A few years ago after watching the Super Bowl half time show with my daughters, I complained on FB that we all could have done without the pole grinding crotch shots of J-LO. My daughters (both under 10 at the time) felt sad about how it made them feel as girls. They read it as objectifying. I was SLAUGHTERED by nearly everyone and slammed as a bigoted, backwards, pearl-clutcher. It was “cultural expression” a lot of them told me. (I asked them if they’d allow someone to prance on stage wearing the confederate flag as cultural expression- no reply.). Others said this was body shaming. My point was that if they were going to call this a family friendly event, make it so. If they want people grinding on poles, then fine but don’t call it that. No one could hear me through the din of outrage over my prudishness. It was breathtaking for me, and as a feminist (and at the time I was a liberal), I was so incredibly disappointed that as a woman, I wasn’t allowed to say - you know what, I don’t feel that staring eye level at J-Lo’s crotch is progress. Twisted.
And for what? But also, I was left wondering - why don’t I get to have an opinion on this? I was dumped on immediately and I don’t know why what I said was soooooo threatening.
A big part of it is that when you’re engaging in conversation on social media, you can’t expect to find reasonable responses. All the filters of civility that are in place with in-person conversation are removed and you are communicating with people’s worst selves. Social Media mobs are akin to a road-rage state. Don’t open up and be vulnerable on a place like FB or Twitter, and don’t think you’re communicating with reasonable people.
I thought the most profound statements came from Anna Khachiyan (57:45 - 59:00) when she stated (paraphrasing) "our Culture now teaches young women to have contempt for the sanctity of family (anti-natalism) ... where they (now) no longer have the receptors to understand what it means to love somebody more than yourself, and sacrifice yourself for them"
Louise Perry followed up with wisdom I'm passing on to my own teenage daughter which is to try your damnedest to "conduct yourself / act as if the Pill doesn't exist"
People crave order, social guardrails and normality. As the Book of Ecclesiastes teaches, there is no new thing under the sun... key to life is centering ourselves on God, not ourselves. The Old (and New) Testaments await re-discovery for all who seek.
Spot on. Because there are really no filters of civility (I love that term) like being face to face, knowing a person's real name and location, there is no motivation to be civil. You'll never win an argument/debate on the internet when the "person" you're debating/arguing with is anonymous. And because of that, they can keep going on and on, and on, never letting it go.
Yes, though sometimes the point of a debate is not to convince the person you're debating, but the bystander. They’re the ones who might swing the consensus.
I find that asking honest questions (sometimes) can break through and result in civil discourse. I've had my current thinking updated by doing so as well. It doesn't always work but I do try this from time to time
"I was left wondering - why don’t I get to have an opinion on this?"
Feminism, which I believe has conjoined with progressivism, is a religion for its adherents. As with all religions, it has its own set of forbidden strictures. Clearly you violated one of them.
I enjoyed this except for a number of technical glitches with the recording playback that caused it to annoyingly restart several times.
I was surprised that Grimes was included, but, despite being less articulate than the others, I found her insights very persuasive. She has a good mind.
But about the inclusiveness of panel - am I to take it that men (and more seasoned women) have nothing to say, nothing to contribute to this debate?
I was disappointed that I did not hear anyone note that porn is made for men, and so is slanted dramatically towards what the filmers believe men want to see. As a result we have a generation of boys who believe women want to be choked and humiliated while having sex, or that many women are waiting for the right trigger to become the wanton sluts these boys want. It's not just about making porn with high production values as I believe Grimes said, it is about not portraying women and men as caricatures.
I agree with your opinion about Grimes contributing valuable insights, but I still think she could have pulled her verbal pants up to her waist, so to speak, and sounded less like a ten-year-old struggling through all the “like” filler words like a kid in a plastic ball pit. My comment is most about presentation, but it really brought the value of the talk down for me. We were promised Female Titans..
I think Louise spoke to this when she touched “on the homosexuality of heterosexuality” comment. Bari touched on it when she spoke about the FP essay winners. That essay gutted me because of exactly what you speak of...
I happen to agree with your opinion and I don't consider myself a prude. It's not appropriate on a family show and it has NOTHING to do with "culture". Girls are being sexualized way too young and then you wonder why we have so many unwanted young pregnancies.
Would it be nice if I had friends who agreed with me? Of course. But I wonder if not having enough visible differences in our friend groups is part of what led us to the polarized, white hot place we’re in now. So, maybe not. Maybe I just need to learn how and when to say these things that no doubt my friends might disagree with.
Yes, and I wish they didn’t. It took me by surprise because they’re actually decent people in the flesh. Part of it I think is that FB is trash for sorting these things out, part of it is that people don’t have experience with disagreeing in a way that allows you to still be nice, and part of it is what I’ve mentioned before - that they were cashing in cultural credit by by displaying rage and towing the virtue signaling line, lest they themselves be cast as bigots.
My kids did not watch that half time show, but they still laugh about my comments about female half time performances lacking pants. It’s a running theme at my house.
Leftists? Come on! I know so many young right wing or right leaning women who love J Lo. Personally, if my kids were young, she’d be off limits, as she is to many of my “woke” friends’ kids. As a feminist since the late 60s, I’ve sat in bars over many beers and debated the difference between freedom vs soft porn with these youngsters, many who are friends. They laugh at my prudishness, their bosoms bursting out of their tank tops. So I do know how fathom2023 feels!
What I see happening now takes me back to the scene in the movie “Moses” where everyone’s actions were full of immorality. Hmmm, I wonder what the missing link is in both biblical times and the present.
Drag Queens are already in the schools in some places like NY. They read stories to children at libraries around the country.
I've heard that you want to follow the Style and Book Review sections of papers to see where the media is leading the culture/where politics are going. This is the WSJ:
"She Won Over America on ‘Jeopardy!’ Now She’d Like to Reintroduce Herself.
Amy Schneider wants fans to know she’s not just the family-friendly trivia champion they fell in love with on TV."
I kinda don't recall falling in love with this guy. If I did would I be a lesbian or straight by today's definitions? None of this is "family friendly".
As an observation on my part: My experience of Drag Queens was gay men/transvestites who dressed up as icons like Dolly Parton, Carol Channing or Marilyn Monroe and often sang or served as entertainers. The "Drag Queens" I see today more often resemble evil clowns or distorted half formed creatures sprung from the human unconscious. They are more archetype than human. They project a kind of Thanatos or death energy and are far more shadow than light. At least, the darlings of the fascist MSM appearing at many staged political events are.
The masculine experience of professional misandrist feminism (now serving the totalitarian globalist Davos crowd as the D.E.I. commissariat) was also a death like anti-life energy. Some feminist openly called for the murder of men and some (Valerie Solanas) actually attempted it. And we can't overlook the anti-male influence of feminist lesbianism on young women and culture in general. Many early feminist leaders were anti-family, anti-male lesbian. Simone Beauvior, pushed this agenda and the fascist MSM, aways selective in its persecution, gladly overlooked her sexual exploitation and seduction of the underaged female students who were entrusted to her care. Many of whom, came forward in adulthood to claim sexual abuse and trauma. For men much of so called feminism amounted to a propagandized weaponized open season on their lives and well being. And fascist totalitarians loved and supported it with grants tax dollars and careers. Malignant feminism was willing to serve their agenda and it was willing to serve theirs. And, men were an easy target. Simply exploit the emotional, mental and psychic vulnerability created by their love for women, children and family and butcher it. Seduce and destroy. Shame, whisper and shun. The central banking globalist Davos crowd immediately saw it as a way to sow discord and took the ball and ran with it. --- Cancelled much.
UP FRONT!! Not all feminists are gay or lesbian. Many are the married, loving partners, parents and career professionals we encounter every day. And the same is true for gays, lesbians and "drag queens". Their sexuality is their business not mine. Likewise I personally admire many of the openly gay because I can see in the way they carry themselves that they've weathered and come to terms with cultural, social and emotional storms which transformed them into the thing most praised, and the thing most needed in the American Republic: Powerful human individuals with agency and moral reason.
Sex has always been weaponized, but not to the scale, nor the distortion we are experiencing today. And sex is married to politics. Many women today are literally married to the State. Which, exploits their lives and robs them of happiness and meaning as much as men, children and marriage ever did. I see an elite class of women who profit mightily from feminism. But, they inhabit, profit from, espouse, support and serve the party line class war politics of the central banking, globalist totalitarian fascist corporatism laying nations and human dignity to waste around the world. Americans today, know it or not, are making the last stand for freedom and human human dignity. Feminism has empowered some poor women but mostly those advantaged and already at the top of the economic scale. As in all things demanding human moral reason, courage and agency, the narrative has been co.opted and distorted to create sexual, political, social and financial discord. Irrational hatred and division, sexual or otherwise is the dividing line. CHOOSE LIFE!!
I’ve had the same thing happen to me on a popular FB parents group who have kids leaving for college. The moms routinely post (sometimes headless) prom pictures of their daughters in skintight, very revealing dresses and all of the other moms gush over how “hot” and beautiful the daughters look. One headless picture was just over the top. So I just asked a general question in the comments about whatever happened to girls just dressing in pretty dresses without the emphasis on sexy? And how it’s strange how boys wear loose fitting clothes from their necks to the floor to dress up and women think girls should show as many body parts as possible and then comment on them in these posts. I got slaughtered as well. Two women liked my comment but you would have thought I said something atrocious. And I think that half time show was pathetic. But it’s like that on every music show too. Lady Gaga wore a very low cut dress to sing at the Rockefeller Christmas tree lighting show several years back. Just weird. Female sexiness is now the new currency.
Several years ago I was sitting at a stop light, looking around and waiting for the light to change when I noticed a young woman opposite in one of those tank top/built in bra halter things. I pointed out to my teenage daughter that when I was 18 (30 years earlier) this would have been called “underwear” and no one would have worn this in public. I’m sure teenage boys enjoy the scenery but imo strolling around half naked has done more to objectify women than to liberate them.
I saw the JLo halftime nonentertainment show and thought it was pathetic. This middle aged woman pretending to be a stripper, hanging on to a youth that will never return rivals Madonna’s desperation. Maybe one of the unintended consequences of the sexual revolution was no one allowed to grow older and not be an object of desire.
I've been observing this for the last two decades with Halloween costumes. They just get more and more 'sexier' (depraved) every year. I think there must be a plateau. The next generation (Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha) I think will push back against the pendulum that has swung too far away from God.
I so agree! From an early age...about the time was allowed to wear panty hose (late 60s haha) I recognized men cover up, women bare their skin. Even though dress was still modest by comparison to today, I realized the unfair pressure on girls to appear physically attractive by accenting boobs, butts and legs. It also made me angry that I couldn’t wear pants to school, despite cold Wisconsin winters! Lol!
Nothing "sexy" about it. It's depraved and utterly lacking in self-respect for themselves and their daughters. Yet these are the women who cry loudest for female "empowerment."
The left is not female friendly. They are feminists in name only.
After all, they elected Bill Clinton, twice, and even after he was shown to be an abusing swine. When he left the White House, the left treated him like a rock star.
Because many of his policies supported the betterment of women, like legalized abortion and welfare reform, which helped break the cycle of dependency and pulled millions out of poverty.
The right has its own cast of characters (and I won mention who) so this isn’t party-specific.
I’m explaining why some women would support a politician whose persona life might run contrary to their believes. Why the religious right supported Trump for example.
Please try and avoid lumping everyone on the left. There are a lot of us aging feminists, happily married, with great kids who are appalled by this stuff.
Did I say anything that was incorrect. The DNC welcomed Bill with open arms. They didn't say, "Bill we can't support you for your run for president. We are the feminist party and you sexually abuse women." No, they supported him and defended his abusing ways.
Well I guess the problem is communication…and it’s important. The DNC to me is part of the left, the progressives are part of the left but not the whole. I do not contribute to the current and many past DNCs and am not a progressive. I still consider myself a Dem, but vote for indies on occasion. And there are many of us out here. It’s the same for the right, the RNC is part of the right, the MAGA crowd is part of the right, but not the whole. I’m pretty sure there are many who consider themselves as GOP, but not supporters of neither of those groups. I’m sure there are folks on right who consider Trump a sexual predator who should be condemned.
Not trying to criticize cuz I get your points here. But the generalizations tend to stifle or discourage communication between decent, sensible and well meaning people. How do we rise above that? It’s tough.
Here is a headline: "Save women's sports' bill passes House with zero votes from Dems, who call it transgender 'bullying'"
I know both parties try and vote as a block but this vote is BS antifeminist from the party that lies and says it is the feminist party. It is Bill Clinton all over again.
Can you blame me for lumping them all together? Look at how many of the left are antisemitic racists. How come the Dems have not kicked the antisemitic racists out of congress? No, they embrace them.
Again, consider such flak as proof that you are dead-center over the target. Or as my old roommate, Bill Shakespeare, used to say, "The lad(ies) doth protest too much, methinks."
I think you'd like the flagpole in my yard. The confederate battle flag - de rigueur in my county - and the American flag - above it, of course. Upside-down.
On the high seas that is the universally-understood indicator for a vessel in distress. In my opinion this ship of state is as close to disappearing under the waves as it has ever been.
Jim, in the context of a ship, ok. On your property? I find it disrespectful. Just this side of burning the flag. We fly the flag not because we love everything that happens in this country, or even to signal our approval of the direction we are going. But rather to signal our support for the American values at their best. We are the first country to proclaim that our rights are NOT granted to us by the government, but rather they are inherently ours given to us by our Creator. There is so much to be proud of in this country. That's only one example. I urge you to reconsider hanging the flag upside down. Hanging the flag upside down, inspite of your explanation, seems to ultimately signal a disgust that is stronger than your love of country.
It is whatever I say it is. It is a signal of distress, and not something I take lightly. I would like to see a movement across the nation to do the same everywhere, since flags can be seen for a long distance and would continuously remind everyone within view that we stand on the edge. There's a great interview of VDH by Tucker a few days ago. I've never seen Hanson, the model of calm and restraint, in such a state of concern. We are losing this country, and whatever it takes to wake people up, it takes.
Not to me. Not ever to me. In my Vietnam-protesting days, I had a very dim view of this Nation. Then my new wife and I bought a new Subaru (on the installment plan, of course), spent six weeks driving cross country, and I actually met so many of the fine people who live here. It's not their fault. Now I would die for them. Unfortunately, it may come to that.
I remember that half time show. My wife and I were watching the game in a local restaurant bar. The men in the audience were mesmerized. The women (including my wife) were not amused.
Knowing the audience here, I doubt that you were "SLAUGHTERED by nearly everyone." In fact, I'll wager that your latest comment will be met with widespread approval. Including by yours truly.
Nope. I wasn’t exaggerating. I live in a very liberal bubble and for the most part those are my FB friends. There were two people out of about 50 who commented who agreed with me.
Let's see the response today. I'm guess most people here - which is a bastion of common sense, as opposed to the childish Facebook - will agree with you about the coarsening of our culture. Facebook is a running joke. An echo chamber for idiots who want their homes burgled. To your point - Who's going to be the next Super Bowl disgrace - Cardi B? Biden's favorite chanteuse.
Super Bowls are for men so we get the JLO show in our living room. We work all our lives, resist impregnating everything we like that we see (because we would if we could) and work until we die for our families. Throw us a bone, momma...
There are a hell of a lot of women who are lifelong NFL fans, enjoying sharing the games and the excitement with our growing daughters and sons. Women work all our lives, resist getting pregnant (unplanned) by men who want to impregnate us, and work until we die for our families. Throw us family entertainment, dada…
But, it's not the football, it's the family. If you had your family over having a great time and cheering on cricket, you would feel the same. God bless women.
? Not sure what you mean, but yes I’d love cricket too! Sure I love my family, that’s why it’s fun sharing my love of sports with them. Just would like the halftime entertainment suitable for all ages.
umm, you mean MEN sound disgusting. Agree, not everything we "see"...just what we like. Please understand, "want" here means the primal inclination or urge.. These are all diffused in society but imagine there is a nuclear war and one man with 100 cheerleaders left on the planet. That kind of urge. Don't hate our nature, you have one too.
No, actually I mean YOU. I'm lucky enough to know many wonderful men who do not match YOUR description. (I did note the 'like', actually.) No doubt we all do have our natures... If it was in the nature of all men to simply impregnate as many pretty ladies as they can see, our species would not have made it this far, since infants don't do well when they've been abandoned.
Sorry, we would, if we could (let us remove laws, societal norms, religion). You can hate primal urges but the next time you are startled by something and react, you must understand that this is your nature. If you have now or have ever worn high heels or makeup, it is because of the same nature. We have been given instinct by our creator to keep the species going. JLO too.
So God has forced you to want to impregnate every attractive woman you see? Convenient. Yet laws forbid you to rape, societal norms dissuade you from abandoning your children, and religion tells you God doesn't want you to rape or abandon your kids. What's a guy to do? Poor you, huh? You deserve to look at J-Lo's crotch during halftime for having sacrificed your desired life of forcibly impregnating one woman after another in order to raise your children, as God both does and does not want you to do.
I did not see the online discussion you were in so cannot comment on it directly. But my semi-educated guess is that commenters had a hard time believing that two kids under age 10 have any concept of objectification. On first glance it makes your story sound implausible. Kids that age are likely to say "why is that lady dancing so weird"? but not make any connection to the patriarchy and family values.
I suspect that had you made the exact same point without invoking the children, your comment would have gotten a different reception.
Ten-year old kids may not understand "objectification" but according to fathom2023s detractors they sure as hell believe 8 year Olds have a right to change their genders if they want to...the adults enabling it are the truly despicable ones (and probably the same people making those nasty comments.
My kids understood it. They didn’t use the word objectification, but they said - “this makes me feel bad because it is suggesting that girls are just good for their bodies.”
The adults in schools, government, medicine, and Pharma who enable it are despicable.
Let's hear it for the Prime Minister of Britain who spoke up against the madness. And, let's hope some leaders in the US follow suit. The Emperor Has no Clothes.
"Patients should know when hospitals are talking about men or women.
And we shouldn’t get bullied…we shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be.
They can’t.
A man is a man and a woman is a woman, and that’s just common sense.
We should also never be afraid to talk about the thing that matters most to most of us – family."
"Washington has pushed to protect experimental gender surgeries and hormone treatments for children, recently passing a law that shelters, or “host homes,” are not required to notify parents of a runaway child if the child claims to be fleeing parents who do not approve of a gender surgery or an abortion. Instead of reporting the runaway child to the parents, the host home is required to notify the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families. The state’s Democratic Governor Jay Inslee was sued in August by America First Legal, which is seeking to stop the enforcement of the law allowing the state to hide child gender surgeries from parents."
The 10 year old kids may not have used the word "objectification" but they would still have been disturbed by that kind of sexual display. Perhaps the mother merely defines it with a word they did not have.
I do not watch much television. But I agree with you that “Pole dancing” is not G rated family entertainment. I also liked your question about the use of the Confederate flag. Thank you for standing up for behavioral boundaries.
The greatest delusion of mankind is that today we know things that a thousand generations before never figured out for themselves.
Human nature does not change. Neither do evolutionary adaptations. Women have a massive investment in propagating the species: they contribute all the nutritional resources to the developing child; they are vulnerable during pregnancy and for many years thereafter, and this investment is repeated for each and every child. Men's investment is contributing a few cc's of seed to start the process. A woman is 100% certain the child's DNA is hers; the man can never be certain, which is why men whose wives cheat are concerned with, "Did you f**k him?" and women with, "Are you in love with her?" These disparities also explain why it is men's nature to spread their DNA far and wide and women's to first and foremost secure a man's resources. It also explains why a prospective partner's body-count matters to men far more than it does to women: a promiscuous woman is more likely to cheat and less likely to pair-bond for a lifetime - and in today's world, to take his resources and run to the next Chad or Tyrone.
Has the sexual revolution failed? The damage to humanity's only priority - propagating the species - can never be fully known. And as a warrior who got off more than a few shots during that revolution, I have to say unequivocally, yes.
great job summarizing the evolutionary psychology at work. The mismatch between our evolutionary programing and the modern environment is the source of most of our social issues today—everything from obesity to population collapse can be explained through that lens. It doesn't mean we can or should revert back to our ancient lifestyles, but it does mean we have to acknowledge our nature if we want to find true solutions that satisfy our natures while not totally giving up and acting like cavemen.
