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Notes -
Trouble in Paradise
A guilty hobby of mine is to follow up with the trad dating scene. Not so much the 'Real Housewives of Alaska' style, but in a more terminally online way where various trad talking heads air out their honest opinions on substack or X that then turn out to be dirty laundry to the opposite sex.
A part of the draw to this is the fact that outside of explicit gender warriors, a lot of the online right has ceded ground to the idea that traditionalism is the way to fight against the modern gender war. We need forgiveness and to look at the broader picture. 'The opposite sex can not be your adversary', 'we are in an age of strife and suffering' and so on.
That sounds good on paper. What are things like in practice?
A Dating Crisis in the Orthodox Church? A Woman's Perspective. Archived link.
tl;dr: A Church going Orthodox woman voices a complaint as old as time: The men aren't good enough. They need to step up.
Let's see the results:
Now... This all feels awfully familiar. Hanging a cross over our problems didn't make any of them go away. People who flock to a place that promises solution to their issues, usually have issues to be solved! It's clear that Traditionalism does not neutralize ordinary mating-market dynamics.
Yeah. But great men and women don't need a church to get together, though. That's kind of baked into what makes them great. They also meet and make families living as radical left/liberal/progressives, for example.
It feels as if the Traditionalist sphere did not have many solutions to any problems. The initial thrust of 'we must rally behind the cause!' similar to other slogans like 'workers of the world unite!' sound good to those who buy into the group pathology, who implicitly believe that we could solve every issue if everyone was but sufficiently devoted to the cause. But there's a seeming lack of realism to what the problems actually are and how one can solve them outside of a faith based cultural revolution, which the author of the article proposes:
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!
The contradiction here seems clear enough. People who have their stuff together don't need any of this. Confident, socially adept well put together men with good jobs and a vision for the future, as desired by the author, are not going to spend their time wallowing around an Orthodox commune filled with incels being bossed around by babushkas. It's just ridiculous to expect successful well adjusted people to saddle themselves with such things in the modern world. Same goes for well put together women that know how to attract men. The real world operates on a 9-5.
Now, that might definitely be to our overall detriment. A key issue with modernity is a lack of real world communities, of course. But a community of needy weaklings is largely what the church has become and it has not made it stronger. And more pertinently, real world communities fall apart in modernity for a variety of reasons. Saying that they would be good to have, which is most likely true, isn't doing much to solve that problem.
This entire thing feels like a giant knot of contradictions and conflicting interests. Much like... nay, exactly like the old gender war. There's a reason why the 'Based Pastors' are doling out "weird" repackaged Red Pill material to try and meet the needs of young men. There's a reason why this woman is regurgitating utopian communalism and anti-red pill platitudes in an attempt at finding men who meet modern standards. Both might very well be correct in their observations. But it's clear they are not seeing eye to eye.
Edit:
I said I was not into this topic for the 'Real Housewives of Alaska' dynamic, but I wanted to see why the article got deleted. Turns out our author deleted the article and much of her online presence after it was alleged that she was sending men nudes. Well... I guess she can now better focus on praying for a husband.
There is power here though, in coordinating people who were doing badly but could achieve their potential with some slack, and building some self-reinforcing loop. To some extent this is part of how I've structured my career, as I find e.g., American programmers to be expensive, but there is talent to be found shifting the bowels of the internet and arbitraging people who should or could have had a better lot.
Just a thought.
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Articles like this can be really interesting windows into small subcommunities, but they aren't really a replacement for broader data, which does show that faithful religious attendance does correlate with a lot of modernity-resistant behaviors. (For instance, Haidt found that practicing religious teens handled the onset of smart phones well compared to irreligious ones, even if they were still negatively affected.) So reading this and drawing the conclusion that religion doesn't in fact have good effects that protect against modernity is wrong.
I don't think it's all that original of an insight to say that in real life the modernity-resisting "trad wives" aren't wearing long dresses and posting shots of themselves in fields on social media, right now if they aren't asleep, they are probably wearing jeans and a t-shirt and cleaning up some sort of bodily excrement or cooking food. They may not conceive of themselves as "trad wives" at all, they go to an nondenominational, Baptist, or Catholic church and probably not a particularly "trad' one, listen to podcasts and contemporary music, have an iPhone, enjoy watching Marvel movies, and probably do not live on a farm. They might not particularly feel like they are winning the battle against modernity now, but over the long run they are having more kids, longer, happier marriages, and a more satisfying life precisely because they aren't posting glamor shots or snippy Substack posts.
However, I do think this post highlights a potentially real problem: people turning to "trad Christianity" (or any other religious practice) because they want to post about it on Twitter or Substack or because they want to find a hot wife/tolerable husband and not because it's true, looking to get something out of it for themselves first, probably aren't going to find what they are looking for, and they're likely going to undermine whatever community they are going to be a part of. I'm not saying religious groups can't work with these types: they can and they should. But it makes one wonder if the future of religion is more gatekeeping, not less.
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It's almost as if we live in a system where the worth of the individual and their ability to support themselves and their family is entirely determined by capital accumulation relative to other people, which society has also decided that there should be as little redistribution of this capital as is politically possible EXCEPT to people that are already well outside child bearing age.
