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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8695 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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I’m somewhat familiar with the work of the reactionary blogger Jim and one thing I definitely never expected him to do was to use the Japanese light novel series KonoSuba and its anime adaptation as a talking point. But now it’s here:

In the anime Konosuba, Kazuma and Megumin frequently find themselves alone together and have a lot of physical contact. Kazuma, who is the main male character, is identified in the storyline as seventeen years old and is drawn as slightly younger; Megumin, who is the primary romantic interest, his waifu, his best girl, is drawn inappropriately young, and is identified in the storyline as inappropriately young even for a seventeen-year-old boy, but all the fanservice women, for example Aqua, are drawn as about Sydney Sweeney’s age. They are all drawn as obviously older than Kazuma, and most of them are identified in the storyline as inappropriately mature for a seventeen-year-old boy. All the other girls perform fanservice, and Megumin does not, but only Megumin gets time alone and extensive platonic physical contact with Kazuma. The storyline could be interpreted as the young main male character preparing her for a future marriage, while at the same time being distracted by all those attractive, far older eye-candy women, particularly Aqua.

One aspect he left out is that Aqua basically exists a comic relief character and not as a potential romantic interest (also the notion that she is ‘drawn as about Sydney Sweeney’s age’ is questionable at best) and that the other main female character who can be called a fanservice woman (Darkness) is basically a delusional pervert which rules her out as a love interest as well.

Anyway, that’s not the main reason I’m linking to it here and I also know this subject matter has been done to death here. The reason instead is the reference therein to mainstream accusations about the ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ among single men. I think it’s a fascinating culture war phenomenon and I also think Jim misses the point about it here. It’s not that it’s a pretext for aging and frumpy hags to whine, it’s that it’s based on the assumption that women are innately mature enough for marriage. I’ll quote a 2011 blog post from an Australian Catholic social conservative author who is also critical of the Manosphere:

On the other hand, what alpha Christian male wants to be sloppy sixth's to the modern shrew? The problem for this type of guy is the lack of quality women out there. He wants to get married but the pickings are so slim. Hymowitz thinks that today's average girl is "quality" product, however I think that there is a fair amount of legitimate disagreement as what constitutes quality No matter what her career achievements, a woman who has ridden the carousel and perhaps made a few trips to the abortuary is not quality material from a Christian point of view. A mature and responsible christian male would think such a woman is high risk material for infidelity and divorce and by-pass her. If there were an en masse movement to alpha up, the following would happen. The hedonists would pump and dump while the Christians would become more choosy; the pool of marriageable suitors for women would shrink.

Where Hymowitz errs, is in the assertion that today's woman is in some way more "mature" than the pre-adolescent male upon which she rightly heaps her scorn. She labours under the illusion that the modern woman is some sort of prize that men will aspire to. Hymowitz has framed her argument in such a way that would be laughable to the good men of the past.

Men and women of the past would both agree that men today leave a lot to be desired, but the fall in quality has been most marked amongst women. From the vantage point of the past, the modern woman today is vapid, slutty, superficial, unfeminine and hence extremely poor quality material.

What marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood is the gradual assumption of responsibility, maturity and independence. What separates the child, the adolescent and the adult is the increasing influence of reason over emotion. The mature adult takes his emotions into account but is not ruled by them. Enter the concept of the Rationalisation Hamster. The concept needs to be understood as the cognitive mechanism by which thought is subordinated and aligned to emotion. The function of this "hamster" is to provide a superficially plausible (if not logically consistent) series of thoughts to align and justify whatever action is required by the emotional state. It is effectively the thought process of an immature adolescent.

The "triumph" of modern Feminism has been to culturally and legislatively legitimise this rationalisation hamster. Marriage is no longer seen as a reciprocal relationship amongst two people, but rather a flexible arrangement of convenience based on the emotive state of the parties. The logic of abortion as a woman's rights issue (ignoring the rights of the father) is another example. The furthering of women into fields that they are totally unsuited to, such as the military, police and firefighting services yet another. Feminism has also been able to reframe feminine identity; what previous generations would have thought trampy and flighty, modern feminism has been able to portray as mature.

When Hymnowitz points to the Star Wards nerds, all I can think of is the "mature" female SATC equivalents. I admit that men sitting in mom's basement jerking off to online porn are pretty shallow, but so are the women who spend their lives shopping for bags, clothes whilst riding the carosel waiting for the enabling supplicant whom will provide them with lifestyle to which they are accustomed. People from a less enlightened age would consider a person who endlessly obsesses about their looks, the latest pair of Jimmy Choo's and who Brad is dating now, pretty superficial. It's the pot calling the kettle black.

My main gripe with arguments along these lines is that they're basically cope. "From the vantage point of the past" doesn't matter. From the PoV of the Aztecs, we are colossally fucking up. But who cares? The same goes, to a lesser degree, for catholic social conservatives.

The reality remains, the average young man is attracted to the average young women in a way that is not reciprocated. For literally all my acquaintances who are or were single for a sustained period of time, the problem was always that in their peer group, the single women do not judge the single men as worth it. The men are single because they got rejected; The women were single because they are rejecting.

Just to be clear, I even think the argument is largely correct! With the benefit of being a father and family man who has no interest in dating ever again, it seems obvious to me that most young modern women have an inflated image of self-worth, an excessively negative view of young men, and a serious problem with even just acknowledging that any perspective but their own might matter. And, to be further clear, the men aren't great, either; They're merely not worse.

I’ll quote a 2011 blog post from an Australian Catholic social conservative author who is also critical of the Manosphere:

This is by no means a Catholic critique at all. There are two completely different ways of how modern feminism or even modern thinking breaks down intersexual relationships. The first one is that the basis of Catholic teaching is not some maturity or anything like that, our morality is Virtue Based. Both men and women should strive to be virtuous: humble instead of prideful, chaste instead of lustful, generous instead of greedy, kind instead of jealous, balanced in moderation instead of gluttonous, patient instead of wrathful, diligent instead of slothful. Above all these virtues we have Christian love, caritas as guiding principle. There are of course other virtues such as courage or wisdom which are subsided in there. The point is that Christian ethics is Virtue Ethics, it is not utilitarianism or harm reductionism - it is centered around personal virtues related to deification and individual relationship toward God and other people.

