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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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You are of course leaving out all the benefits of traditional marriage which are not ‘access to sex on demand’.

What other benefits? Aside from legal protections around having children, there's little else that marriage offers to men that a close male friend couldn't also provide, oftentimes at higher quality. And there's the issue of "marriage" and "close male friends" are often substitutes, i.e. men often lose their male support groups when they get married either due to time constraints or from the woman covertly sabotaging things (e.g. controlling the social schedule and deprioritizing them).

Access to your own children, full time or near full time companionship, having two adults in the house, and all the little things that tend to be improved downstream of having a woman in the house. Most people prefer a woman’s touch for their dwelling, and most men cannot replicate it for themselves.

If you’re saying ‘well men don’t need to marry for all that’- you’re talking about cohabitation, not prostitution. Those are meaningfully different arrangements.

Most people prefer a woman’s touch for their dwelling, and most men cannot replicate it for themselves.

I think this really varies from person to person. I've seen too many single guy friends get married, and then when I visit their home, it's totally dominated by their wife's style. Frilly cute things everywhere, and not a single visible trace of the stuff the guy used to like (or maybe it's hidden away in a single room, the mancave). The women in a modern western marriage just have so much power they can take over the house if they want to. One of the benefits (for the man) of prostitution is he can still get sex very conveniently but allso still have his own living space just the way he likes it. Including being roommates with a close male friend if that's what he wants, which most married women wouldn't tolerate.

It's possible that more of the benefits accrue to society in general than to the specific man, in a way that benefits defectors as long as society as a whole doesn't unravel (as it has been lately). For instance, having an involved father is a benefit to a boy and young man, as part of living in the kind of society where marriage is the norm.