Dowry and the Gold Pill with This Is Shah | Fireside Chat 266

Join us on the Fireside Chat as we speak with This is Shah, a men's advocate who speaks on dowry, child support and more!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello everybody, and welcome to Honey Badger Radio. My name
is Brian and this is the fireside chat where we
talk with let's say, interesting people that are sort of
in and around our wheelhouse the things that we discussed.
And today I'm joined by this is Shaw whether HEAs
that's the name of your channel. That's not your name

(00:22):
unless your name is Sha, which I should have asked you. Yeah,
all right, well dude, thanks so much for coming on.
Welcome to the show. Really appreciate you having, you know,
taking a time.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, no worries, it's it's great to be on. So
hoping we'll have a fun discussion here. Got a lot
to talk about, I'd say.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, definitely a lot to talk about. So I want
to give people a little bit of a background on
how I found your content, and you came recommended partly
by another guy who's on the channel It's Complicated mentioned you.
But before that I saw you on a talk with
Paul Elim. You've done a couple of shows with him
discussing Dowry and the history of that. So tell us

(01:03):
a little bit about your background and what it is
that you do and how you found yourself getting involved
with this kind of content.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, well, my background was I actually used to work
at a child support agency. So I did that for
five years, and you know, it kind of the whole gamut.
I guess what you'd imagine what child support, you know,
the genetic tests and calculating people's child support, meeting with
the parents, going to court, the enforcement of child support.

(01:31):
I've trained other child support well, child support agents, we
would call them child support officers. This was all in California,
so I was very familiar with that. I've spoke with
many moms and dads and seen kind of how the
system work, not just with the parents, but also on
the back end with like you know, the welfare system
and all these kinds of things, and just saw that

(01:53):
stuff come together. And I never really had any idea
or never really thought about that aspect so much.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Prior to that.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
I did see some sort of manosphere stuff like I
used to read, you know, on the subreddit, the red
pill subreddit back then, So that was about the time
I kind of discovered that. And then that was just
after college, and then not too long after I started
working at the agency, and I started seeing these things
come together, especially when it came to families falling apart,

(02:22):
not so much just about people having struggles with dating
or you know, stuff that I would have been concerned
with just as a young guy. But then I started
seeing you know, divorce judgments and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
So it it just.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
You know, seeing that in front of me for so long,
it just got me really interested in the history of
all that and kind of how we ended up with
the system that we ended up because I used to think, well,
if we just changed the laws or something like that,
everything should be fixed. And then it's like, well, how
did we get the laws that we have? Okay, well
this is the culture we come from, and just all
these different changes.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
So it set me down a pretty big rabbit hole.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah yeah, so okay, well out of curiosity, what got
you involved just before all the red pill stuff happened?

Speaker 4 (03:02):
Why did you get involved with child support stuff?

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Was it just like, oh, I just need a job
and this, you know, helps me put food on the table,
or were you particularly interested in this?

Speaker 3 (03:13):
To be honest, it was a fluke.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
It was so my buddy and I we'd graduated college
and he came back into town and him and I
were we were hanging out together because we were trying
to figure out, like, you know, to find some employment somewhere.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
I was.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
I was selling beds and stuff like that. Just I
made the small business in college and I was doing that.
So we were kind of supporting each other. And my
friend he actually found the job posting, and I'd never
heard of child support really, I didn't know what it was.
I was like, oh, it's something that helps kids, I guess,
you know. So we both and we took the preliminary
tests that you know they were doing so you got

(03:50):
as part of the application, and him and I both
applied and I ended up getting the job. So I
thought I was never going to hear back from him.
In like six months later, they sent me a criminal
history disclosure form and I was like, oh, I almost
missed seeing that in the mail, and I filled it
back out and then before you know it, I was
working there. And then that's how I was working there.
I was like, Oh, this is what it is, you

(04:12):
know what I mean? Yeah, I just could have never
imagined just how complex and how many layers to that
system there was. I thought it was something way different.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, So like in broad strokes, because I'm actually interested
in this because I you know, family courts and broken
families are like a big thing that I advocate to address,
you know, on this channel.

Speaker 4 (04:33):
That's one of my central focuses.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
So as someone who worked or works, I assume you
still do in the this you know, in this field,
Like what are some of the things like, first of all,
what is it generally? And also what are some things
that people may not know about child support that they
should know?

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Gosh well?

Speaker 2 (04:52):
I mean typically child support is there when you know,
a family breaks up or if there was really never
a fanamily established in the first place. To be frank,
I mean, there's a lot of out of wedlock birds
and things like that. You can say families no longer
cohabitating if you don't want to discuss marriage in that way.
But when that happens, there is usually an obligation from

(05:13):
one parent to the other to pay a monetary amount
and that's based off of factors like custody and income.
The things that surprised me, and this surprised most people,
you know, because most people I would meet up with,
they're not meet up with, but that would come into
the agency and be sitting across the table from me.
They'd say, hey, why do I have to pay child support?

(05:34):
We have fifty to fifty custody or something like that.
It doesn't make sense. Then I'd have to explain the
laws and the calculator and say, well, whoever the higher
earner is has to pay into the lesser earner, and
you know it's written.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
In the family code that.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
You know, especially I was explained to us that they're
trying to kind of even out the lifestyles there for
the kid as they go back and forth, or things
like paternity laws. One of the things that really surprised
me was in California, child if paternity is established, you know,
especially when the kid's born, and typically through marriage there's

(06:08):
a presumption of paternity, so there's no need for an
extra kind of parental establishment sort of mechanism. It just
happens from the marriage itself, as the child's issued forth
within the marriage. That you know, once the child turns
to you can't you know, you're the parent, you know
what I mean, And you can't challenge that.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
You can't.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
They're not going to undo it because they're going to
say it's going to cause psychological harm to the child.
So you know, I see a lot of people getting divorced,
you know, maybe the kids three or four now, and
then suddenly, you know, whatever comes out of that blow up,
Hey I cheated on you, or I don't think the
kid's mine or something like that.

Speaker 3 (06:44):
Then then they got to get that.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
Kind of spilled to them, and some of them would
do a private genetic test and find that out and
then or you know, she'd go back to live with
their ex boyfriend who actually fathered the child or something
like that, and he's still pining, like I saw all
these wacky things. And there's all these things about the
system that people aren't aware of or they don't think about.
And also sixty five percent of our cases were started

(07:08):
because of welfare. So typically somebody would go sign up
for welfare a cash grant for you know, them and
the child, and then when they saw that you know,
one or the other parent wasn't in the home, we
would get a request from their office to say, hey,
go get the money back, because when they sign up
for welfare, they're signing over child support rights to the state.
So we were trying to recoup a lot of these

(07:30):
these tax dollars going out, and you know, and then
there was all kinds of welfare fraud. That's a different
kind of thing. I used to call that spillage. And
then on the back end, you know, there's there's matching
funds for child support based off how it's collected.

Speaker 3 (07:43):
So there's these different performance measures.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
There's these different sort of family law aspects that were
set up in order to try to establish paternity for
kids born out of wedlock. And then you had this
kind of interfacing of this original family law that we
had for a long time, especially before genetic tests that
would find different ways to say someone is the father
based off of holding out to be the father things

(08:06):
that weren't genetic in nature. Then you have this other
thing here, which is now we have the modern science,
and it kind of seems to come together in a
way that is really tough on fathers in my opinion.
So there's a lot going on there.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
Yeah yeah, yeah, well okay, so that sounds like a
lot of red tape for you know, for and it
seems like it just comes out of maybe there's just
something wrong with like marriage right now, and that's what
so so like families, you know, just like forming them.

(08:42):
So then how did you go from doing this child
support stuff, which kind of got you into the red
pill stuff to then looking at the dowries and the
history of that.

Speaker 4 (08:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
You know, so for a long time I had been studying,
even after having worked at child support. I mean, we
did learn about the history there and the family codes,
but it didn't go that far back. And I was
very much interested in the history of these laws. So
I kind of just kept digging back and digging back,
and it's like, okay, no Fall and then to at
Fall and what came before that, and you know, there's

(09:15):
this huge cultural conversation going on about what marriage is
really supposed to be or what it really was, quote unquote,
and I was interested in child support laws, and I
kept going back and back and back and back, and
I got all the way back to like Hamerabi's code,
and in there, I can't remember the line is this
is this line about, you know, what kind of happens

(09:37):
to the produce of the farm or whatever if the
couple divorced but they had children, and where that would go.
And I'm I'm getting a little kick out of that,
like hey, look, it's the world's oldest child support law
or something like that.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
And then but in Hammerabbi's Code.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
Also bride price and dowry are both mentioned and it's
discussed you know, what happens to those in the event
of splitting up or just just rules around that. And
that wasn't the f first ping I got in my
mind about that, but that was like the recent one.
So as I was looking for child support, it kind
of and looking at the history of child support, it
took me back to that.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
Then I finally decided.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
I was like, you know, I've seen this a couple
times just in my life, and I thought, you know,
maybe I should really do a comprehensive study of this.
And that's when I started digging into academic journals and
just trying to find anything I could find to learn
about the system. Prior to that, i'd say in my
early twenties, I was reading a lot of books, and
one of the books I was reading, I was reading

(10:32):
some Douts Staevsky, you know, and he wrote a book
called Brothers Karamazov and he also wrote The Idiot.

Speaker 4 (10:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
It's interesting because in these books, a lot of the
discussions about the characters, you know, kind of involved their
marriages or their marriage prospects, and there's this discussion about
the dowry, and as I'm reading this, I can see
how the characters are weighing their options based off different
dowry amounts and the different motivations that the characters have.
When I had first read that book, I thought it

(10:59):
was I was like, oh, that's weird. So the woman's side,
I just thought it was weird that the woman was
bringing money because I had always thought it's the man
who brings the money. So that was like my first ping,
and then it kind of just existed back there for
a bit. And then as I was digging into child
support and family law and how we kind of got
the system we ended up with, I just ran into
that basically. And then I I as when I saw

(11:22):
that and I started reading more and more about it,
especially the anthropology about it, it just kind of blew
my mind.

Speaker 4 (11:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah, I've been I've been thinking a lot about like,
you know, we look at the divorce rates and all
these issues with you know, like child support and paternity,
fraud and false paternity and all this other stuff, and
just how like cutthroat it gets, you know when divorce
comes around. I mean, I've heard my parents stayed together,

(11:48):
but I heard horror stories about friends and even my wife,
you know, but and it got me thinking, like something
about this is just wrong, and I think that it's
been wrong for a long time. So well, first of all,
someone in the chat is asking me, so I'm gonna
do this because we're gonna move.

