July 1, 2015

Jonathan Rauch doubles down on the supply-of-women argument for why polygamy is not like same-sex marriage.

Here's my earlier post, "I've got a problem with the supply-of-women argument for distinguishing polygamy from same-sex marriage," poking Rauch (and Richard Posner) for relying on the social interest in preserving more women for men. They seem to think women are "some kind of natural resource to be conserved for the benefit of males." Like there needs to be a bag limit.

Rauch now has another article, going on at greater length and still failing to take account of the problem:
[W]hen a high-status man takes two wives (and one man taking many wives, or polygyny, is almost invariably the real-world pattern), a lower-status man gets no wife. If the high-status man takes three wives, two lower-status men get no wives. And so on.

This competitive, zero-sum dynamic sets off a competition among high-status men to hoard marriage opportunities, which leaves lower-status men out in the cold. Those men, denied access to life's most stabilizing and civilizing institution, are unfairly disadvantaged and often turn to behaviors like crime and violence.
In this view, women are society's tools, to be used to tame men. If some men are successful in winning too many women — if, after getting one woman, they can continue to take additional women out of the pool of potential wives — then there are fewer women left over to do the dirty work of civilizing the less desirable men, men who, undomesticated, run wild and do destructive things.

Rauch does pause to look at it from the female perspective:

The situation is not good for women, either, because it places them in competition with other wives and can reduce them all to satellites of the man.
But that's just offering the advice to women that, in general, polygamous marriages are a bad choice. It's not an explanation of why the choice should be denied to individual women who decide that a particular polygamous marriage they're considering is a good one, better than their other options.

Rauch says there might be "competition with other wives." But the idea of his bag-limit theory is to put more women in competition with all the other unmarried women and thereby to make the competition for women easier for men. Why can't the individual woman choose which kind of competition she prefers (competition with other wives or competition with other unmarried women)? The answer seems to be: Because we want to preserve the supply of women to increase the odds of matching them up with less desirable men lest these low quality men wreak havoc on society in general. 

Rauch points to research:
Here’s a 2012 study, for example, that discovered “significantly higher levels of rape, kidnapping, murder, assault robbery and fraud in polygynous cultures.” According to the research, “monogamy's main cultural evolutionary advantage over polygyny is the more egalitarian distribution of women, which reduces male competition and social problems.”
Men are a problem, and women are the solution.
[S]ocieties become inherently unstable when effective sex ratios reach something like 120 males to 100 females, such that a sixth of men are surplus commodities in the marriage market. That's not a big number: "The United States as a whole would reach that ratio if, for example, 5 percent of men took two wives, 3 percent took three wives, and 2 percent took four wives—numbers that are quite imaginable, if polygamy were legal for a while."
Of course, in nontraditional America, women have sex outside of marriage, and I suspect 10% of men already have 2, 3, or 4 women. And many women — often women with children — go for long stretches of time with no man. We don't just lower our standard until we get a husband. It's not like starving, where you'll eat anything. So the bag-limit argument for monogamy isn't doing the work you want anyway.
By abolishing polygamy as a legal form of marriage, western societies took a step without which modern liberal democracy and egalitarian social structures might have been impossible: they democratized the opportunity to marry.
Fine. But we're already a modern and egalitarian, and you're trying to justify cutting off the individual's freedom of choice. You need to have a reason why cutting off this choice — an informed, free decision to enter a plural marriage — is something government is allowed to do. Rauch doesn't attempt to discuss any process of slipping back into pre-modernism that could occur if polygamy became a recognized legal status in America. Instead he says look at this map:



Yikes! Disturbing! See? The argument by map is a different kind of argument. It invites disgust and contempt for the Muslim world. But I assume Rauch is one of the enlightened people who would not deliberately excite the forces of Islamophobia. Back when the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the criminalization of polygamy, in Reynolds v. United States (1878), it said:
Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people....
I don't think that's the kind of reasoning that Americans are going to want to make out loud today. Of course, we don't want the terrible burdens on liberty that prevail in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, but I don't see how pointing at the limitations on liberty elsewhere works as an argument for imposing a limitation on liberty here. (I certainly concede that Islamophobia, handled subtly, will prod a lot of American minds, but I doubt if Rauch would admit, even to himself, that's what he's doing.)

