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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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The wording (doubtless there are many) I recall is, "a system of gender roles which is harmful to men and women" or some such.

I think the issue with that definition is that it is too weasely. There's too much room to maneuver and keep claiming a patriarchy.

Harmful to which men? Harmful to which women?

Does it matter if a society made rational trade-offs of one kind of harm against some benefit that outweighs the harm?

I think before the Industrial Age, having a division of labor made sense. With all of the developments after the Industrial Age we shrank the scope of the woman's societal role until it was almost nothing (cleaning clothes for a family of five took 20 hours before washing machines!), forcing them to adopt "men's" societal role.

Now there's effectively only one role in the larger society. Stay at home mothers frequently get involved in MLMs, because there's nothing to do for most of the day - laundry takes two hours, watching one kid isn't that stimulating and a person can only take so much TV.

I'm reminded of complaints I've seen from the manosphere talking about the "feminization" of our culture.

I think many people are basically agreed that the life the average person lives in our society is fundamentally unsatisfying. But I don't think "patriarchy" or "feminized culture" get to the core of the issue. We're social animals staring at screens of various sizes throughout the day. We're so prosperous that we don't depend on each other for our individual survival, so it becomes much harder to cultivate deep friendships. We have a service economy that forces a lot of people to do jobs that humans in the ancestral environment we evolved for would have hated too.

Humans weren't built for this, and it has nothing to do with whether our society is benefitting men or women more. Ideally, society would settle on a set of norms that benefit everyone so far as possible, but we're so rich and prosperous that we get whatever we want to satiate our petty impulses and desires and rarely get what we need for a deep and fulfilling life.