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 -
Celebs, boundaries and emotional abuse
So two stories have popped up around the same topic recently: how much men have the right to complain about or police their women's public behavior.
First off: recent mother Keke Palmer finally got to go out and enjoy herself, and her outing involved being serenaded by R&B star and notorious hound Usher Raymond. Her "baby daddy" decided to come out and complain that: "A man of the family doesn’t want the wife & mother to his kids to showcase booty cheeks to please others".
Well, that didn't go well. The feminist-aligned internet tore into him and he appeared to have been promptly dumped and, insult to injury, merch clowning him is now being sold
At the same time, "toxic masculinity" has a white representative to balance it out: Jonah Hill is now being attacked for being a misogynistic narcissist. Soon after the birth of his child, his ex decided to post texts showing his demand that she stops sexy photo shoots or overly close relationships with men or hanging out with women from her "wild past"
Hill is also facing a backlash from the DM women for "emotionally abusing" his ex via his boundaries and non-negotiables and his exploiting of "therapyspeak" to sanctify controlling behavior.
In both stories both men are excoriated for hypocrisy because these women behaved this way when they met, and expecting them to change (including after childbirth) is inconsistency.
So, what culture war implications to take from this?
Keke Palmer's boyfriend had a very standard male reaction, regardless of charges of hypocrisy. Making it public that way was unwise, especially since he was the comparative minnow in the status competition. Times have changed. Maybe men like that should reconcile themselves to playing the role of the honorable wife who conveniently never sees any of these shenanigans, for everyone's sake. Of course, that would suggest some more restraint on Palmer's part...
The situation is reversed with Hill. He has the status. Which I suspect is a significant part of the motive to release it now and draw in Deuxmoi-reading women to help win a battle that she couldn't have won in the relationship. As many people asked: why did she put up with his absurd demands (asking her to not post risque surfing photos when he met her through them) for any time whatsoever? Well, because he was Jonah Hill, presumably.
No pretense to even wrestle with why men don't want the mother of their kids publicly on display. Just near-total lack of care.
Obviously the concept creep on abuse continues.
Is the celebrity (and wannabe celebrity) class just going to litigate every relationship online now for fans and political affinity group points...forever? The Hill thing happened a while ago and now it's supposed to be a thing? I suspect part of the push to call some of this "abuse" is precisely that there's a realization that no one should care about messy personal business. I assume the word game is retarding us coming to the conclusion one should in a panopticon: to stop caring. I wonder how long it'll hold.
Yes, the failure of many men was in not screening the mothers of their children for acceptable behaviour before knocking them up.
After doing a bit of reading it seems that Jonah Hill actually just dated the surfer girl for a year, stated his boundaries after observing unwanted behaviour, and they broke up for that reason (good for him). He then moved onto his current partner with whom he now has a child.
I don't blame Jonah for saying what he said in the way he said it. He said 'if you need to do these things, happy to support you, but I'm not the partner for you'. He was probably mildly insecure, but if stating those insecurities as boundaries is classified as abuse in a relationship then I would say 80%+ of women are guilty too (and a large percentage of men). I doubt he was talking about staying away from 'any friend he hadn't pre-approved of' (additional link with more texts giving context). From the additional texts it seems likely he was talking about guys hitting on her while she was surfing and her not extricating herself from the situation. She was 25 when they were dating, so pretty fair if she didn't know how to handle overly flirtatious men yet.
In contrast Keke's partner kind of brought it on himself by criticising her behaviour on Twitter. I don't know what he was thinking I think posting private relationship discussions publicly pretty much destroys your own reputation as someone safe to date by a large percentage of the population.
You shouldn't need to tell your partner what is acceptable behaviour regarding other men. Trying to change people is a recipe for disaster. Even if wild players/playettes change their behaviour in the early phase of a relationship (perhaps due to limerance or pair bonding), they're likely to eventually revert back to their old ways. As the old PUA saw goes 'you can't turn a ho into a housewife'.
