My years as a feminist on red-pill-adjacent rationalist reddit

Trust and mistrust across ideological divides

It was 2017 and the blogosphere was pretty much dead. One by one, the feminist and atheist bloggers that I had been reading since the late aughts started posting their Twitter accounts in the sidebar and expecting that people would follow them there, or shifting to obscure tumblr blogs where they could be silly or serious or lazy by turns, or else they just plain slowed down as their fellow bloggers supplied them with less material to respond to.

Occasionally you’d find a blog that was still going strong. Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex was one such. Not my usual fare, to be sure, but every so often a stray link would send me there and I’d read for a bit. Scott is not particularly fond of feminists, although his most impassioned critiques thereof could leave me more inclined to reflect on his good points than complain about the parts I didn’t agree with. His posts ran long, but were frequently worth the effort; the twist at the end of I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup was deeply illuminating.

Then one day, Scott Alexander posted what I considered to be an absurd straw man argument against the concept of structural racism. It was written to look like some sort of exhaustive rational search for what the anti-racists of 2017 were really getting at, but it didn’t actually bother dealing with any real examples — it just made up lots of simplistic positions as if sufficiently many made-up people could substitute for a real opponent.

I was furious. Worse still, the comments were turned off.

There was just one potential outlet for my burning need to respond to this instance of Someone Wrong On The Internet. At the end of his post, Scott mentioned that his blog had an associated subreddit and that people could discuss the post there, if they liked.

That’s how it all began.

The Thread

The r/slatestarcodex subreddit was an interesting place back in those days. Scott Alexander was and is deeply wary of internet flame wars; some of his best writing is on rage and the dynamics that can fuel it. But he wasn’t immune to those forces himself, and he knew it. He had a self-aware tag: things I will regret writing. In one of his most well known blog posts, he compared the median number of hits on his “regret” posts with those on other tags:

Things Scott will regret writing get far more hits than anything else.

Scott knew that engagement on his most controversial posts was a double-edged sword. There was a real risk that Culture War topics could take over entirely, swamping everything else. On his own blog, he could control this somewhat by moderating his comment sections and making sure to also write about other topics. But on a subreddit?

Reddit had some toxic subcultures that would be attracted to anti-feminist content. On r/slatestarcodex, people from other communities would be able to submit their own links to rage bait of any kind, which could then go viral on the site more broadly if they got enough upvotes. This could draw a lot of negative attention, very quickly.

Scott suggested to his fans who ran the subreddit that Culture War content ought to simply be banned in its entirety. But many of the commenters didn’t want that, so instead the subreddit set up a compromise. All Culture War content would be confined to the comments of a dedicated “Culture War Thread,” so that things could not easily go viral and people who wanted to avoid that content could do so. The Thread itself would be strictly for discussing the Culture War, NOT for waging it.

That was the idea, anyway.

In practice, the Culture War Thread was a fast-paced stream of barely controlled internet reaction. Not usually Reactionary reaction, mind you — although there was some of that — but there was plenty of Despairing Classical Liberal reaction, and occasional Mildly Progressive reaction. The one thing you could count on was that we were all, almost always, reacting to something.

In the Outgroup

Used to be, on large feminist blogs, anti-feminist commenters would mostly get blocked pretty fast. But sometimes there’d be that one commenter. The blog would have a moderation policy that at least allowed for dissent in theory, and for one reason or another one person would find themselves able to figure out the rules and build up just enough trust, and the owner of the blog would allow them to stick around.

They made things much more interesting, and I always kind of admired them even when I thought they were mostly wrong. What must it have been like, to show up knowing you’d be held to higher standards than everyone else, surrounded by disagreement, and keep engaging politely anyway?

The Culture War Thread had a vast array of ideological views represented in it, but there was one viewpoint that was particularly disliked by the main conglomeration of posters, and it was — well, me. The internet feminists. People who could use words like “patriarchy” and “intersectional” and mean them. The Social Justice Warriors, the woke, the whatever-I-am-supposed-to-call-you-people.

