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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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What is the woman's responsibility towards low TFR?

Low TFR is the new hot topic. I'll use this post to continue the discussion started by @ffrreerree2 (Only 1 comment, if not an alt, welcome to the Motte.) on his post. Because the last week's thread is about to die off.

Also assumes fuck rate is tied to birth rate

I'll focus on the Iranian video discussed in the previous post. I think it's a good enough approximation of a conservative call to marriage/family building. It does well to highlight the individual failure mode of not having worked towards building a family, obviously "crippling" loneliness, lack of purpose, shitty QOL, yada yada.

That video still bugs me. For one, the right side of the video was entirely redundant. Everyone knows that if you have that wonderful magical trad-wife who other than wearing a hijab at home; gets up in the morning before you without an alarm clock, cooks labor-intensive dishes for not only breakfast but also for your packed lunch, combs your hair for you, and presumably organizes a surprise birthday party for you, then fucks it's it up by spraying foam all over the cake., life is all gravy. Does the modal (regardless of Nationality) man need to be reminded of that dream? Doesn't the very next video by Taiwan hint at the notion that that very dream itself is 'problematic' because women are not only for the kitchen? I'm from the East and its an extremely common discussion trope/meme among young females that there exists no worse reality than being sentenced to the kitchen after marriage, and there are more than enough heuristics (how good-looking the guy is) to figure out if a potential suitor would be the kind to do that. Men around my parts go to extreme lengths to hide any and all desire for such a thing, some even convincing themselves that, that isn't actually a great deal for them all things considered.

Now moving on to the left side. What was particularly wrong about the guy in the video if you look past the "this dude totally sucks" aesthetics? He woke up on time, has an apartment, has a job, has a car, looks the same as his alternate reality married version (despite the pizza coke and takeout), and isn't carrying any obvious grooming defects that a visit to the barbershop can't fix. He also has a pet tortoise. I guess him being rude to the girl selling flowers sealed his fate. Or that he turns his apartment lights off, totally can't fix that by.. turning the lights on.

How does the guy on the left become the guy on the right? The video presents an alternate reality side by side, and it's presupposed that left did something wrong along the way. But he is clearly not happy, I am sure he did not turn down the magical trad wife in the past to further progress his presumble software engineering (casual clothes at the workplace) career. He knows his life kinda sucks. Is the world really suffering from a lack of mediocre-looking software engineering men turning women from marriage? Does not literally 5 minutes on the internet or speaking to a man under the age of 25 reveal to you that it's quite literally the opposite?

So let's imagine an alternative video but this time the female is the protagonist.

On the left we have; Our female protagonist waking up to an alarm. She replies to the 58 notifications on her Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram, she eventually musters up the courage to wake up and makes her way to the shower, brushes her teeth and then proceeds to spend 30 minutes putting on makeup because society demanded so, and because it makes her feel better. Having left her house ready to take on The World, but! only after she got her corporation-made coffee, no she doesn't have the time to make coffee at home. Finally, at work, she gets in her pre-email gossip at the breakroom for 25 minutes talking to her female coworker about the latest episode of that totally amazing new Netflix show. Midway through sending the emails the 'cutest guy at the office who is not particularly attractive' asks her how her weekend was, she tells him about how she went to an escape room and was so scared like it was a horror movie! The guy eventually wipes the sweat off his eyebrows during a strategic bathroom break during the conversation and asks her to go with him to this new escape room that he's heard all about next weekend. She declines the offer despite letting him know how that would be so totally amazing and sounds like a really fun plan. The guy contemplates changing jobs and then wonders did he remember to feed his pet turtle. After a hard day of work, she rushes home and reaches for the Beauty by Earth Makeup Remover - with Organic Aloe Vera & Witch Hazel, Use with Eye Makeup Remover Wipes or Cotton Pads, Gentle Non-Greasy Makeup Remover for Dry, Oily and Sensitive Skin Types(also vegan and cruelty free) makeup remover so she can apply it and then reapply another layer of makeup for her upcoming Tinder date, because society said so. She goes on the date talks about her ex, her cat, her totally crazy coworker who is insane enough to go on 10 tinder dates a month as opposed to the usual 5. After an exciting evening out, the couple to be arrives home and engage in unprotected sex because condoms feel like shit, after some pillow talk she says her goodbyes and makes sure to not forget to take the pill because pullout game only gets you so far. She unwinds by watching that totally amazing show on Netflix with the lights off and goes to bed.

Ofcourse the story above other than being terribly written is an exaggeration. The modal young woman isn't this vapid. She maybe goes on 1 date a month, might entertain the guys offer to go for the escape room, and sometimes reads novels instead of watching Netflix, and only uses a 5$ makeup remover instead of a 23$ one. But it's just a difference in magnitude not kind. Both of them do not entertain the idea of procreating with that guy from the office. Both of them are the Pams waiting for their Jim Halperts. They just can't find a good enough guy! And until you do that for them through whatsoever means, no amount of PSA videos is going to help your cause. Start off by thinking towards aiming the video at the right audience maybe. Maybe.

Can I ask all the men blaming women, the hussies, for not getting married at seventeen and pumping out a baby a year for the next ten years - are you fathers? Any of you? Do you have kids? More than one kid? If not, why not? "I always wanted six kids but I couldn't find a woman willing to have that big a family" or "Don't be dumb, I'm not forty yet, time enough for me to settle down after I build my career and have my fun along the way with as many hot chicks as I can persuade to let me bang them"?

