This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"
On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).
On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).
Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:
And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".
Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".
It's obviously more efficient for the general economy and trade to have half your population working than sitting around at home doing nothing productive and no amount of "traditional values" or desires will change that basic fact.
Even history, despite the poor conceptualizations of it among many nowadays, does not refute it. Women historically did work plenty, they just didn't do it at a typical job. Almost all of the "women's work" nowadays is the easy baby casual mode difficulty of what they had to do back then. Doing laundry manually is exhausting and that's despite our understanding of detergents and cleaners being better (a lot of women would burn their hands from the lye and not know better). Cooking and handling food before refrigerators, modern preservatives and supply chains that help keep the food fresh even before you get it and widespread electricity (and thus appliances) is quite difficult. Clothes were way way more expensive and that's if you could even buy them (during the Great depression things were so bad you might even make clothes out of flour bags) and thus sewing wasn't a relaxing hobby but a time intensive necessity so your kids had functional clothing. Even many of the lower noblewomen, who might have a few servants but not many, had a fair bit of of work to be done. And of course many of those servants were women too.
The modern tradwife stereotype is a fiction, one created by automation and modern supply chains. Women were spending their days doing work and being productive, it's just work that isn't needed nowadays.
Indeed and clothes circa a hundred years ago were as expensive as cars today. Working professionals used to spend a significant portion of their yearly income on a meager set of clothing.
Likely depends on the clothing, I don't know if it's that bad but yeah apparel was like 14% of the household budget back in 1901.
Actually considering that the standard recommendation for a car payment is about 10%, if we don't include gas or other costs and just the vehicle alone then cars are actually cheaper than clothes were back then relative to budgets. Of course plenty of people go over that recommendation but still a great showcase of how expensive labor intensive work like that was and how much poorer we were in general. And that's of course still ~100 years after the sewing machine, I can only imagine it must have been even greater before that.
And even more so because it was so expensive, they had less outfits than we do now as well. Double whammy! Way more expensive for a lot less.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Housewives, especially with children, are doing valuable and productive work which simply doesn't contribute to corporate bottom lines. They're doing less of it than they did in the past, but men also work fewer hours(six twelves was literally considered a desirable schedule at one point!).
More options
Context Copy link
So... cooking, cleaning, shopping, taking care of husband and children, being involved in elder care, maintaining the house - that's all "sitting around doing nothing"?
Gosh, I had no idea my house miraculously looked after itself so all that scrubbing I did this morning was completely unneeded and was, in fact, sitting around doing nothing productive! Whereas if I worked for a contract cleaning firm doing the exact same job of cleaning but in an office building, not my home, that would be Real Productive Work!
There's an old joke about this. Something along the lines of two economists are talking. One mentions that a local wealthy man married his maid recently. The second laments how that will harm the GDP.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes that is relatively nothing compared to the work women had to do in the past. Compare the ease of starting an oven and going to the fridge/pantry and then setting a timer for your food to stir every once in a while vs having to pile up firewood in your wood burning oven (or more likely, you're using a hearth) and it's extremely hot and you also have to monitor it far more because the temperatures were rather variable between meals. You might spend four hours a day just on work related to the stove
Cleaning is a bit harder too, you'd probably be making your own soap (and like many women would not have great knowledge on it so you'd hurt yourself from the lye), and using stuff like vinegar and rum as cleaning aids. You don't have vacuum cleaners, there's soot and ash everywhere from the aforementioned wood ovens, stoves and hearths, no dishwashers, and like I explained in the previous comment laundry is way harder. People complain about doing the laundry now when it's basically just "put soap and clothes into machine and press button" easy, imagine doing it all by hand and having to seriously worry about colors blending and mixing and coming off because the detergent tech wasn't there yet either for mixing to go well. The skin peeling off your hands after laundry day because of the hours (often over days it was that intensive) of work scrubbing the clothes in abrasive poorly made soap.
It's not literally nothing, but life is way way easier nowadays and much of that labor shifted from domestic chores to other work.
It only took you the morning huh? I guess the evening was to manage and prepare livestock, haul some water, mending your children's clothes, pounding sugar loaves, sifting the flour, and plenty of other chores.
I mean you know workers in the workforce also work fewer hours, right? We're a wealthier society and people don't work as long.
More options
Context Copy link
Honey bun, I grew up with no running water and my mother washing clothes for a family of six by hand. Don't tell me I have no idea about the difficulties of past labour, it wasn't in the past so far as I and the neighbours around me were concerned.
There's still a lot of work to be done in households now; we expect washing to be done regularly, not just on one specific day. The house should be cleaned every day, not just once a week or longer intervals where you would take up carpets. All the modern conveniences did take the physical labour out of things, but there is still work to be done. And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available". Just as mechanisation in the office did not mean "gosh, now I can get all the letters typed in the morning that used to take all day to write by hand, I can go home at twelve o'clock now with my work day over!" but rather "now there is even more work to be done because now instant replies to letters is the new expectation", so with housework.
Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives, and that's just one of the 'expansion of expectations' - now you have to manage all the extracurriculars your child/children should be doing, for one thing.
We only wash/clean once a week, but we don't invite people over without advanced planning. There was a time when I had a baby in a 500 sq ft apartment, and would only go to the laundromat once a month (and I don't have a huge amount of clothes), but I suppose I was to some degree slumming it at the time.
More options
Context Copy link
You're pretty much either really really old, not American, or were the super poor and rural folk if you grew up a substantial amount of time without running water. I'll believe it, but it's definitely rare enough to be questionable. But even with that, you were a kid and not experiencing all the adult parts of life for yourself. You were the one being taken care of, not the caretaker so it's bound to look and seem a lot easier from your life perspective anyway.
Additionally while "without running water" is worse off than people have it nowadays, that's only one of the various improvements that technology has brought to household work. Unless you wanna say your mother also cleared out the ash and soot from a wood stove, killed and defeathered live chickens from the market, and hauled tons of firewood on top.
If you're spending a whole morning every day cleaning up now, then your family is either top percent dirty or you're OCD. That is not common or necessary for most families.
Exactly, many women with newfound time available to them got jobs to fill that time with new work.
Exactly! Women, thanks to technology, are spending less of their time in hard labor tasks and more of their time bonding directly with their children. It is in some way "work" still yes, but this comes about because there's so much more free time when you don't have to beat the rugs or mend the shoes or make the soap.
She's Irish.
Well I got no idea what conditions would have been like for the Irish housewife then. I would guess it's rather similar but I can't say for sure.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's kind of sad, isn't it? One of those things that makes me think mankind's problems are inherently unsolvable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Historically, a lot of women’s work took place inside the household economy rather than in the formal labor market. That kind of domestic production, cooking, childcare, clothing repair, food preservation, was productive but largely untaxed. When labor shifts into formal employment, it becomes taxable income, increasing the overall tax burden on households.
Higher taxation reduces disposable income, which can make raising children more expensive and is often associated with lower fertility rates in developed economies.
Because of this, maximizing the number of people in the formal workforce isn’t automatically better for families or demographics. You need a high postive money or "energy" inflow for a natural system to be able to reproduce, same physics applies for humans.
The idea of taxation suppressing productivity and income is obvious, so obvious that it is a basic tenet of economics.
In theory yes, in practice almost half of US households don't pay an income tax to begin with. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/
They might pay some other forms of taxes like social security, but they aren't paying an income tax. And even then, most of it is still just the high earners who already make so much that the taxation isn't suppressing things in the same way it would with someone poorer.
Now this isn't true both because the premise isn't real but also the obvious part that if working wasn't meaningfully more beneficial than staying at home and watching TV, people would stay at home and watch TV. The idea that it isn't better is disputed by the chosen actions of the everyday American.
I agree that focusing only on income tax probably doesn’t capture the full picture. A more useful way to approach the issue is to look at the overall cost of living and the net resources households actually have available. Housing, childcare, healthcare, education, and other expenses can place a significant burden on families regardless of whether their income tax liability is high or low.
Regarding the second point, my argument is simply that reproduction in any natural system requires a positive inflow of resources. For humans, that translates to having sufficient financial stability to support children, and for most people: maintaining a desired standard of living. People have different expectations for quality of life, and most are not willing to significantly lower their living standards just to have one or more additional childeren. I would argue that if families could maintain their current social and economic position while experiencing an increase in disposable income, many would be more inclined to have more children.
Fundamentally, modern capitalism rewards childless women with status--higher incomes, more prestigious jobs, bigger homes, more fame and attention. If you're status-maxxing in the modern world, then family is an impediment to success. This competition favors women who eschew femininity and childcare, and so women predisposed as such increasingly set the pace in the status race. Other women, even those who merely seek to settle into the middle of the pack (to feel "normal"), marginally shift their priorities and goals in the same direction as the childless workaholics. This extreme shift in the female status hierarchy is relatively recent, and it is unsustainable over multiple generations for obvious reasons.
Children are a public good that is being under supplied because women now have fewer ways to internalize the benefits in the short run. Status is not the only motivation to supply public goods, but it's a big one, perhaps the biggest, and it is likely necessary to get over the hump of replacement fertility rates.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean it’s only short term more efficient. Essentially, the idea is the same as eating your seed corn. Sure, short term it’s more efficient to eat every single seed of corn you produce. Except that eventually you come to the next season, have no corn to plant and thus will have no future crops to harvest. And essentially, I think this is how our entire society is structured— what matters is not long term success, but the next quarter, the next year, or the next whatever, *even if it means destroying the long term future of your company and society.”
