[allovernow]

>The relationships between men and women have changed. The relationship of the economy to individuals has changed.

>Well, if only women would return home, there would be more lucrative jobs for men, and more need for the women to be taken care of by a man". That ship has sailed

Worth noting that the current changes are explicitly counter to traditional roles which have existed for thousands of years. Yes, appeal solely to tradition is a fallacy, but it's also unreasonable to conclude that all past civilizations were bumbling barbarians with totally dysfunctional societies.

>Many men have adjusted to a new kind of masculinity for that world. Many haven't, and we'll need to discover some new things

The trouble is that most of these modern changes to the definition and role of masculinity (and femininity) are engineered by a particularly loud subset of the population. They run counter to what could be considered human nature (as evidenced by virtually all past and most contemporary societies) and although the ideals are ostensibly about freedom and equality, they fail to be self critical and account for the potential that gender roles have specialized over millions of years of evolution and there are associated costs to such an apparently egalitarian society.

Consider, first and foremost, that by shaming two or so Western generations into believing that the life of a housewife is menial and subservient, we have virtually doubled the workforce, without necessarily increasing the number of jobs required for a functioning society. Results include the modern necessity for a dual household income and negative wage pressure. And there are studies that life satisfaction of women relative to men has been steadily decreasing for 2-5 decades (can't remember exactly).

Maybe that ship shouldn't have sailed. Maybe it's folly to decide to turn thousands of years of wisdom on its head. Men have intrinsic, biological drives to compete, which are far stronger and more critical for life satisfaction than those of women, and the current Western push for "equality" may be leading to worse outcomes for society, especially for men who feel they've been outcompeted not because of lack of skill but because of forced social norms. The unfortunate truth is that the majority of people live their lives according to the norms of their societies - even when such norms have negative overall outcomes.

[majormajor]

Which social changes would you roll back to counteract the technological changes that have resulted in menial jobs without a career ladder or higher-than-subsidence pay?

How would we be better off with a bunch of men chasing these same still-meaningless jobs but with more dependents tied to them? How should we value the frustrations of the people least suited to compete in this new system against the frustrations of people not even allowed to compete in the old system? The more-options-for-more-people scenario has strong "better off" appeal right there.

You could just as easily conclude that the solution is to push forward and make it acceptable for single-income women-led houses, with "househusbands" who play video games all day while babysitting the appliances and kids. We've automated the shit out of the non-emotional-labor parts of that "housewive" job too, after all!

You preach a return to historical tradition but those traditions were forged in a vastly different technological landscape with far more physical labor required for survival, resulting in some splits generally around physical strength. Today is far different, so it's unreasonable to conclude that those old traditions are the best fit.

[allovernow]

I don't think you understand my argument. This isn't about defining what is and is not menial or what kind of lifestyle is socially acceptable. The point is that the job market is a market like any other - if you double supply without changing demand, price for labor (wages) goes down.

>You preach a return to historical tradition but those traditions were forged in a vastly different technological landscape with far more physical labor required for survival, resulting in some splits generally around physical strength. Today is far different, so it's unreasonable to conclude that those old traditions are the best fit.

I don't deny that the landscape has changed. However, human nature largely has not - and tens of thousands of generations of specialization have almost certainly optimized women (in terms of physiology, behavior, and desire) for more social and less competitive tasks. Evidence is all around us - typical male interests and behaviors tend to be far more competitive and aggressive, and we have physiological and genetic mechanisms to explain this difference (testosterone in particular).

>You could just as easily conclude that the solution is to push forward and make it acceptable for single-income women-led houses, with "househusbands"

Well, not exactly. While it could theoretically balance the labor market, what I'm suggesting is that such a campaign would run counter to human nature and lead to worse outcomes in life satisfaction and possibly even economic measures, because of innate differences between male and female psychology and evolutionary suitability (on average) for certain tasks.

I'm not suggesting that we revert to arranged marriages and dowries - and I acknowledge that most of the social progress of the past 100 years or so has been overwhelmingly positive. What I am saying is that perhaps the pendulum with respect to gender roles has swung too far and it's time for it to swing back a little close toward a healthy middle which is more consistent with human nature.

