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 -
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 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!
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").
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.
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?
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?
They are, in literally every human society and every country we have records for.
Firstly, the fact that the trend is so universal suggests that it has deep evolutionary roots, rather than simply being contingent on unique circumstances in any given culture. Plus, women say that they prefer older men in all surveys, in all studies of dating apps and so on.
Divorce was found in 65.8% (125) of the 190 hunter-gatherers groups collected in Apostolou (2007).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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 not that men offered to carry women's books as a way to impress her (or her parents). It's that men were socially expected to offer to carry heavy objects like books for women, and if the man happened to be attracted to the woman then this interaction would also present a good opportunity to flirt with her.
And, conversely, women tend to be attracted to men who can carry said heavy objects; this expectation creates that opportunity for both sides, not just the one.
(Yes, this was intentionally confused by bad-faith actors; kind of the female equivalent to "no low-cut tops, they're too distracting to men".)
More options
Context Copy link
I read a book on the history of Hawaii and the Pacific Islands once and there was an interesting cultural custom that developed in the area that the natives (specifically the women) used to indicate their availability. They would wear a small flower behind their left ear (or it might’ve been the right) in public settings, as a way to subtly let the men know that they were single.
In some Mennonite sects in the U.S., unmarried women wear small white caps and married women wear black ones.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not in cisHajnal cultures. Westerners were choosing their own spouses by about 1000AD for the peasant class and 1400AD for the middle class.
"companionate marriage" as a concept was created during the Victorian era. Your typical European was marrying who mom and dad told them to, and this can easily be observed in oral histories and written records of the time. Your sons and daughters would have, at most, had some say, but tempered by 1) the parents must approve, and 2) the strict expectation that marriage and family formation start as soon as possible after adulthood; no pining away after "the one that got away," and certainly no "playing the field till I figure myself out"
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are you sure about this?
You can observe this behavior by going into a normal office where women outnumber men; I'll caveat this with allowing that if you're looking at turbolib areas, like the Bay Area, this might not hold. But women chasing too few men definitely means they lower their standards of acceptable behavior. Steve Sailor had a good article pointing out observations among Black women, who famously are the least likely to date outside their race, but also hold to the normal trend of educated women not marrying "down"; Black women with a degree wildly outnumber Black men with a degree, and Black women are reduced to putting up with lack of committment, having to turn a blind eye to blatant cheating (or just outright acceptance of soft harems), physical abuse, mooching, etc.
For the sake of clarity I'll outline what I think are observable facts.
It's true that women greatly outnumber men on most college campuses but when looking at society as a whole we see that men are slightly outnumbering women which is a historically abnormal state of affairs as the death rate of young men is usually higher than that of their female peers. In such a situation women are increasingly prone to socially developing a sense of overall male sexual threat as the average level of male thirst keeps rising. I agree with the argument that this is a big driver of third-wave feminism. To the extent that your argument about college girls not actually engaging in debauchery and lowered standards is true, and I think there is truth to it, this seems to be one important cause of it.
I'd refer back to an observation that is supposedly backed up by evo psych research: 1. when (eligible) women start to outnumber men in their social circle for whatever reason, they start engaging in an escalating sexual competition for male attention and resources; this appears rather self-evident 2. however, such competition stops making sense when the sex ratio becomes too lopsided - I can't exactly tell where that point is but maybe a ratio of 130:100 or 140:100 is already there. It gets to a point where sexually unattractive men start propositioning women for casual or commitment-free sex which in turn induces nausea among women and compels them to end the sexual rivalry for male attention. I think it's entirely plausible that at least some college campuses have already entered this phase, which in turn does underpin your argument.
More options
Context Copy link
Common case of “in spite of” or “because of”? Soft harems and physical abuse are tingle inducing for many women.
Rihanna could have dated some other rich, famous guy. Yet, she chose to get beat by Brown. Meanwhile, Brown’s female fanbase only grew and splooshed harder.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
'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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link