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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33350 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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The problem isn't loneliness or lack of romantic relationships, the problem is declining family formation, which those are a prerequisite for.

I think the big problem for both men and women is the opportunity costs involved.

For middle-class women, the prime time to get married and have children overlaps with the critical time for education and launching a career. Additionally, even with access to good child care, there are serious compromises required - you can have kids and raise them well in the early years, but it comes at the cost of someone's career, either theirs or their spouse's. Alternately, you subcontract the raising of your children, and you feel that you're a failure as a mother, because you never have the time or energy for your children.

My wife has a STEM degree. This dynamic hit her hard.

For men, the cost of family formation is adulthood and responsibility. There's a lot of fun stuff that you have to give up or dial back on if you're going to be providing for a family - and as entertainment and hobbies get better, the cost only goes up.

I'm kind of a nerd, and I have (or had) a lot of geeky hobbies. This dynamic hit me hard.

Now, don't get me wrong - the tradeoffs are absolutely worth it in the long run, but they are still tradeoffs.

Here's the real kicker, though: Even if you have a woman who isn't interested in a career and just wants marriage and children, Moloch rears his head and smacks that down. Because, unless she's in an isolated community, this means that she'll need to find a man who can provide for her to dedicate her time and efforts to marriage and children. Which means a man in roughly the upper quartile of earning potential. Which means a man who is educated, interested in settling down, responsible. Which means a man who has a lot of options and wouldn't look twice at a woman without a college education... and so, our aspirational homemaker still needs a college degree, and the attendant expenses in both money and fertile years.

Do men really care if a girl has a college degree or not? I've never heard the need for education expressed by any man. Be it one I know or any real life media.

Have you ever encountered an educated, successful man who has married a woman without a degree? It's possible, clearly, but I think it's extremely rare.

Assortative mating by socio-economic status is extremely pronounced in the US, and the lack of a degree locks you out of the "educated, successful men" part of the dating pool.

Socio-economic status has little to do with woman having a degree. Suppose a man marries woman without a degree, but all her male relatives have degrees. Compare versus where a woman has degree but her relatives are high school dropout.

But I wouldn't say that this is because men want women with degrees. I'd say it's because men with degrees by 'chance' were around women with degrees, specifically in universities or workplaces. It wasn't a requirement on the men's part that the women have degrees. So I don't think the way you phrase things is accurate. Educated men are not locking out uneducated women from their dating pool. The university and workplace is. It might be true that the social stratification we are seeing is leading to extreme rates of assorted mating, but the driving force behind that is not the mating preferences of men.

By mating preferences of men do you just mean what gets men hard? Or do you mean what (those) men want in a marriage partner? Because educated upper class men absolutely want a partner with appropriate educated upper class hobbies and affectations, which tend to coincide with a college degree even if it is not technically a requirement.

My grad school classmates all married women with degrees, and the obvious driving factor was that when one of us was banging a townie bartender (or whatever) at any point and brought her to a party, she was embarrassingly out of sync socially. A spouse that impresses others is important, valuable, to most people. To claim otherwise is to separate social desires out of marriage preferences, which is totally baffling and ahistorical.

Both. And at risk of being to curt here, none of what you say necessitates a man wanting a woman with a degree.

I'd say today the pure non-working housewife role is increasingly economically unviable, which doesn't necessarily mean 'a wife needs a degree', but generally professional roles that work around a maternity schedule will lean that way.

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