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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I found a post on /r/Destiny which I found insightful enough I want to post it in full here: Credit to /u/hello_marmalade

On the Sexualization of Women in Contrast to Men

A sentiment I've heard about women before is that they aren't valued for things other than sex. I think this is correct, but the sentiment lacks context.

I think something that gets missed, is that men will pretend to be interested in women for reasons other than sex, in order to get sex - however if sex wasn't an option, they wouldn't be interested in those women at all.

I think the implication is that these women would be noticed for their other qualities - but in reality, without the draw of sex, most people will be ignored. That's the reality for men, which I think gets lost in translation in conversations about sexual attention.

I think this is why you get situations where men will be very dismissive of women when they complain about this, or where the attitude in response comes from. From a man's perspective, these women seem full of themselves. The thinking going something like "Why the fuck would anybody be interested in you? You're just another random chick." Now that comes off as misogynist but I think the sentiment comes from the experiential reality of most men being essentially being invisible. This doesn't get verbalized, because I think it's something that happens so early to both genders that it just becomes part of a person's qualia. Like, just knowing that the sky is blue. You can see it, it's right there. You could argue for hours with someone before realizing that the sky is green for them, because you wouldn't even think to consider that they thought it was a different color in the first place.

Now, some complications with this. There are more issues with the constant sexualization of women. One is that it fucks up your ability to trust people. How can you know when someone is genuinely interested in you, or is faking it? Two, there will absolutely be people that will ignore your other qualities in favor of sex. Three, people will correctly, but nonetheless unfairly evaluate you with the awareness that other people may have given you credit for things unjustly in order to try and have sex with you, which will simultaneously do damage to your self esteem.

I think this leads to attitudes in women that make complete sense even if they're kinda shitty. Basically, if you're always going to be evaluated in regards to sex, then fuck it, get the best evaluation you can possibly get. Think of the F&F panel with Sneako. The first question they get asked is "How much to fuck you?" Well shit, if that's where we're starting, does saying "As much as someone is willing to give me," make a woman a gold digger? If all you're gonna be evaluated on is being a hole, then fuck it, might as well get the highest value. This then gets weaponized as those women being entitled, or shallow, but if you were never going to evaluate them on anything else, why should it matter?

However, by the same token, it leads to a situation where men will feel taken advantage of. I can say for myself at least (and I think a decent number of other men) that being horny can feel like you're being 'tricked' by your own body. Hell, there's even a term for the clarity after you cum: 賢者タイム "Sage Mode", or more commonly known as "Post Nut Clarity". The phenomenon seems to be so universal that it has equivalents in multiple languages that are disparate. I think this is where the sort of misogynistic hate and bitterness can come out of some men. There's a power that you feel a woman can unilaterally hold over you in a way you can't hold them, which can lead you to doing foolish things. As such, any woman using her sexuality for personal gain feels like "cheating".

Additionally, I don't think most women really understand just how invisible you can feel being a man - on almost every level. Personally, I think this affects us in a really deep, underlying way. I think every woman understands that they intrinsically have value. They have limited control over that value, and that value can overshadow everything else about you as a person - but you have intrinsic value nonetheless. On the flip-side, as a man, you are essentially worthless until proven otherwise. Nobody cares. You intrinsically are valueless at best, and a drain at worst. I think this also forms a root of resentment in men towards women who seem to fundamentally not understand this. The line of thinking being "Who the fuck are you? Why do you think you should be valued for anything other than being a woman unless you've earned it? Why do you think you've earned it the same way as any man has?" For some women, this is true. There are women who don't recognize that they've been given credit for things that nobody would care about if they were male. However, at the same time, this creates a situation where any woman who has earned her value is looked at with suspicion. Her successes cannot stand on their own.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head. Just things that I see come up fairly often, but I don't feel like I hear these things mentioned very much. I think a big problem is that the people who end up seeing these things end up being too invested in their own side to achieve any kind of synthesis of these ideas.

Interested to hear other people's thoughts on this. There's probably some other shit I've missed, since this is mostly off the cuff, so I may add to this with edits later as I remember/think of other shit.

I think this misses a key factor to explain where the actual intersex resentment can come from.

