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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27754 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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There is obviously the risk of that kind of scenario, but I don’t think it considers (as @100ProofTollBooth says) the fact that divorce is pretty much never in a woman’s interest unless (a) her husband is untenably abusive such that being much poorer is worth escaping his grasp, (b) the couple is extraordinarily rich to the point that a settlement will allow her both ‘freedom’ and wealth or (c) the woman in question is still young enough, pretty enough and childless enough to roll the dice again and find a better partner.

A woman over 30, certainly over 35 with kids is pretty much never getting a ‘good deal’ in a divorce unless she married very, very well the first time. I don’t know why this isn’t repeated more in these discussions, men will gladly discuss how they would never date a single mother and how women lose value as their looks fade but then claim some 37 year old woman divorcing her average husband is some great financial coup on behalf of the wife.

In “real life”, she’s likely to either remain single for a long time or remarry to a man far below (in that he’s older, uglier, poorer etc) what she could have got had she remained single the whole time (even at 37). Meanwhile, her 37 year old ex-husband, provided he’s OK looking and gainfully employed, can likely find a 30-34 year old probably-childless woman to start a second family with, or decide not to have more kids and date most of the same kind of people he’d have if he’d never married.

You are correct that divorce is almost never in a woman's best interests. That doesn't mean it is in the man's, either. Women suffer romantically (because a single mother in her 30s will never be able to get as good of a husband as a childless woman in her 20s, if she can get another husband at all) while men suffer materially (because, as the primary bread winner, he is the one that gets hit with the alimony, child support, etc.). It's mutually assured destruction.

That doesn't change the fact that women are responsible for the vast majority of divorces, either initiating them outright or making their husband's life hell until he files for one. It is just evidence that women cannot be trusted to make their own sexual choices. Which is precisely why they were not allowed to until the sexual revolution.

From "The False Life Plan" by the Dreaded Jim:

Consider the reality show star Kate Gosselin, woman has eight children by a decent, reasonably attractive husband, who loves her and loves his children. Acts like a complete shrew towards the only man who will ever love her and her children. Ditches him. Is shocked to discover that no other male wants a woman past her prime and encumbered with eight children.

Kate Gosselin was videotaped continually treating her husband like dirt, as the man she reluctantly settled for seeing as all her preferred choices would not return her phone calls.

She then divorced him, depriving him of his much loved children, depriving her eight children of a much needed father, and herself of a much needed and entirely irreplaceable husband.

And I have seen a similar dynamic in every divorce that I have observed, though of course with considerably fewer children. In every divorce that I have observed the wife was utterly and spectacularly out of contact with marriage market realities. The result of the divorce is that the man, who very much did not want the divorce, was much better off, free of a hateful and unfaithful shrew, and the wife was very much worse off. As the wife goggles fell from his eyes, he usually found a considerably younger replacement.

At the age of thirty eight, with eight children and a notorious shrew, Kate Gosselin’s chances of marrying even a homeless obese seventy year old alcoholic are about equal to her chances of being kidnapped by terrorists and becoming the wife of the sultan, but she specifically requires her new husband to be rich, six foot tall, physically fit, and childless. (Her previous husband was not rich, not six foot tall, and only ordinarily fit, which is presumably why she divorced him.)

Meanwhile her husband, Jon Gosselin, the father of her children, having lost the wife goggles, promptly got a hot twenty two year old girlfriend to replace his aging thirty eight year old wife, and if the girlfriend is lucky, might marry her. But then, having been burned once, maybe not.

The typical marriage is Kate Gosselin and Jon Gosselin: The wife has a hugely inflated idea of her marriage market value (based on her F-buddy market value when she was considerably younger) and this poisons the marriage.

Now theoretically, if a woman is chaste, men will only approach her that are appropriate to her marriage market value, and she will avoid getting an inflated perception of her value, but no man believes that a chaste women is likely to remain chaste, because, they are not likely to remain chaste. So a woman faces a storm of approaches that would never happen if the boys had to ask her dad before approaching her, and if her dad said yes, they would get not a date with the opportunity of physical contact, but merely the opportunity to court her for marriage. These approaches lead Kate Gosselin to believe that she is entitled to marry a six foot tall physically fit millionaire, and that life, her husband, and the male dominated society is being terribly unfair to her in not giving her what she is entitled to have.

or making their husband's life hell until he files for one.