To be fair though, there aren't exactly as many innocent virgin women without an instagram account as there are men. Men have to compromise on something, looks, virginity, Iq, personality, tattoos, mental health, weight etc. Most people are forced to settle rather than are able to chose whatever they dream of.
I believe that one of the reasons why so many people are single today is because too many people are unattractive. Lots of people are obese, many women have tonnes of bagage, there are men who can't do a single pull up or survive three days without electricity. Partially due to the housing market a lot of young men live with their parents. People are remaining single because they can't find someone decent while they themselves aren't decent.
Yeah. Also there is the fact that the things that men were/are traditionally good at (heavy labor and war) aren't nearly as important in the modern world, while the traditional male failure modes of essentially being a violent/drug addicted/game addicted jackass are still just as bad. It's pretty arguable that Joe Median isn't a good deal for Jane Median these days. I'm not at all saying that this is a bad thing; there's been plenty of arguments that patriarchy was a sheltered workshop for unattractive dudes.
imma push back on that because let me just say that if men stopped doing all the things you could reasonably consider "heavy labor" for a week then entire industries and nations would be brought to the brink of collapse.
The modern world has definitely freed up large swathes of the population to do things that don't require lifting the equivalent of their body weight from parallel multiple times a day, and shoved those jobs where it is still expected off to the periphery. But the stuff that DOES require heavy labor as an input (agriculture, construction, energy production) are all FOUNDATIONAL for civilization.
But, from a cultural perspective, the physical and personality traits associated with engaging in heavy labor have certainly fallen out of fashion, so such guys are probably disadvantaged when it comes to finding mates. since a woman might have to take a status hit to be seen associated with such a man.
Fair enough. But...suppose that something (a virus maybe) just nerfed the shit out of male strength, leaving most dudes as weak as the average woman. This would suck, but we'd learn to adapt and even if there was no cure, 10 years after that virus hit we'd be doing OK. This being said, I'm not sure that greater male physical strength is required for agriculture or construction. I will say that construction would be more expensive and less efficient if you only had women working it. This being said, if we had a good deal of warning that dudes doing heavy labor would down tools and stop working we could most definitely keep things going. Designing tools to be smaller and more readily used, building machinery to automate certain parts of processes, and having more people on work crews could allow civilization to keep chugging along.
The median man, as you said, doesn't need to be swole in order to earn a living.
This has already happened. It's called "mass industrialization" (even the swolest man is absolutely nothing compared to the power of the three-phase induction motor, the air compressor, the internal combustion engine, and the thinking machines though those would come much later), and had completed its takeover of the United States by about 1920 (other nations would be slightly ahead or behind); the negative effects of this would be temporarily reversed by an economic golden age from about 1950 through 1970.
It's worth noting that though some societies have had these conditions (the Peoples of the Longhouse being the most relevant example, as those societies never needed to develop agriculture or industry in the 10,000 years between running into a more advanced civilization), it has never been the case that these conditions were true for the most advanced society on the planet. I don't believe that 4 generations of people is enough time to change underlying biological realities though admittedly technology will eventually be good enough to obsolete women just as hard (if that technology is not banned... but it probably will be, with the usual bullshit justifications).
And now you know why male interests have no representation in the halls of power today, and why progressivism lacks the concept of positive-sum economic growth entirely. Countries that are less industrialized, meaning "men are more required to create primary goods", tend to (need to) afford men more political power.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t think this is true, and if it is it’s leaning pretty heavily on ‘without an instagram account’. Pretty sure that men are less likely to wait til the wedding night in every population, everywhere, even when age adjusted. Men are dramatically more promiscuous when you restrict things to the subset of sexually active adults, as well. Even if you put a lot of stock into instagram being bad(and I won’t dispute that- it seems like insta is pretty bad, especially for teen girls), it’s not entirely fair to only be concerned about instagram and not male typical vices.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link