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 -
The recent Superbowl halftime kerfuffle exposed me to some of the culture I usually don't pay much attention to; that being Country, reggaeton ,hiphop, and popular music in general. I don't really pay much attention to that side of the culture war, I'm too busy being an elitist piece of shit about music.
I saw the halftime show of course; the music was kinda boring and derivative IMO but you could dance to it, I've heard worse. The show itself was spectacular, a celebration of people doing people shit, dancing and working and getting married and having kids and living in the house you grew up in, all that good good shit I like.
Due to my circle, I also watched the TPUSA half time show. I'll discount the production because they didn't have infinity million dollars to do it and just consider the theming: Half hearted nostalgia for a past with no character and no value (infinite jihad on kid rock), shitty white versions of black music with no soul and no heart, country music whining about how hard it is, it's so sad you guys.
Upon survey of the major hits of the two most popular opposing genres (Hiphop and country, not to say there aren't communist folk singers or MAGA rappers), this kinda repeats: there are the brainless two chord songs about how much the lead singer is fukin and how good he is at it but also he is sad and relatable because he just wants to find love, maaaaaaaan (eg. 20 cigarettes); we will set those aside for the more political - aspirational - gesturing at a revolutionish songs.
I got some recs. from people who partake and I had AI slop me out a list of such songs for the right and the left over the past couple years, and the trend seems to hold: The right-pol songs are reactive, kinda dour, "I don't like how things are going, it's hard, we need to defend XYZ, try that in a small town", etc.
The left-pol songs are also "shits fucked up, but black this time" but the prominent themes are "Those rat bastards are going to get what they deserve, We are the inevitable victors of history and every setback is temporary, We're gonna be alright".
I wonder where the Bush era triumphal conservative art movement has gotten off to, Am I Berenstein Bears-ing myself into believing that there was a big swell of positive conservative leaning pop art in the post 9/11 pre-2008 crash days?
Tony Keith with the song that goes “brought to you courtesy, of the red white and blue” is quite triumphalist about the U.S. from the Bush era.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
New week is here, it is time for some more random culture (and kinetic) war news, sourced from various parts of internets via xitter.
1/ Middle Eastern issues, and general strategy, tactics, law and customs of war in the current millenium.
About half of US deployable air power is ready for Iran boogaloo 2.0. It would be very symbolic if it began exactly at 4th anniversary of three day special operation to desatanize Ukraine.
How it will start? As massive decapitation strike on enemy elite human capital.
An underrated change in modern warfare is the rise of “man hunting” - targeting of individuals, especially generals and other key personnel.
It is fascinating to see how something that was absolute NO in traditional rules of war "Generals do not take pot shots at each other" became normalized in the rules based order.
First organized crime bosses, then leaders of terrorist/freedom fighter groups like Al Qaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah, and now leaders and VIPs of internationally recognized states as Iran or Venezuela. And not only uniformed personnel, but leading scientists are now fair targets too.
This tactic became prevalent, because the targets are completely unable to reciprocate.
US and Israeli high ranking officers are not so well protected, professional sleeper cells should be able to get at them, but there is no evidence that these cells exist outside of Tom Clancy novels.
The highest ranking Israeli person killed was minister of tourism 25 years ago.
True war of assassins is yet to come.
What would be long term results? Being general is not any more cushy job with spiffy uniform, only people who believe in their cause and are ready to die will strive for such positions. Do the forces of freedom have plan B for case when decapitation strike succeeds, all targets are elliminated, but the enemy still refuses to surrender?
It is important to always have plan B. ready.
2/ More Middle Eastern issues
US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said in Tucker Carlson interview that "it would be fine" if Israel took over all of Middle East.
Angela Price Aggeler, US ambassador to Macedonia, so far hadn't commented whether Macedonians should take back all lands given to their ancestors by Zeus.
3/ Yet more Middle Eastern issues
Israeli ultra-orthodox revived ancient European tradition of burning cats and dogs alive as part of celebration.
Very based and trad pilled.
4/ Woke and also military issues
Ft. Bragg kindergarten teacher who identifies as trans wolf 'Lilith Deathhowl' was fired
It looks like story from 2021, as if celebrations were premature and wokeness hadn't perished yet.
5/ Epstein issues
Epstein before his ultimely demise hid his secrets in storage units. Good news, the whole sordid saga can be prolonged into infinity. At any time, mysterious storage unit can be opened and new Easter eggs rolled out for the eager public.
6/ Now, the thread connecting all issues of the day together
The subway question is again the hottest debate on Xitter right now:
Are homeless drug addicts peeing and pooping in public transport reactionary lumpenproletariat or progressive freedom fighters? Is shitting in New York subway the best way to defeat American imperialism and free Palestine?
This "decapitation strategy" seems like a function of the post-GWOT American toolkit, which consists of
It's a great strategy for creating the appearance of victory at a low cost against tribesmen with no air defenses. In terms of actually producing victory, however, as far as I can tell it has never worked except when some significant faction within the targeted regime is secretly working for the enemy. The Onion released an article all the way back in 2006 titled "Eighty Percent Of Al-Qaeda No. 2s Now Dead"; twenty years later, Al Qaeda is more powerful than ever with control over Syria and a significant portion of the Sahel.
If you prefer a more recent example, we've seen this whole song and dance before with Operation Rough Rider and to a lesser extent, Operation Prosperity Guardian. Trump issues dire threats, carrier groups moved into position, Yemen was obliterated with constant airstrikes for over a month, Houthi officials were assassinated yet the Houthi drone and missile capabilities remained intact and Trump ultimately backed down having achieved basically nothing.
If this sort of strategy went nowhere against Yemen then why would there be any expectation of success against Iran, which is larger, more powerful and more populous by several times?
More options
Context Copy link
Since we had people having trouble telling if Trump is trolling about Greenland, Canada, or running for a third term, I just want to pre-register that this is clearly not-trolling, and how to tell the difference between the two is obvious.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm fairly sure nothing's going to happen. My bet is Trump will get no concessions in negotiations, then he'll loudly make up something about how he got the IRGC to agree to a deal where they stop funding terror/their nuke program and rant about how he deserves the Nobel Peace prize, the Iranians will say they didn't agree to any of that and Trump just hopes everyone will forget the whole circus.
More options
Context Copy link
Do you happen to have a source for that? I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just curious. To be, that would be fascinating if at some point in the past there was a norm against these sorts of attacks.
I can definitely imagine a norm against attacking senior officers under a banner of parley. But if the lines are drawn and the battle is ready to go, if one side has a sniper who can take out the other side's leader, I would have thought they would take the shot.
For a fictional example, I remember a samurai movie where a senior officer in one army is shot and killed by a sniper while he is playing the flute. As I recall, this wasn't presented as a violation of any kind of norm.
More options
Context Copy link
How do you mean? I find it hard to see the parallels between invading Ukraine and bombing Iran, other than both being terrible ideas. Russia’s invasion is of no particular historical significance to either US or Iran.
I doubt that Yamamoto or Nelson saw it that way. Decapitation strikes were historically limited more by capability than by “traditional rules.”
The rest of your links feel more like shotgun-spread booing. Wow, those outgroup members sure are icky today!
Or by the practical benefits. Assassinations in WW2 were rare in part because it was understood that they could easily backfire and lead to more capable leaders replacing those assassinated, with this understanding extending all the way up to Hitler himself. Assassination was reserved for unusually capable, dangerous and likely irreplaceable leaders like Yamamoto or Reinhard Heydrich.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XS7itdfgNnU
Over the weekend, an interview between Tucker Carlson and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has been making the rounds. The general thrust of the Interview is: Mike Huckabee is something called a "Christian Zionist", that is:
Steelman: An evangelical protestant Christian who recognizes the unique place in history and theology that The Jewish people occupy, and recognizes that Israel has a Right to Exist.
Strawman: An evangelical protestant Christian who worships the Jews as the main character of history and society, and sees the rest of the world as second-tier citizens who exist to support the work of Jewish people.
The interview attempts to answer what Christian zionism is, what Mike Huckabee believes, etc.
After listening to this, it seems as though Mike is not doing a great job of hiding the fact that he is closer to the strawman than the steelman on this one. Some points:
Huckabee hosted a meeting with Johnathan Pollard, an Israeli who stole US state secrets and sold them to Israel, and subsequently Russia during the cold war. Pollard currently lives in Israel, and Huckabee has been criticized for hosting a meeting with him.
Israel is currently a safe haven for sex criminals (or accused sex criminals). There is a not-insignificant number of men who have been charged with sex crimes in the US, who flee to Israel, and are protected by the Israeli government from extradition to the US. Or more specifically: the US simply ignores these people once they are safely in Israel. Tucker confronts Huckabee about this.
There are a few other things like this, Tucker also asserts that the Iraq war was done on behalf of Israel. The entire interview is quite spicy, and I recommend listening to it.
The "money" quote, however, is one where Tucker is pressing Huckabee on what Israel is, what "a right to exist" is, and what the borders that Israel is entitled to are. Tucker quotes the bible passage that Huckabee is citing to justify Israel's ownership, and points out that the land indicated in the passage is substantially larger than the land Israel currently claims. Tucker's question is, essentially: "if Israel has a right to the land they currently occupy due to this Bible passage, then don't they actually have a right to a majority of the entire Middle East, due to the same Bible passage"
Huckabee's response is, essentially: yes they do. If they want to take it, then that would be fine.
Hard to overstate what a big deal this has been over the weekend. This undermines 30 years of US foreign policy with regards to the ME, and vindicates every fear that every ME nation has had with regards to their own defense, their desire for a nuclear weapon, etc. It's my opinion that this is bad enough that Huckabee needs to be very publicly fired immediately, and that a lot of reassurance needs to be made to these other countries that Huckabee is essentially in a cult, that his insane beliefs do not in ANY way represent the beliefs of the broader US government, and that we will never allow another member of his cult into any position of power within the US government.
The problem: none of that is true. Yes, from my perspective (a Catholic) Huckabee is in an insane, anti-christian cult with absolutely insane beliefs. My (somewhat unrelated) point is that this is why you need The Church. But there are plenty of people in The US Government who think this way. Ted Cruz is another one, who was also interviewed, also disastrously, by Tucker.
Where this, the Cruz interview, and the general discourse around Israel is heading is: what is Israel, exactly? Why does the US support them so much? What was the Iraq war, actually? If we are really using The Bible to dictate foreign policy, then what implications does that have? (I don't think the bible at all supports Huckabee's idea here, btw. I think this is Zionists essentially preying on a very specific type of protestant)
I would like to gently propose that history suggests that merely having The Church doesn't prevent people in power from developing ideas about Palestine that might be considered by many unusual or harmful, and that despite your understandably vehement theological disagreements with Huckabee he's probably more your ally (theologically and otherwise!) than most.
The Church is the authority that can recognize a flaw and correct it. It does take a really long time (this is a feature not a bug).
The Church of Mike Huckabee likely won't exist in any recognizable way in 100 years, but the Catholic Church will remain, as it has for the last 2000 years. Go to a Byzantine rite Divine Liturgy, or a TLM, and you'll be participating in the mass the same as it existed (largely) 1000 years ago. The Novus Ordo is not on its surface recognizable, but still points to the same things, and the church teaching remains consistent all the way back to the Church Fathers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are many Christian Zionists that believe some flavor dispensationalist premillennialism theology.
I find supersessionist covenant theology, where 'Israel' finds its fulfillment in the Church making The Church the "new Israel" or "true Israel" much tidier.
More options
Context Copy link
You even undersell the depth of Jonathan Pollard's betrayal, who was one of the most damaging spies in US history. Pollard's professed motive was that he believed the US wasn't doing enough for Israel. Huckabee meeting with Pollard is a feature not a bug, as Huckabee's worship of Jews is the fundamental job requirement for his US government position.
