Rebecca keeps acting like there’s this conspiracy to promote marriage among women who don’t yet have children and are dating abusive guys without jobs.
Or that it’s about telling married women with kids in abusive relationships that they should stay with their man. That is not with the discourse says. The discourse says: follow the success sequence. It simply suggests to wait to have a kid until you’re married & financially stable. I see no reason why this should apply differently to lower income versus higher income earning people, unless you think there is something wrong with people who make less money that makes them inherently low quality partners.
I’d really like to see Rebecca engage with the stats on race of infanticide, child abuse, and child homicide and how they correlate with single parent households, especially where a non-parent of a child is present, compared to two parent household. If she thinks children raised by boyfriends, aunties, and grandmothers are less likely to be abused than those raised by two parents, she’s an idiot.
I’m sympathetic to Rebecca’s point of view in some respects, and I thought this was a good discussion. But speaking generally, I’d say a lot of the issues you highlight come from her background assumption (shared, ironically, with some free-market economists with political views opposed to hers) that people must have rational, sensible, intelligible reasons to make whatever choices they make. She underrates the possibility of people making silly, shortsighted, impulsive decisions that aren’t in their long-term interest. That’s a major problem because that sort of decision making is a common form of human behavior (I don’t exempt myself here by any means) and you can’t understand human beings, or the social issues that arise in our societies, without accounting for it.
For example, I think she misses the mark when she describes young women “constantly doing math in their heads” to determine the “optimal time” for major life events. Real people don’t think that way. We don’t approach life as a giant optimization problem to be solved to maximize our utility. People are not calculation machines, least of all where love is concerned. And even if we were, life has a stubborn habit of not cooperating with our designs for it.
I could not agree more! I get what Ms. Traister means when she encourages women in their 20s to really consider what they want from life, and I don't think that's bad advice, but I had no idea what I wanted out of life at that age. I had friends who knew (had always known) they wanted a husband and kids, but it was never that cut-and-dry for me. By the time I met my husband and decided to start a family, I was 35. Luckily it all worked out and 11 years later I cannot imagine life without my son; even so, I don't think we can predetermine life's outcome. If I'd never gotten married or had kids, odds are good I would've found other things in life. Humans are remarkably adaptable by design.
Rebecca and Sarah agree more than either of them are likely to admit. They both think people are (and should be) rational, consistent, and unsentimental about relationships, which they think of in terms of trade-offs, exchanges, and cost-benefit analysis. Their only real disagreement is that Sarah thinks the cost-benefit analysis favors marriage for women more often than Rebecca does. But as your story illustrates, people don’t really think that way. We can be unsure what we want, we are relational and emotional, and big life decisions can’t be easily quantified, measured against each other, or reduced to tidy evo-psych explanations. It’s tempting to think otherwise because it makes the world simpler, less absurd, and less scary, and for pundits like Rebecca and Sarah it makes it easier to generalize and draw digestible conclusions. But I think the more honest path is to admit that our experiences exceed our capacity for understanding and control.
Her arguments about single parents, marriage decline, etc. fall in to the same pattern. She seems to start from the position “there must be rational, well-thought-out reasons why people are doing this” and then work backwards to find out what they are. But what if there aren’t?
Not to bring Charles Murray into it but most people just aren't that intelligent, and they're probably getting dumber. And even if you give them a pamphlet on why they should follow the success pathway, 54% of US dults have a literacy below sixth-grade level-- so they probably wouldn't understand what you're saying!
I suspect that Rebecca was arguing with a strawman. Are there women being abused by male partners? Absolutely. But are the numbers high enough to account for the significant decline in marriage? That we don't know. If that is indeed the case, I'm all ears.
And now that you mention it, a reference to data on the success sequence would have enriched the conversation. Traister likely would have dismissed it as the imposition of bourgeois values
It’s frustrating because there is a discourse that both promotes marriage before having children and encourages people to stay married instead of getting divorced! Rebecca refuses to engage with it in good faith. Instead, she’s acting like conservatives have a problem with a handful of upper middle-class white women having kids on their own with sperm donors. Literally no one is in a moral panic about that.
Or, she could’ve talked pushed back against this research article from 2014 that literally argues people should stay together for the kids, since children with married parents have better “health outcomes”. The authors are careful to argue that people shouldn’t stay married in abusive relationships, but they note that the legalization of no-fault divorce has given people (women) more options to exit marriages that are harmful.
It would’ve been easy for Rebecca to take her argument about different metrics of what’s good for children and apply it to this strand of the pro marriage argument, but she doesn’t. She’s intellectually lazy and dishonest.
Rebecca briefly alluded to her own personal life (married, parents and children all living under the same roof). Deep down she probably knows that it's the ideal situation for raising children but like many leftists publicly refuses to give an inch because she might be perceived as agreeing with those icky conservatives. (As if we're 8 year olds on a playground where the conservatives have cooties.)
In this worldview, even the tiniest acknowledgment of the value of 2-parent families constitutes a call to permanently shove women out of the workplace and back to the home with domineering, abusive husbands. Except for a few fringe extremists, nobody is demanding that women do what my grandma did right after WWII: get married and start popping out 7 babies right out of high school.
To be fair, Rebecca is far from alone. Since November 8, 2016 a lot of the discourse on social issues has suffered due to a visceral fear among smart liberals that they'll be tarred with scarlet letters "MAGA".
You see this same phenomenon with abortion: "if we agree that abortions in the 3rd trimester should be allowed only in medical emergencies, then we're on the road to Taliban-like theocracy with women in burkas and honor killings."
Gender affirming care: "if we agree to ban invasive therapies and surgeries for anyone under age 18, we're condoning genocide against transgender people"
I see an analogy here between the looming spectre of the close-minded parents of gay kids being cruel in to them in 90s TV and movies... and the looming spectre of abused 1960s housewives who have NOWHERE TO TURN TO in 90s TV and movies. The movies brainwashed us all to assume subconsciously that housewives are abused or disenfranchised in some way.
Agreed! I'm in public ed and it seems to me that current adult decision-makers are litigating the issues from their/our own youth, as though it's still the predominant worldview. We've arguably moved on and progressed the last 30 years. It's not perfect, but why are we still discussing these issues the way we (or our parents) did in the '80s and '90s? I'm overgeneralizing a bit, but I just don't get it sometimes.
As is usually the case with these arguments, the assumption is that women have more to fear from men than men do from women, which as far as I know is true in only one narrow (if important) domain. Men will definitely prevail in any physical confrontation, but we have far more to fear overall.
I think there's a typo in your last paragraph. I'm sure you mean "rates" of infanticide, etc., right? I mention it because I paused on that clause a couple times, wondering what kind of thread you were starting. Worth an edit to avoid misunderstanding?
It’s amazing that a bunch of children online just made up an identity in order to slot themselves into a minority group and so called adults eat it up!
Traister is correct that for "lower" socio-economic classes, the horse known as marriage has long left the barn (indeed for many in that strata, marriage is barely contemplated). So any government effort to encourage marriage is likely a quixotic waste of time and money. The marriage advocates are almost as naive as the pro-natalist people who are too obtuse to understand that you can't force people to have children.
Having said all that, Traister seemed to give short shrift to Sarah's assertions about the emotional and psychic benefits of two-parent homes. Traister's essentialist materialism seemed to prohibit her from entertaining any argument beyond "bigger government safety net, all else be damned". I get where she's coming from, but the US has dumped trillions of dollars into welfare and related programs since 1965 and I'm not sure we have much to show for it (if the statistics on multi-generational poverty are any indicator). There's a cultural pathology present in many poor inner-city and rural communities that cannot be addressed simply by writing checks.*
I don't profess to have the "answer" I'm really making observations.
*Note: Lest I be accused of plagiarism, hat tip to Glenn Loury.
ADDITIONALLY. It’s also sad the main gospel of third wave feminism is that the most important feature of successful womanhood is achieving “financially-independent worker” status. As if the most laudable goal should be to some kind of professional person.
This ignores REALITY. Most people have jobs, not super fulfilling careers, women typically choose jobs that are people based and lower paying. A PHD adjunct professor may not earn enough to be financially independent, thus still being dependent on a spouse or family.
I find feminism’s obsession with female “professionalism” depressing. Lots of people are lawyers. Lots of women are lawyers. Lots of women f$^*ing hate being lawyers and if they weren’t burdened by 6 figure law school debt they might have had the choice to stay home raising their children is they preferred. But they are not boxed in by their debt, society’s pressure to be a female professional, and now they are trapped and depressed. Not by their husbands and by their children, but by their debt and their guilt for hating their ‘chosen’ profession.
