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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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I'm a father of two kids. There are multiple reasons why we won't/can't have any more, starting from the fact that my wife is 40 (our kids are 3 years and 5 months, it was not in any way given we would get even two).

I would not blame women myself, either. As I wrote here (originally a comment here, expanded to a blogpost with some other stuff included), the society places a huge amount of extra burdens on families that fall chiefly on the women and those almost certainly play a part of why so many people choose other things in lieu of kids.

Also, I've seen in my friend circles that there's a lot of single mothers with one kid who have evidently split up with their husbands or boyfriends after the kid has been born (maybe the guy has just left them, maybe for other reasons - I also know a lot of amiable separated couples who have no troubles doing co-parenting) and who basically then have to resign to a fairly low chance of ever having any more kids - due to time issues related to dating, sure, but also because they are now treated basically as a broken item, a second-rate price.

There are also a lot of "manosphere"/RW accounts that contribute to this idea - yes, of course, you deserve a perfect virginal tradwife, yes, "of course no guy wants to take care of another man's whelp!" and simultaneously affecting a concern on low fertility rates, not realizing that these sort of discourses might be just another part of the problem. Sure, it's rationalized as hard facts to make sure that women will stick with the fathers of their children and/or won't have premarital sex or whatever, but does it really work that way? It's not like women are the intended audience of manosphere accounts, after all.