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DancingCarrot wrote:
Also, just because I haven’t been a big enough pain already, monogamy and marriage tends to benefit men more – my guess is because of how masculinity is traditionally expected of men. Married men live longer and have better relationships than single men, overall. Married women often lose more sleep and have far bigger family and career stressors than do single women.
Good point. I guess it’s not equal.Traditional masculinity might be part of it, but perhaps a bigger reason why men benefit more is that marriage makes sex far more available that it would be otherwise. It also gives them access to raising children while not spending the majority of their time with them. I’m not saying it’s fair, but men get a great deal.
Then the last 30 years of societal shift have put more burden of providing on mothers without transferring much of the traditional maternal responsibility to fathers. Mothers these days are expected to do
everything, which almost makes men obsolete while giving women the short end of the stick. Nobody is going to be happy constantly working at overdrive. When mothers choose to or need to work for the family, fathers probably ought to step up and take over some of the child-rearing duties and other domestic tasks… Heck, men should be cooking and cleaning at least proportional to the time they spend awake in the home in relation to their wives. Mothers these days have a full plate.
There could also be biology at work. We didn’t come by the “men provide, women raise children” roles by accident or by divine intervention; these roles formed organically from biological tendencies. Generally speaking, fulfilling your gender’s role
tends tobe more fulfilling. Strangely enough, gender career preferences actually diverge more the more egalitarian a nation is. I wonder how the happiness statistics look when taking into account single mothers and childless married women. There might be a statistical paradox lurking in there. For comparison, the single/married happiness stats for men depend on lower happiness rates of divorced men, since divorced men are counted as single. A better statistic would separate never-marrieds from divorced men, which will undoubtedly paint a different picture.
Beefster wrote:
There are distinct differences in biology and psychology that would drive these dynamics.
[admin note]This thread already has enough lurking pitfalls. Please let us not throw into the mix differences in biology, psychology, gender norms, and the relative benefits of the institution of marriage. Please return discussion back to the book being reviewed here (A House Full of Females) and the specific observations pulled from the book. Thank you. [end admin note]
I knew a woman years ago who had two lovers in the same house – polyandry – is that form of polygamy misogynistic? I also know one woman in my city – she is a Hollywood actress and you may have seen her in some films – who has an old husband (a notable but less famous figure in his own right)… and basically she has a younger male lover quite openly and he tolerates it….
Besides which I have talked regularly about the hypocrisy of western society which currently denounces polygamy as baaad, but a person having multiple sex partners outside marriage is apparently alright and polyamory is fashionable. Seems hypocritical.
If it is consensual and the spouses are both full adults, what is the issue? I heard someone say polygamy is bad because of “the abuse”, but I pointed out that there is plenty of abuse in monogamy too.
Quote:If a prophet couldn’t exactly be trusted with the practice, I don’t think anyone else can. Too much room for serious abuse.
Exactly because someone is a prophet is the problem! Prophets are invested with more power and prestige, and polygamy, throughout history, aligns with wealth. The people in power had multiple wives (and harems) while those who weren’t wealthy, who didn’t have power or prestige, got the leftovers. Any way you slice it, that’s women being treated quite literally as a perk of wealth, property.
Quote:There could also be biology at work. We didn’t come by the “men provide, women raise children” roles by accident or by divine intervention; these roles formed organically from biological tendencies. Generally speaking, fulfilling your gender’s role tends to be more fulfilling.
I think you need to expand your reading to include Stephenie Coontz and Cordelia Fine. Several key points here: 1) there is no difference between the male brain and the female brain, 2) most things that you might think are true throughout history (men provide, women raise children) are not nearly as true historically and universally as they have been since the 1950s in the US, 3) you think these roles have formed organically and biologically, but you can’t prove that, and it’s just as likely that culture is shaped by those in power, usually men (as the physically larger of the species on the whole), 4) I don’t know many women who find “women’s work” to be fulfilling. Women have often been barred from entry into careers they would have otherwise enjoyed either by cultural norms, lack of health benefits, lack of support from men, or outright sex discrimination. There are too many external pressures that limit choices for us to say what would happen in a vacuum, naturally or organically.
For example, if maternal mortality hadn’t been as high as it was up to the last 100 years, how would that have affected women’s choices? And that’s a circular question because maternal mortality was doubtless as high as it was because it wasn’t a problem men (who were in power and had access to resources) felt was a high priority to solve. We now live in a time when women outlive men pretty consistently, but historically, a double digit percentage of women died in childbirth.
It’s very controversial but there do appear to be differences between male and female brains. Female brains are often smaller for one – though size does not denote intelligence (Einstein had a small brain.) Again, I recommend expanding your reading to include Cordelia Fine. One study that claimed to show that women’s brains were more empathetic was easily debunked by showing the same result in the brain of a dead salmon. It is not a question of whether they differ, but by how much. [Admin Note]: We now are quite a ways from the original post, which is a review of a book. Let’s return to that focus.
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