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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31420 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Another hopelessly confused feminist who cannot express a coherent thought. Women like her have been indulged, coddled and lied to their whole lives. As you note, almost subconsciously, she senses that something is not adding up (“the lingering shadow “, “performative reverence”, “dimmed”, “faint echo”).

Echoes of the white lies she has been fed, of her incomparable value, of her oppression, and that she can have it all, and do anything men can, and better. The problem is not that she’s elon musk and people value her too much and don’t value ‘her for her’. It’s that people lie to her about how valuable she really is, like an AA hiring panel, or a loving parent.

Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value

This argument has to die. Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women. Slightly prefers them even, at 1.05 to 1. Most rawlsian babies would prefer the male body, it’s the practical choice. Most parents do too. And if you’re founding a city, every romulus in his right mind would choose a hundred men over a hundred women. Women can always be procured. A weapon is as valuable as an incubator. Even more so in the modern world, where the incubators are faulty, and we’re all tools.

Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women.

It most certainly does not. The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.

Biologically humans produce offspring at 50/50 sex ratio by Fisher's Principle. I used to teach this as an excellent example of how individual selection trumps group selection.

And if you’re founding a city, every romulus in his right mind would choose a hundred men over a hundred women.

Consider if you could choose to found your Rome with a population fixated (stably) on genes for 25% male babies or 50%? By the 3rd generation the first group has more men than the latter. By the 5th generation it is already 9.5x the population and 4x the men! And if you preference fighting age (younger) men, it's even higher.

It's not even close. The only reason that this doesn't work is that in the former group (at 25/75), genes that preference males (even a tiny bit, like 30/70) would be massively selected for (since each male has 3x more offspring) and so each generation is nudged back towards 50/50. If everyone could agree not to do that, they'd all be better off, but genes are selfish and so here we are.

It most certainly does not. The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.

This is an often cited fact, but it hides more than it shows. Historically women had lower life expectancy compared to men thanks to horrible death rate during child birth. Yes, they may have managed to reproduce - but so what. It was their family, mostly males who took care of now motherless children. Without men these children would not survive.

This is afaik in artifact of excluding violent deaths in the statistics, not the reality on the ground. Obviously it is silly to exclude violent deaths but include childbirth if you want to understand the differences in life expectancy between men and women, yet it is all to common. See for example this letter in the journal of the royal society of medicine.

In many known societies, males had far higher violent deaths rates, to such a degree that adult women would frequently outnumber adult men. For a particularly extreme example see the paraguyan triple war, at the end of which women outnumbered men 10:1. Only in long peace times you would have higher life expectancy for men. This also isn't just due to large-scale wars with modern weapons in the more developed societies; hunter gatherers often have even higher violent deaths rates "just" due to skirmishes.

Obviously we do not really have reliable data of actual life expectancy for most of history, but I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the ancestor statistic is a simple result of enough men dying a violent death sufficiently early so that the 2:1 is simply the gender ratio in the adult population.

This is only true if your Rome is a paradise with exponential growth. If you have limited resources, then allocating them to making babies you can not feed is not a winning strategy.

(I would expect that in reality, things would be messy and complicated. Being able to bounce back more quickly after a non-fatal disaster is certainly an advantage, but so is having a higher fraction of your population (which is capped by food supply) on the battlefield.)

Another consideration is that in some societies, males had a big advantage in acquiring food, e.g. hunting mammoths or back-breaking agriculture.

Of course, in a species where the 25/75 ratio was magically fixed, sexual dimorphism would decrease as women find themselves in situations where their best genetic strategy is mammoth-hunting or cattle-raiding. So you end up with an androgynous population which can make a lot of babies when times are good, but in which in typical times, the average woman would have 1.33 kids which survive to reproduce, and spend most of her fertile life-span on toiling in the fields to feed them or stab some other woman to death so her own kids can thrive in a world of limited resources.

Indeed. In the fully Malthusian limit the sex ratio becomes much less important -- and as you say, maybe it's better to have a large fraction able to fight your neighbors.

The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.

Complete non sequitur.

Biologically humans produce offspring at 50/50 sex ratio by Fisher's Principle.

Your statement is a vague, theoretical, general principle that most species tend towards a 50/50 ratio. Mine is the actual sex ratio of humans, which slightly favours males. The two statements are not necessarily contradictory. Mine is just more precise and empirically supported.

Consider if you could choose to found your Rome with a population fixated (stably) on genes for 25% male babies or 50%? By the 3rd generation the first group has more men than the latter.

I already decried this reasoning in this thread. You’re assuming infinite resources like it’s a bacterial culture. And Romulus was a reference to the rape of the sabines, where the male-skewed romans just stole women from their neighbours. The only 25% men tribe would get overrun quickly.

“Behold, I will now prove the undeniable superiority of women:

Imagine you’re on an island. There’s no war to be fought, ever. No work to be done, either. Not even a jar to open. All there is to do on this magical island is to go shopping. And the goal is to produce as many babies as possible. Would you prefer 100 men and 1 woman or 1 man and 100 women? Checkmate.”

You know that it’s men who pay for access to women’s bodies, rather than the other way around, right?

Revealed preferences, look at what people do not what they say, etc.

Men appear to enjoy sex more than women. How this factoid relates to this discussion I do not know. Unless.... you're saying that the ubiquitous island scenario is just a harem fantasy concocted by horny men and they don't have a serious opinion on this?

Men appear to enjoy sex more than women.

Yes, and why do you think that is? It’s not just a random coincidence. It’s rooted in the fact that a man’s reproductive resources are very cheap and a woman’s are very scarce.

Just because a man produces, by my count, 5 billion more gametes per month than a woman, and so his gametes are slightly less valuable individually, does not make a man fundamentally less valuable than a woman.

Well, y’know, it actually does! Every social practice that humans have ever engaged in throughout history has confirmed this fact.

So a man has to find something with which to supplement his value. This is no Herculean task, the barrier is very much intended to be surmountable. There are many types of goods and labors that men exchange for access to women’s bodies. But the point is that he has to find something; he’s not born with it.

"Every social practice"? With how diverse they are, that's a sure sign that you're not correctly evaluating contrary evidence you might come across, and you're running entirely on confirmation bias.

I gave examples of people choosing men over women, which should count as proof of at least comparable worth. You're basing your entire theory of human value on the fact that an attractive 20 year old female can get resources in exchange for sex. I guess we won’t reach agreement today.

Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women. Slightly prefers them even, at 1.05 to 1.

More are produced. This does not make them more valuable; more Honda Civics are produced than Porsche 911s, after all. Slightly later in life, it makes them far less valuable.

Both have value. I’m just pushing back against the view that most men have no value while all women have huge, elon musk level value. Usually this theory of value is backed by nothing more than an island hypothetical, with unlimited resources and no enemies.

The usual formulation is that women have value for what they are, and men have value for what they do. This does not give all women huge, Elon Musk level value.

Musk-level value was OP’s analogy, but the problem with your framing is that the being women are valued for is actually a doing, the producing of children.

Doing has obvious value, I’m not sure being has value. Valued for being could just be an echo, a reminder of someone’s past, real doing-value, like the late aristocrats who were once warriors.

Musk-level value was OP’s analogy, but the problem with your framing is that the being women are valued for is actually a doing, the producing of children.

No, they are not. That may be the reason for the impulse, but they get the value regardless of whether they produce children.

I don't think the Birkenhead drill only applies if the women in question aren't barren. Of course the value bestowed upon women is ultimately an evolutionary adaptation to the reality that only women can bear children. But in practice, even barren women are still seen as Wonderful™ in a way that NEET men aren't.

The birkenhead drill is not rationally justified, is my point. I doubt it would apply today, and I certainly wouldn’t go along with it if it did. Of course some people may still worship the ground women walk on like they used to worship cows, a sacred tree, or a magical stone.

I wasn't debating whether it was rationally justified. It's simply a fact of human nature that most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm (an urge they do not feel when it comes to male people, or at least not nearly to the same extent), and that this urge does not discriminate on whether the woman in question is capable of bearing children or not. Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties. So your claim that women are only valued for a "doing" (i.e. the ability to bear children) doesn't really seem to describe male psychology accurately.

I think people are whitewashing their political opinions by calling them ‘facts of human nature’. You say most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm, but in numerous cultures it was normal to beat women. In honor cultures, even related men can kill them for a smile. Obviously rape was widespread, etc. This isn’t the feminist litany of oppression, men suffered terribly too. I just don’t think you can look at all that and see the instinctive urge to protect women. And I personally don’t feel the discriminatory urge to save a random woman over a random man.

Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties.

That's because they are less of a threat, like a child, or a cripple. Doesn't have anything to do with the inherent biological value of women.

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Musk-level value was OP’s analogy

I said it was a "heavily attenuated" version of that. It was just an analogy, not meant to be taken literally.

That’s the definition of an analogy. You did say the female body is one of the most valuable possessions on earth. Your thesis is that her high value makes her insecure. I think it is the gulf between her appraisal of her own value, which is externally reinforced, and her actual, lower, value.

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