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Notes -
BDSM relationships are rational and adaptive for (some? many?) modern women
[Epimistic Status: Might just be the girls I date]
Oh boy! Another post on gender and romantic dynamics. Discussions on this topic here tend to go in a few predictable ways, and unfortunately there's a frequent vibe of posters here just not liking women. Leaving aside the whole hypergamy bit, there's frequent sneers about girls being attracted to partners that will mistreat them. This attraction is attributed to two evo psych explanations:
Men with aggressive and dark triad traits are more likely to succeed in gathering resources and accruing power. This makes them valuable mates, but also makes them high risks for physical abuse, infidelity, etc. There's something good correlated with something bad.
Females evolutionarily were frequently coerced by mates. They often didn't get to even choose their mates at all. This goes back all the way to chimps and monkeys. The ones that tolerated the abuse better were more likely to survive and reproduce. One of the pathways to tolerate abuse better is to enjoy it at some level. If you can't really control whether you get hit or not, it's more adaptive to get off on it than have a mental breakdown. The same goes for submissive behavior. Once you're wired deep down to enjoy something, you're going to start seeking it out.
I broadly think these two points are true, and I still like women. I think given submissive and masochistic impulses are wired in, the rational move is satify them while minimizing damage. BDSM relationships (which I'm using here as a catchall for everything from hard power dynamics to good 'ole slapping and choking in bed) are a social technology that fills that role.
Women want things in a partner. They also have different reproductive strategies that don't always neatly coincide. Pretty boys will make pretty daughters. Kind and caring partners are more likely to invest in you and your offspring. Dark triad partners are more likely to be disproportionately successful, but they might hurt you in the process. Straight up abusive partners just need to be survived, and some level of massochism helps.
Some of these reproductive strategies clearly work out a lot better than others. It's much better to end up with a pretty boy than an abusive one, but instincts were evolved when mate choice was much more constrained. Leaving a bad partner is much more of an option now, rendering some of the survival instincts counter produtive. So what's a gal to do with that masochistic drive? Get with a decent partner than have them do BDSM. Much better to be choked by the pretty boy that loves you than the dark triad guy that will actually kill you.
Backdoor on Feminism?
So here's my fringe, underdeveloped thought. Feminism and "womens liberation" broadly decreased the amount women had to submit to their partners. A lot of women liked that change. Some more reactionary ones didn't and explicitly volunteer for more trad lifestyles. I think a lot of women have mixed feelings. They really value the practical gains in freedom in some areas. But in others they didn't really want to stop being submissive. Western blue tribe women are seeped in the idea that feminism is good, and wanting to roll things back is bad. BDSM offers a figleaf for that. It's culture is soaked in the language of consent, so it doesn't contradict feminism. Yep, wearing a collar and being your man's slave is empowering. BDSM offers a framework for picking and choosing what bits of power to keep and return. You can still have your own job, but do everything you husband says at home.
My anecdotes
I had an ex who I was keeping on a leash. She really liked being given orders. One day I asked her to fetch me food a few too many times and she said "I wanted to be your girlfriend, not your servant!" I learned then when girls want to be submissive it's more like they want to be your pet than your maid.
I had two separate exes who ran away from abusive partners and then ended up with me. They were sensible enough to flee at the first sign of trouble. They liked me a fair amount at first, but when I introduced them to BDSM they became enthralled with me. I think early in the relationship were satisfying the Pretty/Caring strategy. Once BDSM hit the mix they felt like they were satisfying Pretty/Caring/Dominant. I think the BDSM community downplays the relationship with domestic violence for PR reasons. There's definitely something there.
There’s many kinds of BDSM frameworks but as far as I know, the “doing everything your husband says at home” 24/7 dynamic is not typical and the average BDSM relationship is more about having “sessions/scenes” with explicit boundaries. But in either case consent isn’t a figleaf, it’s absolutely essential and it’s extremely, extremely unadvisable to do a scene without safe words and having talked about your limits.
BDSM is basically role play. You’re not rolling anything back or contradicting feminism, you’re playing at being a slave and you can stop at any time. Same with CNC, it’s a way to live out a fantasy that would be extremely distressing if it happened for real and you had no way to stop it. I’m not sure “empowering” is the right word to use, but you have a certain kind of power by voluntarily entering a dynamic as submissive, because in a way, the dom is performing for your pleasure, the pressure is on them to do a good job, and if they don’t, you can just stop the entire scene.
