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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25102 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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The liberation of women from the age-old dilemma of "marry this guy and have six of his kids or become a prostitute" is one of the greatest triumphs of human history, on par with the elimination of smallpox and possibly the invention of agriculture. Thank you industrial revolution and twentieth century social democracy.

Give it another century and I think the opposite will prove true. If social trends are any indication, the most liberated generation in history would tell me that OnlyFans and soft prostitution will always be their highest aspiration in life. Their words. Not mine.

The dichotomy you presented that's imposed on them by their biology, is just the unfortunate tragedy of being female. And it's even more unfortunate to accept that society can get along just fine without women's happiness or independence. It can't survive without mans participation. And those two things directly oppose each other on almost every point.

I agree it is one of the greatest triumphs of human history and we can thank the industrial revolution for that, but you don't need social democracy for it, even in modern day China women can freely not marry or become a prostitute but be extremely successful.

There's also a large amount of sex trafficking in places like Seattle and San Francisco, supposed bastions of liberal democracy.

I wonder which country has a higher percentage of women being forced into prostitution - China or the United States?

My guess would be the United States but low confidence.

Such a dilemma never existed. There's a reason that 'spinster' is a word used in English to describe a single woman. It's how they very often supported themselves. If we take England in 1377 as an example, a full third of adult women were single, and 10-20% never married at all. The idea that the only options were marriage or prostitution is a fantasy, formed (as far as I can tell) by people extrapolating the experience of the midcentury American housewife far off into the past and across the planet.

In 1300 AD, London had 18 brothels employing hundreds of prostitutes. These brothels were regulated, incredibly, by the Bishop of Winchester.

As the entire population of London was less 30,000 we can infer that perhaps 5-10% of the women in London at the time were prostitutes.

Prostitution was certainly a much more common career path during the Middle Ages. And life expectancy for prostitutes was very short. So I would say that, yes, many women were facing awful choices at the time. This shouldn't be surprising. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Malthusian conditions applied more often than not. A large percentage of people, both men and women, did not get enough to eat.

Prostitution was certainly a much more common career path during the Middle Ages

...for the small minority of women who lived in London and/or other major cities. By far the most common occupation for both men and women would have been "small-scale subsistence farmer"

You probably had what, 2-3 million people in England?

Actually almost 5 million! But it would crash to under 2 million by 1450 thanks to the Black Death and its many echoes. The ones who survived the plague enjoyed much higher quality of life as Malthusian constraints were lifted.

Nowhere else would have even close to that concentration of people who had enough money to hire a prostitute.

I think you're probably right. But what a revealing statement. Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!

But what a revealing statement. Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!

It just shows that rich men were concentrated in cities, and their extra wealth was greater than the higher cost of living of the city.

What do you find revealing about this? Is the idea that there were huge wealth disparities in the past a revelation to you?

Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!

Isn’t this an (odd) interpretation of virtually any supply and demand curve? The only thing stopping me from stripping naked on public TV is that nobody is willing to pay me a billion dollars to do it.

The only thing stopping me from stripping naked on public TV is that nobody is willing to pay me a billion dollars to do it.

We've already established what kind of person you are @you-get-an-upvote. Now we're just haggling over the price.

What a revealing statement. Things are so bad on Earth that somebody who wants to strip naked for money can’t because there aren’t enough clients to pay!

I apologize for my snark earlier.

I don't understand the objection. An affluent person doing something for $1 billion is different than a person in abject poverty doing that same thing to survive.

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More like 5-7 million.

Reliable statistics from the medieval era are pretty non-existent but 10% actually seems to be about the rate at which women became prostitutes in the 19th century. It was quite common. Significantly higher than say, uptake on OnlyFans is today. You can also swap "prostitute" for "indigent." Nobody ever accused spinsters of living comfortably.

I've said it before and I'll say it again about this particular factoid - 10% of women or 10% of urban women? We are talking about societies which were 80-90% rural, and the brothels were in the towns - and mostly in the large towns and cities. So 5-10% of women in London per jeroboam (and presumably less in smaller towns) being prostitutes equals 1% or slightly less of all women being prostitutes.

10% of all women being prostitutes in the 19th century (where? it matters!) per To_Mandalay would mean that either 30% or more were prostitutes in the big cities, which I don't think anyone has suggested, or that there was a culture of prostitution even in village-sized communities.

30% or more were prostitutes in the big cities, which I don't think anyone has suggested

Some people did actually. I was thinking not of London but of 19th century New York. According to this book estimates of the percentage of young women in NY who were prostitutes over the 19th century ranged from 1% all the way to 40%. The author says that 5 - 10% seems likely because the police tended to lowball their figures and reformist societies to overstate them. He also suggests that during economic downturns the number may have gone above 10%. Obviously the numbers are extremely uncertain because moralists had a motive to exaggerate them, and at the same time a lot of prostitution was part-time and freelance, and so slipped under the radar. What seems clear is that women being driven to prostitution out of economic desperation was many times more common than it is today.

