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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Great beginning to the post. I agree that with decaying pro-social institutions in the west there is a massive movement towards dropping out, and not working hard to maintain the status-quo of society. The economy seems rigged against specific demographics and jobs specifically (while making others on ez mode like software devs and crypto entrepreneurs).

Huge quibble with the post: all the blackpill “women won’t fuck me” crying is total bullshit. Women are easier at the moment than they’ve ever been. Women literally medically augment themselves (with birth control) so that sex has no consequence, and many modern liberals treat it as lightly as scratching an itch.

If you feel this way, this is a YOU problem, plain and simple. I know so many >30 yr old halfway balding dudes with desk jobs who are banging new girls every week. Even better, it’s a skill that can be learned, not just something innate that you’re born with.

How often do you work out? Are you in respectable shape? Do you live in a populated area? Can you hold a normal conversation? How many girls do you approach, or even just talk to in real life per week?

I absolutely hate this mentality. It’s communism for pussy. Blackpill turbo-online men want to be able to do nothing, not work on themselves at all, and be guaranteed sex and a mate. Sounds like some Marxist who barely tries at their dead end wage slave job and is complaining about the wealth gap and wants gibs and wealth redistribution.

Stop whining and start working on yourself. You’ll thank me later. I know some people get off on self-pity, but chances you’ll get off on pussy 10x more if you give it a shot.

Nope.

The situation has given women more options, which has led to them being more selective.

For the young folks, there's a general recession in sex and in Relationships, which is especially pointed amongst men. Its baked in, young men who don't get experience dating while young will just have a harder time getting dates going forward.

"Women are easier than ever" only holds true for the subset of men that women find attractive on a basic physical level.

Dating Apps, for instance, heavily favor women and the small subset of men who are getting laid left and right and, likewise, have no incentive to settle or commit. Which just makes the women they interact with bitter.

This is supported by virtually every statistic you can find on the matter. You can't self-improve your way out of a game that is rigged against you.

Its harder for everyone else across the board.

but chances you’ll get off on pussy 10x more if you give it a shot.

Men don't just want pussy, they want a meaningful, committed relationship within which they can start a family.

They're not getting it.

Women aren't settling.

This advice is just not going to work for the vast majority of young men, no matter how much it is repeated.

Now what?

You have repeatedly heard from men (I will add myself to that pool) who can tell you from their observed experience that this is not true, that most guys around them don't have insurmountable problems either dating or getting laid, and that those who can't are not perfectly decent, fit guys with good jobs and stable personalities who are being rejected by the entire female population because they are all alpha-widows, but because there is something wrong with these guys.

Frankly, I believe my lying eyes more than I believe a collection of blackpill-curated stats from places like the Institute for Family Studies.

I'm sorry you are having such a struggle, and honestly, the dating landscape does look kind of awful right now (speaking as a guy who was pretty awkward and had a number of other strikes against me in my youth) and I am glad I'm not on the market. But the blackpill is not going to do you any favors. Even if your pessimistic assumptions are true, you ask, "Now what?" Now go out there and get in the game and stop making excuses, that's what. No one is going to hand you pussy or a relationship, and if you have to work harder at it than grandpa, well, every era has its challenges. You probably don't want to deal with the other things grandpa had to deal with.

No, the game is not rigged against you. No, there are not zero acceptable single women in your city. No, the solution is not to contrive reasons why women should not have agency to choose.

those who can't are not perfectly decent, fit guys with good jobs and stable personalities who are being rejected by the entire female population because they are all alpha-widows, but because there is something wrong with these guys.

No, the game is not rigged against you.

From how I interpret your post, I assume you're trying to be charitable and not propose or imply that there's something "wrong" with (posters like) faceh so as to leave him with some hope, but I'd much prefer being told there is something wrong with me and that the game is rigged against me in the sense that I'm somehow inherently inept or dysgenic, than be told to

get in the game and stop making excuses

when platitudes of that sort have brought nothing but misery, humiliation, and further demolition of my self-esteem.

