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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34556 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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A recent tragic event: Mother accused of killing three children in Massachusetts

A mother is accused of strangling three of her children before she jumped out a window in an attempted suicide at their suburban Boston home, officials said Wednesday.

An arrest warrant had already been issued Wednesday for Lindsay Clancy for two counts of homicide in connection with the deaths of her 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. Her 8-month-old son, who she's also accused of strangling and was "grievously wounded," has since died, NBC Boston reported.

First responders found three children in the home in Duxbury. The children were unconscious and “with obvious signs of severe trauma,” Cruz said. "Preliminarily it appears that the children were strangled,"

The Culture War angle: Following this event some TikTok accounts have released videos in support of the mother and voicing concern over mothers and their mental health, leading to discussion. Examples: https://postimg.cc/NKpX61ty, https://postimg.cc/vxT8d6jK, https://postimg.cc/CnnyNC9w, https://postimg.cc/8FvttKzK, https://postimg.cc/TK6wKhWK, https://postimg.cc/K3cXXSKv

Considering the nature of the crime I find the wording in the TikTok's off putting. This isn't phrased as something the mother, Lindsay Clancy 'did'. It's something that 'happened to her' and that she 'needs support'.

On a tangential note: This reminds me of an older sex war question surrounding female violence towards children and how women are treated in society. Specifically the terminology of SIDS. Sudden Infrant Death Syndrome. Which became a notable issue when multiple women who murdered their own children ended up, after a few years, being released scot-free. Neven Sesardić, a Croatian philosopher, wrote a very interesting article published in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Specifically relating to Sally Clark, a woman in the UK who was accused of murdering two of her children, and some relevant statistical analysis that cast aspersions on the validity of SIDS as it was relied on by expert witnesses to defend Clark in court. Along with leveraging statistical critiques against the Royal Statistical Society.

The tangential relevance here is whether or not Lindsay Clancy will be afforded similar legal leniency on top of everything else. Though with the hellish nature of the crime, one could only really hope for punishments that far exceed all the comforts that a lifetime in a women's prison will afford her.

I don’t think this woman deserves sympathy, but motherhood today is very stressful. Before feminism, motherhood was considered an important job and girls were raised at a young age to master the skill. Hence, girls were given dolls young so they could model the way their mother raised them at a young age, and so they would learn to multitask activities (mothers would gently reprimand their daughters if the doll was misplaced while eg cooking). Girls would spend time with women and mothers to learn from them and the separate spheres of male/female interest ensured that women didn’t have men’s stressors. Female culture and its emphasis on “nurturing feelings” like making a scarf for a loved one or beautifying a home was simply a way to prepare the mind for the bond required to raise a healthy child. A girl by the age of 14 would probably have mastered all of the domestic tasks she would be using at 24 as a wife. And so the tasks involved with motherhood would be mastered, which means their stress would be minimized. Women by and large did not have stressful work in addition to duties of mother/wife, or if they did, they would have wet nurses and hired help. Once a woman had a child, family would usually come to minimize the stress at the home. Women would also be around their child much more, forming a bond, because exclusive breastfeeding was common for 1-2 years and then intermittently reduced over 4.

We have essentially raised generations of women who are untrained in being a mother. It shouldn’t be surprising that PPP and PPD are high and that women feel overwhelmed. Motherhood is more like a musical instrument than a college course, you simply cannot learn it by studying from a book for a year at 25 or something. When you see a girl raised by a traditional family and especially if she had many younger children (having to act as a mother to them) her entire nature is different, you can literally feel the the nurturing soul.

Female culture and its emphasis on “nurturing feelings” like making a scarf for a loved one or beautifying a home was simply a way to prepare the mind for the bond required to raise a healthy child

I don't think this is an accurate representation of female culture for most of human evolution. Maybe 1900s american culture or parts of european aristocratic female culture? Do you have a source to elaborate on what you mean?

motherhood today is very stressful

It has literally never been easier

Medicating your child, giving him formula and an iPad, and sending him off to the BPD factory daycare has never been easier. But that’s not motherhood. That’s the industrial baby factory that the industrialized women of America can sense is their destiny (but hysterically impugn on the traditional mode of life, often in the traditional costume of the handmaid’s tale). The actual act of motherhood and meeting the needs of babies has never been harder. The depletion of oxytocin from insufficient mother-baby bosom contact and the eradication of mother-born bonds in the high alertness circadian rhythm hours are what leads to PPD and PPP (and BPD in the baby) and are exactly why these women commit infanticide, like a baboon in the wild doing the same when facing predation and lack of food or facing “male immigrant” stressor knowing that the new authority will slay their children like Herod (and unable to flee to the older tradition encoded in the flight to Egypt)

