Culture It's embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom. - Addressing the actual cause of collapsing fertility: status.

https://archive.ph/BAVb8
Fertility is collapsing worldwide. We lack a coherent theory for why this is happening. As we shall see, the conventional explanations - changes in economics, housing, religiosity, contraception, and childcare - don’t fit the macro data and cannot be the fundamental drivers of the trend. Each of these factors may play an important role in certain circumstances, but none is the ultimate cause of the broader collapse. None has sufficient predictive power upon which to build effective policy. Once I have demonstrated this, I will propose an alternative theory, and use this theory to suggest policy which will significantly increase birthrates.

Economic interventions fail. Hungary spends an incredible 5% of its GDP on its fertility drive through the provision of financial incentives: significant loans, tax breaks, subsidized fertility treatments. Its dire situation has moderately improved, but overall fertility remains far below replacement levels, with a rate of 1.59 births per woman (fewer than the US at 1.66). A society needs a birthrate of 2.1 to sustain itself.

The Nordic nations offer further economic and lifestyle benefits to parents through exceptional state-backed parental leave and childcare policies, with the World Economic Forum describing them as “the best places to have children” in the world. In some, women can take more than a year’s parental leave, challenging the argument that the need to work is blocking women from having children. These countries also have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and they continue to fall.

Religiosity alone does not appear to have the answer. Even if you isolate the most religious population (weekly church attenders) within the most religious of the major Western countries (the USA), you find barely breakeven fertility rates, with churches unable to sustain themselves due to defections to secularism. The three most religious European countries (Romania, Moldova, Greece) all have negative population growth, with Greece’s fertility rate a catastrophically low 1.39 births per woman. Iran - which can reasonably be described as an actual theocracy - has an unsustainably low TFR (1.69).

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in the share of millennials who own homes (by 2022, more than 50% of US millennials were homeowners), but childlessness in the same cohort has continued apace.

The collapse in fertility rates in the Western world long precedes the advent of oral contraceptive pills, as well as endocrine disruptors and other relevant chemical agents which might be interfering with fertility health.

I could go on, but you get the picture: conventional explanations don’t work in any kind of consistent and predictable fashion, including the (seemingly credible) explanations most commonly given by the actual cohorts which have failed to have children. Failing to accept this leads to disaster, like South Korea spending hundreds of billions on economic incentives to have children, only for their birthrate to drop yet faster.

We are thus presented with an apparent paradox: a stable trend which continues to unfold across the West, in country after country, generation after generation, without an obvious causal logic. How is this to be explained?

I propose that there is, in fact, an under-appreciated fundamental cause of these trends, which manifests in the form of different proximate causes (real and imagined) across different geographies and times.

This fundamental cause is status.

Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.

In such a paradigm, if a tradeoff is to be made between having children and another activity which results in higher status conferral (an example would be ‘pursuing a successful career’ for women) then having children will be deprioritized. Because having and raising children is inherently difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, these tradeoffs are common, and so the act of having children is commonly and widely suppressed.

Here it is worth defining terms. What is status?

Status, or ‘social status’, is a key field within sociology. The term denotes a universal set of human instincts and behaviors. Status describes the perceived standing of the individual within the group. It denotes their social value and their place within the formal and informal hierarchies which comprise a society. It finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth).

Higher status individuals are trusted with influential decisions (power), participation in productive ventures (resources), social support (health), and access to desirable mates (reproduction).
Gaining status is a motivation for each individual to productively participate in society. Status is gained and maintained through approved behaviors (achievement, etiquette, defending the group) and through the possession of recognized ‘status symbols’ (titles, wealth, important physical assets).

For the group, status has utility when coordinating social actions: it serves as a proxy measure for attributes like probable competence, leadership capacity, and virtue.
As Will Storr describes in ‘The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It’:

We play for status, if only subtly, with every social interaction, every contribution we make to work, love or family life and every internet post. We play with how we dress, how we speak and what we believe. We play with our lives – with the story we tell of our past and our dreams of the future. Our waking existence is accompanied by its racing commentary of emotions: we can feel horrors when we slip, even by a fraction, and taste ecstasy when we soar.

As an explanatory factor, status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute. Ascribing primary explanatory status to any absolute factor is challenging because almost all material factors have improved over the last two centuries, while fertility has dropped. It is difficult to make a straightforward economic argument that millennials can’t have children for financial security reasons when their ancestors had a higher fertility rate while living in far greater poverty (and had such medical and food insecurity that they would have expected several of their children to die in childhood).

Status is also of existential importance to individuals. This is necessary for our inquiry because we are seeking a behavioral determinant which is powerful enough to influence fundamental human decisions like whether or not to reproduce. Sudden downwards social mobility is a well-established cause of suicide, and this effect is observable even amongst those who have experienced no change in their own material circumstances but have been ‘left behind’ as their peers make gains.1 Status is very important to us indeed.

If the pursuit of status was indeed the primary causal factor in suppressing fertility rates, we would expect to see:

1. Interventions which increase the status of parents to increase fertility;
2. Communities in which parents are higher status to have higher fertility;
3. High-status individuals who become parents causing others to follow suit;
4. ‘Social strivers’ to forgo children for higher status objectives;
5. ‘Status secure’ people (established elites) to have higher fertility;
6. Groups with unusual status systems to have unusual fertility patterns.

Unlike our earlier attempts to map global fertility data onto conventional explanations (the economy, religion, and so forth), we will see that the above list can be demonstrated to closely align with current realities, across countries and across time, even as proximate causes change. And, unlike those based on conventional explanations, interventions which center on status can quickly push a group’s birthrate far beyond replacement levels. (This is to be expected - status can offer a positive motivation for having children, as opposed to economic interventions, which can realistically only mitigate the burden of having children).

Let us turn to the first of the small number of European and Asian countries which defy wider fertility trends. This is the country of Georgia, which sits at the intersection of the two continents, with a population of about four million.

In the mid 2000s, Georgia spiked its birth rate, which went from ~50,000 to ~64,000 over the course of two years - a 28% increase, which it sustained for many years. The country went from poor to replacement-level fertility, and it did so without spending more money or changing policy. What caused this?

The evidence points to an unusual factor: a prominent Patriarch of the popular Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children onwards. Births of third children boomed (so much so, in fact, that it eclipsed continuing declines in first and second children).

This has widely been understood as a religious phenomenon, but I propose that it is better understood as a status phenomenon. Becoming associated with a celebrity figure who becomes, in some sense, an intimate part of your family is an event which is primarily attractive because of our desire to be elevated in status.

There is considerable evidence that people emulate celebrity fertility trends more generally. Individuals with high-status who become parents cause others to follow suit (which is why Taylor Swift’s pregnancy status is so carefully followed). The prevalence of out-of-wedlock births among celebrities likely played a key role in normalizing the practice for the general population, which followed their lead.2 This is to be expected: it has long been known that fertility is subject to strong mimetic effects, and that - even controlling for other factors - an individual’s chances of having a child significantly increase after a close friend has one.3

The implications of these dynamics are likely also true in the negative: celebrities and friends prioritizing other pursuits over having children probably suppresses fertility. Status is to be found elsewhere.

This takes us to the next test for our status thesis: do social strivers have fewer children? (I use ‘social strivers’ as a crude term for upwardly mobile but resource-constrained middle classes. Both the permanent underclass and the established elites have different fertility behaviors, as we shall see).

First, let’s note that goods which are essential for social status are in constant demand, even if they become very expensive. College attendance, for example, is near all-time-highs, even while most Americans now say that the education and career gains are not worth the extraordinary costs. This is because college attendance is understood as a necessary gateway into polite (high-status) society, whatever the cost may be.

Demand for children is not this robust. We are increasingly seeing that resource-limited parents would rather have a smaller number of children who secure places at elite universities than a larger number of children who do not. This is because - whether the parents admit it to themselves or not - the status reward of ‘having a child at an elite university’ is far higher than merely ‘having children’ (which presents a negligible status reward in our current society, and can be actively embarrassing if they ‘underperform’).

This is true for the Western middle classes, but it is even more true for the Asian middle classes, which - due to structural factors - are subject to more extreme variations of the same pressures and whose fertility has further fallen accordingly.

Take the canonical example of collapsing fertility: South Korea (with a catastrophic TFR of 0.68). The country’s birthrate continues to plummet even as the government spends hundreds of billions to provide economic incentives for parents.

Thanks to the Korean formalized systems of etiquette, language, and titles, social hierarchies are clear, explicit, and prominent. Because each person’s social status is unambiguous, individuals are incentivized to take whatever measures are necessary to ensure that their rank within the system is maximized. This process finds particular expression within the structure of the Korean economy, in which the only high-status employers are the small number of industrial mega-conglomerates like Samsung (the so-called ‘chaebols’). Gaining entry to and rank within these corporations has become of existential importance.

Fertility expert Malcolm Collins, who worked in the country, recently offered some fascinating reflections on Korean social pressures:

To understand how much the tribal system matters in Korea: you are not a person of equal status to other people if you don't work at one of the chaebols. The chaebols are extremely important to your social status within Korea… your life is spent to try to get that perfect test score so you can get into the perfect chaebol.

Competition is fierce, and hinges on each individual’s performance in the national exam which determines university places. This exam is so important that they ground all planes and clear traffic on the one day each year it occurs.

Each child must receive exceptional training to perform at this exam. This means that the small number of couples who choose to compromise their own status performance to have children must pay for extended, expensive tutoring, and this in turn precludes almost all couples from having large families.

If striving for status is causing people to forgo having children, we would conversely expect to see those people who have less reason to strive to have more children. To denote this new group, I will use the term ‘status secure’. In contrast to the upwardly mobile middle-classes (‘strivers’), this group is largely comprised of stable elites, who are remarkable for their existing wealth and possession of status symbols.

In the absence of a true aristocracy, our best candidate cohort for the ‘status secure’ is probably the ultra-rich (here defined as families with an annual income over $1m). This is also the only economic class in America with above replacement-level birthrates (about 2.15).

When I began studying this, I thought that I might have to perform careful analysis to disaggregate the status elements at play from the purely economic, since it might be that the ultra-rich can simply afford children while others cannot. It turns out that this isn’t really necessary, since the data speaks for itself. The next income bracket down - those families earning between $500k & $1m a year - have significantly below replacement-level fertility (about 1.85). I don’t think it’s reasonable to argue that these families ‘cannot afford’ more than one child.

My contention is that for the ultra-rich, the status game takes on different contours. The most salient feature of this difference is that at a certain level of wealth, the highest status activity for a wife is no longer to ‘have a career’; it is to move in the right circles, to attend the right events, to support the right charities, to have the most beautiful houses, and so forth. Importantly, while the striver choice of having a career forces a tradeoff with having children, this elite strategy does not. In such circumstances, well-bred children might actually be a unique status asset.

Our final test for our status thesis is whether populations with unique or isolated status systems have unusual fertility patterns. Here I will use ‘cultural difference and isolation’ as a rough proxy for groups having different status signaling systems, but later I will return to this subject to provide a more careful breakdown of the status mechanics at play.

As Adam van Buskirk describes in Industrial Civilization Needs a Biological Future:

Ultra-orthodox Jews have birthrates of up to 7 children per woman, even in the middle of major Western cities. The Amish also show the dramatic effects of a pro-natal subculture. While rural women, in general, have a TFR of around 2.08, Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking women without a phone have an incredible rate of 7.14. This is a fertility rate higher than Niger while living in the United States.

The ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the incredible fertility levels of these particular communities bear more examination, and to this I will shortly return. It is not merely that they are ‘very religious’. There is something particular about their cultural isolation and the structure of their social constitution which facilitates birthrates that other religious groups could only dream of. Spoiler: it concerns unique social mechanisms available for elevating the status of parents. We’ll need to understand what the features of their status systems are - more on this shortly.

At the national level, Mongolia supports the isolation thesis. One of the only European or Asian countries with a high birthrate (2.84), it has unusual demographic features for a large country. A very small percentage of the population is fluent in English (due in part to Soviet suppression). They’re ethnically and linguistically homogenous, geographically isolated, non-Christian, and have their own alphabet. In other words, our cultural mechanics have less purchase there than in almost all other Northern Hemisphere countries.

We start to see a trend emerge: the more isolated a population is from liberal modernity, the higher their fertility. And, our theory goes, this is due to the fact that in a modern liberal paradigm, having children provides a lower status payoff than competing pursuits.

But why should this be? What has changed over the last few hundred years? Why has having children become relatively low status, and how has this view spread around the world? What do we actually mean by ‘liberal modernity’?

Earlier I blamed the “basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization”. It’s time I spelled these out.

A useful model we can take from the literature is to classify the sources of status into three types: dominance, virtue, and success. Will Storr describes:

In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge.4

In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status. The primary sources of her status were therefore upheld by the Church (which held a role of social dominance incomparable to today) and her family (embedded within a formalized class structure).

In other words, the pre-Enlightenment woman derived her status from virtue and dominance games. These virtue strategies did not tradeoff with fertility, and likely supported it, with the Church teaching ‘conjugal duty’ and families demanding heirs.

The Enlightenment brought with it not just intellectual, economic, and scientific revolutions - it drove a status revolution. It challenged the dominance of the Church and aristocracy through the elevation of the ideals of equality, freethinking, and meritocracy.

In turn, this emphasis on the moral primacy of meritocracy changed the primary status game from dominance and virtue to success, with those who demonstrated exceptional knowledge or professional skill held in newly high esteem. Importantly, meritocracy is an individualist model of status. The status accrued by a prominent scientist does not necessarily extend to his wife or children.

This revolution was accelerated by increases in mobility, both physical and social. The Church’s imposition and enforcement of laws against consanguineous (cousin) marriage throughout the Middle Ages undermined the integrity of highly dense and isolated communities made possible by marriage between relatives.

This phenomenon is documented in the interesting study ‘The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation’, which follows the same logic:

With the origins of agriculture, cultural evolution increasingly favored intensive kinship norms related to cousin marriage, clans, and co-residence that fostered social tightness, interdependence, and in-group cooperation… Within intensive kin-based institutions, people’s psychological processes adapt to the collectivistic demands of their dense social networks. Intensive kinship norms reward greater conformity, obedience, and in-group loyalty while discouraging individualism, independence…
…we show that countries with longer historical exposure to the medieval Western Church or less intensive kinship (e.g., lower rates of cousin marriage) are more individualistic and independent, less conforming and obedient, and more inclined toward trust and cooperation with strangers.5

This is relevant because the successful accrual of status through virtue mechanisms requires one to be embedded in a largely static community with shared norms, who appreciate and reward sacrifices made for the group. Conversely, status markers associated with success (wealth, knowledge, skill) attach primarily to the individual and are fungible across groups and geographies, thereby retaining value in less dense networks.

