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And the risk is genuine, even if it's small. Get married in early 20s, be a housewife and mother, raise the kids, support his career (so he can work those crazy long work weeks to get the promotions and not have to worry about cooking meals, clean clothes, nice house to invite the boss back to for the networking dinner parties, bringing the kids to the doctor, etc.) and then you hit your forties and he trades you in for a newer, younger model and you're left with no independent income of your own, no career, no job history or one that is long out of date, and probably custody of and responsibility for the kids (if they're not adults by then).
Pretty much what happened to Mackenzie Bezos, except the new model wasn't younger, and pretty much the majority opinion on here was "why the hell does this leech expect to extract all that money from her poor husband who grew the fortune while she did nothing" (supporting him by working when he was trying to get Amazon off the ground, then being wife, mother, and homemaker for the rest of the marriage counts as 'nothing').
You see why women would want to be sure they have financial independence?
The institute for family studies has some interesting research showing that states in the US with more alimony have a higher percentage of married women as homemakers and a higher fertility rate within marriage.
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I've always seen that.
But the new equilibrium they find themselves in has undermined that goal entirely.
Meckenzie Bezos is also not the most sympathetic case because she's throwing piles of money around at any charitable cause that she can, its functionally an admission that she doesn't need that money to maintain her lifestyle, she just received a massive boon and has no desire to apply it towards herself at all.
Most of what I've read has indicated that this was not all that common of an occurrence, and relegated mostly to the upper classes, where a guy might have enough money to get a younger model. Middle/lower class guys hitting their 40s generally weren't finding hot young side pieces either. The lower class version of this was dad going out for cigarettes and never coming back.
I suspect it was a fear overblown by feminist rhetoric and probably caused more damage than it was worth, since the recent research I've read, which seems pretty reliable, pegs neuroticism as the personality factor most likely to result in relationship failure/divorce.
Or to put it bluntly, a partner being irrationally worried about their partner cheating on them or dumping them for a new partner is more likely to kill a relationship, than it is for the partner to actually do those things. Which doesn't mitigate the emotional impact when a partner does cheat, granted.
Turns out women have seemingly been getting more neurotic lately.
So my diagnosis is that women have been conditioned to fear being abandoned by their partner and left without support (a very rational fear in premodern times, less so now), and in that fear they're making decisions to sacrifice their fertility and sexual market value in their earlier years in hopes of gaining economic independence.
But the conditioned fear itself is contributing to them being less suitable for maintaining relationships... which means they're less likely to get a committed partner at all, on top of all the other forces working against them.
It is a point I keep coming back to. EVERY policy change in the past fifty years has favored women and their autonomy. You would EXPECT this to increase their comfort levels, and to increase their willingness to marry, since the risk of being left destitute is functionally nonexistent now. But lo and behold the exact opposite occurs. They're LESS comfortable... and LESS likely to marry. I don't know what you're supposed to do with a group who gets less satisfied the more privileges they're given.
As stated above, THEY ARE HEDGING AGAINST THE WRONG RISK. The risks associated with picking the wrong guy who abandons you in middle age (which can be mitigated!) are significantly smaller than the risks of delaying picking a partner at all.
Or so I argue.
It's still a risk that is higher for the wife than the husband. I've come across plenty of cases where "couple splits up, guy takes up with new partner, who if she isn't already pregnant soon becomes pregnant, guy is too involved with new family to do much about kids he's left with former partner".
And for Mackenzie Bezos, the attitude I wish to point out was that she did nothing, contributed nothing, so had no right to a fair share of Jeff's money. If it's demonstrably an attitude by the men who will be the future husbands that "marry me and be a full-time homemaker, and I will consider that the work in the home and family you do is nothing and isn't real work and isn't worth a monetary value". Do you really think a woman with any prudence will go into a marriage where she knows the view is "being a stay-at-home wife is being a leech on your husband" and leave it up to his good will as to whether he'll continue to support her should he decide greener pastures lie elsewhere? Having your own job and means of earning a living is security, quite apart from the modern pressure that both partners in the couple must be working and earning to have any kind of chance at home ownership, avoiding debt, etc.
Yeah, and WITHOUT marriage involved there's a common lower-class outcome of "guy knocks up 3 or more baby mommas, is involved in none of their lives, owes huge amounts of child support."
The alternative outcomes of a woman having no children whatsoever OR just having a child out of wedlock is generally not preferable!
My point is that even in the case where the woman is abandoned with a child in spite of being married, there are ample government and non-government social programs that will ensure she at least has a roof over her head, food, and protection from harm. IF she chooses to have a kid, a basic standard of living for said child is all but guaranteed.
Leaving out confounding factors like drug use or pure psychological illness, there is virtually no scenario where a woman is left destitute and to her own devices. Clearly it happens, there are a lot of homeless women out there, but in terms of risk calculation, for a 'normal' woman it is negligible.
And the one thing that reliably ensures a woman's happiness over the course of her entire life is generally "marriage to a decent guy and raising kids who love her." That's it. Nothing else provides the same level of consistent upside over the course of decades. And accepting the risk that a guy might eventually abandon her is the price of getting there.
If many women are too anxious or indecisive to take that initial risk, some additional social pressure to push them along would actually be beneficial overall.
