site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

16
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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'm usually in the bucket of people saying that there is actually something wrong with men that aren't able to find partners, but this time, I've got to say that your experience of being approached by attractive women is so far outside the norm of what I see that you've got to be wildly underestimating your own attractiveness. I would say that I've been pretty romantically successful, including casual encounters, long-term relationships, and a happy marriage, but I've initiated about 90% of the successful encounters I've had, in addition to being rejected in quite a few more advances, and basically never rejecting a woman that I was attracted to. My personal observation is that my experience is pretty common, at least for men under 6'2".

I had the same reaction to this post. OP's experiences are extremely atypical. I'm 6'3", in good shape, and conventionally attractive. I'm married now but was always plenty romantically successful when I was single. Still, I've been approached romantically by no more than five or six women in my life (I'm 35). Even when I was approached, it was always indirect and more of a hint than an actual approach. One time a girl asked me out on a date, but even then she didn't call it a date and I didn't realize that's what it was until it was in progress (I thought she wanted to get coffee to discuss some things about an organization we were both members of). And these women who approached me were, to put it bluntly, not as good looking as the women I would normally date. If you're a man getting regularly approached by good looking women, you're an extremely rare outlier.

There have been two times in my life when a woman initiated a conversation with me, where looking back I think she might have been hitting on me. Both were in college, and interestingly both women were quite attractive. I think I might have been more likely to pick up on it if they were more "meh" looking.

deleted

One should never underestimate the male ability to completely not notice an approach by a woman.

For attractive men, it's very easy to build skill to recognize signs of women's approaching, because half of women like them. For unattractive men, who are repulsive to 95% of women, most of times when they think they're approached by woman, it'd be a false alarm, so it's difficult to build that skill.

Also female approaches are very much built in a couched 'plausible deniability' sort of a framing. I've been a spectator of enough of my female friends' flirtations that they're trying to actually take lead on, and the whole artifice tends to be built in such a manner as for an initial approach to be made with genuine interest but the whole thing can be retconned/denied if for whatever reason there's any icks.

deleted

because they’ll die alone if they don’t.

Attractive men don't have to get over it, they will be fucked anyway, maybe even by school teacher.

I do agree that guys should generally be trying to err on the side of doing too much rather than doing too little, and definitely believe that that approach will lead to more success so long as you don't... overpursue the false positives. Fail fast, fail often is probably the best way to go for the vast majority of guys.

I also feel that male rejection and female rejection tend to be fundamentally different. A lot of guys will definitely have a point of 'I could literally not sustain an erection' hard no, but there's also plenty of girls who they wouldn't consider wife/girlfriend material who they'd still nonetheless entertain if they took the front foot. Failure for girls is just as likely to be a situationship/FWB kind of a situation as it is to be an actual flat, firm rejection.

But on the other hand I know enough girls well enough that I've seen them get icked by the most absolutely random stuff in the formative period of a new crush/potential romantic dalliance. I've definitely seen guys fumble a pretty sure thing, but I've also seen a plethora of times where the fumble has been something totally random. I also feel like girls have way more ability to just instantaneously flick the switch from 100-0 and vice-versa in the face of an ick, compared to guys where I feel like attraction levels tend to remain consistent unless a truly shocking revelation comes up.

One should never underestimate the male ability to completely not notice an approach by a woman.

Yeah, I received a few mix tapes from girls high school. Since I was known in my friend-group as the opposite of "with it", I just figured they were politely trying to expand my musical horizons.

I've chatted with female friends who are convinced they're sending strong signals to other guys in their chats about potential romantic dalliance... then read the actual chats and it's been the most passive/friendly convo ever that they're convinced is them leading a wild romantic chase.

Also seen a lot of cases where a girl's absolutely fawned over some loose male potential and completely refused to lead and/or 'been ghosted' when the convo is prettymuch as follows


Random dude: 'My love, shall we picnic in the park this eve'

Girl: 'K'

Random Dude: 'When are you available? What is your ring size?'

Girl: 'Like React'

Random Dude: 'Are you free this Friday, my swan?'

Girl: Maybe

Then they accost me with 'why did I get left on read' and it's like... dude was trying his utmost best to get a sign of interest from you and eventually assumed you were trying to signal him to fuck off.


But like I understand the feminine impulse. The consequences of misplaced affections for men tend to be out-and-out rejection, whilst the consequences for a woman will trend far more towards getting fuckbuddyzoned/strung along for novelty's sake.

One should never underestimate the male ability to completely not notice an approach by a woman.

Oh, yes. I once worked with a girl on a project and thought we had a productive working relationship. One day she came to tell that she was being transferred to another project and when she left, my boss (an older woman with stellar social skills) loudly exclaimed, "thank God, I was this close to telling your wife about this situation". Notiсing my visible confusion, she asked if I really didn't notice that the girl had a huge crush on me. According to every woman in the room, it was blindingly obvious that she was in full worship mode. I have no idea to this day if they were pulling my leg.

Was this co-worker attractive? Workplace rumors always seem to spring up around young and attractive women, in my experience. For example, I once had a co-worker who was, bluntly, an absolute smokeshow. When I took up at the acting office manager for a spell, practically every other woman in the office stopped by my office to tell me about some supposed office affair this young lady was having. "I saw her coming out of such-and-such's office!" "She got off the train Monday morning with such-and-such!" "She had lunch with such-and-such three days in a row and then I saw them leave together on Friday!" I suppose it's possible I was an extra in a porn movie and that this lady really was a raging nymphomaniac but I'm pretty sure it was just run-away imaginations on the part of a bunch of jealous co-workers.

No, not really.

I suppose it's possible I was an extra in a porn movie and that this lady really was a raging nymphomaniac

I was going to ask if you were paid as such, but then I remembered that extras in porn movies are compensated via exposure.