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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Honest dating advice coaches aren't like "just improve yourself and then supermodels will jump on your cock every day", they're more like "improve yourself and you will be able to maximize whatever you're starting out with". It's not like the Internet dating advice space is just entirely made up of the sort of "bro just improve yourself and you'll start having to fend off supermodels all the time" material. There's plenty of that, but there is also more realistic stuff out there. Sure, there are many grifters out who promise unrealistic abilities, but there is also plenty of dating advice out there that actually works to maximize whatever basic gifts you started out with.

I don't know what serious actions could be taken about the issue on a wide-spread level other than sexual communism. But I myself do not desire sexual communism. Partly for a moral reason... I do not wish women to be coerced to have sex with people they would not otherwise want to have sex with. But also for non-moral reasons. I prefer to compete openly in the sexual marketplace and thus know from an ego perspective that whatever I am getting, I am getting due to my own qualities rather than because of some outside pressures. This is also why I have never had any interest in visiting prostitutes. Which is a funny two-sided thing. Because on the one hand it shows that I value sex for more than just sex, but then if I really dig down into it one of the main reasons why I don't want to visit prostitutes is just because it would be an ego decreaser. I just don't have a sex drive so high that I want to fuck no matter what... for me the satisfaction of having the other person want me is a key part of it, and while that might sound good abstractly, it actually might say more about my ego than about my morality.

In any case, I can't think of any political answer to the issue that wouldn't restrict women's liberties, and I'm not into restricting women's liberties. Most of why I'm not into it is because my morality, the rest is because of a sense that wanting to restrict women's sexual liberties as a man is loser-coded and the proper masculine thing to do is to let women do whatever they want and attract them anyway, not to try to restrict their sexual decisions.

Most of why I'm not into it is because my morality, the rest is because of a sense that wanting to restrict women's sexual liberties as a man is loser-coded and the proper masculine thing to do is to let women do whatever they want and attract them anyway, not to try to restrict their sexual decisions.

Dragging only this chunk out to comment on it.

If you firmly believe this, it implies that men as they acted for the first 6000 years or so of civilization had masculinity wrong. I find this to be extremely improbable, and I am betting that you are operating strictly on modern vibes regarding masculinity, which I believe are actually designed to destroy masculinity in both thought and deed.

If I am wrong and you feel you have applied a great deal of thought to the idea, then I accept we have come to different conclusions. But if on reflection you also think that you may just be running on vibes, I urge you to really dig deep into how some male role model of yours in the pre-modern era approached his interactions with women.

I can't think of any political answer to the issue that wouldn't restrict women's liberties, and I'm not into restricting women's liberties. Most of why I'm not into it is because my morality, the rest is because of a sense that wanting to restrict women's sexual liberties as a man is loser-coded and the proper masculine thing to do is to let women do whatever they want and attract them anyway, not to try to restrict their sexual decisions.

We've run this experiment for about 30 or so years.

That is, we tore up any laws or social norms that might be considered restrictions on women's liberty (Even WITHIN the marital relationship!), gave them 'equal rights' to every legal benefit they could want, we have every single cultural institution, Academia, Corporations, Social Media, Hollywood, all telling them they never have to settle.

Then the few guardrails that remained (i.e. religion) have been pushed aside, so that women genuinely do not have ANY pressure on them to live up to ANY standards, whatsoever.

And what we see is that women have more mental illness, are more medicated than ever, have more radical politics than ever, are less healthy than ever, they have more sex partners yet fewer children, and self reported happiness is lower than ever.

Don't know what to tell you man, women are miserable under this current state of affairs, too. And they tend to blame men, despite having been given all the agency they could possibly want.

Solutions that DON'T directly restrict sexual liberties could involve removing the direct incentives to put off relationship formation and simply reinstate the cultural 'guardrails' that at least give them a path they can follow that tends to create healthy outcomes.

Surely we can put some 'pressure' on women to settle down earlier without making it a legal mandate?

Surely we can put some 'pressure' on women to settle down earlier without making it a legal mandate?

Sure, but that relies on men wanting to settle down earlier, and in the halcyon days before liberalisation as described, men saw marriage and fatherhood as traps, as women trying to net a husband and tie a man down. Jokey references such as "the old ball and chain" may have been jokes, but also were a cultural assumption that wives were shackles (literally) on a man's freedom - to have sexual experiences, to travel, to drink/smoke/have fun, to enjoy being a bachelor.

The movement towards Free Love and Sexual Liberation was two-pronged; men wanted to be free of obligations as much as women wanted the sexual freedoms of men. The (to my ears) rather whiny lyrics of the 70s hit Lydia express this: the guy wants to be free but also wants a no-strings-attached woman and place to crash when he wants/needs it.

Lydia keeps my toothbrush in her apartment and she never complains.
Well, hardly ever. And then jokingly she says.­
Boy, it's been so long since I held you, I nearly gave you up for dead. I nearly gave you up for dead. I nearly gave you up for dead.

Lydia, Lydia how come you understand?
I can offer you nothing at all. This is more than I had planned.
Lydia, Lydia I am at your command, at least until morning comes,
then, I must be off again.

What exactly counts as either coercion or restriction in this particular context though?

This is indeed a relevant question given Women’s susceptibility to social pressure.

the proper masculine thing to do is to let women do whatever they want and attract them anyway, not to try to restrict their sexual decisions.

So I guess all men and women of good character before the sexual revolution, from Caesar to Confucius to Queen Victoria to Jesus Christ were all loser coded and immoral.

What a grand and intoxicating innocence.

Christianity was different in that it put restrictions on male sexuality, as well as female sexuality. Now there was a new standard for men to live up to.

Matthew 5: 27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

Matthew 19: 3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” 8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery."

1 Timothy: 3 The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.

...12 Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well. 13 For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus.

1 Corinthians 7: Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. 3 The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

...10 To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife."

So men must be as chaste as women; no whoring around, no mistresses, no divorce-remarry-divorce-remarry, no casual sex.

I do not think Abrahamism and Christianity in particular is special in regulating the sexuality of both sexes. There's plenty of other moral doctrines that do. It may do it more or in different ways, but the proposition that one sex had total dominion on the other at any point in history except in times of rape and pillage is highly dubious.

But Christianity, as per those quotes from Scripture, put the same limitations on men. For Judaism (and Islam afterwards) divorce was the right of a man, easier for him to obtain, and the divorced woman was left in a parlous position. The Classical world at the time of early Christianity, such as Rome, had no qualms about men divorcing and remarrying multiple times. Polygamy may have been tolerated culturally in some societies, ease of sexual access for men was unquestioned (legal prostitution, mistresses, etc.)

Christianity came along and said no. One wife. No mistresses. Wives have the same right of sexual access to their husbands as husbands have to their wives. No sleeping around before/within marriage. No prostitution. No divorce.

Now, did Christians live up to that code? Of course not. But as a change from the prevailing attitudes, it was incredible. Even the stories of martyrs, like St Perpetua, defying the traditional authority of father and husband and family were amazing new changes in the status and freedom of women.

What a grand and intoxicating innocence.

You could at least call him "Moon and Star" before diving into the insults

but to this place where destiny is made, why did he come unprepared?

You know what, maybe I should start haunting people's dreams. That seems like a good use of my time.

I doubt Caesar would have feared competing in a free sexual marketplace.

"Every man's woman, every woman's man" 😀

In 18 BC, Augustus passed the Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis which made adultery a crime and contained the following penalties:

  • The woman’s father could kill his daughter and the lover if they were caught in the act of sexual intercourse.
  • The husband was not allowed to kill either party, but was to be treated kindly if he happened so to do.
  • The husband had to divorce a wife found guilty of adultery or risk criminal charges as a pimp.
  • The husband had 60 days to prosecute his wife when she was accused of adultery and if he did not do so, the case could then be taken up by someone else.
  • The guilty parties were to be exiled and the woman lost half her dowry and a third of any other property she held.
  • The lovers were to be exiled to different islands.
  • If a woman returned from exile, she appears not to have been able to remarry.
  • Men lost half their property.

I guess the man who won the Roman civil war and made his adoptive father a god and himself an emperor at only 32 was loser coded.

Do you want to know what Victoria, ruler of the largest empire in history, thought about free love or shall we leave it at that?

I interpreted @Goodguy's comment to mean that someone arguing for reducing women's liberties for the sake of improving their own dating prospects is loser-coded. Caesar and Augustus probably had more conservative sexual ethics than most western people do today, but I imagine that was for reasons other than worrying that they'd lose out to chad if women could choose their own suitors.

I think that the concern that either sex would chose the fleeting fun of an attractive partner instead of someone who's dutiful and pro social springs eternal, actually.

Parents have always feared this and will always fear this. They simply used to have more cultural power to enforce their will in societies that had or still have more tight knit familial bonds.

