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 -
Trouble in Paradise
A guilty hobby of mine is to follow up with the trad dating scene. Not so much the 'Real Housewives of Alaska' style, but in a more terminally online way where various trad talking heads air out their honest opinions on substack or X that then turn out to be dirty laundry to the opposite sex.
A part of the draw to this is the fact that outside of explicit gender warriors, a lot of the online right has ceded ground to the idea that traditionalism is the way to fight against the modern gender war. We need forgiveness and to look at the broader picture. 'The opposite sex can not be your adversary', 'we are in an age of strife and suffering' and so on.
That sounds good on paper. What are things like in practice?
A Dating Crisis in the Orthodox Church? A Woman's Perspective. Archived link.
tl;dr: A Church going Orthodox woman voices a complaint as old as time: The men aren't good enough. They need to step up.
Let's see the results:
Now... This all feels awfully familiar. Hanging a cross over our problems didn't make any of them go away. People who flock to a place that promises solution to their issues, usually have issues to be solved! It's clear that Traditionalism does not neutralize ordinary mating-market dynamics.
Yeah. But great men and women don't need a church to get together, though. That's kind of baked into what makes them great. They also meet and make families living as radical left/liberal/progressives, for example.
It feels as if the Traditionalist sphere did not have many solutions to any problems. The initial thrust of 'we must rally behind the cause!' similar to other slogans like 'workers of the world unite!' sound good to those who buy into the group pathology, who implicitly believe that we could solve every issue if everyone was but sufficiently devoted to the cause. But there's a seeming lack of realism to what the problems actually are and how one can solve them outside of a faith based cultural revolution, which the author of the article proposes:
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!
The contradiction here seems clear enough. People who have their stuff together don't need any of this. Confident, socially adept well put together men with good jobs and a vision for the future, as desired by the author, are not going to spend their time wallowing around an Orthodox commune filled with incels being bossed around by babushkas. It's just ridiculous to expect successful well adjusted people to saddle themselves with such things in the modern world. Same goes for well put together women that know how to attract men. The real world operates on a 9-5.
Now, that might definitely be to our overall detriment. A key issue with modernity is a lack of real world communities, of course. But a community of needy weaklings is largely what the church has become and it has not made it stronger. And more pertinently, real world communities fall apart in modernity for a variety of reasons. Saying that they would be good to have, which is most likely true, isn't doing much to solve that problem.
This entire thing feels like a giant knot of contradictions and conflicting interests. Much like... nay, exactly like the old gender war. There's a reason why the 'Based Pastors' are doling out "weird" repackaged Red Pill material to try and meet the needs of young men. There's a reason why this woman is regurgitating utopian communalism and anti-red pill platitudes in an attempt at finding men who meet modern standards. Both might very well be correct in their observations. But it's clear they are not seeing eye to eye.
Edit:
I said I was not into this topic for the 'Real Housewives of Alaska' dynamic, but I wanted to see why the article got deleted. Turns out our author deleted the article and much of her online presence after it was alleged that she was sending men nudes. Well... I guess she can now better focus on praying for a husband.
That one showed up on my Substack feed the other day, and I read it there. I thought it was fine, but there's nothing much to say to it. It's unfortunate, but unsurprising. I wasn't trying very hard to get married when I was attending Orthodox Church every day, and eventually married when I was farther away from that culture, and a man who wasn't Orthodox, but respected my beliefs and habits, asked me out on interesting, romantic, fun dates.
Traditional Christianity recognizes there are a lot of potential matches that are worse than remaining single, and respects monasticism, and even spinsterhood. Many saints actually preferred and recommended it. It's very trad to tell stories about a woman so upset at the prospect of marriage to a man she doesn't respect, she chooses execution instead, or God closes a mountain pass on her pursuers.
More options
Context Copy link
I see this mostly as a decline of social skills. It’s not that “trad” stuff doesn’t work, in fact, it worked for thousands of years. That doesn’t mean that taking on the trappings of tradition with no social skills or status is going to work. I think there are a fair number of LARPers in orthodox communities simply because they think that joining the most trad church available will solve all their problems when most of their issues are less to do with their church and more to do with themselves. If you are a “traditional adult” you fulfill that role for yourself and learn to act like an adult in that era would be like.
To switch to women for a second, the role of a woman in a traditional family structure is: run the household and raise the kids and so on. In order to do that, you need to become the kind of person who can and will do that. You have to be able to cook a healthy meal (not just nuke a big frozen box of glorp, but an actual dish made of multiple components cooked on a stove). You need to keep a clean house now, and need to be able to handle a budget. You also need to learn to get along with other people and do so even when you don’t agree. That’s what actual traditional females are like. If you’re not that, you can call yourself traditional all day, but you aren’t, it’s kind of a LARP.
More options
Context Copy link
Page not found for me, so I'll just use the featured comments.
Overall, it sounds like the usual progressive-conservative epic_handshake.jpg as to women's Wonderfulness and men being shitty.
I imagine the female author intended it to be a commentary on how shitty men are. However, it'd be a colossal L for women to the extent that she broadcasts how young women are—without putting out—unable to maintain the attention of men. That is, from her admission, young women don't bring anything anything else to the table for obtaining male attention, much less commitment. Skill issue.
"Rigid orthobro energy," aka a man who has boundaries and standards and is less willing to tolerate modern thottery. There's a fairly deep journalist bag for euphemisms describing black criminals (urban youth, lunchtime rowdies, subway dancers, masked assailants, etc.). Perhaps there's an emergent euphemism bag to blame men for female hypergamy, such as "financial unreadiness" or "economically unattractive."
The single dad's body, his choice. It's not his problem that single, childless women often fall for single fathers due to female mate-choice copying reasons, such that he doesn't have to deal with single mothers or older women.
More options
Context Copy link
You’ve provided here the perfect argument for why the West needs Christian communities, even though they are difficult to get right. Humans do not naturally help anyone below them, because that’s instinctively ridiculous when they can maximize their own pleasure. But if Westerners continue acting this way, they will be replaced by an endless hoard of immigrants and also different Abrahamists (Amish, Haredim, maybe Salafists in Europe). Not only that, but everything is just kind of ugly and silly, so we’re not even going out in style. So the options are to ignore reality and die, or to try to understand the social technology that our ancestors left us, which worked in the past and works in certain variations today.
One of the ways that social technology worked was by reinforcing that “ridiculous” idea of someone “saddling themselves” with the sins of the deplorables beneath them. That could pass as a working formulation of Christianity. It’s very much about throwing maximum social reinforcement at the prospect of doing this, so that people do it. But this is also why a lot of churches fail IMO: they are very bad at reinforcing this. The ritualism and theology-nitpicking of Orthodoxy does not accurately shape human behavior to turn them into little Christs. It’s too distracted, not powerful enough. The stupid evangelical dance concerts that get tens of millions of views also do very little. You’d think it wouldn’t be this hard, in a culture that gives so much reinforcement to people for grades and haircuts and video games and fashion, to provide them reinforcement for the longterm prosocial things.
Statistically not, though, which is part of the problem. Progressives have a low TFR and declining.
More options
Context Copy link
Archive link since the post now appears to be deleted.
I think the obvious common denominator is that there's much less social, legal, and economic pressure on women to marry compared to history. Women today are able to support themselves and participate equally in society in a way that was not true even 100 years ago. This gives women a lot more power to say no to men they otherwise may have married in the past.
The women she's talking about, who go to church multiple times a week, would've likely been happy enough joining a monastery in the Traditional Society, rather than marrying a man they didn't respect. Maybe they still will, but that works better when the women make their decision at 25 vs 45, since worker to diselderly ratios are important in small communes.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree that this is probably a big factor.
I think this depends on how you define the word "equally." For example, in the last 100 years, a modern welfare state has been established which forcibly transfers massive amounts of wealth from men to women. This is part of the reason women are less dependent on men now -- in reality they are dependent, but the dependence is concealed in the form of indirect transfers via the state as opposed to direct transfers from husband to wife.
I mean, even absent transfers I am very confident modern womens' income exceeds their historical counterparts. Modern economies rely vastly less on muscle power than they did historically.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Alright, this is a little off topic, but is this actually like seriously a widespread issue? I might be a bubble, but even among the nerdy guys I've hung around with hygiene is not an issue unless they're like the highest tier of still functioning autistic.
Kissing a man with a dirty beard is unpleasant?
More options
Context Copy link
I'm a trans woman and after being on estrogen for a bit I became much more aware of how people around me smelled. While I think men smell more often, I would say when someone is totally oblivious to the fact that they reek to high heaven it's usually a woman. I think the literature on this says women generally have better senses of smell then men, but the average difference is modest. I would prefer if men and women made larger investments in deodorant.
