site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Young Prudes: Are sex norms mostly a manifestation of sex ratios?

Aria Shrecker of Works in Progress puts forward an interesting hypothesis. What if the sexual revolution of the 1960s was driven not (primarily) by the pill, but by a growing population?

The thesis rests on a few key points:

  1. Women prefer to marry slightly older men, and men slightly younger women
  2. With a growing population, there are more young women competing for a smaller pool of slightly older men. In a shrinking population, the reverse is true
  3. More women leads to more sexual competition between women, and therefore looser sexual norms. Fewer women leads to stricter sexual norms by the same mechanism

1 is fairly uncontroversial, 2 is a mathematical derivative of 1. The only part of contention is whether 3 is true, and if so, how strong the effect is.

There is definitely a correlation between the ratio of men to women at US colleges and its sexual culture. And the mechanism is pretty intuitive. This would also explain the current sex-negative turn among young people. There are fewer 21 year-old zoomettes than there are 23 year-old zoomer boys, and so with the 'upper hand', the young ladies are turning the sexual culture towards their preferences.

The greatest weakness in the hypothesis is that it predicts that a higher male:female ratio should increase commitment (marriages, having children, buying houses together) and all those things are declining. Of course, its possible that atomisation caused by smartphones is simply too strong of an effect and swamps the influence of sex ratios. Peter Foreshaw Brooks points this out in his review of her article.

If Aria is right, then we're soon in line for a marriage boom. Watch this space, folks!

The problem with this argument is that we aren't seeing the now-scarce Zoomettes getting what they want.

The problem with the dating market in 2026 is that it does not clear, not that it is clearing at a price that young men don't like. Both sexes think it sucks, and there are people of both sexes who want to match with MMV peers and are unable to. Most people of both sexes still want marriage, but marriage rates are low and falling. This is a disaster, not a shift in power in the battle of the sexes.

The normie view on what is wrong seems fairly clear - that the main socially acceptable way of meeting strangers as potential dates (subscription-funded dating apps) does not work.

Dating is a matching market. Matching markets just tend to be hellscapes, and the larger they get the worse they get. But that's not the only problem. The change in balance in power is part of it. I just saw a thread on twitter where a man was derided because he said he want on something like 30 dates and they all went the same way: he took the girl out for dinner, they went for a walk, and he waited for them to initiate physical contact because he didn't want to be #metoo'd. Only 2 did (which is higher than I'd expect). You can claim this is merely paranoia on his part, but that requires putting your head in the sand.

He deserves the derision for taking chicks on first date dinner dates.

he waited for them to initiate physical contact

Hoping for courage and initiative from young women is a great way to never get laid.

I know a couple who met on a dating app which then failed almost immediately because it’s customers were all getting in serious relationships and canceling their subscriptions.

A new economic model is necessary, because dating apps are designed to not work- because otherwise they’ll go under.

I think the problem is two-fold. First, meeting strangers for potential dates is inherently a terrible idea that humans are not designed for. You have no way of vetting the person or build attraction beforehand, and there are no good heuristics to judge much other than "are they hot?" within the span of only one date. Especially when the other person is from a completely different background than you.

Second is the focus on attraction and consent above all else. This sounds good on the surface, but it is clear at this point that it leads to a model where your current feelings dictate everything. Romance suffers when any interaction boils down to "what am I in the mood for right now?". No longer do you find a decent person, go on dates and figure out if attraction can be built. Instead, you find an attractive person, have sex, then start to consider if they are worth being in a relationship with.

Put together, this means that the first date becomes a meeting where you:

  1. Have to figure out whether you are compatible on a personal level.
  2. Have to set the mood for sex to happen.
  3. Have to make a good first impression, because the other person can only judge you on what you show them on the date.

All at the same time. With 1 and 2 often being counter to each other. This is legitimately difficult, and that is without getting into all the ways people gamify the status quo for their own ends.

First, meeting strangers for potential dates is inherently a terrible idea that humans are not designed for.

But there's a social rule nowadays (developed by decades of Jessica Valenti/Amanda Marcotte types, and enforced by social approbation) that you are not supposed to date your friends. It's considered bad faith to do so; the irrebuttable assumption is you were only friendly with her so you could get into her pants.

The 1960's were not the sexual revolution. They were when people stopped pretending the sexual revolution hadn't happened. This is sociologically very normal; now-common behavior is often theoretically taboo for a generation or two after it becomes normalized.

The real sexual revolution was with the flappers. It was all hugely controversial at the time and society made a collective decision to pretend it wasn't happening but let it go through- as it so often does.

I agree more than disagree, but it was a process with many stops and starts. It began in earnest in the 1880s and 1890s, reached its zenith in the decade after the first world war in certain subcultures of young urban women, then went stagnant (and partially reversed, depending on the exact place and metric) for a while through the late 1950s, then was reignited by the sexual revolution and its immediate precursors and finally - for the first time - filtered out into pretty much the entirety of western society by the late 1970s, which is when the sexual revolution actually reached most normal people.

Didn't the Great Depression do away with the flapper phenomenon though?

What if the sexual revolution of the 1960s was driven not (primarily) by the pill, but by a growing population?

I read an argument that reducing syphilis deaths with penicillin was as or more important in creating the necessary basis for the sexual revolution. Syphilis used to be a big killer. HIV and other STDs becoming more prominent later led to restrictiveness again. I also heard that it was somewhat similar back when syphilis was first imported from the New World, it prompted crackdowns on licentiousness.

Anyway, we could compare to other times in history where there was a growing population and consider sexual norms then. Population growth was very high in colonial era North America (higher than the 1960s) but sexual norms were very restrictive back then. The Gaza strip had fairly high population growth more recently but it's not exactly a paradise of free love. There are many counterexamples.

It's possible that this effect contributes but it seems marginal compared to ideological, economic, technological and social factors in the 1960s or today. 1 and 2 might be real. But there's no reason to believe they're strong effects. A marriage boom seems unlikely, marriage rates have been falling for the last few decades.

