This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A quick post for the new subreddit. Are we headed for a new era of polygyny? Looking at contemporary metropolitan dating markets, both anecdote and data arguably suggests that what I’d call casual open polygyny is becoming a lot more common. By this I mean sexual dynamics in which men and women enjoy casual open sexual relationships, but where the male parties in such relationships have more simultaneous female partners than the female parties have male partners. I think the data supports this kind of polygyny specifically rather than general polyamory as the dominant new model, insofar as it seems that a large subset of young men have few or zero sexual partners and a small subset of men have large numbers of sexual partners, with the SD in number of sexual partners being much higher for men than women. (But of course there are plenty of women who have multiple partners too.)
If I had to guess, I’d say this trend is being facilitated by things like hookup apps, societal atomisation, better contraception, and the decline of religion. But we also perhaps shouldn’t be too surprised — monogamy and polygyny are the two most common stable mating norms both cross culturally and historically (polyandry is exceptionally rare; general polygamy fairly rare).
Still, this trend obviously creates a problem in the longer run, because our society is still largely built around social monogamy: Men and women who form long term partnerships overwhelmingly do so on a one-to-one basis. As sexually actively young people transition from polygyny to monogamy in their late 20s, this leaves a lot of jilted women and bitter romantically inexperienced men, hardly a recipe for a happy long term marriage.
In the long run there will probably be some kind of correction, possibly via polygynous marriages becoming more commonplace.
There will also need to be a correction in terms of norms and expectations. Looking to the future, a significant proportion of young men may simply fail to find a romantic life partner unless they can distinguish themselves in some way. This is already how it works in many stable polygynous societies, but a lot of the resentment of Incels comes about because we’re at a liminal period, where monogamous norms dominate public discourse but de facto open casual polygyny is an increasingly common in the sex lives of young people.
The decline of monogamous norms simply means both sexes returning to their baseline sexual imperatives. Men would prefer to have sex with lots of women, whereas women would prefer to lock down a man who is higher value than themselves. Women aren't really interested in having sex with tons of guys the way guys are interested in having sex with lots of women. The most polyamorous I'd expect an average woman to be is if they can't lock down a high value man, in which case they could bifurcate their sexual imperative by having one primary man as the provisioner and then occasionally having sex with high value men she doesn't have the market value to lock down.
This all has a toxic effect on society. Every successful society has brokered a compromise deal between the sexes where women give up their hypergamy in exchange for men giving up trying to have sex with lots of women. Neither side is entirely happy with monogamy since they both have to give something up, but it's a stable Schelling Point that limits frustration of the lower value members of each sex. Without it, you end up with hypergamous women all competing over the top 20% of men, with the other 80% of men fighting over scraps. This lowers the national birthrate, creates an epidemic of single mothers, and means men don't value the society they live in nearly as much if they don't have kids of their own. Bad times all around.
Solution 1: Abort all but the top 20% (per mildly futuristic machine-learned polygenic score) of men. Gender balance in numbers evolved in a setting greatly different from modern industrial societies; maybe having a gender balance of 1:5 is actually more stable now.
Solution 2: If it's really about absolute quality rather than relative (i.e. women don't actually grade men on a curve), just have full male-side eugenics and make 5 clones of each of the top 20% instead of sampling male embryos from the general population. No gender imbalance, but of course this would lead to further increases in gender pay gap and performance which could destabilise society in other ways.
Solution 0: If quality-based eugenics is so unpalatable, just use abortion or chemicals in the water to shift the gender ratio of children to 1:5. We can change reptilian gender ratios by shifting environmental temperature; perhaps we will find something that works for mammals too.
There's a significant positional element to women's rankings of men, so breeding the top 20% of men 5x each will just result in many of those men falling to the bottom once again.
As for the rest of your post, skewing gender %s is a proposition I actually find intriguing. There's obviously some significant Chesterton's Fence issues with immediately going to a 5:1 ratio, but I think it would be an interesting experiment to start with like a 1.25:1 female:male ratio and see what happens.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link