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If you've been on twitter in or around the tpot space the last few days, you may have seen Aella blowing up and deciding to go private. I won't recount the whole story, but it is in screenshots in the link earlier.
Suffice to say, apparently she searched her name and saw a ton of vitriolic attacks and discussions around her online presence. She claims that the worst part is the "overwhelming hate with nobody defending me. People are ashamed publicly to support me, they don't want to be called a simp or cringe."
Long story short she basically said that she is heartbroken, is "so sad the world is shaped this way," and decided to quit twitter and go locked for the foreseeable future.
For some quick background, aella is a prostitute. She is extremely successful, and has built up a huge presence on twitter as well as a cult following in rational spheres. She does data science work as well, and claims to be autistic. She is polyamorous and openly promotes and campaigns for that lifestyle, as well as doing drugs. Some of her stunts include things like tattooing her name on the body of men who have sex with her, having orgies while sharing details of who got to get in, etc.
A few darker claims are that she pushed her two younger sisters into sex work (one of them, by her own admission on twitter, was doing camgirl jobs before she turned 18.) She has also said some... problematic things that are edging around support for pedophilia, although she's canny enough not to come right out and say it.
Now as I'm sure many people here agree with, I don't exactly agree with aella's views or lifestyle. That being said I am still torn, the world is a cruel place. At the same time, aella has probably caused harm to a lot of others with her lifestyle and especially her approach to promoting it online.
This equivocation points to an actual underlying tension/confusion I have around liberal expression. On the one hang I think polyamory, sex work, and some of the.... encouragement aella has around minors watching point &c is quite bad, and should not be allowed to happen in the public square. I think a certain amount of shaming is absolutely good and necessary.
However, perhaps I'm frail hearted or something because it does hurt to see so many attack her so viciously, when they clearly have so much hate in their hearts. Perhaps it's Pollyannaish but I wish that we could do our shaming in a more dignified, and less clearly antagonistic way. It seems that most of the people shaming her, from my read at least, clearly enjoy looking down and judging someone harshly, seeing themselves as better than her. From my perspective, that's not just as bad as what she's doing, but still bad.
I'm wondering, I suppose, whether there's a way we can employ shame in a truly good way as a society? Can we somehow shame people without turning into monsters ourselves, in order to protect our children and especially young girls from (imo) degenerate and overall unhealthy lifestyles?
How should society treat a prostitute who encourages other women to become prostitutes? She's a predator. She is preying on the minds of other young women, as well as on the minds of young men.
There are countless stories from every culture in the history of the human species that portrays people like her as some form of demon that should be cast out of society at best. People aren't being as nice to her as she wants, and she wants to continue preying on them. Even this sob story about how she claims to be surprised that people don't like her is yet another attempt at hijacking the attention of people by violating sexual norms.
Yes she is a human being and I don't want her to suffer, but she should feel a nearly infinite amount of shame for the harm she has done to the people around her. I hope she figures this our and starts working to repair it.
No human being is irredeemable, and this includes her; part of that redemption is an acknowledgment that what she has been doing has been harming society. I truly hope she can figure this out, and once she does society will welcome her with open arms.
I don’t get why being a prostitute is a bad thing.
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
I can only assume there’s some sort of deep psychic/symbolic trauma associated with the making explicit of a contractual obligation that is usually left implicit.
Are you claiming that in a normal, healthy, average relationship man does 100% of childrearing and woman is there to provide sex?
Or are you claiming that in a normal, healthy, average relationship there are no children?
where and when it is supposedly the situation?
AFAIK it was never ever in no location considered the way you claim
That is not healthy or average relationship and it is not normal.
Even in the most radically transactional view of relationship this claim is simply wrong.
For start, relations where woman contributes solely sex in exchange of stuff are in fact simply prostitution.
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The problem with prostitution is not the selling sex for resources; as you correctly note, wives have been doing the same thing for all of civilized history.
The problem with prostitutes is that provide sexual access to numerous men at the same time, thus spreading diseases, creating children of unknown paternity, and destroying their own ability to pair bond.
These are all problems even if she does it for free; hence why "slut" is as much of an insult as "whore".
Prostitution as a spot(often quite literally, in the sense of a geographically contained thing. Ancient law codes were big into defining where the red light district could be) in society probably isn't horrible; it's the spreading out from this little niche that tends to be the problem.
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That kind of transactional relationship sounds like the opposite of normal and healthy. A healthy relationship should be based around mutual love and desire; what you described sounds like being a sugar daddy, not a partner.
Plus it’s not like women need a man’s resources to have a successful life nowadays.
