The Heroic Woman

[Cognisant]

This is prompted by news of a pregnant superhero in the new Spiderman movie.
I think the world desperately needs more positive representations of pregnancy in media, but I think a pregnant superhero is a step in the wrong direction.

Superheroes may engage in other activities but what they're best known for is fighting, a superhero's merit is defined by their martial prowess, of course being able to punch good doesn't make someone a hero but it is the ability to go toe-to-toe with threats the emergency services can't handle is what makes a hero a superhero.

Now I'm not saying there shouldn't be female superheroes or even that there shouldn't be pregnant superheroes, the intended message is that women and pregnant women can be heroes too and that's not a bad message, pregnancy may be inconvenient but it's not a disability, a pregnant woman is not an egg to be kept in a nest and incubated.

Rather the problem is that such "female empowerment" has created an insecurity with being female because it's fundamentally judging women by a male standard. Women can possess martial prowess but in bout between a female martial athlete and a male martial athlete the outcome is all but set in stone, hence I think the propensity for depictions of "strong female characters" to often overcompensate in terms of martial prowess.

But in this way the insecurity reinforces itself, the intended message is that women can possess martial prowess but the message received is that women should judge themselves by male standards. Just as a female superhero cannot be overshadowed by her male peers, she must be equally or more capable, a lot of women today feel they need to be equally or more capable than men in performing the male gender role.

Hence the insistence on "equal pay" even though our legal systems (Western countries, probably elsewhere too) have a precedent for discrimination, if a woman can prove that she's being paid less than a colleague per hour for doing the same work she can sue her employer and most companies would be DESPERATE to settle this out of court because they know if it goes to court it'll be a PR nightmare. So what the people complaining about equal pay actually want is equal pay irrespective of hours worked or the work being performed, which is blatantly unfair, and men generally work longer hours by choice because they're resource acquisition driven, because that's a major part of the male gender role.

I digress, the world needs positive representation of women being heroically women and that's difficult to explain because this notion has almost completely disappeared from the modern mythos. The heroic woman is a supportive and loyal wife, a gentle and kind mother, a skilled cook (granted everyone should know how to cook), she's attractive but it's a wholesome kind of attractiveness, the sort of woman a man wants to fall in love with and dedicate himself to, the sort of woman who can create and nurture a family.

This is merit by a female standard, a man can try to embody these virtues (and should) but in an alternate universe where the tables are turned, where media is full of these distinctly feminine heroes I think men would likewise feel very insecure about their ability to measure up.

Granted this definition of heroism seems a lot less exciting than having superpowers and punching bad guys, but then again what makes a story compelling? Ellen Ripley in Aliens is best known for fighting the xenomorph queen but what got the audience invested in her character, thus making the fight for survival so dramatic, was that she wasn't a badass marine. She went on the mission with the marines (despite her prior traumatic experience) in hope of saving the colonists, when they found Newt she was the one that got the child to calm down and open up about what had happened, and the true defining moment of her character is when she went back to the reactor to save Newt. She is the go-to example of a strong female character, not because she killed xenomorphs but because she confronted her trauma, risked her life to save others (general heroism) and exhibited feminine heroism through her motherly interactions with Newt. Replace Ellen Ripley with some dude-bro space marine that goes back to save the little girl because he's a tough guy that doesn't know when to quit and it wouldn't have been a bad movie, but it wouldn't be such a classic either.

Likewise there's that powerful scene in Terminator 2 when Sarah is thinking to herself how ironic it is that the terminator would actually be a perfect father for John.

Watching John with the machine it was suddenly so clear. The terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there, and it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.

This is an incredibly emotional powerful scene because she's basically saying the terminator perfectly embodies the archetype of the masculine hero, no man can watch that scene and not see the terminator as an ideal to live up to, the sort of man they should aspire to be. If you want to combat domestic violence THAT is how you do it.

Imagine an equivalent scene of a man thinking to himself about an incredible woman and what a perfect mother she would be, it's hard to imagine it happening these days without it being incredibly cringe because it would just look like some guy being a simp for a modern woman that the audience knows full well does not embody the feminine hero archetype.

