So the manosphere blogger who calls himself The Red Pill Theorist has managed to work himself into a tizzy over a Wall Street Journal piece by a woman who — gasp! — froze some of her eggs in her 30s in order to give her more time in which to find the right guy with whom to have kids.
In her op-ed, titled “Why I Froze My Eggs (And You Should, Too),” Sarah Elizabeth Richards wrote:
Between the ages of 36 and 38, I spent nearly $50,000 to freeze 70 eggs in the hope that they would help me have a family in my mid-40s, when my natural fertility is gone. For this baby insurance, I obliterated my savings and used up the money my parents had set aside for a wedding. It was the best investment I ever made.
Egg freezing stopped the sadness that I was feeling at losing my chance to have the child I had dreamed about my entire life. It soothed my pangs of regret for frittering away my 20s with a man I didn’t want to have children with, and for wasting more years in my 30s with a man who wasn’t sure he even wanted children. It took away the punishing pressure to seek a new mate and helped me find love again at age 42.
I have a lot of reactions to this op-ed, ranging from “damn that’s a lot of money” to “that’s kind of a sad way to look at your past relationships” to “congratulations to you, I guess, but I don’t think this is really a solution to the work-life dilemma faced by most working would-be-moms.” (See here and here for discussions of this latter issue that are a lot more informed than my gut reaction.)
The Red Pill Theorist had, well, a different reaction, worrying that egg freezing could become a “grrlpower-enabling” technology, much like the birth control pill before it, and predicting that evil Democrats will soon demand that it be covered by Medicaid.
His real worry? That egg freezing will allow women to have sex with a variety of men into their 30s and even — gasp! — their 40s without “settling down” with the hardworking betas who’ve been waiting patiently on the sidelines for a chance to score a little nookie with the ladies before these ladies get completely old and ugly.
If women begin freezing their eggs en-masse at thirty, and embark upon fifteen more years of debauchery, watch out. The current trend of beta misery, female misery, and alpha ecstasy is only going to get worse. Now 30-35 year olds with a lick of sense leap off the carousel with all the alacrity they can muster. But what if they don’t have to? They’ve got frozen eggs, and early-thirties women can be decent looking. There’s going to be a massive increase in the supply of female sexuality in the dating market. We all saw how well that worked out for women in the sixties.
The Red Pill Theorist imagines that somehow these gals will manage to stick those poor, pitiful, endlessly used and abused beta schlubs with the bill:
In the future, there won’t just be divorce-rape. There will be pre-divorce rape. Crafty college gals will extract financial resources from their beta boyfriends to freeze their eggs, and then unhaapyness will set in, and the beta will be stuck with the bill.
His grand conclusion:
Egg freezing is one more brick in the wall of total sexual marketplace deregulation. Bit by bit, the chains that once encircled the hypergamic beast are falling away. There’s never been a better time for men with options, never been a worse time for men without them. … It’s the next sexual revolution, except this time, women 30-40 will get to have some ill-advised fun.
Imagine that. Women in their 30s and 40s. Having fun. The horror!
I don’t think anyone past college has fun anymore. They spend the rest of their lives working for some jackass, causing everyone to age rapidly. I’m 20 btw
RE: leventa2
I disagree. I had a WRETCHED time in college. Adulthood has been rough, but WAY more fun.
leventa2 – LOL are you serious?
First, not everyone goes to college/university, so get that idea out of your head.
Second, I loathed school, and my life has steadily improved with every decade. Not materially, I might add: my income’s low. But I’ve only worked for one real scumbag in my thirty years’ working history; there have been a few idiots along the way, sure, but they were not overall enough to spoil the jobs. I like my current job best of all the ones I’ve had despite the general manager being a jackass.
You’d also better define “fun”. I suspect your idea of it might be very different from mine. Pleasure isn’t limited to what generally seems to get called fun.
There’s also this thing called maturing. You might find yourself looking back in ten or twenty years and wondering why you thought your teens were as good as it was going to get.
RE: Kittehserf
I would never, EVER want to return to my teen years. Rape, closet, dissociation, and rage? Why on EARTH would anyone try to claim those the best of my years?
It was AFTER all my goddamned schooling that I got to go to NZ and your country. AFTER that I moved here, where I met a lot of wonderful friends! AFTER that I joined the local comics creators and started making a name for myself as an artist.
College was ass. I realize that my experience was apparently unusually bad, but seriously guys.
Yeah, and now I don’t have to hang out with my high school classmates if I don’t feel like it, and eat raspberries instead. 🙂
I don’t think anyone past college has fun anymore. They spend the rest of their lives working for some jackass, causing everyone to age rapidly. I’m 20 btw
Crushing debt in exchange for an often not that useful degree might have something to do with this. Colleges (USian ones, at least) also have a vested interest in promoting the idea of the “college experience” and the idea that college is basically Disneyworld for young adults. The cost of running a university has increased a lot in the last few decades. State appropriations have not, leaving greater enrollment and higher tuition as the only available revenue source. It’s easier and cheaper to attract kids with sports and drinking than with small classes taught by actual professors.
But, just because the conveyor belt is there doesn’t mean you have to ride it.
College student thinks everything after college is going to suck, story at 11.
Makes me wonder if college student is actually doing any work, or is just pissing around, and has a dim realisation that adults who have to work for pay don’t get to do that day in, day out.
LBT – yeah, my teens were not even on the radar for dreadful things, but if they really were “the best years of my life” I think I’d be suicidally miserable by now.
The only thing I’d like to get back from my twenties is a body with all the bits working.
I had way more fun–maybe too much–in my 30s than I ever did in my 20s.
Yeah, My husband’s great, but according to him, he was a ponce back in his younger days. It wasn’t… well, not until his late twenties that he really started hitting his stride, according to him. He never went to college, though. (Did accompany me to grad school, though; his big accomplishment was slugging through the coursework with me, which was really hard for him.)
I can only hope life can continue improving, since godDAMN have I had enough rough goes of it for a while.
I had fun in the quasi-college year I had – it was a replacement for doing sixth form, meant to be an introductory year – but that was doing applied art, so it wasn’t exactly hard academic slog. The kids were a nice crowd, totally different from the douchecanoes at high school, but the only thing of real importance that happened that year was seeing Mr K’s portrait for the first time. No need to say how life-changing that was!
PS and ‘college’ here doesn’t mean ‘university’: when I was there, RMIT was the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and tech colleges were very different from universities. Still are, though the state government is busy gutting the entire tech system AGAIN.
Teens were fun, twenties were fun, thirties have been fun too. I think I sense a pattern here – it’s called “not being a miserable, negative asshole like leventa”.
Wow. I just got the most sexist “joke” from one of the Sydney office blokes. I mentioned I’m losing my voice and he said “The boys’ll be pleased about that, won’t they?” What a fucking loser thing to say.
I have had good and bad years since my teens. I do really love being able to be fully independent, live the way I want to live, and spend my time in grad school working towards a kickass career. I’m only 25, and I’m looking forward to leaving the tumult of my 20s behind.
How does this sexual commercial center function exactly*? Are there air pockets and retreats? Is there quantitative facilitating? Are there common assets? Will individuals purchase offers of boo?