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 -
The distinction is fairly simple to me. In the case of science and technology being run into the ground, these minorities and women who do not obtain these positions are no worse off than your average white man.
In the case of polygyny, I would actually argue that this results in lower-class men's position being worse than women's - being the second or third wife of a powerful man does confer certain benefits that make the position preferable to having no partner at all. Polygyny simply results in a very severe reproductive skew among men that doesn't exist among women: if there is a subgroup of men enjoying the reproductive benefits that polygyny allows them to have, the remainder of men will reproduce less than even the women under polygyny.
This is not the case when a certain sex or race can monopolise positions. However, I will grant that in the case of sex the inherent inseparability of men and women makes things more complicated, namely, the sharing of resources between men and women when they pair up is a pretty big equaliser. That being said, fast-tracking women into high-status positions men are barred from will likely wreak havoc on male-female pairings in the first place due to a female tendency to look to partners of higher status than themselves (so what these DEI programs are doing is essentially making it so that almost all men will be far below her standards, which is going to have wide-ranging effects). And there's also the fact that a lot of these positions are inherently more suited to male preferences than female which makes such extreme DEI programs for women quite a maladaptive way of doing things. So I do think these hypothetical sex-based DEI programs are basically How To Make Everyone Unhappy: A Guide.
I'll also take this opportunity to elaborate on my other statement by providing some challenges of the common idea that polygyny is enforced merely by successful men and that it is against the interests of the women (thus its existence reflects female control by successful men). It's commonly posited that polygyny can definitely be chosen by women when a given female’s position is enhanced by becoming the second mate of a resource-rich and already paired male, rather than the sole mate of a resource-poor unpaired male.
In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice. "These findings are consistent with our prediction that women choose to marry polygynously or monogamously according to which choice benefits them or their offspring".
https://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/SF1999.pdf
Again, none of this is to say that polygyny is a sustainable model for a society to operate by in the long run - sexual egalitarianism among males carries the benefit of increased male-male tolerance. But I fundamentally disagree with the automatic framing of polygynous societies as necessarily reflecting male coercion and control, or that it actually serves the interests of men in general.
EDIT: added more thoughts, cut out some long-winded bits
This is a fair distinction to make, if it is indeed correct that the two scenarios can be distinguished in that fashion. Thing is, though, I'm not sure it's so clear-cut.
However, being the first wife of a powerful man is probably worse than being the only wife of an equally powerful man in a monogamous society. Is the loss to the first wife (assuming for simplicity's sake they can in fact be totally ordered by "quality"; otherwise just take it as a stand-in for "the woman the powerful man would have otherwise monogamously married", assuming for simplicity's sake that her counterpart will be in the harem in the polygynous world) worth less than the gain to the second, third etc. wives over being stuck with someone of their rank? Perhaps it is, in which case your argument holds; but perhaps it isn't, in which case women as a group do in fact lose total utility - and then we could further debate whether their total loss of utility is actually less or greater than that of the men who would counterfactually have been paired up.
If we're moving the discussion into the increasingly wishy-washy realm of "utility" instead of using more definite measures, any such questions are probably going to be very difficult to answer.
But I will add that even if I assume for the sake of argument that the entire population of women does end up losing total utility under polygyny as opposed to monogamy, a pretty convincing argument can be made that men as a whole lose total utility as well (even after you factor in the polygynous men) because of the diminishing returns inherent in adding on wives - after all, a single man getting a wife will have a much higher gain in utility than a polygynous man getting his 5th woman, or his 10th, or his 30th. That woman, if paired with a single man instead, is going to result in a greater gain in utility for the single man than the loss for the polygynous man. Correspondingly, if a successful man can monopolise multiple women, his gain from doing so will be less than the total loss experienced by the (now single) men who would've been able to procure a wife under monogamy.
It also seems clear to me, at this point, that then trying to compare "which sex's total loss of utility is more" is something that would be very difficult if not outright impossible to measure.
EDIT: clarity
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link