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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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I was catching up on the quality contribution threads for last month (yes, I'm very late...) and I ran across this post from @Amadan.

I found this part specifically was interesting in the broader context of the discussion:

Assuming, of course, that their standards are not too high... You don't want fat Sally the checkout clerk or carousel-riding Cathy, fine. You insist on a 20-something slim attractive virgin who is agreeable and submissive? Hmm, good luck if you're not a 6/6/6. (Or a Mormon.)

One of these things is not like the other.

For men:

  • Six figures: quite difficult to do. Statistically only a fourth of the men in the US achieve this (and of course this assumes that the requirement won't change if all men achieved this).
  • Six feet: mostly driven by genetics and childhood nutrition. And only achieved by 14.5% of men in the US (according to Google).
  • Six pack: this presumably any man could achieve with sufficient exercise (and diet control) though it might be difficult to do concurrently with a six figure job.

For women:

  • 20-something: every woman will be a 20-something for ten years of her life.
  • Slim/attractive (they're mostly the same thing): partially driven by genetics? But still, exercise and diet go a long way here.
  • Virgin who is agreeable and submissive: these are all completely within the median woman's control. As they say, manners cost nothing.

Is it just me or is this scale a bit tilted?

(Apologies for responding so late and in a top-level comment; I didn't want this getting buried in a weeks old thread.)

Indeed. I have commented on this before:

Maybe women now do have ridiculous standards. But so do men.

Women's marriage standards are "six feet, six figures, six inches." Men's marriage standards are "teenage virgin". These are not the same. Every woman was a teenage virgin once (modulo the few who got broken in as lolis). Most men never meet the three sixes. There isn't a possible world where most women get what they want (becoming the exclusive wife of a top man); there is a possible world where most men get what they want, and we lived in it from the abolition of polygamy until the sexual revolution.

Never forget what they took from you.

And:

Yeah, great post. If you want a hot, relatively chaste, young, smart right-leaning woman, that’s not impossible, but you better be the equivalent of that as a man, namely a successful, attractive, charming, relatively young guy who probably has similar values, which in the case of chastity is likely some kind of religious conservatism. Young Mormon men seem to have no issue marrying chaste(ish) pretty blondes who will vote for Romney and deliver 3-4 children, because that’s their milieu. Too often some chubby suburban secular engineer whose primary hobbies are video games and online political discussion thinks he deserves the same.

The fact that you think these are equivalent requirements shows how ridiculously lopsided the sexual marketplace is against men. All a woman needs to do is be young and chaste, which is something every girl was at some point, and vote for a party that half the country supports. Meanwhile, a man who has spent decades studying and working to become an engineer or a lawyer is told "whoops, sorry, that's not enough, you also need to have interesting (to women) hobbies, be physically fit, and have a handsome face; I'm sure you will find time and energy to do all while you are working at a ridiculously demanding intellectual job, and also you better get all of that done way before you turn 35 because otherwise the idea of you marrying a 23 year old is just creepy!"

In other words, every aspect of a man's life, from his career to his hobbies to his body, must be optimized for attracting women, and it is no one's fault but his own if he fails.

"Women don't care about your struggles, they wait at the finish line and fuck the winners." -- Richard Cooper, The Unplugged Alpha

I know it's tempting to go meta and do some kind of both-sides moral equivalence thing here, but I think that's just wrong. Female sexuality is fundamentally stupid and evil in a way that male sexuality simply isn't.

How is wanting commitment-free sex from a rotating harem of virgins less "stupid and evil" than wanting commitment from a "chad" who probably won't commit?

Women don't want to fuck a beta who fundamentally despises them. Truly a mystery and an injustice wrapped in an enigma.

But "commitment-free sex from a rotating harem of virgins", pumping and dumping, is not the male fantasy. It is an adaptation to our current circumstances, where there is no secure rights over women. Much like the rational response to a lack of secure property rights is to steal anything not nailed down, and to hell with tomorrow, the rational response to a lack of secure marital rights is to despoil as many virgins as you can, then dump them before they dump you.

If you look at men's romance, you will see that what men want is a non-rotating harem of virgins who they commit to for life. No man wants to know that the virgin he has fucked is going to get fucked by another man; it kills the soul. "She was never yours, it was just your turn" is a philosophy of despair.

From "The Three Magic Words" by the Dreaded Jim:

For the higher races to reproduce, have to prevent women from continuing to cruise for a higher alpha all their fertile years. If not allowed to cruise, property of the first male they have sex with, and compelled to honor and obey.

For about the cost of two dates, you can have a hooker, and it is not an adequate substitute. Hookers are only a marginal improvement over masturbation. What progressives offer men, a rotating series of hookups, is just not what most men want, as revealed by men’s actions.

Yes, a harem is better than just one wife, but a changing rotation of whores is not a harem. The point of having more than one woman is having more than one woman. If I sleep with several women that is really great. If one of them sleeps with another man that is really bad and I will certainly dump her, probably beat her, and might well kill her. I will be very angry and sad for a very long time.

...

A man needs to own a woman, he needs a house, and land and children. A man that does not own a woman breaks, and a rotating collection of sluts is not ownership.

If she is free to suspend cooperation at any time, men are disinclined to invest in her and her children. You pump and dump, so that if you are lucky, you dump her before she dumps you. You spin the plates to avoid being spun. There is always someone more alpha than you are. You pump and dump because it hurts less that way. Evolution shaped you that way, evolution makes it hurt, so that you would not waste time looking after a chick that becomes pregnant with Jeremy Meeks’s demon spawn. Evolution has planted the knowledge in you that investing in a woman you do not own is a bad investment.

You don’t plant trees on land you don’t own, and if you don’t have some land and plant some trees for your grandkids, it hurts.

Roissy truthfully tells us how to operate in defect/defect equilibrium with women. But the point is to achieve cooperate/cooperate equilibrium.

And from "Female Sexual Preferences" by the same:

Men want to bang every fertile age woman. Woman want to be banged by Mister one in thirty.

Women are allowed to successfully fulfill their goal, men are not allowed to fulfill their goal.

Men want to own a woman. Even successful players find it terribly disturbing and soul destroying that the woman that they bang has banged no end of men before them, and will soon bang someone else. This leads to player burnout. Even marginally successful players soon get burnout. The knowledge slowly soaks in that in the game of players and bitches, the bitches are winning, and even successful players are losing. One soon starts feeling homicidal, and is apt to kill the adulterous woman and or her latest lover. Players counsel other players “avoid oneitis” “She was never yours, it was just your turn”. Bullshit. This is the counsel of despair.

If one cultivates a detached attitude “It was just my turn, she did me a favor”, one avoids homicide, but this is not very satisfactory at all. If one abandons one’s telos, one is psychologically broken, hence player burnout. She was not doing you a favor. You were doing her a favor. If you adopt this attitude, you avoid homicide, but develop other disturbingly weird and unpleasant behaviors and attitudes. It is terribly stressful. Homicide is less stressful. There is a reason why the bible counsels to avoid sluts, but today, nothing but sluts, so what is a man to do?

Successful pursuit of telos requires ownership. One despairs or becomes homicidal because even if one get one dick wet from time to time, one is failing at accomplishing one’s telos. Player burnout is a manifestation of despair. One avoids homicide, but in a world with no female companionship other than sluts, loses one’s soul.

I don't think any of this makes sense. Any 'rational' approach to sex in this sense wouldn't involve sex with women you won't have kids with. A non-secure marriage is still the best route to kids, other than sperm donation. Modern women and men have lifetime single digits of sexual partners and most end up in one or a series of long-term relationships if not an actual marriage. Players and pumping and dumping just aren't the experience most people are having. And if players generally burn out, but many people who get in insecure marriages don't, what does that really say?

Not that this is a knockdown argument against patriarchy or legally enforced marriage commitments, there's more complexity there, it's just that Jim is very wrong.

Dude. You need to stop looking at Dread Jim for life advice. Hating women and wanting them to be property is not a recipe for happiness.

I lost my chance at happiness a long time ago; this is all that's left.

There are things under your control. I doubt you're so old as to have no opportunities for improvement. Anyway, if morality doesn't sway you, a desire for truth should. Jim is mostly wrong about everything. He tells a compelling story to doomers who want reasons for their hatred, but these doom prohets are not actually insightful or wise, they're just crafty tale-tellers.

They are both stupid. The former is significantly less evil in practice in that 1) If it works for you, like Genghis Khan, then it is what it is; and 2) Its not supported by majority narratives, so it hurts far less people practically.

Now, its true that far more women in the world will secure 6-6-6 men than men will acquire 6+ women harems that are functional. But since several orders of magnitude more women expect 6-6-6 than expect 6+, the former is significantly more evil as an idea in the world. Its kinda like how murderers are more evil than ghosts.

