Be kind of obsessed
Victoria Smith aka Glosswitch takes on the bros who pride themselves on their top class rationality. She starts with Freddie de Boer and moves on to Jon Ronson and Adam Buxton who discussed
how a “mutual friend” of theirs (Graham Linehan) had become “kind of obsessed” with the issue, which they didn’t see fit to examine themselves. The intimation was that it was all a little bit mad and unseemly. Why would anyone get obsessed with that? Isn’t it funny how people go down those rabbit holes? You’d never catch either of them doing that. Anyhow, Ronson did think about the issue once and decided it would be mean to think about it again.
And in doing so he decided that women don’t matter and that men who stick up for women are weird.
It’s tricky for these men, Smith points out, because their split the difference approach entails ignoring a lot of very obvious bullshit. It’s uncomfortable doing that; it feels itchy, or scrapey, or pully.
For those whose brand values — rationality! curiosity! scepticism! — are quite incompatible with any serious engagement with what has been happening, it has been necessary to portray it as a “culture war” between two equally extremist sides.
Yeah, so? Isn’t that what it is?
No. It fucking is not.
Both sides have to be treated as though they are equally irrational, in order to make it possible for self-styled voices of reason to shake their heads and performatively muse on what drives perfectly ordinary people to adopt such ludicrously polarised positions. Can’t they find some middle ground? Like, experiment on half the number of kids? Let uterus havers and bleeders call themselves adult human females every other Tuesday?
I do love her writing. I’m kind of an extremist about it.
What an excellent essay. Thanks for drawing our attention to it.
From the linked Victoria Smith piece in The Critic:
But Sceptical Man, being both rational and inclined to scepticism has to face the untenable nature of this position sooner or later, or else turn his back on it and keep his focus on other issues. To put it in the classical terminology of Karl Marx ‘our being determines our consciousness; though I would maintain that being and consciousness are a two-way street. We believe what we want to believe, and only then seek rational justification for it.
That in turn can lead to problems; at times serious ones if they cannot easily be explained away.
I really love this piece. This line in particular:
Yes. I too did a little mental dance at that line.
We don’t believe what we want to believe though; we believe what we believe regardless of what we want. It’s just that the primary function of logic is to find rationalizations that justify our beliefs and actions.
Maybe I need to listen to the whole thing, but if the main bit is that Graham Linehan hasn’t done himself any favors, I find that difficult to disagree with. Is he an effective champion of sex-based rights or is he mostly a victim of Twitter poisoning that even Jesse Singal and Helen Lewis find supremely irritating? He could be both, I’ll grant you.
I saw a post of another article of hers, this at Unherd published this past December:
Why women deserve their own sport category — even in pool
Excellent as always. An excerpt:
Every time I read an essay of hers I have some kind of lightbulb moment. So I value them immensely. Her book Hags is fantastic, in so many ways (I wish I’d had it to read when I was younger – but of course both she and I needed to be old enough to understand what she writes about) – for example, in a brilliant subversion of what seems to be the case nowadays, that a woman writing about women won’t be published without including the obligatory ‘men can also be women if they want to be’ paragraph, Hags has a section speculating about whether middle-aged women are actually women.
@ #5 No doubt Graham Linehan does irritate a lot of people. To my mind that’s their problem. It’s interesting that he seems to be criticised in ways that no other man is, but very many women are – doing himself no favours and so on. Well that’s up to him. He was one of the key people in opening my eyes to the monstrosity of trans ideology and I am grateful to him for that, and pleased to donate his excellent substack The War on Women.
I like Graham Linehan and all, but he should really smile more.
Well it all depends on who you put on your fantasy culture war cinematic universe hero team, doesn’t it?
Do you know how lucky people are that have no idea who all these personalities are?
Why does everything so resemble fandoms?
You’re making Victoria’s point all over again. “Why do you care, why do you get so het up about it, it’s supremely irritating, you should be callous and indifferent like me.”
BKiSA #5
I strongly disagree with the former. Using logic “to find rationalizations that justify our beliefs and actions” is practically the definition of motivated reasoning. The “motivated” part of motivated reasoning (like the “wishful” part of wishful thinking) is there for a reason. Sure, people rarely consciously think “conclusion x is desirable, therefore x is true”, but that doesn’t mean “we believe what we believe regardless of what we want”. I think Thomas Gilovich summed it up admirably in How We Know What Isn’t So:
I also used the word “rarely” rather than “never”. Anyone with a long history of debating religious believers must be familiar with the various versions of the Argumentum ad Consequentiam that tend to come up, which explicitly says that conclusion x must be (un)true because it leads to (un)desirable consequences (God must exist or everything is hopeless, nothing has any meaning, morality has no basis etc.). I never got the impression that these believers saw their own arguments as fallacious. Another revealing observation was the way religious apologists – whether they were believers in God or (as Daniel Dennett put it) believers in belief – would accuse “militant” atheists like myself of trying to “take away” other people’s beliefs (as if persuading others to change their minds were something akin to a theft). Why should correcting a mistaken belief be seen as a loss unless keeping the belief were an end in itself?
I have some issues with Linehan*, but they are well within the realm of legitimate differences of opinion and don’t come even remotely close to justifying the price he has paid for his stance on the transgender issue. I think he is absolutely right that the real question here shouldn’t be why people like JK Rowling and himself care so much about the erosion of women’s rights and interests, the mass-application of experimental medical treatments on children etc., but why most people apparently don’t.
* Being too critical of Gender Ideology and the currently dominant strand of trans rights activism is not one of them.