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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24078 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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Thuletide on Fertility

According to Thuletide, the age gap «pedophilia» moral panic, spawned by feminism and kicked into overdrive during the #MeToo era that began circa 2017, is a potentially civilization-ruining phenomenon. He is, of course, not referring to very real problems, like grooming gangs in Britain, but the fact that 18-year-old boys are frequently accused of being an "Epstein diddy blud" merely for talking to 17-year-old girls. If you wanted to vaporize our already plummeting birth rates, stigmatizing any age gap larger than that between identical twins is a great way to do it.

From Thuletide's Telegram:

Girls typically reach physical sexual maturity (adult secondary sexual characteristics) between the ages of 15 and 17, while boys mature a couple of years later. Yet, it is disturbingly common to conflate an 18-year-old dating a 16-year-old — a relationship between two biological adults, legal everywhere in the West aside from a handful of deranged US states — with a 40-year-old raping a 9-year-old. Apparently, the people who do this have no problem with trivializing actual pedophilia (the sexual abuse of prepubescents), which causes immense and long-lasting harm.

The crux of this issue is that healthy male heterosexuality — the preference for younger but sexually mature women — has effectively been criminalized. Meanwhile, older-female age gap relationships are constantly celebrated by the Gynocratic World Order (see e.g. the safe-horny "dommy mommy" phenomenon), to the extent that female teachers who sleep with their male students are routinely spared jail time and socially excused: "Where was she when I was a student?!"

For all of human history until very recently, older-male-age-gap relationships were regarded as normal and good; the average age gap in America from 1850 to 1950 was 4.5 years. Even today, in face of widespread moral hysteria, the average 23-year-old white man and woman in the West prefer partners who are 2 and 3 years older than themselves, respectively. The evolutionary theory is simple: Men prefer fertile women, women prefer men who can provide for offspring; women are most fertile when young, men accumulate resources with age.

From his Twitter, he cites the following. Older-male age-gap relationships produce more children, with total lifetime fertility peaking at +7 years (although the variation from +3 to +13 years is very small). The negative fertility effect of older wives begins immediately at +1 year and declines linearly; at +3.5 years, couples produce 0.5 fewer children, on average. Obviously, this is due to women's limited fertility window, which is much smaller than commonly believed: by age 31, around 10% of women are sterile and around 50% are subfertile (they have difficulty conceiving, decreased egg quality, etc).

He concludes on Telegram:

To increase birth rates and reduce dysgenics, early marriage should be encouraged, particularly among the intelligent. Ideally, both husband and wife should be in their late teens to very early 20s. Older-male relationships between young adults (~16-25) should also be destigmatized. Society should be restructured to ensure that intelligent couples can have as many children as possible before age 30-35; reduce time spent in education, prioritize youth for high-paying jobs, give intelligent young men huge lump sums per child (funded by e.g. abolishing welfare), and so on.

Sounds like a better plan than complaining about phones to me.

The good ol’ “half your age plus seven” rule of thumb still reins supreme, I think.

I do think the whole age-gap-discourse phenomenon has gone utterly off the rails, but it has always seemed to be a deeply internet-bound phenomenon with little impact on the vast majority of people’s daily lives, and I think it has just about nothing to do with the fertility crisis.

And for the record, some twitter rando’s opinion does not mean anything. “Some guy on twitter said it” approaches anti-endorsement.

Is the impact little because young women generally don't marry anyway these days or because normal people don't care about age gaps in their daily lives at all? Or are you of the view that no online phenomenon has any discernible effect on the daily lives of normies?

Sounds like a better plan

You want better plan how to raise birth rate?

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, it was perfected long ago by Amish, Mennonites, Orthodox Jews and similar insular groups defying the modernity, groups found in rather unexpected places.

The plan includes early marriage, but it absolutely does not include anime, and all known examples require supernatural beliefs and practices.

Benefits of such life summarized here.

Unlike membership in an outlaw motorcycle club, being part of normal Haredi society brings benefits beyond a meth habit, jailtime and dental issues. For instance, if you minimally have your stuff together, you’re guaranteed gainful employment or a sinecure. Unless you have severe physical or mental issues, you’re gonna get married off to someone with whom you are basically compatible.

You’re going to live in a place with very low crime. When you have many kids-!כן ירבו-they’ll grow up in a place that’s full of kids, where kids and their behavior are normal and expected, not a bizarre imposition. You can have a high expectation of seeing those kids grow up to follow in your footsteps, to aspire to live as you lived in the ways that both you and them see as important, to marry early and have lots of children.

You will not be lonely, uninvited to the party, because the parties are all simchas-kiddush, weddings, engagements, circumcisions-to which everyone is invited, and they happen constantly.

(well, this part would be seen by many not as paradise, but hell on earth)

You will always be in places where you belong. When you die, you will be buried and mourned by your children, nephews grandchildren, greatgrandchildren, instead of by a dwindling and sad bunch of your equally old siblings and cousins.

Because your community is ruled hierarchically, has a high median IQ and pools its resources towards explicitly defined and concrete political goals, you can punch way above your weight in politics, ranging from primitive block voting and mass protests to filling important positions with your members who are actually qualified to fill them instead of being Somali congressional diversity hires or whatever. All of this leads to political success (until Tucker gets his Harbor Freight pitchforks and torches shipment delivered.) The spoils of this success are distributed to the community.

Here is the sales pitch, the benefits. The drawbacks: you have to follow all your life lots of very detailed rules, and live in equivalent of cosplay, including costume designed to look maximally ridiculous to outsiders.

Is it price worth paying? It is up to you.

I'd say the main drawback is that the only way to become a member of such a subculture is to be born into it. They don't accept outsiders. And if you try starting your own sect, people will just laugh at you.

ranging from primitive block voting and mass protests to filling important positions with your members who are actually qualified to fill them

Indeed and there's a dark side to this. They can take over local school boards. Busses full of Hasids show up with however many are needed to win the school board election. They then loot the school district for their benefit in opposition to everyone who sends their kids to public schools. Their kids don't attend public school, so ruining public resources like this isn't their problem. I'm shocked some of things they do are even legal. Such as shutting down public schools and then selling the buildings to themselves at ultra low prices in order to make yeshivas for cheap.

Infamous and well documented example at the East Ramapo Central School District in New York. Great radio report about it.

Maybe public schools should win more loyalty from the normies.

You want better plan how to raise birth rate?

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, it was perfected long ago by Amish, Mennonites, Orthodox Jews and similar insular groups defying the modernity, groups found in rather unexpected places.

Living like 19th century peasant farmers is a terrible solution.

Nybbler, come on. You know the Haredim do not till the earth. Food comes from the grocery store, as far as they are concerned.

The Haredim are not a useful model; they are parasites. Perhaps you could set up another society which as efficiently exploits a welfare system made for the bottom 10% and the 50th-percentile social workers who administer it, but even if you could, it would be ipso facto dysfunctional.

(and the apocalypse grows ever closer, as I agree with @MadMonzer again)

Can you explain why is it that Haredi men have no normie jobs?

Yes - the alternative for such groups to living in voluntary (real) poverty is parasitism, which notoriously doesn't scale. In Kiryas Jorel, food comes from the store, and is paid for with an EBT card. Haredim in both the US and Israel live off the government teat.

We cannot get society-wide fertility above replacement group by encouraging high-fertility parasitic subgroups for the same reason that cancer victims don't gain weight.

With Mormons succumbed (possibly due to an inability to keep men in the Church - fertility is calculated per woman and allegedly there is a problematic number of TBM spinsters for this reason), Modern Orthodoxy is the only culture that still has above-replacement fertility and a tech sector.

Tradcaths do lots of tech work, law, trades, other jobs that are Basically Necessary and Useful for a Functioning 1st World Society and have a TFR above 3. Even Mormons still have a healthy 2.5ish fertility rate(they hamstring themselves discriminating against converts, but so does everyone else).

Yes - the alternative for such groups to living in voluntary (real) poverty is parasitism, which notoriously doesn't scale. In Kiryas Jorel, food comes from the store, and is paid for with an EBT card. Haredim in both the US and Israel live off the government teat.

At least on paper, that's true. My sense is that the Haredim have a large off-the-books economy. So for example, every few years there is a large welfare fraud bust in the NYC area. Quite often the cheaters are married couples who live in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, who work off the books while collecting welfare.

Of course, you might respond that probably they are working in businesses which are themselves bilking the government in other ways. So really the ultimate question is what would happen to the Haredim without government support.

Quite possibly they mooch off the government because it's easier to do that, consistent with their lifestyle, than to make a living in other ways.

If they couldn't mooch off the government, the Haredim (if they continued to exist) would have to change in significant ways; we cannot know if those changes would also result in blunting their fertility.

but the fact that 18-year-old boys are frequently accused of being an "Epstein diddy blud" merely for talking to 17-year-old girls

I am sure that you can cherry-pick some examples where an 18-yo was accused of being a pedo for asking a 17-yo for the way to the supermarket, and of course the psychopaths (in the mop sense) in woke circles will occasionally weaponize Problematic Age Gaps like they weaponize Problematic Anything, but I seriously doubt that the fertility crisis is due to 18yo boys asking out other 18yo's instead of 17yo's.

