Male perception of women in relationships

[Corraleno]

1 hour ago, Bluegoat said:

These ideas around the anthropological understanding of monogamous marriage didn't arise to explain the incels, which are a pretty small and recent blip in history.  You seem to be suggesting that it should be invalidated as a theory because it might make it sound like they have a point.  Whatever academic literature there is, we can just say, sorry guys, this idea has to be untrue because it might seem to justify bad behaviour, lets just let it go?

No that is not what I'm saying. It's really not a "theory" that restricting marriage to one-female-per-male means that more males potentially get paired with a female; that's a definition not a theory. The "theoretical" link that Peterson and his ilk are trying to make is that sexual monogamy reduces male competition for sex, competition for sex causes anger and violence, therefore the cause of male anger and violence in modern society is lack of sex.

 

1 hour ago, Bluegoat said:

Would the incels be angry if they were having sex?  Who knows?  They are I suspect largely people who would be a problem population in any case.  But the question of how we deal with non-reproducing members, or no sexually active members, in society, is one that many societies face, using different approaches.  Why would someone being interviewed about them avoid talking about that?

"Who knows?" So it's possible that men who sit around fantasizing about raping and murdering women, who advocate the forced "redistribution" of sexual partners so that every man would get the sex he's entitled to, might be normal, functional members of society if only they got laid? You don't think the reason they're not having sex is because they have such incredibly dysfunctional and dehumanizing ideas about women? This basically makes women responsible for male fantasies of rape and murder, because if women would just give men what they want, then the men wouldn't want to rape and murder them.

 

 

[Corraleno]

1 hour ago, Bluegoat said:

You keep saying he says women should have no choices around who they marry, but that is actually the opposite of what he's saying in those quotes, as a few people have pointed out!  You don't have to agree with him, but at least disagree with something he's really saying.  

No, as I explicitly spelled out in a previous post, he is saying that if women want the right to "discriminate" in terms of choosing their sexual partners, then they have to accept being discriminated against in other areas, or admit that they are hypocrites who want to discriminate against men but refuse to accept being discriminated against by men. He is trying to reframe the discernment that each individual woman uses in choosing a mate as "discrimination," and pretending that it is the same thing as systemic social, economic, and political discrimination against women, minorities, LGBT, etc. He isn't actually suggesting that women give up the right to choose their partners, he is saying that since women have this biologically-based "power" over men, women need to accept that men have certain biologically-based powers over them and stop complaining they are being "discriminated against." He is being sarcastic:  "If you women really want to eliminate discrimination, are you willing to give up your right to discriminate against men? Of course not — so shut up."

[Rosie_0801]

If the incels had sex lives, they'd find something else that everyone else has, and they don't, to be angry and punish women about. No woman is going to be on honeymoon level behaviour forever, no amount of sex is going to cure bitterness and when a man is attracted to something he hates/fears, it's only a matter of time before it all hits the fan.

[Corraleno]

2 hours ago, gardenmom5 said:

I've seen some articles suggesting this is starting to happen in china, and it's a problem with which they're going to have to deal.  all those aborted baby girls left a surplus of males.   those males have grown up - and they can't find gf/wives because there just aren't enough to go around, and they don't have the standing to be more desirable than enough males to find a partner.

The result has been a huge upsurge in human trafficking, with young women being kidnapped from Vietnam, Indonesia, Kazakstan, Myanmar, and other areas. Apparently Indonesia is one of the most preferred areas now, because it's harder for them to get home if they escape. Another "solution" to the problem is families "adopting" girls from orphanages, using them as servants for a few years, and then trading them with other families as wives for their sons.

Despite the idea that competition for mates is primarily driven by sex, and that lack of sexual fulfillment is what makes men dangerous, the primary motivation for kidnapping women seems to be economic rather than sexual. The kidnapped women are often put to work in factories to provide income, and in some cases once they produce a son they are sold off to other men like a used car. Having a son means the man will have someone to care for him in old age. A working adult can pay for sex when they want it, but a feeble old man can't pay someone to look after him.

[EmseB]

1 hour ago, Corraleno said:

No, as I explicitly spelled out in a previous post, he is saying that if women want the right to "discriminate" in terms of choosing their sexual partners, then they have to accept being discriminated against in other areas, or admit that they are hypocrites who want to discriminate against men but refuse to accept being discriminated against by men. He is trying to reframe the discernment that each individual woman uses in choosing a mate as "discrimination," and pretending that it is the same thing as systemic social, economic, and political discrimination against women, minorities, LGBT, etc. He isn't actually suggesting that women give up the right to choose their partners, he is saying that since women have this biologically-based "power" over men, women need to accept that men have certain biologically-based powers over them and stop complaining they are being "discriminated against." He is being sarcastic:  "If you women really want to eliminate discrimination, are you willing to give up your right to discriminate against men? Of course not — so shut up."

Can you please explain where you are getting the context to interpret this one tweet? I mean, I get the sense that JP would object to your characterization of his views (but maybe not, idk) but in any case I can't find where you are pulling all of this context and interpretation from, and I keep trying to understand how you're connecting these dots but it seems like it's very obvious to you what he clearly means...and I could see, depending on what the tweet references or is in response to or what follows, the meaning could be very different. I get that you don't have a thread...but also it makes no sense as a stand alone statement apropos of nothing and without some other writing or thoughts on the subject.

[EmseB]

2 hours ago, Corraleno said:

 

 

"Who knows?" So it's possible that men who sit around fantasizing about raping and murdering women, who advocate the forced "redistribution" of sexual partners so that every man would get the sex he's entitled to, might be normal, functional members of society if only they got laid? You don't think the reason they're not having sex is because they have such incredibly dysfunctional and dehumanizing ideas about women? 

 

 

I think that's precisely what bluegoat said in the rest of the post that you quoted but didn't bold. 

I think the "who knows?" is the idea that no one could possibly know how a mental illness or personality could develop in other circumstances or with other experiences, but ALSO probably these dudes would be problematic in one form or another even if it didn't have to do with women. Not that women are responsible for incels' views or keeping them sane or something. At least that's what I think bluegoat was saying.

Edited July 15, 2019 by EmseB

[Corraleno]

Peterson on the way crazy feminist harpies are attacking male culture:

Quote

I'm defenseless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that I would use against a man [i.e. violence] are forbidden to me. So I don't know — like it seems to me that it isn't men that have to stand up and say "Enough of this!" even though that is what they should do. It seems to me that it's sane women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters, and say enough of that, enough man-hating, enough pathology, enough bringing disgrace on us as a gender. But the problem there is that most of the women I know who are sane are busy doing sane things, right? They don't have time, or maybe even the interest, to go after their crazy harpy sisters and so I don't see any regulating force for that terrible femininity. And it seems to me to be invading the culture and undermining the masculine power of the culture in a way that I think is fatal.

Edited July 15, 2019 by Corraleno

[Katy]

The problem with JP is that his ideas are too complex for soundbites or twitter.  If you listen to an entire speech, or read an entire book you'll find that he's speaking in deep nuance and using symbolism.  He also speaks in generalities and with  facts regarding those generalities.  It's in applying generalizations about populations to specifics where he seems offensive. I actually like him, but it took probably 20+ hours of reading his books for me to come to that conclusion.  Before that I suspected he was probably awful because of awful little clips like that.  But I've never listened to an entire unexcerpted interview when he didn't account for either for the nuance of generalizations not being true for any given individual.

He speaks of religious myth in the sort of academic, it's not literally true but it IS symbolically true for everyone sort of way.  He hasn't admitted being anything but agnostic or atheist (at least in the past), but I suspect he IS religious but hides it because of academic discrimination. For one thing, in some interview I saw on YouTube he outright said no academic in their right mind would admit being religious in this era.  And in his shorter, more accessible book 12 Rules for Life (or something like that), he did an entire chapter on status seeking behavior, showing that even lobsters have status seeking behavior, and comparing it to some verses that Jesus said regarding the beatitudes.  The end of that chapter he concluded that you know someone must really be the son of God if his edicts are universally true, even about lobsters.

When JP was young he was extremely liberal, atheist and had a lot of existential angst about nuclear weapons and the cold war.  He went on a search for the meaning of life and found something in Jung. He still leans liberal (contrary to popular opinion), but with a good deal of pragmatism.  IE: Do what actually works, not what makes voters feel good.

I've heard somewhere that every generation over corrects the mistakes of the previous generation.  My conclusion is that the reason JP is so popular among young men is that he's doing exactly that. The consequences of millennials being fully raised in a self esteem movement is that they all think they are great and can do anything.  Then they get into the real world with economic issues and political issues that have no easy answers and everything is frustrating and hookup culture, all of which causes existential angst.  And here comes JP who tells them that contrary to what they think, they aren't special.  That hard problems haven't been solved yet because they are hard problems, not because no one has been special enough to solve them before. So take responsibility for yourself.  Clean your room.  Get an education.  Find one person to have a committed relationship with.  Have a family.  And maybe after 20 years of struggling to be good at that you'll be wise enough to solve hard problems.  But right now you are young and you don't know anything.

[TABmom]

40 minutes ago, Katy said:

The problem with JP is that his ideas are too complex for soundbites or twitter.  If you listen to an entire speech, or read an entire book you'll find that he's speaking in deep nuance and using symbolism.  He also speaks in generalities and with  facts regarding those generalities.  It's in applying generalizations about populations to specifics where he seems offensive. I actually like him, but it took probably 20+ hours of reading his books for me to come to that conclusion.  Before that I suspected he was probably awful because of awful little clips like that.  But I've never listened to an entire unexcerpted interview when he didn't account for either for the nuance of generalizations not being true for any given individual.

