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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

> Bride Price is one way some cultures try to make sure that women -- who will not have careers of their own and power of their own -- are properly cared for by upstanding citizens who are productive and take care of their family because they are good men.

It most certainly does not ensure anything like that. It ensures that they are owned by men with money while having little to zero ability defend themselves, escape or make decisions about their own lives. It ensures that buyer will consider himself entitled to demand from her while the opposite will be seen as transgression - after all he paid money for her.

There is not guarantee that buyer is upstanding citizen or good man. Men with money beat their wifes, abuse their wifes and so on and so fort.

> How do you resolve those humanely and in a manner that treats all parties well?

You don't and this arrangement is not even trying. It is about power and control. Those who have more power end up having their way over those with little power - just like with any other relationship.

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I already said I don't approve of the practice.

But the reality is that the actual solution here is:

1. Turn the country into a developed country.

2. Eradicate sexism so women can have money and power in their own right.

This cannot be done overnight.

Even if you pull that off, there will be women who actually want to be home with their children when they are little. When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, I had female colleagues who expressed regret that they could not be home with their children. They could not afford it. They envied me the fact that I had been home with my kids.

So there doesn't appear to be a perfect solution here. But I can assure you that marrying a man who can afford to feed and house you is better than marrying a man who can't afford that, all other things being equal, especially when you can't possibly have a real career yourself that will provide for you.

I dont need to have immediate solution to point out that "are properly cared for by upstanding citizens who are productive and take care of their family because they are good men" is nonsense.

Reality is that it sux and even if we have no solution, we should not pretend it is something that it is not.

Wanting to stay at home and being sold are two miles away different experiences.

> But I can assure you that marrying a man who can afford to feed and house you is better than marrying a man who can't afford that, all other things being equal, especially when you can't possibly have a real career yourself that will provide for you.

Well then, you don't get to be at home. I assure you that rich abusive or emotionally distant man who think less of you is victory either. Lastly, the ratio of males vs females wont change, so there wont be enough of rich guys for every girls anyway.

But beyond that, while kids need that relationship with caregiver, I don't find the situation as you described it particularly noble. Men are not and should not be treated as wallets only. They deserve equal effort from women including in getting food.

In traditional farms, everybody worked. There was gender split in both power and tasks, but nevertheless, there is no entitlement to be idle.

You are judging this from the perspective of what is possible in a developed country today. I am judging this as a student of history.

Historically, famine was commonplace. We make a big deal about it now, but from what I gather, The Irish Potato Famine is remembered ironically in part because it was kind of one of the last big famines in Europe. Before that, famine wasn't even newsworthy.

So in a very poor country where survival is a big issue, "good man" starts with "does he even have the capacity to provide for a wife and kids?" It does not begin with other niceties concerning how kind and so forth he is.

"I want a man who's kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask in a millionaire?" -- Zsa Zsa Gabor (Has "first world problem" written all over it, to the max)

Edit in response to your edit:

there is no entitlement to be idle.

Full time wives cook, clean, raise children, etc. Implying that being a full time wife and mom is a life where one is "idle" is incredibly misogynistic as it completely pisses on the very real value provided to the world by traditional women's work.

On a traditional farm where women had a garden near the kitchen for spices and vegetables and men provided meat, grain, etc, both worked to literally put food on the table. Around 300 years ago or so, we began shifting labor around to free men up to go do paid work as money began to become more commonly available. "Women's work" wasn't inherently valued less than the work of men because there wasn't a clear dividing line between "This work is worth pay and this work is not and the dividing line closely corresponds to gendered roles."

The problem is we now devalue women's work because it doesn't pay money and money has come to be more central to our lives than it once was. Historically, money was not the way we parceled things out.

I've heard this notion that "we devalue women's work" but I can't actually put my finger on any example of this. I'm not sure it's really true.

Yes, homemakers are not paid in money. That doesn't make the work any less valuable. And I think that anyone who thinks about this for a few seconds would come to this conclusion. There's nothing more valuable about a man cooking in a restaurant than a woman cooking in her home. Maybe the opposite, because a restaurant cook can be replaced more easily than the mother to a particular child.

When I read traditionalists talking about this, they tend to emphasize the value of what women provide in that traditional role. They'd never say that the women are idle or useless or worthless. I remember old Chinese stories about a man choosing a wife based on her cooking skills. And on the modern side, one of the Proud Boys' core tenets is "venerate the housewife".