And moreover, the consequences of licentiousness used to be far more immediate and catastrophic for women before widespread contraception and on demand abortions. It's no surprise that the sexual revolution and the advent of that technology coincided.

Still, the more pernicious effects remain there and that includes the destabilizing effect of winner takes all harem dynamics.

You are correct about my meaning. I probably should have made that more clear in my original comment.

It's not "loser-coded" if you're just a loser. Nobody would even blink an eye at a poor person being for socialism, it's not even a great condemnation to note it. It's sort of a trivial statement that losers look like losers.

"Loser-coded" implies that the act itself carries the stench of failure and ressentiment no matter who does it.

Gibbon tells us that of the first fifteen Roman emperors, only Claudius had sexual tastes that were "correct."

Augustus introduced these reforms to marriage, was succeeded by a series of perverts and deviants for decades until the dynastic changeover at least.

Rome was a pretty libertine society at the upper rungs, but you need to take dirty rumors about Roman emperors with a grain of salt. Politicized smear campaigns were just as much of a thing back then as they are now, and often that stuff later ended up being written down as fact. In 2000 years it will be “well established historical fact” that Emperor Trump was once micturated upon by princesses from the Kievan Rus and that Proconsul Hillary was a witch who drank blood to extend her lifespan.

Sure, but a lot of this stuff wasn't really even a smear. Like the stories that Tiberius would have murder orgies, sure, even at the time those were probably false. But homosexuality, provided one was a top rather than a bottom, was barely a slur. And having sex with slaves and other non-citizen women was completely outside of this legal framework, and mostly outside of. the underlying moral framework.. It likely barely applied to the poor and plebs.

The rumors about Julius Caesar were definitely a smear (given that the rumor was that he was a bottom, and a bottom for a foreign king no less). Also notice that the really degenerate ones like Nero and Caligula happen to be controversial figures who were overthrown and assassinated. The degeneracy bolsters their depiction as generally crazy and unfit to rule.

The rumors about Julius Caesar were definitely a smear (given that the rumor was that he was a bottom, and a bottom for a foreign king no less).

Hard to know. Probably exaggerated, but on the other hand his own soldiers at his triumphs sang bawdy songs about him being the Queen of Bithynia:

Nicomedes IV was restored to his throne in Bithynia in 84 BC. The years that followed were relatively peaceful, though Bithynia came more and more under the control of Rome. In 80 BC, young Gaius Julius Caesar was an ambassador to Nicomedes IV's court. Caesar was sent to raise a fleet using Bithynia's resources, but he remained so long with the King that a rumor of a sexual relationship between the two men surfaced, leading to the disparaging title for Caesar, "the Queen of Bithynia", an appellation which Caesar's political enemies made use of later in his life. During Caesar's Gallic Triumph a popular verse began: "Gallias Caesar subegit, Caesarem Nicomedes," (Caesar laid the Gauls low, Nicomedes laid Caesar low), suggesting that Caesar was the submissive receiving partner in the relationship.

In Roman rhetoric, with modesty (pudicitia) at the forefront, allegations of passive homosexual activity, along with other sexual misconduct, were commonly used against young men, or the youthful period of a man's life. Another example was the trial of Marcus Caelius Rufus, where one of the prosecutors, Sempronius Atratinus, called him a "pretty-boy Jason" (pulchellus Iason).

Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus used the epithet in the edicts he issued during his joint consulship with Caesar.[1] A man named Octavius, at a public assembly, addressed Pompey as "king" and Caesar as "queen" in their presence.[3] At a debate in the Senate, when Caesar recalled some benefits Rome had received from Nicomedes, Cicero interrupted him with "it is well known what he gave you and what you gave him in return". Consul Gaius Scribonius Curio called Caesar "every man's wife and every woman's husband". Caesar's own soldiers upon victorious return from the Gallic Wars sang in parade that "Caesar got on top of the Gauls, Nicomedes got on top of Caesar".

