site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   23398 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Anything that makes my dick hard is a woman. The failure of the modern trans movement is to have ugly failed men be the face of the movement instead of fuckable femboys. Get the trans movement to be astolfo crossplayers, and schedule an anime cosplay competition at the same time as the NRC. Republicans will be singing the tune of femboy superiority in no time.

The time that far right Polish politician posed for a photo holding a femboy at a cosplay convention.

“Gentlemen, is it gay to fuck another dude?” is a question that no amount of philosophizing can answer satisfactorily for a certain segment of the population.

The most impressive part is reaching that philosophical question within 5 subcomments after starting on the topic of money in politics.

On the one hand, feminism is generally hostile to the category of strategy you're suggesting, if it's too obvious. And on the other hand, there's right-wing adversarial selection of ugly failed men to publicly pin to the movement.

Sailers law of female journalism taken one step further to societal engineering? I can accept that. Feminists wanting ugly women to be social currency to enhance their own position is logically consistent with pushing disgusting unwomen into the spotlight. Agreed re the right wingers highlighting every bad example that will exist regardless of the supply of submissive and breedable femboys, but frankly that's still the fault of the trannies for pushing rupaul rejects as their modal representation.

Sailers law of female journalism

... dare I ask?

From Steve Sailer: “The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.”

Can't tell if you're joking or serious, but hard disagree. It's just homosexuality with better costumes. I think the particular modus you are describing is the method of grabbing 'feminine' status/power to avoid a low status position. I honestly read it the same way as those fitness videos where the now muscular bro lambasts their previous scrawny self.

Beware The Femboy Of One Study.

Results Gynandromorphophilia (GAMP) is sexual interest in gynandromorphs (GAMs; colloquially, shemales) ... GAMP men had arousal patterns similar to those of heterosexual men and different from those of homosexual men.

"Traps are gay" is the ultimate Scissor statement. The finest minds of our generation have debated this question endlessly without coming to a consensus. To some, it is clear that literally fucking a man must be gay, regardless of rationalizations. To others, it is equally obvious that, since they are straight, anything that can make them hard is a woman. And to a third group, it depends on the situation.

I'm firmly on the side that liking traps is not gay. We know what gay hentai aimed at actually gay men looks like, and it is completely different from trap hentai which is instead aimed at straight men. And, for that matter, both are completely different from gay erotica aimed at straight women.

I want to fuck Astolfo up the ass. That doesn't make me gay, that makes me straight, because only a straight man would be attracted to a trap character like Astolfo from Fate. Real gay men are not attracted to traps; they are attracted to beefcake characters like Endeavor from My Hero Academia. And women are attracted to aloof, abussive pretty boys like Sasuke from Naruto.

Real gay are not attracted to traps is a ridiculous statement. I contend some gays are only attracted to traps because they are men, if they are women the attraction goes away.

Here I think your thinking hinges on your definition of real 'gay', which seems to be you wanting to group people of certain attributes rather than partakers of actions, or people who hold attractions. This is I think dishonest gate-gatekeeping. If gay is synonymous with homosexual, which I think it is, then you defining it with subjectivity is at odds with how the rest of society uses the word.

I'll caveat that there is femboy stuff aimed at gay men (not even always aimed at people who want to be the femboy, and sometimes not even at tops!)... and it starts at the 100% side of that bar (cw: femboy, furry, no bits but probably awkward to explain to your employer, Helldivers reference) and usually is going to aim for 110%+.

Looking at the image, the femboy isn't particularly muscled or otherwise masculine asides from the flat chest, this is more like a 20-25%. Did you mean to link something else?

Uh... more pointing at the upskirt, though I recognize it's a relatively subtle version of that. MarcusGrayArts put more of an emphasis on 'that's a saran-wrapped sausage', but it's also not even arguably non-porn.

If you're looking at femboy muscle, maybe something like this (cw: gay ass in gayer underwear, don't look at the rest of the artist's feed unless you like gay porn)?

Now that one's definitely 110%, though at that point there's almost no fem in your boy—the snouts are a dead giveaway. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the mere presence of a penis is largely incidental to the gayness of a particular piece.

The eternal question: Are Traps Gay?

I don't know, but Brigitte Lin was amazing in Swordsman II and The East is Red (which I have only seen in terribly subtitled and even more terribly edited versions ages ago). She's playing a man who was turned into a woman via magical martial arts techniques, so she's attracting both male and female lovers.

It's situational. Apologies for the Reddit link; pointing at the image directly ends up breaking the link.

Note that, assuming the reactor is a man, there are 2 different "orientations" hidden in here. They're not the ones you'd expect.

First is the straight obligate woman-fucker one, where the fact it's a man doesn't really come up or have much relevance. See girl physical features, fuck those features, the fact he's not a girl is secondary to the experience.

Last is the gay obligate man-fucker one, where the fact it's a man is both not only central to the experience but focuses just as hard on the physical features of the participant(s). It's just that it's focused on the physical features of him being a man. The fact he's not a girl is also secondary to the experience.

The space in between them is the weird one, where the fact he's not a girl is primary to the experience. These works tend to be focused far more on the emotional aspects of the difference (and, like, not actually being a girl) rather than merely the physical ones.

These traps also tend to intentionally de-emphasize primary and secondary sexual characteristics, so you could probably rather accurately term it asexuality (as in, how I'd expect people who don't have the biological 'reproduce now' imperatives running at the forefront of their minds). Sure, it's still sexual in fact, but it's a bit different than that in intent. [More cynically, it's the two-player version of sex where the others are single-player.]

People whose model of sexuality is limited to the first block cannot draw a distinction between it and the second block, and our language of orientation restricts us to talking about the first block. That's why traps can be in superposition between gay and not gay; the term can't answer the question.

That link has it behind a paywall, but relying on surveys is never strong evidence in my opinion. If arousal pattern is just attraction to the female form, I have no doubt GAMPs will say they're not-homosexual.

It's fairly obvious from cultures where ladyboys are a thing (most notoriously, Thailand) that the men who fuck ladyboys are not gay.

the men who fuck ladyboys are not gay

Then the men who eat cowboys are not cannibals.

Meat is meat. Statement applicable to all groups involved in the above queries

Dog I don't care whether you're a vegan or not but stop telling me green eggs and ham are a vegetable.

That is not obvious to me. Are you confounding social cues with orientation or behavior? Do you consider the men who act with ladyboys not gay because they are 'straight-acting'?

Even in places famous for promoting non-heterosexuality, there's a lot more guys who like woman-and-people-who-have-boob+dick than who like men-and-people-who-have-boob+dick, even before adjusting for demographics. The former category isn't universal or even common among otherwise-straight men, but if I had to guess, there's probably more of it than there are attractive trans woman in the real world. The latter category does exist, but it's really small, and most of the examples are more on the AGP or trans side.

There's some fun argument-about-definitions going on -- the tops are still fucking XY-chromosoned people some of the time, yes -- but whatever the resulting category is called, it's somewhat interesting that it's around. If even a small fraction of this population fit the stereotype of just wanting some breasts around to keep their other attraction toward the male form deniable, you'd expect to see some outputs fitting that, and it's really just not.

(by comparison, that's absolutely a category that shows up in bi porn: Corbin Fisher's a little infamous for having their main talent literally throw the women into the background or out of the camera frame to focus on the real action.)

I think that's more in the ancient Classical world tradition of "if you're the top, it's not gay". Guys who fuck cute boys aren't gay; guys who were cute boys but aged out of that but still like man-on-man sex (particularly bottoming) are gay and repulsive (see Catullus 33).

If even a small fraction of this population fit the stereotype of just wanting some breasts around to keep their other attraction toward the male form deniable

Isn't that just because [mechanism of attraction to the male form] functions differently than [mechanism of attraction to the female form], though? Straight men are aroused by penises after all (I don't believe that 1950s-era study measured women in that way, and this is notable for being conducted in a pre-mass-issue-pornography world) so it's not that far out of left field for futanari to be the overwhelmingly dominant meme for men. /d/ is for dickgirl, after all.

By contrast, I didn't think women were aroused by the form itself and were more into a derivative of its appearance/what it ultimately represents, or the qualities those traits suggest. Strength is attractive, muscles on their own perhaps not as much (if I recall correctly, men rate that chad.jpg meme- the actual picture one, not the MS Paint one- as more attractive than women do).

Straight men are aroused by penises after all

This is an important point, and a reason why "likes dick" is not synonomous with "gay"; as a quick survey of pornography will show you, straight men love seeing big hard throbbing cocks(SFW).

men rate that chad.jpg meme- the actual picture one, not the MS Paint one- as more attractive than women do

See relevant comic 😁

The link's broken. If you link to the page the image is on and not the page directly it should work though.

Can you define what you mean by Gay?

People who have sex (verb) with people who are are the same sex (noun). Also throw in people with same-sex attraction.

Those two definitions are going to sometimes return conflicting signals. One definition is essentially the definition of a crime or a sin, a thief is someone who takes something that isn't theirs. The other is the definition of a predilection or a disease, a kleptomaniac is someone who constantly desires to steal things. Conflating the two definitions leads to communications breakdowns.

A frat boy who wakes up still drunk and drives his lifted Jeep Wrangler home and kills a moron cyclist riding his bike at 4am* is a killer, in the sense that his actions caused the death of another, and he is guilty of the appropriate crime of manslaughter. But he isn't a killer in the sense that a hitman or a gangbanger is, or even in the sense that a Navy SEAL who has never committed a crime** is a killer. We learn nothing about the frat boy's (literal) killer instinct or bloodlust from his drunk driving disaster, it has little predictive value as to the risk that he will kill again. Vehicular manslaughter, as a crime of killing, is mostly non-predictive of a tendency towards killing in other situations. Similarly, special categories exist, killing in the military is poorly predictive of killing in civilian life.

Normally these two definitions of gay will work together. If you want to have sex with a dude, your attraction algorithm probably contains other dudes. But having never been to Thailand or spoken with a ladyboy customer, idk what their attraction algorithms look like. Certainly I doubt most of the gay men I know want to have sex with a post-surgery (breasted) tranny.

*Me

**lol

So your argument is basically if they have implants its not 'gay'?

More comments

If we can't define what it means to be a woman, that means we don't know what gay means either.

I think we can define what a woman is. Do we define the correct human physiology by the edge cases?

More comments

I have a confession: because apparently I'm still 12, I mentally answer to every sentence on this forum that ends with a question mark, with "YOUR MOM!", and then giggle at the occasional critical hit. Though this still isn't as good as the dude that asked "what's your favorite smell?" that one time.

"He who is penetrated is gay" is obvious to humanity in the general case.

You do see where the folks penetrating fellows can also be called gay?

Not so simple; again, see Catullus 56 where bisexuality, at the least, is not something shameful so long as you are the older, dominant, male:

O, Cato, what an absurdly funny thing,
worthy for you to hear and laugh at!
Laugh, as much as you love Catullus, Cato.
The thing is too absurd and funny.
I just found a young boy having sex with a girl:
May it please Diona, I attacked him
with my rigid thing, using it as a spear.

I fail to see what relevance a definition of 'shame' is to my definition of 'gay'.

More comments

In a modern context that had to come up with a way to divorce identity from action to convince the [US] Christian-leaning folks of the time to let them do it because their culture was more receptive to claims it was an in-built identity rather than just something you do? Yes, tautologically.

However, outside of that very specific context, I don't feel that's a good use of the term, no. There's a very good reason the medical field says 'men who have sex with men', not 'gay'; it's a tacit admission that the category is bad since if it were any better it would have been adopted universally.

There’s a lot of truth there, historically;

“The penetrated” are practically always Gay™;

“The penetrators” can often get a lot more leeway than a strict gender/sex binarist might expect.

To take a different approach if you're really into dudes, find them totally interesting, fascinating, say you have a non-trivial oriented preference. Finding out a person you thought was a dude, actually isn't, means you lose interest regardless of their appearance.

Finding out a person you thought was a dude, actually isn't, means you lose interest regardless of their appearance.

Yeah, about that. Also, tomboys in general.

Tomboys are still girls.

I mean the converse can be true? There was this dude I found totally cool and chill and when I discovered he was a girl I totally got the hots for her. Didn't do anything because I was a socially awkward dweeb and also raised not to be a creep but there is something primal about male female dynamics that does get activated when the knowledge is instantiated.

But your statement "whatever makes me hard is a woman", your friend was still a woman before you knew she was; your attraction didn't change her sex (noun). Her actual sex is a non-trivial attribute, from you statement 'I discovered he was girl and totally had the hots for her' your knowledge/attraction doesn't determine her sex but builds off her actual sex as you form your opinions of her.

The assumed presence of penis made my juvenile brain unable to activate the necessary response. The assumed presence of vagina after I discovered the truth made my juvenile brain unable to continue conversation without babbling like a fucking autist. The physical attractiveness wasn't the arousing variable (that she looked like a man meant she was pretty unattractive) the prolonged presence she was willing to have in my company was. Teenagers are fucktarded morons and that is why I don't consider teenagers people.

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