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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Many people are not sufficiently hard-hearted enough to tell the bastard that there's the door, goodbye, he can go pay a whore if he wants it that badly,

Yes, this is my point here:

There really ISN'T an imbalance in bargaining power here! There's just women who aren't able to state their position and then enforce it, so they don't even attempt to bargain.

Emotional connection has a major impact on how one negotiates with the counterparty (since you implicitly expect an iterated game), yes. But this is not the same as someone being able to set all the terms of the bargain because the other has no power or leverage whatsoever. If your emotional side renders you incapable of stating demands and enforcing boundaries, then you're just bad at negotiating, it's not the same as being coerced.

I'm already granting that sociopaths can exploit emotional connection to extract the benefits they want, mind.

Hence a workable solution was that the woman could go to her parents and get the necessary guidance and confidence to steel herself to stand her ground and demand marriage, with there being at least the implicit threat of patriarchal violence if the BF inflicts unneeded harm on her.

Hence a workable solution was that the woman could go to her parents and get the necessary guidance and confidence to steel herself to stand her ground and demand marriage

Yeah, but society backed that up. Today, social attitudes are "waiting for sex until after marriage? what kind of sex-negative repressed loser weirdo are you?"

Yeah.

Although I think I'd couch it as "Wait until you're actually committed to each other in truly demonstrable ways, OR wait until marriage."

There was some real idiocy in thinking we could separate out the emotional components of sex from the act itself.

There was some real idiocy in thinking we could separate out the emotional components of sex from the act itself.

I can understand why the free love guys back in the 60s thought this was a compelling idea, but what I will never understand is how huge numbers of women were convinced by it.

My understanding is that "Science" telling them so was a big part of it.

what I will never understand is how huge numbers of women were convinced by it.

What's so hard to understand? The promise of sex is something women can use to exploit men. Many women wanted to be able to more freely exploit men in this way without realizing men would also be more free to exploit them in return.

Society doesn't back up men who are so lacking in confidence, so why should it back up women? They are supposedly our equals. Why can't they be expected to stand up for themselves or suffer the consequences the way we are?

EDIT: Grammar.

Because they’re not really our equals in the sense of ability(although they are in dignity). That’s a lie society tells.

What does it even mean to be "equals in dignity" though if inequality at the group level justifies disparate treatment of equals at the individual level?