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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 think this is leaving out another viable life path that satisfies all the criteria you're ascribing to women:
Have a kid with a man who has proven wealth/means, then demonstrate his paternity or marry him. Then have a court of law require him to pay for the child's upbringing until age 18. If married then you can get some alimony too out of the divorce. And a bonus there is you can then find another man who might be willing to pitch in some support too and 'double dip'. For some reason the term 'divorce' doesn't appear anywhere in your original post.
And from the man's perspective, either of those is probably a worst case scenario.
Either the man is a cad who doesn't WANT to support kids and is now tied to them for years on end.
Or it was a man who really wanted to have a family for the long term, would have supported them anyway, and yet gets them ripped away on the say of the woman he trusted, with no real recourse.
Woman gets her support and control, man gets...
And we're seeing the emergence of a strange additional option as well:
Pop out a billionaire's kid on the downlow and he pays a very generous amount to keep you and the child in comfort even if he's not particularly involved, as long as he thinks it is actually his kid. I won't pretend this path is all that common, though.
This really goes AGAINST your point here, though:
The 'reproduction thing' seems to come easiest to men who are the least trustworthy, most ruthless, most wealthy, and generally most 'aggressive' about what they want. Yes, some of them can ACT like they're trustworthy, but only as a means to get what they want. And this works about as well as being 'actually' trustworthy.
Being 'trustworthy' just makes you an easier mark. You'll accept a woman you believe is committed to you, do EVERYTHING you can to prove your commitment, and she can still leave on a comparative whim and hang support obligations around your neck on the way out.
The game theory here is not favorable to being the guy who truly commits, when the risk is the woman has no reciprocal investment and can defect at will, and 'retaliating' against her is legally forbidden.
In short, I think you're arguing as though women shoulder most of the risks in the current romantic equation.
When there's a serious argument that it works the opposite way. Society is built around protecting women from any and all threats.
This includes the threat of homelessness and poverty. Men, generally, foot the bill for all this protection, and yet are also forced to pay out to the particular woman who defects from them on top of that.
And so the man is risking HUGE sums of his personal wealth (bought by his own time, efforts, sweat, etc.) to TRY to keep the woman around.
And men have to offer some extreme value ON TOP of that protection (because the protection is provided as a baseline by society) to acquire a woman's commitment, and even then he has no recourse if she decides she doesn't want to stay anymore. And if he married her, she gets to siphon off resources from him to support herself and her kids ANYWAY.
Leaving out this side of the equation makes your overall argument here more dubious, in my opinion.
(and I will surely admit that women DO risk being severely injured or killed by their partner, but this is strongly mediated by factors that she can also control).
You’re right about divorce as a path for extremely cynical women. If I were writing about the man’s perspective, this comes front and center. He’s devoting so much of his life to her! What if she just takes it from him, with the blessing of the courts? It’s genuinely unsettling. But, in that other hypothetical post, I wouldn’t be talking about cads. I don’t think (or hope) my audience is cads, or people interested in cads, and the same goes for the female equivalent.
Divorce is honestly another point of risk for an honest woman, just like it is for an honest man. Risk hitting your mid-thirties with no loyal man, and either no children or worse - children? It’s kind of awful to think about. But the post was already meandering a little for my tastes.
Yes, of course I agree a man needs standards. I have standards, and I insisted my wife meet them (kindly and firmly in the dating stage - and no, not about petty things like how I wanted my breakfast cooked).
But that doesn’t undercut the fact that what underwrites those standards is a man’s reliability and character. I’ve been performing a little personal ethnography on this forum, and in my own life, and the men who are happily married tend to be extraordinarily solid and secure in their opinions, thoughtful and caring about women’s perspectives (NOT a dogwhistle for mainstream feminism), and with a great focus on their own ability to be trusted. And this is something that good women, women who clearly enjoy the high opinions of their husbands and of me (should I meet them), deeply desire.
Anyway. I don’t think women have greater risks in dating, or that men do, for that matter. I tend to agree that the risks are mostly around discerning good from bad, and that’s hairy both ways. But learn good from bad one must do, or at least learn the methods of getting wiser friends to help, if one wishes to make anything of oneself. But I’m sympathetic to your worries, and hope you find a woman who allows you to lay them aside.
I'M not the one you have to worry about.
The Zoomers are not okay.
And the women are not happy.
Your platitudes appear to be missing something LARGE, and it really isn't explained by men being inadequately reliable.
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