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Questions for Men and Women
Why do so many women and men treat woman’s fertility as a sickness? Why do so many (oh, so many) people ask a person who is pregnant if she or her husband are planning to get “fixed” after the birth of the expected child, as though her fertility is a sign something is broken?
Why are so many ob/gyn offices festooned with posters, pencils, pens, mugs, clipboards, paperweights, lights, boxes, calendars, and charts manufactured by companies that make contraceptive pharmaceuticals?
Why does Planned Parenthood have the right in many school districts to have “educators” teaching students as young as kindergarten what sex is like using stuffed toys? Why do federal regulations require that minors are allowed to be given contraception without their parents’ consent through Title X funding?
Why was abortion the leading cause of death in the world last year?
Aren’t these things related?
Published in Group Writing
The solution to this is for her boyfriend to get a sex robot.
This is a complicated topic; one reason we often treat women’s fertility as an illness is because, as has been pointed out, pregnancy and menstruation often cause women to feel ill. Also, we live in a culture in which many people say that there is no real difference between men and women: fertility, especially when it causes women to feel ill, gives the lie to that. Any woman who calls in sick to work because of bad cramps or morning sickness is considered a problem: women’s fertility and full time work don’t always go well together, and if forced to choose between those two things, many people will throw women’s fertility out the window in favor of work. This is what happens when you try to turn women into men, and women who have apparently never had bad cramps or morning sickness may, in their ignorance, make it harder for those who do: “I have been pregnant 7 times and never called in sick!” is something employers will love to hear, but women who have a harder time of it won’t find it comforting.
I have never been pregnant, but since age 18, I have gotten excruciating cramps which are also accompanied by vomiting and passing out. When this first started, I immediately went to the doctor, and was told that there was nothing wrong with me, it was nothing serious, and there was also nothing they could do. I found that easy enough to accept, but some of of my employers didn’t. One woman who made her living as a restaurant manager assured me that there must be some pill they could give me to cure me, and of course there was: the birth control pill, which I didn’t want to take. But I didn’t try to explain that to her, because she would not have understood.
I am sorry if this is too much information, but there is a happy ending: I discovered somewhere along the way that Advil worked like a charm for me. I was raised taking Tylenol, which never worked for cramps, but Advil makes everything better-especially the liqui gels. It not only gets rid of the cramps, it also prevents the accompanying illness, for some reason. I am very lucky, for those who are not so lucky, I wish our culture were more tolerant of the problems some women face: expecting women to “juggle” 2 or 5 or more pregnancies and children along with a career is, I think, incredibly unreasonable.
It’s about what our priorities are, and children are just not a priority.
Are you mentioning your own anecdotal experiences or has there been empirical research done to show such a consensus exists?
I assume this is anecdotal but humans, as others have mentioned, have interest in the reproduction of other humans. Fertility can be seen in both a competitive manner, among females, and as a sign of mate quality to males. That behavior, having an interest in others fertility, was superior to behavior that did not care about fertility, because if you don’t care about fertility then you lower your chances of your genes being passed on compared to those who do care.
Because the school boards in those districts signed off on it. A majority of the locals affirmatively support it. Pretty simple answer right there.
The article mentions that the law is aimed at adolescents. Again this law was passed by Congress so it had the consent of the American people back in 1970 with the Health Services Act.
Because the goal of sexual intercourse is genetic continuity and some sexual pairings do not produce what is considered an optimal offspring for a number of reasons, or the circumstances are off as well. Perhaps the father leaves her, so she thinks she does not have the resources for the child, or the father pressures the mother. Perhaps she feels like the sexual act with that male was a mistake, her judgement of him as a quality genetic donor was wrong. Perhaps her parents feel that the male was not a suitable genetic donor. Probably a ton more possible explanations.
Average number of sexual partners has been increasing for most nations and the age of sexual debut has been declining. Which means more sex and therefore more sub-optimal sexual pairings.
There are several reasons for this increase in sexual activity. First is that technology has increased the means for human socialization drastically. An individual can speak with and get to know far more individuals today than in the past, along being able to physically meet them, and that means they can evaluated for mating quality. In fact there are several social media applications specialized in that matter. So getting to find mates is easy now, and in addition the population has increased also so the raw number of potential mates has increased.
Second is that the operating sexual ratio (OSR) has been changing, in several important ways. The female proportion of most nations has been increasing while the male populations have been decreasing. There maybe several reasons for that change in proportion. For one thing females are more likely to reproduce and therefore have genetic success, research has shown that for every one male that has lived and reproduced two females have done the same. It could also be that technological changes have reduced the demand for intensive labor and so the need to produce males is not as high as it once was.
