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When Sluts Settle Down
One of the incel or black pill arguments I think has more than a grain of truth goes something like this:
Men are raised around the polite fiction that women (and society) want them to be nice above all else. Nice guys get the girl. And, after all, anyone can be nice. That's part of why this is important social messaging. But of course in the end, the boy must live. And he discovers that, in fact, niceness isn't what gets the girl. Being hot is, having status is. The original statement isn't wrong. In the abstract, all but the most damaged women do want a "nice guy". A good husband and father, someone to grow old with, someone who won't abuse her, someone her friends and family will respect. But that isn't all she wants, and it's certainly not the first thing most people look for. The boy knows this himself - after all, he is no less vain when it comes to an ideal partner. But he must see it to know the polite fiction, and when he sees it, it frustrates him.
Girls receive their own version of this polite fiction. It has a worthy intention and there is truth to it. But it is also fake, and when people argue it against the evidence, they do young women and themselves a disservice. That fiction is something like this, although in more liberal or progressive circles it will be stated far less explicitly (although it is still stated, by peers, by elders, and most significantly by men): Men don't want a slut. The sluts end up humiliated, pathetic, and alone. The chaste get the guy, and the happy ending. In the real world, girls grow up knowing this isn't true.
Man, here, will say that men (or at least attractive or otherwise high status men) will fuck promiscuous women but never marry them. But that isn't really true. The truth is that some of the highest status men marry sluts. The truth is, as every woman herself realizes as she gets older, that even chauvinist men, slut-shaming men, men who post nasty comments about a woman's purported body count do so; in many cases even knowingly. Most women could give you a half dozen examples in their own lives. The boy most concerned and public about his contempt for 'sluts' at my own high school married, not ten years later, a woman everyone (including him) knew even then had been around. Who are the Miami streamer/Clav/etc influencer types going to end up marrying? It will not be chaste virgins from the imagined heartland.
Girls know that desirable men love (and fall in love with) sluts all the time. Like the fact that hot women do not always go for the 'nice guy', it is is ubiquitous. In the same way that not being neurotic about being nice makes you more confident, and therefore more attractive, not worrying about being a slut makes many more promiscuous young women more confident around men, more willing to make the first move. As the opinion piece says:
By the way, I think the evidence is clear that promiscuity is bad for men and women. It's bad for the soul, it's bad for future relationships, it makes it more difficult to form meaningful attachments. I don't think it's bad to have a preference for someone who hasn't slept around, in fact it's almost certainly smart. But it's just not a revealed priority preference for most men to strongly disincentive this behavior in and of itself.
Men have always been into sluts, of course. Men have always married them, or always wanted to. Real, working (well, partially working) chastity, it must be remembered, was largely enforced by the older generation, in large part for young women by older women, on both sides of the equation. It was the elderly establishment, the church elders who prevented the King from marrying Wallis Simpson. Chastity is important for paternity and therefore inheritance. There are good societal as well as personal reasons. But as soon as men were allowed (by society, by their parents, by each other) to marry sluts, they did. You cannot take seriously a threat when its very proponents work so hard to disprove it.
I tend to disagree with this. Depending, of course on what is meant by "nice." Here's an example: Suppose you need help with something, such as moving a heavy object. So you ask someone you know if they can help you. Maybe it's the person down the hall in your college dorm. Maybe it's the person in the next cubicle at work. Most people would agree that the "nice" thing to do in this situation would be to help the person.
But when it comes to romance, if a man helps a woman in this way (and they are not already in a sexual relationship), it will reduce his chances of being sexually attractive to her.
So it's not just that being "nice" is given little weight. Being "nice" undermines the man's chances.
I see this as an exaggeration of something which is ultimately true. Being a slut definitely makes a woman less attractive to men for long-term relationships. Especially if the woman has bastard children as a result of her promiscuity.
Of course it's true that men put a lot of value on looks. And the current relationship and sexual marketplace in the West is heavily tilted in favor of women. So yeah, a slut who is decent looking will still be able to find a decent man.
So to sum up: Men are told that being "nice" makes them more attractive to women. This is completely wrong. Women are told that being sluts makes them less attractive to men (for relationship purposes). This is correct, although admittedly the slut penalty is not so great if the woman is childless.
In general, your point seems to be one of those false balance types of arguments. The unspoken argument is something along the lines of "Ok, so men are lied to about niceness, but women are lied to as well, so it's less of a big deal."
