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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...

On a personal note: My man, I don't want to be a jerk, but you had it right in your post a month ago when you said

My absolute lack of contact with any huma[n] female (literally didnt talk to a human female my age since i graduated college 8 months ago) is making me turn crazy.

And you gotta realize that to say it's difficult to find a woman who meets your specifications:

If I want a girl who isn't fat, isn't stupid, and has some zest for life outside of Kpop and TikTok inside of her, or anything at all! Or is 0.75 times as physically attractive as me...

is as absurd in a free sexual market as a capitalist worker saying the only jobs he can find are beneath him. My brother, what you can get is your market value. A guy is a 6 if he can attract a woman who is a 6, a woman is a 7 if she can seduce a guy who is a 7; QED. It's like ELO, you're as good as the opposition you beat, in real life not on paper, this isn't college football where the analysts decide the rankings. So when you say

I think the dynamics are much different for zoomers. In every zoomer/ early 20's couple, I see the guy is more attractive than the girl. The stereotype of "hot girl ugly but funny guy" is flipped on its head with zoomers.

All I can think reading this is, do you maybe have a little Greco-Roman homoeroticism hiding under all that "just 'mirin the dudes?" So when you say:

aren't the stats indicative of something? More sexless/whateverless! men? I understand its "still easy" if you meet certain criterion but what explanation do you have for the increased sexlessness?

You seem like a great guy, a man after my own heart {other than your opinions on glute development}, so it shocks me that you say this. It is not that hard to go get laid.* You can show me stats that the median man is fat, that doesn't make it hard to run five miles or hard to lift weights, it means those men aren't trying. You can show me stats that the median man reads no books, that doesn't make it hard to read a book. Those stats are reflective in large part of a huge number of men who just flat out aren't trying, are ambition-free automatons of fat and grease and CoD achievements, are marginally employed in dead end jobs they hate to pay for their takeout and Xbox(whatever the fuck it is now). Those guys are losers. It might be slightly worse to be a loser today than it was 50 years ago, in the interest of charity and having a happy and functioning society it might be worth exploring how we can make life better for losers, but in a meritocratic sense it is their fault. They aren't good enough. It's a low bar, and they tripped over it.

Which brings me to another question I've been pondering across other circumstances lately, what makes a meritocracy good enough? The platonic ideal of a meritocracy, where effort and talent are distributed and rewarded perfectly fairly according to some innate virtue of humans involved with no luck or unfairness whatsoever, has never and will never exist. All meritocracies we seek to implement are imperfect, all meritocracies produced by nature are imperfect, ruined by genetics and circumstance if not by loopholes and local knowledge. But when is it good enough that we are allowed to just blame people for failing to put in minimal effort to succeed.**

The classical liberal/capitalist/equality of opportunity view is that as long as everyone gets a fair opportunity to apply, whoever gets in gets in, what's a little nepotism or inheritance between friends as long as everyone gets to play and we pick the best people who apply at the end? I tend to fall here, and for the most part I think the dating market sits here right now. Everyone can apply, but the people who get in, get in; the distribution might not be fair in the sense that everyone gets enough, but it is fair in the sense that everyone gets what he deserves.

The Civil Rights law/protected characteristic view, is that certain traits can be discriminated on while others cannot. I can discriminate for a job on intelligence, but not on race; by strength but not by religion. An actress hired for her looks is fine, as is a basketball player hired for his height and speed; but Goddess forbid we should limit either opportunity to whites. So the above, but if you refuse to date Black guys that is fucked up; if you refuse to date Jewish girls that's wrong. There are elements of this to dating today, but they are small enough that while I am sympathetic and think they should be addressed {for the happiness of all, Love Hard was the Xmas romcom of the year}, I don't think discrimination as I understand it undermines the basic meritocracy of the system. Some wokes are trying to expand the categories of protected characteristics in dating, to race and weight and height and birth-sex and whatever else people are bitter about. That is just goofy, and undermines the entire point, as they could always just date other ugly people.

The pseudo-Marxist/Kendi/equity view is that a meritocracy cannot be a meritocracy if it does not deliver some reasonable shot at happiness to everyone, no one can be left behind. In dating, this is the view of the body-positive and the incel. The fact that the system offers no shot at happiness to an individual means the system is unfair by definition, a true meritocracy would have to deliver fair (in the sense of livable) results to everyone. The problem here is the confusion of need with want, of living with standard of living, of pride with survival. Make everyone equal on whatever basis, they will find other bases for discrimination.. Hierarchy, uh, finds a way. Maybe there's something to moderating the consequences of failure to whatever extent possible, but to try to equalize outcomes completely is madness and deleterious to humanity.

What's everyone else's opinion?

*In America or the EU, for middle class white men. I can't speak to anywhere else or any other cultures.

**@SaruchBinoza if you think the responses here are anti-male, try posting the same story but for women being unable to find a good man, and watch the claws come out. The responses aren't anti-male, they're anti-whiner. I expect the responses would be the same here if someone posted saying "Maaaan, I just can't find a job, no one wants to pay me enough for my skills!" or "I just can't learn to do math" or especially "I just can't lose weight no matter how hard I try!"

I largely agree with you, except for the assertion that it's easy to be somewhat fit. No, it's really really not. If it were, then most people would manage it! I can imagine it's easy for you. And for others. But easy for most? No way Jose.

Now that isn't to say people don't bear personal responsibility. They absolutely do. No matter how hard it is for you to keep weight off, it's still on you if you aren't able to do it. Society doesn't owe you welfare hotties jumping on your dick just because that would be really fun for you, not by any means. But I think that the correct response to people who say it's hard for them isn't to say "it's actually easy, you just aren't trying". It's "yeah, it is hard. But you still have to do it if you want to succeed."

I largely agree with you, except for the assertion that it's easy to be somewhat fit. No, it's really really not

It's easy to prevent yourself becoming obese. Losing it is hard (mainly a matter of consistency and time - which is hard for some) but not as hard to not get fat.

A lot of people in the world aren't really fit-fit as in: killing it at the gym regularly. This sort of insistence on self-development in life and career isn't universal. Most of them just reap the health benefits of not being obese, combined with whatever exercise they get at their job.

They wouldn't run a fast mile but they're healthy and don't have an attractiveness malus.