I grew up with formidable grandmothers. One, my mother’s mother, lived 44 years on the edge of the Amazon in Brazil, wife of a Presbyterian missionary. She raised six children and helped run the local clinic and generally took no prisoners. She was a force to be reckoned with when I was growing up, and she gave me my love of abundant flower gardens (boy, did she have a green thumb!). My father’s mother couldn’t have been more polar opposite if you tried. She ran away from an abusive home at 17, showed up in Hollywood, boarded with a B-movie actress, and was a such a knock-out herself that she was constantly asked to chair the USO and head up dances for soldiers during WW2. She sewed a lot of her own clothes and wore them with an incredibly natural elegance and style. My memories of her are of a woman who put on a hat and driving gloves to go to the PX and shop—and “self-serve” gasoline stations nearby never let her pump her own gas. She was treated with great deference and respect. Both of them embraced the “crone” phase in different ways. Mom’s mom wore slacks and tee shirts and gardened much of the day. The most casual Dad’s mom ever got was a floral house dress and her hair wrapped up in a bright scarf until she “did her face” in the morning. Both of them never suffered fools and so had a strong, respectful following wherever they went. The two of them have lived in my head for decades since their deaths as the model of what I want to be in my 50s and beyond. People tell me I don’t look a day over 40 (having lots of children keeps you young, I swear), but I do not “dress down” and try to ape maidenhood. I “dress up” on a daily basis—but more like my stylish Mimi did…in age-appropriate skirts and blouses with scarves and jewelry as accessories. When I’m in my garden, it’s sturdy jeans, a colorful tee shirt, and a wide-brimmed straw hat like Mom’s mom. We need more models of Matriarchs who DO things and don’t just try to ape youth (to a hideous degree these days, if you look at Hollywood). I have been a happy wife for 30 years, a mother for 29, and a grandmother for six months. I revel in this stage of life, and I pray my daughters get the chance to do the same. Crones, unite! The world needs you more than ever.
Crone matriarch life is the best. The kids are older. You feel fulfilled and happy you did a good job raising them. Now you can do whatever guilt free. Start a business or do weird hippie stuff. And the coolest part is you got several humans who you had years to engineer into cool friends, your kids. Only issue is you probably made then so cool you aren't cool enough to hang out with them. Oh well they still hang out with you more than you would normally deserve.
And the coolest part is you got several humans who you had years to engineer into cool friends, your kids. Only issue is you probably made then so cool you aren't cool enough to hang out with them.
This is one of the strongest consequentialist arguments for having kids. If you’re a woman and you’re not like other women, you should have a bunch of kids so that you have the greatest chance of producing more humans who share your general outlook/temperament.
And yes, they often turn out to be far better than you, and you get to humbly accept that you now have friends who are cooler than you. And it’s amazing.
Disagree with some of this, agree with some of this. I don't think it's 100% accurate, but that's no reason not to absorb the finer points. I Recommend a read through: If for no other reason that 80+ other readers on here believe this perspective to be wholly true.
To challenge some of you: Yes, the "Toxic Maiden" is a terrible standard of immaturity, denial, self-centeredness and vulnerability to live by. No, women did not get there on their own. A male-centric culture that demands women exhibit all the positive (physical and psychological) traits of maidenhood, while also becoming mothers of multiple children, is also toxic. And I highly suspect that it's prevalent.
I think the article's good arguments would fare better, if they were not propped up by a simplistic glossing over of other sides of the coin.
I’m not averse to the idea of men gaining a mature mindset with regard to women, childbirth, aging, and the like. I do think the current social and legal structure makes it almost impossible for men to take on the roles and responsibilities that would shape them into mature adults.
The no-fault divorce structure (combined with a legal system weaponized against fathers) makes the institution of marriage itself a giant risk for many men. And the post-Tinder dating landscape seems to make everybody treat relationships as transactional (not to mention the huge disparity in your sexual market value as a woman in your 20s versus a man in your 20s—women have very little incentive to “settle” for someone less than perfect when they’re at the peak of their fertility, and that means that they’ll waste years of their lives sleeping with cads and psychopaths before deciding marriage is an option.)
I guess what I’m saying is: there are major structural forces at work that make a healthy relationship between women and men nearly impossible. Men, I would argue, are the ones who need to force these structural changes to come about.
I think you bring up an excellent point in the no-fault divorce structure and the legal system heavily biased against paternal custody. I would add to that, that if a boyfriend and girlfriend are living together, or at least sleeping together for years, they are effectively married. So when they break up, physiologically and psychologically, they are basically divorcees. How many times can you "be married in common law" before you get married? Eventually, doesn't it mess up your ability to see this commitment as anything but? Can you keep bonding and tell yourself it's special because you get a marriage license, if no fault divorce means ending it this time, just adds a formality?
I say this as someone who VALUES divorce.
There's so much more to comment on. Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I'll stop here.
Good article. Doesn't address how things have changed now that women don't have to rely on men for provision, however. Also doesn't address how money impacts one's maidenhood or motherhood. Did rich women with lots of servants follow this female journey you outline in the article? Or is this a journey limited to a specific class of women?
I wanted to add a section about how things like no-fault divorce and female participation in the workforce has affected this dynamic, but I wasn’t sure if anyone would want to read an article that long. I think these are good questions—they just need their own article (s)!
No-fault divorce has been a disaster, for men in particular. I hope I need not explain how. The work or stay home conflict is best resolved by working from home as Louise Perry does. While she's an outlier, there might be partial solutions because women have always worked - just not in cubicles or office buildings.
Motherhood, of course, is essential for the human race. The maternal instinct is celebrated for a reason. The missing link, however, is fatherhood. By this I mean that while mothers tend to excel at nurturing children; fathers are required for rising young adults. The older children become the more important a fathers tend to be for stability and guidance. This isn't a topic one encounters very often.
Government transfers do not rely on men. They rely on a small subset of men. Random men don't get credit for sharing a gender with the small number of men who actually bear society's financial weight.
Also even if it was only a subset of men paying the tax burden, it would still be men providing the resources. It was never 'all men' before, you idiot.
Numbers matter. If a woman relies on her husband for financial support, she is mot relying on men at large, she is relying on a man. If your grandma is relying on SS money from the subset of financially productive men who pay into the system, she is not relying on men at large either.
Men online like to claim credit for things other men have done. It seems like you are one of them.
Independence from a partner doesn’t mean independence from support systems. In a modern welfare state, everyone relies on some mix of markets, families, and government transfers.
Because the tax system is progressive and men earn more on average, a larger share of net contributions comes from men. That’s an aggregate funding fact. But those transfers go to many groups—retirees, children, healthcare, lower-income households—across both sexes.
So the real point is that ‘independence’ today often means shifting reliance from private arrangements to public ones, not eliminating reliance altogether.
Also - I know it is like one of the three cards women online can play, but I pay more taxes than 90% of Americans. Cool your jets here.
I'm glad I was patient with your previous comments because this one actually has substance. I agree that independence these days means shifting reliance, but this applies to men too; men are not all living off the grid and relying only on their bare hands to build a life for themselves without anyone else's support.
When you say "men earn more on average, a larger share of net contributions comes from men" however, you are still bundling together achieving men with non-achieving men, and acting as if there is some sort of parity between the two. Men at large are not one lump. There's wider variance between men than between women, meaning you get some very high achieving men and some absolute losers. The latter don't get any credit. There is no "men do X" only "some men do X." If Alice and Bob and Charlie are working on a group project together, and Bob is doing all the work, Charlie doesn't get to pat himself on the back and say "without men this project wouldn't get done."
As for your claim that you pay 90% more taxes than most Americans, well, this is the internet. I don't take personal claims too seriously. I'll admit I usually assume that men who spend time on the internet are on the loser end of the bell curve I mention above, but if you're not one, good for you. Though I'm surprised you would care to bundle your achievements with men who achieve nothing then. Most high status men don't do that. They tend to despise non-contributing/violent men and view them not with solidarity but as threats to their property and families.
“Maidenhood” was overrated. Older women were nasty to me, men constantly sexualized me, dating was like playing sociopath roulette, nobody took me seriously, my parents were going after me for various things even when I moved out, suggesting my standards we’re simultaneously too high and not high enough and criticizing me on the basis that I’d “never find a husband” if I did or didn’t start/stop doing something I was doing.
After getting married, everyone shut the hell up and let me live in peace, I have stability and consistency, and am treated like a human being not a piece of sex furniture.
This entire essay could have been called the wicked queen from Snow BIPOC, who tries to stay sexy (i.e. fertile) long past her sell-by date. And does so by killing anyone hotter than her "who is the fairest of them all?" It even gets in the milking farm scenario by having her live with seven horny dwarrves who, by virtue of being half-humanlike, half-monsters cannot fertilize her.
I am distressed by how much Hollywood movies sem to dominate this whole essay. We all know the entire industry is made up of people who rape children on islands, or who accept awards from them, right? Many knew this long ago, since the silent film era of expensive cameras used as the means of production for by exploiters. Strangely enough, it was these same people who came up with the idea of feminism in the first place. I mean, Betty Friedan, Bella (((Abzug))), Gloria Steinem, how much more obvious can you get‽
Never watched Mamma Mia because I'm not a fag, but I have this to contribute from the old Stickman blog of hardened whoremongers who had moved to Thailand to pursue their vocation full-time, long before passport bros became a thing, before that jackass ruined pickup artistry with his stupid book:
Quote of the week comes from a Pattaya Soi Sex (6) Bargirl, "I am unsure as to the identity of the father of my baby, after all, like when you eat a can of beans you can't be sure which one made you fart."
-- Stickman Weekly
Crone is such a deliberately off-putting word. I would have gone with Wise Woman, whose valuable role it is to help other women find husbands and teach them how to take care of children, and their daughters likewise.
