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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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The WSJ published an article today about the voting gap between men and women below the age of thirty. The conclusions should be familiar to the Motte's CW crowd and I'll be diving into them in this post. What is striking and, even better, plainly quantitative, is how just how far apart young men and women are on some issues. In several cases, it's 30+ point gaps. Anecdatally, I'm seeing and hearing similar division. That the WSJ is leading with this also shows how it is now firmly in normie discussion circles.

I've always thought that the true risk to American society wasn't a breakdown in race relations, but in gender sex relations. This is because of the plain fact that you need the opposite sexes to get along to continue families, communities, the nation, society as a whole.

I've tried to break it out below.

The Issues

The WSJ highlights the following issues as most divisive to least, first with those issues that women are more in favor of:

  1. Climate change
  2. Abortion
  3. Student Loans
  4. Gender identity (specifically of children)

Those with the biggest gaps the opposite way, where men approve of the issue moreso than women, are (again, in descending order):

  1. The Trump era Tax Cuts,
  2. Repeal and Replace Obama Care (note that overall men are actually slightly on-net negative about this, but women are 23 points more negative),
  3. Build The Wall (men at -4, women at -47)

Instead of thinking about these in terms of the issues themselves, I've decided to be a little more cultural war-y (because that's. why. we. are. here!) and interpret these issues thusly;

  1. "Climate change" Is a big, hard to define, but very scary bad thing. It's mythical and functions almost like a curse. Furthermore, it is THE virtue signaling issue. People (think) they get all kinds of social credit for driving an EV or using paper straws etc. It has weird touchy-feely connections to "mother earth" pseudo-religious traditions. Women under 30 probably have a higher likelihood of going to festivals like burning man and so having a very personal connection to these "vibes."
  2. "Abortion" is a stand in for the wild claim that "they" are trying to "take away" unspecified "rights." It's a fantastic personalization of an "our team good, their team bad." We're under attack is always a great rallying cry (see: Pearl Harbor, 9/11) and if you can personalize it down to the level of "rights" it sticks well. But what "rights" are we talking about? If this is the number two issue for women, I have to assume there's some sort of female-centric set of rights, right (haha)? Well, of course the thing to point to is Dobbs and abortion. What "right" was stripped remains a mystery but, again this is about personalization of an otherwise kind of hard to pin down concern.
  3. "Student loans" I haven't come up with decided case here. Part of me thinks its just general irresponsibility of The Youths. "College was fun, but I don't actually like paying for it." A more female angle might be "a college degree is important today for status signaling, I'd much prefer someone else pay for it." But that seems a little too easy. I don't have a well developed theory here. An interesting side point is that the article quotes that 60% of graduates are female and those female graduates hold 66% of all outstanding student loans. Not a massive over-representation, but noteworthy enough. My suspicion here is that a very small 1-3% of female grads are taking out MASSIVE loans for obviously low earning majors (art history, music, etc.) from incredibly expensive private schools. Usually the folks doing that have family money aplenty. It's sad to me that there are some middle class girls who are mimicking elite status at places like Williams or Swarthmore and leaving school at 22 with $150k in debt to do it.
  4. Gender identity. Again see points 1 and 2. This is a virtue signal linked to "self expression" and "my right to be me"

Now, for the Men:

  1. "The Trump era Tax Cuts" Honestly surprised me given the age cohort. People generally don't start (a) making enough or (b) having to support multiple kids until they're in their 30s to really pay attention to taxes. Given that a lot of stories about young men in particular are about how they don't have real jobs and live at home, this is really unexpected.
  2. "Repeal and Replace Obama Care (note that overall men are actually slightly on-net negative about this, but women are 23 points more negative)." That Men are actually on-net negative about this (but women are far more negative) and that this is a back burner issue at the moment makes me think that this was simply all the WSJ could find for polarizing issues. Don't know what to make of it exactly but don't think it actually tells us much.
  3. "Build The Wall (Men at -4, women at -47)" Makes a lot of sense. Men always have a more natural inclination towards protecting their in-group. Any guy who isn't deeply committed to open boarders is going to have a natural knee jerk in this direction.

How We Got Here

That's how the issues stand today. I think it makes sense to take a step back and ask "how we got here" over the past few voting and CW cycles.

For Men, I think much or all of this can be traced first to MeToo and second, to its slightly less witch-hunty successor, DEI. One guy in the article says he feels like there are purity tests on the left that are used to berate men into compliance. The article itself also says that many right-wing men don't talk about their views with women for fear of retaliation or other social consequences.

It's hard to overstate how deeply MeToo hit society. I was working a BigCorp gig at the time and it was very common to hear tips from male coworks at happy hours after work about never having a one-on-one with a female subordinate or, at least, doing it out in the open where other people can see the whole encounter. It was the first time I had heard of the Mike Pence rule. I've always looked at MeToo as a weird attempt at bloodletting by Hollywood that morphed into witch trials. There was nothing in the way of sincere attempts to improve male-female professional relationships, just a lot of virtue signalling and subtle actions taken to guarantee against false accusations (see above). The net result on a lot of men was to, I think, begin to question if "the left" and its various causes were simply new ways of trying to tear men down. Another guy in the article states, "It would seem the white male is the enemy of the Left."

For the young women, their quotes bring up (a) Trump being boorish and gross dating to the 2016 election and (b) Dobbs. Again, the "abortion rights" messaging intentionally conflates a complex issue about the start of human life (which Americans are notoriously conflicted and contradictory on) with a more easy to handle and generically adaptable "women's rights." This is why you see it rebranded as "reproductive rights" most often. If it's about just You versus "they" (who are always all male) it's an ease fight to jump into. If it's about more than that, I think women - being generally intelligent - do stop and think to consider the complexity. The media scored a massive win in portraying Dobbs as "taking away the right to abortion."

Trump's amplification of male boorishness ("Grab her by the pussy", "Only Rosie O'Donnell" etc.) is probably the most generation-centric issue in the article. I'm just elder millenial enough to remember the concepts of "boy talk" and "girl talk" growing up (shout out to Melania). Any guy who's ever been in an all male group outside of a professional one (so, a sports team, military, etc.) knows how gross yet hilarious those conversations can get. That kind of speech, however, doesn't go outside of the invisible walls. Guys speak in such over-the-top ways in locker rooms etc. as a way to signal in-group loyalty and build cohesion, but they understand it can and should only take place in those places. This exactly what Trump was doing on that access Hollywood tape. He was making a goofy gross joke to a fawning idiot who was going to laugh at whatever Trump said. He didn't say it at the Met Gala. I think that the outrage was most acute for younger women shows that a whole generation grew up without any awareness whatsoever that differently sexed styles of language exist.

The article also brings up the Kavanaugh hearings. This is strange to me. I always though the Dr. Ford testimony was both contentless and pretty obviously manufactured in a "repressed memory" pseudo-science way.

Boys and Girls are Different

The issues, and my interpretation of them, point to what should be an obvious truth. Men and Women have physical and cognitive differences across their normal distributions. This manifests in society and social reinforcement and, ultimately, results in different relative rankings of shared values. I believe Men and Women largely share the exact same values but rank them in different orders and with different weights placed on them.

Men still intrinsically respect strength and are suspicious of weakness or incompetence. Biden had to drop out of the race because everyone, but especially men, were thinking "no way can this guy lead the country for another four years. He does know what planet he's on." As soon as there are questions about your competency - you're toast. You can be an asshole (although I believe you shouldn't be) so long as you can get the job done.

The Trump assassination attempt probably solidified some male voters who may have been "holding their nose" in the Trump camp. See Zuckerberg calling it "badass". Trump popping up with blood on his face shouting, "fight, fight, fight" hits most guys right in the Papua-New-Guinea-Kill-The-Neighboring-Tribe lizard brain. It's watching your team spike the football in the endzone times four million raised to the power of NAVY-SEALs-KILLED-BIN-LADEN.

A basic male pattern in groups is to defer to the "natural leader." Interesting how often that correlates to height, perceived physical capability, a deep voice, and an outgoing and kind of domineering personality. Trump is maxed out in all of those non-physical traits and that explains so much of his attraction.

Women value this too (remember what I lead with) but there does come a limit in which the domineering personality becomes overbearing, tone deaf, and, at its worse, abusive. Still - better He tends towards jerk than wimp.

A key quote from the article is “Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline.” Couldn't agree more and half of my comments here have been about the destruction of masculinity models for boys in the West. Female centric views of childhood, safetyism, and "play nice" strips boys of this and has for some time. ADHD or just rambunctious boys are getting classified as special needs.

Rather than try to find some sort of balance, I think it's accurate to say the Left has leaned harder into this. The entire concept of "toxic masculinity" is mostly about finding ways to make male behavior that may be offensive to female sensibilities actually reprehensibly immoral. Returning to Trump's boorish language, I am all for calling it out as unpolite, but making the jump to "advocate for sexual assault" is hyperbolic. And this gets to the core of the issue; the extreme liberal faction of the Democrat party not only looks down on traditional male behavior, they want to make it so beyond the pale as to be effectively criminal. MeToo ended the careers of several men who were guilty of nothing more than being awkward jackasses who didn't understand how to flirt. Is that worth one Harvey Weinstein? Tell me in the comments.

Swinging back to female relative values. I see a sensitivity to the prevention of harm (manifested in fear emotion heavy issues like global warming) as well as an appeal to authority (the state) to strictly guarantee certain highly personal values. This is best captured in the "women's rights" meta-issue. Is this a reference to abortion? voting rights (if so, how)? Non-strictly governmental issues like pay equality? I don't think it matters, I think it's designed to me a flexible mapping point. Whatever you think is the women's rights issue is correct. All you have to agree on is that "They" (white republican Men) are coming for it. There are two quotes from interviewed women that reveal this:

  • “What we’re worried about is our rights being taken away,”

  • “If I had to guess why a lot of women are leaning very strongly toward more liberal issues, it’s that we’re afraid.”

Fear. Protection. "Somebody should do something!"

I think this really does women a disservice. It's the same as politicians who essentially use a narrative of emasculation to get men behind them. You've seen this a lot in Trump speeches going back to 2016. "They're taking our jobs" speaks to a hard-wire male perspective on providership. But politicians love an emotionally resonant hack. They won't change tactics anytime soon.

J.D Vance got into some hot water after his "cat lady" comments reappeared. I do think this was an unforced error. "Virgin" is used as an insult to Men and "old hag" and all of its varieties are used to belittle women. Sexual capability is still a big deal and so going after it is a low blow and will trigger a lot of hot resentment even in those not targeted. When a guy is emasculated, all guys feel it even if it isn't happening to them. When a women is targeted for being "the old hag" women can feel how that lands even if they are out of harms way. Vance would do better to focus on something that is tangible to women but not so personally direct - children. "The left wants to indoctrinate your kids" has been winning (see Youngkin in VA).

The above leads us too...

Are We Really Talking About Sex?

"Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men."

I'll pair the above with the fact that both of the women pictured in the WSJ piece are overweight. One, in a green and white dress, is obese.

To what extent are these resentments based in sexual frustration in both directions? I'll offer the opinion, which should be no surprise, that I think it's more about differences in relative value preferences. I don't think we're a nation of genocidal incels and femcels. If anything, I might point the finger more at social media and online spaces creating echo chambers and infinite positive-feedback loops yet divorcing users further and further from normie reality.

Yet, sex is important and young men and young women want it. The politics (literal and figurative) of dating certainly haven't gotten any less complex over the years - and they now definitely involved literal politics. But it's signalling all the way down. Am I really offended that this guy taking me out for a $134 meal is a Trump supporter? No, I'm worried he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship. Am I disgusted that this girl I'm going to SoulCycle with is wearing her Pussy Hat? No, I'm worried she'll hector me to death if I say "retarded" once at home.

Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men.

Again, watch what they do, not what they say.

I've always looked at MeToo as a weird attempt at bloodletting by Hollywood that morphed into witch trials. There was nothing in the way of sincere attempts to improve male-female professional relationships, just a lot of virtue signalling and subtle actions taken to guarantee against false accusations (see above).

I actually have a theory about MeToo. Harvey Weinstein is a talented producer and he's difficult to replace in that role.

He was also the top bundler for Dem political donations in California and a key fundraiser for Dianne Feinstein. He's much easier to replace in that role.

So I think someone big in Hollywood wanted to take Feinstein's senate seat in 2018. She was in her mid 80s and didn't survive that full term. Taking out Weinstein could have reasonably been an attempt to get her to drop out.

Trump had just been elected President in 2016 with no prior political office. Obama held a US Senate seat for only four years before becoming President in 2008. A nationally known name becoming a California Senator in 2018 and then running against Trump in 2020 doesn't sound too wild in that context.

Then MeToo spun out of control, Feinstein refused to budge and the plan went nowhere.

I have no idea who the big name would have been.

"Climate change" Is a big, hard to define, but very scary bad thing. It's mythical and functions almost like a curse. Furthermore, it is THE virtue signaling issue. People (think) they get all kinds of social credit for driving an EV or using paper straws etc. It has weird touchy-feely connections to "mother earth" pseudo-religious traditions. Women under 30 probably have a higher likelihood of going to festivals like burning man and so having a very personal connection to these "vibes."