The most unfortunate part is that what you call the "strawman" of Christian Zionism is actually the only internally coherent position a Christian can hold... like, don't you believe the Bible is divinely and literally true? It's a fatal flaw in the Christian blockchain that the Torah really does reduce to race worship of Jews symbolically represented by their tribal god Yahweh, like Zeus was a tribal god representing the European tribes worshipped by him. I don't see how you could believe the Old Testament and also not agree with Huckabee's perspective.
I understand where HUCKABEE is coming from, it's Tucker Carlson who pussyfoots without saying what he actually means. Is Carlson saying that Yahweh did not promise the land to the Jews? Or is he saying that Yahweh did, but for diplomatic reasons we shouldn't acknowledge it? Why doesn't Carlson then just say "I agree with you but we shouldn't say it out loud because it's not politically expedient", why act shocked if he believes it as well? The best I can infer is that Carlson is saying Yahweh did promise the land to the Jews but the Israelis are not Jews- although he does not say that directly, he makes the argument indirectly by saying "Netanyahu came from Europe."
Carlson incessantly says we can't criticize Jews collectively for their collective behavior, but his approach to antisemitism is a critique of literature he himself claims to hold is true.
I grew up Christian, I understand well the dynamics and how going to a Catholic church is not even close to the same as a sermon from Mike Huckabee. But are you really equipped to challenge Huckabee when he clearly has the bible on his side and you believe the bible as well?
The real problem is that your "strawman" of Christian Zionism is internally coherent within Christianity, and it's actually the Christian antisemitism professed by Carlson that's incoherent.
With that said, for all of Carlson's denials that he is antisemitic he has put himself in a very dangerous position, he has put himself squarely in that camp and none of his meager qualifications or groveling "I hate Rome too because they killed Jews, I'm not antisemitic!" is going to work. I don't understand Carlson's motives. He is either Red Pilled and trying to subversively promote anti-semitism or he's just trying to gain market share from the surge in anti-semitism among young audiences. If it's the latter he's going to have a Come to Jesus moment very soon, if it's the former then he's just demonstrating how Christianity is a blocker from properly engaging that tribe.
Yahweh didn't promise anything to the Jews, Yahweh is literary fiction- ancient capeshit, and the bible is Jewish race propaganda. That's a hard pill to swallow as a long time former Christian myself, but watching the "Carlson vs Huckabee dialectic" on the eve of another major war for Israel just shows how the Christian perspective is unable to grapple with the forces we are dealing with, it is captured by the Torah on both the anti-semitic and philo-semitic side of the debate.
For Christians, does the New Law not fulfill and surpass the Old Law? Do Christians Zionists abstain from shellfish and pork?
Christians claim thew New Law represents the "completion" of the Old Law. But no branch of Christianity claims the New Law supplanted the Mosaic covenant. Jesus himself said he did not come to abolish the law, and Christian doctrine is that the First Covenant is living and they are outside of it.
The New Law actually was a practical mechanism for bringing Gentiles in the fold of Yahweh. Conversion would be quite difficult if you demanded they get circumcised and are unable to eat their traditional diet or at the tables of their pagan neighbors. It was Paul's innovation of the New Law that allowed Christianity to flourish.
But Christians believe in the Mosaic Covenant and the Abrahamic covenant. Huckabee is the one that treats these seriously, Carlson is the one that doesn't present a coherent position rooted in the bible and instead just balks.
More options
Context Copy link
You don't need to go into new law/old law. the old law itself is incompatible with SS's claims.
The Old Law: if you don't properly worship Yahweh (symbolically representative of Jews) you are cursed. And if you do properly worship Yahweh (Jews) you will be blessed. I can hear my own political representatives restate that framework to curse their own race and nation for turning against Israel.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is an absurd statement on multiple levels.
As a bare existence proof, it's notable that most of the history of Christianity as a religion, it has not exhibited anything approaching the strawman behavior you are claiming is required for internal consistency.
In terms of actual theology, your claim appears flatly incompatible with the 26th chapter of Leviticus, as well as many, many, many other passages. You do not actually know what you are talking about even a little. You are hostile toward jews and you want everyone else to be more hostile toward jews; you say whatever you think will nudge those listening in the direction of greater hostility.
And how exactly is Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz droning on about "Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed" contrary to Leviticus?
The 26th chapter of Leviticus is laying out the same framework for the Mosaic Covenant, which is a genetically-inherited blood covenant between the Jews and Yahweh. I am not aware of any Christian sect that claims this covenant does not or no longer exists- I've seen anti-Semitic Catholics claim that Jesus broke the Mosaic covenant, but that's contrary to their own Church teachings.
The Mosaic covenant is one of the most stark "main characters of history" assertions in the body of human mythological canon, and it's remarkable that billions of non-Jews hold it as true. That has real-world consequences, like when we are faced with actual life and death geopolitical standoff we have two Christians debating Genesis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think "preying" is kind of an overstatement here. A better way to put it -- in my opinion -- is that Israeli leadership, and Zionists in general, correctly sense extreme hostility from many parts of the world and are not in a position to be picky about whose support they accept.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm surprised that even the strawman doesn’t invoke eschatology here.
The strawman drawn here is actually kind. The Strawman of a Christian Zionist is something like:
The Jews must regain control of Israel as a prerequisite of the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. We wish well to Israel as a nation for this reason, but this will ultimately not go well for the Jews in Israel: 144,000 will convert to Christianity last minute beating the buzzer, the rest will be damned to eternal hellfire.
I do agree that all positions of biblical Christian zionism are bad, ignorant, and evil.
A quibble, the 144,000 would be proselytizing, they're the beginning of the conversion not the end.
I've never heard it that way, but I'm sure the prots have different versions of everything. The way I've generally heard it is that they're all going down except for the 144,000 who are saved.
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
Lately I have been wondering why our society is (or seems to be) increasingly hostile towards romantic/sexual relationships between a (1) a man; and (2) a much younger woman. Recently I read that a well respected football coach -- Bill Belichick -- was denied admission to the Football hall of fame based on the fact that he is in a romantic relationship with a woman who is much younger than him.
What's interesting to me is that for many years, there has been a popular idea that it's completely fine for two consenting adults to enter into a sexual/romantic relationship, even if those two adults are the same sex; even if they are different races; and so on. Societal disapproval of relationships between an older man and a younger woman seem to be an exception to what could be called the "love is love" principle.
I admit that I have a personal interest in this issue: I am a middle aged man and my fiancee is a good deal younger than me. I will call this an "age-gap relationship" or "AGR." (For purposes of this post, I am referring to AGR's involving an older man and a younger woman.)
I can think of a few hypotheses:
(1) My initial assumption is wrong; outside of a few extremists online, most people don't care about AGRs. As noted above, my fiancee is a great deal younger than me; we have gotten the occasional curious glance while out in public, but I haven't directly experienced any hostility. That being said, the case of Bill Belichick seems to suggest that this sentiment is affecting real world decisions.
(2) This is reflective of society's increasing hatred of and hostility towards men. Although it's been common for decades for TV commercials to portray wives as smarter, wiser, and generally better than their bumbling idiot husbands, it seems this trend has gotten much more intense in recent years. "women are superior to men" is pretty much the constant drumbeat in most media these days. Coupled with that is the idea that male desires are invalid and illegitimate. Against this backdrop, arguably one would expect that society would disapprove of AGRs inasmuch as they are perceived to satisfy the common male sexual desire for younger women.
This explanation appeals to me since it fits with the (very satisfying) idea that my outgroup (progressives) are mainly just bad people who are full of hate, but I will try to keep an open mind.
(2a) Women (whose sentiment has a huge impact on societal values) object to these relationships since it reminds them of a significant disadvantage they have in comparison to men: Female sexual attractiveness inevitably and steeply declines relatively early in life. Since women tend to compare themselves to the most elite men, they get the frustrating impression that society has made life extremely unfair for them. Perhaps women have always felt this way and what's changed is that they have more of a voice.
(3) The internet and social media has made it much easier for AGRs to develop so it's a bigger issue. This seems plausible to me, but on the other hand when I was in high school many years ago there were sexual/romantic relationships between teachers and students. Although these were never approved of, they are far less tolerated nowadays than they were in the 70s and 80s.
(4) Society has become aware that these types of relationships have a much greater opportunity for abuse. While there are definitely a lot of predatory men out there, my issue with this explanation is that there are a lot of relationships (both romantic/sexual and non-romantic/sexual) which entail a lot of abuse and predation, which relationships society doesn't seem to care all that much about.
(5) There's no real reason per se. It's just a self-reinforcing bandwagon effect. This is definitely a possibility but it's difficult to think of how this hypothesis could be verified. Besides, this hypothesis doesn't seem to explain, in a satisfactory way, why society would make this exception for the general "love is love" principle.
(6) It reminds people of guys like Jeffrey Epstein. The thinking is that if a man will openly date a 19 year old, chances are he secretly lusts after females who are below the legal age. This seems plausible, but it doesn't really account for societal disapproval of a relationship between someone who is 70 and someone who is 24. (Or does it?)
Anyway, I would be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on this subject.
It's really not ideal (from a childbearing perspective) for a woman who is in her peak fertile years to be with a guy who is pretty far past his most fertile years (the persistence of male fertility notwithstanding). This might not be the explanation for the actual negative reactions of people, but it is probably good to keep in mind, although obviously it applies mostly to really big gaps like the one mentioned above.
A lot of people have spoken (correctly, I think) about the female jealousy angle, but I think it's also correct that guys don't want people their dad's age elbowing in on their mating pool. And it's bad for romance and male-female relations for men (and women) to start to think of romantic or sexual relationships as one where a woman tries to get as much money/status-adjacency out of a man. (Obviously this does not describe all age-gap relationships.)
The way I tend to think about this is that although it's not really morally wrong for age-gap relationships to exist (presuming no age of consent or other issues) but it's probably good for society to put a few cultural norms that hedge against it, to keep it from being normalized. If older men and younger women were typical, you'd see reduced fertility and a lot of angry young men. All things being equal, it's best if the norm if most people get married relatively young.
I tend to agree (notwithstanding my personal circumstances), but I would also like cultural norms against promiscuity, single motherhood, etc.
No disagreement from me on that. If anything those seem higher priority to me.
Also - in case it's not clear - I'm not trying to pick on you. Merely suggest what I think is a pretty defensible explanation for the norm. I think it's helpful for understanding society to be able to separate out "morally wrong" from "norm" while also leaving room for norms to exist.
I would probably choose the word "rationalization" over "explanation," but thanks.
Here's a thought experiment. Suppose society is made up of 2 groups, one favored and the other disfavored. It could be whites and blacks; gentiles and Jews; women and men; or whatever. Suppose further that there is a hypothetical social norm which, generally speaking, is a good idea. For example "don't play loud music in the library." Would you rather have a world where (1) the social norm does not exist at all; or (2) the social norm exists, but is enforced only as to the disfavored group?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, realistically, this is a very old debate. St. Bernardino (~1400) had writings and sermons criticizing older men marrying very young women. So, I think any explanation that treats it as a novel phenomenon is wrong.
It's more something that will slip in an out of the overton window as cultural and social dynamics shift.
I think there's a reason you're missing in your list, that at least explains why young men would support / go along with prohibitions. Older men taking younger women is fishing in their pond. I think there is some inherent disgust to it, that from an evopsych perspective comes from resource protection.
There is absolutely a social effect with the practice widely tolerated, on the shape of mating and family formation, and whether one finds those effects net ill or not, trying to handwave feelings about it as arbitrary is the most incorrect response.
I was rabidly against even two or three year age gaps in a relationship...between the ages of 13 and 17, when I felt like every girl I tried to date had an older boyfriend, or had previously had an older boyfriend who took her virginity and then broke her heart and now she wasn't interested in dating/sex anymore.
This is extremely relatable, and serves as a good reminder (of what should already be obvious) that encouraging AGRs without restoring functioning sexual morality is worse than nothing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's a good point. I think two factors are at play.
One: in earlier times, an older guy unashamedly, routinely pursuing younger women simply ended up getting beaten up by younger men sooner or later. But in an age of online dating, social atomization and the death of clubbing, this risk disappeared.
Two: few young women are signalling a willingness to settle down with equally young men and thus practice assortative mating. This erodes young men's willingness to mate-guard.
More options
Context Copy link
Fascinating, would you mind linking to some of them? The narrative I've heard is that in the past, age-gap relationships were completely normal and unremarkable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Women spend a significant chunk of their life in infertility. Once their fertile days are over their best reproductive strategy is to limit reproductivity of the still fertile members of the population so that their children will be a larger percentage of the next generation.
Menopause is old enough that this trait is probably selected for, women probably have some innate instinct to see sex of younger women as bad once they are above a certain age. I think many of our norms around sex and marriage are downstream of this (marriage, vows of chastity, transgender fads, aversion to 'sexualized' portrayals of women, etc). The justifications for this stuff (consent, power imbalances, serving the church, etc) are just an irrelevant detail, you know something is bad inside your soul and then you search for an explanation to explain why you felt the wrongness to others. Morality is just what it feels like to be a member of a social species from the inside.
Our society is increasingly controlled by women and their infertile period has been lengthening as percentage of their total lifespan. Age gap is just one of the sticks that was nearby.
Fascinating. So then what explains infertile old hags urging their children to get married and provide them with grandchildren?
I really love reading you guys (and boy do I mean guys) earnestly explaining female biology to me. It's like reading Martians trying to explain dolphins.
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting. But it seems that younger women are complaining of age gaps more than older women. That's my anecdotal observation.
I actually have a theory to explain this: It very much reminds me of the stereotypical ultra-conservative religious preacher who is constantly condemning homosexuality. Which is of course consistent with his religion, but he does it so frequently and so emphatically that it makes you wonder what's going on. In that situation, it's reasonable to (strongly) suspect that this individual has homosexual impulses, and is perhaps even full-on gay, and that he vocally condemns homosexuality as a way of fighting his own (perceived) demons.
In the same way, I think that there is a small percentage of young women -- maybe 5-10% -- who are attracted to older men in the sense that the man's age is not just a matter of indifference to her but rather it makes him more attractive. On top of that, I think there is a much larger percentage - perhaps 75-80% who are not specifically attracted to older men but are somewhat indifferent to age, and therefore they occasionally feel attracted to older men who are otherwise desirable to them. At the same time, at least online, most of these women are aware that AGRs are socially disapproved of, so perhaps they complain loudly as a way of compensating for these feelings of attraction.
All that being said, I realize that this is kind of a just-so story and I don't want to add too many epicycles to the model. The mate-guarding argument is intriguing, but it does seem to be contradicted, at least to an extent, by the phenomenon of young women vocally objecting to AGRs.
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, hot take here, but one of the cool things about women once you notice it is that they tend to say the opposite of what they mean. This is because they are conflict-averse and avoid direct communication so as to maintain deniability.
If a woman complains that you're not spending enough time with her, you're probably spending too much time with her. If she tells you she's happy with your body despite the recent weight gain, it's time to hit the gym. They will tell you everything you need to know provided that you have ears to hear and never let on that you understand this.
My model predicts that the more rights women have, the more vociferously they will complain about oppression. Women dressing up as Handsmaid's Tale concubines and complaining about high-status men wanting to control and breed them speak for themselves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not just that: female sexual usefulness ends at 50ish in a way it doesn't for men. After menopause, is there really any reason ever not to just be FWB, retirement home style? Men can invest and save for this so they can afford someone who can still build a family but no amount of financial prudence will save that for women.
And sure, you could compensate with basic things like "not being openly hostile", but feminists are [by definition] at a disadvantage there, so...
What remains to be seen is how the spinsters are going to take it out on everyone else, because they will have some political capital to getting revenge on the men they feel they are entitled to, and will likely act accordingly. But there will be no State-mandated husbands (besides perhaps Big Brother, imposed with "protecting women" as the main justification- a concept that's 20 years out of date, but history shows this demographic does not care about that); it'll take on the character of a society-wide divorce.
No, this is 100% just the "I consent/isn't there someone you forgot to ask?" meme.
No, the general principle is "love is love so long as it benefits women-as-class", and has been that way since 1900 or so. This is why it's OK for young boys to be sex objects for gay men, but never young girls.
And straight women...
True; Adolescence is basically the distaff equivalent of whatever that salacious Victorian-era book about young teenage prostitutes was (and all the wokeshit is, to lesser degrees).
It's a clear sign there's something real nasty going on, but the relevant actors are too weak to deal with that (to the point that they're too busy getting off on the oppression, in that same awkward/harmful way women do when they stay with a man that abuses them in the ways typical of men).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have seen no reason to believe that Bill Belichick was denied getting into the hall of fame this year because of his relationship with Jordon Hudson. I am not even sure that Hall of Fame voters would care about that. For example, Peyton Manning was voted into the Hall in 2021 despite sexual assault and performance enhancing drug use allegations against him. The NFL's culture usually isn't very sensitive to stuff like this.
More options
Context Copy link
I’d say a combination of 1, 3 and 4. Social media does make otherwise-invisible relationships a matter of public record. Conversely, the plural of “tweet” is not “data”, and the existence of a story is itself invisible until it hits some critical mass.
Then again, I hate and resent this topic for a different reason, so maybe I’m just extrapolating.
More options
Context Copy link
One other thing to add. I often see criticism of the form, "What could an 18 year old and a 27 year old have to talk about? They are at totally different points in their lives with totally different interests and experiences." Which of course reminds me of another great twitter joke that went something like this, "I'm opposed to sex-gap relationships, what could a man and a woman possibly have to talk about?" I think there is this fantasy among college-educated, urban professionals, that an ideal relationship should be some great 'meeting of the minds', where someone finds their intellectual twin. Like ideally, perhaps two chess grandmasters would partner up over their deep love of chess. But man, I just don't think relationships really work that way now or for the vast majority of human history.
With my wife, of course we really had no shared interests when we got together. But you develop those by virtue of being in a relationship. Now we have a toddler and he is an enormous shared interest, we both (of course) find him endlessly fascinating and can talk about him endlessly. Or our shared house. Or our shared friends. Or things like some new restaurant in town, or something we saw on the news. We still don't really have any "hobby" in common, but that's perfectly fine, we have a lifetime of things to talk about. The very act of sharing your life with someone is what generates those shared interests and topics of conversation, it doesn't really matter where you started.
It's funny that you mentioned that. When the subject of mainstream discussion is old people, their declining quality of life, social isolation, solitude and the health risks that entails, people inevitably make the argument that it's harmful for different demographic cohorts to self-segregate, that it's important for your overall well-being to interact regularly with people of different ages, that it's important to open yourself up to the lived experience and perspective of people that are either younger or older than you etc.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree that this is probably just a rationalization. If the couple consists of a man and woman who are from two very different ethno-cultural backgrounds, I doubt you would hear this objection.
Also, here's a thought experiment: Suppose the couple consists of (1) a man who is a well respected orchestral composer and conductor who is 60 years old; and (2) a woman who is a talented 25-year-old flute player. In that situation, society isn't going to say "oh, well probably they have plenty of common interests, so there's no problem." Instead, you will probably get the "power imbalance" objection.
Fantastic point. I will extend that proof to power imbalances. Imagine Jeff Bezos pairs up with a random 62 year old elementary school teacher. Would feminists be decrying power imbalance? I think not, I think they would love it! I think they would say: finally, here is a man that picks an age appropriate woman, where he loves her for who she is.
But surely the power imbalance between a random elementary school teacher and one of the wealthiest men in the world is far greater than the power difference between a couple of socio-economically average 18 and 25 year olds? Ergo, it isn't really about power imbalance either.
More options
Context Copy link
This is gold. Seriously.
"Age-gaps, am I right"
"ohmygod yesssssss uggghhh"
"Miscegenation, am I right"
"..."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I met my wife when she was 18 and I was 27. I'm not exactly a social butterfly but I never noticed any obvious disapproval of this in the real world. I think the dynamic is fairly obvious and is an instance of Sailer's Law of Female Journalism. I think your explanations 2 and 2a are most applicable. Male desires are invalid when they aren't female-approved, but female desire for height and a full head of hair are never questioned outside of incel forums.
I once saw a good joke on twitter that went something like this, "Female desire for men to have a full head of hair is rooted in pedophilia", and truthfully, that is exactly the level most of these critiques are operating at.
Was with a woman at one point who started drinking the feminist kool-aid and hit me with the whole "Wanting me to shave down there is patriarchal pedophilia" thing. I countered by pointing out that she also preferred me (my face) to be clean-shaven. No answer to that of course.
That relationship lasted a lot longer than it had any right to and many years later I still feel relief to have escaped. I have a beard now, too.
It's depressing how easy it is to run circles around so many arguments I've heard from women I've dated. But it doesn't strengthen the relationship, i.e. she treats as dispassionate sport and maybe learns something. It just creates bad vibes and results in a breakup. But I can't be with a dullard either, who isn't interested in ideas and arguing, no matter how nice or well-composed or healthy she is. It's a bummer.
They just communicate differently. The object level is a distant concern compared to the status signals it encodes. Once they feel safe and satisfied they're as capable of sincere intellectual exploration as anyone else.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You're thinking too much into this and putting forth overcomplicated examples that don't have much to do with the way regular people think about these things. It has nothing to do with contemporary politics. It's that any time there's a large age difference there's a presumption that the guy is in it for the sex and the woman is in it for the money. Most of our social relationships are among our peers, and romantic relationships are just an extension of our social relationships. If a girl in her early 20s invited me to hang out with her friends and they were all in their 60s and 70s, I would certainly think it odd. Since we find these kind of relationships implausible in general, we jump to the conclusion that their must be an ulterior motive, especially since the ones we hear about all seem to involve wealthy men and unusually attractive women. The most pushback I ever got against this idea was incidentally from a rather left-leaning podcast that was discussing Anna Nicole Smith's marriage to Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall. Smith was 26 and Marshall was 89 at the time of the marriage, and he died 14 months later, leading to a probate battle that took years to resolve. They argues that the media focused too much on the money and didn't pay any attention to their personal lives, which made it clear that it wasn't a sham relationship.
Beyond that there are practical considerations. A friend of mine, who is about 50, recently got married to a girl 20 years his junior. There doesn't really seem to be an age difference now, but when she's 65 and at the age when most people are looking to enjoy their retirement, he's going to be at the age when most people are looking at assisted living.
This thread also made me think about just this.
I wonder if we won't see some sort of "divorce of love" memetic concept develop. That, in age-gap relationship, the elder partner, once they hit say 80 or so, permits the other partner to date freely again in order to spare them of unintentional hospice nurse status.
More options
Context Copy link
Here's a thought experiment: Suppose there's a skinny male computer nerd who hits it big and is a billionaire at age 30. He marries a 30 year old woman who is very attractive, objectively much better looking than him. To the point where it's pretty obvious she never would have been interested in him if he weren't such a big success.
How will society react? I expect much less negatively than if the same man were 60. If you agree with me, then you presumably agree that there is more to the story than just a relationship which is overly transactional.
Interesting question. I'd say you are probably right but I also wonder how much of that is just because age can be talked about objectively whereas there's no shared way to quantity objectively how far "out of his league" she is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But the story about the money was so much more interesting that even Anna Nicole Smith's tits. 25 years of litigation, continuing after the deaths of both parties and a judge, seven courts in three jurisdictions, two trips to SCOTUS (with amicus briefs by two different SGs), and meaty issues around conflict of jurisdictions and separation of powers.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a big part of it. Consider also that an older, wealthy man is typically going to have existing children/heirs who are expecting his resources and attention, which is now being taken by a young floozy.
My research into step-children on various adult oriented documentary websites suggests this outcome is often welcomed by the male heirs.
Now that you mention it, I remember that this issue was played for laughs in the 80s movie "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure." The two main characters (Bill & Ted) were high school students and the father of one of them got married to a woman who Bill & Ted had known as a hottie in their high school who was a few years ahead of them.
