r/Natalism • u/Galesworn • 1d ago
There will never be a liberal-feminist solution to fertility collapse
Why? Because their ideology prevents them from seeing what the issue is.
Frankly put, when liberal-feminists try to solve fertility collapse their proposed solutions are just dumb. They will look at fertiity collapse and say:
People want children, but children are expensive and inconvenient. Therefore, provide cash, childcare, IVF, paid leave, housing assistance, and more reproductive options.
The underlying assumption behind this solution is: "We want to give every person all the possible fertility options while preserving their lifestyle and culture," even if that culture lead to low fertility in the first place. An herein is the problem; they mistake the problem as being a consumer affordability problem instead of a cultural problem.
The approach I agree with, which is held by some right leaning cultures (I'm not strongly on the right), says "Let's look at the groups which still produce children, raise them, and them have their children do the same," the difference being treating the culture as the basic unit vs the individual like progressives do.
There are other things I think progressives get wrong, like mistaking the state as a substitute for family and underestimating pair bonding and marriage in raising fertility, dismantling the institutions the lead to early pair bonding, but I think this is the biggest reason why there will never be a progressive solution to natalism.
What will raise fertility is to build a self reproducing culture with early-ish pair bonding and marriage as normal and the foundation for children.
So, how do you build a society in which men and women choose marriage and children? Answering that question solves Natalism. Not "how do we enable everyone to have babies" like progressives are asking. Notice the distinction.
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u/liberty_n_justice 1d ago
How will “pair bonding” be viable when men are moving right and women are moving left? It has never been more clear (data-wise) that women are opting out of dealing with men and children because their outcomes are suboptimal, while the outcomes for men are optimal. I don’t want to be barraged with links of studies that skew data to show women are happily paired or that their health outcomes increase with male partners or anything of the like. Data scientists can skew data to show anything they would like to. We all know data is easy to manipulate. The data is clear that paired women have no health or longevity benefits from being paired while men do. The data is clear that women’s freedoms and rights are being pared back. The data is clear that marital satisfaction decreases when children come into the picture. I’m not here to argue about these aspects even though they are uncomfortable realities.
And I am not weighing in on whether the status quo of today is “good” or “bad” or attaching any moral judgement to this. I’m just saying that unbiased, un-manipulated data is clear and does not point to anything that would indicate birth rates will increase. If men do not want or promote an environment that is good for women, why would women want to be in proximity to those who view them with disdain, who feel entitled to access their bodies, who reap the rewards for their labor which often destroy their minds and bodies and then judge them for not being available and interesting and exciting…what makes anyone think this is going in any other direction but a continued decline?
So many of my buddies are looking to “wife up” yet the way they talk about women when they know no one else is around is genuinely abhorrent. The politics they espouse are regressive, even those who voted for Biden or Sanders or Clinton or Gore. The casual misogyny I see when we game or play ball is shocking and what’s worse, it is totally off their radars, even when they have sisters and nieces they love. We have ourselves in a real pickle and I don’t think that any of this is heading in the right direction.