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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A late tangent, but I was warming my hands next to last week's heated exchange between @DaseindustriesLtd and @gemmaem and one thing that popped out at me was @f3zinker's chart representing women's messaging behaviour towards men in different positions of the attractiveness distribution, depending on their own. I've seen variants of this data - introduced here with the unambiguous line "Women just about exercise dictatorial demand." - on the internet for a long time (since the days of the OkCupid blog), and it always struck me as strange, insofar as it did not seem to mesh at all with the reality I perceive around me. The points of disagreement are numerous:
I believe I'm personally around the 60〜70% mark of the male attractiveness distribution, and have always been extremely passive about dating. Nevertheless I've been approached by women in the 50〜90 range of their distribution (as perceived by me), and had those approaches convert into relationships (some of them very long-term) in the 60〜80 band. This would put me smack dab in a pink area in that chart, repeatedly. I do not get the sense that any of those relationships were unequal in terms of effort or resources invested.
People around me, including unattractive ones, of either gender match up all the time, and there is no obvious bias in terms of which side initiates. It's not that unattractive and involuntarily celibate men don't exist (especially from the 70th percentile downwards), but the correlation between involuntary celibacy and attractiveness is actually seemingly quite low.
My entire academic and academia-adjacent blob has very low attachment to existing social conventions around dating. I know several people who are poly, and the most disapproval they meet is being the butt of the occasional jokes. Contrary to the stereotype, the ones I know do not strike me as unusually unattractive. Yet, the most attractive poly guys are not pulling massive harems, and in fact I've observed the most attractive poly girls reject repeated advances from the most attractive poly guys (in favour of less attractive ones).
So what's going on here? After reflecting on it for a bit, it seems to me that there's actually an obvious answer: the very framing of the question being charted ("do you 'like', with the implication of interest in a sexual relationship, this person, based on their picture?") only captures meaningful data when asked of men, because men are the only ones for whom look is a dominant term in the value function that estimates whether they want a sexual relationship with someone. Rewording this question slightly in a way that I don't think actually changes the meaning to "Given that this person looks like that, would you provisionally agree to having sex with them?", what's actually going has an alternative explanation that I think rings more true than "women have unrealistic standards": if looks are only a small term in your value function, you don't know enough about the value of the other terms, and the median answer to "would you provisionally agree to having sex" is no, then the looks have to be exceptionally good to shift the answer to "yes".
Importantly, this model does not require the original preference against sex with an unspecified man to be unusually strong: for any given expected utility -epsilon that women assign to having sex with a completely random man, no matter how close to 0, there exists a delta such that if looks are only at most a delta-fraction of women's value function for sex partners, then a random man would have to be top 10% in terms of looks for the expected utility for women of having sex with him to turn positive.
As an intuition pump, imagine we created the same chart for men, using some quality that men don't value particularly highly (but perhaps women do), and a base distribution of women that you(r people) are just slightly skeptical of as sex partners (your pick, based on preference: Some ethnicity you don't like? BMI >25? Cat owners? Age >40?). Take a dating app where you can't post your picture, but instead publicise your monthly income, and also all women are at least slightly chubby. Would you be surprised to find a chart like the above, but for men towards women, where the top 60% earners among men only are willing to "like" the top 10% earning women? Would this reflect men exercising "dictatorial demand"?
I blame this on a huge lack of self esteem which stems from increased narcissistic traits in the general population, especially among rich developed countries. I don't think less people want relationships, more people are afraid of rejection because they lack self esteem and so are less likely to put themselves in a position to get a relationship. At least that's based on my experiences.
More options
Context Copy link
Its weird I both vehemently disagree with your post, and also generally agree.
When I was 13-17 it was impossible to get sex. When I was 18-22 it was only possible for me to get sex in a dedicated relationship with a woman (usually after a few months of being with them). When I was 23-25 it felt stupidly easy to get sex. I got married after that.
So the majority of my life it was really freaking difficult, and I really started trying to get to know girls and have sex at 13. So it sorta took me a decade to go from "trying" to "this is easy". I have some male friends that were sorta late bloomers and weren't really trying until maybe 17. Those 4 years late still had to be made up.
I agree that it is fully possible to get to a point that it is "easy" to acquire sex, for even not that attractive looking guys. Hell, this comedian is a somewhat known and very successful womanizer.
