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 -
So "Into The Manosphere" is a netflix documentary, that im sure many here have heard of.
Here is a video on it that I watched, by a psychiatrist. Although I enjoyed it enough, there is a common sentiment that deserves to critiqued, one that was echoed in the video, that i will simplify with a youtube comment (note: this comment is in response to another comment, the context of which i will be representing by {} brackets):
I think this gender abolitionist framing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Men & Women are judged and valued by society differently. Men are valued based on their ability to climb up social hierarchy to obtain status. Women's value is more reflected by their attractiveness, and reproductive capabilities. Masculinity (attempts) to provide useful guidelines and structure to achieve this end. Women simply do not exist in the same space, so their variation of being a role model wouldn't be a good representation of the male position. It would be a kin to a white man trying to be a role model for black boys - the critical social context is not there.
Women don't grow up thinking about how to be woman, because much of what defines femininity is there by default. You are simply born a sexy girl - you simply gestate a fetus - and then give birth to it. There is little to no skill barrier required in comparison.
EDIT: Ok, the above statement was hasty initially. There are some aspects that are require skill in some capacity. Not all women are born pretty butterfly's, you need make up, nails, hair, ect, and this requires skill in its own right. But none the less, i wouldn't say this is equivalent to the skills sets required for Masculinity.
The problem with "being yourself" as so often espoused by liberal types is that, it provides 0 road map to achieving the traits that women (and people in general) value in men. & this is the same general issue I take with the manosphere opponents - Many of these individuals believe completely asinine and reality denying ideas like "Looks don't matter" or "You just need to be a good person to be attractive". The manosphere, for all its misogyny and toxicity, is at least calling out the reality of the situation: If you are poor, fat, and socially inept - as a man, you will be harshly judged and looked down on within our society. This is - arguably - one of the main appeals of the manosphere to begin with. If one really wants to see the manosphere go away - we need to start looking at these realities of life straight to the face. Only then can one begin to provide meaningfully positive alternatives.
Yes, probably, and this is as true of women as much as men.
Your post has its points, but you seem to be operating under the assumption that all girls are sort of latent beautiful princesses. And would that this were so. I'd suggest that you're missing (as many who suggest that women just have to sit around being beautiful, picking and choosing which man to allow in) is that arguably most women are simply not very physically attractive in a conventional sense. This is especially true once a girl gets older and no longer has the lithe thinness of the teenage years (but many do not even have that.)
Post youth, the unattractiveness could be because of life style choices (poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, tobacco and alcohol use) or simply genetics. And your later statement that some women may have been born without makeup is either poorly worded or bizarre. I'd suggest men who rail against the unfairness of it all keep this in the forefront of their mind: There are many, many unattractive women. And this when the shelf life for even exceptional female physical attractiveness is measured in years--decades only with a lot of care taken.
I write all this not as a condemnation or dismissal of women. I'm at the age when physical beauty of random women near my own age is almost a non issue. Investing emotionally in one woman (who becomes your wife and the mother of your children) involves reconceptualizing what beauty means.
My final point is one that you seem to be making yourself: Men's worth is not necessarily tied up in how they look, and they are then capable of doing something about it. As WC Fields (or whoever) said to the woman accusing him of being drunk: "Tomorrow I'll be sober but you'll still be ugly."
Obligatory edit: My tastes are certainly not the tastes of many. One man's plain girl is another man's beauty, etc. well as it should be. My larger point is that life isn't all roses for all girls everywhere just because a few young attractive women have a high profile and many followers / orbiters.
Ok, i wouldnt say all women, i think an overall baseline attractiveness is there, at least initially. But i probably edit this post to incorporate some of these critiques. You (and others) do make a good point here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As someone who would describe themselves as broadly anti-manosphere I think the problem is these debates are generally conducted at such a high level of generality as to be useless. They imagine "society", "men", and "women" as undifferentiated masses with uniform preferences in ways that don't really reflect reality.
When you talk about "society" valuing people differently, what does that mean on the level of the individual? I am pretty confident my status in my TTRPG friend group and my status in my World of Warcraft guild and my status at work all depend on pretty different factors. Which one of those is "society"? All of them? None of them? Similarly, my wife sometimes goes down to the local bar to play Bingo and is part of a local beekeeper's group. Is it your assertion that her status in those groups is (primarily? substantially?) based on her attractiveness and fertility? Are those not "society"?
I'll echo others that this is surely true for some women but, almost definitionally, cannot be true for most women. It can't be the case that most women are just born into, say, the top quartile of attractiveness! Some further fraction will have issues that impact their fertility as well.
The point with the "be yourself" advice is that there is substantial variation in what people value and it is better to develop a relationship or friend group with people who value you when you are the way you want to be instead of forming a relationship or friend group where you have to force yourself to be some way you're not. To take a personal example: I'm not particularly good at or interested in sports. Could I force myself to practice and get better and learn more for the purpose of fitting in with a friend group who was really into sports? Probably. But better for me to find a different friend group who enjoys the same things I do (video games, anime, ttrpgs, etc). Similarly I could probably force myself to suppress my interests for the purpose of attracting a woman who found those interests off-putting. But why would I want to do that instead of finding a wife who shared those interests? Speaking from some observational experience with my brother and a friend having to suppress your interests that way sucks!
Perhaps, but there is also substantial overlap. Most people value someone if they are good looking for example, its just something that happens in the subconscious.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't this one of the ironies of the situation? The anti-manosphere folks generally also claim to oppose judging people for being any/all of "poor, fat, and socially inept". Maybe they even believe their own propaganda, but fail to actually deliver on their stated values: maybe things would be different if all these men easily found dates among "progressive healthy-at-any-size neurodivergence activist" women who consider each other high-status, but clearly they're not.
There isn't a shortage of people who claim to be "looking at these realities of light straight to the face", but I don't think that's "meaningfully provided positive alternatives", in part because they've largely gone in different directions with this. As a guy, I'm somewhat more sympathetic to "nose to the grindstone self-improvement" (although I won't endorse the chauvinism) over virtue signaling for ineffective change in society, but it's not hard to see that everyone is really just talking past each other. Not that I have a better proposal.
In practice, being fat and/or socially inept as a woman will get you some pretty harsh judgement too. Maybe not right to your face, because a) that's not how women interact and b) it's a faux pas to say this stuff out loud. But women are judged more harshly, not less, for weight issues or social ineptitude.
How exactly are women judged harshly for social ineptitude?
Because women are rewarded significantly more for social adroitness and therefore the difference between the haves and the have nots is greater for women than it is for men. Thus it depends on how you measure the "harshness". Is it the loss that is measured (if so, women are judged more harshly) or the final destination (if so, men are judged more harshly).
Are women generally expected to have social adroitness though? As far as I can see, this is not the case. If a woman lacks social skills or acumen but is otherwise no actively unpleasant or obnoxious, she's usually just considered a cute dork or a clumsy goofball, I think.
Look at it this way, men's range of judgement is 0-50 while women's is 10-100 (note, scale entirely made up for illustrative purposes). Women don't bottom out as low as men, but their peak is much higher since social skills aren't as major a contributor to men's status as they are to women's. Thus, if you judge the "harshness" as the difference between the highest and the lowest judgement, women are most harshly judged, while if you judge it instead as the depth of the lowest men are.
Frankly I find this mind-boggling. Where did you get such ideas? Why do you think nobody expects female comedians to actually be funny, women in general to be good conversationists or good initiators of conversations even, to be able to tell jokes etc?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is just the scaled-up social version of the stereotypical "I wish I could find someone like you!" and "Just be yourself!" from a woman to a friend-zoned guy, isn't it? She thinks she's judging him positively! They're good friends! She wants to see him find a girlfriend, and thinks it should be easy for him! She just "doesn't think of you in that way", for what she assumes are inexplicable random reasons uncorrelated to what other girls will think, certainly not for any reasons that might sound superficial if identified and examined.
It's tempting to be critical of people who can lie to themselves in such a fashion, but just about everybody seems to do it (about some topic, if not this one), so by induction I'm probably doing it too, so self-interest alone says I probably want to vote for mercy over justice here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ah, the classic bait-and-switch.
