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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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The absolute last thing anyone here needs is more blackpills about dating. Yes, the apps suck. Yes, there are people who will always be more attractive than you due to the vagaries of genetics and society. Yes, birth and marriage rates are going down the drain. No one can deny these things; we live them every day and they have been discussed to death here and elsewhere. If you have some new data apart from Tinder screenshots, that would be interesting. If you insist that we must all accept our place at the bottom of the totem pole in our new de facto polygamous society, that could be an interesting line of inquiry too. After all, we have plenty of historical examples for comparison, as well as other analogous traits (e.g. will people respond any differently to being told they belong to a group with below average IQ vs. a group with below average reproductive success?). Just give us something to work with besides "we're cooked, gooners."

I literally just want to figure out the most most efficient way to show the Boomers pushing the "just improve yourself and then women will flock to you" advice that this is horribly insufficient and increasingly divorced from reality, so that they can be convinced to either start helping with the problem or, preferably, stand aside to let others fix it rather than just interfering with anybody who tries so NOBODY can fix it.

The fact that they don't let any 'serious' guy talk about the problem or take genuine actions is why Andrew Tate is the main voice men get to hear about this from.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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