[Warning: this is a polemic. I use generalizations and trends. To any who think “but not all X are like that,” yes, I know, and this doesn’t apply to those people. This could likely be turned into a really great sermon. Few preachers would, because he fears what his wife will say… Onward!]

Back in the Old Testament days,  God and His people had a deal. An arrangement. A covenant. We worshipped Him, He saved our souls. We had duties and obligations, which came with perks and privileges. There was order and hierarchy. When we did our duty to God and each other, life was good, and when we didn’t, things got pretty rocky. After a while, we’d “pull our head out,” and beg for forgiveness, He’d bail us out, and things would get better for a while. Then we’d forget our duties and obligations God and each other and things would fall apart. Wash, rinse, repeat. Again and again. That is the cyclical story in the OT. Believing, falling away, getting warnings, crashing and burning (cue Sodom and Gomora, Noah, etc.),  repenting, and getting back on track with tradition. 

There was a similar sort of arrangement between old-time kings and lords, lords and vassals, on down to the knight to surfs/peasants, and even between the peasant patriarch and his family.  There were duties and obligations that went up the chain, as well as down, and there were (hopefully commensurate, or at least meaningful) reciprocal rewards and privileges that went up and down the chain as well. “I give you a percentage of my harvest, you protect me” serf-to-knight sorts of things. Some variation of this can be seen among the people of ancient Egypt, Rome, Persia, pre-Columbian America, nearly everywhere across history. In more modern times, employers have a duty to pay their workers and provide a reasonable working environment, employees are expected to give an honest day’s labor. Police and judges are given extra power and authority, and in return they are expected to not abuse those powers as they administer justice impartially unto law-breakers. At least, that’s the way it is suppose to work, and when it does society works well; when it doesn’t, things start to fall apart in due course.

This sort of reciprocity between duties and rights extends in to many parts of a functional society, even though they are often not written into formal law. When people know as a part of their culture that there are mutual and reciprocal duties and obligations, society is functional. The right to free speech carries with it the duty to speak honestly and fairly, to not slander or commit fraud, etc. The right to bear arms comes with the obligation to learn to use said arms properly and safely. The right to assembly includes the obligation to not form a mob for criminal purposes. Freedom of the press caries the obligation to print stories that accurately represent the facts. Yes, again, that’s the way it is supposed to work in a well-functioning polity, though we sometimes forget it in practice. But note, the farther we are from the ideal, the more life sucks. That’s what a functional civilization  and culture that people want to be a part of IS, though; it is a recognition that everyone has to play a part that will both offer benefits and impose obligations; those who fail to deliver are a problem. TANSTAAFL. Everyone has duties and obligations, nobody gets a free ride.

(Side note: the major failing of “multicultural” societies is that the traditional reciprocal arrangements start to fail because there isn’t a common cultural understanding of expectations, duties, right, and obligations, and they cannot be properly encoded into law and enforced without much getting ignored, making dysfunctional compromises nobody likes, or things getting “lost in translation.” There are too many “free riders.” If you look at early Roman Republic art, the men are masculine and the women were feminine, the stories heroic and culture-positive. At late stages of the Roman Empire, as they were flooded with slaves and citizen-wanna-bes from all over the known world with a hundred different cultures who wanted a piece of the Roman action, the art was worse, the men effeminate, the women more masculine, the stories decadent and nihilistic, and the idea of “duties and obligations” became the subject of jest. Notice any patterns here?)

About the only time this reciprocal arrangement didn’t occur was with slaves, who had nothing but obligations and duties (anything they got was “extra”), and in the end-stages of a civilizational collapse when things are still running on the inertia of one side still performing their obligations and duties out of habit, as they hope the other side gets their act together again.  Things degrade rapidly at that point, though, because eventually the one side gets tired of being chumps, the only ones doing the tough jobs and fulfilling cultural obligations without getting anything for it. They say “ENOUGH!” and walk away, or perhaps die trying to do their duty one last time.

