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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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See, as someone who is actually quite fond of women- but not delusional- this is quite sad. Getting taken advantage of happens whenever women aren’t protected, either because no one cares or because of recognizing their ‘autonomy’ or whatever.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the greatest opponents of any potential measure to introduce contractual agreements in the realm of heterosexual mating would be women.

There is a figure you sometimes see, the ‘abortion bro’. He is strongly pro-choice because, although he doesn’t care overmuch about women’s freedom or health, he definitely does not want to wind up a dad by accident. He’ll make arguments along the lines of ‘what if your girlfriend got pregnant- see that’s why it’s important to protect women’s reproductive rights’. Some of them will talk about the need to firmly tell partners interested in keeping the baby that paying for an abortion will be the last help they ever get, and they’re going no contact afterwards regardless of her decision.

For obvious reasons, this figure is not allowed to headline pro-choice rallies. But you find them on Reddit, sometimes IRL, and occasionally in op-Ed’s in lowbrow newspapers. But they definitely exist. I suspect they’re much more common than women who actually want low commitment relationships.

Men have identical happiness whether married or cohabiting- women are far happier married. Women are nearly four times as likely to say they want to save sex for marriage as men are- and by relationship progression, men get their way. The median woman has socially-conservative-in-practice preferences for relationships and sex; in fact feminists generally do too. They’re just unable to advocate for themselves effectively in the face of men’s preferences. And that is the reason for patriarchy. We don’t tell children to stick up for themselves against adults and expect them to do it, at least not well. There are frameworks for dealing with relationships between adults and children- teachers have extensive rules governing how they relate to students, for example. Likewise you can’t reasonably expect an unprotected woman to be at the mercy of whatever man is around.

Yes, the people most offended by this are women. I have no doubt that the feminist will answer with ‘that’s NOT true’ or some variant thereof and the abortion bro will answer with ‘not my problem they’re like that’. But a typical woman flourishes better with couverture than as femme sole.