site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It's debatable whether the "sex recession" is even real. Recent data doesn't show the same kind of numbers that made people on the internet freak out in 2018. If it is real, it doesn't appear to be a problem of men in particular, since women report similar, and sometimes higher rates of no-sex. The idea that an increasingly small minority of men are exercising some kind of sexual monopoly appears to have little to no basis in reality.

men have always been the disposable gender

This is an old redpill bromide but not really true. In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.

In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.

[In Japan] Farmers would often kill their second or third sons. Daughters were usually spared, as they could be married off, sold off as servants or prostitutes, or sent off to become geishas.

Is there any real counter evidence to the argument that infanticide both historically and today is mostly, in most societies, of female children? That is the way it is in modernity from rural South Africa to one child policy China.

In the US today: depending on what you consider infanticide, when IVF is used sex-selectively, it's usually to select for a girl. And when children are being adopted, adoptive parents have a strong preference for girls.

For infanticide itself, according to the CDC, boys are more likely to be victims of it than girls, both in absolute terms and proportionately (8 boys per 100k person years vs 6.2 girls per 100k person years): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6939a1.htm#T1_down

I couldn't find concrete statistics on sex-selective abortion in the USA, but I'd expect it to follow the same trend.

Post-birth infanticide in the USA is extremely rare and shouldn't be used as evidence of anything. Sex selective abortion is harder to track, but isn't it mostly confined to specific subcultures/ethnic groups that may well have different values?

I don't think male infants being more likely to be victims of infanticide is a strong argument about gender bias one way or another. It is a strong argument against the idea that today, in most societies, female children are more likely to be a victim of it than male children: the contemporary US is a society that exists today that has some relevance.

And, yes, there are strong ethnic trends contributing to it.

I said "almost"

In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.

Indeed, and we might add that in historic times of famine food is often reserved for (male) warriors, but almost never for (non elite) women, and women often miscarry or cannot conceive during famines so this has appreciable effects on communal strength. Women are just as disposable as men, it merely doesn’t make sense for them to be warriors given basic biological differences. That doesn’t really make women ‘advantaged’ in any significant way.

Hm. Does it make sense to say that society may advantage either men or women depending in part on economic conditions? In that case, it might still be the case that women are currently advantaged - and unless we expect starvation/subsistence conditions to reoccur in the west, may be sustainably advantaged.