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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11603 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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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:

But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.

And solve it they did.

Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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