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Have to snort if THAT is how this is phrased.
The guy gets to "set the timetable" with their "implicit threat of walking away."
That's generally not how negotiations are framed. A woman has just as much power to walk away, and just as much power to define/set a timetable... assuming she's capable of keeping to her own commitments. "Look, I'll have sex with you by the 5th date if and only if we are exclusive and you've spent ~$400 on me by then" is a valid way to filter out fuckboys... if the guy can reasonably expect that she will keep such a promise.
And a guy is going to walk away only when he doesn't value the sex that highly and/or has multiple other women he can try to hook up with, which devalues sex with any given one of them. There really ISN'T an imbalance in bargaining power here! There's just women who aren't able to state their position and then enforce it, so they don't even attempt to bargain.
From the perspective of virtually every guy who ISN'T trying to solely extract sex, the woman is the one setting EVERY timetable, and even if he does have the power to walk away, he knows he can't/won't cajole her into sex unless and until SHE really wants it, he wouldn't even dream of trying to force the issue.
There was a time in my life when I figured that religious rules against premarital sex were at worst arbitrary and at best outdated given modern contraceptives.
Now, I have to accept that they're an ingenious way to create a Schelling Point where both men and women can be truly sure that they'll be getting the thing they're hoping for, and, much like closing on a house, every material part of the transaction will occur at approximately the same time so nobody can duck out of the bargain before coughing up their side of it.
That is, since it is clear many women are susceptible to being manipulated, and some large subset of men are hardcore manipulators, don't set up a complex set of unwritten rules that can be exploited and that women barely understand. Just tell everyone "no sex until marriage" and don't allow any bend whatsoever. That's a rule that everyone CAN follow and can be policed more directly. Men who want sex... get married. Women who want commitment... get married. Don't agonize over how many dates or how long you have to be with them before giving it up, and don't let guys make implicit promises they fully intend to break.
Maybe it is arbitrary, but no less arbitrary than any other boundary you could set, and a hell of a lot easier/more intuitive to enforce.
In a slightly saner world, Willy would probably be dead. One of these girls' fathers or brothers would have confronted him by now and beaten some sense into him or just put him out of our misery.
But noooooooooo instead the sociopaths are allowed free reign so long as they don't run completely afoul of the law because we've left the sexual marketplace to be regulated solely by social shame and rumor-mongering and removed any implicit threat of violence. And Sociopaths aren't effected by social shame.
/r/deadbedrooms would like a word. It's interesting you brought up closing on a home, and said marriage makes it so that neither party can get what they want without coughing up what they were offering it. It just doesn't hold up under scrutiny though. Virtually the only way to make the arrangement fair like you claim it is would be, is to make it so that you can have as much sex with your wife as you want, consent be damned, legally. But I doubt anyone has the heart to go through with that. So you are left with one side that can defect at will, and the other losing most of their assets and income.
That was part of the religious rules, yes. Before the modern concept of martial "rape", a man was entitled to take his marital rights from his wife. Consent didn't enter into it; she gave consent when she agreed to marry him, and such was irrevocable.
This is an absolutely essential part of the marriage bargain. Sex is the payment that a man receives for supporting and protecting his wife. Saying that a wife has the right to, at any time, stop providing that payment because she does not feel like it, is ridiculous. Doubly so because the typical man disgusts the typical woman, which means any society where the majority of men get married is a society where the wives are laying back and thinking of England, and will stop performing this unpleasant chore at the first opportunity.
To help conceptualize the absurdity, imagine a pro-worker's rights party in government passing a law that an employee is at any time entitled to stop doing useful tasks for a company, but that the company is legally obligated to continue paying that employee his full salary. Oh, and at any time the employee can decide to quit and receive half of the company's assets. What happens to the employment market in such an scenario? Solve for the equilibrium.
Societies which abide by the zeroth commandment cannot survive. Either we get our heads out of our asses about this, or, more likely, we get replaced by a culture that still understands how marriage works, like Muslims (or, more likely still, AI makes all of this irrelevant, but I have never liked "run for the singularity" as an exit strategy).
Every time you DreadJimmers bring this up, I wonder what your model of a marital relationship is like. It's obviously not one where you and your wife actually love one another. So if your wife is not in the mood, or she's injured or sick, or you've just had a raging fight, or you're drunk and stinking and gross her out, you believe in the Good Old Days she'd just have to spread 'em anyway, no recourse, and if she resists, you could beat her until she stops resisting, and that is the past you want to return to?
It does seem to me like there is a whole lot of room between "not when she is injured, or right after a fight, or when you need a bath" and /r/deadbeadrooms. Your examples all seem to assume a pretty high, or at least medium, baseline of sex and then declare that there should be a non-zero number of limits on when a man can assume his marital rights, but what is being discussed is a level which is low to non-existent so your comment seems non-responsive tbh. Real "all debates are bravery debates" energy IMO, where you are saying there must be SOME limits on how often the husband can expect a yes and erwgv3g34 saying there must be SOME limits on how often she can refuse.
There may be room between those positions but there's no stable position between them. The center cannot hold, and has not, and we have reached the stable equilibrium of "she may withhold sex for any reason at any time and his only permissible recourse is a divorce in which he loses most of his assets and future income".
Do you actually know anything about the circumstances under which a man can "lose most of his assets and future income" in a divorce? It is not common. In fact alimony is pretty rare nowadays (and almost never close to "most" of his assets and future income), child support is to support the children, and the number of men paying "unreasonable" child support (however you define that) is exceeded by the number of men not actually paying their child support. The worse case scenario you will usually see is an equal distribution state where a spouse can claim 50% of marital assets, even those he or she didn't bring into the marriage. (This can and sometimes is the man who benefits, though usually it's the woman.) And not all states do a 50/50 split like that.
You guys seriously need to update your notions of how divorce works from the 1960s, or the 19th century.
Yes, he gets divorced.
Spousal support is rare but not non-existent (my father paid it, and he was divorced far later than the 1960s), but child support is very high and doesn't have to be spent on the children. If his income goes up he has to pay more; if it goes down he still has to pay the same.
Which is irrelevant, as they were still demanded to have been paying it. And if they get caught, they have their wages garnished down to subsistence or less, they lose their driver's licenses, professional licenses, go to jail for contempt for indefinite periods, etc.
This is not what actually happens to any man (or the vast majority of men- I question whether it's even a statistically significant number of men) who get divorced.
You mean "pretty rare"? I.e., exactly what I said in the post you are replying to but framing it as a rebuttal?
"Pretty high" is subjective and depends entirely on how much obligation you think a parent has to provide for their offspring. No, there isn't an itemized accounting for every dollar of child support because household expenses are too fungible, but child support is calculated based on the expected expenses of a child and the income of the parents.
Unsurprisingly, the non custodial parent often thinks any amount is too high. Child support can be adjusted up or down. A judge has to approve increasing it, it doesn't happen automatically if income goes up. And it can be decreased too based on life circumstances , though judges tend to take a dim view of the tactic of taking a lower paying job to decrease child support.
It's relevant when you are claiming child support as an injustice, which it is not. In any case, even the most onerous child support does not reach the level of "taking most of his assets and future earnings."
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