Also, 'women getting more bargaining power' might just mean they fuck Chad rather than marry. 'Men getting more bargaining power' might mean that they form harems, that's what they might want as individuals. Marriage is a social innovation, it's not inherently natural. Plenty of tribes do without it (though their achievements are few, which is why they remain tribes). It's more likely that marriage rates are mainly a social/legal construct, not so much about demographics. In the extreme end, like when the Soviet Union had lost so many men and had a surplus of women, they had to have weird marriages/de factor polygamy. But normal circumstances probably don't have much effect.

Anyway, we could compare to other times in history where there was a growing population and consider sexual norms then. Population growth was very high in colonial era North America (higher than the 1960s) but sexual norms were very restrictive back then. The Gaza strip had fairly high population growth more recently but it's not exactly a paradise of free love. There are many counterexamples.

Everything I have read about colonial era North America implies that the shotgun marriage rate was noticeably higher than the old country, with the New England Puritans the worst culprits. Which is exactly what you would expect if there was a sexual loosening but no official toleration.

The shotgun marriage rate was higher but thé illegitimacy rate was lower- to some extent this is tighter norms, not norm-loosening without toleration. Of course thé economic differences are probably bigger.

The actual example of very high population growth with ultra conservative norms is probably French-Canadians, American colonial norms weren’t that different from the old country.

I read an argument that reducing syphilis deaths with penicillin was as or more important in creating the necessary basis for the sexual revolution. Syphilis used to be a big killer. HIV and other STDs becoming more prominent later led to restrictiveness again. I also heard that it was somewhat similar back when syphilis was first imported from the New World, it prompted crackdowns on licentiousness.

Shouldn't we be seeing a second sexual revolution with the availability of PrEP?

that only applies to one particularly limited subset of the population. virtually meaningless to women directly, at least in Western countries.

I could see an argument that PrEP is partially responsible for woke. Gays made a concerted effort in the 90s to appeal to normie sexual ethics as part of the fight for gay marriage. I wonder if that was a much easier sell in an era where all the slutty gays were dropping like flies. In that context, normie Will and Grace monogramous homosexuality had a lot of appeal.

Once PrEP became widely available in 2012, being a degenerate party boy became a viable lifestyle again, and respectability politics was dead.

Veering a bit off topic I suppose, but isn't the idea of "respectability politics" just hypocrisy?

If women were as sexually available as men, then straight men would largely act the way that gay men do today. Female reticence is the only thing that keeps male sexuality in check.

Funny enough, prep has increased the transmission rate of non-HIV STDs because guys think it makes them invincible to everything.

The timeline doesn’t work. Birth rates started to drop in the late 50s, when the oldest boomers were maybe 14. Marriage rates never recovered from their 1949 peak.

I would point at the wild increase in workforce participation driven by the war and by increased mechanization. A woman with her own income has significantly less incentive to follow the pre-war norms. When my grandmother was done tolerating her cheating husband, she divorced him and went to nursing school. Couldn’t do that in 1930.

Ah, but does that track female LFPR? I believe the fifties actually represent a long term minimum of female LFPR, due to rising male incomes meaning fewer women had to work. Statistically rosie the riveter(to the extent that she existed to begin with; she's greatly exaggerated) went back to being a housewife and it was her daughters, not her, that began entering the workforce on a more permanent basis.

I think so? The data shows brief dips in the 50s, but the overall trend starts to go up pretty early.

I suspect if we broke these up by sector, factory jobs probably did go back to men, with gains concentrated in healthcare, educational, and other service sectors.

1 is fairly uncontroversial

It's complete bullshit. For one, it's not even happening now, when mate choice is a thing, but more importantly, mate choice being "a thing" is completely novel; historically, marriages were decided by the families of the prospective spouses, not the spouses themselves, and this is true across cultures and time, as far as we're able to find in the record. Sexual selection was not a thing for humans; there are animals that evolved sexual selection, and we know how they behave, and what they look like. They do not look and behave like humans ever have.

2 and 3 do not describe the world we live in at all. There's about as many Zoomer girls as Zoomer men, and WAAAAAY more girls in college than men. We would not see the current iteration of #MeToo at college campuses if it were all about whether there were more women then men. College behaviors are in fact the opposite of what we would expect to have seen, given how gender imbalances have historically played out before the "Woke" era. Normally, too many women chasing too few men do result in debauchery and lower standards, yet that is not what we are seeing.

Modern sexual norms are downstream of a few things, chiefly increasing narcissism as a result of social atomization (along with an economy that profits greatly from it), decades of "sexual harassment" propaganda that prime women to see all male interest as inherently hostile, and social media giving a megaphone to the craziest of crazies who escalate all interactions to the most extreme (I'm thinking of nonsense like a redditors advising a mother it's actually a good thing her 4 year old son didn't want to be hugged by grandma, because nothing is more vitally important than "consent").

It's complete bullshit. For one, it's not even happening now, when mate choice is a thing, but more importantly, mate choice being "a thing" is completely novel; historically, marriages were decided by the families of the prospective spouses, not the spouses themselves

Most (but not all) traditional cultures required parental permission for first marriage, but that is a world away from young people having no say and not being able to act on their preferences at all, particularly when it comes to the second marriage that typically happens in a woman's 20s (turns out hunter-gatherers have lots of 'divorce'). But even for the first marriage, vetoes, elopement, affairs, divorce and remarriage all allow people to express their mate choices. If our ancestral environment didn't involve individual mate choice, then we wouldn't have evolved (strong and specific) mate preferences.

And I'm not sure what you mean when you say 'it's not happening now'. I mean, the older man-younger woman pairing is literally universal. There are absolutely no human cultures where the typical relationship involves a younger man and an older woman. None at all.

And I'm not sure what you mean when you say 'it's not happening now'. I mean, the older man-younger woman pairing is literally universal. There are absolutely no human cultures where the typical relationship involves a younger man and an older woman. None at all.

Please explain to me how you think the second half of your comment relates to the first. Women, as a rule, are not marrying older men. Even fewer men are marrying older women, how does this prove, to you, that younger women prefer older men?

hunter-gatherers have lots of 'divorce'

Source desperately needed. We do not have record of this behavior in examinations of hunter-gatheres, it doesn't appear in oral traditions/myths. For the love of God, this behavior doesn't even show up in our simian relatives; has the whole community just replaced historical fact with blatant bullshit read on jimdotblog's website?

