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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Any man of decency would say the same.

However, your position of being the one who takes the risks means you deserve additional authority to make up for that. Higher risks, higher rewards; that's just basic fairness.

The ultimate problem with feminism, and why it is destructive, is that it denies that premise; instead preferring to take "women's lives matter more" as a license for selfishness. Its fundamental contradiction is that women's lives only have value because men believe they do; treat them unfairly enough and the men will no longer do those dangerous jobs like "go to war and protect our society from an enemy that, should they win, will make life much worse for those women". (Conveniently for feminists, that enemy is nowhere to be seen, and the other dangerous/difficult/necessary jobs not being performed tend to be invisible until they aren't.)

Nah, the ultimate problem with feminism and why it is destructive is because independent, financially secure women in the labor force simply don't breed enough, and whatever political power they accrue is bent towards giving them more independence and financial security, furthering the problem.

Existence is on the line, not some vague idea of basic fairness. Fairness has never really existed since the dawn of time. Higher risks have only equaled higher rewards when the risks are considered necessary for things to continue to function (and are therefore priced in).

Women's lives do matter more, on a long enough timescale, due to the utility function of childbirth. It's got nothing to do with what men believe. Believing they're potatoes or exotic birds won't make you pregnant. If we science our way around it at sufficiently distributed scale then women's lives won't matter more. Until that day, however...

However, your position of being the one who takes the risks means you deserve additional authority to make up for that. Higher risks, higher rewards; that's just basic fairness.

Not really how the trade works.

Men give the physical self-sacrifice and commercial value, women give the ability to bear children in the first place plus additional care work. Depending on how good either of them are at these things, and how much demand there is for them, the balance of value may favor either party. The willingness to risk life and limb isn't worth a terrible lot in a safe, peaceful first-world country (or one that actively penalizes men who take physical action), noble as it still is when it comes to it. And a deadbeat man who doesn't work won't earn much respect either. Similarly, a woman's biological abilities aren't worth a damn when she doesn't put them use, say through contraception, and her care work needs to actually happpen for it to be counted in her favor.

I think it's entirely fair to look at each case individually to determine whether the man or the woman is more worthy of authority and/or better-suited to exercise it. In most cases it may well be the man, especially in this postmodern age in which most women seem to have been eaten by social media and social contagion.