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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44988 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Probably worth pointing out that you also need to reconstitute the 'middle class' as a major social demographic, which is where women can safely marry a guy and reasonably expect to live in comfort and raise kids to an acceptable standard and not experience much 'buyer's remorse' when she looks around at other women's lives. This means she can settle for a guy without feeling like she just settled.

Because in a situation where 10% of the guys are making huge amounts of money, 80% are barely scraping by, I suspect that women won't deign to marry a guy in that bottom 80% so long as she will be constantly wondering if she has a shot at landing one of those 10% guys.

While reconstituting a robust middle class would be nice for a whole host of reasons and is worth pursuing, I don't think it would be particularly important for reinstituting traditional marriage. Traditional marriage had been around for most of Western society's lifespan even when there wasn't really a middle class, e.g. the medieval age.

I would suggest that the conditions of the medieval age made marriage a more necessary institution for survival purposes, which has been almost lost now.

I'd further suggest that maintaining a middle-class standard of living is one of the few likely benefits of marriage in the modern age, so that might make it a necessary condition for the modern age to bring marriage rates up.;

Indeed. Back in the times of the patriarchy, the normalization of early monogamous marriage basically served as life insurance for women - most of them could safely assume they'll get selected by someone while still young. Now this is gone, and I suspect it plays a large role in demographic collapse.

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