Astral Codex Ten

rape culture

3 min read

rape culture

Article

rape culture is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 10, 2021 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “speeches about male privilege and rape culture”; “Scott who would write thoughtful takes on concepts like … rape culture”. It most often appears alongside 4chan, ACX, alt-right.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: July 26, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
In 2014, armed with this model, I predicted that hip young people would go far-right. For the previous few years, the social justice movement had been the dominant intellectual paradigm in online spaces (and increasingly offline too). The movement had started with the same people who start all trends - starving bohemian artists, poor people on the fringes of society, hip college kids. Beginning around 2008 it spread like wildfire among all the most popular and clued-in people I knew - all my favorite slightly contrarian bloggers, all the most interesting people at my college. But by 2014, it was starting to get embarrassing. We'd already seen the beginnings of "woke capitalism", where Wal-Mart or Amazon or whoever would put their corporate logos in rainbow colors for gay pride day and then everyone would praise them and talk about how they were striking a bold blow against the entrenched forces of the kyriarchy. Hillary Clinton, 25-year-contender for America's least cool person, was giving speeches about male privilege and rape culture. The Instagram pages of the hippest, most counterculture people in the country sounded exactly the same as the lectures corporate consultants gave at mandatory educational workshops. According to Bell's theory there was no way this was a stable situation.
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
So this theory says something like: the Commentariat was uniquely well suited to discussing Culture War issues in 2016. These largely revolved around gender debates – men vs women, creeps and niceguys etc. The Commentariat developed very virtuous norms around Culture War issues, which was self-reinforcing as SSC developed a reputation as a place you could come to have interesting and nuanced discussion about Culture Wars topics. This virtuous Commentariat was fuelled by Scott, who would write thoughtful takes on concepts like trigger warnings, rape culture, harassment, etc, and who set the standard for what this sort of debate could look like.
Inline links: trigger warnings, rape culture, harassment, etc