No amount of waving the bible or chastising is going to work when you are chastising fifty times harder for not staking that paper.
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That one showed up on my Substack feed the other day, and I read it there. I thought it was fine, but there's nothing much to say to it. It's unfortunate, but unsurprising. I wasn't trying very hard to get married when I was attending Orthodox Church every day, and eventually married when I was farther away from that culture, and a man who wasn't Orthodox, but respected my beliefs and habits, asked me out on interesting, romantic, fun dates.
Traditional Christianity recognizes there are a lot of potential matches that are worse than remaining single, and respects monasticism, and even spinsterhood. Many saints actually preferred and recommended it. It's very trad to tell stories about a woman so upset at the prospect of marriage to a man she doesn't respect, she chooses execution instead, or God closes a mountain pass on her pursuers.
That's part of what irked me about the article. It didn't feel like a very traditional perspective, despite coming from an allegedly traditional Orthodox woman. As you point out, and I am generally ignorant of, there are a lot of elements of the faith and the history of the church that are left unexplored relating to the topic.
But at the same time, one could argue that people are flocking towards 'traditionalism' in general since it is being presented as a solution to their modern problems. I'm not sure executions or formalized acceptance of being an incel are what they are looking for. So whilst I lament that there was a rather modern woman presenting herself and her modern problems as being Orthodox, I can also sympathize with her woes. She was having a hard time finding or formulating solutions within Orthodoxy, along with other people. That's a legitimate concern to raise, despite the alleged faults of the messenger.
To that extent the article serves as a sideways critique of much of the generally male dominated Traditional online discourse, that oversells Traditionalism as a silver bullet to a lot of our modern woes when it's not so clear that it is.
Of course, what people fail (perhaps intentionally) to realize is that traditionalism gave way to those modern woes. Which means that sure- be as Based and Trad as you want- but in 50 years you'll be right back where you started with the same problems Traditionalism failed to answer productively in the first place. This is the fundamental flaw of reactionary thought.
The biggest giveaway for this is the fact that "women don't think men are good enough, women most affected" is literally front and center in the article. Not to bang the "traditionalists are just yesterday's progressives" drum too hard here, but this is a pretty clear example of that[1].
Traditionalism does not have an answer for this[2]- in fact, it's one of its weak points, so weak that it was completely displaced by feminism!
So any productive solution to that problem is going to need to understand why traditionalism succeeded despite its failure to evolve any reason/why it never evolved any reason to have an answer for the modern environment, and which isn't just a barely-disguised way to vent about those said modern environment currently privileges ("muh sinful entitled whores").
But then again, people who are succeeding don't have reason to spend time thinking inventing novel sociopolitical philosophies (or spend time implementing, say, a series of technologies that could push society in that direction), especially ones that will only help the poor at the expense of the rich, and doubly so if it would require more effort.
[1] A meme of "X first" applied blindly/traditionally is destructive when X fail to serve the biological function that result in them needing to be first.
[2] Of course, much like communism, true traditionalism has never been tried.
I would have to disagree, I think traditionalism is working reasonably well among groups such as the Amish and the ultra-orthodox Jews.
The solution seems to be (1) discourage people from engaging with outside people and ideas; (2) discourage people from casual/recreational dating; (3) give men a special path to obtain social status; and (4) heap social status on those who marry young and stay together.
Not really, no. Both groups are dependent on being embedded in modern cultures which tolerate (and in some cases, support) them. Yes, the Amish would do fine if they were the only ones around, but the fact is they are not.
This doesn't necessarily mean that "traditionalism" isn't a viable solution for individuals, only that it doesn't scale. (Of course the reason Amish/ultra-orthodox isn't a viable solution for most individuals is that part of the trad solution of both groups is insularism.)
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If that's the test, then no identifiable group has ever had a culture which worked reasonably well. Literally everyone is dependent on the people around them not ganging up on them.
Every individual is. But, e.g., the United States is not dependent on that the way the Amish are.
If the rest of the world decided to gang up on the United States, we'd be in a lot of trouble. Certainly economically. Possibly even militarily, although that's more of an open question. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's historically unusual for one political entity to have a decent shot at fending off the rest of the world combined.
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If you mean the only humans around in the world then maybe, sure. If you mean if they controlled solely their own territory absolutely - would they? The Amish don’t have an army or any real means of defending themselves while they live on some of the world’s best and highest yielding farmland. They aren’t welfare dependent in the way the ultra-orthodox are, but they are ultimately reliant on the United States’ power, military, borders and technological leadership. They live in a garden inside a nearly impenetrable geographic stronghold maintained by the United States.
The Amish seem to do OK in cartel ruled Mexico, they're not reliant on a strong state with an inexplicable soft spot for them. You're correct that they probably couldn't run their own country, but in a post apocalyptic world they'd just feed the hells angels for protection or something, they way peasants always have.
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I meant if they were the only people in the world.
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This reminds me of how Tolstoy, at his best, was writing absurdly complex, nuanced novels with portraits of dozens of interesting, flawed, human characters. And then he got everything he wanted, began to doubt himself, and started writing odd little folk tales and morality plays instead.
The original essay might have been improved by including some Tolstoy romantic pairings as archetypes, the way WASP writers always include archetypal Jane Austen pairings.
Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famous but now little read writer known mostly for the being the creator of the first English dictionary and the subject of the first biography, was desperate for money for much of his life. At first he relied on patronage from largely indifferent patrons, then he was able to rely more on
Kickstarterbook pre-order clubs and life became a little easier. Still fairly hard-scrabble though.Then when he was maybe mid fifties, a good friend put in a word with the King and said that Johnson was a renowned writer, a fierce royalist and an all-around champion of British conservatism, and that the King might honour this with a permanent stipend.
From that day onward Johnson never completed and sold another book. He tried, but he spent too much time procrastinating in the pub and too much effort trying to get everything exactly right now he didn’t have to rush it out for money. It made him miserable.
People react to success and plenty in very unexpected ways!
I'd just like to interject for a moment. Johnson's Life was not the first (English, I guess you mean?) biography. In fact, Johnson himself wrote the Life of Richard Savage.
This is also incorrect. Johnson was a Tory, but also against the house of Hanover. As Boswell put it:
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Probably explains George RR Martin where combination of the excess of other events he's invited to, plus I'd imagine a sort of looming dread that if he releases the next book there's way more potential downside than upside for him in his current status in life.
He's already got enough money/clout that he's well past the point of diminishing returns for both, and being 'the guy who never releases the next novel' is probably less of an issue for him than 'the guy who released the next novel AND IT SUCKED'
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It's a solution to some modern problems. People have been talking about aesthetics a lot lately, and if someone's problem is that they live in a grey box, and work on a smaller grey box inside of a larger grey box, where everything is lit with fluorescent tubes, then Orthodoxy can, indeed, solve their Beauty problem. It can solve the lack of a village problem, if they commit. It might solve their theological or hierarchical problems, depending on what they are.
But, yes, it won't solve their relational problems, especially if, as in the article, they're a woman holding out for a Good, strong, provider, leader sort of man around their own age. Or a man in want of a younger woman who's easy to please, cheerful, pretty, a good homemaker, but can also bring in an income before and after having young children. Those expectations are not solvable. A woman looking for a nerd to visit historical sites with might do fine, and then they might develop feelings for each other, if they're both the kind of person where reading Byzantine poetry is romantic, but the women in the article don't seem to be. It's utterly predictable that male Orthodox converts would always be going on about: Rome! Second Rome! Even Third Rome! Restore Constantinople! Of course they are, even normal men are apparently always thinking about Rome, and Orthodox men have even more Romes!
On the other hand, I've met a couple of these men. My husband, who's a big fan of Rome and aqueducts and whatnot, has been a bit weirded out by some Orthodox men who meet us and immediately start talking about some council or other, and their extremely strong opinions about the outcome thereof, for the entirety of lunch. I suppose they're autistic? But, still, autistic men who want to find friends and eventually wives do need to tune in a little bit to how deep into the old books they should get upon first meeting someone.
Tradcaths have a much lesser grade of these same problems(no birth control, like actually seriously, just short circuits around so so much of this 'how to have trad sexual ethics in a post sexual revolution world', for example), and we straight up tell our young men that women do not care about the third council of Constantinople or whatever, learn to talk about sports or work or something they have a framework for interacting with.
I suspect Orthodoxy is in the unenviable position, though basically no fault of its own, of attracting a certain type of person who thinks that their youth pastor and Pope Francis were both not hardcore enough.
So is traditional Catholicism- 'smoking the whole pack' when you bite down on trad seems to solve a lot of this stuff, even if it's not a magic bullet.
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I see this mostly as a decline of social skills. It’s not that “trad” stuff doesn’t work, in fact, it worked for thousands of years. That doesn’t mean that taking on the trappings of tradition with no social skills or status is going to work. I think there are a fair number of LARPers in orthodox communities simply because they think that joining the most trad church available will solve all their problems when most of their issues are less to do with their church and more to do with themselves. If you are a “traditional adult” you fulfill that role for yourself and learn to act like an adult in that era would be like.
To switch to women for a second, the role of a woman in a traditional family structure is: run the household and raise the kids and so on. In order to do that, you need to become the kind of person who can and will do that. You have to be able to cook a healthy meal (not just nuke a big frozen box of glorp, but an actual dish made of multiple components cooked on a stove). You need to keep a clean house now, and need to be able to handle a budget. You also need to learn to get along with other people and do so even when you don’t agree. That’s what actual traditional females are like. If you’re not that, you can call yourself traditional all day, but you aren’t, it’s kind of a LARP.
American orthodoxy is not trad in that way, however, 19th century Russian peasants did not court in any way that would be recognizable- and probably not in any way that would be approved by- modern American orthodox.
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Orthodox women are usually relatively good at cooking, compared the the average Westerner. If they're serious, they're eating a fasting diet almost a third of the time, so they're always making lentil stew and plant based regional food and whatnot. There are a lot of potlucks, including a lot of fasting potlucks, and also a surprising amount of mandatory homemade bread, for remembering, for celebrating, for certain feast days, for Communion loaves, and so on.
