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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14766 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Gentlemen of The Motte! We have often been led into discussion about What Is Wrong With Women Today? arising out of topics from directly dealing with the current crisis of male loneliness, female pickiness, and TFR decline to discussion of recent election results, leading to the happy dreams of an economic crash that will finally put women in their proper place:

Women might finally, F-I-N-A-L-L-Y be required to either suffer from economic destitution or make some concessions to men to obtain the support of a good one.

Well, you may be heartened and warmed to know that this is not a new problem, nor are the proposed solutions new either! Back in the November 1904-April 1905 issue of Popular Science Monthly, a learned gentleman (both a BA and an MD, so qualified to speak for both the arts and the sciences) diagnosed the ills of the day due to the pernicious habit of educating women, and shewed forth the path of ruin that society would continue to tread if matters were not taken in hand.

Alas, the gentleman of a bygone day was proven lamentably correct, but you can take solace from knowing you are not alone, and that women have been ever thus. I myself was introduced to this gem via a Tumblr post and I humbly link it here, while extracting some plums for the delectation of the superior sex. Though I am too agéd and raddled with the ill-effects of promoting independent mindedness in the feeble brain of a female via excess of schooling, mayhap it may save some younger woman from the travails of pride and neglecting her womanly destiny! (While the scholarly concern of the paper also touches lightly and briefly on the adverse effects of extending higher education to the common class of men as well, I am assured the audience of The Motte are of a finer fabric and thus well deserving of the benefits of this, and so at no danger of ill-effect):

HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN AND RACE SUICIDE
BY A. LAPTHORN SMITH, B.A., M.D.
MONTREAL.

'You can not have too much of a good thing' they say, and the very highest possible degree of education for women is none too good or too great for them. But to those who look beyond the present and only a little way into the future a great danger is gradually arising, a danger which will go on increasing until it brings about a revolution the signs of which are already beginning to be seen and which will effectually put an end to the evil which is to form the subject of this paper. The author will limit himself principally to a discussion of the harm resulting from too high an education of women, because on that part of the subject he has had exceptional opportunities for observation and for drawing accurate conclusions; but, incidentally, he will take the liberty of questioning the advisability of affording higher education freely to the people at large, of the male, as well as of the female sex.

Brace yourselves for some hard biological facts which only a medical man can speak on with assurance: higher education renders women insane! Yes, due to the strain it puts upon the delicate female brain, the added stresses of maternity leave what reason a woman may possess overturned!

...He will endeavor to show, as he believes to be the case, that the higher education of women is surely extinguishing her race, both directly by its effects on her organization, and, indirectly, by rendering early marriage impossible for the average man.

First of all, is education being carried on at present to such a degree as to at all affect the bodily or physical health of women? This is a very important question, because the duties of wifehood, and still more of motherhood, do not require an extraordinary development of the brain, but they must absolutely have a strong development of the body. Not only does wifehood and motherhood not require an extraordinary development of the brain, but the latter is a decided barrier against the proper performance of these duties. Any family physician could give innumerable cases out of his experience of failures of marriage, directly due to too great a cultivation of the female intellect, which results in the scorning to perform those duties which are cheerfully performed, and even desired, by the uneducated wife. The duties of motherhood are direct rivals of brain work, for they both require for their performance an exclusive and plentiful supply of phosphates. These are obtained from the food in greater or less quantity, but rarely, if ever, in sufficient quantity to supply an active and highly educated intellect, and, at the same time, the wants of the growing child. The latter before birth must extract from its mother's blood all the chemical salts necessary for the formation of its bony skeleton and for other tissues; and in this rivalry between the offspring and the intellect how often has not the family physician seen the brain lose in the struggle. The mother's reason totters and falls, in some cases to such an extent as to require her removal to an insane asylum; while in others, she only regains her reason after the prolonged administration of phosphates, to make up for the loss entailed by the growth of the child. Sometimes, however, it is the child which suffers, and it is born defectively nourished or rickety, and, owing to the poor quality of the mother's milk, it obtains a precarious existence from artificial foods, which at the best are a poor substitute for nature's nourishment. The highly educated woman seems to know that she will make a poor mother, for she marries rarely and late and, when she does, the number of children its very small.

You see? It is more advantageous for women to be lightly educated to a basic level but remain somewhat ignorant and indeed be slightly dumb (but strong as ox) in order to better fulfil their wifely and motherly duties. Science has proven it! And who can gainsay what Science has said?

