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Notes -
Time for another dating market piece
From a non-Western angle this time. I enjoyed* this article on the Chinese dating market and its increasing level of dysfunction
*which is to say, I liked the information I gained. I did not at all enjoy reading it as it has the most irritating style known to man, a turbo Linkedin style piece by someone who thinks they are vastly more profound than they actually are. Do not read it. I have excerpted the interesting bits below:
Speaking from my own experience, the article is a touch overwrought. I'm in a major bubble - I haven't lived there for years, I was a foreigner, and all the expats I know now are successful families with children the same age as ours - but so is the person who uses anecdotes from TV shows and marriage markets. Nonetheless, there is some obvious truth here, given the collapse in marriage and fertility rates in the country.
There does seem to be an inherent contradiction in streaming, with the author assuming the government are both using it as a substitute for human affection, while also trying to crack down on gifting and parasocial relationships. Which is it? Perhaps this is a flaw of the CCP themselves, pulling in multiple directions and unable to find a fix for their country's broken dating market.
It sometimes amazes me that there's anyone who actually pushes back on the redpill observation about "Hypergamy."
The idea that women are selecting for the highest status male in their local social system is integrated into virtually every aspect of human culture. There are exceptions in media (Disney's Aladdin had a princess fall for the street rat rather than an uber-powerful, and not bad-looking sorcerer sultan who wanted to keep her as his slave).
I would argue that reality is more exacting than fiction, here. Find me a real life story where an attractive woman with the option to pick between a handsome, reliable, but only moderately wealthy Blue Collar worker, and a high status millionaire minor celeb, and intentionally settled for the former.
And biologically its perfectly sensible. I don't think there's any other way for a woman to operate if she wants to ensure her offspring's success and her own long term security. Completely fair to acknowledge and accept this biological imperative.
The "blackpill" is that this factor doesn't get turned off if a woman gets married and has kids, so a guy is never fully safe from being supplanted if he loses status or a higher status male sets eyes on his woman. The high status males need to be reined in as well!
There is actual research showing that women who acquire more wealth use that to acquire independence, men who acquire wealth use it to start families.
But we are currently seeing what happens when all cultural guardrails and guidelines that limited that factor are removed:
Approximately, women will start demanding outsize displays of wealth, status, power, physical fitness in exchange for mating privileges, and thereby controlling more and more actual wealth, which leads to further inflation of demands.
This is at least one explanation for why females have gotten less satisfied with their status, even as they've been given more wealth and power.
Find me a single person who can argue with a straight face that females are on balance worse off, socially or politically speaking, than 2002.
And so China is rapidly plunging down this dystopic slope and trying to aggressively re-establish the guardrails from the top down.
Interesting to see if they can get to any sort of agreeable equilibrium. At least they are willing to do things that might upset women.
I would still guess that South Korea is the one plumbing the deepest depths of how far things can fall, but even they are showing the slightest glimmer of things turning around.
No, no, no! This is exactly wrong. You cannot solve this problem by placing additional restrictions on men. We have been trying that for decades. It doesn't work. High status males don't need to be reined in. Women need to be reined in. But this is so unthinkable, even your otherwise redpilled comment instinctively veers off from that conclusion.
A man needs to know, when he marries, that he owns his woman from that day forth, the same way a man needs to know, when he buys a car, that he owns that car from that day forth, and that he will be allowed to defend that car with deadly force if needed, and that the state and his community will back him up if Daquan tries to dispute the ownership of his car. And if he does not, do not be surprised when nobody buys a car. The arguments for secure rights over women are isomorphic to the arguments for secure rights over any other form of property.
For marriage to work, a man needs to be able to kill his wife when he finds her in bed with another man. Instead, she files for divorce and gets rewarded with cash and prizes.
From "Why We Need the Double Standard" by the Dread Jim:
From the comments of "The Reactionary Program" by the same:
And from the comments of "COVID Public Service Announcement", idem:
If you execute or castrate ninety-nine fuckboys, but miss fuckboy number one hundred, he gets to spoil a hundred nice girls.
Whereas if you lock up and marry off ninety-nine girls, but fail to control girl number one hundred, you get ninety-nine happily married wives and one fallen woman.
To end the wars of the sexes, make women property again.
I understand the usual response to that is "Lincoln done freed the slaves".
If, in the year of our Lord 2026, you unironically want to own a woman, then no wonder there's a problem getting women to marry and have kids. Why, if you have the choice between "get a job, earn a living, pay your own way and be free" versus "be totally dependent economically on a man who puts you in the same category as a possession like his car", would you pick the man?
Why are some comments here making me (1) eternally thankful to God Almighty for leaving out the wiring in my brain that goes "I want to fall in love with a man and be his" and (2) want very much for those producing such comments to be reborn as a woman under the conditions they so want to impose?
Can you not hear yourselves? Do you think any decent woman would want to go within a mile of a man who thinks she should be literal chattel? Do you understand why such comments and attitudes drive feminism, and indeed drive it to the extremes which are bad for everyone? Is anyone really surprised Chinese or Japanese or Korean women would prefer to be spinsters?
