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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29478 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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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".

The Construction Industry Federation (CIF) had called for sustained strong leadership to further grow the number of women employed in the sector.

The CIF said it is essential to support the drive to meet Ireland's housing, infrastructure and climate challenges.

According to the federation, just 11% of those employed in construction in Ireland are women.

"We can’t afford, economically or socially to draw from only half the population," said CIF CEO Andrew Brownlee.

"The challenge is too big, and the opportunity to attract and retain the best talent to our industry is too important," he added.

The CIF is hosting an International Women’s Day Summit in Co Meath today.

The event is focused on highlighting pathways to careers in construction for women including via STEM subjects and construction-related apprenticeships.

"Our industry is changing and evolving every day and we will become even stronger as our workforce diversifies," said Joanne Treacy, Southern Regional Director with CIF.

"Our International Women’s Day Summit, which this year has the theme 'Give to Gain', will showcase an exceptional line-up of leading female experts to illustrate to women and girls from school-age onwards the vast opportunities a career in construction can bring," Ms Treacy said.

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:

The greatest education I have ever received was in the workplace.

There is nothing quite like learning on the job, having systems and processes seared into your psyche through repetition, and occasionally learning things the hardest way of all – by enduring the shame of doing a task completely wrong and being told off.

But there is also great learning in having a job you don’t enjoy.

...The 17-year-old also learned some valuable life lessons during his recent week of work experience. He managed to get a few days working in a food production facility, and there he also learned a lot about modern food production, specifically, that much as he loves the end product, he’s not wild about being part of the magical process of making it.

It was an incredibly demanding few days, with dawn starts, long hours, and working at breakneck speeds to keep up with those around him. I’ve seen him take two days to unload a dishwasher so I can only imagine the pressure he felt.

But the experience made him start thinking about the future – any time we try to bring up college or career, he seems not to have any particular plan, or even really grasp the concept, but his work experience helped him focus on that in the same way I did.

After leaving school and dropping out of college, I worked in a kitchen for two years, where I learned a lot, mainly that I have absolutely no culinary talent, but also that I needed to go back to college and get some qualifications so I could get a job where I didn’t have to chop onions for ten hours a day.

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?".

The reason the industry wants to recruit women is because they want to spend less money on paying workers, so that they (the owners) can make more money. We really need to stop trusting business owners when they say there is a shortage of workers. A true shortage means that the owner no longer owns a mansion.

if you want a reasonable standard of living

I bet half of men would accept living a poorer lifestyle if it meant coming home from work to a sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went. For such a wife, men would be happy with one pair of clothes and taking buses and living in a shack. Many men would give up all their luxuries for this singular luxury. What square footage, expensive watch, or number of baubles could ever compensate for a stressful partner who nags because both have to work and there are domestic duties that need to be done and everyone is exhausted and you have to order microplastic slop because no one was trained to cook or has time to cook? Hard to imagine more harm done to standard of living than this. Didn't we learn anything from Shrek? Or Rousseau?

But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved"

You’ve got about a century to find the solution before the native Irish population is dropped to below 20%, ie you have lost the game of life. The most practical solution (because anyone can do it) is to form patriarchal microcultures where women are excommunicated for certain lines of work while commended to train in the traditional feminine arts. Then you can once again go back to the norm of happy families and SAHMs. You can share wealth from the wealthiest to the poorest members in this community, as was tradition in Christian Ireland for many-a-century. Then you just add some community rituals and you have yourself a functioning above-TFR community forever. The gypsies do this and they are dominating Europe’s TFR scene; the Irish travelers do it and have above 2 TFR. The alternative is to persuade the elites to care about their nation, which seems… delusional.

The ideal of a "stress-free woman" is not how human relationships work, including marriage as a logical subset. I mean I didn't think it needed to be said, and maybe this wasn't your intent, but women are people too, and ALL (meaningful) relationships take some kind of work or investment. And no, simply paying the bills doesn't count (although it IS a large input). With that said, yes I agree that a decent share of (especially current modern) men would take that tradeoff. Truly, money and status doth corrupt and lead to nearsighted, misguided happiness pursuits. Including many 'liberal' efforts that are counterproductive (from claims that 'all happiness is relative' ignoring basic needs to overly self-indulgent prioritization to rejecting some fundamental human patterns).

