site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7047 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 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.

I'm not sure why I should assume misogyny, though; none was conveyed.

There's a few reasons:

  1. English is in a rough spot where the simplest way to say "a person who's a woman or a girl but age doesn't matter" is "a female", and yet the simplest way to say "an animal who's got the larger gametes but species doesn't matter" is also "a female". Connotations from the latter use case leak over to the former and make it sound dehumanizing.

  2. In your "met a nice female at work" context, as in many others, the "age doesn't matter" use case would be a bit creepy too!

  3. Talking about "males" and "females" is a natural way to discuss gender differences that are meaningful regardless of age. But normal people think that such a discussion is at least risky if not inherently problematic, so the people who discuss it anyway are more likely to be weirdos who want to analyze everything (i.e. mostly men) and who have ingroup bias (i.e. everyone, but "mostly men" means mostly the ingroup is men), so at one end of the range you've got people trying overcome their biases but at the other you've got outright misogyists.

  4. This Star Trek episode was just the first of several in TNG and countless in DS9 to make "female"-as-noun a major verbal tic of the Ferengi race. It may seem silly to list this, but are probably a few tens of millions of people, disproportionately including the types who love to come up with linguistic norms, to whom the noun "fe-male" sounds like it should be read in that accent and with that attitude.

I'm not thrilled by any of this - my favorite author is Heinlein, who often uses "male" and "female" as nouns via category 3, maybe 75% of the way towards the "trying to overcome [his] biases" end of that range - but I can understand it.

No? ‘Girl’ implies unmarried, but referring to a woman as a ‘girl’ would be uncontroversial and normal outside of liberal bubbles, and ‘lady’ is a perfectly normal polite term to refer to a random woman or girl in third person. ‘That lady waiting in the cafe’.

No? ‘Girl’ implies unmarried, but referring to a woman as a ‘girl’ would be uncontroversial and normal outside of liberal bubbles

I think calling an adult woman a "girl" is now restricted to dating and sex-related contexts (including sex work-adjacent jobs like Hooters "girls")

It is quite normal to refer to ‘the girls in the office’ referring to secretaries and the like in my dialect, or ‘girls trip’/ ‘girls night’.

For #1 (& #2), I guess I just don't quite get how baggage a word picked up when someone else used it is supposed to be the preferred interpretation for how I used it when the context for how I used the word is present, unless I uttered some sentence in isolation to a stranger (or I work at a middle school or something, in which case that's more than a bit creepy).

For #3, it's not established at all that the people with ingroup bias wouldn't alter their language to use "woman" in the noun case but keep the bias (clever girl!), so in practice it ends up being the people more likely to be weirdos who want to analyze everything (i.e. mostly men members of this forum) catching an accusation of misogyny by association. I'm sure some ingroup-biased individuals are also among those using "female" as a noun, but if both groups contain this element, why are the people who insist on using "woman" not also tainted by association with those among them with ingroup bias? What I'm trying to point out is that normal people didn't spring forth from the womb1 with this belief, and the noun use of "female" clearly used to be widespread based on published works of the past, so where did the association between the two come from? As best I can tell—and I am not about to wade through the sewage that passes for sociolinguistics literature to attempt to track it down—it got memed into existence as a tool of social ostracization. Now, that is certainly a flex, but I'm choosing to respond to that flex by giving it the finger2.

I'm not sure what to say about #4 except that I haven't seen any of the Ferengi episodes, and I kind of doubt that very many of the people who come up with this stuff have either.

1Perhaps we could figure out a word to refer to people bearing wombs?

2Thus qualifying myself as a weirdo who wants to analyze everything member of this forum :)

I'm not sure what to say about #4 except that I haven't seen any of the Ferengi episodes, and I kind of doubt that very many of the people who come up with this stuff have either.

I would say 100% of the people involved in the Geek Feminism lamewar were aware of the Ferengi connection. I don't know how much of the wide conversation about calling women "females" has passed through that filter, although I first came across it in the Geek Feminism context.

Ah, I was thinking about the wider conversation when I doubted the proportions; seems we were evaluating two different groups.

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