From the front page of the New York Times, February 5, 2025:
The path to “the best sex” starts at the local family court, promises the front page. Does the article deliver?
In 2019, I divorced, at age 46, and went on to have more and better sex than I ever would have thought possible.
I had not imagined that the end of a 20-year relationship would mean a new era of high eroticism; I’d have needed to be delusional to think that. I was middle-aged, with two young children, a bunch of chronic illness and a bank account that was essentially handed over to divorce lawyers. My career was on life support, and after years away in bigger cities, I was back in my hometown, Montreal, enduring the kind of isolation that comes from exiting a relationship that has defined nearly half your life. Then the pandemic hit.
And yet.
…
Two of my friends ended marriages because of their own sexual dissatisfaction. Another divorced and became a card-carrying polyamorist. Two of my friends in their 50s are seriously dating people in their 30s, and a few others are, like me, divorced and engaging in sex practices they’d never tried before.
(Maybe the NYT story is based on some unpublished material from Bob Guccione‘s (RIP) Penthouse?)
For those who didn’t feel sufficient love from the first Valentine’s Day post, let’s look at what it takes to be a successful husband in progressive urban America. “How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me” (New York Times, February 4, 2025, by Daniel Oppenheimer).
“I tell myself: ‘I try really hard. I try to be a good person. I try to be thoughtful about Jess and what she needs. Maybe I don’t get to everything, but it’s not because I’m not a good person.’”
“Instead of looking to Jess to top me off with love, I need to take on that responsibility myself.”
Jess was so much more capable — and demanding — of love and intimacy than I was. This was part of the attraction but also the problem. I was an ambivalent fortress, always defending against her siege while secretly hoping she would breach the walls.
Assuming that “Daniel” identifies as a “man”, masculinity today seems to have drifted quite far from what the Stoics had in mind:
The diagnosis comes after I relate the story of a tantrum I threw at my 48th birthday dinner. It involved me storming out of a restaurant, in front of our kids and friends, and coming back only after a solid 15-minute sulk. It’s not a flattering story, and I don’t try to render it so. Jess and I argued beforehand about what restaurant to pick, which left us tense for days. One of the kids was being difficult. Jess wasn’t as affectionate as I wanted her to be. I wasn’t getting the birthday I felt I was owed. I blew my stack.
We’re informed that gender dysphoria is not a mental illness requiring therapy (only surgery), but going through what used to be considered normal day-to-day life does require therapy:
We’ve both been to a lot of therapy before. As a couples therapist, Jess has been guiding people in this kind of work for years.
Therapy is not for those whose attention spans are short:
[The therapist] Real keeps me in that space, eyes closed, talking to my inner child, for about 30 minutes. … At the end, I put my inner child back inside myself and open my eyes. Real tells me I did a good job.
“No pain, no gain” is not just for the gym:
The box of tissues next to me, which Real asked Jess to get before we started the exercise, remains unused. I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed.
A reader comments that women will like men better when the men become women:
@Tim Thank you for sharing. I also think you have illustrated the widening gap between Millennial women and men, at least in my own social circle. My female friends and I read self-help books, go to therapy and even talk about how we can break the patterns of our parents through personal enlightenment and self-improvement…whereas the men in our lives are staunchly against the idea, at most willing to placate us women by providing lip service in a passive, surface-y couples therapy session or two.
It’s creating a widening gap between the genders and, in my view, resulting in ever increasing misunderstandings and resentment. I’m hoping that articles like this (thank you Oppenheimer!) and guys like Real can de-stigmatize this emotional work for the men that we love and desire a healthy connection with.
(Is the above comment tainted with hateful gender binarism? If we accept the Science of 74 gender IDs, the correct phrase would be “gap among the genders” not “gap between the genders” (implying just 2).)
Here’s the author of this NYT confession (eating a child’s meal of bread with artisanal jam?):
[the effort required to raise a child to adulthood] makes human reproduction analogous to a prisoner’s dilemma. Both father and mother can choose to fully commit or pursue other options [“cooperate” or “defect”]. In this context, marriage provides a framework for encouraging, legitimizing, and stabilizing commitment. … A [men defect/women defect] society looks like the most primitive parts of sub-Saharan Africa or the Amazon rainforest. Women sleep around, while adult men prey on women and children and regularly kill each other for access to women. As men can have multiple wives and wives are not loyal, there is no respite from intrasexual competition; you can always be replaced. Without paternal certainty, men have no investment in the future and spend their time fighting, dancing or resting rather than working. Economically, these societies are desperately poor and largely incapable of collective action. In war, they shatter like glass when faced with an enemy that expect chastity and fidelity from women.
What was the U.S. for its first 200 years? A “men cooperate/women cooperate” society in which there was monogamy and “Divorce is difficult: the marriage contract can be created by mutual consent, but cannot be unilaterally dissolved.”
What has the U.S. been since no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce become available circa 1970?
The shift from a cooperate/cooperate marriage system, where both men and women made sacrifices to gain the security required for childbearing, to a cooperate/defect one, where men are expected to uphold their end of the bargain in exchange for nothing, has failed. This is the legacy of second wave feminism. Men are dropping out of work or burning things down, and both marriage and children are increasingly relics of the past. We are thereby moving towards a defect/defect system of the kind I described at the start.
Why are there so many females trying to have babies with rich guys?
Polygamy is a natural attractor state for humans, since it satisfies the desires of powerful men to have multiple wives and the desires of women to have elite husbands. Monogamy requires both elite men and many women to sacrifice their desires. … Rather than invest in additional wives, men in monogamous societies invest in their original wife and children, with the result that almost everyone is better off.
Where’s the game theory promised by the article title?
But unilateral divorce doesn’t just destabilize marriage. It also changes the power dynamics within marriage from favoring the more committed partner to favouring the less committed partner. Hence, “under unilateral divorce, the distribution of resources within marriage favors the spouse who wished to divorce” (Reynoso 2024). In addition to destabilizing marriage, unilateral divorce incentivizes poor behavior within it, since the threat of ending the marriage on unfavorable terms for the undutiful partner no longer exists. This “weakens the bargaining power of dutiful partners who wish their marriage to continue or who wish to end their marriage because of serious mistreatment by the other partner” (Rowthorn 1999).
Unilateral divorce is sometimes portrayed as an advance in human freedom, but this is a mistake. By removing the ability to credibly commit to a long-term relationship, unilateral divorce prevents couples from reaching a mutually-beneficial bargain that greatly assists in the raising of children. Without forced marriage, which has never been part of the Western tradition, unilateral divorce actually removes an important choice.
The fact that individuals can now exit easily, and unilaterally, from a relationship makes it difficult for couples to make credible commitments to each other. They can promise anything they want, but most of these promises are no longer legally enforceable, and many are undermined by social policies which reward those who break their promises.
Because it no longer guarantees security (or anything else), marriage is much less useful and therefore less appealing.
What about marrying the government?
Rather than merely supporting their own wife and children, men are expected to support women to whom they have no relation, and from whom they can claim nothing in return. Not only is this much less motivating, but it also removes a major incentive for women to marry in the first place. The state can simply extract a potential husband’s wealth and transfer it to her, no marriage required.
How long will it take for family law to turn the U.S. into a richer version of the poorest African countries?
It takes generations to see these effects in full. Not only are we the product of millennia of selection for marriageability; social norms are sticky. At first, men see that their fathers worked hard to get married and that their older acquaintances are doing the same, and imitate them. Women aspire to marry as their mothers did. Even when the law has changed, the norms do not immediately disappear. But they get weaker every generation. People see that marriage no longer offers stability. They see their peers and parents ruined by divorce. They see that they can get the economic and sexual benefits of marriage without giving up options. And the old norms erode.
Why are prime-age men disappearing from the labor force (Obama White House)?
The post-60s settlement attempts to force men to transfer resources to women via the welfare state and child support. But as the Soviets discovered, it’s very difficult to get men to work to the best of their abilities through coercion alone. Without marriage, the state loses its taxpayers and society loses the men who make it work.
By providing a solution to the prisoner’s dilemma of human reproduction, marriage greatly boosts fertility, even today. It’s not surprising that the shift from a cooperate/cooperate marriage system to a cooperate/defect one, and the attendant devastation of the institution itself, corresponds precisely to the end of the Baby Boom.
Happy Valentine’s Day, therefore, to those who celebrate, those who are married, and those who are married to the government!
(Bad news for those who are married: The article notes that, despite the ease of exiting unhappy marriages provided by no-fault divorce, marriages today are less happy than in the (good/bad) old days.)
Male readers: What percentage of your time is spent doing tasks that you wouldn’t have to do but for the fact that you’re part of a family with children? My personal number is about 80 percent. This includes house-related tasks (if it were just me and Mindy the Crippler I could live comfortably in an apartment or condo). It includes all work for wages (I have enough money from previous work for everything that I might reasonably want to buy between now and age 100+; a big motivation for me to work is that I don’t want the kids to see me idle).
