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Notes -
Thesis (not a terribly original one, but here it goes) as food for thought / discussion fodder:
The online proliferation of the man vs bear in the woods meme, plus similar earlier social media phenomena with a feminist message are, in reality, generalized and simplified expressions of women's overall frustration and latent anger directed at the loss of manhood initiation rituals that characterizes modern post-patriarchal atomized societies; namely, the current social reality is that adolescent boys and young single men are no longer vetted by fathers, elders, brothers, uncles and other pre-vetted eligible men before they are, in effect, released into their wider social circle from the family environment, which makes it rather difficult and risky for single women to separate eligible men from ineligible men.
No, it's because almost every woman who of even moderate attractiveness has dealt with weirdness from a decent amount of men, from a pretty young age, and it turns out, they don't like it very much.
This isn't a political, ideological, or social thing, as seen by the almost regular stories of pastors and priests doing things people claim people preforming at DQSH do, and by the same token, the stories of creepy men in various liberal-coded spheres.
Huh? So you're saying that unattractive women aren't at risk of rape??
Rape is an extreme. I'm not about to revive the debate of whether it's about lust or about power, but it's clearly an opportunistic act. You don't pick whoever's most attractive, you pick whoever's most vulnerable/available.
The poster above is talking about weirdness, which is a more tame and regular thing that doesn't need to factor vulnerability in as much (it is less heavily prosecuted and the men have fewer reasons to believe they're committing an immoral act in the first place). Safe to assume that weirdness would be more correlated to attractiveness than rape.
Very obviously the bear vs man meme is about the threat of rape, torture and murder, not about weirdness being icky. The main characteristic of a bear isn't that it's weird, it's that it's a mortal threat. Let's not fool ourselves. The reason the feminist commenter above brought up "weirdness" instead of "attempted rape/murder" is due to his intent of portraying the average woman as living in constant fear of something mundane and widespread and yet horrific (supposedly).
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To the extent we pay attention to man vs bear (which, it seems, will be with us for the foreseeable future), the relevant thing isn't the statistics of attacks or even that women fear men. It's that pretty much everyone seems to be taking the approach that at least one of the man or bear is a major threat.
The reality is that neither is particularly dangerous. So many takes seem to be something like "one will eat me alive, and the other will abduct and torture me for months before killing me," with slightly varying structure depending on the point the speaker is making. But getting in a car wreck on the way to the park or dying of exposure are both more likely causes of death than encountering either a random bear or a random man. And neither cars nor exposure are likely to kill you either. Use appropriate caution wherever you are, and you'll almost certainly be fine.
The hysterical neuroticism involved in the entire exercise on both sides is just a symptom of expressing feelings becoming the dominant political mode thanks to social media. Which can barely be called politics; it's more fashion and gossip than anything else.
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That’s like saying lumberjack thirst traps exist because of latent male disenfranchisement with white-collar work.
Sure, it’s always nice when a mass of strangers turn out to secretly agree with you. Sometimes there’s an easier explanation.
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Social analysis of the bear-or-man meme is a waste of neurons. The initial poll showed very-online urban women did not know bears were at all dangerous. After that, all discourse has been a toxoplasma of gender war signaling — feminists get to signal how super-duper-extra they condemn men with a cherry on top, while anti-feminists get to grandstand about how stupid and man-hating women are.
There's nothing else to it.
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From the context of 'manhood initiation rituals', I would assume that you primarily mean vetting by the family of the male, not the female? I think that in many patriarchal cultures, not being especially rapey was not part of the vetting process on the side of the man. I mean, if you are a medieval woman encountering an adolescent male Scandinavian in the woods, and notice that he bears the signs of a fully initiated viking warrior, that should probably be cause for more concern, not less.
The causal chain might go like this:
The patriarchal vetting process / manhood initiation clearly varied from society from society, Apache, Jane-Austin-England, ancient Rome, fucking Sparta and Aztec all did their own thing. If there was a common denominator, it was perhaps to certify that the male was able to fulfill their expected role in society and support one or more wives and their children. (Of course, such vetting processes are also heavier on the upper end of societies. I am not sure how it was on the lower end: "This helot man has managed to survive for two decades without starving or being slaughtered or maimed by the Spartans, that makes him husband material?")