[majormajor]

But then what does that "healthy middle" actually look like without reverting the doubling of supply of labor?

I think you are overgeneralizing about "human nature" and under-valuing people's choices, based on what you're reading/hearing/seeing about one particular group of people.

It seems like you're suggesting "pushing" this group back into the rat race because of genetic disposition to respond to competitive pressure, but I'm highly doubtful that people who are already voluntarily dropping out of the competition/rat race, who aren't chasing the cars/glory/money/women/whatever, are going to be well-served by that.

[helen___keller]

So... what do you want? A government program to promote the joys of being a housewife? Do you really think that will move the needle on a systemic socioeconomic issue?

Or would you rather see an authoritarian solution? I'm sure that will go over well.

Keep in mind regardless of what you want as a woman, there's very real economic risk to being dependent on a man. Wanting to live a happy life as a housewife doesn't put food on the table when he loses his job and doesn't pay rent when he divorces you. It doesn't make life any easier when you find he has a mistress but you don't have the means to leave him.

Meanwhile, for those who are in the money with well-paying careers and considering quitting work to settle down, the opportunity cost of leaving behind your career is enormous: you are leaving tons of cash on the table even if you plan to rejoin the workforce later (as your career is not progressing for N years), you are giving up your dreams of vacationing abroad for maybe 18 years, and so on.

And this is all assuming the man even makes enough on his own to pay for the family. Many households simply require two paychecks in today's economy, and what you want as an individual will be trumped by the cost of rent every time.

I happen to agree that there's nothing wrong and nothing subservient with being a housewife. But to sum up such a complicated and vast socioeconomic development as merely "shaming two or so Western generations into believing that the life of a housewife is menial and subservient" is patently ridiculous.

[tathougies]

> Wanting to live a happy life as a housewife doesn't put food on the table when he loses his job and doesn't pay rent when he divorces you. It doesn't make life any easier when you find he has a mistress but you don't have the means to leave him.

By and large, these two issues did have solutions.

> Wanting to live a happy life as a housewife doesn't put food on the table when he loses his job and doesn't pay rent when he divorces you

With regard to job loss as well as death and disability, fraternal organizations (such as the Knights of Columbus) were basically founded for this purpose. Still today, they offer a highly rated insurance program and provide scholarships for the children of any members who die before their kids attend college or vocational school.

Divorce was handled by simply not allowing divorce without reason, and requiring the husband to pay upkeep. In more civilized legal systems, wives have automatic access to their husband's finances (community property).

> It doesn't make life any easier when you find he has a mistress but you don't have the means to leave him.

In all 50 states, adultery is still a civil crime. A cheated on wife can sue her husband for adultery if he spends money on his mistress and neglects her and forcefully garnish the wages if she has too.

The merits or lack thereof of these solutions is up for debate, but I don't think we should pretend they didn't exist and stay at home wives were left for dead by society. By and large there were support systems.

[chongli]

Keep in mind regardless of what you want as a woman, there's very real economic risk to being dependent on a man.

Before we automated away most of the jobs for men (leading to the current crisis) we did it first for women, with household appliances like refrigerators, laundry machines, and dishwashers. Go back to the 18th century (or earlier) and you'll find that husband and wife are equally dependent on one another. Families lived on farms where it was "all hands on deck" just to keep everyone fed, clothed, and warm during the winter. This meant even the parents were dependent on their own children to help out, as there was always more work to do.

It really wasn't until the 20th century when men started working away from the home and women found their chores automated, leading to long periods of boredom and loneliness. The genie is out of the bottle on all of this, though, so going back to live on the farm like Agricola [1] is not going to be an option for most people.

There are still some people who live the old way, though. They're called the Amish and they have much tighter family bonds than the rest of us. Even they have a real challenge maintaining their way of life, given that their children are allowed the opportunity of living among "the English" (that's us) for a while before they decide to commit to the community or strike out on their own. It's hard because modern technology is so very addictive.

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31260/agricola

[halfnormalform]

Eh, the "family bond" of the Amish also involves ruthlessly shunning their children and the children of their neighbors for doing things that most people would consider completely normal, so grain of salt re: tight bonds.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/amish-shun...

[chongli]

It goes both ways. The Amish have very deep and committed beliefs about their way of life and its connections to the family unit, which is primary in their community.

