site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 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.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

In 1915 the Bolsheviks were a sausage fest. In 1989 it was dominated by women. In 1922 the NSDAP was a sausage fest, in 1938 it was supported more by women than by men. Putin got more male than female votes in his first election. Today he has a solid lead among female voters. Here in Sweden the socialdemocrats consisted of young radical men a century ago, now they absolutely dominate women with a massive rift between female and male voters.

Women are rarely actual extremists, they rarely support causes that get them in trouble or are controversial. They seem to mainly virtue signal the values of the system. The modern day SJW is the reincarnated church lady. It would be difficult to differentiate the values of these new radical feminists and the values of the HR department at IBM.

Women's radicalism isn't really a problem and it has historically played an important role as women have been the enforcers of the morality of the society they live in. Had women not policed men we would have devolved into degeneracy. If a man lives in a clean house, has good manners and is well dressed it is probably because a women at some point in his life forced him to behave.

Had these women lived 90 years ago they would have been the biggest Mussolini supporters.

I see women’s role in political movements and frankly most social and artistic movements as normalization much more so than radicalization or avant- garde adoption of ideas. Once a movement captures the attention of women, it tends to go mainstream pretty quickly. I agree that women tend to be gatekeepers. And I think they do so mainly by controlling sex. If your political, social, or artistic tastes are things that you’ll likely at minimum keep quiet about it lest it hurt your fuckability levels.

Evo psych offers a simple explanation for this. For men with little or no status, engaging in high-risk, high-reward activities makes objective sense. For women in general, it's the opposite that make sense.

Sources please, so that this isn’t a just-so story? :)

From Wikipedia:

Men can potentially have many children with little effort; women only a few with great effort. One argued consequence of this is that males are more aggressive, and more violently aggressive, than females, since they face higher reproductive competition from their own sex than females. In particular, low-status males may be more likely to remain completely childless. Under such circumstances, it may have been evolutionarily useful to take very high risks and use violent aggression in order to try to increase status and reproductive success rather than become genetically extinct. This may explain why males have higher crime rates than females and why low status and being unmarried is associated with criminality. It may also explain why the degree of income inequality of a society is a better predictor than the absolute income level of the society for male-male homicides; income inequality creates social disparity, while differing average income levels may not do so. Furthermore, competition over females is argued to have been particularly intensive in late adolescence and young adulthood, which is theorized to explain why crime rates are particularly high during this period.

Thank you, that’s exactly what I was looking for!

If all of this is true, the trick is simply understanding how to switch these masses of women to your side, and let them enforce whatever policy you create. The problem here is, imho, that the entrenchment of female power and powerful media has created a block that is too strong to destroy.

I don’t see how. As a political group, they’re a status quo anchor with heavy susceptibility to ‘care-based’ arguments and other immature, conventional justifications. You can’t use them as trailblazers and schock troops. They’ll just follow the mass of winners and push them a bit further by inertia. One should always emphasize self-interest, conformity, and good intentions when speaking to large groups of women, but that also applies to large groups of men (where it is referred to as ‘populism’).

The power of women as political actors is overrated. Like black people and other ‘oppressed’ groups, their privileged legal position and the prestige they enjoy in mainstream discourse is not down to anything they did, it has been granted to them by others, and can be taken away.

their privileged legal position and the prestige they enjoy in mainstream discourse is not down to anything they did, it has been granted to them by others, and can be taken away.

This implies that women were not the main force behind the women’s right movements or various waves of feminism in the 20th century. Is there evidence for that?

Famous suffragist Susan B. Anthony said that woman suffrage laws "probably never would have passed if it had been up to women to vote on them," and that men were actually more progressive about women's suffrage than women were (1902).

Women’s suffrage happened first in states where there were less women.

Our results provide strong evidence that women obtained the right to vote earlier in US jurisdictions in which they accounted for a smaller share of the adult population. This result survives a battery of robustness checks, including the estimation of linear probability models with state-level fixed effects. Indeed, sex ratio imbalances appear to be the single most important determinant of jurisdictions' transitions to women's suffrage.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014498313000119

Women’s suffrage happened first in states where there were less women.

Wasn't that due to powerful madams getting women the right to vote in places like Wyoming?

and that men were actually more progressive about women's suffrage than women were (1902).

Probably the most interesting book I've ever read on the topic was Jane Jerome Camhi's Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880-1920.

All of this let us assume that "political violence" is a good tactic when you need to move women's opinion.

Controlling the status quo is useful for moving women’s political opinions and applying political violence can be a good way to control the status quo.