Since it is Valentine’s Day, let’s have some flowers… (front-yard orchids; tie them to a tree in the shade and walk away):
We consider ourselves smarter and more evolved than people in the past, but the story starts with a successful 33-year-old man deciding to reject 10,000+ years of human convention and marry a woman old enough to be a grandmother:
Catherine Youssef met Allan Kassenoff in New York City in 2005. He was an upstart, 33-year-old patent litigator; she was an associate at his law firm, four years his senior, and had already served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
She would start trying to have her first child, in other words, in her late 30s.
After they got married, Catherine wanted kids “ASAP,” Allan told me; she wanted to do IVF straight away, he said, before they’d even started trying naturally. He wanted to have kids, but he also wanted to at least try to get pregnant without medical intervention, given the expense of IVF—but Allan caved, he said, because Catherine, who was nearing 40, was so adamant. Allan says they underwent several rounds of IVF, estimating that in total the couple spent upward of $200,000 on fertility treatments.
Then, less than two years into their marriage, Catherine was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer and received treatment. According to her therapy records, which Catherine shared with her suicide note, she later told a therapist that Allan “showed that he was not good at handling stress” during this time.
While she recovered, the Kassenoffs decided to adopt. They contacted an adoption attorney, who matched them with a woman in Florida who was pregnant but unable to look after a baby; in July 2009, the Kassenoffs became parents to Ally, who was delivered to them straight from the hospital where she was born.
Soon thereafter, Allan says Catherine wanted to try IVF again—and threatened to do it “with or without me.”
He went along with it, but told me he was “nervous, because of how bad our relationship was.” He didn’t think bringing another child into the family was “the best thing in the world.”
This time, the IVF worked: less than a year after she adopted Ally, Catherine got pregnant. The Kassenoffs’ second daughter, Charley, was born in February 2011—and was quickly followed by a third, JoJo, in August 2013.
So… adoption throughout human history was mostly done in the context of strong family bonds, right? A man might adopt a nephew or niece or the children of a widow whom he married. Getting hold of a baby from a stranger 1,000 miles away is a new idea, I think. Obviously, IVF is also a relatively new idea.
I don’t want to spoil the article, but the mom in this story turns out to be unethical and takes tremendous risks. What job does she get?
But by March 2015 she was employed again, working for Governor Andrew Cuomo as a Special Counsel for Ethics, Risk, and Compliance.
The au pair turns out to have the clearest perspective on the situation:
Celine Dublanchet, who became the Kassenoffs’ au pair in October 2016, also made disturbing allegations about Catherine. According to court documents, Dublanchet said Catherine once locked Ally [the adopted child], then 7, in the basement by herself for two hours as a punishment, and on another occasion made Ally go outside alone after dark to “clean the garden” in the middle of winter.
Dublanchet claimed that Ally slept on a mattress on the floor in her room, while the other two children [the genetic offspring] slept in Catherine’s bed every night. Every morning, she told me, Ally had to make her mother’s bed.
“Ally was Cinderella,” Dublanchet later wrote to the court, “her two sisters Anastasia and Drizella, and Catherine the horrible stepmother.”
After a trip to the hospital on May 11, 2019, Catherine texted a friend: “If I had a mark or a bruise or something, it would be easy.”
“You don’t need a bruise to divorce him,” the friend texted back.
“Just to get full custody,” Catherine replied.
On May 15, 2019—mere days after Catherine sent the text that began, “If I had a mark or a bruise”—Allan says his eldest daughter went to school and told her teachers that her dad had kicked her a couple of days earlier. The school immediately launched a Child Protective Services investigation.
The next morning, Saturday, May 18, Allan woke to an email from Catherine’s friend Wayne Baker, informing him that she had obtained an order of protection, barring Allan from contacting her or the kids. Allan says he believes the entire story about “the kick” was fabricated by Catherine, and she told Ally exactly what to say to school officials—all so that she could get custody of the kids.
When I asked Ally—now almost 15—about it, she supported Allan’s version of events, saying her dad had not kicked her; what she’d said to the school wasn’t true. “My mom told me to, like, always say bad stuff about my dad,” she told me.
The article provides a window into what it costs to settle the question of who gets the cash-yielding children in a U.S. family court (in a European country, the cost is often minimal because the law specifies a custody arrangement that is difficult to deviate from and child support profits are capped so there isn’t a huge financial incentive to get hold of the kids).
