Vox Day: Women should rely on daddy to choose their husbands

Our ol’ pal Theodore “Vox Day” Beale, who’s never encountered a form of misogyny he didn’t take to and spin as a means of preserving (his grotesque ideal of) society, has a suggestion for stripping women of their most basic autonomy:

Who Nose asks a pertinent question:

"If you want to understand why women are not permitted serve in Church leadership, and why human societies do not survive more than a few generations of young women being permitted to choose their own spouses"

It begs the question: Who ought to choose their spouses?

The Church?
The Father?
The Mother?
The State?

The question is further begged: What kind of law would need to be passed to enforce the choosing of a spouse.

Finally, another question is begged: What would you do with the 99% of women who responded to the suggestion or the law with, "F*ck Off"?

1. The Father, with the advice of the Mother.
2. No law is necessary. Simply informing their daughter that a woman who is capable of choosing her own spouse is clearly also capable of paying for her own college education and supporting her own lifestyle decisions will suffice for most parents. If a woman is independent enough to insist on paying her own way in order to pursue a career, she's probably not wife-and-mother material anyhow and would likely end up a reproductive dead end regardless the options she is afforded. We can always hope that instead of children, such a woman will contribute some revolutionary Powerpoint slideshows to society, produce a cure for cancer, or introduce some truly ground-breaking HR policies that will change the world for the better.
3. I would simply wish them the best of fortune in their future endeavors. But the number won't be anywhere nearly that high because women are, first and foremost, the practical sex.

Demographic patterns make it perfectly clear that societies where women are not only permitted, but encouraged, to make their own mating choices are not sustainable. I find it deeply ironic that so many people who claim to firmly believe in evolution by natural selection demonstrate that they do not understand the basic concept of fitness as soon as the issue of societal demographics is raised.

First off, if you’re going to try and mock those who reject your hideous way of thinking, you probably shouldn’t do it by mentioning how they rightfully refuse to shoehorn a biological mechanism into a social science, and not only because they believe there are better ways to measure a society’s health and prosperity than merely by its birthrate.

1. I’d like to know what Vox thinks makes men so uniquely qualified for deciding women’s future, even including their relationships. If his usual puffy rhetoric about “the survival of society!” can be dismissed by noting how the majority of nations that allow women to make their own partnership choices (ie. most of the world) are not disappearing into the sea (or, if landlocked, being obliterated by volcanoes) as we speak – and, in most cases, are in fact flourishing both economically and demographically – then what’s his reasoning? Surely, a self-proclaimed “superintelligence” like Vox wouldn’t dream of making a proposal rooted solely in rank prejudice, right?

   Still, though, it’s nice of him to allow the mother a vague, cursory place at her husband’s examination of the various pigs offered to him by suitors asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage (livestock-based bride pricing being standard in the bygone era of antiquated social mores that lives on in Vox’s mind).

2. Exactly how does a young adult’s right to choose who she pairs up with indicate her financial solvency? Or does Vox have that little issue with dropping any pretense at logic and reasoning (not that his grasp on them is notable to begin with) in favor of blatant emotional manipulation and economic coercion? Any parents who would opt to cut their offspring off outright in protest of them having the gall to choose who they wish to be romantically involved with aren’t people whose advice said offspring should heed in the first place.

3. Yes, women are so “practical” that they apparently need daddy’s say in who should be their life partner. And they’d apparently all be quite fine with this arrangement, at least in whichever alternate reality this would happen to be true.

One of two things will happen. The society will collapse or be overrun, or the government will pass laws to prevent the demographic collapse from taking place. There are no other alternatives; if Who Nose or anyone else should like to suggest one, I'm quite willing to add it to the list. It should be kept in mind that a government which has the power to conscript men to die for the security of the nation quite clearly has the power to force women to marry and bear children for the same purpose.

Because places like India, South Asia, parts of Africa and the Middle East are obviously role models whose cultures the rest of the world should seek to emulate. (Never mind all that perpetual warring, societal struggles and governmental tyranny stuff. “Demographic stability” before all!)

And then, he wrecks this same argument with the very next paragraph:

Many would-be critics here don't seem to understand the implications of my being a libertarian. I don't believe that laws are the answer to undesirable human behavior, not because they are wrong or evil, but because they are ineffective. Customs and traditions are much more powerful; laws only tend to function if they are reasonably in line with them. Laws don't shape society, they tend to follow it instead.

So, countries should pass laws to force women into loveless and unhappy marriages in the name of demographic stability, except they shouldn’t, because laws are useless and we should rely on tradition, instead, which totally works, except that cultures where arranged and forced marriages are an accepted norm are also seeing lower birth rates, so ….

At any rate, it’s amusing to see Vox try to uphold the mantle of libertarianism, an ideology that promotes personal freedom and liberty above all else, while simultaneously explaining how parents and society itself should prohibit women from exhibiting the slightest agency and instead push them into predetermined unions without a single care for their thoughts on the matter. Because women just don’t count, you see, even when acting in their stead to try and preserve a population that they inherently comprise an entire half of.

No, you probably shouldn’t try to understand that sort of reasoning, either.

EDIT: 05/01/13 12:19 AM ET – Added “(ie. most of the world)”.