I have no idea what prostitution looked like in village communities or to what extent it existed. In the 19th century medium-to-large towns and cities in the USA and Western Europe are pretty much the only places with anything resembling reliable statistics.

In modern times we still see that prostitutes tend to concentrate in cities and that rural men will travel to cities to use their services. So the percentage of prostitutes among the rural populace was likely far lower than in the city.

Everyone in this discussion seems to ignore the social issues with prostitutes in small communities, where people are much more aware of the behavior of people in the community than in the city.

And most developed countries now are below replacement fertility, great success!

Don't worry we will get the non-developed countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is the last holdout, but we're coming for them too.

Are you a misanthrope? An antinatalist?

No, but I don’t have “number (of humans) go up” as a terminal value. I think most people wouldn’t be thrilled about high or even replacement level fertility if all of those children being born were going to spend the their entire lives in conditions equivalent to a Soviet gulag or a Caribbean sugar plantation. That’s how I feel about high fertility in a context in which the children being born will spend their lives in societies like those which prevailed before the 20th century.

I don’t view falling fertility rates as good in and of themselves, simply as markers of things I DO view as good, such as female emancipation, wealth, literacy, the demolition of traditional clan-kinship structures, etc.

Declining population is bad for a society.

but if the rat utopia is any indication, it is also inevitable.

I don't think it's even really known what went wrong with those damn rats, so generalising those results to mankind could be a dubious proposition.

It's not even clear whatever happened to the rats was universal among rats.

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Unless you have a very wide definition of "welfare state", modern countries tend to be below that whether they are welfare states or not, and many of them first dipped below replacement in the interwar period already.

What countries wouldn't you consider as welfare states? For me, maybe China, I'm not 100% sure. US and European countries redistribute a fuckton of money for sure.

Singapore and Korea? They're not welfare states, are amongst the richest places on Earth, and have the lowest fertility in the world.

The problem is the middle road between patriarchy and equiality. Either don't give women access education and work, or equalize social expectations and have husbands to take an equal share of chores, housework, childcare, etc.

The middle ground puts too much stress on women, and pushes the most agentic out of the country.

In response to all the discussions below, I'd like to submit this Aporia piece on the Baby Boom:

The Baby Boom was the sudden rise in fertility, beginning in the late 1930s, of the wealthiest and most advanced countries in the world. It is often associated with the end of World War II, but actually began before then. These countries include the Anglosphere (Ireland, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia), the Nordics (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland), the wealthy continental European countries, occupied but victorious in World War II (France, Netherlands, Belgium), and the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), which mostly lost World War II.

…

Many theories of fertility decline claim that it is the inevitable result of various good things: technological advancement, wealth, education, science (through weakening religion), urbanization, individualism, and declines in childhood mortality. Since (almost) no one really wants to go back to being high mortality, low-tech, extremely poor, rural, and ignorant, the story goes, we simply need to live with it. There is good empirical evidence for all of these things mattering, but what the Baby Boom shows is that it is possible to have it all. You can have a rich, rapidly growing, technologically sophisticated, personally free and individualist, urban, long-lived and fertile society. There’s no need to choose between slow extinction and preindustrial poverty.

…

There are several popular, but wrong, explanations for the Baby Boom. These come up in almost any discussion of the Baby Boom, so it is worth debunking them.

[1]. Generational income levels. In this model, popularized by Richard Easterlin, large cohorts lead to lower wages (relative to expectations) leading to low fertility leading to small cohorts leading to high wages leading to high fertility. This would be convenient, since it would suggest population would naturally reach an equilibrium and thus long-term population aging and decline is not a problem. It was plausible in 1978 when it was proposed, but has completely failed since then, with small, post-Boom cohorts across Europe having lower fertility than ever. It has also been refuted by showing that cohort effects (birth year) don’t particularly matter for the beginning of the Baby Boom, with it instead being explained by period effects (changes during the Baby Boom rather than changes in the years those who participated in the Boom were born).

[2]. Household appliances and antibiotics. In this model, recently popularized by Works in Progress, household appliances popularized after WWII reduce the costs of childbearing and antibiotics reduce the risk of various STDs as well as reducing maternal mortality. Since incentives matter, the story goes, easier and safer childbearing means more births. This would be very convenient (all we need is rapid economic growth, which we want anyways!) but has the twin problems that the size of the Boom was inversely correlated with appliance rollout and the beginning of the boom predates the fall in STDs. Also, this model predicts you should see Baby Booms in every country when appliances and antibiotics first spread, but that didn’t (doesn’t) happen. The vast majority of the world only had (or is having) a single demographic transition, rather than the double-transition pattern of the Boom countries.

