Society needs women to make poor choices

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[Edits to add:
– Just like the economy needs some people to make poor spending choices to flourish through the free circulation of money from loosely controlled pockets
– To add insult to injury, even though women are the ones holding everything together by their largely one-sided sacrifices, people still treat us poorly
– Society knows that a certain percentage of men are going to be:
– domestic abusers
– sexually abusive
– financially abusive etc, however it is still in the best interests of society that these men are productive members of society where they can contribute, rather than, for instance, in jail where they might more rightfully belong where they will instead be a drain on society. So it is in society’s best interests to encourage women to put up with this negative behaviour as long as possible, to absorb the negative energy and save society from having to pay. Perhaps that is why the conviction rate for rape and sexual assault is so low; if everyone was sent to prison then there would be no-one far less people left to contribute to society.

It should be different in Christian marriages in that Christian spouses should be better. Howev er the rate of domestic violence in Christian marriages was approx 25% as of a few years ago. What a surprise that in Christian circles too wives are encouraged to endure, to pray, to keep trusting God, to “fight for their marriage”.
– Women’s standards are unrealistic? Women are often brought up to higher standards than their brothers, especially in traditional cultures. So for instance a woman will be brought up to know how to cook, how to clean. When women enter marriages, and especially when they embark on motherhood, if they are also working for pay outside the home they will often ask their husbands to step up in terms of house chores. But their husband are often not brought up this way, they often have not been practising domestic skills for 20 odd years as their wives often have been. So then it becomes “unrealistic” for a wife to ask of her husband what she might routine or unthinkingly do. It is such a common trope online that men will be poor at these types of domestic skills, or they will deliberately employ “weaponized incompetence” to get out of being asked a second time.
Women are often also brought up to higher standards of behaviour, expected to be well-behaved etc, while often boys are allowed to get away with things with a “boys will be boys” attitude. In this way too many men enter marriage with indisciplined behaviour whether that be cheating on their spouse or staying up all night playing video games etc. And then once again it might be considered “unrealistic” for a woman to have different expectations. And these are the ways that it might seem that women’s standards are unrealistic, when women merely expect their husbands to live at the level that they as women already live at. What is worse, is that men will judge women by these standards, and expect a woman to keep a clean home, to be faithful etc – while apparently not expecting to be held to these standards themselves, and crying that it is “unrealistic” for women to expect these same standards of them. Yes, this is a huge generalisation, but it does also happen to be true, and I’m sure that many people would accept that it is true. I came across a certain pertinent YouTube video a few weeks ago. I did not actually watch the video. However from the title it seemed like a man was making a case that female infidelity is worse than male infidelity. Seriously, the hypocrisy.

– Even where a man knows that he does not match up to your standards, because of his ego he will often still need to be the boss. So he will often try to put the woman down just to assert the non-fact that he’s the boss.

– Perhaps all of this is why society makes it out that getting married and having children are the highest accomplishment that a woman could achieve, and why society often treats unmarried women as if they are not worthy of respect. These sacrifices are what society needs of women to continue functioning so it withholds its respect for women who obediently comply as a way of coercing all of us into this.
So as women we are never going to hear the truth from wider society. Rather as women we can only expect to hear the truth from one another. Thankfully in our days we have the power of the internet and women are speaking up en masse to warn other women and our eyes are being opened.

– If you want us to marry you then please learn to treat us with dignity and respect, please learn to pull your own weight at home without needing to be nagged, directed, carefully instructed. If you don’t know how to do XYZ YouTube is a resource, please avail yourself of it instead of insisting that your busy wife should take time out of her already busy schedule to teach you. You are grown adults, please employ some adult initiative. Please also apply to yourselves the same high standards that you demand from us.
– If you want us to have children then please make it worth our while. We all know that motherhood is a sacrifice, it always has been, and I’m sure most women will of course be aware of that before they ever decide to have children. So we are not saying that we do not want to make any sacrifices. Rather we are asking that you please make this sacrifice worth our while. Please increase the minimum wage to an amount that is liveable and please also prioritise the creation of sufficient jobs so that even the poorest paid mother would be able to afford to house, feed and clothe her kids in dignity, even if the father is no longer in the picture. Please make enough decent, clean, dry, warm and affordable housing available for everyone. Please also work to resolve the climate crisis so that we are not knowingly bringing children onto a dying planet.

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Tonight, something finally crystallised into a succinct thought that I have trying to pinpoint and articulate for many years now. I cannot claim that this is purely my own thought because I realise that many women have essentially been saying this in all the YouTube “feminist” videos I have been watching over the last few years. It is this: for society to function in the most stable and sustainable way, it is necessary for women to make poor choices, that is, to act in ways that are emphatically not in our best interests. There are two ways that I am thinking of just now in which this is most glaringly true:
Marriage/romantic partnership and motherhood.

Let’s start first with motherhood. It was perhaps as recently ago as 3 years that I saw the very first post that I had ever seen on this topic of motherhood regret, in the Guardian newspaper, hinting that some women did not like being mothers, and regretted their choice to become mothers.
[I’ve found a similar post, but it was published a lot longer ago than 3 years. The following linked post was actually posted in 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/11/breaking-taboo-parents-who-regret-having-children]
Back then, it truly painted the idea of regretting motherhood as a taboo, something that you have to whisper at, not something that any respectable person could publicly admit to.