I'm always concerned when there is a conflation between "natural" or "instinctual" with "good." There are deadly mushrooms in nature, violence, and predation, within and between species... there are a lot of things we wouldn't call good that are natural. Please be careful about automatically presuming good and nature go together.
couldn't agree more—the natural fallacy is a mistake, something being natural is not the same as it being good. But we also cannot pretend human nature does not exist—we can incentivize in one direction and decentivize the other, but you can only realistically expect to move the needle of human behavior so much. The communists made the mistake of thinking they could build a world without greed, where every person would sacrifice self-interests for the good of all, and look how that worked out in practice. Hence why we must balance the need to not give into our animal natures against the realistic acknowledgement of our natures, and seek to work with the reality we have, not the reality we wish we had.
I agree completely- that does not mean though that we cannot create or improve on the public good. We should make every effort to do so. After WWII in Europe the systems put in place for public good of benefits and welfare were put there to prevent the society from falling into fascism. They could look at the origins of the divides in Europe and see squarely that the haves and have-nots were exploited by a handful of people's desire for power. It is no different now except not enough people are looking back.
"...humanity's only priority - propagating the species..."
I agree with a lot of the premises in your main reply, but this one is just off. Is 'propagating the species' an important priority? Of course it is. But to say it's the only priority is quite another thing.
While humanity's existence certainly depends on children being born (does that even need to be said?), it's hardly the only raison d'etre for us crafty bipeds. For one thing, there's arguably too many of us as it is (debatable for sure). For another, one would think providing a decent world (education, environment, standard of living) for those new kids to live in would go hand in hand with wanting to keep birth rates up...but it never seems to correlate for some reason.
But to think that my only job as a man is to pair up with a woman and make more of us before we die...what a terrible way to go through life. There are innumerable ways in which each of us matter in the world (and soon beyond), ways that are important and essential not just to ourselves but to all those around us. So many ways it would be pointless to try and list them here.
We are more than just a means (DNA + childcare) to and end (healthy, capable adult). Much, much more.
In Robert's Rules of Order, what motion takes precedence over all others?
Setting the time for the next meeting. Not intuitive, is it? But if there is no next meeting, the organization ceases to exist. Ditto for human reproduction. If only one generation out of tens of thousands fails to reproduce, then nothing we have ever done, ever accomplished, ever learned, ever built, matters. And it will all be lost. Forever.
There's a joke among academic circles that the only thing everyone can agree on is that we have to have another meeting. The joke being of course that the content of the meeting is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is that we meet again. Crude analogy, but then so is yours.
You're implying here that procreation is somehow an all-or-nothing binary. Falling birth rates doesn't mean no birth rate. It just means less. It what world is zero birth rates a reality here, even for a single generation? In an ecosystem of finite resources and space (which our planet very much is) an ever-creasing birth rate is just as bad as no birth rate - they both lead to extinction, one just takes longer than the other (and is more gruesome).
No one anywhere is saying that a zero birth rate is an option at all, and one would be hard put to argue that it is or will happen anytime soon. What the 'population' argument is really about is the where the birth rate is or should be itself. That seems to me to be a perfectly valid discussion.
Total fertility rate is the average number of births per woman. Replacement level is 2.1. Above that, the population is growing. Below that, the population is shrinking. Check out the map. How much of the world is already below replacement?
I wouldn't mind seeing a gently declining population for a while. But that's not the trends. A top-heavy population is a problem. If there are 2-3 people over 60 for every person under 40, the society is nonfunctional. We aren't heading for a gentle decline, we're heading for a crash.
It's probably significant that assisted suicide, such as Canada's MAiD program, is popping up in places where birth rates are significantly below replacement. There aren't enough strong young people to care for the elders or the disabled. The "solution" is to simply kill off the elders and the disabled. Dead people require no care.
It's a brutally practical option, but not one I support.
We're not really doing much as a society now to make people WANT to have more children. Most couples are both working, some more than one job and many paying more than half their income in rent. There's no child care, minimal paid leave when a child is born, etc. TBH, I wouldn't mind going back to the U.S. population when I was born--about 200 million. Things were less crowded, there was more open space, etc. What's the real reason to WANT a world of 10, 12, 14, or 20 billion people?
Actually people want more children than they actually have. A combination of economic factors, social factors, and biomedical factors are crashing human fertility rates far below what people say they want on surveys.
Your question is a logical fallacy. Possibly strawman. Possibly false dichotomy. I'll invert it and see if you can recognize it in a mirror image.
What's the real reason to WANT the destruction of cultures? What's the real reason to WANT a population that is mostly old and sick? What is the real reason to WANT widespread killing of the elderly and ill?
Yeah, most of the 1st-world countries (for lack of a better term) are in population decline, especially around the Mediterranean. But this isn't new news, it's been happening for awhile now. The only one that is alarming is China because they have such a huge chunk of the world population already, that is of their own making though.
I would argue that the places where fertility is still high (Africa, South America, Middle East, Caucus region) will, and are, providing the much needed reprieve from this general trend via emigration...if that is relatively easy to achieve. I personally have no problem at all with those ethnic groups becoming the dominant strains of humanity going forward, we're all the same species after all.
Besides, it's not like most of those 1st-world countries are in a glaring precipitous decline, only a moderate one. The problem, like you pointed out, is the tax burden on the young, and who is going to take care of all those old people? But it's not like we can put off population decline forever, better to tackle it now before it gets too big a problem.
South America is below replacement too, or hovering just above it. Subsaharan Africa is still well above replacement, but birthrates are dropping there too. Yes, many nations are in glaring precipitous decline. South Korea has a fertility rate of .78, well under half of replacement levels. The GLOBAL fertility rate is 2.3 and dropping as of 2020. This problem isn't going to be solved with emigration, unless you're hoping for a huge influx of the extraterrestrial kind of aliens.
A fertility rate of 1.9 or 2.0 isn't a huge problem IMO. That would lead to a gentle decline in the global population. That's not what we're seeing, unfortunately. Japan is a good case example. Japan currently has a fertility rate of 1.34 births per woman, and a median age of 48.4 years. So a full half of the Japanese female population is beyond her childbearing years. There's a distinct possibility that Japan will be extinguished as a distinct culture within my lifetime. I think that's sad.
Cultural diversity matters, just like biological diversity. We are, of course, all the same species. However, culture is transmitted from generation to generation. I don't consider human beings interchangeable cogs, to be rearranged at will as suits the needs of global finance.
You are correct: a failing birth rate does not mean zero. To eliminate a species It only has to be below replacement, which I believe is somewhere close to 2.1 children/pair. What is it in the US now? 1.64.
And yes, Malthus went through the "ever-increasing birth rate" argument, too. We should all be glad that it doesn't apply here, and one reason is that most resources are not "used up" when they are accessed. It takes a lot of energy and ore to make aluminum, for example, but guess what? You can recycle it over and over and over. Not true for everything, of course, but true for many. Burning wood makes atmospheric CO2. What happens to that CO2? The ecosystem turns it back into more wood. Just two easy examples....
So how close are we to straining the earth's ecosystem? The "limited resources" and "We need fewer people" argument is, of course, that which the WEF et al, is using in its quest for world domination by the elites. The problem for them, however, is that world welfare in general is improving and the only way to enslave happy people is to frighten them with perma-crises. Which they are trying mightily to do, including the "We have too many people for the planet to support" narrative.
Turns out that's not true. The discredited population alarmist, Paul Ehrlich, said we'd all be starved-out by forty years ago. Didn't happen, did it? Why? Because humans are smart, and industrial farming methods can now feed Every Person On The Planet. Why do the WEF people want to go to all "organic farming?" Well, one reason might be that best estimates are that industrial farming can support about 10-11 billion; "organic" about 6 bn. Guess what the population is? Yep, about 8 bn. As the World's Smartest Man, Henry Kissinger, said, "“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”
I'm no alarmist. I live in ranch country and gleefully eat beef every day.
But I have to say that blindly trusting that we will just "figure it out" via human ingenuity is more than a little irresponsible. Had we other worlds to move to (and the ability to get there), this would be a different story. But we don't (yet). So it seems to me that right now we only have one chance to get it right. And as crafty and ingenious as humans can be, I don't think betting the future on a gamble (even a good gamble) is any way to forge humanity's future.
Also, I don't think it's in any way a good idea to try and pack as many people as possible onto the planet...just because we can viably feed and house all of them. The earth is not a sardine can and we aren't sardines. The argument for keeping vast swaths of unused wilderness decidedly unused is a good one. We shouldn't be trying to use up every available nook and cranny on the planet just to justify a high population count. Despite the obvious economic and habitation downsides, empty space matters and is a good thing to have on this planet.
Agreed. Love the West, especially Wyoming and Montana. Every time I visit the West, I come home with the same phrase ricocheting in my head: I don't belong here.
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Don't sell humans short. The very fact that we are here today shows that each and every time it really mattered, we figured it out. I'll take those odds any time. It's the Oh-So-Smart guys with whom I went to school that invariably cause the problems and the ordinary, workaday men mining coal, welding steel, and raising cattle that solve the problems those people created.
But having said that, I get a lot of schadenfreude in that every time the elites gin up a new crisis, it's already being taken care of. As for population, that seems to be the case, too. The great thing about population prediction is that, if you know the current population and current fertility rate, you know the population thirty or fifty years from now. A couple of years ago I read a book by two Canadians - Brinker and Ibbotsen (sp?) which predicted a gradual slowing of global population growth and then a precipitous population decline. Everything I've read since suggests they were right on the money.
So what's the elite Globalist's next crisis? I can't wait to see....
It's my understanding that a combined meteor/ice melt catastrophe reduced the world human population to 35,000 and all those living today descend from them. Of note is the reality that the event had nothing to do with human circumstance and concern.
What people don't realize is that for most of its existence mankind has struggled, occasionally hanging on only by a proverbial thread. I mean THAT close to extinction. It's only after we became able to control our environment somewhat and had the time to work on progress rather than just survival that we really became secure.
Since women now can live through pregnancies in their teens into thier 30s and even 40s, you’d need to lose more than one generation. I guess it’s how you measure/define generation. There’s plenty of us to go around these days. And just to wax philosophical, if we are all gone…who is here to miss us and our accomplishments? And really many of our accomplishments, some unfortunately scars on the earth, will remain. And the atoms left after our decay will be floating around the universe into perpetuity. Great conversation!
I just heard Ashley Campbell's (Glen Campbell's daughter) version of Jimmy Webb's "The Highwayman," where a soul transmigrates from generation to generation. I'd heard Willie Nelson's version, but this one brings tears to my eyes. I sure hope it's true.
Gods very first commandment is Genesis 1:28 where He said to them "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth". There are many laws after this which explain that Humanity was created to work alongside our Creator (or whatever you want to call the Transcendent Good detected by our Consciousness) -- to actualize the universe's potential and participate in God's own work.
I've always viewed the goal of life to be making things even better for the next generation, not simply to endlessly reproduce for no reason.
My grandparents worked crappy jobs in factories so my parents could work in offices so I could work on a computer at home. When I was growing up, we lived in a really rural area and drove an hour to the store once a week. Now, I just order what I want and it shows up tomorrow. When I was growing up and someone had cancer it was the same as saying they were going to be dead soon. While cancer is still deadly in many cases, survival rates for some cancers are incredible.
Human nature seems to be to seek more comfort while also having a vague dissatisfaction that pushes us to try to make things better. We're the only species that knows that we're going to have to leave the planet eventually (if we survive that long) and are taking the first very baby steps to do so.
> Human nature does not change. Neither do evolutionary adaptations.
This might be slightly somewhat untrue for the last 80-100 years, specifically because of the chemicals we are taking. Birth control hormones and endocrine-disrupting chemicals in water supplies or food have made some massive changes, especially epigenetics (which traits are exposed in sperm/egg cells) which have started to affect future generations. For example, we do know that millennial/gen-Z women go through puberty sooner than they used to, while gen-Z men have significantly lower testosterone on average than boomer men.
To what extent these hormonal and generic changes reflect changes in "human nature", personality, romantic strategies, etc, is always up for debate.
Sounds like you have read or listened to a lot of Jordan Peterson. Your interpretation is too simplistic, and based on a world with limited resources which is not the works we livre in any more.
Why the invocation of Jordan Peterson? Do you not think he could reason and articulate an opinion on his own? It is unfair to have a discussion and infer at the onset that one is not genuine.
I'm not implying any such thing, just that I hear similarities. And given the proliferation of Peterson's philosophy in many pro-masculine circles, why not point out the similarities? Is there anything wrong with having an intellectual basis for your point of view? Are any of us free of the values we consume from those whose points of view we respect?
The poster did not refer to Jordan Peterson anywhere in his post. You used Peterson’s name at the onset of your post when there are several philosophers, both historical and contemporary, who may have shared so called “similarities” with his perspective. He referenced no one else in his post. Also, your term “pro-masculine circles” implies he may be influenced by Peterson whose philosophy is respected by both sexes. I’m confused by your question in your response to me. “Is there anything wrong with having an intellectual basis for your point of view?”That was precisely my point. That you invoked Peterson’s name, not him, therefore suggesting that he based his post on Peterson instead of the poster’s own intellectual basis for his own point of view.
You're clearly affected by what I wrote... why? You're not arguing with my points merely offended that I made a connection between the OP's point of view and a respected philosopher who I often disagree with? What offends you exactly? That I aligned someone with a point of view that they didn't claim for themselves but that I heard an echo of in the comments? That happens everyday on these pages for anyone who smacks even the slightest bit liberal. So with all due respect kindly check yourself.
Do you have counter data that could support what you are saying? Sure, he is painting with a broad brush, but in general we didn't evolve in an environment that didn't have limited resources. So our ingrained behaviors would be built around scarcity. That doesn't mean we can't adjust them for a modern world, but we still need to understand the basis for which we operated for thousands of years.
And what exactly does that provide for now if we aren't self-aware enough to recognize those tendencies? If we can become and remain aware enough to notice our default expectation of scarcity, then perhaps we could make better decisions about the resources available to us. From my perspective the resources are abundant, what we lack is policy to help distribute them equitably or justly- instead relying on a form of Capitalism that even John Maynard Keynes wouldn't recognize or endorse.
Human nature is always going to be the stumbling block to an system. And likely, no system will be perfect because the universe basically wants everything to end and so life itself is a struggle. It is only very recently that we have had any level of mass prosperity. And based on what has historically happened in places that tried to mandate human nature and control everything from the top down, it has usually lowered prosperity, not increased it.
There are no solutions, only trade offs. Even the current plenty some countries see themselves under is precarious. If, for example, we enacted all of the green initiatives that some support, our productions will go down. But if we do nothing, production may also go down due to a change of environment. Should we lower the population? China tried that and now they are on the cusp of huge social issues because of a lopsided population base.
Honestly I feel that many issues people have with capitalism is actually with corruption. If we could magically arrest all of the people currently breaking the laws (companies that are cheating, or bilking employees or customers, or not paying their taxes, etc) you would likely see big changes. But the same people running things have built in all kinds of little loopholes and sub-systems that make it easier for the rich and powerful to 'win'. But those sub-systems are not built in to capitalism. They come from the way that policy makers enact laws (central planning). Or simply not getting caught. Or bribing the right people. Sadly, central planning doesn't seem to make this happen less.
This was rambly, so take that for what it is worth. No caffeine today I guess.
See “superabundance” by Tupay et al. More people = more resources = cheaper prices = less poverty. Scarcity is not the issue, government diktak making energy expensive is
I don't totally agree on energy being dependent on the government. I do agree wit your quoting of Tupay. There's more to the argument to be invested in as well. We can take it further, and argue for and elect people who care as much about the population and its well being as they do about their handlers who write the checks. Having a government for, by, and of the people is still something that is possible (for now).
Jordan Peterson, the universal whipping boy of the woke. The Donald Trump of behavioral sciences. Or perhaps you can actually support your (implied) critique?
My critique was that is argument was too simplistic. I simply referred to Peterson as a voice I heard in the opinion. If I quoted Marx, Lefebvre, Freud, or Rand and you noticed it in my writing there would be nothing wrong with noting the influence of my thought. The commenter's argument was weak and based on a simplistic view of social psychology, sociology, and sexual selection. The loudest reductionist voice in that domain right now is Jordan Peterson. It is inaccurate to conflate sexual selection and gendered behavior- and yet it is a constant in our discourse- "women are like this" or "men are like this," or worse- "evolutionarily men are..." and of course "evolutionarily women are..." none of these tropes are borne out. What we can point to are sexually selected for behaviors and traits. What the OP wrote reduced a complex argument to an overly simplistic point of view.
The fact that you admit that you heard the voice of Jordan Peterson in in his opinion which he didn’t refer to, exposes YOUR bias and judgmental attitude. Calling his view simplistic because he was a man shows your sexism as well.
Where did I say it was simplistic BECAUSE he was a man- NOWHERE. And my reflecting that I sensed some of Jordan Peterson's influence doesn't make me biased, it makes me educated. Check yourself Elizabeth, you're ranting. If you'd like an actual discussion I'm down for it- but please be prepared with an actual argument, not just some anti-woke talking points.
I hear you claiming two things in your comments, both equally absurd: 1. Every time someone is influenced by the writings of another, they explicitly state it in their own writings. 2. People arrive at their views a priori, without having read or been influenced by anyone in the field. Stacey could have enumerated any number of social psychologists or evolutionary biologists, but chose Peterson because he is CURRENTLY the loudest voice. I would have added Brett Weinstein.
Late to the party I know, but let’s be honest, if your critiquing an argument for merely being over simplified and then invoking Jordan Peterson on those grounds, it probably says more about your relationship with Petersons positions than the OP’s. The idea that Peterson is uniquely reductionist in a world where most contemporary wisdom is packed into a slogan or a 100 character social post is wild. I would argue that the debate, and every subsequent comment in this thread are just a succession of oversimplified arguments. All of this is highly subjective, and I think you took some flack for forcing an irrelevant detail into a conversation for your benefit. Instead of putting words in their mouth, you put inspiration in their thoughts.
To some extent, I agree. To some extent, I disagree. Consider the statement “The greatest delusion of mankind is that today we know things that a thousand generations before never figured out for themselves”. Actually, we know all sorts of things that were not known in prior generations. For example, the elements were unknown to the ancient Greeks. The periodic chart post-dates 1800. In 1900, the basic subatomic particles (proton, electron, and neutron) were unknown. Now, we know of dozens, if not, hundreds of subatomic particles. In biology, we didn’t know about DNA, RNA, Codons, protein synthesis, etc. in 1900. Now we do. I could make similar statements about Geology, Organic Chemistry, Meteorology, Astronomy, etc.
“Human nature does not change”
That’s true, but human circumstances do change. In a prior era, a high proportion of children died from natural causes. More children from women were needed to offset child mortality. In a prior era, population growth was ‘needed’. This meant that women had to produce more than two surviving children just to keep human numbers constant and/or have them grow. In a prior era, a woman could reasonably expect to be pregnant and/or breast-feeding from sexual maturity until she died.
Conversely, some truths remain very firm (if unacknowledged and/or rejected). Men are bigger and stronger than women. All children come from women. A society that intends to survive has to maintain a birth rate above 2.0 (2.1?) to continue, long-term. The basic ‘facts of life’ haven’t changed in 10,000 years and probably never will
Let me rephrase that: we are deluded that we know anymore about human nature now than we did then or that it has changed. Of course we have learned about the natural world, but we have learned very little about ourselves, and in fact, most have forgotten a great deal or never learned it to begin with.
“Lol. I introduce students every semester to various non-overlapping or barley overlapping graphs by sex. Every year their jaws drop further. Twenty years ago barely an eyebrow was raised.”
I wonder though when procreation is completely removed from human bodies (which really can almost be done now) how that will affect the evolution of humanity.
"The greatest delusion of mankind is that today we know things that a thousand generations before never figured out for themselves."
Frame it! What is this arrogance of the present that imagines the people who fought World Wars I and II--or for that matter Erasmus, or the Emperor Augustus--were cardboard cut-out cartoons lacking wisdom and self-insight? Is there a Shakespeare among us today? A Dante? How about a Buddha or a Jesus of Nazareth? Horace, two thousand years ago, said, "Many brave men lived before Agamemnon's time; but they are all, unmourned and unknown, covered by the long night, because they lack their sacred poet." Here's an 'ancient' looking back seven hundred years from his own time to the poet, Homer, who in turn is looking back five centuries from his and acknowledging kinship with 'brave men' who lived in an even earlier age. I would suggest Horace and Homer had a better sense of historical perspective than we do.
