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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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I've logged an unfortunate number of hours in "gay" environs. Sadly I can't put that in my actual logbook or portfolio. Perhaps I'm not young (and was never particularly athletic), but I've never been sexually harassed. The closest was some four-eyes weirdo friend-of-an-acquaintance who was coked up, drunk to his man-tits, and convinced by the coca-ethylene to attempt to convince me that I wasn't straight. Very intense. Very retarded. I sat there in increasing discomfort, trying to tell him (politely) that I wasn't interested. Eventually he gave up and went off to go hit on other straight men, or I went off to get a pint and throw darts. I suspect I had a better hit rate. This was just a regular pub, on the seedy side - it had both pensioners and people propping up the Albanian GDP in the toilets.

Nothing else ever happened. I find it very funny when the gay men in actual gay places hit on me. It's good for my ego, or at least it was before I worked out, put on nice clothes, got a nice haircut and enjoyed attention from actual hot women. It's been known to happen. I don't blame them for trying (by which I mean the men). Yeah I'm fucking sitting there in a gay bar, notorious for hosting straight men first and foremost.

I can only say that I've done more time than you have, probably. But the world is a big place, and I don't claim to have performed an exhaustive or representative sampling of homosexual behavior on a global scale. All I can say is that the UK is as or more friendly to the gays than the States is. And it's fine. It's fucking Pride Month and I haven't seen anything ridiculous. I would have, I suppose if my little brother had shown up and I had a reason to expand his horizons. But no, as far as I'm concerned, things are fine.

Another similar problem (in the U.S. at least) is a rise in STIs and drug resistant STIs because gay men have hundreds of partners, refuse to use condoms and then fuck bi and "straight" people. Because they can't get pregnant and HIV is no longer a death sentence they refuse to use safe sex practices. Shut the fuck up and wrap your shit or have a reasonable number of partners, "benign" STIs are significantly more problematic for the female population.

Do I approve of this? You can guess. But there is no point to getting angry about it. The average straight man or even the above average straight man doesn't fuck hundreds of women raw because the latter have standards. The mid gay man can (but not necessarily does) fuck like a straight male supermodel because he's not restrained by feminine sexuality. You are complaining about men being manly men with other men. The straights would do it if they could. They just can't.

You are complaining about men being manly men with other men. The straights would do it if they could. They just can't.

I'm not convinced this is the case, or that this is a full account of what male sexuality is like. You can't simply look at what gay sexual practices look like and assume this is what straight men would be like if women had more casual sex. Gay hookup culture came into existence under certain conditions (particularly ones where you had to grab whatever sex you could get because it was so rare, and could not be connected to intimacy or commitment because homosexuality was clandestine and often criminalized), and persists both because of cultural inertia and because the scripts people are handed limit what they can conceive and expect from others.

Le'ts assume you're a gay man like your brother, or perhaps someone like your brother but without his good and firm insight into what he wants. What does gay culture railroad him into? What will the men he meets on grindr/tinder with gay settings/a gay bar offer him? What will their sexual expectations be like? They're likely to be body-first, push relationships towards casual trysts rather than long-term commitment, emphasize sexual contact over emotional intimacy, and most importantly get bored of him and find someone else if he doesn't put his dick immediately on the table. Because the assumptions of gay culture are body-first, anyone who doesn't play along is presumed to be a liar or simply not that interested. And like straight men learning the Game, people are very good at picking up what is necessary to get them the intimacy they crave and contorting themselves towards it.

Inevitably obligate homosexual men under these conditions, whatever their theoretical desires, will end up having to get on their knees for this system, which they did not create and may not even meet with their aspirations. And especially if you're purely gay, the entire cultural and social system of gay culture will put every pressure on you to believe that hookup culture is liberatory and fun, while monogamy is internalized homophobia.

Like most people under social pressure, it's far psychologically easier to come to believe in the system than to stand aghast at it, especially if your sexual access becomes absolutely dependent on accepting it. The gays don't run "pray away the frigidity" camps, but like every culture this one has its own means of forcing misfits into a tight orifice.