More options
Context Copy link
Imagine a religion that believes it is evil to pick up $100 bills lying on the sidewalk, and even demands you tithe more $100 bills to the sidewalk. From the inside perspective, getting mad at people who pick up the free money makes total sense - they are violating a holy norm. But from the outside perspective, they look like retards.
More options
Context Copy link
This cuts no ice with gender abolitionists because they're social constructionists and their response to something like this is simply to demand society change this judgment.
You're actually falling into the same dynamic that causes the the quoted post. I doubt that no one has given them an explanation of why they think male roles are valuable. They likely reject those explanations because a)most are seen as sexist/essentialist and b) they find what remains to essentially be content-free because no one can make a substantive defense of actual gender roles (precisely because it is sexist/essentialist). Which makes sense: we have changed a lot of gender roles. Appealing to how society treats people without explaining why those things are anchored in biology or dynamics we can't or shouldn't change is useless.
There's no way out of this new folk religion without recreating the old, it's just hard between technological and social change. But that's where you're gonna have to go.
And yet societies put a lot of effort into controlling the transition into womanhood. Conservative Muslims start training their women on how to be at puberty, Westerners had finishing schools, etc.
They can demand what they like, but its probably always gonna be the case to some extent or another. The amount of evidence we have that the sexes are different makes a social constructivist view unsurmountable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The problem with the gender abolitionist framing is that when push comes to shove virtually no one actually believes it. There are a lot of culturally contingent ideas about femininity and masculinity and associated gender roles and there's some heated disagreement over how much the behavioral differences between men and women are rooted in biology(/natural order) vs indoctrination, but the number of people who think we should actually get rid of gender distinctions is close to zero. What is passed off as gender abolitionism tends to merely be a rebellion against perceived male supremacism and heteronormativity. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of women like being women. When they chafe against the strictures of womanhood, they're not (generally) saying "I wish I could be a man," they are saying "I wish I didn't have to put up with all this bullshit."
All of which is to say, I don't think hostility to the development of any sort of masculinist/male-specific movement descents from a serious belief in gender abolitionism. Rather, there are two main motives:
a) a zero-sum view of gender relations, under which any sort of men's movement is a problem because men's gain is women's loss and vice versa.
b) the (usually correct) fear that any men's movement or space will rapidly become anti-woman.
However, you can't just come out and say "men shouldn't be allowed to advocate for their interests because they'll inevitably become a threat to women." That sort of gives the game away. Instead the issue is dressed up in gender abolitionist rhetoric wherein men's interest in masculinity is held to be illegitimate/mistaken in and of itself (as illustrated in the quoted excerpt). However, this doesn't get great traction with men because it's transparently one-sided (and also bullshit). You can't make a big deal about the importance of representation for women and then turn around and say it's not important for men.
(There is also the separate reality that modern liberalism is very hands off on the question of what it means to live well, which makes it averse to highly prescriptive social norms. This includes strongly defined gender roles.)
I can't speak from firsthand experience due to not being a woman, but from what I can observe and have been told, this is very much not true. Girls have their behavior policed from a young age, and while the framing (and content) may be different across social contexts, the basic idea of needing to learn feminine ('ladylike') behavior and skills is omnipresent. Even in the purely physical domain, feminine beauty is, while helped along to a great degree by genetics, heavily artificial. Often in ways men are hilariously blind to (e.g. many men are comically bad at noticing when women are wearing makeup)
I think this depends on our definition of 'makeup'.
Hold up. Men's spaces rapidly become anti-woman? Where is the historical evidence of that? Depending on our definition of 'anti-woman', that is.
I'd say the basic sentiment/vibe that 'men have it better', that men's lives are easier is and was very much a driving force of feminist activism, which is usually middle-class and suburban.
Note that any space that does not explicitly center and privilege women is "anti-woman" so men's spaces are effectively "anti-woman" by default...or completely useless.
Something something misogyny of gamers and Star Wars nerds. You can make a much stronger case for anti-men sentiment in female dominated kdrama/kpop fandoms, as (unironically pro-4B) radfems frequent these spaces and gatekeep like crazy. But it's just a case of women by default having more social capital than men on average.
