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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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This post is a follow-on from a conversation with @Amadan, who observed that I wasn't reading his posts correctly. I thought that hiding an apology behind a button most wouldn't click through would be what the kids used to call a bitch move, so I decided to make it a top level post.

^^^I ^^^also ^^^didn't ^^^want ^^^the ^^^effort ^^^to ^^^go ^^^to ^^^waste

You know what, I went back and read through the thread and it turns out I was misremembering the order of things. I thought you rejected faceh's proposal about tightening college admissions with the browbeating comment. My mind gets a little clouded with this subject sometimes. I think I owe you an apology in the form of a bit more effort, so here goes:

My belief is that the TFR crisis can be broadly understood in terms of basic economics. Sure, there are a million billion variables that go in to the exact shape of the curves, but I believe the fundamental problem is that the supply and demand curves don't meet at a point that produces a longitudinally viable volume. Therefore, any proposed policy must influence those lines to move TFR upward. To put it bluntly, this involves coercing either bid up or ask down. Browbeating. And we need to do it while remembering the goal isn't just more children, but ones raised in wholesome environments that set them up for the social and economic success we need to operate our societies, so "pay women billion dollars per child" is out. I'll note that some of these solutions involve catching women up to around the level of browbeating that men currently experience, and I hope this doesn't run afoul of the standard because it doesn't involve much additional browbeating on men. Lastly, I'd comment that these are not my preferred solutions, mostly because they involve coercion, which is a game I believe when played under real cultural and political conditions will result in much male loss and few additional births to show for it—but more pragmatically because I believe they are impossible to implement on a timescale that matters. I think the only real way out is to quintuple down on our current strategy of hoping for technology deux ex machina.

However, if we were willing to implement some painful measures to buy ourselves some more time, here's what that might look like if it were up to me:

Demand side measures, or, how to sweeten the deal for men:

  • Wholesale refactoring of no-fault divorce and the "best interests of children" doctrine. This is of special interest to men, who under current conditions hold virtually no protection against their investments into family being stripped away from them at any time and for any reason. Solutions to achieve this could be a list onto itself, but I believe the core of the idea needs to involve a rather humble proposition: what if we reformulated the doctrine of "the best interests of children" to take into account that save for extreme circumstances divorce is not in the best interests of children. The doctrine needs to be modified in whatever way necessary to accommodate this and to allow for the application of active deterrence against divorce. Sure, you can still divorce on a whim without any fault, but you're probably not going to like the terms if children are involved. To freestyle a lighter measure example off the dome, this could involve requiring filing parties to attend a humiliation ritual wherein they are browbeaten with every stat and fact known to mankind about how bad divorce is for children, and they must affirm personally and publicly: "yes, I am a complete piece of human shit, afflict all of these maladies on to my own flesh and blood for my own selfish gain".
  • Wholesale refactoring of filial duty and the taxation model used to achieve it. This is of special interest to men, whose earthly contributions to the human union lean more heavily in the direction of provisioning. Put simply, social security and other forms of elder welfare need to be either phased out or replaced with something far less permissive to the old and intrusive to the young. Obligations should be limited to flow within the family unit as much as possible. This would both incentivize family formation and grant more interpersonal and civilizational stake to the reproductive generation, something sorely lacking under current conditions.
  • Requiring of female duty to the well-being of children, in basically any form whatsoever. As it stands, there's very little from women our civilization actually demands for the benefit of children. She can drink, snort, and smoke however much as she likes while carrying her child and nobody can actually stop her. I'm gonna be honest with you guys, I don't know what moral platform our society thinks it has to demand even a single hair off a man's head while it tolerates this behavior from women. The benefits to children are straightforwardly obvious, but it would probably also do well for the morale of men to know that women's participation is an adamant expectation rather than a whispered plea. This would extend to limiting the provision of single mother benefits to the worthy.
  • A sea change in the tone by which our society speaks to men regarding their place in it, particularly in how it relates to his role as husband and father. I'm not going to start enumerating examples because once I do I'll never stop, but I'll point you in the general direction of concepts like the man cave and the world not owing you (male) anything.