If a woman asks a man for help and he turns her down, you think she'll be more attracted to him? Why would you think so?
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There are tradeoffs.
Slutty Sabrina might want Chad Centimillionaire and settle for Nicholas Niceguy. Patrick the Patriarch might want Virginal Virginia and settle for Somewhat Slutty Sarah...
Also 25% of US adults under 40 have never married. So it is completely plausible that Somewhat Slutty Sarah is just not going to marry, same for Nicholas and Patrick for that matter. 25% of the US population seems not to be marriage material.
Why does Internet romance discourse often seem to involve these strange stereotypical characters with catchy names? Chad became so generic and escaped into the mainstream, but who are Slutty Sabrina and Nicholas Niceguy?
Is this a consequence of Dunbar’s number that we must invent these imaginary people to gossip about? You could have said “A slutty woman might want a rich handsome man but will settle for an average nice guy” but instead had to create an alliterative cast of archetypes as if this had somehow happened. Occasionally this catches on and Chad becomes a generic term for a hunk and Karen an annoying middle aged woman, but like, why is this a thing in the first place, to want to give names to these weird fake straw people?
For the same reason Austrian economics appeals to simpletons. If it has highly complex mathematical formulas and macroeconomic models in it, people aren’t going to read it. I find it entertaining, TBF. Sometimes the intellect needs a diet.
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It predates the internet, I remember 'Billy Nomates' and I think I remember a 'John Everyman'. John Smith was the guy who wasn't who he said he was. I'm sure there are others.
I like it, it's an efficient and sometimes witty way to make it clear that we're talking about an example with a particular characteristic not a real person. And for the rest of the conversation you can just call them by their first name: 'Billy' instead of 'our hypothetical unpopular socially awkward example'.
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Should this have been "men"?
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Not much to criticize here, but one bit of nuance: she's been married two years, it may well be that they make it all the way (hope so), but it's a bit early to do victory lap. Which I guess is one of the best things about settling down early: If it doesn't work out, you have more breathing room to start again.
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Very true. A few related thoughts:
Even if you are an outright former prostitute, this does not necessarily preclude you from status if you just choose the right social group (i.e. move to Berkeley). For example, Aella, despite being, as far as I can tell, a midwit, seems to have parlayed her former profession into over 140,000 substack subscribers and about twice as many Twitter followers. This seems to have happened on the back of lurid prose and lurid twitter polls masquerading as "research". Having been Nate Soares' side piece, she has secured funding from MIRI for an AI safety project with other e-girls signing up as mentors. She's also been interviewed on Dwarkesh's podcast - unfortunately the video has been taken down, perhaps because the guy looked like he's nursing a hardon the whole time.
Of course, Aella is something of an interesting counterexample to your specific argument because she is unable to find a husband despite offering a bounty of 100k for an introduction. However, her standards leave very few men in the pool and there may be only a handful of men on the planet who meet them.
Some of these women literally marry and have kids with men they meet at gangbangs. An indicator of the state of socializing in America?
I solemnly swear I only know about this stuff due to my wife's morbid interest in it.
Who do you consider examples of non-midwits (topwits?)? It seems to me that unless the standard you are applying is more correlated with your aesthetic/moral approval of the person than their wits as usually defined, you should then be writing off most of this forum as midwits as well.
(My impression is that she should be a little bit above the median of the Motte in terms of smarts and verbal skills, and way above in terms of agency (mostly evidenced by the successful ascent to and maintenance of local e-celeb status). Not in any sense my "type" either, so I think I have a low risk of bias due to simping.)
I mean, there's a lot of smart people out there. I don't pretend to have the final say on who is smart and who isn't, but I'd say, for example, Scott Alexander in his prime was a topwit.
Aella is sculpting a public persona as her full time occupation. Her output is basically the best that she can do given full effort and attention. I like this forum a lot, but how many people here treat poasting as their full time job? I'd say zero. So I don't think that you can do a naive comparison given the discrepancy in effort involved.
Why?
Debatable, since on a pseudonymous forum you can't actually tell who is successful and who is full of shit. Being a publicly successful figure with a face and a name is part of the game she's playing. Nobody here is posting face reveals and most people here would rather, I suspect, that few people they know IRL knew they posted here.
I do concede she successfully attained celebrity status. Does that mean she's not a midwit? It's 2026, we've had tards as vice presidents.
Sure, but he was... top 0.1%? Top 0.01%? Certainly somewhere pretty high up, in terms of wit, even if we assume that most of the witty people never make their wits available to the public.