In the 1950s, a man could feed a family through unskilled labor. He might even buy a house after a few years. On the other hand, the median young man and his girlfriend of 1952 typically did not have a ton of other options than settling down -- backpacking through Australia, going to university, getting sucked in some video game and so on were all unlikely choices.

Today, the places with a lot of jobs are cities, but they are often expensive. The route to home-ownership looks like "study, do a PhD, work five years as a software consultant for a bank, pay the down payment of a house which is still barely in the public transport hub of your city. At this point you can then reasonably think about having a kid (provided you have a partner and have not aged out of the fertility window)." And of course there is still the possibility that AGI will take your job next year and you will raise your kid on what Elon Musk is willing to spare as an UBI.

Of course, it also does not help that handling a small kid is more than one full-time job. In 1950 women did not have a better option, but today they do. Men have certainly become more willing to help with the kids, but probably not to the point where they are willing to share the burden 50-50. If I am optimistic, I (a guy) might say that I might be able to take care of a baby eight hours a day, every day, until it is old enough for daycare (and the caretaking requirements relax slightly). Unfortunately, this would only work if I had a partner who was willing to take care of the kid 16h per day, and most women would very reasonably tell me to go fuck myself if I proposed that they take over two thirds of the care work. And this is before monetary constraints: I can kinda manage a 40h work week, but that is with the rest being leisure time. And while my job in academia pays reasonably ok (for now -- one of the benfits of having a long-winding education), at 28h per week it is not something which can feed a family with Western standards.

And this is before monetary constraints: I can kinda manage a 40h work week, but that is with the rest being leisure time.

This is one of the points I was raising in the divorce discussions. This is why married with kids women look for part-time jobs, or full-time jobs that will not be career-building "work 60-80 hour weeks climbing the promotions ladder" type jobs. Because they're coming home from work and then cooking the meals, doing the grocery shopping, running the house, looking after the kids, handling if the parents/parents-in-law have health crises or need support, etc. which frees up husband to work the main job as breadwinner.

And then they get dinged in the divorce discussions as "but what did she do? nothing! he made all the money, it's totally unfair he has to split it with this useless leech!" and even worse if she was a full-time stay at home mom. Forget the TFR then, it's all "my money, my toys, not gonna share" for the boys.

Argh. I do think that there isn't a realistic expectation of what marriage and parenthood is like for both sexes. Both of you have to put in the work, both of you have to compromise.

It's not a new problem, there are plenty of humorous folk tales about husbands and wives complaining the other has it easier and swapping jobs for the day to get a taste of how the other half lives.

So look, I am not going to ding you for riding your hobby horse, as annoying as it is. But this entire post is nothing but reposting what some X-personality says. I don't know who Thuletide is or why we should care what he thinks. Is he noteworthy, famous, is there some reason why his thoughts about banging teenagers are interesting? When someone posts a Happening from Twitter that has CW significance and is making the rounds, we'll usually allow a thread about it (we prefer the OP at least frame it with some context and some thoughts of their own), but not only did you not do the latter, but this is literally just "Here is some dude on the Internet with hot takes I agree with."

If you want to write an effort post with your thoughts on the gynocracy preventing older men from accessing nubile fertile young females carefully selected for their evolutionary fitness, go ahead and write that post, but if you just want to repost the resentful yammerings of randos, I will point you to Leave the rest of the Internet at the door:

In keeping with the rules above regarding "low-effort" and "weak-man" comments, and our goal to produce more light than heat, we ask that you refrain from posting bare links to culture-war-related discussions held outside of this sub. If you are going to link to another platform we ask that you please put in the work to contextualize the post and explain why it is relevant to readers of this community.

IOW, "random person said something on twitter" by itself is not really worth of a top-level post.

Girls typically reach physical sexual maturity (adult secondary sexual characteristics) between the ages of 15 and 17

I'm going to stop you there, and I think this indicates a bit of juggling with a hidden agenda. That is the end stage of physical sexual maturity, but not the point at which fertility begins. Looking up the Tanner Scale, that is Stage V our friend is using, but girls can get pregnant at Stage IV (and the Tanner Scale describes physical changes and maturity which do not line up neatly with chronological age):

In 1970 Britain, boys reached the last Tanner stage, the postpubertal stage, on average at the age of 14.9 years and girls around the age of 14 depending on social class and the particular study. In the nearly fifty years since those studies, the ages at which children are beginning puberty has only declined: (as of 2018) "The age of puberty, especially female puberty, has been decreasing in western cultures for decades now [...] for example, at the turn of the 20th century, the average age for an American girl to get her period was 16 or 17. Today, that number has decreased to 12 or 13 years."

Girls can get pregnant before 15. Hell, in the right (wrong) circumstances, you can get a 9 year old pregnant (see some of the cases raised during in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe vs. Wade).

So when someone goes on about "girls are adult at 17, boys take longer, but we're criminalising poor harmless 18 year olds just for talking to a 16 year old", my antennae twitch and I do wonder "are you butt-hurt because you, a grown adult male, is considered a paedo just because she's 15 and you're 30?"

There really are no, or very few, honest and disinterested arguments on this topic. Everyone has an agenda and an axe to grind. And when we get this kind of careful logic-chopping and selective quotes of the Science! around specific ages, I get very damn suspicious as to motivation.

And then of course we get the "intelligent couples" figleaf. So "big brain if older me should have harem of nubile hotties no younger than 16 so they legal, but also no older than 16 so they not wizened hags of 26, that I can knock up to satisfy my breeding kink, all for the good of society of course!"

I'm going to stop you there, and I think this indicates a bit of juggling with a hidden agenda.

We need to stop assuming hidden agenda on this topic.

Like it or not lots of people can't distinguish between:

17 year old female with 25 year old male (lets say a college drop out guitarist in a band and a high school senior).

18 year old female with a 48 year old male (lets say a sleazy manager at a bar who sleeps with college waitresses for better shifts).

8 year old male with a 53 year old male (literal raping priest).

These are all wildly different but the dismissive rhetoric results in people failing to acknowledge that and putting everyone in the same bucket.

For an example of where this might be relevant - 27 year old guy goes to a club, assumes the girl he meets is over 21, but oops she used a fake ID and now he's a rapist. To me (and perhaps most of the posters here) this guy is obviously not a pedophile, but to say my mom "he should have known better, he must be a pedophile" is the obvious interpretation, and trying to engage results in a complete collapse.

Assume a poster has ill intent makes it much harder to actually engage with the substance.

I somewhat agree. I don’t think anyone including the 16 year olds father believes her 18 year old boyfriend having sex with her is a pedophile. Sure, maybe a cad but not a pedo.

Now if she is 16 and the guy is 25? That’s a lot more questionable (though far from having sex with kids).

I think the problem is we only have this ham fisted language of consent to separate good and bad sex. Once you have that as the only dividing line, you need to tie yourself in pretzels explaining why consent isn’t consent.

Instead, I would say pedos are people having sex with prepubescent kids. Such people should be killed. Grown men havint sex with post pubescent but young ladies should be viewed as bores. Fathers should protect their daughters from such people and society should shun them. But they aren’t rapists.

One of the drivers of reduced fertility is while fathers do indeed want grandkids, they don't want their daughters actually having sex.

I doubt many want to think about their daughters having sex but I doubt many fathers are upset about their daughters marrying a good man at an appropriate age and building a family.

Girl-dads perpetually see their daughters as 6yo princesses. They don't want them going to prom, they don't like them dating boys. Yes they want grandchild, but ideally through virgin birth. I suspect it makes you subconsciously feel like you spent all your life being her numero uno man just for some guy to stick his dick inside her. And I'm not convinced this can be "socially engineered" away.

Isn't this a phenomenon mostly concentrated in the suburban middle-class who mostly lead a sheltered existence? The same demographic that was known for its comical levels of prudery in the 19th Century? I'd guess most normal working-class fathers can grok that their teenaged daughters are sexual beings who want to and will get boned.

I have girls but they are still young. I know fathers of girls who are older. His daughters asked what he wanted for Father’s Day. He asked them to come to church once a month. His reasoning, in part, was that it would be much better to meet a culturally compatible eligible bachelor at church compared to online dating.

So count one datapoint as inconsistent with your claim.

I don’t see it as inconsistent. While I can’t read the mind of your acquaintance, I can see the logic in general.

A father may feel the existential dread of the Daughter Question (*hits pipe*) and not want his beautiful little girl to get railed. However, under the current legal and cultural milieu he has no real way to thot-patrol her and prevent her from having her FUN and FREEDOM, so the alternative is accepting strategic defeat.

He can’t stop her from getting taken to Poundtown, but perhaps he can at least stochastically nudge her toward choosing tourguides (or hopefully just one tourguide) with a baseline level of adequate SES and values.

