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 -
Who else up watching election results? As of the time of this writing Decision Desk has called all of:
The Virginia governor race in favor of Abigail Spanberger (D).
The Virginia lieutenant governor race in favor of Ghazala Hashmi (D and the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office).
The Virginia Attorney General race in favor of Jay Jones (D lmao).
The New Jersey governor race in favor of Mickie Sherrill (D).
The NYC mayoral race for Zohran Mamdani (D, projecting a majority of the vote too lmao).
Both statewide Georgia Public Service Commissioner races for the Democratic candidates.
Polls are still open in California so no word yet there on the redistricting ballot measure. In other Jay Jones news the house delegate who leaked his texts is on track to lose her re-election, as part of dems winning a trifecta in the Virginia government.
The county by county level results I've seen show pretty much all of the above running ahead of Harris and Spanberger even running ahead of Biden in 2020. Is this indicative of what we might see going forward? Dems had previously overperformed in special elections this year but this is the closest to a general until next years actual federal elections. If these trends hold up not a good sign for Republicans!
That "IF" is doing absurd amounts of work here.
Anyway, literally none of these outcomes was too surprising or even concerning to me. I have managed to studiously avoid caring too much about these elections since my state has mostly just been a beneficiary of other states self-immolating.
The outcome that was ALSO unsurprising but I think has some really noticeable import is the Young Female Vote*:
and on the male side:
*Exit polling, so the real margins might look different.
Dems can pull a basic majority with young men, but still have 40+% going republican even in a good year. But are pulling huge majorities with the young women.
So there's a sizeable gendered political gap even in blue-leaning states.
If you're a young conservative dude in any of those states, good freaking luck finding a romantic partner. For the <20% of women who might partially agree with your politics, your competition is your 'fellow' conservatives, who overall outnumber the available pool of women.
Oh and then there's the recent research that "Male students show more tolerance for political enemies than females show for their own allies"
So in terms of 'trends,' What do you think eventually happens if young women continue voting for Democrats/lefties in droves... and have extreme intolerance for anyone who doesn't, while young men tack further right?
Complete Democrat political dominance? 80+% of women consistently voting for Democratic party candidates would be a nigh insurmountable electoral advantage.
Right.
Unless men decide they don't like that.
I've said it before, Women are a potent political force but an incompetent military/policing one.
If 60ish percent of men vote one way, and 80ish percent of women vote the other, and win, seems like a problem if the men who are in that 60% are ALSO the ones who would be tasked with carrying out/enforcing the laws they expressly disagree with.
Oh, and paying for it all too.
So here's the question I really want answered:
If less than half of the young men buy-in to the ideal of gender equality, what happens to a Democracy that tries to enforce gender equality?
WE'RE PROBABLY GONNA FIND OUT.
What are you envisioning here? Are police going to refuse to make arrests for crimes? What crimes? Prosecutors refuse to file charges? Judges going to toss cases? Are you under the impression all parts of the justice system today think every law they enforce is just? I am very skeptical that is the case.
What do you think is going to happen?
Depends. If the issue is most prevalent on a state-by-state basis, I think we see Police quit and move to more favorable jurisdictions., which worsens the crime issues in the Blue areas, which either 'forces' a political correction, or it spirals into decay a la Detroit.
Likewise, why, do you suppose, did Military recruitment surge in 2025 after literally hitting an all-time-low in 2022 under Biden?
Guys choosing to simply not join military/police forces would be enough to undermine a government's legitimacy in a given territory.
I think we see a political figure arise who notices and exploits the disconnect between the political priorities of the government and the actual political grievances expressed by a majority of men.
I think we should be very hopeful that its J.D. Vance or a guy like him. Vance clearly NOTICES the issue, and he's good at credibly establishing himself as "one of the guys."
Whether Vance will exploit this to the hilt remains to be seen.
But someone will.
