HighResolutionSleep
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User ID: 172
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
I confident you would be just as horrified if I said that men should also be stoned if they say they'd be fine with another kid and then dipped out when one actually happened.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
Wait, so if she is on birth control but gets pregnant anyway and decides not to have an abortion, I should still hate her?
If that's what she said she'd do in the event of an unexpected pregnancy, yep. Stone her. The common blue tribe position is that partners need to communicate on this issues, but it's also a common blue tribe position that women can change their minds about these things whenever they want, especially when a pregnancy actually happens. Communications mean nothing if they don't bind.
In the event nothing was said beforehand, I'm willing to call them both morons and move on. She's the bigger moron considering she has the power, but if it ever came to pass that this were the biggest injustice in the way we adjudicate these matters I'd consider that a virtually unconditional win for any semblance of balance between men and women.
Why is it so important to you that we make this a black and white issue where she is pure evil and deserves no compassion at all?
Because if we're going to offer men cultural and social protection in lieu of legal protection from the abuse of women's reproductive power, these protections need to bite. It can't just be like, well you shouldn't do it, but if you do it nothing bad happens to you, oh well.
I am trying to understand your position. You keep changing the terms
Please highlight where I have "changed the terms" in such a way that gave you the impression that I want to force women to have abortions like some kind of deranged psychopath.
You really do seem to basically want to punish women for having the final say in reproductive decisions.
I want to punish women for abusing this final say like we punish cheaters.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
If you're talking about a woman who deliberately goes off birth control despite knowing her husband doesn't want a baby, I agree, that sucks, and he's be justified in considering that a betrayal and leaving her
Ok cool, that's way more than most would offer, but it also needs to be the case where the pregnancy is a true accident, and all other cases sans the truly exotic. Not only in the most egregious and difficult to prove case.
I would certainly sympathize with him more than with her in that case, though I wouldn't join in the public shaming and stoning you seem to want.
You shouldn't sympathize with her at all, and the social stoning is the point. People should be socially deterred from cheating on their spouses and bringing children into that family that aren't fully wanted.
you haven't described a "cultural problem" other than that you think it's unfair that men can't either force or forbid women to have abortions.
This bad faith interpretation of my words can talk to my hand. You're welcome to bring a real objection to my position forward if you'd like.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
By "abuse of power" are you talking about a woman who baby-traps an unwilling man with a surprise pregnancy
Any time a woman in a marriage decides to go and have a baby without mutual consent. Sure, for reasons of bodily autonomy or whatever she can still choose to betray the privileged trust of marriage and stab him in the back, but the cultural and social consequences for exercising this choice need to be dire.
As for your edge cases, no, the most extreme and unlikely scenarios you can imagine are not societal problems.
Let's keep things on rails: I said that the broader reaction to it is a cultural problem, which is anything but an "edge case". Not the anomalous event itself.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
I can't say I have seen your scenario often enough to say who's right about frequency of reactions
I'm willing to agree to disagree on this point. Your reaction provides a good enough working example.
my opinion if an otherwise stable marriage ended because she suddenly decided she wants a child and he doesn't would be "I'm sorry, that sucks" to both parties.
Right, and I'm saying that's not good enough and proves you're unserious about protecting men from women's disproportionate reproductive power. Your reaction to this abuse of power needs to not be "oopsies, oh well shit happens", but rather, "you suck, fuck you".
As for risk and choice, it's obviously a risk for both parties.
No, it is a choice for women. A baby does not fall out of a woman's uterus immediately after sex. It is the finished product of a long and in this day and age deliberate process, that only one party has any official control over. This reality simply cannot be rhetorically smoothed over and ignored.
(And if "he said no to the sex" - are you talking about a man being raped by a woman and having to pay child support? I guess that has happened a time or two. About as often as a woman having a rapist's baby and having to share custody, perhaps.)
Sure, and notice how that the cavalry arrived for one of these people and not the other. This is a cultural problem.
I don't think people do actually have much sympathy for a woman whose partner leaves her because she wants a(nother) child and he doesn't. It's just an unfortunate irreconcilable difference.
Let's keep things in scope and specify that this is happening within an otherwise stable marriage and there's an unexpected pregnancy. If you're still willing to assert this, I'm open to reviewing evidence, but as it stands I'm believing my own eyes.
He's still financially responsible for any children he produces, though.
I'd like to point out that men don't produce children, but I realize that the definition of "producing" always shuffles around based on who and whom. When it's calculating who bears the most bodily cost and therefore who ought to have the say, she's doing the producing. When it comes to who pays, well it bears his genes so it's 50-50. (Even if he said no to the sex, because why not.)
That's an ever-present potential consequence of having sex that both parties have to live with.
It's a risk for one party, but a choice for the other. I will continue to point this out until I am blue in the face, shouting into the abyss, probably until the day I die.
I understand what is supposed to happen. My concern is what happens when something goes wrong.
Blue tribe is happy to hand wave away men's vulnerability to women's overwhelming reproductive power as "biological" in origin. I am unsure how biology writes our laws in any sense other than the most reductive and worthless—but on the other hand, I am not opposed to the implementation of cultural protections in lieu of legal ones where the latter may be too unwieldy. Blues would insist that any legal protection for men is impossible to practically implement. I may mostly disagree, but I can see how it might be hard to implement within a marriage context. Cultural protections may be appropriate here.
