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Notes -
The WSJ published an article today about the voting gap between men and women below the age of thirty. The conclusions should be familiar to the Motte's CW crowd and I'll be diving into them in this post. What is striking and, even better, plainly quantitative, is how just how far apart young men and women are on some issues. In several cases, it's 30+ point gaps. Anecdatally, I'm seeing and hearing similar division. That the WSJ is leading with this also shows how it is now firmly in normie discussion circles.
I've always thought that the true risk to American society wasn't a breakdown in race relations, but in
gendersex relations. This is because of the plain fact that you need the opposite sexes to get along to continue families, communities, the nation, society as a whole.I've tried to break it out below.
The Issues
The WSJ highlights the following issues as most divisive to least, first with those issues that women are more in favor of:
Those with the biggest gaps the opposite way, where men approve of the issue moreso than women, are (again, in descending order):
Instead of thinking about these in terms of the issues themselves, I've decided to be a little more cultural war-y (because that's. why. we. are. here!) and interpret these issues thusly;
Now, for the Men:
How We Got Here
That's how the issues stand today. I think it makes sense to take a step back and ask "how we got here" over the past few voting and CW cycles.
For Men, I think much or all of this can be traced first to MeToo and second, to its slightly less witch-hunty successor, DEI. One guy in the article says he feels like there are purity tests on the left that are used to berate men into compliance. The article itself also says that many right-wing men don't talk about their views with women for fear of retaliation or other social consequences.
It's hard to overstate how deeply MeToo hit society. I was working a BigCorp gig at the time and it was very common to hear tips from male coworks at happy hours after work about never having a one-on-one with a female subordinate or, at least, doing it out in the open where other people can see the whole encounter. It was the first time I had heard of the Mike Pence rule. I've always looked at MeToo as a weird attempt at bloodletting by Hollywood that morphed into witch trials. There was nothing in the way of sincere attempts to improve male-female professional relationships, just a lot of virtue signalling and subtle actions taken to guarantee against false accusations (see above). The net result on a lot of men was to, I think, begin to question if "the left" and its various causes were simply new ways of trying to tear men down. Another guy in the article states, "It would seem the white male is the enemy of the Left."
For the young women, their quotes bring up (a) Trump being boorish and gross dating to the 2016 election and (b) Dobbs. Again, the "abortion rights" messaging intentionally conflates a complex issue about the start of human life (which Americans are notoriously conflicted and contradictory on) with a more easy to handle and generically adaptable "women's rights." This is why you see it rebranded as "reproductive rights" most often. If it's about just You versus "they" (who are always all male) it's an ease fight to jump into. If it's about more than that, I think women - being generally intelligent - do stop and think to consider the complexity. The media scored a massive win in portraying Dobbs as "taking away the right to abortion."
Trump's amplification of male boorishness ("Grab her by the pussy", "Only Rosie O'Donnell" etc.) is probably the most generation-centric issue in the article. I'm just elder millenial enough to remember the concepts of "boy talk" and "girl talk" growing up (shout out to Melania). Any guy who's ever been in an all male group outside of a professional one (so, a sports team, military, etc.) knows how gross yet hilarious those conversations can get. That kind of speech, however, doesn't go outside of the invisible walls. Guys speak in such over-the-top ways in locker rooms etc. as a way to signal in-group loyalty and build cohesion, but they understand it can and should only take place in those places. This exactly what Trump was doing on that access Hollywood tape. He was making a goofy gross joke to a fawning idiot who was going to laugh at whatever Trump said. He didn't say it at the Met Gala. I think that the outrage was most acute for younger women shows that a whole generation grew up without any awareness whatsoever that differently sexed styles of language exist.
The article also brings up the Kavanaugh hearings. This is strange to me. I always though the Dr. Ford testimony was both contentless and pretty obviously manufactured in a "repressed memory" pseudo-science way.
Boys and Girls are Different
The issues, and my interpretation of them, point to what should be an obvious truth. Men and Women have physical and cognitive differences across their normal distributions. This manifests in society and social reinforcement and, ultimately, results in different relative rankings of shared values. I believe Men and Women largely share the exact same values but rank them in different orders and with different weights placed on them.
Men still intrinsically respect strength and are suspicious of weakness or incompetence. Biden had to drop out of the race because everyone, but especially men, were thinking "no way can this guy lead the country for another four years. He does know what planet he's on." As soon as there are questions about your competency - you're toast. You can be an asshole (although I believe you shouldn't be) so long as you can get the job done.
The Trump assassination attempt probably solidified some male voters who may have been "holding their nose" in the Trump camp. See Zuckerberg calling it "badass". Trump popping up with blood on his face shouting, "fight, fight, fight" hits most guys right in the Papua-New-Guinea-Kill-The-Neighboring-Tribe lizard brain. It's watching your team spike the football in the endzone times four million raised to the power of NAVY-SEALs-KILLED-BIN-LADEN.
A basic male pattern in groups is to defer to the "natural leader." Interesting how often that correlates to height, perceived physical capability, a deep voice, and an outgoing and kind of domineering personality. Trump is maxed out in all of those non-physical traits and that explains so much of his attraction.
Women value this too (remember what I lead with) but there does come a limit in which the domineering personality becomes overbearing, tone deaf, and, at its worse, abusive. Still - better He tends towards jerk than wimp.
A key quote from the article is “Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline.” Couldn't agree more and half of my comments here have been about the destruction of masculinity models for boys in the West. Female centric views of childhood, safetyism, and "play nice" strips boys of this and has for some time. ADHD or just rambunctious boys are getting classified as special needs.
Rather than try to find some sort of balance, I think it's accurate to say the Left has leaned harder into this. The entire concept of "toxic masculinity" is mostly about finding ways to make male behavior that may be offensive to female sensibilities actually reprehensibly immoral. Returning to Trump's boorish language, I am all for calling it out as unpolite, but making the jump to "advocate for sexual assault" is hyperbolic. And this gets to the core of the issue; the extreme liberal faction of the Democrat party not only looks down on traditional male behavior, they want to make it so beyond the pale as to be effectively criminal. MeToo ended the careers of several men who were guilty of nothing more than being awkward jackasses who didn't understand how to flirt. Is that worth one Harvey Weinstein? Tell me in the comments.
