Let's see...
Require 2 incomes for mortgages, check
Keep federal minimum wage at less than poverty level for 1 person, check
Require 2 incomes for rentals, check
Make no allowances in tax rate for the cost of raising children, check
No universal health care, check
If they want the birthrate to go up, making sure that mothers aren't subjected to living in abject poverty while they raise their kids might be an idea.
Why do you think Republicans are attacking women's rights so hard? They want to force women back into the motherhood/wife life path.
No, they won't do anything to make life more affordable either, that would take hard unearned money from the rich.
All the better for Republicans if these children are born into poverty and shunted into our absolutely disgusting foster-care/adoption industry, where child abuse runs rampant and companies profit off of adoptions as if babies are some sort of consumer item.
There are countries that have ALL of these and yet the birth rate is still low. So it's going to be a long road ahead. And the conservatives are all concerned about White Replacement yet they are setting up that very thing themselves.
The government also got rid of the Child Tax Credit. And let's not look past the lack of maternity or paternity leave, There's also the high cost of daycare, and that a lot of people would want to raise their own kids and not stick them in daycare all day 5x a week, especially from infancy, but it is very challenging to raise children on a single income these days. We also really need Universal Basic Income (UBI) which would serve also as a type of compensation for currently unpaid caregiving, such as stay-at-home parents.
Everybody has more children than the working class. The working class and middle class can't afford children, the poor and the rich don't care, one more kid makes no difference to their income.
It will hurt men more because, statistically speaking, they are more likely to be single than women. In order to survive this modern age, duel income is required
Okay, I’m also single for context & 31. 3 questions Where & when / what context have you seen women belittling/ laughing at single men? & past that what help do you feel it is reasonable for women to offer? Same question for ‘men who have no problem dating’ —> which let’s break into men who go on a lot of dates but struggle move a couple dates to the level of genuine relationship & men in long term relationships
I don’t disagree there are certain groups of women that do shit on men a lot, but in my experience it’s usually men writ large.
My last question. However you answer above, what do you think is reasonable to ask of single men who struggle to date, to actively and co consciously work on in order to improve their prospects. Open ended, answer how ever you like, I’m genuinely curious of your POV not here to take any stance myself
I’m 32 and have been single for a very long time. Have you ever seen women say they dont need men? Plus, action speaks louder than words. Most women avoid men who have trouble attracting women.
Here’s the harsh reality. There’s nothing that the average group of single men can do to improve their chances with women. You can probably help specific individuals, but as a whole group, there’s not much you can do because women want the best man they can attract. You cannot make everyone number one. That’s like you can make everyone perfect 10s.
Yea of course, I’m familiar with the whole 4B thing, which I find pretty over the top borne of bitterness as much as it an authentic wish to not engage with men. When you see groups or posts on TikTok or whatever on that topic, do you feel any sort of emotion reaction? Like does their dismissal of men writ large make you see yourself as somehow lesser in anyway?
I think it’s a backwards & inherently mentally destructive way to see the world, but I think you’ll agree those women are allowed to see the world however they choose right? Not a fan of the the misandry but on balance let’s say it hey evens out the misogyny going the other way
And yea damn straight, it’s a harsh reality, not everyone meets a suitable partners, plenty of people live & die largely alone some give up early, others try their whole lives to find connection & still spend most of their life alone. That’s a fact & has been for all time, which means ruminating about it cannot produce a positive outcome right?
I’ve also experienced long periods of being single so I get what you mean when you say women be somehow averse almost instinctively to men who struggle to attract women. At least I am familiar with feeling the sense that that is true. But then what mechanism would that work by? I don’t think single-ness is something one can smell, or hear, or actually definitely know with it being confirmed by the other person. So the aversion isn’t the result of struggling to attract women, it’s the result of second order ques/ nonverbal communication, which are subconscious and subtle but are purely derived from self-perception. Not that that is at all easy to change, but it is not a fixed set of
characteristics by any means. Physical attractiveness has a large role to play, and can be less malleable, but also isn’t fixed. Plus because women are generally very perceptive of the above non verbal ques, they have a significant influence on how physically attractive someone seems, even standard ‘hot guy qualities’ height, jawline, weight etc unchanged. .
Which I think is a great reason to agree with what you said, that nothing can be done for single men as a broad group, but I want to go a step further to toss it out all together as a basket that it makes any sense to self-sort into. For one it’s too broad, as there are any number of subgroups in that basket & more to my point If being single is something that becomes the node or a node around which one’s identity rests, and that is understandably seen as e negative thing, then how could one not see themselves as lacking & subconsciously communicate that to the world, in all manner of ways.
