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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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We’ll have to focus on women. Either convince/bribe/force them, or revoke their power.

Women have the power over birth, kids and anything remotely connected to natality. We keep giving them more power and taking it from men. Natality keeps going down. Now correlation does not prove causation, but as they say, it does wiggle suggestively. So if natality going down is a problem, it might be a good idea to stop increasing women’s power, which I consider to be well past the point of state-backed privilege anyway.

Convince: End all government-mandated net transfers (until they are no longer net transfers) from men to women, outside of a nuclear family, including child support, alimony, maternity leave, paid university, pensions, welfare etc. If women want to live off men, then at least let it be for the kids, they should cooperate with men economically like they cooperated genetically. I expect men, now in a stronger relative position, to be more likely to vote for kids rather than finding yourself in a fun degree you will never use etc.

Bribe: Boring tax cuts? Increases linearly then drops sharply after the third child. Wouldn’t want a starving rabbit underclass.

Revoke: Right of the father to adopt instead of abortions.

Force: No. All measures compatible with legal equality and freedom of the individual.

We’ll have to focus on women. Either convince/bribe/force them, or revoke their power.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it's like none of you are over twenty. None of you clearly remember the days when men hated the idea of the "marriage trap" and being tied down to a wife and kids. Why the fuck do you think the Sexual Revolution happened? Men wanted sex without commitment. Before the Pill, if you fucked a nice girl, you ran the risk of getting her pregnant and that meant a shotgun marriage. Whether you believe the evo-psych story about men being wired to be promiscuous or not, it's certainly true that men want to be able to play the field until they're ready to settle down once older.

You can have all the women in the world ready to get married and become wives and mothers once they turn 17, but if men don't want to be tied down to be husbands and fathers, it won't work. If a man doesn't want to come home to a house full of six squalling kids, he'll either pack up and leave, or stay away as much as he can and take up with prostitutes and loose women for his fun times. That does not make for stable marriages or families.

Work on getting men to want to be married and fathers before they hit thirty, and then we can talk about increasing fertility.

Women control reproduction in our societies, that's just a fact. A small part of the reason is biological, but the lion's share is legal. Working on men would be like jailing the passenger for the driver's drunken accident. Let's say all men already were fanatical natalists. They couldn't do anything about it, it would still be 100% women's decision. Personnally, I don't think this is normal or fair, but I can understand the contrary position, pointing to biological differences. But you refuse to even assume responsibility for the greater power granted to women. They decide, so if anyone is to be worked on, it's them. They've successfully reduced men to an 'advisory role' in natality and parenting, but according to you women still do not have agency, it's up to powerless men to act .

And to be clear, this is why so many historical societies had arranged marriages with gigantic age gaps.

I should note that one of the big flaws with ‘eh, just have girls right out of high school marry 30 somethings’ is that the women themselves do not like this idea, not one bit. To get women to buy into big age gaps it takes a lot of social conditioning and they still prefer smaller ones. So then you’d basically need coerced arranged marriages. Good luck with that.

... do more men want children than women? That isn't at all the impression I get, whatever the social class.

this takes a bunch of surveys to claim that women generally intend to have more children than they do, but are held back by other factors. I lazily pick gss core ideal fertility because it seems like the easiest one to get, and plot time vs average ideal fertility for men and women. Women's are a little bit higher but they're mostly the same, which was my guess.

I don't think surveys are that valuable here, and what you're measuring isn't intent in any meaningful sense but dumb simulacra, but my anecdotal experience lines up with it.

can one embed images?

All time trends are correlated, so birth rates and female power being anticorrelated isn't any more surprising than birth control and male feminization increasing in tandem. Maybe the birth control's in the tap water, or maybe a lot of significant changes happen simultaneously over decades in a complex society, and seeming similar isn't enough to prove direct causation. That in this survey (and, I'd guess, the others) male ideal/desired children tracks those of women suggests other things are influencing both. Maybe birth control, a desire to better a few children with education rather than have many children, more desire for career or leisure than family, caring for children being an unfun burden, etc.

This is completely pulled out of my backside, but the impression I get is that men are serial fathers - they'll have a lot of kids, but generally by several women. Reading Wikipedia bios of various figures recently, I'm struck by the pattern of "married first wife - two kids - divorced - married second wife - another kid - divorced again - married third wife which lasted until his death - three kids with her". Not all the time, but generally men who have five or six kids are "married, divorced, remarried" not "six kids with my childhood sweetheart whom I married when we were both 18 and we stayed together till death parted us."

Again, impressions from a previous job, but men who split up with their spouses/partners and take up with a new (often younger) partner have a kid with her pretty soon, even if in their first relationship the family was 'complete'; part of this seems to be the woman making sure the new relationship is cemented, but part of it is also something something showing off virility something something for the men. So it seems if you want men to have lots of kids, you need to let them have access to lots of women.

All measures compatible with legal equality and freedom of the individual.

Forcing a woman to carry a child to term so the father can adopt it isn't freedom

It's the solution that offers the best compromise between the rights and freedoms of each. She did have unprotected sex while not intending to care for the resulting child, a few months inconvenience is the manageable consequence. I don't see why she should have the right to kill his child/clump of cells. In any case, artificial wombs should make that argument obsolete.

Only if you disagree with and/or igmore arguments that the unborn baby has rights that are being violated when the mother aborts.