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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10072 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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At a societal level, though, this sort of discrimination is both counterproductive and wrong.

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.

Namely: if you elevate the relative social status of young hetero single men, it’ll incentivize them to pair-bond, marry and have children.

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:

I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest, for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting—Hark you now. Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? They have scared away two of my best sheep, which I fear the wolf will sooner find than the master.

  1. 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.

  2. 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

  3. 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does that matter, though? If everyone sees that the married men are getting all the best assignments, and get constantly let out early to go pick up their kids, and are paid the best - then it doesn't actually matter if it's official or not. Everyone knows what needs to be done to get the benefits.

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:

  1. Single man. He likely has nothing better to do anyway and any plans he may have are bullshit, so fuck him. If anything, he should be grateful for the extra opportunity to contribute.
  2. Married man, no children. The victim here is the poor wife who may have her plans disrupted.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Married woman, no children. Similar to 4.
  6. 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 can arguably be even inverted.

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.

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!

In the Late Middle Ages, a third of the population was probably born extramaritally. From 1400 to 1600, the illegitimacy ratio dropped markedly, but from 1650 to 1850, it seems to have gradually risen from around 5 to 9% in most European states.

"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!

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.

Namely: if you elevate the relative social status of young hetero single men, it’ll incentivize them to pair-bond, marry and have children.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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).

  3. 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.

Exactly. Delaying graduates getting their first meaningful job is liable to snowball

As is the overall delay of parenthood.

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