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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Excuse me rolling on the floor at this bit:

It turns out that a cultural ecology where most quality women get married early on in life—either in college or immediately thereafter—is really bad for the dating prospects of a 25 year old man. In practice a society that encourages late marriage is actually much better for more bookish eccentric guys, who tend to be late bloomers in developing their masculinity and ability to seduce women.

Dude, pal, mate: the reason the local gals didn't date you is because you didn't seem like marriage material, and the reason you didn't seem like marriage material is that their parents (especially their mothers) didn't know you, where you worked, how much you made, where your family came from, where your father worked, how much he made, etc.

If you want a culture of "quality" (and that term alone lets me know there were plenty of women who would date a 25 year old incomer, but they didn't meet his criteria) women who will also date promiscuously, then you want a culture of promiscuous women. And I'm betting those were the women you wouldn't date in that Midwest town.

Do you really think twenty-two year old Joe from down the street has a "developed masculinity and ability to seduce women" and that's why he's dating twenty year old Mary-Lou who's in her second year of college? The same Mary-Lou who won't give you the time of day? No, it's because their families know each other, they grew up beside each other, they went to the same high school. They have connections and roots.

I nearly feel sorry for the poor bastard, if ever there was a case of "be careful what you wish for, you may get it", this is it. He wants trad women who don't sleep around and marry early, and turns out he's the kind of guy their mothers tell them not to get involved with. Also probably because these stolid, cow-like Midwesterners can tell when someone is strutting around with a superiority complex about "I know what a bodega is, I've eaten Thai food (as you get it in an American restaurant), and your elites are vastly less impressive" and so they don't want to bother with someone who will spend 80% of the time looking down his nose at them, their town, their families, etc.

Talk about sour grapes!

Ironically enough, if you are the sort of extremely online neurotic weirdo intellectual who gravitates to “trad” ideology as a young man, you probably aren’t temperamentally suited to dating normie conservative church girls who organically live that way. They much prefer unreflective stoic chudbots with rough hands and smooth brains; to these women any kind of emotional expression is coded as womanly. After you date around for a few years you’ll quickly discover that you are a lot more attractive to the bohemian art hoe daughters of the coastal elite.

Uh-huh. It was your giant throbbing... intellect that turned them off, and your being in touch with your emotions. The coastal elite art hoes may date you (read: sleep around with you) but when it comes to marriage, their parents will be every bit as picky as the Midwesterners.

Of course this revelation won’t come easy to an inexperienced young buck who’s only been with a handful of women. That hipster chick’s tattoos or stripper past or body count of 17 will likely intimidate you. But once you’re nearing 30 and have come into your own as a man, the same girl will seem an ingenue compared to your own triple digit past, while the churchy trad girls you once idealized as innocent little angels will instead seem like frigid judgmental viragoes who could never understand you.

Triple-digit camgirls he's jerked off to, is it? 🤣 Let's break this down: so take it that Big Boy is 30 years of age and started dating at 16. That's 30-16 = 14 years to bang a gong, get it on. As for triple digits, let's be very conservative here. 100 is triple digits. 100/14 = 7 girls a year, which comes down to a new girl every 7 weeks. Well, that's doable, he never has a relationship lasting longer than two months, he can rack up 100 girls over 14 years.

I'm thinking the frigid judgmental viragoes understand you just fine, Big Boy. Like every cheating husband that ever said "my wife doesn't understand me".

Largely agree although I’d add that it’s also that all the pretty midwestern blondes who want to date nebbish [pseudo]intellectual guys who talk about French cinema move to NYC or LA pretty soon, if you move in at 25 you’re meeting who’s left, and they will be by nature small-c conservative.

That's exactly it. The girls who stay behind are the ones who like the small town life, or haven't the opportunity to go to the city university, and they probably have local boyfriends. Moving in as a stranger makes it harder to meet anyone, and if you want 'quality' girls who like scrawny intellectuals, you haven't a great selection to choose from.

Good point. If a local girl doesn't particularly want to a) get married b) enter an exclusive long-term relationship straight out of high school, there are multiple incentives pushing her from her hometown and towards the big city.

Dude, pal, mate: the reason the local gals didn't date you is because you didn't seem like marriage material, and the reason you didn't seem like marriage material is that their parents (especially their mothers) didn't know you, where you worked, how much you made, where your family came from, where your father worked, how much he made, etc.

And thus you demonstrate a fatal flaw with such places. If you can't be accepted in such places for several generations, and there won't be several generations because you not being accepted means no offspring, then these towns cannot get new people. Any people (especially men) they lose to the wicked outside world cannot be replaced.

If he can get over himself, integrate into the local community, and make the effort, he can find a local bride. Or heck, he can marry an outsider woman and go settle down in the town. Their kids will be more accepted because they were born and grew up there, and they'll be able to marry local girls and boys if they want, and the grandkids will be well-integrated.

It's the "I'm an outsider, I'm better than you, and you rubes aren't good enough for me" attitude that means local people won't want to be any closer to him than they need to be. The guy who strolls in to the local pub, club or church expecting the nice girls to be fields of wheat to fall at his scythe (to make a metaphor) with no effort on his part isn't going to get any dates or chances of marriage, particularly when it's "where are you from?" and his answer is "nowhere in particular". If you have no roots to speak of, what parent can be sure that you won't dump their daughter and move on after a few years? Even if he was "I'm from Florida", that's better than nothing, but he's "my parents don't come from anywhere, their parents don't come from anywhere, I go where the money is" talk.