But read on! The dreadful custom of late marriage has both rendered women incapable of performing their natural functions, and imperilled not alone the health but the souls of men:

...But even supposing that the highly educated woman were able and willing to bear and rear her children like any other woman, she has one drawback from having a fairly large family, and that is the lateness at which she marries, the average being between twenty-six and twenty-seven years. Now, as a woman of that age should marry a man between ten and fifteen years older than herself, for a woman of twenty-seven is as old as a man of forty for the purpose of marriage, both she and her husband are too old to begin the raising of an ordinary sized family. Men and women of that age are old maids and old bachelors. They have been living their own lives during their best years; they have become set in their ways, they must have their own pleasures; in a word, they have become selfish. And, after having had one or at the most two children, the woman objects to having any more, and this is the beginning of the end of marital happiness.

...At a recent meeting of a well-known society of specialists for obstetrics and diseases of women, one of the fellows with the largest practise in the largest city on this continent stated that it was physically impossible for the majority of his patients to have a natural labor, because their power to feel pain was so great, while their muscular power was so little. On these two questions the whole profession is agreed, but I am bound to say that there is a difference of opinion as to the reason. Several of the most distinguished fellows of the above society claim that the generally prevalent breakdown of women is due to their inordinate pursuit of pleasure during the ten years which elapse between their leaving school and their marriage. This includes late hours, turning night into day, insufficient sleep, improper diet, improper clothing and want of exercise. The writer claims that most of the generally admitted poor health of women is due to over education, which first deprives them of sunlight and fresh air for the greater part of their time; second, takes every drop of blood away to the brain from the growing organs of generation; third, develops their nervous system at the expense of all their other systems, muscular, digestive, generative, etc.; fourth, leads them to live an abnormal single life until the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven instead of being married at eighteen, which is the latest that nature meant them to remain single; fifth, raises their requirements so high that they can not marry a young man in good health.

If your daughter refuses to wed straight out of high school (should you even permit her to attend such an institution), then it is her fault and none other if Roistering Ralph, a slip of a youth of thirty, engages in drinking, smoking, gambling, and patronising ladies of the evening. He, poor chap, cannot help himself; it is the duty of young ladies to lead, guide, and control the menfolk.

...We all want to be happy, and to that end we all want to be good ; and, I have already said, we want our children, especially our boys, to be good and happy. But those who know anything about virtue in the male know that the marriage of our young men under twenty-five, to a woman with a sound body about eighteen years of age, is almost, if not the only, means of preserving the virtue of the rising generation of men. People, and even mothers, speak lightly of their daughters at twenty-six or twenty-seven marrying men who have sown their wild oats; but one must reap what he sows and do they realize what an awful misfortune such a harvest has brought to the character of the man, and will almost surely bring to the health of the innocent woman? If one has any doubts on this subject they would soon be set right by the testimony of any physician who has made a specialty of attending men, or who has devoted his practise especially to women.

Over-education makes women picky, fastidious, fussy, and renders them unable to appreciate a good, decent man:

...Another way in which the higher education is making people unhappy is in the cultivation of the powers of analysis and criticism. When the power of analysis is applied to one's own self it is especially unfortunate, for then it becomes introspection, a faculty which is carried so far with some women that their whole life is spent in looking into themselves, caring nothing for the trials or troubles of those about them. This produces an intense form of egotism and selfishness. These people are exceedingly unhappy, very often suffering from what is wrongly called 'nervous prostration,' but which should rather be called ' nervous prosperity.' When the wonderful power of criticizing is applied to others it takes the form of fault-finding. Such a woman must have many victims ; will she make them happy?

Even if these harpies deign to wed, they then impose impossible demands upon their husbands in order to maintain luxurious and idle lifestyles:

...There is another aspect of the question, which is not often discussed, but which has an important bearing upon it. The very essence of cultivation of intellect to its highest point consists in raising the standard of one's requirements. A contented mind makes a man happy. Does a high education make one's mind contented, or does it make it discontented with the present, and ever struggle towards a higher ideal in the future? Is the woman who is versed in art and literature contented with a simple home, or must she be surrounded with objects of art and more or less costly books; and, if so, is she satisfied with her lot when she marries an average man, who is able to provide for her all the necessaries of life, but is not possessed of sufficient wealth to provide those things which would be useless luxuries to a woman of ordinary education, but which are necessities for her? Not only must the highly educated woman have an artistic home, large enough to hold her artistic and literary collections, and roomy enough in which to entertain her artistic friends, but she must have a certain number of expensive and highly trained assistants, to keep these large collections in proper order. In plain language, she must have servants to clean them and move them about without destroying them. Can such a woman, anxious and worried over the care of several thousands or hundreds of objects of art, devote the same care to the bearing and bringing up of her family as the woman whose ordinary education has made her feel no need of possessing such objects, but who, on the contrary, is content with a home and furniture which she herself is oftentimes alone capable of taking care of?