The witch is the negative side of femininity whose role it is to make other women miserable and everyone else as well by using sorcery. By speaking words she alters the world around her, and isn't that what Harry Potter does?
Why no ((( )))’s for Steinem and Friedan? (Okay, Steinem only gets half.) I haven’t done a deep dive on the history of second-wave feminism (especially with regard to the ethno-religious origins of its architects, though I have some educated guesses), but I think it’s worth looking at how it (feminism) developed alongside the Evil Queen from Snow White (as you so aptly put it) archetype.
Somehow, we got both “you don’t need no man!” (other than your husband, the Government) and “you need to attract men indefinitely.”
Oh, it gets conspiracy theory really fast once you look into it.
"The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together. Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process."
-- Linda (((Gordon))), Functions of the Family, WOMEN: a Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969.
When you finally decide to cross the line of no return and read My Struggle, accept only the Stalag edition, the only NSDAP-approved English translation ever made. Distressingly, it predicts the scenarios which have come to pass today from the cratering birthrate to the European migrant crisis.
After the Epstein Files, we prefer to be called conspiracy realists.
As one who discovered USENET's legendary alt.seduction.fast during an overnight shift in the server room in my late 20s as a virgin that women didn't just reject but would go out of their way to deliberately torture, I am astonished by how many concepts discovered (today we would say crowdsourced) on that newsgroup are now mainstream, like hypergamy, sexiness meaning fertility and SMV.
This was long before redpill, manosphere or that stupid hat. I remember when Mystery was just an enthusiastic new poster who went out nearly every night and posted Field Reports.
From a white man's perspective who despite being an oppressor in my very DNA, soul permanently damned the moment I became a gamete, all I ever really wanted was a woman of reasonable attractiveness, a 6.5 who I could be nice to and who would be nice to me and have a house with a white picket fence and 2.3 children.
Learning women's true nature as finally described from the other side three decades later, it is just damned depressing to know what women really are. That's where all PUAs end up, unable to trust any woman, if that's any consolation for a anyone else out there. I slept with enough married women to know. It got to the point I actually preferred them. Single women got feelings and wanted to get married sooner or later and I genuinely felt terrible doing what we today call ghosting because I didn't have the guts to make a clean break and never had any intention of buying the cow when I could get the milk for free. But married women never had any such intentions. One told me she had three other men and I was #4, which didn't bother me.
Again, this was long before the apps and every woman had DickDash on her phone and Jamal or Brett the bartender will arrive within the hour to bang her blank.
By the way, "going blank" is Nature's way of saying, "this is a eugenic man you are being fertilized by, do absolutely nothing to interfere with him, remain still at all costs. You don't need your brain right now so it may safely be turned off until he has finished his task.
I'm just a guy past 30. This was an outstanding read and I want this message to reach everyone. It might be too late for my own mother and two younger sisters, but if I ever have daughters this will be the frame in which they will be raised. And if my wife ever attempts to sabotage this... stand by
Thank you! If it helps, I was a blue-pilled libertarian in my teens and early 20s. I sort of lucked into getting married “young” (<25) and experiencing a personal crisis that spurred me to start having kids then, rather than at 35, after I’d amassed a pile a cash and professional accomplishments.
This was a wild ride and felt very true. And explained how incredibly weird it was for me to enter the relationship meat market (*cough* Bumble) as a single mother after my divorce. I was most certainly not a maiden any longer and had no interest in the trappings of maidenhood, which really threw off most men on those apps!
Well, I’m already not very socially adept, being neurodivergent. That certainly contributed.
I found there were often planning hiccups with a majority of the men, when they tried to arrange dates around all the responsibilities and moving parts already existing in my life. It just didn’t seem to compute. Like.. along the vein of “what do you mean, you can’t leave your kids with someone? Are you able to spontaneously come out tonight?”
The life stage of the maiden is one with very few responsibilities or ties holding you in place. Which works very well for dating and socialising! But trying to fit someone that is no longer in that stage back into that role doesn’t work.
Amazing essay. So wise and enjoyable. What do you make of the “patriarchy” dudes who insist that men are superior to women because masculinity is superior to feminity, who require their wives’ permission to leave their home, and who consider it sinful for women to be anything but wives and mothers? This is their response to eternal maidenhood.
This probably requires a longer response (hey, how about another long essay?), but my disjointed thoughts are:
(1) I’m pro-patriachy (in the sense of a hierarchical society structured around a patriarch at the family level);
(2) But I’m aware that there is a low-IQ (for lack of a better word) caricaturized version of this (Saudi Arabia, perhaps, or the FLDS communities).
(3) I think greater female autonomy is a double-edged sword that Western society has had to deal with (and will have to deal with) indefinitely. It requires careful calibration between a barbarous (and third-world coded) purdah-based society and one in which the guardrails are taken away from human sexuality.
(4) I think part of this is a recognition that while the default identity for most women should be wife & mother (as in, centered in the domestic sphere), there will always be a subset of non-conforming women who should be allowed to benefit society in their own way.
