site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28205 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I came across an interesting X post by a right wing Christian religious man on the topic of young people and dating and would like to share:

Jack Reacher Won't Ask Girls to Dance

I’ve had a front-row seat to the social breakdown hitting our young people. You can see it in a lot of places, but one of the clearest examples came from a mom in our church who’s helped run a homeschool prom for several years. She told me something recently that I’ve been stewing on.

When she first got involved, it was normal for boys to ask girls to dance—especially during the “snowball” dances, where the DJ tells you to rotate partners every thirty seconds. That’s the whole point: go find someone new, talk, move, risk a little awkwardness.

But this year? The boys wouldn’t do it. They stood around, clumped up with friends, goofed off, and refused to initiate. Some danced with each other, ironically of course. Meanwhile, the girls were standing around the edge of the dance floor—waiting. Eventually, they gave up and started dragging each other onto the floor. Some even went over and tried to coax the guys to come out. It didn’t work. There were 2 girls for every guy.

The DJ repeatedly re-explained the rules and purpose. Didn’t matter. Nothing changed. He was baffled by it. It didn't use to be like this.

The next day, one of this mom’s younger daughters said something that sums it all up: “I’m graduating, and I’ve never danced with a guy.” Contrast that with her older sister, who just seven or eight years ago came home from prom having danced with seven or eight different young men in one evening.

Something’s shifted. It’s not just social anxiety or awkwardness. It’s paralysis. It’s absence. And yeah—it’s unsettling.

The same trend was the focus of a recent video from Charisma on Command, titled “This Shift in Masculinity Is Scary.” It uses the Reacher series on Amazon Prime as a cultural case study. Reacher is a walking male power fantasy: big, competent, calm under pressure, lethal in a fight. And yet, in the modern adaptation, he is oddly passive with women. He never initiates anything romantic. In fact, the women have to all but throw themselves at him just to get a kiss.

This isn’t how Reacher was written in the books. And it’s not how male leads used to behave. Go back and watch The Girl Next Door or Casino Royale. Whatever flaws those movies had, the men at least wanted something—and they acted on it. Desire was visible. Rejection was a possibility. And risk was part of the reward.

That’s what’s missing now: initiative. Reacher has been reimagined into a man who wins without wanting. He gets the girl without having to pursue her. There’s no risk, no rejection, no emotional vulnerability. He’s strong in every arena except the one that requires personal agency.

And the problem is—it’s not just fiction. The video rightly points out that more and more young men are living like this in real life. They aren’t avoiding women because they’re ascetic or holy. They’re avoiding women because they’re afraid. Afraid of rejection. Afraid of misreading a situation. Afraid of being embarrassed, canceled, or misunderstood. So instead, they scroll. They lift. They build. They wait. They distract themselves endlessly, preparing for a moment they never plan to seize.

I thought this was overstated, but I digress.

It’s not that they don’t want anything. It’s that they’ve lost touch with how to act on what they want. They’ve been taught to suppress desire instead of disciplining it. They’ve learned that passivity feels safer than pursuit.

I used to think this was mainly a problem in my own circles. I’ve harped plenty on the socially stunted sons of Reformed households—the boys who can quote Theologians from memory but can’t make eye contact. But let’s be honest: this isn’t a Reformed problem. It’s a cultural one. We’re just producing our own brand of it.

A lot of young men today have rightly rejected the old “just be yourself” lie and embraced the call to “improve yourself.” That’s a good shift. You see more of them focusing on fitness, career goals, and personal discipline. But that growth often stalls out when it comes to relationships—especially with women. They’ve learned how to level up, but not how to move toward someone.

They’re told to develop themselves but warned off pursuit. So they become hesitant, uncertain, stuck. What’s needed now is the courage to carry that same sense of purpose into the social realm—to risk, initiate, and act with clarity and resolve, even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.

So maybe we need to say this to our sons directly: If you like her, ask. If you want something, step up. If you get rejected, survive it. But don’t stand on the edge of the dance floor waiting for someone else to make the first move.

P.S. This is merely one angle of the dilemma. I know there are issues with the girls as well. Next time.

The replies to the post range from supportive and understanding to hostile. One that caught my eye said:

I genuinely mean no malice when I type this: this showed up on the time line, I got three paragraphs in, and thought "I bet this is a Based Pastor or something." A few seconds later I figured, girldad. I'm right on both counts.

You write effeminately. You don't seem to have any fellow feeling for young men as young men. Until you reckon with that, you and your dj are going to remain confused.

A 'girldad' has either all girls or a mix of boys and girls, and holds the girls to a standard that elevates them while holding the boys to a standard that denigrates them. It's why Con Inc. tells boys not to go to college and work in factories, and girls to work in STEM.

I like this reply since it has a little edge to it, but I am left wondering, to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex? Does that do them any good? To me a lot of the replies about fear of getting 'cancelled' just seem like an overblown and hyperbolic expression of that anxiety and fear. The real question should be why that anxiety and fear exist in the first place. And to what extent the responsibility to overcome it rests on young men rather than someone else.

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.

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.

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