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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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Aella is rich; she could easily afford to support a kept man or a house husband if she wanted, as countless men have done for their wives and mistresses throughout history.

It's not like the reverse is unknown; "huge tracts of land" isn't just a euphemism for boobies.

It's pretty rare that male golddiggers were kept men, though. Usually dashing young military officers marrying much older widows and the like.

At least in England, poor men of the middle class and above marrying rich women was a super standard trope all through the early 20th century. If anything, it's a massively more common and culturally prominent phenomenon than the female gold-digging situation, largely because a rich man who fancies a poor girl can just seduce her and keep her as a mistress until he gets bored.

When a fashion for sentimentality came in in the mid-18th century, there was a mini moral panic among middle-class parents that their young sons might now run off and marry somebody hot instead of a nice rich girl, and there are letter-writer manuals giving advice to parents on how to dissuade sons from doing this.

If the "kept" man doesn't feel familiar as a character, it's because everything a woman owns, including money and land, becomes the full legal property of her husband upon marriage (although by default she'd get about 1/3 of it back upon his death). So the male gold-digger just gets to take his wife's stuff, not be "kept" by her.

I'm fairly sure there were some dissolute losers living large on their wives wealth, even if that wasn't the usual case.