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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Similarly: the Culture war doesn't actually represent lived reality, it is just a loud form of kayfabe, especially on the Left. Women and men pair up and go about their days, regardless of the TikTok rhetoric

This one hits with my personal experience. Much as my TikTok feed is full of TedPosting, but only the marginal "weirdoes" actually go shoot up an ATF office, and I suspect even most people posting these memes would agree that such a person wasn't "in on the joke" or didn't "get it;" the internet is full of feminisms and RedPills, but only the weirdoes actually do things like refuse to have sex for fear of rape/false-rape-accusations, or can't get a date because of ideology, or view men/women as the enemy in a way that interferes with their day to day life. Hell, irl I know a fair number of like serious racists who have fully normal cordial relations with Black people in their day to day lives. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and expecting people to live by their rhetoric would leave very little of the motte standing.

Speaking personally, the only romantic life I can truly speak to, I've hooked up with lots of women who love to make "God, men are the worst" jokes, and for whom Cis-Hetero-White-man is practically a slur! I'm whiter than mayonnaise and straighter than a yardstick; alone in bed the members of our school's "Women of Color Collective" would mostly just flat out say they loved white guys, while the white girls wouldn't admit it but their dating patterns proved them wrong. For all the criticism from the online left and all the corresponding whining from the online right, being a white man is awesome, I've never experienced it as anything but an advantage.

But this probably also plays into the "class struggle" aspect to the soft-polygyny that lots of other comments are pointing out: the top whatever% of white men have it great because the benefits of being tall/strong/pretty/blonde/rich/intelligent outweigh the rhetoric of criticism, while white men who are short/weak/ugly/defective get all the rhetorical criticism and none of the spoils.

I agree with your general point - that most people don't say extreme things and most people who say extreme things don't act on it.

But the problem is the everything is indicating there is a breakdown of the relationship between the sexes, extreme rhetoric or not. Increasing rates (and somewhat assymetric) of sexlessness, lower and delayed marriage, increasing rates of divorce (which are overwhelmingly initiated by women). If we are willing to looking media and culture we are increasingly getting stuff like 'where are all the good men gone' published in mainstream media.

Really, it seems obvious to me that the sexes are coming apart and it's making everyone unhappy. I don't think it's unreasable to that 'TikTok rhetoric' is just a symptom of that.

the internet is full of feminisms and RedPills, but only the weirdoes actually do things like refuse to have sex for fear of rape/false-rape-accusations, or can't get a date because of ideology, or view men/women as the enemy in a way that interferes with their day to day life.

I strongly suspect that framing celibacy as a reaction to being afraid of accusations is often just a mental crutch to explain away an unwillingness to suffer the fear, doubt, and embarrassment of approach and rejection. Rather than having to deal with that real, difficult reality that men get rejected a lot and it stings, but eventually you'll get through (in all likelihood), adopting a defensive crouch that explains away why you're not doing it allows reconciling some cognitive dissonance. Regarding ideology, quite a few people have noted that the commonly experienced reality is that most people aren't actually all that dedicated to their politics and that pairing off with a fairly normie woman tends to result in her adopting some approximation of her man's politics, or at least tolerating his idiosyncrasies. Sure, being a literal Nazi might be a dating problem, but you can probably get away with saying "Pinochet did nothing wrong" without alienating very many women.

I strongly suspect that framing celibacy as a reaction to being afraid of accusations is often just a mental crutch to explain away an unwillingness to suffer the fear, doubt, and embarrassment of approach and rejection.

They admit as much. The people who take this stance are usually the more jaded MGTOW types who had some sort of bad experience (divorce is a common one) and have decided romance isn't worth it.

Incels just tend to state that they have no chance cause women are totally shallow or whatever other story they come up with, not that they could have women but it wasn't worth it