To me it's not really about work, it's about career. Work is about occupying yourself and having income, career is more about status. The left has told women to focus on their careers over everything else, which is very extreme and bad advice, and now some on the right are saying women should be 50's housewives, equally extreme and bad advice.
Intelligence is attractive. Smart people have a good sense of humor, which is just incredibly attractive in a woman. But I do think, as a girlboss yourself, you might be assuming that intelligence and ambition always happen at the same time. I think a lot of ambition is basically hollow. That's something women have known in the past, but it feels like everyone is forced to be ambitious today, forced to market themselves.
The challenge of being an ambitious woman is that most women want men to lead them. Women really want men who are above them. So the higher a woman goes, the fewer men above her there are, the fewer options she has. I think women should keep that in mind. If you're intelligent, you can turn that intelligence into anything. If you put it all into career status, you're limiting your options. So women have to choose, they can't have it all. And smart feminists have always known that, but the feminist message today really is "you can have it all." It discourages women from making decisions.
This is not a decision men have to make. The more career status a man gets, the more attractive he is to women. I don't think women realize how much having a career is often just a way for men to get women.
I have worked with plenty of women in software, and I have noticed that the best female engineers had husbands. I think they got a lot of confidence from their husbands, and that helped them in their careers. So I wish women would reframe their thinking. Instead of focusing everything on career and expecting the relationships to just happen, women should try to marry earlier in their careers and find a husband who supports their career. Men want to feel like we can help women, we want to feel needed. If women don't give men the opportunity to help, to provide value, the resulting relationships are often shallow.
The catch is a lot of careers suffer if you take time out to have kids early.
Women in software have the flipside of Liza's problem with literature: there are *too many* men with those interests, which has its own problems like getting hit on all the time, but at least makes finding a compatible partner much easier.
What both sides seem to miss in these debates is the massive role of technology in shaping human roles. I have two DK books, one called Forgotten Arts, which describes field and workshop crafts traditionally performed by men, and the other called Forgotten Household Crafts, which describes crafts traditionally performed by women, though the first book includes a number of women's crafts as well. What this tells us is that for most of history, men and women both practiced a number of physically and mentally challenging tasks that added equally to the wealth of the family. The women's tasks were a little lighter (though most modern men, myself especially, would be exhausted by half a day of traditional women's work), and that they were practiced closer to home, where, of course, the children would have been.
Technological development over the last few millennia has gradually shifted us from a craft economy, in which you largely made things for your own family's use, to a trade economy, in which you made things for sale and brought the things your family needed. That trend greatly accelerated through the 19th and early 20th century, with the effect that it turned the home from a place of production into a place of consumption. All those complex, challenging, productive tasks that had occupied women through the centuries were eliminated. To be productive, a woman then had to leave the home, which, of course, meant leaving her children.
That is the conundrum we find ourselves in today. It was not that women suddenly started to demand challenging and productive occupations after millennia of being content with unproductive idleness. It was that the industrial revolution stripped away the challenging and productive occupations that had been theirs for millennia.
Not that women would want those old occupations back (though they do still do some of them as hobbies). No more would men want their old occupations back. They were a hard slog for rewards that would seem very meager to us today. But men, at least, still leave the household to work as they always did. It is women who have been placed in a bind between going out and leaving their children, and staying at home without adequate occupation. The fabled 1950s were not the end of a long period do domestic bliss. It was a brief episode in the ongoing struggle to adapt to the fact of the home being a place of consumption rather than production -- as was the Victorian struggle over access to the professions.
But perhaps if we were to recognize the role that technology played in bringing this situation about, and acknowledge the genuine nature of the dilemma it creates, we might lower the velocity of the ideological brickbats we hurl at each other's heads.
I have been trying to figure out why conservative talking heads like Walsh continue to villainize women who'd otherwise be allies simply because they have careers and contribute to their families and societies. Thankfully, you've figured it out for me. Brilliant article! 👏👏
There may be a bit of a cultural split in that Walsh is coming out of the tradcath culture. If you're a Jewish conservative in the big city there's a lot more leeway (look at all the neocon power couples). But tradcaths are much more influential on the right.
There was just an essay today about Christian guys not really wanting a “Proverbs 31 woman”.
I’d encountered that as well, but had thought it was a fluke. I don’t understand where the guys on the right have come up with their ideology/theology from… even those of us that *want* to have traditional lives, have to work…
Probably the whole redpill thing? I tend to think it's a reaction to the misandric feminism of the 2010s, but then I'm biased. The Internet has led to a whole feedback situation where each side goads each other to greater extremes. I'm not female, but even given my limited imagination I can't see wanting to marry one of these guys... they don't seem like they'd be very nice, and I wouldn't trust someone that narcissistic to run my life. There's a reason Christians would always talk about 'servant leadership' and so on. Besides, isn't the whole idea for Christian women that the guy is moral and upright and works hard for his family and doesn't, you know, sleep around?
But then I refused to do the marriage thing myself, so who am I to talk?
Like they were Redpill to Christian, not Christian first? That would make sense.
The in-person tradcath activists aren’t nearly as obnoxious as the ones online, but there are still some that demand a woman cook for them without being worthy of it.
