Re the Jewish focus on male study and its effect on marriage I think it would be remiss not to include the words of Maimonides:
And [our Sages gave] even greater [advice], saying: "A person should always turn himself and his thoughts to the words of the Torah and expand his knowledge in wisdom, for the thoughts of forbidden relations grow strong solely in a heart which is empty of wisdom."
Perhaps culture can override all biology because the human biology includes culture.
So, there isn't a bare human biology that is overwritten by culture such that when we strip away culture, we shall find a human biology that is common to all humans.
Why Ultra-Orthodox women have ten children is entirely conditioned by their culture and then it is futile to find any fundamental facts about women from this alone
1. > Some women and children really will be in dire circumstances when they are deserted or badly treated. Some people will be caught in loveless unions with dysfunctional partners.
Given that you state that all Ultra-Orthodox men have to offer is love, what does an Ultra-Orthodox women stand to lose from abandoning a loveless marriage, especially as there is there is an organization to help divorced women. (Perhaps I should add here that according to the Israeli Democratic Institute only 4% of Haredim over 20 are divorced/widowed, and 86% are married.)
2. If I understand correctly you seem to be implying that Ultra-Orthodox women have it harder than Amish women. Am I correct that this is your perception?
I definitely don't want to downplay the hard work of our women whom I view as superheroes (especially my wife). Additionally, one can't judge from anecdotes and I am sure there are Ultra-Orthodox women who have it harder than Amish women. I just wonder if it is obvious that is the rule.
First of all, our attitude to technology which makes life easier (other than secular media) is the exact opposite of the Amish. We embrace it all with open arms, from microwaves to toasters to blenders to pressure cookers and slow cookers etc. My family uses almost 100% disposables other than pots and baby bottles.
Our supermarkets sell everything at one spot and deliver orders, including prepared or microwaveable foods, and we try to take advantage as much as possible (given financial and health constraints. I do think most mothers (at least of large families) don't do most of the regular shopping, and I don't think the examples you mentioned are typical in the low amount of help the husbands provide (though few can measure up to Anders), but this is something that obviously varies per family and I don't believe there are any studies.
True, the women often work hard to support the family, but they also get to send their children for daycare (hopefully for more hours than they work). Many women feel the tradeoff is worth it. As you wrote in another comment, even stay-at-home mothers often feel the need to have some outlet/vocation of their choice.
I believe that in the U.S. most families(at least those with working mothers) have some hired domestic/cleaning help.
As other commenters have mentioned, the fact that our children (especially males) study for long hours, combined with our tight-knit communities means that we barely see our boys (from about age 8 or younger) during daytime hours, which makes parenting much easier.
All this is aside from family and community help which I assume the Amish also have.
Again, I certainly don't want to downplay the hard work of Ultra-Orthodox women. However, I think many of them may be offended from the assumption that they obviously work harder than Amish women (assuming you meant to imply that).
>>Given that you state that all Ultra-Orthodox men have to offer is love, what does an Ultra-Orthodox women stand to lose from abandoning a loveless marriage, especially as there is there is an organization to help divorced women.
You tell me! I actually don't believe that all the men have to offer is love. They also offer a firm place in the community.
There might be several reasons behind the low divorce rate:
1. Divorce is seen as a failure so people will not seek divorce if they don't have an obvious reason.
2. Spouses see rather little of each other anyway so they have fewer opportunities to develop conflicts.
3. People are genuinely committed to make their marriages work and believe it is possible.
I can only guess. You know much better than
>>If I understand correctly you seem to be implying that Ultra-Orthodox women have it harder than Amish women. Am I correct that this is your perception?
No, not at all. Especially the Amish's lack of washing machines seems terrible in terms of work load. The most important difference is that Amish men and women lead more similar lives ("an Amish scholar" would be a contradiction).
The Ultra-Orthodox household organization seems to me like modern society taken to its extreme. I really would like to see it in real life. It must be an impressive logistics operation. I could never have imagined this thing with the disposable dishes if no one told me. I'm feeling like I would need to see the thing in action to be able to fully imagine the details of it.
I don't doubt LG's testimony that many Ultra-Orthodox women are overworked. If people in a certain group work hard, then inevitably some of them will be overworked, sometimes or always. But I also imagine that those who are on the right side of the limit of overwork get the feeling of doing something rather advanced.
I am constantly impressed by your ability to be so open-minded in analyzing and even taking lessons from other cultures which seem oppressive. The issue of Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel not spending most of their life in the study hall is certainly the most opaque for an outsider and yet you recognized that the women are happy and learnt from this.
I think there is some perspective to add here. If I would have the time and the inclination I would write a few articles providing that. That won't happen but perhaps I will leave some more comments.
For now I shall state that to me the most important takeaway from this post is that the highest fertility societies seem to be those in which mothers have the highest workload (and the males are oppressed), whether this is due to their rejection of technology or to their expectations that men spend much of their time in synagogue or study hall. This seems counter-intuitive and is worthy of reflection.
It seems that the most important ingredient for high fertility is social conditioning to be 'highly oppressed'. One may maintain that this is solely about these cultures doing a good job at brainwashing. However this survey https://en.idi.org.il/haredi/2022/?chapter=48268 shows that Haredim rank far higher in every factor of satisfaction with life and mental and emotional health (and Israelis in general rank very high on this https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/charted-the-happiest-countries-in-the-world/). I assume that this is true for women too, as the survey certainly would have tried to highlight any differences in gender if they were significant.
I think that ApplePie's most recent post would have been the perfect response to this post. It could almost serve as the motto for the Amish and the Haredim.
The 86% married is for age 20+. For 25+ I imagine it is at least 90%. The once-married number may be here for that age group. However, it is possible that it isn't much higher, as I believe that a high percentage of Haredi divorces are soon after the marriage, essentialy a failed marriage.
This might be true today, but seems less true in the past, tho there was far more pressure on women to be faithful then on men. Slut vs stud for similar promiscuity.
In the Baby Boom years, many workers were trying to get their own nuclear family homes, close to where the husband father had a good paying job. As formerly war working women changed into SAHM, with far more labor saving devices but also far from parental help with grandkids, many women wanted more from life than even the most interesting Peyton Place TV soap operas. … (usual story).
