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Notes -
I've been really thinking about this tweet.
This point is interesting, and I think rather noteworthy. There were many protests over the Vietnam conscription, Muhammad Ali's being the most famous example, so perhaps saying no backlash at all is a bit hastey. And who could forget our poor friends in Ukraine.
Still, I think she raises an interesting point. Most men still, (both legally and socially). Have to abide by the traditional man script. And this pressure is more on them then womens end of the social contract, which (from what I can see) is basically non existent.
Now the easiest explanation for this double standard is probably just gender bias: we simply have less empathy for men as a whole.
The way I see it, there are a couple of plausible solutions to make things for fair or consistent(any additional ones are welcome):
Gender "Equality". Extend "bodily autonomy" rights (for those who are actually consistent and believe in the concept, as a side note, I believe this is just a silly excuse) to men and end the draft, eliminate male disposability. Both men and women ask each other out. Stop valueing men as pure economic units. Men aren't wallets or soldiers, their people! Ect. Basically "Masculism" or some variation of MRA movement.
Extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails. Basically bring back some (or all) of the "patriarchy".
From what I can tell, 1 has kinda been tried, and has basically failed, probably due to the gender bias mentioned. I imagine Lauren favors the 2nd option, (& I kinda do). Implementing it may be unrealistic, however, due to various political and environmental constraints. I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable. Maybe we get lucky technology bails us out, but fundementally, I find the prospect of a society with no children, no families, etc, to be deeply dystopian.
I think one thing conscription shows (and the fact that many societies have it) is that, no society really wants to cease to exist. Nor should we. There is something valuable about societies existing, and continuing on into the future, even if we have to make some sacrifices for it. I think one can make a case (and many indeed do!) for extending some modified version of the social contract/roles to women. I've been deep thought about if societies might attempt this in the future, or what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like. What do you think?
Women, as a distinct sex, exist to bear children. Feminism and antinatalism are social dead ends. Let it take a few more generations or a thousand years - the societies that come out the other end of this particular bit of natural selection will have immunity to those memes.
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I've been trying to, in the kindest possible way, put some effort into writing a response to you in a way that makes it seem like I'm not being entirely dismissive of your arguments and thoughts, because I still to some level think you are a highly committed troll of some sort here to make the quokkas look dumber. I'm low-trust, it's my default setting.
What, on God's green earth, would make you think that people want things to be fair or consistent? This is something you want, this is something autistic people want, this is something scientists want when running experiments and even then you'd need something to act as a control. The state of the world is not fair; this is the way of the world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, the systems we build around her as superior broken apes who are above it all are designed around it and the more of us there are the more you have to design for edge cases.
Life isn't fair, and the people who benefit from that arrangement would very much like to keep it that way. Hell, it's not fair that you get to exist while thousands of people got droned to death in Ukraine, is that fair? What possible recompense, what possible thing could you, you personally, offer on the altar, that would balance the scales? And that's just one case caused by two or more countries playing at great power games. What on earth do you expect to be a plausible - forget plausible - workable and practical solution to make women die in wars the same way and in same numbers as men? Even if you enforce gender neutral conscription, they will not occupy the same roles as men, they will not perform the same and excel in the same roles, they will not be treated in combat the same as the men by any opposing enemy force by dint of the fact that sperm is cheap and ovaries are not.
The tweet you are talking about deserves no more thought. It is a whine, someone complaining that the world isn't fair, it is cope that men and women are not viewed and treated the same. And there are very, very good reasons they are not, whatever mouth noises the gender equality brigade make don't hold up to scrutiny under reality.
There is a long list of things that people refuse to do for their country of birth, let alone their country of emigre, and drafts also have significant carveouts or people fleeing the draft every time it's been attempted. Countries not at war that have mandatory military service still have issues with people going to some lengths to dodge the service. How anyone possibly thinks they will get rapturous applause for advocating women surrendering their bodily autonomy for nine months to what will become a fully sentient human being makes me worry about that person's intelligence.
