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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Western Cultural Appropriation of 4B has induced ample low-hanging-fruit-but-amusing counter-memes. Such as those to the tune of “Trump hasn’t taken office yet and he’s already stopping women from being whores” or “You have nothing! Nothing to threaten me with [dark_knight_joker.png]”.

4B is just 2B, the 2B being sex and children. Actually, it’s just 1B. The 1B being sex. Thankfully so, to spare everyone the “2B or not 2B, that is the question…”-related references.

Without the prospect of sex, men generally would not care for dating women. Without the prospect of children and/or continued sex, men generally would not care for marriage (perhaps jokes on those men who get dead-bedroomed). Without sex, children will not result (aside from side cases like IVF or whatnot). Women striking by abstaining from 1) marriage, 2) dating, 3) birthing, and 4) sex would be just abstaining from 4) sex. Like how me hypothetically striking by abstaining from 1) dunking a basketball, 2) spiking a volleyball, 3) running 110m hurdles, and 4) jumping would be just me striking by abstaining from 4) jumping.

Given assortative mating, to the degree female Harris-supporters would be able to form a cartel to punish men by way of withholding sex, they’d with greater likelihood be punishing male Harris-supporters—not male Trump-supporters. It’d be mostly friendly fire. This is on top of the irony of attempting to punish your perceived political enemies—who you regularly and vociferously claim are incels—by withholding sex, and pwning the conservatives by refraining from casual/premarital sex.

It’s funny how online women, despite their insistence that women have value beyond sex and being Birthing Persons, immediately turn to the threat of withholding sex and bearing children when push comes to shove. Horseshoe theory strikes again: Feminists and manospherians agree, the primary worth of women is sex and child-bearing.

The revealed opinions of online women suggest they know that, if not for the bargaining chip of being gatekeepers of sex and children, their collective or individual negotiating power with men would plummet, perhaps to zero. Some part of them knows how their bread gets buttered.

It’s also funny how many women, despite supposedly being the empathetic sex, can’t fathom or are outright hostile to men having preferences, priorities, interests that don’t revolve around serving women.

Online women like to prattle about how men aren’t entitled to this or that, such as sex or female attraction (even, or especially, within marriage). However, they sure look like they feel entitled to men voting the way they want (in addition to other things like relationships/marriage if sex has already occurred, expensive engagement rings, lavish weddings, husband’s attraction regardless if she’s aged and/or gotten fat, to be wined and dined and taken on cUtE dates and vacations).

Women should look out for themselves and vote for their own perceived best interests. Men should be Decent Human Beings and vote for women’s perceived best interests.

My take: I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race. Men of all races voted for Trump in larger shares than women did, with Hispanic men even preferring him on-net.

I don’t think so. As the possibly apocryphal quote from Kissinger goes, “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's too much fraternizing with the enemy.”

For example, apparently the percentage of US men who voted Trump was 55%, and it was 45% for US women. It was 57% and 13% (simulation scriptwriters are getting lazy…) for Whites and Blacks, respectively.

If women got Thanos-snapped away, I imagine a fair amount of young heterosexual men would be lost in life without the prospect of sex and later children. Life for the modal man would be more boring without the thought of the next chick you might bang, the children you might eventually have: It’d be grey, drab, and dreary. At least in Children of Men, one could still get laid.

If American Blacks and Latinos got Thanos-snapped away, it’d be a great increase to the quality of life for White and Asian Americans. Disproportionate sources of violent crime and net-lifetime-tax consumption gone. Living in a “good school district” would be less of a concern, as would be worrying if your grandmother will get randomly punched in the face. Entire neighborhoods would be available as open real estate. The outlook of White and Asian Americans would immediately become safer and richer.

The other thing is that the targets of this are very likely fellow democrats. The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit. They’re not really going to stick it to Trump voters, they aren’t dating them anyway. They’re refusing sex with Dudes for Harris.

Well, they weren't forharrising hard enough, so they get no prize. Yet again, meritocracy raises its ugly (at least as far as the left's theory is concerned) head.

Have you seen the guys who are white dudes for Harris? I don’t blame women for not wanting to have sex with them.

Isn't this a bit, stated preference vs. revealed preference?

I cannot disagree with you.

That said, kinda low effort booing. You know we frown on posts that are just dunking on your outgroup like this.

Fair enough

The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit.

