Agree 100%. In older mass media, "think of the children" was an archetypal motivator in community and political action. But today, living with children in a big American city, it does seem like making the world nice for children is a lower priority than dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc. The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.
I'm reminded of this old quote from Plutarch:
On seeing certain wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them, Caesar asked, we are told, if the women in their country did not bear children, thus in right princely fashion rebuking those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow-men.
- Plutarch, Pericles. 1st century A.D.
According to William Durant, who I believe, a major underlying cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire was a gradual decline in population, in turn due to people deciding to have fewer children. This started with the elites, but eventually reached the provinces. From his Caesar and Christ:
A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian. It has been questioned, but the mass importation of barbarians into the Empire by Aurelius, Valentinian, Aurelian, Probus, and Constantine leaves little room for doubt.3 Aurelius, to replenish his army, enrolled slaves, gladiators, policemen, criminals; either the crisis was greater, or the free population less, than before; and the slave population had certainly fallen. So many farms had been abandoned, above all in Italy, that Pertinax offered them gratis to anyone who would till them. A law of Septimius Severus speaks of a penuria hominum—a shortage of men.4 In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time (250) been halved. He mourned to “see the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away.”5 Only the barbarians and the Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.
What had caused this fall in population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced first by the educated classes, it had now seeped down to a proletariat named for its fertility;6 by A.D. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes, as shown by the use of imperial alimenta to encourage rural parentage; by the third century it had overrun the western provinces, and was lowering man power in Gaul.7 Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished as poverty grew.8 Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect, and the making of eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed into the West. Plantianus, Praetorian Prefect, had one hundred boys emasculated, and then gave them to his daughter as a wedding gift.
gorge
1yr ago
To go along with the others that say this is not new and this is not a mistake, I recently learned that back in 2002 the National Organization for Women -- one of the top feminist organizations -- actually pressured city bus networks to drop ads that educated women about risks to ferility:
The series of advertisements -- developed for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the nation's largest medical association devoted to fertility and reproduction -- uses provocative baby bottle images to highlight four major causes of infertility: cigarette smoking, unhealthy body weight, sexually transmitted diseases and advancing age.
When the ads appeared on buses in several U.S. cities last year, they drew the ire of the National Organization for Women. Accusing the doctors group of using "scare tactics," NOW argued that the ads sent a negative message to women who might want to delay or skip childbearing in favor of career pursuits.
Meanwhile we have a generation of women who are woefully under-informed about how early fertility drops-off and how limited the power of science is to actually extend this. Even women doctors are grossly ignorant of this, often resulting in terrible heartbreak as IVF treatments fail.
As a reproductive endocrinologist, I have seen countless 40-something-year-old female physicians seeking fertility treatment, only to be genuinely shocked that their peak egg number and quality -- that is, their peak fertility -- has long since passed.
Often the only reliable treatment in the setting of substantial reproductive aging is using donor eggs from a much younger woman, which is infrequently a desired solution.
Despite decades of medical education, most physicians and other medical professionals have never had sufficient training in basic human reproduction.
Family planning, to the limited extent is taught in our schools, focuses entirely on the prevention of undesired pregnancy. Ironically, no attention is given to the limits of human fertility and the question of how to conceive when a pregnancy is desired. There is no reliable time in any American's life -- including our physicians' -- when they are taught even the basic reality and limitations of how to become pregnant.
That NOW and feminists in general are actively trying to downplay the risks of infertility due to age says everything about whether they really are working for what is best for women.
gorge
1yr ago
Every DINK with a pet are two votes that should been a pro-child vote balancing out the other forces in politics, but instead they are absent from the fray. When you have so many adults in their prime ages of energy raising pets instead of children, it changes as a whole what the culture values.
The points about unions don’t even fit either circle unless I’ve missed recent developments in the Library Cults.
In my city, libraries have been basically non-functional since the pandemic. The official hours are ridiculously limited, but every time I actually go during those hours, it has been closed. They have rules requiring at least 4 staff members be on site all the time, so if one staff member calls in sick, and they are below the number, the entire thing closes. This is despite staffers admit they spend most of their time doing nothing. They are having trouble hiring, but despite shelving books being a task many people could do, only people with the official sheepskin are allowed to be hired, which is generally a union thing to create barriers of entry and higher pay. Of course, the library workers job can itself suck, because they are lower priority than the rule "always accommodate vagrants lest we get publicized doing something that creates bad optics."
gorge
1yr ago
Having kids, especially infants and toddlers, is distinctly type II fun: "miserable while it's happening, but fun in retrospect."
As a dad, this has not been my experience with infant and toddlers, except for the first two months of the first child. The journey itself is intensely rewarding. Has it been your experience?
tired: standardized testing is on the chopping block because it has disparate impact against blacks and hispanics
wired: standardized testing is unpopular because the white upper class is losing out to Asians, but they can't say this so they use discrimination against blacks as an excuse.
inspired: standardized testing is unpopular because the head girl types who now control our politics are still mad about the class male nerd who blew off all his homework but still beat her on the tests.
expired: the majority being jealous of smart people is just the world historical normal that we are reverting back to, the era of promoting people based on objective academic achievement is the anomaly
gorge
1yr ago
Any institution that criticizes the Zeitgeist gets attacked as being "right-wing" or "partisan." And being pro-free-speech itself is increasingly being portrayed as a right-wing ideology. FIRE likely does not want the taint of being seen as only being interested in free speech as a right-wing thing, it does not want to be pigeon-holed, and so it is going out of its way to publicize its association with a famous case of (alleged) supression of left-wing speech.
To me, this is a case of false neutrality or false both-sidisims. In going out of its way to show it has neither a left-wing or right-wing bias, it is highlighting a case of alleged speech suppression that does not deserve to be highlighted purely based on its own merits.
This kind of thing used to happen, it was the original definition of the word "filibuster": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(military). It has been illegal under U.S. law de facto since the 1794 Neutrality Act, although it wasn't always enforced until the 1850s. So what would actually happen is that the billionaire would be arrested and would lose everything.
Also, what would the billionaire gain? Haiti is a country devoid of human and natural resources, that relies on international aid simply to feed itself.
Even if he wasn't arrested (which he would be), the P.R. for the billionaire would be terrible. The American press would go into a fury at the idea of a billionaire doing an authoritarian corporate fascist take over of a country. They would signal boost every bad thing that happened: Every Haitian killed, every repressive act, every mistake in rule, everything thing with bad optics on the island would be blamed on this billionaire and he would be made to look like a super-villain.
gorge
1yr ago
Even without FTL travel, there is enough energy and material being produced in our current solar system to support an unimaginable number of humans. The Dyson sphere gets built incrementally. You just keep building new permanent space habitations ( each could support 50,000 to 1 million people) that get sent into close orbit around the sun, with an array of solar panels running at 100X the efficiency you get running solar panels on earth. Each of the habitations would have enough energy to both make its world a utopian human experience and allow for building new habitations for the colony's children. In the far future, human life will be primarily non-terrestrial, and visitors from the habitations will come on vacation to Earth and marvel at how people put up with blizzards and mosquitos and rain and other hazards of planetary life. What happens when the Dyson sphere is complete and the solar system has reached capacity of quadrillions people? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it...
Also, there is not reason you couldn't send out colonies to other solar systems even without FTL travel. The colony ships would just need to be self-sustaining habitations that would house many generations of people.
gorge
1yr ago
You can kind of make sense of it if you just suspend disbelief and pretend that in this fictional world skin color and other phenotypic racial characteristics are just a matter of complexion, and no more important to identity than is hair color among white Americans. So it is not any more unusual for a black mom to give birth to a white child than it is for a white brunette to give birth to a ginger child. (Although even this isn't great film making, because a film-maker shouldn't require any more suspension of belief than necessary, so better to just cast families that intuitively look like families).
But what grinds my gears is when the producers advertise the casting as "adding diversity and racial dynamics to the show which will make it more interesting", then halfway into the show when watching it you realize that they did not actually add racial diversity to the in-story universe, they simply added complexion. The fictional society is actually a post-racial one where the different racial phenotype does not actually matter. I end up very confused because I am coming in expecting race to be an issue, expecting it to be a difference that matters in story, waiting for the shoe to drop, but it never happens.
gorge
1yr ago
Back in September a commenter here on the TheMotte posted an argument about fertility trends claiming that among rich countries fertility actually increases with feminism. I did not have time to respond at the time, but this is something that I have heard many times, so I wanted to make an effort post explaining why I don't believe the claim. Here are some examples of prestige outlets making the same claim, from a New York Times op-ed:
The culture of misogyny and gender inequality [in South Korea] may be affecting family life, in a country facing predictions of population collapse. Research shows that a low fertility rate in developed countries reflects backward attitudes over female gender roles. source
And here is the United Nations Population Fund:
Want to increase birth rates? Try gender equality. Many countries in Eastern Europe face what is often perceived as a population crisis....There is broad consensus on what needs to be part of such a policy package: Quality, affordable childcare starting from an early age. Flexible and generously paid parental leave for both parents (with incentives for men to take what they are entitled to). Flexible work arrangements, and providing equal pay for women. Programmes to encourage men and women to equally share care and household work. And affordable housing as well as financial support for low-income families. source
The original TheMotte commenter wrote:
However, what I have noticed is that rich female friendly nations do far better in terms of birth rate than rich conservative strict gender role societies. For example - France has a fertility rate around 1.8. 1.7 for the US. Germany 1.4. In the east with more strict gender norms the rich societies however have far more abysmal fertility rates - Japan 1.3, South Korea 0.8, Taiwan 1.1, Singapore 1.2.
I will address three big problems with the argument, and then I want to talk about the elephant in the room.
The first problem is that this is cherry-picking examples. We could just as easily cherry-pick other countries that show a reversed trend: Spain has a parliament that is 50% women but a fertility rate of merely 1.3. Finland ranks number one on female empowerment, sharing many of the same policies as Sweden, but has a a very low fertility rate of 1.3. In Ireland, where men only do 43% of the housework (which is low for Europe), women have a fertility rate of 1.6.
You might think we could get around the problem of cherry-picking by running regressions against a broader dataset. But turns out there are still too many researcher degrees of freedom. In playing with the data myself, and in reading about others who have played with the data, I could get anything from a massively negative impact of female empowerment on fertility, to no impact, to modestly positive. Here are some charts I made:
-
Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for all countries in the world -- massive correlation between less gender inequality and less fertility -- https://i.postimg.cc/8PngCpQM/gender-inequality-index-versus-fertility-all-countries.png
-
Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for rich countries (>$15k GDP, as rich as Poland or Uruguay) -- small correlation of less gender inequality, lower fertility. No correlation after removing the petro-states. Big range restriction problem (more on this later) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
-
Weeks of Paid Parental Leave versus Fertility, OECD countries (neglibile negative correlation, more paid leave, less fertility) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
-
Net childcare costs (after government subsidies) versus Fertility, OECD countries (no correlation) -- https://i.postimg.cc/nV4LMQ07/net-childcare-costs-versus-fertility.png
That parental leave or subsized childcare has no correlation with fertility rates should dispense with any notion that these are the magic policies that will fix fertility while reconciling child bearing with women pursuing careerist paths.
The second problem is that fertility rate itself is confounded by sub-cultures within a country. The poster children for feminist family polices with high birth rates are Sweden and France. However, their fertility stats are hopelessly confounded by the fertility of more patriarchal subcultures -- that of non-European immigrants. Unfortunately, it is fiendishly hard to find accurate statistics on how much this impacts the numbers.
France, for instance, bans collecting statistics by race. But this report showed 38% of new births in the cities were considered high-risk for sickle cell anemia -- meaning the parents are of Arab or African origin. That's a huge number.
In the United States, fertility is boosted by less feminist groups, such as recent immigrants, Amish, Mormons, and evangelical Christians. Israel's fertility is boosted by ultra-Orthodox Jews who have a fertility rate three times that of secular Israelis.
(continued in the replies due to excess word count)
(cont, part 2)
The third problem is that many assertions about such-and-such country having a "traditional patriarchy" are completely wrong -- these claims are either exaggerations made by agenda-driven activists, or misconceptions of Westerners who only ever hear exceptional stories, and never the stories about how 99% time they are similar to us.
Starting the case of South Korea, we see that the New York Times has signal-boosted a few writers who have called South Korea "patriarchal":
Many men would rather not acknowledge that South Korea is an entrenched patriarchy and that toxic gender relations are taking a toll on society. source
And:
Other trends in South Korea strongly discourage births. They include rising opposition among women to child-rearing expectations by men in what remains a patriarchal society. More women in South Korea, rebelling against the country’s deeply embedded sexism, are foregoing marriage and motherhood in pursuit of education and professional careers.
