I have spent some time in the twilight reaches of the manosphere researching a new book, a world of depressing forums, full of hatred and despair, where young men gather to focus on the absence of sex in their lives. There are two broad categories: The Incels hate women because they won’t sleep with them. The Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW) guys won’t sleep with women because they hate them.
These boys have their own vocabulary and belief systems. Pretty girls (Staceys) all sleep with the same few Alpha men (Chads). The Staceys ride the Cock Carousel, ie, have sex with the same few Chads. All this sluttish behaviour gives the Staceys something called A Thousand Cock Stare.
It is a grim world, in which women are evil and manipulative, and hated both for being sluts and for being virgins. It is a world in which pictures of pretty girls with their pet dogs are unbelievably sinister. These boys choose to live in this bleak world. They are culpable. But, if you tell all young, white boys that they are damned, why should they not behave as if they are damned?
A society which does not allow for people to atone, to be redeemed, and to be judged on their intent and actions is a miserable place. Most people interact with each other without antagonism most of the time. We should start being a bit more forgiving to each other, ditch the Puritanism and learn to cherish the well-meaning stumble towards decency. Even if, sometimes, we fall.
Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.
November 20, 2024
QotD: The Chads, the Staceys, and the Incels
November 15, 2024
Lysistrata updated for 2024
Tom Knighton recognizes the right of progressive women to take whatever actions they feel are appropriate to show their dissatisfaction with the election of Donald Trump, but suggests that the Lysistrata strategy may not be the answer for them:
From the moment Donald Trump was declared the victor in the 2024 presidential election, some started trying to figure out not how they could convince people to vote differently in the midterms but to try and punish people who disagreed.
There’s a reason people are cutting off family members right before the holidays, among other things.
But one of the more…interesting things is that it seems progressive women are going on a sex strike.
In response to Donald Trump’s election victory, some women in the US are joining a radical feminist movement that seeks to “decentralize” men in their lives. The movement, called 4B, originated in South Korea about a decade ago in response to broader dissatisfaction with gender discrimination and sexual violence online. Now thousands of Americans are tuning in to the movement on social media as Trump — who appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn national abortion rights, and has been found liable for sexual abuse—prepares to return to office. While the movement has yet to show signs of gaining traction offline, its resurgence reflects a growing sense of frustration among women who fear that Trump’s second term will be characterized by unchecked misogyny and the continued rollback of bodily autonomy in the US.
…
Now the 4B movement appears to be booming on social media in the US: at time of writing, there were over a hundred thousand videos about the movement on TikTok; Google registered a massive surge in the search for “4B” starting on Election Day. “I’ve been waiting for everyone to catch up to speed for a while,” Alexa Vargas, a 4B adherent, said in a TikTok video posted last week. In a less restrictive interpretation of the movement’s tenets, Vargas encouraged women not to engage in “hookup culture” and to wait at least three months before considering having sex with new romantic partners. “Decenter men from your life,” she advised. “Get off the dating apps.” Another TikTok user said that she’d been keeping her participation in the movement private but decided to speak about her experiences publicly after the election: “As somebody who’s been 4B for two years now … at thirty-six years old, it is the best thing I’ve ever done for my mental health,” she said. “We are not alone in this.”
It’s too early to tell whether the movement will have much staying power, but it has already sparked a debate, both online and in more traditional media. Sex strikes are about as old as male-dominated societies: the practice has been an anti-war measure for centuries — it was central to the plot of the Ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, in which women on both sides of the Peloponnesian War denied their husbands sex as a way of forcing peace talks — and more recently has returned to the discourse in the US following the introduction of a strict anti-abortion measure in Georgia and the repeal of Roe v. Wade. (Lysistrata was also adapted, in late 2015, into Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq.) Such movements “rarely result in widespread support,” Helen Morales, a cultural critic and classicist, told The Guardian in 2022, but they can be a powerful tool for building awareness. “Women tend to protest with their bodies when they don’t have a voice,” Morales added.
Of course, women do have a voice. They can speak freely and petition the government for the redress of grievances. They have full access to every mechanism of free speech men have.
A voice, they don’t lack.
But that said, they’re free to go this route if they want. However, when it doesn’t actually do anything, I’m going to laugh.
First, as was noted above, these kinds of things don’t really go anywhere. Why? Women like sex too. Especially since feminists have said for decades that women being able to be sexual beings is an act of empowerment, only now they seem to want women to turn that off in order to drive a political movement that will do … what?
