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.

About 60% of female sexual partnerships are with the 10% most promiscuous men.

As ever, I am going to request the original source. You link to a tweet, which sticks in a graphic of a pie chart and says "In US data over the past decade, a tenth of men accounted for 60% of female sexual partnerships."

I can't see the chart very well, but it seems to be 95th-99th percentile of men with 58% of sexual partnerships, so whatever that is in the "percentile bin" measure they seem to be using? Which seems to be "guys self-reporting how many women they've had" and that's not the same as "most promiscuous" (and not even "hottest guy", you would be surprised at the guys who apparently have no problem getting a trail of girlfriends).

The data is "mean number of female sexual partners since age 18 by male percentile bin" and the 99th percentile bin are claiming a mean number of 287. I don't know how much I trust that number, but also we don't have ages to go with it. Is this a 60 year old guy saying that over 40 years of being sexually active, he has had 287 partners ranging from one-night stands to long-term relationships?

The tenor of the original post seems to be "a few guys RIGHT NOW are banging all the women" and I don't think that's necessarily so. I agree that sex, romance, children and marriage is a mess right now, but we put ourselves right there because this is what we wanted. We wanted freedom, we wanted to throw off the restraints of the past, we wanted to have sex without needing to get married for it (men) and we wanted sex without childbirth being the consequence (women, but men also) and we wanted casual sex to not be stigmatised any more but taken as a normal, natural need and indeed a human right (hence the complaining about not being able to get girlfriend/boyfriend) and we wanted living in sin to be renamed as cohabiting and accepted as "it's just sensible and reasonable to test out if you're both ready to commit to marriage first".

Thank you, I am going to have to dig into this more later, but I was immediately suspicious as well.

This topic is just too perfect for everyone to project their pet issue onto it as the "dominant factor" and everyone gets so deep into motivated reasoning to get there. And its so complex no one can prove anything more than handwave vibes and because it's so complex, no one can be totally "wrong" while still failing to explain the issue in a useful way.

Personally, I think it's all because housing

"a few guys RIGHT NOW are banging all the women"

Well, the data is in the actual study.

And the data they are using is drawn from the last 10 years (as I emphasized).

And I think the last 10 years is when the gender war trends became most pronounced.

The similar trend is that More young men are reporting having less sex. Young women are having about the same amount, although there is decline.

Women also report more sex partners prior to marriage then in decades past.

Who are the young women having sex with.

I don't think you can finagle out of this one.

Women having more sex partners.

More men reporting less sex on average.

Women's self-reported standards for partners being raised.

Solve for X.

Perhaps there is an increasing number of celibate women... but this doesn't help with the actual problem in the slightest.