site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

When Sluts Settle Down

Of course there were men who wanted to sleep with Alex Cooper, and of course there was a man who wanted to marry her, too

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.

Andrew Tate once posted that he rejects “women who have slept with more than 3 men. Vile.” And the guys they influence might claim in the group chat that they would marry only a pure, virginal woman. But if a woman who looked like Cooper asked any of those guys out on a date, you best believe they’d jump at the chance—no matter how many notches she had on her bedpost.

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:

When she meets the man she wants as her husband, she’ll go get him. Meanwhile, her chaste peers are often left paralyzed on the sidelines, waiting for a hypothetical Prince Charming who respects their sacred timeline and who ticks all the boxes, only to find themselves in a perpetual state of situationship purgatory.

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.

Very true. A few related thoughts:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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.

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.

Yeah I don't think the shower frequency is going to be the immediate disqualifying factor for the 140 IQ, open relationship comfortable tech 9-fig+ guy she's probably hoping for.

The open relationship is a complete non-starter for any guy she’s likely to be interested in that has a brain cell. Any woman who would front the idea of an open relationship either already has someone in mind, or is cheating on you and just doesn’t want to bother with having to hide things anymore. The only real men out there of her wish pool that would “tolerate” that are ones that don’t have options.

Open relationships are kind of an inverse bell curve thing for men, IMO.

If you're bottom percentile you'll go for them out of desperation. If you're top percentile and can trivially attract casual sex from other women, then it has an appeal again even if not everybody will go for it. If you're anywhere in the middle of sexual attractiveness it's inherently skewed where the woman in the relationship will have about 10000x the ease of attracting casual sex partners and it's thus skewed.

Though on the other hand you could just make the argument that somebody on the far right side of the curve is also incentivized to just pick a girl who's monogamous and tolerates his philandering.

If you're top percentile and can trivially attract casual sex from other women, then it has an appeal again even if not everybody will go for it.

In certain subcultures, being in this level means you feel you don't need an open relationship; you can just a) cheat or b) enforce a one-sided/Islamic polyamory model. It certainly doesn't mean "complicate my life by having someone sleep with my wife".

Much more common in the entertainment and athletic fields than the ones Aella frequents so she has that going for her I guess.

That's what 'pick a girl who's monogamous and tolerates the philandering' is gesturing to, though. I'd also imagine that even in top end tech circles that very few men have clout that transfers to instantaneous endless bitches in the way that an entertainment/athletic top ender has

More comments

enforce a one-sided/Islamic polyamory model.

"Open relationship" is the way to launder this arrangement to make it palatable in a politically progressive context.

More comments