I also think "excommunicating for certain lines of work" is an unacceptable values tradeoff, even if it's practical in the sense that it's been done before and 'worked'. As a culture we certainly are too individualistic, the extremes need to be dialed back, and yeah it's possible that as a society we need to figure out if there are better ways of wealth sharing for mutual baseline prosperity than some of the lackluster or downright harmful solutions some have proposed or tried (e.g. communism). As a sort of system-first moderate, I honestly think the Bernie liberals might be on to something with the idea that we can get something decent with smart and targeted tax and governmental policy, but there's probably still at least some kind of gap beyond that. Ideally, I think the uber-rich should do a better job of self-cultivating values of giving back on a more direct level (beyond just creating vanity projects, larger yachts, and giving indirectly via somewhat useless nonprofits), though as a society we can't really force that to happen very easily if at all.

Regardless, I feel like cultural technology can solve this problem even if we haven't quite yet. Along those lines, I don't view stuff like 10% quotas bad at all - some decent research suggests that many fields have "tipping points" where being too homogenous hurts (perhaps in output, but definitely in terms of allowing the minority class to feel welcome or stable). That is not to say that 50% in every field is an ideal. Just that some reasonable minimum allows the society to fulfill the value of "allow people to do and work how and where they want without making it a major pain" while still permitting some 'natural' gender differentiation. In that sense, of course lots of modern liberal efforts are misguided alongside their disproportionate effort, but it doesn't mean all modern liberal efforts at better parity are worthless!

It’s a reality in cultures with traditional conditioning, although I understand that it’s hard to imagine such a thing in our present culture where, as far as I can tell, there does not exist a single piece of media or art, or a even single role model, or even a song or a small paragraph of text, intended to condition the values of thanks, selfless love, meekness, or obedience in women. These are the fruits of traditional social value conditioning, with heroines and saints and God, and cultural behavioral techniques like meditation in the east and prayer in the West. Were you born in the time of Albrecht Dürer, girls would venerate “Mary meek and mild” in the same way they now venerate some ice skater or pop singer, and you would meet women like Mama Dürer who had zero stress despite living hell on earth:

We do know that he had a very close relationship to his mother, Barbara Dürer, who was only nineteen when Albrecht, her third child, was born. In the course of the following twenty-one years she gave birth to another fifteen children, the last in 1492. All but Dürer and two very much younger brothers died; as he describes it: ‘some in their childhood, others as they were growing up’. Reading his observations on his mother’s nature in his Family Chronicle, we are struck by the associations they evoke of contemplative descriptions of the Virgin Mother. Thus Dürer tells us that her favourite pastime was to speak of God and praise him, that she suffered ‘illnesses, poverty, mockery, contempt, and snide words, fears and obstacles, and yet felt no spite’, but quietly continued ‘her pious ways and acts of mercy to every man’, observing her children’s religious upbringing, and habitually receiving and dismissing Albrecht and his brothers with the same phrase: ‘Go in the name of Christ’.

On its face, training women in such a fashion does seem delusional, absurd, ridiculous… but the thing is, all the other options are even more delusional, and in fact have never been done before. Germany with its incredible maternal benefits failed to move the needle, and they will be a lot poorer for the next centuries. If what we want is happiness and existence then I think we have to throw away the false gods of individualism, “self-actualization”, and “education” (the very things which got us into this mess, and other messes).

IIRC conservative gender roles are measured by how many women work traditionally male jobs, not by female workforce participation- because female workforce participation is often initially driven by poverty, market penetration, etc. as much as feminism. 'Excluding women from certain lines of work' appears to be the sine qua non of conservative gender roles.

wants to listen to how their day went

Absolutely fucking not. This question is either a shit test, or a continuing assessment of the beta bux potential. I wish back when I had or was anything I had a lover who explicitly didn't give a damn about how my day went.

There's a difference between "wants to listen to how their day went" and "wants to know how their day went". I interpreted the hypothetical as a wife who's happy to listen if you need to vent, not one who will necessarily ask if you'd rather talk about something else.

For some reason it reminds me of the old green text where a cashier tells anon to have a nice day.

>wife asks me how day at work was

>tell her it was good

>it wasn’t 😈

I have experienced "shit tests" and annoying interrogations from women, but "How was your day?" isn't one of them.