I think it is somewhat more systemic than simply women having more social capital than men on average. Society incentivizes this arrangement by granting men social status for protecting women and granting women social status for being so defended.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A point I realized in discussions with my wife (early millenial), her mom (boomer) and her sister (gen X) is that there are two fundamentally opposed kinds of male supremacism: First, the idea that biological men are just better, and second, that male social norms are just better. The first is extremely unpopular and is fought very openly and very hard, the second is ... complicated.
Especially among liberal Gen X and older women, there is a common story of noticing that you're being valued for your school and later career accomplishments, and having to become tough and competitive to make it in, often explicitly called, "the world of men". Meanwhile, the worst that can possibly happen to you, that will make your parents bow their head in shame and your classmates laugh about you, is to become pregnant early. Even later, while your parents might switch to start egging you to have kids, your environment will subtly or not-so-subtly never really stops primarily considering your status through the lens of achievements. Anyone can have kids, after all, so it's much more prestigious to become a high-powered lawyer, a professor, or something else.
All of this is a very straightforward application of norms that formerly only applied to men, now also to women. Formerly female norms, centering on communal decision-making, friendliness and inclusivity, as well as achievements, mostly revolving around motherhood and the household, were de-emphasized in the former case and discarded wholesale in the later. Interestingly, acknowledging this will regularly get you dismissed as a male supremacist, on the logic that of course the virtues/achievements I call "male" here are actually just general virtues/achievements, and implying that women might be less good or even just merely care less about them is akin to claiming that women are lesser.
This lead to an dynamic in which Gen X men who are very stereotypically male, who are dismissive of femininity, nevertheless consider themselves pro-feminist in the sense of thinking that women can and should behave the same as successful men. Several of my (former) profs are like that.
Of course people generally don't really change fundamentally, so this just got bottled up for as long as it was necessary. With women increasingly being a majority in many fields, they can now simply enforce new norms, even if it takes some time to (re-)normalize them. And it's unsurprising that these new norms happen to reflect feminine virtues. And the Gen X men are the ones being blasted the hardest, who additionally feel completely blindsided since it's a fundamentally different kind of feminism than the one they were told is the right kind. Millenial men might also be split on whether they like this development, but they seem much less surprised.
My wife notices this a lot, contrasting what she is told by her mother what she "needs to do" to be successful in the workplace, and how much her mom was kept back and discriminated against (in addition to being an east german in a west german company, who didn't get her advanced degree accepted to boot!), often in fairly overt ways ... and many of those don't really apply anymore, except for the part where you get screwed over hard for having kids and actually wanting to care for them. As long as you're childless and conform to male norms, you are, if anything, getting beneficial treatment.
The woke revolution seems to a substantial degree to be women just re-asserting that their values matter, too. But unfortunately these values can be wildly disadvantageous in the workplace; For example, you can't do without substantial competitiveness that women find deeply unpleasant. So at the end we arrive at a weird androgynous ideal, where men are forced to engage in female norms they dislike, while women are forced to engage in male norms they dislike. The "great feminization theory" is in this way correct about the recent changes, but fails to see the ways in which women also have accepted a, for lack of a better word, internalized masculinization a longer time ago that now sits so deep that calling it into question feels to many like a personal attack on their self-worth.
Dunno how we can fix this. Just talking about the issue usually gets you called names, and average differences are dismissed with single counterexamples. It's understable that women don't want to be forced all the way back into the kitchen, but at the same time, many of them clearly aren't very happy in highly competitive workplaces that don't suit their values. And the men likewise don't want to work in an adult Montessori kindergarten, either.
...yes, this seems simply correct to me; virtue is a primarily masculine phenomenon (after all, see the etymology). I notice how whenever the comparison between masculine and feminine values are drawn, here and elsewhere, the connection between feminine group behavior (generally, consensus-driven with covert competition) and success in feminine fields is left vague, while the connection between masculine group behavior (generally, hierarchical and camaraderie-driven) and success in masculine fields is obvious. I find it much more likely that many/most aspects of feminine psychology are side effects of domestication and/or adaptations to being the more vulnerable sex, rather than those things being evolutionarily selected for to enhance their fitness in their role.