But is this the true story of South Korea?
I went on a binge of reading articles and forum posts by actual South Koreans. By cherry-picking alternative evidence I can tell an entirely different story:
South Korea in the past decade has gone off the extreme feminist deep-end. Popular online communities for young women, such as WOMAD or Megalia,have been the hosts of campaigns of vitriolic attacks and physical assaults against men -- such as calling men vermin, posting secret nude pics of men up for mockery, wishing for North Korea to invade and kill Korean males. Nor is this not a fringe movement -- the online communities these views thrive on can reach up to a million young female users. While of course the majority of the content on these forums is mundane, when the topic of men comes up, only the radical feminist position is allowed. The Western media, not understanding the nature of South Korean feminism, denounces even a modest backlash against this extreme feminism as being mysoginistic.
At the government level, South Korea is more feminist than the U.S.A. in a number of ways: South Korea elected a woman president in 2013, followed by a male president who campaigned on promises to be a "feminist president." Ministry for Women claims that men are 'potential criminals' and have a 'social responsibility' to prove women that he is 'different from the others.' South korea ranks 10th in the UN's equality index, while America is 46th.
Korean media culture has villainized the domineering mother-in-law of old. The newer generation of mother-in-laws positions themselves as friends and equals of young wives. The rights of Korean women have enormously improved, and women are standing against gender discrimination and injustice. The patriarchy system has disappeared a lot, and daughter-in-law is no longer subordinate to their mother-in-law.
Korean feminism is more selfish than the Western version -- the new trend is to expect guys to be sweet k-drama fantasy men that enthusiastically cook as a hobby. Princess culture cherry picking feminist privilege, not empowerment, has really become an abomination. Korean government is pushing a female quota for police, despite women being held to lower standards and not actually doing anything at the scene of the crime.
Women are now a key part of the work force -- and held to the same standards of long hours as men are held to. Despite stories fed to western news organizations by activists about how South Korea is stuck in the 1950s, that is not true at all. Companies aren't firing women in droves as soon as they get pregnant, instead, they are often asking them how quickly they can come back to work because they cannot afford to lose them for long. There is no baby-making strike, despite what lying activists trick the gullible BBC into saying, all the professoinal working women in Korea are able to go back to work after having children and 50% of homes with children are now dual income. Korean women report that sexual harrassment is actually far greater in Europe and the USA than in in South Korea.
Which portrait of South Korea is more accurate? My own sense based on reading all the original posts and viewing the statistics is that South Korea is more feminist than the U.S. on some dimensions, and less on others. Choosing and weighting the categories in order to add up a total feminist score is an entirely arbitrary exercise. There is a general trend of extreme low-fertility among urbanites in modern cities with high real estate costs, little room for kids to play, and intense job markets. I suspect that South Korea's and Singapore's extra low fertility rates are probably more related to their population being more competitive urbanite than America's. I would guess that South Koreans in Seoul probably have a similar fertility rate to white college educated people living in New York City.
Neither are the Eastern Bloc countries some last hold-outs of patriarchy. Remember that Soviet communism was ultra-feminist for its time-period. The Bolshevik party in the 1920s set up women's departments . Divorce and abortion were available on demand (unlike in the United States at the same time):
In 1923 women's departments existed in most provinces; 35,539 women attended delegate assemblies in cities and towns, and 55,688 more in rural areas....The official message to women was that following the victory of the socialist revolution, women were equal. The Bolsheviks implemented concrete policies designed to equalize the status of women with men, improve their educational level, and involve them in society. ... The main thrust of the rural women's departments was to encourage women to participate in village soviet elections, attend women's assemblies, and promote Komsomol membership. The Bolshevik mission was to enlighten the "backward female masses," overcome their "religious superstition," undermine male domination, and draw them closer to the party. Russia After Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society, 1921 -- 1929.