The chattel thing is overwrought imo. But I think as policy, it’s rather better to target tge things that create stable and healthy societies rather than just “hedonistic capitalist consumption” as the end game. I don’t think anyone wants to be chattel in any sense. Heck, most people don’t want jobs, or to pay taxes, or to be governed by laws or institutions. The human being is an anarchist at heart, as can be seen by observing small children.
Of course the problem here is that a society run in that manner will very quickly become a society that nobody wants to live in. A society in which marriage is easier to end than most business contracts is one in which nobody wants to marry, and even among those who do, would be somewhat reluctant to have kids because they rightly worry that the marriage that makes the family stable enough to have children is not stable at all.
This isn’t much different from other problems. When a society decides that it wants to give support to people who don’t want to work, it finds it difficult to maintain itself. Nobody wants to clean sewers or pick up trash or work in a warehouse. Unless hunger compels them, those jobs won’t be filled. But if those jobs are not filled, you’ll live surrounded by garbage and sewage and the diseases that come from living in filth. If you decide you don’t want taxes, you will live cheaper, but there’s no police to call, the roads are not paved, and if some other country invades, it’s down to you and your neighbors to fend those people off.
Living in a civilization requires trade offs. And you can’t just think about it as just “I don’t want that restriction,” but in terms of what life wou be like when that restriction is gone for everyone. And I think we see the results. Fewer children, fewer families, and more loneliness is what you get. Is that a reasonable trade for the ability to dump your husband anytime you feel like it? I think I want a society with stable families and plenty of kids.
Sure, but trying to solve the problem by "let's take away all freedom from women and turn them into property" is going to be the fastest way to breakdown you could try. "Oh but it works fine in Saudi Arabia/other countries that cover women from the crown of their head to the tips of their toes and murders them with impunity if even suspected of looking at a man". Yes, quite, and do you think there is no such thing as adultery or promiscuity or prostitution in those societies?
If no man wanted to fuck a woman outside of marriage, then all the thots and cock carousel and the rest of it could not happen. As ever, it's both sides of the coin: men want sex more than women, but don't want women to be sexually active if it's not with them, and they want the relationship to end when they want it to end, and the woman should both be experienced enough to be able to satisfy the man sexually but also never have had a boyfriend before or after him.
How do you think that happens? How do you think a woman gets to be good in bed if she hasn't been sleeping with other men before you? Why complain about the friendzone if there is not the expectation that "if I'm interested in a woman, it is for sex, and she should reciprocate that"?
I don't want to be unfair to men. But I do think a lot of misery has been caused by Sexual Liberation, where women thought they could behave like men when it came to love and sex, and there would be no pushback and no more double standard and no more unhappiness. Turns out that you cannot have it all, and that men and women do have different expectations around relationships, and women giving in to male sexuality has not in fact made either sex happier. All the old prudish warnings about "men only want one thing" turned out to be correct, and it's deeply ironic that now men are complaining about this (women sleeping with men they find attractive even without commitment on the man's part).
We can't go back to the past, and unless people all suddenly convert to traditional Catholicism regarding sexual mores (and even many/the majority of Catholics don't stick to the rules), we're not going to put the sexual genie back in the bottle. Men want sex, but they seem to resent women both not wanting sex as much as they do, and thus not being sexually available, and wanting sex and being too available. Women are not blameless, but it's hard to be blamed for being frigid (if you won't sleep with Ted) and a whore if you will sleep with Ted, and with Joe before him when he was your boyfriend, and with Bill after him when he is your new boyfriend.
Suppose that by some act of the simulation overlords in the morning all women refused to have sex outside of marriage, demanded that their boyfriends commit to proposing marriage before entering into a serious relationship, and everyone had to wait until marriage to have sex. There would still be a ton of male sexual frustration around this, there would be the demand for porn and prostitutes, and where do you get prostitutes if not women who either have high sex drives or are driven to it by economic necessity? And so do we then go back to the happy days of silver nitrate eyewash for newborns, due to the risk of blindness from gonorrhoeal infection of the mothers, often given to them by their husbands who frequented prostitutes? The kind of historical background to this story by Arthur Conan Doyle, based on medical experience, where the grandson of a man who contracted venereal disease is suffering from the transmission of the same down the generations?
I have no idea what the solution is. But it certainly won't come from people like our friend speaking of "my wife" in the same sense they mean "my car" or "my shoes". We've had that, and it wasn't happy families, it was the kind of thing satirised by Dean Swift in "A Modest Proposal":
I don’t think I’d make any changes other than require the person who files the divorce to have an actual cause — cheating, abuse, neglect, addiction, etc. before they can just file the papers and court-fuck the other person out of a good deal of the family assets. Maybe I’d require some evidence that said party tried to work out the differences that exist. I don’t see that as making a woman property, maybe you do, I don’t know. I see it as providing the stability for the family that allows for having and raising healthy children, knowing that you aren’t one lost job or ten pound weight gain away from losing your family.
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