I don't think this works as well as the women think it does; men have memes about this (ball and chain) that aren't meaningfully replicated across the gender boundary. Head-crushing (by men) and heel-striking (by women) behavior is the baseline for Biblical gender relations within the context of a marriage, after all.

Head-crushing (by men) and heel-striking (by women) behavior is the baseline for Biblical gender relations within the context of a marriage, after all.

Could you elaborate? I've never heard of "you shall crush his head, he shall strike your heel" claimed as having anything to do with gender relations, given that the trade is between man and serpent. Compare the curses directed at men and women respectively from the same passage: men will suffer toil, women will suffer pain in childbirth.

It’s catholic doctrine that part of the woman’s punishment is chaffing under the rule of her husband, but the woman/serpent thing has nothing to do with it.

Huh, must have conflated the two in memory. (It still seems to me to be the main failure mode of how both genders handle being nasty in relationships, though.)

Aww nuts. I thought I was about to discover a neat rabbit-hole of esoteric scriptural interpretation. Oh well...

Nah, the spiciest thing from me you're likely to get is the claim that 1 Corinthians 8 is... probably not only referring to idol food.

But that's slow-pitch as far as interpretations go, I'm pretty sure everyone already knows that anyway (even if only to abuse it because you want to completely disregard what the previous chapter says... and then create a bunch of fallout for being completely un-self-aware about what doing it does and/or creating a crisis of faith for yourself due to your inability to back up your actions), and it's... well, not unusual, but somewhat remarkable that it's a conclusion that falls out of the significantly more general "should social systems that are designed for the average person still let you flip the safety off, and if you do that, when should you do that, how should you talk/how public should you be about the choices you're making, and why?" discussions that are half of what anyone around here talks about these days anyway.

Maybe I'll have to come up with something more esoteric when I misremember something else about scripture and gender later; too bad that whenever I'm thinking about this it's not for very nice reasons.

Why is the assumption that she would remarry? As I see it, the natural counterfactual is one in which both parties never married, and then the delta is that in the married-and-divorced world, there is a perpetual transfer of money from the man to the woman. This suggests that the compound action "marry arbitrarily, then divorce" is indeed in the woman's interest, unless you want to price in opportunity cost - which could then be read as the expected amount of resources that the woman would extract from men as a class, a reading which itself seems sufficient to drive resentment even before you introduce some mechanism (alimony) that serves to place a floor on how far the individual can fall below expectation.

(Yes, the framing of extracting resources from men completely neglects every way in which men benefit from women in partnerships in turn, but those benefits do not come with an alimony-like floor. A society which opts for fairly applying this idea of capping the loss of trad-model marriage benefits by not only compelling divorced men to pay alimony in resources but also compelling divorced women to pay alimony in household chores would be, uh, interesting.)

Divorce is generally a bad deal(and men usually don’t come out ahead either), yes, but it happens with alarming frequency because people don’t know that.

Perhaps going back to a culture of shaming divorce would be a good thing.

In my culture we see divorce in the same way that I see limb amputations. There are times where it is absloutely necessary, but you should do everything humanely possible to avoid it unless there are no other options left. Westerners see divorce as like leaving a job, much less serious. Raising the costs of a divorce (e.g. through shaming) is probably a good thing.

Except the divorce rate is going down consistently. The main reason there was such a high level of divorce in the 70's and 80's is a lot of bad marriages finally had valve releases, and a lot of people headed for the exists. Now, you can think that was a bad decision or whatever, but I doubt even many conservative-leaning people are going to be OK with, "let's go back to 1955 norms about marriage."

Westerners see divorce as like leaving a job, much less serious.

I would be careful not to generalize Westerners in this case. There are plenty of groups (in the US at least) where divorce is viewed much more like your limb amputation analogy. For example, I grew up in small town conservative Christian culture, and there it's considered pretty awful to have a divorce. Not necessarily shameful (because sometimes it really is the only option left), but definitely it's viewed as a bad thing which should be avoided if possible.

I think this is more about the messaging being wrong and close to what you describe as opposed to what people actually think. People don't think a divorce is like changing a job, but a lot of messaging around it is like that.

I think it's the age old tale of the majority of people hearing a message are people who are in need of the opposite and it leading to more harm than good. The messaging is intented to help people get out of toxic relationships, avoid shaming and discrimination etc. Only, this group is tiny and the group anti-needing this message is large.

It's kind of similar to fat acceptance and other similar campaigns. There is a sympathetic intention but it fails to consider that this might be somewhat of a zero-sum game and that there are a costs involved.

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