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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22341 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Nerdy men were the first to get access to internet pornography, and for a while it was associated with them. Now guys in the slums of Nigeria are watching it on smartphones. Nerds were the first to have access to online conspiracy content. Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams! Muh Magic Bullet! Now the same conspiracy stuff is hitting young women. From an NYT report about a women's conference:

Rhaelynn Zito is one such conservative convert. Ms. Zito is a 25-year-old nurse who lives in Raleigh, N.C. In 2023, she said she had a real belly flop of a year. She went through a breakup, lost a family member and was searching for purpose outside work. Ms. Zito began listening to Ms. Clark, whose Turning Point USA show is often ranked among the top ten of health podcasts on Spotify.

Listening to Ms. Clark, Ms. Zito said, changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down her drinking and stopped dating casually as she focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, taking up a natural family planning method recommended on Ms. Clark's show, and became dubious about abortions and vaccines. She no longer identifies as a feminist.

{sinp}

After the 2024 election, when young men swung markedly to Mr. Trump, pundits and political operatives began a frenzied and almost anthropological analysis of the "manosphere," the ecosystem of podcasters, like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, who nudged young men toward the Republican vote. Less in focus were the young women — a demographic that is still reliably left-leaning, but whose support for Mr. Trump also increased, according to post-election polling. Some were also swayed by what has been labeled a "womanosphere" of uber popular podcasters blending lifestyle advice and political polemics.

Many of the young women at the Turning Point conference were drawn to the event because conservative women influencers had helped them remake their lives: start dating seriously and stop eating ultra-processed foods, start taking supplements and stop using birth control. The Young Women's Leadership Summit, which marked its tenth anniversary, drew its largest numbers yet this year: roughly 3,000 women, up from around 2,000 last year and under 500 in 2015, at its inception. The event, some attendees noted, was light on discussions about policy — immigration raids, trade wars — but heavy on dating, parenting and nutrition advice.

Women are more hostile to COVID vaccination, perhaps reflecting a female urge to make politics revolve around their bodies.

Many people here have been asking about my politics: it's actually remarkably simple: I want the old America back where children were born within marriage, didn't try to change their gender, and got all the vaccines their pediatrician recommended.

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

No, they are going to learn it as part of the puberty talk and will have a Tempdrop to warn them when their period is about to start.

Per WP, the typical-use Pearl Index of "Symptoms-based fertility awareness ex. symptothermal and calendar-based methods" is 24 (i.e. 24 pregnancies per 100 women per year), which is slightly worse than Coitus interruptus. Contrast this to a good method like IUD (0.8).

Awareness methods are only good enough if getting pregnant is not that big of a deal. For example, if you have access to abortions and no objections to them, or if you plan to have a baby with your husband in a year anyhow and would only be mildly inconvenienced by an earlier pregnancy.

For a teenager who is strongly pro-life, but not sufficiently abstinence-only that one can rely on that (which basically is most teenagers), relying on this method seems like a good way to end up being a single mom at 16.

slightly worse than Coitus interruptus.

Coitus interruptus is pretty good though -- it works pretty much every time, you just need to not fuck it up. That's kind of your point I guess, but the other methods do all have their downsides too. Kind of like the COVID vaccine, one needs to consider one's own risk profile.

Primarily, I would be teaching my daughters their bodies and give them tools/trackers just for the educational value. There is so much more value to being aware of your cycle. It can tell a woman when she will be the most motivated, when she'll be more likely to make bad decisions, etc. Teenagers taught to monitor their bodies have reported things like, "Now I know when I'm angry at a certain time of the month, to just wait it out and not make any big decisions." Teenage girls in correctional facilities were astonished to see that their misbehavior typically fell in the same time of the month. Etc. I don't think I need to defend to this sub the value of self-knowledge.

The ideal would be that they don't have sex. But if they do, they will know exactly when and why they got pregnant.

I have a huge issue with lumping together "Symptoms-based fertility awareness ex. symptothermal and calendar-based methods". There are five different methods I can name off the top of my head that meet that criteria, which vary in effectiveness from 75% to 99.8% with perfect use. Complicating this is that a lot of people use a condom during fertile time instead of abstaining, which just makes the effectiveness on par with a condom.

Calendar-based method: Terrible effectiveness rate. I've heard of one that was just, "Have sex every 10 days" and it had an effectiveness rate of like 90%, which is funny but isn't super in-tune with the body.

Then there's the Marquette Method, which is starting to get into more measurable, technological solutions. You pee on a stick every morning, it gives you a reading you chart, the chart tells you whether or not you should have sex that day if you want to be pregnant or not.

There were forty-two unintended pregnancies which provided a typical use unintended pregnancy rate of 6.7 per 100 women over twelve months of use. Eleven of the forty-two unintended pregnancies were associated with correct use of the method. The total unintended pregnancy rate over twelve months of use was 2.8 per 100 for women with regular cycles, 8.0 per 100 women for the postpartum and breastfeeding women, and 4.3 per 100 for women with irregular menstrual cycles.

Typical use effectiveness of 93.3% is not bad at all - very comparable to the pill.

The version I use and will teach my daughters is the Sympto-Thermal method with a Doeringer rule - like the Sensiplan. I would give them special thermometers to wear at night which only need to be synced about once a week (unless you really want sex, in which case they get synced every morning.) For the Sensiplan Method:

After 13 cycles, 1.8 per 100 women of the cohort experienced an unintended pregnancy; 9.2 per 100 women dropped out because of dissatisfaction with the method; the pregnancy rate was 0.6 per 100 women and per 13 cycles when there was no unprotected intercourse in the fertile time.

This is comparable to an IUD.

Trust me, I have done the research on this. It is literally impossible to get pregnant on phase III (three days after ovulation to the start of menses), if your phase I is longer than 6 days. I've had to rely on this knowledge many a time and it doesn't fail. If I have sex anywhere near a fertile window, I get pregnant immediately (I have learned.)

Edit to add an article on the "teach teenagers to be aware of their cycle" thing: https://naturalwomanhood.org/cycle-mindfulness-what-happens-when-you-teach-fertility-awareness-to-teen-girls/

Here is what she found out: for 90% of the girls in the program who had ended up in jail, it happened during the premenstrual phase of her cycle...

One of the documented outcomes of Teen STAR’s work is the much lower likelihood for these girls to engage in premature sexual activities. The program was evaluated by ChildTrends, a leading U.S. nonprofit research organization, which reported “that this program is effective in reducing the rate of pregnancy, delaying the onset of sexual activity, decreasing sexual activity in sexually-active youth, and improving attitudes towards abstinence, compared with students in the no-treatment groups.”

Getting pregnant is not that big a deal. While I am glad my daughter did not have a baby at 16, there are so many other things that would have been worse. Her getting sucked into the alcoholic party culture was something I was significantly more concerned about at the time. Given a choice between my kid being an alcoholic or a teenage mom I am choosing the latter. She declined both.

I am not worried about my daughters getting pregnant as teenagers by itself. I would be overjoyed to have grandchildren while I’m still young and energetic. What worries me is them getting pregnant with inappropriate man. But, then again, I think it’s less bad when it happens when they’re teenagers than when they’re 30+. They still have a chance (though, of course, much reduced) to put their life together with someone more appropriate. When it happens to you while you’re middle aged, the pool of appropriate men that are interested in you is really tiny.

Assuming your daughter isn't fraternizing with men into their twenties as a teen, almost definitionally getting pregnant as a teen is with an inappropriate man. Let's face it, teenage boys aren't ready for that.

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