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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Back in September a commenter here on the TheMotte posted an argument about fertility trends claiming that among rich countries fertility actually increases with feminism. I did not have time to respond at the time, but this is something that I have heard many times, so I wanted to make an effort post explaining why I don't believe the claim. Here are some examples of prestige outlets making the same claim, from a New York Times op-ed:

The culture of misogyny and gender inequality [in South Korea] may be affecting family life, in a country facing predictions of population collapse. Research shows that a low fertility rate in developed countries reflects backward attitudes over female gender roles. source

And here is the United Nations Population Fund:

Want to increase birth rates? Try gender equality. Many countries in Eastern Europe face what is often perceived as a population crisis....There is broad consensus on what needs to be part of such a policy package: Quality, affordable childcare starting from an early age. Flexible and generously paid parental leave for both parents (with incentives for men to take what they are entitled to). Flexible work arrangements, and providing equal pay for women. Programmes to encourage men and women to equally share care and household work. And affordable housing as well as financial support for low-income families. source

The original TheMotte commenter wrote:

However, what I have noticed is that rich female friendly nations do far better in terms of birth rate than rich conservative strict gender role societies. For example - France has a fertility rate around 1.8. 1.7 for the US. Germany 1.4. In the east with more strict gender norms the rich societies however have far more abysmal fertility rates - Japan 1.3, South Korea 0.8, Taiwan 1.1, Singapore 1.2.

I will address three big problems with the argument, and then I want to talk about the elephant in the room.

The first problem is that this is cherry-picking examples. We could just as easily cherry-pick other countries that show a reversed trend: Spain has a parliament that is 50% women but a fertility rate of merely 1.3. Finland ranks number one on female empowerment, sharing many of the same policies as Sweden, but has a a very low fertility rate of 1.3. In Ireland, where men only do 43% of the housework (which is low for Europe), women have a fertility rate of 1.6.

You might think we could get around the problem of cherry-picking by running regressions against a broader dataset. But turns out there are still too many researcher degrees of freedom. In playing with the data myself, and in reading about others who have played with the data, I could get anything from a massively negative impact of female empowerment on fertility, to no impact, to modestly positive. Here are some charts I made:

That parental leave or subsized childcare has no correlation with fertility rates should dispense with any notion that these are the magic policies that will fix fertility while reconciling child bearing with women pursuing careerist paths.

The second problem is that fertility rate itself is confounded by sub-cultures within a country. The poster children for feminist family polices with high birth rates are Sweden and France. However, their fertility stats are hopelessly confounded by the fertility of more patriarchal subcultures -- that of non-European immigrants. Unfortunately, it is fiendishly hard to find accurate statistics on how much this impacts the numbers.

France, for instance, bans collecting statistics by race. But this report showed 38% of new births in the cities were considered high-risk for sickle cell anemia -- meaning the parents are of Arab or African origin. That's a huge number.

In the United States, fertility is boosted by less feminist groups, such as recent immigrants, Amish, Mormons, and evangelical Christians. Israel's fertility is boosted by ultra-Orthodox Jews who have a fertility rate three times that of secular Israelis.

(continued in the replies due to excess word count)

Thanks for this post, I remember seeing a similar comment on slatecoderindex (under the 10,000 years of patriarchy post, I believe). It is true that cities and the population density in these areas outright disincentivise child rearing by raising costs of living. This piece and others by the same author seek to rebut generally held notions regards demography. Would be curious to hear your thoughts on this.

I too dislike the term "traditionalism." What I am actually interested in terms of "retvrning to traditional ways" is learning from the bundle of social technologies and culture from civilizations that were on their upswing, particularly my civilization of Western Christendom. By "traditionalism" I am not interested the culture from ancient civilizations in their decline phase or from tribes that never surpassed the mud-hut phase (or at least, I'm only interested in learning them as examples of what not to do).

My general feeling is that if technology and wealth has made survival easier, it would be better to aim for even greater heights of glory, than to fallback on hedonism. Falling back on hedonism will eventually dull the abilities of a civilization, leading to its decline and fall.

The more I read about cities denser and more populous than mine, the more dystopic I see them. If a city were to truly ban cars, only the rich could afford to work less than half an hour’s walk plus two bus/train stops from their politically legible residence-box.

What are you talking about? Most people in Stockholm do not take their car to work and travel far more than 2 stops.

I used to go 10 subway stops and 5 bus stops on my way to university for 5 years and that was completely fine.

Sorry, I meant transfers. Also, I meant dense megalopoli where even the sprawl is too expensive for janitors.

Want to increase birth rates? Try gender equality.

I find this point interesting, because I distinctly remember a zeitgeist a few decades back in which "gender equality" was being pushed specifically because it would reduce birth rates to ward off Malthusian catastrophe. This was specifically in the lens of low Western birthrates being preferable to higher ones in largely Third-World nations. Admittedly, "the zeitgeist" is hard to cite, so perhaps I didn't really understand the full situation at the time.

