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This is oversimplified.
Women tend to control access to sex: most men are more willing to screw a wider range of women than women are willing to screw men.
Men tend to control access to commitment: most men are more attracted by the idea of avoiding being tied down (figuratively, not literally). One of the more absurd things I see in these discussions is the notion that men are desperate to get married, have a lot of kids, and have said wife/kids impressing demands on these men's precious time. It's like when Chat GPT suggests "MOAR feminism!" as a solution for low birth rates: it's going against what I thought was basic knowledge about male/female psychological differences in humans, which has been deeply ingrained in our cultures since before the invention of writing.
Perhaps the "men are frustrated in their efforts to get tied down to a life of changing nappies and sleeping with just one woman" online memes comes from incels who think that, if only they had the chance, they'd be women's Perfect Partner, as in Futurama: "My favourite things are commitment and changing myself." "Does that robot have a brother?". However, most nerdy guys I know who suddenly started getting laid easily - myself included - played the field, like a normal guy in that position. Then, as naturally tends to happen, they found a woman that they wanted to sleep with repeatedly, developed an emotional bond, and married. I suspect that this is healthier than both the man and the woman being keen on commitment: just as sexual romance needs a partner to be seduced, marriage needs at least one partner to need to be (non-verbally) persuaded that a long-term commitment makes sense. After all, commitment is good for the economy:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7ADncN9HIa4
I donno... maybe I'm simple but most of the guys I knew weren't really excited to play the field, but it more came of necessity. They wanted a woman they could settle down with, but most of the women they'd meet were deranged. Entitled, controlling want beasts that demand all the say and none of the responsibility. Our path through our 20's and 30's towards marriage was a process of getting worn down by the realization that yes, all women are like this. Between the 6 of us, and the 30 or so long term relationships we've all had, it's been a constant. The women feel entitled to make outrageous, thoughtless demands, and throw full blown adult temper tantrums to get their way. Up to and including claims that we don't love them, some other partner of someone they saw on Facebook did it, they don't want to be in a relationship anymore, their friends all think we're terrible, etc, etc, etc.
Eventually we met women who seemed marginally less deranged than the mean we'd all collectively encountered, and got on white knuckling it through life because we wanted kids. I think the guy I knew who has it best (near as I can tell) went hardcore Christian. Like, the man is the indisputable head of the household style Christianity. I'm not sure it's stopped the relentless want beasting directed at him. But it's given him more backbone and moral authority to stand up for himself.
Well... about half of us did. The other half just couldn't take it any more and dropped out.
Sorry to pile on, but I dated pretty extensively in my teens and twenties. Out of the ~20 women I was involved with in some way, I'd say maybe 4 of them fit the definition of "deranged" and I only actually committed to one of those.
As @Harlequin5942 pointed out, not being a mark was key. My philosophy was always to treat anyone I was with (regardless of the scope of the relationship or quality of the woman) super well, but if there was a hint of disrespect or psychosis, I was out.
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I’m sorry that you had to go through that, and depressed that it’s colored your opinion of all women.
I mean, the stats bear out the 'opinion of all women.' It's not hard to justify the opinion itself with reliable data.
I think you're more depressed that this is what an appreciable segment of women are like, and he's noticed it.
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They really aren't. I'd say many or even most women prefer a man who takes charge. And entitlement is much less of a problem if you aren't dating U.S. born white women.
So why is the constant social/cultural/media message, across virtually every mainstream channel, that men need to step aside, elevate women, defer to female input, and basically give women every single advantage so they can 'level the playing field' that was made unequal due to years of patriarchal control?
You're basically suggesting that women want some form of patriarchy, despite it being a literal governmental policy to attempt to dismantle said patriarchy.
Square the circle for me. Why are women, especially the college educated ones, voting for policies that make women less dependent on men and further remove authority for men if they prefer a man who takes charge?
Why wasn't Donald Trump re-elected on a wave of female approval?
Presumably because what people want, what they say they want, and what they vote for are all different things. Why do feminists sleep with Chads and not the sensitive nice guys?
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Being dependent on men in general is very different from being dependent on one particular man the woman has vetted.
I can grant that.
But the net result of making it harder for men to act as authority figures in general is to make it simultaneously harder for them to act as authority figures for a specific person.