Orthodox families have basically average household expectations. Lower than WASP households on average, and also lower than Orthodox Jewish ones where they have to do na extremely thorough cleaning at least once a year, and keep their foods separate.
They also have basically average expectations of the woman working. The woman should probably work at some point, but preferably not while her babies are still babies. This is true of the wives of priests as well, it's kind of weird for a presbytera without young children about to simply keep house. There's a bit of drama about homeschooling being preferred, but not all the families are actually suited to it in practice, and public schooling is perhaps looked down on a bit. Most of the women work, as women have always worked, and people know that it's a fantasy that they should only work on aesthetic homesteading tasks in an era when that isn't economically valuable, and there are women and mothers who are scientists, teachers, nurses, cashiers, counselors, bankers, and so on. Most Orthodox are a bit less gender essentialist than traditional Protestants.
One of the oddities of Orthodoxy, specifically, is that while they are very serious about their liturgical tradition, they're kind of ambivalent about the kind of American traditionalism that resulted in the trad wife meme.
I suppose im not being clear. What im getting at is that a lot of “trads” both male and female (and im talking about specifically family structures and so on as talked about by the movement) tend to be espoused by the people least disposed to impose those restrictions on themselves or hold themselves to that standard. The girl who wants to trad wife unless she comes from a home where this happened mostly has media fantasies of trad life not really connected to anything specific. And most of the vision seems to be on what the other party is expected to do, not what they’re expected to do. So the guy pines after a good tradwife who will cook him good home-cooked meals, stay home with the kids, and so on. He isn’t necessarily thinking about what he’s expected to do— make enough to support the family, be a leader, protect himself and his family, do whatever outdoor chores or repairs are needed. So he’s not really “traditional”. A traditional man would first and foremost be competent in male coded activities. He’s worthy of what he hopes to find, he’s the kind of person that will be attractive to the kind of wife he wants to attract.
I think of most relationships in a sort of reciprocal way. I owe you certain things because of the roles we have in the relationship we actually have. That, as far as I can tell is how most traditional societies tended to view things. Yes, I am supposed obey my superiors, but they are supposed to protect their inferiors, and I am supposed to protect those inferior to me. That goes for teacher/student relationships, boss/employee relationships, husband/wife relationship kids/parents. What the LARPy version does is it breaks that by making everyone focus on what they were supposed to get and ignoring the requirements for how they are to behave.
Ah, perhaps. I didn't get the impression that the women in the article even wanted that kind of retro marriage, where they should be housewives and cook and clean all the time. They sounded like they just wanted normal trad marriages, where they can court for about a year rather than shacking up for years, not have sex until well into the process, expect not to divorce for petty reasons, and their husbands will go to church with them, but are otherwise living fairly normal American lives. Most of the women I know are like that. There may be a mismatch between what the women and the men are hoping for in that respect, though. When I do hear Orthodox people with very strong opinions about homeschooling and (not getting) childcare and such things, it's more from the men (who work normal jobs) than from the women (who are actually doing it).
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You can just say "moral hazard".
Yes, but what else do you expect from those people? The people traditionalism didn't need to force responsibility on to (or for whom that force would have had a negative/redistributive impact) are already happily married under the current system.
The market floor of "how much conscientiousness do you need to secure a marriage [in addition to the other things]" has, simply put, gone up. And the unpleasant reality is that enforcing traditionalism for the benefit of these people would be nothing more than a forcible redistribution of conscientiousness from those who have it to those who don't, because virtue is its own sort of capital.
That's not even saying it's wrong to do that, or that it is not necessary (because it very well may be), but any neo-traditionalist thought that fails to understand this is just selfish noise.
It was enforced socially. There were, in the late nineteenth century lots of social expectations placed on people. How to dress, how to behave in various situations and public venues, how to greet people and how to give dinner parties and teas and other social events. Emily Post’s books on etiquette from the turn of the twentieth century were pretty detailed. If you didn’t live up to expectations, you’d lose status.
Just because we stopped teaching people these things doesn’t mean they couldn’t exist in some updated form (do we really need calling cards? Do I have to pick livery colors?) in the future. I’m convinced that eventually people will sort of have to reinvent or rediscover these kinds of things.
I think honestly there is some benefits to requirements of formality, conscientiousness, and diligence in the modern world. I think such requirements tend to reduce complexity and create a bit more trust. It’s also a bit more pleasant to live in a country where people are more formal and diligent. Would you rather live with the stuffy members of the Grantham house, or in a house where there’s absolute chaos and the parents don’t even change out of pajamas to go to shoplift at Walmart?
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Page not found for me, so I'll just use the featured comments.
Overall, it sounds like the usual progressive-conservative epic_handshake.jpg as to women's Wonderfulness and men being shitty.
I imagine the female author intended it to be a commentary on how shitty men are. However, it'd be a colossal L for women to the extent that she broadcasts how young women are—without putting out—unable to maintain the attention of men. That is, from her admission, young women don't bring anything anything else to the table for obtaining male attention, much less commitment. Skill issue.
