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I.e. bargain.
What type of mating situation would not be bargaining?
None. It's not that you are bargaining that's the point. It's what you are bargaining and what for.
You can't consider yourself 'masculine' after working away to become 'high status' to attain the thing some other guy has been getting without having to 'work'. It just doesn't add up. Which leaves all of these prosocial 'constructive masculinity' prescriptions dead in the water.
In short, consciously attempting to do something to attract women reduces your attractiveness to women, correct? So prosocial masculinity is a contradiction in terms because 'being prosocial to attract women' and 'attracting women' are incompatible, or at least orthogonal.
If so, I think it's somewhat true but also somewhat overstating the case. Unless you possess animal magnetism, trying to look a bit better is probably worth it. And increasing your status is also probably worth it. But it will never make you one of those men who just scores effortlessly.
(I'm going to agree with what you said with more words)
Kind of. You can increase your bargaining power. Like, owning a house or a decent sized apartment is enough to bag yourself a single mother. But in a Venn diagram of three items, 'prosocial', 'attractive' and 'realistically feasible for a young man', you have a very small intersection between all three. Small enough to justify saying, in my view, that these are not realistically achievable. Or at least I would not prescribe the prosocial constructive masculinity framework to anyone I actually care about.
There's a distinction we can make between personal life advice and social commentary. Yes, bettering your life is very possible and for most, easy. Study hard, get a good job, work hard. You get rewarded for this by the time you are 30 compared to if you don't.
But from a social commentary standpoint, what does the life of an 'unattractive' man who does this look like between 16-27 compared to someone who doesn't need to? To echo Elliot Rodgers: "It's not fair!".
You piously work your way through your youngest and most exciting years starved of attention from the opposite sex to do what? Get settled for by the time you hit 30 by some woman who expects you to pay down all the loans she took to fuel her party days of college? Where she had sex with guys she actually wanted to have sex with? Meanwhile you, for all intents and purposes, are in a platonic monetary relationship with this person. You know she doesn't like you the same way she liked those other guys.
I think every man knows in their heart that such a state of affairs is tragic and humiliating. Potentially more tragic and humiliating than just folding. After all, is such a life really worth working hard for?
I think that, regardless of everything else, the 'prosocial' crowd has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Though I agree with @TheDag to an extent. You need meaning, a greater purpose, a true faith to overcome this. There's no way you can tell a non-insignificant percentage of young men that they will simply have to ignore their own emotions and bootstrap themselves through the loneliness whilst there's an ongoing propaganda war on social media where everyone is trying to out-advertise and out-sexualize everyone else to show off just how much fun they are having.
But short of resurrecting Jesus Christ or Adolf Hitler, I don't know the intended way to do that.
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No, a bargain is a quid-pro-quo. "Oooh, that tall guy from Goldman Sachs is so hot, and he's looking at me" is not a bargain.
You are bargaining with the hypothetical woman when you decide to become a tall guy working at Goldman Sachs to garner her interest. You bring being tall and having money, she brings whatever.
Making oneself attractive to women is not the same as bargaining with a woman. And the hypothetical tall Goldman Sachs guy didn't choose to be tall anyway. As you yourself said, she'll give it away for free to him.
If you know a woman would not consider you attractive if you don't work at Goldman Sachs, so you seek to work at Goldman Sachs, what word would you use to describe you working at Goldman Sachs in relation to that woman and their attraction to you? I like the term 'bargaining chip'.
It might not be verbal, but that woman weighed you as 'attractive' on her scale because of that job. You needed that 'bargaining chip'.
I like the term "panty dropper".
It's still not a bargain. There was no negotiation (nor even offer) and she gets nothing from it. There's no "Hey, schlub, you get a job at Goldman-Sachs and I'll be hot for you". She just IS that way.
The woman decided that you were attractive based on a thing you had to work for. It's not you, it's the thing you worked for that she wants. That was the point. Do you get it?
I get the point, but it's wrong. She doesn't want to be tall nor have the Goldman-Sachs job. Maybe she's a gold-digger (in which case you would be right), but maybe just the whole idea of a guy with a high-status job turns her on; these are different situations.
They're not. You are working towards being high status to get the woman. The relevant context here is the man and what he has to do compared to other men. If you have to work to get what another man does not have to work for you can't consider yourself better than him.
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This is starting to sound like the noncentral fallacy, and perhaps a particularly bad version of it. "I can stretch the meaning of X to include Y, therefore I can extend judgements about central cases of X to Y" is not a good argument.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
Is a woman wearing makeup to attract men "bargaining" too?
I think you are employing the 'I don't like the connotations of this so I'm going to call it a fallacy' fallacy. I'm not stretching the meaning of 'bargaining' here at all. Beyond that I don't know what you are insinuating that I am arguing for. I am giving a description of reality. If you want to use different words to describe it, go ahead. It doesn't change the fact that most men have to learn that just being themselves isn't good enough. They need something more. Which is where the entire self improvement become masculine and worthy crap comes from.
Kind of. She's leveraging what she already has.
To help elucidate a bit, a part of the frustration monetarily successful women have described in media is that they want to be able to bargain for a better man than their looks could command but can't since a lot of men don't care about their money. I.e. their money has no bargaining power over the men they want. So they write articles about how men are intimidated by successful middle aged women or whatever.
You don't think it's stretching "at all" to extend it to interactions with no agreement on sufficient conditions for the exchange, articulated negotiations, or legal enforcement? And from a political or commercial context to a romantic one?
But I totally agree with your first two sentences and I don't know what the third one means. My complaint is that thinking of "You have to work hard to gain the romantic approval of others" as "bargaining" is trying to generate a specific emotional response by including the former in the latter category (which, sure, you can do with the right defintions) where the archetypal form of similar bargaining would be e.g. prostitution or arranged marriages.
She's amplifying it, granted. But that doesn't make it bargaining.
Why put it in terms of "bargaining power", rather than "men are largely indifferent to money in a partner, at least for deciding whether to have sex with them"?
(Maybe it also extends to whether they consider women to be marriage-material, but the evidence I have seen is about women's sexual success. And some of that has been dubious e.g. relative frequency of simultaneous partners, but that presupposes that a sexually attractive woman is more likely to have multiple simultaneous partners, something I don't know to be true. Sleeping around seems to require attractiveness on the part of men, but desperation is a sufficient condition for even unattractive women.)
You can bargain with whatever you have. Party X wants something from party Y, and to get it tries to... 'convince' the other party by 'showing' them that he has something they want. How that is not bargaining I don't know and I don't care.
Raising the bar for definitions like this is, to me, an irrelevant game of words at best. If we don't disagree on the factual matter at hand then I have to ask again, what are you insinuating my argument is when I use the term 'bargain'?
This seems similar to objections to general manosphere terminology regarding the 'sexual market place'. Where the accuracy or utility of the terminology is disregarded due to it being too vulgar.
I mean, this is about love and companionship and all those nice, beautiful things, right? A relationship just can't be so ugly. True love is beautiful.
Well, from the perspective of a woman, maybe that's the case. They don't see their requirement for money as something vulgar and emotionally negative. They just see it as the way of the world at worst and a necessary stepping stone towards true love at best. But for a man, at least speaking for myself, it does seem rather crass and vulgar to gatekeep something as talked up as affection or 'love' behind a financial requirement. Really betrays and diminishes the entire concept. I mean, that's not something men are supposed to let get between their affection or 'love', right?
Not too vulgar, but as potentially misleading. For example, simply changing the denotation of a word doesn't automatically change its connotations. Hence, one's reasoning can be affected by associations with a word's old reference.
Well, you said:
"You can't be 'masculine' when you have to bargain with women for access to their genitals."
Well, if "bargaining" specifically means something like handing over money for sex, then certainly masculine traits are irrelevant to the sexual encounter. A femboy, a coward, a dishonest man etc. could do that.
But it seems that you also want to say that anything a guy does to make himself (more?) attractice is also bargaining:
"You are bargaining with the hypothetical woman when you decide to become a tall guy working at Goldman Sachs to garner her interest. You bring being tall and having money, she brings whatever."
However, the connection between masculine traits and attraction becomes more integral here. For example, most women find the ability to obtain resources as more attractive than the mere possession. A trust-fund baby is less attractive than a self-made man, because the latter (if the wealth was acquired honestly, not purely by chance etc.) can provide under a wider range of circumstances, e.g. the loss of his wealth. And if you think of your own (platonic) difference in regard for the two men's characters, it's at least because of the masculine traits required to obtain wealth are admirable, whereas the luck required to be born into wealth deserves no admiration at all.
Similarly, you want to say that a woman who buys and uses make-up to attract men is bargaining. However, in that case, feminine traits (delicacy, attention to the comfort of others etc.) are also usually relevant to the success of the woman, in a way that isn't the case in archetypal bargaining, e.g. a woman who gets a hot husband by her family offering a big dowry.
The extension of "these behaviours aren't really masculine/feminine" seems to depend on the claim that there are bargaining for sex, which is true if you stretch the scope of 'bargaining' far enough. However, it doesn't follow from that subsumption of these behaviours into the category "bargaining" that we can infer that they have the properties of archetypal cases of bargaining for sex (or companionship or whatever). The problem is that such non-sequitur inferences are very tempting due to the connotations of "bargaining", even given an explicit change in its reference.
You're right to make the analogy with "sexual marketplace", which is misleading for similar reasons. I have been in brothels and I have dated, and while there are similarities, it's a reciple for loose thinking to refer to both as "sexual marketplaces". Devoted as I am to capitalism and economic analysis, I'm more devoted to rationality and clear thinking, which are harmed by expecting that the associations (descriptive and normative) of words will change simply as a matter of broadening their definitions.
I have no idea what you are doing anymore. I've told you that I don't care what you call it, so long as we are talking about the same thing. At this point you seem to be fixating on words and definitions to get away from the meat of the matter. It just looks like you want to reject a framing of the conversation without saying it.
When someone is talking about the 'sexual market place' in the context of dating in the western world they are obviously not talking about brothels and prostitution. You are not being rational or precise with language when you play these word games. It is at best obtuse and obfuscatory.
The point I'm making is extremely simple. Man A gets approached by women, gets replies on dating apps and in general finds casual sex and relationships very easy to come by. Man B gets none of those things. In fact women don't even look at him for longer than 2 seconds to decide that he is not attractive.
Man A doesn't need to think about his life goals in terms of what he needs to garner attention from women. Man B does. Man B recognizes that if he does not come by some form of 'thing' or 'currency' or 'bargaining chip' or 'whatever word you want' to balance out his apparent unattractiveness to women, he will likely end up alone or unhappy. Both of these guys might be similar otherwise, but their struggle is not the same. Both want sex and affection. One needs the 'thing' to even be able to play the game, the other does not.
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