Climate change isn't hard to define at all - human activity produces greenhouse gases which cause an increase in global temperatures and adverse weather events while the world shifts to a new climate. It isn't a matter of vibes but one of rigorous scientific evidence, and younger people are more concerned with the issue because they're the ones who are going to be paying the price for it. While I have no doubt that there are a lot of cynical grifters in the movement and plenty of people who operate based on vibes rather than evidence, climate change is a real and serious problem, and one that the people actually profiting from it won't be alive to see the consequences for.

Global warming is real, in all likelihood, yes. Whether or not it's directly caused mainly by pollution in Western societies isn't that clear, as far as I can tell.

I am admittedly in a bit of a filter bubble with regard to this, but all of the irl men I can discuss politics with agree that nuclear is a very attractive solution to the problem. On both sides of the aisle.

The irl women I have broached the subject with, however... /images/17223237173445024.webp

Which kinda goes back to the point OP raised.

nuclear is a very attractive solution to the problem

Just to nitpick, this mainly applies to countries which still utilize coal and oil for such purposes to a large degree. And as far as I know, all of them are outside the West anyway and are investing more and more into nuclear energy, with the sad and pathetic exception of Germany.

Australia still uses tons of coal and oil (I seem to recall we have the highest greenhouse emissions per capita), and despite having lolhuge uranium reserves NIMBY and hippies have entirely stopped nuclear power so far.

Our federal opposition leader is actually running on a platform of "let's actually do nuclear", although it's questionable whether he can actually get plants built due to state bans.

Burning natural gas produces a great deal of CO2-equivalent. If you believe the climate change people and take leaks into account, more than coal.

But dams kill fish, wind kills birds (and offshore wind kills marine mammals though that's more a Republican thing), large-scale solar ruins the pristine desert environment, nuclear glows, and nobody likes transmission lines (and also cute endangered species can't cross the corridors), so what the environmentalists are pushing for is shivering in the dark. They'll agree with various alternative energy proposals until someone figures out a way of making them practical, at which point they'll be against.

It's not like the case for nuclear is so cut-and-dry that men being much more in favour can just be interpreted as evidence for "men more reasonable, women more crazy" without justification. There are complex arguments for and against that ultimately reduce to a lot of boring number crunching; since it's hardly ever the case that large swathes of the population have crunched the numbers, consider the possibility that men like nuclear more and women like it less due to some evopsych coincidence.

Eh. You get what you incentivize. Is the ignorance here genuine or feigned? These guys always had a "we don't have enough kids" fixation anyway...

Drat, you beat me too it. So a couple of thoughts-

  1. Student loans has an obvious explanation- Women are more likely to go to college(because there is no other socially acceptable decision for non-poor women, and no one wants to be poor), choose degrees which are appealing to women(which tend to pay less), when they're not able to handle their first choice degrees switch to psychology(while men tend to go to work), etc, etc. All that means is that women are typically the ones suffering under student loans. Even a young woman with few student loans because of scholarships, fortunate job placement, etc. likely runs in a social circle which overwhelmingly has student loan issues, and women tend to be more sensitive to each others' problems.

  2. Women tend to really value resources, and in the past few years the same-class standard of living for the red tribe has started getting much higher than for the blue tribe. It'll be interesting to see if that has any bearing on this trend in the future, assuming it continues. We know, BTW, that it isn't an inherent fact of life that women don't like red tribe things- Taylor Swift literally started as a country singer and church attendance has slanted female for forever. And while red tribe leftism exists, it rarely looks like a winning horse to back, although some of its hobby horses can get incorporated in a winning agenda, compassionate conservatism style.

  3. Abortion is the mind-killer and public rhetoric about it is generally quite poor, but liberal rhetoric about abortion is in particular just blatant lies. Pregnancy checkpoints in red states, handmaids tale, etc. Prolife rhetoric is the same five arguments repeated ad nauseam but it's usually not a lie unless you play definitional games. And one of those things tends to really hype up why women should care about it, even if it's simply factually not true.

  4. How much of this on the female side is metoo, too? Rape is a primal fear for young women, and the metoo narrative does have something to say to women, and tends to spread through female-heavy social media platforms. Insane rape scaremongering probably drives young women towards the feminist side of things on a 'men just suck and you have to be protected from them- all of them' basis. That can fit comfortably in the left side of the coalition.

  5. This gap is mostly about women moving left, not men moving right. https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx

Rape is a primal fear for young women

Is this a conclusion we can draw with certainty from women's usual observable behavior? I have my doubts.

Can you add detail? I'm not trying to needle you here, genuinely curious. I feel like there's some evopsych data you've got.

The everyday observable behavior of average young women does not seem to indicate that they are gripped by a primal fear of rape.

I'm not particularly sympathetic to the MAGA/right coalition, and I agree with many of the systemic and political factors others here have analyzed well. That being said, isn't the most obvious effect which is taking place here the result of left wing progressive politics constant demonizing of white males? It's not like we're a small group of society - we matter and there are a lot of us. Young people are less established in their politics and identity - they had to go somewhere, and cultural/political/media environments have spent most of the time telling them that they are greedy vain loathsome lazy stupid bumbling rapists, despite men and boys falling further and further behind in any number of key factors in that time frame (not to mention skepticism of these progressive claims at face value —that society was mostly fine as-is in the 60s etc and these critiques miss the mark — which I'm sure we're all familiar reading this website).

4doorsmorewhores

Mr. Rittenhouse has entered the chat. The Kenosha Kid is back!

Ironically, The Kenosha Kid is a great example of this trend. Who's a law abiding volunteer who wants to do good by his family and his nation supposed to side with if all he gets for that is attempted murder and wide media coverage demonizing him for straightforwardly defending his life?

There is no place in the leftie metanarrative for Kyle. No role except as an enemy. Even though he's exactly the sort of person any political movement should be looking to recruit: an upstanding motivated young man.

This wasn't always the case, especially with progressives.

Normie lefties were convinced for MONTHS that Rittenhouse killed 3 black men in cold blood, hunting them down to execute them cartel style. Till the start of the trial there were many progs - particularly women - who were unaware that the three men shot were white, much less that they had all attacked Rittenhouse.

To an extent I absolve this ignorance due to transmitted media messaging and general unawareness of how guns work. Yet when the base evidence is presented - the three dudes shot were white - and the pivot seamlessly transitions to 'well they were shot because they supported Black Lives Matter' then the only reaction I have is to stoneface and go 'ok that's nice by the way did you see that ludicrous display last night Liverpool always try to walk it in'.

fellow rhyming username enjoyer

  1. Number leads
  2. Three words following
  3. Same number of syllables

GET OUT OF MY HEAD

Same number of syllables

Uhhh, how do you pronounce 100?

hunit!

(I wasn't counting the number in the syllable count)

Isn't this common throughout history? Women support the powers that be. In Saudi arabia women are more muslim. In the Soviet union they were more communist, in the third Reich they were more national socialist. Young men get fed up with the system and women keep supporting the position of those in power. Young men overthrow the government and install a new system. In 80 years women will be virtue signalling how much they love Victor Orban and Trump while young men will be rallying against whatever comes after the populist right.

One of the interesting things about the United States currently is that you can have people who see themselves as rallying against oppressive power by supporting the incumbent President and the nation's various intelligence agencies and the like.

The political divisions in the US of course are imho such that both "sides" have at least some credible basis to perceive themselves as the underdogs (or at least sticking up for the underdog) fighting The Man.

"Abortion" is a stand in for the wild claim that "they" are trying to "take away" unspecified "rights."

Your characterization is highly uncharitable. When we talk about "abortion rights", we are talking about the right to an abortion.

For a young woman that has any sex life, the possibility and consequences of getting pregnant loom large. If the woman doesn't want to have children (yet), abortion is the safety net of last resort. The most commonly available birth control methods--condoms and pills--have a typical-use failure rate of 13% and 7%, respectively. That's the proportion of women who become pregnant within the first 12 months after initiating the use of that birth control method. Even with perfect use, those rates are 2% and 0.3%, and every woman should ask herself how sure she is that she is using them perfectly. IUD's have much better rates (1%), and 10% of US women of reproductive age have them installed, and hopefully that number keeps going up; nevertheless, that rate is not 0.

Every young woman who is having any sex with a man has to ask herself what will she do if she gets pregnant. It's no surprise that so many want to keep abortion as an option.

Plenty of pro-life advocates understand this perspective, and are taking a constructive approach. Around where I live, I see bill-boards advertising support services for any woman who is pregnant and is willing to carry the baby to term. They arrange health services and adoption (if the woman wants to give the child away), or connect to support services for mothers with infants.

I don't know how good any of these services are, but I like the principal of this approach. There is a huge penalty for a young woman to complete the pregnancy (financial, physical, and mental), and this supportive approach reduces some of that penalty.

When we talk about "abortion rights", we are talking about the right to an abortion.

This is not the term used on left-leaning Reddit though. It is increasingly framed as “(women’s) reproductive rights”.

I remember reading for years that men that wanted financial abortions should just not have sex if they couldn’t deal with the possible consequences.

The thing I really can't stand is that I've had hours long debates with feminists about legal paternal surrender, and they'll continue to employee the exact mirror-image rhetoric of "women should keep their legs shut", and they just don't get it (in my experiences). It just feels wrong to them to allow financial abortion, and they won't budge no matter how much one points out how much they sound like the traditionalists on the other side that they decry so much.

The fundamental conundrum is that

  • the father can't unilaterally physically abort the child even before it attains sentience, let alone later - abortion requires the woman to undergo a particular medical procedure, which is certainly cumbersome and not entirely safe;

  • child support is framed as being for the sake of the child, not the mother.

You are compelled to pay up because you caused the birth of a human with rights; you don't get the right to prevent the birth after conception because that would amount to compelling a human with rights to put themselves at risk. In the trolley problem space, this is somewhere in the "fat man on bridge" class - you set a trolley (reproductive process) in motion that will eventually run over (leave in need of support) a human tied to the tracks (the child), which could be stopped by pushing a fat man (the woman) onto the tracks (abortion). The fat man decides not to jump, the human gets run over, and now you want to be absolved of responsibility because the fat man could have chosen to jump.

"Getting an abortion is roughly similar to jumping off a bridge and being crushed by a train" seems to take it a bit far?

I only said "somewhere in the class", and aren't trolley problems supposed to isolate moral intuitions by way of hyperbole anyway? Putting it differently, what level of sacrifice do you think it is okay to demand from one person to save another from a major financial onus that they knowingly exposed themselves to the risk of? Losing a limb? Taking a strong emetic? Getting punched in the gut? Surely an abortion can at least be somewhere between the latter two in terms of risk/cost.

Putting it differently, what level of sacrifice do you think it is okay to demand from one person to save another from a major financial onus that they knowingly exposed themselves to the risk of?

This argument is always such a mind-bender. You're getting the causality exactly backwards—her choosing to give birth is what engages his financial obligation under the current legal scheme, not the other way around. This obligation can be discharged without affecting her ability to choose.

The engine drives the transmission, not the other way around.

what level of sacrifice do you think it is okay to demand from one person to save another from a major financial onus that they knowingly exposed themselves to the risk of?

My personal answer is 'zero' -- but it's for deontological reasons, framing it as a trolley problem is anti-convincing for me.

Child support probably shouldn't be enforced unless both parents are given the opportunity for 50% custody though. (and if the father wants to take on 50% custody then child support should be zero)

they'll continue to employee the exact mirror-image rhetoric

Except the sexes aren't "exact mirror-images," and even those who tend to hold it in theory pretty much don't actually treat the sexes as interchangeable in practice (as your feminist interlocutors demonstrate).

and they won't budge no matter how much one points out how much they sound like the traditionalists on the other side that they decry so much.

This is the definition of "privilege". It can't generally be revoked without at least some organization; unfortunately, men have yet to evolve an in-group bias.

They are right insofar as it's not in their class interest. Who, whom.

Arguing against power is pointless really. If there's one thing trying to maintain Liberalism through argument has taught me it's that.

if you want to get feminists to give this to you, you're going to have to hold something hostage or give them something in exchange.

In the IRL battle of the sexes, Team Woman always wins because that's the team most men are on.

Majorities rarely win. It's not about numbers, it's about organization.

Feminists in particular and women in general are a lot more organized today than men, whose special advocacy groups are a joke.

There has been entire eras and civilizations that regarded either sex as most suspect or despicable, so I'm not sold on the idea that this can't be changed. Sex relations may exist on an innate substrate but the lines of how they play out can move a lot.

Perhaps, but we'd need at least multiple generations of favorable cultural iteration before reproductive autonomy for men isn't a fringe lunatic idea. I imagine that by then the issue wouldn't practically matter anymore.

Because as a man, to me, a 'financial abortion' is still a fundamentally irresponsible act.

Getting an abortion if you get pregnant and don't want a child, putting aside morality, is a responsible act.

Walking away from a child you've created and that will be born is an irresponsible act.

  • -13

Walking away from a child you've created and that will be born is an irresponsible act.

At what point, chronologically, from conception to birth does a embryo/fetus become a "child" in your model. Also, if you feel like it, please explain why.

To me, the crux of the abortion argument is "when does life start?" People get uncomfortable in defining that because it's a bit of a philosophical issue, a lot of people don't realize how early a lot of human features emerge (and, so, they find themselves accidentally advocating for "post-life-starting" termination), and advances in medical care will mean that viability will keep getting earlier and earlier.