I'm not particularly convinced that either direction is unilaterally correct: it's quite possible that the results are contextual based on a number of other variables, but it does provide an example of how "more feminism and gender equality" seems to be pushed (primarily by the Left) as a cure for all societal ills. That last part I think is a drastic oversimplification, but probably also a bit of a weakman of the actual arguments.

We are quite specifically in the year when the global fertility trends - if you follow the closest trends through, say, this account - will reach the point where global fertility rate, ie. the average number of children per women, will go under the global replacement rate needed to keep a stable population level, which is somewhere around 2.3 (I would actually guess the replacement rate will rise a bit if the food crisis has the expected famine effects in African countries). In other words, pretty near the specific point where we can fairly conclusively say that the population boom is cancelled, that we know the level at which the population will peak, and after that level global population will start coming down, perhaps not even coming down all that slowly.

As such, one might expect that, consciously or unconsciously, in the coming years the arguments that we need to prevent overpopulation will generally start losing credence and arguments that we should instead be concerned about underpopulation will start gaining it, and indeed the process has probably already started! It won't involve most people admitting they're wrong or that they have changed their viewpoint or anything like that, just barely perceptible social indicators.

I remember that as well. It was essentially secular population reductionists against often religious pro-natalism types.

The fashionability of Westerners telling people in the Global South to have fewer babies has diminished since then, weirdly putting progressives closer to Catholic conservatism stateside that hated the efforts of the United Nations etc.

Here is a citation that of thinking from Scientific America in 2009 "How Women Can Save the Planet: [Empowering young women through education will help reduce overpopulation in areas that cannot support it and avoid extremism in the children they raise"

Or United Nations University in 2019: "Female Education: a Solution for a Crowded Planet"

Time Magazine in 2013: "Why Empowering Poor Women Is Good for the Planet Overpopulation isn't the great environmental fear that it once was, but there are still parts of the planet where large family sizes are a problem. Female education can help change that"

The most charitable explanation is that they honestly believe that empowering women will lead to a more optimal level of child-bearing -- thus more children in countries who are rich and encountering problems of low fertility and less children in countries that are poor and already overcrowded.

A less charitable explanation is that these arguments aren't made by the same people, but since "feminism good" is the only acceptable opinion if over-population is presented as a problem Cathedral editors signal-boost writers who believe that feminism can prevent over-population and if population decline is presented as a problem then they signal boost writers who can take some subset of the data to show how feminism can help with under-population.

It reminds me of the debate surrounding torture. It can't be admitted that feminism has downsides/torture can in some situations work. No, just world demands that the morally preferable solution is also better in every other way than the alternative.

Noah Millman notably avoids this trap, writing,

There is surely still scope for both policy and cultural arguments, but the starting point for any discussion of fertility decline has to be that it is a global, cross-cultural phenomenon. The factors that correlate most-strongly with fertility decline are female literacy and urbanization. As a country urbanizes, and as it modernizes to the point where most women learn to read, fertility declines dramatically. As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.

As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.

That works until you are below replacement. At which point the alternative you are choosing is extinction, unless you have a good reason to think the fertility rate will increase before then.

As a country urbanizes, and as it modernizes to the point where most women learn to read, fertility declines dramatically. As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.

What if the alternative to low-fertility world was something like the 1950s United States of America ... why cannot that be an alternative vision?

As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.

Is Israel, a country in which even secular indigenous population has above replacement TFR, also likely to be perceived to be an example of a state to avoid? Probably not, but it goes unmentioned.

Sure, there is criticism of Israel's treatment of Arabs, but for Jews the Israeli government and society doesn't seem oppressive.

Argentina has also had high fertility rates for a while as a developed and not particularly religious country.

Millman mentions "if it stays much higher, as, for example, Israel’s has" but seems to consider it an outlier. Not sure why he wouldn't consider murderous theocrats or communists to be equally outliers, though.

TFR for secular Israeli women isn't quite above-replacement; it's only around 2.0, typically a little below. It's not plummeting the way it is in most countries, though, it's even back up a bit since the 1990s. Secular Israelis do seem to qualify as a completely-modernized-but-yet-stable demographic. There's also the Mormons, who I'd guess Millman might find objectionable (patriarchy: not just a metaphor!) but who at least ought to be considered a more tempting alternative than ISIS.

On the other hand, just using the word "alternative" seems to be assuming a level of agency that we see in the Hari Seldon books, not so much in real life. In particular:

I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.

That's ... not how the differential equation works.

Yeah, I was reminded of the debate here regarding torture watching this Breaking Points video earlier, where torture comes up in the conversation with the implication that actually yea, it works. I think when that issue is not salient everyone falls back on "of course torture works." And introspection certainly tells me it does. The idea that it doesn't work was a weird 2000s era blip born of disliking George W Bush and company.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lS3vyB7gcNA (a little past 3:30 in)

(cont, part 2)

The third problem is that many assertions about such-and-such country having a "traditional patriarchy" are completely wrong -- these claims are either exaggerations made by agenda-driven activists, or misconceptions of Westerners who only ever hear exceptional stories, and never the stories about how 99% time they are similar to us.

