Hence the collapsing birth rate.
Fitness tests:
A fitness test is usually applied by a woman to a particular man she is thinking she might like in her pussy. When applied in this manner, a fitness test is what pickup artists call a shit test.
For example, suppose one schedules to meet a girl at ten in the morning. One is planning an all day first date with a variety of activities, since one hopes for a first date lay. She is late. A little after ten in the morning she messages one saying she will be there around eleven, twelve, or so. If one says “sure, I will wait for you baby”, one will wait and wait for she is not going to turn up at all. If one says “forget it”, departs the agreed meeting place without looking back or looking around, (she is likely not late at all, but stalking and watching) does not return when she promptly responds that she has arrived (swift forgiveness of drama leads immediately to more drama, not sex), and then goes silent for a few days, then soon she will be pestering one for a date. See the wise and great, Heartiste, minion of Satan, for a lengthy elucidation of shit tests.
Women cannot help shit testing men any more than men can help looking at women’s breasts. This is instinctive and unconscious. They genuinely believe their postures, attitudes, and demands are sincere, genuine, and deeply felt, like a four year old’s temper tantrum, and are entirely unaware that when their bluff is called, they will fold like cheap cardboard, and feel a deep relief, like a child in her father’s arms.
Emancipation of women leads to population collapse:
To reproduce it is necessary that a man and a woman form one household, one flesh. Sharing kids between two households is often tried these days, with results that are uniformly horrifying. One household must have one captain, and that captain the man, for women by their nature will not have sex with kitchen men.
And to reproduce, it is necessary that they are stuck in this arrangement.
If it depends on moment to moment consent, then we have prisoner’s dilemma. Women cuckold their men, and men spin plates. We get tit for tat defection. Tit for tat can only produce good results in iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and with reproduction, there are not many iterations.
Thus, for successful reproduction and child raising, women must be compelled to obey the father of their children, compelled to submit sexually to him, and forbidden to submit sexually to anyone else. Moment to moment consent frustrates both men and women, since it makes it difficult for them to reproduce. We need outside coercion to get to cooperate cooperate equilibrium. Moment to moment consent results in defect defect equilibrium, where no one gets what they really want. To reproduce successfully, men, women, and their children need durable and patriarchal marriage.
Emancipation of women leads to the welfare state, marriage to state, low IQ women having eighteen thuglets by eighteen different thugs, high IQ women having cats in place of babies.
The late nineteenth century, Victorianism, demonstrated that emancipated women without the welfare state means a whole lot of women giving birth in a dark alley in the rain to a fatherless child.
Victorianism was an effort to control this problem by dialing up censorious sexual moralizing to eleven, while simultaneously denying fathers the power to control their daughters and husbands the power to control their wives. Dialing up the sexual moralizing failed, and failed spectacularly. Recall Florence Nightingale’s wealthy gentleman friends, and Queen Caroline attending a ball naked from the waist up, and going back to her hotel with a man she picked up at the ball. Both of them needed a good whipping. No amount of pious moralizing will substitute for a father or a husband equipped with a stick no thicker than a woman’s thumb. Victorianism failed, and failed hilariously badly.
If you give women freedom of choice, a great many women make such terrible choices that men have little alternative but to pay for women’s choices. If you emancipate women to make their own decisions, you have to pay for their decisions, have to have a welfare state, because their decisions are frequently so bad. This profoundly impairs the freedom of men, that they have to pay for bad choices that they have no power over and receive no benefit from. Some thug knocks up some idiot, and the man with a job has to support another man’s child and a woman who is not giving him sex and domestic service.
This is pretty much what “Les Misérables” was about. “Les Misérables” argues that we need a welfare state to take care of criminal men and immoral women. And indeed that is true, if you reject the obvious alternative of coercively, involuntarily, and forcibly subordinating criminal men and immoral women to good men, of enslaving bad men and shotgun marrying independent fertile age women.
Since we don’t want to pay for eighteen thuglets, and we don’t want women giving birth in a dark alley in the rain, we have to keep women under male authority that supervises and restrains their sexual choices.
