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 -
Since nobody seems to be bringing it up, I will:
"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"
It really is Poetry.
Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology. I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.
I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.
It seems that the aesthetics someone chooses to project and their aesthetic sense (taste? values?) are better predictors of what they will do and who they really are than anything else. It seems that half of my political values boil down to aesthetics in any case: I find trump-hegseth-vance-desantis et al to be disgusting and contemptible; I have more respect for Rubio, but the last Republican I could really get down with was Mccain, purely off of his aesthetics, even if choosing someone as gauche as Palin disqualified him from my vote (Romney was too morman for me to handle, I'm sad to say).
Likewise with the D's: Their candidates have been universally superior to the republicans these past 8 years because they would rather be eaten by wild dogs than put "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" up in lights and then line up behind it, but I have the most good vibes off of Bernie, Buttegieg, and Mamdani; also probably for purely aesthetic reasons.
I think this might actually be rational: just by observing the aesthetics an individual chooses to portray, you can make a judgment vis. how they intend to act in a way that is much harder to fake than "Saying shit". Kamala was a social climber totally absent of virtue, and campaigned like it. Bernie is a crusty old marcher, and acts like it. Buttigieg is a bloodless technocrat, and looks like it. Trump is a neuvo rich venal tasteless rich guy, and governes like it.
All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace. Maybe Duublya had a stutter, you can get an aphorism wrong and it's fine. It's ok. That being the case, if any politician in the future sits down and types out something as fucking sauceless and cringe and gross as "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" and thinks "This is great, fucking SEND IT"; they should probably go back to screaming at the cocain ghosts in an alleyway stop blighting our eyes with their garbage.
The guy who chanted "Bomb Iran" to the tune of "Barbara Ann"?
And allegedly purchased a child via surrogacy. Probably not the kind of aesthetics I'd support, but I suppose that's the problem with trying to judge someone by aesthetics. I don't care for Trump's, but I'd be hard pressed to name a politician from either party who has aesthetics that make me think I should support them.
In the absence of artificial uteruses, how is a gay male couple supposed to have a biological kid for one of the fathers except throug surrogacy? I don't see what the aesthetic opposition could be here unless it is to such a degree that gay males are not able to "aesthetically" have biological children at all.
I found the photo uncomfortable to view, it was much too like "new mom in hospital bed after birthing the baby" when it's two guys and someone else's babies, that someone else being written out of the fairytale completely:
"Their" newborns? Yes, well. The children are adopted and - is the term mixed-race or multiracial? They're black, anyway. Which is another entire kettle of fish with some controversy around transracial adoptions.
More options
Context Copy link
Tearing away a child from it's mother's arms is not aesthetically displeasing to you?
They can do it the same way everyone else does.
Since the mother has signed up to be paid for surrogacy, I am not particularly inclined to view the child as being torn away from the mother's possession. Possibly, I am not open enough to the infant's perspective that it is being torn away from its mother, but divorce, mothers dying, infant adoption, etc., seem to me like they are common enough that this is not a huge problem. I am open to the idea that allowing surrogacy should be completely illegal on the grounds that it is too much like selling organs, but a) this would also ban surrogacy for high-risk mothers and b) is better than organ sales in that faking the supply chain is totally impossible. If surrogacy exists at all, it seems like it has to be an option for gay males.
This... gets complicated.
The standard process, right now, is that the surrogate gives birth, the baby and mother are immediately separated, and the surrogate spends the next 24-72 hours recovering in a separate room. Sometimes surrogates are willing to work with the fathers for some time afterward, but for commercial surrogates that's usually a (possibly virtual) meetup a couple times a year at best, and among compassionate surrogates the optimistic case is more often 'stranger who did daddies a favor' than getting six weeks with the kid and two dads to help during recovery before becoming an aunt.
((And then there's the coercive power of large amounts of money, the often-invasive genetic screening, the difficult hormonal supplements and common-place use of a separate donor egg.))
It's at least imaginable that there could be better processes. If I were writing things a utopia, a world where surrogacy and donors are appreciated and common, where they can become pillars of the community as connection points across varied families, and where they're seeing their kids on a monthly or weekly basis during childhood, would all be nice. You don't have to be Ursula Le Guin or a pregnancy fetishist prefer the aesthetics of it. Very rarely, it does happen.
But it's not clear that it could scale. It's not a coup-positive solution, it's a 'rebuild human psychology' solution.
The insistence that the surrogate have little contact with the child after birth is sometimes about greedy parents wanting to maximize bonding, but it's also a clear defense mechanism that surrogates very much want. (This can go to extremes that are a little surprising to me; many surrogates apparently won't pump milk even for significant compensation, and it's pretty common for gay parents to want more contact between the kid and the mother.) Compassionate surrogates often find themselves having to make hard decisions when their career, or a father's career, moves five hundred miles away. People just change, and in a world where 50% of marriages end in divorce, it's hard to complain that surrogates and fathers don't want face legal issues nearly as complicated as a divorce just because they were too close to the mom.
It's not a fun problem!
