Terracotta
5mo ago
In the first friend's case, both spouses had their own individual accounts (which is how he'd funded various peccadillos already), and she managed the joint household budget because she was more organized-- so both of them ended up getting lawyers. It does illustrate that access to funds at the level of individual accounts is important, though, and while I'd recommend that no SAH or working spouse of either gender give their partner absolute control of the finances, I don't see how you avoid this if the sole employed partner wants it that way. In the case of a breadwinning spouse who says "It's my money, I'll deposit it in my account and you just let me know how much you need for the groceries" or "sorry, we don't have enough money for Timmy's braces," what is the SAH spouse's counterargument supposed to be?
Wife: I think we should buy a bigger house, but my husband thinks the smaller one is good enough. He says that he should get to make the decision because he's the breadwinner and I'm a stay-at-home mother.
Wife's friend: He's right. You have no right to complain.
This is an actual dispute that has arisen in a SAHM family I know. In that case, nobody explicitly said "you have no right to complain," but the working spouse said "OK, I'll work on it, I'll let you know when I think we can afford it," and then somehow they never could afford it, even as a series of other things he valued got afforded just fine. There again, I don't know how the non-working spouse's counterargument is supposed to go. "Why are you buying ___ when we can't have a bigger house so Janie can have a yard to play in?" "I told you we couldn't afford the house, and stop nagging me about how I spend my money."
Terracotta
5mo ago
Nah man, I assume that young men and young women in the 50s just fell in love and settled down to have babies early because they could afford to, the way everybody does in times of high economic opportunity for the middle classes. Women might have married at 20 in the midcentury, but men also married at a median of 23, after all.
OTOH I suspect the kinds of 2025 internet people who vocally fantasize about teen brides and argue for excluding women from the workforce, but somehow never consider what historically has happened to the kiddies if Daddy gets sick or his industry contracts, are not coming to this issue from a POV of direct practical interest in forming stable, resilient families.
Terracotta
5mo ago
I've had relatives and friends who've gone through this, so I'm weighting their experiences. One friend was able to reclaim her life after her husband became abusive and floridly unfaithful only because she was the one who kept the family accounts, hence had access to funds to secure an attorney. She also took the advice of friends at work, could use her relative independence of movement to make the necessary consultations, knew something about the process and could assess the attorney's advice because she was well-educated, etc. Her husband continued to spiral downward and there was definitely no spousal support on the table, but after the divorce, she just kept working her existing middle-class job, got a nice little apartment and did fine.
I also have a friend who's a SAHM in a more patriarchal setup where the husband keeps track of the money (after all, it's his, he earned it) and doles out an allowance for household shopping, reads and pays his wife's credit card bills, works from home where he can incidentally observe her comings and goings, is the final word in decisions of household policy (his money, his call). Her husband is a nice guy and she's able to hold her own because she worked for a while before having kids and has a reasonable perspective on things. But if she had gotten married to him at 20, wrangled toddlers full-time for a decade or so and then encountered the family crisis that my first friend did? I really think she would have been screwed. At minimum, she would have stayed in a worsening situation for far too long out of sheer exhaustion, dearth of resources and fear of the unknown.
Terracotta
5mo ago
He would, presumably. It seems like a decent reason why a pro-family middle-class woman might opt to finish college and establish first-job cred through 24-25 or so before having that first kid, rather than pumping out babies right out of high school. Mid-20s is still extremely fertile and still leaves a long childbearing window if that's what you're into. Historically there have been plenty of eras when it was the norm for both middle-class women and men to work and save up for a household through their mid-20s.
I don't know why the pro-tradwife folks aren't more interested in practical family risk-management considerations. Maybe it's just the sheer appeal of imagining a nubile 20-year-old wife who can't afford to leave even if she wanted to?
Terracotta
5mo ago
The problem is that good outcomes in the law go to people who can afford good lawyers. So maybe the divorce actually was cheating-related, but if he has control of all the accounts, a robust community network and is willing to pay up for the absolute best legal representation, then how is his wife going to afford enough representation to gather evidence and make that case? It sounds like OP's uncle was relatively easygoing and generous, but that is not the modal attitude among divorcing spouses.
Similarly, post-divorce, being awarded child support/spousal support and actually collecting said support are extremely different things, and I assume affording good representation makes a substantial difference there, too. There are a lot of ways that someone with good lawyers can bully a less well-connected person into making custody or financial concessions.
Even if child support is awarded and collected, it may or may not match the actual expense of raising the children, a gap which the ex-wife will struggle to close with the wages of the kind of low-skill, entry-level work you can pick up as a 42-year-old job-seeking for the first time.
many of the common ones have a substantial safety net in place.
What exactly is the safety net, beyond the noblesse oblige of the departing spouse? Favorable terms in a divorce go to the party with a good lawyer. Unless she's been very lucky and careful about secretly diverting money, SAHM has no means of hiring a shark attorney or a PI. Post-divorce, she has no resources to battle for payment of child support and spousal support, no economic slack to position herself favorably in the housing or job market. The likeliest scenario is she needs to quickly find some other man to support her and the kids, who may or may not be a good guy (stepfathers have a broadly bad reputation).
So in the event of a divorce mommy having a middle-class career is her safeguard against having to immediately remarry and subject her kids to some jerk, just to get by. Or else try to go it alone with child support plus a low-skill/low-wage job while the kids get raised by the internet.
And that's leaving out second-order consequences! Back in the golden age of what you call the "traditional marriage" (which is actually just the Victorian middle-class town marriage, not lindy at all), the husband got custody of the kids by default and the wife got absolutely nothing. Whatever safety net we currently have was developed because of women's greater economic leverage and participation in the public square, plus the added perspective of female judges/ lawyers/ lobbyists.
So yes, if we total up the possibility of ‘marry the nice guy your parents approve of and be a SAHM’ ruining your life, it’s small enough for a girl to be confident in her decisions.
OK, let's run rough numbers on the most common of these disaster scenarios.
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43% of first marriages end in divorce *31% of divorces initiated by husband= 13% chance the husband just up and dumps her at some point. You'd probably say that middle-class marriages are less subject to these risks; I don't see evidence of that, but fine, let's halve that to 6.5%.
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Of remaining divorces, 35% of women cite their husband's infidelity, 24% abuse, 12% addiction as the reason for leaving. Assume there's some overlap and make it a total of 50% of wife-initiated divorces having one or more of these factors. So 43%*50%= 22% chance the husband eventually philanders, abuses, gambles, drinks or tokes enough to make her wish he'd dump her. Apply the classism correction, that's 11% chance.
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Odds of her husband dying early run from .23%/year when he's 30 to .98%/ year when he's 55 (still too early to have fully adequate retirement savings, even with life insurance). Presumably it's not a linear increase, so say .35%/yr*25 yrs=9% lifetime chance her spouse dies and leaves her to support herself and the youngest of the kids.
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Odds of her husband becoming semi-permanently unable to support the family owing to disability or job changes: this is annoying to figure out, but I'm seeing 3% unemployment, higher underemployment, 1% SSDI for working-age men with college degrees, so let's spitball 1% odds she becomes the family breadwinner by necessity.
To me, that looks like a roughly 28% chance that a married woman will eventually encounter one of the many commonplace disasters where her independent earning capacity would be a huge benefit for her and the kids. Not sure where you get the idea that these things don't happen to nice middle-class moms of 5, but every one of these scenarios, including husband's addiction, abuse, infidelity, early death, has happened to at least 1-2 of the few large families I know. Even if you think a lifetime 28% is still too high, it's fair to ask how just how low those odds would have to be to make it a responsible decision for a young woman to forgo the insurance of a decent career and instead chase an idealized 24/7 tradwife/cupcake fantasy.
And that's leaving out the lower-key negative changes in the family dynamic itself when one spouse has absolutely all the economic power and knows it. Many husbands stay kind and generous, but if not, a SAHM ends up quietly bearing a lot more borderline treatment of her and the kids, simply because speaking up would risk the disaster of her husband's leaving them unsupported. If you cruise by conversations of angry adult children who've cut contact with their parents, a common theme is "my dad was an asshole and my mom did nothing to stop it." A SAHM can't do anything to stop it, because her husband is doing her a favor just by letting her exist on his dime.
Terracotta
5mo ago
Are you sure it's just "fearmongering about getting raped" that makes it seem like a high-risk life choice to enter lifelong, irrevocable financial dependency on a man, and commit your children to same?
In today's economy, a middle-class girl who quits college at 20 to get married and have somebody's 5 babies will find that she's made a life-ruining decision if absolutely any of the following happen:
-Husband falls out of love in a commonplace way and wants a divorce (43% of women and 46% of men are obese by their 40s and at least one poster upthread considers a fat wife strictly inferior to no wife at all; plus, skinny or fat, 100% of 50-year-old women are older than the hottest 20-something at the office).
-Husband's little vices worsen into a behavioral problem (with drugs, alcohol, gambling, porn, gaming, overspending, hoarding, whatever) that make him a misery to live with or a financial liability to the family
-Husband turns out to be physically/ sexually/ emotionally abusive
-Husband turns out to be selfish and won't spend money on the kids, so they limp along with the bare minimum
-Husband commits white-collar crime, goes to prison
-Husband has a midlife crisis and unexpectedly comes out as gay/ trans/ polyamorous/ into a distasteful fetish after a decade or two of marriage
-Husband gets sick in a permanent career-ruining fashion (depression, disability, accident).
-Husband's career unexpectedly implodes for any other reason
-Husband dies
Note that any of these would have a disastrous impact not just on the girl's life, but on the lives of her future children. And every one of those negative impacts could be substantially mitigated (although not removed) by the girl's having access to a decent middle-class job, to partly support herself and the kids in a pinch. Otherwise you live a life that's one negative event away from having to dump your kids with the dodgy babysitter while you desperately slog through night courses at the community college.
If you total up all those probabilities, can the girl really feel justly confident that she and her kids won't need that career someday?
Terracotta
5mo ago
It's an interesting choice for sure, given the context in the poem. What do you love about those lines?
Terracotta
6mo ago
I sure hope you're right. But does there exist a historical precedent for any industry ever moving from "heavily bureaucratized, intensively regulated, ideologically freighted, opaque, inefficient and expensive" toward "lean, simple, transparent and consumer-oriented" in any meaningful way under a modern state? If so, I'd genuinely love to hear about it.
Terracotta
6mo ago
Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but most of the industry-facing benefits of price opacity seem to entail a parallel set of benefits for regulators, legislators and nonprofits. If the meme that Healthcare is Priceless signs blank checks for producers in the industry, it presumably works the same way for bureaucrats and lawmakers, who get a free pass to accumulate power, expand surveillance, reward cronies and promote pet causes through selective disbursement of all that funding. And that's leaving out the large proportion of regulators/ lawmakers who are just literally in bed with parts of the industry, like the FDA folks who retire to take plum positions with Pharma.
I'm sure you could get that class to happily support selected instances of price-limiting legislation where it might hurt their political adversaries, but who's the constituency for plain consumer empowerment, beyond just Joe Q. Public?
Terracotta
6mo ago
I'm curious as to why you think it would ever be in the best interests of the medical industry to provide price transparency.
Like, obviously they could develop ways to formalize price estimates and communicate them to customers. If anything, that's confirmed by the poor quality of the countervailing arguments in the thread below. But why would they ever want to?