Karl Jaspers (writing in 1951): "Beyond any doubt, we are far more advanced than Hippocrates, the Greek physician. But we are scarcely entitled to say that we have progressed beyond Plato. We have only advanced beyond his materials, beyond the scientific findings of which he made use. In philosophy itself we have scarcely regained his level."
"Beyond any doubt, we are far more advanced than Hippocrates, the Greek physician. But we are scarcely entitled to say that we have progressed beyond Plato. We have only advanced beyond his materials, beyond the scientific findings of which he made use. In philosophy itself we have scarcely regained his level."
The broad mass of humanity is ignorant of its debt to Plato, and indeed has practically no notion of the extent to which we're all Platonists. Consider this lengthy (but I hope you'll agree well worth reading) summary of Heidegger's take on Plato--known to us only from a series of lectures translated into English in the 1950s from a German student's notes--by William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. It's a two-edged legacy, as you'll see, that has the defects of its virtues:
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His studies of Holderlin were not undertaken solely out of Heidegger's growing conviction, as a philosopher concerned with the problem of language, that poetry was the essential form of speech. His tie to Holderlin is closer than this. Holderlin, like Heidegger, is the enraptured Hellenist who turns his eyes back to the sunlit age of the Greeks and speaks of the modern age as "the night of the world" from which all of the gods have departed. Holderlin here is the most extreme and the most visionary of the romantic poets, all of whom were possessed by the uneasy dread that in the modern age man had come to sever himself so drastically from nature that some new and uncanny fate would fall upon him. In English poetry this uneasiness, which is something new in the history of poetry, begins with Blake and Wordsworth. It becomes a clamor of warning voices among some of our greatest contemporary poets: for Yeats this is the time of the dark of the moon, of empty objectivity and bloody violence; for Eliot (before his conversion at least, and perhaps after it too) ours is the wasteland in which the saving waters no longer flow; for Rilke (on whom Heidegger has written a perceptive study) this is the time when the lost angelic voices are no longer heard; for Robert Graves, we have lost all contact with the great Goddess, and we are "no longer at home with the lady of the house"—we are no longer at home in nature. This testimony of the poets is so extraordinary that we can hardly afford to brush it aside lightly; and a society that does so has already lost all contact with its poets and thereby confirms their prophecy. Heidegger is the thinker of what these poets seek to poetize. As the poets, from romanticism onward, warn against the severance of man from nature, Heidegger seeks to warn us of a severance of thinking from Being; and this not merely as a severance of man's instincts from the way of nature, but also as something that takes place in the very mode of his thinking.
Heidegger’s interpretations of Holderlin have thus to be seen in the context of a general interpretation of history that is also one of the remarkable products of this last phase of his thought. This view of history is very bold and sweeping, yet in a fashion typical of Heidegger it starts from a very simple and banal observation of the present. This observation is that the characteristic of the modern age in comparison with past ages is the extraordinary development of technology that has made possible the organization of men into mass societies and secured the domination by man of the whole planet. So far, nothing very new about this. But Heidegger pushes this point in a very simple-minded and persistent way: If technology is now the dominant thing in man’s life, how did this become possible? Through modern science. And where did modern science begin? In the seventeenth century, when for the sake of precision and measurement men began to apply mathematics to natural phenomena. The concurrent philosophic expression of this is the Cartesian philosophy of clear and distinct ideas. But it is quite obvious that the development of science in the seventeenth century could not have taken place without the knowledge of Greek science that had been rediscovered by the Renaissance. Our steps from the present backward lead us thus to Greek science.
But Greek science is, in its turn, the offspring of Greek philosophy, for it is out of the speculations of the Greek philosophers that science is born. The seed then of what the world is today and of what we ourselves are lies in the step taken by the Greek thinkers to detach beings as beings, objects as objects, from the environing presence of Being, and so to make possible eventually the thematic elaboration of these objects in science.
With this objectification of nature—that is, the detachment of objects as objects from the environing ground of Being—the age of metaphysics begins. This age culminates 2500 years later in modern science, where the objectification of nature is almost complete. Its final philosophic utterance is in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power: for here, in Nietzsche, is the extreme expression of man’s drive to tear himself loose from nature and manipulate it in the interests of his own power. The process that begins with the earliest Greek philosopher, Anaximander, culminates in Nietzsche; and with a very neat, perhaps too neat, stroke of symmetry Heidegger speaks of the age from Anaximander to Nietzsche as a single unit. This age of metaphysics is now finished, says Heidegger, not in the sense the positivists would aver that metaphysics itself has become “meaningless”; on the contrary, the positivists themselves are unconscious dupes of metaphysics since they are completely captured by its spirit of objectification; no, this age is finished because it has, after Nietzsche, no further fundamental possibilities open to it. The step taken by the Greeks to distinguish clear and distinct objects was the great historical step taken by no other people (the Greeks alone among ancient people created science); but in this great step forward the sheer presence of Being as the environing context from which all objects are detached was lost and forgotten. Poets remind us of this presence. But if there is to be a genuine renewal in the perspectives of civilization, there must be a new kind of thinking (of which Heidegger would be the groping forerunner) that would seek to make us stand once again in the sheer presence of that which is.
All of this historical framework has to be kept in mind in reading Heidegger’s brief essay Plato’s Doctrine of Truth. Plato, according to Heidegger, shifts the meaning of truth from a characteristic of Being—namely the open-ness or unhiddenness of Being (the Greek word we translate as “truth,” alethia, means literally “unhiddenness”)—to a characteristic of mental concepts: their correctness or precision. Hence the Idea becomes for Plato the real reality. But Idea, in Greek, has its root in the verb for seeing: an Idea is always thus a human perspective. Thus the consequence of Plato's shift in the meaning of truth is to turn from Being itself in order to confer preeminent reality upon our own human and mental perspectives upon Being. It is a first step in that long journey that is Western philosophy toward the severance of man from Being. With this little change in words Plato has launched Western history toward the age of cerebration and computing machines.
This may look altogether pat to some readers. It would look less so, however, if all the connecting links were put in, and if Heidegger were to expound his point about Platonism in a broader and less microscopic way. He chooses instead to burrow in the words of the Greek text, and to unfold his point from those words like a man unwrapping tiny nuggets. But to each writer must be granted his own mode of expression, as to each thinker his own mode of attack; and for Heidegger it is a consecrated task to dig back to the original thinking of the Greeks as it is caught in the web of the Greek language.
The Letter on Humanism has also to be read within the context of Heidegger’s historical vision. It is easy to misunderstand Heidegger here as anti-humanist (perhaps in the sense of anti-humane) because he does not see humanism as the essential message for our time. But this would be an entirely superficial and frivolous reading. Heidegger’s point of view is historical, and philosophy, in view of the essential temporality of man, must always take the historical point of view: Humanism was a great historical effort on the part of the Greeks, and it was necessary at that turning point of time to rescue man from his immersion in nature and to define the strictly human as distinct from the animal. The great artistic expressions of humanism are those beautiful and idealized forms of man created by the classic Greek sculptors. If the modern sculptor cannot create such idealized forms, it is not because he is anti-human or anti-humane; another vision claims him, such as the need to reintegrate man into nature, so that some of Henry Moore’s carvings, for example, exhibit the human body as a rock eroded by the sea and cast upon the shore from the waves. Man needs to preserve the inherited values of his humanity; but humanism as a doctrine is incomplete for an age when the human is threatening to overpower nature…
The worst part about the sexual revolution has been the institutional meddling in men’s and women’s choices.
Insisting that there be equal outcomes in all things is crazy.
There are many women who want to serve to be at the top of government, business, name the field. That should not mean that all women need to make the same choices as men. This is where we got things wrong. We assign numeric quotas and ignore the fact that not all human beings have the same objectives for their lives based on their sex (or any other immutable characteristic).
The sexual revolution has also made sexual intimacy far too recreational. As someone who partnered for life, I cannot speak to the thrill of having had an unlimited number of women to mate. But I can say that monogamy was deeply fulfilling, in bed and in the wider world we shared for 40 years.
She is now gone, and I will have many years to live alone, God willing. I don’t intend to change my behavior toward women or sex, in spite of the fact that my obligation to monogamy has been fulfilled and I could choose any path. My life experience set the bar too high to change now.
But whatever few women who genuinely wanted to take those high profile positions and were genuinely capable of fulfilling them were taking them for centuries without any revolutions, anyway.
History is full of women state leaders who governed, started and ended wars and signed verdicts; there also were a few scientists and artists here and there.
What I see came with revolution is a lot of extra flame of those women who as you mentioned feel like they have to take all those positions, because they feel the societal pressure on them to do so. This largely hurt those women who were intrinsically talented engineers, politicians and wise decision makers. We rarely see them any more.
We are managing the West through tyranny. If you are, fill in the blank, you must be represented across all fields based on your representation in the general population. It forces the society to jam people into roles by force, not by freedom. And for many women, like my late wife, the culture treats you like a failure if you don’t smilingly go along with the grand narrative.
Not only is that unscientific, and behaviorally unsubstantiated, but it is oppressive to all of us as individuals with dignity and freedom.
This is beyond sad.. I am lucky to be somewhat immune to this pressure due to my historical background.
I work with women as an image consultant but de facto I find myself working with them as a therapist. This wasn’t my intention but I found that I can’t teach my clients how to dress themselves with dignity if they have their dignity lost under the social pressure of being put in the box of the grand narrative. I end up explaining to them time and again what you just articulated in your comment.
I do what I can for my clients, the readers of my work blog and mostly for my daughter.
I think the real change has just been technological. The roles that women once had in society no longer exist. Women once would fetch water, would sew/knit/weave, would make candles and pottery, would bear and raise oftentimes 5-10 children. None of these things exist in the modern world. Cooking and cleaning are about the last vestiges of the things a woman would be doing in 1800, and even those are tremendously easy today compared to what they once required. Even child rearing is being taken away from women - many don't have kids at all, or only have 1-2. Kids today are raised mostly by schools/teachers/the state and by tech. Give the kid a phone and walk away.
In about 5-10 years the actual act of *gestation* will be taken away from women (or should I say "birthing persons" -- gotta be inclusive of the transmen and non-binary people here!). Scientists have already managed to develop artificial wombs and to create embryos from stem cells. Right now, they say artificial wombs will only be used to help save babies born prematurely (good thing!), but how long before a woman decides she doesn't want to pause her career for pregnancy, or go through the physical pain of labor, so just puts her egg with some sperm into a bag in a factory and comes back 9 months later to collect the child, without ever having been pregnant. And it's one step from there to a millionaire single man using CRISPR to design his perfect child's DNA, generating that embryo with a stem cell, and dropping that thing in the bag; no one with XX chromosomes being involved in the process.
Given that nearly their entire purpose in society has been replaced by globalism and technology, what is a woman's role in society today? That's what 2nd and 3rd wave feminism have been exploring. FWIW, men's roles (chopping logs, fighting wars, hunting, fishing, plowing fields) *also* don't exist in modern Western society, or only for a small subset of people. So men don't exactly have much purpose either.
EDIT: I didn't mean this to come across as misogynistic or anti-feminism, but it probably comes off that way. I meant it more philosophically. Feminism is inevitable because of technological change (unless we go full Afghanistan... although I'm guessing in 100 years, Afghanistan will be getting its first female leader, too). Feminism - at least 2nd-wave feminism - is arguably a *necessary* philosophy given our technological advances.
I don’t see your comment as misogynistic or anti-feminine. I also think that there are a lot of stages between Afghanistan and the Huxlean “Brave New World” where female roles will re-emerge as those who are reading stories to children in different languages and poetry and then discussing the plots and rhymes with them, analysing the paintings and sculpture of wonderful art pieces (yes, the dead white men who built our civilisation); then also the putting family pictures and art work on the walls of their homes, playing piano and singing or / and gardening with kids.
There are so many things women can do in this new world and I romantically believe that they / we will. We might be descending to the Dark Age right now but there will be the Renaissance 🌱🌄
I think Grimes stated it succinctly when asked by Bari for her final argument. I suspect she had AI on the mind when Grimes' replied "I hope living women have a chance in the future"....
As much as I like Louise Perry, I have a difficult time understanding her speech patterns. And "Grimes" was close to being incoherent. reading a transcript would have been better for me as well.
My grandfather used to lift up a thumb, then another finger, then another counting... when us grandkids used the word 'you know' when speaking to him. He did this with a grin on his face, encourage us to 'use our words to explain what we really mean' 'Like' is another lazy speech tool I wish the 80's would take back
In response to (the part of the "How about a transcript?" comment where "Andy in TX" said)
. . . << "Even an AI-made one with some errors would be good." >>
I'd like to add that:
. . . in addition to the fact that [even at first]
--> it "would be good",
. . . there is also the possibility that
--> over time, through the use of some crowd-sourced "suggestions" from readers, corrections (for mistakes ... whether TYPOs or OCR errors, or "AI" slip-ups, or ... other kinds of "room for improvement") could be applied.
So, the quality [of a given transcript] might get better! ... perhaps through some "wiki" methods, or something like that.
The methods and tools used here might not be quite the same as the way they do things on [e.g.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ (some more -- or different -- 'moderating' might be in order here); but eventually the "with some errors" part might involve ... fewer errors ['remaining'].
Grimes: "I mean, like at the airport, how does the entire line not just move out of the way so that moms & kids can go to the front of the line?"
Well that wouldn't be equitable for the CapitalOne platinum card members, all the folx who feel like they may have a disability that day and the people who drug their pets along dressed up up in a "Emotional Service Animal" vest purchased on Amazon.
Please, just stop with the cheap emotional manipulation and resentment. Just once. What about fathers with kids? Grimes is a an elite who has certainly been to the airport at least once and certainly knows that airlines do preboards for people with children or who need extra time to board. But hey, let's not let that get in the way of the narrative.
I flew a couple years ago and I could have sworn I heard a special boarding announcement for elderly, disabled, parents with small children.etc. This was a commercial airline here in the US. What planet is Grimes on?
Recall the recent NYC rental bike dispute between the black teens and the white nurse. Much of the outrage stemmed from the mistreatment of a pregnant woman. To imply that we don't value motherhood is absurd.
Please someone tell Grimes, that there are countries outta there that still do this.
We were in line to board the plane Belgrade-Rome last summer when someone way ahead of us in the line came up and said, please go ahead, you are with the kids!
We were like 😨😨 wow, thank you!!
As our kids were 10 and 11 at the time. They wouldn’t even be considered kids in the US anymore.
In the language of social psychologist Gordon Neufield it’s called “Infrastructural Commitment to Kids.” It doesn’t exist in the US tho.
Let me note that the debate was much more balanced and nuanced than I expected. It was enjoyable. Of course the feminist narcissistic willingness to completely leave men's voices out of the conversation was no surprise. And, discussion of the actual social and cultural chaos and disorder surrounding us.
Women on both sides of the debate hinted at the possibility that "..carpet baggers.." had seized and co.opted feminist ideology. WELL YES!! We're here at TFP ( truth/fact based subscription journalism) because the American national dialogue, society and our economic system has, like feminism, been distorted, captured, co.opted and reduced to a psyop. At times, all four debaters almost acknowledged it. Did I hear Grimes actually use the word "agency" and suggest that if WE accept personal responsibility WE can surmount the problems of the day and build a better future? (My girl!!)
It was heartening to see four intelligent young women alive and firing on all cylinders. And THANK YOU BARI!! and TFP for beginning the necessary expansion of the forum and the discussion to America at large.
We've flown with our kids several times (mostly in the US) and I can't remember a single time when we haven't gotten to board first. The random US-hating is silly - this is totally a thing in the US.
How old were the kids? The toddlers (up to 4 I believe) are boarded priority as an overall policy for all flights.
What amazed me in my example is a civilian initiative of a by-passer towards pretty adult kids. I generally see more accommodation and sympathy towards children and their parents in southern Europe and in the Balkans than I do in the US.
It shows in small things and those who split their time between the US and the aforementioned areas notice and talk about it a lot.
Interesting debate. More stimulating and interesting would have been a few panel members age 70+. These are the women who lived through the entire revolution and birthed the generation struggling or enjoying its effects. The wisdom of their experiences spoken directly by them rather than filtered through this younger panel would have been much more valuable and exciting in trying to decide the answer to the debate topic. I’m surprised some weren’t invited. But then I’m not. This generation is still alive to tell their own story, but really, who would want to listen to a bunch of gray boomers who nurtured the current generation and broke all those so called glass ceilings?
I agree. Although I will congratulate Bari on her first debate. Well done.
It is curious to me the vision of the past in their arguments, read in a history book I suppose by a feminist? There is certainly things to point out, but life is never that black and white, even for women.
I was born in the early 60s, so I was a child during the remaining traditional family years, and a teenager when all hell broke loose. It's fair to say mine is the first generation that wasn't expected to marry and have kids; in fact, it was the other way around. I respect Louise Perry for writing about this, and what she wrote about it. "My Dumb Postfeminist Life" is the title of my forthcoming memoir of how this social experiment caused far more problems than it solved, from my own personal trials and tribulations. And what gets me the most is that when I try to discuss it with my perennial child friends, they look at me like I'm nuts, then return to posting pictures of their pets and food on Facebook.
Great observation and comment. I also think a roundtable would have been more effective as well rather than either/or's. And, there seemed to be more in common than opposed.
Are women happier now than they were ~70 years ago? That's not a loaded question, I'm not insinuating anything. It's a genuine inquiry asked in good faith.
The answer to that might provide an answer to as whether the sexual revolution has failed.
It’s a good question. They must be happier in some ways, but women (and I am one) have so much rage right now. And I can’t say it’s all justified. Or rather, it is (in SOME instances) an overreaction. Women have been justifiably angry about unfair treatment for a long time but then when the tables have tipped in their favor on some issues, they continue the rage. And I just don’t think anyone can be joyful in that scenario. Happier? Maybe. Joyful? No.
Rage or manufactured rage? Women today comprise nearly 60% of college enrollment. Men are overtly discriminated against yet their rage is only beginning to be expressed. And, when people such as Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate try to give a voice to the discrimination men endure they are pilloried and silenced.
Are you sure Tate is "literally a sex trafficker?"
Although not a huge fan of Tate, some of his message is reasonable. I looked to see what the charges against him were and, so far, have seen no evidence of your claim We have to be careful of the slurs of leftists and globalists against people they fear.
I think that rage stems from the fact that they are now socially programmed to expect everything - relationship, children, and career - and so when they fail to have any of these or one interferes with another it has to be society's fault and society is patriarchal therefore men are evil. Nothing will ever be good enough and it doesn't exactly facilitate open-minded thinking.
Totally. As a woman and mother who works, I feel like I’m failing at everything sometimes. It’s hard. And to this point- the sexual revolution and the brand of feminism undergirding it is so misogynistic. We undervalue women who stay at home and undervalue caring for children to such a degree, it’s criminal.
As a man who left work to bring up the kids while my wife followed her career, I agree with you totally that caring for children is undervalued by society and those who do it are looked down on. I found that young mothers were the most supportive group!
I've observed in some left-leaning women a disconnect between what they want and what they ideologically think they should want. Sometimes that inner conflict has become my problem (as in my fault somehow).
I agree the outrage and playing the victim-card seems to be a common theme among even women who have become extremely successful. Seems some women want to believe that being treated unfairly on the way up the ladder of success is something that only happens to them. The difference is that (maybe until recently) men grew up in a system in which they were trained - through sports mostly - that they had to be tough to overcome unfairness. Women just get pissed-off and complain and never stop even when it seems highly incongruent with their evident success.
Well, there's also a system where complaining a lot gets you success. Which doesn't just apply to women -- certain people are quick to play the race card. A bunch of guys recently turned up at a tech recruiting fair for women and claimed to be non-binary.
Right. And, I would like someone to try to give us a scientific definition of what "being non-binary" means. It comes down to people "should be able to identify how they like" even if it makes no sense. Society should be aware that the guy who advanced "non-binary" legal status now deeply regrets it.
"James Shupe lived for 6 years as a transgender woman. His transgender activism prompted far reaching changes, from pushing the state of Oregon to make gender neutral bathrooms, to receiving a legal non-binary gender designation, even on his birth certificate. But in 2019 he detransitioned and was able to restore his birth name and gender. His transgender story begins in childhood, is complex, distressing, and reveals terrible lapses in our national mental health infrastructure."
"That none of his medical professionals asked why he felt the way he did, or even looked into the post-traumatic stress he experienced while in the army, shows the power of the transgender lobby. They have cowed the medical profession into ignoring the Hippocratic Oath, and get them to engage in serious psychological and physical harm."
"Noticeably absent was a discussion from the terrible side effects that this type of treatment causes. It is almost as though the potential profits blind the physicians to their responsibility to do no harm."
"No longer is he referenced as the man who started the “non binary’ legal option, and he is no longer the darling of the liberal media. But he is a man working to live truth, and speak out about his part in changing it."
Part of it is what Pemulis said. Women have been angry about injustices for a long time - about not having the ability to vote, have credit cards or jobs, being shamed for their bodies, being sexually preyed upon, etc. They’ve been justifiably upset about a lot of things. But the rage I’ve seen in the past decade (that reflected and helped produce movements like metoo and BLM) is an anger that boils out of, at root a sympathy for other human beings and desire for “fairness” in the world (that’s an optimistic take, anyway). Women are/have been sympathetic, relational creatures and are motivated this way. When jobs and culture began to shift to accommodate women and their ambitions (a necessary correction), women didn’t stop raging. They continued to point the finger because it feels good and you can right now leverage tremendous social capital that results in real material goods. It’s led to total myopia. I mean - YES - there are still problems. Sexual abuse will always be problematic and women will likely always get the short end of that stick. There is still discrimination in some areas. But why are women still harping about how they make less on the dollar when we have good data on that that suggests that it’s largely due to the fact that women tend to choose to work lower paid jobs and work part time (usually to care for children)? Why is it that my husband has to endure lectures about sexism in the workplace and how held down women are when 9/10 of the people in leadership are women? Why are women still raging about injustices in education when the majority of people in higher Ed are women? Women are emotional. And capable of great rage. We did a lot of hard work to correct things that were problems (and there’s still work to do). But instead of righting the ship, we overcorrected and now I fear we’re facing the iceberg that will sink the whole damn thing. Women can’t complain that men are lame and they have no one to marry while simultaneously demanding power from them in every arena possible based on sex. I think the rage is a form of mental masturbation that also happens to be culturally advantageous right now.
Your comment made me think about my younger daughter, who was born in 2001. She grew up with a cell phone in her hand and can rage about a lot. It seems to be her first reaction all too often. Now compare that with my older daughter, who was born in 1996, and they are two completely different people. The older is calm and thoughtful first. Not reactive. It’s funny too, both do yoga and meditate, which helps control or reduce the reactive mind. But the younger one can’t seem to master quieting her rage. My gut says each are a product of a different generation, though just five years apart. Millennial vs Gen Z. I can’t say exactly what makes the younger one so angry. But I am confident it was taught to her in school and on her phone. She didn’t learn it from her parents.
A part of me looks to the use of “guilt” in the modern society as a tactic to capture people into believing a lot of what the left advocates for. It gets to their emotions, which are out of check, uncontrollable. Guilt, if used correctly, can make anyone do anything. I saw this with my younger daughter as she tried to articulate her “lefty” point of view. Guilt to me was the underlying motivation of her rage. It’s difficult trying to explain to someone who believes that they have committed a terrible “wrong” that it is not their fault. I was lucky as a child, I had a grandmother that used guilt like a knife. So I learned to sidestep it at first sight. I just laugh at guilt now.
I’m sure you’re on to something. So much on our phones breeds rage. Rage is currency and capital. The culture in the last five years has taught us that if we aren’t enraged at something (ostensibly the victim hood of others and ourselves), we aren’t alive. It has infected politics and become our religion. It is SO unpopular to point out that actually, things aren’t that bad. And that keeping a stiff upper lip might actually be advantageous at times, not to mention healthy. Nevermind the data - it is this insidious orthodoxy that creeps into social media and other sources that messages even to kids like your daughter that if she’s not mad and hurt, something’s wrong with her.
I am not decrying your question but we could just as easily ask are people in general happier than they were 70 years ago. I think most people would expect to be a lot less happy if all our 'progress' (smartphones, cars etc) were taken away but I would not be at all surprised if people are less happy than they were 70 years ago; more wanting, less satisfaction with what we have etc etc.
I can't help but wonder if our expectations have changed. Did people 70 years ago expect to be happy? I believe that my grandparents, farmers who lived through the depression and fought in WWII, expected life to be hard. When it wasnt, that was nice. But I never once heard them talk about whether or not they (or anyone else) was "happy."
According to surveys, no. Happiness (at least in America) has been decreasing over the last 40 years according to a number of different polls/surveys. Depression among teens/adolescents in particular has shot up recently; about 49% of 8th-12th graders in the US say they "do not enjoy life" (up from 23% in 2010). In general, women tend to report lower average life satisfaction than men do (despite this, only about 20% of suicides are women).
Neither side won, because they are both right and wrong. What we need is a new sexual revolution. One that recognizes that women deserve equality, but there are biological differences between the sexes. Men should be empowered to be masculine, but held to a high standard. No one should be forced to adopt a lifestyle based on societal expectations either. The benefits of traditional family values on children is undeniable. Our culture should embrace traditional values, but it may look a little different than the 1950's.
I agree neither side "won", as you point out, both made very good cases and points. I really enjoyed it. Perhaps setting it up as a roundtable, and including a pioneer, would have been better for dialogue. I would say the evolving sexual revolution should allow for expression of both masculine (yang) and feminine (yin) qualities in both sexes. Perhaps if we expressed it in this way there would be less extremes and dysphoria.
I didn't watch the debate...just a portion. It would have made more sense to have had women from all generations, no? I sure know way more about myself at 50 than I did at 20. Wisdom is a beautiful thing. My 22 year old daughter and I are very close. She has sought my wisdom over the course of her entire life(age appropriate) on every topic. Maybe the women touched on this but what about the women who have chosen to WAIT to have sex til marriage? That is also part of the sexual revolution and there is nothing wrong with that choice.
Just worth pointing out that Perry argues for 'listening to our mothers' and it is brought up towards the end of the debate this is brought up though she actually talks about grandmothers and Anna mentions it too. So while they are all at a similar age and stage there is some talk and recognition of the wisdom of those who have lived life.
I think the pill was responsible for The Revolution, not the other way 'round. Paraphrasing Doctor Johnson, the prospect of being a single mother concentrates the mind wonderfully - or at least it did back then.
I am 59 years old. Grew up in Ohio. Lived in NYC for 32 years as an artist. Left due to the extreme loss of freedom and tolerance, and I deeply loved that city for years. I was divorced and becoming successful during the Sex and The City years. Felt pressure to change my conservative previous ideas of only sleeping with men I was in love with. No one would ever call me an uptight person. I shaved my head like Sinead O’Connor 29 years ago as a sort of “I express my womanhood any way I want, and I actually feel prettier and more feminine with my lack of hair”. I believe feminism is allowing women to have choices. But a lot of that movement alienated me from a young age when I noticed so much messaging about how we HAD to “have it all” and “be it all”-and that message was increasing that we had to BE LIKE MEN. We had to beat 40 armed and dangerous men in the movies, look like Charlize Theron while doing it, be brilliant and successful in power careers, be as wanton with our bodies as men and remain as emotionally detached. So many women feel they must turn themselves into pornographic images for mens’ increasing addictive, disposable needs. Modern feminism and the sexual revolution have sold women the biggest lies. It de-feminizes us, it sends the message we must be a boss bitch, in effect, a man. It devalues us by making women debase themselves in porn to “make bank”. Plasticity, sex without romance, love or commitment-it just makes us devalued or valued in all the wrong ways. I recall wondering why I did not feel good about my Sex and the City style romps, why they frequently felt performative and ultimately sad when my gay and straight friends all cheered me on as “so fabulous”. I took a long, cold hard look in the mirror and thought: I never succumbed to peer pressure while younger, why am I doing this now in my late 30’s? Why am I ignoring the voice in my soul? The second I decided I would never sleep with a man again that did not meet a very high bar for me, a potential husband and future father-I fell in love with my best male friend and married him. I had my only child at age 40 because of the “your career is everything” myth-at the height of what became a very successful career I cherished. I walked away from the feminist myth at age 41 because I realized women were more visibly angry and miserable around me because of the LIE that they must be like men and HAVE IT ALL. I decided to focus on marriage and baby and became a stay at home, cookie baking mother.— June Cleaver but still with the extreme buzz cut! I was treated badly by other women on many occasions (as if I was deficient or unsuccessful for choosing this life), something that never happened when I had my glam career and single city dwelling life. I don’t recall a man ever expressing that attitude towards me when I shifted gears. I could go on and on and on. Of course human beings are each unique, but in general-our female BIOLOGY and chromosomes determine more about our different genders than people want to admit. I loved this panel and the sense of respect and humor shared amongst all the women! It was just a beautiful thing to see. The world I grew up in, where we had intellectual freedom and civility. Thank you, Bari!
Wow. Well said. I am 58, an artist who has lived in NYC (Brooklyn) for 34 years and is desperately looking for a good place near the ocean to move to. (husband is a native New Yorker - - they are the cool ones - - so this might be hard). Wish I had known you!! I agree 100%. Met my now husband at 42 after a lot of the same bullshit. I always bridled at feminism even at a young age because a lot started from the position of hating men. Or loathing the things they have done. I believe we all have a drop of the other, like the yin and yang, plus who wants to believe in something (non violent) that necessitates hating the other? Yeesh. I am glad you are so happy now, and hopefully I will craft an awesome plan to get out of here. NYC is getting worse and worse and more unbearable. In 5 years you won't even recognize it from what you left.
I am so at peace moving to a beach community very close to the ocean in Florida. It reminds me of the friendly and inclusive and tolerant Ohio I grew up in. I haven’t met a bitter, angry, pushy person yet. Of course, I know there are bad people everywhere-but so far-I haven’t met one here. Miracle. Good luck to you!!!!
I got more out of your reply than the entire debate. I’m about the same age as you and a man. Your experience reminds me of my mother’s from a generation earlier. Immigrant, earned her PHD and a university position, she set out to raise five boys. Something had to give. The amount of grief she used to get from her colleagues for sacrificing an academic star trajectory to wrangling and raising a testosterone farm, alienated her from many of her colleagues. At her funeral she was surrounded by the multitudes of three generations she started - her sons, all married, none divorced and productive folks. No psychos, incels, or addict grandchildren. That or more published academic papers and books?
I love that story and your hilarious reference to the testosterone farm! Lol!!!! I have always TRIED to understand how modern feminists can put career above family and feel so comfortable with that. Young women have now grown up under a relentless barrage of media images that tell them they are nothing unless they “have it all”-but I have never seen more women who seem stressed, addicted, self-debasing, angry, sad, passive aggressive-etc. Yet they will smile and put on a brave face and pretend they love their modern feminist lives of “having it all”. Isn’t that what a cult is ultimately? : A group of people who ignore their true feelings to live a fraud that their peers reward them with approval for.
I was always a pretty independent thinker. So it is remarkable to me that even I fell for the Sex and The City feminist myth for a time. That’s how powerful and pervasive it is in our culture.
Ultimately, I thought there was nothing I would ever do in my career as important as devoting everything I had to mothering my son and supporting my wonderful husband so he could rise so far in his career (which benefited all of us). Your mother sounds like a really impressive, strong woman. Its lonely when you go against the grain and are treated badly or dismissively by others for simply wanting to mother in your own way. But it is anything but lonely when you reach the end of your life and beam with pride at the children you will leave on this earth.
Of course, your mother is exalted by me. FIVE BOYS!!!! Lol. I’m not worthy to shine her shoes. She sounds spectacular!
I always found Sex and City had the most unnecessarily miserable women on TV. As where the mother in Malcolm in the Middle had it all. No other show captured as well how parents wrangle a family of all boys. They captured the sisterless dynamics of relentless fraternal competition.
I think that was the point of some of it. There was one episode where Samantha got sick with the flu and none of her many boy toys cared enough about her to take care of her.
Why did the sexual revolution fail? It didn't for the globalists. Decoupling love from sex was in large part what the revolution was about, and in my view it was by design as part of the depopulation agenda...ironically put into action in the 60's. And as the panel pointed out ...that goal is being met.
Meanwhile, the revolution (which I lived through) has caused a nearly complete failure for close intimate, loving relationships to thrive...which create the bonds that make civilization civil. (The word 'love' was mention only once in the entire debate.) Because the sexual revolution axed love and respect and treated both as superfluous to a sexual relationship, we end up with empty, callous connections....which accounts for the rise in depression. When the sexual revolution gave out its candy "you won't get pregnant" and "you don't have to be married to have/enjoy sex" it tricked(s) many into the car of meaningless hook-ups of degrading sex as sport. Porno has made that sport more sick and perverted by the day, as it must to get the audience who is watching 'off'' as they become normalized to the kink.
The way out of this failure? We need to address the fact that the perennial question of 'Who am I and what am I doing on this planet?' which has not been answered by science..and which can be answered it in 2023 (Based on my studies) in order to design a better world. Materialists claim we are wet computers and when you're dead it is over. Or we are spirits having a human experience here to expand and raise our consciousness to GoOD. In which case love is the reason for being and why we crave it instinctually. Sex that degrades puts us into hell where love doesn't exist and this is where the sexual revolution sum total has landed us.
Appreciate the conversation. Great points made including the recognition that failure may have not been the best term to use. Caused problems? Yes. Failure? Not quite. Having said that, the loosening of all guardrails creates a free for all that absolutely impacts us psychologically & has us again, searching for a structure to live within. I wish someone would have strongly stated the obvious---that men & women are built differently by nature in their sexuality & the push for women to live like men in that regard is a central part of the issue. I love Grimes take on the social move to respect motherhood & children. And I absolutely love the idea about folding children back into society along with the elderly. We all live in age segregated bubbles that creates an unnecessary distance between generations & therefore lack of wisdom sharing & critical conversations.
Very much agree with your thoughtful points. Yes, we are biologically different but less different in psychology and ability that doesn't involve physicality. We need new combined language around both motherhood and fatherhood, and respect, reverence and gratitude are the long-forgotten elephants in the room. At the end of the day, we can share many things, but there are still beautiful things that differentiate us and should be celebrated. I enjoyed Grimes' perspective and her naivete about those who preceded her, but I think she represents what's great in the younger generations' perspective. They are under the influence of the result of the sexual revolution without the direct influence of those who preceded them. Perhaps that's where wisdom comes from. Elders observe and comment on the results of their struggles and labors to younger people. I agree we are living in silos and segregated bubbles, but I think women particularly can easily turn that back around.
Thank you. And love your point about reverence, respect, and gratitude. I imagine we could all benefit with an increase in these. I am noticing the younger generation calling for a return to homesteads, slow living, and centering family. There's also a huge increase in people choosing to forego the modern schooling system. I'm with you...I think women are particularly positioned to turn things around.
Yes! And these things are so heartening to me. I see this in my own children. Hopefully, it’s a trend they’re quietly undertaking while all this chaos ensues. And, it will be a wave. I have great hope in our young people! And, great confidence that women in particular will rise to the occasion and take us all to a better place.
If there was to be a revolution for women, I would have hoped it resulted in more self confidence, empowerment and self respect. I don’t think this one did.
It certainly did result in those things initially and that I can say confidently firsthand. But, that has changed quite drastically over the last 10 years especially for the reasons Louise Perry stated so well. Freedom is not freedom at all if you don't know where you're going. We need to reframe.
It can be painful to be 'too free'. Isn't that what Joplin meant when she so famously sang that "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"? Louise Perry argument was that for the vast majority, social guardrails and norms are a very good thing. I think her closing remarks were that most ought to 'obey the wisdom of being a normie'
Yes. It can be painful to be ‘too’ anything, as things are bearing out. Freedom within a Framework, a wise person once pointed out to me. Outliers, though, allow us to see things differently and help us to improve and evolve. I suppose the key is to be mindful and heartful and ultimately moderate. Sometimes moderating is pushing the norm to extremes. It’s just how extreme and for how long.
Yes, agree we always need the outliers, or entrepreneurs if you will. What I see/sense however is the more ‘normal’ path is no longer widely encourage or advertised to our youth, in popular culture or beyond. Too much of what draws our attention (perhaps the propaganda) disproportionately celebrates the outliers.
A few years ago after watching the Super Bowl half time show with my daughters, I complained on FB that we all could have done without the pole grinding crotch shots of J-LO. My daughters (both under 10 at the time) felt sad about how it made them feel as girls. They read it as objectifying. I was SLAUGHTERED by nearly everyone and slammed as a bigoted, backwards, pearl-clutcher. It was “cultural expression” a lot of them told me. (I asked them if they’d allow someone to prance on stage wearing the confederate flag as cultural expression- no reply.). Others said this was body shaming. My point was that if they were going to call this a family friendly event, make it so. If they want people grinding on poles, then fine but don’t call it that. No one could hear me through the din of outrage over my prudishness. It was breathtaking for me, and as a feminist (and at the time I was a liberal), I was so incredibly disappointed that as a woman, I wasn’t allowed to say - you know what, I don’t feel that staring eye level at J-Lo’s crotch is progress. Twisted.
It's really creepy how leftists defend and protect displays of sexual lust with more passion than almost any subject in our civilization.
And for what? But also, I was left wondering - why don’t I get to have an opinion on this? I was dumped on immediately and I don’t know why what I said was soooooo threatening.
A big part of it is that when you’re engaging in conversation on social media, you can’t expect to find reasonable responses. All the filters of civility that are in place with in-person conversation are removed and you are communicating with people’s worst selves. Social Media mobs are akin to a road-rage state. Don’t open up and be vulnerable on a place like FB or Twitter, and don’t think you’re communicating with reasonable people.
Great debate.
I thought the most profound statements came from Anna Khachiyan (57:45 - 59:00) when she stated (paraphrasing) "our Culture now teaches young women to have contempt for the sanctity of family (anti-natalism) ... where they (now) no longer have the receptors to understand what it means to love somebody more than yourself, and sacrifice yourself for them"
Louise Perry followed up with wisdom I'm passing on to my own teenage daughter which is to try your damnedest to "conduct yourself / act as if the Pill doesn't exist"
People crave order, social guardrails and normality. As the Book of Ecclesiastes teaches, there is no new thing under the sun... key to life is centering ourselves on God, not ourselves. The Old (and New) Testaments await re-discovery for all who seek.
Spot on. Because there are really no filters of civility (I love that term) like being face to face, knowing a person's real name and location, there is no motivation to be civil. You'll never win an argument/debate on the internet when the "person" you're debating/arguing with is anonymous. And because of that, they can keep going on and on, and on, never letting it go.
Yes, though sometimes the point of a debate is not to convince the person you're debating, but the bystander. They’re the ones who might swing the consensus.
I find that asking honest questions (sometimes) can break through and result in civil discourse. I've had my current thinking updated by doing so as well. It doesn't always work but I do try this from time to time
Yeah, I learned that lesson the hard way. Never happened again.
Very true.
"I was left wondering - why don’t I get to have an opinion on this?"
Feminism, which I believe has conjoined with progressivism, is a religion for its adherents. As with all religions, it has its own set of forbidden strictures. Clearly you violated one of them.
I violated something for sure. A certain kind of feminism. But I count myself as a feminist - just not that type.
I enjoyed this except for a number of technical glitches with the recording playback that caused it to annoyingly restart several times.
I was surprised that Grimes was included, but, despite being less articulate than the others, I found her insights very persuasive. She has a good mind.
But about the inclusiveness of panel - am I to take it that men (and more seasoned women) have nothing to say, nothing to contribute to this debate?
I was disappointed that I did not hear anyone note that porn is made for men, and so is slanted dramatically towards what the filmers believe men want to see. As a result we have a generation of boys who believe women want to be choked and humiliated while having sex, or that many women are waiting for the right trigger to become the wanton sluts these boys want. It's not just about making porn with high production values as I believe Grimes said, it is about not portraying women and men as caricatures.
I agree with your opinion about Grimes contributing valuable insights, but I still think she could have pulled her verbal pants up to her waist, so to speak, and sounded less like a ten-year-old struggling through all the “like” filler words like a kid in a plastic ball pit. My comment is most about presentation, but it really brought the value of the talk down for me. We were promised Female Titans..
