Gender Roles
Most hard cultures have very strict gender roles whereas soft cultures typically mandate gender equality. The reason for this is obvious: While it is logical and morally easy to argue for equality, studies have repeatedly found strong connections between high birth rates and strict gender roles (specifically: low female educational attainment and general female disempowerment). This means strict gender role ideologies typically spread through birth rate while egalitarian ideologies spread through conversion.
Cultural gender roles need not exist as two sides of a coin with “Strict gender roles” on one side and “Gender? What gender?” on the other side. We, personally, find both perspectives unacceptable.
It is pointless to pursue a perfectly-gender-neutral ideal if it ultimately produces the same outcome as a highly misogynistic world in which women are disempowered (a likely outcome for soft cultures if they maintain low birth rates). It makes us sick to imagine how much less productive humanity would be without the combined intellectual horsepower of entire families—men, women, and children alike. When I, Simone, married Malcolm, my number one condition was that I never be obligated to withdraw from the world or stop working. Malcolm delivered on his promise to respect these terms and I believe the structure he created for our family—one that acknowledges differences between genders while still maximizing each partner’s ability to intellectually engage with the world—is intergenerationally replicable (one of our test readers described this as being “neotrad”).
In many ways, both hard, highly unequal, and soft, egalitarian approaches to gender rob people of their agency. Optimal cultures take more nuanced approaches to gender, allowing people to leverage useful aspects of strict traditional gender roles in their dating and family units without mandating them—all while downplaying the importance of a person’s gender to their identity. Many traditional gender structures evolved because they work and because there are genuine, systemic differences between genders. That said, it is also important to remember that the way a person experiences their gender will evolve throughout their life and you should not expect that experience to be the same before and after you find your life partner.
In our own relationship, I take on many roles associated with an extremely traditional iteration of a “woman’s” work even though I was extremely gender agnostic before meeting Malcolm. I take on more feminine roles in our relationship because doing so works in our particular family dynamic—that said, I still call upon different aspects of myself as needed. Gender roles are both an outdated artifact from our evolutionary history (like our arousal patterns) and a tool for every individual couple to tinker with and modify until they reach an optimal configuration.
While gender is not that important to us, we nevertheless exploit gender differences to our benefit given the world’s weird obsession with them. As an example, we strategically switch out which one of us sends out emails, takes calls, speaks at conferences, or attends engagements depending on which gender is likely to perform best in a specific context. When dealing with a new population, we typically split test outreach and meetings to see which of us gets more positive engagement. Once we have sufficient data, we proceed with whomever performs best. Sometimes that means I send out emails as Malcolm and vice versa. Generally speaking, people in the U.S. and Europe are overwhelmingly prejudiced in favor of women and people in Latin America and Asia are consistently prejudiced in favor of men, meaning that our Western colleagues typically hear from “Simone” even when Malcolm is reaching out, and our Eastern and LATAM colleagues typically hear from “Malcolm” even when I am initiating contact.
This switching between personas in our outreach reveals a deeper aspect of how we see gender. While before marriage, gender is a useful tool that aids sorting for potential partners,[[96]](#_ftn96) it becomes largely irrelevant as a public signaling device after marriage. Though we’d argue distinct roles within a long-term relationship continue to matter, as making a relationship too egalitarian has all sorts of negative externalities, like making men less likely to take on emotional work, which in turn decreases a woman’s perceived quality of life.[[97]](#_ftn97)
A part of our family culture that has worked extremely well is the idea that the succession of self takes place at the point of marriage. Looking back on life from a combined-identity perspective, we find it difficult to overstate how disgusting and hollow it felt to be an individual—not that we recognized this at the time; we thought individuality was fine (even preferable) because we had no idea how good things could be.
All of this is said with one big caveat: While we respect the traditional role of women in hard cultures—which typically produce women of steel—we see more modern pop-cultural perspectives of femininity to be toxic. Female stereotypes revolving around emotional fragility, a lack of emotional control, and a need to have feelings constantly protected strike us as uniquely toxic. For this and other reasons, we have adopted the practice of giving our daughters gender-neutral names in hopes that we might reduce their odds of identifying with this rising concept of femininity.
In sum, we support our children using gender however they wish, be their interpretations traditional and hard line or more fluid and experimental. As with sexuality, so long as our children’s approaches to gender don’t prevent them from contributing to society or having children of their own, we are in favor of their leveraging various gender roles and norms however they want. What matters is that we use our gender and sexuality to our advantage, rather than letting our gender and sexuality use us.