From: The Cost of Delaying Marriage -
In this sense, we lead lives that are exactly the inverse of our grandmothers'. If previous generations of women were raised to believe that they could only realize themselves within the roles of wife and mother, now the opposite is thought true: It's only outside these roles that we are able to realize our full potential and worth as human beings. A 20-year-old bride is considered as pitiable as a 30-year-old spinster used to be. Once a husband and children were thought to be essential to a woman's identity, the source of purpose in her life; today, they are seen as peripherals, accessories that we attach only after our full identities are up and running.
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Instead, like lords or sailors of yore, a young woman is encouraged to embark upon the world, seek her fortune and sow her oats, and only much later — closer to 30 than 20 — consider the possibility of settling down. Even religious conservatives, who disapprove of sex outside of marriage, accept the now-common wisdom that it is better to put off marriage than do it too early.
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The 33-year-old single woman who decides she wants more from life than her career cannot so readily walk into marriage and children; by postponing them, all she has done is to push them ahead to a point in her life when she has less sexual power to attain them. Instead, she must confront the sad possibility that she might never have what was the birthright of every previous generation of women: children, a family life and a husband who — however dull or oppressive he might have appeared to feminist eyes — at least was there.
Several years ago, I used to work with two women who were born again, evangelical Christians who both had teen-aged daughters. Both of them talked endlessly about their worries for their daughters getting the best education and career they could get as soon as they graduated from high school.
I once made the mistake of suggesting that the most important thing such young girls needed to consider was choosing good men to marry...far more important than what college they were trying to get into, what degree they would try to attain and what career path they wanted to pursue. I tried to explain to them that the biggest decisions with the most far reaching consequences for their lives that their daughters would ever face would be who they decide to mate with. Both ladies didn't even consider my points. Both immediately argued that their daughters needed their educations and careers first and foremost, just in case they did get married and "it didn't work out." Of course, both of these ladies were the primary breadwinners in their family, so it's not surprising they would feel this way.
They were simply following the new ideal of 21st century Churchianity - changing the Church's prime directives to accommodate Feminist ideals.
The infiltration of Christian culture and morality by feminism (Cultural Marxism) is nearly complete.
Population control measures are successfully keeping the population replacement rate down amongst the demographic most likely to promote marriage and large, Patriarchal families.
Not only was this effected by pushing the idea that young women need to pursue education and career "just in case" marriages fail, but also that they must only consider marrying men in their own age group.
Note the lament of a Protestant Preacher's wife over at Dalrock's:
"Do you really believe it’s easier for young women? IDK. My daughter is having problems getting men her age to even approach her. They all seem really shy won’t even make eye contact, most of all they seem to be lacking in basic manners or the social graces (ironically talents women taught their children when they actually about the business of parenting.)"
Why do Christian parents who want their children to wait until marriage to have sex, blindly follow along with the cultural value that women must meet and mate with men their own age?
Why do Christian parents who want their daughters to wait until marriage to have sex, push their young girls to make sure they go to college and start a career before even considering marriage - all while telling their girls they need to remain virgins until marriage?
Do Christian parents consider it ideal to raise virtuous girls who save themselves for marriage, really stop and think it perfectly reasonable to expect their daughters to be completely chaste from the age of 14 to the age of 24-25? Over a decade of abstinence after reaching puberty in this sex-saturated culture? Combine that with the expectation that they must only consider potential husbands in their own age group to boot, when such men are incapable of providing for a family until he's approaching 30, is a recipe for Christian Sluts and the inevitable growth of the Christian spinster populace.
Marriage 1.0 was the original foundation of society. It promoted the formation of families and most families were large. Prior to the "sexual revolution" (or as I like to call it: The deconstruction of civilization by reversion to Matriarchal morality), it was normal for people to get married and commence popping out multiple offspring.Women got married shortly after their bodies were ready, Men got married shortly after their abilities to provide for those women and their children were ready.
Before the imposition of collectivist schemes for supporting single motherhood en mass, this meant that men needed to find the means for supporting his offspring as soon as possible. There was no "teenage" stage to life. Men went to work to develop skills and the means to support his family as soon as possible."Teenage" males were working. "Teenage" females were marrying the older males and starting their families.
These norms ensured long lasting marriages because the age difference between older, experienced and capable provider husband and younger, fertile and inexperienced wife leveraged the females biological directive - hypergamy - while also satisfying the males desire for younger/hotter/tighter - peak fertility.
When these were the norms, most marriages were really for "til death do we part." And barring infertility, usually resulted in multiple children.
