Rise of the Dude Raiders

I listened to Molyneux’s analysis of Zootopia (video here and audio here)—which sounds like a terrible movie, by the way—when he mentioned the white feather phenomenon from World War I. A tough time for pacifist or “other principled” guys, for sure. Being rejected by women romantically is traumatic enough, so much so that most men preemptively select themselves out of possible interpersonal interactions most of the time when they come across someone they are attracted to. I can’t imagine being humiliated in such a public, conspicuous way as those 1914’s Brits were. Such is the power of ostracism: some men undoubtedly were incentivized enough to risk getting blown to bits in a trench in northern France just to avoid the ordeal altogether.

What happened to the economics of marriage after the war may have been interesting…Google probably has some interesting figures that I don’t care to look up right now. Similar conclusions could be drawn after World War II, when we got the televised überfrau housewife trope. The logic behind it isn’t complex: lots of American dudes died in WWII, and the ones that came back were in high demand because of scarcity and the perception that they were literal, acting victors. Women became highly competitive to attract all those marriage-aged veterans being paraded around, i.e., look nice, don’t give it away for free, don’t be a bitch, etc. Thus The Donna Reed Show and the genre’s ilk. The accommodating, good-looking 50’s housewife was less the result of insidious men or graying mothers nagging their daughters to hurry up with the grandchildren, and more about men and women simply reacting to market forces.

6 Comments

  • I’m surprised someone like Molyneaux would have such a Marxist perspective on marriage post-world war I.

    • Jay DiNitto says:

      Would you elaborate on that? Not sure what you mean.

      • It seems I might have misinterpreted the second paragraph as ideas pertaining to Molyneux … if I’m correct now, that’s more of your elaboration than his thoughts from the video(?), which I suppose would undermine my original statement.

        Anyway, the emphasis on competition and economics and how they influence a social relation is what reminded me of Marx. Peter Kreeft sums it up well:

        “The “Manifesto” was one of the key moments in history. Published in 1848, “the year of revolutions” throughout Europe, it is, like the Bible, essentially a philosophy of history, past and future. All past history is reduced to class struggle between oppressor and oppressed, master and slave, whether king vs. people, priest vs. parishioner, guild- master vs. apprentice, or even husband vs. wife and parent vs. child.

        This is a view of history even more cynical than Machiavelli’s. Love is totally denied or ignored; competition and exploitation are the universal rule.”

        • Jay DiNitto says:

          I was economic terms to describe a cultural situation. It’s not that’s all it was, but for the conversation at hand it was appropriate. Using semi-technical economic jargon is good if you’re trying to describe things that heavily involve human behavior/reactions in the light of scarcity, for obvious reasons, even if the topic of money or goods is peripheral.

          I don’t regard Marx as a economist. He was a pampered, imaginative fiction writer, and I’m nearly 100% convinced the Manifesto was really the outline of a novel he was writing, and it someone got mistaken for something real-world. =)

          • For sure, that’s fair. It wasn’t my intention to exactly equate Kreeft’s perspective(s) of Marx with what you had written … I guess it just somewhat reminded me of it, in a rather roundabout way.

            Also, that’s one of the few conspiracy theories I’d get on board with … and pretty much anything to do with aliens. 🙂

          • Jay says:

            “I was *using* economic terms”

            I tend to miss words. But you seemed to get what I meant.

            Engels was probably an alien and had implanted a brain-bug in Marx (a la Star Trek II…the original, not the reboot) when Marx insisted the Manifesto was the outline of a story. It’s on Snopes or something.

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