Rauch has some other arguments at the end of his article, and there are other arguments. All I'm doing is demonstrating the distastefulness of the supply-of-women argument (and the Islamophobia argument). These arguments might work legally. I just don't know if these are things an advocate should want to come out and say.

I presume Rauch doesn't even think he is saying these things. But lawyers and politicians need to be able to see the ways in which the things that sound good to them can be restated unprettily. You have opponents, and you will be paraphrased.

64 comments:

Cameron said...

I think you overlook that the real problem is it is not so much "having a woman" but the opportunity of having a wife, family etc is denied to low social status men in such societies, which adds to the attraction of the jihadi 72 virgins etc - i.e. if they have no prospects in this life, an afterlife which delivers such fantasies becomes much more attractive.

Cameron said...

To quote Ann Althouse - "But... even when you are single, part of your dignity lies in knowing that you could marry if you found someone to love, who loved you, and the 2 of you wanted to participate in the government-approved form of dignifying a 2-person relationship." This is what is denied to those men in such a polygamous culture.

Hagar said...

So, how about polyandry?

Brando said...

Why is it assumed that polygamy means only men with more wives, rather than women with more husbands?

And more importantly, who cares? If my neighbor is living with and having sex with several people--men or women--and no one has been forced into anything, why should I care? If they want to have this arrangement called a "marriage", again why should I care? Don't we have enough to deal with regarding our own lives and government's intrusions there, without policing others' living arrangements?

So some women will get a bad deal out of polygamy--as long as they're not forced into it then so what? The only reasonable argument against polygamous legal marriages is how it affects government benefits such as social security--but if we're ever going to go that route (which I highly doubt) we could deal with those issues then.

Besides, right now it seems the bigger problem is too few parents in many households. An extra spouse might be useful!

George said...

The stronger argument against polygamy, I think, is that the structure of a two person marriage contract in the West (and see, you can subtly draw that distinction in this way) doesn't work with multiple people in the mix. For example, there's no way to shoehorn multiple parties into our system of child rearing (again, in jurisdictions that allow it the child is the property of the male).

Monkeyboy said...

too late

#lovewins

rhhardin said...

Polygamy matches the wively demand for sex with the man's.

Bob Boyd said...

Sex robot technology seems to be coming along nicely. Perhaps tech will solve this problem too.
In the mean time maybe we could tide ourselves over with legalized prostitution.

Paco Wové said...

"women are society's tools, to be used to tame men."

And men are society's tools, to be used for lots of things – defense, heavy manual labor, etc. Everybody has duties. It takes a village, you know.

Ann Althouse said...

"To quote Ann Althouse - "But... even when you are single, part of your dignity lies in knowing that you could marry if you found someone to love, who loved you, and the 2 of you wanted to participate in the government-approved form of dignifying a 2-person relationship." This is what is denied to those men in such a polygamous culture."

Nope.

I said you could marry if you found someone.

Not being able to find someone is the problem that was under discussion in the op-ed I was talking about. I'm well aware of that problem. I was single for 20 years between marriages.

It's one thing for the government to have a beneficial status and to exclude you when you're ready to enter it. It's another thing for social conditions to exist that make you unable to enter that status even when you aren't excluded.

There's a supply and demand problem. Why are individual women being forced to solve the problem that is the badness of men?

MarkW said...

The advantage of legal monogamy from the female point of view is that it protects high-status married women from having to share their husbands. I understand that first wives in polygamous cultures often greatly resent their husbands marrying younger second and third wives (thereby dividing attention and family resources available to them and their children), but there's little those first wives can do about it in those cultures. So you could think of enforced monogamy as a compact between high-status women and low-status men -- it benefits both.

Jane the Actuary said...

Rauch is right insofar as, if polygamy were to become popular, particularly in the form of one man/multiple wives, it has the potential for a lot of social instability. Hence, we might not care, in terms of our moral reasoning, about the harm it does to any one man, but there are grounds to be concerned, if it produces a situation likely to lead to problems of unaffiiiated men prone to greater criminality, for instance. After all, isn't the keenness of Saudi men to join ISIS attributed, in part, to polygamy preventing them from finding wives?

But -- if it were the case that would-be-polygamists (that is, those who are unhappy that they can't cement their emotional ties legally) could convince the rest of us, or, really, the Supreme Court anyway, that they are directly harmed and that it's a matter of equality and justice that they be allowed to marry multiple partners, then I would expect that such abstract, somewhat hypothetical harms, wouldn't be given much weight. It would be the same issue as with fatherless or motherless children and SSM marriage -- who has standing to make this objection? An parent on behalf of their infant son, saying, in the long run, 20 or 30 years from now, my child might not be able to marry due to lack of available women?

Some related posts of mine:

We're talking past each other on SSM and polygamy

What if women pair up because of a shortage of (quality, marriagable) men?

Ann Althouse said...

Polygamy matches the wively demand for sex with the man's."

In modern American polygamy, if it takes off, I would think some of those wives would be having sex with each other.

And why assume there will be one man and many wives, as opposed to 2 men and 2 women. That could be a way for gay people to raise their own biological children. 2 gay couples merge into a legal foursome, perhaps with no male-female sex at all. But they procreate and they care for their own children.

Picture the most wholesome possible 2 gay couples in a foursome with children. What govt benefits should they have? Joint tax return, etc.

MadisonMan said...

Be like Muslims in the middle-east! Have two wives!

Not much of a selling point.

Bob Boyd said...

"Why are individual women being forced to solve the problem that is the badness of men?"


It's dark and lonely work - like oral sex, but someone has to do it.

Hagar said...

My neighbor - divorced, then a widow - certainly thinks that, since I am the only man around, it is my simple duty as a man to service her cooler, mow the yard, shovel the sidewalk, fix faucet drips, etc.
She does take her garbage cart to the curb herself about once a month, when the weather is nice, to show that she really is quite independent and does not totally depend on me.

Hagar said...

To do the "manly" work, that is.

acm said...

For once, the topic is women and marriage and I haven't heard from the Men Who Are Totally Going Their Own Way Once They Say This One Last Thing and I would actually like to hear what they have to say.

Bob Boyd said...

"service her cooler"


I've never heard it called that before.

CStanley said...

And men are society's tools, to be used for lots of things – defense, heavy manual labor, etc. Everybody has duties. It takes a village, you know.

This!

Women were put in arranged marriages, while men were conscripted into the military.

It's unfortunate that the feminist movement coincided with an extreme drive toward individual autonomy in our society. Feminists went off the rails because they conflate the patriarchal excesses of the past with the aspects of organized society that invoked communal responsibility (and no, I'm not suggesting "communal responsibilities" imposed by the state.)

ganderson said...

I don't mind "... deliberately excite (ing) the forces of Islamophobia". Why should we imitate barbarians? Also I believe the "women civilize men" argument. Check your local single-mom predominant neighborhood for quick confirmation. And those of you with kids- think of the challenges of staying on the same page regarding child rearing with two parents. Three or four are unlikely to make things easier.

tim maguire said...

I'm fine with polygamy, it's another "none of the government's business" issue, but the arguments against polygamy are much stronger than the arguments against gay marriage. You don't have to spend too much time doing research or mind exercises to realize that polygamous societies are inherently unstable. So unstable, in fact, that I don't belive you will see a significant number of polygamous marriages even if it is allowed. Probably no more formal arrangements than you already see informal arrangements. Which is part of why I'm fine allowing it. It will be a mostly theoretical right.

Farmer said...

Who cares? Freedom. Equality. Love.

Any other argument is nothing but hate and bigotry.

Roger Sweeny said...

In this view, women are society's tools ...

That is true, but any article that says, "we should ______" wants to make some people "society's tools." "We should have a minimum wage of fifteen dollars an hour." Business people are society's tools. "We should have mandatory national service for eighteen-year-olds." Young people are society's tools.

I would go even further. Any law reflects a social policy. And any law forces people to act in a way that "society" approves of.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

In this view, women are society's tools...

During the splooge stooge discussion you didn't seem to have much problem viewing men as society's tools for providing for children. Not much concern about men's autonomy.

Larry J said...

From what I've read in articles such as this one in "The Economist", marriage rates for lower class men and women have already dropped substantially. If true, then polygamy might be the only hope for a lower class woman to marry at all, assuming she wants to in the first place.

Ann Althouse said...

@Hagar

I wrote a new post to highlight your question.

Ann Althouse said...

"During the splooge stooge discussion you didn't seem to have much problem viewing men as society's tools for providing for children. Not much concern about men's autonomy."

Nope.

I said that men need to take proper care of their tools, which are theirs to use for their own purposes, but when you don't take proper care and there are children, society may choose to put the children's interests ahead of the man's interest in shielding him from the consequences of the failure to take proper care of his tool.

Bob Boyd said...

I understand the argument that women should be free to choose, but
polygamy may actually encourage women to choose situations in which they will be less free.
It seems to me more young women will choose to tie themselves to a wealthy male rather than taking the harder road to become educated, skilled, developing their full potential and therefore becoming self-reliant autonomous individuals who are wealthy in their own right and able to support a stable of big, dumb, beautiful husbands.

Ann Althouse said...

"I think you overlook that the real problem is it is not so much "having a woman" but the opportunity of having a wife, family etc is denied to low social status men in such societies, which adds to the attraction of the jihadi 72 virgins etc - i.e. if they have no prospects in this life, an afterlife which delivers such fantasies becomes much more attractive."

You don't even need to win the mind of the man. Just have a war and draft your unmarried men and send them en masse into doom. It's sort of like herding them into death camps and gas chambers, but more glorious.

Saint Croix said...

I understand that first wives in polygamous cultures often greatly resent their husbands marrying younger second and third wives

Bill and Hillary and Gennifer and Monica. Fun times!

Ann Althouse said...

The war solution is so obvious.

And look at China:

"Today, the population continues to grow. There is also a serious gender imbalance. Census data obtained in 2000 revealed that 119 boys were born for every 100 girls, and among China's "floating population" the ratio was as high as 128:100. These situations led the government in July 2004 to ban selective abortions of female fetuses. It is estimated that this imbalance will rise until 2025–2030 to reach 20% then slowly decrease."

dbp said...

I think MarkW is on the right track here:

Under current law, a woman has a great deal of power in her marriage. If the law was such that she had no say in her husband taking an additional wife then her power is diminished and her marriage investment in her husband will be cut in half upon his second marriage. Yes, she could do the same thing but Human nature and Biology exist and this would not happen very much.

Mostly this would weaken the power of high status married women. It helps low status women and hurts low status men.

Also: If you had a household with multiple husbands and wives, divorce settlements would be a nightmare.

acm said...

Under current law, a woman has a great deal of power in her marriage. If the law was such that she had no say in her husband taking an additional wife then her power is diminished and her marriage investment in her husband will be cut in half upon his second marriage. Yes, she could do the same thing but Human nature and Biology exist and this would not happen very much.

---

I see no reason to think that the law in 2015 and beyond would allow a first wife no say in whether a second wife joined their marriage.

Original Mike said...

Why shouldn't the government manage the supply of women? Polygamy is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Ann Althouse said...

...society may choose to put the children's interests ahead of the man's interest in shielding him from the consequences of the failure to take proper care of his tool.

But the only consequence that the man is trying to avoid is society using him as a tool to provide for his child. Without society's attempt to use him as a tool, there would be no consequence for the man.