 

[BurnedOut]

I don't understand why anything that has something to do with strength is 'masculine' per se. Women till fields, climb trees, forage, work at construction sites, take care of their kids and somehow that does not require any kind of strength. It is as if our bearded pedophile motherfucker has given some reserve divine capacity to each woman to not spend a single calorie and do all of these things and then suddenly when she decides to do sports or any ostensible physical activity, she is trying to be a male or being judged from a male lens. That's quite the logical discourse feminists and antifeminists and nonfeminists and anybody else fights on. You cannot hit a woman and say that being bruised is quintessential to being a woman.

This is merit by a female standard, a man can try to embody these virtues (and should) but in an alternate universe where the tables are turned, where media is full of these distinctly feminine heroes I think men would likewise feel very insecure about their ability to measure up.

These are not female standards. It is a situation forced on them since the inception of agriculture. I would like to see what a human with a dong would do in that situation. Now these penis-envy men that may fall in this category will exclude gays, single dads, male nurses and any male in the hospitality sector. Give them the dong of Big Ben and they will still whine about blue whales have larger ones.

 

[Cognisant]

Civilization is a relay, each generation of men and women carry the torch and pass it on to the next, that is our solemn duty as human beings to continue the civilization that created us and ideally pass it on in better shape for the generations to come.

Since the 1960s the global fertility rate has been in decline, this decline has been in large part offset by decreases in infant mortality but the decline has continued unabated. We are now in a world that faces an impending demographic crisis, most every developed nation's fertility rate has dropped below replacement and those nations whose fertility has remained high (central Africa) their rates are now in an astonishing decline (1 child less per woman per decade).

Something happened in the 1960s to set us down this path and we need to course correct, because it's not just about people, the entire world's economic system is built on the presumption of growth, it's sink or swim, grow or die. We face a future where each new generation is smaller than the last, and each new generation is overburdened with caring for those prior, unable to break the cycle, a demographic death spiral, unless...

What debt do they owe to those who failed to pass on the torch, to those who chose to forsake their duty to their civilization and live only for themselves, who are they to demand to looked after in their waning years, what debt does their neighbor's children owe them? None.

The modern woman is a hateful selfish thing overflowing with entitlement and spite, loathe to be a woman she invents new pronouns/identities/genders for herself, so caught up in perceived oppression and micro-aggressions she cannot find or maintain a relationship, to proud to submit to a partner.

As men and women we both have a role to play and I believe a healthy relationship is one where both parties submit to each other and more specifically the higher calling that is being a family. This takes the form of submitting to each other's desires and expectations, it is what a man wants for wife that defines her role as such, equally it was a woman wants for a husband that defines his role. In broad terms these desires and expectations have remained largely unchanged throughout history, what made someone a good mother or father in antiquity is much the same as what makes them a good parent now.

Accordingly the characters in our stories, the ones who embody our ideals (heroes) are representatives of these virtues for we tell stories not only to entertain but also to educate, it is through stories that we learn what a man and a woman are and what kind of person they should aspire to be.

The reason so many modern stories suck is that modern writers are so ideologically brainwashed they can't tell a story without inserting their agenda, an agenda that runs contrary to human nature, consequently no amount of marketing or spin will convince the audience to like these characters.

 

[Cognisant]

I realize I may have created some confusion in that I keep using different terms for the same thing (as I'm still organizing my thoughts as I write) so for clarity I'll define my terms in, um, stricter terms.

Heroes (in fiction) are characters who embody our ideals.

Superheroes exist to solve a particular narrative problem, the real world has real heroes (emergency services) which somewhat undermines the "average joe rises to the challenge" plot (i.e. Diehard) and the more mythical archetype of a character defined by their heroism (every superhero) hence why Thor made such a seamless transition to modern media, mythological figures are the OG superheroes. I digress, by having the antagonist be someone emergency services and the military can't handle the superhero is given a reason to exist.

Now the important part, heroism is not in part or whole exclusive to either gender but there are particular ideals that are identified as masculine and/or feminine because they are relevant to that gender's role in a family. Those roles being defined by what people look for in a partner and those biases have been long studied, they exist.

The problem isn't that there isn't enough feminine heroes to appeal to male audiences (that is a problem for the studios) rather the problem for human civilization is that there's a notable absence of feminine heroes because the modern female audience has a problem with the concept of femininity.