Many / most women want a status increasing and personally meaningful job outside the home. Because of unfair biology, not injustice, the best years for having babies are also the best years for starting a career. The 20s.
Our society needs to increase the incentives for women to be married sooner, and have children sooner. Like a $10,000 wedding grant from the govt for every couple who marries before their combined years are 55 (25+30, 27+28, 21+34), with this amount decreasing by $100 each month over.
The Amish & UO examples don’t scale into secular, materialistic society.
I think it's quite interesting to note the symmetries between this perspective and the more male/MRA perspective. Complaining about the high divorce risk nowadays, saying that all they want is love, and saying that women/men orient themselves strongly around getting attention from the opposite sex.
Makes me feel like there must be an important missing factor in this type of analysis.
Why? Why couldn't it be that both men and women most of all want love and are afraid to invest in a marriage that ends in divorce?
Can't it just be that our society is failing to give me and women sufficiently efficient tools to negotiate the terms for how to meet and how to stay together?
I have no insider knowledge about the Amish or the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, but I think people might be more inclined to have children if they have a place in a community to offer said children. And reasonable expectations that the children will grow up to have the same opinions and beliefs as the parents themselves. For average westerners it seems more like different generations live in different worlds, don't have much in common. And parents have limited influence over who their children will spend time with in school, something that might have a bigger influence on who their children become as adults than anything their parents do.
I really enjoyed the article, but don't really buy the "women don't have multiple kids because they need to preserve their mate value, in the ceaseless war of all against all in the mating market" explanation.
I mean, as you point out, women initiate most divorces. And more specifically, "most" means 70% of divorces (at least in the US).
Second, they're manifestly NOT preserving their mate value - age is a much bigger factor for mate value for women, and most people in the world get fat after marriage. People would be MUCH more serious about working out, eating well, and taking care of health if "preserving mate value" was an actual concern or motivation, but manifestly, married people don't do this, whether or not they have kids.
On "marriage makes you fat" the meta analysis here, with ~200k couples and ~100k matched singles across 18 countries, shows a strong effect size of marriage on obesity - 1.7 odds ratio, up to 2.5 odds ratio in economic downturns.
It includes a study of same-sex twins from China that finds even among twins, marriage increases BMI for both sexes, regardless of genetic and common environmental factors.
In general, less than half (45%) of divorced women in the USA have remarried 5 years later. Remarriage is getting steeply less prevalent since the 80's. See the graph here:
The more likely explanation for having fewer kids is that it's associated with female education and workforce participation, and not really correlated with divorce, because we see the same drops in fertility in every developed country, even when base divorce rates vary by as much as 4x (Japan has half the divorce rate of the USA, Italy has roughly a quarter the divorce rate, Singapore has a 1.5x higher divorce rate, but all three have much worse fertility rates than the US).
Even in the Philippines, where until a couple of weeks ago divorce has literally been illegal, fertility has been declining pretty much directly in line with female education.
You are completely right in one thing: Divorce is absolutely not the foremost reason why people have few children. The first and foremost reason that people in most modern societies have few children is that children aren't really appreciated and having children give people, men and women alike, lower status. And the reason why people in a few modern societies actually have many children is that those societies appreciate children and numerous children raise people's social status. So as you point out, seeking correlations between divorce and fertility is meaningless.
If a culture wants to raise its fertility rate, the first thing it needs to do is saying "having numerous children is good". But I think that is not enough. After all, Catholics also said "having children is good", but their fertility rates have plummeted in line with the rest of the population. The populations that managed to keep up a high fertility rate are all populations with low divorce rates and strong modesty norms.
So I believe that in addition to saying "having numerous children is good", modesty norms that make people feel comparatively secure in their marriages is a prerequisite for keeping high fertility rates. But without strongly encouraging people to have many children in the first place, such norms make little difference.
Yeah, I think the "status" explanation is much more likely than the "mate value" explanation.
ACX just linked to this post making the same argument, where he attributes the loss of "virtue" status games like religion in favor of the meritocratic "success" status games we all play today as the major factor:
"Over time, this set of status mechanics spread, intensified, and deepened, particularly during the process of urbanization during the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately this culminates in today, when the standard introductory question has become ‘What do you do?’. This is because the most effective way to gauge the status of one’s interlocutor is to understand their level of success within our meritocracy. Unfortunately, ‘I’m a mother’ is not a good answer to this question, because this conveys little status within a success framework, which is usually the operative one. Women are, understandably, hesitant to be continuously humiliated in this way, and will make whatever tradeoffs are necessary to ensure they have a better answer."
He has some suggestions at the end which would probably move the needle on fertility rates at the end, but are essentially impossible culturally, because they're all about "stop enforcing Englightment and feminist norms on subgroups."
That's not as dispositive as might be thought. Women are dutiful and do the paperwork to wind up a failed relationship. The women filing for divorce are not necessarily doing so because they were disloyal; it might equally be because their partners are.
" Technically, women could use men as mere sperm donors and go about their own lives together with other females, much like most social animals are doing. They just don't seem to have the mindset."
The weird part is, economically, that would actually be... pretty easy to afford in the modern western world.
I mean, in THEORY, it would not be impossibly expensive to pick some rural or semi-rural location where land is cheap and the supporting infrastructure is readily available, and then form a.... commune/self-defense organization of about 30-150 women, most or all of them highly qualified to work outside the home. Find the golden compromise between "everyone lives in dorms in the same building" versus "Everyone has their own free-standing home, but they're all integrated into a planned community", whatever that compromise point winds up being.
Hire some shared communal nannies, or more likely, pay members of the community to take up that work, Hire some HEAVILY armed VERY trustworthy VERY highly paid (probably male) private security, and rotate them out every year or two so they don't start thinking that they 'own' the community in some way... And then train all the woman in basic firearms competence and disaster-response competence, as the emergency backstop.
No sleeping with the (community's own) security guards, since that's a conflict of interest, and some sort of community rule would have to be established for how male boyfriends DO work. Like "only sleep with them in their own homes, and always outside of the community defense zone" or something. I guess sleeping with a DIFFERENT community's security guards would be ok, depending on how the rules were written.
