This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I saw a thread about Louis Theroux's manosphere documentary. OP relates his teen daughter's alleged words and experiences to make a point about healthy values and teen male behaviours. The current verdict is that boys should have their screen times monitored or limited so they don't get corrupted by the manosphere, and raise them with feminist values. Okay. I agree with some of this. There are certainly incel adjacent online spaces that spiral into nihilism and hate. There are teenage boys with zero offline male role models to mainline this stuff and end up emerging more bitter than buff. Parental gatekeeping of violent porn, gambling apps, or extremist political content seems like basic risk management. If your heuristic is “anything that makes my daughter feel existentially unsafe is bad for my son too,” the monitoring prescription follows naturally. And yes, the generational digital literacy gap is real. Parents are often shocked their kids know the lore. I'd go further, I'm in favour of a blanket social media ban until they (both boys and girls) turn 16.
That being said. This comes just one day after Clavicular's recent clip with Leela Saraswat went viral. FWIW the "boyfriend" commented on Instagram that it was an old prom pic and they weren't dating. 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? We have a clip of an (allegedly) attached woman melting for a high value male on camera, yet the discourse pivots to “protect boys from the manosphere”. Here's the truth nuke: Clavicular is not an incel. He is living proof of the sexual marketplace the manosphere describes, which is heavily determined by looks, money, height, race, social status, etc. He pulls taken women with minimal effort. 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. So what is the problem with the manosphere? That it spreads dangerous lies and radicalises young men into subjugating and even killing women? Or that the rhetoric makes women look bad?
If it's the former, I need to see some evidence. Netflix's "Adolescence" made waves last year for catching the so called andrew tate problem that's apparently radicalising 13 year old boys into stabbing their classmates. Never mind the fact that homicide rates in the UK have been trending DOWN over the years, particularly against females. Are we allowed to discuss the harm caused by manufactured hysteria? If it's the latter, then you’re not protecting boys. You’re just delaying the day they notice the discrepancy between official feminist sermons and observed reality. And when they finally do notice, they’ll be angrier for the wasted years. And manosphere critics would tell us they've been "corrupted".
Lastly, since #notallmen was mentioned as a gotcha, can I point out how this "collective guilt" only flows one way? If every man should feel ashamed about the manosphere because we share genitals with them, what about the (overwhelmingly male) miners, linemen, firemen, welders, construction workers, road workers, steel workers, etc etc who commit to physically intensive and dangerous labour everyday to keep your lights on? Do we all get a collective male labour paycheck for that too, simply because we share genitals with the workers in these vocations? You don't need to hold yourself to consistent principles if you have sufficient social capital, like feminism does.
I haven’t watched the documentary yet, but IMO if you wish to increase the sum total happiness in society, it’s better to lean into “women should be ashamed of their gender” than “men should be ashamed of their gender”. This is because women are more sensitive to shame, threats of social ostracization, and other kinds of social stressors, while being more socially conformist, and while also being more “vain” in their choice of mate (hypergamy, which is just nature naturing), and more likely to instigate divorce when the status differential is changed in their favor [1, 2, 3]. Men, contrarily, are more likely to take risks and break social norms in order to secure a mate, and so any attempt at shaming them into not getting laid will be less effective. So there is a qualitative difference in the effect size of any behavior-policing social intervention: with the same amount of shame, you can modify more of the behaviors and values of more women than if you tried the same for men. We know from a study on the Lancaster Amish that women who are controlled according to traditional values have less stress, fewer symptoms of depression, higher aggregate scores of mental health, lower levels of intimate partner violence, higher levels of social support, and even report lower levels of unfair treatment owing to gender (lol, lmao even) compared to the general population. We can only imagine how happy they would be with traditional values + modern Starbucks beverages. Traditionalism also uniquely buffers against the depression-increase when women marry:
In light of the data, I’m not sure why anyone would take manosphere / feminism discourse seriously. Neither of them have any evidence-backed plan to make men and women happier. Maybe the manosphere increases male happiness by providing a sense of cameraderie? I doubt feminism makes anyone happier as feminists always seem distraught.
If feminism is making women on average less happy, that is not necessarily a strike against feminism. There is also freedom to consider. If freedom makes you less happy on average, that does not necessarily mean that you should do away with freedom. Perhaps it can mean that, in some cases, but not as a general rule.
Children generally become less happy at first when parents stop just providing everything to them and start to demand more adult behavior. That does not necessarily mean that it is bad to at some point start to demand more adult behavior from children.
