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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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The other thing is that the targets of this are very likely fellow democrats. The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit. They’re not really going to stick it to Trump voters, they aren’t dating them anyway. They’re refusing sex with Dudes for Harris.

The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit.

With mass media and the internet, there are people like anything in every place, just in different proportions. I come from a red area of a red state, and yet there are many progressives here -- I was one, when I was a high schooler. And I've known a great many feminists terrified of Trump who were born and raised here. I've even known women who somehow fit in their brains both evangelicalism and feminism: my favorite was the woman who was obsessed with feminism and railed against the patriarchy, but wouldn't date me (despite straightforwardly saying she wanted to) because, at the time, I was an atheist. Modernity is a funhouse mirror.

Yep. I live in an SEC college town and we had to import our Trump supporting female bartender from California. There are few species of liberal more obnoxious than the first-gen college educated late Xer/Millennial liberal with high-school educated Trump supporting late boomer/Gen X parents, especially if they come from a place where the Moral Majority actually mattered. The middle-aged Yankee liberal English professor might be easy to offend, but was more tolerant in the long run. It's a shame I never got to meet her daughter, who is reportedly very high on the "hot, but crazy" scale (The professor is also this, according to the boomer regular who dated her.). My Gen X mom from George Wallace Democratic stock has been waging a Clintonian holy war on Facebook for far longer than my Gen X father's acquired Trumptardism and addiction to the dumb parts of right-wing Twitter.

Interestingly, the Southern liberals I know from more upper-class backgrounds have been vastly more relaxed about it. One of favorite drinking buddies (He is a hilariously obnoxious womanizer with a country lawyer's drawl and Yellow Fever when drunk.) is a lawyer's son turned Democratic campaign operative. Another is a 40-something professor who never got a steady gig, a hilarious, hopeless dandy who even his liberal female counterparts write off as gay (This does, in fact, cripple his dating life.).

My favorites to drunkenly talk history/politics with are female law students, by a mile. They're well informed and while tough in an argument, they won't take disagreement personally.

This is commonly treated as a slam-dunk argument that Western 4B is counterproductive, but is it really so? What if the intended effect is not that progressive men continue whatever they were doing and get arbitrarily punished with sex withdrawal, nor that some random conservative men also get caught up and punished, but that the men of the tribe go and figure out some way of making sure Trump doesn't win again, be it by running a better campaign, falsifying votes, principles-be-damned lawfare or one million assassination attempt suicide runs on him? What is the actual ratio of blue-tribe men who see the 4B threat and defect to the red tribe to ones who will redouble their efforts whether because they think of tribal duty or imagine that maybe they can personally get ahead enough on the newly established "fight against Trump tooth and nail" ladder that an exemption from 4B is quietly granted to them after all?

Throughout history, propaganda of the form "women will spurn you if you don't do this self-sacrificial thing" has been leveraged too often to be dismissed out of hand. In fact, per what some other posters in these threads say, in general the Korean message that women will not put out unless men work 60-hour weeks to buy a house seems to be achieving its goal just fine, and most Korean men do go on to climb the standard career ladder and work 60-hour weeks and support the lifestyle of their women through the system, rather than "defecting" and going to fraternize with and dedicate their labour to some group of enemy women from the 4Bers' outgroup. Tribal loyalty is strong, and if you write from the perspective of the outgroup it is all too easy to be biased in a way like "Why would blue men not just go red then? As far as my red eyes see, life on the red side is perfectly fine!".

imagine that maybe they can personally get ahead enough on the newly established "fight against Trump tooth and nail" ladder that an exemption from 4B is quietly granted to them after all?

"Imagine" is right. The exemptions from 4B will be granted to Chad, like they always are. Chad voted Trump, and he might wear a MAGA hat while collecting 4Bs.

What if the intended effect is not that progressive men continue whatever they were doing and get arbitrarily punished with sex withdrawal, nor that some random conservative men also get caught up and punished

I’m pretty sure that the intended effect is to inspire conservative women that they have safety in numbers and can leave their abusive husbands to become happy progressives.

That this belief is delusional and the husbands are probably not more abusive than the general population is of no matter; this is a small group of radicals.