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!
Pro Patria, I’m curious now. Wanna point us to some of your anti-racist conversations on white nationalist websites?
PustulentPatriarchy:
Keep your goddamned self away from women. That way you won’t have to be all upset about birth control, or about abortion.
Simple, innit?
I really hate that “pro-lifers” use that as some sort of proof of how sanctimonious and gracious they are. “Look at how giving I am! I might sort of sometimes think it’s totally ok for a woman to decide what happens to her own body, but only if she’s in real real peril, none of that ‘it’s really unhealthy for the pregnancy to continue’ mumbo jumbo. I mean, it IS really sad that most people won’t prioritize a fetus’s life over a fully formed, currently living lady (who might already be mother to someone else) but, I’ll let those slutty ladies not die SOMETIMES!”
This of course, is also demonstrative of the amount of wishful thinking anti-choicers engage in, because it sounds nice-ish (or at least less sinister and misogynist than “if you don’t want to die in childbirth, keep your legs shut you slutty ladies”) in theory, but as soon as you start thinking about how to apply it in real life it totally falls apart. How will we ensure that all abortions are in fact actually for the life of the mother, and not just because some irresponsible lady who probably has lots of sex (and enjoys it! The nerve!) decides at eight and a half months that she’d really rather not be a mom? How can we know it will REALLY be life and death and not just the difference between suffering a lot more severe medical issues and just the initial ones that made the pregnancy dangerous in the first place? And how exactly do you plan on restricting the abortions? Some kind of lawful approval system? What happens if someone files a request for an abortion but while waiting for the paperwork to get processed, approved and sent back, time marches on and the mother dies? And who will approve or deny the abortion requests? A medical professional? Who will help them process the files? Where will the money come from in order to pay these workers?
This is actually a morbidly barbaric idea because rather than allow people to make decisions for themselves when their own lives are on the line, you would prefer to tie the hands of doctors up in so much paperwork that they can’t do anything, while families and friends watch their loved ones die painful deaths. This is monstrous. I’m having a really hard time figuring how that’s “pro-life”.
If there’s any chance that you’re not just trolling for lulz, consider this. Nobody on any of the blogs you’re commenting on has agreed to help you generate ideas for your “treatise”. You have assumed that you can use these people, feminist and MRA, just because you want to. This does not suggest that you are well qualified to produce a solid ethical treatise on any subject.
Also, from an editor’s POV, your writing is terrible. It’s messy and often incoherent, and you use far too many words to convey a very limited amount of information. I hope you’re intending to pay someone to impose some sort of order on your vague ramblings for you and not just assuming that they’ll do so because you want them to, which seems to be your approach to the idea-generating part of the process.
Also, things that are not news to any feminist but apparently are to ProPatria — making abortion illegal just ends legal (and thus more or less safe) abortion, illegal, dangerous, abortion will pick up.
And ProPatria? At least pecunium and I know a fair amount of Latin, plenty of other’s here are familiar with Rome’s pater familias shit. It isn’t some moderate gentle patriarchy, it’s tyranny.
Oh dear. So far your prose has been a tad purple, so I second CassandraSays’ plea that you hire an editor.
So… pro-life = pro-forced-pregnancy. No? You believe in forcing pregnant people to remain pregnant, whether they want to be, whether or not it is in their best interest to be, etc. You also don’t believe quality of life is important, just whether or not someone has vital signs.
I’m just re-stating it for my own understanding, because this boggles my mind.
Speaking of “if someone has vital signs” what about cases where the fetus will either be stillborn, or die soon after birth? Eg anencephaly (warning, there are no non-graphic images of fetuses or newborns without brains, it’s an impossibility)
Yes, or the case in Ireland of that poor woman who was condemned to death because the fetus that was miscarrying anyway still had a heartbeat.
So come on, PustulentPatriarchy: tell us why a fetus matters more than the pregnant person. Tell us why, if it happens to grow up and end up pregnant in its turn, it suddenly becomes less important than it was when it was in utero.
It’s because people with uteri aren’t as important, isn’t it? It’s because they are mostly women and women aren’t people at all, they’re men’s property and breeding machines. You can blather about a kinder, gentler patriarchy but this is what it, and your anti-choice, forced-birth ideas go back to.
Piss off, forced birther and misogynist.
Turn and turn about, I presume. Provided you don’t think too hard about it.
But that really is their position. When you were a mere foetus, we were willing to force a woman to dice with death because your life was so important and valuable. Now you’ve become an all grown up woman yourself, bad luck. Pregnancy might kill you or cause permanent injury or looks like it will kill you or cause you permanent injury – your own life is less important than the possible life of this as yet unknown foetus. And it really doesn’t matter that a particular foetus has no chance at all of life or of living more than a few weeks or months after the birth, it is still more important and valuable than the grown woman’s life or her opportunity to end this pregnancy and have another with the chance of a real live baby at the end of it.
I cannot believe that I’m still having these arguments 40 years on from the first time.
The deja vu is sickening, isn’t it? And I’m not old enough to have had the argument going on that long.
Count me in as also sick of decades of these damn arguments.
Personally I’m sick of pretending that the feelings of people like ProPatria should have any impact on my private medical decisions.
I’m reminded of this image.
… is pretty well not how we Jews think about our prophets (they do a lot of afflicting the comfortable, but it’s a rare one who actually comforts the afflicted). Keep your sanctimonious bullshit off my religious forebears, thanks.
Yeah, I got the impression there’s a high proportion of assholishness among OT prophets. Didn’t Jonah crack the shits because God didn’t smite whatever town it was he’d been telling to mend its ways?
That’s a great pic, Aaliyah.
[CN: threats of sexual assault]
Hey PPT, here’s an example of your beloved patriarchy being “gentle” to women.