Thus the Enlightenment initially opened up new status opportunities for men (success) whilst undermining those that supported women (virtue). We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

Over time, this set of status mechanics spread, intensified, and deepened, particularly during the process of urbanization during the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately this culminates in today, when the standard introductory question has become ‘What do you do?’. This is because the most effective way to gauge the status of one’s interlocutor is to understand their level of success within our meritocracy. Unfortunately, ‘I’m a mother’ is not a good answer to this question, because this conveys little status within a success framework, which is usually the operative one.
Women are, understandably, hesitant to be continuously humiliated in this way, and will make whatever tradeoffs are necessary to ensure they have a better answer.

This implies that, in our quest to increase birthrates by making having children high-status again, we have two possible strategies: find a way to revive virtue games, or find a way to establish having children as a marker of success.

This takes us back to the highly fertile Orthodox Jewish and Amish groups mentioned earlier. I propose that the fundamental driver of their birthrate is not merely their religiousness, it is their isolation and in-group preference which has allowed for the preservation of virtue games. Through the cultivation of intense social density and homogeneity, they have built what I call ‘mimetic infrastructure’, which enforces people’s full participation in their religious duties if they are to maintain standing in the group.

Unfortunately the productive cultural isolation enjoyed by these minority groups makes their way of life quite alien to the rest of us, so we cannot simply ‘join in’. So what is the policy solution here?

Western governments should pursue policies which give greater space for the rise of other stable groupings of people with sub-identities, within which alternative status ecosystems can flourish. As a first step, governments must do everything they can to foster the creation of further mimetic infrastructure which supports virtue games.

These cultural colonies must be uninterrupted, to the greatest degree possible, by the state imposition of universal Enlightenment success games.

Unfortunately for liberal readers, there is no way to do this that does not conflict with Enlightenment values. However, the good news for liberals is that none of the solutions require impositions on liberals - governments just need to ease restrictions on those who wish to pursue alternatives. Most of the obvious interventions would actually save the state money, even while raising the birthrate.

The support for these communities would involve:

1. Not forcing their young to undergo a liberal education;
2. Supporting religious and home schooling;
3. Ending universal mandatory examinations;
4. Ending mandatory sex education which condemns teen pregnancy;
5. Allowing children to work from a young age at local businesses;
6. Equalizing state support for religious colleges;
7. Ending programs which promote universal tertiary education;
8. Ending universal state incentives for women’s further education;
9. Not forcing communities to elevate women professionally;
10. Not forcing communities to take migrants (domestic or foreign);
11. Not forcing communities to cultivate diversity;
12. Allowing hiring discrimination;
13. Allowing business discrimination;
14. Ending state messaging championing women’s professional success;
15. Ending state funding to national liberal media outlets;
16. Removing hate speech laws that de facto mandate particular sexual ethics;
17. Ending inheritance taxes that force property sales;
18. Removing taxes (gas, cars) that raise the cost of children.

I’m sure this list will be shocking to some, but we’re in a shocking situation. Many Western countries are committing civilizational suicide and face economic collapse within the century. Millions of people who say they want children never get to have them.

Again - none of the above make negative impositions on groups who wish to continue following a liberal agenda, although support for liberal programs will have to shift from a national to regional level. This is less radical than it may first appear. Indeed, there have been key times in our recent history - when our countries were flourishing - that all of the items on the above list were the norm.

If followed, this program would be the beginning of an evolutionary race of tight-knit communities underpinned by virtuous mimetic infrastructure. Importantly, this would convey significant benefits (even if these benefits are not the progressive set that we are used to) on their women and their middle classes.

Our task is to clear the way for the most vital of these communities to flourish - and with them, our civilization.

---

1
Manning, Jason. Suicide: The social causes of self-destruction. University of Virginia Press, 2020.
2
Grol-Prokopczyk, Hanna. "Celebrity culture and demographic change: The case of celebrity nonmarital fertility, 1974–2014." Demographic Research 39 (2018): 251-284.
3
Balbo, Nicoletta, and Nicola Barban. "Does fertility behavior spread among friends?." American Sociological Review 79.3 (2014): 412-431.
4
Storr, Will. The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It. William Collins, 2021.
5
Schulz, Jonathan F., et al. "The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation." Science 366.6466 (2019).

 

[Ishtar]

I think this article is on the money, especially about Orthodox Jews. Mothers are REVERED in that community. There are special religious and non religious rewards for pregnancy, childbirth, etc.

Orthodox Jewish synagogues are incredibly loud and full of children running around screaming. Rather than getting angry at them, community members give them candy and toys and set aside kids’ rooms and backyards where they can scream their heads off while the adults pray.

It really makes you realize how demeaned mothers and children are in day to day western society. Children are not allowed to be loud, rude, free. They’re supposed to be tethered and contained, like dogs. If you fail to be a “helicopter parent” (impossible with more than two kids), you might as well just kys because everyone is going to judge you and yell at you like crazy.