Supply side measures, or, how to sweeten the deal for women:

  • Far steeper penalties for dereliction by men. The penalties are already plenty steep if you compare them to what women presently suffer, but not nearly steep enough if the aim is to make women's investment into family formation less scary and shield children from harm. The penalties for up and leaving should be made ruinous and inescapable. Again, measures to this end could form a list onto itself. Would essentially be a modern form of shotgun wedding, but done by faceless bureaucracy instead of by patriarch, so much easier on modern sensibilities.
  • Child support needs to be massively increased in the average case. This can be done by calculating support based on a basket of goods agreed necessary or beneficial to children's developmental success, rather than income. Some men won't be able to afford it. As I've remarked in the past, we have a persistent need for materials such as lithium and rare earth metals, and I think these men can help mine it.
  • In lieu of ill-advised cash bonuses per birth, subsidies for necessities that improve the lives of both women and children, such as housing and food stipends, attached to the child and their guardian, of course. These interventions need to be both greater in volume and more selective than current programs, in order to maximize both reproductive incentive to adults and benefit to children. This is of special interest to women, who due to reasons of physicality are often most impacted by these needs.
  • Expansion of pregnancy-related protections. Needless to say, measures where the well-being of mother and child intersect should be expedited. Regionally, however healthcare ultimately shakes out in the US, women should be exempt from whatever the hell is causing them to walk away from hospitals with not just a child but tens of thousands of debt. Due to the defined scope of this exercise and the well documented negative fertility interactions, measures where women and employment intersect should be deemphasized. If we do anything at this intersection, it should involve keeping women out of the workplace for longer during and after pregnancy, but in a way that doesn't involve direct subsidy by unrelated men. Ideally this should range not just from the big stuff but also to the small stuff like being allowed to park in disabled spaces and drive in carpool lanes; we ought to search wide for easy opportunities where slipping such privileges into existing infrastructure would be sensible, beneficial, and dignified for all parties.

If you haven't noticed, there's a strong pair of themes that run through these propositions. They mostly involve offering men a more durable ownership share in family formation, and women more durable guarantees regarding child-rearing. I know some readers are probably bursting at the seams to point out that a lot of this is just traditional marriage and romantic norms with extra steps. Why don't we just stop beating around the bush and go back to what works? Uh huh. How's that been working out? Mainstream conservatism has taken notice to how unpopular this position is and has largely adapted to this reality by promoting what I've take to calling neotraditionalism: offering a model of male obligation without the durable ownership. Good luck with that.

But this does cut to what I believe is the core of the issue. I think that advocating for any program that even smells like the above would get you accused of being a cryptopatriarch in a cool minute. The basic problem is that our civilization is emotionally allergic to a key active ingredient of the medicine, and that's not something any amount of sugar-coating can help. Take the religious shell away and put it in a container that's as secular and facelessly bureaucratic as we are, and I don't think it makes a difference to the overall reaction. There's also the question of societal patience. This is separate from the consideration of TFR and its consequences. As many including some here have contentedly noted, the current crop of men don't seem to bear an eagerness to form and maintain families that's just waiting to burst out given a few tweaks in policy and culture. This isn't something my program would change. I don't think any ever could. Men as a class have been subject to a campaign of demoralization and dispossession that began decades before I was born. Undoing this may very well require awaiting a completely new generation of men to come of age. This would require a level of patience with the male sex our civilization transparently does not possess, not even remotely close.

These are insurmountable problems. There's nothing to be done.

Would you like to hear about my $100T longevity moonshot instead?

I appreciate you rereading what I said, because the entire issue is poisoned by bad faith toxic discourse on both sides, and it's very hard to make any kind of proposal for how either men or women should change their behavior, or be pressured to change their behavior, without being mapped to the worst extremists.

