I love this and 100 percent agree. So many women not obly have internal mysogyny, but they sexually harass other women also through triangulating with men/setting them up etc cant explain it
Beauty of course is real and children know it, but it can seem like there is a shrinking or … crudity or dumbing down of (varieties of) attractiveness in the past quarter century. Maybe I perceive this because I spend most of my time in the past, culturally.
Admittedly I can’t say what was going in the 30s, 40s, and 50s despite having watched hundreds of movies from an earlier era. Much of the time I can’t see the beauty of the heroine, and the hair looks especially terrible to me. Sometimes her personality is half the (obvious) attraction: Myrna Loy. I just accept the actresses’ attractiveness to make the movie work. Exceptions: Jean Arthur is very beautiful despite her hair. Irene Dunne. Vivien Leigh is very beautiful in GWTW because she is allowed hair for period authenticity. I think of Doris Day, a very pretty woman, whose hair in 50s films is often done (minimized) so as to make her look like a big Gerber baby. She’s more beautiful in the 60s after her movie career was finished, to me.
I have an old 70s crochet pattern pamphlet. I marvel at the fact that the models, presumably not top ones, seem like the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life. Far more beautiful than the models who now model couture clothing in Vogue. And certainly more beautiful than the models for internet clothing websites.
And yet: TV shows and movies and pictures of girls having fun doing this or that, during the long ago years of my childhood, were striking for showing lots of ways to be “cute”. Healthy and cute. Sally Field for example.
Hair was often in ponytails. Hair styles changed pretty often. Clothing for kids more unisex. “Natural” was normal.
When little for a couple years I had a “Dorothy Hamill” haircut. This did not make me look pretty, but I don’t know that it was done so on purpose.
Actual adult woman Dorothy Hamill had this haircut and she was in fact admired, for her looks as well as her skating.
Nowadays the clothing models half the time are homely, however good their and their audience’s self-esteem - meanwhile actual girls and young women and even aging actresses whose own natural looks once indisputably had the stamp of commercial approval, do not generally aspire to that avant-garde contrarian aesthetic but all seem to be aiming for the exact same altered (very juvenile-ly or doll-like sexual, no personality?) look. (“I can safely promise never to talk during sex, or ever?”) The plump lips and the cartoonish eye makeup designed for photos, and the identical waves of hair. The same noses and chins if they can pay for it. (Look at Woodstock; the girls mostly all have long hair, but it looks terrible by modern standards.)
My niece’s sorority looks like a version of a campy sci-fi movie where the women are beautiful clones.
I think this homogenization is remarkable, but I don’t know how to square it with your persuasive essay.
Maybe: post-feminism we must pretend beauty doesn’t exist, hence the almost distractingly odd models that have been put forward in recent decades; but this has prompted a reaction - we can’t be open about beauty, but it will nonetheless be pursued in this cartoonish way, as a rebellious, yet desperate sign? (Look, men, what I am doing to please you?) Or in a multicultural society, we must converge on a single “look” that can be found on the internet and that all can master, with various tricks and interventions, like one of those blended “future post-ethnic person” photos?
It’s funny I ended up at the opposite end after reading your comment, which is that feminism has taught us nothing is ugly (if everyone and everything is equally beautiful). But, I see the way gen z women dressed and am pretty repelled, even as many of them seem to wear ugly outfits as a badge of rebellion against “beauty standards” that aren’t ones imposed by real men in the world, but by media, and by women. It means that femininity is out of fashion, and the woman who presents as conventionally feminine in appearance is suspect. I think we need to stop belittling feminine appearances but also resist cosmetic procedures as much as we can. I agree with you that the actresses of my childhood were more real and attractive as a result. On the one extreme we have ugly clothing and fat positivity, and on the other we have an algorithmically driven beauty industrial complex that’s flattening femininity into one dimension of desirability, and men don’t even desire it.
I guess I would say - nowadays, yes, we are all "equally beautiful" thanks to feminism, or as much so as we can convince ourselves. But in fact there were to me more "attractiveness" options in the past, ways to be pretty, and merely "cute" was right in there (hopefully in real life still, probably); but the future may be forgiven for thinking, based on the internet, and actresses - that there was only one acceptable look - one face almost - thus far in the 21st century.
This is a lovely piece Anuradha. Your essay reminds me of what Ferrante does in her much lauded books. Very few authors seem to touch the obviously rich vein of intra-sexual policing, as you put it. Or at least, a few do but generations apart. As a fellow Hindu-Indian (like you brought up outside India) we might be afforded the kind of intimacy and distance to see certain facets of gendered and cultural life that others might miss. Merry Christmas!
I learned about the female competition component years ago when I was waiting for a friend at a bar. A group of women were having a girls night and there were about 8 of them at a table. The last friend came in, 15 minutes after everyone else, wearing a spaghetti strapped silk top, no bra, and she had clearly had her breasts augmented. It dawned on me that she was dressed for domination; domination over her friends and domination of any attention her table would receive from men at the bar.
I enjoy these articles. I too have wondered why so many parents allow young girls to dress like street walkers. I respect that a grown woman can choose to dress or undress however she pleases, but for children it is dangerous, especially with the pullback in policing. I can see no upside to this, with a large downside (sexual assault). I cannot get inside the heads of anyone who is against this, save for the monsters promoting the worst possible behavior in the hopes of a revolution that will never arrive.
You should write about how promiscuous girls and women will often try to push other women in that same direction. It’s definitely a thing but I haven’t seen it talked about much lately.
Feminist mythology notwithstanding, women and not men are traditionally the most zealous enforcers of female human sexual norms, because "loose women" were the equivalent of scabs who undercut the union price.
"As you can imagine, this lack of attention until later in life and the dampening of earlier signals fucked with my self-esteem. I suppose you can say that I’m weak for this, but it’s worse for a woman to think she’s utterly undesirable than to get an equivalent amount of attention as the women around her."
You're not weak. You're a human being with human needs.
Why has evolutionary biology of gender behavior and sexual attraction become so corrupted and toxic? Frankly, most of what drives related behavior is simply the biomechanical function of hormones. Get rid of the hormones and there is no sexual attraction. And if you think society is problematic with male gazes and female exploitation of sex for power, think about how crappy things would be if nobody had any sexual interests?
These things would be fun if not weaponized by toxic feminism.
The declared feminist dream is to dominate all males but have corralled a cohort of high-quality male sex slaves that are forced to perform on demand, while all the lower-quality males get neutered. Now, this is their dream, but it includes them remaining just as depressed and resentful as they are today claiming it is because of the male gaze. The reason is that the actual dream that they deny is to be swept off their feet by a real man and live a life of a traditional husband and wife. They want it. They know it. They deny it. And it makes them furious that they want it and have to deny it.
It is clear to me that our evolutionary biology causes us to crave attention, acceptance and indications that we are wanted. This makes sense given that the human child is dependent on adults for survival for the largest percentage of its life than any other animal. A lack of attention generally has resulted in early childhood death. For both males and females, the lack of a partner and the lack of procreation also contribute to a lower life expectancy. This is actually true in our current time... married people report higher levels of happiness and live longer lives.
The feminist movement is actually counter to evolutionary biology and counter to human happiness and longevity. It is a small, but growing, group of unsatisfied females that have pursued education and put themselves in girlboss positions where they seek revenge for their resentment by making everyone else as miserable as they are.
My career in corporate IT was probably atypical in the ethnic and gender diversity of my coworkers. But I have a large group of really good friends from that experience. We flirted a lot. We made sexual jokes about each other. We gazed at each other. Some of us strayed and cheated on our spouses with each other (not me). Some of us even got married to each other. Thinking back on this, we helped each other by showing our attraction to each other. We made each other feel good about ourselves. But we were behaving simply as normal human animals based on our evolutionary biology.
Today, the woke feminized HR department would eliminate most of that fun and harmless banter. They would make it a sterile and depressing work culture with weak connections and nonexistent connections.
Feminism has become a war on human evolutionary biology. To win back normalcy, we need to first fire all the HR ladies and replace them with non-feminists. We also need government assistance to support families with young children.
"The feminist movement is actually counter to evolutionary biology and counter to human happiness and longevity. "
Mock nature at your own risk. Not because nature is a sentient woman as some would like to believe (it's not), but because some things just are and always will be.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings have entered the chat.
We are actively warping so many parts of nature and a grand scale. Narrow-hipped women no longer die in childbirth. Appendicitis is no longer the third largest cause of death among males, while suicide is now number 1. Over time these changes will have genetic consequences, if civilization lasts that long. Many of the changes we have made to our environment will long outlive us, from randomly adding alien species to random environments to artificial dams, mankind has changed nature to an extraordinary degree.
