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Downthread, in the discussion on cheating in college and the decay of institution, @hydroacetylene brought up a frequent topic: is the college-to-work pipeline good for society and for women? Rather than the high-level moral or strategic view, I wanted to look more at the countervailing forces here. Even assuming that early family formation is good, desirable, and pleasant for women compared to schooling, why would they choose college? Not to bury the lede: I think it’s risk mitigation.
A woman’s life is, not to an infinite extent but nevertheless to a great extent based around vulnerability. She is especially vulnerable to men, who are stronger than her and yet want something from her. A man who wants something from her more than he cares about her is not a curiosity but an active threat. Even if no such threat manifests, her very nature makes her vulnerable. A pregnant woman, or a new mother, is incredibly dependent on those around her. If any part of that support should go away, she could be in serious trouble. Women’s life strategies, unsurprisingly, center around mitigating these risks.
These strategies fall into two major camps: finding a center for her protection and support, and making damn certain that she has excellent control over that center. (For men this is simple: he is his own center of protection and support, always. Everything else is just a fallback for extenuating circumstances, or part of his larger ambitions.)
For her center, a woman can choose, in essence, a man, an institution, or herself. For herself, she will obviously be unable to reproduce. This is a fallback, the spinster’s last resort. No more needs be said. An institution is impersonal and uncharitable, but (say) a widow will find it tolerable, and she has some modicum of control. If she follows the rules, support will not be retracted. So what is preventing her choosing a man? Her lack of control over him.
Men are famously fickle. A man will sing a woman’s praises to the moon, and maybe even believe himself, and vanish as soon as he gets some. He will spend the family’s money on dice or drinks. He will say that whatever he earns is his by right, and ignore the duty he has towards the flower he plucked in the prime of her life in an explicit contract to care for her forever (till death do we part). Even if he is one of the rare, dutiful ones, his simple preferences become domineering imperatives, and you have to think on every one: is this worth fighting over, if he might just leave? To say all men are cads is to go too far. But there are cads out there, and their attentions are disastrous.
(I know women who have had their men: get fired and refuse to work, get addicted to painkillers and refuse to work, allow their mother to browbeat their wife, and support an entire separate family in another country, off the top of my head. I also know women who have had loving husbands with no problems who are in old age. But would you want to simply gamble on the outcome here?)
So what women need is leverage. Historically this was twofold: the highly salient and important labor they performed, and their tight bonds with their (and their man’s) immediate community. For reference, before modern textile production, a woman would quite literally make the clothes on her husband’s back and the food he ate. Were he to get them elsewhere, they would be much more expensive and less tailored to him. This makes any argument inherently easier for the wife to win. He depends on her, too. Meanwhile, if he were to stray, her connections to the local wives, perhaps including her own parents and his, or moral leaders like a priest, would allow her to bring wide-ranging pressures down upon him. Or, say, if he were to romance her but fall short of his duty to propose to her, a brief word between their fathers would end in a joyous wedding officiated by shotgun. I’m not trying to imply the distant past was a glorious feminist utopia, but these were to the best of my knowledge the mechanisms of women’s power back then.
Woman’s work was eviscerated by the Industrial Revolution, and her community was shattered by the car. Bluntly, there is nothing coarse and material that a housewife can offer a man in this day and age which he cannot get for an acceptable amount of his own money. Food and cleaning are trivial, and the only real limitation on sex is whether porn is sufficient (it generally is). The only things she can offer are on a more sophisticated or higher plane, like the abstract of a continued legacy through childcare or loving intimacy and affection. These are important, but have a lower valence than the material, meaning that the man’s opinion is dramatically privileged. And in a postwar suburb of friendly acquaintances, in and out of the house on errands and excursions, there’s nobody to drop in on and talk to and organize with - and even if there were, why would the man not simply get in his own car and leave to find those who “understand“ him better? As the last nail in the coffin, the pill and the Sexual Revolution deny women even their power over sex. If it’s pleasurable and has no risk, what right does she have to demand that her man do something in exchange - except pay as her john? With pregnancy on the table, it’s obvious: he risks what she does, together with her. But without, it’s harder to argue the obvious truth that she is risking time, because he does not have the same pressure to make the most of the flower of youth.
This is the foundation of our current moment, and given the premises women choose independence. They do not perceive a reasonable alternative by which they can have a marriage where they are respected and equal. The life plan changes accordingly, and becomes: go to college (to protect you in your most vulnerable and desirable period and increase your status and the treatment you can demand), take a job with a good healthcare plan (including maternity leave), find a man who sticks with you for several years (while you are on the pill, and proving he is not a cad), and finally, around 30, get married to a man you TRUST to support you and your children. Of course, this costs a huge amount of time and money, but it’s more palatable than taking a dive for the first schmuck on the street with no good way out. (And even if he is a good man, get stuck in a suburban home near HIS job with an infant or two and an absolute dearth of friends to see during working hours and little sense of what you’re really bringing to the table. At that point, why not just get a job working alongside other ladies and stick the kids in daycare?)
So that’s my analysis. College is just a means here; if it were not available, women would go for anything else that could protect them, probably an employer. The problem for women is that they feel like the whole deal is raw, that they’re going to struggle to get a man who works for them and supports them and who they can influence. Unless they feel their own power in their own relationships, they will scrabble for every edge they can get. If you want to fix this on a personal level, as a man, be trustworthy and the whole reproduction thing will come pretty easily. As a woman - can’t comment with quite so much authority, but valuing men for their private (i.e. directed at you) virtue over their public (i.e. abstract and status-seeking) virtue might help. On the societal level, focus less on pushing women into childrearing and more on pulling. What are the advantages? How do they mitigate risk? And what’s in it for them, on a practical and day to day sense?
Long-term I feel this will shake out. Men and women who figure out how to bond and partner quickly and effectively will be aspirational and fruitful, and they will be the new model. But for those of us alive now, I think it helps to be intentional about our own lives.
Interested in the opinions of married mothers on this (I think we have a few). I’m a happily married father, so I have some insight, but it’s all third person to me.
I would definitely agree that risk aversion is behind the pitch of college and jobs to young women. Part of that is rational- the bottom whatever percent of both sexes is less appealing than it was in the fifties(and this goes for men too), and how are you supposed to make sure you find a commitment-oriented ‘good’ guy anyways? 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. Part of this is also irrational; there’s a cottage industry dedicated to convincing young women that the risk of being mistreated by men is much higher than it is, so don’t get too wound up about the commitment you desire.
I maintain that the risk of Mr and now-Mrs good enough marrying, provided that they’re basically compatible adults seriously intending to make it work, is very low, but that many people ignore one or the other or the third condition. There are simply fewer Mr and Miss good enoughs than there used to be, it seems like modern secular(here used in the sense of ‘in mainstream society rather than a subculture’ rather than to mean ‘non-religious’) dating worries more about vapid nonsense than about big picture compatibility, lots of people don’t have the serious intent of making it work no matter what, etc.
I don’t have a good solution on a society wide level.
I’m interested in your view on how the quality of men and women has gone down, and as a treat, why. If I were to give a description, I’d say that the lowered quality was literally that they weren’t interested in making things work, rather than separate elements. That sort of intentional, serious attitude towards life is basically what you want out of a partner as table stakes, right? That they’ll have the hard fights with you and want to get through them instead of taking them out on you, that they’ll commit materially sooner rather than later, that they’ll stick with you if things aren’t breezy. Obviously material concerns matter too, but people (in my circle, maybe unrepresentative) make plenty if they’re even slightly dedicated. What’s your take?
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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".
Oh there are some with that kind of verification, but they're usually for rich people.
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Can you rephrase the first bit of this? I'm not following.