I would say it is consistent, he has an "acceptable" standard for what kind of man is allowed to touch his daughter, and how. It's irrational and emotionally conflicting, but that's human emotion I suppose. But would he be thrilled if his girls were clubbing and rotating one night stands, even if he wasn't religious?

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Obligatory:

I cannot think or comprehend of anything more cucked than having a daughter. Honestly, think about it rationally. You are feeding, clothing, raising and rearing a girl for at least 18 years solely so she can go and get ravaged by another man. All the hard work you put into your beautiful little girl - reading her stories at bedtime, making her go to sports practice, making sure she had a healthy diet, educating her, playing with her. All of it has one simple result: her body is more enjoyable for other men.

Raised the perfect girl? Great. Who benefits? If you're lucky, a random man who had nothing to do with the way she grew up, who marries her. He gets to ravage her every night. He gets the benefits of her kind and sweet personality that came from the way you raised her.

As a man who has a daughter, you are LITERALLY dedicating at least 20 years of your life simply to raise a girl for another man to enjoy. It is the ULTIMATE AND FINAL cuck. Think about it logically.

Thanks. I see that this is not the original source though, and neither is this probably the first or even the sole version. I distinctly remember coming across this comment somewhere on a redpill-themed subreddit; I forgot to save the URL though. I'm fairly sure it was actually the original. I remember it did include a cringey and somewhat hilarious explicit description of the daughter's tight vag being penetrated for the first time.

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I just don’t relate to this at all. Admittedly I don’t have daughters, but I’ve watched all my cousins getting married and everyone loves the husbands and thinks it’s great to have a new smart, capable chap in the family.

If anything the wives and girlfriends have had a much worse reception, though I think this is because the girls in my family have mostly made good marriages and the guys have mostly made fairly dubious marriages, rather than reflecting any meaningful gender element.

Women marry up, men marry down. I thought this was the usual way of things?

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Yes, but for them an "appropriate age" is probably 35. Overprotective fathers of daughters are a meme for a reason.

Eh, I don't have a dog in the fight, I married someone a whopping three months younger (pedo alert!). But people can be directionally correct for bad reasons.

I would say as a very great generality for the bulk of humanity for the bulk of history, the basic matchup and the best one for fertility is for men roughly 20-30 marrying women roughly 15-25. I think in modern society it's completely normal to expect men in their late twenties to date women in their early twenties. Part of it is resources, part is maturity differentials, part is fertility differentials, part is stages of life, the biggest is linear time. The fertility stuff is just obvious, there's no pro-natal way for women as a population to delay fertility beyond 30. Individuals can do what they want, but society will not hit replacement with women who start at thirty. It cannot possibly work.

Fundamentally, so long as both people are legal adults, I'm not that concerned with age gaps at all. Anyone trying to get high school girls for themselves is obviously sus, but the rest of it is just moralizing and wishcasting. Yeah, a lot of romantically unsuccessful guys will come up with convoluted explanations for why they should be given hot young women somehow, without learning game or going to the gym. Just as a lot of romantically unsuccessful women will come up with convoluted explanations why they should be considered hot young women by billionaire werewolves.

None of this impacts the basic underlying math of fertility and what that means for a society. Whether a given group should be at replacement fertility is a value question, but if you accept that, you must necessarily accept a system of social organization that provides for the bulk of women in society to have children prior to age 30, and the closer to 15 they start, the higher fertility will be. Once again, what rate of fertility society should allow/encourage is values and politics. Higher fertility is not necessarily better, and there are trade-offs no matter what you do.

the best one for fertility is for men roughly 20-30 marrying women roughly 15-25

If you have a good chance of being dead by 40, often in childbed, then okay get married at 15 and start having babies. In our current society, that is no longer ideal. Two 22 year olds getting married and having kids by the time they're 25 is the better choice there, I think.

But the main thing with these kind of pieces that riles me up is that it's not about "I want to get married and start on that family of 10 kids as soon as possible", it's "I'm literally twice her age, she's a hot little piece of ass, is it my fault that Evolution ensures men like hot little 15 year old pieces of ass, why does society blame me that she gives me a boner, the teasing little vixen!"

I don't even care that much that she gives you a boner, I do care when it's "I wanna fuck 15 year olds with no consequences" getting dressed up in "Well ackshully it's about TFR and the best way to ensure the best and brightest in society reproduce and that the inverted pyramid of too many old people and not enough young taxpayers gets put back the right way up".

No, you want to be able to have as much novelty and ability without bad societal effects that you can get to fuck the next cohort of hot little 15 year olds once the current cohort you are fucking age out of your preferred range.

The issue is rather simple, though you may dislike it. Men are attracted to youthful features combined with developed secondary sex characters, and it's around 15-ish that most girls begin to really exhibit that combination. That is when most men start to notice girls sexually, even if they are not especially interested in actually having any kind of relationship with them for other reasons. Probably around 25 percent of men have a strong preference for women who look like they're about 15-18 years old, whether they are actually that old or not. The actual age has nothing to do with it.

It seems like ethnic Europeans might be outliers in having a stronger preference for women in their 20s, since Europeans have long practiced later marriage and tend to remain fertile longer than other groups. I suspect this might be genetic, and this makes Europeans unusual. For the rest of the world, the preference for younger girls is even stronger and much more culturally normative for most of their history. Just look at all the recently arrived doctors and engineers literally chasing after unattended schoolgirls in Europe today. You might as well try to train your cat to not chase the mouse.

Now, all these preferences are telling us something about the human evolutionary history of sexuality. We have inherited these instincts because they were successful among our ancestors. We're all descended from men and boys who got with fertile teenage girls at least some of the time, and so preventing that is going to have consequences for overall sexual behavior and fertility. There are trade-offs here along multiple dimensions, and it's not clear to me that the maximizing the taboo is the best solution in all circumstances.

Probably around 25 percent of men have a strong preference for women who look like they're about 15-18 years old, whether they are actually that old or not. The actual age has nothing to do with it.

It seems like ethnic Europeans might be outliers in having a stronger preference for women in their 20s

The infamous OkCupid graph suggests 20 is the upper bound for what men, on average, find the most attractive in women. The Bruch & Newman paper lowers this upper bound down to 18, where the decline in women's attractiveness is monotonic from 18 to 60.

Thus, given the truncations, we don't actually know what age of girls/women men find most attractive on average. And since the Bruch & Newman sample is drawn from Americans and the OkCupid sample likely is too (if not, it'd be heavily composed of Americans)—unless non-white men literally prefer pre-pubescent girls on average, it's unlikely white men's (if that's what we mean by ethnic Europeans) modal preference peaks too far north of 18.

I don't dislike it as such, we can't help our preferences. We can help being creeps. And "I'm forty and I want to fuck a girl literally young enough to be my daughter, and this should not be considered a bad thing and it should be legal" is about being creepy.

I've said this before: men's sexuality is so goddamn easy. Tits, ass, young as you can get 'em, and don't bother with the contents of the container for the tits'n'ass because you don't care about the person, you just care about getting your dick wet. Evolution may have engineered that, but evolution engineered a lot of things that we've had to rein in for the purposes of moving beyond being primates on the savannah.

Tits, ass, young as you can get 'em, and don't bother with the contents of the container for the tits'n'ass because you don't care about the person

When teenaged boys/young men lament being invisible to teenaged girls/women, they're told it's their problem, that it's a skill issue, and that it's up to them to level-up and Git Gud if they wish to Be Seen and Cared About as potential mates by teenaged girls/young women.

This principle can be generalized. If teenaged girls/young women wish to Be Seen and Cared About as more than "tits'n'ass,” it’d be up to them to level-up and Git Gud.

However, given how common it is that teenaged girls/young women choose to wear outfits that show off and draw attention to their tits and/or asses, choose to take pictures of themselves or have pictures taken of them posing to display their tits and/or asses prominently—their revealed preferences are that they rather enjoy being sex objects and being seen for their "tits'n'ass."

Sloot, we're never going to agree on this. I do wish girls didn't go for tits'n'ass, but they've been conditioned that this is what boys want and this is how they should be and we've moved on culturally so that wearing skimpy is the new default. And the boys on here arguing about nubile and young aren't wanting modestly-dressed women who will only hold their hands until the wedding night and no divorce ever.

We're both ordering the waves to retreat and neither of us will have that happen.

I do wish girls didn't go for tits'n'ass

Indeed, you do have a persistent habit of launching into histrionic reactions toward other commenters based upon your wishcasted vision of what girls and women are like (in the positive direction) and what boys and men are like (in the negative direction), which often leads to you being /r/confidentlyincorrect and amnesic in never updating.

but they've been conditioned that this is what boys want and this is how they should be and we've moved on culturally so that wearing skimpy is the new default

If young women are so readily conditioned, so easily influenced, so lacking in agency, so weak in mental constitution—that they can't take ownership of or accept accountability for their revealed preferences for being sex objects, that instead such a revealed preference can only be attributed to societal conditioning and internalized misogyny from the patriarchy—perhaps we should do a holistic reassessment of the capabilities of young women with regard to other areas of life, such as voting, providing legal testimony, serving as jury members, signing contracts, etc.