"What is your plan for the day?" is the dangerous one.

Agreed. I would add "How was your day?" is also a way for her to judge your emotional state and adjust accordingly. Most guys (and I include myself in this group until my wife started explicitly pointing it out) don't realize that when we first come home from work, especially if theres a shit commute involved, that we're about the grouchiest we will be all day.

Multiply that by frequency.

What does that even mean? She asks how your day was every day? And you interpret this as a hostile interrogation?

When it's an every day question where you can't win and can only lose, rarely catastrophically and frequently marginally, then the purpose of that interrogation is what it does. No sex object has ever been asked about how their day has been.

When it's an every day question where you can't win and can only lose, rarely catastrophically and frequently marginally, then the purpose of that interrogation is what it does.

dude, if this is how any relationship you've been is functions then you need to get out of it, that's madness. Me and my wife ask each other how ours days went basically every day, it's just a pulse check. The last psychiatrist has this to say about boring routine conversations which I think strikes true:

But why do we need "the balance?" What does it replace, what went missing? The very thing Holden Caufield hated: "phoniness", protocol and ritual for seemingly no purpose. Politeness is fine, but why do I have to make small talk? Why do I have to pretend to care about the weather? Why, after a decade of marriage, should dinner be a regular review of the somewhat boring goings-ons of "the day"? Because that formality is freeing, it allows self-conscious physical bodies to get used to standing next to each other without having to be acting, this includes husbands and wives. When dinner is a controlled process with "manners" and expected topics of shared conversation and start and end times, as boring as it may get, it is boring, not you. Women are especially sensitive to this absence of convention, this is one reason for the popularity of Downton Abbey, not to mention alcohol and iphones at dinner. It is against this background of "phony" convention that teens can productively "rebel" and find their own individuality against a status quo; fighting against an emotionally illogical, arbitrary, unpredictable structure results in learning the opposite lesson, "whatever gets me through the day..." Without this structure to social activities, when the "natural" conversation stops being interesting-- and it will, even if most of you weren't bad at it-- it would be a judgment about your relationship, about you. And you'll beg St. Jobs to blink a path to safety because otherwise you have to sit there with no existential support. Texting and social media's slowness gives them their power for this purpose. You read a text, and it lingers, it keeps your attention because it's all there is; and then you respond with a piece of your real self, and wait for a response... what's happening is time travel-- while you are on pause, the rest of not-your life goes faster. It is far more efficient at killing time than a phone call.

Domestic questions are good, life isn't a scripted move where every line can have depth and pointed purpose. You need small talk and mundane connection.

if this is how any relationship you've been is functions then you need to get out of it, that's madness

I definitely got out of the relationship business after a couple of attempts. Nowadays, even aided by me being borderline broke, where I couldn't get back even if I wanted to. Which I don't.

Flip me sideways, I never thought I'd be quoting a Tumblr post of all things, but here we go.

So, to cut it short: person posting talked about how they asked their husband "what are you doing?" and he got all defensive and upset. Couldn't understand why, so she asked him "what did you hear me saying?" and he replied "I thought you were angry with me, why wasn't I doing something, why was I being lazy?" She only meant literally "what are you doing?" as signal of being interested in him.

Conclusion of post was that asking about "what did you hear me saying" for both of them saved a lot of arguments, trouble, and misunderstanding.

I think this applies to our friend here; if what they are hearing from "how was your day?" is the start of an attack, then it's either Mommy Issues from childhood or maybe they need to work out why they are dating/involved with crazy bitches all the time.

they need to work out why they are dating/involved with crazy bitches all the time

Because of heterosexuality.

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Sometimes I wonder what kind of women people are dating. They describe sex vampires who only want your money, and then are bitter because asking "How was your day?" is some kind of malicious kafka-trap.

A normal person asking how your day was is... asking how your day was. If she is your girlfriend/wife, it is generally because she cares about how your day was (or at least is willing to engage in a minimal level of concern to show affection and empathy). That's how things work in normal relationships. Do I actually care about how her day was? Eh, not unless something notable happened. But I will still ask because women like it when you do that. And they do the same thing.

If your partner is just a "sex object," of course you aren't going to ask how her day has been because you don't care. That's not actually a partner.

