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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22599 thread views

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.

Female sexuality is fundamentally stupid and evil in a way that male sexuality simply isn't.

Them's fightin' words, and we could get into a real fight over this. Men have done stupid and evil things for sex, and so have women. Male sexuality will happily fuck six year olds, is that fundamentally smart and good?

Male sexuality will happily fuck six year olds, is that fundamentally smart and good?

That is rather fundamentally unusual and unacceptable behavior in any remotely modern society I can name. There is a massive difference between ~most men being attracted to 16 year old women, but denying that attraction because of laws and socialization, and attempting to sleep with literal small children.

I might as well claim that "female sexuality" involves peanut butter and particularly attractive German Shepherds, since that has been documented at rates >0.

if we're going to say X sexuality is more evil than Y sexuality, then it is going to invite "here are instances of Y sexuality being pretty damn creepy". Both sexes, and sexuality, and fetishes/perversions/kinks, can be pretty damn creepy.

'Women are attracted to what they see as hotness in guys' is no more, or no less, creepy than 'men are attracted to what they see as hotness in girls'. That male sexuality does seem to be a very simple on/off switch of "young, big booba, big ass = dick go sproing!" is not the fault of women. Nor is it the fault of men if women can be attracted to older men who are more interesting/have a broader or deeper range of experience and, yeah, money/status.

"Good provider, good genetic material for potential offspring, attractive, dependable, funny, 6/6/6 = pussy wet" is not the fault of men. Can we stop saying "your preferences are evil" unless those preferences are actually evil? It's the male equivalent of "you should find tattooed, pierced, fat women just as attractive as Sydney Sweeney" - "no, just because I'm short, balding and not particularly well-paid, she's a bitch for not giving me a chance!"

Can we stop saying "your preferences are evil" unless those preferences are actually evil?

Evil is kind of a loaded word, so let's just say that everyone -- male and female -- has sexual desires which are unreasonable and/or destructive. And by that I mean that (1) it's not mathematically possible for everyone's sexual desires to be satisfied; and (2) if people pursue these sexual desires anyway, it's bad for society.

So for example, most men, even average men, instinctively want a harem but there simply aren't enough women in existence for every man to have a harem. At most, only a few extremely elite men can have a harem -- e.g. Elon Musk or the King of Saudi Arabia.

Similarly, most women, even average women, instinctively want a committed relationship from a highly desirable man. This is similarly unreasonable. There just aren't enough highly desirable men in existence.

As I mentioned in a couple other posts, the difference is that men are told (and have internalized) that their instinctive desire for a harem is unreasonable. By contrast, society is very reluctant to tell women that their instinctive desire for commitment from a highly desirable man is just as unreasonable.

As I mentioned in a couple other posts, the difference is that men are told (and have internalized) that their instinctive desire for a harem is unreasonable. By contrast, society is very reluctant to tell women that their instinctive desire for commitment from a highly desirable man is just as unreasonable.

Seems to me you can make the case that the female desire is downstream of the male one, at least on a macro timescale. There do exist many naturally monogamous animal species, and while their courtship involves some mate selection where everyone tries to get the most attractive partner possible, it seems like things shake out so that most individuals have a mate. It doesn't make evolutionary sense for a monogamous animal to prefer sterility to a sub-10% mate; I don't know how that trait would be preserved.

"Harem" animals are generally ones where the male has enough aggression to kill non-affiliated females/ kill their mates/ kill their offspring, and at that point the calculus does shift to make it questionable whether any given female should make a virtue of necessity and try to affiliate with Chad before he swoops in, murders their children, rapes them and pillages all their resources anyway. As you point out, most women would still prefer monogamy with a reasonably mid-status man, but all of the lurking "girls like bad boys" instincts that men deplore can be explained by women needing a partner who seems like they'd be able to defend against marauding other males.

There do exist many naturally monogamous animal species

But humans are not one of them, and neither are most primates. 90% of bird species are monogamous but only 3-9% of mammals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogamy_in_animals

To put it another way, male-on-male aggression is adaptive for males in a polygamous society, and so is the female tendency to go for the strongest male because making babies is expensive and time-consuming and making sperm is free.

To put it another way, male-on-male aggression is adaptive for males in a polygamous society, and so is the female tendency to go for the strongest male because making babies is expensive and time-consuming and making sperm is free.

I was suggesting that in evolutionary terms, it's more plausible that the causal arrow should have run from the development of male aggression, to polygamous society and women driven to affiliate with "bad boys," than the other way around.

For one thing, your argument about the adaptive advantage of infidelity/ hypergamy should be true of monogamous bird species as well as mammals, but the birds have retained the monogamy. For another thing, humans are pretty weak overall, so our male strength and aggression is much more useful for intraspecies conflict than for pure survival via inter-species defense or resource acquisition. Chad's ability to beat up the dweeb in no way translates to Chad's ability to take down a buffalo or fight off a lion, so it's not clear how there'd be a strong-enough adaptive advantage to females breaking monogamous coordination to pursue Chad en masse unless you have an existing culture of violence where Chad might just beat up your man and rape you anyway. Thus, it seems like the precipitating factor is more likely the emergence of battle-males in conditions of plentiful resources.

Of course, once that's in place you certainly get positive feedback loops where the polygamy increases the aggression and vice-versa.

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