Sloot, go catalogue your anime waifu furry waif collection.

If someone annoys you and you don't have a substantive rebuttal, blowing raspberries is not constructive. Knock it off.

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but they've been conditioned that this is what boys want

Conditioned by who? Is it conditioning or is it what boys actually want? If we assume that's what boys actually want (which I don't think is fully true, they also want emotional affection etc, of course from suitably attractive girls), does that mean they should get it? Are girls simply "conditioned" to do whatever, without their own agency? Only boys are supposed to have agency and overcome their nature? If girls are not able to deal with the incentive landscape provided by unconstrained gender-mixed interactions, parties, social media, intra-female competition arms races, then what?

There used to be a counter-force to that "conditioning", mainly provided by the father saying that the daughter is not allowed to wear such a skimpy outfit. It was then decided that this prevents female liberation and empowerment and is oppressive patriarchy and has to be abolished. Now what?

I guess what she really meant to say is that they are conditioned to put out, which is largely true - innate sexual preferences do not change, after all, but social norms regarding sexuality do from time to time. I imagine her complaint isn't that normal guys prefer thicc women over fat or skinny women, it's that current society has normalized casual sex.

it's that current society has normalized casual sex.

It seems that without external pressure from elders, adolescents will converge to this dynamic if left unsupervised. But that kind of pressure has been ruled no-no, because it's oppressive and not liberating, not empowering. The complaint is about an overall effect, a diffuse mood that impacts them overall. To stop that, it would be necessary to intervene pointwise, locally, in relationships that both participants claim and feel in the moment to be what they want. It's the game theory type of thing as the prisoner's dilemma, The local incentives go one way, the global preference would point to another.

Is there really such a huge moral panic though? I have firsthand experience with this issue (I'm in my 50s and my fiancee is 19) and we get the occasional funny look while out in public but that's about it. I imagine the people on Reddit would freak out, but are they really that influential?

The strongest argument I can think of is that silly internet trends may very well end up being very influential. That being said, it's difficult to see how one could formally prohibit age gap relationships between consenting adults.

I have firsthand experience with this issue (I'm in my 50s and my fiancee is 19)

That's disgusting! How did you meet her? Just so I know what sort of lifestyle and places to avoid when I'm in my 50s someday.

we get the occasional funny look while out in public but that's about it. I imagine the people on Reddit would freak out, but are they really that influential?

"It's just a few crazy kids on campus." Maybe or maybe not it's just a few white-knights and bitter middle-aged women on Reddit, but bear in my mind they'd happily have you imprisoned alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire.

That being said, it's difficult to see how one could formally prohibit age gap relationships between consenting adults.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

The age of consent can always be raised, including to over 18, with a Romeo and Juliet clause of ${YEARS}. In the US, for example, there's already plenty of precedent where adulthood isn't fully adult: can't drink, buy handguns, or (in some states) gamble until the age of 21; can't run for House, Senate, or President until the age 25, 30, or 35, respectively.

Romeo and Juliet

That was an adverse outcome.

Had she married Count Paris maybe she makes it to 19.

I think OP is looking for a Juliet and Paris clause.

That's disgusting! How did you meet her? Just so I know what sort of lifestyle and places to avoid when I'm in my 50s someday.

Just to be clear, she sought me out. My preference would be for someone who is older, however I'm not a "Chad" type so I can't really have a laundry list of requirements. Just finding a woman who is slender, reasonably intelligent, and not into Leftism is hard enough.

"It's just a few crazy kids on campus."

Yeah, I know. I concede that all the hate for men who are in relationships with younger women could easily explode into the mainstream. That being said, I think it's more likely to remain more of a sniper's weapon than a shotgun. Maybe it's wishful thinking? Anyway, my fiancee and I have 3 citizenships between us so I guess there are a lot of options to flee.

it's difficult to see how one could formally prohibit age gap relationships between consenting adults.

Oh, that’s very easy. Just follow the miscegenation playbook:

  1. Make shit up about muh brain maturity or whatever that makes the younger partner less human -> not “adult”
  2. Ban relationships on those grounds

I've only heard people complaining about the moral panic, not the panic itself. But I haven't seen any grown men seriously try to date 16 year olds, I suppose people would be upset about that. The WASP types that comprise my ancestors would have been upset about that in the past too, though.

Furthermore, pretty much all the complainers that I've encountered have fit a very specific profile.

How much of this alleged "moral panic" is just the reasonable skepticisn of normie parents who don't like this "weirdo" leering at thier kids?

Yeah, there's potentially a place for a 20 year old who wants to marry a 17 year old (I think most states allow that, sometimes asking for family approval), but that rarely seems to be the intention, despite the cries of "but it's for Fertility!"

The prepubesant anime girl in thier avatar is something of a give-away.

Misuzu Kamio is not prepubescent.

Right... I'm sure she's actually a 700 year old warlock or something.

No, her body is literally not prepubescent.

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Girls typically reach physical sexual maturity (adult secondary sexual characteristics) between the ages of 15 and 17, while boys mature a couple of years later.

His argument would go down much better if he did not say this. It may be objectively the case, but holy shit does it make him sound like a pedophile. It generally reflects quite poorly on people when they sexualize those who are legally and popularly regarded as children.

"An 18 and 16 year old having a sexual relationship should not be discouraged" is one thing. "It is ephebophilia not pedophilia"is quite another and makes it sound like what he really wants is for himself to have sex with 15 year olds without risking punishment.

So how is it feasible in your view to not sound like a pedo but at the same time describe the simple anthropological reality that girls sexually mature earlier than boys?

I did write that "teenage sexual relationships should be decriminalized" does not make you sound like a pedo. The issue is that the rest of the rhetoric seems to serve as an argument for why men who are old enough to have degrees and careers should be allowed to have sex with high school students. That last part is where the problem is. When the poster then doubles down and it turns out I was right and this is what they wanted to argue, the rest falls apart.

Generally, if you want to make an academic argument about sexual maturity you probably shouldn't sully it by then immediately using said argument to justify breaking societal taboos.

If you say teenage sexual relationships should be decriminalized, people will probably ask you why. What will you reply then?

If setting the facts straight "reflects poorly on people", that's a major issue with the conversation that's important to push back against. Pointing out something is incorrect is always a valid addition to the debate, and tabooing the truth is never justifiable.

"An 18 and 16 year old having a sexual relationship should not be discouraged" is one thing. "It is ephebophilia not pedophilia"is quite another and makes it sound like what he really wants is for himself to have sex with 15 year olds without risking punishment.

Or maybe he just doesn't want to be shamed for his perfectly normal sexuality? "It's not pedophilia" is just correct, and implies nothing about what kind of relationship should be appropriate. You can perfectly well be aware that a normal heterosexual man will find 15 year old girls attractive, and this is not inherently a problem, but still think he should wait until she's older, and if he doesn't, then it becomes a problem.

What I quoted is the kind of thing people say when they are trying to push an agenda. Specifically the agenda that older men should be allowed to sexualise and have sexual relations with people under the age of 18. There is a clear taboo against this in modern society, and for good reason. So when someone starts to undermine this taboo through their arguments it is going to result in alarm bells.

This is a very online thing, where people conflate the indeed very sharp and absolute threshold of 18 for porn, with the age of consent for sex that isn't recorded and distributed. In many European countries the age of consent is 14, in some it's 15 or 16. Of course there are other constraints like being in a teacher or similar role, in which case it will not be allowed.

Very online people are simply unable to tell the two apart because they rightfully know that in porn it would be the absolute toxic sludge and nuclear waste to come into contact with such material, and they generalize this to IRL relationships.

So, again, people are allowed to sexualize and have sexual relations with people above 14 in much of Europe. It may be disapproved socially by people in their lives, but it isn't disallowed per se.

Sure, but the reason for the low age of consent in Europe is generally not so that grown men with careers can have sex with high schoolers. It is to decriminalize sex between teenagers. The social convention for adults not to abuse this is quite strong, so it is pretty rare that it happens.

What's your evidence for this? Because I don't think you need an agenda to want to set the facts straight, especially if the wrong claim unfairly demonises you.

Declaring something sacred and therefore any opposition to related claims automatically invalid and evidence of bad faith is not valid epistemics. You can be wrong while thinking it's for a good cause, and people can correct you without being motivated by a bad cause. I don't believe in taboos. If the reasons for the taboo are good enough, the position will be able to withstand counterarguments and the taboo isn't needed.

It's not like the age of consent is a law of nature either. In Germany, for example, it's 16 (with the exception of power-imbalanced relationships like teacher/student), and it's a priori not clear that's a worse solution. Or the 17 in some US states. If you want to argue 18 is the right number, that needs to be based on facts, not bulverism.

Is there a large cadre of people believing an 18 year old having sex with his 16 year old girlfriend is pedophilia? Sure the girls father hopefully discourages it but doubt many think of it as pedo behavior.

I would say it is not seen as paedophilic, but widely seen as unwise for other reasons. "Society should discourage an 18year-old bf and a 16-year old gf from having penetrative sex" is just normie.

