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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14879 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.

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!"

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.

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