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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   25889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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A man needs to know, when he marries, that he owns his woman from that day forth, the same a man needs to know, when he buys a car, that he owns that car from that day forth

I understand the usual response to that is "Lincoln done freed the slaves".

If, in the year of our Lord 2026, you unironically want to own a woman, then no wonder there's a problem getting women to marry and have kids. Why, if you have the choice between "get a job, earn a living, pay your own way and be free" versus "be totally dependent economically on a man who puts you in the same category as a possession like his car", would you pick the man?

Why are some comments here making me (1) eternally thankful to God Almighty for leaving out the wiring in my brain that goes "I want to fall in love with a man and be his" and (2) want very much for those producing such comments to be reborn as a woman under the conditions they so want to impose?

Can you not hear yourselves? Do you think any decent woman would want to go within a mile of a man who thinks she should be literal chattel? Do you understand why such comments and attitudes drive feminism, and indeed drive it to the extremes which are bad for everyone? Is anyone really surprised Chinese or Japanese or Korean women would prefer to be spinsters?

Can you not hear yourselves? Do you think any decent woman would want to go within a mile of a man who thinks she should be literal chattel? Do you understand why such comments and attitudes drive feminism, and indeed drive it to the extremes which are bad for everyone? Is anyone really surprised Chinese or Japanese or Korean women would prefer to be spinsters?

It is extremely clear from his links that he does understand this; much of the point of his (or, well, Jim's) proposal to make women chattel is so that feminists attempting to become spinsters could be chained up and raped.

(And that's terrible.)

The chattel thing is overwrought imo. But I think as policy, it’s rather better to target tge things that create stable and healthy societies rather than just “hedonistic capitalist consumption” as the end game. I don’t think anyone wants to be chattel in any sense. Heck, most people don’t want jobs, or to pay taxes, or to be governed by laws or institutions. The human being is an anarchist at heart, as can be seen by observing small children.

Of course the problem here is that a society run in that manner will very quickly become a society that nobody wants to live in. A society in which marriage is easier to end than most business contracts is one in which nobody wants to marry, and even among those who do, would be somewhat reluctant to have kids because they rightly worry that the marriage that makes the family stable enough to have children is not stable at all.

This isn’t much different from other problems. When a society decides that it wants to give support to people who don’t want to work, it finds it difficult to maintain itself. Nobody wants to clean sewers or pick up trash or work in a warehouse. Unless hunger compels them, those jobs won’t be filled. But if those jobs are not filled, you’ll live surrounded by garbage and sewage and the diseases that come from living in filth. If you decide you don’t want taxes, you will live cheaper, but there’s no police to call, the roads are not paved, and if some other country invades, it’s down to you and your neighbors to fend those people off.

Living in a civilization requires trade offs. And you can’t just think about it as just “I don’t want that restriction,” but in terms of what life wou be like when that restriction is gone for everyone. And I think we see the results. Fewer children, fewer families, and more loneliness is what you get. Is that a reasonable trade for the ability to dump your husband anytime you feel like it? I think I want a society with stable families and plenty of kids.

Sure, but trying to solve the problem by "let's take away all freedom from women and turn them into property" is going to be the fastest way to breakdown you could try. "Oh but it works fine in Saudi Arabia/other countries that cover women from the crown of their head to the tips of their toes and murders them with impunity if even suspected of looking at a man". Yes, quite, and do you think there is no such thing as adultery or promiscuity or prostitution in those societies?

If no man wanted to fuck a woman outside of marriage, then all the thots and cock carousel and the rest of it could not happen. As ever, it's both sides of the coin: men want sex more than women, but don't want women to be sexually active if it's not with them, and they want the relationship to end when they want it to end, and the woman should both be experienced enough to be able to satisfy the man sexually but also never have had a boyfriend before or after him.

How do you think that happens? How do you think a woman gets to be good in bed if she hasn't been sleeping with other men before you? Why complain about the friendzone if there is not the expectation that "if I'm interested in a woman, it is for sex, and she should reciprocate that"?

