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'm sorry to hear that you're struggling. Dating is genuinely hard these days, and I'm not denying that -- I just think that the imputation of active malice to women is factually incorrect. Women, particularly the ones you'd most want to date, aren't really implementing a strategy, just flailing around, being lonely or platonically satisfied by friendships, inconsistently trying to date in a world that provides them little guidance for how to do it right, and not succeeding in their own ways. The manosphere, for all it says about women, persistently overestimates female competence at dating-as-a-strategy in ways that are, mildly speaking, kind of funny.
This is particularly true when we're talking about women in their mid-twenties and above -- most women who are serious about dating, driven towards marriage, and don't have baggage pair up sometime in college, and so it gets harder and harder to find people who are both serious and driven the older you get.
Well, the thing is the women I'm talking about actually just flat out aren't on dating apps, for the most part -- they're single, often don't know why, often are addicted to their phones or to TikTok, often feel like they're missing love in their lives but may never have experienced real love that is transformative in the way love is transformative. They're not implementing a strategy because, to a lot of women, implementing a dating strategy is itself a form of humiliation -- not because they hate men, but because thinking about love strategically is exhausting, and adversarial, and women by and large actually don't want dating to be exhausting or adversarial. What they want is often a deep and individualized kind of passion where they feel like they're finally seen and acknowledged as a person worth knowing deeply and intimately, and dating is as much a minefield of navigating people who claim to offer this but have a knife behind their backs for women as it is for men.
They don't want to end up in a place where they feel adversarial about dating in the way you feel adversarial about dating, and they have plenty of examples of how women can go that direction and they don't like it. They'd rather hold on to their feelings that love is real and beautiful and transformative while not having it, than face the brutal world of dating as an adult and have those hopes dashed or violated or taken advantage of. This doesn't work out for them, and it works out even less for men, but it's what they're doing and because the world is more socially atomized than ever, it's easier than ever to end up alone, only dragged out of your house occasionally by a group of friends, and without any tools or frameworks to understand what adult intimacy is and how you pursue it.
Sometimes women will create a dating app profile for a couple weeks, the process feels painful and the sorting through many options -- rather than feeling validating or empowering, as men often imagine -- puts a woman who really doesn't want to instrumentalize and reject en masse human beings, in a position where she has to do that. She is not having a good time. She is having a specifically bad time. And the women who experience this as a good time -- and such women do indeed exist -- are the very women you don't want to touch with a barge pole.
Moreover, because the men are hungry, she feels like one cute face among many, not like a person who is ever actually seen or acknowledged as an individual person in her own right, which is the basis for women's intimacy with men. They would rather remain alone, hoping for the unmediated connection of twue wove, than become the kind of person who pursues love strategically and thereby (in their understanding of the world) makes themselves unable to receive it authentically.
So, you're right. A lot of single women act very strangely, without a strategy, often in ways that make life harder for her and for the men she sees. But there really isn't much of a voice for giving women real and useful dating advice in our culture. "Just be yourself," is bad advice often given to men, but women often receive their own kind of bad advice, like "Know your worth," or "don't settle," which equally mean nothing. Being specific and useful to either men or to women requires a kind of honesty about dating and romance that is painful for both sexes, and nobody really wants to go down that road unless they have to.
My wife was befriended by another mom at the retard school, and that woman, who I will call Carol, is a perfect example. (To minimize salacious thoughts, she's on the wrong side of forties and built like an advertising column.) She's there on the app to get laid and she constantly terrorizes my wife with the pictures of her recent matches or the stories about her recent trysts. My wife's not impressed with her taste in men.
More options
Context Copy link
hahaha I don't impute malice, honestly.
But it seems objectively undeniable that women are not great at selecting for men who will commit to them long term, and many of them are ignorant of their own role in their repeated failures to secure commitment (e.g. fleeing the moment a guy seems to be willing to commit).
The whole thing about anxious, avoidant, dismissive, its usually based in some psychological issues that have gone uncorrected. By and large I sympathize with women who are struggling due to these mental illnesses after we've torn down the framework that might have guided them to either get the help they need or at least manage to find a man who can tolerate their eccentricity and encourage healing.
I think the average woman really needs some external pressure to actually pick and 'settle' on a guy and someone who can help her effectively vet and filter the guys.
Normally this would be her family, esp. her father.
The apps usurped this role... while not actually fulfilling the aforementioned requirement. They do NOT pressure women to settle (the opposite: "your next swipe might reveal prince charming! keep trying!") and they do a horrendous job filtering, and honestly give more advantages to the sociopathic males than the normal ones.
I happily and squarely blame those who maintain these apps for the conditions we find ourselves in, but I do point out that our unwillingness to do anything that might upset or displease women as a class as to why we're stuck here.
Do feminists actually oppose attempts to kill or control the dating site industry? I think the USA's distrust of socialism might be a bigger deal there, honestly (there could also be First Amendment issues).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link