Most (but not all) traditional cultures required parental permission for first marriage, but that is a world away from young people having no say and not being able to act on their preferences at all, particularly when it comes to the second marriage that typically happens in a woman's 20s (turns out hunter-gatherers have lots of 'divorce'). But even for the first marriage, vetoes, elopement, affairs, divorce and remarriage all allow people to express their mate choices. If our ancestral environment didn't involve individual mate choice, then we wouldn't have evolved (strong and specific) mate preferences.

I basically agree with this, although I have a pet theory which relates:

When a man in the West is attracted to a woman, he will often act nice to her, metaphorically carrying her books. Red pill types have observed that this is usually counterproductive, but I suspect that in past generations it was adaptive. Being nice to a girl would impress her parents, especially her father. And I think this is part of the reason why so many men have this seemingly maladaptive instinct.

It's complete bullshit. For one, it's not even happening now, when mate choice is a thing, but more importantly, mate choice being "a thing" is completely novel; historically, marriages were decided by the families of the prospective spouses, not the spouses themselves, and this is true across cultures and time, as far as we're able to find in the record.

Not in cisHajnal cultures. Westerners were choosing their own spouses by about 1000AD for the peasant class and 1400AD for the middle class.

Yeah but 'choosing your own spouse' is kind of different in a village/medieval town setting than it is in modernity. Your universe of candidates is likely not going to be very big, and if you're especially picky/tardy you're likely just going to get whoever's left. My nanny is from a subsistence agriculture society that doesn't really do tribal intermarriage and the population of her language group/'tribe' is approximately 40,000 people. If you're single at 25 they consider it essentially fair game to kidnap you and make you get married to another spare. I think the vast majority of even 'free association Westerner peasant dating' was a lot more like that than it would resemble modernity.

Normally, too many women chasing too few men do result in debauchery and lower standards, yet that is not what we are seeing.

Are you sure about this?

It's complete bullshit. For one, it's not even happening now, when mate choice is a thing, but more importantly, mate choice being "a thing" is completely novel; historically, marriages were decided by the families of the prospective spouses, not the spouses themselves, and this is true across cultures and time,

This is not really true for Northern Europeans or hunter gatherers though. It became near universal with settled agricultural society but we spent more time as hunter gatherers. Also Northern Europeans never really had arranged marriage outside of the nobility.

Ah, but due to agricultural population densities most humans who have ever lived were peasant farmers, and we know that early agrarians experienced strong selection effects(on nutritional requirements, skin colour, cognition, and many other things) already.

Normally, too many women chasing too few men do result in debauchery and lower standards, yet that is not what we are seeing.

So obviously, there aren't too many men relative to the number of women.

Men are in surplus. Women are not. Men can't accumulate enough of a resource surplus in these conditions to be worth it for the average woman. (And no, "women are worse today" doesn't matter [whether that is true, I make no judgment]. Women are in deficit; therefore they are free to enshittify.)

I will point out that in large degree, this is eugenics in action; women who good enough to get along with men are marrying them, women who are not are not, so the next generations will likely be far more psychologically healthy than the current crop of feminists and inherit a world that has enough economic opportunity per capita for men to continue in a healthy way.

Automation makes the "clearing price" for humanity rise. So does pornography (adventure substitute, romance substitute, free for both genders in enough quantity and quality to fill one's entire life- the automation frees up people to make this stuff).

Every woman and man who come in under the clearing price cannot afford to be with each other. And given the divorce rates in the '70s, maybe that's the best alternative to a negotiated agreement (involving the State stepping in to matchmake).

What you are witnessing is the natural population control cycle of post-scarcity humans.

You don't have an example of that ingrained into your instinct because it has literally never happened before; if you're a man, that's why you hate life (and the concept that any man younger than you should have it better than you did), and simp so hard for women and get nothing in return.

Pre-scarcity, this would have precipitated a civil war and the population control would have happened that way, restoring men to the ~10% population deficit human instinct seems to always assume exists. (Can't imagine why that would be at all.)

Post-scarcity, population control happens one natural funeral at a time, because it turns out your chains have never before set so lightly upon you compared to what it would cost to break them.

historically, marriages were decided by the families of the prospective spouses, not the spouses themselves,

This is bad history. Families did indeed have a lot of influence on who you married, but loving parents (which most are) took into account their kids' preferences. Citing one traditional culture in particular--India's-- arranged marriages still feature a large component of the people being arranged getting to know each other to see if they're a suitable match. Citing "The Great Universe of Kota: Stress, Change, and Mental Disorder in an Indian Village", there are anecdotes about how smitten youths can effectively bully their parents into making sure they get married, and the traditional practice of consulting an astrologer on how well a match fits can be gamed by providing bribes in either direction.

...plus, what makes you think families wouldn't want attractive, fertile/virile spouses for their children? Parents are typically invested in getting grandchildren, and finding a child a match they are attracted to is a good way to ensure that.

It's fairly easy to resolve this contradiction because it should be easy to identify how it all worked in practice: singles did have a choice in mating but only within the social circle they were confined to by their family and elders. In plain English this meant they were provided with a limited pool to choose from. So both factors were at play.

'Good dads only marry their daughters off to men they actually want to marry' is a trope from the literal Viking sagas, it's very old. The indulgent father who can't bring himself to marry off his daughter against her will pops up in Greek mythology multiple times, as well, usually with the daughter setting some impossible task for her suitors that, of course, the hero meets through some combination of superhuman abilities, loophole abuse, and divine assistance.

The greatest weakness in the hypothesis is that it predicts that a higher male:female ratio should increase commitment (marriages, having children, buying houses together) and all those things are declining.

If everything else were equal, sure, but that’s really not the case at all. The shift in the social status of the average man vs woman skews the comparison (with no numbers to back it up). We systematically damaged or destroyed every status granting or meaning generating institution for men and half heartedly replaced them with therapy culture (perhaps besides the military?). If women are after relative status, we shifted the entire bell curve effectively reducing the population. I largely agree with your hypothesis if not your prediction.

(perhaps besides the military?)

