“Advice to Bride and Groom” by Plutarch (C. 100 CE)
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
Feminism has made most women unfit for marriage. The very idea that casting the relations between men and women as a pseudo-Marxist class struggle could lead to happy marriages and households is insane.
Men and women are not equal. We are diverse and complementary, and we need to find ways to once again cooperate if our civilisation is going to have any kind of future
Maybe most women don’t like the implied(?) subservience you want to define as complementary.
Being happy to serve your wife/husbands needs - and indeed the needs of your children is a necessary foundation for a happy home.
What's the alternative? Endless self-gratification? Why bother getting married if that's what you want?
E.g.:
> A wife ought not to make friends of her own but enjoy her husband’s friends in common with him
> a virtuous woman ought to be most visible in her husband’s company and to stay in the house and hide herself when he is away.
> If therefore a man in private life, who is incontinent and dissolute in regard to his pleasures, commits some peccadillo with a paramour or a maidservant, his wedded wife ought not to be indignant or angry, but she should reason that it is respect for her which leads him to share his debauchery, licentiousness, and wantonness with another woman.
For me this paints the picture of a fearful, unfaithful husband who lacks confidence.
However, I think a return to gender roles would do us good. Having two parents be forced into the work place, leaving the kids to be raised by strangers in day care is not really the "liberation" that feminists claim it is.
I am firmly of the opinion that a couple should not have children if they cannot take care of them themselves.
Daycare is a band-aid to a social problem and should never be accepted as the norm or ideal.
A healthy relationship does both. You of course support and help each other. But you also have to have the space for yourself. A person that just looks at the other will not be happy in the long run.
The type of relationship your proposal results in would in my experience not last very long. I am in one happy relationship for half of my life now and have seen countless relationships fall apart over the years.
In the course of dying out, people will change their attitudes and standards. Crisis situations will multiply. In the midst of crisis, I doubt life will be any easier for women than it is now. But maybe I’m wrong and it will be a feminist utopia. Good luck with that.
This talk of people changing their standards only goes one way, and it’s telling. The not so veiled insinuation that women will comply by choice or will eventually be forced. There’s no suggestion that, in whatever civilization failure is contrived to justify this misogyny, men will have to adjust to recognize and treat women as humans.
No luck with that.
Men and women are equal in their value to the relationship and as human beings. However they are not identical. As you said we are diverse and complementary.
I think this is an important clarification before people think you are saying one sex is better and/or can dominate the other (which is not true).
Of all the women I've seriously dated, I can't think of a single one I passed on marrying because of feminism.
> The very idea that casting the relations between men and women as a pseudo-Marxist class struggle
That's certainly a phrase someone could say, but it doesn't sound like the statement of anyone who has much of an idea what Marxism or feminism are.
> Men and women are not equal.
Men and women have some characteristics that are distributed bimodally. Arguably some different natural incentives. You could reasonably say they're different. They're also by many criteria more alike than they are different, and any member of either class is only somewhat more likely to be similar to another member of their class than a member of the other class, which implies that the kind of difference in play here is a pretty suspect basis for founding inequality, and the best basis on which to evaluate any individual is... individual. Which works pretty well as one of several general egalitarian principles.
It's one thing to recognize difference. It's probably even wise to be able to recognize difference and use it as a starting place. But it's another thing to use generalizations of difference as an assertion of inequality, especially one that implies hierarchies of privilege by class like "men and women are not equal."
Where inequality exists, best be sure you can test for it specifically. Simply assuming your priors (especially poorly examined priors) automatically apply has some names, many of them ugly.
I think we basically agree with each other. In other words tradition and statistical modes of innate characteristics are strongly related to each other.
I am just using the framing language of tradition, which is uncomfortable to those who prefer the trappings of a more rationalistic explanation. But it amounts to the same thing.
> But it's another thing to use generalizations of difference as an assertion of inequality, especially one that implies hierarchies of privilege by class like "men and women are not equal."
I think the modern mind needs to grapple with this. Hierarchies are natural and inescapable and typically (but not always) healthy.
There's nothing wrong/shameful with whatever station we might have in life.
For example, I always think of Alfred from Batman.
No, he's not Bruce Wayne, but he's integral to the story. Batman can barely cope without him. He's a servant, and yet he carries himself with a justified sense of nobility.
And Bruce Wayne has a noblesse oblige to ensure Alfred is well taken care of.
We seem to have lost this concept as a culture.
I think each of us must learn to be content with who we have been created to be, and the nobility of whatever position we find ourselves in the great chain if being; caring for those who depend on us, and serving those diligently who are placed above us.
In the same way the traditional conception of marriage isn't abusive, but rather freeing to enable people to find dignity and play to their strengths.
As someone who has a ton of (female) friends who call themselves feminists I never heard any of them portrait marriage even in the slightest like you did here. I highly suspect you fell victim to some form of online exaggeration here.
Most female feminists I know just want a respectful relationship with people from the other gender. And in a romantic relationship or a marriage that means that men e.g. should not automatically assume that the women will organize the household while they chill out.
A household where both partners have respect for each other is certainly a more happy household than the old patriarchal model I know from my childhood.
Historically men didn't "chill out". Most men had gruelling menial exhausting jobs - agricultural work that was simply too physically demanding for most women to do.
The idea that men had an easy life while women did all the struggle is a fever dream.