A fair point, but one hand we have plenty of very active posters and on the other hand all the escorting and socialising and what-not surely must take up some of her time as well. Besides, being able to actually translate more time investment into better output is a skill in itself.
Because most posters here produce significantly less interesting, more brainrotten and worse-researched takes? And even then, I'd be comfortable with assuming that all Mottizens are top 10% for some reasonable measure of "wits" and most are at least top 5%. I just suspect that most of us are so bubbled up that we vastly overestimate the median person.
I don't know, it seems that enough people here drop hints at their occupation that it's likely enough most are in considerably lower-agency life tracks where they essentially operate as employees in standard-ish careers, and the path to get there and advance further forward looks like "get better standardised credentials and perform better on the next performance review".
I do have to admit that I'm quite biased against Aella's detractors, simply because the correlation between aesthetic objections to her lifestyle and politics and barely-solicited public criticism of the quality of her output or intellectual qualities is so high. If my impression is that she is one of the more interesting bloggers, but then every time some topic adjacent to her is discussed a cavalcade of card-carrying MRAs and postrationalist born-again Christians and other assorted trads comes out of the woodwork to assert that she is stupid and boring (and also very unattractive to them), then it just seems like a better explanation that the detractor "doth protest too much" and also is falling prey to a variant of the just-world fallacy (believing that the world can't be so unfair that the immoral and distasteful would also be competent and talented).
Yeah, but what do you want from me? You asked for topwits and got a topwit.
I'm not sure that she still does escorting? In any case, socializing is basically your job as a public figure and helps feed the fame flywheel.
What is so well researched or interesting about her takes? Asking her Twitter followers about something is, I suppose, research, but I don't know it's particularly good. The usual deflection she offers when someone points this out is "social science is even worse" which, even if true, says more about the quality of social science research than about Aella's twitter poll to Claude code pipeline.
I think this is certainly true. I am not sure that conflating "agency" with intelligence is correct.
Ironically it seems to me that you are the one posting a weak knee jerk criticism here since I'm none of those things and didn't say anything about whether I find her attractive or not.
I think the real just world fantasy is to believe that nobody who is a midwit can attain fame and success.
Having somebody with sufficient clout/exposure to get earnest responses to the questions she's asking from a population of higher-functioning horny enthusiasts is a nice novelty. She's also autistic enough not to just automatically discard things that go against her preconceived notions of what the responses should be, which makes her better than social science academy members who are frequently fishing to prove their own notions since reporting otherwise is to get cancelled.
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My bad, it would have been more useful to ask for your understanding of the bottommost topwit or thereabouts.
Sure, but it does not help the "good poasting" flywheel, and I assumed that any assessment of her wits is based on her textual output rather than her life as a Gesamtkunstwerk.
The data analysis and visualisation, ideas for things to ask, and thoroughness in constructing the questions. I have not seen things like that fetish tabooness/preference by gender/popularity chart anywhere else outside of 4chan, and 4chan is many orders of magnitude more sloppy about it.
I would think of agency as at least strongly correlated with some component of intelligence (frontal lobe stuff?), and I say that as someone with very subpar levels of agency.
Both can be just-world fantasies.
Fair point on the latter, but I thought it was fair to put you in the "assorted trad" box given your general right-wing alignment (you get that stamp based on memory, but it's not hard to find posts that give it away in your history) and the somewhat gratuitous use of "prostitute" (Escorts are between not covered by the definition and non-central examples in modern usage, so insisting on the world seems to be meant to convey condemnation).
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this point, since I don't think I can convince you that the fetishes of Aella followers graphed isn't in fact interesting or quality. De gustibus non dispuntandum est.
I probably pass for "right aligned" in, like, San Francisco, but I'm a little baffled to get that label on this forum.
Sorry, but the definition of a prostitute is:
Which certainly covers Aella. The goal was not to convey condemnation, it was to describe how she made her money.
I was under the impression that it's a clinical and neutral label for the world's oldest profession, but M-W helpfully points out that I haven't gotten the latest firmware update:
I'll continue to resist this hyperstitous slur cascade a while longer though.
I see you use "pozzed" in a post on page 2 of your profile. I consider unironic use to be an unambiguous right-wing cultural marker. (Doesn't it come from right-wing COVID vaccine opposition, which if anything is significantly more right relative to the distribution of (>=mid)wit rightwingers than it is relative to the US right wing as a whole?)
