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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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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.

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