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While I can not speak for the OP, I think that the information "people have been panicking over franchise and education for women leading to lower TFR for a very long time" is in itself valuable.
Like, when older people complain about the youth of today, it is fair to quote ancient Greeks complaining about the same thing. This does not disprove either, but it is Bayesian evidence that complaining about the youth of today is just normal baseline behavior.
The last 120 years since the popular science text have been the most successful ever for Western civilization, absolutely speaking. They were also quite good for mankind as a whole, albeit with some big dark spots at the beginning. Ironically, half of these dark spots were caused by people overly worried about the Future Of Their Race.
The places on Earth which still oppress women to breed them at maximum efficiency (e.g. Afghanistan) are not even in remotely the same league as the low fertility countries.
Personally, I believe that civilizational infertility is self-regulating and that life will find a way, if we do not invent artificial wombs for robot waifus first or kill ourselves with ASI.
Counterpoint: Mere decades after the author's complaint, WW2 happened and was thus directly caused by women being educated.
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Sure, but the people quoting the Greeks never seem to mention that Athens was conquered by the (more rural and agrarian and presumably more "conservative") Macedonians just a few decades after that quote.
What does that have to do with anything? I bet the Macedonian elders thought their youth were pussy ass spoiled bitches compared to them, maybe only begrudgingly shutting up after their youth came back home with the spoils of Athens.
It would be great if we had some quotes from contemporary Macedonian elders to compare it to then, eh? But the point should be obvious: just because the Greeks were complaining about the youth being corrupted doesn't mean they were wrong. And given that right around the time those youth would have been old enough to become the elders ruling Athens, they were conquered by a presumably less "corrupt" society.
A complaint can be valid in ancient history and modern times, unless you believe in Whig history or Fukuyama style end of history. Weak men create hard times, etc.
You make a fair point that theoretically, the previous generations can actually be right that the youth relative to them are corrupt, weak, and shitty and then that trend reverses itself a generation or two after.
My point was that given the ancient Greeks were complaining that their youth sucked, and I've now seen two generations of older people say their youth sucked (boomers/Gen X > millenials & everyone > Gen Z), it seems very likely that every generation likes to think the ones after them suck. Given that it's not really possible for every generation to be worse than the preceding one and to have a functional civilization, this complaint should be taken with a few pounds of salt.
One of my favorite variants of this: Hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times
I think it's easy to theorize an asymmetry here, where if things have gotten worse you wax lyrically about the glorious past (in writing), whereas when things get better you don't dwell on the past much at all, thus creating a bias towards continuous accounts of worsening in the historic record that can easily coexist with the present being much better than the past. In this model, the reports of worsening could well have been completely accurate.
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I can't help but notice that we aren't currently living under the hegemony of Greece.
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It is true that this trend is obviously inconsistent with a civilisation that remains functional indefinitely. However, Western civilisation has not remained functional indefinitely. It has remained functional during current trends for ~75 years (NB: the 1950 date I'm using here seems to be relatively bipartisan and static; SJers and their foes both seem to talk about the 50s as the paradigm current trends have moved away from, despite their diametrically-opposed views on the value of that paradigm and the trends since, and haven't started talking about the 70s instead as time has gone on). It is possible that the trend is slow enough that the chickens merely haven't come home to roost yet; "there's a lot of ruin in a nation". Indeed, most of the people pushing this claim at any given time are specifically worried that we might stop having a functional civilisation at some point, and this is something that has happened before albeit rarely (e.g. the Fall of Rome, the collapse of Qing China into warlordism).
I can't help but notice that the USA and significant chunks of Western Europe are not in a good way at the moment. Germany's been talking for a while about banning the party that is now #1 in their polls. The USA has significant groups of people on both sides of the political aisle who literally support murdering their political opposition (citations: this board, and the Blue Tribe Internet following Charlie Kirk). Suicide is a non-negligible cause of death. We have cost disease, one of the causes of which is regulatory sclerosis of productive activity. The USA can't pass laws much anymore, to the point that it's become standard for the President to govern by executive order. It would seem that our civilisation is indeed somewhat less functional (at a nuts-and-bolts level) than it was 75 years ago, which is not in contradiction with the hypothesis you're attacking.