Johanna Lapp said...

How long before each of a man's four widows is demanding full and separate survivor's benefits from Social Security or other pension entitlements?

And our Supreme Courts will quadruple our unfunded liabilities in the name of simple "fairness" and "compassion" and "justice."

dbp said...

If the first wife has a say, then I can only think of one common situation which would lead to an additional wife entering the marriage:

Husband: You can either agree to my girlfriend joining our marriage or I will simply divorce you and then marry her anyway.

Neither option looks great but my objections to polygamy pretty much evaporate if current husbands and wives all have a say in the addition of new members to their marriage. It would be very self-limiting.

Anonymous said...

AA: "Fine. But we're already a modern and egalitarian, and you're trying to justify cutting off the individual's freedom of choice. You need to have a reason why cutting off this choice..."

Good Lord. So, once you're "modern and egalitarian" you're good to go forever, eh? You can dismantle every load-bearing structure that made that state of society possible, and everything that those structures produced will go right on existing?

Awesome. So once we're rich, we can ignore the iron laws of economics and not worry about sliding into poverty again? I guess I can stop worrying about the financial lunacies of the modern West, too. Because we're already rich and successful.

"Yikes! Disturbing! See? The argument by map is a different kind of argument. It invites disgust and contempt for the Muslim world. But I assume Rauch is one of the enlightened people who would not deliberately excite the forces of Islamophobia."

Phew! Lucky for you Rauch threw up some "hate facts" to deflect your thinking into comfortable and approved channels. Waving one's hands hysterically about what dangerous evil bigots the people who object to the practice of X are feels so much better, and is so much easier, than thinking disinterestedly about the consequences of X.

Gabriel said...

"Polygamous societies are inherently unstable".

a) Not true, China and India are still around. b) Irrelevant, polygamy in the US will be practiced in the US, so you have to show it screws up our society here and now. The same kinds of studies that showed same-sex marriage was fine for kids will be used to show it's fine for polygamy.

#LoveWins. What other cultures have done, what the historical meaning of whatever is, is no longer relevant.

Hagar said...

I think Saudi men are more apt to join al Qaeda than ISIS. They are not the same.

Gabriel said...

Furthermore, polygamy in America is not going to result in men going without wives. College-educated men are outnumbered by college-educated women. Women not college educated get married at far lower rates and are much closer to parity.

You have to argue the facts as they are here and now. If you want to say it will corrupt our society, you have to work from where our society is, and not point to the past or completely different cultures.


Gabriel said...

Besides, maybe 1% of the population is going to take advantage of legal polygamy. How is that going to ruin your monogamous marriage? Why do we have to have a blanket prohibition against something that appeals to hardly anyone?

#LoveWins.

Peter said...

"And our Supreme Courts will quadruple our unfunded liabilities in the name of simple "fairness" and "compassion" and "justice."

Social Security already works quite well in transferring the earnings of African-American men (who, statistically, have shorter life expectancies) to white women, who live longer.

The basic principle is: It's OK to charge men more for life insurance (because of their higher mortality) but it's not OK for pension plans (public or private) to pay men at a higher monthly rate just because

Just as it's forbidden to charge men less for health insurance (even though statistically they consume less healthcare) but it's OK to charge men more for car insurance.

Does anyone think that when the Supreme Court permits Muslim men to marry four women it would or could be politically possible to limit any additional financial liability to Social Security?

Paco Wové said...

"send them en masse into doom"

Needs an Althouse trolls her commenters tag.

Larry J said...

Peter said...

The basic principle is: It's OK to charge men more for life insurance (because of their higher mortality) but it's not OK for pension plans (public or private) to pay men at a higher monthly rate just because

Just as it's forbidden to charge men less for health insurance (even though statistically they consume less healthcare) but it's OK to charge men more for car insurance.


This is known as the "Heads we win, tails you lose, suck it men because babies" principle.

CStanley said...

