site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I think one angle missing here is why women want the ability to have their own careers, income streams, etc. This post seems to reduce it to a kind of cultural brainwashing which is far too simplistic. Women want the ability to have their own careers and income streams for the same reason men do: they want to have some control over their lives. They want to be able to mitigate the downside risk that comes with being completely financially dependent on someone else. Imagine you're a woman. You give up your career, education, etc to become a homemaker for a man. Half a decade in (perhaps with two or three children) he becomes an abusive alcoholic. What kind of options do you have for protecting yourself and your children? For exiting the relationship? I know, as a man, I would be pretty uncomfortable being completely dependent on someone else due to the potential for abuse. it seems totally rational to me that women feel similarly. I suspect many women have heard stories from family members or friends about such relationships and so the concern seems especially salient to them. How prestigious does motherhood have to be for women, as individuals, not to care about that downside risk?

I think that you are correct but it is also a broader cultural change that is path dependent. The institution of marriage is unrecognizable to what it was in the past, shaming no longer works and family support is not there. Also in the past the situation was symmetric - being put together man who had quarrelsome wife who constantly created drama and conflict with neighbor was terrible for a man with no way out either. Even if he made all the money it is not as if he could just have a parallel life not supporting his family without massive reputational damage to the extent of destruction. Plus the wife also had family and brothers or uncles and so forth - deadbeat man could end up in a very sorry state if he overstepped his bounds and did not fulfil his family duties.

A similar phenomenon came to be after the advent of the pill. If a young men impregnated a young women, everybody knew that he was responsible to marry her shotgun wedding style. After invention of the pill and access to abortion, suddenly it was all on woman. Are you pregnant? Then it is your fault for not taking pill properly, but you can go and have abortion. You still want a baby? Okay, feel free to be a single mom while the man just leaves and does what he wants.

So yes, maybe women being "independent" and doing some clerical work for government with no husband and no kid is the next best thing in current reality where all the norms are obliterated. But it does not mean it is actually good for them or the society.

I don’t think women entered the workforce en masse as a form of insurance against spousal abuse. I think it was to access a higher standard of living by having two incomes, and that husbands were active participants in encouraging this process.

When raggedyanthem was still active on the forum she liked to make the point that normally when the ‘become a stay at home mom’ question comes up, it’s usually the husband who’s opposed. This speaks to the main reasoning for the lack of stay at home moms being mostly economic factors, which men are typically more sensitive to, and not risk-based factors that women tend to be sensitive to. There’s probably external economic factors involved as well; taking the standard of living cut is simply easier when smaller houses and crappier cars exist as a thing that middle class people have access to, and the story of the past few decades in America has been steadily rendering those things more and more the domain of the poor.

Yes, this fits my observations better as well.

A lot of women think most men are abusive and that they'll be nearly as fertile in their 40's as they are in their 20's. Our culture is extremely uncomfortable telling women that they need to get started with having kids relatively early, to the point that many women don't get that message at all and are shocked when they learn how female fertility actually works.

I would also be very uncomfortable trusting my finances to someone else. There's not just physical abuse to worry about--you also need to hope that they won't quit their careers to pursue a pipe dream, run away with a woman they meet on a business trip, or just get fired and fall into eternal unemployment due to depression. Getting education, and being capable of providing for yourself, is one way to deal with this possibility. Finding a good husband in the first place, one less likely to do any of these things, is another.

Ideally all women do both--getting sufficient education and selecting good husbands. As a culture, though, we refuse to acknowledge that at some point these strategies trade off against each other. Pursue a challenging and time-intensive degree and the best husbands will probably have already married other women. You may not have the time and resources to find a good spouse in time while dealing with educational demands.

I'm not saying women shouldn't get educations. Speaking as someone with no more than a high school diploma, I think a Bachelor's is probably the sweet spot for most women, but individual circumstances vary. I just think it's a shame so many people, men and women, operate off of faulty information and narratives when choosing how much education to get.

Ideally all women do both--getting sufficient education and selecting good husbands.

...? To the extent that there's any selection going on, it can't be done by all women? Do you just mean the women you personally know and like or something?

If everyone's following my advice now, then I'll tell all women to get married immediately and all men to be good husbands. Problem solved.

Really, though, selection is actually a thing that all women can do. If nobody marries deadbeat men, then deadbeats and the corresponding bottom X% of the female population just never marry. This probably leads to some good effects--the marginal deadbeats realize they need to shape up to have a chance with a woman and do so.

It's good general advice to ask people to be selective about choosing spouses because it encourages everyone to shape up.

And yeah, some husbands will still be deadbeats, but I did say women should do both--be selective and get good educations.

