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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   21589 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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Kino Review: Backrooms

Spoiler warning obviously.

Backrooms the movie is superficially based on the 4chan meme “the backrooms”, and yes, there are lots of fun found-footage scenes visually exploring the aesthetics of liminal spaces, but good horror movies are never about the monster, they are about what the monster represents. Backrooms is about the fear that no educated professional white woman will ever love you.

Male Lead is a black entrepreneur who runs a local furniture store. Female Lead is his upstanding attractive white PhD therapist. Male Lead is in therapy primarily because his financially dependent law student wife (who is also an attractive white woman) left him.

It is hinted that Female Lead is also lonely and wants children. From a purely narrative perspective, it might seem as if Male Lead and Female Lead are destined to get together at some point. Taking into account their respective biographies, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA of course that wouldn’t happen. He is a schlubby loser from a lower social class and an unprestigious career. You can practically taste the ick she feels behind the professional facade in every scene they have together. It's great.

The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.

Given widening education and earning gaps between men and women, this is very quickly becoming a theme that men of any race can sympathize with, and it probably makes a good thematic hook for a film aimed at young men. What I find strange is that they cast two actors that are pushing fifty for a movie primarily aimed at zoomers. Maybe they are relying on the IP to bring in young people, and using the casting to broaden the audience demographics a bit.

they cast two actors that are pushing fifty

Renate Reinsve is only thirty-eight.

Well, if I go by the comments of some of the gentlemen on here around female fertility/SMV, once a woman hits thirty it's automatic Old Hagdom. So if she's 38, she's a crone and practically fifty. All dried up. Eggs running out, and only stale, lousy, ancient eggs remaining if she tries to have babies (never mind that historically women were having babies well into their thirties and forties). Looks old, tired, wrinkled, saggy unlike fresh youthful men of that age who always remain attractive up to age seventy at least.

I don't think any of those gentlemen have said that there aren't hot sixty-year-old women (East Asians are notorious for this) or that sixty-year-old men always look attractive. They just said that the former can't have kids and the latter can. (If some of them have said the wrong statement, well, they're wrong.)

In case I'm one of the people you're counting as "some of the gentlemen", I would remind you that what I said was that the chances of making four kids with a woman who's already past 30 when you meet her start to get dicey.

No, it's more than just fertility. I think there is an element of jealousy beneath it all, that (some) men resent being attracted to women. They resent that girls gatekeep sex (and if the girls don't, then they're sluts and whores, so there's no winning either way). They resent having to be the one to pursue it. They resent that girls are the standard of attraction.

So any little stick they can use to beat the dog gets grabbed: The Wall. Oh yeah, you'll be thirty, ugly, alone, childless because your eggs dried up, and I'll be in my prime, bitch!

Do you ever talk to AI? I have this unaccountable sense that you'd probably enjoy it.

Never, the one half-assed attempt I made didn't impress me much. Mind you, I barely talk to people as it is. I have no interest in pretending a toaster has a rich interior life which it can communicate to me.

I just watched it. I'm a fan of all the Kane Parsons YouTube series, and have spent time on the Backrooms fan community wiki. I prefer Parsons' universe as its more consistent with its lore.

I thought it was good. 7-8/10. Mainly because I like the lore and got more out of it than your average normie.

I like how the lore was expanded and it puts past renditions of 'monsters' into hi-res context, which is great. The universe is more or less fleshed out now in detail, so if this movie does well commercially we might get more.

The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation.

This is a very valid interpretation of the film. My theory is that the 'copies' of people are influenced by the mental integrity of the person copied. Clearly Clark was mentally unstable due to alcoholism, his external locus of control, his suppressed anger at his ex-wife, not helped by his undisclosed (nonlinear?) time stuck in the backrooms alone.

As usual with Backrooms, I love that they have normies enter the place and do normie things, which is kind of part of the setting. I don't get how the 'other organisation' is still so unprepared, incompetent and shit scared at going in there, but I guess they're like MRI technicians or something and completely unprepared to that environment.

I feel obligated to post a link to the mildly entertaining story Two Gay Furries Kissing in the Backrooms (behind a login wall; here are the first 30 chapters/⁓70,000 words in HTML and PDF), in which two men (an autistic computer programmer and an outgoing NEET living on life-insurance proceeds) (1) are teleported into the backrooms and transformed into anthro/furry characters (a tall fox and a short cat, respectively), (2) meet each other, and (3) fall in love while exploring. Despite the suggestive title, romance does not start until chapter 28 (the end of part 1), and sex does not occur until chapter 54 (part 2 chapter 26, the end of part 2; the characters magically do not need to eat or drink, so no special preparation is necessary). According to the author:

This is a plot-first, long-form, slow-burn romance/slice-of-life story. It's "plot with some porn eventually", so to speak.

But "plot" is a bit of a stretch. IMO, it's the kind of cute-but-utterly-pointless fluff that I used to seek out 15 years ago under the "NaruHina" label on fanfiction.net.

The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.

I'm reminded of a Spongebob meme I saw a while ago, a comic made up of screenshots where, IIRC, Spongebob is ordering from Squidward, with alternating frames, saying, "In my medieval fantasy story, it turns out that the church is actually evil," "How original," "And the demons are actually the good guys!" "Daring, are we?" It's quite possible and even likely that there's some valuable insight and even challenge there, but this is such well-trod ground that comports with the general thrust of basically all media in the mainstream that this description, in itself, makes it sound boring, if not tiresome. That said, it all comes down to the execution, of course.

I used to have fun asking people if they could think of a few examples of evil priests in fiction. No problem of course; there are many. Then I'd ask if they could think of any non-evil priests in fiction. Crickets.

Over the years a couple of examples have come up, of course, but mainly it's a landslide in the other direction. Particularly for anyone who mainly consumes contemporary media as opposed to reading Chesterton or something.

There's a large amount of contemporary fiction where there's a priest character who is a bastard/failure, but everyone else is basically a bastard/failure as well.

Ignoring Japanese media for reasons others have alluded to.

David Eddings' Elenium has at the very least Sephrenia, Dolmant and the Cammorian pastor, and more broadly essentially all the non-royal Good Guys (there's some degree of question whether explicitly-religious crusading paladins count as priests or not). The main bad guys are a corrupt priest trying to take over the fantasy stand-in for Christianity (but not succeeding), a corrupt paladin, and a priest of an evil god. There are a couple of good priests in the Malloreon, too, but the vast majority of the priests in the Belgariad/Malloreon are bad (unless you count Belgarath/Polgara as priests, which is complicated).

Terry Brooks' Elfstones of Shannara has one of the characters be a straight-up religious martyr, overcoming a crisis of faith and all. I'm not sure it'd entirely pass reactionary muster, though, seeing as she's a priestess and men explicitly couldn't accomplish what she did for vague magic reasons. The Word and the Void trilogy is also to a large extent about a paladin.

Babylon 5, of course, has a whole pile of good priests including some actual Christian ones. I think the only evil priest is the insane Soul Hunter who's explicitly disavowed by the rest of the Soul Hunters.

Deep Space Nine has a few non-evil priests, although the Space Pope is evil for 70% of the series. Sisko himself is, again, complicated.

I've only played Morrowind of the Elder Scrolls games, but in Morrowind the Imperial Cult are straight-up good guys, and despite the main quests of vanilla/Tribunal taking a wrecking-ball to it, the Tribunal Temple clearly has a lot of good in it as well (just also a fair bit of rot).

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is... complicated, since all the faction leaders are supposed to have good and bad qualities, but Deirdre Skye and Miriam Godwinson are canonically two of the nicer ones, and they're both priests, Miriam a Christian one (though in-game the AI for Miriam keeps trying to kill you for not being a theocracy).

Look at the dates on those.

Elenium: 1989-1992

Elfstones of Shanarra: 1982

Babylon 5: 1994-1998

Deep Space Nine: 1993-1999

Morrowwind: 2002

Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri: 1999

And even then, for culture war purposes, priests of fantasy religions shouldn't count.

