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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I've been seeing this rhetoric from certain factions of the right recently, but now I suppose it's being espoused by someone whose attention may be accessible to me—so maybe you can help me out understanding this one.

Who, pray tell, is the audience for this statement? Cads who are looking to get married and start a family? Married men who are looking to fuck around?

What is the thesis of this rant? "Sorry fellas, as long as there are promiscuous men out there, your married ass can't expect fair treatment from family courts."

I am deeply confused.

Who, pray tell, is the audience for this statement? Cads who are looking to get married and start a family? Married men who are looking to fuck around?

The intended audience is anyone dissatisfied with our current norms surrounding sexuality. The thesis is that sexuality is not a series of simple knobs that can be individually fine-tuned to achieve a desired outcome, but is rather a deeply interconnected, highly complex, and highly consequential social system that we cannot reliably conform to our whims.

The sexual revolution's thesis was that crusty old religious fuddy-duddies and repressed bigots had packed our sexual norms full of pointless, killjoy rules based on their own superstitions and hangups, and that once these were removed everyone could just do what felt good and be happy all the time. So they removed all the rules, a whole lot of people got badly hurt, and now they've had to reimpose new, worse rules and people are still pretty unhappy with the results. The claim here is that there are simple, obvious changes that will fix the problems and then everything will be fine. I don't think that was true before, and I don't think it's true here either. Risky sex is always going to be risky sex, no matter how we shuffle the risk around, and the inescapable fact is that all sex involves a significant degree of risk. There are solid strategies capable of seriously mitigating the problems people are pointing to here, but they involve living a Trad life that avoids divorce entirely, not attempting to "fix" divorce so it doesn't fuck people up, something I'm pretty sure it isn't possible to do.

That doesn't mean that none of the examples provided are probative; some of them display some degree of bias, and some are just straight-up badly decided. But I'm fairly confident that these specific issues of female rapists getting child support from male victims are very much edge cases, and while I entirely endorse fixing them, doing so isn't going to do a thing to help the much larger class of despairing men referenced in the comment I was replying to. The fact is that divorce is actually pretty awful, no matter how we try to shuffle its components.

If enough people recognize the failures of the current system, maybe we can as a society try for something better. In the meantime, people are better off accepting that the problem they're pointing to simply isn't going to get fixed, and start looking for workarounds.

That doesn't mean that none of the examples provided are probative; some of them display some degree of bias, and some are just straight-up badly decided. But I'm fairly confident that these specific issues of female rapists getting child support from male victims are very much edge cases, and while I entirely endorse fixing them, doing so isn't going to do a thing to help the much larger class of despairing men referenced in the comment I was replying to. The fact is that divorce is actually pretty awful, no matter how we try to shuffle its components.

But only one part of the argument is about how to "fix divorce". I agree it will never be a pleasant affair.

The other half is "Divorce policies are currently set up to be maximally awful for men and maximally beneficial for women. This is unfair." Your comment does not address this at all. That we may never find a risk distribution that will leave everyone happy is not a good reason to adopt a massively unfair one.

So they removed all the rules, a whole lot of people got badly hurt, and now they've had to reimpose new, worse rules and people are still pretty unhappy with the results.

Very much not a fan of the dude but relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/592/

The audience is dissatisfied young men. Maybe incels, maybe RETVRNers: what matters is openness to women-as-outgroup. The goal is rallying a bloc via distrust for that outgroup. You’re seeing this in right-wing spaces because more liberal ones have very strong antibodies against the general sentiment, for better or worse.

Your interpretation of the thesis is almost correct, but you skipped the premise of societal decay. It’s often paired with claims that females—not women—are the real hypergamists. Thus it becomes “sorry fellas, so long as society is willing to tolerate women acting like whores, your married/responsible/trad ass can’t expect fair treatment.”

There’s a lot to unpack about an almost Marxist version of this argument that’s popular on the far right. But I don’t think you have to bite that bullet to express dissatisfaction with the state of affairs.

The audience is dissatisfied young men.

Dissatisfied young women, too. The current situation makes us all wretched.

what matters is openness to women-as-outgroup.

...What?

Your interpretation of the thesis is almost correct, but you skipped the premise of societal decay. It’s often paired with claims that females—not women—are the real hypergamists. Thus it becomes “sorry fellas, so long as society is willing to tolerate women acting like whores, your married/responsible/trad ass can’t expect fair treatment.”

None of this is accurate. Your married/responsible/trad ass can absolutely expect fair treatment, provided you find a woman willing to treat you fairly, which absolutely can be done. I have in fact done it, and it is delightful. What you can't expect is fair treatment from a system that is, in general, breaking down. There is no way under current conditions for our system to adequately police sexual ethics for men OR women, because we broke too many of the necessary tools, and most of us value personal gratification over workable general rules. It was stupid to imagine that emotionally and sexually intimate relationships can be regulated the way one does parking violations, but here we are.

The problem with relationships is not "Females". The problem is that relationships are necessarily fraught, and we as a society removed most of the safety mechanisms. One can (and should, in my view) find pockets that voluntarily maintain those safety mechanisms. Otherwise, one should understand that there's a lot of risk lying around for everybody that the prevailing narratives resolutely paper over.

Unfortunately, a lot of people making these complaints are the same people helping to generate the risk. You aren't stuck in traffic, you are traffic, as the saying goes. Men and women both embrace Horny Liberalism, and then when the long-term effects manifest, imagine that they can patch the downsides without having to compromise their own desires. Foolishness, but humans were ever thus.

It’s often paired with claims that females—not women—are the real hypergamists. Thus it becomes “sorry fellas, so long as society is willing to tolerate women acting like whores, your married/responsible/trad ass can’t expect fair treatment.”

Maybe we should look up a word before we write an analysis. Your search bar is right there. Type hypergamy into it.

I looked it up, and it seems to fit. Relevant quotes from the first few links:

What point were you trying to make?

You are describing a fairly anodyne observation, that women are more social status conscious and care more about that in their partners, and using Urban Dictionary's almost unrecognizable definition and describing them as whores, which conflates hypergamy with being sexually loose for money.

I don't think many of the people you are describing would primarily think of women as whores. They would describe them as gold diggers. Or maybe they would describe them as whores. But not because of hypergamy. They are very distinct traits, even if they are both leveraging sex appeal for personal benefit.

“Gold diggers” would probably have been a better term, yeah. I somehow overlooked it, though I considered “mercenary...”

But I’ll stand by the appropriateness of “whores.” @FCfromSSC wasn’t just describing hypergamy, he was observing entrenched Horny Liberalism. Dismantling social institutions is absolutely associated with prostitution and vice in general.

You are describing a fairly anodyne observation, that women are more social status conscious and care more about that in their partners, and using Urban Dictionary's almost unrecognizable definition and describing them as whores, which conflates hypergamy with being sexually loose for money.

I think you're refusing to recognize term (meme) creep here. The Wikipedia definition of hypergamy may be "an anodyne observation that women are more social status conscious and care more about that in their partners," but I never see anyone refer to women and hypergamy where it isn't shorthand for "status-seeking whores."

(FYI, I'm not @netstack)

...using Urban Dictionary's almost unrecognizable definition and describing them as whores, which conflates hypergamy with being sexually loose for money.

Urban Dictionary is a perfectly fine source here, because it reflects the same attitudes and biases as the group we're talking about: they conflate hypergamy with being sexually loose for money because "dissatisfied young men. Maybe incels, maybe RETVRNers" conflate hypergamy with being sexually loose for money.

See The Red Pill Community Forum|What is hypergamy? How to Benefit from Hypergamy & Everything You Need to Know About Hypergamy. for a second example.

If you think their claims are incorrect or confused, then go ahead and argue that. They are making the claims, though.

Your link agrees with me. They even recommend a book called Gold Diggers and Sugar Daddies: The Red Pill Guide to Hypergamy by Player Mastermind.

@Gdanning claimed that increasing wages of women would lead to women more often becoming the person with the higher income in a relationship. It was in this context that I brought up female hypergamy, because if there is a higher systemic preference for income among women than in men, "closing the wage gap" doesn't solve. That @netstack decided to drag incelism into this discussion, might be useful rhetorically as it provides him with a punching bag, but doesn't have anything to do with my comment netstack linked.

It’s often paired with claims that females—not women—

Do you find the "female", even if paired with "male" and not "man", offensive?

are the real hypergamist

Women value potential for financial prospects more than men. See this study, page 7 of the PDF. In every of the 37 global cultures included in the study, human females valued "good financial prospects" more than human males did.

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to imply that your claim was incorrect. True statements are valid rallying flags.

females

I think your usage is appropriate.

There is a stronger form of the hypergamy claim where it represents a class interest, a cause rather than an effect. When “female” is used in that context, it is an attempt to sneak onto clinical high ground. I understand that’s not what you were doing.

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