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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So have men. This is just a large part of Western culture at this point.
Yeah, except as with EVERY OTHER SOCIAL TREND, its more women than men. Same with LGBT identification.
This is all tied up in the same basic cause.
If you want to reverse it, target the more susceptible gender.
Its the women.
If a trend affects women by 40% and men by 30% (or whatever percentages you prefer), then no, it's not.
Also, how would you go 'targetting the most susceptible gender' with, for example, social media? Ban social media but only for women? If social media is bad for everyone but worse for women, why ignore the harm to men?
You also conveniently omit the social trends that are affecting men more, like video game, porn and gambling addictions.
Your approach is like the mirror of those 'tell men rape is wrong' campaigns, where the point is clearly to scold men because the activist enjoys it, not because it'll work.
Do you not think an effect size that is 25% larger is significant, meaningful, important?
Okay.
Young women are over twice as likely to say social media has influenced their opinions than young men.
Hence why young women are about 2-3x more likely to identify as liberal/democrat than young men, ENTIRELY explained by the women shifting whilst the men stay steady.
Which, well, we notice that white liberals have the highest rates of poor mental health among political ideologies.
And women are at least 2x as likely to be on antidepressant medication than males. This divide is starker among the younger generation (i.e. the trend has changed for the worse in women only.)
Quoth:
So this all tracks.
And they're now less likely than men to want to get married. Female desire to get married dropped by 22 percentage points over 50 years. Male's dropped... 2. Its the women.
Female religiosity and church attendance dropped off a cliff. from 30% unaffiliated to 50% unaffiliated in less than 10 years. A 20 point shift. Men's shifted... about 6 points. For the first time EVER there's a religiosity gap in favor of young men. Its the women.
Oh, and here's data that 3x as many women under 30 hold a negative view of young men, compared to the reverse. 21% vs. 7%. Oh its 'only" 14 points, right?
When does it become pure epistemic malfeasance to pretend these distinctions don't exist or don't have significant impact on outcomes?
Its the women.
I'm not ignoring the harm to men.
I'm just noticing that every single article examining gender-based social issues pathologizes male behavior and either implicitly or explicitly excuses female behavior. Its almost impossible to find article even WRITTEN by a male that explains their issues sympathetically.
Anyhow. Solutions? Here's my previous thoughts:
I'd like to see some feasible measure developed that can 'quantify' the benefits and harms of social media use and THEN we can craft policies that regulate the issue, just like we do with cigarettes, toxic waste, and like we USED to do with gambling. My general prescription is that we should add friction to the vices.
If we can provably detect that social media detracts from attention span, mental health, educational attainment, and financial stability, then surely we can discuss regulating them at the source, right?
(remember those studies I posted up there with women being more influenced by social media AND having worse mental health?) In practice, flat bans might be the ONLY thing that provides sufficient friction.
Other possible solutions: require women wear a watch device that counts down the days of their highest fertility so she's under no illusions about her timeline for marriage and kids.
My favorite proposal to bring up: Return the funding/loan standards for higher education to their pre-1993 levels. But this would detract from womens' ability to go to college so I'm SURE there'll be a fit pitched about it.
If it isn't clear by now I've considered this whole thing from just about every possible angle with as much data as I can find.
I'm still hammering away on my point here because I have yet to have a single solid refutation: Women's behavior has altered drastically over the past 30 years. Mens hasn't shifted that much.
Meanwhile EVERYONE reports being less happy.
Its the women.
This pitch would go over a lot better if you were to focus on girls, rather than women, and in more of a family and school context, rather than a romantic context. While it's true that an anxious and depressed girl is going to have all kinds of romantic trouble, focusing on that from the perspective of the man who would have liked to have dated her but now can't is way less socially acceptable. You can say they shouldn't be, but you're not going to change centuries of social programming, it's not a fence that's worth removing.
People actually are worried about the girls, and a lot of the negative affects set in in adolescence, especially among teenage girls. People like Abigail Shrier and Johnathan Haidt talk about that a lot, and there isn't all that much pushback about Haidt being a man, since forming young minds has been his area of interest for decades, and now he's interested in these depressed teenage girls; makes sense.
More options
Context Copy link
The funny thing is, I agree with you. But from reading your comment history, your misogyny (and trust me, I do not use that word lightly) makes me distrust anything you say.
Like, if the problem is the phones, you should be talking about the phones, not about how women are awful.
I do concede that maybe you're not like this in real life. I talk about HBD on here occasionally, but I spend approximately 0% of my time in real life talking about it for obvious reasons. Maybe you have deep, fulfiling relationships with women in real life. Maybe you're married with kids?
But to quote a recent article on Astralcodexten:
If you want to fix the world, you're not gonna do it by attacking half of the population, even if the media is unfair when it writes about men.
I can assure you this matters little to me. Like not at all. This is anti-persuasive. You're like the third or fourth person on here alleging misogyny on my part, yet my posts get upvotes so it seems I'm being persuasive to someone. I'll re-up my point:
If you want to change my opinion, present better data. As I said:
I've been begging for counterexamples for years. I WANT to be proven wrong:
You do not provide any, so I will continue to assume you don't have any, which is because they do not exist.
Which half is getting attacked in the mainstream.
Please, tell me which one it is. This seems like a causal factor that itself has to be addressed.
This is like 90% of my point.
If we're not willing to give men actionable advice and assistance this doesn't get solved. Piling pressure them is not helping, as evidenced by EVERYTHING GETTING WORSE for them.
Oh look I've been talking about the phones too.
I DARE you to find a single place where I've said "women are awful" or anything that is an actual synonym to those terms.
This is like saying I think kids are awful because I think they shouldn't be allowed to drive semi-trucks. C'mon man.
This seems obvious. If I could argue about this stuff easily in real life this place wouldn't have much use, would it?
Perhaps the fact that discussion of these sorts of objectively verifiable facts is verboten is why the status quo persists? Maybe?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link