The word "partner" is a whole can of worms I will lovingly save for some other time, but I need to clarify something: I want me to be the sex object. There are only two kinds of objects in a relationship, a sex object or a resource object, and I can't stand being the latter one. And "personality" is a kind of a resource, perhaps the most humiliating one, a speculative investment instrument for resources of a more material kind.

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Do I actually care about how her day was? Eh, not unless something notable happened. But I will still ask because women like it when you do that. And they do the same thing.

You have inspired me to make an "I hate the Antichrist" comic edit depicting the disgust that I feel for such institutionalized untruthfulness.

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You know you've been spending too much time on the internet when your reaction to your hypothetical wife asking 'how was your day?' is 'Don't you manipulate me she-devil! You just want my money!'

If she's a housewife, she doesn't just want your money, she needs it. Wanting a housewife and wanting a woman who isn't excessively interested in your earning potential would, in a sane world, be incompatible.

Yeah A bunch of redpill/internet manosophere types are really incoherent about this. A bunch of them look down on career women and say stuff like men provide resources women provide beauty. But then they get mad or at least annoyed about women considering those resources, and then they constantly worry about "divorce rape" and a woman taking half your shit or even women in general taking half the shit of hardworking men. And they never consider deliberately dating a woman with a career or gasp one who even makes more then them to allay these worries. It just feels like a ball of physchosexual anxieties when what they should do is have a sober analysis about whether to go for a women who wants to stay home or have a career.

No, many years ago I turned to the internet to understand why the consequences of honestly answering were so disastrous. I found the answers convincing.

Dude in all my relationships I've never had disastrous consequences for answering this question. But I was also just giving a basic answer. I suspect some of your problem in how you were answering are you way over explaining and laying out every neurotic insecurity. Or as others have said it's the type of woman you are choosing. Either way the fact that everyone is disagreeing with you should indicate it's a you problem.

Either way the fact that everyone is disagreeing with you should indicate it's a you problem.

Freedom_of_speech.jpg

Really? Which part of the internet told you to never tell your wife how your day was (or conversely, so get a woman who doesn't care)?

I can kind of see it in the same vein as "women think they want an emotionally-sensitive man until they actually have one," or the kind of messaging that led Scott to write both Untitled and Reverse Any Advice.

You should be honest with your wife, of course, and a wife that cares about your day is a blessing! But one should be aware that there's probably a limit to that.

I find my job dissatisfying but stable and hard to escape, I figured out where my wife's limit is on me bitching about it, so it didn't take too long to get to an agreement with "ssdd" and I'll reserve elaboration for when I really need to.

/r/theredpill, /r/purplepilldebate, and the tale of Henry of the Radicalizing the Romanceless fame.

I think one problem with relying on TRP for advice about women is that the community is subject to evaporative cooling. Any guys who end up happily married or in relationships aren't gonna stick around, so you're stuck in an echo chamber or men who have failed to coexist happily with the opposite sex.

The second is that intelligence isn't merely reversed stupidity. The Red Pill guys might be right that the mainstream is lying to you about women and relationships, but that doesn't mean they have good advice on how to exist in the world they describe. As someone said the other day on here, they have a correct description but an incorrect prescription. That's why they're so unhappy.

Surely it would make sense to take advice from the men who have succeeded, i.e. the happily married ones?

I think one problem with relying on TRP for advice about women is that the community is subject to evaporative cooling.

I can't see when the sub was created, but the years I'm talking about were near its beginnings.

Surely it would make sense to take advice from the men who have succeeded, i.e. the happily married ones?

I believe a man that his marriage is happy as much as I believe a hostage saying that his captors treat him excellently.

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Mostly it’s just a way to learn more about your partner’s life and a jumping off point for further discussion

Much like how a Stasi officer asking what you've been reading is looking for literary recommendations.

Can you give an example of when answering this question honestly led to negative consequences?

It's in the aggregate, where the best possible result is maintaining the status quo, and the likely result is a downgrade. Those add up.

Conspicuously missing in your analysis is the possibility that the emotional distance from not having these conversations causes the relationship to decay. I would submit that insufficient communication is likelier to cause two people to fall out of love with each other than repeated communication that multiplies the opportunities for minor annoyances and disagreements to build up, even if I agree the latter can happen.