[3]. Contraception failure. In this model, the Baby Boom is just a marriage boom combined with an inability to practice fertility control due to ineffective contraception. This would not be very convenient, since it suggests that the only way to revive the Boom is to imitate Ceaușescu’s Romania, which (almost) no one wants. The trouble with this hypothesis is that marital fertility actually declined in many Boom countries during this period, suggesting married couples got better, not worse, at controlling their fertility.

The Baby Boom is a Marriage Boom

The proximate cause of the Baby Boom is not a mystery. Almost all births during the Baby Boom were within wedlock, meaning that fertility was a function of (1) nuptiality and (2) marital fertility. In 15/22 countries (8/15 if excluding Southern/Eastern Europe, Ireland, and Japan), marital fertility actually decreased during the Baby Boom, meaning that the entire Boom is explained by more marriage. Only in the US, France, and Austria does marital fertility increase explain more than 15% of the Baby Boom, so when looking at it as a West-wide pattern, we can effectively reduce the Baby Boom to a marriage boom: more people getting and staying married at younger ages.

…

So what caused this marriage boom? The answer appears to be a rise in young men’s status compared to young women’s7. The marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation (down), young male wages (up), and male unemployment (down).

…

This model actually understates the case, because it uses total female labor force participation, rather than the relevant variable, which is labor force participation for young women. An overall decline in female labor force participation masks the fact that there was actually an increase in female labor force participation among older women (in part due to World War II; women who got jobs in factories while men fought often stayed after the war), which in turn drove down wages (and thus labor force participation) among younger women.

…

Wages are not the only way to measure status. After briefly reaching parity at the zenith of first wave feminism, young men during the Baby Boom again greatly exceeded their female counterparts in educational attainment.

…

Note that what matters here is relative gains, not absolute gains. Women did not make less money and were not less educated in 1960 as compared to 1930, merely less so in comparison to their male peers.

…

What ended the Baby Boom?

In three words: second wave feminism. By this I mean the suite of changes referred to as the Sexual Revolution (no fault divorce, normalization of premarital sex, delegitimization of marriage as the normative form of the family), combined with a concerted political campaign to raise women’s relative economic and social status. Fertility in every Boom country, as well as in several countries that didn’t experience the Boom but had slightly above-replacement fertility (such as Italy and Japan), cratered within a few years around 1970 (the time of the social and legislative triumph of second wave feminism) to well below replacement, and never recovered. But what are the precise mechanisms?

The most common answer is the Pill, which made cheap, effective, convenient contraception widely available. But this is highly confounded with second wave feminism, because this movement pushed for its legalization. Where you see second wave feminism and not the Pill, as in Japan, you see the same decline around 1970, and no further drop once the Pill is legalized8.

I think the whole thing is worth a read for those debating here.

I read this a few days ago.

1 - The author's conclusion is "we need to make women poorer so they will be desperate enough to fuck and marry men they don't otherwise want to fuck and marry." This is a value judgment not an empirical statement, so I can't say it's incorrect as a matter of fact, but it's certainly an unappealing suggestion to me and everyone else who isn't already all-in on RETVRNING.

2 - The author says:

This gives the false impression that, while the Baby Boom was significant for the 20th century, it was only a blip compared to the massive fertility decline preceding it. This is misleading. TFR works well for 20th century Western countries, and for most of the world past World War II. But it falls apart when dealing with countries with high infant and childhood mortality, as was universal before the late 19th century.

Once Malthusian constraints are lifted by the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, you have a near-constant net fertility at around three, before a major decline in the early 20th century to around replacement5, followed by a major resurgence to around the original level during the Baby Boom.

Regardless of pre-twentieth century infant mortality, people's behavior was still changing to result in fewer children being born, whether or not some of those children died before adulthood doesn't really matter. The point in the first half of the 20th century where people were having about three children and all of those children survived just seems to be the point where declining fertility rates intersected with advancing medical technology which allowed for near 100% childhood survival rates.

3 -

It’s worth noting that this is not just a natural consequence of the shift from an industrial to a service economy. Affirmative Action in favor of women is common across the Boom countries, as is disproportionate female employment in state-created regulatory jobs such as HR. There are also thousands of organizations explicitly dedicated to promoting women’s careers at the expense of men’s, and almost none of the converse. These combine to artificially raise women’s wages above the market rate, and lower men’s.

