5 ms·
A theory I once read goes like this: in the past it was quite common for lawyers, directors, managers to marry their secretaries, which was the way for them to
by 988747 5y ago
A theory I once read goes like this: in the past it was quite common for lawyers, directors, managers to marry their secretaries, which was the way for them to jump to higher social class. Now, a director making advances towards their secretary faces immediate sexual harassment lawsuit, so they choose to marry other managers/directors instead.
- bduerst 5y agoIs that really a bad thing though? For the 1/10 times at work where the person in power ends up having a meaningful relationship with an underling that you lose, you also have the 9/10 cases of sexual harassment that you lose too.
- dustintrex 5y agoIt's a bad thing from the secretary's point of view if a) she consents to the advances and b) successfully leverages that into a marriage with far greater benefits for her and her offspring. Needless to say, those are pretty big ifs.
- bduerst 5y agoBut then it's a good thing from the 9 other secretaries' point of view where they didn't consent to being harassed sexually, which is the point.
- TMWNN 5y agoYes, I've wondered the same thing. Anti-sexual harassment training, and more broadly the discouraging of socialization between men and women, has also reduced the opportunity for men and women to marry. The flip side of the male executive no longer being able to chase his secretary around a desk to try to pinch her on the butt is another executive not being able to politely court the secretary he is in love with (and vice versa). I don't have a good answer for how to get the one without the other, but both are consequences of modern sensibilities.
- rsj_hn 5y agoMore and more, I'm beginning to think that a society in which there is widespread use of birth control and in which the majority of women enter the labor force and work full time in an office is not going to be able to maintain replacement level fertility rates. In which case, the future belongs to societies where women don't work and birth control is stigmatized. It could be that there is a reason why the world was dominated by large patriarchal societies other than some sort of accident of history. If that's true, then a society with lots of gig jobs or work at home jobs might help alleviate the problem. There could be other creative solutions, like reimagining higher education to give people time to marry and have kids before college. Other approaches are also possible. Whatever the reason, the secular societies will need to scramble if they don't want the world of the future to be dominated by orthodox religious populations.
- monocasa 5y agoEh, Rome had widespread use of abortifacients, only falling after they had harvested those plants into extinction.
- rsj_hn 5y agoDo you have some data on how widespread and effective it was? Perhaps this also contributed to Rome's population problems - it needed to rely on the provinces to supply labor and manpower for a substantial portion of the Empire, and eventually the capital was moved away from Rome entirely. Constantinople was also basically empty by the time it was conquered, having a population of only 50,000 people when the Turks arrived, from a high of one million. But I think in such ancient societies, the struggle is a little different. E.g. when you are being ravaged by wars and plagues, you need more than replacement level fertility. You need huge fertility that can recover massive population loss in a short period of time. After Hannibal decimated the population of Italy, Rome recovered remarkably quickly. They just made more Romans. Later on, that stopped working and they needed manpower from the provinces. In modern societies, we've licked most of the other stuff and so can keep going much longer as fertility declines, to the point where we start noticing only when rates hit below replacement. Traditional societies would see population loss long before fertility rates fell below replacement.