But I vehemently disagree that getting to this point is at all easy. It took a decade of my life, working approximately 40-60 hours a week at it for me to get to a point where I felt it was easy. I went through a lot of rejection. I went through a lot of soul searching at being basically controlled by my urges. I dealt with depression. I had to fake being an extrovert. I read novels worth of content online to glean some kind of advice. It wasn't just getting sex, I had to learn my whole role in our society as a man.
It feels a bit like telling someone "oh, getting a job is easy, just give a good interview, have some useful skills, and don't expect to be paid millions of dollars". Which is kinda true ... once you already have a job and have been in the job market. But getting to that point can be really difficult. We structure approximately 16 years of a person's life around preparing them for holding down a job.
I do believe that the incel movement is partly a problem of boys just not starting the sexual pursuit young enough. Because all of society is telling them not to start that pursuit. I would stay up to 4am during highschool trying to have sexting chats with girls online. Those chats did not help my grades. I would sometimes spend classes just badly sneaking glances at girls in the classroom, barely paying attention to lessons. I had a 3.2 GPA in highschool. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't impressive either. However, I did come out of highschool somewhat prepared to date women. Not very well prepared, I still fucked up multiple times in college.
And things have sorta come full circle. I'm not getting much sex these days. I have a wife I love and 2 kids. We are having sex about once a month, I'm trying to time it around her ovulation for another kid. We miss it some months if either of us happen to be sick. But I'm pretty happy with this. If my wife told me tomorrow I could treat it like an open relationship, it wouldn't change the amount of sex I was having (she would also never say that). I just don't ever want to spend the amount of time and effort I spent in my dating years for an ultimately empty experience. Sex was really exciting when I was young, and I was willing to spend lots of time and effort to get it. Now, its not. But that is maybe the heart of what bothers me about what you said, just because a lot of people are willing to spend a ton of time and effort on something, and through that time and effort most of them can acquire it. That doesn't mean that thing is easy.
More options
Context Copy link
How would gay men fit into your model? They have far more sex than straight men (or women, or lesbians), and it's far easier for them to. And this isn't a minor effect: it's an order of magnitude more sexual encounters, which applies down to the least attractive of them. Isn't that prima facie evidence that sex (for straight men) is hard, in a sense, and the limiting factor is female mate choice?
This was discussed in the latest Bailey podcast.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How would you know? Ever heard of the shitty lock and the master key? Im sorry but that is irrefuteable science and will be retold for millenia to come.
You know for a group of people that wants to have sex so much and are hard-wired jerk off to lightbulbs that look like ass and need to be told to not rape since they are in kindergarten, they sure don't do it enough given how not hard it is, I wonder what the reason is, perhaps those memes about dudes ignoring sex for video games is actually real and not cope made by women who suck at sex or nag about stupid shit all day eliminating any potential sexual desire for them or just deflecting that those are the kind of guys they are capable of attracting, nope, it's always the video games (and never the netflix or tiktok).
A lack of charity is only really obvious when its levied at your arguments.
More options
Context Copy link
I completely disagree and think that it is hard. Men want to get laid. If it wasn't hard and men could get laid on the regular, average partner counts would be much higher.
So either young men must value monogamy much more than society suggests, or they must not be aware that they can bar crawl a few nights to get laid.
Or, it is in fact hard.
Like in if we are in a world where it only takes a few nights of bar crawling to get laid... Why are not in a world where the average 20 something has a partner counts in the 20s or 30s? 3 nights a week, a couple times a month, most months a year? That will add up over the years.
There's more to picking up girls from a bar than "make eye contact and tell funny stories".
I'm sorry, but stripped of the anger and bitterness, @f3zinker is right, you literally do not know what you're talking about. You seem to be describing what the men in your social circle tell you. It's rather shocking that it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that you should perhaps not take this at face value.
Most men show a revealed preference for long term relationships eventually. Yes, most men do desire to eventually settle down with a monogamous partner and have children (though if we're being honest, an awful lot of men would prefer the monogamy be strictly one-sided, which is why we had religion and social disapprobation so that even rich dudes couldn't just sleep around indiscriminately without some consequences). The fact that men, like women, have a natural desire to have a family is not mutually exclusive with a natural desire to bang every chick they can while they have oats to sow.