Threatening women who don’t want to conform to patriarchal norms with sexual assault – how gentle!
Like it has been said already, it’s a protection racket.
@Kittehserf- You’re right on about Jonah, but all of the Bible professors I’ve spoken to about the topic have convinced me that the book of Jonah is supposed to be satire. Really weird satire.
It’s less that the prophets are assholes, per se. It’s more that they’re worried about collectivist problems of morality more than individual ones. As such, you see far more of them exhorting people who are behaving badly to mend their ways than offering succor to individual widows, orphans, etc. (with the notable exception of Elijah)
Also, the phrase “comforting the afflicted” to me carries connotations of loving those who are debased. And Jewish morality is duty based, more than love based. One can hate one’s neighbor with a fiery passion, but must still treat him AS THOUGH he loved him, with decency and respect. In Jewish teachings, it is far more important to do what is required to maintain the social order and follow God’s law than to react with an overabundance of feeling.
How did I miss this before?
“When I release my treatise on gender relations everyone will be surprised that it’s me. I am experimenting with a revolutionary style of artistry in intellectual discourse. It comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.”
*giggle fit*
Pre·ten·tious —
Adjective. Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.
Synonym: showy.
I dunno, I guess some people aspire to be pretensious
Huh. That last sentence wasn’t suppose to be there. Oh well.
M Dubz – ta for the clarification, that’s interesting!
Johah was satire? Ỡ_ō
Good thing they didn’t do standup then. I’d hate to have whoever wrote that doing scripts.
It’s actually really funny when you look at it from the context of the other prophetic books.
Most prophets grumble about being charged with delivering prophetic messages, Jonah RUNS AWAY. Most prophets preach for DECADES to the Jews and nobody listens to them. Jonah spends three days with the Assyrians (Ninveh is an Assyrian city) and they repent. They repent SO HARD that they are putting sack cloth and ashes on their cows. All of the other prophets would be THRILLED for someone to actually listen to them, but Jonah throws a shit fit. And so forth.
That is funny, in context! 😀
I’m suddenly seeing the prophets’ version of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch – “They ignored you for fifteen years? Luxury. My lot tarred and feathered me every day for seventy years and then ran me out of town on a mange-infested camel with wind!”
Brilliant!
::blushes::
Thank you!
How dare you challenge Tea Party logic. Obviously “all” government services are bad, unless I, or he, or someone else, says so, and then it only counts if the right people agree! lol
Its been done already, its called “Sex At Dawn” (The short version of the title), and, whoops… it only only calls into question the claims of very prominent “experts” on the subject, but, unless you assumes its all just dead wrong, undermines pretty much every definition of “normal” that almost anyone here might think “fits” the real model of human sexuality and relationships (or, at least if asks some seriously hard questions about the “standard model”, not the least being, “If you exclude everything that doesn’t fit the model, and then, on top of that, do things that actually change the behavior of the people being observed, how do you can you claim it actually models anything?”). Mind, so would an examination of historical relationships, how marriage differed between even western cultures, etc., especially over time.
Pretty much the only thing you can take from the book that “might” imply any sort of hard and fast rule is, “Humans, for various reasons from power mongering, to property ownership, to just plain making shit up, and convincing others to follow, are very good at adapting to damn near any idiot model/system/standard of inter-relationships, and sexual practices, that we can think of, even when they are destructive, and will construct whole houses of cards, explaining why its a perfectly reasonable system, and every other model is somehow worse.”, assuming, of course, you can even get they to admit something is broken in the first place. The only valid question then becomes – how do you come up with model that makes things better, for real, and not just for the people who claim it works? And, well.. the current “nuclear” model exacerbates cases of jealousy, leads to greater chances of poverty, since there is no extended family, and very little “community” to provide for raising kids. It engenders excessive competitiveness, even between partners, causes various social disorders, including those which are abuse generated, and even leads to insane decisions, like it being considered “reasonable” for parents to next to abandon their kids, in favor of their own dislike of each other, thereby cutting their resources in half, creating emotional confusion, etc., all because having a temper tantrum, and leaving, is more “adult” than trying to make sure your kids won’t be screwed over “first”, even if you do, in the end, you decide staying would be a bad idea (never mind when staying is the worst idea, like with physical abuse).
So.. Yeah, somehow I doubt your “treatise” will be any more useful, and probably even less so, than a lot of the recent “evolutionary psychology”, coming out of places who use self selected, college students, most of whom probably come from at least semi-similar social ranks, and have other high degrees of similarity, to make wild assertions about what is “normal”, and how it got that way. The people that study the genetics involved tend to class 90% of that branch of science as little more than hand waving, navel gazing and fiction writing. Bets on your own “treatise” receiving more acclaim than an entire field of science in the same people’s eyes, and for precisely the same reason – because making assertions, especially from data collected in a self-created vacuum, which excludes most of the entire planets populations, and all outliers (like obscure tribes, with *very* different views on the subject) does not give you a clear picture of the human psychology. On the contrary, it is not much different than polling Tea Party congressional members about their opinion of socialized medicine, and claiming it applies to anyone other than *those, and only those* people. :p
And, you can’t get more “self selected”, than the sort that care enough about these subjects to reply to blog posts, and are willing to waste time doing so, while having the actual access needed, to even be aware of them. Asking your neighbors (the equivalent of asking the other people on your campus, and assuming those are not a biased sample too), isn’t any better. Parsing out real facts on the subject is very hard to do, most people don’t have the resources or time to do so, and thus, nearly *everything* on the subject comes from biased data, taken from nearby sources, while, often, ignoring entire continents, or even, 90% of the rest of the people in the country the data is collected from.
You would get more information, statistically, from having a color blind person count the number of grey jelly beans, in a jelly bean factory.