site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Virality is probably not correlated with pro-sociality.

So far as people like this are concerned, they're just overoptimizing for one aspect of social status and mining the cognitive dissonance for clicks. And what's the goal? In much the same way that bodybuilding quickly loses any connection to actual sex appeal, this "lookmaxxing" or whatever is another proxy being reified.

Young men will always be looking for ways to hack the social milieu in some way that gives them sexual access to young women. Most of them will be looking for One Simple Trick to avoid having to work too hard at it. Drugs, surgery, PUA classes, whatever. The con artists who sell them these fantasies may have a kernel of truth in their spiel, but only that.

Here's the reality: Becoming an expert at seduction, whatever we're currently calling that, is something many men are capable of but far fewer are willing to put in the work to achieve. Most men are best off building a decent life for themselves and trying to find a monogamous wife/girlfriend, not dating as a method of getting laid.

The fantasy is that you can do something easy to change that. Sexual access is competitive.

In my experience, finding an interesting single woman to marry is about two orders of magnitude harder than becoming an expert in seduction.

Getting laid is not easy, but at least doable. Finding someone I wouldn't mind inviting to my lair is... well... unsuccessful.

The whole secret of fishing is where and when.

If there are no suitable mates where you are fishing, try a different hole.

Also, perhaps think long and hard about what you mean by "interesting".

Long ago, I thought interesting women were women who were interested in the same things I was interested in. Which meant all the interesting girls were lesbians.

What do you mean now by interesting?

Able to raise my children in a way I would approve of.

Now I think "interesting women" are a sorta-gay straight-male fantasy. Like a bro, except hot and and female and you have sex!

If you must have an interesting woman in this definition, you better get interested in chick stuff, or start hitting on Camille Paglia. The venn diagram of attractive single women with a 40k obsession and a geographical proximity to a given nerd approaches a geometrical line.

The ways in which women are interesting has little to do with their hobby interests.

I always wonder how men manage to get an erection on a woman who is (metaphorically speaking) "not obsessed with 40k".

Like, I never managed. Boredom as in an inability to find a common discussion topic works better than bromine for switching off libido.

My experience as someone with excessively geeky and male interests is that I needed to build a whole different skill set of talking to girls/normies about topics that weren't my "interests". I had to learn to be interested in more things.

A decent girl with a couple very general shared interests is a reasonable aspiration. A manic pixie dream girl who is into model trains AND confederate reenactment AND the Persona franchise probably isn't. Not to be snide, just trying to make a silly point.

The competition for women who are into male-dominated interests is intense, and you can tell from the physical mismatch of couples how much some men are willing to sacrifice for that shared interest.

I don't know what you're into, but when you go to events for it, are the men notably more or less attractive than their female partners? How many of the men have female partners? How many unattached women are there? Where are you in the social hierarchy of that interest? And can you do the math for what that means for your chances of snagging someone from that particular pool of potential partners?

I can do the math all right :D.

At the events which match my interests precisely, the ratio of women to men is about 1 to 100.

But I'm aware of this "math". When I said that "getting laid is not easy, but doable", I mean that I also go to events where female to male ratio is much closer to 0.5, and sometimes manage to pair with a female. The problem is that I can't really have sex with her without a heavy dose of Viagra, and I don't want to subscribe myself to a pill every day for the next 30 years. It's devastating for the brain, sleeping with someone you don't really desire.

are the men notably more or less attractive than their female partners

This is such a hard question... I don't really find looks attractive, so it's hard to tell. If a person is not obese and doesn't smell like a fish or a goat, he/she's okay.