(5) I don’t think masculinity should be seen as superior to femininity, but in a functioning society, I do think men should be in charge of the public realm because of the natural differences in (most) men and women’s inherent interests and aptitudes.
I do disagree with you essentially as you reduce men and women to their biology and you think they can’t really be friends. And you think women should be private and men public. That’s all manosphere propaganda talking points—and completely false.
Men have two default identities: husband/father and member of a tribe.
As a husband/father, he provides for his family (by gathering resources--in our modern society, this means participating in the workforce, usually) and defends them against outside aggression.
As member of a tribe (or nation - I'm using these words as a stand-in for extended kinship group), he subordinates the interests of his private family to that of the larger group. This virtue is propagated in stories like that of Horatii and Curiatii (in which one of the Horatii brothers kills his sister for mourning the death of her fiancé (one of the Curiatii), who was a champion for the opposing side. ("So perish any Roman woman who mourns the enemy.")
He is also the aggressor who leads a war party to attack the tribe over the next hill, slaughter everyone but women of childbearing age and take them as wives for his too many sons. They never find women's bones of that age in those ancient mass graves.
This is why women prefer Dark Tetrad traits in men like sociopathy and sadism, they want that man who's going to go out and murder to gather resources for her children. Ted Bundy got fan mail in prison.
My understanding is that women want men who are aggressive enough to protect them and their children but not so aggressive (as in, a full-on psychopath) that he'll pose a danger to them.
Thank you for the link to the article! I disagree with Sayers's conclusions (though not necessarily all of the particulars of her argument) and I'd like to give these arguments their proper due by responding to them in a longer format. So I'm going to bookmark this and respond to it in a longer post (don't worry, it won't be 10K words long!) as soon as I have time.
Hmmm... Seems like all women commenting, but I really enjoyed this piece. Hope I'm not out of place commenting.
Brief introduction--62, been married to my highschool sweetheart 41 years, 11 children, 9 boys and 2 girls, positive they're all mine 😁, just welcomed our 29th grandchild into the world.
My wife, at 60, is not a crone, but definitely the Grand Matriarch of our family. She will never escape the male gaze because she always has mine, and she's happy that I still find her beautiful. There was a time in her mid 40s when she started looking older to herself when she looked in the mirror and I could tell she worried if I would still find her attractive. I made sure she got that validation from me and didn't seek it from other men. I tell her that if I died she could find another man in a heartbeat, but if she died I would be alone except for our family. I don't think women ever lose their sexual value but men do.
Lots more I could comment on, but probably went too long already. I see from other comments that you are homeschooling. We homeschooled all of ours and our grandkids are now being homeschooled. I'll read some more of your work and hopefully have something to add to the conversation. Take care.
Thanks. I can feel myself getting a little more irrelevant while she is busier than ever helping with the grandkids, family outings, etc. The young mothers, even the daughters in law, come to her for advice even though they could Google it as you say.
I've run my own business the last 35 years, but I'm slowly retiring and handing it off to my sons. I've worked myself hard since I was 14 and not really looking forward to retirement. I'm hoping I'll be able to stay somewhat helpful to the business until the end; I wouldn't know what to do with myself otherwise. I'm really involved with all the grandkids (only 4 live out of state, the rest are within a half hour drive), but not as much as I would like because of gender. We raised 9 boys and only 2 girls, but the grandkids completely flipped and I have 22 granddaughters and only 7 grandsons. The oldest grandson just turned 7 and the other 5 are still babies. Don't get me wrong, I love my granddaughters to death, and there's nothing sweeter than a granddaughter giving you a hug and telling you she loves you, but they get to be teenagers and don't really want as much to do with you. I do have two or three that share my interest in old cars, fishing, and football. 😁 Menopause has been a blessing to my wife; I can tell she feels more free. I don't think it's anything to fear, especially if you have the love of your life by your side.
Grandpa, never underestimate the power and importance of your presence and love in your children’s and grandchildren’s lives. My dad felt the same way, but even when he was sick and in bed, he helped me raise my children just with his loving presence.
Being a nun sounds based cause then you don’t have sex or get married
Nuns are blissfully wedded; to Christ.
