The real reason women freeze their eggs
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is a huge ask for trust. It's something that I will flat out not consider unless I've known someone for at least four years. And guess what? If this is the timeline it takes to build the trust necessary for starting a family, then 22 year old women are two failed relationships away from being single in their thirties.
Much like how it is the retail consumer that pays sales tax, it's young women that pay for the increased levels of trust required for starting a family. Men can wait, and are under almost negative time pressure. Like, if I have a long enough time horizon, I'm probably better off working until I'm 50, saving up $3M or so, moving somewhere with sane family law, and then trying to make a family work with a significantly younger woman.
No seriously. If this is the future of the family, there will be widespread rioting and civil unrest. Perhaps the only saving grace is that the 22 year old men can pass the time to their 50s by sleeping with the women who age out of the "marry a richer older guy" cohort.
http://www.phillymag.com/articles/the-sorry-lives-and-confus...
Young men got a bad hand and are playing it the best they can. Are they frustrated? I think it's more being resigned.
You're telling us to man up and play russian roulette with 5/6 holes populated. Except that would actually be a nice proposal, when put against family law and divorce rates.
Frankly speaking, women and men also need each other far less than they used to on a practical level. Automation allows for men and women to exist separately from each other and live comfortably; as a man who doesn't have a girlfriend, I have been doing all the chores, shopping, cooking, and cleaning on my own without breaking much of a sweat. Again, this is a great thing and I wouldn't want to give up the kind of automation that both men and women benefit from, but yet again, it's far less of a reason to get married and have kids at a younger age. If you don't have to compromise fun for practical utility, that's way less pressure to "settle down".
In my naive, rosy understanding of the world practicality has never been the main driver of establishing a relationship, but rather a nice-to-have side effect. No automation can replace a meaningful romantic relationship, and we're still social animals that need more than Facebook friends. And no, settling down is not the only reason to find someone.
If you have children, then yes—you do need to pay for them.
I have a feeling it's more linked than we want to admit.
As men we've taken advances in productivity and technology and thrown it in the trash by working longer and harder. More free time is filled up increasingly by more work. Finding a partner and staying together takes a lot of time.
Now women are being pulled into the same trap/punishment as men, and finally we can include them in our own destruction.
Even in ancient times when invaders razed a city they would kill any fighting-age men but often spare women. In Silicon Valley nobody is spared.
So not only is free time not taken up by more work, more work is taken up by free time (this also does not include benefits from eg. washing machines). This also agrees with my own experience, my granddad used to get saturday of at noon (ie. it was half a work day), now I get saturday of entirely.
It's not all the fault of feminists, though. Automation, immigration, and the rise of China have all played a big part.
Why does economics immediately become a zero-sum game when immigrants are involved? What does China have to do with America's changing culture?
And, due to the way trade works, China's rise has changed how folks in the USA value and purchase goods. I'm sorry if this feels racist to you, but I can't fix you.
People have become waaaay to adept at pulling the victimhood card as soon as something either doesn't fit their narrative or disadvantages them. It needs to stop.
B. Not really sure what China's middle class has to do with America's middle class, but OK.
C. I think the modern leftist victim complex is a load of hogwash and I don't think immigrants are always a good thing.
Immigrants do not add "minimal demand", immigrants drive significant demand and expand communities, for example, bloomberg reporting that gas prices dropping may have a contributing factor that immigrants driving less this summer.
Lastly, our use of technology means that nothing is a zero sum game, we have created industries and growth through the use of various pulses of migrants and they are one of the core pieces of american success.
An migrant worker creates less demand than a native doing the same job, because they're trying to live austerely and remit as much of their income as they possibly can out of our economy and back to their family's. They aren't building out water and power homesteading our uninhabitable scrub, they're living ten to an apartment near the few jobs.
This is ridiculous.
What exactly about GP's comment suggests that they believe that some people are inferior by virtue of their race?
The basic model as she describes it is that since spaces in 'good neighborhoods' and good school districts were fundamentally limited (by space and law), adding a second income to a family did little to increase their wealth - all of the extra earnings were devoted to bidding up a supply-limited resource. Middle class families roughly doubled their earnings but saw almost no benefit for it.
There's further evidence for this claim from the left, too. Piketty discusses overall inequality, but Rognlie persuasively argues that much or all of rising inequality in the US is attributable to skyrocketing land/housing costs. This isn't some trad-con claim that women working is a problem, it's a claim that what should have been a massively positive change for families in the middle class and below was consumed by a certain group of rentiers, resulting in more work without more wealth.
edit: I missed the word 'all' in the last line of the parent to your comment - I thought it simply said "not the fault of feminism". That... changes things quite a bit. This wasn't an inevitable consequence of women working, and the implication that the proper cure would be women not working is hideous. Apologies for the misunderstanding.