An adult man who makes his own living is probably less happy on average than a sheltered boy who has everything provided for him. That does not necessarily mean that it is better to be a sheltered boy than it is to be an adult man.
It is not surprising that as women went from having a sort of middle status between children and adult men to having legal freedom equal to men and being expected to make their own economic decisions, they also became less happy in some ways and developed various new stresses different from the stresses that they had before. It is especially not surprising given that this is a new development in history, with few precedents. So there is no guidebook.
But this does not mean that women's liberation is a bad thing. In any case, the journey of women's liberation has only begun. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
Yeah exactly, freedom is bound to make tons of people unhappy, because they make bad choices for themselves in at least one area. Like every fat ass is unhappy with their freedom over food consumption instead of big government controlling calorie intake. It's a tradeoff situation, big government authoritarianism favors the retards who can't control themselves and make choices so bad that having someone else tell them what to do works out better. From people who eat a little too much to the morons who go and take a mortgage on their house to gamble with or whatever else. Even the midwit of government can be better than their own idiocy.
Freedom favors the smart and responsible people who can control themselves and make good decisions. Freedom says you are accountable to yourself. Freedom is for the people who make better decisions in their life than a central bureaucrat on a power trip could do. If you're less happy in a free society, that's on you for overeating or being an asshole or choosing to gamble or whatever stupid shit you do.
I don't think of myself as a retard, I think of myself as someone who knows better for my life than the government would. I want my freedom to do with myself as I wish. If the retards want their king, I guess we can have an opt in no freedom program for them or something where you can sign up and live in a government facility that stops you from overeating and drinking too much and changes your diaper for you. They'll tell you when it's work time, play time, nap time.
This is one of those things that seems obvious, but also seems like it's not talked about nearly enough, to the extent that people actually don't understand it as obvious. I certainly wish the feminist movement talked more about these downsides and the fact that many women will end up less happy (and, quite possibly, less good for whatever they might judge as "good" in terms of their life), but that this is a worthy cost to pay for the freedom that feminism offers them. Because, right now, I see so many women being failed by the feminist movement, having been convinced that freedom won't have these severe and significant downsides and then conclude that their own lack of happiness despite their freedom means that the movement clearly needs to keep doing more until
morale improvessomehow both greater freedom and greater happiness is achieved. Without that grounding in actual reality - and the tradeoffs that are always present in reality - it's become a movement that just keeps inviting greater and greater justified pushback while leaving its supporters dissatisfied.Of course, the
marketmovement can stay irrational longer than you can staysolventalive, and there's a sucker born every minute, so its inability to - and apparent lack of desire to - accomplish its stated goals doesn't mean that there's going to be some correction anytime soon.This is kinda true but in a different way. It's more possible for the average person to do a stereotypical "traditional life" of a working husband and stay at home wife than ever before, and it'd be far cozier since the women back then actually had to do hours and hours of meaningful domestic work. If you want to be the "loyal Christian wife who serves her husband instead of working" you could do that and get to watch soap operas or makeup tiktoks all day. Or at least it would be, if it wasn't for two things.
The main one of Housing. It's basically impossible to have the cheap and small homes people lived in back then, zoning and land use regulations saw to that. Owning a home on a single income is more difficult when you're competing against richer households on less stock. More freedom to build would allow for these one earner households to also get a home. This is where "we need more freedom" is true, just not of women's liberation.
And the second one of "keeping up with the Joneses". Obviously having someone sit at home watching Tiktok while the laundry machines and dishwasher do most of the domestic labor for them is less contribution to society than having them go out and do a job, so your household is gonna earn less money than your neighbors who have two working adults. You have to sacrifice somewhere else like not having fancy cars and new stuff for the kids as often or whatever if you want a one income life. Unhappiness here is just "waaah I want the same pay as someone who is smarter and works more than me" complaining.
But if you're willing to accept that one earner is obviously less money than two earners, and live in a smaller home with less stuff then freedom allows you to do that for yourself. You have no excuse for unhappiness there except for your own fault. There are no feminism police coming to break down your door because you're a wife without a job.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Women's liberation isn't a bad thing, unless it ends up with society overcorrecting because people refused to implement corrections before things got out of hand.
Humans respond to whatever incentive structure that is laid out for them. If society allows a group to maximize their advantages and minimize their disadvantages they will respond accordingly, and that might come at the expense of some other group. In the case of women's liberation, that expense appears to be laid at the feet of the modern day average Joe.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link