Since I read that post however, it’s like the floodgates have just opened, and there has been an absolute deluge of similar content from mothers openly stating that they regret becoming mothers. It’s like no-one even cares about the respectability anymore. People will jump on TikTok or YouTube, openly show their faces, and simply rant about how tired and frustrated they are in motherhood, although, almost invariably, they will preface their rants by emphasising that they do indeed love their children, deeply. Many women will admit that even though they deeply love their children, given the choice, if they could go back in time they would choose a childfree life.

Here is the thing. It seems as if motherhood is not in women’s best interests. Or at least this seems to be what these hordes of exhausted women are suggesting. They seem to be suggesting, or outright stating, that the fulfilment that they get from motherhood, the deep unconditional love that they receive from their kids does not make up for the sacrifice that it entails. I think that circumstances in our times are different from how they may have been historically. Motherhood would likely always have entailed sacrifices, but because of conditions in our day and age like the breakdown of community across the Western world, what may have been difficult but worth it a generation or so ago suddenly presents as being too difficult and not truly worth it in our times. And that’s without taking into account the huge financial cost of bringing up children.

And yet society requires women to keep making this sacrifice. Why? So that it would have a steady supply of workers to support the economy via their taxes and to pay the increasing social welfare bill for ageing populations across the developed world. And furthermore society also requires women to carry on doing this for free because as it is economies are struggling. The unpaid labour of women globally apparently would have a monetary value exceeding trillions of dollars if paid for. If economies cannot balance the books now as it is, where would we expect them to find extra trillions of dollars to compensate women fairly for their unpaid child-rearing labour including cooking, cleaning, childcare, laundry etc? Clearly that is not going to happen, so women are just going to be required to keep doing it for free.

So this is one example: motherhood appears to not be in the best interests of women, at least not in our day and age, not with global economic conditions. But all the same, for the sake of providing workers for the economy, society requires women to keep doing it.

Secondly, relationships. This should logically be discussed first, but I found the arguments a little tricky mentally. I will just try to state it as it is:
Apologies, this might seem like a big generalisation but I will say it anyway: In short, to be utterly candid, society needs the majority of men to be partnered up or married. Otherwise the alternative is that there will be lots of sexually frustrated men running around, and they will channel their frustration into destructive or violent ends. Like for instance there have been a few incels over the last few years who have committed mass murders or mass shootings. To make matters worse, Western society is highly saturated with sexual imagery. Pornography is readily available online. All these mean that it is all too easy for someone to generate sexual yearnings and feed them to fever pitch without having a legitimate outlet for their yearnings, ie a willing spouse or partner, which might then cause them to lash out violently.

Even looking beyond sexual matters, a common topic that I have come across online is this: that in the US many men are dropping out of the workforce, preferring instead to stay home and play videogames. It turns out that for many men the hope of a relationship is the biggest driver that causes them to participate in the workforce and in society generally. Otherwise they are happy to drop out, and just sit in their parents’ basement and achieve nothing with their lives. However it is becoming harder to successfully get into relationships and more and more people are remaining single. Society cannot afford to lose the financial contribution that these men would make, especially as they would tend to earn more than and so pay more in taxes than the women who are not dropping out, at least not at the same rate. Furthermore, when these men stop contributing to the financial system they will often become takers instead, drawing on social security or unemployment benefits. So not only does the economy lose the financial contribution that they would have made, but the effect is doubled as now they also have to pay out to them.
So the easiest, time-tested solution to all this is to simply get these men married off.

But here’s the thing though: another common trope is that many men, or most men, would not make amazing spouses. Many of the women who are married complain about how awful their husbands are, how hard their marriages are, that they are essentially “married single mothers” ie essentially single mothers in that they are doing all the work, but technically, there is a husband in the picture.
It has now gotten so bad, there has been such an unending flood of posts of women relating horror stories from their own relationships, that some women have decided that all men are bad, and that no man is worth marrying. This has resulted in the 4B movement sweeping across the developing world from its origins in South Korea that practises zero intimate connection with men: no marriage, no childbirth, no dating, no sex. As it is South Korea has the lowest or one of the lowest birth rates in the whole world and everyone is panicking about the fact that the population is dying out. But what do you expect? From my YouTube viewings South Korean society is deeply misogynistic and there is a significant rape culture there. So when you as a society treat women so badly why are you surprised that they then refuse to cooperate by willfully enslaving themselves in motherhood for the supposed betterment of that same society?

So then, if society requires the majority of men to be married, but women are angrily testifying that most men are not good “husband material” then that means that society requires us women to act against our best interests by marrying these men who will not be good for us just so that we can prevent negative displays of energy for the sake of society and instead encourage them to be productive members of society.
So yeah, these men are bad, but shrug – they still need to be married off! So guess who is going to be required to make that sacrifice? Not me, that’s for sure! There is no way I am going to endure the nonsense of a poor spouse, even for the sake of “society”. If you know that you need these men to be married for the stability and sustainability of marriage, then you need to bring up your sons to be better, to be the kind of good husbands that women would actually want to marry, the kind who would share the burden of childcare to make it more worthwhile for the wife. Otherwise, if you appeal to us that we need to make these sacrifices for the sake of “society” I too would shrug my shoulders and say “Not my problem!” And increasingly, as the global 4B movement shows, many women are saying the same thing.