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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16059 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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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.

As best I can tell, cultures that explicitely and successfully reject American cultural products have kept marriage rates up. In a very real sense, America is the global monoculture, where even domestically-produced cultural products in foreign countries are still influenced by America and American values. To paraphrase (ok, bastardize) Chairman Mao, what we see in China, Korea, Japan, France, England, etc. is "Americana with Chinese/Japanese/insert country here characteristics"

I'm not so sure. Scott made the pretty strong case that what people are usually talking about when they describe something as 'western' (or in your case 'American') is really just modernity, which was summoned up in the west first but isn't of the west. Spending ages in education instead of getting a job at 14 and getting married a few years later is certainly a modern thing, but I'm not sure its western. My grandmother left school at 14, after all.

And in terms of developed countries, America actually has pretty high marriage rates and (until very recently) quite high birth rates. How can you blame America for lowering marriage and birth rates in Europe and East Asia when America has higher birth and marriage rates than those places and has done for decades?

America still has high birthrates by developed world standards. And 'developed world standards' means GDP/capita of over $5000/yr, not 'the US+EU' or 'highest in the anglosphere'. The US has higher birthrates than Mexico. It has higher birthrates than Russia or China or Brazil.

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.

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