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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.

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.

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).