Oh boy yeah, the amount of merry-go-round of A is with B, has baby, they split up, A goes on to C and B goes on to D, new babies: it's horrible. I saw it in a former job. But generally it is easier for a guy to move on to new partner (and new baby if new partner thinks this will solidify the relationship, though why they think that I can never figure out; he's already walked out on former wife and kids) than a woman with kids to get a new partner willing to commit. That's for nice middle-class people, not just the dregs and underclass.
And if you have a middle-class lifestyle, having the main breadwinner walk out and leave you with a couple of dependents does hit harder.
I've watched (from some distance) a scenario where a young woman gets knocked up by a guy she's living with, leave him, give the baby up for adoption, then finds another guy, gets knocked up, leaves him while pregnant and travels for a bit, gives the baby up for adoption, and then again just finds a guy to live with.
Insanely corrosive way of going through life.
But she can somehow always find a guy willing to put a roof over her head.
Sometimes I have to shrug and go "I have no idea how the hell this is working, but obviously it is".
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And I've come across plenty of cases where "middle aged woman goes insane, blows up perfectly fine marriage while all the kids are still in grade school, forces sale of family home, takes half of assets + half of guy's future retirement income, and proceeds to act like mid-20s party girl." Why do your anecdotes carry more weight than my anecdotes?
How do we measure that? Based on my anecdotes, I say the modern risk is much higher for the husband. And the anecdote I outlined, as I've seen it in the U.S., is far more common now among white-collar educated types than the scenario you outlined.
No, I don't say mine carry more weight. People who blow up their marriages for stupid reasons, no matter their sex, are in the wrong.
But if a possible mate is saying "Look, I think whatever work you do in the home if we marry is not valuable", then why would I marry them? Why would I give up a job and career on the assumption "my dear husband will appreciate what I do to support his career and raise our children in the years when I am no longer the hot 20 year old he bagged"?
The unfortunate reality is that very few men are going to marry women rich enough to support them if they give up their job and become house-husbands, while for women it's in general the opposite. Love may be blind, but there's an increasing trend towards pre-nuptial agreements even among those not wealthy or upper-class, simply out of mutual distrust: the men, that they will be 'divorce raped', the women, that they will be abandoned post-divorce. Or even in an amicable mutual separation, what happens to joint property? There's really an attitude of "what's mine is mine and what's yours is yours".
And even if you both trust one another, the pragmatic thing is "what happens if I become a widow? with young kids? what do I do then?" Granted, not so much a likely outcome as in the past, but still a possibility.
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Which makes this look like a positive feedback loop. And what you do is you stop responding in the way that perpetuates the loop. Which is why (in a related example) I get frustrated at people suggesting more maternity leave and subsidized childcare for working women and such as a way to increase TFR; the result of that is just the opposite.
That's my conclusion.
Rough as it sounds, the evidence is that giving women what they've said they wanted is becoming an albatross and we've sacrificed a lot of theoretical children on the altar of a false god. That's a melodramatic way to say "TFR has cratered", of course.
When I say "pressure women to actually settle" I DO NOT mean "force them to accept men they find unworthy, bar them from academia, mandate pregnancies, etc. etc.".
I literally just mean "Stop granting uncapped, unrestricted optionality that is subsidized mainly by the males they're refusing to settle for."
Women have been handed the unrestricted ability to pursue academic degrees, careers, travel, sex with anyone they want (and nobody they don't), raise kids or don't (irrespective of getting pregnant! She can abort if she wants, or adopt if she wants), imbibe whatever illicit substances she wants, associate with whomever she wants, and in many cases, inflict social ostracization and legal consequences on anyone she can gin up plausible enough allegations of abuse or sex pestism against.
In the case of attractive women, it isn't exaggeration to say that if she wants anything, literally anything, she just needs to broadcast that desire to the world (trivial thanks to social media) and it is all but certain someone will run out of the ether to give it to her.
The one thing that they don't get guaranteed for them in this life is "commitment from a high value male."
Which, irony of ironies, is basically the one specific thing they're actually wired to want. The very basis for all the intrasexual competition, the 'hypergamy,' the makeup, the social climbing, the degree-getting. Almost all else (except child-rearing) is arguably secondary to that evolutionary drive to lock down the male with the highest status in her vicinity.
So all that optionality and many of them are just cut off from the thing that nature programmed them to actually covet. Whoops.
My concern now is that between the women themselves who are wont to give up this optionality, the cohort of men who are wont to ever upset women, and the small cohort of men who are massively benefiting from the status quo (until it all crashes), there's no way to muster any political will to even adjust the current policy reality.
We've basically got some sub-majority portion of men, including the hardcore trads and the incel brigade, who would possibly be on board with any platform that includes "possibly telling women 'no, you can't have that.'" So as some on here have been saying, it seems like a "coup-complete" issue.
What I expect to happen at Current Rate No Singularity is that the first world never wakes up, we keep giving women more and more "rights" paid for by stealing from men (or at the very least refuse to repeal any such), the incels never revolt, TFR continues to sit in the toilet, the elites keep importing foreigners to make line go up, eventually patriarchal third worlders make up the majority of the population in formerly first world countries (if they aren't patriarchal, they won't reproduce, so immigration will continue until they are the only source) and that will be the end of feminism.
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