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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19313 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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This creates an inherently muddled message to men. "DON'T listen to the siren song of red pill grifters, DON'T give in to misogyny, DON'T become a parody of masculinity. That's VERY BAD."

"Okay okay, but what should I do instead?"

"Fuck you, figure it out yourself or die alone."

The issue here is that the muddling of the message is the point, and encoded in that above interaction is the clear message: "figure it out yourself [the first step of which is to ignore everything my peers and I tell you to do and learn to think for yourself]." Women want men who can figure things out for themselves, and the only way to discriminate between men who do and don't is to give them a hard, confusing, self-contradictory problem and then see which ones figure out the answer.

Yeah, but the feedback mechanisms are all screwed up.

Mistakes men make are probably overcorrected, i.e. punished too quickly and harshly for them to learn the proper lesson. Related to my point that women aren't good at gracefully rejecting guys (or accepting rejection) who approach them.

Attempts by men to coordinate into groups designed to advance their mutual interests and provide mutual support and advice tend to get disrupted and infiltrated if they gain any success.

Taking the correct action usually doesn't offer immediate rewards, and progress can be hard to perceive. Hell, you can even be PUNISHED for taking the 'correct' path, and the rewards only manifest if you push through that and have faith it will pay off.

A guy is going to take a LOT of lumps before he happens on the 'working' strategy, and he can't even be completely sure if the working strategy will be enough to win until he's followed it past the point of probable no return.

So its "figure it out on your own" but you dropped men into the wilderness with a mislabeled map, barely any supplies, and not even a walkie talkie, much less an expert guide to keep them from stepping off a cliff. So they can set off walking in a given direction and hope it works out, but without the actual resources to tell if they're walking to their doom or not.

And when the comparison point is VIDEO GAMES, which have very tight feedback loops, visible rewards and progression, and satisfying 'gameplay,' the real world seems intolerable by comparison.

That's only a problem if you believe that men in general or on average deserve a fair chance at accomplishing things like romantic partnership, sex, children, family, general life satisfaction. But my observation is that women aren't concerned with that, and I doubt it's physically possible to make them concerned with that, in general. They're concerned with finding the highest quality partner for themselves, and the highest quality partner is heavily determined by the partner's genes, and so the point of the test is purely to discriminate, not to be a system that men can learn from in order to pass it. The entire point is that they should be able to pass it without any help, despite the, again, bizarre, contradictory, nonsensical nature of the test, which also has a horrendous feedback mechanism. If the tests fixed any of these things, then the tests would work less well.

That's only a problem if you believe that men in general or on average deserve a fair chance at accomplishing things like romantic partnership, sex, children, family, general life satisfaction.

What can I say?

I'm a man, I would like a 'fair shot' at every one of those things. I think the world that is ordered to enable the majority of men to achieve this outcome if they can follow a few relatively simple guidelines, and become 'worthy' of raising kids, will produce a LOT more human happiness and long term thriving on net than the trajectory we're on now.

If women themselves are less happy by any reasonable measure then clearly this whole experiment has failed to produce good results!

The world was never fair. But it is likely that it has become substantially less fair in this regard than most men were ever taught to expect.

So as a very basic level of fairness, if the actual 'rules' are thus:

They're concerned with finding the highest quality partner for themselves, and the highest quality partner is heavily determined by the partner's genes, and so the point of the test is purely to discriminate, not to be a system that men can learn from in order to pass it. The entire point is that they should be able to pass it without any help, despite the, again, bizarre, contradictory, nonsensical nature of the test, which also has a horrendous feedback mechanism.

THEN WE SHOULD BE HONEST AND ACTUALLY TEACH THIS AS TRUTH.

I will grant it as true for purposes of discussion.

If the entire social system does not teach men that this is how things work, and inculcates them with rules like "be yourself," "treat her with respect," "believe women," and "you have male privilege"... and these men find that adhering to these rules is not effective for achieving their goals...

This is what creates the opportunity for Red Pill Influencers to step in. The whole reason it is called "red pill" is the metaphor for 'waking up from the program' and breaking the conditioning of how men are socially expected to act... and accept the biological reality of what actually produces romantic, sexual, and genetic success!

The only reason they can claim to be providing special/secret knowledge is that society and culture have in fact been hiding this information. Hence why I said:

Its like we have a culturally-enforced Women are Wonderful Effect. It doesn't matter if they're performing objectively anti-social, destructive behavior for all to see. Women can do no wrong therefore if women are doing it, it isn't wrong. If you say its wrong and level a critique, YOU are in fact the bad person.

So in short, even if the world can't be made more fair in outcomes, we could at least teach men the reality of how the game is played.

And what we appear to be observing with Clavicular Et al. a huge generational cohort of men who have been exposed to and accept that reality, and they are trying to optimize as best they can, and (unsurprisingly) the social institutions that want to maintain the status quo revile this. But they can't refute them.

I see a bunch of essentially "we should" statements, which I interpret as "the world would be better if this were so:" and for your statements, I do agree. I also think the world would be better if we all got unicorns and rainbows and eternal life without illness beyond what's exactly needed to provide just the right amount of suffering and challenge for a good life. If only we could just "we should" into that world!

Now, perhaps such a world you describe, unlike one with unicorns (until we figure out genetic engineering to a sufficient extent), is possible to get to from here. I don't think it's obviously impossible. Figuring out if and how to change this world to that better world are the real challenges, not just "what would a better world look like." And you cannot expect women as a group or on average, to do anything other than be maximally sabotaging to such a project. Because giving men information and feedback on how to be attractive is something that directly harms women's ability to judge them as potential mates. So any project of getting to that better future from here must take into account their sabotage and route around it or through it. Their sabotage is as much a fact of life as death and taxes, so best to just accept it as it is instead of considering it bad or good.

Women have sons and brothers though. Shouldn’t they be invested into increasing the fitness of their male children?

Sometimes, at the direct one-to-one cost to the male children of other women who aren't related to them, of course.

Sure, but who's going to hold them accountable if they don't do it?

(The current answer is "nobody, and if men themselves try it, they'll just get oppressed and blood-libelled even harder for it", and it shows.)

They're not trying to correct men. They're trying to filter them. And the criteria are not legible, not to men and not to them. Any stated criteria will work out to be a brick wall; those aren't real.

In terms of the larger genetic fitness level, many many women are successfully filtering themselves out too.

But this would lead us to the aside of how young ladies being on hormonal birth control probably screws up their actual desires and has them filtering for factors that aren't great for long term reproductive success.

is to give them a hard, confusing, self-contradictory problem and then see which ones figure out the answer.

Sure, but instinct doesn't self-moderate in the presence of better alternatives, which is why a good chunk of [modern] men can now go "you're not worth it, go fuck yourself" to women (and society as a whole, for that matter). It's not necessarily a positive thing, but it is a necessary part of the process.

Just as fathers failed their daughters in the '50s and '60s by giving them outdated self-sabotaging advice (the "never make anything of yourself, just marry well" one that feminists complain about), mothers fail their sons now in the same way (the "respect women and make yourself as unattractive as possible" stuff).

Its not surprising some young men feel resentment at being set up to fail, and instead choose ruthless self interest (whether that looks like checking out of the dating market or sexual exploitation of women). You can't break the social contract and expect young men to unilaterally honour their side.

You can't break the social contract and expect young men to unilaterally honour their side.

Much of society breaking the social contract and expecting men (especially white men) to unilaterally uphold their side has been working pretty well for the last 40 years, so why would the defecting part of society bother to change course?

They think that it is working, but they are not actually achieving their goals.

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