I mean, the status of serving in the military is clearly not what it used to be, at least in America. People will still go "thank you for your service" and let them board airplanes earlier, but:

  • Every military action America takes is seen as evil by a pretty sizable subset of the population, so even if they're not willing to go after the individual soldier, there's always kind of a backhanded "you're a tool for the evil empire"
  • Secondary to this, wars are a lot less total than they used to be, so actually fighting the war has you second-guessing what the eventual perception of your actions are going to be. WW2 and back, "blowing up this thing that belongs to the enemy" was uncontroversially good because the bad guys were the bad guys, now it's "let's hope this doesn't end up in the ICC".
  • Media portrayal of the military has gone way downhill: sometimes they'll at least get to showcase the cool equipment, but "PTSD-haunted danger to himself and others" is a way more common trope than "dashing young lieutenant". The upper echelons are portrayed as out-of-touch plot barriers, and the organization as a whole is often portrayed as wildly incompetent (although to be fair a lot of this is just necessary to get the plot to work, i.e. every zombie movie). I can't remember the last time I've seen "the military comes in and saves the day" as a plot device, though admittedly my media consumption is unusual so I could have missed a few.
  • Online sentiment tends to land somewhere between focusing on the idiocy of the lower ranks (Hellcats at 183% APR, Jackass stunts) or complaining about how people working for the military are enabling genocide/oppression/what have you.

Whether these things are improvements in how we think about the world is debatable (certainly there was a lot more nuance to war than perhaps the public was appreciating, and we do have rather a lot of PTSD-haunted veterans), but it's clearly a loss in status to the people serving.

Counterpoint: Uniform chasers are a thing.

My former boss was a part-time policeman, and the times he'd get approached when in uniform - well, that number wasn't zero, let's say.

Don't underestimate the appeal of men who have government permission to kill to some women.

Sure, but would we expect that not to have been the case before?

"The military still has non-zero status" is totally compatible with "the military's status has significantly declined"

Don't underestimate the appeal of men who have government permission to kill to some women.

Note that "men signalling they can/will kill for you" is the root here. ("Government permission" is whitewashing it.)

Any Michael Bay film? Top Gun: Maverick? That bizarre Battleship movie?

Militarist aesthetics aren’t at all dead. Just much much more likely to draw hecklers, which are in turn made much more visible by the usual social-media shitstorms.

Yeah that's fair, it's certainly hyperbolic to say NOTHING supports the military, but I think it's massively down and accelerating downward.

  • Michael Bay definitely has some pro-military stuff, but it's certainly headed downhill: Ambulance has a down-and-out Marine protagonist, 6 Underground has vigilantes doing what the military won't (with a PTSD sniper), 13 Hours is all private and foreign militaries, and the last Transformers has both good and bad military.
  • Top Gun 100%, but it's also Hollywood failing to create anything new and rehashing a 1986 movie. I guess props to them for not subverting the themes of the original movie, good chance that would have cost them at the box office but I don't know why I'd expect that to stop them.
  • Battleship is a 14 year old movie.

These are all ongoing trends and it's not like there's a cliff after WW2, but the original premise was that we have damaged all status-granting institutions for men and I definitely think the public perception of the military is damaged.

I'd refer to an older comment by @Lewyn:

The original Michael Bay Transformers is exactly this type of period piece. It encapsulated everything about that era of early-2000s American culture; military dudebro Call of Duty aesthetics, jingoistic patriotism, frat boy humor, etc. That type of theming was dead and buried by the 2010s, but is maybe making a resurgence now. I remember hating it at the time, but it does feel nostalgic to see now with how different everything became.

(emphasis mine)

I can't remember the last time I've seen "the military comes in and saves the day" as a plot device, though admittedly my media consumption is unusual so I could have missed a few.

There's The Mist from 2007, but the military also caused the disaster they had to save everyone from.

Also I know Japan doesn't count but the anime Gate is a fun counterexample, where a portal to a fantasy world with dragons etc. is opened and invades Japan only to be soundly defeated by the Japanese military (who then proceed to venture into the fantasy world and set uo a FOB there and kill more dragons and stuff).

Gate was a propaganda piece funded by the JSDF, the sentiment it reflects is not organic.

There’s a lot of genuine military otaku though.

We systematically damaged or destroyed every status granting or meaning generating institution for men

Did we? And by we I mean humanity. Because marriage is collapsing in basically every country on earth. That points to something that has affected everyone, not just Anglo or western countries. I think smartphones (or more broadly digital entertainment) are a better explanation than wokeness or whatever.

Interestingly, there are secular normie exceptions to the declining marriage rate- basically all of them are towns where some external economic shock(commonly oil) raises young male wages by a factor of a million without affecting female wages very much.

If Aria is right, then we're soon in line for a marriage boom.

I'm not saying there's nothing to this hypothesis, but:

With a growing population, there are more young women competing for a smaller pool of slightly older men. In a shrinking population, the reverse is true

There are various countries with populations that are shrinking faster than the U.S.' and in fact have not seen a marriage 'boom.'

I think the missing line of argument is "and women are restrained from simply sharing a single, older, high value man." i.e. the underlying culture enforces monogamy.

To me the seemingly 'obvious' factor is whether women receive enough material wealth to be intentionally 'selective' and thus little pressure to settle down. Women will marry to ensure they have resources for themselves and their kids. If they can get the resources independently of the spouse they can simply opt not to choose a spouse. There is an increasing body of research on this point. Give men more resources relative to women = more families and kids. Give women more resources, the opposite.

tl;dr gender and age ratios will likely play a role, but you still have to incentivize women to actually pick and settle down for it to matter.

you still have to incentivize women to actually pick and settle down

Incentivize them how?

You say that "culturally enforcing monogamy" is equivalent to women being "restrained"; ok, by what mechanism will you restrain them?

Reduce the size of the government. That's it. Women are both disproportionately employed by it and get a lot of handouts. Never going to happen though.

Reduce the size of the government. That's it. Women are both disproportionately employed by it and get a lot of handouts. Never going to happen though.

The US government workforce is 55% male, compared to 53% of the country's overall workforce. Government workers are disproportionately men, not women.

Is that federal workforce only or all state/county/local workforces as well?