Starting the case of South Korea, we see that the New York Times has signal-boosted a few writers who have called South Korea "patriarchal":

Many men would rather not acknowledge that South Korea is an entrenched patriarchy and that toxic gender relations are taking a toll on society. source

And:

Other trends in South Korea strongly discourage births. They include rising opposition among women to child-rearing expectations by men in what remains a patriarchal society. More women in South Korea, rebelling against the country’s deeply embedded sexism, are foregoing marriage and motherhood in pursuit of education and professional careers.

source

But is this the true story of South Korea?

I went on a binge of reading articles and forum posts by actual South Koreans. By cherry-picking alternative evidence I can tell an entirely different story:

South Korea in the past decade has gone off the extreme feminist deep-end. Popular online communities for young women, such as WOMAD or Megalia,have been the hosts of campaigns of vitriolic attacks and physical assaults against men -- such as calling men vermin, posting secret nude pics of men up for mockery, wishing for North Korea to invade and kill Korean males. Nor is this not a fringe movement -- the online communities these views thrive on can reach up to a million young female users. While of course the majority of the content on these forums is mundane, when the topic of men comes up, only the radical feminist position is allowed. The Western media, not understanding the nature of South Korean feminism, denounces even a modest backlash against this extreme feminism as being mysoginistic.

At the government level, South Korea is more feminist than the U.S.A. in a number of ways: South Korea elected a woman president in 2013, followed by a male president who campaigned on promises to be a "feminist president." Ministry for Women claims that men are 'potential criminals' and have a 'social responsibility' to prove women that he is 'different from the others.' South korea ranks 10th in the UN's equality index, while America is 46th.

Korean media culture has villainized the domineering mother-in-law of old. The newer generation of mother-in-laws positions themselves as friends and equals of young wives. The rights of Korean women have enormously improved, and women are standing against gender discrimination and injustice. The patriarchy system has disappeared a lot, and daughter-in-law is no longer subordinate to their mother-in-law.

Korean feminism is more selfish than the Western version -- the new trend is to expect guys to be sweet k-drama fantasy men that enthusiastically cook as a hobby. Princess culture cherry picking feminist privilege, not empowerment, has really become an abomination. Korean government is pushing a female quota for police, despite women being held to lower standards and not actually doing anything at the scene of the crime.

Women are now a key part of the work force -- and held to the same standards of long hours as men are held to. Despite stories fed to western news organizations by activists about how South Korea is stuck in the 1950s, that is not true at all. Companies aren't firing women in droves as soon as they get pregnant, instead, they are often asking them how quickly they can come back to work because they cannot afford to lose them for long. There is no baby-making strike, despite what lying activists trick the gullible BBC into saying, all the professoinal working women in Korea are able to go back to work after having children and 50% of homes with children are now dual income. Korean women report that sexual harrassment is actually far greater in Europe and the USA than in in South Korea.

Which portrait of South Korea is more accurate? My own sense based on reading all the original posts and viewing the statistics is that South Korea is more feminist than the U.S. on some dimensions, and less on others. Choosing and weighting the categories in order to add up a total feminist score is an entirely arbitrary exercise. There is a general trend of extreme low-fertility among urbanites in modern cities with high real estate costs, little room for kids to play, and intense job markets. I suspect that South Korea's and Singapore's extra low fertility rates are probably more related to their population being more competitive urbanite than America's. I would guess that South Koreans in Seoul probably have a similar fertility rate to white college educated people living in New York City.

Neither are the Eastern Bloc countries some last hold-outs of patriarchy. Remember that Soviet communism was ultra-feminist for its time-period. The Bolshevik party in the 1920s set up women's departments . Divorce and abortion were available on demand (unlike in the United States at the same time):

In 1923 women's departments existed in most provinces; 35,539 women attended delegate assemblies in cities and towns, and 55,688 more in rural areas....The official message to women was that following the victory of the socialist revolution, women were equal. The Bolsheviks implemented concrete policies designed to equalize the status of women with men, improve their educational level, and involve them in society. ... The main thrust of the rural women's departments was to encourage women to participate in village soviet elections, attend women's assemblies, and promote Komsomol membership. The Bolshevik mission was to enlighten the "backward female masses," overcome their "religious superstition," undermine male domination, and draw them closer to the party. Russia After Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society, 1921 -- 1929.

Now, later on the West experienced second wave feminism while the situation in the Soviet Union was more stagnant. That is probably how the reputation arises for the Eastern Bloc being less feminist. But since the opening up the ex-Soviet bloc to western style TV, these countries are anti-traditional in their own way. Russia for instance, has American inspired reality TV shows glamorizing the "gold diggers" who leave their local towns for wealthy boyfriends in the city. Divorce rates in Russia are insane. Pick-up artists have reported on Poland being especially prime place to pick up women who cheat on their husbands.