Convince men that everything they believed was wrong because they want to actually have a relationship with a woman?
I hate to break it to you ladies, but most single men on the right are looking at this right now and thinking, “Thank you, God”.
November 6, 2024
QotD: “Colourism”
which reinforce the inherently colonial practice of “colourism” – the discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone.
It’s not colonial, it’s classist. Dark skin means sun exposure. That is, someone who works for a living outside in the fields. Pale skin means someone rich enough to stay inside. Thus the bits in Jane Austem where the girls worry about their bonnets for they might get freckles.
This also changed, entirely, when work for poor people moved inside and only the rich could afford to get away for a tan. Suddenly, to have a tan – darker skin – became a mark of wealth, not poverty.
A change rather reflected in make up in fact, pre WWII (about, roughly) the aim was to powder or cream the face to be pale, pale, white. Post[-WWII] much foundation make up is to add colour, not take it away.
This also explains the popularity of sunbeds and fake tans, something which a century ago would have been quite literally unthinkable.
Colourism exists, most certainly, but that flip shows that it’s about class, not colonialism.
For the part about it that the colonialism reason cannot explain is why that flip.
That it’s about class also explains why colourism happens in places that never were colonies – Thailand say.
Tim Worstall, “Educashun”, Tim Worstall, 2020-01-12.
November 5, 2024
QotD: “If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others”
I’m a biological essentialist about sex — your sex is a given of your chromosomes and organs, and I will never actually believe that you can invert it by choice.
I am, however, conditionally willing not to challenge your weird Gnostic beliefs on this point, and to treat you as the sex you “identify” as anyway. Here are the conditions:
1. You must be good at passing. If you can’t present a convincing pretense, it’s neither in my interest nor anyone else’s to help you prop up an unconvincing one.
2. You must be harmless. Most obviously, you must not use your “identification” to prey on others, whether directly by violence or by using the physical advantage of your sex to overwhelm them in sports, or in any other way. And if you’re told you’re unwelcome in a bathroom or changing room, it’s on you to not impose.
3. You must be modest. Your desire to role-play as M or F does not entitle you to violate prevailing norms about where, and to whom, you expose your genitals. If you aren’t polite enough to refrain from this, I won’t be even a bit polite to you.
4. Children are off-limits. The moment you engage in behavior that seems intended to confuse or indoctrinate them, you enter the category of “predator” and stay there. My response to sexual predation on children only begins with rejection and rudeness.
5. If you try to use the force of law to gain what equal and voluntary negotiation with individuals won’t give you, you also enter the category of “predator” and stay there.
The meta-rule is: the more your behavior imposes costs on others, the less polite and accepting I will be. If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-07-28.
November 4, 2024
Violence and sex differences
Lorenzo Warby discusses some basic biological differences between men and women and how those differences account for much of the variance in violent behaviour:
Human anatomy fundamentals: advanced body proportions
design.tutsplus.com
(Note on usage: Sex is biological — i.e., which gametes a body is structured to produce. Sex roles are the behavioural manifestation of sex. Gender is the cultural manifestation of sex.)
Adult human males have, on average, about twice the lean upper body mass of adult human females. This means that adult human females have, on average, 52 per cent of the upper body strength of adult human males.
The consequence of this is that men dominate violence between adults. They dominate victims — another male is far more likely to be a physical threat or obstacle than a woman. Men even more strongly dominate perpetrators.
A Swedish study found that one per cent of the population committed almost two-thirds of all violent crimes. That one per cent was almost entirely male. Four per cent of the population committed all the violent crimes. That four percent was almost 90 per cent male1 and constituted just over seven per cent of the male population.
These patterns of behaviour do not require any “hard wired” differences by sex in human brains. They merely require that men have about twice the upper body strength of women. They represent strategic behaviour within that context.
Indeed, these results are not compatible with sex-differentiation being strongly “hard-wired” in brains by sex. The overwhelming majority of men do not commit any violent crimes, while some of the perpetrators —almost eleven per cent — were female.
What makes it even clearer that these patterns represent strategic behaviour—that is, responses grounded in (biological) constraints and capacities — is that men and women each make up about half the perpetrators of violence against children.
When women are dealing with the physically stronger sex, they are much less likely to use violence than is the physically stronger sex. When they are dealing with a systematically weaker group of Homo sapiens — children — they are as likely to be perpetrators of violence as men.