On a more analytical note, I suppose that women pull down other women's desirability (either by reputation damage or self-esteem manipulation) because "It isn't fair" the way that women gain social cache among men. It is not a fair competition (It's just your outer shell. It's something you're born with or purchase), and it punishes the ugly - uglier. And every girl and woman discovers that there is only ever 1 bright star in a solar system of men, in any room. The rest fade away in their eyes, and they all jockey for the most beautiful, the best. You can go from the belle of the ball, to invisible in 2 seconds flat. And once you're invisible, you're worthless and you feel it. So if NO one can win, then women don't allow ANYONE to compete - unless it's themselves - and they are winning. What do you think?
"...as a middle-aged woman, I feel as though young girls are dressing and acting like adult women, and mothers in particular have become highly permissive in this regard because there’s been such a strong reaction to shaming that was prevalent in decades past. But the answer to victim shaming isn’t to then go in the opposite direction and encourage one’s daughter to lean into her sexuality in elementary or middle school."
The norm of sexual shame has definitely been transformed, but I suspect this is partly an instance of social desirability bias. Mothers won't actively shame girls, and girls will pretend to be sexually liberated... but NO woman wants to be seen or rumored to be promiscuous. The insults that women throw at each other still mostly revolve around (1) promiscuity and (2) being unappealing to men. This is telling. This disingenuous social illusion could be a good example of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs. The underclass experienced the erosion of sexual shame and relationship norms decades ago, and their marriage rates tell the tale. Now we have upper class women pretending to repudiate any concept of sexual shame, while daily reinforcing it with their decisions and attitudes.
But there HAS been (or seems to have been) a move towards libertinism among many girls and women, of all ages and classes. I don't see it in my school as much (most of my middle school students are Haitian-American, and the majority have two traditional parents in the home) but there is a kind of slight ambient change, perceptible in their values and language and cultural references. One factor is the constant access to adult content on phones.
Among the upper class we see a distinct pattern: mothers pretend to encourage open sexuality in their daughters. Daughters explore their sexuality until their late 20's... when the priority often becomes a stable relationship (marriage) and monogamy. the number of women who comment on the spiritual desolation of promiscuity is striking. We're reaching the point, I think, where the celebration of uninhibited sexuality i beginning to interfere with older structures and norms of monogamy. Women who wait until their 30's to get married are by no means 'too late' but their chances of success HAVE declined. Female promiscuity is HIGHLY unappealing to potential male mates. As with so many other things, we've replaced norms constructed for the benefit of society as a whole (which lies in as many stable relationships and 2-3 children on average) with the desires of a minority of the population, and the political appeal of transgressing traditional norms. We can certainly abandon traditional norms, but we'll need something to stand in their place... and "I will do whatever I want to do (provided it doesn't victimize someone) simply because I want to do it, and criticizing me is patriarchy" isn't going to work. If it was going to work we'd be able to be honest about what was going on.
I'm working on a book about authority (when I finally get my Substack going, it will be the main course); the main pathology of authority is that it seeks to evade accountability, as authority sees any kind of challenge or vulnerability as an existential threat.
Everybody wants to be in charge. However, nobody wants to be responsible.
I hadn't considered some of this... very interesting.
To me the fascinating aspect of your writing is how much of your insight is strictly proscribed by the culture. We can't discuss these matters, we can't acknowledge that we can't discuss them, and no one will willingly admit that there are speech codes or invisible red lines... despite the fact that everyone knows they exist and many people are personally invested in maintaining them. But don't you dare discuss any of it!
I love this and 100 percent agree. So many women not obly have internal mysogyny, but they sexually harass other women also through triangulating with men/setting them up etc cant explain it
Beauty of course is real and children know it, but it can seem like there is a shrinking or … crudity or dumbing down of (varieties of) attractiveness in the past quarter century. Maybe I perceive this because I spend most of my time in the past, culturally.
