I would need a reason to care. There are millions of YouTube videos and thousands of YouTubers talking nonsense about evolutionary biology all the time.

Why should anyone care about this one? Isn’t referring anyone listening to that drivel over to TalkOrigins enough of a response to it?

Unless you mean to hire me to do a direct critique? If paying attention to that guy is worth your money, perhaps it might be worth my time. Sometimes not. But if you ask I’ll look into it and quote you a rate if I think it’s worth addressing.

That’s all a good analysis.

So we actually have people at the time talking about how they wanted precisely this outcome. https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/child-welfarechild-labor/widows-and-waifs/ , https://www.americanyawp.com/text/23-the-great-depression/ and others review it pretty well, I can’t find the quote I had seen before but it was even stated quite directly by policymakers, including conservative policymakers who had accepted the logic. Yes, it was initially targeted at groups like widows etc., but expressly to avoid them having to go into the workforce, exactly as the later welfare reform expressly wanted them to do even if they were single, widowed, etc. This change is both because black people gained access and because women got some independence and so society decided to punish them. The point is that the idea was expressly that it was okay for women to not need to work so they could spend full-time care with their children. And, yes, it’s very good that the programs were expanded (though now they’ve been decimated). The assumption was that the women were never going to be the breadwinners. So brutal capitalism has found a way of being even crueler now that that assumption has changed, which manospherians (and other people who are less of dunces) have confused for it being feminism’s fault.

I bring this up because it goes to show the depths of the perverse cruelty of our present culture. While the idea of the poor becoming dependent and lazy has always been there, we had some ability to overcome it. Today liberals and leftists need to try to argue that Moms will totally go work even if welfare is sufficient and it totally doesn’t breed dependency, but what even that admits to the right is the idea that if it were different it’d be okay to let the poor die and kids suffer . But as awful as the 1930s were, they had greater humanity (for white women) and recognized that, if one outcome of the welfare system was mothers being able to be full-time moms, that would be fine .

Yes, the rationale was always ultimately to help the children primarily, not to give people the ability to experience the joy of parenting, and yes, it was in a sexist context, but I still think it’s important to see the way the rationale changed. People once accepted that it was okay if welfare let some people not have to enter the job market.

They will never once acknowledge that child support is an issue of responsibility to the child. It’s not a feminist issue.

I think this may have something to do with their constant conflation of alimony and child support (which I covered in my article on Stardusk/Thinking Ape). Barbar shows he knows the difference (Ape does not; he just acts like they are the same thing), yet argues as if there isn’t one. Indeed, he doesn’t even distinguish (in practice) alimony from property settlement (e.g. he screenshots an article about Michael Jordan’s $168 million divorce settlement, which was neither alimony nor child support, but a simple dissolution of partnership settlement that would be the same if Jordan split up with a business partner and they had to split the valuation of the business, and the scale of it is peculiar to American aristocracy, not anything average Joes encounter, where the issue is having a roof to live under, not which yacht you get the keys to).

By the by: Welfare systems in the United States were expressly started to allow women to be stay at home moms.

I’m not sure that’s entirely true. The Mother’s Pensions started with widowed mothers (thus, single moms) and then to abandoned women (also single moms, and then to reduce the necessity of women turning their children over to orphanages). They rarely included married women. So they were always targeting single mothers (and more particularly, children). And as such they really were just poverty programs (from the earliest of times the Christian church ran a pension system for widows on the same point, but manosphere Christians don’t believe their religion used to be Marxist).

One might ask why then there were no widower pensions, or children’s pensions for married parents, and the answer is sort of what you say, I think. But that didn’t last long. Within decades of mother’s pensions becoming widespread, the Social Security Administration created programs also serving impoverished and unemployed men, and absorbed the entire mother’s pension system. By at least the 1970s it included single fathers (in fact, “dads, grandparents, foster parents, and anyone raising kids under five can receive apply for support for the kids in their care”). The only funds exclusive to women were for pregnancy and nursing, which of course, only women do (if you adopt the manosphere rejection of transmen as men).

By the way, I am stealing “The Thanos Effect”. That’s such a good, succinct example of how miserable folks like that are. And Thanos, hilariously, has a level of emotional intelligence and cognitive brilliance most of them won’t have, and he still wasn’t happy because his massive character faults never let him actually do it.

