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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 about the elephant in the room - personality?
Many young women are irritating and unpleasant. So are many men for that matter. I think this is a bigger problem than body-count, where the woman can simply lie. Or at best you can just ignore the body count in a way you can't do for personality. In so far as body-count matters, it's really about pair-bonding and personality.
Grok or O3 can't tell you whether women have a bad personality. We can't quantify this right now, though I'd be very eager to see the figures if we could. Anyway, it's age old wisdom that some women are just crazy and you don't stick your dick in crazy, let alone date one. Maths can't quantify personality yet it's a key criteria.
But if there's anything that the mathematics shows, it's that your point is real since we need only observe plummeting birth rates and a growing divide between the sexes. There's clearly a major social problem. Obviously there are exceptions. This is the most 'there are exceptions' kind of thing imaginable, it's individual human behaviour. But statistics can model this and the numbers are indisputable. It's no good saying 'just man up' when quite clearly that's not working as a solution. It can be a solution for an individual but it's not a solution to the problem because there's clearly some reason why everyone isn't already doing it, if it worked.
With the 'climate crisis' nobody says 'just have a cold shower'. That won't have any effect, it's a global industrial system that requires collective action to fix.
The fertility decline is a much bigger and more important issue. It's not going to be resolved by men looksmaxxing or grinding hard at work to self-improve. They do both a lot in South Korea to absolutely no avail. I highly, highly doubt anything non-coercive is going to work. There's a reason nearly all settled states had extremely coercive (by modern standards) treatment of women through most of history. That's a stable, high-fertility equilibrium.
I doubt we can even lower house prices non-coercively if you want to tackle fertility purely economically, without any cultural/social tools. People don't want their wealth taken away from them. It goes against the cherished principle of Universal Boomer Income where their assets must always rise in value.
Also acceptance of men having mistresses, legalised (in many societies) prostitution, concubines, etc. That's not a stable family dynamic because the coercive control of women also means men wanting to break out of the rigidity of marriage and family life. If you need prostitution because "men have needs" then you need women to break the taboos on sexual promiscuity through choice, circumstance, poverty, etc. (e.g. families selling daughters to brothels in time of bad harvests or economic need). It also incentivises women to have affairs when married.
You can structure a society like that, but men won't like the society that says "women marry early, have lots of kids, don't get an education, and don't interact with men outside of their family" because we see that men break the social rules by seeking out prostitutes, concubines, etc. which, in a society that runs perfectly on "women are chaste and non-sexual and under the control of the man of the house and only have one male sexual partner, their husband, in their entire lives" would not generate exceptions like prostitution, affairs, etc.
"My wife is chaste and doesn't even think of another man ever than me in her entire life, also I have the right to fuck the maidservants in my house whether they're willing or not" is not consistent in its view of female sexuality. It's certainly coercive but it's also incoherent.
It might be intellectually incoherent but it worked.
Obviously the modern context presents different challenges. Child mortality is not sky high anymore.
However, our society has huge coercive resources. Economically, citizens are coerced by powerful bureaucracies to fund all kinds of programs, wars, welfare. Socially, policing works via coercion. They don't just educate people on what to do, people are coerced by police wielding guns.
There's no reason to drop coercion entirely with regards to sexual relations when it's present in all other aspects of life. In fact there are extremely strong coercive systems set up for underage sex and other scenarios. One might very reasonably say that it's bizarre and inconsistent to have such harshness allocated for relatively minor problems while civilization-ending, nation-ending decline is met with a limp-wristed 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas, bring in more immigrants'. Imperial Japan tried coercion, they restricted female employment, banned abortion and taxed bachelors. There was modest fertility growth in an industrializing, urbanizing society albeit complicated by the war. In 1945 the US changed their constitution to give equal rights to women and Japanese fertility plummeted, never to recover.
https://x.com/SyroJaziran/status/1848973547344928887
This kind of coercion may not be the only solution but it is a solution. There could also be incentives-based solutions. Take the entire pension budget and transfer it to fund parents who raise children to certain standards. 10-15% of GDP should get things happening. But you'd have real political problems doing this, any sufficiently powerful incentive resembles coercion, it would require the same voter-proof political consensus that mass immigration enjoys in many Western countries. There'd need to be a huge, forceful redistribution of political power for this to happen, likewise with largescale cloning or any other effective solution.
Nonsense, that is perfectly coherent.
Men, Inc. wants to acquire sex for as little a price as possible (as opposed to Women, Inc., which wants to set the price of sex as high as possible). Everything either one does is downstream from that fundamental fact, which is itself downstream from human biology. (This analysis ignores men that want commitment/women who want sex, but those are statistical outliers and can be safely ignored.)
So we should expect, when men are dominant in society, that we see lots of high-quality sex at affordable prices (so lots of mistresses, sex-pro-quo/workplace sex [historically frustrated by the lack of co-ed workplaces but the prototypical example is the Casting Couch] and secret other families, the 'raise my kids/be exclusive to me while I fuck other women' polyamory, and maximally attractive [as in, 13-16 year old] brides... into marriages that bind them but doesn't protect their interests in any way); when women are dominant in society, we should expect price controls out the ass ('fight for 25', #metoo, 'if she's younger than you it's rape', the 'pay my bills while I fuck other men' polyamory, and marriages that bind men but don't protect their interests in any way).
Unless Women, Inc. is in control, in which case again, it's perfectly consistent that men be punished [more severely than for most other crimes, including murder] for an act that inherently devalues older women. Young women are competition for old women, you see, so naturally old women would seek to keep them out of the sexual marketplace so they can demand a higher price. It is quite literally just the distaff counterpart to the "state-mandated girlfriend", but that selfishness is tolerated/Women, Inc. can afford that right now, so it continues (contrast men, who are forced to support children born of statutory rape).
Not necessarily; Men, Inc. started ceding power to Women, Inc. in a major way centered around the 1900s. The suffragettes were not a violent movement. What did change was technology that brought the average woman up to the productivity of the average man- the sweatshop is an equalizing force, you see- and why lots of traditionalists get confused about the Sexual Revolution, because it was in a time of economic productivity that didn't solely advance men.
It is worth noting that the Japanese solution you mentioned above addresses both male and female selfishness according to what the balance of power in the society could bear at the time. To deal with Men, Inc. you impose heavy costs on sex (and make sure that having it with more than one woman is unaffordable); to deal with Women, Inc. you suppress their worth outside of sex (and make sure that they don't have a good life outside of a context where they're selling that sex to a man).
Since Japan has come up it might be my chance to introduce the concept of 枕営業or "makura eigyou." This term could be translated strictly as "pillow business" but in reality refers to the necessarily transactional nature of the mizu shoubai or "water trade" aka night life business such as hostess bars, etc.
Relevant to this discussion due to a 2015 case that made the news.. Essentially while long term infidelity is grounds for divorce, just sex with your friendly neighborhood hostess is not. At least not so in a way that would grant the wife a settlement. Why? Because our friendly neighborhood hostess (or whatever) works hard for the money, that's why. Just another part of the nightly grind. Sorry, wives and mothers in Japan, but at least dad was just paying for it and wasn't really in Luv.
Who says Japanese law is impenetrable? Well, I say that, but I suppose sometimes I'm wrong. All puns intended.
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