site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21491 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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Do I think that Ezra Klein or other feminists are primarily or even substantially responsible for a subculture of porn addicts? No, but the force they apply does push in that direction.

Am I recommending "men being allowed to rape" as being better than this or that social ill? No! But the thinking that supposes that that's the only alternative is going to be increasingly destructive.

From the original article:

What binds these disparate masturbators together, then, are the communal rituals surrounding the goonstate... By far the most popular of these rituals is “feeding,” a sort of porn-mediated cybersex in which one gooner sustains another’s session by sending them curated porn from their private collection.

There is, it should be said, a separate, equally vibrant, and by all accounts far less psychosexually muddled world of gay-porn gooning.

this phenomenon in its full sweep can be traced at least partially to the fact that, in the span of about five years earlier this century, virtually every child in the developed world was granted instant, unrestricted access not merely to hardcore pornography but to some of the most extreme examples of it ever produced in human history. Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit.

he’d spent part of our call trying to explain the appeal of damaging your penis badly enough to permanently prevent getting an erection, but not so badly as to prevent masturbating for hours on end.

In the introduction to his recent video “Follow Me,” a woman’s voice whispers ominously, or perhaps sexily, that “over two hundred ten million people worldwide are addicted to social media. You are one of those people. Keep scrolling. Further. Deeper. Forever. And ever. Submit. To porn. You can’t. Turn back.”

Whatever conversation needs to be had about little boys getting traumatized by hardcore images at 10 and proceeding to spend 20-30h/ week frantically rubbing themselves to 27 windows' worth of simultaneous pumping penis images... the need for more tradwives is not at the heart of that conversation. If anything, tradwives are the shadow selves of egirls and thots: the two reciprocally determine each other within the same memetic system, and that system doesn't make a lot of sense beyond online porn.

Plenty of people have thought they could escape tedious self-loathing by using/ controlling/ hating/ destroying another person instead, but I don't think it ever really works that way.

If anything, tradwives are the shadow selves of egirls and thots: the two reciprocally determine each other within the same memetic system, and that system doesn't make a lot of sense beyond online porn.

Could you explain this? I don’t follow. Also, it would help if you could clarify what you mean by tradwives here; there are several very different ways the word is used, and I can’t figure out which you mean from context.

Independently of whether women hypergamy should be celebrated or socially repressed and shamed, a lot of the obsession you see in the crowd that say they want nothing but a virgin tradwife has very clear parallels with other sexual fixations. If it was really just about worrying about how it affects their chance at a good relationship, they could just, you know, get to know a woman' personality before committing, for sure a better indicator of compatibility and relationship potential than any reading the tea leaves in her sexual past. But the point is that a lot of the "trad or bust" crowd really have a purity fetish, with exactly all the same implications that the word 'fetish' has in porn.

Do you just mean that they find purity a sexually appealing trait? If so, that's not surprising, and I don't see how that would cast doubt on their other reasons. Or do you mean something more than that?

Edit: If you could give a relatively SFW example, that would be helpful.

Well, innocence of personality can be endearing. And chastity, continence, fidelity, strength, self-control are admirable character features in both men and women.

But purity isn't any attribute of the beloved themselves, it's just an imagined state of non-contamination by sex: for instance, feeling that a woman is pure when no cocks have ever touched her but impure when 1,000 cocks have touched her, whatever. That's a clear setup for a fetish-based arousal, i.e. arousal by a thing itself separated from the person, because the energy of the appeal comes from one's feelings toward the contaminant, not toward the partner themselves.
For some folks, it appears to be impulse of underlying disgust for one's own sexuality, the virginal submissive tradwife envisioned as a retreat from all those dirty whores and your uncomfortable desire/repulsion toward them. For others, it seems more motivated by aggression/dominance and the appeal of getting to be the one whose sexual contact destroys the pure thing. Either way, the big complex feelings driving that attraction would be between the guy and his own self-image, not actually between the guy and his partner.

Which is a point the article also makes, actually, when the writer realizes that all the gooners' cave photos seem to center on their own erect penis standing up in the middle.

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