Category Archives: Family

Why Are Children So Expensive?

I wrote this a few months back, but never got around to posting it. Scott’s post on wage stagnation reminded me to post it, because I discuss some of the same things here, while he ignored what I think is the most obvious cause of wage stagnation.

Someone posted on twitter, asking why kids became expensive. I answered mostly about the spiritual reasons: the unwillingness to sacrifice. And that’s true; kids are affordable, IF you’re willing to make the necessary sacrifices.

However, as Nick B Steves has said, ordinary virtue should not require heroic effort. You can have many kids if you’re willing to make extraordinary effort to do so, but any sane and healthy society should make it relatively easy to have many kids, ours does not. So,I’m going to show why kids are so expensive.

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Wages

The first reason is wages. Inflation-wise wages have been stagnant since about the 70s. Despite massive increases in productivity, people are not making more real money.

Wages are determined by where the demand for labour and the supply of labour meet: how many jobs are there and how many people need jobs. This is elementary economics, but I’m going to make it clear here, because when it comes to discussing labour supply and demand, I notice people tend to make self-serving analyses as if basic economic principles change when it comes to labour, so I want to make it clear:

The more jobs that need to be filled, the higher the demand for labour, so this pushes wages up. If the jobs to be filled decreases, demand for labour decreases, which pushes wages down. If the size of the labour force increases, labour supply increases, which pushes wages down. If the size of the labour force decreases, labour supply decreases, pushing wages up.

Over the past 60 years or so, there have been multiple major trends both increasing the labour supply and decreasing labour demand.

The biggest trend is feminism. Feminism pushed women into the workforce which (more or less) doubled the labour force over a period a few decades. This pushed wages down hard.

The second major trend is immigration. Since the Immigration and Nationality Act was passed in 1965, opening immigration up, 59 million immigrants (as of 2015) have arrived in the US. The US population in 1965 was 194 million, in 2015, it was 321 million, for a total growth of 127 million. 46% of US population growth since 1965 has been from immigration.

That is a unnaturally massive growth in the labour supply, which has had a massive downward pressure on wages.

I will note here, that keeping wages low has been a near explicit part of the arguments for immigration. “Labour shortage” is synonymous with “wage shortage”; when employers argue that there are not enough workers, what is really being said, is they are not paying enough to attract workers. “Jobs Americans won’t do” is synonymous with “Jobs Americans won’t do unless paid more than currently offered”.

To make matters worse, the 1965 INA opened up immigration from third world countries, where wages were already naturally low. So labourers being imported into America would be willing to work for much below what an American would accept as reasonable, increasing the downward pressure on wages.

While these two trends where increasing labour supply, other trends were decreasing labour demand. Particularly off-shoring and mechanization.

Off-shoring moved industry from high-wage America to low-wage third-world countries, while mechanization has replaced human workers with machines. Both of these have had large depressive effects on labour demand, and therefore wages, particularly in non-service, low-skill occupations, which are the easiest jobs to both automate and move.

You can’t afford children, because you’re not getting paid decent wages because capital has systematically forced you into competition with poor third-world labour, imported labour, and your wife over jobs, forcing wages down.

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Housing Costs

Housing costs are the single biggest expense (rivaled only by taxes) to your average person, and housing costs have exploded.

In 1960, the median house price was $58,000 (in 2000$). In 2000, the median house price was $119,600. In 2015, the median house price was $294,200 (in 2015$), which comes to $213,700 in 2000$.

In 55 years, housing prices have almost quadrupled, while wages have stagnated.

One of the major reasons is the increase in housing size. Since 1975, housing size has doubled. But that does not explain a quadrupling in housing costs. It would at best explain a doubling, but should be less than doubling because new marginal square footage should theoretically be cheaper due to the fixed costs in a home.

Another major drivers of house pricing includes increased demand from the fracturing of the family. In an intact nuclear family, two parents and their children share 1 house (possibly with a grandparent or two). In a divorced family, two parents and their children share 2 houses. An unmarried man and an unmarried woman have 2 houses (roommates amerloriate this to an extent). A single mother with children and her baby daddy have 2 houses. Etc. Throw on top of this the shift from multi-generational homes, and the fracturing of the family and the turn away from marraige has had a large, but, AFAIK, unmeasured effect on home prices (this would make a good study proposal for any economists out there).

Another major driver is immigration. 59 million people needing housing is a huge upward driver of housing demand and therefore housing prices.

A third major driver is schooling and safety. “Good schools” is a major driver of house prices and “safe neighbourhoods” because most parents, understandably, want their kids to get a good education and to be able to live without worry they’ll won’t become involved with or victims of drugs, gangs, and crime. Everybody is also aware that “good schools” and “safe neighbourhoods” are politically-correct codes words for schools and neighbourhoods without poor minorities who statistically make schools bad and neighbourhoods unsafe.

Because federal laws make discrimination in housing on any basis but price illegal, the only way to keep schools good and neighbourhoods safe is to discriminate on price. This puts a huge upward pressure on price, as people move to high price neighbourhoods to escape poor minorities (who may then follow them, because they too want good schools and safe neighbourhoods, forcing the process to repeat, escalating prices even higher).

Because of this, safe, affordable housing is functionally illegal in American cities and prices ever increase.

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Two Income Trap and Child Care

The increased upward pressure on housing prices has the side effect of forcing more families into the two income trap, so they can afford a good house.

This has a variety of effects that increase costs, making children expensive.

Child care is the largest of these. As I’ve explained before, affordable child care is impossible, so child care will immediately eat up a significant portion the second income. Child care by itself, is a major factor of why children are so expensive.

A second income usually requires a second vehicle (more on this below), another major fixed expense. A stay-at-home parent has time to cook home made meals, mends clothes, and participate in other cost-saving activities; a dual income household will eat out more often, purchase more expensive pre-made food, have to replace clothes, etc.

The two income trap imposes a number of large extra costs on families and removes many cost-savings that an at-home parent allows.

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Taxes

I was going to write about the increasing tax burden here, but I couldn’t find much much data on the overall US tax burden; most of it was just federal tax rates, and calculating overall tax burden for the average middle class person over time is much more effort than I’m willing to put in to a blog post.

But according to this 2012 NYT article, the overall tax burden has been declining somewhat, except for low-income people, who continue to pay minimal taxes.

So we’ll say increasing taxes probably aren’t particularly responsible for kids costing too much.

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Vehicles

Among average people, vehicles are second largest major fixed expense after housing, and they have generally gotten more expensive over time, primarily as more families have moved to being two car households and gas has gotten more expensive.

This site compared a few classic cars and all have increased by half to almost doubling since 1965 (inflation-adjusted). But these are classics and so might no be applicable.