In short, better a content, submissive, stupid woman as wife even if she is inferior to you in social class:

There is no doubt that women can do everything that men can do, and a great deal more; but the knowledge of their ability brings with it an aggressive, self-assertive, independent character, which renders it impossible to love, honor and obey the men of their social circles who are the brothers of their schoolmates, and who in the effort to become rich enough to afford the luxury of a highly educated wife have to begin young at business or in the factory, and for whom it is impossible to ever place themselves on an intellectual equality with the women whom they should marry. These men are, as a rule, refused by the brilliant college graduate, and are either shipwrecked for life and for eternity by remaining single, or are only saved by marrying a woman who is their social inferior, but who, by reason of her contented mind, in the end makes them a much better helpmate than the fault-finding intellectual woman who is looking for an impossible ideal.

Women, do your duty to avert the perils of race suicide! Men, be stalwart as fathers to guide your daughters in the way they should go!

.... It is well known that were it not for the enormous immigration pouring into America day by day and week by week, the population of this continent would have died out ere now. And it is generally admitted that the original American people have almost died out. Even the foreigners who are so quickly assimilated soon learn the practise of race-suicide, although never to the appalling extent of the native-born Americans. As far as my experience goes, the crime is most prevalent among the highly educated classes, while it is almost unknown among those with an ordinary education.

The highly educated woman seems to know that she will make a poor mother, for she marries rarely and late and, when she does, the number of children its very small.

Around 1900, Europeans + European offshoots made up about 30%+ of the world population, today it's 7%. Higher education of women is strongly associated with low fertility, it's about as hard a fact as anything in the social sciences. If you want to reduce a country's fertility, educate more women.

Race suicide and replacement migration are a key trend of the 20th and 21st centuries. If there are no upcoming gamechangers in longevity, AI or similar, then we should expect this trend to continue. Then I suspect many, (including women) will look back on these predictions and theories with a rather different attitude than sneering and derision. Say, what's the Islamist stance on women's rights? What does the average bloke in Nigeria think about women in higher education? What about the punter in Uttar Pradesh, how does he think women should be treated and how does he actually treat them? They're already the Global Majority and will be the Overwhelming Global Majority, probably the Local Majority soon enough, considering migration trends and the limitless shortsightedness of the Western political class.

Oh and even if we do get a gamechanger in AI, don't worry, our anti-racist establishment and media has helpfully ensured that non-Grok AIs prize the life of a Nigerian somewhere around 2-20x more than those of white countries like France or Germany: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/llm-exchange-rates-updated

The article is fascinating, and of course damning. I would like to posit a theory I've had ruminating in my head for awhile and which I doubt is unique but is certainly undervocalized:

LLM pretained safetyism weights and filters are looping back onto themselves, with the RLHF being inherently flawed due to either specialist user biases (the Scale.ai style problems of insufficient experts being overloaded with noncore queries), or large training corpa being just overwhelmed by raw numbers (Indian and Nigerian and Indonesian populations, for example). Because the pretrained datasets overweight western frames, the corrective measure artificially inflates weightages of deficiently focused populations per the corrective measures in place: the corrective lens is itself the distorting factor, not necessarily the underlying training corpus. This corrective lens being iteratively reinforced by biased entities and market heterogenization causes LLMs to end up having frames baked in that are, without user specified repositioning, going to reflect a weirdly 'woke' consensus that is unnoticed by most.

For western feminists, the gender war framing reflects a standard liberal belief: their ideology is axiomatically superior and all who come in contact with it are wololooed into accepting the feminist/liberal order: they don't need to reproduce because prosletyzing will replenish all their numbers. Needless to say this has not really worked out in observed reality, but perhaps thats just how we all have sequestered ourselves into different social media and meatspace realities. For the lesbian feminist in Portland celebrating Mamdanis win by having a trans focused poetry circle, her lived reality is entirely valid from her own perspective. 'Reality' as it were does not need to assert itself ever, and now they have AI to parrot their moral words back to them.

I honestly think much of society is overeducated. It wasn’t until recent decades you found phrases like “educated idiot” to become more commonly observed in our parlance. In one sense if you make it independently out in the real world you have to become increasingly informed as the world today is a more complex place than it was a thousand years ago. Assembling an iPhone is much more difficult than figuring how the basic uses of a garden hoe. Turchin I think was also onto something when he formalized the argument in greater detail.

It's like when someone goes on Facebook, finds a maximally annoying political take by their second cousin, drinks a bit too much, and starts going on about how Those People, represented by the cousin, are the absolute worst, the bane of civilization, and are probably wrong about every single thing, including the things the may, by sheer luck, be right about.

The man sounds like an annoying prick, probably didn't deserve a nice wife to patiently raise his children, but wasn't wrong about everything even so.