He speaks of religious myth in the sort of academic, it's not literally true but it IS symbolically true for everyone sort of way.  He hasn't admitted being anything but agnostic or atheist (at least in the past), but I suspect he IS religious but hides it because of academic discrimination. For one thing, in some interview I saw on YouTube he outright said no academic in their right mind would admit being religious in this era.  And in his shorter, more accessible book 12 Rules for Life (or something like that), he did an entire chapter on status seeking behavior, showing that even lobsters have status seeking behavior, and comparing it to some verses that Jesus said regarding the beatitudes.  The end of that chapter he concluded that you know someone must really be the son of God if his edicts are universally true, even about lobsters.

When JP was young he was extremely liberal, atheist and had a lot of existential angst about nuclear weapons and the cold war.  He went on a search for the meaning of life and found something in Jung. He still leans liberal (contrary to popular opinion), but with a good deal of pragmatism.  IE: Do what actually works, not what makes voters feel good.

I've heard somewhere that every generation over corrects the mistakes of the previous generation.  My conclusion is that the reason JP is so popular among young men is that he's doing exactly that. The consequences of millennials being fully raised in a self esteem movement is that they all think they are great and can do anything.  Then they get into the real world with economic issues and political issues that have no easy answers and everything is frustrating and hookup culture, all of which causes existential angst.  And here comes JP who tells them that contrary to what they think, they aren't special.  That hard problems haven't been solved yet because they are hard problems, not because no one has been special enough to solve them before. So take responsibility for yourself.  Clean your room.  Get an education.  Find one person to have a committed relationship with.  Have a family.  And maybe after 20 years of struggling to be good at that you'll be wise enough to solve hard problems.  But right now you are young and you don't know anything.

I agree with this. I had no idea who JP was until I picked up his book 12 Rules of Life because it was on the new shelf at the library and it looked interesting. I read the book twice and actually took notes. I was a JP fangirl for awhile. Now, I don't think he's right about every single thing he says. The quote earlier about women needing to reign other women in being an example of a place where I disagree with him. But he has a lot of great, very practical advice. I think he is taken out of context a LOT. 

[shawthorne44]

19 hours ago, Bluegoat said:

 

Im not reading that the same way at all.  I think he is saying women are supposed to be making a choice based on what they would think would make a good mate - his post is suggesting they shouldn't want to give that up.  But that embracing it honestly means understanding that they are making an evaluation that has a very practical element.  As opposed to a lot of the posts we see in this thread which have said its not only untrue but kind of offensive.

That is how I read it too. 
Note, I have no opinion on him. 

[EmseB]

4 hours ago, Corraleno said:

Peterson on the way crazy feminist harpies are attacking male culture:

I...don't disagree with that quote either, depending, again, on further context. But as it stands, I can see the point. There are few of brands of feminism or groups that call themselves feminists that I think are ultimately damaging to women as a whole. I'm not the only woman who thinks so. I don't see him talking about damaging male culture specifically so much as a certain brand of feminism being bad for women and probably society as a whole. I know you and I would disagree on that, but I don't see his statement as beyond the pale.

[Bluegoat]

I think if you look at culture in academia right now, in the arts and social sciences, it's difficult to conclude that there has not been a near total breakdown of academic integrity on the basis that how people feel is more important.

I have actually seen academics call other academics criticising the rational basis of their ideas mean and hateful.

Being a woman, and a rationalist, I don't really like to identify that with women, and there are certainly men who use that kind of approach to get ahead.  But is that a more feminie approach?    I'd not have charachterised it that way, and I don't like the sound of it, but that is really irrelevent., the question is, is it true?

 It's harder to argue when he's being critisized for misogyny largely for seeming not nice and not toeing the line.

[SKL]

13 minutes ago, Bluegoat said:

I think if you look at culture in academia right now, in the arts and social sciences, it's difficult to conclude that there has not been a near total breakdown of academic integrity on the basis that how people feel is more important.

I have actually seen academics call other academics criticising the rational basis of their ideas mean and hateful.

Being a woman, and a rationalist, I don't really like to identify that with women, and there are certainly men who use that kind of approach to get ahead.  But is that a more feminie approach?    I'd not have charachterised it that way, and I don't like the sound of it, but that is really irrelevent., the question is, is it true?

 It's harder to argue when he's being critisized for misogyny largely for seeming not nice and not toeing the line.

As a professional / educated woman in a man's field, born in the 1960s, I think there was/is a place for the touchy feely stuff as a balance against the "old boy's club" type of training.  To help transition from all-male / aggressive alpha type management to a more inclusive arena where both men and women could compete more fairly, it was/is good to (a) admit that men and women are different and (b) point out the benefits of what women can better (on average) bring to the table.  To recognize that clients / customers / culturally different business partners / younger employees include many individuals/groups who would rather deal with a different kind of corporate personality than what the "old boys' club" typically produced.  That you'll actually be more successful in business if your organization nurtures certain "softer skills" up to a point.

The previous options were for women to (a) pretend they were men - dress like them, drink like them, talk like them etc. - or (b) work practically around the clock so that their numerical results were so exceptional that they had to be noticed.  Neither of which is sustainable or satisfying in the long run.

I have no doubt that this "balance" thing has been taken too far in some cases.  But it has worked well in others.  The fact that we value what women (on average) offer does not mean we expect men to act like women or devalue masculine qualities that have been helpful throughout history.  There seems to be a lot of confusion on this point.  😛

Edited July 15, 2019 by SKL

[brehon]

1 hour ago, Bluegoat said:

I think if you look at culture in academia right now, in the arts and social sciences, it's difficult to conclude that there has not been a near total breakdown of academic integrity on the basis that how people feel is more important.

I have actually seen academics call other academics criticising the rational basis of their ideas mean and hateful.

Being a woman, and a rationalist, I don't really like to identify that with women, and there are certainly men who use that kind of approach to get ahead.  But is that a more feminie approach?    I'd not have charachterised it that way, and I don't like the sound of it, but that is really irrelevent., the question is, is it true?

 It's harder to argue when he's being critisized for misogyny largely for seeming not nice and not toeing the line.

One of my dd’s is very interested in the classics. I was helping her with some research on different university classics programs and stumbled on a recent major (? maybe) classics conference where one or more sessions apparently degraded into, um, a less than professional verbal melee. After the conference one side was upset for basically the reason you just mentioned - hard questions shut down and people blackballed for asking them. 

Now, I obviously don’t know the players or issues involved and I don’t know who was “right”. Your post reminded me of reading about that incident. 

[KathyBC]

Edited: Pretty much already been said.

As is getting to be a habit,  I'll throw my first instinct out there before reading the rest of the responses. But at least initially these responses seem to be hung up on appearance. I think Rogan and Peterson are using shorthand, since they have discussed this topic before, to reference females looking for someone who would be a superior provider to future children. One class up, then, could also refer to intelligence, ability, education, finances, or just the physical work ethic indicated by a biological reaction to a strong jaw. 

Edited July 15, 2019 by KathyBC

[gardenmom5]

14 hours ago, Rosie_0801 said:

If the incels had sex lives, they'd find something else that everyone else has, and they don't, to be angry and punish women about. No woman is going to be on honeymoon level behaviour forever, no amount of sex is going to cure bitterness and when a man is attracted to something he hates/fears, it's only a matter of time before it all hits the fan.

people who are perpetually angry about something, when given what they claim to want - will proceed to find something else to be perpetually angry about.

 if they were getting some - they'd just find something else to be angry about - because the problem is: they're angry.  period.  this isn't even about their anger directed at women, that's just a focus/excuse.  if it wasn't that, it would be something else.

[Corraleno]

3 hours ago, Katy said:

The problem with JP is that his ideas are too complex for soundbites or twitter.  If you listen to an entire speech, or read an entire book you'll find that he's speaking in deep nuance and using symbolism.  He also speaks in generalities and with  facts regarding those generalities.  It's in applying generalizations about populations to specifics where he seems offensive. I actually like him, but it took probably 20+ hours of reading his books for me to come to that conclusion.  Before that I suspected he was probably awful because of awful little clips like that.  But I've never listened to an entire unexcerpted interview when he didn't account for either for the nuance of generalizations not being true for any given individual.

He speaks of religious myth in the sort of academic, it's not literally true but it IS symbolically true for everyone sort of way.  He hasn't admitted being anything but agnostic or atheist (at least in the past), but I suspect he IS religious but hides it because of academic discrimination. For one thing, in some interview I saw on YouTube he outright said no academic in their right mind would admit being religious in this era.  And in his shorter, more accessible book 12 Rules for Life (or something like that), he did an entire chapter on status seeking behavior, showing that even lobsters have status seeking behavior, and comparing it to some verses that Jesus said regarding the beatitudes.  The end of that chapter he concluded that you know someone must really be the son of God if his edicts are universally true, even about lobsters.

When JP was young he was extremely liberal, atheist and had a lot of existential angst about nuclear weapons and the cold war.  He went on a search for the meaning of life and found something in Jung. He still leans liberal (contrary to popular opinion), but with a good deal of pragmatism.  IE: Do what actually works, not what makes voters feel good.

I have watched a lot of his videos and his ideas aren't "complex and nuanced" so much as they are a rambling mishmash of Jungian psychology, pseudo-science, self-help, and anti-liberalism/anti-feminism. (The idea that he is a liberal is absurd — he rails against liberalism as a Marxist/postmodernist/feminist/nihilist conspiracy.) 