I agree. I remember in college in the 1990's the saying "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" which I felt was a bit silly. Humans are deeply social animals. Most of us cannot stand alone, and we need people in our lives professionally and "non-professionally" as friends, lovers, and family. There are many ways to lead rich fulfilling lives as men and women, and a deep dive into non-professional life as the partner of someone else who brings home the bacon is not less human or less important. It can complement who you are. My mother was a SAHM and my dad a physician. I never thought my mom was not a full woman or was oppressed or didn't have value because she was not a "professional". She ran the home and managed with my two other siblings. My father never expressed resentment at her role.
This chick really struggles to say anything positive about marriage, or even the benefits of two-parent households. Both of those things are fine, people can think what they’d like. It does come across, to me, as close-minded. It was hard to take her very seriously in parts of the conversation as a result.
I've not listened yet to the episode yet and it's mostly because Traister's lack of nuance on MeToo topics turned me into someone who avoids her. I'll get around to listening eventually but, given your comment, I'm not expecting much.
It's hard to take her seriously as a knower of reality, but as an indication of where American professional women's mindset is, there are probably a lot like her.
That’s probably true. The other part of what she likes to avoid taking seriously is that a career is something you can do and make progress in, in your 40s. Having a child isn’t. At least. Not the natural way. Obvious caveats exist, but you get my point. If you close that door as a woman in your 20s and 30s-it doesn’t open again.
Thanks Ernie. Something seems so off about the emphasis on women’s success being only in the process realm. I am a SAHM myself, I am a caregiver for my husband and daughter. My husband is very ambitious and has a very demanding and stressful career. I feel so fortunate I can focus my attention on my daughter while she’s young and supporting my husband who needs it more than any monetary contribution I might provide.
I’m surrounded by friends with multiple masters degrees, unhappily trapped in jobs that pay only marginally more than the median income. Their children are in aftercare so they hustle, alongside their spouses in the rat race. There is so much exhaustion and guilt. Any not necessarily much monetary reward or benefit.
My friends seem entrapped by the third wave feminist ideology in which most of us millennials were steeped. Their choices restricted by educational debt more than advanced by it. Besides, the university system is churning out so many graduates, these degrees, even from elite universities, are not competitive because tens of thousands of people have them. And with more and more graduates coming into the workforce each year, salaries are being driven down, there is much less job flexibility than we admit.
I liked this episode so much I decided to subscribe. Don't get me wrong, I trink Traister has bad ideas, but I was so impressed with the way Megan and Sarah kept it interesting and pushed back, but in a polite way.
It's a bit hypocritical for a married mom of two pretend that single parenthood is just as easy...as anyone who has solo parented for a weekend knows!
No episode has made me appreciate your show quite like this one. The contrast between the hosts and their guest with respect to treating a complex issue intelligently and legitimately open-mindedly was immense.
Rebecca says she is not anti marriage but it sure seems like she is. She says the key ingredient to raising children is economic stability. It’s true that money is important, but money can’t replace a father. Also, the government can’t replace the family. We should not want the government to be our daddy. Contrary to what she says about economic stability, currently the richer countries have lower rates of marriage and less children.
Economic stability is important, but the idea that the government can just hand it out to people is a bit of a stretch. I think *most* economic stability comes from a robust free market and good decision-making, public assistance being available when needed but not a source of income for the average person.
Rebecca says “I’m not saying that people with financial problems are more likely to have volatile marriages, I’m just saying that financial problems increase volatility in marriage.”
She is basically saying that if you marry a guy that doesn’t have a degree or make a lot of money, he’s going to be a shitty husband and treat you poorly and you will be worse off than if you had his child and then were dependent on the government to take care of you and it.
So while we are in the most economically prosperous period in human history, Rebecca thinks throwing money at the single moms and girlfriendless men will solve our social problems. Yes to Megan for pointing out these same problems exist in Scandinavia. Maybe changing social mores anyone?
This reminds me of a WSJ op-ed I read about motherhood in Sweden several years ago. I believe the title was “The High Cost of Social Welfare” or “The High Cost of Gender Equality,” either way. It was about the ways the social mores force in Sweden force women into the workplace at higher rates and its corollated with higher rates of depression in children and feelings of isolation society wide.
It’s a shame Meghan didn’t bring up Scandinavia until the very episode, as it’s an important counter-example to many of Rebecca’s empirical claims and she didn’t really have time to respond to it.
A worthy topic and an interesting guest skillfully engaged. I'm glad you had her on and had this discussion. I was genuinely surprised by the lefty sloganeering - I think she said, 'for WHITE people' about ten times, and referred to marriage as a gendered institution that privileges male power. I didn't expect that degree of ideological capture. Sounded like a critic of leftism mocking it.