I wonder if a movie with a gag like this would get green-lighted in 2026. I tend to doubt it.
I remember that. What was unconscionable was the father and his young wife getting it on Bill (or Ted's) room!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I was laughing about that to myself the other day in the FFT, when @FtttG said that men have fallen out of lust with lesbians because they saw actual lesbians and they weren't that hot, and then I thought of the average stepmom...
I can't imagine the average stepmom is especially attractive, but how many stepmoms can you name off the top of your head? It's not a highly visible identity in the way that "lesbian" or "black" is: no woman introduces herself by stating that she's a stepmom. Probably the only time we hear about women raising the children of her husband from a previous marriage/relationship, it's a celebrity, who are selected for being attractive. Hell, even searching the term "stepmom" (specialised websites excepted) would probably just bring you to the movie Stepmom (starring a young Julia Roberts). Most of the time you hear the word "stepmom" used in the media, it's in reference to an unusually attractive woman!
(Funnily enough, the primary context in which I heard the word "stepmother" growing up was the "wicked stepmother" archetype in Grimm's fairy tales: that being an evil, sexy woman who seduces a hapless man and persuades him to abandon or kill his children. I wonder to what extent porn studios are consciously playing on this archetype. Certainly the "stepmom" in porn videos is a wicked, conniving seducer.)
Personally, the incest/faux-incest trend in porn never appealed to me – I just find it creepy and off-putting, and downright paedophilic when it comes to the "stepdaughter" stuff.
...I feel like I can name five or six that I know closely pretty easily? I'm not even sure how to process this question. Do you not know divorced people?
I personally know several divorcés, but off the top of my head can only think of one stepmom.
I suppose what I was really getting at is that being a stepmom is rarely the most salient fact about a person in a way that "lesbian" is. "Lesbian" is a highly salient trait about Megan Rapinoe, such that when someone says "lesbian" she might be one of the first people who pops into your head. Meanwhile "bookkeeping clerk" isn't a very salient trait about someone. If someone says "bookkeeping clerk" you would probably draw a blank, even though statistically most people surely know at least one woman in that line of work. I think "stepmom" is more like "bookkeeping clerk" than it is like "lesbian".
Huh. I guess I know a lot more blended families than average or something. Just on my block growing up I can think of three or four stepmoms of friends of mine. Stepmom is a very salient fact from the perspective of the stepchild or their peers.
But once it's the porn genre it's a very salient fact about the person. If I clicked on "hot stepmom porn" I know a lot of facts about that woman.
My point is more that I'm not sure that the differential between PornLesbian and RealLesbian is any bigger than PornStepmom and RealStepmom, or PornTeacher and RealTeacher. There's a few hot ones that form the basis of our fantasies.
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
If he's 50 and she's 20 years younger, then she's 30. That's a woman, not a girl. Yeah, I know it's nit-picking, but it does infantilise women. Would you refer to your friend as a boy if you were talking about him in terms of "I know a boy who is dating a younger woman"?
Have you never heard the term "boy toy"?
More options
Context Copy link
FWIW, girl has been so normalized as a generic casual word for young-ish woman that it doesn't really register to me the same way as "boy". Boy is pre-puberty; Girl can be anything below ... 40 or so? It functions more like "guy" nowadays, woman would sound stilted to me.
It flows back to societally valuing youth in women and age/experience in men (common idea in this thread), doesn't it? "Boy" is almost insulting to an of-age male in various instances (some related to racism), while "girl" is acceptable because it's considered flattering.
Not endorsing, just observing linguistic implications.
I know a Russian girl who got offended when someone referred to her as a woman. She said it made her sound old.
To move from being called 'madame-moiselle' to 'madame' is an unpleasant right of passage for every young French woman.
Really, the anglosphere is weird in that we think referring to a young woman as a girl might be a bad thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As a side note, I agree. But I think when age-gap relationships are being discussed, it's important to use the words "woman" and "man" so it's clear that we are discussing relationships where neither partner is underage. But yeah, in common parlance, a 25 year old woman is a "girl" and a 25-year old man is a "guy."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like "in it for the money" is a bad cultural concept in this context, which conflates the natural class interests that go into marriage, especially for a woman, with prostitution. The problem with "gold diggers" isn’t that they find wealth a critically important quality in a man, it's that they simply plan to extract it and leave.
Exactly, if a woman marries me for my money, extends me love and attention, raises my kids, watches me die of natural causes and then goes to the Bahamas to cry on a cruise ship, I'm not really seeing the issue here.
There are very few women who don't care about money at all. I ask the married male Mottizens here to consider what would happen if they suddenly gave away all their money, quit their jobs and then told their wives that. "But don't you love me for who I am?", you'll have to cry plaintively as she files papers and takes the kids.
Don't get a Bahamas mourning wife, get you a St. Barts mourning wife.
Got a few million? / start chasin a billion.
Aim higher, king.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel confident saying its a mix of (2) generally and (2a), specifically intrasexual competition driven by the fact that Millenials are hitting their late 30's 40s, many, MANY of them single (including both those who were married, and who got divorced). And they're now facing down the implications of this situation in a way that prior generations never had to.
And now we've got a sizeable surplus of older women who are effectively 'unionizing' to try and preserve their value in the marketplace, and a surplus of older guys who are in the 'prime' (if they took care of themselves physically) and have the wealth to expend on acquiring the things they missed out on in their younger days. No, its not unique to millenials, but I suspect that the environment they're in is creating pressures previous generations didn't experience at the social level.
On top of the complete demolition of any social/religious guidance around dating, leaving everyone to do things on an ad hoc basis.
Older women would love to prevent older men from getting taken off the market by younger women. Rationally so! They have an uneasy alliance with younger men who would ALSO like to keep older men from competing.
The only way to restrict wealthier older men from 'poaching' young women is either massive doses of social shame (which Celebs, at least, are probably immune to) OR getting them MeToo'd (which is a specific type of social shame that can also carry legal consequences). So some sort of 'moral' framework gets built out around these relationships to attempt to justify the attacks.
I've pointed out that if we don't have a system where EVERYONE (even the King) is Monogamous... then the likely stable alternative is harem-maxxing.
Anyway, here's my prior research into the prevalence of age gape relationships:
https://www.themotte.org/post/120/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/19112?context=8#context
I was actually surprised to find that they were more common (historically and now) than I thought. Husbands being 10+ years older is already about 8% of heterosexual marriages!
And that's not accounting for non-marital ones.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/half-americans-say-they-have-been-10-year-age-gap-relationship
Here's a more recent poll on that point. HALF of Americans say they've been in a 10+ year relationship? I actually find that a bit hard to swallow, but should tell you something nonetheless.
Given the study's design, take it with a whole shaker of salt:
Oh, yeah. Marriage was not all about romance and your true love and soul mate and whatever until relatively recently. Families wanted their daughters to make good marriages, so if that meant an older man or even a widower, then yeah, that's who you are walking down the aisle with.
Also widowers - men getting married a second (or more) time because they need someone to look after their household and young children.
Kipling, in a funny poem, has the distaff version of that; young officers/company men in India flocking around older women (possibly because young men were not encouraged to/permitted to get married, taking native mistresses was frowned upon, so a flirtation or even affair with a married or widowed woman was one of the few sexual outlets, and if sufficiently old no chance of inconvenient and scandalous pregnancy):
My Rival
I go to concert, party, ball —
What profit is in these?
I sit alone against the wall
And strive to look at ease.
The incense that is mine by right
They burn before her shrine;
And that's because I'm seventeen
And She is forty-nine.
I cannot check my girlish blush,
My color comes and goes;
I redden to my finger-tips,
And sometimes to my nose.
But She is white where white should be,
And red where red should shine.
The blush that flies at seventeen
Is fixed at forty-nine.
I wish I had Her constant cheek;
I wish that I could sing
All sorts of funny little songs,
Not quite the proper thing.
I'm very gauche and very shy,
Her jokes aren't in my line;
And, worst of all, I'm seventeen
While She is forty-nine.
The young men come, the young men go
Each pink and white and neat,
She's older than their mothers, but
They grovel at Her feet.
They walk beside Her 'rickshaw wheels —
None ever walk by mine;
And that's because I'm seventeen
And She is forty-nine.
She rides with half a dozen men,
(She calls them "boys" and "mashers")
I trot along the Mall alone;
My prettiest frocks and sashes
Don't help to fill my programme-card,
And vainly I repine
From ten to two A.M. Ah me!
Would I were forty-nine!
She calls me "darling," "pet," and "dear,"
And "sweet retiring maid."
I'm always at the back, I know,
She puts me in the shade.
She introduces me to men,
"Cast" lovers, I opine,
For sixty takes to seventeen,
Nineteen to forty-nine.
But even She must older grow
And end Her dancing days,
She can't go on forever so
At concerts, balls and plays.
One ray of priceless hope I see
Before my footsteps shine;
Just think, that She'll be eighty-one
When I am forty-nine.
Yeah a big (if hidden) part of this story is the combination of the extraordinary reduction in childbirth mortality and the concurrent reduction in the "work in a dangerous male-only environment on the frontier for 10 years before getting married" life trajectory for men over the last century. Men would often get married later (to a younger woman), having returned to their poor home towns as impressive figures with money in their pockets to whisk away a bride from the local church social, then remarry (to a much younger woman) years later once the first died in childbirth, again organized by the local church, this time at the behest of the older ladies who couldn't stand to see the children grow up without a mother.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From my perspective, any man that divorces his wife of simillar age to fuck a just about teenager is morally a piece of shit for deontological reasons.
Secondly: If the only thing you care about is youth and beauty, you are a shallow piece of shit.
Thirdly: Some part of the reason women don't want to have kids or get married is cultural memory of men saying they are down for a life long commitment to this family, then dipping as soon as their dicks could get wet easier elsewhere. We don't want the same group of people berating them thusly: "Settle down! Have kids! Sacrifice your freedom for family and the state! If your partner fucks off for some young pussy, don't get in your feels about it!"
Indeed- now it's the women doing the
"Settle down! Have kids! Sacrifice your freedom for family and the state! If your partner fucks off for some old dick and takes those kids and most of your resources, don't get in your feels about it!"
dance, and it's just as bad as it was when the men were doing it.
In a healthy system, men and women check each other (according to their biological/instinctual strengths and weaknesses), but we broke that system in the 1900s with the first wave of mass automation (replacing mostly men, which removed their ability to check the way women conduct abuse due to being in surplus) and then entered an economic boom that temporarily restored that balance (and the people in power now grew up under these conditions). If the second wave of mass automation, which may or may not be bearing down on us right now, replaces mostly women, society will rebalance somewhat; if it does not, and it replaces mostly men, this will get worse.
Once again, the institution of marriage was solving some pernicious coordination problems (women don't want to get pumped and dumped and left preggers, men want to marry a virgin or as close to it as possible, neither can truly verify the intentions of the other) so for COMPLETELY SECULAR REASONS its very very useful to have "abstinence until marriage" as a strong norm and "'til death do us part'" as an 'enforceable' obligation.
But there's a lot of other obligations that we tie up in there that trip people up, to say nothing of the obligations to the children that emerge.
But
A) You can't really construct a piecemeal version of this and expect it to work. and
B) You need some severe punishment for breaching the covenant to really make it stick. Religious folks have fear of their God as a factor, I don't know what we can impose on nonbelievers (short of a death sentence) that will keep them in line, even against their baser instincts.
Any secular punishments we create can likely be circumvented by clever/powerful enough actors.
It seems to me that there are two nodes for human sexuality.
Going full chimpanzee "Death do us part except for cheating [oppresses and protects men and women equally], all sex is rape, woman must marry rapist, woman must be virgin if still living at home [protects father's property rights]" is stable. (Yes, the enforcement for deviation from this procedure was death, but enforcement for everything in the ancient world was death. Personnel were cheap back then.)