I was one of Them. The Repugnant Cultural Other. The Outgroup. The red flag in front of the bull.

The moderators wanted to be mostly viewpoint-neutral, but I knew I’d be more likely to be reported to them in the first place. Some of the commenters believed deeply in trying to listen to the people who most enrage you, but many were around for the like-minded people they could find there. The place had principles that I quickly learned to try to invoke, but barely-concealed rage in the guise of detached commentary was still the most likely response to someone like me.

Hey, argumentation always was my preferred adrenaline hit.

I’d rather have an argument. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Developing principles

Oh, but it was hard! I liked the difficulty of it, but it was hard. Partly, it was hard just to keep engaging as an outsider without falling afoul of community norms. I quickly gave up on ever understanding the contested boundaries of the rule set. It was easier to use internal rules. What were my standards, for myself, about how to engage? What lines would I not cross?

Left-leaning commenters used to flame out of the Culture War Thread on a regular basis. Some of them just found it harder and harder not to hit back with the same snark they were getting. Inevitably, they’d get more and more moderator citations, start racking up short term bans as punishment, lose faith in the rules, and decide to write one last tell-all comment detailing their grievances before leaving. Or alternatively, maybe they wouldn’t get bans, but they’d self-censor so hard that eventually their cognitive dissonance would snap and, well, cue the “goodbye” in a similar tone to the persistent rule-breakers.

I didn’t want to be one of those people. Their parting shots never seemed to convince anyone. In a context that prizes rational detachment, it’s hard for a yowl of protest to seem other than pathetic. So one of my first rules for myself was that I wouldn’t do that. I could leave, if I wanted to, but I’d leave quietly. If nothing else, leaving quietly would mean I wouldn’t have to eat my words if I ever came back, as people sometimes did. I don’t blame them exactly; the place was oddly addictive.

A second rule that I had was never to argue “for the onlookers.” The problem with arguing for an invisible audience is that you’re free to imagine your own feedback. The chorus in your own head may well be cheering you on, but that’s no reason to assume that you’re having a salutary effect on any fence-sitters. Safer by far to focus on the person in front of you. At least then you’ll have some idea of how you’re coming across.

So I was arguing to persuade, or more realistically to at least reach some slightly better level of mutual understanding. I wanted people to be willing to change. But most people won’t be open to hearing you unless they think that you are open to hearing them. So I had a third rule. I wasn’t going to fake openness. I was going to use the real thing. I was going to, at least potentially, allow myself to be persuaded.

Making distinctions

One of the first things I learned was that people are not always who you think they are. If someone is threatened by the possibility of sexual harassment accusations in the workplace, for example, there are lots of different possible underlying mindsets. These include:

• Somebody who would never want to make a co-worker uncomfortable, and would in fact go out of their way to stop that from happening, but who is scared that they might make a good-faith mistake.

• Somebody who doesn’t care if they make their co-workers uncomfortable and who is annoyed by having to think about that possibility.

• Somebody who has, in fact, been falsely accused of sexual harassment that they never committed. (It can happen. It doesn’t matter how rare you think this is, such people are still going to be disproportionately concentrated in harassment-skeptical parts of the internet).

• Somebody who has been quite accurately accused of sexual harassment, and who isn’t remotely sorry about what they did and thinks it should have been allowed.

Because I, as a feminist, feel threatened by people who feel threatened by the possibility of sexual harassment accusations in the workplace, making these distinctions was honestly quite hard for me. Community standards on the Culture War Thread were that one ought to try to interpret people charitably, assuming the best about them wherever possible. My time in the feminist blogosphere had trained me to do the opposite, assuming the worst wherever possible.

As a practical matter, if you want to persuade, you need to know exactly what you are dealing with. I was fascinated by how difficult this could be. I needed techniques. “Can you elaborate on why you feel that way?” was a favourite. Frequently, I would be saying this as an alternative to “How can you possibly believe something so hurtful and absurd?” Sometimes I would be surprised by the answer.

