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So was the sexual revolution a failure? Everyone in the linked thread seems to take it for granted, and just argues about why it was a failure and how bad of a failure it was. What's the evidence that the SR was worsened people's lives, and what metrics are being used to assess that?
Fertility has fallen hugely, which is bad IMO. In addition to hundreds of millions of lives not lived, there are surely many discoveries and artistic products that were never made, because their creators were never born. I don't buy Malthusian logic, we could've used our resources more efficiently to sustain higher populations. Labour and brainpower is the most important economic input, more is better.
The advanced world is now below replacement rate, our civilization is literally unsustainable. A lot of people seem quite depressed and need powerful drugs to cope - I recall a statistic showing unmarried women in the 40-50 age group were hardest hit. Having children is probably good for you. At least it ought to be a default setting for wellness, like sunlight and sea-level air pressure. Our brains and bodies evolved to have children.
Anyway, the massive fall in fertility came just as the sexual revolution showed up, it's not like there was a massive plague or war at the same time. What other cause could there be?
Fertility has been dropping steadily since the early 19th century across the developed world. The sexual revolution at worst accelerated an ongoing trend, but if you look at the graph even that doesn't seem to be true, since the rate of decline since the 60s is actually lower than it was prior to the 40s - 50s baby boom.
Were people less depressed in 1932? 1832? Obviously most people would have said 'no' because 'I have depression' was not something that would have even crossed most people's minds, even if they displayed the same symptoms as someone who was 'diagnosed' with depression today, but would they have been popping SSRIs if they were available and socially acceptable? Does the question even make sense? Like I said in another comment, I don't really put a lot of stock into downward trends of positive answers to questions like "are you happy?" over time, because I doubt the invariance of the measurement. People were different in the past, even in very basic psychological ways. Someone then saying "I'm happy" and someone now saying "I'm not" doesn't imply the modern would be happier with the life of the premodern. Even if people are significantly more miserable today than the historical average, the sexual revolution is hardly the only thing that's changed in the past few decades. There's a huge inflection point in rates of self-reported anxiety and depression right at 2012 when social media exploded.
We evolved to have children not to enjoy children. It's not like the vast majority of people, at least not women, for the past million years had much of a choice in reproducing or not. The fact that rich people in every society in history offload as much of the hard work of child-rearing as possible onto servants strikes me as a very strong indicator that most people don't actually enjoy raising kids that much.
On a purely personal and selfish level having to marry a girl and raise seven kids sounds nightmarish and I am endlessly thankful that the technological and social change of the past century means I don't have to do that.
People like playing and cuddling with kids, and if those people are women they also like dressing them up in cute outfits and taking pictures of them to post on instagram. People do not like disciplining kids, making them eat their vegetables, waking up in the middle of the night to take care of them, changing their diapers, etc. For obvious reasons for the vast majority of the population the two categories go together, but I think that the first category makes people happier than the second category annoys them.
This can be rough, but when you successfully soothe them and get them to sleep again, it feels really good. Compare the popularity of Dark Souls; there's something to be said for succeeding at a challenge.
This is so little trouble it's barely worth the mention.
It does seem like it's going to be a massive deal before you've done it though.
Only to PMC women who are afraid of dirt. Men are only afraid of it to the extent that they think it is emasculating. Traditional elite women learned to handle filth by mucking out stables as teenagers. (Old money will buy their daughter a pony, but never hire a groom for her). And working class women don't seem to have a problem with it either.
Ever mucked out stables and barns? Horse, cow and chicken shit is not even close to as disgusting and rank as human shit. Pig is the only kind that is even in the same zip code.
There's also the element of the distribution of tasks not being equal in many relationships; trading off 50-50 is one thing but being the designated shit cleaner for years on end is a bit much. Thankfully Millennials seem much more fair about dividing up unpleasant tasks like that, compared to the stats on single digit percentages of baby boomer men having ever changed a diaper.
Baby poop really isn't that bad. Much smaller quantities and probably much less fragrance in general. This may depend on the diet. We tend to feed babies very simple dishes like pureed vegetables, pasta, rice, cut fruits, and a lot of dairy (milk and yogurt). It may get more pungent if they eat garlic, onions, eggs, meats... It smells so little sometimes that you don't even notice it until you actually take off the diaper.
I find the biggest inconvenience to be the dirtiness of it, having to quickly dispose of a very full diaper before somebody decides to play with it and stick it on clothes or carpet. Also wiggly babies that will not let you tie them up, but eventually they calm down.
By the time it starts getting more significant, you should have them potty-trained (2-3 years old).
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