He claims that women were much better off in the 1950s and 60s, when they stayed home. He blames stagnating wages and income inequality on women for insisting on careers, claiming that the reason wages are so low now is because women doubled the workforce and halved the wages, so now it takes 2 incomes to support a family. If women would just stay home and be good mothers, as they were meant to be, then men could earn enough to support them. He claims that women working will eventually push men out of work, and "that's where we are headed." He says that women are already pushing men out of college, and that "in 10 years there will be no men left in college, except in STEM," and then women will be really sorry because they won't have anyone educated or employed to marry.

The fact that women are symbolically associated with darkness and chaos and evil, while men are associated with light and order and goodness, is not, according to him, a tool which the patriarchy has used to oppress women for millennia, it is based in biological reality. There's a reason women are associated with witches and swamps, there's a reason it was a woman who ate the apple and caused all subsequent chaos and disorder. Women are just naturally more neurotic and less competent than men, and their attempts to overthrow the patriarchy refuse to acknowledge that patriarchy is based on the superior competence of men. Overthrowing the patriarchy equals chaos overcoming order, which means the end of society as we know it.

The self-help stuff, urging young people to get off their butts and get jobs, is not offensive in and of itself. But he presents self-help and political action as antithetical processes, and urges young people to forget about working for social change. Forget about trying to end discrimination (which doest exist!), forget about fighting for female equality (which only leads to chaos!), forget about trying to address growing poverty and income inequality. Just be a nice guy, work hard, be a good husband and father, and everything will work out. That is not complex and nuanced, it is naive and simplistic.

 

[Corraleno]

18 minutes ago, gardenmom5 said:

if they were getting some - they'd just find something else to be angry about - because the problem is: they're angry.  period.  this isn't even about their anger directed at women, that's just a focus/excuse.  if it wasn't that, it would be something else.

Yes, exactly, and the claim that lack of sex causes anger and violence only serves to validate in these guys' minds that focusing their anger and violence on women is justified. It ignores the fact that the vast majority of men who are angry and/or violent are not incels, and the vast majority of men who are not having sex are not obsessed with the idea of raping/killing/punishing women for their own unhappiness. 

[EmseB]

1 hour ago, Corraleno said:

Just be a nice guy, work hard, be a good husband and father, and everything will work out. That is not complex and nuanced, it is naive and simplistic.

 

I guess I am naive and simplistic then because, yeah, I think those things would solve a lot of problems, especially relating to poverty and misogyny among other things. Not the worst I've been called, I guess, lol.

[Sneezyone]

1 hour ago, Corraleno said:

I have watched a lot of his videos and his ideas aren't "complex and nuanced" so much as they are a rambling mishmash of Jungian psychology, pseudo-science, self-help, and anti-liberalism/anti-feminism. (The idea that he is a liberal is absurd — he rails against liberalism as a Marxist/postmodernist/feminist/nihilist conspiracy.) 

He claims that women were much better off in the 1950s and 60s, when they stayed home. He blames stagnating wages and income inequality on women for insisting on careers, claiming that the reason wages are so low now is because women doubled the workforce and halved the wages, so now it takes 2 incomes to support a family. If women would just stay home and be good mothers, as they were meant to be, then men could earn enough to support them. He claims that women working will eventually push men out of work, and "that's where we are headed." He says that women are already pushing men out of college, and that "in 10 years there will be no men left in college, except in STEM," and then women will be really sorry because they won't have anyone educated or employed to marry.

The fact that women are symbolically associated with darkness and chaos and evil, while men are associated with light and order and goodness, is not, according to him, a tool which the patriarchy has used to oppress women for millennia, it is based in biological reality. There's a reason women are associated with witches and swamps, there's a reason it was a woman who ate the apple and caused all subsequent chaos and disorder. Women are just naturally more neurotic and less competent than men, and their attempts to overthrow the patriarchy refuse to acknowledge that patriarchy is based on the superior competence of men. Overthrowing the patriarchy equals chaos overcoming order, which means the end of society as we know it.

The self-help stuff, urging young people to get off their butts and get jobs, is not offensive in and of itself. But he presents self-help and political action as antithetical processes, and urges young people to forget about working for social change. Forget about trying to end discrimination (which doest exist!), forget about fighting for female equality (which only leads to chaos!), forget about trying to address growing poverty and income inequality. Just be a nice guy, work hard, be a good husband and father, and everything will work out. That is not complex and nuanced, it is naive and simplistic.

 

 

I love these conversations. Both the people/ideas being debated and, often, those speaking assume a non-working, white spouse and white male as the ‘norm’/default in some halcyon, bygone era to which they’d like us ALL to return. That era never existed for huge swaths of American men and women.

Edited July 15, 2019 by Sneezyone

[gardenmom5]

1 hour ago, Corraleno said:

Yes, exactly, and the claim that lack of sex causes anger and violence only serves to validate in these guys' minds that focusing their anger and violence on women is justified. It ignores the fact that the vast majority of men who are angry and/or violent are not incels, and the vast majority of men who are not having sex are not obsessed with the idea of raping/killing/punishing women for their own unhappiness. 

considering how violent towards women a lot of p*rn can get, ….  I'm willing to lay odds they really get off on that kind...

 

[gardenmom5]

1 hour ago, StellaM said:

And honestly, I dunno, but if most men concentrated on cleaning up their metaphorical rooms, the world would probably be a better place.  

I've been attacked by some as attacking women - but I really get angry when people talk as though only men were the problem.  I was ABUSED BY A WOMAN, who was ENABLED by another woman.  my grandmother was a misogynist - and I won't even go into how she treated her female progeny, other than it was incredibly debasing.  (I always felt loved and valued by my grandfather and my father.  it. was. her.)  

[Corraleno]

 

10 minutes ago, Sneezyone said:

I love these conversations. Both the people/ideas being debated and, often, those speaking assume a non-working, white spouse and white male as the ‘norm’/default in some halcyon, bygone era to which they’d like us ALL to return. That era never existed for huge swaths of American men and women.

Yes exactly — implying that if all of the (overwhelmingly white, middle-class) males in his audience would just get jobs and be good dads, then society would sort itself out, does not even begin to address problems of systematic racism and misogyny, or problems with failing education, ever-increasing income inequality, and lack of healthcare. It's incredibly patronizing. 

He claims that the reason there are so many more men in positions of power is because men are willing to work so much harder and put in so many more hours. He loves to use the example of a high-powered law firm to illustrate why there are more men at the top — women want to quit and have babies, which is the normal sane thing to do, so all the power and money ends up with a handful of hyper-ambitious men who are willing to work 80 hrs/wk. As if elite law firms are a representative microcosm of the entire political, social, and economic structure!

There are plenty of men in power who don't work remotely those kinds of hours, and plenty of women and POC working 80 hrs/wk in shit jobs who will never have the kind of power and financial security that certain men assume as a birthright. "Warning" women that by going to college and working they are pushing men out of the workforce and out of higher education, and they are going to regret this when they have no one suitable to marry, accomplishes what exactly? Are women supposed to say "Well I'd really love to go to college and have a career, but I'd better just find a nice husband and stay home instead, so men can take their rightful place in positions of power, and society won't dissolve into the chaotic abyss of femininity"?

 

[EmseB]

I like to think I read outside my bubble a fair bit, but men working hard and taking responsibility for their lives being problematic (nay! emblematic of all the other ills in the world) has not hit my inbox yet.

[Bluegoat]

5 hours ago, SKL said:

As a professional / educated woman in a man's field, born in the 1960s, I think there was/is a place for the touchy feely stuff as a balance against the "old boy's club" type of training.  To help transition from all-male / aggressive alpha type management to a more inclusive arena where both men and women could compete more fairly, it was/is good to (a) admit that men and women are different and (b) point out the benefits of what women can better (on average) bring to the table.  To recognize that clients / customers / culturally different business partners / younger employees include many individuals/groups who would rather deal with a different kind of corporate personality than what the "old boys' club" typically produced.  That you'll actually be more successful in business if your organization nurtures certain "softer skills" up to a point.

The previous options were for women to (a) pretend they were men - dress like them, drink like them, talk like them etc. - or (b) work practically around the clock so that their numerical results were so exceptional that they had to be noticed.  Neither of which is sustainable or satisfying in the long run.

I have no doubt that this "balance" thing has been taken too far in some cases.  But it has worked well in others.  The fact that we value what women (on average) offer does not mean we expect men to act like women or devalue masculine qualities that have been helpful throughout history.  There seems to be a lot of confusion on this point.  😛

 

I think more stereotypical male and female ways of communicating can be valuable.  When I was in the military, I found that my more typically female type of communication wasn't always effective.  I didn't assume it was wrong .  The conclusion I came to after I thought a bit about it was that in some situations, it wasn't useful - it was better to adopt the male style, it was more direct and that was better for those situations.  But in many cases I felt that the female style was actually better in some ways, so I carried on with it, keeping in mind I would have to take extra care to make sure I was being understood by my largely male colleagues.

That's not really what I think is going on in academia though.  It's integral to it that people can argue about their ideas in a very clear and specific, and "not nice" way.  That people can be passionate in defense or their views, and that they are held by their peers to a standard of evidence and argument that isn't about making them feel included or nice or validated.

If that's too masculine - well, that's one point for Peterson, isn't it?  

[Bluegoat]

Is it actually news to anyone that a lot of these things are in fact related to women entering employment in a fuller way, or to women's particular biology?

It is the case that women earn and advance as well as men, sometimes better, in careers, up until they have kids.  Clearly having kids makes a difference.  It is also the case that even in similar careers, women are more likely to choose job situations that offer more flexibility, but often are paid less.  This all has an effect in who gets to the boardrooms.

