the_others
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User ID: 2680
the_others
1mo ago
That would be very ironic, since I imagine the kind of woman who would most value full time employment and the lack of a criminal record in a man would be unlikely to be described as "rich".
the_others
1mo ago
I predict that, contrary to the usual pattern, a dating app which vetted the applicants on basic questions(stable and full time employment, criminal record, etc) would have more women than men, at least if it wasn’t just a matchmaking service.
If true, this sounds like a business opportunity, and not a particularly obscure one at that. Dating apps are basically all trying to figure out ways to get more women to use them, but I can't think of any apps that have tried this kind of verification. The closest I can think of are things like "The League", which requires users to submit an application (which consists of your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, apparently?) and have it approved by the company before they can use the app, which is much different in that presumably they're not evaluating "basic questions".
the_others
1mo ago
One reason to enforce property ownership of things is to incentivize people to create or improve things. This seems to have mostly worked.
The natural follow-up is, if we made children perpetual slaves of their parents, would that increase the fertility rate and/or the quality of the average person? Why or why not?
the_others
2mo ago
For those curious, the Japanese abbreviation of Assassin's Creed, アサクリ (asakuri) can be parsed as asa ("morning") + kuri ("chestnut"). "Morning Chestnut Problem" is presumably a cheeky way to refer the problematic aspects of Assassin's Creed: Shadows, viewed from a Japanese perspective.
the_others
4mo ago
I definitely agree that control over the accounts is important. I just don't see how that's related to being a breadwinner or a homemaker. Just because someone is the person who performs the labor that leads to money being deposited in an account doesn't mean they're the one who controls said account. In East Asia, for example, the traditional arrangement is that the husband works outside the home to earn a salary and the wife manages the finances, giving him an allowance to spend. So to answer
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?
"We are married and therefore equal stakeholders of this marriage and should have equal say over how our money is spent. If you don't agree with this, I will tell my friends and your reputation will be harmed. If you still do not accede, I will take you to court and you will lose because every institution that deals with this sort of thing recognizes financial abuse as a real and horrible thing, especially when done by a man to a woman, and you will incur their wrath."
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."
If it's just two people having an argument, no arguments matter. It doesn't matter who's correct unless one of them can use their correctness to convince the other, which is a strategy easily defeated by refusing to be convinced. The only time anything matters is when other people get involved. Therefore, the winning argument is to go to a third party and say "My husband is doing the dictionary definition of financial abuse to me. Please smite him." And unless that third party agrees with the husband that it's his money and not their money (which they won't, as was the point of my hypothetical "You have no right to complain" conversation), the wife easily emerges victorious.
I'm not sure I see how your examples support your view.
Example 1 is a couple where both partners earned money, presumably in approximately equal amounts, yet only one partner (the wife) managed the accounts. This pretty directly disproves that earning money yourself shields you from not having access to money to hire a lawyer with, since judging by your wording, the husband was earning some of the money during their marriage and yet it was the wife who controlled the accounts. That is, in a universe where it was your friend who was abusive and her husband the victim, he would have had no recourse despite earning money himself. This means that having a job doesn't actually protect one from this type of abuse!
Example 2 is a couple where everything is going great and the problem only exists after a series of hypotheticals. There are a few assertions about how the husband holds the power, but power doesn't exist unless it is exercised and you can't know who actually has the power until a conflict happens. In particular, these quotes make me suspicious:
(after all, it's his, he earned it)
(his money, his call)
I've only ever encountered this kind of reasoning in situations where someone wants to paint the man as a powerful abuser and the woman as a powerless victim for the purposes of legitimizing some sort of benefit given to women. If it was truly a principle that whoever earns the money gets more say in how it is spent, you'd see that principle used in other contexts, which I don't. For example, try imagining this exchange actually happening:
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.
Maybe that's normal in your circles, but it's unthinkable among anyone I've ever known.
My point is, it might very well be that your friend's husband handles the finances in their marriage, but that probably has more to do with the fact that handling finances is a household chore that get assigned and less to do with the fact that he's the breadwinner. In a breadwinner-homemaker relationship, there is very little the breadwinner can do to leverage their position against the homemaker short of threatening to go on "strike" by quitting their job. In contrast, the homemaker typically has a lot of leverage due to their greater influence on the children and greater control over the home environment.
the_others
4mo ago
I agree that good outcomes go to the well-resourced in both law and life, but the average wife is much better resourced than the average husband. The median American woman is, famously, much better socially connected than the median American man, and when we're considering a married couple, their wealth at the point of divorce is by definition equal. That, combined with the well-known bias for women and against men of divorce courts, should mean that the average woman is getting a better deal out of the divorce than the facts normally would suggest by the letter of the law. The common story that comes out of divorce court is that it's the men who are being bullied into making custody or financial concessions, not the women.
I don't know, I feel like there's a severe disconnect between what we perceive to be normal. Having non-joint accounts in a marriage, for example, seems insane to me unless both partners work and have similar earnings, and the other stipulations in your post seem like severe outliers that one could reliably detect ahead of time if a woman were truly afraid of being abandoned.
the_others
4mo ago
My point was slightly different—I fully understand why a husband would want to leave his wife, but what I don't get is how that leads to such a disastrous outcome for the wife that it warrants any significant amount of fear. It just seems to me that the relatively low odds of it happening combined with how mild the downside is means that it shouldn't be a major factor in a woman's decision of whether to marry.
the_others
4mo ago
I often hear this trope about husbands getting bored and leaving their wives, but I have a hard time conceiving how that actually works. Surely he would be on the hook for child support at the very least, and if the impetus for him leaving was cheating-related, surely that would result in a very favorable judgement in the divorce. I'm aware that in many cases the man is "judgement-proof" in the sense that he has few assets or income to extract, but in this case you've mentioned that your aunt is a middle-class person, so presumably her ex-husband is as well, and therefore not judgement proof.
This is obviously not an ideal outcome for the woman, especially socially, but it's much better than is commonly portrayed, where a woman has pinned her entire economic future on a man only to see him abandon her and condemn her to a life of eternal poverty.
My (admittedly clumsily made) point was more that rich women's male peers, including their matches on the apps, are almost universally employed and non-criminal, so such verification would be mostly useless. The distinction would be more useful for underclass women, for whom the verification system would reveal actual information about their potential male partners.
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