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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Eugenics as a whole necessarily entails external limits put upon female sexual choice by a state authority which is a notion that is extremely off-putting to modern women. I'm assuming this is the most likely explanation.

This is needlessly limiting criterion, almost example noncentral fallacy. Eugenics is not only a government policy, it is also an ideology and a social movement. Eugenicists are interested in outcome of improving DNA of the population, the means to do that can vary. There were rabidly antistatist eugenicist of old, such as radical libertarian Herbert Spencer. They had more in common with modern technocratic approach of "nudges" - moral stigma, social engineering, subtle subsidies or penalties or outright propaganda in lieu of brute coercion.

My personal theory is, that the whole identification of eugenics with fascists and statists was just a standard Progressive PR campaign to clear the stain and declare post-hoc victory of always being on the right side of the history. But underlying impulse and logic is still there. They are defacto eugenicists, they just don't want to be identified with Nazis.

I don't think that's true. There are plenty of non-coercive policy options for promoting eugenic pairings. For example, education programs, or cash payouts for children born to couples meeting certain criteria. Back when eugenics was a popular progressive cause, a lot of eugenics societies focused their efforts in this direction, and just trying to establish societal norms that were conducive to eugenic outcomes.

There are plenty of non-coercive policy options for promoting eugenic pairings.

That doesn't matter, though, because nearly all of them ultimately lead back to the "male oppressors incentivizing -> suggesting -> forcing me to do my job do the thing that requires I be dependent on a man" thing.

The only policy that will work is to valorize and protect those who do their job, but you can only have that in societies that are allowed to accept their own right to rule. (Which is why women reflexively oppose any social movement that suggests this; after all, according to the stereotype, all social turmoil ever comes from the cardinal sin of ever permitting a man to think he can do something right.)

State authorities already place external limits on female sexual choice (e.g. a female high school teacher raping one of her male students is just as illegal as the opposite pairing).

Ah, but the only reason they do that is to protect female class interests when the law has to be symmetric for some reason (women want it to be illegal to fuck young women more than they want the right to fuck young men [which affects a rounding error number of women, and the women who do engage in this are the pick-me-est of pick-mes so they're also hated by women in general]).

Eugenics is different, since the median woman assumes it'll affect who the median woman has babies with.

You sure about that? I know the law sets equal boundaries, but I have my doubts about the legal system doing the same.

Teachers caught doing this are prosecuted. South Park nice jokes aside, this is taken seriously by courts and law enforcement.

Do the police pursue it with equal zeal? Do the prosecutors put as much effort into getting the same punishments? Do judges and juries treat them equally? I'll grant that there are external limits on their choice, but that's a far cry from being just as illegal (unless you treat illegality as a binary, in which case it's just as illegal as walking with ice cream in your back pocket or whatever zany oldtimes law you can find).

Consider Nick Olivas: At 14, he unknowingly fathered a child with a 20-year-old woman. Later, he was pursued for child support and the mother was never charged with any crime. Hermesmann of Hermesmann v. Seyer "contributed to a child's misconduct" when a 13-year-old got her pregnant. There are a few more in this pdf, but I think the pattern is established well enough: Women who commit statutory rape against boys are not consistently prosecuted, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence.

Let's imagine the opposite situation, accounting for biological reality. A girl in her early teens becomes pregnant, gives birth, and gives up the child. Later, the (significantly older) father claims paternity, which is confirmed. The state shrugs its shoulders, gives him the child, and goes on with its day.

That's even less of a legal burden than the real cases have, and yet it feels pants shittingly insane. It would never happen in a million years. If you could find something one tenth as crazy, I'd consider it a significant blow against my stance. Can you?

Do they get equivalent punishment?