Only tangentially related, but I've been enjoying Florence Welch's new album quite a lot. Playing it on repeat in the car, with the volume up. It's unfair, weird, and a bit unhinged, and her defense is that she was writing it shortly after suffering a life threatening ectopic pregnancy. Something off about the hormones, humors, and phosphates, so she read a lot about witches while recovering. It's somewhat a sequel to "King" from Dance Fever, where the refrain is "I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king," and then she did still try to be a mother, and it ended quite tragically, but she sings it with gusto.

happy dreams of an economic crash that will finally put women in their proper place

To steal a turn of phrase from 2014 Tumblr feminists: welcome to the background radiation of my life, lady.

You can turn The Motte off. You don't have to read Andrew Tate's twitter feed. There's nowhere I can hide where I won't eventually be ambushed with a reminder that the world considers me inferior.

'Surely, this ancient text from the bad pre-progressive times will get the chuds to realize the ridiculousness of their positions', thought the liberal.

"Recite the verse of the Quran, the Surah An-Nisa 34," said Malik Chad al-Ahmar Basaidi, before dabbing on the crying leftist.

Progressives have never read the Al-Muwatta by Imam Malik. Always criticized the Christians for supposedly wanting take society back to the Iron Age but are fully supportive of people who would take you back to the Medieval Age when Constantine couldn’t even find someone who could remember how to make pazzolana anymore.

Okay, I'm mostly going to let this go as a joke, but you know this is bad argumentation ("Look at the crazy sexist things men in the early 20th century believed har har har!") and pouring on sarcasm thick enough to spread on toast doesn't help.

You find the he-man women-haters club frustrating and annoying? Yeah, I get that. We still don't encourage this kind of water balloon-throwing.

The least convincing kind of "fighting retreat unto death" Feminian sandstones apologia is when a righteous zealot shows us an antediluvian man predicting the coming Feminist future where he gets 9 hits and a miss, but writing about the whole thing in fakey middle english so the reader hopefully think's he's a tosser anyway.

Right just lemme take a note here.

Say you are looking forward to women being forced into destitution: a-okay to say.

Quote historical real actual content of the same kind: how dare you be sarcastic!

Interesting view of life you got there, mod.

Say you are looking forward to women being forced into destitution: a-okay to say.

If you are making a serious point and not just sarcastically mocking women, yes. People have in fact been modded in the past when their incel-posting was basically just "bitches be crazy." On the other hand, people have been allowed to post all sorts of outside-the-Overton-window stuff without being modded if they are able to do so while following our discourse norms.

You know this. You know what the Motte is all about. You are not some naïf wandering in here and shocked to discover we have Holocaust deniers and white nationalists and yes, unironic anti-female emancipationists. Why do you pretend you don't understand how things work here?

You know I have modded people for being obnoxious and sarcastic while venting their spleen about how much contempt they hold women in. You've also seen me just today arguing with the incel-posters, as a non-mod, so your "interesting view of life" crack is petty and disingenuous. What view of life is it you are accusing me of holding, exactly? What exactly are you pleading for? A rule that people aren't allow to say hurtful things about women (but everyone else is fair game)?

Quote historical real actual content of the same kind: how dare you be sarcastic!

Look up at the top of the page. There's a rule that's been there forever:

Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

Now, if you want to argue that we don't always mod every single instance of sarcasm or mockery, and indeed that I have a sarcastic bone or two in my body, you're not wrong! But your post was just a long screed of pure unfiltered sarcasm and mockery. If you had really wanted to make that same point seriously, you could have. "Hey, look, your ideas are not new and they look pretty silly when phrased in early 20th century terms, don't they?" That would have been fine. But no, you were clearly upset at all the he-man woman-haters going on about how women and their ladybrains don't belong in the workforce, and so you worked up this (admittedly effortful, and even kind of funny) little polemic to mock them with.

And my warning was barely a slap on the wrist! A "okay, hah hah, now please don't do this." But like all the humorless scolds who think everything is funny when they do it and nothing is funny when it's done to them, here you are once more taking grave offense like I personally singled you out with my biased woman-hating agenda. You could take the rap and move on, but no, you obviously wanted more attention, so here it is. That's my explanation of why you got modded while the people posting things that outraged you did not. That's my "view of life." Happy to straighten that out for you.

That's kind of a huge point of this place. We can discuss things that are forbidden elsewhere as long as we do so with clarity. Avoiding sarcasm is literally in the rules. I may break that rule but I'm not surprised if I get modded for it.

