Craving Freedom, Japan’s Women Opt Out of Marriage (i.e., Slavery)
A constantly growing number of people worldwide are beginning to understand, albeit still not at a deep enough level, what marriage is all about: slavery. An article on The New York Times mentions men and especially women in Japan who seem to have had enough of being slaves. Here’s from “Craving Freedom, Japan’s Women Opt Out of Marriage” (August 3rd 2019) (full article archived):
Not so long ago, Japanese women who remained unmarried after the age of 25 were referred to as “Christmas cake,” a slur comparing them to old holiday pastries that cannot be sold after Dec. 25.
Today, such outright insults have faded as a growing number of Japanese women are postponing or forgoing marriage, rejecting the traditional path that leads to what many now regard as a life of domestic drudgery.
…
Fed up with the double standard, Japanese women are increasingly opting out of marriage altogether, focusing on their work and newfound freedoms, but also alarming politicians preoccupied with trying to reverse Japan’s declining population.
As recently as the mid-1990s, only one in 20 women in Japan had never been married by the time they turned 50, according to government census figures. But by 2015, the most recent year for which statistics are available, that had changed drastically, with one in seven women remaining unmarried by that age.
And for women aged 35 to 39, the percentage was even higher: Nearly a quarter had never been married, compared with only about 10 percent two decades earlier.
The change is so striking that a growing number of businesses now cater to singles, and to single women in particular.…
With the social expectation that men should be the primary breadwinners, many men worry they will struggle to support a household financially. Just over a third of men aged 35 to 39 have never been married, up from less than a quarter 20 years ago.
Mr. Arakawa, who came of age in the late-bubble years and is single himself, says that many of his male peers view marriage as an encumbrance.
…
Ms. Shibuya, who lives with her widowed mother, said some women choose marriage because they feel vulnerable on their own. […]
As a child, Ms. Shibuya said, her parents’ relationship looked idyllic. “But now as an adult, I look back and realize maybe she had to bear many burdens,” she said. “In the older generations, husbands were the bosses of the family and the wives were obedient and in a weaker position.”
[…] Though single motherhood is on the rise in Japan, it is largely due to divorce rather than women choosing to have children on their own.
There you have it; women see married life as ‘drudgery’ while men see it as an ‘encumbrance’.
These feelings are completely in line with the true history of marriage as described in my post “Why getting married is a very bad idea”. Marriage has its roots in slavery, and although the people interviewed in the above article probably don’t know this, they do clearly feel and observe that it is in fact slavery.
While the above article mainly looks at marriage from the women’s point of view, where they used to be (and still are to some degree) the ‘beasts of burden’, men are also seriously abused within this anti-social system. As mentioned in the article, men are expected to work like slaves to support the household financially and are being manipulated to do the work; I discuss this in more detail in my post “The Manipulated Man”.
Comments
There are 0 responses. Follow any responses to this post through its comments RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.