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So the Bezos-Sanchez wedding took place, and by all accounts it was exactly as overblown, tacky, and vulgar as anyone's little heart could desire. I haven't watched any of it myself, so why am I mentioning it in the Culture War thread?
Well, because Tina Brown commented on it, and it's at least tangential because we've often discussed on here "what do women want/dating apps/men get the rough end of the stick in divorce/other such delightful War of the Sexes fodder".
I get the impression that Tina wasn't on the guest list so there may be an element of sour grapes here, but in general I think I agree. Jeff Bezos, fourth richest man in the world (depending on the day and the ranking) could have pretty much any woman in the world he wanted. So, who did he blow up his marriage for and before we get into the complaining about his wife taking him to the cleaners, it was he who caused the divorce (actually, divorces because his inamorata was also married at the time)?
The woman next door, a triumph of grinding determination to keep her figure through diet, exercise, and plastic surgery. She managed to find a classy wedding dress so kudos for that, as well as showing off the results of all that effort.
Back to Tina's commentary:
Ouch. But also, yes. What am I trying to say here? Mostly that the next time there's yet another post about reversing the fertility decline by putting obstacles in the way of women going to higher education, steering them to marrying early, and good old traditional 'the man is the head of the house and women should work to please their husband and that includes sex whenever and however he wants it', remember this. Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs (though once again, I have to salute her commitment to starving and exercising in order to keep a taut muscle tone). It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.
What exactly does Bezos gain from being married again?
Monogamy is a huge time saver. A spouse can help you with all sorts of random life crap.
Bezos got married young and doesn't want to learn how to do things like plan dinner parties with his friends while in his 50s.
Sure he could hire personal assistants and prostitutes, but he's got a company to run and it's just easier to have a wife.
I've never had a single person tell me it's easier to have a wife. In fact it's the one thing I hear most guys complain about at work.
As a newly married man, my experience has definitely been that having a wife makes life easier. Pooling our social lives means that she picks up maybe 70% of the organising seeing friends, she organises most of the house stuff, she helps me draft tactful messages with her womanly social skills. Plus even if I'm working from home I'm guaranteed to spend at least some time socialising every day. 12/10 would wife again.
I understand the point but in relation to Jeff Bezos you are not explaining how having a wife is easier than having paid assistants do all of the things that need to be done.
I dunno dude, the idea of thinking of a wife as like some kind of utility calculation around chore maxxing or whatever seems like the kind of thing that deranges radical feminists. Our society is structured around you picking one person who is closer to you than anyone else, that swears to you a mutual pact of loyalty and confidence. They aren't like your butler who can quit at any moment and you're expected to congratulate them on getting a better offer. We've added some escape clause but the basic idea is still to death do us part. You pick them and then get to turn off the part of your brain worried about mate selection and the two of your focus on the more important things, the two of you against the world. You can't pay and assistant to have undying loyalty through sickness and in health. Maybe Bezos isn't getting that from his wife, I wouldn't know, but I'm providing that to one person and she's providing it to me.
That's not what is being done by me to any greater extent than it was being done by the person I replied to.
I'm not interested in your selective disagreement with me. Marriage in this thread was leveraged in two contexts, a material function one, i.e. you wife can do things like organizing, doing housework etc, and an emotional function, i.e. you love them, they are your soulmate etc.
My point was that Bezos, on account of being a billionaire, does not need a wife for material function. So leveraging the utilitarian functions of marriage in support of an argument that marriage is beneficial to Bezos is asinine. I'd even argue that such a thing would be stupid. He probably has more than one giant house. Do we expect the wife to clean all of that? Of course not. Same for organizing big social gatherings. Hell, why even bother to cook when you can have a learned chef cook for you? It just doesn't make any sense.
For the emotional function, you don't need marriage to love a person or spend your life with them.
As for your definition of marriage, I'd argue that the only coherent view of marriage is when two persons want to start a family together. Marriage is a contract, Both a legal and not, between two people who a binding themselves for the ultimate task procreating. It can be because two people feel a very special connection and want to be with one another forever and start a family. It can also be because two people who don't really know one another all that much were pushed together because of necessity, and everything in between. Marriage is important and sacred all the same as a starting point for procreation.
To contrast this with your view, you can pay an assistant to functionally have undying loyalty through sickness and health, and you can marry a person who doesn't have that. I'm sure you have an enviable marriage, but I'm not sure if you leveraging that is conducive to a coherent argument.
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You would also need a butler to supervise the assistants - managing staff is a job in itself.
Having a wife is a job in itself - my coworker every day.
I guarantee you your coworker goes home to his wife and bitches about you/his job all night long.
You have a coworker who is just a bitchy wuss of a person. You can identify this by all the bitching he does. You should exclude his bitchy opinions from your mental map of the opinions of capable people.
In fact, you should do this with more people that you meet, even online. Bitchy whiners should be ignored. If they can express a solution, even a crazy solution, that’s different, but if all they do is whine, ignore them.
Anyways, to countersignal your coworker, my wife and I have our ups and downs for sure, but she is not a “job in herself.” She’s the best part of the day, for which, through the struggles, I remain grateful.
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