"I think men should be responsible for any progeny they create, you can't just dump them on the mother and/or the state and keep fucking around."

"OH SO MEN ARE JUST PAYPIGS FUCK YOU AS LONG AS WOMEN CONTROL REPRODUCTION AND CAN HAVE ABORTIONS MEN ARE SLAVES OF THE STATE!!!!!"

"I think women should be encouraged to have children young instead of giving up their most fertile years seeking a career they probably won't even enjoy."

"OH BAREFOOT AND PREGNANT IN THE KITCHEN IS IT? WHY DON'T WE JUST MAKE IT ILLEGAL FOR WOMEN TO LEARN TO READ LIKE IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS YOU PATRIARCHAL INCEL?!"

Obviously, it's pretty hard to have a dialog like this. Also obviously, the all-caps lines are a bit tongue-in-cheek but not far off from what you see most places online and even to some degree here. So I have definitely taken the first position, for example- if you get a woman pregnant, you did the deed, now you have to feed the kid. No, I don't care how irresponsible and slutty the mother is or if she "baby-trapped" you. No, I don't care that she has the unilateral power to abort or not. You stuck your dick in it, you know how babies are made, so the options are (a) you pay for it, (b) I pay for it, (c) we let the child starve. I choose option (a). Yes, some men get screwed. This is unfair. Tough shit. Use a condom or don't drink and fuck.

"OH SO WE SHOULD ONLY BE UNFAIR TO MEN WE CAN'T BE EVEN A LITTLE BIT MEAN TO WOMEN????"

Sure, we can be "mean" to women. I am not anti-shame. I think slut-shaming is good and we should do more of it.

I think if there was a way to implement welfare reform to ensure children get fed and clothed with as little incentive to the mothers as possible to keep popping them out, we should do it (I admit, I don't really know how this could be done, short of poorhouses or something, which historically have been even worse).

Relatedly, I would be in favor of social messaging to encourage fewer people (but especially fewer women) to go to college, and start families instead. But realistically I don't know how this social engineering would work, especially without the power of a church behind it, and I am not in favor of increasing the power of religion, so, yes, once again you may be right that there is no real solution.

Also, "young people should get married and start families young" and also "young people are totally screwed, the economy is terrible, no one can buy a house" - I read Scott's "vibecession" post and I am still not sure how much to believe about how bad the economy and the future really is but it does seem rather bleak for a young couple starting out without a lot of money.

All of which is to say, I mostly don't disagree with your proposals per se, and I mostly agree they can't really happen.

In the alternative, the proposals I mostly see amount to varying levels of coercion, and mostly this is directed at women. Ranging from "Be more mean to them and make them settle" to "Be really mean to them and make them property."

As much as I dislike the rabid bad faith feminists calling any man who has standards and expectations a sexist incel, you can kind of see why they react like this when you see their opposite numbers. There are quite a few men who hate women and are very clear that they consider women to be inferior beings who should just acknowledge their inferiority and suck it up (literally). We have some of them here on the Motte, and their he-man woman-hating screeds get lots of upvotes. A woman who's had a few encounters with these men (who also make it very clear they want to fuck the women they hate) is understandably going to develop a negative attitude about men and a paranoid attitude about any proposal that smells like "control women."

I dunno, man. But nothing any of the he-man woman-haters say has ever convinced me the solution is to hate/control women, or that I should feel anything but contempt for incels. I am not really averse to a "neotraditional" revival of some kind, but like you, I don't see how it can be done.

Relatedly, I would be in favor of social messaging to encourage fewer people (but especially fewer women) to go to college, and start families instead. But realistically I don't know how this social engineering would work, especially without the power of a church behind it, and I am not in favor of increasing the power of religion, so, yes, once again you may be right that there is no real solution.

There is already a thumb on the scale in favor of women getting more educated uber alles. Obviously removing it is difficult in se, but we should probably start there.

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