I grew up with formidable grandmothers. One, my mother’s mother, lived 44 years on the edge of the Amazon in Brazil, wife of a Presbyterian missionary. She raised six children and helped run the local clinic and generally took no prisoners. She was a force to be reckoned with when I was growing up, and she gave me my love of abundant flower gardens (boy, did she have a green thumb!). My father’s mother couldn’t have been more polar opposite if you tried. She ran away from an abusive home at 17, showed up in Hollywood, boarded with a B-movie actress, and was a such a knock-out herself that she was constantly asked to chair the USO and head up dances for soldiers during WW2. She sewed a lot of her own clothes and wore them with an incredibly natural elegance and style. My memories of her are of a woman who put on a hat and driving gloves to go to the PX and shop—and “self-serve” gasoline stations nearby never let her pump her own gas. She was treated with great deference and respect. Both of them embraced the “crone” phase in different ways. Mom’s mom wore slacks and tee shirts and gardened much of the day. The most casual Dad’s mom ever got was a floral house dress and her hair wrapped up in a bright scarf until she “did her face” in the morning. Both of them never suffered fools and so had a strong, respectful following wherever they went. The two of them have lived in my head for decades since their deaths as the model of what I want to be in my 50s and beyond. People tell me I don’t look a day over 40 (having lots of children keeps you young, I swear), but I do not “dress down” and try to ape maidenhood. I “dress up” on a daily basis—but more like my stylish Mimi did…in age-appropriate skirts and blouses with scarves and jewelry as accessories. When I’m in my garden, it’s sturdy jeans, a colorful tee shirt, and a wide-brimmed straw hat like Mom’s mom. We need more models of Matriarchs who DO things and don’t just try to ape youth (to a hideous degree these days, if you look at Hollywood). I have been a happy wife for 30 years, a mother for 29, and a grandmother for six months. I revel in this stage of life, and I pray my daughters get the chance to do the same. Crones, unite! The world needs you more than ever.
Crone matriarch life is the best. The kids are older. You feel fulfilled and happy you did a good job raising them. Now you can do whatever guilt free. Start a business or do weird hippie stuff. And the coolest part is you got several humans who you had years to engineer into cool friends, your kids. Only issue is you probably made then so cool you aren't cool enough to hang out with them. Oh well they still hang out with you more than you would normally deserve.
And the coolest part is you got several humans who you had years to engineer into cool friends, your kids. Only issue is you probably made then so cool you aren't cool enough to hang out with them.
This is one of the strongest consequentialist arguments for having kids. If you’re a woman and you’re not like other women, you should have a bunch of kids so that you have the greatest chance of producing more humans who share your general outlook/temperament.
And yes, they often turn out to be far better than you, and you get to humbly accept that you now have friends who are cooler than you. And it’s amazing.
The best read in quite some time. Eloquent, funny, apt and wise. Thank you!
Thank you! Glad you liked it.
Disagree with some of this, agree with some of this. I don't think it's 100% accurate, but that's no reason not to absorb the finer points. I Recommend a read through: If for no other reason that 80+ other readers on here believe this perspective to be wholly true.
To challenge some of you: Yes, the "Toxic Maiden" is a terrible standard of immaturity, denial, self-centeredness and vulnerability to live by. No, women did not get there on their own. A male-centric culture that demands women exhibit all the positive (physical and psychological) traits of maidenhood, while also becoming mothers of multiple children, is also toxic. And I highly suspect that it's prevalent.
I think the article's good arguments would fare better, if they were not propped up by a simplistic glossing over of other sides of the coin.
I’m not averse to the idea of men gaining a mature mindset with regard to women, childbirth, aging, and the like. I do think the current social and legal structure makes it almost impossible for men to take on the roles and responsibilities that would shape them into mature adults.
The no-fault divorce structure (combined with a legal system weaponized against fathers) makes the institution of marriage itself a giant risk for many men. And the post-Tinder dating landscape seems to make everybody treat relationships as transactional (not to mention the huge disparity in your sexual market value as a woman in your 20s versus a man in your 20s—women have very little incentive to “settle” for someone less than perfect when they’re at the peak of their fertility, and that means that they’ll waste years of their lives sleeping with cads and psychopaths before deciding marriage is an option.)
I guess what I’m saying is: there are major structural forces at work that make a healthy relationship between women and men nearly impossible. Men, I would argue, are the ones who need to force these structural changes to come about.
I think you bring up an excellent point in the no-fault divorce structure and the legal system heavily biased against paternal custody. I would add to that, that if a boyfriend and girlfriend are living together, or at least sleeping together for years, they are effectively married. So when they break up, physiologically and psychologically, they are basically divorcees. How many times can you "be married in common law" before you get married? Eventually, doesn't it mess up your ability to see this commitment as anything but? Can you keep bonding and tell yourself it's special because you get a marriage license, if no fault divorce means ending it this time, just adds a formality?
I say this as someone who VALUES divorce.
There's so much more to comment on. Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I'll stop here.
I couldn't agree more. Thank you for writing this.
Good article. Doesn't address how things have changed now that women don't have to rely on men for provision, however. Also doesn't address how money impacts one's maidenhood or motherhood. Did rich women with lots of servants follow this female journey you outline in the article? Or is this a journey limited to a specific class of women?
I wanted to add a section about how things like no-fault divorce and female participation in the workforce has affected this dynamic, but I wasn’t sure if anyone would want to read an article that long. I think these are good questions—they just need their own article (s)!
No-fault divorce has been a disaster, for men in particular. I hope I need not explain how. The work or stay home conflict is best resolved by working from home as Louise Perry does. While she's an outlier, there might be partial solutions because women have always worked - just not in cubicles or office buildings.
