this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it's actually pretty popular.

Do you have some that's really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?

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[–] donotthecat 1 points 1 year ago

I don’t see what it has to do with my argument, though.

You're proposing an extremely harmful measure to remediate a problem that men cause without citing that we're also the main victims of said problem. You're framing it as if we only cause suffering and do not experience it.

Or are you saying that risk-taking is important so it’s worth keeping men the way they are even if it causes most serious crime?

Risk-taking is one example of effect of testosterone other than violence. It does not justify serious crime, it shows that if you get rid of testosterone you also get rid of other caracteristics.

Most people see violent crime as a problem, but few see it as a problem with men. When people discuss crime, I never hear them frame the problem as “there’s something causing men to commit 10 times as much rape and murder as women: what is it and how do we stop it?” Even feminists who talk about male violence generally don’t frame it that way.

Telling that a group very concerned with gender equality don't frame it that way, isn't it? Reasonable people will never suggest that racialized groups should learn western European values by norm to solve their high criminality rate.

No empirical data can lead us to accept something as “necessarily true,” but it stretches credulity to think that castration would reduce aggression in pretty much every kind of male mammal we try it on

Again, it doesn't. People are orders of magnitude more complex than any other animal and, even then, we haven't castrated that many animals. You're thinking of domesticated animals, and we've done a lot of other things to remove undesired traits in them, like selective breeding. Do you think that eugenics is a reasonable solution to violence amongst men too?

that the most aggressive humans coincidentally have elevated testosterone levels.

So we already have a much more reasonable, though still very unethical, measure: bring down testosterone levels of violent individuals so that they're closer to the average. Miles ahead and still in the same line of thought.

I don’t think that you actually believe that, since you said:

It may make them less aggressive, but what else would happen?

I specifically listed the other effects I could think of. If you think something else bad might happen, just say what it is. If your objection is that we should be cautious because there might be unexpected effects… well sure, that’s true, but it’s also a general-purpose objection to any suggestion to change anything ever.

I don't have an specific effect in mind and your examples are bad. Let's quickly analyze the third one:

  1. They’ll won’t be able to get hard—That’s what viagra is for

Is solving hormone-caused impotence that straight-forward? What are the side effect of using Viagra? For how long can you take Viagra and how frequently?

I don't think we could enumerate the problems that would arise from screwing with people's endocrine systems. The issue isn't that solutions also bring problems, the issue is that your "solution" brings so many problems that it is very hard to believe that you actually want to solve anything.

Furthermore, “make society less toxic” is a goal, not a policy.

Yeah, sure, and castrating men is a "policy".

But I think chemically castrating men would have a bigger effect in a shorter amount of time than just about any other policy you could think of, and those effects would be in addition to anything else you did.

Wow, and the things you can think of are so spectacular, while you can't even spot your own prejudices. Your "fax and logic" facade does not fool anyone other than yourself that you want to help society instead of externalizing your prejudices.