Speaker 4 (12:04):
On into towery stuff.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
But someone is asking, what is the craziest situation you've
ever seen with child support?

Speaker 4 (12:10):
Doing the child support thing.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
I mean, I've seen some very large amounts, I've seen
some very weird divorce judgments. The one I always remember
and I've I've shared this in some other places. But
the one that was like both my coworker and I
just had to like take a break for a second.
Was I kind of touched on it earlier. But my
coworker who sat next to me, he was on a
phone call. He was on our advanced collections team, so

(12:33):
when people really didn't want to pay, we had a
special team in the office that would try to go
in there and get this money and with whatever enforcement
tactics they had. And he was on a pretty tough
phone call. And when he got off the phone call,
he walked over to come just he just had to
talk to somebody, I guess, but I was hearing him
on the phone and he's like, he was just like,

(12:54):
I don't know what I would do if I was
that guy, you know. And I was like, what's going on? Man,
I'm like, you know what happened? And he was explaining
to me that this guy was married and he had
I think it was two kids with somebody, and then
they had gotten divorced, and you know, he had to
pay child support. And what ended up happening though, according
to this guy, is that she went to go live
with her ex boyfriend with the kids too. And according

(13:16):
to him, those kids are you know, we're from his
own private tests or whatever. It's actually not his kids
and they were the kids of that boyfriend. So he
couldn't stomach it. I don't think most guys could having
to have his labor slaved over to that household and
pay every month to go pay into a household of

(13:38):
you know, for that's their family and it's not even
his kids, and you know, he was having just he
just couldn't take it.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
That ruling was made with that knowledge or was it
that like did the did the judge or whoever asked
the ruling? They were like, I know, these aren't your kids,
but you're paying for them anyway.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
Like that, That's essentially what happened, just because of how
the law works here and when they got divorced. I
don't know if if the judge took that into account,
but even if he did, presumption of paternity was already there,
you know what I mean. So since the kids were
issued within the marriage, and you know, the kids were
above two at the time of the divorce, even though

(14:17):
he wasn't the father, he still had a legal obligation
to fulfill as as the legal father of those kids.
And we just live in such a weird system where
it's like she can get away with doing that, and
the custody to him at that point probably wasn't worth
fighting for, especially if they weren't his kids, and we
knew that, and everybody you know pretty much knew that.

(14:39):
But there's no there's unless you can, like maybe somehow
facilitate an adoption, and like that other guy, and everybody
would be willing to do that.

Speaker 3 (14:47):
There's no way out of it for that guy. So
he just he refused to pay.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
And you know, refusing to pays another problem, because you
can't bankrupt. That debt interest is going to keep growing
on it. Child support has like the strongest ENFORCEM and
actions right up there with the IRS. It was modeled
off of the IRS system when it was pitched to
Congress to vamp up child support in the mid nineties.
So you know, no license, no not able to renew

(15:10):
your passport, bank account levies, business licenses, fishing's licenses, all
that stuff, revoked, gambling winnings, intercepted tax returns, intercepted lians
put on houses, liens put on your parents' houses, if
we think you're going to inherit it, I mean it
just the list goes on of stuff that we would do.
So that's one thing that that always stood out to me.
Other than that, it was just seeing you know, a

(15:32):
lot of divorces. I've seen a lot of I've seen
a lot of guys kind of take the trad con deal,
so to speak, at least that's what I call it,
and then just kind of end up, you know, with
high style my child support just in the sense of
like being the sole provider and having to stay at
home mom. And you know, I know a lot of
people my especially conservatives, and I get it. It definitely

(15:54):
is strange or feels strange to them. I reading so
many divorce or I had come to the conclusion if
I was ever going to sign based off of the
laws that we have, that I would do it with
someone with a similar income with me, or at least
putting something significant into the marriage. Because of all the
divorces I saw, the ones where they seem to make

(16:17):
around the same amount, seem to be the most amiable
go figure, and you know, typically what would happen is
they would just waive spousal support, both of them, and
they would they would figure out custody, you know, as
best they can, and one person I have to pay
a smaller amount of child support depending on what the
custody arrangement was going to be, but it just makes
it a lot easier. It was either that or don't

(16:38):
have the marriage license involved at all. Then you're gonna
have to still pay a significant amount of child support,
but at least you're not also paying spousal support and
going through these other things.

Speaker 4 (16:48):
Right, Yeah, yeah, no, I think you're right about that.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:51):
I believe that the trad cons I guess as we
call them today, they think they're living in a world
that or there a world that existed, but I think
that what they're living in is still modernity in a
lot of ways, Like it's it's a recent invention, which
is why I wanted to talk to you about the
dowry stuff.

Speaker 4 (17:10):
So, so, like when people think of the.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
Term dowry, if they are aware of it, they usually
associate it with you know, like countries like India, where
it still goes on, and of course there's a lot
of issues with that even there. There was a documentary
made about, you know, the problems with the dowries in India.
But this is not like really exclusive to those parts
of the world. So could you just for the you know,

(17:34):
people watching, explain what dowry is and like how it
differs from the current system.

Speaker 3 (17:40):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yeah, And most of my research has focused on Western history,
and I specifically did that on purpose because when we
do think of dowry, we think of these far away
places from cultures that are different from us. But the
most surprising thing for me was how pervasive and how
prevalent dowry was in European and Western history altogether, but

(18:01):
dowry specifically, and this is as opposed to bride wealth
so this is this is a book Bride Wealth and
Dowry by Jack Goody and S. J. Tambia. Jack Goody
At was an Oxford anthropologist and dowry very specific bride
price dowry.

Speaker 3 (18:17):
These are housed.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Under the term the umbrella term of marriage transaction. Okay, yeah,
So a marriage transaction is a transfer of you can
say wealth, goods, property, cash at the time of marriage.
So basically there is a property transmission, a property trans
transfer event, a wealth transfer at the time of marriage.
And for most of human history, most marriages had some

(18:41):
kind of wealth transfer.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
Now, a dowry very specifically is a wealth transfer from
the bride's parents to the bride, so she becomes endowed
with what is essentially an inheritance except you know, you
might hear okay, sons used to inherit and then sons
got the inheritance and daughters didn't, but daughters did get
an inheritance, and that that's what the dowry was. So

(19:06):
they would get their portion of the family fund at
the time of marriage and then this would be you know,
dowered upon them, I guess you can say endowed, and
then when they got married that would go with them
to form the new household with their husband. Okay, so
it is a very real material amount of wealth, right, Okay,
it was.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
Like a business merger then, or something like forming a
if you or is that like to crew to call
a marriage like a business.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
It's creating new conjugal estate or conjugal fund. I mean,
because you know, when you think about it, this new
couple forming will need something to get them started. I mean,
there's a bargain there, there's a there's a marriage bargain.

Speaker 3 (19:49):
You could call it a.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Business kind of thing. I think the issue with that
is what really ends up happening to this whole system
if something called the love match comes and unseats it,
you know what I mean. I mean, especially as labor
value between the sexists start to change, and we can
get into that. But there is a negotiation, and typically
what you would see happen is that the size of
the endowment to the daughter or the dowry would typically

(20:13):
match either the son's potential the groom. The potential groom's
potential income and then also his inheritance are bequest from
his parents down the line. So in the marriage contract
and in the negotiation, you see a positive ascertain of matching,
and there's a balance there between what she's coming with
now and what he's pretty much expected to get. So

(20:36):
this helps set up the new household and it helps
set him up to then be, you know, the person
that's out there providing and all these kinds of things,
and dowries were no joke. I mean, families work together
to save the dowries for their daughters. And in a
lot of places Italy, France, even England, Germany, Cyprus, Greece,

(20:56):
a typical dowry would be a house from the wife's side,
provided you know, by them. And this is like middle
class stuff right here, as you go from top to bottom,
so you know, you might another myth you might hear
is that it was just wealthy people, just royalty or.

Speaker 3 (21:11):
Something you did this.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
That's another thing that I discovered isn't true. It's it's
everybody from from top to bottom. And if you don't
have a dowry, well then you didn't get married. I
don't know if I can share my screen, but it's
like I have newspaper articles of the pope giving out
dowries in the eighteen hundreds, so that women who couldn't
get married, can then get husbands or use it to
join a convent, which is typically a little cheaper than

(21:34):
the entry into marriage.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
Yeah, I won't be able to share screens right now
because I don't have it set up for that.

Speaker 3 (21:40):
But well that's no problem. That's no problem.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
I can just I trust that it's really You can
give me the links and I'll put them in the
description people.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
Yeah, sure, yeah, but yeah, anyway, so that's that's no problem.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
But so it is from top to on. So that's
the dowry.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
The other thing is is the bride price, which anthropologists
renamed bride wealth because bride price carried this connotation of
buying and selling, which once anthropologists really looked at this,
that's not the case. And so a bride price that's
what you'd see in like the Old Testament, like the
Mohar basically, and when you read in the Old Testament

(22:14):
about some of the marriage transactions there, that's what you
see typically, and that is a transfer from the groom
side and that goes to the bride's family. Okay, And
the reason anthropologists changed it from brideprice because it's not
like a highest bidder situation. Typically, bride prices are uniform,
meaning that there is just this one set bride price

(22:35):
within the community and then it creates a circulating fund,
so unlike a dowry, which goes and it stays with
the new couple and solidifies them in a certain class
because it tends to be people of matching wealth, you know.
Marrying you get essentially a circulating fund around the community.
So you pay a bride price, and that bride price
needs to be enough to get that other family the

(22:57):
ability to procure another daughter as a wife their family,
and then it goes around like that. So the differences
between the dowry in a bride well their bride price
system is that in dowry systems you see a lot
more income stratification, so there's very rich, there's middle class,
there's poor, and you also see you see less divorce
and you see monogamy. Typically in bride price paying systems,

(23:20):
you see more uniformity in wealth, so there's less variation there,
and there tends to be higher divorce from what I've
read and what they see nowadays, And a lot of
the difference has to do with women's labor value. So
what you see historically is that in bride price paying societies.
A women's labor value was the bulk contribution to agriculture,
so they the tools humans were using in order to

(23:44):
do agriculture was a lot more primitive. Then the plow
comes on board, and the plow, oh, you have this
ability to plow a bunch of land, make a lot
more calories, make a lot more money. And then things
like you know, private landholdings start to become more important
and you start seeing a differentiation. But it was mostly
men that can do the plow because it required a
lot of burst strength. You got this giant thing digging