It's undoubtably the case that the rise of the two salary family has affected the power of wages, notably on house pricing.  It's also the case, speaking of the ongoing ork of working class women over the years, that this has put those families in an even worse position comparatively, since they were already two-income families just to get by.  They also typically are the pople who take on what used to be the work of the middle class women.  It's also the case, objectively, that women are outperforming men in university, and that one of the most vulnerable groups in the workforce are unskilled males.

The changes in the make-up of the workforce have had mixed results for everyone, and that is not wrong to point out, and its not some huge sign that someone is evil if they don't think they were very positive.  There is something very odd going on when pointingout that someone has a different view of a social change must mean they are horrible and beyond the pale.

Unlike JP, I'm a leftist. (And yes, he is absolutely a classical liberal, liberalism is not left or Marxist.) I think the main effect of bringing all women into the workforce was to commoditise a larger proportion of human life, which is to say, advance the reach of capitalism.  It was a way for those at the top, the capitalists, to get access to the value of women's labour as well as men's.  For capitalism to claim more ground for the market too, because not only was the labour of career women now something that could be harvested, all the domestic tasks being taken over by paid labour were as well.  Quite a coup, really.

Obviously JP and I would differ significantly about this.  But I am not going to point to him saying something that modern progressives are uncomfortable about and demonise him about it just because its not what he is supposed to think.

[Bluegoat]

40 minutes ago, EmseB said:

I like to think I read outside my bubble a fair bit, but men working hard and taking responsibility for their lives being problematic (nay! emblematic of all the other ills in the world) has not hit my inbox yet.

 

It's pretty weird really.

I read an interesting article the other day about an increase in religious vocations after years of decline.  And in very orthodox orders especially, with habits ad such.  Ad a similar interest in orthodoxy by the young in other religions. This is in the west. 

I think a lo of young people are craving some ind of real structure for how to live.  

A lot of these young men - mostly who are not incels but just young lost men, on the one hand are looked down upon as unreformed and useless.  But somehow it's not ok to give them some guidance or tell them to start with the simple stuff.  Like it doesn't count if they don't discover it themselves.

It's like a bad elementary school math program.

[Rosie_0801]

4 hours ago, Corraleno said:

I have watched a lot of his videos and his ideas aren't "complex and nuanced" so much as they are a rambling mishmash of Jungian psychology, pseudo-science, self-help, and anti-liberalism/anti-feminism. (The idea that he is a liberal is absurd — he rails against liberalism as a Marxist/postmodernist/feminist/nihilist conspiracy.) 

He claims that women were much better off in the 1950s and 60s, when they stayed home. He blames stagnating wages and income inequality on women for insisting on careers, claiming that the reason wages are so low now is because women doubled the workforce and halved the wages, so now it takes 2 incomes to support a family. If women would just stay home and be good mothers, as they were meant to be, then men could earn enough to support them. He claims that women working will eventually push men out of work, and "that's where we are headed." He says that women are already pushing men out of college, and that "in 10 years there will be no men left in college, except in STEM," and then women will be really sorry because they won't have anyone educated or employed to marry.

The fact that women are symbolically associated with darkness and chaos and evil, while men are associated with light and order and goodness, is not, according to him, a tool which the patriarchy has used to oppress women for millennia, it is based in biological reality. There's a reason women are associated with witches and swamps, there's a reason it was a woman who ate the apple and caused all subsequent chaos and disorder. Women are just naturally more neurotic and less competent than men, and their attempts to overthrow the patriarchy refuse to acknowledge that patriarchy is based on the superior competence of men. Overthrowing the patriarchy equals chaos overcoming order, which means the end of society as we know it.

The self-help stuff, urging young people to get off their butts and get jobs, is not offensive in and of itself. But he presents self-help and political action as antithetical processes, and urges young people to forget about working for social change. Forget about trying to end discrimination (which doest exist!), forget about fighting for female equality (which only leads to chaos!), forget about trying to address growing poverty and income inequality. Just be a nice guy, work hard, be a good husband and father, and everything will work out. That is not complex and nuanced, it is naive and simplistic.

 

 

Gotta wonder how all these less competent women are pushing properly competent men out of universities and the workforce.

Maybe they do it with the special skills refugees have where they can all be on welfare at the same time as they're stealing our jobs.

[Corraleno]

23 minutes ago, EmseB said:

I like to think I read outside my bubble a fair bit, but men working hard and taking responsibility for their lives being problematic (nay! emblematic of all the other ills in the world) has not hit my inbox yet.

Oh please, NO ONE has ever said that men working hard and taking responsibility is either problematic in itself or "emblematic of all the other ills in the world."  Seriously. No one.  🙄

Pointing out that those things alone are not going to solve the serious systemic social and economic problems we are facing does not in any way imply that "men working hard" is the cause of all social problems. The idea that men — largely young, white, middle-class men — are the appointed saviors of modern culture, and all they need to do to save it is clean their rooms, get a job, and be nice guys is incredibly insulting to all the people — men and women, white and nonwhite, poor and middle class — who are already doing those things and are still suffering.

There are millions of people who are working their asses off and taking full responsibility for their lives, whose lives still SUCK right now,  because they can't afford basic necessities, they don't have adequate access to healthcare, they can't get a decent education, and/or they are subject to racial, sexual and other forms of discrimination. Those problems were not caused by pushy women who dared to want a college education and a career, and they are not going to be solved by telling women to step aside and let men do the work while they go back to some 1950s utopia of stay-at-home parenting. Even women who want to stay home will not be able to do that until we resolve serious economic issues, especially income inequality and lack of access to affordable healthcare. And nice middle class white boys cleaning up their bedrooms and getting jobs is not going to accomplish that.

[EmseB]

I honestly don't know how to keep responding, @Corraleno. You make so many assumptions in your posts and seem to have so much context that I'm lacking. No one is mentioning middle class white people except you. I don't believe in the utopia of the '50s. I don't know why any speaker/academic/author would be required to address every issue you're talking about just because they talk about some other issues. No one but you is using absolutes like men cleaning their rooms as solving every injustice in the world. 

I now remember how I first discovered JP. It was an interview that went viral because the woman interviewing him set up straw man after straw man, and he made her look rather ridiculous because she fundamentally did not understand his arguments and kept asking him about positions he did not hold. 

[Rosie_0801]

Not to mention that those nice, white, middle class boys shouldn't have to work 80 hours a week either. They should have time to go home to their families while they still have the energy to interact with them.

[Corraleno]

39 minutes ago, Bluegoat said:

The changes in the make-up of the workforce have had mixed results for everyone, and that is not wrong to point out, and its not some huge sign that someone is evil if they don't think they were very positive.  There is something very odd going on when pointingout that someone has a different view of a social change must mean they are horrible and beyond the pale.

The issue isn't that he is pointing out problems, the issue is where he places the blame and what he proposes as the solution. 

Other countries have managed to absorb large numbers of women in the workforce without causing the issues we have. The Nordic countries rank among the highest for gender equality, income equality, and overall happiness and satisfaction. They have done this by adapting the work environment to be more family friendly for everyone, by increasing flexibility of hours, providing extended parental leave for both parents, and providing high-quality, affordable childcare and healthcare. 

Miraculously, this hasn't led to social collapse due to working women stripping society of its masculine power! Scandinavian men have not been pushed out of universities and workplaces by feminist harpies. Peterson's warnings that allowing women to have college educations and careers is the cause of our economic problems, and therefore the only sensible solution is to return to the 50s when women stayed home and let men support them, belies the reality that many other countries have found solutions to the problem that involve moving forward rather than trying to turn back the clock to 1950.

[EmseB]

43 minutes ago, Corraleno said:

The issue isn't that he is pointing out problems, the issue is where he places the blame and what he proposes as the solution. 

Other countries have managed to absorb large numbers of women in the workforce without causing the issues we have. The Nordic countries rank among the highest for gender equality, income equality, and overall happiness and satisfaction. They have done this by adapting the work environment to be more family friendly for everyone, by increasing flexibility of hours, providing extended parental leave for both parents, and providing high-quality, affordable childcare and healthcare. 

Miraculously, this hasn't led to social collapse due to working women stripping society of its masculine power! Scandinavian men have not been pushed out of universities and workplaces by feminist harpies. Peterson's warnings that allowing women to have college educations and careers is the cause of our economic problems, and therefore the only sensible solution is to return to the 50s when women stayed home and let men support them, belies the reality that many other countries have found solutions to the problem that involve moving forward rather than trying to turn back the clock to 1950.

But it's not like Nordic countries don't have their own issues, or that they have the exact same issues that the US does. I kind of wish Scandinavia would stop being brought up as utopian or some ideal...maybe akin to your disdain that some of the people you read idealize some version of the 50s.

[Rosie_0801]

1 hour ago, EmseB said:

But it's not like Nordic countries don't have their own issues, or that they have the exact same issues that the US does. I kind of wish Scandinavia would stop being brought up as utopian or some ideal...maybe akin to your disdain that some of the people you read idealize some version of the 50s.

 

Nobody has said Scandinavia is a problem-free Utopia. 
You don't have to be perfect to teach your kids and for them to learn from you. Same goes with Scandinavia.

(I should read 'Utopia' one day. Has anyone else here read it? Is it annoying? lol)

[Katy]

6 hours ago, Corraleno said:

...He claims that women were much better off in the 1950s and 60s, when they stayed home. He blames stagnating wages and income inequality on women for insisting on careers, claiming that the reason wages are so low now is because women doubled the workforce and halved the wages, so now it takes 2 incomes to support a family. If women would just stay home and be good mothers, as they were meant to be, then men could earn enough to support them. He claims that women working will eventually push men out of work, and "that's where we are headed." He says that women are already pushing men out of college, and that "in 10 years there will be no men left in college, except in STEM," and then women will be really sorry because they won't have anyone educated or employed to marry.