It's a... strange.... way of life, but it's not economically impossible. From a certain point of view, done right, it might even be safer and more efficient than whatever system those women would-have-been living in.
But almost nobody actually lives that way, or wants to live that way. Which implies that there's something women want besides just physical security and economic security.
Lots of candidates for what that could be... Social Rank? Social-Rank-by-Proxy? male role models for future sons? the fundamental feeling of male-female teamwork? not being labeled by society as a paranoid militia cultist? The luxury of not spending every moment of your life thinking about all of society as a highly risky 'game' which needs to be 'solved' ? The desire to actually build a functional society that works for everyone, not just reasonably wealthy western woman and a small proportion of trustworthy security guards?
...how would you prove that? some sort of chart showing county-by-county divorce rates vs fertility rates?
Maybe you could measure number of pregnancies vs length of time in a single marriage, indexed for a situation where only marriages beginning at age 22 or so are counted?
Would belief in contraception be a contributing factor?
e-e-e-h.... I'm less enthusiastic about this analysis of the Ultra-Orthodox marriage situation. I think you're missing how insular the community is and how powerful the brainwashing. One of the most powerful items on the brainwashing agenda is that you need to stay within the community or you will immediately lose everything and become a pariah. Even while in college studying for their professional careers, most of those women attend Orthodox universities. They don't get any chance to explore ideology until well past age 23, at which point they are already married and pregnant.
I know this because I was lucky enough to not get married til 27. At that point I had been able to slide to the left in religiosity, and did not end up with a husband in the "forever studying" mileau. The truth is, the reason I didn't get married is because I dated those men and they were pretty uniformly self-absorbed (for reasons I explain shortly). It was only by exiting that ultra-orthodox community that I was able to find a man who was capable of respecting his wife.
So here's the brainwashing that men and women undergo in the UO community:
Men do the important work. That religious studying makes the world go round. Women get to participate by easing their load and allowing them to keep studying as long as possible.
Can you see the catch here? If women want their eternal rewards they *need* a husband, and that husband has to study as much as possible. Of course these women are desperate to get married to men who are mostly a burden. And of course they are eager to do the household work in addition to the breadwinning, if it means their husbands will be earning them more eternal reward.
Now, they may not be signaling discontent by leaving in droves, because you can only leave if you lose your faith in the system. But even when overworked, exhausted, broke, and desperate, they still believe. Trust me: this is my sister, my sister-in-law, and my friends from high school. I keep in touch and trust me, many are in a sort of glassy-eyed despair at their impossible load.
Thank you for your input. I guess you are right. I mean, it must be that many Ultra-Orthodox women despair at their impossible load. Everything else would be very strange.
I don't think I have a rosy picture of marriage and family life in the Ultra-Orthodox community. But I have a rather bleak picture of those phenomena in my own community. Women suffer here too, but in different ways and for different reasons. And they also can't "get out" from here.
People don't have perfect agency in any culture. But as your example shows, they also have some agency.
I think LG is completely legitimate for feeling the way she feels and I think it is very important for people with experiences like hers to voice their complaints.
However, I think you are correct in pointing out that everyone has similar low agency in shifting cultures and her example shows that one can successfully shift out of Haredi culture. This comment https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/israels-forgotten-victim-card/comment/57670986 too seems to suggest this. Personally, I would think that shifting out of Haredi culture is easier than shifting in, due to the high cultural barrier of Haredi society. (And I think most Ultra-Orthodox families these days are pretty accepting of their children's choices, if they don't act too obnoxious about it, especially if they remain somewhat religious.)
And yet, in the study below (pg. 5-6), only 2% (within the margin of error) of the 287,057 Haredim studied became irreligious or even traditional but not so religious (7.1% still defined themself as religious but not as Haredi), whereas 109,000 non-Haredim became Haredi. (How many Christians became Amish in the same time period-1990-2015? Forget about the Amish. Did any religious culture in the world experience anything similar recently?)
Great piece, as usual! Super interesting take but I’ll have to disagree with one point.
“A woman earning her own money has a higher mate value than a woman who is only capable of keeping a home and caring for children.”
Men do not list a woman’s earning capacity as one of their top things they look for in women. On every social media platform men keep proclaiming that they don’t care about a woman’s finances as men can earn money on their own.
If men's partner choices weren't affected at all by a woman's education, income and professional status, assortative mating wouldn't be a thing. And it is.
It doesn't need to be that men care about women's income in particular. It could be that they tend to meet their partners at work or at university, and that gives women with better jobs an indirect advantage. It could also be that men appreciate the manners and self-confidence that comes with a certain standing. One thing is clear: Staying home with kids is a terrible way of meeting a new man (also online; "I'm seeking man man to provide for me and my kids by another man" is not a great selling point).
Assortative mating has traditionally been explained as female choice. Men don't care; but women do. So marriages only form where the partners are about equal, or the man is higher status/income/education. (Of course there is the "bad boy" marriage, which is based on the primate pairing system that you explained in earlier essays.)
Men traditionally care about looks, personality, and character. (Personality being things like extraversion, optimism, creativity, and sense of humour, and character being things like loyalty, money sense, reliability, levelheadedness, morals, and discretion.)
If men didn't care, why don't more well-to-do men marry sexy waitresses? In “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman”, Richard Feynman once wanted to take a waitress to a dance at whichever Ivy League university it was (I forgot which of them), but his friends convinced him that it was a very bad idea. Apparently Richard Feynman hadn't learned about proper assortative mating at that point.
Yep, I've made this point in this debate with people many times. It's far far far more common for say a middle class Western white guy to marry a woman say from China or India of similar educational background (who they met at university or work) than to marry a working class woman of their own cultural background, even if she's attractive with a good personality and character.
The idea that men don't care about class/education whatever is obviously contradicted by all evidence. It astonishes me that people continually trot it out.
I think what everyone is missing is that the whole education thing for women is an INDIRECT force multiplier - it doesn't give the same straight ahead, direct, on the nose bang for the buck that it does for men. All manner of studies using dating apps for example bears this out: A man listing that he holds a graduate or advanced degree from a top tier school and attendant career success that goes with it will, stand alone, bring all the honies out to the yard. The same thing cannot be said of the ladies on dating apps, in the main.
