Many of both the mainstream conservative intelligentsia and the anonymous online accounts live in urban left-leaning cities. Source: met a lot of them here in NYC, and know that many others live in LA. They romanticize the image of the “trad” rural town because they don’t really know what it’s like.
I’m something of a crunchy con myself, the right really isn’t one thing.
A friend of mine coined the phrase “Heil at Home”, basically the phenomenon of lefties living their personal lives like white supremacists. They talk lefty junk all day but when they’re at home, they wait until they’re married to have children, live in far whiter communities than most conservatives, shoot look at Martha’s Vineyard; when migrants showed up they called up your actual ARMY and had them gone by literal sundown.
Calling them hypocrites has no purchase because their sense of right and wrong is eminently flexible.
Meanwhile conservatives continue to be weighed down by in practice egalitarianism and functional feminism; we’ll talk a big game but the minute “daddy’s little girl” sheds a tear, it’s give her whatever she wants time.
Bill Buckley has gotten some heat lately, some deserved, but the man understood quality control. Keep the crazies out and try to produce actual quality.
Having spent six years in the backcountry, in rural Texas and Montana, I was not surprised by the author's experience. I was in my late twenties, and in both places all of the women my age were either married, had been married, had something very wrong with them, or had left for the city.
Now, for young women, going to rural America to find a spouse isn't the worst idea, but if you're a guy, the cities and suburbs are where the women actually are, and if you're willing to put some work into filtering who you're going out with instead of just swiping right on anyone born with a vagina you can actually find someone suitable to marry.
Yeah, I see this all the time here in NYC: young women talking about how they left their rural town and came to the big city for college or work. I rarely hear the same story from a young man. I wonder what those excess men in those towns are doing.
Working in farming, ranching, mining, or other blue-collar jobs, mostly.
Just to give you an idea of how bad the gender ratio is in some of these places, a church I briefly attended in Montana had about seventeen young men and four or five young women in the singles group. (While I was there, I was the only one in the singles group older than twenty-five.) I will also note that almost all of these young men were either employed with decent jobs, attending the local state university to get a degree to make themselves employable, or both. No failures to launch there.
Been noticing this for years, I’ve posted elsewhere but for some dumb reason conservatives assume every place and venue is roughly half men and half women with a normal age distribution.
The other problem I've seen is young guys who want marriage but can't break the self-sabotaging habits of urban blue-culture "marriage." They go to suburban churches or rural communities and then they start looking for women who share their interests, their politics, their Bitcoin investing strategy, who are conversant in their tastes in literature or niche television shows, and are shocked to find out that 18-25 year old women without a college education don't share the tastes of 25-30 year old libertarian men in law/tech/business.
Not to say that those matches wouldn't work, given the correct mindset, but not as a blue-culture "companionate" egalitarian match. I want to grab those guys by the shoulders and tell them "You're looking for a wife, not a bro, not a person on which to dump the burden of all your social needs, and certainly not a competitor/rival." We need to be reminding young men that the purpose of marriage is to start a family, not to have a whiskey tasting, novel-appreciating, and bitcoin investing partner.
This sounds like an example of the spouse-as-best-friend category error that bedevils marriage these days. For most people their spouse isn't and can't be everything to them. Men also need male friends and male spaces, and women need female friends and female spaces too.
Many rural areas do not have a viable economy. Additionally some, by rigid zoning restrictions, also have painfully expensive housing. Hence the young people who can, leave.
Many of both the mainstream conservative intelligentsia and the anonymous online accounts live in urban left-leaning cities. Source: met a lot of them here in NYC, and know that many others live in LA. They romanticize the image of the “trad” rural town because they don’t really know what it’s like.
I’m something of a crunchy con myself, the right really isn’t one thing.
A friend of mine coined the phrase “Heil at Home”, basically the phenomenon of lefties living their personal lives like white supremacists. They talk lefty junk all day but when they’re at home, they wait until they’re married to have children, live in far whiter communities than most conservatives, shoot look at Martha’s Vineyard; when migrants showed up they called up your actual ARMY and had them gone by literal sundown.
Calling them hypocrites has no purchase because their sense of right and wrong is eminently flexible.
Meanwhile conservatives continue to be weighed down by in practice egalitarianism and functional feminism; we’ll talk a big game but the minute “daddy’s little girl” sheds a tear, it’s give her whatever she wants time.
Bill Buckley has gotten some heat lately, some deserved, but the man understood quality control. Keep the crazies out and try to produce actual quality.
RE: finding a spouse in rural America.
Having spent six years in the backcountry, in rural Texas and Montana, I was not surprised by the author's experience. I was in my late twenties, and in both places all of the women my age were either married, had been married, had something very wrong with them, or had left for the city.
Now, for young women, going to rural America to find a spouse isn't the worst idea, but if you're a guy, the cities and suburbs are where the women actually are, and if you're willing to put some work into filtering who you're going out with instead of just swiping right on anyone born with a vagina you can actually find someone suitable to marry.
Yeah, I see this all the time here in NYC: young women talking about how they left their rural town and came to the big city for college or work. I rarely hear the same story from a young man. I wonder what those excess men in those towns are doing.
Working in farming, ranching, mining, or other blue-collar jobs, mostly.
Just to give you an idea of how bad the gender ratio is in some of these places, a church I briefly attended in Montana had about seventeen young men and four or five young women in the singles group. (While I was there, I was the only one in the singles group older than twenty-five.) I will also note that almost all of these young men were either employed with decent jobs, attending the local state university to get a degree to make themselves employable, or both. No failures to launch there.
Been noticing this for years, I’ve posted elsewhere but for some dumb reason conservatives assume every place and venue is roughly half men and half women with a normal age distribution.
The other problem I've seen is young guys who want marriage but can't break the self-sabotaging habits of urban blue-culture "marriage." They go to suburban churches or rural communities and then they start looking for women who share their interests, their politics, their Bitcoin investing strategy, who are conversant in their tastes in literature or niche television shows, and are shocked to find out that 18-25 year old women without a college education don't share the tastes of 25-30 year old libertarian men in law/tech/business.
Not to say that those matches wouldn't work, given the correct mindset, but not as a blue-culture "companionate" egalitarian match. I want to grab those guys by the shoulders and tell them "You're looking for a wife, not a bro, not a person on which to dump the burden of all your social needs, and certainly not a competitor/rival." We need to be reminding young men that the purpose of marriage is to start a family, not to have a whiskey tasting, novel-appreciating, and bitcoin investing partner.
This sounds like an example of the spouse-as-best-friend category error that bedevils marriage these days. For most people their spouse isn't and can't be everything to them. Men also need male friends and male spaces, and women need female friends and female spaces too.
Many rural areas do not have a viable economy. Additionally some, by rigid zoning restrictions, also have painfully expensive housing. Hence the young people who can, leave.