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Notes -
Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.
A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:
Edit: typo
I read things like this and remain grounded by the successful young white men in my family buying homes and having kids. Are they in prestige jobs? Partly. One is a corporate lawyer in San Francisco. Blonde, blue-eyed. He hasn't been shut out. My other brethren aren't working in anything prestigious, but they're doing something even better: starting families.
It's amazing how bad humans are at understanding probabilities. The existence of some successful white men doesn't mean there is no widespread discrimination against white men, any more than the existence of successful black women tells us that racism against blacks is fake.
Affirmative action's impact is by its nature stochastic, but as the old Democratic campaign line goes when you are out of work the unemployment rate is 100% for you. It's not that every white man makes 20% less, it's that some percentage of white men will be unable to get a job or a promotion or a project completed, while the rest move through their lives normally. If I'm at a law firm that commits itself to diversity in the partner ranks, it's not that I'll be paid less because I'm white when I'm an associate, or paid less if I make partner, it's that when I come up for partner I might draw the short straw and be up as the same time as a black guy or an Asian girl and get shafted.
Sure, but no white man is all white men simultaneously. Additionally, people getting blackpilled reading this kind of shit need to keep things in perspective.
These are fully generalisable arguments against ever caring about anything ever, though.
Holocaust? Well, the Jews in Israel are fine.
Rwanda? Some of them make it, no Tutsi can be all Tutsis.
Fired without cause? Well, my brother still has a job.
The whole point of the article is that actually a lot of people are having serious difficulties. You can decide how much you personally care, and to be glad for your own good fortune, but you are not rescuing people by persuading them that their troubles don't exist. There is a spectrum between 'full blackpill' and 'this is fine', and the clear proof for massive discrimination at all levels really ought to be nudging you a bit further along IMO. I have personally seen people I care about fail to launch because of exactly this kind of stuff.
"Massive discrimination at all levels."
But it's not all levels. I don't think that for the vast majority of people these troubles do exist. And it certainly doesn't involve MURDER per your examples, where it does. Most of us are exposed to non-prestigious jobs where actual merit does in fact apply. Got a clean driving record? Voila, you're a pizza dude. It's a big, complicated, growing, non-zero sum economy where there's lots of opportunity.
I think my lack of professional success - or even much caring about it - is why I'm less bitter than the software engineers on this site who feel hectored by women of color with soft degrees.
I don't get how you can think that unless you ignore every single official pronouncement about how hard they're working to employ 'diverse' candidates, the massively changing demographics of your society as foreigners are bussed in to drive down wages, being told by practically every single person here that they've seen this stuff...
Some blackpills are very definitely up for interpretation: for example the people worried about the covid vaccine have to interpret certain things about the evidence, how pharma works, how vaccines work, etc. to come to the conclusions they have. Anti-white discrimination is different. They boast about it on every channel possible! People can't wait to tell you how hard they're discriminating against white men! I can't help thinking you are so keen not to be blackpilled that you're putting your fingers in your ears.
Beyond that, let's say you're right. Maybe the pizza dudes are fine. (I doubt it, I've seen the demographics.) It still means that white people are being given an incredibly hard time in better paying areas. Personally, I worked very hard to get into a good school, and then very hard to get into a good university, and then very hard to get into a good PhD and then very hard to get a good job. And at every stage, they clearly and loudly said that it was a shame they had so many white men, and they discussed what could be done to make sure that people like me weren't doing the kind of stuff I'm doing. You couldn’t see the noticeboards under signs about women’s mentorship groups and women’s leadership groups and female-only funding opportunities.
All indications are that it’s starting to work. My friends and colleagues are really struggling to get new jobs. The cohort under me, including my own relations, are having huge trouble and some of them are failing to launch completely. Good for you if you’ve found another way to live your life, but ‘just deliver pizza, bro, it’s not hard,’ frankly isn’t good enough.
Yea, see, I didn't. I'm not of that class, so I don't see what you're talking about. It's been a unified front of multiracial peons railing against a multiracial management my whole life, in jobs that are easy to get, for anyone, and easy to dispose of. Or put it another way: the generalized shitty, Kafkaesque labor experience from behind a colorblind Rawlsian veil is far, far more salient for me as I suspect is for most.
I don't find this an impossible to understand perspective, I do find it a rather odd perspective for someone hanging around this place to have. If you truly can't be bothered about systemic discrimination against your racial group then I'm tempted to say "don't worry about it kitten". Like what are you even doing here? Go have a slice and a brew and let the rest of us sort the big problems out.
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Do you expect arguments against discrimination to ever hold water in any context, ever again?
Sure. Here's an example: I bring home a non-white girlfriend, dad is apoplectic. I say chill out, race doesn't matter.
