Gender Tropes, Reluctant Truths

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Simple question: When it comes to these marriage/relationship/gender discussions and debates, what is one trope that rings more true about your own gender than you would like to readily admit?

I'm often engaged in these discussions trying to provide a male perspective on a lot of the issues that are raised. I'm often called misogynist or MRA for some of the opinions I raise here, and that is to be expected on the internet and with such charged topics. I think one problem with these discussions is that people cannot separate their immediate circle, circumstances and experiences from broader set of actors and forces in the dating/marriage landscape. My circle of friends is largely responsible, respectful, self-sufficient, intelligent men, so it can be hard for me to fathom and really digest a lot of the complaints about men that I hear, because it is not reflective of my immediate surroundings. I have to do extra work to overcome my cognitive biases and ingest those possibilities (realities) and realize that there is an entire other universe of men out there that are not like my friend group or circle. This factors into how women conduct themselves, vet mates, follow certain "rules", etc.

I was reminded of this last month when told story about a friend's husband who unilaterally scheduled an invasive procedure without consulting her that would immobilize him for a while, under the assumption that his younger wife just handle everything, including the finances, her own, time-consuming, full-time job, the kids and pets and her own ailing parent. Like...who does that?

Another problem is that people dig in their heels and just reject anything that goes against their team/gender, which completely belies the complexity and gray areas of some of these topics. So maybe for one thread we can not do that?

So the reluctant truth: A lot more men than I would like to admit do just want a wife to "mother" them and completely handle everything in their lives and they are kind of bummy.

Anyone have any?

How do you think men got that way?

Their mommies babied them far beyond infancy. Many mommies will never give up on this insanity, even when it threatens the stability of their boy’s marriage.

Wives keep complaining, yet I see them repeating the same thing with their own sons. Funny how that works.

Sometimes there is little choice. You either create someone dependent on a mom or the government. And until they are 18 they are your responsibility. My ex turned out to have major mental illnesses that I just didn’t understand in my 20s. He basically masked for 3 years and then another 10 in marriage and then slowly fell apart. One of my children does not have the illness and is totally fine. The other one does and causes mayhem daily. He is almost an adult and yesterday I gave him a very important instruction that took 30 seconds to complete. Verified with him that it was done. Found out he didn’t do it and guessed and caused complete mayhem that will cost me hundreds of dollars to fix not to mention time. It’s always a balance between how much I involve myself and how much I let go. My safety and health matters too. Some people just have bad genes. Someone has to take care of them. Should have been his parents but of course they wanted to have a break so were behind the scenes trying to marry him off. My son luckily has said he wants to remain single which is how it should be. He will barely be able to take care of himself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is a weird post. It seems like you're a thoughtful, introspective, analytical person, yet the thrust of your post is "let's all say the stereotypes about men and women that we hate but are kind of true, "as if this is going to give us all any great insight. What do you expect of a discussion that is going to devolve into things like, men just want a Nurse and a purse, or women just want a rich tall man. Maybe you could use all your intelligent friends to understand those things a little better.

I think he is just contrarian and argumentative, which is a predominantly male trait.

— 51 yo white man.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

Can you share the pieces re: toxic masculinity and single motherhood?

I understand the phenomenon of "luxury beliefs" and I think it is rampant, but I think you (or Rob) are giving it way too much explanatory power with regard to the decimation of the working class, which I would attribute more to technological and economic forces. To be sure, there are some cultural forces at work as well, but they are myriad. Keying in on the memification of toxic masculinity is doing a lot of work. Moreover the typical indica of toxic masculinity tend to thrive or be more prevalent in lower class communities, and that phenomenon precedes the proliferation of what you are deeming the memification of toxic masculinity, which is relatively recent phenomenon.

Likewise, I'm not sure what is meant by "single motherhood". Perhaps destigmatizing single motherhood? Again, this has been a issue beleaguering lower classes for decades, so I have some trouble with the top down attribution.

I'll try to respond the best I can although my response may still be a bit disjointed--it's an internet forum conversation after all. But you seem genuinly interested and I am certainly fascinated by this topic. Re: the memification of toxic masculinity, as you point out it's relatively recent and I think really emerged out of the #metoo movement. While there are certainly men who display psychopathic (which is really what toxic tendencies are) traits, recent thinkers and my own experience with hook up culture lead me to believe that the vast majority of the experiences described by women during #metoo were not remotely non-consensual in the conventional sense, but were really ways for women to describe sexual experiences that they deeply regreted in a culture that doesn't give women space to say that without being slut-shamed from misgynists or accused of victim-blaming from feminists. In a world where there aren't supposed to be any meaningful differences between the sexes, women can't say that they don't like casual sex, even if most of us don't. So #metoo was a way of getting around that. This led to the memefiction of toxic masculinity which has further marginalized lower and working class men. So the connection with the lower classes is perhaps more indirect than I initially claimed but I think the connection with #metoo is relevant to the OP's first post.

Again, you're right that the roots of poor masculine identity formation among the lower classes is multi-faceted and wasn't caused by the meme per se, but the meme turned them (and men in general) into scapegoats for a variety of liberal socio-political causes that have been popular over the last 5-10 years b/c you can't have a victim without an oppressor--regardless if that opprressor isn't nearly as rampant as the meme would suggest.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-sexual-revolution-has-hurt-women-11660921139

https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/thor...campaign=post&utm_medium=emailg

Now whether you buy into the idea that the concept of luxury beliefs has as much power as I've argued that it does, I'll just point out that while Rob Henderson has popularized the term to describe contemporary realities, it recently came to his attention that Adam Smith discussed this exact proclivity of advanced economies in Wealth of Nations back in 1776:

https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1631772059721187328

Smith's observation is almost exactly what Henderson is referring to when he describes that there are generally two ways of living "strict and austere" or "loose and liberal." Taking single motherhood as a contemporary an example: posters routinely claim on DCUM that it's preferable to be a single mom than to be married to a man-child, even if he is the father of her children. Chances are she has a variety of resources to make this tenable. Two-parent households are nice for the upper and upper-middle classes, but ultimately viewed as optional b/c the fall out can be minimized to weigh well against the drawbacks of staying married. But for the working class the collapse of traditional two-parent, married families has been a disaster. Again, there a certainly a number of gov't policy related reasons for this but if we were to go through them one by one, how many of them could directly or indirectly be informed by the elite (policy makers) evolving attitudes about the necessity of traditional familial and lifestyle structures and supports (e.g. conservatives would point to the introduction of wellfare here as replacing the protoypical male-breadwinner)?

Socially conservative lifestyles are not the answer to anyone’s problems.[/quote

The left won the culture wars. We are all affected by the lifestyle whether we choose it for ourselves or not.]

Make traditionalism more appealing to women.

[Anonymous]

Self-confident women don’t want “traditionalism”. That’s a mechanism to control women.

[Anonymous]

Not what you asked, OP, but in the spirit of your thread:

In one of my circles of friends, it’s considered inappropriate/rude to complain about your spouse in any way that confirms some of these stereotypes of men and women. So for instance, I would never complain to these friends that my DH often feigns incompetence (claims he doesn’t know his or is somehow unable to do tasks like booking summer camp, shopping for kids clothes, calming a child who is melting down, etc.) to get out of childcare and housework. If I did complain about this, I would be accused of playing into gender tropes. Some of the women in this group would also immediately seize on the idea that whatever I was complaining about was actually my fault— that I was gatekeeping, that the problem is I’m disorganized, that I haven’t done enough to make DH feel confident. They would explain they never have these problems, that their marriages are totally equal and they just don’t believe a man would behave that way.

I have recently decided to distance myself from this group, all of whom consider themselves feminists, because I think this is basically just gaslighting and another way for these women to compete/one-up each other (“my DH is the perfect partner/my marriage is a model of equity”). It’s exhausting and doesn’t make me feel supported or accepted. It certainly doesn’t feel feminist.

So I guess my trope that I think is actually true is that women really are viciously competitive with one another, even when they are pretending they are too evolved for it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Self-confident women don’t want “traditionalism”. That’s a mechanism to control women.

Exactly. It’s not a “luxury belief” to think otherwise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

The working class folks are the ones who are doing it wrong; that’s why they’re working class after all.

You don't get it. They have so many intergenerational problems stacked against them. The gendered social norms and traditional family structures that elites can get away with criticizing (think about how many ppl are pro-polyamory on this board) have decimated working class families.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure?r=5pwik&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

"It’s remarkable that the twin giants of American leadership in the 20th century — FDR and JFK — were crippled or close-to. The modern sub-strand of wokeism concerned with 'ableism' looks very different...neurotic, feminised, victimhood obsessed"

Yeah he’s an idiot.

