minor incident from the weekend
minor incident from the weekend
Premise: there's a fundamental mismatch between what being an adult/having high status means to men and to women. To men being high status means others serve you. To women being high status means being independent, competent, autonomous, and ultimately having resources to share with others (of course there can be a 'dark' side to this, with women withholding or maldistributing the resources at their command, but this isn't about that). So to women, male high status looks like acting like a child; to men, women's high status looks like acting like a 'mom'. And any woman who doesn't act like a 'mom', who is adult/high status enough to be autonomous, is by definition lowering a man's status.
So women serve men to demonstrate their high status (they have the resources to choose to give), and men are served by women to demonstrate their high status. (I'm not exactly sure how to express the alignment here between 'being an adult' and 'being high status' - we know that adults have more status than children, but this bit of the story needs more solid connections.)
I think I may have been groping toward this years ago when I wrote that the capitalist 'free market' is a mechanism to determine who deserves to be helped, i.e. people with lots of money get lots of help - and that this is somewhat of a paradox because we as a culture deride and dismiss people who 'need help' (as a friend of mine once said, 'anyone who needs something I don't need is weak').
Good point - we know men love it when women are submissive to them, but there may be an (assumed/presumed) status issue here as well.
Premise: there's a fundamental mismatch between what being an adult/having high status means to men and to women. To men being high status means others serve you. To women being high status means being independent, competent, autonomous, and ultimately having resources to share with others (of course there can be a 'dark' side to this, with women withholding or maldistributing the resources at their command, but this isn't about that). So to women, male high status looks like acting like a child; to men, women's high status looks like acting like a 'mom'. And any woman who doesn't act like a 'mom', who is adult/high status enough to be autonomous, is by definition lowering a man's status.
So women serve men to demonstrate their high status (they have the resources to choose to give), and men are served by women to demonstrate their high status. (I'm not exactly sure how to express the alignment here between 'being an adult' and 'being high status' - we know that adults have more status than children, but this bit of the story needs more solid connections.)
I think I may have been groping toward this years ago when I wrote that the capitalist 'free market' is a mechanism to determine who deserves to be helped, i.e. people with lots of money get lots of help - and that this is somewhat of a paradox because we as a culture deride and dismiss people who 'need help' (as a friend of mine once said, 'anyone who needs something I don't need is weak').