I guess some people are uncomfortable with the issues raised in the article. Alternative explanation: some users are trigger-happy and flag an article based on the headline before they have a chance to read it. ~Its un-flagged by now~, and I vouched too BTW...
Its a good article and a balanced discussion about feminism would be very nice to have here...
Yes and if you'd continued to read the article, you would have noticed that this situation is used as an example about the problematic aspects of sexuality in our society -- its a segue to an argument, not the argument itself.
> You are not entitled to sex with anyone, but people can have preferences that are problematic
You rather took this one line out of context and interpreted in the worst possible way.
You are missing the point: saying that some preferences are problematic while others are not by itself creates an unfair double standard, even if you pay lip-service to the idea of individual right to consent. When a man rejects a woman because she's obese, that's problematic. When a woman rejects a man because he's short, that's not problematic.
I also find it sexist that both examples of racial preferences involve men, when it's well-established that women have stronger racial preferences than men, for example, white women prefer white men over Asian men (the least desirable group of men) by a much larger margin than white men prefer white women over Black women (the least desirable group of women). You could probably do the Grindr experiment on Tinder and find that the white man has an easier matching with women than the Asian man (especially if "Asian" means "Indian man" and not "K-pop idol dreamboat").
It's also strange to focus on men, when women are the pickier gender, especially when it comes to sex but to lesser extent also when it comes to dating. Even the undesirable black woman probably has an easier time hooking up than most white men.
Of course, it all makes sense when you realize that most modern-day feminists are only interested in pointing out the “problematic” behavior of men and how it impacts women, and never the other way around.
Finally, you phrased it as “THE problematic aspects of sexuality in our society” but the crux is that defining WHICH aspects are problematic is itself subjective and political. In Western society feminism dominates the institutions, so we get the result that "men rejecting black women" is problematic and "women rejecting Asian men" is not problematic. Of course, this isn't at all objective.
The double standards are real, and I say that as someone who is quite leftist (as vague of a term as it is, I think the general meaning is understood). The social justice warriors overshot in terms of equality. The inequal treatment of domestic violence in the US is also a big issue. Not that any domestic violence should be tolerated, but men are often abused and powerless to report it.
That is dubious but people are calling it out and everything else seems not egregious, so it seems better to not flag it and let the discussion carry on.
Nevermind, seems like I suffered from the same misunderstanding. I even read the next part but I forgot.
Okay I'm half joking, but this crowd of people is simply incapable of having such discussions without the thread turning into a pile of garbage very quickly because of a no-no word in the title. (Not talking about the word sex, but feminism.)
I love having such discussions, but it's not happening here for my own sanity.
The blog author doesn't actually make it clear if the line
> You are not entitled to sex with anyone, but people can have preferences that are problematic.
is spoken from their perspective or the book author's perspective. It's not a given that they agree with that sentiment. So it might be that the blog author briefly entertained their question of entitlement as a consideration before arriving at the conclusion quoted above, or they still favor it.
What the fuck, I was totally caught off guard by the comments in this post.
There's the usual torturing of definitions of word that pisses me off on HN (like when someone tried to convince people that flying is like running except you don't touch the ground) but in this thread there are weird accusations of call to rape based on the worst interpretation possible of an excerpt of the article.
It kinda put into perspective (and in a negative light) all the other posts that deals with philosophy or social issues.
> The only torturing of definitions is when the author insists that certain people not wanting to have sex with her is problematic.
Considering the article author is named Armand Halbert and is not a she I am pretty sure the biases you are showing are clouding your judgement.
The author doesn't say "not wanting to have sex with me is problematic", they say "not wanting to date someone based on their ethnicity is a political stance and it's problematic if it's the only factor in that decision". Granted the choice of words ("Are they entitled to have this preference") is poor but the whole sentence "Are they entitled to have this preference, when it comes to something as personal as dating and sex?" means "should something as personal as dating and sex be decided based on a political stance? ", the political stance being here "I don't date black people out of principle".
ELI5: it's problematic as a whole, for the community and society, when people decide not to mix, to mingle based on ethnicity.
How you arrive at the conclusion the author is promoting rape is beyond me.
For the posterity, this is the passage from the submission :
> In college, I was with a group of white men and the topic of dating came up. One of them mentioned he wouldn’t date a black woman. To my shock, the rest of the group agreed with him. We say that nobody is entitled to a relationship with someone else, but I was still disgusted. Are they entitled to have this preference, when it comes to something as personal as dating and sex?
