8 ms·

I am consistently amazed by the profound contempt which modern liberalism holds for the traditional role of the wife and mother. In traditional societies, mothe

I am consistently amazed by the profound contempt which modern liberalism holds for the traditional role of the wife and mother. In traditional societies, motherhood is not looked down upon or held in contempt, but mothers are honored. As the managers of families and the people that consistently invest the most in the next generation, they are the backbone of society. Every successful person today owes his success to a chain of hundreds of successful mothers, stretching back into pre-history. It is only as our planning horizon has shrunk from a thousand years to six months that we begin to look on motherhood as a form of slavery. Females are told that they must do anything but a traditional female role to have value in society. We cajole women to act like men. In a way, liberalism is ironically misogynist. It is little surprise then that Western liberals no longer breed above replacement rates. Denigrating motherhood is not the way for a people to last the aeons of time. I believe the future of the West is profoundly more conservative than the present, because Darwin. Liberalism is a suicidal ideology.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
You might be projecting a little. The comment you're replying to makes no mention of the role "wife" or "mother" in a disparaging sense, or otherwise.
bluthru 13y ago
>We cajole women to act like men. There's your problem. Equality means removing old sexist views about the role of men and women in society. "Women to act like men" or "men to act like women" is a farce. Humans should be free to define their role for themselves. Also, I don't know why you're worried about the amount of humans on the planet. It's already overpopulated.
- goggles99 13y ago
  If OBSERVING that men and women are built and operate differently on a mass and indefinite number of levels (mentally, physically and emotionally) - I guess that I too hold these "sexist views". Then again, maybe I am just honest and choose not to buy into lies and false propaganda. How can there be the kind of equality that you are referring to when there is no equivalence? There are always going to be some women who could have done better than the man that got the job that they both interviewed for. Same for men who were beat out by a women, but the idea that some preconceived notion that a man is going to be a better fighter pilot than a women is going to go away is pure fantasy. When something is true 99+% of the time, people are going to lean toward probability. It is human nature. I guarantee that if anyone in this topic (man or women) was playing a game of deadly roulette and had to choose odds with who was more qualified and would do a better job in a field of men and women with certain careers, everyone here would be a "sexist". So don't call out someone with There's your problem. If you consider it a problem then it is YOUR problem too. Maybe not on the same level, but you yourself are affected by it on some level (like it or not). You are a human - therefore have human nature.
betterunix 13y ago
What does any of that have to do with the marginalization of women? Women are marginalized when they are told that they are simply not allowed to do certain things, or that they are not allowed to do certain things without their husband's or father's permission. American women are not told that they must do anything but being a housewife. They are actively encouraged to pursue careers that at one time women were basically forbidden to pursue. Most of those careers are compatible with motherhood as much as they are compatible with fatherhood.
- mrbuzer 13y ago
  > American women are not told that they must do anything but being a housewife. They are actively encouraged to pursue careers that at one time women were basically forbidden to pursue. Most of those careers are compatible with motherhood as much as they are compatible with fatherhood. Especially black American women who have to look forward to being a bitch, a mother, and a low wage worker. Liberation for the win. This rhetoric is about reducing people to workers and saying that because people can't serve a corporation they are not being themselves because the desire that corporations create for women to be something in the public sphere competes with similar jobs which they held in the private sphere. Liberation is freedom from work to do whatever you choose. Liberation has not held up to this ideal as it's a lie. The whole point of women's lib was to increase the work force so that the capitalists can have more people in the economy and the government can tax those people and get richer and so on.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Agreed. This is why men overwhelmingly choose to stay home and take care of the kids when given the option. /s
    - mrbuzer 13y ago
      Yes because men and women find child rearing to be equally fulfilling socially and psychologically... because evolution obviously made them that way. /s Why be a wife and a mother women you can be a scientist busting their ass for making your university or corporation the next 1 billion dollars. Or why not be a model or a booth babe? Or better yet why not flip burgers and answer phone calls at a call center. These give meaning to lives!
test-it 13y ago