Now, later on the West experienced second wave feminism while the situation in the Soviet Union was more stagnant. That is probably how the reputation arises for the Eastern Bloc being less feminist. But since the opening up the ex-Soviet bloc to western style TV, these countries are anti-traditional in their own way. Russia for instance, has American inspired reality TV shows glamorizing the "gold diggers" who leave their local towns for wealthy boyfriends in the city. Divorce rates in Russia are insane. Pick-up artists have reported on Poland being especially prime place to pick up women who cheat on their husbands.
As one prominent Russian nationalist recently wrote:
I have to admit that for many years I've been pissed off at our official Duginist rhetoric about the holy war of Russia as the center of world good, tradition and shit, with the bad West and the Euroatlantic civilization. There are two problems with these ideas.
First, it's all a lie. There is no “tradition” in Russia - not in the sense of an historical tradition and canon, but in the sense of a “living” tradition here and now. Russia is the country of total divorce, low birth rates, abandoned old age, an absence of elder men (and thus zero patriarchy), general cynicism, individualism, cult of consumption, extremely weak religiosity (unless we count DIY paganism and DIY esotericism as such), mass (not only elite) aping of any foreign fashions, torn historical and familial memory, indifference to everything national, concrete high-rise construction with no feel of the earth or a feeling of being masters on the land, and most importantly an extreme lack of trust in all social and collective institutions.
USA is an infinitely more “traditional” country than Russia. In USA, almost every other man has read the Bible - and will quote from it. But whatever, the second thing is worse.
In fairness, this is rant likely exaggerates the difference between the USA and Russia in other direction. My general sense is that in the Eastern Bloc both the men and the women are defecting harder than in the West. Outsiders with an agenda look and at this and see how poorly men are behaving and associate that with "toxic masculinity" which codes to them as "traditional patriarchy." In reality there is excessive bad behavior with both sexes and the bad male behavior has little to do with traditional patriarchy.
...on to part 3...
gorge
1yr ago
(cont, part 3)
The elephant in the room
Now that we muddled the situation by discussing all the confounders, unknowables, and conflicting evidence, we should adress the the elephant in the room: Every low-fertility country in the world today -- from South Korea to Sweden to Poland -- is wildly feminist by the standards of history, and by the standards of countries that have had high-fertility.
When we compare basic measures of modern feminism versus traditional partriachy -- % of women enrolling in college educated, % of legislatures women, divorce rate -- we see that contemporary South Korea and Japan are far closer to the modern United States and Sweden than it is to 1950s America.
Fertility Rate | Gross college enrollment rate for women | % national legistlators women | Divorce Rate |
|
America 1820 | 6.42 | 0% | 0.0% | 3% |
America 1890 | 4.39 | 0% | 0.0% | 6% |
Japan 1925 | 5.18 | 0% | 0.0% | 10% |
America 1950 | 3.31 | 5% | 0.1% | 25% |
Saudi Arabia 2020 | 2.28 | 74% | 20.0% | 48% |
Iran 2020 | 2.15 | 57% | 6.0% | 33% |
America 2020 | 1.8 | 102% | 24.0% | 39% |
South Korea 2020 | 0.84 | 88% | 17.0% | 42% |
Japan 2020 | 1.34 | 62% | 10.0% | 35% |
Poland 2020 | 1.38 | 84% | 29.0% | 33% |
Sweden 2020 | 1.8 | 96% | 47.0% | 50% |
Spain 2020 | 1.24 | 102% | 47.0% | 54% |
Finland 2020 | 1.35 | 101% | 45.0% | 56% |
Russia 2020 | 1.5 | 93% | 17.0% | 70% |
Most Americans would probably be surprised by how feminist contemporary Iran and Saudi Arabia are. When these countries entered public consciousness we saw them as ultra-patriarchal, "medieval" and "theocratic" kingdoms. But by 2022, Saudi Arabia now sends 76% of women to college, has a 47% divorce rate, and allows a modest amount of women rpresentation in parliament. Most laws against women living alone or owning property have now been rescinded. Correspondingly, its fertility rate has plummetted from 7.1 in 1980 to 2.2 today.
When we want to determine if low fertility is an inherent part of wealthy modernity or of feminism we have a problem in that we have no control group. Every country in the world post-1945 either came under the dominance of the American hegemony, the Soviet hegemony, or the Chinese hegemony. All three of these empires were explicitly feminist. Feminism has been a core part of the United Nation's declarations and intiatives. America has pushed feminism in every country that matters, whether that be via the hard power of conquering Japan and rewriting their constitution, or the soft power of requiring certain governance and "human rights" intiatives in order to gain aid and favored trade relations.
This does raise a big question of whether wealthy modernity, feminism, and low fertility are all inherently linked together -- maybe it is not just historical accident that there is no control group. Perhaps we will address that in a future post.
gorge
1yr ago
Here is a citation that of thinking from Scientific America in 2009 "How Women Can Save the Planet: [Empowering young women through education will help reduce overpopulation in areas that cannot support it and avoid extremism in the children they raise"
Or United Nations University in 2019: "Female Education: a Solution for a Crowded Planet"
Time Magazine in 2013: "Why Empowering Poor Women Is Good for the Planet Overpopulation isn't the great environmental fear that it once was, but there are still parts of the planet where large family sizes are a problem. Female education can help change that"
The most charitable explanation is that they honestly believe that empowering women will lead to a more optimal level of child-bearing -- thus more children in countries who are rich and encountering problems of low fertility and less children in countries that are poor and already overcrowded.
A less charitable explanation is that these arguments aren't made by the same people, but since "feminism good" is the only acceptable opinion if over-population is presented as a problem Cathedral editors signal-boost writers who believe that feminism can prevent over-population and if population decline is presented as a problem then they signal boost writers who can take some subset of the data to show how feminism can help with under-population.
The collapse in Saudi tfr happened well before recent liberalization, and in fact the largest collapse occurred during the most severe period of post-Siege of Mecca religious reactionary conservatism, when Saudi society became much less feminist, the Niqab was mandated, the modern guardianship system was mandated, middle and upper-middle class women were largely removed from the professions, Saudi society became more markedly segregated even among urban elites and so on.
Saudi Arabia was already oil rich by 1980. The World Bank says that female college enrollment in Saudi Arabia has risen steadily and consistently and massively, from a mere 5% in 1980 to 75% in 2020 -- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR.FE?locations=SA --, which correlates well with the decline in TFR during that same period. If there is a religious conservative backlash, they seem to have utterly failed at even arresting female empowerment, much less actually rolling it back, or else female college enrollment would have gone down, not up.
Second wave feminism was a necessary reaction to the sexual revolution (which was invented by powerful men for the purpose of basically sexually exploiting women without recompense),
Sex positive feminism and women-should-work feminism was pushed by elite men who wanted easy access to cute young women. Many women liked it too because it is crack for women to be around the highest status men. "MeToo" feminism is bolstered by dads who don't want to see their daughters run through by the football team, husbands who don't like their wives being seduced at the office, beta men who are resentful of alpha men hoarding the pussy, and elites who find metoo incidents as useful way to take down competitors. Many women on board with #metoo because sex-with-no-strings actually left them very hurt. Unfortunately, everyone has misidentified the problem as being one of lack of consent, as opposed to the problem being inherent to fornication and adultery.
Can someone explain to me how sex with no strings hurts people, and specifically how it hurts women more? In an age of contraceptives?
There are two potential problems with "sex with no strings" -- either the sex is bad or it is good. If it is bad, it is bad. If it is good, high chance that one of the two people "catches feelings" -- and now that person has formed a bond with someone else who might not be good for them, or that into them. Forming a bond with someone who is bad for you is very damaging. And forming a bond to someone, exposing your nakedness and vulnerability to someone, and then having that person reject you is also tremendously damaging and hurtful. This goes for both men and women.
"Sex with no strings" is not something that was common among our ancestors, it is not something we have evolved to handle. Young men and women have not evolved to make good decisions in some lazzei faire sexual marketplace, nor have they evolved to even predict how they will react to sex. "Sex with no strings" is simply not something that can be predicted a priori. Impossible.
Sex did evolve to generate a powerful, intense bond with your partner (especially for women), which helps bind the couple together through the difficult years of child rearing. Sex with random people at best fritters this bonding power away, and at worst makes people bonded to partners who aren't properly screened or committed and thus will end up creating great hurt.
gorge
1yr ago
I did add as a quick edit to my comment "Many women liked it too because it is crack for women to be around the highest status men."
