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Reproduction Ends as the Sexes Merge
After decades of fear-mongering about overpopulation, the world is very belatedly coming to the realization that the wealthy world has stopped having children. And it poses an existential risk for civilization: No children = no future.
There are many reasons offered for this: economic (kids are no longer a net asset, but a net liability), birth control (trivial to limit now, but even Adam Smith in the 18th Century pointed out that the fertility rate among the rich was much lower than the fertility rate among the poor!), hedonistic narcissism, etc. I have even written on the need for purpose and meaning (i.e. Hamas and anti-semitism are the reason Israel is the only wealthy country where secular women have 3+ children).
But what if there is something else as well?
I offer that people are comfortable with others who are the same – but we are all attracted to The Different. (To me this partially explains, all by itself, why teenaged girls befriend gay guys and vapid boys, but women seek out men.)
But society has been blurring the differences between the sexes for many decades. Men are no longer men, and women are no longer women – and neither is all that titillated by members of the opposite sex who are essentially as distinctive as puréed mush. Women, whether they admit it or not, want to make babies with men who look and act like men. And men, beyond any doubt, are attracted by feminine women.
Professional and successful career women don’t want to make babies with Beta Males. Men who might otherwise want to procreate are turned off by women who are competing with them – so they check out, instead.
Is the merging of the sexes, including in the home as well as the academic and professional worlds, a major driver for the threatened end of civilization?
Published in General
And small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are no longer small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri!
But seriously–great post.
Outstanding post.
And all the congregation said, “Amen.”
You imply the “blurring” is a cultural thing and that women wanting to “make babies” is not a cultural thing. I think it is the other way. The sex drive in males is very strong normally, but we are seeing a physiological drop in “maleness” among men. Testosterone and motility are plunging and that is not a construct. Conversely, the idea of becoming a mom has become a bad thing among Western women, who fear the cost, the effort, the climate impact,…
We need to work on fixing the culture, so that young people want to couple and have a family. We also need to work on the medical situation of dropping “maleness” in men.
Lastly, people worry about a plunging population. At what point in America’s history was population the perfect size? Is more always better? Are we just worried about Social Security solvency? Or, are we worried about a ground invasion from Mexico??
I met a demographer from Connecticut in the 1970’s back when the silly book The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich was still in vogue who told me that nobody seems to realizes that extreme poverty causes higher birth rates and not the other way around. When social order breaks down, family and kinship is everything. Intermarriage with other clans for influence and protection, kids to grow up and care for elderly parents and the numeric need to overcome high infant mortality rates together drive high birth rates–and make it a rational choice, not the unthinking ignorant behavior of unenlightened lesser sorts.
Enormously expensive efforts to control birth rates in poor countries (programs with the overtly racist heritage of Planned Parenthood) were far less effective than the Green Revolution to increase crop yields, civil engineering to provide roads, water and sewer and the rule of law to protect property. As wealth increases kids become a cost not a resource. And if fewer babies die, you don’t need as many to have a surviving family of intended size.
I know young people who are terrified of marriage and family as if infringements on their social life was too great a price to pay. And divorce too great a risk. I hope that is not common. It is certainly not sustainable.
I don’t see it as a merging of sexes. Young women seem to be struggling to succeed in male-created employment niches yet still be seen a feminine. Young men have increasingly been denied the sense of mission that is integral to manhood but without any diminution of sex drive. It is a if society wants to create more predatory lounge lizards and paid sperm donors.
Somebody also needs to solve the mystery of the worldwide decline of testosterone levels.
My long-term girlfriend and I made eight kids and have 17 grandkids–we did our bit to offset the great Western birth dearth.
Children are not just about demographics or economics, as important as they are.
Children set the entire mindset of a society. If we have children, we look to, and plan for, the future. We learn to delight in learning and teaching. Young people try new things and take risks and lead innovation and creativity.
I walk the walk – we had as many kids as we could, and our kids in turn are procreating. Children are the way in which everything we hold dear (including ideals) are perpetuated and developed. In every way, if there are no children, there is no future.
It may be that the total population declines while the not-interested-in-having-children subset eventually, hopefully, drops to zero. But at some point, if those remaining do have children, the numbers stabilize and then rise again.
Mark Steyn discussed this almost 20 years ago in “America Alone” and in interviews regarding the book. My favorite was in December 2006, on Northern Alliance Radio Network. I saved the podcast.
“Demography is destiny.”
I think that you are factually incorrect about Israel. According to this article from the Times of Israel in June of this year, reporting data from 2020, the birth rate among Israeli women was:
The overall birth rate in Israel was 2.9.
So the claim in the OP that “secular women have 3+ children” in Israel does not appear to be correct.
I do think that you have a good point in the OP, iWe, except that I don’t think that identifying it as the “merging of the sexes.” The change that has caused birth rates to plummet, I think, is feminism.
Feminism has two major manifestations in this regard. First, it involves women acting like men, though generally not being very good at it. Second, it involves undermining male virtues and achievements.
In other words, “the merging of the sexes.”
Right you are. Thank you for the correction.
2.0 still leads every OECD country, I believe.
I think I read in The Economist more than ten years ago that all the birth control chemicals women take had filtered into rivers and lakes and were affecting fish.
But don’t nobody ask if them pills are affecting human males.
I’ve seen that too, about estrogen “leaking” into the environment. In fact, I’ve wondered about it possibly causing the transgender phenomenon. However, I don’t see how that would affect testosterone.
Explosion alert: I’m going to saying something about Rachel Carson so read no further if your blood pressure is a problem. :)
I read Silent Spring about thirty years (about 25 years ago) after it was published. She made some very interesting points that have been lost in the DDT controversies. She explained at length how the reproductive system is the most sensitive in the human body. And the questions she raised about DDT could apply to any of the chemicals used in modern life, frankly.
