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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   28400 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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From the abstract:

A viable means for aiding the survival of low-fertility nations could be to provide women with the economic and social resources necessary for them to conclude that having children alone makes for a better life than remaining childless.

So the authors are suggesting that, as women seem increasingly unwilling to couple up with men, the solution is to rid ourselves of the nuclear family entirely. If you no longer need a committed relationship to have kids, and having children is economically incentivized by the state, then the problem is solved.

This is certainly a refreshing take, compared to what we usually see here. Not returning to tradition, but moving towards further individualization and reliance on government. Is that what this is really about? Increase the power of our leaders by making people completely dependent on the goodwill of the state?

Skimming through it, this article reads almost like an overall warning rather than a genuine suggestion. Is this actually a veiled way for academics to criticize feminism and individualism? Show clear evidence of all the harms caused, theorize that things will become much worse, then propose a solution that is compliant with the ideology while at the same time obviously inhuman for anyone giving it serious consideration. It is almost like they are looking at the slippery slope of current dating norms and suggesting we move to its logical conclusion as an attempt to shock us out of it.

This is pretty much the logical end result of feminism and the progressive left's social project, so I don't see why you find it surprising or refreshing to see it written out.

I got halfway through typing an angry rant about how the unholy alliance of progressivism+neoliberalism has hollowed out western society and then realized a large % of what I am pissed off about and attribute to fertility decline, etc to is happening in China which is not experiencing a lot of the same issues we are.

Societies without antinatalist policies like italy and the nordics experienced organic fertility declines. Antinatalism didn't reduce african birth rates. The only thing that actually works is womens economic empowerment and a tradeoff between autonomic hedonism versus domestic partnership, and lets be fucking real for most societies domestic partnership kind of left women on the short end of the stick once the gossiping church ladies became insignificant as a social power vector.

China korea japan do have their problems and their dating markets are insane (plus the dudes are just really fucking rizzless) but thats an issue of social outcomes being determined by rival economic activity (property+education) that just makes status a red queen race there. The gender wars are restricted to korea, and many east asian women are not keen on the western feminist literature because it has made western women ugly and miserable at the same time. Better to cry in the back of a BMW than ride your own bicycle. Maybe BYD dirt cheap cars having built in massage chairs and friendly AI changes the calculus though.

Progressivism and neoliberalism having the same effects on society as a communist revolution that killed tens of millions is, uh, not the exoneration you think it is.

I'm not a communist nor a fan of the CCP.

But this is a hard subject because it's so global, despite politics and economics being more regional.

Also hating neoliberalism is a MAGA policy. Have you seen Trump's economics? LMAO

protectionism, state owned shares, the rejection of globalization

Mitt Romney is rolling in his grave

That is also not the gotcha you think it is. China today is vastly different from when it was undergoing a communist revolution. China, when it was killing tens of millions, didn’t have a fertility problem.

Peasant farmers always have high fertility, regardless of culture. The urbanization crash, however, is not a universal- not at the level China did.

If I came to the conclusion that the only way to maintain replacement-level fertility was to spend 25% of GDP on a brand new "Department of Reproduction" tasked with paying millions of professional surrogates to gestate eugenically selected embryos to ensure a viable next generation, that's probably what I would put in my abstract for publication too.

Its hard to tell these days.

I also have to suspect they added the female author on there to pre-emptively deflect certain types of critiques that would arise when people see what their data says.

Its why I suspect that we'll eventually, finally see a politician try to place male's concerns front and center.

I think there will definitely be some kind of backlash if things keep escalating. Even young women seem disappointed by the kind of men created under the current norms. The anxiety about approaching and escalating is unattractive. The ambiguous nature of any given relationship when the man does not clarify what he wants is uncomfortable.

It is hard to see how this can last.

This is perhaps my biggest concern.

If there is no controlled unwinding, the upcoming generation might be particularly amenable to a drastic policy shift.

Whatever happens when a young man is raised to internalize the opposite of the women-are-wonderful effect...

faceh, are you married? Do you want nine kids? People in past generations had large families, and raised those families in conditions much less appealing than the way we live today. Are you prepared to be economically responsible for a wife and multiple kids, and to be involved as a father with those children?