In general, fault-lines of policy interest don't actually split men against women. Feminism is the work of one faction of men and women, and anti-feminism has also been the work of one faction of men and women. Feminism was not some victory of women over the opposition of men. It was a victory of certain women done with the support of certain men, often powerful men.
Prior to then, women in the work force were more likely to be involved in manufacturing jobs (such as in the garment industry).
Doubt. I think they were by far most likely to be domestics. I would be curious what percent of unmarried young women in the U.S. worked in manufacturing at its non-war peak -- I would be surprised if it was higher than 15%. I think you are right there was an increase in demand for clerical work between 1920 and 1970 -- but I suspect true need for clerical work has actually decreased since then. But instead we have seen a rise of "pink color" jobs in the hypertrophied healthcare, education and non-profit sector. IMO, these are mostly vanity jobs doled out by the government as sugar daddy instead of a husband. Feminism has created the jobs, not the need for the work created feminism.
gorge
1yr ago
As a country urbanizes, and as it modernizes to the point where most women learn to read, fertility declines dramatically. As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.
What if the alternative to low-fertility world was something like the 1950s United States of America ... why cannot that be an alternative vision?
gorge
1yr ago
Why is the balance of women’s university attendance the sole gauge of feminism when many women were educated in even traditional patriarchal societies?
I would say it is one of the most important metrics that we can actually easily quantify and track. Unless it is a finishing school or Mrs degree, university attendance means everything that is the opposite of patriarchy: 1) the woman will be removed from the guardianship of her father 2) she will be making a big investment in developing skills unrelated to being a good wife or mother 3) she will be immersed in messaging from the university in the years leading up to application and during university that developing these work skills is super valuable and important. University attendance is simply massively more central to life than whether there are women news anchors.
There are other important metrics of feminism, but it is just very hard to get good data on them, especially historically. How easy it is for a woman to divorce her husband (this is imperfectly modeled by overall divorce rate)? How easy and unstigmatized is it for a single woman to live by herself or with friends? What is the default cultural messaging from TV and authority figures? How many women have sex before marriage (with someone other than their eventual husband)? What is the actual nature of university education -- is it an Mrs degree? Are women living at home or in a sex-segrated dorm under in locus parentis? Or it more like something out of "Sex Lives of College Girls"? What percent of young women are working outside of domestic work? What percent of married women with children are working full-time outside the home?
A major problem with other metrics of feminism is that it can be very difficult to distinguish de facto from de jure. During the late Roman empire paters familia was the law of the land, but in practice is was almost abandoned and the "three days a year" rule ended up being a loophole that greatly empowered women. In early 1900s America, it was mostly de jure illegal for a man to physically punish is wife, but a spanking or a slap would often be winked at or go unpunished, and even portrayed as normal in popular media. Catholicism canon law still makes it impossible to divorce -- but then in practice annulments are given out very liberally.
And so in Saudi Arabia we see reports such as:
“I have a routine: the weekdays are only for studying, and the weekend is for going out, meeting friends, and partying — yes, partying. In Saudi Arabia most things are prohibited, but we have ‘the life underground’ where we can do all the crazy, mostly illegal things without anyone knowing. Sometimes we go to our guy friends’ houses since we can’t invite guys over (otherwise our parents will destroy us), or a place like a private compound where non-Saudi people live, but we can enter as visitors.” —Aisha, 21
...
“Because of the guardianship system, my father can turn my life into hell, preventing me from doing anything, forcing me to do whatever he wants. But he doesn’t. Why? Because I told him if he beats me or abuses me in any way I will call the police. Even if the police can’t do much, my family is too scared of the scandal it would create to test me. But I am ‘careful’ about not giving my father a reason to punish me or take away my job, which to me is the only thing worth living for.” —Salma, 21
https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/young-women-living-in-saudi-arabia-interviews.html
In an actual patriarchy, the idea a woman would call the police on a father or husband would be laughable. Now other examples from that same article show women who are more controlled. Unfortunately, it is difficult for me to know which is the more common case.
Saudi Arabia is still more patriarchal than the United States, but it seems to be a lot less patriarchal in practice than what the law or media coverage would suggest.
