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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.
If you're arguing that genes don't care about human happiness and that eventually (hundreds or thousands of years from now) maladaptive cultures like feminism will die out and be replaced by adapative ones like Hassidic Judaism, then yes, I agree.
But unlike my genes I do care about human happiness, and I think that feminism is working out very badly for women.
If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why, rather than just shrug and say "another person weeded out of the gene pool".
I mean, you buried it in your post: equal rights came without equal responsibilities.
Now that men and women are equal, should it not be equally valid to say "another woman weeded out of the gene pool"? If we're judging each gender by their own standards, women had it far easier than men and they're still failing, so why shouldn't men rejoice the same way women do when this happens to a man? They have equal rights, they can take equal lefts.
Not that I think that's a helpful way to look at things, but the only people who can meaningfully change this for women are other women. Do I think that'll happen? Well, maybe; men have largely adapted from losing 200,000 years of biological supremacy overnight by comparison and I see no reason women should not be similarly adaptable after losing their edge to video games and porn.
To clarify, I was saying "another woman weeded out the gene pool". And, yes, people do celebrate that. I'm conflicted whether to celebrate too or feel sorry for the catwomen. A little bit of both I suppose, but my largest reaction is to want the people who have no role in the future to have no role in decision making today.
I think that in any stable system, there will be as many unmarriageable men as there are unmarriageable women, and I don't think that's a big deal. I think the reasons those people remain unmarriageable are intractable, and that their not reproducing is going to have a non-trivial eugenic effect on the populations over which it applies (lower base rate of mental illness, less tolerant of selfishness).
I'm not as certain; a lot of parents get at least a little stupid when it comes to dealing with the most expensive luxury items they will ever purchase.
Then again, non-parents (especially non-parent women) are somehow even more risk/human-dignity averse when it comes to other people's children (which is why the education system is the way that it is), so maybe it'd still be an improvement.
Mental illness is weeded out, but it has average heritability, and high IQ is weeded out, and it has high heritability so decreasing IQ will dominate.
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