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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32411 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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A couple of months ago @Goodguy left the following comment here:

I think that in modern society the opinion that men should have more control over women's sexual decisions, other than potentially in the one case of abortion (because that one has potential moral implications beyond the woman) is just fundamentally loser-coded because the Internet has made it pretty clear that the majority of men who want to police women's sexual decisions are doing so out of sexual frustration. Of course there is a small minority of rationalist-types who genuinely care about the impact of women's sexual decisions on fertility rates or social cohesion out of a detached interest in supporting pro-social policies, but the modal guy online arguing for controlling women's sexual decisions is, assuming that he is not a genuine pro-lifer, pretty clearly doing it because he isn't getting laid as much as he wants.

I tried to initiate a discussion about this without success, with my argument being that single men „policing/controlling” the sexual decisions of single women (I'm including „slut-shaming” in this category) has actually only been a social reality in the minds of feminist culture warriors. It was never implemented as a tool of women's „oppression” anywhere. To the extent that such „policing” existed (if we want to call it that), it was mainly done by other women, mainly due to the simple and understood fact that it's such policing that serves the long-term sexual interests of women as a whole. And the men that did engage in this were mostly fathers with daughters, not single men in the current sense of the word. (One can argue that in traditional patriarchal communities it was normal for single men to band together and remove outsider single men through threats or force; I guess this may count as indirect policing, which isn't saying much.)

I'm open to reading any counterarguments but anyway, this is not the subject I want to address here. I think Goodguy touched on something rather important which didn't occur to me at first, namely that society used to have a different attitude regarding this issue before it became modern. There actually used to be a group of men who were basically deputized by society to morally shame women in certain contexts despite being technically single (as I alluded to this above): priests and monks. (And this doesn't just apply to Christendom.) They were also voluntarily celibate, which is another category that disappeared with the rise of modernity. (The cultural memory of this lingers on though, otherwise the people who came up with the „incel” label would simply have called themselves celibate.)

As I was pondering this issue, it also occurred to me that secularization meant that Western societies did lose something significant not just in this respect but others as well. It appears to me that secular society and the churches/denominations used to exist in a symbiosis with the terms never being openly stated. It's well-known that Christianity used to be in a culturally hegemonic/privileged position. But it's also true that the churches basically volunteered to take care of those social groups that nobody else wanted to look after because they're socially a pain in the neck:

  • singles who can't or won't get married (see: priests, monks, nuns)

  • generally adults lacking social skills to such an extent that they become shut-ins without outside assistance

  • sick/diseased people unable to pay for treatment

  • children sired by men who can't or won't become husbands and providers

  • poor people that are so helpless and lacking in agency that they die from poverty without the charity of others

  • children of married couples too poor to pay for any schooling

I think atheists and people hostile to religion in general emotionally get hung up on the former and lose sight of the latter. Some of them who did not lose sight of it came up with the doctrine of eugenics as a solution, but we know what reputation that has today. Instead we expect the state to pick up the slack and look after all these unfortunate groups, which only results in a multitude of horror stories about police departments, child protective services etc. being a useless bunch of uncaring buffoons.

I wonder what the rationalist point of view on all of this is.

I mean, you’re essentially correct. It’s practically axiomatic that civilization requires (and arguably is) the control of young men. Whether they are controlled by old men (as was historically the case, and indeed this is what patriarchy is) or a mix of old men and old women (as is increasingly the case now) varies, but they were always controlled. This is also why you can’t really describe BAPism or Andrew Tateism as ‘trad’, even aside from the performative misogyny, because they appeal to some kind of mythical past where young men were in control to appeal to their powerless young male audience who are, like many young men, angry at the world and their lack of pussy (again - this is often as or even more true in many socially conservative societies, hence Tate’s popularity among young men in Muslim countries where sex before marriage is taboo). But a simple glance at currently extant highly patriarchal societies makes clear they were never in control, absent the state of nature of course (and even there, our knowledge of the pre-neolithic-revolution societies our ancestors lived in is limited; modern tribesmen are by nature exceptional).

All successful civilizations controlled female sexuality heavily, and used the promise of such as the carrot.

Because it is the best carrot out there.

All successful civilizations controlled female sexuality heavily,

CisHajnal Europe (from about 1000 AD) less than most*, and we are the most successful civilisation by far. The socially optimal amount of male control over female sexuality may well be higher than what we have now, but it is lower than what arises by default in the vast majority of societies.

One of the sources of confusion here is that people misunderstand the 1950's social model as a free-market outcome. Women working outside the home was and is fundamental to modernity (the first factory jobs were pink-collar) and the societies that better accommodated it outcompeted the ones that did not - notably on the battlefield in the World Wars. The 1950's housewife - i.e. the idea that respectable working class married women should not work outside the home - is a result of post-war America (and post-war Europe once it had repaired the war damage) deciding that is both rich enough relative to historical expectations and egalitarian enough to prioritise leisure over wealth accumulation. The whole point of the social model was to give each respectable family access to 40 hours a week of paid work at above-market wages, but not the ability to get ahead by working harder than that. Because if families can compete for social status by sending mum to work, empirically they will. Famously, this is what drove Elizabeth Warren to anti-feminist heresy in The Two Income Trap.

* Hoe-based agriculture produces the least patriarchal societies, plow-based agriculture produces more patriarchal societies, and animal herding produces even more patriarchal societies. Hunter-gatherer societies are all over the place. Premodern cisHajnal Europe is comfortably the least patriarchal plow-based society.

Hoes are the earliest form of agriculture. Does that mean that the first farmers where less patriarchal? I think Ive heard the opposite.

