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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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)?

[/quote]

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.][/quote]

Make traditionalism more appealing to women.[/quote]

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