site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   26051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The Sidney Sweeney commercial.

AKA, why nutpicking is not a valid defense. And probably hasn't been in a while.

The Sidney Sweeny "Good Jeans" commercial has gone viral as many here probably know. Of course, with a commercial featuring a conventionally attractive white woman making a double entendre about how she is hot and wears cool pants was sure to be. But, perhaps more than the merits of the original commercial, the backlash to the commercial has vaulted it into an even higher tier of virility than even the most optimistic American Eagle marketers could have projected.

Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc. So, just about everything normally happening on the internet. Right? Well, sure there is your token tic tok users making such accusations. The usual suspects like Salon.com immediately seized upon this narrative, along with someone who is apparently famous called Doja Cat. And MSNBC to complete the set of entities that pick up anything they can regarding online outrage.

But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring. ABC especially went deep with Good Morning America bringing on an "expert" to rail against the ad as "Nazi Propaganda" (the host's words), "The American Eugenics Movement" and "White Supremacism" (the expert's words).

Where does this leave us? For me its another data point that the accusation of "nutpicking" whenever one of these woke controversies emerges is kinda a bad faith argument to make. People who see these things aren't nutpicking, they are being presented with a lot of nuts, often in prominent positions or positions of power. This particular controversy had me feeling sympathetic cringe on behalf of the reasonable center-leftists. But then I fisk that feeling and have to ask when they are actually going to police their crazies the way the right's mainstream does. Candace Owens employment status at the Daily Wire is terminated. Tucker Carlson's status at Fox is terminated. The guys who got fired at NPR and the NYT? For NPR its the guy who was saying they were too biased towards the left. For the Times, its the guys who let a Senator write a fairly bland Op-Ed about how to police riots.

As for the politicians, most have seemingly stayed away. I doubt many will answer any questions on this directly (Democrats I mean, obviously many Republicans have already made hay with yet another unforced error by the left's activist class). The reason is clear, they know the right answer, particularly for most general elections, is to laugh at the activists and "nuts" on things like this. But they cannot actually seem to bring themselves to actually express that in public. The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun". I don't know what the math on this actually is, but there it is. You are what you do, and this is no longer nutpicking, its mainstream. I dont know if nutpicking was ever valid, but I don't think it can reasonably be said to still be so for this category of things.

A strange situation has arisen over the last 15 years or so where mild sexual titillation became taboo while extreme hardcore porn became easily available. There was such a glaring contrast. Nerds were wrong to enjoy attractive female characters in their videogames, because misogyny, patriarchy, and oppression of women. But at the same time these nerds were two clicks away from the most graphic hardcore pornography that has ever existed. OnlyFans is tolerated if not celebrated while milder forms of sex appeal were being erased. It's almost like the hardcore porn was, ahem, sucking all the sex out of everything else, but there has definitely been a shift against internet porn now as people who grew up with it start to resent it. I wonder if that latent energy is now pushing mild sexual titillation back into the mainstream.

Of course, this taboo was mostly or entirely focused on the preferences of straight white men, so perhaps that alone better explains why it was tabooed.

mild sexual titillation became taboo while extreme hardcore porn became easily available

And yet, mild sexual titillation is also more easily available than ever before: women dress for the gym in clothing that's only marginally less revealing than if they'd shown up in their underwear, and post "thirst trap" photos on Instagram that are indistinguishable from softcore pornography. More and more I think the outrage about video games objectifying women had less to do with the content in its own right and more to do with who was creating it. The game designers making money by making sexy video game characters are men, so it's bad; the people posting thirst trap photos are women, so it's good. Perhaps it all came down to who owns the means of production.

It's negative political polarization applied to the culture war. Your most important sign of loyalty to the (Republican / Democratic) party is your steadfast hatred of the (Democratic / Republican) party; you're in good standing with the left because you hate Trump, or Trump is in good standing with you because he's doing something the left hates.

Translated to the culture war: What makes you a good feminist is to find something men like, and then do the opposite. So if men like good titty in their videogames, but want their actual girlfriend to have never been a prostitute, the feminist ideal is to be in favor of sex work but opposed to sexy space marines. Porn is acceptable because the actress's boyfriend(s) would prefer that she just be a hot barista instead. Attractive women in videogames are bad because not only do men enjoy it, the company profiting is probably made up of men, too.