Also this is discussing people meeting in an environment where they're expected to present themselves in a relatively formal way. If a man smells even little bit at church what does that indicate about his hygiene the rest of the time?
More options
Context Copy link
No, of course not. It's just that women tend to be uncomfortable admitting that they are rejecting a guy for being only 5'8"; or having a receding chin; or having male pattern baldness; or whatever. They are afraid it will make them look shallow or unreasonable. So they frequently cite "hygiene," since it seems reasonable to reject a guy for something that is universally considered unappealing; is easily fixed; and puts the blame on the rejected suitor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
She is trying to break down a set of problems as she sees them among American converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. I don't know the situation there. I am inclined to give her more credit because she acknowledges the reasons we'd expect the facts on the ground to be different. On the other hand, she pattern matches to someone who treats the other sex's read of the vibes of a core part of the problem and her own sex's read as objective truth, which is a common failure mode for analysts of both sexes. So I don't know.
I think it is a mistake to take her analysis for granted and then extrapolate from her niche to the broader church.
But, in any case, the church exists to preach the gospel, to worship God, and to edify believers. None of those goals is really compatible with choosing your members to maximize your impact as a social club. If a church heeds Scripture in choosing its leaders, those will be men who have their acts together, judged by Christian standards rather than by secular ones.
More options
Context Copy link
There is a certain subtext to the incel thing, in general, which includes a lot of online rightists and people drawn to these movements but also obviously various other groups.
Once a young man knows he is actually attractive to women he mostly wants to play the field, at least for a while.
This is a big difference to young women and I think is something gender warriors on the ‘male’ side often don’t acknowledge. Most much maligned 20-25 year old women would, if a man who was attractive, charismatic, good to them, etc came along, be willing to marry him. If that moment of “I should have sowed my wild oats” comes for women it tends to happen much, much later, in an Eat Pray Love kind of way, after a divorce or bereavement in midlife or a husband who loses interest or something. The number of women in their early or mid 20s I know who were really all about maximizing the amount of casual sex they had with random men is miniscule.
By contrast, once a young man knows he’s attractive enough to sleep with a sizeable number of young women, he usually wants to do so and becomes unwilling to settle down until he’s ’done’ or feels pressure of age or expectation or really wants kids. The exceptions are high school relationships where he never plays the field, situations in which the man ‘settles down’ but cheats the whole time, men who fucked around a lot in high school and college and so have had their fill by their early twenties, and the very and genuinely religious. And, of course, extremely socially anxious men, but they’re not going to approach women anyway.
If a hot 23 year old man suddenly finds himself in a situation where he can (a) marry young to an attractive woman, and be monogamous for the rest of his life or (b) hook up with plenty of attractive women for 7-10 years, he is almost always going to pick option (b). This is also why I made the point last week that men who suddenly become hot in their late 20s or 30s (or 40s) are more likely to cheat because they suddenly find themselves invited to a party they’ve always wanted to attend but never got the invite to.
Hookups are exhausting, genuinely inefficient, and disgusting, even for gigachad. Would it not be so that a smart man realizes there's 100x more sex in a marriage?
Source
Even if you’re a man who likes casual sex with a variety of partners, surely you’d prefer to have like a new fwb every few months as opposed to having one night stand after one stand night? It takes time for two people to get into a good rhythm and learn what feels go for each other, and you’re unlikely to have great sex if you’re doing it with a different person each time.
More options
Context Copy link
Shouldn't be an issue day-to-day if your wife is attractive.
This is a common misperception, that a guy with an attractive wouldn't get tired of sex with her. Not so. Men with a 9 will mess with 5s just to keep things interesting.
"Show me a hot woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of f***** her"
If they have a genuine 9, then there is something wrong with them if they are tired of fucking her. It would be very weird to hear someone with a 9 wife who is 22 who is genuinely tired of fucking her just because they have been together since she was a teenager.
This implies that there’s a linear scale of attractiveness that’s the single only factor that makes having sex with someone enjoyable. Someone that’s physically attractive can be awful in bed, unenthusiastic, or incompatible with you for whatever reason.
More options
Context Copy link
I know from experience. Well, that is to say, if you can get tired of an 8, there's no reason you wouldn't get tired of a 9. It's on a spectrum. I don't think experience "gets over a hump" so to speak at which point you're fine with the same person forever.
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
The problems might be qualitatively the same, but to what quantitative degree? I'm inclined to believe that the problems men and women complain about when it comes to dating are intrinsic to the differences between the sexes, but that traditional organizations moderate their terribleness. We do so, for example, lower rates of divorice and higher fertility rates among the devout. That's suggestive of actual success in the traditional project.
As a trivial example, these Orthodox girls are unhappy about men pushing for sex and then leaving when they don't get it. But it's telling that we're not hearing the secular fears of getting raped and murdered by a tinder date.
What does it tell us? I expect you're more likely to die in a car crash on the way to a tinder date than to be murdered by your date.
Which doesn't stop it from being a stated concern from women.
I once saw a woman at a bar, loudly going through men's hinge profiles and commenting (shitting) on them. A guy near her asked her if she'd ever been on a Hinge date
Then another guy mentioned being gay, and suddenly he had her full attention, loving gaze and all.
A straight guy around women and gay guys is the lamest. The only thing that saves you is the gay guy being flirty, which may induce interest toward you by the woman.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
26+ is too old for a first-time marriage. In general, they should not be on their second marriage unless their husband died, which is extremely rare these days, so women over 26 marrying should not be an issue in a traditional parish.
The women who are young enough to marry for the first time should seek men between 4 and 10 years older than themselves. Statistics show this produces the best reproductive outcomes and this is what most human societies of the past practiced. That the first item on their complaint list is immaturity tells me they are not doing this.
In other words, the solution is to double-down on traditionalism. A thin gloss of God and chastity is not enough, small age gap, 27 year old bride marriages are simply not traditional. Therefore, they do not work.
Assuming this is correct (and I don't necessarily disagree with you) one can ask why this woman is posting her grievances publicly in the first place. A more traditional approach, if she has some issue to raise, would be to voice it to her husband, father, or other male guardian and let him decide what to do with it.
The wisdom of this approach is evident when looking at this woman's article. It would be better for her to be silent than to publicize this kind of drivel. Because the real problem is not that the highly desirable men she wants are foolishly passing her by in favor of women who are younger; or from more patriarchical cultures; or whatever. Nor is the problem that the mass of recent male converts are autistic losers who just need to take a shower.
The real problem, of course, is the female hypergamy instinct. For the most part, average women are simply not attracted to average men. The bitter truth is that in world where everyone follows traditionalism and pairs off monogamously at a young age, a lot of women are going to be disappointed.
To be sure, this issue can be ameliorated by (1) giving men a special path to obtain social status; (2) discouraging women from having contact with the sort of highly desirable men who trigger their hypergamy instincts; and (3) award social status to men and women who get married and stay married. But you can bet that this woman, who is basically just another flavor of feminist, would not be happy about (1) opportunities widely available to men but not women; (2) being discouraged from exposure to popular media and casual dating; or (3) women who failed to marry early being treated as second-class citizens (of course I doubt she has any objection to treating single men as second-class citizens).
I think that in general there is a problem with supposedly traditional women who want to dictate the terms of their traditionalism. Fundamentally, they are no different from feminists who want to be highly paid professionals while still expecting men to pay for first dates.
More options
Context Copy link
It's taking longer and longer for people to launch due to the amount of time in university/finding a graduate job etcetera for most white collar roles. Especially if you're looking to be in position to setup house and make a beeline towards child-rearing. The relationship dynamic of previous eras also had women essentially being unable to operate as solo agents in the world which meant that 'has a job and doesn't beat me' would frequently be enough especially when coupled with no birth control. It's way easier to be a single female circa 2026 so there's less automatic pressure to couple off.
Okay, but this is the opposite of trad. Trad churches should not tolerate this attitude.
The Orthodox Church, while extremely into Holy Tradition, and even cultural traditions, is basically neutral on that kind of tradism, perhaps mildly negative.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In the UK the only time the average age at which women married was below 24 was very briefly when the baby boomers came of age, 26 was actually quite close to the average from the 16th century onwards. Or is 1500s England not traditional enough?
I mean, there is that whole thing with Henry VIII normalizing divorce in that timeframe.
Fair but if you’re too trad for the 1500s I better see you denounce the printing press and the evils of movable type. Real men write books by hand with a goose feather! And you better own a crossbow for home defence, not a musket.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My stats say ~24 from 1700 to 1950, but that's for all marriages, so I'm guessing it's 23 for fist. But yes, it's still quite high.
Well, they went wrong somewhere, because they are being replaced by more traditional people. Actions have consequences, I guess, even if they are delayed by a few centuries.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link