So the near-complete eradication of childhood mortality is outweighed because…bosom contact is slightly more inconvenient? The vast increases in housework efficiency by microwaves, refrigerators, vacuums, laundry machines and dishwashers thereby giving you more time for your children is outweighed by…circadian rhythms? The complete elimination of starvation as a realistic threat/stress is outweighed by…?

Any slightly objective assessment would find the scales tipped dramatically towards the past having far more dramatic stressors, hardships and timesinks than the present. I don’t see how you can realistically just handwave away six children in a row dying of scarlet fever as less stressful than the present

Childhood mortality and mortality in childbirth are stressful events, naturally, and every animal species deals with the death of children. That does not turn the entire enterprise into stress. A death during early years is stressful for the mother after it occurs, but this does not mean that all of motherhood and all of its tasks and labor spent are stressful. Women miscarried and their children died young, but this was normal during that period, and it’s not as if they didn’t social bonds to help them through the emotional pain.

The vast increases in housework efficiency by microwaves, refrigerators, vacuums, laundry machines and dishwashers thereby giving you more time for your children

… Are you kidding? The key difference is the 9-5 work week that most women are forced by conditions to deal with; the lack of training in motherhood; insufficient time spent with child and breastfeeding. That was the whole post. Mothers do not spend more time with their children in America today. Especially when you consider that “time” is not “experience salience”; the importance hours are during high alertness, not making them dinner after they’re exhausted from daycare/school.

I don’t see how you can realistically just handwave away six children in a row dying of scarlet fever as less stressful than the present

Sure I can. How about three children in a row being infanticided by their mother? How about women not even trying to have children because they find it too stressful? How about the increase in childhood obesity and autism which are associated with stressed mothers, or BPD increases associated with poor mother-child bond?

Women by and large did not have stressful work in addition to duties of mother/wife, or if they did, they would have wet nurses and hired help.

No. What about wet nurses and hired help? Did they have no stressful work, or did they have wet nurses or hired help of their own? Cooking and laundry and spinning used to occupy a lot of women's time.

Once a woman had a child, family would usually come to minimize the stress at the home.

Yes. Living in an extended family is much easier. Judging by the ages of her children, she has been a full-time mom for five years. It's impossible to do this alone and lead an "instagrammable" life at the same time. At some point you have to say, "fuck it, I don't care if your pants are covered in dry mud, they are dry and that's all that matters" or "fuck it, we're eating frozen lasagna today. Again" or "fuck your colic, Imma put the cot outside and listen to some relaxing music instead" or "fuck it, I ain't ironing anything ever again". If you have a sufficiently neurotic personality that you can't do this, you will break down sooner or later.

It’s easy to be confused about the etiology of stress. Wet nursing is not a stressful occupation. Generally speaking, when humans are doing tasks that they evolved to do, the task isn’t mentally taxing. (There was a study last month about how loggers have high life satisfaction, one of the highest of any profession. This is weird until you realize, “wait, men were designed to cut out trees and be in forests, of course they do.) A young woman who previously had a child nursing a child is possibly the least stressful task a person can do. Wet nursing was a regulated and solid profession for these women. Some of the oldest contracts we have are Babylonian contracts specifying nursing protocol for wet nurses. Remember that some women are born with what we moderns call humongous mommy milkers, and that breastfeeding significantly reduces their risk of breast cancer. Someone like Abigail Shapiro was designed by God to nurse babies, not to be an eh opera singer, and because she didn’t nurse babies she had to cut her boobas off (which is a crime against God). Women are literally designed to be around babies and there are a number of studies showing extensive health benefits for woman-child contact. Of course, when you raise every girl from 6-21 in a sterile classroom and tell them they should be a girlboss, maybe it’s stressful for them.

Spinning is a flow state activity. Not only is it not stressful, it is the very antagonist of stress. Cooking and cleaning are not stressful when you were raised to do this at 6 and mastered it at 10. Plug in “cleaning inspo” to YouTube and behold a bountiful gender imbalance. Then check out the gender ratio of whoever watches the great British bake-off.