Pulled up her verbal pants LOL
I think Louise spoke to this when she touched “on the homosexuality of heterosexuality” comment. Bari touched on it when she spoke about the FP essay winners. That essay gutted me because of exactly what you speak of...
I was thinking the same thing. It would be interesting to get the perspective of men. Maybe on a separate panel.
I happen to agree with your opinion and I don't consider myself a prude. It's not appropriate on a family show and it has NOTHING to do with "culture". Girls are being sexualized way too young and then you wonder why we have so many unwanted young pregnancies.
Somebody needs new "friends......."
Would it be nice if I had friends who agreed with me? Of course. But I wonder if not having enough visible differences in our friend groups is part of what led us to the polarized, white hot place we’re in now. So, maybe not. Maybe I just need to learn how and when to say these things that no doubt my friends might disagree with.
If you can’t change your friends then change your friends - also teach them that you can agree to disagree without being disagreeable
There is a vast gulf between disagreeing and doing do disagreeably. Clearly your "friends" fall largely in the latter category.
Yes, and I wish they didn’t. It took me by surprise because they’re actually decent people in the flesh. Part of it I think is that FB is trash for sorting these things out, part of it is that people don’t have experience with disagreeing in a way that allows you to still be nice, and part of it is what I’ve mentioned before - that they were cashing in cultural credit by by displaying rage and towing the virtue signaling line, lest they themselves be cast as bigots.
My thoughts exactly.
You were dissing depravity, fathom 2023. That's been a leftist no-no since the 60s, increasingly so since then.
My kids did not watch that half time show, but they still laugh about my comments about female half time performances lacking pants. It’s a running theme at my house.
And are the least capable of having a lasting relationship with the opposite sex.
Leftists? Come on! I know so many young right wing or right leaning women who love J Lo. Personally, if my kids were young, she’d be off limits, as she is to many of my “woke” friends’ kids. As a feminist since the late 60s, I’ve sat in bars over many beers and debated the difference between freedom vs soft porn with these youngsters, many who are friends. They laugh at my prudishness, their bosoms bursting out of their tank tops. So I do know how fathom2023 feels!
Showing lots of skin, but having very little sex. That’s this young generation.
Lol. It’s strange isn’t it?
The time is coming when drag queens and kids will be the halftime entertainment and will be called family friendly.
This sounds alarmist at first glance but I honestly think you could be right.
What I see happening now takes me back to the scene in the movie “Moses” where everyone’s actions were full of immorality. Hmmm, I wonder what the missing link is in both biblical times and the present.
I’ll say it, belief in God.
Drag Queens are already in the schools in some places like NY. They read stories to children at libraries around the country.
I've heard that you want to follow the Style and Book Review sections of papers to see where the media is leading the culture/where politics are going. This is the WSJ:
"She Won Over America on ‘Jeopardy!’ Now She’d Like to Reintroduce Herself.
Amy Schneider wants fans to know she’s not just the family-friendly trivia champion they fell in love with on TV."
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/amy-schneider-jeopardy-book-861bd8da?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1
I kinda don't recall falling in love with this guy. If I did would I be a lesbian or straight by today's definitions? None of this is "family friendly".
As an observation on my part: My experience of Drag Queens was gay men/transvestites who dressed up as icons like Dolly Parton, Carol Channing or Marilyn Monroe and often sang or served as entertainers. The "Drag Queens" I see today more often resemble evil clowns or distorted half formed creatures sprung from the human unconscious. They are more archetype than human. They project a kind of Thanatos or death energy and are far more shadow than light. At least, the darlings of the fascist MSM appearing at many staged political events are.
The masculine experience of professional misandrist feminism (now serving the totalitarian globalist Davos crowd as the D.E.I. commissariat) was also a death like anti-life energy. Some feminist openly called for the murder of men and some (Valerie Solanas) actually attempted it. And we can't overlook the anti-male influence of feminist lesbianism on young women and culture in general. Many early feminist leaders were anti-family, anti-male lesbian. Simone Beauvior, pushed this agenda and the fascist MSM, aways selective in its persecution, gladly overlooked her sexual exploitation and seduction of the underaged female students who were entrusted to her care. Many of whom, came forward in adulthood to claim sexual abuse and trauma. For men much of so called feminism amounted to a propagandized weaponized open season on their lives and well being. And fascist totalitarians loved and supported it with grants tax dollars and careers. Malignant feminism was willing to serve their agenda and it was willing to serve theirs. And, men were an easy target. Simply exploit the emotional, mental and psychic vulnerability created by their love for women, children and family and butcher it. Seduce and destroy. Shame, whisper and shun. The central banking globalist Davos crowd immediately saw it as a way to sow discord and took the ball and ran with it. --- Cancelled much.
UP FRONT!! Not all feminists are gay or lesbian. Many are the married, loving partners, parents and career professionals we encounter every day. And the same is true for gays, lesbians and "drag queens". Their sexuality is their business not mine. Likewise I personally admire many of the openly gay because I can see in the way they carry themselves that they've weathered and come to terms with cultural, social and emotional storms which transformed them into the thing most praised, and the thing most needed in the American Republic: Powerful human individuals with agency and moral reason.
Sex has always been weaponized, but not to the scale, nor the distortion we are experiencing today. And sex is married to politics. Many women today are literally married to the State. Which, exploits their lives and robs them of happiness and meaning as much as men, children and marriage ever did. I see an elite class of women who profit mightily from feminism. But, they inhabit, profit from, espouse, support and serve the party line class war politics of the central banking, globalist totalitarian fascist corporatism laying nations and human dignity to waste around the world. Americans today, know it or not, are making the last stand for freedom and human human dignity. Feminism has empowered some poor women but mostly those advantaged and already at the top of the economic scale. As in all things demanding human moral reason, courage and agency, the narrative has been co.opted and distorted to create sexual, political, social and financial discord. Irrational hatred and division, sexual or otherwise is the dividing line. CHOOSE LIFE!!
I agree, coming to the family hour near you.
It is just the sort of thing that makes girls want to "opt out" of being girls when they hit puberty.
Who wouldn't?
I’ve had the same thing happen to me on a popular FB parents group who have kids leaving for college. The moms routinely post (sometimes headless) prom pictures of their daughters in skintight, very revealing dresses and all of the other moms gush over how “hot” and beautiful the daughters look. One headless picture was just over the top. So I just asked a general question in the comments about whatever happened to girls just dressing in pretty dresses without the emphasis on sexy? And how it’s strange how boys wear loose fitting clothes from their necks to the floor to dress up and women think girls should show as many body parts as possible and then comment on them in these posts. I got slaughtered as well. Two women liked my comment but you would have thought I said something atrocious. And I think that half time show was pathetic. But it’s like that on every music show too. Lady Gaga wore a very low cut dress to sing at the Rockefeller Christmas tree lighting show several years back. Just weird. Female sexiness is now the new currency.
Several years ago I was sitting at a stop light, looking around and waiting for the light to change when I noticed a young woman opposite in one of those tank top/built in bra halter things. I pointed out to my teenage daughter that when I was 18 (30 years earlier) this would have been called “underwear” and no one would have worn this in public. I’m sure teenage boys enjoy the scenery but imo strolling around half naked has done more to objectify women than to liberate them.
I saw the JLo halftime nonentertainment show and thought it was pathetic. This middle aged woman pretending to be a stripper, hanging on to a youth that will never return rivals Madonna’s desperation. Maybe one of the unintended consequences of the sexual revolution was no one allowed to grow older and not be an object of desire.
I've been observing this for the last two decades with Halloween costumes. They just get more and more 'sexier' (depraved) every year. I think there must be a plateau. The next generation (Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha) I think will push back against the pendulum that has swung too far away from God.
I so agree! From an early age...about the time was allowed to wear panty hose (late 60s haha) I recognized men cover up, women bare their skin. Even though dress was still modest by comparison to today, I realized the unfair pressure on girls to appear physically attractive by accenting boobs, butts and legs. It also made me angry that I couldn’t wear pants to school, despite cold Wisconsin winters! Lol!
Nothing "sexy" about it. It's depraved and utterly lacking in self-respect for themselves and their daughters. Yet these are the women who cry loudest for female "empowerment."
The left is not female friendly. They are feminists in name only.
After all, they elected Bill Clinton, twice, and even after he was shown to be an abusing swine. When he left the White House, the left treated him like a rock star.
Because many of his policies supported the betterment of women, like legalized abortion and welfare reform, which helped break the cycle of dependency and pulled millions out of poverty.
The right has its own cast of characters (and I won mention who) so this isn’t party-specific.
You may think this predator is wonderful. I think he is scum.
I’m explaining why some women would support a politician whose persona life might run contrary to their believes. Why the religious right supported Trump for example.
Are you saying sexual predation is his personal life and shouldn't be condemned? It is a criminal act and should be examined.
I voted for Clinton, and like you after Ms Lewinsky, I too despised him. Again..the right has its own set of characters too
You are absolutely correct. Most politicians regardless of party are scum.
Exactly.
Please try and avoid lumping everyone on the left. There are a lot of us aging feminists, happily married, with great kids who are appalled by this stuff.
Did I say anything that was incorrect. The DNC welcomed Bill with open arms. They didn't say, "Bill we can't support you for your run for president. We are the feminist party and you sexually abuse women." No, they supported him and defended his abusing ways.
Well I guess the problem is communication…and it’s important. The DNC to me is part of the left, the progressives are part of the left but not the whole. I do not contribute to the current and many past DNCs and am not a progressive. I still consider myself a Dem, but vote for indies on occasion. And there are many of us out here. It’s the same for the right, the RNC is part of the right, the MAGA crowd is part of the right, but not the whole. I’m pretty sure there are many who consider themselves as GOP, but not supporters of neither of those groups. I’m sure there are folks on right who consider Trump a sexual predator who should be condemned.
Not trying to criticize cuz I get your points here. But the generalizations tend to stifle or discourage communication between decent, sensible and well meaning people. How do we rise above that? It’s tough.
Here is a headline: "Save women's sports' bill passes House with zero votes from Dems, who call it transgender 'bullying'"
I know both parties try and vote as a block but this vote is BS antifeminist from the party that lies and says it is the feminist party. It is Bill Clinton all over again.
Can you blame me for lumping them all together? Look at how many of the left are antisemitic racists. How come the Dems have not kicked the antisemitic racists out of congress? No, they embrace them.
How did we get on an Oct 5th BBS?
PS
Don't go away. I may not agree with you but I enjoy the back and forth. I will always try and be civil and respect your point of view.
J Lo’s display was inappropriate.
This was simply the left pushing its culture on others.
Just keep resisting and don’t be afraid to speak your mind.
Again, consider such flak as proof that you are dead-center over the target. Or as my old roommate, Bill Shakespeare, used to say, "The lad(ies) doth protest too much, methinks."
I think you'd like the flagpole in my yard. The confederate battle flag - de rigueur in my county - and the American flag - above it, of course. Upside-down.
Sad
Why do you fly the Confederate battle flag?
For the same reason I carry a gun. I don't need a reason. I have the right, and that's all that matters.
Wait... I'm confused. You hung the American flag upside down?
On the high seas that is the universally-understood indicator for a vessel in distress. In my opinion this ship of state is as close to disappearing under the waves as it has ever been.
Jim, in the context of a ship, ok. On your property? I find it disrespectful. Just this side of burning the flag. We fly the flag not because we love everything that happens in this country, or even to signal our approval of the direction we are going. But rather to signal our support for the American values at their best. We are the first country to proclaim that our rights are NOT granted to us by the government, but rather they are inherently ours given to us by our Creator. There is so much to be proud of in this country. That's only one example. I urge you to reconsider hanging the flag upside down. Hanging the flag upside down, inspite of your explanation, seems to ultimately signal a disgust that is stronger than your love of country.
It is whatever I say it is. It is a signal of distress, and not something I take lightly. I would like to see a movement across the nation to do the same everywhere, since flags can be seen for a long distance and would continuously remind everyone within view that we stand on the edge. There's a great interview of VDH by Tucker a few days ago. I've never seen Hanson, the model of calm and restraint, in such a state of concern. We are losing this country, and whatever it takes to wake people up, it takes.
When our own embassies are flying "pride" and BLM flags, I'd say that flying the American flag in distress is more than warranted.
VDH on Tucker was excellent.
The guy can really articulate the rot infesting our society.
Makes sense. I agree.
Sure. But if the strongest 20% can swim to shore, the species will be okay. The fate of this dumbass country is pretty irrelevant
Not to me. Not ever to me. In my Vietnam-protesting days, I had a very dim view of this Nation. Then my new wife and I bought a new Subaru (on the installment plan, of course), spent six weeks driving cross country, and I actually met so many of the fine people who live here. It's not their fault. Now I would die for them. Unfortunately, it may come to that.
I remember that half time show. My wife and I were watching the game in a local restaurant bar. The men in the audience were mesmerized. The women (including my wife) were not amused.
Knowing the audience here, I doubt that you were "SLAUGHTERED by nearly everyone." In fact, I'll wager that your latest comment will be met with widespread approval. Including by yours truly.
Nope. I wasn’t exaggerating. I live in a very liberal bubble and for the most part those are my FB friends. There were two people out of about 50 who commented who agreed with me.
Let's see the response today. I'm guess most people here - which is a bastion of common sense, as opposed to the childish Facebook - will agree with you about the coarsening of our culture. Facebook is a running joke. An echo chamber for idiots who want their homes burgled. To your point - Who's going to be the next Super Bowl disgrace - Cardi B? Biden's favorite chanteuse.
Coarsening. Good word.
I agree. It also applies to the vitriol flung at each other by opposing factions. We need to get polite again.
I feel you.
Isn't that called petting?
LOL!
The Free press group would agree with me probably, but I was talking about Facebook.
That is your first and most egregious error.
Facebook. Some people never learn
Glad you have everything figured out 🤣
I don't remember saying that. Just making an observation
What? Do you actually think this forum represents America? We wish.
My husband always says that to me... who reads that? It’s so niche
Well we do have Comprof, the village idiot.
You have insulted village idiots all over the world. Shame on you!
Ask any of the people who claim it was cultural expression if they would want to see their teenage daughter in a strip club on a pole.
Yes!
Super Bowls are for men so we get the JLO show in our living room. We work all our lives, resist impregnating everything we like that we see (because we would if we could) and work until we die for our families. Throw us a bone, momma...
There are a hell of a lot of women who are lifelong NFL fans, enjoying sharing the games and the excitement with our growing daughters and sons. Women work all our lives, resist getting pregnant (unplanned) by men who want to impregnate us, and work until we die for our families. Throw us family entertainment, dada…
But, it's not the football, it's the family. If you had your family over having a great time and cheering on cricket, you would feel the same. God bless women.
? Not sure what you mean, but yes I’d love cricket too! Sure I love my family, that’s why it’s fun sharing my love of sports with them. Just would like the halftime entertainment suitable for all ages.
You sound disgusting. Not every man wants to impregnate everything he likes and can see, thank God.
umm, you mean MEN sound disgusting. Agree, not everything we "see"...just what we like. Please understand, "want" here means the primal inclination or urge.. These are all diffused in society but imagine there is a nuclear war and one man with 100 cheerleaders left on the planet. That kind of urge. Don't hate our nature, you have one too.
No, actually I mean YOU. I'm lucky enough to know many wonderful men who do not match YOUR description. (I did note the 'like', actually.) No doubt we all do have our natures... If it was in the nature of all men to simply impregnate as many pretty ladies as they can see, our species would not have made it this far, since infants don't do well when they've been abandoned.
Sorry, we would, if we could (let us remove laws, societal norms, religion). You can hate primal urges but the next time you are startled by something and react, you must understand that this is your nature. If you have now or have ever worn high heels or makeup, it is because of the same nature. We have been given instinct by our creator to keep the species going. JLO too.
So God has forced you to want to impregnate every attractive woman you see? Convenient. Yet laws forbid you to rape, societal norms dissuade you from abandoning your children, and religion tells you God doesn't want you to rape or abandon your kids. What's a guy to do? Poor you, huh? You deserve to look at J-Lo's crotch during halftime for having sacrificed your desired life of forcibly impregnating one woman after another in order to raise your children, as God both does and does not want you to do.
I stupidly expressed the same opinion about this performance on a FB thread. Boy, did I get clobbered!
make sure your privacy settings are set to friends and not public
I had the exact same reaction! So not "family friendly" and such an image of success for a young girl - or a female at any age.
I agree. Entertainment is much like politics. Too many entertainers rely on the shock factor to get viewers and the attention of the press.
I did not see the online discussion you were in so cannot comment on it directly. But my semi-educated guess is that commenters had a hard time believing that two kids under age 10 have any concept of objectification. On first glance it makes your story sound implausible. Kids that age are likely to say "why is that lady dancing so weird"? but not make any connection to the patriarchy and family values.
I suspect that had you made the exact same point without invoking the children, your comment would have gotten a different reception.
Ten-year old kids may not understand "objectification" but according to fathom2023s detractors they sure as hell believe 8 year Olds have a right to change their genders if they want to...the adults enabling it are the truly despicable ones (and probably the same people making those nasty comments.
My kids understood it. They didn’t use the word objectification, but they said - “this makes me feel bad because it is suggesting that girls are just good for their bodies.”
The adults in schools, government, medicine, and Pharma who enable it are despicable.
Let's hear it for the Prime Minister of Britain who spoke up against the madness. And, let's hope some leaders in the US follow suit. The Emperor Has no Clothes.
"Patients should know when hospitals are talking about men or women.
And we shouldn’t get bullied…we shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be.
They can’t.
A man is a man and a woman is a woman, and that’s just common sense.
We should also never be afraid to talk about the thing that matters most to most of us – family."
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2023/10/04/sunak-steps-in-it-a-man-is-a-man-and-a-woman-is-a-woman-n582395#google_vignette
"...the adults enabling it are the truly despicable ones"
Latest example:
"Court-Appointed Child Advocate Dismissed After Refusing To Support Gender Surgeries For Kids Under 12: Report"
https://www.dailywire.com/news/court-appointed-child-advocate-dismissed-after-refusing-to-support-gender-surgeries-for-kids-under-12-report
"Washington has pushed to protect experimental gender surgeries and hormone treatments for children, recently passing a law that shelters, or “host homes,” are not required to notify parents of a runaway child if the child claims to be fleeing parents who do not approve of a gender surgery or an abortion. Instead of reporting the runaway child to the parents, the host home is required to notify the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families. The state’s Democratic Governor Jay Inslee was sued in August by America First Legal, which is seeking to stop the enforcement of the law allowing the state to hide child gender surgeries from parents."
The 10 year old kids may not have used the word "objectification" but they would still have been disturbed by that kind of sexual display. Perhaps the mother merely defines it with a word they did not have.
I do not watch much television. But I agree with you that “Pole dancing” is not G rated family entertainment. I also liked your question about the use of the Confederate flag. Thank you for standing up for behavioral boundaries.
The greatest delusion of mankind is that today we know things that a thousand generations before never figured out for themselves.
Human nature does not change. Neither do evolutionary adaptations. Women have a massive investment in propagating the species: they contribute all the nutritional resources to the developing child; they are vulnerable during pregnancy and for many years thereafter, and this investment is repeated for each and every child. Men's investment is contributing a few cc's of seed to start the process. A woman is 100% certain the child's DNA is hers; the man can never be certain, which is why men whose wives cheat are concerned with, "Did you f**k him?" and women with, "Are you in love with her?" These disparities also explain why it is men's nature to spread their DNA far and wide and women's to first and foremost secure a man's resources. It also explains why a prospective partner's body-count matters to men far more than it does to women: a promiscuous woman is more likely to cheat and less likely to pair-bond for a lifetime - and in today's world, to take his resources and run to the next Chad or Tyrone.
Has the sexual revolution failed? The damage to humanity's only priority - propagating the species - can never be fully known. And as a warrior who got off more than a few shots during that revolution, I have to say unequivocally, yes.
great job summarizing the evolutionary psychology at work. The mismatch between our evolutionary programing and the modern environment is the source of most of our social issues today—everything from obesity to population collapse can be explained through that lens. It doesn't mean we can or should revert back to our ancient lifestyles, but it does mean we have to acknowledge our nature if we want to find true solutions that satisfy our natures while not totally giving up and acting like cavemen.
I'm always concerned when there is a conflation between "natural" or "instinctual" with "good." There are deadly mushrooms in nature, violence, and predation, within and between species... there are a lot of things we wouldn't call good that are natural. Please be careful about automatically presuming good and nature go together.
couldn't agree more—the natural fallacy is a mistake, something being natural is not the same as it being good. But we also cannot pretend human nature does not exist—we can incentivize in one direction and decentivize the other, but you can only realistically expect to move the needle of human behavior so much. The communists made the mistake of thinking they could build a world without greed, where every person would sacrifice self-interests for the good of all, and look how that worked out in practice. Hence why we must balance the need to not give into our animal natures against the realistic acknowledgement of our natures, and seek to work with the reality we have, not the reality we wish we had.
I agree completely- that does not mean though that we cannot create or improve on the public good. We should make every effort to do so. After WWII in Europe the systems put in place for public good of benefits and welfare were put there to prevent the society from falling into fascism. They could look at the origins of the divides in Europe and see squarely that the haves and have-nots were exploited by a handful of people's desire for power. It is no different now except not enough people are looking back.
"...humanity's only priority - propagating the species..."
I agree with a lot of the premises in your main reply, but this one is just off. Is 'propagating the species' an important priority? Of course it is. But to say it's the only priority is quite another thing.
While humanity's existence certainly depends on children being born (does that even need to be said?), it's hardly the only raison d'etre for us crafty bipeds. For one thing, there's arguably too many of us as it is (debatable for sure). For another, one would think providing a decent world (education, environment, standard of living) for those new kids to live in would go hand in hand with wanting to keep birth rates up...but it never seems to correlate for some reason.
But to think that my only job as a man is to pair up with a woman and make more of us before we die...what a terrible way to go through life. There are innumerable ways in which each of us matter in the world (and soon beyond), ways that are important and essential not just to ourselves but to all those around us. So many ways it would be pointless to try and list them here.
We are more than just a means (DNA + childcare) to and end (healthy, capable adult). Much, much more.
In Robert's Rules of Order, what motion takes precedence over all others?
Setting the time for the next meeting. Not intuitive, is it? But if there is no next meeting, the organization ceases to exist. Ditto for human reproduction. If only one generation out of tens of thousands fails to reproduce, then nothing we have ever done, ever accomplished, ever learned, ever built, matters. And it will all be lost. Forever.
There's a joke among academic circles that the only thing everyone can agree on is that we have to have another meeting. The joke being of course that the content of the meeting is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is that we meet again. Crude analogy, but then so is yours.
You're implying here that procreation is somehow an all-or-nothing binary. Falling birth rates doesn't mean no birth rate. It just means less. It what world is zero birth rates a reality here, even for a single generation? In an ecosystem of finite resources and space (which our planet very much is) an ever-creasing birth rate is just as bad as no birth rate - they both lead to extinction, one just takes longer than the other (and is more gruesome).
No one anywhere is saying that a zero birth rate is an option at all, and one would be hard put to argue that it is or will happen anytime soon. What the 'population' argument is really about is the where the birth rate is or should be itself. That seems to me to be a perfectly valid discussion.
Total fertility rate is the average number of births per woman. Replacement level is 2.1. Above that, the population is growing. Below that, the population is shrinking. Check out the map. How much of the world is already below replacement?
I wouldn't mind seeing a gently declining population for a while. But that's not the trends. A top-heavy population is a problem. If there are 2-3 people over 60 for every person under 40, the society is nonfunctional. We aren't heading for a gentle decline, we're heading for a crash.
It's probably significant that assisted suicide, such as Canada's MAiD program, is popping up in places where birth rates are significantly below replacement. There aren't enough strong young people to care for the elders or the disabled. The "solution" is to simply kill off the elders and the disabled. Dead people require no care.
It's a brutally practical option, but not one I support.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate
We're not really doing much as a society now to make people WANT to have more children. Most couples are both working, some more than one job and many paying more than half their income in rent. There's no child care, minimal paid leave when a child is born, etc. TBH, I wouldn't mind going back to the U.S. population when I was born--about 200 million. Things were less crowded, there was more open space, etc. What's the real reason to WANT a world of 10, 12, 14, or 20 billion people?
Actually people want more children than they actually have. A combination of economic factors, social factors, and biomedical factors are crashing human fertility rates far below what people say they want on surveys.
Your question is a logical fallacy. Possibly strawman. Possibly false dichotomy. I'll invert it and see if you can recognize it in a mirror image.
What's the real reason to WANT the destruction of cultures? What's the real reason to WANT a population that is mostly old and sick? What is the real reason to WANT widespread killing of the elderly and ill?
Yeah, most of the 1st-world countries (for lack of a better term) are in population decline, especially around the Mediterranean. But this isn't new news, it's been happening for awhile now. The only one that is alarming is China because they have such a huge chunk of the world population already, that is of their own making though.
I would argue that the places where fertility is still high (Africa, South America, Middle East, Caucus region) will, and are, providing the much needed reprieve from this general trend via emigration...if that is relatively easy to achieve. I personally have no problem at all with those ethnic groups becoming the dominant strains of humanity going forward, we're all the same species after all.
Besides, it's not like most of those 1st-world countries are in a glaring precipitous decline, only a moderate one. The problem, like you pointed out, is the tax burden on the young, and who is going to take care of all those old people? But it's not like we can put off population decline forever, better to tackle it now before it gets too big a problem.
South America is below replacement too, or hovering just above it. Subsaharan Africa is still well above replacement, but birthrates are dropping there too. Yes, many nations are in glaring precipitous decline. South Korea has a fertility rate of .78, well under half of replacement levels. The GLOBAL fertility rate is 2.3 and dropping as of 2020. This problem isn't going to be solved with emigration, unless you're hoping for a huge influx of the extraterrestrial kind of aliens.
A fertility rate of 1.9 or 2.0 isn't a huge problem IMO. That would lead to a gentle decline in the global population. That's not what we're seeing, unfortunately. Japan is a good case example. Japan currently has a fertility rate of 1.34 births per woman, and a median age of 48.4 years. So a full half of the Japanese female population is beyond her childbearing years. There's a distinct possibility that Japan will be extinguished as a distinct culture within my lifetime. I think that's sad.
Cultural diversity matters, just like biological diversity. We are, of course, all the same species. However, culture is transmitted from generation to generation. I don't consider human beings interchangeable cogs, to be rearranged at will as suits the needs of global finance.
You are correct: a failing birth rate does not mean zero. To eliminate a species It only has to be below replacement, which I believe is somewhere close to 2.1 children/pair. What is it in the US now? 1.64.
And yes, Malthus went through the "ever-increasing birth rate" argument, too. We should all be glad that it doesn't apply here, and one reason is that most resources are not "used up" when they are accessed. It takes a lot of energy and ore to make aluminum, for example, but guess what? You can recycle it over and over and over. Not true for everything, of course, but true for many. Burning wood makes atmospheric CO2. What happens to that CO2? The ecosystem turns it back into more wood. Just two easy examples....
So how close are we to straining the earth's ecosystem? The "limited resources" and "We need fewer people" argument is, of course, that which the WEF et al, is using in its quest for world domination by the elites. The problem for them, however, is that world welfare in general is improving and the only way to enslave happy people is to frighten them with perma-crises. Which they are trying mightily to do, including the "We have too many people for the planet to support" narrative.
Turns out that's not true. The discredited population alarmist, Paul Ehrlich, said we'd all be starved-out by forty years ago. Didn't happen, did it? Why? Because humans are smart, and industrial farming methods can now feed Every Person On The Planet. Why do the WEF people want to go to all "organic farming?" Well, one reason might be that best estimates are that industrial farming can support about 10-11 billion; "organic" about 6 bn. Guess what the population is? Yep, about 8 bn. As the World's Smartest Man, Henry Kissinger, said, "“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”
I'm no alarmist. I live in ranch country and gleefully eat beef every day.
But I have to say that blindly trusting that we will just "figure it out" via human ingenuity is more than a little irresponsible. Had we other worlds to move to (and the ability to get there), this would be a different story. But we don't (yet). So it seems to me that right now we only have one chance to get it right. And as crafty and ingenious as humans can be, I don't think betting the future on a gamble (even a good gamble) is any way to forge humanity's future.
Also, I don't think it's in any way a good idea to try and pack as many people as possible onto the planet...just because we can viably feed and house all of them. The earth is not a sardine can and we aren't sardines. The argument for keeping vast swaths of unused wilderness decidedly unused is a good one. We shouldn't be trying to use up every available nook and cranny on the planet just to justify a high population count. Despite the obvious economic and habitation downsides, empty space matters and is a good thing to have on this planet.
Agreed. Love the West, especially Wyoming and Montana. Every time I visit the West, I come home with the same phrase ricocheting in my head: I don't belong here.
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Don't sell humans short. The very fact that we are here today shows that each and every time it really mattered, we figured it out. I'll take those odds any time. It's the Oh-So-Smart guys with whom I went to school that invariably cause the problems and the ordinary, workaday men mining coal, welding steel, and raising cattle that solve the problems those people created.
But having said that, I get a lot of schadenfreude in that every time the elites gin up a new crisis, it's already being taken care of. As for population, that seems to be the case, too. The great thing about population prediction is that, if you know the current population and current fertility rate, you know the population thirty or fifty years from now. A couple of years ago I read a book by two Canadians - Brinker and Ibbotsen (sp?) which predicted a gradual slowing of global population growth and then a precipitous population decline. Everything I've read since suggests they were right on the money.
So what's the elite Globalist's next crisis? I can't wait to see....
It's my understanding that a combined meteor/ice melt catastrophe reduced the world human population to 35,000 and all those living today descend from them. Of note is the reality that the event had nothing to do with human circumstance and concern.
What people don't realize is that for most of its existence mankind has struggled, occasionally hanging on only by a proverbial thread. I mean THAT close to extinction. It's only after we became able to control our environment somewhat and had the time to work on progress rather than just survival that we really became secure.
Since women now can live through pregnancies in their teens into thier 30s and even 40s, you’d need to lose more than one generation. I guess it’s how you measure/define generation. There’s plenty of us to go around these days. And just to wax philosophical, if we are all gone…who is here to miss us and our accomplishments? And really many of our accomplishments, some unfortunately scars on the earth, will remain. And the atoms left after our decay will be floating around the universe into perpetuity. Great conversation!
I just heard Ashley Campbell's (Glen Campbell's daughter) version of Jimmy Webb's "The Highwayman," where a soul transmigrates from generation to generation. I'd heard Willie Nelson's version, but this one brings tears to my eyes. I sure hope it's true.
https://youtu.be/mtuPwjA-NDE?si=uV-c5f9n49irqCa2
Oh I love this song. You are right, this is a very beautiful rendition. I too hope it’s true.
Gods very first commandment is Genesis 1:28 where He said to them "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth". There are many laws after this which explain that Humanity was created to work alongside our Creator (or whatever you want to call the Transcendent Good detected by our Consciousness) -- to actualize the universe's potential and participate in God's own work.
I've always viewed the goal of life to be making things even better for the next generation, not simply to endlessly reproduce for no reason.
My grandparents worked crappy jobs in factories so my parents could work in offices so I could work on a computer at home. When I was growing up, we lived in a really rural area and drove an hour to the store once a week. Now, I just order what I want and it shows up tomorrow. When I was growing up and someone had cancer it was the same as saying they were going to be dead soon. While cancer is still deadly in many cases, survival rates for some cancers are incredible.
Human nature seems to be to seek more comfort while also having a vague dissatisfaction that pushes us to try to make things better. We're the only species that knows that we're going to have to leave the planet eventually (if we survive that long) and are taking the first very baby steps to do so.
> Human nature does not change. Neither do evolutionary adaptations.
This might be slightly somewhat untrue for the last 80-100 years, specifically because of the chemicals we are taking. Birth control hormones and endocrine-disrupting chemicals in water supplies or food have made some massive changes, especially epigenetics (which traits are exposed in sperm/egg cells) which have started to affect future generations. For example, we do know that millennial/gen-Z women go through puberty sooner than they used to, while gen-Z men have significantly lower testosterone on average than boomer men.
To what extent these hormonal and generic changes reflect changes in "human nature", personality, romantic strategies, etc, is always up for debate.
Sounds like you have read or listened to a lot of Jordan Peterson. Your interpretation is too simplistic, and based on a world with limited resources which is not the works we livre in any more.
Why the invocation of Jordan Peterson? Do you not think he could reason and articulate an opinion on his own? It is unfair to have a discussion and infer at the onset that one is not genuine.
I'm not implying any such thing, just that I hear similarities. And given the proliferation of Peterson's philosophy in many pro-masculine circles, why not point out the similarities? Is there anything wrong with having an intellectual basis for your point of view? Are any of us free of the values we consume from those whose points of view we respect?
The poster did not refer to Jordan Peterson anywhere in his post. You used Peterson’s name at the onset of your post when there are several philosophers, both historical and contemporary, who may have shared so called “similarities” with his perspective. He referenced no one else in his post. Also, your term “pro-masculine circles” implies he may be influenced by Peterson whose philosophy is respected by both sexes. I’m confused by your question in your response to me. “Is there anything wrong with having an intellectual basis for your point of view?”That was precisely my point. That you invoked Peterson’s name, not him, therefore suggesting that he based his post on Peterson instead of the poster’s own intellectual basis for his own point of view.
You're clearly affected by what I wrote... why? You're not arguing with my points merely offended that I made a connection between the OP's point of view and a respected philosopher who I often disagree with? What offends you exactly? That I aligned someone with a point of view that they didn't claim for themselves but that I heard an echo of in the comments? That happens everyday on these pages for anyone who smacks even the slightest bit liberal. So with all due respect kindly check yourself.
Do you have counter data that could support what you are saying? Sure, he is painting with a broad brush, but in general we didn't evolve in an environment that didn't have limited resources. So our ingrained behaviors would be built around scarcity. That doesn't mean we can't adjust them for a modern world, but we still need to understand the basis for which we operated for thousands of years.
And what exactly does that provide for now if we aren't self-aware enough to recognize those tendencies? If we can become and remain aware enough to notice our default expectation of scarcity, then perhaps we could make better decisions about the resources available to us. From my perspective the resources are abundant, what we lack is policy to help distribute them equitably or justly- instead relying on a form of Capitalism that even John Maynard Keynes wouldn't recognize or endorse.
Human nature is always going to be the stumbling block to an system. And likely, no system will be perfect because the universe basically wants everything to end and so life itself is a struggle. It is only very recently that we have had any level of mass prosperity. And based on what has historically happened in places that tried to mandate human nature and control everything from the top down, it has usually lowered prosperity, not increased it.
There are no solutions, only trade offs. Even the current plenty some countries see themselves under is precarious. If, for example, we enacted all of the green initiatives that some support, our productions will go down. But if we do nothing, production may also go down due to a change of environment. Should we lower the population? China tried that and now they are on the cusp of huge social issues because of a lopsided population base.
Honestly I feel that many issues people have with capitalism is actually with corruption. If we could magically arrest all of the people currently breaking the laws (companies that are cheating, or bilking employees or customers, or not paying their taxes, etc) you would likely see big changes. But the same people running things have built in all kinds of little loopholes and sub-systems that make it easier for the rich and powerful to 'win'. But those sub-systems are not built in to capitalism. They come from the way that policy makers enact laws (central planning). Or simply not getting caught. Or bribing the right people. Sadly, central planning doesn't seem to make this happen less.
This was rambly, so take that for what it is worth. No caffeine today I guess.
I agree with you whole-heartedly. (And also need some coffee...) :-)
See “superabundance” by Tupay et al. More people = more resources = cheaper prices = less poverty. Scarcity is not the issue, government diktak making energy expensive is
I don't totally agree on energy being dependent on the government. I do agree wit your quoting of Tupay. There's more to the argument to be invested in as well. We can take it further, and argue for and elect people who care as much about the population and its well being as they do about their handlers who write the checks. Having a government for, by, and of the people is still something that is possible (for now).
Jordan Peterson, the universal whipping boy of the woke. The Donald Trump of behavioral sciences. Or perhaps you can actually support your (implied) critique?
My critique was that is argument was too simplistic. I simply referred to Peterson as a voice I heard in the opinion. If I quoted Marx, Lefebvre, Freud, or Rand and you noticed it in my writing there would be nothing wrong with noting the influence of my thought. The commenter's argument was weak and based on a simplistic view of social psychology, sociology, and sexual selection. The loudest reductionist voice in that domain right now is Jordan Peterson. It is inaccurate to conflate sexual selection and gendered behavior- and yet it is a constant in our discourse- "women are like this" or "men are like this," or worse- "evolutionarily men are..." and of course "evolutionarily women are..." none of these tropes are borne out. What we can point to are sexually selected for behaviors and traits. What the OP wrote reduced a complex argument to an overly simplistic point of view.
The fact that you admit that you heard the voice of Jordan Peterson in in his opinion which he didn’t refer to, exposes YOUR bias and judgmental attitude. Calling his view simplistic because he was a man shows your sexism as well.
Where did I say it was simplistic BECAUSE he was a man- NOWHERE. And my reflecting that I sensed some of Jordan Peterson's influence doesn't make me biased, it makes me educated. Check yourself Elizabeth, you're ranting. If you'd like an actual discussion I'm down for it- but please be prepared with an actual argument, not just some anti-woke talking points.
I hear you claiming two things in your comments, both equally absurd: 1. Every time someone is influenced by the writings of another, they explicitly state it in their own writings. 2. People arrive at their views a priori, without having read or been influenced by anyone in the field. Stacey could have enumerated any number of social psychologists or evolutionary biologists, but chose Peterson because he is CURRENTLY the loudest voice. I would have added Brett Weinstein.
Late to the party I know, but let’s be honest, if your critiquing an argument for merely being over simplified and then invoking Jordan Peterson on those grounds, it probably says more about your relationship with Petersons positions than the OP’s. The idea that Peterson is uniquely reductionist in a world where most contemporary wisdom is packed into a slogan or a 100 character social post is wild. I would argue that the debate, and every subsequent comment in this thread are just a succession of oversimplified arguments. All of this is highly subjective, and I think you took some flack for forcing an irrelevant detail into a conversation for your benefit. Instead of putting words in their mouth, you put inspiration in their thoughts.
Moreover , I’m not at all sure JP would agree with him.
Resources are unlimited? If this is true, why must I pay for anything?
I didn't say they were unlimited- I said they weren't as scarce now as they were historically. Please don't read past my words.
Yes, yes, yes! We are at that point in history where science is being ignored or twisted for political purposes.
Agree. Also, “Chad or Tyrone” 🤣🤣
Aw, just say it. I'm a racist....LOL
Having both is inclusive.
To some extent, I agree. To some extent, I disagree. Consider the statement “The greatest delusion of mankind is that today we know things that a thousand generations before never figured out for themselves”. Actually, we know all sorts of things that were not known in prior generations. For example, the elements were unknown to the ancient Greeks. The periodic chart post-dates 1800. In 1900, the basic subatomic particles (proton, electron, and neutron) were unknown. Now, we know of dozens, if not, hundreds of subatomic particles. In biology, we didn’t know about DNA, RNA, Codons, protein synthesis, etc. in 1900. Now we do. I could make similar statements about Geology, Organic Chemistry, Meteorology, Astronomy, etc.
“Human nature does not change”
That’s true, but human circumstances do change. In a prior era, a high proportion of children died from natural causes. More children from women were needed to offset child mortality. In a prior era, population growth was ‘needed’. This meant that women had to produce more than two surviving children just to keep human numbers constant and/or have them grow. In a prior era, a woman could reasonably expect to be pregnant and/or breast-feeding from sexual maturity until she died.
Conversely, some truths remain very firm (if unacknowledged and/or rejected). Men are bigger and stronger than women. All children come from women. A society that intends to survive has to maintain a birth rate above 2.0 (2.1?) to continue, long-term. The basic ‘facts of life’ haven’t changed in 10,000 years and probably never will
Let me rephrase that: we are deluded that we know anymore about human nature now than we did then or that it has changed. Of course we have learned about the natural world, but we have learned very little about ourselves, and in fact, most have forgotten a great deal or never learned it to begin with.
