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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.

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.

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.