Yes, I read that a while back and it's a good report. It was enlightening.
---
I happened to just read this article in the Atlantic. Have a quick glance at the first graph. In the just the last few years, there has been an astonishing shift to the left among women, but not so much among men.
Yes, I read that a while back and it's a good report. It was enlightening.
---
I happened to just read this article in the Atlantic. Have a quick glance at the first graph. In the just the last few years, there has been an astonishing shift to the left among women, but not so much among men.
I've seen other statistics indicating that liberal women are very much leading the mass charge towards CSJ. (Mass charge as in providing the tens of millions of supporters, vs a few activists). I see CSJ ideology (Critical Social Justice ideology) as a mind virus which uses compassion and the need to be seen as virtuous as its entry point to infect a large number of decent people just trying to do the right thing, care for the needy and make the world a better place; and statistically there are more women who are susceptible because of that entry point to the psyche.
Some of the people I've known who have succumbed were quite nice people, at least until they felt they had the moral high ground because they were defending the helpless and thus didn't need to treat opponents as they would wish to be treated. It's like a drug and it hijacks the reward centers. Those infect often start out from a very caring place, but after a few years more than a tiny portion of them appear to get off as much on morally demonizing anybody who dissents, as they do on actually helping anybody on the ground.
I can't read the article since I don't subscribe, but the first two 'graphs sound like what I've read elsewhere - politics being just one reason why people won't marry certain others. A few years ago, Trump supporters had a much harder time getting a date.
Jonathan Haidt is working on a new book about social media's impact on young people (I subscribe to his Substack) and he notes that liberal kids have higher rates of mental illness than conservative kids, and liberal young girls & women have the highest rates of all. He never mentions transgender issues but he does cover suicide as a social contagion and it points very strongly to the theory (in my mind anyway) that it's entirely possible suicidal kids are drawn to the transgender movement, marketed as the latest 'drug' to cure whatever ails you, rather than that transgender kids are at higher risk for suicide.
Fact is, spiralling suicide rates came several years before the trans craze so 'underlying pathologies' strike me as far more likely than 'so many people born in the wrong body'.
First, I think your speculation is interesting, plausible and deserves investigation.
But in regard to the article I linked, I was just referencing the first graph, using it not to bring up the article's subject, but as a convenient data reference for my own separate point about amazingly rapid change in women's attitudes compared to men's in the past few years. I believe that at the statistical level, women are largely driving the numbers of woke believers.
As for the subject of the article itself - that article was making a point not about the dating prospects of conservatives versus liberals overall, but more specifically about the gender differences. There are about twice as many liberal women as men, and about twice as many conservative men as women, today (not so true even just 4-5 years ago). So conservative women can easily find men to date, and liberal men can as well - but not so much so for conservative men and liberal women.
Then the article's larger point built on that by noting that there is no sign of a compensating trend to more frequently choose partners outside one's one political position (more the opposite), so a very large number of people of all political persuasions will fail to ever find a partner, given the stats.
From other sources, we find that white and Black women in the US both have a reproduction rate of about 1.5, where 2.1 is needed for zero growth. Those two population groups are headed towards fairly rapid decrease and an increasingly older distribution in the coming decades. (The overall US population is not shrinking because there are other population groups with higher reproduction rates, and many immigrants). I suspect that the NYT article points to another reason why this low reproduction rate is likely to shrink even further in the future.
I've noticed in reading comments on the internet, that in the wake of the reaction to ending Roe v Wade, the number of young women writing of being terrified of, and highly avoidant of, childbirth is far higher now than I have ever seen. They graphically list dozens of potential terrible outcomes from carrying to term; as with most visceral fear processing, they don't mention frequency. I think this comes from trying to make a resounding moral and medical case (ie: motivation) for pro-abortion activism ("very many of us will die or be crippled if forced to give birth, so our very lives depend on having abortion on demand"), but it appears to me to have had the likely unintended side effect of discouraging even intentional childbirth among a generation of young women. "Yuck" as they say to each other. This kind of early conditioning can be hard to change, so I expect that to become yet another factor in reducing reproduction rates in coming decades.
