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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm dragging up the gender, dating, and fertility discourse for one last rodeo.
The below analysis is a possible infohazard for young single males. It contains analysis done by LLMs, but I solemnly swear I drafted this through my own brainpower, using AI only for the analysis I was too lazy to do myself.
I'm following upon a comment I made about a year ago that pulled out some raw numbers on the quality of women in the U.S., and how this might impact the desire of men to actually develop themselves and find one of those women and settle down.
At the time I didn't bother doing the work to produce an actual estimate of how many women would match the basic crtieria, given that these are NOT independent variables. The though occurred to me that AIs are the perfect solution for exactly this type of laziness, and now have the capability to do this task without completely making up numbers.
So, based on my old post, I chose 9 particular criteria that I think would ‘fairly’ qualify a woman as ‘marriageable.':
Single and looking (of course).
Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified.
Not ‘obese.’
Not a mother already.
No ‘acute’ mental illness.
No STI.
Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
Under age 30.
And ask both ChatGPT and Grok to attempt to estimate the actual population of women in the U.S. that pass all these filters, accounting for how highly correlated each of the variables are.
Notable criteria I omitted:
Religious affiliation
Race
Political affiliation
Career
Drug use
Sex work/Onlyfans
I argue that a reasonable man would NOT want to ‘compromise’ on any of the original criteria, whereas the omitted ones are comparatively negotiable, or alternatively, are already captured in one of the original criteria.
Would you accept a woman who was carrying $50k in student loan debt into the relationship? I guess maybe if she was a doctor or lawyer or made enough money to justify it. Much higher than that and it starts to suggest financial recklessness.
5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making. Ditto for being STI positive.
The age one is probably the most ‘unfair,’ but if having kids is a goal then this is pretty close to the ‘reasonable’ cutoff given the ticking fertility clock. Adjust upward if needed, I guess.
Here is the ChatGPT conversation. I used o3 in this case.
Here is Grok, specifically Grok 3.
In each case I used the “Deep Research” mode for the main query. I used identical prompts to start them off, they each seemingly did slightly different interpretations of the prompt. I was not using any fancy, complex prompt engineering to try and force it to think like a statistician or avoid hallucinations.
ChatGPT Gives this conclusion:
Grok comes to quite the similar conclusion:
Then I asked the truly cursed followup question: “how many men in the U.S. might be seeking these eligible women and thus how much competition is there for this population? How many are likely to ‘fail.’"
ChatGPT:
Emphasis Mine.
Grok:
Then the followup, when I tell it to extend the age range:
The error bars are pretty large on this one... the 9-out-of-10 number doesn't quite pass the smell test... but I think the point speaks for itself.
I don’t want to say that this is bleak, per se. I mean, 1 million or so women in the U.S. with some decent marriageable bonafides. That’s not a small pool! The problem stems from noticing that said women will have somewhere upwards of 5 men, possibly near 27 who will be competing for their affections, or more if they’re near the absolute peak of physical attractiveness.
Hence my increasing annoyance with the bog standard advice proffered to young males “become worthy and put in some effort and you will find a good woman” as it becomes increasingly divorced from the actual reality on the ground.
It’s not wrong. It is incomplete. Insufficient. If we increase the number of “worthy” men, that’s just intensifying the competition for the desirable women… while ALSO ensuring that more of those ‘worthy’ men will lose and go unfulfilled, DESPITE applying their efforts towards “worthiness.”
You CAN’T tell young men both “be better, improve, you have to DESERVE a good woman before you get one!” and then, when he improves:
“oh, you have to lower your standards, just because you thought you deserved a stable, chaste(ish), physically fit partner doesn’t mean you’re entitled to one, world ain’t fair.”
That dog won’t hunt.
Thems the numbers. I’m not making this up wholesale or whining about advice because I find it uncomfortable. No. The math is directly belying the platitudes. I’m too autistic NOT to notice.
So where am I going with this?
First, I’m hoping, praying someone can actually show me evidence that this is wrong. All of my personal experience, anecdotal observations, research, and my gut fucking instinct all points to this being an accurate model of reality. But I am fallible.
If I’m wrong I want to know!
I’m also not particularly worried about ME in general. I am in a good position to find a good woman, even though I’m sick of all the numerous frustrations and inanities one has to endure to do so. I get annoyed when someone, even in good faith, tries to suggest that my complaints are more mental than real. I can see the numbers, I've been in the trenches for years, this is a true phenomena, the competition is heavy, the prizes are... lacking.
And finally and most importantly, I genuinely feel the only way we keep the Ferris Wheel of organized civilization turning is if average women are willing to marry average men, and stay married, and help raise kids. I’m all for pushing the ‘average’ quality up, as long as actual relationships are forming.
