The essay there weaponizes sarcasm + the emotional experience of that reality to hit the reader over the head with, in an attempt to break their script and force them to a change in perspective.
This - evidently - worked and works, but there are trade-offs to it.
Specifically, it is zero-sum, which eventually led to the gender war we have now. Since the defenses have been (for the most part) broken down, a modern pivot would likely move towards more unification again, I guess.
The social mechanics to decouple woman permanently from reproduction are already in the making. Incubators and AI educators and people can have children with a company, the rest of the social problems (the social network harem effect) then go out the window. If you need to be a millionaire to have a conventional family, tradition is out, corporate cloning is in. The working alternative to religious fundamentalism.
This comment was dead on arrival, but I've vouched for it, because I believe it's interesting.
I do not believe the conspiracy part, but I do also believe that this decoupling will happen eventually. It seems like the logical conclusion of the trajectory we're on. Leaving biological reality behind in the pursuit of individualism.
It might be a good thing, but we might also find that we were not ready for the total freedom from said biological reality. But that is to be said about a lot of things, SV is pushing towards.
But maybe we will also see stuff crashing down in the near-ish future, and then, pondering about the "end of biological reality" will seem like unreal hallucinations.
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Hmm. The LLM I've been feeding this comment section pointed me at the Universe 25 Experiment. I've never heard of that before.
Check out a book called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?
It’s looking far more likely that traditional approaches to these questions will become more popular with time, simply because the people that have kids don’t have the opinions you’ve mentioned here.
Which makes a lot of sense in a cultural evolution sense - you wouldn’t really expect individualism to outcompete group activity on a long timeline.
While I support equality between biological sexes this had some ill effects.
Giving birth is a woman job. Breastfeeding is a woman's job. Replacing breast milk with something else might be one of the causes of allergies and other ill effects (I'm guessing).
To me it looks like women want to be compensated for the unpaid work of birthing children and taking care of them during their upbringing. No one fucking likes unpaid work. It's not right.
For me this if the current feminism and I do support it.
Given that surrogacy runs to 20-80k for the woman carrying the child I don't think women will appreciate their new wages if we convert all social relations into market ones.
Isn’t being a stay at home wife being compensated to do that work?
Your bills and mortgage are paid for, so is the food. You get to spend time with the kids. Sounds way less stressful than a high stakes job.
You also have no way to get out of a bad relationship if things turn sour. Being stay at home is extremely risky, you give up freedom.
Tbf, that's a very "modern"-ish way of viewing the idea of "committing".
And there are good reasons for that, of course, but with that thinking, you're always going to be not fully there, which might be harmful in different ways than the ways it tries to protect against.
It's a hard problem to solve, because Humans and interpersonal stuff is hard, but, ideally, one would frontload the friction, so that there is no need to keep an out on hot standby.
Sure in our modern era there are a lot more divorce and it's probably partly because people are less inclined to make efforts to stay in a relationship. But there's also statistically less abuse and domestic violence and that's partly because women by and large have a lot more options than they used to.
I don't think the trade off of having less divorce and more long lasting relationships is worth the increase of domestic violence and abuse so I do believe that people in any relationship should have an out (even if it's not in case of abuse or a breakdown of a relationship but instead for supporting oneself after the death of the only parent bring money home).
That still means that I would teach my kid that the secret behind any successful relationship is to make efforts and that one should not give up at the first problem but you never know what the future might bring and having some way out is always useful
> there are a lot more divorce
That is not what I was talking about. Mainly because it's a dumb talking point.
You've I think replied to what you expected one would write and not to what was written.
> Sounds way less stressful than a high stakes job.
If it's by choice, then yes. Otherwise, it could be really bad.
> (I'm guessing)
Please don't do this. It's not helpful.
The fact that everything in life is compared to monetary value is the problem. There abstraction of paternalism to the state is another. For the state you are a number for your family and friends you have a name