Ok, they’ve finally done it. A post in the Men’s Rights subreddit has turned my brain to mush.
Blerp.
I mean, this post got 90 upvotes from the r/MensRights crowd. Can anyone explain to me what the fuck this dude is talking about?
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Ummmm, it’s news to me that nature has a self-serving bias towards women and children so that we don’t die in childbirth as often as historically? I think that’s science, but ok. As for it being at the expense of some oaf, it feels like he’s conflated childbirth with IVF and thrown “I’m not getting laid” into the mix. As for the stakes being too high for men as the reason why more women are choosing not to have children, I’ll believe that when he has to birth one. I suspect his perceived high stakes have more to do with his lack of success on the dating scene and he has to blame women/nature/society for his shitty, unattractive views.
Does that help? It’s more of the same shite, just a rearranged word salad.
It couldn’t possibly be that fewer people are having kid, and when they do have them, they have them in fewer numbers because of a combination of available birth control and increased income inequality with less generous safety nets. Nope. It must be that men aren’t allowed to women but women are allowed to hit men. I think that was what the point was?
So survival is a zero sum game and if women and children survive longer, it means men won’t? To go back to the natural order of things, women should die in childbirth and children should die of, I don’t know, diphtheria or something to set things right again?
I don’t know, that’s my guess.
Jordan Peterson, is that you?
@Weirwoodtreehugger: Don’t forget concerns about climate change. I have plenty of acquaintances who explicitly mention their carbon footprint (Children add a lot) and the state the environment is in as one of their primary reasons for not wanting children.
As for the OP: whenever I hear concern about declining birth rates, I feel the motivation is either ‘nobody will take care of me when I’m older’ or the 14 words. But I’m willing to admit I’m very cynical about that might give me tunnel-vision in that regard, so if someone has possible alternative interpretation I’d love to hear them.
If I understand him correctly, this MRA is saying that only some women are greedy and violent. Not all women? Now my brain is broken.
@Battering Lamb – I think there are some legitimate concerns about ageing societies. Younger people can bear an unfair economic and social burden, as older people have more healthcare needs and are less able to help with socially necessary labour. Older societies might be more conservative, less focused on new challenges – you can see the huge age gap in the way people respond to climate change for instance. It looks more scary to people who know they’ll be living with it for decades.
I live in a country where the average age is 44.5, and the typical voter is retired. While I don’t think Germany is irredeemably conservative and there are many insightful, engaged, wise elderly people out there, this effectively means that people who are not working and so tend to be slightly insulated from economic and social change, are making the decisions for people who are still doing the work.
Not to say that these are at all the concerns expressed by the right, or that the environmental benefits of reducing our population might not outweigh those concerns anyway.
@BatteringLamb
I think for lots of right-wingers/mras/etc the concern over declining birth rates relates particularly to white births. They think too many of the wrong people are having too many kids while selfish white women aren’t having nearly enough, making them a “minority in their own country”.
Other shades of right winger (the cleverer kind) worry about it because less kids = less consumption = slowing of growth economy. For companies like Nestle, a huge part of their share price comes from the fact that in countries such as Nigeria (where their lobbyists undermine efforts for public water projects) if you want to drink safe water you have to buy it bottled, and Nestle are pretty much the only provider. They absolutely do not want a) a reduction in poverty and b) people having less kids.
Also I guess in our current capitalist hell-scape having an aging population isn’t a great thing. It increases the tax burden and slows productivity.
Thanks for the insights. Profit had to be in there somewhere of course.
While personally, I’d see those concerns as more reason not to have children of my own, that would be a prisoners dilemma reasoning (unless everyone contributes me and mine are ‘screwed’, so it’s better not to bother) which is an anti-social attitude, because it makes things more difficult for those who do have children. But I never wanted children to begin with, so that colors my viewpoint as well (and is more than enough reason on its own).
The aging population concern I kinda get. The concern, that is. Over here the average population is 41.6 (Hi neighbor! Greetings from across the western border!). I’m not sure if that outweighs the reasons for not having children. Or if migration from countries with higher birth-rates couldn’t offer a more suitable solution (rightwingers would absolutely hate that idea, which alone makes it something to consider :P).
OT, but our fickle and not especially smart Prime Minister called an election here and now the fucking Tories are polling neck and neck with his Liberal party. If Tories get in power at the federal level during the pandemic, I’m probably doomed. Maybe we all are.
Also, the date for the next day with reasonable walking weather keeps getting pushed back and pushed back. It had been Tuesday (today) until yesterday, when it got pushed back to Thursday. And now I see it’s been pushed back further, to Friday. I need to restock some supplies now, not three days from now! How do I stop things like this from happening? If there’s a day coming up with good walking weather I need a way to nail it in place until I get there …
Not sure why I am taking the time to parse this, but he seems to be saying that society puts pressure on men to not do bad-man-things, but does not put a similar pressure on women to not do bad-woman-things. (citation needed) And this is somehow causing declining birthrates. (citation needed, underpants gnomes don’t count).
I like the opening sentence; but I cannot for the life of me suss out what the rest of his argument is meant to be.
It’s like I had a run-in with the MRA mafia, and they made me an offer I couldn’t understand.
I would upvote that if I were on that subreddit, purely because for once it don’t actively advocate pedophilia, child grooming, or mass murder.
What it say is otherwise a mystery to me.
