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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
…Come on, this is a trivial confounder. If there's a reason not to marry or date a conventionally hot sex worker, it's not her looks as such. At worst, it's some perverse signaling consideration, like you say, or insecurity about competition, but ordinarily just an essentially moral and practical choice. A fat prostitute, or an emaciated drug addict with anorexic «model» proportions, are obviously even less attractive! And a «decent» woman with a hourglass figure is not seen as non-respectable or non-desirable.
In fact, you can get in trouble for slut-shaming an actual slut! Assuming that a conventionally hot woman who isn't a slut is non-respectable just because of looks that would boost a slut's popularity is ludicrous and frankly suicidal levels of sexism.
Men seem to be generally less influenced by choice copying, though I admit evo psych explanations of this aren't very solid.
I flatter myself thinking I'm a misaligned high-order mesa-optimizer that maximizes abstract notions like model consistency, aesthetics and diversity of possible agents.
But my dick has a head of its own, and I think this is the same for most men. Taste can be socially influenced; but you were discussing raw attractiveness. The position I and your previous interlocutors defend is that there are some damn robust biologically determined attractors in the attractiveness space, and the body shape common to healthy women with normal hormonal profiles is one such attractor for cis men. Another is skin quality (even harmless freckles are a rather minor fetish), another is hair quality indicative of high estrogen. A man can be an ass man or a breast man or even an abs man, but an archetypal shorthair tomboy with visible abs is still just a 90-60-90 girl who's cut her luscious hair short, trained a bit more and ate a bit less. And everything we see shows that the modal desirable female phenotype oscillates around this, actually quite narrow, setpoint.
How is pointing at revealed popular preferences not even wrong? It's clearly less not even wrong than pointing at arbitrarily picked runway models.
I mean, several recursions ago I was just talking about dudes wanting to wear dresses. Other guy had to bring sexuality into it.
I'm not necessarily claiming my poop is better than yours, yet we feel the need to fling it just the same.
It's the equivalent of me writing an effortpost about some survey data/psych experiments on undergrads suggesting that we date people with traits held by our opposite sex parent, and all my friends find it eerie how they've ended up with girlfriends similar to their mom. If I show people photos of women of varying races, men will invariably show a strong preference for women of the same race as their mom. Ceteris paribus, controlling for variables like weight/clothing/whatever, men show a statistically significant preference for women that look similar to their mom. Season with some choice quotes from Freud and myths from antiquity. Do you now believe that the Oedipal complex drives human sexuality, and that we have a genetic imperative to fuck the closest thing to our mom that we can find?
Just the fact that you agree all those other considerations (money, status, body 'archetypes,' flavors of the week, lineage, etc that you call confounders) feed into sexuality and 'mate choice' (to sound like a sperg) more or less lines up with my main thesis that sexuality is fairly plastic according to the norms du jour. I don't deny that there are genetic influences, but I do disagree with throwing out a bathtub full of babies to focus on a single axis of sexuality.
edit: Maybe this post is closer to my thesis than what I linked to above.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link