Frequent commenter GoodLookingAndSleazy made an excellent remark on modern feminism recently, which I’d like to give more visibility to. The full comment is below.
Here’s my theory on modern feminism. Like all political movements it is grounded in legitimate grievances. The grievance is exploited by political opportunists, which is also very common. The anger is real. Generation after generation women were having babies by the time the were 20 y/o. Due to corporatism and social Marxism this was stripped from women in the name of “liberation,” and the whole thing was thrown in reverse.
College age women understand that something is amiss. They are pissed off that they don’t have a relationship and children but know it at a conscious level. This anger is misdirected by mass media and feminist academia at “patriarchy.” That these natural maternal desires are the fault of a long dead patriarchy. They are angry because a patriarchal society is TELLING them to they want a man. When society has done no such thing for half a century. The evil system feeds off its own lies. The legitimate anger is shifted away from the culprit and towards the one thing that these women actually desire desperately, and was taken from them by false prophets.
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Yeah absolutely. There always has to be SOME nugget of truth. For example, toxic masculinity. “Toxic masculinity is about men shaming each other and bullying.”. This could have been a seductive line to take with someone like me because I had a verbally abusive friend (who I deFOOed, thanks Molyneux!) who would make fun of me for being a virgin (i lost mine at 19 or 20), make fun of my facial spasms (as a result of being medicated), and would lord the fact that he was bigger than me and could beat me up over my head. However, the shot (for those who don’t know, “the shot” is a meme for “the truth underneath”) is swiftly revealed when men try to get together for the cruel activity of comisserating with each other regarding astronomical alimony payments, and feminists label it toxic masculinity and make bomb threats.
Right. The Gillette commercial from a couple years ago went over the line with the sexual harassment bullshit, but actually made a few good points about bullying. In fact, I don’t think the two belong in the same conversation.
“shifted away from the culprit”
So, what’s the real culprit, then?
Could it have ANYTHING to do with our money?
nawwwwwww…
https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/eztlkdtxsaayeda-1.png?w=780
Correlation is not causation.
You seem to imply here that the marriage age went up because we gave up the gold standard.
This seems very far fetched to me. So, do you have an explanation for this?
Marriage is a low time-preference thing.
Fiat money and all its side effects lead to high-time preference thinking.
first principles thinking:
Sound money and marriage are both low-time-preference “things”.
Destroy the soundness of money and it infects all other aspects of life. Postponing marriage is low-time preference.
Please spare me your usual lengthy lecturing, going off a tangent about how libertarians, btc-maximialists and other groups you identify, don’t see the nuances only you seem to see.
First, thanks for the explanation.
I still don’t buy it ;p
About the lecturing: if it came of like that, I apologize.
The point of discussion is so that everyone can present his arguments, and then
we hopefully can all update our beliefs about the world with new ideas and facts.
If we would never change our opinions, there would be no point in arguing or reading this blog.
I have read multiple books by the Austrian economists, mostly from Mises.
It is a nice framework to analyze some things, but it is just that, a framework.
It also has serious flaws in my opinion.
The biggest flaw is that they don’t think they need empiric verification. They set up some axioms
like “all humans are perfectly rational” and then derive economic laws from that.
The problem is just that in reality, humans are not rational.
(and some other of their axioms are also wrong in my opinion)
So in theory, people should react to changes in interest/inflation rates / gold standard.
But in reality, I seriously doubt that the average woman, even knows what the interest/inflation
rate is, yet alone makes her decisions based on it.
And the Austrians are clearly biased here. Yeah inflation is probably bad, but is it the root
of all evil? (in one of the books I read they almost linked all of the moral decay in society
to inflation) I doubt it. There was evil in the world much before people even used money.
And the world is more peaceful now than it was in the past. The trend is clearly going down.
So if a woman was a perfectly rational actor, maybe then she would really base her decisions
on the inflation rate. But they are anything but rational.
(and even then it would only be one of many variables)
I still think the main reason for this is the feminist propaganda which tells women to delay
marriage and to go for a career first.
There is also another big flaw in the Austrian interest rate theory:
It assumes that agents in the market are not aware of the FED fuckery. But most of the big players are aware that the FED is fucking with interest rates, so they consider this in their decision making. They are not assuming that the interest rate reflects the time preference of most actors.
The game change from:
“Plan for the future based on the current interest rate”
to
“try to predict how the FED will fuck with the money supply in the future”
That’s also the reason the actions of the FED have less and less actual effect on the economy, as soon as all the players unterstand what the FED is doing, they plan for it.
If you are interested in other arguments, I recommend “Debunking Economics” by Steve Keen.