The fact that women are symbolically associated with darkness and chaos and evil, while men are associated with light and order and goodness, is not, according to him, a tool which the patriarchy has used to oppress women for millennia, it is based in biological reality. There's a reason women are associated with witches and swamps, there's a reason it was a woman who ate the apple and caused all subsequent chaos and disorder. Women are just naturally more neurotic and less competent than men, and their attempts to overthrow the patriarchy refuse to acknowledge that patriarchy is based on the superior competence of men. Overthrowing the patriarchy equals chaos overcoming order, which means the end of society as we know it.

The self-help stuff, urging young people to get off their butts and get jobs, is not offensive in and of itself. But he presents self-help and political action as antithetical processes, and urges young people to forget about working for social change. Forget about trying to end discrimination (which doest exist!), forget about fighting for female equality (which only leads to chaos!), forget about trying to address growing poverty and income inequality. Just be a nice guy, work hard, be a good husband and father, and everything will work out. That is not complex and nuanced, it is naive and simplistic.

 

I'm not going to pretend that in excerpts he isn't offensive, or that some people (like you) don't have profound philosophical differences with him. While I am definitely more politically moderate than you (lean libertarian) I cannot and will not justify every offensive thing the man says or does, but I am willing to discuss where I think he would disagree with you.  I've read the second book, I'm only about halfway through the first, and I've seen a fair amount of him on YouTube since...  idk, when was the "intellectual dark web" a topic on podcasts?  A few years ago?  I thought it sounded scary and decided to look into it.  JP struck me as a sort of cultist antichrist so I decided to look into him.

I've heard him say that he's wondered if most women were better off in the 50's, because women tend to find that careers (not more typical jobs, but the sort of positions where you're going to be making $150k/yr or more) are not as fulfilling as they thought. He says this is because women are smarter than men and figure out quicker that careers are draining and relationships are meaningful.  Women figure this out by their mid 30's, men often don't figure that out until their mid 50's. While this sounds like some creepy reactionary way of implying women should all be barefoot and pregnant, it actually came from a long series of lectures in the Maps of Meaning class he taught at Harvard and was part of a lecture on careers.  According to him, most people don't have a career, they have a job.  If you want a career you have to work very hard, very long hours, and it is very stressful. He went into particulars regarding some law firms he was brought into to consult (I know you went into this below, but many other people on the forum don't follow him so explaining for their benefit).  They hired women from top law schools in equal numbers, but in less than 10 years women left. They wanted to know why.  Why extra benefits and parental leave and on-site daycare didn't keep them there.  They couldn't find women who even wanted to be partners.  They just left in droves within 10-12 years.  It turned out that women generally don't want to work 80-120 hours a week. They don't want to be on call 24/7.  They don't want their whole lives to be about their jobs.  They want families, and they don't want to hire someone else to raise them.  They want their children to know them.  His point wasn't reactionary as much as that women are wiser and face up to the existential crises of the sacrifices a career must bring much sooner than men do.  Which is why in many "career" fields (law, medicine, pharmacy, etc), once women have student loans paid off and start having children they tend to leave companies that require that sort of commitment in favor of jobs that require 50 hours a week or less.  Sometimes job sharing.  Most of them are married to men who are also in high-paying fields so it's not like it's THAT MUCH of a sacrifice if they choose to quit.   (As an aside, this rings true in my experience as well. I'm surprised how many of the women I know were unhappy in "professional" fields and either quit, changed fields, or went into a job sharing situation before the age of 40, and those who didn't often have spouses that choose to stay at home instead.  The absolute exceptions I know either never got married or had kids or had enough help and autonomy it wasn't an issue for them).

He is definitely a classical liberal, in the sense that he doesn't think there is anything better than capitalism (though he recognizes it is still not ideal as it leaves 10% of the population economically alienated, it is the least-worst system to date because other systems such as communism killed millions of people in the 1900's, either directly through murder or indirectly through starvation. He does say we need to do something about the 10% of people who are incapable of contributing, but doesn't know what. Otherwise he is a good bit what many people today would call libertarian, if only because the logical ends of policing things like speech is fascism.  Obviously not everyone agrees with that, but it is pretty much the definition of classical liberal.

The quote about women pushing men out of college was out of context, but I agree it was offensive.

I think I agree to disagree with you that it is naive and simplistic.  I think you missed a couple key points, but we have such different worldviews I don't think we would change each other's minds.

3 hours ago, Corraleno said:

 

Yes exactly — implying that if all of the (overwhelmingly white, middle-class) males in his audience would just get jobs and be good dads, then society would sort itself out, does not even begin to address problems of systematic racism and misogyny, or problems with failing education, ever-increasing income inequality, and lack of healthcare. It's incredibly patronizing. 

He claims that the reason there are so many more men in positions of power is because men are willing to work so much harder and put in so many more hours. He loves to use the example of a high-powered law firm to illustrate why there are more men at the top — women want to quit and have babies, which is the normal sane thing to do, so all the power and money ends up with a handful of hyper-ambitious men who are willing to work 80 hrs/wk. As if elite law firms are a representative microcosm of the entire political, social, and economic structure!

There are plenty of men in power who don't work remotely those kinds of hours, and plenty of women and POC working 80 hrs/wk in shit jobs who will never have the kind of power and financial security that certain men assume as a birthright. "Warning" women that by going to college and working they are pushing men out of the workforce and out of higher education, and they are going to regret this when they have no one suitable to marry, accomplishes what exactly? Are women supposed to say "Well I'd really love to go to college and have a career, but I'd better just find a nice husband and stay home instead, so men can take their rightful place in positions of power, and society won't dissolve into the chaotic abyss of femininity"?

 

Again, he was speaking in terms of elite careers, the top 10% of the curve, not jobs in general.  But if you missed that once sentence this is definitely offensive. I disagree that men assume they'll be in the top 10% of anything as a birthright, but in the context of teaching this class AT HARVARD COLLEGE, I absolutely think those students probably assumed they were headed for the top 10% of career type positions.  I doubt they considered it a birthright - even if their parents bought them admission they probably thought they worked very hard and were still lucky to get in.

I get that you're making the leap to the logical ends of his arguments, but when he's directly been asked about what women should do I've never heard him say anything so offensive. He's always quick to point out that individually any person may be an exception, but statistically it is true that there are differences between what men and women want out of life, and as a result we tend to make different choices.  He LOVES the examples of Nordic countries, because the data proves it is true.  In countries that are the most equal, where women are guaranteed equality and parental leave and daycare, gender differences are even more pronounced.  It turns out that when given more freedom to choose whatever they want, women in Nordic countries often choose "feminine" jobs working 30 hours a week or less.

 

1 hour ago, Corraleno said:

Oh please, NO ONE has ever said that men working hard and taking responsibility is either problematic in itself or "emblematic of all the other ills in the world."  Seriously. No one.  🙄

Pointing out that those things alone are not going to solve the serious systemic social and economic problems we are facing does not in any way imply that "men working hard" is the cause of all social problems. The idea that men — largely young, white, middle-class men — are the appointed saviors of modern culture, and all they need to do to save it is clean their rooms, get a job, and be nice guys is incredibly insulting to all the people — men and women, white and nonwhite, poor and middle class — who are already doing those things and are still suffering.

There are millions of people who are working their asses off and taking full responsibility for their lives, whose lives still SUCK right now,  because they can't afford basic necessities, they don't have adequate access to healthcare, they can't get a decent education, and/or they are subject to racial, sexual and other forms of discrimination. Those problems were not caused by pushy women who dared to want a college education and a career, and they are not going to be solved by telling women to step aside and let men do the work while they go back to some 1950s utopia of stay-at-home parenting. Even women who want to stay home will not be able to do that until we resolve serious economic issues, especially income inequality and lack of access to affordable healthcare. And nice middle class white boys cleaning up their bedrooms and getting jobs is not going to accomplish that.

 

The point isn't to be a savior at all.  The point is to take responsibility for yourself.  Help yourself first.  Put on your air mask first.  Yes, his message is largely resonating with young white men.  You didn't really think anyone was going to confront the patriarchy without leaving a bunch of confused and disoriented young white men who are now unsure of what to do with themselves, did you?

JP does not in any way diminish the suffering of people.  He studied these things because of his own existential angst and personal and family struggles with depression. He is trying to use information that is gained on the level of a society to help individuals ease suffering. He isn't saying that no one should ever try and solve those problems.  He is saying that you cannot take responsibility for the world unless you take responsibility for yourself first.  And for a group of people who largely escape from life and evade responsibility this is true.  He's not against healthcare. 

1 hour ago, Corraleno said:

The issue isn't that he is pointing out problems, the issue is where he places the blame and what he proposes as the solution. 

Other countries have managed to absorb large numbers of women in the workforce without causing the issues we have. The Nordic countries rank among the highest for gender equality, income equality, and overall happiness and satisfaction. They have done this by adapting the work environment to be more family friendly for everyone, by increasing flexibility of hours, providing extended parental leave for both parents, and providing high-quality, affordable childcare and healthcare. 

Miraculously, this hasn't led to social collapse due to working women stripping society of its masculine power! Scandinavian men have not been pushed out of universities and workplaces by feminist harpies. Peterson's warnings that allowing women to have college educations and careers is the cause of our economic problems, and therefore the only sensible solution is to return to the 50s when women stayed home and let men support them, belies the reality that many other countries have found solutions to the problem that involve moving forward rather than trying to turn back the clock to 1950.