The problem is that this form of protection isn't offered to men by blue tribe in nearly enough volume to justify the power differential. Blue tribe culture may be willing to condemn reproductive coercion of men by women as being kinda mean, and wag a finger at women who do it, but that isn't nearly enough, and proves that blues don't really care about this abuse of power.
If we're taking this seriously, reproductive coercion of men by women really ought to be considered at a similar level of transgression as infidelity. This is a good example of a love crime that we do actually take quite seriously, and offer serious cultural protection against in lieu of legal protection. If we were to apply this kind of protection as a safeguard against women's reproductive power, things would look very, very different. It would look like blue tribe looking at a sobbing woman whose husband left her because she tried forcing another baby on him dead in the face, and, shedding no pity whatsoever, assuring her that all this ruin is only what she wrought upon herself. It would look like, in the other timeline, blue tribe lionizing a husband as downright saintly for finding it in himself to forgive this kind of transgression, given to an individual wholly undeserving of mercy, even if the true intended beneficiaries are the children.
But in the current blue milieu, unexpected babies in marriage are something that just kinda happen. Like, it's a little bad if the woman is being deceptive, but comon dude, shit happens. You need to move on and focus on making room for the new kid. I don't even want to know how much of the asshole he would be if he up and left due to this betrayal. Sticking around is simply being a decent human being and awards no cookies.
Again, I'd have less of a bone to pick with Blue Culture if the protections it claims to offer to men were real, but as it stands right now calling it a fig leaf would be offering too much credit.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
That being the case, that only one person has the deciding vote under the law doesn't make it "deceitful" to argue that for most people it is a decision of "heart and home."
Right but the people who want me to accept this would never characterize it that way.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
I think this is a good description of the story the modern blue tribe tells about itself, and if it were true to form I'd probably have less of a bone to pick with that side of the isle's treatment of my sex. But like many autobiographies, it gives itself too much credit.
I think you'll find that in practice, very little scorn is offered to wives who decide for themselves that having another baby is "right for her", and very little lenience to husbands who aren't prepared to quickly get with that program.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
Couple of thoughts:
- People who own homes often spend against their equity, and dropping house values would at the very least put a stop to this money faucet;
- People who own homes often don't want their neighborhoods to become more affordable, as they do not wish to live near People of Affordability;
- People who don't own homes often have pensions and retirement accounts affixed to the nominal value of homes.
Under the current regime, if you're savvy, you can buy an asset that more than pays for itself, appreciates over time, becomes completely yours after 30 years, and even gets a lot of tax benefits. Why put your money anywhere else? This can't go on.
I agree with the general thought that homes as an investment is incompatible with a functioning nation, because it by definition requires housing to become only less affordable over time. When you consider the fact that what can't continue won't, it's simply inevitable that this arrangement will end at some point. The only question is who will be left holding the bag, which I imagine will be a hotly battled political contest.
Not sure if I want my money in that fight. Difficult to imagine that property owners will somehow win. On the other hand, the tide doesn't look like it's turning quite yet. We're still patching in buffs to what is already the best asset class.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
Sure, and a car can last a million miles if diligently maintained.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
Perhaps, but we'd need at least multiple generations of favorable cultural iteration before reproductive autonomy for men isn't a fringe lunatic idea. I imagine that by then the issue wouldn't practically matter anymore.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
In the IRL battle of the sexes, Team Woman always wins because that's the team most men are on.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
It's unpopular to say to women.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
If the choice is between the father financing her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support and me and you financing her unilateral choices... I say the father.
As long as truly not a single red cent comes out of my pocket to fund her reproductive choices, these terms are tolerable.
HighResolutionSleep
8mo ago
Putting it differently, what level of sacrifice do you think it is okay to demand from one person to save another from a major financial onus that they knowingly exposed themselves to the risk of?
This argument is always such a mind-bender. You're getting the causality exactly backwards—her choosing to give birth is what engages his financial obligation under the current legal scheme, not the other way around. This obligation can be discharged without affecting her ability to choose.
The engine drives the transmission, not the other way around.
HighResolutionSleep
9mo ago
I feel really bad for the other guy that Twitter thought for sure was the shooter.
HighResolutionSleep
10mo ago
It's been said a few times that our rejection of supernatural stories has left young people without the kinds of cautionary tales that used to transmit some amount of wisdom.
Maybe Keith Gill can be the modern world's Icarus.
HighResolutionSleep
10mo ago
Why is there this special carve out to discriminate against men?
Because men think it's gay to organize and demand things. Simple as.
HighResolutionSleep
11mo ago
HighResolutionSleep
11mo ago
Really? No posts on Wellness Wednesday? Any wellers in chat?
HighResolutionSleep
11mo ago
She's a 10, there's absolutely nothing wrong with her, you managed to bring her home with you, and she's a little tipsy. But you just noticed that on your bookshelf behind her there's an exposed and visible hardcover copy of Ted Cruz's Unwoke. What do you do?
HighResolutionSleep
11mo ago
The problem is that nobody is joking.
HighResolutionSleep
11mo ago
I think roughly 0% of respondents would actually pick the bear. They are, to borrow a phrase from yesteryear, virtue signalling.
The more notable revelation is how cleanly this whole ordeal demonstrates that hating men is very much considered a virtue in some spaces.
The emerging problem with this is the inevitable backlash. The Culture style gender equality can't happen, because if too many men take up the offer to become women because they are treated better it will be declared not fair and do over.
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