I lean towards the ‘forgotten a great deal’ perspective. Check out ‘Spencer’s’ comments over at “Sex is a spectrum” (https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/sex-is-a-spectrum/). Quote from him
“Lol. I introduce students every semester to various non-overlapping or barley overlapping graphs by sex. Every year their jaws drop further. Twenty years ago barely an eyebrow was raised.”
I wonder though when procreation is completely removed from human bodies (which really can almost be done now) how that will affect the evolution of humanity.
To my eye the question is, will we be able to stop those who desperately want to control it?
"The greatest delusion of mankind is that today we know things that a thousand generations before never figured out for themselves."
Frame it! What is this arrogance of the present that imagines the people who fought World Wars I and II--or for that matter Erasmus, or the Emperor Augustus--were cardboard cut-out cartoons lacking wisdom and self-insight? Is there a Shakespeare among us today? A Dante? How about a Buddha or a Jesus of Nazareth? Horace, two thousand years ago, said, "Many brave men lived before Agamemnon's time; but they are all, unmourned and unknown, covered by the long night, because they lack their sacred poet." Here's an 'ancient' looking back seven hundred years from his own time to the poet, Homer, who in turn is looking back five centuries from his and acknowledging kinship with 'brave men' who lived in an even earlier age. I would suggest Horace and Homer had a better sense of historical perspective than we do.
Karl Jaspers (writing in 1951): "Beyond any doubt, we are far more advanced than Hippocrates, the Greek physician. But we are scarcely entitled to say that we have progressed beyond Plato. We have only advanced beyond his materials, beyond the scientific findings of which he made use. In philosophy itself we have scarcely regained his level."
"Beyond any doubt, we are far more advanced than Hippocrates, the Greek physician. But we are scarcely entitled to say that we have progressed beyond Plato. We have only advanced beyond his materials, beyond the scientific findings of which he made use. In philosophy itself we have scarcely regained his level."
THAT'S what needs to be framed.
The broad mass of humanity is ignorant of its debt to Plato, and indeed has practically no notion of the extent to which we're all Platonists. Consider this lengthy (but I hope you'll agree well worth reading) summary of Heidegger's take on Plato--known to us only from a series of lectures translated into English in the 1950s from a German student's notes--by William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. It's a two-edged legacy, as you'll see, that has the defects of its virtues:
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His studies of Holderlin were not undertaken solely out of Heidegger's growing conviction, as a philosopher concerned with the problem of language, that poetry was the essential form of speech. His tie to Holderlin is closer than this. Holderlin, like Heidegger, is the enraptured Hellenist who turns his eyes back to the sunlit age of the Greeks and speaks of the modern age as "the night of the world" from which all of the gods have departed. Holderlin here is the most extreme and the most visionary of the romantic poets, all of whom were possessed by the uneasy dread that in the modern age man had come to sever himself so drastically from nature that some new and uncanny fate would fall upon him. In English poetry this uneasiness, which is something new in the history of poetry, begins with Blake and Wordsworth. It becomes a clamor of warning voices among some of our greatest contemporary poets: for Yeats this is the time of the dark of the moon, of empty objectivity and bloody violence; for Eliot (before his conversion at least, and perhaps after it too) ours is the wasteland in which the saving waters no longer flow; for Rilke (on whom Heidegger has written a perceptive study) this is the time when the lost angelic voices are no longer heard; for Robert Graves, we have lost all contact with the great Goddess, and we are "no longer at home with the lady of the house"—we are no longer at home in nature. This testimony of the poets is so extraordinary that we can hardly afford to brush it aside lightly; and a society that does so has already lost all contact with its poets and thereby confirms their prophecy. Heidegger is the thinker of what these poets seek to poetize. As the poets, from romanticism onward, warn against the severance of man from nature, Heidegger seeks to warn us of a severance of thinking from Being; and this not merely as a severance of man's instincts from the way of nature, but also as something that takes place in the very mode of his thinking.
Heidegger’s interpretations of Holderlin have thus to be seen in the context of a general interpretation of history that is also one of the remarkable products of this last phase of his thought. This view of history is very bold and sweeping, yet in a fashion typical of Heidegger it starts from a very simple and banal observation of the present. This observation is that the characteristic of the modern age in comparison with past ages is the extraordinary development of technology that has made possible the organization of men into mass societies and secured the domination by man of the whole planet. So far, nothing very new about this. But Heidegger pushes this point in a very simple-minded and persistent way: If technology is now the dominant thing in man’s life, how did this become possible? Through modern science. And where did modern science begin? In the seventeenth century, when for the sake of precision and measurement men began to apply mathematics to natural phenomena. The concurrent philosophic expression of this is the Cartesian philosophy of clear and distinct ideas. But it is quite obvious that the development of science in the seventeenth century could not have taken place without the knowledge of Greek science that had been rediscovered by the Renaissance. Our steps from the present backward lead us thus to Greek science.
But Greek science is, in its turn, the offspring of Greek philosophy, for it is out of the speculations of the Greek philosophers that science is born. The seed then of what the world is today and of what we ourselves are lies in the step taken by the Greek thinkers to detach beings as beings, objects as objects, from the environing presence of Being, and so to make possible eventually the thematic elaboration of these objects in science.
With this objectification of nature—that is, the detachment of objects as objects from the environing ground of Being—the age of metaphysics begins. This age culminates 2500 years later in modern science, where the objectification of nature is almost complete. Its final philosophic utterance is in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power: for here, in Nietzsche, is the extreme expression of man’s drive to tear himself loose from nature and manipulate it in the interests of his own power. The process that begins with the earliest Greek philosopher, Anaximander, culminates in Nietzsche; and with a very neat, perhaps too neat, stroke of symmetry Heidegger speaks of the age from Anaximander to Nietzsche as a single unit. This age of metaphysics is now finished, says Heidegger, not in the sense the positivists would aver that metaphysics itself has become “meaningless”; on the contrary, the positivists themselves are unconscious dupes of metaphysics since they are completely captured by its spirit of objectification; no, this age is finished because it has, after Nietzsche, no further fundamental possibilities open to it. The step taken by the Greeks to distinguish clear and distinct objects was the great historical step taken by no other people (the Greeks alone among ancient people created science); but in this great step forward the sheer presence of Being as the environing context from which all objects are detached was lost and forgotten. Poets remind us of this presence. But if there is to be a genuine renewal in the perspectives of civilization, there must be a new kind of thinking (of which Heidegger would be the groping forerunner) that would seek to make us stand once again in the sheer presence of that which is.
All of this historical framework has to be kept in mind in reading Heidegger’s brief essay Plato’s Doctrine of Truth. Plato, according to Heidegger, shifts the meaning of truth from a characteristic of Being—namely the open-ness or unhiddenness of Being (the Greek word we translate as “truth,” alethia, means literally “unhiddenness”)—to a characteristic of mental concepts: their correctness or precision. Hence the Idea becomes for Plato the real reality. But Idea, in Greek, has its root in the verb for seeing: an Idea is always thus a human perspective. Thus the consequence of Plato's shift in the meaning of truth is to turn from Being itself in order to confer preeminent reality upon our own human and mental perspectives upon Being. It is a first step in that long journey that is Western philosophy toward the severance of man from Being. With this little change in words Plato has launched Western history toward the age of cerebration and computing machines.
This may look altogether pat to some readers. It would look less so, however, if all the connecting links were put in, and if Heidegger were to expound his point about Platonism in a broader and less microscopic way. He chooses instead to burrow in the words of the Greek text, and to unfold his point from those words like a man unwrapping tiny nuggets. But to each writer must be granted his own mode of expression, as to each thinker his own mode of attack; and for Heidegger it is a consecrated task to dig back to the original thinking of the Greeks as it is caught in the web of the Greek language.
The Letter on Humanism has also to be read within the context of Heidegger’s historical vision. It is easy to misunderstand Heidegger here as anti-humanist (perhaps in the sense of anti-humane) because he does not see humanism as the essential message for our time. But this would be an entirely superficial and frivolous reading. Heidegger’s point of view is historical, and philosophy, in view of the essential temporality of man, must always take the historical point of view: Humanism was a great historical effort on the part of the Greeks, and it was necessary at that turning point of time to rescue man from his immersion in nature and to define the strictly human as distinct from the animal. The great artistic expressions of humanism are those beautiful and idealized forms of man created by the classic Greek sculptors. If the modern sculptor cannot create such idealized forms, it is not because he is anti-human or anti-humane; another vision claims him, such as the need to reintegrate man into nature, so that some of Henry Moore’s carvings, for example, exhibit the human body as a rock eroded by the sea and cast upon the shore from the waves. Man needs to preserve the inherited values of his humanity; but humanism as a doctrine is incomplete for an age when the human is threatening to overpower nature…
The worst part about the sexual revolution has been the institutional meddling in men’s and women’s choices.
Insisting that there be equal outcomes in all things is crazy.
There are many women who want to serve to be at the top of government, business, name the field. That should not mean that all women need to make the same choices as men. This is where we got things wrong. We assign numeric quotas and ignore the fact that not all human beings have the same objectives for their lives based on their sex (or any other immutable characteristic).
The sexual revolution has also made sexual intimacy far too recreational. As someone who partnered for life, I cannot speak to the thrill of having had an unlimited number of women to mate. But I can say that monogamy was deeply fulfilling, in bed and in the wider world we shared for 40 years.
She is now gone, and I will have many years to live alone, God willing. I don’t intend to change my behavior toward women or sex, in spite of the fact that my obligation to monogamy has been fulfilled and I could choose any path. My life experience set the bar too high to change now.
But whatever few women who genuinely wanted to take those high profile positions and were genuinely capable of fulfilling them were taking them for centuries without any revolutions, anyway.
History is full of women state leaders who governed, started and ended wars and signed verdicts; there also were a few scientists and artists here and there.
What I see came with revolution is a lot of extra flame of those women who as you mentioned feel like they have to take all those positions, because they feel the societal pressure on them to do so. This largely hurt those women who were intrinsically talented engineers, politicians and wise decision makers. We rarely see them any more.
We are managing the West through tyranny. If you are, fill in the blank, you must be represented across all fields based on your representation in the general population. It forces the society to jam people into roles by force, not by freedom. And for many women, like my late wife, the culture treats you like a failure if you don’t smilingly go along with the grand narrative.
Not only is that unscientific, and behaviorally unsubstantiated, but it is oppressive to all of us as individuals with dignity and freedom.
This is beyond sad.. I am lucky to be somewhat immune to this pressure due to my historical background.
I work with women as an image consultant but de facto I find myself working with them as a therapist. This wasn’t my intention but I found that I can’t teach my clients how to dress themselves with dignity if they have their dignity lost under the social pressure of being put in the box of the grand narrative. I end up explaining to them time and again what you just articulated in your comment.
I do what I can for my clients, the readers of my work blog and mostly for my daughter.
I think the real change has just been technological. The roles that women once had in society no longer exist. Women once would fetch water, would sew/knit/weave, would make candles and pottery, would bear and raise oftentimes 5-10 children. None of these things exist in the modern world. Cooking and cleaning are about the last vestiges of the things a woman would be doing in 1800, and even those are tremendously easy today compared to what they once required. Even child rearing is being taken away from women - many don't have kids at all, or only have 1-2. Kids today are raised mostly by schools/teachers/the state and by tech. Give the kid a phone and walk away.
In about 5-10 years the actual act of *gestation* will be taken away from women (or should I say "birthing persons" -- gotta be inclusive of the transmen and non-binary people here!). Scientists have already managed to develop artificial wombs and to create embryos from stem cells. Right now, they say artificial wombs will only be used to help save babies born prematurely (good thing!), but how long before a woman decides she doesn't want to pause her career for pregnancy, or go through the physical pain of labor, so just puts her egg with some sperm into a bag in a factory and comes back 9 months later to collect the child, without ever having been pregnant. And it's one step from there to a millionaire single man using CRISPR to design his perfect child's DNA, generating that embryo with a stem cell, and dropping that thing in the bag; no one with XX chromosomes being involved in the process.
Given that nearly their entire purpose in society has been replaced by globalism and technology, what is a woman's role in society today? That's what 2nd and 3rd wave feminism have been exploring. FWIW, men's roles (chopping logs, fighting wars, hunting, fishing, plowing fields) *also* don't exist in modern Western society, or only for a small subset of people. So men don't exactly have much purpose either.
EDIT: I didn't mean this to come across as misogynistic or anti-feminism, but it probably comes off that way. I meant it more philosophically. Feminism is inevitable because of technological change (unless we go full Afghanistan... although I'm guessing in 100 years, Afghanistan will be getting its first female leader, too). Feminism - at least 2nd-wave feminism - is arguably a *necessary* philosophy given our technological advances.
With the world designed by a man’s brain, you can expect its imminent decline shortly thereafter.
Well, ~8000 years (from the start of cities -- before that not to much was "designed") till now ain't a bad run.
I don’t see your comment as misogynistic or anti-feminine. I also think that there are a lot of stages between Afghanistan and the Huxlean “Brave New World” where female roles will re-emerge as those who are reading stories to children in different languages and poetry and then discussing the plots and rhymes with them, analysing the paintings and sculpture of wonderful art pieces (yes, the dead white men who built our civilisation); then also the putting family pictures and art work on the walls of their homes, playing piano and singing or / and gardening with kids.
There are so many things women can do in this new world and I romantically believe that they / we will. We might be descending to the Dark Age right now but there will be the Renaissance 🌱🌄
I actually think everything you said here is pretty on target. Been thinking about these things too.
I said something along these lines to. Another comment. Yes technology will erase a lot of our roles. I don't think what you wrote was misogynistic.
I think Grimes stated it succinctly when asked by Bari for her final argument. I suspect she had AI on the mind when Grimes' replied "I hope living women have a chance in the future"....
Science fiction, but coming to a store near you very soon.
Not anymore...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/19/health/artificial-womb-human-trial-fda/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jun/14/synthetic-human-embryos-created-in-groundbreaking-advance
https://www.science.org/content/article/crispr-bombshell-chinese-researcher-claims-have-created-gene-edited-twins
Thanks for sharing.
So scary.
How about a transcript? Lots of us prefer to read than to listen / watch. Even an AI-made one with some errors would be good.
As much as I like Louise Perry, I have a difficult time understanding her speech patterns. And "Grimes" was close to being incoherent. reading a transcript would have been better for me as well.
Grimes did seem to like the word, "like."
My grandfather used to lift up a thumb, then another finger, then another counting... when us grandkids used the word 'you know' when speaking to him. He did this with a grin on his face, encourage us to 'use our words to explain what we really mean' 'Like' is another lazy speech tool I wish the 80's would take back
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb21lsCQ3EM
Exactly. I won't view it, but I'll read it.
In response to (the part of the "How about a transcript?" comment where "Andy in TX" said)
. . . << "Even an AI-made one with some errors would be good." >>
I'd like to add that:
. . . in addition to the fact that [even at first]
--> it "would be good",
. . . there is also the possibility that
--> over time, through the use of some crowd-sourced "suggestions" from readers, corrections (for mistakes ... whether TYPOs or OCR errors, or "AI" slip-ups, or ... other kinds of "room for improvement") could be applied.
So, the quality [of a given transcript] might get better! ... perhaps through some "wiki" methods, or something like that.
The methods and tools used here might not be quite the same as the way they do things on [e.g.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ (some more -- or different -- 'moderating' might be in order here); but eventually the "with some errors" part might involve ... fewer errors ['remaining'].
excellent idea!
This about sums it up-
Grimes: "I mean, like at the airport, how does the entire line not just move out of the way so that moms & kids can go to the front of the line?"
Well that wouldn't be equitable for the CapitalOne platinum card members, all the folx who feel like they may have a disability that day and the people who drug their pets along dressed up up in a "Emotional Service Animal" vest purchased on Amazon.
Just sayin....
Please, just stop with the cheap emotional manipulation and resentment. Just once. What about fathers with kids? Grimes is a an elite who has certainly been to the airport at least once and certainly knows that airlines do preboards for people with children or who need extra time to board. But hey, let's not let that get in the way of the narrative.
I flew a couple years ago and I could have sworn I heard a special boarding announcement for elderly, disabled, parents with small children.etc. This was a commercial airline here in the US. What planet is Grimes on?
Recall the recent NYC rental bike dispute between the black teens and the white nurse. Much of the outrage stemmed from the mistreatment of a pregnant woman. To imply that we don't value motherhood is absurd.
Please someone tell Grimes, that there are countries outta there that still do this.
We were in line to board the plane Belgrade-Rome last summer when someone way ahead of us in the line came up and said, please go ahead, you are with the kids!
We were like 😨😨 wow, thank you!!
As our kids were 10 and 11 at the time. They wouldn’t even be considered kids in the US anymore.
In the language of social psychologist Gordon Neufield it’s called “Infrastructural Commitment to Kids.” It doesn’t exist in the US tho.
Let me note that the debate was much more balanced and nuanced than I expected. It was enjoyable. Of course the feminist narcissistic willingness to completely leave men's voices out of the conversation was no surprise. And, discussion of the actual social and cultural chaos and disorder surrounding us.
Women on both sides of the debate hinted at the possibility that "..carpet baggers.." had seized and co.opted feminist ideology. WELL YES!! We're here at TFP ( truth/fact based subscription journalism) because the American national dialogue, society and our economic system has, like feminism, been distorted, captured, co.opted and reduced to a psyop. At times, all four debaters almost acknowledged it. Did I hear Grimes actually use the word "agency" and suggest that if WE accept personal responsibility WE can surmount the problems of the day and build a better future? (My girl!!)
It was heartening to see four intelligent young women alive and firing on all cylinders. And THANK YOU BARI!! and TFP for beginning the necessary expansion of the forum and the discussion to America at large.
Well said ....
We've flown with our kids several times (mostly in the US) and I can't remember a single time when we haven't gotten to board first. The random US-hating is silly - this is totally a thing in the US.
How old were the kids? The toddlers (up to 4 I believe) are boarded priority as an overall policy for all flights.
What amazed me in my example is a civilian initiative of a by-passer towards pretty adult kids. I generally see more accommodation and sympathy towards children and their parents in southern Europe and in the Balkans than I do in the US.
It shows in small things and those who split their time between the US and the aforementioned areas notice and talk about it a lot.
This made me laugh! So true…and after all, it’s about feelings first, and you can decide in an instant that you feel a certain way to get the goods!
Interesting debate. More stimulating and interesting would have been a few panel members age 70+. These are the women who lived through the entire revolution and birthed the generation struggling or enjoying its effects. The wisdom of their experiences spoken directly by them rather than filtered through this younger panel would have been much more valuable and exciting in trying to decide the answer to the debate topic. I’m surprised some weren’t invited. But then I’m not. This generation is still alive to tell their own story, but really, who would want to listen to a bunch of gray boomers who nurtured the current generation and broke all those so called glass ceilings?
I agree. Although I will congratulate Bari on her first debate. Well done.
It is curious to me the vision of the past in their arguments, read in a history book I suppose by a feminist? There is certainly things to point out, but life is never that black and white, even for women.
I was born in the early 60s, so I was a child during the remaining traditional family years, and a teenager when all hell broke loose. It's fair to say mine is the first generation that wasn't expected to marry and have kids; in fact, it was the other way around. I respect Louise Perry for writing about this, and what she wrote about it. "My Dumb Postfeminist Life" is the title of my forthcoming memoir of how this social experiment caused far more problems than it solved, from my own personal trials and tribulations. And what gets me the most is that when I try to discuss it with my perennial child friends, they look at me like I'm nuts, then return to posting pictures of their pets and food on Facebook.
Great observation and comment. I also think a roundtable would have been more effective as well rather than either/or's. And, there seemed to be more in common than opposed.
Are women happier now than they were ~70 years ago? That's not a loaded question, I'm not insinuating anything. It's a genuine inquiry asked in good faith.
The answer to that might provide an answer to as whether the sexual revolution has failed.
It’s a good question. They must be happier in some ways, but women (and I am one) have so much rage right now. And I can’t say it’s all justified. Or rather, it is (in SOME instances) an overreaction. Women have been justifiably angry about unfair treatment for a long time but then when the tables have tipped in their favor on some issues, they continue the rage. And I just don’t think anyone can be joyful in that scenario. Happier? Maybe. Joyful? No.
Rage or manufactured rage? Women today comprise nearly 60% of college enrollment. Men are overtly discriminated against yet their rage is only beginning to be expressed. And, when people such as Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate try to give a voice to the discrimination men endure they are pilloried and silenced.
Agree and I love JP.
Somewhat agreed, but Andrew "women don't ever drink water" Tate is a bad example. He's literally a sex trafficker.
Are you sure Tate is "literally a sex trafficker?"
Although not a huge fan of Tate, some of his message is reasonable. I looked to see what the charges against him were and, so far, have seen no evidence of your claim We have to be careful of the slurs of leftists and globalists against people they fear.
I think that rage stems from the fact that they are now socially programmed to expect everything - relationship, children, and career - and so when they fail to have any of these or one interferes with another it has to be society's fault and society is patriarchal therefore men are evil. Nothing will ever be good enough and it doesn't exactly facilitate open-minded thinking.
Totally. As a woman and mother who works, I feel like I’m failing at everything sometimes. It’s hard. And to this point- the sexual revolution and the brand of feminism undergirding it is so misogynistic. We undervalue women who stay at home and undervalue caring for children to such a degree, it’s criminal.
As a man who left work to bring up the kids while my wife followed her career, I agree with you totally that caring for children is undervalued by society and those who do it are looked down on. I found that young mothers were the most supportive group!
I've observed in some left-leaning women a disconnect between what they want and what they ideologically think they should want. Sometimes that inner conflict has become my problem (as in my fault somehow).
You’re probably right. Sorry you have to deal with it.
I agree the outrage and playing the victim-card seems to be a common theme among even women who have become extremely successful. Seems some women want to believe that being treated unfairly on the way up the ladder of success is something that only happens to them. The difference is that (maybe until recently) men grew up in a system in which they were trained - through sports mostly - that they had to be tough to overcome unfairness. Women just get pissed-off and complain and never stop even when it seems highly incongruent with their evident success.
Well, there's also a system where complaining a lot gets you success. Which doesn't just apply to women -- certain people are quick to play the race card. A bunch of guys recently turned up at a tech recruiting fair for women and claimed to be non-binary.
Right. And, I would like someone to try to give us a scientific definition of what "being non-binary" means. It comes down to people "should be able to identify how they like" even if it makes no sense. Society should be aware that the guy who advanced "non-binary" legal status now deeply regrets it.
"FIRST LEGAL NON-BINARY PERSON REGRETS"
https://ruthinstitute.org/stories/first-legal-non-binary-person-regrets-and-detransitions-james-shupe/
"James Shupe lived for 6 years as a transgender woman. His transgender activism prompted far reaching changes, from pushing the state of Oregon to make gender neutral bathrooms, to receiving a legal non-binary gender designation, even on his birth certificate. But in 2019 he detransitioned and was able to restore his birth name and gender. His transgender story begins in childhood, is complex, distressing, and reveals terrible lapses in our national mental health infrastructure."
"That none of his medical professionals asked why he felt the way he did, or even looked into the post-traumatic stress he experienced while in the army, shows the power of the transgender lobby. They have cowed the medical profession into ignoring the Hippocratic Oath, and get them to engage in serious psychological and physical harm."
"Noticeably absent was a discussion from the terrible side effects that this type of treatment causes. It is almost as though the potential profits blind the physicians to their responsibility to do no harm."
"No longer is he referenced as the man who started the “non binary’ legal option, and he is no longer the darling of the liberal media. But he is a man working to live truth, and speak out about his part in changing it."
Where is the rage coming from? And I like your distinction between happy and joyful.
Part of it is what Pemulis said. Women have been angry about injustices for a long time - about not having the ability to vote, have credit cards or jobs, being shamed for their bodies, being sexually preyed upon, etc. They’ve been justifiably upset about a lot of things. But the rage I’ve seen in the past decade (that reflected and helped produce movements like metoo and BLM) is an anger that boils out of, at root a sympathy for other human beings and desire for “fairness” in the world (that’s an optimistic take, anyway). Women are/have been sympathetic, relational creatures and are motivated this way. When jobs and culture began to shift to accommodate women and their ambitions (a necessary correction), women didn’t stop raging. They continued to point the finger because it feels good and you can right now leverage tremendous social capital that results in real material goods. It’s led to total myopia. I mean - YES - there are still problems. Sexual abuse will always be problematic and women will likely always get the short end of that stick. There is still discrimination in some areas. But why are women still harping about how they make less on the dollar when we have good data on that that suggests that it’s largely due to the fact that women tend to choose to work lower paid jobs and work part time (usually to care for children)? Why is it that my husband has to endure lectures about sexism in the workplace and how held down women are when 9/10 of the people in leadership are women? Why are women still raging about injustices in education when the majority of people in higher Ed are women? Women are emotional. And capable of great rage. We did a lot of hard work to correct things that were problems (and there’s still work to do). But instead of righting the ship, we overcorrected and now I fear we’re facing the iceberg that will sink the whole damn thing. Women can’t complain that men are lame and they have no one to marry while simultaneously demanding power from them in every arena possible based on sex. I think the rage is a form of mental masturbation that also happens to be culturally advantageous right now.
Yes, the squeaky wheel gets lubricated.
Your comment made me think about my younger daughter, who was born in 2001. She grew up with a cell phone in her hand and can rage about a lot. It seems to be her first reaction all too often. Now compare that with my older daughter, who was born in 1996, and they are two completely different people. The older is calm and thoughtful first. Not reactive. It’s funny too, both do yoga and meditate, which helps control or reduce the reactive mind. But the younger one can’t seem to master quieting her rage. My gut says each are a product of a different generation, though just five years apart. Millennial vs Gen Z. I can’t say exactly what makes the younger one so angry. But I am confident it was taught to her in school and on her phone. She didn’t learn it from her parents.
A part of me looks to the use of “guilt” in the modern society as a tactic to capture people into believing a lot of what the left advocates for. It gets to their emotions, which are out of check, uncontrollable. Guilt, if used correctly, can make anyone do anything. I saw this with my younger daughter as she tried to articulate her “lefty” point of view. Guilt to me was the underlying motivation of her rage. It’s difficult trying to explain to someone who believes that they have committed a terrible “wrong” that it is not their fault. I was lucky as a child, I had a grandmother that used guilt like a knife. So I learned to sidestep it at first sight. I just laugh at guilt now.
I’m sure you’re on to something. So much on our phones breeds rage. Rage is currency and capital. The culture in the last five years has taught us that if we aren’t enraged at something (ostensibly the victim hood of others and ourselves), we aren’t alive. It has infected politics and become our religion. It is SO unpopular to point out that actually, things aren’t that bad. And that keeping a stiff upper lip might actually be advantageous at times, not to mention healthy. Nevermind the data - it is this insidious orthodoxy that creeps into social media and other sources that messages even to kids like your daughter that if she’s not mad and hurt, something’s wrong with her.
Yes, well said.
Moral outrage is the elixir of today.
I am not decrying your question but we could just as easily ask are people in general happier than they were 70 years ago. I think most people would expect to be a lot less happy if all our 'progress' (smartphones, cars etc) were taken away but I would not be at all surprised if people are less happy than they were 70 years ago; more wanting, less satisfaction with what we have etc etc.
In most studies I've read about, the answer is a resounding "no".
I can't help but wonder if our expectations have changed. Did people 70 years ago expect to be happy? I believe that my grandparents, farmers who lived through the depression and fought in WWII, expected life to be hard. When it wasnt, that was nice. But I never once heard them talk about whether or not they (or anyone else) was "happy."
According to surveys, no. Happiness (at least in America) has been decreasing over the last 40 years according to a number of different polls/surveys. Depression among teens/adolescents in particular has shot up recently; about 49% of 8th-12th graders in the US say they "do not enjoy life" (up from 23% in 2010). In general, women tend to report lower average life satisfaction than men do (despite this, only about 20% of suicides are women).
I can dig up some links if you're curious.
Women tend to be more neurotic (focused on negative things) and less successful in committing suicide. The statistics about teens is disheartening.
Neither side won, because they are both right and wrong. What we need is a new sexual revolution. One that recognizes that women deserve equality, but there are biological differences between the sexes. Men should be empowered to be masculine, but held to a high standard. No one should be forced to adopt a lifestyle based on societal expectations either. The benefits of traditional family values on children is undeniable. Our culture should embrace traditional values, but it may look a little different than the 1950's.
I agree neither side "won", as you point out, both made very good cases and points. I really enjoyed it. Perhaps setting it up as a roundtable, and including a pioneer, would have been better for dialogue. I would say the evolving sexual revolution should allow for expression of both masculine (yang) and feminine (yin) qualities in both sexes. Perhaps if we expressed it in this way there would be less extremes and dysphoria.
I didn't watch the debate...just a portion. It would have made more sense to have had women from all generations, no? I sure know way more about myself at 50 than I did at 20. Wisdom is a beautiful thing. My 22 year old daughter and I are very close. She has sought my wisdom over the course of her entire life(age appropriate) on every topic. Maybe the women touched on this but what about the women who have chosen to WAIT to have sex til marriage? That is also part of the sexual revolution and there is nothing wrong with that choice.
Interesting point that was overlooked.
Just worth pointing out that Perry argues for 'listening to our mothers' and it is brought up towards the end of the debate this is brought up though she actually talks about grandmothers and Anna mentions it too. So while they are all at a similar age and stage there is some talk and recognition of the wisdom of those who have lived life.
“We have the sexual revolution to thank for things like the pill”
————————————————
This is like saying
“We have the military industrial complex to thank for things like cluster munitions.”
I think the pill was responsible for The Revolution, not the other way 'round. Paraphrasing Doctor Johnson, the prospect of being a single mother concentrates the mind wonderfully - or at least it did back then.
Amen. Nailed it again in that fabulous acerbic manner that cuts right through all the B.S. 😂
I am 59 years old. Grew up in Ohio. Lived in NYC for 32 years as an artist. Left due to the extreme loss of freedom and tolerance, and I deeply loved that city for years. I was divorced and becoming successful during the Sex and The City years. Felt pressure to change my conservative previous ideas of only sleeping with men I was in love with. No one would ever call me an uptight person. I shaved my head like Sinead O’Connor 29 years ago as a sort of “I express my womanhood any way I want, and I actually feel prettier and more feminine with my lack of hair”. I believe feminism is allowing women to have choices. But a lot of that movement alienated me from a young age when I noticed so much messaging about how we HAD to “have it all” and “be it all”-and that message was increasing that we had to BE LIKE MEN. We had to beat 40 armed and dangerous men in the movies, look like Charlize Theron while doing it, be brilliant and successful in power careers, be as wanton with our bodies as men and remain as emotionally detached. So many women feel they must turn themselves into pornographic images for mens’ increasing addictive, disposable needs. Modern feminism and the sexual revolution have sold women the biggest lies. It de-feminizes us, it sends the message we must be a boss bitch, in effect, a man. It devalues us by making women debase themselves in porn to “make bank”. Plasticity, sex without romance, love or commitment-it just makes us devalued or valued in all the wrong ways. I recall wondering why I did not feel good about my Sex and the City style romps, why they frequently felt performative and ultimately sad when my gay and straight friends all cheered me on as “so fabulous”. I took a long, cold hard look in the mirror and thought: I never succumbed to peer pressure while younger, why am I doing this now in my late 30’s? Why am I ignoring the voice in my soul? The second I decided I would never sleep with a man again that did not meet a very high bar for me, a potential husband and future father-I fell in love with my best male friend and married him. I had my only child at age 40 because of the “your career is everything” myth-at the height of what became a very successful career I cherished. I walked away from the feminist myth at age 41 because I realized women were more visibly angry and miserable around me because of the LIE that they must be like men and HAVE IT ALL. I decided to focus on marriage and baby and became a stay at home, cookie baking mother.— June Cleaver but still with the extreme buzz cut! I was treated badly by other women on many occasions (as if I was deficient or unsuccessful for choosing this life), something that never happened when I had my glam career and single city dwelling life. I don’t recall a man ever expressing that attitude towards me when I shifted gears. I could go on and on and on. Of course human beings are each unique, but in general-our female BIOLOGY and chromosomes determine more about our different genders than people want to admit. I loved this panel and the sense of respect and humor shared amongst all the women! It was just a beautiful thing to see. The world I grew up in, where we had intellectual freedom and civility. Thank you, Bari!
Wow. Well said. I am 58, an artist who has lived in NYC (Brooklyn) for 34 years and is desperately looking for a good place near the ocean to move to. (husband is a native New Yorker - - they are the cool ones - - so this might be hard). Wish I had known you!! I agree 100%. Met my now husband at 42 after a lot of the same bullshit. I always bridled at feminism even at a young age because a lot started from the position of hating men. Or loathing the things they have done. I believe we all have a drop of the other, like the yin and yang, plus who wants to believe in something (non violent) that necessitates hating the other? Yeesh. I am glad you are so happy now, and hopefully I will craft an awesome plan to get out of here. NYC is getting worse and worse and more unbearable. In 5 years you won't even recognize it from what you left.
I am so at peace moving to a beach community very close to the ocean in Florida. It reminds me of the friendly and inclusive and tolerant Ohio I grew up in. I haven’t met a bitter, angry, pushy person yet. Of course, I know there are bad people everywhere-but so far-I haven’t met one here. Miracle. Good luck to you!!!!
I got more out of your reply than the entire debate. I’m about the same age as you and a man. Your experience reminds me of my mother’s from a generation earlier. Immigrant, earned her PHD and a university position, she set out to raise five boys. Something had to give. The amount of grief she used to get from her colleagues for sacrificing an academic star trajectory to wrangling and raising a testosterone farm, alienated her from many of her colleagues. At her funeral she was surrounded by the multitudes of three generations she started - her sons, all married, none divorced and productive folks. No psychos, incels, or addict grandchildren. That or more published academic papers and books?
I love that story and your hilarious reference to the testosterone farm! Lol!!!! I have always TRIED to understand how modern feminists can put career above family and feel so comfortable with that. Young women have now grown up under a relentless barrage of media images that tell them they are nothing unless they “have it all”-but I have never seen more women who seem stressed, addicted, self-debasing, angry, sad, passive aggressive-etc. Yet they will smile and put on a brave face and pretend they love their modern feminist lives of “having it all”. Isn’t that what a cult is ultimately? : A group of people who ignore their true feelings to live a fraud that their peers reward them with approval for.
I was always a pretty independent thinker. So it is remarkable to me that even I fell for the Sex and The City feminist myth for a time. That’s how powerful and pervasive it is in our culture.
Ultimately, I thought there was nothing I would ever do in my career as important as devoting everything I had to mothering my son and supporting my wonderful husband so he could rise so far in his career (which benefited all of us). Your mother sounds like a really impressive, strong woman. Its lonely when you go against the grain and are treated badly or dismissively by others for simply wanting to mother in your own way. But it is anything but lonely when you reach the end of your life and beam with pride at the children you will leave on this earth.
Of course, your mother is exalted by me. FIVE BOYS!!!! Lol. I’m not worthy to shine her shoes. She sounds spectacular!
I always found Sex and City had the most unnecessarily miserable women on TV. As where the mother in Malcolm in the Middle had it all. No other show captured as well how parents wrangle a family of all boys. They captured the sisterless dynamics of relentless fraternal competition.
I think that was the point of some of it. There was one episode where Samantha got sick with the flu and none of her many boy toys cared enough about her to take care of her.
Has the Sexual Revolution Failed?
The US birthrate per 1000 has dropped by more than one-half since 1950.
You tell me.....
Why did the sexual revolution fail? It didn't for the globalists. Decoupling love from sex was in large part what the revolution was about, and in my view it was by design as part of the depopulation agenda...ironically put into action in the 60's. And as the panel pointed out ...that goal is being met.
Meanwhile, the revolution (which I lived through) has caused a nearly complete failure for close intimate, loving relationships to thrive...which create the bonds that make civilization civil. (The word 'love' was mention only once in the entire debate.) Because the sexual revolution axed love and respect and treated both as superfluous to a sexual relationship, we end up with empty, callous connections....which accounts for the rise in depression. When the sexual revolution gave out its candy "you won't get pregnant" and "you don't have to be married to have/enjoy sex" it tricked(s) many into the car of meaningless hook-ups of degrading sex as sport. Porno has made that sport more sick and perverted by the day, as it must to get the audience who is watching 'off'' as they become normalized to the kink.
The way out of this failure? We need to address the fact that the perennial question of 'Who am I and what am I doing on this planet?' which has not been answered by science..and which can be answered it in 2023 (Based on my studies) in order to design a better world. Materialists claim we are wet computers and when you're dead it is over. Or we are spirits having a human experience here to expand and raise our consciousness to GoOD. In which case love is the reason for being and why we crave it instinctually. Sex that degrades puts us into hell where love doesn't exist and this is where the sexual revolution sum total has landed us.
Did you know that either 2021 or 2022 (I forget which) was the slowest population growth for the United States in its entire history?
Pretty wild.
You would think people locked down because of Covid would have found something constructive to do...
Appreciate the conversation. Great points made including the recognition that failure may have not been the best term to use. Caused problems? Yes. Failure? Not quite. Having said that, the loosening of all guardrails creates a free for all that absolutely impacts us psychologically & has us again, searching for a structure to live within. I wish someone would have strongly stated the obvious---that men & women are built differently by nature in their sexuality & the push for women to live like men in that regard is a central part of the issue. I love Grimes take on the social move to respect motherhood & children. And I absolutely love the idea about folding children back into society along with the elderly. We all live in age segregated bubbles that creates an unnecessary distance between generations & therefore lack of wisdom sharing & critical conversations.
Very much agree with your thoughtful points. Yes, we are biologically different but less different in psychology and ability that doesn't involve physicality. We need new combined language around both motherhood and fatherhood, and respect, reverence and gratitude are the long-forgotten elephants in the room. At the end of the day, we can share many things, but there are still beautiful things that differentiate us and should be celebrated. I enjoyed Grimes' perspective and her naivete about those who preceded her, but I think she represents what's great in the younger generations' perspective. They are under the influence of the result of the sexual revolution without the direct influence of those who preceded them. Perhaps that's where wisdom comes from. Elders observe and comment on the results of their struggles and labors to younger people. I agree we are living in silos and segregated bubbles, but I think women particularly can easily turn that back around.
Thank you. And love your point about reverence, respect, and gratitude. I imagine we could all benefit with an increase in these. I am noticing the younger generation calling for a return to homesteads, slow living, and centering family. There's also a huge increase in people choosing to forego the modern schooling system. I'm with you...I think women are particularly positioned to turn things around.
Yes! And these things are so heartening to me. I see this in my own children. Hopefully, it’s a trend they’re quietly undertaking while all this chaos ensues. And, it will be a wave. I have great hope in our young people! And, great confidence that women in particular will rise to the occasion and take us all to a better place.
Of course it failed. It was based on a lie and always has been.
No men on the podium. Apparently, they’re not involved?
That's what I was thinking. I don't know anyone who understands and articulates the Sexual Revolution's consequences better than Jordan Peterson.
Haven't you heard? Women don't need men today.
Yes, or so my wife keeps reminding me. So kind of her to keep me on anyway!
I know it's not the same but worth noting they are all mothers of boys
If there was to be a revolution for women, I would have hoped it resulted in more self confidence, empowerment and self respect. I don’t think this one did.
It certainly did result in those things initially and that I can say confidently firsthand. But, that has changed quite drastically over the last 10 years especially for the reasons Louise Perry stated so well. Freedom is not freedom at all if you don't know where you're going. We need to reframe.
It can be painful to be 'too free'. Isn't that what Joplin meant when she so famously sang that "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"? Louise Perry argument was that for the vast majority, social guardrails and norms are a very good thing. I think her closing remarks were that most ought to 'obey the wisdom of being a normie'
Yes. It can be painful to be ‘too’ anything, as things are bearing out. Freedom within a Framework, a wise person once pointed out to me. Outliers, though, allow us to see things differently and help us to improve and evolve. I suppose the key is to be mindful and heartful and ultimately moderate. Sometimes moderating is pushing the norm to extremes. It’s just how extreme and for how long.
Yes, agree we always need the outliers, or entrepreneurs if you will. What I see/sense however is the more ‘normal’ path is no longer widely encourage or advertised to our youth, in popular culture or beyond. Too much of what draws our attention (perhaps the propaganda) disproportionately celebrates the outliers.
Yes, wholeheartedly agree.
If I could love this comment, I would. Spot on!