‘The tail risks of marriage(abuse, divorce, infidelity) between reasonable and eligible people who are compatible and committed to making it work regardless of the cost are lower than commonly believed’.
Ahh ok I see. Yeah thanks for this! I like to think I'm a good fit for marriage, but the tail risks definitely keep me awake at night. It sucks.
If you have a woman who you’re dating who is a good candidate, learning to trust her goes a long way, and trusting yourself the rest. “Learning to trust” is not an abstract journey of the soul. Select things to trust her, and yourself, on, and see how they go when things get hairy. Stressful situations are effective here!
Buyer beware: I’m not recommending a good time, here.
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You know, maybe that would be good advice if the circumstances were different, but you have to remind yourself that picking up 30 year old women who have had multiple partners is signing up for a high divorce rate and possibly raising the children of others. All in a society where all the shit you've accumulated over years of not actually getting any from these women can just be handed over to them through divorce.
Men would happily sign that deal blinded by lust, but it's 30 year old women we're talking about. If you're a trustworthy man, you either are lucky enough to get married young or you're fucked. That's just how it is now. Blowing up marriage has consequences.
Changing the incentives means radical social reform that actually forces people to pair bond before they have economic independence. Anything less is simply going to be as unsustainable as what we have now.
When you say
I think you are misreading what OP said:
The "ideal" state described is not waiting till 30 and then figuring out who to pick. It is to pick around University and stick with your choice. The children (and marriage) wait until the woman feels safe both by herself (that is she has education and a job to support herself and potential children, if something were to happen to her bf/husband) and with her bf/husband. That is he proves that he is reliable etc.
This is certainly not ideal when it comes to having (especially many) kids. The biological window is limited (not only for women). But it is a perfectly rational choice of action fo women if you want to mitigate the risk of having a terrible husband who will not treat you well.
But that's my point. This desire for safety is antisocial.
And before we start arguing that this is an unreasonable or special demand, let me remind you that men can still, to this day, be forced to fight and die for society.
If you want your society to continue to exist, you're going to have to sacrifice some comfort and take some risks to make sure that there is a next generation of your people. Or we can just live in anarchy and have no loyalties to each other until we get conquered by more sensible people. I so far see no reason to believe there is an alternative.
Speaking as someone who is against the draft, I am also against forcing women into performing an equivalent sacrifice.
We're in the age of automation and exponential productivity growth. Surely the solution is simply to guarantee security and flourishing for everyone. I cannot imagine any version of the world where solving that engineering problem is actually harder than convincing millions of women to sacrifice their security.
For goodness sake, we're already most of the way there!
As for being conquered, I'm willing to bet everything on NATO. A planet-spanning military alliance that spends more on weapons than the rest of the world combined will not be overcome so easily. China might get Taiwan back, but they're not going to land troops in San Francisco any time soon. In the long run, AI will change the nature of the game in a way that makes population dynamics obsolete long before any power rises that can credibly challenge NATO.
First, this seems entirely unprincipled given that NATO (and its proxies) relies on conscription ultimately.
Second, I see here no reason to believe that AI or any sort of productivity improvement changes the base reality that it is people who exist who shape society. Japan's automation strategy is a pragmatic mitigation but doesn't change the destination of their society.
What the hell kind of twisted definition of "flourishing" are we using here that people being so secure and domesticated they won't have children counts? It's a zoo you're building.
Some of NATO's proxies rely on conscription, but I think that NATO itself doesn't, at least as long as it only cares about defense and not taking the offense. I think that nuclear weapons by themselves are already sufficient to guarantee NATO's security, and maintaining an effective nuclear deterrent does not require the labor of so many people that a developed country would ever realistically need to use conscription to get the necessary manpower, as opposed to using less forceful means of recruitment such as money, patriotism, and the mystique of nuclear weapons.
I don't understand why people are so keen to forget that Korea and Vietnam were both very much in the atomic age. I can understand people in the 50s thinking nukes would be the end of war, but we're surely free of such illusions? At best they're the end of world wars. Maybe.
