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Counter hypothesis. For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity. With these pressures lessening more and

• api 4y ago
  This brings to mind one of my rules about conservative panics: If laws against witchcraft are removed and/or witchcraft is destigmatized and then all the sudden there appears to be an explosion of witches, the explanation is probably not that hordes of people are adopting witchcraft. I'll leave it to the reader to guess the simplest and most likely explanation.
  • wwilim 4y ago
    Captain Obvious here - the witches were already there, they were just closeted
  • conchrat 4y ago
    I understand your point but I think witchcraft might not be the best example. If witchcraft started going viral, I would absolutely be tempted to give it a shot lol. Would not surprise me if I was not in the minority there
    • alisonatwork 4y ago
      Sure. Adventurous or curious people might give something a try just for the hell of it. For some it will stick. For many it won't. This is what I find so exhausting about those who try to drum up some kind of controversy around gender identity. Assuming it is all just a fad, who cares? Where's the issue when people decide to switch their gender on a whim? It's their lives. People do all kinds of things on a whim. Adults, teens and children too. Especially children, in fact. Sometimes people regret the things they did, sometimes they don't. Oh well, it's part of life. I could understand being concerned about a social trend if it was causing violent behavior that negatively affected other people's lives, but this isn't that. Who is it hurting if someone decides to identify as another gender? Even if they pursue medical intervention, it's only going to affect them at worst. If anything the small government/pro-freedom position should be to defend the right of those people to live how they want.
      • dahfizz 4y ago
        > Where's the issue when people decide to switch their gender on a whim? The issue, at least for me, starts when we give children drugs and surgeries to enable them to switch genders. There's nothing wrong with little Timmy wanting to play with Barbies. He doesn't need hormone injections because of it.
        • maxbond 4y ago
          These same points are made & rebutted in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33880094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33880094
      • dmm 4y ago
        > Even if they pursue medical intervention, it's only going to affect them at worst. People are worried about their kids. People are scared and the media amplifies the most extreme voices. Establishing scientifically the effectiveness of medical interventions is difficult in the best of circumstances and most psychology is non-reproducible, so it's hard to know what to believe is best.
  • moffkalast 4y ago
    Maybe the real witches were the friends we made along the way
  • nmadden 4y ago
    An explosion of witches is usually down to too much eye of newt.
  • rendall 4y ago
    > one of my rules about conservative panic... Rule implies that it applies to past conservative moral panics. Is there a past moral panic in which lots of formerly suppressed identities suddenly expressed themselves once the moral panic was over?
    • pjc50 4y ago
      A lot of people came out after homosexuality was decriminalised. Freedom of religion allowed a lot of people to express their religious identity which was formerly suppressed?
    • amarant 4y ago
      A bit of an obscure example, but: Capoeira was forbidden in Brazil for a very long time, mostly because of a moral panic(for brevity I'll leave the complexities of this situation out of this comment), then when it was legalised, and the stigma around it began to disappear, it quickly became very popular, both in Brazil and internationally!
      • cshimmin 4y ago
        This seems to be to opposite of the example GP was seeking. Unless you mean to say that a great many people (both in Brazil and internationally) were already practicing Capoeira before it was legalized...
    • bigbillheck 4y ago
      Left-handed people.
      • api 4y ago
        I bring this one up every time someone brings up Chesterton's Fence arguments about stuff like this. Why was left handedness considered taboo and evil? Do we need to figure out a legitimate reason for this before we can remove the fence? Could there possibly be a legitimate reason for something that clearly absurd?
  • rowanG077 4y ago
    Why not? If something illegal/destigmatized which has some advantages becomes legal I would absolutely expect there to be an explosion of people who now start adopting that thing.
  • adolph 4y ago
    The Satanic panic is a moral panic consisting of over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of Satanic ritual abuse (SRA, sometimes known as ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organized abuse, or sadistic ritual abuse) starting in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout many parts of the world by the late 1990s, and persisting today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic
    • mc32 4y ago
      Well, there were actual cases of it, but it was exaggerated in the media. Just as the media makes it out like the next stop by a cop could end up in an execution if you’re not the same ethnicity as the cop. It’s still rather rare, or at least not happening at the rate the media portrays it.
      • actionfromafar 4y ago
        Yeah, but the ethnicity of cops is blue.
        • denton-scratch 4y ago
          Why can't blue men sing the whites?
      • adolph 4y ago
        Exaggeration of the actual happens for cause and effect alike. It is often hard to tell which side exaggeration favors until time passes.
  • naasking 4y ago
    > the explanation is probably not that hordes of people are adopting witchcraft. I don't know how you can a priori gauge this probability. If something illegal suddenly becomes legal but is still somewhat taboo, that obviously attracts experimentation, at least from rebellious youth.
• xd 4y ago
  As a parent I have no idea what you are trying to say with this idea of pushing "heteronormativity" - I don't and don't know any parents that push anything sexual let alone encouraging kids to explore sexuality .. they are kids and will be kids until they mature and begin to feel the urge to explore. This normalising of sexualising of children is abhorrent. Edit: the voting on this comment is crazy.. the number of HN users that feel sexualisation of children isn't bad is utterly shameful.
  • quietbritishjim 4y ago
    I have no skin in the overall debate but it's clear that a prince and princess running off together in a Disney film is heteronormative, while most people wouldn't consider it to be abhorrently sexualising for children to watch those films.
    • refurb 4y ago
      I mean, heterosexuality is the predominant form of sexuality in humans? Humans come in all forms. Most humans have two legs, but not all. Some are born missing a leg and some lose them from injuries. If we only show two legged characters in Disney films does that mean it's some sinister message of "bipedalnormativity"?
      • quietbritishjim 4y ago
        I never said it was sinister. I just made a statement of fact that it shows a heterosexual relationship, but doesn't significantly sexualise children. If anything, my comment could be construed as defending that sort of film rather than attacking it.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    You've not noticed the pink for girls/blue for boys distinction?
    • xd 4y ago
      Yes and me and my wife laugh about it but there is an obvious distinctive preference for kids male and female which will play into sales .. no one is forcing anyone to buy anything and even back in the 80s growing up I knew kids that would buy toys you'd associate with the other gender.
• largepeepee 4y ago
  >For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity. Only decades? You mean for all of history, where there are distinct roles mostly because of anatomy. In fact, it was only in recent decades with birth control that was there even an option for most women to take a different role for extended periods. I'll say the opposite is true, the last several decades did a great job and removed the notion of heterogenomativity. We are just going so far past that into the illogical now.
  • TomSwirly 4y ago
    > it was only in recent decades with birth control that was there even an option for most women to take a different role for extended periods. Reliable birth control methods are sixty years old. And of course there have always been non-reproductive sex acts since the birth of time.
  • red_admiral 4y ago
    I think it's a bit more complicated than that. As far as "all of history" goes, ancient Greece for example tolerated a particular kind of "homosexuality", but not one we should try and emulate - it matched neither of two conditions in "consenting adults", for example. While it's true that few if any societies other than "modern Western" would score as high as ours on Stonewall's diversity index, there were definitely ups and downs if you plotted things over time. Go back several generations in the USA or Western Europe and it's absolutely normal for straight men to have close and emotional friendships for life; when photography was first invented, it was a thing that male BFFs had photos of themselves taken that I bet anyone today, if shown without context, would immediately pattern-match to "gay couple". I'm going to quote the "art of manliness" site, of all places, on this: https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/relationships/bosom-buddies-a-photo-history-of-male-affection/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/relationships/bosom-bu... (warning: images may be considered NSFW at your place of work, despite being absolutely non-pornographic as far as I can tell) Some of these men were undoubtedly gay in the sense we understand the term, but the idea of having a close emotional bond with another man was certainly open to straight men too (and to some extent, also expected). But then, to quote "The History of Male Friendships" linked on that page, > First, men were free to have affectionate man relationships with each other without fear of being called a “queer” because the concept of homosexuality as we know it today didn’t exist then. America didn’t have the strict straight/gay dichotomy that currently exists. Affectionate feelings weren’t strictly labeled as sexual or platonic. There wasn’t even a name for homosexual sex; instead, it was referred to as “the crime that cannot be spoken.” It wasn’t until the turn of the 19th century that psychologists started analyzing homosexuality. When that happened, men in America started to become much more self-conscious about their relationships with their buds and traded the close embraces for a stiff pat on the back. > [...] > The man friendship underwent some serious transformations during the 20th century. Men went from lavishing endearing words on each other and holding hands to avoiding too much emotional bonding or any sort of physical affections whatsoever. Fear of being called gay drove much of the transformation. Ministers and politicians decried homosexuality as being incompatible with true manhood. And like most deviant behavior in the 1950s, homosexuality was associated with Communism. So, once "gay" appeared on people's radar, heteronormativity shot through the roof and men were expected to be performatively straight, to prove themselves that they were not "tainted" by this new "affliction". That's where a lot of this pressure came from, it was definitely not constant throughout all of even relatively modern history.
• rendall 4y ago
  > For the last several decades society put massive pressure on kids to conform to heteronormativity This is patently untrue. Since the 60s, western society has been increasingly accomodating to the non-gender-conforming. Especially with the rise of the internet, people who once felt isolated with whatever made them different were able to find others like themselves.
  • brookst 4y ago
    I wouldn’t say it’s untrue, just incomplete. Kids who present as the “wrong” gender are still much more likely to be bullied by kids and emotionally abused by parents. But that isn’t a new thing in the past few decades, and indeed it does seem to be getting better.
• throwaway049 4y ago
  'The last several decades' is an odd specification. Are you saying there was a point in the quite recent past when this was different?
  • niom 4y ago
    Yes. Outright bans and persecution of homosexuality is relatively new. Effeminate gays were practically eradicated, Europe had the Nazis do it, the US had the lavender scare (because gay=communist), the Soviets under Stalin did much like the Nazis. This is why gays reinvented themselves into the hypermasculine leather culture starting in the 50s. It's why older gay men have negative attitudes towards younger effeminate gays and the reason why the same parts of the gay community look down on bottoms who aren't vers.
    • simiones 4y ago
      > Outright bans and persecution of homosexuality is relatively new. In most of Europe at least, homosexuality could not be openly practiced for most of the middle ages. There were certain exceptions, but it was not generally considered acceptable, and it was persecuted by the church or other moral authorities, at the very least as ostracism if not outright legal punishments - usually seen as a deviant sexual act, which were also routinely punished. Since the states were far weaker than modern states, it wasn't as systematic and universal as the Nazis attempted, but it was still happening. Even in societies we perceive as more open such as ancient Rome, homosexual acts were often not explicitly accepted as normal, except for some we today would (rightly) consider abhorrent - adult men having sex with teenagers, but never the other way around.
      • niom 4y ago
        Ancient acceptance of MSM generally depended on who did the penetrating, because in a nutshell penetrating was manly and A-OK while being penetrated (orally / anally / vaginally) was womanly and hence bad. MSM was an exercise of social power.
    • red_admiral 4y ago