(24:05):
into the earth. You got too big cattle over here,
and you're trying to keep this thing straight. So women
weren't really doing it, so their labor value went down
in respect to men. And this led to a further
complexity of society, a class stratification, more specialization, and different
niche type of professions. You can say private property mattered
a lot more. The transference of private property through the

(24:27):
generations meant a lot more. But as you saw this
change in the amount of labor value, women now need
to be endowed with the dowry in order to match,
in order to you know, keep them in league with
guys who are up here, and that's how you get
this stratification with it land in bride price. Typically, land
is not scarce in bride price paying societies because people

(24:48):
can only work so much of it and the land
is more so held in corporate As this starts to
change over, you see this historically. You see you know,
Israelites changing from bride price a dowry. You can see
this in the history of marriage contracts as they're still
paying some mohart, but the dowry the woman's bringing in
dwarfs that by a lot and we have that, we

(25:09):
have all that stuff, and then you know, so it
really much is in league with how society developed pretty much.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
So I know that was a long answer, but those.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
Are that lasts all the way down from bride price,
specifically in the Near East. It's still in Sub Saharan
Africa and a lot of places because they didn't really
get the plow. But what you what you see is
in ancient Athens they're doing a dowry system. And we
know ancient Athens is fairly sophisticated compared to the rest
of the surrounding bride price paying societies, and they would

(25:38):
almost look at them as as more barbaric or something.
But this is where you get these these high works
of philosophy and geometry and music and all these things
that we have from then on, and there's been this
unbroken dowry, you know, sort of going from there to
the Romans, and then as they start to you know,
spread into Germania, then the dowry starts to take over

(25:59):
there as they start to you know, change society there
and it becomes more sophisticated. Then you get you know,
Germany doing dowry. You get France doing dowry. France had
dowry until the laws were there until the mid sixties
is when they got rid of them. Italy it was
in I believe it was in the in the seventies
when they abolished their dowry laws. Greece was in eighty three.

(26:22):
I believe Spain was eighty one. So as you start
to see industrialization, you start to see feminism, you start
to see the change in labor value between men and
women and what people are doing.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
Do you think it started with industrialization because I was
wondering about that, Go ahead.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
Think yeah, So.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
The dowry system was still alive and well in a
lot of places, and that is one major factor. Or
you can say modernization, but really industrialization too, because England
is one of the first two to modernize, you can say,
and that's pretty much the first place where it started
to fall out of favor because in the early parts
of modernization, people can make a lot of money and

(27:03):
they can finance things a lot easier. So I don't
want to say it's just myrinization, because it's also the rise.

Speaker 3 (27:09):
Of romantic love. I would put that there.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
And for a long time that was not something that
happened within marriage. It was happening outside of marriage, and
only a very small amount of people can even afford
to really indulge in that. As time goes on, you
get the printing press, you get these tales of you know,
romantic chivalry starting to become more popular. It's still very
hard to have a marriage just based off of you

(27:33):
have a love marriage or a marriage based off of
passion instead of reason. And then as we get into
industrialization and modernization and all these kinds of things, we
start to see great wealth, we start to see different
forms of media, and the culture starts to change. Suddenly
in England they're not saving dowries for their daughters anymore.

Speaker 3 (27:52):
Now it starts to.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Be like, well, you know, as a man, you shouldn't
even you know, ask for a dowry. But meanwhile, over
in France they're still doing their dowry and their marriages
are turning out fine, and you have newspaper clippings of
English writers comparing their system to the French system and thinking,
should we, you know, bring back the dowry for us

(28:13):
or not? And then you know, the US had some
history with dowries as well for a long time, but
you know, pretty soon after independence that started to go away,
even though there were still plenty of people doing it.
I think that really was only made possible because of
a huge boom in wealth basically. And then you know,
as you get into that, you get into World War Two,

(28:35):
and then there's feminism as well, what was called the
woman's Movement. I have a newspaper article on that from
about one hundred years ago, and it's called the Dowerless Girls,
and it's talking about how you can say it's written
kind of by a feminist. It's almost like a propaganda piece.
It's talking about, well, if you're not going to give
us dowries, then you should at least let your daughters

(28:55):
get educated, because if we end up as spinsters, then
we want to be able to take care of ourselves.
So you get all this stuff, and then as it
comes in more recently, then there starts to be more
of a harshness against it, and they're doing everything they
can to get rid of dowry laws. I have an
article from seventies from Italy and it's talking about how

(29:15):
once they allowed divorce there because there was no divorce.
I mean, there was divorce prior in European history, from
Roman times and all that. But then when Christianity was
really managing things there, it was just the Nulmans, so.

Speaker 3 (29:28):
That's what they had to deal with.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
But then in the seventies, when Italy finally allowed divorce,
then suddenly it was like, what do we do about
these old dowry laws that used to be here? And
then it became this whole thing where, oh, the dowry
is something that puts these unfair expectations on women. And
then you see a lot of this stuff about like
dowry violence and India and stuff like that and all
these kinds of things. But it's sold it's spoken of

(29:53):
in a way to where they want, in my opinion,
they want people to have a kind of collective amnesia
about it. But it was a system that was there
for a long time. And then when you bring it
into today, we get our knees marriage, which is kind
of what was sold on TV. You know, it's a
love match. The man brings everything to the marriage. Women
don't have to worry about that. I think we can

(30:13):
afford that back then, but nowadays, as the cost of
living goes up, the cost of housing goes up, we
have no fault divorce, which has been a disaster. At
least at fault divorce gave you some protection if you
were going to be the sole provider of everything. I
think men are having to recalibrate and we're kind of
having a look at this to see what is it
that our ancestors were doing and how can we apply
some of that.

Speaker 4 (30:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, So for the audience, do you guys have any
questions or statements that you want to send us, and
you have questions for Shaw here, feel free to send
us a super chat, a rumble rant, or a super
child by going to feed the Badger dot Com force.
Last just the tip to send it and I'll be
sure to read it on stream.

Speaker 4 (30:51):
I'll do them in a bulk.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
So it's interesting we're looking at all of these different phases,
and I was thinking, it's funny that we're living in
a time I'm where conservatives are preserving something that's actually
really new, Like they think they're conserving something, but it's not.

Speaker 4 (31:08):
It's like this.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
Illusion, this mythology from the fifties that you were just
talking about, and then you have like the I guess
you could say the feminists or the progressives, and they're
railing against that like it's oppression. But there's something much
older that seems to have been memory hold by people right,
Like we don't even talk about it, and it confuses
people a lot because I feel like we've been sold

(31:31):
this idea of romantic love as the most aspirational goal
for people.

Speaker 4 (31:37):
It just doesn't.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
I mean, it seems like marriages were more stable, more sustainable,
more realistic. Even if you according to what you said,
it seemed like people of the higher classes were matched
with people of the higher classes, and then the middle
classes were matched and the lower classes were matched, and
people were relatively satisfied, like hypergamy wasn't you know, at

(32:01):
least it couldn't like get its claws in even if
it did exist.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
Right, I often say that dowry is a check on hypergamy. Yeah,
and it was because you know, there are these things
whirling around like like romantic love or passion, you know
what I mean. And yes, these two people might find
each other and they might have some sense of that.
But what would happen is eventually, when the marriage discussion

(32:25):
came around, it would be okay, let's get down to
brass tacks here, and the families would then start parlaying
in that way. And if the dowry is not commensurate
with what you know, would make sense for that family
and what they know to be, you know, is going
to be the level that their son is at, they

(32:45):
would reject the marriage. So there was a level of
pragmatism that existed within the system. Then what happened is
that all kind of got thrown out the window of
a moving car and it was well, if you two
love each other, then that's all that matters, and the
rest will figure itself out. We even have articles from
back then of people It's like people knew once the
love matt started becoming popular that after a few years,

(33:07):
you guys would would hate each other or start fighting
each other. And a lot of it, you know, did
surround money and these kinds of things. So it's just
it's amazing seeing that stuff in the written word, you
know what I mean. And it's just it's it's absolutely fascinating.
Just it's just fascinating to me.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
And you know a.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Lot of the stuff too, you can you can see
you know, in the marriage contracts, and there there were matchmakers,
matchmakers who knew, you know, what a woman's dowry was
or what a man's prospects were.

Speaker 3 (33:37):
You know.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
Another myth is like this kind of arranged marriage understanding
of like, well, you guys are both kids and your
parents figured it out and it's forever going.

Speaker 4 (33:44):
To be that way.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
But it wasn't really like that. It was more of
like who's available, what does this look like? You know,
let's have a discussion. Can we make this work? You know,
there was no prevailing welfare system back then, that people
just lived off the tea of that system. It's like,
if we're going to get married and do this project together,
we need to make sure that we have some kind

(34:07):
of plan so we don't do this and then run
out of steam and it's just a complete disaster, especial
if we're going to bring kids in the world. Nowadays,
it's just like there's all these other mechanisms that you know,
because of the states sort of barging into the private
home life of people to where either there's going to
be a welfare system for you know there, or there's
going to be a sort of forced wealth transfer through

(34:29):
child support and the family courts and these kinds of things.
So in order to secure good marriages, you know, the
bride side is looking for a guy with a good
potential income. Here the groom side is looking for a
well and dowed daughter, and in that negotiation process, both
sides are actually being hypergamas. She's trying to get the
highest she can get, he's trying to get the most
well in doubt he can get. And in that negotiation

(34:51):
process people end up getting the best bargain they can get.

Speaker 4 (34:54):
Yeah, yeah, but it's realistic.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
It's like like today we have you know, fating and
there is no Families are generally not involved at all
in that whole process. Like men and women are just
swiping left or right, or they're going to you know,
swap me to whatever it is they do.

Speaker 4 (35:11):
I don't even know because I've been married for ten years.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
But but whatever it is, people do they do that now,
and I think it's it's it's they think that this
is like the best you can do is working with
the system as it is.