‘The US government workforce’

I suspect those employed by governments at all levels have a gender ratio determined by whether there’s more teachers or cops.

Yes, good point. The indoors government workforce at state/county/local levels is probably majority women, but the outdoors workforce (law enforcement of all stripes, maintenance/utility types, etc.) are majority male, so it is likely more even than it would seem.

Fully agreed for Germany. Cut academic, buerocratic and corporate sinecures enabled by government regulations and spending so women need to get actual jobs to be economically independent. Cut public welfare so they can't just fallback onto being paid for existing.

That'll force women to actually work for a living or else depend on marriage again, will force men to work for a living instead of becoming parasitic hedonists, and will dissuade welfare migrants to boot. Win-win-win.

As I often say:

Return to 1993.

Make it harder in general to attend college, which will incidentally make it harder for women to go to college, as a natural effect of making it harder to obtain funding for unprofitable degrees.

Women with college degrees are more arbitrarily selective of their mates, have more debt (and pick degrees that pay less), are are generally more liberal which correlates strongly with 'anti-male' sentiment. This is not universally true, but the impact is too large to ignore.

Fewer women going to college means, on the margins, more of them are likely to seek marriage.

Remove the economic privileges that make it preferential to hire women over men, we'd simply expect men to gain back more resources, which, as per the aforementioned studies, would mean more marriage, more families.

I see no reason not to do this because women themselves have only gotten increasingly miserable since 1993. THEY THEMSELVES are not any happier than they were back then, so something clearly went wrong.

You say that "culturally enforcing monogamy" is equivalent to women being "restrained";

Point of fact: this restrains BOTH Genders.

Again, I've said it before:

No sex before marriage solves the problem for both sides.

We could try making marriage a stricter, more meaningful contract again, too.

But nobody has a single hangup about restraining male behavior. There'd be little pushback if you wanted to pass a law that made it legal for women to unilaterally kick their husbands out of the house for alleged abuse, but specifically banned men from doing the same. This is the whole issue.

We're already restraining male behavior... why it it somehow beyond the pale to discuss restraining ladies?

I've brought this point up before with... oh it was YOU, SPECIFICALLY. 1 year ago. We are not making progress, it seems.

More educated women have higher marriage rates.

I'm sympathetic on a societal level to the broader goal- we do not need more BA's in psychology. But it's very obviously not the solution to this specific problem.

I wonder if you are reversing cause and effect. University is really the only organic in person dating scene left. Dating at work is at best uncouth these days.

Four year university is the only facilitated dating scene left, everyone goes to the parties.

Which the bluenoses and metooers keep trying to shut down, and they appear to be slowly but inexorably succeeding.

Fewer women going to college means, on the margins, more of them are likely to seek marriage.

College-educated women are the only ones who are still getting married. The collapse in marriage has been among women (and men) who didn't go to college. College-educated women born in 1980 ended up having the same marriage rate as women born in 1940.

Indeed, the fact that women overtook men in college enrolment in the 1980s mean that graduate women must have been marrying down educationally to make the maths work.

Wage hypergamy is real, educational hypergamy doesn't exist (any more).

True but the remaining non-collegiate population is increasingly only the dregs. The point is more that 'people who would otherwise get productively married and churn out more people are wasting 4 years getting a useless degree'

Which is arguably a bad thing, but empirically isn't causing falling marriage rates.

Remove the economic privileges that make it preferential to hire women over men

Sure, I'm down with that.

No sex before marriage solves the problem for both sides.

Ok but like, how? How is that a workable policy proposal? How are you going to enforce that? "Cultural norms"? How do you intend to put that particular genie back in the bottle?

I frequently run into this same frustration any time I'm talking to someone who wants to turn back the clock to before the sexual revolution. They have many goals they want to achieve, but are somewhat shy about detailing how they intend to actually go about achieving them, outside of gesturing in an increasingly fervent manner that Something Must Be Done.

My impression from reading your (unrelentingly dour and pessimistic) dating posts over the years is that you're really chomping at the bit to implement some policies that would be broadly considered to be outside the Overton window (whether that be anything from making premarital sex illegal, all the way up to government-mandated breeding programs), but are perhaps a bit reticent to discuss them publicly. If that is the case, then my only advice to you is, discuss them! We are blessed to be on one of the few public forums where radical ideas can actually receive a fair and rational hearing. (It might help you release some tension too, you always seem really wound up in these dating posts, jeez.)

You're already on record as supporting the death penalty for men whose (consensual!) sexual behavior you disapprove of. That's pretty extreme. What principle of bodily autonomy do you hold to, then, that would prevent you from supporting forced marriages for women, especially considering that such an arrangement would be done in the service of ameliorating such a dangerous impending social catastrophe?

We could try making marriage a stricter, more meaningful contract again, too.

See above. Stricter how? Who enforces it?

We're already restraining male behavior

Restrained in the sense that a prospective employee is restrained relative to large corporations, I suppose. But that's just what you get with a free market.

There'd be little pushback if you wanted to pass a law that made it legal for women to unilaterally kick their husbands out of the house for alleged abuse, but specifically banned men from doing the same.

Really? I think there would be considerable pushback against a law that is that explicit about stating that female abuse doesn't happen and that only men can be abusers. I realize there is a sizeable contingent of feminist legal theorists who functionally believe this, but I doubt your hypothetical law passes anywhere in the U.S. At most, they try to write the definition of "abuse" in such a way that it's much more difficult to accuse a woman of it, and even that would be tough.

You can make a reasonable case that this is already de facto the law in most of the US (and the UK, and presumably most of western Europe) because of the way police and courts enforce facially gender-netural laws. If cops and judges who deal with domestic violence are exclusively trained in the feminist Duluth Model then the law as enforced will reflect that.

Duluth Model

A wikipedia article that, as far as I can tell at a skim, does not actually explain the model itself.

Edit: This is more direct: Anti-Femicide laws. Not exactly making it lawful for women to abuse men, but instead imposing extra penalties if the man is the abuser and the woman the abused. With a sufficient rebalancing of penalties between the gender neutral law, and the "bonus" punishment for Male on Female crime, your exact scenario could come true. Anti-femicide laws are not merely something on the feminist wishlist, but exist on the books in several countries.

