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Re:Great Male Renunciation by marginalia_nu on Sunday October 22, 2023 @05:40PM (#37979338)
Well, having servants for one night only isn't really comparable to paying for them several decades.
Re:Great Male Renunciation by ben_w on Sunday October 22, 2023 @05:51PM (#37979417)
Tautologically most people can't afford human servants, because if we were all that rich it would include the servants who we then couldn't afford.

Quite a lot of us have robot vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, washing machines, and all of us now have zero marginal cost (to ourselves) voice-controlled AI assistants free with our radio-video-telephone-dictaphone-gramophone-calendar-notepads.

Some of the aforementioned are also powerful enough to be able to locally, for an energy cost so small that it's less than the cost of the food calories you burned reading this sentence, create a new artwork in any arbitrary artistic style.

Re:Great Male Renunciation by rsynnott on Monday October 23, 2023 @06:46AM (#37983873)
Most people, of course, didn't have servants at all, and the really big staffs were an _extreme_ outlier; in the period mentioned you're basically talking just high nobility. It did become _somewhat_ more common in the late 19th century (most of the really silly Downton Abbey type setups date from then), before collapsing entirely in the early 20th.