Speaker 4 (35:24):
But I don't.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
I don't think it's I don't think it's designed to work.
I think it's broken. And I think that you can
just look at, you know, the state of marriage, divorced children,
dating in general. So like, do you think that do
you ever wonder or do you believe that maybe the
concept of romantic love came into place specifically to sabotage

(35:45):
like marriages or do you think there was some some
like optimistic view of those who were pushing it and
then they didn't know what the consequences might be.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
I think that I think that to some extent, you know,
it did come in when there was opportunity for it
to come in. Maybe people felt like they could afford
to do that. It was still something that you can
say was shamed for a very long time, even up
until recently, and seen as a more selfish thing I
think more recently, especially it's become commercialized, you can say,

(36:19):
and definitely encouraged that way. It's a tough question for
me to answer because I don't want to say it
was on purpose, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
It almost seems like women in a.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
Way use romantic love, you know, especially culturally speaking, and
especially when it comes to certain entitlements that they believe
that they have in a way to say, this is
what it's supposed to be and that's traditional, and men
are kind of shamed into this role or told that
they're not masculine. The whole discussion of what masculinity really
is I think revolves around this because men feel like

(36:50):
they have to play into this otherwise they're shamed if
they don't. But deep down, I think men have this
gut feeling that something just isn't right, you know. And
when I looked at this system, I was like, Okay,
now I understand, like this makes complete sense. But I
do think it has been used, you know, I don't know.
I don't want to say by this or that, but
it's like, as as a culture, I can say it

(37:11):
has been used to encourage hypergamy, and you know, for
a there's definitely an element of people wanting to indulge
in it itself because I would say it's like a
sweet sugar, you know what I mean. And you had
these more pragmatic style marriages that I would say really
built the entire West or all of civilization. And then
it's like, okay, well we're going to try to allow

(37:32):
love into marriage when typically love was was an extra
marital thing that was not like I don't want to
say Dowry style marriages are loveless marriages. There is a
love built on respect, there's a familial kind of love.
There's a love that comes with the mutual investment. But
it wasn't like a romantic save the world that's just
you and I against the world type of thing. It's hey,
our families matter and our communities matter. But then what

(37:54):
happens is you start to see these changes in family
law because you know, pretty much when the US is born,
they break away from the Church of England. They want
divorce where you couldn't have divorce before, and then it
moves into the state legislature to decide that. But this
is how you get our system of at fault divorce
because and then then you start to have reasons like
adultery or you know, infidelity or abandonment, and you start

(38:17):
to see this whole process evolve. But with at fault divorce,
the reason you needed fault was was to decide, okay,
what happens to the assets and stuff within the marriage.
If she did something that was untoward, then you know,
the courts can see that and say, okay, you're the
injured party, You're going to keep all the assets and
then you guys are gonna get divorced. So or if

(38:39):
he did something bad, even if he's the one coming
in with the wealth, then you know she has the
right to go seek a divorce there at the courthouse
and if if they can prove that, then then she
would get the bulk of the assets. Then when you
got no fault divorce, it's like they really just took
off any.

Speaker 3 (38:54):
Restraints they out on hypergamy.

Speaker 2 (38:55):
It was already now you were allowing hypergamy with the
love match to occur, but and then it became okay.
I know people don't like hearing fifty to fifty, especially conservatives,
but they need to understand that in our family codes,
it's just a rote fifty to fifty, especially when it
comes to divorce. Then we got no fault marriages and
all hell, I'd say, really broke loose at that point,

(39:16):
and then it became love matches being used against people
or in a predatory manner. I do think also, to
answer your question a bit, I do think there is
an aspect of governments having an incentive to move away
from the dowry system. I was reading about Greece, you know,
and they were looking to join the EEC, which became

(39:37):
the European Union somewhere there in like the late seventies,
early eighties, and I think my suspicion is is that
there was a lot of conditions in order to sort
of receive the economic benefits of joining these larger sort
of groups of economic networks was to modernize, basically, and
they saying, okay, well, in order to modernize, this is
what you need to do. You're gonna want women in

(39:58):
the labor force, because that's gonna make it make sense
for us to take you into this commitment, into this union.

Speaker 3 (40:04):
Here.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
What happened in Greece was that they were looking to
abolish the dowry system, and it was the Greek Orthodox
Church was the one that they were standing against it,
and they had been doing dowry since ancient Athens over there,
And then there was a meeting with the Justice minister.
This isn't a newspaper article from the late seventies talking
about this or early eighties, I believe, and somehow they

(40:26):
convinced the church to basically stand down. They never gave
their approval to it, but they said, well, just we
have no opinion on this basically.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
And then they got rid of that, you know what
I mean.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
And it's like, so I do think not I guess
what I'm trying to clarify is it's not just an
individual basis of people wanting to indulge in this. But
I do think there is such a thing as this
economic incentive for states in themselves to try to essentially
juice the family nest eggs, so to speak, and bring
it out into the economy for this short term run up.
And we're now seeing people that have nothing left and

(40:57):
they're trying to figure out what to do.

Speaker 4 (41:00):
Yeah, yeah, I think I can see that.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
It's like these things happen maybe a little organically, maybe
mostly organically, but then there are other entities that see
that and they're like, oh, we can you know, like
let's leverage this to benefit like the state does. And
I could see how that would work out. So yeah,
it seems like, you know what, another thing about the
dowry that you're pointing out with I guess you could
say like it's essentially bringing two families together to like

(41:24):
strengthen them by having them marry, you know, like the
son to the daughter or whatever, and you get like
a larger family as a result of that, which has
a ton of benefits to it.

Speaker 4 (41:35):
You know.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt you, forgive me. These people
own this land over here. You guys own this land.
You now have some kind of tie that's just on
a normal peasant landholding level.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
Yeah, on the level of royalty.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
You know, England is looking at France, and Spain is
looking at France, and France is getting too powerful. Let's
marry you know, a daughter of Spain over into England
and give her a large dowry, and we now have
an alliance to hold France back. I mean, so this guy,
you know, the king in England could sit here and
say I want to marry the hottest tavern wench I

(42:09):
can find you know what I'm saying or whatever, or
he can indulge in romantic love, but it's going to
seem irrational to everybody if he chooses to do that
instead of marrying you know, a princess of Spain and
then you know, receiving one entire annual year of income
that the crown brings in as dowry and solidifying this alliance. So,

(42:31):
you know, the other myth I guess to the spell
is that people have no choice in it. That's not
entirely you know, true. It's people do have a choice
in it. It's just that they have to face the
sort of community ire of there's a good marriage here,
why why wouldn't you consider it? This one, especially when
it comes to all these benefits that help the family
and also helps put you in a better position.

Speaker 3 (42:54):
So typically, you know, the incentive that the parents have over.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
The kids is the inheritance, right, because the the daughter's
dowry is is it's what's called the pre mortem inheritance. Okay,
obviously the son's gonna get one too on the back end.
But what they're doing is they're negotiating for for the
kid's marriages, and the kids are negotiating too. And it's
if the kid, if you know, son or daughter, wants
to elope with their lover Romeo and Juliet style, you

(43:20):
will get disowned. And to be disowned means you're giving,
you're forfeiting your inheritance. That's going to affect you greatly
down the line, because if one kid wants to do that,
then the parents might say, let's put our money into
these other two kids or other kid that we have
who's actually has our the family's concerns at heart. And
it's just I guess what I'm trying to say is
it's there's this level of pragmatism and consideration that that

(43:43):
people have to think about. And before the era of
class mobility, so with modernization, you can it was a
lot the sell of college. For instance, It's just like, okay,
you could take this relatively poor person and you can
put them to college and then they can have a
big jump and income.

Speaker 3 (43:59):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
So so with class mobility comes to certain thing where
it's now you can make a bunch of income. We
have all these apartment buildings that are you know, coming
in this megacity that we're building, and that's cheap. We
actually don't listen, need to listen to mom and dad
so much anymore, because we can just we're eighteen now
we can pay for everything. Back then, for a long time,
it wasn't like that. What I'm basically saying is it's

(44:20):
it's looking like it's kind of becoming like how it
used to be. As the cost of rent go up,
as the cost of.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
Housing, people are staying at home longer, and yeah, yeah, that's.

Speaker 3 (44:29):
A whole thing.

Speaker 4 (44:30):
You know.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
Oh well half a millennials are at home or whatever.
So it's like, okay, as this becomes tougher, Maybe it's not.
It's not really because of you know, like instead of thinking, oh,
idealistically it should be like this for everybody, it's like, no,
we've had the fruits of modernization. We are now at
a point where we're kind of at the tail end
of this. Costs are high, and literally right before this

(44:52):
we had to do things a certain way. So what
are we going to do now now that that conditions
are changing?

Speaker 4 (44:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:59):
And the the other thing too, is that like if
you when if you live in that time, it wasn't
I would guess that in most cases people weren't really
against like, you know, marrying into this other family because
they were probably people you knew very well, you grew
up with, you probably felt like strongly for them already
because you were they were in your community, and you

(45:19):
wanted to bring this together. And so I don't think
it was like, you know, there's this usually this come
out of these romantic stories where there's a girl and
she's betrothed to somebody and she doesn't like them, and
that person's not a nice guy or whatever. But that's
I mean, that's obviously just there to make it make
the other guy see more appealing. But the truth is,

(45:39):
I think most people were, you know, like if you
even when I was growing up, I lived in a
neighborhood and I knew everyone that I went to school
with because we all lived in the same area. We
didn't have the internet, so you know, there was a
pretty good chance that if I didn't move, I was
going to probably end up with a girl who lived
in the neighborhood. And you know, but even but even then,

(46:01):
that's not that's still in modernity more or less. But
I think that, you know, that's that's another thing to.

Speaker 4 (46:07):
Point out as well.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
And also, I so what I'm also understanding from this
is that when you when you do this, you make
your clan larger and you make these connections. That this
is tied to something that I think that in particular,
men are losing and this and this has a lot
to do with the sort of fatherlessness that we're that
we have going on. A lot of people, especially men,

(46:31):
young men, they are losing their connection to their ancestry
because of how adomized they are from their own fathers,
grandfathers and so on. Right, this is like a big
and people don't want to acknowledge this as a problem
because we keep hearing this is essentially patriarchy, right, But
I think that this is like a necessary thing, like

(46:53):
when you have all these For example, there's a lot
of men out here now that are you know, they
join radical groups. They you know, become members of Antifa
or some you know, the KKK or Neo Nazis or
communists or whatever, because they're looking for something to belong to,
and a lot of them are fatherless, like they come

(47:14):
from single mother homes. And if you look at the
number of generations of single motherhood, we have like men
who are so whose fathers didn't have fathers and whose
fathers then didn't have fathers, right, So this is the
opposite of the thing that you're talking about, which is
normally you would be able to say, like you know
what your last name means right now, like you know,

(47:37):
women are taking their husband's.

Speaker 3 (47:39):
Name support.