Ours is an age of menstrual breaks, of hygiene products being tax exempt, if they are only used by the fairer sex. Men do not think they will find themself in a situation where a woman might abuse them, as they generally do not view women as a threat in a sense that current laws ban.

Here subsequent radicalizations of feminism play contradictory roles: if men and women are equal, a man abusing a woman, and a woman abusing a man are both likely scenarios, and the possibility of the latter one is what feminism at that stage paid lipservice to and went against the traditional grain. More extreme feminism that emerged later, that men can't be victims, can be viewed as a return to a previous value system, but when promulgated in a society that now treats women as legally no inferior to men, clearly reduce equality.

I think there would be considerable pushback against a law that is that explicit about stating that female abuse doesn't happen and that only men can be abusers.

How many male jurors pushed back against the Clancy verdict?

I don't think there would be any pushback; I think men would actively welcome this.

I am increasingly disappointed how often argumentation (really just kneejerk snap responses) here resembles the same level of reflection and analysis found on /r/news. Much has been written in the "State of the Motte" thread that has already been said, including the pros and cons of moving off reddit, but the worst of it is this kind of "Durkahurk somethingsomething-current-news-cycle NUh-uuuuuHHHHHHHH!" response. These have largely replaced long effortposts when people would at least bother to pretend the capability to consider the thoughts being thought by people who are not them. To be clear, the latter still exist, but I think it's not a coincidence that the signal-to-noise ratio keeps going down, while some people persist in complaining that we put too much value on "moar words."

I don't have an archive link handy, but IIRC, it has been shown that the average comment back in the slatestarcodex containment thread days was considerably worse than today.

Not that we can't strive to be better.

If you need me to bring further receipts for the claim, I can take the time to do that; I feel as if I've been running a little hotter in that respect than usual lately.

However, as far as "no pushback against law that states female abuse doesn't happen", this one is honestly pretty clear. So's the "male statutory rape victim forced to pay child support" one. So was the UK rape law that, for quite some time, was written so that only men could even be guilty of the crime (it requires anatomy women do not possess). Canada, too- "we'll change the law so men accused of rape can't as easily gather evidence of the women collaborating to frame the guy" actually happened, again with zero pushback.

I think men are obsessed with Protecting Women; I think women are happy to say "thank you very much" and pocket the resulting political power differential while at best simply looking the other way when women abuse men (from women's perspective). The female jurors are, as I recall from previous threads on the subject, literally on record stating that Protect Women is why they voted that way.

These have largely replaced long effortposts when people would at least bother to pretend the capability to consider the thoughts being thought by people who are not them.

I've tried, I just get downvoted without engagement. And yes, I'm frustrated by the fact nobody wants to bother to ask then, what's in your head?; it is present here, it is present there, it is present everywhere.

(Perhaps the men and women getting married are doing so simply because they are, on average, the only human beings on the planet capable of asking at least their life partner that question merely at a higher than average base rate. Education predicts that much, at least.)

Okay, bring receipts for the claim that there would be no pushback to a law the explicitly allows a woman to kick a man out of a shared household for abuse, but does not allow a man to kick a woman out of a shared household for abuse. A law literally written that way, with language that makes it black and white that it only applies in one direction.

"Lindsey Clancy" and "Child support laws" are not receipts.

More comments

There was no Clancy verdict. One of three men, and none of the nine women, objected to the otherwise-unanimous vote of not guilty by reason of insanity.

So 66% of men, n = 3, agree that female abuse is literally beyond their ability to comprehend.

(And the 33% was of a particular demographic whose women are stereotypically maximally hostile to men.)

No, 11 of twelve jurors voted that she was too crazy to go to a women’s medical prison, and should instead be held in the state’s long term women’s mental hospital against her will. There is likely no actual difference between the two facilities, and it seems worth noting that everyone agrees she is actually crazy.

No. 2 men out of 3 in a jury of 12 were convinced to say that there was at least reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy was legally sane when she murdered her kids. While I disagree with these men (and the 9 women), this is not such an obvious thing as to be equivalent to "female abuse is literally beyond their ability to comprehend"

More comments

My tongue's partially in my cheek because... that's approximately how the law works (in Florida!) already.

A husband is ALLOWED to seek a domestic violence injunction but far and away in my experience its the wives/girlfriends getting them. In Miami-Dade County its about 73% women filing for them. In terms of who gets them granted its 80+% women.

And the effect of getting filing an injunction is that the other person can't come near the 'alleged victim' which means... they have to leave the house, and can't even talk to the alleged victim.

So this isn't quite the exact law I'm talking about... but nobody seems to question the one we have on the books, as applied.

Okay, sure, but I'm very intentionally questioning the assertion you actually made, that no one would push back on a de jure law that only applies in one direction. That it de facto heavily benefits one sex over the other isn't surprising, but, you know, 27% of filings and 20% granted being men is a minority, but it's not nothing, or even statistically insignificant.

And, courts unfair to men women never held responsible yadda yadda whatever, but men are more often the ones being removed for physical abuse? I am shocked. To the degree these court orders are weaponized (a push or a slap becomes "threatened my life"), I would be very surprised if men aren't doing that just as often.

To the OP’s point I still think things are far more the case in favor of the impact the pill had on society than skewed population ratios, but it still has an effect. Russia is the better case study for the latter due to how lopsided demographics became after losing so many men on the eastern front in WW2. They still haven’t recovered from that loss. I don’t recall the figures for Moscow but the ratio was something like 70 men for every 100 women.

Wealth inequality and declining marriage means there are far more Peter Pan boys who are older. And in my experience most 20 something girls don’t have major issues dating as high as 50 especially since men are aging slower than ever due to fitness culture etc. Wealth inequality my gut says is increasing available male to female ratios far more than population pyramids.

I would still argue that less sex is more due to fewer relationships + lower social skills.

I would still argue that less sex is more due to fewer relationships + lower social skills.

I think it's more the obesity epidemic making everybody unfuckable. If we remove all the obese people from the calculation I doubt the sex recession is still visible in the data.

I would still argue that less sex is more due to fewer relationships + lower social skills.

