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"?
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
More options
Context Copy link