These patterns represent strategic behaviour. They represents actions responding to constraints and capacities. You get sex-differentiated patterns when the constraints are different between men and women. Our sex-differentiated biology is enough, on its own, to produce sex-differentiated patterns of behaviour.
So, even in (then) peaceful Sweden, one in 14 men are violent. That a significant proportion of men are violent predators informs female behaviour, as the systematically physically weaker sex.
Men dominate sexual violence because they are physically stronger, have penises and cannot get pregnant. That is enough to have men dominate sexual violence without any sex differentiation in the “hard-wiring” of brains at all.
We are embodied agents. How we are embodied makes a difference for our behaviour.
Women have, on average, half the lean upper body mass as men not so much because they are smaller—the average differences in height and weight are nowhere near as large. A much more significant factor is that women have a higher fat content to their body, especially their upper body.
They have a higher fat content because human brains are energy hogs, and women are structured to be able to support not just one, but two or more, energy-hog brains — i.e. babies and toddlers. More fat means more readily-available stored energy. That extra female fat enables us Homo sapiens to be the most body-shape dimorphic of the primates: far more so than any of our ape cousins.
This goes to the other biological constraint that produces sex-differentiated behaviour. Women can get pregnant, men cannot. The risk profile differs for men and women, and not just for the risks of pregnancy and childbirth but also for child-rearing.
1. The text of the paper and the summary table have different numbers for female offenders. As the text states that 10.9 per cent of offenders were females, which agrees with the table but not the figures given in the text, I have corrected accordingly. Fortunately, it does not affect the logic being presented.
November 1, 2024
QotD: J.D. Vance, a Führer for the rest of us
Expert: JD Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism
Quoted for the lulz. Ol’ JD, a Führer for the rest of us.
But since we’re here … a fascinating footnote in Jaynes informs us that schizophrenics, who Jaynes thinks might be throwbacks to the “bicameral mind”, have no problem with “diffused identity” or whatever the term was. Jaynes hypothesizes that ancient, preconscious peoples didn’t see images of their gods in cult objects; they saw the actual, physical gods. We unicameral people can’t wrap our heads around it, since there are lots of statues and they can’t ALL be god — even if we grant that the biggest statue in the best temple can be god, or if we allow that the black meteorite or whatever is really god to them, still, god can’t be diffused like that: Either your statue is god or mine is; or neither of them are, but they can’t both be.
Schizophrenics, at least according to Jaynes, would be down with that. He notes that you can put two guys who think they’re Napoleon in the same padded cell, and you don’t get a schizo bum fight, you get complete agreement: They’re both Napoleon, somehow. The law of the excluded middle, personal identity version, simply doesn’t apply.
And since my hypothesis is that smartphones are re-decameralizing (it’s a word) us at Ludicrous Speed, well … here you go. Donald Trump is Hitler, but J.D. Vance is somehow also Hitler. It’s not like the real, historical Hitler lacked for shitty, evil underlings — J.D could easily be Heinrich Himmler or somebody. But no, he’s gotta be Hitler, the same way Trump has to be Hitler, and if that means they’re somehow both Hitler, well … there it is. Bicamerality for the win.
Severian, “Catching Up With the Crazies”, Founding Questions, 2024-07-29.
October 25, 2024
Diversity at all costs
In the National Post, Harry Rakowski explains why Toronto Generic University — sorry, I mean “Toronto Metropolitan University” — is reserving 75% of available enrolment in their new medical school for more diverse candidates, even if they wouldn’t normally qualify by their grades:
We have a critical shortage of doctors and nurses in Canada. Almost a quarter of our population can’t find a family doctor. Wait times for seeing a specialist, getting medical imaging and surgical dates continue to climb, with only Band-Aid solutions being proposed by the federal and provincial governments. We desperately need to expand medical schools and the licensing of highly qualified foreign medical graduates.
So it was welcome news to hear that 94 undergraduate medical students and 105 postgraduate students (residents) will be entering the newly established Toronto Metropolitan University School of Medicine when it opens in September 2025. The city of Brampton, Ont. donated a former civic centre along with $20 million in funding for renovations in order to make the school happen.
However, it was highly disturbing to learn that admissions to the new facility will be driven by a culture-war philosophy that will dilute the quality of medical practice.