This book mostly debunks neo-classical economics (the current model used by the Fed) but as far as I remember also has a chapter which debunks Austrian economics.
Oh and by the way:
“1960 The first oral contraceptive, Enovid, a mix of the hormones progesterone and estrogen, is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It quickly became known simply as “the Pill.””
So around the time the pill was invented, the marriage age started to go up.
Could it be, that women often married when they got pregnant? And now they don’t get pregnant anymore?
This seems to me much more plausible than it being linked to the interest rate.
You just proved my point. Endless rambling about this and that, but not one single time did you pick up my point about time-preference.
Please don’t try again.
@Neutral: can you explain this point about time-preference to a complete layman in Economics? I kind of have a vague idea of what it is, but it should be obvious if you fully grasp that bit of theoretical concept.
This is easy to explain. Let’s say you want a new TV for your crib but don’t have the necessary amount of cash. Now, consider these two options:
1) Save up the money and buy the TV once you can afford it
2) Take out a consumer loan to buy the TV right now
In 1), you have high time preference, in 2) low time preference. In 2), the joy you derive from the TV in the present is worth more than the fact that you’ll pay extra for this privilege in the form of interest. It also doesn’t register to such people that by the time the load is paid off, the TV will be obsolete again. At that point, they’ll just get another load for another TV.
No, I actually addressed your point. I argued, that if women were completely rational, then maybe they would actually have this time preference.
But they are not rational, and there are a lot of psychological studies as direct evidence for that. (just Google hyperbolic discounting bias)
And if they were rational, they would have to realize that they have a limited fertility window, and this biological constraint would override all other considerations.
So the fact that a lot of women delay pregnancy now, is clear evidence that they are not very rational.
But there is no point in arguing with you, I have to agree on that.
Your beliefs are not falsifiable, as you argue based on “first principles” and not on empirical evidence.
But then don’t claim to be rational, as falsifiability is the core of all rational thinking.
Yor argument boils down to: women are rational, and because of artificially low interest rates, they have a high time preference, therfore delaying marriage and pregnancy.
So far so good.
But if women are so rational, they would have to realize that biological constraints around fertility, are a factor which overrides all other considerations.
So you argument only works if they consider the interest rates but they don’t consider the much more significant biological pressures at all.
Which does not make a lot of sense. Interest rates only exist for a few 1000 years, but fertility factors exist since the creation of biological life. So we should expect women to consider these biological factors much more than interest rates.
And there are a lot of countries which also have central banks, but in these countries women marry much earlier.
E. G. Iran.
So then please explain this discrepancy to me.
And why is it that certain groups in Europe, immigrants, have much lower average marriage ages, and they also get much more children? They have exactly the same interest rates.
Obviously, the interest rate is not a significant variable here.
I don’t think this is necessarily a good counter argument. After all, could it not be that they have low time preference to begin with? Also, if you live off gibs, you don’t have any reasons to save money anyway.
Never mind, with Ubermensch’s latest back-and-forth I already got the gist of it.
@Aaron: I think it doesn’t really matter.
The premise of the time-preference argument is that women are very rational.
So we have two premises:
– women are very rational
– women have the goal to have a family and get children
But now the point is:
if the interest rate is 10%, the optimal age for pregnancy for women is 18-25
if the interest rate is 0%, the optimal age for pregnancy is still 18-25
So I would argue, even if they were rational, the interest rate should not have a big influence on their decision, because biological considerations trump all other considerations (when it comes to pregnancy).
And when so many women delay pregnancy beyond the optimal age range, this is just evidence they are not very rational (assumption is they want to have children at some point)
And if they are not rational, they surely won’t consider interest rates.
Also from practical experience, do you really think the average women thinks about interest rates, and how this should affect her decision? I really doubt that.
And you cannot really argue this happens on a subconscious level, as in our evolution there was no such thing as interest rates.
Imagine the average woman who desires instant gratification. Does the “long game” appeal to her according to which she will have kids in her 20s, raise them well together with her husband, and provide a good home or do you think she is more inclined to blow money she does not have (this is where low interest rates come in!) on shoes and dresses? It is a meme at this point that Stacies want to get railed by as many Chads as possible in their 20s. They do not even want to settle down.
pregnancy for the average woman probably happens more like this:
“Chad cock feels nice, and condoms suck…. ooopps I’m pregnant now”
than this:
“The interest rate is X, so the conditions for pregnancy are good/bad now, lets find a good husband and start a family”
But this is what my argument was all about, people are way less rational than Austrian economics assumes.