The judge also appointed psychologist Marc Abrams—who had worked in the Westchester County courts system for over two decades—to offer a neutral assessment of the parents and recommend a custody agreement. Though the report is confidential, Abrams revealed during a July 2020 temporary custody trial that he recommended Allan have sole custody of the kids—and that he believed Catherine had an “unspecified personality disorder.”
Catherine, along with two other women, filed complaints against Marc Abrams, the psychologist who recommended Allan have custody, alleging professional misconduct and inappropriate behavior toward women. Abrams denies these allegations, calling them and any others “defamatory.” After an investigation, the panel of court-approved mental health professionals removed him, meaning he could no longer provide court evaluations—a lucrative gig, with each case paying around $50,000.
That’s just for the psychologist. What about the divorce litigators? The article just says “after millions of dollars, and over 3,000 court filings, the divorce still hadn’t been finalized.” (The decision to get married also cost the man his $1 million/year job and career.)
Five years ago, all my girlfriends suddenly decided to abandon their husbands en masse.
That is how it seemed at the time, at least. It all started when one woman blew up her marriage with one of those affairs so indiscreet that getting found out seemed like not just a risk but the entire point—then landed on her feet with generous alimony and a new boyfriend who was a 24-year-old fitness influencer. A few others, perhaps hoping to replicate her results, followed suit.
I lost touch with these women during the pandemic, so whether it all worked out for them, I couldn’t say; all I remember is that shortly after the last of the breakups, the new divorcées threw a Halloween party at which I was the only woman not wearing lingerie as a costume, and also the only one accompanied by a husband (what can I say? I’ve always liked him). I spent the evening feeling excruciatingly frumpy and middle-aged and also, absurdly, a little left out.
I’ve been thinking lately of that party, those women, the husbands they jettisoned like so much dead weight in a mimetic frenzy of best-life-living. Maybe the men were bad and deserved it, but it strikes me that nobody ever said so. My friends didn’t talk about being unhappily married; they just thought they’d be happier divorced, and no wonder. Even as divorce has retreated from the oft-cited peak rate of 50 percent, its place in the culture has all the urgency and incandescence of a current thing.
a New York Times feature about how Emily Ratajkowski has set off a booming new market for “divorce rings,” refashioned from the wearer’s old wedding band. One of them is engraved with the word badass, a detail I would have found absolutely impossible to believe had it not been accompanied by photographic evidence. … I try to imagine a world in which we’d tell a man that getting divorced made him badass, instead of a schmuck, a deadbeat, a loser who didn’t try hard enough. A world in which divorce rings for men are a thing, let alone one positively written about in The New York Times. It would never happen, of course. It’s only women who are seen as requiring this particular brand of cheerleading, who are relentlessly encouraged to reframe all their negative experiences as the best thing they ever did. … In this vision of feminism, marriage is a trap, divorce is a superpower, and women are not so much people as Strong Female Characters. …
It’s interesting, that last one: women are allegedly made more appealing by divorce, but nobody ever specifies to whom. The feminist cause? The next ex-husband?
Brent had long held sway over a cerebral corner of the New York art scene, promoting women and diverse artists in the early 1990s when few galleries or museums exhibited either. … friends gravitated toward his wicked sense of humor, a zest that extended to an ebullient social life, often populated by a revolving door of lovers. “He liked younger men,” says his friend, the artist Vik Muniz.
DEI box… checked. 2SLGBTQQIA+ box… checked.
Now, landing in Rio, Brent was trying to move past a personal low point. Despite his outward success, close friends say he had been emotionally drained after nearly two years of hashing out a divorce settlement with his estranged husband, with whom he had a 13-year-old son. In Rio, he could spend a few weeks relaxing, maybe walk along Copacabana beach to meet locals or meditate.
What can New Yorkers do with all of the free time they have because they never have to go to Home Depot?
After work, he and Brent sought out the same nightlife, going to sex clubs and swapping ribald stories, Renaud-Clément says.
Does marriage interfere with going to the sex club?
friends of both men say the couple was known to have an open marriage
Personal background?
Daniel was born in a tiny town in the Cuban province of Camagüey. … Daniel was fleeing a troubled childhood and doing whatever he could to survive in Havana and later Madrid, including sex work, according to Daniel’s 2006 memoir.
Low-skill immigration box… checked.