Considering that women were already participating in labor intensive work, just unpaid domestic work that doesn't fit the "job" archetype, I don't see much reason to believe that working is the general cause of people not having babies.
Maybe there's some sort of difference in the work of sitting typing in an office into a spreadsheet vs doing laundry manually for hours, spending hours sewing clothes, getting fresh water and the other types of hard and time consuming house work that women were doing which promotes fertility in the latter but not the former but it's not a very clear difference.
It’s not just working that’s at issue. It’s working for other people outside of the home, thus creating a situation where the woman is tasked with keeping house and cooking after a full on workday. Add to this that such an arrangement pretty much requires that the family fork over tens of thousands of dollars a year to warehouse the kids while mom and dad work, and that if anything less than ideal happens to the kids, they’re blamed, and you have a situation where having a child (let alone 3-5) is just so daunting time and money wise that a lots of couples don’t even try.
More options
Context Copy link
It's the double whammy of having to have a job outside the home, then you come home and the ordinary work still has to be done, plus you have to be available for demands of work. If you need to take time off for bringing kids to the doctor, dentist, stay home with a sick child, etc. then you find yourself falling behind or even let go because "yeah you're not here to do the job you're being paid to do". If you want to get on in your career, you need to be able to devote yourself to the job at least in the early years. If you want a life where eventually you can afford to have kids, you need that career. If you have kids early on, you can't have that career. It's catch-22.
Now, it's not impossible, I'm working in a place where lower middle-class to middle-middle class are working, and managing to have families. But it's not going to be the kind of "this is High Value Human Capital Driving The Economy Line Go Up Better World Through Progress" work and careers that is also complained about (not enough Smart Productive People having babies, why not? Because it's very damn difficult to eat the cake and still have it, is why).
More options
Context Copy link
The obvious difference is moving from an environment where it is easy to watch children to one where children are effectively prohibited. A pre-modern woman doing domestic labor is working fairly hard, but it's work that (for the most part) allows you to keep one eye on the kids and can be easily interrupted. As work increasingly moves out of the home, that stops being practical. This isn't that big a deal when men do it, because they weren't doing much childrearing anyway, but when women do it forces a choice between working and taking care of your children.
A lot of modern jobs could replicate this - the biggest problem letting white collar workers take their young children to work is that it might be distracting - but making every day Bring Your Child To Work Day doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar. And I imagine managers and business owners would not be thrilled about it.
It's not just effectively prohibited, it's actually prohibited, even for child care workers. The children cannot be with their parents, they must be enrolled, taxed, and watched by someone else.
I'm talking about children young enough to not be enrolled in school. The truant officer isn't going to come and arrest you for bringing your 1-year old to the office, but your boss will probably be annoyed if you keep doing it.
That's what I'm talking about as well.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The other thing you need is an environment where it's acceptable to keep only one eye on the kids rather than both, and if the kids do escape supervision and get into trouble, it's considered normal and not neglect.
More options
Context Copy link
I recall the topic of corporate-provided childcare coming up in a company-wide chat at a medium-sized tech company I once worked at that considered itself employee-friendly and kept a sponsored GP doctor on site to encourage annual physicals. At the time the executive response was largely centered around insurance costs and liability. To be fair, the response was similar when asked about a pool for the company gym, but it does seem a reasonable concern that a jury would find the company liable for incidents regardless of the internal structure in ways that a separate building next door with no legal ties.
Observation: as far as I know, there aren't any large corporate chain daycare (and many other large-scale child service providers), possibly because liability risk bounds the benefits of corporate mergers and acquisitions.
Although I did also once work at a startup where someone started bringing their dog to work daily. At least it was pretty well-behaved.
Multisite corporate daycares are a thing in the UK, but the reason you don't see large corporate chain daycares is the lack of economies of scale. It is a business which depends on the quality of on-site management, and the best way to motivate and retain quality on-site management is to let them own the business. This is why so many chain restaurants are franchises. And there is no point in franchising daycare because there is no travelling trade of people who have to choose their daycare based on a national brand.
More options
Context Copy link
You could do it, but it would be expensive. And also probably taxed, because it would be considered benefit-in-kind. Would people be willing to work for Company A if it paid less because "and we include subsidised/free child care" than Company B which pays more (but you have to source and pay for your own child care)?
Also, just thinking about most office buildings and where they're located, it probably would be tough to convert part of the building into childcare facility (e.g. you need some kind of outdoor space/playground area for the kids to run around. Believe me, you got a room full of hyped-up four year olds, you want them to run around and burn off that energy). I do imagine your insurance premiums would go up by a hefty amount. Here's an example from Irish insurance provider for child care centres:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link