(at least when it comes to sex, when they buy a house they probably do consider the interest rates)
Or maybe you cannot even call it irrational. It is more like, they only have short term goals.
If you only have the short term goal of feeling good in the moment, getting lot of Chad dick is not irrational.
Thanks Aaron, greatly appreciated. I also find it interesting that the left has so maligned the 1950s. It was actually a very progressive era despite what feminists will tell us. It was the first time that high School enrollment became commonplace. Which is why there is so much high school mastalgia from the era (the movie Grease for example). Girls were encouraged to become educated before becoming wives and mother’s. Kids weren’t slaving away in factories any more. Neither were women after the war. Labor was stronger than ever. The middle-class boomed.
Apparently this was too much for the oligarchs to tolerate. And they found a useful idiot ally in feminism.
*nostalgia
When I was on jury duty a few years ago the judge said something I will never forget. In the US we get interviewed by the prosecution and the defense in the jury selection process. Part of the interview is asking what we do for a living and if we have a spouse, what they do for a living etc. One prospective juror said that he was a journalist. He said his wife “doesn’t work, she stays home with the kids.”. The female judge retorted, “oh, she works.” The courtroom broke out in laughter.
We need more women like that judge. Feminist rhetoric has even corrupted our language. It was very refreshing to see a “strong, empowered, educated, successful” woman stick up for house wives.
In Austria (and I expect in most other western countries as well) the feminists are constantly bitching that women do “most of the unpaid work”.
So this is another contradiction. They shame women who just want to be housewives into going for a “career” (which for most is basically just paper pushing and making power points), basically putting a lower value on the house work, but then they complain that the housework is not valued as much as the “real work”
This entire ideology is so retarded and full of contradictions, you just have to see people as stupid who fall for this crap.
First, I think giving women the right to vote was a mistake.
Women are too emotional/empathic, they will always vote for more socialism
and a bigger nanny state. It is in their nature.
Most women really are like children. And no one would think it is a good idea
to give children the right to vote.
By the way, I also think not all men should have the right to vote.
Only net tax contributors over a certain age should be allowed to vote in my opinion.
But, if you are are libertarian, and I know some of you are, you obviously
have to be for equal rights for women.
(but then ironically, giving them voting rights, will end your libertarian society,
because they will then vote for a more socialist government)
And first-wave feminism was basically just for equal rights.
So as a libertarian you have to be a first-wave feminist.
But I think we all know the current feminism is no longer just about equal rights, now
it is all about getting the most benefits for women.
And it is not about freedom either. Women who just want to be stay-at-home mums are
socially shamed now by the feminists. You have to be a career woman now.
So they just replaced one role-model with a different one, and ironically the new
role-model makes women more unhappy than the old one.
The destruction of the nuclear family was also one of the primary goals, imagine
the horrors of being dependent on your family!
Much better to beg the government for child support!
Why have a loving family when you can have a nanny government which just treats you as a number?
Is my observation that women tend to be repulsed by men’s weaknesses incompatible with the statement that women are empathic? How would you reconcile them?
No it’s not a contradiction, because empathy doesn’t have to be universal. You can have empathy for one group of people, but not for a different group.
In a healthy society, the empathy of women would be directed mostly at their own children.
Now because a lot of women don’t have children anymore, their empathy goes to immigrants or minority groups.
Men are not seen as a discriminated minority group, so they get no empathy. (exception of curse is if you are an immigrant, this overwrites your gender, and so you have the empathy-deserving status)
So basically, women don’t see men as a group worthy of empathy.
And that women are disgusted by weak men, I think this is how it should be.
Men run society, so if men are weak society will die. And women obviously don’t want society to die, so that they are disgusted by weak men is good.
Emotionally, they seem convinced that the millions of MENA doctor-engineers will save society. I’d argue that there is a big surprise waiting for women at the end of this development.
Or to summarize: The care-mindset of women works great when it is directed at their own children (but even here you can overdue it, especially with sons), it doesn’t work so great when directed at the entire society.
…or primarily at outsiders, which seems to be the case with a significantly large subset of women.
Well said
I want to add one thing to the timing of all of this. IMO it has a lot to do with lobbyists taking over Washington DC. Richard Nixon was the last real man to be president of the US. When he stepped down he was replaced by a pussy and fool Gerald Ford (who was never even elected VP). The incomperent Ford actually SOUGHT OUT lobbyist advice because he had no idea what he was doing. Since then corporate lobbyists have dominated Washington. They have gotten their way on everything getting access to a never ending supply of cheap labor. Starting with women and now to Third Worlders, legal and illegal. These and other policies make it almost impossible to start a family at a “young” age.
*incompetent.