Crowstep
4hr ago
It's complete bullshit. For one, it's not even happening now, when mate choice is a thing, but more importantly, mate choice being "a thing" is completely novel; historically, marriages were decided by the families of the prospective spouses, not the spouses themselves
Most (but not all) traditional cultures required parental permission for first marriage, but that is a world away from young people having no say and not being able to act on their preferences at all, particularly when it comes to the second marriage that typically happens in a woman's 20s (turns out hunter-gatherers have lots of 'divorce'). But even for the first marriage, vetoes, elopement, affairs, divorce and remarriage all allow people to express their mate choices. If our ancestral environment didn't involve individual mate choice, then we wouldn't have evolved (strong and specific) mate preferences.
And I'm not sure what you mean when you say 'it's not happening now'. I mean, the older man-younger woman pairing is literally universal. There are absolutely no human cultures where the typical relationship involves a younger man and an older woman. None at all.
Crowstep
5hr ago
@ZorbaTHut Any stats on how many new users we're attracting per month? What's the trend like?
Crowstep
17hr ago
We systematically damaged or destroyed every status granting or meaning generating institution for men
Did we? And by we I mean humanity. Because marriage is collapsing in basically every country on earth. That points to something that has affected everyone, not just Anglo or western countries. I think smartphones (or more broadly digital entertainment) are a better explanation than wokeness or whatever.
Fewer women going to college means, on the margins, more of them are likely to seek marriage.
College-educated women are the only ones who are still getting married. The collapse in marriage has been among women (and men) who didn't go to college. College-educated women born in 1980 ended up having the same marriage rate as women born in 1940.
Indeed, the fact that women overtook men in college enrolment in the 1980s mean that graduate women must have been marrying down educationally to make the maths work.
Wage hypergamy is real, educational hypergamy doesn't exist (any more).
Crowstep
22hr ago
If you look at his main period of dominance (1930-1953), there's really only Kaganovich. Everyone else got purged. And then he instituted a bunch of antisemitic campaigns like the attacks on 'rootless cosmopolitans' or the Doctors Plot.
I guess comparing scientific advancement with 'communism' isn't really a fair comparison. The science thing has a clear mechanism. The Askenazim are extremely intelligent and therefore contribute disproportionately to scientific progress. But there's no gene for communism. And even if you argue that there's something about Jewish culture that predisposes them to communism (doubtful when looking at extremely right-wing Israel), almost all the examples of Jewish communists are atheists who have no real attachment to their ethno-religious identity, including Marx himself. The only reason anyone cares is because antisemites seek out things to blame on their hated outgroup.
Crowstep
22hr ago
I'm surprised the forum has kept going as long as it has. If we take the Culture War thread as a barometer, there hasn't even been a significant decline in activity. In early 2024 each thread was getting about 1500 comments, and that's how much the posts are getting today.
I do miss the regular influx of new users that we had when we were on Reddit. I understand why Zorba moved us, as I'm sure it was only a matter of time before the Admins found some pretext to ban the subreddit. Still, I do hope that if activity on this forum declines too much we give Reddit another go. I don't see any other option for attracting fresh blood.
Crowstep
22hr ago
When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes
I mean, how much data are you willing to disregard? We have numbers for almost all countries. The country with the highest age gap is Eritrea at 8.5 years. But outside of the Muslim world and Subsaharan Africa, age gaps are small, and nowhere comes close to 20-30 years. And they're not driven by religious sects who marry young. The average age of marriage in all western countries (even those without any Amish, Haredim or Mormons) is around 30 or higher.
The most parsimonious explanation is that you, an old man who dates young women, hang out with other old men who do the same.
When Jeff Bezos was talking about data and anecdotes disagreeing, he was cautioning against measuring the wrong thing. He wasn't instructing people to ignore all data in favour of generalising their own unusual circumstances to the entire country/world.
Is this strictly a byproduct of age
The Haredi are an interesting example. Haredi women complain about the lack of young men to marry in their fast-growing population, even though the men are just going to study the Torah while she earns the money. The Haredi women have no instrumental reason to prefer slightly older men, he's not going to be the main breadwinner regardless of whether he's 19 or 22.
I mean, I do think the deep evolutionary reasons women prefer older men and men prefer younger women are the obvious breadwinning ability/fertility thing, and obviously women do express a strong, explicit preference for men who earn more money than they do. At the same time, I think in an AI utopia where we all live on UBI you'd still see the familiar age pattern. Men and women do seem to have preferences for relative youth/age qua themselves.
Crowstep
23hr ago
most 20 something girls don’t have major issues dating as high as 50
Citation needed.
The average married couple in the US are two years apart, and that gap has been narrowing for decades with no sign of going back.
Crowstep
23hr ago
I'm not so sure. If Jews made up 20% of communist dictators, you might be able to say that Jews are disproportionately responsible for communism in the same way they are disproportionately responsible for scientific advancement. As it is, Jews have made up 0% of communist dictators (sorry Trotsky). And the reason communism is bad is not whatever bullshit theory Marx and Engels wrote, it's all the killing, repression and poverty caused by its political implementation.
There's a reason that when we think of fascism we think of Adolph Hitler instead of Giovanni Gentile. Fascism is bad because Hitler tried to kill everyone in the world, not because of what an intellectual wrote in a book.
Crowstep
1d ago
Yeah that's a pretty good way to put it. The 'sellers' are young women and the 'cost' they demand is commitment (with concomitant effects on the overall sexual culture).
Young Prudes: Are sex norms mostly a manifestation of sex ratios?
Aria Shrecker of Works in Progress puts forward an interesting hypothesis. What if the sexual revolution of the 1960s was driven not (primarily) by the pill, but by a growing population?