The eighteenth century system of guardianship was in large part a system for coercively marrying off young women who would have otherwise become independent women of property. They were generally married off to their guardian, or their guardian’s son. Guardian/ward marriages were the normal outcome of guardianship, and though theoretically consensual were usually clearly involuntary or the result of rather forceful manipulation. When the ward was taken into the guardian’s family at a very early age she was usually married off to a family closely related to their guardian’s family as soon as they came of age, to avoid psychological incest. Psychologically incestuous marriages between guardian and ward, in effect adopting a child with the intent of marriage at puberty, were not illegal but were subject to social disapproval, immoral but legal. Though legal, seem to have been extremely rare. If it was necessary to raise a female ward from an early age, she was raised in a household separate from her intended husband and transferred to her intended husband’s household at puberty.
Our society encourages gay men to adopt small helpless children as sex slaves, so we should not get agitated about eighteenth century guardians, who had to marry their wards for life in order to have sex with them and to keep charge of their ward’s property and dowries.
It is not clear what happened to poor independent young women, but somehow, in the eighteenth century, there do not seem to have been many poor independent women, so I suppose that something was done.
What was done with convict women in the early days of Australian settlement gives us a hint as to what was done with poor independent women in eighteenth century England.
When the convict ships landed in Australia, the convict women, now far away from family restraints, and free to mingle with men, acted like it was spring break in Cancun or Woodstock Revival. None of these women were there because of convictions for prostitution, and though they all acted like whores in eighteenth century meaning of the term, they don’t seem to have been selling sex, rather the reverse. The popular stereotype of a transported woman was a servant girl who stole something from her employer to give to her unreliable bad boy lover, who showed up at infrequent and unpredictable intervals to rough her up, have sex with her, and take her stuff. These days we longer call such women whores, because all women are like that, except for those few who have chosen to submit themselves for life to the firm hand of a strong man who is better than that.
If you read secondary and derived sources about the convict women in Australia they all invariably depict them as poor pitiful victims who were cruelly coerced into having casual sex by economic pressure or rape. This nineteenth and twentieth century account flatly, directly, and blatantly contradict what the primary sources and contemporary sources that they supposedly draw upon depict. What primary and contemporary sources all uniformly and consistently depict is Woodstock Revival and spring break on the shores of Port Jackson: Girls Gone Wild: “their desire to be with the men was so uncontrollable that neither shame nor punishment could deter them”. We don’t see contemporary reports of convict women in Australia trading sex for money until twenty years into the nineteenth century, three decades after settlement began – which is to say we don’t see contemporary reports of convict women in Australia trading sex for money until the coercion to impose monogamy was considerably reduced.
There is no contemporary report of convict women being forced into casual sex or paid for casual sex. What they do however report is women being forced, often by disturbingly severe violence, into monogamous sex, but resisting that coercion with amusing vigor and flair.
To solve the problem of spring break on the shores of Port Jackson, the authorities would frequently line up newly arrived female convicts in front of the female factory, and bring a bunch of preapproved males to marry them. Each male, on seeing a female he liked, would drop a small gift at her feet. If she picked it up, they were married (even if the female convict was already married to someone else in England). Any girl left over after every male had walked past was forcibly assigned to some male for seven years as servant and concubine, so it was advisable to pick up one of the gifts.
Upon arrival female convicts had to make a hurried choice between monogamous durable consensual marriage, or monogamous durable non consensual concubinage. Thus, for example, most, probably all, of the females that arrived on the Brittania in 1798 were either immediately married, married within a few weeks, or assigned to men to whom they subsequently bore children. They were swiftly taken out of circulation one way or another way. In some cases, many cases, they were taken out of circulation coercively by assignment. In the other cases, they voluntarily took themselves out of circulation with a swiftness that indicates very forceful pressure. Earlier and later convict women mostly got married in a less hurried manner, but they got married fast enough to suggest that pressure was applied case by case, and/or that they were shotgun married upon getting pregnant, but not shotgun married shortly after showing up on the docks like the girls of the Brittanica and other ships arriving around that time.
The first batch of convict women tended to produce children of uncertain paternity in brief and transitory relationships. Women off the Brittanica, who were swiftly married or assigned, generally produced children of known paternity in durable relationships, often durable relationships of assignment that they were forced into with open and unambiguous coercion, suggesting a harsh crackdown against immoral relationships and in favor of monogamy at about this time.
I would guess that what happened to poor independent fertile age women in eighteenth century England was something intermediate between what happened to rich independent fertile age women in eighteenth century England, and what happened to fertile age convict women on the shore of eighteenth century Port Jackson but I have no data supporting this conjecture, other than that eighteenth century England, unlike Victorian England, did not much resemble spring break in Cancun.
While the nineteenty century theory was that women were so naturally pure and chaste that all the apparatus of coercion to keep them from misbehaving was sheer cruelty and could safely be discarded, the eighteenth century view was that women had to be in the custody of someone with a duty and practical motive to keep them from engaging in sex, and the authority and power to coercively prevent them from engaging in sex, or else married to a husband who had the authority and power to coercively prevent them from engaging in extra marital sex. Eighteenth century people believed that fertile age women urgently needed sex, and if prevented from getting some were apt to take alarmingly drastic measures or go into hysterics, while from the mid nineteenth century to the present, people seem to think that sex is something alarming and unpleasant imposed on women by men. The nineteenth century treatment for hysteria reflects the realistic but unmentionable eighteenth century belief as to what caused it.
Harem formation
If female choice is unrestrained, twenty percent of the males get eighty percent of the pussy. But they don’t get it in any stable way. A girl spends a few months as number three on some man’s booty call list, then realizes she has little chance of making it to number two, so gets herself a position on some other man’s booty call list. So nobody gets to reproduce, whereas in old fashioned harems formed by male power, rather than female power, she would be stuck in one man’s harem, so she and that man would get to reproduce.
Harem formation, whether the result of female control of sex, or a few powerful men controlling sex, has a detrimental effect on the rapidly diminishing number of men in the society. Without access to pussy, they are disinclined to work or fight in defense of order, peace, and their society. Instead they hang out in mom’s basement.
Monogamy and chastity can be understood as socialism in pussy, the seizure of the means of reproduction by beta males.
The King is worried that men do not seem keen on working, paying taxes, or soldiering. So he price controls pussy down to something ordinary men can pay. Bride price shall be low or zero, women shall obey their husbands, not their fathers or their own whims. Price control causes a shortage, as always, so the King and the high priest introduce rationing. Only one pussy per customer.
This works if you have non consensual marriage, if marriage is handshake between the groom and the father of the bride, or between the father of the bride and the father of the groom. But what if you have, partially or wholly, romantic and consensual marriage? In which case the woman is likely to delay marriage hoping for a booty call from Jeremy Meeks until her eggs start to dry up.
So the high priest deems that going out on booty calls will result in eternal damnation. This, however, has curiously little effect. So the King and the high priest say that if daughter goes out on a booty call, the father is dishonored, and possibly punished. This works, assuming the King backs parental authority over daughters. Or the King could give all women the status of pets, and the high Priest switches marriage to being a handshake between the father and the groom. Or the King could give only misbehaving women the status of pets, and have consensual romantic marriage normal and normative, but only normal and normative for virtuous women, which is to say virginal women, or women plausibly presumed virginal, under paternal supervision. (Which is of course the solution that I favor.)
This is not necessarily a literal account of the origins of monogamy, rather I have personified the motives leading to monogamy as the motives of individual powerful people.
Most societies seem to have used, somewhat inconsistently, hypocritically, and irregularly, a mixture of these tactics, with marriage being mostly consensual and romantic, but female choice severely constrained by the authority of the father and pressure to get married, particularly severe pressure to get married in the event of illicit sexual activity or illegitimate pregnancy.