For example men don't really complain when actors like Hugh Jackman, Jason Momoa and Chris Hemsworth are depicted topless (or completely nude), we know it's pandering to the female gaze, we don't care because we're not insecure in our masculinity. But if a woman is not only attractive but also costumed in a way that accentuates her attractiveness, oh no that's problematic, that's the oppressive male gaze.


Btw this woman was a former beer babe herself, she wasn't oppressed, she was making money off being attractive and that launched her career in marketing.
Soo oppressed

 

[BurnedOut]

She is the go-to example of a strong female character, not because she killed xenomorphs but because she confronted her trauma, risked her life to save others (general heroism) and exhibited feminine heroism through her motherly interactions with Newt.

That renders men as being unconcerned about others which is bullshit. Then men have a problem with being called uncaring but when you call them caring, they scream 'feminine'

The modern woman is a hateful selfish thing overflowing with entitlement and spite, loathe to be a woman she invents new pronouns/identities/genders for herself, so caught up in perceived oppression and micro-aggressions she cannot find or maintain a relationship, to proud to submit to a partner.

The modern woman is desperately trying to be a wife, mother, productive employee at the same. Even if the former two are gone, they are replaced with myriad other societal expectations with constraints. I have zero clue why you think females have it less bad than males do when enough scientific and interpretive data exists otherwise

 

[BurnedOut]

Those roles being defined by what people look for in a partner and those biases have been long studied, they exist.

It is quite easy to get rid of those biases for women if the men in their life actually think through what's happening. Don't forget that men played an equally pioneering role in women empowerment. So it's proven that it is not a hard-coded bias but a result of laziness, selfishness and hence completely political in nature and political behavior never exists without complete consciousness of what you are doing.

Btw this woman was a former beer babe herself, she wasn't oppressed, she was making money off being attractive and that launched her career in marketing.
Soo oppressed

People make fun of her for being successful but put a man in her place and you will find someone like Andrew Tate who is unnaturally glorified by a lot of males. Pretty hypocritical because attention whoring males get praise but not the females

 

[BurnedOut]

Now the important part, heroism is not in part or whole exclusive to either gender but there are particular ideals that are identified as masculine and/or feminine because they are relevant to that gender's role in a family. Those roles being defined by what people look for in a partner and those biases have been long studied, they exist.

Heroism has nothing to do with society and gender. It has everything to do with how awesome you make your story sound to others. These so called heroes are puppeted by nothing but pure luck and you take that away, you will find McClane being in jail in real life and Spider Man a domestic terrorist

 

[Cognisant]

That renders men as being unconcerned about others which is bullshit. Then men have a problem with being called uncaring but when you call them caring, they scream 'feminine'

Nitpicking.

The modern woman is desperately trying to be a wife, mother, productive employee at the same.

That's the problem and it's only those over about 35 that are complaining that they can't find a husband to settle down with, or they have and they're not fertile anymore.

Society has lied to them, told them to put their careers first, sleep around, freeze your eggs, don't worry about the future you'll find a man when the time's right. Then the time comes and they discover that just as they were dating older men in their 20s they're now competing with those younger women for a husband and those frozen eggs, they might be viable, they might not, it's a gamble.

Spoiler

UK and Ireland: According to the UK Office for National Statistics, 1 in 5 women (20 per cent) born between 1961 and 1966 remain without children, dropping slightly to 19 per cent for those born in 1967. The most recent ‘completed childbearing’ data available, for those born in 1968, drops again to 18 per cent. However, this is still double the 1 in 9 (9 per cent) of their mothers’ generation. From speaking to many childless women born in the 1970s, I think it’s quite likely that this may grow to 1 in 4 women (25 per cent) because of the combined impact of ‘social infertility’ (being unable to find a suitable partner), along with delaying or not feeling able to have children for financial reasons due to the global economic downturn since 2008. The data available so far shows that up to 47 per cent of women born in the 1970s were childless at the age of 30, compared to up to 28 per cent of their mothers’ generation, which may be one such early sign. Ireland’s rate of childlessness is similarly 18 per cent for those born in 1965.

