site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 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.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Greetings fellow Mottizens!

I greatly appreciate those of you who participated in the romantic preferences survey which allowed me to map out our preferences towards women. Thank you!

However, it's been months, and I still have only 189 respondents who've shared their Romantic Preferences Towards Men.

If you're interested in seeing how this turns out, more responses from gay and bisexual men are definitely helpful, and, I would greatly appreciate it if you could also spread the word about the survey to your lady friends so that I could have a balanced representation of genders and orientations for analysis.

I feel like there's something missing in your article, something actionable. If most men like slender women with delicate fair features and long shaved legs, what personality traits should women that look like fantasy dwarves cultivate to maximize their chances? That is, what personality traits do men that don't value the most-liked body traits prefer?

This is a better suggestion than GBRK's response implies, because most of the article was dedicated to the clear fact that some people prefer, well, dwarves to elves.

The trouble is A) the article was already quite long, and B) I'm not sure what women with less popular looks should do other than find people who like their look. But I'll think about this at least; there may be a follow-up article where I could include more speculative advice like this. Do you have any ideas of your own?

The fact wasn't that clear to me. You identified five factors, plotted some of them against each other and against the conservative-progressive axis, but some things would've made the message clearer:

  • how much do these five factors correlate?
  • are there distinct clusters of male preferences beyond that tiny group of fat fetishists?
  • as an example, there's a 2D plot of factor 2 vs factor 4 with six clusters of beauty traits, if we break men down into 64 groups based on how much they value each cluster, how big are these groups, do they have any significant biases along political or social axes?

Think of those five dimensions as five indepenent, unrelated personality traits. They aren't clusters, and the fat fetishists aren't really a tiny group, any more than "smart people" are a tiny group. Every person attracted to women could roll up a character on 3d6. For example:

Robert Heinlein
18th level Science Fiction Author
Alignment: Chaotic-Libertarian

Attributes:

  • Curve-Lover: 14
  • Great Personalities: 16
  • Barbie-Lover: 9
  • MILF-Chaser: 11
  • TradWife-Lover: 4
Powers: Write excellent novel, inspire fan base
Vulnerabilities: Nudism, divorce

Are they truly independent? Because I didn't get that from your article.

Welcome to the wide world of principle components analysis, orthoxerox! These dimensions are orthogonal.