So basically, if women want to make themselves independent of "males" so they're free to choose which male they want to depend on, it is fair to ask how that's working out for them.
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I mean, dating preferences and politics aren't things you would necessarily expect to have a one-to-one correlation in. And both of these fields are basically filled with self deception to the point that that's the norm rather than the exception, so when you've got lies stacked up on top of lies, a square circle is entirely expected.
But to humor the question for a bit, I've heard an explanation that the type of anti-patriarchy politics you see are a sort of society-wide "shit test." The idea being that, if you fully immerse society in the anti-patriarchy message, then the only men who will be dominant are the ones who are so dominant that they refuse to submit to those messages. Thus it becomes easier for women to discriminate between dominant and non-dominant men, with the latter type of men having to face higher barriers if they want to fake being the former. It's a win-win for women, because besides the emancipation/extra power gained from reducing the patriarchy, they also only get hit on by men who are more likely to be actually attractive.
The possible obvious pitfall is that there are only so many Truly Dominant men around, so most women end up unable to pair with one of them, instead being another notch on their bed stands during their younger years before having to settle for a substantially less dominant and thus less attractive man or just singlehood. And if the anti-patriarchy messaging was strong enough, that substantially less could be substantially less.
Like most such simple theories, there's probably a grain of truth and a lot of convincing-sounding just-so stories to it. At the least, none of this seems at all intentional or coordinated, and it's mostly an emergent phenomenon from the aforementioned stacking of lies upon lies that leaves everyone confused, is my guess.
I can agree with much of this.
As you stated, there may be a grain of truth to this. But it's one of those things that might be workable in a small tribe or otherwise tight-knit community where the whole society willingly recognizes the dominant males and affords them authority.
Probably something that, when scaled up to a sizeable nation state, ends up leading he massive population of 'less dominant' males to defect in hopes of improving their own social position, and the relatively small, and vastly outnumbered, dominant males are now beset by a group with outsized political power which they cannot defeat without near-perfect coordination amongst themselves. And of course the issue where the women are all competing for this pool of dominant males and thus are happy to enlist the less-dominant males to their side as needed. Consider the rise of Onlyfans as a means of separating less-dominant men from resources en masse in exchange for no actual physical interaction, which then allows a woman to be self-sufficient while she seeks the ideal mate.
Other factors like the shifting of social status from males who are good at fighting, killing, and leading male-centric warbands to guys who are good at manipulating numbers on a spreadsheet, building technology, and navigating feminine social environments (I'm being pretty obtuse here, admitted) are also making it harder for dominant males to assert the sort of social control that might counter the feminine influence.
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If they were leaping into commitment, I'm not surprised. Not only are they letting the devil find work for idle hands (what's a woman supposed to do if a man is giving her what she wants? That's a recipe to make most people deranged) but they're walking around the dating market with a huge neon sign saying "I am a mark. You can take my money if you want and I shall love you for it." It would be surprising if they didn't meet emotional hustlers.
The female equivalent is a woman who acts very slutty and gets surprised that she doesn't meet gentlemen. Maybe she concludes, "All men are swine. Yes, all men."
This is why men ought to look for women in circles where women are competing on being 'trad'.
Find the right meme-culture and you will find women that are just as enthusiastic for breeding as you are.
Then all you have to do is compete with the other trad-minded men, and it's not that hard imo.
It comes with another sets of demands, like providing for a set of children, actually fitting the trad-meme culture yourself, etc, but what other choices do you have?
If you're looking for a woman to have 3 kids in the Bay Area or NYC, you're doing it wrong, but there are ways to get that done, like being an Orthodox Jew in the latter, for example.
Yes, and in general, if a man really wants to find a woman who is interested in settling down and having kids, that's hard only insofar as it usually involves things that are beneficial anyway: having a good job, being sober, being responsible/reliable, and being kind.
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I feel like a huge amount of this is the sheer grind required to 'ascend' and the rejection along the way, especially in the modern dating app sphere. IMO the majority of both gender rock up with more-or-less good intentions, but it only takes a little bit of exposure to the current culture to reach a state of Fuck You.
In my experience, the response of men about this depends on the context.
All male company: We pretend to be more averse to commitment than we really are.
Mixed company: "My favourite things are commitment and changing myself."