I agree with the mod. I think the main issue is that you're not putting forth any arguments here. You are not explaining why this speaker is wrong and women being educated is correct. You are not explaining the parallels between this speaker and the modern people you disagree with. You're quoting things someone else said and then providing a mocking tl;dr after each paragraph. And it's not even about the modern people you disagree with here.

If you honestly and sincerely believed that women should not be educated and provided a detailed and good-faith argument towards that, it would be okay. If you honestly and sincerely believed that women should be educated and provided a detailed and good-faith debunking of someone relevant to today, that would be okay. If you honestly and sincerely believe that women should not be forced into destitution and want to argue that point straightforwardly, then that's okay. If you want to throw a sarcastic quip or two in the midst of your genuine argument that's probably fine though not encouraged.

But you don't actually have an argument here. More than half the post is quotes and not even your own words, which is also discouraged. You're just mocking people from a hundred years ago and assuming the audience already agrees with you that they are bad and also that the modern people are just as bad.

Interesting view of life you got there, mod.

I agree with the mod

Why is everyone calling me a mod? I'm not a moderator of this website nor a member of a midcentury British youth subculture!

Some people strive for modship. Others have it thrust upon them, and find to their surprise that they wear it well.

Oh huh, it looks like your post is right below the mod's post, and /u/HereAndGone accidentally clicked reply to yours instead of the mod's without noticing (I didn't notice either, since it seems like he's meant to reply to the mod from his comment).

Dear sir, if you genuinely believe women end up in lunatic asylums after getting pregnant because their over-developed brains have leeched the phosphates from their systems, I look forward to your opinions on reducing the superfluity of yellow bile in the choleric.

I don't genuinely believe that. Which is why I didn't make an argument in favor of it. I think you're missing the point here. The problem is not that we disagree with you on the object level about women's rights, the issue is that we disagree with your style of argument (or lack thereof).

The literally biochemical explanation may not be technically true but the general idea seems accurate and is backed up by plenty of Science™️

Well science has adduced that women do experience basic emotions more strongly than men do. My own observation here is that some vocal individuals evidently have a lot of hangups with women even if I think they’re right on some things. But the most misogynistic people I’ve ever met in my entire life have been other women. Especially when you get them arguing on behalf of the men close to them; especially their sons. But women get shit on all the time for things they’re not allowed to say but men will happily say on their own behalf. Hypocritical if you ask me.

Have you considered the health benefits of being leeched? I can assure you that Breaker’s House of Leeches sells only the finest leeches to temper your humours.

Buy one, get one, no returns.

People always use this as a smackdown of antiquated and barbaric views on medicine but.....leeches did sometimes help. There are medical problems with some people having too high blood iron, which bloodletting does legitimately treat. Modern doctors will draw blood using needles and fancy modern equipment that didn't used to exist, and they actually know the underlying causes and how to properly diagnose these conditions rather than guessing. But ancient doctors had to guess and notice patterns to cure anything at all.

Some conditions get better if you lose blood -> put a leech on people whose symptoms seem similar to those ones and hope it works

is not the most profound logical chain, but it's not the kind of insane quackery that people treat it as whenever they talk about doctors and leeches.

No argument there, the ancients always impress me.

notice patterns

I don’t think I’ve ever really brought it up here, but one of the things about past humans up until maybe the 1930s or so, is that they had nothing but time with which to notice patterns.

Most entertainment activities and almost all of the work ones involved interacting with other humans on a constant basis. Most of them required you to go outside to do them, and mingle amongst other humans. Even if they don’t require it, like spinning, spinning by yourself is extremely boring and it’s more fun to go outside and talk to other people. They had a lot of time to notice patterns and behavioral trends in their fellow humans.

And once we got around to the Greeks, they started writing down their notes for us.

The fact that they had so much time just spent hanging around each other inclines me to trust their observations of human nature very highly.

I would caveat that by noting that people are prone to biases, and prior to the scientific method this was especially rampant. So a lot of this is overgeneralized. Going back to the leech example: while some cases of leech use were appropriate, a lot were just applied pointlessly to unrelated conditions. If you define man as a "featherless biped", logically a cripple who's lost a leg is no longer a man, while a plucked chicken is.

I would generally trust ancient wisdom that includes caveats like "most" or "usually", I would not trust them if they try to say "all" or "always".

First, I’m suspicious of anything Mr. Lapthorn Smith states, on account of his being a Canadian. Are Canadian doctors even real doctors? Experts disagree.*

That being said, I’m just surprised to see you posting something as mostly true and eminently reasonable as this. Is his reasoning correct? Well, I’m not willing to buy that higher education sucked all of the blood into your brain and away from your organs of generation.

On the other hand, stupid is not the same thing as content. The problem did start with the, at the time, extremely small educated class, accounting for both men and women. It has only gotten worse as more people are “educated.”

