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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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My whole perspective is that the spouses differing roles are complementary

Three sentences earlier:

if women are even less able to sustain a relationship if their partner is a woman, it indicates that they're not very good at being a 'partner' at all.

The perspective explicit in this statement, and implicit in most other trad apologia, is not "men are good at some things and women are good at other things, so they should both stick to what they're good at", but rather "women are bad at everything other than their biological prerogative, so they ought to stay in their lane while the men handle everything else of import". Through this lens, women are "complementary" to men only insofar as the servant complements his master. Although modern trads are always quick to assure us that they mean no such thing, learned men of ancient times understood this:

There are three attributes for which I am grateful to Fortune: that I was born, first, human and not animal; second, man and not woman; and third, Greek and not barbarian.

Edit: I haven't ever seen this point made, but classical liberalism is a statement of value-finder supremacy. This is distinct from communism and fascism, which are worker-supremacy movements (when workers are in oversupply or undersupply, respectively), and monarchism/oligarchy, which are goal-setter/manager-supremacy movements.

This is why classical liberal societies (and those inspired by them) all converged on this viewpoint.


Through this lens, women are "complementary" to men only insofar as the servant complements his master.

Sure, but the excuse made to constantly assert this is that X designates servant, and further, used as an excuse to be lazy about/completely ignore that's a deadweight loss if a master X (or a servant not-X re: Peter Principle) exists.

This is why societies that are sufficiently mercantile tend to be the freest ones, since the base condition of what allows them to be so mercantile is a deficit of laborers to produce whatever it is they sell. They're more concerned about exercising and expressing natural talents because encouraging more of that makes the society more productive, rather than a dirt-poor society where that would be a net-negative due to lack of resources or market.

(Also, if you're a Christian society there tends to be an associated meme of actively checking for overlooked potential for what ultimately comes down to... better service. The US is obsessed with underdogs partially for this reason.)

"women are bad at everything other than their biological prerogative, so they ought to stay in their lane while the men handle everything else of import"

to the trads: they already know that, stop rubbing it in, that's only making it worse