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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   31036 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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I wanted to highlight a reply to this that I thought was insightful.

Every species has mating rituals. If those mating rituals cannot be performed, they will not breed.

That's why we say of some animals that they "won't breed in captivity". It isn't because they have abstract philosophical ideas about freedom and want to take a stand. It's because the zoo environment has some restriction that disrupts their mating rituals.

In humans, these rituals are partially instinctive, but also must be adapted to culture, so parts of them must be learned.

If these parts are not taught, because they're not understood, or because speaking of them openly is politically off-limits, the next generation will have trouble mating.

If you put a group of unattached young boys and girls, in a room with music, and they don't dance with each other, that disruption, that failure to teach, has clearly happened.

But most people don't understand what was disrupted, or how it's supposed to work... and that's why they can't teach it.

They think that young men are supposed to just have the courage to approach girls. That this is a failure of character.

Wrong.

That's not how the human mating ritual works at all.

If that was how human mating worked, young men would not be afraid to approach women. They wouldn't just be "brave enough" to do it. It wouldn't be scary at all, because the men who were scared by it would have less descendants.

If you're a keen observer of old books and movies, you already know what the basic human mating ritual really is.

But if you aren't, it can be logicked out from what boys and girls are afraid of.

Girls are afraid of embarrassment from being too forward.

Boys are afraid of embarrassment from being rejected.

So, it's pretty clear that girls aren't supposed to be overt, and boys aren't supposed to cold approach. Which tells us everything we need to know.

Correct human mating rituals are covertly initiated by the female.

She signals interest or, at the very least, availability. But she does so in a plausibly deniable way.

He then perceives the hint, and decides if he wants to pick it up. If he does not, she avoids embarrassment because she can pretend there was no hint. If he does, he can approach with confidence because he has been invited.

That's how it actually works.

But for this to work, young men need to know how to pick up a hint. And young girls need to know how to drop one.

And before they can learn how to do it, they have to learn that this is what they need to do.

If you don't understand this, then you try to shame young men into cold approaching, then girls complain about being cold approached, because they instinctively don't like it, and it takes a lot of charisma to overcome that.

Don't bother me at the gym, don't bother me at the coffee shop, don't stop me on the street out in public, etc, etc, etc.

But when men ask them, when should we approach you, then, they immediately bluescreen and start giving nonsense answers, because the real answer is they only want to be approached by men they like, and even they realize that this is impossible without telepathy.

Because they've never been taught how to send a signal that says "I want you to come talk to me" with no telepathy required. They don't even know that's what they are supposed to do.

And with zero instruction or examples, young men would be equally inept at spotting the hints she doesn't know how to drop.

Idealistic political notions about how people "should" be hurt everyone, because they prevent us from dealing with them as they are.

Great reply. This is why the “groomer” discourse* is so wild to me. Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children. I imagine that much of tribal and traditional child rearing involves educating children and adolescents into how courting/mating/reproduction operate, and it is at the exact moment that straight parents fail to teach this to their children that they choose to project their failures onto nearby drag queens or trans people. If you don’t do it yourself they’re going to pick it up off the street. Are the parents not possibly creating sexual minorities (which are to some degree sexual dysfunction in my opinion) in their children through the lack of education surrounding courtship ritual?

If you are disturbed to imagine parents providing sexual or courting education (which is a response I might expect from this post) I don’t really disagree with you but it also reinforces my point. I don’t really know how to create an environment more conducive to courtship today but the clinical answer of high school sex ed isn’t very sexy and doesn’t seem to be working.

*Groomer discourse referring to straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”

Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children. I imagine that much of tribal and traditional child rearing involves educating children and adolescents into how courting/mating/reproduction operate

That's because social norms are moving too fast and parental dating advice is as cringe as their job-seeking advice.

The part of traditional child rearing that might still work is children hanging out without parental or pedagogical supervision in mixed-age groups. Since being forced to hang out with older siblings, spending the summer at your grandparents' farm and being friends with your neighbors are the things of the past, we need to come up with more ways to force children to observe the courtship habits of those slightly older than them.

My proposal is mandatory student-led school clubs with equally mandatory 33% sex quotas. This won't help homeschooled kids much, but at least those going to public schools will have to interact (in person!) with students of different sex both older and younger than them.

Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children.

Time after time I see otherwise-competent Boomer parents utterly fail to delegate effectively or otherwise inspire the want to risk/reward in their children. They think giving their teenagers literal societal puberty blockers is the height of parenting- or more charitably, failing to administer the appropriate antidote to puberty blockers society forces down their throats (and then those of a traditionalist bent freak out when progressives take that to its logical conclusion).

I have yet to encounter a case where this has worked well; when it occurs, it occurs by accident.

I don’t really know how to create an environment more conducive to courtship today but the clinical answer of high school sex ed isn’t very sexy and doesn’t seem to be working.

Just make young men more attractive to women (again). This will require the old and women to pay some socioeconomic or sociopolitical taxes, or as is just as often the case, for a war to break out.

Are the parents not possibly creating sexual minorities (which are to some degree sexual dysfunction in my opinion) in their children through the lack of education surrounding courtship ritual?

Yes, they're taking tops/potential active partners and turning them into bottoms/passive partners (I call this transgenderism, because statistically men are meant to top and women are meant to bottom, but most people do not share that definition). This is why Boys [must] Beware- because they try it, actually get some fucking validation for the first time in their lives, and stay there without progressing back to the top/active role (or they get turbo-AIDS and die).

This functions independently of actual orientation, but most people don't actually understand that distinction because they're too focused on "peepee in but", much like how most people don't understand that consent for tops and consent for bottoms functions differently.

straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”

Oh, that's just traditionalist men failing [intentionally or otherwise] to understand how female sexuality works. If they knew how it worked, they could combat its excesses (in the gay case, where older men take younger men-who-would-be-tops off the market, and in the trans case, where women with a castration/sissification fetish encourage younger men-who-would-be-tops to castrate themselves, or lie to them that people will still want them after the modifications), but they are unwilling or unable- so they're reduced to that characteristic impotent screaming.

*Groomer discourse referring to straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”

What's your take on people using the term "groomer" to refer to a person in a position of authority who uses that position to secretly involve themselves in a child's sexuality?

A huge portion of the debate very clearly centers on authority figures lying to parents to hide information from them about what's going on with their kids. Surely you are aware of the many, many documented cases where this has been the center of the controversy? How can you frame teachers and administrators "teaching" kids about aberant sexuality, explicitly urging the kids to hide this information from their parents, and then lying to the parents when they ask what's going on, as a matter of policy, as parents "failing to teach" their kids?

Correct human mating rituals are covertly initiated by the female. She signals interest or, at the very least, availability. But she does so in a plausibly deniable way. He then perceives the hint, and decides if he wants to pick it up. If he does not, she avoids embarrassment because she can pretend there was no hint. If he does, he can approach with confidence because he has been invited. That's how it actually works. But for this to work, young men need to know how to pick up a hint. And young girls need to know how to drop one.

This was probably the most important lesson I gained from the PUA community (replace 'aerial combat' with pick up and fighter pilots with 'PUA'). Not just the words of it, but the experience of it in repetition to truly grok it.

Learning what Indicators of Interest looked like was critical. In generations past there was all sorts of weird things girls could do to show interest, like dropping a handkerchief, but luckily most can be done with nothing at all and are just as relevant today.

Eye contact was pretty much rule zero for getting a warm opener when approaching a woman. There were a lot of other minor behaviours to notice, like a girl standing in proximity or brushing past you, but at the end of the day, eye contact was always the go-to. What was funny is that I think some girls would instinctively look at you in a particular war and be genuinely surprised when you approached them, but would still be warm. And that 'particular way' is difficult to explain, but I think many people know it when they see it. Some girls knew exactly what they were doing ("took you long enough") and others really believed 'it just happened'.

There's something twisted about the whole 'We want you to know how to approach women. No not like that. You aren't meant to learn, you're just meant to know.' thing.

You aren't meant to just know, though, is the thing. You're meant to just not know. You're meant to be eugenically filtered out.

Luckily finding a cheat code by learning and not getting caught doing so is a perfectly acceptable strategy towards mating success.

It's not an acceptable strategy, which is why the whole PUA thing is so despised.

Hence the "not getting caught" clause.

Glad you posted this one. I wanted to discuss it as well in conjunction with a different post written by Foster, but the OP was lengthy enough as is.

