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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I'm not letting men off the hook

And yes, perhaps bans on porn and restrictions on video games should be on the table

Why are the problems with society my duty to fix? I'm already being asked to finance Boomer entitlements and their massive deficits, and now you want to take away the ability for me to enjoy the things that have given me a very happy, inadvertently MGTOW life. We all know that if a system was proposed that punished both men and women, that the punishments targeting men would get the political capital to pass first, long before anything targeting women would come into effect. Both the left and the right think men are the source of all the world's problems. My response would be a simple "buzz off". Let me do my own thing

Somehow I figured in this screed that basically calls for Making Women Subservient Again someone would zero in on male side of it.

I'm sympathetic, I hope I got that across:

Males need good role models. Andrew Tate is the solution they've turned to because any "truly" Masculine Positive Role Model is simply disallowed in the current Zeitgeist. They need a reliable path/script to follow, and they need a meaningful, valuable reward to pursue. Family formation does a lot of the lifting here if men are willing to pick up the weight. An attractive woman is the short term 'reward' (so women need to be attractive, see above), then the kids provide the ongoing motivation.

I'm trying to make ways for guys to have meaning in their life. To get rewarded. Its in your blood. I'm never going to hold a gun to your head to take away what you love, but I am hoping to provide you a better offer.

I think the complaint comes down to the coup-complete aspect. If you could implement all these policies at once, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff: men and women each are given different sets of privileges and limits that offer them a fair expectation of equal happiness, for a net increase of happiness over rampant individualism (a tradeoff that creates more winners than losers, but there would still be losers).

In practice, though, the dynamics of politics and social change would bias the restrictions against men and the privileges toward women. The banning of porn and video games that make life seem a bit more bearable for losing men would happen first, and the rest would always be politically impractical.

I say this as someone who thinks that legal limitations on porn and video games would be beneficial for men, even without any offsetting privileges.

Yes, absent a serious upheaval in the vein of the Iranian revolution, incrementalism is the best/most realistic hope for getting stuff like this implemented. If you're going for one big upheaval, attacking full bore the political bloc of single women seems like the best 'all-in' approach. If you can restrict unmarried females' political power (and not just the vote, but their influence on almost every bureaucracy) then every subsequent policy proposal becomes easier to implement.

ALL THAT SAID, we'd 'only' be turning back the clock about 60 years, it seems like it would only take a single generation of incremental change to do so, if the will existed.

I wonder how much modern technology has made a return to previous settings impossible, though. Honestly, if I had to pick a policy I wouldn't ban video games, I would ban dating apps and severely restrict social media usage. That seems like it would be broadly beneficial if only by forcing more face-to-face interactions.