RE: (AMA) I live in a patriarchy. Ask me anything.
March 5, 2017 at 5:08 am
(This post was last modified: March 5, 2017 at 5:13 am by ErGingerbreadMandude.)
(March 5, 2017 at 3:22 am)paulpablo Wrote: Are you living unconventionally by being unmarried at your age in the country you life in? If the answer's yes then what made you choose your lifestyle?
I'm 21. It is not unconventional for me to not be married at my age, my dad got married at 26 while my mom was around 19.
There are two reasons for this:
* When you live in a patriarchy the whole responsibility of running a family is on the man. He will have to dedicate his whole life to developing his family. Our society places huge importance on family and lesser importance on individuals, meaning, we would rather see a family survive with unhappy members than see a family fall with happy members. A woman's job is limited to cooking, taking care of the house and taking care of the children, they live a protected life. What this means is that a man cannot marry a woman unless he is financially and emotionally sure of his capability of running a family, once he has spend a significant part of his life learning and then a significant part mastering a job he is socially pressured to share his resources with another woman and start a family. That is our standard paradigm.
* I'm against marriage. It is generally a bad deal for men, most marry because it's the "right" thing to do or the "normal" thing to do and other times because of social pressure. I would've been okay with marriage but our society has slightly changed for the worse. I don't know how else to describe this but we're having a proper shortage of "quality" women and there's a reason for this. We are historically farmers but after modernization high paying jobs started flowing in and these jobs required specialized skills, skills that required 3 to 5 years of learning and mastery. Most men started learning these skills and after their mastery started choosing women they wanted to marry according to the kind of skills a woman had mastered. It was beneath a man that had spent say 7 or 8 years mastering a skill to marry a woman who had mastered no skill at all or a mediocre skill that took her 6 months. This forced women to devote time mastering their own skills because it was the only way they could attract the interest of a quality man. Typically they would spend around 3 to 5 years mastering a skill, get married and then take up the job of taking care of the house, the kids etc. There was a slight problem in this paradigm because usually women used to spend their time mastering skills required to take care of a house, of a baby, cooking etc but since modernization they spend their time mastering other skills and still ended up as housewives, housewives with no skills for being a housewife. This meant even more time devoted to mastering skills required to be a quality housewife but it would either be too late or women just don't bother. Some women are unfortunately born into poor families so they typically followed the same route but for financial reasons. Women born into rich families were fortunate enough to follow the traditional route but this meant that they would only prefer men who were even more wealtheir than them, so if a man had to marry and settle down with a proper women he will have to be
very wealthy and had to have powerful social relations. This means spending even more amount of time mastering skills and developing social connections, going through all of the hardships..and for what? To marry a woman, take care of her the rest of our life, be subject to even more hell? No thanks, it just doesn't make any sense anymore. Many of my (male)friends are against marriage too but if by some luck I find
the one I'll be open to the idea of mariiage, most men would be too it's just extremely rare a find.