I said that men need to take proper care of their tools, which are theirs to use for their own purposes, but when you don't take proper care and there are children, society may choose to put the children's interests ahead of the man's interest in shielding him from the consequences of the failure to take proper care of his tool.

Doesn't it follow that a woman's sexuality is her tool to use for her own purposes, but if she doesn't "take care of it" then society might choose to put the children's interests ahead of her interest in shielding her from her failure to take proper care of her tool?

n.n said...

Well, this is entertaining. Without the ability to apply the pro-choice doctrine, presumably to avoid association of indiscriminate killing and marriage equivalence, they are scrambling to rationalize the latter under "equal". One thing that stands out is their effort to constrain the frame of reference to a manageable problem set. I wonder how many people will allow them to play their game on their terms.

tim maguire said...

Blogger Gabriel said..."Polygamous societies are inherently unstable".

a) Not true, China and India are still around. b) Irrelevant, polygamy in the US will be practiced in the US, so you have to show it screws up our society here and now. The same kinds of studies that showed same-sex marriage was fine for kids will be used to show it's fine for polygamy.


Say what? China and India are countries, not societies. Both are unstable. Neither practices polygamy. As for "b)", you set up an impossible requirement that isn't necessary in any case. You also ignore the other half of my statement.

n.n said...

The argument against polygamy falls short for two reasons: selective-child policy and open relationships. They would like people to dissociate from the problems created by progressive morality and their other institutional doctrines.

Ann Althouse said...

"But the only consequence that the man is trying to avoid is society using him as a tool to provide for his child. Without society's attempt to use him as a tool, there would be no consequence for the man."

Only after he makes a tool of himself.

Don't be a tool!

Laura said...

Why are individual fetuses being forced to solve the problem that is the badness of women?

Ah, the glorious feeling of defeating the enemy in Battlefield Uterus!

The assumption that women have no tools to take care of in their arsenals is sexist. When Ms. Fluke gets her donation from the eugenics lobby, she's sure to advocate for the cost effectiveness and limited environmental impact of subsidized laproscopic sterilization.

Jane the Actuary said...

Ann trolls her commenters, indeed!

I'm of the opinion that very few of us care about polygamy; it's just a means of discussing the underlying issues around marriage (can you legitimately claim that indirect harms are valid concerns?, for instance).

Fun fact: not only did the Hebrews of Abraham and Sarah's time have polygamy, but it continued, though not very commonly, until the Middle Ages. Memory's hazy on the particulars, though.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/janetheactuary/2015/07/who-cares-about-polygamy.html

kcom said...

Why an intelligent person would continue to use the meaningless propaganda term "islamophobia" is a mystery. Open your eyes and open your brain and think about how silly that is. Then your analysis might be a lot wiser.

Static Ping said...

AA: You don't even need to win the mind of the man. Just have a war and draft your unmarried men and send them en masse into doom. It's sort of like herding them into death camps and gas chambers, but more glorious.

Sigh.

The point was not to send them to their doom. If things worked out well the nation conquers the enemy's land, takes on lots of slaves and - key - female captives, and the nation comes out richer and more powerful. Everybody wins except the enemy and those that died but they barely matter at that point. Send the enemy to the mines and the bridal chambers, build a monument to the war dead, profit.

Of course, if the war does not go well that's unpleasant but then again better to use excess manpower towards some potentially useful end than have them rise up against the king, at least from the king's perspective. The king's motivations and the good of the nation did not always coincide.

Of course, if you can come up with a different solution that's good too, but there generally were not a lot of other solutions available in the 15th century or the 5th century or 2000 B.C. I suppose you could buy excess females, probably slaves, but the unmatched men would most likely be unable to afford them and rich countries tended to be the ones conquering their neighbors. You can also send the men out to the frontier to mine for gold or farm the wilderness or conquer the Aztecs. The successful can usually get a wife. The unsuccessful often died but, hey, needed to prune the male population anyway.

CStanley said...