I originally noted the role of elite men in driving feminism. You challenged me in the reply by saying that women's agency also played a role. I replied to clarify that I believe that both men and women played a role in driving feminism.
gorge
1yr ago
I too dislike the term "traditionalism." What I am actually interested in terms of "retvrning to traditional ways" is learning from the bundle of social technologies and culture from civilizations that were on their upswing, particularly my civilization of Western Christendom. By "traditionalism" I am not interested the culture from ancient civilizations in their decline phase or from tribes that never surpassed the mud-hut phase (or at least, I'm only interested in learning them as examples of what not to do).
My general feeling is that if technology and wealth has made survival easier, it would be better to aim for even greater heights of glory, than to fallback on hedonism. Falling back on hedonism will eventually dull the abilities of a civilization, leading to its decline and fall.
gorge
1yr ago
Why do you think that women have zero recourse to ill treatment from a husband under patriarchy?
I didn't say women have zero recourse from ill treatment from a husband under patriarchy.
gorge
1yr ago
Others have done a great job calling out your professor's sophistry, so let me be a tiny bit charitable to one portion of his argument.
Objection 2: Scientific authority: Scientists don't talk of "races" but instead prefer to speak of "populations."
The classic definition of race was basically "a branch of the human family tree." From Webster's 1913:
- The descendants of a common ancestor; a family, tribe, people, or nation, believed or presumed to belong to the same stock; a lineage; a breed.
This turns out to not quite be true, at least for most groupings we commonly refer to as "races." What happens is that "populations" get separated from other populations, evolve a distinct set of characteristics, but then after a while they usually end up mixing with some other population nearby, and so what we commonly call a race, like "Han Chinese" is not a single branch of the human family tree, but rather an admixture of multiple populations.
Still, just because things are more complicated than the 1913 definition of "race", that is not a reason to say "therefore there is no biological basis for race." That is moving in the wrong direction, making things even more inaccurate. Honest critics should just work on making the definition of "race" more accurate. The simplest, accurate definition of race that matches a real phenomena and cuts reality of the joins and matches how people intuitively use the word is: "a race is cluster of relatedness." So even though "Han Chinese" is an admixture of several ancestral populations, that admixture forms a very distinct cluster of relatedness that is obviously different than Slavic White people, etc.
gorge
1yr ago
Premise 1 and 2 are false.
To the extent that a particular society (such as America in the past few decades) declares it morally wrong for white people to select friends based on race, and to the extent that this declaration has any merit, it is because racial division is an area prone to create political divisions and bloody war. So there can be a legitimate rationale for encouraging intermarriage and interracial friendship in a particular society in order to integrate the two groups and create ethnogenesis and create one people. Of course it may also be legitimate to have some sort of millet system and manage racial friction that way. In the Christian moral tradition there is no obligation to be race blind in choosing friends or lover. Also even modern American morality is very confused on this question because it is OK for black people to prefer friendships with other blacks, universities even encourage this through heavily recruiting black kids into ethnic houses, but it is very taboo for white people to do the same. So there really is no society that holds Premise 1 as a basic moral principle.
So even in the particular case where a state is encouraging cross-racial friendships for ethnogensis, there is no reason to extend this to other "immutable" characteristics. There is no basic division based on "height" or being left-handed that causes terrible societal strife and bloodshed. And needless to say, race is nothing like sex, is an entirely different phenomena, comparing apples to puppies, so it is a complete non sequitur to say "if we don't believe in racial sorting we shouldn't believe in sex sorting."
gorge
1yr ago
Can you hear the Kafkatrap being lined up? If you argue against this premise, it must be because you have a preference for a certain race of friends. You must therefore be a racist.
OP should reverse the trap by writing a letter to the school newspaper about how Professor X says we have a moral obligation to ban the African-American cultural house ...
There seems to be many signs of this, such as the rise of Black Liberation Theology in the church:
Of course this kind of capitulation to the zeitgeist goes back further such as 1994 when they disobeyed the instructions of Saint Paul and started ordaining women as priests. Going further back, in 1928 the Church of England started phasing out the marriage vow for the wife to "obey", which seems like it was floating with the Zeitgeist of first-wave feminism. Over the past two centuries there seems to have been a steady stream of English who were very serious about their religion converting from Anglican to Catholicism, a sign that there was a feeling that Anglicanism was somehow less legitimate (eg, John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton). Or course Catholicism is suffering from its own problems of being converged by the Zeitgeist.
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