Why does sharing the housework increase divorce?

Norwegian researchers have found, to their surprise, that couples who share the housework equally are more likely to divorce than those who don't (hat tip: Laura Wood).

The figures clearly show that “the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate”

I thought the researchers explained the likely reason for this quite well:

But the deeper reasons for the higher divorce rate, he suggested, came from the values of “modern” couples rather than the chores they shared.

“Modern couples are just that, both in the way they divide up the chores and in their perception of marriage” as being less sacred, Mr Hansen said.

The researchers may or may not be aware but a similar research project was undertaken in the U.S. back in 2007 and it came up with similar findings.

The American research was an attempt to find out why women in traditional marriages were on average happier than those in more modern "egalitarian" marriages. The researchers found, just like their Norwegian counterparts, that:

women who earn a greater-than-average percentage of couple income ... and whose husbands take up a greater share of household labor report greater unhappiness.

But why? The researchers were intrigued to find that men in traditional marriages were more affectionate toward their wives (they did more "emotion work"). But the researchers dug deeper and came up with an even more interesting explanation.

It seems that there is a divide in the approach to marriage by traditionalists and moderns. The modernist view is described this way:

a growing number of Americans, influenced by the cultural logic of “expressive individualism”, act as self-interested agents who bargain over their marital roles and interests in an effort to maximize their personal fulfillment

The traditionalists take a different view:

These Americans see marriage as a sacred institution in the Durkheimian sense that the relationship is accorded extraordinary value. Hence, the marital relationship is supposed to trump the individual interests of partners, calling forth virtues such as fidelity, sacrifice and mutual support

This traditionalist understanding then leads to a more altruistic "gift giving" approach to marriage, rather than a critical "acount keeping" attitude:

In this setting, exchanges between marital partners are often conducted according to an “enchanted” cultural logic of gift exchange where spouses give one another gifts that vary in value, may or may not be reciprocated, and often have some kind of symbolic value above and beyond their immediate instrumental value

I think this explanation has merit and is worth serious consideration. There is, however, one further way to explain the research findings, which is that men who are overly domesticated fail to trigger a sexual response from their wives.

If the topic interests you, I wrote two posts on the American research:

What kind of marriage makes women the happiest?

So marriage is a bit of paper?

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Welcome to Sydney Traditionalists

Some good news. A group of traditionalist-minded individuals in Sydney have formed the Sydney Traditionalist Forum.

The group has already organised or attended several events, including the screening of a documentary and lectures by Mark Steyn and Dr Edward Feser.

The group has its own website called SydneyTrads (it seems to load better in Google Chrome than in Internet Explorer), with information on past events, some political commentary and recommended books and periodicals.

I haven't been involved in the formation of the group but it is does appear to be a worthwhile attempt to create a more genuinely traditionalist political space in Sydney. I'd encourage any Sydney readers to consider getting in touch or attending an event.

I congratulate those who have taken the initiative to establish the group. The discussions we have on the internet are important, but a real world presence takes things to the next level.

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Three attacks in Five Points

We are encouraged by our schools and by the media to believe that it is whites who are violent toward blacks. That leads some white people to have a complacent view toward life in a multiculture. How can there be any danger for white people, when it is whites who are the violent ones?

But the reality is different. I'm going to post a video, but I should warn you that it is sickeningly violent. It shows an attack on two white men by a group of 8 to 10 black men in Columbia, South Carolina.

One of the white men is punched and when his friend, Josh Bosworth, goes in to help he is king hit (sucker punched) from behind. The group of black men are clearly excited by what they have done. It is left to a white woman to tend to the unconscious and bloodied Josh Bosworth.

Later on the same night in the same area a group of black men bumped into a white man and when he remonstrated he too was attacked and left with a broken arm.

In yet another incident an 18-year-old white man, Carter Strange, was left in a critical condition after being beaten by a group of 8 young black men. He was jogging through the same area (Five Points) of Columbia.

Here is the video:



My point in posting the video is not to malign all blacks as a group. It's to show the reality of what life is likely to be like when young white men are left as a minority. There is not going to be justice in this situation. It won't matter how courageous you are, or how good a fighter you are, or the rightness of why you are fighting, you will be overwhelmed. The only possible outcome is your humiliation.

The answer is not impotent rage, or revenge fantasies, or hating on blacks or any other group. It is for whites to get real - to no longer think in terms of abstract ideologies in which it is lazily assumed that whites are the invulnerable oppressor group victimising the other.

If we are to be smart we need to give ourselves permission to think about what we need to do as a group to maintain communities in which we remain predominant, so that our sons aren't left in the same hopeless position as Josh Bosworth or Carter Strange.

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Deveny on the grand final

It's the Australian Football League (AFL) Grand Final today. It's a contest which showcases masculine athleticism at the highest level and it's a longstanding part of local culture. And yet this is what feminist Catherine Deveny chose as her grand final day tweet:

Men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men and none openly gay.

At first I thought I shouldn't post on this. Deveny likes to act the part of the provocative leftist and I don't want to rise always to the bait. But then it struck me that her attitude is not all that different from the way that feminists respond, say, to the armed services. If twitter had been popular 10 or 15 years ago, it's not hard to imagine someone like Hilary Clinton having tweeted about the U.S. armed services:

Men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men and none openly gay.

The feminist focus is not on the larger purpose of the institution and it's relation to masculine endeavour and strengths, but on transformation along gender and sexual lines.

Most people see a great mark
Catherine Deveny sees too many men

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Why does Andrew Bolt admire Lady Gaga?

I should begin by making clear that there are things I admire about Australian columnist Andrew Bolt. He doesn't follow along timidly with political class opinions, but is willing to go out on a limb on a range of issues. In doing so he has helped to shake up the left-liberal orthodoxy in this country.

But it has to be said that he is nonetheless a liberal in his politics. What matters for him is that we self-determine our own individual identity. Therefore, he believes that it's wrong for people to have predetermined national or ethnic identities.

I've given examples of Bolt arguing for this previously. For instance, Bolt once criticised a group of Aborigines who wanted an historic artefact returned to them on the basis that the Aborigines were forgetting:

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race.

Bolt has also related the story of how he once, as a Dutch migrant to Australia, attempted to identify with his Dutch heritage:

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

So I chose to refer to myself as Australian again, as one of the many who join in making this shared land our common home.

Yet even now I fret about how even nationality can divide us.

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

That is a radically liberal, rather than a conservative, position to take. He is only allowed to identify with himself rather than with a communal tradition. It is his own self-determined, individual identity that is allowed to matter, rather than a predetermined one that is treated negatively as "a mere accident of birth".

One of the problems with taking this liberal view, that what matters is that we are autonomously self-determined, is that a whole raft of other positions logically follow on.

Bolt himself this week provided a small example of this. He has expressed his admiration for Lady Gaga on this basis:

Lady Gaga’s music is irrelevant. Her real art is in reinventing her identity, and for that alone I like her.

As a boy I moved from town to country to town, and learned how powerfully liberating it could be to define afresh who you were.

Gaga has demonstrated this possibility to millions.

There’s her personal story – of going from a bullied loner at school to the brash superstar.

And there’s her professional guises – tramp to vamp to sophisticate, costumed from the barely there to the heavily lacquered.

With every change, let the critics complain, Lady Gaga would be who she pleased.

What matters to Bolt is not whether Lady Gaga is virtuous, but that she is adept at being a self-creating individual. Freedom, asserts Bolt, is an ongoing act of self-definition - and doing and being what you please.

Bolt is supposed to be the leader of conservative opinion in Australia. And yet what we've ended up with is the idea that we should admire those who do whatever they please in order to define their own individual self.

There's no sense here that people might be oriented in a stable way to an objective good, or that our deeper sense of identity is tied to things we don't invent but that are given to us (which then means that those who trangressively reinvent themselves over and over might be thought of as disconnected rather than as liberated).

One of Bolt's readers left this comment:

“As a boy I moved from town to country to town, and learned how powerfully liberating it could be to define afresh who you were.”

With all due respect, you’re not a true conservative, AB. I too moved from town to town as a child because of my father’s employment, but I always longed for the stability and rootedness that I saw others had, even more so now, 40 years later. Conservatism is rooted in the stability of place, family, community and religion, and it transcends the Right/Left paradigm, knowing that the modern Right can be as destructive of community as the Left can be. Read Russell Kirk or Wendell Berry. No, you’re not a conservative, you’re more a reactionary modernist. Anthony of Toowoomba

That's well-observed by Anthony of Toowoomba. And yet for all that Bolt still manages to be a voice in opposition to the main current of left-liberal thought in Australia.

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What would Deveny advise women to do?

The news here in Australia has been dominated by a murder and abduction case in inner-city Melbourne. A beautiful woman, Jill Meagher, who migrated from Ireland and who married a local man, had been drinking till the early hours of the morning with work colleagues. When she decided to leave, one of the men offered to walk her home but she declined. Walking home alone she was raped and murdered. The alleged perpetrator was arrested, in part, because of evidence from CCTV cameras.

It's a desperately sad thing to read about and I couldn't help but think about the moment she turned down the offer of a male friend to walk her home.

Catherine Deveny, a radical leftist writer, has an interesting connection to this case. She believes that she was attacked by the same man earlier this year, having recognised him on the CCTV footage. She has also pondered the moment that Jill Meagher turned down the offer of being walked home, but from a very different perspective to mine:

Like all of us I am deeply disturbed by the disappearance of Jill Meagher. It's very close to home on many levels. The thing in the report that really resonated is as she left the bar her male work colleague asked if he could walk her home. She said no. Repeatedly.

Which would have been pretty much what I would have said. Actually my response would have been more like, “F... off. Walk me home? Like you could protect me. I walk these streets all the time. Thanks sunshine. I grew up in Reservoir. I can look after myself.”

...You cannot rely on 'a man walking you home'. Nor should you want to. Your city sister. Walk wherever you like.

Not good advice. Catherine Deveny obviously doesn't like the idea that a woman might turn to a male friend for physical protection. She would rather women make a point about their independence by putting their lives at risk. It's not prudent and the idea that Catherine Deveny could defend herself against a criminal thug better than a man could (because she grew up in Reservoir) is delusional.

And Catherine Deveny is not the only feminist commenting on the murder. Megan Clement claimed that such violence was part of the efforts of men as a class to subordinate women:

What’s the most likely cause of death, disability or illness if you’re female, aged 15-44 and living in Victoria? Intimate partner violence.

...And fear itself is powerful. That is why violence against women works so well. Because often it is our fear of what could happen that constrains us. The UN describes gender-based violence as a "social mechanism by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men”. We are subordinated because we have experienced violence; even if we haven’t, we are subordinated because we know that we might.

This is FTP - feminist patriarchy theory: the idea that men as a class use violence against women to uphold male privilege and to keep women oppressed.

But the facts don't fit what Megan Clement is claiming. First, it's not true (by a long way) that intimate partner violence is the leading cause of death for young women. That has been shown by a statistician to be a rogue statistic (a false statistic that is circulated to the point that it is believed, without evidence, to be true).

Second, the man accused of murdering Jill Meagher is not your average suburban husband [note: I can't say anything more here until the trial is over.]

The feminist analysis is not only wrong, but it unfairly maligns the average father and husband because of the acts of criminals who break, rather than enforce, traditional social norms.

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Julie Bindel - a follow up

In yesterday's post I described the views of an English feminist, Julie Bindel. She takes the radical and generally unpopular view that women should choose to be lesbians. However, as I pointed out, she is at least being logically consistent. If a feminist believes that men, as a class, act to oppress women, then why would women love men? That would be akin to sleeping with the enemy.

Anyway, a reader (Elizabeth Smith) made the following perceptive comment:

Lesbianism is just the logical conclusion of the complete autonomous project for a lot of feminists (particularly the sex-negative types).

In what sense is that true? Well, if you believe that autonomy is the highest good, and therefore the aim is to be self-determining, then you will want to choose your sexuality rather than have your sexuality be an unchosen biological destiny.

And that's the position taken by Julie Bindel. She writes:

To me, political lesbianism continues to make intrinsic sense because it reinforces the idea that sexuality is a choice, and we are not destined to a particular fate because of our chromosomes. I also suspect that it is very difficult to spend your daily life fighting against male violence, only to share a bed with a man come the evening...

I think it's time for feminists to re-open the debate about heterosexuality, and to embrace the idea of political lesbianism...Women are told we must love our oppressors, while, as feminists, we fight to end the power afforded them as a birthright. Come on sisters, you know it makes sense...

Most feminists don't quite take that leap. But they draw near to it. Like Julie Bindel they see the feminine as inferior to the masculine, and yet to be heterosexual they need to be feminine beings attracted to masculine ones. I don't suppose it's always easy being such a heterosexual feminist - you would always feel somewhat conflicted, as you would want to connect with a man on a masculine/feminine basis and yet at the same time you would see the feminine as inferior.

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