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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.

  • -10

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.

  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?

What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically.

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.

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.

Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment.

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.

But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been.

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:

  1. professional childless woman

  2. single mother

  3. 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.

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.

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.)