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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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There is little gender discrimination based on pay; it's a gap that opens up when women choose to enter into relationships with men, have children, and enact gendered labor norms. My objection is to the idea that women who do choose to do just that are entitled to the same income as men, despite e.g. working fewer hours or in more flexible jobs than men in order to care for kids. The "pay gap" is largely a relational issue, driven by personal choice (and unfortunately constrained by gendered norms).

More broadly, we make a big deal of women doing more housework than men, but why should that be a social or political concern? It's a purely relational issue, similar to how men not being able to find a partner is a purely relational issue. We can very easily say to women, "get better!" and attract a mate who'll do equal amounts of housework; but we never do that and instead start hurling invective at men. But when a man can't attract any kind of mate, we stop at "get better!"

I've no objection to purely economic anti-gender discrimination laws. When laws and social attention get into the realm of structuring interpersonal relations, either everyone is worthy of protection by them (with equal emphasis on different gendered protections) or no one is.

The housework thing always seems odd to me -- these are consensual relationships. If it bothers the people they should talk about it, or leave.

(Also, apparently the leisure time of both is about the same, men are working longer, or doing things that don't get counted. I tend to be skeptical of these things, for the reasons noted in this thread).

Time use surveys suggest that men and women do about the same amount of work, just with a different distribution of paid vs unpaid.

I see a meaningful complaint there: if there's a large portion of women who want an equal or reversed distribution of labor but men do not want to switch the current distribution, I think there's room for legitimate activism there, even though women always have the choice to not be in a relationship with one of those dastardly men.

But it is fundamentally about changing social and gender norms to improve women's experience of relationships. Which is fine in my book, but I don't see a justification for that that doesn't apply to improving men's relational experiences (beyond men bad).