Daniel got a WhatsApp message from Prevez, his former caretaker in Cuba. Prevez had since moved to São Paulo and wanted to catch up, according to his police statement. … Like Daniel, Prevez had struggled for years to scrape together a living in Cuba, repairing bicycles by day and working as a night security guard. In September 2022, he moved to Brazil in hope of a better salary. … Prevez says he took a job making deliveries for an online marketplace known as Mercado Livre in a borrowed Fiat Palio, but he wasn’t earning enough to support his own family in Cuba.
Low-skill immigration box… checked a second time. (Mr. Prevez migrated from his caretaker job to live in Brazil.)
Prevez said Daniel told him about the ongoing divorce. Then, he told police, Daniel made him an offer: $200,000 and a free place to stay in Rio in exchange for killing his ex.
According to New York law, Daniel could seek a third of Brent’s net worth as the surviving spouse—likely more than he would get in any divorce settlement. Daniel’s lawyers say they intend to claim his share as a surviving spouse.
A European friend: “Big irony is that these gay dudes fought so hard to be able to get sued for divorce.”
Related:
“Couple who led gay marriage fight to divorce” (NBC): Julie and Hillary Goodridge were among seven gay couples who filed a lawsuit that led to a court ruling making Massachusetts the first state to legalize same-sex marriages in 2004. The couple became the public face of the debate in the state and married the first day same-sex marriages became legal. The divorce case was filed last week in Suffolk Probate and Family Court and was not unexpected. The couple announced they were separating in 2006.
Less than 50% of immigrants who arrived in the US since 2022 are employed, per new report.
The analysis is based on the government’s monthly Current Population Survey (CPS). pic.twitter.com/tfEXerw4Dz
On the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, our Administration stands in solidarity with LGBTQI+ people around the world as they seek to live full lives. We will continue to work to advance rights of LGBTQI+ people, as we have since Day One. pic.twitter.com/j2d9bAn2xH
A friend’s sister recently died of cancer at age 62 (despite Joe Biden’s pledge to eliminate cancer). He had previously been sued by the mother of the people who used to be his children. As is conventional in Maskachusetts, she was able to obtain a court order that her child support profits be guaranteed in the event of his death via life insurance. The successful plaintiff learned of her kids’ aunt’s death via the kids and reached out to her former defendant… to ask for confirmation that his life insurance that would benefit her was up to date.
Matt Gorzkowicz, Healey’s budget chief, said officials believe most of the unexpected revenue was generated by the state’s new surtax on annual income exceeding $1 million — the so-called millionaire’s tax — and collections from capital gains, all money that state officials largely can’t use to balance the budget as a whole.
This is the first year that MA is living its principles of taking from the rich to give to the poor. Previously the state constitution required a flat rate tax (I guess that also enables taking from the rich and giving to the poor because the rich paid a lot and didn’t receive much in the way of services). I wonder if those who are subject to the 9% rate (previously they paid 5%) will eventually wander up to New Hampshire or down to Tennessee, Florida, or Texas, thus restoring revenue to its previous percentage of state GDP. This has been the pattern with federal tax rates over the decades, i.e., a roughly constant percentage of GDP extracted despite wildly varying rates:
(Note that the Federal government went on a “wartime footing” in the 1940s, with taxation ramping up from 5 percent of GDP to 20 percent and then has stayed on this wartime footing ever since!)
Friends who live in what Zillow says is a $2.5 million house in the Boston suburbs are in the process of negotiating the purchase of a $4 million to-be-built house here in Jupiter. They’ll pay the millionaire tax on their way out partly because they bought their house in 2007 for $1.45 million. Adjusted for official inflation and expected realtor commission, it is actually worth about the same as what they paid (which means they’ve lost money when you factor in maintenance and pre-sale repair expenses and they’ve lost huge $$ if you compare to the S&P 500), but they’ll have a fictitious capital gain that is larger than the $500,000 married couple exclusion for a primary residence:
Massachusetts is still getting money from them, even more than before, but the bureaucrats aren’t privy to their escape plans. I.e., the state government is on a sugar high, at least with respect to them, and the inevitable crash will come in 2025 when the new house is finished and the Pack Rats are loaded up.
Circling back to the original topic… it’s important to remember that a human in his/her/zir/their 60s is like a 9-year-old dog and that cancer can strike either kind of animal at any time. Get that estate plan tuned up and, unless you love progressive political schemes more than your own children, have a way to move out of Massachusetts (16 percent state estate tax) as soon as the first cancer diagnosis is received!
Other than gender studies graduates who are about to have all of their student loans transferred onto the backs of the working class, divorced women are the most reliable Democrat voters in the U.S. What’s the latest harvest of material from Democrat-controlled media on the miracle of family court?
