Gaashk
3hr ago
Google suggests that <10% of American men served in Vietnam, of whom about 25% were drafted, whereas even now about 80% of women are having children. Apparently 10% - 15% of couples have fertility issues, though some of that might be age related. The easiest win is probably to re-normalize families with 3 - 4 kids.
Gaashk
3hr ago
You'll have better luck drafting women for war, especially since it's rare even for men.
The more society pushes women to act like men, the more like men they will act. Much of modern society heavily encourages women to act more like men in a variety of ways. Their education should be masculine, STEM oriented, and in co-ed settings. They should wear jeans and t-shirts most of the time. They should sleep around a fair bit in their 20s, and get the same jobs as their male peers. If they do choose to give birth, they should work those same jobs that are also worked by men right up until they're having contractions, and should come back when their babies are six weeks old. This is even true of women heavy professions like teaching! They're leaving their two month old infants with strangers all day to go to work. This is not appealing! But women who take a year or two off to raise their infants are also isolated, because we have no villages in much of the West. Societies that show such distain for motherhood don't deserve babies.
I suppose we could trial a military base for new mothers, where pregnant women are assigned a cohort to bond with, do exercise and nutrition classes together, and they get a housing discount or can move to a government compound with their husbands. They and their husband and baby can move around to various places where the US has interests every few years until their babies are all old enough for school. I might have signed up for that deal.
I have cats. One is a cuddle, the other a mouser; a good balance.
I want to get backyard chickens again, but do not feel up to building them an enclosure. When I had them before, they kept getting killed by dogs, and there are also mountain lions, so it might not work out. Too bad, since it solve the sad layers problem. They were very happy layers while alive. Or I could just commit to getting new not very secure hens every year? They start laying fairly quickly. I could eat them myself and also solve the sad meat chickens problem locally, but butchering is a lot of work.
Dogs are fine, but not worth the effort of boarding them when we're away. The cats just stay home for up to two weeks together, and seem OK with it
Gaashk
2d ago
Is that how things are where you live? I haven't noticed any of those things, for the most part.
- Child friendly restaurants - check (conversely, parents did not go to upscale romantic restaurants with their young children in the past, either)
- Can I take my kids to a cheap townie baseball game? Yes. There's still a pizza and baseball ticket reading program for kids too.
- Do most of the parks around here have playgrounds? Sure. Or they can climb on boulders, which is also fine. Or they can wade in a stream or river, likewise perfectly fine.
- Do people smile at the kids in public, and ignore them when they're throwing a fit? Mostly, yes.
- Can my kids legally play in my yard without me? Yes, though for the toddler, it should probably be in the fenced part of the yard, and not in the canyon or the driveway. Or at least, it would be actually negligent to let a toddler play there.
- Is there enough kid-centric entertainment? Yes! Good grief! Yes, of course there is enough entertainment for them, that's why everyone's been complaining about "iPad kids" these past several years.
Not that there aren't ways the culture is less child friendly than in some other times and places. The lack of friends within walking distance is a genuine concern.
Gaashk
2d ago
Then, when they have daughters, they can tell them about the experience, and this is how civilizations goes through various phases.
Gaashk
2d ago
Ah, perhaps. I didn't get the impression that the women in the article even wanted that kind of retro marriage, where they should be housewives and cook and clean all the time. They sounded like they just wanted normal trad marriages, where they can court for about a year rather than shacking up for years, not have sex until well into the process, expect not to divorce for petty reasons, and their husbands will go to church with them, but are otherwise living fairly normal American lives. Most of the women I know are like that. There may be a mismatch between what the women and the men are hoping for in that respect, though. When I do hear Orthodox people with very strong opinions about homeschooling and (not getting) childcare and such things, it's more from the men (who work normal jobs) than from the women (who are actually doing it).
Gaashk
2d ago
Interesting, I would have expected people just to go to the AI directly, rather than through a stock image site. I used to do marketing assistant work, and the AIs can even now do 80% of that job, but the finding and getting licensing bundles on stock images part of it was significantly more annoying than writing prompts.
Gaashk
3d ago
Sure, I hear they have better maternity leave than the US. I've also heard that Japan has been at least beginning to ask their people to form families.
Gaashk
3d ago
I do think the fertility crisis is still percolating towards the mainstream, and there are potential grandparents who still interpret potential overpopulation in Africa as the same thing as potential overpopulation for them. Also, there are still a bunch of millennials who think they have to be basically perfect, watch their kids constantly, play constantly, never lose their tempers, and so on in order to parent well. Propaganda against these viewpoints have barely been tried so far. It's mostly just a bunch of online rightists talking about it. The culture at large hasn't even stuck its toe in he discourse with fake babies and home ec at high schools, they're currently still below even the 90s in terms of acknowledging teenage girls might eventually become mothers.
Gaashk
4d ago
But then again, people who are succeeding don't have reason to spend time thinking inventing novel sociopolitical philosophies (or spend time implementing, say, a series of technologies that could push society in that direction), especially ones that will only help the poor at the expense of the rich, and doubly so if it would require more effort.
This reminds me of how Tolstoy, at his best, was writing absurdly complex, nuanced novels with portraits of dozens of interesting, flawed, human characters. And then he got everything he wanted, began to doubt himself, and started writing odd little folk tales and morality plays instead.
The original essay might have been improved by including some Tolstoy romantic pairings as archetypes, the way WASP writers always include archetypal Jane Austen pairings.