Motherhood, of course, is essential for the human race. The maternal instinct is celebrated for a reason. The missing link, however, is fatherhood. By this I mean that while mothers tend to excel at nurturing children; fathers are required for rising young adults. The older children become the more important a fathers tend to be for stability and guidance. This isn't a topic one encounters very often.
It demands a sledge hammer.
What the fuck are government transfers if not "relying on men', Jinny?
Government transfers do not rely on men. They rely on a small subset of men. Random men don't get credit for sharing a gender with the small number of men who actually bear society's financial weight.
Also even if it was only a subset of men paying the tax burden, it would still be men providing the resources. It was never 'all men' before, you idiot.
Numbers matter. If a woman relies on her husband for financial support, she is mot relying on men at large, she is relying on a man. If your grandma is relying on SS money from the subset of financially productive men who pay into the system, she is not relying on men at large either.
Men online like to claim credit for things other men have done. It seems like you are one of them.
Independence from a partner doesn’t mean independence from support systems. In a modern welfare state, everyone relies on some mix of markets, families, and government transfers.
Because the tax system is progressive and men earn more on average, a larger share of net contributions comes from men. That’s an aggregate funding fact. But those transfers go to many groups—retirees, children, healthcare, lower-income households—across both sexes.
So the real point is that ‘independence’ today often means shifting reliance from private arrangements to public ones, not eliminating reliance altogether.
Also - I know it is like one of the three cards women online can play, but I pay more taxes than 90% of Americans. Cool your jets here.
I'm glad I was patient with your previous comments because this one actually has substance. I agree that independence these days means shifting reliance, but this applies to men too; men are not all living off the grid and relying only on their bare hands to build a life for themselves without anyone else's support.
When you say "men earn more on average, a larger share of net contributions comes from men" however, you are still bundling together achieving men with non-achieving men, and acting as if there is some sort of parity between the two. Men at large are not one lump. There's wider variance between men than between women, meaning you get some very high achieving men and some absolute losers. The latter don't get any credit. There is no "men do X" only "some men do X." If Alice and Bob and Charlie are working on a group project together, and Bob is doing all the work, Charlie doesn't get to pat himself on the back and say "without men this project wouldn't get done."
As for your claim that you pay 90% more taxes than most Americans, well, this is the internet. I don't take personal claims too seriously. I'll admit I usually assume that men who spend time on the internet are on the loser end of the bell curve I mention above, but if you're not one, good for you. Though I'm surprised you would care to bundle your achievements with men who achieve nothing then. Most high status men don't do that. They tend to despise non-contributing/violent men and view them not with solidarity but as threats to their property and families.
Random men still provide more in taxes than they receive, dude.
Some of them, yes.
65-80% of men are net taxpayers. 20-35% of women are.
Then it seems even if we take your figures for granted, we have at least 20% of men who are not being relied on for anything.
“Maidenhood” was overrated. Older women were nasty to me, men constantly sexualized me, dating was like playing sociopath roulette, nobody took me seriously, my parents were going after me for various things even when I moved out, suggesting my standards we’re simultaneously too high and not high enough and criticizing me on the basis that I’d “never find a husband” if I did or didn’t start/stop doing something I was doing.
After getting married, everyone shut the hell up and let me live in peace, I have stability and consistency, and am treated like a human being not a piece of sex furniture.
This article is a great example of Hegel’s insight:
"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
This entire essay could have been called the wicked queen from Snow BIPOC, who tries to stay sexy (i.e. fertile) long past her sell-by date. And does so by killing anyone hotter than her "who is the fairest of them all?" It even gets in the milking farm scenario by having her live with seven horny dwarrves who, by virtue of being half-humanlike, half-monsters cannot fertilize her.
I am distressed by how much Hollywood movies sem to dominate this whole essay. We all know the entire industry is made up of people who rape children on islands, or who accept awards from them, right? Many knew this long ago, since the silent film era of expensive cameras used as the means of production for by exploiters. Strangely enough, it was these same people who came up with the idea of feminism in the first place. I mean, Betty Friedan, Bella (((Abzug))), Gloria Steinem, how much more obvious can you get‽
Never watched Mamma Mia because I'm not a fag, but I have this to contribute from the old Stickman blog of hardened whoremongers who had moved to Thailand to pursue their vocation full-time, long before passport bros became a thing, before that jackass ruined pickup artistry with his stupid book:
Quote of the week comes from a Pattaya Soi Sex (6) Bargirl, "I am unsure as to the identity of the father of my baby, after all, like when you eat a can of beans you can't be sure which one made you fart."
-- Stickman Weekly
Crone is such a deliberately off-putting word. I would have gone with Wise Woman, whose valuable role it is to help other women find husbands and teach them how to take care of children, and their daughters likewise.
The witch is the negative side of femininity whose role it is to make other women miserable and everyone else as well by using sorcery. By speaking words she alters the world around her, and isn't that what Harry Potter does?
