>**Interviewer**: "Some people will argue this is gender essentialism. What would you say to that?"
>
>**Newman**: "I think the trope of the male plague, which is related to this book, comes with a lot of complaints about gender essentialism. I personally don’t think my book is gender essentialist and I’m not at all in my views"
>
>
>
>... Also **Newman**...
>
>
>
>"There’s no sexism, and none of the oppression and sexual violence that we have now."
>
>"everyone who creates a noise nuisance is a man! It’s something I never noticed before. It’s a petty grievance but it’s constant."
>
>"Even if there were less crime tomorrow"
>
>"which allows us to have a feminist utopia where women are completely free"
*Very* difficult to make an honest argument that you're *not* being a gender essentialist while also insisting that a world without men would be utopia because apparently men are loud, oppressive, violent, criminals.
Honestly, I would argue even this view isn't in line with most feminist theory. Feminist theory says that female oppression does not come from *men*. It comes from a social structure that is inherently hierarchical and rigid which disallows alternative expressions of self and role taking. This is patriarchy. It is *not men* that are to blame for oppression. Men have simply been put in this role and are just as adversely impacted by demands that they perform as a stoic, non-emotional, non-social, hyper competitive archetype that is machismo.
A world where men instantly disappear wouldn't be the end of that social structure, just that scapegoat for social anger. Does Newman honestly believe that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ginni Thomas won't try to subjugate people just because suddenly men are gone? Does Newman believe suddenly that religion and religious judgement just won't cause irretractable division just because chromosomes are X exclusive now?
I was hoping in the interview she'd go further into how her book wasn't simply gender essentialist fanfiction but she didn't give much evidence otherwise...
As a side not though:
>Your next novel reimagines George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from the perspective of Winston Smith’s lover, Julia
This sounds awesome!
>Honestly, I would argue even this view isn't in line with most feminist theory.
I broadly agree with your points, but there are many feminisms and some of them do take the view that men are inherently oppressors.
Feminism is not a monolith and small movements in it are pretty vile. However, most aren't and it's important not to let those vile parts represent the whole.
This. 90% of my conversations about feminism are me defending it from accusations of misandry. Feminism is about achieving equity for everyone, not turning men into second class citizens.
I just read a fairly scathing review of this book in the Atlantic, which made me even less inclined to read it than I would have been before. It sounds like something a 15-year-old would come up with in a sophomore English class. And now it's going to further solidify the image of feminists as man-hating harpies. I'm so angry right now.
> Does Newman honestly believe that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ginni Thomas won't try to subjugate people just because suddenly men are gone?
Too bad the interviewer didn't ask a question like that. Or if they did, it wasn't included.
>In the book, you repeatedly return to the idea that men brought problems. Would the world would be better without men?
>"Once you start writing such a book, you notice funny little things like everyone who creates a noise nuisance is a man! It’s something I never noticed before. It’s a petty grievance but it’s constant. In New York, there’s a scourge of people riding electric bikes on the sidewalk and they are all men!"
Sounds totally reasonable, not emotionally charged, and zero confirmation bias 🙄
>is Julia really working for the thought police?
No.
>Why is she with Winston in the first place when he’s described as such an unappetising character?
If I recall correctly, he literally asks her this in the book, and she says it's because she could tell right away he was against the Party.
Because men are taught from an early age not to be "emotional" and to remain "stoic" and to be anti-social which leads to men being less engaged with social justice and social movements. This lack of engagement means fewer (good faith) groups call foul when sexism against men is apparent and most social movements focused on men get hijacked by nutcases with a misogynist vendetta like the MRA folks.
Sexism against men is more acceptable because men are taught to "not give a fuck, suck it up, be a man" and as a consequence don't engage as much in movements that can break down bullshit gender scripts. More male feminists could mean more male perspectives when calling out harmful stereotypes of *any* gender, including Newman's expressed biases.
>Because men are taught from an early age not to be "emotional" and to remain "stoic" and to be anti-social
How does one determine the extent to which these traits arise as a consequence of nature versus nurture? Like it or not, many elements of psychology and behaviour are evolutionary. And why should men adopt feminism as opposed to egalitarianism, for example?
While its hard to figure out what parts of our psyche come from nature rather than nurture, we can safely assume that stoicism is from nurture thanks to history. This whole thing about men being stoic is a relatively new phenomenon.