How many accounts — real or fictional — about relationships and marriage have you read that were written prior to the 19th century? Or from a non-Western culture (like any where arranged marriages were common). Marriage being treated to a great extent like a sort of financial/institutional merger involving two families, or a sort of "mutual physical/financial support" arrangement first, with "mutual love and desire" being a secondary factor — indeed, as something a couple deliberately builds over time — seems to be the more "normal" attitude across the history of settled human societies, with the 20th century West "all you need is love" attitudes being rather the outlier.
Edit: see also OracleOutlook's longer comment below.
yes, and it is still quite distinct from "men trade resources and services for sex"
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It's so strange to me that people's view of a normal relationship are so skewed here. It's like they turn off all their rational thinking capabilities when posting opinions about relationships on the motte.
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In a normal, healthy, average relationship, a single man and a single woman partner together to provide each other with resources that would be difficult for the other to get. They do this because they have a shared vision of the future, a shared project to raise the next generation.
The historical norm was for a woman to be spinning cotton, wool, or flax from sunup to sundown to make enough thread to weave enough cloth to sew into enough garments for herself, her husband, and her children. There was a gendered world - every civilization had their own norms, but they all had norms surrounding what tasks belong to women (tasks that can be done by weaker people with the tendency to get pregnant and have babies/toddlers hanging off them.) For example, in a European village a man paid taxes by giving his lord crops, while women owed their taxes in eggs.
Men needed women's labor. Women needed men's labor.
There was a weird period in the 19th-20th century where machines took over a lot of the labor that women could do, while there was much less automation of male labor. Then in the later 20th century, the women's labor that wasn't automatable went overseas to cheaper labor. This lead to more "Homemakers" outside the upper class.
But now, the majority of the time, both men and women work outside the home. Both men and women need to labor productively to keep themselves in comfort. We are reverting back to the historical norm (except for the "women taking jobs they can do while minding their own children" part. We'd probably need to repeal the CRA and some license regulations before we could get there.)
I agree with you that my initial formulation was an oversimplification, although I don't think any of this has much bearing on what makes prostitution in particular morally problematic. You could reasonably argue that prostitution is inferior to a long-term committed exclusive relationship based on certain metrics; but as I pointed out in my reply to KMC, many other heterosexual relationships would be judged inferior on the same metrics. Being single would also be judged inferior on the same metrics. But no one thinks that being single, or having a series of different monogamous partners, is morally blameworthy in the same way that prostitution is.
Prostitution dumps the sex market, which is also one of the reasons women hate sluts/whores the most.
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Yes they do. Lots of criticisms of serial monogamy to be had and it's actually a historical outlier that the modern west doesn't publicly worry about the plight of men not being interested in marriage.
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Plus the consequences of faking emotions on a consistent basis. Practice makes permanent.
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In a normal, healthy, average relationship, that exchange is mutually exclusive, for the purpose of procreation, acknowledged by the family and community of both people, and lifelong. Not sure why you didn't notice those pieces of the puzzle.
But people (non-prostitute people) break all of these conditions all the time.
People date without getting permission, they have sex without procreating, they break up, they date new people. That's a very common course for a relationship to take in 2025, and no one thinks that's as bad as prostitution.
There are trads who disapprove of this sort of arrangement of course, but even they don't compare it with prostitution afaik.
Those things are all bad in the same way that prostitution is, just less so. I'd add to the list: giving resources without even getting sex (simping), consumption of pornography, and divorce are all degenerate forms of relationships that in the ideal would be marriage.
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That is not just how it goes.
Do you believe that human emotions exist?
It's pretty close to how it goes.
I should certainly think so! I'd wager I'm at least 2-sigma above the mean in terms of the intensity and variety of emotions I experience on a daily basis.
Given that you cannot imagine the love that a man and woman would have for one another in a relationship, I doubt this.
A couple things:
One, I'm not sure what I said that gave you this impression. Presumably you thought my description of the typical relationship as "an exchange of resources for sex" somehow precluded the presence of love in such a relationship. But I never said that.
Two, I'm not sure how my conception of love is relevant to the task of determining what critics of prostitution find morally blameworthy about prostitution. Maybe your claim is that a prostitution transaction is devoid of love, and is thereby deficient. Ok, that may very well be true. But deficiency is not the same as blameworthiness. I don't see why the loveless prostitute should be a "predator" and a "demon" simply because she is loveless. She's not stopping you from falling in love with whoever you please! Lots of people are deficient in all sorts of things. The man who drives an old beat up car is using a deficient mode of transportation in comparison to the man who drives a new sports car, but there's nothing morally blameworthy about driving an old car. Not everyone has to own everything and experience everything, and that's ok!
Furthermore, I find the assertion that the prostitute is necessarily loveless to be rather presumptuous. I see no reason why there couldn't be someone she loves; perhaps even her clients.
I really want to explore your claim about feeling more emotions than other people, but also imagining a romantic relationship as purely transactional.