There’s no doubt that diversity in medicine helps to optimize care and provide better outcomes for the differing needs of Canada’s highly diverse population, which includes many individuals disadvantaged by their geography as well as racial and economic inequality. But TMU is going about it the wrong way. Its admissions policy will focus on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) rather than quality.
TMU’s plan is to reserve 75 per cent of its enrolment slots for “equity-deserving” students — Black and Indigenous applicants and others who meet “equity-deserving” criteria including students who identify as members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, those who are “racialized” and individuals “with lived experiences of poverty or low socio-economic status.” It will accept a minimum grade point average (GPA) of 3.3 (B+) — or even less for select Black and Indigenous applicants — and then use GPA only as an application criterion, not as a selection criterion. By comparison, the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine requires a minimum GPA average of 3.6 for undergraduate applicants (although average acceptance is now 3.95).
October 18, 2024
Accidentally creating an epidemic of food allergies, from the best of intentions
Jon Miltimore discusses how the unintentional outcome of professional organizations making recommendations to the public without proper scientific understanding created so many of the allergies that now plague youngsters:
“Peanuts, LEAP study (Learning Early About Peanut allergy)” by jlcampbell104 is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 
.
In 1992, with the help of a grant from the National Institutes of Health, The New England Journal of Medicine published a report on a rare phenomenon: fatal or near-fatal anaphylactic reactions in young people due to food allergies.
Examining a period of 14 months, researchers identified thirteen cases, twelve of which involved asthmatic youths. Six of the thirteen anaphylactic reactions resulted in death, and each case had involved a young person with a known food allergy who had unknowingly ingested the food.
“The reactions were to peanuts (four patients), nuts (six patients), eggs (one patient), and milk (two patients), all of which were contained in foods such as candy, cookies, and pastry,” researchers wrote.
The paper said nothing about banning these foods, but concluded that “failure to recognize the severity of these reactions and to administer epinephrine promptly increases the risk of a fatal outcome”.
Nevertheless, food bans followed, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began to encourage educators to “consider possible food allergies” during food preparation.
By 1998, the New York Times was reporting on the rise of peanut allergies and the measures school districts were taking to stop them.
“Prodded by parents warning of lethal allergies, by the contentions of some researchers that peanut allergies are on the rise and, not least, by a fear of litigation, growing numbers of public and private schools across the country, including many of New York City’s most selective independent schools, have banned peanut butter from their cafeterias,” wrote Anemona Maria Hartocollis.
“The Biggest Misconception”
When the Times published its article in 1998, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) was not yet issuing recommendations about peanuts or food allergies in infants. But as public concern grew, they decided they had to offer guidelines of some kind.
“There was just one problem,” Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon, noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Doctors didn’t actually know what precautions, if any, parents should take.”
Instead of remaining mum, the AAP followed the lead of the United Kingdom’s Committee on Toxicology and recommended that mothers avoid peanuts during pregnancy and lactation, and that children avoid peanuts until the age of 3.
The decision to make such a sweeping decision in the absence of compelling scientific evidence was a mistake, allergists say, and runs counter to basic immunology.
Dr. Gideon Lack, an allergist at King’s College London, says the collective effort to cocoon children from peanuts and other foods is responsible for what has been described as a “food allergy epidemic”.
The data suggest Lack is right.
In the 25 years since the AAP issued its recommendation, the US (like the UK, which also advised peanut avoidance) has experienced an explosion of food allergies, especially peanut allergies. Data from Mount Sinai Hospital System in New York show that peanut allergies more than tripled in the decade and a half following the AAP’s guidance. In 1997, peanut allergies affected 1 in 250 children in the United States. By 2002, this rate had risen to 1 in 125, and by 2008, it reached 1 in 70 children.
Anecdotally, I only remember one kid in my middle school who had food allergies … and poor Rusty had ’em all. He was known as the “Kid with a thousand allergies” and had to be so careful of what he ate and even what he touched. but this was the mid-1970s and there weren’t formal school guidelines on what we could bring in our school lunch bags or use scented things like deodorant. (It was the 1970s, and a lot of us were just hitting puberty and many of my classmates were new Canadians from poorer countries … we needed the deodorant!)
October 16, 2024
Many of the posh pro-trans activists are objectively anti-gay
It’s starting to be a true wedge issue in the LGBT community, as the logic of the pro-trans activists leads quite directly to the suppression of the gay and lesbian parts of that community:
It was hardly a plague of locusts, but it was disruptive nonetheless. During the annual LGB Alliance conference at the Queen Elizabeth II centre in Westminster on Friday afternoon, teenage activists unleashed thousands of crickets into the auditorium. The inconvenience was only temporary. The crowd simply relocated to another room and the event went on as before.