These past few months have been my first foray into slacktivism, and I’m really shocked by all of it.
Christian women are individuals, just like any other women, and emphasize different virtues when looking for a husband. So some of the Redpill stuff about guys sleeping around isn’t necessarily inaccurate.
I prize valor, cleverness, and perseverance in a man, so I don’t expect chastity… because the higher levels of testosterone a man like that has, makes him more vulnerable to sexual temptation.
The problem is that a lot of these Redpill guys are not warriors, so they can’t expect us to seriously forgive their (in many cases feigned) promiscuity, at the same time they talk like the Virgin Mary isn’t virgin enough for them.
To your point here: The book of Proverbs actually has a lengthy passage describing the perfect wife and according to it she is an entrepreneur who runs her own business and is a leader in her community: In fact she sounds substantially more productive than her husband, if I'm honest. But maybe the passage starts with the assumption that he's a winner, too, rather than a random schlub who got lucky.
Yeah. I don't want to oversell the passage too much, I guess; it does make a lot of reference to family and domesticity. But at the same time it describes the ideal wife as someone who is basically employed in her own home business, working late into the night to make sure it turns a profit, who is engaged in land transactions, and who is bringing in enough money, apparently, that her husband doesn't need to fear financial ruin.
I mean, don't get me wrong; this sounds very much like the "have it all" girl-boss of the mid 2000's and 2010s, so I don't think it's a model to aspire to unless you aspire to burnout. But for me the big takeaway is, how the fuck did these guys on the right get the idea that an ideal woman is so passive?
Yeah, I wasted a lot of time holding out for a woman who was smart as I was. By the time I started looking they were all married off to guys who were maybe 10% less smart but had much better social skills.
That's on me, of course, but the soulmate thing is rarely satisfied.
The "traditional view" he refers to here is highly Victorian. If he were to keep going back in time he's see the "traditional view" has fluctuated greatly. The Georgian time period was more loose than the Regency one. In Colonial times many women worked as printers and shop keepers. In pre-industrial Medieval times it was women who were the Alewives. Women being "in the home" is a Victorian mid to upper class ideal more than it's a traditional one because it's about class and status more than anything else. Prior to the industrial age, there was no such thing as "outside the home" because everyone was working "inside the home" so to speak to produce income. I'm generalizing here, but you get the point. And lower class women have always needed to work.
Oh, this was an interesting one. Here are my thoughts.
Many men, even highly intelligent ones, gravitate toward women who prioritize family life. Not because they’re intimidated by ambition, but because they’re seeking emotional harmony, not rivalry. It’s not weakness. It’s wiring. Call it yin and yang, call it the natural balance of masculine and feminine energy, but it’s encoded in us.
From my experience, and I’ve dated a lot, and I’m in my 40s, ambition is rarely what men are looking for in a partner. This essay seemed to assume that ambition is the highest virtue in a mate. But in reality, qualities like emotional availability, steadiness, kindness, and a shared long-term vision often rank far higher in relationship satisfaction studies.
Now, maybe Matt Walsh is wrong to suggest that women must be docile to be desirable. I’d agree with you there.
But it’s equally flawed to suggest that a man who doesn’t want an ambitious, career-driven woman is simply not smart enough to understand her. Desire doesn’t follow ideology or IQ. It follows temperament, energy dynamics, and deeply individual visions of what a meaningful life looks like.
That’s why intelligent, successful men often marry women who are desirable, soft, and attractive, not necessarily women with the highest IQ.
Ambition is admirable. But let’s be honest: it’s not universally attractive to most men. It doesn’t even make the top five. I don’t make the rules. I wish I did.
And to your other point, which I agree with: Yes, you can be ambitious, driven, and a good mother, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking you can excel at both a demanding career and raising children at the same time.
As soon as you take that ambition and direct it toward your career, your children start getting the leftovers.
You’re either building your empire or you’re raising your kids. One is happening in real time. The other is being squeezed into the margins of your Google Calendar. You can outsource the cleaning, the cooking, the laundry, but not the childhood.
To be clear, I understand that you weren’t necessarily arguing that women can do both at a high level. You were discussing ambition as a character trait, not a high-powered career path, and I agree with you on that.
For men, the connection between ambition or drive and romance is “I’m seeking this, and I want you with me”. At the same time, there’s a tension between external goals and direct investment in family that most men struggle to get right. The compromise is often that he biases external & she biases internal
And the older one gets, the more trade-offs you need to make. This is not a bad thing.
Ambition is a good thing in a successor. Like changeovers in a relay: I hand this to you and you take it further. But a man’s wife is a teammate, not a successor - he wants her for now, not later. Intelligence, competence, etc are all good things. Even drive is good, if his & hers are aligned. But for most men, he’s more interested in whether she backs up his ambition rather than brings a competing drive
What if she is the one who brings the ambition and he joins? Many women find men with less ambition to be “passive” and unattractive
Not saying that a couple can’t carve out creative space for both parties. They can and should. But a woman whose long term goal is family should consider how the virtues she is demonstrating now set her trajectory.