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I see statements like this a lot on here and they always leave me so confused because it’s so far outside my own experience and the experiences of other guys I know. I’m an okay looking nerdy guy with a mid-compensation nerdy job in the Bay Area, which is apparently the epicenter location/demographic for these kinds of dating difficulties and yet neither I nor any of my male friends experiences them at all.
Ever since I moved here a few years ago there has been a constant flow of good looking, in shape, smart, well educated, my age-and-younger women who have their shit together and want to go on dates/sleep with/get serious with/get engaged to me, with honestly very little effort or grind on my part. Sometimes people don’t respond to my messages on bumble. Okay?
I could go on dates with women like this every day if I had the energy. And they’re almost all nice, not manipulative, not looking for handouts, not romantic climbers at all. It’s the same for all my guy friends. And we’re pretty average / below average in terms of income. Where are all these sexless dudes?
There was a thread on here last week about how the EA movement was basically a way for nerdy guys to meet women. Huh? It’s all so bewildering.
Maybe notice your confusion, and then update your priors based on the data explaining that most men aren't sharing your particular experience and that the data you've got available from your own experiences may not be representative of the larger trends.
I come into these threads and see one side that points at various studies and polls showing "this is what dating is like for huge swaths of the population" and then another that says "that's weird, it doesn't seem to be true in [smaller area]" without really engaging with the information the other side points to.
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Teach us your ways! I am a guy with a mid-compensation nerdy job in the Bay Area. I like to think that I am good-looking but I suppose that I cannot quite be sure. In any case, more than one woman has told me that I am attractive. I used to do quite well with women but then for various reasons I took a long time off from pursuing sex. Recently I have been trying to get back in the game and I have had some success - I made out with a few women whom I met at bars but have not gotten laid so far. I have never seriously tried online dating so far but given how often I hear guys say that they are getting good results from it, I think that I am going to actually seriously try it. I should just go ahead and put in the work of getting some good photos and writing up a good profile. At the same time I also intend to keep meeting women offline, since I find that it can be quite exciting and fun and anyway, I already spend more than enough time using technology at work.
How do you usually meet women? Got any pointers?
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Also, to piggyback, in my normal life, the vast majority of the people I keep track of from my fairly normal suburban/exurban high school in Florida are either married w/ kids or serially in fairly long-term relationships. Even out here, in supposedly SJW-infested Seattle that's also a tech hub, do you know what I see when I actually walk around in the outside world? Lots of couples.
I really think the current "crisis" is a combination of some bad data (even the GSS data seems kind of flawed) and the type of person who's not getting laid being very loud and overrepresented on the Internet.
The type of person who is able to successfully attract a mate seems likely to be heavily overrepresented in any group where one has loose acquaintances that would even care to "keep track of," as well as walking around in the outside world. How many literally friendless people are you friends with, and more broadly, how many people who has no meaningful friend/acquaintance group are you enough of a loose acquaintance with to "keep track of?" How many people who spend their lives with basically no social contact are you running into when you walk around in the outside world?
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I mean, you have to meet them somewhere right? They don’t just show up at your door. One of the most common pieces of dating advice I’ve seen is, “get a hobby and meet women there.” Maybe I erred in assuming EA to be a hobby.
I am starting to suspect that the dating scene in the Bay Area is just different. There was a post on Caroline Ellison’s tumblr about how she never got hit on in public before she moved to the Bay. Maybe once you reach some critical mass of nerdy people in one location they stop internalizing themselves as poorly socialized and become Chads and Stacys.
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One issue is that vocal incel or incel-adjacent people tend to be higher income, higher education, and more vocal/online than the mass of men most affected by sexlessness. Sexlessness isn't driven by 30-something software engineers making $300k in the Bay Area; it's driven by 20 year, non-college educated men living in their parents' basement in Akron.
(That said, if you're able to get a date with a different attractive, successful woman every evening as a heterosexual man in the Bay Area, you're certainly in the top decile in how much you attract women.)
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Dude you're almost certainly making something like five times the national median household income, you are not normal.
It's still a good rebuttal to the the EA claim, because EAs are also high income / class.
The median EA is probably closer to the 'autist unsociable nerd' side of the spectrum than bay area lothario, though outliers exist.
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