To me, the crux of the abortion argument is "when does life start?"

It should be. But pro-choicers really seem to love arguments that imply (or make explicit) that abortion should be permitted in all circumstances regardless of the sapience of the child. I take this as strong evidence that they're being disingenuous when they claim not to believe that the child is sapient. I think abortion is primarily a religious (Satanic) rite of child sacrifice.

I don’t think of abortion as responsible. Instead, it seems like someone did something irresponsible. Then instead of taking up the consequence of their irresponsibility they terminate the life of an in utero’s baby life. Seems the height of irresponsibility.

I'm sure that plays well to traditionalist boomers. I really don't know what load-bearing social scaffolding in modern times you expect to bolster this sense of responsibility.

Well, responsibility isn't needed in a world where you can be made to be financially responsibly by the state.

First of all, the social sanction that outside of small communities like this, men who try to find ways to not pay their child support are largely seen as terrible human beings among all ideologies, races, and income levels. About probably the only thing a non-college educated Trump-voting guy making $40k and a PMC woman whose still sad Hillary lost that is making $250k can agree on is guys who don't pay reasonable child support and try to avoid it are a-holes.

Plus, the collapse of cash-only jobs means it's impossible to have any income that make senses that avoids wage garnishment.

Yes, most people have been socially conditioned to still expect men to carry the weight of themselves and others. Even those who have gotten completely tanked on "Women don't need men" narratives for the better part of a decade or more clearly believe this. This doesn't make it right, fair, or justified. Nor is there any assurance that this state of affairs is permanent.

I'm not sure how much weight being a self-interested asshole will carry in the future when we have turned into a nation of self-interested assholes. Or when the thing you're banking on to carry forth this duty (masculinity) has been discarded as either a historical myth or a vacant shape not exclusive to one gender ("girls can be just as strong/powerful/responsible/horny/aggressive as men"). I need to pay child support because I'm a man, but 'man' doesn't have a definition any more, traditionalism is dead, and I'm supposed to keep this going because Outlaw83 prefers it this way?

Good luck with that. No way this will ever collapse, I'm sure.

You vaguely gesture towards some "responsibility" that you can't even coherently define. And when pressed, you collapse into threats from the state and just-so social sanctioning. You can't offer anything else, just sticks. Said threats are certainly salient to this dynamic, but if that's all that's on offer, then I wouldn't be be so assured of this being an enduring constant.

About probably the only thing a non-college educated Trump-voting guy making $40k and a PMC woman whose still sad Hillary lost that is making $250k can agree on is guys who don't pay reasonable child support and try to avoid it are a-holes

Guys are assholes until you find out most child support is owed by blacks. https://www.irp.wisc.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CSRA-22-24-T7-01042024.pdf

Then the issue is suddenly genericized and pivoted. Child support should be enforced, but if it is specifically black men that do not pay child support then it is all men who are evil. This pivoting is glaringly obvious to any in the system, and the disingenuity suggests that society is not even with its castigation, even if one population still 'suffers' more by population proportion, because their criminal proportion is still not accurately captured.

One compelling reason for the stateification of social more enforcement is because community social sanctions do not work evenly, and if some communities display greater failure rates in internal prosocial behavior enforcement then it becomes appealing to use the state as the mediating entity. Reworking extant incentive structures is difficult in the best of times, and we plainly are not living in such an era of boundless abundance and social trust.

The costs are not symmetric, and the woman bears costs no matter which option is taken.

Right to financial abortion Right to physical abortion
Woman Impossible; still has to bring the child to term and give birth, a huge cost. ✓
Man ✓ Reprehensible; would be forcing the woman to have an abortion. She still bears medical risk.

Okay, put a hard number on the medical risk of Abortion, which I'm told is significantly safer than carrying and delivering a child to term. We can discount malpractice and similar, which should obviously be covered by the abortion providers' insurance. It seems to me that the monetary value of any remaining medical risk would have to be orders of magnitude smaller than the expected cost of 18 years of child support.

Problem solved, no?

You don’t need to do this math—there is a market for surrogates. NPV of child support is significantly larger than the cost of a surrogate.

Walking away from a child you've created and that will be born is an irresponsible act.

Pardon, but the consensus is that it isn't a child, which is why we allow routinely allow doctors to cut such entities to pieces with surgical implements and then sell the resulting offal as pharmaceutical raw ingredients, an entirely normal and unobjectionable practice that social consensus strongly resists critiquing.

Likewise, whether or not it will be born is entirely the mother's decision. Financial hardship is a generally-approved motive for termination. Why would it be irresponsible for to allow the man to be absolved of financial responsibility for the potential child before they are born? If the mother does not wish to finance the child's rearing on her own, she is still free to choose to terminate. Why should she be allowed to compel the father to finance her unilateral choices?

Because there are differences between cis-men and cis-women, the responsibility differs - with women, the responsibility continues through the pregnancy with the option for termination, but the man, because he's not carrying the child, the responsibility begins the moment he chooses to have sex with a woman.

Also, a truly financially destitute man won't really be on the hook for more than a meager amount of child support.

  • -17

...But the man, because he's not carrying the child, the responsibility begins the moment he chooses to have sex with a woman.

...And ends the moment he makes it clear that he doesn't want to raise or support a child, and has offered compensation for the remaining medical risk inherint in terminating the pregnancy, minus that covered by the doctor's malpractice insurance. The fact that biological reality makes perfect symmetry impossible does not salvage even a fraction of the asymmetry you are endorsing. The woman still has all the choice, and there is no principled reason to finance her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support.

Also, a truly financially destitute man won't really be on the hook for more than a meager amount of child support.

What relevance does this have? Rich women are still allowed abortions. Whether the man can pay for a child's rearing has zero bearing on whether he should have to, any more than it does for whether women should have to carry a potential child they do not wish for. The established standard here is not hardship, but mere perception of inconvenience.

It seems to me that your arguments would work a whole lot better on a 90s-era Evangelical social conservative; maybe if that was the sort of person you could reason with, you should have made some effort to preserve their continued existence.

there is no principled reason to finance her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support.

If the choice is between the father financing her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support and me and you financing her unilateral choices... I say the father.

Legal paternity surrender would increase the number of abortions (great!), but also increase the cost to the taxpayer (bad!) There's no principled reason either that someone should be able to get an abortion or that someone should be free from financial obligations: the government should just do whatever makes for a better society.

More comments

There's nothing that says a woman wouldn't be able to choose to get an abortion after the legal paternal surrender, knowing that the man is choosing to not be involved. The man surrenders, and then the woman can then choose what she wants to do accordingly. If she chooses to have the baby at that point, knowing that there's no father, then she would be the one choosing to do the irresponsible act.

This is legitimate logical argument in theory, except it appeals to nobody outside of like, nineteen people in a Discord, because both pro-life and basically 98% of pro-choice people think forcing a woman to have an abortion via pressure is a terrible thing to do.

I guess. I mean, we could talk about what it means to "force" someone to do something. Is a woman forced if she chooses to have an abortion because she knows she can't make ends meet, even if she did have child support from the father? Can someone be forced simply by the circumstances of their life? Anyone can choose to have a baby or not regardless of their lot in life. I don't like that we are less willing to ascribe agency to women than men. I want to be consistent, but no one else wants to be.

Also, regarding responsibility, I don't see why we should make it illegal for someone to do something simply because it is irresponsible.

But I also wanted to add that I sense that my original argument of "feminists just don't get the parallel between LPS and abortion rights" probably doesn't apply to you, since you are likely a traditionalist (?). I'm basing this assumption on that I don't believe that a feminist would generally argue about laws being made based on whether they are responsible actions or not.
Most feminists tend to argue for abortion from the basis of "human rights", whatever that may mean. And I see no reason why the human right for a man to decide his own destiny is any less important than for a woman to decide her own destiny.

Uh, is the bias of a ready-for-relationships-but-not-ready-for-kids young woman not obvious here?

It’s good advice, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

For a young woman that has any sex life, the possibility and consequences of getting pregnant loom large.

Indeed. That is why one should not have sex unless they are prepared to face the potential consequences. It's not like women simply wake up pregnant and had nothing to do with it.

I consider abortion to be infanticide. I know you probably don't, and we don't have to try to argue with each other on it because it won't be productive. But I imagine you can understand how thoroughly unpersuasive your argument is for someone who thinks as I do, right?

That is why one should not have sex unless they are prepared to face the potential consequences.

I agree.

Whatever the prevalent culture war rhetoric around sex and abortion, it seems that young women are actually more likely to follow that ideal than previously. Teen birth rates are way down, a quarter of what they were in 1991. Teens are less likely to have sex than before, those who do have it later than before, and with fewer partners source. The number of abortions is down by about a third, compared to early 90's.

These trends don't count as a culture war win for conservatives because they weren't achieved through wider adoption of conservative ideals. But these trends are a definite win for the goal of reducing the deaths of unborn children. Wider adoption of IUD's will further reduce these deaths.

“Don’t have sex unless you want to procreate” is just a really unpopular stance towards sex in the western world

It's unpopular to say to women.

Yeah, the male sex is famously averse to having sex for purposes other than child rearing

That's not the point. Saying it to women is unpopular in normie society in general, saying it to men isn't.

More accurately, "don't have sex unless you can handle procreation if it happens". And yeah it's unpopular, but that doesn't make it incorrect. Being an adult means being prepared to handle the consequences of your actions.

The consequences are you get an abortion if you get an accidental pregnancy. We have the technology.

We also have the technology for nuclear bombs, but you don’t get to bomb civilians with nukes if their head of state pulls out of a trade deal.

What? I fail to see the correlation.

"You have to be an adult and handle the consequences of your actions" and "an unborn child has rights" are two separate clauses and will have to be argued separately.

That is not true. The potential consequence is "you are pregnant", getting an abortion is one answer to the consequence. It isn't the consequence itself.

Well how far down the ladder do you go on something like that. The consequence may be an expensive unwanted burden, a cherished child, an abortion, a miscarriage, nothing at all, and on and on. An abortion may be one consquence of sex.

Too extreme an assumption. It could simply be "don't have sex unless probability of a child is acceptable to you."

When we talk about "abortion rights", we are talking about the right to an abortion.

I'm glad you helped straighten that out for me.

Every young woman who is having any sex with a man has to ask herself what will she do if she gets pregnant.

She could choose not to have sex. That people believe a lack of sex is impossible to live with shows how obsessed with sex society has become. I'd also argue that if a woman does not have the emotional maturity to be firmly committed to accepting the consequences of her actions - whatever their probability - she shouldn't be engaged in whatever those actions are.

Adoption

While I, of course, support adoption infinitely over abortion, we have to face facts and realize that foster systems and adoption have statistically significant higher rates of abuse etc. It takes a lot of love and effort to raise a child, it takes even more to raise someone else's child.

There is a huge penalty for a young woman to complete the pregnancy (financial, physical, and mental), and this supportive approach reduces some of that penalty.

Just to be clear, "penalty" here is the life of a human infant, correct?

She could choose not to have sex.

That's exactly what's been happening: the trend among young people is to have sex less. It's even possible that the political divergence between young men and women will contribute to this trend.

While I, of course, support adoption infinitely over abortion, we have to face facts and realize that foster systems and adoption have statistically significant higher rates of abuse etc. It takes a lot of love and effort to raise a child, it takes even more to raise someone else's child.

I agree that the ideal is for both parents to raise a wanted child. In case of an unwanted pregnancy, the best outcome is for it to somehow become wanted.

Healthy babies are in high demand for adoption, and don't last in the foster system. Normalizing the option of carrying the pregnancy to term and then giving the baby up for adoption not only would reduce numbers of abortion but would help satisfy this demand. I doubt that adopted healthy babies are more at risk of mistreatment than babies who stay with their mother, and a quick online check bears that out.

The other advantage of normalizing giving-baby-up-for-adoption option is that a woman goes through massive biological changes during pregnancy which increase the likelihood of her wanting to keep the baby after all. That's the unwanted-pregnancy-becomes-wanted-baby scenario.

The objective sex fulfills is emotional self actualisation. The biochemical serotonin and dopamine hit of an orgasm is the same whether it is organically or externally derived, and oxytocin release can be achieved by simply being a fucking human being and having close connections. The narcotic hit of the chemical rush obtained during a tinder hookup is fun, but the consequences are so manifestly bad that it can only be peer pressure (including social media) continually reinforcing toxic positivity about the joys of a hoe phase and situationships.

Re adoption, these remain incredibly popular but specifically for babies. Babies are awesome, and raising a baby is infinitely easier than undoing toddler behaviors that have not been managed, much less children or adolescents with deficient emotional regulatory abilities.

Having said that, despite my pro-infant rhetoric, I find abortion to be a hugely necessary component of modern failed society. Without communities and with perverse incentives, restricting abortion results in more children horn to unfit mothers and absent fathers. With social welfare systems present in multiple facets ,(calorie provision, shelter provision, even automatic school grade promotion in particularly crunchy lefty societies) the cost of bearing a child is borne not by the woman but by society. Forcing these women to carry a child to term will be more taxing on contributers, and so abortion is a necessary release valve.

There are preferred optimalities, such as better deployment of aid resources and education, but direct social shaping tends to fail in heterogenous societies with competing value systems/resource payouts.

By right the optimal solution should be a homogenous overculture with universally accepted standards for compliance and sanction, so a neighbour can castigate a deviant as freely as a mother, or total removal of the social ill. Sex is the most human of desires, so that is never going away. Instead I forcefully propose self terminating 12 year lifespan virtual companions for q3 year olds and state provided sex toys to let them bitch at and get off with, and they are only allowed to have IRL experiences before 25 if both virtual companions sign off on compatibility.

No one said my state provided waifu had to be a real woman.

I like it.

q3

I assume this is supposed to be "13"

It brings up an interesting consideration. Would the ever increasing availability of porn, weed, online gambling, and now AI-waifu girlfriends be the minimal "cost" that hard pro-lifers must be willing to pay to reduce abortion? Hmm.

JD Vance wants to ban porn, so unfortunately he may be an enemy. Given his SV adjacency he may be open to customizable fuckbots, so lets see what Altman et al posit regarding future human relationships. We may all end up dating ScarJoAtHome. Not the worst option but this may be what finally breaks my F2P streak.

While I, of course, support adoption infinitely over abortion, we have to face facts and realize that foster systems and adoption have statistically significant higher rates of abuse etc. It takes a lot of love and effort to raise a child, it takes even more to raise someone else's child

Adoption and the foster care system are very different things. Foster care is mostly for children who have been removed from their parent's home, or otherwise become wards of the state. It's dealing with a population that's selected for a bit more than bad luck and is usually selected into it at an older age, and it's also not typically intended to be a permanent placement. Foster kids can and do get moved, and ideally reunited with the parents(in practice, the parents usually don't get into fit shape to get their kids back, but that's the theoretical goal of the system).

Adoption, on the other hand, is a permanent placement with a new family. Adopted children are usually adopted as infants, or otherwise too young to remember, and domestic adoptions are basically selected for a birth mother in unlucky circumstances.

I'll step in and say this seems uncharitable and worded to gain internet points. Though I have been nodding in agreement with many of your earlier posts.

It may sound harsh and uncaring but sure, yes, an unplanned pregnancy taken to term can seem like a penalty, a life-changing penalty, particularly if the father has fucked himself right off, the woman's parents are judgmental or absent, and she is faced with raising the child essentially (or actually) alone. This shouldn't be so difficult to grasp, unless you simply don't like the wording.

This is partially for internet points, yes. I also think that waging a culture war on an anonymous forum is pretty low stakes, so I don't mind chucking grenades over the wall that I wouldn't in person. Perhaps that makes me an anonymous digital coward, so be it.

I understand what you're saying. I've seen it up close. Appalachian extended family. 15 and pregnant happened to a cousin. Dad was dead, Mom was in rehab. The extended family stepped in and ... it almost ruined like three families financially. So, I guess not only do I understand what you're saying, I can confirm it.

But my prior also happens to be that human life is sacred and priceless. I also wouldn't assume that every woman who gives birth in dire situations sees their life satisfaction plummet. I'll acknowledge again that a hard pro-life stance easily comes off as hard hearted. It's difficult for it to shake that.

This is partially for internet points, yes. I also think that waging a culture war on an anonymous forum is pretty low stakes, so I don't mind chucking grenades over the wall that I wouldn't in person. Perhaps that makes me an anonymous digital coward, so be it.

Not a coward, but this place is not for explicitly waging the culture war. Please do not try to "score Internet points."

Most of your post was fine, but the parts that weren't (the "waging culture war" parts) are precisely what makes most abortion threads turn into shitty exchanges of bad-faith straw men. "You think a child is an inconvenience that should be casually disposed of!" "You just want to control women's bodies!" Usually both sides actually have a pretty good understanding of what the other side actually believes (and doesn't) , but "chucking grenades" is more satisfying.

Don't do that here.

Dude, I agree with you. But this isn't the place to wage the culture war. There are lots of incredibly relevant points you can make without waging the culture war, much less actively admitting you're violating the fundamental rule of the site.

Those with the biggest gaps the opposite way, where men approve of the issue moreso than women, are (again, in descending order):

The Trump era Tax Cuts, Repeal and Replace Obama Care (note that overall men are actually slightly on-net negative about this, but women are 23 points more negative), Build The Wall (men at -4, women at -47)

I'm not American but it seems to me that these three are much less relevant politically than the other four.

You're right. This comment sheds some light. But there is still somewhat of a mystery to why/how the WSJ selected these as the "top" issues for Men-relative-to-women.

I think those are just the ones that the WSJ supports and feels comfortable talking about.

From what I've seen, the issues with the biggest gender divide of "men support, women oppose" are nuclear power, sports gambling, and legalizing prostitution. AKA "the Libertarian party." It would be hilarious if the Republican party chose to run on those as its main issues, but I don't think it would win an election.

But what "rights" are we talking about? If this is the number two issue for women, I have to assume there's some sort of female-centric set of rights, right (haha)? Well, of course the thing to point to is Dobbs and abortion. What "right" was stripped remains a mystery...

This is not in any way a mystery and I have no idea why you say it is. Supporters of legal abortion are very clear that they think it is a woman's natural right to choose whether or not to have a child inside her, and that this right means women should be able to get an abortion. I don't agree with their analysis, but it's also not like it is hard to learn what they think.

Supporters of legal abortion are very clear that they think it is a woman's natural right to choose whether or not to have a child inside her, and that this right means women should be able to get an abortion.

In broad strokes, yes. But they aren't all as lockstep as you seem to be implying: Dobbs was handed down when the Blue Team held control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, and even heard some Republicans offer to cross the aisle, yet no bill to codify these rights could be passed. Some point to cynicism trying to make an issue out of it for the election (possibly true in part), but there is also a lot of disagreement of what the terms to be codified would be: which trimesters, which exceptions, and so forth. Previous precedent didn't require elected representatives to take stances on these. Late term abortions are, IIRC pretty uncommon and very unpopular, but also sometimes medically indicated. And I say that as someone who generally accepts "safe, legal, and rare:" every abortion is tragic, but sometimes it's the least bad choice.

"Safe, legal, and rare" has been an intellectually dishonest (or at least lazy) opinion to hold for several decades now. There are over a million abortions every year in the US, vs. ~3.5 childbirths annually, it's anything but "rare."

I think one can very well believe that the number of abortions is tragic and bad without going all the way to full-pro-life. The people in my life who hold the safe, legal, and rare position hold that there are way too many abortions, using abortion as a form of birth control without taking proper precautions beforehand is immoral, and often support bans consistent with the global average of 12-15 weeks. The US is an outlier with its extremes on abortion (particularly in the permissive direction; the left-wing view of abortions in the US is incredibly uncommon globally), but there is definitely a view in between the pro-life and pro-choice coalition that represents a huge chunk of the electorate but is politically disenfranchised.

There's also a poster, sorry I don't remember the name, who's sympathetic to pro-life concerns but believes enforcing any abortion law with exceptions creates a dangerous legal environment that would be impossible to justly enforce, while a no-exeptions law goes too far for them. I find that an intellectually consistent and well-reasoned position, even if I disagree with it.

I'll admit the phrasing could be improved.

I was trying to go exactly where you went. There is no "women's rights" issue that isn't abortion. The closest could be the "pay gap" concept which, if not utterly overstated, is also something government can't do much about on its own.

So the question becomes, why say "women's rights" instead of "abortion rights" I think the answer is obvious from the rest of my post - anything that makes it very directly, personally, emotionally about YOU is more effective than a de-personalized partially abstract issue. "They are coming after your body!" is the most personal thing you can say - and that is literally what's being thrown out at women (particularly the young one's, I wonder why).

Yeah basically I think you have it. Framing things in terms of "women's rights" is more effective in terms of appealing to people's emotions.

Yeah, the odd responses from men are a signal they're not asking the right questions. Probably because they're not even allowed to think what questions might be relevant to young men.

Possibly, but your comment seems to in a way belittle the men involved because they may have chosen a different side from you ("because they're not even allowed to think...")--as if, in a world were they (allowed) to think as you do, in other words the correct way, their responses would be different. I'm not sure this kind of dismissal is productive or holds any hope of understanding the different perspectives out there.

Edit: I misunderstood the point being made.

"Because they're not even allowed to think" is belittling the WSJ writers and poll-creators, not the interviewed men.

To do the homework, the WSJ's 2024 numbers come from an series of internally-run poll. While I can't get the questions of all of them or breakdowns by gender, I can find the relevant parts for Feb 2024, and the split between Q12A and Q12B is... demonstrative in a lot of ways.

How did you get the report? Archive.is couldn't even get me past the paywall on this one. Is there a better way now?

That makes more sense.

I should have been more careful with the they, my bad

Sorry could you help me understand what you are implying at the end with the link? I couldn’t even find 12B in the doc

Sorry, Q13 Split B, on page 6. I'd confused the numbering system since Split B would not have been asked Q12.

Half of the response group (Split A) were asked

"What issue is most important to you when thinking about who you will vote for in the 2024 Presidential election?"

They gave answers in 30ish categories, with 9% giving some category outside of those answers, and 3% giving no answer. The other half were asked :

"Some people feel so strongly about an issue that they won’t vote for a candidate if they disagree with them on that issue. Of the following issues, what is the one issue you most strongly feel you couldn’t vote for a candidate who disagrees with you about it? If it’s another issue or if you do not feel strongly enough about any of the issues to determine your vote, please just say so."

They gave answers in only 15 categories, with 7% other, and 12% no answer. For individual answers, there are wide spreads -- 20% of split B thought abortion so important that they mostly strongly felt and could not vote for a politician that disagreed with them, while only 8% said it was the single most important question. In Split B, the closest I can find is the 1% that were categorized as "Inflation".

Some variation from one split to the next isn't unusual -- it's hard to get a perfectly random sample -- but the gap here is vast, and not especially coherent. Some of this probably the different question wording, especially the dropped importance of the economy-focused answers for Split B. But another portion probably reflects merged or split answers, especially for things like "Freedom and Rights", "Foreign Policy (general)".

And that's the open-ended question, where the poll subject had the most control over matters. If the WSJ article is really coming down from the latter questions that are thumbs-up or thumbs-down on specific matters (which they almost certainly must be, given the numbers the WSJ infographic uses), this gets even uglier. There's a lot of questions, even ones fairly high on Q12/Q13, that weren't investigated in later question at all.

Absolutely, because the procedural manipulation of science, polling, etc. starts with who gets to who gets to select the default hypothesis and areas of research.

The people who pick a list of polling questions like "how concerned are you that not enough is being done about the looming Climate Crisis?" aren't interested in understanding what their subjects are actually thinking.
At worst they're push-polling, at best they sat around in an office full of identical people picking questions from a hat full of NPR headline printouts. They definitely deserve ridicule for not caring to think about asking the right questions, and not even noticing they're asking the wrong ones.

Ah, I see what you're saying. That makes sense.

The Issues

The fact that the gender gap is large and consistent across issues strongly suggests that it is driven by vibes and not issues. In other words, something is causing young men to identify as Republicans, or conservatives, or MAGA, or some similar right-wing identity, and they are then adopting the bog standard right-wing positions on all the issues, and something else is driving young women to identify as Democrats or liberals or some such and they are then adopting the bog standard left-wing positions.

And we aren't looking at a general argument about vibes like "Mummy Party vs Daddy Party" - we are trying to explain something that has grown dramatically since about 2010, in multiple Western countries. (This FT article shows the same pattern in the UK and Germany as well as the US, as well as a similar but not simultaneous pattern in South Korea - notably France seems to be an exception, with only a small gender gap in the exit polls for the recent legislative elections. There is also a minimal gender gap in the exit polls for the 2024 UK general election, but I think that is because so few young people voted for right-wing parties at all that a youth gender gap wouldn't show up in the overall results.

Why isn't the obvious explanation the best one? Women got more politically involved and embedded in the infrastructure of modern first world western countries, and what we are seeing now is just the way we are wired.

If a large number of people live in isolated societies where safety of the tribe is not an immediate concern, men's concerns about protecting the tribe are not valid. Why would they get any power they don't seize themselves - violently?

Right...My post was trying to go past the Issues. That's why I wrote ... all the sections after "The Issues"

For expansion, I like this comment by @cofee_enjoyer and this one by @faceh

IMO the divergence can be explained through nature (biology). Men are the stress-resilient, systems-oriented, conflict-oriented gender. Women are the nurturing gender, which must remain less stressed to raise healthy children, and remain more innocent (or naive) to identify and bond with her child. It just so happens that politics is a stressful systems-oriented conflict. Yet political propagandists takes advantage of the female nurturing instinct to recruit supporters. Women today are less maternal than ever before, but the instinct doesn’t go away —“nature, uh, finds a way”. That outlet is nurturing the environment, or minorities, or animals, other women. If there is someone suffering and painted as an in-group member, women are there to nurture them. So much of the anti-white and anti-male ideology winds up creating an outgroup connotation to the real ingroup, and studies indeed show that white liberals empathize less with their own race and have a net unfavorable rating for whites (iirc). You can modify a person’s in group and out group through propaganda.

Pro-life may appear at first glance to be the nurturing position to take, but it’s really an abstract idea: the invisible lifeform you cannot sense is actually a child. It’s hard to empathize with an abstract idea, but easy to empathize with a suffering woman, whose face, voice, and story you can sense. Women primarily operate through this social dimension, through personal sensation. (If you are a woman who does not operate this way, statistically you are less likely to raise psychologically healthy children, who require the one-on-one motherly social interface to learn about the world. And you are probably less adept at make-up, which reduces your chance of obtaining a partner).

I don't know why but I laughed on the train as I read the last few sentences of your post. I heard it internally as that Public Service Message that used to begin "If you or someone you love has a problem..."

Sorry, carry on.

Liberal women steer clear of Trump supporters not because they worry "he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship" but because they worry that the cops are going to knock on their door if they go the doctor after a miscarriage.

Being "hectored to death" is not equivalent. Being concerned about 2A restrictions might be somewhat equivalent in the sphere of rights being taken away.

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Liberal women steer clear of Trump supporters not because they worry "he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship", but because they fear their friends/peer group disapprove of their mate. Being red tribe is low status among blues. The same gender split is happening in Europe, where abortion is not a political issue.

The "Red Tribe" screen is mostly a screen for class/income/education to satisfy female hypergamy, another case where "Red Tribe" is not equivalent to Possible Republican Voter.

When looking at college/MBA/JD/PhD educated "Chads" in the States, such a modal Chad comes from a grey/blue-tribe family (where his father is likely Chuddier than his mother, if his mother has any sort of stance at all). It's typically not some rags-to-riches, or red-to-blue/grey tribe, type of character. Ivy-adjacent Lax Bros are more blue/grey than red.

College and graduate-educated men who've had varied and extensive sexual experiences tend not to have Women are Wonderful views (and in fact, tend to view women as unserious playthings) and don't automatically grant women "respect,” although they may feign to for social and professional reasons. Among boys and men across cultures, space, and time, it is instructed, internalised, and understood that respect is something to be earned, not given.

They also tend to be less worshipping of non-Asian minorities, unlike "Red Tribe" Americans who may say un-PC things about non-Asian minorities from time to time, but then wear black athlete names on their backs and cheer for said athletes. See for example, variations upon the Cam on Ingerland meme—albeit different football, different side of the pond.

Liberal women steer clear of Trump supporters not because they worry "he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship" but because they worry that the cops are going to knock on their door if they go the doctor after a miscarriage.

This is an interesting inversion of the usual complaint that Males try to avoid SJWs because they worry that the cops are going to knock on their door if their partner goes to the doctor and claims they've been physically abused.

Which happens more often than the scenario you're describing.

Is one fear rational and the other irrational? If so, which is which?

Hmmmmm.

This does not really seem rational. Women in states like California are at absolutely no risk from any repeal of Roe. Not to say that people can’t be irrational, but women’s opposition to Trump supporters seems to have nothing to do with actual risk. I suppose if this were the case I expect women in Alabama would be much less likely to date conservative men that women California, due to the greater risk. In reality I suspect the opposite is true

but because they worry that the cops are going to knock on their door if they go the doctor after a miscarriage.

This is hyperbole and deliberately so.

Yes, at present, there are some wacky state laws that are creating head-scratcher situations. But this will normalize. Miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and other similar situations are going to be codified sooner or later by state legislatures so that women won't face weird "technically you broke the law" situations.

Want to bet? Here in Texas, we’re still having that exact problem.

There is zero incentive for the Texas legislature to make a clean definition. There is negative incentive for the AG’s office to be helpful or clear, since they score political points every time the scary word ends up in the news. Abortions are rare enough that most people aren’t directly affected by it, and get to cheerfully keep voting R.

So let’s make a bet: when do you think Texas will pass a more narrow law? When do you think they’ll leave the “wacky” regime behind in favor of that elusive common-sense situation?

Texas just clarified the standards for a medically necessary abortion. Kate Cox would not have been covered under the new standards either, but let's not pretend Texas criminalized miscarriage care(because it's not a pregnancy anymore).

Ken Paxton does not have unilateral control over the state's abortion policy, and the republicans in the legislature will likely clean up the definition now that Dade Phelan(who can't get any abortion laws passed post-Dobbs because he supports a rape exception) will not be speaker.

Do you have a link? All I found in the statutes was from 2013 or earlier. Is this an agency guideline?

I don’t think Texas criminalizes miscarriage. I said we’re still actively creating the situations @100ProofTollBooth dismisses as “head-scratchers.” Mainly in the haze around “medical necessity.” I expect that to continue so long as the Texas Republican Party can make political hay out of the issue. Phelan or not, there’s little incentive to play the careful technocrat. Not on one of the prime culture war battlegrounds.

I think there’s another reason for the environmental and student loan gap between men and women. It’s the level of interaction with the economy that drives those divisions. For a man his interaction with the economic system is “I have to get a good job or be a failure.” This makes men a lot less willing to slow the economy for the environment, and much more likely to choose economically viable majors. For a woman interaction with the economy isn’t about success and survival, it’s about prestige in some sense. They don’t have to care about the money as much (that’s their husband’s job) so they tend to cluster in aspirational positions and fun arty jobs and so on. Those jobs aren’t needed and aren’t necessarily subject to the constraints of the government. They also don’t pay that well, despite women getting 4-year degrees to qualify for them. So women want out from under the loans, obviously. And because they’re not doing work that would be harmed by the government enforcement of environmental regulations, they don’t need to stop them.

I think the education-industrial-complex is probably the driver of the vast majority of these gaps. The male experience in school has become increasingly miserable. And their opinions of the opinions of the overwhelmingly female/feminine teacher class is reflecting a rebellion from those views. Whereas school is now the ultimate feminized environment where traditional female status games are the primary ones that are allowed to exist and are directly encouraged by authority figures.

Compounding this, the specific choices men and women make of which area of education they pursue and what economic prospects those have select women to be more burdened by debt.

And women are vastly overrepresented in the "social work" jobs eligible for loan forgiveness, which in retrospect was obviously a "free college for party members" giveaway.

Agree, but that is probably also a subset of the issue I am trying to highlight. School is not fun for boys. Thus, only the high achieving boys, or those with a specific interest elect to continue with it. School for girls is like being in water for fish. They can just kind of mindlessly continue through the system with no real goal. So some major, any major, serves the purpose of them getting an organized sit and talk session.

I mean, the actual reality here is it turns out, women are actually much better at the type of schooling initially dominated by boy's for decades - aka, sit at a desk and listen to a teacher for hours upon hours, which even with whatever changes to pedagogy there have been, still seems to be the prominent way education is done, except maybe now there's a few more computer screens.

It's interesting how there wasn't there criticism of this type of schooling when men were 70% of college students - no, the boys were just told to sit down and listen instead of being given excuses by conservatives.

It's interesting how there wasn't there criticism of this type of schooling when men were 70% of college students

Back when men were 70% of college students, the men who actually made it there were also the kinds of men who were actually high achievers and would benefit from that.

College was far from mandatory for any job- you could quit at Grade 10 (or earlier, in some cases) and still expect to make a reasonably decent living. Men (and women) for whom additional schooling would not help could just... leave, and be a full-fledged adult at 16 (which gives them far greater time to achieve their goals and become more mature). Now we have grade inflation and people now need a college degree to receive government-mandated UBI (i.e. workers employed in the education-managerial complex) because high school graduation rates became a target and thus ceased to be a good measure of graduate competence.

you could quit at Grade 10 (or earlier, in some cases) and still expect to make a reasonably decent living.

My dad did this (in the late 70s) and was able to support a family of five (in the 80s and 90s) on just his single income.

Start making evaluation of students at school track objective measures of learning instead of whether the teacher vibes with the kid, and maybe you'd have a point. As it stands, boys significantly outperform girls on standardized tests, particularly at the top end. It's likely the abandonment of objective standards that students can fairly compete over is a major part of why boys are disengaging (and also explains the collapse of the college wage premium). It's not surprising that when you turn school into a question of who can flatter a teacher and her their biases more that you end up favoring girls.

Boys still score higher than girls on standardized tests and other objective measures. They just do worse when you include subjective assessments of their abilities.

Is homework a subjective measure? IIRC girls, especially teenagers, do a lot better at getting their homework done and turning in assignments on time. Granted, a typical middle school homework assignment is not some tough test of intelligence- it's more like "read a chapter of the book, then write a paragraph of plot summary to prove that you did actually read it." But then, that's what a lot of real-life work assignments are like too- "do what i tell you, get it done, don't complain about being bored."

Except the systems and the goals are completely different. In the old days, yes, the boys were told to sit their asses down and listen, for the period of time that class was. But class was shorter, intermissions longer, and rough play was allowed during the intermissions. In addition, a GOAL of the old system was kicking kids out. A huge attrition rate is desirable because only a small % of people were expected to continue on with school. It would be a waste for Jimmy to keep going to school forever when he's going to work on the farm anyways.

In many ways, the failure of our current system is the lack of attrition, particularly among the girls. But I'd think halving the number of boys currently in university and cutting girls to about that number would be a huge improvement.

But if the system says attrition is bad, it should look at the causes of attrition.

There's lots of arguments you could make there as to the content and framework of education. Things didn't used to be this dominated by administrative minutiae and social games. Men thrive in straightforwardly competitive environments, which used to be provided for in schooling and was specifically de-emphasized through reform.

You can't really deny cultural changes so mainstream that they get Simpsons episodes made about them.

But who cares for this pointless score keeping anyhow. It used to work for men, and now it doesn't. Why and how do we fix it? Mocking them isn't helping answer that question.

This is exactly the sort of reflexive sneering that shows there's no argument to justify your position beyond "haha you have no power to stop us hurting your children, and we do it because it's funny to us".
Nor is there any concern for "fairness", which was just tactical rhetoric until you were in a position to jeer at the kids your policies hurt.
All those arguments about "implicit bias" go right out the window when studies show teachers are biased against a group you want to torture for fun, because your "concerns" about bias were only ever an excuse for power to hurt people.

The experience of interacting with leftists and learning about how they behave has been horrific. Like hearing a voice crying for help in the woods, only to come face to face with a giant spider mimicking human speech to ambush prey.
Is there even any motivation to the entire ideology beyond sheer pointless malice?

As I said last thread, he's doing you the service of taking the mask off. They know what they're going to do, they're going to do it, and if you won't accept their thinly-veiled justifications, they'll just use force; they are in no way scrupulous about that.

Also a huge portion of the college degrees require a big left wing government. Sociology majors need a welfare state. Much of the regulation the government invents requires college educated bureaucrats to enforce. A radical reduction of the state would be an absolute disaster for gender studies majors. Lots of college educated women work in child care and other fields that are built around feminism.

I feel like this is an underappeciated factor both here and in the general discourse that also plays into wider trend of Democrats being increasingly unmarried and childless.

Even if they're not participating in the economy directly, wives will be concerned about thier husband's prospects and mothers that of thier children.

A cynic might theorize that recognition of this "family dynamic" is at least partially behind the hate Trump's pick of Vance as VP has gotten from certain elements of both the left and right.

Reading Motte discussion of gender essentialism makes me want to partake in another very male-coded activity and shoot myself. I guess I’ll keep this brief:

Is it possible that the statistics overstate this gap? A 30-point difference is kind of big if it’s 15 for, 15 against. Something with 5 vs 35 for is still an obvious policy win.

But noooo. WSJ gets good mileage out of telling people they’re actually an embattled minority, so this gets to be “America’s New Political War”. Look at that opening quote. I find that a lot of thinkpieces melt away if you ignore anything that starts with “it seems…” This guy is asking different questions than the polls are answering.

So how many of the 30-pt culture war battlegrounds are actually disagreements in direction rather than magnitude?

I am surprised that you had trouble understanding the economic gap between men and women. Women dominate the economic sectors of health-care and education (especially administration). These are also the two sectors being pumped-up by government-subsidized demand. Of course they won’t vote for the gravy train to end. The male computer engineering graduates aren’t the ones who are expected to default on student loans. It’s the female psychology majors.

This does help clarify and I am also surprised I didn't think of that.

Learning has occurred.

This is a very unfortunate state of affairs for everyone, but I’d flag that the left needs to be careful here, more so than the right. In the event of a collapse of the existing social and political order, young men play an outsize role in both committing and defending against acts of violence. To the extent that the left can’t call on this constituency in a time of crisis, it may be disastrous for them.

Is it an unfortunate state of affairs though? Or is it just normal? My dad was more conservative than my mum, way back in time. They've been married 60 years. How much of our civilization is built between the different preferences of men and women pulling at each other? That men work to deliver what women want so that they can have women is as old as building a shack and a fire.

Just because there are differences doesn't mean its a problem after all. In fact the differences could be what drives our societies to improve. Signalling and status are huge motivators.

There’s no equivalence. It’s one thing when men and women compromise on an individual basis in the context of marriage despite differences in points of view. It’s entirely different to have social conditions of increasing atomization and an overall decline of social engagement where young men and women are, relatively speaking, getting politically radicalized in opposite directions, which appears to be a phenomenon without historical precedent.

politically radicalized in opposite directions, which appears to be a phenomenon without historical precedent?

And? Lots of things are without historical precedent. It doesn't mean they are actually problems. It's a self correcting issue. Either through assortative mating, or in people who won't reach out across the aisle simply not having relationships while others will find their desires for companionship overcome their political biases, or they don't and simply don't pass on their genetics. There is nothing that needs to be done, a new balance will be found.

By definition, society is only able to adapt to, and withstand the effects of, events with precedent, as it obviously lacks experience in dealing with events without. It’s the same thing as armies preparing to fight the last war, which is understandably the butt of jokes, but unfortunately nobody can prepare for the next war, as nobody has seen it yet. Every event without precedent has the potential to result in an enormous crisis.

Also, the social radicalization in question is mostly happening in one direction only, which is not something that is discussed to a larger extent here, as far as I can see. In the past decade or so, it’s leftists, and leftist single women in this particular case, that are mainly radicalizing in Western societies, not rightists. This is mostly resulting from intentional, systematic and choreographed propaganda campaigns directed at them. Thus I find it rather rich on your part to declare that “there is nothing that needs to be done, a new balance will be found”. I’m sure you’re aware that any social concern of the liberal Left can simply be dismissed out of hand according to the same line of reasoning, aren’t you?

Anyway, frankly I find your attitude regarding this rather conceited, so I don’t have anything else to add.

If society could only deal with things with precedent it could never have developed in the first place as early societies would constantly be encountering things for the first time. So i think your first point is demonstrably in error.

I think you're also getting mixed up between the meta and object levels. If you think society is going to be better with lots of kids then you can and arguably should campaign for and have lots of kids yourself. No issues there! But my point is that regardless of what you do, or what we do individually societies are exceptionally resilient and adaptive. Societies survive civil wars, coups, nuclear bombs, plagues, ice ages, famines. Civilizational collapse and more.

My point is not that you shouldn't try to change something. Its that at a societal scale adaptions will happen regardless as situations change. Because pressures will emerge whether anyone is planning them or not.

Even the leftist stuff you decry is an example, the pressures that created that movement exist outside of the movement itself.

You need to think at a much more macro level when looking at societies. Big changes are the result of cascades. Leftism could not have got to this point without the relevant circumstances having been created by prior societal choices and outcomes which created a favorable environment for those leftist ideas to be successful. And in turn the outcomes of this wave, will create the conditions for the next, which might be a more conservative swing, or something else we won't predict.

People are just the vector at this scale. Individual choices are socially mediated as a gestalt that no-one has control of.

If you want to shape a wave thats fine. Everybody does, just be aware the ocean will exist whether your wave breaks or not. That is my point.

If society could only deal with things with precedent it could never have developed in the first place as early societies would constantly be encountering things for the first time.

Well, yes, societies have the potential to undergo development/refinement in such conditions, that much is certainly true. But they can also degenerate and collapse, which is what a demographic implosion is likely to result in, or at least contribute to.

I don't think women in a healthy society would, say, be greatly invested in making it more socially acceptable to kill their children, for example.

Entirely depends. What is healthy for a society can be very different than what is healthy for specific individuals. In any case it will resolve itself as the population rises or falls.

Why would a woman in a healthy society not want to retain control over whose children she'll carry and invest into, and when? Robust systems have failsafes.

You could justify a whole lot of things by explaining their benefit to some party involved and calling it a failsafe. I don't see how that's a compelling pro-infanticide argument.

What's your criteria of a healthy society, then?

The gaps seems larger than in that generation, and we have a highly plausible locus of the difference: Modern education. Girls are opting in, boys are opting out. Its clear why, modern schools are almost cartoonishly designed to be anti-boy. More girls are going to college now. That's a 60/40 gap, despite boys actually out-competing girls in the top 10/20% of educational accomplishment.

Old schools were designed to be "anti-boy." My dad was a headmaster in one, who do you think most of their discipline was aimed at? How many boys did he literally beat obedience into with a belt and paddle?

The problem does not appear to be that modern schools are anti-boy, more than they are not policing boyish behaviour enough.

Your theory is there is increased levels of unpoliced physical play in schools in 2024 compared to 1990?

Yes. In that teachers are not allowed to actually discipline or police children effectively nowadays.

So all activity is non-policed.

Perhaps at the degenerate schools. At the schools where most mid-high achieving students will attend there is vigorous policing. Anti-bullying investigations by schools are expansive and go off campus. Recreation is heavily policed with things like dodgeball, football, etc banned during recess and PE.

At the schools where most mid-high achieving students will attend there is vigorous policing

No there is not, that is my point. There is little to no actual punishment for students. Suspension and expulsion and investigations are not real punishments that channel male aggressive behaviors constructively. Unless either the teachers or parents are giving actual punishments that kids care about, then that is not policing. Teachers are not allowed to, and most parents do not seem to want to.

Then because you cannot actually correct behaviour, you ban the things that might lead to it. That isn't policing. it is ducking the problem entirely.

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When women’s suffrage was first passed, and for several decades after, women voted, on average, more conservatively than men. I don’t think anyone knows for sure why women are now much more liberal, but some have speculated that it has a lot to do with the rising number of unmarried, childless women. Women (and men) who are married with children tend to be much more conservative than their single, childless counterparts.

In fact the differences could be what drives our societies to improve.

Looking at the last decade, does it seem to you that society is improving?

Absolutely. There are always ups and downs of course, and the last decade perhaps hasn't improved as fast as previous, but a better question to look at is is, has society improved from say the 70's. And the answer I think is (to me!) clearly yes. And part of that is due to progressive influences. Those influences in turn may push too far and alienate people and cause a reaction (just how the progressive movement itself was welded together), some changes are rolled back, some stick, but all in all, humanities story is onwards and upwards.

My kids have it better than I did by a significant margin. This world is significantly less violent and much wealthier than the one I was born into. My kids have and had opportunities I could never have dreamed of. There are still wars and atrocities of course, and there always will be.

My perspective as an outsider in the US, is that things are not nearly as bad as being made out to be by either side. And that stepping away from media and social media, it is quite possible for a middle class Brit to live among both Red tribe rural Trump voters while married to a black urban liberal woman with no problems whatsoever, and also for the same middle class white Brit to be in the middle of the ghetto fixing a fence in a straw hat and khakis and attract nothing but curiosity.

My wife's cousin brought her kids around last weekend, and I was teaching them cricket and showing them my video game collection and I invited my white Republican neighbor over for the bbq, and he was teaching them about hunting. Overall this country is doing just fine in my opinion.

Now many parts do have real problems, rural Rust belt white communities and urban black ones are very similar in many ways (both my wife and J.D. Vance were raised by their grandmothers, in and around poverty and drug use). But overall, yeah I am pretty optimistic about both the world and the USA itself. You're a positive resilient nation with an exuberance and enthusiasm that is somewhat enchanting to this cynical Brit at least. You have problems, but you are great problem solvers and both Red and Blue Tribers can get along, with the moderate middle of each pushing back against the excesses of either side.

This world is significantly less violent and much wealthier than the one I was born into. My kids have and had opportunities I could never have dreamed of.

This happens to be precisely the thing that is no longer true.

That men work to deliver what women want so that they can have women is as old as building a shack and a fire.

I think the distopian view would go something like

  1. Men, fundamentally, no longer care what women want and don't care to have a long term mate. So they just take care of their basic needs and then use any extra income they generate for substance abuse, mindless hobbies, and ...

  2. The consumption of commoditized sex. Even if we never get to fully legal prostitution, AI girlfriends and hyperabundant porn might get to the point where it is satiating enough for a plurality of men. Which leads to...

  3. A drastic imbalance between the number of women looking for an eligible long term partner and the number of available and looking eligible men. If you look at the numbers after WW2 in places like Belorussia and Ukraine, anything past 55/45 female-to-male is HUGE. If we got to something "even" at 60-40 (for my above criteria) things would get weird. Harems, polyamory (shit, that's already on the menu), hyper-sociopath-players, spousal surveilance and, for a minority, a drastic RETVRN to harsh conservative religious models of gender roles.

You can see how this would put society into a very fragile state of affairs. I don't personally think it will get this bad, but I do believe the cost of avoiding it will be some amount of younger Millenial and Gen-Z men growing up, living, and dying alone (and often early) to shock society back into working to restore generative relations between the sexes.

You can see how this would put society into a very fragile state of affairs.

Not really, you yourself pointed out a whole bunch of ways society has of dealing with those issues. That society would change is a given, but looking at history you can have stable societies with all kinds of social norms. The men that don't care about getting a woman won't procreate, those that will or can, will. Society will go on.

Society can't work to restore relations between men and women, society is the emergent outcome of millions of individual decisions of men and women. It will change as those decisions change. It might bounce back and forth between different models, and that is ok.

Society can't work to restore relations between men and women

Can it work to restore relations between blacks and whites though? Heterosexuals and homosexuals?

So far society doesn't seem to be shocked by this at all and in fact seems perfectly willing to make that happen so far as those men are not angry enough to cause problems. I've seen people here positively argue for mollifying the male masses with video games and pornography.

There are some people, even important people, giving a concerned look at the birth rates; but nobody is seriously considering any solution to the problem because that would require abandoning some individual freedoms that have now become a sacred given, on both sides.

Can you really imagine a politician successfully selling a ban on onlyfans and no-fault divorce? Let alone on abortion and pornography? These things were already hard to maintain when people were religious, asking people to give those away without a spiritual revival seems far fetched, and such a revival seems impossible without fire and brimstone raining down on us for at least a little bit.

Male misery isn't going to cut it, we're not sympathetic enough. I've watched enough MRAs try in vain to know this by now. All it's going to take is all we have.

In the medium term, how likely are young men to take to the streets, instead of wasting their lives watching porn and playing whatever the modern equivalent of WoW is?

We are a long way from the point where there's a domestic civil war. I think the left should pay a lot more attention to the needs of men, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that it loses anything if it doesn't. Men are just withdrawing from society and stagnating, not rioting. Even vote wise, each male vote lost is more than compensated by an additional female vote won.

Civil wars are for motivated people, but unmotivated people still have an effect. 4chan NEETs may be a bit pathetic in their tongue in cheek glorification of a miserable hikki life, but you can't run a society if most men refuse to participate.

So you'll get rot and ruin, nothing getting maintained, rampant banditry, people screaming for help with nobody answering. Low trust society all around. No bangs now, only whimpers.

I expect things to get back to organization and positive action once a small cadre of competent men realize that this unmaintained society is ripe for conquest. But "there is a lot of ruin in a nation".

but you can't run a society if most men refuse to participate.

Why not? Sure, you couldn't in the past, but we were less technologically advanced then. Many of the things that you needed men to do have been automated to the degree they're done by machines, and others can now be done by women instead. Add in that immigrant men are still willing to participate, because it beats the alternative back in the old country.

Who's going to maintain all that technology? If your answer is immigrants, why should they want to stay here once you're no longer competitive? And what's left then?

And this is all without the elephant in the room of who's going to prevent your nice technological society from just falling into the hands of it's enemies. For all the meme posts about wine aunt air support throwing JDAMs around, it's still the good old AK holding young adult man that's moving the Ukrainian front in either direction.

I have seen the world of machines, and it isn't operated by women, whatever the propaganda posters say. Women mostly work safe email jobs that aren't "essential workers".

You’ll basically end up with a society that looks like Atlas Shrugged, minus the fantasy mountain retreat of the hypercompetent.

Nonsense, me and my fellow Principled Libertarians saw this coming and are rushing through every part of the tech tree that might lead to Galt's Gultch. If it is physically possible we will have it. We possibly already do.

You may have to buy some expensive NFT or proclaim some weird religious beliefs to get in, though I suppose that was also the case of the fantasy one.

Galt's Gulch in the novel required violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It's not physically possible. And anyway state capacity is too great for it even ignoring the physical impossibilities.

You can't seriously be arguing that state capacity is increasing at the moment.

Why not? State capacity is absolutely enormous at the moment, and it's certainly not getting smaller. Yes, a lot of people are getting away with a lot of crimes, but that's only because those in charge see no advantage to turning the state on them. A Galt's Gulch would disappear faster than you could say "David Koresh".

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Why not? Or perhaps just holding steady? Or, at the very least, if decreasing, then decreasing very slowly, even as the "capacities" of private individuals are also shrinking, perhaps even faster.

Something something 'there's a lot of ruin in a nation.'

Seems like the bet is that they can stave off a sharp collapse for a while and even if there is one as long as they control the narrative then most men won't be inspired to suddenly turn to violence to either attack the existing order or to defend a competing one.

It is really hard to imagine a group of capable young men organizing into something resembling a warband without being infiltrated by six different federal agencies, vilified to hell and back by every media company, and possibly debanked and deplatformed as well.

Which is just to say, they'd probably have to push things REALLLLLLLLY far before this became a real concern. Which is not me saying that it won't get there.

In and of itself, it probably isn’t. But we are in the midst of a poly-crisis, and this is another unstable element in an already rickety Jenga tower.

Yeah, that's perhaps my take on it.

We're in prime 'Black Swan' territory where the interaction of several different crises at once can lead to sharp and SUDDEN downturns from angles we weren't looking at directly.

My position is that Covid sufficed to pull a LOT of slack out of the system. Putin started strumming on the taut strings. China (or any number of other actors) might just go ahead and take a wire cutter to the strained order and let things fall where they may.

Generally agree with this.

The slow motion catastrophe is already self-evident; Women are competing for a shrinking pool of eligible long term partners and subgroups of men are either (a) opting out of mating altogether or (b) sociopathically exploiting the inherent ambiguity of courtship for their own benefit. You have more divorce, more single parenthood (mostly single motherhood), and constant household instability.

