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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I mean... I hate to out you but...

Nor spent any time being physical with women

So like, age 25, you found out about physical strength differences between men and women from a senate transcript before you got any hands on experience?

I'll be out with it. It's really difficult for me to square total ignorance of the sex differences between men and women with first hand carnal knowledge of the opposite sex. So when I hear "I honestly had no idea and zero exposure to any physical reality that could possibly contradict that men and women are equally as physically capable" I just think "So.... you're a virgin?"

Although I suppose the bottom quintile and the top quintile could shack up from time to time. Just odd to think of that being someone's sole experience from which they extrapolate out to the entire human population. I mean, everyone has a type I suppose, but then again, if it's your type, you'd have to be aware of that fact, right? Which means there are lots of people out there outside your "type"?

Like others have said, I'm confused what physical strength differences have to do with having sex. I have sex [citation needed], and it's never been relevant. My wife and I are having fun jamming our genitals together, not wrestling.

I mean, forget all the euphemisms I've seen like "struggle snuggles" or whatever. Who carries who? Who picks up who? Who holds who up against a wall? There are ample non-violent opportunities during sex to notice a strength difference.

I donno, maybe I'm opening the kimono too much. If you put on smooth jazz and languidly do whatever you do with your genitals that makes it happen for you, more power to you.

In our case... nobody, nobody and nobody. I think that like you said, this comes down to personal style differences.

Plenty of people aren't having/into the sort of struggle snuggles at volume that would make the strength difference apparent

Most people also just don't really think about things

Consider that the gap between “me and a woman I have had sex with” may not generalize to World Cup men vs. women, logically speaking. Yes, it actually does (assuming me and the woman are average) but we know that [male] athletes in strength sports are basically superhumans, they are incomparably stronger and more fit than the general population. If you do not pay any attention to sports and aren't very observant, it's easy to believe that there exist outliers, massive 250 lb Amasons with six-packs and 20 inch biceps, somewhere out there. They exist in fiction, after all…

The biggest reason that the strongest women are much weaker than the strongest men is not the average gap. It's that they have a much lower ceiling.

Nor spent any time being physical with women

If you are playfighting with a woman you are on the way to having sex with (which is the main time you might legally get into a battle of strength with a woman), you modulate your effort in order to win slowly. I always knew that there is a large strength gap, and correctly intuited that she was going all-out and still losing, but I can imagine a guy who had been told that the strength gap is smaller thinking that she is half-assing it just like he is.

If you are playfighting with a woman you are on the way to having sex with

I’d like to add a modification to that to say: if you’re playfighting with a woman, you’re on the way to having sex with her.

Whenever a chick initiates a playfight or playfight-adjacent physical contest, I know a trip to pound town is imminent. It’s high key hilarious how chicks are turned on by getting dominated.

I can’t imagine any scenario in which an adult woman would play fight with an unrelated man she wasn’t attracted to, sure. I can’t even really imagining it happening in the context of something that wasn’t already a relationship or a date, except in the “best friends who are not-so-secretly in love with each other” way.

It’s not merely a product of selection, but a causative effect—the odds are that dominating a chick through interactions such as playfighting increases her attraction toward you and/or turns her on much more than the marginal replacement typical date interaction.

I will willingly out myself here to give some perspective. No, I have not had carnal knowledge of a woman. Yes, throughout high school, I thought the difference between me and the average woman was probably not much. I knew women who could do more pull-ups than me (I could do one-and-a-half unassisted, and I didn't know they needed assistance, but even once I did know, it still hadn't really sunk in for me), I knew women who had better mile times than me, and I thought the difference in push-up requirements weren't much different. I think it wasn't until I did co-ed softball in college that I realized "wow, all the women are really slow and horrible at the game, and all the dudes are superstars who we bank the entire game's performance on".

Kickball in high school probably could have given me this realization as well, if I had cared to notice, but it's not as stark because you've also got unathletic girls and boys who weren't choosing to be there and don't want to put in much effort. I guess I thought even the athletic girls playing just weren't as serious about it as the boys.

Admittedly, there may be a bit of an inferiority complex that played into my not realizing that I am actually stronger than most women. I always thought I was sort of weak. Also, you generally don't get into armwrestling matches with women who are not lesbians, and there were almost no lesbians at my school. Sad, isn't it?