Nerds were wrong to enjoy attractive female characters in their videogames, because misogyny, patriarchy, and oppression of women. But at the same time these nerds were two clicks away from the most graphic hardcore pornography that has ever existed.

You can't do much about porn, it's too low status and ubiquitous. People already think it's low status so trying to make it more so is just a waste of energy . And you can't "improve" it because the rubber really meets the road there. (Same reasons the current backlash to porn is irrelevant if you don't pull a UK. It was rape to feminists in the past, 'cool' or at least accepted at some point, and is now being seen more negatively by feminists. People who consumed did so regardless)

You can however do something about nerds and what they're liking in public. Since sff media became mainstream and arguably took over the box office in the 2010s, people have an incentive and levers to fight those battles.

Porn also still has a small amount of leftover leftist street cred from the “pissing off the Moral Majority” days in the 70s and 80s. Not a lot though, leftists have started to sour on porn and I only see that increasing in the future.

You can't do much about porn, it's too low status and ubiquitous. People already think it's low status so trying to make it more so is just a waste of energy . And you can't "improve" it because the rubber really meets the road there.

You absolutely can ban it and/or require ID to view it. A few states have already done this and I expect more to follow on.

Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny is an interesting essay that touches on some of these points. It fails to come up with much of a conclusion, and it doesn't address how/why this dichotomy is still true with so many Americans being overweight/obese, but I found it worthwhile anyway.

I think there's three separate motions: a specific anti-straight-male-sexuality coming from feminism, a weak effort toward normalization of other sexuality, and a broader and pretty strict anti-public-expression control from the professional class. The professional class doesn't actually like "crying low-testosterone manchildren, ponies, furries and ugly transexuals", it just finds them useful or tolerable for now; that's how you get itchio or spotify thrown under the bus as easily as hardcore porn sites, while at the same time so many discord guilds have dedicated channels for tits-(and-or-dick)-and-ass level smut and there's little or no working-class stigma about a month-long subscription to a ShowMeYourHoles-tier onlyfans.

Really feels like we managed to get the worst of both the sexual revolution AND the evangelical movement.

Sex is no longer taboo or 'sacred' in the slightest. Women will wear painted-on clothes at the gym and go around braless in public. Even if she isn't selling nudes on OF, she might be selling feet pics or is at least thirst trapping on Instagram.

BUT, you aren't allowed to stare at her ass or chest. Unless of course you go online and pay for a subscription, then you get to see ALL the goods. But only digital interaction allowed. Can't approach a woman in real life unless she approves, either.

Thanks to cell-phone cameras, women can send nudes to any guy they find attractive. This is not a big deal, "it's their body!" But thanks to cell-phone cameras, women are not as prone to whip out their boobs at a party on the off chance it gets posted online. Oh, and of course if you post a woman's nudes online you can often literally be prosecuted for revenge porn. Because sex and nudity are no longer a big deal, you see.

Of course you get the dating apps that make hookups much more frictionless. Yet you can't ever SAY you're just looking for FWB, and advertising that you're just there to bang as many people as possible is verboten. Unless you say you're polyamorous, then its somehow kosher.

There's like 30 different derogatory slang terms/innuendos to describe being in a noncommittal, ambiguous, and completely sex-based 'relationship,' just don't suggest to someone that they're making things harder for themselves and should try dating for marriage, what are you a prude?

You're allowed to complain about NOT getting sex, but if anyone hears you you're getting called an Incel.

If you try and convince a woman that she should pick a nice guy, settle down, and have kids with him as soon as possible, its exploitation and controlling womens' bodies. You convince her to become an online prostitute the very day she turns 18, though, putting her body out there for any given man to pay to see, you're just empowering her to be independent or whatever.

And now of course they're putting further legal restriction on the access to porn ANYWAY, right as we're getting Titty-based commercials on TV again.

I overstate, but its so annoying to live in a world where sex is both not a big deal thanks to contraceptives and the lifting of taboos... AND its jealously guarded by women (mostly), still stuck behind paywalls and used to extract resources, and people who aren't having it are still targeted with derision.

Its as if everyone knows that that's a critical component of human flourishing, but we're all required to politely agree that treating sex as anything other than a 'boring' commodity to be dispassionately traded makes you a weirdo fundamentalist or something.

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.
The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

-CS Lewis, Screwtape Letters

On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.

-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

-Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings

It's a problem that was predicted well in advance.

My kingdom for something resembling 'authenticity' in a romantic relationship.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats