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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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I suppose this is the sort of cultural ability that is non-recoverable once it's been lost.

I am not sure about that. It is true that for past few generations, women were progressively more and more socialized into thinking that they can have it all. For so long as the societies drove on the fumes of old norms and habits, the fundamental falsehood of the notion was not obvious, but ultimately the reality will reassert itself. It might take one more generation, but already among millennials the failure to form families is extremely widespread. As these millennial women enter their 40s, and huge, double digit percentage of them never managed to form a family, they will become a huge cultural force, a massive living testament to the lie their generation was fed and eagerly believed.

For the generation after zoomers, these millennial women will serve as a clear, explicit warning sign of the peril that threatens them. The millennial mothers will know many other women of their generation who missed their chance to procreate, chasing the career goals, while overestimating their chances of snatching the top man and then failing to adjust to their increasingly precarious situation on the sexual marketplace. They will warn their daughters of this very real phenomenon, despite not being warned by their own mothers, as by that point it will be impossible to ignore, and impossible to pretend that they can expect to settle down into stable family with a high status man after a decade of whoring around and girlbossing.

As these millennial women enter their 40s, and huge, double digit percentage of them never managed to form a family, they will become a huge cultural force, a massive living testament to the lie their generation was fed and eagerly believed.

The last time we had this, with the excess women after the deaths in the Civil War, we got Prohibition. I think your take here is very optimistic. I think we're more likely to see a renewed movement to ban video games under the fig leafs of gambling and encouraging violence.

Maybe we're lucky and they push to ban / restrict porn.

The last time we had this, with the excess women after the deaths in the Civil War, we got Prohibition

This tracks for WW1- 60 years after it wrapped up was 1978, and that was around the time we banned childhood and instituted punitive measures for men when they offend women.

This doesn't quite track for WW2, though- since 60 years after that was 2005. Maybe most of the really bad stuff that they wanted was already instituted so they didn't have much to try and solve, but the specifically-women-privileging movements were delayed by about 10 years after that.

I guess you could control for people living and working longer, but I'm not as sure this time, and it's also true that the the project over the time they were switching from second-wave to third-wave womanism was "don't arrest people or deal with the homeless, just let them be and it'll be fine"- but I'm not as convinced.

the time we banned childhood

I am not sure if you forgot a word here (pregnancy?) or if this is a crack at the Stranger Danger stuff that started the safetyism trend.

The latter, though economic circumstances arguably imposed the former anyway (TFR in 1978 was as low as it was 3 years ago).

When the social climate is "children are luxuries whose childhoods should be extended as long as possible" rather than "they need the opportunity to develop because our need for development requires adult men and women" it makes sense that certain factions would get non-trivial agreement if they started claiming that doing anything else was abuse.