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Notes -
It speaks to the thickness of hypoagency bias that women can write ten thousand volumes of "So I'm Defecting, Here's Why and What That Means for You" (you did an oppression, you disrespected house work, you called me Jane Catlady, etc) over the course of decades and we still can't figure this one out.
To me the question was never who defected first—but rather were women justified in burning it all down. Litigating that question with individual women extracted so much from me that I'm simply not interested in doing so anymore. Agreeing to disagree, I'm now much more concerned with what's to be done about the fact that women find the historical conditions that generated sustainable fertility intolerable. It troubles me because all solutions I've heard from all across politics right now seems to be some flavor or variety of "well if it really gets down to it men will simply be forced to pay the market rate for replacement", but I think people, specifically men who haven't spoken to women about the subject, grossly underestimate how high that price really is. We had a world where childbirth was considered a woman's bloodsoaked battlefield, and that valuation was considered by women to be oppressively low.
And it was decided that, in hindsight, they didn't actually deserve it, they never deserved it, and the fact that they got it is strong contender for the biggest heist in human history. I sometimes find myself wondering: if my forefathers who sacrificed so much more for so little weren't worthy, what possible hope do I have?
My preferred solution is dumping 100 trillion dollars over 30 years into regenerative medicine with an eye toward enhanced longevity. This would attack the big problem from both ends: both reducing dependents and increasing lifetime fertility at the same time. The pitiful value of my blood isn't a threat to me if I'm never compelled to trade it, but I worry there will be a decade or two of experimentation with the "men just pay up" solution before it's realized to be a dead end.
Hopefully I've been born just in time to have aged out of being a primary target.
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