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The coming Ukraine/Russia baby boom?
There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:
Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.
It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern femininist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.
You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.
Nearly all nations had a baby boom after WWII. And this wasn't merely making up for lost time. In the United States, the fertility rate peaked at 3.74 children/woman in 1957. Even Russia had a fertility rate near 3 despite a ridiculously lopsided gender ratio where more than 80% of men born in 1922 didn't survive until 1946.
So anyway... I predict that Russia and Ukraine will experience a similar (but smaller boom) in the decade following the end of the war.
This doesn't sit right with me.
Fundamentally, men must compete for access to women, while women act as gatekeepers. It's simple supply and demand. Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. The biological essence of being a male is having to continually prove yourself under adverse conditions, so when men start complaining that women's standards are too high because feminism gave them naughty ideas, it comes off as a cope. Rather than standards being too high, it's more likely that women are setting the standards exactly where they need to be (or at least relatively close, anyway), in accordance with many millennia of evolutionary adaptation to precisely this task. Yes, it's a hyper-competitive environment, but there are plenty of men who are succeeding. Lots of men are making money and having sex and having kids and generally living very productive lives. If you can't do the same, that's on you.
Not to say that biological organisms are incapable of going wrong, of course. If there is such a severe mismatch between women's standards and men's capabilities such that the birth rate plummets to zero, then it's more plausible to say that that's simply the race/species reaching the natural end of its lifecycle, rather than putting the blame on any one particular event/ideology/movement/etc. Perhaps the industrial/digital environment of modern first world countries is simply poisonous to the type of organism that we are. If it is, then we will decline naturally, possibly to be replaced by a more virile form of life that has a longer future ahead of it, and there is little that can be done as a matter of conscious will to arrest this trajectory.
Historically women did not act as gatekeepers. Marriages we're arranged by the parents either directly or by making sure that your daughter only ever came in contact (socially) with acceptable matches.
Hasn't that really only been the case in (relatively) recent agricultural communities? Human sexual dynamics evolved during a period of time in which we were primarily hunter gathers, after all.
Nobody really knows what those societies were like since they predate writing. Our best guesses come from the handful of remaining hunter gatherer tribes which are all, by definition, extremely unusual in not having settled down or been wiped out.
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