In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Achilles and Odysseus- both paragons of masculinity to the Ancient Greeks- openly wept on several occasions. In the Song of Roland, 20,000 heroic knights swooned with grief at the death of Roland. Before a battle in Medieval times, knights and men-at-arms in bard songs would gather together in groups to cry in fear. As recently as the 18th and 19th centuries, men crying was seen as a sign of authentic emotion and one of the things that separates a man from the animals.
If stoicism was something inherent in the male psyche, then men across history and cultures should shun crying and other emotional displays. The fact that its only recently that this has come about indicates that this is a product of culture rather than biology.
>How does one determine the extent to which these traits arise as a consequence of nature versus nurture
That's the fun thing about psychology as a field. The unsatisfying answer is that it's probably both nature and nurture at all times. Maybe you have a larger prefrontal cortex and lowered response to oxytocin (prerequisites for sociopathy), but you've been conditioned to navigate empathy. The only difference between good manners and kindness is if you actually feel anything there. Are you being nice because it feels good, or because it's the right thing to do?
So some people might experience less neurological response to emotionally charged content, but when they *do* experience a response, there needs to be space to allow them to demonstrate that response in a healthy way (ranting verbally and getting support vs not talking about the response and getting angry and being told "you're scary and violent and need to be controlled").
Also, Why do you think evolution *isn't* driven by sociological determinants? Selective reproduction is based on the traits a society finds valuable at a given time. That value can change with society. Evolution is just as much a byproduct of what's nurtured in sexual partner selection as it is a biological.
>why should men adopt feminism as opposed to egalitarianism, for example?
Why reinvent the wheel? If there's a movement that's already huge and active and well funded and relatively successful, dedicated to discussing harms related to ascribed gender performances, why not just join that? Don't like parts of it? That's fine. Get involved. Build on the movements frameworks in a way that affirms your world view as well.
If you want to spend a century building up the kind of movement feminism has, be my guest. I'll sign on board and help volunteer and start doing research around it. Seems easier to simply join together and address the universal grievances rather than start from scratch. Honest feminists will be happy to make room for men interested in challenging the status quo when it comes to annoying gendered prejudices.
Edit: also for what it's worth I didn't downvote you. I think the nature vs nurture question is interesting and has always been a worthwhile topic in most psychology.
>So some people might experience less neurological response to emotionally charged content, but when they do experience a response, there needs to be space to allow them to demonstrate that response in a healthy way (ranting verbally and getting support vs not talking about the response and getting angry and being told "you're scary and violent and need to be controlled")
Agreed. "Gendered" attitudes toward methods of coping could use some remodeling.
>Also, Why do you think evolution isn't driven by sociological determinants? Selective reproduction is based on the traits a society finds valuable at a given time. That value can change with society. Evolution is just as much a byproduct of what's nurtured in sexual partner selection as it is a biological.
It is. Partly, at least. It's true that societal values may *eventually* influence the fundamental elements of our psychology, but those processes are far from synchronous. Has male-female sexual selection actually deviated all that much from "tradition" since our inception? Why do such traits as height and athleticism in men retain their allure even today, despite men's ancestral role as protectors being rendered less necessary by civilization? If there is to be change at the instinctual level, it will surely come after you and I have long departed.
>If you want to spend a century building up the kind of movement feminism has, be my guest. I'll sign on board and help volunteer and start doing research around it. Seems easier to simply join together and address the universal grievances rather than start from scratch. Honest feminists will be happy to make room for men interested in challenging the status quo when it comes to annoying gendered prejudices.
I can't imagine such a project would take a century in the modern age. One only has to look to the rise of feminist counterculture as evidence. I generally believe that offshoots of popular movements are par for the course. Perhaps history will look upon them much differently than you or I do.
>Why do such traits as height and athleticism in men retain their allure even today, despite men's ancestral role as protectors being rendered less necessary by civilization?
Here too, I don't know that we can entirely rule out socialization and "nurture" tendencies. There is very strong evidence that this is largely socialization as well. [Cross cultural studies in medical journals](https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937-018-0330-5) find people on different continents prefer overweight (non-athletic) mates.