Even with that notwithstanding, it's also pretty obvious to me that achievements in the masculine realm are simply more valuable than achievements in the feminine realm, at least in a modern economy. Having children definitely gives a sense of personal purpose and satisfaction, and the sentimental value of care work is not to be discounted, but the woman who is an exclusive homemaker is almost never regarded as highly as her husband so long as his work is more complex than semi-skilled labor, and for good reason; feminism was inevitable once the middle class became modal.
Now, what separates my perspective from @TitaniumButterfly et al. is that I believe that this is no excuse for "angel of the house"-style social norms. While some degree of patriarchal norms may be necessary for reasons of hypergamy/biological limitations, I see the development/expression of such virtues as strength, competence, and reason in women as a near unambiguous good, and the exercise of these traits in the public sphere as necessary in modern societies. Not necessarily for reasons of "independence" qua independence, but because they make the woman who develops them a better wife, mother, and person.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There was a story not too long ago about Men's Sheds, an organization for men to get together to combat social isolation. These were not young incels. These were not redpillers. Many were married older men.
If any institution wouldn't need to be feminized in order to avoid sexism, you'd think it'd be this. And yet...
I think it's just zero sum thinking on the part of ideologues + an obvious realization among others that society makes it easier for people to force entry into someone else's organization rather than being forced to do their own thing. The Men in Sheds women were not really nefarious or trying to maintain their gender's power, they just wanted to spend time with their husbands. Once upon a time, it'd just be accepted that men can have a little corner to themselves. Now it's more dubious (since we know men and women aren't really that different), so some people push in.
I don't think that trans-identifying males barging into woman's spaces is because of a real sense that women would be otherwise sexist (though that sort of neuroticism can be encouraged as a pretext). Society has simply corrected for past sins by moving towards a suspicion of allowing groups to determine their own affairs if it cuts against certain protected characteristics. If Ibram Kendi is right about anything, it's that these legal norms then spread out to the rest of society.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’d phrase it as: society generally believes that men need to be prepared for marriage through conditioning, rewards and punishments, whereas in the case of women this is unneeded, because they are naturally a) monogamous b) inclined to become mothers. This isn’t incorrect as such, as women are indeed naturally monogamous, with the caveat that their promiscuity, to the extent that it is indulged, manifests as serial monogamy, which is something that has zero allure to promiscuous men. And the motherhood part obviously no longer necessarily asserts itself in a world of cheap and reliable contraception, abortion access, various distractions etc.
I’d phrase it as: poverty is a state you’re supposed to remedy as a man by raising yourself up, being an ambitious worker, earning more money, acquiring more skills etc. As a woman your remedy is supposed to be eliciting commitment and financial support from a rich man. Society in general is willing to cut women slack and provide support in such situations if they fail, under the assumption that it’s somehow all the fault of evil men or something, but has zero sympathy towards men who fail. Also, social adeptness is seen as a necessary virtue for men if they want to mate but not for women.
Women do have non-sex drive inclinations to motherhood- watch them interact with small cute things(children or animals) sometime. Our society gives girls enormous amounts of conditioning to try to break this, because it's terrified of having to eat the bill for unwed motherhood and is unwilling to oppose pre-marital sex. But remember those studies of girls who had to care for infant simulators and then went and got pregnant?
More options
Context Copy link
Calling this pattern of behavior "serial monogamy" is like calling someone who gets shitfaced every other day "serially sober".
I'm stricken every time by the level of effort levied to whitewash and excuse women's promiscuity. I still haven't stopped thinking about the time I was told that women's desire to lock down the double alpha is somehow an impulse that a meaningfully monogamous society could be built on. Cool, I guess all we need to do is figure out a way that Ultra K-Pop Superstar can somehow monogamously marry ten thousand horny fourteen year old girls.
Unfortunately this is what it looks like to midwit normies, I think. What they see is that the average single woman is never sexually interested in multiple men at the same time, and wants to hold onto just one. So they assume that women are naturally fit for marriage and men aren't. It also doesn't help that society's entire concept of romantic relationships is gynonormative.
What do you even mean by this?
It means there is an unstated social consensus that romantic relationships are to be assessed according to female norms by default.
If a guy and a girl are sort of seeing each other and the girl wants to make it ‘official’/serious but he doesn’t, he’s seen as a ‘commitment-phone’, Peter Pan, manchild, player, free rider etc. If this happens the other way around, she’s just weighing her options, not ready for anything serious, still seeking to find herself, finding her voice and place, still wants to have fun etc.
