site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Your original claim is that women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment. I assume the 'lack of male investment' equals an accusation that men are generally unwilling to commit; this is a widespread and usual female complaint. I'm not going to comment on that in general here but I'd argue that the main reason why women delay marriage is that they are unserious about it, don't see early marriage as necessary or preferable, decide that they have other priorities and aren't aware or just don't care what effect their biological clock actually has. So yes, I think it's factually true that 'she was unable or unwilling to secure the necessary male investment at a time when it would have made more difference'. I'd also add that a woman unable to secure male investment is in most cases someone unwilling to prepare and present herself as a potential wife, the exceptions being unfortunate women who are hideously ugly or having some genetic defect.

If I had to give a tl;dr answer to "Why are women not getting married and therefore (unless chavettes who are happy to reproduce while single) not having children they want?" it would be a lack of marriageable men. Below-average men are in a much worse state than they used to be, and in a worse state than below-average women - the women who are being asked to lower their standards and settle really are being asked to make (and largely refusing to make) compromises on e.g. employability that their mothers didn't have to.

Why 90-100 IQ men are worse husbands in 2025 than they were in 1955 is a more complex question, which involves some or all of changes in education, blue-collar job markets, working-class male institutions, and gender roles.

But the key point is that this is a problem that lives in the interface between men and women - the problem is that respectable working class and marginal working class women are unwilling to settle for the actually available men. In a sense it doesn't matter if the men got culpably worse, the men were damaged by bad public policy, or the women got pickier - the point is that (given the continued existence of monogamy norms and the unwillingness of the political right or the median voter to subsidise bastardy more than we do already) the first step in raising fertility is to unf*ck the marriage market in a way which changes both sexes' behaviour.

There is a separate problem with middle-class and above women marrying too late to complete their desired family size, and ending up with 1 kid instead of 2 or 2 instead of 3 because of age-related infertility. Again, fixing this - i.e. getting professionals to marry earlier - is about changing social norms in a way which changes both sexes behaviour, not about blame placing.

This seems to echo in a series of comments left by another regular visitor on a social conservative blog in 2012 (emphasis mine):

...In the United States, the highest educated social class is mating fairly effectively based on assortative mating. But, and I emphasize this, a main part of this is that women in this group are generally selecting mates based more on beta success/responsibility factors than on alpha sexiness factors, across the board. There is a mercenary character to some of the marriages, and a dull one to others, and in some ways many of these marriages resemble those of the 50s (this has been remarked in commentary about them as well), although the women in them are much more educated and many of them have careers which rival or even exceed those of their husbands. Affairs are rife in this group, but divorce is not common. Costs too much in terms of lifestyle for most of them and is bad for the kids. Again probably not so different from 50s sytle.

Below this, you see things basically falling apart, and to a greater degree the further down you go. The main reason for this is twofold. The first is that the further down the pole you go, the less likely a woman is to choose her mates with an emphasis on the beta side rather than the alpha side. There's poorer decisionmaking and judgment in general, and more thugspawn as a result. The second reason, which is closely related to the first, is that, again, the further down you go, the fewer guys there are who have significantly successful beta aspects, so that even if women wanted to choose on this basis, the pickins are slim, so to speak. Marriage in these social classes seems pretty much doomed to a slow death, it seems to me, for these two reasons, both of which are quite change resistant....

...In the shrinking middle, you have a fast deteriorating situation when it comes to mate finding. Again, this is to some degree based on what is happening economically and socially in this group. In general, it is in this group that the women tend to want a balanced mix of alpha and beta (whereas in the higher group it's leaning beta, while in the lower it's leaning alpha) -- sexiness and success, in other words. And this is hard to come by, because it's a mix that isn't very common in men. So what we see is that marriage is quickly eroding in this group as the women are becoming as advanced if not more so in terms of success as the men are, but want an alpha/beta mix for a mate, and simply can't find the guys -- because very few of them, in fact, exist. They tend to be either more sexy than successful, or more successful than sexy, bit not "Goldilocks" men, as it were.

Yes, hypergamy feeds into this as well, but the odd thing is that the most educated women, who are in the smallest hypergamy pool, are not having issues finding mates. It's the women in the next tier or two below them who are...

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats