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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Where do you see the Gender War going?
My Definition of the Gender War.

There are many fronts in the Culture War that can be more or less described as a 'Gender War'.

  • Front 1: Which pronouns to use? Does "gender even exist?

  • Front 2: Is Western society a "patriarchy"?

  • Front 3: Is Masculinity Toxic?

  • Front 4: "Incels".

This post is about Front 4. Growing male sexlessness. I am not going to make much of an empirical argument but more of a rhetorical one.

So what if men are having less sex?
  1. A large enough contingency of young men not having sexual partners is almost always a precursor for political and social instability. All that excess energy needs to be directed somewhere (work to provide for the wife and kids), if it isn't it usually boils over towards the rest of society as men seek out more violent and high-risk avenues to gain social status let that be joining gangs or starting political revolutions.

  2. Moreover, young men are the most productive demographic in society in just about every domain. If a large enough percentage of them don't see any reason/reward for working hard, they just won't.

It's getting worse.

A growing number of men not having sex is a canary in the coal mine. That whatever was holding the socioeconomic fabric together is deteriorating. Let that be worsening economic conditions (we got plenty of that), worsening economic inequality (plenty of that as well), or just worsening social institutions (Online dating is the plurality method of how heterosexual couples met., It's growing rapidly.).

The cultural wind is blowing

Not only that but the two sexes resenting each other is mainstream. As I was growing up in the early 2000s there were 'boys vs girls' conversations. But those conversations were light-hearted and there were no hard feelings.

Nowadays browsing through social media comment sections and talking to other young guys. The tensions are much higher. I see normies spouting black pill talking points all over Instagram and TikTok. And that seems to be the majority ideology. This is in stark contrast to the early 2000s and even the 2010s were the majority consensus amongst men could have been described as 'RedPill' or 'BluePill'.

If you want an example of the above, Read the comments of this video (Videos like this are an entire genre among zoomers). You can feel the tension in the comments. To me, it's obvious this girl is joking, even if the joke isn't all that funny or whatever. The comments don't suggest most people viewed it as such, the men are on edge. I'd wager they wouldn't have reacted like this a decade ago. Another interesting phenomenon is that unattractive girls produce content like this imitating the attractive ones who can actually get away with it and just end up sinking the sanity waterline further as young naive men peers who know her think "wait I can't even this this bitch?" and the women gas up their egos without being able to back it up.

I mean Andrew Tate is actually popular FFS! I have had so many of my normie friends and acquaintances ask me about what I think of Andrew Tate, and most of them say the same thing. "He's got a point, I agree with a large part of what he says". The man is a clown, he's a comedian in my eyes. The fact his rhetoric resonates with men despite all else is a testament to the times we are living in.

On the female side of the aisle, it seems like they are doubling down too. They will just make more TikTok videos like the one I linked above.

Where do I see all this going?

Increasing political and social tension. More fringe political parties are elected, and how that happens will be left as an exercise for the leader.

One can make the argument that countries like Japan and South Korea are already further along the line of atomization and sexlessness (their TFR is atrocious!).

I don't think East Asian countries with the rice farming optimized culture (and genetic predisposition against inhibition, extremely interesting but I can't find the link) are good proxies to model the rest of the world after.

India might be a candidate they have a Front 4 gender war as well, arranged marriage puts a damper but Hindu Nationalism is clearly on the rise.

It seems that we are in the perfect storm for worsening Gender relations. Economic struggles, increasing OLD (that comes with a massive amount of its own problems) app usage, increasing atomization, recommendation algorithms primarily suggesting media that lowers the sanity line (rage bait of the likes made by Ms Andrea Subotic), gender confusion, Males being vilified for???, Women specific AA, all of them compounding on each other...

Here's what it fundamentally comes down to in my understanding: You cannot have a democracy of the feminine and the masculine (or rather, as it often degrades into, the feminine versus the masculine), because they are only two voters between them. (This as far as I can tell scales up to society as a whole as much as it applies to individual relationships.) What happens when both sides disagree? In a democratic modality: nothing. There is no majority and thus nobody can win. It's simply he said she said, 1v1, a tie. Thus all you get is deadlock, disagreement, anger, and confusion. (Occasionally in the best cases you may get trade and compromise, but the capacity of even this is heavily limited when you have a strong disagreement of fundamental values/preferences as you do here.)

One side has to be in charge, has to have the unilateral right of the tiebreaker, because otherwise there's no way of ending most standoffs. Is it not likely that nature, as the most fundamental arbiter of propriety (particularly in sexual/romantic matters which are as instinctively-driven as it gets, at least unless we want to hack our brains to remove its influence and until we're able to), has designated the generally stronger, generally larger, generally taller, generally possessing of more geniuses, generally more entrepreneurial and innovative, generally more possessing of great administrative ability, etc. gender as this tiebreaker?

We slowly began tearing down the above Chesterton's fence over the past centuries, and then suddenly demolished what was left in the last 60 years or so (partially on the basis of a fairly trivially obviously wrong but trendy view that there really aren't any fundamental differences between the genders at all and thus no natural tiebreaker), but did we really justify it any point along the way other than by dogmatic appeals to egalitarianism?

Did we not forget that the most fundamental egalitarianism is an equivalent right to anyone else to simply do what you wanna do and go your own way, cooperating or not as you please? Except cooperation between the masculine and the feminine is absolutely essential for the health, happiness, and continuation of our species. If one side cannot compel the other to cooperate when necessary, then why wouldn't their cooperation and thus the overall health, happiness, and continuation of the species decline?

(It's worth noting that on balance the overall greater welfare created by this often offsets even the "losses" of the party compelled into cooperation. Some day in the past there was probably some cavewoman wishing some caveman would go out and do something practical like hunt or collect firewood instead of worrying about this "wheel" idea of his, but in the end even she was probably better off once he figured it out. Many such cases.)