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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9197 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home.

The problem is that in the 21st century, a housewife and mother of three is not going to be relaxed; she's going to be perpetually stressed and exhausted. Servants are the missing variable in these arguments. The old system presupposed that anyone middle-class or above would have at least part-time servants to do the cleaning and look after the very young (and even for the poor, to a certain extent it presumed big family clans where retired members could be put to "work" for household and childrearing stuff, though it also largely presumed that it was okay if poor women's mental health was a horror show).

But we have appliances, which drastically reduce the need for servants. We don't wash clothes by hand or, for the most part, even have to iron them. You can put food in the oven and come back to check on it until it is done(and before modern, thermostatically controlled ovens, you could not). Medieval housewives didn't just have to bake their own bread, they had to grind the grain for it, on top of making all of the household's clothes from raw fiber.

Women are relaxed around children. Female school teachers for young grades are like the most relaxed women in the world, and those aren’t even her kids and she isn’t at home. There is a biological reason for why a woman would be stressed after being severed from her child but no reason why she would be stressed being in a homemaking environment. When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs). There’s also a study showing Amish women are significantly less stressed than normal Americans, and they have eight kids. There are a lot of different compelling reasons to believe that a mother with her child is the least stressed version of woman, provided she isn’t also laboring for eight hours a day away from her kid.

Women are relaxed around children.

You don't actually have a wife and kids, do you?

When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs).

Notably, these games can be paused when you get tired of them.

I see women with children from time to time and from what I recall they are relaxed less often that when alone. The child cries or acts in an annoying way and they shout at them or seem stressed.

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