The other thing here is, and this is going to Tove's point about the fictional Richard Feynman, social status matters to successful men. To be sure, successful men down through history and time immemorial have taken up with galley wenches and the like, but they weren't to be seen out and about with them, and certainly weren't supposed to take such lesser ladies seriously. Think "Game of Thrones" - the high lords of the great houses of Westeros were expected to marry women of high birth, basically their assortative mating equal. GOT is fictional of course, but it is rooted in real world fact and history, and while we no longer live in feudal climes, the idea of "highly placed" men getting with "highly placed women" still holds sway, thus accounting for the very well documented and highly robust research on the matter of assortative mating. But here again, the women's educations, etc., are INDIRECTLY a factor - NOT the same DIRECT one as in the case of the men.
P.S.: Lady Tove, you SERIOUSLY need to bind up ALL of your postings on human mating, etc. and make them into a book. If you need any help doing so, holla; I know a little something about that...
Depends on what she’s doing. Watching TV and clubbing are her high points? She’s a loser even if she makes good money. Yoga instructor and artist? Can get a man with a good job. If she’s also interesting then he could be rich.
Most queens are able to tend to and fend for a litter on their own, and wouldn't take help from a tom even if he offered it, which he wouldn't.
2. "For that reason, it is not enough for society to tell women to have many children. Women are indeed conformists - but they also like to please men. Young women's spare time interests largely revolve around looking good in the eyes of men. Their friendships revolve around talking about relationships to men."
I thought human women dressed primarily for each other? Otherwise, they'd dress differently.
3. "The so-called soft girls and trad wives are perpetually assaulted with that possibility: What if he leaves you? "
For human males, it's "What if she divorces you and you gotta pay alimony and child support?" Again, it's very different for cats. We don't do marriage, but if I had to pay support for every kitten I might have sired, I'd probably starve to death, even though kittens are on their own at a younger age than the human kind.
>>I thought human women dressed primarily for each other? Otherwise, they'd dress differently.
They just pretend that they do. Too obviously dressing to please men is seen as vulgar and immodest. Fashion is a way to pretend to be doing art for the sake of art while working on impressing men. Also, it is a kind of peacocking, but reverse. It sends the message "look, I'm too thin and I dress in a weird patterned garbage bag, and I'm still gorgeous, losers!" I was once sent a link to a lengthy tutorial for women on how to dress, diet and exercise to please men, innocently assuming that we don't know what men like. It is the opposite. We know and we feign ignorance in order to give the impression that we stand above such cheap tricks.
"Too obviously dressing to please men is seen as vulgar and immodest." - Also seen as being desperate, "thirsty" and a "Pick Me" (or as they put it on the White side, a "Trad Wife"). But again, and I am certain you know this well Lady Tove, the evidence says otherwise. Indeed, I was recently made aware of some novel research into the phenomenon of female thirst trapping, that suggested that it was strongest in areas of the country or locale where the sheer number of eligible bachelors were scarce - hene the thirst trapping strategy being one that would signal to said eligible bachelors. Makes perfect sense to me.
The book "Dateonomics", which I believe you've discussed (and I've interviewed the author on my live show) and the book upon which it was based, "Too Many Women?" both discuss the very real impact of relative sex ratios, and how we've evolved to get an eyeball sense of the potential available mates in a locale at any given time, and how we as men and women respond to the relative abundance or lack of the opposite sex. For women, a perceived lack of highly desirable males resorts to the ladies bending to those who remains will - showing more skin and wearing "louder", more revealing clothing; ramping up their "hanging around" strategy, as well as derogation of competitors, suggesting that the other women are loose or otherwise unacceptable; and being more willing to put out quicker and in ways that are freakier than they would have liked, in a bid to lock down said perceived rare eligible bachelors. I've tested these theories out in real time in multiple outings and events over the years and it is a very fascinating thing to witness in real time...
I have read that, statistically speaking, men prefer models with less makeup snd smaller breasts than women. Yet demand for makeup and boob jobs seems strong.
Cats don't monkey with makeup, nor do we have protruding breasts. So maybe I should stick to things I know about personally.
I find the distinction between provisioning and protection interesting, but I'm curious how this applies to the case with the Ultra Orthodox Jews. As you describe their relationship, it seems like the Ultra Orthodox women get neither provisioning nor protection from their husbands (who are largely absent).
I assume that in this case, much of their innate need for protection is satisfied by being part of a tight-knit community instead. But that might be more of an argument for this kind of tribal-like living, as opposed to specifically needing more male dedication.
In human evolution, protecting was not the same thing as being physically present all the time. Among the Yanomamö, other men would only take advantage of a woman of they found it unlikely enough that her husband would return and take revenge (which happened to Kenneth Good's teenaged Yanomamö wife when he was away for several months). So I believe that the Ultra-Orthodox Jews are doing the protection thing in full.
I guess the threat of revenge is a valid form of protection, but I fail to see how this applies in the case of modern Ultra-Orthodox Jews. If one of their women got accosted in New York or Tel Aviv, it would be a police matter. I don't really see the threat of (their otherwise absent) husbands going vigilante being an effective deterrent in their daily life.
I would assume that any such protection would more come from the members of their tight-knit community looking out for each other as they go through their life. Something the men seem to have bailed out of.
I'd be curious to understand how you think the husbands are offering this protection.
Re the Jewish focus on male study and its effect on marriage I think it would be remiss not to include the words of Maimonides:
And [our Sages gave] even greater [advice], saying: "A person should always turn himself and his thoughts to the words of the Torah and expand his knowledge in wisdom, for the thoughts of forbidden relations grow strong solely in a heart which is empty of wisdom."
https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Forbidden_Intercourse.22.21?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
Perhaps culture can override all biology because the human biology includes culture.
So, there isn't a bare human biology that is overwritten by culture such that when we strip away culture, we shall find a human biology that is common to all humans.
Why Ultra-Orthodox women have ten children is entirely conditioned by their culture and then it is futile to find any fundamental facts about women from this alone
2 questions.
1. > Some women and children really will be in dire circumstances when they are deserted or badly treated. Some people will be caught in loveless unions with dysfunctional partners.
Given that you state that all Ultra-Orthodox men have to offer is love, what does an Ultra-Orthodox women stand to lose from abandoning a loveless marriage, especially as there is there is an organization to help divorced women. (Perhaps I should add here that according to the Israeli Democratic Institute only 4% of Haredim over 20 are divorced/widowed, and 86% are married.)
2. If I understand correctly you seem to be implying that Ultra-Orthodox women have it harder than Amish women. Am I correct that this is your perception?
I definitely don't want to downplay the hard work of our women whom I view as superheroes (especially my wife). Additionally, one can't judge from anecdotes and I am sure there are Ultra-Orthodox women who have it harder than Amish women. I just wonder if it is obvious that is the rule.
First of all, our attitude to technology which makes life easier (other than secular media) is the exact opposite of the Amish. We embrace it all with open arms, from microwaves to toasters to blenders to pressure cookers and slow cookers etc. My family uses almost 100% disposables other than pots and baby bottles.
Our supermarkets sell everything at one spot and deliver orders, including prepared or microwaveable foods, and we try to take advantage as much as possible (given financial and health constraints. I do think most mothers (at least of large families) don't do most of the regular shopping, and I don't think the examples you mentioned are typical in the low amount of help the husbands provide (though few can measure up to Anders), but this is something that obviously varies per family and I don't believe there are any studies.
True, the women often work hard to support the family, but they also get to send their children for daycare (hopefully for more hours than they work). Many women feel the tradeoff is worth it. As you wrote in another comment, even stay-at-home mothers often feel the need to have some outlet/vocation of their choice.
I believe that in the U.S. most families(at least those with working mothers) have some hired domestic/cleaning help.
As other commenters have mentioned, the fact that our children (especially males) study for long hours, combined with our tight-knit communities means that we barely see our boys (from about age 8 or younger) during daytime hours, which makes parenting much easier.
All this is aside from family and community help which I assume the Amish also have.
Again, I certainly don't want to downplay the hard work of Ultra-Orthodox women. However, I think many of them may be offended from the assumption that they obviously work harder than Amish women (assuming you meant to imply that).
>>Given that you state that all Ultra-Orthodox men have to offer is love, what does an Ultra-Orthodox women stand to lose from abandoning a loveless marriage, especially as there is there is an organization to help divorced women.
You tell me! I actually don't believe that all the men have to offer is love. They also offer a firm place in the community.
There might be several reasons behind the low divorce rate:
1. Divorce is seen as a failure so people will not seek divorce if they don't have an obvious reason.
2. Spouses see rather little of each other anyway so they have fewer opportunities to develop conflicts.
3. People are genuinely committed to make their marriages work and believe it is possible.
I can only guess. You know much better than
>>If I understand correctly you seem to be implying that Ultra-Orthodox women have it harder than Amish women. Am I correct that this is your perception?
No, not at all. Especially the Amish's lack of washing machines seems terrible in terms of work load. The most important difference is that Amish men and women lead more similar lives ("an Amish scholar" would be a contradiction).
The Ultra-Orthodox household organization seems to me like modern society taken to its extreme. I really would like to see it in real life. It must be an impressive logistics operation. I could never have imagined this thing with the disposable dishes if no one told me. I'm feeling like I would need to see the thing in action to be able to fully imagine the details of it.
I don't doubt LG's testimony that many Ultra-Orthodox women are overworked. If people in a certain group work hard, then inevitably some of them will be overworked, sometimes or always. But I also imagine that those who are on the right side of the limit of overwork get the feeling of doing something rather advanced.
Working on a response.
It is hard to encapsulate an entire culture in a substack comment but I will try to do what I can.
Wow!
I am constantly impressed by your ability to be so open-minded in analyzing and even taking lessons from other cultures which seem oppressive. The issue of Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel not spending most of their life in the study hall is certainly the most opaque for an outsider and yet you recognized that the women are happy and learnt from this.
I think there is some perspective to add here. If I would have the time and the inclination I would write a few articles providing that. That won't happen but perhaps I will leave some more comments.
For now I shall state that to me the most important takeaway from this post is that the highest fertility societies seem to be those in which mothers have the highest workload (and the males are oppressed), whether this is due to their rejection of technology or to their expectations that men spend much of their time in synagogue or study hall. This seems counter-intuitive and is worthy of reflection.
It seems that the most important ingredient for high fertility is social conditioning to be 'highly oppressed'. One may maintain that this is solely about these cultures doing a good job at brainwashing. However this survey https://en.idi.org.il/haredi/2022/?chapter=48268 shows that Haredim rank far higher in every factor of satisfaction with life and mental and emotional health (and Israelis in general rank very high on this https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/charted-the-happiest-countries-in-the-world/). I assume that this is true for women too, as the survey certainly would have tried to highlight any differences in gender if they were significant.
I think that ApplePie's most recent post would have been the perfect response to this post. It could almost serve as the motto for the Amish and the Haredim.
>according to the Israeli Democratic Institute only 4% of Haredim over 20 are divorced/widowed,
The link is here https://www.idi.org.il/media/22473/statistical-report-on-ultra-orthodox-society-in-israel-2023.pdf. It is on pg.16-17. I can't find it in English. The 4% in the chart on pg. 17 is actually for חיים בנפרד, גרושים או אלמנים; living separately (but still married), divorced or widowed.
The 86% married is for age 20+. For 25+ I imagine it is at least 90%. The once-married number may be here for that age group. However, it is possible that it isn't much higher, as I believe that a high percentage of Haredi divorces are soon after the marriage, essentialy a failed marriage.
This might be true today, but seems less true in the past, tho there was far more pressure on women to be faithful then on men. Slut vs stud for similar promiscuity.
In the Baby Boom years, many workers were trying to get their own nuclear family homes, close to where the husband father had a good paying job. As formerly war working women changed into SAHM, with far more labor saving devices but also far from parental help with grandkids, many women wanted more from life than even the most interesting Peyton Place TV soap operas. … (usual story).
Many / most women want a status increasing and personally meaningful job outside the home. Because of unfair biology, not injustice, the best years for having babies are also the best years for starting a career. The 20s.
Our society needs to increase the incentives for women to be married sooner, and have children sooner. Like a $10,000 wedding grant from the govt for every couple who marries before their combined years are 55 (25+30, 27+28, 21+34), with this amount decreasing by $100 each month over.
