The reason that women need to be subordinated for successful reproduction

Examining difference in fertility, it is clear that fertility is primarily controlled by female status relative to their husbands.  The more women are subordinated, the higher the fertility.  Japan is a good test case.  Not only did fertility dramatically drop when General McArthur emancipated women, but in feudal Japan, fertility among high status families was below replacement when women were high status, indicated by upward mobility and room at the top.  Later in the feudal era, when women were low status, fertility well above replacement, leading to a massive oversupply of elite children relative to available elite positions.  It is difficult to assess Japanese feudal fertility exactly, but it seems to have been similar in patriarchal feudal Japan as it was in the immediate postwar period in patriarchal industrial Japan, the same laws leading to similar fertility in industrial and feudal Japan.

Modern contraceptive technology changes little, for we have always had infanticide, always had non reproductive sex, long had abortion.  Early feudal era upper class Japanese women, late Spartan women, women of the upper classes of the Roman empire, and late Bronze age Egyptian women also had well below replacement fertility.

Societies with emancipated women do not reproduce very successfully.

Men want to have sex with as many women as possible, and give them no support.

Women want to have sex with the highest status men available (as women perceive male status, which is similar to the way a small evil child raised by cannibal head hunters perceives status) and be supported by men.

A prisoner’s dilemma problem, the war of the sexes, ensues.

If both freely pursue their interests, we get a defect/defect equilibrium, where a small minority of men have casual no strings attached sex with the large majority of women.  Women get the sex they want until they approach the end of their fertile years, but children don’t get fathers.  Since producing fatherless children places a large burden on women, women do not have children until used up on the cock carousel and approaching the end of their fertile years.

Both sides of the war are better off if a cooperate/cooperate equilibrium is coercively imposed.  One could in principle have legal enforcement of the marriage contract, with women being severely unequal inside marriage, but equal (eg, no child support, no special privileges, freedom of association permitted) outside marriage.  But a society in which women are equal is going to find it hard to uphold and protect marriage.  Further, because women are not in reality equal, women cannot be equal in a society with freedom of association, because people will not want to associate with bastards, because most of the high status associations will choose to be male only, and so on and so forth.

To enforce a cooperate cooperate equilibrium, mating choice has to restricted, denying men access to women, and women access to men.  Women have to be compelled to mate with their husbands, and forbidden to mate with anyone else.

Fertility is determined by the extent that we have a cooperate cooperate equilibrium starting early in a woman’s fertile years.

A ship can have only one captain, and household only one head.  If men and women equal, requires separation.  If separation, one side or the other is denied the opportunity to invest in their children.

So, patriarchy.  If men own women, except that they may not resell them, cruelly mistreat them, rent them out, abandon them, nor even allow them to rent themselves out, then both men and women know who their children are and live with their children.  The converse system, women owning men, would not work, because men would not know who their children were, would be denied the opportunity to invest in their children, and would therefore revolt.

It might be argued we have the converse system now, and yet men are not exactly revolting, but they are dropping out and refusing to participate.  They will not support or protect women on current terms.

We have always had fertility control in the form of infanticide, and have fully adapted to it.  We have had fertility control in the form of abortion for around three and half thousand years, and have substantially adapted to it.  We have had condoms for long enough that men have evolved to dislike them and women are beginning to evolve to dislike them.

Children by previous lovers get in the way, hated by their mother’s new lover, inconvenient to their mother.  Such inconveniences are, as in fairy tales, apt to be eradicated.  This is the most ancient fertility control solution.  Tomcats notoriously apply it.  Humans and cats are behaviorally adapted to optimal application of this solution.

With cryptic estrus and lengthy infancy, if males and females each freely pursue their biologically optimal strategy without regard to the interests of the people they mate with, very few will successfully reproduce, because almost all infants get infanticided.  Prisoner’s dilemma, defect defect equilibrium.  Successful reproduction requires enforcement of the cooperate cooperate equilibrium.

In a species with cryptic estrus and lengthy infancy, women have to be subjugated for the species to successfully reproduce.  Matriarchal societies did not vanish from history because conquered. They vanished from history for failure to reproduce.

In modern times, we are more civilized, and contracept children or abort them to avoid the embarrassment of mummy’s latest boyfriend grabbing the child by its feet and smashing its head against the bedpost, but modern mummies have a strange tendency to acquiesce in such “accidents”, when they discover just how much their former husband’s children cramp their style.  There is a very high rate of “accidents” among fatherless children.

If children go with the mother, Gnon demands future male lovers commit infanticide.  Civilization avoids this bloody embarrassment with the delicately civilized abortion.

Cooperate cooperate equilibrium is that the man and the women are stuck with each other.  He owns her, but does not own her in the sense that he can resell her to the highest bidder, nor punish her without cause or in ways likely to cause injury.  There is an approximately equal distribution of women between the men, socialist rationing of women, and each man respects all other men’s property rights in their women, with severe punishment for violators,  the male who sleeps with another man’s wife punished by law, the wife punished by her husband at her husband’s discretion.

Under this circumstance, men can invest in their wives and children with confidence in paternity and without fear of losing them, without fear that any attempt to support them will result in them supporting their wife’s bad boy lover instead.

In defect/defect, investment in children is inadvisable, for the woman will probably wind up a single mother, and a man a cuckold.  Any children with her are likely by previous lovers, so should be mistreated or eradicated, and any children he might have with her are likely to be similarly mistreated by future lovers.

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65 Responses to “The reason that women need to be subordinated for successful reproduction”

  1. Udolpho says:

    This is fucking hilarious Olympic level spergery.

  2. Thought I’d jump in and suggest the other theory to fertility in pre-feudal Japan.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2247545/How-Japans-samurai-caste-toppled-MAKE-UP-Lead-poisoning-left-warriors-children-backward-physically-deformed.html

    But maybe that doesn’t cover the overall fertility drop in Samurai Japan. I know in Japanese culture that have really weird habits like giving women full control over the money, and I mean FULL control once you are married. With that said, Japanese can recover, with what the West is doing it cannot. Even the Romans didn’t have it so bad when Germanic peoples invaded, Northern Italians resulted later down the line, but there will be no progress for the West since it isn’t smarter and more fitter peoples invading, the exact opposite.

  3. JS says:

    You should submit this to Return of Kings. It will get the wider exposure it deserves.

  4. […] gems from Jim on sex realism: First, The Reason that Women Need to be Subordinated for Successful Reproduction. And in Why Women Ruin Everything, Jim […]

  5. […] women need to be subordinated for successful […]

  6. Alan J. Perrick says:

    “Jim”

    I read on a manosphere blog, in the comment section, that some-one was proposing a way of thinking about it where a woman’s hypergamy means that if a woman is too high status above her children, then she will kill her own. That killing could be in the form of abandonment or abortion.

    The commenter pointed to negro abortion rate as a sign of it because women have as much buying power as a man does due to the welfare she receives. Why not regularly use contraception? Because the child’s life wasn’t worth that much to the mother in the first place.

    Another sign of the truth in that theory is the way that mothers divorce. She doesn’t love her children enough to stay together with their father so she moves onto the next one.

    Subordination is good and it can especially be done by making the home the woman’s sphere and the “exciting and mysterious” world the man’s.

    A.J.P.

    Another

  7. Sam says:

    There’s another way to slow the decline. Make a different type of marriage status legal. When someone gets married they can ask for the “Diamond” wedding. It should cost more maybe $1000 and it’s under the same laws as before no-fault marriage. Maybe “Diamond Forever”marriage. Even better in case of divorce the children go to the Father. Make up a nice diploma looking certificate. The State could actually make money on it which would greatly add to its preference for the Statist.

    • Adolf the Poorly-Named Children's Book Character says:

      That would be sexist, and therefore illegal.

      You can already have pre-nups, which can achieve a lot of what you’re talking about. And the judicial system now let’s judges throw out pre-nups that are insufficiently supportive of the female’s status. (in their words “unfair to the woman”)

      • Redneck Esq. says:

        Sounds similar to the “covenant marriage” that exists in a couple of states, less the kids-going-to-father part. Not overwhelmingly popular in practice, and liable to the race-to-the-bottom problem: You can enter a “covenant marriage” in Louisiana, but if your wife decides to Eat Pray Love, she can still go get a quick divorce in Nevada.

        We can all see where this is going, even if the law hasn’t quite crystallized on it yet. State A has to recognize gay marriages from State B, even though State A doesn’t allow them, because [insert facially ludicrous rationalization about how the men in blue at Gettysburg died for it or something], but State C is under no obligation to enforce the obligations implicit in a covenant / diamond marriage from State D, or enforce a female-status-lowering prenup, because [insert equally facially ludicrous rationalization]. Just policy choices by the judiciary, all the way down.

    • Phil Sheridan says:

      This is an interesting concept. Most states retain the right to distribute children of divorce “in the best interests of the child”. They do not FORCE this distribution against the will of both parents in divorce, however. What they do is side with the favored parent (i.e. the woman) where there is a conflict between the two of you.

      To break this cycle there needs to be a burden imposed directly on the wife to make her not want to keep the children.

      For example, prevent her from getting 50% of your accumulated earnings by using a Nevada domestic asset protection trust. You cannot prevent a court from splitting your assets. But if there are no “marital” assets (because you have been keeping all your assets in an irrevocable trust that you manage) there is nothing to distribute.

  8. scientism says:

    I think a more elegant way of pursuing this idea is to take the family, rather than the individual, as the basic unit of society. Actually, I think this is a more accurate account of the past. The idea of women as non-transferable human “property” is kind of awkward anyway.

    So both men and women belong to families. The family is the unit upon which status is conferred. There’s a division of labour within the family. Adult male family members are the public representatives of the family (and hence gain and lose status for the family “name”). Women take care of the domestic situation. A woman belongs (in the part-whole sense) to her parents family until she marries and then she belongs to the family of her husband (takes his name). The legal system does not treat people as individuals but as family members (this is how Japan’s legal system worked until the occupation). There is no divorce, because what would that mean? Would the woman go back to her parents family until she found another husband? In Confucian societies, there was no remarriage at all, and widows remained with their husband’s family after their husband died and were expected to remain chaste. Marriages are arranged by parents.

    From this perspective you can just see feminism as confused. By looking at society as a collection of individuals, rather than families, the problem of women’s status comes up (since status was conferred on families and attained by adult male representatives). The switch back to the family as the basic unit of society fixes this, along with many other problems, such as the supposed “unfairness” of inheritance (whether wealth, genes, status or titles), which is often the basis of arguments for wealth redistribution, and the supposed illegitimacy of hereditary rule. I think the family is also the context of long-term thinking, with parents representing our connection with the past and children representing our connection with the future: individualism (as opposed to familism) leads to short-termism.

    • jim says:

      Yes, “status of women” is a leftist concept. The Japanese high fertility system was that family, extending infinitely in time in both directions, represented by the male head of family, was simply the unit of society, not the individual.

      If you conceptualize society as composed of families, not individuals, status of women is simply not a meaningful thought.

    • jay says:

      ”A woman belongs (in the part-whole sense) to her parents family”

      Shouldn’t a woman belong to her father’s family?

  9. […] defense of hardcore patriarchy? (This, however, seems […]

  10. jay says:

    ”The converse system, women owning men, would not work, because men would not know who their children were, would be denied the opportunity to invest in their children, and would therefore revolt.”

    For example the Matriarchal mosuo allow child visitation by the father but disallow him from investment and headship:

    ”While a pairing may be long-term, the man never lives with the woman’s family, or vice versa. Mosuo men and women continue to live with and be responsible to their respective families. The couple do not share property. The father usually has little responsibility for his offspring.[11] “It is the job of men to care more for their nieces and nephews than for their own children.”[4] A father may indicate an interest in the upbringing of his children by bringing gifts to the mother’s family. This gives him status within the mother’s family, while not actually becoming part of the family. Whether or not the father is involved, children are raised in the mother’s home and assume her family name.[11]”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo#Role_of_men

      • jim says:

        Everything you read about the Mosuo in any source that is academically respectable is a lie.

    • jim says:

      This is the politically correct feminist version of Monsuo culture.

      People who are not puppets of Academia report that the men do no work and live by predating on women and children – pretty similar to the almost equally matriarchal American ghetto culture.

      • Adolf the Poorly-Named Children's Book Character says:

        Read the wikipedia page closely. It says the same thing as you are saying, just with subtlety.

