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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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only one side is telling them the path to having a 34-year marriage is getting pregnant at 15 years old

That isn't what the words you've quoted have said. They say that is a path, not the path. Any sane pro lifer in this day and age would probably Counsel waiting until graduating high school before marrying the sweet heart and, maybe naively, they'd Counsel not having sex until then. But if you do have sex before then, and that sex does result in a pregnancy, they'd say you should not abort the pregnancy and instead raise the kid, leaning on your family and the family of the father for support in doing this which they also think should be provided.

What’s naive about it? There are lots of people who don’t have sex before marriage, which is what the pro-life position would actually advocate.

Right, I have in the past argued that it is actually not too much to ask for young people to not have sex in high school. I just didn't want to make this a post about that argument so I gave theoretical ground.

Well, who'd be doing the asking? In the current cultural milieu, parents are unable or unwilling to thot-patrol their daughters. If parents can't or won't, what chance does anyone else have without a coup-complete solution?

Some parents are even outright enablers. For example, I saw this comment on DSL a few weeks ago and I was like alan_grant_removing_sunglasses.gif. Buying your teenaged daughter a larger bed so some boy can more comfortably rail her is taking the daughter cuckoldry to new heights. What's next, buying a chair for a corner of her room so you can better cheer on your little girl?

I have to ask this straight at this point, would you breed with your own daughter if inbreeding and social backlash was not in the cards?

  • -21

That's a pretty typical attempt at well-poisoning when any man prefers, or is suspected to prefer, a real or hypothetical daughter to be chaste. "Hur dur, you just want to fuck your own daughter." Note women don't receive such attempts at well-poisoning when they prefer a real or hypothetical son to be tall/athletic/etc.

That's a pretty typical attempt at well-poisoning when any man prefers, or is suspected to prefer, a real or hypothetical daughter to be chaste.

I disagree. While it is sometimes used to well-poison in this way (and while I do think that our society severely undervalues chastity and parents do have a moral responsibility to protect the chastity of their children and particularly their daughters), I think that "your behavior strongly suggests a subconscious-at-best desire to fuck your own daughter" is an insult that is deserved far more often than it is issued.

Perhaps it is precisely because of the complex collapse of traditional sexual morality in our society that so many fathers are unable to articulate a desire to protect their daughters' virtue that does not ironically sound disgustingly incestuous. (I would certainly expect that this is a large part of the problem; the pathology I'm pointing at rings so false to me because it seems detached from any hope of eventually finding one's daughter a suitable husband. It's like a male-pattern counterpart to empty nest syndrome, at least as afraid of one's daughter growing up and getting married and moving out as it is of her falling victim to some cad. Watch out for rhetoric suggesting that the reason the daughter's chastity should be preserved is to extend her easy low-maintenance childhood; this implies both that the father specifically objects to the thought of his daughter getting married young and that he'll be fine with her becoming a slut once she gets too old to maintain the facade of childhood anymore.) In any case, though, I don't think that this behavior helps to preserve traditional sexual morality on either a personal or societal level.

("Rules for dating my daughter" t-shirts, pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals, etc, aposematically convey to me: "I am unable to distinguish between the concepts of protecting my daughter from men with ill intent and kidnapping her to go live together in a cabin in the woods, and I am very close to doing the latter; I have often considered the logistics of setting up a Josef Fritzl basement.")

Trads probably don't get to blame 100% of this problem on modernity, though. A lot of it does seem rooted in (echoes of the long-gone) patriarchal model, in which women are property first of their father and then of their husband, and, IE, rape is understood as a form of property crime. While such a model does have a lot to recommend it, it also clearly has a lot to disrecommend it, and though I have a very low opinion of feminism, I think one of the more compelling (and fringe) complaints they've made is that traditional societies seem to have had a lot of unreported incestuous rape going on. The parallel construction of father-daughter and husband-wife is clearly very easy to fuck up and confuse both in ancient and modern contexts, and I would generally urge people to maintain a clearer delineation between these roles.

Libertines would like us to think that the offputting thing about purity balls, purity rings, and the like is the purity, the thing that libertines want to destroy. The actual offputting thing is the balls, the rings, signifiers of marriage where no marriage can actually exist, with the father in the husband role. These young women should be getting married off ASAP, not LARPing as pseudowives for their fathers. I would also suggest that, when fathers participate in their daughters' weddings, they should take care not to equate themselves too directly with their new son-in-laws, and to generally be watchful of innuendo and scandal. General talk of "giving away my daughter" is iffy; talk of "giving this man my daughter to love as I once loved her, though we'll always know that I was first" is right out.

Of course, there are also men who deserve this insult for reasons that have nothing to do with some malformed defense of chastity. (Sometimes, indeed, because they are insufficiently protective of their daughters' chastity; because they proudly parade their daughters around in a sexualized fashion, unbothered.) Certainly, for everything positive one can say about Donald Trump, and there is a lot, this is an attack he has invited upon himself.

("Rules for dating my daughter" t-shirts, pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals, etc, aposematically convey to me: "I am unable to distinguish between the concepts of protecting my daughter from men with ill intent and kidnapping her to go live together in a cabin in the woods, and I am very close to doing the latter; I have often considered the logistics of setting up a Josef Fritzl basement.")

I am not seeing how "hurt my daughter and I kill you" equates to "I am unable to distinguish between 'hurt my daughter and I kill you' and being a rapist kidnapper".

It seems like a fairly natural continued escalation of the combined thoughts "I care very deeply about protecting my daughter", "I have an extremely expansive definition of protecting my daughter which includes preventing her from ever having a relationship with a man, regardless of what she wants", and "you should be scared of me because I am criminally insane, particularly in these daughter-related matters".

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