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 -
I don't think that's having a point at all. Those women were entirely free to not do that to themselves. Just don't go home with the guy. If he then crosses the line into actual rape, then and only then, she has a point. Her having unrealistic expectations and a random man failing to meet them is not and will never be a serious problem in need of solving.
People's choices aren't products of some wholly independent life philosophy consciously derived from first principles. We're products of society and we act like it. If you had been raised from birth in an Afghan village the sum of your philosophy, identity and belief system would be radically different to what it is, even mediated for genetics. Expecting young women to wholesale reject 60 years of the sexual revolution as teenagers (when all almost everyone wants to do is fit in) is ridiculous. It's up to the adults in the room to change norms.
Hugh Hefner and the ad men of Madison Ave weren’t teenage girls. Teenage girls wanted male attention as much in 1865 as they did in 1965, the difference was the adults who surrounded them and the culture they were raised in.
More options
Context Copy link
It feels good in the moment, and consequences come decades down the line. Even then, it needed a few generations to take hold.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sorry but the fact that something is not a crime doesn't mean it is not a serious problem. The problem is that half of the solution - use your judgement, don't put yourself in peril, listen to your mother and so in is anathema to the modern safetism feminists. The other half is to actually have men abide to some semi formal dating rules (if you didn't get to second base outside of the house, don't be pushy inside for example) and dating language. This will minimize the communication errors and unpleasant experiences.
Feminists don't seem to want the other half in practice either. Obviously getting rid of those kinds of situations entails good behavior but feminists don't want that, they want institutional control.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I largely agree. However, the sexual market place is bigger than the individual. The sexual revolution has limited the bargaining power of women and the extent to which men will wait for sex. In a hook up culture competing by showing more skin and sleeping faster has become widespread. Trying to make the demands a women could make decades ago such as waiting for sex, demanding that the man provide for the family etc isn't really feasible.
It has only limited their bargaining power with Chad, who now has four other girls on his booty call list just waiting for a text from him. But women have more bargaining power than ever over the ever-increasing percentage of men who are incels.
If a woman actually wanted to marry a provider and remain chaste until marriage while she was still young and hot and virginal, she would have her pick of the litter.
But women only want Chad, and would rather fuck a dog than an average-looking beta provider. They only hold their noses and marry such men when they hit the wall and stop getting attention from Chad, or when they end up as single mothers looking for a bailout.
Women debase themselves by having sex after a few dates and performing degrading sexual acts because that is the only way to compete for Chad, and the alternative to competing for Chad is accepting a man that is not Chad, which is a fate too terrible to countenance.
I have a hard time seeing this as women having a point.
Post about specific groups, rather than general groups, whenever possible. Write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation.
As a rule, if you can't differentiate between "women" and "some women," you're going to have a hard time.
More options
Context Copy link
This is not my third-hand anecdotal experience. Even conservative-leaning men want premarital sex even more than the women of similar cultural leaning do.
And even in past societies, among the masses, (note: vague guess on my part based on reading a few historical sources, could be wrong but I doubt it, there's definitely better scholarship on the topic I haven't read yet) sex before marriage was very common, and the strictly enforced rule was more 'marry the women you have sex with and raise the children'.
It seems like redpill/PUA/manosphere adjacent people have these theories about the whole of modern sexual behavior that are exclusively based on the way < 20% of the population behaves, and then exaggerate even their behavior. Ugly men and ugly women have casual sex AND date, even in college! On dating apps specifically, and i guess on social media, women have a massive advantage - but that's in large part because connection there is mediated by looks and very short-term interactions, which men are more interested in than women. And as a result dating apps have 5x more men than women. But if you're dating friends, or people you know from shared activities, non-Chads do quite well.
This just seems false, if I interpret it literally, compared to the experiences anyone I know has had?
More options
Context Copy link
Really? The average guy (not Chad) is happy to date a woman who wants marriage first, sex after? When he's young and horny and wants to have sex with as many women as he can realistically manage to get, because he wants fun and experiences and not to be tied down aged 18+?
It takes two to tango, and for every guy who says he wants a nice girl fiancée, there's one who means "when I've sown my wild oats and am ready to settle down".
The average non-Chad guy doesn't get a chance to sow his wild oats while he is still young and horny. That is precisely what would make such a marriage a good deal for him; he could trade commitment and financial support in exchange for guaranteed, exclusive sex.
Sure, he would like it even better if he could have sex with a bunch of women, but, not being Chad, he doesn't have that option. Having the opportunity of an early marriage would be a strict improvement over his current situation of masturbating to porn and maybe getting laid once or twice a year if he tries really hard every weekend (there is a reason they call it "getting lucky").
As fortaleza84 put it:
But the average man doesn't get that option anymore, because women are not actually interested in getting commitment from a beta provider. The only reason they ever got married to such men was because their fathers, who had legal, social, economic, and religious control over their sexual choices, forced them to. The sexual revolution ended that.
Now, a beta provider is expected to wife up a woman in her 30s after she has finished spending her youth, beauty, fertility, and purity getting pumped-and-dumped by Chad:
From "The Archetypal Modern Woman":
But, increasingly, men are saying "thanks, but no thanks" and leaving those women to become bitter cat ladies and single mothers. In the immortal words of Michael:
Not to worry, though; the government is perfectly happy to steal the fruit of men's labor to help pay for Chad's bastards.
In the welfare state, every working man is a cuck.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In secular urban circles in the modern West (and no, suddenly deciding to leave your family, friend and community and become a Mormon or an Orthodox Jew at 17 isn't a realistic option for most women), what percentage of eligible young men do you think expect or consider it reasonable to wait until marriage?
People are products of society, even as they participate in shaping it. Young women who grow up in the shadow of the sexual revolution had no choice about which society they were born into and what its norms were and are. Yes, everyone has free will, expecting every teenage girl to rebel against the entirety of modernity is absurd.
Isn't this kind of like saying "in vegetarian urban circles in the modern West, what percentage of eligible ladies want to have steak every Friday"?
If you want steak, you shouldn't be hanging out with vegetarians -- even urban churches should have no shortage of men who are OK with waiting until marriage for sex -- so long as the wait is not too long ofc.
More options
Context Copy link
The answer depends on your definition of the word "eligible".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I read a fair bit into the link you provided, and found nothing that could be reasonably read to support your claim. The link claims that a small minority of women have bestiality fantasies (hardly surprising), that a very small minority of female participants in surveys report having engaged in bestiality, and that bestiality-themed dildos are popular (yes, furries are a thing.) None of that adds up to women, as a class, preferring sex with dogs to sex with non-chads, or even preferring it to sex with outright incels; there is no evidence provided that "women's" preference for sex with dogs is a significant factor in the sexual marketplace at all.
Your statement appears both highly inflammatory and entirely unsupported. The sexual marketplace is woeful enough without resorting to absurd caricature, and in fact your comment would be greatly improved by its absence. Don't say things because they sound good, say them because you've thought about them seriously and concluded that they're true.
Not him, and don't necessarily support his claim, but I think the logic goes something like
I think it's less about the idea that it has a major impact on the marketplace (though the complete non-existence of dogs would probably have some infitessimally small impact) and more just one of those realizations where people are hit with the fact that they are literally less fuckable than a literal dog.
Of course, this all falls apart if the focus is on "average looking" rather than "beta," as it only works if talking about incels specifically.
My own view is that what I laid out above is roughly true, but mostly just the fault of the bottom-tier men for sucking that badly. It's not even really a bad or shocking thing. As you said, furries exist, and they're a much larger group than loser-philes.
Zoophilia is not that common a paraphilia, practicing zoophilia even less, removed from contexts like degradation or zoosadism yet rarer still, and female non-degradation-focused zoophiles even more uncommon.
((I don't recommend using Bad Dragon as a metric, since regardless of Varka's issues the median Bad Dragon sale or advertisement revolves around the fantasy of a sapient and often bipedal partner, but a) the median customer has or had a dick, and b) an overwhelmingly male ratio applies to self-reports among actual-bestialists, too.))
It's just more visible, in the sense that someone getting arrested and/or publicly shamed for animal abuse (whether in any remotely less-violent way, or as the degradation or animal-sadism sense that very few incels would want) shows up in the news for incels to talk about, where "woman with kink for ugly/submissive/pathetic men" doesn't in any visible or identifiable way. But the later is more common than you'd think; if more generally spaced among written fiction than visual pornography.
And, of course, the broader "average-looking beta provider" is far better off, even before considering all of the ethical and pragmatic problems with actual animal abuse.
((Peter Singer's impact on the Wider EA Community isn't the worst thing that hit the tumblr ratsphere, but that I know this stuff is definitely not a benefit.))
But the article linked in the post you linked mentions that 4% of the female population had a sexual experience with an animal, with much higher rates among certain sub-populations (particularly farmers). I mean that's not exactly the 5% I mentioned off the cuff but cut me some slack. That just becomes more significant when taking into account that actual practicing zoophilia isn't even required for the overall point.
As to that data, my understanding is that the data is pretty all over the place, women fantasize about animals more often, men actually engage in the actions more frequently (but typically don't fantasize about it even if they do normally fuck animals,) and the actual rates of interest in it are pretty close.
The points about the pathetic-man-fetish are all valid though, and I'm not too attached to the overall point anyway, though I expect for anyone who does care about it, any nitpicks are unlikely to remove the emotional damage of "there are attractive women who have fucked dogs but wouldn't touch you with a 10-foot-pole."
Unfortunately, a lot of Kinsey's data and his redefinitions -- note that the writer says sexual experience rather than anything specific -- got blurred aggressively, in no small part by Kinsey himself. His actual data for women was far more restricted, with literally only one actual adult woman in thousands who had full coitus with an animal (a dog) in the sample for Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, with paeans to a few more who might not have been included to protect them legally, and a more significant but still sub-0.05% who'd 'received' oral.
The 4% number comes from rounding up his 3.6% for his "accumulated incidence" of all sexual contact, which explicitly included women who did not report any arousal from the contact. Of those, the overwhelming majority consisted of poking at an animal's genitals, or having ever had sexual fantasies or dreams about the topic; most only reported this happening once or twice in their lives.
That's fair.
Very interesting to know that about the Kinsey data, thank you. I never went as far as to actually look at the primary source (classic mistake!). Frankly it being defined that way makes the stats for farm areas absolute nonsense. Of course like half of people on farms have had "sexual experience" with an animal if you count something mundane like cleaning a horse's sheath!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is not ~0% of all women who don't want to sleep with the incel, it is tilde 0% (Zorba fix markdown escape pls) of all women he ever met (more plausibly, approached).
He probably haven't met any dogfuckers, either.
To demonstrate the problem a different way: Go to an incel forum, select a thousand incels. Go to a dog competition, select a thousand charming, beautiful, intelligent, expensive male dogs with female owners. Which group do you think will have more sex with female humans in the next five years?
The "incels are less fuckable than dogs" doesn't hold up unless you redefine "incel" much more narrowly than anyone actually does. Your average unemployed 5'6" recessed chin guy on those forums is still more sexable than a chocolate lab.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link