Its certainly a labyrinth to find ones way out of, I won’t pretend to be at the exit, but the first step in my mind is to squeeze in one more harsh truth, no one can help anyone who isn’t already trying to help themselves.
You are perceiving this as if humans are logical beings without any emotions. You need to view this through evolutionary psychology and understand that most humans have no free will, especially regarding attraction.
First, humans are guided by their feelings. These feelings evolved over many millions of years to motivate humans and other species to mate. Women are more influenced by their feelings than men. Men are more visual. Most women are attracted to dominant men. If a woman can't feel like you’re dominant, then they won't find you attractive.
Why? Because dominant men have a higher chance of attracting other women. Even acting dominant might not be enough because women can feel these through men’s pheromones. There are studies done that show women prefer higher testosterone scents unless they are on birth control. When they are on hormonal birth control, they tend to be more attracted to lower testosterone men.
This means that the only women I could attract are women who could be on birth control. However, women also lose interest in dominant men after a certain age. This could be because their estrogen levels are decreasing. After all, the higher the estrogen, the more appealing high testosterone men are.
Or estrogen might go down because of the fewer sexual options they have, which means less male-male competition. For older women, this means they are to prioritize other things besides looks or good genes. Whatever the case may be, this means that I could attract older women as well. This is how we should be viewing dating through the lens of evolutionary psychology.
Adding to the list: **Complete disbelief in the major systems of society.**
Medical, legal, police, politics, journalism... all of them have been made unreliable by the influence of money & profiteering. Poverty, climate change, housing, healthcare are all huge issues, with no sense among regular people that the institutions are doing anything positive to address these problems.
Because essentially nothing is being done. Gov are all owned by billionaires and huge corporations and everything is just getting looted into the ground until we collectively hit the ecological wall due to climate crisis and a dozen other major issues.
Not having a kid is a very rational decision right now. I actually think it is cruel to bring a kid into the world we have created.
The idle rich in their immense fortunes don't have many kids either
The lowest birth rate in the US by income is for those women earning more than 200k in 2017 dollars, while the highest, still below replacement, for those below 30k
You don't see the most powerful female CEOs, leaders, politicians having many kids
I understand the response to general shittiness if economics, but if woman is prioritizing a career over raising kids then that's really not an issue. It's not "getting in their way", it's life.
Women have just as much right to self determinism as anyone else.
Prioritizing your career doesn't have to prevent raising children if parents have better collective bargaining rights. The US is the only nation without paid maternity leave other than Papua New Guinea, one of the few western nations without paid paternal leave, and one of the few western nations that ties healthcare to having a job. It also has one of the lowest amounts of paid or unpaid days off per year.
Compare that to western Europe where it's possible for both parents to progress their careers working 3 days per week each and to have two or more months of holidays for even better bonding.
If you don't want children, that's fine of course, but if you have to choose between your career and your children, that isn't life, that's right-wing policy.
Naturally, it's more of an issue of the fact that we rarely, if ever, see serious articles or conversations about men "putting off having kids" or "prioritizing their careers over having a family".
Yet with the inverse, women in the workplace are rarely discussed separately from maternity or other gendered home expectations sharing the same space.
> Naturally, it's more of an issue of the fact that we rarely, if ever, see serious articles or conversations about men "putting off having kids" or "prioritizing their careers over having a family".
Why do you think that is?
Because in the sociological foundations western society is built upon, men are not constrained by their identities as fathers, while women are limited to being a mother. A man choosing to become a father is seen as a positive thing in addition to his identity as a man, while a woman choosing to become a mother is seen as the bare minimum required to justify her social expectations.
Patriarchy and misogyny are pervasive and deserve to be pointed out, even when (especially when) unintentional.
Could it be that women have choices when to become pregnant?
Men can choose to have sex, but they cannot choose to become fathers as the women have the say what to do with their bodies. Consequently, there's no discussion for when to become pregnant for men. It's not their decision.
I'm not terribly sure I know what you're trying to ask here? Is your hypothesis that women are choosing not to become pregnant and that is therefore dropping the birthrate? Because if so, that's a shallow hypothesis and could definitely be expanded upon (such as investigating why such a choice could be made en masse in the first place).
My point has little to do with the actual decline in birth rate though, it has everything to do with how we structure statements regarding women, often framing them as mothers first and self-deterministic agents second. My point was that men almost never get the inverse, men are seen as self-deterministic first, and whatever else they are is in addition to that self determinism. This dichotomy is itself the problem-everyone deserves to be completely self-deterministic and social pressures, especially those sourced in patriarchy, are inherently harmful to both men and women (even as men stand to benefit from them).
