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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2607 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 18, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Many anti-discrimination laws have carve-outs with reasonings like "to redress historical injustices" etc., which is how womens' groups of all kinds remain legal.

Technically, aren't most of these groups private clubs, who can be as discriminatory as they like? You can have your white men’s club just as much as you want(although dues are likely well beyond your price range).

Private clubs can only discriminate based on protected characteristics (race, sex, etc) if the characteristic is intrinsic to the purpose of the organization (beyond simple bigotry) and the club doesn't act as a de facto barrier for something like career advancement (no male-only golf club if that's where all your partner meetings are held and where the firm entertains high-value clients).

For something like the Boy Scouts or various fraternal organizations, you're mostly in the clear. Boy Scouts of America v. Dale held that, because the BSA was an explicitly religious organization dedicated to molding young men according to a particular set of principles, it had the right to exclude gay men from participating as scoutmasters.

Most men's clubs that aren't too closely tied to professional advancement are generally safe in a way that a white men's club is not. In theory, this applies the same with other racial groups, which is why you'll often see fine print explaining that everyone is welcome at, say, the black lawyers networking night, even though everyone knows that's not the way it works in practice. Every once in a while you'll see a story about some guy winning a women's group's college scholarship or something because allowing only women to apply would be illegal and nobody bothered to read the name on the resume he submitted.

You can have your white men’s club just as much as you want

Ha. Good one.

They literally exist. Many fraternities and unions are this in practice, a few country clubs maintain it as explicit policy, and of course there’s the hells angels.

When you say "explicit policy", are you including situations where it is an (alleged) internal policy that is denied publicly?

The central example of an [identity group] club to me is one that is openly [group]-only. Something like "Black Girls Code", where the fact it's for [group] is baked into the name (versus "Spouting Rock Beach Association")

They are a little sneaky in avoiding openly stating they are excluding people. If you look at the mission page they speak in generalised terms about how representation matters, black women are under-represented, and that:

Our approach is backed by research that shows girls taught within a group setting of peers who look like them report an increase in both their coding abilities and participation in STEAM activities

[insert joke about SJWs accidentally agreeing with racists]

Digging further to their careers community, they are (partially) explicit:

Who is this for?

This online community is built for college students and early-career professionals (0-5 years) in the STEAM fields. While we center the experiences of Black women and women of color, our community is open to all who identify as:

  • 18+
  • Femme or nonbinary

(Looking closer at the photos, one of them include a black-passing Indian woman with nametag "Manjula", so they don't strictly exclude non-blacks)

Is there anything like this for white men? "White Boys & Men Hunting Association" - open to all biological males, but centring White identity. A mission page talking about white sub-replacement TFR and how there needs to be support systems to encourage white boys to become fathers. Group photos of smiling white boys out in nature, their white male mentors, and one white-passing blue-eyed Arab boy called "Ali".

a few country clubs maintain it as explicit policy

which ones?

there’s the hells angels

no, the hell's angels are not explicitly whites only

Most outlaw biker clubs took the "whites only" language out of their charters back in the 90s when they realized half their members (and approximately all of their wives) were actually Mexican. I doubt the Hell's Angels still have it in there, but there are probably a few still around with the old rules.

you base this on what?

my limited experience is talking to a client of mine who ran in that scene; the mexicans were with other clubs and gangs which they feuded with

when you're at the point where you're trying to come up with examples for "white men's clubs" existing and you come up with outlaw biker gangs and even then it's not true since the 90s, maybe we can just admit that explicitly white men's groups are de facto illegal and treated like criminals

In most states, it is legal for a 30 year old man to marry a 16 year old girl. Not only that, such marriages were pretty common 150+ years ago, and no one thought anything much about it. Here’s the thing: while I in theory have no problem with a 30 year old marrying a 16 year old, I can’t help but notice that most 30 year olds who are interested in marrying 16 year olds today are creeps. That age gap has become so uncommon and socially frowned upon, that almost the only guys who pursue it are antisocial weirdos that I don’t really want to hang out with.

Likewise, I don’t have a problem with the existence of private, monoracial clubs. In some ways, I can even see the appeal. But whites-only clubs are even more frowned upon than 30/16 marriages, so any such club is going to pretty much exclusively attract an audience of schizophrenics, neo-Nazis, feds, and other undesirables who I don’t particularly want to spend time around.

I don’t think most people have thought about it in quite the same terms that I have, but I think most people have arrived at the same conclusion. Until that changes, whites-only clubs are going to be pretty thin on the ground, even if they remain technically legal, because schizos, neo-Nazis, and feds tend not to build durable, attractive organizations.

I don't think there exists a single state in the US which allows a 16 year old to marry without parental or court consent and even then many of the states which do require special circumstances like pregnancy. So it's not really true a 16 year old can marry a 30 year old in most US states. It's only true in very specific circumstances.

But anyway, I'm not really sure what you're arguing or what you think I am arguing.

I don't particularly care about whether or not whites-only clubs exist, but let's not lie to each other about them existing and how they got that way. There are plenty of mono-racial clubs, but not whites-only men's clubs. Once upon a time, there were many whites-only men's clubs, but they were repeatedly attacked by state power and social power for various reasons.

How many 30/16 marriages have resulted in ongoing lawfare campaigns over the last 100 years at the local, state, and federal level?

I've never heard of a 30/16 marriage resulting in the inability to open a bank account, but maybe you have.

And so it's a pretty goofy analogy. Whites-only men's clubs attract only criminals and others because that's the only space they're allowed to marginally exist by the state. They are just plain illegal except for particular circumstances. And in the remaining places they're not explicitly illegal, they are de facto illegal anyway in the US.

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I think you're right, and it reminds me of something similar Scott Alexander said a decade ago (!) in his piece Neutral Vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

This sort of social taboo has such a weight that it is almost impossible to break, no matter how justified or not the taboo is.

I have an old friend who was a fully patched member of one of the larger California clubs in the 2000s/2010s who I got a lot of stories from. So I'm getting old timer lore secondhand, and things may have gone down very differently in different parts of the country, but it tracks with the demographics I've seen at the barbecues and whatnot I was invited to. And "never ask a white supremacist the race of his girlfriend" is a very old joke for a reason.

Don't gaslight me. The federal government has come down HARD on all-white organizations for a long time. I seriously doubt you can find any explicitly all-white country clubs. If there are still one or two, it must be at the cost of extreme social censure.

Also, you left out prison gangs.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) belongs to an "all white + jews" club. He's very serious about systemic racism, but he just keeps forgetting to check and see if the private, exclusive club he belongs to has admitted any brown people yet. Stop snickering. It's [D]ifferent.

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