The author explores this tension in “The Right to Sex”. You are not entitled to sex with anyone, but people can have preferences that are problematic. To the author, there is a political dimension to what we desire. She cites an example of the Grindr short videos, called “What the Flip?”. In it, a beautiful white and asian man swap profiles. The white man has scores of lovers beckoning to him, the asian man comparatively few, and those he does match with send racist messages. To the author, this video illustrates the contradiction between the principle of consent and the principle of equity:
> > the question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question.
And this is the relevant (I think) passage of the author (Amia Srinivasan) of the essay being discussed in submitted blog post:
> In her shrewd essay ‘Men Explain Lolita to Me’, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that ‘you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you,’ just as ‘you don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you.’ Not getting a bite of someone’s sandwich is ‘not a form of oppression, either’, Solnit says. But the analogy complicates as much as it elucidates. Suppose your child came home from primary school and told you that the other children share their sandwiches with each other, but not with her. And suppose further that your child is brown, or fat, or disabled, or doesn’t speak English very well, and that you suspect that this is the reason for her exclusion from the sandwich-sharing. Suddenly it hardly seems sufficient to say that none of the other children is obligated to share with your child, true as that might be.
> Sex is not a sandwich. While your child does not want to be shared with out of pity – just as no one really wants a mercy fuck, and certainly not from a racist or a transphobe – we wouldn’t think it coercive were the teacher to encourage the other students to share with your daughter, or were they to institute an equal sharing policy. But a state that made analogous interventions in the sexual preference and practices of its citizens – that encouraged us to ‘share’ sex equally – would probably be thought grossly authoritarian. (The utopian socialist Charles Fourier proposed a guaranteed ‘sexual minimum’, akin to a guaranteed basic income, for every man and woman, regardless of age or infirmity; only with sexual deprivation eliminated, Fourier thought, could romantic relationships be truly free. This social service would be provided by an ‘amorous nobility’ who, Fourier said, ‘know how to subordinate love to the dictates of honour’.) Of course, it matters just what those interventions would look like: disability activists, for example, have long called for more inclusive sex education in schools, and many would welcome regulation that ensured diversity in advertising and the media. But to think that such measures would be enough to alter our sexual desires, to free them entirely from the grooves of discrimination, is naive. And whereas you can quite reasonably demand that a group of children share their sandwiches inclusively, you just can’t do the same with sex. What works in one case will not work in the other. Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal. For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms.
> The author doesn't say "not wanting to have sex with me is problematic", they say "not wanting to date someone based on their ethnicity is a political stance and it's problematic if it's the only factor in that decision".
No, that still isn't problematic. It's someone's right to choose who they have sex with. Only a rapist denies that.
> ELI5: it's problematic as a whole, for the community and society, when people decide not to mix, to mingle based on ethnicity.
Not mingle. Sex. That's different.
Some people are really eager to defend rape apologia and I have to wonder why.
> > The author doesn't say "not wanting to have sex with me is problematic", they say "not wanting to date someone based on their ethnicity is a political stance and it's problematic if it's the only factor in that decision".
> No, that still isn't problematic. It's someone's right to choose who they have sex with. Only a rapist denies that.
Fine, I'll get down to your level.
You think it's not problematic for people not to date black women because they are black. Only racists agree with that.
> > ELI5: it's problematic as a whole, for the community and society, when people decide not to mix, to mingle based on ethnicity.
> Not mingle. Sex. That's different.
> Some people are really eager to defend rape apologia and I have to wonder why.
So far you have accused a lot of people of defending rape apologia without providing any explanations as to why the text would suggest that. When given comments explaining why the text, the blog author or the original essays author isn't promoting rape you get back to "you are all defending rape apologia".
I think one can generally find many viewpoints on politics on HN, but I suppose a few commenters who post abysmal takes can drag the whole conversation down. I don't think that's really solveable without allowing people to form their own discussion rooms. Maybe fitting for Mastodon or something.
I'm tired of everything being flagged on HN that has even a 1% chance of painting feminism or something female-related in a negative light. I believe the community at large is able to have an honest discussion, but a certain minority of users keep shutting it down by flagging submissions before it even has a chance to begin.
Its a good article and a balanced discussion about feminism would be very nice to have here...