Our 19-year age gap feels treacherous and gossip inducing — and is also the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
This is his first marriage and my third. Minutes before our rainy courthouse wedding, my future mother-in-law said, “He’ll be your last love and you’ll be his only love.”
If you had asked me five years ago if I would ever date again, I would have said, “Not in a million years.” I was a middle-aged woman filing for divorce,…
The author is grateful that the mandarins permitted her to leave her house and work for wages:
I work as a freelance makeup artist in Portland, Ore., but business had been slow back then, so for extra income I took a cashier job at the local Fred Meyer grocery store, which is where I met Tylan. He struck me as gorgeous with his long hair, piercing blue eyes and hippie wardrobe. He worked the cash registers too but was a “P.I.C.” (person in charge) who also had management responsibilities. When the pandemic hit, my makeup work dried up completely, and I became reliant on my cashier job at Fred Meyer, which, as an essential business, stayed open even during the worst of Covid.
… I was 46, one year younger than his own mother, and he was 27, two years older than my son.
He introduced me to emo-rock and I introduced him to obscure slow-core. We drank mead, tested out new recipes, and discussed music, career goals and sometimes, our love lives. Mine was nonexistent and I was content with that, and he was single, waiting for the right one. There were times I even tried to play matchmaker, but it never quite worked out.
There was a midnight skinny dip at the river, making out on a giant velour bean bag, and indoor camping with a tent made out of bedsheets. And then it happened one night, Tylan knelt on one knee and proposed. I was stunned and momentarily mute. It wasn’t until Tylan said, “Yes?” that I nodded my head and blubbered, “Yes!”
Lenz walked away from her marriage to rebuild her life in her 40s, and to find out what freedom feels like. Reading her story, we get to feel that freedom too. I talked with Lenz—divorced woman to divorced woman—about why divorce isn’t a tragedy.
People are really uncomfortable with a woman who is free and a woman who chooses herself. I think that adds into the dissonance—it makes people really uncomfortable when you say, “Hey, my marriage was not great and I’m leaving.” And you know this, too: The moment you get divorced, so many women go, “When did you know? When did you know? How should I know?”
I am anti the legal structure of marriage, because it is founded on women’s inequality. Look at the history of marriage. Look at these laws of coverture. Look at the laws in America where marital rape wasn’t even illegal until the past 20 years. And that’s because wives are property, and that’s the way that our legal system views women.
How tough is it to be a wife and mother with a full slate of modern appliances supplemented by Uber Eats food delivery and a weekly Latinx crew to do the real cleaning?
No, you feel miserable in your marriage because you never get a break because this whole system is packed on top of your shoulders and you can’t fricking breathe. And then the one time you get a moment to breathe, he’s like, “Hey, we haven’t had sex in two weeks.” … even the worst marriage still benefits a man in the end, because he is still getting free child care and his dinner made every night.
(Fair to guess that after the author sued her co-parent, both the retroactive and going-forward child care were not free?)
Contrary to nearly all survey data and journal articles, the book author says that the kids are way better off when mom and dad are having sex with a variety of new partners:
I think of it rather as a gain for [the kids, who were 4 and 6 when she sued their father], because they deserve relationships with the happiest version of both of their parents. … it’s really uncomfortable to be a sexual person to your kids, because if you tell, especially a tween daughter, that you’re dating, she wants to know, are you having sex? And then you have to talk about it.
Here’s an idea to bridge the divide on abortion: codify sexual responsibility for men into the law. If a woman carries a child to term, she can automatically make the man fully $$ responsible both for herself and for the child, if confirmed by paternity test. Should be an idea that both parties can agree on.
Elon Musk is in the midst of a custody battle with Grimes, and things are getting as complicated as a SpaceX mission.
According to reports from Business Insider, Musk initially filed in Texas, accusing Grimes of moving to California to avoid the Lone Star State’s child support cap of $2,760 per month for three kids.
Grimes fired back with a countersuit in California, seeking physical custody. Musk reportedly had custody of their 3-year-old son X Æ A-Xii against Grimes’ wishes. The different child support limits in California, where there’s no cap, could mean a hefty sum for Musk, currently the richest person in the world.