Swinging back to female relative values. I see a sensitivity to the prevention of harm (manifested in fear emotion heavy issues like global warming) as well as an appeal to authority (the state) to strictly guarantee certain highly personal values. This is best captured in the "women's rights" meta-issue. Is this a reference to abortion? voting rights (if so, how)? Non-strictly governmental issues like pay equality? I don't think it matters, I think it's designed to me a flexible mapping point. Whatever you think is the women's rights issue is correct. All you have to agree on is that "They" (white republican Men) are coming for it. There are two quotes from interviewed women that reveal this:
“What we’re worried about is our rights being taken away,”
“If I had to guess why a lot of women are leaning very strongly toward more liberal issues, it’s that we’re afraid.”
Fear. Protection. "Somebody should do something!"
I think this really does women a disservice. It's the same as politicians who essentially use a narrative of emasculation to get men behind them. You've seen this a lot in Trump speeches going back to 2016. "They're taking our jobs" speaks to a hard-wire male perspective on providership. But politicians love an emotionally resonant hack. They won't change tactics anytime soon.
J.D Vance got into some hot water after his "cat lady" comments reappeared. I do think this was an unforced error. "Virgin" is used as an insult to Men and "old hag" and all of its varieties are used to belittle women. Sexual capability is still a big deal and so going after it is a low blow and will trigger a lot of hot resentment even in those not targeted. When a guy is emasculated, all guys feel it even if it isn't happening to them. When a women is targeted for being "the old hag" women can feel how that lands even if they are out of harms way. Vance would do better to focus on something that is tangible to women but not so personally direct - children. "The left wants to indoctrinate your kids" has been winning (see Youngkin in VA).
The above leads us too...
Are We Really Talking About Sex?
"Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men."
I'll pair the above with the fact that both of the women pictured in the WSJ piece are overweight. One, in a green and white dress, is obese.
To what extent are these resentments based in sexual frustration in both directions? I'll offer the opinion, which should be no surprise, that I think it's more about differences in relative value preferences. I don't think we're a nation of genocidal incels and femcels. If anything, I might point the finger more at social media and online spaces creating echo chambers and infinite positive-feedback loops yet divorcing users further and further from normie reality.
Yet, sex is important and young men and young women want it. The politics (literal and figurative) of dating certainly haven't gotten any less complex over the years - and they now definitely involved literal politics. But it's signalling all the way down. Am I really offended that this guy taking me out for a $134 meal is a Trump supporter? No, I'm worried he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship. Am I disgusted that this girl I'm going to SoulCycle with is wearing her Pussy Hat? No, I'm worried she'll hector me to death if I say "retarded" once at home.
Again, watch what they do, not what they say.
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I actually have a theory about MeToo. Harvey Weinstein is a talented producer and he's difficult to replace in that role.
He was also the top bundler for Dem political donations in California and a key fundraiser for Dianne Feinstein. He's much easier to replace in that role.
So I think someone big in Hollywood wanted to take Feinstein's senate seat in 2018. She was in her mid 80s and didn't survive that full term. Taking out Weinstein could have reasonably been an attempt to get her to drop out.
Trump had just been elected President in 2016 with no prior political office. Obama held a US Senate seat for only four years before becoming President in 2008. A nationally known name becoming a California Senator in 2018 and then running against Trump in 2020 doesn't sound too wild in that context.
Then MeToo spun out of control, Feinstein refused to budge and the plan went nowhere.
I have no idea who the big name would have been.
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Climate change isn't hard to define at all - human activity produces greenhouse gases which cause an increase in global temperatures and adverse weather events while the world shifts to a new climate. It isn't a matter of vibes but one of rigorous scientific evidence, and younger people are more concerned with the issue because they're the ones who are going to be paying the price for it. While I have no doubt that there are a lot of cynical grifters in the movement and plenty of people who operate based on vibes rather than evidence, climate change is a real and serious problem, and one that the people actually profiting from it won't be alive to see the consequences for.
Global warming is real, in all likelihood, yes. Whether or not it's directly caused mainly by pollution in Western societies isn't that clear, as far as I can tell.
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I am admittedly in a bit of a filter bubble with regard to this, but all of the irl men I can discuss politics with agree that nuclear is a very attractive solution to the problem. On both sides of the aisle.
The irl women I have broached the subject with, however... /images/17223237173445024.webp
Which kinda goes back to the point OP raised.
Just to nitpick, this mainly applies to countries which still utilize coal and oil for such purposes to a large degree. And as far as I know, all of them are outside the West anyway and are investing more and more into nuclear energy, with the sad and pathetic exception of Germany.
Australia still uses tons of coal and oil (I seem to recall we have the highest greenhouse emissions per capita), and despite having lolhuge uranium reserves NIMBY and hippies have entirely stopped nuclear power so far.
Our federal opposition leader is actually running on a platform of "let's actually do nuclear", although it's questionable whether he can actually get plants built due to state bans.
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Burning natural gas produces a great deal of CO2-equivalent. If you believe the climate change people and take leaks into account, more than coal.
But dams kill fish, wind kills birds (and offshore wind kills marine mammals though that's more a Republican thing), large-scale solar ruins the pristine desert environment, nuclear glows, and nobody likes transmission lines (and also cute endangered species can't cross the corridors), so what the environmentalists are pushing for is shivering in the dark. They'll agree with various alternative energy proposals until someone figures out a way of making them practical, at which point they'll be against.
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It's not like the case for nuclear is so cut-and-dry that men being much more in favour can just be interpreted as evidence for "men more reasonable, women more crazy" without justification. There are complex arguments for and against that ultimately reduce to a lot of boring number crunching; since it's hardly ever the case that large swathes of the population have crunched the numbers, consider the possibility that men like nuclear more and women like it less due to some evopsych coincidence.
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Eh. You get what you incentivize. Is the ignorance here genuine or feigned? These guys always had a "we don't have enough kids" fixation anyway...
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Drat, you beat me too it. So a couple of thoughts-
Student loans has an obvious explanation- Women are more likely to go to college(because there is no other socially acceptable decision for non-poor women, and no one wants to be poor), choose degrees which are appealing to women(which tend to pay less), when they're not able to handle their first choice degrees switch to psychology(while men tend to go to work), etc, etc. All that means is that women are typically the ones suffering under student loans. Even a young woman with few student loans because of scholarships, fortunate job placement, etc. likely runs in a social circle which overwhelmingly has student loan issues, and women tend to be more sensitive to each others' problems.