USA: Almost 1 in 5 women (20 per cent) remained childless by the mid-2000s, but this number dropped to 15 per cent in 2014. Some analysis predicts that childbearing delayed due to the global economic downturn may prove to be ‘fertility foregone’, but it is too early to tell for sure. This compares to data from the mid-1970s, which showed that 10 per cent of women were childless. The childbearing rate of women in their 20s fell 15 per cent between 2007 and 2012 and it remains to be seen how many of these ‘Millennials’ go on to have children in their 30s and early 40s.

Canada: Almost 19 per cent of Canadian women were childless aged 40–44 in 2011, more than double the previously recorded rate in 1992. Also, according to the 2011 census, there are now more people living in single-person households than households with children. The same survey also shows that 44.5 per cent of Canadian couples are ‘without children’.

Australia and New Zealand: Almost 1 in 4 women (24 per cent) of childbearing age are expected to remain childless in Australia. This compares to 9 per cent for women born between 1930 and 1946, who benefited from the improved economic outlook after World War II. In New Zealand, 1 in 4 women (25 per cent) born in 1975 are expected to remain childless, compared to 10 per cent of women aged 44–49 in its 2006 survey, and 9 per cent in 1981.

Europe: France and Sweden have two of the lowest rates of childlessness (due to liberal state support for working mothers and families) at 10 per cent and 13 per cent, whilst Germany has the highest rate at 28 per cent, with Italy coming in second at 24 per cent and then Spain at almost 22 per cent. Some of the other European countries with a high rate of childlessness (around 20 per cent) are Austria, Finland and the Netherlands.

East Asia: In Japan, of those women born in the 1960s, almost 13 per cent have no children. However, for those born in the 1970s, it is expected that 30 per cent (almost 1 in 3) will remain childless. Singapore has the highest current rate of childlessness amongst women aged 40–44, at 23 per cent (almost 1 in 4). According to the UN report, East Asia would appear to be the area where childlessness is growing most quickly.

Even if the former two are gone, they are replaced with myriad other societal expectations with constraints. I have zero clue why you think females have it less bad than males do when enough scientific and interpretive data exists otherwise

And I'm telling you this men vs women comparison is pointless, childlessness is going up, fertility's going down and it's not because women are being held back by a glass ceiling in the workforce. Granted India has greater gender inequality problems than Australia and guess what? Your childlessness rate is really low, how about that, indeed as I'm looking up data on childlessness in India (which is clearly increasing over time but still really low, only about 4-5%) the main driver of it appears to be women's education, the more educated women are (i.e. more focused on participating in the workforce) the less children they have.

Here look this is India:

And this is Australia:

CLEARLY the problem isn't women being held back by the fucking patriarchy, the problem is women's priorities and what they believe based on the narratives they've been exposed to.

It is quite easy to get rid of those biases for women if the men in their life actually think through what's happening. Don't forget that men played an equally pioneering role in women empowerment. So it's proven that it is not a hard-coded bias but a result of laziness, selfishness and hence completely political in nature and political behavior never exists without complete consciousness of what you are doing.

Do you have anything to back up that wild claim you just pulled out of your ass?

People make fun of her for being successful but put a man in her place and you will find someone like Andrew Tate who is unnaturally glorified by a lot of males. Pretty hypocritical because attention whoring males get praise but not the females

And how would I put Andrew Tate in her place? Nobody's calling her out for attention whoring, they're calling her out for being a misandrist and massive hypocrite.

I suppose Andrew Tate is a misogynist, I've never really watched any of his stuff so I can't say whether or not he's a hypocrite, in any case I'm not going to defend him because if you think men are the only ones successfully attention whoring on the internet you're either utterly deluded or you've never heard of OnlyFans.
If that's not attention whoring for profit I don't know what is.

Heroism has nothing to do with society and gender. It has everything to do with how awesome you make your story sound to others. These so called heroes are puppeted by nothing but pure luck and you take that away, you will find McClane being in jail in real life and Spider Man a domestic terrorist

Heroism has nothing to do with society and gender because fiction isn't reality... ok but how? Fiction may not be real but it does exist in reality, our fictional heroes may not be real but they are heroes to us because they embody our very real ideals, I don't know where you were going with this and I'm pretty sure you don't either.