>> Liberalism is a suicidal ideology. Modern technologies mean a smaller group of people can have vastly superior industry and military. Human cloning and artificial general intelligence have the potential to far outproduce any traditional society.
rbehrends 13y ago
If managing families and raising children is such an honored and fulfilling role and makes you the backbone of society, why don't conservative men fall over themselves to fill that role? My guess would be that they don't actually believe their own ad copy.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >why don't conservative men fall over themselves to fill that role? Because different sexes perform different roles in different species? Even watched a nature documentary?
- ajuc 13y ago
  Just as there are roles specified by society for women - there are roles specified for men. Actually nowadays I think men have much less choice than women if they care about society opinion at all. Nobody blinks an eye when some women doesn't have kids and choose career. On the other hand being a "house husband" that doesn't work and "only" deal with house and kids is still considered weird and people think you are "not 100% man". See the whole "real men" stereotype. There's no "real women" stereotype. We have one sex that have a choice, and one that doesn't. It's even visible in fashion. Women wear what they want. Men doesn't wear dresses. BTW at least part of the differences in salaries is direct consequence of that. People expect men to keep working no matter the family situation, because "man should work". With women there's significant probability that they'll eventually choose kids, and salary reflects that belief. Feminists try to deal with the salary gap by regulation - I don't think it will work. You need to change society so men have same choice women have. It will be even harder.
  - rbehrends 13y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree [1]. The point that I was making was that childcare is often sold as a high-status job, when in reality it is generally a low-status, low-reward job. This ties directly into your argument about stay-at-home dads being looked down upon. It's the other side of the same coin. [1] Nor do I necessarily agree, either, but I don't want to get sidetracked.
- 13y ago
CleanedStar 13y ago
> It is little surprise then that Western liberals no longer breed above replacement rates. Denigrating motherhood is not the way for a people to last the aeons of time. I believe the future of the West is profoundly more conservative than the present, because Darwin. Liberalism is a suicidal ideology. It doesn't really work like that. India has over 1 billion people, and I'm sure "traditional" lower caste women there "breed above replacement rates" as you put it. On the other side you might have an upper middle class, white, historically mainline Protestant couple living in the US. Both have a sibling, both have advanced degrees, both have parents who went to college. Their families have slowly been acquiring wealth for generations. The couple will have two "replacement rate" kids. On the other hand, the lower caste Indian woman has more than one child die in infancy. The family does not always have enough food to eat every day. Yet in your mind, the Indian family is a winner because of "Darwin", because the western liberals have a "suicidal ideology". But who would doubt the upper middle class American son would not want to trade places with the Indian kid, and there's a much more significant chance that the Indian kid would trade places with the white kid. You seem to see some "contempt" and a "misogynist" tone in the parent which I do not. You're advocating a way of life and morality and such that belongs to history, and to rural farmers in that history. The US is losing its industrial jobs never mind its agricultural jobs. Traditional life in the US is Michael Moore's "Roger & Me" vision of 1950s blue collar unionized industrial workers driving their cars back to the suburbs. A way of life going away with Detroit's bankruptcy. Your vision of women only raising kids, and more than two as you say, is not traditional, it's almost ancient tradition. It's like, Pennsylvania farmers circa late 17th century. The Amish and Mennonites in Pennyslvania live like you're talking. But most of America considers it rather antiquated.
- smm2000 13y ago
  It does not matter who is happier or have better life - middle class family in US or low-cast family in India. Sad fact is that ALL western societies are below replacement level. White US population is on decline (and it's not steep only because of conservative rural population). Depopulation is a bitch and nature hates void. Two kids are not replacement level - you need 2.33 kids on average. Fertility rate for white female with college degree (liberal dream) is 1.6 in US. What it means? It means that it takes only 10 generations (180-250 years) to go from 150 million species to 15 million (10x reduction). That means that current model of liberal society just does not work from evolutional perspective. Being educated white female is a negative trait from evolutionary perspective. I am saying this as somebody who has highly educated girlfriend and who is very unlikely to have more than two kids (one reason being that it takes 200k to send one kid to college).
WildUtah 13y ago
I believe the future of the West is profoundly more conservative than the present, because Darwin. Ironically, Darwin's work and ideas will be banned as a result.
- newnewnew 13y ago
  History is full of its little ironies. Maybe someday a group of people will arise that see through the lies and wishful thinking of both liberals and conservatives, and marry the best qualities of each group.
WasimBhai 13y ago
>> I am consistently amazed by the profound contempt which modern liberalism holds for the traditional role of the wife and mother. In traditional societies, motherhood is not looked down upon or held in contempt, but mothers are honored. Only if they follow a certain line. Those lines are defined by the nature of society, and being from a country that has a middle-class which resonates between being mildly conservative to ultra-conservative, these lines can be anything, but in the end they are nothing more than a tool to control women. For mildly conservatives, they are happy if their daughter goes to a medical school, but then the same girls are put into marriages even before they complete their medical school. For the ultra-conservatives, women are supposed to be hidden behind those hideous burqas and must be married off as soon as it can be. Again under the pretense of Honor. The only thing common between them is of course mothers and wives are honored. If only they do not challenge the status-quo, do not ask for their rights, are an honor to a family. This is not honor. This is a vile way to justify objectification of half of the population.
mjn 13y ago
> It is little surprise then that Western liberals no longer breed above replacement rates. The implication here seems to be that politics is a major independent predictor of fertility rates, i.e. liberal views on gender depress fertility rates, independently of, say, socioeconomic status. Is that true? If we look across countries, the lowest birth rates aren't in places particularly famed for the dominance of their feminist movements: South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan.
- newnewnew 13y ago
  There are a lot of graphs on the topic here[1]. Income isn't explicitly controlled for, but correlated characteristics like education level and IQ are. IQ appears to be strongly anti-fertile for liberal men and slightly pro-fertile for conservative men. 53% of the smartest group of liberal men age 35-44 had no children in the GSS data from 1995-2012[2a] compared to just 21% of conservatives[2b]. The differences with women are smaller but similar. It should be noted that regardless of one's political beliefs, our modern culture can broadly be considered "liberal" and it is an extreme conservative indeed that doesn't guzzle down liberal books, movies, and television. Thus, while conservatism increases your fertility at the margin, white Americans of all political persuasions are having fewer kids than they used to[3]. [1] http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/whos-having-the-babies/ http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/whos-having-the-babi... [2a] http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/whos-having-the-babies/libs-by-iq-kids-young/ http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/whos-having-the-babi... [2b] http://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/conserv-by-iq-kids-young.png?w=1000&h= http://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/conserv-by-iq-kid... [3] http://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/lib-cons-cohorte.png?w=1000&h= http://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/lib-cons-cohorte....
gbog 13y ago
Some more water to add to this side of the debate: In China women were also regarded as reliable agents for spreading Chinese culture and civilisation. Quote: After Mongol rule had been ended by the Ming Dynasty in 1368, [there was] a violent Chinese backlash against West and Central Asians. In order to contain the violence, the Ming administration instituted a policy where all West and Central Asian males were required to intermarry with native Chinese females, hence assimilating them into the local population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation#China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation#China Please also note that in most other culture, the way to fix ethnic violence is in the "remove them away" to "kill them all" range. In the above example, the solution found was "merge them through our girls", which actually worked not that bad (Hui people still exist, and are relatively well integrated).
lispm 13y ago
Time to get rid of more of the 'traditional' roles. There is a lot of so-called 'tradition' which is just religious fundamentalism. Also there is no need to 'breed above replacement rates'. For thousands of years humans in Europe were living in much smaller numbers. There is no need to add more millions to the 500+ million people we already have here. To get to more sustainable levels of population, we'll some downsizing can be necessary. We need to see that the religious fundamentalistic views will die out over the next decades, with its proponents. At least in Europe.
- jk4930 13y ago
  Please don't forget the immigration of fertile religious traditionalists.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Your romantic notion of motherhood in traditional societies totally denies centuries of oppression and abuse, continuing to this very day in those traditional societies you praise so much.
- JanezStupar 13y ago
  It is not about praise. Society abuses both men and women for its own ends. Please read: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
adrianbye 13y ago
well said

