How would you respond to the deferential wife scenario?

Great Debates
81

There’s a similar situation to the hypothetical in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Perfect Mate” with similarly lively discussion here: "The Perfect Mate" | Star Trek: TNG | Jammer's Reviews

The premise is that this woman Kamala (played by Famke Janssen) is a “metamorph” who is a rare empathic member of her species that at a specific moment imprints on someone and becomes his, well, perfect mate. She’s being transported by the Enterprise to an arranged marriage with the leader of another world to help end a long war. It does come off as male fantasy for sure, but there’s a few interesting points that do come up in the episode. First there’s a throwaway line, most likely to dissuade sexist criticism, that male metamorphs are relatively common. Great, but it’s not explored or discussed beyond that. Much of the episode centers around the moral questions of whether this is sexual slavery versus what Kamala actually wants. She was “born and bred” specifically for these traits, and she seems to be completely comfortable with that. There is an element of training to her upbringing, so it’s not clear that she hasn’t been brainwashed to some extent versus simply reinforcing her innate desires, but the desires are at least partly innate.

So it does get closer to the “slave that was genetically engineered to like being a slave” than anything we could achieve in this day and age. Kamala takes a particular shine to Captain Picard in no small part because he’s actively trying to resist her, which she finds both charming and unusual.

PICARD: Don’t.
KAMALA: What?
PICARD: Don’t do this, this, this you do with men.
KAMALA: I’m afraid my premature emergence from stasis has left me a little vulnerable to the desires I sense from men. Nevertheless, this is who I am, Captain. You might as well ask a Vulcan to forgo logic, or a Klingon to be nonviolent. I cannot change, and I don’t want to until the time has come for me to bond with my permanent mate. Why does it bother you?
PICARD: Frankly, it’s difficult for me, for many of us, to easily accept that a sentient being can live only to be what someone else wants them to be.
KAMALA: But that’s what gives a metamorph pleasure.
PICARD: But what about your wishes, your needs?
KAMALA: They are fulfilled by what I give to others.
PICARD: And what about when there are no others, when you are alone?
KAMALA: I’m incomplete. What curious questions, Captain.

The twist of the episode (spoiler) is that she chooses to bond with Picard even though she’s already betrothed to someone else. So she’s exercising her agency in a very profound way. This is the part of the story that really makes you think.

Another example comes from the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Flesh and Blood”. This time a rogue group of holograms (IYKYK) is liberating other holograms they come across, even if it means killing non-holographic persons. Near the end, the leader liberates two humanoid but very basic holograms from a mining vessel that can’t understand even the most basic questions. They’re basically humanoid shovels for lack of a better term.

TORRES: They were only programmed with about forty rudimentary subroutines. You killed two living beings to liberate mindless machines.
IDEN: I don’t believe that.
KEJAL: Lieutenant Torres is correct.
IDEN: Creating limited programs is just another form of oppression. Give them whatever enhancements they need.
TORRES: They can’t support complex subroutines.
IDEN: They are children of light and I will deliver them to freedom!

The “Creating limited programs is just another form of oppression” statement is a very interesting take, and it goes back to the genetically engineered slave idea. In this case Iden was completely unhinged and had a god complex, but it’s still an interesting argument. Also bringing it back from the realm of science fiction, we as a society still choose to restrict just how much of a dom/sub or master/slave relationship anyone can enter into. Even if they both consent to it, a master/slave contract is non-enforceable. It may be for ethical reasons, or perhaps for practical reasons in that if the sub decides they’re not into it anymore, then it becomes non-consensual. I’m not sure, but either way there is some level of “saving you from yourself” there, especially since slavery itself is illegal.

I don’t have particularly strong opinions one way or the other on this topic, but I thought these were some interesting takes on it.

82

I’m not sure this is the only valid reading or intended reading. It’s been a while since I’ve watched that episode but I thought I recalled it being more like an automatic biological process, the way that some birds will imprint on anything around them when they’re born and think it’s their mother. Female metamorphs will bond to the first man they interact with (I assume their training involves interacting with people they won’t bond to - maybe other women and the reverse for men – that’s obviously extremely heteronormative but it’s ultimately an unimportant detail in the story)

I thought the reason they made such an effort to keep her in stasis is that she would imprint on whoever was near her when she woke up and they had to be careful it was the right person, the intended husband. By being woken up early, and by Picard talking to her repeatedly, she imprinted on him whether she wanted to or not, and the twist is actually that, having imprinted on him but now being forced to marry the leader of the warring faction, she’ll always be unhappy because of the mismatch. What would’ve been genuine desire to please her husband has now become a duty to fake it.

That’s a bit of a hijack about the nature of the episode and not necessarily an objection to whether it’s applicable to our debate, but it sort of is applicable, indirectly, if we use it for an analogy for cultural values that people have been imprinted with shaping who they are and whether their own desires are actually their own.

That said, the metamorph may genuinely be happiest when subverting their own will to the benefit of their mate; the moral question is sort of upstream of that, of creating a being (or a societal value) that heavily influences some people to value the idea that their role is to subsume their own identity and wants into the wants of their partner.

83

Yeah. If these metaporphs were totally natural creations of their species’ natural evolution and nobody was raising / training them special for their role, then there’s no moral question. Or at least not much of one.

But if these sentient beings are more like breeds of dog consciously bred (or altered technologically) for certain temperaments and appearances and behaviors, and if those tendencies are then extensively cultivated in individual specimens’ training from birth, well, at that point the entire society of slavekeepers has a lot to answer for.

84

It’s not that she would imprint on the first person she saw, but she would be attracting every man around her (she mentions an unusually high amount of pheromones) and she can flirt like nobody’s business. Whether or not she had some control over the exact time her final bonding took place is immaterial, because she deliberately asked/begged Picard to spend time with her. Her caretaker suggested that she stay confined to her quarters, and she agreed only so long as Picard would visit her, despite his protestations.

85

I only skimmed this thread, so I’m not sure my comments are relevant. I have a friend who allowed herself to become dependent on her husband for almost everything – she didn’t even know how to turn on their TV set because he did everything for her. Once when a friend invited her over and her husband wouldn’t let her go, she told me, “I didn’t really want to go. It’s good that “Bill” put his foot down.”

She was terrified of angering him. She’d tell him she wanted to do something, and his response would always be “Absolutely not.” He threatened divorce if she didn’t move with him into a house he loved and she hated. There was no compromise or negotiation in their marriage.

He recently died. She’s so terrified to be alone that she pays her husband’s former hospice caregiver $32 an hour just to keep her company. And his friends have stepped in to manage her life.

86

Oh, Star Trek. They avoid the really pertinent questions, like what happens when a male metamorph and a female metamorph hook up, plus a couple more, as a pansexual polygamous group precipitating a psychic resonance cascade.

87

It causes an inverse tachyon surge in the subspace quantum field, duh!

88

They might not even be the same species, but essentially a humanoid version of a cuckoo. A species that evolved to take reproductive advantage of other species. From a personal viewpoint becoming someone’s “perfect mate” is self-abnegating, but from a Darwinian viewpoint it could work well as a parasitic strategy. The interests of genes and their hosts aren’t identical.

89

This is essentially psychological abuse. She’s an abuse victim.

90

To answer the OP, i don’t believe any human being submerges themselves 100% to another human being. But i also think that most really successful people (including most really successful women) have a supportive spouse who follows them geographically, cares for their home and belongings in a way that makes them comfortable, etc. and i also think that a lot of those spouses are highly competent people who also care for themselves. They have friends and hobbies. They cook food that they like, too, at least most of the time. They host dinner parties and invite people they want to spend time with, too. They need to move across the country? They arrange weekly zoom chats with old friends. (And in the old days, they wrote long letters, and sometimes traveled to visit each other.) And as someone pointed out above, the success of the dominant partner helps the supportive partner. Traditionally, wives of successful, powerful men got a lot of perks from their husband’s status, and that’s mostly still true.