As one prominent Russian nationalist recently wrote:

I have to admit that for many years I've been pissed off at our official Duginist rhetoric about the holy war of Russia as the center of world good, tradition and shit, with the bad West and the Euroatlantic civilization. There are two problems with these ideas.

First, it's all a lie. There is no “tradition” in Russia - not in the sense of an historical tradition and canon, but in the sense of a “living” tradition here and now. Russia is the country of total divorce, low birth rates, abandoned old age, an absence of elder men (and thus zero patriarchy), general cynicism, individualism, cult of consumption, extremely weak religiosity (unless we count DIY paganism and DIY esotericism as such), mass (not only elite) aping of any foreign fashions, torn historical and familial memory, indifference to everything national, concrete high-rise construction with no feel of the earth or a feeling of being masters on the land, and most importantly an extreme lack of trust in all social and collective institutions.

USA is an infinitely more “traditional” country than Russia. In USA, almost every other man has read the Bible - and will quote from it. But whatever, the second thing is worse.

In fairness, this is rant likely exaggerates the difference between the USA and Russia in other direction. My general sense is that in the Eastern Bloc both the men and the women are defecting harder than in the West. Outsiders with an agenda look and at this and see how poorly men are behaving and associate that with "toxic masculinity" which codes to them as "traditional patriarchy." In reality there is excessive bad behavior with both sexes and the bad male behavior has little to do with traditional patriarchy.

...on to part 3...

Pick-up artists have reported on Poland being especially prime place to pick up women who cheat on their husbands.

The most shocking thing I got from this was being reminded that Roosh apparently found religion.

Is that the male pick-up artist's version of "I'm ready to settle down with a good man?"

Is that the male pick-up artist's version of "I'm ready to settle down with a good man?"

No. First, because sexual experience increases a man's Sexual Market Value, while it torpedoes a woman's SMV. And, second, because women who say that would happily go on riding the Cock Carousel, except that they are no longer able to (either because they hit The Wall and are getting passed over by their younger peers or because they got pregnant and ended up a single mother who is now looking for a bailout). Whereas a PUA like Roosh could have easily kept pumping and dumping women indefinitely. It seems he genuinely burned out on the hedonic treadmill.

I mean, even if we go by TRP older women can still keep riding the cock carousel. They stop because their other desires and values - security, stability, a partner to raise a kid with - would be compromised.

Roosh also could similarly continue to get laid continually - without the decrease in fertility that a woman would face - but, first off: even he is getting old (at 43). And, if he wants things like a family, he can't just delay forever either. And, if he now wants to switch to women who want relationships, some explanation that mitigates his past might be valuable.

TRP is right about men's particularly strong desire for youth and sexual novelty - perhaps their greatest point is just unapologetically reiterating what were once truisms - but that's not all men want either.

(cont, part 3)

The elephant in the room

Now that we muddled the situation by discussing all the confounders, unknowables, and conflicting evidence, we should adress the the elephant in the room: Every low-fertility country in the world today -- from South Korea to Sweden to Poland -- is wildly feminist by the standards of history, and by the standards of countries that have had high-fertility.

When we compare basic measures of modern feminism versus traditional partriachy -- % of women enrolling in college educated, % of legislatures women, divorce rate -- we see that contemporary South Korea and Japan are far closer to the modern United States and Sweden than it is to 1950s America.

Fertility Rate

Gross college enrollment rate for women

% national legistlators women

Divorce Rate

America 1820

6.42

0%

0.0%

3%

America 1890

4.39

0%

0.0%

6%

Japan 1925

5.18

0%

0.0%

10%

America 1950

3.31

5%

0.1%

25%

Saudi Arabia 2020

2.28

74%

20.0%

48%

Iran 2020

2.15

57%

6.0%

33%

America 2020

1.8

102%

24.0%

39%

South Korea 2020

0.84

88%

17.0%

42%

Japan 2020

1.34

62%

10.0%

35%

Poland 2020

1.38

84%

29.0%

33%

Sweden 2020

1.8

96%

47.0%

50%

Spain 2020

1.24

102%

47.0%

54%

Finland 2020

1.35

101%

45.0%

56%

Russia 2020

1.5

93%

17.0%

70%

Most Americans would probably be surprised by how feminist contemporary Iran and Saudi Arabia are. When these countries entered public consciousness we saw them as ultra-patriarchal, "medieval" and "theocratic" kingdoms. But by 2022, Saudi Arabia now sends 76% of women to college, has a 47% divorce rate, and allows a modest amount of women rpresentation in parliament. Most laws against women living alone or owning property have now been rescinded. Correspondingly, its fertility rate has plummetted from 7.1 in 1980 to 2.2 today.

When we want to determine if low fertility is an inherent part of wealthy modernity or of feminism we have a problem in that we have no control group. Every country in the world post-1945 either came under the dominance of the American hegemony, the Soviet hegemony, or the Chinese hegemony. All three of these empires were explicitly feminist. Feminism has been a core part of the United Nation's declarations and intiatives. America has pushed feminism in every country that matters, whether that be via the hard power of conquering Japan and rewriting their constitution, or the soft power of requiring certain governance and "human rights" intiatives in order to gain aid and favored trade relations.

