The Decline of Marriage could lead to more Egalitarian living and single women living together.

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Permalink Reply by TNT666 on September 23, 2012 at 9:59pm

It is indeed an interesting article. IMO she misses addressing the possibly single most important factor in this whole mess that is the patriarchal institution of modern marriage. She does go over our history quite well, but forgets to put the entire debate in the context of overall population growth.

Throughout all of Homo sapiens history, never have we been in the situation we've been in for the past 500-1000 years, where the mere fact of our existence is destroying the rest of our ecosystem, living beings and non-living resources. Not our technologies... no... the mere fact of our existence.

In Homo sapiens' past, all structures were optimised  to rear a certain number of offspring (not all females or males procreated, only the alphas and a few additionals). But Earth's population is headed to 8 billion, and all other large life forms are disappearing. Procreation should be the very last of our priorities.

In this sense, looking towards the past to find examples of female freedom is nice and certainly informative, and helpful to help break up engrained stereotypes created by patriarchy, but our future will be something different all together, and we must continue to look to the future and see that ANY procreation system is now obsolete, as procreation per se is nearly obsolete. We could easily designate a few healthy individuals in each bioregion as procreators, and leave the rest of civilisation to whatever endeavours we choose.