site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32850 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

23
Top Bottom New Old Controversial
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats