A Kinder, Gentler War Between the Sexes:

How do we protect women from the abuses of the past?

If women can't support themselves, they are beholden to others, who may not have their best interests at heart.

If they are beholden to bad parents, they may be forced to marry bad people. Never mind marrying someone they do not love, love is just a word and has no real significance to the well-being of a relationship. But marrying an actually evil, loathsome, or despicable person is just a lifelong sentence of rape, no one should have to do it.

If they are in turn beholden to bad husbands, they cannot get free of them. There is no divorce, and anyway, they have no means of supporting themselves once they are single again. Even good parents can make mistakes and trust a deceitfully benign looking man with their daughters. It is only the wife who can find, through long experience and use, the true nature of her husband, which can be full of cruelty, violence, cheating, or any rotten thing. But at such a time as she would like to leave such a man who has revealed his true colors, she finds it legally and physically impossible. This, too, is a sentence of lifelong rape. There is no penalty in the criminal code as severe as the ones we condemned endless millions of innocent women to in the past.

Women should not have to marry men they do not want to out of economic necessity. They should not have to stay with men they do not want to out of economic necessity. Both paths lead to unhappy outcomes for women, and a sort of licentiousness among men where they can get away with anything and there are never any consequences in their lives.

There was a legitimate reason, then, for 'women's liberation,' and women rightfully fear the imposition of a reactionary despotism by disgruntled men. If this world were simple and only men could be evil, we could reach a quick and easy conclusion, just let women decide everything for themselves.

Women can choose to abort their babies or not. They can choose to divorce their husbands, cheat on their lovers, go to work, stay single, or do anything they like. Then the old abuses wouldn't happen, right?

Wrong. Women are still instinctually inclined to companionship with men, it just now occurs outside the bailiwick of marriage. These 'boyfriends' who come and go are generally worse people, more abusive, less loving, less loyal, etc than wives of the past ever suffered. Yes, technically, women can dump them one after the other, and they do so, but what's the use when the next guy is so much like the previous one, when every single one of them is violent and degraded? When women pile up a long string of exes, all of whom have criminal records, take drugs, are unemployed, cheat on her, and beat her when they're angry or suspicious, does a woman really benefit from her 'right to dump?'

The right to choose is meaningless if all your choices are equally terrible to begin with. Do you wish to die by burning or drowning? It's your free choice!

Women are not happy alone. They may put a brave face on it, but they desire company and companionship, and once they've missed it for too long, like a sailor adrift in the ocean mad with thirst, they will lean over and start slurping the saltwater in the hopes of slaking their burning need. If society allows women to be adrift in a sea of worthless men, women will find themselves no longer in a prison confinement like in the past, but in the insane asylum of the present.

Alternatively, giving women the right to choose about anything, while closing the door on a host of old abuses (men betraying women, men not supporting their women, men being cold and cruel to the women in their power), simply opens up the door on a host of new abuses (women betraying men, women dumping men, women not having any children, and women not raising the children they do have.) While one set of abuses made a woman's life a powerless sinkhole, this set of abuses is even worse, because it means the literal extinction of humanity. Furthermore, it goes hand in hand with the previous problem I was speaking of: When single mothers fail to raise the next generation, said children are even less capable of having a good relationship with the opposite sex than their parents were.

It turns out that if either group has ascendancy over the other, abuses will ensue. One abuse is painful, but kept mankind going for tens of thousands of years in a world that was getting better every day. The other is lethal, and has spun out of control in less than a hundred years, making the world worse ever since its inception. Women have no right to whine about reactionary despotism when the birth rate is below replacement, they don't give children a two parent, stable home, they betray and abandon innocent, perfectly nice and competent men for no reason, and they don't provide good examples for their children, or teach them the most basic levels of moral behavior.

Women complained about their lot in life for centuries until men deigned to listen. Being reasonable people, we felt sympathy for them and agreed to cast loose their chains. How do they repay us? With a war on men so fierce and terrible that all 'feminist' nations are in danger of emptying out and reverting to wilderness. This isn't what we intended, a world without marriage (remember, starting in 2011, the majority of households in America are unmarried, and 40% and rising children are illegitimate.) A world, really, without families, or relationships of any significance or worth, at all. A world, ultimately, without even life.

The question, then, is this:

How do we address the concerns of women, and correct the ancient abuses, if letting women choose to do whatever they please is not the answer, and only leads to worse, though sometimes different, abuses?

The first answer is obvious: Give everyone in your country a citizen's dividend. If people have a basic income that can provide for them, regardless of their parent's neglect or lack of a husband, they will be free of the tyranny of need. People should not use your feelings of hunger, cold, sickness, or the like against you, forcing you into glorified prostitution/slavery, which is all marriage based off of poverty can be called.

If we all had a citizen's dividend, then women would not have to be a burden to their parents, who could then use the guilt of that fact to force them into unwanted marriages. They would also have a recourse to go it alone if their husband could not or would not treat them like wives instead of chattel.

In one swift stroke, the citizen's dividend breaks the stranglehold of abusive/neglectful parents and husbands and sets women free for life.

But if we stopped there, the modern abuses wouldn't stop, and we'd only be worse off than when we began. Yes, we want women to be free from rape/prostitution/slavery, but that doesn't mean we want them to be free of marriage, family, children, virtue, and life itself. Women's liberation wasn't meant to be that free.

The next set of laws must constrain our modern abuses: Marriage is for life. Adultery is forbidden on penalty of death. If you get pregnant by a man, you must marry the father of your child and raise said child, not abort it.

These three laws would clean up almost everything wrong with relationships today. Children would be born, they would have parents, and families wouldn't split up anymore. But it doesn't cure everything. If married life is still vile to women, they will simply make sure they don't get pregnant by men -- using birth control or just abstaining from contact with men entirely.

There needs to be a way to reassure women that marriage is not the equivalent to serial rape, life imprisonment, or slavery. The answer to this is the most important reform of all -- moral education.

Currently we believe education is for the sake of teaching people skills they need to make money, and in a more vague way, how to hold the right 'beliefs' to be a good 'citizen.' There is no attempt whatsoever to encourage virtue and personal morality. Likewise, the media and entertainment world is 'free' of censorship, able to encourage any sort of lifestyles or behaviors equally, without any interest in whether they have an uplifting or corrosive force on general public morals.

Both of these abuses must be cleared out before we can create the first ever 'happy for both sexes' society.

Why were men so abusive to women in the past, or today?

1. Because it was tolerated.
2. Because they were never taught to be any different.

Both of these problems are moral issues. A culture tolerates bad behavior because it has not been taught to see that behavior as reprehensible. In short, if someone thought something was truly evil and bad, he would not tolerate it, he would destroy it at any cost. A culture that looks the other way, a culture that is indifferent, to sin is a culture that does not admit the sin even exists or feels anything but a drunken lassitude about the whole matter.

If we brought our children up in proper schools, that taught them what was acceptable in life and what wasn't, they would be more judgmental towards a) themselves when they behaved unacceptably, and b) others when they behaved unacceptably. Men and women both would be called on their sins, and shamed by their peers for them. They would be ostracized, punished, disowned by their family, any legion of penalties even before the law stepped in. And the law SHOULD step in, both as a reinforcer of the public perception that this activity is intolerable and evil, and as a means of keeping order and virtue in the public by excising the cancers in its midst.

If the media were regulated and censored, we would not allow stories that promote sin to be broadcast 24/7 into our children's (and adults, for that matter) heads. Instead, we would seek out stories, fictional or non-fictional, that encourage virtue and discourage vice in whoever hears them. In this way, people would be constantly edified by their entertainment, rather than coarsened and taught an anything goes mentality where 'everyone does it so why can't I?'

The power of peer pressure, the law, education, good parenting and storytelling all put together is a formidable thing. The odds of any sinner resisting and defying them all, and sinning into the teeth of this headwind, is extremely low. In any case, the damage will be kept to a human minimum beyond which nothing more could be done.

What do I mean by sin, in this context?

What I'm talking about is the sort of behavior that is, or was, making women unhappy in the past. Sin = lack of compassion. Sin = selfishness. Sin = debauchery. Sin = lying. Sin = breaking your word of honor. Sin = breaking your promises. Sin = violence against women. Sin = violence against children. Sin = abusive, cutting phrases that constantly undermine and condemn the person you are supposed to love and cherish. Sin = not helping your wife raise the kids, set a good example, do the chores, work, etc. Sin = lack of good grooming, diet, exercise or whatever that makes you look uglier than you need to be. Sin is, in short, anything that women might disapprove of in men and drive them from marriage into a preference for a monastic abstinence.

If we raise our men to be moral, and stop doing things that hurt women, women will flock back into our arms, and marriage as an institution will be restored. Coercion will Protect the institution, but the institution will not be forced upon women. Only men's good behavior can induce women to make that first, crucial step of consent.

Even this isn't good enough though. There are two problems with even this plan:

1) Some people want to work, but can't find employment, and thus appear as 'worthless' to women when in fact market forces have rendered most people, men and women, uneconomic. This isn't due to their laziness, but just the reality of automation and modernity.

The solution to this issue is the citizen's dividend. Allow these men and women to collect a paycheck every month for doing precisely nothing, enough to support themselves and not be a burden on their wives/girlfriends/husbands/boyfriends, and a lot of the strain in boy-girl relationships will disappear overnight. If people can't find useful work, but can still support themselves, the charge of 'parasitism' and using relationships to extract money from their partners will go away. Laziness will have to be judged by other means, like whether they're willing to do chores, play with the kids, or excel at a sport or hobby by putting in real effort to the task. Men could then escape the 'sin' of bumming around and still look admirable in the eyes of women again.

2) Many men wouldn't sin, and would actually be wonderful husbands, if they were given the opportunity. However, since they don't see any reward in keeping to such high standards, because there is no guarantee women will reciprocate by holding to high standards themselves, and there is no guarantee women will reciprocate by falling in love with said men, the whole thing falls apart.

So long as women all fall in love with the same top 10% men, the lower 90% have no reason to better themselves. They see no point in even competing. They drop out of the competition and find other, lesser ways to satisfy themselves, not because they actually love drugs or alcohol or whatever it is they do, not because they prefer their lifestyle to love, marriage, and children, but because they never had a choice to begin with, they knew it, and they carved out what meager happiness they could. Women then turn around and blame them as the reason for why women won't commit to such worthless losers, and the vicious cycle continues.

How do we break this cycle? I think it can be done. Here's what I'd do:

First off, we have already banned divorce and adultery. This means that the top 10% men cannot grab off a larger and larger share of the women in a giant harem. ((It is irrelevant whether alpha men have large numbers of women simultaneously or sequentially, the sequential women will avoid relationships with lesser men and prefer singlehood, followed by a short time with the alpha, if there is any chance of getting the alpha at all.))

Next off, the first woman who gets pregnant by a man marries said man, which means men who are hot commodities clear off the market quickly. Men are eager to have sex and will quickly get someone or other pregnant if women give them the opportunity, which will then force them to marry said women by law. Popular, attractive men will be married early in their lives and they will then vanish from the scene. Women will have to look elsewhere for companionship from this point forward. And I'm talking like by eighteen years of age, they will have to give up on their prince charmings, who some lucky girl has already snagged by getting pregnant, and look to the rest of the male world.

Basically, a return to monogamy will immediately help out men's chances with women. Which will encourage them to stay in the race and act as virtuously as they can, which will then make women find them more attractive and eventually 'settle' for them in a respectably short amount of time.

Is monogamy alone sufficient to give men a shooting chance, which will give them the energy to stay an attractive mate even when no one is looking their way? I hope so, but I doubt it. In that case, there needs to be a still greater incentive for men to stay good even when there's no visible reward.

Let's try this, then: For men who can prove to a sort of government dating service that they have behaved honorably and well, and are of perfectly marriageable material, they are entered into a 20+ dating service. Women who are not married after age 20 are automatically enlisted into this dating service. Then men and women are matched by lottery, or perhaps computer personality analysis or the like, and required to make an honest effort of dating for a month, after which point they can elect to marry, continue dating for up to six months before coming to a conclusion, or break up, and re-enter the dating lottery. The lottery won't pull out your number more than once every six months, so if you find someone you like and marry in-between runs, you're free to go.

Yes, this is coercion against women, but it's a soft touch. Basically, there are penalties for staying single and not doing your duty by men or the next generation. The penalty is that you will thrown into a whirlwind of relationships you did not seek one after the other until you get off the merry go round, by marrying already.

If women are goaded into dating and marriage, men will have a chance. They will see that they have a real chance, but ONLY IF THEY STAY VIRTUOUS. Only if they meet the standards required to be a good man, do they qualify for these marriage sweepstakes. For people who drink, use drugs, swear, look ugly, are fat, lazy, mean, violent, cheat, etc, there is no recourse for them. They don't get access to any women and no one has to put up with their attentions. They will become like the untouchable class and just left to rot somewhere in a deep hole. Men who wish to marry, who want to love and be loved by a girl, know that if they dot their i's and cross their t's, society will afford them the opportunity to meet that dream girl. Women are never forced into actually marrying a guy, but they will find it easier to do so than to constantly be dating people they don't like year after year. And loser men will no longer be able to bother women at all.

I think this is a fair compromise. Perhaps it won't be necessary and simple monogamy laws will suffice. But in any event, it is a better world than the one we live in, or the one from the past that women wished to be liberated from. No one can complain when there are so few perfect solutions to such a complicated question.

More than anything else, we must have the courage to start experimenting again. This is not the best of all possible worlds. There is a great deal of misery underneath our liberated and anything-goes modernity. We can't stop here, or settle for this. It would be a death sentence for mankind. If these policies don't work, we must have the courage to at least first see if they don't work by actually trying them. Then we can learn from the mistakes we made, we can learn why it didn't work, and try something ELSE, which takes said mistakes into account. The scientific method can't figure out anything without experimentation. With no data to observe, no conclusions can be reached. It's impossible to improve this world without sometimes making mistakes and making it, temporarily, worse than before. The willingness to change always carries some risk with it. But it's also impossible for this world to stay the same indefinitely -- it MUST improve. Therefore, we must continue instituting new laws and codes of behavior, until we find something that does work. Will it be our first try? Our second? Our third? Who knows. But it must happen all the same. There is no future in staying like this.