Catholic anthropology follows this in sacraments. In baptism, a child is introduced into a community where mother, father, godfather and godmother take responsibility to educate the child toward these virtues in form of caretakers utilizing methods of discipline and consistency to teach the child. This results in first communion around age of 7 o 8, this tracks the ability to discern between good and evil, the child is capable of sacrament of confession and to decide on what is good and evil. From there there is the period of theological grounding for child's decision making, the parents are there as teachers with the child having more autonomy to explore these realities. The child is a catechumen and this period ends around age of 15-16, where he is considered and adult but still to be mentored by other people, including parents and the community.

Now the point is that in terms of maturity, by age of 16 you as a Catholic should be fully aware of what is Christian moral teaching, what are vices and virtues and live you life accordingly. There is no eternal "kid" mentality where somebody can be 28 and still "exploring" as some forever university student, it is preposterous. You can be 17 or 18 years old and preparing yourself for marriage and taking care of children in the same loop. Maturity is not about wealth, "responsibility" in terms of being a manager of team of 50 people or anything like that. While this is of course one way to grow, it is by no means implied in catholic teaching. You are mature as long as you posses ability to discern good and evil and as soon as adult Christian you know the doctrine to live virtuous life. The catholic teaching of responsibility is stemming from subsidiarity, by age 15-16 you are fully capable of thinking and managing yourself, and you are preparing to take care of your closest family such as husband/wife and even children and whole community. But this is reciprocal, The Church is proper way to live Christian life and the community is helping everybody till their last days. The process of deification is a lifelong process where the whole community including your priest is helping you in this endeavor.

When Hymnowitz points to the Star Wards nerds, all I can think of is the "mature" female SATC equivalents. I admit that men sitting in mom's basement jerking off to online porn are pretty shallow, but so are the women who spend their lives shopping for bags, clothes whilst riding the carosel waiting for the enabling supplicant whom will provide them with lifestyle to which they are accustomed.

That is not lack of maturity, these young adults are mature enough to have capacity to understand what is going on. It is lack of virtue. You can be 80 year old alcoholic bum jerking off on your pissed matrass doing stupid shit. We do not think that such a person did not mature, they are just lacking virtues.

Anecdote: I was recently at a dinner with a family and their early 20s daughter... the level of bitchiness was off the charts. Bitchiness directed towards her own parents mostly, which was unbecoming. Seemingly every second sentence she spoke was some kind of expression of above-it-allness, disinterest, disdain for explaining some topic further. Very unattractive. Even allowing for the fact that she probably didn't want to be there, that's not at all how you're supposed to behave at dinner even if you don't want to be there.

They aren't making women like they used to. Nor men for that matter.

Women learning more cute anime-girl mannerisms would likely raise fertility and supercharge pair bonding. Probably we need more anime-boy mannerisms too, which means a good deal more fighting and high stakes competition. Women like handsome, confident 'the greatest of all time' characters like Gojo Satoru.

But we do all this social engineering for what? Children? Fertility could drop to zero tomorrow and there would be no true existential consequences. There are many reasons why it'd be bad, people not caring about the future, the intrinsic good aspect of raising children. Many people not falling in love is a bad thing too, obviously. From Jim:

It should not be this way, and it does not have to be this way, for seventy years ago, it was not this way. But this is what we have now. It is horrifying. This has to end, or our race and our species will end.

OK, that's kind of true.

But we won't need new 18-year old human workers in 2044. We hardly need them today, there's a huge oversupply of young people relative to actual demand for labour. Employers are acting like the pickiest hot-girls on dating apps with all the bullshit they're pulling because they simply do not want or need more people. If they actually had a labour shortage, they'd act like it and scrap the 'we interview you 5 different times and make you pass 3 tests' approach. The modern dysfunction in dating markets and the workplace reflects a breakdown in the core assumptions of our civilization, rooted in the technologies we have available and how that affects the social system. The combination of mobile phones, social media, mass automation, deindustrialization, microplastic/chemical pollution would surely be disruptive to whatever we had 70 years ago, just from first principles?

Whatever gross dysfunction going on with our civilization's inability to reproduce or pair up properly doesn't really matter at all, it'll be blown out of the water by AI.

Imagine if we set up anime battle schools to turn out legions of super attractive, cute couples. Men are men again. Women are women. Korea has TFR 5. Even if that was somehow possible, so what? Either AI goes well or it goes badly. Whatever mild or gross dysfunction pales in comparison to being dead or immortal. I think a functional society would do better - but a functional society is also going to get torn to pieces. It's like spaghettification when one gets close to a black hole. How could ASI not disintegrate our society at minimum, when it nukes all the basic assumptions we have about the role of people, labour, economies, even what it means to be human?

Or imagine even that I'm wrong about AI. Even if AI is a nothingburger, there are still way more people than there are jobs for them. There's this gigantic disability/welfare architecture built up for this very purpose, ever expanding layers of education to keep young people out of the labour market, ridiculous regulations requiring employment of useless people that necessitate even more to fix up their mess and still huge oversupply. As time passes, we get more machinery that can do more work in agriculture, manufacturing, more robots and so fewer people are needed. I think the root cause of the dating market dysfunction is driven by technology destabilizing all old equilibriums simultaneously. A mere social fix isn't going to work, it's like building a castle on the sand in an hourglass. And especially Christianity cannot work, since that's the very thing we observed completely failing!

Love existing doesn't interact negatively with AI. If anything it does positively, which means AI makes fixing this problem more important, not less. Under superabundance people will still want romantic partners, it's of terminal value, unlike jobs.

Either AI goes well or it goes badly.

Well this is an externalized locus of control. I don't think this is random, I think a functioning society is better able to get its priorities in order and not fight about petty stupid stuff, and therefore is significantly more likely to figure out how to make AI go well. Imagine if all of the culture war stuff was absent and AI was the ONLY serious issue people were discussing, debating, arguing about, and talking to politicians about. People would spend more time learning about it, educating people about it, discussing it, understanding it. It doesn't guarantee we'd get it right, but it would surely up the chances. It would also prevent people from getting confused and thinking AI "alignment" means making it not say offensive things for PR reasons.

Obviously this is an unrealistically exaggerated scenario, but on the margins every amount of less time people spend hating each other for gender reasons is more time they can spend figuring out other things. Also, having stable happy marriages with children would get people more invested in the future and long term thinking which would adjust their priorities to care more.

Fertility could drop to zero tomorrow and there would be no true existential consequences. There are many reasons why it'd be bad, people not caring about the future, the intrinsic good aspect of raising children. Many people not falling in love is a bad thing too, obviously.

I think a functional society would do better - but a functional society is also going to get torn to pieces.

I said basically what you're saying... it's true that getting our act together would probably help. But the extent to which it would help is pretty small compared to the magnitude of the problem.

It's automatically proportional because it increases the probability of

  1. Making a properly aligned AI
  2. Putting in exactly the right level of socialist (or Georgist...?) policies at exactly the right time to ensure that the massive productivity of AI is shared among the people and not monopolized by the winner-takes-all investors.

A significant part of the reason why socialist policies are awful and doesn't work in real life is because it disincentivizes work, and people need to work in order for the economy to function. In a world where these assumptions are no longer true, the conclusion that socialist policies are awful won't necessarily hold and the balance will shift. If we increase the chance of doing this properly by 10%, then that's 10% multiplied by the magnitude of the problem. To the extent that current problems don't affect AI they will be blown out of the water by whatever AI does, but to the extent that they do, they matter proportional to their impact. If 1000 fent zombies in San Francisco cause $1 billion in damage (summed over property damage, consumed welfare, hospital bills, court costs, economic friction of people not wanting to be near them, etc.) and ten years from now AI can produce $100 quadrillion per year, yeah we can just pay to repair everything and solve the issue and undo long term damages and whatnot. But if 1000 fent zombies cause harm, discomfort, and disgust in AI researchers and cause them to become more reclusive, selfish, and less sympathetic to people with less than themselves, decreasing the probability of a good outcome by 1%, that's a HUGE deal.

All of this stuff affects people's thoughts and behavior, which in turn affects the direction we travel in as we attempt to navigate a future with AI. We're not trying to build enough of a solid economic and cultural foundation to weather the storm, we're trying to build a steering wheel and steer the ship away from the storm in the first place.

Either AI goes well or it goes badly. Whatever mild or gross dysfunction pales in comparison to being dead or immortal.

There's also the option of "it goes banned", with countries that refuse to implement the ban having their independence revoked.

In that one, fertility actually does matter to a reasonable extent.

(From where I sit, aligning neural-net ASI - i.e. figuring out whether it will produce omnicidal outputs, and then tweaking semi-randomly until it no longer does so - is almost certainly flat impossible. "What does this program output when run" is literally the (proven-impossible-in-the-general-case) halting problem, and here you don't even know which outputs are omnicidal because reality is complicated and the ASI is smarter than you. So the "it goes well" case is ruled out, and the only case worth planning for is "it goes banned".)

We are so far away from 'it gets banned' though. Trump commands US nuclear forces and Trump has made clear that he's all for AI development, bigly and with great speed. Who wins AI, wins! And then there's Jensen whispering in his ear.

China doesn't want to get left behind and they consider US AI progress a strategic threat, Dario especially they fear and hate. They spent the last 100 years trying to catch up in technology to the West, they're not likely to stop now. A pause is to their advantage if the US halts and they catch up in semiconductors. That makes the situation more volatile. A Chinese leader is hardly likely to say 'we accept an inferior position indefinitely in this valuable field of technology by treaty', that would be humiliating.

This is not something we can hold back from, AI is obviously lucrative and potent and beneficial. More potent and lucrative and beneficial as the danger rises. It's not like competing to stack up H-bombs in deserts somewhere, where you pay lots of money and get very little for it.

It seems much more likely that we just have to go through the event horizon than a ban being manageable or sustainable. In the worlds where anything vaguely human survives, it's more likely that 'something mysterious and good happens beyond our ability to predict' than a ban being sustainably implemented.

Trump commands US nuclear forces and Trump has made clear that he's all for AI development, bigly and with great speed. Who wins AI, wins! And then there's Jensen whispering in his ear.

Trump could still flip. He could also die (he's 80 and there have been... what, a dozen assassination attempts on him already?), or be impeached/removed (the Republican Party and even the Republican base are not really behind him on this).

China doesn't want to get left behind and they consider US AI progress a strategic threat, Dario especially they fear and hate. They spent the last 100 years trying to catch up in technology to the West, they're not likely to stop now. A pause is to their advantage if the US halts and they catch up in semiconductors. That makes the situation more volatile. A Chinese leader is hardly likely to say 'we accept an inferior position indefinitely in this valuable field of technology by treaty', that would be humiliating.

There is the possibility of agreeing to parity, or to a gap that's smaller than currently exists. There is also, as you're probably sick of hearing from me, the possibility that we have WWIII over Taiwan and nobody has to worry about China for the next 100 years.

This is not something we can hold back from, AI is obviously lucrative and potent and beneficial. More potent and lucrative and beneficial as the danger rises.

The international moratorium on human gene editing is holding up pretty decently IIRC.

*gets banned not goes banned

Good luck «revoking» Chinese independence. Anyway it getting banned is impossible but if it happened it would increase the salience of eugenics because the fundamental risk is human alignment / relative untintelligence.

*gets banned not goes banned

He said "goes well" and "goes badly". I was following the pattern.

Good luck «revoking» Chinese independence.

I think the Chinese could be convinced to sign on; they don't want the world to end any more than we do. In extremis, though, I will point out that the USA does possess enough nukes to return China to the 1930s in population and infrastructure.

