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!
@ellex – yeah, the idea of going to a sex worker (when doing their job, not socialising, I mean) for affection seems like a really dumb and self-deluding idea. Colour me surprised that Dumbsmay is wittering about it.
@princessbonbon – too true! And yet he’s indignant that sex workers are sex workers and not pretendwifeyegostrokers as well. ::rolls eyes::
@thebewilderness – yeah, I don’t think we’ll be getting an answer on that question. Possibly because the “go back to traditional Christianity!” twits know jack shit about the history of the religion. And I bet they’d freak at the idea of being, say, Coptic, or Eastern Orthodox – branches with much longer histories than the USian fundamentalism that’s usually the source of this sort of blather. Hell, nineteenth-century revivalist Protestantism … what a pack of johnny-come-latelies to be talking about tradition! 😀
Sadly, I often find that the people who spout the loudest about “tradition”, religious or otherwise, are often the people who are the least educated about the actual origins and history of their precious “traditions”.
And that’s real!
I read that condoms existed in ancient Egypt. They’ve probably been around as long as people have had any idea that spunk makes babies.
Fell on the floor guffawing at “sexual marketplace regulation”.
How does this sexual marketplace work exactly*? Are there bubbles and recessions? Is there quantitative easing? Are there mutual funds? Can people buy shares of boner?
*Don’t actually want to know, I’m sure I would be horrified.
Oops that was supposed to be *deregulation.
*runs off to speak to financial advisor about boner investment opportunities*
Sure, sure. After all, it did so many wonderous things for oh so many colonized countries.
” Can people buy shares of boner?”
That puts a whole new slant on being a controlling shareholder.
( he he he)
and
( sad sad sad )
—-
Setting aside every questionable use of economic terms in relation to describing sexual activities, isn’t more de-regulation of the sexual market place inherently a good thing?
No, really. If the metaphor holds true (it doesn’t, but fuck it), then the constraints and circumstances of the sexual market place is biologically based. Right? It’s all evolutionary psychology, the value of life as expressed in zygotes and the interactions of different sexes. So any “regulation” must be, must come, from the basic reality of nature at the time. Am I wrong in thinking that? Any regulation of the sexual market place is an expression of the way “reality” works, because the sexual market place is the economic reality of human carnal relations? It sounds like a tautology, but what I’m getting at it this:
So if you de-regulate, you lessen the barriers that nature imposes on sexual behaviour. You broaden the options of human possibility. You expand the horizons of any kind of relation, any kind of situation, any kind of circumstance, parameter and because you deregulate the most basic expression of human sexuality.
and Mra’s see this is a bad thing?
That snide, myopic little worm is actively trying to argue that a fundamental broadening of the entire human conception of sexuality is a bad thing.
Because some whackheaded notion of hypergamy would lead to some kind of maybe suffering.
That is the single most offensive notion I have ever read about. At least whoring out single mothers and storing the vocal chords of female children is so outlandishly, cartoonishly evil that you can see they don’t really, truly intend to do so all the time, that it’s an expression of frustration, but this, this fucking guy, would rather limit the entirety of the human species ability to mess around and do things people want to do, would rather narrowly and specifically define the borders of people’s interactions as the haphazard, callous whims of Nature on any given day, than maybe risk having to re-evaluate his life.
What in all the untold names of the Devil whispered by cultists in a thousand alien tongues produces a mind so twisted with malice? That is wrong. Wrong. WRONG WRONG WRONG WROOOOONG.
It takes a special kind of evil to not only want to ignore a chance for joy, but to actively take pleasure in denying it to others. This isn’t just hating women, that is actively hating the mere concept of joy.
How sad.
Or well, maybe I’m over-reacting.
Welcome, pollydactyl! ^_^
Karalora — idk about condoms, but I know ancient Egypt had diaphragms made of (squick warning) crocodile dung.
And either Rome or Greece (maybe both) drove a plant to extinction for this reason (might’ve been abortion, not birth control but either way, 2k+ years of natural family planning)
I thought it was Rome and birth control, but I could be wrong.
I think this is it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
They also made use of pennyroyal as an abortifacient, but of course that’s not extinct.
You can take your traditional Christianity and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
So wait, don’t they have the same reaction to the birth control pill? So something to keep women from being pregnant is misandry and something to make sure she gets pregnant is also misandry? Jesus christ, what are they even supposed to do?
I’m a Roman Catholic. I’d of course love it if everybody would become Catholic, but I don’t expect that to happen, and like most American Christians I’m allying with the rest of traditionalist Christianity against secularism, although I don’t support a lot of the current Christian Right’s political strategy (I voted for Obama for economic and foreign policy reasons, for example). The conversation about birth control has been interesting, but birth control doesn’t actually bother me too much; it’s a necessary evil. I’m anti-choice on abortion though.
I am currently working on a treatise about the true nature of gender relations. It won’t be done for a long time most likely. I’ll be posting on a variety of feminist and manosphere blogs in order to generate ideas; also to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Good comments here about not seeing all people as sexual beings. A lot of my closest friends are women; in fact it was anti-feminist women who convinced me to be anti-choice on abortion. I might ask one of them to be a co-author with me on my treatise. Feminists are right about the pervasive rape culture infecting America, and about the long history of mens’ abuse of women. Feminism is a result of mens’ abuse of women, and the manosphere doesn’t get that. My goal is to set up a kinder, gentler patriarchy, governed primarily by traditionalist women, as Andrea Dworkin (who I am informed converted to christianity shortly before her death), outlined in her work on right-wing women.
“I’m anti-choice on abortion though”
So you’re fine with women being allowed to die rather than have an abortion, I take it?
So much for your “kinder, gentler patriarchy”.
Also that last sentence has a whiff of sockpuppet about it.
Not interested. Go away.
I support an exception for the life of the mother.
Who am I supposed to be a sockpuppet of? I’d like to check out that person’s posts. No I’m very new to this. My previous activity online was writing anti-racist posts on so-called white nationalist websites.
Hellkell — yeah that’s the plant. If it does work like wild carrot it’s sorta like the morning after pill. “Promotes the menses” makes me think it does exactly what it says on the tin. Not gonna get pregnant because the uterine lining just got flushed out. (And wild carrot is mostly safe [ask your doctor, etc], so I’d assume this was too)
@ProPosterous
A gilded cage is still a cage. Kindly go shower with legos.
What about victims of rape or incest, then? What about cases of anencephaly in the fetus? What about cases where the woman’s health will be ruined?
You do realise, don’t you, that most women who have abortions have already had children, or go on to do so later when they are in a position to raise a child? Who the hell are you to force birth upon anyone? Because that’s what being anti-choice means. It says your beliefs give you the say over another person’s body. Do you also support forced organ donation?
Isn’t the man in this scenario doing that to himself? It’s not like sex workers usually operate by kidnapping random men off the street, taking them to brothels, and holding them there until they agree to pay for sex instead of the affection that they were apparently seeking when they were kidnapped.