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Downthread, in the discussion on cheating in college and the decay of institution, @hydroacetylene brought up a frequent topic: is the college-to-work pipeline good for society and for women? Rather than the high-level moral or strategic view, I wanted to look more at the countervailing forces here. Even assuming that early family formation is good, desirable, and pleasant for women compared to schooling, why would they choose college? Not to bury the lede: I think it’s risk mitigation.
A woman’s life is, not to an infinite extent but nevertheless to a great extent based around vulnerability. She is especially vulnerable to men, who are stronger than her and yet want something from her. A man who wants something from her more than he cares about her is not a curiosity but an active threat. Even if no such threat manifests, her very nature makes her vulnerable. A pregnant woman, or a new mother, is incredibly dependent on those around her. If any part of that support should go away, she could be in serious trouble. Women’s life strategies, unsurprisingly, center around mitigating these risks.
These strategies fall into two major camps: finding a center for her protection and support, and making damn certain that she has excellent control over that center. (For men this is simple: he is his own center of protection and support, always. Everything else is just a fallback for extenuating circumstances, or part of his larger ambitions.)
For her center, a woman can choose, in essence, a man, an institution, or herself. For herself, she will obviously be unable to reproduce. This is a fallback, the spinster’s last resort. No more needs be said. An institution is impersonal and uncharitable, but (say) a widow will find it tolerable, and she has some modicum of control. If she follows the rules, support will not be retracted. So what is preventing her choosing a man? Her lack of control over him.
Men are famously fickle. A man will sing a woman’s praises to the moon, and maybe even believe himself, and vanish as soon as he gets some. He will spend the family’s money on dice or drinks. He will say that whatever he earns is his by right, and ignore the duty he has towards the flower he plucked in the prime of her life in an explicit contract to care for her forever (till death do we part). Even if he is one of the rare, dutiful ones, his simple preferences become domineering imperatives, and you have to think on every one: is this worth fighting over, if he might just leave? To say all men are cads is to go too far. But there are cads out there, and their attentions are disastrous.
(I know women who have had their men: get fired and refuse to work, get addicted to painkillers and refuse to work, allow their mother to browbeat their wife, and support an entire separate family in another country, off the top of my head. I also know women who have had loving husbands with no problems who are in old age. But would you want to simply gamble on the outcome here?)
So what women need is leverage. Historically this was twofold: the highly salient and important labor they performed, and their tight bonds with their (and their man’s) immediate community. For reference, before modern textile production, a woman would quite literally make the clothes on her husband’s back and the food he ate. Were he to get them elsewhere, they would be much more expensive and less tailored to him. This makes any argument inherently easier for the wife to win. He depends on her, too. Meanwhile, if he were to stray, her connections to the local wives, perhaps including her own parents and his, or moral leaders like a priest, would allow her to bring wide-ranging pressures down upon him. Or, say, if he were to romance her but fall short of his duty to propose to her, a brief word between their fathers would end in a joyous wedding officiated by shotgun. I’m not trying to imply the distant past was a glorious feminist utopia, but these were to the best of my knowledge the mechanisms of women’s power back then.
Woman’s work was eviscerated by the Industrial Revolution, and her community was shattered by the car. Bluntly, there is nothing coarse and material that a housewife can offer a man in this day and age which he cannot get for an acceptable amount of his own money. Food and cleaning are trivial, and the only real limitation on sex is whether porn is sufficient (it generally is). The only things she can offer are on a more sophisticated or higher plane, like the abstract of a continued legacy through childcare or loving intimacy and affection. These are important, but have a lower valence than the material, meaning that the man’s opinion is dramatically privileged. And in a postwar suburb of friendly acquaintances, in and out of the house on errands and excursions, there’s nobody to drop in on and talk to and organize with - and even if there were, why would the man not simply get in his own car and leave to find those who “understand“ him better? As the last nail in the coffin, the pill and the Sexual Revolution deny women even their power over sex. If it’s pleasurable and has no risk, what right does she have to demand that her man do something in exchange - except pay as her john? With pregnancy on the table, it’s obvious: he risks what she does, together with her. But without, it’s harder to argue the obvious truth that she is risking time, because he does not have the same pressure to make the most of the flower of youth.
This is the foundation of our current moment, and given the premises women choose independence. They do not perceive a reasonable alternative by which they can have a marriage where they are respected and equal. The life plan changes accordingly, and becomes: go to college (to protect you in your most vulnerable and desirable period and increase your status and the treatment you can demand), take a job with a good healthcare plan (including maternity leave), find a man who sticks with you for several years (while you are on the pill, and proving he is not a cad), and finally, around 30, get married to a man you TRUST to support you and your children. Of course, this costs a huge amount of time and money, but it’s more palatable than taking a dive for the first schmuck on the street with no good way out. (And even if he is a good man, get stuck in a suburban home near HIS job with an infant or two and an absolute dearth of friends to see during working hours and little sense of what you’re really bringing to the table. At that point, why not just get a job working alongside other ladies and stick the kids in daycare?)
