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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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I like the case for modesty as intimacy increasing. There is something to having a large delta between the woman that she presents to the world and the women she presents herself as to you personally. I'm not sure how that weighs against other interests but I am sure there is at least some value there.

As for why women are more lefty I can see this from a bunch of different lenses and have trouble coming up with as strong reasons for the opposite. the evo psych lens is pretty simple that women do best in stable safe environments where all their offspring can make it to adulthood and men do best in somewhat more risky environments where they might sire children with many women. When resources are plentiful women might prefer they be shared equally and men might prefer a chance to roll the dice and end up with a bigger share. From the self interested lens the redistributive state as it is today tends to take from men and give to women on average. The social dynamics lens tells us that caring, self sacrifice and gentleness are a feminine traits that women compete with each other on and leftists successfully pitch leftism as the humane alternative to callous and brutal liberalism. Older masculine framings of leftism like those in the soviet era of manly men menacing their enemies with the tools of their trade and demanding what is theirs would see a different skew but the feminine framing predominates today. From a propaganda lens it seems like the leftist strategy of just showing as many dead or suffering children as possible and drawing some plausible causal chain to the status quo is more effective on women than men.

and men do best in somewhat more risky environments where they might sire children with many women.

This is not your main point, but it's always seemed like a particularly BS part of the whole redpill evopsych narrative to me. Men may have evolved instincts to take advantage of conditions where promiscuity is possible, sure. But that's not the same as them "doing better" under those conditions.

I recall a discussion here pointing out that the modal historical outcome for superfluous weak males is not frustrated inceldom, but early violent death. Given that a monogamous pairbonding system vs. a lothario/harem system necessarily offer identical expected value in terms of offspring, and that the harem almost certainly offers lower expected value in terms of personal pleasure owing to the lothario's diminishing marginal returns from screwing multiple partners, I don't understand how men in these spaces seem to regard promiscuity as some kind of inherently manly value that's unfairly gatekept in our women's world.

What you correctly hit upon here regarding polygynous systems marks a crucial distinction between blackpillers/self-identified-incels and redpillers/PUAs. The latter are more in favor of polygyny and harems, as they see themselves as better able to thrive under such a system, armed with their Game. The former, in contrast, long for a patriarchal system of strictly-enforced monogamy and government-mandated gfs.

Of course, to any normal, well-adjusted person, this all has the same flavor as arguments between the People’s Front of Judaea and the Judaean People’s Front.

A fair nuance. I'm not quite a red piller and do think that monogamy is a good a social technology. For the evo-psych perspective though it's sufficient that men with the ability to influence such things would generally prefer more risk though as it's selected for where they can influence reproductive success and irrelevant where it doesn't.