No wonder some kids are looking for an out, a magic bullet.
I would be extremely curious to have a glimpse into the future 50 and 100 years from now, to see what the survivors have made of this country.
Thanks for clarifying what the article was about. I was basing my words on the one I wrote a few years ago, based on the one I found about how Trump single guys were having a hard time finding dates.
I think you're right about liberal women - Haidt notes that young liberal teens & women have the highest rate of mental illness, and it *doesn't* seem to be related to political issues (although I wonder about that - it contributed to *my* depression back in the day, wondering if Reagan would destroy Roe or start a nuclear war, the latter of which I worried about *a lot* and had nightmares about.
It sounds like the young American women you're talking about are catastrophizing about Roe, in somewhat the wrong way. It likely won't put as many women's lives in physical danger as they're making out, but it WILL ruin their lives if these pregnancies are not planned, their baby daddy (if he's even a partner) isn't up for the task of daddyhood/husband (she may rightfully not want him to be), she could be ostracized within her family or a nutty religious group, etc. And some *will* die. But more may die from illegal abortions, just like 'the good old days' conservatives fantasize so much about.
I'm really hoping this results in men getting laid less. Nothing will change the law quite like women snapping their legs closed.
> "It sounds like the young American women you're talking about are catastrophizing about Roe"
To be a bit more precise, the young women are catastrophizing about **pregnancy and childbirth**, as a result of the political tool of "exaggerate your victimhood as the source of getting power" used to foster opposition to the ending of Roe v Wade. Talk in graphic details about a dozen possible negative outcomes of (any!) pregnancy. Exaggerating or hyperfocusing on the (real) risks of pregnancy & childbirth (and associating them with being oppressed and a victim) is unlikely to fully dissipate later when considering whether to voluntarily have kids, as an unintended side effect of this victimhood-centric organizing tactic.
As for your last sentence, Nicole, do you really think - in today's society as we best understand the dynamics thereof - that women as a whole can improve the situation by using the withholding of sex as a weapon? What changes in men do you think such women would expect before granting sex?
First off, I think it creates all sorts of psychological problems - for both partners - to use sex as a political weapon. At the minimum, it reinforces the concept of sex as a tool for manipulation rather than as a mutually desirable and mutually rewarding activity.
You seem to hope that most of the men will cave, and do whatever the women want in order to have access. I'm not at all sure of that; wouldn't coercion of that general sort generate some negative reaction on your part of you were the recipient (whether the reward was sex, attention, money, whatever)? At the least it would depend on what the women required before opening their legs (see below). But if the men don't mostly cave, I don't think a society is likely to benefit from having a lot of men who feel frustrated, manipulated, and angry with women and with society. That's not a good breeding ground for positive engagement with society, but rather the opposite.
Note that the situation is that there are about two single liberal women for every single liberal man. Who is going to have the stronger hand in that market?
But what would "women snapping their legs closed" demand before opening them, if that tactic DID work? The masses are not going to share your or my understandings of the world. Would you expect liberal women to convert conservative men to (pretend?) wokeness as a pre-condition to granting sex, due the shortage mentioned above?
And if it did work, would this coercive power be used only for grand political schemes, and not for personal things (like extracting money, marriage, etc)? If men as a whole are willing to do what it takes to get women to open their legs, what will be demanded next? And what happens when this tactic stops working?
But maybe you were not serious, and just wanted to imagine an easy Lisistrata victory over the bad forces in our society. If almost all women had your values, insight, and intelligence that might be a good thing (with the above concerns), but I think you are not the norm, and that power would not be used in the ways you would hope.
I said it tongue in cheek. Of course it's not a real response, and I wrote a sarcastic article last year called NO MORE BLOWJOBS!!! making up humourous responses to the loss of Roe. Although I think it's possible some women might be less inclined to have intercourse because of this. Part of the reason why I waited as long as I did to lose my virginity was fear of pregnancy. Sure, there was birth control and abortion but I was a college kid without a lot of money, and I didn't want to disappoint my parents who would have supported me, but nevertheless been really upset. I know men aren't THAT easily controlled by their ding dong!
Although we already have a nation of frustrated, manipulated, angry and entitled incels, so too late for that ;)
Yes, I read that a while back and it's a good report. It was enlightening.
---
I happened to just read this article in the Atlantic. Have a quick glance at the first graph. In the just the last few years, there has been an astonishing shift to the left among women, but not so much among men.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-marriage-rate-different-political-views/674358/
I've seen other statistics indicating that liberal women are very much leading the mass charge towards CSJ. (Mass charge as in providing the tens of millions of supporters, vs a few activists). I see CSJ ideology (Critical Social Justice ideology) as a mind virus which uses compassion and the need to be seen as virtuous as its entry point to infect a large number of decent people just trying to do the right thing, care for the needy and make the world a better place; and statistically there are more women who are susceptible because of that entry point to the psyche.
Some of the people I've known who have succumbed were quite nice people, at least until they felt they had the moral high ground because they were defending the helpless and thus didn't need to treat opponents as they would wish to be treated. It's like a drug and it hijacks the reward centers. Those infect often start out from a very caring place, but after a few years more than a tiny portion of them appear to get off as much on morally demonizing anybody who dissents, as they do on actually helping anybody on the ground.
I can't read the article since I don't subscribe, but the first two 'graphs sound like what I've read elsewhere - politics being just one reason why people won't marry certain others. A few years ago, Trump supporters had a much harder time getting a date.
Jonathan Haidt is working on a new book about social media's impact on young people (I subscribe to his Substack) and he notes that liberal kids have higher rates of mental illness than conservative kids, and liberal young girls & women have the highest rates of all. He never mentions transgender issues but he does cover suicide as a social contagion and it points very strongly to the theory (in my mind anyway) that it's entirely possible suicidal kids are drawn to the transgender movement, marketed as the latest 'drug' to cure whatever ails you, rather than that transgender kids are at higher risk for suicide.
Fact is, spiralling suicide rates came several years before the trans craze so 'underlying pathologies' strike me as far more likely than 'so many people born in the wrong body'.
First, I think your speculation is interesting, plausible and deserves investigation.
But in regard to the article I linked, I was just referencing the first graph, using it not to bring up the article's subject, but as a convenient data reference for my own separate point about amazingly rapid change in women's attitudes compared to men's in the past few years. I believe that at the statistical level, women are largely driving the numbers of woke believers.
As for the subject of the article itself - that article was making a point not about the dating prospects of conservatives versus liberals overall, but more specifically about the gender differences. There are about twice as many liberal women as men, and about twice as many conservative men as women, today (not so true even just 4-5 years ago). So conservative women can easily find men to date, and liberal men can as well - but not so much so for conservative men and liberal women.
Then the article's larger point built on that by noting that there is no sign of a compensating trend to more frequently choose partners outside one's one political position (more the opposite), so a very large number of people of all political persuasions will fail to ever find a partner, given the stats.
From other sources, we find that white and Black women in the US both have a reproduction rate of about 1.5, where 2.1 is needed for zero growth. Those two population groups are headed towards fairly rapid decrease and an increasingly older distribution in the coming decades. (The overall US population is not shrinking because there are other population groups with higher reproduction rates, and many immigrants). I suspect that the NYT article points to another reason why this low reproduction rate is likely to shrink even further in the future.
I've noticed in reading comments on the internet, that in the wake of the reaction to ending Roe v Wade, the number of young women writing of being terrified of, and highly avoidant of, childbirth is far higher now than I have ever seen. They graphically list dozens of potential terrible outcomes from carrying to term; as with most visceral fear processing, they don't mention frequency. I think this comes from trying to make a resounding moral and medical case (ie: motivation) for pro-abortion activism ("very many of us will die or be crippled if forced to give birth, so our very lives depend on having abortion on demand"), but it appears to me to have had the likely unintended side effect of discouraging even intentional childbirth among a generation of young women. "Yuck" as they say to each other. This kind of early conditioning can be hard to change, so I expect that to become yet another factor in reducing reproduction rates in coming decades.
No wonder some kids are looking for an out, a magic bullet.