Yes, life isn't fair, but it should be and so we should force it to be is the thought mode of tyrants. While I am not excusing inaction, an incomplete understanding of tradeoffs for actions and what it means to go up against people who are Winning and don't want to Lose just so a new bunch of people can Win should be properly accounted for in any model of the world.
Edit: This might be instructive. Here is a comedian talking about how he asked for consistent metrics to hit to try and score a deal. He knows if they gave him a metric, he could meet that metric and then get the deal. Rejecting him was the point, expecting the people he was dealing with to act with any sort of consistency was the point. Any metric can and will be gamed by people who can meet it, and people know this. The goal is not to meet the metric, the goal is to do what you wanted in the first place. You're asking what color the car is, while ignoring the point that people weren't really talking about cars.
Fairness being something only autistic people want is something someone came up with here but it's not really correct in the sense that only autistic people care about fairness; autistic people merely care more about mechanical rules rather than things like inclusivity or reciprocity, but people still deeply care about their notions of what their deserts should be, that they get a decent deal. The entire edifice of western thought and society is built upon some idea of (Christian) fairness. Fairness is so important to people that income inequality, etc. is the biggest topic du jour. All this stuff is about fairness. The entire idea of bodily autonomy you cite is downstream of that.
The ultimate question is, to paraphrase a book title, whose justice, whose notion of fairness? Or if we forgo fairness entirely, then what? What virtues, what values is your post-fairness society based on? It used to be Christian-adjacent virtues, but I guess now it's post-Christian "woke" virtues like racial equity (is that not fairness?) and "bodily autonomy".
A very common bias or tendency I see among ideologues of different stripes is that they implicitly carry a value system and expect everyone to abide by it and just not care about "what's in it for me". But people do care about that. You have to think about what your value system actually is, what it's based on, what are its precepts. Otherwise people will defect, your system will lose alignment, bad actors will fill the vacuum.
If we go with a value system of "nature is unfair", then we move past our corpse of Christian morality straight into "the weak suffer what they must, the strong take what they can". Which is a value system you see and which exists, like as Judge Holden articulates in Blood Meridian or more broadly a sort of law of the jungle. Or maybe you have some sort of gynocracy in mind. Or maybe you think AI will save us all. We shall see. But it's not a value system which would tend to place women's suffering or bodily autonomy very highly at all.
Things don't happen until they do. If a war happens then your value system of women's bodily autonomy being the prime concern of society might collide with weak armies and men fleeing (as they did in Syria, Ukraine, etc.) and the barbarians raping all your women (or worse, like what happened to German women after WW2). Then nature will truly assert itself. That is also a value system not based on fairness.
I guess you might just say your value system includes noble male self-sacrifice in return for nothing. Again, you might find it a bit hard to get buy-in for that.
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Conscripting women to die in wars is gonna be a hard sell, but I can easily imagine a western government conscripting women for the kind of non-military national service that Israel does for its Orthodox women. The young men go to learn and fight wars, while the young women go and work in hospitals and care homes. They could even frame it as feminist!
Of course, conscripting women for motherhood is gonna be tough, given that the birth rate decline is being caused by less coupling, and not by mothers having fewer children. You would also need to conscript men for fatherhood. Basically, you'd need forced marriages, organised by the state.
I thought that was precisely what the main problem was: mothers stopping at 1-2 when they should be having 3+.
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You'll have better luck drafting women for war, especially since it's rare even for men.
The more society pushes women to act like men, the more like men they will act. Much of modern society heavily encourages women to act more like men in a variety of ways. Their education should be masculine, STEM oriented, and in co-ed settings. They should wear jeans and t-shirts most of the time. They should sleep around a fair bit in their 20s, and get the same jobs as their male peers. If they do choose to give birth, they should work those same jobs that are also worked by men right up until they're having contractions, and should come back when their babies are six weeks old. This is even true of women heavy professions like teaching! They're leaving their two month old infants with strangers all day to go to work. This is not appealing! But women who take a year or two off to raise their infants are also isolated, because we have no villages in much of the West. Societies that show such distain for motherhood don't deserve babies.
I suppose we could trial a military base for new mothers, where pregnant women are assigned a cohort to bond with, do exercise and nutrition classes together, and they get a housing discount or can move to a government compound with their husbands. They and their husband and baby can move around to various places where the US has interests every few years until their babies are all old enough for school. I might have signed up for that deal.
That gets things entirely wrong. It's not that women have been masculinized and gone into masculine roles; it's that institutions have been feminized, offering roles that are much less competitive and much more about your social standing. Universities now are scared to grade on a curve that might imply some people perform better than others; you turn up, and you get an A. It's much more about consistency and the kind of conscientiousness that women excel at.
Citation needed, for such a bold sweeping claim. I have taught CS at a fairly high-tier US school for a long enough period of time, and we did not hand out As if you just "turn up". The curve was more generous than I would have liked, sure, and there were a lot of loopholes and "accommodations" and second chances; a lot of those also turned out to primarily benefit those who lacked consistency and conscientiousness, as at a "more hardcore" university you would not have gotten the allowance to strike out your lowest homework grade or have a TA dispatched to invigilate your stinky two weeks unshowered self in a separate room taking the exam two hours later than everyone else because you overslept.
You can maybe make the "feminisation" claim about school (K-12, for Americans), but even there the story seems complicated: at first glance not being smacked with a ruler if you fail to sit upright with your back straight or have crooked handwriting anymore surely makes less of a difference for the conscientious and obedient girls. I'm more on board with the "boys used to be able to engage in fistfights during recess without having the cops called, which helped them sit still later" explanation.
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The main ethical difference I can see between conscription and 'forced' childrearing is the immediacy of the consequences and the duration of the commitment.
If a nation is faced with an invading force or a war over critical resources and can't front enough manpower into the fight, they will very likely cease to exist. So the country, or perhaps the state the governs it, if it considers preservation of its people a priority, has a strong basis for forcibly recruiting men if there's insufficient volunteers. "If we don't make you fight, then we're all going to die."
By comparison, if women start abandoning or delaying the childbearing role, there's no immediate danger, you won't even feel the pinch for decades. There's no enemy that will march over you in the end. And likewise, conscripting them doesn't mean sending them to a distant battlefield to fight on a frontline. They would continue to exist in your society, living fairly normal lives for the 20+ years it takes to raise all those kids.
Plus, the Faustian bargain it presents has some upsides: more women in the workforce means more economic productivity, and more money to spend on luxuries. And hell, fold sexual revolution into the deal and you get more sex for pleasure, with fewer duties tied to it, and able to optimize the activity for things other than procreation.
By the time anyone asks "wait, who is raising the next generation to carry us into the future" you've already reconfigured your whole economy around other pursuits.
So there's a legitimate question: if the threat is not immediate, at what point are you actually justified in pressing women into service? How dire must things appear? How much foresight are you allowed to use?
And something small to consider: if some men will go to pretty serious lengths to get out of a draft, what might women do to render themselves ineligible as brood mares?
As I pointed out with my comment, there's also a big question of convincing people the threat even exists to begin with. Right now more Americans believe the opposite is true and that overpopulation is a larger threat than low birth rates. Large amounts of people fundamentally believe in a limited amount of wealth and resources in society and that having more people just cuts into their own share. Even conservatives (who are more sided towards birth rates being an issue but still 40% believe in overpopulation more) do it when they complain about immigrants "taking jobs", so I'm pretty sure this divide is just because birth rates has become memetic among parts of the online right and not reflecting a deeper view about growing the pie.
Meaning even if you convince society to press women into some sort of top down birthing related authoritarianism, it's likely going to be getting them into having even less kids.
"Even conservatives (who are more sided towards birth rates being an issue but still 40% believe in overpopulation more) do it when they complain about immigrants "taking jobs""
This seems very obviously false. Do you actually believe this? That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down. I'm far from a conservative, but I've heard the second plenty (from people on both sides) and never, even once, heard the first.