The impact though is that males have greater influence on the sexual market. Human males have relatively high and continuous sexual libidos which means more pressure for sexual contact earlier in the relationship and greater quantities of it. On top of that, because of prior mentioned technological changes females have greater occupational opportunities, along with reduced costs in living, which means sexual competition for work and high paying occupations. That means the sexual relationship trade-off economy that characterized human sexual relationships in the past 1000 years or so is weakened.
Empirical research has shown that a necessary precondition for females to enter into relationships with a male mate is that he has some degree of material superiority compared to her, that he either has considerable wealth or is earning a superior income flow. So with sexual economic competition the number of “desirable” male mates has declined, which probably explains the increased rate of drug abuse and suicide rate in males of depressed areas where there is little economic growth and small female populations.
So there is a smaller cadre of males that are deemed optimal mates and the cost, sexual trade, for them is incredibly high to females. This results in more sex happening but fewer long-term sexual relationships. Compared to the less developed world of prior years, that were more influenced by the sexual desires of women, this results in more competition and less social cohesion.
Not a pretty picture but who said reality had to be nice.
Well I hope this isn’t true, cause that’s awful. People who fall outside of the ability of practical treatments for their ailments shouldn’t be viewed this way. If anything they should be more sympathized with. They are unlucky that the nausea medicine can’t help them like it does for so many others. I guess being unlucky is a kind of curse, but I would hope in modern times we could avoid such superstitious thinking. Certainly we know better than to think their bad luck could rub off on to us (which is one reason people would shun the unfortunate and “unclean” in the past).
The “fruits” of their labors, or the “fruits” that they are?
I guess it’s both . . .
That’s not the way I’ve observed any school boards to work.
Okay, NPR may not be the most trusted source, but 26 per 100k is still too many:
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/528098789/u-s-has-the-worst-rate-of-maternal-deaths-in-the-developed-world
Giving birth is still a challenge, but better now and in this country than even thirty years ago . . .
School Boards govern local education, unless there is some state mandate, and those elections are open to the citizens in that district. It’s a reflection of the public will in that area.
You’re lucky . . .
If it sounds that way to you personally, I apologize for that impression. I know that you, personally, and some others on the thread, don’t. Instead, we pray for one another’s families, including over medical stuff which can’t be cured, only endured.
In terms of sounding like that to some impersonal “you”, a personification of certain pro-fertility attitudes that I consider rather idolatrous — worshiping Gnon or GoTCHa rather than God — yes I do mean that impersonal “you” can treat women like that.
Or fixed. A non fertile couple works.
I always thought of fixed as being fixed in time, rather than fixing of something that was broken. People were fixed because there was no hope for a change from their current state.
School boards govern much less of local education these days, especially now that most funding comes from the state. State funding = state control. There are still some local decisions, but school boards mostly ratify the programs of the administration at a very general level, usually in very general way. The only time they might deal with the specifics is if a big enough fuss is made about it to threaten approval of local bond proposals, and local citizens don’t have so much leverage to do that any more. I used to go to school board meetings occasionally, and never saw them get into the specifics of something like this. If a Superintendent makes enough decisions unpleasing to the public, they might gently nudge him out and hire someone else. That’s a reflection of public will, but it’s a the sort of reflection you might see in a dirty, cracked window. And at their meetings, they ratio of time spent reading the tea leaves in the state capital to the concerns of local citizens is about ten to one.
It makes life more difficult. It doesn’t destroy it.
I know a very happy woman who got pregnant when she was 16, dropped out of high school and got her GED at the same time I graduated. She had supportive parents. She is married and has 3 boys now, working as a manager in retail. It isn’t ideal, but she’s better off than many who that didn’t happen to.
What is this?
Since you and @saintaugustine seem to have asked, Gnon a.k.a. GotCHa are principalities and powers of this world. They are
And these two are basically equivalent. They are nature’s telos. They may (or may not) aid in pointing to a telos beyond nature, but they are not that telos.
Lord Tennyson (among many others) realized that while the natural world is God’s creation and glorifies Him, it’s also true that “God and Nature [are] at strife” — a strife reflecting the fallen state of the cosmos. Nature
Nature, a.k.a. Gnon, a.k.a. GotCHa, knows no more.
In biology, Nature manifests as evolution, and “[E]volution is a blind idiot alien god that optimizes for stupid things and has no concern with human value.” Gnon can make use of Christianity as window dressing for a survivalist fertility cult, but Gnon has little use for Christlikeness — heck, Christ sired not a single child, making him a dud in Gnon’s eyes!
Gnon/GotCHa pursued as an end in itself offers no telos beyond nature, and is a Moloch. It isn’t the only manifestation of Moloch possible, but one of them. The essay “Meditations on Moloch”, which I’ve quoted a few times already, is really about the moral frontiers of artificial intelligence, but it’s also about that which “always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power.” (Maybe it’s now clear why this might have something to do with AI.) A Catholic neoreactionary had this to say about Gnon:
The argument “X—being a creature of God—automatically accedes to God’s will immediately” strikes me as obviously specious, even when X = Nature. Certainly it’s untrue when X = a human soul!
It can be tempting, especially to conservatives, to equate Gnon/GotCHa with the Christian God, and as I said earlier, Gnon can make use of Christianity as window dressing for a survivalist fertility cult: it’s one thing to observe that Christianity just happens to be friendly to large family formation, and large families aid in helping one tribe out-compete other tribes; it’s another thing to say the purpose of Christianity is that tribal survival. Treating Christianity like that, as a mere instrument of tribal survival, is worshiping Gnon. It is Gnon-worship, pun very much intended.
Sorry for the length of this reply — been composing it off and on today in between the Gnon-duty of mothering.
Thanks for the information!
I’m still largely lost. What has “gods of the copybook headings” to do with “nature and nature’s God”?
And who talks about this? Is this just some internet lingo?
I’m deeply suspicious that this sense of the terminology has any informed connection to historical language and concepts.
Even the Tennyson seems unconvincing; the conclusion to “In Memoriam” seems more like Boethius or Augustine: Nature serves the true G-d, and it’s we humans who know little regarding how. But I’m no expert on Tennyson.
I can testify to Locke: Lockean natural law ethics is nothing like this. Nature’s G-d is G-d.
The Declaration of Independence is very Lockean, and I’d need some pretty good evidence that anything of the sort was in the minds of more than a few Deists who may have signed it; it wasn’t in the minds of the orthodox Christians or the Deists who were informed Lockeans.
Oh, I get it. A Kipling poem.
Ok, but what evidence is there that Kipling thinks these “Gods of the Copybook Headings” represent a natural law and a merely natural God? I’m no Kipling scholar either, but I don’t understand why we should take this particular metaphor as standing for a particular theology or a particular theory of natural law ethics.
Kipling? I don’t think there’s a reason to believe Kipling in particular thought this.
The reason to do it is because “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” is such a popular poem among conservatives, and a popular way for conservatives to appeal to some natural telos which our society violates at its peril. That neoreactionaries, who are internet weirdos (you’d kind of have to be to come up with “Gnon”), specifically identified Gnon and GotCHa is relevant mainly because whatever else neoreactionaries get wrong, they get this identification correct. Kipling ends the poem with a note of warning (or satisfaction, depending on how you look at it):
The reason to obey these Copybook Gods isn’t because they love you and want your good. The reason is because they destroy you unless you do! They’re gods of necessity, not gods of Love. I wrote in the (epic) Silmarillion thread
The Copybook Gods aren’t big on transcendent longing, or indeed on any existential predicament beyond, “Are you or are you not biologically alive? Will or won’t your tribe survive?” Tennyson, on the other hand, was one of the rest of us, and recognized these questions weren’t enough.
Yes, Tennyson reconciles the tension between Nature and God later in In Memoriam. Importantly, though, Tennyson bothers to articulate the tension, to articulate that Nature is pretty lousy as an end in herself — that appeal to Nature alone to establish what is good is not enough:
Yeah, Nature sometimes does that. Nature is fallen. The Copybook Gods are fallen gods (principalities and powers, I tell you), and it’s OK for Christians to not be 100% OK with everything they do.
“that appeal to Nature alone to establish what is good is not enough”–yes, I think we agree! We agree on this as a truth in itself and also on this as part of the necessary interpretation of Tennyson!
Whether Nature is a rebellious god worked up into G-d’s higher order seems a less important issue in Tennyson interpretation.
I think it’s probably safer to say that even the passage you cite here is but a temporary failure to understand nature. “And out of darkness came the hands That reach thro’ nature, moulding men.” This poem could have been in my “Philosophical Ascent and Its Critics” course! It sure looks to me like Tennyson goes all Boethian/Augustiney and explains that nature happily serves G-d.
But, again, a relatively minor point. And, again, I am no Tennyson scholar.
We also seem to agree that the theology or metaethics captured by the “GNOC” and “GOTCHA” terms is not promoted in Tennyson. Where then in venerable sources is it promoted? Not Tennyson, not Locke, not likely the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps Stoicism?
Then there’s Kipling.
Continued:
So they correctly interpret Kipling’s poem in a way we have no reason to think Kipling thought?
What’s going on here? Are you saying the meaning of a poem escapes the intentions of its author?
In theory I’m fine with that, but I also have no reason to think anything in the poem itself points to a particular theology or a particular theory of natural law ethics. It’s just zooming in on one aspect of life, and is silent about whether and how it connects to the rest of reality.
They’re also metaphors. They are not gods occupying a position in anyone’s theology or theory of natural law ethics.
Not that I’m a Kipling scholar. But can’t see any evidence here that the notions captured by the “GNOG” and “GOTCHA” terms have any informed connection to his poem. How does a polytheistic metaphor used in a close-up look at one aspect of life support a theory in theology or a theory in natural law metaethics?
I’m not even sure if we’re disagreeing on anything much here, Midge–beyond subtle questions on the interpretation of poetry.
This is still the main point:
I’m really hesitant to even walk into this… but I feel like Midge is mis-representing a view point that she has a strong aversion to.
I think she thinks conservatives elevate the natural over God, and her evidence is certain segments of conservatives promoting a certain ideal of male and female roles. (Is that accurate, if simplified?)
Gee, if that’s what’s going on, my doubts whether GNOG and GOTCHA notions have any connection to Kipling, Tennyson, the Declaration, etc. are miles off topic.
Augustine and Aristotle might have a place, but I want to make sure my simplification isn’t a straw man before I take a crazy dive.
I see this hesitancy doesn’t include hesitancy to tell me I’m misrepresenting something — just hesitancy at having to justify the claim that I am, I guess.
That some conservatives do this, or do it in certain milieus, comes reasonably close. It is not something that conservatives always do. (Obviously!)
Not exactly.
Perhaps I rarely emphasize that I’m sympathetic to a soft, statistical complementarian approach, but now I just have, meaning I’d encourage others not to be too tempted to locate disagreement within “Midge merely misunderstands male and female roles”. This isn’t just about roles between the sexes. It’s also about who and what is “unnatural”, what kind of frustration receives the dignity of social existence on the right —
It’s related to how far we ought to apply Greek philosophy to Christianity, but more importantly, it’s addressing how the conservative man on the street (or rather commenter on Ricochet) tends to intuitively understand “natural” and “unnatural”, no matter what trained philosophers say about it. John Nerst makes a brilliant distinction between postmodernism, rightly understood, and what he calls the Pomoid Cluster:
Well, that’s the pomoid blob.
I believe that similar politically-charged blobs form on the right over “natural” human roles (or at least what tradition calls natural), including the roles between the sexes. Such a blob smears together what’s really clusters of interrelated ideas more amenable to scholarship and analysis, not all of which agree with one another completely. I’d say I’m pretty well known around here for being vocally pro-chastity, I advocate a more Tocquevillian approach to sex ed, and so on. Evidently I find much to defend in this cluster, though I’m leery of what happens when resolution is lost and only the most politically charged features from all over the “natural human roles” network can be made out.
Finally, I’ll add that it’s much easier to encourage people to conform to a social role than it is to talk them into believing they’re actually happy in that role. I don’t consider happiness an end in itself, so it’s not… necessarily bad… if women who aren’t innately convinced childbearing is “their role” bear children anyhow and have a fairly miserable time of it. As long as they’re not so miserable they do permanent damage to the rest of the family, who cares? Maybe no-one does, and that’s OK. Not being happy isn’t a reason to shirk one’s duty, after all. But if we want more women to do their duty, that means accepting that’ll include women who aren’t about ready to rave about how wonderful and full of sunshine and puppies and rainbows their duty is. Indeed, that goes for any duty we’d like more people (whether male or female) to do more of.
I don’t think they’re miles off topic. The peace we make with the natural order, is it an uneasy truce? Must we be happy about it? Are Christians called to values which make the truce an uneasy one? (My answers: yes, no though happiness has advantages when it can be managed, and yes.)
Not likely.
But it looks like that if we think that “nature” in one of the usual senses of the term is the same as “nature” in natural law ethics. Sometimes they overlap, but they are not the same.
What sense of the word “natural” do you mean here?
Three available sense of nature, not to be equivocated:
A: how things work when we don’t interfere.
B: the proper function of something.
C: the laws governing the world.
Natural law ethics is traditionally concerned with B.
In Daoism that also involves A, but there’s little or no emphasis on A in Aristotle.
Boethius is interested in C in the Consolation of Philosophy, but it’s not the same “nature” as B, which is the overriding point of his book.
It looks to me like the Tennyson poem in question is about G-d and C, not really about A or B. (But I’m no Tennyson scholar and haven’t read the whole thing in years.)
Catholic natural law ethics as I understand it is all about B, which involves A when interference has a bearing on proper function. That can weigh for or against interference: With colonoscopies, interference is to check on, protect, or restore proper function; with contraception, interference is usually to prevent proper function.
Locke and the Declaration–a different kind of natural law ethics. We could probably characterize it as focused on C primarily, but with an emphasis on moral rather than physical laws. I think there also is an idea also of humans as developing and managing creation as part of our proper function. Some B with a resistance to A.