On commentators, I agree that Walsh comes off as something of a boffin and somewhat unsophisticated. Do not confuse sophistication for wisdom. It’s easier to be both wise & sophisticated if you’re smart, but it’s easy to regard the trappings of intelligence as the more important
Also, people who are highly correct in one area can be woefully under-informed in others, and this is not a failure of their intelligence
Assortative mating works both ways though. Lower-IQ men typically react negatively to high-IQ women and prefer women with similar IQ to themselves. Most of Walsh’s audience is not high-IQ. Also, it’s a mistake to think education raises IQ. The correlation is entirely due to sorting. High-IQ people almost all go to college and low-IQ people almost all don’t. What happens in the intervening four years doesn’t really matter.
Finally, I know plenty of highly intelligent men and women who are very much not ambitious. Some of them prefer to study in the privacy of their homes rather than pursue high-stakes careers. Also, there are a LOT of ambitious people who are quite stupid.
You make a really good point about it being more about IQ than education.
I never went to college thanks to family burdens, but more than a few guys haven’t taken me past date 5 for being “too smart” or “intimidating” with my… massage therapy education?
I don’t know why studies base everything on degree vs no degree. It’s more about how couples relate to each other.
You’re young and naive Liza, my IQ isn’t that bad and I can tell you that Matt is 75 percent right. What happens with “higher IQ” woman is that many are low emotional IQ and very high on their “intelligence” which makes for an unhappy marriage. Why work through any bumps in the road. I’m intelligent and he mansplains while I “reason” when I’m talking to him. Society has taught woman to mistrust any man who believes the family outweighs a woman’s career. Emotional connections outweigh any intelligence quotient you and the modern educated woman believe to be the preponderance. Many woman aren’t educated for many reasons and intelligence via education is just one aspect of “intelligence”. I’m happy for all the careerist woman out there and I wish you all good luck.
To be fair, I would describe myself as having average intellect and I struggle with emotional intelligence. Meanwhile, my friend (who is also a woman) is very intelligent and has high emotional intelligence. A person's emotional intelligence and IQ are very variable
Marriages where both parties have college degrees are the most likely to end in divorce, and the most likely to have the divorce initiated by the woman.
I’ve been married for 33 years. We both have college degrees. We are unusual. Many people from our cohort are divorced, and in almost every case the divorce was initiated by the woman. In most of these cases, the divorce was protracted and expensive, and particularly devastating for the man involved.
My observation over those decades is that many of the men were thoughtless, and even romantic, about the decision, where the women were much more calculating and transactional — i.e. mature and intelligent, not stupid. The stereotype is that women are romantic, but my observation is that the men are foolishly so, and naïvely so, far too often.
All that’s happened is that in the last few years men have seen the wreckage of enough of their friends and relatives, and finally grasped what is actually going on. More of them are now making decisions based on the costa, benefits, and risks involved. That’s just rationality catching up with the evidence, and it’s overdue.
Marriage is a very high risk decision for men, and for many, probably most, the risks and costs outweigh any possible benefits. It’s pretty much Russian roulette with several bullets in the cylinder.
Agreed that Walsh is missing the point here. Even if he’s right, that men want what he says they want, the number of women who can be that, who can provide that, is trivially small, and for practical purposes, no longer exists, or, as you pointed out, probably never existed. His notion that there were some ongoing conflict between feminism and whatever traditional set of values, he thinks he is fighting for is delusional. “Feminism“ has comprehensively taken over the culture and it is now simply the bedrock reality. Self-contained, religious communities may function according to somewhat different rules, though the women will always have recourse to the state legal system to dissolve their marriages. other than that, this war is long, long over. I don’t wish this on him, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if his supposedly submissive wife ditches him at some. At least, that’s the way to bet, based on the odds.
While I basically agree with what you say (it's the reason I never married), I do think you are dealing with the situation in the professional-managerial class where there tends to be a larger income gap between the parties. If he's a construction worker and she's a nurse spousal support is going to be less of an issue, though of course there are acrimonious custody battles and so on.
You really ripped Matt Walsh a new one in this article, Liza! This article shows you’re just as willing to criticize the right as you are the left. I do agree with you, Liza that Am I Racist? is one of the most important documentaries made this century. But I must confess that I’m not a fan of Matt Walsh. Nonetheless, to each his or her own. But I 100% agree with you, he simply doesn’t have the intelligence to understand ambitious, career women. I didn’t know a college education was
such a big factor in who men and women dated or married but it doesn’t surprise me. Of course people want partners who provide them will intellectual stimulation and are as driven,
ambitious and passionate as they are! He has
no understanding of how assortive mating works.
Matt Walsh simply doesn’t get it. He’s to put it bluntly, not smart enough to. He wants women to be docile 1950s housewives who are content to stay in the home, cook, clean, and raise the children. He wants women to sacrifice their own hopes and dreams, shut up and do what their husband tells them to do. This in my opinion is classic chauvinism. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for traditional marriage values and women having kids and being moms. But Liza is 100% right, a woman can be intellectually fierce, assertive, strong, and career driven while also being feminine, kind, gentle, and an amazing mother to her kids! It’s not an either or type situation.
