Gaashk
1d ago
Perhaps you could clarify that you're a hardcore pacifist, and that it would have been wrong to murder Hitler as well?
Gaashk
1d ago
I know and have known a decent number of trad women. They're basically OK with "husband makes the final decision".
Focusing on controlling appearance is weird, though, since traditionally the woman manages not only her own appearance, but that of the children, and to some extent her husband and interior design as well. She is also forming the aesthetic judgement of the children. So it's best not to marry a woman with very poor taste.
Gaashk
1d ago
Lol. Controlling the internet settings is a more reasonable and trad position than controlling your wife's fashion choices, anyway.
Gaashk
1d ago
I'm doubting the premise that 1) a woman in a happy relationship would disfigure herself in ways she knew would piss off her husband, or 2) if she did, whether him going on about Authority and Correctness and the he's got to corral her behavior, would do anything except make the situation worse.
Do you know many conservative women? The main danger is that they'll start wearing frumpy t-shirt dresses and let all their makeup expire, such that it become very difficult for them to dress up nicely, which is what I thought your initial comment was pointing to. If they're going full midlife crisis, I don't know what the solution is in that case, probably a change of social group. Perhaps an internet free religious retreat?
Gaashk
1d ago
The reason it comes across as weirdly controlling is that women in happy relationships don't suddenly dye their hair and get a new tattoo that they know their husband will hate. That's already a sign that the relationship is on the rocks, without any control rhetoric. This is true of most things (getting fat less so, especially after some children). If you say "wow, those huge pants that are trending sure are ugly!" And she goes out and buys the ugly pants you hate, that is already a sign that she doesn't respect you. That's less the case with things like getting fat and cutting her hair after bearing your children, because small children really do like pulling hair with surprising intensity, and all things cooking and exercise related can become harder.
Gaashk
1d ago
Exactly. So it should be even easier for them to stay home.
That is not necessarily true. "Easier" can mean different things. Idle hands are the devil's workshop and whatnot. Suppose you've got a mother of three children, they are a baby, a three year old, and a five year old. In a traditional household, there would be washing day, when she and her neighbors go down to the stream to wash, you all bring your children, and the children splash around in the stream. You would have pastry making day, when your sister brings her kids over, they kick a ball around the street, and you make pastry together. You spend a lot of time making clothes, and your older daughter is gradually also learning to sew, and the younger kids are out watching some other kids kick a ball around.
(This was not true of the American West, but the Dustbowl West sounded like a uniquely nightmarish place to raise children)
Now, you can still invite your friend and her children to the stream, but you're just sitting around watching the children. You can still make pastry together, but you realize this is a bit futile, because the pastry at the store is both better and cheaper, and the children cannot kick the ball around the street, there are cars, and no other kids their age. You can sew with your daughter, but it's just a hobby, and mostly for cosplay. And so on. Armenians have Rug Beating Week, when they air out and beat their rugs, all at the same time. You're replacing a communal activity with having to make up activities to avoid boredom, which feels quite different.
Gaashk
1d ago
That part stood out to me as well. I couldn't imagine what it even meant. Sure, he could divorce her is she got too fat or something, I guess, but otherwise I'm simply confused.
Gaashk
1d ago
I miss cooking for one. I could make something nutritious but not amazing, like lentil and onion stew, and I would eat it for two meals, and it would be fine. Now I get to say things like "you can't have a snack because you didn't eat your mashed potatoes and fried chicken strips!"
Gaashk
3d ago
Sure, kids should be able to go places alone a bit more. That wouldn't affect my own neighborhood all that much, but would be an improvement on the margin.
Gaashk
3d ago
Sure, if I manage to befriend anyone. We were friends before having kids. My mom started making new mom friends when my brother and I got into 4-H.
Gaashk
3d ago
Only tangentially related, but I enjoyed this article enumerating the ways in which family life is more costly in ways that don't show up in the statistics. Most of these points are already known here, but I thought it was a good consolidation of them.
