16 Comments

Maggie, remember that 1975 novel " Fear of Flying" by Erica Jong, about a woman ♀️👠 s sexual awakening? We used to 🤣 joke it should have been titled "Fear 😮 of Not Fucking?", by Erica Dong. Am I Satan ?? 📱

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Andrew, I have not read 📖🤓 “Fear of Flying” yet 🫣😳 but I do ☝️ own a copy!!!

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The economic strain of having a child is something that doesn’t come up in conversations like this that purely focus on cultural expression. Young families, especially in the United States, have such little safety nets that many are waiting longer until they feel more established. Anecdotally, at 27 I’ve been wanting to start a family. My partner and I are both hourly underinsured workers- when we’re in such precarious circumstances, it feels unfair to start a family without being able to guarantee the stability that we see as so important in young age. Catherine Liu and Joshua Citarella recently appeared in a podcast together talking about the placement of family dynamics within the economic pressures of the day which really articulated things that I’ve been feeling.

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Are you serious? This is brought up incessantly on this subject much to the annoyance of a lot of us. It’s the most cited excuse. And yes it is merely an excuse as people in developing countries are having more children in much more precarious circumstances than we have in developed western countries. I wish we’d just admit that we don’t want to inconvenience ourselves too much with annoying children, rather than blaming it on the economy or culture or the other gender, etc.

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I can’t believe how fucking dumb these people are. Yes, there is evidence to support that women of much, much higher body weights could have more trouble conceiving, but the idea that that if you gain 20 pounds or whatever more than your thinnest self you’ve rendered yourself infertile is just staggering. I have to believe that these are younger women who don’t have friends having kids or struggling with infertility yet. If they did, they’d see that there’s little discernible rhyme or reason for who is easily getting pregnant and who isn’t. The medical establishment doesn’t even always know, hence the “unexplained infertility” diagnosis.

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This is very well stated. My instinct on this whole conversation has always been that it’s bizarre. I’ve come to understand that it is a legitimate conversation to be had (i.e., the social impacts of birth rates, etc.), but our current discourse on social media and whatnot where that’s concerned and how people slot themselves and their personal choices and lives into it is weird and sad to me.

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Very interesting article! I think one “problem” of our generation is, that many young women are choosing their career over building a family. For example: women who study medicine, can’t have children so easily because they have to work in labor , and so on it’s somehow “impossible”. I feel kinda the same, I really want to have children, but I’m in 2nd semester of med school all I do is learning at the moment. And finding the right man is another topic hahahah

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You overestimate the power of the media. No man needs the media to tell him that losing the ability to have an erection is a sign of him being less of a man. Men are very well in tune with their sexual abilities. Losing the ability to perform a bodily function that is central to his identity is certain to invoke an instinctual sense of loss. No propaganda required.

Similarly, if conservative psyops had any power at all to make an impact on women's behavior, churches would be overflowing with congregants on Sunday, not hemorrhaging members as they are today

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The larger context is vicarious living. We have substantially reduced our interaction with the world -- and that includes the people we would otherwise physcially engage with -- to a controllable two dimensional sphere, far away from the complexity and challenges of traditional three dimensional existence. Marcuse had warned us about One Dimensional Man -- we're almost there. The fear of it is what has us longing for fertility, which may well be the strongest shorthand for authenticity as it tugs at the core of our human condition.

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"HighIQGF" sounds high maintenance, whatever her actual IQ may be.

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This podcast was fantastic - on the topic of cessation of hormonal birth control:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HtunqKavKHAdfKYLXe6QX?si=gkNdSJOfSx2E5vzr6Yl9DA

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Maybe the best way to flaunt your potential fertility is by saying, "I've never gone on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones."

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Excellent piece

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So you don't think the white bro culture and its embrace of racist replacement theory has anything to do with young white women advertising their fertility?

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I think that falls squarely within the phenomenon of right wing politicization of the body that I refer to in the piece.

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"Embracing fertility is right-wing coded; taking birth control and not having children is left-wing coded."

You don't say that "right-wing coding" means white women need to have more kids, even involuntarily, if necessary, in order to keep black and brown people from gaining a demographic advantage. The left wing coding is women should have a choice and ultimate say in deciding to have children. Are those two sides equivalent in your opinion?

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