(The all sex is rape + woman must marry rapist requires a bunch of unpacking: technically speaking, it doesn't prohibit casual sex, but gives the woman the means to invoke a shotgun wedding if she becomes pregnant. It also draws a stated distinction where a woman was assumed, and not assumed, to have cried rape by default- which protects the man.)
Going full bonobo "No STDs or pregnancy and everyone fucks like rabbits, marriage is for life (even including adultery) and carries sexual/financial obligations for both parties, single motherhood very institutionally difficult" is also stable.
Law must protect and bind men and women equally. Right now, it only binds men; 100 years ago, it only bound women. (To a point, modern problems are caused by women taking revenge for this bondage against their sons.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Can you maybe offer, at least, some perspective or background on why you feel this way?
Right now, this post is just three or so "boo outgroup" assertions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Just as an anecdote and because I like to talk about it, I'm substantially older than my wife and we've both found it to be a healthy, even ideal dynamic. Coincidentally, yesterday, she told me that sometimes she likes to dream that I'm even older and she's even younger. But then we are also countercultural weirdos who believe in things like traditional gender roles and having lots of kids, so ymmv.
Finding a jailbroken woman who's willing to notice how things actually work and what she actually wants, independent of mass cultural programming, is strongly indicated if one can manage. But despite having intentionally optimized for finding such a girl, I can't pretend it was anything other than the grace of God that we got together. It's hell out there.
Thank you for this bon mot.
Any tips for the young trad turboautists on the bored to replicate your success?
The only good advice is to date a neurotypical woman. Do not under any circumstances try to date a "based" woman.
There's a lot of truth to this but I think it's phrased a bit too strongly. A based woman may be fine and they are out there; a woman reaching for the 'based' stereotype is bad news.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm leery of this for the reason I already gave, which is that I cannot take credit and I mean 'the grace of God' entirely literally.
But, off the top of my head:
It wasn't until relatively late in life that I discovered that I'm very attractive. All the signs were there all along but no one ever told me so I didn't know. Hilarious amount of history snapped into place when I realized it, etc. But this doesn't help anyone not in the same boat.
That said you may be more attractive than you know and regardless you are absolutely capable of maximizing this by working out and dressing well. The former does take a lot but pays its own dividends; the latter is much easier and cheaper than commonly supposed. Happy to expand on either upon request.
The usual advice seems to be that women are attracted to confidence (true) so the winning move is to learn to fake those signals (effective but ultimately pyrrhic). In fact the 'secret' is to genuinely become confident, which can only be accomplished through intentionally choosing to become worth that sense of self. In my case, going into business for myself and learning to stand my ground unflinchingly in the face of despair may be the single greatest factor in my maturation. Whoever said that trying to get one's own business off the ground is like eating glass every day until (and if) that changes was correct. While I've never gotten much alpha from stuff like BJJ I expect that in most cases something like that would be a helpful and viable path for other men. At least in the US we have been raised in a culture which seeks to infantilize and emasculate us; this must be countered consciously, but not obnoxiously. Women out there, regardless of what they repeat to themselves and each other, are desperate for grounded, confident, masculine men.
In that vein, if you want a hot young happy wife, and especially one content to be a full-time woman rather than pursuing her own career in the masculine sphere, you need to be able to generate enough income to keep her comfortable that way plus the inevitable frivolous expenses which please women so well. This may sound callous but it's almost impossible to manage that with a job at this point; starting your own business is, in our generation, the only plausible path I've found to this level of income, and it's far from a guarantee.
Learn basic stuff like how to repair things around the house, cars, etc. Youtube is amazing for this and a little bit goes a long way. My wife likes to say "A husband is a Daddy you choose" (tongue in cheek, mostly) and whatever you can do to push that button is probably worthwhile. Gets back to masculine confidence.
Trite as this may sound, I don't think I could have landed my wife until I had made peace with the possibility of not finding anyone, especially as I got older. When I was at peace with myself as a single man, I instantly became much more attractive. Not much turns off women like the smell of desperation. When a mutual friend introduced us I told her up front "I'm not really interested in dating at the moment," (true; I had decided to raise my SMV a bit more before getting serious about that) "but you seem really interesting so let's at least meet up." Was I conscious of this as 'game'? Yes. Did it only work because I actually meant it? Also yes. In other words, don't chase girls and don't try to make them into anything they don't want to become. Raise your own value, stand firm, and let the illiquid market come to you. This may be a comparatively high-risk strategy but the rewards, if any, are commensurate. She was amazed at how unconcerned I was with impressing her. "This is going to be yes or it's going to be no and either way it'll be by a landslide," I said; "Either way we don't need to worry about it."
Know what you want (this takes experience and maturity) and hold to it. When I met my wife I told her that if we were going to move forward she wasn't a vegan anymore (because babies) and that her beliefs were her business but we'd be going to church together, and ultimately as a family, every week. Pop relationship advice might label this as controlling or somehow abusive but I could almost see her sigh with relief. Women want you to establish structure and boundaries and can't feel safe unless you do. Flip side, again, is that doing this in a loving and appropriate way requires a certain gravitas which cannot be effectively simulated in the long run.
Your wedding is the starting gun, not the finish line. She married you because you gave every indication of continuing on the trajectory that she found so attractive and you owe it to her to live up to that, and only by doing so may you expect the same in return. Failure is more acceptable than you'd think, but defeat is a state of mind and must never be accommodated. Learn to take losses in stride without losing your own frame before imagining that you are ready for a wife.
Pray without ceasing. This will go over the heads of many here but you want the woman God has for you, or else none at all, and those really are the only two good options. You can be ready for her to appear but you cannot cause her to appear. Thy will be done.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If nothing else, I've think the argument about "different life experiences" falls flat on its face.
The whole point of long term relationships is mutually experiencing life. If you stick it out then your life experiences will inherently equalize. One being substantially more experienced than the other doesn't reduce that factor, as long as they're willingly sharing in experiences going forward.
Now, I'm going to politely inquire, in terms of you and your wife's physical attractiveness, would you rate each of you as close on an 'objective' scale? I'm specifically NOT accusing her of being a gold digger or you of flexing wealth to make up for anything, its just helpful context.
People's subjective preferences override such things anyway.
Yes, I think we're extremely well-matched in terms of physical attractiveness. Specifically each other's league as it were. We both find each other very hot. Between the two of us I might be the objectively more-attractive one but not by a lot and her youth goes a long way toward closing that (notional) gap in a manner that feels sustainable -- no matter how old I get, she's younger than me enough that she occurs as much more attractive than any women my age. I enjoy the stares she gets when I take her out to nice places; other men dating older women seem to have a hard time taking their eyes off of her and what can I say except that this works for me.
When we started dating she was mistaken for a highschooler a couple of times (actually in her 20s) and while we never went out of our way to generate the age-gap-curiosity stares we did enjoy laughing about it when it happened. She's old enough now, and I seem to be preserving myself well-enough, that it happens less often, which is good also. I'd say it was fun but it's also nice to draw a bit less attention nowadays.
God Bless.
I see enough 'mismatched' couples appearancewise that I always wonder at what else is cementing their bond. Having it all is wonderful.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Our culture is so fixated on individualism that the contrarian pseudoreactionaries are reinventing women’s lib. Respect.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It’s fundamentally bad for Democracy for guys like Musks/Belichick getting second or even more cracks at marriage. If some may have many partners it means other men have 0 or partners they hate. There is no way for this to scale in my opinion without having massive flaws that don’t work well in Democracy. Absent war that kills off a huge portion of the male population. The likely result is ending up with 20% of the voter base being angry and looking for a fight.
I basically agree with this line of reasoning, but at the same time, it seems like a rationalization to me. Arguably single motherhood is just as bad for Democracy, and probably worse since it is so very common compared to situations such as those of Belichick. And yet, outside of a few dark corners of the internet, I don't see anywhere near the level of hostility towards single mothers that I see towards men in AGRs.
Yep. I wrote an article for a website called Topix ~2012 that was very respectfully written, claiming single motherhood was deleterious for children. The focus of the piece was almost entirely ON THE CHILDREN. Putting their welfare first. But it was rejected for "punching down" at single mothers.
No, it was rejected because the notion that "if you become a single mother, it might not totally be the man's fault" is offensive to gynosupremacist thought, and single mothers were just the political excuse to invoke that.
Nobody actually cares about the welfare of single mothers, or of children more generally, beyond their usefulness as an excuse to do this. Helping these groups is generally the domain of the religious.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, by contrast one can imagine a hypothetical article arguing that it's bad for children to have a father who is far older than their mother. I'm pretty sure the same reviewers would eat it up like a pack of hungry wolves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why is single motherhood bad for democracy?
I also think you need to look to your bubble if you don't see anti-single motherhood content out there. I still know a few guys with the traditional truck sticker on the topic.
You mean the people that keep this country movin'?!
More options
Context Copy link
If nothing else, it makes it harder for young men to find a wife. A lot of them will reasonably decline to become a step-dad. And even among those who are willing, a lot of those single mothers will take themselves off the marriage market, to the extent that they were ever on it in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thing is, its also utterly unrealistic to expect extreme-high-status men to accept being alone for 40+ years OR marry someone they aren't attracted to.
How do you stop them from using their status to just override any taboos and get what they want?
I do think its a real problem when they cycle through young women and leave them less appealing for the younger guys, of course, so I agree in general.
I agree with what you say here and in many other posts.
The biggest single policy device would be to end no-fault divorce and to make adultery a crime (perhaps without incarceration time).
"Til death do you part" has to mean what it says.
Right. But the problem with relying solely on social technology is that if a high-status guy doesn't like them, he might break the norms and 'win' due to everyone else deferring to his position, as our monkey brains are wont to do.
I think the threat of eternal damnation is a necessary component we haven't figured out a replacement for.
For Henry VIII even that wasn't enough.
The only compromise position I've hit on that might align incentives is setting it so that 'marriage' is 25 year contract that can't be exited without EXTREME difficulty during that time, but can then be 'extended' if the parties choose at the end of that period.
Logic being that's enough time to raise the kids to adulthood and get them set up well.
Its not very romantic or aspirational though, so it is probably too autistic of a solution.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, for the belichick example it seems worth noting that she’s not just younger than him- hes old enough to be her grandfather. Normies don’t care about much smaller age gaps thé internet freaks out about.
More options
Context Copy link
Is this you, baby? Back under a fake name? Because the whole aura of "why can't I, a 30 year old man, bang hot nubile sexy little Lolita 15 year olds without society tut-tutting at me" sounds awful familiar.
So far as I can find out, it's not "Belichick was denied because he was banging a chick 48 years younger than him for the past three years", it was "some kind of cheating scandal cooled the vote":
Glad you got there first.
Bill is both probably the greatest football coach of all time, and the co-leader and spirit animal of a Patriots organization that was ontologically evil during the dynasty years. He got caught cheating twice, and there's no doubt in anyone's mind that there were other creative strategies that were never (publicly) found.
No one cares that he (was) banging a influencer, it was mostly just hilarious to see them together.
More options
Context Copy link
Shit man, he should be disqualified for that reason. You cheat, you don't get accolades. Very simple, or it should be very simple.
More options
Context Copy link
You (and @ArjinFerman):
If you suspect someone of being an alt, report it to us (people frequently do this when pressing the report button). It is much more effective and less annoying. We'll take it under advisement, though we won't necessarily (and probably will not) tell you if we decide someone is a ban evader. People suspect other posters of being alts all the time. Usually they are wrong, sometimes they are right, but publicly calling someone out like this is not productive. It just causes drama, especially the way you do it, in such a taunting "neener-neener I see you" manner.
Length of account history is not a guarantee of not being an alt. Many people create multiple sockpuppets, sometimes going back years, just to establish account history and have backups in case their primary shit-stirring alt gets banned. They frequently brag about this to us when they get banned, and think they are demonstrating their great cunning, because we've surely never anticipated such a genius move.
