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I keep engaging with the gender wars/fertility crisis topic even though its slowly driving me mad. But its too important to ignore.
Actual title of a paper published today in the Cambridge Press, by a Norwegian research team:
Toward individualistic reproduction: Solving the fertility crisis could require a further marginalization of men
Not paraphrased or exaggerated. Apparently published by a team of two males and a female. I don't even mean to attack the authors, the paper doesn't seem to be 'slanted' in its presentation... and this implied solution just appears to be the sort of blunt facial honesty that Norwegians are known for. I'm not attacking this paper.
We had the discussion just yesterday where a German Police Chief (himself male) says women should avoid relationships with men for their safety. My commentary is on the larger cultural trend.
Now, the paper itself draws some specific conclusions using data from the last ten years. (i.e. when the gender wars really accelerated) From a twitter thread:
Women's freedom is strongly correlated with declining fertility.
About 60% of female sexual partnerships are with the 10% most promiscuous men. I have to interpret "most promiscuous" as "most attractive," because very, very few men are able to be promiscuous without being hot. Likewise, this looks VERY suggestive of a broader 80/20 rule in place.
Women can't all form relationships with this top 10%... so more women are single... so they are less likely to have kids.
Ultimately they suggest that solving the TFR crisis means getting single women to have more kids. Hence the 'marginalization' of men.
This paper so readily confirms almost everything I've talked about in here I'm worried its designed precisely to trigger confirmation bias in me, specifically. Read it and decide for yourself, I guess.
As I've said, going off of the last 10-20 years of data:
Women probably only view about 20% of men as 'people' worthy of attention.
Women who got to college and enter careers tend to have the highest standards... regardless of their own suitability as a mate.
Lotharios exploiting the current gender dynamics for low-commitment sex are a problem.
Of course I note that every single bit of this is explained by shifts in female behavior, which is to say there's not much shift in men's behavior, so the overt focus on men's alleged failures seems... odd.
I do not find it pleasant to believe all these statistics and their implied conclusions, but no matter how much I ask for challenges, every bit of data just adds on to the pile of confirmation.
I'll throw out hope spot because there is a small bit of data that contradicts the overall narrative... South Korea is actually seeing a bump towards increased fertility!. I am watching this very keenly to determine if there is much hope of pulling out of the spiral.
I've genuinely got very little new to say on this topic. Its beaten to death. Its a bloody pulp, we're standing ankle-deep in the putrid mix of entrails of this topic as the waterline slowly rises every day. I've very interested in workable solutions, though.
I am a very reasonable person. I do not get angry at mere insults easily. Call me whatever you want to my face, your words have no power. But what sets me off is when someone pisses on my leg and tells me its raining, when I can look up and see there's not a cloud in the sky. "Men are horrible, and it is socially good and necessary to marginalize them." The insinuation against my person doesn't bug me. Its the blatant lie contradicted by all available information. It is simply false (especially in the West). It is epistemic malpractice. And it seems intentional and malicious, on some level.
Every. single. day. I am faced with a loud cultural message that (unattractive) men are expendable, mostly unwanted, dangerous, useless, and generally deserve to be lonely, poor, and depressed. And, as a kicker, that 80% or so of men are unattractive to women, so its the majority of them who are marked for evolutionary failure.
Today its this paper.
Yesterday its Mr. German Policeman.
The week before it was that Manosphere documentary.
Last year it was that British Miniseries.
It is a neverending cascade. And of course there's zilch, zero, nada content produced in the mainstream that examines if female behavior is becoming more toxic and suggesting intervention.
Me, I have the mental fortitude to put all this in context and ignore it as an influence on my individual behavior. I have my internal locus of control and the self-confidence to believe I will succeed anyway.
Yet there's millions of young males who are vulnerable to this message, and it is killing them, metaphorically and often literally, and nobody with any authority is doing anything about it or even talking about it without also piling on with the exact same rhetoric.
I simply don't see how one can claim that there's any true 'Patriarchy' in the Western World when government officials, scientific papers, nationally broadcast documentaries, and general everyday people can happily proclaim that men ought to be marginalized for everyone's good if they can't accept a lot in life that amounts to being a second class citizen in their own country... while women are elevated to the level of landed aristocracy on their backs.
Meanwhile the main voices speaking on the other side are inherently outsiders like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I don't even think we have a matriarchy to be clear, it really does just seem like society is organized around the "women are wonderful effect" and the average person is psychologically incapable of deviating from this programming.
Where does this end?
Robert Frost poem Mending Wall
It is an allusion to people just following what their father told. And they never counter it back. It is a deep programming of the subconscious.
Over that, they will think that it is what they thought themselves. Kind of Inception, but without the sci-fi stuff. Deep ingrained system of thought which appears like the person has thought it out themselves (makes them feel rational too, so the counter logical arguments do not work easily). They call it conviction, when it is just inheritance.
They follow what the father told, and find that things (the world, their life) doesn't quite work well that way. And they still don't go beyond them.
They find someone with a new set of sayings, and again never go beyond them.
They continue to behave like Blind Bats with new Beepers, never considering that they have a built-in navigation system and never using it.
The father said. The mother said. The society said. The priests said. And the automaton follows.
The Whispering Earring also fits here. The perfect guide able to tell you what you need to do to have lot of money, social prestige, big house, car, kids, happiness, everything what one can want - you just have to follow what the earring says and you get that. All these people want their father to be that Earring.
But there is no such earring. No such perfect sayings exist.
Trying to correct the sayings, to correct the priests, or the earring, is still the same problem. Somewhere in that solution, you still want people to follow the new corrected system. You are changing the voice in the earring, not the ear.
Yes, there is wisdom in what one's father says. But there are also things which are wrong also. One needs to be able to differentiate the right from the wrong. Then have the courage to discard the wrong things and add new right things.
Stop blindly following your Maps app when you can see that there is no road in that direction, no bridge across that river.
Frost would have liked that son to be able to assess if the neighbor was good or bad. Look at the apple tree. and Decide for himself whether to mend the wall or let it fall.
Wait until you get into a boundary dispute or want to sell land or buy land or are in a court fight with a neighbour over whose responsibility it is that that tree branch broke off and fell on the roof of your car and damaged it. Arguments over closing off rights of way. Access to your land through someone else's property.
You'll see the point of maintaining established walls then. "Here is the land registry where the boundaries are marked. Here are the traditional paths."
Suppose Frost decides not to keep the apple orchard, now he's keeping goats or pigs. Or he wants to expand the orchard. Let the wall fall, then encroach on the neighbour's land and claim no, that was his patch all along. Same for the neighbour. I'm sure Frost would have been all for the neighbour making up his own mind whether to mend the wall or let it fall - right up until it came to "hey, why are you on my land?" when the neighbour started planting pine trees beside the apple orchard.
"Good fences make good neighbours" because it keeps you out of court.
the fence in Frost's poem is a metaphor for inherited rules (and sayings). i am not arguing for removal of literal property boundaries but for assessing which traditions serve us before mending them reflexly.
Before the metaphor, there is the reality of the falling-down wall. Fix your leaky roof first, then philosophise all you like about "but isn't this just blindly reflexive tradition?" Though if you like sitting under the rain streaming down your walls, well that's your choice.
i agree that practical walls (and roofs) serve real functions.
but do you ever assess which walls require mending? or do you mend every wall on reflex?
The broken wall is the wall that gets mended, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: maintenance so the wall doesn't break in the first place is cheaper and better.
i think we are operating at different levels. my original argument was whether one should assess which inherited rules to maintain, not whether practical maintenance is useful. i agreed (later) that it is useful.
but "an ounce of prevention" applied universally to all walls, all rules, all traditions, sometimes with the urgency of leaky roofs, is exactly the unreflective position i was describing. the question is not whether to maintain walls, it is which ones, and why?
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