How wasn't it? The supply of housing in family-friendly neighborhoods is limited. Increase every family's disposable income and they'll bid up housing prices.
In fact, if you look at the types of jobs women take it's exacerbated even further. The vast majority of women work in cities. Hardly any women work in remote areas. This puts even more upward pressure on home prices in cities.
I didn't say the 'proper cure' is for women to not work. I'm glad so many women are able to live with financial Independence today. My comment needs to be read in context with the article. Women who have reached a point of success in their careers but are obviously unhappy due to not 'having it all'. They've been sold a bill of goods. For women, the ability to work has become the necessity to work.
The supply of housing in family-friendly neighborhoods is limited by the # of family-friendly neighborhoods, which in turn is limited by the number of people having families. As more people have families, there are more family-friendly neighborhoods, and so the supply increases.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
This was my thought through the whole article. There's some value to the basic observation here - that this isn't purely a career decision - but everything after that feels like a false dichotomy.
It's not just "having a kid means spending less time at the office, so I'll miss a promotion". It's "having a kid, and everything leading up to having a kid, is an enormous time sink that I can't sustain with the job I've already committed to". That's a standard explanation for the demographic issues of, say, Japan, but it somehow disappears when we're talking about professionals in the US - even though it's far more obvious than implying that career and dating are somehow opposing explanations.
Isn't it a fabulous irony. The dream of technology is that it'll free up more time for us to enjoy life, yet we find ourselves more slave to our hamster wheels in an ever more expensive, demanding world, where our only comfort is living the commercially constructed "now".
Women with families are doubly punished. Today they are expected to be both breadwinner and home-builder. While this is welcoming, the reality is that this is a superpower and can be a burden, especially if society doesn't adapt to it (e.g. work flexibility) and men and women continue to not share responsibilities at home.
Sometimes I think that in our intellectual battle for gender rights and justice, we forget another party, the one most innocent yet may bear the most brunt - our children. Who, coincidentally, will also be the next generation.
The rest is a weird mix of 'male culture' blaming and anecdotes. Nothing lost by skipping this...
People are feeling less stable financially and career wise. Dating is also far more complicated than it used to be and people have unrealistic expectations. This inevitably leads to prolonged dating, delayed marriage, and delayed childbirth. Freezing eggs is a pretty natural hedge against this problem.
Not to say obstacles and actual deficits don't exist, but I've found that often when concerns about partner suitability come up the standards involved aren't given as much attention as they merit, or that frequently there are standards being applied the person isn't aware of or doesn't want to admit to.
In what world is this? Younger women are outperforming men in just about every metric, economic and social. They're also legally privileged, in family law and criminal sentencing. And despite all this, they still have half of the men in the country advocating for even more special privileges for women.
> [...]the issue that drives the success of the egg freezing industry has never been employer’s attitudes to motherhood, but instead, men’s. Even if it’s something that only strikes us as it becomes a reality, women know there is a time limit on our fertility. But it’s as if men are encouraged to ignore this icky truth, to look away as if from something obscene.
I fail to recognize how it's somehow a man's responsibility to recognize a woman's "time limit". It seems like this author is pining for some kind of Patriarchy Lite where men's primary goal in dating is to inseminate a woman for the sake of her eggs, and not so much for his own benefit. Just like nearly every one of these sorts of articles I've read, it fails to take into account the perspectives of men in the "man deficit". I can speculate to almost no end on why women might believe that there's a "man deficit", but I won't because plenty of men perceive a deficit of women, both in terms of archetypes and availability.
In summary, the author is sexist and views men as failures for not providing enough sperm for women's eggs, failing to take into account how in any way how such a setup benefits(or fails) men or why men would even agree to get married in the first place. The view that women have of fatherhood that this author is implying is much more twisted than how she thinks men view motherhood. Seriously, I'm supposed to take pity on women in the dating pool because their biological clock is ticking and therefore sacrifice my own desires? Hah.
> And here you have the men who learned at school to lose interest in a girl if she texts back too quickly.
I've never heard of this. Has anyone else here? Maybe this is specific to the UK? Seems pretty bizarre as I can't imagine boys in school teaching each other not to get together with girls.
its hard to make any meaningful comments without actual data, but it feels many of these people have become picky yet want Mr perfect, when they are far from perfect.
And where did their 20s go? Probably dedicated to their careers
Men who just wait will end up waiting for a long time, maybe forever, too. Equality also means responsibility. Today, finding a partner means taking initiative, not just waiting, for both sexes.
Ugh.
I don't know if most men just decide "screw those friendships" and go for the gusto, or what, but that never made sense to me.
(I'm ignoring issues of kids vs career that women have to make here, which is a sucky thing indeed.)