Everyone can easily say what duties and obligations men have to society at large and their family. Defend and protect. Be a soldier (or at least fighting-capable) and defend the tribe / country / nation. Work and provide for / protect wife and kids and family. Work a job that’s respectable, or at least needed. Honor your parents and your nation. Make sure the women and children get in the lifeboats first. Don’t complain. Change the oil in the family car. Take the garbage out. Exercise self-control. Investigate the bump in the night. Etc. There are endless duties and obligations and demands made of men, by everyone. To “man up” means to do your duty, to meet your obligations.

Two questions arise from this about today’s society and culture.

First, for all these demands and expectations, what are the perks and privileges for men? Increasingly, there aren’t any. They do not get respect, they are constantly the butt of jokes, denigrated on popular TV shows, publicly trashed in the media and academia, they are not sought out to be husbands or anything else good. They are not given priority on jobs or promotions. They get nothing but an endless honey-do list and bills from all sides, and if any of them have the audacity to not be in the top 10% they are are brokies, dusty, chopped, or simps, not worth the time of day to even the most aggressively average of women. There are hiring preferences for everyone but a man, especially a straight white Christian man. Colleges and corporate HR teach that “diversity is good,” and diversity is everything that isn’t a straight white male. By default, then, it’s understood men are bad.  Dangerous. They are the publicly acceptable whipping boy. We laugh along with the jokes aimed at us because if we push back we get marginalized further, as a snowflake, overly sensitive, a misogynist, a white nationalist, an oppressor. Why should young men not walk away from that society, when it offers them nothing? Not respect or support or…. anything, really, beyond a list of demands and the pay they earned with hard work, and that paid only begrudgingly, while seeking to replace them with cheaper foreign labor. And even then the walking away to be left alone in peace and silence is called “dangerous.”

Second: what unique duties and obligations do women have, either to men they are in personal relationship with, or to wider society? If they don’t have any, then they are not equals with men, who DO have duties and obligations. That is why men are walking away from women and relationships (beyond the strictly short-term transactional types); men see no reciprocity. Bigger picture, that’s the sort of inequality that leads to rapid civilization breakdown. In the meantime, women demand everything, and do not expect to give anything back.  Women who are grossly overweight won’t “settle” for a guy who isn’t fit. Women want a leader, but are not expected to follow. Women want a provider, but can’t control their spending. Women want a protector, but won’t follow his advice on keeping the family or themselves safe. They want a man who earns more than they do but they demand equal pay. They say things like “his money is our money, but my money is my money,” and laugh about it. They have a list of demands for what the man should provide, but resent being asked “what do they bring to the table?” and play dumb about what the question is asking and start gaslighting the guy. That’s not equal or reciprocal. That is very nearly the definition of a dysfunctional culture, an unbalanced civilization in collapse. The fact that there is no expressions like “to woman up” is telling.

If a woman exploits her Sexual Market Value when young, she lowers her Marriage Market Value for life. The SMV and MMV for men and women are very different, and change in VERY different ways over time, with a woman’s MMV being highest when young and pure, and drops fast with age and “experience,” while men start out with low MMV and it goes up with their earnings and experience over time. No, it’s not “fair,” it’s just reality. An average man doesn’t want to marry an Alpha Widow, and it’s unkind to the children of such a marriage to make just because she “deserves” something, and she’ll never forget what she “could / should have had.”

Now, I’m not going to tell women what they should do about this. They’ve made it abundantly clear that they will not listen to men.

I won’t tell them that there is no such thing as a “hoe phase,” there is just “hoe” and “not hoe,” or that “hoe” and “wife material” are mutually exclusive for most men. They may be perfectly willing to sleep with almost anyone, but they are not willing to marry her.

I won’t tell them that most men are average, and most women are average, too; ignoring 75% of men will leave most of the women single or sharing the “top” guys.

I won’t tell them that a woman’s “value” or “status” is, largely, dictated not by the highest value man she can sleep with, but the highest value man she can get commitment from.

