site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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.

16
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Hypergamy is a vacuous concept. People want to maximize positive attributes in their partners, you don’t say. It’s the male version of the female fear ‘all men want to do is replace their wives with younger models’.

Let's grant that. The difference: most men can't go out and get a younger girl to replace his wife. Only DiCaprio can do this reliably. Women, on the other hand, can get attention from higher-status men to replace her husband, but not as a husband. So, even if hypergamy is vacuous, it's still relevant if only one sex can act on their hypergamous instincts.

It's far easier for women to cheat, because men are hornier and less discriminating.

I agree they can't find a better husband, but they can find someone who they think will be their husband, and this is the whole issue. Men using prostitutes isn't the same for obvious reasons.

No, I do not think that the average women high-five each other every time they get pumped & dumped by a high status man and I find the insinuation rather insulting.

What I do claim however is that the average woman who struggles to find a long-term partner (note that this is already not the average woman) often has already been asked out by perfectly respectable similar-status men but rejected them for flimsy reasons. If you confront them and ask, well, among the people you know, who would you be willing to date, they'll frequently mention a single, maybe two or three, high-status married men (or, to take an extreme example, the aforementioned non-existent Prof. Brad Pitt). Depending on their taste, they might instead be into a flaky artist they've been having an on-off relationship/affair with for years, their boss, or their most popular co-worker, but the principle stays the same. Their obvious main issue is that among their peers, they simply deem no men worthy of being in a relationship with them, except the ones that clearly have other options. The moment they actually want to settle down and have a family, they'll often find someone in an instant. It's just they're still hoping for a better deal.

On the other hand the average man who struggles to find a long-term partner has already asked out similar or slightly below status women than themselves and been rejected. If you confront them and ask, well, among the people you know, who would you be willing to date, they'll give you a long list of all their female friends, as well as most their female co-workers except the batshit crazy or disfigured, and the same for female acquaintances that may even be significantly below their own status. Their obvious main issue is that among their peers, they simply are not deemed worthy of being in a relationship by almost all women (no, a women telling other women to date him bc he's so "nice" doesn't count). If they wanted to reliably find a girl, they would have to go to great and unusual lengths that may even cause their peers to lose respect for them, like going to Thailand and hitting on every non-prostitute they can find. Otherwise their main options are a) waiting until the women among their peers become sufficiently desperate with age or b) work harder to become higher-status. But unfortunately the latter is a zero-sum approach that will mostly kick down other men even further.

For reference, I'm talking about upper-middle class behaviour here (i.e. the group of people we hear the most complaining from & about). So, well-mannered people with decent hygiene, good work ethic and enough income that any reasonable family can be provided for. I'm a research postdoc at a decent western university, and the number of women with frankly delusional expectations and a surprising amount of sneering disgust towards even slightly below their status men that try to hit on them is downright frightening. Single female professors with bitter attitudes towards the male professors who dared to marry a non-professor are basically a running joke. Plenty of my wife's female acquaintances and friends, who are mostly also researchers, therapists, or I/O psychologists at companies show exactly the behaviour described above, and my wife, who has also become a bit sick of their attitudes, occasionally digs a little deeper into who would actually be good enough for them, and it's reliably exactly who you'd expect.

And to repeat myself, I'm specifically talking about the women who claim to struggle to find a partner, not those that are in stable long-term relationships (I do think women in general are hypergamous, but for most women that preference is weak enough to not lead to this obvious failure mode). And also to be clear, I have plenty of gripes with male mate-finding behaviour as well and do not consider women's behaviour worse overall. But the topic here is the existence of female hypergamy, and the specific issue of a seeming pandemic of unhappy single people is in my opinion mainly caused by female hypergamy, and not by men playing too much video games or similar claims in mainstream journalism.

As an aside, I'm also quite frustrated how reliably every time one complains about how much men suck as a group in some way (they're more violent & criminal, they constantly try sleeping around if given the chance, they flake on family duties, they're less reliable in general, etc. are all things I genuinely think are true on average), it's just everyone nodding along, but if one mentions a single way in which women might not be so great, they get these ridiculous assertions thrown at them.

Good post.

To put it succinctly: eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Female bodies are inherently valuable, male bodies are not. Everything follows from this principle.

To contextualize a bit, I’m a MRA-ish antifeminist and rafa, while having some feminist sympathies, can hardly be called a mainstream one. So you shouldn't pattern-match this criticism to the general, frequently feminist, view. The line ‘men want to replace their wives with younger models” is indirectly aimed @2rafa , as they have expressed such sentiments in the past.

I think some redpill concepts obscure more than they reveal. You limit your argument to single women already, but that is not how it is used (awalt).

One can explain the attitude you describe in single college-educated women with general human failings, ego protection and sour graping. Feminism and other forms of female chauvinism, when present, obviously don’t help. But those are not the insurmountable, almost genetically coded obstacles redpill thought makes them out to be, encouraging bitterness and helplessness.

That's the thing, I think you're obscuring more than you're revealing by trying to put everything into generic boxes that can apply to both genders. For example, you can kind of explain "roid rage" through general human concepts like regular rage/anger. But no, the very specific hyper-violent presentation of roid rage is caused explicitly by excessive male hormones. You can also see in general that men express anger and rage much more violently, and that some unlucky men can even get something resembling roid rage more or less naturally. An angry women is just frankly not comparable, and will consistently express that anger very differently. Violence in general is more or less a male-specific problem, with women who are engaging in substantial violence being basically a rounding error (yes, I know the female domestic violence stats; no, I don't think it's very comparable).

The same applies here as well. Being perpetually, unhappily single due to inappropriately high standards is pretty much a female-specific problem. You can kind of find similar-ish behaviour in men if you squint hard enough (some super-high status men seem to have trouble holding a long-term relationship, but they also seem pretty happy dumping their young model gf for an even younger model gf), but again, it really isn't very well comparable. Every single guy I've met that claimed to be single due to his high standards immediately jumped at the opportunity once any woman showed him any attention whatsoever. It was just pure cope.

I agree though that viewing this as as insurmountable is wrong as well. As an individual, there's plenty of things you can do to improve your chances.

Don’t concur with your anecdotes. I don’t think incels or hikkikomoris act like they would jump at the chance to have any girlfriend (not that I condemn that attitude, again, legitimate preference).

I think the situation is symmetrical. For every complaint about men making no effort and being childish, there’s one about women being fat, expecting too much. It’s a market. At the end of the day, some of the inventory sits unsold despite there being some buyers left. Only they want to pay 10 dollars for a bunch of apples, and the sellers want 15. I have no sympathy for their intersex whining ‘the sellers/buyers want to exploit us, they’d rather have nothing than our perfectly good offer.’ Then it degenerates into two separate locker room talks about useless men and bitches.

Adjust your price or live with the fact no transaction will take place, both of you. No side is especially wrong or irrational here.

every man who ever worked his way up in society who then married into old or established money, something that has happened throughout the entire history of civilization and still does toda

Precisely! It's well that you're describing economic selection for marriage, and not sexual selection/attraction. That's the whole point! What you described does not disprove the thesis about hypergamy, and is not, in fact, a case of hypergamy.

is that women sleep with a very attractive man and then assume that this is the same kind of person they can marry. Related is the idea that fucking an extremely hot or rich man is some great status symbol for women.

Well, yes, if you word it that way, of course it comes across as stupid. The way I'd word the Red Pill thesis on this is this: for women, it's self-evident and natural to develop an emotional bond to the man they enjoy fucking, and assume that the same is happening to the man; it's so natural to assume that they don't even recognize it. But for men, it isn't. That's the point.

Precisely! It's well that you're describing economic selection for marriage, and not sexual selection/attraction. That's the whole point! What you described does not disprove the thesis about hypergamy, and is not, in fact, a case of hypergamy.

Er, the original use case of hyeprgamy was exactly economic selection for marriage and that is how the term is still used outside of redpill spheres. Women being hypergamous has been accepted in my (non-western) culture since time immemorial. Men being hypergamous too is accepted although them being successfully hypergamous is rarer. Indeed when I get married I'll be paying close attention to the economic status of potential in laws before making my decision (someone who's a 8/10 fit for me by the only child of a very rich family is a much better choice for my future children than someone who's a 9/10 fit for me but comes from penury).

Related is the idea that fucking an extremely hot or rich man is some great status symbol for women.

I've never seen this idea in RedPill spaces before - not from "official" sources, nor from any random commenters on reddit or blogs.

It's well understood in RedPill circles that men and women relate to sex differently and that women do not derive status from sex in the way that men do. The concept of hypergamy has nothing to do with women trying to make alleged displays of status.

I think you've misrepresented what I've said a bit, no doubt mostly my fault for weak communication. And I take the important grain of salt that I'm a man trying to model the mind space of women, as I can tell how poorly that tends to go the other way I should be humble in my assumptions. That said I did not mean to imply women are happy to be "pumped and dumped" by higher status males. They definitely want these men as committed partners. My point was that 'settling' seems to be harder for women than men for reasons I can understand.

I'm not perfectly happy with my post, it seems weak to the criticism of:

wait I thought you just said male status is more legible but now you're saying it's multifaceted enough that men don't have as much status anxiety when comparing themselves to other men. Is it legible or not?

To which I think I can respond that the stuff women find attractive in men, from what I can tell on the outside and having spent considerable effort in improving my attractiveness, are fairly legible but other male competition is more nuanced and not as dependent on the evaluation of women. I don't think I'm describing this all that well but do you at least agree that there is some asymmetry at play here?

Disagree pretty hard. Men have a much lower bar for a partner before they say "I'd rather stay single" than women and men would rather sleep with many different partners than having a single super-high status partner. Or the other way around, some women, particularly while they're still young, apparently even prefer being a high-status man's affair over a low-status man's wife.

Just as an example, I personally know multiple women who "have trouble finding a good man" only to find out that they got hit on by a man who was, quite frankly, better than them. My wife confronted a friend of hers who had this problem and concluded herself that she will probably never find someone unless it's literally Brad Pitt, but he is also an accomplished researcher (her words, not mine). Meanwhile looking at my male friends who struggled, most jumped at the very first chance of getting any girlfriend whatsoever.

You should in particular compare what high-status man vs woman say and what they do, since this is the group that has most agency and can optimize for what they actually care about. High-status man will quite frequently have multiple affairs and rarely complain about finding a partner. High-status woman have much less affairs, and if they have one it's usually with a single man that is often even higher status than them, they will frequently complain about finding a good man and generally invest their resources into finding a single high-status man.

These are very simple, real differences between the sexes, and while you may use any word for it you like, hypergamy is a good one.

As a gay man I would absolutely prefer three 6/10 guys than one 9/10 guy. I have been with guys who are 9/10 and it feels degrading because I know they're hotter than me and it makes me feel bad to be with them. The older I get the less I want to sleep with a super hot guy because it just makes me feel worse about myself. It's basically this meme. In theory I love guys who look super hot because I am attracted to masculinity but it's the cheap thrill subsides when we both know who's hotter. I can imagine myself as richer or smarter or better educated or better on any other metric than any hotter guy but none of these dimensions really matter to me when I'm with a man I perceive as physically hotter than me. I can only imagine that straight men ultimately go through this same process of realization- the classic Gilligan's Island trope comes to mind (younger guys go for Ginger because she's a glam bombshell, older guys go for MaryAnn because she's sweet and loving). The older I get the more I'm looking for a sweet and loving guy I can actually believe likes me, rather than a guy who others will think is hot. Having three men I can believe really like me is a million times more appealing than a guy hotter than me that makes me feel less hot than him.

As a purely egoistic question? Absolutely the former, no questions asked, and I'm even talking about me personally here. Though I do think it applies to the average man as well, especially given I know how they talk when in all-male company & drunk. If anything in my experience I'm already somewhat unusual in that I actually want kids since I'm a teen instead of purely casual sex. But again, if I'm being honest to myself, I would prefer to have lots have kids with several 6/10 than to have only a few with a single 9/10, assuming I can provide for them.

Of course, in a how-to-structure-society meta way, I prefer for everyone to prefer the latter. So I do not think my egoistic preferences to be good, in fact they're very bad, but I think it is important to be aware of your failures & weaknesses.

Is it wrong to say it would depend on the man's age? I think the % preferring each option would be noticeability tilted in opposite directions for say 21 vs 31.

Are you saying you think the 21 year old would prefer the three 6's over the 9 and the 31 year old would prefer the 9 over the 3 6's? Or the other way around?

Correct on the first one, I think the average 21 year old would prefer the greater quantity and the average 31 year old would prefer the greater quality.

It’s undeniable that the status of their partner is more important for women than for men. If you want to call that hypergamy, fine, but to me it’s trivial, and doesn’t translate to the vitriol that usually accompanies the term.

That this way of choosing partners is worse than men’s is not clear. I don’t see much evidence that women would rather stay single than men, for example women are often asking men to commit more, ie be less single. But in any case this is also a legitimate preference, condemning an entire sex on that basis doesn’t make sense.

Where did I condemn women, or implied that their way of choosing partners is worse? If it satisfies you, I will say that men's mate-seeking behaviour ranges from pathetic groveling on one end to callous hedonism on the other end, depending on their status. It is in no way better than women's mate-seeking behaviour.

Saying that women are hypergamous is not a “condemnation”. It’s supposed to be a neutral descriptor of their mating strategy. The strategy itself is neither good not evil; it’s simply a brute fact, the natural outcome of biological and evolutionary factors beyond the control of any one individual.

Of course no descriptor is ever entirely neutral, and you do see vitriol accompanying the term, simply due to the fact that TRP/manosphere circles attract a lot of vitriolic young men who can’t get laid and are angry about it. But hypergamy itself isn’t inherently a “bad” thing.

Like Marx's description of capitalism is supposedly morally neutral and a brute fact. It becomes this sprawling, undefeatable monster of negative attributes of the other.

I also disagree that hypergamy as redpillers use it ( meaning , women will leave them at the drop of a hat for a higher-status man, women in general are far more likely than men to think their prospective partners are below them, etc) correctly describes women's behaviour and attitudes.

I think either your understanding of the conversations taking place is flawed or you're just looking at lower quality redpillers. It never turned into this sprawling, undefeatable monster in the circles I travelled in - the term has a very specific meaning, and even the additional connotations it took on were related to and in service of that meaning. Women will absolutely not leave them at the drop of a hat for a higher status man(notice how all marriages on earth didn't break up so that the women could go join President Trump's harem), and among people who are actually having conversations (and not just incels transforming rage and sexual frustration into boring screeds) hypergamy is viewed as one of many factors involved in female mate choice. You don't need to have a 140 IQ to understand why such a drive would come into being, and at the same time it is something that men(who simply do not function the same way) would want to know about.

Hypergamy doesn't describe a qualifier, it describes the disqualifier. Obviously, everyone WANTS the best, not the best they can get, but the best there is.

Men don't disqualify from having sex with or partnering up with a woman if she is of lower status than him. Women don't [dm]ate with lower-status men.

It's not what they want, it's what they viscerally don't want.

I think the main difference is that male attributes are more legible and women are attuned to the relative status of their males. Men can have the relative attractiveness of their wives blur together and anyways they compete with other males on plenty of other categories that wife attractiveness is only one factor in many. Mean while until women have children to brag about other women can very quickly tell how tall, how apparently wealthy and how well placed a partner is in the legible male status hierarchy. Neither women nor men seem to care all that much about women's careers so despite energy being put there it doesn't really impact status anxiety all that much.

At least by perception the status of women is mostly one level removed from their control, what they can control is which man they attach themselves to. They get a facsimile of having high status by sleeping with the highest status male they can and convincing themselves that this is their true status. At least the single ones who didn't attach to a proto high status male, which is the underside of the iceberg often left undiscussed. These single people that make up the population we discuss have already been selected for something.

I think the main difference is that male attributes are more legible and women are attuned to the relative status of their males.

Interestingly, the same is true for crime. When men attempt to destroy their enemy, the signs are generally very, very visible- hard to hide scratches, bruises, and broken bones- but when women do the same, it's invisible and completely deniable (it's very difficult to prosecute a woman for false rape accusations, and their bullying more generally as the lies are told and the damage done behind closed doors and side channels).

As such, it takes a lot more effort to put an end to female bad actors (and a lot of the judgment will be on circumstantial evidence anyway), and the effect multiplies as the gender balance of an organization (including society at large) skews their way to the point where the (for lack of a better term) "begone thot" school of problem solving stops working.

Corruption is a difficult beast to deal with and no civilization ever survives it (States fall apart when the parasitic load gets too high, but can survive a lot of it to begin with); they all just fracture or are conquered (and we've managed to exterminate all barbarians that could do the latter).

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats