“If Americans can be divorced for ‘incompatibility of temper’ I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.”

— G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World (1912)

The beginning of economics is the division of labor. If we were all hunter-gatherers, there would little for us to exchange in the marketplace. Hunter-gatherer societies are universally poor. Agriculture and the domestication of livestock were the first steps beyond subsistence and those steps were attended by the development of sex roles. It is only with the affluence and convenience provided by advanced industrial market economies that any idea of “sexual equality” becomes feasible.

Our pioneer ancestors never could have conquered the frontier if the men had stayed home cooking, while sending the womenfolk out to hunt, plow and fight off savage Indians.

A great problem of young people today is that they have been so indoctrinated in the gospel of Equality (capitalized, to signify its status as a quasi-religious belief) that they lack even the vocabulary to discuss ideas like sex roles and complementarity.

Young people are afraid of acknowledging the natural differences between male and female — which are evident to everyone — and this fear leads them into a timid artificiality of discourse, trying to tiptoe around the truth that no one is supposed to mention: Insofar as men and women are different, they are not equal, and all attempts to equalize things which are inherently different are doomed to fail.

This comes to mind after I noticed David Covucci’s article, “New Rules for Women” at BroBible.com, which is a response to an article at the feminist site Jezebel, “New Rules for Men.” Some of what Covucci writes is useful and clever, but he cedes far too much to feminism:

There are horrible males out there who believe a woman should literally be chained to the stove because if she leaves the house her tiny brain will forget she put a pot pie in the oven and then the crust might be slightly overdone. These men are 65. Most of us — even if we hate burnt dough — believe in equality and women’s rights. So while I apologize for old, white males, remember they are our fathers. And they ingrained in us their shitty beliefs. We are fighting to overcome them, so realize that occasionally defaulting back to them isn’t MISOGYNY. We are aware when we are wrong. We don’t need to be hit in the head for it.

David, do you think anyone is deceived by your white-knight gesture? “Oh, there are horrible misogynistic Cro-Magnons out there perpetuating the patriarchy, but I’m not one of them.”

Don’t be that guy who denounces Those Hateful Sexists Over There as a way of touting your own egalitarian bona fides. That’s creepy.

Egalitarianism itself is creepy. No sane person desires to live in that androgynous asexual utopia where men and women are the same, but this is the future to which feminism proposes to lead us.

Also, why do you feel the need to “apologize for old, white males”? What have I done that you need to apologize for? Am I such a boor? For that matter, were my own father and grandfathers really such awful misogynistic monsters?

And, while we’re at it, why “old white males”? Are black men, Hispanic men or Asian men more-feminist friendly than white men?

I think not.

A few years ago, when I had written a denunciation of feminism, someone tried to categorize me as a “men’s rights advocate,” a label I wholeheartedly reject. I don’t believe in “men’s rights” for the same reason I don’t believe in “women’s rights,” because the entire concept of collective “rights” is misguided, especially when applied to the relations between men and women. Each couple must negotiate their own terms of cooperation, their own division of labor, and this individual arrangement cannot be dictated by ideology.

It is my own observation and experience that couples are generally happier, and their unions more durable, the more their relationships approach the traditional arrangement of husband-father-breadwinner/wife-mother-homemaker. That is to say, the more successful a man is in his career, the less pressure his wife feels to enter the workplace. Assuming that the wife has any aptitude for domesticity and motherhood, she really doesn’t want to have to work outside the home just to pay the bills. The two-career household is inevitably afflicted with more stress and conflict after children arrive, because the wife resents her need to abandon her children and return to a job, while the husband feels like a failure because his income is insufficient to support the entire household.

Marriage is the object of courtship, and the purpose of marriage is to create a stable household for child-rearing. The more traditional household is structurally more stable, which is not to say that two-career families are doomed to failure, but rather to say that the basic bond between man and woman is stronger where there is something more to their union than the transient emotion of “love.”

Men and women need each other, and the reason for this need is that men and women are different. Insofar as feminism is about encouraging men and women to be more the same — to be androgynous and sexless — then feminism makes marriage less desirable as an object, less durable and more prone to conflict.

David Covucci apparently believes that he can negotiate with feminism, but this is impossible. Feminism is a totalitarian ideology that acknowledges no limits to its ambitions. Men who seek to negotiate a compromise with feminism are like Neville Chamberlain, supposing he could have peace by handing over the Sudetenland to Hitler.

David, where does your policy of compromise with feminism lead us?

If this is the future, you don’t want to go there, man.

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