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What Happened to Society's Life Script
In the fifties, the American dream was, for the vast majority of people, pretty obvious. You find a job with the main employer of the town, whether that was a coal mine or a factory or a railyard or whatever the case may be. You marry, if not literally the girl next door, then something close; maybe a high school sweetheart. If you were a woman you were then expected to stay home and be a housewife, and except for a few very highly-female coded jobs, that's just what you did. If you were a man you might have been required to serve in the army beforehand, but few people went to college; only if you were wealthy and/or very, very smart. It mostly wasn't your decision either way, about any of it. 'Should I go into the military, or skilled labor, or go to college?' wasn't a question very many people had to ask; usually what you did next after finishing high school was readily apparent, often literally by having only a single option or a very small set thereof. If you did have the opportunity to go to college- most people didn't- both the university and your parents had much more say in what you did there. And I think we should note- the vast majority of people here could find respect as a worker bee. This is important because the vast majority of people have to be worker bees to have a functioning society.
Today, that is not the case. Everyone who wants to can go to university, or near enough. Many people stay in university long past the point at which it does any good, in point of fact. The military is 100% volunteer, and few people live with access to a single major employer. Young people can't find spouses, and these days don't seem to be able to blunder into relationships either. Every individual can, with certain reasonable limits, do what he wishes, and nobody with institutional power seems keen to say no, that's stupid, do this instead.
And it seems that we have lost something, there. Occasionally conservative pundits will start talking about the success sequence- finish high school, work full time, get married, and then have children. There's some other obvious things that go along with it, like 'don't do drugs'. But the gist of the success sequence is, well, a (somewhat vague)life script. And realistically the success sequence is the sort of thing our culture should be putting more effort into promoting; it isn't the default message despite every idea therein being a good one.
I think the youth agree with me, here. Jordan Peterson's popularity, notoriously, came from offering boomer dad advice. Recently there's been discussion of positive male role models to replace Andrew Tate; Andrew Tate's pitch isn't much different from tons of other redpill influencers. What's different is he's selling 'you, too, can be like me, just do x, y, z'. Obviously he's a lying grifter, but his fanbase are mostly teens. What replacement for his (dumb)life script are these positive male role models offering? The pro-social version of Andrew Tate isn't the male feminist activist. It's Mike Rowe.
Unfortunately, "work hard, at a quite possibly unpleasant job" isn't a great sales pitch. But I want to circle back to the point I made ending my discussion of the fifties- most people have to be worker bees. In a functioning society there are few girlbosses because there simply are not very many bosses- the average person will always make the median income, live a not particularly impressive lifestyle, and live in flyover. To put it more pithily, average people will always be average. And being average isn't, well, a flashy and appealing thing. In the past, lack of options meant people became average worker bees. Today, people have the option not to do that; they may not be Indian chiefs and fighter pilots and surgeons and other high status jobs instead, but they're being something, and usually that something is below average, gig workers and basement dwellers. It has to be said, therefore- most people can't figure it out on their own. For every unrecognized genius there's a dozen schizos. Boring middle-aged advice serves a useful purpose; to throw out the social pressure to follow it was a mistake. The question becomes, then, 'how do we bring it back?'
There's a lot more to it than this, as there usually is, but here is a pretty serviceable summary of an industrial-revolution-one-two-punch
You didn't have a little family business out of your family home making rope, you were one part of the ropemaking company. Rather than owning a small pile and building on it you had a salary and a mortgage.
Modern appliances, particularly the washing machine, inadvertently erased what little was left for your wife to help out with while you were working
When Betty Crocker first came out with instant cake mix, you didn't even have to add an egg (obvious, now that you know). Women were despondent that they'd been reduced into "just adding water."
So that's apparently where the line was drawn and the scraps over which we've been fighting
Thank you for reducing the contribution of women in the home to "what little your wife does while you do Real Work".
Now that we have vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and microwaves, what need for men to marry at all? They can just do those five minute tasks in between coming home from their Real Jobs and settling down to have fun with online porn, online gaming, and ordering drugs and booze online.
Even our own lot thinks this is sexist language and want to replace it:
What contribution, indeed? The "little that was left for a wife to help out with" isn't anything important or meaningful, it's just idle women sitting on their hands while you toil and sweat as the breadwinner!
This, but unironically. Especially since men's standards on those tasks tends to be considerably lower than women's.
This is part of the problem about the relations between the sexes, and why both men and women are dissatisfied. Women are finding out they can't have it all, and men are caught between what women's expectations are, and what they think they should be, and everyone is caught between what they are and the ideal. See the foofah about female models in video games; it's not something that is really important, but at the same time it's irksome when the complaint is "They made the women ugly" and no, they just made the women look more realistic. I suppose if we all calmed down and accepted that this is fantasy, and guys want fantasy big-titted sluts they can use as masturbation material (or not even that, just what they expect as a porn model for online female) and that this is not how real women look, but I suppose that's too much to ask for. Maybe customisation options where if you are that rara avis, a female gamer who wants to play Suicide Squad you can tone down Harley's looks, or if you're a guy who wants her to have mega-gigantic jiggly boobsock, you can both get what you want. And we all agree to live and let live.
If realism was what game devs pursued in their depictions of women, EA Sports FC (formerly FIFA) wouldn't give women stats comparable to men's. Note that these stats aren't just for show, a mixed team is possible in game and playing such a team is a perfectly valid strategy.
Like I said, it's all fantasy. I don't want to play a football game with a mixed team, but presumably somebody does, and enough somebodies to make it worth producing this edition.
But I don't see "they made the women ugly" when I look at the images being complained about and the woman looks normal to me.
It's a bit unfortunate that we likely aren't going to see the natural gender-flipped example, with media consumed (primarily) by women being pressured by a political interest group to make the men depicted in it more average. This would have to look like every k-drama started changing its male characters to balding dad bods and genuinely (rather than a cutesy female-fantasy version of) awkward spindly nerds with bad skin.
It seems evident to me that people aren't generally consuming fiction to see "normal", outside of some narrow domains of high art where the normality is made worth seeing by the abnormal level of insight by the author. To mandate that fiction depicts normality is political interference, with historical precedent all looking like things like socialist realism (not that its depiction of people was actually that representative in reality).
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