Anyway it getting banned is impossible

Then we're dead. The fact that >99% of humans don't want to be dead is the reason I think it's not impossible.

but if it happened it would increase the salience of eugenics because the fundamental risk is human alignment / relative untintelligence.

Maybe. So?

But we won't need new 18-year old human workers in 2044. We hardly need them today, there's a huge oversupply of young people relative to actual demand for labour.

I suspect this undersells how the economy works. The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal. A better demographic pyramid requires less taxation per capita to support a social safety net for the elderly, allowing more reinvestment into other economic opportunities. It also would create different, potentially beneficial governance effects in democracies.

Either AI goes well or it goes badly. Whatever mild or gross dysfunction pales in comparison to being dead or immortal.

It seems quite possible that AI goes fine and that humans are still a valued or even necessary part of the economy. But even if it turns out so "well" that most people do not need to engage in labor, I think it behooves us to figure out how to get romance and childrearing right. In a good AI takeoff scenario, that will quickly (over civilizational time-scales, anyway) become the focus of most human beings, in all likelihood.

And especially Christianity cannot work, since that's the very thing we observed completely failing!

What are you talking about? When practiced, Christianity shows better results in dating markets (and tfr) – this is pretty well known social science. Broadly speaking steady religious practice (not limited to Christianity) correlates well with better life outcomes, at least in the United States.

The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal.

They have to generate more than they take, not just generate some. Most people do not. How many people have ever created even 1 job?

The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal

Even China can't find enough work for all their young people, they have high youth unemployment despite an enormous pool of well-educated young people and intense capitalist pressure.

If the economy is primarily acting like a network effect, then why don't we see the network effect in action? Why can't Johnny walk in with a firm handshake and get a good job with all these opportunities being made? The US has a pretty free market and a pretty large population. I don't deny that there are some aspects of a network effect, certainly with elite talent there are. But adding merely able-bodied workers is not helping much at all.

This is the mass-immigration school of economic thought. Adding 10 million able bodied Haitians or Hondurans isn't going to make America much richer at all. All the Arabs and Africans going to Europe aren't bolstering the eurozone economies, largely because they don't work. Even if they did, it only impedes automation of low-value labour. Domestic births are naturally better but even then, automation is already chewing through these roles.

In a good AI takeoff scenario, that will quickly (over civilizational time-scales, anyway) become the focus of most human beings, in all likelihood.

I agree but it's a lot easier to handle that later. There will be all the time in the world to fix that up.

When practiced, Christianity shows better results in dating markets

So why isn't it being practiced, then? Church attendence rates fell from 70% in the mid 20th century to 30% today. Even these remaining nominal Christians are mostly not acting like it's 1950 either, they're largely feminists and progressives who show up for a sermon about progressivism from a priest. They don't act like Christians used to act with regards to divorce, marital roles or the things that Jim is calling for.

It's true that small pockets of highly religious-reactionary people are high fertility. But there is no evidence that a technological country can be run this way by usually-isolated population of the highly devout. Why would the Mormons or Amish or Hasidic Jews not immediately act like everyone else when they end up having to run a whole country?

Even if they did, it only impedes automation of low-value labour.

Oh, so that's how mass immigration serves the lower/underclass.

So why isn't it being practiced, then?

Because the State has incorporated most of Christianity's community-building aspects. You don't make the choice to donate your time to the soup kitchen any more; the government simply confiscates your time (through a process known as "income tax") and runs that program itself (at times it will pay religious groups to do this). Same thing with permitting crime, actually- the way Western society donates to the poor is simply by permitting them to walk into any store, take what whatever they require, and the cost of that is redistributed through something called an "insurance premium".

they have high youth unemployment despite an enormous pool of well-educated young people

The education, of course, was mostly just to dissuade young people from dealing with unemployment the traditional way. Education to those who can't use it provides no bonus.

Because the State has incorporated most of Christianity's community-building aspects. You don't make the choice to donate your time to the soup kitchen any more; the government simply confiscates your time (through a process known as "income tax") and runs that program itself (at times it will pay religious groups to do this).

Most Christian Churches do still do things like soup kitchens and community meals and similar things. The Mormon Church has a whole internal welfare system and huge pressure on members to volunteer for the Church which most do. Churches actually can do these things if they are vibrant and organized. Also Christianity first grew under the oppression of the Roman state. If the Romans couldn't kill it do you really think it's JUST income tax?

so that's how mass immigration serves the lower/underclass

I think the lower classes would rather have robots doing their jobs than a flood of immigrants rendering them strangers in their home towns, not to mention abusing their daughters. Everything gets automated eventually but there's no need to import populations with wildly different values.

Because the State has incorporated most of Christianity's community-building aspects

Well, if you squint at it, single mothers are now married to the state who provides benefits for their offspring. But this is not really what Christians mean by 'marriage'. The modern state does perform some community aspects but in a totally different way to how they're done under a genuinely Christian society. A mountain of abortion here, euthanasia there, pornography on the left and fornication on the right and directly in front of us a great big Pride Parade... doesn't sound very Christian to me!

Aqua basically exists a comic relief character and not as a potential romantic interest

I think it's interesting to try to figure out how this works. Kazuma is totally a pervert, yet he doesn't have any romantic or even sexual interest in the apparently attractive and well endowed fanservice characters. And us as the viewers empathize with him, agreeing with him on that aspect. Why is this?

As other posters say, Kazuma is shown having romantic and sexual interest in a number of characters. But I'm not sure there's anything to take from it, since the show at its core is a comedy and parody of the Isekai genre, not something with any serious intent. That Megumin "wins" in the end is probably just a reflection that there are a very large number of paedophiles creating and watching Japanese anime. And technically that might not even be relevant, given the anime is an adaptation of a novel in which I believe all the characters are teens

since the show at its core is a comedy and parody of the Isekai genre, not something with any serious intent

Yeah, the worldbuilding of Interspecies Reviewers was much more serious. (Konosuba isn't actually that thoughtless though I stopped watching it after S1.)