Gaashk
4d ago
Orthodox women are usually relatively good at cooking, compared the the average Westerner. If they're serious, they're eating a fasting diet almost a third of the time, so they're always making lentil stew and plant based regional food and whatnot. There are a lot of potlucks, including a lot of fasting potlucks, and also a surprising amount of mandatory homemade bread, for remembering, for celebrating, for certain feast days, for Communion loaves, and so on.
Orthodox families have basically average household expectations. Lower than WASP households on average, and also lower than Orthodox Jewish ones where they have to do na extremely thorough cleaning at least once a year, and keep their foods separate.
They also have basically average expectations of the woman working. The woman should probably work at some point, but preferably not while her babies are still babies. This is true of the wives of priests as well, it's kind of weird for a presbytera without young children about to simply keep house. There's a bit of drama about homeschooling being preferred, but not all the families are actually suited to it in practice, and public schooling is perhaps looked down on a bit. Most of the women work, as women have always worked, and people know that it's a fantasy that they should only work on aesthetic homesteading tasks in an era when that isn't economically valuable, and there are women and mothers who are scientists, teachers, nurses, cashiers, counselors, bankers, and so on. Most Orthodox are a bit less gender essentialist than traditional Protestants.
One of the oddities of Orthodoxy, specifically, is that while they are very serious about their liturgical tradition, they're kind of ambivalent about the kind of American traditionalism that resulted in the trad wife meme.
Gaashk
4d ago
It's a solution to some modern problems. People have been talking about aesthetics a lot lately, and if someone's problem is that they live in a grey box, and work on a smaller grey box inside of a larger grey box, where everything is lit with fluorescent tubes, then Orthodoxy can, indeed, solve their Beauty problem. It can solve the lack of a village problem, if they commit. It might solve their theological or hierarchical problems, depending on what they are.
But, yes, it won't solve their relational problems, especially if, as in the article, they're a woman holding out for a Good, strong, provider, leader sort of man around their own age. Or a man in want of a younger woman who's easy to please, cheerful, pretty, a good homemaker, but can also bring in an income before and after having young children. Those expectations are not solvable. A woman looking for a nerd to visit historical sites with might do fine, and then they might develop feelings for each other, if they're both the kind of person where reading Byzantine poetry is romantic, but the women in the article don't seem to be. It's utterly predictable that male Orthodox converts would always be going on about: Rome! Second Rome! Even Third Rome! Restore Constantinople! Of course they are, even normal men are apparently always thinking about Rome, and Orthodox men have even more Romes!
On the other hand, I've met a couple of these men. My husband, who's a big fan of Rome and aqueducts and whatnot, has been a bit weirded out by some Orthodox men who meet us and immediately start talking about some council or other, and their extremely strong opinions about the outcome thereof, for the entirety of lunch. I suppose they're autistic? But, still, autistic men who want to find friends and eventually wives do need to tune in a little bit to how deep into the old books they should get upon first meeting someone.
Gaashk
4d ago
Not sure about movie series, but I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel during formative years, and still enjoy them quite a lot.
The Twilight book was very absorbing in a slightly uncomfortable way, but I don't think I enjoyed the movies very much. Maybe I didn't even watch the last one. The first person perspective really sells the books, and all the drama around the Edward POV book getting leaked, and its wonderful over the top broodiness was great.
Gaashk
4d ago
That one showed up on my Substack feed the other day, and I read it there. I thought it was fine, but there's nothing much to say to it. It's unfortunate, but unsurprising. I wasn't trying very hard to get married when I was attending Orthodox Church every day, and eventually married when I was farther away from that culture, and a man who wasn't Orthodox, but respected my beliefs and habits, asked me out on interesting, romantic, fun dates.
Traditional Christianity recognizes there are a lot of potential matches that are worse than remaining single, and respects monasticism, and even spinsterhood. Many saints actually preferred and recommended it. It's very trad to tell stories about a woman so upset at the prospect of marriage to a man she doesn't respect, she chooses execution instead, or God closes a mountain pass on her pursuers.
Gaashk
4d ago
The Orthodox Church, while extremely into Holy Tradition, and even cultural traditions, is basically neutral on that kind of tradism, perhaps mildly negative.
Gaashk
4d ago
The women she's talking about, who go to church multiple times a week, would've likely been happy enough joining a monastery in the Traditional Society, rather than marrying a man they didn't respect. Maybe they still will, but that works better when the women make their decision at 25 vs 45, since worker to diselderly ratios are important in small communes.
Gaashk
4d ago
I agree with this take, and predict that AI will disrupt marketing and stock imagery a lot, but fine art relatively little.
Gaashk
6d ago
Technical high schools and community colleges are relatively popular, but they're for the average student, or above average working class, not the trouble makers.
Gaashk
6d ago
There's a sense in which we don't educate them, certainly. In my preferred world, the ones who aren't expected to live independently would have a pleasant sensory environment prioritized over being in a school setting, freaking out at "transitions" every hour or so. We could build some gardens with greenhouses for what we currently spend on specialists, and have them hang out enjoying the pleasant sensory experience.
My main impression of why we don't is that if they're in a normal school, with normal administrators stopping in and checking on them now and then, and normal specials teachers trying to engage with them, it will be obvious if their minders become weird and abusive towards them. Whereas if they're in a completely different environment, everyone might just spiral into even more misery and degradation, even if there are gardens.
Gaashk
6d ago
Someone who can follow Khan Academy is probably at least 10th percentile in public education, and would be fine in a regular remedial class. They might have an IEP, but it'll just say things like they should sit near the teacher and have extra time on tests. Perhaps an extra study hall and interventionist time.
On the other hand, plenty of women actually like babies, especially their own. More than men who like war, probably.
More options
Context Copy link