Women tend to really value resources, and in the past few years the same-class standard of living for the red tribe has started getting much higher than for the blue tribe. It'll be interesting to see if that has any bearing on this trend in the future, assuming it continues. We know, BTW, that it isn't an inherent fact of life that women don't like red tribe things- Taylor Swift literally started as a country singer and church attendance has slanted female for forever. And while red tribe leftism exists, it rarely looks like a winning horse to back, although some of its hobby horses can get incorporated in a winning agenda, compassionate conservatism style.
Abortion is the mind-killer and public rhetoric about it is generally quite poor, but liberal rhetoric about abortion is in particular just blatant lies. Pregnancy checkpoints in red states, handmaids tale, etc. Prolife rhetoric is the same five arguments repeated ad nauseam but it's usually not a lie unless you play definitional games. And one of those things tends to really hype up why women should care about it, even if it's simply factually not true.
How much of this on the female side is metoo, too? Rape is a primal fear for young women, and the metoo narrative does have something to say to women, and tends to spread through female-heavy social media platforms. Insane rape scaremongering probably drives young women towards the feminist side of things on a 'men just suck and you have to be protected from them- all of them' basis. That can fit comfortably in the left side of the coalition.
This gap is mostly about women moving left, not men moving right. https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx
Is this a conclusion we can draw with certainty from women's usual observable behavior? I have my doubts.
Can you add detail? I'm not trying to needle you here, genuinely curious. I feel like there's some evopsych data you've got.
The everyday observable behavior of average young women does not seem to indicate that they are gripped by a primal fear of rape.
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I'm not particularly sympathetic to the MAGA/right coalition, and I agree with many of the systemic and political factors others here have analyzed well. That being said, isn't the most obvious effect which is taking place here the result of left wing progressive politics constant demonizing of white males? It's not like we're a small group of society - we matter and there are a lot of us. Young people are less established in their politics and identity - they had to go somewhere, and cultural/political/media environments have spent most of the time telling them that they are greedy vain loathsome lazy stupid bumbling rapists, despite men and boys falling further and further behind in any number of key factors in that time frame (not to mention skepticism of these progressive claims at face value —that society was mostly fine as-is in the 60s etc and these critiques miss the mark — which I'm sure we're all familiar reading this website).
Mr. Rittenhouse has entered the chat. The Kenosha Kid is back!
Ironically, The Kenosha Kid is a great example of this trend. Who's a law abiding volunteer who wants to do good by his family and his nation supposed to side with if all he gets for that is attempted murder and wide media coverage demonizing him for straightforwardly defending his life?
There is no place in the leftie metanarrative for Kyle. No role except as an enemy. Even though he's exactly the sort of person any political movement should be looking to recruit: an upstanding motivated young man.
This wasn't always the case, especially with progressives.
Normie lefties were convinced for MONTHS that Rittenhouse killed 3 black men in cold blood, hunting them down to execute them cartel style. Till the start of the trial there were many progs - particularly women - who were unaware that the three men shot were white, much less that they had all attacked Rittenhouse.
To an extent I absolve this ignorance due to transmitted media messaging and general unawareness of how guns work. Yet when the base evidence is presented - the three dudes shot were white - and the pivot seamlessly transitions to 'well they were shot because they supported Black Lives Matter' then the only reaction I have is to stoneface and go 'ok that's nice by the way did you see that ludicrous display last night Liverpool always try to walk it in'.
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fellow rhyming username enjoyer
GET OUT OF MY HEAD
Uhhh, how do you pronounce 100?
hunit!
(I wasn't counting the number in the syllable count)
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Isn't this common throughout history? Women support the powers that be. In Saudi arabia women are more muslim. In the Soviet union they were more communist, in the third Reich they were more national socialist. Young men get fed up with the system and women keep supporting the position of those in power. Young men overthrow the government and install a new system. In 80 years women will be virtue signalling how much they love Victor Orban and Trump while young men will be rallying against whatever comes after the populist right.
One of the interesting things about the United States currently is that you can have people who see themselves as rallying against oppressive power by supporting the incumbent President and the nation's various intelligence agencies and the like.
The political divisions in the US of course are imho such that both "sides" have at least some credible basis to perceive themselves as the underdogs (or at least sticking up for the underdog) fighting The Man.
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Your characterization is highly uncharitable. When we talk about "abortion rights", we are talking about the right to an abortion.
For a young woman that has any sex life, the possibility and consequences of getting pregnant loom large. If the woman doesn't want to have children (yet), abortion is the safety net of last resort. The most commonly available birth control methods--condoms and pills--have a typical-use failure rate of 13% and 7%, respectively. That's the proportion of women who become pregnant within the first 12 months after initiating the use of that birth control method. Even with perfect use, those rates are 2% and 0.3%, and every woman should ask herself how sure she is that she is using them perfectly. IUD's have much better rates (1%), and 10% of US women of reproductive age have them installed, and hopefully that number keeps going up; nevertheless, that rate is not 0.
Every young woman who is having any sex with a man has to ask herself what will she do if she gets pregnant. It's no surprise that so many want to keep abortion as an option.
Plenty of pro-life advocates understand this perspective, and are taking a constructive approach. Around where I live, I see bill-boards advertising support services for any woman who is pregnant and is willing to carry the baby to term. They arrange health services and adoption (if the woman wants to give the child away), or connect to support services for mothers with infants.
I don't know how good any of these services are, but I like the principal of this approach. There is a huge penalty for a young woman to complete the pregnancy (financial, physical, and mental), and this supportive approach reduces some of that penalty.
This is not the term used on left-leaning Reddit though. It is increasingly framed as “(women’s) reproductive rights”.
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I remember reading for years that men that wanted financial abortions should just not have sex if they couldn’t deal with the possible consequences.
The thing I really can't stand is that I've had hours long debates with feminists about legal paternal surrender, and they'll continue to employee the exact mirror-image rhetoric of "women should keep their legs shut", and they just don't get it (in my experiences). It just feels wrong to them to allow financial abortion, and they won't budge no matter how much one points out how much they sound like the traditionalists on the other side that they decry so much.
The fundamental conundrum is that
the father can't unilaterally physically abort the child even before it attains sentience, let alone later - abortion requires the woman to undergo a particular medical procedure, which is certainly cumbersome and not entirely safe;
child support is framed as being for the sake of the child, not the mother.