I agree actually. Western society is actually very hostile to children and youth in general. Children are seen as a burden, and as this article notes an embarrassment. You are either poor and stupid, or some sort of weird hyper religious freak if you see children in your life as anything more than a secondary afterthought. They are shuffled in between eight hours in school, then a few hours home doing homework and then to bed to repeat the cycle. Parents have kids and then despise them-a screaming four year old won’t let me watch Netflix in peace. So you give them an IPad to shut them up.

The amount of spaces that are child friendly have drastically declined in the past 30 years, and in many cases-adults that never really mature (Disney adults) end up taking up space that children ought to have.

So yeah it’s a deep seated sociological problem. One I don’t think the PTB have any intention of solving.

 

[isalaide]

I wouldn't be able to do it. Not because it's tedious and repetitive, I can handle that. What I can't positively handle is the *fucking screaming about everything*. I can barely handle 3 hours non stop, but this always breaks my balls

Mind you we're talking about kids younger than 4 here. These don't happen all the time, but happen enough to drain the soul from my body and by the end of the day I'd rather be beaten up by a pack of feral niggers than suffer one more round. To ask me to handle that all day every day is like asking to put my ballsack in a vice. Women have an innate ability to bear this shit and not go ballistic which is what is required of parents these days. I can handle one or two shitfits during a day, but more than that? I need a break and silence. My wife doesn't. Which I am *very* thankfull for.

This isn't even touching the point that men *want* to be providers and there's no higher praise you can give your husband than "Thank you honey, good job"



My brother in Christ, you try that today, you go to jail quickly for domestic violence

Brother I see you know the struggle.

At one point I had a three year old, a two year old, a one year old, and two baby twins. The amount of general grizzliness and tears was completely developmentally normal - they are in fact pretty happy cheerful kids - but jesus there were five of them and therefore someone was always in tears. And if one twin cried that set the other one off 100% of the time which I had hoped was an old wives tale but in my experience was true. The dogs would come in and just look at me like "woman why is this situation not under control" and lick a few crying faces. This generally worked which did not improve my feeling of competence. The thought "well girl you have done this to yourself" was not particularly helpful at this time. I found occasionally going out to the garden alone for five minutes was necessary. They have mostly replaced tears with now a slightly constant low level bickering which is... actually also that rips my knitting. This is why I do not recommend stupidly close family spacing. It's not for their sake but for the general sanity of the person in charge. Part of the reason why I think it's important for one of you to be out of the house most of the time is that that person can tag in for the one whose neurons are fried after eight hours of.... toddler bullshit. You know what I mean but it's difficult to explain to people without the experience of someone basically nipping your ears for hours on end and the absolute necessity to respond to them at all times with patience and understanding and love.

 

[Justa Grata Honoria]

This is one of the things we truly can't just come back to. We've told women for decades that they are as smart as men and that they need to prove their value by going to college.

Reality is, women's average IQ is too low for them to pursue many careers and many of them don't have the emotional fortitude to deal with stressful situations, neither the stamina.

Basically, you'd have to tell half the population they aren't good enough for their current "dreams". Nobody's doing that.

If average womens iq is too low for college then definitely 90% of the men is

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-scottish-iq-test-scores-by-gender-reveal-the-greater-variability-of-male-intelligence/

As the chart shows, girls outnumbered boys for test scores in the middle – between 90 and 115, while boys outnumbered girls both for: a) low IQ scores below 90 and b) high IQ scores above 115. Further, the share of boys increased going out towards both ends of the distribution, so that boys represented 57.7% of the highest IQ scores of 140 (136 boys for every 100 girls) and boys represented 58.6% of the lowest IQ scores of 60 (142 boys for every 100 girls).

While we are at it , what is your opinion on women who were sahms divorcing their husband ? should they get alimony and half of his shit?

 

[Male Idiot]

Why not have 100 or 110 be the IQ you need for college? Why does everyone need a degree?
The average IQ is too low for college and it should only be needed for the rarest leadership positions. Doctors, scientists, CEOs, engineers etc.

You shouldn't need collage for mid management stuff or paper pushing. Just a 3 month training with a senior co worker.

 

[Super-Chevy454]

Why not have 100 or 110 be the IQ you need for college? Why does everyone need a degree?
The average IQ is too low for college and it should only be needed for the rarest leadership positions. Doctors, scientists, CEOs, engineers etc.

You can add also that question: why they created useless degrees like gender studies?

 

[YautjaWeeb]

If average womens iq is too low for college then definitely 90% of the men is

Ver archivo adjunto 6860295

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-scottish-iq-test-scores-by-gender-reveal-the-greater-variability-of-male-intelligence/

As the chart shows, girls outnumbered boys for test scores in the middle – between 90 and 115, while boys outnumbered girls both for: a) low IQ scores below 90 and b) high IQ scores above 115. Further, the share of boys increased going out towards both ends of the distribution, so that boys represented 57.7% of the highest IQ scores of 140 (136 boys for every 100 girls) and boys represented 58.6% of the lowest IQ scores of 60 (142 boys for every 100 girls).

While we are at it , what is your opinion on women who were sahms divorcing their husband ? should they get alimony and half of his shit?

The average woman is smarter than the average man, there should never be any doubt of that. And not only that, socially women are at least 10 times smarter and more adapted.