"The age of consent should be 18" is comfortably inside the Overton window.

I'd argue it's widely seen as unwise for the simple reason that teenagers aren't assumed to reliably practice birth control.

Where is that normie? Do teenagers not have sex in that normie world? Or are you claiming that they must be in the same year of school? Say, the guy is in the last year of high school, the other is one year lower but the guy is on the older end of his cohort and the girl is the younger end of her year. I think nobody bats an eye about this in real life.

I'm no sociologist but I'm guessing that social norms regarding this are more or less shared throughout the West, in towns both big and small. That is, when two teenagers are in a sexual relationship but both are discrete about it and are otherwise not seen as anti-social delinquents, their social circle quietly tolerates it.

Those small town cops that conservatives favor love busting teen boys for such things; this effectively ends their chance at a good life with a sex offender conviction. "Romeo and Juliet" statutes were made to make that a little harder, though there's still edge cases.

On an unrelated note, naming a statute after a tragedy involving suicide, murder and treachery is probably not a good PR move.

I see. Small-town conservative America is quite foreign to me, as I'm in Europe. Here it's normal that people around 15-16 start to drink alcohol, have parties, and at 16-18 it's very normal to have relationships that include sex, with the more adventurous "cool" partyface types starting earlier.

Exactly the same in the US.

Was. Teens aren't drinking, partying, or having relationships much any more.

Most states have a Romeo and Juliet exception to the age of consent being 18 whereby if the difference in the age of the lovers is a small number the age of consent doesn’t matter. This suggests the Overton window is a bit nuanced.

That is, we don’t want to send high school boyfriends to jail for having sex with their slightly younger high school girlfriends even if ideally we don’t want them having sex.

holy shit does it make him sound like a pedophile

Let's be kinder (and more precise), it makes him sound like an ephebophile. Generally 17 year old boys are not crying about age discrimination with regards to their 15 and three-quarters year old girlfriend, and guys who like to quote stats and ages are a lot older than the "persecuted 18 year olds" used as the example here.

The general public, bless their hearts, think an ephebophile is a paedophile with a dictionary. I think an ephebophile is just a man with normal (straight or gay) male sexuality. In both cases, the word is not helpful.

It is due to a hyperstitious cascade, in Scott's terms. Normal people have gotten the memo that this is not something to talk about in polite society.

holy shit does it make him sound like a pedophile

That description also applies to the author of the OP, fond as he is of peculiar terms like "scientifically consent". Profile picture of a prepubescent anime girl is a dead giveaway.

Misuzu Kamio is not prepubescent. Being scientifically able to consent means you can understand what is going on and make an informed decision. The age at which this happens vs when it's legally recognized correlates positively but probably < 0.60 which is not that strong. Can you understand that?

Misuzu Kamio is not prepubescent.

No idea who this is (other than a Google search telling me she's some kind of reincarnated moe light novel character) but that's some real "She's actually a thousand-year-old dragon" energy.

Being scientifically able to consent means you can understand what is going on and make an informed decision.

Look, I don't love @FtttG's call-out (@FtttG: Argue with the OP directly if you take issue with his statements, do not play the "Reminder: OP is a bad person!" game). But you aren't exactly beating the rap here. "Scientific consent" seems to be something you made up, in the way that people who want to make up terms to justify something that would otherwise be hard to justify will do. It has no legal (or scientific) basis. "Can understand what is going on and make an informed decision" rests entirely on how we define "understand" and "informed," and having unfortunately seen some interviews with actual pedophiles, they will absolutely argue that 5-year-olds can understand and consent to sexual relations. 12-year-olds certainly think they can understand and consent to sexual relations. So if your definition of consent rests on the expressed internal mental state of a child, you are going to be defending the premise that essentially anyone who's verbal can consent.

"Scientific consent" seems to be something you made up, in the way that people who want to make up terms to justify something that would otherwise be hard to justify will do.

It's a very basic concept that isn't being used pedophilia. If you don't have this concept, you have to accept the Orwellian newspeak idea that in California, 17 year olds can't consent. The notion of scientific consent ability divorces ability to consent from the local law. It says that the law might be wrong in many cases, which is true. It is trivially true that if you allow real thought on the topic instead of no thought, pedophiles might make some arguments. However, if I were you, I'd have more faith that you can figure out using reason why 5 year olds can't scientifically consent, and why people who claim otherwise are factually wrong.

No idea who this is (other than a Google search telling me she's some kind of reincarnated moe light novel character) but that's some real "She's actually a thousand-year-old dragon" energy.

The character is in high school. She is designed to look 17 or 18. It doesn't say how old she is exactly or what year she is in but in Japan people attend high school at 18 years old.

It's a very basic concept that isn't being used pedophilia. If you don't have this concept, you have to accept the Orwellian newspeak idea that in California, 17 year olds can't consent.

I think everyone understands that age of consent laws are arbitrary and when the law says someone can legally consent does not necessarily correlate to when someone actually has enough agency to consent. Age of consent various from state to state and from country to country, and everyone knows this does not mean that teenagers in Alabama are ready for sex earlier than teenagers in California. This is no less true of age restrictions on everything else, from driving to enlisting to signing a loan.

Inventing a concept like "scientific consent" just sounds suspiciously like an attempt to punt. Even if you and I agree that five-year-olds cannot meaningfully consent and most 17-year-olds can, if you reject age-constricted consent and you just want go on vibes, the door is open, yes, for someone to argue that a five-year-old has enough awareness and agency to consent. (If you think this is absurd, enjoy some Piers Anthony).

The problem is we have this concept 'consent', which means something. And we have 'legal consent' which means something else. In theory, 'legal consent' could capture something like 'consent by someone who cannot understand what they are consenting to', but in fact it does not, but we still want a word for that concept.

Sure. But I think you are pointing at a different problem than what dogma is focused on.

No idea who this is (other than a Google search telling me she's some kind of reincarnated moe light novel character) but that's some real "She's actually a thousand-year-old dragon" energy.

Do you know what the word "prepubescent" means? It is not a synonym for "child". It specifically refers to someone who has not yet started puberty. Misuzu Kamio is canonically 16-17, ~5'2", with a prominent hour-glass figure indicating fully-developed secondary sexual characteristics. Is she a child? Yes, she is a teenager, which is considered a child by most modern people. She is clearly not prepubescent.

I think Misuzu is closer to 15 based on a shot we see of her half-eaten birthday cake in the anime (which for plot reasons, we know has the right number of candles), but the bigger point is that she's not a particularly sexualized character and I wouldn't expect someone having her as a profile picture to be thirsting for her.

Misuzu is closer to 15 based on a shot we see of her half-eaten birthday cake in the anime

This is interesting because Key were obscure about the ages of the characters in Air, while in Kanon they were aged very obviously, at least to the extent that you find out their specific years in school and then can deduce from that. The reason for that could be twofold. First, the main character is older in Air. We don't find out how old he is exactly but it's implied he's between 20 and 25. He pretends to be Misuszu's classmate to her aunt but it's implied that he's slightly too old to pass well for this if you look at him too long. But still young enough to attempt it. Later he confirms he's over the age of 20 but it vague about how old he really is. In Kanon the player character in his second to last year of high school which makes him about 17 per the Japanese school system the girls are either in his year or the year above, making them 17 to 18.

In Japan, high school is three years and starts at the age of 16, with most people graduating after turning 18. Additionally, Air occurs at the end of a school year, but all of the girls are not graduated, so they must be starting their middle or last year, making them closest to 17 or 18 years old.

The only way they are plausibly younger is if they are actually attending a combined junior-senior high school and are in the lower grades. The evidence that this could be the case is mostly circumstantial; it seems that Japan does have some schools like that. The setting is a small village, and I think they are more common in small villages due to economic factors. Also the characters all act extremely immature, which could just be moe writing, but they do act like they could be on the younger side.

The most direct piece of evidence would be Misuszu's homework. She was catching up on math from the previous school year and specifically is working on quadratic equations, IIRC. That seemed a bit held back for Asia ... I studied that when I was 14, so that's what first gave me the idea. The internet says this is usually studied in Japan first in the last year of junior high or the first year of high school. So it's possible she enters her first or second year of high school after the events of air, which could mean her summer birthday is her 15th birthday if she will turn 18 during the summer after her graduation, and was actually in her last year of Japanese junior high prior to the summer.

In my translation of the VN she says «will I ever need to use things like quadratic functions in my daily life» and «this is the right formula, I solved it.» This is very vague still. It sounds like she's applying the quadratic formula in her homework and has been introduced to quadratic polynomials. Claude says the first year of high school in japan is usually graphing and basic functional analysis of quadratics. So, she would likely be graphing a function instead of applying a formula. Claude is very interested in the distinction between the word function and equation, but I don't know how important that actually is and what the Japanese says. To me they are the same thing.

