Botond173
3hr ago
I imagine the main driver of this was the mass entry of middle-class single white women to office jobs.
Botond173
3hr ago
I have seen, and take seriously, the theory that the 1950's sex relations were the way they were because WW2 casulaties (not just deaths - also physical or psychological wounds which tank a man's marriage market value) created a female-heavy marriage market.
Are you specifically referring to sex relations during the Eisenhower years or the social reality of young Boomers?
Botond173
3hr ago
A sort of limited soft polygamy did exist in the USSR though, as far as I can tell. Men who were more attractive than the average usually kept a mistress or two on the side.
Botond173
4hr ago
I remember someone on the internet quoting George Orwell of all people making the exact same argument but was never able to find it afterwards. His basic point was that it's folly to think that humans can be bred like cattle.
Botond173
19hr ago
I recall reading this piece of data in the 1994 publication A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II. Again, maybe I'm misremembering and the 12% figure applies to all Soviet pilots, military and civilian, as of 1941. I should mention though that you aren't wrong in the sense that the great majority of Soviet female pilots in the air force were bomber, recon and transport pilots, not fighter pilots. Also the overall losses of fighter pilots were rather high and only a relatively really small proportion became aces.
Botond173
19hr ago
I'm assuming military service is plan A for a great number of young men but not for an equal or similar segment of women. Maybe plan B or C, but not A. Young women have different options and a different level of social status than young men do generally. Hence my original claim, which is just an assumption, as I don't know much about this social phenomenon.
Botond173
19hr ago
None of this is relevant here no matter how sociologically accurate it is, sorry. The original claim I'm replying to is this:
An 18 year old woman would be discharged at 22, 24 or on the outside 26 -- well before any appreciable drop in fertility. A 24 year old can easily have 4-6 kids, well over the current average (e.g. beyond the current most-binding-constraint).
Botond173
19hr ago
I’d say one destructive consequence of the Versailles ‘Treaty’ is that the notion of any great power terminating a war through a just and negotiated peace treaty has become a laughingstock. It’s no wonder no great power has ever waged war under such delusions since 1919. Everyone fights to win or to the death. If neither option is on the table, you get a trainwreck of a ‘settlement’ like that in Korea.
Botond173
5d ago
Let's consider a 24-yr-old woman who completed 6 years of military service and another woman of the same age who did other things. Which one of them have a higher chance of entering a stable marriage resulting in 4-6 kids?
Botond173
5d ago
As a general rule, women mature earlier but also age faster. In the case of an early marriage, the woman front-loads her investment while the man back-loads it. In other words, in a functioning marriage the wife makes the most of her contribution while she's young and the man does so when he's old. In that sense, OP's assessment is correct.
Botond173
5d ago
This is also another consequence of the normalization of extended adolescence. Some proportion of men have always turned out to be bums and louts, everyone was aware of this, but back when people were expected to mature earlier, the matter was usually settled by the age of 25 or so. Today it's entirely possible for a single man to appear to be a good catch on the surface at the age of 25 but turn out to be a lout, a bum, an addict etc. 5-10 years later, so committing to him entails a higher risk.
Botond173
5d ago
There was supposedly a social program in Singapore called Graduate Mothers with the exact goal of promoting this strategy. It supposedly also happened to be the one policy of Lee Kuan Yew that was a failure, which says a lot about the enormity of this problem.
Botond173
6d ago
Two relevant comments from 2014 on a social conservative blog I used to visit:
It was clear from the beginning that this was never about legal equality, per se (although that was an important part of it), but rather about social equality – that is, forcing everyone to treat same sex couplings the same way they do opposite sex couplings, under penalty of severe social sanction if they do not do so.
There is a template for this – the template that was used for race, and the template that was used for sex. It’s just being applied in a new context, but the template is the same, and that’s why it will work. It has a track record of working, after all. In 20 years, if not sooner, these kinds of discussions will be viewed the same way as discussions about race that took place in the 1950s-70s – anachronistic, bigoted, and something worthy of eye-rolls and headshakes.
They’ve won, folks. On this issue, they have won – it’s going to be treated like being an open racist or an open sexist – in other words, severe social and professional sanction, all unofficial of course, but powerful all the same. It will have the effect of stamping it out. Just like with cigarettes. It’s the way we do things here – slap a scarlet letter on it, and stamp it out through social sanction.
We will be permitted to have dissenting views, but only privately – as in, not expressing them in public, not outside of our homes, not outside of our churches. Not in the professional sphere, nor the political sphere, nor the extended social sphere. Over time, this will lead to the ideas dying out, slowly, over time, other than for a committed radical core. Which will be seen as being radical and fringe.
Of course, that’s not a call for surrender. They have won for the time being, but no merely human victory is ever eternal. Their star will wane eventually, and we must be ready when it does. But for now, it’s a time to consolidate, to reflect on what went so badly wrong, and to protect to the extent that we can without making ourselves martyrs needlessly.
There will be a "virtual gulag" in which dissidents are excluded from society. They lose their jobs and can't find any work other than subsistence work, if that. They are excluded from churches and places of worship. They will be banned from public accommodations such as restaurants and hotels; banned from doing business or purchasing goods and services. It won't be official. It will just be that word gets around about who the dissidents are, and no one will do business with or socialize with them at all. They will starve to death, literally, in plain sight.
I recall reading that 12% of Soviet military pilots were women at the start of the war, actually.
Botond173
6d ago
Also, it's women who build and maintain the entire social world, which is also sort of important.
Botond173
6d ago
In honor-based patriarchal cultures it was also generally expected of a woman belonging to the warrior class (by marriage) or the nobility to grab some bladed weapon and inevitably die a honorable death if the alternative is getting captured and gang-raped by a victorious enemy or mere criminals. (This doesn't apply to peasants, serfs and the servant class, as they are without honor and aren't expected to fight.) Thus it made sense for these women to have at least a minimal familiarity with weaponry. This is probably the reason for the common misconception that shieldmaidens or female samurai existed.
Botond173
6d ago
I’m not familiar with any data on this but I seriously doubt the average woman who signs up for military service anywhere in the world normally does so at the age of 18.
A 24 year old can easily have 4-6 kids
Not unless she belongs to some dedicatedly natalist counterculture like the Amish or so - that is the current social reality in the West. And in that case she’s very unlikely to become a military volunteer. I also doubt that a woman doing military service is generally conducive to her ever entering a stable marriage in the first place.
Even in the worst of the wars, only 15% of young men died -- that would in France/Germany in WWI.
That would not be the worst of wars in terms of the loss of young men. The Paraguayan War of 1864-70, the Serbian army in WW1 and the Soviet army in WW2 all resulted in a casualty rate that was much higher than 15%, to name just three examples. Not that any of this disproves OP’s argument about the 30% figure in any sense but it needs to be pointed out anyway.
Botond173
6d ago
My point is that there may have been a palpable feminist message in the series for all I know but I surely don't remember it. My memory is not the best though. To the extent that girlboss characters are present, I don't recall them being portrayed positively.
Botond173
6d ago
I'd say the crazy and hot (maybe implicitly sexually aggressive) warrior girl who also has male-coded interests (weapons, martial arts etc.) is a fairly typical male fantasy and is the main reason for the inclusion of such characters in Avatar, for example. I remember binge-watching the series a couple of years ago and while there are only a few aspects I can recall, not once do I remember getting any impression that it carries a (radical) feminist message. But maybe I'm just dull.
Botond173
8d ago
May I ask why are you talking of 'based and trad white Russia' as if this was some sort of pwnage? I'm sure you're also aware that the very simple reasons why the notion of 'based and trad' Russia even exists is that Russian society a) does not promote or expect white ethnomasochism b) does not normalize feminism and the LGBT+ agenda. That's it; there's nothing else to it. The idea that Russia is a white supremacist or nativist regime which strictly limits immigration is a fantasy alleged by virtually nobody anywhere.
Botond173
9d ago
"But these munitions are from the 70s and 80s. Half of them do not function, and the rest require either restoration or inspection before use," the GUR official said, citing Ukraine's latest assessment.
Ignoring Ukrainian propaganda aims for a moment, I'd suspect this statement is basically accurate, except for the 50% figure maybe (it's probably lower). I imagine it's merely a standard procedure at the artillery arm. It makes practical sense that at least the first batches of the shipped North Korean shells are the oldest ones in stock, as these are the ones that need to be used up first when the necessity arises.
Botond173
9d ago
Remember that it was Russia that rejected Trump's peace plan, which included international recognition of Crimea as Russian, no NATO membership for Ukraine, and Russia gets to keep captured territories, including the land bridge.
It had to include other conditions as well for them to reject it, provided that this allegation is true in the first place.
To extrapolate on my initial question about the reputation of the Promise Keepers organization:
Back in the days I remember reading a succinct definition on one of the Manosphere blogs that used to exist: the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) When this system is dismantled as oppressive and outdated, as it has very obviously happened throughout the developed world already (contrary to the loud protestations of die-hard feminists), we inevitably end up in a social rule set where women are no longer accountable to men and men are no longer responsible for women.
As it was also observed on said blog, it’s safe to conclude if you have eyes and ears that society is generally OK with the former and doesn’t even think twice about it but is ambiguous at best about the latter. This ambiguity manifests in various attempts to compel men to claim responsibility for women one way or another**, and is exacerbated when there’s an ever taller mountain of evidence to observe that the brave new world of sexual equality and freedom is failing to materialize in the way normies imagined it would***.
One obvious consequence of this is that anti-feminist public figures appear. They include both men and women from the onset already, but anyone can observe that the only ones getting any positive attention are women, of course. And society is generally structured in a way that a critical mass of women advocating for something is perceived as a sign by men that it’s also safe and even beneficial for them to advocate for it. And since said women are generally promoting some murky concept that can best be described as a new positive masculinity****, you’ll inevitably see men’s groups appearing with the aim of promoting the same concept.
As far as I know, the Promise Keepers was just one of these and not even all of them had a religious profile, and there were/are many outside the US as well. Their common denominator is that they are nebulously pushing a narrative that rejects both radical feminism and rigid old patriarchal norms and endorses a new positive view of masculinity that is designed to appeal to normies, especially women, without antagonizing lipstick feminism (they claim no allegiance with PUAs, for example). As you can imagine, this is largely doomed from the start already for the simple reason that defining masculinity in any form would also necessarily entail defining (and thus restricting) femininity as well, and as you can imagine, that is today a big no-no. As I alluded to above, any message such groups carry is thus destined to be rather murky.
(On a sidenote, I even find the name cringy. “Promise Keepers” implicitly means that other men do not keep their promises, the scoundrels they obviously are. I guess the naming was designed to gain sympathy from single mothers. Then again, maybe I’m just a dick.)
Before I continue I should mention that the organization briefly had a sort of heyday in the ‘90s but has long been defunct in a practical sense, as many of you might have already noticed and commented on (I assume they still exist in the legal sense). That is no coincidence, and I’m sure the main reason is that their leaders made the most obvious rookie mistake there is in politics: when their opposition (in this case, some radical feminist talking heads) denounced them in the press for some made-up reason, they apologized. (Take this with a grain of salt though, as I’ve only read this claim on a long-gone blog.) They thought they need to apologize to some feminist loudmouths, even though their entire public image hinged on being as inoffensive as possible, which clearly renders any idea of publicly apologizing a really bad one (why would you want to give any impression that you need to apologize when you’re a bog standard church org?). Anyway, even if this incident didn’t happen the way I remember it or if it didn’t happen at all, I think the general point still stands: it’s clear that the Promise Keepers were treated with either indifference or scorn and ridicule by the mainstream media, and only found sympathy within their own culture war tribe / wagon fort. This is a general rule of society: a man making any complaints about women, no matter how indirect or mild, is a sign of low status. Or to quote a former Manosphere blogger: a man pointing out the pettiness of petty women is actually seen as a sign of he himself being petty. For further proof just look at what public image fathers’ rights groups and activists have; they are basically lepers.
(end of Part 1, I suppose, as at this point I’m just rambling maybe)
*In reality it went even further than that. It was generally expected of young men to keep socially undesirable men away from their sisters, and it was normal for said sisters to act as matchmakers for their single bothers etc. But that is largely beside the point here.
**Exhortations by Christian preachers and so on for single men to marry single mothers and gamers/slackers to man up, man-shaming in the media in general, the endless denunciations of “deadbeat dads”, the Bradley Amendment, affirmative consent laws, the Duluth model etc. are all examples of this, I’d say
***I guess this included the notion that promiscuous women will be able to live without sexual shame and that “average” women will have casual sex with “average” men because they actually want to have sex for the sake of it; then again, I’m just guessing (I’ll explain the quotations marks if anyone is interested)
****Believe it or not, a handful of sympathetic women did visit these Manosphere sites back when these existed, at least for a while; they generally agreed that while the post-patriarchal age means that women don’t need men in their lives per se, they still generally want [some of] them, and that it should be possible to be a functioning masculine man in a feminist cultural milieu still
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