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Notes -
Yes...
Getting closer...
And a miss. So close; I'm sure we'll figure out a constructive version of interaction between the sexes without going straight to the cold bucket of water someday.
Nobody defected. What happened was that men went with the best information they had at a time when the bottom fell completely out of the market for the product men provided, that being "material goods for survival". In the US that happened 90 years ago, a timeline most Western countries followed.
See, in the pre-industrial ages, where the picture of the US is Little House on the Prairie (and people think this is true of Europe all the way back to the start of the Dark Ages- it's not true, but this is what most people think), men were responsible for a society's survival. They're the one evolution gave that advantage to.
That gives them leverage in a way it doesn't for women. Even your verse- rated #1 by Wicked Husbands Weekly for the past 2 millennia- has this state of affairs buried in it. The duties assigned there are rhetorically symmetrical, and perhaps in the first century they actually were, but in post-scarcity "men, love your wives" is little more than an inkblot/no-op, while the converse demand of submission is an utterly massive ask for a post-scarcity woman. We're rich enough now that the reason a man would take a wife he wasn't willing to love already has been lost, so it's a strict boon for men at the expense of women.
Wicked and simple men love this verse for a good fucking reason. They know what they're doing.
What happens when a society structured around food scarcity runs into the brick wall that is the hydroelectric generating station, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, the farming combine, smokeless powder/dynamite/the other trappings of modern chemistry, the Haber-Bosch process, practical fixed-wing aviation, and hundreds of thousands of others? Well, what happens is that men who grew up in a society where being a man had privileges because survival was a scarce resource now had nothing.
So you get a few generations of people born right at the tail end of scarcity, right as the value of survival was hitting zero, and their children, who have absolutely no earthly clue on how to maximize their daughters' standing in modern society, did the only thing they know how to, the only thing they reasonably could have been expected to. Fathers and mothers alike agree, because that is how it was back in their living memory, that women must be submissive to men because men do deserve it, or rocks fall and everyone dies. That is why going barefoot from kitchen to bedroom was the highest calling- Mom would have legitimately loved that this job had been made so much easier to the point it turned her full-time job into one that required perhaps an hour or two at a time and Dad just can't fully understand what the big deal is; after all, it worked for them, and Mom loved it, did she not?
Thus leading us to having a breed of more-than-average-disagreeable woman who refused to listen to their folks who told them not to make anything of themselves, and they prospered wildly, especially compared to the ones that did and never made anything of themselves (and who comprised the first huge divorce wave once it was legalized in the '70s). Which now makes the selection effect of "don't listen to your folks, they don't know fuck all" because they really, truly, genuinely did not know fuck all (they simply weren't equipped to do so; nobody at the time really had a good idea of what "the value of men just dropped to zero" would mean), so as the generations go by and the older pre-scarcity people die off, there's no counter-meme for moderation.
So if you're wondering how you get feminists, and how '60s feminists turn into '10s gynosupremacists, that's how. Under Whig History, this is traditionalists' "fault", and aspiring traditionalists who still believe in that (and perhaps more importantly, who want to convert people into Christians) must absolutely come up with an answer for that. Until that day, our "god-given gender roles" will continue to be viewed as a twisted joke, and our persecution complex (and the makeup of our churches- which is selected for men and women who haven't come to terms with modernity, whether we like that or not, healthy people don't need doctors after all) will tempt us to double down on RETVRN.
There were some academics- the autistic women [and men] who were disagreeable enough to get into an academic career track to study this- that did show some signs of actual understanding. But the weapons they left lying around were then picked up by wicked women, and it turns out they continue to work even today. We even pretend it is an advancement to be ruled over by wicked women than by wicked men.
So, uh, what's a path forward? Well, I don't actually think men can do anything about it on their own; their marginal value is basically zero, after all- other than noting that men did not fight a violent battle against women when it became clear the "battle" was lost, or to attempt to restore our monopoly on survival, and that the main problem is women fighting a violent battle [by proxy, and forcing men to bear the costs of intentional inaction because the solution wasn't "just right"] against us now.
We'll generally be in the supporting role for this one: specifically, that if we ultimately agree that the role/general desire of the statistical-average woman is indeed to be provided for, that we take care not to burn out the devotion that makes that state of affairs tolerable -> attractive -> stable. Already we see this is on a knife's edge more than it used to be in part to an overzealous slash-and-burn of what used to provide a path resistant to mere boredom/casual unwillingness to work, and the standard traditionalist "the moral inferiority of womankind is an obvious conclusion of most redpill/traditionalist thought, but proponents of such always either handwave it away or dutifully ignore the implication" doesn't actually help that (I'm not sure why redpillers are particularly interested in doing the mental equivalent of calling their wives, or the stock of the pool of wives for the average man, stupid and fat- oh, wait, yes we do).
Fortunately, the average progressive has a weakness: they also believe (due to instinct) that they're morally inferior to men, and are as such so focused on taking revenge for this state of nature that they make mistakes in a way that the traditionalist female stereotype can predict and outperform.
That is, when it's not just being used as an excuse to be retarded. Oh well, at least if we fumble the ball sufficiently we can at least take solace in the fact that virtueless women (and men) will fail to reproduce at outsized rates, and will have a eugenic effect on the population. So maybe humanity will evolve to solve it ourselves.
It speaks to the thickness of hypoagency bias that women can write ten thousand volumes of "So I'm Defecting, Here's Why and What That Means for You" (you did an oppression, you disrespected house work, you called me Jane Catlady, etc) over the course of decades and we still can't figure this one out.
To me the question was never who defected first—but rather were women justified in burning it all down. Litigating that question with individual women extracted so much from me that I'm simply not interested in doing so anymore. Agreeing to disagree, I'm now much more concerned with what's to be done about the fact that women find the historical conditions that generated sustainable fertility intolerable. It troubles me because all solutions I've heard from all across politics right now seems to be some flavor or variety of "well if it really gets down to it men will simply be forced to pay the market rate for replacement", but I think people, specifically men who haven't spoken to women about the subject, grossly underestimate how high that price really is. We had a world where childbirth was considered a woman's bloodsoaked battlefield, and that valuation was considered by women to be oppressively low.
And it was decided that, in hindsight, they didn't actually deserve it, they never deserved it, and the fact that they got it is strong contender for the biggest heist in human history. I sometimes find myself wondering: if my forefathers who sacrificed so much more for so little weren't worthy, what possible hope do I have?
My preferred solution is dumping 100 trillion dollars over 30 years into regenerative medicine with an eye toward enhanced longevity. This would attack the big problem from both ends: both reducing dependents and increasing lifetime fertility at the same time. The pitiful value of my blood isn't a threat to me if I'm never compelled to trade it, but I worry there will be a decade or two of experimentation with the "men just pay up" solution before it's realized to be a dead end.
Hopefully I've been born just in time to have aged out of being a primary target.
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