Woman’s biological impulse is to have kids and be a mom. Those who claim they don’t and actively fight against that are fighting against nature and as Liza showed, according to statistics over half will regret it. But that doesn’t mean women need to stay in the kitchen and stifle themselves. Men and women BOTH desire partners who will challenge them and push them to be the best they can be and grow together! Also as Liza makes clear here, women have NEVER been docile at any point in history! They have always been driven by ambition and desire just as men have. Smart men desire smart women.
Young girls definitely benefit from having a strong female role models in their lives just as boys benefit from having a strong male role model in theirs. Need more proof women have NEVER been as Matt describes them? Just look at how intelligent men wrote women in past literary works. Bleak House’s Esther Summerson, The Moonstone’s Rachel Verinder and Lady Glencora Palliser from the Palliser series are all proof of this as are female characters written by legendary female writers such as Dorothea Brooke, Jane Eyre and Margaret Hale. I would also add the real life examples of Anne Sexton, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and George Eliot all of whom challenged the patriarchal conventions of their time and followed their dreams and desires.
I will say though, Liza while I agree it would have been cool to go back to Victorian Times and see what it was like first hand, I’m also kind of glad you can’t because I fear how you would’ve been treated as a Jewish woman. You would have been a second-class citizen as a female and discriminated against because of your ethnic background. I also am not thrilled with the prospect of living in America at a time when slavery and later Jim Crow came into being, the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, and other immigrant groups were being discriminated against, the Chinese were excluded, and the Native people were being kicked off their land and herded onto reservations.
I also worry about how I’d be treated as a disabled person. But nonetheless, I do agree that at least visiting those times would’ve been cool and in all fairness, a lot of good things were taking place in those times also! Literacy and childhood education became near universal and prosperity rose in Britain during this time. Britain’s population increased rapidly as well. The Corn Laws were repealed in response to the famine in Ireland, the British Empire rapidly expanded, slavery was stamped out in Britain’s African colonies, and the transportation of convicts to Australia came to an end.
Furthermore, in the United States we did get the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments during this time, Civil Service Reform, the Industrial Revolution spread to America, the Union prevailed in the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad was built, the Second Industrial Revolution started, the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair took place, successful human flight happened for the first time, and the hamburger, hot dog and ice cream cone were born.
Also throughout Europe, you did have Jewish Emancipation going on and the birth of Zionism. So perhaps it wouldn’t be too bad, just bring some more people with you before you travel back in time that’s all. Also, bring Gabriel as well to keep anyone who tries to give you trouble in check. :)
Also I totally agree with you about traditional marriage values, but I hope that would not preclude gays and lesbians from also getting married and being able to adopt children. Not to put words in your mouth or anything like that, I don’t think you were trying to exclude anyone when you said that. I just want all couples regardless of sex to be able to experience the joys of marriage and family! But I get what you mean.
Thank you so much for this most thoughtful piece filled with important facts from the latest in social science research! Very much a piece worthy of being on Substack! Sorry for being so long winded in this comment, I just had a lot to say. Your piece really gave me a lot to think about it. Indeed, Matt Walsh is the problem here.
I fully agree about traditional marriage values for gay and lesbian couples. I've seen some LGBT books that I agree are inappropriate for schools, but my proposal is to have books that all feature gays and lesbians in committed relationships, as parents etc.
Nearly all of the needs that men and women have are taken care of by tech ology today. Outsourcing. We dont have to pair up to survive anymore. Throw in a whole lot of extremely unreasonable expectations on both sides, along with infinite content to reinforce those expectations, and you have the current situation.
Then theres the illusion of unlimited choice via online dating, the absence of community and the unrealistic expectation that a mate can fill the 12 roles that are absent because of that lack of community, and so on.
We're swinging back toward traditionalism, but its going to get a lot messier first.
In these conversations, I'm not sure everyone is using same definition of ambitious. I'm a retail pharmacist. I love my job, but I wouldn't consider myself an ambitious career woman. I'm not looking to advance. Occasionally, I'll work extra hours or get called if my manager is sick, but even then, I work my shift and I'm done. There are pharmacists who are career driven, of course, but even in jobs with professional doctorates, not everyone is ambitious.
I don't know how common this is, but how I define it, I wouldn't want to marry an ambitious, career
man. My husband becoming a stay-at-home Dad never occurred to us while we were dating, but I wouldn't have married him if he had a job working long hours, traveling often, stressed about work when at home, etc.
Intelligence is super attractive - to me at least. I told my wife when I met her that I found her intelligence her most attractive quality - that was over 30 years ago. She was just about to publish her first novel, which I have to say impressed me enormously. She was certainly physically attractive but I saw her intelligence in her appearance.
To me it's not really about work, it's about career. Work is about occupying yourself and having income, career is more about status. The left has told women to focus on their careers over everything else, which is very extreme and bad advice, and now some on the right are saying women should be 50's housewives, equally extreme and bad advice.
Intelligence is attractive. Smart people have a good sense of humor, which is just incredibly attractive in a woman. But I do think, as a girlboss yourself, you might be assuming that intelligence and ambition always happen at the same time. I think a lot of ambition is basically hollow. That's something women have known in the past, but it feels like everyone is forced to be ambitious today, forced to market themselves.
The challenge of being an ambitious woman is that most women want men to lead them. Women really want men who are above them. So the higher a woman goes, the fewer men above her there are, the fewer options she has. I think women should keep that in mind. If you're intelligent, you can turn that intelligence into anything. If you put it all into career status, you're limiting your options. So women have to choose, they can't have it all. And smart feminists have always known that, but the feminist message today really is "you can have it all." It discourages women from making decisions.
This is not a decision men have to make. The more career status a man gets, the more attractive he is to women. I don't think women realize how much having a career is often just a way for men to get women.
I have worked with plenty of women in software, and I have noticed that the best female engineers had husbands. I think they got a lot of confidence from their husbands, and that helped them in their careers. So I wish women would reframe their thinking. Instead of focusing everything on career and expecting the relationships to just happen, women should try to marry earlier in their careers and find a husband who supports their career. Men want to feel like we can help women, we want to feel needed. If women don't give men the opportunity to help, to provide value, the resulting relationships are often shallow.
The catch is a lot of careers suffer if you take time out to have kids early.
Women in software have the flipside of Liza's problem with literature: there are *too many* men with those interests, which has its own problems like getting hit on all the time, but at least makes finding a compatible partner much easier.
I basically agree with everything else.
What both sides seem to miss in these debates is the massive role of technology in shaping human roles. I have two DK books, one called Forgotten Arts, which describes field and workshop crafts traditionally performed by men, and the other called Forgotten Household Crafts, which describes crafts traditionally performed by women, though the first book includes a number of women's crafts as well. What this tells us is that for most of history, men and women both practiced a number of physically and mentally challenging tasks that added equally to the wealth of the family. The women's tasks were a little lighter (though most modern men, myself especially, would be exhausted by half a day of traditional women's work), and that they were practiced closer to home, where, of course, the children would have been.
Technological development over the last few millennia has gradually shifted us from a craft economy, in which you largely made things for your own family's use, to a trade economy, in which you made things for sale and brought the things your family needed. That trend greatly accelerated through the 19th and early 20th century, with the effect that it turned the home from a place of production into a place of consumption. All those complex, challenging, productive tasks that had occupied women through the centuries were eliminated. To be productive, a woman then had to leave the home, which, of course, meant leaving her children.
That is the conundrum we find ourselves in today. It was not that women suddenly started to demand challenging and productive occupations after millennia of being content with unproductive idleness. It was that the industrial revolution stripped away the challenging and productive occupations that had been theirs for millennia.
Not that women would want those old occupations back (though they do still do some of them as hobbies). No more would men want their old occupations back. They were a hard slog for rewards that would seem very meager to us today. But men, at least, still leave the household to work as they always did. It is women who have been placed in a bind between going out and leaving their children, and staying at home without adequate occupation. The fabled 1950s were not the end of a long period do domestic bliss. It was a brief episode in the ongoing struggle to adapt to the fact of the home being a place of consumption rather than production -- as was the Victorian struggle over access to the professions.
But perhaps if we were to recognize the role that technology played in bringing this situation about, and acknowledge the genuine nature of the dilemma it creates, we might lower the velocity of the ideological brickbats we hurl at each other's heads.
I have been trying to figure out why conservative talking heads like Walsh continue to villainize women who'd otherwise be allies simply because they have careers and contribute to their families and societies. Thankfully, you've figured it out for me. Brilliant article! 👏👏
Yeah, I was thinking, surely he's met Ben Shapiro's doctor wife, right?
I really think that's a Jewish vs Catholic thing. Heck, Proverbs 31 is from the Old Testament, right?
There may be a bit of a cultural split in that Walsh is coming out of the tradcath culture. If you're a Jewish conservative in the big city there's a lot more leeway (look at all the neocon power couples). But tradcaths are much more influential on the right.
There was just an essay today about Christian guys not really wanting a “Proverbs 31 woman”.
I’d encountered that as well, but had thought it was a fluke. I don’t understand where the guys on the right have come up with their ideology/theology from… even those of us that *want* to have traditional lives, have to work…
The alternative would be, what? OF?
https://open.substack.com/pub/sarahcoppin/p/most-christian-men-do-not-want-a?r=268b51&utm_medium=ios
✌️
Probably the whole redpill thing? I tend to think it's a reaction to the misandric feminism of the 2010s, but then I'm biased. The Internet has led to a whole feedback situation where each side goads each other to greater extremes. I'm not female, but even given my limited imagination I can't see wanting to marry one of these guys... they don't seem like they'd be very nice, and I wouldn't trust someone that narcissistic to run my life. There's a reason Christians would always talk about 'servant leadership' and so on. Besides, isn't the whole idea for Christian women that the guy is moral and upright and works hard for his family and doesn't, you know, sleep around?
But then I refused to do the marriage thing myself, so who am I to talk?
Like they were Redpill to Christian, not Christian first? That would make sense.
The in-person tradcath activists aren’t nearly as obnoxious as the ones online, but there are still some that demand a woman cook for them without being worthy of it.
These past few months have been my first foray into slacktivism, and I’m really shocked by all of it.
