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Comment by arien | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I believe that it has to do with the role of women in the current society, not exactly with the race. I don't live in America, but I think the trend is present in most western countries anyway. We're jumping from the "dependant housewive" to the "independent worker". I remember my mom used to say when I was a kid that I had to find a good husband. But now I have my own house and a good job... I don't need to marry a man to provide myself.

It sounds cruel, but I don't think people married in the past just because they loved each other so much. As said in the article, it was a necessity, but such thing is ceasing to exist, so the disposition of people for marriage is decreasing.

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That doesn’t track for me.

Look at men in the past. It’s against men’s evolutionary nature to marry yet they still got married just as quickly (and they didn’t need wives to support them). So your argument that women are taking a role traditionally held by men before and hence aren’t marrying doesn’t seem to hold water.

Here’s the problem: The feminist narrative currently out there is a myth. It says women were always kept down and only now are rising to positions of power. But look at history and you’ll see there were women in positions of power going back thousands of years (Most pre-industrial societies gave power over a nation to the Queen if her King died first and societies like the Egyptians were ruled over by women even without men)

To me this seems like a societal misfire. It seems like the majority of women in the past wanted to stay home and take care of their family (as evolutions suggests they do). Then that became their accepted role and the minority who didn’t want that felt trapped in their circumstance. They became the original feminists and rightfully won the ability to do whatever they want. Then the next generation feminists developed some kind of resentment towards women who did stay at home and attacked them. So now we have a society that has forgotten how valuable housewives were and in doing so has created a value system in which women who want to be housewives are told their inferior to those who don’t. But the housewives were the ones who were driving most men to get married.

So with women feeling they’d be inferior to want to be married with a family and men screwing everything that moves (as evolution has taught them to do) we have a society where no one’s pushing marriage (and I think we’re worse off for it)

It’s against men’s evolutionary nature to marry yet they still got married just as quickly (and they didn’t need wives to support them).

Actually, as I understand it, current evo-psych holds that men (and women) have dual evolutionary strategies. One, as you imply, is to play the field as widely as possible. But the other is to invest one's energy in a single woman/family in order to increase the chances for a particular set of offspring. (Note, it's possible adopt these simultaneously if you, say, have a wife and mistresses on the side.)

I first read this in Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal," where he argues that the institution of monogamy actually benefits poor/lower status men the most.

I've never heard of this occuring at a primitive level (which was what I was referring to). I know there are primates where females are considered the "leaders" such as Gibbons and monogamy has been observed in them but I've never seen a male dominated society of primates where monogamy was naturally occuring.

Again, I'm not disputing the fact that men can want to be monogomous or realize it's the best way to breed. I'll even concede it occurs in non-primates such as birds. But I don't see any examples where a primate male's nature is to be monogamous without female influence.

Edit: You know, I'm thinking on this and it doesn't even make sense. Lets say its true and we have dual evolutionary natures one of which is to seek out means to create a paticular type of offspring. How is that contradictory to polygamy? Couldn't you hunt down every female in your area with those desired traits? More to the point wouldn't it be smart to do just that in order to increase your chances of generating that preferred off spring (assuming primates didn't have in depth knowledge of genetics and passive traits)?

I think you're misunderstanding the previous comment. It says the objective of the monogamous strategy is to increase the chances of survival for a particular set of offspring, not a particular type. That is, if a man partners with a woman and provides for the children they have together, he increases that set of offspring's chances of survival.

The point about marriage and/or monogamy benefitting lower status males is that, in a polygynous system, all or most of the females will be having sex with the few high-status males who can provide for them and their offspring (barring rape). High-status males would have lots of sex partners and opportunities to produce offspring, low-status males would have few or none.

I'm not sure what you mean by "without female influence." In humans, semi-monogamous coupling is an a result of the extraordinary expense (in time and energy) of raising a human child. Read The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond for a full discussion on how the spectrum of human monogamy - I say "semi-monogamous" since cheating is prevalent in all humans, and he provides potential reasons for why this is so.

We might be rising into positions of power, but how many years did we spend without being able to vote or to even being allowed into universities, etc? In certain cultures or countries women have been always well considered, but in others it's not so clear.

Housewives being inferior? No way. Being a housewife requires a lot of skill, energy and certain sacrifices that most modern women (me included) don't want to make. Managing a house is like managing your own little company. Except you cover 90% of the job positions at once. And generally cannot fire your "employees". Housewives really deserve a lot of respect. And a honor spot in the entrepreneur comunity :)

Anyway, that's the issue, precisely. We have on one side, a lifetime job, where you will most likely have to depend on someone to provide enough money to run it properly. On the other side, you can be independent by getting a job you might change whenever you feel like. Wouldn't you prefer traveling, have different job experiences, etc. while you're still young? We women actually can now make this choice between committing early to family or wait some more years (I think sooner or later our genetic code will push us to want a family). It's more or less what the article says.