Women are excellent conformists and test takers too. They study the material as given and never go into the territory of doubt or dissent and expanding upon anything. Women just do their homework and get degrees. It shows. If the material is possibly wrong or can be vastly improved its still socially correct. This mindset is a huge advantage in addition to the female compulsion to network and own-group preference. Add the proclivity for constant deception sans guilt and pretending to be stupid to get men to do things and bolt some nice tits onto that too. Lots of smarts at play, always... when that fails, soma. It's not a surprise that common men have given up, they should.

Radfems or average fems are all correct the board needs to be tilted to get men to participate. The most looney I've ever seen anyone get is the run of the mill mild boomer abuser whose SAHM boomer wife got an education and a job to instantly out earn him before a boomer divorce. Cucking and fucking with other men is one thing, boomer men love that, but holy shit put a woman in some shoulder pads with a nice piece of academic paper and paycheck they'll go homicidal.

 

[Otterly]

Wait shouldn't they be happy to get whatever was fed to them?

Yes they should, BUT you made the wrong shape of pasta, and now they are going to cry for an hour.

At one point I had a three year old, a two year old, a one year old, and two baby twins. The amount of general grizzliness and tears was completely developmentally normal - they are in fact pretty happy cheerful kids - but jesus there were five of them and therefore someone was always in tears.

Yeah that’s the thing isn’t it? The nights when none of them have a nappy leak or wake up or wander in to your bed to kick you all night are few and far between and it’s extremely tiring.

Why not have 100 or 110 be the IQ you need for college?

It used to be, not as an explicit ‘pass this IQ test’ but the content of the average degree needed an IQ of about 115 or over to ‘get.’ By opening up college to all, the uk now has OVER half of kids go which means that many are now below average, and average is below what should be needed for a degree. It also devalues what are valuable societal jobs like the skilled trades, and making things like nursing a degree hasn’t been a success either.

Why does everyone need a degree?

They don’t. It was just a way to fudge the youth unemployment numbers and prepare for the transition from making stuff to a ‘knowledge economy.’ We never quite got there and now we have a service economy, no manufacturing and no knowledge based power either. Total fucking disaster, devalued all degrees. I saw this first hand. I graduated well before 1997 and post 1997 was working in a university. I saw first hand how the courses were totally dumbed down for the students - this was a science based department too, goodness knows what it was like in the humanities
@Atlas Sneezed it’s nice to hear a bloke actually say this, and appreciate what it takes to keep your head under provocation. Ironically I get praised for my ability to keep chill with difficult out clients at work, and often get asked how I do it. I’m never quite sure how to answer.

 

[The Ugly One]

But, there’s no need to go full Scorched earth on your career if you don’t want to - lots of women keep up professional certifications, keep in touch, do consulting, or bank shifts or whatever occasionally.

Do not EVER let professional certs expire. Even if hubby never leaves, he could get hit by a bus or you could find yourself insanely bored once the kids are in school.

 

[Free the Pedos]

I really don't see how being a Stay at Home mom is considered low status at this point. You're telling me that your husband makes enough money to support not only you AND your kids with enough money that you don't have to work? Sounds like you got a keeper.

Seriously women just respond to every one that makes a comment with: I'm sorry your so poor that you both have to work. And just watch the seething.

But she has to do icky house chores! And for a man! That's practically slavery! Couldn't be me...

As other commenters have said, people assume SAHMs are braindead and lazy. Also, most are not rich. Most are poor or making sacrifices to have a middle classish life while staying at home.

I have dealt with their children in a classroom setting. The girls were usually very sweet, but the boys could be awful when compared to all the other ethnic groups I worked with. To be fair, plenty of the boys were fine to very well behaved, but the awful ones left a lasting impression.

I’m guessing you’re an educator. Boys generally don’t respect secular educators in right wing orthodox environments. It’s not a high status area of study for them, whereas women are more likely to go out into the world and work so it’s good for them to know math and English and whatnot.

I'd go drive a garbage truck before I gave them up.

I’ve always wondered if it might be kind of chill to be on a trash truck team. You’d probably go nose blind to the smells after a while, and if you liked the guys on your team and could talk it wouldn’t be so bad.

 

[Sailor Kim Jong Moon]

This article is so fucking dumb. I don't think I know many women over 30, myself included, who wouldnt want to be a stay at home mom.


I mean there are exceptions, of course, my ex boss had 2 little kids and was a workaholic, shed go nuts at home. Also if you're young , you wanna work, you wanna make money, have fun etc, and you don't necessarily want to be a mother. So basically women who love to work, young women, and of course women who don't want to have children.

But you're telling me that birth rates are dropping cos women are ashamed to stay home and look after the baby? Are you fucking kidding me?

Looking after a newborn, then a toddler, is a thankless exhausting task on its own. Going to work on top of that, especially when you work for some corpo on steroids that sucks your energy out, sucks big time. Staying at home in this case is a dream come true, and a privilege. Financial privilege.

Not many can afford that. To indicate that women aren't doing that because feminism told them they have to be a career oriented girl boss is beyond retarded.

Also, I've said it before, will say it again, feminism gave women a choice, and feminism supports women making their own choices.
Whether she wants to be a childless CEO, or stay at home mom with 8 kids.

Also, I checked out the author. Lol expected, he gives red pill incel with breeding fetish vibes.

I disagree. Being a working mom is the dream. You get 6am-6pm to do as you please in SILENCE. Go to your desk job, sit in silence working on a task. Eat your food in silence. No interruptions. Just focus. Plus you have adults to talk to. AND you get paid?

Pick your kids up at 6. Drive home, feed them, bathe them. In bed by 8? Easy.

I love kids. But I also love focusing on a project for a long block of time. Having young kids as a SAHM is like gaining ADHD and losing all your adult friends.

Its hard. It’s boring. You don’t get to focus on anything. People assume you’re an idiot. Try engaging in a hobby or start a side hustle and people say “ugh, you’re just a bored house wife.” It’s not a privilege - it’s worse than desk job across the board.

Maybe a long time ago when women had community and shared in the work. But that’s gone.

Be a SAHM because you want to work & sacrifice for your kids out of love. Not because you think it’s going to be a dream. It’s not.

 

[BulkForceFive]

Seven pages and nobody's brought up John B. Calhoun's 'rat utopia' experiment??? COME ON PEOPLE LETS DO OUR JOBS HERE. Behavioural sink

"But rats aren't people!" No shit, and their behaviour in these collapsing rat utopias doesn't mirror the collapse of our own societies because of that. It's still a useful model for explaining what we see, even if it doesn't point to easy or palatable solutions.

 

[isalaide]

you made the wrong shape of pasta, and now they are going to cry for an hour.

I still remember the day it was "the wrong kind of cheese" and my eyes genuinely filled with tears. It had been a long day... week... month... we were in the Dreamtime when every day is somehow the same day and lasts forever and the same episode of Peppa Pig repeats and repeats

 

[Atlas Sneezed]

And if one twin cried that set the other one off 100%

I have no emote to relay how much this sentence makes me feel. It's like dogs barking. Except the screams pierce right through your gut

This is why I do not recommend stupidly close family spacing

I feel really lucky to have a multi-story apartament. Sometimes just taking one upstairs away from the other makes for like an hour of 2 of pure bliss where they JUST PLAY SILENTLY and you can hear your thoughts again. Then the other one decides he misses his sister and it's fucking operation Desert Storm

At one point I had a three year old, a two year old, a one year old, and two baby twins

God have mercy on your soul

Yes they should, BUT you made the wrong shape of pasta, and now they are going to cry for an hour.

I'll give you a better one. We leave the car whole family ensemble, the older one starts crying for the whole trip from the garage through the stairs to the apartament for no apparent reason. First sniffling then a full on battlecry. Then cries on the couch. 40 minutes later she FINALLY spills it out - she wanted to close the car doors by herself but mom closed them first.

 

[Otterly]

I have no emote to relay how much this sentence makes me feel. It's like dogs barking. Except the screams pierce right through your gut

There were some days when they were little that I wore earplugs, just to soften it a bit.

 

[Lidl Drip]

Yeah, this is I think a point that’s overlooked - as long as there is no penalty to walk out on a family, it will happen at high frequency. We can’t have no fault casual divorce and stay at home parents. Women also are stuck in a bind, because even if you want to have kids, unless you’ve got your own money or have rich suitors knocking the door down it is a risk to you. The path of least risk is your own money but us average plebs can only get that through having a career, which requires a degree at least, and so thats the path chosen. Men would also need to accept that if they walk out on the woman who left school at 18 to have their children and be a housewife, tanking any earning ability, they’re paying alimony. Stay at home mothers require the fairly rigid social structure we used to have wrt divorce and marriage, I’m not sure that would be very popular.

Good luck enforcing Alimony again, lmao. Many men don't even pay child support. Men want all the benefits of a SAHM but are not willing to give any security. Giving a woman half of the assets acquired during marriage while she stayed home and raised his kids is "divorce rape". They don't think the work she did at home entitles her to anything.

Plus putting a system in place that punished men financially for leaving their wife and kids makes it a lot more likely for him to decide to just murder her instead. Many men already see that as a great alternative to divorce. Or they just pack up and leave to an undisclosed location. There was a woman recently on Twitter who was looking for her husband who one day decided to just leave her and their FOUR kids and move to a different state, she had no idea where he went. She was looking for him so he could sign the divorce papers. Eventually he was located through social media, he had started a new family and not told anyone he already had one.

Plus it's not just if the man decides to leave you or cheat on you or become abusive, an alcoholic, drug addict or decide to gamble all money away at the casino so you can't buy food for the kids anymore. What if he dies? Sure if you are lucky you get life insurance pay out, but that's not enough to keep you and your kids going forever. Even in "the good old days" widows did not always have support from family or community. They had to find jobs and sometimes had to resort to prostiution or found themselves homeless and having to give up their kids to live with family members far away or in an orphanage cause she just couldn't take care of them alone. Nowadays we have even less support and men constantly argue single moms should not receive any support from the state because no matter the reality of how she became a single mom it's assumed to be her fault.

Being a SAHM is basically gambling absolutely everything on a man who can decide to fuck up your entire life at any point. Yes, this is something women need to be warned about by other women, because if women decide to listen to men they might get the idea that she can just "divorce rape" Joe Shmoe who makes 40k a year and somehow become a millionaire.

 

[Atlas Sneezed]

There were some days when they were little that I wore earplugs, just to soften it a bit.

Do you still have that jerk inside your body when you hear a toddler crying? Does it ever go away?

 

[Otterly]

Even in "the good old days" widows did not always have support from family or community.

They weren’t even allowed to remain unmarried in England until Magna Carta outlined the circumstances in which it was OK to not be married off again (clause 8 for anyone wondering.)
SAHM-ing can work out, but it IS a risk for a woman, and until we can have that conversation, and until there’s a social milieu in place that actively discourages family breakups, I can’t see women going back en masse. You’d need it to be an acceptable choice AND for it to be a winning strategy. For that to be the case the man needs to be loyal.
I think we need to have the ability to be at home with children when they’re tiny - there has to be a way, the scandi countries seem to manage long maternity leaves and part time hours when children are small. This culture of work work work for no benefit to your own household is not good for families. It’s not even very good for the single.
@Atlas Sneezed yes I do, and no it doesn’t. It’s very odd. You can hear that foghorn wail going off in Tesco from some random mum and kid and it makes you want to go over and help. hard wired in I think after a while. I also hear them calling for me in white noise. Not sure if that’s me being mental or a thing, but stuff like a bathroom extractor fan, can sound like voices

 

[Male Idiot]

Scandinavian ones have like 50% income tax.

It could be fixed, and fixed by any ideological group with a solution that appeals to their favoured moral principles, but it would nuke the economy.

Megacorporations eould never let it fly. They can import workers as much as they want. Why spend a fortune for a problem that can be solved by simply importing Abdul and Pajeet?

 

[YautjaWeeb]

Good luck enforcing Alimony again, lmao. Many men don't even pay child support. Men want all the benefits of a SAHM but are not willing to give any security. Giving a woman half of the assets acquired during marriage while she stayed home and raised his kids is "divorce rape". They don't think the work she did at home entitles her to anything.

Plus putting a system in place that punished men financially for leaving their wife and kids makes it a lot more likely for him to decide to just murder her instead. Many men already see that as a great alternative to divorce. Or they just pack up and leave to an undisclosed location. There was a woman recently on Twitter who was looking for her husband who one day decided to just leave her and their FOUR kids and move to a different state, she had no idea where he went. She was looking for him so he could sign the divorce papers. Eventually he was located through social media, he had started a new family and not told anyone he already had one.

Plus it's not just if the man decides to leave you or cheat on you or become abusive, an alcoholic, drug addict or decide to gamble all money away at the casino so you can't buy food for the kids anymore. What if he dies? Sure if you are lucky you get life insurance pay out, but that's not enough to keep you and your kids going forever. Even in "the good old days" widows did not always have support from family or community. They had to find jobs and sometimes had to resort to prostiution or found themselves homeless and having to give up their kids to live with family members far away or in an orphanage cause she just couldn't take care of them alone. Nowadays we have even less support and men constantly argue single moms should not receive any support from the state because no matter the reality of how she became a single mom it's assumed to be her fault.

Being a SAHM is basically gambling absolutely everything on a man who can decide to fuck up your entire life at any point. Yes, this is something women need to be warned about by other women, because if women decide to listen to men they might get the idea that she can just "divorce rape" Joe Shmoe who makes 40k a year and somehow become a millionaire.

This is the great thing about "love" and marriage, something designed around being permanent with permanent consequences for voiding it.

The perpetual female backup plan mentality in the form of education, alternate careers, side hustles. Yet chronically unmentioned is there's always a plan to use other men and potential paramours as additional backup plans to those other backup plans. Let's not forget the wonderful female "backup plan" study where at least half of women admitted to having a backup husband/simp on the back burner. Admitted to.

This is a lot of backup plans when women still obtain security from the state, employers, their families, anyone who sleeps with them or wants to sleep with them, their own children once they are adults and whatever else. Its almost the consensus female viewpoint is that society only exists as an amalgam of men to provide women with perpetual security and opportunities without genuine responsibilities or any obligation to perpetuate it. Which is not to say women shouldn't have reproductive optionality I'm saying they should reach for their long standing ideal of being treated exactly like men and therefore free to die on the street alone to the outcry of no one when they make a few bad decisions.

Don't know what century or legal system you live in but it sounds nice to be a man there. Is this an undeveloped patriarchal nation of some kind where men are free to always murder their wives and not pay any support without any risk of prison and asset siezure like there is in North America?

 

[Male Idiot]

Women also have the option to use sperm banks, no matter how ugly or homosexual they are.

So having a nanny, or a neet sister or grandma to look after the kids from the Navy freezer is an option too while Mrs Navy Freezer earns big bucks.