There goes "any context"
Let me attempt to be more precise, then. Do you expect arguments against societal-level discrimination to continue to hold water?
Perhaps not. I'm a small man, and I keep my identity small. I only think in terms of very direct and overt discrimination, of the everyman sort, hence "dad won't let my black girlfriend come to dinner."
Would it surprise you to learn that arguments about discrimination, concern over those arguments, and actions taken to address those concerns have been a notable driver of sociopolitical change in our society for at least the last century?
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"I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon."
I'm surely less successful than almost everyone here. I make 16 an hour part time (and even that's going away in two weeks), childless, single, in my 40s. And yet I'm less doomer than the lot o' ya
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I would agree that at an individual level, there are still plenty of opportunities for young white men, perhaps more than ever before. At a societal level, though, this sort of discrimination is both counterproductive and wrong.
At any rate, I would definitely advise young white men in the US to avoid career paths such as academia where it's impossible to get ahead without being dependent on large institutions.
This article reinforces one of the theses I encountered on Red Pill sites. Namely: if you elevate the relative social status of young hetero single men, it’ll incentivize them to pair-bond, marry and have children. Thus the marriage rate and the birthrate will grow, the average age of both men and women at first marriage will drop, and men will become more economically productive on average. This is what happened in the US after WW2, for example. If you do the opposite, you’ll get the opposite of all of this, which is what we’ve been seeing throughout the West for decades.
We really do need a proper survey done of 20-25 year old men asking them "so, do you want to get a job, settle down, marry one woman and have three kids with her, I mean right now, not in ten or fifteen years time?"
Shakespeare for one didn't think the young hetero single men of his day were eager to settle down to domestic responsibility the very first chance they got:
You're all making it too complicated. Do you agree that the status of young women relative to young men is higher than it ever was? How's the fertility? I'm not saying correlation is causation, but it's certainly worth a shot.
Men's 'domesticity' (ie, money they give women, some help) is not actually necessary for reproduction in our age of abundance. Not that it matters, because
What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically. So the whole TFR debate is just a woman-convincing enterprise. And I think it would help fertility to convince them they are not God's gift to humanity, and no, the teacher's praise, and the AA spots they snag are not actual proof they are as wonderful as they think they are. It seems obvious to me. What's the alternative? I don't know how much more praise we can heap onto women, and contempt onto men. Have you looked at Hollywood lately? But does anyone believe that more of this effusive praise will make them reproduce?
Men ran away as fast as they could from marriage and child-rearing during the Sexual Revolution. So this is reaping what was sowed - oh, women are now on the Pill and other contraceptive devices and don't have to get pregnant if they engage in sex outside of marriage, and indeed we WANT women to engage in sex outside of marriage because then they're not baby-trapping men and tying them down?
Well, here come consequences, boys.
Where's the evidence for this? For your argument to be true, stats would have to prove that men were filing the majority of divorces and were the ones driving the overall delay of marriage and parenthood. As far as I can tell, the opposite of this is actually true.
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Do you have anything besides blaming men for everything and women for nothing, based on your personal feeling? You're not even presenting some solution, you're just gloating about things being shit. For everyone. Haha I burned the house down.
I've long concluded that it's largely impossible to have a clear-headed, rational conversation about these issues with women.
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Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment. (I am including "started too late because I married late" as lack of male investment even though the proximate cause of not having more kids is age-related infertility.)
As a matter of physical reality, your point 2 is correct - women can reproduce without male investment. But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been. In practice, it is also dependent on a system of government transfers - raising kids in third-world poverty is illegal for good reasons, and you can't raise kids in first-world poverty as a single mother on a lower-middle-class salary without supplementing it with child support or government bennies.
I note that the political faction that is most worried about falling fertility wants to dismantle the public subsidies for single mothers and reinforce the systems that make them low-status. Nobody who thinks low fertility is a problem thinks encouraging single women to pop out more bastards is the solution.
On what basis, may I ask?
If a woman planning to get married and have children eventually ends up with fewer children than she wants because she marries late and ages out of her fertility window, then the ultimate cause of having too few children is failure to marry younger. In other words she was unable or unwilling to secure the necessary male investment at a time when it would have made more difference.
The point I am making is that, assuming you accept that women are at least directionally truthful about how many children they actually want and why they didn't have that many, is that the problem lies in the relationship between men and women, not the behaviour of women in isolation. While true as a matter of biology, @Tintin's point that women don't need anything valuable from men (sperm is cheap) to reproduce is irrelevant in practice given that respectable working class and above women don't reproduce without male investment, and society doesn't want them to.
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I do, if they are of sufficient quality. You heard the hubbub about chinese millionaires paying dozens of american models to give birth to their kids? Those smart, rich, handsome kids have great net expected value to the state and to existing americans.
