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 -
These are not independent variables. Just to hammer on the most obvious point, obesity is inversely correlated with wealth, typically measured by race in these statistical reports, and wealth is also inversely correlated with single motherhood. So you’ve got a bunch of fat poor single mothers out there, probably with 5+ partners, sucking up all of those negative attributes. Meanwhile, on the other end, you have relatively thin and sexless women… who have college debt and are very liberal. So which is more important? Impossible to do without the headache of real analysis. Said again, I really don’t like the practice of asking AI as if it’s an oracle. It ain’t.
Finally, the most important question to ask about this data is: have things been getting worse, and why, and for whom? Obesity is obviously getting worse, and is a real scourge, but there’s no effort here to measure things which would have been very important in the recent (<100y) past, like: does she live in my town? Is she the right Christian denomination? Is she white and NOT Irish?
Mating is an incredibly complicated sorting problem, where the constraints are enforced by personal attraction, class standards, and social Brownian motion that brings suitable parties into contact. If I had to swipe through the millions of women in a couple-hour drive from me, my wife (or someone like her, single) would be a bit of a needle in a haystack. And yet I met her at the right time, seemingly without effort. My friends tend to have similar stories.
Put another way. Obesity is high, yet very few of the people in my area are fat. In my personal circle the number goes down even further. At the same time, wealth goes up. So, by those standards, if men want to marry they should leave the areas with bad women.
Personally, I believe there aren’t many good women, but that there are plenty. A helpful factor breaking this down is that there aren’t many good men either. Being intelligent and stable starts moving you one to three standard deviations out of center, and makes a strong position feasible. If you’re in that category, the remaining question is: what unmarriagable characteristics do women and men in your subcategory have and what can be done about them?
In my experience, intelligent and educated men struggle with, basically, giving women what they like. They don’t have much personal, visceral experience with flirting, pushing boundaries gently and challenging women without threatening them. At the same time, they are insensitive and unresponsive to women’s needs, which are typically more subtle (or she drops the point more easily than she feels). Men who have a lot of trouble are typically aggressively against caring about what women like, usually out of spite. This can be fixed with experience and focused learning.
For women, the problem is that they are socialized to disrespect men and to identify any male qualities that they don’t personally gel with as moral failings. They are more aware of what men do and don’t like, but are encouraged to view giving men what they like as a sort of selling out. (At the same time, women actually LIKE positive attention from men, so you get bizarre behavior like women wearing revealing clothing and insisting that it’s “for them.”) This obviously sabotages relationships, but again, you can learn your way back out of it.
Finally, educated men and women both have problems with respecting the privacy of a relationship (although women have more trouble). So when they have problems, instead of dealing with them personally, they broadcast them widely - meaning that other people’s dysfunctions enter the relationship.
All this can be learned away. So, for the high-class young men looking for relationships, they should fix what problems they have in themselves and anticipate and work towards lessening them in women, probably starting with the public-private distinction.
But then again, who am I to say, I’m just another guy who just happens to know a lot of great guys my age (late 20s, early 30s) who found and married great women and are having kids with them. I guess that’s elite privilege? If so, I’ll happily bear that designation; why shouldn’t being better entail getting better things? I know some guys who aren’t doing so well in life who have worse women - is that supposed to surprise me?
More options
Context Copy link