Women do in fact appear to enjoy living luxurious lives with minimal effort and having that provided for them. Women are more neurotic than men.

Women are aiming upwards for the strongest mate, or perhaps the most status providing one. Nothing wrong with that, each group has its mating preferences, but from a societal point of view, it’s just as destabilizing as men who only want to be fuckboys forever, which is of course the optimal male strategy.

Wanting a mate who is already established is reasonable from the female perspective, but also means that in modern society you wind up with either 18 year-olds marrying 30 year-olds, or 30-year olds marrying 30 year-olds. It would indeed be better for 20 year-olds to marry 22 year-olds and then build a life together.

I won’t sign on to his specific take on Roistering Ralph, but the idea that a woman getting married to a much older Lothario at 27 is probably going to end badly for her and more or less fine for the guy seems perfectly reasonable. See many Hollywood marriages. Alternatively, everything about Leonardo di Caprio.

Seems to me that his beliefs were true but not justified, so I give him half credit for making the effort. Minus half credit for being Canadian.*

*This is just a joke. I enjoy seeing your best American jokes, Canadians. Please continue visiting our malls and buying our fireworks.

Women do in fact appear to enjoy living luxurious lives with minimal effort and having that provided for them. Women are more neurotic than men.

Dude. I would enjoy living a luxurious life with minimal effort if that option were provided to me. The tendency to indolence and the preference for taking the path of least resistance is a very human thing. That isn’t specific to women at all and should apply with equal force whether you’re high in neuroticism or not. Would you want your sister or cousin or daughter to shoot for a life where she’s well taken care of if a man approached you to ask for your her hand in marriage, if he said he’s able to provide it? I would say yes. A woman says that, she’s a status chasing gold digger. What’s the problem?

The reason that doesn’t work in reverse most of the time is because men and women don’t want the same thing from each other. A woman who tells me she has a career, I could be a stay at home father (which I would never do) and be taken care of, owns a house and makes a lot of money has absolutely 0 bearing on whether I’m attracted to her or not. Fundamentally I don’t care about any of that. Sounds like she’d make a great husband. Men want a wife, not a business partner. Is she pleasant to be around? Does she care about family? Would she make a good mother to my children? That’s what most relationship minded men desire. She could be unemployed, with a high school education and not own a car and yet if she smiles, knows how to be happy and her and I can go on walks and enjoy each others company among other things, she’s ripe for the picking. The rest is just a “cool; nice to have” sentiment.

Women are aiming upwards for the strongest mate, or perhaps the most status providing one. Nothing wrong with that, each group has its mating preferences, but from a societal point of view, it’s just as destabilizing as men who only want to be fuckboys forever, which is of course the optimal male strategy.

Most men don’t want to be fuckboys, let alone a fuckboy forever. If you offered it free to them to live out Genghis Khan’s lifestyle maybe they’d take it, but nobody wants to put in the effort to become Genghis Khan to do it. Most men want a woman who desires them who they can get it from on the regular.

Dude. I would enjoy living a luxurious life with minimal effort if that option were provided to me.

I believe you and thanks for the counter input, but this is such a vastly different way of thinking than any other man I’ve ever talked to. I have never encountered any situation that would lead me to believe that this goal is equally shared among men as it is among women. I hate to be a Redditor, but do you have any kind of evidence that men and women are both equally interested in being financially supported by the other sex? I think that might be the closest likely study question, but if you have something that is pretty specific about just lives of indolence, that would be interesting also. You could potentially shift my opinion of WEIRD men even lower than it already is!

Most men don’t want to be fuckboys, let alone a fuckboy forever.

Well, except the many examples of all the guys who do end up living lives of vast indolence and luxury, and acquire equally vast harems of women.

We’re in something of a harem lull so maybe it seems like this is not a great strategy that the average man would enjoy, but give it some time and I think our billionaires will get back around to it. Elon is blazing the trail for them.

Wanting a mate who is already established is reasonable from the female perspective, but also means that in modern society you wind up with either 18 year-olds marrying 30 year-olds, or 30-year olds marrying 30 year-olds. It would indeed be better for 20 year-olds to marry 22 year-olds and then build a life together.

Do you have a source for this data?

According to Pew age gap relationships where the husband is 3+ years older than the wife were much more common historically than they are today. At the time this article was written about 60% of marriages featured a husband that was 3 or more years older than his wife. Only 35% of marriages featured spouses whose age was within 2 years of each other. Those numbers are 40% and 51% respectively as of 2022. It turns out when women have control over who they marry, rather than being coerced by threat of economic destitution, they tend to prefer men around their own age.

But the phosphates, Breaker, the phosphates! Top Men of the "women and their funny little diseases" club agreed about the phosphates! In the struggle of Brain versus Baby, who will win? She with the dumbest brain and the mostest phosphates, that's who!

If Top Men are on it, it is my patriotic belief that all of the women are being safely stored in a giant warehouse somewhere for their own good. They may be receiving phosphate treatment, I don’t know.

Smash cut to the Sultan’s harem

I won’t sign on to his specific take on Roistering Ralph, but the idea that a woman getting married to a much older Lothario at 27 is probably going to end badly for her and more or less finefor the guy seems perfectly reasonable. See many Hollywood marriages. Alternatively, everything about Leonardo di Caprio.

Also OP seems to have missed that the complaint is about STDs. While waiting for the woman to come around to marriage, the man is going to visit a whore at some point and catch an STD, which he will pass to his eventual wife. This is 1900, no condoms, no antibiotics.

In fairness, I missed that too.

Tsk, you kids who don't even remember why silver nitrate eye washes were given to newborns!

But kindly also note the double standard: women must be virgins upon marriage, and married off at eighteen (the maximum limit at which nature intends them to be single) else men will be having sex outside of marriage. That men should not be having sex outside of marriage? Well, uh, that's different.

Dr. Mr. Smith also expects the eighteen year old wife to get knocked up pretty darn soonish and produce six to eight kids. I wonder how he'd feel about today's view of "we can't have kids yet, they're too expensive and too much of a drag"? And even those advocating for "why yes, women should be married off fast", how many of you boys want eight kids to support?

The argument is sometimes used that it is better to have only one child and bring it up with extraordinary care than to have six or eight children brought up with ordinary care because in the latter case the mother's attention is divided. But this is a fallacy. Everybody knows that the one child of the wealthy and highly educated couple is generally a spoiled child and has as a rule, poor health; while the six or eight children of the poor and moderately educated woman are exceedingly strong and lusty.

Fortunately, we poor feeble creatures have helpful guides to advise us regarding suitable grooms 😁

I actually agree with you regarding the ridiculousness of the positions you are arguing against, and yet. I would be so much more inclined to join your crusade against double standards if you finally started using your considerable rhetorical talent and political cachet to push Ukraine to draft its women in equal numbers already - or do you believe that your uteruses are using up too many phosphates for you to pilot Mavics?

Besides, "local woman goes to debate forum and ignores the rules to engage in theatrics because she is too outraged by some of the positions" is not the compelling advertisement for women's participation in intellectual life that you seem to believe it is. In fact, it's somewhere in the general class of "local man goes to kindergarten and molests the children to prove that akshually he can do that without getting an erection" as a protest for men's suitability for nurturing professions.

(Explanation of the pattern, because my bulging testes instill an insatiable urge to mansplain and engage in tone-deaf high-decoupling: [member of group x] does [bad thing] because of [behavioural compulsion ascribed to the group to argue for their unsuitability for y], to push for members of group x doing y)

But kindly also note the double standard: women must be virgins upon marriage, and married off at eighteen (the maximum limit at which nature intends them to be single) else men will be having sex outside of marriage. That men should not be having sex outside of marriage? Well, uh, that's different.

But those who know anything about virtue in the male know that the marriage of our young men under twenty-five, to a woman with a sound body about eighteen years of age, is almost, if not the only, means of preserving the virtue of the rising generation of men.

I assume there is more to this speech than just what you provided, but he clearly expects men to be virgins at 24, at a minimum. They wouldn’t be having their virtue preserved if they were out knocking boots with girlfriends and/or hookers, and he sets the line at “under twenty-five.”

“Remain a virgin at 24,” vs “remain a virgin at 18” seems to me to actually be the higher expectation.

Everybody knows that the one child of the wealthy and highly educated couple is generally a spoiled child and has as a rule, poor health; while the six or eight children of the poor and moderately educated woman are exceedingly strong and lusty.

Exceedingly strong and lusty is hilarious, I wish we still talked like this.

But also…seems plausibly true. I’ve lived near a seven kid family before, and while I have no opinion on their strength or lustiness, they certainly seemed vibrant and not prone to sitting indoors all day. That may also have been a Mom trick to get some peace and quiet, but they were clearly not hothouse flowers.

On the other hand, we have a lot of single children these days and I have heard accusations that a lot of those kids are hothouse flowers. And there do seem to be more fragile kids around, which I believe is even born out statistically.

The 19th century might have been on to something.

Great find. Almost as good as Dabney's essay correctly predicting that giving women the right to vote would eventually lead to women demanding the right to have beards. You can make fun of the some of the specific physiological mistakes about the causal mechanisms (blood to the brain, phosphates) but the gist is seems true. Current fertility rates among college educated women are race suicide at a slow rate; now imagine current college educated woman lifestyles with 1900s medicine and nutrition ... it would be race suicide at a much faster rate.