The Amish & UO examples don’t scale into secular, materialistic society.
Another view on the subject:
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/its-embarrassing-to-be-a-stay-at?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I think it's quite interesting to note the symmetries between this perspective and the more male/MRA perspective. Complaining about the high divorce risk nowadays, saying that all they want is love, and saying that women/men orient themselves strongly around getting attention from the opposite sex.
Makes me feel like there must be an important missing factor in this type of analysis.
Why? Why couldn't it be that both men and women most of all want love and are afraid to invest in a marriage that ends in divorce?
Can't it just be that our society is failing to give me and women sufficiently efficient tools to negotiate the terms for how to meet and how to stay together?
"Society is failing to give men and women sufficiently efficient tools" could be the important missing factor to describe here, but I'm not sure.
I have no insider knowledge about the Amish or the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, but I think people might be more inclined to have children if they have a place in a community to offer said children. And reasonable expectations that the children will grow up to have the same opinions and beliefs as the parents themselves. For average westerners it seems more like different generations live in different worlds, don't have much in common. And parents have limited influence over who their children will spend time with in school, something that might have a bigger influence on who their children become as adults than anything their parents do.
I really enjoyed the article, but don't really buy the "women don't have multiple kids because they need to preserve their mate value, in the ceaseless war of all against all in the mating market" explanation.
I mean, as you point out, women initiate most divorces. And more specifically, "most" means 70% of divorces (at least in the US).
Second, they're manifestly NOT preserving their mate value - age is a much bigger factor for mate value for women, and most people in the world get fat after marriage. People would be MUCH more serious about working out, eating well, and taking care of health if "preserving mate value" was an actual concern or motivation, but manifestly, married people don't do this, whether or not they have kids.
https://imgur.com/a/EgkHNzB
On "marriage makes you fat" the meta analysis here, with ~200k couples and ~100k matched singles across 18 countries, shows a strong effect size of marriage on obesity - 1.7 odds ratio, up to 2.5 odds ratio in economic downturns.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/39057117/
It includes a study of same-sex twins from China that finds even among twins, marriage increases BMI for both sexes, regardless of genetic and common environmental factors.
In general, less than half (45%) of divorced women in the USA have remarried 5 years later. Remarriage is getting steeply less prevalent since the 80's. See the graph here:
https://imgur.com/a/Ehtu9BJ
From here:
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/reynolds-remarriaage-US-geographic-variation-2019-fp-21-18.html
The more likely explanation for having fewer kids is that it's associated with female education and workforce participation, and not really correlated with divorce, because we see the same drops in fertility in every developed country, even when base divorce rates vary by as much as 4x (Japan has half the divorce rate of the USA, Italy has roughly a quarter the divorce rate, Singapore has a 1.5x higher divorce rate, but all three have much worse fertility rates than the US).
Even in the Philippines, where until a couple of weeks ago divorce has literally been illegal, fertility has been declining pretty much directly in line with female education.
https://imgur.com/a/0Abli1D
You are completely right in one thing: Divorce is absolutely not the foremost reason why people have few children. The first and foremost reason that people in most modern societies have few children is that children aren't really appreciated and having children give people, men and women alike, lower status. And the reason why people in a few modern societies actually have many children is that those societies appreciate children and numerous children raise people's social status. So as you point out, seeking correlations between divorce and fertility is meaningless.
If a culture wants to raise its fertility rate, the first thing it needs to do is saying "having numerous children is good". But I think that is not enough. After all, Catholics also said "having children is good", but their fertility rates have plummeted in line with the rest of the population. The populations that managed to keep up a high fertility rate are all populations with low divorce rates and strong modesty norms.
So I believe that in addition to saying "having numerous children is good", modesty norms that make people feel comparatively secure in their marriages is a prerequisite for keeping high fertility rates. But without strongly encouraging people to have many children in the first place, such norms make little difference.
Yeah, I think the "status" explanation is much more likely than the "mate value" explanation.
ACX just linked to this post making the same argument, where he attributes the loss of "virtue" status games like religion in favor of the meritocratic "success" status games we all play today as the major factor:
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/its-embarrassing-to-be-a-stay-at
"Over time, this set of status mechanics spread, intensified, and deepened, particularly during the process of urbanization during the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately this culminates in today, when the standard introductory question has become ‘What do you do?’. This is because the most effective way to gauge the status of one’s interlocutor is to understand their level of success within our meritocracy. Unfortunately, ‘I’m a mother’ is not a good answer to this question, because this conveys little status within a success framework, which is usually the operative one. Women are, understandably, hesitant to be continuously humiliated in this way, and will make whatever tradeoffs are necessary to ensure they have a better answer."
He has some suggestions at the end which would probably move the needle on fertility rates at the end, but are essentially impossible culturally, because they're all about "stop enforcing Englightment and feminist norms on subgroups."
> women initiate most divorces.
That's not as dispositive as might be thought. Women are dutiful and do the paperwork to wind up a failed relationship. The women filing for divorce are not necessarily doing so because they were disloyal; it might equally be because their partners are.
Your other points I agree with.
You know, that's a great point. I hadn't considered that, but I think you're probably right, and that is probably a big factor.
" Technically, women could use men as mere sperm donors and go about their own lives together with other females, much like most social animals are doing. They just don't seem to have the mindset."
The weird part is, economically, that would actually be... pretty easy to afford in the modern western world.
I mean, in THEORY, it would not be impossibly expensive to pick some rural or semi-rural location where land is cheap and the supporting infrastructure is readily available, and then form a.... commune/self-defense organization of about 30-150 women, most or all of them highly qualified to work outside the home. Find the golden compromise between "everyone lives in dorms in the same building" versus "Everyone has their own free-standing home, but they're all integrated into a planned community", whatever that compromise point winds up being.
Hire some shared communal nannies, or more likely, pay members of the community to take up that work, Hire some HEAVILY armed VERY trustworthy VERY highly paid (probably male) private security, and rotate them out every year or two so they don't start thinking that they 'own' the community in some way... And then train all the woman in basic firearms competence and disaster-response competence, as the emergency backstop.
No sleeping with the (community's own) security guards, since that's a conflict of interest, and some sort of community rule would have to be established for how male boyfriends DO work. Like "only sleep with them in their own homes, and always outside of the community defense zone" or something. I guess sleeping with a DIFFERENT community's security guards would be ok, depending on how the rules were written.
It's a... strange.... way of life, but it's not economically impossible. From a certain point of view, done right, it might even be safer and more efficient than whatever system those women would-have-been living in.
But almost nobody actually lives that way, or wants to live that way. Which implies that there's something women want besides just physical security and economic security.
Lots of candidates for what that could be... Social Rank? Social-Rank-by-Proxy? male role models for future sons? the fundamental feeling of male-female teamwork? not being labeled by society as a paranoid militia cultist? The luxury of not spending every moment of your life thinking about all of society as a highly risky 'game' which needs to be 'solved' ? The desire to actually build a functional society that works for everyone, not just reasonably wealthy western woman and a small proportion of trustworthy security guards?
...how would you prove that? some sort of chart showing county-by-county divorce rates vs fertility rates?
Maybe you could measure number of pregnancies vs length of time in a single marriage, indexed for a situation where only marriages beginning at age 22 or so are counted?
Would belief in contraception be a contributing factor?
Great essay! It would be interesting to see how social dynamics and gender relationships will change among more conservatively minded humans.
Progressive ones look for longevity, cyber augmentation and some even for uploading.
We gonna have species divergence eventually
I thought your name was Edwin!
e-e-e-h.... I'm less enthusiastic about this analysis of the Ultra-Orthodox marriage situation. I think you're missing how insular the community is and how powerful the brainwashing. One of the most powerful items on the brainwashing agenda is that you need to stay within the community or you will immediately lose everything and become a pariah. Even while in college studying for their professional careers, most of those women attend Orthodox universities. They don't get any chance to explore ideology until well past age 23, at which point they are already married and pregnant.
I know this because I was lucky enough to not get married til 27. At that point I had been able to slide to the left in religiosity, and did not end up with a husband in the "forever studying" mileau. The truth is, the reason I didn't get married is because I dated those men and they were pretty uniformly self-absorbed (for reasons I explain shortly). It was only by exiting that ultra-orthodox community that I was able to find a man who was capable of respecting his wife.
So here's the brainwashing that men and women undergo in the UO community:
Men do the important work. That religious studying makes the world go round. Women get to participate by easing their load and allowing them to keep studying as long as possible.
Can you see the catch here? If women want their eternal rewards they *need* a husband, and that husband has to study as much as possible. Of course these women are desperate to get married to men who are mostly a burden. And of course they are eager to do the household work in addition to the breadwinning, if it means their husbands will be earning them more eternal reward.
Now, they may not be signaling discontent by leaving in droves, because you can only leave if you lose your faith in the system. But even when overworked, exhausted, broke, and desperate, they still believe. Trust me: this is my sister, my sister-in-law, and my friends from high school. I keep in touch and trust me, many are in a sort of glassy-eyed despair at their impossible load.
Thank you for your input. I guess you are right. I mean, it must be that many Ultra-Orthodox women despair at their impossible load. Everything else would be very strange.
I don't think I have a rosy picture of marriage and family life in the Ultra-Orthodox community. But I have a rather bleak picture of those phenomena in my own community. Women suffer here too, but in different ways and for different reasons. And they also can't "get out" from here.
People don't have perfect agency in any culture. But as your example shows, they also have some agency.
I think LG is completely legitimate for feeling the way she feels and I think it is very important for people with experiences like hers to voice their complaints.
However, I think you are correct in pointing out that everyone has similar low agency in shifting cultures and her example shows that one can successfully shift out of Haredi culture. This comment https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/israels-forgotten-victim-card/comment/57670986 too seems to suggest this. Personally, I would think that shifting out of Haredi culture is easier than shifting in, due to the high cultural barrier of Haredi society. (And I think most Ultra-Orthodox families these days are pretty accepting of their children's choices, if they don't act too obnoxious about it, especially if they remain somewhat religious.)
And yet, in the study below (pg. 5-6), only 2% (within the margin of error) of the 287,057 Haredim studied became irreligious or even traditional but not so religious (7.1% still defined themself as religious but not as Haredi), whereas 109,000 non-Haredim became Haredi. (How many Christians became Amish in the same time period-1990-2015? Forget about the Amish. Did any religious culture in the world experience anything similar recently?)
https://chotam.org.il/media/37347/demography-of-religiosity.pdf
Great piece, as usual! Super interesting take but I’ll have to disagree with one point.
“A woman earning her own money has a higher mate value than a woman who is only capable of keeping a home and caring for children.”
Men do not list a woman’s earning capacity as one of their top things they look for in women. On every social media platform men keep proclaiming that they don’t care about a woman’s finances as men can earn money on their own.
In Indian middle class, it is virtually imperative for a girl to have a decent job in order to marry.
If men's partner choices weren't affected at all by a woman's education, income and professional status, assortative mating wouldn't be a thing. And it is.
https://www.nber.org/digest/may14/assortative-mating-and-income-inequality
It doesn't need to be that men care about women's income in particular. It could be that they tend to meet their partners at work or at university, and that gives women with better jobs an indirect advantage. It could also be that men appreciate the manners and self-confidence that comes with a certain standing. One thing is clear: Staying home with kids is a terrible way of meeting a new man (also online; "I'm seeking man man to provide for me and my kids by another man" is not a great selling point).
Assortative mating has traditionally been explained as female choice. Men don't care; but women do. So marriages only form where the partners are about equal, or the man is higher status/income/education. (Of course there is the "bad boy" marriage, which is based on the primate pairing system that you explained in earlier essays.)
Men traditionally care about looks, personality, and character. (Personality being things like extraversion, optimism, creativity, and sense of humour, and character being things like loyalty, money sense, reliability, levelheadedness, morals, and discretion.)
If men didn't care, why don't more well-to-do men marry sexy waitresses? In “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman”, Richard Feynman once wanted to take a waitress to a dance at whichever Ivy League university it was (I forgot which of them), but his friends convinced him that it was a very bad idea. Apparently Richard Feynman hadn't learned about proper assortative mating at that point.