Why no ((( )))’s for Steinem and Friedan? (Okay, Steinem only gets half.) I haven’t done a deep dive on the history of second-wave feminism (especially with regard to the ethno-religious origins of its architects, though I have some educated guesses), but I think it’s worth looking at how it (feminism) developed alongside the Evil Queen from Snow White (as you so aptly put it) archetype.
Somehow, we got both “you don’t need no man!” (other than your husband, the Government) and “you need to attract men indefinitely.”
Oh, it gets conspiracy theory really fast once you look into it.
"The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together. Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process."
-- Linda (((Gordon))), Functions of the Family, WOMEN: a Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969.
When you finally decide to cross the line of no return and read My Struggle, accept only the Stalag edition, the only NSDAP-approved English translation ever made. Distressingly, it predicts the scenarios which have come to pass today from the cratering birthrate to the European migrant crisis.
After the Epstein Files, we prefer to be called conspiracy realists.
The sheer audacity of this piece is well-appreciated. Brilliant and painfully accurate. I will come back to this and re-read it many times.
Based and cronepilled.
As one who discovered USENET's legendary alt.seduction.fast during an overnight shift in the server room in my late 20s as a virgin that women didn't just reject but would go out of their way to deliberately torture, I am astonished by how many concepts discovered (today we would say crowdsourced) on that newsgroup are now mainstream, like hypergamy, sexiness meaning fertility and SMV.
This was long before redpill, manosphere or that stupid hat. I remember when Mystery was just an enthusiastic new poster who went out nearly every night and posted Field Reports.
From a white man's perspective who despite being an oppressor in my very DNA, soul permanently damned the moment I became a gamete, all I ever really wanted was a woman of reasonable attractiveness, a 6.5 who I could be nice to and who would be nice to me and have a house with a white picket fence and 2.3 children.
Learning women's true nature as finally described from the other side three decades later, it is just damned depressing to know what women really are. That's where all PUAs end up, unable to trust any woman, if that's any consolation for a anyone else out there. I slept with enough married women to know. It got to the point I actually preferred them. Single women got feelings and wanted to get married sooner or later and I genuinely felt terrible doing what we today call ghosting because I didn't have the guts to make a clean break and never had any intention of buying the cow when I could get the milk for free. But married women never had any such intentions. One told me she had three other men and I was #4, which didn't bother me.
Again, this was long before the apps and every woman had DickDash on her phone and Jamal or Brett the bartender will arrive within the hour to bang her blank.
By the way, "going blank" is Nature's way of saying, "this is a eugenic man you are being fertilized by, do absolutely nothing to interfere with him, remain still at all costs. You don't need your brain right now so it may safely be turned off until he has finished his task.
Thus women find it the best sex of all.
I'm just a guy past 30. This was an outstanding read and I want this message to reach everyone. It might be too late for my own mother and two younger sisters, but if I ever have daughters this will be the frame in which they will be raised. And if my wife ever attempts to sabotage this... stand by
Thank you! If it helps, I was a blue-pilled libertarian in my teens and early 20s. I sort of lucked into getting married “young” (<25) and experiencing a personal crisis that spurred me to start having kids then, rather than at 35, after I’d amassed a pile a cash and professional accomplishments.
So what I’m saying is…it’s never too late!
This was a wild ride and felt very true. And explained how incredibly weird it was for me to enter the relationship meat market (*cough* Bumble) as a single mother after my divorce. I was most certainly not a maiden any longer and had no interest in the trappings of maidenhood, which really threw off most men on those apps!
Well, I’m already not very socially adept, being neurodivergent. That certainly contributed.
I found there were often planning hiccups with a majority of the men, when they tried to arrange dates around all the responsibilities and moving parts already existing in my life. It just didn’t seem to compute. Like.. along the vein of “what do you mean, you can’t leave your kids with someone? Are you able to spontaneously come out tonight?”
The life stage of the maiden is one with very few responsibilities or ties holding you in place. Which works very well for dating and socialising! But trying to fit someone that is no longer in that stage back into that role doesn’t work.
I’ve heard online dating is a nightmare. I’d be curious to know what your experiences were like, especially as a non-maiden!
Amazing essay. So wise and enjoyable. What do you make of the “patriarchy” dudes who insist that men are superior to women because masculinity is superior to feminity, who require their wives’ permission to leave their home, and who consider it sinful for women to be anything but wives and mothers? This is their response to eternal maidenhood.
This probably requires a longer response (hey, how about another long essay?), but my disjointed thoughts are:
(1) I’m pro-patriachy (in the sense of a hierarchical society structured around a patriarch at the family level);
(2) But I’m aware that there is a low-IQ (for lack of a better word) caricaturized version of this (Saudi Arabia, perhaps, or the FLDS communities).
(3) I think greater female autonomy is a double-edged sword that Western society has had to deal with (and will have to deal with) indefinitely. It requires careful calibration between a barbarous (and third-world coded) purdah-based society and one in which the guardrails are taken away from human sexuality.
(4) I think part of this is a recognition that while the default identity for most women should be wife & mother (as in, centered in the domestic sphere), there will always be a subset of non-conforming women who should be allowed to benefit society in their own way.
