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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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72% of men under 30 view women positively. 7% view them negatively.

I think this statistic elides some subtleties which women IRL realise but which are non-obvious prima facie. While I am no longer under 30, my opinions now remain as they previously were: in that I would answer a polling question “Do you have a positive opinion of women” with a yes, but this is almost exclusively because I have a positive opinion of titties. “Do you have a positive opinion of women” is synonymous with “Are you heterosexual”; a yes answer comes not because I have a positive opinion of respecting a woman, or treating her and her opinions and professional goals with anything like the consideration I would do for a male peer (affirmative action is a great way to weight my priors that she’s not as competent as a man in the same job, that’s just an inevitability).

So I put it to you that possibly this dynamic is at play, and women are right to infer that mens’ positive opinion of them is positive in a way that they don’t want (or at least they’d like to check height and jawline before they decide whether they want). Under such conditions, it makes some sense that they would not reciprocate the demographic’s affections; and their opinions are based on an understanding of men which is MORE accurate, not less accurate, than that captured by the survey’s relative ratios.

This seems like an overly complicated rationalization.

Whatever the basis for it, if men are claiming a positive view of women by and large, this runs against any strict definition of 'misogyny.' As I alluded to, viewing women as more likeable and having more positive emotions towards them is common enough that it has a specific term in psychology that doesn't mince words: the "women are wonderful" effect.

And on top of that, there are precisely ZERO ways in which Western society has become more patriarchal over the last 50 years. Many ways it has advanced women's interests.

So how exactly have women correctly assessed mens' true feelings and intent, when the actual consistent trend over decades is men standing by and even actively supporting the social ascension of females across the board. This needs an even more elaborate explanation for why men, in spite of hating women, have used their social authority to give them every thing they've requested and have not backtracked on it once.

Their belief is arising from somewhere, and you're basically saying that they're Making it up in their heads based on attempted mindreading.

Meanwhile we can see many womens' negative feelings towards men demonstrated constantly in their easily observed behavior.

Its literally backwards logic:

"Men, despite their actual statements and their observed behavior, are secretly all hateful towards women and actually dislike them very much. No I have no direct evidence of this but we can reach this conclusion by reasoning from certain premises... which I also have no evidence for."


And of course, if men really were these dangerous, secretly malevolent actors who were obscuring their true beliefs, how in the hell do you feel comfortable constantly antagonizing this group.

"Men, despite their actual statements and their observed behavior, are secretly all hateful towards women and actually dislike them very much. No I have no direct evidence of this but we can reach this conclusion by reasoning from certain premises... which I also have no evidence for."

I always feel like I'm living through Groundhog Day whenever I participate in one of these gender discussions, and it is always pretty incredible to me how much of the discussion always proceeds solely on vibes (seen often whenever people discuss the supposedly widespread nature of Male Bad Behaviour here, with this omnipresent "Everyone knows" attitude that really shouldn't be so common in a forum like this one).

This seems like an overly complicated rationalization. Whatever the basis for it, if men are claiming a positive view of women by and large, this runs against any strict definition of 'misogyny.' As I alluded to, viewing women as more likeable and having more positive emotions towards them is common enough that it has a specific term in psychology that doesn't mince words: the "women are wonderful" effect.

It's not just overly complicated, it's actively contradicted by much of the existing literature. The argument is especially lacking if you're in any way acquainted with the actual methodologies of these studies, considering that many of the Women are Wonderful studies do not simply ask people about their positive or negative opinions about the opposite sex absent any further investigation. The basis for a lot of these studies is to get respondents to indicate their beliefs about the traits typically held by a certain social group, and then to evaluate these traits on a good-bad ranking system. The very first Women are Wonderful study going all the way back to 1991 explicitly studied the evaluative content of people's beliefs about men and women in this way, and no evidence of negativity towards women was found from both male and female respondents, in fact they found preference. Then there's also the fact that more contemporary research shows that perceptions of competence and intelligence (and also communalism) now favour women, and male respondents assigned traits like competence more to women than they did to men (the only gender difference that favours men is perceptions of agency, possibly a byproduct of the constant promotion of female victimhood and helplessness). The new study is just another drop in the ever-growing body of evidence that points in a female-favouring direction.

It is very common to find that perceptions of women among both sexes are more positive than perceptions of men. The issue is that women's activism constantly needs a new problem to justify its continued existence, and without any proper empirical basis for misogyny they have to signal-boost disparate wrongthinking corners of the internet that haven't yet been aligned with their ideological project and, hilariously enough, bring them more into public view. It's a memeplex whose survival is dependent on creating problems that it then "solves", and it has resulted in women having a very prejudiced view of how hostile men and the world at large are to them, with a seriously adversarial view of gender relations. And yet we are supposed to believe men are the ones who are The Problem in spite of everything. I'd echo Strider's sentiments further downthread; I become more and more radicalised on the topic of sex issues as time goes on, and feminism is the cause of this, not "Andrew Tate".

Making it up in their heads based on attempted mindreading

Yeah, because women would never try to do that, especially when men are concerned.


Men, despite their actual statements and their observed behavior, are secretly all hateful towards women and actually dislike them very much.

Well, we could turn that around and say

Women, despite their actual statements and their observed behavior, are secretly all loving towards men and actually like them very much.

which I think is closer to the truth of the matter but it's inconvenient for both parties. That whole "seriously but not literally" thing comes to mind... but then the [comparatively rarer] women who don't work like that achieve power -> an audience because they don't work like that, then start telling the more traditional women that not being treated [as a fellow man would be] is bad, who then believe it and enter a state of confusion where they don't actually want to be treated that way but insist on it anyway because femininity is, like, weakness or whatever.

(Of course, because that's been the room temperature for the last 100 years, most of the literature about this is just, like, really bad, and as we can see from what passed for psychology in the late 1800s [and earlier] we were just as stupid then as we are now so it's not like you can even go back to the past for answers.)


Meanwhile we can see many womens' negative feelings towards men demonstrated constantly in their easily observed behavior.

You know, it's almost like that negging thing is fundamentally uncomfortable to women [the kind it doesn't work on] more because they know it's the thing their gender does to men. A trans-gender behavior where the man's adopting what the woman sees as a female behavior.

We can't talk to each other honestly because some of us don't even work like that and especially post-feminism it's all case-by-case for people who aren't used to that. The pronoun discourse is perhaps instructive about this matter.

You know, it's almost like that negging thing is fundamentally uncomfortable to women [the kind it doesn't work on] more because they know it's the thing their gender does to men.

It is rather interesting how men acting like women in relationships is considered abusive isn't it?

I guess trans acceptance only goes so far.

And of course, if men really were these dangerous, secretly malevolent actors who were obscuring their true beliefs, **how in the hell do you feel comfortable constantly antagonizing this group.

The same way Jews are both running the world and are about to be wiped out any second if only USA stops helping.

and are about to be wiped out any second if only USA stops helping.

The only people saying this are Jewish, or sympathetic to them. Otherwise, the suggestion to stop helping them would be met with a shrug, not all the drama we see in reaponse to it.

Jews are permitted far more leeway to organize specifically around advancing their own interests than males are, incidentally.