I also think that an economic contraction will re-assert some 'reality' to the discourse, should it occur. We had a long era of economic growth post the 2008 crash and the Zero-Interest-Rate era. Plus the Covid Hiring boom.
lotta people getting laid off from cushy jobs, in many cases maybe the only real career-type jobs they've ever held. Women might finally, F-I-N-A-L-L-Y be required to either suffer from economic destitution or make some concessions to men to obtain the support of a good one.
If they can't marry a corporation who will take care of all their needs, and the Federal Government, for once, isn't bending over backwards to accommodate their complaints, well, the default fallback is probably either prostitution or marriage. And there's already a lot of prostitutes.
I do personally expect things to get worse before they get better.
Without @HereAndGone's snarkiness: why do so many of you salivate at the thought of women being forced to sexually service someone they don't want in order to eat? Yes, this was the norm in earlier ages. Those ages sucked a lot for almost everyone, given that the average person lived a precarious existence at best.
To desire a return to the sort of civilization in which you can get a woman because her survival literally depends on you does not seem to me like a normal, healthy thing to desire in a society with abundance enough that most people shouldn't have to consider starvation or enslavement a realistic possibility.
Even if this worked, would you not always be living with that gnawing awareness that she's only with you out of necessity? That you're literally just the next best thing to starvation?
It seems to me to not only be a spiteful and misogynistic attitude, but one utterly lacking in self respect.
The question is whether this level of abundance will remain sustainable on a level where average women are practically self-sufficient.
If they were practically self-sufficient, I think we would actually see more abundance, and that would be a very different and very interesting world. I think that world would have a high chance of dying out in a generation or two, but it might not, and that would very interesting.
The problem is that, even accounting for the fact that practically no one is truly self-sufficient in these times, women appear to be less self-sufficient than men, on average.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Consider it this way: when the Chinese government banned cram schools, one might think they were attacking a deeply beloved institution. People paid huge amounts of money to the cram schools, kids spent huge amounts of their time there. Surely they would be really upset at having them taken away?
But no, of course not. Everyone hated and resented the cram schools. They existed because of a specific set of incentives that were unchangeable from the inside, and that could only be changed by a large-scale coercion.
I can’t speak for the Dread Jim etc. because I don’t follow them, but IMO the point is that men and women more naturally form loving bonds when a) they are paired together, and b) their interests are broadly aligned.
Modern society has broken both of these conditions, in an attempt to solve the problems that arose in cases when the previous system went wrong. By allowing women to work in the same paying jobs as men, and by providing unconditional support, it deliberately ensured that women didn’t require a man to take care of herself. A noble goal to be sure, but the result is that the natural fear of opportunity costs, generalised fear and distrust of men, (and, yes, a certain hypergamous tendency) combine to ensure lots of women don’t end up paired. (The same dynamics apply on the male side to but I think to a lesser degree).
Likewise, we have worked hard to ensure that even when married, a woman’s interests are kept separate from her husband’s, in order to avoid genuinely nasty abuses that occurred under the previous system. Women now retain their property when married, they usually retain their jobs, and they can decouple with minimal difficulty. This means that even during marriage, a woman often has one eye on being ready for an exit and her own private interests often conflict with the interests of her husband and family.
IMO the goal is lots of loving, happy relationships. (With, yes, an inevitable long tail of grudging-but-functional relationships and some pretty nasty ones). This benefits a big fraction men very clearly, because the current system is straightforwardly inimical to them; it’s hard to say whether it benefits women because they will gain certain things and lose certain things and probably different groups of women will benefit. I would like to think that the averaged outcome for women would be better, but even if it is mildly negative, ultimately the end effect will be positive when averaged across the sexes.
I don't personally agree with passing whatever laws you think would be necessary to eject women from the workforce, but the principle behind it, that women are happier being married with children and that everyone would be happier if society aligned to encourage that instead of "independent women," is probably true. I object to coercion and restricting people's freedom, even freedom to make bad choices, so I am not going to subscribe to "We should make women do what's best for them" even if I really did believe it's what best for them and not motivated by self-interest. "Society would be better if people did X, therefore we will force X through legislation" is ironically the sort of authoritarian thinking communist governments try to implement to reorder society for the greater good.
