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Adding to the interminable hand-wringing conversation in these parts around the “fertility crisis” and what to do about it, I’ll submit an interesting Substack piece I stumbled upon today. The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.” That no amount of cajoling, cultural/media propaganda, government-provided financial incentives, etc. will prevent an intelligent and perceptive woman from noticing this basic fact about biology and doing whatever is in her power to limit her risk of being forced to do something that she’s going to hate.
Now, certainly this author is far from the first woman to make this case, nor even its most effective advocate. However, her piece resonated with me simply because it closely mirrors statements that have been made to me by multiple women in my life whom I respect and value. One of them is my younger sister, who has said explicitly and in no uncertain terms that she will not be having children. She has even discussed with my (aghast and befuddled) mother the possibility of undergoing a tubal ligation (“getting her tubes tied”) in her early thirties to prevent any further concern about the possibility of becoming pregnant. My sister is in a happy cohabiting relationship with an intelligent, well-paid, all-around great guy; her concerns have nothing to do with the fear of being an abandoned single mother, or of being poor and struggling, or anything like that. She just recognizes that having a child would represent a considerable and arguably permanent deduction in her quality of life. It would substantially decrease her freedom to travel, to make decisions without intensive planning around childcare and child-rearing costs, etc.
Our brother has three daughters, ages four, two, and infant. I love them to pieces and am extremely grateful to have them in my life. I envy my brother, and my desire to have children of my own gnaws at me daily. However, I have to acknowledge that a great many things about my brother’s life became infinitely more constrained, more stressful, more irritating, when he had children. His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare. He is very fortunate to still live in the same city as both our own father and his wife’s mother, which provides access to free childcare; I cannot imagine how much more constrained his life would be if he and his wife had to pay for childcare every single time he had to leave the children unattended. Nevertheless, we see him more rarely, and get less quality time with him, than we would if he didn’t have children. His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror. I am so happy for my brother that he gets to experience fatherhood (and again, I fervently hope to experience it myself in the future) but I admit that it has negatively impacted my relationship with him in a number of important ways. And my sister sees that - and sees how even more constrained our sister-in-law’s life has become - and has, understandably, said, “No thanks, I’ll pass.”
At least his children are healthy and his wife seemingly content and well-adjusted, though. My very good friends - well, formerly my very good friends - had a far worse experience. I’ve known these two since high school; we were inseparable friends for over a decade, both before and after the two of them got married. My buddy always talked about wanting a large family; his mother was one of nine siblings, and he dreamed of having a similarly-sized brood. However, his wife is small-framed, physically fragile, and somewhat sickly. It was always clear to me that she was not built for having lots of children. And, in fact, when they had their first child, it totally wrecked her, both physically and mentally. She was briefly hospitalized for postpartum depression. Probably a large part of that depression was due to the fact that her baby clearly had something wrong with it even from an early age. (My brother and I would, sheepishly and in secret, occasionally sing a certain Stephen Lynch song and he would smugly crow about how much better-looking his own newborn daughter was than theirs.) Well, it turns out the kid has pretty severe autism. She’s now four years old and can barely speak. She’ll likely never know more than a handful of words. She’ll need lifelong intensive care and support, which will consume the rest of their lives. The experience of childbearing was so taxing and so confoundingly disappointing for them - and for her especially - that she has recently undergone a hysterectomy. They moved to a different state years ago, just before having that child, and my relationship with them has cratered, partially because the stress of the experience and the extreme impact on their lives made them so stressed-out and insular. It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays? Their whole lives are about caring for this broken child, with whom I can’t even have a rudimentary conversation. It was so damaging for them, and I guarantee if she could go back in time and undo the whole thing she would. Hell, I hope she would. Surely many women are profoundly and justifiably terrified by the possibility that something like this could happen to them.
I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them. And once we admit to ourselves that white and East Asian women are probably never again going to organically desire large families, we can then focus on reducing fertility in the third world, since the TRF differential between advanced and non-advanced countries is the real problem that we as a global species need to deal with.
“...pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.”
It is absolutely impossible for natural selection to cause a species to not want to have children. No, it is emphatically not natural that women would desire to have no children, and instead have to be forced into it, throughout all of human history. The "logic" proffered borders on absurd; "well, people tend to avoid pain and inconvenience, so logically it must be the case that they would also avoid such in childbirth as well!" reasoning from first principles while obstinately avoiding all of known history that shouts otherwise. One would think we would see evidence of such "nature" prior to the Sexual Revolution, were it so.
There is a massive blind spot in both the linked article, and the post here, which is the refusal to contemplate that perhaps it is the modern paradigm - that having a family is bad, but having a career is good - might, just might, be [what was psyopped into existence] (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/03/dont_hate_her_because_shes_suc.html). Make note; the system didn't just have convince women that having children was negative, but it also had to convince them that this belief came from within; that's why all the talk of "revealed preferences" only reference the modern era - a couple generations back at most - but not the "revealed preferences" of the past couple hundred thousand years.
I think this ignores the human capacity for imagination and reason. No other animal even understands the connection between sex and pregnancy, it is all just biological drives. Humans are special in that we have evolved beyond being slaves to our biology.