Can you give an example of a situation where this led to a downgrade?

I respond with something negative, she thinks less of me, repeat X times, the relationship is done.

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Women and men have different modes of communication; it's not like women don't like to talk other women's ears off as well.

In broad strokes, men don't like to revisit past events to form narratives and emotional bonding around them; if they must be revisited, then it's for the goal of finding a solution to some unpleasantry, to be finished as quickly as possible. Women prefer the opposite. Not understanding this leads to conflict. Men offering unsolicited solutions to women who just want to do shared narrative forming, and women talking the ears off men about Karen at work while men do the interminable emotional labor of pretending to care. Neither is right or wrong, just differing gendered styles, and the solution is for both parties to realize this and meet in the middle.

That's kind of funny, hereabouts it's AFAICT a whole trope that men are prone to bonding over the shared (ridiculously alien to regular modern life and in many ways unpleasant) experiences of the semi-mandatory military service, and the ladies will get vocally frustrated if the dudes don't have the good sense to keep away from that immensely boring-to-them topic when they're around.

women talking the ears off men about Karen

But this is not what I responded to. Back in the day I found being asked about my day particularly dangerous and/or demeaning. Listening about hers is merely annoying.

Have you considered the possibility that whatever relationship you were in was unusually dysfunctional (and in your choice of internet forums, you sought out a selected crowd with similar experiences)? Over here in relatively functional land, I don't think I know anyone who would consider being asked about their day "dangerous and/or demeaning", don't know any couples who don't keep each other updated about their day or suffer any danger to their health or status from providing accurate information, and see a shared understanding that anyone suggesting otherwise would soon be met with advice to break up for their own and their partner's good.

I have considered it and I have rejected it. Have you considered that if you're not lying you're in a unusually functional relationship?

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I bet half of men would accept living a poorer lifestyle if it meant coming home from work to a sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went.

I bet many women would accept a poorer and more boring lifestyle if it meant a handsome, kind-natured and faithful husband who was good around the house and yard, knew how to repair everything (and did it without being asked) and who devoted themselves fully to providing for and looking after their family (and not drinking or being abusive or cheating).

The reality of traditional marriage, of course, was that many husbands were not honorable or good around the house or happy being providers, many wives were not sweet or good cooks or great mothers. Advocating for traditional marriage is still reasonable, perhaps even desirable, but a simple fantasy it is not.

Indeed, both sexes are in practice willing to reduce their standard of living for happier family life.

We should stop the propaganda campaign telling young people that's impossible.

Funny you should say this. Which person in this family at middle age do you think is happiest now:

  1. Female. Probably lowest IQ. Got married to a Heroin addict. Grinded in nursing. Had a couple kids who now have kids in the trades.
  2. Female. Mid-IQ. Went to a regional school. Got into medicine field. Was married and didn’t work out. 40 single. Travels. Owns a home. Decent discretionary income. Kind of cute.
  3. Went to Ivy. Worked on trading desks. Often had whatever he wanted. Some relationships failed. 40 single.

The last one probably figures it out. Something in society hurt number (2) and now it’s probably tough to fix. Probably both jealous of the one who just got pregnant at 19.

Ya that’s my family. And maybe it’s not unique. Trending on twitter San Francisco has a lot of single men so going for success can backfire.

Trending on twitter San Francisco has a lot of single men so going for success can backfire.

San Francisco has a bad gender ratio for men, like New York has a bad gender ratio for women.

There is an excess of single men under 40 essentially everywhere in the US, including New York.

A very frustrating point that many online commentators overlook. I wish this guy would update his map with newer data (that one uses 2012). Once you set the limit to under 40-45, basically everywhere is a sausage-fest.

Is that ratio before or after San Francisco's historical reputation that many of its men aren't looking for women? I'm not familiar with the dating market anywhere, just curious.

I appreciate this. I was feeling a bit bent out of shape about the "sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went," but not sure what to say about it. Sure. We all want to be surrounded by virtuous people intent on serving us.

Agreed. There's no shortage of men who could have an idyllic trad wife like that at home who would almost certainly still go out to the pub after work and spend 1.1 days worth of wages there.

Seems like a fantasy to believe homes would be so much happier if women stopped being libs.

