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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24918 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. Keeping their legs closed before marriage is entirely possible.

My daughter is more at risk of NEVER having any sex because she is at her tender age already obsessed with degenerate homosexual kpop boylove fics (RIP the Chatgpt server instance tasked to her). Between that and her godsis already being a degenerate goonette whose collection of bad dragons highly upsets even her somewhat liberal mother, the risk is more in the opposite direction. While the risk of infiltrators in good christian churches or feminist groups are both extant, the greater risk of women having impossible standards for men and defaulting to the internet rabbit hole instead is unexplored.

women having impossible standards for men

While there are definitely a minority of women on the internet demanding men be 6'5 self made millionaires who believe every woke shibboleth and yet act like conservatives, it seems like most women have eminently reasonable standards(be stably employed in a good job, not be a porn/substance/gambling addict, not a criminal, taller than her, etc) and simply aren't exposed to men who meet them.

My daughters generation expresses interest in sensitive artsy guys with glossy hair and perfect skin who happen to be straight. A particularly gnarly one is "good at talking" which used to be ok but now the boys apparently are using AI to do all their initial flirtations and the girls are copy pasting the messages into chatgpt to figure out if the boy is sincere and get mad at the AI for telling them things they don't want to hear.

The boys I know only have "not annoying' as a criteria. The older guys I know who have more stringent criterias are just avoiding rejection by seeking perfection, and I can't say the same for women. Sorry babe the hybrid of Benedict Cumberbatch and Asa Butterfield who also loves romantasy does not exist in straight versions.

Ah, yes, the ‘combination doesn’t go together’ problem.

With all due respect, when's the last time your looked for a partner? This isn't 1999.

If only those were women's standards. But it's not. Some of those things aren't important at all, in fact - not a criminal? Criminality's huge social proof of studliness to an awful lot of women.

the greater risk of women having impossible standards for men

A lot of women who are heavily invested in gay M/M content report enjoying it because it feels "safer" and "less complicated" than hetero content. They want to enjoy a romantic relationship in a "voyeuristic" way without having the worry about the imbalanced power dynamics that are intrinsically a part of any relationship between men and women. If the characters in the story are both men, then she can enjoy it without having to worry about the possibility of "self-inserting" as the female character and getting too personally enmeshed in the story, which could dredge up uncomfortable hang-ups about her own real life sexuality. It's not so much about running to the image of an idealized man as it is about running away from the dangers that real men present.

Obviously, it's something that she mostly has to work out for herself. I think the best thing you can do is to just set a good example in your relations with your own family, and if it ever seems appropriate to bring up, be open and honest about your own political views, what you perceive as the deleterious effects of modern wokeness, etc (the danger here isn't so much the porn per se, but rather the fact that the communities for this type of content tend to be filled with radfem and woke types who could reinforce negative beliefs).

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