Because we all have to be honest. Large families stopped being the norm because spending that money on ourselves was more appealing. Not putting the physical, emotional, mental strain on ourselves was more appealing. Not having the shortage of time, space, and resources was more appealing. The 1926 Irish census is online. My paternal grandparents, at that time, were 10 people in 2 room house (2 parents, 8 children in ages from 17 to 2 years of age). My maternal grandparents were 8 people in 2 rooms (2 parents, 6 children in ages from 13 years to 1 month old). Nobody today wants or is able to live in those circumstances.

In my darker moments, I think if we do manage to crack the problem of cis men being able to carry pregnancies to term, it will be very revelatory. All the partnered guys on here who want four or five kids? Now you can have that! You can carry those seahorse pregnancies to term! Let's see how enthusiastic the "barefoot and pregnant" guys are when it's them barefoot and pregnant!

But those are the dark moments, so let's move to a better way of thinking.

Whatever happens when a young man is raised to internalize the opposite of the women-are-wonderful effect

We'll go back to how history used to be. You are making dark hints that this will be a terrible new dawn, for women it will just be Tuesday.

EDIT: Gentlement of The Motte, what do you want in a girlfriend/wife? What do you bring to the table? And please, "I have a good job and earn good money" is not enough. If you're going to treat it as "my value is solely financial", then why be surprised women chase after high-status guys?

In my darker moments, I think if we do manage to crack the problem of cis men being able to carry pregnancies to term, it will be very revelatory. All the partnered guys on here who want four or five kids? Now you can have that! You can carry those seahorse pregnancies to term! Let's see how enthusiastic the "barefoot and pregnant" guys are when it's them barefoot and pregnant!

I may not be representative here, but my partner and I have actually discussed this before and lamented that I was the man and she the woman — we both think I’d be more willing to put my career on standby and suffer the physical consequences for children than she would be, though it’s difficult to say for certain given the biological impossibility in practice.

That said, I do most of the housework/chores in the household, and we expect if/when we have children I’d probably spend more time with them than she would. We both work in similar roles as well, so it’s not like I’d be giving up less than she would be — it’s just that the way things came to be, I happen to have occupied the stereotypically feminine part of our relationship and she the more masculine part. We might both just be built different.

Though e.g. Shanghainese men are very whipped stereotypically do cater to their women very much, so it’s not like this is unheard of.

You are making dark hints that this will be a terrible new dawn, for women it will just be Tuesday.

This is quite particular and hard to generalize worldwide.

Large families also stopped being the norm because people realised that spending the same amount of money on three kids versus nine results in a much better quality of life for the kids. They can get better clothes, healthy food, and afford a lot more free time. So it is not necessarily selfish! If you want your children's childhood to be as good as possible, it makes sense to limit the amount you have.

If you want your children's childhood to be as good as possible, it makes sense to limit the amount you have.

Is it better? Are the kids having more free time, because we're now starting to worry that all that free time is going on screen time.

Screen time is an entirely separate issue. Families were shrinking way before screens became commonplace.

Do TVs count as screens?

More comments

Whatever happens when a young man is raised to internalize the opposite of the women-are-wonderful effect...

What do you expect to happen?

My sense is that there historically were stable societies with all sorts of different attitudes towards women. In very broad terms, around the end of the 19th century, all "white" countries were already fully committed to a proto-version of their present-day attitude to women; East Asian countries were broadly genuinely committed to something close to the opposite (China's selective abortions are just the tip of an iceberg of attitudes); and Arabic and African countries maybe were neutral. (Note I'm trying to analyse the moral attitude to women orthogonally to their sociopolitical rights and privileges: it's entirely possible (and was common) to think of women as wonderful creatures who need to be coddled and managed, like children, and conceivable to think of them as sociopathic parasites who nevertheless have a natural right to hold the reins, which in a way gets closer to the world of a whipped 1960s Japanese salaryman).

The share of boys agreeing that women deserve equal pay also fell

How much of that can be attributed to them disagreeing with the idea that there's a significant pay gap for equal work to begin with, and instead just selecting "disagree" to represent that?

Where would they derive that idea from?

Contact with reality.

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