I am also skeptical of claims that the female's male relatives filtered especially for a kind man. In societies where marital violence and rape were considered normal, why would they? They men were probably more concerned with political implications or making sure that the husband was not some wimp who would get himself killed in the first battle, leaving the woman a penniless widow.
If I were a woman, I would take tinder et al any day over a random pre-1900 mating system.
Obviously such things are pretty light in available sources, but both Ancient Rome(plays in this case) and the late 19th century had mass-consumption media that describes courting for the hoi polloi in those societies, and Christian moralists writing in the early modern period provide another window. They describe a system in which husbands were often much older than wives, the woman’s parents were very involved(it seems pretty clear that Laura’s father gives his approval for Almanzo to begin showing interest in her in Little House on the Prairie), and that economic factors and reputation were considered the most important things in a potential suitor. One has to imagine, given that fathers tend to love their daughters, that screening out potential abusers would have been taken seriously in societies where husbands had the right of corporal punishment over their wives, but it’s not the sort of thing you see in mass media.
Vetting happened for the most part because your first interaction with the person was not a date.
Pre-app, the dating pool was restricted to two groups: people you knew personally and who were in your personal social circle, and friends of friends who were introduced by those friends to you. Yes in 1910 the parents were involved deeply, but really, even if they aren’t, it’s hard to bypass the vetting process of having to become known to the person you want to date in person before actually asking her out. My parents met in college on a date arranged by their friends. My grandfather sat behind my grandma in elementary school. The vetting was that you could observe them in lots of social contexts before deciding to date them. You’d go to the same school and likely the same church. You’d see him out and about on the streets. If he yelled at store clerks, you or someone in your circle would know about it.
The difference between that situation and an app, to me explain the exact reason why modern dating sucks for both parties. You’re not dating someone you know, and the only information available is either public records or information on his very curated social media feeds. Other than that, you’re going by looks. It’s super easy for a jerk to thrive in an environment where he cannot be held to account for his previous actions.
Sure, but the use of IRL social networks didn’t change with the sexual revolutions; it changed with the destruction of IRL social networks.
I'd say the two are necessarily interconnected. Existing social networks need to weaken and dissolve to a degree for the Sexual Revolution to happen, because social controls need to loosen for it to happen.
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In short: no. In a patriarchy, the family of the male fulfills the role of raising him up to be a prospective husband, because that’s in their interest. They put incentives in place to ensure he doesn’t turn into a lout, a gambler, a hobo etc. The family of the female basically does the mirror image of this, plus they restrict the girl’s social life in the sense that she only moves around in the wider social circle of the family where everyone is assumed to be vetted. To put it in cynical terms: she’s basically provided a pool of, say, 5-10 potential husbands, and she’s free to choose from them, under the supervision of her family and the families of those 5-10 guys. (Maybe it’s just 3-5 guys or whatever, but that’s not important.) That is the extent of the mating choice she has. It is in this sense that her family is vetting her future husband. This is feasible because the social circles of the future spouses either overlap or have direct connections. There are strong social bonds, a sense of community, social capital etc. Of course, people aren’t only getting vetted on an individual basis, their families are also getting vetted.
Again, I’m no sociologist, but I assume this is how this all went down normally. These societies no longer exist, so it’s all bygone history anyway.
You’re absolutely correct. In the current sense of the word, it wasn’t part of it because it wasn’t seen as relevant. In a different sense of the word, though, not being rapey towards virtuous women in your social circle was 100% part of it. Of course, feminists will happily explain to you that the patriarchy is a horrible shitshow with a wholly backward concept of rape. Which is basically true, in the sense that yes, it’s a system which, in certain circumstances, gives you covert license to rape a woman whom you encounter in the woods. If, for example, she’s a loud alcoholic whore who had abortions, belonging to a family that your family has a feud with. Or if you’re a soldier of a victorious army on enemy soil etc. And again, these societies had a vastly different concept of the word ‘rape’, but I don’t think it’s necessary to go into detail here.
Yes and yes.
And you’re absolutely right to be skeptical. A patriarchy has no concept of ‘marital rape’, for example.
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And that is what they are doing, but as with many of the things modernity has produced, it feels good but is actually bad for you and society.
Tinder basically only selects for looks and short term fun, but unlike your parents, it's not going to pick someone who will want to make you an exclusive partner. So female you is going to suffer from the common malady of the situationship era, she's going to pine for guys out of her league hoping she can lock one up, fail to do so and grow into a leftover woman who resents men and insults them with bear analogies.