The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.
Yes, obviously they want more money, like the lawyer in Idiocracy. We have given them an awful lot already (legal and economic protections up the wazoo, free pointless education so they can have fun, free sinecures that look like prestigious jobs, 24/7 cultural programming blasting their awesomeness, etc), more than anyone ever had, and in return they have produced less and less children. When you're in a hole, stop digging.
Right, it's more of a psychological problem that women have to overcome, nothing to do with resources. Certainly, giving women in general more status, like we've been doing, is not going to help, since status is relative. I am fine with raising the status of single moms who produce quality citizens, and its corollary, diminishing the status of voluntarily barren women. Although I'm not a big believer in 'changing status' solutions. I want laws changed, to be less (unfairly!) favourable to women.
If the single professional woman gets less goodies, the married and single mom will get more (relatively), creating an incentive to pair-up, because it's still easier to do the mom thing with dad help. I know the pro-fertility position gets caricatured as 'forcing women to breed' or something, but all I want is to take our hand off the scale favouring women, and let women freely choose from the fallen chips.
Let's try to make it simple: Women have three choices:
professional childless woman
single mother
married mother
There are easy, cheap and fair ways to encourage option 3.
Cut off AA, scholarships, anti-discrimination law, free college, that encourage 1.
Make divorce fairer to the working partner by making the default 50/50 custody, no alimony etc , to encourage women to stay married.
You could limit welfare to single moms more, to get them from 2 to 3 - That's the idea of conservatives you criticize, although I personally I prefer outcome 2 to 1, so I'm not really on board.
You're missing another failure mode, one very much inherent in single parenting and in some ways worsened by social justice.
Specifically, that there's no easy way to spot abuse in a single parent. There's by definition no other adult in the household, and abused kids have trouble noticing that their parent is a psycho because they have little basis of comparison and are highly susceptible to frame control (the single parent does, after all, have a very-large degree of control over the kid's environment and can argue circles around him/her).
I say that this is in some ways worsened by social justice because, well, social justice feminism does not exactly teach mothers not to abuse their sons, and it does tend to try to direct the police at the wrong target if and when they do become involved, complicating the issue even after official attention is drawn.
(I was starved as a teenager for the "sexist abuse" of "standing over" my foot-shorter mum. Eventually I went stark raving mad and started threatening to topple bookcases, she started dialing the police, I wrestled the phone away from her in a panic, she fled, and of course eventually she made it to a phone and the police reduced me to tears with a lecture about how I was going to grow up into a wifebeater and they expected most of my life to be spent in prisons and halfway houses (well, after making me put on underpants; I wasn't kidding about "stark"). Now, the fallout of that was actually mostly good - specifically, it was enough of a blowup that everybody working my case switched from "keep things from exploding" mode to "find me somewhere else to live" mode, and I wasn't actually arrested - and it's hard to blame the police given she wasn't lying (just delusional) and I was badly brainwashed to the point that I thought I was at least in large part in the wrong; spotting that in a short encounter is not actually trivial. But, y'know, I'd rather not make that situation, or that bad call by the police, happen more than necessary.)
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Ah, well. I guess there's nothing to be done. Men too awful. Good for nothing. Never did well. How could we ever hope to build a demographically stable future while carrying such worthless dead weight?
Hey, good reason to go for broke with longevity right? Maybe I can find support here for my $100T regenerative medicine campaign. Men being impossible isn't a problem if they're unnecessary for securing the future.
Chin up, if AI works out as everyone is hoping, we're all unnecessary for securing the future, the transhumanists who are happy to be replaced by our superior silicon descendants will win, and neither men, women, nor others will survive the Great Robot Purge.
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I think you know that surveys don't mean a thing in this context, at least not in the way you imagine. The current feminized world is all that 20-25 year old men - or their fathers, for that matter - have ever known and most of them cannot imagine any other, they don't grok what it'd mean. Either way, you as a woman(?) are probably also affected by the apex fallacy, which is why you'd probably be surprised by many of the answers to that survey.
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Whether very early twenties men want to do this or not, it does demonstrably work- the military achieves a very high marriage and fertility rate with its population of, mostly, extremely young males from working class backgrounds.
The same working class background that a certain commentator likes to sneer about. And that our society has spent a lot of time over the past decades trying to shift the culture to "we're all middle-class now", and which has been successfully gutted so that the vices, but damn few of the virtues, of that background survive.
I'm constantly astounded by how much I find myself agreeing with Shoe0nhead, even when I disagree very strongly with other beliefs of hers; see this recent video, where she talks about how she grew up and now how her kids will grow up, starting at 17.01 here.
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The military achieves a high marriage rate by legislating benefits for married servicemen.