This is a pretty autistic Motte-pilled take. "If we measure how much happier most men would be, and how much happier many women would be, we can calculate that the net increase in happiness X is greater than the decrease in happiness Y of the women who don't like this arrangement, therefore they can suck it up." Talk about your authoritarian central planning! But let's say it's true. Let's say we blithely handwave away your "long tail" of abuse and misery which was much of the motivation for the rise of the feminist movement in the first place.
Here is the part you're really missing:
The Dread Jims of the world (of whom there apparently many more than you might think, even in Western society) don't care about love and happiness. They care about themselves and sexual satisfaction, and removing the indignity of women being able to thwart them. I don't know what Jim's personal life is actually like, but having read enough of his essays, it's hard to believe he actually loves his wife or daughters, except maybe in the same sense you might love your dog. Some of them (like Jim) might talk in Biblical terms about God's intended role for men and women, but their motivation is much baser and cruder: they think women should be property. Literally. Unironically. Dread Jim wrote an essay about it. He isn't kidding and he isn't being metaphorical. Most of our blackpillers and incels aren't so explicit about it, but you can read it in their words. They aren't motivated by some philosophical notion of what's best for society. They're seething that women they want to have sex with can tell them no. Their goal is not "loving, happy relationships," because that implies that the happiness of women is important also, and they consider pleasing women to be a distraction at best, the source of all evils at worst. You are not cynical enough when reading the words they actually type.
You know the old feminist slogan "Feminism is the radical belief that women are human." It's rightly derided for its simplistic, bad-faith assumptions about those who criticize feminism ("What the hell do you mean, no one is saying women aren't human!") While I roll my eyes like most people when I actually see it on t-shirts in the wild, I am occasionally reminded, even here on the Motte, that there are in fact people who exemplify the mindset that slogan is reacting to. It is not surprising to me that, faced with men like this who make it clear that they see a woman as a collection of warm wet holes that unfortunately has vocal cords and a brain stem attached, some women react in an extreme and possibly self-destructive fashion. If you want to persuade women that they should "settle" for less than the unrealistic and absurdly high standards that supposedly they are all demanding nowadays, keep in mind you're not just telling them to settle for an average guy who'd be a good if unexceptional husband, you are (at least from the incel viewpoint) telling them they should settle for a man who viscerally hates them and will treat them like a fleshlight.
You can either say you don't care about that because society as a whole will be better off, or you can have some understanding for why this is a hard sell for anyone who does, um, think women are human.
More options
Context Copy link
The mistake is thinking that modern society broke men and women on a simple whim that could be reversed just as simply with a lil' bit of political will. In reality, we have had techno-economical changes that first uplifted many men and women from farming/peasantry to urban work, offshored a lot of labor that required raw physical strength to machinery, and interlinked industry in such a way that people no longer rely mostly on themselves and a few local craftsmen to produce all they need in life.
Meaning, the attempts to blindly RETVRN are not aligning the interests of men and women because regressing to the farmer economy is not really in most people's interest. Also, the men that are most interested in upending the status quo are, it seems, not really the kind of men who were capable of forming "grudging-but-functional relationships" before, let alone loving ones.
The way for west-of-Hajnal societies, I think, is nowhere but forward. Or, we can break down our factories, go back to villages and sit there waiting for the ever-dreaded Muslims, who have got a lot more experience in that kind of life, to overrun us.
Contra ergw and the rest, I do not believe most true incels are so productive that they must be appeased with government-issued wives or society collapses. It should be sufficient to let the incels have their AIfus, the femcels their serial killer LLMen, erect some basic fucking standards so that the eligible men don't poach the femcels too much and use technology to connect pair-bondable men to pair-bondable women for once. Instead of whatever it is the dating apps are doing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's a spiteful and misogynistic attitude, but the alternative you imply isn't good either -- that women get to eat through the efforts of men that they provide absolutely nothing for. His attitude is pro-rape; that alternative is slavery.
Are those truly the only two alternatives you can conceive of? You are literally incapable of envisioning, or observing, relationships between men and women that are not slavery?
That is indeed horrifying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because the typical man disgusts the typical woman. The only way the average man gets laid on a regular basis if a woman is coerced into fucking him through some combination of physical force, legal authority, social pressure, religious indoctrination, and economic privation. The alternative is what we see now; masses of incels whose best chance at marriage is to wife up some post-wall roastie in her thirties, huge numbers of single mothers and childless cat ladies, legions of children traumatized by divorce, cratering birth rates driving us towards extinction, elites responding by importing infinite immigrants to replace the missing grandchildren.
The fact that the government steals at gunpoint from productive men to support women's """independence""" just adds insult to injury. The government taxes us to provide welfare to underclass women, uses the threat of lawsuits to force companies to hire middle-class women, and employs armies of men as cops and soldiers to physically defend all women. In other words, men are still providing money and protection for women, like we have always done, but now we do it collectively rather than individually, and get nothing out of it.
The message the political figure @faceh is talking about needs to deliver is simple: "We don't have to live like this. We don't. There is another way; a better way. But it starts with rejecting the zeroth commandment".
If the redpill view on women is correct, what's the alternative? You can accept being an incel and become a MGTOW, you can work towards a tradcon world where every productive man is rewarded with a wife, or you can try to become Chad and use PUA to pump and dump as many women as possible while enjoying the decline.
Still, it does fill one with existential dread. As AntiDem put it:
Since I was nine years old, I have known I never wanted to get married. And every time I revisit that and wonder "what would it have been like to get a partner/spouse?", some guy comes along with "women should be forced by the threat of actual starvation to marry me because that means I have the whip hand in that situation, and if you think that's a metaphor you aren't reading what I'm writing".
Thank God for spinsterhood, say I!
You should hear the cursing and swearing I'm doing right now. But okay, guys, let's cosplay Gor and force women into subordinate sexual service complete with leashes. Women can make themselves widows, and the rate of poisonings will go zooming upward. Be forced into a marriage, wait a little, disencumber yourself of the tyrant, and be a free widow. This worked in the Classical world and you want that back in the modern world?
We will see the return of veneration of St. Uncumber!
You want adultery and uncertain paternity to skyrocket? Because that's what you get when forcing women into unwanted marriage. Read the Canterbury Tales and all the jokes/stories about younger wives cuckolding their elderly, jealous husbands.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a big claim. Neither my anecdotal observation nor the data that I've seen supports it. According to this 2020 survey only 31% of US men are single. Now, out of the 69% of men who are not single, of course some fraction is partnered with women are either not having sex with them or are only having sex with them for reasons other than being attracted to them. I contend, based on anecdotal observation, that this fraction is not large. If you believe otherwise, perhaps you can put forward some data to support the claim.
However, no matter how large the fraction is, keep in mind that out of the US men who are single, there is also a fraction who would not be single if they lowered their standards.
More options
Context Copy link
You aren't citing redpill theory, which argues that we all act according to evolutionary imperatives to reproduce, which supposedly explains almost all male/female behavior. As reductive as it is, it does not posit that we are a loveless, hateful species unable to be happy with one another.
You are blackpilling. That's the "Females are hypergamous whores incapable of forming genuine emotional attachments to men because they hos" theory.
Indeed. If I believed your philosophy, I would see little reason to pursue a relationship at all.
If I were a woman in your world, I would expect death to be preferable to being forced to partner with men.
Now of course an outlook being bleak and nihilistic beyond words doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. But my empirical observation suggests you're wrong.
Certainly, you don't make a compelling case for any woman, or any man who doesn't absolutely despise women, to adopt your worldview and solutions.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link