From the perspective of elite social engineers who desired a dramatic curb in population growth of the sheeple...the useless eaters...the foundation needed to be altered to stop all this reproduction. The multiple child family as the base unit of society needed to be altered.
To do this to a society that used to be overwhelmingly Christian, the twin tactics of "empowering" females in education and career, combined with normalizing the idea that people should only marry in their own age group, appears to have been quite effective in reducing the growth of the Christian demographic.Christian women are least likely to use birth control and/or to have abortions...two of the most important planks of the feminist population control program. But they sure seemed to have accepted the idea that women need to pursue education and careers before "settling" down.
Christian or not, putting education and career over marriage and child bearing puts many women on the path to either small families (2.1 children) at best...or spinsterhood and cat collecting at worst.
19 comments:
Good post, HL.
Here is a little tidbit, regarding women's inability to stay chaste through their most fertile years, from Matheolus, written in 1295.
Women and Lechery – Mathieu of Boulogne
People say that women are lecherous. On the surface, these words sound insulting. However, with due respect to all ladies, it is necessary to speak as one finds. . . .
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If there is anyone who says that women with their tits and boobs are colder than the male, let him lose his purse and its contents. If anyone has come to this conclusion, he hasn't looked at the evidence carefully enough. For, by Saint Acaire of Haspre, their lust is much stronger than ours and turns into greater ardour. A woman underneath a man gets very excited. But let's say no more about it at present. . . Women are by nature very weak and frail and more fragile than glass. Ovid says that woman is only chaste when no man courts or chases her. Given their lust, the pope has granted them permission to marry without delay in order to pay the tribute their flesh demands. For otherwise they would hardly manage to wait and would offer or sell themselves to all comers.
Also, before the 19th Century, when women's political power began to rise with things such as the Temperance & Suffragette Movements , it used to be that it was men who needed to be protected from women's uncontrolable sexuality, not the other way around.
"Pre-Nineteenth century Western culture assumed that women, not men, were the insatiable sexual aggressors, with men as vulnerable creatures in need of protection." -- Historian Peter N. Stearns in his 1990 book Be a Man: Males in Modern Society
And it's true today as well. Think about it. Girls on average lose their virginity something like two or three years earlier than boys. Most girls nowadays are losing their virginity at 14 or 15, while most boys at 16 or 17. Women are "the sex," as so many philosophers of old have aptly described. (While men are also sexual).
There was a campaign in the 1800's to reverse this image, portraying men as uncontrollable sexual beasts who needed women's morality to civilize them.
"Dr. John Gordon, a professor of English at Connecticut College, says that in the 1800s anti-male novels and anti-male tracts - thousands of them - "were part of a campaign to represent men as barbarians whose urges had to be leashed in by the forces of decency - meaning women - if civilization were to survive." -- Jack Kammer,If Men Have All The Power, How Come Women Make The Rules? p.30
I'm always amazed with fathers at work who talk about the endless road trips with their daughters checking out colleges, the continuous projects, volunteering, extra-curricular high school activities, SAT tutoring, etc. to make sure they get into the "right" college. When I ask what they are doing to teach them how to select a husband, they give me this incredulous look - how could I even ask such a thing.
And yet, as you say, that isn't the most important life-impacting decision; it's selecting a husband.
The ideal way for marriage to work for both men and women (with the given of presumed-father-custody as its basis) is for women to marry in when they are eighteen to men who are thirty-eight.
First off, this works sexually. Humans have always exhibited pair-bonding, but something we seem to have forgotten is that our pair-bonding also exhibits staggering. For example, it used to be quite common for men and women of relatively similar ages to pair-bond and marry – say an 18 year old girl to a 22 year old man. However, back in the days when women died in large numbers due to childbirth, often there would be a 35 year old widower who would marry again in a few years to a new bride. However, the then 38 year old widower rarely married a 30-something spinster or widow, because humans exhibit generational “staggering” in their pair-bonding. The 38 year old widower would most often choose his second wife again as a young, fertile woman of her late teens or early twenties, and continue to have more children with her.
This works on many more levels than just historical examples such as put forth above re: widowers remarrying. In fact, “staggering” probably works much better than traditional “age-matched” pair bonding. Remember, as Schopenhauer puts forth: ”Man reaches the maturity of his reasoning and mental faculties scarcely before he is eight-and-twenty; woman when she is eighteen;…
Thus, when a man of 22 marries a woman of 18, he is outmatched and outwitted by her… the beta-ization will soon set in with such situations because she is more mentally mature than him. A 38 year old man marrying an 18 year old woman however is far more able to match a woman’s wily ways, and basically not put up with her BS as much as a younger man would. This keeps the alpha/hypergamy dynamic going much better in the marriage, and of course, this leads to more successful/happy marriages.
Even further, this gives the man the first 20 years of adulthood to swash-buckle and adventure around the earth, building both his knowledge and his fortune. Then, when he hits mid-life crisis and wonders “what life is all about,” he uses his fortune to fund a family and finds meaning in the joys of watching his family grow and “husbanding” them into proper human beings – with which his now greater life experience and wealth will have prepared him for. He’ll most likely even get to watch a few grandkids get born and realize his “immortality” through them before his death.
Continued…
For the woman, marrying at 18ish makes very good biological sense. The reason she “reaches the full of her maturity at 18” is because, as her entire body is designed for bearing children (including her mental faculties), at 18 she is best suited to start bearing children. A woman of 18 is highly fertile and can easily have two to four children by the time she is twenty-five years old. By the time she is 30, they will be in school, and now she can use her time to begin her education and/or career – either work into it part-time as the kids are in school, or maybe even full-time if her now fifty-ish husband chooses to slow down a bit to help take over her previous responsibilities. She will be at the 35’ish age when she is establishing herself in the job marketplace – an age at which women are far more sought after than the 25ish woman who will be constantly quitting for a year to cost her employer big $$$ for maternity leave, and then doing it again a couple years later. She will have a good thirty years to “accomplish” with her career – plenty of time to “do it all.”
Furthermore, since they have “staggered” in their pair-bonding, the husband will likely die 20 or so years earlier than her, leaving her as widow in her fifties with a solid career – AND the husband’s large inheritance. Now it is her turn to swashbuckle and adventure around the earth, as the children by this time will be adults and out of the house.
The only thing that the older husband ought to do in such a staggered relationship is completely void the husband-wife inheritance laws in his will. Make a codicil to resemble the patriarchy of old, where the eldest son (or all of his children) inherit the majority of his wealth, but are forced by the codicil to provide a living stipend for the mother. The reason for this is the same reason as old. It is the greatest insult imaginable to the deceased husband to leave his entire life long fortune to his widow through marital inheritance laws, when the actuality of his efforts was for the purpose of providing for his children. Should she inherit it all in the modern form of marriage, and then remarry and die herself, the new husband will be the recipient of the deceased husband’s life’s work, which was meant to benefit his children – not the schmuck who was shtupping his wife after he died.
All in all, the “marriage reformers” ought to stop trying to “fix” marriage 2.0 or 2.5, and just scrap that nonsense altogether. The truth lies in the past. Why else does anyone think it worked for so many thousands of years? Blind luck?
But, what do I know, eh? I’m just a poor, lonesome country boy with nothing but chicken wire to sit on and a rusty old marble to play with.
Spot on, Keoni. We've been discussing this over at Patriactionary, too, as have the folks over at Traditional Christianity.
Boundless surprises me now and then, with actual intelligent observations, as in this column you've linked.
Did you see their follow-up article, where they had to defend it? Turns out a bunch of people wrote in with complaints. Sometimes people don't the truth, even if it's what saves them.
That should be, they don't LIKE the truth.
Well, over at TC there is a nice graph. There is a four or five year gap traditionally between men and women... Men marry late 20s, by which state they are established in a trade or earning from their profession.
Girls marry at 18 -- 21 before they fully develop their frontal lobes and lean on their husbands (who have got them -- they kick in around 24). Instant hypergamy and no betaization.
Works. Always worked. Until the boomers decided that they would destroy anything that worked.
Cultural marxism appears to have won much success. Church girls are often christian only in belief, not in action.
Chasing careers, bad boys and personal fulfilment, they can have their damn cats. And civilisation will be the lesser, for it.
Even when, or if they have children, they infect them with the same noxious lies. Get a career. Travel. Don't tie yourself down. Be all you can be.
Marx would be proud.
Carnivore has a good point about fathers/parents not being willing (or able) to talk to their daughters about selecting husbands. In the realm of romantic and sexual relationships, it seems almost expected that parents and everybody else butt-out and let teens/young adults sort out their mating decisions for themselves.
If a daughter or son is in a relationship with someone the parents or other family know is not going to be suitable long-term, no one approaches the child to give advice or talk about his or her dating partner. It's become a new taboo, something you just don't discuss with your kids, because you don't want to be seen as the Controlling Parent who is trying to bring back Arranged Marriages, Inc.