According to Wiki, the Chevrolet Impalla was the best-selling full-size car in 1965 and is still the best-selling today, so we’ll use this and assume other similar cars are competitively priced. In 1965, a 4-door V-8 sedan Impala was 2,779, which comes to $20,910.17 in 2015$. The base price of a new Impala in 2015 was $27,700. An increase of about a third.

But large families need more than five seats. The 1965 Impala 9-passenger station wagon was $3,073, $23,122.33 in 2015$, the 6-passenger was $22,347.32. You generally can’t buy station wagons today, because US regulations classified them as cars, making them uneconomic to produce under US fuel standards, which was a major regulatory backfire for environmentalists, as families switched to minivans and SUVs, which were much worse on fuel. The best-selling SUV in 2015 was the Ford Escape, which started at $24,000, but only can seat 5 passenger. The best-selling minivan, is the Dodge Grand Caravan, it seats 7 passengers, and started at $22,000. The Chevy Express was the cheapest 9+-passenger I found on a site, and it starts at $29,000 for the cargo version, so probably just a bit more for a passenger vehicle.

So, it looks like 3-4 child family vehicles are significantly more expensive to buy, as are larger 8+ child family vehicles, but, contrary to my expectations, the large 5-7 child families are about the same.

Except that the SUV’s and vans cost a lot more in fuel and as mentioned above, 2-income families now almost always need 2 vehicles.

Gasoline costs have increased: with the exception of the 1973 and 1979 oil crises (when prices hit $3/gallon, post-WW2 gas prices generally stayed between $1.50-$2/gallon (in 2015$). Since 2000, gas prices have ranged between $2.50-$3.80 per gallon. Since 2006, gas prices have generally been higher than the $3/gallon they were at the peak of the oil crises. During this time gasoline usage has also been increasing, likely largely due to increasing suburbanization.

Another hidden cost: older vehicles were generally easier to repair and maintain at home, but the increased inclusion of electronics in vehicles, makes it increasingly difficult to repair without very expensive specialized electronic equipment, necessitating an increasing reliance on professionals for maintenance and repair, adding significant cost.

So, the need for two vehicles due to the two income trap has increased the cost of vehicles significantly for your average family, while vehicles themselves have become moderately more expensive. The cost of gasoline has increased significantly while consumption has increased.

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Food

Food is generally the fourth biggest cost to families after housing, taxes, and vehicles. The average American spends less on food, as a percentage of income, then they used to. Hoever, good expenditures have stopped declining and been flat over the last 15-20 years.

However, this is deceptive, if you look at average household size since 1960, it mirrors average household size relatively closely. The levelling off of food costs as income share matches the levelling off of household size. This suggests food costs have been mostly constant per person, but less kids means less spending on food.

In a time of major productivity gains and stagnant wages, food costs have not really shrunk.

A major cause of this is the increase in eating out. It costs more to eat pre-made food than it does to make your own food. The average American now spends about 43% of their food budget on eating out. As well, when eating in, they are more likely to buy expensive pre-made meals than making their own. All this increases food bills.

The primary cause of this increase in eating out and in eating pre-made foods, is the two-income trap. When one parent was at home, they had sufficient time and energy to create homemade food, saving money. When both parents work, food preparation time becomes a luxury often foregone due to a lack of time and motivation.

In addition, to eating out costing more, eating out itself has increased in cost.

In economics, there’s an informal purchasing power parity index known as the Big Mac Index, that can roughly how close inflation rates measure actualy close consumer price data.

In 1968, when it first came out, a Big Mac cost $0.49, $3.34 in 2015$. In 1986, the first year of the Big Mac Index, it cost $1.60, $3.46 in 2015$. In 2000, $2.51, or $3.45 in 2015$. In 2015, the most recent year the BMI measured, it cost $4.79.

The cost of a Big Mac stayed relatively even until sometime after 2000. Since then there has been a ~40% increase in the cost of a Big Mac beyond inflation. My anecdotal experience in Canada and basic market competitiveness theory, suggests that this growth is probably true across eating out on average.

So eating out, which is 40% of your food bill, is now 40% more expensive than it used to be.

I’ll also note here, that the rapid growth of Big Mac costs past inflation, suggests that inflation has been severely underestimated, in which case, everything I’ve posted is much worse than the numbers suggest. I’ve always been skeptical of CPI, but a 40% extra increase over 15 years in something as basic and omnipresent as a Big Mac heightens my doubts.

Food costs haven’t really increased, but they haven’t particularly decreased either.

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Education

Saving for college is a major expense for many middle-class families. Lots of ink has already been spilled over this, so I’m not going to repeat much. College has been increasing in price much faster than wages. 8 times as much according to this article.

A lot of young people start off with a lot of college debt. The average student loan borrower has $37k in debt upon graduation. That’s a lot of money, the equivalent of a down payment on a house. Instead of buying a house and accumulating capital, they’re paying off usury.

And they’re not really getting anything of increased value for this debt. The money is being burned in cost disease and their job prospects are worse than those of college grads decades ago.

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Consumer Debt

Now, one of the major destroyers of people is usury. The average millennial has $42,000 in debt, the plurality of which is credit card debt. The average American is $33,000 in debt. I’ve already written about usury (and inflation) before, but debt and debt payments are major

Usury takes advantage of the average person who is not mentally equipped to fully understand the implications of debt and compounding interest. It shackles them in debt bondage. The average American spends $280k over their lifetime just on interest. The average person with credit card debt pays $1.1k in interest each year.

Household debt has increase from 31% of income in 1951 to about 100% now (it was up to 120% during the housing boom). All this debt means increased interest payments to banks.

Usury is strangling the average household, particularly the young.

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Communication Technology

This is a simple one, but the average American user spends $47/month on mobile phones and $132 on cable and internet. That’s almost ~$180/month. When I was growing up, cable was rare and internet and mobiles practically non-existent. And this is just monthly bills, not including the purchase of HD TV’s mobile phones, and computers. This is a huge added expense most families take on.

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Personal Choice

Finally, personal choice is why you can’t afford children. This is what my tweets harped on. People can’t afford children, because they are unwilling to sacrifice for them.

People eat out instead of making meals at home (driven by the two-income trap). People buy larger houses than they should (driven by “safe schools” and the two-income trap). People by two cars (driven by the two-income trap) and new cars. People go into consumer debt. People take useless degrees. People buy luxuries.

There are major structural issues making children expensive, which I’ve outlined above, but on the individual level, you can probably afford children if you are willing to sacrifice. People have been raised and become accustomed to luxuries they can’t afford (hence the massive amount of consumer debt most have). This may be due to structural issues, but on an individual level you can probably afford kids if you sacrifice.

Don’t go into debt for a useless degree; take trades or get a useful degree. If one of the parents stays home and engages in traditional money-saving practices (such as home-cooking and coupon-clipping), the family can avoid buying a second vehicle and paying child care costs. This will require buying a smaller house, children may have to share rooms and you may have minimal private space. Luxuries in entertainment and food may need be cut back. Cable cut. Home internet forgone for mobile only, or vice versa. It may require moving to a lower cost county or state.

