site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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.

10
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I have a lot of confusion about this topic and I'd really appreciate it if someone could help me understand this complex of problems.

Most of the discussion around this topic here seems completely divorced from my lived experience. For reference I am male, live in Europe and make decent but not fantastic money. Assume I am average in all important respects. I could have had "access to reproduction" from when I was 18 until now without issue. There are plenty of mildly-attractive women that would gladly start a family with me simply because I am middle class and they are working class. So is this a problem affecting only working class men? I also know some working class men, some of whom have problems finding a mate. All of them are either obese or have severely lacking social skills, both those problems could be solved with maybe a year of consistent effort. I don't know any man that has no glaring problems and wants a long term relationship with a (any) woman but can't find one. Sometimes it looks like that but on closer inspection it always turns out that they are shopping above their price range so to speak.

My toy model for the "sexual marketplace" is this:

Both men and women are open to long-term committed relationships only if they get a great deal. People who marry often think that they both got lucky in the sense that they self-rate as a 6 but rate their partner as a 9. Of course this doesn't happen all that often.

Outside of that women put a premium on a long-term stable relationship with material benefits. So they will get into a relationship with someone they would not outright marry (and have children with) if that person pays their rent and makes them look good socially etc etc. This often leads to disappointment and conflict later on.

Men value non-committed casual sex with multiple partners, probably out of some mesa-optimizing desire to shotgun their genes in the gene pool. So they will lower their standards if the woman is sexually available and does not demand exclusivity.

I know men who want to have a "player" lifestyle and struggle to have that happen and I know women who struggle with domesticating an attractive man. From the article it sounds like that is not what is going on. It sounds like there are many men who have already lowered their standards as much as possible, who are willing to commit, provide etc and are still struggling to find any woman at all? Why am I not seeing that? Is this less prevalent in the EU? Am I too isolated from those men by being middle class? Or is there some other misunderstanding here?

All of them are either obese or have severely lacking social skills, both those problems could be solved with maybe a year of consistent effort. I don't know any man that has no glaring problems and wants a long term relationship with a (any) woman but can't find one.

This is my experience as well, but quite a few people pushed back against similar sentiments when we discussed this last week. There are at least two ways of interpreting that pushback:

  1. I'm wrong and many men that are reasonably fit, healthy, socially competent, and employed struggle to find relationships. My observations fail to capture a broad enough sample and the men that I know that are romantically successful all could have failed if not for a fair bit of luck.

  2. The responses are largely coping mechanisms - romance-less men are much more socially incompetent or physically unattractive than their defenders admit.

I know I favor the second explanation, but I'm open to being cautious about applying too much of a just-world fallacy. Still, I can't think of anyone I know that persistently fails romantically that doesn't have something that stands out as severely unappealing to women.

I'm wrong and many men that are reasonably fit, healthy, socially competent, and employed struggle to find relationships.

This is circular, since "socially competent" implies that they are able to find relationships.

I'm a bisexual man, attractive enough to be asked out on the street (by men), who has struggled to meet women to date. There's not really any mystery as to the cause: I'm 5'3, and testing suggests I'd get around a dozen matches with women per day if I were 5'10", as compared with none at my actual height.

Which kind of covers both your explanations: a man can have all his bases covered and still be unattractive because of a single trait outside his control; masculinity is stridently policed by women when it comes to dating, and a single deviation incurs a very heavy cost in terms of attractiveness as a mate. Pick out half a dozen normally distributed, uncontrollable traits like height, and it's inevitable that something like half of all men will be more than a standard deviation below average on at least one and be cut out of the dating market. Most of those men would do perfectly fine if they dated men.

You know, it's going to sound incredibly stupid, but I actually didn't even consider height as a variable in this conversation, which is obviously foolish and wrong. From everything I've seen, height is favored to an incredible extent, with many women outright excluding all men that don't clear a given bar (which may be several inches taller than them). Even petite women frequently demand men of average height or higher. There probably isn't any other trait that combines a complete lack of male control with strong predictive power in romantic success.

I also know some working class men, some of whom have problems finding a mate. All of them are either obese or have severely lacking social skills, both those problems could be solved with maybe a year of consistent effort. I don't know any man that has no glaring problems and wants a long term relationship with a (any) woman but can't find one. Sometimes it looks like that but on closer inspection it always turns out that they are shopping above their price range so to speak.

Now what does this reminds me of... Oh right, Scott's Annus Mirabilis.

According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

Now in 2023, according to Pew Research cited by OP already,

among men under 30 years old, over 60 percent are single, almost double that of women in the same age bracket. Not only are more young men single but their opportunities for developing a relational and sexual repertoire have all but vanished, as levels of sexual intimacy across genders appear to have hit a 30-year low (Lei & South, 2021).

You must be in a fortunate bubble indeed, to now not know of any among those 60% who aren't obese, autists, basket cases or aiming way above their level!

The explanation, shifting midway from male withdrawal to increased standards (because of the pandemic, bizarrely) and the solution offered, are pretty cool:

As young women continued to pursue intimate relationships less intently post-pandemic, men could have increased their relationship skills to close the effort gap. They could have confronted their relative avoidance and challenged the gender norms that made them so anxious about intimacy. They appear to have done the opposite, turning even further away from real-life relationships and into the virtual world. [...] The good news is that all of these young single men can choose differently. They can choose to focus on developing the necessary relationship skills to be more successful in dating. It starts with re-prioritizing the development of close, intimate relationships in their life for their own well-being and as a counterbalance to the shift in priorities for women. They must do this to reach their fullest potential whether or not they have had great male role models illustrating these efforts. By no means will dating in 2023 be an emotionally painless process, particularly for heterosexual men who are attempting to date women. Rejection may be a far more common result given competitiveness and higher relationship standards. Therefore, young men must be inoculated to avoidance in their dating life by normalizing women’s selectiveness.

My toy model of this issue and its discussion is very primitive. Standards really are rising quickly, and roughly 30% of marriage-age men are now, for all intents and purposes, incels. (This checks out, in my experience: even fit, okay-looking, psychologically stable guys with degrees and high-percentile (80-95ish) incomes often cannot find a 5/10 woman for a long-term relationship who isn't (physically) dangerously psychotic, a drug addict, an insufferable whore, or otherwise critically compromised). Men in the lower half of the distribution who are still viable begin to feel the pressure, and so double down in all usual tactics: «improving relationship skills» (which in practice means either deluded male feminist antics or PUA-like bullshit), distancing themselves from incels, ostentatiously signaling that they are «not like that» and have no problem scoring, then moving on to intense bodybuilding, shoe lifts, cosmetic surgery, TRT... As a result, everyone is awash in gaslighting. Normie men who feel they still have a chance will never admit that they may not have it tomorrow, because this in itself feels like diminishing their chances.

What has changed was the passing grade, but men are graded on a curve, so in effect the proportion of rejects has increased permanently. This rat race is pathetic and unsustainable, as are copes.

You must be in a fortunate bubble indeed, to now know of any among those 60% who aren't obese, autists, basket cases or aiming way above their level!

What percentage of Americans are obese, autistic, or mentally ill?

42% obese, 2.3% autistic (1 in every 44 children, according to the 2018 data; can't find any data on prevalence in adults) and 20% mentally ill (1 out of every 5 Americans will experience a mental illness in a given year). All figures from CDC.

There’s no significant gender difference in obesity. Who are all the fat girls dating?

Well, a lot of them aren't, isn't it the best predictor of single status ?

Those who do, they date mostly guys who settle for them. There's a preference for fat women but it does seem very rare, on the order of genuine male homosexuality. Maybe there's more men who don't mind it, but I've never seen much of an indication that they exist.

Even as an obese girl on online dating you're getting arbitrarily large amounts of interest in casual sex, which tends to lead them into an equivalent of the '7/10 girl gets casual sex from 10/10 guy but cannot get commitment but refuses to compromise loop' but instead it's 2/10 girl gets casual sex from 6/10 guy but cannot get commitment'

Black guys /s

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