It’s obvious to me but the point is for the scenario to be kinky, not practical. Not many subs would be turned on by being ordered to do their dom’s tax returns, which is probably what would happen if the scenario was real instead of just a fantasy for their sexual gratification.
Full service submissive exist, but they’re up there with findom subs and consensual cuckolds for rarity, having pretty esoteric hard nos, and for being overwhelmingly (cis) male.
I’d… also spell out that the more complicated the submissive’s focus, the more likely there’s a narrative they need. Some BDSM doesn’t: for some masochists, they just had a hard medical experience in early puberty involving chronic pain, a cut or injection or pressure made the pain stop, and surprise surprise, that cut or puncture or pressure takes a whole new meaning. Some bondage or dominance subs, the ‘narrative’ is just ‘oh no don’t make me do this thing I want but don’t want make myself admit’.
But even for masochism, that’s not the only variant. ‘I’ve been a bad girl/boy/whatever’ is a cliche, but it’s a cliche that exists for a reason, and that’s to separate the blame from the responsibility. It literally only feels good if you ‘deserve’ it, or you want the release of anxiety from having fucked up and being ‘free’ of that, or it shreds something core to your identity and self-idealation. That’s near-certainly the punchline to Yudkowsky’s Math Pets thing, for those who remember it. Bondage can be about not successfully doing something, or being ‘forced’ into something they’d want to do, or having something you’d normally not think twice about become ‘impossible’.
Even matters like free use aren’t psychologically free. You gotta work with your sub and understand them if you don’t want to breed resentment.
I believe light maledom/femsub dynamics are on a continuum with normal heterosexuality, but extreme BDSM in general, and particularly femdom/malesub dynamics are disruptions that speak to fundamental psychological problems and not kink-as-play.
My crackpot theory is that straight male subs are driven by their actual schemas and beliefs about the world, not by raw sexual desire. Their submission fantasies are actually a means of separating themselves from their sexual desires, which they believe they aren't worthy to fulfill. Submission becomes a sublimation of the sexual into the enjoyment of denial. "I may not be worthy of having sex with a woman, but I can serve her non-sexual needs." "I may not be able to please a woman, but I can watch and faciliate as she is pleased by another man."
The 'upside' is that you're at least acknowledged by a woman, even if you're humiliated by it. But if your schema of the world tells you that you're unlovable and unfuckable, sexually worthless, then being humiliated by a woman is at least something, some kind of involvement with her, and that's better than nothing.
IMO, this is far, far more common as a fantasy or desire than the actual number of people practicing it, almost entirely due to the complete lack of female dominants.
Female dominants have their own problems -- one thing is there's like 5 of them for every 1 trillion men who want to find one. But also I believe that women who sexually dominate men are almost exclusively 1) mentally ill, and dangerous, predatory or 2) doing it because their male partner got them into it, and his enjoyment of it positively reinforced it or 3) into it because they actually want something else and they've sublimated that desire into dominance.
On #1, IMO, this is not the sort of thing you say at a dinner party, but I believe the majority of self-initiated female dominants are psychopaths, extreme narcissists, or in general people with serious mental disorders who see sexual domination as a power trip. They're often surprised at how low male subs are willing to go, and being able to push against boundaries and find nothing pushing back is the sort of thing that predatory people have always done. An uncomfortable number of female dominants are little more than Warren Jeffs in a dress.
Because of the dearth of female dominants, male subs are often desperate and willing to put up with almost anything, and this is a really, really bad posture to have when entering into a power exchange relationship. "Exploring this side of my sexuality is too dangerous given the environment" needs to be the fallback. But if people were able to do that with their sexuality broadly we'd live in a better world.
On #3, I've seen women who really just wanted to be in a mutualistic and affectionate relationship describe it as a "female led relationship", and their conception of this is literally "having a honey-do list" and "being the one who buys the groceries." I've seen women who simply wanted a man who admired them describe it as "femdom" because their husband called them ugly and they wanted a man she could order to call her beautiful. I've seen women who genuinely wanted a relationship in which she could expect an orgasm now and again describe this as "femdom," because her big idea was that she could order a guy to go down on her.
"Maybe if I get leverage over men and form a relationship in which I'm In Charge, then I can get what I want" is the logic there. In that sense I'm not sure that I can say definitively whether or not it's simply the same phenomenon as the redpill discourse, but from another angle. It's power relations as the resigned second-choice after affection and intimacy didn't work out.
And of course, the biggest portion of #3 is dominatrixes/'findom' 🙄 where "the thing they want" is simply money, and because there's far more demand for female domination than supply, money is a... workable selection mechanism and it's one that many men are willing to pay. Often for crumbs -- again, male subs are desperate, and the amounts of money men are willing to pay to be indifferently humiliated by a woman flabbergasts me. I read a story on the internet once about a mildly sexually traditional woman who got into doing paid femdom chats on the internet, was utterly disgusted by it, but kept going because she made wildly good money. The oldest profession in the world is quite remunerative.
I personally believe a big part of the large numbers of female submissives has to do with women genuinely desiring hot sex, but feeling ashamed of this, for traditional ('sex is sinful'), status ('don't be a slut'), and feminist ('male sexuality objectifies women') reasons.
It's hard to overstate how much of the past 20 years has been a sustained attempt at putting in the water supply a level of cynicism about women's sexuality re: men that competes with the Victorians in terms of how bad it makes people feel about sex. As a teenage boy, I actually believed women got exactly zero pleasure from vaginal intercourse -- not just that they typically couldn't have an orgasm from it, but that they genuinely felt nothing, it had no level of satisfaction either physical or psychological for them and they did it entirely because men made them do it, and then when I actually started having sex and she enjoyed it and said she wanted to do more of it I was utterly shocked. She was too!
It's also not hard to find women whose three extreme kink interests are exactly the same: "free use", breeding, and CNC. In other words, sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and rape. What are women desperately afraid of? What are the complaints we hear from women about their fears of men? They're afraid of being sexually instrumentalized ("objectification"), being stuck with a pregnancy ("deadbeat dad"/"men want to control women's bodies"), and rape, which of course needs no reference because its badness is clear.
IMO, I think this is another form of painful (and not always true) schemas about the world being sublimated into a kind of resigned acceptance, and therefore made in some way pleasurable or sought-out. These young women believe that the state of the world is such that all women can expect is sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and assault, and seeking out explicit BDSM relationships becomes a way of finding a man who will at least admit that's what he's doing, and provide a safe word escape route from the experience of being treated like a warm body by a man's sexual desire that wants nothing else from her.
It's "all sex is rape" being taken to its ultimate conclusion, formalized and made explicit, even to the point where a submissive woman's desire for sex is sublimated into it. If this is the dark and unforgiving world a woman lives in, and every man is in fact a rapist-in-waiting, then the only option available, unconsciously and psychologically, is to find one who will at least be nice about it.
I guess you can say I have ethical and psychological critiques of the kink community. I don't believe they're in general bad people (although predators love to wear the language of kink like sheep's clothing), but I do think there are unexamined psychological problems, pain, and mental illnesses that seriously affect the community and those deserve to be interrogated.
Scattered thoughts:
Oh no, I fully believe I'm worthy to fulfill them. But that statement also disqualifies me from being a sub. Rather than the "I may not be able to please a woman, but I can watch and faciliate as she is pleased by another man" sense, it's the power to know that happening doesn't actually matter, not the pain of knowing that it does (re: the chad 'swinger' vs. the virgin 'cuckold'). Which is why allowing the realization to happen (on either side) destroys relationships if provoked.
Or the "or you want the release of anxiety from having fucked up and being ‘free’ of that" dynamic is in effect on the male side, but that's just the "had a bad day at work so the woman initiates even though he's not on it today" kind of femdom. Not necessarily a central example of such though.
gold_digger.jpg, and what I describe at the very bottom is part of why people get really mad at [minimum, the appearance of] this
You do have to be careful when doing this; thinking with your dick here leads to trouble. But that's just more being able to gauge people accurately/keeping a clear head in the discovery process between who is and isn't suitable to have a relationship like that with than anything else, something malesubs might not even be able to pull off given the lack of femdoms (or may "settle" for someone driven more by a quest for D/s than is healthy for either participant).
I tend to do this but that's more a question of seeking people to grow with, so it's not really as one-sided as it otherwise seems, but there's always that risk and I'm probably doing it wrong anyway. Or maybe it's just an unacknowledged mental problem on my end.
Yeah, but of course they're going to call it that given the room temperature is what I describe at the bottom. This is kind of just what healthy relationships are supposed to look like.
It occurs to me that a command of "you shall not lay with a man as you would a woman" may not technically be limited to men.
The people who invented this believe 2 things:
Which maps 1:1 onto the liberal critique of socialists, mainly because both are true. Which is why people who believe this claim so loudly that it isn't true, and that bleeds into the claim that it's deontologically wrong to see sex as labor. They make those claims of "don't be a slut" and "being sexually available is sinful" because it literally devalues sex to do that, which affects those at the bottom of the market worst of all.
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