@omw_68, while on thin ice for other reasons (mostly bad faith attacks on other posters), is probably not Mr. Underappreciated Naturally Whitely Superior Genius Ebophile. That guy is in the category of people who cannot hide their light under a bushel--they always reveal themselves quickly. Most of our repeat obsessives underestimate how difficult it is to hide their obsessions and their writing style even when they are trying to fly under the radar. At any given time, we're aware of a number of alts who think we haven't noticed them yet. Generally our policy is to let them have enough rope. Fact is, subject matter alone is rarely a decisive tell, and guys who want to complain about progressives and specifically why progressives are terrible for disapproving of age gap relationships and prioritizing female preference are... not exactly rare on the Motte.
@HereAndGone2 was never permabanned and is not ban-evading. If she had been, she would not be allowed to still post (she is another one who could never keep a mask on for very long). She has flounced several times and come back under a new name, which we allow because she doesn't exactly try to hide it. That said, her past record doesn't get wiped clean with a new account. Please behave yourself, Daoiseach-of-the-many-names, I would also hate to see you leave forever, even though you keep blaming me for your departures.
Yes sir, right sir, sorry sir 😁
I did think it was rather curious that we'd get two guys in a row complaining about how unfairly society treats older men/younger women couples (which caused me to raise both eyebrows because dudes, that's been society forever, the only current modern complaints are (a) idiot online social media about how a small age gap is terrible grooming power imbalance and (b) the more common 'yeah man you're literally twice her age, that's not a good idea').
But I suppose it's entirely possible that Mr B was encouraged to tell his tale of woe after reading Mr A's posts on how 15 is totally old enough to be having babies.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No it’s a totally different person and this isn’t his hobby horse.
Okay. Just amused that when I looked it up, the teeny-weeny age gap between Mr. Belichick and his second squeeze after breaking up with his missus was a mere 48 years. Nothing at all, really. Why shouldn't a sprightly, virile, famous (presumably rich?) 71 year old man be attractive to a 23 year old woman? Just like Mrs Merton!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
She's never been permabanned. I seem to recall her saying she'd lost the password to her previous account, and she then turned down our offer to restore it.
More options
Context Copy link
It just seems awfully coincidental that a second person with the same bee in his bonnet over age gaps should pop out of nowhere.
Am I? How nice of you to keep track for me, I feel so seen, cherished, and valued that you spend precious time and energy on worrying about what I'm doing!
Sure, in isolation that's a fair thing to base your, but when you can click his profile and see things like "joined 2022 September 08", and "452 comments" that should put the suspicion to rest.
Oh, I can do better. I think you're an indispensable part of this forum's folklore, and I'm happy that you're still posting here. I'm just pointing out that someone's throwing stones in glass houses.
I tend not to click on profiles, unless I'm very infuriated and want to know what other stupid crap this stupid idiot who annoyed me has been spouting.
Also, I have a terrible memory so I really don't keep track of "this is A, who used to go by name B, who got banned back in year C, and then came back as new account D". I have enough to do to remember to set my alarm clock for the morning.
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
Two additional points.
One: middle-class, urban, college-educated, office-working single women generally agree that a) society should be OK with them waiting until the age of 31-33 to settle down b) when that happens, 33-37-year-old well-paid, high-status, successful, ambitious, good-fashioned male managers should be lining up to propose to them because, as far as they're concerned, these are the men that are their own equals. It should be just self-evident. When these men refuse to do so and, moreover, decide to jiggle / pair up with 22-25-year-old hot women instead, it generates a considerable level of resentment. That wouldn't normally spill over to other social circles, but the people who write blogs, articles, books etc. about, and generally appear in the media to comment on, the human marketplace are either such women themselves, or are in social circles where most of the women are such women as these. This then has a larger social effect as a result.
Two: the notion of a man openly, unashamedly making selfish and hedonistic use of whatever advantage he has in life is generally not something society is OK with. It's seen as unbecoming behavior. Like taking a long vacation in the Philippines and making local impoverished young women engage in all sorts of disgusting sexual acts with you in exchange for a sum of money that's almost considered a pittance at home.
regarding (2a) and (4), it's not just abuse but also another form of disadvantage. Due to the mismatch in male and female average life expectancy, a woman who marries a significantly older man will be condemned to the lot of a widow with children for many years, someone who's basically an unmarriageable, invisible creature.
More options
Context Copy link
I haven't heard this talked about very much among the women I know, or seen it come up in real life. It seems like opinions vary depending on the specifics, not only of their ages and life circumstances, but also their personal characteristics.
There probably is an annoyed old maid effect, though I haven't encountered it in real life. Nobody I actually know was hoping to date Brad Pitt, and was disappointed when he chose a younger woman instead.
Some religious sects like to emphasize women as those who stay at home under their husband's umbrella of protection, while the men go out into the world, work, and lead. Since this is already playing up the power and agency differential, I would be concerned about a young woman in that culture marrying a much older man with much stronger preferences/opinions/set life circumstances than her. They'll tend to fall into "I do this/like/believe things because my husband does," which I don't like, and seems to be setting them up for abuse.
I would be much less concerned about a couple with an age gap, but similar life development levels, where she's responsible, conscientious, serious, and wants to settle down young and start a family, and he has a steady job and house to make that happen, and they're working together on their household as project. In those cases I'm not sure that I really notice the age gap all that strongly.
It seems like in real life thé people who get very upset about age gap relationships are mostly young, not old. There’s obvious reasons- if you don’t like it, it affects you personally, which is a different thing.
Right, this is influenced by my own demographics, but most of my experience of people complaining about AGRs takes the form of young men complaining about old men stealing all the attractive young women (and, to a lesser extent, older men who don't have the game to attract younger women and now resent the fact they seem to have lost out on both ends). I certainly remember being frustrated about my female classmates dating 30-year-old obvious losers in high school and college.
I also see a lot of older women complaining about age gaps with romantic leads in movies, but I'm not sure if that's more a personal resentment thing or a "representation in media" thing.
I'm somewhat more sympathetic to the "representation in media" complaint here, but it actually slightly cuts against the complaint about real AGRs. The problem is that the fictional relationships are rarely actually being depicted as AGRs. A fifty-year-old actor is playing a Generic-Age Man and a twenty-year-old actress is playing a Generic-Age Woman. If the script was actually trying to portray an AGR - which it may well be likelier to do if AGRs were more culturally accepted - the implications would be quite different.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It occurs to me that the "power differential" argument could actually be analysed as almost entirely upside down. Isn't it the case that the 20 year old woman is the one with good BATNA/options, and hence greater negotiating power, compared to the 50 year old one who would be left with whatever the market looks like for 50 year old divorcees? In fact, as long as there are in fact 20 year old women who date 50 year old men, the 50 year old woman's equal-age-bracket husband is even less incentivised to stay in his marriage rather than chase that possibility; so perhaps the age-gap relationship is indeed bad for someone's power differential, but not the one of the people involved in it.
I'm not convinced that this is outweighed by whatever impact the difference in "life experience" has. Outside of romance novels, most 50 year old men do not actually seem like they have acquired a mastery of guile and manipulation that no 25 year old could hope to compete with, but are basically what you'd expect a boomer to be - that is, financially a bit more settled, perhaps a bit less anxious, mentally quite a bit less sharp and more rigid, and slowly falling out of touch with modernity. I don't see this conveying a degree of power over young women that must be regulated, unless you hold that they are constitutionally incapable of resisting someone who can stay calm (in a slightly loopy way) and buy them dinner.
I tend to agree with this. Just looking at Belichick's girlfriend, it's obvious that she has a tremendous amount of power to walk away and quickly replace Belichick with a man who is highly desirable in terms of money, social status, and physical attractiveness.
The "power differential" argument has more merit if the man exclusively controls something the woman desperately wants, for example she is an aspiring actress and the man one of the few entertainment executives who makes casting decisions. But that's why we have laws against sexual harassment.
More options
Context Copy link
Large age differentials are so uncommon in my social sphere, that my actual encounter is from time spent in rural Muslim Albanian villages. I don't think I've met a mainstream American woman who was sexually attracted to a settled boomer man, so it's not really a point of concern. I suppose if it happened, I might think something like "huh, that was unexpected," and not much else.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Can you define this for me? What does "power differential" mean in the Western context?
Is this like the Dragonball-Z thing where power levels are quantifiable?
Because, to my understanding, in most (all?) western nations, men and women have totally equivalent rights. There's a lot and, somehow, growing legislation in the U.S. to guarantee this. Where exactly is the extra or additional "power" that a husband has over his wife?
Money? Well, ok. If the wife decided to rely on the man to pay for everything isn't that like her decision? It's not like bridestealing is legal.
Age? Even more of a "wha?" from me. Do old guys get magic powers at 50 that let them bamboozle young maidens? Do women under the age of 30 not have their full faculties developed yet (wait, don't answer that. Yass queen slay at any age).
The entire "power dynamic" or "power differential" trope seems absurd to me. Obviously couples often have one partner who is domineering and authoritative. I don't think that's a good thing but the antidote to that is telling both men and women to not let their partner walk all over them. Furthermore, are there also copious examples of couples loving and respecting one another despite massive actual power imbalances? Isn't that kind of the point of a lot of traditional marriage rituals and covenants?
"Power dynamic" seems to be yet another instance of suicidal absolution in which we tell mostly women - "Oh, you have no agency in your own relationship (that you entered into voluntarily) but that's okay because (somehow) this awful, awful man is using his power differential to "gaslight" you."
Either women over 18 (or 20? 21? 25?) have legally and socially incontestable ability to make and abide by their own decisions or else we have to start taking the crazies' "make women property" argument seriously.
There's only very few 10+ year age gap relationships in my extended bubble, but those I can think of have clear power differentials: the guy already owned a house and was established in his career when she left grad school. This means, once she decided to enter that relationship, he got to choose the city they would live in. She's also, by not pushing for it in a prenup, not on the title of the house.
At some point, his pension scheme is going to allow him to retire, maybe even retire early. Whether she will continue to work or retire extremely early herself - together with him - will probably not feel like her choice.
She could have pushed against all that, but by being older, a lot of the default choices were already locked in by him. It would have taken a lot of effort to change some of those defaults, and realistically, the relationship would not have survived that effort.
Oh the other hand: free rent, lots of disposable income, friends in similar situations, a network to boost her own career... certainly nice perks, but I bet she wonders how much of that would survive a divorce.
But none of what you're describing would have been unknown, to either party, even at the start of the relationship. I don't know, to me it just sounds like they're both giving something up (money or choice of where to live) and both getting a lot out of the relationship. Maybe it's not perfectly balanced, but life seldom works out that way.
Admittedly I'm biased, because I finally escaped from a relationship that would have pattern-matched to a "power imbalance" from outside, but from inside was soul-crushingly bad for me. Appearances can be deceiving.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
While ‘power dynamics’ are another example of Marxist fan-fiction as theory, age gaps do correlate quite strongly with patriarchy- but the causation probably runs the other way.
Imagine you are a peninsular Arab man. You love your daughter, but you are a man of your culture, and you know that she needs to marry and will then be at the mercy of her husband. Don't you want to make sure it’s a known quantity? Mathematically that’s going to push older. Older husbands that are less likely to change is a sensible risk minimizing strategy when you don’t have a backup plan.
Yes, my main experience with age gaps is in Islamic villages. It's so uncommon in my home culture as to not have an opinion other than "huh, guess you have unusual tastes," without that much more thought put into it.
I mean at the very least the west is sufficiently different from Islamic third world societies as to be an irrelevant point of comparison, rendering your point two a different point about different people?
There are a decent number of muslims and extremely conservative Christians in America.
Do secular Americans care about an age gap unless it's someone literally in their family? If it's within their family, they would have a lot more to go off of than just that, so their opinions would probably be specific to the people involved.
The median American Muslim- and the vast majority of ‘not a literal cult’ fundamentalist Christians- practice what amounts to love matches, between adults, which are extremely different from middle eastern or third world behavior. This does not produce the same dynamics, because husbands love their wives. Hotbeds of spousal abuse in the US are mostly alcoholism driven, not driven by power structures within religious subcultures.
