site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8119 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Just to make a general observation about the gender war as a followup to my comment on the Promise Keepers organization:

I think we can generally observe is that women’s main complaint about men is that desirable hetero men are unwilling to exclusively commit. If we accept this, we can also see that this is actually two complaints rolled into one. 1. The men that are willing to commit are undesirable (icky, clingy, lame, “chopped”, entitled, toxic, porn-addled, skinny fat etc.). 2. The men that are desirable are unwilling to commit. (On a tangent I’d argue that most of the lipstick feminist complaints made in the mainstream media by middle-class women about men in general do usually boil down to the rather similar complaint that 34-37-year-old successful, well-paid, charismatic, tall, ambitious etc. urban men are in no rush to marry 31-34-year-old college-educated middle-class office worker women.)

If we look at this logically, to the extent that it even makes sense to try doing so (which is a valid question in itself), there are two potential remedies for this problem. 1. Focus on the undesirable men that are willing to commit and somehow transform them into desirable men i.e. alphaize the betas 2. Focus on the desirable men and incentivize them to commit i.e. betaize the alphas.

Now I don’t know about you but to me it seems self-evident that #2 has more potential for success no matter how you look at it and yet virtually everyone who makes any sort of recommendations regarding this entire issue (and that does not only include Red Pillers) is promoting #1. No, really – I’ve never seen anyone advocate for #2, not even the Promise Keepers or, for that matter, any other similar group that does not claim to be feminist and is at the same time pushing the nebulous concept of a new positive masculinity.

Am I seeing things that are not there or is this really not the case? Because as far as I can tell, it is. It seems like there is a general unspoken consensus in society that trying to compel sexually successful men to commit to women is a completely impossible, pie-in-the-sky idea that deserves no attention at all; that, in other words, expecting modern women to elicit commitment from the men they are attracted to is laughable lunacy.

I think people tend to talk about (1) because they perceive (accurately) that it is where the change has been in the last several decades regarding relationship formation. I'm not aware of any data indicating that "desirable" men are less willing to commit today compared to, say, 20 years ago but there is some data showing women are less interested in getting married over that period. Additionally it's a little unclear to me how large the pool of "desirable but unwilling to commit" men even is. Are there a large fraction of men out there who women want to marry but do not themselves want to marry? That's not clear to me. I can think of some high profile anecdotes but not sure how generalizable that is.

On (1) my pet theory is that women's expectations for marriage and relationships have evolved along with their economic development in ways that men's expectations have not really caught up with. If your pitch, as a man, is that you are going to be an economic provider that is probably much more effective as a pitch in 1982 (when men's average wage was 50% higher than women's average wage) than it is in 2025 (when men's average wage is ~18% higher than women's average wage). Among young people (aged 25-34) that gap is even smaller (35% advantage for men in 1982 vs 5% today). Add to this that it seems women are more comfortable being single than men are and a drop off in relationship formation is not that hard to explain.

Add to this that it seems women are more comfortable being single than men are and a drop off in relationship formation is not that hard to explain.

Yeah, I think the old belief that women are more romantic than men, on average, isn’t true. That’s not to say that women don’t read romance novels more than men, or that many women don’t have a great interest in romance, but there’s a revealed preferences sense in which men feel the lack of a partner more acutely than men do.

Is it just sex? I don’t know. When I was single and lonely obviously that played a factor, but more of a factor was falling asleep alone, missing subtle physical affection, enjoying telling someone I love them, giving little gifts and seeing someone’s eyes light up, cuddling on the couch, etc. Having a partner feels physically grounding. Do women just not experience that kind of lack as acutely? Am I just weird?

Yeah, I think the old belief that women are more romantic than men, on average, isn’t true. That’s not to say that women don’t read romance novels more than men, or that many women don’t have a great interest in romance, but there’s a revealed preferences sense in which men feel the lack of a partner more acutely than men do.

There is a large and real asymmetry to these two types of singles. Any woman that is not currently sleeping next to a man has the option of doing so so long as she is not completely grotesque. Like any of the "girlboss" types that are single and are proudly single, still can call or swipe on any single guy in the vicinity and simply trade a little fornication for companionship for at least a few days. A single man simply doesn't have that option. Even the guys who are 6'+ and great looking don't routinely get instant hookups from the apps.

There is a saying that men are the more romantic sex, masquerading as the more pragmatic one, while women are the more pragmatic sex, masquerading as the more romantic one.

From speaking with my female friends, vs my male ones, there are dramatic differences in how they talk about their partners/potential partners. My female friends, specifically, tend to literally talk about how much the man makes, how good of a partner he appears to be (as in, if they were out in public, how well would he make them look), and how high status he is (expressed as what would their parents/friends think about him); whereas my male friends tend to be a lot more about how their partner makes them feel (some of which is appearance, but it also includes things like how she thinks about them, or does them little favours, etc). A book I read by a female author (The Black Magician, by Trudi Canavan) had a line in it that was something like "People in the slums tried to find a man who could provide, but often married for love instead" (in the context it was in, it was presented as a contrast to the well off people in the city, who married specifically for providers).

Actually, come to think about it (and it's a little bit of a tangent), one of the things I've noticed from reading a number of books is that you can always tell from how the romance is presented whether it was a female or male author, even if the rest of the book passes fairly well for either gender of writer. Off the top of my head:

  1. Male writers tend much more towards smaller age gaps between men and women, and try to avoid power differentials; female writers definitely do not. It is extremely rare for a male author to have a male character date his students, proteges, trainees, etc. - whereas I'd almost say it's the reverse for female writers. There was a period of time in the fantasy genre where every single book being written was "male assassin trains younger man, and ends up dating him" - which were all written by women. There's a series by Tamora Pierce in which the main character is raised by a man in his twenties, and when she's 16 ends up dating him which seriously squicked me out when I read it.
  2. Male writers often have the man doing all of the work to set up the relationship - with women it tends to range from the woman being actively seductive (see Tamora Pierce, above), to being closer to equals (Robin Hobb has this with Fitz and Molly in Assassin's Apprentice). Even in examples written by male authors where the woman is much more seductive in nature (I'm thinking here of Shade's Children, by Garth Nix), the actual 'event' tends to have the male character taking more of the lead.

(I do realize all the books I mentioned above are both YA and fantasy - I'm trying to maintain a tiny bit of opsec here, even if I've basically given everyone enough info to identify who I am with even a trivial amount of work).

Male writers tend much more towards smaller age gaps between men and women, and try to avoid power differentials; female writers definitely do not. It is extremely rare for a male author to have a male character date his students, proteges, trainees, etc.

I'm pretty sure this reflects only on what is acceptable in the publishing industry.

I would agree except that it’s exactly the opposite for female authors - like, another Trudi Canavan book (Priestess of the White) has the exact dynamic of young girl raised by an elderly man in her village, and ends up with him in the second book.

It’s just not something men think about putting in their books in the same way women do. It’s hard to describe the exact difference, but a while back, I read a bunch of books that ranged from “romance” to “kind of smutty” to “basically just pornography” by both male and female authors (with the goal of comparing and contrasting how men and women approach the genre). With male writers, a dynamic like that is more of a “sleep together once,” while with female authors, it’s presented as a healthy relationship.

Seriously, it is very very easy to tell - the male smut novels were honestly kind of hilarious in how they immediately presented exact measurements of every female character who appeared - the female ones were much more likely to focus on how well dressed or wealthy they were.

I think this is the first time I've heard of Shade's Children in the wild. I loved that book when I first read it in middle school, after Sabriel.

Sabriel (and Liriel/Abhorsen) were really good books - I stayed up way too late reading Sabriel when it first came out, and the scene in the reservoir was so creepy that I didn’t get any sleep at all that night.

Sabriel is one of my favorite books from my youth. The fighting on the modern side of the wall was what stuck for me, but that reservoir scene was so eerie, I don't blame you.

I stayed up all night one Thursday reading Lirael cover to cover because the girl I borrowed it from wanted it back over the weekend. Seven hundred plus pages, under the covers at night. They really are fantastic books. The bells were always so interesting to me. Named, with personality and purpose, to control the dead. And one, bigger than the rest, that never* gets used.

*Chekov's death bell

My impression from what I've read is that women tend to have more intimate platonic friendships than men do and so a lot of these kinds of emotional needs are fulfilled by those relationships. Whereas men tend to get those needs fulfilled from a romantic partner.

I guess in some ways that’s true, and I guess I do hear about the “galentine’s day” type stuff where that’s leaned into. But it also doesn’t describe the women I’ve known personally, who have definitely been in close relationships with women but nothing I would say gets anywhere close to competing with men especially for physical affection. But I can also say I’ve never been close with women who are kind of the stereotypical “girl with the girlfriends” energy. Most of the women I’ve known have been introverts who hate sororities, that sort of thing.

Straight women can get physical affection from female friends without it being weird, whereas men can only get it from immediate family members or a sexual partner.

Also frankly if a woman does want to get sexual affection essentially delivered to her doorstep she can do it on an app so long as she possesses a somewhat warm body. Meanwhile most guys have to actually work somewhat.

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