So that’s my analysis. College is just a means here; if it were not available, women would go for anything else that could protect them, probably an employer. The problem for women is that they feel like the whole deal is raw, that they’re going to struggle to get a man who works for them and supports them and who they can influence. Unless they feel their own power in their own relationships, they will scrabble for every edge they can get. If you want to fix this on a personal level, as a man, be trustworthy and the whole reproduction thing will come pretty easily. As a woman - can’t comment with quite so much authority, but valuing men for their private (i.e. directed at you) virtue over their public (i.e. abstract and status-seeking) virtue might help. On the societal level, focus less on pushing women into childrearing and more on pulling. What are the advantages? How do they mitigate risk? And what’s in it for them, on a practical and day to day sense?
Long-term I feel this will shake out. Men and women who figure out how to bond and partner quickly and effectively will be aspirational and fruitful, and they will be the new model. But for those of us alive now, I think it helps to be intentional about our own lives.
Interested in the opinions of married mothers on this (I think we have a few). I’m a happily married father, so I have some insight, but it’s all third person to me.
I can agree on the broad strokes here, but the marriage + baby boom that happened in the 50s is a pretty evident counterexample. The Industrial Revolution was mostly played-out by that point and there were plenty of creature comforts and trappings of modernity, yet the marriage rate ticked up by quite a bit. Any story on birthrates or gender relations that is just a broad trend of the modern world sucking, and which doesn't take into account the booms that happened in the 50s is woefully incomplete IMO.
My take is a bit different from yours. It's that second-wave feminism in the late 60s and 70s let women earn their own keep, which meant marriage became far less of a necessity for basic survival. This made women choose men more for "love" than provisioning, which made us regress to our biological roots. Women all naturally want a high-value man and so they broadly chased after the same small percentage of guys (in other words, women's standards went up). These lucky few men got their pick of the lot and could treat women like barely-sentient fleshlights. The dating market effectively got worse for everyone except the lucky few guys, and now women broadly hate men since their opinions are formed on the small % that have the least incentive to commit. This led to a collapse in marriage rates, which ended up collapsing birth rates as well.
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
This comment seems to echo the fantasy among some dateless conservatives that if only they were born in some bygone era where women didn't have nearly as many options then they'd surely get a girlfriend almost by default. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then. And I suspect that these guys never once consider that they're being just as selective as the women they're criticizing. I grew up in the Mon Valley, an area that's not exactly hot at the moment. If anyone here is seriously interested in getting married to a woman who is young enough to have a lot of children and doesn't mind staying home and not working, DM me and I will be glad to take them to the kind of bar where their chances of meeting an overweight, chain-smoking phlebotomy school dropout who's willing to date them are nearly 100%. Hell, you don't even need a good job; a steady, decent job is more than enough, considering most of the guys these women date are the kind of guys who quit because they got into an argument with their boss. Where I'm from these girls are a dime a dozen.
There's a fair criticism of pickiness, and not to put unspoken words in your mouth but if you're implying it, you're only implying it, that the righties wouldn't want the chainsmoker at the bar. A lot of those young men are picky, but it's turnabout from the woman being more picky. Not to cast blame here because there isn't blame, the behavior from both sexes results from society. But blaming society is also a folly, might as well blame the sun for rising, for the good it can do to change it.
You're right and you're wrong. We're in the most narrow slice between past and future where you will approach rightness. Some of these men couldn't get dates if they were born 10 years earlier, or 20, 30, 40, 50--except far enough back and then things change, because dating is a hyper-modern activity, as is equally the degree of autonomy that men and/but far more women, have in romance. Go far enough back and dating doesn't exist, it's courtship, a bit farther back and courtship lands between betrothal and marriage. Farther back and it's pure arranged marriage, and far enough back and it's men dragging women and girls away from the primitive domiciles of their slain husbands, brothers, and fathers.
That violence is so relevant. Most men never reproduced, each of us is the legacy of those few who had many wives and many children. Because those were the traits of our most ancient forefathers, this urge courses through our veins. We're happier and better as couples, but even while you are (I assume) a married man, and to cast no aspersions, I assume you still notice the beautiful waitress, or young woman at the gym or working as a paralegal. You're not blind, you appreciate it viscerally because it's biological. Or maybe you're better than me, which I probably believe myself; wiser, more mature, and you actually don't really think about it. Still you would understand generally men are like this, even the most faithful of husbands.
Most women did reproduce, but up until the 20th century, pretty much no women anywhere on Earth -- not enough to change the behavior of the sex -- had a choice in who would be the father of their children. Men ravished, women were ravished. This is our nature, it is what our environments selected. There was never environmental pressure nor enough advantage conferred for men, as a sex, to apprehend some ineffable and holistic quality of "wife and mother material" beyond the purely physical. She's young, she has wide hips and nice breasts, good enough. Equally, there has never been a reason for women to acquire the mirror of that trait, just as men didn't get to reproduce, women didn't get to choose not to.
Then very, very suddenly, for the first time in the history of our species, most women became the ones who chose. I don't like a lot of the points I could branch to from here, but what is certain is that no less than 50% of women simply lack the good judgment to make that decision, and oh boy is that rate identical for men. See I don't think the damage is autonomy itself, not dates, not those men who can't get dates. The damage comes from a beast of many facets, all of them culture, but the cruelness in its eyes is named fictive love and soulmate. Women look for it, men look for it, who gets it?
Based on divorce rates, the answer seems to be not very many.
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