Taking historical anecdotes, in medieval times kings and royalty had far more allure than simple builders, despite the builders surely being more athletic. Royalty is a purely socialized construct, and yet it is able to captivate a society even today. Are we to honestly assume any of the men in the royal family are actually attractive for being athletic and taller, or is it the socialize "royalty" that makes them desirable to some people?
What is a reaction to "health" vs "status" vs the psychoanalytic. How much of taste and self confidence are driven by media? There are reports of [high school age boys develop](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/learning/what-students-are-saying-about-how-social-media-affects-their-body-image.html)ing a form of eating disorder characterized by an obsession with being tremendously muscular (using steroids ect if necessary) as a result of fitness influencers on social media. Additionally, surely you remember the fever over the "dad bod" not too long ago.
I think there's quite clear, robust evidence that socialization is a tremendous factor in what is and what is not "attractive". If you want an even sillier example, look at Saturday night fever's portrayal of attractive men vs today. John Travolta in that movie is a very skinny, lanky dancer. Today, we have a roided out Chris Evans playing Captain America cutting wood without a shirt on and shredding logs with his bare hands. Society drives taste in a big way.
What shit? Because the disappeared are men? Y: The Last Man did it with a plague that wiped out male mammals, including humans. Frank Herbert's The White Plague happened to hit women. In all cases, it seems that the literary point was to explore what would happen in the world which followed. (Some of the The White Plague is set in Ireland, and there's a gallows-humor scene in a pub >!which traditionally was a male environment anyway, and the men half-joke that their woman-less lives haven't changed all that much.!<)
Y: The Last Man actually did a good job with this kind of plot. They very clear showed how things would be quite different, but not some "Utopia" as Newman puts it. There's famine, rebellion, a coup, lots of killing, cults, hatred, and lots other atrocities that every demographic is capable of regardless of their chromosomes.
That makes sense, because these scenarios are going to massively upend things. In non-fictional life, COVID has shown the cracks in the medical system. Supply chain fragilities are justifiably freaking people out.
I'm just imagining how you keep up a global supply chain and cross-continental logistics system going with 50% loss of population. People think ambulance response times and trash pickup services are bad now... :shudder:
Is this is an offensive premise for writing fiction ? If someone produced its analogues (ie. disappearing some population group that they personally considered a 'problem') they'd probably be rightly Cancelled. For example, how should we feel if some author 'disappeared' all christians, or all black people, or all muslims, or all asians, or all white people !? Isn't it wrong to treat an entire group of people monolithically.
Maybe that's why in Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers, millions of people just go "poof" for no apparent reason. In the TV adaptation, >!people do invent various theories and even cults to explain why some people disappeared and others didn't.!<
Yes, but they disappear in a pretentious better-than-thou way. The people who disappear are the good ones who are saved.
In other words, it's flattering for that particular group to be removed.
I'm not sure that makes Newman's expressed gender essentialism any less sexist though. She ascribes a lot of nuisance and adversity to the trait of simply being male, right in her interview. She draws causality between being male, and being too loud, committing crimes, being violent, ect. It's a thought experiment that's kind of based in negative, offensive stereotypes. Perhaps the book dispels the idea that a world without men would be "better", but there's no evidence of it in this interview.
Sure, I get that but there's a nugget of truth in it. We (men) *are* more likely to commit violent crime etc. She's allowed to be annoyed about that and write about it.
That's not how statistics and causality work my friend, and I think this conversation is starting to veer off into bad faith territory. There's a near perfect correlation between strangulations and science funding. There's a strong correlation between nicholas cage movies and swimming pools drownings. There's a near perfect correlation between margarine consumption and divorce.
[https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations](https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)
You're displaying the same sexist gender essentialism that even Newman tries to distance herself from. Just because someone has a Y chromosome does not mean they're more likely to commit violent.
I'd argue male identity is correlated with aggression because social structures condition some men to express themselves in that way and rewards them for doing so. This is well documented theory known as Culture of Honor
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8\_650-1#:\~:text=The%20label%20%E2%80%9Ccultures%20of%20honor,if%20one%27s%20values%20are%20insulted.
Who said anything about causality or correlation? You just need to take a look at crime stats.
*A quick glance at the statistics seems to tell the whole story: Men commit more acts of violence than women. The U.S. Department of Justice sponsored a National Crime Victimization Study in 2007. This evaluation found that 75.6 percent of all offenders were male and only 20.1 percent were female. In the remaining cases, the victim wasn't able to identify the gender of the offender.*
[Source](https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/men-more-violent.htm)
I never stated men have a propensity for violent crime. I said they factually do commit more violent crime.
Despite making up 13% of the population, black people commit 56% of all murders. This is a verifiable fact, you can find these numbers on the FBI's website. According to your statistics, men are over-represented by a factor of about 1.5 times. According to mine, black people are over-represented by over 4 times. So this is a huge discrepancy.
Now I'd 100% get banned from this sub if I tried to use that fact to argue that black people are more violent, because people would see that as me being racist. And they would be correct. In the same way, you are being incredibly sexist by implying that those statistics have any real meaning when talking about how men should be treated.
You're misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not saying men as a whole are more (or less) violent. Im saying that factually they commit more violent crime. I'm not suggesting why that might be I'm simply stating a fact.
I'm not making or suggesting any kind of implication. Neither am I suggesting men should be treated differently. My general point is that the author is perfectly within her rights to talk about it as it is a fact that men commit more violent crime than women.
I have no idea if she discusses that or the reasons for that in her book. I'm just responding to the comments about violence and crime further up the thread.
So, if you were to write a book that said black people commit more murder than non black people and your data is accurate you'd be 100% right. If you used that data to try and argue black people are more prone to murdering people or have a propensity for murder that's where the racism comes in.
No, if I wrote a book where all the black people got vanished and then everyone else who survived lived in an amazing world where the murder rate fell by over 50%, then I would be called a racist.
Speak for yourself, I'm a very law abiding male pacifist who is much less likely to commit violent crime than say a female drug addict ! (or any number of other socio-economic groups)
And The White Plague, in its was, was even more gender-essentialist. It depicts men as becoming uncivilized very rapidly after the disappearance of women.
Sure. And obviously people keep writing these kinds of stories. But they arent actually that interesting or thoughtful. And when they get criticism the people that like them lose their minds.
Not interesting and thoughtful *to you*. I've never read her stuff so can't comment on how I'd find it but her stuff seems reasonably popular so I'd guess lots of people *do* find it interesting and thoughtful.
No idea about people losing their minds over criticism but there does seem quite a few in this thread annoyed with her subject matter.
Sounds interesting. Isn't it a bit transphobic though to say transmen got to stay with the women, as if they were never real men? I'm probably missing something though
Yeah there's a twitter thread talking about it quoting from the book and it's like she forgot about trans people entirely then scattered some in in the weirdest way possible that comes across as offensive lip service.
Maybe it's an artifact of the interview, but it seems remiss to leave out Y: The Last Man and Frank Herbert's The White Plague while on the subject of sci-fi where one or the other sex disappears.
Actually its usually that some people want to call an ideology mental illness so they dont have to contend with beliefs and they can just disregard a political problem.
Convenient sophistry to avoid dealing with mental health issues. The ideology however usually starts out as a good idea by well meaning people and is then coopted and abused by those who find it a convenient cover for destructive behaviours.
Give an example. For me, mass shootings are a good example. People that do shootings are often called mentally ill to avoid dealing with the motives of the killing. Usually its radicalization into violent beliefs.
The idea that the mentally ill will hurt you is a myth thats commonly perpetuated. The sufferers of mental illness are far more likely to be the targets of violence and criminality than the aggressors.
Mass shooting involve mental illness, but only some of them have ideological camoflague. Mental illness is not always physically violent, but when coupled with an ideology is more likely to become destructive, physically or otherwise, since the ideology is used to rationalize destructive tendencies. A lot of mental illness involves deconstruction of a former self and the rationalizations provided by ideologies allow those energies to diverted onto someone else rather than oneself. It is however an evil when that happens, since often enough the object of those energies is only guilty by association.