Given that family court profits are a huge sector of the U.S. economy and Vivek was claiming to be qualified to run the whole thing, I find it fascinating that Vivek is unfamiliar with the current system in which having sex with an already-married specialist physician can yield a spending power equivalent to what an American who goes through medical school and residency to work as a primary care doc can enjoy (profitability depends heavily on the state in which the plaintiff resides/sues). Some lawyers who specialize in this area refer to child support as “woman support” since the typical plaintiff identifies as female, the money is paid to the adult plaintiff, and there is no requirement that a successful plaintiff spend any of the family court profits on the child.
Hunter Biden was reported to be paying $20,000 per month to Lunden Roberts (Daily Mail), thus giving her an after-tax spending power in excess of a primary care doc’s (the $240,000 per year was tax-free). Why wouldn’t someone in politics such as Vivek have followed the Biden family and thus learned that sex in the U.S. can pay better than most jobs?
Of course, it isn’t just Vivek. Twitter shows over 5,000 replies to the post. Most of them seem to be from people unaware that it is already possible to get a court-ordered paternity test and then 18-23 years of cashflow (depending on the state).
Elon Musk simultaneously believes that (1) civilization will collapse because of a declining birth rate in the West, and (2) we’re entering a glorious age of humanoid robots.
In early 2021, Musk began mentioning at his executive meetings that Tesla should get serious about building a robot, and at one point he played for them a video of the impressive ones that Boston Dynamics were designing. “Humanoid robots are going to happen, like it or not,” he said, “and we should do it so we can guide it in a good direction.” The more he talked about it, the more excited he got. “This has the potential to be the far biggest thing we ever do, even bigger than a self-driving car,” he told his chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen.
Musk gave the specs: the robot should be about five-foot-eight, with an elfish and androgenous look so it “doesn’t feel like it could or would want to hurt you.” Thus was born Optimus, a humanoid robot to be made by the Tesla teams working on self-driving cars. Musk decided that it should be announced at an event called “AI Day,” which he scheduled for Tesla’s Palo Alto headquarters on August 19, 2021.
It was not a very polished event. The sixteen presenters were all male. The only woman was the actress who dressed up as the robot, and she didn’t do any fun hat-and-cane dance routines. There were no acrobatics. But in his slightly stuttering monotone, Musk was able to connect Optimus to Tesla’s plans for self-driving cars and the Dojo supercomputer. Optimus, he said, would learn to perform tasks without needing line-by-line instructions. Like a human, it would teach itself by observing. That would transform not only our economy, he said, but the way we live.
Even as he envisioned futuristic scenarios, Musk focused on making Optimus a business. By June 2022, the team had completed a simulation of robots carrying boxes around a factory. He liked the fact that, as he put it, “our robots are going to work harder than humans work.” He came to believe that Optimus would become a main driver of Tesla profits. “The Optimus humanoid robot,” he told analysts, “has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business.”
I can’t understand how these thoughts are consistent. If human population were to slide back towards 4 billion or 2 billion, there might be a short-term labor shortage, but wouldn’t that labor shortage be solved by a working humanoid robot?
I think that Musk is completely wrong about civilization collapse even without the robot angle, incidentally. The median age in Japan is 49. People don’t say that’s a collapsed civilization compared to Gaza, where the median age is 18. The worldwide median age is about 30. There is no realistic scenario, as far as I’m aware, in which the median age of the world population ever exceeds Japan’s current median age. Therefore, Japan represents a worst-case scenario.
How bad is Japan doing? Not any worse than the typical advanced economy, says this tweet:
An astonishing paper this week finds that population explains virtually all of the difference in GDP growth in advanced economies over the last 30 years! “From 1998 to 2019, Japan has grown slightly faster than the U.S. in terms of per working-age adult.”
What drives population growth? For the Palestinians, the world’s most successful people demographically, it seems to be the UNRWA guarantees of food, health care, education, and other essentials, all funded by the US and EU taxpayers. A Palestinian can have 10 children, not work, and never worry that one will go hungry so long as there are taxpayers in Illinois and Germany. What about for economies that don’t receive guaranteed aid from foreigners?
This article on “The Baby Boom” by Arctotherium looks at a falling birth rate at the beginning of the 20th century followed by the familiar post-WWII baby boom (1946-1964; I was born in 1963). Wikipedia points out that our baby boom coincided with a marriage boom, but doesn’t offer a single agreed-on explanation for why the marriage boom occurred. Arctotherium points out that a baby bust is not an inevitable result of wealth:
The Baby Boom took place in what were, at the time, the wealthiest, most technologically advanced, longest lived, most urban, most educated, most individualist, and most scientifically sophisticated societies in human history, by a wide margin. And it took place during a time when all of these metrics (except maybe individualism) were very rapidly improving.
Consistently with Wikipedia, Arctotherium highlights the marriage boom and adds a theory for the cause:
So what caused this marriage boom? The answer appears to be a rise in young men’s status compared to young women’s. The marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation (down), young male wages (up), and male unemployment (down).
Wages are not the only way to measure status. After briefly reaching parity at the zenith of first wave feminism, young men during the Baby Boom again greatly exceeded their female counterparts in educational attainment.
The mechanism here is clear: young women want money and status, young men have relatively more money and status, women can get men’s money and status by marrying them. Marriage leads to babies, and thus the Baby Boom.
What caused the baby boom to end with a baby bust? A decline in marriage. Women didn’t have to get married to get money and status.
Affirmative Action in favor of women is common across the Boom countries, as is disproportionate female employment in state-created regulatory jobs such as HR. There are also thousands of organizations explicitly dedicated to promoting women’s careers at the expense of men’s, and almost none of the converse. These combine to artificially raise women’s wages above the market rate, and lower men’s.
But we don’t just have wages to consider, we also have taxes and transfers. Thanks to progressive taxation, men pay the vast majority of taxes while women receive the vast majority of benefits. Since married men are the most productive, while single women are the poorest (on a per-household basis), this is predominantly a transfer from married men to single women. This makes marriage less attractive to women; they can get men’s money for free, courtesy of the government, without having to give anything in return. The state serves as a surrogate husband.
Arctotherium has some data from New Zealand, noting “The welfare state has done to marriage what the Soviet Union did to agriculture: effectively collectivized it, with the corresponding horrendous set of incentives for individual men and women”:
But young men’s vs young women’s economic status is not the only factor determining marriage rates. It fully explains the boom, but not the bust. The explanation lies in the fact that second wave feminism thoroughly redefined marriage. It shifted from a patriarchal institution in which husbands had social (and some legal, though this was mostly dismantled by first wave feminism) power over their wives to one in which wives had effective legal power over the husbands (through the mechanisms of feminist family courts, greatly expanded definitions of abuse, and the replacement of the marriage model of the family with the child support model), and from a lifelong contract to one dissolvable at will (though the institution of no-fault divorce). In JD Unwin’s terms, we shift from a regime of absolute monogamy to one of modified monogamy. This had obvious and immediate consequences on marriage rates.
The mechanism through which no-fault divorce reduces marriage rates is simple. No-fault divorce eliminates the promise of lifelong commitment, greatly reducing the benefits of marriage for both parties. The other partner can bail at any time, for any reason. This particularly increases the costs for men through the mechanism of family courts (as divorce usually means he loses his assets, income, and children).
Arctotherium found an interesting data set on marital happiness:
Despite the increase in divorce rates, people aren’t happier in the marriages that have survived.
If Arctotherium is correct, the U.S. will never have a high birth rate again because marriage will never be attractive again. (The article has some pipe dream proposals for radically overhauling our society, e.g., “Roll back the welfare and pension state and lower income taxes.” It is safe to assume that none of these will ever happen and, therefore, marriage will never make the kind of sense for a young woman that it did from 1946-1964.)
Circling back to Elon Musk, what would be so bad about the U.S. population stagnating at 336 million or declining to 200 million (the 1970 level), especially if we had robots to help out the oldsters with domestic tasks?
Related… miscellaneous quotes from Michel Houellebecq’s novels (not in quote style for better readability):
A bachelor who breathes his last at the age of sixty-four is hardly the stuff of tragedy,
I thought about Annelise’s life—and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether “stylish” or “sexy,” most likely “stylish” in her case. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her a while to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted (Bruno was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner—he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and yoga pants, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known—had to have known—that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.
Bruno and Annelise must be divorced by now. That’s how it goes nowadays. A century ago, in Huysmans’s time, they would have stayed together, and maybe they wouldn’t have been so unhappy after all.
my body was the seat of various painful afflictions—headaches, rashes, toothaches, hemorrhoids—that followed one after another, without interruption, and almost never left me in peace—and I was only forty-four! What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I’d be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition, my life an unending torment, grim, joyless, and mean.
On 14 December 1967 the government passed the Neuwirth Act on contraception at its first reading. Although not yet paid for by social security, the pill would now be freely available in pharmacies. It was this which offered a whole section of society access to the sexual revolution, which until then had been reserved for professionals, artists and senior management—and some small businessmen. It is interesting to note that the “sexual revolution” was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word “household” suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.
Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules
