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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Congrats, you’ve discovered why the modal marriage arrangement throughout history was ‘teenaged girl with an older man’.

If you think we’re going to bring that back, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The fact of the matter is that at least part of the reason that 20 year old brides are so rare is the dearth of young, college aged men ready to be husbands. I suspect destigmatizing age gap relationships would boost the fertility rate dramatically. So start a TikTok trend of bragging about silver Fox husbands or something, I don’t know how you’re going to replicate the social conditions(aka patriarchy) that convinced young women in historical societies to marry older men.

I don’t know how you’re going to replicate the social conditions(aka patriarchy) that convinced young women in historical societies to marry older men.

In a word? Inflation.

Sure, there's some snark there, but there's a lot of stories from the Depression about wild age gap relationships just due to economic realities.

I am close to convince that the American economy of the next 20 - 30 years is utterly bifurcated. Zero "middle class." An utter divide between permanently dependent on the state for near serfdom conditions, and the independently able who are literally starting companies with the help of AI overnight and have more money than they know what to do with. The upper class status games will start to get very strange.

Sure, there's some snark there, but there's a lot of stories from the Depression about wild age gap relationships just due to economic realities.

I certainly don’t think there’s nothing to this- my great-grandparents married at 17 and thirty because he was a millionaire in the early depression- but the pattern of ‘young woman seeks marriage to established man for economic reasons’ is one that our culture lacks the inclination towards- we have near-unlimited personal debt, a constant diet of TikTok fear porn about abusive men, and a much smaller gap in gender based economic prospects.

I also strongly doubt the narrative that artificial stupidity will be an economic wonderwaffe- a few people, disproportionately already very wealthy, will become even more wealthy from selling it as customer service improvements and it still won’t be able to turn on a wrench or supervise a construction site or get around all sorts of occupational licensing barriers.

Congrats, you’ve discovered why the modal marriage arrangement throughout history was ‘teenaged girl with an older man’.

The age gap has rarely been more than 5 years, and you have to go back hundreds of years before average age of a woman at her first marriage was under 20. Teenagers weren't generally marrying "silver foxes" (though it happened).

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