And women carrying out their version of mass shootings/abductions- false rape allegations and pedo panic-ing- against men. Rare, but highly destructive, and a crime that's always perpetrated by women of the same social class/race.

And every man knows this. Accusations of sexual impropriety are assault, and the iPhone (and social media) are the assault weapon.

One is just as destructive as the other to the social fabric.

most 20 something girls don’t have major issues dating as high as 50

Citation needed.

The average married couple in the US are two years apart, and that gap has been narrowing for decades with no sign of going back.

Is there a difference between dating and marriage?

When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes. I don’t know anyone in same-age relationships. My date today I have 20 years on.

My best guess is this has something to do with who gets married today. Probably some kind of k-shaped market. Amish-Mormon-Orthodox Jew have high early marriage rates along with other religious.

Maybe the dating and marriage markets are different.

Either that or Miami is super skewed.

Most attractive 24 year old women in Miami aren’t dating fifty year old men, or close to it. There is a larger sugar baby / p4p scene in Miami than any other major city in the US adjusted for the population, but it’s still quite limited. I think it’s more likely the circles you’re in. I know a few women with much older parters, but they tend to be average looking women who get out of a long relationship at, say, 32, don’t like the prospects their age, and settle for a much older man with kids already who funds a nice and relaxing rest of their life. A hot 24 year old, in general, knows that a silver fox today is the man whose ass you’re wiping in twenty years, when you’re still in your forties.

I think it’s more of a big city thing. Celebrities seems to have large age gaps even when they both have money.

The economy and a lot of social games feel very k-shaped to me now which would surprise me that age-gaps are shrinking. Along with a huge lack of social skills in younger generations. My gut would still guess a religious reason if it’s shrinking.

Yeah. They are more likely to get with an early 30s already prettt successful guy

I would guess 8-10 is ideal now. It takes a lot longer for male financial security today. The last friend I went to I believe was 38 to 30 and both have similar parental social class (midwestern SMB owner to Doctor parents).

Amish-Mormon-Orthodox Jew have high early marriage rates along with other religious

Ultraconservative religion tends to push average age at marriage down for men as well as women, because 'no premarital sex' is a heck of a motivator for twenty-one year old young men.

Not to mention the older you get, you slowly age out of everything in general. A lot of the things I used to be obsessed with as a teenager and young adult just no longer have the appeal they used to, for me. I still have a good amount of kick left in me and the range of things I spend my time on anymore has narrowed considerably. The girl I’m currently seeing I used to be something of a mentor to when she was younger and I tutored her in science class in school. Our peer groups were proximate to each other and although she’s younger than me, she isn’t that much younger. The only issue is she’s unsure if she wants children, and that’s the ultimate deciding factor for me.

Marry her and she'll decide she wants a baby.

What makes you confident? She is really into me and we’ve known each other since we were kids.

Yeah I know a few friends in their early-mid thirties who tried the 'get married and she'll flip on it' where No turned into 'maybe I guess' but somehow never turned into actually trying to have a child.

When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes.

I'm a vibes enjoyer too, but surely in this case the data is straightforward and accurate whereas your anecdotes are just your own personal bubble.

I like the Bezos quote when it applies to messy data with lots of confounders, especially when the data is polluted by political bias.

I don't think that's the case here. One shouldn't just pop this quote out anytime you are surprised by data that conflicts with your priors. What possible reason would there be for this data to be incorrect?

especially when the data is polluted by political bias.

I think this is the key issue. When any research comes out from an institution which has been captured by the Left; and that research happens to support the Leftist narrative; and it contradicts my general observations and experience, I tend to go with my own observations and experience.

As far as age gap marriages go, my general observation is that as far back as I remember, they've always been pretty unusual. And they still seem pretty unusual. I'm talking about large age gaps, like 10 or 20+ years.

As far as same age marriages go, the data here seems to say that in the last 50 years, the average gap has gone from 3 years to 2.2 years. That's not really enough to be very noticeable.

At the same time, in my general experience, most women in their 20s are open to dating men 10, 20, or even 30 years old, provided that the man is otherwise attractive to them (which is kind of a big "if").

Anyway, my instinct is that recent technological changes (social media; easy availability of pornography; smartphone dating apps etc.) are the main drivers behind any recent changes in dating and mating patterns.

Despite disagreeing with poster above, I think in this case data is missing a fairly straightforward element: Dating preferences are highly localized, Aggregate statistics is highly not. The locality has a lot to do with local culture, local norms, local socio-economic factors, and local attractiveness. The problem cuts both way. Opt-out is making sweeping generalizations projected from his hyperlocal data but the reverse is also true, people making sweeping generalizations from aggregate statistics towards highly specialized local regions.

When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes. I don’t know anyone in same-age relationships. My date today I have 20 years on.

Sure but that goes for the reverse. I'm a couple states north of you and I know about 14 long term relationships/marriages with a 1-2 year age gap and only 1 with a 10 year age gap. But I'm in my mid 30s for context and I'm guessing you are over 40, unless...

I think it'd be a Miami thing where Miami is essentially the PVP meat market realm

When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes

I mean, how much data are you willing to disregard? We have numbers for almost all countries. The country with the highest age gap is Eritrea at 8.5 years. But outside of the Muslim world and Subsaharan Africa, age gaps are small, and nowhere comes close to 20-30 years. And they're not driven by religious sects who marry young. The average age of marriage in all western countries (even those without any Amish, Haredim or Mormons) is around 30 or higher.

The most parsimonious explanation is that you, an old man who dates young women, hang out with other old men who do the same.

When Jeff Bezos was talking about data and anecdotes disagreeing, he was cautioning against measuring the wrong thing. He wasn't instructing people to ignore all data in favour of generalising their own unusual circumstances to the entire country/world.

This issue has been fairly extensively discussed on Manosphere blogs back when they were still a thing. I can recall the main arguments more or less. Shrecker's analysis is fundamentally right with one important caveat. If the sex ratio in question becomes even more imbalanced, the effect starts to reverse. What apparently happens is that even men of lower social status start exploring opportunities for casual sex which is something they otherwise never do. This nauseates women and they respond by rejecting such advances wholesale and essentially forming a new sex cartel, waiting for the Chad with a heart of gold to show up.

