A commentary on an article from The Atlantic by Olga Khazan
I was motivated to write this article after reading “Doomed to Be a Tradwife Can a Marriage Ever Truly Be Equal? By Olga Khazan,” and the commentary by her readers. In her article, she discusses her own experience attempting to foster a” Fair Play” relationship with her husband and how it fails, largely due to the failure of male partners to support the ideal of household equity. While her discourse follows her own experience, she does little to delve into the phenomena that cause the failure of the well-intentioned ideal of equity in a modern relationship. While the proposition of an equitable division of labor makes a great deal of sense to individuals with a modern Western liberal mindset, it is complicated by the manifestations of human consciousness and the state of the human condition. Many of the ideals of cultural liberalism are intellectual propositions that were meant to foster changes within the human condition fostering equality and equity in areas where it did not exist in earlier times. Historically, in most of the world, the balance of power in relationships is tilted towards men. Liberal ideals have forced us to question our patriarchal tendencies and to posit whether gender equality is a possibility in a post-modern liberal society. In this discussion, I will explain how this noble proposition is complicated by our psychology, history, anthropology and social constructs.
This is not my first go-round with the discussion of inequity in marital relationships, I wrote a research paper discussing gender roles and income inequality in married couples roughly ten years ago. My most alarming discoveries came from the from the ABA’s publication “The State of Women in the Practice,” that showed that, even in professional households, with both partners holding par employment, women did over seventy-five percent of the work in the household. Living in a time where equality has become a sacred proposition, one would question the fact that it has not made its way to the bedroom or boardroom, or should I say kitchen? We know that income inequality is a reality, though it has improved in recent history, but this could be explained if you accept that the demands of pregnancy and raising children lower women’s value in the labor market. One would think that these economic equations should not affect the equity in this household, unless there is more to this proposition that meets the eye. To a modern woman who has been raised in a world where the equality narratives seem to be a guaranty of marital equity, the failure is painful.
There are many different paradigms that can be used to explain the lack of gender equality in the household. Cognitive psychology would suggest that gender biases are part of our “cognitive schemas.” Each individual has a unique cognitive schema that is developed over the course of their development. One’s cognitive schema contains the substrates of their identity and fosters how one sees themselves in the world, sees others in the world, and how they think others see them in the world. Our cognitive schemas are developed during the process of our socialization, with our family of origin, education and our specific socio-temporal-geographic reality playing important roles in our outcomes. In each individual there is an exponential number of variables that contribute to our schemas, but there are critical areas that are defined through social norming that are learned via our observation of our household of origin and our “everyday world” in which we are immersed. In our society, most men and women were either raised in households with traditional gender roles, or with divorce rates at about fifty percent, they were parented by a single mother who did all the heavy lifting. These experiences do not convert easily into marital equity, even if both partners believe in the principle, but have no real model for their relationship. While “ideology” can shape our thoughts and feelings and make us believe in a principle, it would require a great deal of effort to successfully create a working model in the household.
Another challenge that many may find difficult to accept is that much of our intrinsic programming exists at an unconscious level driving many of our thoughts and behaviors. Human beings, modern homo sapiens, are a relatively new species that have existed for roughly 55,000 years. Additionally, we have only been “culturally modern” for 10,000 years which means that most of our unconscious programming occurred during our longer pre-modern history where we were hunter-gatherers living in what is referred to as “band level societies.” In most hunter-gatherer tribes there was a division of labor where men would leave the camp for the purpose of hunting, while the women would stay near the camp, gathering and providing for their children. Evolution is a process of adaptation the fosters traits and mental processes that ensure the survival of the species. If we look at this reality from a scientific standpoint, we find that female attachment to their children is higher than male attachment to their children and women are do not geolocate as adeptly as men. Perhaps these two traits are bound to our evolutionary reality? The ideal of marital equity arises from” liberal ideal” that was fermented by rationalist and empiricist philosophers in the 17th century. These ideals like “all men are created equal” drove societies move from tribal and kinsman realities towards a liberal reality where equality is elevated in stature to a “moral obligation.” If we look carefully at the struggles our society has in instantiating liberal ideals in other areas, we might find that our psychologies are grounded in tribalism and inequality was the accepted norm. As we look to our world today, we see a conservative uprising, driving our world back into the abyss of tribalism and kinsman relationships. Nietzsche, who was brilliant in his observation of human behavior offered that “mankind is a species of atavism.”
Atavism-noun
“the more civilized a society seems to be, the more susceptible it is to its buried atavism”
Remaining in the domain of human behavior, it can be said that man is “homo-politicus” or a political animal. Both Plato and Hanna Arendt offered that “all men are political,” which posits that in all human relationship’s distribution of power effects the nature of relationships. Nietzsche offered that man’s primary drive was his “will to power,” which is often achieved through political means., If we examine the mate selection process in most cultures, political interests and “power” has driven women towards hypergamy or the desire to marry a man from a higher social class or in a man with superior earning power. In the dating and mating game, we are not all created equal! Men from higher social castes or with strong career pathways can select breeding partners who are desirable, often for their attractiveness level or for their extrinsic value as an object. If this is the case, mate selection becomes a materialistic enterprise, women trying to elevate their own stature, and men marrying a woman who are a “trophy.” If the relationship itself is a materialistic enterprise, then the balance of power that is maintained has its own unconscious manifestations. The man who marries an attractive woman who is a trophy, has procured a mate who is a symbol of his success, but the trade-off is that she is also expected to manage his household and children in exchange for her security.
In today’s society we are engaged in a war over “liberal values.” We are seeing that Nietzsche’s observation that mankind is a species of atavism, is being played out in real time. While liberal ideals are noble and derived through a philosophical commitment to “utopian eschatological” thought, the belief that mankind will continue to develop, moving away from our historic failures, until we reach a utopian existence, we are still saddled with a consciousness that has not evolved to a level to make this a possibility. While we can make a case for marital equity, it is only a possibility when two individuals are committed to the precept and are able to set forth the principles that manifest equity in an agreed upon manner. I would argue that marital equity might need to be negotiated and laid down contractually for it to work in most relationships. I am not stating that it is impossible, my son and daughter-in-law have achieved real marital equity in their own household, and it is a pleasure to watch. There are many variables that make this a possibility, similar goals and drives, equivalent earning power, and both individuals being raised by a father who was not defined by traditional gender roles. I have lived my life embracing the tenets of “real” liberalism, not the neo-liberal nonsense that we have seen gaining credence in the past twenty years. Neoliberalism may be the overextension of liberal ideals that have pushed our society back into it’s atavistic tendencies. Stay tuned, we live in a very interesting time!
A footnote- I asked AI to create an image of a woman who works who is tasked with managing a home. What it produced was a picture of a happy woman who did not like at all stressed with her complicated reality. I turned to the web and did the same search, once again the same result happy women overjoyed with their complicated reality. The bottom line here is that what is being depicted is an extension of our expectations, women are told that they are to embrace their inequality and be happy with it! Is this not a proof that women are historically oppressed?
Michael Nelinson
August 2025
A Journey to the Center of Your Mind 