Interesting point.
I've argued elsewhere that martial arts gyms/dojos are pretty much the last bastion of healthy male masculinity that hasn't been invaded by woke culture. Because end of the day, there is simply no amount of social maneuvering that will make up for the strength differential between men and women, and you can't 'fake' martial arts skills without willing participants, which makes entryism nigh-impossible.
But yeah, despite pressure from both sides of the political spectrum, strip clubs and various other sex-adjacent spaces where men can pay to skip the formalities and just get to the T&A do a pretty good job filtering as well.
Implicitly, the females in these spaces are there to look pretty and be quiet (unless it is part of the tease) and this is 'enforced' when they rely on earning tips.
Lefties have given some cover to these places too, by being 'sex-positive,' 'pro-slut,' and 'anti-christian' to the extent they like that dens of vice piss off a certain segment of the right, and (probably) provide a wedge to bring in LGBT matters.
But yeah, the fact that guys can use these places to form reliable partnerships and create networks that aren't so legible while filtering out guys who have hangups that might turn into liabilities later makes them useful.
I would definitely say I prefer the Dojo as the healthy alternative, but if it works and persists across decades, hard to say its doing something 'wrong.'
faceh
4d ago
I wouldn't bet on that.
If they can play the "exploiting vulnerable minorities" and "objectification of women" angles they can attack from that side if they want.
Or they can start pushing the "healthy at any size" and "trans women are women!" angle to force said clubs to accept... less enticing employees.
Now, prostitution will continue to exist in spite of any and all attempts to thwart it, but I do think they can make it impossible for such 'third spaces' to exist easily.
The Dojo has the unavoidable barrier to entry of physical fitness, and I've yet to see anyone who can undermine any martial arts/combat system other than by producing a better system (i.e. how BJJ took over MMA for a long time).
Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races.
...balanced out, mind you, by higher rates of obesity, lower educational attainment (manosphere takes it as a given that women won't seriously date someone who doesn't have equal or greater credentials than she), more of them in prison (i.e. out of the dating pool) and of course less wealth in general.
And this is only to lead into my point about "Passport Bros" as a class. The literal main thing they have going for them in the foreign dating market is the ability to offer a quick path to American Citizenship.
That's it. Beyond anything else, they are a golden ticket to getting established in the States.
So for black males in particular, who would struggle otherwise with competing for a high quality mate, they are on an much more equal playing field when the only question is how quickly they can transplant the new lady to the states and marry her so she can move along towards citizenship.
Now, I don't think this explains the full phenomenon, but I've seen enough foreign wives using marriage to an American male as a fulcrum to gaining citizenship (and, if the husband is particularly old, getting access to his wealth when he dies) that I have no illusions about what ACTUALLY attracts foreign women to American males.
faceh
3d ago
You'll find girls doing the kickboxing workouts for cardio. You'll find far fewer that do the version where they're actually getting kicked and punched.
My gym also holds special females-only BJJ classes, which doesn't get ANY pushback from any parties whatsoever about lack of inclusivity because it is better for everyone involved.
As for Akido, I have particular feelings about it as anything other than fun techniques to train.
faceh
3d ago
Yes, and dating an obvious foreigner seems like a universal way to rebel against the overculture/go "fuck you, dad."
Not me.
A guy who became an Akido master and taught akido professionally ultimately shut down his Dojo when he realized that the actual techniques he was teaching would not be effective for his students if they ever had to use it against an aggressive opponent and that the philosophical elements of it were mostly used to distract from this problem.
This was a big deal in that he was a well-known personality in the Akido scene at the time, and he (intentionally) got his ass kicked by an MMA fighter to test his over a decade of experience in Akido. Learns quickly that going for wrist control against a striking opponent doesn't work well, most throws won't work if the opponent resists, and his defense is thwarted easily.
He's gone on to makes a TON of videos where he examines different styles and really tries to test them for their efficacy and see if he can make them work under stress, and honestly assess whether there's any useful knowledge there. Akido really does not measure up, in his estimation.
My general opinion is that Akido is pretty much ballroom dancing with malicious intent. Beautiful to watch, but depends on a willing, coordinated partner to perform as intended.
The lack of strikes, lack of ground game, and general lack of any techniques that damage an opponent suggest, to me, that nobody should use this as their preferred self-defense method.
The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value.
Well, SOME women's work.
It would absolutely fair to study and figure out if there are areas where female-dominated industries (and/or certain departments within an industry/company) are in fact creating an economic net negative. I am specifically thinking of the massive increase in bureaucracy and administrative costs which are endemic to certain sectors of the economy, such as education, healthcare, and, increasingly, finance. A whole lot of what females produce for the economy is actually designed to slow down some other sector of it.
We could slice these sectors out of the economy tomorrow and immediately see increased productivity and less waste. And we'd also see hundreds of thousands of women unemployed.
You're making a sweeping claim that isn't inherently backed up by data. I think that generally speaking creating tons of economic productivity is what frees up women from household tasks so they can in fact find full-time employment, it is NOT necessarily more women working which frees up tons of economic productivity.
This is especially obvious if you look at the gender makeup of those jobs that are either fundamental to society (energy production, mining, farming, construction, heavy industry) or that are producing the most marginal value (designing computer chips, computer programming, maintaining the tech stack that enables the internet to continue existing).
If females by and large aren't doing the work that enables society to exist at all (childbearing/rearing notably being the exception), and aren't doing the work that produces the most excess wealth, then how productive are they, really?
I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')
The real question is how much excess value a given female produces for the economy over and above the value she would produce if she were instead raising kids and maintaining the household. Childcare costs are 'internalized' if she takes over this role, but it still counts.
That is, if a given family is paying $3000/month on average for childcare tasks that could be handled by the mother (or, to be fair, the father), then she would have to be producing $3001/month in value on average to actually be producing a net economic value.
I'm not convinced that >50% of women currently in the workforce are in fact producing more value than they would produce if they were instead taking on the childcare role themselves.
faceh
1d ago
Yep.
The temptation is to assume its multicausal and there are several inputs all interacting at once to produce the outcome, and some countries have a different mix than others but on net it all puts downward pressure on fertility.
Even so, I FEEL as though there's probably some singular root cause that could be discovered. Discovering still doesn't mean we can address it effectively, though.
faceh
1d ago
There is a complex formula which determines how much of that is allocated to the HSA "pot" (Medisave) but the effect is that most people end up with $1 less in their retirement pot for each $1 they spend on healthcare. This is backstopped by a government-subsidized catastrophic insurance fund (Medishield) and an indigent fund which is made deliberately unpleasant to claim from (Medifund).
There is also a very deliberate class system - if a Singapore citizen stays in a class C ward (nightingale wards with no facilities and deliberately inferior food) the government picks up 65-80% of the bill and if they use a class B2 ward (similar but with 6-bed bays) the government picks up 50-65%. Class A patients get a private room and pay full freight.
These seem like facially reasonable approaches that nonetheless would be politically untenable in the U.S.
Assuming quality of care was comparable, it shouldn't be controversial for the government to maintain lower standards for amenities at the facilities they're paying more for, and people willing to pay for the nicer stay are in contrast agreeing to foot more of the bill.
Now, in practice this is basically how Medicaid works for long term care, and I think we're going to see some massive birfurcation in end-of-life treatment between people who are reliant on Medicaid and people who actually saved up enough to cover cushier facilities. But it seems likely that U.S. citizens would flip their lid if the government declared that was exactly how the system was supposed to work, right on the tin.
Almost all of them? Even in the heavily male dominated industries you mention women are somewhere between 10 and 30% of all workers. Do you think if 36% of all farmers disappeared no one would notice? What about 10% of all construction workers? Or hell, how about healthcare. Would no one notice if 88% of all nurses disappeared overnight? What about 38% of all physicians?
ALMOST making my point here.
Who would notice if nurses and physicians disappeared? People with doctor's appointments, or the elderly and infirm who depend on nursing care.
Most people wouldn't notice right away because most aren't going to see a nurse or doctor very often.
Compare that to say, if your local power plant shut down because all the staff left. Who would notice? Literally every person whose electricity just switched off.
In the case of physicians, the economic impact wouldn't be immediate because economic activity could still continue even as the healthcare system suffered from a huge backlog. We kinda 'proved' this during Covid. Work continues even if the hospitals are overwhelmed.
In the case of energy production, or internet infrastructure, tons of economic activity would INSTANTLY cease because those inputs are NECESSARY to said activity. So we'd "notice" immediately.
10% of construction workers would indeed be a hit, but with some reshuffling construction would continue.
Also, it is of course likely that just because they make up some significant portion of the workforce, it does NOT imply they're actually responsible for the same share of actual productivity.
If the female 36% of all farmers are only producing 10% of the food, the actual felt impact is less severe than the first number would imply.
And that's a good distillation of my point. Its likely that 80% of economic productivity is the result of the efforts of 20% of the people. And I'd bet my left testicle that the most productive members of the economy are mostly male.
So if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce, I would guess we'd lose closer to 10% of economic productivity. Which is to say... we'd survive.
And if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce but actually devoted themselves to raising kids such that all childcare costs were internalized, the actual hit would probably be negligible.
If she quits working outside the home to raise a child very little of that value comes back to her in a form that can be spent to sustain herself. If the state wants more women to choose raising children then more of the value that action produces needs to come to them in a form they can use to sustain themselves.
I think to make this proposal make sense, it would be simpler to say that the male whose sperm produced the child she's caring for is on the hook to pay her for her work caring for the child. Rather than the government taking the male's money via taxes and distributing it to women as some kind of subsidy just give her a direct claim to the guy's money as compensation.
I think it is, more specifically, technological development. It reduces the amount of labor needed to perform household tasks, freeing that labor up for other uses, and increases economic productivity at various tasks outside the home. Technological development simultaneously increases the benefits and reduces the opportunity cost of working outside the home.
The huge glaring irony, though, is that almost any female-centric industry can be to some extent 'replaced' by technology (I will grant that this is NOT the case for Nursing)... except bearing and raising kids.
Like, any job that a female can do, a male with the right tools, automation, and basic support can presumably also do. EXCEPT THE PRECISE JOB THAT FEMALES EVOLVED OVER MILLENNIA TO PERFORM, which men still struggle with despite better tech. In the case of bearing children, men are literally incapable of doing it.
So it seems like steps toward a solution require us to 'un-taboo' the idea that females bearing children is in fact a good social priority and women should be encouraged to become mothers.
Ding ding.
There seems to be a situation where a corporate job is, dare I say, a substitute good for a committed husband. A woman getting a corporate job is given healthcare, a retirement account, oftentimes food and transport are subsidized, she gets a social life and maybe some travel attached to work, and is REWARDED for giving up her prime childbearing years to produce extra value for the shareholders. Many of the reasons women have 'settled down' with men in the past are satisfied by a decent job that provides baseline benefits as part of the package.
But a corporate job can't provide her with a kid. So while all the above 'benefits' are legible, the opportunity cost of NOT having a kid is not concrete until, say, 15 years down the line where she's got a career but she's still single and childless and her bio clock is punishing her for not reproducing.
Looking at it that way, males are in direct competition with megacorps to attract mates who will want to raise kids. They have to offer a 'better deal', which is to say they have to make enough money to provide shelter, healthcare, retirement, food, transport, etc. And if the female isn't explicitly incorporating 'bear and raise children' into her calculation then the corporate job looks like a solid choice.
So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?
My model of modern western women™ is basically this:
They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:
- High-powered career woman (Girlboss).
- Freespirited, cultured, 'independent' woman. That is, one who travels everywhere, has a fun and carefree life, and flits from party to party.
- Devoted and effective mother.
They may re-order the priority and emphasis they put on it (or if its a triangular graph, they may land on some different space on it), but its the rare woman who doesn't have one of these three as their primary concern when it comes to status-seeking. You watch Tiktok, these are effectively the three 'genres' of women you'll find, if you ignore the e-prostitutes (which are technically a subset of 2). They want to project the image that they have an important, powerful job, or that they're constantly traveling, partying, and 'living life,' or that they're supermom, handling everything in life with grace and wisdom.
Modern Western Culture heavily emphasizes 1) and 2) as desirable options, heavily de-emphasizes 3). So women naturally start clumping more towards those two points on the graph. Once they've moved too far along towards that side of the graph (i.e. they've spent their twenties girlbossing, partying, travelling, etc.) it becomes VERY HARD to move out of that section of the graph to the one where they can become a devoted mother... and so they declare 1) and 2) are high status, and 3) is low status, and claim high status for themselves, accordingly.
If we limit ourselves to strictly social explanations, I think this one sounds pretty good. As you say, cultures that emphasize 3) will confer more status on motherhood, so it'll draw more women towards that point on the graph, and thus you'll have more attraction towards that section.
Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her endeavours in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed. But the subtext of the current culture is that women should be able to do all three WITHOUT male support, somehow.
faceh
1d ago
How many people die in hospitals normally?
Why would retail activity halt? Isn't a huge portion of such shopping done online?
How much "disposable" income is really being lost, exactly?
faceh
12hr ago
Worst case, if we accept that males are likely to make more money over their lifetime than females, there's a bias towards having male children.
It certainly places the children in a situation where they may decide to earn less salary since some portion of it is being taken away from them with no promise of return.
faceh
11hr ago
Could have some of the daughter's share of income from her offspring flow to her mother. Should be some mathematical way to make this work out.
Interesting to have wealth flowing in 'reverse' down the Matrilineal line.
And, frankly, I would be surprised if a large number of men would be that resentful of a formalized way to discharge their financial obligations to their parents.
Well, we can imagine some that are upset that their parents were abusive or neglectful growing up yet get to share in their wealth. Perhaps there would need to be a process for cutting off parents for cause.
I made some money on a prediction market by betting the film would receive decent reviews. Every previous entry had received good reviews, and the trailer for this one looked good.
Maybe I'll actually bother to watch them.
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