This process has been going on for a long, long time in gay culture, while cultural movements towards restraint, safe sex, dating before fucking, or STD awareness is pattern-matched by many gay men either to dastardly heteronormativity or to Republicans calling AIDS a punishment from God, and therefore resisted.

Do I approve of this? You can guess. But there is no point to getting angry about it. The average straight man or even the above average straight man doesn't fuck hundreds of women raw because the latter have standards. The mid gay man can (but not necessarily does) fuck like a straight male supermodel because he's not restrained by feminine sexuality. You are complaining about men being manly men with other men. The straights would do it if they could. They just can't.

The male sex drive is so strong because it has to be to deal with female frigidity. You can clearly see what would happen if both partners had a woman's sex drive in lesbian couples; it's called lesbian bed death.

It is only by combining male horniness and aggression with female selectivity and passiveness that you get a healthy relationship. We're complements, designed by Gnon to bring out the best of each other. Gays demonstrate the worst of mankind; male sexuality unrestrained.

Kind of hard to take such profound arguments seriously when your usual argument is for removing the women's ability to select.

He makes the correct point in this case though.

I dare say there are worse things about mankind than gays.

It's certainly possible my community was particularly aggressive, that it was an American thing, or that that time is now over - but for a good decade or so if you were in a gay space you'd get groped, or get comments that were rather unacceptable or forward. Some of this is the lack of time wasting in the gay community but even gay men will complain about this - someone who wants a more heterosexual romance can often find it hard or impossible to find and just end up barraged with dick picks, promiscuity, and harassment.

The community is degenerate, and to some extent that is okay - but it's a problem when it impedes on people outside the community (it does) and has reached the point where some people in the community are mad about degeneracy (see: growing number of gay Republicans).

With respect to the STIs - yes many straights are just jealous and straights would have similar behaviors if allowed (and celebrities do do that) but celebrities are small in number and the rest can't so gay people are currently causing a public health crisis (and did in the past when parts of the community declined to acknowledge the existence of AIDs).

It's selfish and anti-social behavior that does in fact hurt others and while I don't think it should be banned it does annoy me that we don't have the social technology to make things better. Likewise I don't agree that we should just let them die from venereal disease but it should be doable to understand why some people feel that way.

Most STIs are much, much more of a choice than the average lifestyle disease. Avoiding addiction and overeating is hard. Putting a goddamn condom on is easy.

Social technology is grossly inferior to medical technology. We couldn't shame or blame or diet away the obesity epidemic. Ozempic is doing what no amount of moralizing can.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/

Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean.

And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs.

On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. Sometimes it’s just giving people more iron supplements. But the best example is lead. Banning lead was probably kind of controversial at the time, but in the end some refineries probably had to change their refining process and some gas stations had to put up “UNLEADED” signs and then we were done. And crime dropped like fifty percent in a couple of decades – including many forms of drug abuse.

Saying “Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed brain structure” sounds callous, like you’re abandoning drug abusers to die. But maybe it means you can fight the problem head-on instead of forcing kids to attend more and more useless classes where cartoon animals sing about how happy they are not using cocaine.

What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts. As a result, everyone…keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have been for the past couple decades. Wouldn’t it be nice if increasing obesity was driven at least in part by changes in the intestinal microbiota that we could reverse through careful antibiotic use? Or by trans-fats?

How prescient. Lucky that I've made my peace with never being as good as Scott. Well, I'm content with being the fourth best psychiatrist blogger on the internet. I can only name two who are better, but eh, humility is clearly my greatest strength.

Likewise I don't agree that we should just let them die from venereal disease but it should be doable to understand why some people feel that way.

I understand these people, on an intellectual level. I understand why schizophrenics are the way they are too, but I don't relate to them from a phenomenological perspective or like their actions.

As someone who’s illiterate regarding pharmaceutics I do wonder what side effects Ozempic has.