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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.
I'm pretty confident that if Bezos would have married a literal nubile twenty something, we would have feminist journalists write about how this proves that men are shallow. If he had married a lower class mexican wife, it would be decried as vaguely coercive and that this proves men enjoy power differentials. If he had married white trash, he would be ridiculed as going back to his roots. Hell, if he married a conventionally attractive, age-appropriate, low-agency woman with a conventional job, that would probably also be insinuated as some sort of tradwife, wanting the woman to go back to the kitchen situation.
As several people have pointed out, Sanchez is in many ways precisely the sort of high-agency go-getter that should be popular with feminists, but who in practice always seems to be hated instead. In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
I don’t disagree with this and that the just so undermines credibility of the point. On the other hand, I do think Bezos deserves to be criticized whoever he marries. He started an affair and broke up two marriages with children.
I think part of the issue is that modernity has removed the vocabulary to cricicize the object level misbehavior so they displace their ‘something is wrong’ to a secondary element
Absolutely! I have had exactly one partner, who is now my wife & mother of my children, and the only thing we intend to change about this arrangement is increasing the number of kids. I have very little understanding for breaking up after being a family for so long.
But the people critizing Bezos aren't even better on that front; The journalist writing the article broke up her own marriage with an affair.
Right which is why she can’t criticize it on that front. So the present moral distaste is transferred onto something else
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Or it’s the other way around, and christianity arose as the spiritual justification for this intrasexual bitching, which no doubt predates it.
No, what @iprayiam3 is talking about predates Christianity by atleast a thousand years its the main driver of conflict in half the great greek tragedies as well as the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.
Yeah that’s what I’m saying, intrasexual competition, gossip, envy and jealousy have always fueled human conflict. Religions then built on and justified that primal pettyness, look at the behaviour of the gods in greek mythology. Christianity is particularly attuned to women’s petty intrasexual concerns, with its emphasis on female promiscuity.
I think this is far more complicated a topic than a single sentence can do justice to, but the Christian tradition, as much as it would like to attribute everything to Jesus, wasn't written in stone at the Ascension or Pentecost. Most of the "emphasis on female promiscuity" parts I can think of are from Paul, and were written a bit later.
I'd also point to the context of family matters in Rome at the time: Augustus rather famously enacted some policies that encouraged fidelity and "family values" before Jesus was born (and were continued on and off again with later emperors), and it's difficult to fully extract the existing Roman cultural context from the Christianity that took off there.
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Christianity bans promiscuity for both sexes; thé Vice lists in the New Testament condemn all sex except married PiV, mostly by name. The patristics are even more explicit that the only acceptable sex is married, PiV, at least aiming at conception.
The outsized concern for promiscuity is itself female-coded. The general hostility to sex also. Compare the sex lives of greek gods versus your guy and his mom. Or gays versus lesbians. Christianity is basically the lesbian of religions.
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If being on the motte should teach any one anything, it’s that men often care about female promiscuity as much as if not more than women do.
no we just have a lot of women and christians.
We have, off the top of my head, at least one male atheist redpiller concerned about promiscuity. Every time he brings this up I ask him why he hasn’t converted to a fundamentalist branch of Christianity and he doesn’t answer, but theres clearly a reason.
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Clearly on TheMotte, it’s the men who are writing most of the posts about the ills of promiscuity. (I have specific names in mind.)
That attitude may ultimately stem from their Christianity. But there are also a lot of atheist manosphere types who get REALLY upset about female promiscuity. You can’t dismiss it as a purely female concern.
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