I would be extremely curious to have a glimpse into the future 50 and 100 years from now, to see what the survivors have made of this country.
Thanks for clarifying what the article was about. I was basing my words on the one I wrote a few years ago, based on the one I found about how Trump single guys were having a hard time finding dates.
I think you're right about liberal women - Haidt notes that young liberal teens & women have the highest rate of mental illness, and it *doesn't* seem to be related to political issues (although I wonder about that - it contributed to *my* depression back in the day, wondering if Reagan would destroy Roe or start a nuclear war, the latter of which I worried about *a lot* and had nightmares about.
It sounds like the young American women you're talking about are catastrophizing about Roe, in somewhat the wrong way. It likely won't put as many women's lives in physical danger as they're making out, but it WILL ruin their lives if these pregnancies are not planned, their baby daddy (if he's even a partner) isn't up for the task of daddyhood/husband (she may rightfully not want him to be), she could be ostracized within her family or a nutty religious group, etc. And some *will* die. But more may die from illegal abortions, just like 'the good old days' conservatives fantasize so much about.
I'm really hoping this results in men getting laid less. Nothing will change the law quite like women snapping their legs closed.
> "It sounds like the young American women you're talking about are catastrophizing about Roe"
To be a bit more precise, the young women are catastrophizing about **pregnancy and childbirth**, as a result of the political tool of "exaggerate your victimhood as the source of getting power" used to foster opposition to the ending of Roe v Wade. Talk in graphic details about a dozen possible negative outcomes of (any!) pregnancy. Exaggerating or hyperfocusing on the (real) risks of pregnancy & childbirth (and associating them with being oppressed and a victim) is unlikely to fully dissipate later when considering whether to voluntarily have kids, as an unintended side effect of this victimhood-centric organizing tactic.
As for your last sentence, Nicole, do you really think - in today's society as we best understand the dynamics thereof - that women as a whole can improve the situation by using the withholding of sex as a weapon? What changes in men do you think such women would expect before granting sex?
First off, I think it creates all sorts of psychological problems - for both partners - to use sex as a political weapon. At the minimum, it reinforces the concept of sex as a tool for manipulation rather than as a mutually desirable and mutually rewarding activity.
You seem to hope that most of the men will cave, and do whatever the women want in order to have access. I'm not at all sure of that; wouldn't coercion of that general sort generate some negative reaction on your part of you were the recipient (whether the reward was sex, attention, money, whatever)? At the least it would depend on what the women required before opening their legs (see below). But if the men don't mostly cave, I don't think a society is likely to benefit from having a lot of men who feel frustrated, manipulated, and angry with women and with society. That's not a good breeding ground for positive engagement with society, but rather the opposite.
Note that the situation is that there are about two single liberal women for every single liberal man. Who is going to have the stronger hand in that market?
But what would "women snapping their legs closed" demand before opening them, if that tactic DID work? The masses are not going to share your or my understandings of the world. Would you expect liberal women to convert conservative men to (pretend?) wokeness as a pre-condition to granting sex, due the shortage mentioned above?
And if it did work, would this coercive power be used only for grand political schemes, and not for personal things (like extracting money, marriage, etc)? If men as a whole are willing to do what it takes to get women to open their legs, what will be demanded next? And what happens when this tactic stops working?
But maybe you were not serious, and just wanted to imagine an easy Lisistrata victory over the bad forces in our society. If almost all women had your values, insight, and intelligence that might be a good thing (with the above concerns), but I think you are not the norm, and that power would not be used in the ways you would hope.
I said it tongue in cheek. Of course it's not a real response, and I wrote a sarcastic article last year called NO MORE BLOWJOBS!!! making up humourous responses to the loss of Roe. Although I think it's possible some women might be less inclined to have intercourse because of this. Part of the reason why I waited as long as I did to lose my virginity was fear of pregnancy. Sure, there was birth control and abortion but I was a college kid without a lot of money, and I didn't want to disappoint my parents who would have supported me, but nevertheless been really upset. I know men aren't THAT easily controlled by their ding dong!
Although we already have a nation of frustrated, manipulated, angry and entitled incels, so too late for that ;)