This reply is very PUA or maybe more classically 'RedPill' adjacent. Which I found surprising considering the crowd one might expect to find following a pastor. But reading more of Pastor Fosters work, it looks to fit right in.

There seems to be an odd synergy of old /r/TheRedPill type dating advice woven into the otherwise traditionalist presenting pastor. As seen here.

The post goes over things like abundance mentality, 'sarging' to get over rejection, not being needy, friendzoning women and getting them talking, he even goes into text game... And every piece of advice there is underlined with verses from the Bible.

Whilst modern problems sometimes require modern solutions, this endeavor is certainly not coming from Biblical or 'traditional' channels, as far as I know. Foster seems to stumble into this fact when replying to a negative comment:

With your PS statement in mind, I'll say this:

Improving yourself has shown that 1) women bring very little, if anything, good to the table, 2) women do not improve, as they are raised to believe they're perfect from a very young age, and 3) the risk is not worth the reward

Foster replies:

This is really a loser mindset that rejects basic statements in Scripture.

What follows is a deluge of comments from negative posters dancing around the fact that the modern American Christian woman and the dating market as a whole are not exactly in line with Biblical norms.

On one hand I am sympathetic to Fosters position. There seem to be a lot of negative posters who, I suspect, might not be very representative of the people Foster is trying to reach. Anonymous X accounts can be anyone. On the other hand, this is an indirect participation in a long debate regarding the gender wars. As such, one would hope that people like Foster would have a more holistic approach to the issue at hand. That issue being that we are not just dealing with people who want to engage with the opposite sex but don't know how. But people who seemingly do not want to engage with the opposite sex or view it adversarially. Throwing the Bible at them might not be a solution with a very wide audience.

To underline that point I'd remind those who missed it that RedPill and PUA dating advice was looked upon with great scorn back in the day. The assertions against it being that it was explicitly and implicitly misogynistic. And to an extent I would have to agree. Though maybe for the wrong reasons:

The pastor is warning the young male sheep of his flock that the potential love of their life might simply reject them and their potential lifelong union because he, in his infatuation, posts cringe texts...

There is some disconnect here between the Bible and RedPill/PUA philosophy, at some level. Even if I'm not quite smart enough to articulate it.

This reply is very PUA or maybe more classically 'RedPill' adjacent. Which I found surprising considering the crowd one might expect to find following a pastor. But reading more of Pastor Fosters work, it looks to fit right in.

Devon Eriksen is an indie sci-fi author. He's a polyamorous libertarian with multiple wives. He's "redpill adjacent" in the same sense that folks like Eric S. Raymond are - anti-woke and evpsych aficionados (when it fits their priors) but not really part of the manosphere.

Ironically, Eriksen came to my attention through TracingWoodgrains, who positively reviewed his book. (I thought it was good enough that I'll read the sequel, though it's got some rough edges.) Eriksen also hides his power level a bit, probably because he wants to sell books.

This isn't the first time I've seen a somewhat improbable coalition of vaguely right-aligned people online, conservative Christians rubbing shoulders with libertarian atheist SF authors, united mostly by their hatred of woke. Often these affiliations fracture on their fault lines - KulakRevolt probably lost a fair bit of his audience once he started going hard on "Christianity is a pussy simp Jew religion," and the only time Eriksen gets pushback from his mostly rightie followers is when he reminds them he's a polyamorous atheist. (He probably gets a bit of a pass on the first because his situationship seems to be closer to "harem" than "polycule").

Does he lean in hard on the poly-am thing?

Every time I run into one of his tweets or a tweet from his marketing wife, it distinctly sounds like a harem. Is there reason to think there is another guy in the mix?

Not really, he just mentions his wives regularly. Afaik he's the only penis in the mix.

This certainly describes a social technology that used to exist and has in large part corroded away, but I'm unconvinced by the claim that it's instinctive enough to resist attempts to replace it with some other social technology (or indeed literal technology, eg dating apps). Being afraid of embarrassment might be a spontaneous response, but I don't think it is written into the Y chromosome that being rejected is inherently embarrassing, and I especially don't think it's written into the X chromosome that being romantically or even sexually forward is inherently embarrassing. Sexual taboos are social. Women who were raised to have none, or in whom they didn't 'take', need feel no such embarrassment.

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