A few days ago I posted a link to my discussion with Richard Lucas, leader, Scottish Family Party – here. Our thanks to Nigel, our #1 commenter, for this:

At the time the “old age pension” was introduced it was set to be paid (to men and women) at age 75. At that time the life expectancy of a man was 52 or 54, depending on which figures you look at. At that time my maternal and paternal great grandfathers were teenage men in families of 8 and 6 children respectively excluding 3 other children who had died in infancy. One family was relatively prosperous but still lived in a terraced house with only four bedrooms. Clearly our reality, born into a world where life expectancy was in the mid 70s (where retirement had reduced to 65 and 60 for women) and family sizes were falling dramatically, especially after “the pill” in the 1960s, is radically different from probably all previous generations of humanity. I think very long lives and the comparative rarity of children in materially well-resourced societies changes the conditions in which the traditional marriage existed.
I recall years ago GirlWritesWhat pointing out the heavy burden placed on males, husbands, sons and brothers in Islamic and other traditions in Asia and the middle east in order to support women in bearing and nurturing the next generation for the village. With teenagers often supporting whole families when adult men had died or been killed. And of course polygamy is explicitly only for wealthy men who demonstrably can support more than one women and the children they will bear.
From a purely sociological point of view there seems little evidence that our western notion based on haphazard reasoning and fleeting emotions are particularly effective if the goal is to create stable couplings nurturing children.
Somehow I think we are seeing “serial monogamy” become the result but with institutions still totally focussed on the patriarchal concept that males have an open-ended commitment to support females “till death do us part” even though there are no longer practical reasons for such a burdensome responsibility. The result is the unfair enrichment of women who have no reason they cannot look after themselves once a partnership is dissolved. And children used in leverage of the same when in fact the one or two children involved are not a practical burden for long (unlike the 6 children of whom my father was the youngest).
In a bizarre way I think modern men would be less disadvantaged by an “equal” approach that explicitly assumes the equality of partners and their responsibilities. Because the considerable discretion given to judges in “settlements” seems to give free rein to gynocentrism (making our courts the acme for divorce when so many foreign jurisdictions explicitly equally share assets or in many only share assets built up over the marriage and exclude property inheritances etc. from before the partnership was formed). Just as the paramouncy of “the child” actually means the mother in a gynocentric society and system still built around the idea women will spend a substantial proportion of their lives nurturing.
I’m inclined to think Richard Lucas is being a bit of a romantic in his high expectations.

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