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 -
I think there is a class of "sex pest" that has always been around, which is men who are hyperattuned towards what is popular with women and optimise their personality and social strategy around charming and bedding new partners. They only become "pests" in that their handling of partners, once bedded, is essentially consumptive - rather than trying to build a relationship, they just speedrun whatever sexual acts they feel amount to having "used up" the sexual partner (often by maximising extreme/degrading acts, which register as conquest milestones), and then move on to the next.
This is not to say they don't believe/inhabit the personality they arrived at by optimisation - much like Mr. Beast is an honest product of reinforcement learning under the YouTube algorithm, the pump-and-dumper is an honest product of reinforcement learning under the female attention algorithm. It's just that any attendant preference structure remains strictly subordinate to the "conquer more women" terminal value. The actual manifestation depends on the fads of the day: in the '40s, it could be a dashing young GI, an Elvis-like character in the '50s, a philosophical druggie rogue in the '70s, ..., or a soft-spoken feminist alpha nerd since around 2015.
Solid point. The "Lothario" genre of male has existed for most of human history (I say 'most' because I'd bet that it was harder to pull of consistent pump-and-dump schemes when your social circle was a tribe of <100 people and you couldn't just hop to the next town on a whim).
They adapt to copy and send off whatever signals will get women to sleep with them. Provided those signals are cheap to replicate. And I'd argue that signalling "I'm a male feminist" is about as cheap as it gets. It is basically free, you literally just affirm what a woman says and denigrate males as a class while subtly implying you're not really a member of that class.
To the extent this keeps working for them they'll keep doing it until they run afoul of a particular woman's feelings and are suddenly called out as an abuser themselves.
Double bonus, in that feminists are substantially less likely to try to lock you into marriage and will happily abort any pregnancies the Lothario causes AND other men aren't allowed to police your behavior because that would imply that women aren't capable of handling their own affairs.
Had you heard about this when you included the hyperlink? I hadn't heard of it prior, but I can't say I'm terribly surprised. That whole caption doth protest too much.
Holy cow yes I remember hearing about it but it had completely slipped my mind.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think that this part is a bit of a cope/emotionally comfortable belief about the triviality of the outgroup. The dating market is not so uncompetitive that a priori one would expect any successful strategy to be cheap. Gaiman's schtick was hardly just that he is "a male feminist" - he is a bestselling author, gregarious convention-goer, and supposedly a commanding storyteller in person and all around magnetic personality, on top of being a male feminist. It is this whole package that allowed him to enrapture groupies so easily - of course there must be some natural predisposition involved, but he nevertheless would have worked hard his whole life to become the New Feminist Man that a particular type of woman finds irresistible. Neither you nor I would get anywhere by just suddenly going out there, affirming what women say and denigrating males as a class; people like that are dime a dozen, and they are more likely to wind up as sad caricatures or give up in short order to churn through other cheap-and-ineffective approaches than to even get to the point where they would be #metoo-ed.
I have encountered a good number of guys who fit the same archetype in my life, and it is always abundantly clear that they pour a lot of effort into verbal skills and social standing, like by volunteering as DMs for D&D sessions, volunteering for all sorts of things in general, or attending improv theatre. One of them even forced himself to pretend to be bisexual.
True, although I'd argue that signalling his progressive bona fides was a necessary component to him successfully bedding women given the social circles in which he was considered to be a high-status figure. Bestselling authors in the sci-fi and fantasy genres who don't have the "correct" politics will get cancelled and deplatformed long before an opportunity to bed a groupie presents itself. Just ask Orson Scott Card.
Weren't some of Gaiman's, er, "conquests" from well before Sad Puppies, though?
More options
Context Copy link
The conservative mormon authors remain successful and widely read, though. They aren't bedding groupies but they don't seem to try to.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I never said it was inherently successful, I said it was cheap.
Gaiman obviously has charms that work irrespective of his stated ideological positions.
The fact that its cheap and easy to replicate one portion of the signals is why actual Lotharios might adapt it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I like this theory the most. It definitely maps to my observations of people exploiting niches to get what they need sexually.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link