But it is just as possible that she is turning 16 or 17 because she could be 18 before her last year, and she could be entering her second year of high school. Ultimately, the VN is too vague on her exact age. The cake only has 11 candles as well, but you could suppose there is one for every gap between the nuggets. Then there's 12 on the cake with one obscured, and three missing since they eat two pieces with two nuggets, so that makes 15.

I appreciate the detailed analysis. A few minor points:

  1. The Japanese school year starts in the spring, so summer vacation happens during a school year, not in between two school years. This doesn't change too much about the quadratic evidence though, since she's also specifically being made to take summer classes because she's behind, so even if she's actually in high school, her schoolwork could be remedial middle school stuff.

  2. The Japanese cutoff date for when you start school based off your birthday is April 1, which is also around when the school year starts. So most students start high school at 15. If Misuzu turns 15 in the summer, that means she was 14 when the school year started, which would make it her third year of middle school.

  3. It's been a long time for me, but is it ever explicitly stated that the school is a high school and not a middle school? I remember this being vague. I know that some girls from Kanon make a cameo appearance, but there's no reason to think that the Air versions of Ayu and co. are the same age as the Kanon versions, or that they're the same year as Misuzu (unless there's some "different years have differently colored ribbons" thing going on?).

If I had to give a number for Misuzu's age I'd definitely say 15 as more likely than any other.

I'd be interested to see if you had any thoughts on how old Kanna was during the events of 1000 years ago. Narrative niceness would dictate she be the same age as Misuzu during the events of Air, but 15 seems too old for Kanna.

I'm not super invested in this particular debate, but I want to state that I, for one, am rejoiced to see themotte.org finally evolve into discussing things that truly matter - anime girls.

Yes, I know what prepubescent means.

My point is not that being thirsty for a barely-legal anime character makes someone a pedophile, my point is that splitting hairs over the exact age (or technical age, hence the thousand-year-old dragon meme) and secondary sex characteristics of a character clearly drawn to be childlike fits a certain archetype.

To increase birth rates and reduce dysgenics, early marriage should be encouraged, particularly among the intelligent. Ideally, both husband and wife should be in their late teens to very early 20s. Older-male relationships between young adults (~16-25) should also be destigmatized. Society should be restructured to ensure that intelligent couples can have as many children as possible before age 30-35; reduce time spent in education, prioritize youth for high-paying jobs, give intelligent young men huge lump sums per child (funded by e.g. abolishing welfare), and so on.

Sounds like a better plan than complaining about phones to me.

Almost nothing here could be defined as 'a plan' in even the most generous sense. There is no 'destigmatise' button that any government can press. 'Prioritise youth for high-paying jobs' is not possible in a free market. Giving baby bonuses is possible, although realistically not politically likely given that old people vote and unborn children don't.

Meanwhile, the 'complaining about phones' crowd is actually doing stuff.

And the stuff they're doing matters because it's obviously the phones.

Actual high fertility groups like the Amish and the Haredim was very small age gaps between spouses, because the key thing for fertility is early marriage, and if your young women are getting married at 18-20, it makes more sense to have the young men marrying them at 20-22 than waiting a few more years for no reason.

High-paying jobs are often also paying as much, or more, for the experience in life and work of the individual as their intelligence and qualifications. Fresh out of college (two year accelerated course) 20 or 22 year old Thule may like to imagine he could do the work of the CEO of MegaLogistics Corp, but in practice he's likely to run the place into the ground by making rookie mistakes due to simple "yeah, this is why we don't do that shiny new thing, we tried it back in '22 and hoo boy it took 2 years to get the production line back to what it used to be" reasons.

High-paying jobs are often also paying as much, or more, for the experience in life and work of the individual as their intelligence and qualifications.

Agreed. If companies wanted intelligence, they would just recruit 17yo's based on IQ tests.

Formal qualifications are often a proxy. The point is not that anything you learned in your master or PhD is directly useful for doing software consulting, it is that it filters for (mild) ambitiousness and executive function.

Domain experience is obviously relevant, hence all the companies looking for people with at least three years experience using Claude. But it is also harder to check by HR than formal qualifications.

Agreed. If companies wanted intelligence, they would just recruit 17yo's based on IQ tests.

No, they wouldn't, because that would be illegal. Degrees are an unprincipled exception to disparate impact.

IQ tests for jobs are legal in the UK and widely used (the civil service is using them less than before because of disparate impact, with the predictable negative effects, but large private sector employers still use them fairly widely). Credential inflation has been less bad than in the US, but not much less bad. So although Griggs v Duke Power doesn't help, I don't think it is the main thing.

I remember reading horror stories about youth training camps in Nazi Germany where they would sometimes bring the boy and girl groups together and have them do all sorts of activities with one another. The horrifying details of some of the girls coming home pregnant were a sign of the sordid nature of the Nazi regime and the people that organized these programs. The idea that there was a system in place that wasn't all that concerned with youth pregnancy and could be seen as functionally encouraging it was presented as lurid and practically evil from the perspective of the historians.

But from a naturalist perspective, what else is nature trying to have you do when your hormones are raging? When every emotional impulse is felt fivefold? Why should the bedrooms of teenagers in a coed training camp be monitored like prison cells or there is otherwise some great moral crime being committed? It's an odd juxtaposition with modern society where we have the same impulses but they are all intentionally neutered or directed towards childlessness.

To that extent, how bad is it that two young people with relatively high IQ's and neurotypical temperament create a family together early? Even if they are circumstantially encouraged by an adult matchmaker. Should they grow apart, they still have a chance at a second life before they turn 40. When many modern couples are having their first kid!

I keep thinking back to the idea of a genetic matchmaker of sorts. Even one as rudimentary as the infamous 'immune system smell test'. The notions that looks and personality compatibilities are impossible to study or roughly figure out seems stupid to me. You don't need a matchmaker with 100% or even 70% success rate. You just need to do better than the sexually liberated wild west we have today where apparently fewer people than ever are having sex and even fewer having children.

Like, is it completely impossible to just teach teenagers how to get along? There's an entire industry outside of schooling dedicated to just that, but it's reserved for adults who have already made all the mistakes. Feels like the entire thing is upside down.

I remember seeing a somewhat recent short documentary series on everyday life in the Third Reich which was based on first person accounts and described the same phenomenon among Hitler Youth groups during the Nuremberg rallies, with a large number of girls, even a majority of certain regional female groups, getting pregnant. I’m assuming this description and the horror stories you mentioned originate from the same accounts.

The deciding factor in all of this was that while the Party was openly promoting high birthrates and had little scruples about girls and young women getting pregnant outside of marriage (under the assumption that they were to get married immediately afterwards), the majority of the German people, regardless of their level of sympathy for Nazi ideology, was still influenced by Christian norms at this period to such an extent that they strongly objected to such sexual libertinism. The Party leaders were careful enough to take note of such complaints and thus decided to have male and female Hitler Youth groups camping at great distances from each other during the annual Nuremberg rallies from 1936. (Or so the documentary claimed.)

Once again, being a member of the iberal striver class is dysgenic

I think it's worse than that.....meritocracy might be dysgenic. Yes, you draw from a much larger population, take all the talent (on whatever metric you're measuring talent) and promote them into the middle-class rat race where one's career is the primary social status.

The problem with meritocracy is talented people who have attained wealth, power and privilege don't want their reversion-to-the-mean children to lose financial/social position. This makes the competition for those jobs greater, reduces the places for lower-class talented people to rise to, etc. The middle class fertility shredder is a natural consequence of social mobility. In the long run, this leads to genetic bifurcation of the population as the lower and working class lose everyone with this trait, and the middle class breeds with itself at far below replacement levels.

I think you may be conflating the trappings of merit with "meritocracy"

The prioritization of "the rat race", of wealth power and privilege over every other consideration is exactly the attitude I'm talking about. You know you can just not do that right?

I would contend that every single person posting on this forum today lives a life of abundance that would've been the envy of anyone from their great grandparents' generation. When a middle class striver posts something on the internet about how they can't afford kids it not because they literally don't have the resources, it is because they have higher priorities.

You know you can just not do that right?

I'm afraid contemplating NEETdom as spiritually superior is the sole (and reserved) domain of the Aristocrat. Centuries of Liberal revolution has, fortunately or unfortunately, not changed this tendency.

I'm not talking about "contemplating NEETdom". As @JTarrou's parable of the "skint Mexican" aptly illustrates, there are other options. I'm talking about prioritizing things other than personal autonomy and "number go up".

If doing so goes against the liberal striver ethos, that only reinforces my point that the liberal striver ethos is simply not conducive to forming families.

The problem is that anyone who wants you to prioritize things other than personal autonomy wants to run your life for his own benefit, and anyone who objects to "number go up" wants to impoverish you, again for his own benefit.

I was half joking, but the fads of the middle class are a reflection of their nature. If it was prestigious to have a million kids, all self respecting bourgeois would do it. But as soon as you put these people in charge of everything, which Liberalism certainly did, the mammonism becomes the whole of the law and we naturally gravitate to looser sexual mores that don't allow family formation.