You are compelled to pay up because you caused the birth of a human with rights; you don't get the right to prevent the birth after conception because that would amount to compelling a human with rights to put themselves at risk. In the trolley problem space, this is somewhere in the "fat man on bridge" class - you set a trolley (reproductive process) in motion that will eventually run over (leave in need of support) a human tied to the tracks (the child), which could be stopped by pushing a fat man (the woman) onto the tracks (abortion). The fat man decides not to jump, the human gets run over, and now you want to be absolved of responsibility because the fat man could have chosen to jump.
"Getting an abortion is roughly similar to jumping off a bridge and being crushed by a train" seems to take it a bit far?
I only said "somewhere in the class", and aren't trolley problems supposed to isolate moral intuitions by way of hyperbole anyway? 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? Losing a limb? Taking a strong emetic? Getting punched in the gut? Surely an abortion can at least be somewhere between the latter two in terms of risk/cost.
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.
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My personal answer is 'zero' -- but it's for deontological reasons, framing it as a trolley problem is anti-convincing for me.
Child support probably shouldn't be enforced unless both parents are given the opportunity for 50% custody though. (and if the father wants to take on 50% custody then child support should be zero)
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Except the sexes aren't "exact mirror-images," and even those who tend to hold it in theory pretty much don't actually treat the sexes as interchangeable in practice (as your feminist interlocutors demonstrate).
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This is the definition of "privilege". It can't generally be revoked without at least some organization; unfortunately, men have yet to evolve an in-group bias.
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They are right insofar as it's not in their class interest. Who, whom.
Arguing against power is pointless really. If there's one thing trying to maintain Liberalism through argument has taught me it's that.
if you want to get feminists to give this to you, you're going to have to hold something hostage or give them something in exchange.
In the IRL battle of the sexes, Team Woman always wins because that's the team most men are on.
Majorities rarely win. It's not about numbers, it's about organization.
Feminists in particular and women in general are a lot more organized today than men, whose special advocacy groups are a joke.
There has been entire eras and civilizations that regarded either sex as most suspect or despicable, so I'm not sold on the idea that this can't be changed. Sex relations may exist on an innate substrate but the lines of how they play out can move a lot.
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.
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Because as a man, to me, a 'financial abortion' is still a fundamentally irresponsible act.
Getting an abortion if you get pregnant and don't want a child, putting aside morality, is a responsible act.
Walking away from a child you've created and that will be born is an irresponsible act.
At what point, chronologically, from conception to birth does a embryo/fetus become a "child" in your model. Also, if you feel like it, please explain why.
To me, the crux of the abortion argument is "when does life start?" People get uncomfortable in defining that because it's a bit of a philosophical issue, a lot of people don't realize how early a lot of human features emerge (and, so, they find themselves accidentally advocating for "post-life-starting" termination), and advances in medical care will mean that viability will keep getting earlier and earlier.
It should be. But pro-choicers really seem to love arguments that imply (or make explicit) that abortion should be permitted in all circumstances regardless of the sapience of the child. I take this as strong evidence that they're being disingenuous when they claim not to believe that the child is sapient. I think abortion is primarily a religious (Satanic) rite of child sacrifice.
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I don’t think of abortion as responsible. Instead, it seems like someone did something irresponsible. Then instead of taking up the consequence of their irresponsibility they terminate the life of an in utero’s baby life. Seems the height of irresponsibility.
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I'm sure that plays well to traditionalist boomers. I really don't know what load-bearing social scaffolding in modern times you expect to bolster this sense of responsibility.
Well, responsibility isn't needed in a world where you can be made to be financially responsibly by the state.
First of all, the social sanction that outside of small communities like this, men who try to find ways to not pay their child support are largely seen as terrible human beings among all ideologies, races, and income levels. About probably the only thing a non-college educated Trump-voting guy making $40k and a PMC woman whose still sad Hillary lost that is making $250k can agree on is guys who don't pay reasonable child support and try to avoid it are a-holes.
Plus, the collapse of cash-only jobs means it's impossible to have any income that make senses that avoids wage garnishment.
Yes, most people have been socially conditioned to still expect men to carry the weight of themselves and others. Even those who have gotten completely tanked on "Women don't need men" narratives for the better part of a decade or more clearly believe this. This doesn't make it right, fair, or justified. Nor is there any assurance that this state of affairs is permanent.
I'm not sure how much weight being a self-interested asshole will carry in the future when we have turned into a nation of self-interested assholes. Or when the thing you're banking on to carry forth this duty (masculinity) has been discarded as either a historical myth or a vacant shape not exclusive to one gender ("girls can be just as strong/powerful/responsible/horny/aggressive as men"). I need to pay child support because I'm a man, but 'man' doesn't have a definition any more, traditionalism is dead, and I'm supposed to keep this going because Outlaw83 prefers it this way?
Good luck with that. No way this will ever collapse, I'm sure.
You vaguely gesture towards some "responsibility" that you can't even coherently define. And when pressed, you collapse into threats from the state and just-so social sanctioning. You can't offer anything else, just sticks. Said threats are certainly salient to this dynamic, but if that's all that's on offer, then I wouldn't be be so assured of this being an enduring constant.
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Guys are assholes until you find out most child support is owed by blacks. https://www.irp.wisc.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CSRA-22-24-T7-01042024.pdf
Then the issue is suddenly genericized and pivoted. Child support should be enforced, but if it is specifically black men that do not pay child support then it is all men who are evil. This pivoting is glaringly obvious to any in the system, and the disingenuity suggests that society is not even with its castigation, even if one population still 'suffers' more by population proportion, because their criminal proportion is still not accurately captured.
One compelling reason for the stateification of social more enforcement is because community social sanctions do not work evenly, and if some communities display greater failure rates in internal prosocial behavior enforcement then it becomes appealing to use the state as the mediating entity. Reworking extant incentive structures is difficult in the best of times, and we plainly are not living in such an era of boundless abundance and social trust.
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The costs are not symmetric, and the woman bears costs no matter which option is taken.
Okay, put a hard number on the medical risk of Abortion, which I'm told is significantly safer than carrying and delivering a child to term. We can discount malpractice and similar, which should obviously be covered by the abortion providers' insurance. It seems to me that the monetary value of any remaining medical risk would have to be orders of magnitude smaller than the expected cost of 18 years of child support.
Problem solved, no?
You don’t need to do this math—there is a market for surrogates. NPV of child support is significantly larger than the cost of a surrogate.
