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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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You can have a society where women get married instead of finishing high school(I mean in the sense that it would be perfectly functional, not in the sense that anybody knows how to get there), but those societies as they actually exist do not have those women marrying their same age peers, they’re marrying older- and sometimes much older- men who can support them. What those kinds of societies look like is a solved problem, what a society where men bear the primary responsibility for child rearing and women are the main breadwinners is a thought experiment.

I mean, I would certainly argue that men not wanting kids and not being willing to commit to their romantic partners is a big part of the fertility problem, and that marrying teenaged girls as a solution is mostly tradlarping. But a society in which people are allowed to drink at their own weddings and have above replacement fertility is also a solved problem, historically speaking, even if the only modern day first world society that does that without being horribly dysfunctional is Israel. You can use a stick to make men commit to women they have romantic relationships with without engaging in biologically ignorant thought experiments(and, little known fact, anglosphere societies did up until comparatively recently- ‘seduction of a virgin’ and false promise laws were on the books and regularly enforced within living memory).