Christian women are individuals, just like any other women, and emphasize different virtues when looking for a husband. So some of the Redpill stuff about guys sleeping around isn’t necessarily inaccurate.
I prize valor, cleverness, and perseverance in a man, so I don’t expect chastity… because the higher levels of testosterone a man like that has, makes him more vulnerable to sexual temptation.
The problem is that a lot of these Redpill guys are not warriors, so they can’t expect us to seriously forgive their (in many cases feigned) promiscuity, at the same time they talk like the Virgin Mary isn’t virgin enough for them.
Refused, at all? Not even proposed to anyone?!
To your point here: The book of Proverbs actually has a lengthy passage describing the perfect wife and according to it she is an entrepreneur who runs her own business and is a leader in her community: In fact she sounds substantially more productive than her husband, if I'm honest. But maybe the passage starts with the assumption that he's a winner, too, rather than a random schlub who got lucky.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2031%3A10-31&version=ERV
underrated comment, particularly because Walsh talks so much about his so called christian values. Not sure he's read the bible much tbh.
Yeah. I don't want to oversell the passage too much, I guess; it does make a lot of reference to family and domesticity. But at the same time it describes the ideal wife as someone who is basically employed in her own home business, working late into the night to make sure it turns a profit, who is engaged in land transactions, and who is bringing in enough money, apparently, that her husband doesn't need to fear financial ruin.
I mean, don't get me wrong; this sounds very much like the "have it all" girl-boss of the mid 2000's and 2010s, so I don't think it's a model to aspire to unless you aspire to burnout. But for me the big takeaway is, how the fuck did these guys on the right get the idea that an ideal woman is so passive?
Come on ...Irene Addler obviously 😁
“men, after all, don't marry “roles”—they marry minds.”
Though I have been unmarried my whole life and less of it is before me than behind, you have stated my precise ambition. Bravo!
Yeah, I wasted a lot of time holding out for a woman who was smart as I was. By the time I started looking they were all married off to guys who were maybe 10% less smart but had much better social skills.
That's on me, of course, but the soulmate thing is rarely satisfied.
The "traditional view" he refers to here is highly Victorian. If he were to keep going back in time he's see the "traditional view" has fluctuated greatly. The Georgian time period was more loose than the Regency one. In Colonial times many women worked as printers and shop keepers. In pre-industrial Medieval times it was women who were the Alewives. Women being "in the home" is a Victorian mid to upper class ideal more than it's a traditional one because it's about class and status more than anything else. Prior to the industrial age, there was no such thing as "outside the home" because everyone was working "inside the home" so to speak to produce income. I'm generalizing here, but you get the point. And lower class women have always needed to work.
Oh, this was an interesting one. Here are my thoughts.
Many men, even highly intelligent ones, gravitate toward women who prioritize family life. Not because they’re intimidated by ambition, but because they’re seeking emotional harmony, not rivalry. It’s not weakness. It’s wiring. Call it yin and yang, call it the natural balance of masculine and feminine energy, but it’s encoded in us.
From my experience, and I’ve dated a lot, and I’m in my 40s, ambition is rarely what men are looking for in a partner. This essay seemed to assume that ambition is the highest virtue in a mate. But in reality, qualities like emotional availability, steadiness, kindness, and a shared long-term vision often rank far higher in relationship satisfaction studies.
Now, maybe Matt Walsh is wrong to suggest that women must be docile to be desirable. I’d agree with you there.
But it’s equally flawed to suggest that a man who doesn’t want an ambitious, career-driven woman is simply not smart enough to understand her. Desire doesn’t follow ideology or IQ. It follows temperament, energy dynamics, and deeply individual visions of what a meaningful life looks like.
That’s why intelligent, successful men often marry women who are desirable, soft, and attractive, not necessarily women with the highest IQ.
Ambition is admirable. But let’s be honest: it’s not universally attractive to most men. It doesn’t even make the top five. I don’t make the rules. I wish I did.
And to your other point, which I agree with: Yes, you can be ambitious, driven, and a good mother, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking you can excel at both a demanding career and raising children at the same time.
As soon as you take that ambition and direct it toward your career, your children start getting the leftovers.
You’re either building your empire or you’re raising your kids. One is happening in real time. The other is being squeezed into the margins of your Google Calendar. You can outsource the cleaning, the cooking, the laundry, but not the childhood.
To be clear, I understand that you weren’t necessarily arguing that women can do both at a high level. You were discussing ambition as a character trait, not a high-powered career path, and I agree with you on that.
Interesting read, either way!
You all just parrot each other, do you realize that?
The reality is that to live in the world, you must have a skill, you must use your talents, and you must contribute something.
This is a gender neutral reality.
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Wise feedback
For men, the connection between ambition or drive and romance is “I’m seeking this, and I want you with me”. At the same time, there’s a tension between external goals and direct investment in family that most men struggle to get right. The compromise is often that he biases external & she biases internal
And the older one gets, the more trade-offs you need to make. This is not a bad thing.