And if either party wants to end an ongoing relationship, we generally see the same pattern. If the guy leaves, he’s a jerk, asshole, uncaring etc. If he wants to remain, he’s a clinger, a creep, emotionally immature, it’s only that the woman feels trapped and wants to find herself again etc.
"Emotional intelligence" certainly seems to be a $4 doublespeak for "my way or the highway".
Closely related: how society "intellectualises" female gaze and sexual interest as more sophisticated than its more primal and unfiltered male counterpart, hence justifying policing of female sexualisation in media.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are a lot of ex-wives out there who would be surprised to hear that. I'd agree that male promiscuity leans toward trying to attract multiple mates in parallel rather than in serial, but cads who "trade in their wives for newer models" are a stereotype (and occasionally a hilarious stereotype) for a reason.
To what extent was this phenomenon a social reality, I wonder? Outside the imagination of Boomer feminist activists, that is?
Prominent examples of male infidelity + divorce + serial monogamy with younger partners currently include the President of the United States, around half of the six richest men in the world, the last male UK Prime Minister before this one, two of the last three governors of California ...
Though, looking into details, I'm not sure any of them became serial monogamists by choice, they're men who tried to pull off parallel polygyny in secret but got caught. I'd guess those men found serial monogamy more alluring than actual monogamy but tried to also pull off polygyny as long as they could first, but perhaps they just found polygyny so much more alluring that they were willing to risk it backfiring into serial monogamy if their spouse caught and didn't forgive them.
Do you mean Rishi Sunak? How does he count? Did Schwarzenegger or Jerry Brown leave their wives and then marry a younger and hotter woman? I don't get it.
Damn it, I'm one Prime Minister off. I meant Boris Johnson.
Shwarzenegger's affair partner was 6 years younger than his wife, though I wouldn't say hotter. After Gavin Newsom's divorce he dated a woman literally half his age, but the woman he married was only 7 years younger. I'm afraid I also misremembered a bit about Newsom: the "affair" he was part of might not have started until after he was divorced, in which case the only infidelity was that the woman was married to ... well, Wiki calls Alex Tourk "Newsom's close friend", but I feel like the rest of the sentence disproves that description.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So I think she's being inaccurate. I wanted to go with dishonest initially but that isn't the right word... she's not purposely being deceptive exactly, she's just trying to piece together a plausible sounding argument to get the outcome she wants and hasn't thought it through.
Feminists have been talking about the importance of female role models for women for over 40 years. Probably much longer. They also constantly throw in "as a woman" or "a woman's perspective". It isn't possible for her to have missed it. Particularly since her talk about patriarchy shows she's no stranger to gender discussions.
She just takes it for granted that women need female role models and men can't fill that void. However she isn't willing to accept that men want male role models and women can't fill that void.
Yeah, this. "Girls Need Role Models" thing has been beaten on the cliche drum for decades, and in the Girlboss era of screenwriting you'd have to be living under a rock to not notice it.
In my personal life, I've even noticed a reflexive poisoned-well disdain among women for anything empathetic towards men that feels downright-coordinated; Blade Runner 2047 is Misogynistic, Frankenstein is Incel. Basically anything with Ryan Gosling in it makes them uncomfortable, and I don't know what the vector for all this groupthink is. I just know that I can't get through a casual conversation about film with a woman without them shitting on something that spoke to me. Or praising something for being "so queer" when they themselves are obstensibly straight.
Idk if it's tragic or funny that /r/okaybuddyliterallyme was swearing up and down that they were just exiled depressed introverts but NOT incels, repeating the script "I'M the one to blame" verbatim. Admirable if genuine, but it's reddit so I default assume it's just performative accountability to retain a single crumb of ingroup social acceptance. But there is negligible difference in social/sexual success between self declared incels and whatever Ryan Gosling posters fashion themselves as.
This is why I endorse that Chinese dating discourse from the last thread, those gals were brutally honest!