This does raise a big question of whether wealthy modernity, feminism, and low fertility are all inherently linked together -- maybe it is not just historical accident that there is no control group. Perhaps we will address that in a future post.

The poster children for feminist family polices with high birth rates are Sweden and France. However, their fertility stats are hopelessly confounded by the fertility of more patriarchal subcultures -- that of non-European immigrants. Unfortunately, it is fiendishly hard to find accurate statistics on how much this impacts the numbers.

I did some digging to see what I could find and, well, you're right. There is some data available, but it's mostly obfuscated by divergent definitions, different time periods or lack of categorisation.. Anyway:

Here's a Statistics Sweden source comparing fertility rates between foreign born and Swedish born women. On average over the last 50 years, foreign born fertility rate was 0.38 (or 22%) higher compared to the Swedish born one. The overrepresentation over time seems to fluctuate quite a bit, but remains roughly around that value.

Note that the Swedish born category does hide some members of "patriarchal subcultures" (for example, 6.2% of Sweden's population was born in Sweden to two foreign born parents), and the same goes for foreign born which includes significant proportions of Europeans, Southeast Asians, and so on - in other words, be careful when drawing conclusions from these figures.

Just as a fun exercise, I also found some population background statistics for the last 20 years to compare with Sweden's total fertility rate. Foreign background is defined here as either being born outside of Sweden, or having at least one such parent. The resulting scatter plot (which coincidentally is also a chronological series from 2002-2021) shows no strong correlation, although the same reservations as above stand - the data has some severe limitations.

The thing is, though, that when you look at a map showing European TFR's by region, the Swedish (and French) TFR's are also quite healthy in regions that don't contain the major cities of these countries (ie. where one would expect most of the migrants to live). Ie. the Swedish TFR is healthy all over the map of Sweden, not just in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö (it's slightly lower in Stockholm country than elsewhere, though of course that's general urban fertility heat sink effect for you.)

There's actually quite a lot of immigrant fertility research from Sweden, and at least according to this study, when it comes to immigrant descendants born in Sweden, their fertility is actually slightly lower than those born of Sweden of two Swedish-born parents, though of course there is some fluctucation by group.

Sweden and France both have ultra-high fertility rate native religious minorities that are most common in rural regions and smaller cities.

The thing is, though, that when you look at a map showing European TFR's by region, the Swedish (and French) TFR's are also quite healthy in regions that don't contain the major cities of these countries (ie. where one would expect most of the migrants to live).

Well, to some extent - Stockholm and Skåne (containing Malmö) tops the charts, but Västmanland, Södermanland and Kronoberg beats Västra Götaland (containing Göteborg). Apart from Stockholm, immigrant populations really only start significantly decreasing as you travel north - which to be fair did also have a high TFR according to your image.

I would also add that the Swedish TFR has declined significantly since 2016 (as your paper says: roller coaster fertility).

There's actually quite a lot of immigrant fertility research from Sweden, and at least according to this study, when it comes to immigrant descendants born in Sweden, their fertility is actually slightly lower than those born of Sweden of two Swedish-born parents, though of course there is some fluctucation by group.

I only scanned the study quickly, but - interesting! Combining mine and your sources (here we go again with the different time periods and definitions.. Caution!), "full-Swedish" women beat those born in Sweden but with foreign backgrounds, but that group as a whole gets beaten quite handily by foreign-born women.

An updated version of that study would be welcome considering the paper mostly uses data sources from 2014 or earlier, but I feel I'm already spending too much time on this topic - there are many other factors far more influential on mine and the country's futures.

I only scanned the study quickly, but - interesting! Combining mine and your sources (here we go again with the different time periods and definitions.. Caution!), "full-Swedish" women beat those born in Sweden but with foreign backgrounds, but that group as a whole gets beaten quite handily by foreign-born women.

Both the roller-coaster fertility and this trend are explainable by women immigrating from high-fertility countries continuing to have an elevated fertility after immigrating, but in time acculturating to a lower fertility, and particularly their children doing so. The peaks in fertility rate seem to correspond with equivalent immigration peaks. Of course, one question then is whether this will be affected by the fact that many high-fertility countries, such as in the Middle East have been trending down heavily in fertility, too.

Thank you for this post, it was interesting.

There's Afghanistan as an example, where fertility is high at 4.2 births per woman in 2020. This fell from about 7 in 2001, presumably due to the US occupation and its emphasis on feminism. I think Afghanistan alone could prove your argument. Afghanistan actually was an ultrapatriarchal, medieval, theocratic kingdom.

Argentina and Israel are the only developed countries that have maintained above replacement TFR for long periods of time- do they notably buck the trend? I don’t think they do, I think it’s happenstance. But it’s worth investigating.

which was invented by powerful men for the purpose of basically sexually exploiting women without recompense

In your view, was there any tangible difference in those days between prostitutes and such duped and exploited women, other than the latter foolishly not demanding any financial recompense for their services?