I thought about mentioning the dates, but I've not actually consumed much post-2010 Western media.

If we're not counting priests of fantasy religions, then we shouldn't count evil fantasy priests and evil fantasy religions, either. I think that would cut down the initial grievance by a lot.

That's fair, but on the other hand there's also the tendency for evil priests to include the things that people hate the most about religion while there is no corresponding tendency for good priests to include the things that people find positive about religion. An evil priest who is a demagogue is not really balanced by a good priest who is just a spell battery.

Dolmant, the Cammorian pastor, the girl from Elfstones of Shannara, a decent chunk of the priests in Babylon 5 (though not so much the Minbari religious caste), Bareil, the Imperial Cult, the Tribunal Temple, and Miriam Godwinson, at least, do priestly stuff on-screen.

Then I would count them, with the caveat that it's still all from so long ago that it isn't part of any modern trend.

More comments

The Cleric in Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God? Um... huh. This is more difficult than I expected, and I expected there to not be many. Oh, the priests - both Catholic and Protestant - in The Quiet Man. I'm actually kind of surprised by the lack of chaplains in media I consume... the only ones I recall are from The Longest Day (good), Bill the Galactic Hero (evil), and Phule's Company (Elvis). If nuns count, there's a good nun in Our Flag Means Death, and there's the titular Vicar of Dibley...

In addition to Frieren already mentioned by @ChickenOverlord, there's other examples of a 100% good church in anime:

https://myanimelist.net/anime/48761/Saihate_no_Paladin (Good Paladin)

https://myanimelist.net/anime/52082/Shiro_Seijo_to_Kuro_Bokushi/ (Saint romcom)

Though, it is common trope that the church is evil too.

Are we talking about Christian priests or just any priests at all?

William of Baskerville from Name of the Rose comes to mind. Also Padre Benicio Del Toro from Machete. Father Paul Dure and Father Captain Federico de Soya from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos.

The church in the anime Frieren is objectively good. The priest character you first encounter is a bit of a colorful character (he likes his alcohol a bit too much, among other things) but he's a good person generally. And there's another priest who shows up later who has a gambling problem and similar issues but is, once again, a decent person overall.

Trigun, trivially, but that’s Eastern media and probably doesn’t count.

Shepherd Book works, although he’s a little harsh.

“Father, don’t the bible have something to say about killin’”?

“It does. It is however a mite fuzzier on the topic of kneecaps.”

Such a squandered character. Idk, Firefly used to be the best thing ever to me but at some point in the last couple of years I seem to have gotten over it.

I can think of a number in anime. Ghost Hunt has one, for instance. Of course, the factors which make there be a lot of evil priests in fiction don't apply to anime.

Particularly for anyone who mainly consumes contemporary media as opposed to reading Chesterton or something.

There is a pretty popular Father Brown TV show on the BBC that’s been running for ten years, so regular people may have more familiarity with the character than you might think.

non-evil priests in fiction

Zadok is the obvious example. Father Ted and Co. as well, although I accept there is scope for disagreement here.

Zadok from the Old Testament? Is this one of those "move all the Bibles into the fiction section of the bookstore" things?

Admittedly at first I got him mixed up with Zardoz and was like man I guess I should have finished watching that movie.

Yep, that Zadok. Although I was mostly thinking of Handel's Zadok the Priest anthem and his Solomon opera where Zadok is a character.

Father Ted and Co. as well

So we have:

  • the titular character, a greedy, embittered narcissist, sent to Craggy Island as punishment for his assorted financial improprieties – his catchphrase is literally "That money was just resting in my account!"
  • Father Jack Hackett, a violent, greedy alcoholic routinely implied to harbour ephebophilic tendencies
  • Bishop Len Brennan, a cantankerous bully who takes pleasure in humiliating the protagonists, and who does not take his oath of celibacy remotely seriously
  • Father Dick Byrne, Father Ted's opposite number and hence like him in almost every way.
  • Father "Todd Unctious", who becomes so obsessed with trophies and trinkets that he tries to steal one of Ted's (and steals a fellow priest's vestments as a disguise despite himself being a priest and having vestments of his own, seemingly out of spite)

There is also Father Dougal, who can't be called evil only by virtue of being too stupid to understand the consequences of his actions.

I genuinely can't think of a single sympathetically portrayed priest in the show.

You've almost piqued my interest enough to watch the film. Almost.

the fear that no educated professional white woman will ever love you

My life improved immeasurably once I genuinely stopped giving a shit what this type of person thought about me. It concerns me now about as much as I am concerned by the fact that no herd of American bison will ever love me.

Bisons are majestic though.

Fair point. I guess being loved by a herd of bison could indeed help the soul and I shouldn't have been so dismissive about them. My point still stands about educated professional white women.

How could you so blithely compare the two?

One is a capricious herd animal that can suddenly get mad at you for no reason. The other is the bison.

Would you rather be alone in the woods with a herd of American bison or an educated professional white woman?

Isn't that a false parallel?

I imagine a full herd would be antsy and anxious in the woods. They want to graze on tall grass in a prairie and run together, they'd feel confined by too many trees and very quickly get hungry.

Depends, am I at a safe distance from both? Othwise it's picking my poison of physical damage vs professional/psychiatric damage.

No bison ever called me a chud.

Bison are very hazardous and best enjoyed at a safe distance; if an entire herd of them loved you, I suspect you would not be long for the world.

They’re a pretty good anti-compass for me and mine; what’s generally good for their social position is bad for me and my family and vice versa with the exception of things that are extremely obviously bad for everyone like nuclear holocaust or something akin to that.

Systemically destroying their social power will almost always get my support.

Systemically destroying their social power will almost always get my support.

I didn't realize bison had that much social power.

They’re clearly possessed with the demonic souls of long dead enemy native tribes hell bent on revenge against the USA. Wake up, sheeple!

Wait wait wait - the film has a black man pursuing a white woman for sexual purposes against her will and without her consent?

Hoo-boy. How did it get made? Doesn't it know this is the Emmet Till Murder motivation? Doesn't it know how the myth of white female purity being assaulted by rapacious black men was behind so many lynchings?

I'm being slightly facetious here, but only slightly. I've seen some mention of the movie online but nothing about this being the plot. Has Peak Woke indeed passed?

EDIT: Okay, reading the Wikipedia article on the movie, it's slightly different. The monster existed there before the Male Lead discovered these places, and it seems that whatever is there, if there is anything independent there, shapeshifts into a version of the latest real-world person who stumbles in. So it's not, as described, a creation of the Male Lead's id and the backrooms being creations of his as well. That makes more sense for a movie adaptation, not "scary sexuality of scary black men pursuing white women".

No one noticed the unfortunate implications because the character is so aggressively white-coded. He wears khakis and button up shirts and drives a somewhat boring BMW. Ejiofor uses a flat California accent and talks like an educated professional (the character is a failed architect) with no traces of AAVE.

I may be prejudiced because Chiwetel Ejiofor is a fine lookin' man so the stereotype of Scary Black Guy doesn't register with me. Don't know how they make him look in the movie, though.

I have only seen the film once, but I think the Wikipedia summary is an overly literal interpretation. In the context in which the monster is first fully revealed onscreen, it is a metaphorical extention of the frustration and aggression of Male Lead towards Female Lead.

Title IX on campus has already been disproportionately used against black men. Nobody dares question it except a few right wingers.

Black men and white women are both on the woke scale, so being against the former and for the latter is inter-woke conflict, not the woke losing. White women are in theory less oppressed, but they influence more media.

For all the talk about women "hitting the wall", it seems quite evident to me the average male has an even limiting shelf-life, if even that. Online is full of guys who never recovered from their loss of childhood social value. The older I get, the more I've come to believe that humans are only mostly monogamous, or rather "serially monogamous". In the absence of monogamous social constraints, the "low value males" (real or perceived) slip to the wayside and struggle to recover. This movie seems to capture that psychology (mostly) accurately.

Oof. That guy from Twitter...

Being a man is brvtal

At first; everyone thinks ur cute, ur face looks angelic and cute - women think ur adorable and want to protect u

Then u slowly watch urself turn into a Ugly Hairy Ape Gorilla Monkey and most women want you to die and call u a creep weirdo

This is either a man who has a deeply inaccurate perception of social reality or is hardcore engagement-baiting, or both.

If it's the former, and maybe even if it's the latter, then there's a good chance that this man's troubles with women have at least as much to do with his mental issues as it does with the transformations of puberty.

Yeah that was truly one of the most... unique tweets I've bookmarked and I keep coming back to it. I think he did hit on something big on the mental repercussions of male puberty, but there's a level of self-awareness in his nihilism that I find fascinating. His entire tweet history (monologuing about the "low value male" lifepath) reads like someone who stared into the abyss and liked what he saw.

In women's defence they stop viewing us as cute because we stop being cute. If the average man is anything like me, and I'm a very average type of a man, there's a distinct change from being silly kids who want to show them the cool thing that we discovered into randy buggers who mostly just want to see their tits and are put out that they're reluctant to oblige.

Looking at the guy's Twitter though he just reads like a contrarian shitposter. It's reminiscent of Hlynka's bit about people being so immersed in a woke-adjacent worldview that even their rejection of it is framed in the same terms. It's very "You want navel-gazing idpol gender conflict? Okay, but this time men are the victims! Ha!".

I remember feeling like that as a teenager and young adult. Puzzled at why women suddenly treated me so different and feeling the pressure of expectations suddenly trust upon me. Then I started reading social media which only made it worse. Puberty is hard and the social expectations for men are rough, especially if you were never really prepared for them. I can believe some people would stay in that mindset for a while.

I never really encountered this. It certainly wasn’t a sudden transition. My experiences didn’t change drastically when I hit puberty; women in authority liked me before, and liked me after. The girls didn’t pay me much attention before, but paid me a bit more attention after. My mom’s attitude didn’t get worse in any way. If anything, I felt my connections with women improved after puberty, but I also had a tough childhood.

I didn’t feel the kind of pressure you’re hitting at until I was around 24 or 25. Even then it was pretty light pressure. It’s fair that people have higher expectations for productivity, emotional control, and accomplishment for grown adults than for children.

So, I don’t know. I believe you and the tweeter are talking about a real phenomenon, and I’m aware of deeply misandrist women, even mothers, who treat their boys as dangerous rather than beloved once they reach puberty.

It’s true that there have been various times in my life where my negative emotion was seen concernedly in a way it might not have if a woman experienced the same thing, but this has always been defused by actually talking about it and demonstrating reflectiveness and control. I feel like every relationship I’ve had with women has rewarded my ability to communicate emotionally, and I do wonder where the gap is between my experiences and other male experiences sometimes.

I don't really remember that.

I remember new expectations feeling unfair, or intimidating, or whatever. But it always seemed well explained why 'you're a teenaged boy, you don't get treated like a kid anymore, them's the breaks- but you also don't get to be treated like an adult'. Granted, I was a bit of a late bloomer and have been consistently physically attractive.

It's a matter of how you are raised I imagine. Pre-puberty I rejected the idea of identifying with my gender and the roles that came with it. Still saw myself as a boy in the biological sense, but didn't really care for the social role of "boy" or "man". I was told by authority figures around me this was fine. So puberty ended up hitting extra hard. Had the LGBT culture been more active where I lived, I might have become nonbinary.

I imagine the more boyish girls get a similar reality check, going from playing in the mud with the boys to someone who is obviously, undeniably female and treated as such.

Turning it back to the culture war, there is a real question here of how much we should enforce gender roles on young children, and what we do with the girls and boys who don't cleanly fit the mold.

We should tell them to fit the mold. I benefited greatly from enforced sports, and girls seem to benefit from skirts and babysitting and home economics.

But I also don't remember much tolerance for gender bending. I remember 'that's feminine' as similar to 'that's low class' or 'that's wrong'(and for my sister 'ladies don't do that'). And people, even tomboys, raised that way turn out fine.

That would be the conservative answer, I suppose. It is also the answer that pushes people towards the LGBT. While the manosphere recruits men vilified by leftism, the leftists recruit men and women who have felt gender roles to be stifling with little benefit. There are absolutely people who will run from the mold the moment they get the chance.

But of course, it is the duty of adults to guide children. Defining their identity by themselves is not really something most young kids are capable of.

I think there are multiple ways to embody masculine traits in ways that suit different kinds of boys. The academic is different from the sports star, and both are different from the politician. But they can all be men. It is the duty of the parents to figure out what kind of archetypes and traits suit their children the best, and try to raise them accordingly. You may push your academically inclined son to do sports for the sake of his health and physical capabilities, but you are okay with him not excelling at it, since that is not the arena you expect him to compete in. His brother who is much more talented with his body can then be pushed harder as he actually enjoys the competitions and pushing his body to its limits.

Where you really run into problems though, is when manhood is defined as performative nonsense and subsequently discarded, leaving boys to figure everything out from scratch.

Definitely. I remember feeling that way too. It sucked. It's hard for me to imagine how a man would jump from such an experience to "most women want you to die and call u a creep weirdo" unless he absorbed exaggerations from social media. As you said, social media made it worse for you. If this guy isn't engagement baiting, then perhaps social media made it much worse for him. What one pays attention to is usually selective and emotion-dependent. If you become convinced for some reason that women despise you, it's easy to go online and find examples from various nutcases and engagement bait artists who will confirm you in that belief.

Sorry lads, are ye all complaining about "women think little boys are cute"? Well duh, of course! That's the evolutionary hook to get us to have babies and then stick around and not abandon the kids!

Going through puberty is hard on everybody, I have to say guys do have it extra tough what with voice breaking, wispy facial hair, etc.

But if this guy is really lamenting "Now I'm in my 20s/30s/40s no big mommy want to cuddle me and treat me like liddle baby boy cutie-face and protecc", um, I think there's an entire niche fetish website or two for that, friend.

Going through puberty is hard on everybody, I have to say guys do have it extra tough what with voice breaking, wispy facial hair, etc.

Maybe in the people-finding-you-pleasant-to-look-at sense it is. But to me as a guy, having to deal with menstruation and other female reproductive issues sounds like an order of magnitude worse.

Oh, waking up and finding you're bleeding out of your lower parts and panicking (back in the days before everyone was educated since age six about such things) was, as you can imagine, so much fun. Then "oh yeah this will happen for the better part of a week every month for the next forty years or so"?

But it's much less visible than what happens to boys. Though for girls, growing breasts does get you male attention, and creepy adult males leering at thirteen year olds is rare but does happen.

I imagine that suddenly being sexualised by your school classmates, maybe even your friends, to be a weird and difficult thing to sort out.

The male side is not all bad. I remember being pretty stoked about the rather sudden increase in strength. But the smell, the voicecracks, the fact that I was no longer "cute"... Then there was the increasing expectations that I was supposed to be confident, good at sport, have suitable levels of self control... All while experiencing new emotions with no one providing good advice on what to do. The flood of sexual desire in particular and just being told to essentially figure it out yourself, while knowing that losing control of yourself at the wrong time would be heavily punished, was distressing to say the least.

I still appreciate the strength boost. And while I am rarely cute, at least women find the physical changes attractive, assuming decent grooming and exercise practices.

I used to share Goodguy's perspective that periods are harder than anything I experienced. These days, I prefer to not compare suffering. Men and women go through different things with different pros and cons. And hopefully the advantages of adulthood makes puberty worth it.

No, he's just, like 80% of men, ugly in the eyes of women.