Admittedly I can’t say what was going in the 30s, 40s, and 50s despite having watched hundreds of movies from an earlier era. Much of the time I can’t see the beauty of the heroine, and the hair looks especially terrible to me. Sometimes her personality is half the (obvious) attraction: Myrna Loy. I just accept the actresses’ attractiveness to make the movie work. Exceptions: Jean Arthur is very beautiful despite her hair. Irene Dunne. Vivien Leigh is very beautiful in GWTW because she is allowed hair for period authenticity. I think of Doris Day, a very pretty woman, whose hair in 50s films is often done (minimized) so as to make her look like a big Gerber baby. She’s more beautiful in the 60s after her movie career was finished, to me.
I have an old 70s crochet pattern pamphlet. I marvel at the fact that the models, presumably not top ones, seem like the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life. Far more beautiful than the models who now model couture clothing in Vogue. And certainly more beautiful than the models for internet clothing websites.
And yet: TV shows and movies and pictures of girls having fun doing this or that, during the long ago years of my childhood, were striking for showing lots of ways to be “cute”. Healthy and cute. Sally Field for example.
Hair was often in ponytails. Hair styles changed pretty often. Clothing for kids more unisex. “Natural” was normal.
When little for a couple years I had a “Dorothy Hamill” haircut. This did not make me look pretty, but I don’t know that it was done so on purpose.
Actual adult woman Dorothy Hamill had this haircut and she was in fact admired, for her looks as well as her skating.
Nowadays the clothing models half the time are homely, however good their and their audience’s self-esteem - meanwhile actual girls and young women and even aging actresses whose own natural looks once indisputably had the stamp of commercial approval, do not generally aspire to that avant-garde contrarian aesthetic but all seem to be aiming for the exact same altered (very juvenile-ly or doll-like sexual, no personality?) look. (“I can safely promise never to talk during sex, or ever?”) The plump lips and the cartoonish eye makeup designed for photos, and the identical waves of hair. The same noses and chins if they can pay for it. (Look at Woodstock; the girls mostly all have long hair, but it looks terrible by modern standards.)
My niece’s sorority looks like a version of a campy sci-fi movie where the women are beautiful clones.
I think this homogenization is remarkable, but I don’t know how to square it with your persuasive essay.
Maybe: post-feminism we must pretend beauty doesn’t exist, hence the almost distractingly odd models that have been put forward in recent decades; but this has prompted a reaction - we can’t be open about beauty, but it will nonetheless be pursued in this cartoonish way, as a rebellious, yet desperate sign? (Look, men, what I am doing to please you?) Or in a multicultural society, we must converge on a single “look” that can be found on the internet and that all can master, with various tricks and interventions, like one of those blended “future post-ethnic person” photos?
It’s funny I ended up at the opposite end after reading your comment, which is that feminism has taught us nothing is ugly (if everyone and everything is equally beautiful). But, I see the way gen z women dressed and am pretty repelled, even as many of them seem to wear ugly outfits as a badge of rebellion against “beauty standards” that aren’t ones imposed by real men in the world, but by media, and by women. It means that femininity is out of fashion, and the woman who presents as conventionally feminine in appearance is suspect. I think we need to stop belittling feminine appearances but also resist cosmetic procedures as much as we can. I agree with you that the actresses of my childhood were more real and attractive as a result. On the one extreme we have ugly clothing and fat positivity, and on the other we have an algorithmically driven beauty industrial complex that’s flattening femininity into one dimension of desirability, and men don’t even desire it.
I had never thought of this so-called beauty paradigm in connection with the algorithm. It’s so obvious now you’ve said it.
I guess I would say - nowadays, yes, we are all "equally beautiful" thanks to feminism, or as much so as we can convince ourselves. But in fact there were to me more "attractiveness" options in the past, ways to be pretty, and merely "cute" was right in there (hopefully in real life still, probably); but the future may be forgiven for thinking, based on the internet, and actresses - that there was only one acceptable look - one face almost - thus far in the 21st century.
Tl; dr - nobody’s “cute” anymore.
We are eternally overcorrecting. Its always about balance.
This is a lovely piece Anuradha. Your essay reminds me of what Ferrante does in her much lauded books. Very few authors seem to touch the obviously rich vein of intra-sexual policing, as you put it. Or at least, a few do but generations apart. As a fellow Hindu-Indian (like you brought up outside India) we might be afforded the kind of intimacy and distance to see certain facets of gendered and cultural life that others might miss. Merry Christmas!
