One of my guilty pleasures every week is listening to the Voice of Saruman on his Friday morning podcast. I refer of course to the mellifluous musings of the ZMan on his on his Z Blog’s Power Hour. As with others on the Far Right, I find it easier to agree with his analysis of the modern world’s dysfunction than with his solutions to these problems. So back on Friday I listened as he regaled us with the tragicomic details of the War of the Sexes or, as he called it, “Wammin’s World”. And after enjoying the mockery of the absurd antics of the feminists I reflected on the takeaway message that the speaker was making;
“The thing about the war of the sexes is that it is really a war on normal women. When you examine the arguments from the Left and from feminists, not a lot of it is aimed at changing male behavior that is beneficial to women. Mostly it is aimed at eliminating the protections a healthy society has for its women. The resulting social breakdown creates more unhappy women, who can then be recruited into the coven of feminism.”
With that analysis I agree wholeheartedly. But the ZMan doesn’t specify how this lunacy can be ended. Being the pragmatic fellow that I am I tried to think what practical changes could be made that might move us in the right direction.
And the first thing that came to mind was something else that the ZMan touches on often; that the way that our civilization cannibalizes its less affluent members is by setting up institutions that monetize the social capital of the family in ways that end up destroying the family. So, for example, parents bankrupt themselves to send their daughters to expensive colleges and this ensures that the daughters will attempt to recoup that investment by entering the economy as corporate drones. And during their time in both college and the corporate world it will be drummed into them that their real value and their happiness is as drones, busily making up power point slides and decorating their cubicles with colorful diversity slogans. And so, between working in the corporate environment and drinking the Kool-Aid of female empowerment they either never get around to marriage and children or they raise their one or two children by proxy with nannies and daycare. And the next generation doesn’t even know what a normal family life even is. This is social capital (families trying to do the right thing) being monetized by the colleges and corporations. The schools and the corporations that use these women profit immensely from the process. But the families that underwrite the whole thing are basically cutting their own throats by doing it. And flooding the labor force with women depresses the value of labor for the men trying to find a place in the world too. This along with the rampant female affirmative action makes it more than likely that a man will find his wife making more money than him. This further degrades the likelihood of a normal happy family relationship for all involved. Society might as well just turn us into Soylent Green and save the time.
So, the practical changes should be a way to avoid this whole family destroying cycle. And the first change would be, Don’t send your daughters to college. I could expand it to don’t send any of your kids to college but let’s start small. As the father of daughters who went to expensive colleges, I can tell you that not doing this would first of all restore solvency to many an American family and also allow families to provide much needed help to their daughters when they want to get married. In other words, reinstitute the dowry. This might sound almost medieval but can you imagine if the money that a father spends on his daughter’s college education could be diverted to a down payment on a house? That could be enough to allow his son-in-law to support his new family with just his own salary. In other words, letting a woman stay home to raise her kids. Additionally, if parents don’t have to bankrupt themselves to turn their daughters into childless drones then those parents will have the wherewithal to help the young married couples when the pitfalls of life intrude on their world; illness, unemployment and Acts of God.
And a non-financial benefit of this arrangement would be the restoration of the normal relationships within the extended family. Parents would be respected and appreciated for the financial and familial leadership they would represent when decisions like home purchasing occurred. Husbands as the primary bread winners would be appreciated by their wives and this would give the men the psychological reinforcement to value their roles that they currently lack. But most importantly, it would allow young women to fulfill their most valuable roles in our world. They would be the mothers that every child needs and deserves. Modern society has denigrated and devalued the role stay at home mothers play in producing happy and sane children. Anyone who has seen how children are raised today knows that it is a miracle that any of them avoid becoming psychopaths. This alone would justify any productivity to our economy associated with women withdrawing from the workplace during their childbearing and childrearing years. But another facet that people rarely discuss is the satisfaction that a woman gains from being a mom. Now granted there are some women who are unsuited for motherhood. I wish there were a blood test that could identify these poor things and redirect them to something where they’ll do less harm like loan sharking. But for the majority of healthy well-adjusted women motherhood is fulfilling as well as extremely valuable to society.
Reclaiming the Family – Part 2 – The Family Business