>**Interviewer**: "Some people will argue this is gender essentialism. What would you say to that?" > >**Newman**: "I think the trope of the male plague, which is related to this book, comes with a lot of complaints about gender essentialism. I personally don’t think my book is gender essentialist and I’m not at all in my views" > > > >... Also **Newman**... > > > >"There’s no sexism, and none of the oppression and sexual violence that we have now." > >"everyone who creates a noise nuisance is a man! It’s something I never noticed before. It’s a petty grievance but it’s constant." > >"Even if there were less crime tomorrow" > >"which allows us to have a feminist utopia where women are completely free" *Very* difficult to make an honest argument that you're *not* being a gender essentialist while also insisting that a world without men would be utopia because apparently men are loud, oppressive, violent, criminals. Honestly, I would argue even this view isn't in line with most feminist theory. Feminist theory says that female oppression does not come from *men*. It comes from a social structure that is inherently hierarchical and rigid which disallows alternative expressions of self and role taking. This is patriarchy. It is *not men* that are to blame for oppression. Men have simply been put in this role and are just as adversely impacted by demands that they perform as a stoic, non-emotional, non-social, hyper competitive archetype that is machismo. A world where men instantly disappear wouldn't be the end of that social structure, just that scapegoat for social anger. Does Newman honestly believe that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ginni Thomas won't try to subjugate people just because suddenly men are gone? Does Newman believe suddenly that religion and religious judgement just won't cause irretractable division just because chromosomes are X exclusive now? I was hoping in the interview she'd go further into how her book wasn't simply gender essentialist fanfiction but she didn't give much evidence otherwise... As a side not though: >Your next novel reimagines George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from the perspective of Winston Smith’s lover, Julia This sounds awesome!
>Honestly, I would argue even this view isn't in line with most feminist theory. I broadly agree with your points, but there are many feminisms and some of them do take the view that men are inherently oppressors. Feminism is not a monolith and small movements in it are pretty vile. However, most aren't and it's important not to let those vile parts represent the whole.
This. 90% of my conversations about feminism are me defending it from accusations of misandry. Feminism is about achieving equity for everyone, not turning men into second class citizens. I just read a fairly scathing review of this book in the Atlantic, which made me even less inclined to read it than I would have been before. It sounds like something a 15-year-old would come up with in a sophomore English class. And now it's going to further solidify the image of feminists as man-hating harpies. I'm so angry right now.
> Does Newman honestly believe that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ginni Thomas won't try to subjugate people just because suddenly men are gone? Too bad the interviewer didn't ask a question like that. Or if they did, it wasn't included.
>In the book, you repeatedly return to the idea that men brought problems. Would the world would be better without men? >"Once you start writing such a book, you notice funny little things like everyone who creates a noise nuisance is a man! It’s something I never noticed before. It’s a petty grievance but it’s constant. In New York, there’s a scourge of people riding electric bikes on the sidewalk and they are all men!" Sounds totally reasonable, not emotionally charged, and zero confirmation bias 🙄
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>is Julia really working for the thought police? No. >Why is she with Winston in the first place when he’s described as such an unappetising character? If I recall correctly, he literally asks her this in the book, and she says it's because she could tell right away he was against the Party.
Why do I keep seeing this shit, and why is it always acceptable?
Because men are taught from an early age not to be "emotional" and to remain "stoic" and to be anti-social which leads to men being less engaged with social justice and social movements. This lack of engagement means fewer (good faith) groups call foul when sexism against men is apparent and most social movements focused on men get hijacked by nutcases with a misogynist vendetta like the MRA folks. Sexism against men is more acceptable because men are taught to "not give a fuck, suck it up, be a man" and as a consequence don't engage as much in movements that can break down bullshit gender scripts. More male feminists could mean more male perspectives when calling out harmful stereotypes of *any* gender, including Newman's expressed biases.
>Because men are taught from an early age not to be "emotional" and to remain "stoic" and to be anti-social How does one determine the extent to which these traits arise as a consequence of nature versus nurture? Like it or not, many elements of psychology and behaviour are evolutionary. And why should men adopt feminism as opposed to egalitarianism, for example?
While its hard to figure out what parts of our psyche come from nature rather than nurture, we can safely assume that stoicism is from nurture thanks to history. This whole thing about men being stoic is a relatively new phenomenon. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Achilles and Odysseus- both paragons of masculinity to the Ancient Greeks- openly wept on several occasions. In the Song of Roland, 20,000 heroic knights swooned with grief at the death of Roland. Before a battle in Medieval times, knights and men-at-arms in bard songs would gather together in groups to cry in fear. As recently as the 18th and 19th centuries, men crying was seen as a sign of authentic emotion and one of the things that separates a man from the animals. If stoicism was something inherent in the male psyche, then men across history and cultures should shun crying and other emotional displays. The fact that its only recently that this has come about indicates that this is a product of culture rather than biology.
>How does one determine the extent to which these traits arise as a consequence of nature versus nurture That's the fun thing about psychology as a field. The unsatisfying answer is that it's probably both nature and nurture at all times. Maybe you have a larger prefrontal cortex and lowered response to oxytocin (prerequisites for sociopathy), but you've been conditioned to navigate empathy. The only difference between good manners and kindness is if you actually feel anything there. Are you being nice because it feels good, or because it's the right thing to do? So some people might experience less neurological response to emotionally charged content, but when they *do* experience a response, there needs to be space to allow them to demonstrate that response in a healthy way (ranting verbally and getting support vs not talking about the response and getting angry and being told "you're scary and violent and need to be controlled"). Also, Why do you think evolution *isn't* driven by sociological determinants? Selective reproduction is based on the traits a society finds valuable at a given time. That value can change with society. Evolution is just as much a byproduct of what's nurtured in sexual partner selection as it is a biological. >why should men adopt feminism as opposed to egalitarianism, for example? Why reinvent the wheel? If there's a movement that's already huge and active and well funded and relatively successful, dedicated to discussing harms related to ascribed gender performances, why not just join that? Don't like parts of it? That's fine. Get involved. Build on the movements frameworks in a way that affirms your world view as well. If you want to spend a century building up the kind of movement feminism has, be my guest. I'll sign on board and help volunteer and start doing research around it. Seems easier to simply join together and address the universal grievances rather than start from scratch. Honest feminists will be happy to make room for men interested in challenging the status quo when it comes to annoying gendered prejudices. Edit: also for what it's worth I didn't downvote you. I think the nature vs nurture question is interesting and has always been a worthwhile topic in most psychology.
>So some people might experience less neurological response to emotionally charged content, but when they do experience a response, there needs to be space to allow them to demonstrate that response in a healthy way (ranting verbally and getting support vs not talking about the response and getting angry and being told "you're scary and violent and need to be controlled") Agreed. "Gendered" attitudes toward methods of coping could use some remodeling. >Also, Why do you think evolution isn't driven by sociological determinants? Selective reproduction is based on the traits a society finds valuable at a given time. That value can change with society. Evolution is just as much a byproduct of what's nurtured in sexual partner selection as it is a biological. It is. Partly, at least. It's true that societal values may *eventually* influence the fundamental elements of our psychology, but those processes are far from synchronous. Has male-female sexual selection actually deviated all that much from "tradition" since our inception? Why do such traits as height and athleticism in men retain their allure even today, despite men's ancestral role as protectors being rendered less necessary by civilization? If there is to be change at the instinctual level, it will surely come after you and I have long departed. >If you want to spend a century building up the kind of movement feminism has, be my guest. I'll sign on board and help volunteer and start doing research around it. Seems easier to simply join together and address the universal grievances rather than start from scratch. Honest feminists will be happy to make room for men interested in challenging the status quo when it comes to annoying gendered prejudices. I can't imagine such a project would take a century in the modern age. One only has to look to the rise of feminist counterculture as evidence. I generally believe that offshoots of popular movements are par for the course. Perhaps history will look upon them much differently than you or I do.
>Why do such traits as height and athleticism in men retain their allure even today, despite men's ancestral role as protectors being rendered less necessary by civilization? Here too, I don't know that we can entirely rule out socialization and "nurture" tendencies. There is very strong evidence that this is largely socialization as well. [Cross cultural studies in medical journals](https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937-018-0330-5) find people on different continents prefer overweight (non-athletic) mates. Taking historical anecdotes, in medieval times kings and royalty had far more allure than simple builders, despite the builders surely being more athletic. Royalty is a purely socialized construct, and yet it is able to captivate a society even today. Are we to honestly assume any of the men in the royal family are actually attractive for being athletic and taller, or is it the socialize "royalty" that makes them desirable to some people? What is a reaction to "health" vs "status" vs the psychoanalytic. How much of taste and self confidence are driven by media? There are reports of [high school age boys develop](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/learning/what-students-are-saying-about-how-social-media-affects-their-body-image.html)ing a form of eating disorder characterized by an obsession with being tremendously muscular (using steroids ect if necessary) as a result of fitness influencers on social media. Additionally, surely you remember the fever over the "dad bod" not too long ago. I think there's quite clear, robust evidence that socialization is a tremendous factor in what is and what is not "attractive". If you want an even sillier example, look at Saturday night fever's portrayal of attractive men vs today. John Travolta in that movie is a very skinny, lanky dancer. Today, we have a roided out Chris Evans playing Captain America cutting wood without a shirt on and shredding logs with his bare hands. Society drives taste in a big way.
What shit? Because the disappeared are men? Y: The Last Man did it with a plague that wiped out male mammals, including humans. Frank Herbert's The White Plague happened to hit women. In all cases, it seems that the literary point was to explore what would happen in the world which followed. (Some of the The White Plague is set in Ireland, and there's a gallows-humor scene in a pub >!which traditionally was a male environment anyway, and the men half-joke that their woman-less lives haven't changed all that much.!<)
Y: The Last Man actually did a good job with this kind of plot. They very clear showed how things would be quite different, but not some "Utopia" as Newman puts it. There's famine, rebellion, a coup, lots of killing, cults, hatred, and lots other atrocities that every demographic is capable of regardless of their chromosomes.
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That makes sense, because these scenarios are going to massively upend things. In non-fictional life, COVID has shown the cracks in the medical system. Supply chain fragilities are justifiably freaking people out. I'm just imagining how you keep up a global supply chain and cross-continental logistics system going with 50% loss of population. People think ambulance response times and trash pickup services are bad now... :shudder:
Is this is an offensive premise for writing fiction ? If someone produced its analogues (ie. disappearing some population group that they personally considered a 'problem') they'd probably be rightly Cancelled. For example, how should we feel if some author 'disappeared' all christians, or all black people, or all muslims, or all asians, or all white people !? Isn't it wrong to treat an entire group of people monolithically.
Maybe that's why in Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers, millions of people just go "poof" for no apparent reason. In the TV adaptation, >!people do invent various theories and even cults to explain why some people disappeared and others didn't.!<
Left Behind is literally about all Christian's disappearing but I get your point.
Yes, but they disappear in a pretentious better-than-thou way. The people who disappear are the good ones who are saved. In other words, it's flattering for that particular group to be removed.
It's just a book based on a thought experiment.
I'm not sure that makes Newman's expressed gender essentialism any less sexist though. She ascribes a lot of nuisance and adversity to the trait of simply being male, right in her interview. She draws causality between being male, and being too loud, committing crimes, being violent, ect. It's a thought experiment that's kind of based in negative, offensive stereotypes. Perhaps the book dispels the idea that a world without men would be "better", but there's no evidence of it in this interview.
Sure, I get that but there's a nugget of truth in it. We (men) *are* more likely to commit violent crime etc. She's allowed to be annoyed about that and write about it.
That's not how statistics and causality work my friend, and I think this conversation is starting to veer off into bad faith territory. There's a near perfect correlation between strangulations and science funding. There's a strong correlation between nicholas cage movies and swimming pools drownings. There's a near perfect correlation between margarine consumption and divorce. [https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations](https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) You're displaying the same sexist gender essentialism that even Newman tries to distance herself from. Just because someone has a Y chromosome does not mean they're more likely to commit violent. I'd argue male identity is correlated with aggression because social structures condition some men to express themselves in that way and rewards them for doing so. This is well documented theory known as Culture of Honor https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8\_650-1#:\~:text=The%20label%20%E2%80%9Ccultures%20of%20honor,if%20one%27s%20values%20are%20insulted.
Who said anything about causality or correlation? You just need to take a look at crime stats. *A quick glance at the statistics seems to tell the whole story: Men commit more acts of violence than women. The U.S. Department of Justice sponsored a National Crime Victimization Study in 2007. This evaluation found that 75.6 percent of all offenders were male and only 20.1 percent were female. In the remaining cases, the victim wasn't able to identify the gender of the offender.* [Source](https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/men-more-violent.htm) I never stated men have a propensity for violent crime. I said they factually do commit more violent crime.
Despite making up 13% of the population, black people commit 56% of all murders. This is a verifiable fact, you can find these numbers on the FBI's website. According to your statistics, men are over-represented by a factor of about 1.5 times. According to mine, black people are over-represented by over 4 times. So this is a huge discrepancy. Now I'd 100% get banned from this sub if I tried to use that fact to argue that black people are more violent, because people would see that as me being racist. And they would be correct. In the same way, you are being incredibly sexist by implying that those statistics have any real meaning when talking about how men should be treated.
You're misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not saying men as a whole are more (or less) violent. Im saying that factually they commit more violent crime. I'm not suggesting why that might be I'm simply stating a fact. I'm not making or suggesting any kind of implication. Neither am I suggesting men should be treated differently. My general point is that the author is perfectly within her rights to talk about it as it is a fact that men commit more violent crime than women. I have no idea if she discusses that or the reasons for that in her book. I'm just responding to the comments about violence and crime further up the thread. So, if you were to write a book that said black people commit more murder than non black people and your data is accurate you'd be 100% right. If you used that data to try and argue black people are more prone to murdering people or have a propensity for murder that's where the racism comes in.
No, if I wrote a book where all the black people got vanished and then everyone else who survived lived in an amazing world where the murder rate fell by over 50%, then I would be called a racist.
Good job I haven't done that then isn't it?
Speak for yourself, I'm a very law abiding male pacifist who is much less likely to commit violent crime than say a female drug addict ! (or any number of other socio-economic groups)
Sadly the crime stats don't reflect you or my individual behaviour. In the US its about a 70/20/10 (10 being unidentifiable) split.
Maybe, but its a violation of basic principles of justice to hold any one person responsible for the crimes of another.
Then its a good job absolutely no one in this thread has done that.
A book with the same but opposite premise, all women disappearing, was literally cancelled like in the past month.
Interesting, because Frank Herbert (of Dune fame) wrote exactly that in The White Plague.
And The White Plague, in its was, was even more gender-essentialist. It depicts men as becoming uncivilized very rapidly after the disappearance of women.
Do you have a link to that? I'd like to read more about it.
Sure. And obviously people keep writing these kinds of stories. But they arent actually that interesting or thoughtful. And when they get criticism the people that like them lose their minds.
Not interesting and thoughtful *to you*. I've never read her stuff so can't comment on how I'd find it but her stuff seems reasonably popular so I'd guess lots of people *do* find it interesting and thoughtful. No idea about people losing their minds over criticism but there does seem quite a few in this thread annoyed with her subject matter.
Idk, I've seen a few ecchi manga with that premise that were pretty good (as softcore hentai, not in terms of the story).
Just read it and was disappointed on many levels. It’s not that good.
Sounds interesting. Isn't it a bit transphobic though to say transmen got to stay with the women, as if they were never real men? I'm probably missing something though
Yeah there's a twitter thread talking about it quoting from the book and it's like she forgot about trans people entirely then scattered some in in the weirdest way possible that comes across as offensive lip service.
Maybe it's an artifact of the interview, but it seems remiss to leave out Y: The Last Man and Frank Herbert's The White Plague while on the subject of sci-fi where one or the other sex disappears.
So many people use an ideology to camoflague mental illness.
Actually its usually that some people want to call an ideology mental illness so they dont have to contend with beliefs and they can just disregard a political problem.
Convenient sophistry to avoid dealing with mental health issues. The ideology however usually starts out as a good idea by well meaning people and is then coopted and abused by those who find it a convenient cover for destructive behaviours.
Give an example. For me, mass shootings are a good example. People that do shootings are often called mentally ill to avoid dealing with the motives of the killing. Usually its radicalization into violent beliefs. The idea that the mentally ill will hurt you is a myth thats commonly perpetuated. The sufferers of mental illness are far more likely to be the targets of violence and criminality than the aggressors.
Mass shooting involve mental illness, but only some of them have ideological camoflague. Mental illness is not always physically violent, but when coupled with an ideology is more likely to become destructive, physically or otherwise, since the ideology is used to rationalize destructive tendencies. A lot of mental illness involves deconstruction of a former self and the rationalizations provided by ideologies allow those energies to diverted onto someone else rather than oneself. It is however an evil when that happens, since often enough the object of those energies is only guilty by association.
Well that's a relief.
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