"Rigid orthobro energy," aka a man who has boundaries and standards and is less willing to tolerate modern thottery. There's a fairly deep journalist bag for euphemisms describing black criminals (urban youth, lunchtime rowdies, subway dancers, masked assailants, etc.). Perhaps there's an emergent euphemism bag to blame men for female hypergamy, such as "financial unreadiness" or "economically unattractive."
The single dad's body, his choice. It's not his problem that single, childless women often fall for single fathers due to female mate-choice copying reasons, such that he doesn't have to deal with single mothers or older women.
Yeah part of me wants to see a photo of the 'single women between 23-35 who get overlooked' that she's very much advocating for. There's likely one particularly literal elephant in the room that doesn't get enough attention in modern dating discourse, and she even particularly highlights that she finds that Orthodox men are largely disinterested in adult convert women to Orthodoxism.
And, not to cast aspersions upon the church or belief, but I feel that women who spontaneously and entirely-individually decide to shift to a conservative church in their mid twenties probably have an excess of life experience.
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OP's quotes are accurate but not fully representative. Fortunately Gillitrut posted an archive link below, if you want to read the whole thing.
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You’ve provided here the perfect argument for why the West needs Christian communities, even though they are difficult to get right. Humans do not naturally help anyone below them, because that’s instinctively ridiculous when they can maximize their own pleasure. But if Westerners continue acting this way, they will be replaced by an endless hoard of immigrants and also different Abrahamists (Amish, Haredim, maybe Salafists in Europe). Not only that, but everything is just kind of ugly and silly, so we’re not even going out in style. So the options are to ignore reality and die, or to try to understand the social technology that our ancestors left us, which worked in the past and works in certain variations today.
One of the ways that social technology worked was by reinforcing that “ridiculous” idea of someone “saddling themselves” with the sins of the deplorables beneath them. That could pass as a working formulation of Christianity. It’s very much about throwing maximum social reinforcement at the prospect of doing this, so that people do it. But this is also why a lot of churches fail IMO: they are very bad at reinforcing this. The ritualism and theology-nitpicking of Orthodoxy does not accurately shape human behavior to turn them into little Christs. It’s too distracted, not powerful enough. The stupid evangelical dance concerts that get tens of millions of views also do very little. You’d think it wouldn’t be this hard, in a culture that gives so much reinforcement to people for grades and haircuts and video games and fashion, to provide them reinforcement for the longterm prosocial things.
Statistically not, though, which is part of the problem. Progressives have a low TFR and declining.
I agree things can not go on like this if we want to survive, but I also don't see this piece of social technology of the past being all that useful.
It was not Christianity that did the heavy lifting back in the day. It was a useful tool that fit the needs of a specific people in a specific environment. But it was the environment that drove that need. Principally by how barren it was. Now the environment has changed, and our needs follow. And unless you want to commit to the bit and go full Amish or similar, then you're not going to get much mileage out of Christianity.
I mean, that's why you end up with stupid evangelical dance concerts. That's just how reduced the utility of Christianity is in modern society. You already have the broadest strokes of philosophy, law and culture existing independent and separate from it.
You need something concrete for those who lack the lifetime of regret that is seemingly required to understand just how damaging modernity can be. You can't afford to waste time on teaching people about theoretical burning bushes when the real danger is starting our progeny in the face in real time. Especially when we have seen just how little sway Christianity has today. I demand new technology.
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Archive link since the post now appears to be deleted.
I think the obvious common denominator is that there's much less social, legal, and economic pressure on women to marry compared to history. Women today are able to support themselves and participate equally in society in a way that was not true even 100 years ago. This gives women a lot more power to say no to men they otherwise may have married in the past.
Thanks for the archive.
Reading the article as best I can, I tune out with the emote:fact ratio skews over 75%, it sounds like she's observing what happens when something deeply personal to you becomes a meme and the normies flood in and start LARPing, because yes, somehow, someway, Orthodox Christianity has become a meme. When my wife and I were searching for a parish, and deciding what type of Christian we wanted to become, we witnessed some of this. There was this weird, redpill, manosphere, Orthobro social media vertical that kept peeking out of the algorithm in a way we didn't see with other varieties. We saw clips of popular Orthodox priests trying to split the difference between welcoming these brain rotted, too online individuals into the faith, but also begging them to leave that shit at the door and forget everything they read or saw online.
As much as I want to dunk on another entitled woman who wants to modernity for she but not for thee... she's probably not bullshitting.
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The women she's talking about, who go to church multiple times a week, would've likely been happy enough joining a monastery in the Traditional Society, rather than marrying a man they didn't respect. Maybe they still will, but that works better when the women make their decision at 25 vs 45, since worker to diselderly ratios are important in small communes.
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I agree that this is probably a big factor.
I think this depends on how you define the word "equally." For example, in the last 100 years, a modern welfare state has been established which forcibly transfers massive amounts of wealth from men to women. This is part of the reason women are less dependent on men now -- in reality they are dependent, but the dependence is concealed in the form of indirect transfers via the state as opposed to direct transfers from husband to wife.
I mean, even absent transfers I am very confident modern womens' income exceeds their historical counterparts. Modern economies rely vastly less on muscle power than they did historically.
I would agree with that, although I am still pretty confident that women's overall contribution is significantly less than that of men. (Unless of course you add pregnancy and childbirth into the equation.)
