Feminist Criticism and Contrarianism (NoH)

This comment thread is the “No Hostility” thread. Please read this and this for the ground rules. The “Regular Parallel” thread can be found here.

Why is it that I blog on FeministCritics.org if I have as much agreement with feminism as I say that I do? If I have so many problems with Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), or pickup artists (PUAs), why don’t I blog at MRACritics, or PUACritics?

I’ve asked this same question of myself. While I agree with plenty of pro-feminist, or anti-MRA/PUA positions, it’s just often harder to get myself fired up about talking about them. Perhaps that’s partly because of an emotional issue: I just relate better to men’s hardships, particularly at the hands of feminists.

Yet I don’t think having sympathy for people who are more like me is the whole story. Reading an article on LessWrong a while ago about contrarianism helped me put finger on other aspects of my motivations.

In Intellectual Hipsters and Metacontrarianism, Yvain points out the tendency for people to signal intelligence, superiority, or refinement by engaging in contrarian cultural practices or holding contrarian views. He gives the example of views on death:

Ask any five year old child, and ey can tell you that death is bad. Death is bad because it kills you. There is nothing subtle about it, and there does not need to be. Death universally seems bad to pretty much everyone on first analysis, and what it seems, it is.

But as has been pointed out, along with the gigantic cost, death does have a few small benefits. It lowers overpopulation, it allows the new generation to develop free from interference by their elders, it provides motivation to get things done quickly. Precisely because these benefits are so much smaller than the cost, they are hard to notice. It takes a particularly subtle and clever mind to think them up. Any idiot can tell you why death is bad, but it takes a very particular sort of idiot to believe that death might be good.

So pointing out this contrarian position, that death has some benefits, is potentially a signal of high intelligence.

Yet if being a contrarian towards the popular wisdom is good, then being a contrarian towards the contrarians can be even better! If you see someone trying to act wise by insisting that death is a good thing, you can trump them by asserting that death is bad, which strangely loops you back to the same position as the 5-year-old child.

The article dubs a name for these “contrarians towards contrarians”: “meta-contrarians.” Contrarians contradict the conventional wisdom; meta-contrarians contradict the conventional wisdom of the contrarians. Yvain observes that these beliefs seem to fall in triads of convention/contrarian/meta-contrarian:

- KKK-style racist / politically correct liberal / “but there are scientifically proven genetic differences”
- misogyny / women’s rights movement / men’s rights movement
- conservative / liberal / libertarian
- herbal-spiritual-alternative medicine / conventional medicine / Robin Hanson [an economist who criticizes views in conventional medicine; see here and here for examples —Hugh]
- don’t care about Africa / give aid to Africa / don’t give aid to Africa

Some other examples from the article:

- people who wear ratty, old, or unfashionable clothes / people who wear expensive clothes / hipsters who wear ratty, old, or unfashionable clothes to look hip

- being pro-technology and industrialization / being anti-technology and industrialization and romanticizing pre-industrial cultures / being pro-technology andindustrialization again

- men who have nothing to offer women and ask for sex / men who try to show their superiority to the losers by making romantic gestures or buying gifts / men who don’t make romantic gestures or buy gifts to signal that they don’t have to

Of course, Yvain points out that being contrarian, or meta-contrarian, doesn’t make a certain position right or wrong:

One more time: the fact that those beliefs are in an order does not mean some of them are good and others are bad. For example, “5 year old child / pro-death / transhumanist” is a triad, and “warming denier / warming believer / warming skeptic” is a triad, but I personally support 1+3 in the first triad and 2 in the second. You can’t evaluate the truth of a statement by its position in a signaling game; otherwise you could use human psychology to figure out if global warming is real!

I think I might have a bit of a contrarian streak. I tend to poke holes in whatever seems like the conventional wisdom. Since I was raised in white, liberal, middle-class culture, the conventional wisdom I encountered was heavily influenced by feminism.

Feminists take a contrarian stance towards traditional views of gender, which they regard as conventional wisdom. And I take a contrarian stance towards feminism, which I regard as the conventional wisdom in public gender discourse. I guess that makes me a “meta-contrarian.”

So am I an “intellectual hipster?” Well, I can’t deny that I get a kick out of being contrary to misguided contrarianism. Contradicting feminism while maintaining the gender progressive high ground is a challenge, and I don’t always succeed. Yet I think the difficulty of that challenge makes me more needed. Feminists don’t need me as badly as people who are critiquing feminism but who don’t want to turn back the clock to tradition. Furthermore, while I find many feminist arguments compelling (and the arguments of various MRAs or PUAs to be flawed), I just don’t find those arguments interesting. I’ve heard those arguments so many times that they’ve lost their novelty, so I’m not very motivated to repeat them myself.

If I had been born in a different place or time, perhaps I’d be a feminist. If feminists lost power to MRAs, and the latter started making laws instead of Catharine MacKinnon, perhaps I would start up MRACritics. If the good things about pickup and seduction were more widely understood, then I would feel more comfortable criticizing PUAs without worrying that my criticisms would fuel the conventional feminism wisdom that pickup is valueless and harmful.

Until the climate in discussion about gender changes, however, more of my energy is probably going to go into criticizing feminism. But this doesn’t mean that I’m not getting started composing material for MRACritics.org and PUACritics.org in my head, my notes, and my private conversations.

14 Comments

  1. machina says:

    Not to say that there aren’t strings of contrarian positions, but that these strings can be any length if you work backwards.

    -”but there are scientific differences”/politically correct liberal/KKK-style racist/anti-slavery movement/slave industry/European serf rights…

    These binaries are particularly common in Western philosophy, and there are various methods of dealing with them… Socratic method, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, Derrida’s deconstruction, etc.

  2. Hugh Ristik says:

    Yeah, the dialectics can have various lengths depending on how you define them. I do think there can often be a loopback effect, leading to a lot of triads, where the 1st most recent and 3rd most recent positions have at least a superficial similarity.

  3. roshni says:

    “feel more comfortable criticizing PUAs without worrying that my criticisms would fuel the conventional feminism wisdom that pickup is valueless and harmful.”

    Perhaps you should just stop worrying and criticize what needs to be criticized and praise what needs to be praised. You have no way of knowing where along the curve of conventional wisdom-contrarianism-meta-contrarianism your readers are going to be. Especially on the net, you’ll get all sorts of folks reading your thoughts. I live in India where the contrarian view is still feminism, so I do consider myself a feminist. Despite that I’ve never had much of a problem accepting that PUA’s seem to have got at least a few things right regarding male-female interactions.

  4. Clarence says:

    Heh.

    Ironically, I’m with roshni on this one.

    If something is wrong either morally or factually it needs critiqued no matter whether it is the conventional wisdom or not. I critique certain aspects of MRA myself, for instance. And I don’t find it very likely that -within the current political system- MRA is ever going to have the power to implement many of their ideas , good or bad. I view western feminism as a cautionary example of what happens when political ideas grow old.

  5. Schala says:

    @Clarence

    Something like in The Dark Knight

    “You die a hero…or live long enough to become the villain”

  6. Clarence says:

    Schala:

    Precisely.I couldn’t have put it better.

  7. Jim says:

    “Contradicting feminism while maintaining the gender progressive high ground is a challenge, and I don’t always succeed.”

    That presumes that feminism is gender progressive. Quite a lot of it is not. So it should be fairly easy to attack that feminism – DV orthodoxy, rape culture – from a gender progressive position.

    ” Yet I think the difficulty of that challenge makes me more needed. Feminists don’t need me as badly as people who are critiquing feminism but who don’t want to turn back the clock to tradition.”

    Check out the discussion on Spearhead and A Voice for Men (Paul Elam) for the state of the debate on tradtionalism. Basically the tradtionalists have been shouted down pretty much as chivlarists and white knights etc.

