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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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As I understand it, the claim is that women are so powerful that they have turned into little dictators who go around making unreasonable demands. This requires substantiation. What kind of unreasonable demands?

I'll give you one such example, which is more or less what this entire discussion is based on. The [dm]ating market.

Women just about exercise dictatorial demand. This is patently obvious to most men, but this visualization might give a somewhat illustrative example. Notice how most of the space is pink, indicating female advantage. The advantage shifts genders only when the man is 95th percentile. When @FarNearEverywhere speaks of the infamous choosy male she is falling for the apex fallacy given a majority of the male population is at a severe disadvantage, but they are also invisible to women.

More generally, women wield the power to destroy careers with mere accusations of sexual misconduct, men don't have this privilege. This trend more or less applies to any social shaming, men just about cannot wield the weapon of shaming at all, it's almost an exclusively female activity. Men can intimidate and hurt and wield a lot of other weapons but shaming not so much.

Do you think Davis Sabatini would have been fired for sleeping with a coworker if he was a woman?

You've given me a second claim, that "criticizing women as a group is so verboten that any and all of it is taken with utmost offense." It is true that claims about women are policed more strongly than claims about men. However, women are not unique in this regard. Claims about black people are policed more strongly than claims about white people, for example. So it does not make sense to attribute this to women's overwhelming manipulative dictatorial power. It has more to do with the fact that there is a historical pattern of unfair mischaracterisation of women that was bad enough that it gave rise to a movement dedicated to correcting it.

That is only part of the reason. Women have an ingroup bias and men have an outgroup bias. Humans are biologically hardwired to be more protective towards eggs than sperm because of obvious evolutionary logistical reasons.

Regardless of the reason, is it rational?

None of what I have been given substantiates the claim that I was initially criticizing -- namely, that women are "queens by political fiat" in any real sense of social or political power. We are not. It is obvious that we are not.

Yes, women are not queens. I am not claiming that is a rational statement but I will try to explain where its coming from to bridge some of the inferential distance.

As a young frustrated guy, it certainly feels like they are. When you see all kinds of scholarships for them, programs to get them STEM degrees and jobs, when there are trends such as "Believe all women" and questioning them is tabooed, when an average run-of-the-mill girl can demand her partners to be 6 foot tall, earn 6 figures and have a minimum 6-inch dick when men making even 1/10th of that demand despite them being worthy or not are chastised to hell. When you are told repeatedly that all of society's social ills are because you keep on playing video games or won't take showers and women are not criticized one bit. When NGOs say "Women are the greatest victims of war" despite men being the overwhelming number of casualties, and doesn't get chastised for it. It certainly sometimes feels like the game is rigged against you.

That is a statement out of frustration, you are not the audience for it, the audience is other men who can relate to the frustration. And the worst part of it all (rhetorically)? You take a massive social hit for pointing any of those things out. Even in a post about how 60% of young men are single and how that is a sign of severe social decay, you clutch your pearls about guys being frustrated at women and lashing out a bit sardonically at the grimness of the situation, it's the lack of empathy.

I probably am sea lioning a bit, it's true. But, on the other hand, it's not actually good for the Motte when it becomes a place for men to lash out in frustration at women with exaggerated claims. You joke that there are about 2 women here, but really, if you want viewpoint diversity, this can't become a space where people are perceived as having the right to complain about a particular subgroup without getting pushback.

For what it's worth, you have my agreement of some of your complaints. "Women are the greatest victims of war" is pretty indefensible. There have been instances in which the social movement against rape and sexual assault has led to deeply unfair outcomes for some of those accused. And, in this context, it is silly to blame men for not being in relationships. If women are "rational" for dating each other or choosing their careers instead, then men are just as "rational" for looking at the hell that is dating apps and deciding to watch porn instead.

The liberal position is that people can "demand" whatever they want out of a partner, provided that they are willing to accept not having a partner if they cannot actually convince such a person to date them. And I think that's a pretty important principle, actually -- that individuals can always opt out of the dating market, if they've decided that it sucks. That women fear coercion in this space is not actually a sign that we are manipulative; our fear is based on a not-too-distant history in which social norms used to make it harder for women to say no to relationships even when they wanted to. If you want to throw away liberalism in this context, because you think it simply isn't sustainable, then it's not illegitimate for people to respond by pointing out that this will create harms of its own.

If we're keeping liberalism, then I think the finger-pointing in both directions has to stop. I think sometimes people point the finger at men because they want to forestall any sort of conversation that might lead to social coercion of women, but I don't think this is actually helpful. Men are also within their rights to opt out if they want to.

Honestly, if you ask me, one reason this problem is hard is that child-rearing just doesn't fit easily into an atomised, market-based society. The strongest incentives are not economic nor directly related to happiness; they happen on the wishy-washy level of fulfillment and even sometimes self-sacrifice. The best ways to support it naturally take place not on the individual level nor the national level but rather on the intermediate, community level.

It's possible that some of the solutions to the problem of finding relationships need to happen on that local level, too. Dating apps suck particularly badly for men, but women don't really seem to love them all that much, either. Rather than berating people for not engaging with the system as it exists, it surely makes more sense to try to reform the system so that better ways of finding partners and starting families start to seem possible for people. That's easier said than done, but better than sitting around arguing about who is to blame.

Neither I nor Dasein suggested politically/legally disenfranchising women, you are arguing against a strawman if you think that is the case.

I'll speak for myself though; Given the parent thread is just a continuation of a conversation that has been going on for a while, I previously talked about my solution not being to take away women's rights (I'm a libertarian and that goes against my political framework anyways), but instead to stop;

  • Artificially inflating women's social status. And by all means, I do think it is artificially inflated; by subsidizing college degrees that are economically unproductive but female-dominated,

  • Non-stop feminist rhetoric from just about all facets of society/institutions starting from kindergarten; to stop holding boys back by punishing them in schools, essentially defeminizing schools, Stop with the incessant "yass queeen" girl power rhetoric in just about all media,

  • The boys drool rhetoric when it comes to every issue.

  • Assigning social status to college degrees to the point that a professional email sender who makes 40k a year stops thinking that an Electrician who makes 50k a year is beneath her feet,

  • Women being able to fight for their interests as a class (why does 50% of the population even get to do this? post full enfranchisement), And many more.

You can visit last weeks CW thread to see the entire list of ideas discussed that would deflate the currently presumed inflated female status without taking away any of their rights. Most of the changes proposed are cultural.

Ultimately, I don't think any of these things will work. Hence my doomerist position that there is nothing to be done about male disenfranchisement anyways because we have been psychologically/culturally primed otherwise beyond any fixing (partly thanks to online dating). I repeat, this conversation is not about TFR, it's about the fact that 60% of young men are single.

If you have a potential solution/idea for that problem, I am all ears.

That's fair but I hope you won't be as quick to assign blame to men when the consequences of those liberal positions come to fruition. More men, especially the Gen Z generation are opting into watching porn instead of the hassles of dating. They're also opting out of society, which by the liberal position is within their rights. The modern educated women is so far detached from the modern male laborer and man that I fear you don't fully understand how much they contribute to the world that you thrive in.