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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.
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.
Certainly, but it's also the thinking of anyone who writes legislation! I don't know you very well, but I don't think you are the kind of full-fat libertarian who thinks that all regulation should be repealed, that we should remove all central attempts at law-enforcement and go back to privately-leased thief-takers and bounty hunters, etc. etc. Assuming that you aren't, the next obvious question is, 'when and to what degree should we force X through legislation, and when should we refrain?'. My previous reply was an attempt to argue that for the last 70 years or so we have been too liberal in the area of 'relationships between men and women' and 'female employment', that the results have been bad on net, and we need to roll that back somewhat.
Well, there's a reason I'm writing here and not in a byline for the Times. But more seriously, this is simply a reversal of the argument from feminism for the last 70 years. That argument being that 'men have had a good run of it for centuries, and they now need to take a hit to vastly increase the happiness of women'. You may well be a principled libertarian who objects to this particular argument equally whether it comes from women or from men, but it is clearly not a moral bridge too far for many people.
I have two responses to this, neither of which will probably satisfy you:
The first is that I do not think we should aim for a 100% marriage rate. Some men (and some women) are simply so toxic that people will not marry them even under pressure, and that's okay. Good, even. Similarly there are people who simply can't be in a relationship for various reasons. I want to give the curve a firm shove back to times of much higher marriage rates, not to ensure that even the most spittle-flecked violent maniac gets a government-mandated girlfriend. But yes, there will still be sad cases. There are sad cases today too - we have domestic murders, abuse, and deeply vile things perpetrated up and down the land - but they are likely to increase somewhat under this system. And it is indeed a hard, even an impossible sell in a modern democratic society operating under today's social mores. I write these things for my own satisfaction and to clarify my thoughts, not as an act of political activism.
The second is that we are now in the realm of competing intuitions, axioms and viewpoints:
In practice, I suspect that your informal definition of misogyny is much more extensive, very broadly along the lines of 'sees men as being rational enlightenment agents who have high moral worth and deserve respect and high levels of liberty, and treat women with some combination of having reduced rationality, reduced moral worth (depending on the tradition) and believes that they should be constrained i.e. not granted liberties to the same degree'. Would I be right in saying so?
If so, I think you are then vastly inflating the number of misogynists and unintentionally hopping between the motte and the bailey by using the latter set of beliefs as dogwhistles for the former. I'm sure that's true sometimes, but I think it's also very untrue sometimes, and you can tell because it basically condemns all humanity prior to 1900, plus the Amish, many Mormons, etc. etc. all of which clearly contained men who valued and loved their wives for more than being a warm orifice. It's always dangerous to make assumptions about other people's POV but assuming I'm correct, I believe this is a place where your beliefs aren't quite cleaving the joints of reality correctly, though of course that doesn't mean you have to approve of either.
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