His writing has a thin patina of erudition and learnedness, but ultimately it is pretty tendentious, callow and undercooked. He repackages a well-trodden concept as "luxury beliefs" and then ascribes to this concept explanatory powers that far outstrip his willingness, or ability, to enact the intellectual labor to accord his concept with such status (pun intended). He is flitting from one name or idea to another without properly building a solid foundation and connecting these disparate themes in a way that undergirds his ultimate thesis, which remains flimsy at best.

Veblen goods most definitely still do exist. Moreover, the idea of luxury beliefs as some sort of substitute for such goods is a little difficult to swallow given that they retain little value as markers of status because of their ephemeral nature. A lot of the things he deems luxury beliefs are here today, gone tomorrow. And any joker on twitter can adopt them and drop them with ease, as he rightly notes. They lack the exclusivity and inaccessibility that typically mark Veblen goods. Are the elite really going to rest their status on something so fickle? Does this sound like a class that is typically concerned with long time horizons, legacy and permanence?

It you want to make the claim that politics is downstream from culture, fine. If you are going to make the claim that phenomena that only bubbled up in earnest less then a decade ago are material drivers of patterns that have been at play for many decades, I'm gonna have a harder time buying it. The 80's and 90's were the height of the era of luxury goods as status symbols, at least in recent history. The timing of this luxury goods/luxury beliefs displacement theory doesn't add up as a means of explaining what he wants it to explain. The timing is all off.

It's gonna be a no for me, dawg.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not what you asked, OP, but in the spirit of your thread:

In one of my circles of friends, it’s considered inappropriate/rude to complain about your spouse in any way that confirms some of these stereotypes of men and women. So for instance, I would never complain to these friends that my DH often feigns incompetence (claims he doesn’t know his or is somehow unable to do tasks like booking summer camp, shopping for kids clothes, calming a child who is melting down, etc.) to get out of childcare and housework. If I did complain about this, I would be accused of playing into gender tropes. Some of the women in this group would also immediately seize on the idea that whatever I was complaining about was actually my fault— that I was gatekeeping, that the problem is I’m disorganized, that I haven’t done enough to make DH feel confident. They would explain they never have these problems, that their marriages are totally equal and they just don’t believe a man would behave that way.

I have recently decided to distance myself from this group, all of whom consider themselves feminists, because I think this is basically just gaslighting and another way for these women to compete/one-up each other (“my DH is the perfect partner/my marriage is a model of equity”). It’s exhausting and doesn’t make me feel supported or accepted. It certainly doesn’t feel feminist.

So I guess my trope that I think is actually true is that women really are viciously competitive with one another, even when they are pretending they are too evolved for it.

OP. Wow, what an interesting and counterintuitive friend group dynamic. Thanks for sharing.

That must've sucked; complaining like that is a pastime to blow off steam lol.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

The working class folks are the ones who are doing it wrong; that’s why they’re working class after all.

You don't get it. They have so many intergenerational problems stacked against them. The gendered social norms and traditional family structures that elites can get away with criticizing (think about how many ppl are pro-polyamory on this board) have decimated working class families.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure?r=5pwik&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

"It’s remarkable that the twin giants of American leadership in the 20th century — FDR and JFK — were crippled or close-to. The modern sub-strand of wokeism concerned with 'ableism' looks very different...neurotic, feminised, victimhood obsessed"

Yeah he’s an idiot.

His writing has a thin patina of erudition and learnedness, but ultimately it is pretty tendentious, callow and undercooked. He repackages a well-trodden concept as "luxury beliefs" and then ascribes to this concept explanatory powers that far outstrip his willingness, or ability, to enact the intellectual labor to accord his concept with such status (pun intended). He is flitting from one name or idea to another without properly building a solid foundation and connecting these disparate themes in a way that undergirds his ultimate thesis, which remains flimsy at best.

Veblen goods most definitely still do exist. Moreover, the idea of luxury beliefs as some sort of substitute for such goods is a little difficult to swallow given that they retain little value as markers of status because of their ephemeral nature. A lot of the things he deems luxury beliefs are here today, gone tomorrow. And any joker on twitter can adopt them and drop them with ease, as he rightly notes. They lack the exclusivity and inaccessibility that typically mark Veblen goods. Are the elite really going to rest their status on something so fickle? Does this sound like a class that is typically concerned with long time horizons, legacy and permanence?

