The most criticized of the left-wing movements by sane people is the #metoo movement. Some of these were warranted and some were not and I don’t call the people sane if I agree with them. It is just that the anti-vaxx movement is likely bigger, now, than the anti-#metoo discoruse and the anti-vaxx people have zero validity and are completely insane. Climate change denial is up there and is also insane. Narrowing the focus to criticisms of left-wing movements to the sane points made by sane people we get to the worries about the #metoo movement.
Because this debate happened in soundbites and tweets, it seldom got nuanced and mostly consisted of people weighing whether their gut told them a punishment was excessive or not. The great question I want to ask is what of humanity it wished. I also want to bring in similiar trands like the popularity of true crime and horror which brought a paranoia and dystopian-level fear to an otherwise fairly sober discussion.
The true crime and horror helped turn a feminism that had been often about childcare, economics, and such into being hyperfocussed on sex offenses. The French open letter criticizing the #metoo movement is reasonable but if someone is hypervigilant for red flags and is keenly watching for followers behind her back, the slightest discomfort is a potential threat and all precautions are justified. That mixed in with the academic feminism and did not became a hatred of men as is often lamented but a fear of men.
Being a man was increasingly like being an American Muslim in 2002. The True Crime fad was like, to continue the analogy, the media being flooded with profiles of jihadists. Most American Muslims were not attacked by xenophobes but all were under suspicion and their behaviors scurinized, analyzed by armchair detectives without forensic or any psychological training trying to assign red flags to potential threats. As was many a straight male in the the wake of true crime and #metoo. Olivia Benson was our Jack Bauer. I would often interject into conversation my virginity and lifelong singlehood and no desire to ever date. It was a way of saying “I am safe; please don’t fear me” It was, to further the analogy, show them a picture of me eating bacon so they knew I wasn’t a devout Muslim and was not a danger.
However, there is a major irony in all of this. The irony is that the people who are least subject to this suspicion are the most dominant, masculine, and macho. In the end, the women, mostly, are not eschewing statistical danger but aesthetic discomfort. At no point in my lengthy college career was a woman afraid to get drunk at a frat party but they misread red flags from my autistic ass regularly. On one side of the Berlin Wall was a part of the human experience with its color and frivolity and on the other was the gray concrete wasteland of Soviet design scowered by barbed wire, searchlights, machine gun posts, and the Stasi.
The statistics show that younger generations are far less romantic and if asking a girl on a romantic date is “hitting on her” and creepy then only the most lustful men will risk it. The guys with less testosterone and oxytocin will look at the metaphhorical mace and gage it isn’t worth it. This is not about sexual misconduct but anxiously censoring a conversation so as to not sound like flirting. The great question is whether the human experience will survive it and where this trend lands when all is said and done.
My prediction is it ends with the pipette, AI, and natural selection. The pipette has been covered on this blog before. For the most serious sexual dangers, testosterone and oxytocin levels can be reduced genetically which will abate some of the reason for the fear. The AI is that android’s with AI and programs like ChatGPT will become affordable and people will abandon organic people for their platonic ideal. Even the macho boys the girls prefer can’t compete with a platonic ideal. Of course, that will demolish the birth rate except among personalities who prefer organic people. In the end, nature will come roaring back because only genes of the people who flirt and date other organics will be passed on.
It is, in one sense, the end of humanity, if humanity is the Homo Sapeins species. They’ll have Homo Sapiens genes like Homo Sapiens have Neanderthal and Denisovan genes and Homo Sapiens shall join the ranks of those species. My prediction, though, is that we’re facing the most powerful selection pressures in a very long time. This species is like the Neanderthals of Gibraltar, the last believed Neanderthal settlement. We stand at the Pillars of Hercules, the Atlas Mountains across the water, as an epoch witnesses its sunset.
The Autistic Resistance 