“I always wanted Stacy, and I finally got Stacy, but then I found out that Stacy can be greedy and quarrelsome, and that evolution didn’t spare me the trouble of having to deal with these traits. My own predisposition is to say that the battle for existence should have wiped the cussedness out of Stacy thousands of years ago — I mean, cussedness is useful to me but not to her, right? — but it looks like the battle wasn’t fought on my behalf. I don’t know, maybe it’s a prejudice on my part, but I always thought a woman who looks sweet and inviting should be sweet and inviting, and now I find out that it ain’t necessarily so. Result is: I feel cheated. My God, do I ever feel cheated. Life has been a waste, and existence is barren and vain. Dammit.”
{See: Lydgate and Rosamund in Middlemarch.}
Lol, why do these doods always turn their thoughts into a heckin’ mountain climb? I feel like I need to pack a bag lunch to parse their meaning.
Dood’s upset that society doesn’t give him a perfect tradwife as payment for behaving like an adult. As if women aren’t socially punished for being greedy or violent. Yeah, women can do anything they want without penalty, sure.
Of course the reading MRA will read that as me being dismissive of men who are trapped in relationships with abusive women. Which is the opposite of true. Women are abusive, and society does give them a pass more than men. This is because – brace yourselves for it my doods – the heckin’ Patriarchy does that to them. Our patriarchal society diminishes men who aren’t domineering over women, and so erases the abuses that women can do to men. It’s Patriarchy my doods.
Sweet Sif on a surfboard, these people are exhausting!
The main argument of that strange post actually could be parsed in a way that makes some sense, as follows:
Society often tends to ignore or downplay intimate partner violence and other forms of abuse and exploitation committed by women against men.
That’s a reasonable point, as @Scildfreja said. But then he surrounds that nugget of perception with a bunch of the usual pseudoanthropological nonsense:
This happens because “Nature” makes us predisposed to protect women more than men because women die in childbirth so much. Nope, the minimizing of violence and abuse by women is necessary to the patriarchal narrative in which women are weak and helpless and a “real man” can always easily control and dominate a woman. If a woman is abusing a man then that’s contradicting the narrative and we can’t talk about it, except in the context of aggressively punishing the “demonic” woman and/or humiliating the man for being “weak”.
This is the main reason why there are fewer people choosing to have children: men are scared that society will give the mothers of their children a pass on abusing or exploiting them. Nonsense. The main reasons for declining US birthrates (and in many other parts of the developed world) are that (1) women are no longer as economically dependent on men and are more able to leave partners who abuse or exploit them; and (2) childcare and other costs of parenthood in our very family-unfriendly economy are just too expensive for more and more people.
Don’t birthrates also drop when you have better health care and social safety nets like pensions?
Like people don’t need to have as many kids if there’s more of a chance they’ll survive to adulthood; and the parents aren’t as reliant on children providing for them in old age?
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes:
Bag lunch, schmag schmunch; this one warrants packing some bottled oxygen.
Yup, but they rise again among the wealthy who can afford to hire all the childcare help they need.
@ kimstu
That was interesting; and I must confess, a little surprising. It does make sense though. I wonder if that’s just a US phenomenon or if it also applies in other countries? I don’t know if it’s true or not, but the impression I get here (UK) is that there’s less reliance on nannies and other types of domestic help here; even with people who might be able to afford that. I know some pretty well off people, and whilst they might hire babysitters for an evening out; they generally look after their own kids. They might not be representative of course.
@Alan : for what it’s worth, solid maternal support (like school for year 2-6, nursery, things like that) is linked to higher birthrate.
Given that it’s a form of social safety net and healthcare, I would argue that the form of social safety net is very important. If your help is shaped to help people work 50 hours per week, the birthrate will go down. If your help is shaped to make it easier to get children, the birthrate will go up.
I think he’s complaining that it’s unfair that modern society has given women the gift of not dying in childbirth, but men didn’t get any corresponding gifts. Instead they got the horribly crushing burden of no longer being able to hit their wives free of divorce/legal/social repercussions.
(I’m not sure why he’s ignoring all of modernity’s other gifts, like antibiotics, frozen pizza, and motorized farm equipment, but I guess he’s narrowly focused on male-female relations, and specifically what things can be leveraged as weapons to control or weaken an
adversarypartner. He sounds like a delightful catch.)(He’s also ignoring the fact that modern medicine still hasn’t equalized the burden of gestating, carrying, birthing, nursing, and raising children. All he’s being asked to do is not hit people. And be an oaf on a straw mattress for five minutes.)
Then he goes on to vastly overstate the risk of violence from female partners in order to explain away his own lack of dating success, as Correction Automatique said. A not inconsiderable number of these entitled guys, lacking perspective, experience rejection from women as actual violence, combined with slavery, the Holocaust, and World War 3. It’s THE WORST THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN IN HUMAN HISTORY.
@Alan
“Nice syntax ya got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.”
@ buttercup
Only peripherally related, but you reminded me of this. An image that many people can relate to down here.
ETA: As seen here
I do think it’s unfair to deny them an education though. If anything, that would divert them from a life of crime. Or make them cleverer at nicking chips. I guess it’s a double edged sword.
@Alan: Heh! Leave the chips AND the cannoli.
I’ve had seagulls steal sandwiches right out of my hand. I’ve also witnessed them delve into my backpack, remove a Ziploc bag, and undo it to get at the grapes inside (while I shouted and waved helplessly from the water). They’re criminal masterminds who will stop at nothing.
@ buttercup
I had a seagull snatch a vegan pasty; then a few seconds later drop it back on me. So, one failed convert there.