Objectively, that is not happening. And so I’m worried because if society breaks down... well, I live here and I don't like what that implies for me, either.
(Yes, AGI is possibly/probably going to make this all a moot point before it all really collapses)
What proportion of men are:
Not including but probably should:
I mean, I could probably keep going and match all of your points with equivalents.
Do it.
Please.
I beg you.
Run the numbers on it all.
Give me some evidence that counteracts what appears to be a very clear trend.
Also, your criteria probably excludes 95+% of the black male population.
I'll caveat right away that these numbers are coming from Grok (and Grok is pulling from academic sources that are worse than just an LLM); I don't trust them, you shouldn't trust them, yada yada. two links, because I derped on setting up the first (yes, I shouldn't have asked about the felony one first; everything else got obsessed with race.).
"Thus, 35-45% of 52-68% yields an estimate of 18-31% of American men aged 19-30 having both an income above $50,000 and stable employment."
"To estimate the percentage of American men aged 19-30 who are both emotionally stable and have no history of interpersonal or domestic violence:[...] Assuming independence (a simplification, as mental health issues like PTSD or substance abuse can correlate with IPV perpetration), we multiply the probabilities: 0.80 × 0.70 to 0.85 × 0.75 = 56-64%. If we account for correlation (e.g., mental distress increasing IPV likelihood), the range might be slightly lower, around 50-60%."
"Thus, an estimated 16.4 to 18.2 million American men aged 19–30 are not obese [ed: 60%], based on recent data."
"Approximately 80–89% of American men aged 19–30 would not cheat in a relationship given the opportunity, based on reported infidelity rates and adjusted for hypothetical temptation." [ed: I told you I don't trust the LLM]
"Approximately 40–60% of American men aged 19–30 are fiscally responsible, defined as regularly saving, budgeting, and managing debt without significant financial strain. This range accounts for the variability in financial independence and literacy among young adults."
"Approximately 65–75% of American men aged 19–30 have not fathered a child."
"Approximately 65–75% of American men aged 19–30 have not had more than five previous real-life sexual partners, based on CDC data, General Social Survey findings, and recent trends in sexual inactivity"
One that pidgeon didn't cover, but I think you are motioning around:
Add them together, and Grok says:
[caveat: it did so with the formula "0.65 × 0.30 × 0.80 × 0.60 × 0.80 × 0.40 × 0.65 × 0.65 ≈ 0.0092". Don't trust LLMs!]
And this doesn't include stuff like orientation (despite what you'd think from the yaoi fans, there's a lot of distrust of actual bi guys among women) or student debt or willingness-to-have-kids or whether they're already married. It still leaves a gender gap, but given that the 'seekers' approach was comparing two decades of men against one decade of women, that's not really surprising.
I think that's bad in a different sense; having the vast majority of both gender 'not count' suggests that we're measuring the wrong thing.
((And I think this sort of button-pushing is itself dangerous, in the sense that it's letting both of us do harder statistical analysis without the gut-level integration of the knowledge that adding multiple filters after each other breaks apart comparisons.))
More options
Context Copy link
I went and fed the initial criteria I listed through Gemma 3, had to correct it for one misunderstanding it made. It gave between 4.3% and 11.2% of the US male population.I fed it through a Deepseek R1 Distill to see if a reasoning model went about it a different way. The reasoning chain, the way it tried to guesstimate, was wild. Still, it came up with 5-10%, so roughly similar.
Strikethrough: Sorry, just realised I also forgot to tell it this is of SINGLE men, so the numbers are probably significantly lower. I'll prompt again.
And I'm sure I could add criteria. I forgot to ask them for cishet men, I forgot to tell them to exclude men above a certain age.
If you want to put a ceiling on body count for women, it'd be fair to put a floor on it for men; at least 1 partner; virginity is not attractive for men, it's lack of social proof. Maybe if we wanted to be more fair we could put a specific age to them. A floor of 1 partner for men after 20, a ceiling of 5 partners for women before 25.
*SUBSEQUENT EDIT: I reran the numbers with SINGLE men and cishet, and it gave less than 2% of men fulfilling these criteria. Note that I don't trust AI estimates for these since it uses extremely simplistic analysis and can't really account for correlation between criteria appropriately, and tends to mix specifics in ways they shouldn't (compared US-wide salaries to rents in highly inflated high cost of living areas) but I think for both men and women, with my and your criteria, we're probably both in single digit percentages.
If you want to see this as a blackpill, go ahead, but I think both criteria sets probably are too restrictive. Women probably shouldn't be looking only for men who are financially capable of being single income breadwinners, men probably shouldn't be looking at education debt and >5 body count as dealbreakers.
As for the large contingent who fall short of these criteria, they'll end up matching with one another.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link