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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
One tenet that was getting repeated on those sites is that women don't understand cause and effect well because it's unnecessary for childrearing.
Golly these people are sexist. Women do do better with male supervision but only if those men don't hate them for being women.
Let’s be honest though. Most men don’t faire very well either in their youth when the hormones first kick in and all they can think about is love and sex. It’s all consuming on a level that is maddening to get ahold of and they shouldn’t be entrusted with too much independent decision making either. It’s practically as intoxicating as trying to rear every young man off cocaine because those changes are essentially are a cocktail of drugs. When the testosterone first hit my body and mind were brimming with a level of energy that was uncontrollable and I felt like I could conquer the world. I was a raging hell storm for others to deal with at times. And while I perform quite well in all spheres today, 16-18 year old me could absolutely run circles around me in 2025; I would be no match for myself then.
No, sixteen year old boys shouldn't be emancipated either.
Patriarchy is elders the managung incompetent and emotive youngins and the greatest trick of women was to have men take the label when mothers are the ones who exert control over their daughters and other inferiors far more viciously than men do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, I guess they'd say that they hate women not for being women per se, but for being irrational, cowardly, idiotic, etc etc you get it. The chuddiest among them might draw parallels to 13/52 and whatnot.
Honestly, they have a point. The moral inferiority of womankind is an obvious conclusion of most redpill/traditionalist thought, but proponents of such always either handwave it away or dutifully ignore the implications.
But hating them for these things does not help to lead them. The bible's first instruction for husbands is 'love your wives' presented as being as important as wives submitting to their husbands.
Well, just like when a wife stops submitting when a husband demonstrates over the long term that he doesn’t love her, when women as a class have demonstrated over the long term that they are not interested in anything that even smells like submitting, they shouldn’t anticipate much love from men as a class.
The Bible also has plenty of examples of God allowing his loved children to get the fruits of their bad decisions good and hard while saying some extremely harsh things about them/us, and that’s sometimes part of actually loving someone.
I don't think this works as a parallel. It seems to me that submissiveness is not desirable in of itself, but as a proxy for a cooperative demeanor. Trivially, a wife who is capable of exercising sound judgement within her domain and contributing effectively to collective decisions seems superior to a more "submissive" wife who never exercises her agency to the benefit of the couple. I suppose that most men would prefer to be the generally senior partner in the relationship, but that's a much looser paradigm than 1 Timothy 2:12 would have it. If I may also get a little Freudian, surveys consistently find that men prefer to be the dominant partner only by a relatively small margin. By contrast, women are much more insistent that they be the submissive party and are far more averse to dominating than men are to submitting.
Now, insofar as one believes that women are intrinsically poor agents, then female submission is approximately equivalent to effective cooperation. I know @hydroacetylene is insistent on women's lesser capacity for agency, and I presume you are too. However, this view would naturally seem to lead to a recognition that women are lower creatures than men, in accordance with the pre-Christian understanding; a donkey may not be a defective horse, but it is still an ass. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with Christian philosophy and there's some galaxy-brained epicycle around this implication, but everything else within the redpill/traditionalist consensus on women seems to implicitly corroborate this outlook. This, fundamentally, is the core concern of feminism, or at least the most defensible steelman of feminism, and so long as the Right neither has a satisfying answer for them nor reinstates complete patriarchal control, its spectre shall continue to haunt them.
Women are not lesser creatures than men because agency is not the end all be all. They have their role and it's quite important. It's just not as much about leading.
More options
Context Copy link
This is backwards, imo. The problem is that most women lose all respect for us if we're not. Riffing off what the other guy said, women are still evolved to expect men to take charge of most of that physical reality and survival and stuff. Except now the mechanisms for those things are heavily feminized bureaucracy so it seems natural to let the women take the lead on it and they utterly fucking hate doing it because if they are taking care of and being responsible for something, that means it is a baby.
More options
Context Copy link
My fundamental position on the question really is no more complicated than this.
so then why not just lead with that instead of "boys rule girls drool god says so"?
and by extension, why doesn't the average traditionalist seem interested in changing their byline about women to this?
Because modern society interprets that as “boys rule girls drool god say so.”
