site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Telling men they shouldn't be worried about promiscuity because it's no longer linked with paternity certainty, is like telling people they shouldn't have sex because it no longer results in pregnancy when they use protection.

It's about how evolution wired our brains.

There’s two justifications for those preferences, pick one:

A) It’s hard wired. Counterexamples: men don’t act like it’s all that important, especially in their sexual desires, the most hard-wired of all, desires that bypass the brain entirely. Women do have problems with promiscuity in men.

B) There are rational reasons for those preferences. Answer: Those mostly went away with modernity.

It's not a complete binary, environment and genetics interact in very complex ways. But sexual jealousy is quite common in humans and other animals for obvious biological reasons, and to argue these are completely cultural is just insane.

Women experience sexual jealousy. Men want to have sex with promiscuous women. Evolution apparently wired you differently for fucking, and for the primordial institution of marriage, back in the savannah. Yeah it's very complex maintaining a theory contradicted left and right.

Women do experience sexual jealousy as well, not sure what your point is there.

Yes evolution is complex, pair-bonding did evolve and requires different investment as a strategy on the part of the male. All of this clearly happened and the different strategies can even be seen in different mammals, let alone the Savannah. Human males align with the different strategies and differ in their investment to loyal women vs promiscuous women.

Where is the contradiction?

My point is that you try to use the sexual jealousy of men as the backbone of your 'men want non-promiscuous partners, women want the opposite' theory. Obviously if men and women do not differ on jealousy, your theory goes down the drain. But it's even worse than that, because your theory predicts a sort of anti-jealousy for women.

The second contradiction, and this stands undisputed even by you, is that men do want to have sex with promiscuous women.

The third one is that our ancestors did not have the institution of monogamous marriage. It's clear they wanted to have sex with promiscuous women, and since the hormones released during sex lead to pair bonding, we can assume they were pair bonding with them. Anyway, if you have sources, I'd like to take a look.

I never said women want the opposite, where are you making this stuff up from? Your imagination is running wild. Of course women evolved sexual jealousy, although not in the exact same way as men.

"Hormones released during sex leads to pair-bonding" is highly simplistic. I don't have sources on hand and am not putting together stuff for some clown who can't read and accuses me of things I didn't say, but mating strategies are a widely studied topic.

You're being uncivil.

I took it from the subject we're discussing, redpiller's beliefs . As formulated by thasero in the highest upvoted comment in the thread: "Men like innocent partners, women like promiscuous partners." If you think this is stupid, say so, but I don't think you will, so spare me the fake strawman defense.

I'm responding for myself, you're the one accusing me of things I didn't say and being uncivil. My logic wasn't directly about how female jealousy works, while you said "your theory predicts a sort of anti-jealousy for women." No it doesn't, it just predicts a certain type of jealousy for men.

The comment above was about men and women being different, which, of course they are and do have different preferences. Female jealousy may be different, but I didn't say it doesn't exist or is always in the opposite direction of men. The point is that men have this hardwiring, and the fact that women don't have it the exact same way or in the same degree due to differing evolution pressures is not the same as "anti-jealousy". That's just silly and you are implying things that were never implied because you were thinking in terms of binaries while the situation is much more complex.

More comments