Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
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User ID: 3132
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
18d ago
Women have much much less agency than men
If you were to give a rationalist-style quantifiable estimate of the agency gap between men and women, what numbers would you give for the SD gap, overlap percentage, and percent of women at or above the male average? I agree with you directionally, but I think that the actual biological difference is closer to the gender IQ gap than the strength gap, and in any case I believe that agency and general virtus is a nearly unalloyed good and should be more prevalent among the fairer sex.
Great for you, legitimately. It sounds like you have a good thing going for both of you, and I don't mean to denigrate your particular situation, whatever it may be. I was more trying to use your framing to make a broader point.
the women in our parish do not care in the slightest what mainstream culture considers low-status
Mainstream culture has nothing to do with the point I'm making here.
Some things are more or less valuable by their very nature, including labor roles. Hard work and simple living will always have its place, but the moneychangers will have theirs too, and they'll always be more individually valuable and materially better off than the salt of the earth types. When status corresponds with practical value (as it has to greater or lesser degrees in every society on Earth), more valuable work = more status.
I posit that modern housewives are less essential to the functioning of the household than they've ever been, and that this reduction in utility has resulted in a concomitant reduction in status. Women's work has been declining in utility ever since the transition to agriculture, but the trend became turbocharged with the Industrial Revolution; it's no coincidence that feminism began in earnest in the mid-1800s. This status reduction can be moderated with religiosity (as in your case), but not negated. This is why we cannot simply "RETVRN" — not without adaptation, anyways. I have my own ideas about how to manage this on a societal scale, but I'm glad that you've made it work for you.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
26d ago
I meant the stay-at-home dad comment to mean more that men don't seem to be particularly unsuited to housekeeping, certainly not to a similar extent that (trads say) women are unsuited for work outside the home.
But plenty of higher status people would suck doing lower status work. It is complementary but unequal.
I'm still not convinced that their roles are really complementary, and my impression is that it used to be less unequal. When everyone's a farmer/hunter-gatherer, the relative complexity of work within and outside the home is far closer than when your society is built on white-collar work.
Eupraxia
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26d ago
That's true, a lot of archaic household tasks require true skill and specialization such that they're legitimately complimentary to men's work; I don't mean to diss actual traditional housekeeping. The problem is that we're living in the 21st century, and you can't meaningfully specialize into vacuuming and Crock-Pot operation.
Eupraxia
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26d ago
Sure, it's possible that women have some temperamental lean towards homemaking, but I haven't seen any rigorous establishment of that premise. By my informal observation, you don't see a broad movement of stay-at-home dads complaining about having to be around their kids and do chores all day, and in any case the actual complexity of the work (and thus its associated status) is still low.
Is your wife's role in the family actually complimentary to you or simply a lower station? Because it seems to me like if you swapped positions, you could do her job perfectly well (minus the pregnancy bit), but she'd have no idea how to run your business.
I suppose that your relationship might be described as harmonious compared to alternatives, but you and other trad types have to own the fact that (edit: modern) homemaking is a low status occupation and that many women won't be happy with that.
Eupraxia
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27d ago
As @quiet_NaN said below, agency (that is, the ability to be an independent agent) is not necessarily correlated with asociality (that is, the tendency to devalue/neglect the collective good). While there's a degree of social conformity that's required to maintain the commons, a dearth of distributed agency/agentic elite causes a society to follow the path of least resistance, usually to its detriment. Some(well, most) societies are built to require less distributed agency/more social conformity (e.g. East Asia), but they tend to be outcompeted by more individualistic but still commonwealth-respecting societies (e.g. the West).
Eupraxia
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28d ago
Maybe not a virus, but a vaccine...
Eupraxia
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29d ago
I can semi-concur with you here. I went to a French immersion school in a decently black area as a kid, and it was a far better school than its demographics would suggest. Most of the black kids were either immigrants from Francophone Africa or otherwise upper-middle class, and while it still wasn't private-school quality, it seemed a hell of a lot better than the surrounding public schools.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
I suppose I have. I'm still fermenting this philosophy of mine, but I see it as a good sign that it's led me to solid ground.
More aspirationally, I envision a reworking and expansion of pink-collar work to span a wider gamut of expertise and prestige while remaining distinctly feminine. There still need to be secretaries and receptionists (or not, depending on how AI shapes up), but I'd prefer if more was expected of the average pink-collar worker in terms of embodied competence.
Whose definition of eudaemonia are we using here?
My own idiosyncratic definition, which rests on certain assumptions:
I take it as an axiom that eudaemonia comes from the exercise of virtues, and that virtues range on a scale from passive virtues to active virtues. Passive (feminine) virtues include chastity, temperance, mercy, and piety: they are something you avoid, or are. Active (masculine) virtues include valor, industry, courage, and nobility: they are something you do, or become.
I take it as further axiom that in general, the active virtues hold greater eudaemonic potential: they are what build monuments. Feminine virtues are absolutely important for individual and civilizational well-being, but they are the mortar and masculine virtues are the brick.
Therefore, the sex who is disinclined towards and incentivized against exercising masculine virtue will suffer lower average potential for human flourishing. Women's maximum capacity for masculine virtue is almost certainly lower that men's maximum capacity due to the consequences of gestation, but I believe that they are capable of more, should be incentivized to exercise what they have, and might hopefully be gifted with greater capacity for excellence.
tl;dr: genetically-modified tomboy supremacy
I'm not sure what you mean about agency in this context. That they should be more assertive?
Those typically-male traits which combine to create agency (internal locus of control, risk taking, a certain amount of disagreeableness) are what have led men to dominate public affairs since the beginning of civilization. The increasing complexity of civilization over time has in turn caused the expansion of the public sphere and atrophy of the private sphere. After thousands of years of this, 99% of everything that matters for the maintenance of civilization occurs in the male realm, and the instrumental value of femininity for civilization has been pared back to its bare biological function. You yourself have touched on something like what I'm getting at here.
Given this, it seems to me that to preserve the dignified utility of woman, her sphere should be expanded to include particular sections of the public domain. You'll notice that this is the stated goal of feminism; while I agree with the early feminists about the root of the problem and the directional solution, my preferred means and ends acknowledge intrinsic sex differences and attempt to work within them when possible and subtly modify them when required.
Also, I'm proposing an increase in the mentioned masculine traits, but not to the point of complete parity with men. There's definitely some amount of contextually beneficial tradeoff to conformity and risk aversion, I just think women's present average amounts aren't adaptive.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
Women's importance to the continuance of the species is absolutely important, I agree. My concern is that on an individual level, it seems to me like women get the short end of the stick in their potential for eudaemonia, to the point where the Athenian prayer isn't unwarranted. See here downthread for my elaboration.
(I appreciate your enjoyment, thx!)
I wrote the above before I saw that it's Mother's Day, lack of tact, mea culpa, etc.
To be clear, I don't want to just dunk on women — I like the women in my life and bear no ill will towards their sex. I'm just skeptical of uncritical complementarian narratives that declare that men and women are simultaneously unequal in their dispositions and yet equally valuable in their own domains, because it seems pretty obvious to me that men get the better deal. Earth Mother and Sky Father might be of equal value in nature, but the story of civilization has been of reaching to the stars with only a minimal umbilical connecting us to our roots.
If I were dictator, I'd look into ways of (eugenically or otherwise) partly relieving women of those traits which most negatively impact their eudaemonic potential (neuroticism, conformity, lower risk tolerance, lower agency) and augmenting their traits which legitimately compliment men's (verbal IQ, social intuition, physical endurance, sensual sensitivity).
Damn, I legitimately forgot it's Mother's Day, I look like an asshole. To the women here, I apologize for my oh-so-masculine lack of tact.
...but if you'll afford me some charity, I'm trying to highlight the other admirable qualities of women besides their (definitely important!) biological prerogative.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
Girls hit most developmental milestones before boys, so in a certain sense a "longer" adult life is possible.
That faster development could be part of the cause of the spatial/logical intelligence gap, as faster development is (at least interracially) correlated with lower intelligence after the completion of puberty. I wonder if girls who get their periods later are consistently more intelligent, or if there are racial differences in average age of menarche?
When I say "advantages", I mean those things which make it better to be of one sex over the other in a particular practical circumstance. It is true that mammalian biology places the burden of gestation on the woman; my question is about what other aspects of her biology might take the sting out of her manifest physical inferiority and considerable neurotic pathologies.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
1mo ago
I've seen some evidence that women's better fine motor control is largely an artifact of their smaller hands, which would make sense. There could still be something there, though: weaving and spinning are traditionally women's work, at least in western culture.
I forgot about g-force tolerance in my OP, though again that's partly a side effect of their smaller bodies. Even controlling for that, women seem to have an advantage. Gynoid fat distribution might be the cause, but I'm unsure.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
And only men can produce the sperm required to conceive said child. Primary sex characteristics are table stakes.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
What physiological/psychological advantages do women have over men? The only solid ones I can think of off the top of my head are a better immune system, greater flexibility, and greater conscientiousness. I've also seen some stuff about more acute color vision, more efficient use of fat stores during endurance activity, and better scores on verbal/memory IQ subtests, though I haven't investigated those as thoroughly.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
1mo ago
Yep, I recall reading somewhere that Asians tend to respect Jews for their disproportionate influence, the thought process going something like:
You're telling me that this tiny minority dominates your finance, media, and government? Sounds like they're doing something right, what's their secret?
This is frequently to the detriment of their drastically reduced number of children
Most of the Western fertility decline was justified and needed. Infant mortality rates approaching 50% were near-universal before the 19th century; the average woman doesn't need to and shouldn't have 4+ children anymore, lest we tempt the spectre of Malthus. (The demographic argument for pro-natalism still applies, but in the long run fertility still needs to converge on replacement.)
Mothers can't be "more precious than rubies" when the job prerequisite is the bare biological minimum expected of a mammalian female. I've seen such pro-natalist exhortations to value motherhood more before, but since status (especially female status) is a zero-sum game, the end result of such efforts is going to look much more like shaming barren women rather than celebrating mothers. It only makes sense for women to branch out into the male realm when the need for their singular area of expertise has been significantly obviated.
Sure, childcare and housework is necessary, but I'd contend that it actually isn't all that valuable in an economic sense, nor is it really that hard. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that a near-majority of housewives aren't earning their keep:
From a quick google search, the median cost of daycare in the US is $12.5k/yr and the median salary of a maid is $27.5k/yr. Housewives only need to maintain one house/a few children and don't need to adhere to professional standards for cleaning/childcare, so let's halve the sum and add maybe $10k/yr for other miscellaneous responsibilities, coming out to a $30k/yr equivalent salary for the responsibilities of a housewife. The average male salary in the US is ~70k, so if the median man is spending >40% of his income on supporting his wife, it could be said that she's got a bit of a grift going for her, with the scale of the grift increasing with greater male earnings and investment.
It's crass to lay such things bare, but I think it's an important point to be made, and to note alongside it that it wasn't always this way. Good housekeeping used to include responsibilities such as practical crafts, tending to the hearth, spinning wool, etc. that made women far more economically valuable, if not as primary providers. As the functional value of home economics has been hollowed out by technology, the expected role of women ought to adapt to the circumstances.
"The guillotine is far too gruesome and traumatic for moderns"
[Hanging] is violent enough to make a point, but, at least in its long-drop form, not too gruesome to witness.
Public execution is already wayyy outside the realm of consideration for modern Westerners; if it should be reinstated, I'd prefer that we go the whole nine yards, as it were. Also, have you seen the comments on gore sites? Asides from stupid teenagers, I'd wager that ~everyone who frequents those sites to see anything more graphic than bodycam footage are somehow mentally disturbed.
Besides, the broader objection I have is towards the instrumental value of your formulation. When there's just not that much crime that deserves capital punishment compared to how it was in the past (at least among the blue-blood races), you don't really need to drive the point home in that way; it seems like your ought doesn't follow from the is. I'm curious: what crimes do you think deserve the death penalty (and while we're on topic, which deserve caning)?
…Where are you getting your numbers from? I simply cannot believe that support for criminalization of homosexuality approaches 1 in 5, let alone support for construction crane conversion therapy. By my observation, the anti-LGBT crowd generally don’t desire to go on the offensive, they just want to be left alone.
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