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 -
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.
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.
Arranged marriage satisfaction rates are generally higher than love match. Whilst the 'clubbing over the head and off into the sack' model of courtship tends to produce misery, I think this kind of reaction vastly understates the human ability to just kinda roll with things once a new reality has been imposed.
You can roll with it once the guy is in the same boat and you both have to make the best of it and can rub along in a friendly manner.
But I'm old enough that I remember, for instance, episodes of a late night (late night for Ireland back then) chat show talking about the children's allowance being paid without being means tested, and this being defended as a way to give married women money when their husbands (middle class as well as the dregs of society) would absolutely refuse to give them any money for housekeeping. Even respectable middle-class married women, so it was accepted, could be living lives of abuse and neglect due to abusive husbands.
The days of "yeah I can beat you and nobody will interfere because that's a domestic dispute, yeah I can control the purse strings and you have no options outside the home" are within living memory for some of us.
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