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Pardon, but the consensus is that it isn't a child, which is why we allow routinely allow doctors to cut such entities to pieces with surgical implements and then sell the resulting offal as pharmaceutical raw ingredients, an entirely normal and unobjectionable practice that social consensus strongly resists critiquing.
Likewise, whether or not it will be born is entirely the mother's decision. Financial hardship is a generally-approved motive for termination. Why would it be irresponsible for to allow the man to be absolved of financial responsibility for the potential child before they are born? If the mother does not wish to finance the child's rearing on her own, she is still free to choose to terminate. Why should she be allowed to compel the father to finance her unilateral choices?
Because there are differences between cis-men and cis-women, the responsibility differs - with women, the responsibility continues through the pregnancy with the option for termination, but the man, because he's not carrying the child, the responsibility begins the moment he chooses to have sex with a woman.
Also, a truly financially destitute man won't really be on the hook for more than a meager amount of child support.
...And ends the moment he makes it clear that he doesn't want to raise or support a child, and has offered compensation for the remaining medical risk inherint in terminating the pregnancy, minus that covered by the doctor's malpractice insurance. The fact that biological reality makes perfect symmetry impossible does not salvage even a fraction of the asymmetry you are endorsing. The woman still has all the choice, and there is no principled reason to finance her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support.
What relevance does this have? Rich women are still allowed abortions. Whether the man can pay for a child's rearing has zero bearing on whether he should have to, any more than it does for whether women should have to carry a potential child they do not wish for. The established standard here is not hardship, but mere perception of inconvenience.
It seems to me that your arguments would work a whole lot better on a 90s-era Evangelical social conservative; maybe if that was the sort of person you could reason with, you should have made some effort to preserve their continued existence.
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.
Legal paternity surrender would increase the number of abortions (great!), but also increase the cost to the taxpayer (bad!) There's no principled reason either that someone should be able to get an abortion or that someone should be free from financial obligations: the government should just do whatever makes for a better society.
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There's nothing that says a woman wouldn't be able to choose to get an abortion after the legal paternal surrender, knowing that the man is choosing to not be involved. The man surrenders, and then the woman can then choose what she wants to do accordingly. If she chooses to have the baby at that point, knowing that there's no father, then she would be the one choosing to do the irresponsible act.
This is legitimate logical argument in theory, except it appeals to nobody outside of like, nineteen people in a Discord, because both pro-life and basically 98% of pro-choice people think forcing a woman to have an abortion via pressure is a terrible thing to do.
I guess. I mean, we could talk about what it means to "force" someone to do something. Is a woman forced if she chooses to have an abortion because she knows she can't make ends meet, even if she did have child support from the father? Can someone be forced simply by the circumstances of their life? Anyone can choose to have a baby or not regardless of their lot in life. I don't like that we are less willing to ascribe agency to women than men. I want to be consistent, but no one else wants to be.
Also, regarding responsibility, I don't see why we should make it illegal for someone to do something simply because it is irresponsible.
But I also wanted to add that I sense that my original argument of "feminists just don't get the parallel between LPS and abortion rights" probably doesn't apply to you, since you are likely a traditionalist (?). I'm basing this assumption on that I don't believe that a feminist would generally argue about laws being made based on whether they are responsible actions or not.
Most feminists tend to argue for abortion from the basis of "human rights", whatever that may mean. And I see no reason why the human right for a man to decide his own destiny is any less important than for a woman to decide her own destiny.
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Uh, is the bias of a ready-for-relationships-but-not-ready-for-kids young woman not obvious here?
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It’s good advice, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
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Indeed. That is why one should not have sex unless they are prepared to face the potential consequences. It's not like women simply wake up pregnant and had nothing to do with it.
I consider abortion to be infanticide. I know you probably don't, and we don't have to try to argue with each other on it because it won't be productive. But I imagine you can understand how thoroughly unpersuasive your argument is for someone who thinks as I do, right?
I agree.
Whatever the prevalent culture war rhetoric around sex and abortion, it seems that young women are actually more likely to follow that ideal than previously. Teen birth rates are way down, a quarter of what they were in 1991. Teens are less likely to have sex than before, those who do have it later than before, and with fewer partners source. The number of abortions is down by about a third, compared to early 90's.
These trends don't count as a culture war win for conservatives because they weren't achieved through wider adoption of conservative ideals. But these trends are a definite win for the goal of reducing the deaths of unborn children. Wider adoption of IUD's will further reduce these deaths.
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“Don’t have sex unless you want to procreate” is just a really unpopular stance towards sex in the western world
It's unpopular to say to women.
Yeah, the male sex is famously averse to having sex for purposes other than child rearing
That's not the point. Saying it to women is unpopular in normie society in general, saying it to men isn't.
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More accurately, "don't have sex unless you can handle procreation if it happens". And yeah it's unpopular, but that doesn't make it incorrect. Being an adult means being prepared to handle the consequences of your actions.
The consequences are you get an abortion if you get an accidental pregnancy. We have the technology.
We also have the technology for nuclear bombs, but you don’t get to bomb civilians with nukes if their head of state pulls out of a trade deal.
What? I fail to see the correlation.
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"You have to be an adult and handle the consequences of your actions" and "an unborn child has rights" are two separate clauses and will have to be argued separately.
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That is not true. The potential consequence is "you are pregnant", getting an abortion is one answer to the consequence. It isn't the consequence itself.
Well how far down the ladder do you go on something like that. The consequence may be an expensive unwanted burden, a cherished child, an abortion, a miscarriage, nothing at all, and on and on. An abortion may be one consquence of sex.
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Too extreme an assumption. It could simply be "don't have sex unless probability of a child is acceptable to you."
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I'm glad you helped straighten that out for me.
She could choose not to have sex. That people believe a lack of sex is impossible to live with shows how obsessed with sex society has become. I'd also argue that if a woman does not have the emotional maturity to be firmly committed to accepting the consequences of her actions - whatever their probability - she shouldn't be engaged in whatever those actions are.
While I, of course, support adoption infinitely over abortion, we have to face facts and realize that foster systems and adoption have statistically significant higher rates of abuse etc. It takes a lot of love and effort to raise a child, it takes even more to raise someone else's child.
Just to be clear, "penalty" here is the life of a human infant, correct?
That's exactly what's been happening: the trend among young people is to have sex less. It's even possible that the political divergence between young men and women will contribute to this trend.
I agree that the ideal is for both parents to raise a wanted child. In case of an unwanted pregnancy, the best outcome is for it to somehow become wanted.
Healthy babies are in high demand for adoption, and don't last in the foster system. Normalizing the option of carrying the pregnancy to term and then giving the baby up for adoption not only would reduce numbers of abortion but would help satisfy this demand. I doubt that adopted healthy babies are more at risk of mistreatment than babies who stay with their mother, and a quick online check bears that out.
The other advantage of normalizing giving-baby-up-for-adoption option is that a woman goes through massive biological changes during pregnancy which increase the likelihood of her wanting to keep the baby after all. That's the unwanted-pregnancy-becomes-wanted-baby scenario.
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The objective sex fulfills is emotional self actualisation. The biochemical serotonin and dopamine hit of an orgasm is the same whether it is organically or externally derived, and oxytocin release can be achieved by simply being a fucking human being and having close connections. The narcotic hit of the chemical rush obtained during a tinder hookup is fun, but the consequences are so manifestly bad that it can only be peer pressure (including social media) continually reinforcing toxic positivity about the joys of a hoe phase and situationships.
Re adoption, these remain incredibly popular but specifically for babies. Babies are awesome, and raising a baby is infinitely easier than undoing toddler behaviors that have not been managed, much less children or adolescents with deficient emotional regulatory abilities.
Having said that, despite my pro-infant rhetoric, I find abortion to be a hugely necessary component of modern failed society. Without communities and with perverse incentives, restricting abortion results in more children horn to unfit mothers and absent fathers. With social welfare systems present in multiple facets ,(calorie provision, shelter provision, even automatic school grade promotion in particularly crunchy lefty societies) the cost of bearing a child is borne not by the woman but by society. Forcing these women to carry a child to term will be more taxing on contributers, and so abortion is a necessary release valve.
There are preferred optimalities, such as better deployment of aid resources and education, but direct social shaping tends to fail in heterogenous societies with competing value systems/resource payouts.
By right the optimal solution should be a homogenous overculture with universally accepted standards for compliance and sanction, so a neighbour can castigate a deviant as freely as a mother, or total removal of the social ill. Sex is the most human of desires, so that is never going away. Instead I forcefully propose self terminating 12 year lifespan virtual companions for q3 year olds and state provided sex toys to let them bitch at and get off with, and they are only allowed to have IRL experiences before 25 if both virtual companions sign off on compatibility.
No one said my state provided waifu had to be a real woman.
I like it.
I assume this is supposed to be "13"
It brings up an interesting consideration. Would the ever increasing availability of porn, weed, online gambling, and now AI-waifu girlfriends be the minimal "cost" that hard pro-lifers must be willing to pay to reduce abortion? Hmm.
JD Vance wants to ban porn, so unfortunately he may be an enemy. Given his SV adjacency he may be open to customizable fuckbots, so lets see what Altman et al posit regarding future human relationships. We may all end up dating ScarJoAtHome. Not the worst option but this may be what finally breaks my F2P streak.
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Adoption and the foster care system are very different things. Foster care is mostly for children who have been removed from their parent's home, or otherwise become wards of the state. It's dealing with a population that's selected for a bit more than bad luck and is usually selected into it at an older age, and it's also not typically intended to be a permanent placement. Foster kids can and do get moved, and ideally reunited with the parents(in practice, the parents usually don't get into fit shape to get their kids back, but that's the theoretical goal of the system).
Adoption, on the other hand, is a permanent placement with a new family. Adopted children are usually adopted as infants, or otherwise too young to remember, and domestic adoptions are basically selected for a birth mother in unlucky circumstances.
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I'll step in and say this seems uncharitable and worded to gain internet points. Though I have been nodding in agreement with many of your earlier posts.
It may sound harsh and uncaring but sure, yes, an unplanned pregnancy taken to term can seem like a penalty, a life-changing penalty, particularly if the father has fucked himself right off, the woman's parents are judgmental or absent, and she is faced with raising the child essentially (or actually) alone. This shouldn't be so difficult to grasp, unless you simply don't like the wording.
This is partially for internet points, yes. I also think that waging a culture war on an anonymous forum is pretty low stakes, so I don't mind chucking grenades over the wall that I wouldn't in person. Perhaps that makes me an anonymous digital coward, so be it.
I understand what you're saying. I've seen it up close. Appalachian extended family. 15 and pregnant happened to a cousin. Dad was dead, Mom was in rehab. The extended family stepped in and ... it almost ruined like three families financially. So, I guess not only do I understand what you're saying, I can confirm it.
But my prior also happens to be that human life is sacred and priceless. I also wouldn't assume that every woman who gives birth in dire situations sees their life satisfaction plummet. I'll acknowledge again that a hard pro-life stance easily comes off as hard hearted. It's difficult for it to shake that.
Not a coward, but this place is not for explicitly waging the culture war. Please do not try to "score Internet points."
Most of your post was fine, but the parts that weren't (the "waging culture war" parts) are precisely what makes most abortion threads turn into shitty exchanges of bad-faith straw men. "You think a child is an inconvenience that should be casually disposed of!" "You just want to control women's bodies!" Usually both sides actually have a pretty good understanding of what the other side actually believes (and doesn't) , but "chucking grenades" is more satisfying.
Don't do that here.
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Dude, I agree with you. But this isn't the place to wage the culture war. There are lots of incredibly relevant points you can make without waging the culture war, much less actively admitting you're violating the fundamental rule of the site.
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I'm not American but it seems to me that these three are much less relevant politically than the other four.
You're right. This comment sheds some light. But there is still somewhat of a mystery to why/how the WSJ selected these as the "top" issues for Men-relative-to-women.
I think those are just the ones that the WSJ supports and feels comfortable talking about.
From what I've seen, the issues with the biggest gender divide of "men support, women oppose" are nuclear power, sports gambling, and legalizing prostitution. AKA "the Libertarian party." It would be hilarious if the Republican party chose to run on those as its main issues, but I don't think it would win an election.
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This is not in any way a mystery and I have no idea why you say it is. Supporters of legal abortion are very clear that they think it is a woman's natural right to choose whether or not to have a child inside her, and that this right means women should be able to get an abortion. I don't agree with their analysis, but it's also not like it is hard to learn what they think.
