[127]

>Hang on, did anyone propose affirmative action here or something? All the blog talked about was trying to praise girls for their smarts rather than their looks. If this is enough to cause misery for you, I think you have self-esteem issues.

As the pool of eligible husbands diminishes, the pool of men who simply can't get a wife grows and the disparity between the lucky and unlucky men increases. I'm sure you can see how this can generate social friction inside a nation?

I'm not making a moral statement either way here, just observing some forces that I believe do affect our lives.

[wanorris]

Wait, are you saying that we need to encourage women to be less capable because the career market is zero sum, and men need careers more than women?

I'm very open to the idea that I misunderstood your statement, but if I have characterized it correctly, then the flaw in it is that careers are not zero sum, and having additional capable, productive people in a society creates more wealth for the society as a whole than would otherwise have existed. This creates more opportunities for men as well as women.

[127]

I certainly believe that marriages can be more harmonious when the men is in a economically leading role. Do I believe that women should suppressed in order to achieve this? No. Do I believe that if a woman wants a successful marriage, pursuing a high-status career can be harmful to this? Yes.

[wanorris]

So in a gay or lesbian marriage, which partner should voluntarily subordinate themselves to the other?

Which I guess is my way of saying that any particular marriage happens between two individuals with their own strengths, weakenesses, and interests, not between two archtypes or statistical distributions. A successful marriage is only possible between two happy partners, and if a person will be unhappy without pursuing their other life goals along with their marriage, giving those life goals up for the sake of the marriage is still a losing strategy.

Personally, I think overgeneralization from the statistical majority is one of the signal problems of trying to talk about gender rules and guidelines -- though, admittedly, the opposite problem is nearly as common, which is refusing to acknowledge that there are such things as common tendencies and statistical majorities.

[127]

I'm only talking about heterosexual marriage, nothing else.