Killarney, I don't demand trust, I'm offering it. You see, trust can't be demanded, only obedience can and obedience is a pretty poor substitute. It is to be hoped that trust will be repaid with faith, which is the fundamental principle of cooperative behaviour.

As I said, it's your choice.

With respect to your comment to Jay vis a vis a woman's social identity as a mother, why do you think that identity is so strong?

Killarney,
Work was my wife's problem, she's been at home for almost three years now and she's loving it, sure we're only a couple of thousand dollars a year above the threshold for a health care card but she's thriving, she's reconnected with the kids and her mum and sister and is the treasurer of a club.
I think the original poster quoted Germaine Greer as saying "I said get a life, not get a job!", the idea that a life of homemaking is selling women short is nonsense and with modern conveniences the drudgery traditionally associated with that life choice is all but gone, women can even study and take courses from home or run a small business of their own, such as online retail.

Craig,

I'm not talking about specific interactions. The dynamics of a game are predicated on the players understanding the game they are playing. Is it a prisoner's dilemma, is it a battle of the sexes, etc. Those seeking to control the narrative seek to manipulate the payoff matrix to make people think they are playing a different game. OMG, this is a crisis, do something. MORAL PANIC!

"feminism challenges the pervading narratives"

Thanks, Killarney, for conceding my point about narratives. Of course, the first step in trying to build a successful narrative is to paint all other narratives as false and use pejorative terms like 'slavery' and 'control' when referring to them. Oh, and be sure to cast your own narrative in heroic terms by throwing around words like "justice" and "liberation".

Naturally, the notion that men and women throughout history might have both had it tough is way too prosaic. For instance, what was the time between full male suffrage and full female suffrage in the UK? Centuries? Decades? No, 10 years!

And then there is that inconvenient fact that women lived 2-4 years longer for most of the 19th and 20th century. That hardly seems like the masters were lording it over the slaves does it?

Stev, what you're describing is a one-off games theory approach, in which we make our choices without regard for anything other than the immediate outcome. The "narrative" is no more than an attempt to construct a game with a specifically biased set of outcomes that happen to suit the narrator. It never works for very long, because human beings form a dynamic system that interacts in complex ways (including creating narratives of many different, conflicting types) to produce emergent outcomes that none of the narratives may have been designed to achieve and that none of the narrators regard as even close to optimal.

In other words, the games iterate or repeat over time somewhat recursively, with the outcome of one game influencing the way that the next one will be played. If I find that you act in an untrustworthy manner, I won't trust you next time and so on. In that environment there is only one possible optimal, stable way for us to behave and that is to be trustworthy and to cooperate with each other to help each other achieve our aims.

The thing is, this tells us nothing about what our aims should be, so it is important we are clear about what we really want, or we end up with the endless waste of the Cold War; stable only because of the threat of MAD, and all resources being used to shore up an equality of threat instead of equality of opportunity.

In my view this is precisely the position we have within much of the sociopolitical discussion and perhaps most evident in the gender area.

Don't be a party to it. We can do better.

Craig, I'm very familiar with repeated games. I find you are somewhat fixated on games with solutions. Check out the literature on hawk/dove games with more than 2 players. There is no guaranteed equilibrium. Whether hawks or doves dominate a population depends on the payoff structure. If one can control perceptions of payoffs then you can control behavior (at least in the short run).

However, I concur with your general point that single shot games change players' behavior when repeated and often lead to unanticipated (or unintended) consequences. Men going on a marriage strike because of the punitive nature of no-fault divorce and custody laws would be an example. As you point out, the way out of these impasses is cooperation, but this can only occur when both sides can agree on standards. Standards of value, standards of evidence etc. but the whole postmodernist project is based on rejecting standards.

I don't know if you have been following the UVa/Rolling Stone case in the US but an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Zerlina Maxwell was entitled “No matter what Jackie said, we should automatically believe rape claims,” but after tons of Twitter mockery, the headline was changed from “automatically” to “generally.” See the strategy of the narraristas - who cares about the evidence, who cares about the standard of innocent until proven guilty, who cares about the truth?

If you can figure out of a way to get ideologues to stop strategically misrepresenting themselves then I'm all ears. Perhaps you could start by getting a feminist to define equality - would that be equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? Try to nail them down on which one they mean.

Going back to the original article, if a woman chooses to stay home then that's her choice right? Oh no, that's not the outcome we want, she must have false beliefs planted by the patriarchy so it wasn't really a free choice.
"But I feel I made a free choice."
"No, you didn't. Sit down and shut up".

And therein lies the problem...

Stev, the propensity for hawks and doves to evolve is precisely why I refer to needing to develop a better way. A multi-partite game is soluble if every player is committed to resolution of every other player's problem. In other words, if there are no hawks or doves, or if being a hawk or a dove automatically leads to a maximally sub-optimal outcome for the hawk or dove.

A schoolyard example is that of the bully. If everyone allows the bully to exert her power unchecked, then each of her victims suffers. On the other hand, a bully confronted with a staunch group of potential victims is faced with a choice of either taking them all on or backing down, neither of which is a good outcome if you happen to be a bully.

The British Commonwealth exists where there was once a British Empire because the British recognised the alternative was total defeat and were smart enough to negotiate a mutually satisfactory (even if less than optimal to an Empire) outcome.

There is no Spanish or Dutch or Portuguese Commonwealth because they weren't.