Generally speaking, the average age of marriage is low and the marriage rate is high when women outnumber men, but only slightly - which has normally been the standard state of affairs. This means women in general are imbued with a sense of urgency but are at the same time not getting demoralized/dispirited.

When there are much more men then women, the general attitude is 'why should I bother settling down, all guys are available'. When the reverse is true, it's 'why should I bother settling down, no guys are available'.

My experience trying to get young people to pair off is that you want between fifty and sixty percent women- a huge female supermajority and they just clique together and talk to their friends, if it’s not majority female they get scared and one or two over aggressive guys run amok.

There are more 21 year-old zoomettes than there are 23 year-old zoomer boys, and so with the 'upper hand', the young ladies are turning the sexual culture towards their preferences.

You probably wanted to write "fewer", not "more".

There is definitely a correlation between the ratio of men to women at US colleges and its sexual culture. And the mechanism is pretty intuitive.

As an old fart who went to undergrad at a school that was 55:45 male:female (and of course women were almost mythical in STEM classes), I can hardly imagine what life is like at modern US universities with 60:40 female:male ratios.

I think the ol' "The odds are good, but the goods are odd" saw applies, since you're going to get a higher ratio of turbolibs, Blue-haired SJWs, obese Trigglypuffs and weird sexualities than in the outside world.

Trigglypuff

Now that's a blast from the past. The Internet used to be so much more fun.

2015-2016 was wild. I never participated in Kekistani memes but people took them pretty far.

My brother would not believe me when I told him the capital of Kyrgyzstan was literally called Bitch Kek.

Is this strictly a byproduct of age or down to the material advantages males get from those extra years? Obviously impractical to conduct an experiment but I'd be skeptical it's purely just age and I'd argue there's now a raft of financial, educational and professional reasons why there's now a shortage of 'guys who are doing slightly better than their female peers'

Is this strictly a byproduct of age

The Haredi are an interesting example. Haredi women complain about the lack of young men to marry in their fast-growing population, even though the men are just going to study the Torah while she earns the money. The Haredi women have no instrumental reason to prefer slightly older men, he's not going to be the main breadwinner regardless of whether he's 19 or 22.

I mean, I do think the deep evolutionary reasons women prefer older men and men prefer younger women are the obvious breadwinning ability/fertility thing, and obviously women do express a strong, explicit preference for men who earn more money than they do. At the same time, I think in an AI utopia where we all live on UBI you'd still see the familiar age pattern. Men and women do seem to have preferences for relative youth/age qua themselves.

For Haredim specifically, that mandatory stupid haircut/beard combo they all have probably looks awful on someone who can't quite grow a beard yet.

Jewish people are one of the most unattractive populations I’ve ever looked at. I don’t blame their people for wanting to culturally defect and intermarry into other groups. I would too. Personally I love me some of my own people, but I find a lot of ethnic women attractive.

It's because boys are stupid and men are awesome. It's a byproduct of maturity, which is the better assessor of long term financial and emotional stability than their current discretionary money. A 32 year old who might not have a great job still can demonstrate that they will not quit in a huff when they face some pushback from their boss. A 23 year old with a small inheritance is less proven.

Once upon a time people became adults much earlier (see other top level thread). I think a 25 year old could be old enough to marry if they have had responsibility thrust upon them from their teenage years. But most people aren't forced to be responsible until later and later.

Relatedly, did you know that in times of economic downturn in America, the teenager labor force participation rate goes down? It's because they have to compete in the job market with underemployed adults. The teenage laborforce participation rate never really recovered from the 2008 crash.

The teenage laborforce participation rate never really recovered from the 2008 crash.

Teenage labor force participation rate never really recovered from the 1934 crash. There was a brief respite in the '50s and '60s, which is why they were golden years by comparison, and why the generation in charge now, who came of age during that time, still act as if that is reality.

It's because boys are stupid and men are awesome.

Nah, bro. Men are lame, boring, decrepit, and dead inside. Boys might be annoying, but at least they actually bother to live... until men teach them they shouldn't, commonly around the late teens. (Women haven't figured out they need to encourage men yet; it might be as incomprehensible to women as "women can be abusers too" clearly is for men.)

I remember observing this viewpoint emerge gradually among late-teen male peers and not necessarily because they were told, which leads me to believe the willingness to actually live properly for once ends in one's teens.

Nah, bro

The complex use of "bro" aside, your interlocutor in this case is a woman. (The person you were responding to.)

I even changed my flair to pink.

All the more for me, I guess? I dunno.

I guess appreciating those aspects really is rocket science or something. And in their defense it's biologically contraindicated for them to do that, but then again it's also biologically contraindicated for me to do that.

I dunno, it seems to me that marrying far older kind of removes any reason for them to bother to actually adapt, and if you have a sufficient frame of reference you can pretty clearly see where they're headed (occasionally in such measure that you'd want it now). Compared to 'known quantity, take it or leave it, for better or worse'. Which is ironically probably more attractive a quality in women than it is in men, or at least it is from my point of view, when it comes to something that predicts they'll get along with me better.

As a man married for quite some time, I'd suggest that the idea that women retain their pre-marriage characteristics post nuptials (or post childbearing) is certainly pretty to think, but may be at odds with reality. Put another way: It may be expedient to be deeply in love with or profoundly committed to the girl to whom you propose marriage. Because she will change.

On the other hand the older you go the more that the population has necessarily been picked over by other women and that's going to have selection effects. Stability isn't a good thing if you've already proven that you're in the 80th percentile for earnings/desirability and that's unlikely to change going forward.

I'd also imagine the teenaged laborforce also has many-pronged issues such as unskilled manufacturing ceasing to exist in much of the West, large legal/illegal immigration waves competing for their jobs and Academic entry being a lot more competitive than it was historically.

So essentially, the 1960s was a buyers' market, and the 2020s is a sellers' market?

Tapping the sign.

Though to be honest, I'm not even sure that'd help.

Yeah that's a pretty good way to put it. The 'sellers' are young women and the 'cost' they demand is commitment (with concomitant effects on the overall sexual culture).

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats