site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So the promiscuous woman is scorned, not primarily by men, but by other women.

This always made sense to me and seemed to match what I encountered and saw in the world. That is, until gen-z men started to become visible to me on the internet about 5 years ago, who seemed to be the ones lashing out at women with shaming language about 'thots' and 'thirst-traps' (any women publicly using their good looks on youtube/twitch/etc). By my priors, I would have expected men to be quite fine with women dominating instagram/streaming/asmr/whatever, while some women would be trying to enforce against the defectors with various levels of slut-shaming. And by my reading, the young men aren't simply playing catch-up with new norms and trying to signal their new virtues -- it's more like: "damn you for tempting me to donate my hard earned money!" Am I misreading this as a phenomenon?

I'm pretty certain that this is a selected very online group you're looking at, because the loudest voices on the internet will tend to be people who are not representative of the general population. A huge portion of terminally online people will likely be lonely men who are suffering from lack of sex and companionship and relationships (which I think is something that's very important to people), and who will be frustrated that they can only obtain any semblance of these things through a paywall. They likely see women starting accounts, getting huge amounts of attention from men around the world, and they compare and contrast that with their own situation where they get so little attention that they're tempted to pay for a simulacrum of attention and desire. I can imagine it feels miserable, and it's hard for me not to be at least a little bit sympathetic.

In other words, I think there is a massive difference between the lashing out at Twitch thots you're describing and actually wanting to restrict female sexual behaviour. The lashing out is not because they think women make themselves too sexually accessible and want to restrict their activity, it's precisely because of the opposite reason: because women are not accessible to them. Furthermore, I doubt this attitude can be extrapolated to the general male population out there for the aforementioned reasons, and would caution against any hasty generalisations.