Having the ability to inflate prices without reducing demand, because nobody at the point of consumption has any idea what anything costs, seems like a pretty sweet situation. Likewise, high salaries and various other forms of grift and waste across healthcare are made possible by the broader cultural perception that the industry provides priceless, sanctified Human Care Through Science rather than some mere grubby service like your hairdresser or auto mechanic. Giving patients the power to participate in rational cost-benefit analysis about their healthcare seems like it'd work out worse for every single level of the industry.
Terracotta
7mo ago
Never attribute to feminism what can be adequately explained by endumbening.
Substituting cartoony physical stuff for nuanced dialogue and subtle social powerplays has been a trend in youth media for a while now. Women's YA novels should be the peak medium for wordy scenes of deception and covert social manipulation, and even those regularly pull out some kind of broad screen-ready Loony Tunes thing these days, not necessarily girlboss swordplay but someone being punched or shoved, or physically restrained, or exploded (!), in interactions that would have been subtle verbal insults or manipulations a few decades ago. There's maybe some element of fantasy about women wreaking physical revenge, but equally often it's evil moms and boyfriends inflicting violence on girls, or just the universe conveniently providing violence to fill up plot holes, so I don't think it can be purely a girl power thing.
My bet is on a combination of progressively lower social intelligence in younger cohorts (if you're raised without freeform peer play, how would you learn to recognize and understand negotiation or manipulation strategies?), worsening verbal/logical ability in writers, and possibly some studio mistrust of audiences. Say what you will about sword-swinging girlbosses, but they're easy to write, don't need to say much, and reliably capture a viewer's attention.
Terracotta
7mo ago
Most people are aware of Bipolar disorder, at least superficially. Lots of people say "I have mood swings" and tell that to healthcare workers with less training, these people dutifully write down Bipolar in the chart. Or they say "you ever like have mood swings and be unable to sleep?" Gets the diagnosis. Someone who actually has Bipolar 1 with a manic episode barely sleeps for a week of more, does illegal things, or spends ALL of their money in the bank account and all kinds of other stuff. The diagnosis is serious and life limiting without treatment. The medications are also serious - most patients get antipsychotics these days which increase all cause mortality. They are worth it if you actually have the disease. Put undertrained staff give the dx to people who don't have it and then suddenly...
OK, this is a good example for illustrating the difficulty I'm having with the binary MD-competent/ NP-incompetent model. So here we have a fairly clear, potentially dangerous error in practice. Insofar as it is fairly clear, you were able to explain it to me in a paragraph or so: now I, a random Mottizen, understand that it's bad to diagnose and medicate bipolar just on the basis of "mood swings" or "poor sleep," and that patients should instead be experiencing very florid manic episodes with clear life consequences. That's facile, but for someone going on to psych practice, I'd imagine a few additional hours of video case studies would eliminate the lowest-hanging 80-90% of obvious mistakes of the form "don't diagnose bipolar in this clearly not-bipolar patient, dummy." So presumably that same advice and video training could be administered to a DNP before they begin psych practice, problem solved.
Fine, says the MD, but what about the top-10% "art of medicine" situations where the line is far more nuanced? There aren't empirical tests to verify a diagnosis; what if the situation sounds right on the border? The precise mechanisms of bipolar are poorly understood; what if there are a lot of other things going on and it's not clear how they interact? Or it's not clear how medication will impact any particular patient, so what if the risk-benefit math around prescription is very challenging?
I can easily see how what you call the "skill ceiling" could come into play there, leading an NP to get those questions wrong. What I don't see is the training value-add that makes you confident a random board-certified psychiatrist would clear the skill ceiling and get them right. There's not good basic science around these issues, so the organic chemistry and anatomy from med school certainly won't help. Residency? Presumably this means that the MD encountered some difficult cases under supervision and was admonished to approach each case the way their attending would do it. However, (a) that could have been an indefinite amount of time ago, and there's nothing beyond some trivial online quizzes to ensure the MD has kept up with new data since their training; and (b) even back in training, nobody was checking to make sure the supervisor was themselves particularly judging the situation "correctly". Indeed, how could anyone even define "correctly," if the case was by definition so difficult and subtle, the kind of situation where the wrong call would just make a patient sadder and less functional 20 years hence, not cause them to keel over and die on the spot? Doubtless the attending felt confident that their approach was making a real difference; but we all know the various cognitive biases that would lead doctors to overestimate the correctness of their judgment and the effectiveness of their treatment under those circumstances.
