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.

Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I won’t dispute those statistics and I have to concede that they do contradict the usual Red Piller / Manosphere arguments. But two things need to be pointed out in this regard. One is that there are roughly three female college students for two male college students and it has been so for more then a decade or so. This means that roughly one out of three college-educated women who want to marry will basically have to either accept a husband without a college degree or forego marriage. As the former is unlikely in most cases, I very much doubt that the marriage rates quoted in the article will continue. (Someone in the Manosphere called this the coming ‘hypergamy crunch’.) The other thing is that we’ve seen the normalization of something in the past 2-3 decades that can be called the ‘consumption marriage’ among the middle-class and the upper class, meaning a marriage formed primarily for financial reasons in order to preserve and signal class status. Since the consequences of the Sexual Revolution have become clear, single motherhood and family dysfunction have largely become associated with lower class status; I imagine this is the main factor driving this trend.
Whenever women engage in transaction sex of any sort with men they aren't attracted to, as opposed to having sex for its own sake, I'd argue that doesn't count as sexual attention.
Actually, we've already seen this exact thing happening. Scott has written about it. Basically graduate women are marrying the higher-earning working class men. Turns out women don't care much about credentials for their own sake, only credentials as a proxy for high potential salaries.
What percentage of the 90% of young, unmarried men who have had sex do you think visited prostitutes? My bet is a very low number.
It's not prostitution I was referring to, but the phenomenon known as settling - i.e. women marrying men they aren't sexually attracted to. These relationships don't include female sexual attention.
I'm not going to deny that this can be true, but I wonder how these two groups of people are even meeting? Their social circles scarcely overlap, if they overlap at all.
On Hinge. Putting some effort into your dating profile and including "Electrician", "Elevator Mechanic", etc. is definitely gonna get you dates. I honestly don't know how men who make $40-50k a year are going to get married. The only friends of mine in relationships are the ones making $80k+.
I'm in a major west coast city, and in-person dating seems to be dead. I got 5-7 phone numbers from girls last year, and only one ended up getting coffee with me. This was going out every other weekend. Compared to 16 matches, which became six dates from instagram, Hinge, etc.
I may be too broke to date in person though. The bars and events that are $50-100 per night may be active.
I somehow doubt that one third of all college-educated single women in the future are going to resort to online dating apps and also be willing to marry working-class men in order to alleviate their relationship issues.
Are you posting from 1999? Boy, are you in for some nasty surprises [edit: this link seems to work better]. Online dating never gets any better, mind you; the alternatives just keep getting worse. I recommend trying to find a spouse before OKCupid gets bought out. Oh, and if you find yourself on a plane getting hijacked, ignore all the "just cooperate and don't get hurt" protocol; they're not just flying to Cuba next time.
To be fair, "online" in this graph does not differentiate between dating apps and non-dating-app online locations (such as forums and chatrooms). It would be funny if someone were to take a closer look and discover that everybody has switched from Tinder to Discord for romance.
That's not a bad point. I'm old enough that "find a spouse before OKCupid gets bought out" was actually an actionable strategy for me, so I'm hearing the awful reports of modern dating apps second-hand, and I don't actually hear anything about modern non-app-based online dating.
Does it really exist, though? Naively, I'd have expected random Discord channels to be subject to the same social dynamics that work/school/etc were, wherein now that there's a "Find Your Dates Here" Schelling Point of the apps, more and more of the younger generations are starting to consider any but the most slow/careful flirting in ostensibly non-romantic contexts to be intrusive and creepy.
4chan's /soc/ board is chock-full of invitations for messaging (both group and one-on-one) on Discord, Telegram, and Kik.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link