Whether that's a better or worse fate than marrying a brutish viking warrior that still provides, I don't know. Maybe it is actually better, it's certainly more comfortable. But the battered viking's wife has children, and the bitter wine aunt does not. Surely that enters into the calculation.
Maybe your parents don't care that much about your feelings when it comes to mate selection, but they do care about important things that are now excluded from the process, to everyone's expense.
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Well they can express that frustration all they want, so long as it's still illegal to implement the mechanisms of tradition, it's pointless.
Just recently the literal boy scouts switched to being gender neutral. This is a small symbolic final step that is but the culmination of the systematic destruction of an institution whose entire purpose was turning boys into men. Not an isolated case either, pretty much all male segregated spaces are gone, certainly most of the ones that would lend themselves to teaching.
I'm sure drunks are also frustrated with the quality of their livers. But unless they stop drinking, it's not going to get any better, however much they complain.
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The "man or bear" meme has not really seemed to have caught on that much in Finland, probably since going to the forest (to pick forests and berries, to hunt, just to walk around, even if you're walking from place X to place Y and the quickest route is through a patch of forest since there are patches of forests even all around cities etc.) is genuinely a very common activity to both men and women and you tend to typically run into other men and women all the time without consequences when you do it. (Encountering a bear is very rare, the numbers of the large beasts are strictly controlled.)
I'd imagine the meme originates from the US or Canada, which are enormous countries with enormous areas of wilderness, where relatively crowded forest trails aren't the norm, so women's preconceptions are different.
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I've asked my gf about this.
Women seem to assume that "in the forest" means "without social consequences, ever". Meaning, they suspect that some significant portion of men do not actually have an innate problem with rape and violence towards women, they simply do not do it most of the time out of fear.
She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.
She also claimed that most wild animals leave you alone if you are not a threat.
I'm pretty sure (3) does not mean you have a high chance of surviving a bear encounter. I would shit my pants and start running away the moment the bear started approaching me, make myself a threat, and get caught and mauled.
And while this may sound crass, I think getting mauled by a bear is worse than rape. I would rather be raped as a man that get mauled by a bear.
In that case you can ask them the same question again but now where they have a cyanide capsule they can break at anytime to commit suicide if the man/bear starts doing bad stuff to them and they'd rather die. I don't think this would make many of these women switch from bear to man.
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2 sounds like nonsense, but 1 and 3 are at least plausible. I think another underdiscussed component of the dress colour of the bear question is that in recent years, the threat of bears seems to have been massively memed up in American outdoorsmanship-adjacent circles, at least based on sheer volume of "this is how to survive a bear encounter" videos that Youtube injects into my feed, the comments on them and the vibes of the 4chan "innawoods" greentext corpus. If you are a host of this meme (which is likely to correlate with being male), you might think of it as common knowledge and not consider the possibility that women responders don't actually think of bears as uniquely threatening (as in some other cultures), instead parsing the answers as saying that from a baseline of your threat level assignment to bears, they think men are worse.
Is there a tangible reason why it's getting memed up?
Something of this form (easy and accessible way of signalling preparedness and baseline belonging to a more aware and professional group) seems to get memed up often enough - the bear safety thing reminds me a lot of the older "trigger discipline" fad, which was characterised by an endless torrent of people who wanted to be adjacent to American gun culture making a show of nitpicking media that depicted characters as keeping their fingers on a firearm's trigger without imminent intention to shoot. The particular choice of subject matter is probably opportunistic.
(Trigger discipline scissor question: "Which of these two situations is more dangerous? Lone woman at frat party with handgun, finger on the trigger to be ready to defend herself at any time / lone woman at frat party, unarmed". The 2A demographic will probably contend that she's more likely to hurt herself in an accidental discharge in the former than to get raped in the latter.)
I dunno man, "which gun is best for bear defense" has been a recurring shitshow thread-meme on basically every gun forum I've encountered since about the 90s -- it's not a new thing. (other than maybe some youtubers have caught on I guess?)
Bears are just a handy stand-in for 'stuff that can kill you in the woods' -- even if in reality it's not much of a threat, it's fun to think/fantasize/argue online about.
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So will the average Democrat. I think you’re misjudging the Venn diagram of “people who think rape is common” and “people who hate and fear firearms”.
Then make it a taser or something. I would've thought firearm sentiment to be more who/whom - not that this is actually realistically going to be championed by anyone, but would a "guns for women only" policy be instinctively opposed by most blue tribers?
Take away the firearm, and you might have a scissor, but not one that touches the 2A crowd. It’s along the lines of “believe women”: the scenario is underdetermined, so you have to import either the red- or blue-tribe assumptions. Whichever you choose makes the answer obvious.
The blue-tribe assumption regarding firearms is that most uses are illegitimate. At best, mere ownership makes those illegitimate actions more likely. At worst, expressing support for firearms is announcing intent to commit a crime with one.
This is enough to justify near-total gun control. I think that preempts any instinctive opposition to “guns for women only.”
Also, women really don’t care for guns. Ownership rates are like 3x higher for men. Maybe it’s historical, maybe it’s the masculine love for machinery—we’re way more likely to own guns, let alone commit gun violence.
In the frat house case, neither tribe is going to say the girl is justified in brandishing the gun. If you want to cut on the gender angle, you need a different scenario.
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In my experience, women conflate SA with rape claims whilst expanding SA to many things that are very far from rape. Further women obviously are not interested in applying skepticism (generally) to another woman’s claim of rape. No 3 sounds like someone who has internalized bad stats.
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Interestingly 1) is basically the conservative Hobbesian view right? That all of civilization is just a skin over our inherent natures. Women it appears are aware of the Leviathian shaped hole, even if they have never heard of Hobbes.
Which probably aligns with memes where men threaten their daughters prom dates with guns. They believe an 18yo man can't be trusted with their daughter without some fear being involved.
The question is are they right or wrong. I might suggest the large amount of rape during invasion and conflict might point to an underlying truth many men are uncomfortable with.
That more men than we might think would rape when the social order is not there.
Of course that is just a subset of the idea that more of us would murder or commit violence in general in the absence of a restraining force. The state of war of all against all.
"It follows that, in such a condition, every man has a Right to everything--even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural Right of every man to own everything exists, there can be no security to any man--no matter how strong or wise he is."
In a Hobbesian view there may not be a lot of difference between a bear and a human unburdened by societal restraint. We both exist in a state of nature.
Of course the bear is atill stronger and has better natural weapons. Is it better to be hunted by a bear or a human (assuming the human only has what they can cobble togerher in a forest)?
An old redpill/manosphere saying was "Men are the real romantics, while women are, at the end of the day, the hardcore realists"
Validity of that statement aside, I think your phrasing is far better and more inclusive of real cultural dynamics.
Is this not self-evidently true? Societies with weaker social/cultural/legal system infrastructure have higher rates of physical violence, SA, etc. There's the infamous (repeated!) studies on Papua New Guinea pointing out how it's Heart of Darkness levels of pain and chaos.
Does this mean that inside the heart of every man is an eager but repressed rapist? Of course not. That's on-its-face wrong. The entire point of well developed social/cultural/legal system development is to leverage the inherent social conformist nature of humans to build broad pro-social patterns of behavior. In fact, those who fail to conform in the extreme are either/both (a) locked up permanently and/or (b) labeled as cognitively malfunctioning. This is a good thing. What could be looked at as "boys will be boys!" behavior to an A.D. 1000 viking is now seen as "criminally insane and unsafe for anything besides lifelong warehousing."
Well if it takes a well developed cultural system to leverage us into not behaving that way, then are we not just repressed rapists? Just ones buried under years of conditioning? Teach men not to rape indeed..
Just to be clear I don't 100% agree with Hobbes here, though I think it is as you say partially true. Just noticing the similarity in positions between somewhat feminist thought and the Hobbesian conservatives.
You're right. And it wasn't lost on me the weird parallel between Hobbes and feminists that emerged when I wrote the response. I can't say I've totally wrapped my own head around it. All of us Trads do say "We need trade values or else society will fall apart." But it's couched heavily with the idea of personal choice; "You can choose to not follow Trad values, but then your life is going to be shitty." I'd contrast that with the progressive concept of culture which is fundamentally authoritarian; "You MUST adhere to the approved cultural norms, or else you are dangerous and will be excluded from society."
