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 -
[Reason without restraint] Rates of risky sexual behaviors by race and sex in the United States
Reason without restraint is perhaps my new favorite HBD blog. While the topics that he writes about are nothing new (race & IQ, race & crime, etc.), he does a valuable service of marshaling all of the evidence in one place in an easy-to-consume format.
Here, he tackles the topic of racial differences in sexual behavior. He uses survey data taken of high school students where they report on various aspects of their sexual activity. The data starts in the year 1990 and extends to the present day. There are five sections to the article:
(1) Lifetime sexual intercourse (2) Sexual intercourse before 13 years of age (3) Sexual intercourse with 4 or more partners (4) Use of condoms (5) Use of birth control pills
Of the five sections, the first three are the most interesting. Based on the survey data, a couple things stick out:
The young people aren't having sex.
I am a bit, um, obsessed with the "sex recession": the dramatic decline in sexual activity in high school and college-aged people. Sex is perhaps the most human activity there is--the physical enactment of our Darwinian imperative, the raison d'etre of so many hormone-drenched adolescents. And yet: young people aren't having sex. Why?
Based on one of the graphs: in 1990, 65% of white 12th graders report having had sex. While in 2021 only 50% of white 12th graders report having had sex. This drop in sexual activity is not limited to white students, of course. It's a large drop across the board. Why?
Black people used to have a lot of sex but not anymore?
Look, I'm not stupid. At this point, I've had enough experience with the "stereotype literature" to know that, overwhelmingly, stereotypes tend to be true. But even I wasn't prepared for how much sex black teens were having in the 90s. I could cite a lot of different numbers, but just to choose one example: apparently, in 1990, more than 80% of black male 9th graders reported being non-virgins. Over 80%! And even if you rightfully suspect some exaggeration due to male ego, more than 65% of black female 9th graders report being non-virgins.
This is just incomprehensible to me. I'll admit that I grew up sheltered and nerdy, but still: none of my friends were having sex or really even close to having sex in middle school. Maybe the 90s were better after all?
What's interesting though is that there has been a rather dramatic decrease in black sexual activity. By 2021, only 30% of black male 9th graders report having ever had sex. And it's the same story for the other statistics as well: in 1990, black people were way more sexual active than Hispanics and Whites while by 2021, they have mostly converged, especially in the case of black females.
Asians don't have sex.
Not too much to say about this one. Pretty self-explanatory.
Condom usage seems... kinda low?
The survey reports that 60% of teenagers report using a condom during their last sexual encounter. Is that not kinda low given teenage pregnancy rates? I am a prude in real life who dislikes salacious talk, so I haven't talked about condom usage with my friends. So I don't really have a strong intuition here.
Overall, a fun article with lots of great graphs. What do I personally think explains the decline in sexual activity? I basically favor the consensus view as espoused by Jonathan Haidt and others: it's the phones (and social media). I think a lot of sex used to happen because people had nothing to do except each other.
There's a lot of good hypotheses put forward in the thread, many of which I hadn't considered before. I have generally thought that that reason they're having less sex is largely due to that generation having internalized the prudish leftist messaging that "sex is harmful, you're likely to harm women if you don't ask for permission every
minute, no wait,30 seconds, no wait10 seconds, no wait just don't ever stop asking for permission just to be safe. Or just avoid fucking alltogether because only jerks and potential rapists feel like they need to have sex in order for a relationship to be fulfilling, and if you feel that way then you're just someone who thinks that women owe you sex, and you might as well be raping them."In addition I've felt like there's a component by which younger people (and even millennials, too) kinda feel like bodies are gross. This has been a trend for a long time, with promotion of obsessive cleanliness to the point of it probably not even being useful, like people feeling they need to take showers multiple times per day, and also wear deodorant and cologne/perfume. I hear about historical views towards sex, like apparently Napoleon might have written a letter to Joséphine telling her not to bathe for 3 days before he came home to her from war, because her smell turned him on. The modern reaction to that story generally disgust and confusion. But think about how much the world much have smelled strongly like people's bodies, and bodies must have smelled really strong, for milennia before regular bathing was a thing, and people still has lots of sex back then.
Sex is very connected to bodies, sweat, fluids, and smell. People are raised on porn these days, with tissues at the ready to mop up any fluids shortly after their release. Sometimes when I watch porn, I think about how different it is to watch these recorded sex acts than it probably was for the actors to make them. Just thinking about the smell is interesting, considering that that sensation is completely absent when watching porn. I suspect that many people these days may have watched so much porn from a young age that the thought of sex being so much more messy and smelly with someone else's body that they'd rather just keep their nice, contained, fairly clean method of getting off to porn instead.
I’ve often wondered if our current culture is so regimented that kids don’t take risks at all as they fear that messing up is going to alter their life trajectory too much to be safe. They hear parents and older siblings talk about, or worse live out the consequences of one bad decision made in the moment. Maybe sex and you either get the girl pregnant or get accused of rape afterwards — there goes the hope of being comfortably middle class in adulthood. Or drinking. A car accident, saying the wrong things, maybe partying and possibly not doing well enough on your grades to get into the right school. It’s almost, just looking at the trends like kids have a sense that being spontaneous, doing something crazy, means messing up, and that messing up is unrecoverable.
This actually is much more true than it used to be. For example, my grandfather only went to elementary school and worked in a factory. He was considered poor even then, but he didn't have a bad life. He could raise a whole family on his factory wages, in circumstances no worse than many people today.
Today you would need both parents to hold a decent, respectable office job to have a similar quality of life. Anything below that, you're competing with the entire Third World (either through imports or immigration). Add to that things like stringent environmental laws. The mines are gone, the factories are almost all gone, and the EU is currently in the process of de facto outlawing agriculture. What'll even be left for you to do, if you don't get the respectable office job?
There are many more people, and there are fewer opportunities to achieve the living standards of a factory worker 50 years ago. And so, life has turned into a vicious, high-stakes game of musical chairs. There's no room for slip-ups.
To me this sounds a bit backwards. Much of the working class has it better than ever and their skills are increasingly in demand and paid better and better.
It's the lower rung of office workers (and some service workers) that have precarious situations and are struggling to keep up.
If you're actually ready to work in the industry, construction or in a trade things are really good. Farming seems like a pretty raw deal though, I agree.
Most farmers today have a ton of assets. Even if liquid cash isn't always easily available. Simply owning enough land to make the irrigation, crop storage, and harvesters worth it is a multi million dollar endeavor. In bad years they have to leverage those assets with the bank for loans. In good years they pay back those loans, or expand the land/equipment they own.
If we are talking about "farmers" as in farmhands, the people that just work at a farm. Then yeah they have a raw deal. Its difficult physical labor for minimal wages.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link