1) The brazen hypocrisy of when they detect and assert bias. For bias against women, you can demonstrate not only an effect where all non-sexist causes are controlled for but smoking guns testifying to direct evidence and confirmed causal mechanisms, and they’ll keep insisting that it must be womens’ fault. For men, the mere presence of bias is enough . And they will flip their lid when you point out their hypocrisy and treat them as they treat women. “Oh, men don’t get custody of kids? Men are more likely to be abusers and rapists. Seems that’s fair!” “Men are way more criminal. Seems likely they should be treated worse in the criminal justice system!” Because they think of men as more human than women, and thus more deserving of being treated as individuals rather than as scions of a hivemind.

2) The hypocritical laziness in that same regard. They will castigate feminists (falsely) for lazy bias, but will then use it, and will dismiss you criticizing them as just overcomplicating the issue and wanting to argue.

3) The irrational contrarianism. Most of them justify themselves by insisting that they’re just pushing back against feminism, so it’s totally okay that they act like a defense attorney. But, of course, any feminist can point to the extreme misogyny in the real world and then say that they’re defending women from that. So why is it okay when they do it but not when feminists do it? Right, misogynistic hypocrisy.

4) Not understanding (at least when it’s not convenient) that more power translates to more responsibility. Most of their complaints are about men being treated as if they are powerful and thus potentially dangerous. The fact that the system sometimes holds middle-ranked people in the hierarchy accountable (usually by men holding other men accountable for things that harm men – e.g. child custody issues affect men whereas letting rapists get away with rape also serves men) is confused for bias against them. But it’s the expectation of power put onto men that warrants that. You can see this in how readily and trivially they dismiss male predisposition to criminality even though that signal is one of the most powerful. They whine that Bindel said men should be put into camps, but if they’re going to act like boys will be boys and high levels of rape are just built into men, the idea of treating them like they are an actual criminal underclass becomes extremely justified, in a way it just would never be for racial minorities.

5) Misunderstanding interactions of system. Men dying on the job is due to capitalism, not women. It doesn’t benefit women that men die on the job: In fact, it hurts them, since they would need that income (to say nothing of, you know, loving their husbands and not wanting them to die) . Much of the issue that “men” face in the courts is actually what poor and black men face. Rich men get to get away with horrific crimes. Meanwhile, even women at the top echelons of societies historically had incredibly little latitude, as virtually every queen in human history could attest.

6) The endless whining about child support. They will never once acknowledge that child support is an issue of responsibility to the child. It’s not a feminist issue.

By the by: Welfare systems in the United States were expressly started to allow women to be stay at home moms. That was explicitly discussed as a program directive. That idea only became viewed as a bad thing when black people got access to it. So that was expressly started because it was just assumed that men would be deadbeats and that women should be required to raise children, and the system finally had an ounce of compassion and rationality and made that easier. And now those systems are getting slammed, disproportionately harming women (even given that, yes, men are more likely to be homeless and the other things they cherry-pick).

Two things, Shaikh.

First:

It’s good to be self-aware of how much you are sharing in a relationship to avoid “being parasitic” (i.e. taking more than you give), just as it is good to be self-aware of how much you are getting (i.e. actually noticing all the things they do for you, all the benefits you are obtaining).

But don’t aim to be a “massive” net positive; that runs the risk of creating an imbalance that will doom the relationship (as you will wear out doing too much for too little). Aim for equal, but count everything (e.g. emotional labor counts; affirming a shared perception of reality counts; cuddling for shows counts; doing dishes (correctly) counts; taking your pet to the vet counts; jaunting out to get the others’ meds counts; etc.). And noticing counts (if one of you makes a lot of money while the other tackles a lot of housework, for example, they need to each notice and thus perceive the value of the trade).

Because this is actually, scientifically, one of the most important modulators of a good relationship: relationships collapse when a significant imbalance in trade occurs, and isn’t corrected (it’s then just a matter of time before implosion). The science also shows, that the collapse begins with contempt, which registers on faces and in body language before it does in words, which is why scientists can predict relationship longevity just by observing a couple interact with the sound turned off (per the work of John Gottman and others).

