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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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The article may be badly written because of second language errors. That certainly seems like a contributing factor to what I read.

As far as the Chinese dating market, it obviously sucks, because there’s more men than women. Ideally you want slightly more women than men, so that every reasonably eligible man pairs off, women don’t feel so overwhelmed with male attention that they resort to third wave feminism(and third wave feminism is, by and large, a reaction to the perception of male sexual threat. This perception might be illusory but that’s what’s driving it- and this is why feminism spends so much time talking up sexual harassment), etc. Add in that this is a country which doesn’t have a history of dating/courting like in the west, so they’re trying to figure this out from first principles.

Ideally you want slightly more women than men, so that every reasonably eligible man pairs off, women don’t feel so overwhelmed with male attention that they resort to third wave feminism(and third wave feminism is, by and large, a reaction to the perception of male sexual threat.

This is why…New York is the happiest place in the country?

New York, along with basically every other place in America, has a surplus of single males under 40. It appears to have a surplus of single women overall mostly because women die later.

Ironically Chinese cities have this dynamic. The leftover men are all out in the countryside and the women all in the cities.

third wave feminism is, by and large, a reaction to the perception of male sexual threat

I’m no political theorist but as far as I know, one defining characteristic of 3rd wave feminism that differentiates it from the 2nd wave is sex positivity. So there’s either an obvious contradiction here or there is some weird-ass angle to all this that I fail to notice.

3rd wave feminism is sex-positive as long as only women are involved, or between transexuals and non-binaries or whatever, but for straight men it's only acceptable if the women initiate and control the whole encounter, which is an unusual kink at best.

Do 3rd wave feminists unironically advocate for women to initiate all male-female pairings?

I think an under-discussed aspect of this is that acts as a force multiplier is just how precarious the economic situation is for large parts of the Chinese population. Yes, there has been massive economic development but there has also emerged sources of immense levels of inequality that are genuinely very hard, or impossible, to overcome with labour alone for the regular or even moderately successful guy.

People complain about housing affordability in America but in china the income to house price ratio is like 20x worse. I don't think people internalise what something like this really means for people on the ground.

Combine this with the gender imbalance and i don't begrudge women there setting what is for many men an unreachable standard, because the alternative is fucking dire.

China is indeed not a place where famine, massive uprisings, civil war and regime collapse are unfathomable by any standards. The situation is probably more precarious than it seems from the outside.