Subsidizing Single Moms Is Not A Substitute For Fathers

[–]PigTenis 22 points23 points24 points 4 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

[–]jinladen040[S] 8 points9 points10 points 4 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

[–]Much_Very 2 points3 points4 points 4 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

Is this real? I grew up with kids who came from single-parent homes and were on welfare and they always lived in the shittiest apartments, on the shittiest side of town, and our school organized to give them pantry boxes with canned goods and turkeys in them every Thanksgiving. There was no “good lifestyle.” Children are hella expensive, and even with an apartment voucher and monthly food stamps, it couldn’t possibly cover all of your expenses.

What should happen: the earnings threshold should be increased. Allow a woman earning $30k to collect benefits, instead of forcing her to quit her job to meet some silly maximum. Easily, you’d keep moms employed and allow them the opportunity to supplement their benefits with their income until they can better their station. Forcing them to rely strictly on benefits creates the exact culture and atmosphere that the government loathes. We hate women who don’t work, but then again, we encourage you not to work in order to receive help.

Also, men in these communities need to stop having multiple families that they cannot afford or refuse to support. It becomes a state problem when you have 8 kids with 4 different women. There needs to be some accountability.

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[–]jinladen040[S] 11 points12 points13 points 4 years ago (6 children) | Copy Link

"Earlier this month, a new study for the RAND Corporation claimed to have found that problems our children and society face are not because of the lack of dads, and in fact fathers are not needed at all. According to Kathryn Edwards, the researcher behind the study, the problem is that the government is not spending enough money on subsidizing single parenthood."

"Instead of sending single mothers more tax money, as Edwards advocates, we should be doing what Focus on the Family President Jim Daly suggests, that “every man needs to be reminded from time to time that their wives and children deserve their best” which is what the Florida fatherhood policy sets out to do with such targeted excellence."

I do find these studies interesting. In this case, this very study was funded by the US Government mostly by our Tax dollars under the Biden administration. So to me, it's more proof positive of Democrats continually pushing their Liberal/Feminist Agenda by funding studies that would only contribute more to the current custody problems Fathers face and only add more fatherless children to society.

Fortunately, we do have Republican States like Florida that are indeed taking a step in the right direction. With Gov. DeSantis just earlier this month passing a 70 million dollar bill thats to be spent on Fatherhood programs, how effective it will be is up for debate but it's a direct contrast to how Liberals are treating Fathers in this country.

[–]Oncefa2 13 points14 points15 points 4 years ago* (1 child) | Copy Link

The whole socioeconomic angle is bullshit for a couple of reasons.

If a father works and struggles to keep his children out of poverty, especially when a single mother refuses to do that (and instead expects child support, which can't replace having a career) then I think he deserves credit for putting in that hard work for his children.

Moreover, studies that do look at socioeconomic status and try to control for other variables still find that single mothers fall behind. Including even behind single fathers. A father raising a child by himself, often without government assistance, does a better job than a single mother on average. Including if relevant factors like income levels are adjusted for.

Which indicates that having a father is way more important then getting free money just for being a parent. Especially when that money is often the impetus for fatherlessness (when mothers use their children to game the system, which necessitates removing the father from his parenting role and then expecting child support as compensation for removing him).

So if we actually care about the best interests of children instead of the best interests of mothers (who want to be paid by the government for doing what they're supposed to do in life) then maybe we need to work on child custody reform.

I'm not saying that welfare isn't necessary or that some single mothers / fathers aren't given a raw deal, but clearly the system as it stands is deeply flawed and works against the best interests of children.