(5) I don’t think masculinity should be seen as superior to femininity, but in a functioning society, I do think men should be in charge of the public realm because of the natural differences in (most) men and women’s inherent interests and aptitudes.
I do disagree with you essentially as you reduce men and women to their biology and you think they can’t really be friends. And you think women should be private and men public. That’s all manosphere propaganda talking points—and completely false.
Should the default identity for men be husband and father, or does he also get to have other identities?
Men have two default identities: husband/father and member of a tribe.
As a husband/father, he provides for his family (by gathering resources--in our modern society, this means participating in the workforce, usually) and defends them against outside aggression.
As member of a tribe (or nation - I'm using these words as a stand-in for extended kinship group), he subordinates the interests of his private family to that of the larger group. This virtue is propagated in stories like that of Horatii and Curiatii (in which one of the Horatii brothers kills his sister for mourning the death of her fiancé (one of the Curiatii), who was a champion for the opposing side. ("So perish any Roman woman who mourns the enemy.")
Defends against aggression? From whom?
He is also the aggressor who leads a war party to attack the tribe over the next hill, slaughter everyone but women of childbearing age and take them as wives for his too many sons. They never find women's bones of that age in those ancient mass graves.
This is why women prefer Dark Tetrad traits in men like sociopathy and sadism, they want that man who's going to go out and murder to gather resources for her children. Ted Bundy got fan mail in prison.
My understanding is that women want men who are aggressive enough to protect them and their children but not so aggressive (as in, a full-on psychopath) that he'll pose a danger to them.
Women LIKE it when men discipline them. It shows he really cares.
Especially feminists. I don't know this first-hand (I mean, eww) but apparently they like it rough.
It's not me that says this, it's replicable research. It used to be called Dark Triad traits but they found a fourth so now it's Dark Tetrad.
Four very bad traits that women find irresistible for solid evolutionary reasons.
That flowers and chocolate shit don't work.
See this: https://matiane.wordpress.com/2024/06/26/dorothy-l-sayers-are-women-human/
Thank you for the link to the article! I disagree with Sayers's conclusions (though not necessarily all of the particulars of her argument) and I'd like to give these arguments their proper due by responding to them in a longer format. So I'm going to bookmark this and respond to it in a longer post (don't worry, it won't be 10K words long!) as soon as I have time.
Hmmm... Seems like all women commenting, but I really enjoyed this piece. Hope I'm not out of place commenting.
Brief introduction--62, been married to my highschool sweetheart 41 years, 11 children, 9 boys and 2 girls, positive they're all mine 😁, just welcomed our 29th grandchild into the world.
My wife, at 60, is not a crone, but definitely the Grand Matriarch of our family. She will never escape the male gaze because she always has mine, and she's happy that I still find her beautiful. There was a time in her mid 40s when she started looking older to herself when she looked in the mirror and I could tell she worried if I would still find her attractive. I made sure she got that validation from me and didn't seek it from other men. I tell her that if I died she could find another man in a heartbeat, but if she died I would be alone except for our family. I don't think women ever lose their sexual value but men do.
Lots more I could comment on, but probably went too long already. I see from other comments that you are homeschooling. We homeschooled all of ours and our grandkids are now being homeschooled. I'll read some more of your work and hopefully have something to add to the conversation. Take care.
I love everything about this comment! I can’t imagine the wealth one must feel to have 29 (!!) grandkids.
I also appreciate hearing the Grand Matriarch’s husband’s perspective.
Thanks. I can feel myself getting a little more irrelevant while she is busier than ever helping with the grandkids, family outings, etc. The young mothers, even the daughters in law, come to her for advice even though they could Google it as you say.
I've run my own business the last 35 years, but I'm slowly retiring and handing it off to my sons. I've worked myself hard since I was 14 and not really looking forward to retirement. I'm hoping I'll be able to stay somewhat helpful to the business until the end; I wouldn't know what to do with myself otherwise. I'm really involved with all the grandkids (only 4 live out of state, the rest are within a half hour drive), but not as much as I would like because of gender. We raised 9 boys and only 2 girls, but the grandkids completely flipped and I have 22 granddaughters and only 7 grandsons. The oldest grandson just turned 7 and the other 5 are still babies. Don't get me wrong, I love my granddaughters to death, and there's nothing sweeter than a granddaughter giving you a hug and telling you she loves you, but they get to be teenagers and don't really want as much to do with you. I do have two or three that share my interest in old cars, fishing, and football. 😁 Menopause has been a blessing to my wife; I can tell she feels more free. I don't think it's anything to fear, especially if you have the love of your life by your side.
Grandpa, never underestimate the power and importance of your presence and love in your children’s and grandchildren’s lives. My dad felt the same way, but even when he was sick and in bed, he helped me raise my children just with his loving presence.
Both of your comments genuinely put a smile on my face, sir. God bless and, if you'll pardon one of my generation's colloquialisms, Stay Winning.
I'm blessed, for sure. Thanks.