Yep, I've made this point in this debate with people many times. It's far far far more common for say a middle class Western white guy to marry a woman say from China or India of similar educational background (who they met at university or work) than to marry a working class woman of their own cultural background, even if she's attractive with a good personality and character.
The idea that men don't care about class/education whatever is obviously contradicted by all evidence. It astonishes me that people continually trot it out.
I think what everyone is missing is that the whole education thing for women is an INDIRECT force multiplier - it doesn't give the same straight ahead, direct, on the nose bang for the buck that it does for men. All manner of studies using dating apps for example bears this out: A man listing that he holds a graduate or advanced degree from a top tier school and attendant career success that goes with it will, stand alone, bring all the honies out to the yard. The same thing cannot be said of the ladies on dating apps, in the main.
The other thing here is, and this is going to Tove's point about the fictional Richard Feynman, social status matters to successful men. To be sure, successful men down through history and time immemorial have taken up with galley wenches and the like, but they weren't to be seen out and about with them, and certainly weren't supposed to take such lesser ladies seriously. Think "Game of Thrones" - the high lords of the great houses of Westeros were expected to marry women of high birth, basically their assortative mating equal. GOT is fictional of course, but it is rooted in real world fact and history, and while we no longer live in feudal climes, the idea of "highly placed" men getting with "highly placed women" still holds sway, thus accounting for the very well documented and highly robust research on the matter of assortative mating. But here again, the women's educations, etc., are INDIRECTLY a factor - NOT the same DIRECT one as in the case of the men.
P.S.: Lady Tove, you SERIOUSLY need to bind up ALL of your postings on human mating, etc. and make them into a book. If you need any help doing so, holla; I know a little something about that...
yes but when they come across a woman who has no job or prospects they steer clear, unless they are pretty low-value themselves.
Depends on what she’s doing. Watching TV and clubbing are her high points? She’s a loser even if she makes good money. Yoga instructor and artist? Can get a man with a good job. If she’s also interesting then he could be rich.
Or they’re high earners themselves and like the woman for herself, not the career she has or doesn’t have.
1. Fascinating. It's very different for cats.
Most queens are able to tend to and fend for a litter on their own, and wouldn't take help from a tom even if he offered it, which he wouldn't.
2. "For that reason, it is not enough for society to tell women to have many children. Women are indeed conformists - but they also like to please men. Young women's spare time interests largely revolve around looking good in the eyes of men. Their friendships revolve around talking about relationships to men."
I thought human women dressed primarily for each other? Otherwise, they'd dress differently.
3. "The so-called soft girls and trad wives are perpetually assaulted with that possibility: What if he leaves you? "
For human males, it's "What if she divorces you and you gotta pay alimony and child support?" Again, it's very different for cats. We don't do marriage, but if I had to pay support for every kitten I might have sired, I'd probably starve to death, even though kittens are on their own at a younger age than the human kind.
>>I thought human women dressed primarily for each other? Otherwise, they'd dress differently.
They just pretend that they do. Too obviously dressing to please men is seen as vulgar and immodest. Fashion is a way to pretend to be doing art for the sake of art while working on impressing men. Also, it is a kind of peacocking, but reverse. It sends the message "look, I'm too thin and I dress in a weird patterned garbage bag, and I'm still gorgeous, losers!" I was once sent a link to a lengthy tutorial for women on how to dress, diet and exercise to please men, innocently assuming that we don't know what men like. It is the opposite. We know and we feign ignorance in order to give the impression that we stand above such cheap tricks.
"Too obviously dressing to please men is seen as vulgar and immodest." - Also seen as being desperate, "thirsty" and a "Pick Me" (or as they put it on the White side, a "Trad Wife"). But again, and I am certain you know this well Lady Tove, the evidence says otherwise. Indeed, I was recently made aware of some novel research into the phenomenon of female thirst trapping, that suggested that it was strongest in areas of the country or locale where the sheer number of eligible bachelors were scarce - hene the thirst trapping strategy being one that would signal to said eligible bachelors. Makes perfect sense to me.
The book "Dateonomics", which I believe you've discussed (and I've interviewed the author on my live show) and the book upon which it was based, "Too Many Women?" both discuss the very real impact of relative sex ratios, and how we've evolved to get an eyeball sense of the potential available mates in a locale at any given time, and how we as men and women respond to the relative abundance or lack of the opposite sex. For women, a perceived lack of highly desirable males resorts to the ladies bending to those who remains will - showing more skin and wearing "louder", more revealing clothing; ramping up their "hanging around" strategy, as well as derogation of competitors, suggesting that the other women are loose or otherwise unacceptable; and being more willing to put out quicker and in ways that are freakier than they would have liked, in a bid to lock down said perceived rare eligible bachelors. I've tested these theories out in real time in multiple outings and events over the years and it is a very fascinating thing to witness in real time...
I have read that, statistically speaking, men prefer models with less makeup snd smaller breasts than women. Yet demand for makeup and boob jobs seems strong.
Cats don't monkey with makeup, nor do we have protruding breasts. So maybe I should stick to things I know about personally.
I find the distinction between provisioning and protection interesting, but I'm curious how this applies to the case with the Ultra Orthodox Jews. As you describe their relationship, it seems like the Ultra Orthodox women get neither provisioning nor protection from their husbands (who are largely absent).
I assume that in this case, much of their innate need for protection is satisfied by being part of a tight-knit community instead. But that might be more of an argument for this kind of tribal-like living, as opposed to specifically needing more male dedication.
In human evolution, protecting was not the same thing as being physically present all the time. Among the Yanomamö, other men would only take advantage of a woman of they found it unlikely enough that her husband would return and take revenge (which happened to Kenneth Good's teenaged Yanomamö wife when he was away for several months). So I believe that the Ultra-Orthodox Jews are doing the protection thing in full.
I guess the threat of revenge is a valid form of protection, but I fail to see how this applies in the case of modern Ultra-Orthodox Jews. If one of their women got accosted in New York or Tel Aviv, it would be a police matter. I don't really see the threat of (their otherwise absent) husbands going vigilante being an effective deterrent in their daily life.
I would assume that any such protection would more come from the members of their tight-knit community looking out for each other as they go through their life. Something the men seem to have bailed out of.
I'd be curious to understand how you think the husbands are offering this protection.