Is it progressives/feminists who are devaluing womens' work? Is it a side-effect of the campaign to free women from having to do that work, that the work itself ends up getting denigrated along with the women doing it? I think feminists would generally also say that home work is fully respectable, but maybe there's an undercurrent of disrespect there. To say women should move from home to career is in some sense implicitly valuing career over the home.

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You point to the daily use of money as the source of the difference. I think that may be wrong. I think the cause may actually be education.

Traditional women's work doesn't require more than a primary education. When everyone is uneducated, one may see that work as equal to an equally-uneducated man's work doing subsistence farming or laboring. But once society starts educating men (and only men, because resources are scarce and there are no washing machines or dishwashers and every woman is occupied on all-day every day home work and so they cannot be spared), a difference in hourly value appears between the man and the woman. Because of education, the woman's work is in some sense actually less valuable per-hour than that of her educated husband - hiring a replacement for him would cost a lot more than hiring a replacement for her. So the mens' work becomes literally more valuable.

The asymmetry seems to be that the men got educated first. And I think the basic reason for that is technological: The work men did in medieval times was largely about simple muscle power (farming, building etc), and can be automated with simple industrial-era technology. The work women did was based on hand-eye coordination and social interaction (cooking, cleaning, child discipline), and largely still can't be automated very well today. So the men were automated out of their jobs first, which allowed them to spend time getting educated instead of pushing plows, while the womens' work still needed to be done by hand.

Anyway, it's an interesting set of questions. I'd be curious to see what examples of people "devaluing womens' work" actually exist, if anyone can point them out. I'm not sure I've really seen it.

There's nothing more valuable about a man cooking in a restaurant than a woman cooking in her home.

Traditional women's work doesn't require more than a primary education.

Professional chefs go to special and expensive schools to learn to cook. Women often learn it at home starting at an incredibly early age as they help their own mother's in the kitchen.

Your claim that women's work doesn't require education is the very essence of the problem of which I speak. Women in traditional cultures are essentially apprenticed to the role of wife and mom from an incredibly early age and typically have spent many years learning to cook, clean, raise kids, etc before they get married and become wives and moms.

Dismissing this as "not educated" is one of the ways we fundamentally pretend that women's work is unskilled labor and worth less than the kinds of labor men do.

I used the word "cook". You seem to have substituted "professional chef" into that sentence, and then responded as though that's what I wrote. Obviously nothing I wrote will made sense if you're substituting out new words with very different meanings.

I specifically used the word "cook" and not "professional chef" to indicate the type of cook who can do the work without going to university for it. Picture the guy flipping burgers at a McDonalds. That's a cook.

I really liked your previous post, I was hoping we could have a conversation without the hostile misinterpretation.

When I say education I'm referring to university. The traditional education a girl in Somalia can get by the time she is 16 is, in comparison to a university education, "not educated". This is plain language, and you understand it well. But you seem to be mixing in some sort of moral judgmental meaning along with the economic factual meaning.

If simply stating that homemaking requires less education than engineering, medicine, or law is "devaluing women's work", then devaluing women's work would be the correct thing to do. But a statement about the economic dollar investment into work is not the same as a moral judgment of it.

When you say people "devalue women's work", is that all you mean then? That people correctly note that it requires less educational years to produce a homemaker than an engineer, doctor, or lawyer? Because "devaluing women's work" really sounds like a moral thing.

I'm not looking to fight with you. In a nutshell, a girl being married off at age 16 may have been trained from age 4 for her future role as wife and mom.

Some wives and moms are excellent cooks, on par with professional chefs. Most people would probably prefer "mom's home cooking" to McDonald's. And it seems a bit insulting for you to act like I moved the goal posts by saying professional chef. Most full time homemakers I have known did a lot of cooking and were very good at it, on par with a professional chef.

In fact, one of the mom's I knew growing up had been to cooking school. If she hadn't been a woman, she likely would have been running a restaurant rather than cooking gourmet meals for family and friends.

I was a homemaker who homeschooled my 2e sons. I know a lot about gifted education, special needs education, accommodating various things. But that somehow doesn't really count in the eyes of most people.

I have been told right here on HN that college education is wasted on homemakers. I needed my college education to do right by my kids and make sure they had some hope of a future.

I mean, I really don't want to fight with you, but you are basically digging your grave deeper by telling me I am wrong to compare a mom's cooking to a professional chef and you were intending to compare it to a job at McDonald's.

Women also do things like patch up kids who are injured, take care of them while sick etc. In fact, I am getting well when the world tells me it cannot be done and that is largely through leveraging the domains of knowledge that are the purview of homemakers.

So when you say that we should rightly devalue women's work in comparison to medicine, my feeling is there is no means to bridge the vast distance between your mental models of life, the universe and everything and mine.