It's that same tendency that prevents those same people from contemplative idleness. It takes another man than the bourgeois to prioritize legacy, and unfortunately the goal of Liberal society is to turn everyone into bourgeois man by any means. We must distribute college degrees and contraceptive pills to all Afghanis, otherwise they're not truly free, etc.

I think the "liberal striver ethos" is written deep in the hearts of a certain kind of men, and that it may be easier to remove those men from some positions of power they are ill suited for than to disabuse them of their tendencies. Tendencies which I should say, are tremendously useful if directed to productive pursuits.

Half-joking here but also half-serious. It's the triumph of the Protestant Work Ethic and the Calvinist spirit. If worldly wealth and success meant God was blessing you, then mo' money mo' blessing. So they made work and success the most important things in life, and then God got taken out of the picture, but work remained as the idol.

Thus all the discourse about "but what would you do if you retired?" and the mixture of disdain and sheer incomprehension for people who don't make their jobs their life, or don't say that they love their jobs instead of just "need to work for a living", and consoling themselves that this means they, the Mammon-slaves, are instead High Value Human Capital and Economically Productive Drivers with Low Time Preference unlike the high time preference slackers who only want to enjoy life and not toil and moil for as many hours in the day for as many years until the grave as they could.

I very much agree. This is how skint mexicans can afford to come here and work for pennies on the dollar and raise a dozen kids. They value different things and are willing to live differently.

As to the trappings of merit versus its reality, that's the question isn't it? We target things that seem to be part of merit, but every proxy creates an incentive to game it. Everyone likes a meritocracy until it's time to define what merit actually is.

Yeah, it's going to create a small cohort of highly capable individuals and a much larger cohort of ne'er-do-wells. The number of diamonds in the rough will diminish over time. It will create the hyper unequal dystopia the left fears, but it will be even more intractable unless we figure out a technological solution to the genetic rot. The accumulating genetic load must also be addressed by similar means, or else natural selection will eventually do it for us and that is likely to be rather unpleasant.

The middle class fertility shredder is a natural consequence of social mobility.

Not quite. It is, at least in your model, a consequence of downward social mobility. As far as I can tell, few systems have totally eliminated the threat of downward mobility (except perhaps for a very small slice of the population, like the Tsar's family), so it's not clear to me why meritocracy is uniquely bad in this respect.

Unlike economic pies, social status pies are zero sum by definition. Social status, and the economic and political benefits, tend to be "sticky". This isn't a problem with meritocracy, it's a problem with heirarchy, which meritocracy is supposed to streamline, but cannot entirely avoid.

Social status, and the economic and political benefits, tend to be "sticky".

Stickiness and mobility are opposites - if status is sticky, then reversion to the mean is not a concern.

This isn't a problem with meritocracy, it's a problem with heirarchy, which meritocracy is supposed to streamline, but cannot entirely avoid.

Indeed, unless we RETVRN to hunting and gathering we need to have some kind of hierarchy for society to function (and even then...). Certainly meritocracy delivers results and I don't believe that it necessitates people having fewer kids (and in any case the present fertility decline is mostly driven by the marriage decline so I'm not sure that anxiety about children's status is even the important factor here).

He concludes on Telegram: [a bunch of stuff]

That basically just boils down to "reduce sociofinancial taxes on young men", though.

Personally, I'm more in favor of startup-type relationships where you have young woman encouraged to pair off with an [even younger] man that actually has some promise. More of a collaborative relationship, less just "dommy Mommy".

stigmatizing any age gap larger than that between identical twins is a great way to do it.

Despite Pornhub's insistence I'm not actually convinced incest is eugenic.

Personally, I'm more in favor of startup-type relationships where you have young woman encouraged to pair off with an [even younger] man that actually has some promise. More of a collaborative relationship, less just "dommy Mommy".

If the woman is older than the man, the statistics show that relationship fertility will suffer. It's not natural. An 18 year old marrying a 23 year old is usually making an investment anyway.

But why? Be an established 30 year old woman who can now afford to have babies (and hire a nanny to do the scut-work), get yourself a 19 year old stud full of prime youthful sperm to fertilise your eggs and virile enough to service you as many times a day or night as needed, and just dumb enough to shut his mouth and do what Mommy tells him 😁

If it works for the (successful, intelligent, high eugenic value) men, why not for the women?

Because men and women are different, that's why.

Perhaps, but should 18M-23W be less dysgenic than 35M-30W, it's still arguably worth encouraging.

If women have free choice, no encouragement is going to have 23W voluntarily dating or marrying 18M 99% of the time. The 18M are likely willing, but the 23W will have no interest in most 18M unless they are built like a greek god.

The bonny boy is young but he's growing

Oh! father, dear father
I think you did me wrong
For to go and get me married
To one that is so young
He is but sixteen years
And I am twenty-one
Oh! the bonny boy is young
And he’s growing

Oh! daughter, dear daughter
I did not do you wrong
For to go and get you married
To one that is so young
He will be a match for you
When I am dead and gone
Oh! the bonny boy is young
But he is growing

..At the age of sixteen years
He was a married man
And at the age of seventeen
The father of a son
But at the age of eighteen
O’er his grave the grass grew green
Cruel death put an end
To his growing

You're definitely going against the current there. 23W generally aren't interested in 18M; in fact, 18W often aren't interested in 18M, they usually want older.

When I looked at the OKCupid data (so long long ago that OKCupid was an independent site, good for dating, and publishing good data!), there was a surprisingly sharp and linear relationship between ages and "allowable match" cutoff ages. For women the lower cutoff was roughly M >= W * 0.8 + 3.6. A typical 18W would just barely be interested in an 18M, and a typical 23W wouldn't be eager to go below 22M, certainly not 4 years below.

Like I said, life stages. At eighteen for a girl, a four year gap would be a fourteen year old boy, and that's way too young (how eighteen year old boys feel about fourteen year old girls I can't comment). Nineteen and twenty-three isn't quite so bad, but still a gap. You might have younger siblings that age, and the idea of "I'm dating the peer of my younger brother" just feels off.

If men apparently have no problems with "yes she is young enough to literally be my daughter, so?" then "young enough to be a sibling" would be no deterrent.

Sorry about whoever was downvoting you, and I wish they'd bug off.

how eighteen year old boys feel about fourteen year old girls I can't comment

I vaguely recall thinking "she'll probably be really cute in a few years, but it'd be gross to say so" about a fourteen year old girl when I was seventeen. I don't think I was an outlier. In the OKCupid data, there was a cutoff for both sexes at 18, but the male lower limit for the ages represented was a pretty linear W >= M * .5 + 6.5 (slightly more creepy than the "Seinfeld rule"!), and if we (dubiously) extrapolate that back to 18 that would give us 15.5 as a lower limit.

Nineteen and twenty-three isn't quite so bad, but still a gap.

No, but what throws a wrench in semi-logical explanations is that for both typical men and typical women it's a gap that is considered to be much more significant in just one direction. 23 year old men in the OKCupid data were generally interested in 18-27 year old women, and 19 year old women were interested in 19-25 year old men; 23 year old women were interested in 22-29 year old men, and 19 year old men were interested in 18-23 (probably 16-23, extrapolating) year old girls+women. Apparently "I'm dating the peer of my younger brother" gives The Ick, and "of my older sister" is Ick-adjacent, but "of my younger sister" and "of my older brother" are (or at least were; I'm sure Age Gap Discourse has had its ups and downs over the decades after this data was created) much more accepted.

You might have younger siblings that age, and the idea of "I'm dating the peer of my younger brother" just feels off.

This is just silliness.

You wouldn't feel weird dating "this girl is in my sister's class, my sister who is five years younger than me"?

Women would feel a bit odd about "I'm twenty-two, he's sixteen". Men, of course, are different as I'm being told on here. Big tits? Old enough!

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If we are talking about intentionally making babies soonish, it makes perfect sense for 23W not to pick 18M, because unfortunately, most 18M's are not heirs to vast family estates, nor are most 23W's for that matter. In 2020 (e.g. before AI complicated things further), it made perfect sense for both men and women to postpone having kids until they are in their 30s, have finished their education and have high-paying, steady jobs. Of course, this does not give them a lot of window to find a partner and have kids -- especially if they want multiple kids.

Shouldn't you add more of your own comments, rather than just repost the views of... er... some guy on Twitter/Telegram?

You do not help yourself by exaggerating. 18 and 17 is fine, and everyone thinks so except for mentally ill people. 24+ and 17 is about where the controversy battle lines are set.

8 and 17 is fine, and everyone thinks so except for mentally ill people. 24+ and 17 is about where the controversy battle lines are set.

Thinking there is no problem with 18 and 17 but there somehow is with 25 and 17 is about as reasonable as thinking there is a problem with 17 and 18, imo.

Let's take that to the extreme.

25 and 17 is 8 year age gap. 18 and 17 is 1 year age gap. When Mr 25 was 18, Ms 17 was 10. You cool with an 18 year old fucking a 10 year old? Because that's where the objections are coming from: when A was the age B is now, B was way too damn young.