If it works for you, like Genghis Khan, then it is what it is;

And if it doesn't work for you, society isn't going to tell you that you're settling for less than you deserve. And chances are you won't feel anything negative about it. Personally, as a man, I would love to have 3 or 4 concubines -- beautiful, youthful, exclusively committed to me, and accepting of my other relationships. But I don't feel any sense of disappointment or frustration over the fact that I haven't been able to build a harem. If I complained about the situation online, I would be (rightly) mocked. The most positive comments I could expect to receive is a suggestion to go out and get a few billion dollars or become a world-renowned athlete or actor.

Its not supported by majority narratives

Yeah, average women are regularly told, in substance, that they are very desirable; that they should never settle; that they deserve the best; that if their dream-guy won't commit, it's because that guy is a jerk; etc.

How is wanting commitment-free sex from a rotating harem of virgins less "stupid and evil" than wanting commitment from a "chad" who probably won't commit?

There is an important difference which is that society has no problem telling men that their primal desire for a harem is stupid, unreasonable, anti-social, and unrealistic for all but a very small minority of men. And most men have internalized this message. If a man has one wife, at some level he may desire a couple concubines as well but he won't feel outraged or cheated if this desire is not fulfilled.

By contrast, society is very reluctant to tell average women that her desire for exclusive commitment from an extremely desirable man is similarly stupid, unreasonable, and unrealistic. One of the most common female dating complaints is that the woman is in a "situationship" with a man who keeps stringing her along. Outside of a few dark corners of the internet, most of the reaction she will receive is that the man in this situation is a bad person; she won't be told that almost certainly it's because she's an average woman chasing men who are out of her league.

Women don't want to fuck a beta who fundamentally despises them

Fortunately for women, men are much less likely to despise a given woman than the reverse.

Women may despise individual men, but the few who despise men as a class don't want to fuck them.

Incels despise women as a class but still want to fuck them.

I agree men and women should both be given better advice about realistic expectations.

Women may despise individual men, but the few who despise men as a class don't want to fuck them.

Completely disagree. You just need to search social media for women who post things like "I hate men" or "kill all men" and then check up later on their relationship status.

Incels despise women as a class but still want to fuck them.

Well, they despise women BECAUSE those women won't have sex with them. In a hypothetical world where things were arranged so that the vast majority of men could have a respected, socially approved sexual/romantic relationship with a woman, there would be far less of this type of hate.

I agree men and women should both be given better advice about realistic expectations.

It seems to me this is a bit of a cop-out because there is a world of difference between what society says to men and what society says to women as described in my previous post. Generally speaking, society is far more accommodating of female desires and far more eager to blame men for any problems with romantic/sexual relationships.

The women performatively "hating men" mostly do not, by revealed preferences, hate men. Incels really do hate women, and while you can cast them as victims, they are victims only of their own inadequacy and self pity. Society isn't making them feel that way , and society isn't obligated to reorder itself so women who don't want them will want them.

As for their being such a difference in how society treats women, yes women have their own pressures men don't, which many of them find very unfair and oppressive.

I don't think society is as hard for either one as they say, and find whiny feminists and loser men equally insufferable, mostly victims of their own mindset.

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society isn't obligated to reorder itself so women who don't want them will want them.

Completely avoiding the moral judgment, if we don't meet a post-scarcity society soon, societies that wish to continue, or at least, continue supporting the elderly, may begin to attempt this.

Whether they succeed or not is another story entirely, but the desperate flailing may be extremely torturous. When women can achieve status in ways other than marriage, they won't marry, and the baby bust trends with marriage bust.

The women performatively "hating men" mostly do not, by revealed preferences, hate men. Incels really do hate women,

Strong disagree. What percentage of incels do you think would accept a romantic/sexual relationship with a reasonably attractive woman? (In fact, incels regularly tease each other over the fact that most of them would "ascend" if they had the opportunity.)

while you can cast them as victims,

The question is what is the source of their hate, not whether they are victims.

ociety isn't obligated to reorder itself so women who don't want them will want them.

Assuming this is so, so what? Have I stated or implied otherwise?

As for their being such a difference in how society treats women, yes women have their own pressures men don't, which many of them find very unfair and oppressive.

Again, assuming this is so, so what? Does this contradict anything I have said?

I don't think society is as hard for either one as they say, and find whiny feminists and loser men equally insufferable, mostly victims of their own mindset.

Again, assuming this is so, so what? It seems reasonably clear that in the area under discussion, society is far more accepting and accommodating of women's unreasonable desires than it is of men.

Of course every incel would leap at the chance to score an attractive woman. That doesn't mean they actually like women.

Does society have more sympathy for women? (The "women are wonderful" syndrome?) Yes, generally so (at least in the West). That doesn't mean incels deserve sympathy, any more than the proverbial carousel rider does.

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