I guess it boils down to the broader question "when psychiatry works clearly, it should work for DNPs too; but when it doesn't work clearly, how can you be sure it works at all?" One established answer is to turn to empirical investigation to discipline our judgment; but as you point out, psychiatry isn't a field with a lot of options for carefully blinded RCTs and massive long-term studies.
Terracotta
7mo ago
However the bad outcomes are mostly increased lifetime mortality and risk of side effects 20 years down the line when the patient is seeing someone else. This becomes effectively impossible to study so we don't... Psychiatry is a better example - psychiatric interviews and pharmacology are the most complicated in medicine. Mental health care NPs are terrible at both of these things, give people unnecessary medications and incorrect diagnoses and are legible experienced as lower quality by patients and staff with some regularity.
I should emphasize that I have a lot of respect for psychiatrists, who seem to hurl themselves into the breach of various social ills in a way I certainly wouldn't want to do. But if we're searching for a test field where rigorous evidence makes it very legible which are the "necessary medications" and "correct diagnoses," so that MDs' highly effective healing practice contrasts clearly with NPs' useless flailing, then I'm not sure psychiatry is the obvious pick. We're talking about the same psychiatry that regularly diagnoses from subjective surveys and patient self-reports, correct? Where almost none of the biological mechanisms are thoroughly understood, either for the ailments being treated or the medications that treat them? Where exercise, healthy diet and getting plenty of sun/fresh air seem to work as well as the best drugs a lot of the time? Where official medical conditions pop in and out of the DSM with every passing political wind?
Would you say that psychiatry does a good job of monitoring its physicians' contribution to patients' lifetime mortality and/or risk of third-order side effects 20 years out, either across different levels of physician talent/conscientiousness, or versus not receiving psychiatric care at all?
Also, since this is why people normally bring it up - if you magically paid all doctors NPs salaries and didn't really change anything else......healthcare costs wouldn't go down at all in any substantive way.
I don't quite get the reasoning here. Is the idea that receiving NP salaries would cause physicians to practice as badly as you believe NPs practice, because all the competent MDs would decamp for higher-paid professions (notwithstanding the additional benefits of prestige, flexibility, autonomy and meaning in medicine)? Doctors in Canada, the UK and Germany earn about 1/3 to 1/2 what they earn in the US; is the contention that they must practice incompetently and waste a ton of money doing so?
Terracotta
7mo ago
That AMA link gives such a laughably biased summary of the actual study, though. The paper itself suggests a far more nuanced picture than your metaphor about Juan the day laborer-- and that's a study led by an MD who presumably has his own professional axe to grind. (I'd be much more interested in seeing some adversarial MD-DNP research collaborations in this area.)
Notably,
- The study focused almost entirely on costs in an ED setting; on a skim, I can't find that it examined detailed health outcomes at all beyond 30-day mortality and "preventable hospitalization," the latter of which seems difficult to define in terms of patient welfare. They say NPs and MDs had no significant differences in 30-day patient mortality.
- The study did find that treatment by NPs cost the system more than treatment by MDs, owing to NPs calling for longer hospital stays and more tests. But the difference in costs diminished with more experienced NPs.
- The cost difference also diminished to a relatively trivial level for less complex cases, and the authors themselves suggest that this means NPs could be valuable substitutes for physicians in primary care.
- They found almost as much variability in productivity from clinician to clinician *within* professions as there was *across* professions. Money sentence from the abstract: "Importantly, even larger productivity variation exists within each profession, leading to substantial overlap between the productivity distributions of the two professions; NPs perform better than physicians in 38 percent of random pairs."
Terracotta
7mo ago
That would certainly explain a lot. Including, potentially, the silly debate over "what is a woman". Because if by "a woman" they inadvertently mean "a 95th-percentile hotness woman," i.e. the concept of womanhood inheres in the hotness not vice-versa, then "I'm smokin' hot because I feel hot/ because I believe in my hotness" actually is a popular meme in the wider culture.
Terracotta
7mo ago
I've heard it pointed out that transwomen who embrace the female in long hair and flirty dresses never seem to connect with the unsexy but more psychologically and socially deep-rooted parts of stereotypical female gender performance, like being held responsible for emotional labor in conversations, over-contributing to household scut work, organizing office parties and remembering birthday observances, spontaneously volunteering care for the sick and elderly, feeling impulses or pressure to politely apologize, compromise and defer in conversations, feeling sorry for winning in a competition (because it hurts someone's feelings), fearing unwanted sexual contact and altering behavior to avoid it, fearing pregnancy and ditto, shouldering by default the more grueling parts of childcare responsibilities, etc.
Not all AFAB people experience all of these to the same extent, but I bet the proportion of women who experience their femaleness partly in one or more of these ways is vastly greater than the proportion who experience femaleness through short skirts, pert boobs and glamour makeup.
Might a real point of compromise be to clarify that AGP individuals desire to be, not women, but specifically hotties? It's possible that the few women who also self-identify as hotties would have an easier time embracing men who do the same, and it would clear up a lot of the issue for the many, many other women who feel that their womanhood is something more complex and fairly unconnected to hotness.
Terracotta
7mo ago
I think you're right that there's some important impact from the decline of embodied competence (material, social, physical) as a personal quality that people aspire to. In a society where people need to do more to survive on a daily basis, there's more value from the kind of deep, optimized knowledge you accrue through pure repeated experience; and that feels like a natural factor in making people respect their parents enough to want to become them, in a household/family setting that's similar to the one where they excelled. I definitely consult my mother regularly on workplace relations, etiquette, domestic stuff, child/husband/friend psychology, and various adulting skills, in addition to her professional areas of expertise, and I similarly pay attention to other women and men of her generation as models for social technologies and ways of being that I feel like we're in danger of losing. I expect it will be unpleasant to become a crone when it's my turn, but I don't think I'd trade the abilities and understanding I will have gained along the way.
If that kind of respect for experience is on the wane, I wonder how much of it is (a) the devaluation/ demystification of knowledge in general with the rise of the Internet; and (b) the massive Dunning-Krugerization and loss of intellectual humility that the culture has undergone as a result. But also, the high-status life narratives these days seem much more consumption-oriented than production-oriented, so maybe people don't particularly know or care whether they're good at anything.
Terracotta
7mo ago
(And I should add, by the way, @doglatine , that I deeply appreciate how open-minded, thoughtful and respectful this whole exchange was; it's been a real pleasure to get into these questions in such an honest way. Thank you!)
Terracotta
7mo ago
It can be a fun and an interesting exercise, but I'm less convinced that it helps us access truths in any meaningful way, at least most of the time. It's a kind of "social psychoanalysis" that just like regular psychoanalysis, is largely immune to falsification (Freudianism was one of the ur-examples that motivated Popper).
I had a long thing about my concerns with Popper (although I'm certainly no fan of Freud, either)-- but rather than getting too deeply into it, I'd just strongly question that claim that it's always a basically speculative and time-wasting project to try to model someone's motivations from a combination of their words and actions. Developing and refining theories of mind seems to me like a kind of metis that humans are inherently excellent at based on our nature as a social species-- certainly better at, on average, than we are at understanding the laws of physics, for instance. The processes of observation and analysis aren't always very legible, so they might not stand strict Popperian scrutiny-- but it's also not accurate to say that there's no opportunity to gather more data, discard false hypotheses and refine models accordingly.
In this instance, for example, I suggested that perhaps men like mom-rape jokes but hate daughter-rape jokes because, on some level, they like the idea of moms being taken down a peg. You countered that au contraire, perhaps men's love for their moms is so deeply embedded that it's more easily outraged versus fatherly love of a daughter, hence those jokes are funnier. Human minds are enough of a black box that we may never fully resolve it, but is it really true that we can literally never get any closer to the truth, and thus that we should never ask the question at all? It seems to me that we could try to get a bit closer by asking whether we know of any men who didn't grow up with their moms, or men who hate their daughters, and explore how they react to humor. Or by asking whether men are on the whole more respectful, deferential and attentive to their moms in other contexts, versus their daughters. Or by asking whether your or my interpretation better models how aggressive humor works in other contexts: for instance, do men more greatly enjoy rape jokes about their political outgroup, or their political ingroup? About a disliked boss, or a beloved boss?
It's certainly possible for this kind of inquiry to be done poorly, and it definitely gets dramatically worse the more you fund university professorships to do it at industrial scale (as does empirical science itself, for that matter). But just refusing to countenance it at all seems just oddly incurious, unless it's part of some strategic boundary that women shouldn't be allowed to think about male sexuality. As a man, are you not interested in why some jokes are hilarious while others are painful? Do you not feel that on some level, you respond differently to some classes of people versus others, and are the causal mechanisms underlying those feelings not intriguing to try to model?
Terracotta
7mo ago
I'm late responding, but just wanted to say that it's been a while since I read anything so solidly info-dense and enlightening. Wish I could find more deep dives into the entirely foreign and fascinating culture of gay porn. Thank you for this!
Terracotta
7mo ago
I'm not exactly sure why it's taboo, when mothers are fair game, but jokes about someone's kids are ugly or dumb or gay would come across very poorly.
Yeah, I think this is what I meant by making humor subject to "political analysis": not hand-wringing that rape jokes mean you're a rapist, but acknowledging that a group's perception of what's funny vs. unfunny could indicate something important about their underlying sentiments and desires, and that it's fair to investigate those sentiments by close-reading the jokes. Ironically, the threat of over-reading is probably what provokes some of the compensatory under-reading here, but there must be some level of valid interpretation between "jokes are a straightforward statement of intention" and "jokes mean literally nothing about anything."
(For instance, on why mama jokes are funny but daughter jokes aren't-- is it possible that most men have a little bit of underlying resentment/ contempt for older women, including their moms, that makes it a teeeeny bit viscerally enjoyable to imagine them being put in their place or subjected to male dominance, whereas having a beloved daughter demeaned is just straightforwardly painful?)
I think men who struggle with locker-room talk fall into two main camps. The first are those who can handle the social dynamics but don't like the mock aggression, and to oversimplify, they become theatre/art/literature club kids. The second are those who ASD kids who don't get the complex social dynamics.
That's really interesting: when I asked the question I was thinking about a certain type of dumb and self-serious but also very athletic "jughead"-style guy that seems both common in sporty contexts and reasonably socially successful. Having known those folks in their administrative and bureaucratic afterlives, they seem too rigid, touchy and literal-minded to ever have been great at verbal sparring, but that's just from mixed-company observations. Are successful jocks really witty and transgressive with other men? I'm trying to imagine what that would even sound like.
Terracotta
7mo ago
The only hill I'm dying on here is that I think that the actual communicative intention behind this kind of humour is typically misconstrued by women as more sincere or literal or psychopathic than it is, whereas men can more readily see that it's taking a kind of entirely performative humour/banter/mock aggression that's common in all-male contexts and employing it outside of them
Thanks for your candor and critical thinking about this! I think the only hill I'd die on is that female proscription of rape humor is similarly rational and grounded in practical safety considerations for female-bodied people in a sexually dimorphic species, not just some outpouring of blue-haired librarian priggishness as various bros would have it elsewhere on this site.