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Alright, this is a little off topic, but is this actually like seriously a widespread issue? I might be a bubble, but even among the nerdy guys I've hung around with hygiene is not an issue unless they're like the highest tier of still functioning autistic.
Orthodoxy has a strong norm for male facial hair, and poor maintenance practices or merely bad genetic luck(or even insufficient age) can make facial hair seem very unhygienic.
Orthodox men also do not have the best of reputations in traditional Christian circles, as regards things like hygiene or social skills. Of course, the elephant in the living room that seems unaddressed is the gender ratio- American Orthodoxy is very very male. A highly imbalanced gender ratio simply does not work well.
There's a fairly balanced gender ratio among younger converts in my (Finnish) parish (60-40 with men predominant, perhaps?) with several couples and marriages forming, and I've still seen women complain about the dating prospects - though not due to the beards AFAIK (which are generally well maintained), just the general levels of tism.
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Kissing a man with a dirty beard is unpleasant?
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No, of course not. It's just that women tend to be uncomfortable admitting that they are rejecting a guy for being only 5'8"; or having a receding chin; or having male pattern baldness; or whatever. They are afraid it will make them look shallow or unreasonable. So they frequently cite "hygiene," since it seems reasonable to reject a guy for something that is universally considered unappealing; is easily fixed; and puts the blame on the rejected suitor.
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She is trying to break down a set of problems as she sees them among American converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. I don't know the situation there. I am inclined to give her more credit because she acknowledges the reasons we'd expect the facts on the ground to be different. On the other hand, she pattern matches to someone who treats the other sex's read of the vibes as a core part of the problem and her own sex's read as objective truth, which is a common failure mode for analysts of both sexes. So I don't know.
I think it is a mistake to take her analysis for granted and then extrapolate from her niche to the broader church.
But, in any case, the church exists to preach the gospel, to worship God, and to edify believers. None of those goals is really compatible with choosing your members to maximize your impact as a social club. If a church heeds Scripture in choosing its leaders, those will be men who have their acts together, judged by Christian standards rather than by secular ones.
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There is a certain subtext to the incel thing, in general, which includes a lot of online rightists and people drawn to these movements but also obviously various other groups.
Once a young man knows he is actually attractive to women he mostly wants to play the field, at least for a while.
This is a big difference to young women and I think is something gender warriors on the ‘male’ side often don’t acknowledge. Most much maligned 20-25 year old women would, if a man who was attractive, charismatic, good to them, etc came along, be willing to marry him. If that moment of “I should have sowed my wild oats” comes for women it tends to happen much, much later, in an Eat Pray Love kind of way, after a divorce or bereavement in midlife or a husband who loses interest or something. The number of women in their early or mid 20s I know who were really all about maximizing the amount of casual sex they had with random men is miniscule.
By contrast, once a young man knows he’s attractive enough to sleep with a sizeable number of young women, he usually wants to do so and becomes unwilling to settle down until he’s ’done’ or feels pressure of age or expectation or really wants kids. The exceptions are high school relationships where he never plays the field, situations in which the man ‘settles down’ but cheats the whole time, men who fucked around a lot in high school and college and so have had their fill by their early twenties, and the very and genuinely religious. And, of course, extremely socially anxious men, but they’re not going to approach women anyway.
If a hot 23 year old man suddenly finds himself in a situation where he can (a) marry young to an attractive woman, and be monogamous for the rest of his life or (b) hook up with plenty of attractive women for 7-10 years, he is almost always going to pick option (b). This is also why I made the point last week that men who suddenly become hot in their late 20s or 30s (or 40s) are more likely to cheat because they suddenly find themselves invited to a party they’ve always wanted to attend but never got the invite to.
Hookups are exhausting, genuinely inefficient, and disgusting, even for gigachad. Would it not be so that a smart man realizes there's 100x more sex in a marriage?
Were I to try to hook up with random women, it would be exhausting, inefficient, and likely disgusting. But I think you underestimate the world Gigachad lives in. Imagine a world where you can ask very nearly any woman, assuming they don't offer first, to suck you dick and they just do. No foreplay, no buttering them up, no having to pretend to be someone you aren't. For reasons you fail to appreciate, you have something they want, and they are of the belief that if they suck your dick good enough, or empty your balls aggressively enough, you'll give it to them. And the line of women leaping at the chance to try to fuck you until you love them, no matter how much shit you give them back, is inexhaustible.
You basically have to imagine the default female experience of having too many available options coming at them from every direction, except most men treat it like the dream life it is instead of somehow still finding something to complain about.
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Even if you’re a man who likes casual sex with a variety of partners, surely you’d prefer to have like a new fwb every few months as opposed to having one night stand after one stand night? It takes time for two people to get into a good rhythm and learn what feels go for each other, and you’re unlikely to have great sex if you’re doing it with a different person each time.
Some people enjoy the pursuit/novelty-factor, though how that actually correlates to the sex itself can be all over the place. I'm currently married but went through a looot of online dates in the year or so before I met my now-wife, and like most of the really pleasant memories I have of that period were more of 'something cool happened on the date' than direct sexual acts. But maybe I'm a wild romantic or something.
