This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
Ah, fuck it. I'll be blunt on the point. Yes, childbirth isn't pleasant, nor are certain elements of the pregnancy process.
But generally speaking society expects men to take on tasks entailing similar levels of discomfort (military service?) and for much longer durations than asked of pregnant women, in the end. And the guys might not even have a reward to show at the end of it all. The least a woman can do if a man pledges his eternal love and support to her, even if it means he has to work his ass off at an unpleasant job for almost his entire life, is go through the pregnancy process and give him a kid or three.
And "women can't overcome their fear of temporary discomfort to do the thing that ensures the survival of the species and can produce a lot of long-term benefits for her" is NOT EXACTLY A STRONG ARGUMENT FOR LISTENING TO THEIR CONCERNS ON THIS MATTER. If she wants to make the case that yeah, pregnancies can go badly, kids can be a nightmare, she has other priorities she wants to pursue that's fine, but I suspect the raw statistical analysis isn't going to overcome the fact that every single generation before her had kids. Many, many good things can only be attained by absorbing short-term pain or even extreme, drawn out discomfort. Being unwilling to bring new life into the world because it might hurt for a bit seems... immature... on the face of it.
Of course, we can agree that she is allowed to make her individual choices! But I think we should also agree she, as an intelligent, high-quality woman, should be internalizing all the costs of that decision.
That is why in my screed yesterday I suggested that we need to stop subsidizing women in the workplace and with welfare, so that the 'cost-benefit analysis' of finding a husband and giving him a kid falls more in favor of the family formation.
In which case, an "intelligent and high-quality woman" might be able to do the math and decide the discomfort of childbirth is worth all the benefits it would bring.
Because as I've pointed out, a woman who lands a high-quality man early on can literally have it all. He can take her on trips and out to parties, he can give her a career boost as needed, and he can give her kids and help her raise kids.
Attempting to do it all on her own seems like a real self-defeating premise when the historical model through which she can get support and companionship for her entire life is always available.
Anyhow, my brother and his wife had their first child just about a month ago, and having met her now, I can say that I would happily kill to protect her even though she shares a somewhat smaller portion of my genes than a child of my own would. Its crazy how much evolutionary wiring there is to make us attached to babies and find joy by merely holding or looking at them. The value of such experiences that are tied deep into our biology shouldn't be flippantly discarded.
I apologize if you’ve made this clear before, or if I’m confusing you with someone else, but I have to ask.
Were you conscripted at some point? Did you, in some other way, find yourself coerced into violent service in the manner you describe? Perhaps you “volunteered” under the tremendous social pressures acting on men, but now regret it?
Because it’s easy for me to view discomfort with childbirth and objection to the draft as two sides of the same liberalization of society. An assertion that the existence of an option does not oblige any man or woman to take it. That, knowing the risks and benefits, one might choose to reject the bargain, cutting a different path, so long as he promulgated the liberal principles which allowed him a choice in the first place.
And I know you’re someone who understands the masculine urge for violence. This is probably my favorite thing you’ve written. Men are clearly getting something out of the voluntary side of dirty, violent, tough jobs. Even setting aside the prospect of pay.
But here you’re suggesting that can’t be enough. That men, as a class, aren’t seeing the same benefits from liberalization. That the prospect of coercion or even just discomfort washes out any benefits men might claim. And that the least women can do to remedy this, the only way to make up for the hardships they’re imposing, is to “give him a kid or three.”
I don’t understand you.
I don't know anyone, regardless of political opinion, who thinks (in the US) that the Draft is even viable. Everyone would ignore it and the president who implemented it would quickly be found on a lamppost.
Right - the US Draft is like the Queen's/King's Assent in UK. Sure, in theory, they could veto something, but the monarchy would be effectively over the next day in an overwhelming vote supported by strong majorities of every party.
Anything that would require a draft would be met with unequalled volunteers anyway. I realize this part of the Internet thinks all of the Red Tribe thinks the military is all woke and ran by transgender furries and woke anti-racist generals, but the actual cause of the downtown is the best ecoonmy for low wage workers since the late 90's and much higher actual standards of recruits. But, if China or Russia actually did do some wild attack or whatever, and we needed recruits, they would come.
I would agree thats about how it would play out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link