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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.
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?
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 whippedstereotypically do cater to their women very much, so it’s not like this is unheard of.This is quite particular and hard to generalize worldwide.
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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.
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?
Yes and no. I think modern social media is way worse than TV's, although vegging out on the couch is also not good.
In any case, families were also shrinking before TV's became common household items. It is not that many decades since they were quite expensive luxuries.
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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).
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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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