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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Medicine's particularly tricky to get with normies due to a combination of relocating a lot during peak years and absolutely brutal hours. Most top tier earning/educational professions don't have the same risk of being banished to the middle of nowhere for 3 years in order to get residency or specialization requirements out of the way.

On the flip side, medicine is unusually legible to marriage-minded women who are into that kind of thing as a high-potential career track. There is a reason why <culture X> mother jokes involve the daughter marrying a doctor.

You could probably use "What fraction of lower-middle class women want to be a doctor's wife?" as a measure of family-orientation across ethnic groups.

At least to me, it would code 'not going to be around the house much, will have constant life-or-death calls on his/her time that will take precedence over you, likely nice but permanently stressed'. Rather a double-edged sword.

Very much agreed - lore when I was a teenager considering careers was that doctors had some of the highest divorce rates as a result. (No idea if this was or is correct or not)

But the same is true of any other high-earning upper-middle-class career, apart from the life-or-death aspect. The thing that is different about doctors that makes marrying a doctor a meme is their visibility. I suspect marrying a doctor really is the easiest route for a lower-middle-class woman to enter the upper-middle-class.