As those responsible were apprehended, many people were struck by just how young and posh they were. By this point, it should surprise precisely no-one that anti-gay activism in its current form is a predominately bourgeois pursuit. The symbolism of the crickets was, of course, deliberate. It was an attempt to dehumanise those in attendance, to suggest that they were akin to parasites, vermin, spreaders of disease, a common trope of those who seek to demonise minorities.
Images via @leng_cath on X
The perpetrators were children, and so it would be unwise to speculate too much on their motives. It is likely they were being manipulated by the group that has claimed responsibility, calling itself “Trans Kids Deserve Better”. As Bev Jackson, co-founder of LGB Alliance said on my show last night:
Trans kids do deserve better. They deserve better than to be told lies that that they might have been born in the wrong body. They deserve better than to be told that these hormones and surgeries that they are clambering for will somehow solve all their problems. Many are on the autism spectrum. Many are struggling with their sexual orientation. We know that. They deserve better than to be told that we hate them. And they deserve better than to be labelled trans when they’re going through all the turbulence of adolescence, when your feelings about yourself are in constant flux.
Irrespective of the intentions of the teenagers involved, this was anti-gay activism. To attack a group of lesbian, gay and bisexual people who have assembled to discuss the ongoing threats to their civil rights could hardly be defined in any other way. Likewise, to refer to groups such as LGB Alliance as “anti-trans”, “transphobic” or “hateful” – as activist media outlets such as the Metro and the Guardian have been known to do — is also an anti-gay strategy. In order to address a problem, one needs to label it accurately.
Gender identity ideologues are, by definition, anti-gay. They are campaigning to force their pseudo-religious belief-system onto the rest of society, one that claims that same-sex attraction is a myth, and that a mysterious spiritual sense of “gender” is the defining feature of homosexuality. Even if they have convinced themselves that they are “pro-trans” and “compassionate” and “progressive”, the implementation of their demands would result directly in the demolition of gay rights. And so “anti-gay activism” is not only an accurate description, it also cuts to the heart of what is at stake.
October 15, 2024
QotD: The Mandela Effect
Your memories may be different from mine, but not as different as Fiona Broome’s. I remember watching the live TV footage of Nelson Mandela walking to freedom after 27 years in captivity, while Broome, an author and paranormal researcher, remembers Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s.
When Broome discovered that she was not the only person to remember an alternative version of events, she started a website about what she dubbed “the Mandela Effect”. On it, she collected shared memories that seemed to contradict the historical record. (The site is no longer online but, never fear, Broome has published a 15-volume anthology of these curious recollections.)
Mandela, of course, did not die in prison. On a recent trip to South Africa, I visited Robben Island, where he and many others were incarcerated in harsh conditions, to speak to former prisoners and former prison guards, and to wander around a city emblazoned with images of the smiling, genial, elderly statesman. How could it be that anyone remembers differently?
The truth is that our memories are less reliable than we tend to think. The cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser vividly remembered where he was when he heard that the Japanese had launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. He was listening to a baseball game on the radio when the broadcast was interrupted by the breaking news, and he rushed upstairs to tell his mother. Only later did Neisser realise that his memory, no matter how vivid, must be wrong. There are no radio broadcasts of baseball in December.
On January 28 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after launch; a spectacular and highly memorable tragedy. The morning after, Neisser and his colleague Nicole Harsch asked a group of students to write down an account of how they learnt the news. A few years later, Neisser and Harsch went back to the same people and made the same requests. The memories were complete, vivid and, for a substantial minority of people, completely different from what they had written down a few hours after the event.
What’s stunning about these results is not that we forget. It’s that we remember, clearly, in detail and with great confidence, things that simply did not happen.
Tim Harford, “The detours on memory lane”, Tim Harford, 2024-06-20.
October 14, 2024
The reviews are in for this season of The West and it’s as bad as you think
Spaceman Spiff has been a longstanding fan of The West, but the current season is doing much more than giving him the sadz:
The current season of The West is a disappointing mishmash of bad writing, wooden acting and implausible plot lines.
Critics have known the show has been in decline for years although have been reluctant to say openly.