In broad strokes, yes. But they aren't all as lockstep as you seem to be implying: Dobbs was handed down when the Blue Team held control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, and even heard some Republicans offer to cross the aisle, yet no bill to codify these rights could be passed. Some point to cynicism trying to make an issue out of it for the election (possibly true in part), but there is also a lot of disagreement of what the terms to be codified would be: which trimesters, which exceptions, and so forth. Previous precedent didn't require elected representatives to take stances on these. Late term abortions are, IIRC pretty uncommon and very unpopular, but also sometimes medically indicated. And I say that as someone who generally accepts "safe, legal, and rare:" every abortion is tragic, but sometimes it's the least bad choice.
"Safe, legal, and rare" has been an intellectually dishonest (or at least lazy) opinion to hold for several decades now. There are over a million abortions every year in the US, vs. ~3.5 childbirths annually, it's anything but "rare."
I think one can very well believe that the number of abortions is tragic and bad without going all the way to full-pro-life. The people in my life who hold the safe, legal, and rare position hold that there are way too many abortions, using abortion as a form of birth control without taking proper precautions beforehand is immoral, and often support bans consistent with the global average of 12-15 weeks. The US is an outlier with its extremes on abortion (particularly in the permissive direction; the left-wing view of abortions in the US is incredibly uncommon globally), but there is definitely a view in between the pro-life and pro-choice coalition that represents a huge chunk of the electorate but is politically disenfranchised.
There's also a poster, sorry I don't remember the name, who's sympathetic to pro-life concerns but believes enforcing any abortion law with exceptions creates a dangerous legal environment that would be impossible to justly enforce, while a no-exeptions law goes too far for them. I find that an intellectually consistent and well-reasoned position, even if I disagree with it.
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I'll admit the phrasing could be improved.
I was trying to go exactly where you went. There is no "women's rights" issue that isn't abortion. The closest could be the "pay gap" concept which, if not utterly overstated, is also something government can't do much about on its own.
So the question becomes, why say "women's rights" instead of "abortion rights" I think the answer is obvious from the rest of my post - anything that makes it very directly, personally, emotionally about YOU is more effective than a de-personalized partially abstract issue. "They are coming after your body!" is the most personal thing you can say - and that is literally what's being thrown out at women (particularly the young one's, I wonder why).
Yeah basically I think you have it. Framing things in terms of "women's rights" is more effective in terms of appealing to people's emotions.
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Yeah, the odd responses from men are a signal they're not asking the right questions. Probably because they're not even allowed to think what questions might be relevant to young men.
Possibly, but your comment seems to in a way belittle the men involved because they may have chosen a different side from you ("because they're not even allowed to think...")--as if, in a world were they (allowed) to think as you do, in other words the correct way, their responses would be different. I'm not sure this kind of dismissal is productive or holds any hope of understanding the different perspectives out there.
Edit: I misunderstood the point being made.
"Because they're not even allowed to think" is belittling the WSJ writers and poll-creators, not the interviewed men.
To do the homework, the WSJ's 2024 numbers come from an series of internally-run poll. While I can't get the questions of all of them or breakdowns by gender, I can find the relevant parts for Feb 2024, and the split between Q12A and Q12B is... demonstrative in a lot of ways.
How did you get the report? Archive.is couldn't even get me past the paywall on this one. Is there a better way now?
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That makes more sense.
I should have been more careful with the they, my bad
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Sorry could you help me understand what you are implying at the end with the link? I couldn’t even find 12B in the doc
Sorry, Q13 Split B, on page 6. I'd confused the numbering system since Split B would not have been asked Q12.
Half of the response group (Split A) were asked
They gave answers in 30ish categories, with 9% giving some category outside of those answers, and 3% giving no answer. The other half were asked :
They gave answers in only 15 categories, with 7% other, and 12% no answer. For individual answers, there are wide spreads -- 20% of split B thought abortion so important that they mostly strongly felt and could not vote for a politician that disagreed with them, while only 8% said it was the single most important question. In Split B, the closest I can find is the 1% that were categorized as "Inflation".
Some variation from one split to the next isn't unusual -- it's hard to get a perfectly random sample -- but the gap here is vast, and not especially coherent. Some of this probably the different question wording, especially the dropped importance of the economy-focused answers for Split B. But another portion probably reflects merged or split answers, especially for things like "Freedom and Rights", "Foreign Policy (general)".
And that's the open-ended question, where the poll subject had the most control over matters. If the WSJ article is really coming down from the latter questions that are thumbs-up or thumbs-down on specific matters (which they almost certainly must be, given the numbers the WSJ infographic uses), this gets even uglier. There's a lot of questions, even ones fairly high on Q12/Q13, that weren't investigated in later question at all.
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Absolutely, because the procedural manipulation of science, polling, etc. starts with who gets to who gets to select the default hypothesis and areas of research.
The people who pick a list of polling questions like "how concerned are you that not enough is being done about the looming Climate Crisis?" aren't interested in understanding what their subjects are actually thinking.
At worst they're push-polling, at best they sat around in an office full of identical people picking questions from a hat full of NPR headline printouts. They definitely deserve ridicule for not caring to think about asking the right questions, and not even noticing they're asking the wrong ones.
Ah, I see what you're saying. That makes sense.
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The fact that the gender gap is large and consistent across issues strongly suggests that it is driven by vibes and not issues. In other words, something is causing young men to identify as Republicans, or conservatives, or MAGA, or some similar right-wing identity, and they are then adopting the bog standard right-wing positions on all the issues, and something else is driving young women to identify as Democrats or liberals or some such and they are then adopting the bog standard left-wing positions.
And we aren't looking at a general argument about vibes like "Mummy Party vs Daddy Party" - we are trying to explain something that has grown dramatically since about 2010, in multiple Western countries. (This FT article shows the same pattern in the UK and Germany as well as the US, as well as a similar but not simultaneous pattern in South Korea - notably France seems to be an exception, with only a small gender gap in the exit polls for the recent legislative elections. There is also a minimal gender gap in the exit polls for the 2024 UK general election, but I think that is because so few young people voted for right-wing parties at all that a youth gender gap wouldn't show up in the overall results.
Why isn't the obvious explanation the best one? Women got more politically involved and embedded in the infrastructure of modern first world western countries, and what we are seeing now is just the way we are wired.
If a large number of people live in isolated societies where safety of the tribe is not an immediate concern, men's concerns about protecting the tribe are not valid. Why would they get any power they don't seize themselves - violently?
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Right...My post was trying to go past the Issues. That's why I wrote ... all the sections after "The Issues"
For expansion, I like this comment by @cofee_enjoyer and this one by @faceh
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IMO the divergence can be explained through nature (biology). Men are the stress-resilient, systems-oriented, conflict-oriented gender. Women are the nurturing gender, which must remain less stressed to raise healthy children, and remain more innocent (or naive) to identify and bond with her child. It just so happens that politics is a stressful systems-oriented conflict. Yet political propagandists takes advantage of the female nurturing instinct to recruit supporters. Women today are less maternal than ever before, but the instinct doesn’t go away —“nature, uh, finds a way”. That outlet is nurturing the environment, or minorities, or animals, other women. If there is someone suffering and painted as an in-group member, women are there to nurture them. So much of the anti-white and anti-male ideology winds up creating an outgroup connotation to the real ingroup, and studies indeed show that white liberals empathize less with their own race and have a net unfavorable rating for whites (iirc). You can modify a person’s in group and out group through propaganda.
Pro-life may appear at first glance to be the nurturing position to take, but it’s really an abstract idea: the invisible lifeform you cannot sense is actually a child. It’s hard to empathize with an abstract idea, but easy to empathize with a suffering woman, whose face, voice, and story you can sense. Women primarily operate through this social dimension, through personal sensation. (If you are a woman who does not operate this way, statistically you are less likely to raise psychologically healthy children, who require the one-on-one motherly social interface to learn about the world. And you are probably less adept at make-up, which reduces your chance of obtaining a partner).
I don't know why but I laughed on the train as I read the last few sentences of your post. I heard it internally as that Public Service Message that used to begin "If you or someone you love has a problem..."
Sorry, carry on.
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Liberal women steer clear of Trump supporters not because they worry "he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship" but because they worry that the cops are going to knock on their door if they go the doctor after a miscarriage.
Being "hectored to death" is not equivalent. Being concerned about 2A restrictions might be somewhat equivalent in the sphere of rights being taken away.
Liberal women steer clear of Trump supporters not because they worry "he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship", but because they fear their friends/peer group disapprove of their mate. Being red tribe is low status among blues. The same gender split is happening in Europe, where abortion is not a political issue.
The "Red Tribe" screen is mostly a screen for class/income/education to satisfy female hypergamy, another case where "Red Tribe" is not equivalent to Possible Republican Voter.
When looking at college/MBA/JD/PhD educated "Chads" in the States, such a modal Chad comes from a grey/blue-tribe family (where his father is likely Chuddier than his mother, if his mother has any sort of stance at all). It's typically not some rags-to-riches, or red-to-blue/grey tribe, type of character. Ivy-adjacent Lax Bros are more blue/grey than red.
College and graduate-educated men who've had varied and extensive sexual experiences tend not to have Women are Wonderful views (and in fact, tend to view women as unserious playthings) and don't automatically grant women "respect,” although they may feign to for social and professional reasons. Among boys and men across cultures, space, and time, it is instructed, internalised, and understood that respect is something to be earned, not given.
They also tend to be less worshipping of non-Asian minorities, unlike "Red Tribe" Americans who may say un-PC things about non-Asian minorities from time to time, but then wear black athlete names on their backs and cheer for said athletes. See for example, variations upon the Cam on Ingerland meme—albeit different football, different side of the pond.
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This is an interesting inversion of the usual complaint that Males try to avoid SJWs because they worry that the cops are going to knock on their door if their partner goes to the doctor and claims they've been physically abused.
Which happens more often than the scenario you're describing.
Is one fear rational and the other irrational? If so, which is which?
Hmmmmm.
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This does not really seem rational. Women in states like California are at absolutely no risk from any repeal of Roe. Not to say that people can’t be irrational, but women’s opposition to Trump supporters seems to have nothing to do with actual risk. I suppose if this were the case I expect women in Alabama would be much less likely to date conservative men that women California, due to the greater risk. In reality I suspect the opposite is true
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This is hyperbole and deliberately so.
Yes, at present, there are some wacky state laws that are creating head-scratcher situations. But this will normalize. Miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and other similar situations are going to be codified sooner or later by state legislatures so that women won't face weird "technically you broke the law" situations.
Want to bet? Here in Texas, we’re still having that exact problem.
There is zero incentive for the Texas legislature to make a clean definition. There is negative incentive for the AG’s office to be helpful or clear, since they score political points every time the scary word ends up in the news. Abortions are rare enough that most people aren’t directly affected by it, and get to cheerfully keep voting R.
So let’s make a bet: when do you think Texas will pass a more narrow law? When do you think they’ll leave the “wacky” regime behind in favor of that elusive common-sense situation?
Texas just clarified the standards for a medically necessary abortion. Kate Cox would not have been covered under the new standards either, but let's not pretend Texas criminalized miscarriage care(because it's not a pregnancy anymore).
Ken Paxton does not have unilateral control over the state's abortion policy, and the republicans in the legislature will likely clean up the definition now that Dade Phelan(who can't get any abortion laws passed post-Dobbs because he supports a rape exception) will not be speaker.
Do you have a link? All I found in the statutes was from 2013 or earlier. Is this an agency guideline?
I don’t think Texas criminalizes miscarriage. I said we’re still actively creating the situations @100ProofTollBooth dismisses as “head-scratchers.” Mainly in the haze around “medical necessity.” I expect that to continue so long as the Texas Republican Party can make political hay out of the issue. Phelan or not, there’s little incentive to play the careful technocrat. Not on one of the prime culture war battlegrounds.
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I think there’s another reason for the environmental and student loan gap between men and women. It’s the level of interaction with the economy that drives those divisions. For a man his interaction with the economic system is “I have to get a good job or be a failure.” This makes men a lot less willing to slow the economy for the environment, and much more likely to choose economically viable majors. For a woman interaction with the economy isn’t about success and survival, it’s about prestige in some sense. They don’t have to care about the money as much (that’s their husband’s job) so they tend to cluster in aspirational positions and fun arty jobs and so on. Those jobs aren’t needed and aren’t necessarily subject to the constraints of the government. They also don’t pay that well, despite women getting 4-year degrees to qualify for them. So women want out from under the loans, obviously. And because they’re not doing work that would be harmed by the government enforcement of environmental regulations, they don’t need to stop them.