If I had Down's Syndrome, but had enough introspection to feel humiliation at my intellectual inability to pursue a serious college education, it would bring me no happiness to hear that I just need to "try harder" when what I'd really need is to be told that some things are beyond my abilities: then at least I'd be given my peer group's permission to come to terms with it. But for some reason, similar platitudes are reflexively dispensed in dating discourse regardless of the aptitudes of the people these platitudes are thrown at: "you are deeply awful and there's something very abnormal about you but also never give up, keep on trying to jump for that bone, you retarded little doggie" is - broadly speaking, referring to dating discourse as a whole - how absurd and cruel these juxtapositions sound to me, even if, in the more rigorous and careful context of your post, you are making a charitable distinction between faceh and the faceless guys you know that "something is wrong with."

Why can't people like me even be given the solace of hopelessness? I'm an aspie, my parents deprived me of peer socialization almost (they were blindsided by the internet, all the worse for me) entirely throughout my youth via isolationist homeschooling, my post high-school experiences were retarded by COVID lockdowns, and all my attempts at friendship crashed and burned because I'm a hollowed out pseudo-sociopathic social imitation machine (I still get to feel terrible about socially "lying" at people, so I wish I'd just been born a real sociopath who didn't care) who's never had a single positive response to "just being myself," so I'm well past the point of having normal relations with the opposite sex, and certainly not relations on the terms I'd have once looked for (not overweight, not a single mother, not a drug addict, not older than me, not prodigal). So at this point I really should give up hope and move on, which I try to do with public stoicism (really just another extension of habitual masking, so no biggie), but then I see all these platitudes thrown my way, and every time I do, for the briefest of moments I get just enough hope to torment myself with.

certainly not relations on the terms I'd have once looked for (not overweight, not a single mother, not a drug addict, not older than me, not prodigal).

So you haven't had much response from younger women who are 75th+-percentile slender and wholly unencumbered. Out of curiosity, what happened when you reached out to women who were slightly plump, slightly older than you, or divorced/had a kid in tow?

Firstly, if we are limiting the discussion to the mentioned attributes, with the exception of age (a condition which on retrospect I suppose I only included because it tends to correlate with accumulation and accentuation of other mentioned issues), why is it unreasonable for me to set as conditions my own characteristics (not with children, not overweight/obese)? I refuse to compromise on what I also expect of myself, and if that destroys my odds, so be it. Whether this is "punishment for entitlement" or "punishment for having standards" is a good Russell Conjugation.

Secondly, if it is, as I believe, psychological issues which inhibit my rapport with the opposite sex, then a relationship with someone sufficiently "low value" to initially entertain my eccentricities and chronic self-esteem issues would likely end up going badly in the long run.

This does loop back around to a rejoinder which I have come to accept: it is also perfectly reasonable and fits with my experience that most women are similarly unwilling to compromise on certain severe psychological and self-esteem issues in men, and that's not a standard I'd expect anyone to spontaneously drop.

why is it unreasonable for me to set as conditions my own characteristics (not with children, not overweight/obese)?

Well, both of those features are much, much more important to men than they are to women. Some women may care, don't get me wrong - but numbers of women irl don't mind a potbelly if the guy is kind/confident/funny, and could cheerfully learn to love somebody else's cute kid in the right circumstances. So in saying "She shouldn't have 25BMI, because after all I don't have 25 BMI, and no kids because I don't have kids," you're trying to buy two things that are somewhat rare and highly valued, with two things that are nice but not especially highly valued. By contrast, charisma and good social skills do matter a lot for women's attraction, so your challenges there also align you at a somewhat lower percentile on the global scale, where to match properly you might have to make corresponding concessions in some domain of male attraction.

