This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
“...pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.”
It is absolutely impossible for natural selection to cause a species to not want to have children. No, it is emphatically not natural that women would desire to have no children, and instead have to be forced into it, throughout all of human history. The "logic" proffered borders on absurd; "well, people tend to avoid pain and inconvenience, so logically it must be the case that they would also avoid such in childbirth as well!" reasoning from first principles while obstinately avoiding all of known history that shouts otherwise. One would think we would see evidence of such "nature" prior to the Sexual Revolution, were it so.
There is a massive blind spot in both the linked article, and the post here, which is the refusal to contemplate that perhaps it is the modern paradigm - that having a family is bad, but having a career is good - might, just might, be [what was psyopped into existence] (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/03/dont_hate_her_because_shes_suc.html). Make note; the system didn't just have convince women that having children was negative, but it also had to convince them that this belief came from within; that's why all the talk of "revealed preferences" only reference the modern era - a couple generations back at most - but not the "revealed preferences" of the past couple hundred thousand years.
I think this ignores the human capacity for imagination and reason. No other animal even understands the connection between sex and pregnancy, it is all just biological drives. Humans are special in that we have evolved beyond being slaves to our biology.
In the past couple of hundred thousand years humans were not much different than some animals in that we didn't really have the capacity to stop pregnancies easily and for many of those eons seemed not to really understand the sexual process and resulting children all that well. Children were also a value add for the tribe, community, family in that they were needed for labor and warfare and continuity and you could see those effects in front of your face.
We are now very detached from any economic positives from our own children but very exposed to all of the negatives. The balance for the individual has shifted, you should really only have kids now if you think you'll enjoy it. Imagine if a mother octopus knew what was coming, I think the species would be dead in 10 years.
More options
Context Copy link
This ignores how much women's agency has increased over the last 100 years. It might have always looked like a bad idea to bear kids but they didn't have much of a choice.
Your point is more interesting if you use it to extrapolate into the future
More options
Context Copy link
Why not? It's well accepted science that humans are exceptionally bad, among animals, at having children. We are terrible at giving birth. Humans evolved a large brain, but that large brain comes at a terrible price. A very long incubation period, a horrifically painful pregnancy, and then years of being a helpless baby. No other animal species puts anywhere near that much effort and pain into having kids, because no other species evolved giant brains. And unfortunately the modern world puts even more premium on the brain so... here we are, I guess. The Great Filter of human extinction is our own brain.
None of which suggests that women would evolve to not want children, which violated the most fundamental law of natural selection - alleles that lower reproductive fitness get weeded out. It's a tautological - anything that hinders reproductive fitness had better be making it up somewhere or it's gone.
Bear in mind that evolution works exceedingly slowly. Like, over millions of years. "Modern" human civilization- meaning like, agriculture- is only like 10,000 years old. Maybe we're now in the "it's gone" phase of human evolution.
This is not true. Evolution can work quite fast. So fast to the extent that, back in the day, it had paleontologists and paleoanthropologists tearing their hair out as to why transitory specimens ("missing link(s)") were so lacking in the fossil record.
For example, lactase persistence has went from zero to substantially non-zero, the majority, or even near 100% quite a few times within the time-scale of a few hundred to a few thousand years in various Eurasian populations, possibly even a few dozen years in some cases.
Speaking of 10,000 years, in The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending discuss not only human evolution, but accelerations in human evolution, since the agricultural/civilization era.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Excellent. AAQC'd
Avoid low-effort applause signals, please.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Use of herbal and mechanical contraception is well-attested as early as very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Countless women throughout history have sought methods to prevent pregnancy. The fact that these methods were often crude, unreliable, ineffective, or only available to women of considerable means is certainly one reason why such women so often ended up still having children despite their best efforts.
What made the Sexual Revolution so incredibly society-altering is that it went hand-in-hand with mass availability of The Pill - the first widely-available, affordable, safe, wildly reliable and effective contraceptive ever created. The first time that sexually-active women could exert anywhere near this level of control and agency over whether or not they would become pregnant. And within a few decades of its introduction it had become nearly-ubiquitous in every society able to reliably produce and/or distribute it. If this isn’t a textbook example of revealed preferences, I don’t know what is. What reason do we have to believe that if the Pill had been invented in Victorian England, women wouldn’t have adopted it en masse?
Appealing to what evolution has created doesn’t hold much weight with me, because evolution has produced all sorts of utter horrors for the various species of the world. If the male praying mantis had the ability to conceive of and actively choose whether he would still like to reproduce, knowing full well that it will nearly-inevitable lead to him being violently decapitated, do you think we’d still see comparable mantis TFR numbers? Or how about male bees, whose dicks straight-up fatally detach during the act of conception? How many of them do you think would still answer nature’s call, given the knowledge and ability to choose otherwise?
In the modern era when much of traditional social structures had been drastically reduced and there was little social stigma to women having recreational sex and not becoming pregnant. After we created the modern welfare state, lots of people decided that labor wasn’t for them.
I think given that, no, Victorian women would not be choosing not to have babies because their status would increase as a mother, particularly of a son. This was even more pronounced in earlier generations. Culture matters. Our culture says “careerist women are superior” and women do what they can to meet that standard.
More options
Context Copy link
"Use of herbal and mechanical contraception is well-attested as early as very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia."
Attested to by women of all stripes and social status, or attested to by women caught in status traps?
That cities are population sinks doesn't tell us that humans evolved to avoid having offspring (again, such a thing would be impossible for natural selection); we see frequently in history that the moment you get cities, you get reduced fertility as people get caught up in status games, behavior which doesn't happen muich in lower-scale societies where social trust is much higher, and social pressure can much more easily tamp down on defectors. This is because cities - civilization in general - are not conducive to healthy families, not that humans inherently don't want families.
Not familiar with Egyptian/Mesopotamian sources, but in classical antiquity contraception was well attested as a thing that existed and associated with a full spectrum of urban women- from prostitutes to upper class married women.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The true problem for 'it's inherent for women to want to have babies' arguments isn't PMC girlbosses in suburban Virginia or whatever people may think are destroying society. It's that even in places like Iran or Saudi Arabia, where women continue to be very socially conservative in a variety of other ways - marrying early, openly religious, and so on, are also happily controlling their own reproduction instead of just jumping into babies as quickly as possible.
How does this even rise to the level of an argument against the idea that women inherently want babies? I have an inherent need to eat, but I don't scarf down the first bit of food that I can see as quickly as possible. I make conscious decisions like "I'm going to cook pasta for dinner tonight" and happily control my own consumption of food and I don't see any contradictions between those two positions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link