With mass media and the internet, there are people like anything in every place, just in different proportions. I come from a red area of a red state, and yet there are many progressives here -- I was one, when I was a high schooler. And I've known a great many feminists terrified of Trump who were born and raised here. I've even known women who somehow fit in their brains both evangelicalism and feminism: my favorite was the woman who was obsessed with feminism and railed against the patriarchy, but wouldn't date me (despite straightforwardly saying she wanted to) because, at the time, I was an atheist. Modernity is a funhouse mirror.

Yep. I live in an SEC college town and we had to import our Trump supporting female bartender from California. There are few species of liberal more obnoxious than the first-gen college educated late Xer/Millennial liberal with high-school educated Trump supporting late boomer/Gen X parents, especially if they come from a place where the Moral Majority actually mattered. The middle-aged Yankee liberal English professor might be easy to offend, but was more tolerant in the long run. It's a shame I never got to meet her daughter, who is reportedly very high on the "hot, but crazy" scale (The professor is also this, according to the boomer regular who dated her.). My Gen X mom from George Wallace Democratic stock has been waging a Clintonian holy war on Facebook for far longer than my Gen X father's acquired Trumptardism and addiction to the dumb parts of right-wing Twitter.

Interestingly, the Southern liberals I know from more upper-class backgrounds have been vastly more relaxed about it. One of favorite drinking buddies (He is a hilariously obnoxious womanizer with a country lawyer's drawl and Yellow Fever when drunk.) is a lawyer's son turned Democratic campaign operative. Another is a 40-something professor who never got a steady gig, a hilarious, hopeless dandy who even his liberal female counterparts write off as gay (This does, in fact, cripple his dating life.).

My favorites to drunkenly talk history/politics with are female law students, by a mile. They're well informed and while tough in an argument, they won't take disagreement personally.

This is common enough that right wing twitter/substack has already "invented" a term for it. They call them hicklibs.

This is commonly treated as a slam-dunk argument that Western 4B is counterproductive, but is it really so? What if the intended effect is not that progressive men continue whatever they were doing and get arbitrarily punished with sex withdrawal, nor that some random conservative men also get caught up and punished, but that the men of the tribe go and figure out some way of making sure Trump doesn't win again, be it by running a better campaign, falsifying votes, principles-be-damned lawfare or one million assassination attempt suicide runs on him? What is the actual ratio of blue-tribe men who see the 4B threat and defect to the red tribe to ones who will redouble their efforts whether because they think of tribal duty or imagine that maybe they can personally get ahead enough on the newly established "fight against Trump tooth and nail" ladder that an exemption from 4B is quietly granted to them after all?

Throughout history, propaganda of the form "women will spurn you if you don't do this self-sacrificial thing" has been leveraged too often to be dismissed out of hand. In fact, per what some other posters in these threads say, in general the Korean message that women will not put out unless men work 60-hour weeks to buy a house seems to be achieving its goal just fine, and most Korean men do go on to climb the standard career ladder and work 60-hour weeks and support the lifestyle of their women through the system, rather than "defecting" and going to fraternize with and dedicate their labour to some group of enemy women from the 4Bers' outgroup. Tribal loyalty is strong, and if you write from the perspective of the outgroup it is all too easy to be biased in a way like "Why would blue men not just go red then? As far as my red eyes see, life on the red side is perfectly fine!".

Except there is a large group of women who don’t share the values of the strikers. So effectively you have probably at least 40% of the population already going to defect and they will heavily benefit which would encourage the not true true believers to defect.

The White Feather Movement did not get large numbers of British men to elope with the droves of eligible German bachelorettes. Are you sure nothing like the many factors that led to this are present in the modern US scenario? The cutting of ties that would have been necessary to move and socially establish yourself in an enemy country will surely be necessary to a lesser degree for a blue->red defection, as will the circumstance that red women might not necessarily like blue men over red men (as German women may not have chosen British men over German ones).

imagine that maybe they can personally get ahead enough on the newly established "fight against Trump tooth and nail" ladder that an exemption from 4B is quietly granted to them after all?

"Imagine" is right. The exemptions from 4B will be granted to Chad, like they always are. Chad voted Trump, and he might wear a MAGA hat while collecting 4Bs.

What if the intended effect is not that progressive men continue whatever they were doing and get arbitrarily punished with sex withdrawal, nor that some random conservative men also get caught up and punished

I’m pretty sure that the intended effect is to inspire conservative women that they have safety in numbers and can leave their abusive husbands to become happy progressives.

That this belief is delusional and the husbands are probably not more abusive than the general population is of no matter; this is a small group of radicals.