Either that, or the parents prefer to remain clueless as to their kids' boy/girlfriends and potential partners. The fear might be that if a parent says something, it will only drive his child further away from him.
Christian or not, if it is a parent's duty to see to a child's educational choices and career paths, why not also take matters of the heart to heart, and gently oversee those as well? Young women know little about how to choose a mate - they think they know what they want but it is their bodies, not their minds and hearts, dictating that to them.
And the age-cohort mate sorting that our society expects is part and parcel of the age-cohort sorting done in education, which we can see is also no good, as it leads to kids of very, very different ability levels from their cohort nevertheless being forced liked square pegs to learn and develop at the same rate as other kids, merely because they share a birth year with each other. I thought sociology was a "science" and could have figured this out by now, but say any of the above in a room full of social "scientists" and they look at you like you've 3 heads and horns, to boot!
A.L. Haines
with power comes responsibility. women want all the benefits of traditionally male endeavors but none of the responsibility.
they want to marry late after banging a bunch of dudes, they want to be a career woman, and a mom, and have a sex and the city decade in their 20's, they want to sleep around but not get std's, they want to be 40 and fabulous when 40 is old for women. always has been, always f'ing will be.
There is a certain kind of woman I refer to as
Self-Deluded Ambitious Spinsters.
In their minds it is not their fault they are alone but the fault of men.
It is evidently very painful to live in the past. Face it. As a woman, a lucrative career can provide you with the ability to aingswithout a husband, or even the necessity of enduring pregnancy. Surrogates, aritificial insemination, fertility treatements, make all your so called cat loving spinsters just one more choice of a free society. What you really don't like is the freedom that women fought valiantly for, and over a ridiculous amount of time, acheived. It's over little men, and your patriarchial utopia exists only in your dreams, and the ash heap of history.
Surrogates are women, too, anon. Or do they not count as women because they're usually poor Indian women living in dormitories and pressured into mandatory primary c-sections?
And what female scientists are responsible for the level of technological infrastructure required to have fertility treatments at all, much less ones that work a decent percentage of the time?
I could go on, but it is just so typical, the blindness and cluelessness.
Women are people too, you know, guided by a wide and rich variety of motivations. We can talk about how the culture has changed to delay childbirth and marriage, but I don't see why we have to insult women to have that discussion.
I think that choosing the right husband or wife is basically the most important life decision for men and women. There is a huge decrease in emphasis on the family in society, and I don't think it has anything to do with women's liberation. As I see it, it has much more to do with our rampant consumerism. As a result all of us, men and women, are running on a perpetual treadmill at work, spending time away from our families, eating crappily, and getting stressed, all to buy a bunch of crap we don't need. Yes women and men are different in many ways, and I think it's useful to ask why society doesn't support women to do the things you're advocating (having children young/etc). Have you seen how much shit women get for trying to breastfeed in public? How are women and babies treated by employers? Pretty terribly, as far as I can see.
Ask yourself if you would want to be restricted to the limited choices you are advocating for women. I seriously doubt that the men on this forum can do that, though, because you are so brainwashed that women are not full human beings with complex inner lives. I imagine that when one of you figures this out, you may run down the street screaming it (a la "Soylent green is PEOPLE!!!!"). Seriously, if you haven't fully internalized this simple truth, you are way behind.
There is a huge decrease in emphasis on the family in society, and I don't think it has anything to do with women's liberation. As I see it, it has much more to do with our rampant consumerism.
You've got cause and effect mixed up.
Looks like there's some pervy old men posting on here. They seem to think that 18 year old girls want rancid 38 year old men mauling their young flesh. Most women of that age would rather have a young buck who is only a few years older than her. Women's peak fertility is 19-24 and likewise for men. Both sexes' fertility declines after age 25 and, despite lack of emphasis on the subject, there are as many health problems suffered by children of older fathers as older mothers - children of older fathers are more likely to suffer mental health problems and Apert's syndrome (where the bones of the skull fuse to early causing some terrible deformities). Old men, leave us young girls alone and pick on women your own age.
When I was 18, there was no way I'd give a man who was 38 a second glance. The previous poster is correct. There are very few young women who would pass up a man who is closer to her age, for a man who is past his youth and looking to relive his glory days.
I do find it unrealistic to expect an 18 year old woman to remain chaste for an entire decade while she makes a career.
I also find it equally unrealistic to expect a man to remain chaste until he's 27-38 and able to provide for a family.
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