I was waiting for the author to mention this. He just handwaves the impact of this transition with "well there's affirmative action and feminist initiatives." He doesn't attempt any kind of analysis to quantify what kind of impact affirmative action and feminist initiatives have or have not actually had on women's earning power. That's unfortunate, because his thesis stands or falls on this. The question is whether the M:F income ratio would still have shrunken in the absence of such efforts, and to what extent. The transition from an industrial economy meant that, in developed countries, manual labor was less important than ever. Since upper-body strength is the single biggest advantage men hold over women, it would be quite shocking if the decreasing importance of jobs requiring upper body strength did not result in a narrowing of the M-F income gap. And if much or most of this narrowing would have taken place purely as a material consequence of this transition, then just getting rid of AA and feminism wouldn't actually have the desired effect, you would have to artificially restrict the labor market to LARP as if the economic foundation of the western world is the same as it was in 1950.

4 - One imperfect but perhaps useful way to test the "M-F income gap make fertility go up" thesis would be to compare across nations, and see if developed countries with larger income gaps in favor of men have higher fertility rates. Let's see what fertility rates look like in the OECD country with the largest income disparity between men and wome - oh no

One more nitpick:

This particularly increases the costs for men through the mechanism of family courts (as divorce usually means he loses his assets, income, and children).

It doesn't actually mean that. The manosphere loves these horror stories but alimony is awarded only in a minority of divorce cases, about 10%. Women tend to wind up significantly poorer after divorce, not richer.

It doesn't actually mean that. The manosphere loves these horror stories but alimony is awarded only in a minority of divorce cases, about 10%. Women tend to wind up significantly poorer after divorce, not richer.

That's a sobering white pill if I've ever seen one, but it only partly addresses the income portion.

There is still the loss of assets, as the division of assets is different from alimony. For example, South Carolina considers equitable distribution as a separate concept from alimony. As men tend to be the partners with a higher income, they will have contributed to a greater portion of the assets in a marriage, and thus lose out more in terms of the assets.

Child support, while not alimony, is also something that the man has to contribute, and it's no secret knowledge that men get the short end of the stick when it comes to rights over their children.

There is still the loss of assets, as the division of assets is different alimony

His "Women tend to wind up significantly poorer after divorce, not richer" claim covers this too. This study seems to agree, finding 'Third, the key domain in which large and persistent gender differences emerged were women’s disproportionate losses in household income and associated increases in their risk of poverty and single parenting', and it checks out anecdotally too.

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Everyone knows the answer to this question and is always cognizantly, tiptoeing around the solution. There is no straddling a middle ground between achieving the objectives of equality and keeping to more natalist, patriarchal norms. Short of imposing an Afghanistan style, Islamic theocracy on women (the part everyone is too afraid to mention in public), you're not likely to see a resolution to this issue.

Financial incentives and social support aren't likely to offer a path to a solution either. The poorest societies in the world have the highest rates of fertility and childbirth. Ed Dutton wrote an interesting piece on this.

What country has gotten its fertility above replacement again by equalizing social expectations? Israel, Saudi, and Argentina are the developed countries which have had above replacement tfr recently and neither is especially feminist by developed world standards.

The whole idea that the problem is too much stress on women is risable anyway. Women have gotten more freedom while men have retained their duties and more has been demanded of them. Supermarket-tabloid feminist articles constantly complain that men don't do enough chores/housework/childcare, but never mention that married men still bring in a lot more money.

Sweden? The TFR was pushed up above 2.1 in the 80-90s after some reforms.

The swing up started too early to just be due to the boomers and our baby boom was kind of tiny.

There might be other explanations as well such as people who delayed childbirth finally got around to it (maybe due to better conditions?), which then didn't translate to sustained higher rates as the fertility then went down again.

Thanks. Can you go into more depth about how this can be traced to feminism/women’s equality? AFAIK in the 90’s and early 2000’s economic conditions pushed the US TFR above replacement but this was mostly not feminism; social conservatives(including non-white ones) found it easier to do the things they wanted to do anyways because the economy allowed it and progressives got a lot more moderate.

Well, I can't say for sure but it followed, with some lag, a series of extensive reforms in regards to parental leave, equality in the work place, state funded day care and so on, that at least seemed to boost female labour force participation.

It didn't follow immediately after these reforms, to the extent I'm aware, but something did boost Swedish tfr compared to nearby comparable countries.

It should be said that it also somewhat coincided with an economic boom and it's end somewhat coincided with the severe recession that followed. The general boom in the 80s happened in other comparable places as well though and they didn't experience nearly as big a fertility premium, and after the recession ended Swedish fertility largely rebounded to a sustained higher level at ~1.9, which of course is below replacement but still decent and sustainable in the medium term.

All this happened well before any large scale migration of higher fertility groups (that actually aren't that fertile once they get here it turns out).

Lastly, I don't think further efforts to boost equality will have much impact on fertility, I think other issues are far more important.

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