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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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I think that "hard status" is a terrible name for that axis. "physical status" and "body-inferred status" might be better.

I had a really hard time naming the two axes. First I had "male power" and "female power" but it became so conflated when I began to imagine two different charts. Then I thought of calling "hard status" "power" and "soft status" "status" but it wasn't exactly right either. I kept changing it, ended up with "hard status" and "soft status" and thought it worked well enough to illustrate the point and just went with it.

And social status is obviously contingent on the society you are considering. Plenty of cultures value Mohammed a lot more than Buddha.

I said as much in another comment here, I wasn't really claiming and omniscient point of view in my ranking, things are highly subjective in general even as I try to disentangle something universal

I asked my gay friends what the chart absent the stated axes were and it became "who would you rather top" and "who would you rather be bottomed for". Not that reductionism is more common in gay circles, but this status differentiation mapping cleanly was somewhat hilarious. I bet if I had female friends who were kore racially adventurous I'd get a similar dynamic.