Speaker 4 (47:42):
Hyphenated names.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
It's weird too, because they think that they're disconnecting from men.
But they're just taking their father's name if they you know,
like if they hyphenate, so it's still the man's name.
But but there's this propaganda, this thing that we're fed
like you know, you the attachment to the father is
there's something wrong with that. There's something you know, like

(48:06):
toxic about that. And I think that like don't I
don't know if we're gonna get back to that system,
but I think that there should be an acknowledgment that
it existed. Like this whole concept of dating is new,
isn't it, like in the grand scheme of things?

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, like the way we do dating now.
I would absolutely agree. You said a lot of things there,
and a lot of important salient things, especially about the atomization.
I mean, just on an individual level, like me working
at Child'sport, reading all the divorce judgment. One of the
things that I realized even before all this stuff was
that I was watching and understanding how hard it is

(48:43):
to build generational wealth in this country. Cause if you
can't have solid marriages that you can rely on property
transmission between the generations, it just falls like sand through
your fingers. As soon as the family law courts touch it,
I would see, you know, what's supposed to go to
the sun and dots there, whether it's for college or
their marriages. It gets, you know, juiced by the attorneys.

(49:05):
You have all these custody issues with fathers, you know,
not being able to see their kids unless they pay
a lot of money, and that that's unfortunate in itself.
You don't have parents looking forward to their to their
kids' futures in that way. And then you have a
lot of kids born out of out of wedlock or
born from these unions that didn't have much thought put
into them. And then people get tired of each other

(49:27):
once once the love's gone. That's the sort of unfortunate
thing there is. What a lot of families understood back
then is that love is very fleeting, and a lot
of our marriage therapy.

Speaker 3 (49:37):
I'm sorry was it.

Speaker 4 (49:39):
I'm sorry for interrupting.

Speaker 1 (49:40):
I said, I think that love is not like people
think love is this like chemical thing that you just
feel and your butterflies and all that. But I think
that it's something that you build over time, like you
you don't. You don't just either have It's not one
of these things that either happens or it doesn't happen.
You work on it and and I think the work
that you put into it is where it comes from,
and it lasts a lot longer. I think Bruce Lee

(50:01):
had a saying about that that it was like, it's
not like a roaring flame, but it's like an ember,
you know, that burns for a long time.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
So well, yeah, and I mean, you know, families, I'd
like to think over the long course of the generations
figured out that if you build a marriage on what's essentially,
you know, seduction and romantic love, I mean, some element
of seduction can be there, like there is some element
of you being attracted to your wife and your wife
being attracted to you. I get that, you know, but

(50:28):
if it's front and center and nothing else means anything,
and you're making your decision based off that, A lot
of people knew that that was a recipe for disaster.
A lot of our marriage therapy is about when the
love dies, you can kind of say, and it's about, well,
what do you do to reignite that spark, so to speak,
And it's just about like, there's we know what we
know that that that kind of I've seen the light

(50:50):
switch happen so much, even with just people that I
moms and dads have had to speak with that child support.
I can tell that the people who hated each other,
by the time they were talking to me, probably we
were in love with each other the most, you know,
before they ever had to deal with our agency.

Speaker 3 (51:04):
So it's just it's this thing.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
And I think even naturally as guys in our current
dating sort of scene, I mean, there's just so many
relationships that don't work out. There's plenty of heartbreaks, and
then you get to a point where you are more pragmatic,
I think, with how you choose or you're gonna be
because you realize love is so unreliable, you know, for
a long time, even love stories are always like tragedies.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
You can say, you know.

Speaker 4 (51:27):
That is not actually a romance, it's a tragedy.

Speaker 1 (51:30):
Yeah, because they were stupid kids that thought they could
make it work, right, and you know, then they like
meet in the next day. I think they fall in
love like instantaneously, and it's yeah, I think it was
supposed to be like this is stupid.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
Right, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (51:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:44):
Well, and to say your point about you know, kind
of the strengthening of families within a community, there's a
lot of fraud that can happen. You know, if you
don't know who you're marrying into. Well, most people don't
even want to see their their potential bride or grooms
to be's credit report before they get married. Then they
find out down the line that they have crushing student
loan debt, or have all these weird things that they're

(52:06):
bringing into the marriage or whatever happens to be. And
you know, one of the things the benefits of it
is is the family can verify they do know these people. Well,
there's an incentive to There's the words kind of related
to hypergamy called endogamy, and endogamy doesn't always mean like
marrying within like a specific ethnic group or something. It
can mean marrying within a specific economic group, whatever the

(52:28):
factor happens to be.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
Marrying it means in group versus.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
Out group and in the one sense encourage more in
You can encourage in group marriages sort of by this
means because it's like, Okay, we do want you within
the culture, so to speak, as far as the family's
concerned or or you know, you're not going to get
disinherited basically, so there's an incentive to marry within than
to marry without. There's still the dowry still plays a
big role in marrying without, and if anything, the dowry

(52:54):
proves that this family is serious about the marriage, if
they know that there's a particular high state as family,
you know, from an out group or something that's going
to make sense for them based off the situation. You
also have people using love by the way to do fraud.
In Greece, you had these things, these people that they
would call broika theories. Breka means dowry and Greek and

(53:15):
it means dowry hunters. So you have these kind of
early pickup artist types even in other parts of Europe,
that are using these seductive methods to try to get
these women, and then if the family wants to save face,
then they would do the marriage and give the dowry
over to make it a kind of clean thing. So
there's all these all these different factors for how it works.
But one interesting thing is is I think it does

(53:37):
encourage this kind of sort of community building aspect of it,
because that's the families know each other. They know, they're
not lying about what they have or what they don't have.
People know each other there, they own land near each other.
It keeps things very strong within the group, and it's
it's better than as these things start to break, you
see the state get more and more and more powerful.

Speaker 3 (53:59):
You know, kind of proto changed to.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
This was prior to the church coming in, you had
these very strong, strong clan type systems. Then as the
church came in, it did make the more more of
this sort of individual, nuclear family style thing, with the
church kind of as the glue in between it. Then
that kind of lended itself over to becoming even more
atomized with the state frankly just being and you know,

(54:24):
having their tentacles and most aspects of our lives at.

Speaker 3 (54:26):
This point, you know. So it's an interesting change.

Speaker 4 (54:29):
Yeah, So going back to these old writings about dowry
and romantic love stuff like when when this I guess
like this shift or this change started happening. What were women.
I don't know if women.

Speaker 1 (54:46):
Wrote a lot of articles or pieces or you know,
essays on this, but do you know what if there
were women that were also concerned about this move, because
I'm sure that there are men who.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
Wrote about Yeah, there's a newspaper clip of women saying
that the love match is a bad idea, we should
go back to the dowry system. There are different writers
back then that are simply should be endowing our daughters
with dowries. We're setting them up for a life of failure.
And these are older women who have seen a lot
of marriages in their lifetime. Yeah, and there's one called

(55:19):
Dowries for Daughters. Gosh that I'd have to dig through it,
but I found that one early on. So there is
this kind of The interesting thing about the newspaper articles
is you can see there was a very definite period
of debates going on, because you can see in the
search queries that the world. You know, it's being used
a lot here, especially in English newspapers around the time

(55:40):
they abolished it and got rid of it, and then
after that just kind of dealing with it. So there
were plenty of people who are just like, we don't
like this system. But you know, I think by that
point feminism really started pushing against it and modernization and
its just I think people probably felt like they could
finance love. But even in places like Germany, as love

(56:04):
started becoming popular and even so much, you know, being
kind of hailed in the pulpit, so to speak. If
you look, there's a there's a paper I have. It's
called romantic love or material interest. And in this particular
city in Germany, in order for people to get married,
they had to register their assets at the time of marriage.
It was a requirement. So we have all this data

(56:24):
about who was getting married to each other. And when
you chart out the data, you can see it's pretty
much people of like equal assets that are getting married,
sometimes with women having more. The bulk of it kind
of clusters with women having more because you know that
money's then being used to open up a trade shop
or something for the new husband and.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
Then he's working and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
But what it says in there, what that data shows
is that in that time period that the data is
taken in, romantic love is being sort of spoken of
on a surface level, as this beautiful thing. But when
you look at the actual marriages, people are negotiating marriages
based off of assets and the purse held all the
weight is is what it's said in there.

Speaker 4 (57:01):
So she had yeah from the table? Is that what
you're saying?

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Yeah, essentially, right, he's not the table, She's not exactly
I am the table.

Speaker 4 (57:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
So then okay, So when what did feminism have to
do with taking away the dowry? What were there any
Because I know that it, I know that it. There's
a lot to say about that, but I think we
have to touch on it a little bit at least.
So what was feminism's role or reasoning behind removing the dowry?

(57:35):
What was the arguments and why did it get pushed through?

Speaker 3 (57:38):
Can I read to you a paper?

Speaker 2 (57:40):
It's a three paragraphs and I can't show it because
I can't share my screen.

Speaker 4 (57:43):
But yeah, it's okay.

Speaker 2 (57:45):
It's it's from an article I believe it's from nineteen
seventy one or nineteen seventy excuse me, and it says
no more dowry. When Italy finally legalized divorce in December
nineteen seventy, there remained the problem of the dowry. The
dowry or goods and money which the bride brings into
a marriage, is firmly established an Italian law. The State

(58:06):
Civil Code contains thirty two articles defining the amount, use,
and title to the dowry everything accept its disposition in
the case of divorce, arguing that a man could divorce
his wife and still keep her dowry. Italy sent it
recently decided to abolish the age old dowry tradition outright.
The act was favored, needless to say, by Italy's liberated
young women, who considered the dowry a price on their

(58:27):
heads and a hostage to their fidelity. Under the old laws,
you see adulterous women forfeited all claim to their dowries.
So it's stuff like that that.

Speaker 3 (58:38):
Sounds fair to me.

Speaker 2 (58:39):
If you're gonna cheat on your husband in the marriage, yes,
you're forfeiting the assets now within the marriage, which includes
your dowry. But what's going on is they're coming in
with a lot of propaganda saying that there's violence against women,
or it's unfair to expect that towards women, and it
treats women like chattel, and a lot of that isn't true,
but this is kind of the narrative is being pushed around.

(59:01):
And then you know, there's I think I have a
few others here. Gosh, there's there's one from Greece. I'll
try to pull it up while while we're talking, and
it's talking about how you know a lot of feminists
were pushing to get to get rid of the dowry,
and a lot of it is wrapped up with women,
women wanting control, full control over their property basically, and

(59:22):
the way the dowry works is the dowry always was
the woman's property, but throughout a marriage, a man would
have usuffruct over the benefits of the dowry basically like
if it was land, the harvest coming, therefrom.

Speaker 4 (59:33):
Building something with it.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
So but he would like till the land and turn
it into something that produces more values.

Speaker 3 (59:41):
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 (59:42):
And you couldn't just go and gamble her dowry tomorrow.
There were laws protecting against that. And if you were
acting in a way that was irresponsible, she can get
her dowry back and either you know, put it, keep it,
you know, under her own decisions, or put it under
the decisions of her brother or father. Or something like that. Yeah,
but what what ends up happening? I have I have

(01:00:04):
another paper here.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
Oh no, no, that's the same one.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Sorry, I was trying to find one. There's another paper
I have. It was in the New York Times. It's
from the seventies. It's around the same time. And what
happens in that paper is it describes how the sort
of the communists and the feminists were working together in
order to get this this dowry of boss. So what
we read there about nineteen seventy Italy when they finally
got rid of this stuff, it was a result of
like the alliance of feminists and at least in that

(01:00:29):
country coming together. So I have one from from Greece here,
if I mean, this is pretty long, so I'll try
to find the sort of the sort of feminist aspect
of it. It says persistence of the dowry. So this
is a quote. So I'm going to read to you
about five or six paragraph if you don't mind me
doing that, but it'll show you the feminist perspective. But

(01:00:50):
I want to start off with the church. It says
the strongest opposition to change had come from the Greek
Orthodox Church. But after a meeting this week between the
governing Holy Synod and the Justice Minister, the church announced
that it was quote unquote not interested if the dowry
was abolished or not. It was not clear why the
church changed its position. I would have loved to be
a fly in that meeting. The dowry originated in ancient

(01:01:11):
times as a continuation by the woman to as a
contribution by the woman to the family. At the time,
a wife was not expected to work outside the home,
but she was expected to take care of the home
and children. A man who expected his wife to work
outside the home was seen as incapable of caring for
the family. Negotiated marriages have often had the dowry as
a key feature, with real estate or other valuables offered

(01:01:32):
to attract a quote unquote good husband. The need was
accentuated by social pressures and that stigmatized the woman who
remains unmarried. Now here's where the feminism comes in, and
this is a quote. Persistence of the dowry has proved
socially harmful in an international embarrassment for the country. According
to Aleko Mirago Pulo Pulu, a deputy dean of the

(01:01:53):
Athens School of political science and leader of a feminist
group pushing for change. It humiliates women, this is quote,
makes them an object of bargaining and marriage and economic transaction,
and in fact also humiliates men by rendering them.

Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
Sort of purchased husbands.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
She said, they're the ones that are making this system
seem like it's just about buying and selling meat.

Speaker 1 (01:02:15):
Turning into this cold transaction. But they're also kind of
boiling it. They're using I think, okay, like stay with me.
I think that there is a they're using the concept
of love match or like you know as a romantic
love as the baseline or the basis the framework to
turn this to like shame the dowry system as cold

(01:02:39):
and unloving by saying, oh, you're just treating women like
a bargaining chip or whatever. And where's but they have
to lean on romantic love to do that. Where which
is what they're doing right?

Speaker 4 (01:02:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
And if I can read this next paragraph, this gives
you an idea of what the promise was, because there
was kind of a promise or a sort of deal
that was being made, it says missus. Marago Pulo said
dowries had become outdated since most Greek women now work,
have similar educational opportunities as men and can generate similar incomes.

Speaker 3 (01:03:11):
Do you see what the promise is there?

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
The promise is that if we got rid of the
dowry system, then they would be contributing to the household finances.

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
But they really haven't been doing.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
What was about women were entering the workforce, then entering
the workforce, and yeah, and education opportunities. Yeah, so it says,
I'll read another paragraph says the report by the Social
Research Center said dowry survived through the ages largely because
of tradition. Okay, is that bad real tradition?

Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
Well then, but yeah, but when they say tradition, they
do mean yeah, that's like the actual tradition, not what
people today call tradition, but.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
Go on exactly, and the support of a large portion
of the population that was over sixty five and more
inclined to respect tradition, so that the older population was
aging out, but they still said, no, keep the traditions,
and then you have feminism coming in. It found that
the practice had been shaken by workers who returned from
industrial centers like the United States and Western Europe with
more financial security and less dependency on the Dowry. So

(01:04:09):
you know, as college was coming into people were sending
their kids over to a place like England to be
educated or these modernized places to then come back and
then by that time they'd be kind of educated into
not really being with this system anymore, which is kind
of unfortunate there. So that's where the propaganda comes in.
And then you know, it's like you can imagine, you

(01:04:31):
get the TV, you get the movies, and you get
all this kind of stuff, and it's just like, oh
my gosh, and people somehow people think everybody in the
past were just these I don't know that they just
didn't know what they were doing. They were really just
taking in from the propaganda.

Speaker 1 (01:04:45):
Yeah, it was basically like the idea of the time
we live in now is the most enlightened, the most intelligent,
the most you know, forward thinking, and everyone before that
was primitive, backwards, sexist, racist, you know Volger and a
lot of that came, yeah, from our media, but I
think that the seeds of that were probably being planted

(01:05:05):
like way before that.

Speaker 3 (01:05:08):
Sorry, go ahead, I just want to know I have
one more I want to read to you. If yeah,
go ahead for god time.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
So this one's from nineteen thirty three from the Aberdeen Press,
and it says off the dot. The dot is another
word or an adult for for the dowry. The French
usually call it that. The old word dowry is seldom
heard nowadays, at least in this country, although with the
French and the Jews it still seems still as essential
to a marriage as the bride. The French were doing dowries,
and they were very serious about it. These are the

(01:05:35):
people that gave us the city of Love, by the way,
for a long time, way further than England, a greater
chivalry holds that the bride herself is gift enough. So
there's a direct tie there in that article of how
the the table, that's it. That's from the table, yeah,
saying we are the table. But if it does, but
if it does happen that she quote unquote has money.
As the idiom now puts it, bridegrooms are not expected

(01:05:58):
to object. Dowry was a romantic word means tied up securely,
we hope under the married Women's Property Act, And I
think that's really what undid coviture in England was the
Women's Property Act, because it gave them more control over it.
It's purely prosaic. But the words, I'll have to double
check that. But the word still survives in the civil
service for one thing, as one would expect in that

(01:06:20):
atmosphere of hallowed antiquity, where women employees on marriage receive
their dowry. So you had women that were working and
they would have these contracts basically off when you complete
the contract, especially if you're from a poorer background. Women
would work to save up their dowries and then once
they got the dowry, you can now be married.

Speaker 3 (01:06:37):
And then they could focus on home life.

Speaker 2 (01:06:38):
It survived until yesterday too and the National Union of
Distributive Workers, but is now no more. The trade union
has decided against the giving of dowries to members who
become brides on two very sound and up to date grounds.
The first that since women claim equality with men who
have no dowry, they should have it in this and
the second even more conclusive, that there is no money

(01:06:59):
to pay them. And at last we suggest it's probably
the main reason why dowries have dropped out of custom
in this poverty stricken world.

Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
So that the important part.

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
There is that this particular work union or whatever is saying, okay,
we're not giving the dowries to the women are having
these deals anymore for them because women are saying we're
equal to men, so they're wanting the same deal or whatever.
And then so it's like, if they're equal to men
and they're making incomes, then they should be figuring out
their marriage that way.

Speaker 3 (01:07:26):
But somehow we.

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
Went from let's abandon the dowry system to women working. Therefore,
since women make money too, then that's okay, all the
way down to trad cons who are just like women
should not have to think about money at all.

Speaker 3 (01:07:38):
That's a man's job.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
And it's but it's like when you look in the past,
families worked so hard. Sometimes the brother's marriage would be
delayed just so they can save up for the sister's dowry.
The sister herself would be working. You know, this is
from Bridewells.

Speaker 4 (01:07:55):
Everybody worked all through history.

Speaker 1 (01:07:57):
Like this whole thing about the stay at home why
and mother is a very recent invention and it's held
I think it's held up by this. It's almost like
a kind of virtue signaling to be like a man
that says, my wife doesn't have to work, right.

Speaker 3 (01:08:12):
But yeah, like an ornament.

Speaker 1 (01:08:14):
Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's when my wife works.

Speaker 4 (01:08:19):
God damn it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:20):
Well so yeah, but I'm joking she does. Oh yeah,
that's that's good. You know that that's that's a blessing.
And it wasn't something that was strange to the past,
but they they made it into this thing, which I
think feeds into something that I like to call like
the sort of Barbie archetype. There's another This is from
bride wealth and dowry. It's just a quick thing, but
it says the propensity of bride wealth systems to lead

(01:08:40):
to male migration into the towns has an interesting corollaryan
dowry systems, where considerations of status and honor dictate that
a woman has to acquire a certain measure of property
before she can get married. The opposite kind of migration
may result. In many parts of Europe, young women moved
into households, into the households of other people in order
to become domestic servants until the time for their marriage

(01:09:01):
came along. And they're doing that in order to say,
for their dowry. And then once they hit that minimum amount,
now you can get married, and you know, you can
you can begin a domestic life that way. So it's
a it's a fascinating history, and all this stuff has
been largely almost successfully swept under the rug by feminists
and even trad cons alike, or they they must really

(01:09:23):
have a collective amnesia or something.

Speaker 4 (01:09:25):
And yeah, I don't think.

Speaker 1 (01:09:26):
I don't think trad cons want to know, like they've
not bothered to look into it. In my opinion, they
probably I'm gonna guess that they picked up their framework
for what a marriage looks like from the Boomers, And
I think that, yeah, because I think the boomers they
were they they had like a big effect on this

(01:09:47):
shift away from the dowry just be considering the timing
and everything to the system where we're living on her now,
which is just like a completely lopsided mess that just
leads to you know, like every cause. Like the reason
why I say the track cons are like they don't,
they don't, they're just ignorant of the history is like
at best that though they didn't really think it was
worth looking into. They only look as far back as

(01:10:09):
like the nineteen sixties, Yeah, and exactly, and that's as.

Speaker 4 (01:10:12):
Far back as they look.