You’re significantly overrating the structural behavioral similarities to Middle eastern societies. Neither American Christians nor American Muslims regularly practice arranged marriages with unconsenting or underaged brides, preach domestic violence from the pulpit, forbid female education, etc. This includes the sects which teach that women ought to be submissive and domestic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Makes sense. It's men playing indirect chess with one another via their daughters. Yes, very patriarchal but actively with the intent of a better, or, at least, better risk adjusted outcome for their daughters.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have four theories myself:
1: People are getting older on average. As the ratio of young people go down, more careful attitudes dominate society. The average age of internet users probably doubled since 2008, and teenagers are much more accepting of sexy 18-year-olds than 30-year-old users are.
2: Womens social value goes down rapidly after the age of 25. They're upset about this, so they hope to change socities standards so that men are forced to choose them over younger women. Your "society hostility towards men" fits in here nicely.
3: Leftist moralizers. Moralizers are ruining society in general, every new law and social attitude is basically "This was okay in the past, but now it's wrong and we need to stop it". The only attitudes I see going in the opposite direction are those related to hedonism (legalization of weed, porn, psychedelics, gay marriage, etc.). While moralizers are ruining society globally, age-gaps are more accepted in Asia (I mean Japan and the surrounding countries, I don't care for other definitions of 'Asia'), which is more traditional.
4: The right hates those in power, calling them pedophiles. The left accuses the right of pedophilia, not because there's signs of it, but because it's the most damaging accusation you can currently use against another person (now that 'nazi' and 'racist' don't cut it anymore). The left attacks anime, saying it sexualizes school girls, and the right attack transsexuals, saying that they're pedophiles and that they want to corrupt children.
The consequences of this is that everyone hates pedophiles and vigilantly looks for signs of it, while also being terrified of associating with anything which might look like pedophilia. And the average person now thinks pedophilia includes sexual attraction to the 13-18 age bracket, even though it does not. So the most neurotic of them think being attracted to 20-year-olds is "almost pedophilia".
Some open-minded(?) leftists tried to get pedophilia to be accepted, with their new "MAP" concept. But due to what I assume is the above reasons, it didn't gain enough traction to sway public opinion. It may still be possible in the future, though. Laws governing porn keep getting stricter as porn is becoming more normalized, so such developments aren't self-contradicting.
What I'm noticing is that these attitudes are almost exclusive to the U.S., and I'd assume the main motivation behind them is to throw ragebait at the Christian Right out of spite, even though I don't think most of the people doing this ever notice that they're about 20 years late because the Christian Right has been a spent force for a long time.
"[Cultural leaders] are always preparing to fight the last [culture] war" sounded funny when I initially considered it, but I think may have a ring of truth to it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
6 is close but many upper class elites being pedophiles was suspected or known even before Epstein's fall exposed it. I remember the hilarious skit where Sacha Baron Cohen bought a "pedophile detector" when meeting with Roy Moore for instance. Jimmy Savile was able to abuse hundreds of people, many children, without anything being exposed till after his death. There's a former Speaker of the house who was a serial child molester and suspiciously like many others the courts just seemed to drop the ball with him. He literally admitted to it*. Pizzagate was moronic as the only meaningful failure here but that was a bunch of partisan brained morons trying to find "secret messages" rather than actually being against child abuse.
If the pedophiles aren't going to be exposed and punished then the second best option is to be weary of anyone who does pedophile lite behavior. Like a 40 year old who only wants to date people 18-20? Pretty suspicious, makes me wonder how much lower they'd go if it wasn't illegal. Makes me wonder how much lower they are going and how much they care to check if the person they're with is of age.
For a male....No? Nothing at all suspicious.
20 - 30 is objectively when women are most physically attractive to men of all ages. When I was in 8th grade I had Megan Fox or whoever - that is, women older than me as objects of fantasy. My Dad remembers 1990s Cindy Crawford - younger than him then (and, now, too fwiw).
How is this suspicious?
More options
Context Copy link
"wary". Though in the context of serial offenders on two continents with decades of abuses it's an understandable typo.
Weary/wary and risque/risky are two spelling errors that baffle me. I'm a pretty poor at spelling, and mix up there, their, they're more than occasionally, but those two aren't homonyms.
They are natural errors to make if you learn english mostly by reading, so are a strong sign of a non-native speaker. English spelling is unusually arbitrary and it's very easy to read those pairs as homophones. And otoh mixing up there and they're is a nonsensical error to make if you learned by reading, so are a sign of a native speaker. See also could of.
Good points! I'm surprised at how many native speakers use risky when I'm pretty sure they mean risquè.
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
There is a theory I've seen floated around by Louise Perry (author of "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution") that, as a practical matter, a lot of women really don't actually like the fruits of the sexual revolution. As much as the manosphere theories float around about women generally loving riding the "the cock carousel" with Chad before settling down or whatever with some beta cuck, in actual fact, that's not really a great description of a very broad slice of women and what they really would prefer (see the jokes about lesbians bring a U-Haul the first date, or the phenomenon I've been seeing discussed more recently of successful professional well-educated women getting trapped in a sequence of serial monogamous relationships over the course of their fertile years that never results in a proposal from the men they're with or children, and these women eventually having to end it and move on and getting really frustrated and eventually never producing families and children - obviously progressive discourse frames these women as victims of misogyny, but there is an interesting phenomenon in the background).
But Perry's theory is something like, ideologically, these women are heavily socialized into accepting the sexual revolution as progress, and as liberation, and as a key part of the freedom they have inherited, and so on. The sexual revolution is Progressive. Women having the freedom to have the same sexuality as caddish men = progress. So... well, at least in her telling, this disconnect ends up getting sublimated into all sorts of other social critiques that previously would have just been part and parcel of prior more restricted sexual norms for both men and women. I think she noted it especially about #MeToo - given the realities of sexual dimorphism in humans, it's extremely difficult to have sexual revolution behaviors and its "upsides" without having a lot of risk taking, overly assertive, overly optimistic male sexual initiation and gambling of a sort that will be hurtful and unwanted sometimes. And that's specifically what #MeToo was built to demonize the hell out of. And this applies more generally. We love sexual liberation, but men asking women out who they don't know is creepy. We love sexual liberation, but if a women "consents" to sex but then her friends convince her she didn't "consent" six months later, that's actually rape, because women are in an oppressed class and can't really ever truly give consent. We love sexual liberation, but "consent" is the highest moral good, and it can only exist in the most legally explicit, legible-to-the-world contexts, and so conceived, it requires social behaviors that are awkward, unpragmatic, and functional anti-erotic. We love sexual liberation, but any male-female age gap, or any possible social power differential, automatically makes "consent", the highest good", impossible. We love sexual liberation, but male heterosexual desire is dangerous and misogynistic and objectifying and intrinsically suspect. We love sexual liberation, but really we don't, and so expect these norms to be revised over and over and over, each time framed as progress, never resolving, with no stable norms for men, especially, to just count on. And on and on and on.
Obviously not everyone (or even most women, anyway) feel this way consistently, and I think everyone in this system ends up highly conflicted and confused... but I think the larger argument is that, on some level, many of these critiques are getting purchase because the actual reality is in conflict with this dominant ideology... Women want many things, but one thing many of them really, really want is to live in a world where female sexuality is treated as though it were really, really special and important, and they want to be treated that way especially by actual appealing men in their personal lives, and they want to live in a world where that leads to them being pursued and supported by worthy, desirable men with some sort of happily-ever-after stability attached to it. And the actual reality of the sexual revolution world, even with legal "consent" philosophies attached to it, is just fundamentally contrary to those desires.
Agreed, and I'll take it further (farther?)
A lot of men don't either. The very heavy movie Shame is somewhat about this. Although it's further down the line and gets into themes of real sex addiction, the movie can also be seen as the emptiness that comes from being a really rich and hot dude who sleeps with whoever he wants.
This post is an excellent summary of how many, many of the online "pickup artists" have success across a decade or more and bed perhaps hundreds or thousands of women ... and then lose their fucking minds.
To me, it's almost a "fish don't know what water is because they live in it" situation in terms of how obviously sexual libertinism is actively harmful to 99% of humans and the 1% who it does "work for" are pretty much sexual pathologists who we should highlight as cautionary tales for mental disorders instead of "liberated" heroes.
I personally find it fascinating to notice how the cultural stereotype of the incel is actually a sort of amalgam of two different archetypes of men, and one of them is indeed the established pickup artist who's lost his fucking mind. That really puts the lie, IMO, to the idea that "incels" hate women as a sour grapes thing; by far the most vicious misogyny I see in those online spaces seems to trace back to men who have led terribly disordered and promiscuous lives; they were already quite misogynist in the first place but got worse when their lifestyle proved unsatisfying. I think there's something of a feedback loop between the celibate woman haters and the caddish woman haters, but the latter are much more aggressive and manic in any case, where the former are more depressive and blackpilled.
Most "redpill" pickup artist advice basically boils down to "find an emotional unstable and needy women. Then, use these tactics to manipulate her into sleeping with you."
If that's the strategy a guy chooses, he's going to overexpose himself to emotionally unstable and needy women. It makes sense that would create a false perception of the median woman and therefore lead to a lot of misogyny despite the "success" of the pickup artist.
The corollary to that is strippers. (Side note: I should do my effortpost on strippers). Having dated a few of them in my pre-Jesus days, they all develop a cynical misandry-lite because so many of their male interactions are with drunk men attempting to do or say nasty things to them. Strippers do have an extra cognitive dissonance; many, many of them are hardcore progressives who believe what they're doing is "sexual empowerment" manifest. That this, in reality, entails literally crawling around naked for money thrown at them by cro-magnons means their mental model of the world is much like a snake eating its own
taletail.More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have never hidden the fact that I hate the fruits of the sexual revolution. We are currently in what is my own personal hellscape for all romantic purposes, everything about it is my anti-preference. I don't expect my preferences to be universal, its a 'me' problem. But nobody else appears happy either.
If we could have stopped them somewhere around the norms of, I dunno 1995 I might find it tolerable. But alas there were never any brakes on the train.
And people are rediscovering traditional sexual norms from 'first principles' but we don't have the social cohesion to even attempt to rebuild the system as it existed before. This may or may not be an intentional result of certain groups (I make no specific accusation) intentionally stirring the pot.
There but for the grace of God go I. Thankfully when I was doing my study of pickup artists and red pill ideas, I could reason out that following the rules and ideas to their logical conclusion would lead to that exact outcome.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I had an ex who was actually two years older than me, but could have passed as 18 without much hassle. I visited London with her when I was 26ish, and she was 28. I remember getting dirty looks at a liquor store with her on my arm as we were gawking at the variety of booze on offer. The next time, when she went alone, she got even dirtier looks, and was finally accosted by both a random old granny and the lady at the till on suspicion of underage drinking. It was funny in hindsight, as much as women complain about getting carded, they're even more upset when it stops.
On the other hand, excluding venues where they have a policy of carding anyone who walks in, I haven't been specifically asked for ID since I was 16. I can only presume that the we were giving off the impression of a sizeable age gap.
Anecdotes aside, I think the primary driver of age gap discourse is the bitterness of a specific age group of women engaged in intrasexual warfare that spills out into intersexual forms.
Ages 25-35, I'd say. Just young enough to be terminally online, unlike even older women who grew up and settled down this before this was capital-d Discourse. (There are very few grannies out there who are going to lecture their granddaughters about dating a 35 yo when they're 22.)
They notice that the youth they once prized is fading, and while they're still perfectly happy to go for older men (as are almost all women), they resent the fact that the men in their ideal age range don't consider them to be in their ideal age range.
Lip-service to feminism makes it difficult to directly attack their direct competitors (younger girls), without coming off as bitter and butt-hurt. But you can attack the men. And if you can successfully pathologize male preference for youth as predatory, you accomplish two things simultaneously: you make the competing demographic seem like victims who need protection rather than rivals, and you make the men who prefer them seem like villains.
