No, 40 year old childless cat ladies are not viewed positively.
Yes, if you did not notice, the childless career woman was the latest democratic candidate for presidency. There is growing acceptance or removing of stigma for number of topics related to child rearing, marriage and other traditional duties of women during last few decades - be it acceptance of childlessness, popularity of DINK movement, acceptance of single mothers or growing support for abortion. It is all wrapped up as celebration of personal freedom, autonomy and individualism.
georgioz
18d ago
The dynamic is that someone (like JD Vance) attacks the childless cat women as destroyers of society, then others defend them, and that defence appears to some as if the childless cat women are being elevated into heroes.
This is weird - are we not arguing that childless cat women by choice are destroyers of society? This was argued since time immemorial, the only difference is that nowadays the defense of this lifestyle has more success.
georgioz
18d ago
It’s not some new thing caused by the awfulness of modern women
I am not sure. In the past being a spinster/old maid was considered as negative. Nowadays 40 years old childless women are viewed as empowered role models. This is by definition two sides of the same coin - for every solitary woman there is a solitary man. The only difference is social stigma - seasonal worker who earns just enough to survive is still viewed negatively as if it is his own character flaw, while for women it is either empowerment if they like it or they are victims of society if they are femcels. If you normalize antisocial female behavior, it automatically impacts men who are supposed to be in relationship with those women. Of course it also applies the other way around, so the genders can blame each other in vicious spiral. Welcome to modern gender relationships.
georgioz
25d ago
Him and Trace changed after leaving, kulak changed a lot more but trace did too. There are plenty of alums that are popular on twitter, covfefe anon, cremieuxrecueil (allegedly trannyporn0).
I am a little bit torn on this one. For instance with Trace, I think he is more authentic after leaving his anonymous motte persona, except at least from what I observed he is now more into gay stuff and mormonism - probably stemming more from his personal experience and history. I think he was more interesting in his fictional anonymous personality writing about whatever here on The Motte, when he had to mold himself into The Motte ethos. In a sense rules here are also some sort of algorithm forcing some people into writing style, that may not be natural to them. And they may be better for it.
georgioz
23d ago
Agreed. I bet that any famous personality has ton of haters no matter what side they are on be it Destiny or Joe Rogan or Hasan Piker or Tim Pool. Some of these people read out loud their hate male for fun from time to time, or they just describe what is happening - e.g. Tim Pool is swatted every couple of weeks and hate is through the roof. I don't think it is good, but it is part of what is going on. Why should it be different for women.
georgioz
18d ago
I don't even know how to properly address the "science" question that people seem to want to throw at religious people as a Catholic. There is nothing in Catholicism which is incompatible with wanting to pursue science and we Catholics would consider scientific inquiry a good thing. The big bang, evolution, whatever els, etc. these things are all not just "allowed" within the doctrine, but encouraged.
I absolutely agree. In fact I would even argue that Christian/Catholic science is actually the most genuine one, in fact Thomas Aquinas was famous adherent of empiricism with claim that truth cannot contradict truth - meaning that if truth of Faith and truth of Reason are in contradiction, it means either faulty reasoning or incorrect interpretation of scripture.
I would argue that this view of truth is crucial for scientific endeavor as they promote true and free research even if it is let's say supposedly against some religious dogma. In this sense Catholic science is much freer than let's say Soviet Science or often even modern ideological progressive science which is much more heavy with (self)censorship.
I learned about it from tweet by Yudkowsky, his defense got pretty bizzare at some point. I think he said that he sniffed Aella and she does not stink or something like that. Bunch of other people also tweeted some platitudes about how Aella is amazing, or how bad it is that she has to go through all this when she was molested as a child etc.
Yes, that is why I was talking about general attitude. In general men may view loneliness as more problematic, for instance according to Pew research 57% of 18-34 men compared to 45% of women want a family. That is why I previously mentioned that men are more likely to see loneliness as a bad thing and approach it from despair, while women may view loneliness as an empowerment and something they want.
I think this goes hand in hand with general trend where men have more societal expectations put on them when it comes to traditional gender roles - strive for high status, provide for and protect your family and your community especially women and children. While for women the gender roles were targets of more attacks, to the extent where some traditional gender duties like motherhood were dropped completely. To even talk about having children as duty for women is viewed as misogyny.
This also informs how the topic is handled - incels are universally reviled as failures of their own character, while femcels are victims of society in general and men in particular at best. But this may also change in the future and men will be more comfortable also dropping the societal expectations - like 40 year old guys just working part time and playing video games completely reneging on social pressure on their behavior, similarly how it is with women now. However I would not see it as cure for loneliness, just more acceptance of shitty situation.
There are really only a handful of anti-trans people who literally believe people shouldn't be "allowed" to transition.
I think this just cheap consensus building, a semantic trap which rests a lot on what the word "allow" means. Not many people would for instance literally believe, that it should not be allowed for people to drink themselves to death or that they are not allowed to cut off their fingers or any number of other gruesome things. But these arguments would be more in line with thinking that alcoholism or self-harm is bad, and that the society should do everything to prevent it using shaming and other tools. Because any other measure to prevent it would be worse and not really applicable.
But many more conservatives and also liberals would be against let's say having "gender expression" as a protected characteristic in law or having transition being financed by taxpayers.
Sure, but then this cuts both ways. In that sense MGTOw man who regularly goes to pub with his colleagues or who plays D&D with his friends or who organizes grill party for his nieces and nephews or who volunteers for summer camps for children is not lonely either.
Of course this can explain only part of the problem, loneliness is something deeper no matter how women or men try to rationalize it. And maybe in current culture lionizing single powerful women it may be easier for women to do that. The word "incel" has much more shame and negative connotation in it compared to femcel. A lonely childless widow may have more social status than lonely childless widower. Nevertheless in some fundamental way they are still lonely.
georgioz
16d ago
Agreed. Actually the first link about Oprah contains another 22 celebrities promoting childless lifestyle. This push definitely exists.
georgioz
30d ago
I read a lot about the male loneliness crisis, or think pieces on why men are dropping out of the dating pool and I can’t help but draw nebulous connections with these experiences.
I always found this weird, as mathematically for every lonely man there has to be one lonely woman and vice versa. There are some confounders, like that women can have one night stands or situationships. Or that men can pay for prostitutes as a substitute for one night stands. Or that there is more lonely women especially in higher age due to them living longer than men. In any case for each man that lays his head alone in his bedroom, there is a woman somewhere doing the same. It is intrinsically linked phenomenon and it does not make sense to talk about it separately.
Maybe one thing that is different is that in general men who are alone are more aware of it not being ideal situation and they talk more of despair. Even MGTOW community talks about loneliness as preferable to other types of suffering, not as something that is preferable to fulfilling relationship. While on the other side when people are talking about lonely women it is more linked with some sort of empowerment and other positive vibes.
There seems to be a revival of non-religious conservativism, often called as Cultural Christianity. One such example is for instance Carl Benjamin AKA Sargon of Akkad - a self declared atheist who nevertheless is socially conservative, and lately even started going to church on Sunday. This is also very common for Jews, as judaism is more open to legalistic forms of worship, but I also find it quite common right now amongst former atheists.
It may also be one of the reasons why Orthodoxy is now on the rise, as they have more space for orthopraxy/lived theology/theosis as eventually leading to redemption as opposed to Catholicism and other churches, which put faith above all else.
One statement I've found that cuts across the bipartisan spectrum is 'the internet made us all crazy'.
It may be one of the factors, but not necessarily the primary one. People in the past refused to date or engage with people of other religions or classes. What I think really happened in the past decade, is that for many secular people the politics basically became the new religion - especially for those more radicalized ones. Internet may spread the radicalization more effectively, but the underlying phenomenon is still the same.
American politics are generally much less corrupt than Roman ones were. Sure, companies will sponsor campaigns, but any voter who cares can find out what the sponsors of a politician are. My gut feeling is that 87% of the political decisions (weighted by impact) are made on either ideology or merit, perhaps 10% of the decisions are made to please campaign donors and perhaps 3% of the decisions are made to personally enrich the decision maker.
You could say the same about crucial issues in Rome at that time such as let's say land reform or distribution of wealth from kingdom of Pontus. On surface level it was a discussion of ideological conflict between optimates and populares, but in the end the conflict was about which faction will distribute wealth and maintain power.
For instance during latest elections 92% of votes of people in DC landed in favor of Democrats - these are all people staffing all the most powerful federal institutions. You can go one-by-one with other institutions depending on public money be it public schools, academia etc. It is by now basically captured by one of the parties. You may downplay it such as merit or ideology, but the fact is that people governed by bureoucracy have different views from those who rule them. This also means that members of one political party extract resources from general population and distribute them toward their own client network of sympathizers.
In a sense the system is already corrupted. When they saw Caesar giving them personal promise of benefits they saw it as more tangible and in a sense even less corrupt compared to some vague promise of of reward by the republic controlled by people they viewed as actually corrupt.
Except that every single number you can think of related to marriage or motherhood is going to shit. Just name it: divorce rate, support of abortions, childlessness rate, age at marriage/first child, rate of single mothers and everything else. I can even grant you that "society expects" something from women - except they don't listen and do their own thing apparently. No role models involved, women just adopted these changes from ether.
georgioz
25d ago
I tried to drag this board into a conversation about cars. I won’t make that mistake again, but a point of discussion centered around all of them being way less colorful than they used to be..
I am not sure if this proves what you think it does. If you look at the graph, the difference is basically in people selecting white as their color. I am not sure how it is in the US, but the last time when I was shopping for a new car, the white color was for free while everything else was €500 - 1,000 extra. I don't care enough about color to pay that, although I would prefer more vibrant color - if for nothing else then to be more visible on the road for more safety.
Why do you care about what he cares about? So what if somebody has a chat about poor body hygiene of somebody else - what is it to you? Do you often go around snooping on conversations you are not interested in, so you can deliver some petty sermons about the fact, that you do not like their conversations and that they should talk about something else?
I mean, come on, if the next thing to go pandemic (lab leak, bioweapon, or natural) has the mortality rate of septicaemic plague, there's just straight-up no alternative.
Non sequitur. We had data regarding COVID outbreak on board of Diamond Princess cruise ship since February 2020. We had 7-14 deaths out of 700 confirmed cases out of 3,700 passengers and crew - of course depending on how strict you want to attribute these deaths to Covid. This rate of 0,2-1% mortality rate that was discussed early on, it was known already in April including age and comorbidities based on this ideal natural experiment, and even that was the upper bound given small portion of people infected on board. All of this was known way before lockdowns were enacted. These policies were nothing short of criminal.
(…) for the first time [this debate] made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate acrimonious for years to come.
Even if it was a coincidence, it still means that lab leak theory should never have been considered a conspiracy theory. You can believe whatever you want, but the sheer coincidence of all this should always give some credence to lab leak at least enough not to outright mock or ban it as completely wacky thing to believe in.
I think this depends on what you view as "role model". Would you for instance say that Andrew Tate is a role model? Even if I disagree with his prescriptions, I would definitely agree that he is a role model for large number of young men, even though he is incessantly criticized from left and right, often more from especially socially conservative right. But in my eyes he is still a role model influencing millions of young men toward his vision of society, manhood and masculinity. It is the same here with what the OP talks about. A carefree hermit surfer/pineapple gatherer is in this case a role model for sizeable chunk of population despite the fact that people like you criticize it.
The key issue here is that it is hard to criticize any of this from the standpoint of prevailing culture that puts individual rights, personal and body autonomy on the pedestal. It is almost impossible to mount effective counteroffensive against these alternative lifestyles. What if somebody wants to work part time and pour his attention toward his hobbies and enjoying his life? He is just living his life and he can leverage the modern live and let live ehtos in the same way this ethos is used to defend all sorts of now normalized alternative lifestyles such as childlessness or DINK life.
georgioz
3mo ago
Exactly. It would be as if we had an 80ies movie about how bunch of regular and nice kids committed heinous murder inspired by violent action movies while trying to reenact D&D spell in real life. And the whole thing would be promoted by school system as a guide for teachers and parents.
I am not sure if there was anything like that during satanic panic, but it would not surprise me. Wokeness has attracted the usual moral busybodies of yesteryear, I would not be the first one to go with "woke is secular puritanism" angle.
And that's because US foreign policy decisions seemingly being driven not by wider strategic objectives or alliances but by the personal feelings and sentiments of a president upset about if you wear a suit or only say thank you X amount of times and not Y is a terrible way to go about any sort of long term planning.
I think that this is incredibly onesided view of things. I remember that Trump was since 2016 constantly target of ridicule, jabs and insults. I used AI to list some of them, here are examples:
Boris Johnson: The only reason I wouldn't go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump
Kevinn Rudd, former Australian prime minister and US Ambassador called Trump "traitor to the West" and the "most destructive president in history."
David Lammy, UK foreign secretary: described Trump as a "tyrant" and "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath".
You can go on with more or less egregious examples from Merkel, Macron, Trudeau and many more. Are these people not supposed to be wise world leaders who are beyond antagonizing their allies with unnecessary insults? Should they not be beyond "personal feelings and sentiments"? And I would even get some spats between diplomats, but it really is something to see when you literally come begging for handouts but lead it with insults? I think a lot of these leaders - especially in Europe - smelled their own farts for too long. They just cannot help themselves as they do the same to their own opposition at home be it Le Pen, Farage, Meloni or politicians from AfD. And of course they have no problem to insult Orban and Georgescu or Fico and dozens of other leaders they need to work with. I find it fascinating how can they be this surprised after spending years antagonizing people they actually need.
georgioz
4mo ago
In what sense is this a collateral damage? It is not as if the government wants to send an airstrike for military installation and kills an innocent janitor. They are defunding a corrupt organization and money spent are saved. In fact I would say that the DEI and grift is the airstrike in question, it is those corrupt people who in their greed caused people to suffer now.
As an analogy - basically all the companies have some sort of charity pledge to send 1% of the profit from a good you buy to spend on saving poor children in Africa. So if you personally decide no longer to buy that product, are you an evil man who just collaterally damaged kids?
You have number of adcovates for childlesness: Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Aniston, Helen Mirren and many more. You have people promoting DINK lifestyle, there is large number of feminist journals and magazines promoting childlessness.
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