Traditionalists are just modernists from fifty years ago

None of you really want to retvrn

One thing that annoys me about “Trads” is that they call me a “modernist” but will never themselves push back against a lot of extremely modern assumptions about the world. In most respects Trads are just advocating normie sensibilities from the 1980s.

Their thinking is indelibly shaped by hard-fought feminist and progressive arguments from a century ago, but they don’t realize it and would never think to question those arguments. And yet if any of them actually retvrned to premodern and prefeminist America they would think of it as a third world hellhole.

Below are some modernist assumptions Trads never would think to challenge.

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Men should spend time with young children

Your great-great grandpa would think it’s weird and effeminate that you as a man want to hang out with your toddler. He would definitely call you a pussy and say you should be having a beer with the guys instead.

In most societies throughout history the father wouldn’t be that involved in raising the kids until the boys reached a certain age and needed to be initiated into manhood. In a lot of times/places men weren’t even permitted in the birthing chamber. Everything that dealt with young children was mostly part of the female sphere.

For most of history it was pretty much necessary to have this division of labor. This could only change with the widespread access to industrial wealth and leisure time that emerged from the labor movement and postwar economic boom.

Children’s feelings matter

Your great-great grandma would probably say your kids are horribly behaved and you are a terrible parent for indulging them as much as you do.

For most of history children were seen as stupid and not fully formed, and people didn’t care about their feelings. Parents would yell at and beat their kids pretty regularly, and children weren’t supposed to say anything when adults were having a conversation.

Women would regularly swaddle their kids so they could do home textile work for a bit of extra money. Children had no privacy and often had to share a room well into adolescence, or even sleep in close proximity to their parents so they could hear their mom getting plowed like in Angela’s Ashes.

Sex is a reciprocal thing and the female orgasm matters

Your great-great grandpa almost certainly never ate pussy and would absolutely roast you for doing so.

The idea that sex is a mutual act and not something the man does to the woman is extremely modern. Until the birth control pill the risk / reward ratio for women was simply too high for this idea to catch on.

That’s not to say past cultures had no concept of the woman enjoying sex; it varied a lot and Georgian society was a lot more egalitarian than Victorian society for instance. But it NEVER reached modern levels until the 60s-70s when the pill changed everything and you saw the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Fear of Flying, etc.

A man’s looks are important

Your great-great grandpa would definitely call you a queer for caring so much about your “physique” or doing weird shit like “looksmaxxing” or “mewing”. That kind of stuff has always been associated with homosexuals. Hell, it wasn’t uncommon for men to get called gay just for being handsome (Julius Caesar had to deal with this).

Prior to the widespread adoption of dating apps a man’s looks just weren’t that important when it came to sexual success. The 90s sitcom dynamic of the schlubby guy with a hot wife actually was a realistic thing for most men to achieve, because in person women care a lot more about the “vibe” you emanate than your appearance.

But Tinder made this a lot harder to achieve for Millennials and especially Zoomers, and these days nobody questions whether this is a good thing. Doing so would come off as low status and get you called incel / ugly.

We should be nice to animals

Just a century ago people had a much more utilitarian attitude toward animals and didn’t really think of them as “members of the family”. This is an extremely postwar development. Even 20 years ago it was extremely common for Boomers to stick a dog’s nose in its pee and avoid spending lots of money on surgery for their pets like subsequent generations do as a matter of course.

Back in the day it wasn’t uncommon for teenage boys to torture dogs and cats and frogs for fun. Hell, you still see this today in some especially brutish subaltern and rural types. These cretins will just shoot small animals with BB guns and people will act like it’s youthful hijinks.

It takes modern civilization to beat this savage impulse out of people.

We should let women enjoy a relatively innocent girlhood

A lot of your male ancestors would be seen as pedophiles today.

My own great-grandmother was 13 when she first got together with my 20-something great-grandfather, and my uncle used to tease my grandma about this and call her dad a pedophile. This naturally made my grandma absolutely furious, but was my uncle wrong? There’s really no way to square the circle on this.

A major talking point among sex negative feminists of the 70s and 80s (and Zoomer feminists today) is that the 19th century push to increase the age of consent was a feminist project that faced backlash from men. Whenever they say this they get dismissed as hairy legged feminazis because the implications make people uncomfy.

This is one of the most difficult things to grapple with about the past and honestly the present. Pretty much every girlfriend I’ve had has told me that around 12-13 she would start getting creepy stares from friends’ fathers at sleepovers etc. And yet no girl ever seems to wonder if her friends felt the same way about *her own father*.

I think we need a much more candid conversation about this issue to improve life outcomes for young girls, but the moment you try to get real about this as a man you will just face a hysterical backlash, so it needs to be a woman who does it. Hopefully someone will soon.

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Obviously there are some trads who object to the above things. But they tend to keep mum about this. Whenever someone *does* say that animals don’t matter or we should lower the age of consent, other trads will inevitably call them a psycho or a freak and ostracize them. Objecting to any of the above views would be seen as either unacceptable or low prestige, and I don’t see this ever changing.

In practice there is a very firm Overton Window and you simply aren’t allowed to advocate returning to a pre-1960s world. For the most part this is a good thing.

Many aspects of life in the past (certainly as a non-elite) were extremely unpleasant. Childhood especially was incredibly traumatizing and probably caused a huge proportion of the population to have emotional issues as adults. It probably wasn’t rare to spend a huge chunk of your early years getting beaten up or molested.

This was exacerbated by the lower access to protein and saturated fat, which depressed IQs and probably created personality disorders in most of the peasantry, while lowering executive functioning and creating a feedback loop for bad behavior.

If you go to isolated rural areas or the inner city today you will see what this combination looks like. That is also how most normie white people used to act prior to industrial agriculture, and that explains why crime rates used to be so much higher.

For most of human history your life looked like either The Hills Have Eyes or Precious.

#Tradlife

Happily, the Industrial Revolution has given us enough wealth that we can create a softer and gentler society where people don’t have to live like animals or be cruel to one another just to get by. If you aren’t willing to challenge the above principles then you should be willing to thank feminists and progressives for this development.

That said, we can obviously indulge this desire too much and get the problems inherent in socialism / wokism. People today don’t feel enough pain or harshness, and are slaves to their hedonic treadmill. That is why everyone finds it so hard to get out of bed in the morning and is dissociating or developing ADHD.

And this in turn is why you need a countervailing fascist / vitalist impulse from men that will push back on woman’s gentleness and soppy sentimentalism and help people feel things again.

But ultimately it’s a dialectic and you probably need both sides pushing back on each other to achieve the optimal societal outcome.