But with cancellation rumours growing it is difficult to see how it can survive. If the current season is any measure they simply don’t have the writers even if the producers hadn’t lost their minds.
The plot thickens
The West has always been known for its compelling plots. Epoch-defining inventions, new technologies and globe-spanning empires. Even grand moral crusades no one else would consider such as ending slavery or elevating women to equal status.
Just some of the storylines they said would never work and yet we were glued to our screens as they unfolded.
Unfortunately, more recent seasons have shown none of the flair of the past.
The latest drama is the threat of another plague. It is difficult to know how this got the go ahead so soon after the Covid storyline.
The original pandemic idea got off to a roaring start since it was then a novel idea. But as the drama unfolded the plot became increasingly contrived. The writers became carried away and eventually struggled to get out of the hole they had dug themselves.
It ended in absurdity with obvious conflicts between the original lockdown plot and the later mask and vaccine subplots.
It was almost as if different teams of writers were competing with each other instead of cooperating on the story arc, exactly the kind of mistake audiences are increasingly complaining about.
The latest version is a species-jumping virus and is already facing criticism for lazy writing and reheating ideas from last time. Audiences are unimpressed. Time will tell if they can pull it off again.
The second plot they seem to be exploring is even more implausible, war with China.
After the last few seasons mired in the Ukraine storyline it beggars belief the writers went in this direction.
There were rumours of production overruns and expensive reshoots as the Ukraine storyline dragged on. We will never know the full extent of their production woes but tough decisions were clearly made as well as a shakeup of the production team.
Critics had warned wars were rarely popular. People like the drama of course, but audiences quickly get bored. None of this stopped the producers and the writers dutifully did as asked.
Now it is China.
Many are saying this is just a sign the producers have been there too long. It is time for another clear out.
At least war is exciting. But after numerous attempts to sell immigration storylines they are trying it again despite its unpopularity.
Previous attempts to promote immigration plots failed to resonate with audiences although it has always been popular with a small, loud minority.
Most found it too farfetched, millions of young foreign men just wandering into Western nations as if no one would stop them. The critics had a field day.
But this season they are going with climate migration. People moving around because of the weather.
This is partly to shore up their failing climate plot. It was obvious several seasons ago this long running theme, a strong favourite with the showrunners, was no longer popular.
October 12, 2024
QotD: From conspicuous consumption to junk science
Buck Throckmorton, “Organic Food & Anti-Vaxxers – Does The Fear of Safe Food Lead to Fear of Safe Vaccines”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2019-12-08.
October 7, 2024
The demographic impact of modern cities
Lorenzo Warby touches on some of the social and demographic issues that David Friedman discussed the other day:
US Birth Rates from 1909-2008. The number of births per thousand people in the United States. The red segment is known as the Baby Boomer period. The drop in 1970 is due to excluding births to non-residents.
Graph by Saiarcot895 via Wikimedia Commons
Cities are demographic sinks. That is, cities have higher death rates than fertility rates.
For much of human history, cities have been unhealthy places to live. This is no longer true: cities have higher average life expectancies than rural areas. But they are still demographic sinks, for cities collapse fertility rates.
The problem is not that more women have no children, or only one child, making it to adulthood. Such women have always existed, though their share of the population has gone up across recent decades.
The key problem is the collapse in the demographic “tail” of large families. Cities are profoundly antipathetic to large families, and have always been so. This is particularly true of apartment cities — suburbs are somewhat more amenable to large families, though not enough to make up for the urbanisation effect.
While modern cities do not have slaves and household servants who were blocked from reproducing as ancient cities did, various aspects of modern technology have fertility-suppressing effects. Cars that presume a maximum of three children, for instance. An effect that is worsened by compulsory baby car-seats. Or ticketing and accommodation that presumes two children or less. There is also the deep problems of modern online dating. Plus the effects that endocrine disrupters and falling testosterone may be having.
These effects also extend to rural populations: falling fertility in rural populations is far more of a mystery than falling fertility in urban populations. How much declining metabolic health plays in all this is unclear. Indeed, futurist Samo Burja is correct, we do not really understand the “social technology” of human breeding.
Be that as it may, cities as demographic sinks is a continuation of patterns that go back to the first cities.
Matters at the margin
There are factors at the margin known to make a difference. Religious folk breed more than secular folk, though that is in part because rural people are more religious and city folk more secular.
