Athol Kay explains that the societal and legal changes that are collectively described as Marriage 2.0 rest primarily on a technological foundation, not an ideological one.
The entire Marriage 2.0 edifice is driven by technology not ideology. For sure the ideology is there, but without the technology creating the environment to support the ideology, the ideology simply would have been nothing more than a handful of intellectuals thinking about possibilities rather than reality.
There are three primary technologies involved in creating Marriage 2.0.
(1) Nuclear Weapons…. Now we have a situation where it’s probably only the prison population of young males keeping the sex ratio of young men and women in check. In plain English, if everyone makes it to adulthood, there’s going to be 105 men for every 100 women, so even with a perfect monogamy system, a small number of guys are never going to have a wife. As a result, women can be pickier about who they marry and there’s generally always someone willing to step up and replace a deposed husband.
(2) Birth Control…. the short version is…. birth control allows sex to not be a socially bonding experience, where before it was a bonding one.
(3) Computers…. The downside to computers is that they save labor, and in particular the labor of males. Entire industries have gone by the wayside, or overseas, in the staggering societal changes. Cars used to be made by men, now they are for the most part made by robots. Broken cars used to be fixed by men, now they pretty much just ask the computer in the car “Where does it hurt?” and replace that.
While I don’t know if I would necessarily agree that these three technological factors are the three primary factors that have driven the social change, they are certainly three significant factors. I would venture to say that women’s suffrage has been at least as influential as nuclear weapons and computers, especially given the way in which some of the social patterns that are now obvious were beginning to develop prior to the invention of computers but after women’s suffrage. Another significant factor is the decline of religious influence, which I believe is the underlying problem upon which birth control has acted as a force multiplier.
But Athol is definitely on the right track, as he points out how the collective changes that will eventually lead to Marriage 3.0 – or as I usually refer to it, the Brothel/Burqah option – will not be driven by ideology, but by the same technological and demographic factors that drove the change from Marriage 1.0 to Marriage 2.0. I see several potential game-changers, including:
Male birth control
Robot sex dolls
Artificial wombs
Sex-aware “week after” pills
Economic collapse
Expensive electricity
Continental and/or global war
The myth of ideological progress assumes that Man will continue to become wealthier and that technological advancements will continue to become widely available to the masses. But for the first time in a very long time in the West, we are seeing that a generation is leaving the generation behind it less wealthy. (Thanks, Baby Boomers!) And while we can’t possibly expect to anticipate all the changes that will result from this historical event, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to suppose that some form of societal “regression” will be the eventual consequence.
On this basis, we can conclude that men’s rights activists will be more effective if they take the first-order approach and focus upon creating the technologies and events that will drive the societal change they seek instead of taking the second-order of appealing to the government in order enforce the desired ideological changes.