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You frame it as if the birth rate collapse is being caused by women choosing not to have children.
It's not, mothers are still having as many children as they did in the 1970s. The issue is that fewer women are becoming mothers. And it's not because they are choosing not to. Childless by choice women have always existed, but they've always been a tiny proportion.
The birth rate collapse is happening because young men and young women are not coupling up any more.
And given that men make up 50% of the non-forming couples, I think we are perfectly entitled to talk about it.
As the saying goes, men chase and women choose. Women are choosing not to have children.
That's false. According to surveys, women still want to have children. If every woman had as many children as she wants, every country barring a few would have above-replacement fertility.
But young people aren't coupling up, and that's obviously not 100% women, how could it be? That would have to mean that young men are asking out as many women as they always have, but the women are all saying no for some reason.
In reality, both men and women are socialising much less, and the effect is more pronounced among men than women.
Surveys don't mean much. If women aren't having children, it's because they don't want them, they biologically can't have them, or because they can't find a man to impregnate them. Infertility happens but there's no evidence it's increased anywhere near enough to explain the drop in TFR. The last is not credible.
Yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. Young people are failing to couple up which has caused the recent birth rate collapse. But that's not a unilateral decision on the part of any individual woman or man. It's a coordination problem. Leaving aside the fact that blaming 'women' is incoherent because 'women' cannot make a collective decision as billions of autonomous individuals, you seem to be ignoring the fact that it takes two people to have a baby. The average young woman wants to get married and have children, but no woman can do that on her own. She needs to find a man who wants to do the same, and do it with her. The coordination mechanisms we used to have for this (in person socialising in most societies) have broken down, so the birth rate has collapsed.
Blaming individuals for systemic problems, or blaming one sex for a problem that involves both sexes, is a lazy copout.
As the saying goes, men chase and women choose. Women have, increasingly, been choosing "none of the above". Societally, it is anathema to even consider that women's choices may be the problem, so we get this shifting of the responsibility back to men... but this is a problem men can't solve short of going Full Roman, which isn't going to happen.
Why do you only focus on women though? It takes two people to form a relationship. Neither men nor women are socialising much in person, and yet you blame the resulting lack of coupling as exlusively the fault of women, as if our hypothetical twenty-something woman is somehow obliged to break into the apartment of the modern porn- and video game-addicted young man and drag him down the aisle?
Did you ever read Scott's essays Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled which describe the broad atmosphere of online feminism in the late 2000s/2010s?
Or for that matter Ezra Klein's article on "Yes Means Yes"? The moneymaking quote is:
Many young men including myself blame the modern-day lack of coupling on the fact that that we grew up in the fifteen years where feminists were telling us with absolute sincerity that any interactions with women were potentially sexual assault, and that we needed to be afraid when dealing with women. Men are on the dating apps, hellscape that those are, because men were made to feel unsafe approaching women in any environment except one where women had explicitly opted into being approached. And even that doesn't work, because an awful lot of women in both dating apps and other dating meetups make it very clear that they are not actually there to be approached in any non-theoretical manner. (This is likely the reason for the sudden turndown you were discussing in another post, incidentally).
Yes, a decent number of men had enough female friends and social nous to realise the gap between the rhetoric and the reality, and now have happy dating lives. Good on them. Seriously.
But feminists wanted young men to feel afraid and uncertain when socialising with women in person, and they worked hard and they achieved their aim. And fixing that requires more than an insincere apology (which we haven't had) and even more blame for not being supermen and fighting through the blizzards that they ginned up. The reason that I focus on women is that fixing this requires women to actually be positive and welcoming towards advances by men, which all experiences show only occurs when they need us for something.
Yes I did, and they are excellent essays. But to explain the coupling and birth rate collapse on the excesses of anglosphere feminism is parochial. Coupling is down everywhere. I mean literally across the entire world. Since 2010 birth rates are down in Mongolia, Russia, Nigeria, Japan, Egypt, Brazil. Name a country that isn't Israel and you can be almost certain that its birth rates have been dropping recently.
Mongolian shepherds aren't coupling up less because they are worried about getting Me Too'd. They're coupling up less for the same reason as everyone else. It's obviously the phones.
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