What we consider “completely normal” (cell phones, dating apps, sharing economy conveniences and luxuries) hasn’t done anything to keep us from atomizing to the point where people are killing themselves directly or through alcohol/drugs. The Amish want to keep those things out of their society because they see plainly what the rest of us have become.

It’s extreme and difficult to understand, but I wouldn’t call it ruthless. Those who are shunned have made the informed decision to reject their rules and leave.

[allovernow]

>So... what do you want? A government program to promote the joys of being a housewife? Do you really think that will move the needle on a systemic socioeconomic issue?

Not at all. I would like to see policy makers back away from the nonsensical notion that lack of gender parity across industry is indicative of a broken society, and stop pushing young women aggressively into STEM and leadership roles and encouraging industry to effectively set quotas.

>Keep in mind regardless of what you want as a woman, there's very real economic risk to being dependent on a man. Wanting to live a happy life as a housewife doesn't put food on the table when he loses his job and doesn't pay rent when he divorces you. It doesn't make life any easier when you find he has a mistress but you don't have the means to leave him

Sure, those are legitimate risks, but as other commenters have pointed out there are ways around them. But what people fail to consider is that there is stress associated with the rat race, particularly if someone is pushed into a role unsuited for them, either by cultural or economic pressure.

>And this is all assuming the man even makes enough on his own to pay for the family. Many households simply require two paychecks in today's economy, and what you want as an individual will be trumped by the cost of rent every time.

As I've mentioned, besides globalization, I think the largest contributor to the dual breadwinner requirement is the cultural push by liberal policy makers to get women working. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.

>Meanwhile, for those who are in the money with well-paying careers and considering quitting work to settle down, the opportunity cost of leaving behind your career is enormous

A problem neatly solved by specialization of home roles, though there's no reason a man can't stay home to take care of the kids. The main issue here is that a vocal minority has taken hold of policy with flawed assumptions which consider neither human nature nor unintended effects, and we're dealing with the fallout.

>I happen to agree that there's nothing wrong and nothing subservient with being a housewife. But to sum up such a complicated and vast socioeconomic development as merely "shaming two or so Western generations into believing that the life of a housewife is menial and subservient" is patently ridiculous.

Do you disagree that two generations of feminist ideology have structured educational and industrial policy such that women are strongly discouraged from child rearing? If not, where do you expect the demand and funds for all of that extra labor to come from when the fundamental needs of society are more or less unchanged? Sure, there are other geopolitical influences on wages and life outcomes, but this is a major and understudied driver.

[_fq4v]

> though there's no reason a man can't stay home to take care of the kids

Yes there is. Babies spend nine months in their mothers. When they are born they prefer their mothers more. Not out of hatred of their fathers but because that is who they are used to, due to simple facts of biology. More importantly, only mothers can breastfeed. While true that fathers can stay home with older children, there is an obvious advantage to mom staying home with babies, both for mom and baby. Keep in mind the WHO still recommends breastfeeding until age 2. Two years out of the workforce is a lot.

[helen___keller]

I'm not going to argue the side points because I doubt either of us have evidence

My post is just meant in support of GPs "that ship has sailed". STEM and leadership initiatives affect a tiny portion of the workforce by definition of how few women are in these roles, so it's clearly not bringing us back to the 1950s family unit. If you have another policy suggestion that could revert decades of socioeconomic change let me know

[notfromhere]

Maybe arguing for a solution where women were property of their husbands is cruel. I reckon the people making these arguments don’t expect to be on the barrel-end of that social dynamic.

Maybe we as men can figure out a different way to interact in society that doesn’t require stripping the other half of their rights.

Maybe the people making this argument just can’t compete in the modern world.

[_fq4v]

There have been plenty of societies with strong marital bonds where women were not property. Even in England women were not property. That is a tired line that undersells reality. One could equally say men were property since under the law of coverture in england a wife could enter into debts on behalf of their husbands poteentially forcing them into servitude to pay that debt while men could not do the same to their wives.