In the past couple of hundred thousand years humans were not much different than some animals in that we didn't really have the capacity to stop pregnancies easily and for many of those eons seemed not to really understand the sexual process and resulting children all that well. Children were also a value add for the tribe, community, family in that they were needed for labor and warfare and continuity and you could see those effects in front of your face.
We are now very detached from any economic positives from our own children but very exposed to all of the negatives. The balance for the individual has shifted, you should really only have kids now if you think you'll enjoy it. Imagine if a mother octopus knew what was coming, I think the species would be dead in 10 years.
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This ignores how much women's agency has increased over the last 100 years. It might have always looked like a bad idea to bear kids but they didn't have much of a choice.
Your point is more interesting if you use it to extrapolate into the future
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Why not? It's well accepted science that humans are exceptionally bad, among animals, at having children. We are terrible at giving birth. Humans evolved a large brain, but that large brain comes at a terrible price. A very long incubation period, a horrifically painful pregnancy, and then years of being a helpless baby. No other animal species puts anywhere near that much effort and pain into having kids, because no other species evolved giant brains. And unfortunately the modern world puts even more premium on the brain so... here we are, I guess. The Great Filter of human extinction is our own brain.
None of which suggests that women would evolve to not want children, which violated the most fundamental law of natural selection - alleles that lower reproductive fitness get weeded out. It's a tautological - anything that hinders reproductive fitness had better be making it up somewhere or it's gone.
Bear in mind that evolution works exceedingly slowly. Like, over millions of years. "Modern" human civilization- meaning like, agriculture- is only like 10,000 years old. Maybe we're now in the "it's gone" phase of human evolution.
This is not true. Evolution can work quite fast. So fast to the extent that, back in the day, it had paleontologists and paleoanthropologists tearing their hair out as to why transitory specimens ("missing link(s)") were so lacking in the fossil record.
For example, lactase persistence has went from zero to substantially non-zero, the majority, or even near 100% quite a few times within the time-scale of a few hundred to a few thousand years in various Eurasian populations, possibly even a few dozen years in some cases.
Speaking of 10,000 years, in The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending discuss not only human evolution, but accelerations in human evolution, since the agricultural/civilization era.
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Excellent. AAQC'd
Avoid low-effort applause signals, please.
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Use of herbal and mechanical contraception is well-attested as early as very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Countless women throughout history have sought methods to prevent pregnancy. The fact that these methods were often crude, unreliable, ineffective, or only available to women of considerable means is certainly one reason why such women so often ended up still having children despite their best efforts.
What made the Sexual Revolution so incredibly society-altering is that it went hand-in-hand with mass availability of The Pill - the first widely-available, affordable, safe, wildly reliable and effective contraceptive ever created. The first time that sexually-active women could exert anywhere near this level of control and agency over whether or not they would become pregnant. And within a few decades of its introduction it had become nearly-ubiquitous in every society able to reliably produce and/or distribute it. If this isn’t a textbook example of revealed preferences, I don’t know what is. What reason do we have to believe that if the Pill had been invented in Victorian England, women wouldn’t have adopted it en masse?
Appealing to what evolution has created doesn’t hold much weight with me, because evolution has produced all sorts of utter horrors for the various species of the world. If the male praying mantis had the ability to conceive of and actively choose whether he would still like to reproduce, knowing full well that it will nearly-inevitable lead to him being violently decapitated, do you think we’d still see comparable mantis TFR numbers? Or how about male bees, whose dicks straight-up fatally detach during the act of conception? How many of them do you think would still answer nature’s call, given the knowledge and ability to choose otherwise?
In the modern era when much of traditional social structures had been drastically reduced and there was little social stigma to women having recreational sex and not becoming pregnant. After we created the modern welfare state, lots of people decided that labor wasn’t for them.
I think given that, no, Victorian women would not be choosing not to have babies because their status would increase as a mother, particularly of a son. This was even more pronounced in earlier generations. Culture matters. Our culture says “careerist women are superior” and women do what they can to meet that standard.
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"Use of herbal and mechanical contraception is well-attested as early as very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia."
Attested to by women of all stripes and social status, or attested to by women caught in status traps?
That cities are population sinks doesn't tell us that humans evolved to avoid having offspring (again, such a thing would be impossible for natural selection); we see frequently in history that the moment you get cities, you get reduced fertility as people get caught up in status games, behavior which doesn't happen muich in lower-scale societies where social trust is much higher, and social pressure can much more easily tamp down on defectors. This is because cities - civilization in general - are not conducive to healthy families, not that humans inherently don't want families.
Not familiar with Egyptian/Mesopotamian sources, but in classical antiquity contraception was well attested as a thing that existed and associated with a full spectrum of urban women- from prostitutes to upper class married women.
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The true problem for 'it's inherent for women to want to have babies' arguments isn't PMC girlbosses in suburban Virginia or whatever people may think are destroying society. It's that even in places like Iran or Saudi Arabia, where women continue to be very socially conservative in a variety of other ways - marrying early, openly religious, and so on, are also happily controlling their own reproduction instead of just jumping into babies as quickly as possible.
How does this even rise to the level of an argument against the idea that women inherently want babies? I have an inherent need to eat, but I don't scarf down the first bit of food that I can see as quickly as possible. I make conscious decisions like "I'm going to cook pasta for dinner tonight" and happily control my own consumption of food and I don't see any contradictions between those two positions.
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