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There’s been a recent Men's Activism Discussion about the “Baby Bust”, the fact that the fertility rates in the Western world seem to be going down. We’re having less children so we end up with an aging population. This was prompted by an article, Fertility crisis: why you can't blame the bloke, in “The Age”, an Australian newspaper that suggested that you can’t actually blame men for this, as quite a lot of people do. The media and commentary that it comments on says there is an accusation that men no longer wish to take on fatherhood, but it adds that men cannot be unaware of the risk of marital breakdown or the long term cost. In other words, men can be casualties rather than beneficiaries of the marital marketplace.
There have been a number of articles along these lines including back in the middle of last year, a thing called The Baby Bust by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times</a>, referring to a Time article suggesting between a half and a third of 40 year old professional women are childless. She states “the more successful a woman the less likely she is to find a husband or bear a child. For men the reverse is true, men apparently”, it says, “learn to protect their eggshell egos from high achieving women. If only men would give up their silly desire for world dominance, the world would be a much finer place”. She then goes on to cite the bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees. Apparently they have an extraordinary happy existence. Why? What she says is in bonobo society, the females are dominant. Just light dominance she calls it. I suspect that is like being a little bit pregnant. She calls this light dominance, more like a co-dominance, equality between the sexes. So there you have it! You let these wonderfully superior females take over and everything is going to be alright.
On the other hand Dowd on Women and the 'Baby Bust': It's All Men's Fault by Glenn J. Sacks lists about six reasons why she is wrong, in particular including women always want to marry “up”; they never want to marry “down”. They’re going to run the companies now. They only want to marry men who at least run a company and preferably better than that. As he says the problem with Dowd and many modern women who think like her is that it never seems to occur to them that they, and not men, are the cause of their own problems. He ends up by quoting a friend, who said “My wife said her problem was her career success, but I was happy for her and her success. The problem wasn’t her career. The problem was her negative critical view of men. In the end, I simply got tired of being wrong all the time”.
There are other articles about the population decline, and how it seems to be men’s fault in all sorts of ways. One is called The Case of the Reluctant Male from the Sydney Morning Herald, and it says it is possible that men are reluctant to commit to fatherhood because there’s a reasonable statistical probability that they will not live with their children as they grow up. It concludes “the important question is for policy makers to help him change his mind”. It seems to me that they are saying that the man who thinks he’s going to become a wallet and thrown out father for his children doesn’t need to have anything changed about society, they just have to change his mind. In other words he should accept the situation and have children anyway.
There’s a woman called Taylor Marsh, Ally
McBeal, Sex Appeal, and the Baby Bust. She certainly agrees
that it is not men’s fault. She
says it is not the brains that scare the hell out of men, it’s the bad
attitude, bitterness and the Ally McBeal whining that takes the fun out of
dating. Her only solution however is that women can get accidentally pregnant,
and that seems to be a solution that doesn’t seem to be working too
well.
And it doesn’t seem to be just Western society, for example China has gone out of its way to reduce the population and it has succeeded. In fact, according to United Nations statistics, it will be declining from 2042. That may not sound terrible, but as the article says on China's Baby Bust, in the fast paced cities the one-child policy is effectively morphed into a no child philosophy. It’s said “They’re rebelling against all concept of family”, so we’ve got a bunch of young adults who just want to have a career. Because they’re not having children, they’re not terribly interested in the old people now, so they’re now even refusing to care for their elders. One official said “When we started our policy 20 years ago we had no idea of the problems that would follow. Now we must address the consequences”.
In other words, it looks a bit like whether it’s China or Australia
or any other country, the family can be a bit like Humpty Dumpty. Once you’ve
broken it, it can be very hard to put back together again; and the conclusion
that men are at fault for this is kind of ridiculous. It seems to me is that
the number one success of feminism is that they teach this hatred of men,
to women, so much so that women cannot see what is glaringly obvious to anyone
without prejudice. They cannot see what should be in front of their eyes,
that what they need is the mutual love, and it has to mutual, that they can
and should have for a husband and they can and should have for their children,
the children apparently they are not currently having.