Yeah. 'Pass' is a valid selection.

I feel very confused by the way this is often talked about.

Women need jobs for the same reason men need jobs. Hardly anyone marries a well-off man at 18. It's not really an available choice for that many women, even in very conservative communities where it's theoretically ideal. Someone might say that they can go be a waitress or barista or something at 18, and sure, that's not that bad. But then unless both partners have really bought into the homeschooling lifestyle, most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day. That was the issue in the 50s -- taking nicer and nicer jello casseroles and sewing unusually pretty aprons is not any more fulfilling than even quite a dull job, and husbands are not impressed by their wives chilling with their friends all day while they're at work. And then their kids grow up enough to take care of themselves, so what are they going to do? Running a non-profit for fun is for the rich, and costs money. and it's not great to be a waitress at 50. Maybe some women can take 10 years off to raise young kids, but there's another 30 years or so there where most of them will have to work, or face resentment and very tight finances. And for what? Lots of leisure is only enjoyable if you have money or similarly situated friends and neighbors.

But then unless both partners have really bought into the homeschooling lifestyle, most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day.

I read this, and think of my parents, who don't really match the picture you've drawn here. Mom was pretty much fresh out of high school when she married Dad — who was about as far from "well-off" as you'd expect a functionally-illiterate high-school-dropout handyman to be. Mom didn't homeschool me and my younger brothers, and yet she still found ways to fill her day — and, in fact, be frustrated by time pressures getting things done — that weren't "spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day" (being as she had little in the way of money or friends), and only went out into workforce once my youngest brother was off to college. Part of this, I suppose, comes down to a standard element of living on the poorer end of the socio-economic scale (to which I can also attest personally) — that is, doing yourself what others pay to have done, those with more money substituting said money for time. I remember Mom, particularly when we were younger, doing a fair bit of sewing. Lots of cooking. Smoking or canning salmon. Thursdays and Fridays spent packing for weekend trips out of town — hunting, fishing, or just spending weekends at the cabin (and Mondays spent putting everything back). Gardening, once we were no longer in apartments. Shopping trips to Costco. Laundry (lots and lots of laundry). And, of course, plenty of cleaning up after three messy boys and a man with ADD and no ability to organize his collection of work tools and spare parts.

Much of this sort of thing — the "idle 50's housewife" and such — seems to be dependent on class, and not so much a thing down at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Growing up, my family was a good bit more suburban and less rural. Gardening for fun more than sustenance. Sewing to mend the odd item rather than maintain everything. Dad had a somewhat more technical job, and if we were ever desperate for money, they were able to hide it.

With that in mind, like you, I can't think of my mother as idle. Cooking for a family of six is the obvious time-sink. Cleaning, too, even once we were old enough to be useful. She managed most of the groceries, but also all of the clothes, furniture, Christmas presents, road trips, and other intermittent expenses. Not to mention the actual bills. Somehow she also juggled four kids' worth of extracurriculars and social groups while (apparently) managing to bond with her peers.

It's not like Dad was checked out. He loved us and took on his fair share. But the minutiae of raising kids was always Mom's full-time job.

Go back a generation, and both my parents had extremely rural upbringings. I can't imagine their day was any less full.

That makes sense, closer to a preindustrial household economy, where cooking, cleaning, and textiles/crafting were much more important and harder to replace. I think it was CanIHaveaSong who used to write sometimes about (her?) mother hand washing everything and growing up without running water.

On the other hand, the original context was about the kind of woman who might get a degree in psychology but not take her eventual career path too seriously, since ultimately she's more interested in meeting a future husband at college, which to some degree higher status than I am. My grandmother was of the Mrs Degree class, and went to university to get a BA in stage or something before settling down to raise her four children in the 50s and 60s, and even when she lost her husband and became the head of household, I'm not entirely sure what she did, actually. Which isn't judgment on her as a person, and seems to have been appropriate to her class.

So I suppose I was thinking of a socioeconomic situation somewhere between my grandmother's and your mother's, the kind of lower middle class woman who's certified as a teacher or nurse or something. I personally get summers off and spend the time going on road trips with my family, reading Motte posts, and painting in the garden, and would absolutely be a poor candidate for an actually useful stay at home mom. This is related to why old female novels make such a huge deal of women, especially, dropping classes -- they won't necessarily know what to do or have any useful instincts for it, having been trained mostly to read books and paint (or whatever) for their entire childhood.

most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day. That was the issue in the 50s -- taking nicer and nicer jello casseroles and sewing unusually pretty aprons is not any more fulfilling than even quite a dull job, and husbands are not impressed by their wives chilling with their friends all day while they're at work. And then their kids grow up enough to take care of themselves, so what are they going to do?