Your grandparents raised 6 kids in a small 3-bedroom house with no TV, 1 car, minimal entertainment or luxuries, home-cooked meals, and penny-pinching. You can too if you will it enough and are willing to sacrifice for it.

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The reason you can’t afford children is because wages stagnated while costs increased across the board.

Wages have been destroyed by a rapidly expanding labour pool due to immigration and feminism. At the same time, housing costs skyrocketed due to the two-income trap, a quest for safe schools and neighbourhoods, rapidly and artificially expanding population, and family breakdown. The two-income trap necessitated two vehicles, which along with gas greatly increased transportation costs.

Education has trapped the young in debt, while general usury eats people alive and prevents them from accumulating capital.

Finally, you’ve been raised to be accommodated to a lifestyle and luxuries you can’t afford and which you finance with debt.

On a personal level, you can overcome this and have children by making major sacrifices. On a societal level, it is insane and unhealthy to require the average person to make inordinate sacrifices just to be able to afford children. Any decent and sane society will do what it can to make raising a family comfortably affordable to most people.

Our society has been designed to destroy your ability to have children without either being rich or taking on massive usurious debt and making inordinate sacrifices.

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Post-Script: I am not blaming immigrants for immigration, minorities for integration, or women for feminism. All of these are structural issues basically forced upon an unwilling populace by government and capital. Immigrants, minorities, and women followed, as would be expected, the incentives given them, and I generally don’t fault people for following incentives unless it’s a heinous evil, which none of the individual actions taken under this incentive structure would be. In fact, minorities and women probably suffered the most under this regime. Immigrants generally benefited, but being foreigners had minimal hand in the original changes in the 1960s.

The ones at fault are government and capital who imposed a destructive economic incentive structure upon society so they could destroy wages and increase consumption to feed their greed and lust for power. They are the ones who caused this and the ones responsible for why you can’t afford children.

Make sure you aim the blame properly.

Mutual Submission

I tweeted at Rachel Held Evans (a liberal Christian) who was going against patriarchy and complementarianism.

In one of the side threads, the topic of mutual submission came up.

https://twitter.com/AshleighKelsay/status/720394333652791297

So I am going to quickly comment on it

Mutual submission comes up in Ephesians 5, preceding the part dealing with marital roles:

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

(Ephesians 5:18-33 ESV)

Some translations, such as the liberal NIV, make it the mutual submission clause part of the marital roles section. (The KJV includes it in the previous sentence of verse 20). I don’t know Greek, but commenters believe it to be properly linked to the preceding verses.

But even if we go apart from the Greek, it is clear from the immediate context that that submit to one another is an exposition to the church, not the husband. The use of “wives,” shows a clear transition from one thought to another. As well, the duty of wives to submit is explicitly instructed, the duty of husbands is stated to be love.

As well, the exact same commandment, of wives submit to your husbands is also found in Colossians and 1 Peter, there is no mutual submission commandment near either of those.

Traditional teachings have always been wives submitting to husbands, not mutual submission. It is only since feminists of the radical left took over the culture that any one even thought mutual submission might be a theology of marriage. There is no way one can argue that generally anti-church, anti-family, anti-God, anti-child, atheistic, communist feminists are better at interpreting the Bible than 2000 years of Christian saints, scholars, and priests.

Throughout the Bible and church teachings, wifely submission (and the corresponding duty of husbands to love) is taught. You can not overturn these clear teachings through the selective interpretation of a single verse taken out of its immediate context. Mutual submission is an errant teaching that can only be gained through malicious interpretation of scripture. It is the rejection of Christian marriage for feminism.

Natalism and Status

Natalism has been going around lately. TRS has linked the problem to affluence, Yuray has made the fairly obvious observation that minor tax incentives are not enough to raise the baby-making rate, while Spandrell has linked the the fertility crisis to kids costing lots and recommends making it profitable with major tax incentives.

I’m actually rather surprised by Spandrell’s answer. He’s the one who’s been pushing Status Points theory the hardest around here and has noted that any kind of insanity can be accomplished when status is on the line. As we’ve seen, people will go to almost any length for status.

It’s obvious that women want to work rather than procreate, but this is not because (most*) women particularly like working or because they prefer work to marriage and family. It’s not because housework is drudgery, most women who work do something similar to housework in their jobs.

The reason women want to work is because working is high status.** The reason women don’t have children is because having children is low status, and the more children the lower the status.

Examples of this abound: When you read about the Duggars or another large family, you will almost assuredly find criticisms along the line of ‘use a condom’ or ‘brood mare’. Women who stay home to care for their family are ‘stepford wives’. Women who spend their lives on home and family are ‘wasting their lives‘. Relationships show a lack of ambition and too much traditionalism (which is negative). Young marriage is discouraged. Etcetera, etcetera. Feminists have been working very hard to destroy any status attached to motherhood.

You’ve no doubt heard the blatant lie that motherhood is the toughest job in the world? Nobody could honestly believe taking care of a child is tougher than working in a coal mine or as an infantryman in Afghanistan, but everybody spreads that lie because it bolsters the low and declining status of women with children.

Having children is low status, but even beyond that status games pervade all of motherhood. The mommy wars aren’t about whether children are better off being raised by their parents or by daycare workers, it’s about who gets good mother status points: stay-at homes or working mothers.

Before you thinks that good mother status contradicts my thesis, know that low status is still some status, while having no children is no status. Have you ever read an article by childfree women? I can almost guarantee you it was complaining about how others expect them to have kids, think them odd that they don’t, or using the status of having kids to one-up them.  In other words, their primary complaints are about the status hits they are taking for not having children. These status hits gnaw away at them despite having an ‘exciting, meaningful’ life of travel, work, and leisure. (Notice how they will always status signal other areas in their life to make up for this lack of status).

Having children is lower status than eduction, working, travel, or having status-giving interests. Being a stay-at-home mother is low status compared to being a working mother. Having many children is lower status than having one or two children. Having children young is lower status than having them once infertility hits.

This, more than anything, is why he have such low birth rates.

So, the answer to the fertility crisis is not tax changes, natalism benefits, or motherhood welfare. The way to get women to want to reproduce is to make children the ultimate status symbol.

Read the story of Leah and Rachel in Genesis 29 and 30. Having children was high status, so they did everything they could possibly to produce more children so they could win the status competition against each other.

We need to make it so that instead of the culture lauding whorish celebrities and woman CEO’s, mothers are celebrated. We need news reports to make glowing reports on women having their 6th child, rather than shows idolizing women who adopt foreign children or slutty daring dresses. When Mrs. Duggar has more status than Hillary Clinton, that’s when we will turn this ship around.

Sadly, we don’t control the levers of the culture-industry, so there’s not much we can do for society as a whole, but there are things you can do in your own little circles.

Make a point of praising women who have kids and their mothering skills. If a family is thinking of having another kid, make a positive comment. Praise young men and women you know who are thinking of young marriage, and otherwise encourage young people aroudn you to marry early. Let some disappointment slip out if people say ‘two’s enough for us’. Register some thinly concealed disapproval or contempt if someone says, ‘we don’t want children’. If you can smoothly do backhanded compliments or negs for the self-sterilizing, that would work too. And so on.

You’re working against the combined forces of the media, academy, bureaucracy, and culture, but you might be able to have some influence. Status is mainly an abstraction of a multitude of positive and negative social interactions. If you add to the interactions around you, elevating motherhood and deriding self-sterilization, you might indirectly change a few minds in your local communities. If enough people do it, maybe the trend could be reversed.

One warning, try to keep it subtle enough. Push too hard or too blatantly and you it might backfire if they get defensive or if you look like a jerk. You want to subtly influence their general perception of status, not come off as someone pushing a low status opinion.

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* Before some idiot brings it up: yes, not all women are alike, yes, there are some women that like their jobs, and yes, some women just don’t like children. A generalization is not an absolute, spare me.

** And yes, because they need cash, but the need for cash came after the desire for status. The drive of women into the workplace was due to status, but once women entered, it drove wages down and costs up, forcing more women into the workplace for monetary reasons.

Sparing the Rod

Recently the Liberal Party of Canada have floated the idea of banning spanking, so I’m going to write a bit on spanking.

The anti-spanking crowd is superficially right in that most studies of spanking find that spanking correlates with  a number of negative traits, particularly increased aggression.

I’ve read many of these studies over time, and the primary problem with these studies is that they are always observational. Nobody sets up controlled, randomized studies of spanking (getting parental consent and cooperation would likely be prohibitively difficult). A superficial examination of the problem, ignores other more likely factors for increased aggression among those children who are spanked.

Another problem with most of these studies is that they look at physical punishment, and do not distinguish between spanking and abuse. Most “spanking” studies would lump together breaking your kids nose in a fit of rage and smacking our child’s bottom with your hand in a controlled manner after a ‘this hurts me more than this hurts you’ talk as both being corporal punishment. The studies would then find out that, very obviously, there were negative effects from “physical punishment” (ie. beating the shit out of your kid) which was then translated as spanking harms children. When the form of physical punishment is controlled for, controlled spanking ranges from harmless to beneficial.

Back to the primary problem, the correlational approach misses two related explanatory factors that I think would be more likely explanations than ‘lovingly-enacted disciplinary swats on the bottom permanently scar children’.

The first is that aggressive and impulsive kids get spanked more often and more harshly. Lots of these studies find that those children who are spanked more are more aggressive (and maybe even less cognitively able) and assume that they are aggressive because they are spanked. But wouldn’t the reverse causation be more likely. Wouldn’t you be more likely to physically discipline a more aggressive child? One study on the causation question found that it was both, aggressive kids were physically disciplined more and physically disciplined kids were more aggressive. They say early childhood spanking starts the cycle, but I can not access the study to check. (Note, the data for this study do not distinguish between forms of spanking).

The second is that those parents who engage in physical correction, particularly the more violent forms thereof, are likely those parents who are less self-controlled and more aggressive themselves. Aggression and self-control are largely heritable. It stands to reason that the kind of parents who physically discipline children are the kind of parents who would have more aggressive and more impulsive children.

I find it doubtful that moderate spanking is in itself harmful. I think it likely that aggressive children were born that way due to naturally aggressive parents who use aggressive parenting to control them. (Note: I am using aggressive as a continuum here, not a dichotomy).

Like many things though, the people controlling the discussion are liberal elites. The children of self-controlled puritans and Jews at Harvard and Yale likely don’t need physical discipline. These children are likely naturally non-aggressive, self-controlled, and intelligent, and need only minimal discipline. So banning spanking will work fine for them, it is a luxury they can indulge in.

On the other hand, when upper class sentiments meet the lower classes of naturally aggressive and impulsive Scots-Irish and blacks, a ban on spanking probably will not work out as planned. Time-outs and lectures probably won’t work as well at controlling, directing, and teaching morality to the aggressive, impulsive children of aggressive, high-time preference people.

I would hypothesize that applying cultural elite values on spanking to lower classes will be harmful to the lower classes. The parents probably know their children and their temperments better than disconnected elites and will be more apt to properly punishment their children. Forcing an unnatural ban on spanking on populations where spanking may be necessary could be counter-productive.

Of course, to say for certain some proper studies would need to be conducted and that is unlikely to happen.

Until then though, instead of assuming lower-class parents are abusive for their, to-us, violent methods of parenting, maybe we should consider that they know how to properly raise their own children. Maybe for those children with less natural self-controlled, the application of violence is necessary to teach lessons that more naturally self-controlled children would learn after a firm lecture.

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One side note: I find it somewhat amusing that the sorts of people who are strongest against spanking are also the sorts of people that are happy to put their children on mind-altering drugs. I would think that latter would be more abusive than the former, n’est-ce pas?

The Wages of Aspiration

Trawling the advice columnists again, I found this gem, which I’ll quote in full:

Dear Amy: My sister lives across the country. She has been married for 33 years. They’ve raised two daughters who are now adults, but she’s been living the most boring life ever!

I don’t know how she could be happy doing nothing but cooking and cleaning for all these years. And then she has the nerve to criticize me for not having enough time in my day, when she has no clue what it’s like to work full time.

Well, OK, she did work full time once — years ago before her daughters were born. She also had a little job when her kids were in school, but it wasn’t a “real job,” just a little part-time lunch-lady position.

I can’t understand why she doesn’t want to work more and help her poor husband with their finances. Then they could travel and see the world! They hardly ever go anywhere. I want so much more for her!

She has never had to live through things like illness, job loss or divorce, as I have. She has been supportive sometimes, but not all the time. I guess I’m a bit jealous because she has so much free time.

I’ve asked her to write me a list of what she does all day. I’ve sent her lists of what I manage to accomplish in the three hours I have in my home, but she has declined to provide her list.

It’s so sad that she has never had any aspirations!

It makes me so sad to feel like she’s wasted her life; she’s only in her 50s! I told her all this in an e-mail, but now she’s mad at me for just being honest. She expects an apology, but I’m hurt now, too. How do we get past this? Do you have any advice on getting her to see my view? — Frustrated Sister in PA

Amy rightfully smacks her down.