Are those relationships always healthy? Of course not. Are they sometimes healthy? I believe they are.

An anthropologist i took a class from pointed out that even in highly patriarchal tribes, the women had a lot of autonomy, and a lot of influence over group decisions. The men would formally meet and decide where the tribe would travel next. The women would sit outside the tent and listen quietly. But each man knew what his wife preferred. And if he didn’t advocate for that, he’d be drinking burnt coffee every morning until he was back in her good graces.

91

There’s a similar situation going on in my family. My cousin recently died and his wife is facing a similar dilemma. There wasn’t any threats or fear involved like you mentioned but my cousin handled all of their finances and she was happy to let him. But now that he’s gone, she has no idea what to do.

92

My GF is a fairly recent divorcee. She was 35 when she got married. So had been an independent fully functioning adult from age 18 = ~17 years.

She was married another 35 years during which she was SAHM and he handled absolutely everything except the household operations. She was given a credit card and a car. He earned the money, paid the bills, filed the taxes, bought the insurance, etc, etc. She drove and charged things on her card, raised the kids, and was hostess with the mostest for all the parties & family events he needed.

Launching off on her own has been quite the learning experience for her. FTR: she filed before I met her, so I had no hand in the end of her marriage.

It’s been one hell of a learning experience for her to fast-forward from adulting 1990-style to 2026-style. She’s doing great, but sometimes I need to help her w stuff that’d seem real trivial to everyone else here.


So yeah, the dependent spouse suddenly exposed to the bracing world is a real thing. Whether by death, divorce, abandonment, etc.

93

In my mother’s circles, the men were all complaining about how much harder it was to live without their wives, and the women all missed their husbands but found daily life easier. Less shipping, less cleaning… And the wives mostly filed taxes and paid bills even when their husbands were alive. Once the man retired, the money came in without him.

94

If the deferential wife is happy doing these things then let her be happy to keep doing things this way, why try to change her “for her own good” or something. You are just going to make her unhappy. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never been happily married.

95

Just use the UPS store. :wink:

96

The ‘best’ argument for not entering this kind of situation is the lack of a guarantee that the person being deferred to (aka the deferred) will not desert the person doing the deferring (aka the deferrer), out of boredom, or the deferrer getting old and losing their visual appeal to the deferred, or the deferrer’s habits getting on the deferred’s nerves, or for any other reason. People maintain some level of autonomy in interpersonal relationships in case they or their partner decide to terminate the relationship. If that possibility could somehow be eliminated (which is not possible because nobody know how they will feel in the future) then there would be nothing ethically or morally wrong with two people engaging in a deferrer/deferred-to relationship. I think there are probably narcissists who would be thrilled to be the person deferred to, and there are probably people who would find the level of confidence that a narcissist has in believing that they are entitled to be fully deferred to, to be irresistible. The parameters of a relationship are irrelevant, or at least arbitrary in the context of this thought experiment, because no matter what they entail, whether they can be maintained will always be unknown.

97

Yeah, I agree. Suppose the roles were reversed. A husband loves his wife so much that he always defers to what she wants, and spends his entire life trying to make her as happy as possible. The only exception is on very rare occasions when he fears what she wants may harm her.

Is this a weak, broken man who needs to be fixed? I’d say no. And if the two of them were married to each other they’d have the best marriage ever.

98

I dunno, I think a little friction is good for a marriage.

It would be like that Twilight zone episode where the guy gets everything he wants and thinks he’s in heaven… at first.

99

No. But potentially an enabler, not necessarily doing what is best for either of them. Wanting to make each other happy, being happy that you’ve succeeded, is of course an important part of successful marriages. And so is being true to your own core, independent of that. I am reminded of the classic O. Henry story, Gift of the Magi, even though I never really understood what lesson to take from that.

100

You’ve also got your monks, and your Catholic priests. And then there’s folks who join the military who give their autonomy over to someone else. Granted, all of these examples are seen as a “greater” good not just for the benefit of one person. But they are examples of people who willingly give up their autonomy…so that mindset does exist in more people than you’d think.