Ambition is a good thing in a successor. Like changeovers in a relay: I hand this to you and you take it further. But a man’s wife is a teammate, not a successor - he wants her for now, not later. Intelligence, competence, etc are all good things. Even drive is good, if his & hers are aligned. But for most men, he’s more interested in whether she backs up his ambition rather than brings a competing drive
What if she is the one who brings the ambition and he joins? Many women find men with less ambition to be “passive” and unattractive
Not saying that a couple can’t carve out creative space for both parties. They can and should. But a woman whose long term goal is family should consider how the virtues she is demonstrating now set her trajectory.
On commentators, I agree that Walsh comes off as something of a boffin and somewhat unsophisticated. Do not confuse sophistication for wisdom. It’s easier to be both wise & sophisticated if you’re smart, but it’s easy to regard the trappings of intelligence as the more important
Also, people who are highly correct in one area can be woefully under-informed in others, and this is not a failure of their intelligence
Is Walsh in this category? Not sure.
Assortative mating works both ways though. Lower-IQ men typically react negatively to high-IQ women and prefer women with similar IQ to themselves. Most of Walsh’s audience is not high-IQ. Also, it’s a mistake to think education raises IQ. The correlation is entirely due to sorting. High-IQ people almost all go to college and low-IQ people almost all don’t. What happens in the intervening four years doesn’t really matter.
Finally, I know plenty of highly intelligent men and women who are very much not ambitious. Some of them prefer to study in the privacy of their homes rather than pursue high-stakes careers. Also, there are a LOT of ambitious people who are quite stupid.
You make a really good point about it being more about IQ than education.
I never went to college thanks to family burdens, but more than a few guys haven’t taken me past date 5 for being “too smart” or “intimidating” with my… massage therapy education?
I don’t know why studies base everything on degree vs no degree. It’s more about how couples relate to each other.
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You’re young and naive Liza, my IQ isn’t that bad and I can tell you that Matt is 75 percent right. What happens with “higher IQ” woman is that many are low emotional IQ and very high on their “intelligence” which makes for an unhappy marriage. Why work through any bumps in the road. I’m intelligent and he mansplains while I “reason” when I’m talking to him. Society has taught woman to mistrust any man who believes the family outweighs a woman’s career. Emotional connections outweigh any intelligence quotient you and the modern educated woman believe to be the preponderance. Many woman aren’t educated for many reasons and intelligence via education is just one aspect of “intelligence”. I’m happy for all the careerist woman out there and I wish you all good luck.
To be fair, I would describe myself as having average intellect and I struggle with emotional intelligence. Meanwhile, my friend (who is also a woman) is very intelligent and has high emotional intelligence. A person's emotional intelligence and IQ are very variable
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You can’t put women back in the BOX.Just check on the Percentages of women in our Universities.
Marriages where both parties have college degrees are the most likely to end in divorce, and the most likely to have the divorce initiated by the woman.
I’ve been married for 33 years. We both have college degrees. We are unusual. Many people from our cohort are divorced, and in almost every case the divorce was initiated by the woman. In most of these cases, the divorce was protracted and expensive, and particularly devastating for the man involved.
My observation over those decades is that many of the men were thoughtless, and even romantic, about the decision, where the women were much more calculating and transactional — i.e. mature and intelligent, not stupid. The stereotype is that women are romantic, but my observation is that the men are foolishly so, and naïvely so, far too often.
All that’s happened is that in the last few years men have seen the wreckage of enough of their friends and relatives, and finally grasped what is actually going on. More of them are now making decisions based on the costa, benefits, and risks involved. That’s just rationality catching up with the evidence, and it’s overdue.
Marriage is a very high risk decision for men, and for many, probably most, the risks and costs outweigh any possible benefits. It’s pretty much Russian roulette with several bullets in the cylinder.
Agreed that Walsh is missing the point here. Even if he’s right, that men want what he says they want, the number of women who can be that, who can provide that, is trivially small, and for practical purposes, no longer exists, or, as you pointed out, probably never existed. His notion that there were some ongoing conflict between feminism and whatever traditional set of values, he thinks he is fighting for is delusional. “Feminism“ has comprehensively taken over the culture and it is now simply the bedrock reality. Self-contained, religious communities may function according to somewhat different rules, though the women will always have recourse to the state legal system to dissolve their marriages. other than that, this war is long, long over. I don’t wish this on him, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if his supposedly submissive wife ditches him at some. At least, that’s the way to bet, based on the odds.
While I basically agree with what you say (it's the reason I never married), I do think you are dealing with the situation in the professional-managerial class where there tends to be a larger income gap between the parties. If he's a construction worker and she's a nurse spousal support is going to be less of an issue, though of course there are acrimonious custody battles and so on.
You really ripped Matt Walsh a new one in this article, Liza! This article shows you’re just as willing to criticize the right as you are the left. I do agree with you, Liza that Am I Racist? is one of the most important documentaries made this century. But I must confess that I’m not a fan of Matt Walsh. Nonetheless, to each his or her own. But I 100% agree with you, he simply doesn’t have the intelligence to understand ambitious, career women. I didn’t know a college education was
such a big factor in who men and women dated or married but it doesn’t surprise me. Of course people want partners who provide them will intellectual stimulation and are as driven,
ambitious and passionate as they are! He has
no understanding of how assortive mating works.