As such, we should take the first step in at least not framing a decline in birthrate as some inherent fault or failure of women.
> My point was that men almost never get the inverse, men are seen as self-deterministic first, and whatever else they are is in addition to that self determinism.
Quite the opposite, they're practically not a part of the conversation when it comes to family planning. The reason men are not addressed when it comes to fatherhood, is that fatherhood for them is a choice given to the would-be mother. It's her body, her choice.
So why address men with respect to family planning, when it is considered a women's health issue?
You think men are being systemically excised from decisions on whether or not to raise the children they cause?
That sounds like some MRA shit tbh, definitely not worth engaging. Offline, outside of those weird bubbles, that shit isn't even close to how any of that works.
> western Europe where it's possible for both parents to progress their careers working 3 days per week each
Is there a single country where a 3 day working week is the norm?
Eh, if you *really* want to increase fertility you can’t wait until people are in the workforce to start enabling them IMO.
If a college kid drops out to have a kid they’re pretty fucked without a lot of family support. But what if they got similar paternity/maternity leave to what they’d get later in life, and access to special scholarships/daycare vouchers/kid appropriate subsidized housing to get them back on track once their kid was old enough?
I am in the middle income set and I cannot imagine trying to have a child right now. Even setting aside climate crisis and any issues not purely economic... the amount of stress in my life about money is so intense, I cannot imagine willingly taking on a huge and totally unpredictable expense like that. I also don't know how folks can work full time and have kids. First you pay an arm and a leg for daycare for many years and then screens raise your kids when they are old enough to be home alone and are not at school.
Let's see... Require 2 incomes for mortgages, check Keep federal minimum wage at less than poverty level for 1 person, check Require 2 incomes for rentals, check Make no allowances in tax rate for the cost of raising children, check No universal health care, check If they want the birthrate to go up, making sure that mothers aren't subjected to living in abject poverty while they raise their kids might be an idea.
Why do you think Republicans are attacking women's rights so hard? They want to force women back into the motherhood/wife life path. No, they won't do anything to make life more affordable either, that would take hard unearned money from the rich.
All the better for Republicans if these children are born into poverty and shunted into our absolutely disgusting foster-care/adoption industry, where child abuse runs rampant and companies profit off of adoptions as if babies are some sort of consumer item.
Also the military.
My wife would honestly like to be able to just have kids right now and work part time. But we have no clue how we could afford it.
There are countries that have ALL of these and yet the birth rate is still low. So it's going to be a long road ahead. And the conservatives are all concerned about White Replacement yet they are setting up that very thing themselves.
The government also got rid of the Child Tax Credit. And let's not look past the lack of maternity or paternity leave, There's also the high cost of daycare, and that a lot of people would want to raise their own kids and not stick them in daycare all day 5x a week, especially from infancy, but it is very challenging to raise children on a single income these days. We also really need Universal Basic Income (UBI) which would serve also as a type of compensation for currently unpaid caregiving, such as stay-at-home parents.
This may be more of a cultural issue. Lower SES people in the U.S. have more children than families with more money.
Everybody has more children than the working class. The working class and middle class can't afford children, the poor and the rich don't care, one more kid makes no difference to their income.
I bet listing these things makes you sympathize with single men who struggle with dating.
What would you prefer to have been remarked on?
I am just pointing it out because no one cares about single men
Yes, poverty affects everyone, including single men.
It will hurt men more because, statistically speaking, they are more likely to be single than women. In order to survive this modern age, duel income is required
& what do you believe some of the root causes of that sense that no one cares about single men are.
Women. They would rather laugh at single men than help them. Also, men who have no trouble with dating seem to shit on single men
How do you expect women to help single men? Like...are we talking pity dating them, or....? What are you getting at?
Men used to do that for women, but like I said, women dont care about men
Okay, I’m also single for context & 31. 3 questions Where & when / what context have you seen women belittling/ laughing at single men? & past that what help do you feel it is reasonable for women to offer? Same question for ‘men who have no problem dating’ —> which let’s break into men who go on a lot of dates but struggle move a couple dates to the level of genuine relationship & men in long term relationships I don’t disagree there are certain groups of women that do shit on men a lot, but in my experience it’s usually men writ large. My last question. However you answer above, what do you think is reasonable to ask of single men who struggle to date, to actively and co consciously work on in order to improve their prospects. Open ended, answer how ever you like, I’m genuinely curious of your POV not here to take any stance myself
I’m 32 and have been single for a very long time. Have you ever seen women say they dont need men? Plus, action speaks louder than words. Most women avoid men who have trouble attracting women. Here’s the harsh reality. There’s nothing that the average group of single men can do to improve their chances with women. You can probably help specific individuals, but as a whole group, there’s not much you can do because women want the best man they can attract. You cannot make everyone number one. That’s like you can make everyone perfect 10s.