jamesaguilar 13y ago

You might be projecting a little. The comment you're replying to makes no mention of the role "wife" or "mother" in a disparaging sense, or otherwise.

bluthru 13y ago

>We cajole women to act like men. There's your problem. Equality means removing old sexist views about the role of men and women in society. "Women to act like men" or "men to act like women" is a farce. Humans should be free to define their role for themselves. Also, I don't know why you're worried about the amount of humans on the planet. It's already overpopulated.

goggles99 13y ago
If OBSERVING that men and women are built and operate differently on a mass and indefinite number of levels (mentally, physically and emotionally) - I guess that I too hold these "sexist views". Then again, maybe I am just honest and choose not to buy into lies and false propaganda. How can there be the kind of equality that you are referring to when there is no equivalence? There are always going to be some women who could have done better than the man that got the job that they both interviewed for. Same for men who were beat out by a women, but the idea that some preconceived notion that a man is going to be a better fighter pilot than a women is going to go away is pure fantasy. When something is true 99+% of the time, people are going to lean toward probability. It is human nature. I guarantee that if anyone in this topic (man or women) was playing a game of deadly roulette and had to choose odds with who was more qualified and would do a better job in a field of men and women with certain careers, everyone here would be a "sexist". So don't call out someone with There's your problem. If you consider it a problem then it is YOUR problem too. Maybe not on the same level, but you yourself are affected by it on some level (like it or not). You are a human - therefore have human nature.

betterunix 13y ago

What does any of that have to do with the marginalization of women? Women are marginalized when they are told that they are simply not allowed to do certain things, or that they are not allowed to do certain things without their husband's or father's permission. American women are not told that they must do anything but being a housewife. They are actively encouraged to pursue careers that at one time women were basically forbidden to pursue. Most of those careers are compatible with motherhood as much as they are compatible with fatherhood.

mrbuzer 13y ago
> American women are not told that they must do anything but being a housewife. They are actively encouraged to pursue careers that at one time women were basically forbidden to pursue. Most of those careers are compatible with motherhood as much as they are compatible with fatherhood. Especially black American women who have to look forward to being a bitch, a mother, and a low wage worker. Liberation for the win. This rhetoric is about reducing people to workers and saying that because people can't serve a corporation they are not being themselves because the desire that corporations create for women to be something in the public sphere competes with similar jobs which they held in the private sphere. Liberation is freedom from work to do whatever you choose. Liberation has not held up to this ideal as it's a lie. The whole point of women's lib was to increase the work force so that the capitalists can have more people in the economy and the government can tax those people and get richer and so on.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Agreed. This is why men overwhelmingly choose to stay home and take care of the kids when given the option. /s
  - mrbuzer 13y ago
    Yes because men and women find child rearing to be equally fulfilling socially and psychologically... because evolution obviously made them that way. /s Why be a wife and a mother women you can be a scientist busting their ass for making your university or corporation the next 1 billion dollars. Or why not be a model or a booth babe? Or better yet why not flip burgers and answer phone calls at a call center. These give meaning to lives!

test-it 13y ago

>> Liberalism is a suicidal ideology. Modern technologies mean a smaller group of people can have vastly superior industry and military. Human cloning and artificial general intelligence have the potential to far outproduce any traditional society.

rbehrends 13y ago

If managing families and raising children is such an honored and fulfilling role and makes you the backbone of society, why don't conservative men fall over themselves to fill that role? My guess would be that they don't actually believe their own ad copy.

