I try to have on this topic eventually gets shifted to the point of "bUt dO We HaVe a RiGHt tO sToP tHe WAhMEn?!?"
No, focus on the point: what the men do in that video, and they have the control there, is fucked up beyond belief, and we should not tolerate men doing things like that in a society that cares even a little bit about human dignity.
@mewmew The man, fully dressed, completely in control over his body, is being dehumanized like the women who are physically constrained in a device that hides their whole body except for exposing their arses through a hole?
Some people are just too desensitized to understand what dehumanization even means. If you really meant what you said and aren't just trolling, I'm worried about your interactions with women, or other humans in general.
I don't think porn is bad, but "men are also the real victims" is just stupid when it comes to this discussion. In gay porn I would agree, as many are gay4pay.
i mean that's the problem with trying to audit any supply chain for ethical production standards. who fucking knows where anything came from? its pretty likely that there's slavery involved in producing everything you use and consume on a daily basis.
this is obviously not acceptable, but how do you actually fix that?
in this case, probably stick to snapchat nudes and hookups instead of getting free pr0ns on the internet. that's a short enough supply chain that you can audit it (as long as you don't worry about who mined the cobalt in your battery).
"Let's ban coal mining because the workers are endangered!" = no one outside of libertarians make so much as a peep.
"Let's ban prostitution because the workers are endangered!" = suddenly leftists are concerned and libertarians are ready to go postal.
@kick @kaikatsu @mewmew @p @alex @velartrill @realcaseyrollins @xj9 "Let's ban <anything that's done between consenting adults>"
Yeah, that's fucking shit, not gonna lie.