The thesis rests on a few key points:
- Women prefer to marry slightly older men, and men slightly younger women
- With a growing population, there are more young women competing for a smaller pool of slightly older men. In a shrinking population, the reverse is true
- More women leads to more sexual competition between women, and therefore looser sexual norms. Fewer women leads to stricter sexual norms by the same mechanism
1 is fairly uncontroversial, 2 is a mathematical derivative of 1. The only part of contention is whether 3 is true, and if so, how strong the effect is.
There is definitely a correlation between the ratio of men to women at US colleges and its sexual culture. And the mechanism is pretty intuitive. This would also explain the current sex-negative turn among young people. There are fewer 21 year-old zoomettes than there are 23 year-old zoomer boys, and so with the 'upper hand', the young ladies are turning the sexual culture towards their preferences.
The greatest weakness in the hypothesis is that it predicts that a higher male:female ratio should increase commitment (marriages, having children, buying houses together) and all those things are declining. Of course, its possible that atomisation caused by smartphones is simply too strong of an effect and swamps the influence of sex ratios. Peter Foreshaw Brooks points this out in his review of her article.
If Aria is right, then we're soon in line for a marriage boom. Watch this space, folks!
But I also believe that the political influence of Jews over time has been so incredibly negative overall that it undoes all the good things. (Communism is doing a lot of work here).
Seems kind of a stretch to blame communism on 'the Jews'. Like yes, Marx was a (secular) Jew, but Engels wasn't. None of the communist dictators in Russia, Europe, Asia or Latin America were Jewish. And the communist impulse (eat the rich, total power for the government) really doesn't require much theory behind it anyway.
Crowstep
3d ago
How's that "the closest thing"?
A militaristic, nationalistic dictatorship in the 1930s that rejected liberalism in favour of extreme statism and corporatism, suppressed alternative ideologies, promoted traditional values, conquered and brutalised its neighbours and allied with explicitly fascist regimes in Europe.
Japan's racial ideology was slightly different, in that it didn't want to exterminate the Chinese (like Germany wanted to exterminate the Jews and Slavs), just rule over them. And it didn't have a single leader like Mussolini/Hitler and instead had the Emporer as a figurehead with power being held by competing military factions. But based on the many similarities I think it's reasonable to call Imperial Japan the closest thing to East-Asian supremacist fascism. Can you think of another regime that would be closer?
Crowstep
3d ago
I'm pretty sure I'd be better off under fascism that favors East-Asians over current European democracy.
The closest thing we've had to East-Asian supremacist fascism didn't go too well for those under its boot.
Crowstep
5d ago
Ok, and I doubt that Quentin Tarantino was setting out to try to pass the Bechdel test. Arguably, he just made a female-centered action movie and as a natural result of that there was dialogue between women which wasn't about men.
I would say that he passes by writing male dialogue for his female characters. Real life assassins are men, as are people who go on 'rip-roaring rampages of revenge'. Passing the bechdel test is easy, as long as you don't require that any of your characters behave in ways that real women do.
Crowstep
7d ago
I've been reading a ton of Golden Age crime/detective fiction from the period roughly 1900-30s and boy howdy, the women in it are only there to be
Those sound like archetypes, in a genre where (to my understanding) everyone is an archteype. Are the male characters really so rich and multifaceted?
Crowstep
7d ago
I could see how it would be difficult to find women's romance not about a hapless lady stuck in a boring life who gets swept off her feet by a rich and competent suitor
The prototypical Hallmark movie has a female protagonist who is very competent in her high-powered city job before she moves back to her hometown for plot-convenient reasons.
Of course, the city life and her jerk city boyfriend make her miserable, which is why she'd much rather move back and hook up with the handsome widowed lumberjack.
Although you're basically right. The Hallmark movies are just as gender-normative as the billionaire werewolf romance novels.
Crowstep
10d ago
This has me thinking, the idea of "dropping out of the rat race" is very Gen X coded. Youth today think that's "copium" and seem to want to fight for control of the places and positions that matter
I wonder if it's due to young people being raised on social media. The only kind of dropping out they can idolise is the vanlife/digital nomad/world traveller kind that is broadcast on Instagram.
Crowstep
10d ago
A lot of these kind of grouchy iconoclastic guys do a ton of work to carve out their own path but then lack any kind of community and their kids just leave because there's not community for them to become an adult in
I suspect that's what will happen with the Collins' children. I can't see them adopting their dad's techno-puritanism.
Crowstep
10d ago
Huh, TIL. I wonder why there hasn't been such a backlash in the Rugby-playing countries as there has been against American Football.
Crowstep
10d ago
It's possible they are able to introduce enough new equipment and rule tweaks to solve the CTE issue, but the clock is running out
RETVRN to Rugby!
Crowstep
10d ago
you cannot tell me Aphrodite of II is not a man's face stapled onto a woman's figure
I feel like I must be missing something, because I'm looking at (what I think) is the two figures compared and I genuinely couldn't tell you which one is the uglified version. They both have angrogynous faces. Did they change up the version for II after the backlash or something?
Crowstep
10d ago
Hubbard literally wrote his own science fiction and seemed to be relatively self aware, those who have studied Scientology’s history have often argued he never really did believe the way that his successors did
I'm reading a book about Joseph Smith at the moment and I'm really struggling to put myself in his mind and work out whether he really thought Jesus was talking through him. Like, he clearly believed in God and cared about religion (hence the fact he spent ages retconning the Old and New Testaments to get rid of all the obvious contradictions) but also his 'revelations' were so transparently self-serving. Like sureeee Joe, a big scary angel with a sword said he would kill you if you didn't have sex with all those teenage girls. You really didn't want to, but you're scared of the angel!
The US government workforce is 55% male, compared to 53% of the country's overall workforce. Government workers are disproportionately men, not women.
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