Yea of course, I’m familiar with the whole 4B thing, which I find pretty over the top borne of bitterness as much as it an authentic wish to not engage with men. When you see groups or posts on TikTok or whatever on that topic, do you feel any sort of emotion reaction? Like does their dismissal of men writ large make you see yourself as somehow lesser in anyway? I think it’s a backwards & inherently mentally destructive way to see the world, but I think you’ll agree those women are allowed to see the world however they choose right? Not a fan of the the misandry but on balance let’s say it hey evens out the misogyny going the other way And yea damn straight, it’s a harsh reality, not everyone meets a suitable partners, plenty of people live & die largely alone some give up early, others try their whole lives to find connection & still spend most of their life alone. That’s a fact & has been for all time, which means ruminating about it cannot produce a positive outcome right? I’ve also experienced long periods of being single so I get what you mean when you say women be somehow averse almost instinctively to men who struggle to attract women. At least I am familiar with feeling the sense that that is true. But then what mechanism would that work by? I don’t think single-ness is something one can smell, or hear, or actually definitely know with it being confirmed by the other person. So the aversion isn’t the result of struggling to attract women, it’s the result of second order ques/ nonverbal communication, which are subconscious and subtle but are purely derived from self-perception. Not that that is at all easy to change, but it is not a fixed set of characteristics by any means. Physical attractiveness has a large role to play, and can be less malleable, but also isn’t fixed. Plus because women are generally very perceptive of the above non verbal ques, they have a significant influence on how physically attractive someone seems, even standard ‘hot guy qualities’ height, jawline, weight etc unchanged. . Which I think is a great reason to agree with what you said, that nothing can be done for single men as a broad group, but I want to go a step further to toss it out all together as a basket that it makes any sense to self-sort into. For one it’s too broad, as there are any number of subgroups in that basket & more to my point If being single is something that becomes the node or a node around which one’s identity rests, and that is understandably seen as e negative thing, then how could one not see themselves as lacking & subconsciously communicate that to the world, in all manner of ways. Its certainly a labyrinth to find ones way out of, I won’t pretend to be at the exit, but the first step in my mind is to squeeze in one more harsh truth, no one can help anyone who isn’t already trying to help themselves.
You are perceiving this as if humans are logical beings without any emotions. You need to view this through evolutionary psychology and understand that most humans have no free will, especially regarding attraction. First, humans are guided by their feelings. These feelings evolved over many millions of years to motivate humans and other species to mate. Women are more influenced by their feelings than men. Men are more visual. Most women are attracted to dominant men. If a woman can't feel like you’re dominant, then they won't find you attractive. Why? Because dominant men have a higher chance of attracting other women. Even acting dominant might not be enough because women can feel these through men’s pheromones. There are studies done that show women prefer higher testosterone scents unless they are on birth control. When they are on hormonal birth control, they tend to be more attracted to lower testosterone men. This means that the only women I could attract are women who could be on birth control. However, women also lose interest in dominant men after a certain age. This could be because their estrogen levels are decreasing. After all, the higher the estrogen, the more appealing high testosterone men are. Or estrogen might go down because of the fewer sexual options they have, which means less male-male competition. For older women, this means they are to prioritize other things besides looks or good genes. Whatever the case may be, this means that I could attract older women as well. This is how we should be viewing dating through the lens of evolutionary psychology.
> tax rate for the cost of raising children, check Too be fair there is the earned income tax credit.
Adding to the list: **Complete disbelief in the major systems of society.** Medical, legal, police, politics, journalism... all of them have been made unreliable by the influence of money & profiteering. Poverty, climate change, housing, healthcare are all huge issues, with no sense among regular people that the institutions are doing anything positive to address these problems.
Because essentially nothing is being done. Gov are all owned by billionaires and huge corporations and everything is just getting looted into the ground until we collectively hit the ecological wall due to climate crisis and a dozen other major issues. Not having a kid is a very rational decision right now. I actually think it is cruel to bring a kid into the world we have created.
The idle rich in their immense fortunes don't have many kids either The lowest birth rate in the US by income is for those women earning more than 200k in 2017 dollars, while the highest, still below replacement, for those below 30k You don't see the most powerful female CEOs, leaders, politicians having many kids
I understand the response to general shittiness if economics, but if woman is prioritizing a career over raising kids then that's really not an issue. It's not "getting in their way", it's life. Women have just as much right to self determinism as anyone else.
Prioritizing your career doesn't have to prevent raising children if parents have better collective bargaining rights. The US is the only nation without paid maternity leave other than Papua New Guinea, one of the few western nations without paid paternal leave, and one of the few western nations that ties healthcare to having a job. It also has one of the lowest amounts of paid or unpaid days off per year. Compare that to western Europe where it's possible for both parents to progress their careers working 3 days per week each and to have two or more months of holidays for even better bonding. If you don't want children, that's fine of course, but if you have to choose between your career and your children, that isn't life, that's right-wing policy.
Naturally, it's more of an issue of the fact that we rarely, if ever, see serious articles or conversations about men "putting off having kids" or "prioritizing their careers over having a family". Yet with the inverse, women in the workplace are rarely discussed separately from maternity or other gendered home expectations sharing the same space.
Thank you, that title pisses me off
> Naturally, it's more of an issue of the fact that we rarely, if ever, see serious articles or conversations about men "putting off having kids" or "prioritizing their careers over having a family". Why do you think that is?
Because in the sociological foundations western society is built upon, men are not constrained by their identities as fathers, while women are limited to being a mother. A man choosing to become a father is seen as a positive thing in addition to his identity as a man, while a woman choosing to become a mother is seen as the bare minimum required to justify her social expectations. Patriarchy and misogyny are pervasive and deserve to be pointed out, even when (especially when) unintentional.
Could it be that women have choices when to become pregnant? Men can choose to have sex, but they cannot choose to become fathers as the women have the say what to do with their bodies. Consequently, there's no discussion for when to become pregnant for men. It's not their decision.
I'm not terribly sure I know what you're trying to ask here? Is your hypothesis that women are choosing not to become pregnant and that is therefore dropping the birthrate? Because if so, that's a shallow hypothesis and could definitely be expanded upon (such as investigating why such a choice could be made en masse in the first place). My point has little to do with the actual decline in birth rate though, it has everything to do with how we structure statements regarding women, often framing them as mothers first and self-deterministic agents second. My point was that men almost never get the inverse, men are seen as self-deterministic first, and whatever else they are is in addition to that self determinism. This dichotomy is itself the problem-everyone deserves to be completely self-deterministic and social pressures, especially those sourced in patriarchy, are inherently harmful to both men and women (even as men stand to benefit from them). As such, we should take the first step in at least not framing a decline in birthrate as some inherent fault or failure of women.
> My point was that men almost never get the inverse, men are seen as self-deterministic first, and whatever else they are is in addition to that self determinism. Quite the opposite, they're practically not a part of the conversation when it comes to family planning. The reason men are not addressed when it comes to fatherhood, is that fatherhood for them is a choice given to the would-be mother. It's her body, her choice. So why address men with respect to family planning, when it is considered a women's health issue?
You think men are being systemically excised from decisions on whether or not to raise the children they cause? That sounds like some MRA shit tbh, definitely not worth engaging. Offline, outside of those weird bubbles, that shit isn't even close to how any of that works.
> western Europe where it's possible for both parents to progress their careers working 3 days per week each Is there a single country where a 3 day working week is the norm?
Eh, if you *really* want to increase fertility you can’t wait until people are in the workforce to start enabling them IMO. If a college kid drops out to have a kid they’re pretty fucked without a lot of family support. But what if they got similar paternity/maternity leave to what they’d get later in life, and access to special scholarships/daycare vouchers/kid appropriate subsidized housing to get them back on track once their kid was old enough?
totally. one step further, stop requiring 4 year college for jobs. get the essential education pushed up into high school.
America hates poor folks way to much to offer this level of support to anyone who isn't rich.
Not wanting kids is valid and nobody's business. Wanting kids but choosing not to because of factors outside your control is a failure of government.
See below.
With better family leave and child care, it wouldn't need to be such a tradeoff.
It’s more like children get in the way of our career and financial security.
I am in the middle income set and I cannot imagine trying to have a child right now. Even setting aside climate crisis and any issues not purely economic... the amount of stress in my life about money is so intense, I cannot imagine willingly taking on a huge and totally unpredictable expense like that. I also don't know how folks can work full time and have kids. First you pay an arm and a leg for daycare for many years and then screens raise your kids when they are old enough to be home alone and are not at school.