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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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The formula is true for the average/typical male, not universal. Evolution gears men to be attracted to healthy fertile human women. However biology and psychology are complicated, and so different people develop differently. Some men end up attracted to things like feet or armpits, which are much worse signals for fertility than breasts or hips. Some men end up attracted to dogs or other men, who can't bear their children. Some men have a fetish for cuckoldry, which decreases the chance any children they have are actually theirs. Some men end up deciding to not have children and their genetic line ends. Some men end up stalking people who don't want them. Stalkers are not normal, healthy, or common. If you look at per capita out of all men, how many of them are stalkers, they're quite infrequent. It's just that celebrities are also infrequent so if you pair all the potential stalkers with all the celebrities they end up disproportionately prevalent.

Plenty of individual men break the formula. But if you look on a population level, averages dominate the market. If the majority of men dislike X, then having X decreases your ability to find a good partner. You either need to tradeoff to find a partner who likes your good qualities enough to make up for this flaw, leaving you with a lower value than you otherwise would have, or you need to get lucky searching among the subset of people who don't think X is a flaw. This can be done. If X is really important to you and you not only want someone who would tolerate it but would actively embrace and encourage it, then maybe advertising and amplifying X to disqualify the majority of partners is a good thing for you. I know I did that with being a nerd. When I was single on online dating I actively advertised my nerdiness to screen off anyone who would consider that a negative. But it does significantly curtail your options and make it harder to find a partner. And you can only do it with so many things. If being a massive slut is the core of someone's identity, the hill they're willing to die on, then I suppose they can do that. But it's a heavy cost, and is unlikely to lead to good long-term results in my opinion (especially since the majority of men who are okay with promiscuous women are likely to be promiscuous themselves and less likely to settle down).

Some men end up attracted to things like feet or armpits, which are much worse signals for fertility than breasts or hips.

Disagree. I have noticed that even otherwise stunning MILFs tend to have veiny feet. In fact, that's my theory for why foot fetishism is so prevalent in men; pretty feet are a hard to fake signal of youth.

I was under the impression that it was cross-wiring in the brain due to feet and sexual organs being modeled in physically close proximity in the brain.

I've read this hypothesis thrown about a bunch, but I don't think I've seen it actually substantiated empirically. We'd need at least like 3 fMRI studies done by 3 different institutions all trying to prove each other wrong having no choice but to publish that they found evidence of some sort of this cross-wiring that was different in people with foot fetishes versus those who didn't before we could conclude anything like this.