I won’t tell them that while women might control access to sex, men control access to commitment, and good men won’t commit to high-risk, low value, high-mileage goods.

I won’t tell them that women peak 20-24, so husband-hunting for a “high-value man” to “settle down and have a family with” at 35 after an extended “hoe phase” and expecting to find a rich Mr. Right is Mission Impossible.

I won’t tell them that while it’s normal to want a man with a solid income, the difference between a gold-digger and a totally reasonable desire to marry a man of means is who the woman plans on spending the resources on: herself for personal entertainment / enrichment, or her kids in order to give them the best chance of success in life.

I won’t tell them that, generally speaking, men don’t care about a woman’s credentials, diplomas, career, world travels, or that they would rather marry a nice barista with a HS diploma, well-used kitchen utensils,  and a happy disposition than a MBA at a fortune 500 company, because they want a wife and mother for their kids, and not another dude.

I won’t tell them that having 25k Instagram followers liking the bikini pics are a negative for most men looking for a long-term thing, it only attracts the sort of men who want to lower a woman’s MMV by exploiting her SMV.

I won’t tell them that a hundred grand in college debt for a marginally-useful degree is toxic for family formation.

I won’t tell them than lots of tats, constant phone and social -media use, being popular on OF, or septum rings put a woman in the “recreational use only” category for most men, certainly for most “high value men” looking for a wife, because they see those as red flags indicating high risk of (expensive) relationship failure.

I won’t tell them that men respond to the incentives they see, and if a woman acts like a piece of meat, then she should not be surprised if she is treated like a piece of meat… or is totally ignored, seen as nothing more than a sexual harassment suit in waiting, and interacted with at the most minimal degree needed by work demands (and then only with witnesses or via terse and to-the-point emails).

The concept of Chivalry was a reciprocal arrangement, where men would act like respectable gentlemen in exchange for proper, respectable, ladylike behavior from women. I won’t tell them that there is no reason to act like a gentleman when dealing with with an amoral self-centered prostitute.

I won’t tell them that fake hair, fake boobs, fake lips, and fake everything, along with mediocre IQ and contentious demeanor, means that even the women are unhappy with their genes, and they are not likely going to be passing on good genes.

I won’t tell them that a very smart and healthy woman choosing to not have kids and pursue a career because she wants to self-actualize herself means she’s OK with being a Darwinian dead-end,  a biological failure, a person wasting her parent’s investment in her family line, to be a replaceable corporate cog, a person not contributing to humanities’ future the most rare of gifts, good genes, because she is so self-centered and short-sighted she wants to serve a boss who doesn’t care about her rather than a man who does.

I won’t tell them that the feminists are lying and leading you down a false path, though I might point to Mathew 7:16, “by their fruits you shall know them.”

I won’t say women have to follow the advice I gave my own daughter WRT relationships, which was in part “Don’t play games, don’t put up with BS, be worth it,” but it does seem to work pretty well.

I won’t tell them that most men would love to get married and have a family, they just don’t find the current domestic offerings worth the risk/reward ratio.

But I will say this: If women don’t figure it out and start offering men something in relationships that the men value enough to put up with the rest of the expenses and headaches and added duties she brings, then men’s indifference to women’s plight and suffering will only increase. Without reciprocity there is no “us,” only parasites and slaves. Because, to use an old-time-sounding metaphor, if you are not the fertile field he’s committed to plowing and planting season after season because the harvest is worth the work, then your weeds are not his problem. And if you want men to continue maintaining things like indoor plumbing and central heating and drilling for petroleum, you’d better figure it out soon. Otherwise, either civilization collapses, and nearly all of you all die of starvation, or civilization almost collapses and you become property with no rights at all.

{Edit to add- One person who gets it. Another pair of well-known pod-casters discussing this topic. The science comments on the topic, via Sargon. Related, how they are being programmed in the spiritual war. An interview with the author of a book on the topic.