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Well, the biggest reason I replied then was because that's when I saw it. I didn't have time to write a reply until now-ish. I don't live on this forum and semi-regularly get quite busy.
Regarding the subject of varying opinions, you're missing the point. Of course people have varying opinions. But you cannot say "nobody is saying X" when there are people saying X right next to you. You really shouldn't be saying "nobody is saying X" when you are saying X. You, specifically, call out accusing gender traditionalists of holding up idealized historic gender relations as a kind of strawmanning and then proceed to hold up idealized historic gender relations: "It's largely women that have a problem with this in 2025, not men. They're the ones who want to hold men to historic conventional standards of behavior." (emphasis mine) I did not "blow past" this. The fact that historic conventional standards of behavior do not reflect what you seem to think they did is my point.
This is also missing my point. Suppose you think motherhood is the most valuable thing a woman can do. Great, awesome. Surely if motherhood is that important, women deserve say and rights comparable to men. Why, then, do our gender neo-traditionalists complain about gender equality and claim that men are entitled to a privileged status on account of all the special responsibilities they assume? Why is men's work held up as load-bearing while women's work isn't?
"Human mating is too important to leave to individual initiative" does not in any way imply a male-led social order, and yet for some reason the people saying that always seem to come back to it, as if women are the ones who need to be convinced to settle down. There might be some half-hearted condemnations of male promiscuity, but it usually gets written off while the focus is always on bringing women to heel. (In point of fact, I don't think men or women need to be pushed that hard to settle down - most of this discourse is focused on highly visible outliers, but that's a separate matter). I rather strongly suspect that this is because they want women in a subservient social role. That, in turn, is because they see women as inferiors. Certainly, I have enough firsthand experience seeing that a lot of men really don't like dealing with women as peers.
That's very clearly not true in both particulars. To the first: a lot of men (including people here) very pointedly complain that they find this or that aspect of modern life emasculating. Witness the anger over "HR ladies", "feminization of the workplace", demands for bringing back traditionally masculine jobs, etc... This rebellion against the breakdown of old gender roles is a huge part of the appeal of manosphere-type media. To the second: men are generally more willing to date down than women, but less willing to date up (see also: feeling emasculated). Yeah, there aren't a lot of female doctors who want to marry male plumbers; there also aren't a lot of male plumbers who want to marry female doctors.
Likewise, there are a lot of behavioral social scripts that govern our interactions, but it is far from obvious that unequal gender relations are the 'best' way to handle things. As with the mating problem, there seems to be a strong preference in right-wing spaces for social scripts that subordinate women. Obviously, that's not terribly surprising - anti-feminism is what marks them as right-wing in context - but it shows the same tendency to insist new things can't work even as they are actively functioning. Very clear, men are capable of treating women with common decency, regardless of the enforcement of gender roles. The fact that many of them don't (and actively resent the suggestion that they should) is an indictment of them as individuals, not a particularly compelling argument for traditionalism.
I'm sure there are a bunch of people here who feel persecuted on account of their interactions with women. I find it hard to believe they've never been told 'good job' or 'I love you' unless they are incompetent and have incredibly toxic families and social groups, neither of which are gendered issues.
Did they? Decree 770 was one of the first things to go after Ceaușescu got got, and in the interval required a totalitarian enforcement apparatus (and resulted in an enormous number of abandoned children). This is less 'conservative' and more the kind of thing conservative anti-communist writers would make up to make communism look bad. If your policy proposal leads to people overthrowing you and shooting you on TV, I think it's safe to dismiss its viability (and yes, I'm aware that the Romanian Revolution was not about this specific issue, but you can't separate totalitarian policy from totalitarian regimes).
Georgia, as far as I can tell, basically pulled the same "please have sex" maneuver a lot of countries have. It just somewhat unexpectedly appears to have worked, unlike, e.g. Japan or Denmark. Great that it worked for them, but the fact that it hasn't elsewhere indicates they either got lucky or there's some Georgian idiosyncrasy.
Have you heard that from me?
Show me on single person in TM that has ever said "the 1950's was a utopia for relationships," and I will retract my reply that that is a strawman. You're conflating two separate points on this issue.