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, there's that, but also, it's rather naive to think that it's all fine because the mother signed on the dotted line, before a major transformative experience. And that's without looking into the gory details, like how a lot of them do it out of desperation, how the contracts penalize them for backing out, etc.
All of these things are massive tragedies, and we don't go out of our way to deliberately create them. Divorce, given it's scale, is a huge problem.
Correct. Surrogacy should not exist at all, it is a moral horror. I don't understand how the thought that this is about gay men, enters into people's heads.
Although it is not my own, I find the position of no surrogacy for anyone perfectly coherent. Normally, I would just upvote and move on, but I find myself wondering how you feel about wet nurses. Breastfeeding is a fairly intimate bonding experience, so a wet nurse arguably also has a strong claim to motherhood, or at least it seems aesthetically displeasing on the same grounds as surrogacy.
Depends on the reasons for it. Sometimes a mother can't produce milk, so if it's either wet nursing or the baby starves, it seems fine. If it's because of some aristocratic lady's notions that breastfeeding is beneath her, someone should slap her around and tell her that maybe motherhood is beneath her (though the issue with that is she'd have your hands chopped off for it).
Yeah, sounds about right, though it feels less severe to me, as it doesn't involve literally selling a child. From the child's perspective, it's pretty messed up, though.
I think of surrogacy as probably involving the implantation of a fertilized egg that does not originate with the surrogate. This way, a mother without a functional womb would still get to pass on her genetic material, and it would also make it so that surrogate-purchasers would not be forced to use the surrogate's genetics, which is potentially very desirable for both sides of the transaction. The financial transaction here is selling the use of the womb, which seems sufficiently icky for someone to reasonably find it unacceptably unaesthetic, but it does not really seem like selling a child unless the birthmother's egg is being used.
Maybe a way to think about this is to ask if an eggless woman somehow steals a couple's last and only viable fertilized egg from a fertility clinic and implants herself, to whom should the child belong once birthed? My view is that the child clearly belongs to the woman who provided the egg.
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
Gay men impregnating women is unironically very lindy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Surely it hasn't been that long since "kids need a mother and a father" was a mainstream, common-sense point of view on the right?
Obviously the conservative position is that gay couples, whether male or female, cannot have children. It is physically impossible for such a couple to have biological children, obviously. One partner might be the biological parent, but there must necessarily be a mother or father who is being excluded somewhere, and this exclusion is firstly an injustice, and secondly itself a mere pretense, an attempt to ignore the biological fact of parentage while fantasising a similar role for the same-sex partner. And sociologically, sure, the same-sex couple can adopt a child, but it is normatively bad for a child to be raised by a same-sex couple. Children need both their parents, and if for some reason that is not possible (there are divorces, separations, maybe a biological parent dies, etc.), they still need parental figures of both sexes.
It's barely been a decade since Obergefell. Has everyone forgotten the gay marriage debate so quickly? Gay adoption? It is very common for conservatives to just bite the bullet here and say, "Gay couples can't have a biological child, and shouldn't parent children at all. That's the whole point."
I mean, you'll find people forgetting that Western society literally went full Nazi 6 years ago and destroyed ~20% of planetary wealth (mostly through inflation) in an ill-fated attempt to cure a particularly nasty variant of the common cold.
So not only is 20 years ago ancient history, but the loudest contingent opposing it has shrunk by half due to a dynamic best described by actuarial tables. People who were 60 and driving the opposition to gayness in 2008 are 78 now, so half of them are dead and the other half have been brainrotted by social media, usually into TDS (these are the kinds of people you see at No Kings protests).
Yeah, that's not what the people who came of age during the '70s (and so are 65-70 right now) think (remember, divorce was [simplification] legalized at that time), which is why it's not a big deal for them to have family units with 2 'parents' of the same sex. Which is why once the last generation grew too old to combat it, that "need" was done away with.
Conservatives have conserved nothing.
And progressives haven't progressed anything, what's your point? :P
More seriously, I think it depends on the time-scale you look at and who you think counts as a 'conservative', and I'm also inclined to think that it's unfair to judge a movement for not necessarily succeeding overall. Movements tend to name themselves for their goals - we understand that it's not really that fair to criticise American libertarians or communists for not having restored liberty or brought communism, because those are small parties. How small is 'conservatism' as a movement? Over the last decade or so there's been plenty of writing trying to distinguish 'conservatives' from 'the right', with the understanding that actual conservatives might be a significantly smaller tribe than was realised.
Anyway, if I look at the last two hundred years so, I think that conservatives, in a broad sense, have achieved plenty of things. Not everything they wanted, certainly, but I wouldn't say their efforts were wasted. Eugenics and communism stand out as probably the two biggest issues that conservatives were on the winning side of.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This would be a salient argument if the only children not raised by their biological parents were either orphans or adopted by gay people.
But reality is different. Gay marriage did not destroy marriage, instead marriage was destroyed long before that. People marry, have kids, then divorce. Or just get pregnant outside of committed relationships. Parents have their kids taken away because they are terrible parents.