And the accounts about him and about Mark Antony are, at least, highly entertaining to read. Suetonius mentions the rumours but is at least restrained about it:

45 1 He is said to have been tall of stature with a fair complexion, shapely limbs, a somewhat full face, and keen black eyes; sound of health, except that towards the end he was subject to sudden fainting fits and to nightmare as well. He was twice attacked by the falling sickness⁠42 during his campaigns. 2 He was somewhat overnice in the care of his person, being not only carefully trimmed and shaved, but even having superfluous hair plucked out, as some have charged; while his baldness was a disfigurement which troubled him greatly, since he found that it was often the subject of the gibes of his detractors. Because of it he used to comb forward his scanty locks from the crown of his head, and of all the honours voted him by the senate and people there was none which he received or made use of more gladly than the privilege of wearing a laurel wreath at all times. 3 They say, too, that he was remarkable in his dress; that he wore a senator's tunic with fringed sleeves reaching to the wrist, and always had a girdle⁠ over it, though rather a loose one; and this, they say, was the occasion of Sulla's mot, when he often warned the nobles to keep an eye on the ill-girt boy.

49 1 There was no stain on his reputation for chastity except his intimacy with King Nicomedes, but that was a deep and lasting reproach, which laid him open to insults from every quarter. I say nothing of the notorious lines of Licinius Calvus:

"Whate'er Bithynia had, and Caesar's paramour."

I pass over, too, the invectives of Dolabella and the elder Curio, in which Dolabella calls him "the queen's rival, the inner partner of the royal couch," and Curio, "the brothel of Nicomedes and the stew of Bithynia." 2 I take no account of the edicts of Bibulus, in which he posted his colleague as "the queen of Bithynia," saying that "of yore he was enamoured of a king, but now of a king's estate." At this same time, so Marcus Brutus declares, one Octavius, a man whose disordered mind made him somewhat free with his tongue, after saluting Pompey as "king" in a crowded assembly, greeted Caesar as "queen." But Gaius Memmius makes the direct charge that he acted as cup-bearer to Nicomedes with the rest of his wantons at a large dinner-party, and that among the guests were some merchants from Rome, whose names Memmius gives. 3 Cicero, indeed, is not content with having written in sundry letters that Caesar was led by the king's attendants to the royal apartments, that he lay on a golden couch arrayed in purple, and that the virginity of this son of Venus was lost in Bithynia; but when Caesar was once addressing the senate in defence of Nysa, daughter of Nicomedes, and was enumerating his obligations to the king, Cicero cried: "No more of that, pray, for it is well known what he gave you, and what you gave him in turn." 4 Finally, in his Gallic triumph his soldiers, among the bantering songs which are usually sung by those who followed the chariot, shouted these lines, which became a by-word:

"All the Gauls did Caesar vanquish, Nicomedes vanquished him;

Lo! now Caesar rides in triumph, victor over all the Gauls,

Nicomedes does not triumph, who subdued the conqueror."

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Once again, yes many things were smears, but other things that likely run against the sexual morality of most moderns wasn't a smear, it was just a mundane fact. Fucking a 12yo slave prostitute would (I hope!) widely be agreed today to be worse and more degenerate than fucking a married woman, I don't think the Romans would have agreed.

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It's true, people rarely live up to their principles, and powerful men are no exception. But people still understood that as a failure.

Sexual impropriety among the Romans caused them real concrete problems that those reforms tried to ameliorate. The idea that those were just the hangups of losers that don't merit consideration is silly.

The idea that those were just the hangups of losers that don't merit consideration is silly.

I want to register my agreement with your general point. But:

It's true, people rarely live up to their principles, and powerful men are no exception. But people still understood that as a failure.

My point isn't that Augustus and co didn't live up to his principles, it is that their sexual principles were largely alien to ours and probably in relevant ways that make the law's impact different than simplistically comparing it to the modern day. The laws probably didn't really apply to poor people, and mostly didn't apply to non-citizens, and definitely didn't apply to slaves. Citizens were somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population at the time, depending on what estimate you prefer. Then you get into the commonplace homosexual behavior.

So the ban on adultery was, in function, more like a Bro-Code deal than a moral statement. In impact, it's roughly like a law in modern America which prescribes punishments to College Graduates if they steal the wife of another College Graduate.

their sexual principles were largely alien to ours and probably in relevant ways that make the law's impact different than simplistically comparing it to the modern day

I think this is true in a specific sense but untrue in a general sense. People had vastly different conceptions of morality and sexuality, certainly, but they were still human beings so their concerns were ultimately the same: securing material commitment, certainty of paternity, etc.

In impact, it's roughly like a law in modern America which prescribes punishments to College Graduates if they steal the wife of another College Graduate.

And that's still a significant and willful regulation of the sexual marketplace. Those real Alpha jocks are not up for a free for all where the best man can just fuck everybody's wife, actually. Because they want their kids to be theirs.

Only one biological child - a daughter - and gives the empire to his stepsons? Cuck.

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