 

[Cognisant]

I get where you're coming from, if women aren't educated and active participants in the economy that would undermine their position in society as independent actors which is what the feminist movement originally fought for and in some parts of the world still does.

Basically what I'm saying is that rather than women's priorities looking like this:

• Primary Education
• Secondary Education
• Tertiary Education
• Get a job
• Build a career
• Find a man <- Stretch goal
• Start a family <- Stretch goal

It should look more like this:

• Primary Education
• Secondary Education
• Find a man
• Start a family
• Get a job / Tertiary Education <- Stretch goal
• Build a career <- Stretch goal

A woman's job should be less important than her family, for men it's different they work to support their family, whereas if a woman puts her career first, doesn't settle down until later in life and then either can't get a good man or she's infertile then what was all that work for?

Besides for a young attractive woman finding a man, getting married, having 2-3 kids, she can knock that over in 5yrs, 10yrs tops, worst case scenario she enters the workforce at say 35, that gives her 25yrs to have a career and retire at 60. Indeed this is assuming she's not doing anything productive in those man-getting child-having years which wouldn't realistically be the case. Realistically she's studying and/or working, just not as intensively, putting family first doesn't mean everything else has to stop.

 

[dr froyd]

i demand that next James Bond is a pregnant woman. Anything else would be a perpetuation of bourgeois patriarchal status quo

 

[∴∴∴]

Drive by comment I know, but something I REALLY don't get here is how you apparently both think the world is "over-populated" (don't see you disagreeing with that over here: https://www.intpforum.com/threads/if-you-believe-that-the-world-is-over-populated.29397/) and are over here panicking about the impending lack of replacement and big bad sad that apparently does to the endless growth (totally unsustainable, fucked up) economics we rely on.

Huge disconnect seems to be:
WHY NOT TRY TO CHANGE THE ECONOMIC DYNAMICS?
Please see: https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics
and similar sorts of things I'm not personally married to any one model or path to it but assume, barring weird circumstance, if we're surviving with any quality of life we're moving to something like that, not endless growth or end of growth precipitated by uncontrolled population collapse while the zombie endless growth system eats us alive.

If you say well because we alone can't do that, same goes for your ability to rearrange women's priorities. Your arguments here for example have left me exactly where I was before: absolutely committed to having no biological children, primarily because pregnancy sounds like a bad time and not worth the trouble or the results, which include "having children" being the main feature in my life. A life I'd rather live doing other shit.

I think it would be fair to say the big priority rearrangement that needs to happen if you want more people having more kids is the priority of the social/political/economic systems to not make it such a fucking pain. Increase maternal healthcare. Increase funding for research into short term and long term complications that arise in pregnancy, childbirth and post-partum. Favor funding for proactive health care that supports women's fertility, overall health, lowered risk of all those complications. In short: Make it safer. Make it more possible.

Access to abortion being key because like hell am I or many women risking pregnancy when they might make me keep going to term even if the fetus has gone wrong and has no brain. Or any number of complications. So many women know at least one other woman, or know someone who knows someone, who was irrevocably disabled, has life long injuries, or health issues (ex: gestational diabetes) from complications in pregnancy or birth. You know what the level of care for that shit is? Even in the best best best systems? Not great. You can go ahead and look into it if you don't trust me here.

Another important factor: Agitate for large paternal and maternal leave and benefits. You could seek it as a law as in Spain or perhaps company policies if unions get in on demanding it. And that's just scratching the surface of the wide variety of policies public and private that would actually change anything.

Women's priorities being changed by arguing online (or offline) that we should totally care more about baby making and less about career is going to go down like a dry fart in a noisy hall. Stinks, and nobody really hears it or cares about lying back and thinking of endless growth and macro economics when it's our quality of life on the line.