Being generous you could place the end of mandatory military service and the West's choice to rely on professionals in the 60s, which is less than a century ago and did not result in an end of conscription laws being on the books. If it reverted it wouldn't be the first time something like that happens.
I wouldn't exactly take it for gospel that you'll never be handed a rifle, not when you can lawfully be handed one right now on a whim of "national security".
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One thing to note is that in WW2 people were ultimately forbidden to volunteer (in the British Army, anyway). Relying on patriotism creates big bulges of recruits that are hard to process at the start of the war, after important event etc.
Conscription works much better for any serious war because it allows you to stagger your intake, make sure the impact of losses is spread through the country, and get a wider variety of applicants.
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I should note that Japan too has recently discovered the joys of ActuallyIndians. If you go to any convenience store or quite a lot of chain restaurants, all the staff are Indian now and have been for several years. Maybe since Covid?
It’s less so outside Tokyo but I imagine that’s a matter of time.
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I can agree on the broad strokes here, but the marriage + baby boom that happened in the 50s is a pretty evident counterexample. The Industrial Revolution was mostly played-out by that point and there were plenty of creature comforts and trappings of modernity, yet the marriage rate ticked up by quite a bit. Any story on birthrates or gender relations that is just a broad trend of the modern world sucking, and which doesn't take into account the booms that happened in the 50s is woefully incomplete IMO.
My take is a bit different from yours. It's that second-wave feminism in the late 60s and 70s let women earn their own keep, which meant marriage became far less of a necessity for basic survival. This made women choose men more for "love" than provisioning, which made us regress to our biological roots. Women all naturally want a high-value man and so they broadly chased after the same small percentage of guys (in other words, women's standards went up). These lucky few men got their pick of the lot and could treat women like barely-sentient fleshlights. The dating market effectively got worse for everyone except the lucky few guys, and now women broadly hate men since their opinions are formed on the small % that have the least incentive to commit. This led to a collapse in marriage rates, which ended up collapsing birth rates as well.
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
Baby boom was in a sense a last gasp. Huge wealth changes the equation. But it was the specific experiences of the baby boom that sparked feminism; when second-wave feminists deride the life of the housewife, they are and can only be specifically talking about the baby boom housewife. Daughters saw what life was like for their mothers, and they wanted out. You can’t declare feminism as a premise; feminism was, like any social movement, a reaction to prevailing conditions. Those conditions were, first, the Victorian era and second, the baby boom.
The advice is distilled from my own life and my successful friends and coworkers, who are by and large married and with or currently having children. It’s not advice on how to get laid, or how to attract women initially (I have opinions but consider it besides the point), but how to convert a relationship into a companionable and loving marriage with children, which is what I consider valuable. Take it or leave it, I guess.
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This comment seems to echo the fantasy among some dateless conservatives that if only they were born in some bygone era where women didn't have nearly as many options then they'd surely get a girlfriend almost by default. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then. And I suspect that these guys never once consider that they're being just as selective as the women they're criticizing. I grew up in the Mon Valley, an area that's not exactly hot at the moment. If anyone here is seriously interested in getting married to a woman who is young enough to have a lot of children and doesn't mind staying home and not working, DM me and I will be glad to take them to the kind of bar where their chances of meeting an overweight, chain-smoking phlebotomy school dropout who's willing to date them are nearly 100%. Hell, you don't even need a good job; a steady, decent job is more than enough, considering most of the guys these women date are the kind of guys who quit because they got into an argument with their boss. Where I'm from these girls are a dime a dozen.
If this is true you have a golden business opportunity starting a matchmaking business for overworked SF nerds with more money than sense. But my experience talking to people who do this kind of thing is that even those kinds of women have become unreasonably picky.
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This seems directly contradicted by the various attempts at measuring the frequency of baseline human relationships. My understanding is number of friendships, number of relationships, number of sexual partners, number of marriages, number of young people who've never had sex, age of first sexual relationship and so on are all trending in the same direction, and the trend is not a subtle one. If significantly more people are actually spending their lives alone than previously, it doesn't seem possible to me that this part of your argument stands.
The odds are good but the goods are odd part, though, seems perfectly accurate.
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This is only a feature of the mid to late dating app era, this was not the norm until dating apps because these unusually attractive men just could not be in enough places to create the pickiness.
There was a lot of hatred of men already appearing before dating apps really took off.
It isn't a feature of the current era, either, but an excuse guys who can't get dates use to justify why it isn't their fault. Dating apps are easy mode compared to how it used to be. Yeah, you may have a better chance of getting that cute girl to talk to you if you ask her in the real world rather than like her profile on a dating app, but in the real world chances are you aren't going to cross paths. In the real world there isn't a seemingly bottomless well of single women advertising their availability. In the real world you might get a prospect once every couple months maybe she'll go out with you if you ask. I doubt there are many people who had a ton of game pre-app and are now getting nothing but crickets.
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I would say it's true. It's just that "trustworthy" is a bigger concept to unpack than it looks like. Being trustworthy is not like dateless guys thinking they're a catch because they're a "feminist ally" or because they think that it's all so easy not to be an asshole and that if they had a girlfriend/wife they wouldn't be abusive to her and wouldn't cheat on her, etc...
Those people are not trustworthy, they're untested. It's easy to think you'd never ever cheat, if you've never had the opportunity to, if you've never been on the receiving end of an attractive woman signaling she'd be up for no-strings-attached sex.
Being trustworthy means being reliable and having your shit together, and making women at ease in your presence.
Women date and, to a lesser extent, marry and reproduce with lots of untrustworthy men. That doesn't mean that the men they don't date are trustworthy, but it does suggest that trustworthiness isn't the primary blocker. And if you're a man who can't get a date and wants one, it's better to focus on changing other aspects of yourself than some fuzzy concept of trustworthiness. Those other aspects being those that fall into the broad category of attractiveness, almost tautologically.
What kind of woman does that? Would you consider her in your league? In the college league?
Besides, this was advice for reproducing, not dating. Dating advice is a different kettle of fish.
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This seems like it's veering towards a No True Scottsman sort of thing. As in "if women don't want to be around you, it's clear they're not at ease in your presence, which is what trustworthiness means, therefore you weren't trustworthy to begin with". We can generally infer "trustworthiness" by how people act in other areas of their life, if they follow the rules and don't cheat, etc. Of course men could behave differently in contexts that involve women, but we'd generally expect a pretty strong correlation. Yet there are plenty of men who are trustworthy in other areas often don't find much success in love.
Here's my own personal take of what it takes to be successful with women:
Being "reliable" isn't a bad thing, but I wouldn't say it's an overriding concern most of the time. Perhaps a lack of reliability could be seen as sufficiently negative that a girl who would date a guy wouldn't want to marry him, but I've never seen it be a proactive concern beyond that.
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An appreciable number of women (at minimum) go for guys who observably aren’t reliable and don’t have their shit together.
Yes, but that does not mean the opposite people are not also successful.
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I don't think your observations are at all incompatible with the fairly standard antimodernist narrative. i.e.: that Modernity started hacking away at everything old and sacred without any sense of what was load bearing, and eventually had to hit things that truly were.
The antimodernist narrative is too broad. It typically takes the position that the past was uniformly better than the present, and that it linearly decayed towards the present day. Then antimodernists use this as a cudgel to attack almost anything they don't like about the modern world (HR, woke, college education, etc.)
I'm more of a fan of Arctotherium's take about a really specific aspect of modernity being the root cause, rather than modernity broadly being at fault.
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Well, if you're 'just trustworthy' (and able to provide) I'm confident that you'll be able to have and raise children. Maybe not your own, but...
tee hee =)
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