But yeah, hired help would certainly have stressful lives. They were the bottom rung of society. Today we just feed them GMO slop and over-medicate them and whatever.

A young woman who previously had a child nursing a child is possibly the least stressful task a person can do. Wet nursing was a regulated and solid profession for these women.

Yes, but they still had to cook and wash and clean and do the rest of chores. It's not like they could scroll TikTok all day between the feedings.

Generally speaking, when humans are doing tasks that they evolved to do, the task isn’t mentally taxing

... no? Both "strenuous exercise", "difficult intellectual work", and "complex conflicts" are things people evolved to do, yet are 'mentally taxing'. Most efficient use of resources usually involves almost exhausting them sometimes (otherwise you use more!). This is like saying 'during evolution, human life was always good', forgetting the prevalence of disease / parasites.

You’re right that moderate exercise is something humans evolved to do, which is why it shown to be healthy in a number of ways and protective of stress.

Semiregular strenuous exercise is something humans evolved to do, and it's still mentally taxing - no matter how fit you are, you'll be tired and a lot less able to do difficult intellectual stuff after a long game of / session at the gym. I'm not saying it's bad, just that it's 'mentally taxing'. Evolution involved playing a lot of different tradeoffs against each other, not just a bunch of unreserved goods in all contexts.

The kinds of exercise humans evolved to do were long walks or jogs as a group to obtain a reward. The Hunter gatherer tribes still existent would walk to follow herds, and there are some that jog out to tire an animal (humans are the best at endurance jogging, not sprinting). You then have the exercise of chopping wood or obtaining dwelling materials.

Modern strenuous exercise attempts to be cost efficient but humans didn’t quite evolve for “sprinting for no reason” or “repeatedly lifting up extremely heavy thing while laying down”. When you take a fat American and you place him in a European city where he has to walk 30 minutes to obtain the buffalo meat cappuccino, this is generally considered relaxing and is why a lot of people are promoting walkable cities. There are studies on this. Importantly, humans evolved to not exercise when there is no salient appetizing reward.

Human males often evolved to fight, I suppose. I think men would be a lot more relaxed if they got to punch their boss.

But I’m at a loss why you think humans evolved to do difficult intellectual work. That’s the one thing we do that we are least evolved to do, and so it requires tremendous social incentive, decades of training, and the decidedly non-evolutionary skill of reading to accomplish. We did evolve to learn complex physical skills through imitating older members of the community, but that is much different.

I agree that most exercise was light over long durations, and the fact they're light + long-duration means they don't cause one to be that tired, but that coexisted with less-frequent shorter periods of strenuous exercise, which do cause exhaustion. Things like fighting other humans, moving heavy things.

We did "evolve to do difficult intellectual work". Things like planning for human conflicts or making boats are quite complicated.

While I have no doubt that most women would rather hold babies than make spreadsheets, and that mothering is probably much less stressful for women who are used to being around children requiring active care, being incredibly busy all the time(and just mathematically most women cannot have hired help, at most 50% of them can, and that’s assuming women do literally nothing else) is actually really stressful.

Of course. Women today are stressed because they have to work stressful jobs in addition to being mothers, in addition to being informed citizens. But it’s not busyness per se, it’s disparate tasks, non-mastered tasks, and ennui. The Amish fill up their day with busyness in excess of the girlboss cohort, and yet they have limited stress. This is because many of their tasks fit the Csikzentmihalyi model of optimal flow (among other reasons)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1049386707000369

If you have a sufficiently neurotic personality that you can't do this, you will break down sooner or later.

I wish I had a meme of a woman thinking she can handle a situation, with a giant looming monster behind her labelled "Statistically likely to be highly neurotic". And I doubt their statistical likelihood of being highly agreeable helps either. That peer pressure to fit in with all your "friends" instagrammable life is a bitch and a half.

These counterfactuals of "Yeah, if women just weren't neurotic, their lives would be a breeze" make me want to go "And while we're playing in fantasy land, what if I earned $1m every time I jacked off?"

But they are what they are. They appear to have a biology purpose designed to extract care for children out of them with a big ass stick of neuroticism, and not much carrot to go along with it. It's no wonder when Dworkin style feminist began exploring the human condition with respect to women, they began reacting with horror and disgust to childbearing and families.

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