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Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I broadly agree with this analysis with a small caveat. I tend to think that human behavior can't be reduced directly to economic thinking. Rather, economics impact behavior through evolution, both biological and cultural. So ultimately this is a level or two above the question of the immediate cause. Maybe @gattsuru gives the phenomenology of the cause, you give the far-origins of the cause, but ultimately the shift has to be situated into the modern drift towards feminism in and late marriage more generally. Given feminism and late marriage, ideas about the age of consent needing to be high will win out, in large part because of selfish reasoning on the part of women like you detail. @gattsuru documents what those ideas actually feel like. So the final part of the explanation concerns this more general drift, which as been happening for over 200 years.