Your claim that somehow marriage is against "men's evolutionary nature" is a pretty strong one. Certainly, widespread attempts at reproduction (screwing everything that moves) is one strategy, but it's not at all clear to me that such a strategy is favored by our human instincts honed by evolution.

Frankly, your use of the word evolution seems to be to justify preconceived notions of male and female roles in society.

Are you kidding? Look, you can argue there are varying opinions. I have no problem with that. But the majoirty opinion among people who study male nature is that our instinct is to "spread our seed" as widely as possible because or evolutionary purpose is to further our own lineage.

You see this in pretty much all primates. Silverback Gorilla's have whole tribes that are made up of the women they have sex with and their children. Because even in modern primates the males nature is to breed with as many women as possible.

Also, I said nothing about male and female roles in society. My entire argument is based around male and female instincts and I've said there are exceptions (again look above where I say feminism exists because there are exceptions and it's a good thing)

That is not the majority opinion. That's reasoning is too simple; it takes no account for the cost of raising children.

Using other primates as support is dangerous. Raising a human child is much more time consuming than raising a gorilla. Gorillas can forage for themselves much earlier than a human child can provide food for itself. Our ecological niche is using tools, so we have to train our children how to use them. This takes time.

As the expense in terms of time and energy of raising an offspring increases, it puts selection pressure towards monogamy.

That's a pretty warped depiction of 'the feminist narrative,' and in any case exceptions don't make the rule.

In California, in the 1850's, for example, it was determined that any property of a married woman's was legally the property of her husband. Therefore the hundreds of entrepreneurial and successful women land or business owners were suddenly rendered legally and financially dependent on their husbands. Only single women and widowers could hold property.

In case you're ever interested in investigating your assumptions about man's evolutionary nature, I highly suggest you read Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography.

The copy of "The Age of Gold" by H.W. Brands sitting in front of me says you are wrong about married women's property in 1850's California. From the soft cover, pg. 283, regarding the constitutional convention held in Monterey in 1849:

`A proposal to permit women to keep control of their property upon marrying led to discussion of the relative merits of the common-law and civil-law traditions. "I am not wedded either to the common law or the civil law", observed Halleck, "nor, as yet, to a woman; but having some hopes that some time or other I may be wedded, and wishing to avoid the fate of my friend from San Francisco [a crotchety old misogynist], I shall advocate this section in the constitution, and I would call upon all the bachelors in this convention to vote for it." Enough did to win the measure's approval.`

So unless there was a constitutional amendment created a few years after the constitution itself that I'm not aware of, married women actually were allowed to keep their property in California. Indeed, the text from the original 1849 constitution states, in part:

`Sec. 14. All property, both real and personal, of the wife, owned or claimed by marriage, and that acquired afterwards by gift, devise, or descent, shall be her separate property; and laws shall be passed more clearly defining the rights of the wife, in relation as well to her separate property as to that held in common with her husband. Laws shall also be passed providing for the registration of the wife's separate property.`

I'm not an expert in the area: my reference is an old copy of the SF Argonaut I found in the doctor's office. There it said that the majority of independently wealthy women in the early days of San Francisco were single or widowed, and the 1850's were the timeline they gave. However, I may have confused it as the point at which married women could enter into business under their own name. I did a little more digging.

The Legislative Act entitled "Act To Authorize Married Women To Transact Business In Their Own Name, As Sole Traders," was passed into law by the California State Legislature on April 12, 1852. California State Printing Office Index to the Laws of California, i850-1920 (Sacramento, 1921).

Subject to some restrictions - only married California women-not single, widowed, or divorced women-were required to publicly declare their commercial intentions and to limit their investment to $5,000 or less. Some argue that such restrictions limited women's personal, financial, and commercial freedom and, as such, underscored their dependent legal status.

In any case, the laws of California were rather advanced compared to the common law, and advanced compared to other states.

How is my view "warped" when nothing you said contradicts it. What I said was that women initially chose the role of home maker and then it became their accepted role and that was a problem. I specifically said...

"They became the original feminists and rightfully won the ability to do whatever they want."

The reason I brought up the feminist narrative is because the lie of "women were never in power" allows them to claim women would never choose to be a housewife which in turn allows them to claim it's somehow an inferior way to live one's life.

As for the book, I will check it out. But there is a view of male nature accepted by the majority of the scientific community and that's what I was quoting.

Actually, in the west, title held by a married woman in her name was considered her own property. Property held by the husband was considered to be marital property. If the property was deeded to the "Husband and Wife", the wife's interest was the her 1/2 interest via the deed "and Wife", plus the marital interest held by the husband. This was called the Married Woman's Presumption; it was abolished in 1975.

I don't think people would marry today just because they love each other either. The system is setup in such a way that people often have an incentive to leave the marriage and perhaps with more women being financially independent they are just as concerned with the fallout of a marriage as compared to a good long-term relationship.

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