Few towns are happy with wandering single men moving in, they’d probably be much more accepting of a young couple or an already-extant family unit.

This. They're happy to have new families come in. Enroll your kids at the local public school, and they'll all want to talk to you at school functions or whatever. There just isn't going to be a hot spot for singles to hook up for casual sex.

There just isn't going to be a hot spot for singles to hook up for casual sex.

Or if there is, 25 year old him will be too old for it, since it'll be a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds doing underage drinking and fumbling around while they try to get some privacy away from their parents.

Not to be gross, but uh... there's a lot of places where the age of consent is 16, and a lot of 25 yr olds guys wouldn't mind taking advantage of a 17 yr old who wants to experiment with an older boyfriend. But like you said, those teens are looking for privacy, so it's hard for a newcomer to come to town and meet them. Probably a good thing overall!

There are shortcuts. Come in with a membership transfer from your local church, Masonic temple, Elks lodge, or the like, and you’ll be accepted and welcomed like some long-lost relative. Get involved in the local community and demonstrate that you’re hard-working, reliable, and not a complete ass, and within a couple of years (or sooner), you’ll have people trying to set you up with their female friends and relations.

Come in with a membership transfer from your local church, Masonic temple, Elks lodge, or the like

The chance of anyone trying to leave Blue-tribistan being a Mason, an Elk, a Moose, or a Water Buffalo is pretty much nil; a local church not much better.

Joining the elks or becoming active in a church is a possibility, this guy just didn't want to do it.

@Lewis2 suggested you had to be active in the Elks or a church before attempting to move. Which, like I said, isn't too likely for the latter and has pretty much probability zero for the former. If you're in Blue and don't like the way Blue is going, well, tough shit buddy; you can't retreat to Red because Red don't want you. If you don't count your ancestors among those who founded the town, you're an untrusted newcomer, not fit to date the local women. "Stick to your own kind", they say.

As I said, coming in as a card-carrying member of whatever organization you prefer is a shortcut. You can still get many of the same benefits by joining up once you move to a new location, but it’ll take longer since you’ll have to prove yourself; you won’t come in pre-vetted, as it were.

You can still get many of the same benefits by joining up once you move to a new location, but it’ll take longer since you’ll have to prove yourself; you won’t come in pre-vetted, as it were.

Sure, a little longer; your children's children might be grudgingly accepted... except you won't have them.

To an extent conservative Red tribers would not be conservative Red tribers if they welcomed people unlike themselves with open arms no? Just as coastal Blue tribers wouldn't be them if they weren't more welcoming to the other. Having said that, having been a Brit moving to a Red American town, I found as long as I signaled the right way (went to Church, didn't mention i was an atheist, etc.), that while I was not regarded as local, no one treated me particularly badly. It was a little while before I was able to embed myself in the social fabric (particularly because I didn't work locally), but I was still invited to bbqs and functions out of politeness if nothing else, and within 6 months or so, I was much more embedded socially, so I don't think it is massively difficult. Just like with any society, you need to make an effort to fit in, if you want the locals to actually take to you.

having been a Brit moving to a Red American town

This is an unfair advantage in two ways:

  • As a Brit (or any other European or Asian immigrant), you are coming from a neutral position rather than the default hostility that would have faced OOP as a Blue Triber (even a Blue Tribe heretic).
  • A great many foreigners suspect that the British are still the master-race that invented the modern world and built the British Empire and have the Right Stuff in reserve somewhere in case it is needed. If you can plausibly LARP being a British traditional elite (RP accent, classical British style etc.) then you can play that to your advantage.

2 isn’t really true so much as British accents are just high status in America. Since Hart-Cellar the only British immigrants are highly skilled professionals and celebrities, and Brits are very overrepresented among Hollywood stars, popstars and TV presenters. This is mostly true without regard to class - people with a strong Geordie or Scouse accent might have to moderate it, but most Americans can barely distinguish between a posh / RP accent and, say, the way David Beckham speaks. Nuances of class are mostly something only Anglophiles or Americans who have lived in Britain would know about.

You can join the elks or a church in NYC or Chicago or whatever, and people who want to live a flyover lifestyle but are obliged by circumstances to live in those places do exactly that.

I'm not quite clear on how joining the Elks or a church, either in chicago, or bumfuck nowhere, gets you any closer to meeting a single biological female. And in bumfuck nowhere, there quite simply are no single women of any age.

Well, there's senior citizens.

But there essentially aren't prime-age single women anywhere, or at least there weren't a decade ago.

It helps get you integrated into the local community much more quickly and proves you have a certain baseline level of compatibility with the people you’re trying to live with. Once you’ve established your bona fides, you’re more likely to be introduced to single biological females (though definitely don’t call them that) by their friends and relatives with whom you’ve built up a solid relationship, to say nothing of meeting women at church, trivia nights, etc., yourself.

Even with all that, I’m not going to pretend it’s easy; dating anywhere these days isn’t exactly easy once you’re past your college years. But it’s also not impossible.

In bumfuck nowhere, few women are single, but many are available -- there is a knack to picking up the signalling there; not sure it's different in the city or not.

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You don't understand how interacting with a larger social group introduces you to more potential "single biological females"? Even in flyover cities and towns, women exist...and some of them are single, or better off with you than the other guy. You just go...meet people. I say this as another member of the, "last New Atheist, being a stubborn prickly contrarian against smug sanctimony and moral panic regardless of the mask it wears." tribe.

A lovely turn of phrase by the way, I'm going to use that in the future if that is ok with you. Have you tried going out drinking?