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting. I've always encountered Frankenstein discussed in exactly the opposite way among feminists, because it was written by Mary Shelley and some feminist interpretations discuss it as an allegory in favor of women's unique role in creating life because trying to create life without them resulted in a Monster (which is, of course, rather a conservative interpretation in a lot of ways, but nevertheless a popular one).
More options
Context Copy link
Women(except for a few very type-A examples) tend to communicate in casual speech to express agreement, not to express opinions or observations(as men normally do). This doesn't necessarily mean anything other than 'I am very liberal'.
Well, someone is telling them that being "very liberal" requires shitting on stuff from a very specific list that someone put together.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Masculinity and femininity as general pro-social concepts are only really useful when there is a division of gender roles. Modern society has been mostly trending away from gender roles so I would agree that teaching masculinity or femininity is less relevant than ever. The major exception being, of course, dating and sexual attraction. Which makes this look like yet another example of a woman having a blind spot to what women are attracted to. My only disagreement with OP is that this applies equally to women and I think you're hitting the same blind spot. To the extent that men and women are attracted to different things women also need to learn how to be feminine in order to be attractive. Girl game is real, look at Bezo's new wife for example.
Why would masculinity and femininity be downstream of social roles rather than biological tendencies? Regardless of social expression, there needs to have a framework for disciplining the excess physical energy of rambunctious teen boys, and the excess social power of young-adult women.
More options
Context Copy link
Id argue that the masculinity and feminity, to the extent they are socially constructed are just attempts to understand and navigate the base biology of two sexes. There is more to that than just the "roles".
Hmm, im curious, whats your argument here?
Lol. Really? I’m sorry man, but have you been outside the last 30 years and seen their behavior? Evidently it isn’t something that comes naturally.
Idk, pointing at somewhat extreme outliers but there seems to be no male Amoranth (spelling?) or female West Elm Caleb, zoomer culture may be dysfunctional in many ways but it's not not gendered.
Somewhat OT but there seems to be lot more males in gen z with an older woman fetish at least online, in spite of the metaphorical "wall". I saw a Chinese woman talking about this, she links this to directness and better socialisation of older gals, which makes sense but I suspect there's more to it.
My guesses, in order of assigned probability, would be:
More options
Context Copy link
I wonder if it has to do with what seems likely to be fact that the average age at which males become acquainted with porn has been decreasing throughout recent generations, such that a far larger proportion of boys under 18 - and even under 13 - have consumed significant amounts of porn in 2026 than in 2006 or 1986. And due to current laws, this means that these boys have spent some of their most formative years admiring and feeling pleasure watching women who are older than them.
Also the fact that, throughout the generations, the length of time that someone looks like a young adult is increasing. Even if you go back just to the 90s - and certainly if you go back to the 60s - the proportion of people in their 30s who look like they could be 45 versus who look like they could be 25 seemed much higher.
You might be onto something there! Millennials are still seen as youngish people in the media, lots of millennial aged men and women in Hollywood who were childhood crushes for a lot of zoomers growing up are still seen as desirable. And big productions usually cast somewhat seasoned actors and actresses for main roles, which would put them in the 30+ age bracket. Which makes me think that male preference for strictly younger women is not quite as universal as women usually preferring older men.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This kind of reminds me of the romantic discourse about "careers" and "finding a fulfilling career," as though most people's jobs are so status enhancing. No, most people don't live there. Most girls aren't "born sexy," and even those with favorable genetics can totally make a mess of things if they just go with whatever seems fun and exciting in the moment. "Dr Ana" isn't right, but she's more right than this rubbish about how all women are valued for gestating fetuses, as though women with a bunch of kids and various baby daddies get so much status and respect for their femininity. Because poor, fat, socially inept women get so much respect. No! I hope @HereAndGone2 appears and says something suitably caustic.
Women are, to some extent, admired for different things than men, which can include doing a good job raising children, and can include their beauty, and some of those avenues have deteriorated lately, like the women who host the church socials, but that's a different conversation.
But, sure, just telling boys they should simply adopt female role models if there aren't any good men around isn't going to work, fair enough.
Most women have at least a few years of being naturally very attractive without putting much effort in; this often disappears very early due to the efforts required for weight control in modern society, sure, but it's not a false notion inherently.