Gaashk
3d ago
Maybe. "You could do things that are now technically legal, but everyone in your social group will think you're a crappy mom" isn't much of a pitch to have more children.
But I'm currently having an annoying summer break because my youngest, not yet two, needs to be chased down and grabbed everywhere we go, I'm sure I'll feel better about him again in a month.
Gaashk
4d ago
The limiting factor is mostly sustained attention. I brought my kids over to my friends house the other day to play with her kids, and it was nice, I'd like to do it more often, but a child needed something about every 5 minutes. I'm sure this gets to be less frequent as the youngest children are older, but it has been about 7 years of this for us now, which is certainly not nothing. Her husband was looking forward to returning to his trades job after a month of parental leave, because it was less chaotic and allowed more sustained attention.
The parents arguing on Substack seem to consist of some parents who want to vent, often because they're playing on hard mode. Their husband is gone until evening, they have six children spaced very closely together, the youngest is a baby or toddler, and they're homeschooling the other ones. Then someone pipes up and says: you can just teach your children to not be like that. Arguing ensues.
Gaashk
4d ago
I'm not sure if I understand your point but, yes, it is very common for American fathers to tell their sons they're sure there are jobs out there that will hire them, but not have any actually useful information about looking for them.
Gaashk
4d ago
I do think the anthropological lens applies to an even greater degree in Europe. Have you read any Orwell? I'd recommend The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London. I've spent some time in Albanian and Georgian villages, and, yeah, probably wouldn't want to marry there and remain forever. But, also, I generally liked the people, they were interesting, passionate, had strong ties to ancient cultures and traditions, made labor intensive cultural foods. They may have been less drained by emigration than some areas, though, and strong cultural self image.
Gaashk
4d ago
I've gotten sucked into the mommy wars section of Substack lately, and my impression is that it does go a layer deeper than that. College educated women want status for their ability to do things like write, reference interesting authors, articulate cultural and educational opinions, and so on. In the past, women educated in that fashion had nursemaids. Now, they drive their baby to daycare at four weeks old, and work. Their work does not produce much status, and neither do their children. But with everything going online, it's increasingly difficult to gain status from the things they go to college for either, so the popular ones are happy because they're popular, and bully the less popular ones, for saying unpopular things. This is not a good state of affairs, middle class women should be able to do a bit of cultural generation while their children are in daycare or school, and generate positive feelings about their lives. Feminists did not help with that, merely chaining them to fake desk jobs and bloated school systems instead of their kitchens. And the ones at home don't sound happy either, because they never get a break at all.
I, again, don't have a solution, but giving up on women doing classic feminine things like writing essays to each other, and making everyone nursemaids again seems like the wrong direction to be pushing in.
Gaashk
4d ago
In my town, it is commonplace for people to openly make overtly sexual jokes around children, people prying into my political views at random right as I introduce myself, people at functions reaching for food in a communal bowl with their hands instead of using the spoon or tongs in it, people nudging me with their shopping carts or standing like deer in headlights instead of asking me to give way, people breathing in my mouth as they reach for some frozen pizza, etc.
Huh. I'm having some difficulty interpreting this. I've lived in small American towns, and didn't notice these sorts of behaviors, or not in a way that got on my nerves. Perhaps it's best to treat it anthropologically, rather than looking for a soul mate. I enjoyed living as a single young person in a very small town. They thought me to cut fish, let me participate in town festivals, it was interesting.
Try applying your own curiosity and open-mindedness to your situation, and it will lead to amusing anecdotes you can tell your future girlfriend once you get to college.
Gaashk
4d ago
The women in my family were also teachers with university degrees and 3-4 children, at least three generations back. Which is what stability looks like in an era of low infant mortality; it's not like society even wants a bunch of 15 child underclass families anyway.
I don't have a theory for this. None of them moved to IQ shredder places like San Francisco or New York, and when two of my cousins did, they have in fact not had any children.
Gaashk
10d ago
I like the way even the free version of Claude starts by listing what sources it's looked at, while I wait for an answer. It conveys that it's researching something, unlike Free GPT, which answers instantly, and maybe there's a website embedded somewhere.
Gaashk
11d ago
what is rightfully theirs in terms of status, money, and employment.
This is specific rather than general, and would depend on intuitions concerning specific events. It depends, ultimately, on what the work is. For instance, I don't necessarily want a pastor or professor who's been grindmaxxing his whole life, I'd like someone who's been cultivating wisdom through conversations, study groups, perhaps even traveling to get different perspectives, praying or reflecting, and other low stress activities.
But that's not because the status is somehow "rightfully theirs" in a caste sense, but because the grindmaxxing doesn't necessarily produce more wisdom, which is what people are paying them to cultivate. If they start thinking their status is "rightfully theirs," they should become subject to the rule of "whosoever humbles himself will be exalted, and whosoever exalts himself will be brought down," because that position is showing a lack of wisdom and maturity.
The oil riggers are welcome to produce more oil, as long as they aren't so exhausted they're making stupid mistakes.
Gaashk
11d ago
I've mostly heard drama around the kind of homeschool families and communities who don't want to have to prove they did in fact educate their children in basic ways, but the accusation was educational neglect more than religious practices.
There was a Muslim cult in New Mexico that got in trouble for physically neglecting its children, after one of them died of preventable causes.
While I think states sometimes go too far in scaring parents about what constitutes "neglect," both cases seem basically reasonable, not of the "kids playing alone in the park" variety.
Yes, it's chemistry based, I don't think they're antagonistic, but just developed and tested their glasses separately. Their website says they have different expansion and contraction rates when heated and cooled. Not being a materials science person, I don't really understand the reasoning behind it, something about different flux ratios and other chemical differences.
Ceramic glazes are also developed to heat at different temperatures, and in the 20th Century were classified into "cones" that droop at a certain point of heat absorption, so that a mid fire potter might look for "cone 6" clay and glazes, whereas a low fire potter, firing about 400 (f) cooler, might look for cone 06, which is weird but at least predictable and the different temperatures can be easily sold in the same store.
Edit: I'm not aware of any potters here, but Coyote Clay Glazes are great fun! They create different colors and effects based on kiln, location, thickness, and other idiosyncratic things, and each piece is unique and beautiful. Next time I'm firing, I want to try their "Texas two step" series, which creates spots by one glaze breaking over another.
Gaashk
12d ago
It's called different things in different states. Here it's CYFD (Children Youth and Families Department).
It depends on who the trad families are interacting with. I had thought there were scandals about Muslim communes at a similar rate by population to the extremist Christian ones, but haven't looked at the numbers.
Gaashk
12d ago
I think this must be a trend. I went to my first Korean BBQ restaurant last week. There were a surprising number of babies and toddlers there, considering the place was full of hot stoves and raw meat. We couldn't talk because of the loud ventilation fans, and the toddler struggling to get loose part way through, but they didn't allow food to be taken out, it all had to be consumer on premises. It seems fun as a date night idea, except for the noise. I liked the food and didn't mind the cooking, but didn't get to eat as much as I wanted or stay as long as I wanted, which is bad in an anti-carryout environment.
This pitch would go over a lot better if you were to focus on girls, rather than women, and in more of a family and school context, rather than a romantic context. While it's true that an anxious and depressed girl is going to have all kinds of romantic trouble, focusing on that from the perspective of the man who would have liked to have dated her but now can't is way less socially acceptable. You can say they shouldn't be, but you're not going to change centuries of social programming, it's not a fence that's worth removing.
People actually are worried about the girls, and a lot of the negative affects set in in adolescence, especially among teenage girls. People like Abigail Shrier and Johnathan Haidt talk about that a lot, and there isn't all that much pushback about Haidt being a man, since forming young minds has been his area of interest for decades, and now he's interested in these depressed teenage girls; makes sense.
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