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 -
I keep engaging with the gender wars/fertility crisis topic even though its slowly driving me mad. But its too important to ignore.
Actual title of a paper published today in the Cambridge Press, by a Norwegian research team:
Toward individualistic reproduction: Solving the fertility crisis could require a further marginalization of men
Not paraphrased or exaggerated. Apparently published by a team of two males and a female. I don't even mean to attack the authors, the paper doesn't seem to be 'slanted' in its presentation... and this implied solution just appears to be the sort of blunt facial honesty that Norwegians are known for. I'm not attacking this paper.
We had the discussion just yesterday where a German Police Chief (himself male) says women should avoid relationships with men for their safety. My commentary is on the larger cultural trend.
Now, the paper itself draws some specific conclusions using data from the last ten years. (i.e. when the gender wars really accelerated) From a twitter thread:
Women's freedom is strongly correlated with declining fertility.
About 60% of female sexual partnerships are with the 10% most promiscuous men. I have to interpret "most promiscuous" as "most attractive," because very, very few men are able to be promiscuous without being hot. Likewise, this looks VERY suggestive of a broader 80/20 rule in place.
Women can't all form relationships with this top 10%... so more women are single... so they are less likely to have kids.
Ultimately they suggest that solving the TFR crisis means getting single women to have more kids. Hence the 'marginalization' of men.
This paper so readily confirms almost everything I've talked about in here I'm worried its designed precisely to trigger confirmation bias in me, specifically. Read it and decide for yourself, I guess.
As I've said, going off of the last 10-20 years of data:
Women probably only view about 20% of men as 'people' worthy of attention.
Women who got to college and enter careers tend to have the highest standards... regardless of their own suitability as a mate.
Lotharios exploiting the current gender dynamics for low-commitment sex are a problem.
Of course I note that every single bit of this is explained by shifts in female behavior, which is to say there's not much shift in men's behavior, so the overt focus on men's alleged failures seems... odd.
I do not find it pleasant to believe all these statistics and their implied conclusions, but no matter how much I ask for challenges, every bit of data just adds on to the pile of confirmation.
I'll throw out hope spot because there is a small bit of data that contradicts the overall narrative... South Korea is actually seeing a bump towards increased fertility!. I am watching this very keenly to determine if there is much hope of pulling out of the spiral.
I've genuinely got very little new to say on this topic. Its beaten to death. Its a bloody pulp, we're standing ankle-deep in the putrid mix of entrails of this topic as the waterline slowly rises every day. I've very interested in workable solutions, though.
I am a very reasonable person. I do not get angry at mere insults easily. Call me whatever you want to my face, your words have no power. But what sets me off is when someone pisses on my leg and tells me its raining, when I can look up and see there's not a cloud in the sky. "Men are horrible, and it is socially good and necessary to marginalize them." The insinuation against my person doesn't bug me. Its the blatant lie contradicted by all available information. It is simply false (especially in the West). It is epistemic malpractice. And it seems intentional and malicious, on some level.
Every. single. day. I am faced with a loud cultural message that (unattractive) men are expendable, mostly unwanted, dangerous, useless, and generally deserve to be lonely, poor, and depressed. And, as a kicker, that 80% or so of men are unattractive to women, so its the majority of them who are marked for evolutionary failure.
Today its this paper.
Yesterday its Mr. German Policeman.
The week before it was that Manosphere documentary.
Last year it was that British Miniseries.
It is a neverending cascade. And of course there's zilch, zero, nada content produced in the mainstream that examines if female behavior is becoming more toxic and suggesting intervention.
Me, I have the mental fortitude to put all this in context and ignore it as an influence on my individual behavior. I have my internal locus of control and the self-confidence to believe I will succeed anyway.
Yet there's millions of young males who are vulnerable to this message, and it is killing them, metaphorically and often literally, and nobody with any authority is doing anything about it or even talking about it without also piling on with the exact same rhetoric.
I simply don't see how one can claim that there's any true 'Patriarchy' in the Western World when government officials, scientific papers, nationally broadcast documentaries, and general everyday people can happily proclaim that men ought to be marginalized for everyone's good if they can't accept a lot in life that amounts to being a second class citizen in their own country... while women are elevated to the level of landed aristocracy on their backs.
Meanwhile the main voices speaking on the other side are inherently outsiders like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I don't even think we have a matriarchy to be clear, it really does just seem like society is organized around the "women are wonderful effect" and the average person is psychologically incapable of deviating from this programming.
Where does this end?
I was intrigued, so I clicked through. This statistic appears to be derived from randomly-chosen men's self-reports of the number of their sexual partners on the GSS. It also appears that the sexual-behavior portions of this survey are entirely self-administered.
So I guess if you believe guys are always scrupulously honest about their sex histories, and there's no way that 10% of men, filling out a survey in the privacy of their own home, would ever vastly over-report their number of partners for the lulz?
Oh so we'd expect most surveys on the topic to be an over-report on the men's side.
Okay.
Interesting that young men are claiming fewer sex partners and less sex, recently.
What changed? Why'd they suddenly stop overreporting?
By your logic, the sex recession among men is EVEN WORSE THAN IT SEEMS from this data.
(women remain more steady on this, btw)
I have yet to see a SINGLE data point that goes against the "lots of women are actually hooking up with relatively small portion of men" talking point. And the dating apps seem to have exacerbated it.
China saw it as such a huge problem so they've taken drastic action.
Yeah I've discussed this before too.
Oh, I'm not disputing that everybody's having less sex lately. Everyone's very lazy and anxious, young people seem pretty undersocialized, AI will feed your delusions, videogames are more entertaining and porn's more extreme than ever, and dating-app interactions seem custom-designed to drive everybody into celibacy.
I'm mostly disputing the Chads-and-sluts narrative, because every time I look into cited evidence for this it seems to be built around long screeds and BS evopsych rationalizations, propped up by just the flimsiest social science imaginable.
Yes, and you've got an actual piece of research saying that 10% of the promiscuous men are accounting for 60% of the sexual encounters women have.
You've also got the data that shows fewer young men are having, young women are reporting about the same amount.
And the additional factor of women having more sex partners on average than years past.
So whomst are the young women having sex with.
Then of course you can watch a Clavicular stream and see that exact dynamic play out in real time.
I dunno what type of evidence you would find convincing, but it is likely available.
The reason people keep questioning your numbers is that the math doesn't math. At least not without some creative explanation of what "the sexual encounters women have" means.
So let's say we've got a group of 100 sexually active men and 100 sexually active women and assume we have normalized all other factors (they are all in the same age range, social class, all straight, etc.) so we have a hypothetical dating pool of 200 people.
According to your interpretation of the research, 10 of those men are fucking 60 of the women. Or they are fucking almost all the women, who are also giving sloppy seconds to some of the other 90 men. And the other 40 women are, what, being shared by the 90 lesser men? Do you see how this doesn't add up? Do you really think the 10% most attractive/desirable men routinely have harems? Sure, a young guy with options probably sleeps around, and so do women with options, but... most people neither want to be part of a harem nor necessarily be permanently spinning plates.
The research shows the most desirable men sleep around a lot more than the less desirable men, which is hardly a new phenomenon. And it shows women, given options, are pickier than when they didn't have options. It does not show that the most desirable men are hoarding all the women.
Likewise your figure that "80% of men are unacceptable to women" does not fit real-world observations. Are 80% of adult men today incels? Really? Are 80% of young men not dating or having sex at all?
If you give a woman a lineup of 100 male profiles, and she only checks 20 of them as attractive enough to date, it does not follow that the other 80 men will never find a woman.
You point to real problems but you abuse statistics to make an exaggerated point.
I think ironically you also ignore a factor that would also explain a lot of male datelessness: a lot of women are just... not desirable nowadays. Obesity is a big part of it. Outside of danker corners of the Internet, there isn't a lot of straightforward discussion about the fact that a lot of women are fat nowadays and most men don't want fat women. Then add the shrill brand of feminism that even among straight girls (whether or not they call themselves "bi") sneers at the idea of pleasing men in any way, and it's not surprising that the dating landscape has narrowed for men. And in ways they find socially unacceptable to state out loud.
"I'd rather jerk it to AI porn than settle for a septum-pierced landwhale who hates me" is also a problem, but it's not actually a problem of female pickiness!
Not quite.
There's some subset of women who aren't having sexual encounters at all.
Of the women having sexual encounters, this implies that about 60% of those encounters are with a particular subset of men.
And then we ALSO have data that women are on average having more sexual encounters than ever.
So contingent on the amount of women actually having sex (somewhere around 80% of young women, based on self reports) the vast majority of their sex is with a small cohort of men.
And the contingent of men having sex is decreasing fairly quickly. Suggesting that the % of men on the receiving end of these sexual encounters is getting even more exclusive.
The only sane interpretation is that women are having more sex, on average, with a smaller pool of guys.
Which is, ONCE AGAIN, backed up by data from Dating apps.
A small % of guys are even matching with women, let alone having sex with them.
Am I the only one that uses google anymore?
Half of Young men just aren't dating.
Around 45% have never asked a woman out at all.
That's 50% out of the pool already. Do you think a guy who turns 25 with minimal/zero dating experience is likely to turn that around and have success with women by age 30?
As of 2023, 60% of young men reported they were single. That number. 34% of young women reported being single. WHO ARE THE WOMEN DATING if not those young men?
As of 2026, around 34% of young men report being in a 'serious' relationship.. Situation is not really improving.
So we're hovering somewhere around 70% of young dudes who are not currently on trajectory to get married.
You tell me why that would be, if men actually want to get married. What's the holdup, why can't they attract a partner?
There's little reason to think that'll improve.
And you can hear women tell you the exact same thing straight from their mouth.
"If your standards don't eliminate most, they're not high enough."
"I'd rather die alone... ...than know that I didn't get it all."
This is being openly stated, in publicly viewable forums, young women TELLING YOU DIRECTLY that most men aren't sufficient for them. THEY'RE NOT HIDING IT.
Why would that be? What possible explanation is there other than... some large % of men (60%? 70%? 80%?) don't rise to their notice.
I've discussed each of these individual points before, of course. Its getting very rote to have this discussion when the data still says the same thing, and all the new data just reinforces the existing point.
My precise position is that about 50% of men are invisible to women, with an additional 30% that only become visible on occasion once acknowledged.
It's like a combination of several factors, the largest being the Dave Chappelle skit about 'I don't have a girlfriend, but there's some women'd be upset to hear that'.
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
More options
Context Copy link