Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn't it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
People more plugged in than me in US culture war issues: is the opposition to infant male circumcision driven primarily by anti-semitism / anti-islamism or by more general manosphere vibes?
my experience has been that it's actually driven primarily by the absolute weirdest ppl you will ever meet, these people having overlap with anything weird you can think of, including antisemitism, wellness fascism, inceldom, MRAs, etc, but not tending to be based particularly in any of those groups.
all of which is unfortunate because i also think they are just correct in their claims that this is a real bodily autonomy issue
I think the incels are into intactivism because a circumcision is an unrectifiable loss. Incels are deeply attracted to events and actions that are unrectifiable. Think about all the robots on 4chan bemoaning the absence of mutual adolescent love. One can be a turbo virgin all the way into college at least and still turn out fine. Incels didn't (turn out will), and they didn't (get any tail in highschool); so that must mean that being a virgin in highschool is what broke them.
In a similar way, many intactivists (especially the r/circumcisiongrief types) blame their sexual inadequacy on their post-natal circumcision, rather than their own psycho sexual issues or their habits of completely monkey-wrenching their shit on the daily. To be absolutely fair, a circ will almost definitely negatively affect your sex life, and really, it's frustrating to have a completely pointless operation done to your meat without your consent, but I think intactivism is a heatsink its proponents fervor, rather than the source of the anger.
this is very insightful, and it sheds some light for me on something underappreciated: the way in which inceldom is not the same as not having sex. it's an ideology characterized by misogyny, misanthropy, and a sense of one's own brokenness, and in particular by a fixation on the sense of unrectifiable loss you describe. people really struggle with the idea that there are incels who have had sex or that someone can not have had sex and not qualify for the label incel.
more generally, chan culture and its offshoots really successfully capitalized upon these tendencies in ways that seem to be underexamined. there's a reason /lgbt/ attracted so many trans people. if you went through the wrong puberty, you have suffered actual, extremely painful unrectifiable loss, and a culture that recognizes that and encourages wallowing in it can serve an oppositional role to a broader culture that just lies to you about what you've experienced. i rarely hear about this and when i do it comes wrapped in moralizing terms like "brain poison" which are in their own way accurate and useful, but which are not sufficient for a complete examination
So just a couple things before the rest of this comment:
I spent about five minutes trying to see what I could find out. I looked up a few “intactivist” organisations and, at risk of poisoning my algorithms forever, looked at their socials and who they followed. I don’t think I really found out anything that interesting, except that a lot of them follow daniel “tosh.0” tosh? He probably platformed some of them at some point. Otherwise, I think in terms of what is organisationally there, it’s a little too fringe to be “driven primarily” by any particular cultural faction.
E: adding that when I think about it, I’ve seen intactivists presented in two tv shows as fringe weirdos. I think the editors of the shows chose to focus just on the views surrounding circumcision and not anything else.
in retrospect I regret starting this hare
The impulse was a HN sub where the ~~CDC~~CPS was gonna mark infant male circumcision as bad
~~becase the CDC is now basically RFK JR/MAHA aligned, my thought went instantly to neo-nazis.~~ [See above, this was CPS, not CDC, so I doubly misread. Further association follows] In part because a couple of election cycles ago here in Sweden, the local nationalist party tried to resurrect the old Swedish ban on kashrut slaughter as an anti-islamist trope, showing that these bad Nazi ideas keep showing up
HN submission (flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567696
Previous discussion on HN from 9 years ago, no-one mentions Fremskrittspartiet are heirs to Nazis, nor that the linked submission explicitely calls out the legislation as anti-semitic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291906
I completely forgot that the US is almost unique in the prevalence of infant male circumcision on non-religious grounds
When I used to work at the farmers' market in San Francisco, I would always dread when somebody had a protest scheduled for the Embarcadero plaza, as it would make packing up and getting out at the end of the day even more of a chore. But the most, ah, visually striking of those was certainly the "intactivists." It was actually a fairly gender-diverse crowd, plenty of concerned moms mixed in (and I was given to suspect that some of them had to be drawn from what we would now call MAHA circles)... But the centerpiece was a bunch of guys holding signs and wearing bleached-white jeans with red circles painted on their groins 😬
Ah yes the first group I looked up, the “Bloodstained Men & Their Friends” (BSM) are the ones who started (perhaps appropriated from period havers) the red on white pants thing.