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Shouldn't be an issue day-to-day if your wife is attractive.
This is a common misperception, that a guy with an attractive wouldn't get tired of sex with her. Not so. Men with a 9 will mess with 5s just to keep things interesting.
"Show me a hot woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of f***** her"
If they have a genuine 9, then there is something wrong with them if they are tired of fucking her. It would be very weird to hear someone with a 9 wife who is 22 who is genuinely tired of fucking her just because they have been together since she was a teenager.
This implies that there’s a linear scale of attractiveness that’s the single only factor that makes having sex with someone enjoyable. Someone that’s physically attractive can be awful in bed, unenthusiastic, or incompatible with you for whatever reason.
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I know from experience. Well, that is to say, if you can get tired of an 8, there's no reason you wouldn't get tired of a 9. It's on a spectrum. I don't think experience "gets over a hump" so to speak at which point you're fine with the same person forever.
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The problems might be qualitatively the same, but to what quantitative degree? I'm inclined to believe that the problems men and women complain about when it comes to dating are intrinsic to the differences between the sexes, but that traditional organizations moderate their terribleness. We do so, for example, lower rates of divorice and higher fertility rates among the devout. That's suggestive of actual success in the traditional project.
As a trivial example, these Orthodox girls are unhappy about men pushing for sex and then leaving when they don't get it. But it's telling that we're not hearing the secular fears of getting raped and murdered by a tinder date.
What does it tell us? I expect you're more likely to die in a car crash on the way to a tinder date than to be murdered by your date.
That either orthodox girls are less likely to catastrophise (which is already a win!) Or that they're equally likely to catastrophise but that they asses their risks are much lower and therefore make predicted catastrophes much more mundane.
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Which doesn't stop it from being a stated concern from women.
I once saw a woman at a bar, loudly going through men's hinge profiles and commenting (shitting) on them. A guy near her asked her if she'd ever been on a Hinge date
Then another guy mentioned being gay, and suddenly he had her full attention, loving gaze and all.
A straight guy around women and gay guys is the lamest. The only thing that saves you is the gay guy being flirty, which may induce interest toward you by the woman.
I don't think you get the point of the story. Also, I don't want interest from a woman like that.
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26+ is too old for a first-time marriage. In general, they should not be on their second marriage unless their husband died, which is extremely rare these days, so women over 26 marrying should not be an issue in a traditional parish.
The women who are young enough to marry for the first time should seek men between 4 and 10 years older than themselves. Statistics show this produces the best reproductive outcomes and this is what most human societies of the past practiced. That the first item on their complaint list is immaturity tells me they are not doing this.
In other words, the solution is to double-down on traditionalism. A thin gloss of God and chastity is not enough, small age gap, 27 year old bride marriages are simply not traditional. Therefore, they do not work.
Assuming this is correct (and I don't necessarily disagree with you) one can ask why this woman is posting her grievances publicly in the first place. A more traditional approach, if she has some issue to raise, would be to voice it to her husband, father, or other male guardian and let him decide what to do with it.
The wisdom of this approach is evident when looking at this woman's article. It would be better for her to be silent than to publicize this kind of drivel. Because the real problem is not that the highly desirable men she wants are foolishly passing her by in favor of women who are younger; or from more patriarchical cultures; or whatever. Nor is the problem that the mass of recent male converts are autistic losers who just need to take a shower.
The real problem, of course, is the female hypergamy instinct. For the most part, average women are simply not attracted to average men. The bitter truth is that in world where everyone follows traditionalism and pairs off monogamously at a young age, a lot of women are going to be disappointed.
To be sure, this issue can be ameliorated by (1) giving men a special path to obtain social status; (2) discouraging women from having contact with the sort of highly desirable men who trigger their hypergamy instincts; and (3) award social status to men and women who get married and stay married. But you can bet that this woman, who is basically just another flavor of feminist, would not be happy about (1) opportunities widely available to men but not women; (2) being discouraged from exposure to popular media and casual dating; or (3) women who failed to marry early being treated as second-class citizens (of course I doubt she has any objection to treating single men as second-class citizens).
I think that in general there is a problem with supposedly traditional women who want to dictate the terms of their traditionalism. Fundamentally, they are no different from feminists who want to be highly paid professionals while still expecting men to pay for first dates.
The actual trad solution was that women were younger than their husbands. It's not hard to impress almost-literal teenagers when you're in your late twenties.
Once again, (western)trad doesn't run on 'boys rule, girls suck it up'. It runs on politically incorrect compromises where young men are the ones that usually get the short end.
I don't know the history of age gaps, but will agree that can play a role. That being said, it surely helps quite a bit if (1) that man in his 20s is a respected member of the community; and (2) that woman is discouraged from having contact with men who are far more desirable than that man in his 20s.
Sure, it runs on boys suck it up; girls suck it up. It's just that modern society sees boys sucking it up as the natural state of affairs; girls sucking it up is oppressive patriarchy.
Well, no. (Actually, I'd argue traditionalism really doesn't "run" on anything so much as it is a mostly-blind adaptation to it. But this is also coming from someone who sees [the kind of person who becomes a] traditionalist and [the kind of person who becomes a] progressive as the exact same thing, in their hearts.)
