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 -
Here's an interesting question that occurs to me, inspired by this post:
Is promiscuity worse when it's public or when it's private?
I'm inclined to think that we reached a social consensus that public promiscuity is worse than private promiscuity. ("As long as they keep it in the privacy of their own bedroom", laws against obscenity, etc.) But I'm also inclined to think that that social consensus is wrong. Yes, there are special types of damage done by public promiscuity - "normalization", corruption of bystanders, etc. But there are also special types of damage done by private promiscuity, and I'm inclined to say that they are much worse.
Everyone here can laugh it up about the men who'll marry these open prostitutes. But, y'know - at least they'll know what they're getting. It's not exactly a viable secret to keep. This doesn't seem, to me, nearly as corrosive to the social fabric as the general social expectation that even normie religious women will have some sexual history that they don't need to disclose to their husband.
My instinct is that it is actually better and less sexually immoral for a woman to be a clownish slut and publicly document a farcical orgy centered on herself than it is for her to act chaste and traditional but have a single one-night-stand she never tells another soul about. It is better to unconsciously offer oneself up as a cautionary tale about rough living than it is to consciously erode the trust between the sexes. I do not find that the cases like Aella blackpill me nearly as much as women in explicitly Christian/conservative contexts who accidentally let on that their morals are looser than they realize. It's like the difference people point to between Donald Trump, who's repulsive, but openly so, and a more classically dishonest politician.
A car's value plummets as soon as it's driven off the lot. Provided, I have no interest (in this metaphor) in purchasing a used car - but I have no quarrel with used car dealers, per se. It's about the integrity of the thing.
To make this argument work, you have to consider the problem with private promiscuity to be just that it's a lack of honesty. Then it's only that to the extent those involved placed some idiosyncratic value on avoiding the act. Many people have such standards (such as religious diet restrictions) which outsiders don't have much reason to care about.
On the other hand, if there's some intrinsic reason promiscuity is bad, women who do it publicly aren't only doing the same thing but honest. They're suspect because its publicity creates an added inappropriate relation, now with a public who shouldn't be involved at all, above the men involved.
None of this is to say you should be tolerant of the presentable slattern either...but treating it as just a matter of hypocrisy demeans the issue.
More options
Context Copy link
I see your point, but to extend the metaphor further, I feel like a man who marries a woman without knowing her full sexual history is a bit like a man who buys a used car without giving the tyres so much as a cursory kick - caveat emptor and due diligence has to kick in somewhere. Of course people can lie and keep secrets, but if you know someone well enough to consider marrying them it should be fairly obvious that there's something they're keeping from you, unless they're a truly consummate (so to speak) liar.
On the other hand, many pornstars have a fairly brief career under a stage name and then retire and go into teaching or something. There's a recurring scandal when a primary school discovers that one of their teachers used to be a porn star and fires her (e.g.). For obvious reasons, the porn industry is keen on insulating porn actors from the social consequences of pursuing a career in the industry: some guy compiled a database of porn actors and their real names (so that men could find out if their girlfriend had ever done porn before they popped the question), and Bang Bros bought it for the express purpose of shutting it down.
Perhaps this "one and done" approach is less viable in the OnlyFans era, but still, I have to assume that a significant proportion of "content creators" are performing under stage names. Many even film their videos in such a way that their faces aren't visible.
More options
Context Copy link
I thought hiding that was the point, though.
Normie religious/straight marriage laws and rules are all about managing competing interests, are optimal if you assume you don't actually have love up front, and help keep the marriage together should the desire in learning how to love not be equal among partners. They work even better if/when the woman is not economically useful.
But modern society turns this into a trap for the men in the relationship! If you ask with the tacit statement that you'll be offended by your future wife "having cheated on you before the relationship even begins, what a sinful broad", what do you think your wife going to say? It's the spear counterpart of unintentionally selecting for assholes, where what you're doing here is excluding women who aren't intending to lie to you (which are the ones you actually want... right? Or maybe not; I wouldn't know- is the 'virgin experience' really an emergent property of virginity?).
From a biological standpoint, I want to minimize the chance I end up raising another man's child (if I'm going to put effort into kids I want them to actually be mine). I think I have a better chance of doing that by emphasizing "my wife feels safe telling me things", but my biology hasn't yet resisted me for dating a non-virgin and people tell me this occurs magically, so...
Another analogy that occurs to me is the dsyfunctionally adversarial relationship between employers and applicants. An expectation emerges among the applicants that it's acceptable to lie while applying for a job. The employers tacitly accept this; they don't punish the dishonesty, and instead act dishonestly themselves, asking for qualifications that are impossible or at least implausible, reinforcing the emerging norm that it's acceptable for the applicants to lie. And so it becomes quite difficult indeed to determine if the applicant is actually qualified for the job. The people have collectively failed. Thanks, Moloch. (There are other factors at play there, of course.)
I thought I already explained this in the previous post, but perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I'm uninterested in nonvirgins as partners, but the moral offense to me comes in when someone tries to pull one over on me. My whole point here is that I'm not cursing the women who honestly filter themselves out for me, as I consider this more honorable than trying to subvert the filter. That can't mean that having a filter is itself wrong; that's an absurd modernist notion, like saying that hiring decisions shouldn't take ability to do the job into account. If you put up a sign that says "looking for qualified drivers" and you get a bunch of qualified drivers and a bunch of liars, then sure, the people who didn't show up because they weren't willing to lie about their ability to drive are far more virtuous than the liars, but that doesn't mean that you should hire them to drive; it means that you should try to figure out which of your applicants are telling the truth.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link