Matt Walsh simply doesn’t get it. He’s to put it bluntly, not smart enough to. He wants women to be docile 1950s housewives who are content to stay in the home, cook, clean, and raise the children. He wants women to sacrifice their own hopes and dreams, shut up and do what their husband tells them to do. This in my opinion is classic chauvinism. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for traditional marriage values and women having kids and being moms. But Liza is 100% right, a woman can be intellectually fierce, assertive, strong, and career driven while also being feminine, kind, gentle, and an amazing mother to her kids! It’s not an either or type situation.
Woman’s biological impulse is to have kids and be a mom. Those who claim they don’t and actively fight against that are fighting against nature and as Liza showed, according to statistics over half will regret it. But that doesn’t mean women need to stay in the kitchen and stifle themselves. Men and women BOTH desire partners who will challenge them and push them to be the best they can be and grow together! Also as Liza makes clear here, women have NEVER been docile at any point in history! They have always been driven by ambition and desire just as men have. Smart men desire smart women.
Young girls definitely benefit from having a strong female role models in their lives just as boys benefit from having a strong male role model in theirs. Need more proof women have NEVER been as Matt describes them? Just look at how intelligent men wrote women in past literary works. Bleak House’s Esther Summerson, The Moonstone’s Rachel Verinder and Lady Glencora Palliser from the Palliser series are all proof of this as are female characters written by legendary female writers such as Dorothea Brooke, Jane Eyre and Margaret Hale. I would also add the real life examples of Anne Sexton, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and George Eliot all of whom challenged the patriarchal conventions of their time and followed their dreams and desires.
I will say though, Liza while I agree it would have been cool to go back to Victorian Times and see what it was like first hand, I’m also kind of glad you can’t because I fear how you would’ve been treated as a Jewish woman. You would have been a second-class citizen as a female and discriminated against because of your ethnic background. I also am not thrilled with the prospect of living in America at a time when slavery and later Jim Crow came into being, the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, and other immigrant groups were being discriminated against, the Chinese were excluded, and the Native people were being kicked off their land and herded onto reservations.
I also worry about how I’d be treated as a disabled person. But nonetheless, I do agree that at least visiting those times would’ve been cool and in all fairness, a lot of good things were taking place in those times also! Literacy and childhood education became near universal and prosperity rose in Britain during this time. Britain’s population increased rapidly as well. The Corn Laws were repealed in response to the famine in Ireland, the British Empire rapidly expanded, slavery was stamped out in Britain’s African colonies, and the transportation of convicts to Australia came to an end.
Furthermore, in the United States we did get the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments during this time, Civil Service Reform, the Industrial Revolution spread to America, the Union prevailed in the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad was built, the Second Industrial Revolution started, the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair took place, successful human flight happened for the first time, and the hamburger, hot dog and ice cream cone were born.
Also throughout Europe, you did have Jewish Emancipation going on and the birth of Zionism. So perhaps it wouldn’t be too bad, just bring some more people with you before you travel back in time that’s all. Also, bring Gabriel as well to keep anyone who tries to give you trouble in check. :)
Also I totally agree with you about traditional marriage values, but I hope that would not preclude gays and lesbians from also getting married and being able to adopt children. Not to put words in your mouth or anything like that, I don’t think you were trying to exclude anyone when you said that. I just want all couples regardless of sex to be able to experience the joys of marriage and family! But I get what you mean.
Thank you so much for this most thoughtful piece filled with important facts from the latest in social science research! Very much a piece worthy of being on Substack! Sorry for being so long winded in this comment, I just had a lot to say. Your piece really gave me a lot to think about it. Indeed, Matt Walsh is the problem here.
I fully agree about traditional marriage values for gay and lesbian couples. I've seen some LGBT books that I agree are inappropriate for schools, but my proposal is to have books that all feature gays and lesbians in committed relationships, as parents etc.
Nearly all of the needs that men and women have are taken care of by tech ology today. Outsourcing. We dont have to pair up to survive anymore. Throw in a whole lot of extremely unreasonable expectations on both sides, along with infinite content to reinforce those expectations, and you have the current situation.
Then theres the illusion of unlimited choice via online dating, the absence of community and the unrealistic expectation that a mate can fill the 12 roles that are absent because of that lack of community, and so on.
We're swinging back toward traditionalism, but its going to get a lot messier first.
In these conversations, I'm not sure everyone is using same definition of ambitious. I'm a retail pharmacist. I love my job, but I wouldn't consider myself an ambitious career woman. I'm not looking to advance. Occasionally, I'll work extra hours or get called if my manager is sick, but even then, I work my shift and I'm done. There are pharmacists who are career driven, of course, but even in jobs with professional doctorates, not everyone is ambitious.
I don't know how common this is, but how I define it, I wouldn't want to marry an ambitious, career
man. My husband becoming a stay-at-home Dad never occurred to us while we were dating, but I wouldn't have married him if he had a job working long hours, traveling often, stressed about work when at home, etc.
Intelligence is super attractive - to me at least. I told my wife when I met her that I found her intelligence her most attractive quality - that was over 30 years ago. She was just about to publish her first novel, which I have to say impressed me enormously. She was certainly physically attractive but I saw her intelligence in her appearance.