And in rich countries, who are the people still having many children? The poor, uneducated, rural, religious/conservative segments of the population, who believe in some way or another that raising a child struggling in poverty is preferable to not having children at all.
Sounds like a pretty big cope. Sex isn’t about cumming. It’s about emotional connection with another human being. Being unable to get fulfillment of this basic human need is sad and lonely. This is why fleshlights have a stigma that beating your bishop the old fashioned way doesn’t - every healthy teenaged boy spanks it on the reg. But actually purchasing a device speaks to a level of hopelessness at obtaining actual sex that is sad, which implies a failure to be attractive, which is itself unattractive.
If that were true, we would expect richer countries to have higher birth rates. Instead, we see roughly the opposite trend. The richer a country gets, typically, the lower the birth rate. You can’t tell me that a teacher and a data entry clerk in Virginia are less economically capable of raising children than subsistence farmers in Malawi, no matter how high the rent in Virginia is.
If you want to see high income places with high birth rates, then you end up in very traditional/religious cultures, like Mormons and the Arab petro-states, where women face extremely high cultural pressure (if not force/violence) to be child-bearers.
Some books I enjoyed when I was a kid that didn’t fit the trips above:
I’d really like to see the evidence for this statement, since it really seems like this trend is just an extension of the phenomenon we see in poorer countries: when you give women education, opportunities, and birth control, fewer of them will have children. It stands to reason that the more education, the more opportunities available, and the more freely accessible birth control is, the fewer women will have children.
OP is a tankie USSR apologist. No reasoning with them.
This seems true only on short time scales, and in corporate work structures. On long time scales and with more collaborative, voluntary work structures, a group of people working together and supporting each other will almost certainly outperform a disorganized collection of non-communicative individuals. We can see this is true because, yaknow, society exists.
You would be categorized in the study as “childless” - wanting children but being unable to have them - and thus would not be part of the headline statistic.
Thanks I hate it.
Look up “polarizing” as a dating strategy. You don’t have to attract everyone. Just the people who are into what you’re into.
I’m confused as to what your objection is.
Not really. I’d say that most fetishes heavily favor one gender or another.
I mean, a further controversial opinion - the 18 year old cutoff is completely arbitrary. If we were somehow able to confer the ability to consent based on the maturity level of the individual, then the consent age of any given person might be lower, or might extend all the way to their death. In a small communal society where everyone has intimate knowledge of everyone else, this might be possible, and even preferred. But on the scale of nations, we need rules which are legible to courts, which means we say “the age of consent is X”, and assume it covers most cases decently enough.
Who said it isn’t working?
No, but a lot of women are really into giving pleasure to their partners, whatever that might entail (within boundaries). So if a guy is really into feet and shows it, there’s a decent chance his partner will get off on indulging his fetish. Plus, I assume foot fetishists give the best foot massages.
For all the reasons others have described, this is problematic. However, I propose a middle ground: develop permanent, reversible, side-effect-free birth control, and apply it to every child at 10 years old. When you turn 18, you can have it removed. You just need to show up at a government office, sign a form, and have the procedure completed. It is completely free, and you are out the door in an hour. The treatment can be reapplied at any time.
What happens? No more accidental pregnancies. No more getting knocked up in high school. No more scares after one night stands. No more becoming impregnated by a rapist. Everyone can fuck to their heart’s content, but babies only get made if both people actually want a baby. Most of the problems you are talking about typically occur when either one or both of the parents don’t want or weren’t expecting a child. Make pregnancy opt-in, and you’ll solve 90% of the problems.
Ooh, I’ll beat your unpopularity here.
Cycling on the sidewalk in suburban areas is often safer than cycling on the road, and should not be discouraged.
I mean, why would anyone want to live in Venezuela as a life choice? Typically, those who would really like to leave don’t have the means to, and those who have the means to leave don’t have a real reason to. This current shake up is concerning, but you have to also understand that most people’s lives don’t revolve around the actions of the federal government. They revolve around the social connections they’ve made, the physical things they own or have built, and the places that they know and call home. Leaving means losing all of those things. And my perspective, as a blue tribe member in the US, is that most of my friends are watching this unfold with a worried grimace, but with an assumption that we’ll oust the dumbass from office in the next election and begin the work of rebuilding what he broke. In the meantime, they are worried about raising their kids, fixing up their houses, building their businesses or advancing in their careers, going on dates and finding partners, staying fit and healthy, and all the other things people really tend to spend their time thinking about.
Older men having sex with sexually mature teen girls is fine, under reasonable circumstances. The world seems to think this is always coercive or predatory or harmful, but there is no reason any of these things are universally true.
The age of consent in almost all nations is around 18. This stands to reason, since society expects people of this age to be able to make reasonable decisions. Depending on the country, people around this age are given agency to emancipate themselves from their families, take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt, join the military and possibly die for their country, drive an automobile, buy alcohol or tobacco, etc. If we believe someone is mature enough to do these things, then we should certainly give them the lawful right to have sex with whomever they like.
Meanwhile, women often find maturity, status, or wealth to be attractive qualities in men, and men find youthfulness to be an attractive quality in a woman. Of course, this differs person to person - everyone had different sexual preferences. But there are general trends, and based on these trends, the pairing of younger women and older men is an obvious one.
The typical response to this is that “the only reason a man would want to date a woman that young is so he can have someone to control and manipulate” - which is crazy. The primary reason men want to date younger women is because they are hot. However, because there is a social stigma against age gap relationships, most men are put off of their interest to pursue younger women. So what you end up with is only dirtbags pursuing younger women - the men who do not care about negative social stigmas.
However, if you are a man who is interested in dating younger women, this whole situation works to your favor - if you are willing to tolerate the social stigma, you end up with much less competition for the women you find most attractive.
In your language, we would expect people in the first sentence to revert to K type parents. If they do not, they simply fall into the category described by your second sentence.