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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32961 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Are they confusing having sex and having kids? Or are they implying low fertility rate is the consequence of people not having enough sexual intercouse, and if so, is there any data to support it?

That said, I can just imagine what a field day would people on some alt-right forums will have with the fact that Europeans now apparently need to be convinced to have sex (and the ad seems to place emphasis on the male as the party not wanting to rumble).

That said, I applaud to whoever in the marketing dept thought of this. Tapping into retiree's incomes to sell them active vacations they can't actually do is not an easy task, but they found a way.

all it took to break down conventional roles [man pushing a stroller with his son]

Oh come on, my woke copywriter bro, breastfeeding is breaking down conventional roles for a male, walking with one's son never has been.

paternal benefits are also open to same-sex couples.

Not sure how this is going to help the issue? I imagine the grammatical structure of wokese does not admit any other way of expressing it, though.

Because in a democratic society, everyone has the right to decide how they want to live their life.

But some of the decisions are so wrong, or we wouldn't be doing this ad.

With gender education [?] and environmental awareness as our starting point

It will all undoubtedly prove a huge waste of taxpayer money. But doubleplusgood woke duckspeak, to be sure. Maybe one day they'd be so desperate as to kick out the wokesters, but that day is definitely not today.

Oh come on, my woke copywriter bro, breastfeeding is breaking down conventional roles for a male, walking with one's son never has been.

All the reports of men being harassed for taking their child to the park because people are assuming they're some kind of paedophile kidnapper indicate otherwise.

That's not breaking conventional roles, that's moral panic which has been promoted for years in the press (completely contrary to stats showing stranger child kidnapping is a very rare event, and pedophiles mostly prey on children already close to them). But I don't think it has much to do with gender roles. It used to be normal for a father to play with their kids. I've seen old movies that are full of these tropes. It's not some recent invention, it's very traditional (well, maybe not in the Victorian tradition where kids are meant to be seen rarely and heard never, but in less rigid ones).

"All the reports"? I'm a father. I take my kid to parks. Other dads do also. I've never seen or 2nd hand heard of a dad being accused of anything at a public park. I accept that it must have happened sometime somewhere in a nation of hundreds of millions of people. But I believe such a thing is vanishingly rare.

I once took a teenaged non-blood-relative out to dinner. Given our relative ages and racial differences it should be obvious I'm not her dad and you wouldn't know we are relatives by marriage. I wondered if I looked like a creep. No one cared. No one gives a damn about a 30 year old eating dinner with a teenaged girl.

That's not tradition, that's the remnants of an earlier moral panic.

That said, I can just imagine what a field day would people on some alt-right forums will have with the fact that Europeans now apparently need to be convinced to have sex (and the ad seems to place emphasis on the male as the party not wanting to rumble).

From a Russian (headquartered in Riga, Latvia, ofc) liberal globohomo news portal Meduza.io:

At Berlinale 2023, Manodrome, a psychological thriller starring Jesse Eisenberg, was screened

You immediately recognise the protagonist - not Ralphie himself, but the type he embodies. A frustrated, lonely, struggling to cope with his impulses, obsessed with childhood trauma, a taxi driver in a metropolis at night: a direct descendant of Travis Bickle from Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Nowadays, such a loner drives an Uber. The director brilliantly defines his character in the opening scene: he's looking too intently in the rear-view mirror at a female passenger who has decided to breastfeed an infant right in the car. Calling the driver a pervert, she exits halfway through. In fact, Ralphie's interest can be explained. His girlfriend Sal is pregnant and about to give birth. Struggling with irritation and fatigue, she ploughs on at the supermarket cash register while Ralphie, who has recently lost his job, drives customers around. The only outlet in his life is the gym, where he works out to a deafening heavy metal soundtrack.

[...] The only hope for success comes when the guy is welcomed into their circle by members of the mysterious «Manodrome», an elite fraternity of men. Its members call themselves «sons» and its leaders «fathers». In this phantom club, Trengov has developed the dreams of hundreds of thousands of alpha males, venting their frustrations on the universe in the social networks. He has created the perfect ersatz family of incels, where women are not allowed.

The word «incels», as you can see, is helpfully disambiguated:

From the English "incel", an abbreviation for "involuntary celibacy", meaning "involuntary abstinence" [rus]. These are people who feel unable to find a sexual partner, despite wanting to do so.

Fair enough. However, doesn't this seem at odds with the text around, where incels are simultaneously alpha males who also avoid the company of women? Web archive, yesterday's snapshot:

From the English "incel", an abbreviation for "involuntary celibates". These are people who have completely renounced sex because of their own belief that they are incapable of building a romantic relationship.

I think this is telling. The notion that men can be genuinely not guilty of some failure relating to relations of sexes – whether to score or to sire – is about as far outside the Overton window as HBD. It just feels weird to those progressive journalists and the whole «Cathedral». There must be some mistake, or barring that, a conspiracy of alpha male incels who just refuse to pull their weight... It can't be that the solution lies in any conceivable change to female behavior, except even more emancipation, even greater triumph over toxic masculinity. Так победим.

Haven't heard about the movie, but looks like woke Fight Club, tbh.

As for the whole story, it always boils down to the same thing - in the leftist idpol ideology, the oppression categories are fixed, and only the proper oppressed are allowed to have qualia and have their suffering mean something. If you are not a member, your suffering is a) your own fault for being an evil oppressor and b) does not matter and you have no right to ever mention it, because it's just a cynical manipulation in order to keep your oppressor position. And if you try to make it otherwise, it never ends well - the "tragic finale" is guaranteed. As if you weren't warned by hot iron rituals. Thus, people that are desperate to find love and human connection, or struggling an ages-old struggle for meaning, are always reduced to a one-dimensional universal metaphor for evil.

The notion that men can be genuinely not guilty of some failure relating to relations of sexes – whether to score or to sire – is about as far outside the Overton window as HBD

Interestingly, the fertility rate itself says otherwise: whether they feel it's their fault is immaterial to the fact they're going "well, fuck you then", strapping on the wirehead if they have one, and laying flat. And when the barbarians come to enslave the women... well, they weren't putting out for the men of their own tribe anyway, so what's the difference?

I guess the shy Tory effect applies to the Overton window, too.

I, for one, welcome our new barbarian overlords.

Faustian man is done, the sooner we move on the more will still be around for the next civilization to build upon. This slow agony is almost unbearable.

Declining rates of sexual intercourse, plus a rising percentage of virgins and practical celibates among young people, have been recorded in most Western or Westernized societies (such as Taiwan) for many years. This, the so-called sex recession, has been discussed extensively on the parent subreddits as well, multiple times, and also on this forum here. I can’t be arsed to dig up sources because I’m lazy, and because the sources themselves aren’t much relevant here. But anyway, yes, I’m sure that declining fertility rates can easily be explained in part by this. And I’m also sure that it’s driven by multiple factors that are, in part, mutually reinforcing: obesity epidemic, opioid epidemic, rising rates of prescription drug abuse, rising rates of alcoholism and unhealthy life choices in general among single women and the resulting health problems, chemical pollution, endocrine disruptors in the drinking water, dropping sperm counts, a growing mental health crisis in society due to the consequences of social media use/abuse etc.

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