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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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My in laws are out of their damned minds. I saw a support thread for the subreddit in the region I moved away from. There was a thread where ladies were trying to find places to get their tubes tied.

There is this infamous evolutionary just-so story from the manosphere days of yore titled War Brides. It is almost a 100% conjecture and goes like this:

Women possessing a more pronounced empathic capacity undoubtedly served our species in nurturing young and understanding tribal social dynamics, however it was also a liability with regards to a hostile change in her environment. Stockholm Syndrome is far more pronounced in female captives (the story of Jaycee Duguard comes to mind), why should that be? Because women’s peripheral environment dictated the need to develop psychological mechanisms to help them survive. It was the women who could make that emotional disconnect when the circumstances necessitated it who survived and lived to breed when their tribe was decimated by a superior force. This is also known as the War Bride dynamic; women develop an empathy with their conquerors by necessity.

Preposterous, right? And yet I cannot prevent me from thinking about this whenever I read another hysterical article about female Western journalists trying to make the 4b movement (essentially a Lysistrata-style boycott on sex and child bearing) happen in the West. Add to that a couple of social media posts about "not even my very progressive husband getting any for a long time" and a haphazard conclusion presents itself:

In the face of defeat, which woman in her right mind would mate with a member of the losing tribe?

From that NPR link on 4b:

It calls for the refusal of dating men (biyeonae), sexual relationships with men (bisekseu), heterosexual marriage (bihon) and childbirth (bichulsan).

Koreans didn't have a word for sex until the West brought them one?!

I think it just doesn't sound right otherwise. To match with the other terms, they need something that is short and not ambiguous. The standard term for the act of sex (sexual relations) is three syllables. They could shorten it to two, but then it would just mean "relationship".

There are also taboos about talking about sex, where even the common euphemisms and clinical terms are not uttered much in public. I guess using the English loanword is the most socially acceptable way to specify "act of sex" in print.

Also radfems seem to get their craziest ideas from their academic connections to the anglosphere, so they use loanwords more than the general public.

Don't know how it happened in Korea, but a lot European countries ended up borrowing it too. The native word for sex often feels (extremely) vulgar, and the non-vulgar alternatives are either vague euphemisms, clinical multi-word phrases or compound words in languages like German. "Sex" by comparison is pretty handy - short and neutral.

Also seems to be a thing in Japan, if some media is to be taken as representative.

Interestingly (to me) another euphemism for sex is etchi or エッチ which is itself the pronunciation of the letter H, which in turn is a representation of the romanization of the word 変態 (hentai or perversion).

The term's arduous journey softens the tone from the original hentai meaning--エッチ really just is a noun for sexual intercourse --but it's one of those weird words in Japanese.

There is a term 性行為 or sēkoi which means sex, but it's a clinical term (think "intercourse"). Sēi means sex or gender, koi means "deed" or "behavior."

In the face of defeat, which woman in her right mind would mate with a member of the losing tribe?

Given that, which man in his right mind would remain a member of the losing tribe, if he had the option of converting? The bulk of the Afghan National Army could figure out the answer to that one, why not Western men?

If Trump keeps on winning so much that his fans become tired of winning AND if men living in larger cities can keep prestige employment while not swearing fealty to Woke Inc., it's reasonable to assume that we will see an even larger shift in the political realignment of men than the one we observe now.

If Trump keeps on winning so much

What has Trump actually won, really? What makes people — on both sides — think he's going to be any more "in charge" of the executive branch than Biden currently is?

I don't think he has. He has the track record of an unusually ineffective administrator.

But this is about perception and status. It's about who won the popularity contest, not about who's in charge of the bureau of boringness.

if men living in larger cities can keep prestige employment while not swearing fealty to Woke Inc.

They can borrow a page from Islam, and engage in taqiyya.

taqiyya

You say that as if it isn't already widespread practice.

(lays finger alongside nose)

Thanks for the reminder to rewatch The Sting.