You can train boys to possess those masculine strengths just as you can train girls to possess their feminine strengths. This was the norm for a long time. “Gentlemen”, “virtuous”, “holy” depending on the period. There is a lot of time wasted in schools on less valuable materials. (We need every single person to learn science? The 95% of people who will never use the periodic table must spend a year memorizing it? There’s not a better way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age, like by IQ and interest?)

The deal for women is that, instead of spending the 18,000 mostly-worthless hours in classrooms before graduating college, and instead of working a stressful occupation, you learn the fun skills that are valuable for happiness and not going extinct. You can probably accomplish this with only 500 hours if you use interesting and memorable material. Then maybe some of the remaining 17,500 hours can be spent on the things that are required for homemaking, like working with calendars and fiscal tables and babies. That leaves 16,000 hours totally free for women. They also don’t have to do the 80,000 hours of stressful work that the average person does. With that amount of time they can learn to promote happiness through their spirit and conduct, which actually comes naturally to women who are outside of the Western media / educational landscape. It is in a woman’s nature to see Punch the Monkey— which is a terrible name for a monkey — dealing with the alienated modern conditions of his enclosure, and feel the harm-reduction empathy response to shower the monkey in nurturing love while feeding him treats. It is not difficult to switch the object of this behavior from monkeys to husbands and children, as they have a number of similarities.

“Many husbands were not honorable or good around the house”, but bosses suck, and teachers suck. Some woman just killed herself through self-immolation after an affair with her boss in Congress. No one has a stronger biological motive to care about a woman than her husband, certainly not her boss or coworkers, and if the woman is pleasant to be around and helpful, then you are maximizing the odds of female felicity.

You had to memorize the periodic table? We had to learn how to use it, what the rows and columns meant(not that I remembered), that sort of stuff. But it was about learning to use a reference and not about memorizing the reference, that would obviate the point of having a reference.

My memory is hazy but I do think we had to memorize at least some of the table.

Was it the part that went, "there's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, ..."?

To the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General?"

We need every single person to learn science? The 95% of people who will never use the periodic table must spend a year memorizing it? There’s not a better way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age, like by IQ and interest?

I think making anyone memorize the periodic table is a bit silly in the age of pocket supercomputersphones, and I'm not at all against the idea of teaching more practical/homemaking skills in schools - but the point of teaching everyone science is not solely to benefit those who will grow up to be scientists. It's not supposed to be "a way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age", so even if I have my own misgivings about the current system, that's not a fair criterion to judge it by.

As I see it, teaching science to everybody including the kids who are not in a million years going to go into science has two main purposes, benefiting both the individuals themselves and society as a whole.

Firstly, it serves to make sure that ~all citizens have a basically sane idea of how the world works - you need laymen to have a layman's understanding of science to develop the intuition that science makes sense even if the specifics go over their heads, lest they think that any nerd spouting sufficiently complex and formal-sounding jargon, whether he's a scientist or an ayatollah, should be listened to just the same. Or indeed, lest they start thinking that both can be safely ignored because it's all Greek to them either way. If you don't teach girls basic science, what you're going to get is a whole lot more superstitious, gullible women who believe in astrology and homeopathy and the most bone-headed religious bullshit you can imagine. (Ditto "low-IQ boys".) The world can barely function with the current levels, the last thing we need is to stop vaccinating idiots against woo.

Secondly, it trains kids to actually use their heads and work. Exercises that involve actual reasoning rather than rote memorization are best, but even with the latter, whether they're memorizing the periodic table or the phonebook, they're at least exercising their long-term memory, attention span, and ability to just sit down with boring unpleasant work for hours and focus. That's not nothing, particularly in the age of ipad babies. And if we're going to give them boring learning exercises for the overall betterment of their intellects, we might as well make them learn boring true things like science rather than go with the phonebook.

It also helps people recognize medical quackery for what it is, so if they have cancer or arthritis they won't waste time and money on ointments that "draw the toxicity out of the body" or whatever.

Uh, does it? Lots of people use woo-woo crap despite being more than scientifically literate enough to know better; I would expect the correlation between alternative medicine and scientific literacy to be near 0(or even, as in the case of creationism, running the opposite way you'd expect).