Can you expand on this?
I said that it was transactional. I didn't say it was purely transactional. There's a difference.
I previously shared some of my thoughts on love in general here. The most relevant bit is this:
Transactions are a reality; love is an absurdity, if not an outright impossibility. Love has value only and precisely because it is absurd.
I occasionally become impatient with people who glibly assert that they are "in love" without realizing that they are uttering an absurdity (or without realizing that, statistically speaking, their relationship probably won't last the year). This is not at all to say that people shouldn't love; it is only to say that it should be done self-consciously rather than than unconsciously.
It has long since penetrated popular consciousness that "justice" is an open and apophatic concept. Any assertion that such and such an act is "just" can be met with "ah, but what is justice? Whose justice? Is that really justice?" I am simply opening the possibility of a similar discourse on love. At least as far back as Plato's Symposium, it has been recognized that love is not (just) an emotion but a discursive concept which can and should be subject to critique (critique not in the sense of "mere" criticism, or dismissal, or negation -- but rather critique in the sense of a coming to self-consciousness, a laying bare of the groundwork and the conditions of possibility). To assume that we know love when we feel it is presumptuous. We can always interrogate whether any emotion, action, or other particular entity is an instantiation of the general concept of love, whether the conditions of instantiation of love can ever be met at all, etc.
One can feel and experience many things; but whether and how these feelings can be mapped to concepts should not be decided too hastily.
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No, it is not.
As I have experienced it, marriage is almost a perfect inversion of my thankfully-secondhand understanding of prostitution. My relationship to my wife is not commodified, it is not compartmentalized, it impacts every decision I make each day in a significant way. In the sense that engaging a Prostitute is a discrete choice, my marriage is much less of a choice and much more of a consequence, an effect rather than a cause, leaning far more on path-dependence in a way that would be incoherent if applied to prostitution. You are attempting to fit something into a discrete box whose main feature is its inability to be discretely boxed, and then you are claiming that since everything outside the discrete box isn't inside the box, it can be safely ignored.
A concrete example: if we define "haggling" as "negotiation to maximize one's own benefit at the expense of one's opposite", then haggling's role in prostitution is straightforward and practical. And yet, in a proper marriage, there is no way to productively haggle, because your opposite's interest is your own interest. Most married men will grok the maxim "happy wife, happy life"; I am not aware of an equivalent formulation for prostitutes.
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" shouldn't be taken to entail anything more than what it says on the tin. It doesn't imply there's no such thing as love, it doesn't imply that there's nothing beyond commodification, etc. (There are many complexities here that would have to be addressed, but I probably don't hold the views that you think I do on these questions.)
As I argued in another post, I don't think that the deficiency of prostitution (deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever the claim is) entails the moral blameworthiness of prostitution. People seem to think that prostitutes are bad, in some particularly unique way. We're trying to figure out why they think that.
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" is a claim that the exchange of resources for sex is the central feature of the relationship. It is true that marriage relationships involve both sex and the sharing (as distinct from exchanging!) of resources; they also involve a great many other acts and features: emotional intimacy, emotional support, the bearing and rearing of children, companionship, emotional and physical labor, cooperation, negotiation, and on and on; most forms of positive human interaction would either be included or approached by a complete list. What you are doing is to take two items from a very long list, and claim that these two items and their interrelation are central, and all else is peripheral. To say that this elides more than it reveals is a notable understatement.
Another concrete example: Parenting involves exercising total control over a human, while also providing for their physical needs. These two features are the essence of both slavery and imprisonment; therefore, parenting/slavery/imprisonment is basically just slavery/imprisonment/parenting.
One can play this particular game with any form of complex human interaction. Selectively ignoring and exaggerating the aspects and interrelations of any two forms of interaction allows one to claim that anything is like anything, but sophistry provides no actual insight, only the illusion of insight.
From a strict materialist perspective, it seems the chain of argument starts with noticing that these two modes of interaction appear to be mutually exclusive, and quite stubbornly so, and then note that one is very obviously more conducive to human flourishing than the other. It's really no different from materialist arguments against drug addiction, wireheading, or other forms of degenerate hedonism. If you yourself admit that prostitution is deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever relative to marriage and you recognize that prostitution and marriage appear to be mutually incompatible, then prostitution is worse in concrete terms, and in the abstract the situation is improved with less prostitution and more marriage, all the way up to no prostitution and all marriage. Why, from a strictly materialist perspective, should we encourage or even accept the worse state, rather than pushing people as hard as we can toward the better? Maybe that pushing grows counterproductive at some point, quite likely there's a level of coercion where the juice isn't worth the squeeze, but again, the same is true for all the other degenerate forms of hedonism, defection, and bad tradeoff behavior. We live in a society, as they say.
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