And here “trade” is not measured tit-for-tat or just financially, but in overall terms of needs met and burdens shared: see Reciprocity and Love and Unfair Division, or, as you may know, the books I recommend in my other article about this very point: Fair Play or Marriage of Equals or Equal Partners.

Second:

Note the problem isn’t “most men” are awful partners but “too many” men.

Statistically, “most men” are partnered (over 6o% of men) and most partnered people (women and men) are happy (even among partners with no plans to marry, who are only slightly less happy).

If, say, 70% of the 60% of partnered men are happily partnered, that’s 42%; and if half the unhappy men just have bad partners (and are not themselves bad partners), that’s 15% of 60% or 9%, which adds up to 51% of men. If half of unpartnered men are so only because of accidents of internal disposition, external circumstance, or societal inefficiencies in pairing people (and not because they are awful partners), then that’s 50% of 40%, or 20%, which adds up now to 71% of men are good partner material.

These numbers are within the ballpark of all data (except the use of “half” which is just a median guess). Yet that would mean the “bad partners” who are scaring women off from trusting any men are only 29% of men. Enough to ruin it for everyone else, but not an indictment of “all men.”

You can think of the problem as not “most men are turds” but “from the epistemic position of the average woman, all men are Schrödinger’s turd.” Which easily happens when close to 1 in every 3 men turns out awful, but all men “act” the same, so you can’t tell which you’re getting until after a lot of energy is spent. Hence it’s too much effort to find out for every prospect, so people have to resort to superstitions or other devices of mixed merit to decide who to invest test-energy on, because they have no reliable tools to do that otherwise, and only a limited amount of energy and time to spend.

Men face the same problem with women. It’s not unrealistic to think near a third of all women are just as awful, in some other or the same ways, yet it’s expensive to find out. But men have advantages in this (e.g. men aren’t punished for sleeping around or dating a lot and have much lower risk of being raped or abused and have been enculturated more toward, and thus may be more skilled in, risk-taking and independence, etc., which I suspect makes “testing out partners” less costly for men).

I think in my hypothetical “good” society that would be the case. Which is why it’s worth steering society that way even if we won’t survive to see the end result, we will see some slowly, and leave progress for the next generation to pick up and run with, and so on.

Also remember, this is all talk of averages and means; individuals vary. So some may be better off not partnered, others will benefit more from partnering than average, etc. And that will be true in all possible systems, because these are complex stochastic systems so their properties always bell-curve, i.e. humans are highly individualized, not hive drones. So what’s best for each individual may still vary.

But at the ethical level, I wouldn’t worry about whether you benefit more from partnering than your partner, because that (usually) isn’t going to be your fault.

The disparity comes from “the cloud” (i.e. culture). Imagine for example you were poor and you marry a rich woman who loves you: obviously you benefit more than her in some sense, but (a) she loves you, so obviously she doesn’t care and (b) this disparity is not your fault (the economic system created your poverty and her wealth and its unequal distribution; which, if she’s a good woman, she will completely understand and, if you are a good man, so will you).

Ultimately, the real incentive is all the emotional and physical sharing advantages of partnering which always exist for both. Everything else (like health, longevity, etc.) is just a consequence of the defective social system we are in.

So men and woman (on average) always have a sufficient incentive to partner in all possible systems. Because (a) we evolved as social animals (so the needs and benefits of partnering are baked in) and (b) physics (i.e. economies of cooperation and scale always exist because they reduce to physics, e.g. two people can cover more guard watches than one because no one can stay awake for ever, nor can one person do two things at once, but two can, and so on; likewise, pooled resources, not just time but also wisdom, money, perspective, skills, always outnumber separated resources).

Shaikh: And that’s exactly correct! It’s just that it can be difficult to take a risk on finding a good guy and find the right venues for them. It’s a very understandable risk calculus that’s being made. But you will absolutely see these women make very clear that they are perfectly confident there are good guys out there.

However…. the reality is that a lot of the good guys will actually be taken. When I think of my friends who are married, while I’m obviously biased, I’m also pretty clearly the kind of guy who isn’t going to be spending a lot of time hanging out with nutters, idiots and deeply uncompassionate people. And those guy friends who are married are all incredible people who have been wonderful, loyal partners, often at great cost. So, yeah, you can definitely see why women would start to worry about marriageable men given that they probably do know tons of good guys… who are gay (and probably in a dedicated relationship) or married.