This reframing has the additional advantage of being unfalsifiable in ways that make it rhetorically robust. Any counterexample, any young woman who says she's perfectly happy in her relationship and was not victimized, can be explained as evidence of how thorough the manipulation was. She doesn't know she's a victim. That's the worst part.
The frontal-lobe argument is where things get especially interesting. The claim is that the prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed until 25, therefore people under 25 lack sufficient judgment to consent to relationships with older partners. I've seen this argument made by people with actual MDs on /r/medicine, which I find both impressive and alarming. It's impressive because it successfully launders a social preference into neuroscience. It's alarming because it's bad neuroscience.
Neurodevelopment is continuous. The "fully developed at 25" framing suggests a step function where below 25 you're basically a golden retriever and above 25 you're suddenly Immanuel Kant. This is not how brains work. The research shows gradual changes in certain cognitive and regulatory processes, with enormous individual variation, and basically no evidence that this translates into systematic inability to make reasonable decisions about relationships.
The younger girls? They absorb this by cultural osmosis. Younger Gen Z is actually the most vocal about age-gap discourse. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that isn't enough to overcome their innate biological preference for older, successful men, so actual behavior doesn't change much. If a 20 year old girl meets a 30 year old man she thinks is cute, she'll usually have few qualms about sleeping with him or getting into a relationship, age-gaps be damned.
Power-disparity is bad? Huh, someone should tell all the women who prefer that kind of disparity, in favor of the men they desire. Men tend to be more focused on attributes such as physical attractiveness and youth, which are, no prizes for guessing, more common in younger women.
I find such pathologization of universal human preferences distasteful, doubly so when my field is molested and forcefully conscripted to shore up bad arguments. Oh well, so be it. I'm lucky enough to be a MILF enjoyer and thus immune from direct blowback for the most part, even if I regretfully note that "MILF" increasingly just means women my age.
(Another anecdote: I remember grinding on a girl I vaguely knew at a club in Scotland. An older friend of mine had a thing for a bisexual woman about the same age as me. She ended up chatting with the first girl, who seemed receptive to her advances. Then the girl disclosed that she was 19, and that made the woman freak out, as they later explained in our company. I put aside any plans to approach the girl later, since the headache was far from worth it.)
If I was less lazy/busy, I'd insert the usual OkCupid stats blogs/archives from before they were bought and cucked. They showed that female attractiveness peaked at 18, but that was their minimum age cutoff, so I suspect the actual figure is even lower at around 16. Men also showed tolerance to wider age gaps as they got older. 30 year old and 35 year old men showed roughly the same willingness to approach 25 year old women.
I believe Gwern has a copy. Someone please do this in the comments, thanks, :*
Link (doesn't quite match your assertion)
Thank you, that's the one. My internal betting market had strong odds in favor of you being the first to find the link, good to see I'm well-calibrated.
Hmm. It seems I was misremembering. I will weaken from saying that 18 (or my speculation of 16) being peak female attractiveness isn't supported by the graph.
I will note:
I think this supports part of my argument: namely, that by setting an age minimum at 18, OKCupid obscures the fact that many/most men would happily approach younger women if they had the option. I suppose this is even less controversial, women don't magically go from being divorced of sexual value at 18 years - 1 Planck time to being hot when the clock strikes 12 on their 18th birthday.
Also look at the charts titled "The shape of the dating pool" and "how a person's attractiveness changes with time":
The latter shows that 18 year old women are about 75% as attractive as they are at their absolute peak at 21. They are roughly twice as attractive as they would be at 34. This strongly implies that women below 18 are more attractive than the majority of older women, the range restriction just doesn't allow us to measure this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's a ton of politics around football (and arguably more around baseball hof voting).
Bill Belichick will get voted into the hall of Fame, but not on a first ballot (after retirement there's a limited window of eligibility and getting voted in the first year of eligibility is a higher honor). Belichick had a lot of smoke around his career being a little too close to cheating scandals (Spygate and Deflategate) and those likely had as much to do with him not getting voted in first ballot as his taste in partners.
More options
Context Copy link
(Replying to the meat of your post)
Good writeup, but you've wasted your considerable analytic ability on a topic that's explained, sadly, by something basic and ugly.
Female jealousy.
(Relatively) older women who really have a problem with AGRs are disproportionately not in any relationship whatsoever. Ask a married woman and you'll get a shrug and, at most, "Yeah, I guess maybe it's a little old. Whatever." The only exception to this rule is if said married women is deep into the progressive left or socially hectoring right.
The intrasexual competition dynamics for women are different than men. Middle aged husbands don't really fear that Chad the pool boy is going to seduce their wife after three kids have done three-kids worth of damage to her body. In terms of direct competition, it's hilarious to envision a situation in which that same Chad confronts the husband at Buffalo Wild Wings and goes, _"Hey, brah! Just want to let you know I'm coming after that sweet Karen you got at home." If such an implausible situation were to occur, I'd bet heavily on the Husband countering with a Dad Joke along the lines of "....Do you promise? Garage code is 1234." [Footnote 1]
This is not the same with older vs younger women. Go to a wedding. Watch a bridesmaid talk totally-non-flirtatiously (seriously) with one of the Husband milling about searching for good finger food and free beer. If that young lady fucks up does the "arm touch" after a Dad Joke, you can actually hear his Wife's radar lock onto the young harpy. The trope of "he left me and married his secretary" was so strong for so long because it was fucking real. Geographic proximity plus regular interaction plus basic physical attraction = relationship.
AGR discrimination is female mate guarding at about the same level as classic slut shaming. Basic stuff.
Footnote 1: This is the present situation in the West. This probably used to be less of the case. In classic / ancient literature, there is a common archetype of a young, righteous warrior or prince fighting the evil old king to then capture (willingly that is, as in a prize) the kept Queen / Princess. This likely reflects the reality that young up and comers might actually try to ace (as in kill) the current powerful male in the local clan / tribe / what have you. However, this was also probably done for very cut and dry power and influence reasons - the Queen was a political asset. It was probably relatively unlikely the young upstart was actually romantically infatuated with the beleaguered lady monarch.
This almost never happened until the 1990's and even then mostly among people in the public eye like actors and politicians. The scenario the older wife would have been worried about before then is "he began an affair with his secretary and I felt duty bound to kick him out".
Given a free choice, men who can keep both women will, and men who have to choose would mostly prefer to go back to the mother of their children than marry a floozy. At some point the social rules changed so adultery is a purely private matter, whereas trifling with your mistresses affections is mistreating a vulnerable member of a protected group, which made it increasingly disreputable for a man not to marry his mistress, and also increasingly embarrassing for the wife to stay with a cheater.
While I'm pretty sure it doesn’t outweigh the social instability of the large single male population, this situation feels like a decent argument for polygamy. There's an obvious local equilibrium there in "the man takes the secretary home, marries her also, and sweetens the deal for the first wife by giving her an elevated position of authority over the second (and third, and so on)".
More options
Context Copy link
That's a better examination of it. Thanks.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
RE: your footnote, I vaguely associate that trope with the kept Queen herself being closer to the young man's age than the King's. I wonder to what extent that's part of the original trope and to what extent that's something imposed by later adaptations as an instantiation of modern values.
I guess in a time before regular elections, "young buck tears the throat out of the aging alpha and leads/fucks the pride into a bright new future" seemed as good a model as any to pin your hopes on for positive change. The only way for the sons of Mars to grow up big an strong is to periodically murder the old men so the young and verile warriors can start breeding.
Though he's a villain rather than a hero, I take Absalom as a Biblical ur-example here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The christian heresy, having jettisoned religious mores on sexuality two generations ago, now struggles to patch the gaping holes in its sexual ideology with the framing of abuse, grooming and rape. Nothing can be "sinful" i.e. morally condemnatory but not legally culpable. They're reinventing Victorian sexuality from the ass-end of sexual degeneracy using criminal acts and therapy-speak.
People have moral intuitions about things, often faulty and biased by ideology, but nonetheless. It's not surprising that a certain sort of middle-class, middle aged woman would be resentful of younger, more attractive women who are trading on their youth and beauty to get what they want. This sort of moral busybodying is completely normal and fuels countless gossip circles, tabloid magazines and hate-crushes. These are just the church ladies of today, only their moral language sounds retarded, because it is. And it's happening on social media instead of around the AIDS quilt.
More options
Context Copy link
Pump the breaks. This is not the reason why he was denied his first attempt at the HOF.
First off, first ballot HOF isn't exactly rare, but it's a big deal. A lot of players get a non-negligible number of votes their first year of eligibility and then the next year, or even several years after, actually make it across the threshold. Belichicks' NFL career was, quantitatively and statistically, incredible. But he had some black marks against him. The Patriots had numerous credible accusations of cheating during the Brady-Belichick era. Furthermore, Belichick is a notorious asshole on a personal level. So much so that Tom Brady, starting last year, began granting open interviews where he states "Yeah, the coach I won six superbowls with actually was such a boner at the end I decided to GTFO."
At another level of analysis, some NFL fans - including me - aren't convinced Belichick was the mastermind coaching genius he gets credit for. The theory goes that Brady was really the "X factor" for the Patriots dynasty. The major piece of evidence in favor of this is that a 40+ year old Brady leaves the Patriots and then quickly wins the Superbowl with Tampa Bay against Patrick Mahomes in his prime.
All of that is aside the primary point imho - Belichick is an asshole and has been since long before he started dating the FemmeBot. In the NFL, the group of coaches who hang around for more than ten years is fucking tiny. They all know each other, they all know the owners (who are heavily involved in the HoF process). It is a High School popularity contest and people remember that one time 9 years ago when you were a dick to them at the party.
Having read the list of "women, the harpies, want to keep the good men for themselves when we all know that women are peak attractive at 16 and once they go past 20 they're ugly crones" responses, thank you for at least examining what our friend with the "I'm middle-aged and my girlfriend is still too young to drink legally even where drinking age is 18" posting asserted as TRUE! REAL! FAX!
I read him as saying he was in his forties and dating a 20 something woman, not a teenager.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't understand what you are saying.
EDIT: nvm. You're a weird troll who is seconds away from another permaban. Sorry for misunderstanding.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not a football fan, but it's my understanding that this is a gross oversimplification. News articles (1 2) indicate that the voters refrained from inducting Belichick for several reasons. One reason that stands out is the fact that, under the recently-updated voting system, some people are losing eligibility, so this is their last chance to be inducted (before they are relegated to a separate "senior" category, where induction is technically still possible but also harder). Another reason is his involvement in cheating scandals. Neither of the linked articles mentions anything about a scandalously young romantic partner.
You got things a bit mixed up. Regular inductees are selected from a pool of 15 finalists. The number is culled to 10, then to 7, before the final vote, and committee members can vote for up to 5 of the 7, with players receiving 80% of the vote being recommended for induction. This is separate from coaches, contributors, and seniors, who are grouped together for voting purposes. There is a block of 5 consisting of 1 coach, 1 contributor, and 3 seniors, and the voters can select up to three, with the same 80% threshold for induction. This is in contrast to years past, where there were 5 senior candidates and an up/down vote for each one. The upshot is that not only are there fewer senior candidates, but a vote for anyone in the pool comes at the expense of another candidate. The theory was that since the senior candidates this year were especially strong and Belichick was considered a lock, there may have been some strategic voting. The guy from the KC Star admitted to casting all three of his votes for the senior candidates on this basis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have to imagine something like this is the largest factor, after being told they can have everything women become upset when men aren't interested in them for economic success and they find themselves in their late 30s with no partner or prospects.
They will (maybe rightly?) complain.
This is understandable and has been discussed to death on this site as well, but we should consider that female attractiveness equals female fecundity, the maintenance of which is rather taxing on the body. I imagine most women would not prefer a life of being fertile for multiple decades.
Women are, literally, fertile for three decades on average, and tend to be healthier towards the earlier end of that range(granted, largely for different reasons).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link