  8. Danny says:

    Contradicting feminism while maintaining the gender progressive high ground is a challenge, and I don’t always succeed.
    Actually its not. Thinking it is a challenge seems to hinge on the idea that feminism = gender progressive high ground. As in the thought that feminism is airtight and correct beyond question. As much as feminists would like to think they are on the gender progressive high ground they are not always in that position. Its not a matter of who’s on the high ground its a matter of helping people, quite the minefield I know.

  9. desipis says:

    I think it comes down to how you define the moral high ground. “Helping people” or harm minimisation is commonly the basis for much progressive policies. The other basis is the Marxist style class analysis. Generally I find myself in agreement with feminist theories supported by a harm minimisation ideology (e.g. we should stop individuals suffering from discrimination, harassment, etc).

    However, where the feminist theories focus on achieving equality of gender classes I find myself frequently at odds. Firstly, where the feminist theories advocate something that clashes with the ideal of harm minimisation. Secondly, their approach to social change tends to ignore the unavoidable impact of culture heritage on the desirable outcomes; as much as we want a society based on equality we also want to be able to feel connected to the culture our parents and ancestors, including the gender roles within that culture. Equality at the class level can be considered an important goal but needs to be balanced with other goals.

    I generally base my opinions around a balance of ideologies, rather than focusing on just one. I think this is where contrarianism comes into play; from a sense that the currently held beliefs have moved to far in one direction and need to be rebalanced.

    If one considers that alternative ideas will have had less examination, then contrarianism will attempt to discover and put forward the unexamined positives. Meta-contrarianism then, is needed to provide balance through the advocation of the negatives of the alternative ideal.

  10. Hugh Ristik says:

    roshni said:

    Perhaps you should just stop worrying and criticize what needs to be criticized and praise what needs to be praised. You have no way of knowing where along the curve of conventional wisdom-contrarianism-meta-contrarianism your readers are going to be.

    I’ll take these thoughts into account.

    Clarence said:

    If something is wrong either morally or factually it needs critiqued no matter whether it is the conventional wisdom or not.

    Right, but I’m limited by time, energy, and interest, so I may prioritize certain critiques over others to talk about, even if I think they all need to be made eventually.

    I said:

    Contradicting feminism while maintaining the gender progressive high ground is a challenge, and I don’t always succeed

    Jim said:

    That presumes that feminism is gender progressive. Quite a lot of it is not. So it should be fairly easy to attack that feminism – DV orthodoxy, rape culture – from a gender progressive position.

    Danny said:

    Actually its not. Thinking it is a challenge seems to hinge on the idea that feminism = gender progressive high ground. As in the thought that feminism is airtight and correct beyond question. As much as feminists would like to think they are on the gender progressive high ground they are not always in that position.

    Jim and Danny, it’s not hard to hold the gender progressive high ground while criticizing feminism in the eyes of people with lots of agreement with me. It’s not convincing them that’s challenging: it’s convincing feminist-leaning people that we have the progressive high ground.

    Jim said:

    Check out the discussion on Spearhead and A Voice for Men (Paul Elam) for the state of the debate on tradtionalism. Basically the tradtionalists have been shouted down pretty much as chivlarists and white knights etc.

    While it’s unlikely that the clock would get turned back completely, there are still certain traditional and misogynistic ideas that linger in various places in the MRA and PUA movements, and not just in otherwise-traditionalist men. For instance, some types of MRAs and PUAs aren’t traditionalists in general, but may have some of the following views:

    - slut-shaming
    - believing women to be morally or intellectually inferior to men
    - believing that women are interchangeable
    - believing that relationships with women are harmful in general
    - trashing men who don’t toe the party line (e.g. “mangina”)

    See also the comments picked for this thread at Yes Means Yes.

    Since these beliefs are minority views in a marginalized political movement, I don’t find them worth criticizing. Yet if a movement containing people with such beliefs become more powerful, then I’d feel motivated to pick on it a lot more.

    (Some replies to this comment have been moved to the RP thread. — Daran)

  11. Daran says:

    Hugh:

    If the good things about pickup and seduction were more widely understood, then I would feel more comfortable criticizing PUAs without worrying that my criticisms would fuel the conventional feminism wisdom that pickup is valueless and harmful.