Lol did Rebecca just spend five minutes trying to explain to us that women used to have to get married because otherwise they didn’t have another way of supporting themselves?
Basically. I think there's something to it. Without marriage, the *average* woman would have been in quite the pickle until modern times. There is a poignant scene in Pride and Prejudice where Charlotte explains to a mortified Lizzie why she accepted the proposal of marriage from the dufus pastor guy (forgot his name). She's terrified of entering middle age on her own.
Part of the hypergamy narrative assumes that it's just natural, but as to the question at the end of what could be changed, I do wonder how much of a difference it would make if there were a shift in cultural messaging away from the unbridled hatred of all things male and masculine. She keeps talking about women who "haven't found a partner"; whereas Sarah likes to humblebrag about how she was surrounded with men during her brief pre-marriage period. I do not believe there are any significant number of young women who can't find a partner, but I do believe that there are lots of women who incorrectly think that they're better than the men around them. Maybe that is unavoidable, but maybe it isn't.
Also, I've certainly observed-in medicine-the level of discomfort that ensues if one suggests that women experience aging or declining fertility, or that having children is even a life decision worth considering. It's not usually me bringing it up, but it's one of those topics best described by the Eric Weinstein coinage "anti-interesting". Must be one of those generational things because this idea of a biological clock has been unspeakable for as long as I've been around.
Anna Louie Sussman, whom I cited in an earlier comment, wrote a recent piece arguing that many of the issues with single parenthood, declining marriage, etc. boil down to women struggling to find men who clear reasonable criteria like “isn’t a drug addict”, “isn’t a criminal”, “is employed”, and “doesn’t hit me”: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/opinion/marriage-women-men-dating.html.
Probably quite a lot. Drug addiction, criminality, and perpetrating domestic violence are all more common in men than women. Employment is maybe a more nuanced case. But I think it’s understandable for women to be wary of unemployed men unless they’re prepared to take on the housework, which they tend not to be.
The differences in drug use are there but are quite small (I'm looking here https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt42728/NSDUHDetailedTabs2022/NSDUHDetailedTabs2022/NSDUHDetTabsSect1pe2022.htm). The domestic violence issue has always been that women are more likely to do low level violence but men (on account of strength) are more likely to do actual damage. As to overall rates of criminal behavior, you're correct, but I don't think any of this is at a level where the marginal difference between men and women really justify this sort of sweeping conclusion.
When it comes to employment, the question becomes more nuanced, and a lot more women are underemployed (in the sense of working part time jobs or working beneath the level of their training) rather than unemployed.
It seems to me that all of this is overwhelmed by the simple fact that women of reproductive age have an enormous pool to choose from because men of reproductive age is basically all adult men.
For drug addiction, you have to consider that men may be more likely to have a serious problem. Google tells me men are 2-3 times more likely to die of overdoses than women.
For domestic violence, “men are more likely to do actual damage” is kind of the point. It means women have much more cause to be scared of being physically hurt by their intimate partners than men do, and that impacts marriage and family decision making.
Similarly for criminality, the gender gap rises with the seriousness of the offense. Little/no gap for jaywalking, but a wide one for violent crime.
For all of these examples, the pattern is that if you factor in some measure of intensity the gender gaps get a lot bigger.
That's factually true, but is not the original framing that you used, which was a binary of either someone is a criminal/addict/etc. or not. And frankly, I think binary, Manichean thinking is more likely what's going on here.
It's also very dependent on social strata. There's a dynamic in lower-income black communities that I think really does meet this description, because the rates of crime and violence are so high. If we're talking about someone with a degree from a nice college who is working a professional job, realistically their peers do not have high absolute rates of violence or other criminality. They have options.
Rebecca keeps acting like there’s this conspiracy to promote marriage among women who don’t yet have children and are dating abusive guys without jobs.
Or that it’s about telling married women with kids in abusive relationships that they should stay with their man. That is not with the discourse says. The discourse says: follow the success sequence. It simply suggests to wait to have a kid until you’re married & financially stable. I see no reason why this should apply differently to lower income versus higher income earning people, unless you think there is something wrong with people who make less money that makes them inherently low quality partners.
I’d really like to see Rebecca engage with the stats on race of infanticide, child abuse, and child homicide and how they correlate with single parent households, especially where a non-parent of a child is present, compared to two parent household. If she thinks children raised by boyfriends, aunties, and grandmothers are less likely to be abused than those raised by two parents, she’s an idiot.
I’m sympathetic to Rebecca’s point of view in some respects, and I thought this was a good discussion. But speaking generally, I’d say a lot of the issues you highlight come from her background assumption (shared, ironically, with some free-market economists with political views opposed to hers) that people must have rational, sensible, intelligible reasons to make whatever choices they make. She underrates the possibility of people making silly, shortsighted, impulsive decisions that aren’t in their long-term interest. That’s a major problem because that sort of decision making is a common form of human behavior (I don’t exempt myself here by any means) and you can’t understand human beings, or the social issues that arise in our societies, without accounting for it.
For example, I think she misses the mark when she describes young women “constantly doing math in their heads” to determine the “optimal time” for major life events. Real people don’t think that way. We don’t approach life as a giant optimization problem to be solved to maximize our utility. People are not calculation machines, least of all where love is concerned. And even if we were, life has a stubborn habit of not cooperating with our designs for it.
I could not agree more! I get what Ms. Traister means when she encourages women in their 20s to really consider what they want from life, and I don't think that's bad advice, but I had no idea what I wanted out of life at that age. I had friends who knew (had always known) they wanted a husband and kids, but it was never that cut-and-dry for me. By the time I met my husband and decided to start a family, I was 35. Luckily it all worked out and 11 years later I cannot imagine life without my son; even so, I don't think we can predetermine life's outcome. If I'd never gotten married or had kids, odds are good I would've found other things in life. Humans are remarkably adaptable by design.
Rebecca and Sarah agree more than either of them are likely to admit. They both think people are (and should be) rational, consistent, and unsentimental about relationships, which they think of in terms of trade-offs, exchanges, and cost-benefit analysis. Their only real disagreement is that Sarah thinks the cost-benefit analysis favors marriage for women more often than Rebecca does. But as your story illustrates, people don’t really think that way. We can be unsure what we want, we are relational and emotional, and big life decisions can’t be easily quantified, measured against each other, or reduced to tidy evo-psych explanations. It’s tempting to think otherwise because it makes the world simpler, less absurd, and less scary, and for pundits like Rebecca and Sarah it makes it easier to generalize and draw digestible conclusions. But I think the more honest path is to admit that our experiences exceed our capacity for understanding and control.
Her arguments about single parents, marriage decline, etc. fall in to the same pattern. She seems to start from the position “there must be rational, well-thought-out reasons why people are doing this” and then work backwards to find out what they are. But what if there aren’t?
Not to bring Charles Murray into it but most people just aren't that intelligent, and they're probably getting dumber. And even if you give them a pamphlet on why they should follow the success pathway, 54% of US dults have a literacy below sixth-grade level-- so they probably wouldn't understand what you're saying!
I suspect that Rebecca was arguing with a strawman. Are there women being abused by male partners? Absolutely. But are the numbers high enough to account for the significant decline in marriage? That we don't know. If that is indeed the case, I'm all ears.
And now that you mention it, a reference to data on the success sequence would have enriched the conversation. Traister likely would have dismissed it as the imposition of bourgeois values
It’s frustrating because there is a discourse that both promotes marriage before having children and encourages people to stay married instead of getting divorced! Rebecca refuses to engage with it in good faith. Instead, she’s acting like conservatives have a problem with a handful of upper middle-class white women having kids on their own with sperm donors. Literally no one is in a moral panic about that.
Or, she could’ve talked pushed back against this research article from 2014 that literally argues people should stay together for the kids, since children with married parents have better “health outcomes”. The authors are careful to argue that people shouldn’t stay married in abusive relationships, but they note that the legalization of no-fault divorce has given people (women) more options to exit marriages that are harmful.
It would’ve been easy for Rebecca to take her argument about different metrics of what’s good for children and apply it to this strand of the pro marriage argument, but she doesn’t. She’s intellectually lazy and dishonest.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240051/
Rebecca briefly alluded to her own personal life (married, parents and children all living under the same roof). Deep down she probably knows that it's the ideal situation for raising children but like many leftists publicly refuses to give an inch because she might be perceived as agreeing with those icky conservatives. (As if we're 8 year olds on a playground where the conservatives have cooties.)
In this worldview, even the tiniest acknowledgment of the value of 2-parent families constitutes a call to permanently shove women out of the workplace and back to the home with domineering, abusive husbands. Except for a few fringe extremists, nobody is demanding that women do what my grandma did right after WWII: get married and start popping out 7 babies right out of high school.
To be fair, Rebecca is far from alone. Since November 8, 2016 a lot of the discourse on social issues has suffered due to a visceral fear among smart liberals that they'll be tarred with scarlet letters "MAGA".
You see this same phenomenon with abortion: "if we agree that abortions in the 3rd trimester should be allowed only in medical emergencies, then we're on the road to Taliban-like theocracy with women in burkas and honor killings."
Gender affirming care: "if we agree to ban invasive therapies and surgeries for anyone under age 18, we're condoning genocide against transgender people"
I see an analogy here between the looming spectre of the close-minded parents of gay kids being cruel in to them in 90s TV and movies... and the looming spectre of abused 1960s housewives who have NOWHERE TO TURN TO in 90s TV and movies. The movies brainwashed us all to assume subconsciously that housewives are abused or disenfranchised in some way.
Agreed! I'm in public ed and it seems to me that current adult decision-makers are litigating the issues from their/our own youth, as though it's still the predominant worldview. We've arguably moved on and progressed the last 30 years. It's not perfect, but why are we still discussing these issues the way we (or our parents) did in the '80s and '90s? I'm overgeneralizing a bit, but I just don't get it sometimes.
As is usually the case with these arguments, the assumption is that women have more to fear from men than men do from women, which as far as I know is true in only one narrow (if important) domain. Men will definitely prevail in any physical confrontation, but we have far more to fear overall.
I think there's a typo in your last paragraph. I'm sure you mean "rates" of infanticide, etc., right? I mention it because I paused on that clause a couple times, wondering what kind of thread you were starting. Worth an edit to avoid misunderstanding?
When Sarah said she was gonna ask a trolling question, I wish she would’ve asked her how many genders she thinks there are
She's just so glad things have changed for "gender non-confirming" people.
It’s amazing that a bunch of children online just made up an identity in order to slot themselves into a minority group and so called adults eat it up!
She asks trolling questions, but Sarah is not a troll
Traister is correct that for "lower" socio-economic classes, the horse known as marriage has long left the barn (indeed for many in that strata, marriage is barely contemplated). So any government effort to encourage marriage is likely a quixotic waste of time and money. The marriage advocates are almost as naive as the pro-natalist people who are too obtuse to understand that you can't force people to have children.
Having said all that, Traister seemed to give short shrift to Sarah's assertions about the emotional and psychic benefits of two-parent homes. Traister's essentialist materialism seemed to prohibit her from entertaining any argument beyond "bigger government safety net, all else be damned". I get where she's coming from, but the US has dumped trillions of dollars into welfare and related programs since 1965 and I'm not sure we have much to show for it (if the statistics on multi-generational poverty are any indicator). There's a cultural pathology present in many poor inner-city and rural communities that cannot be addressed simply by writing checks.*
I don't profess to have the "answer" I'm really making observations.
*Note: Lest I be accused of plagiarism, hat tip to Glenn Loury.
ADDITIONALLY. It’s also sad the main gospel of third wave feminism is that the most important feature of successful womanhood is achieving “financially-independent worker” status. As if the most laudable goal should be to some kind of professional person.
This ignores REALITY. Most people have jobs, not super fulfilling careers, women typically choose jobs that are people based and lower paying. A PHD adjunct professor may not earn enough to be financially independent, thus still being dependent on a spouse or family.
I find feminism’s obsession with female “professionalism” depressing. Lots of people are lawyers. Lots of women are lawyers. Lots of women f$^*ing hate being lawyers and if they weren’t burdened by 6 figure law school debt they might have had the choice to stay home raising their children is they preferred. But they are not boxed in by their debt, society’s pressure to be a female professional, and now they are trapped and depressed. Not by their husbands and by their children, but by their debt and their guilt for hating their ‘chosen’ profession.
I agree. I remember in college in the 1990's the saying "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" which I felt was a bit silly. Humans are deeply social animals. Most of us cannot stand alone, and we need people in our lives professionally and "non-professionally" as friends, lovers, and family. There are many ways to lead rich fulfilling lives as men and women, and a deep dive into non-professional life as the partner of someone else who brings home the bacon is not less human or less important. It can complement who you are. My mother was a SAHM and my dad a physician. I never thought my mom was not a full woman or was oppressed or didn't have value because she was not a "professional". She ran the home and managed with my two other siblings. My father never expressed resentment at her role.
This chick really struggles to say anything positive about marriage, or even the benefits of two-parent households. Both of those things are fine, people can think what they’d like. It does come across, to me, as close-minded. It was hard to take her very seriously in parts of the conversation as a result.
I've not listened yet to the episode yet and it's mostly because Traister's lack of nuance on MeToo topics turned me into someone who avoids her. I'll get around to listening eventually but, given your comment, I'm not expecting much.
It's hard to take her seriously as a knower of reality, but as an indication of where American professional women's mindset is, there are probably a lot like her.
That’s probably true. The other part of what she likes to avoid taking seriously is that a career is something you can do and make progress in, in your 40s. Having a child isn’t. At least. Not the natural way. Obvious caveats exist, but you get my point. If you close that door as a woman in your 20s and 30s-it doesn’t open again.
Wow- a lot to think about here.
I will limit myself to the artificial womb thing.it sounds nightmarish.
It seems horrific that we would cut out a mother In that way: moms show love and care for their babies long before they are born.
I have always thought that sperm donation is unethical- it’s awful that before the child
Is even born we are cutting his father out of the equation. Fathers are so important!
Moms are too.
Counter point: My father was cut out of the equation (for other reasons) but I am very glad I was born (most days).
Sorry if my life makes you sad [hides the knives]
<3
I don’t know you- but I’m glad you were born too!
I have had the ultimate gift of great parents- so it’s hard for me to imagine life without my dad.
That’s said- everyone gets their shit sandwich at some point in their lives.
To be fair I was vastly over-stating how glad I am to have be born lol
I hear you on that!
Thanks Ernie. Something seems so off about the emphasis on women’s success being only in the process realm. I am a SAHM myself, I am a caregiver for my husband and daughter. My husband is very ambitious and has a very demanding and stressful career. I feel so fortunate I can focus my attention on my daughter while she’s young and supporting my husband who needs it more than any monetary contribution I might provide.
I’m surrounded by friends with multiple masters degrees, unhappily trapped in jobs that pay only marginally more than the median income. Their children are in aftercare so they hustle, alongside their spouses in the rat race. There is so much exhaustion and guilt. Any not necessarily much monetary reward or benefit.
My friends seem entrapped by the third wave feminist ideology in which most of us millennials were steeped. Their choices restricted by educational debt more than advanced by it. Besides, the university system is churning out so many graduates, these degrees, even from elite universities, are not competitive because tens of thousands of people have them. And with more and more graduates coming into the workforce each year, salaries are being driven down, there is much less job flexibility than we admit.
ITS A TRAP 🪤
I liked this episode so much I decided to subscribe. Don't get me wrong, I trink Traister has bad ideas, but I was so impressed with the way Megan and Sarah kept it interesting and pushed back, but in a polite way.
It's a bit hypocritical for a married mom of two pretend that single parenthood is just as easy...as anyone who has solo parented for a weekend knows!
First
****************ON FIRE****************
^^^ Tradfirst
^^^ Radfirst
No episode has made me appreciate your show quite like this one. The contrast between the hosts and their guest with respect to treating a complex issue intelligently and legitimately open-mindedly was immense.
Rebecca says she is not anti marriage but it sure seems like she is. She says the key ingredient to raising children is economic stability. It’s true that money is important, but money can’t replace a father. Also, the government can’t replace the family. We should not want the government to be our daddy. Contrary to what she says about economic stability, currently the richer countries have lower rates of marriage and less children.
Economic stability is important, but the idea that the government can just hand it out to people is a bit of a stretch. I think *most* economic stability comes from a robust free market and good decision-making, public assistance being available when needed but not a source of income for the average person.
Rebecca says “I’m not saying that people with financial problems are more likely to have volatile marriages, I’m just saying that financial problems increase volatility in marriage.”
She is basically saying that if you marry a guy that doesn’t have a degree or make a lot of money, he’s going to be a shitty husband and treat you poorly and you will be worse off than if you had his child and then were dependent on the government to take care of you and it.
Yeah this is the big hole in her argument for me. Welfare + 2 parents is much better than welfare + 1 parent.
So while we are in the most economically prosperous period in human history, Rebecca thinks throwing money at the single moms and girlfriendless men will solve our social problems. Yes to Megan for pointing out these same problems exist in Scandinavia. Maybe changing social mores anyone?
This reminds me of a WSJ op-ed I read about motherhood in Sweden several years ago. I believe the title was “The High Cost of Social Welfare” or “The High Cost of Gender Equality,” either way. It was about the ways the social mores force in Sweden force women into the workplace at higher rates and its corollated with higher rates of depression in children and feelings of isolation society wide.
It’s a shame Meghan didn’t bring up Scandinavia until the very episode, as it’s an important counter-example to many of Rebecca’s empirical claims and she didn’t really have time to respond to it.
*very end of the episode
Anna Louie Sussman wrote an essay a few years ago that tried to explain declining Scandinavian fertility from a left-of-center perspective. She might be a good future guest if the pod ever revisits this topic: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/capitalism-children.html
A worthy topic and an interesting guest skillfully engaged. I'm glad you had her on and had this discussion. I was genuinely surprised by the lefty sloganeering - I think she said, 'for WHITE people' about ten times, and referred to marriage as a gendered institution that privileges male power. I didn't expect that degree of ideological capture. Sounded like a critic of leftism mocking it.
Lol did Rebecca just spend five minutes trying to explain to us that women used to have to get married because otherwise they didn’t have another way of supporting themselves?
Basically. I think there's something to it. Without marriage, the *average* woman would have been in quite the pickle until modern times. There is a poignant scene in Pride and Prejudice where Charlotte explains to a mortified Lizzie why she accepted the proposal of marriage from the dufus pastor guy (forgot his name). She's terrified of entering middle age on her own.
Part of the hypergamy narrative assumes that it's just natural, but as to the question at the end of what could be changed, I do wonder how much of a difference it would make if there were a shift in cultural messaging away from the unbridled hatred of all things male and masculine. She keeps talking about women who "haven't found a partner"; whereas Sarah likes to humblebrag about how she was surrounded with men during her brief pre-marriage period. I do not believe there are any significant number of young women who can't find a partner, but I do believe that there are lots of women who incorrectly think that they're better than the men around them. Maybe that is unavoidable, but maybe it isn't.
Also, I've certainly observed-in medicine-the level of discomfort that ensues if one suggests that women experience aging or declining fertility, or that having children is even a life decision worth considering. It's not usually me bringing it up, but it's one of those topics best described by the Eric Weinstein coinage "anti-interesting". Must be one of those generational things because this idea of a biological clock has been unspeakable for as long as I've been around.
Anna Louie Sussman, whom I cited in an earlier comment, wrote a recent piece arguing that many of the issues with single parenthood, declining marriage, etc. boil down to women struggling to find men who clear reasonable criteria like “isn’t a drug addict”, “isn’t a criminal”, “is employed”, and “doesn’t hit me”: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/opinion/marriage-women-men-dating.html.
Stephen Pinker (!) made this argument. Forgot which book - Blank Slate?
I think it's in "Better Angels of our Nature"?
That might be what they think, but how many women who think that meet those criteria themselves?
Probably quite a lot. Drug addiction, criminality, and perpetrating domestic violence are all more common in men than women. Employment is maybe a more nuanced case. But I think it’s understandable for women to be wary of unemployed men unless they’re prepared to take on the housework, which they tend not to be.
The differences in drug use are there but are quite small (I'm looking here https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt42728/NSDUHDetailedTabs2022/NSDUHDetailedTabs2022/NSDUHDetTabsSect1pe2022.htm). The domestic violence issue has always been that women are more likely to do low level violence but men (on account of strength) are more likely to do actual damage. As to overall rates of criminal behavior, you're correct, but I don't think any of this is at a level where the marginal difference between men and women really justify this sort of sweeping conclusion.
When it comes to employment, the question becomes more nuanced, and a lot more women are underemployed (in the sense of working part time jobs or working beneath the level of their training) rather than unemployed.
It seems to me that all of this is overwhelmed by the simple fact that women of reproductive age have an enormous pool to choose from because men of reproductive age is basically all adult men.
For drug addiction, you have to consider that men may be more likely to have a serious problem. Google tells me men are 2-3 times more likely to die of overdoses than women.
For domestic violence, “men are more likely to do actual damage” is kind of the point. It means women have much more cause to be scared of being physically hurt by their intimate partners than men do, and that impacts marriage and family decision making.
Similarly for criminality, the gender gap rises with the seriousness of the offense. Little/no gap for jaywalking, but a wide one for violent crime.
For all of these examples, the pattern is that if you factor in some measure of intensity the gender gaps get a lot bigger.
That's factually true, but is not the original framing that you used, which was a binary of either someone is a criminal/addict/etc. or not. And frankly, I think binary, Manichean thinking is more likely what's going on here.
It's also very dependent on social strata. There's a dynamic in lower-income black communities that I think really does meet this description, because the rates of crime and violence are so high. If we're talking about someone with a degree from a nice college who is working a professional job, realistically their peers do not have high absolute rates of violence or other criminality. They have options.