Accepting for now the premise that men are functionally invisible for most of their lives, they DO have a key advantage over women in this particular game: their value INCREASES with time as they age... if they play their cards right.

A woman's value as a sex object, in contrast, has a ticking timer on it, and whether it's at age 30, 35, or 40, there will be a point past which she can never get the same level of attention for her looks that she used to.

And most of these women will be slathered in male attention starting at puberty, so they WILL notice this change.

Thus, we get a real issue where women get "taught" early on that they can use their looks and sexuality to get male attention and turn this into, well, whatever she wants, including sex.

Meanwhile, young men are simultaneously at their horniest and yet least capable of exercising good judgment in this age range... and some huge portion of them end up sexually unsuccessful WHILE they watch women exploit sex appeal for fun and profit. Often with older, established men.

So the lesson THEY'RE learning is that they're not good enough to stand out from the crowd and women are living life on easy mode as long as they're even moderately attractive.

Then a guy who finds himself alone in his mid-twenties either falls into despair or buckles down and presses his one advantage: time. Time to build wealth, acquire skills, get fit, and learn how to exploit said factors to the greatest extent.

And then soon the script flips. The dude who put in the effort and didn't blackpill himself is suddenly able to more easily land the hot young chicks who ignored him back then, meanwhile the women his age are losing the ability to effortlessly draw in male attention and have fallen back on... well hopefully they have developed some other valuable skill or trait.

So men get to feel the resentment early but (MAY) still find mating success later in life whereas women are likely to develop an expectation as to how easy life will be early on that will later be thwarted by age, and THEN they resent men their age for ignoring them and the men from her past for never settling down and leaving her to this fate of loneliness.

So men and women who are similarly aged probably end up looking and talking past each other as each side has a different set of experiences at each stage in life.

Young women ignore young mens' plight because they have no reason to care, and older men ignore older womens' plight because... they have little reason to care.

And this apparent lack of care or compassion when the other side needs it most would certainly explain resentment on both sides.


I have intentionally excluded the men and women who find a partner and settle down earlier in life since almost by definition they aren't contributing much to this problem, although the resentment that builds between some married couples is likely similar in nature.

And then soon the script flips. The dude is suddenly able to more easily land the hot young chicks who ignored him back then,

Except 90+% of the time this part never happens. The average middle aged man isn't pulling hot young chicks, not even close. He might be able to pull other 40-year divorcees and single moms who used to be hot young chicks 20 years ago but that's not exactly the same thing

Sure.

But the prevalence of age gap relationships where the female is younger and the male is older vs. the practical non-existence of older-female, younger-male relationships makes my point for me.

Sugar daddy and sugar baby relationships, likewise, are FAR more common than the gender-swapped equivalent.

Leo Dicaprio is the ur-example here.

Older men can target and acquire younger women. Younger men either aren't targeting or can't acquire older women.

I pointed out 2 fates for the lonely mid-twenties guy. One is despair.

If a guy isn't in a relationship by then and doesn't try to maximize his sex appeal, then NO SHIT he won't be picking up hot younger ladies as he gets older, unless he takes some really financially irresponsible steps.

Not counting prostitution what percentage of 40+ year old men do you reckon can regularly pull "hot young chicks"? I would put it at a few percent. It's a small minority for sure. Of course Leonardo DiCaprio can do it, he's a rich and famous actor. His experience says nothing at all about what most men will experience.

I went to college, I know who the hot girls were sleeping with and for the most part it definitely wasn't significantly older men, it was mostly other college students.

Not counting prostitution what percentage of 40+ year old men do you reckon can regularly pull "hot young chicks"? I would put it at a few percent.

I'm talking more about guys in the 30-40 range, but if we limit it to single men I wouldn't say you're obviously wrong but it might be time to update some priors.

Lets pull some stats to get an inkling of an idea of how this dynamic works in practice.

Here's data from U.S., Heterosexual, MARRIED couples, as a percentage of all married couples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_disparity_in_sexual_relationships#Statistics

For marriages where the male is 10+ years older than the female, its' already at just shy of 8%. Include 6-9 year splits and it starts pushing 20%.

This already implies that many guys find themselves single in their late 20's/early 30s, and are able to find and secure a woman in her early-mid twenties. And that's just as a percentage of marriages, it doesn't reflect how many dates a guy goes on to get there.

(I will grant that many or even most of such age gap marriages are probably found in religious communities).

So recent data on age gap dating is also available:

(note this poll was commissioned by 'Cougar Life' but is otherwise done with proper procedures)

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/age-gap-dating

Men are more likely to have dated someone 10+ years younger than them compared to women (25% vs. 14%). Meanwhile, women are more likely to have dated someone 10+ years older than them compared to men (28% vs. 21%).

1/4 of men right there saying they've dated someone 10 years or more younger. I'd guess this fraction shoots up if we drop men married men out of the equation.

Here's a tantalizing headline:

https://archive.ph/dHvWf

For Online Daters, Women Peak at 18 While Men Peak at 50, Study Finds. Oy.

Here's the study in question:

https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.aap9815 (PDF warning)

This one probably gets the closest to our exact query, since the sample is drawn from online dating sites, which ideally captures the population of single males we're discussing.

Once we have our desirability scores, we can use them to identify characteristics of desirable users by comparing scores against various user attributes.

As shown in Fig. 2, for instance, average desirability varies with age for both men and women, although it varies more strongly for women, and the effects run in opposite directions: Older women are less desirable, while older men are more so (18, 19). For women, this pattern holds over the full range of ages on the site: The average woman’s desirability drops from the time she is 18 until she is 60. For men, desirability peaks around 50 and then declines.

From the data in the study, this appears to mean that men at age 50 (conditional on them being on a dating site) are most able to get matches, conversations, and dates with their preferred demographics, regardless of the age range they are targeting.

And as the data in the study already pointed out that women are most desirable at 18, not a huge leap to guess who a 50 year old guy is targeting.


So I dunno bud, 25% of men claim to have dated someone 10 years their junior, and 8% of married men tied the knot with one. Even FIFTY year old guys are able to succeed on dating sites despite targeting younger women.

If this isn't an indication that a guy going into his 30's or even 40's single can get dates with younger women, if he cares enough to work at it, I don't know what else you can do to confirm or refute it. Other than maybe find one of your male friends who remained single in his 30's and has decent looks and a stable job and ask him to talk about his dating life with you.

I feel like there's a bit of a motte and Bailey going on here. The bailey is something like "don't worry if you didn't get laid in college, in a decade once you're established you'll be able to go back and sleep with hot young girls just like the ones who always rejected you" while the motte is "men age a little bit better than women and you can date a wider age range as you get older so the pool opens up so dating might get a bit easier especially if you're financially successful and stay in shape" the motte is true but the bailey is pure cope

if you're financially successful and stay in shape" the motte is true but the bailey is pure cope

This situation may indeed be so bad that there are guys leaving college a virgin who have ~0% chance of losing it without paying going forward.

But I think the Bailey as described is mostly a POSSIBLE strategy for a guy who has managed to increase his odds of dating success later in life, based on factors he now knows to be true. His SMV can be increased, and with it his odds of finding a partner, if he doesn't give in to despair. If he does give up, then yeah, he falls out of contention and has nothing left but cope.

But his odds of success are limited by the fact that ALL eligible guys are chasing those younger women, so every older single guy is competing with every other older single guy is competing with all the younger single guys for the same pool of women, and there's no way for even half of these guys to 'win.'

Which contributes to the whole "women are slathered in male attention from puberty onward" part.

That said, it is theoretically possible for most older guys to sleep with a whole passel of younger women over time, assuming they never give commitment to any particular one and that woman moves on to a new (older) partner quickly.

So if a bunch of men go with the strategy of banging as many women as possible and 'spinning plates' so he always has fresh ones in rotation, this resolves the above hyper-competition issue to some degree.

But that whole "sleeping with them and never giving commitment" thing is the likely explanation for women growing resentful towards men as the woman gets older.

I think all of this is happening at once to various degrees, which is creating a really unhealthy situation for everyone stuck in the dating rat race. Relatively few people are getting what they 'actually' want (committed relationships with a compatible partner) and many are even having difficulty getting what they're willing to settle for (regular sex and companionship, even without compatibility or commitment).

It all strikes me as suboptimal, but I don't control any of these factors, I just observe.