But then again, Squeers, I think I may have misconstrued the point in your last - no need to respond.

Poirot,
Sorry for delay, but worth responding to rhetorically.
“But most heterosexual people still get together to raise a family as a partnership”.
Do they? Perhaps they do, I don’t know. I’d have thought we’ve grown out of the injunction to replicate. The call of the modern age is (faux)individualism, development and indulgence, and the white picket fence mentality is now a lived cliché, at least in the West. According to Gore Vidal, “Men and women are dispensable carriers, respectively, of seed and eggs; programmed to mate and die, mate and die, mate and die. One can see why “love” was invented by some artist who found depressing the dull mechanics of our mindless mission to be fruitful and multiply”. It seems to me we’re being reprogrammed, to consume abortively, and needn’t “take on the load of reproduction and years of nurture” with the same mechanical attitude. Indeed from our present vantage, how can we reflect on marriage as anything but a make-shift and disastrous institution from the beginning? Maybe daycare’s a better option for kids than generally dysfunctional families? Now that women are protected by law and welfare, or can combine careers and families, surely we can segregate the sexes and hand the prime responsibility of child-rearing over to professionals and the State? This is women’s logical next step, from the dubious protection of men to the haven of the State. Jocelynne Scutt bemoans the “struggle against the imposition of religion and the notion that women are and should be subject to male authority”, yet she’s trying to preserve the integrity of a religious institution and the nuclear family—a redundant patriarchal compromise, opposed originally against the greater dangers of nature and the elements.
If women aren’t prepared to change the world, to take charge of their own destiny rather than feign individualism in the shopping mall, they have to accept to some extent the realities that underlie the clichés and illusions they cleave to. If women really want to be free of paternalism, let them stand up and apart from their programming, at least in the West

Women have to stop being passive in their own interests. It’s absolutely ingrained; that men are women’s big problem. “Men” have to be reformed, have to comply with women’s needs, ‘twas ever thus, and now the big male, the law, has to fix it.
What are “women” going to “do” to help themselves and to change the world? Instead of women wanting everything done for them—poor helpless things—by the state and its ideological apparatuses, let them use democracy to reconstruct it. But there’s the rub; first they have to deconstruct it, and few modern feminists are doing that. And thus they have no idea how to change it, or what to change it into, in fact probably don’t really want to change such a cosy nest.

Squeers,

I see I didn't misconstrue your point.

"....I'd have thought we've grown out of the injunction to replicate..."

Based on what? The blip on the evolutionary screen that represents our own culture?...which is more of a swerve or detour in social construct than anything that could be sustained as an alternative human paradigm. As if that is going to override the reality of our biological imperatives, as mundane as is their reality.

Of course, I get your point. If, as is the modern penchant, we institutionalise our children from infancy to adulthood, why the need for the social construct of marriage....excepting all those "educative" institutions right from their inception only ever sought to work on the minds of children and were never interested in taking on the broader responsibilities of providing material necessities for their charges, like (out-of-hours) shelter and clothing.

It seems to me that Western women, in attempting to take advantage of their relative power, have managed only to ape the traditional male paradigm. I'd like to know exactly what your idea is of women "taking charge of their destiny" is? And how are they to go about it without cooperation from the complementary side of the bargain - men?

Squeers wrote: "According to Gore Vidal, “Men and women are dispensable carriers, respectively, of seed and eggs; programmed to mate and die, mate and die, mate and die."

Vidal's language is questionable. It used to be thought that the active principle of life was in the male effusion, and the female was merely the carrier of the male seed. Actually, a seed results from the union of sperm and egg in plants. In humans a being results from the union of sperm and egg. The fact that a child may resemble its mother was expained, before the mechanism of heredity was known, by the environmental influence of the womb. The Bible story made the denial of the female role explicit in having woman created from a man's rib. In that fairy tale man gives birth to woman. To refer to sperm as seed preserves this archaic perception, and you can't eat archaic and have it, too.

Squeers,

"....poor helpless things...."

You do realise that all Western children are herded into institutions in order to be indoctrinated as to the way they should go. If women are "poor helpless things" who have decided to travel upon the prescribed route to "fulfillment", why do you lay the blame at their feet? Our "system" is expressly designed to dissuade both genders from independent thought and analysis. Why should it be that women are more at fault because they are programmed to embrace the culture as it is presented to them?

Frankly, until both genders realise that we are in this together and learn to respect the frailties and strengths inherent in the opposite sex, then we're on a hiding to nowhere - and that makes us all "poor helpless things".