The ressentiment here is hidden worse than a toddler’s lies. This women is alone, hurting, and busy-working herself to death, and you can tell she hates it, however much she protests otherwise. She has so little going on in her life, she spends the”three hours I have in my home” on hectoring her contented sister who lives on the other side of the country. She’s looking for validation for her misery, but her sister refuses to provide it by buying into her lies, so instead she tries to destroy her sister’s life because she wants “so much more for her!”

She has refused to tend her own garden, she has leaned in, and now she seethes with resentment towards her sister who is “wasting her life” on creating a loving family. Instead of a family, she chose divorce and a job, and you can feel the pain and betrayal she experienced with her job loss. You can also feel it from her mention of illness; I do not think many people were there to care for her.

Notice how in her miserable ressentiment, she frames her choices as compared to her sisters. “Aspirations!” “So much more!” “Boring”

Having a quiet, happy family life is not an aspiration, but working for a job which would abandon you any time the profit margins were right is? Working your ass off, so you only have 3 hours of free time a day, so that you can go on a vacation once a year is more? Having a contented home life is less? Having a happy family is boring, but working in a cubicle for 13 hours a day is not?

What kind of mutilated soul thinks that way?

This women is in her 50’s, or thereabouts. Retirement looms in a decade. What will her life be when she doesn’t even have her job to distract her from her loneliness? How much of this rage towards her sister is because she knows that horror awaits her soon and she needs to justify the dear she feels to herself?

Dear young lady who may read this, reread that letter and decide carefully which of these sisters you want to be.

Guest Post From Europe: Historical Divorces

Today, we have another guest post from our European reader, with some musings on history, divorce, and mythology:

1.Victory is sweet, even though it tends to take a long time. I SUSPECT that my my self-estranged & self-separated wife will find herself in the Maria Callas’ Mother situation quite soon. Maria Callas, the OPERA singer, was born in 1923 in New York of Greek immigrant parents. When Maria was about 11 the Mother humped off back to Greece with “HER” children while telling the father to keep the dollars’ tsumanai flowing. The Mother told EVERYBODY else (including the children) that the father was an abusive drunk. When Maria Callas found out why she (Maria Callas) had NO Father, she, (Maria Callas) NEVER EVER spoke to the Mother again. Granted, the parents were somewhat reconciled on the Mother’s death-bed, but Maria Callas STILL refused to speak to her Mother.

2. The most famous divorce ever, as you know, is the divorce by Henry VIII of England, of his wife Catherine of Aragon. When Catherine, in 1527, first heard that Henry, planned to divorce her, she went to Confession. Henry, as you know said that his marriage to Catherine was invalid, as Catherine had previously been married to his brother Arthur, two years Henry’s senior, and three years Catherine’s junior. It is true that the above situation, had been a law of the early Church, as Henry always claimed, but it had been modified, as the Church expanded to say that provided the wife and brother A had done nothing inside the bedroom, she could marry brother B. She claimed to the priest in Confession in 1527, that on their wedding night, in 1501, Arthur was legless drunk, and had to be almost physically carried upstairs. She then said that once the bedroom door closed, Arthur collapsed on the bed to sleep it off. She then sat on the bed beside him. She said that she later fell on top of Arthur and dozed off, but she adamantly maintained that they got no further. Arthur left the next morning for Wales, and died soon after. During the Divorce Court hearing in 1529, Catherine repeated, the exact same story as she knelt in front Henry. As Catherine lay dying in 1536, aged fifty, quite old for that time, she again went to Confession, having sent for a priest, and repeated the exact same story. She had the priest write down her Confession in 1527 and 1536. She then had it sent to her nephew King Charles 1 (Carlos Primero) of Spain. Both statements, with absolutely no difference in what Catherine had said, turned up years later. In view of the fact that Catherine’s story NEVER wavered, and Henry varied his story to suit different circumstances and audiences, I think that we can now say that Catherine was telling the truth and Henry was not.

3. Similarly, in 1520, the then twenty year old Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V was persuaded to allow a totally unknown German monk called Martin Luther address the Diet or Parliament in Worms, the following year, 1521, on Luther’s religious views. Charles was a devout Catholic. He was Emperor of what we would now call Holland, Belgium Luxemburg, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Western Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia Northern and Eastern France, plus the far north of Italy, roughly ‘the hammer’ of Italy connecting the far SE of France and Slovenia. When his political advisors heard about this plan, they were outraged, and wanted him to kill Luther, problem solved. But Charles refused, saying that he could not break his word, once given. So in May 1521, he sent one of his knights to meet Luther at a pre-arranged spot, just as he had promised. The knight then escorted Luther on the two weeks’ journey to Worms, where the Diet was held. This in modern terms would have been the equivalent of allowing him address the European Parliament, or putting him on the Euro News today. Luther said his piece, and while the knight was escorting him back to the pre-arranged spot, Luther’s supporters, not trusting Charles, kidnapped him. No evidence has ever emerged to suggest that Luther knew of the kidnapping, or that Charles planned to break his word, or was planning to allow anybody else do so. Charles, who was also Charles 1, King of Spain, Carlos Primero, retired from his different royal duties between 1554 and 1556, and died in a monastery outside Salamanca in 1558, aged 58. To the end of his days, nobody, but absolutely nobody could accuse him of dishonesty. Conclusion: Keep YOUR end of the bargain. Let the other chap break his end of the bargain. History will vindicate you.

4. There is a story, along the same lines from America. When the American Constitution was being written, some of the Founding Fathers wanted the US Senators to be appointed for life to enable them to put the national interest first, and resist populist pressure. Eventually the compromise reached was that the Senators were almost like Ambassadors, appointed to represent their State in Washington, to the Federal Government. Senators were popularly elected after 1912, I think. After the US Civil War, the Northern twenty seven States were dominated by the Republican Party. The Republican Party was divided into the ‘Lincolnites’ who wanted reconciliation with the defeated twelve Southern States, and the ‘Radicals’ who wanted to exploit the defeated South until it was bled dry, and then start again. In 1866 Kansas recalled one of its Senators, a Lincolnite and replaced him with Edmund G. Ross. Ross was a Radical. No matter how harsh the exploitation of the defeated South was, it was never enough for Ross. He was the most belligerent, extremist, hardline, unreasonable politician of the belligerent, extremist hardline, unreasonable politicians of the Radical Republicans. No matter what was done he was not satisfied that it was tough enough on the South. President Johnston, nothing to LBJ was a Lincolnite. He was the only Southern Senator who had stood with the Union/Northern side. He had been a Democratic Senator from Tennessee. He was on Lincoln’s ticket in the 1864 Presidential election, and became President after Lincoln was murdered. In 1867, the Radical Republican leaders decided that they would impeach the President, as he had constantly used his veto to stop their plans. To do that they needed a simple majority in the House of Representatives, after which the President was tried before the Senate, and had to be found guilty by a two-thirds majority of the full Senate, not just those there on the day. They got their House majority, no problem. At that time there were fifty four Senators, two from each State. There were forty two Republicans and twelve Democrats. It was assumed that the Democrats would back the President in the Senate vote and this happened. Quite soon into the proceedings in the House, six long-serving Republican Senators announced that as the reckoned that the whole thing was a joke, they were going to vote to acquit the President. This meant that the Radical Republicans could not afford to lose any more votes. By all the rules Ross should have been Impeachment Vote No. 1. However his remark ‘Now that we have him in the dock, we must give him a fair trial’ to Senator Sprague of New Jersey was merely the start of his problems. The Radical leaders threatened him with loss of his Senate seat, and the end of his political career, bankruptcy and jail, on false charges. All this happened. A few days after his vote to acquit the President, the Kansas State Assembly recalled him. He ended up a jailed, bankrupt fraudster, soon afterwards. When he was released from jail, he was sleeping on the streets. But in 1872 the US Supreme Court stated that he had been correct. Conclusion: History ALWAYS vindicates those who do the right thing.

