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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15707 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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In fairness, I missed that too.

Tsk, you kids who don't even remember why silver nitrate eye washes were given to newborns!

But kindly also note the double standard: women must be virgins upon marriage, and married off at eighteen (the maximum limit at which nature intends them to be single) else men will be having sex outside of marriage. That men should not be having sex outside of marriage? Well, uh, that's different.

Dr. Mr. Smith also expects the eighteen year old wife to get knocked up pretty darn soonish and produce six to eight kids. I wonder how he'd feel about today's view of "we can't have kids yet, they're too expensive and too much of a drag"? And even those advocating for "why yes, women should be married off fast", how many of you boys want eight kids to support?

The argument is sometimes used that it is better to have only one child and bring it up with extraordinary care than to have six or eight children brought up with ordinary care because in the latter case the mother's attention is divided. But this is a fallacy. Everybody knows that the one child of the wealthy and highly educated couple is generally a spoiled child and has as a rule, poor health; while the six or eight children of the poor and moderately educated woman are exceedingly strong and lusty.

Fortunately, we poor feeble creatures have helpful guides to advise us regarding suitable grooms šŸ˜

I actually agree with you regarding the ridiculousness of the positions you are arguing against, and yet. I would be so much more inclined to join your crusade against double standards if you finally started using your considerable rhetorical talent and political cachet to push Ukraine to draft its women in equal numbers already - or do you believe that your uteruses are using up too many phosphates for you to pilot Mavics?

Besides, "local woman goes to debate forum and ignores the rules to engage in theatrics because she is too outraged by some of the positions" is not the compelling advertisement for women's participation in intellectual life that you seem to believe it is. In fact, it's somewhere in the general class of "local man goes to kindergarten and molests the children to prove that akshually he can do that without getting an erection" as a protest for men's suitability for nurturing professions.

(Explanation of the pattern, because my bulging testes instill an insatiable urge to mansplain and engage in tone-deaf high-decoupling: [member of group x] does [bad thing] because of [behavioural compulsion ascribed to the group to argue for their unsuitability for y], to push for members of group x doing y)

do you believe that your uteruses are using up too many phosphates for you to pilot Mavics?

Well you see, in order to pilot a plane or drones or high-tech equipment, I would need to be as educated as a man. And that would be bad, because it would be developing my nervous system at the expense of my generative system. And that would mean I could only have a few, sickly, children instead of a healthy football team as Nature intends!

It is the phosphates, Science and Dr. Smith's medical colleagues proved it in 1905 and are you going to say they were wrong?

But kindly also note the double standard: women must be virgins upon marriage, and married off at eighteen (the maximum limit at which nature intends them to be single) else men will be having sex outside of marriage. That men should not be having sex outside of marriage? Well, uh, that's different.

But those who know anything about virtue in the male know that the marriage of our young men under twenty-five, to a woman with a sound body about eighteen years of age, is almost, if not the only, means of preserving the virtue of the rising generation of men.

I assume there is more to this speech than just what you provided, but he clearly expects men to be virgins at 24, at a minimum. They wouldnā€™t be having their virtue preserved if they were out knocking boots with girlfriends and/or hookers, and he sets the line at ā€œunder twenty-five.ā€

ā€œRemain a virgin at 24,ā€ vs ā€œremain a virgin at 18ā€ seems to me to actually be the higher expectation.

Everybody knows that the one child of the wealthy and highly educated couple is generally a spoiled child and has as a rule, poor health; while the six or eight children of the poor and moderately educated woman are exceedingly strong and lusty.

Exceedingly strong and lusty is hilarious, I wish we still talked like this.

But alsoā€¦seems plausibly true. Iā€™ve lived near a seven kid family before, and while I have no opinion on their strength or lustiness, they certainly seemed vibrant and not prone to sitting indoors all day. That may also have been a Mom trick to get some peace and quiet, but they were clearly not hothouse flowers.

On the other hand, we have a lot of single children these days and I have heard accusations that a lot of those kids are hothouse flowers. And there do seem to be more fragile kids around, which I believe is even born out statistically.

The 19th century might have been on to something.

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