        >According to some, men have no responsibility in Mosuo society—they have no jobs, rest all day, and conserve their strength for nighttime visits.
        >However, Mosuo men do have roles in their society. They are in charge of livestock and fishing, which they learn from their uncles and older male family members as soon as they are old enough.
        >Men deal with the slaughter of livestock, in which women never participate.
        >It is the job of men to care more for their nieces and nephews than for their own children
        >Death is the domain of men, who make all funeral arrangements. It is the only time men prepare food for family and guests.

        Fishing, killing domesticated animals, and cooking for funerals is tough work guys. Also, we fish so rarely, that people report we never work.

        >Myths & Controversies
        >Mosuo women are “promiscuous”?
        Then later it says
        >Some of these pairings may even last a lifetime.
        >Some older Na report having upwards of 30, 40, even 50 partners throughout their lifetime”.

        • Steve Johnson says:

          There’s a clue here –

          “It is the job of men to care more for their nieces and nephews than for their own children”

          But the nieces and nephews by their sisters not their brothers, right?

          In other words, zero paternal certainty and so zero paternal investment.

          • jim says:

            Obviously they are inclined to doubt that “their own children” are in fact their own children.

        • Just sayin' says:

          Controlling the livestock and determining when it gets slaughtered is a “job” that you want to have.

        • jim says:

          In short, men have responsibility for going fishing and hosting barbeques. Will the domestic burden never end?

          OK. Respectable sources sometimes do tell the truth, if, as when reading Larry Summers, one reads the fine print and then between the lines.

          • Dr. Faust says:

            It sounds similar to the things the American Indians did before Europeans arrived. The women did all the work. The men hunted, ate, and fucked. Sounds pretty good to me.

          • Adolf the Poorly-Named Children's Book Character says:

            Except for the perpetual violence part.

            Matriarchal societies tend to have over 10% of all male deaths by murder. Often, it’s over 50%.

            If men don’t do anything productive, they really aren’t valuable. So killing them off is fine. There will still be some other guy to fuck and eat.

  11. Mark Yuray says:

    Jim has a talent for crisply summarizing reactionary thought.

  12. Adolf the Poorly-Named Children's Book Character says:

    >There is an approximately equal distribution of women between the men, socialist rationing of women
    Is this another way of saying “monogamy”?

    I thought monogamy was just another way of reducing female status? If you prohibit males from marrying a second wife, then the demand for wives decreases. And so women have a harder time finding marriage, or financial support. In practice, polygamous wives tend to be pretty independent, because their husband needs to please them (and he’s usually rich).

    I’ve heard a lot of Muslims argue that their polygamy is essentially an organic form of the welfare state.

    The concern here is not about men having sex with multiple women, but with men supporting multiple women. If mistresses and girlfriends are permitted, demand for females increases. So their status increases.

    Parental financial support for fertile-age women also increases female status. I am not sure, but I suspect that prostitution reduces female status, by giving men options, other that dating.

    • Red says:

      There’s a reason that later Arab armies were mostly slave armies. Their own people seldom fought very hard for their empires. Monogamy is mostly tied up with the ability to get every man to fight because everyman has a chance at a wife and children. It also increases a man’s investment in his own children by not having multiple wives to please. Women love polygamy but as a group but it’s detrimental to the social stability and the ability to wage war. Monogamy + soft polygamy in the form of mistresses for very successful men seems to have worked out well as long as the children from these mistresses were treated harshly by bastardy laws.

    • jim says:

      > >There is an approximately equal distribution of women between the men, socialist rationing of women

      > Is this another way of saying “monogamy”?

      Yes. Gives more men a stake in society, a reason to work and defend it, and lowers the status of women.

  13. Adolf the Poorly-Named Children's Book Character says:

    >as women perceive male status, which is similar to the way a small evil child raised by cannibal head hunters perceives status
    In a Patriarchal society, don’t females just accept the dominant culture’s definition of status? That is, the male version of status?

    • jim says:

      Reading old books, I don’t get that impression. Women were reported to be attracted to soldiers, the least suitable of husbands.

  14. Adolf the Poorly-Named Children's Book Character says:

    >Modern contraceptive technology changes little, for we have always had infanticide, always had non reproductive sex, long had abortion.
    I disagree. We have evolved to dislike non-reproductive sex. Few guys fantasize about fucking a girl’s armpit. And anal sex is not especially common.

    However, we cannot tell that ejaculating in a woman’s vagina, while she is on the pill, is non-reproductive sex. It’s tricking us.

    Eventually, we’ll evolve ways to get around the pill. Probably have already started. But in the short term, women have been liberated from babies. And thus liberated from husbands.

  15. Reader says:

    Assuming there have been other societies somewhere in the past that evolved into our current predicament, I wonder how they got back to a healthy women-subordinate-to-men arrangement.

    Does it always happen because the society devolves due to low reproduction? Is the society always conquered by a stronger society?

    Or do such societies sometimes come to their senses and reverse the norms and laws? Perhaps the ascent of the fundamentalist Iranian society is an example.

    From where we are now it’s a little hard to imagine peaceful circumstances by which women lose the right to vote, to divorce, etc, and we return to a patriarchy.

    I’m pretty sure that if we are to have a chance it’s going to depend on white men waking up to reality. What women think about it is not going to mean much one way or the other.

    • Adolf the Poorly-Named Children's Book Character says:

      A subgroup eclipses the majority group.

      Today, Amish and Old Believers have 6 children per woman. This means that each generation, their population triples, relative to the American population. Forecast that forward 200 years.

      This is how Christianity took over Rome. Lots of Christian babies. And chaste Christian women were made wives by pagan Roman elites, rather than taking slutty pagan Roman women.

      Mormons are also a good candidate for this takeover, because they’re part of the elite, and have much above-average fertility. But the Mormon church’s future is in doubt.

      • Red says:

        Mormonism is transforming themselves into the Protestant version of the Jews. They look down on manual labor, they love being the middle man who rips people off, they have a persecution complex were they can’t see their own actions harming others and more and more they’re being recruited as competent government administrators. But just like the jews their family structure is being destroyed as they consume more and more progressiveness into their lives.

    • jim says:

      Iran has converted to feminist Islam, although the Koran and traditional Islamic law quite directly commands the subordination of women. Everywhere in the Islamic world, nine year old girls get taught to put a condom on a banana. They have honor killings, and university courses in women’s studies, both. The proportion of Muslims who kill their misbehaving daughters is not a whole lot higher than the proportion that go off to fight for Islamic State.

      The normal outcome is that once a people go feminist, they disappear from history. Their men will not fight, and pretty soon they are mighty short of men even if their men would fight.

      Feudal Japan went from females emancipated to females thoroughly subjugated through one of those regular periods of feudal disorder. It is hard to say what happened. They were so busy fighting over who would have power, and what forms institutions would take, that no one paid much attention to what was happening to the status of women and why it happened.

      Historically, the trend to the female emancipation is reversed only in periods of extreme disorder. Such reversals commonly take the form of an all male band of invaders conquering some people with a completely different language and culture, killing all the males and instituting monogamy – they continue fighting until they have one girl and some land for each warrior, then they make peace.

      The change in feudal Japan was, however, less drastic. The winners wanted to be masters of their own lands, and part of that was being masters in their own homes. Each warrior got to make his own law, and part of that was his wife did as she was told. What was law for the top people gradually over time became law for everyone – or rather law for all property owning male heads of household.

        • jim says:

          In the age of the cell phone, there is no solution but early marriage.

          If parents try to keep boys and girls with cell phones under control, the thirteen year old girl drops her cell phone number on the floor as she passes the sixteen year old boy, and then they chat about the weather and football and stuff, and pretty soon she sends him a picture of herself naked diddling the top of a coca cola bottle in front of a bathroom mirror, and sooner or later, they organize a hookup.

          And then there is no solution but to marry the thirteen year old girl and the sixteen year old boy at shotgun point.

          Of course, in Islam, even that probably would not work because all the thirteen year old girls would marry the same sixteen year old boy.

          • Adolf the Poorly-Named Children's Book Character says:

            Why does a thirteen year old girl need a cell phone?

            Most of the parents I know, won’t let their kid have one until they can drive.

          • Red says:

            My of the parents I know give their kids smart phones when they start school.

          • Red says:

            Most of, not my.

    • Dave says:

      Someday our fiscal Ponzi will collapse, hundred-dollar bills will blow around in the street like autumn leaves, millions of single mothers will lose their welfare benefits, and millions more will lose their government-funded jobs in education, health care, and social services.

      At that point, you can buy yourself a 12-year-old virgin from a starving single mother and knock out a few babies. You could do this today in Moldova, but you’d have to wait til she turns 18 to bring your new family back to a Western country.

      Imagine the shock on the older kids’ faces when told “Guess what? You’re NOT adopted! I only pretended to adopt you so I wouldn’t go to jail for underage sex.”

  16. Thomas says:

    > We have had condoms for long enough that men have evolved to dislike them and women are beginning to evolve to dislike them.

    This alone, is an interesting point worth to consider. Evolution is in fact quite fast.

    Quite an enemy!

    • Candide III says:

      I think this point is silly. There is no need to evolve a dislike for foreign matter that is in the way of both parties’ natural sensations. You might as well talk about an evolved dislike for mildewed bread or for arrows through the gut (also known to have happened to enough people long enough).

      • Thomas says:

        You don’t understand how evolution works. Could be a lot of perverts out there who really enjoy condoms.

        Will be less of those in the next generation.

        • Candide III says:

          Same goes for perverts who enjoy arrows in their gut. So what?

        • Lars Grobian says:

          “Pervert” means defective. You’re suggesting that it’s unlikely we would evolve to *like* condoms. Valid point. Where then would all those perverts come from? Nothing inherited, I bet. (Where they GO TO is easy — the New York Times, of course. “Products of decorous cohabitation”, every one).

          “Could be”, yeah, right. Show me some reason to believe they exist in any numbers.

          Liking condoms is not a neutral state we would have to evolve out of. It is a preposterous state, the dying fetish of grisly epicene freaks unable to produce issue.

          The African (some parts) fetish for “dry sex” may be an interesting counterexample, except that they don’t seem to have any trouble breeding.

          • Exfernal says:

            Does this fetish for “dry sex” coincide with circumcision? If so, then the explanation is quite obvious…

  17. Candide III says:

    You really should read ‘Sex and Culture’ by J. D. Unwin. You can skip his theorizing and just go through the factual descriptions. Uncivilized primitive peoples usually have (had) nothing like the enforced cooperate/cooperate monogamy that you describe. And they were very durable, too, they haven’t ‘died out from failure to reproduce’ until they came into contact with the products of civilization — guns, alcohol and leftism. It is true that they didn’t have civilization either, but we’re not really interested in living in a hunter-gatherer tribe here.

    Also you’ve omitted Middle East-style polygamy from your analysis.

    • “And they were very durable, too, they haven’t ‘died out from failure to reproduce’ until they came into contact with the products of civilization — guns, alcohol and leftism.”

      1. Yes. They did well. In total isolation. Until they met another tribe. And then they disappeared. Well, 99.999% of them. There’s a few left in the Amazon basin I hear.

      2. Polgymay is this squared.

      • Candide III says:

        They weren’t totally isolated. Other similar tribes were all around and low-level warfare was continuous. If you put civilized peoples such as English or French with hunter-gatherer tribes in the same “another tribes” box, you won’t get much out of your analysis.

        • Rooster says:

          you’re hairsplitting, they were isolated and the moment they faced competitive pressures they failed. Generally monogamous societies are stronger.

          • jim says:

            Monogamous societies are stronger where there is a deal between political alphas and betas at the expense of women, the deal being that the political alphas get soldiers and taxpayers, and the betas get virtuous obedient wives and obedient children. Monogamous societies are stronger when it is a deal at the expense of women, not when it is a deal at the expense of beta males.

    • spandrell says:

      He does say that civilization depended on monogamy. Failure to adopt monogamy was a guarantee of uncivilization. And the more sexual opportunity the less civilized the place.

    • Candide III says:

      Besides the descriptions of primitive tribes in the book, the important paragraphs dealing with civilized tribes are §161 and §§167-174, in particular §173 deals with the marital and familial customs of the English in XVI-XXcc. I recommend these paragraphs to your attention.

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