When I can keep on be being a very fulfilled and happy researcher who camps and travels every vacation with my friends and gets to have great time occassionally helping out with the babies of the people in my life who chose to have them (and did the heavy lifting of that themselves), why do anything else? If you think I care about "passing on my genes" I have only to point you to my deep bank of fertile cousins who are a few spits away from being my clone, and the fact that the future "life" of "my genes" has 0 impact on how I experience life, to show how much that actually matters. Personally, I care most about transmitting my ideas which can be done with mentoring for other people's kids who are finally old enough to not (usually) throw up on me, and/or by publishing in my field. More and more women are going to quit mainlining the koolaid and realize we, too, can choose from more than one path to satisfaction in life and arguments like yours about the alleged big scale shit we "need" to make babies for just won't slow that down.

The closest to a compelling argument for having kids is how much our society appears to expect you to rely on them as a bank/investment/affairs manager in old age. However in practical terms, that's always a risk anyway (the kids can die, hate you, join a cult, be unable or unwilling to work and/or be incompetent, be too busy to really help) even if you do your best. And also, having proactively talked to childless older adults, including ones in their 80s and 90s, if you plan ahead, do ok financially, get your legal and financial shit set up wisely before you get too old to manage it, and build and maintain relationships in your community, it works out just fine. If you try to propagandize to the contrary, that will only go so far until the truth leaks out and probably won't convince too many women in the meantime regardless.

So I recommend aside from potentially caring about the above changes and similar that would materially, rationally incentivize baby-having for the baby-wanters, get your head out of seeking to poorly propagandize women's priorities and just do your best to help move us toward a sustainable economic and political system that does not (supposedly) require oodles of babies for the money-death endless (cancerous) growth churn only to get killed off in some future nut's "overpopulation!!" schemes or scarcity wars, etc.

 

[Cognisant]

Drive by comment I know, but something I REALLY don't get here is how you apparently both think the world is "over-populated" (don't see you disagreeing with that over here:

Well you need to improve your reading comprehension skills.

When do the ends justify the means?

I think they do when it's a matter of long term vs short term, going with the example of over-population and assuming population growth is inflexible (which isn't the case in reality) then the dilemma is a choice between killing some people now or more people later. The smaller the population is the smaller the number of people that need to be killed to counteract population growth.

This is what's called a Thought Experiment.

Scorpiomover asked a philosophical question in the Philosophy section which I interpreted as "When do the ends justify the means?" so I developed a hypothetical scenario to demonstrating such.

This scenario requires some fairly wild assumptions but that doesn't matter, it's not a real ship, they're not real people, I was just demonstrating my point.

That point being that in order for the ends to justify the means it must be a scenario in which you must either make a detrimental choice now or a worse choice later.

 

[∴∴∴]

That's fine then at least you're consistent.

You'd think given how much you care about this you would have at least tried to link to something or some other thread substantiating your claim the world is not overpopulated/becoming overpopulated, but sure. I respect participating in the thought experiment someone else posed without dragging in other objections to it.

 

[Cognisant]

WHY NOT TRY TO CHANGE THE ECONOMIC DYNAMICS?
Please see: https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics
and similar sorts of things I'm not personally married to any one model or path to it but assume, barring weird circumstance, if we're surviving with any quality of life we're moving to something like that, not endless growth or end of growth precipitated by uncontrolled population collapse while the zombie endless growth system eats us alive.

That's not an economic model, that's just pure ideology.

Are health, food and water bad things? Why are they in red like the stuff on the outside? It's like the person who came up with this doesn't even understand it themselves, since when are housing and education shortfalls?

I think they're trying to say the stuff in the center is the foundation for a successful society, well yes, good things are good, but why are they good and how good are they? Let's take education for example, I totally agree education is an investment in a nation's future but how much should a nation spend on it? Normally that would be justified as a percentage of a nation's GDP but this doughnut is supposed to replace GDP somehow?

It's just words, it's ideology, it's asserting (poorly) that some things are good and some things are bad and that's supposed to revolutionize economics somehow?

If you say well because we alone can't do that, same goes for your ability to rearrange women's priorities. Your arguments here for example have left me exactly where I was before: absolutely committed to having no biological children, primarily because pregnancy sounds like a bad time and not worth the trouble or the results, which include "having children" being the main feature in my life. A life I'd rather live doing other shit.

So why should the government look after you?

Think of it like a tribe, the tribal elders are respected because in their youth they supported the tribe, they did the hunting, the gathering and cared for the children, infirm and the elders of their time. Thus the tribe is strong and able to look after them in their old age, the tribe owes them a debt of gratitude for making the tribe strong.