Educating women reduces fertility. This is, in part, an urbanisation effect, as more education is available in cities. It is also an opportunity cost effect — there is more to do in cities, both paid and unpaid.
Education increases the general opportunity cost of motherhood, by expanding women’s opportunities. This also makes moving to cities more attractive. Women having more career opportunities reduces the relative attractiveness of men as marriage partners, reducing the marriage rate.
Strong cultural barriers against children outside marriage can reduce the fertility rate, by largely restricting motherhood to married women. This makes the fertility rate more dependant on the marriage rate.
Educating women makes children more expensive, as educated mothers have educated children. Part of the patterns that economist Gary Becker analysed.
October 5, 2024
David Friedman on falling birth rates
In the west, generally speaking, female employment and economic power has been rising and birth rates have been falling, except among religious minorities. David Friedman provides some explanations:
“Tetra Pak® – Housewife at the dairy counter in a Swedish shop” by Tetra Pak is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
.
One possible explanation is changes in norms and legal rules that make mate search more difficult. An example is a norm against dating fellow employees and a stronger norm against dating someone who has authority over you or you have some authority over.
For many people, their job is the only context in which they routinely interact with lots of other people, the best environment for mate search. The interaction often provides a way of evaluating someone for characteristics such as honesty and competence as well as compatibility, much harder to do in the context of dating, harder still in computer dating. It works better for people who not only are fellow employees but are actually working together, which often means one just above the other in the office hierarchy.
The same issue arises in the university context. Undergraduates are free to date each other — mate search is arguably one of the main functions of college. Junior faculty members, likely to be unmarried, are commonly not supposed to date students, even students not taking classes from them, certainly not students who are. I am not sure what current norms are for graduate student/undergraduate interaction, expect graduate student/faculty romance to be at least somewhat frowned upon, especially if the faculty member has some authority over the student which is likely if they are in the same field, the context in which they are most likely to get know each other.
Another cause for declining birth rates might be changing norms of courtship. I have not been part of that market for over forty years but I gather from what younger people say online that many men believe that making advances that do not turn out to be wanted is not only embarrassing but dangerous, that they risk being accused of harassment or some related offense. In the student context, many men believe that if a romantic partner changes her mind she can get him into a great deal of trouble by taking advantage of a college disciplinary process heavily biased against men. I do not know to what degree that belief is true but many men believe it is, which could be expected to discourage courtship.
Along related lines:
Also, when I was working for a big time international consulting firm, they tried to come out with a formal rule that said that you were allowed to ask out a co-worker, but only one time. If they said no, you could never ask again. Apparently the Italians howled with laughter and insisted that if this rule was enforced in Italy, no one would ever have kids, as the typical Italian courtship approach involves like a dozen rejections before ultimately the woman finally gives in. (GoneAnon)
That cannot be the full explanation since Italian birth rates are down too. Since birth rates are down in all or almost all developed countries and many less developed ones, it is worth investigating how widespread the relevant norms are.
Housewife Becoming a Low Status Profession
For a very long time, the default system for producing and rearing children was a married couple, with the husband producing income and the wife in charge of running the household and rearing the children. Over recent decades, the woman’s role in that division of labor has become a low status activity, lower status than making a living in the marketplace, much lower than professional success.1 Being an unmarried adult woman used to be, in most contexts, low status, on the presumption that if she could have caught a man she would have. At present, in much of western society, that has reversed — being a married housewife is lower status than being an employed single woman.
…arguments from the stay-at-home moms I know, who say people are constantly giving them grief about it, and who are often looking for some part-time make-work job they can take just so people will stop giving them grief about being a stay-at-home mother (Scott Alexander)
It is possible for a married woman to have both a job and children or for an unmarried woman to have children, but the former is more difficult than for a full time housewife, the latter much more difficult.
1. For a much more detailed presentation of this explanation, along with arguments against a variety of alternatives, see It’s embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom.
October 1, 2024
TikTok’s Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) community
The more we experience the joys of widespread social media, the more people seem to discover ways to bring attention to themselves for genuine or dishonest reasons. Freddie deBoer looks at the DID-sufferers on TikTok and assesses the chance that such a rare disorder can have had so many newly discovered sufferers:
Let me turn back to the TikTok “systems”, the strange, maybe-shrinking world of adolescent women on social media who pretend to have an incredibly rare and debilitating mental illness and treat it as a fun and quirky alternative lifestyle.
This piece from The Verge, though a little misguided, is a good jumping off point for this topic. The basic story is pretty simple. Dissociative identity disorder (DID), long referred to as multiple personality disorder, is a remarkably controversial diagnosis that has long captured the public imagination. It’s not hard to see why; the idea of someone who switches from one personality to the other is lurid and dramatic, making it easy fodder for television. (The number of episodes of legal dramas about DID is immense.) The condition also invites a particularly stark consideration of the question of individual agency and culpability for bad deeds. As you can imagine, pretending to have “alters” can be very convenient; a notorious case involved an embezzler whose only defense for his crimes was that he had multiple personalities and one of them stole the money. There have long been researchers and clinicians in psychiatry who doubt the very existence of DID, and even among those who are friendlier to the concept, the disorder is known to be incredibly rare. Many prominent cases of DID have proven in time to be fraudulent. The most famous American case, that of “Sybil“, was particularly tragic. The woman who supposedly suffered from the disorder, who faced a childhood of abuse and neglect, would go on to admit to her psychiatrist that she had made the alternate personalities up. (We know because we have the letters.) But the doctor, who had been made wealthy and famous thanks to her work with Sybil, threatened to withdrawn her financial support if Sybil did not recant that confession. Having no other choice, she did.
What DID TikTok asks us to believe is that, in the span of maybe half a decade, tens of thousands of adolescent women developed DID, an exceedingly rare disorder marked by symptoms entirely unlike those on your For You page. The Verge article, written by Jessica Lucas, is typical of the media’s take on this issue, to the degree that they’ve written about it at all: relentlessly sympathetic to the DID TikTok adolescents even when grudgingly admitting that there’s a lot of fakery. And admit that she does, as it would be essentially impossible to pretend otherwise. Even the wokest wokie couldn’t help but look at this shit and conclude that a lot of it is bullshit.
The cases of DID that are considered to be particularly valid or believable are very few, and the people who have suffered in them have been people living absolutely wasted lives, lives filled with abuse and instability and addiction and misery; the overwhelming majority of DID TikTokers appear to be living perfectly stable and successful adolescent lives. Those with DID have almost never professed to be able to switch from one alter to another on command; many DID TikTokers playact that exact behavior for their viewers. Alters are notoriously uncooperative towards each other; TikTok DID videos routinely feature alters happily participating in “roll calls” in which they switch from one identity to the next, conveniently timed for the creation of #content. (The DID people claim that really they’re just opportunistically capturing organic switches, but a) it’s very clear that many of these videos are filmed in one day and b) that would still require alters to willingly turn the camera on and get into the costume etc, which is not at all how alters have traditionally acted.) In the DID literature alters are almost never aware of what’s happening when another alter is “fronting”; on DID TikTok they almost universally are, justified with the convenient idea of “co-consciousness,” which is one of many evolutions of DID these people have implemented to allow their little pageant to continue. Most people with DID diagnosis, historically, have not been photogenic women with an interest in getting more followers. I could go on.
Lucas’s piece is particularly useful for the remarkable, remarkably depressing story of Dr. Matthew Robinson, a clinician and researcher from Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital. (The site of Girl, Interrupted, among other things.) Like a lot of people in psychiatry, Robinson noted with alarm that his hospital had “been inundated with referrals and requests from schools, parents, and our own adolescent treatment and testing services to assess for symptoms of what [patients] call DID.” He proceeded to discuss the difficulties this sort of situation provokes in an already-overtaxed mental health system, and spoke frankly about the fact that a considerable number of the people presenting with this disorder obviously do not in fact have it. He stated plainly that which many are too circumspect to say, which is that these TikTokers are faking. The consequence, of saying this in a lecture with his professional peers, was review-bombing of the hospital online, threats, a call to have Robinson’s medical license revoked, and sufficient harassment that McLean pulled online videos of the lecture. The online mob engaged in the typical social justice-vocabulary freakout campaign, McLean folded, and as stated in the piece, most researchers are now too scared to publicly comment on this absurd situation. If someone tells you that there is no such thing as a social justice-inflected cancellation campaign, you can point to this exact scenario and to the vicious and vengeful disability rights movement in general.
To be clear, I think that probably literally zero of the people who perform DID on TikTok have the disorder. Zero. I imagine that a significant portion of them have deluded themselves into thinking they do. But I’m quite confident that most of them are very well aware that they’re faking.