Now, you could institute a regime where these cases were avoided. Perhaps you make abortion mandatory for any pregnancy where the parents are unable to prove that they will stay together with a probability higher than 0.95. Or you just extract gametes from everyone after puberty and then sterilize them, and rely on IVF for couples after they convince an expert panel that they will make great parents. Or you just make people require such an expert panel for marriage and make PIV sex outside marriage illegal.
So far, I have not seen any conservatives arguing for any of that. Your 'injustice' lives in every single parent family, and your 'pretense' in any patchwork family. In fact, the pro-lifers are actively creating more of that -- nobody believes that a crack addicted prostitute who got pregnant will become clean and form a happy fairy tale family with her former client just because you force here to have the child.
The imperfect is not the opposite of the good. It’s the imperfect of good. You do not choose evil (which children like Buttigieg is evil) because the world is imperfect.
And it’s the same thing with gay marriage. Because you can find bad marriages does not mean you just get rid of marriage which gay marriage essentially did. You work to improve marriage.
I feel like your arguments boil down to some people starve therefore all people should starve.
More options
Context Copy link
For what it's worth, I was describing a position, not advocating one myself.
Personally I agree entirely with the conclusion that marriage was destroyed or degraded long before this particular issue emerged. I am not therefore sympathetic to same-sex marriage, though I note in that linked post that it's probably 'good policy', but I do think that the argument about SSM specifically is missing the deeper point.
From the comments of "The Argument from Cultural Evolution":
And from "Beware Systemic Change":
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They're not. That's what they sacrifice as gay men. It's a helluva dilemma to be put on the horns of, but that's the hand they've been dealt.
More options
Context Copy link
Gay couples having kids really is a bad thing. It’s obvious girls are just different. I see it every time my gf does little baby talk with her cat. Men just don’t have that silliness where they can actually have fun doing dumb kid stuff for hours every day. Mothers are different.
We actually did have a technology that let gay guys have kids. They just picked a wife and had sex. Then occasionally went out with the boys and did gay stuff. It worked fine for gay guys who wanted kids.
Instead modern society places sexual identity at the top of a hierarchy of needs. But not having a mother (by design) seems far worse to me than having to hide some sexual attraction.
You need to broaden your horizons.
Neither I nor Mrs. FiveHour have the baby talk skill. This is concerning for our offspring, but we'll figure it out.
Human experience is broader than you and your girlfriend.
That’s one example. Every girl in my family I can think of has that skill set. For the vast majority it’s instinctual. And for most men it’s not instinctual. My mom had the skill set. My father did not. My sisters have the skill set. My aunts have the skill set. I don’t know your gf or if you have kids but I would still with a great probability assume if you put her child in her hands the instincts come out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What kind of heartless man wouldn’t want to spend as much time as possible doing “dumb kid stuff” with their own child? Or calls it “dumb kid stuff” in the first place?
I make no commendation of it, but it is very common to find paradigms of masculinity which hold that a man must be tough and serious at all times. Dealing with children is for women.
More options
Context Copy link
Having just spent the Easter weekend with my brother’s small kids, there was a lot of kid stuff but remarkably little of it was anything I’d call ”dumb”. Occasional silly (and TBH fun) stuff as you’d expect but mostly helping them get toys / puzzles, dressing for outdoors, pushing them in the swing and making sure they didn’t run into the water without rubber boots on.
5/5, will do again.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Jfc your life must be boring.
What value does this comment have? What's it's point other than to be randomly nasty, unprovoked? Don't do this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I broadly agree that men and women have different psychology around kids and nurturing, but has there been much research into ways gay men are psychologically more similar to women?
Like, aside from the obvious thing of being attracted to men, it seems like gay culture in several different times and places tends to adopt a lot of the trappings of the female gender role. Is this just because it is a slightly better way to seduce "straight guys", or does it reflect actual biological differences in gay men? Do gay men tend to have more thing-orientation, or person-orientation?
Is it possibly the case that gay men are better nurturers, on average, than straight men? (Though, if this turned out to be true, it would just shift to the idea that two lesbians raising kids would probably be a bad idea. Unless it is an averaging effect of some sort with other biological factors balancing out, then maybe the best nurturing parents might be: straight woman > lesbian woman ~= gay man > straight man.)
I guess there are tops and bottoms. Of my gay friends I would assume two are tops and the third not sure on. The tops definitely act more masculine and why I find it easier to be friends.
Bottoms probably are a little bit more of a nurturer personality but I would still doubt they come close to the average female nurturing personality trait.
I would be curious what % of gay men would find my comment offensive. It’s sort of taking away a right many think they should have today. But they also don’t find females attractive and I am confirming that men and women are different. And confirming their masculinity. You can be my bro and drink beers together but obviously because we are men neither of us should design a life to be primary care givers to a child.
From the gay (and bi) men I know there’s not really a strict separation between tops and bottoms, most are vers and many will change their preferences over time, and I’ve rarely met stereotypically feminine gay men the way I’ve met stereotypically masculine lesbians.
Maybe it’s because most of the fems end up as trans women these days, so the gay male population ends up consisting of guys who are at least mildly comfortable with their masculinity (even if it’s limited to working out and growing a beard).
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