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@SSCReader argued the following in the context of a discussion here on the palpable divergence of political views between young men and women, especially young single men and young single women in the US and the West in general a few months ago (emphasis mine):
Lots of things are without historical precedent. It doesn't mean they are actually problems. It's a self correcting issue. Either through assortative mating, or in people who won't reach out across the aisle simply not having relationships while others will find their desires for companionship overcome their political biases, or they don't and simply don't pass on their genetics. There is nothing that needs to be done, a new balance will be found.
In light of the online gender war apparently gaining fresh momentum in the wake of Kamala's election defeat, with a bunch of leftist women declaring support for importing the South Korean 4B Movement to the US and proclaiming a sex strike, and commentators proclaiming toxic male voters to be the decisive electoral force behind Trump etc., and all of this being rather unlikely to just die down with the passing of time, I'm curious if he(?) still holds this view unironically and confidently. To be clear, when he says there's no need to do anything, I'm assuming he doesn't simply mean 'the government shouldn't intervene', I'm also assuming he wouldn't say that the media should try deradicalizing angry right-wing single men, or that moderate feminists should not sympathize with the 4B LARPers.
Right?
What is the time horizon for this, though? When I look at modern intergenerational differences on things like feminism, gay marriage, and so on it does not seem clear to me those shifts are the result of people with certain politics having more children than people with different politics. Is gay marriage more popular with current generations than past generations because people who were more pro-gay-marriage had more kids?
I think the theory states that the liberal-conservative fertility gap only started to open in the ‘08 recession, so the oldest age cohort it could affect are currently teenagers.
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I guess I don't see it. All the people alive today who are choosing not to have kids are, themselves, the kids of "kids who have kids." Seems like there's a further assumption required that some proportion of the population will never be convinced by memes or ideas that lead people not to have kids. That is, humans will never do some kind of voluntary extinction.
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My interpretation would be that things like LGBT propaganda/feminism/etc are relatively new and so previous generations were not selected for people with resistance or immunity to them. So you have a new virus burning through a population that has zero immunity to it, it's going to wipe out a lot of the population before things stabilize. I have no idea how long it will take for evolution to course correct here, and hopefully it happens before things get really unpleasant, but I don't doubt that it will correct eventually.
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I don't understand the distinction between working on having your own kids versus advocating for policies that'd make it easier for you and yours to have more kids. Surely you'd advocate for a raise to help pay for your own kids? How about for lower taxes at a municipal level? How about per-kid payments at a federal level?
I agree that individual returns to societal-level advocacy are usually small, but again I don't understand where you draw then line between "advocacy for strong families" versus "Attempting to optimize policies for the societal production of kids".
If having kids is so central, then why spend time trying to get market value for your labor, instead of spending that time having more kids?
Something bad being common doesn't make it OK - it makes it scarier! And both of these things increase the chance that your descendants won't be able to have as many kids as they otherwise would.
I agree that setting the precedent of meddling with family formation is a bad one. I'm just saying that I don't understand what your advice looks like in practice. If my local municipality proposes subsidizing building a daycare, how do you vote?
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What sex strike? Go to a hundred college sororities across the US, from California and New York to Texas and Alabama over the next month and interview the girls outside, how many would you say have heard of the “4B” movement? How many have sworn off sex with men, not for reasons of chastity or heartbreak, but out of some kind of feminist politics?
Even if you repeated the experiment with the keenest GDI theater kids and socialist club members, my guess is fewer than 2% of women would have knowledge and even fewer would take part. The battle of the Sexes can’t be won because there’s too much fraternising with the enemy etc.
South Korea is a unique situation, but even there people get laid and get into relationships and get married, they just don’t have kids (and when they do, they have 1). The reasons for that are economic and cultural, but have relatively little to do with third-wave feminism and almost nothing to do with the “4B Movement”.
As has been said here before, Western reportage on Korea is overwhelmingly by upper-middle-class foreign correspondents and English-speaking local journalists, both typically of Korean descent, who studied abroad, dislike their home country, have fully adopted Western progressive politics, and are on the hunt for an ‘interesting’ story that foreign audiences will click on to justify their pay.
Maybe sorority thots aren’t going to stop sorority thotting, but marginal effects affect the margins. Maybe the drab psychology major decides dating isn’t worth the hassle and dedicates her attention to social causes instead. Maybe the shy hypochondriac is afraid of health complications of getting pregnant (my god have those been bullhorned lately), and decides to keep to herself instead of downloading a dating app.
Yes, precisely this. Anyone who doesn’t think there’s already a large cohort of late millennial and gen-Z women with no interest in realistic romantic relationships is either wildly out of touch or willfully blind.
Sure, but they were already 4B, I don't think having no romantic relationships, sex, or babies is actually spreading.
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I haven't changed my views, if anything I think the election results supported me. The gap between men and women did not change much at all, (11 points in 2016, 12 points in 2020, 10 points in 2024) The 4B thing is just signaling and will pass, I haven't heard a single woman I know in person mention it. Commentators can claim whatever they want, it doesn't mean they were right. Race, education and urban/rural are still much more important factors than gender. A white rural woman is much more similar to a white rural man than to a black urban woman in this regard.
Even among ages 18-29 the gap between men and women was smaller than in 2020. I don't think there is any evidence here that it is becoming more of a problem in other words.
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