Yes. And AI makes this only more stark. The reality is, working memory can only work with what's already in the brain as background. Knowing facts as well as frameworks for understanding, especially in science, literally enable higher thinking. There's limits of course, and we can debate what a sensible "baseline" is, but science instruction in basic chemistry, physics, biology, and to some extent math (that's a whole other conversation) is absolutely essential. And similar arguments apply to basic reading, history, geography, and bits and pieces of the humanities. If anything, recent research has actually underscored that especially US education has shied a little too far away from memorizing and internalizing facts, because you do need that baseline as I said to do anything more complex.

I bet many women would accept a poorer and more boring lifestyle if it meant a handsome, kind-natured and faithful husband who was good around the house and yard, knew how to repair everything (and did it without being asked) and who devoted themselves fully to providing for and looking after their family (and not drinking or being abusive or cheating).

I'd bet against. They'd find the guy boring and want more. You've basically described the stereotypical 1950s situation, which is usually considered to be "stultifying" by women.

So a couple of things to bear in mind about the fifties in this discussion:

-Upper class women before the long fifties did not scrub their own baseboards. Upper class women after the long fifties do not scrub their own baseboards. Upper class women during the long fifties, scrubbed their own baseboards. The historical aberration of 'everyone except the true societal elites has housewives who do their own housework, including the stuff that really sucks' was a historical aberration, and upper class women were not used to scrubbing toilets and ironing underwear(yes, fifties undies needed to be ironed). Upper class women were also the ones that launched second wave feminism.

-Fifties women were the happiest women, on average, since data became reliable. This isn't all self reports either- everything correlates.

-Women today still choose to cut their standard of living by working less when they are securely and happily married, and this is such a trend that it shows up in national level economic data.

-Sixties/seventies feminists had a number of hard cases that wouldn't happen today to use to make their point. Poor enforcement of domestic violence laws, much higher male alcoholism rates, a generally poorer society, and difficult divorce meant that there were more women trapped in bad situations. And a highly mobile society with shitty communications technology meant that women were also more likely to get into bad situations. Feminism tends to fall back on hard cases to make its point.

You've basically described the stereotypical 1950s situation, which is usually considered to be "stultifying" by women.

Was it actually stultifying by the majority of women who actually lived through it? Or was it considered stultifying at the time by a small minority of the women who get the most press because careerist women are in a better situation to push agendas in the mass media, and then every women growing up since then has been subject to a torrent of propaganda about how unhappy 1950s housewives were and so they believe that it was stultifying.

The stats on the relative happiness of married vs. unmarried women suggest its still a Pareto improvement.

And no, "I'm staying with you for the Pareto benefits" is not how most people want to envision their marriage. Its just, if their alternative is worse you shouldn't discourage the slightly better arrangement if they're otherwise suited for it.

To me, its fair to say "Traditional Marriage, encompassed by a socioeconomic order (likely with religious foundation) that is maximally supportive of marriage happiness and longevity is best suited for human thriving."

It is indeed unfair to say "just get into a trad marriage and you'll be happy," when the the social connective tissue and supporting structures are not present.

Or put a little more broadly, Trad marriage doesn't work as well when society isn't geared towards producing devoted, supportive, loyal men and modest, sweet, submissive women for each other to marry, yes.

But that indicts society, not the institution of marriage.

Why did you add in 'handsome' when the op said nothing about the woman's looks?

For men it’s usually implied when they talk about women in this way, they’re not envisioning an ugly tradwife.

Fair, but also women care less about men's looks than men do about women's. Might I suggest 'funny' would be a better adjective?

Critically, the vision assumes a society where no prime-age women are overweight, rather than respectable working class communities in 21st century America where they all are. Most white men think the 20th percentile normal weight woman is hotter than the 80th percentile fatty.

As far as I can see, in real patriarchal societies where food is plentiful, most women start gaining weight immediately after the wedding and are blubberbeasts by middle age.

Ozempic?

I think the tradwife vision assumes that one of the skills that would be taught in these "I can't believe it's not finishing school" less-academic women's institutions would be healthy eating. But Ozempic solves the problem withe less effort.

If the problem was a lack of skill to engage in healthy eating, surely the gain of weight would not correlate so neatly with marriage (in plentiful-food patriarchal societies). It's not like being unmarried shields you from weight gain due to unhealthy food all by itself.

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