No, most men don't want to sleep with "ever larger numbers of bar girls," they'd usually be satisfied with getting their fill while they are young, and the exact number varies from dude to dude. While most guys don't really want to be sleeping with a different woman every night forever, your rather touchingly naive view that down deep we're all just looking for our waifu is not really true. Some of us settle down faster than others, some of us really do just want to find The One and aren't interested in "bar girls," but almost all men have a desire (even if it's restrained by mores or religious beliefs) for an awful lot more sex than most of us are able to have, at least when we're young.
You seem to be projecting what you think sounds like a good time onto men. There are undoubtedly men who'd rather spend time getting stoned or playing videogames that bar crawling, but most of those men just don't think bar crawling would result in them coming home with a girl, and if they had better success at that, getting stoned and playing videogames (or even spending a Friday evening with friends and family) would be less appealing.
Like, I'm sorry, but almost every (single, non-religious, straight) man, if you told him "Go spend the evening in a bar and you will 100% come home with a girl who wants to bang you" is going to go spend the evening in a bar. Maybe not every single night, but definitely they'd be doing that more than staying home to get stoned and play videogames. Yeah, even the really successful ones might get tired of that eventually or meet someone they really like and want to settle down with. But that's mostly a function of getting older and feeling social pressures.
Your opinion of men is not too high, it's just very female-centric. You think it would be a bad thing for a man to want to sleep with large numbers of women, so you convince yourself that "good" men, "responsible, decent, mature" men, don't actually want to do that.
They do. Maybe some of them didn't because in your circles that's just not done (openly). But most men who don't do it, unless they have strong religious or other reasons not to, absolutely would do it if they had the ability. Note that this doesn't mean every man is into the bar scene, specifically. There are plenty of men who don't want "bar girls" even if they could easily get them. But abundant, willing sexual partners, from whatever their preferred dating pool might be? Absolutely. They may be limited by their dating pool (trying to bang every chick in high end London banking circles wouldn't work out well), but again, that's a "can't," not a "wouldn't."
More options
Context Copy link
So then why does the same not apply to Gay men? Gay men have counts way higher than straight men. Are gay men not only gay, but also more interested in getting laid in general? More than straight men?
I don't think Gay men have sex drives that different from Straight men, aside from orientation obviously. Rather the the fact that they have so much casual sex is because it's far easier for them to hook up with other men, then it is for straight men to hook up with women.
More options
Context Copy link
You have no theory of mind of the human male. Its seriously off like comedically off.
If men could get laid that easily they would all rack up 20-30 partners each. Its literally what sperm cells are for! To spread the seed. Why do you think nature imbued the ability in men to impregnant a woman minimum a day forever.. to not want to do it??? Women literally can pass on their genes only once every 9 months at minimum. Where is the female Ghenghis Khan? Literally cannot exist.
What the fuck do you think men who could get laid all the time are doing? They get laid all the time. The ones who arent are not doing it for a lack of want.
Unfortunately I dont think telling you anything at all even in the most explicits terms will do anything at all, you will still make the same comment every time this topic comes up and refuse to engage with any criticism. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Go watch the youtube videos of Norah Vincent or read accounts of FtM trans people and tell me if they conclude being a guy is not even merely harder but orders of maginitude nightmare difficulty harder relative to a woman trying to get laid. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Also its not hard to benchpress 100kg/225lbs most guys do it after a year of lifting, I dont know why so few women do.. its not that hard really.
Look, I know its easier for the avg guy to get laid than it is for the 90th p woman to benchpress 225, im not a moron. But its not as easy as YOU think it is, guys just do it just like how they do all the other hard things women cant even do, doesnt mean its easy. Calling things you cant do easy, is moronic. You wont catch me saying childbirth is easy even if I know most women can do it.
And im pretty confident you cant because women in general have 0 game/rizz, do a gender swap on your own face and hit tinder and set up a date if you dont believe me. Hint: starting conversation with "hey hows it going" or hi wont work. https://youtube.com/watch?v=DZTIbHIsIYw (Or if you wnt a more realistic experience talk to your dad or your brother or male cousins, I assume they should be somewhat good facsimiles of the male you, if they don't immediately laugh at your idea, congrats you have excellent genetics)
Where are all the female comedians if cracking a few jokes is so easy? Perhaps females dont need to develop a sense of humor to get laid, idk.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link