coldtea 13y ago
>why don't conservative men fall over themselves to fill that role? Because different sexes perform different roles in different species? Even watched a nature documentary?
ajuc 13y ago
Just as there are roles specified by society for women - there are roles specified for men. Actually nowadays I think men have much less choice than women if they care about society opinion at all. Nobody blinks an eye when some women doesn't have kids and choose career. On the other hand being a "house husband" that doesn't work and "only" deal with house and kids is still considered weird and people think you are "not 100% man". See the whole "real men" stereotype. There's no "real women" stereotype. We have one sex that have a choice, and one that doesn't. It's even visible in fashion. Women wear what they want. Men doesn't wear dresses. BTW at least part of the differences in salaries is direct consequence of that. People expect men to keep working no matter the family situation, because "man should work". With women there's significant probability that they'll eventually choose kids, and salary reflects that belief. Feminists try to deal with the salary gap by regulation - I don't think it will work. You need to change society so men have same choice women have. It will be even harder.
- rbehrends 13y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree [1]. The point that I was making was that childcare is often sold as a high-status job, when in reality it is generally a low-status, low-reward job. This ties directly into your argument about stay-at-home dads being looked down upon. It's the other side of the same coin. [1] Nor do I necessarily agree, either, but I don't want to get sidetracked.
13y ago

CleanedStar 13y ago

> It is little surprise then that Western liberals no longer breed above replacement rates. Denigrating motherhood is not the way for a people to last the aeons of time. I believe the future of the West is profoundly more conservative than the present, because Darwin. Liberalism is a suicidal ideology. It doesn't really work like that. India has over 1 billion people, and I'm sure "traditional" lower caste women there "breed above replacement rates" as you put it. On the other side you might have an upper middle class, white, historically mainline Protestant couple living in the US. Both have a sibling, both have advanced degrees, both have parents who went to college. Their families have slowly been acquiring wealth for generations. The couple will have two "replacement rate" kids. On the other hand, the lower caste Indian woman has more than one child die in infancy. The family does not always have enough food to eat every day. Yet in your mind, the Indian family is a winner because of "Darwin", because the western liberals have a "suicidal ideology". But who would doubt the upper middle class American son would not want to trade places with the Indian kid, and there's a much more significant chance that the Indian kid would trade places with the white kid. You seem to see some "contempt" and a "misogynist" tone in the parent which I do not. You're advocating a way of life and morality and such that belongs to history, and to rural farmers in that history. The US is losing its industrial jobs never mind its agricultural jobs. Traditional life in the US is Michael Moore's "Roger & Me" vision of 1950s blue collar unionized industrial workers driving their cars back to the suburbs. A way of life going away with Detroit's bankruptcy. Your vision of women only raising kids, and more than two as you say, is not traditional, it's almost ancient tradition. It's like, Pennsylvania farmers circa late 17th century. The Amish and Mennonites in Pennyslvania live like you're talking. But most of America considers it rather antiquated.

smm2000 13y ago
It does not matter who is happier or have better life - middle class family in US or low-cast family in India. Sad fact is that ALL western societies are below replacement level. White US population is on decline (and it's not steep only because of conservative rural population). Depopulation is a bitch and nature hates void. Two kids are not replacement level - you need 2.33 kids on average. Fertility rate for white female with college degree (liberal dream) is 1.6 in US. What it means? It means that it takes only 10 generations (180-250 years) to go from 150 million species to 15 million (10x reduction). That means that current model of liberal society just does not work from evolutional perspective. Being educated white female is a negative trait from evolutionary perspective. I am saying this as somebody who has highly educated girlfriend and who is very unlikely to have more than two kids (one reason being that it takes 200k to send one kid to college).

WildUtah 13y ago

I believe the future of the West is profoundly more conservative than the present, because Darwin. Ironically, Darwin's work and ideas will be banned as a result.

newnewnew 13y ago
History is full of its little ironies. Maybe someday a group of people will arise that see through the lies and wishful thinking of both liberals and conservatives, and marry the best qualities of each group.

