Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Employers complain that if unemployment benefits are generous, then all the workers start making demands because they know they can quit. So when the prospect of poverty is not the alternative—when it’s not work or starvation, but it’s work or doing something else—then people are able to make demands, and it changes the power relationship between the employer and the employee
✏️ Same as with women and men in relationships.. if women have more options and aren’t required to have a man to survive, they aren’t forced to stay in bad relationships; they can make demands instead of suffer. So women are now in a position to raise their expectations and make more demands. They’re not forced into marriage because they have an alternative.
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That’s how you evaluate whether there’s exploitation occurring: what alternatives do people have? And when you evaluate power in sexual relationships, you’re thinking, well, do people have real meaningful choice here, even if they have nominal market choice?
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If your baseline of what a non exploitative relationship should look like is, well, at least I’m not being raped and beaten, then… I don’t know if you’ve ever seen someone say, “well, you know, he’s a good guy. He’s never hit me.” Well, that’s great. But it’s like saying, “This is a good boss. Sometimes they let me go home.”
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sex parallels a bigger political project of building a society where people care about what happens to each other, and that we need to not keep accepting the idea that mere consent means that nothing has gone wrong.
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The language of heterosexuality more and more emotionally cauterizes masculine desire in the way that all emotions are meant to be reduced into the key of anger. All sexual desire is meant to be the sort of desire to dominate and own and conquer and penetrate. And it’s very limiting.
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Peggy Orenstein
✏️ Look up her interviews with boys and young men about sexuality
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I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.
✏️ By YA author Lauren Morril
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Victorian England, and how much of the logic and cultural weirdness at that time is in the DNA of our culture now. The intense social hierarchy of those times mandated that most people in society who were members of the working class—or the serving class, there were far more servants back then than anybody realizes—you had to be polite. You had to care about other people as that was your job. What you aspired to be—or you knew you never could be good enough to be—was the kind of person who doesn’t have to care about anybody else. An aristocrat is somebody who, by right or might, doesn’t have to care about other people.
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The work of caring for other people is feminized, both when it’s paid and when it isn’t. And that work is considered for the suckers. Only women do that. Women care about other people so that men don’t have to, because to care about people would be seen as weak or gay. You see that with the reactions to mask mandate or even just masks suggestions, the idea that just mildly inconveniencing yourself in order to protect other people from a potentially deadly disease is an unacceptable intrusion into your personal freedom. Just being asked to use someone’s correct pronouns or to call somebody by the name that they choose. That’s the requirement that you treat other people with basic consideration.
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But that is the idea, the idea that only women should be expected to make sacrifices for other people, that the basic work of care and of social reproduction and of looking after other people is something that women should be forced to do even at the cost of their own lives. And it tallies absolutely with the destruction of social welfare, with the fallen wages and the idea that women’s bodies are meant to be the safety net that allows the rest of society to continue.
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There’s a baseline communism in society without which even the most strictly capitalist economies wouldn’t function. People do help each other. But now even just basic considerations for others are now considered foolish because you’re not profiting from that. So you’re a sucker. Unless you’re a woman, in which case, you should be legally mandated to do that work. Otherwise, you’re evil in some way.
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It’s not to say that because there’s this baseline communism, women shouldn’t have to be empathetic and kind; it’s to extend the demand and say, We need to build the kind of society in which everyone cares about each other’s pleasures and desires.
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empathize, trying to understand what the other person is feeling so I can predict their reactions. And that’s not approval at all. That’s threat modeling. And my threat modeling is empathy. For me, it’s a strategic way to think about it. But I do think empathy of all kinds, including cognitive empathy, is politically useful. It doesn’t mean that you extend sympathy. You extend compassion and mercy.
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There is a fallacy that showing empathy, or even just trying to understand somebody’s point of view, means letting them off the hook. And it means indulging them and not creating consequences. And that comes from how many of us—white men in particular—have often been treated down the centuries. White men are the only people who are allowed mercy and forgiveness and tolerance and understanding. And actually, I think everybody should be offered all of those things and be held to expectations of behavior