And now I’m imagining ordering a porchetta sandwich at Roli Roti, seeing them protest, and remembering to ask for extra pork skin.
j/k, I would never forget to order the crackling.
(I’m so sorry for that)
Don't forget to tip!
Think the opposition to it is pre manosphere, but yeah, I think from tne manosphere side not everybody who says that is a anti-semite / anti-islam, lot of it also felt very 'we need a cause to show those dastardly feminists that they don't have the moral high ground', if that makes sense. Same with the manospherian opposition to prison rape (which often felt a lot of 'men get raped too!' stuff, and not really that active in opposition to the prison system. (I mean in general, there are elements of it that were pretty vocal about it, but from what I always got from that space was that is was more like an empty signal). (Note im just talking about the manosphere and the bits I read from that space, not the general opposition to circumcision).
When phrased like that, they can't be disentangled. You'll have to ask the person whether they come from a place of hate or compassion.
content warning: frank discussion of the topic
Male genital mutilation is primarily practiced by Jews and Christians. Female genital mutilation is primarily practiced by Muslims. In Minnesota, female genital mutilation is banned. It's widely understood that the Minnesota statutes are anti-Islamic and that they implicitly allow for the Jewish and Christian status quo. However, bodily autonomy is a relatively fresh legal concept in the USA and we are still not quite in consensus that mutilating infants should be forbidden regardless of which genitals happen to be expressed.
In theory, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has been ratified; Mr. Biden said it's law but Mr. Trump said it's not. If the ERA is law then Minnesota's statutes are unconstitutionally sexist! This analysis requires a sort of critical gender theory: we have to be willing to read a law as sexist even when it doesn't mention sex at all. The equivalent for race, critical race theory, has been a resounding success, and there has been some progress on deconstructing gender as a legal concept too. ERA is a shortcut that would immediately reverberate throughout each state's statutes.
The most vocal opponents of the ERA have historically been women; important figures include Alice Hamilton, Mary Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Phyllis Schafly. It's essential to know that these women had little else in common; Schafly was a truly odious anti-feminist while Roosevelt was an otherwise-upstanding feminist.
The men's-rights advocates will highlight that e.g. Roosevelt was First Lady, married to a pro-labor president who generally supported women's rights; I would point out that her husband didn't support ERA either, as labor unions were anti-ERA during that time due to a desire to protect their wages.
This entanglement is a good example of intersectionality. We generally accept in the USA that a law can be sexist and racist, simultaneously, and similarly I think that the right way to understand the discussion around genital mutilation is that it is both sexist and religiously bigoted.
Chaser: It's also racist. C'mon, how could the USA not be racist? Minnesota's Department of Health explicitly targets Somali refugees when discussing female genital mutilation. The original statute was introduced not merely to target Muslims, but to target Somali-American Muslim refugees.
Not disagreeing on sexism or racism being involved in decision making, and female genital mutilation can refer to several different things, but all of them are more damaging and harmful than male circumcision.
In the same way that in France, separation of church and state sounds good on paper but means "local government will still sponsor nativity scenes but schoolchildren will be banned from wearing hijabs" in practice.
There's no good reason for male circumcision, but female "circumcision" is not comparable at all. It's almost never done safely and it more than often involves removal of the glans clitoridis (i.e. genital mutilation). Male circumcision does not usually remove the bellend. No one can possibly equate the two in good faith.
Anyways, yeah I would say the main driver is men's rights activists, though unsurprisingly I've seen a fair share of antisemitism come with it. They're more or less the same ideology anyway.
Supposedly it reduces std transmissions and thus HPV caused cancers, which of course is neither here nor there with respect to doing it to people who can't meaningfully consent, and also there are non surgical alternatives like condoms and hpv vaccines.
Female circumcision is usually butchery and completely indefensible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTXTDvY_sDY
Fuck that’s a banger
yeah bye now
Would you say that in your life you find it hard to engage in conversation with women?
8ball says “yes” but it had rendering difficulties, fontsize too big
“I, personally, possess the choice on what irreversible impact to make on some other human being’s body without their input at all. Oh and also it’s supes totes fine to do, in general. To babies. Duh.” sure is a take
From their posts earlier in the thread, I'm 99% sure that's sarcasm.
Yes, not mutilating infants' genitals is the default choice! A few nations have that custom like a few have the custom of stretching necks, or footbinding, or piercing ears. Its not even a very old custom in the USA (early 20th century I think whereas in North Africa and West Asia it goes back thousands of years).