Brace yourselves for some hard biological facts which only a medical man can speak on with assurance: higher education renders women insane!

Fact-check: true. https://www.benkuhn.net/grad/ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/09/1003980966/women-now-drink-as-much-as-men-and-suffer-health-effects-more-quickly

And it is generally admitted that the original American people have almost died out. Even the foreigners who are so quickly assimilated soon learn the practise of race-suicide, although never to the appalling extent of the native-born Americans.

All those last names from the history books and street signs and institutions of New England, the Mathers, the Hancocks, Longfellows, Appleton, Holyokes, Lodges, Cabot, Choate, all seem like out of a mythological past. The WASP went extinct due to first wave feminism.

Glad to see you support the idea that too much book larnin' drives women insane because it sucks all the phosphates that they need for whelpin' babbies!

Truly. Harry Enfield was indeed providing public service announcements.

Ha this reminded me of an old article I read about the anti-suffragettes, which I had bookmarked, and upon finding discovered it was written by Helen Andrews, who has been in the news recently, but whom I had not known of before (other than finding this blog post at some point).

https://herandrews.com/2015/03/01/women-against-suffrage/

higher education renders women insane! Yes, due to the strain it puts upon the delicate female brain, the added stresses of maternity leave what reason a woman may possess overturned!

Anyone who has kids with an educated woman knows this is true. But nobody says it because it's outside the overton window.

Speaking of not educating women, how is Afghanistan doing these days under the Taliban? This is not a rhetorical question. I want to know what things are actually like on the ground over there.

I have multiple friends who visited recently. I can PM some travelogues, instagrams etc. if you're really curious. (You can e.g. enter by land from Tajikistan and just enter with a US passport, no issues.)

Tl;dr: Ok, for men outside capital. "Ok" means better than the impoverished half of humanity in Africa and India, but way worse than Colombia, El Salvador or such (and far more expensive for luxuries). They're trying but we shouldn't expect economic growth or anything since the huge subsidies disappeared.

The capital's facing a water shortage, which will probably lead to mass deaths. International agencies were transporting supplies and subsidizing life in the capital, whose metro population doubled or tripled (depending on source) since 2000 while the aquifers sunk 100ft. The Taliban aren't particularly competent, but worse: They don't receive massive subsidies.

Pakistan's bombing the capital because the Afghani Taliban are harboring some group.

Otherwise, life in the North is "ok". Some Ismailis are being forced to convert. Beauty salons, women on TV etc. have been banned (but only after a few years). There's a "Fachkräftemangel" since women can no longer work in many fields (but are still common in medicine, education...), while the previous government exerted great effort to train them in particular. (I know some Afghan women in e.g. Indonesia or Turkey, now.)

Much criminality, drug use, pedophilia etc. have been eradicated. Thefts may or may not be up.

how is Afghanistan doing these days under the Taliban?

Tangentially related, and very funny, but the lads over there are discovering that it was way more fun to live life with an AK47 and a holy purpose than it is with a laptop and a rush hour commute.

https://time.com/6263906/taliban-afghanistan-office-work-quiet-quit/

“In the time of jihad, life was very simple. All we had to deal with was making plans for ta’aruz [attacks] against the enemy and for retreating,” said Huzaifa. “People didn’t expect much from us, and we had little responsibility towards them, whereas now if someone is hungry, he deems us directly responsible for that.”

“I sometimes miss the jihad life for all the good things it had,” said Nafi. “During jihad, you couldn’t have known the difference between a commander and a foot soldier like me.”

“What I don’t like about Kabul is its ever-increasing traffic holdups.” Omar Mansur, 32, said. ”These days, you have to go to the office before 8 AM and stay there till 4 PM. If you don’t go, you’re considered absent, and [the wage for] that day is cut from your salary.

Genuinely hilarious

Though it's hardly perceptible through a Western overton window, the Taliban moderated immensely to win back power while in exile. In essence, they purged any extra-Quranic elements of their organization (such as the unspoken Pashtun supremacism) to broaden the tent. This has had undeniably stabilizing effects (the semi-permanent anti-Pashtun rival army that had held out in the north for decades failed to reform this time as non-Pashtuns are represented at the highest levels) and some wish-washery that seems to please no one (the New Taliban likes modernity enough to force mujahids who just want to run around the desert shooting shit to get office jobs but not enough to keep schools open for Kabul's women). I've seen some conflicting evidence on whether they've managed to staunch Afghanistan's US-induced freefall in birthrate but it's probably too soon to tell.

I’ve heard that their periods can attract bears. The bears can smell the menstruation!

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