  • -10

I think your intuition of the ick of a relationship depending on the absolute age difference constant is not shared by most people. The xkcd standard of "don't date below $own_age/2+7" is a lot more reasonable (though also not a hill I am prepared to die on).

By your logic, a 35yo dating a 55yo is equivalent to a 35yo dating a 15yo. Yet I do not the much of a problem with the former, while I consider the latter pretty much always wrong.

If I have 25yo boxer fighting against an 18yo boxer, that may or may not be a fair fight, but it will not be in even remotely the same category as the fight would have been if the older boxer was still 18 and the younger boxer was 11.

Maturity is one of these s-curve things. A 10yo is still in the phase where she is rapidly gaining life experience, and a 17yo can sometimes run circles around her in emotional maturity and pressure her into sexual behavior which is not in her long-term interests.

But in the next seven years, that gap between them will get smaller as the initially 17yo will hit diminishing returns on his growth. At age 17, she is much more likely to consider the possibility that he is just looking for a quick fuck when he is talking about how they are soulmates for eternity.

Age both of them by another seven years and the relationship would be entirely un-Problematic. He will not gain great powers to charm women out of their pants between age 24 and 31, and at age 24 she will very likely know what she wants in a relationship and have some judgement on whether the 31yo will give her that or not.

I've been thinking about this a little, and I do think the difference is that with the age-gap, men are thinking about the sex (sorry, guys) and women are thinking about the relationship. Guys are thinking "Well is she old enough to be legal? Okay? What's the problem?" and women are thinking about "Yeah but she's way too young to have anything in common with you, what will you talk about, how will you both navigate problems when they arise, are you only interested in her because she's green and malleable and can be moulded to what you want?"

I'm not saying this operates on a conscious level, but I do get the impression the men here are coming at it from the angle of "if she's big enough, she's old enough" (to steal the wartime recruiting mantra) and dressing it up in "evolution, baby, it conditions men to want the nubile fresh baby-making machine full of prime eggs for genetic maximisation".

Uh-huh. How many of the fellas laying out elaborate arguments about "sixteen is old enough" really do want to have twenty kids that will all be raised in sequence in the same house and that they will have to provide for? Because if we're talking about evolution-driven nubile fertile reproduction-maxxing, that's what it looks like, not "have two kids that we pour resources into so they end up in the upper-middle class".

are you only interested in her because she's green and malleable and can be moulded to what you want

I do note that the gender-reversed version of this - wives should get a husband who's not yet set in his ways and wives can and should mould their husbands - is lindy and entirely uncontroversial. Sure, there's no move to bang 16 year old boys but this seems like another case of things that used to be expected for both sexes now being abandoned on one side for the sake of female freedom whilst the male version tightens if anything.

are you only interested in her because she's green and malleable and can be moulded to what you want?

I agree many women seem to think suspiciously in these terms but it seems like a real theory of mind failure. Men by and large are not looking for the hassel of having to mould a partner into what they want besides a handful of fine adjustments at the end - I have taught my wife the proper way to load a dishwasher.

Nah the logic of why it is questionable is wrong. The same logic would hold it’s wrong if you add ten years to each (ie a 35 year old and a 28 year old). Yet no one blinks an eye at that (yet he was 18 when she was 11).

I think the concern is that teenagers are quasi adults and actual adults can prey on them easily — much easier than other quasi adults.

So 18 and 17 is fine. 35 and 28 is fine. But 25 and 18 is questionable

Literally how does their age 7 years ago matter in the present? It's not even the "babysitter fucking their ward once the ward grows up", they had not known each other in this hypothetical.

It matters for the life stages. 30 and 50 is not so big of a gap in experience and knowledge as 25 and 17, even though the former has a bigger chronological gap than the latter. And the suspicion always lingers that wanting the young, unformed, and inexperienced partner is so you can control them to get what you want out of the arrangement, not what both mutually want and need.

Leonardo diCaprio is probably the example people look at here, and while there isn't that terribly bad a disparity in ages (26 for his current partner while he's 51 is still nearly twice her age but she's in her mid-20s so an adult), the string of "relationships that end after a while and always with younger women" does seem to indicate something. I think men look at him and go "good for him, he can have his pick of hot young things and dump them when he's bored" but women look at that as "never married, no sign of marrying, partners much younger, that's a guy who's immature in some fundamental way and not a fully-formed adult".

Ten and seventeen are very different ages, and it is in no way inconsistent to treat them that way. You are, presumably, ok with, say, 32 and 50- maybe a bit weird, but few people would say 'it's a problem'- even though when 50 was 32 32 was way too young to be dating adults(or, I would say, anyone at all).

I'm totally against 25/17 and the OP but this logic doesn't hold water either.

Are you against a 30 year old marrying a 50 year old? When the 50 year old was 30, the 30 year old was only 10! Nevertheless, it seems quite clear that a 30 year old can consent to marry a 50 year old.

I'm totally against 25/17

How do you justify that at all?

It's quite simple. There needs to be a line drawn somewhere, and 18 is as good a place as any.

No, I don't think this withstands basic scrutiny. The optimal line drawn curve is definitely n shaped, and it definitely doesn't peak at 18. Also, there does not need to be a line drawn somewhere, other strategies like test and examinations could be used instead.

Exactly. It could be 17 or 19 and the moral arguments wouldn't change much. The important part is that there's a widely agreed line below which you are violating a social compact. This is also why a less formal environment might bend the rules sometimes, so as not to punish less anti-social cases.

You can move too far in the other direction; Mr 50 and Ms 32 may be okay now, but when Mr 70 and Ms 52 are together? Too much of an age gap and it ends up where the younger partner is more or less the caretaker for the older one while the younger partner is still near their prime.

Very few men are clamouring for the right to date 40 year old women, it's the guys who are pushing the limits on "if 17 old enough, why not 16? If 16 old enough why not 15?" that set off the alarm bells.

You can move too far in the other direction; Mr 50 and Ms 32 may be okay now, but when Mr 70 and Ms 52 are together? Too much of an age gap and it ends up where the younger partner is more or less the caretaker for the older one while the younger partner is still near their prime.

First of all, that's not really a good reason to oppose a relationship. Second of all... one partner is rather likely to end up the caretaker of the other one way or another.

Too much of an age gap and it ends up where the younger partner is more or less the caretaker for the older one while the younger partner is still near their prime.

Well sure, it's ill advised, but I hardly see why it's anyone else's business, unlike the 25/17 situation.

unlike the 25/17 situation.

This is not anyone's business except the 17 year old's parents. Society does not own other people's daughters. It's kind of creepy that random unrelated grown men are worried about what other people's daughters are doing with their private parts, actually.

I don't actually believe that parents should be able to do whatever they want with their children without limits, so this line of argument isn't convincing to me.

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This is not anyone's business except the 17 year old's parents.

Unfortunately, in ${CURRENTYEAR} parents are unwilling or unable to thot-patrol their daughters, so they want the state to act on their behalf.

Both conservatives and progressives agree that there exists a tradeoff between the freedom and protections afforded to teenaged girls and young women, so a compromise is struck by having the state restrict the freedom of and protections for teenaged boys and young men to maintain and/or expand the freedom of and protections for teenaged girls and young women.

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when A was the age B is now, B was way too damn young.

Do you extend this logic to retirees: that 78 and 70 are not supposed to date?

That's an 8 year gap and not as bad. Once over the age of adulthood and into maturity, the disparity is remedied. The problem at the younger end is that it's not about "Well she's physically able to get pregnant and deliver a child", it's about "she (or he) really is too damn young and inexperienced for all the troubles of adult life".

Even grown ups have their marriages fail due to problems, why would an 'old enough to be my dad and me' couple do much better under the same kind of stressors?

Presumably, they do better than two twenty year olds getting married because there's a real adult and a quasi-adult, rather than two quasi adults. Yes, that says all sorts of things about power dynamics in the relationship, which is the reason to look real hard at the guy who claims to want this(not nonsense about his browser history). But if he intends to marry her in a timely manner and treat her well, I mean, women are supposed to submit to their husbands anyways.

Yes, and then when the quasi-adult gets old enough to be a real adult, there's regret and "I married way too young to the wrong guy, now I have met my True Love and want a divorce".

I haven't seen a relationship that doesn't go through a rough patch after 7-ish years. Whether they will work through it, or crash out, doesn't seem to have anything to do marrying young or running into your True Love.

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women are supposed to submit to their husbands anyways.

We can't have nice things because feminists disagree with this. That's the core of it.

"18 and 17 is fine" was not the dominant view when I was in high school (which was not too long ago, and since then things have only moved in the direction of it being less fine). Every adult at school that spoke on the topic explicitly said that 18 and 17 was not fine, and 17 and 17 was also not fine.

It is still the case in some US states such as California that 17 and 17 is illegal.

The US just seems weirdly puritan about this. Age of consent in most of the world is slightly younger than 18, and it doesn't seem to cause problems. You can have a low age of consent so that teenagers are not punished for having sex, while still stigmatizing much older men having sex with someone half their age. And obviously 17 year olds should not be charged with possession of child pornography for having nude pictures of themselves on their phones.

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