Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
A number of times on this forum, posters with right-wing sensibilities have solicited dating advice along the lines of “Every woman I talk to expresses progressive opinions, so how do I navigate around the inevitable political disagreements?” Each time, several posters have asserted that this is not in fact as much of a problem as it may appear to be; if everything else in the relationship is going well and the woman respects you for other reasons, she not only won’t have a problem with your politics, she’ll actually start to mold her own political beliefs to become more in line with yours!
This assertion has always struck me as equal parts intriguing and bizarre. Certainly I’m familiar with much of the copious amount of commentary around psychological differences between men and women, including Dissident Right discussion of the “Woman Question”. I fully accept that aggregate differences in temperament and political reasoning between the sexes are real and substantial. Still, it’s tough for me to wrap my head around the idea that most adult women’s beliefs are malleable to that extent. Perhaps I just haven’t managed to wrap my head around the unavoidable truth that, when it comes to men and women, the inner machinations of each sex’s mind are an enigma to the other sex, and that a regime of healthy relations between the sexes requires both men and women to contort themselves into a mode of external presentation that renders them legible to each other.
Although I am currently in a situation wherein the relevance of this line of questioning is probably going to become significant to me in the pretty near future, I’m not actually asking for advice here. I’m actually more just curious as to how this supposed process actually operates. The claim is that a woman who is in a long-term relationship with a right-wing man will become more right-wing herself over time. How does this work? Is this only true of women who did not express a strong political worldview before the start of the relationship? If the woman did have progressive opinions before the relationship, will she end up explicitly repudiating those opinions later on? (i.e. “I was wrong about that, and you were right. I can’t believe I ever believed that!”) Or will it just be a more subtle shift over time, with the woman beginning to express right-wing opinions and either not noticing or not acknowledging the way in which these opinions contradict her earlier views? Does the shift reflect a genuine change of worldview within the woman’s mind, or is it merely a change in the views which she verbally expresses? (The really alarming and potentially blackpilling answer would be “There is no difference between those two things.”) Also, is this shift only sustainable if the woman does not have a larger social sphere of women who will reinforce progressive views and thus act as a countervailing force against the influence of the husband?
I realize that this is a series of questions and that the subject matter might be too broad for the “Small-Scale Questions Thread”, but it doesn’t seem to be appropriate for the Culture War thread either.
You focus on the gender dynamics, but I think phenomenon is not primarily about gender.
The two main drivers are, IMO:
When two people like each other and spend significant time together, they build trust. This means they will tend to be more charitable toward one another and less dismissive of one another's beliefs. This reduces confirmation bias by making it harder to dismiss the other partner's politics on flimsy grounds, e.g. "they only believe that because they're ignorant/evil."
When a person with orthodox politics spends significant time with a person with heterodox politics, on average the person with orthodox politics is more likely to change their views than the person with heterodox politics. This is because it is easy to hold orthodox politics without considering carefully (or even encountering) arguments against those politics, whereas it is impossible to hold heterodox politics without constantly encountering counterarguments. Thus, heterodox beliefs will tend to come into the relationship more "battle hardened" and "stress tested" than orthodox beliefs.
Where gender might play into the dynamic above:
Women tend to be more agreeable and thus more likely to hold orthodox beliefs.
Women tend to be more agreeable and thus less likely to have engaged in "stress testing" (e.g. vigorous debate) of their political beliefs.
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