You might notice that, for example, this wife who is far more precious than jewels is clearly busy with much more work than just child-rearing and domesticity. She’s finding intellectually stimulating ways to contribute to the family, from within the domestic sphere. She’s clearly interacting with the external economy by buying a vineyard, providing the merchants with sashes, selling linen garments, etc. She’s just doing all that in the name of her home and family, in a way centered around the home, rather than in a way centered around career-progression/girl-bossing and in the name of an NGO or Wal-Mart.
You might also notice that while her works are praised in the city gate, the one who actually takes his seat there and interacts with the elders is the husband. We don’t know what this specific husband does for day to day work, but it’s Proverbs, so I have to assume he is also working hard, just outside of the home in the non-domestic sphere. He’s the one that handles the external politics. He’s the one that’s going to go to war. That’s his job, it’s not hers.
Just having this as a baseline stance is already a thoughtcrime and called misogynist thought.
Additionally, we also live in a society where people, for better or worse, don’t accept “The Bible says,” as valid reasoning. So if someone has the intuitive opinion that things have gone wrong with gender relations, has identified some factual evidence of this, and believes the Bible is either the word of God or even just good advice, they have to attempt to validate their position not by quoting the Bible, but by identifying what the secular cause of the man/woman damage is.
That often results in having to tell women they are not perfect, which is immediately interpreted as:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Gender Marxism, man, it’s toxic in every respect. Individual women are not part of a class, I mean, obviously they have interests as a class, but they prefer their interests as part of a family. Corporatism, you know, not Marxism. Women aren’t defective men and men arent defective women, either.
Red pill bullshit makes me worry for my daughters more than feminism does. Granted lots of that is just exposure bias. But there are still good women out there. They don’t deserve to be treated like radical feminists. Women respond to love and care and consideration, even if they’re in a defensive mode.
I don’t know which sex, on average, defected first. The whole question seems entirely irrelevant. What matters is what an individual should do, how to build virtue, and treating people in accordance with their god given gender roles. No, that’s not exactly the same, but it’s also not in revenge for what some other person who happens to have the same chromosomal configuration did. Listen to the Bible instead of coming up with excuses, I’d tell the same thing to the gays, drug users, etc. Don’t come at me about anarcho-tyranny or whatever the latest ‘Christian moral rules are for cucks’ framing is. Women should submit to their husbands and men should love their wives, but neither of these things is preconditioned. It’s a requirement, not a contractual arrangement. That’s for Mohammedans.
Yes...
Getting closer...
And a miss. So close; I'm sure we'll figure out a constructive version of interaction between the sexes without going straight to the cold bucket of water someday.
Nobody defected. What happened was that men went with the best information they had at a time when the bottom fell completely out of the market for the product men provided, that being "material goods for survival". In the US that happened 90 years ago, a timeline most Western countries followed.
See, in the pre-industrial ages, where the picture of the US is Little House on the Prairie (and people think this is true of Europe all the way back to the start of the Dark Ages- it's not true, but this is what most people think), men were responsible for a society's survival. They're the one evolution gave that advantage to.
That gives them leverage in a way it doesn't for women. Even your verse- rated #1 by Wicked Husbands Weekly for the past 2 millennia- has this state of affairs buried in it. The duties assigned there are rhetorically symmetrical, and perhaps in the first century they actually were, but in post-scarcity "men, love your wives" is little more than an inkblot/no-op, while the converse demand of submission is an utterly massive ask for a post-scarcity woman. We're rich enough now that the reason a man would take a wife he wasn't willing to love already has been lost, so it's a strict boon for men at the expense of women.
Wicked and simple men love this verse for a good fucking reason. They know what they're doing.
What happens when a society structured around food scarcity runs into the brick wall that is the hydroelectric generating station, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, the farming combine, smokeless powder/dynamite/the other trappings of modern chemistry, the Haber-Bosch process, practical fixed-wing aviation, and hundreds of thousands of others? Well, what happens is that men who grew up in a society where being a man had privileges because survival was a scarce resource now had nothing.
So you get a few generations of people born right at the tail end of scarcity, right as the value of survival was hitting zero, and their children, who have absolutely no earthly clue on how to maximize their daughters' standing in modern society, did the only thing they know how to, the only thing they reasonably could have been expected to. Fathers and mothers alike agree, because that is how it was back in their living memory, that women must be submissive to men because men do deserve it, or rocks fall and everyone dies. That is why going barefoot from kitchen to bedroom was the highest calling- Mom would have legitimately loved that this job had been made so much easier to the point it turned her full-time job into one that required perhaps an hour or two at a time and Dad just can't fully understand what the big deal is; after all, it worked for them, and Mom loved it, did she not?
Thus leading us to having a breed of more-than-average-disagreeable woman who refused to listen to their folks who told them not to make anything of themselves, and they prospered wildly, especially compared to the ones that did and never made anything of themselves (and who comprised the first huge divorce wave once it was legalized in the '70s). Which now makes the selection effect of "don't listen to your folks, they don't know fuck all" because they really, truly, genuinely did not know fuck all (they simply weren't equipped to do so; nobody at the time really had a good idea of what "the value of men just dropped to zero" would mean), so as the generations go by and the older pre-scarcity people die off, there's no counter-meme for moderation.
So if you're wondering how you get feminists, and how '60s feminists turn into '10s gynosupremacists, that's how. Under Whig History, this is traditionalists' "fault", and aspiring traditionalists who still believe in that (and perhaps more importantly, who want to convert people into Christians) must absolutely come up with an answer for that. Until that day, our "god-given gender roles" will continue to be viewed as a twisted joke, and our persecution complex (and the makeup of our churches- which is selected for men and women who haven't come to terms with modernity, whether we like that or not, healthy people don't need doctors after all) will tempt us to double down on RETVRN.
There were some academics- the autistic women [and men] who were disagreeable enough to get into an academic career track to study this- that did show some signs of actual understanding. But the weapons they left lying around were then picked up by wicked women, and it turns out they continue to work even today. We even pretend it is an advancement to be ruled over by wicked women than by wicked men.
So, uh, what's a path forward? Well, I don't actually think men can do anything about it on their own; their marginal value is basically zero, after all- other than noting that men did not fight a violent battle against women when it became clear the "battle" was lost, or to attempt to restore our monopoly on survival, and that the main problem is women fighting a violent battle [by proxy, and forcing men to bear the costs of intentional inaction because the solution wasn't "just right"] against us now.
We'll generally be in the supporting role for this one: specifically, that if we ultimately agree that the role/general desire of the statistical-average woman is indeed to be provided for, that we take care not to burn out the devotion that makes that state of affairs tolerable -> attractive -> stable. Already we see this is on a knife's edge more than it used to be in part to an overzealous slash-and-burn of what used to provide a path resistant to mere boredom/casual unwillingness to work, and the standard traditionalist "the moral inferiority of womankind is an obvious conclusion of most redpill/traditionalist thought, but proponents of such always either handwave it away or dutifully ignore the implication" doesn't actually help that (I'm not sure why redpillers are particularly interested in doing the mental equivalent of calling their wives, or the stock of the pool of wives for the average man, stupid and fat- oh, wait, yes we do).
Fortunately, the average progressive has a weakness: they also believe (due to instinct) that they're morally inferior to men, and are as such so focused on taking revenge for this state of nature that they make mistakes in a way that the traditionalist female stereotype can predict and outperform.
That is, when it's not just being used as an excuse to be retarded. Oh well, at least if we fumble the ball sufficiently we can at least take solace in the fact that virtueless women (and men) will fail to reproduce at outsized rates, and will have a eugenic effect on the population. So maybe humanity will evolve to solve it ourselves.
It speaks to the thickness of hypoagency bias that women can write ten thousand volumes of "So I'm Defecting, Here's Why and What That Means for You" (you did an oppression, you disrespected house work, you called me Jane Catlady, etc) over the course of decades and we still can't figure this one out.
To me the question was never who defected first—but rather were women justified in burning it all down. Litigating that question with individual women extracted so much from me that I'm simply not interested in doing so anymore. Agreeing to disagree, I'm now much more concerned with what's to be done about the fact that women find the historical conditions that generated sustainable fertility intolerable. It troubles me because all solutions I've heard from all across politics right now seems to be some flavor or variety of "well if it really gets down to it men will simply be forced to pay the market rate for replacement", but I think people, specifically men who haven't spoken to women about the subject, grossly underestimate how high that price really is. We had a world where childbirth was considered a woman's bloodsoaked battlefield, and that valuation was considered by women to be oppressively low.
And it was decided that, in hindsight, they didn't actually deserve it, they never deserved it, and the fact that they got it is strong contender for the biggest heist in human history. I sometimes find myself wondering: if my forefathers who sacrificed so much more for so little weren't worthy, what possible hope do I have?
My preferred solution is dumping 100 trillion dollars over 30 years into regenerative medicine with an eye toward enhanced longevity. This would attack the big problem from both ends: both reducing dependents and increasing lifetime fertility at the same time. The pitiful value of my blood isn't a threat to me if I'm never compelled to trade it, but I worry there will be a decade or two of experimentation with the "men just pay up" solution before it's realized to be a dead end.
Hopefully I've been born just in time to have aged out of being a primary target.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This gives me quizzical eyebrows. There are multiple examples of God, in the Bible, treating people as a class. Surely not every single child in Jericho was more inherently wicked than an Israelite child, and yet God instructed the Israelites to kill them all, young and old.
Not every single person in the Kingdom of Israel could have been fully deserving of being conquered by the Assyrians. But they still were caught up in the disaster that fell upon the Kingdom, which God had been warning them about, as a class, for some time.
That being said, there are, I firmly believe, millions of good women out there in America. I want my boys to find the good woman for them, and then be good, responsible, kind, loving husbands who deserve their position at the head of the family, just as much as I imagine you would want the gender-swapped version for your girls. The problem is that those millions of women either have next to no voice or are not exercising it to sufficiently to reel in their sisters. Isaiah and Josiah tried everything they could, and the general trend of Judah was still in the direction of being conquered by Babylon. Even Deborah managed to get the Israelites to stay in line for only 40 years.
This is less to do with woman specifically, but I don’t think Christian moral rules are cucked. I think they’re great, the result of literally the best thing that ever happened to the Earth and humans. I just also think Urban II was a good Pope and that as recently as 1881 in our Church and civilization, Christians just like you and I could grasp the idea that the guy who started the chant “God wills it!” and was the first mover for hundreds of years of bloodshed, is also Blessed in Heaven.
No disagreement there. I too have read Theology of the Body.
This I’m really confused about, because I don’t think they line up well.
If I treat a woman, in the workplace, in accordance with her God-given gender role, perhaps by saying something like “I don’t know if it’s really worth it for you to keep being a lawyer/doctor/shelf-stacker if you can at all avoid it. Children benefit way more from having Mom around, vs going to daycare, and you might find that you like being a stay-at-home Mom more than you thought.” Or something like “It’s better to get married and have kids when you’re young, then think about building your career later.” I mean, really, what’s your over/under on when HR comes around to tell me to stop being such a sexist, or just cuts straight to finding a reason to fire me?
Maybe I should do it anyways, and have the courage of my convictions. I’m no Daniel, I’m not brave to face the incredibly lame corporate arena like the martyr’s, better men than me, were.
But I just don’t see why I shouldn’t treat the average woman like a radical feminist? I don’t see a need to invite more unpleasantness into my life by being chivalric towards them. I’m chivalric towards my wife, the parish ladies, and that’s about it, honestly.
I don’t know if you think that I have some desire to grind the boot into women’s faces or something, but I don’t.
I do, however, think that we are living through the consequences of the modern bio-Leninist view of equality, and the child sacrifice/sexual perversions/upending of gender relations and even the concept of sex itself that came with that view.
I hold out hope. Nineveh received a long reprieve when they repented. We still could too. I just don’t think it’s likely, and that we’re all going to get what some of us wanted, good and hard, eventually. I think having this point of view is at least as loving as, say, Jeremiah, who really did want the best for his people.
You are not God. God is not you.
But in any event, the biblical account of God also has multiple examples of God engaging differently with some individuals out of a class. These things are not trivial to just take one way or another.
If you can go back through my post history, and tell me where I said or even, in your opinion, implied I am God, I will then assume this comment is in good faith.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, yes, it's sexist. Then again, society is also sexist, as are most women.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't it? Surely punishing a child is just reinforcement learning.
The punishing was normally done by the father though, wasn't it?
No? My grandfather recalls his cousins that were still subsistence farmers at the time(Acadiana in the early 20th century was not a developed country) living in terror of their mothers, who would immediately beat them with whatever was at hand at the slightest sign of wrongdoing. The chancla is female coded even today.
I suppose there's a gender norm of serious corporal punishment being administered by men, but the average spanking was probably done by a woman.
More options
Context Copy link
On a farm, yes. By the mid-20th century, no - Dad didn't reliably get home before bedtime, and in any case Mum knew that immediate punishment was dramatically more effective than delayed punishment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link