That Megumin "wins" in the end is probably just a reflection that there are a very large number of paedophiles creating and watching Japanese anime.

Yes- by the social conservative and feminist definition, "wanting a decent-ish relationship with a relatively-close peer at any age where you'd actually be attracted to said peer" is absolutely indistinguishable from pedophilia. She was only barely post-menopause, you sick fuck.

The reason men tend to watch anime is mainly because it's free from this bullshit. Even though their birthrate is relatively poor Japan really doesn't seem to be a country whose men and women hate each other. Perhaps it's because women look way younger for way longer, so there's correspondingly less temptation for the collective of older women to re-enact Snow White on everyone younger.

Which, it turns out, is easiest to do simply by pathologizing natural attraction to them (by any group whatsoever).

Megumin is a character that looks 12 and acts 12. As mentioned, the original material had all the characters being teens and perhaps different descriptions, but in the anime Kazuma and many of the other characters are basically depicted as adults. I struggle to believe anyone would consider Megumin a suitable partner or find her attractive without serious paedophilic tendencies

In the show I think she's 14 and acts 14. IIRC Kazuma is 17 in the show. It's less weird they end up together, considering they're both NEETs at heart.

I dated a girl once with the megumin body type. She was 28. And starved as a child. Whoops.

Yunyun best girl.

but in the anime Kazuma and many of the other characters are basically depicted as adults

I am not sure what you are talking about. When I watch the anime Kazuma seems like a boy and it explicitly starts with him getting run over coming home from school.

Megumin is a character that looks 12 and acts 12.

The joke is that she kind of looks 12, but I think she acts a little older being the most intelligent member of the party and so on.

I'm pretty sure he's shown as being into Darkness and Wiz physically. He just doesn't like their personalities. I think the non-attraction is specifically towards Aqua, on account of her being a massive dumbass.

She's given the nickname 'Useless Goddess' for a reason.

Ie, sometimes character design isn't enough to save a character. They have to actually be likeable. Unless that's the point, like we get with Aqua.

I haven't read the manga, but in the anime, it's spelled out that intelligence is Aqua's dump stat. It's pathetically low and she is "max-level" so it's never improving. It's also strongly hinted that basically all of the problems in the world have all been caused by Aqua, through various short-sighted acts. Several of her previous choices for reincarnations created civilization-ending disasters, her followers/cult are pretty much responsible for the demon-king, and I read some theory that the demon-king is actually someone she reincarnated.

Essentially Aqua is on the hot-crazy scale where her crazy-selfish-stupidity needs to be graded on a log scale, relative to her hotness. That's the joke.

Nearly every anime girl is designed to be impossibly hot. With such an abundance of superstimuli, it's easy enough to look over the hot and crazy women for the merely hot ones.

That being said, I think you're operating on bad priors. There are still plenty of fans attracted to aqua, and dedicated kazuma/aqua shippers. The same goes for darkness.

I saw the preface of reactionary and thought I'd be reading some Yarvin-slop, but this guy is reactionary-reactionary. Certainly it's the case that when you hold up the state of the world to the light in just the right way, a few reactionary glimmers appear. Speaking this strongly, though, seems irresponsible to me and there are so many disagreeable assumptions made that undergird this article that it's hardly possible for me to respond to it in a meaningful way. If there was one claim in particular that you wanted to highlight, what would it be?

Edit: I saw "reactionary-reactionary" and thought you meant the second blogger, but after posting I realize you may have meant the Dread Jim. I am leaving this post up in case I got it right the first time.

disagreeable assumptions made that undergird this article

I'm not the O.P., but I would be curious to see how you frame them, if you've got the time and energy to make it legible to folks like me who probably share many of those assumptions.

If there was one claim in particular that you wanted to highlight, what would it be?

My summary of the central claim: The complaints that modern men are immature or poor marriage material aren't wrong, but they are incomplete; modern women suffer similar faults, but they aren't discussed because socially prevalent forms of feminism excuse them, or even laud them, in women.

I think this false notion that women are somehow innately fit for marriage by virtue of having been born with an uterus whereas men need to basically be domesticated into this role is remarkably widespread even among people who should know better. I’m guessing there are two main reasons for this. One is that most people are capable of noticing that the average woman is only interested in one man at a time and thus practices monogamy even when she’s not interested in marriage. (Serial monogamy = promiscuity, as practiced by women.) The other is that when relationships are formed, the man is usually more averse to initiating commitment (averse to making this big change in front of his entire social circle, that is) than the woman is whereas the woman is more likely to be averse to staying committed. This means men and women are actually equally picky in this regard but it’s men’s pickiness that manifests earlier in the process which creates the notion that the average man is somehow a ‘commitment-phobe’.

I'm using "reactionary-reactionary" as repetition for emphasis. Like how on the schoolyard people used to say "like-like" when they mean you have a crush on someone, that sort of thing. And yes, I was referring to the first article.

...I would be curious to see how you frame them, if you've got the time and energy to make it legible to folks like me who probably share many of those assumptions.

What else is The Motte for than writing a treatise on gender relations on a weeknight? Unfortunately, I attempted to write this reply and found that I was unable to do it sufficiently. I've been sitting at my computer for an hour and am simply not satisfied with the argument I've constructed because it effectively requires me to describe my worldview from first principles. This is proving to be a task too great for right now. I'll give you a bit, but it's not my best work. Feel free to ask me to clarify as necessary.

The nugget I can share is this: paying attention to the behaviors of "women" and "men" as a whole, when examining the dating world, is an incredible fool's errand and bound to produce resentment. I have a lot of respect for the courtship woes that swathes of modern men have experienced. Certainly, we can examine studies on hypergamy and track fertility rates and bemoan the state of the world when the latest ragebait Hinge exchange populates our Reddit feeds. However, that does not mean that anger is the appropriate response, nor do I think it necessitates wholesale societal revolution or a RETVRN of some kind. The pessimism that these authors radiate is entirely voluntary.

