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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Who, pray tell, is the audience for this statement? Cads who are looking to get married and start a family? Married men who are looking to fuck around?

The intended audience is anyone dissatisfied with our current norms surrounding sexuality. The thesis is that sexuality is not a series of simple knobs that can be individually fine-tuned to achieve a desired outcome, but is rather a deeply interconnected, highly complex, and highly consequential social system that we cannot reliably conform to our whims.

The sexual revolution's thesis was that crusty old religious fuddy-duddies and repressed bigots had packed our sexual norms full of pointless, killjoy rules based on their own superstitions and hangups, and that once these were removed everyone could just do what felt good and be happy all the time. So they removed all the rules, a whole lot of people got badly hurt, and now they've had to reimpose new, worse rules and people are still pretty unhappy with the results. The claim here is that there are simple, obvious changes that will fix the problems and then everything will be fine. I don't think that was true before, and I don't think it's true here either. Risky sex is always going to be risky sex, no matter how we shuffle the risk around, and the inescapable fact is that all sex involves a significant degree of risk. There are solid strategies capable of seriously mitigating the problems people are pointing to here, but they involve living a Trad life that avoids divorce entirely, not attempting to "fix" divorce so it doesn't fuck people up, something I'm pretty sure it isn't possible to do.

That doesn't mean that none of the examples provided are probative; some of them display some degree of bias, and some are just straight-up badly decided. But I'm fairly confident that these specific issues of female rapists getting child support from male victims are very much edge cases, and while I entirely endorse fixing them, doing so isn't going to do a thing to help the much larger class of despairing men referenced in the comment I was replying to. The fact is that divorce is actually pretty awful, no matter how we try to shuffle its components.

If enough people recognize the failures of the current system, maybe we can as a society try for something better. In the meantime, people are better off accepting that the problem they're pointing to simply isn't going to get fixed, and start looking for workarounds.

That doesn't mean that none of the examples provided are probative; some of them display some degree of bias, and some are just straight-up badly decided. But I'm fairly confident that these specific issues of female rapists getting child support from male victims are very much edge cases, and while I entirely endorse fixing them, doing so isn't going to do a thing to help the much larger class of despairing men referenced in the comment I was replying to. The fact is that divorce is actually pretty awful, no matter how we try to shuffle its components.

But only one part of the argument is about how to "fix divorce". I agree it will never be a pleasant affair.

The other half is "Divorce policies are currently set up to be maximally awful for men and maximally beneficial for women. This is unfair." Your comment does not address this at all. That we may never find a risk distribution that will leave everyone happy is not a good reason to adopt a massively unfair one.

So they removed all the rules, a whole lot of people got badly hurt, and now they've had to reimpose new, worse rules and people are still pretty unhappy with the results.

Very much not a fan of the dude but relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/592/