site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25951 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 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.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Dating is an extreme act of delayed gratification. Many men do not really enjoy the act of seducing women, which requires enormous investments in time and effort, and generally putting on at least a little bit of act rather than just being comfy and normal. Many men enjoy the thrill and payoff of a successful seduction but that is different from the act itself.

I agree, but I think this is mainly a result of our modern techno-dystopia. No one enjoys swiping right on hundreds of profiles just so we can "take whatever we can get" from the bottom 1% who swipe back at us. No one enjoys being the orbiter/reply-guy on social media. No one enjoys fighting for the attention of the one semi-hot woman at a party/bar/club when she's surrounded by men jockying for her attention, with a 10:1 ratio of men:women. Noone enjoys doing our best to make witty conversation while she just stares into her phone (or even worse, texting her while she takes 48 hours to reply "lol") . Noone enjoys going into some women's space like a yoga class/book club/knitting circle and feeling the suspicious stares and closed-off body language. Noone enjoys awkwardly shaking our butts to shitty hop hop at the generic dance clubs.

What I do enjoy is if I can actually meet a woman IRL and have some sort of real connection. It could be dancing, a good conversation, sharing a meal, anything really, as long as I can tell she's actually focusing her attention on me and feeling something from it. But modern life makes it so damn hard to get even that... one time I was a cocktail bar talking to a woman who was not very conventioanlly attractive, but she was still fun to talk to. I was having fun until she mentioned that she was surprised how many men were trying to talk to her, including much younger men. I was like... "look around, you're the only woman here, and there's so many single men here. Of course we all want to talk to you!" The single women are all at home hiding out on social media and I have to pay them if I want even digital attention.

All that said, I still kinda like paying women to hang out with me and give me attention sometimes, just to have that kind of "great date" experience even if it doesn't lead to seggs. They're just way better at entertaining men than any normal woman. So maybe it makes sense for this to be the modern division of labor.

Saw a tweet that made the specific argument that men aren't really competing to be more interesting than other men for a woman's attention at any given time (sometimes they are, of course). He's competing to be more interesting than her phone. Which is a difficult lift. She's got a dozen apps on there for various forms of communication, another dozen for feeding video slop, and then probably a half dozen games to fill in the gaps.

Up against that much dopamine-hacking technology, what can a given guy sitting in front of her do or say that will actually get her to stop thinking about her messages, or her latest instagram post, or make her want to engage in conversation instead of scroll tiktok.

I feel like I can do that, provided that she's sufficiently motivated to get off her butt and go out into the real world to meet people in meat-space. I also like to play with my phone when I'm sitting at the bar, but I'll put at away as soon as I meet anyone interesting to talk to. The real challenge is the women staying at home, using the phone as their sole means of communication... which is most women these days. I went to three bars tonight (fancy cocktail bars in a trendy neighborhood) and there was literally zero women there who weren't there as part of a date.

Yeah. I can't say for sure how much of it is just my own perception, but the time of a single woman going out by herself to places where she might get noticed and approached seemed to be literally over.

Its always a girls' night thing, or she's with a group of friends for a specific event, or maybe its a date she pre-arranged on the apps.

If you spy a woman sitting alone, wait five minutes and it'll always turn out she was waiting for someone. I've avoided some embarrassment by slowing my roll when I see them, even if shooting my shot was the 'right' choice.

what can a given guy sitting in front of her do or say that will actually get her to stop thinking about her messages, or her latest instagram post, or make her want to scroll tiktok instead of engaging in conversation.

You might as well ask what a given woman can do to be more appealing for an average 2D aficionado than his endless, effortless, potentially AI-enhanced harem of 2D waifus.

From AntiDem's Ask.FM account:

Once we develop artificial wombs, will there be any reason to keep women around? Should we exterminate them all?

I think it was Matt Forney who pointed out that all the talk about women having to compete with porn and 2D waifus was ridiculous. If, as a real, live, human woman with a beating heart and a warm bosom, these things are even the tiniest bit of real "competition", there's something desperately wrong and you fucked up royal. Women are supposed to be our help-meets, our comfort, our joy, our safe harbor from the bitterness of this harsh world. Modernity destroyed that on the theory that turning them into cold, mechanical cogs in the corporate/industrial machine would somehow make things better. Did it? Maybe it did add an extra 2% to GDP. Any sane society would declare that some things are not for sale, and give it all up to have our women back. But I fear they're lost. Degrees and exceptions, yes, but bottom line, I think they're gone, and I don't see how we get them back any time soon.

And the worst part is, I can't even bring myself to care enough about them to even be angry anymore.

As well as:

You don't really mean all that stuff about 3DPD, do you?

Don't I? Has anybody ever really liked 3DPD? The ancients believed that 3DPD were for procreation, but cuteboys were for love and pleasure. In fact, the ancients liked their cuteboys so much that the God of the Bible literally had to resort to threatening to roast them in a lake of fire for all eternity in order to get them to stop screwing cuteboys and to pay attention to their 3DPD wives instead. After that, some combination of strong patriarchy, social pressure, mythologizing (of the troubadour/romantic variety), and the abovementioned threat kept things going relatively smoothly for a good long while, but when deconstructors started breaking all that down for ideological reasons, an unintended consequence was that men started drifting away from 3DPD again, this time to internet porn and/or 2D waifus. It of course hasn't helped matters that feminism seems to have spent decades on a crusade to make 3D women as unpalatable as humanly possible. A couple of centuries ago, the strong constraints placed upon them by rigid gender roles had created a sort of 3D womanhood that was not without its charms. Now that they have been loosed, well... look at rates of divorce, and at birthrates. Men have "voted with their feet", so to speak. They have in some cases fled 3DPD altogether, and in others have fled any commitment to them.

You'd think this would send a message to 3DPD that maybe they should try to regain whatever charms they once had in hopes of enticing men back for more than some casual sex. But no - they seem to be doubling down on feminism, and headed down the Cat Lady Highway as fast as they can drive. Well, good luck to them, but I won't be along for the ride.

And from the comments of "Asia Is Not Our Salvation; It Is Our Suicide" by the same:

This article is full of the typical female inability to take any fucking responsibility whatsoever for anything they ever do wrong. Western women are such mannish, rude, petulant trash that their men have walked away and started searching for other options? It's the fault of men, or those Asian bitches they seem to like these days, or 2D cartoons, or Pornhub, or everything except the idea that you - YOU - fucked up. You want men to walk away from their Asian girlfriends or put down the anime body pillows? Then you - YOU - put in the effort to become the better option. You want a place to start? Here's an idea: stop bitching men out for noticing incentives and disincentives, and for taking a better deal over a worse one. That's not going to get your men to come back to you. Here's the thing - you can become the change you want to see, which involves effort, or you can just complain, which requires none.

Man, do you just bookmark every woman-hating rant on the Internet? I deeply regret learning today what "3DPD" means.

Man, do you just bookmark every woman-hating rant on the Internet?

Not at all; I simply remember them, then look them up at need. For example, I recalled that the first two were from AntiDem's Ask.FM page, so I trawled the cache archives (which list several years worth of question and answers) with Ctrl+F until I found them. The last one I saw reblogged on @Capital_Room's tumblr once, so I searched and, sure enough...

A good rant lives rent-free in my head.

I deeply regret learning today what "3DPD" means.

I aim to please.

I think guys like boobs enough to put down the phone if there's a real pair in front of them, at the very least.

Well - getting a pair of boobs in front of you while you're still secluded at home is, as they say, a coup-complete problem.

But the point I'm trying to make is - you can't appeal to the dopamine-hacked, at least not without significantly sacrificing your own preferences and incentives. They have to realize the error of their ways and make efforts to fix them.

They have to realize the error of their ways and make efforts to fix them.

And if they, "the the dopamine-hacked", collectively don't realize the error of their ways?

You might as well ask what a given woman can do to be more appealing for an average 2D aficionado than his endless, effortless, potentially AI-enhanced harem of 2D waifus.

Oh, that's easy. Blowjobs.

The respective answer for faceh's question would be "just buy GFE from her onlyfans".

A girl with OF isn't going to hold my hand while we walk into Home Depot to pick out supplies for our weekend project.

...well, not unless I pay her an obscene amount of money.

I'd assume a companionship service to go to a specific public location would be not much more expensive than a regular escort (which seems to be the original source of the euphemism). But maybe handholding is just too weird for modern whores.

Yes, Escorts provide GFE-stuff. Of varying types, of varying lengths. I've checked. The point I was trying to make is, such an activity as I described it involves a deep degree of investment on both sides of the fence and a level of intimacy that just doesn't boil down to 'these two fuck every so often'. It speaks of two people actively trying to keep together a household and the long time-horizon that implies.

Can't really get that from an Escort, or an OnlyFans.

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