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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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But are we allowed to question what message women's questionable dating choices (made of their free will with no external pressure) send to young boys and girls?

Young men are not “corrupted” into noticing these patterns. They notice them first (through lived failure) and then find the subculture that names the pattern instead of shaming them for noticing.

Well, I don't doubt there's some truth in this but if we're in the noticing game it seems crucial to also notice something else: there is a strong psychological motivation to generalise from some women's questionable dating choices. It lets men who are feeling difficult feelings blame them on women. Then they get served algorithmically with more "opportunities to notice" the questionable dating choices, and become more invested in an explanation that excuses what they may see as their own failure. And conversely, they are highly motivated not to notice women's "good" dating choices.

To be sure this is a form of torture for the men who are sucked into it, and you have to feel for them, but it is going to be hard to be clear eyed about these things if you miss out that massive piece of the puzzle.

there is a strong psychological motivation to generalise from some women's questionable dating choices.

True, and I think this is a thinly disguised "permission" to take the black pill and opt out.

Then they get served algorithmically with more "opportunities to notice" the questionable dating choices

Perhaps, and sure there may be some incentive to not notice the good ones. However, this is also due to the disproportionate share of loud online voices pinning men's dating struggles on some form of personal moral failing, like their perceived rightward shift and the so called manosphere. No man who's struggling will enthusiastically listen to platitudes about feminism, male privilege and women's issues. And they can tell you're gaslighting them because some of the worst men they know don't face these struggles to begin with. You can't preach compassion and empathy for someone's feelings and mock someone else for getting their feelings hurt. The first hurdle for the anti-manosphere folk is to acknowledge certain experiences that may be inconvenient to feminism, so I'd say there is also a reciprocal motivation to not clear it to begin with.

Yes. Social algorithms are inherently polarising and the same forces are at work in the opposite direction for many women, in such a way that knowing what the "other side" is looking at makes people dislike each other even more and even (worse) become genuinely more unlikeable. Ban algorithms! (I don't know if I think this but probably could be persuaded.)

Oh I think that. Social media has dramatically hastened the senescence and unraveling of society when organic bonds, cohesion and shared reality were already in a state of entropy. I'll happily freeze the clock to the late 90s if this timeline was inevitable.

The situation sounds somewhat like the complaint that young teen girls who feel insecure about their appearance go on instagram to see what the norms are, where the algorithm, sensitive to stopping and viewing times, will feed them more and more unattainable images and anorexia content. Whereas it won't show it to their mothers (I have a lot of pretty landscape paintings and handmade historical costumes on Instagram). I can't remember a real person spouting the male collective guilt line, but then I don't linger on such a thing when I find it, so the egrigore doesn't bother feeding me a stream of it.