site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6145 thread views

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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I am generally not for marriage age gaps of -10 years, nor am I for it when these teachers are cheating on their husbands, but the cruel way in which Americans punish these women is absurd. Realistically they should just lose their careers and only go to jail for a few years if their husband presses charges for adultery. At least adultery actually has a victim. Why do Americans refuse to have adultery laws but yet they have all these absurdly cruel victimless crime sex laws? There is nothing actually being done to the teenage boy when he consensually has sex with his cougar teacher. Don't Americans see that when they assign these heavy handed sentences to such women, that they are the criminals?

IMO it's a straightforward projection of female vulnerability, the fear of being overpowered and exploited by a stronger man, onto male children, whom they imagine as equally helpless. Americans would jump out of their seats if they saw this German film where, an adult woman, stark naked, shared a scene with her then 12yo male co-star, even though the on-screen relationship between their respective characters was presented as an inherently unhealthy one.

FWIW I wouldn't be thrilled if a grown woman made sexual advances on my 15yo brother or son if I had one. Now I don't think the physical consequences of that relationship would have any pronounced difference if the boy in question was 14 as opposed to 16 (age of consent in my country), if he personally enjoyed it. But age of consent laws exist for a reason, there is still the moral quandary of blurring healthy boundaries at a critical stage of development.

Jumping off topic, I think @FtttG is hitting on something big here:

I don’t think the antinatalists, for the most part, are people who could have children if they wanted to, but are electing not to for moral reasons. I believe they are mostly profoundly mentally disturbed people with whom no one would want to have children, and who have erected a towering edifice of convoluted reasoning wherein this deficiency in fact makes them morally superior to the “breeders” in their vicinity. Their worldview is ultimately the product of sour grapes.

A very astute and widely applicable observation that can extend to any ideology that calls for radical upending of current societal arrangements. Its adherents don't actually want that, not really. They really just want to play the game the way the winners do. So naturally, they gravitate towards an arrangement where they're the winners. No incel would favour overhauling current dating market dynamics if he magically transformed to chad.

Yes, antinatalism is just one example of the general trend wherein politically radical people are almost invariably those who are least satisfied with their lives. An antifa meetup will not exactly be swimming with charming, good-looking people, but neither will a gathering of white supremacists.

If you're interested in this topic I highly recommend Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. I was a bit disappointed to find that I'd been scooped seven decades in advance.

Thanks for the rec. Yeah, I suspect a big part of why incels are so viscerally hated by other similarly maladjusted groups (transgenders, ANTIFA, /r/okbuddyliterallyme) is that they serve as an ugly, unfiltered mirror to their own insecurities and resentment over social/sexual rejection, but without dressing it up with pseudo-intellectual scaffolding or progressive moral language. Ironically, even when they larp as world-saving radicals online, they still submit to reddit leftist taboos for updoots (social acceptance). On the other hand, incels just say the quiet part out loud. That raw honesty makes them intolerable.

Why do Americans refuse to have adultery laws but yet they have all these absurdly cruel victimless crime sex laws?

The laws against young men having sex are mainly there as a logical/equal-opportunity side-effect of society's desire to punish sex with young women.

It's not that complicated.

I was an attractive youth and got some attention from pretty, relatively-young female teachers, but nothing over the line even given the much wider latitude afforded by society at the time. This was gratifying and is especially so in retrospect as I understand it better, whereas in the moment I didn't really know how to interpret anything and wasn't sure.

But when I was 16 I did babysit for a while for a military wife whose husband was often away, and she came on to me pretty strong. She'd touch me a lot and suggest that maybe sometime she could get another babysitter and the two of us could hang out. That kind of thing. Again, I wasn't fully sure about what was happening, and had the sense I should probably tell my parents about it, but chose not to. I didn't feel threatened, even though it was weird, and maybe a little exciting. She was very cute and probably about 28.

In retrospect it bothers me more. I am very glad she didn't push harder. I'm pretty sure I'd have refused, and probably gotten out okay, but it would have been severely traumatizing. And if I'd gone along with it, that would have been worse. Talk about life regrets! I care a lot about my sexual integrity and have never slept with anyone but my prior and current wife. I'm physically sick at the thought of that being taken from me when I was, mentally and spiritually, very much still a child who didn't exactly understand what was going on. And that's beside the damage to her family, and the community more generally if it were discovered, which I can only suppose it would have been eventually.