Not the person you replied to but I honestly respect prostitutes more than I respect "independent" women who sleep around for free. At least the former know their worth...

Point taken. But the idea that non-prostitute women should be 'compensated' for the premarital (and presumably hetero) sex acts they engage in is, I'm sure, definitely not something the majority of modern society accepts.

As a woman, there’s no reason to abandon feminism unless men abandon the ideas and actions that brought it about quite naturally in response. I am open to a new settlement, but I have yet to hear one I support wholeheartedly.

What even is feminism in this formulation? As an institution it hardly seems static enough that this claim could be made. If feminists made clearly factually unsound claims that act against the actual interests of women then surely that would be cause to abandon feminism. Wasn't the sexual revolution cloaked in feminist garb if not feminist itself?

The usable interpretation of this is the really uninteresting "women should look out for their own interests" but it's dressed up to say something much more controversial. this whole post feels incoherent in that is pits feminist against feminist as if there is only one true line that should be obvious to everyone.

There’s a reason that the non-feminist women you’ll run into who are assimilated into more or less mainstream western society are pretty much all very religious- because of the presence of large numbers of men who can be trusted to behave in the ways nonfeminism tells them too.

which was invented by powerful men for the purpose of basically sexually exploiting women without recompense

Men have always wanted to exploit women sexually without recompense.

In fact: one of the Church's missions was to prevent this. The assumption was that these male tendencies had to be controlled by the institution of marriage, for women's - hell, everyone's - sake.

What made the sexual revolution special? One theory:

But then, in a single sentence of its reportin 1970, the Committee grasped the central issue: ‘It is the promiscuous girl who is the real problem here.’ In this utterly sexist statement, the Committee actually understood the central issue – that the ‘moral turn’ in female sexuality destroyed the entire house of cards. Boys had always been boys, but female permissiveness meant that a generation of young women were turning their back on the discourse of pious femininity. With this realisation, the Committee could not cope, and by 1972 it voiced total exasperation with ‘the turbulent continent of morality’ and the unfolding ‘promiscuous age’.

Death of Christian Britain.

Men have always wanted to exploit women sexually without recompense.

So the idea of sex outside marriage, done with mutual consent and for the sake of mutual pleasure, is a lie? Is that what both of you are saying?

I can agree with that, with a few caveats.

  1. It's almost always socially deleterious to single hetero women who specifically made it their overriding wish to marry early, and are willing to organize their entire lifestyle around this. And I'm sure such women are relatively rare.

  2. This still does not mean that men were consciously, knowingly exploiting women i.e. the great majority of them very obviously did/do not believe/recognize that premarital sex in itself is almost always socially deleterious to women.

  3. Even when women come to this realization, I'm sure most of these women do not do so before the age of, say, 36. Which is sort of relevant here.

Not an outright refutation of any fact, but a challenge to the emphasis in the final para: i.e. all of this will happen so long as men maintain X-Y Systems. Here:

As a woman, there’s no reason to abandon feminism unless men [my emphasis] abandon the ideas and actions that brought it about quite naturally in response.

Point is that (high status especially) men have always tried to break this system. They managed - continually - to circumvent it. It was only truly broken - according to the exasperated Church - when women themselves rejected the underlying normative argument.

I mean...that passage I quote is telling you that men tried. They tried to hold back the dam. They were told to stop.

So whose revolution is it really? And in whose name does it persist? Whose ideas and actions (which now need to be abandoned) drove it? If men couldn't hold the line on the old system what new one is supposed to be magicked up when the original criticism of sexual protectionism still holds (any solution here would quickly be pilloried as "patronizing" or patriarchal)?

The collapse in Saudi tfr happened well before recent liberalization, and in fact the largest collapse occurred during the most severe period of post-Siege of Mecca religious reactionary conservatism, when Saudi society became much less feminist, the Niqab was mandated, the modern guardianship system was mandated, middle and upper-middle class women were largely removed from the professions, Saudi society became more markedly segregated even among urban elites and so on.

Saudi Arabia was already oil rich by 1980. The World Bank says that female college enrollment in Saudi Arabia has risen steadily and consistently and massively, from a mere 5% in 1980 to 75% in 2020 -- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR.FE?locations=SA --, which correlates well with the decline in TFR during that same period. If there is a religious conservative backlash, they seem to have utterly failed at even arresting female empowerment, much less actually rolling it back, or else female college enrollment would have gone down, not up.

Second wave feminism was a necessary reaction to the sexual revolution (which was invented by powerful men for the purpose of basically sexually exploiting women without recompense),

Sex positive feminism and women-should-work feminism was pushed by elite men who wanted easy access to cute young women. Many women liked it too because it is crack for women to be around the highest status men. "MeToo" feminism is bolstered by dads who don't want to see their daughters run through by the football team, husbands who don't like their wives being seduced at the office, beta men who are resentful of alpha men hoarding the pussy, and elites who find metoo incidents as useful way to take down competitors. Many women on board with #metoo because sex-with-no-strings actually left them very hurt. Unfortunately, everyone has misidentified the problem as being one of lack of consent, as opposed to the problem being inherent to fornication and adultery.