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Yes, but not in the way you mean, since TFR has been decreasing for a long time (with the exception of the post WWII Baby Boom)
Yes, but that was seen as a good thing. Instead of having thirteen children, eleven of whom would die in infancy, now you had four/three/two healthy children who would survive to adulthood, get an education, get a good job, and have families of their own.
What happened after that was a combination of "we would rather spend our youth enjoying ourselves and our adult years enjoying our money" dressed up with "it is immoral to bring children into this world due to overpopulation/nuclear weapons/climate change".
And men, as I have repeatedly pointed out, wanted that as well. They didn't want to be trapped into marriage with a clingy, dependent wife and a brood of kids, they wanted to sow their wild oats during the Sexual Revolution, settle down to marriage once established in a career, have a couple of kids (the raising of which would mostly be left to the wife) and then enjoy retirement travelling and doing fun things. Maybe skip the couple of kids and enjoy freedom and economic prosperity.
That is why I am kicking back against "it's all the fault of women, they shouldn't go to college, their fathers should marry them off at eighteen". The hell you thirty year old guys want a dependent on you full time wife and six kids, you want as many girls who will sleep with you and be sexually adventurous as you can get, then maybe a wife who earns money to contribute to the household herself and put off having kids to later or never.
You're painting with an extremely broad brush and making a lot of assumptions about men as a whole without providing any evidence to back it up. Just because there are "chads" out there pumping and dumping as many women as they can and trying to avoid any commitment doesn't mean that all, or even a majority or even a significant percentage of men are seeking the same thing. I had zero sex prior to marriage, and my wife and I would have several kids by now (and she would be a stay at home mom) if it weren't for fertility issues.
If you're going to make broad claims like this on this forum, then bring evidence to back it up. Or expect similar broad smears to be made against you and women generally, like how you're reinforcing the stereotype that most women are incapable of separating emotion from logic in debates ;)
The amount of guys dropping back onto the fainting couch clutching hartshorn-soaked hankies to their brows is giving me immense entertainment, not gonna lie. I said mean words! How dare I say mean words! Mean words are hurtful!
I don't see anyone complaining about mean words though? Care to link to/quote any specific examples? I see a lot of people complaining that you're not actually making an argument. And you're continuing to fail to do so even after having it pointed out you, and after being given specific examples of how you could approach this topic that would both make coherent arguments and not run afoul of the rules.
And it didn't go unnoticed that you completely ignored my request that you back up your claim that all us "thirty year old guys... want as many girls who will sleep with you and be sexually adventurous as you can get" with something remotely resembling evidence or an argument. So I'm going to straight up ask: Are you interested whatsoever in an actual debate about this? Or are you just lashing out at us because we let people here voice opinions about women that hurt your feelings?
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Men had prior to the sexual revolution tried to maintain systems of chastity and monogamy for the past few thousand years or so. Being marginally successful at the same time they marginalized women enough to keep the system going. Then, correlating with a rise in women's empowerment and finally culminating at a time of unprecedented power of women, during the 1960's, it all officially went tits up. And you say that this happened because men just wanted casual sex. But I'd ask: When did they not want casual sex?
The traditional system worked by restricting access to sex in any way it could. These systems were explicitly weakened and torn down by women. That's what women empowerment is practically defined as. One could agree it's not just the women. There were venomous actors involved in the process as well. But I don't see how women escape culpability here, given the only systems shown to work rely on constricting women and access to them in some way, and the history of the modern women is proudly defined as the revolt and destruction of these systems.
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In the period you’re talking about, the West has been 25-50% replaced with migration from conservative regions of the world with no real signs of slowing down, especially among the upper classes. We have record levels of female neuroticism, female unhappiness, female delayed marriage.
I can recall a few very important historical events that have interfered with Afghanistan’s ability to become a powerful state. None of these events had to do with their rules on the fairer sex whatsoever. It’s not their fault that empires keep invading them or funding insurgent groups to destabilize them, but they’re doing a very good job pumping out more children to replace all the deaths.
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And all of those would have been fair points to make. But made in the OP they were not.
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