    That’s an understandable concern, but I think it is misplaced. Failing to criticize your own, only serves to make you look partizan in the eyes of your ideological opponents.

    Until the climate in discussion about gender changes, however, more of my energy is probably going to go into criticizing feminism. But this doesn’t mean that I’m not getting started composing material for MRACritics.org and PUACritics.org in my head, my notes, and my private conversations.

    If any of these notes are substantial enough and fleshed-out enough to be made into posts, then they would be welcome on FeministCritics.org.

  12. AlekNovy says:

    Thanks for writing this article :) I had always wondered how super-intelligent folks manage to remain extreme-leftists despite overwhelming evidence to show how that ideology fails to deliver…

    So now I get it… Its by using this rationalization, that anything more nuanced is automatically the same as the thing you’re contradicting. When you tried to say that libertarians are the same as conservatives (reach the same place by contradicting the contradictors) I pretty much burst out laughing and spit on my monitor…

    Libertarians are dope-smoking atheists who are known to even dress like hippies sometimes, and you’re comparing them to conservatives… bwahahahahaa… Oh wow :)

    But ya, basically, I view those scales too. But I tend to think number 3 is actually the truth.

    Number 1 (traditionalists), the tradition is some tradition which was adopted due to some oudated needs and was based on an untruth, but kept due to tradition

    Number 2 (contrarians) they do everything OPPOSITE just for the sake of doing things opposite. This is better in some ways than tradition as they get things right simply by accident, but also get many things wrong because they’re doing the right things for the wrong reasons

    Number 3 (the truth) these are people who witness the damage caused by the contrarians and the re-examine everything to find out that tradition got some things right, contrarians got some things right, and some things are neither.

    This whole mode of meta-contrarians is a way for contrarians to avoid changing and progressing. Its a way to not examine whether your ideology is true. Anytime someone comes in who tries to settle the pendulum on the truth, you rationalize out that they’re just a glorified new-traditionalist… so you don’t have to look at the evidence he/she brings.

    It allows you to remain static and not grow. Anytime anyone comes with new evidence, you can simply label them into a stereotype. Anytime someone shows evidence that feminism got something wrong, you can just say “oh, they’re just a woman hater who wants his women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen”… Anytime someone shows liberals got something wrong, you go “ya, that’s just a conservative with a new name” :D Very, very, very good rationalization.

    Its interesting, but the more intelligent people get, the more able they are to do things, and that includes a better ability to create great defense mechanisms and rationalizations for not improving.

  13. Eagle33 says:

    AlexNovy, for all your talk about intelligence creating defense mechanicisms and rationalizations for not improving, you certainly aren’t above employing the same baseless stereotypes you accuse others of doing here.

    So, according to you, Liberterians are:

    “dope-smoking atheists”

    “known to dress like hippies sometimes”

    Then being all smug about it with that :) face all the time. The least you can do is exercise the same level of nuance you claim to advocate otherwise you’re coming off as no better than the “Extreme-leftists”.

  14. AlekNovy says:

    Because as we know using the word “sometimes” means you’re making a stereotype… I’d actually label myself a libertarian and poking and fun at myself is one way you can read it.

    You can read what I said as smug-stereotyping radicalism, or as it was meant light-hearted-tongue-in-cheek communication.

    I could have gone on to explain how most of us libertarians are atheists (unlike conservatives who tend to be strongly religioous). I could have gone on to explain how extremely different our stances are on drugs. FYI, its an odd thing that we support drugs, even thought most of us don’t actually use them, but we support their legalization… I could have gone on to explain all the difference in the social attitudes between conservatives and libertarians…

    Or… I could have done what I did was to shorten it into funny two sentences about hippies and dope-smoking, risking that people can project anything and everything on it, like you just did.

    p.s.

    I’m still shaking my head in disbelief that you actually read into a computer smiley, and actually read subtle sub-emotions into a smiley… The graphic of which is chosen by the website, not me when I type : | ) .

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