And if you and the rest of HN will excuse me, I think I have had enough of arguing this topic.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving if you are American and insert whatever appropriate greeting suffices if you are not.

I don't want to fight with anyone either.

"when you say that we should rightly devalue women's work in comparison to medicine"

I said the opposite of this, with emphasis. It was my whole point. It's such a struggle to communicate through these repeated hostile misinterpretations. Please, please, read what I'm actually saying. There is nuance. This isn't a flame war. You're jumping to the conclusion that I think your personal daily struggles for years are worthless. This is not what I an saying at all.

It seems you are equating price with moral worthiness. It costs more to train a doctor than a homemaker. This is simple fact measurable in dollars. I don't think that this devalues women's work any more than it devalues a soldier's work because they are not paid well. But I guess you do see price as equivalent to moral value. That is a gap in worldview I can't cross; the counterexamples are so numerous I can't make sense of any statement based on such a premise.

Famine and disease are not a good comparison for sexism. Yes, we want to eradicate both, but there's a difference:

Technology can give us new vaccines and increase our crop yields. It can't change human nature.

That's all there is to it. Even if we were able to change people to make them incapable of sexism we would not have changed human nature, we would only have robbed them of their free will (and thus their human nature).

Without the ability to do evil, you can't be good.

I read quite a lot about history and it was more complicated then that. There were famines, but also plenty of time without them. There was feudalism and social classes did not mixed (meaning dude and girl having families of similar resources), so what you wanted from dude was physical strength.

There were mining areas where men died young so women fed themselves and kids. Occasionally wars killed men leaving women being more in numbers.

There were multi generation families where everyone worked and elders ruled.

In any situation near famine, everyone worked for money or food however they could (women and kids having limitations but also able to prostitute). Poor people always had two working and not just caring about kids - idle lifestyle being luxury.

And then aristocracy marrying for power and peace.

Then farm had everyone working on own property, no one working outside house.

Historically there were many different arrangements. None of that requires or implies selling and buying brides as something good that that girl, through that happens.

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I was full time stay at home. It was idle. Also hard, but due to psychological reasons - kids were fine but that lack of everything else and no purpose no usefulness no challenge and isolation were killing me.

>In traditional farms, everybody worked. There was gender split in both power and tasks, but nevertheless, there is no entitlement to be idle.

You don't seem to understand the implications of that statement. In a country where the way to obtain food is tightly coupled to physical strength, men dominate because they are stronger. That's reality.

Even though women can (and do) substantial, non-trivial, and important work, the work they do [in unindustrialized nations] is derivative of a man's; you can't operate on resources that aren't there (preparing food is impossible if there's no food to prepare). That's also reality.

Those two things are the reason why women are second-class citizens in unindustrialized countries- implying that there's some grand conspiracy by men that makes this so is intellectually dishonest. Once industrialization renders the physical strength to resource equation moot, women are able to be productive in their own right (a farming combine does not care who is sitting in the driver's seat), and they become first-class citizens shortly thereafter as the Western world has demonstrated without exception.

(Residual effects may vary and are to be expected because humanity evolved with this concept; I needn't elaborate as to what they are).

The problem is that women still look for men who can provide for them, even if they can provide for themselves.

Yes. I think I covered that when I said Even if you pull that off, there will be women who actually want to be home with their children when they are little. When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, I had female colleagues who expressed regret that they could not be home with their children. They could not afford it. They envied me the fact that I had been home with my kids.

Given that pregnancy can result in debilitating health problems, a woman can wind up bedridden while pregnant, a woman lactates following pregnancy and may want to breastfeed the baby, etc, I don't think we will ever have a slam dunk solution here.

If you are capable of getting pregnant, you cannot realistically discount the possibility that you will need your partner to be capable of adequately providing for you and one or more children, even if you have zero desire to actually be home with them. That may not be a choice. Sex can lead to a pregnancy you didn't intend and that can lead to situations where working full time is worse than staying home if you can afford it.

"I can assure you that marrying a man who can afford to feed and house you is better than marrying a man who can't afford that"

In practice, sure, that's how that goes, because women are deprived of Independence. But given the will they would actually prefer to be poor than to be picked up by some rich asshole. Typically called morals.

I am going to assume you are unaware that I both appear to be the highest ranked woman on HN and also achieved that status while homeless for nearly six years, in spite of having about six years of college, etc. while I bitched about how my gender appeared to be a barrier to networking here and got told I was imagining that.

So you will have to excuse the hell out of me for being a hair skeptical about the possibility that banning this practice will somehow immediately lead to women having better options and wonderfully middle class lives on their own efforts from their gratifying careers and yadda.

You are attacking some argument, but certainly not one anybody was making.

As for the rest, you seem rather to be rather proud of karma points on the Internet. As someone with almost as many of them, I am somewhat intrigued. Do I get access to some secret club that I never even dared to dream about before?

FWIW I have never had as much as an email conversation that started on HN. I actually doubt anybody even notices usernames. Personally tptacek(?) is the only name on HN I remember, and that’s only because he tends to make exactly my arguments, only better.

As someone with almost as many of them

My other account, that I retired shortly after it hit the leaderboard last year, has 25k karma.

I will refer you here and then say no more on the matter cuz Reasons:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18466918

I've seen your posts frequently here and I think you make HN a better place. You provide a different perspective than many of us are used to hearing.

Thank you.

(My general policy, developed over many years of being me on the internet, is to upvote comments of this sort and not reply to them. In part because it's Thanksgiving, I've decided to make an exception.)

There's probably enough people arguing with you already, I'd like to just say that I respect you're sticking to your guns. You are mostly right. That said, nothing of my response had to do with your gender or status, and I'll not dig into that any further.

Thank you. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that you had done any such thing.

I'm just saying that I'm an educated woman in a first world country who absolutely was not being forced into a relationship with a man and that failed to get me the middle class life I desired and was willing to work towards. So there is a lot more that needs to happen in order to solve such problems. Merely banning this one thing will not somehow automatically give women empowered, moneyed lives.

That simply is not how it works. If I thought it would, I would be the first to say "Hell yeah!"

> "I can assure you that marrying a man who can afford to feed and house you is better than marrying a man who can't afford that"

It is nice to see that the open secret being spoked out aloud. It is the basis for the counter argument by MRA that instead of bias against women, it is different incentives for men and women that is driving men to get money and power in disproportional amount. This then lead to stereotyping and sexism where a large portion of society assume and even associate those desire with male gender, and they judge male worth and social status based on it.

> They envied me the fact that I had been home with my kids.

From a social status perspective I am not surprised. I would hazard a guess that if you instead told them how you worked for months on a oil rig for a heavy pay check while the kids were young it would generate a very different response. The difference in how social status is gained and maintained is significant for men and for women.

To then go to actual solutions, developed countries does not have a significant different view on social status and gender roles. The gender expectations if anything has an even large impact if we look at places like Sweden, often called the Gender-equality paradox. Bride price does not exist in developed countries simply because children there are not expected to support the parent. There is multiple ways for men to signal wealth so that aspect of bridge price is resolves through other means such as expensive ring, clothing, cars, restaurant dinners and other social status signals. In order to eradicate the practice of bride price you have to distance the dependency that parents has on children when they grow old, and how important a large family is for survival and success.

I doubt "social status" is the best explanation for those statements.

Bride price does not exist in developed countries simply because children there are not expected to support the parent.

That's insightful and good info. It suggests working on retirement funds et al is one of the things that can be done by anyone who wants to try to find a realistic and constructive path forward to end this practice.

> It ensures that they ... [have] little to zero ability defend themselves, escape or make decisions about their own lives.

In these societies all that is the baseline. The wife will be a piece of property no matter who the husband is. The bride price doesn’t create that situation.

It does still provide incentive to the bride’s parents to get their daughter married off, though.

Marylin Monroe was married off at an early age. Parents who cannot afford to support their children or for whom that is burdensome have inherent incentive to move them out of their house.

If you deny them the chance to marry them off for money, then what? Do you think they just rise to the occasion and provide for the girl a life of luxury? Or do they maybe throw her out into the street because it's the only option left to them?

In a situation where being a homeless woman is likely to result in starvation, rape, possibly gang rape, possibly being taken in by a pimp, does getting married to some rich guy who may happen to be an asshole really sound like the worst thing ever?

I’m just saying that the current situation seems to value selling of daughters, whatever the motive: be it poverty or a desire to perpetuate the system. Considering that women in this situation often do not have much say over the process, it is my assumption that there is a very real chance that the end result may not be the best one for them, whatever it might be.

You are basically moving the goal posts here, No True Scotsman style.

Am I? I think my original point still stands, which was nothing more than "there is an incentive for parents to sell their daughters" because they literally make money in doing so. In my second comment I provided an example of why this could be in conflict with the bride's interests.

In a society where women can’t participate in the work force and the economy and peoples’ health is uncertain, parents already have huge incentives to get their daughters married off.

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