The thing is, the bottom quintile of men (edit: or even third quintile of men) and the top quintile of women very rarely get together, so a man who has noticed women he has had sex with are weaker than he is, but who has also noticed there are much bigger and stronger women around may not realize the general situation.

If you do participate in sports where both genders participate (though not formally competing), you will probably find yourself in situations where high-tier women and similar or lower-tier men get compared, and the women are sometimes surprised and upset at how badly they come off.

Yes, lots of smart, shy men who spend time on the internet are virgins. I don't think anyone should find this surprising.

Do they also not have sisters and female cousins or friends or moms? Aunts? Grandmas?

Or dads to tell them to be gentle with women?

The levels of ignorance get really deep really fast. As a male, there is some gigantic certainty that you will at some point become much much stronger than the females you are close to. Maybe its your mom who you can pick up with ease at 13 even though she's heavier than you. Maybe its your sister. Older or younger doesn't matter, there are common feats of strength easily observable. Maybe its a cousin. Or an aunt. Maybe all those people and your dad or grandpa told you the importance of "never hitting a woman". Any normal individual understands this, it is because they are fragile. Which is statistically true.

Being a virgin isn't an excuse. You have to be the level of the the guy who wrote the original article to get close to having an excuse. He was all of that plus more.

Sure, he’s autistic and probably was quite self-righteous about being ‘one of the good ones’.

I think though that a lot of people here are Red-Tribe-ish enough that they’re used to having largeish families.

If you don’t have children until mid-late 30s that means…

  • Your children are unlikely to have more than one sibling, if that (so 50% chance no sisters).
  • Their aunts and grandparents will be quite old and weak by the time they’re physically mature.
  • Their parents are unlikely to have many siblings either, so few aunts/cousins. Both sides are likely to move regularly for work, so you don’t see them often.

It’s sad but having relatively little familial contact is quite normal for a big section of society at this point, especially upper-middle class.

Well, as long as we're on the topic of innumeracy and poor estimation skills, I actually do still feel a moment of surprise when I realize I'm interacting with someone that's missing such a basic and core experience. It's one of those things that I know intellectually is some relevant percentage of the populace, but it's still surprising to encounter. This is a similar sort of thing to realizing that you might have been arguing with a 13-year-old about something.

Shrug. Despite being a virgin, I've always taken it as a given that women are just overall weaker than men. Training in martial arts just confirms it even further, to the point I almost feel bad about it.

Alot of it may just come down to living in radically different bubbles, some bordering on active, almost delusional isolation.

What does having had sex have to do with having physically struggle against a woman anyway?

The mere fact of your interaction with a woman at that level of intimacy will reveal to you that she is comparatively incredibly weak in the vast majority of such intimate interactions.

This need not be intentional for you, you will simply be stronger. It wont be close. People dont have sex, as a general rule, where the only interaction is the penis penetrating the vagina. Other, non-essential (from a reproductive POV) things happen. They are going to involve legs and arms. If you are the man, your legs and arms will be stronger in almost every instance.

The world records do indicate that women stronger than me do exist. I have never met such a woman. Honestly, I would speculate they likely have what my HS coach called "air muscles". This is a derogatory term for lifters for both sexes and is true. Being strong at weightlifts is only useful if it translates to combat or hay baling. Obviously the best at both are men.

I have to say that carrying 50 lbs sacks of dirt for my mom's gardening projects when I was a teenager did infinitely more to drive that home than any sex I had a couple of years later. Not that I needed any of that given that "men are stronger than women" was and still is a universally accepted fact here the same way as "men are taller than women" is.

I still don't see how bringing having sex into it is anything other than a way to make fun of nerdy guys for not being lucky with girls.

Yes, at age 31 I have fucked exactly zero hawt gurls. Unfortunately, the rumors of magical wizard powers are greatly exaggerated. (I may spend five kilodollars on a trip to the brothels of Australia after I retire two years from now, but I probably will not be able to justify that expense.)

Surely there must be a cheaper way for you to pay to get laid, wherever you are? If you're traveling to Australia at significant expense, there's likely a whole bunch of cheap Asian countries along the way.

Flying to the brothels of Nevada would cost me next to nothing. But it's my understanding that the extremely low supply of (legal) prostitutes in Nevada results in high prices and low quality. If this is the only sex I will ever have, why not go to a proper free market in order to buy it at low prices and high quality, rather than rewarding the Nevada government for its stupid policies?

Wikipedia indicates that, other than the US, Australia is the only English-speaking country where brothels are legal. (In Britain, prostitution is legal, but brothels and advertising prostitution are not.)

Why the only time? First you can always go back. Second, maybe getting laid will inspire you to get laid without paying for it

Sounds expensive either way.

Hiring prostitutes is a fun thought, but thinking about the price at all dispels the notion. The cheapest escorts on the forward thinking hippie sex work site are like, $500. Imagine... you could buy a Glock 19 for that and it wouldn't be gone in an hour of passion. You could buy a bike. You could upgrade a bunch of your old computer parts. You could fix your air conditioner during a heat wave in June. You could put it in an investment fund. I'll be the first to say it: for $500, investment funds are better than sex.

Back when I was an adult virgin, I would have easily paid 500$, or up to four times that, if it could permanently dispel the feeling of shame I would sometimes feel being virgin. The point would not have been to enjoy myself, but to break a psychological barrier that I saw as a blocker for all my attempts at dating. The reason I didn't is not because of the opportunity cost, but because I didn't believe it would dispel that feeling, and perhaps pile on a whole new shame on to it.

Australian brothels advertise prices around 200 Australian dollars (130 US dollars) for 45 minutes of time. The majority of the cost would be the plane tickets, which I agree probably are not worth it.

I'd rather advice a trip to Southeast Asia, in that case. If you want to retire anyway, it's a great place to stay for indefinite time as well.

They don't speak much English in Southeast Asia.

Trust me that's the very last of you worries. Two of my best school friends, then college age, went backpacking there for several months with very mediocre english and no knowledge of any local language.

One of them, a very shy but super nice, hardworking and competent guy who never had to my knowledge even kissed a girl - zero game as the kids say -, came back with a girlfriend. And not a bad one, some kind of banking business work, very easygoing, down-to-earth and admittedly quite attractive. They're now living together for a few years.

Of course sex tourism is also an option there, but imo getting a serious gf is a much more sensible option and very realistic for a well-earning westerner now matter how much you struggle with western women.

Also living expenses are quite low, so even apart from any dating a great place for young retirees to stay or travel indefinitely.

Trust me that's the very last of your worries. Two of my best school friends, then college age, went backpacking there for several months with very mediocre English and no knowledge of any local language.

That doesn't sound very enjoyable to me.

IMO getting a serious gf is a much more sensible option and very realistic for a well-earning westerner now matter how much you struggle with western women

I am not seeking a romantic partner. After around a half-dozen attempted friendships in college, I concluded that friendship was not worth the effort—and romance is just deeper friendship, so it would be even worse.

Also living expenses are quite low, so even apart from any dating a great place for young retirees to stay or travel indefinitely.

My calculations indicate that I will have enough money to retire in the US two years from now, so I have no need to move to the jungle.

Well, suit yourself. My personal experience with people who use this line of argument is that it's pure cope; i.e., the moment someone comes along who opens up the possibility of romance, they'll jump and cling on by any means necessary, betraying their earlier statements. It would have been wiser for them to put in more effort earlier, so that they're not so desperately dependent on that particular person later. But I don't know you, so maybe you really are different than everybody else.

My firm plan for retirement is to die alone and unloved.

My 5 star hotel that I was staying at with my family (!) overlooked the red light district in that part of Thailand. Trust me, not speaking the local language was the last thing dissuading the gents who came by, and they seemed to be having a great time.

It appears that brothels are illegal in Thailand (1 2). Randomly walking the streets of a country where I don't speak the language in order to look for women of widely-varying hotness at opaque prices (and, if this is the only sex that I will ever have, why not go for the hottest ones?) does not sound very enjoyable, in comparison to being able to pick from a lineup of brothel-curated employees at transparent prices that are posted on an English-language website.

There's a very good reason the country is so popular for sex tourism. It's safe, and it's cheap, and the only English required is me love you long time.

Even if outright brothels are illegal, there are entire red light districts, and you can just take them to a hotel. But of course, if you really want legible prices, legality with easy access and English speakers, your options are limited. I just think those are unusual priorities and people seem to do fine there.

Bangkok is kinda known for this sort of thing, so I imagine their are plenty of polyglots in the industry. Also nominative determinism, but I'm sure that's been done to death.