site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15300 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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!"

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.

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats