Some Liberalism and Feminism, as a Treat

There's a reason we don't live in a traditionalist society anymore--people don't want it.

Photo by Brittani Burns on Unsplash

A while ago, I had my brother on my podcast. This caused some people to worry that by episode two, I had already run out of potential guests (I redeemed myself by later having Jeremiah Johnson and Matt Yglesias on.) But the main reason I wanted to feature my brother was that at the time, he had fallen into a rabbit hole of observing the men of the passport bro subreddit.

One thing he noticed while reading this subreddit was that some of the men who went overseas to find a more traditional wife—someone untainted by the evils of feminism, liberal Western society, or Gen Z Boss and a Mini—found themselves struggling to adapt in a culture that was, well, traditional. He mentioned one guy who permanently moved overseas to live with his perfectly subservient tradwife, only to discover that part of living in this traditional society was that he was obligated to host (and cater to) her extended family on a regular basis. He complained of random aunties, uncles, and cousins showing up at all hours of the day, and the fact that he never got any peace and quiet. He wanted a “traditional” society that consisted of him not participating in any kind of community—not a thing!

People have a lot of negative things to say about the state of the world today. It’s taken for granted that everything is worse, except for maybe our ability to ask a chatbot to create an image of us if we were in the Spongebob cinematic universe. While not everyone blames liberalism and feminism, many do. But liberalism and feminism didn’t show up randomly because a shadowy cabal wanted to promote degeneracy (in some parts of right-wing Twitter, this is actually a controversial statement—it’s their version of genocide denial, I guess.)

No, we have liberalism and all its associated gender and sex-based evils because we wanted it. We saw arranged marriages, multigenerational living, religious dogma, and other vestiges of traditions past and said, “Ehhh…I’ll pass.” Modern liberalism and all its “depravity” is an amalgamation of our revealed preferences. And much like the tired parents who claim to want a “village” but actually just want free maids, a lot of trad guys out there don’t actually want to stop living in a liberal society—they just want a hot woman to fuck them on command (and never in a way that requires much of them.)