 

I don't think he is placing the blame OR proposing solutions.  He's simply sharing what eased his suffering - following the age old edict, true in almost every system of religion, that you should fix your own sins before you fix someone else's.

Your conclusions about Nordic countries and his are so opposite I don't think you're looking at the same data he is.

Again, you're taking an analysis of the social changes of the past and assuming that his conclusion is reactionary.  But when he has been directly asked he is NEVER reactionary, it's just an analysis of how things have changed, not that they should go back to the way they were before.  This is where you are taking him wildly out of context.

[EmseB]

28 minutes ago, Rosie_0801 said:

 

Nobody has said Scandinavia is a problem-free Utopia. 
You don't have to be perfect to teach your kids and for them to learn from you. Same goes with Scandinavia.

No, although the PP's description sounded pretty close. I don't have to be perfect to teach my kids, and Scandinavia doesn't have to be problem free in order for us to learn something from them, but that could be said of just about anything (including the halcyon days of yore, lol).

But in any case, I doubt anyone (including JP, but I don't know) has said "women [should] step aside and let men do the work while they go back to some 1950s utopia of stay-at-home parenting" or that anyone commenting on this thread even thinks that or resonates with that kind of characterization. Yet it's been articulated several times and then no irony at all when Scandinavia is brought up as basically the same type of trope.  If only we could go back to the good old days. If only we could be more like Finland. It's all kind of the same idea, with different broad prescriptions for fixing things but doesn't acknowledge the problems we have here or today are very different than what they had then or over there.

[gardenmom5]

4 hours ago, Rosie_0801 said:

 

Gotta wonder how all these less competent women are pushing properly competent men out of universities and the workforce.

Maybe they do it with the special skills refugees have where they can all be on welfare at the same time as they're stealing our jobs.

as the mother of daughters and sons in stem....

it's by allowing female stem majors to have lower scores to gain admittance to their programs.  "they're representing an underserved minority" - those are the words used to justify it.   it's by offering a preponderance of scholarships for girls ONLY, so they are more likely to be able to afford their degree over their male counterparts.  (ds didn't go to the school he'd have preferred to attend because … money.)

1dd has been at "women in tech" conferences sponsored by major corporation - where female managers *bragged* about getting rid of men in their depts. for one reason only: so they could hire more women.  not because the men were incompetent, but because they had xy chromosomes.  

 

 

[gardenmom5]

24 minutes ago, StellaM said:

 

Tell her to stay clear of philosophy departments just now 🙂

I believe that discipline was voted as most toxic discipline on Twitter ? (lol, don't take Twitter polls seriously!)

I can believe it though. I've seen absolutely vile behaviour towards philosophers from others in their discipline. 

hmm.  1dd is a classics major.  the professor she found utterly toxic - was not a classics prof, but was teaching a required for everyone class.  she loved (most of) her classics profs.

[gardenmom5]

49 minutes ago, StellaM said:

 

Sure; women don't tend to be incels though. It's not a female specific problem, incelness.

 

I didn't know this thread was only about bashing men....(and some comments certainly have painted all men with a broad brush - while painting women are poor put upon darlings.)

[Frances]

11 hours ago, Katy said:

 

I'm not going to pretend that in excerpts he isn't offensive, or that some people (like you) don't have profound philosophical differences with him. While I am definitely more politically moderate than you (lean libertarian) I cannot and will not justify every offensive thing the man says or does, but I am willing to discuss where I think he would disagree with you.  I've read the second book, I'm only about halfway through the first, and I've seen a fair amount of him on YouTube since...  idk, when was the "intellectual dark web" a topic on podcasts?  A few years ago?  I thought it sounded scary and decided to look into it.  JP struck me as a sort of cultist antichrist so I decided to look into him.

I've heard him say that he's wondered if most women were better off in the 50's, because women tend to find that careers (not more typical jobs, but the sort of positions where you're going to be making $150k/yr or more) are not as fulfilling as they thought. He says this is because women are smarter than men and figure out quicker that careers are draining and relationships are meaningful.  Women figure this out by their mid 30's, men often don't figure that out until their mid 50's. While this sounds like some creepy reactionary way of implying women should all be barefoot and pregnant, it actually came from a long series of lectures in the Maps of Meaning class he taught at Harvard and was part of a lecture on careers.  According to him, most people don't have a career, they have a job.  If you want a career you have to work very hard, very long hours, and it is very stressful. He went into particulars regarding some law firms he was brought into to consult (I know you went into this below, but many other people on the forum don't follow him so explaining for their benefit).  They hired women from top law schools in equal numbers, but in less than 10 years women left. They wanted to know why.  Why extra benefits and parental leave and on-site daycare didn't keep them there.  They couldn't find women who even wanted to be partners.  They just left in droves within 10-12 years.  It turned out that women generally don't want to work 80-120 hours a week. They don't want to be on call 24/7.  They don't want their whole lives to be about their jobs.  They want families, and they don't want to hire someone else to raise them.  They want their children to know them.  His point wasn't reactionary as much as that women are wiser and face up to the existential crises of the sacrifices a career must bring much sooner than men do.  Which is why in many "career" fields (law, medicine, pharmacy, etc), once women have student loans paid off and start having children they tend to leave companies that require that sort of commitment in favor of jobs that require 50 hours a week or less.  Sometimes job sharing.  Most of them are married to men who are also in high-paying fields so it's not like it's THAT MUCH of a sacrifice if they choose to quit.   (As an aside, this rings true in my experience as well. I'm surprised how many of the women I know were unhappy in "professional" fields and either quit, changed fields, or went into a job sharing situation before the age of 40, and those who didn't often have spouses that choose to stay at home instead.  The absolute exceptions I know either never got married or had kids or had enough help and autonomy it wasn't an issue for them).

He is definitely a classical liberal, in the sense that he doesn't think there is anything better than capitalism (though he recognizes it is still not ideal as it leaves 10% of the population economically alienated, it is the least-worst system to date because other systems such as communism killed millions of people in the 1900's, either directly through murder or indirectly through starvation. He does say we need to do something about the 10% of people who are incapable of contributing, but doesn't know what. Otherwise he is a good bit what many people today would call libertarian, if only because the logical ends of policing things like speech is fascism.  Obviously not everyone agrees with that, but it is pretty much the definition of classical liberal.

The quote about women pushing men out of college was out of context, but I agree it was offensive.

I think I agree to disagree with you that it is naive and simplistic.  I think you missed a couple key points, but we have such different worldviews I don't think we would change each other's minds.

 

Again, he was speaking in terms of elite careers, the top 10% of the curve, not jobs in general.  But if you missed that once sentence this is definitely offensive. I disagree that men assume they'll be in the top 10% of anything as a birthright, but in the context of teaching this class AT HARVARD COLLEGE, I absolutely think those students probably assumed they were headed for the top 10% of career type positions.  I doubt they considered it a birthright - even if their parents bought them admission they probably thought they worked very hard and were still lucky to get in.

I get that you're making the leap to the logical ends of his arguments, but when he's directly been asked about what women should do I've never heard him say anything so offensive. He's always quick to point out that individually any person may be an exception, but statistically it is true that there are differences between what men and women want out of life, and as a result we tend to make different choices.  He LOVES the examples of Nordic countries, because the data proves it is true.  In countries that are the most equal, where women are guaranteed equality and parental leave and daycare, gender differences are even more pronounced.  It turns out that when given more freedom to choose whatever they want, women in Nordic countries often choose "feminine" jobs working 30 hours a week or less.

 

 

The point isn't to be a savior at all.  The point is to take responsibility for yourself.  Help yourself first.  Put on your air mask first.  Yes, his message is largely resonating with young white men.  You didn't really think anyone was going to confront the patriarchy without leaving a bunch of confused and disoriented young white men who are now unsure of what to do with themselves, did you?

JP does not in any way diminish the suffering of people.  He studied these things because of his own existential angst and personal and family struggles with depression. He is trying to use information that is gained on the level of a society to help individuals ease suffering. He isn't saying that no one should ever try and solve those problems.  He is saying that you cannot take responsibility for the world unless you take responsibility for yourself first.  And for a group of people who largely escape from life and evade responsibility this is true.  He's not against healthcare. 

 

I don't think he is placing the blame OR proposing solutions.  He's simply sharing what eased his suffering - following the age old edict, true in almost every system of religion, that you should fix your own sins before you fix someone else's.

Your conclusions about Nordic countries and his are so opposite I don't think you're looking at 

11 hours ago, Katy said:

 

I'm not going to pretend that in excerpts he isn't offensive, or that some people (like you) don't have profound philosophical differences with him. While I am definitely more politically moderate than you (lean libertarian) I cannot and will not justify every offensive thing the man says or does, but I am willing to discuss where I think he would disagree with you.  I've read the second book, I'm only about halfway through the first, and I've seen a fair amount of him on YouTube since...  idk, when was the "intellectual dark web" a topic on podcasts?  A few years ago?  I thought it sounded scary and decided to look into it.  JP struck me as a sort of cultist antichrist so I decided to look into him.

