or, if we wish to stay on the personal level, you’d want to question any relationships in which both sexes were considered equal in the first place.
I think that happens; it’s hard to imagine e.g. a president with anything other than a traditional family (were/are the Clintons equals? More so than those before them, but in public at least Hilary conformed to the traditional “supportive wife” role (in a way that I think contrasts with Bill’s position for the 2008 primaries)). To a certain extent LW is always going to seem cultish if our leaders’ relationships are at odds with the traditional forms for such. And I don’t think that’s irrational: in cases where failures are rare but highly damaging, it makes sense to accord more weight to tradition than we normally do.
(on the voting analogy: I’d be very cautious about adopting any change to our political system that had no historical precedent and seemed like it might increase our odds of going to war, even if it had been tried and shown to be better in a few years of day-to-day use. I don’t think that’s an argument against women having the vote (they’re stereotypically less warlike—although it has been argued that the Falklands War happened because Thatcher felt the need to prove herself and wouldn’t’ve occurred under a male PM), but it is certainly an argument for not extending the vote to non-landowners and under-21s. In as much as war has declined since the vote was extended to non-landowners and under-21s—which is actually, now that I think about it, really quite surprising—I guess that’s evidence against this position)
I think that happens; it’s hard to imagine e.g. a president with anything other than a traditional family (were/are the Clintons equals? More so than those before them, but in public at least Hilary conformed to the traditional “supportive wife” role (in a way that I think contrasts with Bill’s position for the 2008 primaries)). To a certain extent LW is always going to seem cultish if our leaders’ relationships are at odds with the traditional forms for such. And I don’t think that’s irrational: in cases where failures are rare but highly damaging, it makes sense to accord more weight to tradition than we normally do.
(on the voting analogy: I’d be very cautious about adopting any change to our political system that had no historical precedent and seemed like it might increase our odds of going to war, even if it had been tried and shown to be better in a few years of day-to-day use. I don’t think that’s an argument against women having the vote (they’re stereotypically less warlike—although it has been argued that the Falklands War happened because Thatcher felt the need to prove herself and wouldn’t’ve occurred under a male PM), but it is certainly an argument for not extending the vote to non-landowners and under-21s. In as much as war has declined since the vote was extended to non-landowners and under-21s—which is actually, now that I think about it, really quite surprising—I guess that’s evidence against this position)