Hoe-based agriculture produces the least patriarchal societies,

Hoe-based societies are notoriously find only in places where heavy labor is not required for farming, and usually there are also good conditions. This results in men having the free time to engage in their favorite past-time - fighting to steal land and women from other men, and getting women to feed them, too. Men aren't pulling their weights because women can be free.

It's precisely one of the reasons why they are not really going anywhere and are never getting anywhere, and why the patriarchal, cattle-herding Tutsi, are, at the moment, invading a neighboring country 30x their size and winning.

less than most*, and we are the most successful civilisation by far.

Have, you, per chance, ever read any of these awfully boring 19th century novel written by women, mostly griping about marriage and so on ?

It's precisely one of the reasons why they are not really going anywhere and are never getting anywhere, and why the patriarchal, cattle-herding Tutsi, are, at the moment, invading a neighboring country 30x their size and winning.

That’s not patriarchy, for the same reason that 10,000 British didn’t rule over 300 million Indians or a few million Israelis didn’t hold back the combined Arab armies due to differences in patriarchal values. That’s just IQ.

animal herding produces even more patriarchal societies

I wonder why that is. (Unironically.)

As I understand it, livestock on the hoof is a lot easier to steal than the types of wealth you see in crop-growing societies. This means that men are a lot more valuable to the tribe, because they can guard cattle or steal the other tribe's cattle. But I'm not an expert.

Damn. That didn't even occur to me.

Physically harder to wrangle cattle than till the earth with a hoe or drive a plow?

Man, if they're tilling the earth with them, I'd think that would be considered more patriarchal.

Depends, are you tilling the earth using a hoe or alongside her?

Makes sense.

Regarding your last paragraph, I don’t think that’s a meaningful anthropological distinction. I’m sure there would be plenty of plowing in any truly hoe-based society.

It's certainly a distinction used by academic anthropologists, which given the epistemic standards of anthropology is only weak evidence that it is useful. Yudkowskian rationalists who read books by antrhopologists have said that this particular concept is non-BS, which is rather stronger evidence.

The broader point - that some, but not a majority of, sub-Saharan African cultures fit a pattern where farming is considered pink-collar work, men do very little useful work for the tribe, and women enjoy more sexual freedom than they did in almost any other premodern culture is well-attested by a wide range of Western commentators including journalists, travel memoirists, British imperialists, aid workers etc. as well as academic anthropologists .

I know, I was just trying to make a puerile joke.

If those civilizations were successful, don't you think they'd still be around?

Western Christian patriarchy is still around in the sense that we've been eating its seed corn for decades, as it was that successful.

Let’s judge what the modern west looks like in 100 years. The sexual Revolution is new. Like new new. It’s only been a few generations.

I won't agree that the Sexual Revolution has only been around for a few generations; I posit the people of medieval times certainly were not the paragon of sexual un-promiscuous behavior.

They are.

Which modern civilizations that exist today that also police their population's sexual activity exists today, according to you?

Islam is undoubtedly a civilization. Not as nice of one to live in as the west, but undoubtedly a civilization. So is India.

Fair, I questioned it wrong; which successful modern civilizations that also police their population's sexual activity exist today?

Fair, I questioned it wrong; which successful modern civilizations that also police their population's sexual activity exist today?

Mormons. Modern Orthodox Jews. Per some other discussions in this thread, possibly the less strict Mennonite sects. Ethnic Chinese Blue Tribers in the US. European traditional elite families still do it, although they don't (and never did) stop their sons banging lower-class chicks on holiday.

And of course the dirty little secret of the Blue Tribe PMC (see for example Charles Murray's Coming Apart) is that they police their own sexual activity much more than they are able to admit to.

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Islam is still a good example of it unless you have trivial definitions of success that only apply to Faustians. Saudis and Emiratis live very modern lives in countries that still criminalize adultery.

But you can look at Eastern Asia too, the marital norms there are all still quite more stringent than Western mores, just in different ways. The West is an anomaly in how liberal it is with women, and quite literally always has been an anomaly in this way.

If eating the seed corn causes starvation, why is my belly full?

You (and many orhers in this thread) are acting like an MBA from Harvard or Yale is the seed corn of civilization, not the actual corn.

Huh?

  • -10

He's imagining the sexual revolution will ruin society. But it takes a while for the consequences to set in. Like eating your next year's seed corn will ruin your farm in a few months.

Thank you. As an aside, I can't help but think that Henry VIII initiating the English Reformation that separated the Church of England from papal authority and appointing himself Supreme Head of the Church of England to dissolve convents and monasteries for which he was excommunicated by the pope so that he could divorce his first wife Catherine to sexually pursue his wife's lady-in-waiting's sister was quite a revolution in the sexual world of England in 1509, and yet society was not ruined enough to not produce the grassroots social conservative activism in the 1960s. I struggle to see how the legal changes brought on by legalizing no-fault divorce and the sale of condoms and allowing women to own property and open bank accounts is more ruinous to a society than a society's government changing the fundamental religion of the country so that he could cheat.

My metaphor was much more literal than that. The corn of a society is its people. If your society has values that cause it to not reproduce itself, as ours does, it will simply cease to exist. Young people alive now will, if things don't change, see their societies wither to failure within their lifetimes. That seems to me to be an unambiguous lack of success. That it will leave a beautiful corpse is cold comfort.

There was quite a bit of grassroots resistance to the reformation in England and the Catholic Church has an entire category of saints associated with it(the English martyrs).

Notably also, the Anglican Church maintained until quite recently that divorce was impossible; Henry VIII’s annulment was based on a dispute as to whether Catherine of Aragon had consummated her marriage to his older brother before his death, which would have rendered the marriage impossible due to incest. The effect of the Anglican Church on marriage practices in England was restricted to a literal handful of cases.

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