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I love these types of complaints so much because I can't tell if they just exist in a bubble or are being purposely stupid. Tons of people oppose drafting on a moral basis and whenever it gets done, even in immediately existential circumstances like literally defending your country from the approaching Russian hordes who are coming right now, right this moment with no time to ignore, there's still constant pushback and struggles in implementing it.
Like it's so filled with controversy that it's the literal first line on Wikipedia
Solution 3: They're obviously just different things and it's not a double standard to begin with so the idea of a "solution" for fairness doesn't make sense.
"The Russians are coming right now to destroy our country" is an obvious immediate direct threat. If we don't fight right now, it's over as a nation.
Meanwhile "in the next few generations we'll have the same population we did a few decades ago" both isn't obvious or immediate, and to many people isn't even seen as a threat. Tons of citizens would look at that as a good thing, they think that more people = more pie being divided up = smaller piece for them and don't grasp the concept that larger populations tend to grow the pie faster than the share of pie shrinks. If you employ the logic for high skill immigrants, then you should be able to easily understand their view point when it comes to having more youth!
Concerns about overpopulation isn't just common, it's the more believed view for the US itself and the large majority of belief when applied to the world for Americans.
And weirdly enough, their logic is looking to actually become true in the near future if AGI and full automation actually happens. Each new person really does just become someone else to share the robots with in that scenario. Why would you ever want to encourage the population to grow if that just means you have to share more?
And yet it's still implemented, eagerly and enforced by state violence against men by governments who are typically hyper-sensitive to the barest hint of coercion. Natural state of the world, I guess. While "birth conscription" is so far outside the Overton window that I can't say I've ever heard it seriously argued for. Scoffing loudly at the idea of something being a double standard doesn't make it not a double standard.
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It looks what we were doing before the mid 20th century. Young women are handed specific literature and media at a young age which makes them want to be mothers. In school, they take classes to help them to be mothers. They are told to behave in a way which is conducive to being mothers (meek, sensitive, humble, loving, &tc), and if they stray from that they are shamed. As they get older, they are looked down upon for not settling down. They are shown anti-spinster propaganda in female media. There were many Victorian guides for women penned, filled with pronatal propaganda. Women are sensitive to shame and so you don’t actually have to do a draft, you just have to successfully moralize natality. But that’s also a big difficulty, with all of our secular cultural institutions captured.
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It's even worse than that, because we're at the stage of decline where a large chunk of sub-replacement fertility women are past childbearing age. Further, pretty much every traditional culture from the dawn of civilisation mandates that the elderly be respected, which, in the presence of modern pension schemes, just translates to "let others waste their life on kids that will have to support you anyway even though you're not related to them." Back in ye olden days, when all these norms were developed, they were more sustainable partly because the population pyramid was actually shaped like a pyramid in the first place, but also because in the absence of modern medical care, the elderly are quite cheap to care for: you just feed them a small amount of food each day until they die, and that's that. There was no way to blow the family inheritance on treatments to keep grandma alive for another 2 years, and certainly no state-mandated financial shenanigans to make this happen at scale even for grandmas that don't have grandkids.
Realistically, nothing will happen because our civilisation is not adapted to be able to address these questions and would rather end itself than do so.
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Will the implications ever become unignorable?
I'm actually a bit confused by a lot of the right wing concern about birth rates. The people who choose to have kids in the current environment have some combination of genes (personality traits, etc.) and memes that lead to them being more successful at reproducing.
If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out, because each generation will have a higher share of the reproduction-in-industrialized-information-age genes and memes, and the less fit people with inferior genes and memes that don't lead to reproduction will die out. Why would we even want to dysgenically keep around genes that aren't well suited to reproduction in the current environment?
Because we have agency in shaping that environment to a significant extent, and we can steer it towards (expected) outcomes that align with our values and preferences. Are you similarly confused about eco-conscious people who say we should e.g. try to consume less oil? Like, what's the big deal here, once the oil runs out or the Earth becomes uninhabitable the industrial economy causing this in the first place will collapse, so all's well, it's just selection at work, right? No, obviously most people would prefer that we could somehow alter conditions such that we aren't slaves to a selection process that will consume a lot of things that we value pretty strongly.
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The danger is pension schemes result in a siphoning of scarce youth labour to subsidise the abundant elderly, rendering it even more difficult for the young generation to reproduce.
I think these cascading effects are very dangerous. People just assume the situation will sort itself out, but it can just… not. Civilisations and species can just be wiped off the face of the earth forever. It happens all the time.
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It will sort itself out, eventually. But for a period of a couple decades, things will be really rough. Since I'll be living and retired for those decades (and my kids will live through it!), I'm very concerned. Best case scenario, we take the iceberg approach to the elderly for the interregnum; worst case, we tax the kids to take the large majority of their income so the elderly can have a dedicated ass wiper.
That choice is kind of baked in at this point (unless AI saves us all), but maybe we can make it a bit less painful.
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I'll make the non-standard argument that a lot of non-reproducing genes are good for other values, but that's probably just my own preferences.
The intermediate problem is that many of the environmental constraints here are less 'meme' or 'environment' and more result of TFR-buzzsaw policies. Whether they're intentional or not, they're probably not going to be as stable as human genetic code, and there's a non-zero chance they're going to just focus on the next least-desirable group.
The more serious problem is that modern industrial society doesn't scale down to one person, or ten thousand people, or a million, and I wouldn't want to bet too hard on a half-billion. Even assuming that the TFR-buzzaw ends somewhere, it might not stop at a point where we can still do things like 'build integrated circuits' or 'get to space' -- and if we fall below 'produce and refine fertilizer', you get some bad problems that might shove you down the path further. That's not a likely problem, but it's the sort of problem that comes up all at once.
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You should not expect that we will do absolutely nothing, though, you should expect that we will continue to progressively structure society around the needs of the elderly as they age because a democratic society with an inverted population pyramid is a society where the elderly have the advantage of both wealth and rank and numbers. And so it will be that the children of the people who are having kids will be forced to support not only their parents but also the people who had no kids in their dotage as well. In so doing we will discourage the birth of further children, as those in their prime childbearing years are laden by heavier and heavier financial burdens to care for the needs of the aged, which increasingly will be thrown back on society as the generations that had children give way to generations that have no natural support in their old age.
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I mean, generally speaking a child is an 18 year commitment (and socially this is not usually passed on to fathers); the most we asked from any drafted Vietnam soldier was what, a 13 month tour? Sure, WW2 if you were unlucky it was maybe 4 years at most, WWI was only like a year, and the Civil War was a 3 year commitment (which ended early). This is not a fair comparison at all and I cannot really get past that so I don't understand what use the rest of the conversation is. They also all involved a pretty serious national or international emergency.
There is the risk of death that you're leaving out. IIRC for a conscriptee to Vietnam it was around 1 in 40; the risk for women dying of pregnancy related complications is at least an order of magnitude lower, so in terms of QALYs, military conscription probably outweighs it.
That said, we will never conscript again, so conscription seems like a kind of fake issue to me: if it were abolished tomorrow, pretty much no one complaining about male gender roles would change their tune, because it's not really a primary or even secondary issue motivating people in their day-to-day lives.
Google suggests that <10% of American men served in Vietnam, of whom about 25% were drafted, whereas even now about 80% of women are having children. Apparently 10% - 15% of couples have fertility issues, though some of that might be age related. The easiest win is probably to re-normalize families with 3 - 4 kids.
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Meh, I kinda see what you’re saying. But going to war and fighting is probably a lot worse morally and on the psyche compared to raising a child.