The primary society wide result will be that the next generation grows up developing a lot of maladaptive traits.

Then, we get the warbands.

Interesting observation there.

You get a cohort of males raised without discipline from father figures, and eventually realizing that the only thing restraining their bad behavior is physical force, and maybe noticing that there's a shortage of people who are capable of using physical force to stop them.

If these men are likewise convinced that their lives will not improve by following along with the roles society suggests, then yeah, what else COULD happen?

You get a cohort of females raised without discipline from father figures, and eventually realizing that the only thing restraining their bad behavior is nothing, and maybe noticing that there's a shortage of people who are capable of using physical force to stop them.

Which describes the state of '80s and '90s particularly well. If the nastiness in gender relations is cyclical (and relative equality should suggest that it is), then you'll get the men doing it next.

It’s also a problem in the event of any great power foreign conflict that requires a draft.

It has also already toppled one nation, though whether one considers Afghanistan a nation is up for debate.

The female divergence is interesting, because from a somewhat objective perspective almost every single policy that has been passed on the state and federal level for almost 100 years has been explicitly designed to benefit them directly or indirectly. There's certainly been close to ZERO that would advantage men over women. Just a random smattering: Marital rape exceptions have been repealed across the board, Title IX has ensured Womens' sports survive, the ACA requires birth control be covered in full by insurance even for those who can't give birth, there's special accommodations for females in military service, and there's virtually no restrictions on women's sexual behavior on either a legal or social level. Indeed, regardless of what 'mistakes' a woman makes in this area, there's probably a program designed to alleviate the consequences at almost no cost to herself.

But there's always some other new issue that is now causing them horrible discomfort that must be addressed immediately, at all costs.

Seems like there are a few incontrovertible facts on the ground:

  1. Women have, year over year, decade after decade, been getting LESS HAPPY since about 1970, despite receiving virtually every political benefit possible, as described above.

  2. The percentage of females taking psychiatric drugs for diagnosed disorders has massively increased.

  3. Females, or specifically unmarried ones, have been swinging further and further left by any reasonable measure.

Which is to say, they want MORE political interference on behalf of disadvantaged minorities, even when they themselves are quite literally the most advantaged group in the entire world.

Feel free to controvert any of said facts if you have reliable information to the contrary!

My basic thought on this is that we now have a huge sub-population of perpetually dissatisfied voters, who are particularly sensitive to fear-inducing stimuli, and are constantly under the influence of some kind of mind-altering substance. Who are also constantly, incessantly, loudly pushing for more of the sorts of policies that haven't led them to happiness and life satisfaction in the past. Nothing will appease them, granting political rights hasn't helped, medication hasn't helped, control of an increasingly large share of the economic pie hasn't helped. Give a woman billions of unearned dollars, she'll still go all in for Leftism!

(On a side note, its interesting that the single easiest path for a female to become a billionaire is... to divorce a billionaire. Actually rather amazing that the law of this country enables someone to claim billions of dollars on the basis that they're not satisfied with their marriage. And if a billionaire can't keep his woman satisfied, what hope do the rest of us have?)

While we simultaneously have an entire media edifice/egregore screaming in their ear at all hours that they have to be afraid of virtually everything in their environment, including the environment itself, and the only path to safety/protection, absolution for sins, or social acceptance is to fall in line behind [BLUE TRIBE CANDIDATE], and join the mob that is howling at the rest of the population demanding action on whatever the issue du jour is.

So it makes sense to me that there is some level of intentionality behind these developments, because it allows the powers that be to have a reliable voting bloc that can be pushed towards or away from any given policy goal simply by adjusting the messaging sent out to this group so as to scare them into supporting whatever said powers need to do at that given point in time. If TPTB want them to be afraid of taking an 'untested' vaccine, they can pull that string. If they want them to be afraid of NOT getting the vaccine, they can swap messages. Which is precisely what we saw.

And additionally, to the extent males form a block of uniform voters at all, it is in the interest of the Cathedral/the Machine to keep them divided and demotivated from participating in the political process, lest they advocate for policies on the basis of their expected outcomes or cost/benefit analysis or something.

You’re pretty clearly waging the culture war in your favor here especially in the way you frame and dismiss the “women things.” Take abortion, for example. I say this as someone who is probably more anti-abortion than the median American, but indeed post-Dobbs there is less protection over a woman’s ability to get an abortion and further erosion has been made possible in the future. It’s not a made up thing. You appear to be characterizing this issue as not a “real issue” because you don’t recognize abortion as a right. I mean, fine, we can argue on the merits of whether abortion is a cognizable right but whether a woman can get one matters to lots of women and it’s a live political issue.

A key quote from the article is “Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline.”

Lots of young women would like to be able to get abortions in case they get pregnant while having fun casual sex. Why is the male version of this something cool and fun while the female version of this cat lady hectoring?

Lots of young women would like to be able to get abortions in case they get pregnant while having fun casual sex. Why is the male version of this something cool and fun while the female version of this cat lady hectoring?

While some will say the male version is not cool as well, the fact is you are comparing very different acts. The fact is that women are naturally the gatekeepers of sex. An average young woman who desires to have sex need merely go to a frathouse and remove her clothing, and she will soon be filled by a penis, and eventually if she so desires, semen. A man who disrobes in a sorority or other all female space will soon be in the back of a police car. `

And this is not just because eggs are expensive and sperm is cheap. Although that is a biological reality. The lady in our scenario is more likely to catch an STD by about a 10x factor than the bloke. And if she does its more likely to cause serious damage to her reproductive system. And her system is on a much more tight clock. So our bloke who's "wasting" his sperm at 21 isn't really. He's diminished by 35, but not nearly as much as our girl. And at 45, forget it. She's approaching zero fertility or already there. He is at, "improve your diet and exercise so you have a good shot over a 6 month period".

So yeah, one activity is low effort and actively hostile to your long term fertility. The other is high effort and has de minimus effect on your long term fertility. Pretending they are similar is silly.

You appear to be characterizing this issue as not a “real issue” because you don’t recognize abortion as a right. I mean, fine, we can argue on the merits of whether abortion is a cognizable right but whether a woman can get one matters to lots of women and it’s a live political issue.

This pretty clearly isn’t inherent in the issue because the reasoning it matters so much to women is implausible conspiracy theories about the handmaid’s tale and government pregnancy tracking.

You appear to be characterizing this issue as not a “real issue” because you don’t recognize abortion as a right.

Absolutely correct. This has been my repeatedly stated position for years.

Why is the male version of this something cool and fun.

I can see that there's some ambiguity in my original phrasing, so let me address that. Young men do want freedom, recklessness, and adrenaline. The destruction of masculine models of behavior is bad because we have to rechannel those desires into something prosocial and constructive. If you simply let young boys go out and be free and reckless adrenaline junkies you get gangs, violence etc. Society should channel it in other ways and, I believe, we used to.

Lots of young women would like to be able to get abortions in case they get pregnant while having fun casual sex.

Both of these things are objective anti-social in my estimation. I won't call casual sex 'immoral', but I definitely apply that label to abortion.

There's nothing wrong with young women going out to have fun at festivals/bars/backpacking through europe, whatever. I think casual sex should be treated very carefully. I think abortion is a natural consequence of sex and that people should have to deal with their consequences.

Young men who want to be reckless absolutely face consequences. Get into a fight? Might get your ass kicked, might go to jail. Gang up on someone else and ambush them with your buddies? Jail. Steal something. Jail. Drive fast late at night. Jail (or death). We as a society have spent centuries moderating young male behavior (and, as stated above, rechanneling it) because of its destructive power. I don't think objectively young female activities are as destructive - and so I am, in fact, inclined to give a little more leeway. But that doesn't mean there are (or should be) zero consequences.

Lots of young women would like to be able to get abortions in case they get pregnant while having fun casual sex. Why is the male version of this something cool and fun while the female version of this cat lady hectoring?

I've never understood this argument. It's not cool and fun when men engage in casual "fun" sex, nor is it cool when women do it. The more we treat sex as something separate from a person emotionally, physically, and spiritually, the more it become commodified and exposed to a 'free market' exchange of sex, in which selfishness is prioritized instead of mutual building. Suddenly we have an increase of single parents which is well documented to lead to worse behavioral outcomes for men, which even the politically washed Bing-GPT still spits out:

Male children of single parents face unique challenges and experiences. Here are some key points:

Demographics: A growing number of single-parent households are headed by fathers. As of recent data, 16.1% of single-parent households are led by fathers, up from 12.5% in 2007 1.

Educational and Behavioral Outcomes: Studies show that boys raised in single-parent households may face more behavioral and academic challenges compared to those in two-parent households. However, the presence of a supportive and involved parent can mitigate many of these issues2.

Economic Factors: Single-parent households, especially those led by mothers, are more likely to experience financial difficulties. This can impact the resources available for the child’s education and extracurricular activities2.

Emotional and Social Development: Boys in single-parent households might experience different social dynamics. They may take on more responsibilities at home and develop a strong bond with the custodial parent1.

Role Models: The absence of a male role model can be a concern, but many single mothers and fathers actively seek out positive male influences for their sons through family, friends, and community programs3.

It's not cool and fun when men engage in casual "fun" sex, nor is it cool when women do it.

This is a very contrarian opinion. On one hand, go off king. On the other hand you are really swimming against the tide on this one.

It's not cool and fun when men engage in casual "fun" sex

No offense but you need to touch grass

  • -30

Your talking points are straight out of 2015, it's amazing that you just pretend the last decade of evidence for e.g. title IX abuses doesn't exist

Either make the actual argument, or keep it to yourself. Dropping in for an insult is against the rules.

No offense but you need to touch grass

Notably, this is not actually an argument.

Can you provide a rigorous distinction between "casual fun sex" and "rape culture", as understood by current-year Feminism? I certainly can't, and I notice most feminists can't draw one either.

It tries to change, through brute legislative force, the most private and intimate of adult acts. It is sweeping in its redefinition of acceptable consent; two college seniors who've been in a loving relationship since they met during the first week of their freshman years, and who, with the ease of the committed, slip naturally from cuddling to sex, could fail its test.

The "yes means yes law is terrible, but necessary...

If the Yes Means Yes law is taken even remotely seriously it will settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt and creating a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent. This is the case against it, and also the case for it. Because for one in five women to report an attempted or completed sexual assault means that everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.

We're a full decade past the point where the ideological schizophrenia within Feminism became impossible to ignore. Naïve ra-ra sex-positivism is dead, Jackie killed it, and Title IX cremated the corpse. If you disagree, take it up with Ezra Klein and the DOE.

ideological schizophrenia within Feminism

I think it's better understood as "the Junior Anti-Sex League wearing a rotting skinsuit of sex positivity", which is why feminism for the last 10+ years has been very concerned with promoting everything-but-straight-sex.

The problem with doing that is that eventually, you run out of road and have to get more extreme to still be considered sex-positive, which is why they've pivoted to things like valorizing the castrated (i.e. transgenderism) and ensuring that, provided you pass a paper bag test, the age of consent does not apply to you.

Was Sex Positivity ever actually workable, or did culture war dynamics aid in sweeping its contradictions under the carpet for a decade or two? "Skinsuit" implies that there was something alive and worthwhile inside that skin in the first place. Does it seem to you that this was the case?

It seems to me that Horny Liberalism was never actually going to work long-term. Sex is not, in fact, harmless fun; it simply has too many consequences, physical and psychological, for it to be treated as such. Those consequences can be hidden for a time, but they build up and sooner or later they demand a reckoning. For that matter, it seems likely to me that the same is true for LGBTQ2A+; the reckoning will come, sooner or later.

Was Sex Positivity ever actually workable, or did culture war dynamics aid in sweeping its contradictions under the carpet for a decade or two?

The latter. It "worked" for a small group of elite men, who could use their celebrity star power to reel in an endless series of naive young women (or teenagers), bang them, and cast them aside. Their wealth and social status shields them from most of the worst consequences. Huge boost for them over the days of Victorian England, when even a celebrity aristocrat like Lord Byron faced the risk of a lynch mob from his scandalous actions.

But its not going to work- it cant work- for the average male. There's not enough women to go around for wvery guy to get groupies, and women aren't going to be attracted to the average guy compared to the celebrities she sees on TV. The women who do sleep with those celebrities often end up psychologally scarred from the encounter. Or in the extreme case, trafficked to Epstein's island or something similiar.

[I hope this is at least somehow coherent. If I had more time I'd compose a post that has more of a condensed point.]

Sex is not, in fact, harmless fun; it simply has too many consequences, physical and psychological, for it to be treated as such.

Sex is harmless fun so long as you're a man liberal. Most people are not men liberal, a lot of people resent the fact they're not men liberal, and the gender role of men social role of liberals is to make devotion to them not degrading (a role in which they have failed as is in their nature to do, and something that "well, the man brings home so much money that I can deal with the occasional mistress standards of living are increasing so quickly that even spaces free of all that liberalism are enhanced by accepting that the sanctity of the commons is diminished by their presence").