"Teach men not to rape" is too far of an extreme because I think the implicit assumption is that men are born with the rape module turned up to 10. I don't think this is the case. Men (and women!) are born with the basic mammalian firmware desires for food, water, shelter, reproductive activity. The duty of society is to teach men and women how to go about fulfilling these fundamental needs in pro-social ways.
Appreciate your comment. One of the better "stop and made me think" situations I've had on here in a while.
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I admit to not being enough of a Hlynka scholar. Can someone explain what this actually means?
A related question, who coined the phrase Leviathan-shaped Hock? It's been living in my head since I read it in one of these roundups.
I did, to make fun of them both being a meme at the same time.
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Essentially (to my understanding) that people assume our rules and norms are self-enforcing whereas in actuality (as per this theory) without significant effort we would exist in the "state of nature".
So thinking that men would revert to such a state when deprived of the social efforts to repress our base instincts means you are noticing the hole in our current (mostly Western) mindset.
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Exactly what it says on the tin. Modern civilization is so successful at hiding the base reality of violence that props it up that it's easy for people to forget it even exists. That we're just animals in a well organized pit.
Though I would argue, here this distance from violence rather manifests in being so delusional that you think a bear isn't a death machine that can eat you alive on a whim if some armed man isn't around to save you.
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As I understand it, it's the assertion that whenever someone identifies a societal problem and begins asking "why is it like this? what can we do about it" the answer is that the identified problem arises from something we ought to already be aware of; base human nature.
The solution (what Hlynka used to point to as the piece that would fit into the "Leviathan Shaped Hole") is often some mix of traditional cultural values, a stronger executive within the state Apparatus, more rigidly defined social roles for men/women/minorities/majorities. I'll admit that on this last part, I could be a little wrong as Hlynka's writing was often a little impenetrable.
I hope I'm close enough here.
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In war, aren’t you selecting for people who are already murdering people? War is different from just the state of nature.
Well Hobbes believes the natural state is war of all against all. So the idea here is that everyone is really such a killer if left to our own devices. And war (or other catastrophes) just removes the oversight we would normally fear.
I think Hobbes is wrong. Most of the time most people are like hobbits. State of war is the oddity; not the normal.
Both Rousseau and Hobbes are wrong. There has never really been a thing such as the state of nature in the anthropological history of man, we were never perfect individuals, we were always individuals living in communities.
Man isn't inherently good or bad. He's both, has always been both and will always be both.
The point that Hobbes makes that this common Shire existence exists because there is a sovereign to monopolize violence and enact justice is still a potent one though.
The saga era Iceland didn’t really have a sovereign and it wasn’t super dystopian for the era
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Something's not adding up here.
Suppose we have a rape victim who says this. Then, regarding the time she was raped, she would prefer it if she had died instead.
But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now. But she doesn't - she chooses to keep living instead. So it seems that her revealed preference is that she actually doesn't want to have died back then, because she rejects the necessary consequences of that choice.
I certainly believe there are fates worse than death. But I also think that in the majority of cases where people say "rape is worse than death", it's just hyperbolic social signalling rather than a genuinely held conviction.
You're missing something. There are three separate states being talked about here.
(1) the anguish of mentally-anticipating the pain of being raped.
(2) the in-the-moment physical experience of being raped.
(3) the mental anguish experienced in the wake of being raped, through recollections, PTSD, etc.
Each of these three is a separate experience, all tied to the concept of "being raped." A rape victim who says they wish the had died instead of being raped may well be saying that, now knowing what (2) and (3) are like, she would have preferred to never go through them and die instead without having had those experiences. But, having gone through them, dying now would not retroactively alleviate the anguish that has been already experienced.
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Regardless of whether your conclusion is right, it doesn't follow from this argument. Even to someone for whom rape is worse than death, rape+death can be (and likely is) still worse than rape-without-death.
I want to believe this, but I didn't even expect the "bear" answer to be popular in the context of signalling, so I'm clearly not modeling people correctly ... if there are people who would answer "bear" as some weird rhetorical point, couldn't there be people who would decide "bear" in real life too? I'm imagining a woman hiking alone in a canyon (unprepared for any sort of combat), when a male hiker catching up to her shouts that the park rangers got a report of a bear further down the trail ... but I'm trying to imagine the woman then breaking into a run away from the man and toward the bear, and I just can't seem to do it, not without adding a bunch of assumptions that weren't in the viral question.
