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Yes, I did, and I noticed that her calculator estimating the cost for a woman to have children doesn't even attempt to place a value to a woman on having a child. Just the inconveniences like nausea. But her calculator includes no consideration of the cost of being a miserable, old, ugly cat lady with a gaping hole in her life she can't fill with all the wine and cats in the world. And that outcome is closer to the modal childless woman than the sad story of parents who get stuck with a non-verbal, autistic child.
If her calculator attempted to estimate the dollar value the average woman places on her child, and subtracted the average misery of the typical childless cat lady, she would come out of her analysis with an entirely different conclusion. Her "million dollar shortfall" shows she hasn't actually thought it through, and she does exactly what I am accusing childless woman of- being hyper-conscious of the benefits of remaining childless while being aggressively oblivious to the costs... which just happens to align with the pattern of cultural signals young women are bombarded with. It's not independent thinking.
She talks quite a bit about the arguments in favor of having a child. Do you really think "Did you know that some women actually enjoy having children and find motherhood to be an enjoyable and fulfilling experience" is a mind-blowing thought she never had? She's making a point about the costs that men arguing for children frequently don't consider, not saying "Having children is miserable for everyone and no one would want to do it if they considered the costs."
That's your assumption, which requires you to assume that you know what people experience internally better than they do. Her argument is that in fact some "cat ladies" are actually pretty happy and are not the miserable, bitter hags you wish to believe they must be. Of course it is possible that she really is miserable and lonely and just coping, but I'd trust her account of what she actually feels over yours.
Writing a defense of an opinion that many people share does not mean they are bots writing effortposts like an LLM, which is basically your assertion. Do you think that in the world you want where women are pressured to have as many children as possible and told this is their natural and most fulfilling role, a woman who wrote an essay about the joys of motherhood and why everyone should do it would be exercising independent thinking? Or would you just say "Well no, because women can't do that, but it would be good because she's been properly programmed according to values I agree with?"
Obviously in that case a woman would not be engaging in independent thinking. No more than if she wrote a "racism is bad" Substack essay listing all the reasons racism is bad according to the prevailing cultural wisdom. The notion she reached that conclusion independently of cultural signals is hilariously naive.
You don't get it, there is no "don't program women, let them think independently" option. It's only a question of how we program them. This applies to men as well to a somewhat lesser extent, but women in particular are highly susceptible to the social memetics that get naively mistaken as independent thought. Humans are a pack animal and hive mind, "independent thought" does not exist, there only exists variation within a collectively-shared distribution.
"I thought about it, and decided being a childless cat lady won't be so bad" is not independent thought, it's downstream of all the cultural signals she's internalized her entire life.
Pretty much nobody reaches conclusions "independently of cultural signals." Do you think you came to your beliefs entirely through independent research and reasoning from first principles?
Do you think absent "cultural signals", there would be zero women who would actually prefer being cat ladies over being mothers?
Did you read my comment? There is no "absent cultural signals." We are a hive mind. There's no "what would women prefer if they weren't programmed one way or another." The question isn't if we should program women to have a certain perception of motherhood, it's just a question of how we should do it.
But I do think even in the presence of strong cultural signals in favor of Motherhood there would be some women who would prefer to be cat ladies. A lot of them were probably burned at the stake in Old Europe on the accusation of Witchcraft, as that decision would have been regarded as highly anti-social and low-status. It's quite ironic that the cultural Witchcraft movement on Reddit and the like is closely associated with childless advocacy as well. Witches exist, and they do mean to tear apart the fabric of our society.
Okay, so we agree her opinions didn't come out of the aether. Since her opinions are as well-formed and independent as yours, no more, no less, you have only object level disagreements with her (namely, you'd prefer she not persuade other women to think like her).
Obviously it would be bad if all women decided to be cat ladies. But she's addressing people who think she can't possibly be happy and that women shouldn't really have that option. (Not necessarily in the sense they should be forced to breed, though at least here on the Motte that viewpoint is certainly represented, but in the sense that a lot of conservatives' "solution" to low TFR would be to impose steep social and economic costs on women who don't.)
Conservatives don't have a solution to low TFR because Christianity, the European fertility cult for many hundreds of years at this point, is waning.
You know who has a fertility cult? The Jewish sects in Israel which have staggering TFR. Those sects have other problems, too, but it's proof positive for how our religious impulse directs our breeding behavior.
We need a post-postmodern, non-Abrahamic fertility cult, specifically one that esoterically targets, not just higher TFR in general, but a eugenic mate selection. Higher TFR for only high-quality people. Conservatives can't provide that.
Damn, you just can't not talk about Jews for very long, can you?
Mormons and Amish and Muslims are pretty fecund too. So, for that matter, are Africans, mostly not followers of Abrahamic religions.
I think it's more complicated than "fertility cults" but sure, good luck with your eugenics program.
Fertility has always been associated with a collective religion, and collective religion is a eugenics program. Judaism is a eugenics program. This is the result of a eugenics program and a demonstration of the world-shaping power of Religion as an esoteric eugenics program.
We are living in the only time in which fertility is not heavily associated with a collective religion, and it's also the time in which TFR is collapsing. And the collapse falls along the lines of religiosity, with Christian families having substantially higher TFRs than atheists. It is not at all an oversimplification to relate reproductive behavior to Religion. Mormons, Amish, Muslims, Jews, Christians are all examples of this. Atheists are an example of this, too, by way of breeding themselves out of existence.
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Huh? 93% of Sub-Saharan Africans self-identify as either Christian or Muslim.
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