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I was following the latest flame war regarding the human mating marketplace on this board (see here and here, for those that are unaware) with mild interest and was considering posting some dudebro take on the matter by using as an educative example the story of the now largely defunct Christian men’s identitarian group in the US who called themselves ‘Promise Keepers’, of whom I learned a long time ago completely by accident. Then I realized this may not be the best idea, as I imagine only relatively few people are even aware of their (past) existence. So before I decide to proceed I’ll ask this very question: how many of you have ever heard of this particular sad bunch?
I remain perpetually confused as to how a group of Tough Minded Rationalists™, who believe in the invisible hand of the free market and facts over feelings, can be so concerned about birth rates.
Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.
Why so much ire over nature taking its course? Any attempt to engage in large scale social engineering that would cause civilization to deviate from its current course in order to force it to align with an abstract values framework starts to sound a bit... socialist-y.
I've only ever encountered birth rate concerns in the predictable context of "p.s. they should get out of my workplace and onto my dick"-type sentiments, but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.
Tinfoil-hat read is that the whole fertility panic was deliberately astroturfed on Twitter as a way to lay the groundwork for "....so this is why we need to invest heavily in artificial wombs," with incels as useful water-carriers for the interim messaging. I can certainly think of entities who'd plausibly want to push that based on stated values, but speculating about end goals gets too bizarre to waste much time on.
I don't find it so tinfoil-hatty because I do believe artificial wombs need to be invested in. It seems like things that are meaningfully different about the West and made it good inevitably lead to things that make people find something better to do than coerce half of the population into being the means of reproduction and little else.
I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.
I know plenty of mid-20s women who would love to find a kind, conscientious guy to have three kids with, followed by a nice Boomer-style dual-career middle age. I know absolutely no real-life girlbosses wishing someone else would pop eggs into a slow cooker so they could get back to those late-running meetings with Marketing. Thus, the fact that the discourse keeps presuming the latter rather than the former feels like an artificial move to guide the conversation to a place it wouldn't normally go.
You believed an innovative solution would come from
what passed for progressive thought 50 years agotraditionalist thought, especially when parroted completely uncritically? This is just mostly just men being butthurt.You believed an innovative solution would come from
what will be traditionalist thought in 50 yearsprogressive thought, especially when parroted completely uncritically? This is mostly just women being butthurt anyway.There are no table stakes. We're not interested in investing in youth outside of how much interest that student loan is going to generate, we banned all development that would make their current salary appropriate, and we're too invested in "teach men to not rape" to make sure that those who weren't going to do that anyway aren't getting treated as pre-emptively guilty (we have taxed their virtue to redistribute it to rapist men and stupid women, and now wise men don't want to exercise that virtue or see doing so as too risky? And now they have anxiety and won't come out of their room(s)? couldn't have seen that coming).
Sure, there seems to have been a cohort of hyper-conscientious Millennial men of ~Scott Alexander age that got traumatized by Title IX culture and now complain about it. But those men are now aging out of family-starting age, anyway. And Title IX was never actually about gender relations, just about a parasite class of university administrators finding an excuse to justify swelling their retinues.
I don't see grounds for presuming that "teaching men not to rape" has created any more recent crop of hikikomori-style dropouts, if that's what you're arguing. I haven't heard a Zoomer say they didn't want to date because rape accusations, just that dating feels awkward, is a PITA and they worry the girl would be judging them. I can spin about ten different just-so stories for why they might increasingly express those feelings, but "because they were taught not to rape" is pretty low in the plausibility ranking. Certainly it's far below "too little free play as kids, now permanently anti-social"; porn fucking up sexual desire and behavior; Netflix, weed and videogames fucking up attention and motivation; collapsing economy fucking up developmental pathways; anti-family culture fucking up availability of role models; and youth mental-health memetics destigmatizing "I can't, I have anxiety" as a life narrative.
On the other hand, assuming that Anti-Rape-Culture Did It means you can blame the whole thing on girls being so darn sensitive, so there's that.
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