WasimBhai 13y ago

>> I am consistently amazed by the profound contempt which modern liberalism holds for the traditional role of the wife and mother. In traditional societies, motherhood is not looked down upon or held in contempt, but mothers are honored. Only if they follow a certain line. Those lines are defined by the nature of society, and being from a country that has a middle-class which resonates between being mildly conservative to ultra-conservative, these lines can be anything, but in the end they are nothing more than a tool to control women. For mildly conservatives, they are happy if their daughter goes to a medical school, but then the same girls are put into marriages even before they complete their medical school. For the ultra-conservatives, women are supposed to be hidden behind those hideous burqas and must be married off as soon as it can be. Again under the pretense of Honor. The only thing common between them is of course mothers and wives are honored. If only they do not challenge the status-quo, do not ask for their rights, are an honor to a family. This is not honor. This is a vile way to justify objectification of half of the population.

mjn 13y ago

> It is little surprise then that Western liberals no longer breed above replacement rates. The implication here seems to be that politics is a major independent predictor of fertility rates, i.e. liberal views on gender depress fertility rates, independently of, say, socioeconomic status. Is that true? If we look across countries, the lowest birth rates aren't in places particularly famed for the dominance of their feminist movements: South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan.

newnewnew 13y ago
There are a lot of graphs on the topic here[1]. Income isn't explicitly controlled for, but correlated characteristics like education level and IQ are. IQ appears to be strongly anti-fertile for liberal men and slightly pro-fertile for conservative men. 53% of the smartest group of liberal men age 35-44 had no children in the GSS data from 1995-2012[2a] compared to just 21% of conservatives[2b]. The differences with women are smaller but similar. It should be noted that regardless of one's political beliefs, our modern culture can broadly be considered "liberal" and it is an extreme conservative indeed that doesn't guzzle down liberal books, movies, and television. Thus, while conservatism increases your fertility at the margin, white Americans of all political persuasions are having fewer kids than they used to[3]. [1] http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/whos-having-the-babies/ http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/whos-having-the-babi... [2a] http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/whos-having-the-babies/libs-by-iq-kids-young/ http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/whos-having-the-babi... [2b] http://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/conserv-by-iq-kids-young.png?w=1000&h= http://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/conserv-by-iq-kid... [3] http://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/lib-cons-cohorte.png?w=1000&h= http://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/lib-cons-cohorte....

gbog 13y ago

Some more water to add to this side of the debate: In China women were also regarded as reliable agents for spreading Chinese culture and civilisation. Quote: After Mongol rule had been ended by the Ming Dynasty in 1368, [there was] a violent Chinese backlash against West and Central Asians. In order to contain the violence, the Ming administration instituted a policy where all West and Central Asian males were required to intermarry with native Chinese females, hence assimilating them into the local population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation#China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation#China Please also note that in most other culture, the way to fix ethnic violence is in the "remove them away" to "kill them all" range. In the above example, the solution found was "merge them through our girls", which actually worked not that bad (Hui people still exist, and are relatively well integrated).

lispm 13y ago

Time to get rid of more of the 'traditional' roles. There is a lot of so-called 'tradition' which is just religious fundamentalism. Also there is no need to 'breed above replacement rates'. For thousands of years humans in Europe were living in much smaller numbers. There is no need to add more millions to the 500+ million people we already have here. To get to more sustainable levels of population, we'll some downsizing can be necessary. We need to see that the religious fundamentalistic views will die out over the next decades, with its proponents. At least in Europe.

jk4930 13y ago
Please don't forget the immigration of fertile religious traditionalists.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Your romantic notion of motherhood in traditional societies totally denies centuries of oppression and abuse, continuing to this very day in those traditional societies you praise so much.

JanezStupar 13y ago
It is not about praise. Society abuses both men and women for its own ends. Please read: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

adrianbye 13y ago

well said