Thinking that "most women want you to die and call u a creep weirdo" if you are not in the top 20% of attractive men would be a profoundly inaccurate perception of reality.

They only do that if you attempt to interact with them in any way.

They don't, actually.

Like, I don't know if you interact with some unusually unpleasant set of women, are unusually unpleasant yourself, or simply have perceptual issues, but I promise that you do not need to be in the top quintile for hotness for women to not think you're a creep for existing near them.

The older I get, the more I've come to believe that humans are only mostly monogamous, or rather "serially monogamous".

We don't need to paint all of humanity with the same brush. In fact there's lots of room for individual and group-level variation here, even speaking on a purely instinctual level before nurture comes into it.

But look at the divorce rates in the developed world, once freed of all constraints of feudal society, and when operating purely on love and personal compatibility, half of all marriages do not last "till death do us part". So many dead bedrooms and married couples with kids falling out of love.

The Wall is about sexual value, not social value, as hitting it entails a strictly biological/bodily transformation.

it seems quite evident to me the average male has an even limiting shelf-life, if even that

Eh, I think the wall hits both sexes in the thirties. Losing all value when you hit puberty is pathetic, at least wait until your skufization.

I think men an women hit the wall 5 years apart. Historically, at 25 and 30, but today I guess most would agree you get some extra time. Although I don't know how much of that is cope.

Eh, I think the wall hits both sexes in the thirties. Losing all value when you hit puberty is pathetic, at least wait until your skufization.

I think "the wall" is an expression which isn't very well defined, allowing people to argue past each other. Obviously, everyone's physical appearance declines with age, male or female. But defining "the wall" in this way, elides a significant difference between men and women: Essentially all women suffer a steep and inevitable loss of sexual attractiveness at some point in their 30s, while men do not.

It's a myth that there's a "wall" with regard to female attractiveness in their 30s.

It's more of a steady, monotonic decline from the time women are in their late teens to early 20s. Checkmate, misogynistic redpillers.

Is it possible women are less attractive with age? No, it is the men who are wrong.

I don't think the loss of sexual attractiveness is steep for essentially all women. A woman who takes good care of her body will generally see a slow decline in sexual attractiveness over time in her 30s.

A woman who takes good care of her body will generally see a slow decline in sexual attractiveness over time in her 30s.

Compared to men?

I agree and I don't. I'd say it's like this:

  • the average drop is greater for women than men
  • at the same time, the pre-drop difference in innate attractiveness is still greater, so that women still end up on top
  • at the same time (again!), it's much easier for men to reduce their individual drop in sexual attractiveness and end up on top

In other words, women suffer a steep and inevitable loss of sexual attractiveness at some point in their 30s, while men suffer a steep and evitable loss.

There's some data to suggest at least in the online dating market women dominate before 25 but afterwards the average man of the same age has higher desirability.

I can attest to this. Guys, if you're single, over 30, and got burnt out on dating apps in your early 20s, give it another shot. Women in their mid-late 20s seem to be significantly more interested in 30-something men with their lives together (throw in a photo of you drinking an aperol spritz in front of the Colosseum and you're fucking golden) than guys their own age, and it feels amazing to finally be the "in demand" demographic for once.

In its essence the Wall is simply a biological reality - boys generally mature slower than girls but women also generally age faster then men. It's no wonder that an age gap of 3-5 years has been widespread in marriages throughout history (on both sides of the Hajnal Line, as far as I know, but again, I'm no ethnographer). And in societies where early marriage and childbirth plus enforced monogamy are the norm, the Wall practically does not matter, as the average woman hitting the Wall is already a wife and the mother of multiple children, plus soon to become a grandmother, in fact. So she already bought into the social fabric.

I suggest there are three main aspects to the Wall in the current social reality. One: there are more and more women hitting the Wall when they are single or at least childless, which then causes lots of hurt and disillusionment. Two: the worsening trends of female alcoholism, drug use, prescription pill abuse, sedentary and unhealthy lifestyles in general are all accelerating ageing, which makes the whole phenomenon worse. Three: a small but visible and loud minority of women are capable of spending a great deal of resources on anti-aging measures with notable success, which in turn creates the widespread illusion that the problem is much less worse than it actually is.

Greater Male Variability hypothesis wins again!

Anything is unlikely to be well-defined when any discussion of it is purged from society instantly even on the internet.

Anything is unlikely to be well-defined when any discussion of it is purged from society instantly even on the internet.

Yeah, I think that the issue here is that society is uncomfortable with differences between men and women if those differences favor men. So people have a tendency to deflect, distract, and distort when those differences are brought up.

It's interesting to note that people will readily agree to the existence of "the wall" provided it is framed in such a way as to make women seem superior to men. For example:

"Most men are creepily obsessed with youth when it comes to the women they date. Do you see the way Leonardo DiCaprio dates only young women and loses interest the moment they turn 30? Probably all men would do the exact same thing if they could."

This statement is basically identical to the way I defined the wall above. And yet one formulation will make people freak out while the other will make those same people nod their heads in agreement.

One of the pushbacks people will give is that DiCaprio's dating young women is a kind of moral failure. Therefore, your readers would disagree with it this way: many of them are morally upstanding and would only ever want to date someone with similar levels of life-experience and power. And so, they would take issue with "Probably all men..." bit.

Therefore, your readers would disagree with it this way: many of them are morally upstanding and would only ever want to date someone with similar levels of life-experience and power. And so, they would take issue with "Probably all men..." bit.

Sadly, I disagree. In mainstream discourse, claims along the lines of "Men are shitty!" typically get little or no push back.

A lot of people seem to have this mythical idea about "attractiveness" or "good looks" or "being pretty" or "beauty" or etc. that exists as a concept outside of human judgment, as if how "attractive" someone is isn't defined by how many and how hard other people actually are "attracted" to them. I think this sort of thinking is especially encouraged in women, which is why the idea that "all women are 10s" is so common among women. And why the idea "straight men will judge you, a straight woman, as less attractive" registers as something different from "you, a straight woman, is less attractive."

You have a point that slight reframing can change people's opinion depending on who is flattered and who is scolded, but the two statements here are not identical.

The way to reconcile this is to say that while older women are still objectively stunning and great catches, men refuse to acknowledge this because they want unequal, power-imbalanced relationships to oppress women. Over 30 women are too wise to all the manipulative tricks, they are harder to boss around, too financially and professionally stable which intimidates men etc.

True in my case. When I was a kid, girls in my class and even grown women would come up to me - sometimes even in the supermarket - and tell me I was "cute". You better believe that stopped the very minute I hit puberty; suddenly I was invisible to half the human race!

Related anecdote: thirty-some years ago I was in a shopping mall, and an attractive woman I had never seen before smiled, with real warmth, seemingly at me. Turns out she was actually smiling at a baby being carried by a woman right behind me! Sheesh, can't win for losing.

Your appearance obviously invoked motherly feelings as long as you were just a boy, that is all. It has nothing to do with The Wall.

As someone who hasn't seen the movie I assume there are two things going on. One: the store owner, unlike his female therapist, is not college-educated, which is a significant social barrier to a potential relationship between them. The therapist would probably suffer social ostracism if she paired up with him, which obviously could be offset were he an attractive stud, which he isn't. Which leads to - Two: it'd be possible for a store owner entrepreneur and a therapist to have a successful marriage, as the difference in terms of social status does not seem to be that big, but again, mutual attraction needs to be there for that first.

Well, I imagine that probably makes for a bad backrooms movie if true. Horror fiction that touches on the weirdness that can happen in romantic relationships can be very interesting, I think, but that is not what the backrooms is about.

Weighted by screentime, the majority of the film is about the aesthetics of 90s furniture stores. It's hard to convey this feeling by text, so I focused on the thematic subtext of class and relationships.

Having thought on it more, the one healthy relationship in the film is between Male Lead's two employees. They are both lower-middle class. They even have the exact same job!

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