Fatherlessness is associated with poor outcomes for children in basically every category of life: education, occupation, criminality, family, health, and mental health.
Fatherlessness has a direct causative effect on these problems: they are not due to socioeconomic problems or secondary stresses associated with fatherlessness or divorce.
These outcomes are associated with single-mother households specifically. Children raised by single-fathers have outcomes comparable to that of intact families. Even the presence of a stepfather dramatically improves the outcome of children.
The more time that children are given with their father, the better their outcome is. There is a "dose-dependent" association with partial father absence and the negative outcomes associated with complete father absence.
Boys raised without their fathers fare quite a bit worse than girls, likely due to the fact that women are more involved in childcare and education (it is often the case that a boy's father is the only real male role model that he has during his formative years).
A staunch conclusion is that masculinity is healthy and that we actually need more of it, not less. For example it is fathers who often instill discipline and responsibility in their children with what is sometimes seen as a "harsher" approach to parenting comparing to the traditional approaches that mothers take.
It's possible that children raised by single fathers have better access to their biological mothers than the other way around, due to a father's greater willingness to be fair to his ex and include them in their children's lives instead of using their children as a bargaining chip in the family court system (see Downey et al below).
The only metric that single mothers performed better on was having routine doctor's appointments for their children. Although it should be noted that children from single-father households were in better health and also had better long term health outcomes, including better mental health outcomes.

Source:

Men’s Issues and Men’s Mental Health: An Introductory Primer

Compared to children living with married couples, children in single mother, extended single mother, and cohabiting couple families average poorer outcomes, but children in single father families sometimes average better health outcomes... children in single father and, to a lesser extent, extended single father families are often less disadvantaged than children in single mother or extended single mother families, respectively. After adjusting for SES, children in single father families have lower odds of worse global health, were advantaged on six other health outcomes, and missed fewer days of school than children in married couple families.

Krueger, P.M., Jutte, D.P., Franzini, L. et al. Family structure and multiple domains of child well-being in the United States: a cross-sectional study. Popul Health Metrics 13, 6 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12963-015-0038-0

More here:

Antecol, H., & Bedard, K. (2007). Does single parenthood increase the probability of teenage promiscuity, substance use, and crime? Journal of Population Economics, 20(1), 55–71

Coles, R. L. (2015). Single-father families: A review of the literature. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 7(2), 144–166. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12069

Downey, D. B., Ainsworth-Darnell, J. W., & Dufur, M. J. (1998). Sex of parent and children's well-being in single-parent households. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 878-893. https://doi.org/10.2307/353631

Flouri, E., & Buchanan, A. (2002). Life satisfaction in teenage boys: The moderating role of father involvement and bullying. Aggressive Behavior, 28(2), 126–133. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.90014

Golding, P., & Fitzgerald, H. (2019). The early biopsychosocial development of boys and the origins of violence in males. Infant Mental Health Journal, 40(1), 5–22. https://doi.org/10.1002/imhj.21753

Harper, C. C., & McLanahan, S. S. (2004). Father absence and youth incarceration. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 14(3), 369–397. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2004.00079.x

Krueger, P.M., Jutte, D.P., Franzini, L. et al. Family structure and multiple domains of child well-being in the United States: a cross-sectional study. Popul Health Metrics 13, 6 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12963-015-0038-0

McLanahan, S., Tach, L., & Schneider, D. (2013). The causal effects of father absence. Annual Review of Sociology, 39, 399–427. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-071312-145704

Sbarra, D. A., Bourassa, K. J., & Manvelian, A (2019). Marital separation and divorce: Correlates and consequences. In B. H. Fiese, M. Celano, K. Deater-Deckard, E. N. Jouriles, & M. A. Whisman (Eds.), APA handbook of contemporary family psychology: Foundations, methods, and contemporary issues across the lifespan (pp. 687–705). American Psychological Association.

Victorino, C. C., & Gauthier, A. H. (2009). The social determinants of child health: Variations across health outcomes – A population-based cross-sectional analysis. BMC Pediatrics, 9(53). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2431-9-53

[–]jinladen040[S] 3 points4 points5 points 4 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]CawlinAlcarz 4 points5 points6 points 4 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

I do find these studies interesting. In this case, this very study was funded by the US Government mostly by our Tax dollars under the Biden administration. So to me, it's more proof positive of Democrats continually pushing their Liberal/Feminist Agenda by funding studies that would only contribute more to the current custody problems Fathers face and only add more fatherless children to society.