Most businesses tend to give better benefits towards men who are married, even if it isn't explicit. This can involve promotions or better opportunities (as married men tend to be seen as more stable or more reliable), better financial compensation (as the man is "providing for a family"), or better work-life balance (the number of times I've been asked to work late or on holidays while my married coworkers get to go home early is way too high).
Those are unspoken or indirect or accrue over time, the military gives benefits immediately upon marriage for the act of marriage.
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In terms of fuckoverability when it comes to work-life balance (e.g., dumping an urgent task on someone and wrecking their night or weekend)—or fuckoverability in general—the rank-order I’ve seen over the years, holding seniority/age equal:
Single man. He likely has nothing better to do and if he does have plans who cares, so fuck him. If anything, he should be grateful for the extra opportunity to contribute.
Married man, no children. The victim here is the poor wife who may have her plans disrupted.
Married man with children. We’re basically doing him a favor by giving him an excuse to be out of the house. The victim here is the poor wife who has to perform even more childcare-related physical and Emotional Labor.
Single woman. What kind of jerk would be so MEAN as to disrupt the FUN that she has planned? We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.
Married woman, no children. Similar to 4. We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.
Married woman with children. What kind of monster would interfere with a brave working mother’s work-life balance? We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.
Where the biggest gap between contiguous ranks is that between 3. and 4. The smallest one, to the extent it exists, is between 4. and 5. and the rank-order there can arguably be even inverted.
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And these marriages are attractive to local women because the status of soldiers is boosted.
I'm not sure that's true. I don't think soldiers have a higher rate of being paired off than guys the same age that work at Wal Mart, but Walmart doesn't instantly pay their young male workers thousands of dollars extra for getting married.
Soldiers also have higher divorce rates than civilians.
If we made it a national policy to pay everyone thousands extra for getting married, instantly, we'd raise the marriage rate. I'm not sure that's increasing the status of young men, exactly, just paying people to get married.
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Shakespeare has been dead for almost 510 years; I doubt he knows much about the modern situation. Anyway, it's certainly not clear that the particular cantankerous character you quote represented Shakespeare's views. He has young men who do want to (or do) get married.
500 years ago they were getting the wenches with child but not marrying said wenches; today they don't have to get them with child because contraception and abortion.
Most young men want to have fun, sow their wild oats, and then settle down. Even in the 19th century, they didn't want to be tied down, and ironically often those who did want to marry had to wait a long time for economic stability to do so, or even that their employers discouraged marriage as taking their attention away from the job.
This is classic apex fallacy. You are looking at the tiny slice of men who were some combination of rich, powerful, and charming enough to sow their wild oats, and completely ignoring the huge mass of men for whom marriage was their only chance at getting regular sex.
Do not make me go dig out mediaeval illegitimacy and prostitution rates.
Okay, early modern period, which is very roughly 16th-18th century. Someone has done work on that, and probably plenty more as well. But if you are trying to tell me the vast majority of men, historically, have been doomed to die kissless virgins if they could not find a wife... then we must have the heavens full of saints in spite of themselves!
"A third of the population" would cover "had the baby first then the wedding" as well as "never got married", but one third? That's a heck of a lot of men not getting regular sex if they didn't have wives yet managing to father children!
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Even Shakespeare's cantankerous shepherd put the end of that period at 23. Anyway, in practice leaving bastards all over the country was a privilege of the aristocracy.
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For me (as a conservative) that's one of those claims that's "too good to check." i.e. I really would like to believe it.
That being said, I agree that there is a decent amount of evidence to support this, for example:
The Swedish lottery study, which apparently found that when a man wins the lottery, he is more likely to get married and stay married; when a woman wins the lottery she is more likely to divorce.
Ultra-Orthodox religious groups in the US, such as Haredi Jews and the Amish. In both of those groups, young men have a good path to obtain social status (in Judaism, by means of religious study; among the Amish, by working the land).
The evidence is pretty good that when seeking a long-term partner, most women have a strong instinct to "marry up," i.e. to prefer someone of higher status than themselves.
So yeah, I could definitely see that (1) taking traditionally male pathways to social status and opening them up to women; and (2) substantially closing those pathways to a lot of men by giving women preferential treatment would have a negative impact on birth rates and such. How big of a factor it is, I don't know. But I do think that the kind of society which is wise enough to avoid getting caught up in runaway gynocentrism would be a much better place for everyone, male and female.
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Exactly. Delaying graduates getting their first meaningful job is liable to snowball
As is the overall delay of parenthood.
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"I read things like how cigarettes cause cancer and remain grounded by my family's good health. None of the smokers in my family have gotten lung cancer. Even my grandfather, who smoked a pack a day, didn't die of any smoking related causes."
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