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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28035 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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  1. You're all making it too complicated. Do you agree that the status of young women relative to young men is higher than it ever was? How's the fertility? I'm not saying correlation is causation, but it's certainly worth a shot.

  2. Men's 'domesticity' (ie, money they give women, some help) is not actually necessary for reproduction in our age of abundance. Not that it matters, because

  3. What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically. So the whole TFR debate is just a woman-convincing enterprise. And I think it would help fertility to convince them they are not God's gift to humanity, and no, the teacher's praise, and the AA spots they snag are not actual proof they are as wonderful as they think they are. It seems obvious to me. What's the alternative? I don't know how much more praise we can heap onto women, and contempt onto men. Have you looked at Hollywood lately? But does anyone believe that more of this effusive praise will make them reproduce?

Men ran away as fast as they could from marriage and child-rearing during the Sexual Revolution. So this is reaping what was sowed - oh, women are now on the Pill and other contraceptive devices and don't have to get pregnant if they engage in sex outside of marriage, and indeed we WANT women to engage in sex outside of marriage because then they're not baby-trapping men and tying them down?

Well, here come consequences, boys.

Men ran away as fast as they could from marriage and child-rearing during the Sexual Revolution.

Where's the evidence for this? For your argument to be true, stats would have to prove that men were filing the majority of divorces and were the ones driving the overall delay of marriage and parenthood. As far as I can tell, the opposite of this is actually true.

Do you have anything besides blaming men for everything and women for nothing, based on your personal feeling? You're not even presenting some solution, you're just gloating about things being shit. For everyone. Haha I burned the house down.

I've long concluded that it's largely impossible to have a clear-headed, rational conversation about these issues with women.

What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically.

Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment. (I am including "started too late because I married late" as lack of male investment even though the proximate cause of not having more kids is age-related infertility.)

As a matter of physical reality, your point 2 is correct - women can reproduce without male investment. But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been. In practice, it is also dependent on a system of government transfers - raising kids in third-world poverty is illegal for good reasons, and you can't raise kids in first-world poverty as a single mother on a lower-middle-class salary without supplementing it with child support or government bennies.

I note that the political faction that is most worried about falling fertility wants to dismantle the public subsidies for single mothers and reinforce the systems that make them low-status. Nobody who thinks low fertility is a problem thinks encouraging single women to pop out more bastards is the solution.

I am including "started too late because I married late" as lack of male investment

On what basis, may I ask?

If a woman planning to get married and have children eventually ends up with fewer children than she wants because she marries late and ages out of her fertility window, then the ultimate cause of having too few children is failure to marry younger. In other words she was unable or unwilling to secure the necessary male investment at a time when it would have made more difference.

The point I am making is that, assuming you accept that women are at least directionally truthful about how many children they actually want and why they didn't have that many, is that the problem lies in the relationship between men and women, not the behaviour of women in isolation. While true as a matter of biology, @Tintin's point that women don't need anything valuable from men (sperm is cheap) to reproduce is irrelevant in practice given that respectable working class and above women don't reproduce without male investment, and society doesn't want them to.

Your original claim is that women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment. I assume the 'lack of male investment' equals an accusation that men are generally unwilling to commit; this is a widespread and usual female complaint. I'm not going to comment on that in general here but I'd argue that the main reason why women delay marriage is that they are unserious about it, don't see early marriage as necessary or preferable, decide that they have other priorities and aren't aware or just don't care what effect their biological clock actually has. So yes, I think it's factually true that 'she was unable or unwilling to secure the necessary male investment at a time when it would have made more difference'. I'd also add that a woman unable to secure male investment is in most cases someone unwilling to prepare and present herself as a potential wife, the exceptions being unfortunate women who are hideously ugly or having some genetic defect.

If I had to give a tl;dr answer to "Why are women not getting married and therefore (unless chavettes who are happy to reproduce while single) not having children they want?" it would be a lack of marriageable men. Below-average men are in a much worse state than they used to be, and in a worse state than below-average women - the women who are being asked to lower their standards and settle really are being asked to make (and largely refusing to make) compromises on e.g. employability that their mothers didn't have to.

Why 90-100 IQ men are worse husbands in 2025 than they were in 1955 is a more complex question, which involves some or all of changes in education, blue-collar job markets, working-class male institutions, and gender roles.

But the key point is that this is a problem that lives in the interface between men and women - the problem is that respectable working class and marginal working class women are unwilling to settle for the actually available men. In a sense it doesn't matter if the men got culpably worse, the men were damaged by bad public policy, or the women got pickier - the point is that (given the continued existence of monogamy norms and the unwillingness of the political right or the median voter to subsidise bastardy more than we do already) the first step in raising fertility is to unf*ck the marriage market in a way which changes both sexes' behaviour.

There is a separate problem with middle-class and above women marrying too late to complete their desired family size, and ending up with 1 kid instead of 2 or 2 instead of 3 because of age-related infertility. Again, fixing this - i.e. getting professionals to marry earlier - is about changing social norms in a way which changes both sexes behaviour, not about blame placing.

