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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Because it's as fundamental to each person as one's personality is?
If you're capable of thinking of it in those terms you might just be asexual.
From observation, it's normal to think of your kids as never having grown past the age of 13 (and thus it be forever icky to think of them as having adult desires), and every parent I've ever known does this (except for one, maybe two). [The Jewish rite of adulthood doesn't happen at 13 for no reason.] It changes when you get married because the opposite-sex parent becomes permanently subordinate at that point (and also your kid has backup when dealing with you). I'm not sure how they see grandkids.
It's normal to think that sex with men is dangerous and bad, and that women desire nothing else but to have a marriage without any sex whatsoever if they can get away with it. Which is in their finely-honed evolutionary biological interests to do for obvious reasons; note that lesbians aren't immune to this reflex, which is why the majority of definitionally lesbian sex that has ever happened has been in front of a camera, not in committed lesbian relationships.
There are memes about this from the distaff side as well- give seldom, and above all, give grudgingly. Straights unironically and fully believe that "while sex is at best revolting and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured, and has been by women since the beginning of time, and is compensated for by the monogamous home and by the children produced through it." Men and women deal with this differently, and take advantage of this differently, but they both agree on this fundamental point. And now you know why
women/bottoms/betasconservatives are justmen/tops/alphasprogressives driving the speed limit in sexual matters; the only reason it's through a progressive lens these days is because women have more socioeconomic power than men do for other reasons, so the power politics are a lot more naked from the male perspective now where it's usually the women staring down the barrel [which is why when that wasn't the case, the average woman was more traditionalist than the average man, even in cultural milieus where wife-beating was the norm].Again, this has strong and extremely important biological underpinnings- humanity hasn't had enough time to evolve to deal with the fact that women can just have sex without any major consequence at their leisure. We solved this with technology in the '50s and what we got was a 20-year-long society-wide orgy... until AIDS [and Boomer women hitting the wall] killed that society dead. Women were screaming and throwing their panties at Elvis because it turns out that, shock of shocks, some women actually like having sex- this continues to baffle straights to this day because casual sex is literally the most counterintuitive and physically dangerous thing you can do as a woman!
And now you know why some people who can't deal with this make themselves eunuchs (Skoptskyists, modern transgender movement, etc.): for a straight man looking through the lens of how a straight man sees straight women, it's the ultimate gift to a woman [to have a relationship but never have to have sex- this is "respects women" to a pathological degree, and now you know why the most visible ex-men are usually autistic, and also Like That more generally] and for a straight woman it's the ultimate safety blanket [ruining their body's sex appeal as the price for joining a religious community frees them from the need to sell their body for sex- which is the definition of a straight marriage per the above- and from the perspective of an ex-woman seeing that, because she's already in such a community, that mutilating herself has no downsides].
Christianity is appealing to men and women who find that resisting ancient instincts is very hard, and so you'll find a disproportionate amount of men who do consciously want to resist them are Christian, because it's a cultural milieu where they will be praised for doing so (it's also a place for people who aren't getting any, because that's also virtuous)- so naturally, you'll find them to be a lot weirder about sex than the general population. Their complaints about "oversexualization" and "promiscuity bad" are best viewed through the lens of how alcoholics who consciously need to resist relapse would see constant ads for beer- why the absolute fuck should a Healthy Society not only tolerate that, but encourage it (in the "silence is violence" way), given how many alcoholics [they believe there to be, and not without reason] are out there, even if they're aware they're in a filter bubble that consists solely of alcoholics?
More generally, this is where the "I don't want a woman that had forty penises in her- that's as many as four tens, and that's terrible" disgust reflex comes from. Excessively promiscuous women have something fundamentally wrong with them as they're not performing their gender role properly- they're not gatekeeping sex- in the same way that multiply-divorced men have fundamental problems with commitment. And we should expect that to be extremely visceral for straights (in a way that it isn't for gays/lesbians/asexuals, who have different problems).
So, straights/traditionalist-progressives can't fully understand
free loveAce Pride because their mental model of it is "first, be very aware that sex with men is bad and has immediate life-ending consequences for women, then act as selfishly as you possibly can under those circumstances", which you can see an excellent example of as a related comments to this one. And it's not like Free Love didn't have elements of that, because it couldn't really reject straights poking their... noses where they shouldn't have and took the claimed Psychic damage (or purposefully inflicted status effects on others out of selfishness, like certain gay men with AIDS and monkeypox).The reason Aces don't take Psychic type damage is because they're Dark type, and while Dark types might not take Psychic damage they're not immune to status effects [like 'disease' or 'pregnant']. Even if it's permissible, it's not really beneficial (and 'but don't you have anything better to do?' is the argument I never see Christians make, even though it doesn't depend on first-century sexual morality to be valid, but I think the reason why they don't feel the need to is explained sufficiently above).
Also, conversely, asexuals don't usually try to understand straights (or are blinded by Pride, just like how straight women are now, and how straight men used to be) so they tend to propose solutions like "maybe we can do some conversion therapy by encouraging little kids to fuck, if they grow up thinking casual sex is normal then so much the better" [which I'll point out is the exact same thing that Proud straight women do to little boys/girls where they encourage them to be the opposite instead, for the same reasons, coming from the same sexual place as I explained above, and it is just as Psychically harmful to them- victims of both cases appear to develop hypersexuality as a coping mechanism and so I think it hurts the same place in the same way] and "if we plaster sex everywhere, we drive the marginal value of sex down to zero; when sex is so ordinary as to be trivial there will be no more sex abuse, and there are very definitely no knock-on effects from this whatsoever" [as a response to straight sexuality's natural impulse to drive the marginal value of sex infinitely high that nobody will pursue sex any more].
If this were true... why is female promiscuity a problem at all? Why has this topic come up over and over again on TheMotte? Why would the sororities have to strictly police their members so they don't go overboard in indulging in something that is allegedly painful and revolting to them?
There's a contradiction in simultaneously believing "women don't actually want sex that much" and "young women are absolutely out of control with how much sex they're having and we need to shut it down NOW".
I'm not entirely clear from reading your post where you fall on this particular question. You seem to acknowledge that there are some women who DO actually just straightforwardly desire sex with (alpha, attractive) men. But I also know some people who just endorse both of these contradictory positions, and they manage to dodge all the cognitive dissonance somehow.
We agree on this much at least. You hit the nail on the head here. (Ironically, one of the staunchest manosphere types I know who had a full on conversion from libertarian "live and let live" values to full on "being a slut is the absolute worst thing a woman can do" trad values, is also an ex-alcoholic.)
I dunno man I'm just not seeing it. Quite a lot of people who advocate "free love" also engage in a lot of free love themselves! Are you literally trying to suggest that certain individuals, who are having a lot of sex, are actually asexual in some sense? Because that would be quite remarkable.
Yes. I think that to do this and not become worn down over time you need to not see sex that way, and I think that's a qualitatively different orientation from the people that do. Asexuality is the closest label that fits- in the "sure, they might even get laid a lot, but the otherworldy-special significance normal people put on sex is just... absent somehow" (in the same way that sociopaths tend to be terrible human beings unless they have other reasons not to be).
Which is what makes them so fucking weird to deal with in the first place. They don't get the magic special soul-bonding for free, and thus act in a way that assumes the soul-bonding thing doesn't exist (and taking that to its logical conclusion leads you to start asking the progressively edgier questions sex-positivity is historically known for). I suspect this is a birth defect, because the notion that sex is Very Special is advantageous to have, especially in marginal relationships.
When you have a job, it is in your interest to bargain for the least demanding job at the highest wage. The weird ones are those who intentionally sell themselves short because they actually like the job, and that drives down the maximum wage for every other job.
Slut-shaming is a market force: the union [of all women] imposing a minimum wage. Is it that surprising a sorority (a union of women with the end goal of being a union of women) would be interested in enforcing that?
As union membership becomes more powerful, sex becomes less free.
If I wasn't limited to observing it exists, I'd call it something different than "magic special soul-bonding". However, I also believe that people who have that property should seriously avoid having sex with people that don't (because they really need that bond to be taken for granted and bad things happen when it isn't- it's like you already cheated on them), that people that don't should not offer sex to people that do (because if you do, they'll just feel used if you don't tell them this or patronized if you do), and most importantly, that people that do have it aren't lesser than people that don't (and the people that don't should under no circumstances act like they're better).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If they liked having sex, they would be shacking with the unassuming guy who, according to the female grapevine, is the best at pleasuring a woman. What they liked instead was being associated with a high-status man, even if that connection was "out of all the rabid groupies he glanced at me".
More options
Context Copy link
This is a very fascinating post and I'll probably ask more questions later, but for now I have one.
Am I understanding you correctly that straight sexual people want there to be no sex and asexual people want there to be as much sex as possible?
Yes. Or rather, that if you're straight, your interests converge on nobody but you having/accessing sex (your ideal society is that you're the only one of your sex present, male or female- since if you're male you can demand an infinitely high price for commitment under those circumstances, and if you're female you can demand an infinitely high price for sex in the same way), and if you're ace, as a property of not having that drive, it wouldn't matter if everyone but you was having sex [at least, not for reasons that directly have to do with sex for the sake of sex- this would/could still be existentially crushing for other reasons, but not in the same way it would be for straights].
I think a lot of people have a hard time processing/coping with the reality of sex; the meme about "I was forever traumatized by seeing this" is too common to all be lie and I've heard enough "I wasn't ready to do it then and regret the sex", "getting laid changes you", "too many penises", "don't you regret that/wasn't that a stereotypical grooming relationship?", and "you did this mostly for self-gratification, right?" (a question I'm still not allowed to answer, because it would reveal this kind of orientation mismatch to someone I don't want to reveal that to) to think the people who say those things must be telling the truth and not faking
their orgasms.Obviously that has to come from somewhere, should be taken seriously, and starting from initial biological conditions seems to make the most sense. But I think there's a big gaping hole (one held open by 2 hands, with a gold ring on one of the fingers) in the understanding of what the sexual politics of the last 60-100 years were really caused by, I think that what caused it wasn't fully understood in that time (and is now misunderstood on purpose by different people, in different ways, for different reasons), and I intend to discover a reasonable way to explain what it is and why.
On the most literal reading possible, I don't see how this can be true. If you're the only one having sex, then the species will die out and your bloodline along with it. You can't make enough people on your own (and even if you could, there's inbreeding to worry about).
If you're dead, what use is the species to you? Sex to straight [men] is not only a scarce resource, but is fundamentally a self-enriching endeavor ('selfish' is not a good word for it; this is a neutral to positive thing, not malicious).
Again, women seeking sex as self-enriching is a malfunction (where the self-enrichment they're supposed to get is the resources and exclusive supply agreement on the man), because sex damages their ability to do that according to straight men (who have to be forced to pay that as a cost- since if they're straight, those things are contrary to their biological interest).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link