5. I have no doubt but you have heard of Cronos, a mythical King in Ancient Greece. He overthrew and killed his father. After learning that he, Cronus, was destined to be overcome by his own sons, just as he had overthrown his father, he devoured all of his children as soon as they were born, to pre-empt the prophecy. When the sixth child, Zeus, was born, Zeus was hidden and later fulfilled the prophecy. Conclusion; No matter how ALL-POWERFUL a Tyranny may appear to be it will EVENTUALLY be overthrown.

6. I have NO DOUBT but you heard of Icarus, the bird-man of Greek legend. His father, Daedalus made two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son Icarus so they could escape from Crete where they were held prisoner. Daedalus tried his wings first, but before taking off from the island, warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his (Daddy’s) path of flight. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky curiously, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms, and so Icarus fell into the sea and drowned. Conclusion: ALL Ponzi Schemes crash in the end, the bigger the Ponzi Scheme, the bigger the Crash Mess.

7. I have NO DOUBT but you heard of Procrustes, a rogue smith and bandit of Greek myth. Procrustes physically attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed. Conclusion: Facts CANNOT be changed to suit a pre-existing theory.

8. Before he invaded Russia, Napoleon said “Apres trois mois, la Russie me demandera la paix/After three months, Russia will ask me for peace” to one of his generals. In June 1941, as Germany prepared to invade Russia, German officers on the ground (as opposed to the Nazi leadership) told the troops that the serious fighting would last 6 weeks, that the Germans would be at the Urals in 14 weeks and that they would all be back home in Germany for Christmas. As a matter of FACT the Germans destroyed the ENTIRE Soviet Air Force in a week.

9. In 1941, as Hitler’s armies were racing towards Moscow, Stalin summoned Ivan Stamenev, the Bulgarian Ambassador to Moscow to the Kremlin, and asked him to mediate with the Germans, as Bulgaria was neutral. Stamenev refused saying ‘Even if you have to retreat to the Urals, you will beat them in the end’,in reply to Stalin a prediction, that Time, proved correct. Men and families are now back at the Urals. However, do NOT worry as this toxic tsumanais called ‘Family Law’ & ‘Feminism’ in Western countries WILL come to an end. If you had said ‘This is the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union’ on December 24, 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, you would have been the butt of EVERY joke as people rolled around the streets laughing at you. We all now KNOW that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan WAS the beginning of the end of the Soviet Empire. Slowly, men and families are moving westward. We are NOT QUITE YET in the position of the Soviet trooper Sgt. Alyosha Kovalyov who on May 02, 1945, hoisted the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in the famous photograph from our History books, but we are getting there.

10. The day WILL come when Families hoist the Flag of Freedom over the TOXIC MT EVERSTS called ‘Family’ Law’ & ‘Feminism’ in Western countries. Within twenty years in Western countries, we will see some of the cheerleaders for the Feminist/Liberal/Child Abuse Agenda doing the General Deboi & Julius Streicher Act.

Julius Streicher

Julius Streicher 1885 – 1946 was a Nazi newspaper owner in post WW1 Germany. His racist newspaper even by Nazi standards spewed forth the most vile virulent hatred of Jews. He incited Germans to the persecution and to the extermination Jews. For “the persecution and the extermination Jews” you may read “the persecution and the extermination of the family & fathers” in Western countries including modern Ireland. Hitler was NOT tough enough on the Jews for him. After WW2 he claimed to know NOTHING of any anti-Semitic campaigns NEVER MIND any Death Camps. He was tried at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and executed by hanging.

General Deboi

After Stalingrad, the Russians captured 22 four-star German generals. One of these generals, General Deboi was appointed group spokesman as he could speak French, Europe’s international language of that time. Deboi was born in 1893 in Vienna and in 1912 he joioned the GERMAN Army. During the Russian-organized press conference Deboi stressed ‘Je suis autrichien, je ne suis pas allemand’ constantly, to anybody who would listen.

Why Young People Leave the Church

Heartiste has posted a chart of where couples meet their spouses and romantic partners:

Follow the yellow line, it represents the church. In 1940, the church was the third likeliest method of meeting your spouse, after family and friends. Now it is the lowest, practically non-existent, while family is the second lowest.

Some of this could possibly be chalked up to declining church attendence rates, especially among the young, but, church attendence has remained near 40% since 1940.

Church leaders are always asking why young people leave the church. The first graph is all that needs to be said.

Young people are looking to find love. This is natural, this is healthy. If they can not find love in the church, they will find it elsewhere.

The church should be supporting young people in finding love, so healthy, productive marriages will result. Instead, the church has entirely abandoned its responsbility to promote family formation, and has left the process to peers, clubs, and online dating.

Why is the church letting this happen? Why is the church forcing their young people to rely on friends, the club, and online dating to find a family? Are godly marriages going to result from restaurants and bars? Are peers the best means of finding a marriage partner?

If young Christians are forced to look elsewhere to find love and marriage, they will be enticed by the secular world. If a man can’t get a wife at church, that cute non-Christian smiling at him at work may have a stronger pull than his developing faith. If a young woman isn’t being courted at church, resisting the temptation of the attention of dozens of men at the club will be difficult.

If the church doesn’t capture its young people through marriage and love, the secular world will through sex and pleasure, and the church will continue to collapse.

Is the church really going to allow the depersonalized meat market that is online dating to be the most effective way to find a Christian spouse?

Of course, church’s aren’t entirely to blame: where are the parents? Look at that blue line? Why has this generation completely abandoned their children to fend for themselves?

If you want to see the church renewed, if you don’t want your young people to continue abandoning the church, fix this. Bring your young people together and get them married. Don’t abandon them to their own devices and allow the secular world to devour them.

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Here’s some ideas for churches of where to start fix this:

1) Christian parents need to start talking with other Christian parents and start meeting with each other as families. Bring your children together in casual situations so they can get to know each other.

2) Christian families and churches should work on positive courtship. Courtship should be about bringing compatible Christian young men and young women together. It should not be a negative sorting mechanism to prevent young men from courting young women.

3) Churches need to create a culture where going for casual first dates are not a big deal. Being serious about finding a spouse does not mean that every interaction must be deathly serious. Church culture should accept that early interactions can be both and purposeful; casual dates should not be treated as major decision points equal to buying a wedding ring, because how many men are going to court enough girls to find the right one when young when a date is treated as the equivalent of an engagement.

4) Similarly, casual interactions should not be held against men or women. Men who ask a lot of women in their church out for casual dates for the purposes of getting to know each other, should not be worried about being shamed as players, likewise, women who accept many such casual dates should not be shamed as sluts. (For both 3 & 4, this, obviously, does not mean tge acceptance of casual sex).

5) Don’t discourage young dating, encourage it. There needs to be an elimination of ‘sex is bad’ talks in youth groups, more ‘sex is good, get married as soon as possible so you can have it’. Instead of discouraging dating, start getting your teenagers to take it seriously and setting them up together. If the church doesn’t start getting young people together in marriage, the secular world will bring them together in fornication. In the war between young hormones and chastity, Paul was exceedingly clear on what is to be done. Modern teachings on abstinence need to be destroyed as the near-satanism they are and replaced with the wholesome promotion of marriage. Two teenagers marrying in the church and starting a family should be celebrated as a triumph of the church, then young couples should be supported by the church as they set up their family lives.

6) Large churches should be running regular, casual events for their young adults (including teenagers) so they can get to know each other and pair off. Small churches should be networking together with other churches to create regular casual events so young adults can meet each other and pair off.

Nobody Cares About You

I’ve written on this before, but here’s a little reminder, what you as a man think, feel, and desire don’t matter. Society doesn’t give a shit about you and expects you to take its shit happily.

A recent letter to an advice columnist (h/t: RPR) is from a slut who got alpha widowed hard. After getting alpha widowed she swore off sex outside of marriage. She meets a nice beta, who she lies to about her past through omission. On their wedding night, I’ll repeat: their wedding night, she calls out the name of the alpha who widowed her. Understandably, and thankfully for himself, Rick acted like a man and dropped her hard, setting up a divorce lawyer, calling her parents, abandoning her at the hotel to go to Europe alone, and cutting off contact (if you’re Rick and happen to stumble across this, good for you BTW, allow me to be the one voice of encouragement). So, the the lying slut wrote a woe-is-me letter about how to salvage her relationship as her lies caught up to her.

The story itself is not overly important. The ending was as happy an ending as could have occurred given the situation the lying slut created. The man can annul before the marriage is consummated and he probably won’t be divorced raped given that the marriage didn’t even last the night.

The practical take away there is to make sure you understand your wife-to-be’s sexual history. Do not assume she’s a virgin because she tells you she’s waiting until marriage, get her to explicitly say she is one. If she’s not a virgin, get her number, and weigh the odds. She may lie, but at least then she’s the one deceiving you rather than you deceiving yourself.

The other practical take away is to make sure that one of her previous relations was not “intense” or anything else similar. That’s in indicator of an alpha widow. You do not want to marry a woman who’s relationship with another guy was more intense than your own.

Beyond that fairly obvious advice, the part that matters is the response from Carolyn Hax, syndicated advice columnist published in 200+ papers. So know that she’s not some lone voice, she’s the mainstream of how modern relationship’s are supposed to work. Here’s what she wrote:

Your honeymoon and marriage are in tatters because Tom reacted with absolutely stunning hostility to a quirk of the human brain.

Lying to your husband(-to-be) and calling out another man’s name on the wedding night are “a quirk” and reacting poorly to it is stunning. But she gets worse from here.

But. For this to obliterate all of his supposed love and trust, plus any inner mandate to be kind? His commitment to you — as a human being, vs. as a bride or presumed virgin — can’t have been deep.

What love and trust? She lied to him for their whole relationship and used him. Where was her kindness as she was deceiving him and abusing his trust? Where was her kindness as she called another man’s name on their wedding night(!)?

She could hardly have shivved his soul and humiliated him worse had she spent months planning it. But when you think about it, she did spend months planning it, she just hoped he’d never find out.

Here’s the kicker:

He didn’t just get sad or angry, or yell, or cancel the honeymoon — he went for your emotional jugular and hasn’t let go. He called your parents to shame you. Making mistakes, that’s life. Living in fear of his reaction to your next mistake, that’s Hell.

This glimpse of his true character is a gift. Accept it and annul the marriage.

Out of all this the man is evil. The man is deceived, used, and betrayed on his wedding night by the woman who (deceitfully) professed to love him and reacts by annulling the non-consummated marriage and Hax calls him the evil one.

She doesn’t call out out the slut on her absolutely despicable behaviour other than to mention it was a mistake, not evil, just a mistake, which she immediately apologized for, but she’s fast to condemn the man as evil for reacting naturally and logically to this betrayal.

The commenters agree, but go even farther (at least until the red piller’s brigaded the comments). Here’s a collection of how much normal people hate men and sympathize with lying whores:

you got rid of someone who was going to do this to you somewhere down the line anyway. So much better to know he was a mean, abuser now than two years form now when you are more committed with maybe a mortgage and maybe kids.

What an arrogant *** this (hopefully soon to be ex husband) is. I guess he has never made a mistake in his life.

Run! Run as fast as you can AWAY from this probable abuser!

Yeah Tom’s a whiny little baby that doesn’t deserve a single look back from the LW. The immaturity of his reaction is only reinforced by his calling mommy and daddy to set up a divorce attorney for him. Set up your own stupid attorney! What a tool.

Your life, and the lives of any children you may have had with this person, would have been sheer Hell. Down the road, he would have found many other things about which to throw tantrums. You are very lucky to bid rid of him. If he changes his mind and wants to renew things, run as fast as you can.

yer better off without such an immature reactionary… imagine what kind of hell you’re going to have to put up with if something big happens… move on with your life… without mr. immature…

Get the marriage annulled, report hubby to the police for stealing your passport, next time be honest with your beau about how you don’t want a premarital sexual relationship now but have had one in the past, and learn to use the term “darling” when you’re in the throws of passion.

The commenters called him a (potential) abuser, an arrogant ass, immature,  and even said she should call the cops on him for “stealing” (ie. taking his own luggage, which happened to have) her passport. Barely any of the (pre-RP brigade) comments had even the tiniest amount of sympathy for the man or the slightest hint of criticism for the duplicitous slut.

This may be outrage porn, but I’m going to continue ramming modernity and progressivism down your throat until you vomit it out, because this is important for you as a man to understand.

In our society you don’t matter, your preferences don’t matter, your emotions don’t matter, your well-being doesn’t matter. Healthy marriage and healthy family doesn’t matter. Everybody believes you should be forced to eat shit so that the present dildocracy can roll on and if you object or protest to the shit-eating, you will be painted as the devil incarnate.

Don’t eat their shit. Don’t believe that are obligated to eat their shit. Don’t believe that it is moral to eat their shit.

If you can, find a good girl to marry and raise a prosperous, productive family with. If you can’t find a good girl, don’t marry a slut, or it might be you being pilloried for objecting to your wife calling out someone else’s name on your wedding night.

Women are Achieving

The Guardian has an article on how boys are a mess (h/t: TRP), there’s nothing all that new there other than its the Guardian acknowledging the problem and its somewhat RP’d. But it has this little bit that comes up with all these articles:

“Men are opting out and women are opting in. Women are working harder at jobs, they’re working harder in school, and they are achieving – last year women had more of every single category of degree, even engineering. This is data from around the world. Now in many colleges there’s a big gap as boys are dropping out of school and college.”

Zimbardo estimates that there are, in Britain and the US, 5-10% more women than men at many colleges and universities. “So they’re going to have to have affirmative action for guys because obviously one reason you go to college is to find a guy.”

Everytime the crisis of boys/men comes to the fore, there’s always the section on how women are achieving. The triumphalism varies, this one tones it down quite a bit compared to, for example, this but there’s always this note of woman are doing better.

Except, are they?

Women are going to school more, getting more education, and outnumber men in the workforce. So, they are achieving more, at least for the mediocre positions, men still dominate the elite positions.

But are they really better off? What exactly are they achieving?

To most men, work is/has been something they had to do so to obtain a wife, then provide for the resulting family. Most men probably took pride in a job well done or in creating, but the purpose of going in to work was to earn to provide for his family. He could have gotten the pride of creation elsewhere, not to mention in today’s white-collar, paperwork world, satisfaction from creating something tangible is rapidly disappearing. Likewise, since the growth of mass post-secondary education, getting a degree for men has primarily been about avoiding a job doing physical labour, getting a better job to hopefully attract a prettier wife, and provide a more materially rich life for his family. The main purpose of post-secondary education was to get a family and provide for it, while making provision easier.

Men did this work, not for its intrinsic own sake, but for the extrinsic good of the family.

To repeat, as an aggregate woman are achieving more, but what are they achieving?

Women are now doing the work men did to support their families, without having families to support, barring (the usually poor) single mothers, who are not the kinds of women-in-the-workplace these articles are happily pointing to as signs of success. In fact, statistically speaking, these women are less likely to have families and when they do these families are smaller.

So, what are they achieving?

The only thing they seem to be achieving is more consumption and more money to be spent on the consumptive treadmill. Is that something we should be proud of? Is that kind of achievement really something we as a society should be pursuing and pushing our boys and girls to pursue?

The other question then becomes, are men really being left behind?

If a young man has no need to support a family, because he doesn’t have a wife, he might not get a wife, and when he does his wife will work and IF they have children, there will only be one, maybe two, why does he need to work?

Is he really falling behind if his part-time McD’s gig pays for his quarter of the bachelor pad’s rent, beer, and the new XBox?

Is a man really worse off spending his hours playing video games and chilling with his bros rather than spending them working hard to get a bigger (but still empty) house and a (nominally) better car?

Why is empty, high-work, high-stress consumerism somehow assumed to be better than empty, low-work, low-stress consumerism?

Either way it’s empty, but the latter is a lot easier and more enjoyable.

Maybe this ‘high achievement‘ is not some victory for women, maybe it’s simply that men know the score: Work sucks, but is (was) necessary to get a wife, regular sex, and a family. Now that men can get sex without a wife and aren’t getting a wife or family anyway, why work?

On the other hand, women seem to have been tricked into thinking that grinding away at a white-collar job is its own reward. They’re doing the shit men were forced to do and mostly disliked, while not even having the reward of a wife having supper ready for them when they get home.

Is it just the boys that are mess? Are the women really achieving?

Beauty, Function, and Reproduction

Here’s my final piece to cap off my Aesthetics Week contributions.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

(Genesis 1:26-28 ESV)

Women are beautiful, they are the most beautiful thing in the world. Why? Because Woman’s intrinsic biological purpose is the highest aim of mankind: to reproduce. Woman brings forth and nurtures life; her intrinsic purpose is to create the Imago Dei anew, again and again.

The function of Woman is to create new life, an intrinsically transcendent task. Her form signals her reproductive capabilities. Her beauty is a product of where her form and function points to this purpose.

Man is not beautiful, he can not be beautiful except through warped physical feminization, for his intrinsic biological purpose is not transcendent. Man’s intrinsic biological aim is to subdue the earth, an intrinsically material task.

Man may be attractive, handsome even, when his form signals high capabilities for subduing the earth or quality genetic material for helping Woman make life, but beauty is not his to have.

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This is why attractiveness in women is prized by men. An attractive woman is signalling fertility, that she will be successful in this most transcendent of purposes.

This is where here becomes a difference between the beautiful and the hot. The beautiful woman signals that not only is she fertile, but she has the inner qualities which would make a good wife and mother to raise the resulting children. She signals that she would have high capabilities to the transcendent task of making a home. The hot woman signals fertility, but she does not signal motherly qualities. Hence, the the difference between hos and housewives. Men use hos, but make homes with housewives.

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This is also why to most men think their particular wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, even though she is likely not the most attractive, she is probably only average. He may even recognize, on an objective level, that she is not the most attractive. Yet, despite this, she is beautiful, the most beautiful, because she is particularly transcendent to him.

As defunct blogger Solomon II wrote (Proverb 28) of the musings of an older man:

Listen to me. A good woman ages beautifully. When I look at my wife, I see the most gorgeous woman in the universe. Her wrinkled hands got that way by keeping up with my two boys and working hard for them while I was on the road. The lines under her eyes are from years of shedding tears for me when I was at war, and those wrinkles on her brow are from decades of worry for me and my two sons. It was her legs they held on to when they were learning to walk, her lap was where they learned to read, and her breasts were their first nourishment. The first kiss those boys ever received was from her lips, and God willing, my last kiss will be from her lips.

You two don’t know what you’re missing – or maybe you do. But all I know is that she’s as beautiful, desirable, and lovely today as the day I met her, and I wouldn’t trade one second with her for a lifetime of rowdiness with one of those harlots you guys have waiting for you back home.

You two don’t know what beauty is. In a way, I feel sorry for both of you.

A man’s wife’s form might not particularly signal transcendent functionality to most men, but to him she is the one that brought forth his children, that made life not just in the image of God, but in his own image as well. She is the one that nurtured and raised his own particular instantiations of God’s image. No mere objective attraction, objective beauty, can possibly match that beauty such as that.