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;

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.