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Can I ask all the men blaming women, the hussies, for not getting married at seventeen and pumping out a baby a year for the next ten years - are you fathers? Any of you? Do you have kids? More than one kid? If not, why not? "I always wanted six kids but I couldn't find a woman willing to have that big a family" or "Don't be dumb, I'm not forty yet, time enough for me to settle down after I build my career and have my fun along the way with as many hot chicks as I can persuade to let me bang them"?
Because I'm fed-up right now of this stream of comments as if women magically are the only ones having babies or not. Oh, all the eighteen year old men just aching to take on adult life as a husband and father, if only those trollops weren't busy painting their faces and working at jobs!
Excuse me if I don't believe that.
Let's turn the solutions that have been presented in previous comments around. Easy one first: no contraception. Men who have sex are going to become fathers, or else they can wait until a woman decides to marry them. And let's make it harder for men to waste their prime fertile years going to college. Get them working good honest blue-collar jobs out of high school, married to their childhood sweetheart, and having babies by the time they're twenty.
Men can wait ten or so years to have a career, they'll easily pick one up when they're thirty-plus and asking an employer to take them on for full-time white collar work for the first time ever. It's much more important that they be around to be the head of the house and raise the kids right. Women can take a year out to have a baby and then go back to work, but it's a full-time job for a father. And since women have it so soft and easy in this world, and it's easier for women to get degrees and white-collar jobs, let Mom be the worker but Dad should be there for his brood because who else is going to teach them the right ways?
Economic incentives for men to marry early, father lots of kids, and postpone further education/career-building will surely change the fertility slump! If it would work for a woman, certainly no man would object to having his freedom curtailed in this way - after all, his duty to society and the future trumps any petty personal ambitions, right?
EDIT: Yes, I am going to put this out there: unless you are a married father of at least three kids, shut your yap about this. You are as much part of the problem as the women. Any guy who is not married (if you're cohabiting, why the fuck aren't you getting married instead of lolling around getting free milk without buying the cow?) and not the father of kids (are you putting it off until "someday later"? "it's too expensive"? "it's not the right time"?) can't have the neck to say "oh why aren't those women getting married and having kids?"
Well so far no one who actually is a father appears to have responded but a lot of people reported to the mods. That's pretty funny, though I expect eventually a father will respond. Has there been a demographic survey recently, does it ask about children?
Father here, don't have a ton of time to respond -- I need to think more about what I'd want to say here, but I think @FarNearEverywhere's rant is basically right. Putting together a family with lots of kids is a lot of work and requires a total mindset change and buy-in from both spouses. It's not fair to blame it on women in #currentyear when, as best I can tell, young men aren't remotely interested in the hard work it takes to be a good husband or father -- too easy to play vidya and watch porn and bang whoever swipes the right direction on Tinder (swipes left? I actually don't know).
Or ... as we've seen in at least two responses below, too easy to say "Oh we're gonna have a family for sure, just not yet because we're waiting on the right economic conditions / career to come along / degree to finish." etc. My wife and I got married right after undergrad and had three kids while I was doing a PhD and she was in nursing school. We had help from the grandparents to pay the rent, but no childcare -- nearest grandparents were 1,000 miles away. It can be done, but it requires real work and real sacrifice and I don't think anyone in #currentyear really wants that -- it doesn't maximize utility, or something.
Until you change the culture such that the sacrifice and hard work it takes to make a family actually seems worth it, you won't get buy-in from anyone ... men or women.
We have five kids now and one of them is special needs, low-functioning autistic. It's a lot of work, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
This appears to be a common trope that has been endlessly repeated in mainstream discourse for decades without basis. Do many people actually believe that young men in droves are opting to binge online porn and video games instead of seeking long-term relationships with women because they’re just lazy and entitled, somehow brainwashed by bad actors into believing that such relationships are only for losers?
I am not sure about "droves." There is (or, was) a strain of thought in red pill/manosphere type places that long term relationships with women are a suckers game because she'll just divorce you and take all your stuff and so its better to have a series of casual relationships than settle down and be taken advantage of. At the extreme end this culminated in Men Going Their Own Way who would definitely agree that video games and porn are better than interacting with women.
I am not sure about the prevalence of these beliefs but they're definitely out there.
They are out there because it is a very real problem. Women consistently fail to date men in their same attractiveness percentile, and also much more often terminate relationships.
I am not sure how to interpret this part. Is it a bad thing for women to date men in a different "attractiveness percentile?" Why?
It is bad for them and society. Imagine a high school with 10 girls and 10 boys, they graduate, and pair off. Ideally, they'd find someone about as attractive and successful as them or some combination and you'd have 10 couples. What actually happens is that all 10 girls end up rejecting all but the top boy for dates. The one guy then bangs the 10 girls for a while until he ends up settling down with the #1 or #2 girl, and now there are 9 women who have spent ages 16-30 in meaningless relationships with a guy they never really had a chance with. Meanwhile, guys 2-10 have not gotten any dates at all, and now are 30 and depressed and the unlucky girls go running in search of the next version of #1 guy until they are 35 and settle for mr #5. Then they divorce him ten years later because they still, deep down, think they have a chance with Mr #1. Meanwhile guys 6-10 never get a date at all for the rest of time.
I am skeptical there is empirical data to support the idea that this is an accurate description of reality.
That aside I'm not sure I see what the problem is. If the ten women would rather spend time dating one guy than dating different guys that seems fine? It's their lives. This description makes it sound like all the women who aren't eventually going to end up with the man they are dating are wronging the other men by not dating them but I don't think that's true.
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