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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.
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.
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".
I suggest you go to the local courthouse and observe the number of women in felony rooms waiting for a man they are not married to to have his case called.
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