I think it's pretty difficult to construct a realistic hypothetical on which to test intuitions. Yours doesn't really work because the woman is choosing between an actual man and a report of a bear (by the man), which is a very different comparison.
That's a very good point ... but doesn't that flaw make my man-vs-potential-bear scenario as favorable as possible toward not choosing "man"? If we imagine instead that our hiker first saw the bear herself and turned around, and then encountered a man in between her and the trailhead, it feels even wilder to imagine her turning around a second time and taking her chances with the actual-bear after all.
Yes, that was my concern, I can definitely imagine a woman coming to the conclusion that a man making that claim was trying to trick her and steering clear. But I think your updated hypothetical is better, and I agree that very few if any would run towards the bear. A sight of an actual bear would act on someone at an instinctual level in a way that the word "bear" in a Twitter poll would not.
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What kind of rituals do you think were there for confirming "eligibility", and what was the cutoff point? Are we talking "bullet ant mittens"?
It is my impression that many obviously "ineligible" (by modern and premodern standards) men successfully reproduced in the premodern era, because opportunities for women to be anyone but a wife were either incredibly scarce or worse than a subpar husband.
Before the Sexual Revolution became the new norm*, it was not standard practice to hit on girls outside your social circle as a single man. In fact, the unstated consensus was that your relatives or friends will introduce you to some girl in their social circle, thereby vetting you for her sake, and sort of vetting her as well, although that wasn't seen as equally important, I think. This is how rank-and-file people paired up.
Mandatory military service, hard physical labor, service in the Boy Scouts, boarding school, time spent in all-male environments in general were all social norms throughout the West for large numbers of men. This had the aggregate effect of toughening men up to a degree, which served to at least partially offset/balance the effects of hypergyny / female hypergamy on the mating market.
There was social consensus that masculinity is an ideal and is clearly defined. This wasn't undermined by any social institution. Boys were expected to assume this role, with sticks and carrots put in place accordingly.
Feminists will happily complain that patriarchal societies enact slut-shaming, which is more or less true. What is left unsaid is that there existed the parallel practice of cad-shaming. Both single men and single women lived under the surveillance and control of their social circle to a degree.
"Eligible" in this context means "eligible for marriage or at least long-term commitment" i.e. "to be considered as a future husband". Which means a couple of things: not addicted to any substance, not a gambler, not a domestic abuser, not a rake, not a violent thug etc.
*So sometime between 1970-1980, depending on social circumstances. That was the cutoff point, I think.
"Both single men and single women lived under the surveillance and control of their social circle to a degree."
Yet, somehow, prostitutes continued to be healthily employed in every major and probably minor European city even during the most buttoned up times. Which proves the feminists point - there was never actually true equality, even in repression.
If being a john was seen as (relatively) normal yet prostitutes were pariahs, then this parallel practice of cad-shaming wasn't as prevalent as slut-shaming, and the feminists are justified in leaving it unsaid.
Well, yes, this is a classic misunderstanding. Cads aren't johns per definition, they're men who prioritise casual sex and other forms of hedonism and avoid the social role of the father, the husband, the provider and worker. It's not a matter of visiting brothels or not.
Visiting brothels sounds like failing at the social role of a husband to me.
And if it's fine because husbands weren't expected to be as faithful as wives, then this is again evidence of inequality.
Yes, it was fine. And it's not like the current social regime is not as unjust in other aspects, so it doesn't matter.
Anyway, why are you also bringing up inequality? This entire subject has nothing to do with inequality.
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It's not like there isn't room to criticize past societies, but I don't get the whole equality angle. Even feminists don't want equality.
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There were actually two sexual revolutions. One just after WWI, where a greater degree of free choice, longer period of courtship, smaller age gaps, and other things we associate with the west as opposed to other cultures today became the norm, and a second one where people admitted to having fornicated.
For pre-first sexual Revolution courtships, read a little house on the prairie. One of the books is functionally the story of how it went down(I remember the story of my great-grandparents, who were on the very tail end of this system). A minority of conservative Christians want to bring the system back, but as any of them could tell you, it’s not working very well.
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It seems what we need here is the Hock.
There’s already a Victorian-approved social gathering which brings men and women together in opportunities for status competition. I should set up a series of such events.
Hock? My balls.
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Oh for Christ's sake not this again.
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