I've heard him say that he's wondered if most women were better off in the 50's, because women tend to find that careers (not more typical jobs, but the sort of positions where you're going to be making $150k/yr or more) are not as fulfilling as they thought. He says this is because women are smarter than men and figure out quicker that careers are draining and relationships are meaningful.  Women figure this out by their mid 30's, men often don't figure that out until their mid 50's. While this sounds like some creepy reactionary way of implying women should all be barefoot and pregnant, it actually came from a long series of lectures in the Maps of Meaning class he taught at Harvard and was part of a lecture on careers.  According to him, most people don't have a career, they have a job.  If you want a career you have to work very hard, very long hours, and it is very stressful. He went into particulars regarding some law firms he was brought into to consult (I know you went into this below, but many other people on the forum don't follow him so explaining for their benefit).  They hired women from top law schools in equal numbers, but in less than 10 years women left. They wanted to know why.  Why extra benefits and parental leave and on-site daycare didn't keep them there.  They couldn't find women who even wanted to be partners.  They just left in droves within 10-12 years.  It turned out that women generally don't want to work 80-120 hours a week. They don't want to be on call 24/7.  They don't want their whole lives to be about their jobs.  They want families, and they don't want to hire someone else to raise them.  They want their children to know them.  His point wasn't reactionary as much as that women are wiser and face up to the existential crises of the sacrifices a career must bring much sooner than men do.  Which is why in many "career" fields (law, medicine, pharmacy, etc), once women have student loans paid off and start having children they tend to leave companies that require that sort of commitment in favor of jobs that require 50 hours a week or less.  Sometimes job sharing.  Most of them are married to men who are also in high-paying fields so it's not like it's THAT MUCH of a sacrifice if they choose to quit.   (As an aside, this rings true in my experience as well. I'm surprised how many of the women I know were unhappy in "professional" fields and either quit, changed fields, or went into a job sharing situation before the age of 40, and those who didn't often have spouses that choose to stay at home instead.  The absolute exceptions I know either never got married or had kids or had enough help and autonomy it wasn't an issue for them).

He is definitely a classical liberal, in the sense that he doesn't think there is anything better than capitalism (though he recognizes it is still not ideal as it leaves 10% of the population economically alienated, it is the least-worst system to date because other systems such as communism killed millions of people in the 1900's, either directly through murder or indirectly through starvation. He does say we need to do something about the 10% of people who are incapable of contributing, but doesn't know what. Otherwise he is a good bit what many people today would call libertarian, if only because the logical ends of policing things like speech is fascism.  Obviously not everyone agrees with that, but it is pretty much the definition of classical liberal.

The quote about women pushing men out of college was out of context, but I agree it was offensive.

I think I agree to disagree with you that it is naive and simplistic.  I think you missed a couple key points, but we have such different worldviews I don't think we would change each other's minds.

 

Again, he was speaking in terms of elite careers, the top 10% of the curve, not jobs in general.  But if you missed that once sentence this is definitely offensive. I disagree that men assume they'll be in the top 10% of anything as a birthright, but in the context of teaching this class AT HARVARD COLLEGE, I absolutely think those students probably assumed they were headed for the top 10% of career type positions.  I doubt they considered it a birthright - even if their parents bought them admission they probably thought they worked very hard and were still lucky to get in.

I get that you're making the leap to the logical ends of his arguments, but when he's directly been asked about what women should do I've never heard him say anything so offensive. He's always quick to point out that individually any person may be an exception, but statistically it is true that there are differences between what men and women want out of life, and as a result we tend to make different choices.  He LOVES the examples of Nordic countries, because the data proves it is true.  In countries that are the most equal, where women are guaranteed equality and parental leave and daycare, gender differences are even more pronounced.  It turns out that when given more freedom to choose whatever they want, women in Nordic countries often choose "feminine" jobs working 30 hours a week or less.

 

 

The point isn't to be a savior at all.  The point is to take responsibility for yourself.  Help yourself first.  Put on your air mask first.  Yes, his message is largely resonating with young white men.  You didn't really think anyone was going to confront the patriarchy without leaving a bunch of confused and disoriented young white men who are now unsure of what to do with themselves, did you?

JP does not in any way diminish the suffering of people.  He studied these things because of his own existential angst and personal and family struggles with depression. He is trying to use information that is gained on the level of a society to help individuals ease suffering. He isn't saying that no one should ever try and solve those problems.  He is saying that you cannot take responsibility for the world unless you take responsibility for yourself first.  And for a group of people who largely escape from life and evade responsibility this is true.  He's not against healthcare. 

 

I don't think he is placing the blame OR proposing solutions.  He's simply sharing what eased his suffering - following the age old edict, true in almost every system of religion, that you should fix your own sins before you fix someone else's.

Your conclusions about Nordic countries and his are so opposite I don't think you're looking at the same data he is.

Again, you're taking an analysis of the social changes of the past and assuming that his conclusion is reactionary.  But when he has been directly asked he is NEVER reactionary, it's just an analysis of how things have changed, not that they should go back to the way they were before.  This is where you are taking him wildly out of context.

 

This is a complete aside, but I’m throwing it out there in case anyone’s child is considering pharmacy, one of the high paying time consuming careers mentioned above. In our experience, it’s is nothing like law or medicine, except that it pays very well and takes an advanced degree. Unless they are high level managers, most pharmacists work a very normal number of hours and they are paid for every single minute they work, including extra for holidays, shift differentials, and any overtime. Even working less than full-time, which is not uncommon, they can make over $100k per year. The one new risk with pharmacy is that’s it’s probably just about the only medical profession we are even close to over producing in this country, as colleges have figured out that it’s a lot like having a law school, relatively cheap to run but can bring in high tuition $.

Now academia can often be the worst of both worlds. Extremely long hours, especially in the early years, and most do not make $150k. I’ve known many people in academia who when taking their salary divided by hours worked are barely making minimum wage, and that’s with a PhD and often many years of post doctoral work.

[Bluegoat]

20 hours ago, Corraleno said:

The issue isn't that he is pointing out problems, the issue is where he places the blame and what he proposes as the solution. 

Other countries have managed to absorb large numbers of women in the workforce without causing the issues we have. The Nordic countries rank among the highest for gender equality, income equality, and overall happiness and satisfaction. They have done this by adapting the work environment to be more family friendly for everyone, by increasing flexibility of hours, providing extended parental leave for both parents, and providing high-quality, affordable childcare and healthcare. 

Miraculously, this hasn't led to social collapse due to working women stripping society of its masculine power! Scandinavian men have not been pushed out of universities and workplaces by feminist harpies. Peterson's warnings that allowing women to have college educations and careers is the cause of our economic problems, and therefore the only sensible solution is to return to the 50s when women stayed home and let men support them, belies the reality that many other countries have found solutions to the problem that involve moving forward rather than trying to turn back the clock to 1950.

 

The Nordic countries have not managed this with quite the lack of problems you seem to assume.  They have many of the same ones we do, including the inability of families to get by on one salary if they would like.  It's too bad the US is so badly served in these areas, so I imagine it looks far better elsewhere, but there are in fact many of the same problems, or sometimes different ones.

Your characterisations of JP are kind of odd, he doesn't object to women going to university.  You seem to be filling in a set of beliefs that you expect to see.

[Bluegoat]

16 hours ago, StellaM said:

 

It's not news. Unanticipated outcomes exist, even when a change is generally positive. I mean, it's pretty clear house prices are insane where I live for many reasons, but one of them is, it is now the cultural norm to have two fulltime incomes servicing a mortgage. Nobody meant for women's entry into the workforce in higher numbers to help push housing out of the reach of middle and lower class single- income people and families, something that occurs regardless of whether an individual or family has traditional or non-traditional working patterns. 

Also a leftist, and there is zero in what I've seen/read of JP that is Marxist or leftist. He reads liberal to me.

Re the last, I've read something in the last couple of weeks, about the adjacent-religiousity of 21st C post-modernism,  which addresses the sheer disdain of modern progressivism for 20th C attitudes seen as arising from Enlightenment values (and what's more Enlightenment than a white dude scholaring, right ?) and although my brain is too fried from two weeks of Spalding training to put it into words, it made sense of the intense negative reaction some people have towards him. 

(This is completely off on a tangent now, but it also made sense of the absolute outcry in universities here about a new degree, called Western Civilization. I heard the outcry and thought it must have literally been teaching white supremacy or something, so went looking for the syllabus. It's actually a great course, by the looks of things, and I wish I was young enough to enrol in it. I think it would give an amazing grounding in...no surprises...Western Civilization. It looks so good I couldn't work out what the story was with the objections...the same article made sense of the outcry. Basically - and I'm badly paraphrasing - it transgresses, but in the wrong way. Maybe it was on Aeon ?)

 

 

That sounds very like a very interesting article.  I may do some googling to see if I can dig it up.

I did a course a lot like the one you mention, the first year was a great books program that was meant to roughly outline the curve of how western thought developed.  It was great, and extremely useful in terms of understanding the rest of my studies.  That program has come under similar criticisms for a while, a lot of them along ID politics lines.  Apparently it's all colonialist, assumes the primary importance of western thought.  Which is obviously BS.  It's not what it was, as a result.  But it is totally about not affirming deconstructionism, which of course is directly opposed to the whole idea of historical understanding of anything.