Can someone explain to me how sex with no strings hurts people, and specifically how it hurts women more? In an age of contraceptives?

I'm not saying it's not true, it obviously is. I've been in situations where "sex with no strings" turned out to have a lot of expectations attached after all, while I on the other hand would be perfectly fine if we just went on with our lives. As would most men I know. (Maybe I'm some awful combination of high value enough to be given a chance, but not high value enough for it to be free.)

So it must be true, because they wouldn't bother pursuing anything more un

Can someone explain to me how sex with no strings hurts people, and specifically how it hurts women more? In an age of contraceptives?

There are two potential problems with "sex with no strings" -- either the sex is bad or it is good. If it is bad, it is bad. If it is good, high chance that one of the two people "catches feelings" -- and now that person has formed a bond with someone else who might not be good for them, or that into them. Forming a bond with someone who is bad for you is very damaging. And forming a bond to someone, exposing your nakedness and vulnerability to someone, and then having that person reject you is also tremendously damaging and hurtful. This goes for both men and women.

"Sex with no strings" is not something that was common among our ancestors, it is not something we have evolved to handle. Young men and women have not evolved to make good decisions in some lazzei faire sexual marketplace, nor have they evolved to even predict how they will react to sex. "Sex with no strings" is simply not something that can be predicted a priori. Impossible.

Sex did evolve to generate a powerful, intense bond with your partner (especially for women), which helps bind the couple together through the difficult years of child rearing. Sex with random people at best fritters this bonding power away, and at worst makes people bonded to partners who aren't properly screened or committed and thus will end up creating great hurt.

Alright, makes sense. I guess I'm just one of those people who doesn't form romantic bonds. Completely alien to me.

But I will note this reads a bit like ideology in that it conflates a useful social technology of monogamy with something natural and true. It seems like throughout history and today, powerful men had no issues with such bonding, and in fact one of the main motivators for men is access to a variety of women. Their goals aren't to faithfully commit to a single one.

But I will note this reads a bit like ideology in that it conflates a useful social technology of monogamy with something natural and true.

I would say that Christian teaching with regards to fornication and monogamy is rooted in natural law; natural law I define as follows: Given human nature, human sexuality, human group dynamics, the basic realities of the world, etc, natural law is the set of rules that result in the game theoretical optimum for most people and for society as a whole. So yeah, powerful men often like to fornicate, they also like to lie, cheat and murder too, all of which are violations of morality and natural law, it's good for them, but at the expense of others.

I should note though that even a powerful man who enjoys sleeping with a variety of women would prefer if the woman he sleeps with remains attached to him in concubinage. It is painful for almost any man to witness the woman he has slept with, sleep with someone else. If that is not painful for you, you are a true outlier.

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Maybe I'm some awful combination of high value enough to be given a chance, but not high value enough for it to be free

Not sure that's awful: free lunches tend not to be the tastiest, while you still have the opportunity of not going hungry. Of course, sex is never really cost-free, but there are some men who are unlucky enough to be able to obtain it with minimal effort and in quantities mostly of their choosing, which is a great way to lose the greatest joys in sexuality.

I'm sorry but this reads like mega-cope. I think most of my friends of the "chad" variety find quite a lot of value in it.

For almost every guy, even those with the relevant genetic, economic, and other gifts, being a "chad" is actually quite a lot of effort, especially if you have moderate or high standards in women.

Sex positive feminism and women-should-work feminism was pushed by elite men who wanted easy access to cute young women.

I’m not as familiar with the driving forces behind sex-positive feminism, but for women in the work place, ☝️ this is not only dubious, but appears bad faith and near-infalsifiable since a hand can be waived in the direction of some cohort of elite men and their plan(s) to get more women into the office, which of course they couldn’t and didn’t openly articulate, leaving no historical record.

Post-war, expand high school graduation percentages met with an increased demand for clerical work. Prior to then, women in the work force were more likely to be involved in manufacturing jobs (such as in the garment industry). Women found office jobs, which were far less dirty and dangerous, more appealing. And this, among other factors, led to increased participation in the workforce, and specifically by married women, who were less motivated to drop out of the work force as office work was more palatable.

After a couple decades, women began to expect to spend a significant period of their life in the workforce where prior generations had not. And from here, many women, of their own agency, began to pursue higher education and assert themselves professionally.

If you want to subjectively debate whether this was “good”, feel free to embark on that tangent. But if you want to objectively deny that a subset of women, through their own agency, pushed for greater economic opportunity and independence, then you’ll need to show your work.

I did add as a quick edit to my comment "Many women liked it too because it is crack for women to be around the highest status men."

In general, fault-lines of policy interest don't actually split men against women. Feminism is the work of one faction of men and women, and anti-feminism has also been the work of one faction of men and women. Feminism was not some victory of women over the opposition of men. It was a victory of certain women done with the support of certain men, often powerful men.

Prior to then, women in the work force were more likely to be involved in manufacturing jobs (such as in the garment industry).

Doubt. I think they were by far most likely to be domestics. I would be curious what percent of unmarried young women in the U.S. worked in manufacturing at its non-war peak -- I would be surprised if it was higher than 15%. I think you are right there was an increase in demand for clerical work between 1920 and 1970 -- but I suspect true need for clerical work has actually decreased since then. But instead we have seen a rise of "pink color" jobs in the hypertrophied healthcare, education and non-profit sector. IMO, these are mostly vanity jobs doled out by the government as sugar daddy instead of a husband. Feminism has created the jobs, not the need for the work created feminism.

Man you argue in bad faith. Where did I say feminism was all women versus all men? Where has anyone said that?

I originally noted the role of elite men in driving feminism. You challenged me in the reply by saying that women's agency also played a role. I replied to clarify that I believe that both men and women played a role in driving feminism.

Why is the balance of women’s university attendance the sole gauge of feminism when many women were educated in even traditional patriarchal societies?

I would say it is one of the most important metrics that we can actually easily quantify and track. Unless it is a finishing school or Mrs degree, university attendance means everything that is the opposite of patriarchy: 1) the woman will be removed from the guardianship of her father 2) she will be making a big investment in developing skills unrelated to being a good wife or mother 3) she will be immersed in messaging from the university in the years leading up to application and during university that developing these work skills is super valuable and important. University attendance is simply massively more central to life than whether there are women news anchors.

There are other important metrics of feminism, but it is just very hard to get good data on them, especially historically. How easy it is for a woman to divorce her husband (this is imperfectly modeled by overall divorce rate)? How easy and unstigmatized is it for a single woman to live by herself or with friends? What is the default cultural messaging from TV and authority figures? How many women have sex before marriage (with someone other than their eventual husband)? What is the actual nature of university education -- is it an Mrs degree? Are women living at home or in a sex-segrated dorm under in locus parentis? Or it more like something out of "Sex Lives of College Girls"? What percent of young women are working outside of domestic work? What percent of married women with children are working full-time outside the home?

A major problem with other metrics of feminism is that it can be very difficult to distinguish de facto from de jure. During the late Roman empire paters familia was the law of the land, but in practice is was almost abandoned and the "three days a year" rule ended up being a loophole that greatly empowered women. In early 1900s America, it was mostly de jure illegal for a man to physically punish is wife, but a spanking or a slap would often be winked at or go unpunished, and even portrayed as normal in popular media. Catholicism canon law still makes it impossible to divorce -- but then in practice annulments are given out very liberally.

And so in Saudi Arabia we see reports such as:

“I have a routine: the weekdays are only for studying, and the weekend is for going out, meeting friends, and partying — yes, partying. In Saudi Arabia most things are prohibited, but we have ‘the life underground’ where we can do all the crazy, mostly illegal things without anyone knowing. Sometimes we go to our guy friends’ houses since we can’t invite guys over (otherwise our parents will destroy us), or a place like a private compound where non-Saudi people live, but we can enter as visitors.” —Aisha, 21

...

“Because of the guardianship system, my father can turn my life into hell, preventing me from doing anything, forcing me to do whatever he wants. But he doesn’t. Why? Because I told him if he beats me or abuses me in any way I will call the police. Even if the police can’t do much, my family is too scared of the scandal it would create to test me. But I am ‘careful’ about not giving my father a reason to punish me or take away my job, which to me is the only thing worth living for.” —Salma, 21

https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/young-women-living-in-saudi-arabia-interviews.html

In an actual patriarchy, the idea a woman would call the police on a father or husband would be laughable. Now other examples from that same article show women who are more controlled. Unfortunately, it is difficult for me to know which is the more common case.

Saudi Arabia is still more patriarchal than the United States, but it seems to be a lot less patriarchal in practice than what the law or media coverage would suggest.

Why do you think that women have zero recourse to ill treatment from a husband under patriarchy?

I didn't say women have zero recourse from ill treatment from a husband under patriarchy.

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This here. Back home I come from a culture that most westerners would call patriarchal (I scoff at the association but lets humour them for a second) . That doesn't mean I could just mistreat my future wife with no consequence. I was specifically raised by my parents to always respect women and put their needs before my own (what counts as "their needs" naturally varies between cultures) and if I were to mistreat my wife I would run the risk of my own family disowning me both for moral and honour reasons as well as because were they not to do this it would jeopardise my brother's ability to find a good high status wife for himself.

Plus family bonds are very important for us so being disowned isn't like the western "never talk to your family again but otherwise live your life as you were doing before" where you can still live a fulfilling life but rather a serious and highly damaging event, it's more like the ancient exile from your city state (almost as bad as execution, as Socrates showed by his actions in the Apology) compared to a modern hypothetical exile from a city (just go to a new city and find a job there).

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