Speaker 1 (01:10:13):
And they say, well, my my parents, my grandparents did fine,
you know, and it's like.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
But yeah, but like that, and Matt Walsh will like
somebody like Matt Walsh he said it recently, he will say,
going all the way back to time immemorial, like somehow
that gets pushed back into what it always was. And
but it's it's mind boggling to me that that they
just haven't even looked at it. I have another couple
of senses here. This is from a book called Marriage
Bargain from nineteen eighty five, and this is Frankly, this

(01:10:41):
is written by a woman who's frankly a feminist, but
I like to just read whatever I can find to
see what's in there. She's talking about different articles from
you know, the Sicilian peasantry in the nineteenth century, Imperial
German bourgeoisie, Greek workers and farmers. And she's talking about
these articles that are going to be presented in this
book which features all the articles, and she says the
articles illuminate the ways in which families protected their lineage

(01:11:04):
and property, endeavoring to maintain or enhance their class status
by matching a quote unquote promising young man of appropriate
status and good economic prospects with a financially well endowed
young woman. They underline the controls, particularly arrange marriages and
the threat of disinheritance the noble bourgeois and property peasant

(01:11:25):
families exerted over their daughters and sons to ensure the
continuity of existing social relations. Also, they de tel the
broader economic and social structures within which young women married,
and to the degree to which the institution of dowry
structured courtship and marriage.

Speaker 3 (01:11:39):
But you know, what you hear.

Speaker 2 (01:11:40):
From these trad cons is about preserving the way of
life and this and the culture's disintegrating and all these things.
But you have to understand how families did this, how
they kept this train moving, and if you don't want
to accept that, it's not going to work.

Speaker 4 (01:11:56):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
So there's this, I really believe there's a fundamental just
disconnect and misunderstanding.

Speaker 3 (01:12:03):
It almost seems purposeful.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
I'd hate to say that, but they've sort of gotten
the wool pulled over their eyes at least, you know,
from the feminists and all these, yeah things, it could
be purposeful.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
But yeah, I mean, as if I'm being charitable, I'd
say it's just ignorance. If I'm being charitable, but we
can't really know for sure. So someone asked, why you
think the Communists were interested in getting rid of the
dowry since you said that they got involved.

Speaker 4 (01:12:27):
I think I know.

Speaker 1 (01:12:28):
But but do you know if there's anything that was
said about that or if it was like if there's
a theory about why the Communists were getting Yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
Just have some of the stuff I've read, so I
haven't seen like like I wish I could find like
an academic thing that digs deep into it. So I
only have kind of what I've read and my suspicions.
The entire dowry system and system of marriage transaction revolves
around this idea of property, property ownership, and property transmission.
So if you believe in private property and the right

(01:12:56):
to private property based off of you know, your labor's frankly,
then the ability to transmit the property in past, the
sort of towards so to speak, requires a system like this,
I think to do it do it most efficiently when
it comes to communists, their their view of property is
let's say, it's different, you know what I mean? Yeah,

(01:13:18):
And also with feminists too, Feminists have this sense of
entitlement that sort of meshes into a welfare system, right,
And this idea of a welfare system, I guess you
could say socialism is not too far off from the
government sort of controlling all property and redistributbuting wealth as
it sees fit. So you know, you know, when you
look in China, so it's like where there is a

(01:13:38):
communist society, these systems tend to go away or get
really broken because it's like, well, the government's supposed to
provide the home, not the bride's family, or you know what,
I all these kinds of things.

Speaker 1 (01:13:48):
Communists also want to live in a classless society. So
like the thing is that the dowry system is it's fair,
like it works for people of all levels because they're
sort of like matching, right, and communists thing, well, there
shouldn't be levels at all, so that they have to
like take it apart. And one of the best ways
to do that is to destroy families by eliminating like

(01:14:11):
that connection. So it's not just like getting rid of fathers,
but and that's where they're at now.

Speaker 4 (01:14:15):
It's that that's inevitably leads to a destruction of the
entire line.

Speaker 1 (01:14:20):
Imit, Like from what is it the Chinese called filial piety,
right that like familial piety, like I am my father's
you know son and his father before hid in Ka.

Speaker 2 (01:14:31):
Well, yeah, because and there's more dependence on the state,
and it's like the state kind of grows in on
itself and wants that. The feminists want the state transfer
of wealth to women because they say that that's the
equality that they deserve. And then you know, you have this,
you have the state coming in and taking what families
used to save for themselves and for their care and saying, okay,

(01:14:54):
you know, like we have social Security for instance, we
all pay out of our checks into Social Security. If
you look into these older marriage contracts, sometimes it wasn't
just about the two people. It's also discussing what's going
to happen with the parents. And okay, the bride's parents
are giving this land as dowry, but they're gonna have
useufruct and to be able to live on the land.
And the sun is responsible for providing them with you know,

(01:15:14):
three new tunics a year, and you know, whatever food
or whatever it happens, whatever happens to be, you know,
from what the farm generates.

Speaker 4 (01:15:20):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):
Yeah, so elder care and all that stuff kind of
goes in and it's very important that stuff starts to
get subsumed by the state, and so now we're paying
taxes into that, so it's harder to then save money
to put into something like this. And instead of having
reliance on the community and on your family's it's about
the state saying have reliance on us. And then on

(01:15:42):
the back end you have this feminist wealth transfer through
family law. It's just people just can't hold families together
because the environment we've created. It's just not conducive for
strong family building. I hate to say that, and I
want to be wrong about that, but there's just these
other avenues of control that people can take of vantage of.

Speaker 4 (01:16:01):
For sure.

Speaker 1 (01:16:02):
Yeah, you know about the Greek Orthodox Church, I can
probably find out maybe because I know the Orthodox priests
and so like I could they they and you know
Orthodoxy is it's there's a lot of like let's say,
reverence for history, because it's it is, you know, one
of the oldest churches. So like for them, like you know,

(01:16:25):
three hundred years ago was like yesterday, Like they keep
track of like everything, So I might be able to
find out, like what the reasoning was. My suspicion is
that it might have something to do with you know,
what does it render unto Caesar? What is Caesar's like
basically staying out of the state's involvement. And yet like
within the church, marriage is not a legal thing. It's

(01:16:46):
a sacrament, so it's it is a holy sacrament. And
you know the church I go to, people get married
all the time, and of course they I mean, they
do the paperwork because you're supposed to, but that's not
like the that's not for them what's important, right, So yeah, yes,
and I could probably try to find out something about that.

Speaker 3 (01:17:03):
That would be fascinating.

Speaker 2 (01:17:04):
I would love to learn more about that, because when
I came across that in the in the newspaper, I
found that fascinating and it did make sense that the church,
I mean that the church would would stand up against that.
I tried to look more up about it. I just
couldn't find primary sources.

Speaker 4 (01:17:20):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:17:20):
One thing I found seemed to indicate that there were
differing opinions amongst the church fathers there and that it
had to do with being concerned about See I don't
know if it's just feminist revision stuff or not. Or
about women's property. I really, I really don't know. The
feminists could be just misrepresenting for sure. My suspicion about
that is that Greece wanted to join the EEC. There

(01:17:41):
were a lot of short term economic benefits to be
made if that happened, so they kind of negotiated them
to stand down, so to speak, so that they can
avail themselves of this new system.

Speaker 3 (01:17:53):
That's my sort of tinfoil hat. Guess.

Speaker 2 (01:17:56):
I think there is maybe some story about maybe changes
in Christian thinking that might have to do with some
of this, like because you know, France was doing dowries
for a long time, same with Spain, the same with
you know, well in Italy too, and I know I
think those are majority Catholic, so that may like it's
given me a clue that there may have been some
differences in opinions there. And then you have, you know,

(01:18:17):
your Protestant Reformation alongside a lot of this the printing
press not only did it make you know, tales of
romantic chivalry, but we had different pamphlets and stuff that
got that whole Reformation stuff going along. And then I
think you start to see this change and maybe that
strain of Christianity that views the spirituality around marriage different

(01:18:38):
the way I I kind of see the folks in
the past looking at it as there is a spiritual
component to marriage, but that is in balance with the
material component, the tangible aspect of marriage, which the dowries.
So it's like, once you figured out a dowry, you know,
once you figured out a marriage bargain or negotiation, then
you go to the church and get that, you know,
spiritually certified, they're sanctified, whatever word you want to use,

(01:19:00):
and that that became a way of doing things, you know,
But then it became like trad cons nowadays sell it
as like the spiritual aspect is the most important aspect,
But I really believe both aspects.

Speaker 3 (01:19:12):
Of that are are important. I acknowledge it.

Speaker 2 (01:19:15):
I respect that there is a spiritual aspect, and I
think that's an important thing, and I think it's great
that people see it that way. But I think it's
a mistake to neglect the very real material realities that
go along with something like marriage and creating a family.
And we live in a society that values private property.

Speaker 3 (01:19:33):
I think we do, I hope we do.

Speaker 2 (01:19:35):
We live in a society with the class stratification, Yeah,
and things like inheritance that I think ideally families do
want to leave stuff to their kids, but it's you know,
there's so many things that change. There's the gold Sorry
I was thinking that. I was looking at this on this.
There's the there's the technology aspect of it. This, this
is what gets me into this conversation of gold pill is.

(01:19:57):
The X factor for me is always technology and how
far we've come, And it's just like, can't we go back?
I don't know if we can go back. I don't
know if our psyche is fundamentally changed or if we
can only try to learn from this old system and
try to see how do we apply it going forward
on an individual or even collective level of how do
we negotiate marriages going forward? When does it make sense?

(01:20:17):
You know what I mean to pull the trigger on it,
so to speak.

Speaker 1 (01:20:20):
Yeah, well, this has been a really great conversation. We're
running out of time, but.

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):
Yeah, for me, but if there's questions in the chat,
like I can stay for longer, just try to address
them if if you need to do that, So.

Speaker 1 (01:20:32):
All right, let me see, just looking to see if
anybody has a question that I like we should call
them holycons because their ideas of traditionalism come from fifty
and advertising.

Speaker 3 (01:20:42):
I like that one.

Speaker 4 (01:20:43):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's basically what it is. It's it's
not it's not really reality.

Speaker 3 (01:20:48):
Yeah, let's remove.

Speaker 4 (01:20:51):
So like the engagement ring where what is that? I
saw you your video on it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
I watched some of your videos just see like, yeah,
get in the sense of like what it is you
like to talk about.

Speaker 4 (01:21:04):
And it was all around that engagement.

Speaker 1 (01:21:07):
Ring photo that uh yeah, that one track con Chick
shared and all of the essentially intersexual competition that came
out of that with all these women attacking each other
and you.

Speaker 4 (01:21:18):
Know over it. I don't think that's tread Yeah, I
don't think it is.

Speaker 3 (01:21:23):
But I thought it was a sorry go on, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26):
No, I was just gonna say, like the what's the
Is there a relationship between this idea of the engagement
ring that which seems to be a product of like
the romantic love worship stuff, But is there some relationship
to that and the dowry?

Speaker 2 (01:21:40):
Like historically yeah, the dowry specifically not really. There is
something called the Morning Gift and this was kind of
in that transition period of of you know, like these
these sort of German lands as as they're becoming, as
they're changing, as the church started after the Romans movement,
but then as the church starts to move in there
and the changing the way marriage is done basically, and

(01:22:02):
the dowry system is starting to take over. They did
have something called the Morning Gift, and a lot of
that was that was kind of given, you know, the
day after I guess you could say, you know, consummation
or whatever. I do know that there was like rings
do go back quite a ways, but it's not like.

Speaker 3 (01:22:18):
A dowry proper in the sense, you know, it's it's
something symbolic.

Speaker 2 (01:22:23):
Yeah, it was more symbolic you can say. And then
it really gets taken over with you know, the diamond
industry and that it should be three months of a
man's salary or something like that. Then then it really
goes that way. So I know, I know there is
a little bit more history that just isn't you know,
the diamond industry back there, But it's not like a
true marriage transaction or something like that. It's not a

(01:22:43):
bride price because it doesn't go to her family. It
goes on her finger, and it's not a dowry in
a sense because well it's not coming from her family
first of all, to be her, so it's it's it
really is different from what those transactions represent.

Speaker 3 (01:22:57):
To begin with.

Speaker 2 (01:22:58):
You know, yeah, yeah, but you know there is a
history around it. I don't have it off the top
of my head. I have read a little bit about it.
Some people will say it still represents a kind of
nod to the bride price or the mohar, which was
the man giving you know, the amount over. But since
it doesn't go to her family and it's not enough
for that family to procure another daughter, you know, for them,

(01:23:19):
I don't see it as the bride price. It's more
just a kind of symbolic exchange, you know, between them.

Speaker 4 (01:23:24):
Yeah, I think it's lost.

Speaker 2 (01:23:26):
It's the funny part about the Twitter storm was, you know,
there's this aspect of I guess showing off. I don't
even know if it's fair to say that, but it's
like this idea of well, it's a status signal or
it's my change in status. But typically, you know, that's
what the wedding is for, and there is this idea
of status signaling. I mean, sometimes you'd present the dowry
so everybody can see and then that would firmly say okay,

(01:23:48):
this family, it's not just about the wedding and the
status change, but it's status signaling the entire family to say, hey,
this family is here on the sort of status hierarchy.
Somebody who wants to marry into that family you can
expect to pay a dowry commensurate on what you're seeing in.

Speaker 3 (01:24:03):
Front of you.

Speaker 2 (01:24:04):
You know, so I can see how like a an
engagement ring sort of becomes this kind of quasi status
signal that people kind of like to show off.

Speaker 3 (01:24:11):
How yeah, the bigger the ring Ronaldo just got.

Speaker 2 (01:24:15):
Married or he just got engaged, and you know, her
diamond was like gigantic.

Speaker 4 (01:24:19):
Well that's why she said what did she say? I won?

Speaker 1 (01:24:21):
And that was like it And there was a picture
of her hand with the ring, and we don't know
who what what that means?

Speaker 4 (01:24:27):
Who she married?

Speaker 1 (01:24:28):
The man's exactly right, Yeah it was.

Speaker 4 (01:24:33):
That's all it is.

Speaker 1 (01:24:35):
But okay, so one more thing I wanted to say,
because I just thought about this. One of the things
that I think we lost as a result of all
that we've been talking about. When you are bringing a
family together through marriage, through this dowry system. There's there
has to be like obviously get an established relationship between
the two clans, I guess, or there usually is, and

(01:24:58):
there has to be because you said that there are
people who you know, use fraud or they exploit this
in some way, so what you want is to have
like trust between them. So I think that one of
the things that gets lost by that is first of all,
the value that we put or the amount of value
put in trust itself as like an idea, and also honor,

(01:25:19):
because I think that honor is a thing that we
people express or use, like believe in, but it's not
something that we value very highly these days. I mean
I don't think so, you know, and I think that
that's something that men in particular, like, I think they
care about that a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:25:36):
You know, yeah, I you know, it's they absolutely do.

Speaker 1 (01:25:40):
And there is like the reputation matters, right, your reputation,
your word, things like.

Speaker 3 (01:25:45):
That, your values and all that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:48):
I mean, there's it's one thing to proclaim that you
have a certain value system and that you live by it.
But the dowry is the tangible proof that you guys
have been doing this family project and actually been living
by those values. So it's not just about the exchange
of money, but it's saying here, we're serious about this,
We're serious about how we represent ourselves and what we do,

(01:26:08):
and these are the you know, expectations that come with that.
I think honor is something that men, or at least
the space discusses that I think trad cons maybe even
want to discuss as a phenomena. Is that's something we
should care about because they're saying, hey, we want you
to live by a value system, and it's dishonorable not to,
you know, if you proclaim to have these these but
it's important, you know, beyond that, but to actually have

(01:26:31):
these tangible things behind it that sort of declare this
is how it is.

Speaker 4 (01:26:35):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:26:35):
When it comes to dowries too, there is a lot
of honor there in a way, because you might have
whole families contributing to somebody in the family is getting married.
They may not be your direct they might be your
extended relative, maybe a cousin or something, or a niece basically,
and you might send money over that way to put
in on her marriage, so that the whole family has

(01:26:57):
come together and contributed something and they put it in
on this marriage. So these other people that you're getting
married to, they're gonna understand that, Hey, this entire family
has put in on this, you know what I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:27:09):
And yeah, it's like Italy.

Speaker 1 (01:27:12):
Yeah, we were talking about Italy, and I'm thinking about Italians,
the ones I know. You know, they're like things like
honor and family obviously, and I'm not making a mafia joke,
but like honor and family is a big.

Speaker 4 (01:27:25):
Deal, and I think that that's probably why they held
onto it for so long. So I agree with you.

Speaker 1 (01:27:31):
I mean, I think it's inherently masculine too, just in
my opinion. But anyway, I don't know, do you have
any final thoughts. We got to wrap it up, unfortunately,
but this has been a really good conversation. I hope
you'll come back.

Speaker 2 (01:27:40):
On some time absolutely though. Thanks for having me. I'm
sorry about that scheduling snafu earlier, and uh I no,
I I just what I'd like to see is just
more more folks talking about it and just you know,
understanding what it was.

Speaker 4 (01:27:54):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:27:55):
Me personally, I don't know if we can go back
in time and completely revive the system as it once was.

Speaker 3 (01:28:00):
I don't believe that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:01):
I do think romantic love has changed the Western psyche
over hundreds of years to some degree. And I don't
think that we shouldn't have love and marriages. I just
think to some extent we have to understand the priority
of all these things when we're making these decisions. Should
romantic love be front and center. Probably not. Could it
be some small part maybe, But we have to have
these practical considerations. And it doesn't mean that you're less

(01:28:24):
of a man, or you're not masculine. Masculinity back then
it wasn't viewed that way. Men did expect dowries, and
if you didn't, even the bride's father would think there
was something wrong with you if you said, I've seen
that written in here in several places, you know. So
it's important to not be captured by this idea of
masculinity that kind of big media is selling you. It's sometimes,

(01:28:47):
you know, not sometimes, but all the time. It's better
to negotiate things upfront and see what you're getting into.
Because I don't want people to be afraid of marriage.
I don't want to say you should never be married.
This whole cop versation that we're having and that we've
been looking into When I look at red pill stuff,
I kind of have this thing where I say, red
pill helps guys max my short term relations with women. So, yeah,

(01:29:11):
you're having trouble dating women or whatever, and you understand
these techniques to get them attracted to you. But a
lot of these the red pill people come into a
problem when it comes to what do we do about
marriage and this family creation thing now? And that's where
they've struggled for a long time. And I believe that
the answer to that lies in all of this history
right here, because negotiating a short term relation versus a

(01:29:35):
long term sustained family are two different things that require
two different, you know, modes of thought.

Speaker 1 (01:29:41):
One hundred percent, I think the red pill guys are
are looking for the short term solutions, and that's why
they're they're you know, like the whatever podcast. Those guys
they're unequipped to handle the real like problems of marriage
and family and children and parenthood because it's going to
require a lot.

Speaker 4 (01:30:01):
Of hard work.

Speaker 1 (01:30:02):
And that's why we do what we do, you know,
And we're not the only ones, but but I think that, yeah,
I mean, like, you know, no matter what you think
about the modern world, a lot of men want to
get married and they want to have kids, and so
we should try to make that, you know, like possible
for them.

Speaker 3 (01:30:18):
Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

Speaker 2 (01:30:21):
So I've I've really been enjoying, you know, learning about
this and having discussions about it. And again, thanks for
having me on, and you know, maybe we could do
it again sometime.

Speaker 1 (01:30:30):
Yeah, definitely, Well we'll do it again sometime. Maybe Allison
will join us or something. Okay, So thanks guys for
coming on the show, and thank you so much Shah
for joining me and sharing your insights. If you guys
want to check him out, I got all of your links,
your YouTube channel, your x your email address. Do you
have like a substack or something or am I thinking

(01:30:50):
of somebody else?

Speaker 3 (01:30:51):
No? I don't know, no, suse Okay, Okay, it.

Speaker 1 (01:30:54):
Was a guy I had on me that it had
a substack that was pretty good too, where he was
looking at the spending of like you and women and
stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (01:31:02):
But oh's fascinating.

Speaker 4 (01:31:04):
Yeah, yeah, very good stuff. Okay. So anyway, thanks guys
for coming on the show.

Speaker 1 (01:31:09):
If you guys like this video, please hit like subscribe
if you're not already subscribed to the BELF Notifications, Leave
me a comment, let me know what you guys think
about what we discussed on the show today, and please
please please share this video because sharing is caring. Thank
you guys so much for coming on today's episode of
The Fireside Chat, and we'll talk to you all in
the next one ends right.

Speaker 5 (01:31:26):
Activists are machines, dude, Okay, they are literal machines.

Speaker 3 (01:31:31):
They are talking point machines.

Speaker 5 (01:31:33):
They are impossible to fucking deal with, especially if you have, like,
especially if you have like a couple dudes who have
good memory. On top of that, too, Holy shit, you're
fucked