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 -
If I understand your sarcasm right, this seems like a fully generalizeable counterargument to most human progress. If you want to argue "back in the ancestral environment we (likely) did not have a conception of sexual consent, so I do not see why we need one now", the same argument could be made against other civilizational projects like trying to limit the murder rate, curing diseases or preventing starvation.
I think that both in the ancestral environment and agrarian societies, age (above 20) was directly negative in a husband, but sometimes positively correlated with beneficial qualities.
Evolutionarily speaking, if you are a 14 and looking to marry, you perhaps have 15, 20 years of fertility ahead of you. Sure, there is some heavy discounting because chances are that you will die in childbirth or some unrelated cause before you reach age 30. Any children you have will be a net drain on resources until they are perhaps 14 (when they will either be in the position to sell themselves into sexual/domestic/reproductive bondage or work to produce their own calories). If your expected age at the birth of your last child is 25, that means you would want your husband to provide for your family until you are about 40 (or possibly 50 if you are really lucky wrt fertility).
That is a tall order in the best of circumstances! If the husband you marry is 20, he would have to be able-bodied at age 46. If he is 35, he would have to be able-bodied at age 61.
Now, I will grant you that in the ancestral environment, humans might not have had a conception of fatherhood, or long-term monogamous mating patterns, so let us consider agrarian societies instead, where both of these were generally a thing. (Absent paternal involvement, the trade-offs for age in mating are that on the one hand, paternal age is indicative of a higher genetic fitness, but also will increase the mutational load.)
In an agrarian society, almost everyone is a peasant. Most girls will not marry some noble land-owner. Working marginal fields is back-breaking labor, my guess is that most men give out before 40. What happens then is very dependent on the customs of the society. In the best case, your husband dies quickly and you inherit his land and can marry some landless 20yo who will be happy to breed you for the rest of your fertility window. In most cases, this is not how societies organize. The realistic best outcome is that your husband had a younger, landless, unmarried brother who will just take both the land and you over for him, but more realistically, he will inherit the land and marry a fresh 14yo. He might keep you around and feed you and your kids while times are good, but if he has to chose between his wife and his kids and you and his nephews, things will look grim for you. Realistically, the land might never have belonged to your husband in the first place, but just been leased out from a local noble, who will simply proceed to lease the land to some other guy once your husband fails.
Obviously, if you can become the nth wife of some guy rich enough that he does not have to work the field, that would be preferable from an evo PoV, but realistically that is not an option most girls have.
In conclusion, from evo, you would want to go for a rich man if you can, but settle for a young, strong man if you can't.
More options
Context Copy link