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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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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.

The following article is pulled in part from conversations with other Orthodox women looking for a husband, from the survey of 41 responses from Orthodox women- recently married or engaged, conversations with my Priest and older married men, and my own personal experience.

Let's see the results:

“The problems shift with age. Younger women (17–25) often deal with immaturity, hygiene issues, or lack of physical attraction, aggressiveness, ghosting after “love-bombing”, or pressure to be sexual, then ghost when her boundaries of chastity are put up.

Women in their 20s (26–29) struggle most with compatibility, “too online” rigid orthobro energy, emotional instability, and financial unreadiness (i.e., a stable job or career that they feel would support a growing family).

Older women face a shrinking pool of men who also seem to want someone much younger, despite the men already being in their 30s or 40s. Often these are widows are women whose husbands have left them and have children. The single dads often still do not want to court them either.

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.

The good news? Several women in the survey did marry or get engaged to kind, stable, normal men. I personally know many great men. They happen to all be married!

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:

We must stop pretending the problem doesn’t exist. Parishes need real community, not forced “single dances” that feel like Protestant youth group 2.0, but actual family-style fellowship where people of all ages eat, talk, serve, and get to know each other as brothers and sisters in Christ first. Priests and godparents can gently guide the catechumens toward a healthy understanding of vocation, marriage, or monasticism, without shame or pressure. I do think that marriage is too heavily emphasized in our post-protestant culture, where if you are unmarried, you are somehow second-class citizens. I think we as a church need to do a better job lifting all those who are still single and find a way to integrate our young people in a much broader vision of family life within the local parish. Married couples need single people and vice versa. Our monastics need our support, and we need them. We should be visiting them often.

The young men need older men to look up to and mentor them. I have seen this work very well at our parish. The babuskas need muscles to help around her house and hungry men to feed. We really do not need more awkward matchmaking and pressure to force things to happen, but rather organic opportunities for people to grow into healthy members of a big family, for friendships to blossom between men and women organically without all the weird red-pill approaches, and to acquire the skills and virtues of well-adjusted Orthodox Christians.

And we, as laypeople, have to be honest with ourselves: Are we praying for our future spouse like it actually matters? Are we forming ourselves into the kind of man or woman the Church needs, or are we waiting for the perfect trad spouse to drop out of the sky to then begin our life in Christ?

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.

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.

I think the obvious common denominator is that there's much less social, legal, and economic pressure on women to marry compared to history.

I agree that this is probably a big factor.

Women today are able to support themselves and participate equally in society in a way that was not true even 100 years ago.

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.

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