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Notes -
Here's what it fundamentally comes down to in my understanding: You cannot have a democracy of the feminine and the masculine (or rather, as it often degrades into, the feminine versus the masculine), because they are only two voters between them. (This as far as I can tell scales up to society as a whole as much as it applies to individual relationships.) What happens when both sides disagree? In a democratic modality: nothing. There is no majority and thus nobody can win. It's simply he said she said, 1v1, a tie. Thus all you get is deadlock, disagreement, anger, and confusion. (Occasionally in the best cases you may get trade and compromise, but the capacity of even this is heavily limited when you have a strong disagreement of fundamental values/preferences as you do here.)
One side has to be in charge, has to have the unilateral right of the tiebreaker, because otherwise there's no way of ending most standoffs. Is it not likely that nature, as the most fundamental arbiter of propriety (particularly in sexual/romantic matters which are as instinctively-driven as it gets, at least unless we want to hack our brains to remove its influence and until we're able to), has designated the generally stronger, generally larger, generally taller, generally possessing of more geniuses, generally more entrepreneurial and innovative, generally more possessing of great administrative ability, etc. gender as this tiebreaker?
We slowly began tearing down the above Chesterton's fence over the past centuries, and then suddenly demolished what was left in the last 60 years or so (partially on the basis of a fairly trivially obviously wrong but trendy view that there really aren't any fundamental differences between the genders at all and thus no natural tiebreaker), but did we really justify it any point along the way other than by dogmatic appeals to egalitarianism?
Did we not forget that the most fundamental egalitarianism is an equivalent right to anyone else to simply do what you wanna do and go your own way, cooperating or not as you please? Except cooperation between the masculine and the feminine is absolutely essential for the health, happiness, and continuation of our species. If one side cannot compel the other to cooperate when necessary, then why wouldn't their cooperation and thus the overall health, happiness, and continuation of the species decline?
(It's worth noting that on balance the overall greater welfare created by this often offsets even the "losses" of the party compelled into cooperation. Some day in the past there was probably some cavewoman wishing some caveman would go out and do something practical like hunt or collect firewood instead of worrying about this "wheel" idea of his, but in the end even she was probably better off once he figured it out. Many such cases.)
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