site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 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.

In short, consciously attempting to do something to attract women reduces your attractiveness to women, correct? So prosocial masculinity is a contradiction in terms because 'being prosocial to attract women' and 'attracting women' are incompatible, or at least orthogonal.

If so, I think it's somewhat true but also somewhat overstating the case. Unless you possess animal magnetism, trying to look a bit better is probably worth it. And increasing your status is also probably worth it. But it will never make you one of those men who just scores effortlessly.

(I'm going to agree with what you said with more words)

Kind of. You can increase your bargaining power. Like, owning a house or a decent sized apartment is enough to bag yourself a single mother. But in a Venn diagram of three items, 'prosocial', 'attractive' and 'realistically feasible for a young man', you have a very small intersection between all three. Small enough to justify saying, in my view, that these are not realistically achievable. Or at least I would not prescribe the prosocial constructive masculinity framework to anyone I actually care about.

There's a distinction we can make between personal life advice and social commentary. Yes, bettering your life is very possible and for most, easy. Study hard, get a good job, work hard. You get rewarded for this by the time you are 30 compared to if you don't.

But from a social commentary standpoint, what does the life of an 'unattractive' man who does this look like between 16-27 compared to someone who doesn't need to? To echo Elliot Rodgers: "It's not fair!".

You piously work your way through your youngest and most exciting years starved of attention from the opposite sex to do what? Get settled for by the time you hit 30 by some woman who expects you to pay down all the loans she took to fuel her party days of college? Where she had sex with guys she actually wanted to have sex with? Meanwhile you, for all intents and purposes, are in a platonic monetary relationship with this person. You know she doesn't like you the same way she liked those other guys.

I think every man knows in their heart that such a state of affairs is tragic and humiliating. Potentially more tragic and humiliating than just folding. After all, is such a life really worth working hard for?

I think that, regardless of everything else, the 'prosocial' crowd has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Though I agree with @TheDag to an extent. You need meaning, a greater purpose, a true faith to overcome this. There's no way you can tell a non-insignificant percentage of young men that they will simply have to ignore their own emotions and bootstrap themselves through the loneliness whilst there's an ongoing propaganda war on social media where everyone is trying to out-advertise and out-sexualize everyone else to show off just how much fun they are having.

But short of resurrecting Jesus Christ or Adolf Hitler, I don't know the intended way to do that.