Perhaps in other cultures, where the rules of human engagement are spelled out clearly and boys are prepared for such things by 16, there could be room for older women pushing them into it. But having been close to something like that myself, I have no sympathy for the ones who do it in our culture.

I can respect that you have strong personal values around sex and relationships. But you're still describing a values violation and deep regret, not a clear physical assault. Feeling profoundly disgusted or used after a regretted encounter is real and common, but I highly doubt that you would've felt the degree of bodily violation, physical illness, and scathing hot showers to wash off her touch following that encounter, if you went through with it.

As a man, the closest analogue I can imagine to that level of visceral violation by a woman would be something like being pinned down by a morbidly obese landwhale with horrible breath, and having my dick forced to get hard inside her. This is precisely why most cultures throughout history — even highly patriarchal ones — have had no real concept of a female rapist. The evolutionary dynamics and physical consequences are simply not symmetrical.

Is this a joke? How would you not know what sexual intercourse is when your IQ was fully developed and you had been alive for over a decade and a half? It's not difficult.

Because generally that relationship is inversely proportional if you’re a smart kid.

Then empirically, they aren't that smart.

There is nothing actually being done to the teenage boy when he consensually has sex with his cougar teacher.

FWIW I am male and as a youth I had two incidents along these lines in which adult women attempted to groom me. One was a camp counselor and the other was a teacher. Fortunately nothing happened and both of these women were nice enough to back off once they realized I wasn't interested sexually.

I'm not going to say that I was traumatized by these incidents, but they were mildly disturbing and I do think that female on male child molestation is more destructive than is thought by the "where were these women when I was a child" crowd.

Idk, it doesn't make sense intuitively that much, causing you discomfort by unwanted advances doesn't mean they deserve to go to prison for years. I've never seen any compelling evidence that these women should go to prison, unless they cheated on their husband, but that's not why they go.

Idk, it doesn't make sense intuitively that much, causing you discomfort by unwanted advances doesn't mean they deserve to go to prison for years.

I would definitely agree with that and I am certainly not claiming otherwise. My point is that there is an element out there which seems to think it's basically a nothingburger if an adult woman in a position of authority seduces an underage male student. In my opinion, it's not.

Idk, it doesn't make sense intuitively that much, causing you discomfort by unwanted advances doesn't mean they deserve to go to prison for years.

Talk about moving goalposts. We're not talking about causing discomfort by making unwanted advances, we're talking about sex, and some of us are still backward enough to think that's a big deal.

Talk about moving goalposts. We're not talking about causing discomfort by making unwanted advances, we're talking about sex, and some of us are still backward enough to think that's a big deal.

There is no way to consistently think sex is a big enough deal that are willing lock up single women for having sex with a 16 year old boy consensually, but you refuse to log up adulterers in general. Adultery actually has a victim, the Hanania meme does not.

An adult woman can't have consensual sex with an underage boy by definition. Adults cheating on one another don't need society to step in. Adults fucking kids do.

I think your definition is wrong. Whatever age you decide on as the cutoff, it means that the society assumes consent when both partners are above this age, modulo literal mental disability.

Below this age? The lack of consent is not automatic (and if it is, it's the fault of a badly written law), the assumption of the lack of consent is. The couple has to prove their relationship is healthy when challenged, but they should be able to prove it.

I would be fine with two cutoff dates, with the lower one separating "definitely a crime" from "could be problematic".

The couple has to prove their relationship is healthy when challenged, but they should be able to prove it.

It has nothing to do with the outcome for the couple (insert "I consent/I consent/I don't" meme here).

Whatever age you decide on as the cutoff, it means that the society assumes consent when both partners are above this age

It doesn't even do this now. It's actually impossible to consent to sex; participants cannot bind themselves in this way (and may cry rape/coercion ex post facto at any time no matter how ridiculous it is).

But that was the problem with defining "consent" to stop needing to have the "sex isn't harmful to anyone, so that's why kids can have it" argument in the first place. Consent is simply waiving the veto power society entitles you to over sex, which is why doing so is not possible.

Wow. If we were in a bar I would demand some more details. Unless your expression was telling me don't.

Shared my similar story here and you're welcome to ask questions though I don't think I have much more to say about it.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats