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Notes -
I would agree that at an individual level, there are still plenty of opportunities for young white men, perhaps more than ever before. At a societal level, though, this sort of discrimination is both counterproductive and wrong.
At any rate, I would definitely advise young white men in the US to avoid career paths such as academia where it's impossible to get ahead without being dependent on large institutions.
This article reinforces one of the theses I encountered on Red Pill sites. Namely: if you elevate the relative social status of young hetero single men, it’ll incentivize them to pair-bond, marry and have children. Thus the marriage rate and the birthrate will grow, the average age of both men and women at first marriage will drop, and men will become more economically productive on average. This is what happened in the US after WW2, for example. If you do the opposite, you’ll get the opposite of all of this, which is what we’ve been seeing throughout the West for decades.
We really do need a proper survey done of 20-25 year old men asking them "so, do you want to get a job, settle down, marry one woman and have three kids with her, I mean right now, not in ten or fifteen years time?"
Shakespeare for one didn't think the young hetero single men of his day were eager to settle down to domestic responsibility the very first chance they got:
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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