This supposed RAND study is horseshit and is clearly a reflection of the underlying political goals of this overall so-called "Feminist" agenda and the current administration as you say.

When you look at the foundational writings and philosophy of the current "Feminism" you find that the agenda is about the destabilization of and subsequent destruction of the nuclear family unit (financially incentivized through Title IV-D) and abdicating parental influence to the State to enable easier indoctrination of the next generation on "collectivism" (which is what our educational system has become).

Additionally, as I have stated before, the impact of programs like Title IV-D is felt primarily by men in the middle class. Poor men have nothing for the State to take, and the very wealthy have so much that they are financially insulated from the State's predations - for the time being.

It is axiomatic that the middle class is the engine of all economies, and the way the US is set up, the individuals laboring away in the middle class have some individual ownership of the proceeds of their efforts, or the fruits of their labor, if you will. This is in direct opposition to the socialist agenda of the Biden administration, which still needs the labor of the middle class, but needs the collective (or the State) to have direct agency over the fruits of those labors, thus disenfranchising the individual. That is the aim of the aggressive financial incentivization by the State and judicial bias in sorting family law cases.

To all of those who buy into this agenda, a fundamental basis of 50/50 parentage as the default for divorce is anathema as it disincentivizes the disruption/destruction of the nuclear family unit (by reducing or removing the financial incentives to divorce that are currently in place today), and also reduces the ability of the state to financially disenfranchise individuals.

I read the remark in another thread yesterday that this was all basically pre-packaged communism/socialism, and that's the truth.

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[–]Sailbad_the_Sinner30 0 points1 point2 points 4 years ago (21 children) | Copy Link

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[–]Sailbad_the_Sinner30 1 point2 points3 points 4 years ago (14 children) | Copy Link

First of all, kudos for you posting a study instead of a media report of a study! That is rare as fuck!

Secondly, the first thing that springs out at me is that their definition of “extended” is not the anthropological definition: they are exclusively looking at grandparents, which is problematic for several reasons, as the study itself brings up.

Third, gosh, it’s almost as if these results come from a society that is structurally organized in order to privilege nuclear families! One, for example, that doesn’t have publicly-funded childcare or, indeed, any free public health at all. I wonder what the outcomes would be in a cross-societal comparison with a society that does have these things?

Finally, the study shows that single parenting is generally bad. The big elephant in the room, which they unaccountably do not reference, is that single parent dads generally only have their kids after conducting a hell of a fight for them. They are thus self-selected to be better single parents.

What this study does not show is that “a male father in the house is absolutely necessary for a boy’s proper development”.

[–]Oncefa2 1 point2 points3 points 4 years ago* (13 children) | Copy Link

I agree with everything you're saying.

Universal free childcare is something that I've advocated for in the past. Both for single moms and single fathers. In fact I think it would have an even greater effect on single fathers because of how often they work full time compared to mothers.

The statement about father figures being important doesn't come from that study though. If you want there is a whole bunch of research here that you can look at pertaining to that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/u7v7ew/comment/i5h3bq9/

I also made a post a while back based on a different study here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/oirefm/research_appears_to_support_the_conservative/

I know you'll probably disagree with the title based on your above points about how society is structured, but there's information in the body of the post (and the original study) about the unique role that men / fathers play in child care, and why that's important.

Edit, this specifically:

The parenting contributions that fathers make have been identified by psychologists to be important for the mental wellbeing of both girls and boys, so this goes beyond things like financial stress, and into the realm of things like discipline, and gendered differences in parenting strategies (for example it's usually the father who serves as a role model and teaches his children responsibility, self-discipline, and right from wrong, among other things).

The book I mentioned in my other post goes into a lot of detail about this as well. So it's not just about family structure or how society is structured. Masculinity itself is what's important in child care, and especially for mental health. And it is the father that usually brings this into the equation. I'm sure femininity is important as well but that's not what we usually have a problem with (in part because of how society is structured -- education being female dominated and all that). It's the lack of masculinity and masculine typical parenting strategies that leads to these problems (especially in the context of mental health for children and young boys), not just socioeconomic problems and things like that.

[–]Sailbad_the_Sinner30 0 points1 point2 points 4 years ago (12 children) | Copy Link

Again, as I always do in these cases, please point me to what you consider the best available piece of research regarding father figures.

For the record, though, I agree. I just don’t think these figures necessarily need to be fathers or even men. I think a boy with a bunch of women looking after him is probably going to be functionally indistinct from a kid raised by a mom and dad. Research into lesbian families seems to support this.

So if by “father figure” we mean another adult you can identify with and look up to as a model, we agree. I just don’t think this needs to be a father or a male.

The idea that fathers are “naturally” better disciplinarians is complete nonsense. Again, if these guys want to support that point, they should do some cross cultural studies.

There is no singular “masculinity”. Please: try to define it, empirically, in a way it can be tested.

[–]Oncefa2 0 points1 point2 points 4 years ago (11 children) | Copy Link

For the record, though, I agree. I just don’t think these figures necessarily need to be fathers or even men.

Yes absolutely.

The idea that fathers are “naturally” better disciplinarians is complete nonsense.

Maybe not "better" but I think necessary (or at least beneficial) is closer to the point. There are discipline styles unique to both types of "parents" and both are likely necessary.

For example:

"Developmental psychologists assert that fathers are more important for the development of socially acceptable forms of behavior that do not include violence and aggression (Popenoe 1996). In other words, fathers teach self-control and are models for compassion and empathy, for both males and females, in ways that quell violence. Fathers are important sources of messages unfavorable to interpersonal violence that permeate throughout the community."

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/206316.pdf

There is no singular “masculinity”. Please: try to define it, empirically, in a way it can be tested.

This is an active area of research. What modern psychology is zeroing in on are things like building / construction, adventure, risk taking, self-reliance, self-sacrifice, and mastery over your physical environment (with mastery over your social environment being a feminine trait).

[–]Sailbad_the_Sinner30 0 points1 point2 points 4 years ago (10 children) | Copy Link

Sorry, man. There is no “unique” gender-based parenting style. There are culturally-induced, patterns, yes.

Regarding that paper, which seems to be a master’s or doctoral thesis, again, they are self-selecting for their values of “father” in a reductionist and even tautological way. There is absolutely no proof presented in that paper, that I can see, that fathers occupy some distinct space as opposed to co-mothers, uncles, etc.

Regarding your views on “modern psychology” and masculinity, you’re probably not aware of this but the research you seem to be referring to is now decades old and often superseded. The behaviors you describe are not particularly masculine and, in fact, the hormonal and generic processes which produce what we call “masculinity” and “femininity” are a hell of a lot less binary than you seem to believe.

[–]Oncefa2 0 points1 point2 points 4 years ago* (9 children) | Copy Link

Regarding your views on “modern psychology” and masculinity, you’re probably not aware of this but the research you seem to be referring to is now decades old and often superseded.

How about this university level textbook from 2021?

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-86320-3

Or this publication from 2019?

https://malepsychology.org.uk/2019/03/19/the-provider-role-indicates-that-masculinity-is-prosocial/

What you're talking about is actually what's old-fashioned nowadays.

The APA kind of blew that up a few years ago. There's been a huge backlash and probably what I'd call a culture change inside of academic psychology literally within just the last 5 years on this topic.

the hormonal and generic processes which produce what we call “masculinity” and “femininity” are a hell of a lot less binary than you seem to believe

I would refer you to this publication (from 2019) on that point:

"From Fetuses to Boys to Men: The Impact of Testosterone on Male Lifespan Development" by John A. Barry and Rebecca Owens in The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-04384-1_1

A lot of this is coming from newer research into transgender and intersex individuals which is often mediated through these hormones. For example testosterone and estrogen lead to male typical and female typical brain differences that you can see on brain scans, and transgender individuals have those same male / female typical brain differences that we see in cis individuals.

Of course it exists on a spectrum. But if you want to talk about being reductionist, it's actually this view that "gender doesn't exist" (or is a "social construct") that is reductionist. Like literally the existence of trans people proves that this is not the case. If gender wasn't real then it wouldn't matter what your sex was or how you presented.

[–]Sailbad_the_Sinner301 point 4 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

Re: the first article, it doesn’t appear to say that there’s some sort of determinative hormonal or genetic component to male psychology, does it?

The 2019 publication gives me an error message.

The third article seems to support what I am saying: testosterone affects development, yes, but it is not an exclusively male hormone, nor does it seem to be what determines aggression in men.

What we now know is that hormonal development is a constant tug of war determining sex and gender, not a simple shake’n bake kinda thing, a view which that third article apparently supports.

As for gender not existing, it obviously does and it is just as obviously a social construct. Whether or not sex is the same is what being debated. But gender? Name one aspect of gender that has been constant between cultures over the past 2000 years.

[–]Oncefa21 point 4 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

I didn't say half of any of that...

Name one aspect of gender that has been constant between cultures over the past 2000 years.

Are you sure you read any of this?

[I]t is of course plausible that researchers are influenced by their own preconceptions about gender stereotypes to the degree that this impacts how they interpret their findings. This criticism applies to researchers whether they appear to focus on gender differences (alpha bias) or gender similarities (beta bias). For example, the work of Janet Hyde (2005) has been very influential in the social sciences, and her ‘gender similarities hypothesis’ -- with the notion that ‘there are more similarities between men and women than diferences’ -- has become axiomatic. However, Hyde’s hypothesis is based on the flawed notion that because there are more similarities, any differences are unimportant. By this logic, we could say that because mice and humans share 95% of their genes, the differences between mice and humans are unimportant. Readers of the present chapter might come to the conclusion that some of the differences between men and women are not only of statistical significance, but are of clinical significance and profound human significance. Hyde based her hypothesis on a meta-analysis (2005), which is flawed in failing to include research on many variables that show a sex difference (such as those listed in Ellis 2018) and toy preference, a behaviour that shows a large sex difference and which dozens of studies stretching over decades have replicated (Todd et al. 2017). Hyde’s reasons for these omissions are unclear, but the effect of the omissions is to bolster her case that gender differences are caused by context rather than biology. There is compelling evidence that sex differences in cognition and behaviour are seen internationally (Ellis 2018), and the fact that they are found worldwide and, in many cases, map onto our notions of gender (e.g. men are more competitive, interested in sports, work-orientated and fearless) suggests that masculinity is to some degree innate.

[–]Sailbad_the_Sinner301 point 4 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

[–]Oncefa21 point 4 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

[–]Sailbad_the_Sinner301 point 4 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

No, I am pointing out some epistemological and empirical problems with studies that are low N, that recruit from basically white, middle class English-speaking populations (with perhaps an occasional foray into China or Japan or France), and which seek to prove human universals.

Knowing what I know about human play and toys as a social anthropologist with a side line into archeology, I am wondering how anyone could positively identify the gender of toys on a cross-cultural basis when we are learning that we haven’t even been able to positively identify the gender of many BURIALS based on their artifacts.

If you’d like to present the cross cultural methodology these scientists used to classify male and female toys, I am all ears.

The 2005/2018 problem is that the author you cite seems to be criticizing a 2005 book for “unaccountably” not mentioning data from 2018.

I think there’s a pretty good explanation for why that might be the case which doesn’t involve intellectual dishonesty, as your cited author implies, don’t you?

[–]Oncefa21 point 4 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

The 2005 study was criticized for manipulating the data to come to the conclusion that they wanted to come to.

Subsequent research has failed to replicate their findings. But this one study, despite being debunked over and over again, is one of the reasons people seem to think gender has nothing to do with biology.

If you've ever heard that individual differences are greater than intragroup differences, that's where that came from. And it is patently false.

Here is the 2018 study:

Ellis, L. (2018). Evolution, societal sexism, and universal average sex diferences in cognition and behavior. In Oxford handbook of evolution, biology, and society. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190299323.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190299323-e-30

I don't know anything about it and I don't even have access to it.

But keep in mind what this discussion was about because you keep moving goal posts. Even if you think it's flawed -- which I'm sure any research that comes to this concussion will be flawed according to you -- the discussion was about our modern understanding of this topic, as well as your insistence that my view was "out of date" despite actually having read three academic level psychology books recently (all published after 2019) that touch on this topic. Our understanding can always improve so I'd never suggest that this is all there is to it. But for you to suggest that this isn't "current" demonstrates your own ignorance on this topic.

Btw the guy who wrote this seems to be in these fields that you claim to be an expert in, and he lives in Malaysia so I doubt his research is anglocentric.

Lee Ellis is a semi-retired former Professor of Sociology at Minot State University and Visiting Professor in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Malaya. His main areas of research are sex differences in behavior, social stratification, criminality, and religion.

It's kind of funny that you were just pumping your chest about all of this. Maybe you could learn some humility.

[–]Sailbad_the_Sinner301 point 4 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

Whoosh.

OK, where to begin?

Ellis’ evidence comes from two sources: an overview of published research (which is what the guy you quoted complains about in Hyde’s work as open to dubious interpretations) and a low N comparative study of self-reported behavior among Malaysian and American inmates.

Needless to say, both of these are extremely weak reeds upon which to hang seeping generalizations about humanity.

Even so, he himself is unable to explain the data in purely evolutionary and biodeterminist terms.

Furthermore, Ellis argues more than a bit dishonestly here. Take the following quote from his conclusions:

“The evidence that sex differences in personality traits appear to be more pronounced in Western industrial societies than in most non-Western developing societies (Part 4) presents a conundrum for all three theories of ASDCBs. It is especially devastating to social role theory, which is based on the assumption that gender differences would be least prevalent in cultures that foster the greatest degree of “gender equality” (Schmitt et al., 2016). The fact that most sociologists subscribe to this theory more than any other (Horowitz et al., 2014; Sanderson & Ellis, 1992) suggests that a sea change is in the offer- ing for how social scientists think about cognitive and behavioral sex differences.”

Now, first of all, this is a bit of a strawman. “Blank slate” social role theory has been discredited for some time. The current consensus among folks who study sex and gender is that nature and nurture are hopelessly intertwined, in manners far more complex than we originally imagined.

Ellis casts “blank slate social role” theory in an absolutist sense, then provides two non-absolutist biological evolutionary theories as alternatives. Given that any non-absolutist, synthetic theory will obviously be better (given the current consensus re: nature and nurture), this makes Ellis’ preferred theories look eminently more reasonable.

In other words, he offers up a biological model affected by social-cultural constraints (which is indeed what his comparative data shows) as set against a purely cultural determinist model. A more honest appraisal would bento compare his preferred model against a cultural model affected by bio-evolutionary traits.

Simplifying, it’s easy to argue your pet theory is better if your theory allows for both some degree of nature and nurture and your chosen opposing theory is cast as only allowing for nurture.

But even with this trick in hand, he cannot account for the data that differences between the sexes are supposedly higher in “western” nations than “non western” nations. Furthermore, he used these two terms in a very strange and almost tautological way, whereby “western” is basically defined as any nation with a high degree of sex/gender difference and “non-western” is any nation with a low degree. (He also seems to make the very common mistake of assuming that nations are societies are cultures. A problem when the nation at hand is, say, Brazil or South Africa or India, but that’s another discussion).

More problematically, he defines western and non-western as being marked not only by differences in differential gender behaviors but also by “industrialization”. Here’s a direct quote from his conclusions:

“Part 3 indicated that sex differences in personality traits were more pronounced in most Western industrial societies than in most non-Western developing countries.”

But — SURPRISE! — two of the countries showing the least pronounced sex differences in personality traits are Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile, Spain, Austria, Switzerland and Serbia — none of which can be reasonably classed as “industrial societies” — and Serbia, Estonia, and Peru — none of which can be classed as highly developed — show highly pronounced sex differences.

This all becomes even more silly when we arrive at Ellis’ final theory as to why “Western” nations have more pronounced gender differences than “non-western” nations. Listen to this. You just can’t make this shit up:

“In closing, I offer a proposal for social scientists to consider and test during the ensuing years. It is partly based on evidence that arranged marriages, particularly among close relatives (usually first cousins), are widespread both historically and even today in most developing countries (Desai & Andrist, 2010; Jurdi & Saxena, 2003). Contemporary developed countries appear to be among the only cultures in which arranged consanguineal marriages are rare (Hatfield, Rapson, & Martel, 2007).

“I propose that one of the effects of freely marrying individuals from large pools of nonrelatives is that this cultural practice allows the expression of genes for traits to be maximized. This includes genes responsible for sexually dimorphic cognitive and behavioral traits. If so, it is in societies in which out-marrying is most common—that is, primarily Western industrial countries—that one will find the expression of genes for masculine traits in males and feminine traits in females to be the greatest.”

[–]Sailbad_the_Sinner301 point 4 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

Now, this is total bullshit.

First of all, arranged and relatively consanguineal marriages were common pretty much everywhere until relatively recently. There is no evolutionary reason why thousands of years of this in, say, Peru, the Balkans, or Estonia would be wiped out by a century or so of relative modernity while the same thing didn’t happen in Korea or Japan. In fact, his stereotyping of “western” and “non western” here is so crude and uninformed it borders on racist. Japan is an undeveloped, unindustrialized nation where arranged marriages are common while Serbia is a developed, industrialized nation where they are not?

Please.

And this is what Ellis’ work shows: biology AND culture obviously affect sex and gender behavior. But there’s no serious doubt about that. The idea that “western” nations see more gender division than “non western” ones is trash because it is based on Ellis’ extremely simplistic and even tautological notions of what is western and non western.

The basic problem that Hyde brings up — and which the man you quote unfairly dismisses — is EXACTLY the same that Ellis sees. Hyde is not arguing for “blank slate, it’s all socially programmed” sex and gender roles. Just like Ellis, she sees nature and nurture working in a complex interchange.

Hyde, however, doesn’t try to pull just-so theories about eternal sexual differences from out of her asshole like Ellis does. She makes the following point, which neither she nor Ellis can explain:

There’s obviously something biological going on here because in no country do we find women murdering more than men. However, this biology is obviously very susceptible to social factors because Brazilian women, say, kill more than Swedish men.

Ellis’ own data shows a huge variation between countries (and, one would presume, cultures) regarding the degrees of difference between male and female behavior, undermining his basic thesis that their are clear gender related universal human behaviors. He tries to handwave these differences away by basically saying “non-westerners” (read “non-white”, for the most part) are less socially evolved than westerners and thus more likely to fuck their cousins.

In other words, there’s probably a very good reason Ellis is teaching in Malaysia and not at some top rank “western” institution (using his own definition of western).

Title	Subsidizing Single Moms Is Not A Substitute For Fathers
Author	jinladen040
Upvotes	104
Comments	35
Date	April 20, 2022 12:19 PM UTC (4 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/u7v7ew/subsidizing_single_moms_is_not_a_substitute_for/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/subsidizing-single-moms-is-not-a-substitute-for.1111920 https://theredarchive.com/post/1111920

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