But I'm also a bit skeptical of attempts to place male aggressive humor beyond political analysis because it's supposedly so impartially transgressive and also 100% facetious and harmless. Sure, there are plenty of nuts overreacting to mildly edgy jokes these days, but it also doesn't match my experience to say that men's humor suggests nothing about their underlying views and values because they apply that humor equally to every possible target. I think there are types of harm and violence that men don't joke about, either because it would provoke a threatening response or because they just don't find it funny, and I suspect those gaps probably signal underlying vulnerabilities and anxieties the same way that jokes about raping aged moms aren't as funny to people in the process of becoming weak old ladies (and conversely, a surprising number of Twitter feminists turned out to enjoy jokes about assaulting Republican women and TERFS over the past few years). So it does seem worth exploring the contours a little. I also think that transgressiveness and dominance/aggression are two separate things - I know humorists who are wildly transgressive but still don't make any jokes of the dick-swinging, put-down sort - so just pointing out that men love breaking rules doesn't fully account for what makes women uneasy about YOUR BODY MY CHOICE.
Two follow-up questions: do men think it's funny to joke about raping each other's daughters, the way it's funny to joke about raping moms? I feel like the former isn't as common. Why? How about each other's sons?
Second, there are plenty of humorless men out there (I've met some of them!). When a guy has no sense of humor, how does his participation in locker-room banter usually fall flat? Does he go too far? Not far enough? Not in the right direction?
Terracotta
7mo ago
Uh... at least for 'fucked your mom' level jokes, absolutely positively yes.
Those are pretty funny, and also it's interesting that they are so very, very delicate about it: the language is "I want to flirt with your dad" and "I did your dad," both of which are like 5th-grade starter-pack level in the scale of "fucked your mom" jokes. So maybe it will evolve all the way to where a dude can joke about how another guy's dad moaned as he double-fisted him last night, who knows?
While we're in this media sphere, another thing I've been genuinely curious about: what's the standard level of sexual violence theming in gay porn (of the sort actually made for gay men)? Like, does popular gay porn do "dumb twink rammed until he CAN'T WALK STRAIGHT" or "Ten portly bears PUNISH this bratty man's BLEEDING ASSHOLE while he begs" style videos at the same rate as straight porn, and are there similar levels of theming about men getting choked and hit, getting stuck in tight places and begging for help, having guys cum on their face and chest, etc., as you see in videos about male sex with women?
That is fascinating, because I was honestly about to make the same argument in the opposite direction: that regardless of how far orders could actually be enforced in a case of open resistance, people mostly obey when they believe the other person has a legitimate authority to give the orders. A husband's being able to say "Come on, I'm happy to support you because I love you, but I sweated for this money while you were baking cookies with the kids, it is the product of my labor and skill" - well, that's a somewhat psychologically compelling way to claim authority over the family funds. And "I gave you this material thing, now you owe me something back" is pretty universally effective as a coercion tactic, so much so that street scammers use it on tourists all the time.
Respecting my friend's example, I was only imagining that it illustrated how having an independent income can ensure your children get what they need even if your husband is a skinflint - I'm pretty well up in modern PMC/HR-type attitudes, but it never occurred to me that her predicament was textbook financial abuse or that she should call him out on it, so it's really interesting that you find it obviously unacceptable. Knowing the wife, I'm fairly sure she also just thinks "well, so he feels possessive about the money, no use starting a big fight about it," so preserves family harmony while being a little sad about what she is and isn't able to do for the kids.
At least one relative she consulted in my hearing also had the reaction that it was unkind of him to keep refusing the house (so, not "you have no right to complain"), but without any instinctive sense that his behavior was actually violating her financial rights, so I'm not as optimistic about the informal third-party community intervention as you are. And I do think that taking things all the way to separation over something like low-level bullying would be obviously disastrous for a mom with no money and small kids who adore their dad.
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