The Sexual Revolution made it possible for a lot of women to enjoy being men liberals too. Technology and antibiotics brought the risks of straight sex to an all-time low; so women on the margins (with a slightly higher risk tolerance) could reasonably expect to get more action without getting knocked up. Which is good [citation needed]. It helped marriages in all sorts of ways, too; you could actually have a healthy marital sex life without having so many children that you couldn't fit them all in the station wagon.

And then the '80s came and the places you could meet people all died. And a turbo-STD came out as a death sentence. And the economic golden age ended, so the social stakes went higher (to the point where the non-liberals were once again empowered to whip out their purity boners and fuck up everything). In short, sexual liberalism stopped being affordable; it recovered slightly in the '90s and '00s only to take a dive [suspiciously coincident with the rise of ZIRP economics, now that I think about it].

Do I think it was worthwhile to encourage high-value transgender liberated people (as in, people who are liberals inside but unable to come out of the closet for various sociopolitical/socioeconomic reasons)? Yes, because I think that when people who can do that get to do that, it makes them happier and thus more productive (and considering the people who can do that tend to be of high value more generally- one only need look at how many furries in tech there are- keeping them happy has far more value than keeping an angry wokescold happy and therefore that wokescold should be oppressed by having to suffer the existence of furries). People who are able to act like children/liberals/mistake theorists all day are more innovative than those who have to act as adults/in self-defense/conflict theory; that's why tech startups outcompete large firms. And so on. (If men must toil, they might as well maximize return on investment while they're at it.)

[I do admit this is more 'feelings' than anything else; I haven't measured workplace productivity across free and non-free societies and I'm not even sure you can given different starting conditions. I have noticed that most people who migrate from less liberal nations to more liberal ones tend to be unusually productive, though.]

So yeah, I think there is value in having less friction in sexual relationships (because the negative consequences are less salient, you can disengage from a relationship that goes south much easier), and the need to fuck defensively is net-negative for the enrichment of a class of person who does not actually create anything (while they do tend to spawn 200 pounds of cat food upon death that's not intentional on their part). Especially if we can encourage the people who eventually might end up in the unproductive class to not even consider it.

For that matter, it seems likely to me that the same is true for LGBTQ2A+

I'm honestly not sure how their position follows. I think that the only thing that's going to do them in is some unforseen upheaval that puts them in the same company as the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts (i.e. they fall out of favor with old women while old women are in power), and because they're an excuse for old women to wield power through weaponized tolerance, well...

sweeping its contradictions under the carpet

I think the problem with liberalism/childishness is that it's an emergent property of a society (enabled by its wealth) and not a coherent means of political organization (mainly because once they can organize they're too busy enjoying the fruits to plan long-term). If it was able to do this, it wouldn't be liberal, it would be something else.

Can you provide a rigorous distinction between "casual fun sex" and "rape culture"

Do both parties enthusiastically want to have sex with each other? That is casual fun sex.

It’s really not hard to define rigorously. Of course it’s harder to set down a list objective evidence that proves both people enthusiastically wanted to have sex with each other, but notably for the vast, vast majority of casual sexual encounters the facts are not in dispute.

  • -13

Do both parties enthusiastically want to have sex with each other?

What if one or both parties later think "You know what, I wasn't enthusiastic about it?"

Do both parties enthusiastically want to have sex with each other? That is casual fun sex.

This is not a rigorous definition. A rigorous definition would offer a clear way to distinguish the state of "enthusiastically want to have sex with each other" from the absence of such a state.

It’s really not hard to define rigorously. Of course it’s harder to set down a list objective evidence that proves both people enthusiastically wanted to have sex with each other...

...You say it isn't hard, and then explain why it is hard, and make no effort to actually do it successfully.

but notably for the vast, vast majority of casual sexual encounters the facts are not in dispute.

Do you disagree that the vast majority of rapes are unconvicted, and a large majority unreported?

This is not a rigorous definition. A rigorous definition would offer a clear way to distinguish the state of "enthusiastically want to have sex with each other" from the absence of such a state.

It’s a fully rigorous definition, “enthusiastically want to have sex with the other person” is a well-defined state of the world. Separately, it is difficult to provide objective evidence of this state to outsiders, but that doesn’t mean that the definition isn’t rigorous. Fortunately it’s extremely rare for there to be any disagreements.

  • -16

It’s a fully rigorous definition, “enthusiastically want to have sex with the other person” is a well-defined state of the world.

So it's a rigorous definition because it's well-defined? What makes it well-defined? What are the simple, easy-to-assess components that allow us to distinguish A from !A?

Separately, it is difficult to provide objective evidence of this state to outsiders, but that doesn’t mean that the definition isn’t rigorous.

My understanding is that definitions exist to draw distinctions in reasoning, and rigorous definitions allow us to draw distinctions in reasoning rigorously. You seem to be conceding that your "rigorous definition" can't actually draw distinctions in practical examples of the issue encountered in the real world, which is the fact that I'm attempting to discuss with you. If "rigorous definition" is a hindrance, I'm happy to discard the term and use whichever term you'd prefer to encapsulate the problem of actually determining, whether in advance or in hindsight, whether sex was rape or harmless fun, in a way other than simply the woman's say-so.

If on the other hand, you believe that the woman's say-so is in fact all that is needed, that abuse of this power isn't a problem worth worrying about, and that men concerned about this evident power imbalance are just being silly, I'm prepared to take you at your word. At that point, it would be interesting to hear how you reconcile your perceptions with those of Ezra Klein, the state of California, and the Department of Education, which seem to directly contradict you.

Fortunately it’s extremely rare for there to be any disagreements.

You are arguing that sex is basically just harmless fun in the vast majority of cases, and we don't need to think too hard about the exceptions. Klein is explicitly arguing that enough cases are harmful that a considerable portion of all the Fun in sex needs to be replaced by explicit, government-enforced fear.

So it's all fun, except for the parts you don't want to talk about, and those parts need draconian punishments stripped of due process and all the other procedural safeguards. But they're rare, which is why it's okay to be super-loosie-goosey with who the draconian punishments stripped of procedural safeguards will actually be applied to, and why there's no actual need for someone to be able to tell, in advance, whether they're in danger of them.

Klein says there's a crisis that demands immediate action, and damn the consequences. You say everything's fine.

Which is it?

So the fake "1 in 4 women" statistic about college rape counts as something being "extremely rare"?

I uh, think he had more to his comment there that you failed to respond to.

For my part, casual fun sex is probably the optimal outcome/lifestyle for like <10% of males, who are psychologically inclined against commitment and towards Hedonism, but outside of the literal rockstars who engage in it, merely being a manwhore doesn't make you 'cool' to the larger population.

The point is men having casual sex are widely perceived as cool.

Yes, and the comment you replied to was making a normative rather than descriptive claim, and it’s wild and uncharitable to interpret it otherwise.

Were the anti-drug PSAs in the 80s that said “it’s not cool to do drugs” making a claim about the belief systems of teenagers?

I really do not think that is the case.

For example, is a man who constantly goes to strip clubs to pick up strippers for sex, or hires escorts on a weekly basis... do people consider this guy 'cool' for all the sex he has (and pays for?).

Is the guy who hangs around college campuses to hit on younger girls and seduces a new girl every month or hits up frat parties to bring drunk girls home 'cool?'

Is the guy who trolls the apps and hits on every single unattractive female he can find, and manages to bag one every so often, 'cool?'

I think the 'coolness' is ALMOST ENTIRELY derived from the status of the person engaging in the casual sex. A rock star, a celebrity athlete, maybe the guy who fits the 'bad boy' or 'outlaw' model to a T is 'cool.'

The mere knowledge that a guy engages in lots of casual sex isn't going to raise his social status much, but a guy with a lot of social status will have an easier time getting casual sex, and the fact that he gets so much casual sex is considered a perk of being so cool.

I.e. casual sex doesn't grant men status, men acquiring status grants them casual sex.

I think this is a kind of sleight of hand.

The image of a man who has lots of casual sex is perceived as cool. Movie starts and rock stars, playboy business gurus etc.

The reality is way bleaker - Bikers, gang members, drug dealers, drug abusers, semi-homeless but sort of handsome or a smooth talker, divorced uncles who cruise North Vegas casinos, real estate hustlers and YouTube "buy my course!" influencers. Their sexual partners are not starlets and supermodels - they're desperate, often addicted or otherwise compromised women who are so fragile that a literal smile is all that's needed to win their affections. The reality is that your median "playboy" probably has a familiarity with the criminal justice system and is not someone you would want to hang out with.

This is I believe both inaccurate and extremely uncharitable. Guys who fuck around are probably not mostly criminal losers.

Nor are they mostly superstars. We don't know the real mix, but men that are so successful and popular that women throw themselves at them are rare by definition. The most common non-"criminal loser" guy who has lots of casual sex is a mildly sociopathic college student/young professional: he knows his target demographic, knows how to steer the first or at most the second date towards sex, knows how to dump them the morning after.

But being a guy who gets fresh disposable poon every weekend is lower status than being a guy who gets a new supermodel girlfriend every few years.

Also I think its a reversal of cause and effect.

Guys who are 'cool' just have an easier time getting casual sex.

So casual sex is a perk of being cool.

So yes there's some association with coolness and casual sex, but I can think of a number of scenarios where guys who get regular casual sex are in fact deemed 'pathetic' by society.

Is a guy that goes to Thailand on a regular basis specifically to engage in sex tourism 'cool?' I can't think of a single case of such.

I’m not sure what your point is? I’ve been married for a while but had lots of fun casual sex beforehand?

Why is the male version of this something cool and fun while the female version of this cat lady hectoring?

If abortion advocates would be consistent in making consequence-free sex a human right, not merely for woman, his complaints would ring hollow. But they don't so I would characterize complaints about reduced access to abortion as claims of oppression, while only privileges have been rescinded.

As a taxpayer, child support is a defensive mechanism I rely on to not be indirectly responsible for other people's kids. Or at least a bit less than the alternative.

If there is anywhere a single mom on welfare and food stamps, I advocate the most coercive methods be applied to motivate the father to pay for that child. I'm willing to take a very narrow and permissive understanding of "cruel and unusual" in this matter.

I advocate the most coercive methods be applied to motivate the father to pay for that child

Why not apply "the most coercive methods" to the mother?

She can get a share also. I was responding to a financial abortion post, so my response was deadbeat-dad-focused.

I’m sorry but “financial abortion” is just way too off putting for normies. If men want to get together and advocate for that that’s fine but when actual abortion restrictions are in play it shouldn’t surprise you that advocates focus on that.

Even when abortion restrictions weren't in play, you'd often hear people defending abortion as something needed because having a child substantially impacts the mother and she's often not ready for it. The same argument applies to men, but then to make that analogy becomes something... deeply stigmatized. It is a clear double standard. I say this as someone who broadly supports maternal abortion rights and opposes financial abortion.

I don't think young men are en masse forming a political identity out of financial abortion, but I do suspect they're becoming bitter and listless because of the dominant oppression lens that obscures their actual lived experiences.

impacts the mother and she's often not ready for it. The same argument applies to men

As a man with a kid I will emphatically tell you that there is an extreme asymmetry between being a father who is the sole financial provider and being a woman who carries a pregnancy to term, delivers the baby, and breastfeeds the baby, so much so that it’s basically nonsensical to see the financial aspect and the physical aspect as analogous issues.

  • -11

If you look at the risk of death, the asymmetry is quite small. In the US, the CDC gives maternal mortality of 22 per 100,000 live births (which is probably overstated). The BLS gives an annual workplace mortality rate of 3.7 per 100,000 FTE workers. An absent father is going to end up spending roughly 4 years working to pay child support (20-25% of after-tax income for 18 years), which would give a death toll from paying child support of 15 per 100,000 live births if child support defendants had average workplace death rates. Since men work much more dangerous jobs than women, the true figure is probably higher than the maternal mortality rate. But the crucial point is that the risks of dying due to giving birth or paying child support are of the same order of magnitude.

Except they have to work anyway, and would die anyway. The number of men who die on a job who would not be on that specific job if not for child support payments is likely not that high. Unless there's some society with a much lower workplace death rate that has divorce banned I'm unaware of.

In America (and, to a lesser extent, other 1st-world countries) the socially acceptable way to not work because you don't need to is to retire early - there used to be a soft norm that blue-collar guys retired at 60 if they could. There are plenty of men in their 60's working who would be retired if they had been able to accumulate more wealth, and for a lot of them the reason why they couldn't accumulate wealth was divorce or child support obligations.

I think you are right that the average guy who is irresponsible enough to knock up a sloot is going to spend the money he saves by avoiding child support on driving a bigger truck rather than saving for retirement. But this doesn't affect the moral point I was making, which is that the male role as breadwinner and the female role as mother have similar death tolls.

That's a bit harsh; although I can see the argument that being a sole financial provider for 18 years is a worse deal for the father, the asymmetry isn't so great that you can entirely discount women's contribution.

"The Trump era Tax Cuts" Honestly surprised me given the age cohort. People generally don't start (a) making enough or (b) having to support multiple kids until they're in their 30s to really pay attention to taxes. Given that a lot of stories about young men in particular are about how they don't have real jobs and live at home, this is really unexpected.

I think not. Men are still given the message that they have to work and no one will give them anything if they don't. So "tax cuts" is far more positive for them than for women. (The details don't particularly matter) Young male NEETs exist but they're a fairly small minority, overrepresented online for obvious reasons.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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