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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.

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.

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.