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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Male behavior doesn’t support body count rhetoric. This isn’t bitterness, I would even have met your own standard before I met my spouse, it’s just fact.

  1. Very high status men marry formerly very promiscuous women all the time. Prince Harry, Ronald Reagan, Jeff Bezos, Edward VIII, Evan Spiegel, even probably Donald Trump (NYC was a crazy place for Eastern European models in the early 1990s). If even men with the highest status and most options do this, clearly the revealed preference isn’t very strong.

  2. Status signalling about not marrying a promiscuous woman is more for other men than women. “For the streets” rhetoric is for the boys, it’s male bonding, often times it’s even post-breakup comforting of the “don’t worry babe, he didn’t DESERVE you. Men suck!” variety, just between men rather than women. The truth is that men love promiscuous women and always have, I suspect because promiscuous women are disproportionately likely to be more ‘masculine’, more outgoing, more likely to have male interests and are more likely both to enjoy male company and enjoy entertaining men.

  3. Other rules explain male courtship behavior better, including assortative mating and related patterns around class, hotness, shared extraversion (which means people who…partied a lot in their twenties usually settle down with people who partied a lot in their twenties).

  4. Public disdain for promiscuous women is mostly redirected class signalling. See copious 4chan memes where the trad chaste woman in the sundress is compared to the nasty tattooed whore with the body jewelry and the (mixed race) baby, no father in sight. Many of the most promiscuous women I know are hot, not tattooed, have no children or OnlyFans and are otherwise indistinguishable from other urban PMC other than being marginally more outgoing than average. I presume there are also low class women (maybe even some single mothers) who were not particularly promiscuous at all and who have tattoos.

  5. In my long experience knowing many women in their twenties of varying levels of promiscuity, I have never encountered one case where a woman was actually ‘punished’ for her promiscuity. Women do share their Ls with the girls, at least a lot of the time. Certainly there are examples where the woman might never know, but I have never found an example of a beautiful woman who couldn’t settle down with a man in her league and social class because she was too promiscuous in modern America or Britain.

  6. Some quick fire anecdotes: my Arab coworker, who told our mutual male coworkers that all British women were whores, just married a bottle blonde Dubai Russian with a dubious past, but it’s OK because she’s converting to Islam. The sluttiest girl in my high school class just married er boyfriend of 5 years, a handsome Ivy rower with family money from the same extended social circle and so undoubtedly knows all about her past.

The woman punished for her promiscuity is a male obsession in a deeply seated and likely unchangeable way. Men are obsessed by ‘fallen women’ because men (gay and straight, which make me think this is even deeper than just sexuality) love sluts (and not just for sex). Men are scared and in love with promiscuous women. They imagine grand punishments for them (many of the greatest novels and plays of all time). In the end, the joke is that there is no real punishment, at least most of the time.

Men have no reason to dislike sluts, on the contrary. It’s women. Like OP, women want the sexually promiscuous of their own sex, and I quote, ‘culled’. So that now perhaps, their dream partner, deprived of rival options, will turn to them, on their terms.

The women and their priest (religion, and Christianity in particular, being a woman’s game, with women’s ethics) always rail against the town bike. But most men secretly love the slut, as you recognize. And no wonder, because how can one love someone who gives seldom, and grudgingly? Men’s tragedy is there aren’t enough bikes to go around.

The fallen woman who pays the ultimate price? Yeah it’s common, but it’s part of the silly trope where the writer really wants to tell a mundane story that happened to him, he’s two-third done and fears he has nothing left to say, so to make it seem more important, give it some oomph and end it with a bang, Mr. or Mrs. Smith dies at the end for some ill-explained reason. It’s death out of a machine. And look at that, it's the end, and there's a death, just like in real life, death is the end. They all sit back and wait for the nobel after that flash of genius.

@2rafa @Tree You think that way because you’re both boomers. The reason people used to like the town bicycle is because they would occasionally get a turn to ride the town bicycle. That’s where the term comes from! When the town bicycle gets seized from the public commons and only the mayor and the five richest businessman in town get to ride it anymore, it just becomes yet another symbolic way you’re getting ground into the dirt. You have to open Instagram and see the mayor in his stupid little top-hat doing donuts in the town square on the bicycle that you never get ride going ding-ding-ding on the bell and you grit your teeth in hatred and tab over to BicycleHub dot com to look at even more bicycles that you’ll never, ever get to ride. Forget actually owning a bicycle, they’re much too expensive. You’ll just have to walk.

As I recall 2rafa is a recently married millennial woman.

So like I said, a boomer.

No?

If you’re over thirty, you’re a boomer. The future is now, OLD MAN.

Is that a reference? A joke? I don't get references, because I was raised in a homeschool bubble determined to turn us all into 18th Century boomers.

The concept comes from 4Chan, which maintains that anyone over thirty is a boomer. I think there is something to it, the culture and society is changing so fast that people who aren’t that old can quickly find themselves out of touch with the situation on the ground.

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