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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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men in spheres bemoaning lack of trad values often mention virginity but I'm never clear on if they're offering the same virginity themselves

Probably(even if rather unhappily so). But the crux of what makes white weddings work is ‘the man who makes it clear you aren’t a virgin has to marry you’, not ‘men dont get premarital sex’- even if the latter is still discouraged(rightly).

I did have a ‘duty’ frame in mind, but what I was really trying to get at in my post was- different people have different duties. Sometimes this looks unfair, but it’s because people are different.

I did have a ‘duty’ frame in mind, but what I was really trying to get at in my post was- different people have different duties.

Part of the problem is that underneath those surface differences, those varied daily duties were (and were explicitly claimed to be) the exact same set of primary duties: work as hard as you can, deny yourself, give up your life for those weaker than you, obey those set by God in authority over you. People forget that this cosmic hierarchy used to entail quite a lot of frictional social-class-based and age-based role rigidity, as well, so everybody had the daily experience of both authority and submission. In European trad systems, for example, the working man needs to obey both his lady and his lord and doff his cap to his betters of both sexes, everybody needs to obey the priest, who in turn needs to obey the bishop who needs to obey the Pope, etc. Sons and daughters need to obey both their mothers and their fathers, even as they reach uppity young adulthood. Of course, few humans are good at either authority or submission, so there are endless quarrels about boundaries for all this. But it's really clear how all of the role systems are upheld by the same explicitly analogical thinking and grounded in presumptions of not just difference but also similarity across stations.

The interesting corollary to this is that the dismantling of various family roles flows directly from the (economically-driven) political movement to dismantle class, legal and religious hierarchies, and is driven by exactly the same appeals to natural self-ownership, liberty of conscience and inborn equality before God. Although the US does pass through a couple of decades where class/political/religious hierarchy is gone but some limited gender hierarchy still holds, I don't think it's a stable equilibrium. For the middling sort, the system inevitably gets torn apart by the inherent contradictions in believing strongly in class mobility and spiritual self-determination but not in gender mobility or family self-determination.

Once you're committed to a class ethos of "you are not born to any fixed (economic) station, you can be anything you want to be! You should use your talents to try to rise in the world, in accord with your individual desires," then it's pretty hard to maintain the exact opposite line as regards genitalia. Even for yourself, I wonder if you'd get behind a system where a wife's natural duty to [whatever] implied that you also had a natural duty to obey your parents and go to college as they wished?

I did do as my parents wished- they agreed to HVAC. There were job plans they vetoed. I presented an alternative plan to their preference for me to go to college and they accepted it.

Fair, but that delicate interaction happened in a deeply individualistic society where you had the leverage of both parties knowing it was your right to choose. Tilt the conventional balance back toward hierarchy, connection, fixed roles and knowing your place, and now the peremptory or even tyrannical father comes back into the Overton window - the sort of father who is empowered to command rather than negotiate, who can refuse consent to a minor child's marriage or force an apprenticeship and back that up with physical discipline, and who has the right to make those decisions as he pleases without necessarily consulting his son.

Also back in the Overton window would be the full weight of social and political censure against rebellious subjects, disobedient sons, disorderly commoners, runaway 'prentices, religious heretics (I hope you're not Protestant?), innovators and entrepreneurs, misers and profiteers, and various other social groups who our present-day society lauds to the skies precisely for not accepting their customary role and place in the order of things.