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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31396 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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When Jane doesn’t have to choose between starvation and prostitution on the one hand and marrying John on the other, she’s not going to marry John.

I'm unsure how historically accurate this most extreme formulation is, but I'm sure that in a world where manual labor meant a whole lot more, something like this probably happened in some capacity. I still don't understand why people say it.

I've seen this statement a lot. I've seen it said in many ways by many different kinds of people across many different hues and shades of culture and politics. I've heard it said in a few different tones, largely ranging from triumphant to bemused—which isn't the way I would say it if I thought it were true and a major cause of modern trends.

The first thing I think when I see it is that I wonder what the endgame is supposed to be. I think that people who have fun saying it usually intend it as some kind of polemic call to men to DO BETTER. I can't help but notice that this often comes coincident with a political framework that generally rejects not just the morality but the pragmatic efficacy of such a posture—but I suppose that by itself doesn't necessarily prove anything. I have an even harder time understanding people who say it with a rightward perspective. How exactly are we supposed to have healthy family formation in a future where this is true? There does seem to be a handful of small, right-facing factions that seem to recognize this contradiction to the detriment of modernity and its consequences, but funny enough I don't usually see those types saying this sort of thing. It's usually people like JBP et al and the occasional cathposter. I'm not really sure what the point is supposed to be when they say it, or if they fully realize the implications for the future when they do.

It's difficult to fully describe the degree to which this statement inflames my passions. What I really want to say is something like "wow, with all this porn and sex dolls, women can't just coast into success with men just by having a moist hole anymore"—but as we all know, the rhetorical switcheroo never works. Nobody is going to stop and think about the myriad ways such a statement would butcher women's dignity as a class of human being—nobody is going to think about how such a statement utterly de-romanticizes women's value as partner and mate, or how it faithlessly summarizes women's unique sacrifices that in part brought us to where we are today before cynically discarding it like a wet torch—and if they do, they're never going to relate any of it back to what they just got done saying about men. They're just gonna call you a hater and move on.

Now, I'm not the kind of man who is seriously deficient in hole moistness earning power, but I don't care. The simple fact that this the way my civilization views my caste makes me worry not that it isn't reproducing. The world should be inherited by men and women who actually love each other.

The first thing I think when I see it is that I wonder what the endgame is supposed to be. I think that people who have fun saying it usually intend it as some kind of polemic call to men to DO BETTER. I can't help but notice that this often comes coincident with a political framework that generally rejects not just the morality but the pragmatic efficacy of such a posture—but I suppose that by itself doesn't necessarily prove anything. I have an even harder time understanding people who say it with a rightward perspective.

Well I don't mean it in a smug "sucks to be a man!" way. And I consider myself a liberal so I don't mean it in a twitter fash "women should be property!" way. It just seems to me to be the case.

How exactly are we supposed to have healthy family formation in a future where this is true?

We're probably not. But I don't mourn its loss. I don't think the family is some beautiful, mystical union handed down by a beneficent God--it was a jury-rigged institution that persisted because it was the only apparent way to keep civilization from imploding, and was at least tolerable for a plurality of people. My personal experience is that huge numbers of couples, possibly an outright majority, end up resenting each other. I see little reason to think it was different in the past. Modernity is unpleasant in a lot of ways, including the one we're talking about, but it's far from clear to me that it's worse than what it supplanted. "RETVRN to coupling with someone who doesn't really like you all that much but will put up with you and raise a couple of kids" doesn't exactly inspire me. I guess it's 'healthy' insofar as it reproduced the status quo, but was the status quo all that worth reproducing? If that's the best we can aspire to, we might as well just blow the whole thing up.

What I really want to say is something like "wow, with all this porn and sex dolls, women can't just coast into success with men just by having a moist hole anymore"

Well you've phrased it crudely but is it not empirically the case that many men are replacing real-life relationships with porn? And if we really do get hyper-realistic AI companions in the near future, well...

Now maybe this is all just me. I can't relate to anything in the article OP posted because. Maybe because I don't consider myself particularly masculine, so it has never been a source of angst for me. I have never felt this drive for purpose and achievement that is apparently endemic to modern young men. I don't have the yearning for male spaces or brotherhood. I have never once in my life felt the urge to be a husband or a father. I feel less than no desire to ever be anyone's provider and protector, and the relationships I've been in, romantic and platonic, have shown me that the fastest way to make me to resent somebody is to be responsible for their wellbeing, material or emotional.

"RETVRN to coupling with someone who doesn't really like you all that much but will put up with you and raise a couple of kids"

I mean...for a lot of guys, isn't this a pretty good deal or what they honestly already have? I've known: skilled blue collar workers in relationships with 450lb women that need canes to walk and get winded walking a hundred yards, women in relationships with guys they'd divorce if they had had jobs and hadn't chosen homemaking, guys who chose to remain married to women that tried to strangle their 10-year-old child after the child and their mom had an argument.

That being said: it is probably a good thing that only the best/most adapted/most graceful of men get to have families and children; the idea that patriarchy was a sheltered workshop for low-value men doesn't sound too unreasonable.

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