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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?
Discussion (40)
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And small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are no longer small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri!
But seriously--great post.
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Outstanding post.
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And all the congregation said, "Amen."
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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??
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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.
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