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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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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.

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."

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.

It seems to be the opposite: it's is a matter of highly subjective judgment so any group of sufficiently motivated humans can just change the prevailing social judgment or just ignore it.

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.