[caconym_]

You say women have been shamed into pursuing careers, but I don't see the evidence for that as the root cause of their increasing participation in the career-age workforce, nor do I think it's obvious that this expanded workforce is the cause of the general modern necessity for a dual household income. Why not the opposite? That the increasing costs of housing, goods, and services, due to XX factors, are making single-income multi-person households infeasible?

Seriously, what percentage of people in households that are dual-income by necessity are happy with their situation?

[spicy_throwaway]

I agree with you, but given the current culture the most likely outcome here is continued grinding hopelessness of men in Western society. Women may fare better briefly for one or two generations by moving into and evicting men from the remaining roles, but within another few generations automation will put both men and women back into the home. However, not as a family unit, but as wards of the state.

[cmdshiftf4]

>The unfortunate truth is that the majority of people live their lives according to the norms of their societies - even when such norms have negative overall outcomes.

- People (men and women) are more stressed than ever

- People are reporting less satisfaction with life than ever

- People are increasingly anxious, isolated and suffering from depression

- What once took one person going to work to provide now takes two, and even then many struggle, and childcare is fobbed off on strangers who charge a fortune in a large part due to the premiums they have to pay for other strangers failing to take adequate care of the children fobbed off on them

- Pessimism for the future of the developed world is the highest it has ever been

- Despite living in the greatest economic times, ever, with less inequality than ever, we have classes of people who swear they're more oppressed than ever and are comparing those who disagree with fascists of the past. What optimism people retain is slowly being diminished watching this charade play out

- Men are dropping out of society, are graduating less, working less, are killing themselves, or trying to kill themselves, or are fracturing mentally, becoming homeless and/or turning to drug addicts at a rate we've never seen before

- More women are also experiencing some of the above, despite graduating more than ever, earning more than ever and being more empowered than ever

- Life expectancy in the developed world is starting to drop as people view society as fractured and without purpose, which is manifesting itself in transient, only briefly gratifying greed-fueled hedonism or self-harm and suicide

- The traditional nuclear family has been denigrated, people are now growing up in broken homes - which has terrible outcomes for children who become adults - and on the sidelines of broken homes acting as a warning sign on marriage, coupling, etc.

- Birth rates are, as a consequence, dropping through the floor

- Governments, hell bent on continuous growth at all costs because a drop in growth will bring the economic pyramid scheme they've concocted crashing down, are replacing their now-demoralized, not-breeding-at-replacement-rate populations with immigrants from completely different cultures who, while economically beneficial, have severe consequences on the idea of identity and sense of community in the areas and countries they (understandably) leave their broken home countries for

- The drop in sense of community, shared identity and sense of security is having severe ramifications on the next generation as they're kept indoors, glued to entertainment, while their parents become increasingly politically polarized against their own people

It feels like we're either in the midst of a grand but badly thought out social experiment, intentionally made, whose consequences our ancestors would mock us for, and our descendants loathe us for, or we've been manipulated into a race-to-the-bottom while being told it's good for us by someone or something to gain from it.

Maybe we're living out the Mouse Utopia Experiment for real, and with these NEETs we're now seeing the emergence of the "beautiful ones" while the rest of us chase one another around biting one another without real reason, straddling what little space is available to us, while the mice we've decided to call leaders fret over making us more productive so yet more food and cheap entertainment can be dropped into our laps.

The above may seem pessimistic but none of it is nonfactual. We techies are pretty out-of-touch with the average joe at this point, and while we enjoy the financial success on two incomes to provide the kind of life available to the average family on one income in our grandparent's generation, most cannot.

But we're told this is working. That it's progress. That we should continue on as we have. I ask is it working? Is this actual progress? Should we actually continue in this vein? Because from where I'm standing we've taken values, lessons, structure and understanding developed and passed down over hundreds of thousands of years as we progressed from animals, through pre-humans and to our modern form and have flipped them on their head, denigrated and discarded them at the behest of entities with loud mouths and personal agendas, backed not by science or nature but simply by assertion, and whose "rules" and "norms" seem to change on a whim as every day, week and month passes by.

I'm not saying I have the answers so I'd appreciate people didn't strawman the above, put words in my mouth and find outrage in them, etc.

[aratakareigen]

Most of these claims I've never heard before, and I know at least one of them (the claim that inequality is lower than in the recent past) is definitely false, so I feel justified to ask: do you have any sources?