It you want to make the claim that politics is downstream from culture, fine. If you are going to make the claim that phenomena that only bubbled up in earnest less then a decade ago are material drivers of patterns that have been at play for many decades, I'm gonna have a harder time buying it. The 80's and 90's were the height of the era of luxury goods as status symbols, at least in recent history. The timing of this luxury goods/luxury beliefs displacement theory doesn't add up as a means of explaining what he wants it to explain. The timing is all off.

It's gonna be a no for me, dawg.

Well he just pointed out that Adam Smith made a similar observation of human nature in 1776. No ideas are new--just repackaged for the current moment.
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1631772059721187328

I think your timing argument would historically be true but basically since the 1950s we've been in a medical and technological revolution (mainly the invention of hormonal contraception and the internet) that has sped up the speed of social change to an essentially lightening-fast pace. The fact that we can refer to the past 6-7 decades as their own definitive "eras" speaks to that real change. Huamns are obsessed with social status and maintaining distinctions between the classes so it's really not that far-fetched that we adapt our social barriers at a similar pace.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Man here. Father of two (girls, 11 and 13). And I’m enlightened yadda yadda. My mom worked full time forever with an advanced degree. But still I’d say a reluctant truth is that a lot of men just don’t have the makeup to be doting parents and raise kids. Really nurture and raise them. They just don’t want to do it. They could hit just don’t like doing it. They can and like to do tasks. But bro g responsible for the emotional crap with kids? Screw it. I’m sick of it and it is massively unpleasant work to do it. My own skill set clearly lies in things like: wooing and bedding women or a woman, making her and them safe, doing hard labor, thinking deep thoughts and clearly, being decisive, and I’d have been a damn good warrior if I had had to do that. But nurturing whiny kids? I just hate it.

I'm a woman and I agree with you. Feminism encourages women to access their masculine energy in order to have successful careers, but as an ideology just assumed that men would want to access their feminine energy in the same kind of way. We can both do this for short periods of time, but most of us don't want to spend decades accessing abilities that we're capable of but not really interested in making lives out of. Iand yes, I'm speaking of men and women on average, here.

dp Dude, no one likes whiny kids! Where did you get the idea that women liked it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not what you asked, OP, but in the spirit of your thread:

In one of my circles of friends, it’s considered inappropriate/rude to complain about your spouse in any way that confirms some of these stereotypes of men and women. So for instance, I would never complain to these friends that my DH often feigns incompetence (claims he doesn’t know his or is somehow unable to do tasks like booking summer camp, shopping for kids clothes, calming a child who is melting down, etc.) to get out of childcare and housework. If I did complain about this, I would be accused of playing into gender tropes. Some of the women in this group would also immediately seize on the idea that whatever I was complaining about was actually my fault— that I was gatekeeping, that the problem is I’m disorganized, that I haven’t done enough to make DH feel confident. They would explain they never have these problems, that their marriages are totally equal and they just don’t believe a man would behave that way.

I have recently decided to distance myself from this group, all of whom consider themselves feminists, because I think this is basically just gaslighting and another way for these women to compete/one-up each other (“my DH is the perfect partner/my marriage is a model of equity”). It’s exhausting and doesn’t make me feel supported or accepted. It certainly doesn’t feel feminist.

So I guess my trope that I think is actually true is that women really are viciously competitive with one another, even when they are pretending they are too evolved for it.

Female here and what you've written resonates with me as well. Unfortunately we've constructed our lives around the premise of o btaining the perfect egalitarian partner, or how as mothers we're supposed to be raising boys that can live up to that egalitarian ideal. Admitting that he's a fantasy would do a lot of ego damage. It's actually really sad bc humans have evolved to set up and construct their lives around a narrative or story. But if a fundamental tenet of that story isn't true you can't hide from it forever...hence the source of a lot of tension btwn the sexes

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

The working class folks are the ones who are doing it wrong; that’s why they’re working class after all.

You don't get it. They have so many intergenerational problems stacked against them. The gendered social norms and traditional family structures that elites can get away with criticizing (think about how many ppl are pro-polyamory on this board) have decimated working class families.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure?r=5pwik&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

"It’s remarkable that the twin giants of American leadership in the 20th century — FDR and JFK — were crippled or close-to. The modern sub-strand of wokeism concerned with 'ableism' looks very different...neurotic, feminised, victimhood obsessed"

Yeah he’s an idiot.

His writing has a thin patina of erudition and learnedness, but ultimately it is pretty tendentious, callow and undercooked. He repackages a well-trodden concept as "luxury beliefs" and then ascribes to this concept explanatory powers that far outstrip his willingness, or ability, to enact the intellectual labor to accord his concept with such status (pun intended). He is flitting from one name or idea to another without properly building a solid foundation and connecting these disparate themes in a way that undergirds his ultimate thesis, which remains flimsy at best.

Veblen goods most definitely still do exist. Moreover, the idea of luxury beliefs as some sort of substitute for such goods is a little difficult to swallow given that they retain little value as markers of status because of their ephemeral nature. A lot of the things he deems luxury beliefs are here today, gone tomorrow. And any joker on twitter can adopt them and drop them with ease, as he rightly notes. They lack the exclusivity and inaccessibility that typically mark Veblen goods. Are the elite really going to rest their status on something so fickle? Does this sound like a class that is typically concerned with long time horizons, legacy and permanence?

It you want to make the claim that politics is downstream from culture, fine. If you are going to make the claim that phenomena that only bubbled up in earnest less then a decade ago are material drivers of patterns that have been at play for many decades, I'm gonna have a harder time buying it. The 80's and 90's were the height of the era of luxury goods as status symbols, at least in recent history. The timing of this luxury goods/luxury beliefs displacement theory doesn't add up as a means of explaining what he wants it to explain. The timing is all off.

It's gonna be a no for me, dawg.

Well he just pointed out that Adam Smith made a similar observation of human nature in 1776. No ideas are new--just repackaged for the current moment.
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1631772059721187328

I think your timing argument would historically be true but basically since the 1950s we've been in a medical and technological revolution (mainly the invention of hormonal contraception and the internet) that has sped up the speed of social change to an essentially lightening-fast pace. The fact that we can refer to the past 6-7 decades as their own definitive "eras" speaks to that real change. Huamns are obsessed with social status and maintaining distinctions between the classes so it's really not that far-fetched that we adapt our social barriers at a similar pace.

I take your point, and I think I agree with you that those sorts of things (medical advances, technology, globalism, etc.) are accelerating the rate of social change. I just view them a different from luxury beliefs as a primary driver. Perhaps your point is that all of these things are interrelated? We are not too far removed from a time when luxury goods were the predominant, visible signifier of status (I would suggest they still are) and, given this, it's harder to reconcile "me too", "polyamory" and "toxic masculinity" as thoroughly explanatory of single motherhood, alternative family structures and the immiseration of lower classes, especially in light of the things you have flagged.

Perhaps I was harsh in my assessment. Thank you, appreciate it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Self-confident women don’t want “traditionalism”. That’s a mechanism to control women.

I have a “traditional” marriage there is nothing controlling about it. It was my choice. I have a very good life;

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Man here. Father of two (girls, 11 and 13). And I’m enlightened yadda yadda. My mom worked full time forever with an advanced degree. But still I’d say a reluctant truth is that a lot of men just don’t have the makeup to be doting parents and raise kids. Really nurture and raise them. They just don’t want to do it. They could hit just don’t like doing it. They can and like to do tasks. But bro g responsible for the emotional crap with kids? Screw it. I’m sick of it and it is massively unpleasant work to do it. My own skill set clearly lies in things like: wooing and bedding women or a woman, making her and them safe, doing hard labor, thinking deep thoughts and clearly, being decisive, and I’d have been a damn good warrior if I had had to do that. But nurturing whiny kids? I just hate it.

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Self-confident women don’t want “traditionalism”. That’s a mechanism to control women.

I have a “traditional” marriage there is nothing controlling about it. It was my choice. I have a very good life;

A benevolent dictatorship is probably the best government type to live under if you can actually get a competent dictator who is benevolent. The problem is that it's tough to reproduce at scale or to replicate. And, so, statistically democracy is a better option. I think traditional marriages are like that. If you can find a noble, capable, loving, considerate husband, it's probably a great set up. But give that kind of power to a brute or a coward, and it's going to be a horror show.