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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)
Don't you think we could create a similar list of "minimum requirements for a marriageable single male" that would likewise exclude the vast majority of single men? While your criteria vaguely gesture at a general problem that seems true (a lot of women on the market will be excluded by a man with reasonable filters), your crunching the numbers to conclude it's something like 1-in-10 odds of finding an acceptable woman seem similar to Newsweek's infamous 1986 article "Too Late for Prince Charming", publishing a marriage study allegedly concluding that college-educated women over 40 were more likely to be killed in a terrorist attack than to get married. This study was later found to have distorted or misestimated a lot of numbers for the sake of producing a sensational punchline. Many, many more women over 40 than that study would have estimated did in fact wind up married.
I think we could quibble a lot over your criteria. You think most men would be bothered more by a woman with a body count > 5 than a sex worker? Or would find drug use more acceptable than student loan debt?
It's easy to ask ChatGPT to crunch some artificially-generated numbers to produce a blackpill. But sometimes "lived experience" is actually more convincing than dubious statistics, so I'd like to ask if 90% of the single men you know are incapable of finding a decent woman? Because that is not my experience. I know a few guys who seem to struggle, but it's nothing like "90% can't find a woman who isn't an obese single mother with BPD"...
Yes?
And then what.
I think a sex worker will ALMOST CERTAINLY have a body count greater than 5, so it'd be redundant to include.
And yeah, I think a guy serious about marriage would start to have second thoughts if he learned his GF had 5, 6, 7, bodies. Thats the point at which it has very noticeable impact on divorce rates. Guys are aware of that.
Of course, other factors could override that.
And for drug use... depends on the drug, doesn't it?
My dude, I found the numbers myself, a year ago, no LLM involved:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1042/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/221415?context=8#context
The numbers are a 'real' as any other statistical conclusion can be.
YES.
Or damn near to it.
I'm surrounded by men who are great catches by all appearances, and THEY LITERALLY ALL HAVE THE PRECISE, EXACT SAME COMPLAINTS ABOUT TRYING TO FIND A PARTNER IN THE CURRENT SEXUAL MARKETPLACE.
EVERY ONE. I've got multiple friends whose women divorced them for seemingly no decent reason in the past 4 years. They are even MORE scarred and they're still scared of the dating scene they've been out of for a while.
I go on reddit's dating advice forum and its the same complaints. Note that one is complaining about the UK. It isn't just limited to America!
The young guys are cooked. Its hard to get even to a second date.. Guys will be single for years and years, despite living in NYC and checking all the boxes.
Its everywhere. These people are not outliers. Yet the advice always assumes they are the problem.
Almost half of Gen Z guys claim they're not even dating anymore.
Relationship formation is cratering across the globe
I talk to anyone, ANYWHERE and they're all saying the exact same thing about it. I DEFY you to find anyone who is having a 'good time' trying to find a partner.
Yes.
IT IS THAT BAD.
Guys who are CURRENTLY single are having a nightmarish time finding a partner.
Note: I have to exclude the guys I was great friends with in college (circa 2010) who are all still married with kids now.
Which just emphasizes how much worse its gotten since, say, 2013.
But you put it in the "not a dealbreaker" column. I assume you were also including women with OnlyFans who might not actually have had a lot of sex.
Sure, but my point is you seem to be eliding a lot of nuance. For some guys, weed will be a dealbreaker, and I would hope any reasonable person would consider meth or heroin a dealbreaker.
Okay, I believe you, but your bubble is evidently very different than mine (and I'm not in some trad red bubble - far from it), and I am unconvinced that yours is more representative.
This I believe, but I don't believe it's because women in general are nightmares and mostly unmarriageable. I believe it's because dating norms and Tinderification have made dating a nightmare. That and norms you and I would probably agree are detrimental, like feminist hazard zones and the much-discussed choosiness of 80% of women wanting the top 5% of men (which is also a consequence of Tinderification). That said, I remain skeptical of the blackpill take that always circles around to "Actually, the solution is we should somehow contrive to force women to settle for... me." (Should I settle for a woman I'm not really into? Heavens no!)
What do you think the mechanism for that is?
Hint: your average woman on Tinder is getting easily 50x the attention that the average male is getting
What would all this excess attention and the APPEARANCE OF CHOICE do to a woman's psyche, and her tendency to settle for a man? Any guesses?
Just throw some thoughts out there.
Do you think that women will become more likely to marry?
Of course.
But more and more women aren't settling for ANYONE.
Objective fact.
What now?
Unsurprising. Tinder commodifies sex, and men mostly play a numbers game. (The average woman at a sock hop in the 50s or at your church social probably gets vastly more attention than the average male too.)
Accept that you have stiff competition, but it's not as hopeless as blackpillers would have you believe. Do not succumb to blackpill solutions like "Women are all hypergamous slutwhores and we should just make them marry
mesomeone."And now she can get attention from almost every guy in a 20 mile radius.
The worst part, as I see it, is that every woman is AWARE they can hop on the apps for a quick confidence boost, casual sex, or even a free meal.
There's zero friction.
So even the ones who aren't actively using the apps are having their behavior modified by their existence.
Doesn't work when on a societal level we're trending towards the hellscape that is South Korean dating.
Even massive government subsidies hasn't helped
So we see that we in the U.S. haven't hit rock bottom yet.
i.e.
IT CAN IN FACT GET WORSE.
I don't have to be a blackpiller to say "Guys maybe we should TRY to change course because I see where this is going."
South Korea's problems are numerous, and the lack of desire of South Korean women to marry and have children is more that they perceive it as being a shit deal for them than that they are all sleeping around. (SK is still a pretty conservative country and most of them aren't.)
Most American women are also not just ordering up dick on Tinder.
When you say "We should change course," do you have any suggestions that aren't basically "Reduce female agency"? Because you seem to blame everything on women while rejecting any suggestion that unsuccessful men are to blame for their own lack of success .
How many men would take the bargain of "you'll have to get married and have a kid, preferably a son, and pour resources into that kid to succeed by getting into the limited range of jobs deemed socially acceptable; this will mean no childhood for the kid but that's the price to pay. you also have to work. you also have to do all the housework and childrearing, because your husband will be working more than he is at home, will have obligations outside of official work hours, and the rare time he is home, all the domestic labour is on you because that's a woman's duty. also you will have an interfering mother-in-law who will expect you to obey her every command because respect for seniors and preserving family harmony is important."
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