Sometimes, however, people are exactly who you think they are. The first time I really lost my cool on the Culture War Thread was in reaction to a comment about dating norms. The writer was suggesting — as a joking sort of “compromise” — that perhaps there should be a rule about how, given prior interactions such as dancing together, a man is allowed to slap a woman on the ass, whereupon the woman is still permitted to get mad about it, but only “a 'cute' sort of mad that will evaporate once we [i.e. men] do something really nice for you.”

I could barely even parse my own fury — could barely, in the moment, write more than a sentence or two in response — but one thing I did realise, as I slowly cooled down over the days that followed, was that a lot of my anger was actually just latent frustration from a completely different fight. Several months prior, I’d been involved in a contentious argument over a minor #MeToo story in which a woman had successfully avoided going home with a guy who simply would not take “no” for an answer. A number of commenters claimed that statements like “no thanks, honestly, I’m too tired” were too mild, and that if she’d really hated it so much she ought to have expressed herself more strongly. Some of them had been pretty scathing about it; one guy had written:

[F]or God's sake, if this woman was so horribly scandalized by his behavior, why couldn't she leave? I read this, and it seems like she is a person totally bereft of the will to transgress even the most minor of social taboos, who is then terribly upset when things happen to her she'd rather not happen. It's like she has a rare genetic condition or something.

Of course, eventually she did leave; I had pointed that out at the time. But this commenter had wanted, I guess, for women not to feel bound by social norms when faced with someone who insists on pushing boundaries. I don’t think this is a reasonable thing to ask of everyone, but I do understand that a man could, in theory, just really want clear and unfettered communication.

I had done my best to stay calm in that earlier fight. Now I was being faced with a different argument, about how women shouldn’t be allowed to get too mad or hold grudges — that there should be social taboos, and women should follow them. Grasping my sanity for dear life, I told myself that this new commenter shouldn’t be held responsible for an old conversation with some other people that had happened months ago. I decided to go and find that earlier conversation, and quote it to point out that different people have different requirements for how they want women to behave in these kinds of situations, even if a few days had passed and probably no-one would read my response.

Readers, I went and looked at that earlier conversation, and it was the same flipping guy.

To this day, I don’t know if I was subconsciously aware that I was hearing from the same person. Is that why I got so mad? Is my subconscious lizard brain that only knows how to set off a fight/flight/freeze alarm secretly a genius pattern matcher? I suppose it kind of is, actually. It’s just biased towards false positives and it doesn’t know how to explain itself in order to help me evaluate more carefully.

Having the guy dead to rights actually made it easier to be measured in my reply; I wouldn’t have wanted to waste an opportunity like that by overstepping my conclusions. Gallingly, his comment was included in a roundup by the moderators of “quality contributions.” On the bright side, that did mean some people saw my reply. To this day, if you wish, you can click through and see his comment, with 65 upvotes, and my response, which sits on 13 upvotes. And, uh, that is what it was like to be a feminist on the Culture War Thread.

Motte and bailey

While I was trying to perceive the underlying motives of the people I was talking to, they were doing the same with me. Often, I would meet with skepticism if I claimed to be in favour of listening to male abuse victims, or tried to make a nuanced argument about how to deal with cultural differences when some other cultures might be very sexist, or defended the practice of calling a book “sexist” as an important form of cultural criticism that needn’t in itself constitute any form of censorship.

One of the most common ways to accuse me of bad faith was to refer to the “motte and bailey” fallacy. The idea is that, when pressed, you retreat to a defensible position (the motte), but then as soon as you are no longer under scrutiny you go back to believing the indefensible position (the bailey) that you actually prefer. I might say that I was only defending the practice of calling a book “sexist,” but — the claim was — I would probably be in favour of stronger measures than just criticism or counterarguments as soon as the spotlight was off.

The motte is the small, defensible castle on the hill. The bailey is the village that is easier to live in but harder to defend. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This excuse for not engaging with a more defensible position that you hate was so popular, on the Thread, that some of its denizens developed new versions of it. The “distributed motte and bailey,” according to them, is when you have many opponents, some of whom believe the more defensible thing and others of whom believe the less defensible thing, and then the former provide cover for the latter.