Possibly so, and it's not like it's of no value at all to the girl herself, but it's kind of a mixed value. A girl can play up her sexuality for attention from men, which is exciting but also scary, and many very young women either don't like it, or do things they regret and feel upset about later. Or she can play up her femininity in a modest way, and get protection and help from men, which can be helpful, sure, but to get any kind of lasting social credit, she does also have to act well, for whatever her local social definition of that is.
Well yeah, I didn't say the manosphere was correct about where they're trying to go with this specific point. Merely that there's not nothing to it. The average 20 year old girl is very attractive, they are correct to notice this.
In general I am not a manospherian, but when arguing against them we shouldn't shred apart the true things(which don't mean what they say they do) along with the falsities.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m assuming you have mainly underclass women in mind when mentioning single mothers with a bunch of kids from various fathers (well, sires might be a more accurate description). I’d argue that yes, it’s actually true that the one activity that may accord underclass women social status and respect is them having and (supposedly) properly raising children as responsible mothers. But even if they prove to be irresponsible mothers, them remaining childless is still a worse alternative on average.
In other words, if an underclass or working-class woman decides to remain childless, no path that she chooses and no activity she engages in will get her as much social status in the eyes of her social circle as being a mother, even a single mother. Society generally has a different attitude towards higher-class women who delay or reject motherhood because we assume that they have good career options, disposable income, various potential fun hobbies they can afford, some sort of higher calling etc. I suggest this blog post from Steve Sailer from 2005 in which he quotes a social worker about this.
Clearly I described low status behavior, if you immediately assumed I meant underclass. Sure, it might still be less low status than some other ver low status behavior, like being a childless meat packing plant worker or something.
Which is work carried out intentionally and intelligently over a long period of time. Being a good mother absolutely can confer status on women, though much of that status comes into effect when the children are mostly grown, which is a pretty long deferral period even for most careers. So in the meantime women do a bunch of status signaling around not letting their kids look at screens and other such mommy wars things, which are only able to generate a small amount of status, at large inconvenience.
Personal anecdote: my status dropped a bit upon having children, because previously I had some amount of high openness adventurer and religious adherent status, whereas now I spend all my free time with my family, and I've basically dropped out of all my social organizations for the time being. My status at work went down slightly, especially it's low status to have to return quickly from maternity leave, which I had to do for financial reasons. This seems fairly common among women with young children, the gestating leads to isolation, but good mothering can raise status eventually, if it works out, but since it's dependent on other people, there's always a risk one of the kids will have serious mental health issues outside their parents' control, which will also sink status in a way that's difficult to recover from.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Meh, Ok perhaps this was poor framing on my part. Im gonna narrow it down a bit. Many girls arent born thin (there are many that are) or born with make up (though make up really just enhances whats already there naturally). But id still maintain that the option to leverage beauty exists more often, and the emphasis of beauty is clearly slanted towards women more. And the skills necessary to maintain it arent really as complex and difficult as the skills for climbing the social ladder.
Yes you can make yourself ugly with bad decisions, but the point here is that you'd have to make the decision to begin with - you'd still be starting with a baseline of attractiveness handed to many via the lottery of genetics, and then losing it due to your own decisions. Attractiveness is not as valued in men to start with (although it matters). To put this into perspective, women are rated as more attractive than men, id argue just because they are - well, women.
I'd bet money that if you asked people whether Chris Evans was more attractive than Scarlett Johansen, Scarlett would probably win. Even thought they are "close" in attractiveness.
The loss in status here has more to do with how reproduction was facilitated. Yeah, its low status, because its blatantly irresponsible behavior. Its the same reason boxers and UFC fighters would have high status on the male side of things, as opposed to a thug and a gangster starting fights, despite both actors utilizing masculine characteristics, such as strength and toughness: context matters!
I mean, yeah, i see your point, but again, the social effects here are disproportionate. We see men who are poor and socially inept judged more harshly and given less grace - homeless men are a good example: people will see a homeless men as a lazy and a bum, unworthy of compassion or help. This leads to many in our society giving less help towards, and women being given more (there being more womens shelters and the like). It likely contributes to men being more likely to be homeless in general.
Bear in mind here, im not saying women have it "easier". Just that the 2 experiences are unique.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link