This seems to echo in a series of comments left by another regular visitor on a social conservative blog in 2012 (emphasis mine):

...In the United States, the highest educated social class is mating fairly effectively based on assortative mating. But, and I emphasize this, a main part of this is that women in this group are generally selecting mates based more on beta success/responsibility factors than on alpha sexiness factors, across the board. There is a mercenary character to some of the marriages, and a dull one to others, and in some ways many of these marriages resemble those of the 50s (this has been remarked in commentary about them as well), although the women in them are much more educated and many of them have careers which rival or even exceed those of their husbands. Affairs are rife in this group, but divorce is not common. Costs too much in terms of lifestyle for most of them and is bad for the kids. Again probably not so different from 50s sytle.

Below this, you see things basically falling apart, and to a greater degree the further down you go. The main reason for this is twofold. The first is that the further down the pole you go, the less likely a woman is to choose her mates with an emphasis on the beta side rather than the alpha side. There's poorer decisionmaking and judgment in general, and more thugspawn as a result. The second reason, which is closely related to the first, is that, again, the further down you go, the fewer guys there are who have significantly successful beta aspects, so that even if women wanted to choose on this basis, the pickins are slim, so to speak. Marriage in these social classes seems pretty much doomed to a slow death, it seems to me, for these two reasons, both of which are quite change resistant....

...In the shrinking middle, you have a fast deteriorating situation when it comes to mate finding. Again, this is to some degree based on what is happening economically and socially in this group. In general, it is in this group that the women tend to want a balanced mix of alpha and beta (whereas in the higher group it's leaning beta, while in the lower it's leaning alpha) -- sexiness and success, in other words. And this is hard to come by, because it's a mix that isn't very common in men. So what we see is that marriage is quickly eroding in this group as the women are becoming as advanced if not more so in terms of success as the men are, but want an alpha/beta mix for a mate, and simply can't find the guys -- because very few of them, in fact, exist. They tend to be either more sexy than successful, or more successful than sexy, bit not "Goldilocks" men, as it were.

Yes, hypergamy feeds into this as well, but the odd thing is that the most educated women, who are in the smallest hypergamy pool, are not having issues finding mates. It's the women in the next tier or two below them who are...

I do, if they are of sufficient quality. You heard the hubbub about chinese millionaires paying dozens of american models to give birth to their kids? Those smart, rich, handsome kids have great net expected value to the state and to existing americans.

The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.

Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment.

Yes, obviously they want more money, like the lawyer in Idiocracy. We have given them an awful lot already (legal and economic protections up the wazoo, free pointless education so they can have fun, free sinecures that look like prestigious jobs, 24/7 cultural programming blasting their awesomeness, etc), more than anyone ever had, and in return they have produced less and less children. When you're in a hole, stop digging.

But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been.

Right, it's more of a psychological problem that women have to overcome, nothing to do with resources. Certainly, giving women in general more status, like we've been doing, is not going to help, since status is relative. I am fine with raising the status of single moms who produce quality citizens, and its corollary, diminishing the status of voluntarily barren women. Although I'm not a big believer in 'changing status' solutions. I want laws changed, to be less (unfairly!) favourable to women.

If the single professional woman gets less goodies, the married and single mom will get more (relatively), creating an incentive to pair-up, because it's still easier to do the mom thing with dad help. I know the pro-fertility position gets caricatured as 'forcing women to breed' or something, but all I want is to take our hand off the scale favouring women, and let women freely choose from the fallen chips.

Let's try to make it simple: Women have three choices:

  1. professional childless woman

  2. single mother

  3. married mother

There are easy, cheap and fair ways to encourage option 3.

Cut off AA, scholarships, anti-discrimination law, free college, that encourage 1.

Make divorce fairer to the working partner by making the default 50/50 custody, no alimony etc , to encourage women to stay married.

You could limit welfare to single moms more, to get them from 2 to 3 - That's the idea of conservatives you criticize, although I personally I prefer outcome 2 to 1, so I'm not really on board.

The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.

You're missing another failure mode, one very much inherent in single parenting and in some ways worsened by social justice.

Specifically, that there's no easy way to spot abuse in a single parent. There's by definition no other adult in the household, and abused kids have trouble noticing that their parent is a psycho because they have little basis of comparison and are highly susceptible to frame control (the single parent does, after all, have a very-large degree of control over the kid's environment and can argue circles around him/her).

I say that this is in some ways worsened by social justice because, well, social justice feminism does not exactly teach mothers not to abuse their sons, and it does tend to try to direct the police at the wrong target if and when they do become involved, complicating the issue even after official attention is drawn.

(I was starved as a teenager for the "sexist abuse" of "standing over" my foot-shorter mum. Eventually I went stark raving mad and started threatening to topple bookcases, she started dialing the police, I wrestled the phone away from her in a panic, she fled, and of course eventually she made it to a phone and the police reduced me to tears with a lecture about how I was going to grow up into a wifebeater and they expected most of my life to be spent in prisons and halfway houses (well, after making me put on underpants; I wasn't kidding about "stark"). Now, the fallout of that was actually mostly good - specifically, it was enough of a blowup that everybody working my case switched from "keep things from exploding" mode to "find me somewhere else to live" mode, and I wasn't actually arrested - and it's hard to blame the police given she wasn't lying (just delusional) and I was badly brainwashed to the point that I thought I was at least in large part in the wrong; spotting that in a short encounter is not actually trivial. But, y'know, I'd rather not make that situation, or that bad call by the police, happen more than necessary.)

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