I don't want to be unfair to men. But I do think a lot of misery has been caused by Sexual Liberation, where women thought they could behave like men when it came to love and sex, and there would be no pushback and no more double standard and no more unhappiness. Turns out that you cannot have it all, and that men and women do have different expectations around relationships, and women giving in to male sexuality has not in fact made either sex happier. All the old prudish warnings about "men only want one thing" turned out to be correct, and it's deeply ironic that now men are complaining about this (women sleeping with men they find attractive even without commitment on the man's part).

We can't go back to the past, and unless people all suddenly convert to traditional Catholicism regarding sexual mores (and even many/the majority of Catholics don't stick to the rules), we're not going to put the sexual genie back in the bottle. Men want sex, but they seem to resent women both not wanting sex as much as they do, and thus not being sexually available, and wanting sex and being too available. Women are not blameless, but it's hard to be blamed for being frigid (if you won't sleep with Ted) and a whore if you will sleep with Ted, and with Joe before him when he was your boyfriend, and with Bill after him when he is your new boyfriend.

Suppose that by some act of the simulation overlords in the morning all women refused to have sex outside of marriage, demanded that their boyfriends commit to proposing marriage before entering into a serious relationship, and everyone had to wait until marriage to have sex. There would still be a ton of male sexual frustration around this, there would be the demand for porn and prostitutes, and where do you get prostitutes if not women who either have high sex drives or are driven to it by economic necessity? And so do we then go back to the happy days of silver nitrate eyewash for newborns, due to the risk of blindness from gonorrhoeal infection of the mothers, often given to them by their husbands who frequented prostitutes? The kind of historical background to this story by Arthur Conan Doyle, based on medical experience, where the grandson of a man who contracted venereal disease is suffering from the transmission of the same down the generations?

“Perhaps I spoke a little abruptly,” said the doctor, “but you must have known the nature of your complaint. Why, otherwise, should you have come to me?”

“God help me, I suspected it; but only today when my leg grew bad. My father had a leg like this.”

“It was from him, then——?”

“No, from my grandfather. You have heard of Sir Rupert Norton, the great Corinthian?”

The doctor was a man of wide reading with a retentive, memory. The name brought back instantly to him the remembrance of the sinister reputation of its owner—a notorious buck of the thirties—who had gambled and duelled and steeped himself in drink and debauchery, until even the vile set with whom he consorted had shrunk away from him in horror, and left him to a sinister old age with the barmaid wife whom he had married in some drunken frolic. As he looked at the young man still leaning back in the leather chair, there seemed for the instant to flicker up behind him some vague presentiment of that foul old dandy with his dangling seals, many-wreathed scarf, and dark satyric face. What was he now? An armful of bones in a mouldy box. But his deeds— they were living and rotting the blood in the veins of an innocent man.

“I see that you have heard of him,” said the young baronet. “He died horribly, I have been told; but not more horribly than he had lived. My father was his only son. He was a studious man, fond of books and canaries and the country; but his innocent life did not save him.”

“His symptoms were cutaneous, I understand.”

“He wore gloves in the house. That was the first thing I can remember. And then it was his throat. And then his legs. He used to ask me so often about my own health, and I thought him so fussy, for how could I tell what the meaning of it was. He was always watching me—always with a sidelong eye fixed upon me. Now, at last, I know what he was watching for.”

“Had you brothers or sisters?”

“None, thank God.”

“Well, well, it is a sad case, and very typical of many which come in my way. You are no lonely sufferer, Sir Francis. There are many thousands who bear the same cross as you do.”

“But where is the justice of it, doctor?” cried the young man, springing from his chair and pacing up and down the consulting-room. “If I were heir to my grandfather’s sins as well as to their results, I could understand it, but I am of my father’s type. I love all that is gentle and beautiful—music and poetry and art. The coarse and animal is abhorrent to me. Ask any of my friends and they would tell you that. And now that this vile, loathsome thing—ach, I am polluted to the marrow, soaked in abomination! And why? Haven’t I a right to ask why? Did I do it? Was it my fault? Could I help being born? And look at me now, blighted and blasted, just as life was at its sweetest. Talk about the sins of the father—how about the sins of the Creator?” He shook his two clinched hands in the air—the poor impotent atom with his pin-point of brain caught in the whirl of the infinite.

The doctor rose and placing his hands upon his shoulders he pressed him back into his chair once more. “There, there, my dear lad,” said he; “you must not excite yourself. You are trembling all over. Your nerves cannot stand it. We must take these great questions upon trust. What are we, after all? Half-evolved creatures in a transition stage, nearer perhaps to the Medusa on the one side than to perfected humanity on the other. With half a complete brain we can’t expect to understand the whole of a complete fact, can we, now? It is all very dim and dark, no doubt; but I think that Pope’s famous couplet sums up the whole matter, and from my heart, after fifty years of varied experience, I can say——”

But the young baronet gave a cry of impatience and disgust. “Words, words, words! You can sit comfortably there in your chair and say them—and think them too, no doubt. You’ve had your life, but I’ve never had mine. You’ve healthy blood in your veins; mine is putrid. And yet I am as innocent as you. What would words do for you if you were in this chair and I in that? Ah, it’s such a mockery and a make-believe! Don’t think me rude, though, doctor. I don’t mean to be that. I only say that it is impossible for you or any other man to realise it. But I’ve a question to ask you, doctor. It’s one on which my whole life must depend.” He writhed his fingers together in an agony of apprehension.

“Speak out, my dear sir. I have every sympathy with you.”

“Do you think—do you think the poison has spent itself on me? Do you think that if I had children they would suffer?”

“I can only give one answer to that. ‘The third and fourth generation,’ says the trite old text. You may in time eliminate it from your system, but many years must pass before you can think of marriage.”

“I am to be married on Tuesday,” whispered the patient.

It was the doctor’s turn to be thrilled with horror. There were not many situations which would yield such a sensation to his seasoned nerves. He sat in silence while the babble of the card-table broke in upon them again. “We had a double ruff if you had returned a heart.” “I was bound to clear the trumps.” They were hot and angry about it.

“How could you?” cried the doctor severely. “It was criminal.”

“You forget that I have only learned how I stand to-day.” He put his two hands to his temples and pressed them convulsively. “You are a man of the world, Dr. Selby. You have seen or heard of such things before. Give me some advice. I’m in your hands. It is all very sudden and horrible, and I don’t think I am strong enough to bear it.”

The doctor’s heavy brows thickened into two straight lines, and he bit his nails in perplexity.

“The marriage must not take place.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“At all costs it must not take place.”

“And I must give her up?”

“There can be no question about that.”

The young man took out a pocketbook and drew from it a small photograph, holding it out towards the doctor. The firm face softened as he looked at it.

“It is very hard on you, no doubt. I can appreciate it more now that I have seen that. But there is no alternative at all. You must give up all thought of it.”

I have no idea what the solution is. But it certainly won't come from people like our friend speaking of "my wife" in the same sense they mean "my car" or "my shoes". We've had that, and it wasn't happy families, it was the kind of thing satirised by Dean Swift in "A Modest Proposal":

Men would become as fond of their wives, during the time of their pregnancy, as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf, or sows when they are ready to farrow; nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage.

I don’t think I’d make any changes other than require the person who files the divorce to have an actual cause — cheating, abuse, neglect, addiction, etc. before they can just file the papers and court-fuck the other person out of a good deal of the family assets. Maybe I’d require some evidence that said party tried to work out the differences that exist. I don’t see that as making a woman property, maybe you do, I don’t know. I see it as providing the stability for the family that allows for having and raising healthy children, knowing that you aren’t one lost job or ten pound weight gain away from losing your family.

Oh yeah, I think no-fault divorce was a disaster. But society wanted it, so society got it. All in the name of "make divorce amicable, it's better for kids to have separated parents than live in a home where the parents are angry and unhappy, and everyone should be able to move on and start over again".

Lessons don't get learned until much too late.

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