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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I know the dating crisis has been done to death on this forum, but I want to talk about it perhaps from a slightly different angle than previous posters; that of the collapse of the ability to make collective decisions/sacrifices. Various self-improvement substackers seem to be populating the majority of my feed these days, and one, Get Better Soon had a post yesterday about how to attract women. Although much of the post is the standard dress better, be fit, be more interesting shtick, one thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was Get Better Soon's insistence that you had to be making at least $70k to be thinking about having a girlfriend, as well as living by yourself and preferably owning your own house/car. Now the median income in the US in $60k, and even controlling for the fact that men out-earn women, Get Better Soon is effectively saying here that more than 50% of men in the US are undateable. This no longer sounds like a problem that can be fixed merely through self-improvement.
Now I'm not saying that the advice I see from this guy is necessarily unhelpful for the individual: you will have more success if you earn more, aren't fat, and can hold a conversation. And historically some self-improvement was necessary to have for example, land to support your wife and future family. But we've rapidly gone from a situation in which pretty much everyone, including the ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50% of society could expect to get married, to a world where maybe that will happen to 20% of the population, and most of those people should expect to get divorced. The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional.
It's not just dating, I kind of see this with everything. We used to be able to take effective collective action as a country. Things like ballooning government debt, government incompetence, rapid urban decay, and breakdown in communities are relatively new phenomena that have popped up in the last twenty to fifty years. Aurelian loves to talk about how much the civil service and government in general have decayed in the UK (and France I think) since the end of the Cold War, and lays a lot of the blame at the feet of the focus on individual outcomes. I'm not sure if he has the causality the right way round, but it seems clear to me that we can no longer really effectively do things as a society. The inability to form lasting romantic and family attachments is only part of that.
I think that most men who are in about the top 80% of male attractiveness could find a girlfriend or wife if sufficiently motivated, even without changing their income or physical appearance. I agree with @2rafa. Much of this is about motivation. Many guys are just content to do things other than seeking out women. Also, some men are holding out for the most desirable women instead of being willing to lower their standards. I think a third factor is that women are no longer as much expected socially as they probably were in the past to have the kind of men-pleasing, friendly, docile personalities that a large fraction of men find sexually desirable, which explains part of men's motivation problem. The more fun and personable that a man finds the average woman, the more motivated he will feel to go out and interact with women, as opposed to sitting at home. I'm sure that this goes both ways, and many women find themselves far from impressed with the average man's personality.
This. 100% this. I spent many years on dating platforms and saw hundreds and hundreds of young women who were just.... unlikable. Shallow, prideful, promiscuous, and just generally masculine. The number one lie that modern feminism has sold to women is that the male gender role is what defines success: money, strength, ambition, stubbornness, ruthless competitiveness, etc. Men had all of those and that was oppressive and if a woman wants to be successful she needs to have all of those. And women believe this and become strong independent faux-men and don't even try to be good women. To be clear, I think it's acceptable if a woman naturally inherently through her own preferences wants to be ambitious and strong and all that. But that doesn't make her an attractive dating partner, and more importantly we shouldn't have a nation-wide psy-op trying to brainwash young girls into becoming this because they were born too feminine or something. And we shouldn't lie to girls and tell them that masculinity is attractive. If we as a culture openly and honestly told young women what men actually want a lot of them would become more feminine on purpose because they like men and want to be attractive to men.
I happened to luck out and eventually find one of the few remaining friendly, docile, feminine women left and married her. But now she's not in the pool anymore. This is not a generalizable solution because there aren't enough of them to go around.
I was under the impression that we do, as a culture, openly and honestly tell young women what men actually want, and the problem was that it currently results in them spitting and going "fuck men then".
Well, "we as a culture" don't ever fully agree on anything. A hundred voices are screaming a hundred different things, and the truth is lost in the noise.
Some people are telling the truth, and some people are not. But these signals are not all received equaly. But collectively, the average socially acceptable advice given by the mainstream media and by middle aged women to their younger colleagues tends to be feminist nonsense. And then a lot of young men, seeking not to give good long term advice but instead to get an easy lay, are giving the advice that they want women who are easy and sleep with them immediately. And the women believe them and become "popular", but nobody wants to marry them and the men get bored and leave. This in turn causes them to doubt advice from men and listen more to the feminists.
The problem isn't quite as simple as men saying what they want and women spitting in their faces. The scenario is older men saying what they want, younger men saying what they want short term and pretending it's long term too, older women who've been burned by this spitting in the faces of both, and then younger women watching this exchange and then eventually following the older women, possibly after getting burned once or twice themselves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link