Althouse: "splooge stooge meme" = Sullivan: Sarah Palin's uterus.

IMHO.

I'd like to be proven wrong and see Prof Althouse reverse course because she must recognize the disproportionate responsibility she's putting on on men to avoid starting a pregnancy. I always thought Andrew Sullivan smart enough to have realized his error (so inconsistent were his calls to invade the medical privacy he'd otherwise champion) but probably couldn't find a face saving way to reverse course so he kept doubling down.

Alex said...

Islamophobia - the ultimate sin that must be fought with the same ferocity as Stalingrad.

Ken B said...

Roger got it right. Ann's tendentious formulation as making women society's tools is one of these arguments that proves too much. We want parents to feed their children: society 'uses' parents as baby-feeders. Worse! We really do want breast feeding; now we're using just women. We want laws enforced, sometimes by people with guns. We are using 'police officers' as our tool of social control! Any policy will involve either rewards or punishments, and so will use some members of society as 'tools' for that policy.

Static Ping said...

Oh, now that I think of it, there was another solution to excess males: forced homosexuality. When ancient Crete got overpopulated and the locals paired up unmarried men to be couples. This didn't really work very well. The island was in a state of near perpetual war, piracy was widespread, and large chunks of the population left to become mercenaries. On the plus side, Cretan archers were prized mercenaries used all the way until the end of the Byzantine Empire.

Static Ping said...

And for the record, Rauch does not sound any more intelligent than last time. He should go order lunch.

Akiva said...

The new era American argument is always rights and freedom...with no responsibilities. The sole exception being holding MEN responsible for supporting offspring (sometimes when not even theirs).

But societal responsibilities...none (for men or women). So what happens when, because of this mess, birthrates fall below replacement level (which they are now in most of the Western world, and the US is only holding just below replacement due to immigrants still having sizable families)? What happens when there are not enough workers because everyone is busy experimenting with alternative family structures to meet their urges of the moment?

What if all the women of a city simply decided it's too much hassle to procreate? Or the family structures are not stable enough to do so?

What happens? Detroit - population down 50% as the city crumbles. Japan, with towns emptying because there are no children.

Iran recently made some forms of contraception illegal...because birthrates are down 25%.

How about the responsibility to make sure there are future generations? And not indulge in the gender or familial fad of the moment at the risk of literally destroying your city / state / country future? Not a problem when a few people do, but what happens when it exceeds 10%...20%...30%...50%????

Gahrie said...

I said that men need to take proper care of their tools, which are theirs to use for their own purposes, but when you don't take proper care and there are children, society may choose to put the children's interests ahead of the man's interest in shielding him from the consequences of the failure to take proper care of his tool.

You are lying again. The discussion concerned men who became fathers through the bad actions of women, like fraud (lying, or using sperm from oral sex or a condom to impregnate herself) or rape. The men did take proper care, but were abused by women.

Your position was to call men splooge stooges and insist that society has an interest in forcing them to pay for the children anyway.

Women have rights, men have responsibilities.

Woman = good, man = bad

Gahrie said...

Why are individual women being forced to solve the problem that is the badness of men?

1) They aren't. No one is forcing anyone to marry anyone.

2) Why are individual men being forced to solve the problem that is the badness of women? (Forcing men to pay child support as a result of fraud, or rape by women.)

Anonymous said...


Ann Althouse said...

"During the splooge stooge discussion you didn't seem to have much problem viewing men as society's tools for providing for children. Not much concern about men's autonomy."

Nope.

I said that men need to take proper care of their tools, which are theirs to use for their own purposes, but when you don't take proper care and there are children, society may choose to put the children's interests ahead of the man's interest in shielding him from the consequences of the failure to take proper care of his tool.


That sounds like an excellent argument against abortion. If the woman had taken proper care of her tool, she wouldn't have gotten pregnant. Now that she is pregnant, she's created another human being, and society has a duty to protect that human being from his or her murderous mother.

So, no more Roe v. Wade?