I was unimpressed by this. I was dealing with a “distributed motte and bailey” every damn day on the Culture War Thread, every time I had to make a distinction between a more understandable anti-feminist viewpoint and a truly execrable one. If I had to at least consider the possibility of charity, I saw no reason why they couldn’t find it in their hearts to tackle the same problem.

With that said, even as I was frustrated by a lot of the arguments I was receiving, I was also changing. I’d hear an argument and realise that, yes, the pattern of thinking that I was relying on had problems and would need to be re-worked.

Some of these realisations built on problems that I was already aware of. For example, I’ve never been much of a fan of dismissing a comment as “privileged” without going into detail about where the underlying flaw is and how a person’s perspective might alter their ability to see it clearly. Reading some of the frustrations that people on the Thread had with “privilege” as a concept made me realise that such reflexive dismissals were not just a small matter of bad behaviour. There were people with cogent points who were not being listened to. There were also people with less-cogent points that would have been easy enough to respond to, except that nobody had, because they were too busy calling the speaker “privileged” to elaborate on the problem. “Privilege” was diminishing people’s understanding, on both sides of the debate.

On the other hand, though, I do use the concept of privilege. It’s a load-bearing part of my understanding. Actually, upon reflection, I found that it was several load-bearing parts of my understanding, some of which might be able to be extricated from the overall mess. I wrote a long blog post, pulling out some aspects of the concept that I found to be defensible and important.

Discussing that blog post has deepened my understanding still further, over the years. I think the strongest counterpoint, that took the longest time to fully sink in, is that “privilege” does two things. In its better forms, it asks us to look more closely at some people, to realise that their experiences may be different from the assumed “norm” and to try to reach out across that difference in perspective with careful listening. Thats good!

The concept of privilege can also have a dark side, though. It can tell us not to listen to some people, even when they are talking about their own experiences. Men, or white people, or cisgender people, or whoever, may be assumed never to suffer in certain ways, as a class. That’s a problem, because it’s a big world out there with a lot of people in a lot of circumstances. Generalisations that implicitly tell you not to bother listening to any counterexamples are bad.

Mind you, I thought I wasn’t claiming anything of the sort. I took it as axiomatic that “being privileged doesn’t mean you’ve never suffered” and I thought that caveat was enough. It wasn’t.

It took me years, but I did finally start to catch myself in the act of taking people’s problems less seriously because I was thinking of them as privileged. I guess, on that count, I really did live in the bailey while defending myself via the motte. To be honest, I can’t guarantee that I would not still do so, but at least I’m aware of the problem.

Responsibility

When I began commenting on the Thread, I spent a lot of time considering the question of whether I should even be there in the first place. I was fully aware that there were people who would claim that even engaging in such arguments was letting the side down. This often came up in leftist flame-outs. People would say things like “This place has gone too far! I cannot in good conscience be part of it any more.”

Readers, the Thread was already “too far” for me, well before the first time I so much as stepped into it. I always wondered what those exiting leftist commenters thought they had been reading, all this time. To be fair, most of them were a bit less socially progressive than me. Perhaps they really had felt comfortable in the Thread for a while, I don’t know. Maybe leaving it really was important for their own personal development.

It was a matter of contention whether the Thread was getting worse over time. Were its viewpoints getting more extreme? Were people waging the Culture War more often and having fewer calm discussions?

In hindsight, I think it’s clear that both changes were happening, albeit slowly enough that it was hard to be sure. There were a couple of points where the change was directly visible, though. I am referring to the two times that the Culture War Thread changed location. Scott Alexander eventually found that having the Culture War Thread on a subreddit associated with him was creating opportunities for people to attack him by quoting things that had been said there. He asked the Thread to move, and it did, to a new subreddit called r/TheMotte. A few years after that, as the Thread got hotter and reddit got more restrictive, the Motte moved off reddit to its own site at www.themotte.org. It’s still there now.

Both changes necessarily altered the group of people commenting there. As a rule, those most likely to make the move were more extreme and more emotionally engaged. There was a perceptible shift in tone, both times.

I don’t comment on the Motte very much, any more. I feel like it has a lot less to teach me than it used to. The price of learning is also, I confess, a lot higher. It is deeply interesting that there are men who believe that women rule the world by their overwhelming powers of evincing sympathy, and who therefore consider any effort by a woman to ask for any sympathy for women as proof of feminine untrustworthiness. However, getting one of those men to actually explain their reasoning to you is not a pleasant process.

One part of me still remains on the Motte, though. Long ago, back when we were all still commenting on the Culture War Thread on r/slatestarcodex, I suggested that the top post of the Thread ought to have some sort of introduction to what we were trying to do there, and what any of it had to do with Slate Star Codex, the blog. With the approval of the moderators, I drafted some wording. I referenced some of Scott’s best posts on Culture War dynamics to avoid. I copied some explanations that moderators had made in other places of what kinds of behaviour consisted of Culture Warring that should be avoided.

I included some ideals for how to engage. “In general,” I wrote, “we would prefer that you argue to understand, rather than arguing to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another. Indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here.”

Much of my old wording still exists on themotte.org, posted automatically each week as the new Culture War Roundup thread goes up. Sometimes I don’t quite know how to feel about that. I know there are still people who post there who appreciate the ethos that I tried to channel with it, and who note that there is something in the formula of the place that stops it from immediately degenerating into a free-for-all.

I also know there are people who would say I should never have written that post in the first place. They’d say I have given the Motte cover. Now, when people comment there in bad faith, recruiting for accelerationist viewpoints, or promoting sexism and racism and other evils, they’ll have that post to point to in order to convince people that they are harmless folks who are just asking questions. Have I helped to defend the indefensible? Is it better for the Motte to have fewer perceptible ideals so that people won’t get suckered into giving it any credit?

In response, let me note that I started posting on the Culture War Thread in 2017. Consider the recent consequences, at that time, of a strategy of “Let’s get our political enemies to be as vice-laden and repulsive as possible so that no-one will join them and they’ll have to join us instead.”

Yeah.

Honestly, I think virtue always matters. I think you should want your political enemies to learn civic virtue, even if it makes them more attractive to some people. I hope that people can still get something from the ethos I tried to convey in my introductory post, even if they hold views I would find it hard to engage with.

However, I admit that I can only hope that the Motte’s slow slide hasn’t taken too many people down with it. Moreover, it’s very hard to know what effect my comments there might have had, overall. The internet has a lot of writers, but it has even more readers. I’ll never know what most of the people who read my comments were thinking.

One of the few things I can say with reasonable certainty is that I am a better person for the time I spent on the Culture War Thread. That might not seem like much. I am only one person. But it’s something.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A few of the more niceness-oriented Motte posters did create a little spinoff subreddit, at r/theschism. It’s, uh, quiet, but it does contain some ideological breadth that has been deeply worthwhile. I still learn things, there. One of the most surprising things I’ve learned is also one of the most obvious. Culture War topics are personal. That’s why they are so inflammatory. They contain our worst fears: violence, violation, rejection, ostracism, failure.

When you talk to someone for long enough on subjects like that, when you build up the kind of trust that would allow you to leave your motivations open to someone who disagrees with you on such personal topics … the endpoint of that road is friendship. I wasn’t expecting that. I was never there to make friends. I made some anyway.

I think, on the socially progressive left, we’ve tried to short-circuit that road to friendship and trust by outlining a set of viewpoints to agree on, instead. Understandably, we don’t want to deal with the pain of trusting when we ought not. We have lost something important in the process.

Cross-ideological interactions that improve the character of both sides are a context-dependent art. On the internet, we started out not very good at this and mostly got worse, until many of us concluded that the whole process wasn’t worthwhile. But we don’t have any other choice! We can’t survive, as a society, without finding ways to talk to each other that can make the participants better people, rather than worse. A chance of finding such a thing is worth some risk.

Many thanks to

TracingWoodgrains

for beta-reading! Controversial opinions posted here are my own, though, so blame them on me and not him.