I have not actually read her CV or anything, but since people referred to her as an escort I thought she primarily sold companionship/romance (not a sex act). She may also have worked as a camgirl (since I remember seeing posts about camgirling), which I would also not group with prostitutes (as long as you can't lose your virginity over a video feed, nothing you can do over one counts as sex, as far as I'm concerned; therefore camgirling is not a sex act). I have no issue with the term "prostitute" for people who take money for performing sex acts, especially if sex acts are the main component of what money is being taken for ("I hang out with you all day and at one point we have sex" feels borderline).
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I don't understand why, instead of offering cash upfront, she didn't first try bathing more frequently.
I don't know that it would make much of a difference given her requirements.
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It’s possible they are lying on their self-reports, but this study shows mate desirability falls when either male or female participants know the number of partners of a prospective match. Maybe there’s a better study somewhere. In the case of Alex Cooper, she is famous and worth $60 million dollars. Many men will look past flaws for fame and fortune.
I’m more confused why the FreePress is running this piece. I thought this was a conservative mag? Is it not anymore?
The Free Press is Bari Weiss's outlet, so the editorial line is generally speaking heterodox center left (like a 90s/early 2000s liberal) that goes soft on Trump because he's very pro Israel.
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Female Value = (Sexual attention she gives you)/(Sexual attention she gives/has-given others + 1) * (Everything Else)
If she gives you 0 sexual attention, she has no value. I am not making the claim that sex is the only thing women are good for, but the claim that a woman who is unwilling to have sex with you (even after marriage), clearly does not take you seriously as a partner. Even a woman who is for some biological reason incapable of PIV should still be interested in blowjobs or something.
If she has sex with thousands of other people in all sorts of kinky ways and then gets old and loses sexual interest and you end up in a boring vanilla relationship, that's bad.
If she has sex with a bunch of guys and then marries you and has a bunch of sex with you then that's fine.
If she is a virgin and has sex with you, and only you, and never anyone else, then that's a huge bonus.
All of this multiplies all of the other features. A big everything else like being hot and rich and funny are good features to have, and enough of them can make up for a large denominator in the fraction. But it's an uphill battle compared to someone chaste and loyal who is really really into you, specifically.
How is this consistent with the existence of celebrity simps and stalkers, who receive ~zero sexual attention from the target they value the most?
The fantasy in their heads substitutes for sexual attention. Hincley thought Jodie Foster would pay attention after the fact of his attempt at killing Reagan, so thats just action preceding outcome. Stalking and online simping lets the fantasy of the future potential be generated entirely in the head of the admirer, with little cost to the object of affection. Egirl with jannies modding their socials for free lean into this and since its all remote theres no downside.
Well, then you need to argue that imagined/expected/fantasised-about sexual attention does not usually constitute a significant term in male perception of female value.
By coincidence, just today I got myself re-earwormed by this tango classic, which is about the male protagonist lamenting how he repeatedly gets baited by imagined sexual attention. Surely its popularity suggests that the sentiment resonates.
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It ought to be a truth universally acknowledged- although of course it isn't- that those who have lots of boy/girl friends are for the most part those possessing of the necessary sanguinity in temperament to generally attain to a high degree of success in all of the more ordinary tasks of social intercourse besides, and that these must be acknowledged as more desirable for all the normal reasons. It furthermore ought- although it often isn't- to be acknowledged that these chaste virgins sitting on the sidelines do not particularly want to date and marry Clav, their Mr Darcy may bear physical resemblance to him but is entirely unlike him in other ways.
But all that being said, there really is a large premium for social skills paid in all social tasks, including the mating game. To the sexually frustrated men reading this- go out and socialize. That alone explains a huge portion of this gap- do you think Justinian found Theodora's sexual history incredibly appealing, or Pericles Aspasia's, or Napoleon Josephine's? No, they wanted someone they could interact with as a friend rather than the stereotypical prissy upper-class wife of the day.
I suspect Aspasia's line of work did appeal somewhat to Pericles. He had a side that enjoyed a little rakish scandalizing (particularly in the Socratic tradition, which is at pains to show that Alcibiades didn't get his villainy from Socrates, but it's also evident in Plutarch).
I'll also note that in my experience this question of sexual history goes away somewhat on a psychological level if you as a guy rack up a high body count and some confidence in your skills in bed, and leveling up social skills is a first step to that.
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Not sure Alex Cooper is a great example. She has good genes. Probably legitimately top 1% in looks and has over a $100 million after tax. I would marry her. That wouldn’t refute that don’t be a slut isn’t good advice for most girls. Not going to debate whether slut or not slut is better. All things being equal I would prefer the not slut. But all things are not equal.
In general people of greater ability can do thing and get away with things that would be harmful for people of lesser ability.
Personally I can do things like actively trade or go play poker and it benefits me. I would not recommend gambling to probably 99% of the population.
In modern American society my gut says I would advise young women to go be a slut. It opens a lot of doors for you and not being a slut is socially awkward now. Though I think it may be very psychologically damaging.
Hm, as always with this topic, it does seem to me that people draw a ton of conclusions based on the apex fallacy. It's hard to avoid the reality that people you notice are, definitionally, people who are high status enough to be noticed, and, as such, do not accurately reflect the reality of the everyday person. What sucks is that the one societal institution that has the responsibility of cutting through the bias and fallacies to get at the truth of these things has so completely discredited itself that it has become worse than worthless for it.
That's my take on it.
There are MANY, MANY things that someone who is top 1% in status (by whatever means they came into it) can just 'get away' with that is likely to wreck someone who attempts it while even slightly outside that top tier.
Bill Belichek can date a woman who could be his granddaughter (Hugh Hefner also got away with this). Elon can sire kids with multiple women he is not married to.
I mentioned a while back that there seem to be two main stable social norms around human mating.
Either everyone is held to monogamous standards (but we expect people to fail), or nobody is... but this means top tier guys collect a harem and lower tier guys duke it out over the remains.
We're in a very uncomfortable transitory period where both sort of exist simultaneously but the exceptions that have been carved out are causing the foundations of the former to crumble in a way that may take it out entirely. Maybe already has.
This can indeed apply to women too. Madonna gets a boy toy. Beyonce sings a ballad for single ladies the same year she got married to an extremely wealthy man herself. Alex Cooper gets celebrity ladies to admit to ridiculous beliefs and behaviors that, were it a (lower status) male were saying it would sound almost psychopathic. Which, it turns out, is basically what the Fresh and Fit Podcast gets tarred with, rightly or wrongly.
Alex Cooper also gets her happy marriage regardless since she's attractive, wealthy, and now a celebrity in her own right.
This whole topic gets perilously close to my rant on elite accountability. Elites face few consequences for encouraging behaviors in the lower classes that lead to horrific outcomes, and use their status to achieve the outcomes they want regardless of their own misdeeds.
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It seemed to me that this was essentially what remained of @2rafa's point, after one cleaned up the slightly muddled argument, anyway. Relatedly-
If you define "psychological damage" sufficiently broadly, is this not just the two sides of the deal offered by any form of social interaction? The modal rat-adjacent slightly right-wing homeschooled CHAD would like to keep the purity of his autistic trains of thought, birthed from the dust of the internet and nursed in its dark corners like the medieval idea of a, well, rat; but his life success will increase if he goes to college, has his rough corners filed off by the feminised DEIcracy and learns to talk the talk of successful people. The monk-like mathematician would like to stay in his ivory tower counting ordinal angels on the head of a pin, but three increasingly depressing postdocs with overwhelming teaching load later he gives up, starts spending his nights on HN and before long he is grifting funding from schmucky finance bros with papers about smart contracts instead.
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Makes sense. Partying and hookups in a woman's 20s is signaling that she's wealthy and energetic enough to be able to do that, likes sex a lot, and has decent judgement that she didn't end up traumatized by it.
Women I've known who did that seem to be ending up with mixed results, since they go on to have a series of several year long relationships in their late 20s and early 30s, and it's easy to mess up the timing there. But most women I've known haven't been able to go out all the time anyway. They're working, a bit tired, and don't enjoy short term sexual relationships, which sounds like the more common female experience.
Yeah I think this is true, though from the male perspective it can be pretty hard to discern whether or not she ended up traumatized and, not to be cruel, that's something that can be very unpleasant to deal with in a relationship and you'd avoid if you could. People on the internet like to believe that everyone in the outgroup gets the worst-case scenario (e.g. "all party girls will cheat on you", "all picket-fence nuclear families have bad shit behind closed doors"), but there's always a distribution of outcomes.
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Tangential to your point but alex cooper has that high cheekbone look so popular in hollywood that I find absolutely repulsive, so I would not in fact date alex cooper if given the chance.
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