That's true, but you could also say the same about working a job. Most jobs, even well-paying ones, just aren't that interesting as far as self-actualization and giving meaning to your life. It's an existential struggle that we all face, in this modern age of atheism and material abundance. If she's chilling with her friends, at least that might provide some real community and social circle, compared to the career woman late at night, too tired to do anything except order takeout and watch TV.

This is one reason why teaching is a popular career for women who want to take time off to raise kids. It is easier to get back into teaching compared to other careers as there isn’t as much technical changes.

This is a post in itself but a substantial reason why so many work outside the home today, and why women working outside the home is correlated with wealth and technological development, is because having access to labor saving devices heavily shifts the economic calculus in favor of women working outside the home. It requires far fewer hours today to achieve what would have been a full time job providing goods for a household historically. One of the few areas where this is not true is child rearing and i s part of why daycare is so expensive and why people sometimes quit work to care for children. Otherwise we have largely automated the tasks of homemaking, freeing people's labor up for other productive uses. Related to this is the idea of a "gold digger." A woman interested in a man for his wealth but who does not proportionally contribute. It's much harder to proportionally contribute without a job when technology can automate most of the things you're supposed to be contributing!

Sure.

But then you probably can't just advise a young woman to get a frivolous degree and hope to be a housewife, because even if it works out to get married, start a family, and be a stay at home mom from 22 - 35 or something (big if), she'll still either need to develop a very substantial hobby that might as well be a job, but without burning through all their disposable income, or have a plan to get a job that's sustainable as a middle aged and older mom, both of which take some amount of forethought.

One of the few areas where this is not true is child rearing and i s part of why daycare is so expensive and why people sometimes quit work to care for children.

There is no way that daycare costs aren't artificially inflated. If you're already taking care of a kid full-time, you can throw in a couple more, and barely see the difference (it's the whole reason it's even possible for daycare to work). The reason your SATHM neighbor can't offer daycare as a service is that she's not allowed to, not that it wouldn't be cost effective.

I think part of it is government regulation but another part is that we often have higher standards for entities we outsource these things to than we have for ourselves. Compare home cooking to eating out a restaurant. I generally want the restaurant food to be at least as good as what I could make or I wouldn't bother going. On top of that the restaurant has to comply with a bunch of food safety regulations I probably don't abide when cooking at home. This makes things more expensive!

On the parenting front, I suspect a lot of parents who would be fine giving their kid an iPad or some other device for entertainment would be mad at a daycare they pay for doing the same.

I was formerly the board chair of a local non-profit daycare. Even with free facilities, only a couple of full-time staff, a bunch of part-time high school and college students making barely above minimum wage (this was pre-Covid), and zero excess funds most years, we still were barely cheaper than many of the other local daycares. At least where I live, childcare is a highly competitive field. Any conspiracy to artificially inflate costs would need to include every daycare run by a non-profit, university, church, stay-at-home mom, large employer, etc., including every new entrant into the business, of which there are many. A sinister cabal is just not possible.

A little-discussed phenomenon is that since 2011 or so, low-wage pay has skyrocketed in major urban areas. People who were making $8 an hour in 2008 make $30 an hour today. Meanwhile, white collar workers who made $50 an hour (converted to hourly pay) in 2008 may make $75 an hour today, a much smaller increase.

The cost of childcare, fast food, hotel rooms etc for white collar professionals (ie. the upper middle class) has therefore increased much faster than their own incomes.

Oh, you’re absolutely right. I remember raising the minimum wage for the part-timers to $8/hour ten or twelve years ago. The last I heard, the new starting wage at the same daycare was something like $15–$17/hour, and this isn’t even in an urban area, let alone a major one. I don’t know of any white collar jobs that saw a 100% increase in salary over the same time period.

The downside is half the kids I know making $19/hr are paying $1.5k/mo in rent, $5.60/gal in gas, and there are hardly any used cars for under 10k.

Friends with a guy who drives 25 miles each way to do 2.5hr shifts at $18/hr. $37 after tax, minus $14 for gas. And he needs to save some of that $23 to buy a new car when his '89 with the doors held closed by baling twine finally dies.

I don't know if the math has really sunk in for him.

Oh sure, I think for gig workers it’s still tough. But for, say, a full-time fry cook or security guard I think life has probably improved even adjusted for inflation over the last 10 years.

"Good news everyone! Income inequality has really decreased in the past few years. Bad news: everything is now really expensive relative to your inflation-adjusted wage."

The fact that people don't realize those are two sides of the same coin is another black pill.