Because I'm fed-up right now of this stream of comments as if women magically are the only ones having babies or not. Oh, all the eighteen year old men just aching to take on adult life as a husband and father, if only those trollops weren't busy painting their faces and working at jobs!

Excuse me if I don't believe that.

Let's turn the solutions that have been presented in previous comments around. Easy one first: no contraception. Men who have sex are going to become fathers, or else they can wait until a woman decides to marry them. And let's make it harder for men to waste their prime fertile years going to college. Get them working good honest blue-collar jobs out of high school, married to their childhood sweetheart, and having babies by the time they're twenty.

Men can wait ten or so years to have a career, they'll easily pick one up when they're thirty-plus and asking an employer to take them on for full-time white collar work for the first time ever. It's much more important that they be around to be the head of the house and raise the kids right. Women can take a year out to have a baby and then go back to work, but it's a full-time job for a father. And since women have it so soft and easy in this world, and it's easier for women to get degrees and white-collar jobs, let Mom be the worker but Dad should be there for his brood because who else is going to teach them the right ways?

Economic incentives for men to marry early, father lots of kids, and postpone further education/career-building will surely change the fertility slump! If it would work for a woman, certainly no man would object to having his freedom curtailed in this way - after all, his duty to society and the future trumps any petty personal ambitions, right?

EDIT: Yes, I am going to put this out there: unless you are a married father of at least three kids, shut your yap about this. You are as much part of the problem as the women. Any guy who is not married (if you're cohabiting, why the fuck aren't you getting married instead of lolling around getting free milk without buying the cow?) and not the father of kids (are you putting it off until "someday later"? "it's too expensive"? "it's not the right time"?) can't have the neck to say "oh why aren't those women getting married and having kids?"

I guess I gotta drop a post from elsewhere here:

The population of females aged 18-29 in the U.S. is approximately 23.3 million (as of 2016)

Remove the obese ones (Almost 40%, apparently, so we’ve already DRASTICALLY cut down the field).

Remove the lesbians.

Remove the prostitutes, porn stars, strippers (Onlyfans counts for these purposes).

Remove the single mothers.

If you care to, remove the ones with an N-Count above, say, 5.

I’m inclined to also account for the prevalence of certain mental illnesses, but lets leave that aside for now.

Maybe we even choose to leave in the ones who have incompatible political views.

And then tally up the ones who are left that are NOT currently in committed, long-term relationships.

Suddenly the number of ‘marriagable’ women who might be geographically accessible to most men looks a LOT more constrained. “Plenty of fish in the sea,” but barely any that are safe to eat.

I can put numbers to each of the above if that helps.


Like, the statistics bear out two things:

  1. The average woman is pickier than ever while bringing fewer things 'to the table' for the male than ever.

  2. Women are ALSO more likely than ever to terminate the relationship, EVEN AFTER many years of marriage and multiple children.

So there's a relatively small pool of marriageable woman who are what would be considered 'wife material', and every single male, from ages 18-50, is competing for this pool. So men are exposing themselves to the same old risks (woman leaving at any time) for less possible reward.

All that a male can do is work as hard as possible to increase his competitive advantage and thus his odds of success. Which is something of a red queen's race since all other guys are competing just the same.

He can't do anything to increase the number of marriageable women, can he?

So it certainly does imply that women's behavior is at issue here.

Male and Female obesity rates are pretty similar roughly 40% in both but severe obesity is 7% in men and 12% in women so there's some difference there.

Men & Women are identify as homosexual at very similar rates. Every woman in a long term relationship is one less man in a long term relationship.

If the pool of potential mates for men is much smaller isn't that offset by being marriageable for 3x as long? Under your marriageability assumptions men's set of marriageable mates at age 18 is all women 29 to -14 (43 birth cohorts) since many women will become 18 over their time in the dating pool? Women's set at age 18 is all men aged 50 to 9, or 41 birth cohorts. It's true that in any given moment there are more men competing for women, but women are competing against women who will enter the pool in the future. The 29 year old trying to get a 30 year old guy to commit is implicitly competing with the 20 other cohorts of women who will turn 18 over his lifetime.

Also what percent of men make enough money to support a family? In 2016 the 50th percentile income for a 35 year old male was ~50k, 33rd percentile was 30k. It's not a "good deal" to keep yourself chaste and attractive so you can snag a guy making that much.

I think the core of it is that you're demanding the old bargain where women provided sex, domestic labor and paternity certainty in exchange for men who would "protect and provide". Well in a modern society male protection isn't particularly necessary, and the gender wage gap isn't huge and largely accounted for by women choosing more flexible careers so they can do childcare labor for their husbands, or jobs that pay less but that they find self actualizing. You can't demand an attractive, young, chaste wife with similar social background when she can earn 70-85% of that income and do whatever she wants.

You can't demand an attractive, young, chaste wife with similar social background when she can earn 70-85% of that income and do whatever she wants.

Unless of course she wants babies, which is kind of the whole point. That's the missing enticement.

IVF is popular here and with rationalist but have you actually talked to women about it? It seems unlikely to me that it'll catch on all that much, your average straight woman that wants a baby without a man attached will probably try and get it done the old fashioned way. It is not a pleasant process.