But surely that's just self-awareness, not despair? You're saying "My 1010 SATs/2.8 GPA didn't get me into Duke, guess it's miserable NEETdom and food stamps for me," but millions of people are living happy, fulfilled lives with community-college degrees. You're a good writer, you seem intelligent; you worry about long-term prospects with a "low-value" woman, but many of those plump ladies and single moms are very nice, smart and kind people who would at minimum be fun to get to know. Is it really better that you and all the plump/ slightly older/ kid-having ladies in your vicinity should be lonely and celibate, rather than compromise your standards to connect with each other?

My gut reaction is that there are some things I will never compromise on, particularly being a stepfather, but on consideration my reasoning extends beyond mere prejudice to further self-doubt. My prima facie reasoning for not wanting to raise another man's child is that I've seen too many relationships of that sort (no, not just online, but among friends and acquaintances) devolve into volatile and ultimately catastrophic affairs for everyone involved, but with the bulk of legal censure & penalty falling onto the man, and so I believe that no amount of mutual compromise will make it worth my trouble when women are given legal advantages (again, not just online drek, but personally known), and they are also prone to leveraging those advantages on what externally appears to be a whim - presumably due in part to the fault of the men for their lack of assertiveness and charisma.

But it is this latter point that most concerns me, because it implies a lack of male assertiveness and charisma is a catalyst for dooming relationships. As I fall into that category, that would make any relationship an anvil over my head: I can't play the odds because I bring the disaster with me. Put another way, even if the catalyst for poor outcomes isn't "single mothers" but "the sort of man who shacks up with them," the outcomes are still poor, I have reason to suspect I share a lot in common with those unfortunate men, I have no interest of participating in those outcomes, and those outcomes would have increased odds of occurring regardless of who I shack up with, single mother or no.

In short, it creates the possibility that that sort of low-charisma, low-assertiveness man will have long-term problems with any relationship, and perhaps out of a prejudice against single mothers or perhaps out of circumstance, I've only noticed the problems with relationships involving them.

Some things aren't worth taking risks on, especially when the payoff is low, the risks are enormous, and my disposition is the catalyst for those risks, meaning I may as well go double-or-nothing hoping to both overcome my own issues and satisfy my desires, rather than compromise because of those issues, and still court disaster long-term regardless of the compromise.

As for overweight women, well, that is just prejudice. I'm in the USA. Our fat is a special kind of fat, and the fatter that fat gets the more viscerally I am repulsed by it. If a woman can't establish herself as capable of maintaining a healthy weight, I'm going to assume that she's just going to keep getting fatter over time - again, based on experience, the sorts of people I see either maintain a healthy weight or proceed to obesity. And I cannot overstate how repulsed I am by obesity, to the point that I struggle not to grimace when I see obese people in public. I nervously peruse NIH & CDC obesity & overweight projections and wistfully browse coffee table books full of pictures from when such was not commonplace.

Some things aren't worth taking risks on, especially when the payoff is low, the risks are enormous, and my disposition is the catalyst for those risks

Well, it's not like you're signing the marriage license by asking a woman out; you could just enjoy learning about her and having a fun time together, day by day. I totally get the masochistic appeal of shutting oneself away in proud, bitterly high-minded self-isolation. But in the meantime you do miss out on the opportunity to share some potentially good (or at least interesting) company, to appreciate somebody's good points and be appreciated by them in turn.

As for overweight women, well, that is just prejudice. I'm in the USA. Our fat is a special kind of fat, and the fatter that fat gets the more viscerally I am repulsed by it.

You doubtless know that this means being viscerally repulsed by like 80% of adult men and 75% of adult women in the country, and as a smart guy you probably realize that such big feelings must be coming from a bunch of your own and your parents' stuff, not just from the bodies in front of you. Sometimes I look at old photos of working people, and those people are also tragically less beautiful than they should have been, through a similar combination of too little sleep, poor-quality food, shitty jobs, contaminated surroundings, illness, sorrow, sin and old trauma. I'm not sure any of us is all that beautiful, inside or out, but it would be hard to feel this stressed by it, and I'm sorry you're dealing with this.

I've really appreciated how reflective and fair-minded your responses are here; thank you! Hope better days are ahead for you.