More comments

If you're already taking care of a kid full-time, you can throw in a couple more, and barely see the difference

This doesn't appear to be true. It's extremely complicated to get a stay at home mom to watch another mom's kids even for a couple of hours of babysitting. I have heard of it happening now and again, or in an emergency, but it is absolutely not a regular thing, and I could definitely not pay my stay at home mom friends to watch my kids reliably, all day, at any price that I would be able to pay. I grew up around stay at home moms, it was definitely not illegal to watch each other's kids, and it also very rarely happened at a greater scale than very light occasional babysitting.

I have heard of it happening now and again, or in an emergency, but it is absolutely not a regular thing

Weird, was pretty common when I was a kid.

it was definitely not illegal to watch each other's kids

Yeah, it's also not illegal to invite someone over to dinner, that doesn't mean you can sell your food.

that doesn't mean you can sell your food.

Yes I can. Nobody bothers the tamale vendors, clearly selling stuff they made in their home kitchens from out of their personal cooler chests. The teachers in the schools are selling their home cooked food (mostly tamales) to each other through the official newsletter. Just if they make enough money at it, they'll be expected to pay taxes.

Maybe you can. Maybe the police will catch you in an undercover sting and you'll actually end up prosecuted.

Similar informal (and illegal) daycare setups also exist.

Are you talking about legality, or are you talking about lack of enforcement? Because, although it was a while back, I distinctly remember stuff like a SWAT raid on a raw-milk co-op.

same reason men

Men frequently want careers / success to improve their likelihood of reproductive success. Career success can even offset other deficits, short stature, asymmetry, etc.

Does education / career improve women's odds of reproductive success?

Do women hold up their degrees in pornography?

I'm not sure I understand the question.

crushedoranges wants to imply that men are mostly picking women for their physical characteristics.

I think that while physical attraction governs who men might want to have sex with, there might be other considerations for long term relationships. At least some men would prefer a spouse who shares their interests, views et cetera, and having a similar degree of education might serve as a proxy for those.

Just as an abstract question, if you were a woman, how would you go about becoming the mistress of Arnold Schwarzenegger? He is undoubtedly at the top in the political, physical, and social sphere of America. How would you do it?

Well, certainly not by going to college!

He had a child by his cleaning maid, a child that seems to have recieved the jackpot in terms of genetics, becoming a Hispanic clone of his father. We're not talking about relationships here: we're talking about reproductive success.

If you're a woman, and you want to have ubermensch children, you don't even need to be attractive. You just need to be available to elite men, be discreet, and be feminine and pliant. That's all it takes. It's not complicated. Women have been doing it for millenia. You don't need a piece of paper to get into Chad's pants. You just need girl game.

Career? Working is for the working class!

Certainly. It's also likely a proxy for 'class'.

To @crushedoranges question then, I don't believe harlots would lead with their pornography credentials unless their targets are similarly credentialed. Any sex industry involvement is a disqualifyer for many men seeking a wife.

I think attraction to physical characteristics plays a role it can be more subtle than simply having two breasts are like two fawns, twins of the gazelle grazing among the lilies...

There had been 'research' that purported to show men ranked women as more attractive when the women's faces looked more like the men. In my own experience n=1 this is true. Though I did not notice / realize until several other people, friends, family drew my attention to the similarities. Then I saw it too.

On the individual level, absolutely.

Do you have any data? All the graphs and studies I've seen seem to show tfr declining with increased education / work outside the home.

'years of education' .. is also one of the things most strongly associated with infertility, no ?

Sure, but things correlate with multiple things at once.

Things can't correlate with the same thing both positively and negatively.

When the causal graph has more than two nodes, something can have a negative correlation (when measured with no controls) despite having a positive causative effect (which would show a positive correlation in an RCT), or vice versa. People who get chemotherapy are way more likely to die of cancer than people who don't.

I can't imagine the education/fertility relationship being an example of that, though. Nerds go to college more and have fewer kids, but not as many fewer as they'd have had without going to college? Sounds like a stretch.

Presumably we could see a bimodal distribution of fertility, though I don't believe we do. Most of graphs I've seen look more like a dose response curve.

Starting a company is both correlated with bankruptcy and business success.

Bankruptcy and business success aren't mutually exclusive the way high and low TFR are.

I think what you mean is that high education is correlated with both low TFR and with being one of the few women with very high TFR, but this doesn't seem to be true. Those extreme-TFR women generally get there by marrying rich, not via personal education. Maybe they met their rich husbands at college but probably not in PHD programs.

100% of businesses that go bankrupt were started

100% of successful businesses were also started

I'm not sure this a a very descriptive or useful corralation.

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