Let's say you are a conservative, marriage-oriented 25-year-old man. It behooves you to not give a shit about what the median woman is doing. It is incredibly easy to view the bad behavior of many women online, the vapidity, the promiscuity, the double-standards and essentialism and the blah blah blah. You can sneer 24/7, if you so choose. But you shouldn't. You likely aren't going to date those women. You absolutely won't marry those women. If you think modern woman is dooming herself to romantic suicide borne out of the sexual revolution, you can think that. But you wouldn't marry her anyway, so why sneer? Turn your gaze elsewhere.

Fundamentally, this is a multiculturalism and visibility problem. Past people had minimal exposure to dating norms outside of their community. The gentry did not pay attention to how the peasants were dating, and yet we insist on examining "men" and "women" as a whole. The women who get riled up at comments from traditionally minded men, too, are playing this game of vicarious imagistic anger. But she wouldn't date or marry him, either. We're driving ourselves crazy by looking at people who hardly exist in our dating sphere in the first place, with entirely different values and goals. The reality is that dating norms are so much more granular than that.

For the man struggling, the solution is to find your tribe as quickly as possible and be social within it. Find people, institutions, and places that give you the best odds to meet people with the same norms as you. Living in a coastal city and think the women are too feminist? Move. Having a hard time meeting religious people? Move. No luck on dating apps due to demographic asymmetries? Move. Dating and marriage, on the experiential level, have so little to do with the aggregate behaviors of the sexes, and everything to do with how one spends their time and the people they surround themselves with.

In the past, perhaps it didn't take as much effort to find your community, so I suppose there is some justified anger there. However, this appears to me a much more economic problem, borne out of our increased social atomization a la Putnam's Bowling Alone. Perhaps there used to be greater numbers of dateable women in one place. Interconnected economic networks result in more transience, less community, and more variance in local values, making it harder to find a mate that aligns with you. I just don't think "feminism" is the appropriate target. For every man that decries feminism, there is another man who finds the modern, liberated woman attractive. For every woman that decries traditional marriage, there is another woman who remains committed to those values. We can get into the fine-grained demographic data about how values are shifting between the genders, and so on, but again: what's the point? Know your place, surround yourself with people with similar values, and work hard at putting yourself out there. You will have a much better success rate than if you direct your attention toward those whose lifestyle you disavow in the first place.

I'll add:

People from a less enlightened age would consider a person who endlessly obsesses about their looks, the latest pair of Jimmy Choo's and who Brad is dating now, pretty superficial.

This made me laugh. If anything, modern woman is less concerned with her looks than women in eras past. If anything, modern woman is less parasitically materialistic than women in eras past. If anything, modern woman is less of a gossip-vulture and has far broader interests than women in eras past. In eras gone by, when marriage was an economic institution above all else, women had so few opportunities to be interesting. Yes, perhaps the life of the historical homemaker was, in a sense, honorable, which hedges against accusations of shallowness. But her primary purpose was to be a womb, a pretty thing, and a domestic servant. Now, marriage is about romantic love - an extremely contemporary development. Consummate, equitable love is much harder to achieve with women who don't have lives of their own. We take for granted the extent to which feminism has encouraged increasing numbers of women to have dynamic personal lives, a developed intellect, and the inner richness necessary to be an equal partner. I cannot deny that there have been some unsavory excesses produced by the sexual revolution, and vapid, unscrupulous women exist. I just harshly question the hypothesis that if not for feminism, we'd be better off.

Feminism excuses women who aren't as well-suited for marriage because feminism is broadly about giving women more paths forward in life than dependency on a man. It's practically tautological. Further, women suddenly getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex doesn't make them fundamentally unattractive, even if it alters their trajectory vis a vis marriage. In contrast, the ways men are dropping the ball - gambling, porn, anger, laziness, isolation - are extremely unattractive. I don't think it's a double standard for precisely this reason, even if there is some sociological analysis to be made about how these behaviors affect marriage. I'll save that for another post. My hands hurt from typing. Cheers.

Unfortunately, I attempted to write this reply and found that I was unable to do it sufficiently. I've been sitting at my computer for an hour and am simply not satisfied with the argument I've constructed because it effectively requires me to describe my worldview from first principles.

Oh boy, I can relate to that. I appreciate the effort.

I want to give your post some more thought, probably review it after I've slept. But two differences stand out to me: One is that I think that different relationship practices vary in their conduciveness to human flourishing far more than you do. The other is that I'm not looking primarily at potential mates but at other people I care about being led into costly mistakes by a society that encourages them.

Sure, I did my best but judging by other responses, it leaves a bit to be desired.

I'll add that I don't believe in a libertine blank-slatism where all relationship types are created equal. I will assume that you believe marriage or stable monogamy are ideal for human flourishing? I don't disagree. I just think that the excesses of a state in which traditional marriage is enforced or even encouraged are less tolerable than the excesses of a state that is permissive of individual relationship choice. I do not believe experimenting with casual sex or premarital sex generally in your 20s, as a man or woman, is an inherently detrimental event, so long as it is done within reason. I do not believe that matters of the heart ought to be addressed with market-style approaches, wherein we examine the "price" that "women" "set" on "men." It's far too broad a level of analysis to be personally useful. Call me ignorant if you wish, but I think this is a situation in which ignorance is adaptive.

You could argue that marriage is unfairly pilloried these days to our societal detriment, which is fair, but a different conversation.

I’m sorry but the female equivalent to male gambling, porn, anger, laziness and isolation is by no means merely ‘getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex’; it’s credit card debt, female anger (publicly directed at men and usually getting zero social pushback), (obsessive) female porn consumption (of trashy YA literature, dark romantasy or whatever and emotional porn marketed to women in general), social isolation (see the latter example), trashiness, frumpiness, OF ‘modeling’, camwhoring, pigging out, getting addicted to painkillers and alcohol etc.

What getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex represent on the part of women is simply them abandoning the social roles that the bygone Christian patriarchy expected of them – it does not necessarily entail personal degeneracy and dysfunction. Men abandoning the social roles that the bygone Christian patriarchy expected of them simply manifests as one no longer interacting with women from the perspective of responsibility and protection but from the perspective of pleasure and fun – in other words, delaying marriage and fatherhood, not marrying your first sweetheart etc. It's an overall situation where women no longer feel accountable to men and men no longer feel responsible for women.

Living in a coastal city and think the women are too feminist? Move. Having a hard time meeting religious people? Move. No luck on dating apps due to demographic asymmetries? Move. Dating and marriage, on the experiential level, have so little to do with the aggregate behaviors of the sexes, and everything to do with how one spends their time and the people they surround themselves with.

Do you think it's a reasonable request to be made to average single men or women to upend their entire lives just to supposedly increase their personal chances of finding a suitable partner?

+1, fair elaborations. I'm not claiming that the current dynamic is perfect, just t

Do you think it's a reasonable request to be made to average single men or women to upend their entire lives just to supposedly increase their personal chances of finding a suitable partner?

I suppose I was speaking a bit harshly in my haste to respond. My ultimate point is that changing one's voluntary associations is likely to have a far greater impact on one's romantic satisfaction than paying much mind to aggregate female behaviors. "Moving" in the sense of physical relocation is one way to do that, and perhaps the most dramatic way to do so. To those unwilling to move, there are still many ways to change one's voluntary associations.

You're correct that in many cases, it is unreasonable for one to move and it's a highly personal decision. However, for the motivated partner-seeker, taking concerted steps to engage with more potential mates, up to and including moving, is hardly upending one's life - it's choosing the life that one wants. Under the age of 30, it pays to be flexible.

Now, there may be some dissatisfaction that such a suggestion is even necessary these days. Again, I don't think this is "women's" fault any more than it is the fault of cultural balkanization in the U.S., and women often find themselves in similar demographic quicksand that they have to escape by moving, too. For example, many young heterosexual women bemoan the fact that NYC has a highly skewed male-female ratio, making dating much harder.

Do you think it's a reasonable request to be made to average single men or women to upend their entire lives just to supposedly increase their personal chances of finding a suitable partner?

Honestly? Yes, because that’s probably not their only tension with their local community, and the alternatives (changing the rest of the community for your niche, or resigning to loneliness) are more unreasonable.

We should normalize people intentionally moving to regions with like-minded individuals. It would reduce tension and restore community, desperately needed in this era. Already, moving once or twice in a lifetime, like leaving for college then working somewhere else, is fairly typical and not hard for most people, especially with fast travel and instant long-distance communication. Moving more shouldn’t be necessary.

We should normalize people intentionally moving to regions with like-minded individuals.

This has actually been happening on such a scale and for such a long time that a popular book was released on its harmful effects back in 2008. I know this is somewhat off-topic but still.

People prefer those like them, attempts to disturb this amount to the Berlin wall, the argument against it happening within the US afaik is «it's bad for undesirables» whether they be blacks (in the case of white flight) or the dumb (in the case of whatever Charles Murray was complaining about in the first part of the Bell Curve). Personally if you want me to be around such people you have to grant me elevation and authority, or else I will resent it and try to escape. From what I see of arguments like the one you link to they tend to refuse or ignore the authority component and instead they want people like me to accept some kind of duty to lower ourselves by living equal among people we don't want.

"elevation and authority"? Are you a fan of feudalism?

More comments

That link is dead for me, just fyi.

Interesting. Looking at district maps like this, I had the impression that even many “one-sided” areas had a decent share of the other side: the darkest red and blue regions still have 1 of every 5 members voting the opposite.

reactionary-reactionary

You have correctly identified that DreadJim is a male feminist. Feminists take the posture that women are better than men and tend to take "well, what are they good for" for granted. So does DreadJim, with the valence swapped.

Anyway:

Further, women suddenly getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex doesn't make them fundamentally unattractive

Yes, it absolutely fucking does.

It does in the same way and for the same reasons as the listed behaviors make men unattractive to women. You're making the same tired mistake the social conservatives and feminists (though I repeat myself) do where they fail to weight the desires and worth of men and women equally in an environment where they by all rights should be.

Which is why the assertion it's a double-standard is correct: what you've listed are all the ways men want to skip the bill for providing what women want, and you claim that's bad, and then you list all the ways women want to skip the bill for providing what men want, and you claim that's good.

Now, in the before times, "it's worse for men to skip the bill" was OK because there were external factors that balanced it out; mainly that, because women were not capable of primary resource extraction, women were dependent on those resources and had to sell (which is why you correct observe marriage is an economic bargain).

But, exactly coincident with the dawn of feminism, men destroyed that constraint in a massive wave of automation. So the instinctual double-standard remains, but now nothing else exists to moderate the impulse.

I'm not really going to bother refuting the rest of the post since most of it's just a word-for-word transposition for why the dead weight loss in a market that a cartel inherently creates (the cartel here is "all women" and the product is "family") is morally justified.

The nugget I can share is this: paying attention to the behaviors of "women" and "men" as a whole, when examining the dating world, is an incredible fool's errand and bound to produce resentment.

I really don't believe you are as free of resentment as you claim to be. Systems design begins with observing the users.

... Yes, it absolutely fucking does.

That is completely acceptable and is reasonable as an individual preference. I am not so stupid as to suggest that no one cares about promiscuity when thinking about family formation and long-term relationships - read me charitably here, please. I'm not trying to moralize: every person's icks and turn-offs are acceptable in my books. I'll admit it wasn't a very well written sentence. I'll clarify:

It's a matter of prevalence. I imagine there are far more women who are turned off by the median man than there are men who are turned off by the median woman. Of course, there are women with stratospheric body counts, and for those hoping for virgins, any number above 0 is too high. Still, I am doubtful most men would throw a fit that their girlfriend wants to have a career or slept with 4 or 5 people. These women are not "skipping the bill" for most men - the bill has simply changed as attitudes have shifted, and perhaps your attitude has not shifted with the majority. That is completely fine.

Truthfully, this idea is not a lynchpin of my views if you still find yourself in opposition. What follows is more important and definitive to me.

... [the] rest of the post [is] just a word-for-word transposition for why the dead weight loss in a market that a cartel inherently creates (the cartel here is "all women" and the product is "family") is morally justified.

If one is a family-minded traditionalist, it's fair to say that one's values have decreased in influence over the years. That's certainly upsetting if one wants to preserve that way of life. That said, these values haven't decreased in frequency just among women. This is a society-wide change, with plenty of men along for the ride. The idea that there is some grand war in incentives between women, as a class, and men, as a class, is precisely the mindset that I think is fallacious.

If you honestly think that "all women" are in a sort of cartel where they determine the cost of entry for "family formation" or engage in "resource siphoning," I'm not sure we will ever see eye to eye. Cartels coordinate. Certainly, social movements have developed since the 50s, feminism among them, but I don't believe that the outcomes of feminism were a coordinated effort to create intractable dating standards for men. I have not observed any sort of unity in female behavior. Instead, I think there are loose federations of women with their own sets of values, who coordinate to the extent that their values change concomitantly. Perhaps you find some of these federations virulently offensive to your preferred way of life. My suggestion remains the same: disassociate from the federations of women you find disagreeable, and associate with the federations of women that you find agreeable. Otherwise, it just is an utter waste of time to talk about "the women." It's a floating signifier, so broad as to be practically useless on an individual level.

I really don't believe you are as free of resentment as you claim to be.

I'm not sure where you're deriving resentment from my comment. I think it's fairly lucid, even if you disagree with it.

Cartels coordinate.

That's called an in-group bias. Women have one, men not so much.

Since the amount of available product on the market depends on women and not men (also for biological reasons), we put women on the selling side and men on the buying side.

If sellers co-ordinate, then it's a cartel, by definition. Slut-shaming (a classic practice among women) is kind of the basic example of this: given women form a union, that is scab behavior [it's working at a discount from the cartel's perspective, defeating the power of collective bargaining], and discouraged accordingly. See also the concept of a "pick-me", where the woman throws in some other value-adds to gain an individual advantage, and the chain is similar: why would you do that, unless you want to sell -> you're trying to undercut everyone else = slut = scab -> punish.

If you honestly think that "all women" are in a sort of cartel where they determine the cost of entry for "family formation" or engage in "resource siphoning,"

The idea that there is some grand war in incentives between women, as a class, and men, as a class, is precisely the mindset that I think is fallacious.

This isn't really a conscious thing; it's merely human instinct. Revealed preferences by the relevant actors (as buyers compete with buyers, as sellers compete with sellers, and as both negotiate between each other) demonstrates the collective negotiation between men and women has the character of a market, so economic analysis is the correct framing with which to make predictions.

perhaps your attitude has not shifted with the majority

'What the average market participant is willing to afford' is actually kind of the central issue here, so 'attitudes' are inescapable here (and again, this has biology/instinctual roots). Sexual attraction obviously has a lot to do with that, and that's something you simply don't get to decide.

In this case, the clearing price of the sexual marketplace has risen to the point where it's created a much larger proportion of men and women who are either unwilling or unable to afford each other; even when they can, they have far smaller families as a result.

Feminism is to blame for a little bit of that (in the "why bother buying into someone they're only marginally attracted to" and "government-enforced wealth transfers from men to women handicaps buyers and frustrates price discovery for sellers"[1] senses- this also matters on the seller side, particularly when considering [2], but inherently affects buyers far more than sellers), but a lot of it is that the substitute goods have become far better and cheaper than they used to be (and the cost of everything else associated with supporting a family has become far higher), so the value each party must bring also must be correspondingly higher.

Which means that, at the clearing price floor, attraction (and perhaps the compromises thereon) is making most of the difference (and perhaps providing more of the buyer's remorse upon purchase), so the fixation on it at that point makes sense.

[1] Forced-diversity initiatives as well as intentional subsidy of college degrees increase a seller's perception of their real value; once they realize they're overvalued, their more advanced age has devalued them further (again, this is a thing men value, and no, you don't get to pretend they don't). Discovering this is more likely to lead to their leaving the market entirely, creating further distortion.

[2] Divorce laws in the "she took everything including the kids" direction result in buyers perceiving more risk than there actually is. This should actually decrease the price a woman can charge due to fewer buyers willing to take that risk, and can lead to sellers competing with each other in ways like "known adherent to a religion where divorce is a sin".

The idea that there is some grand war in incentives between women, as a class, and men, as a class, is precisely the mindset that I think is fallacious.

feminism [exists], continuing significant political split between men and [particularly unmarried] women

If you can't agree on the facts there's nothing further to discuss. Having interests is not inherently malicious; good and evil are not life's concern.

If you honestly think that "all women" are in a sort of cartel where they determine the cost of entry for "family formation" or engage in "resource siphoning," I'm not sure we will ever see eye to eye. Cartels coordinate.

Slut-shaming is an obvious case of such coordination, isn't it? Not the slut-shaming done by angry incels online, which is a huge social crisis existing only on the minds of feminist journalists, but slut-shaming done by other women.

I imagine there are far more women who are turned off by the median man than there are men who are turned off by the median woman.

This has always been the case though.

Further, women suddenly getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex doesn't make them fundamentally unattractive

Attraction is in the eye of the beholder. Many men are repulsed by women having more sex. Thus they say 'ran-through', 'whore', 'roastie'... Same with girlboss for that matter, with regard to careers.

Women are often repulsed by virgins. Their opinion isn't illegitimate. They use it as an insult: 'virgin' or 'have sex, incel' how could they be lying about what they believe?

Things that give men the ick aren't illegitimate while things that give women the ick are fine.

See my reply to ThisIsSin.

Could you please make the point you're trying to make more explicit?

See the reply from Hieronymus and the response I posted here.

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