I learned about the female competition component years ago when I was waiting for a friend at a bar. A group of women were having a girls night and there were about 8 of them at a table. The last friend came in, 15 minutes after everyone else, wearing a spaghetti strapped silk top, no bra, and she had clearly had her breasts augmented. It dawned on me that she was dressed for domination; domination over her friends and domination of any attention her table would receive from men at the bar.
Maybe I am wired up funny, but I am allergic to attention-seeking behavior.
I enjoy these articles. I too have wondered why so many parents allow young girls to dress like street walkers. I respect that a grown woman can choose to dress or undress however she pleases, but for children it is dangerous, especially with the pullback in policing. I can see no upside to this, with a large downside (sexual assault). I cannot get inside the heads of anyone who is against this, save for the monsters promoting the worst possible behavior in the hopes of a revolution that will never arrive.
I imagine it’s partly that they want to feel good about their own choices so they encourage it in their daughters.
I haven’t even read this yet and I know it’s gonna be fire
lol I think it has underperformed compared to part 1 but I bet that’s because I turn the gaze inward, and it’s shorter than usual. But who knows.
You should write about how promiscuous girls and women will often try to push other women in that same direction. It’s definitely a thing but I haven’t seen it talked about much lately.
Ooh great topic
Feminist mythology notwithstanding, women and not men are traditionally the most zealous enforcers of female human sexual norms, because "loose women" were the equivalent of scabs who undercut the union price.
It definitely goes in both directions!
"As you can imagine, this lack of attention until later in life and the dampening of earlier signals fucked with my self-esteem. I suppose you can say that I’m weak for this, but it’s worse for a woman to think she’s utterly undesirable than to get an equivalent amount of attention as the women around her."
You're not weak. You're a human being with human needs.
I appreciate this
This is great. Thank you Anuragha.
Why has evolutionary biology of gender behavior and sexual attraction become so corrupted and toxic? Frankly, most of what drives related behavior is simply the biomechanical function of hormones. Get rid of the hormones and there is no sexual attraction. And if you think society is problematic with male gazes and female exploitation of sex for power, think about how crappy things would be if nobody had any sexual interests?
These things would be fun if not weaponized by toxic feminism.
The declared feminist dream is to dominate all males but have corralled a cohort of high-quality male sex slaves that are forced to perform on demand, while all the lower-quality males get neutered. Now, this is their dream, but it includes them remaining just as depressed and resentful as they are today claiming it is because of the male gaze. The reason is that the actual dream that they deny is to be swept off their feet by a real man and live a life of a traditional husband and wife. They want it. They know it. They deny it. And it makes them furious that they want it and have to deny it.
It is clear to me that our evolutionary biology causes us to crave attention, acceptance and indications that we are wanted. This makes sense given that the human child is dependent on adults for survival for the largest percentage of its life than any other animal. A lack of attention generally has resulted in early childhood death. For both males and females, the lack of a partner and the lack of procreation also contribute to a lower life expectancy. This is actually true in our current time... married people report higher levels of happiness and live longer lives.
The feminist movement is actually counter to evolutionary biology and counter to human happiness and longevity. It is a small, but growing, group of unsatisfied females that have pursued education and put themselves in girlboss positions where they seek revenge for their resentment by making everyone else as miserable as they are.
My career in corporate IT was probably atypical in the ethnic and gender diversity of my coworkers. But I have a large group of really good friends from that experience. We flirted a lot. We made sexual jokes about each other. We gazed at each other. Some of us strayed and cheated on our spouses with each other (not me). Some of us even got married to each other. Thinking back on this, we helped each other by showing our attraction to each other. We made each other feel good about ourselves. But we were behaving simply as normal human animals based on our evolutionary biology.
Today, the woke feminized HR department would eliminate most of that fun and harmless banter. They would make it a sterile and depressing work culture with weak connections and nonexistent connections.
Feminism has become a war on human evolutionary biology. To win back normalcy, we need to first fire all the HR ladies and replace them with non-feminists. We also need government assistance to support families with young children.
"The feminist movement is actually counter to evolutionary biology and counter to human happiness and longevity. "
Mock nature at your own risk. Not because nature is a sentient woman as some would like to believe (it's not), but because some things just are and always will be.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings have entered the chat.
We are actively warping so many parts of nature and a grand scale. Narrow-hipped women no longer die in childbirth. Appendicitis is no longer the third largest cause of death among males, while suicide is now number 1. Over time these changes will have genetic consequences, if civilization lasts that long. Many of the changes we have made to our environment will long outlive us, from randomly adding alien species to random environments to artificial dams, mankind has changed nature to an extraordinary degree.
I'm sorry all that happened to you.
On a more analytical note, I suppose that women pull down other women's desirability (either by reputation damage or self-esteem manipulation) because "It isn't fair" the way that women gain social cache among men. It is not a fair competition (It's just your outer shell. It's something you're born with or purchase), and it punishes the ugly - uglier. And every girl and woman discovers that there is only ever 1 bright star in a solar system of men, in any room. The rest fade away in their eyes, and they all jockey for the most beautiful, the best. You can go from the belle of the ball, to invisible in 2 seconds flat. And once you're invisible, you're worthless and you feel it. So if NO one can win, then women don't allow ANYONE to compete - unless it's themselves - and they are winning. What do you think?
"...as a middle-aged woman, I feel as though young girls are dressing and acting like adult women, and mothers in particular have become highly permissive in this regard because there’s been such a strong reaction to shaming that was prevalent in decades past. But the answer to victim shaming isn’t to then go in the opposite direction and encourage one’s daughter to lean into her sexuality in elementary or middle school."
The norm of sexual shame has definitely been transformed, but I suspect this is partly an instance of social desirability bias. Mothers won't actively shame girls, and girls will pretend to be sexually liberated... but NO woman wants to be seen or rumored to be promiscuous. The insults that women throw at each other still mostly revolve around (1) promiscuity and (2) being unappealing to men. This is telling. This disingenuous social illusion could be a good example of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs. The underclass experienced the erosion of sexual shame and relationship norms decades ago, and their marriage rates tell the tale. Now we have upper class women pretending to repudiate any concept of sexual shame, while daily reinforcing it with their decisions and attitudes.
But there HAS been (or seems to have been) a move towards libertinism among many girls and women, of all ages and classes. I don't see it in my school as much (most of my middle school students are Haitian-American, and the majority have two traditional parents in the home) but there is a kind of slight ambient change, perceptible in their values and language and cultural references. One factor is the constant access to adult content on phones.
Among the upper class we see a distinct pattern: mothers pretend to encourage open sexuality in their daughters. Daughters explore their sexuality until their late 20's... when the priority often becomes a stable relationship (marriage) and monogamy. the number of women who comment on the spiritual desolation of promiscuity is striking. We're reaching the point, I think, where the celebration of uninhibited sexuality i beginning to interfere with older structures and norms of monogamy. Women who wait until their 30's to get married are by no means 'too late' but their chances of success HAVE declined. Female promiscuity is HIGHLY unappealing to potential male mates. As with so many other things, we've replaced norms constructed for the benefit of society as a whole (which lies in as many stable relationships and 2-3 children on average) with the desires of a minority of the population, and the political appeal of transgressing traditional norms. We can certainly abandon traditional norms, but we'll need something to stand in their place... and "I will do whatever I want to do (provided it doesn't victimize someone) simply because I want to do it, and criticizing me is patriarchy" isn't going to work. If it was going to work we'd be able to be honest about what was going on.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/its-a-womans-duty-to-choose-well
In some regards this seems to be like generals trying to re-fight the last war.
If there is an Achilles' heel here, that is it.
In my experience, very few women really want to actually be in charge, to be the boss, to be Where The Buck Stops.
Rather, they want to run elaborate whispering campaigns and run things behind the scenes or to be seen on the arm of the boss male.
Yes, because that would require risk tolerance and accountability for potential failure.
I'm working on a book about authority (when I finally get my Substack going, it will be the main course); the main pathology of authority is that it seeks to evade accountability, as authority sees any kind of challenge or vulnerability as an existential threat.
Everybody wants to be in charge. However, nobody wants to be responsible.
A lane few people are in, and I look forward to reading
Succinctly so.
I hadn't considered some of this... very interesting.
To me the fascinating aspect of your writing is how much of your insight is strictly proscribed by the culture. We can't discuss these matters, we can't acknowledge that we can't discuss them, and no one will willingly admit that there are speech codes or invisible red lines... despite the fact that everyone knows they exist and many people are personally invested in maintaining them. But don't you dare discuss any of it!
The boundaries of acceptable discourse are unnameable.
They are unnameable because they follow Calvinball rules.
They are not strategic rules to prevent disorder; they are tactical "rules" to aggregate power.