The problem here has always been economic. Before the advent of the "energy wherever we want it"- hallmark of the early 20th century- that was literal man power. There's a concept called "primary and secondary goods" that explains this pretty well- men extract primary goods (sexual dimorphism gives men an advantage in this area), women turn those primary goods into secondary goods (including children, it's worth noting). The problem, of course, is that while not having secondary goods is bad, not having primary goods is catastrophic. Sociofinancial power, then, is naturally controlled by men.
And so here's where I tap my sign: traditionalism (Abramic religions most famously) simply doesn't have an answer for when [the place men get their power from] is supplanted by technology- except for the null answer which is "turn inwards and die"[1]. And this resulted in two things:
Which is why traditionalism gave way to progressivism, and was also why the 20th century (and especially the first half) was full of alternative answers to one or both of those questions (what that answer actually was depended on the local conditions: communism is a natural fit for places with a low ratio of people to economic opportunity like Russia or China [or the entirety of the Middle Ages- equally worthless is still equal], whereas fascism is natural for places with a high ratio like 1930s Germany). Technology naturally drives this ratio down, which is part of why fascism really isn't a viable answer today while communism remains sympathetic[2].
Those questions still haven't really been resolved, because the winner of that conflict was the only remaining frontier nation (that didn't at the time, and still doesn't, have any productive way to answer this question beyond "be rich lol") that threw resources at the conflict until it vassalized basically the entire world, and if your society has a more productive answer to that question you'll just get invaded. So it goes.
[1] Now, I get that a lot of men really do like this [even some intelligent ones, on occasion]; especially since the Taliban spent 20 years providing an object lesson to the West in just how successful a strategy like that could be, and the fact the largest cities didn't even bother to resist them suggested that Taliban rule was what [the men responsible for holding up the US-led order] wanted all along. Which is a valid assumption, because the US-led order offers literally nothing to men, and if it happened in the continental US many believe that a campaign of white feathers would be ineffective.
[2] Socialism naturally occurs in populations where the variance in ability to extract that economic opportunity, and the variance in that opportunity, is low (for a variety of reasons both internal, like bad land, or external, like being a vassal state of a greater power); liberalism naturally occurs when it is high (great powers not being liberal is historically unusual).
Well I think that depends on how you define the word "run." The way I interpret the word is that it means that the thing is a core belief or practice.
This seems reasonable to me, but -- so far -- I don't think it contradicts my point. Even in a society which is controlled by men, it doesn't necessarily follow that men aren't coerced into doing things they wouldn't otherwise do. If nothing else, power is going to be concentrated in the hands of a minority.
I disagree with this. For example, in ultra-Orthodox Judaism, men get power by being respected rabbis, which is a combination of lineage and years of religious study. Among the Amish, many modern technologies are simply banned, which means that men are still plowing the fields like their forefathers did.
Additionally, even if your point is true, I don't see how it contradicts my position -- that traditionalism coerces both men and women into doing things they wouldn't otherwise do.
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Historically wasn't the median age gap for first-marriage something like a few years, though? I'm not aware of any era where the historical norm was, like, 19 for women but 27 for men.
Most historical eras.
Not post-industrial ones. But the whole point of trad is copying stuff that worked in really old societies in the modern era.
That's not what I recall from my reading on the topic, or - to be clearer - at least not in the Anglo tradition. I'd be very interested in contrary sources!
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It's taking longer and longer for people to launch due to the amount of time in university/finding a graduate job etcetera for most white collar roles. Especially if you're looking to be in position to setup house and make a beeline towards child-rearing. The relationship dynamic of previous eras also had women essentially being unable to operate as solo agents in the world which meant that 'has a job and doesn't beat me' would frequently be enough especially when coupled with no birth control. It's way easier to be a single female circa 2026 so there's less automatic pressure to couple off.
Many of the most successful professional-track zoomers I know kept an early relationship, married young, and went through all those difficult setting-your-life-up times as a team instead of alone. And you certainly don't need a house for the first or even second kid, two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments are fine. But our cultural expectations are calibrated on the very wealthy and thus don't even present that as an option for the Aspirational 14%.
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Okay, but this is the opposite of trad. Trad churches should not tolerate this attitude.
Orthodoxy is, in practice, not that socially conservative.
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The Orthodox Church, while extremely into Holy Tradition, and even cultural traditions, is basically neutral on that kind of tradism, perhaps mildly negative.
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In the UK the only time the average age at which women married was below 24 was very briefly when the baby boomers came of age, 26 was actually quite close to the average from the 16th century onwards. Or is 1500s England not traditional enough?
I mean, there is that whole thing with Henry VIII normalizing divorce in that timeframe.
Fair but if you’re too trad for the 1500s I better see you denounce the printing press and the evils of movable type. Real men write books by hand with a goose feather! And you better own a crossbow for home defence, not a musket.
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My stats say ~24 from 1700 to 1950, but that's for all marriages, so I'm guessing it's 23 for fist. But yes, it's still quite high.
Well, they went wrong somewhere, because they are being replaced by more traditional people. Actions have consequences, I guess, even if they are delayed by a few centuries.
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