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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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The pre-modern marriage arrangement is something like men offer physical protection and income in return for chastity, sex, and domestic labor. The marriage 'deal' is being renegotiated because the male contribution has been devalued; physical protection is provided by the state, women make 80% of what men make. Women's domestic labor has largely been devalued too with the exception of childcare. Women's chastity used to be essential to make sure she didn't end up a single mother in a world where agricultural labor was essential, and to indicate paternity certainty. Now we have DNA tests and birth control, female chastity doesn't serve some essential social purpose it's just something men like.

You act like accepting a 'slutty partner' is some unthinkable conflict with masculinity but for most of the past 1000 years would a high status man have accepted anything less than a virgin? Women have already parlayed increased economic power into different norms about how much female promiscuity is acceptable, and their relative economic power keeps increasing.

Like most Intra-gender competition, promiscuity is something of a collective action problem. If every girl in the village is a virgin the one who fucks one guy is unmarriageable. If everyone fucks ten guys then the girl with only one body is practically a virgin. The function of stories where "slutty" women get "it all" in this context should be obvious, they help coordinate reduced intra-gender competition to be chaste. As women and men's economic power equalizes you would expect women to have to cater less to male preferences overall, and the role of such feminist media to be coordinating and normalizing this.

This may lead some people to sort of 'overplay' their hand and stop catering to male preferences at all. The woman who sleeps with fifty dudes, the woman who gives up on makeup and shaving her legs, they're probably going to have to accept low status mates or be single. Whether women systematically holding out for too good of a deal is responsible for low marriage and childbearing rates over all is difficult to say.

While marriage rates overall have fallen they've fallen way more for less educated women. Women 40-45 with Bachelor's degree went from 85% married in 1968 to 75% in 2015, women with a high school degree fell from 80% to 60%. If feminist indoctrination at college and in upper-middlebrow media was the culprit we might expect the opposite. Maybe the issue is that non-college women are huge sluts, but I suspect that a big factor is that real wages for high school educated men have declined since the 1980's so there's fewer marriageable men.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/08/19/the-most-educated-women-are-the-most-likely-to-be-married/amp/

https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/changes_in_real_hourly_earnings_by_education

Women 40-45 with Bachelor's degree went from 85% married in 1968 to 75% in 2015, women with a high school degree fell from 80% to 60%.

Many years ago on a long-defunct tradcon blog, I saw this summed up as: marriage is becoming unavailable mostly for women who'd need it the most.