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Notes -
(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 Most laws against women living alone or owning property have now been rescinded.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.
I did some digging to see what I could find and, well, you're right. There is some data available, but it's mostly obfuscated by divergent definitions, different time periods or lack of categorisation.. Anyway:
Here's a Statistics Sweden source comparing fertility rates between foreign born and Swedish born women. On average over the last 50 years, foreign born fertility rate was 0.38 (or 22%) higher compared to the Swedish born one. The overrepresentation over time seems to fluctuate quite a bit, but remains roughly around that value.
Note that the Swedish born category does hide some members of "patriarchal subcultures" (for example, 6.2% of Sweden's population was born in Sweden to two foreign born parents), and the same goes for foreign born which includes significant proportions of Europeans, Southeast Asians, and so on - in other words, be careful when drawing conclusions from these figures.
Just as a fun exercise, I also found some population background statistics for the last 20 years to compare with Sweden's total fertility rate. Foreign background is defined here as either being born outside of Sweden, or having at least one such parent. The resulting scatter plot (which coincidentally is also a chronological series from 2002-2021) shows no strong correlation, although the same reservations as above stand - the data has some severe limitations.
The thing is, though, that when you look at a map showing European TFR's by region, the Swedish (and French) TFR's are also quite healthy in regions that don't contain the major cities of these countries (ie. where one would expect most of the migrants to live). Ie. the Swedish TFR is healthy all over the map of Sweden, not just in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö (it's slightly lower in Stockholm country than elsewhere, though of course that's general urban fertility heat sink effect for you.)
There's actually quite a lot of immigrant fertility research from Sweden, and at least according to this study, when it comes to immigrant descendants born in Sweden, their fertility is actually slightly lower than those born of Sweden of two Swedish-born parents, though of course there is some fluctucation by group.
Sweden and France both have ultra-high fertility rate native religious minorities that are most common in rural regions and smaller cities.
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Well, to some extent - Stockholm and Skåne (containing Malmö) tops the charts, but Västmanland, Södermanland and Kronoberg beats Västra Götaland (containing Göteborg). Apart from Stockholm, immigrant populations really only start significantly decreasing as you travel north - which to be fair did also have a high TFR according to your image.
I would also add that the Swedish TFR has declined significantly since 2016 (as your paper says: roller coaster fertility).
I only scanned the study quickly, but - interesting! Combining mine and your sources (here we go again with the different time periods and definitions.. Caution!), "full-Swedish" women beat those born in Sweden but with foreign backgrounds, but that group as a whole gets beaten quite handily by foreign-born women.
An updated version of that study would be welcome considering the paper mostly uses data sources from 2014 or earlier, but I feel I'm already spending too much time on this topic - there are many other factors far more influential on mine and the country's futures.
Both the roller-coaster fertility and this trend are explainable by women immigrating from high-fertility countries continuing to have an elevated fertility after immigrating, but in time acculturating to a lower fertility, and particularly their children doing so. The peaks in fertility rate seem to correspond with equivalent immigration peaks. Of course, one question then is whether this will be affected by the fact that many high-fertility countries, such as in the Middle East have been trending down heavily in fertility, too.
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Thank you for this post, it was interesting.
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There's Afghanistan as an example, where fertility is high at 4.2 births per woman in 2020. This fell from about 7 in 2001, presumably due to the US occupation and its emphasis on feminism. I think Afghanistan alone could prove your argument. Afghanistan actually was an ultrapatriarchal, medieval, theocratic kingdom.
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Argentina and Israel are the only developed countries that have maintained above replacement TFR for long periods of time- do they notably buck the trend? I don’t think they do, I think it’s happenstance. But it’s worth investigating.
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In your view, was there any tangible difference in those days between prostitutes and such duped and exploited women, other than the latter foolishly not demanding any financial recompense for their services?
Not the person you replied to but I honestly respect prostitutes more than I respect "independent" women who sleep around for free. At least the former know their worth...
Point taken. But the idea that non-prostitute women should be 'compensated' for the premarital (and presumably hetero) sex acts they engage in is, I'm sure, definitely not something the majority of modern society accepts.
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What even is feminism in this formulation? As an institution it hardly seems static enough that this claim could be made. If feminists made clearly factually unsound claims that act against the actual interests of women then surely that would be cause to abandon feminism. Wasn't the sexual revolution cloaked in feminist garb if not feminist itself?
The usable interpretation of this is the really uninteresting "women should look out for their own interests" but it's dressed up to say something much more controversial. this whole post feels incoherent in that is pits feminist against feminist as if there is only one true line that should be obvious to everyone.
There’s a reason that the non-feminist women you’ll run into who are assimilated into more or less mainstream western society are pretty much all very religious- because of the presence of large numbers of men who can be trusted to behave in the ways nonfeminism tells them too.
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Men have always wanted to exploit women sexually without recompense.
In fact: one of the Church's missions was to prevent this. The assumption was that these male tendencies had to be controlled by the institution of marriage, for women's - hell, everyone's - sake.
What made the sexual revolution special? One theory:
Death of Christian Britain.
So the idea of sex outside marriage, done with mutual consent and for the sake of mutual pleasure, is a lie? Is that what both of you are saying?
I can agree with that, with a few caveats.
It's almost always socially deleterious to single hetero women who specifically made it their overriding wish to marry early, and are willing to organize their entire lifestyle around this. And I'm sure such women are relatively rare.
This still does not mean that men were consciously, knowingly exploiting women i.e. the great majority of them very obviously did/do not believe/recognize that premarital sex in itself is almost always socially deleterious to women.
Even when women come to this realization, I'm sure most of these women do not do so before the age of, say, 36. Which is sort of relevant here.
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Not an outright refutation of any fact, but a challenge to the emphasis in the final para: i.e. all of this will happen so long as men maintain X-Y Systems. Here:
Point is that (high status especially) men have always tried to break this system. They managed - continually - to circumvent it. It was only truly broken - according to the exasperated Church - when women themselves rejected the underlying normative argument.
I mean...that passage I quote is telling you that men tried. They tried to hold back the dam. They were told to stop.
So whose revolution is it really? And in whose name does it persist? Whose ideas and actions (which now need to be abandoned) drove it? If men couldn't hold the line on the old system what new one is supposed to be magicked up when the original criticism of sexual protectionism still holds (any solution here would quickly be pilloried as "patronizing" or patriarchal)?
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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.
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?
I'm not saying it's not true, it obviously is. I've been in situations where "sex with no strings" turned out to have a lot of expectations attached after all, while I on the other hand would be perfectly fine if we just went on with our lives. As would most men I know. (Maybe I'm some awful combination of high value enough to be given a chance, but not high value enough for it to be free.)
So it must be true, because they wouldn't bother pursuing anything more un
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.
Alright, makes sense. I guess I'm just one of those people who doesn't form romantic bonds. Completely alien to me.
But I will note this reads a bit like ideology in that it conflates a useful social technology of monogamy with something natural and true. It seems like throughout history and today, powerful men had no issues with such bonding, and in fact one of the main motivators for men is access to a variety of women. Their goals aren't to faithfully commit to a single one.
I would say that Christian teaching with regards to fornication and monogamy is rooted in natural law; natural law I define as follows: Given human nature, human sexuality, human group dynamics, the basic realities of the world, etc, natural law is the set of rules that result in the game theoretical optimum for most people and for society as a whole. So yeah, powerful men often like to fornicate, they also like to lie, cheat and murder too, all of which are violations of morality and natural law, it's good for them, but at the expense of others.
I should note though that even a powerful man who enjoys sleeping with a variety of women would prefer if the woman he sleeps with remains attached to him in concubinage. It is painful for almost any man to witness the woman he has slept with, sleep with someone else. If that is not painful for you, you are a true outlier.
there is nothing inherently christian about natural law, it only became part of catholic theology in the 13th century because of thomas aquinas incorporating ideas from aristotelian philosophy, and even then his synthesis was controversial and took some time to be accepted. I assume early christians based their teachings off of the judaic teachings at the time.
also i have never heard natural law described that way, can you elaborate what you mean? like what is considered the game theoretical optimum?
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Not sure that's awful: free lunches tend not to be the tastiest, while you still have the opportunity of not going hungry. Of course, sex is never really cost-free, but there are some men who are unlucky enough to be able to obtain it with minimal effort and in quantities mostly of their choosing, which is a great way to lose the greatest joys in sexuality.
I'm sorry but this reads like mega-cope. I think most of my friends of the "chad" variety find quite a lot of value in it.
For almost every guy, even those with the relevant genetic, economic, and other gifts, being a "chad" is actually quite a lot of effort, especially if you have moderate or high standards in women.
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I’m not as familiar with the driving forces behind sex-positive feminism, but for women in the work place, ☝️ this is not only dubious, but appears bad faith and near-infalsifiable since a hand can be waived in the direction of some cohort of elite men and their plan(s) to get more women into the office, which of course they couldn’t and didn’t openly articulate, leaving no historical record.
Post-war, expand high school graduation percentages met with an increased demand for clerical work. Prior to then, women in the work force were more likely to be involved in manufacturing jobs (such as in the garment industry). Women found office jobs, which were far less dirty and dangerous, more appealing. And this, among other factors, led to increased participation in the workforce, and specifically by married women, who were less motivated to drop out of the work force as office work was more palatable.
After a couple decades, women began to expect to spend a significant period of their life in the workforce where prior generations had not. And from here, many women, of their own agency, began to pursue higher education and assert themselves professionally.
If you want to subjectively debate whether this was “good”, feel free to embark on that tangent. But if you want to objectively deny that a subset of women, through their own agency, pushed for greater economic opportunity and independence, then you’ll need to show your work.
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.
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.
Man you argue in bad faith. Where did I say feminism was all women versus all men? Where has anyone said that?
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.
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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:
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 didn't say women have zero recourse from ill treatment from a husband under patriarchy.
I suppose she meant zero official recourse?
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This here. Back home I come from a culture that most westerners would call patriarchal (I scoff at the association but lets humour them for a second) . That doesn't mean I could just mistreat my future wife with no consequence. I was specifically raised by my parents to always respect women and put their needs before my own (what counts as "their needs" naturally varies between cultures) and if I were to mistreat my wife I would run the risk of my own family disowning me both for moral and honour reasons as well as because were they not to do this it would jeopardise my brother's ability to find a good high status wife for himself.
Plus family bonds are very important for us so being disowned isn't like the western "never talk to your family again but otherwise live your life as you were doing before" where you can still live a fulfilling life but rather a serious and highly damaging event, it's more like the ancient exile from your city state (almost as bad as execution, as Socrates showed by his actions in the Apology) compared to a modern hypothetical exile from a city (just go to a new city and find a job there).
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