You work, you pay taxes, you contribute to society (begrudgingly) but you don't want to set up the next generation, you don't care about the future of the tribe you only care about yourself so you just save money and make investments for yourself, to secure your future. But that money and those investments they only have value as part of a society, if you own real estate and the population declines your real estate will lose value. If you're invested in businesses and the population declines those businesses have less people to sell to, they make less profit and your shares lose value. Even the value of the dollar is based on the economic prosperity of the nation so if the population declines that causes inflation because there's fewer people making less productivity but there's still the same amount of money in circulation.

When it's your turn to prepare the future of your tribe, your civilization, your nation and you shirk that duty out of selfishness, why should tribe bother to look after you when you can no longer support yourself in the age of recession you created?

I think it would be fair to say the big priority rearrangement that needs to happen if you want more people having more kids is the priority of the social/political/economic systems to not make it such a fucking pain. Increase maternal healthcare. Increase funding for complications that arise in pregnancy. Make it safer. Access to abortion being key because like hell am I or many women risking pregnancy when they might make me keep going to term even if the fetus has gone wrong and has no brain. Or any number of complications. So many women know at least one other woman, or know someone who knows someone, who was irrevocably disabled, has life long injuries, or health issues (ex: gestational diabetes) from complications in pregnancy or birth. You know what the level of care for that shit is? Even in the best best best systems? Not great. You can go ahead and look into it if you don't trust me here. So in summary: Make it less of a shitty time. Agitate for large paternal and maternal leave and benefits, you could seek it as a law as in Spain or perhaps company policies if unions get in on demanding it. And that's just scratching the surface of the wide variety of policies public and private that would actually change anything.

I 100% agree with all this, we need to support parenthood like our civilization depends upon it, because it does.

So I recommend aside from potentially caring about the above changes and similar that would materially, rationally incentivize baby-having for the baby-wanters, get your head out of women's priorities and just do your best to help move us toward a sustainable economic and political system that does not require oodles of babies for the money-death scarcity churn machine.

Fair enough, likewise you don't have to have kids but don't go around preaching the virtues of being childless, because someone has to do it or otherwise we're all fucked.

 

[Black Rose]

When it's your turn to prepare the future of your tribe, your civilization, your nation and you shirk that duty out of selfishness, why should tribe bother to look after you when you can no longer support yourself in the age of recession you created?

There is not going to be a recession based on fewer kids. (except in China)

And tribes are not the same as nations with hundreds of millions of people.

The reason we support old people in capitalism is so that people don't need to be laid off to take care of the elderly.

Work funds the government so people work more if the government takes care of the old folks.

People cannot fund this themselves which is why it is an insurance system. to help those who lack family that can afford to care. In capitalism, the poor cannot take care of the old so they need insurance.

People without kids are not the problem. If they work they fund the insurance program with taxes. So it is a collective effort. You cannot blame individuals for what the government does. Not unless the government is crap because of crap services. If things hold out then everyone gets to work and retire without fear of capitalism failing. What matters is not kids becoming fewer it is that adults do not have a place to put them when they are at work. And that means we need an education system that functions properly to get them into jobs like everyone else.

Inflation happens because of fractional reserve banking. This steals more from the economy than childless people. If it is not fixed then capitalism WILL collapse.

The money supply is increasing because of the government, not women. Your efforts to make more children for the system via social engineering are not the solution. We are not supposed to view women as just another resource for the system if the system is broken from the systemic level, to begin with. No amount of children will solve the fundamental problems. War, Poverty, and Inflation.

As long as capitalism exists we need to make the system function yes but that is not going to be done by reducing services. Services are needed for people to work more like healthcare and daycare. Then people will be good little drones for the system. Economic policy is about making it easier to be a citizen not worse.

Children should be affordable, not unaffordable.

 

[scorpiomover]

This is prompted by news of a pregnant superhero in the new Spiderman movie.
I think the world desperately needs more positive representations of pregnancy in media, but I think a pregnant superhero is a step in the wrong direction.

I have no issue with a superheroine who gets pregnant.

Wouldn't want her fighting, though. Bound to get punched in the stomach a few times by a superman with incredible strength. Not good for the baby. Let her do the technical stuff for a few months/years.

Superheroes may engage in other activities but what they're best known for is fighting, a superhero's merit is defined by their martial prowess,

Only in the latest films, as film-makers today seem to focus on extreme violence.

a pregnant woman is not an egg to be kept in a nest and incubated.

Do you understand that whether or not a woman is incubating a human egg, is literally what differentiates a pregnant woman from a non-pregnant woman?

Rather the problem is that such "female empowerment" has created an insecurity with being female because it's fundamentally judging women by a male standard.

I can see how that hypothesis would be consistent with what seems to be going on in modern secular society in general.

Women can possess martial prowess but in bout between a female martial athlete and a male martial athlete the outcome is all but set in stone, hence I think the propensity for depictions of "strong female characters" to often overcompensate in terms of martial prowess.

I've known about several cases of women who beat up men. The Bible even mentions how Yehudit cut off Sisera's head.

But I saw Big Daddy once completely pound 2 young, fit guys.

So if we want to make a genuine comparison, we ought to make mixed-sex competitions where the competitors are roughly the same height and weight.

The heroic woman is a supportive and loyal wife, a gentle and kind mother, a skilled cook (granted everyone should know how to cook), she's attractive but it's a wholesome kind of attractiveness, the sort of woman a man wants to fall in love with and dedicate himself to, the sort of woman who can create and nurture a family.

That sounds like the ideal woman to a male chauvinist.

Speaking as someone who grew up in a matriarchal culture, the ideal woman is one who is good at looking after her husband and children, but also wise, and also one that all men fear, beause if any men step out of line, she'll hit them over the head with her saucepan.

Granted this definition of heroism seems a lot less exciting than having superpowers and punching bad guys, but then again what makes a story compelling? Ellen Ripley in Aliens is best known for fighting the xenomorph queen but what got the audience invested in her character, thus making the fight for survival so dramatic, was that she wasn't a badass marine. She went on the mission with the marines (despite her prior traumatic experience) in hope of saving the colonists, when they found Newt she was the one that got the child to calm down and open up about what had happened, and the true defining moment of her character is when she went back to the reactor to save Newt. She is the go-to example of a strong female character, not because she killed xenomorphs but because she confronted her trauma, risked her life to save others (general heroism) and exhibited feminine heroism through her motherly interactions with Newt. Replace Ellen Ripley with some dude-bro space marine that goes back to save the little girl because he's a tough guy that doesn't know when to quit and it wouldn't have been a bad movie, but it wouldn't be such a classic either.

I have watched Aliens dozens of times. Ripley's woman character is contrasted with the woman marine, who is arrogant and overly violent, and Burke, who is arrogant and overly cowardly.

Ripley is the reluctant hero, the guy/girl who isn't looking for a fight, but having found one, will make sure that the good guys win. She is the female equivalent of John McClane in Die Hard.

This is an incredibly emotional powerful scene because she's basically saying the terminator perfectly embodies the archetype of the masculine hero, no man can watch that scene and not see the terminator as an ideal to live up to, the sort of man they should aspire to be. If you want to combat domestic violence THAT is how you do it.

Robots are unlikely to make good parents. They can't teach children how to control their feelings. They don't know how to control their own feelings, as they don't have feelings to control.

 

[ZenRaiden]

What ever happened to mothers just having a baby and chilling and kicking back.
Oh yeah, we live in a dystopian society where we need superheros, because our society fails at everything basic - even crime prevention.

I noticed that American specific hero worship is societal inclination for individuals who overcome collapsing society.

No in reality one individual cannot save jack shit.

One individual means nothing.

Hence why people evolved to cooperate.

Yeah its a major toxic message.
Because a society that cannot afford a mother to take care of her kid on her own terms, and needs to have a job and jump through hurdles is a deprived society that is failing mothers.

People chasing money at every turn and chasing success at every turn and toxic grind set are the reason modern society is falling apart.

People are becoming neurotic hamsters, yet we are productive as ever and we seemed to have less peace and less time and less of everything.

I mean it makes sense someone makes a god complex mother.