Going to war against your children is even worse. Parents would do well to learn that the young generation always wins because the old generation dies. If you’re determined to go to war with your kids, don’t be surprised when they view you as the enemy if you’ve spent years hard at working achieving precisely that. Personally I love the idea of parenting. Yes it’s work but to me it’s also extremely fun. I’ve spent a good chuck of my life practically raising several people I know, being a positive force and influence in their lives, etc. I would love nothing more than that ideal.
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We could do a Spartan-style thing, and only have women "drafted" for the duration of their pregnancy with the ability to give up the child for adoption, with the children being raised communally.
That said, I really don't think any of that is necessary one way or the other.
A few glaring problems. Who is the lucky man to fertilize the drafted uterus? We have organ transplants already going to the wealthy, expect the same type of corruption with drafted women.
Suppose the birth mother decides to keep and raise the child herself. We just reinvented the welfare single mother, with more steps. Because we're obviously not going to take away a baby from an unwilling mother to be raised communally.
If it's a communal rearing then to defuse any specific parent bias a group of men should be 'drafted' at the same time.
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I know this is a bit more off-topic, but it's been extremely hilarious to see various right-wing communities essentially suggest or re-invent the American left-wing commune (that actually has a very rich and deep history that doesn't even have much to do with communism exactly) from first principles. It's uncanny. Understandable, but still uncanny. I guess in some sense communitarian counterculture homesteading has intrinsic human appeal, but in another sense they don't spring up out of nowhere and so their presence I think usually says something about moral and socio-political climates, beyond just "horseshoe theory is correct".
If by “commune” you mean some bizarre, 1960’s hippy nudist colony up in Humboldt County somewhere, there’s no one on the right that I know that’s pushing that. Our lot has always been tightly community focused and proselytizing you could say. That’s why “organicism” and “primordialism” have always been two major themes in so much right-wing political thought and sociology, over a collection of “abstract rights.”
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Communes arent inherently leftwing. There is something very conservative about sticking with your own people and raising kids in a very orderly community based way. The problem of the left wing commune (and possibly Sparta, I am no expert on Greek history) is the intentional dissolution of family units which results in pedophilia, pederasty, and polyamory (with the associated bastardy) which are degenerate. A commune with strong families is just the Amish with electricity, and is a very strong social force indeed.
Amish with electricity have less use for the physical labor of men. The more technology we have, the less men's labor and protection is valuable to women, which devalues the average man as a worthwhile husband.
What starts as a strong natalist force will fade over time unless backed with a religious imperative to reproduce.
If you’re a secular conservative you’re pretty much just fucked. A friend of mine and I once tried approximating what country out there and in what period might have approached something like that, that was nationally large enough to matter. Best we came up with was Czechoslovakia. Although you could say the Nazis tried something like that. They had strange ideas when you read into their “blood and soil” notions. They were against what they called “biological pacifism,” and wanted a 4-child family, health passports, a 4-stage hierarchy of eugenic marriages between biologically fit individuals (Class I, Class II, Class III, Class IV) etc. Really strange stuff.
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Communists to the left, communitarians to the right, pretty much no place for an individualist in this fallen world.
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There is no mechanism available to "extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails." The male gender role is primarily constructed by social pressures, not through any kind of law or policy (hypothetical conscription notwithstanding). And the role that women collectively imagine for men forms something much more strongly coherent than the role men collectively imagine for women. Both can turn down their respective roles in an instant merely by choosing to; men face far more social consequence from that choice, though, so they choose not to and learn either to shut up and accept their role or to celebrate it.
That depends on the society. There have been plenty of social contracts and there are plenty of social contracts that have absolutely no problem placing obligations on women.
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On the other hand, plenty of women actually like babies, especially their own. More than men who like war, probably.
Anyone will go to war for a cause they’re vested in. I’m not going to join the military to become a drone operator hunting for some hideout in Iran. If the Russians were about to invade my hometown, I’d become a first rate neocon on the other hand.
It's a bit late at that point.
Pretty sure I’m not Ukrainian. They’d have a hard time setting one inch on our land.
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