If you didn't blow past it then why did you take issue with something I agreed with you about? It seems your disagreement with me is based on something I never said.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I've said the exact 'opposite' of this. I've said I think if a woman chooses to pursue a professional vocation she absolutely should. If a woman wants to pursue a commitment to family life, that should be considered a full time job and should be paid for by the state. What's the issue I'm supposed to have with this?
This should be pretty obvious. Show me where all these matriarchies are in the present day or throughout history in comparative terms. History's rendered a pretty clear judgment on this.
Trust me, I've known men who have thought this way. There are definitely men who think like this and try to control them for all kinds of reasons. All of them as such have issues that become clear if you get to know them.
HR departments are necessary. Especially in large institutions. If you employ 100 people and expect there never to be interpersonal difficulties between others, disagreements and professional worries to process through and review you're a fool. But the stereotypes around the attitudes of the people that often populate these departments draws attention because most people have experienced it through their interactions with them.
That's a symptom of the problem. This all goes back to the 1960's. I was around before social media was a thing. Trust me, this absolutely existed before YouTube. And then before Facebook. And then before MySpace. All social media today has done is put a camera in front of it. The breakdown of gender roles in this sense also coincided with an e collapse in parental authority over misbehaving children and constant arguments between husbands and wives over pursuing individual desires over being a responsible and cohesive family unit. I've seen it dude. You may say, "well that isn't a causal relationship." And it may not be. But it highly tends to follow after the fact.
Shit like this would've got you murdered in my family by my father and grandparents. I was very harshly disciplined when I misbehaved as a kid. If the stuff that happened to me was repeated today, my parents would be in jail. What was done to me wasn't the best way for them to get their point across and the rod often carries emotional damage people carry later in life. I'm not against spanking at all, but there are much better ways to raise children than how I was taught. In my own life one of the things my parents would always do when I was growing up was accuse me of doing things I never did and lying about things I never lied about. I sometimes used to wonder if that was some kind of reverse psychology tactic. Maybe the entire point was for them to make me that way. Because if I'm being accused of X constantly, well then I'll just become the thing they're accusing me of in the first place because why not?
If a child gets into trouble and you catch them in a lie, you don't ask them if they're lying. You already know they did. By asking them, you're inadvertently training and teaching your children how to lie to you. The goal should be for your children to come up with solutions to problems and ask what they can do to fix what they've done and not do what they did, in the future. That doesn't mean your children never get into serious trouble with you. But a lot of parents don't try to understand how to parent correctly and they don't think deeply about what it is they're doing. Punishing them when they "tell the truth" in the case of demanding the answer you want to hear of your children versus punishing them "telling a lie" only ever showcases that lying is a gamble. A gamble that's totally worth it if you get away with it in 9 out of 10 cases.
Sure. Part of it may feel being emasculated. The other part owes to the fact that men and women aren't after the same thing in relationships. Income is wholly irrelevant to a man's desire for a woman. If she has what he's looking for, whether she makes $70k a year or $1m a year makes no difference to him. Yes, this don't apply for "absolutely every single" man out there. But it might as well by the lopsided preferences men overwhelmingly have.
Yeah. Because of the differences you encounter. Read the immediate statement quoted above.
Again, you're putting words in my mouth:
Thus far, it has been the best way.
Let's just be honest dude. With guys who have no opportunities to score, it's just jealousy and envy. Nothing more. Guys will lie about it to save face and not lose social standing. But that's really what it is. But look at it from the standpoint of being an advocate for the young women in your own life. You'd quickly understand their perspective on things if you were forced to be their advocate. Guys don't like confronting that, so they'll divert from and redress the issue in other subtopics which they think will favor their point of view and conceal their internal feelings of frustration about the matter out of embarrassment.
But again, who can blame women for wanting to avoid men like that? A woman would have to be insane not to be turned off by those men. When it comes to me, I wouldn't let guys like that within 100 yards of my niece or younger female relatives. And then I'd get decried for being a "misogynist" for "controlling" their behavior if they choose to associate with such guys who would mistreat and abuse them. What gives? I'm only trying to guard their own interests and be protective of them...
Extreme. Just as I said it was.
It's "conservative" in the sense it's collectivistic and paternalistic. And even of the terminal values itself (technically speaking). Natalism is a primary concern of conservatives. Myself included.
I'm not at all saying I advocated what he did. I'm simply stating an observation that it worked. Draconian? Absolutely. And yet, very practical. The remainder of that comment I don't see any substance in replying to.
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