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I don't think this works as a parallel. It seems to me that submissiveness is not desirable in of itself, but as a proxy for a cooperative demeanor. Trivially, a wife who is capable of exercising sound judgement within her domain and contributing effectively to collective decisions seems superior to a more "submissive" wife who never exercises her agency to the benefit of the couple. I suppose that most men would prefer to be the generally senior partner in the relationship, but that's a much looser paradigm than 1 Timothy 2:12 would have it. If I may also get a little Freudian, surveys consistently find that men prefer to be the dominant partner only by a relatively small margin. By contrast, women are much more insistent that they be the submissive party and are far more averse to dominating than men are to submitting.
Now, insofar as one believes that women are intrinsically poor agents, then female submission is approximately equivalent to effective cooperation. I know @hydroacetylene is insistent on women's lesser capacity for agency, and I presume you are too. However, this view would naturally seem to lead to a recognition that women are lower creatures than men, in accordance with the pre-Christian understanding; a donkey may not be a defective horse, but it is still an ass. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with Christian philosophy and there's some galaxy-brained epicycle around this implication, but everything else within the redpill/traditionalist consensus on women seems to implicitly corroborate this outlook. This, fundamentally, is the core concern of feminism, or at least the most defensible steelman of feminism, and so long as the Right neither has a satisfying answer for them nor reinstates complete patriarchal control, its spectre shall continue to haunt them.
Women are not lesser creatures than men because agency is not the end all be all. They have their role and it's quite important. It's just not as much about leading.
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This is backwards, imo. The problem is that most women lose all respect for us if we're not. Riffing off what the other guy said, women are still evolved to expect men to take charge of most of that physical reality and survival and stuff. Except now the mechanisms for those things are heavily feminized bureaucracy so it seems natural to let the women take the lead on it and they utterly fucking hate doing it because if they are taking care of and being responsible for something, that means it is a baby.
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My fundamental position on the question really is no more complicated than this.
so then why not just lead with that instead of "boys rule girls drool god says so"?
and by extension, why doesn't the average traditionalist seem interested in changing their byline about women to this?
Because modern society interprets that as “boys rule girls drool god say so.”
You might notice that, for example, this wife who is far more precious than jewels is clearly busy with much more work than just child-rearing and domesticity. She’s finding intellectually stimulating ways to contribute to the family, from within the domestic sphere. She’s clearly interacting with the external economy by buying a vineyard, providing the merchants with sashes, selling linen garments, etc. She’s just doing all that in the name of her home and family, in a way centered around the home, rather than in a way centered around career-progression/girl-bossing and in the name of an NGO or Wal-Mart.
You might also notice that while her works are praised in the city gate, the one who actually takes his seat there and interacts with the elders is the husband. We don’t know what this specific husband does for day to day work, but it’s Proverbs, so I have to assume he is also working hard, just outside of the home in the non-domestic sphere. He’s the one that handles the external politics. He’s the one that’s going to go to war. That’s his job, it’s not hers.
Just having this as a baseline stance is already a thoughtcrime and called misogynist thought.
Additionally, we also live in a society where people, for better or worse, don’t accept “The Bible says,” as valid reasoning. So if someone has the intuitive opinion that things have gone wrong with gender relations, has identified some factual evidence of this, and believes the Bible is either the word of God or even just good advice, they have to attempt to validate their position not by quoting the Bible, but by identifying what the secular cause of the man/woman damage is.
That often results in having to tell women they are not perfect, which is immediately interpreted as:
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