[Bluegoat]

19 hours ago, Katy said:

 

 

I've heard him say that he's wondered if most women were better off in the 50's, because women tend to find that careers (not more typical jobs, but the sort of positions where you're going to be making $150k/yr or more) are not as fulfilling as they thought. He says this is because women are smarter than men and figure out quicker that careers are draining and relationships are meaningful.  Women figure this out by their mid 30's, men often don't figure that out until their mid 50's. While this sounds like some creepy reactionary way of implying women should all be barefoot and pregnant, it actually came from a long series of lectures in the Maps of Meaning class he taught at Harvard and was part of a lecture on careers.  According to him, most people don't have a career, they have a job.  If you want a career you have to work very hard, very long hours, and it is very stressful. He went into particulars regarding some law firms he was brought into to consult (I know you went into this below, but many other people on the forum don't follow him so explaining for their benefit).  They hired women from top law schools in equal numbers, but in less than 10 years women left. They wanted to know why.  Why extra benefits and parental leave and on-site daycare didn't keep them there.  They couldn't find women who even wanted to be partners.  They just left in droves within 10-12 years.  It turned out that women generally don't want to work 80-120 hours a week. They don't want to be on call 24/7.  They don't want their whole lives to be about their jobs.  They want families, and they don't want to hire someone else to raise them.  They want their children to know them.  His point wasn't reactionary as much as that women are wiser and face up to the existential crises of the sacrifices a career must bring much sooner than men do.  Which is why in many "career" fields (law, medicine, pharmacy, etc), once women have student loans paid off and start having children they tend to leave companies that require that sort of commitment in favor of jobs that require 50 hours a week or less.  Sometimes job sharing.  Most of them are married to men who are also in high-paying fields so it's not like it's THAT MUCH of a sacrifice if they choose to quit.   (As an aside, this rings true in my experience as well. I'm surprised how many of the women I know were unhappy in "professional" fields and either quit, changed fields, or went into a job sharing situation before the age of 40, and those who didn't often have spouses that choose to stay at home instead.  The absolute exceptions I know either never got married or had kids or had enough help and autonomy it wasn't an issue for them).

 

 

So, I think this is interesting and there is some insight there.

It's true IME that many men come to the same place around value of career as those women do, but usually later.  It's what used to be thought of as a mid-life crises.  I actually have a friend, a lawyer in fact, who has pretty much done just that.  Realised it isn't all it was supposed to be, he doesn't see his kids, it has been a huge deal.

I don't find it surprising that women might catch on sooner.   I don't know that I'd say they are wiser though they do tend to be on the whole more relationship oriented.  But I think it may also go back to the fact that women have already in many cases done some of the mental work of getting to that place when they had their kids.  That's when they start making the calculation around value, and many take real action.  For men, because biology, it's less immediate, but also it's the case that if the woman makes that choice, in the family he may not be able to do so - he gets locked into work.  So he doesn't really take the time to think about it much at that point.

It's also the case IME that men take longer than mothers to adjust to the perception change that comes with being a parent.  It takes them longer to reconcile giving up free time, giving up spare cash for hobbies and so on.  Whereas new mothers, hormone fuelled, often throw themselves into a kind of total self-sacrifice for the good of the infant, often to an unhealthy extent.  

Interestingly, my lawyer friend say that in law, many of the younger men seem to be making the value judgement right off the bat, and are opting for less strenuous career options within the law which give more time for other things.

[SKL]

I don't know what I think really ... assuming it was an actual choice for every adult whether to have a career or not, how many men or women would really want to have a full-time career?

I mean, I have a ton of education and have never been out of work since 1986.  I've made pretty good money if that matters.  There was a short period of time (before kids) when I really enjoyed my career.  It was short-lived thanks to the ugliness of competition in the work place, and the fact that in a high-paying profession, "I'm happy just excelling at this" is not acceptable - you must always be striving for something else.  My brothers or dad probably would have disliked that too.  (They were/are in more hands-on professions.)

So yeah, most women don't love their paid work most of the time ... and I don't think most men do either.  But I also don't think men go into it thinking this is going to satisfy them the way some women seem to expect.  Like very few of us are going to change the world by going to work every day.  Many of us don't like people so well that working with them all day is energizing.  Few of us get some kind of spiritual boost by getting our day's work done, most of the time.  Why did anyone sell those lines to women?  Was it a "grass is greener" phenomenon?

As far as college, it does force many women to stay in the career world in order to pay back and/or justify what the education cost.  On the other hand, we got to have intellectual discussions and meet lots of people.  But on the other other hand, couldn't we have done those things without paying for college?  (Of course if it turns out that we love our career, then college was the best choice ... unfortunately we can't always predict whether we'll love our career ....)

I don't think it's a bad thing for women to "have" to work just like men generally "have" to work.  I do think it is ridiculous to glamorize it.  When I sit down to work, I don't feel like I'm "living the dream," LOL.

As for the comparisons to the 50s or the stone age or whenever ... the fact is that housekeeping was a lot more work back then.  There is no going back.  And we can't exactly look back when deciding how best to move forward.

[Rosie_0801]

18 minutes ago, SKL said:

As for the comparisons to the 50s or the stone age or whenever ... the fact is that housekeeping was a lot more work back then.  There is no going back.  And we can't exactly look back when deciding how best to move forward.

 

It was more work, but the work was appreciated at least.
I'm not sure any traditional "women's work" is appreciated now. 

[Bluegoat]

6 minutes ago, Rosie_0801 said:

 

It was more work, but the work was appreciated at least.
I'm not sure any traditional "women's work" is appreciated now. 

 

That's for sure.

It's work for low status people, these days.

[maize]

2 hours ago, Bluegoat said:

 

So, I think this is interesting and there is some insight there.

It's true IME that many men come to the same place around value of career as those women do, but usually later.  It's what used to be thought of as a mid-life crises.  I actually have a friend, a lawyer in fact, who has pretty much done just that.  Realised it isn't all it was supposed to be, he doesn't see his kids, it has been a huge deal.

I don't find it surprising that women might catch on sooner.   I don't know that I'd say they are wiser though they do tend to be on the whole more relationship oriented.  But I think it may also go back to the fact that women have already in many cases done some of the mental work of getting to that place when they had their kids.  That's when they start making the calculation around value, and many take real action.  For men, because biology, it's less immediate, but also it's the case that if the woman makes that choice, in the family he may not be able to do so - he gets locked into work.  So he doesn't really take the time to think about it much at that point.

It's also the case IME that men take longer than mothers to adjust to the perception change that comes with being a parent.  It takes them longer to reconcile giving up free time, giving up spare cash for hobbies and so on.  Whereas new mothers, hormone fuelled, often throw themselves into a kind of total self-sacrifice for the good of the infant, often to an unhealthy extent.  

Interestingly, my lawyer friend say that in law, many of the younger men seem to be making the value judgement right off the bat, and are opting for less strenuous career options within the law which give more time for other things.

I left a career as a military officer to parent full time. I got a lot of negative feedback from both males and females around me over that decision--except for the retired military civil service guy--probably in his 50's--who told me it took him too long to recognize that he needed to put family first.

[Katy]

3 hours ago, Bluegoat said:

 

So, I think this is interesting and there is some insight there.

It's true IME that many men come to the same place around value of career as those women do, but usually later.  It's what used to be thought of as a mid-life crises.  I actually have a friend, a lawyer in fact, who has pretty much done just that.  Realised it isn't all it was supposed to be, he doesn't see his kids, it has been a huge deal.

I don't find it surprising that women might catch on sooner.   I don't know that I'd say they are wiser though they do tend to be on the whole more relationship oriented.  But I think it may also go back to the fact that women have already in many cases done some of the mental work of getting to that place when they had their kids.  That's when they start making the calculation around value, and many take real action.  For men, because biology, it's less immediate, but also it's the case that if the woman makes that choice, in the family he may not be able to do so - he gets locked into work.  So he doesn't really take the time to think about it much at that point.

It's also the case IME that men take longer than mothers to adjust to the perception change that comes with being a parent.  It takes them longer to reconcile giving up free time, giving up spare cash for hobbies and so on.  Whereas new mothers, hormone fuelled, often throw themselves into a kind of total self-sacrifice for the good of the infant, often to an unhealthy extent.  

Interestingly, my lawyer friend say that in law, many of the younger men seem to be making the value judgement right off the bat, and are opting for less strenuous career options within the law which give more time for other things.

 

22 minutes ago, maize said:

I left a career as a military officer to parent full time. I got a lot of negative feedback from both males and females around me over that decision--except for the retired military civil service guy--probably in his 50's--who told me it took him too long to recognize that he needed to put family first.

 

I think one of the advantages of having women in the workplace is that women tend to push for more work-life balance.  DH is in a career field too, and he's lucky to be working for a company that in most locations puts a lot of emphasis on work life balance.  But on the whole I don't think that, or harassment, or hazing issues were largely addressed until women came in and fought for it being unacceptable.

[Katy]

10 hours ago, Frances said:

This is a complete aside, but I’m throwing it out there in case anyone’s child is considering pharmacy, one of the high paying time consuming careers mentioned above. In our experience, it’s is nothing like law or medicine, except that it pays very well and takes an advanced degree. Unless they are high level managers, most pharmacists work a very normal number of hours and they are paid for every single minute they work, including extra for holidays, shift differentials, and any overtime. Even working less than full-time, which is not uncommon, they can make over $100k per year. The one new risk with pharmacy is that’s it’s probably just about the only medical profession we are even close to over producing in this country, as colleges have figured out that it’s a lot like having a law school, relatively cheap to run but can bring in high tuition $.

Now academia can often be the worst of both worlds. Extremely long hours, especially in the early years, and most do not make $150k. I’ve known many people in academia who when taking their salary divided by hours worked are barely making minimum wage, and that’s with a PhD and often many years of post doctoral work.

 

This may be rural location specific, but we also have a pharmacist in the family (not a child).  Sometimes there isn't a lot of coverage so overtime is required, and in family member's experience more than 60% of the women go to half time or less before the age of 40, when their student loans are paid off.  It's stressful and there's more customer service issues than someone with that level of education typically has to deal with.  The job pays well, so half time is still well paid, but I don't think it's immune from women wanting less work.

[shawthorne44]

12 hours ago, Bluegoat said:

 

That's for sure.

It's work for low status people, these days.

I don't think it was ever appreciated.   Even middle-class people had servants.  

There had been the post-WWII propaganda campaign to promote the importance of the housewife and what she did.   But, that was about getting women out of the workforce to make room for the returning soldiers.  So, that was an exception.