At the time I read it, I already had a lot of questions about the human reproductive system and what may have been messing with it. Things I had noticed:
The C-section rate was way too high. I had had three of them, and it seemed like so many of my friends had had C-sections too. The anti-doctor press had decided that it was obstetricians who didn’t want to miss their golf games or mothers who wanted to control the date and time of delivery. I didn’t see any of that. I didn’t know a single doctor who would ever in a million years perform an operation that was medically unnecessary. Certainly mine wouldn’t.
Then there was the early menstruation for young girls–a year or two earlier than was true historically. All of the pediatricians were seeing it.
There was a significant and noticeable uptick in breast cancer. It showed up strongly on Cape Cod, which is why the Silent Spring Institute took up residence here. Some scientists believed it was caused by chemicals leaching into our groundwater from the local military base, Camp Edwards. And there were some who thought that, when that number started to go up, Cape Cod had embarked on an aggressive mammogram program, and some (including me) wondered if that program was exacerbating the problem. I can’t believe that it is a good idea to bombard the most sensitive tissue in the human body with x-rays. At any rate, no one ever found a good answer.
And finally, the infertility rate was at 10 percent when historically it had been at 3 or 4 percent. Again, many possible explanations.
Yes, yes, yes, I’m not a doctor or a scientist, and I know there are other explanations for all of these changes. A positive change in our nutrition could explain a lot of it. However, taken together, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out there was something in the environment that was confusing the sexual response wiring in some way.
I love chemicals. I wouldn’t be alive without them. And I want to bring back DDT. But cancer is not the only health problem out there in the environment of which we are a part.
I’m not saying I believe any of this. It’s just some things I’ve been observing on my own or reading about and wondering about. Please do not misunderstand what I’ve said. I’m not putting out conspiracy theory of any kind. It’s just my mind wandering to possibilities. :)
But that’s why I’m curious about what you said about the hormone pills affecting men.
I’ve always rather enjoyed merging with the other sex.
Third working your career until you are bored, then having a kid. It should be the other way around. Have kids young, then start a career and work until you are bored. If a woman waited until age 37 before diving into their career, should could have 4 high school age kids and still work 30 years before retirement. Seems like a full life and a life fulfilled to me.
Breast cancer risk increases with more menstrual cycles. Females start earlier and do not lose cycles to being pregnant and breast feeding like they used to. Hormones are very powerful!
I thought that was true of uterine cancer. But I did not know it was true of breast cancer. At the time, some people wondered if it was the bottle feeding trend. Breastfeeding hadn’t caught on yet to be as popular as it is today. There was some evidence that women who breastfed their babies tended not to have breast cancer.
Yours is an interesting bit of information I shall add to my list. :) :)
I presume, then, not a very good merging.
People need to stop lying to women, pushing college debt-slavery and soul-crushing “careers” in bleak cubicles. Time is not on a woman’s side when it comes to fertility; they typically hit peak fertility in their late teens, which lasts about 10 years until their late twenties. At that point, from her late twenties to early thirties, it will go into decline. From her mid-thirties onward it plummets like a stone.
As a rule, women should be married and pregnant with their first child by 25 years of age, if not sooner. IMHO there is something profoundly cruel in not telling women this.
Quite so. A colossal mess.
They started Social Security and Medicare at gunpoint even though they have been actuarial disasters for decades. They can make people procreate FICA slaves at gunpoint.
They started Social Security and Medicare at gunpoint even though they have been actuarial disasters for decades. They can make people procreate FICA slaves at gunpoint.
We had a very smart local talk host that always insisted that 2/3 of GDP growth came from population growth. He said it multiple times. Seems serious.
This whole post is excellent, but that is just outstanding writing. lol Well done.
Now describe this dynamic when one of the parents has narcissistic personality disorder. lol
It’s a hell of a fact if it’s true.
I find the stupidity of the way they started and ran Social Security and Medicare versus the procreation rate and what influences it amazingly incredible. Then, separate from that stupidity, you have all kinds of other problems if people don’t procreate.
[ devil’s advocate mode = on ]
Yabbut, that’s only the legitimate fertility rate among the rich.
Their bastards were most likely counted in the fertility statistics for the poor.
[ devil’s advocate mode = off ]
Adding this to my list of favorite quotes: “. . . teenaged girls befriend gay guys and vapid boys, but women seek out men.”
Long term hormonal birth control also has negative affects on women. Not just potentially men. From my mother this has been known for many years. It apparently was not initially intended as a long term medical course. It was supposed to be used as a stop gap measure or for shorter terms. The hormonal birth control has side effects.
More recently girls and young women have apparently automatically been influenced to get on “the pill” without being properly warned of the side effects. It seems in general there have been issues with patients being given treatments and not being fully informed. There’s actually a social media tread of women posting about how they were surprised that hormonal birth control has side effects after being on it for periods of time. Hippie type women tend to shun hormonal birth control more than others center left
Masculinity will never go out of style. Femininity will never go out of style. You can take that to the bank. These are not determined by social constructionism, but instead something more deeply engraved into humans. You can fight nature, but it’s still there.
This idea of the “sexes merging” only further highlights the reality of the differences, especially when it comes to sexual selection. As humans we still are driven by a lot of instinct. And many women have no conscious idea of why they do what they do, or chose as they do. This leads at times to Feminists feeling conflicted and she doesn’t know why.
The feminizing of men of society has only increased the value of sound, successful masculine men. More women then have to compete for this more desired segment of men. For certain men getting women has never been easier. Yet for certain men getting women has never been more difficult. And for many women becoming satisfied has been perhaps never been more confusing.