I read somewhere (NYTimes?) that in spite of fertility declines, we are not seeing more single child families. Society is becoming split between families with and without multiple children. This may be more of a developed-country phenomenon but it would be interesting to dig into the numbers at the distribution of children per family. One child is actually a fairly efficient way to experience parenthood with many fewer costs - however, there is also a sense that it isn't great to be an only and so they are in a sense "protecting" the child from that fate by just not having him/her. This data bite struck me, because it seems like having a huge chasm between lots of people with no kids and then a bunch of people still having families with multiple children could be really bad for society. I think we already see this with comparisons between pets and children. Soon it will be between robots/AI and pets and children. The expectation of level of control you will have over your life and environment falls through the floor with multiple children and I think contributes to an impatience with children in public spaces, and lack of interest in subsidizing them, as well. How can we build ties between the childless and families with multiple children? How can we develop these bonds? This kind of binary could create problems at work, and social lives outside of work could become quite distinct. There is a lot to chew on here.
Yes, I've heard that as well, though I am not sure it is quite that simple. The percentage of families with large numbers of children dropped significantly when the Baby Boom ended. Those numbers have probably ticked up recently, but from a very, very low base.
Similarly, the percentage of families who have only 1-2 children rose appreciably, but I think that transition mostly happened decades ago. The rising ages of first marriage and first pregnancy inevitably limit the number of children a woman is likely to have.
Recent trends that have dropped fertility further include the dramatic drop in teenage pregnancy and the rise in the number of women who choose to have no children. The latter is what you're focusing on, and I agree with you that if that division tracks other major cultural divides, it could have very negative social consequences.
I will note though that, historically, a significant minority of women chose not to have children (or simply were never able to marry). It's just that, generally, they had siblings who married and had children, and so remained part of an extended family. Obviously, that's still going to be the case to a significant degree, but the question is how powerfully mitigating those extended family ties remain.
Though social media tend to get blamed for everything these days I tend to concur with your belief that it has depressed fertility rates. If you live in a large house with plenty of available bedrooms, you’re probably more inclined to reproduce than if you live in a small house that already feels crowded. Social media tend to make us all feel a bit crowded. If you own a cell phone or a computer, it’s difficult to sit quietly in your house without feeling as though millions of people are breathing down your neck. I’m 65, so maybe this is just one crotchety old technophobe’s opinion. But I actually like my cell phone and my computer, and I appreciate the internet a great deal. But every day I get notifications from various social media websites that some friend of mine is celebrating a birthday or anniversary or has posted photos of his new grandson. Then I get to feeling that I ought to at least “like” this tidbit of information. I’m home alone quite a bit, and happily so, but since the advent of Facebook and all its spin-offs I never really feel entirely alone. My world feels somewhat crowded. I imagine that if I were of childbearing age this sense of an overcrowded world might suppress my interest in adding more people to it.
Well, I think you hit at least part of the nail (or one of the nails) on the head... children as a luxury. But not just in cold hard terms of "uncompensated labor" as you put it, but also the opportunity "cost" of having children vs. engaging in what we have now in the west in the past 20 or so years which is a lifestyle of fairly incredible luxury. A childless yuppie in the right industry these days can basically live like the royalty of yesteryear and deciding to have children is mindfully giving that up.
I have children, but, I say this with as much modesty as possible, I belong to a wealthy family. My material needs are met, I have a level of autonomy that few have, but even I feel the stress and the pressure of having multiple children... I cannot even fathom what it's like these days for working parents.... and I 100% understand why people are just opting out of that, especially in the west
what *really* blows my mind is that fertility is plummeting even in places where that wealth is not present...
but in general at least in our own society... I think things are just wound way too tight. People have choices and they're making them. We are distant from any possible solution. I feel like this requires reform at almost every level of our society.
1. It seems important that a bunch of developed countries' TFR dropped below 2 in the interwar period, aka before modern contraception, and then rose back above it in the postwar baby boom. I got this stat IIRC from the MoreBirths Twitter account, which speculates that labor saving household machinery and expanded housing supply helped raise the postwar birth rate-- consistent with your Baumol story.
2. In general there are a lot of parallels to climate change, another very complicated "success problem" of modernity, where the problem takes many decades to really bite and solutions likewise take decades to really work. You have denialists insisting that this is not really a problem and the people who say so are pushing an extreme political agenda, and doomers who say that modern society is done for and the future belongs to the Amish. You have personal-sacrifice people trying to do their bit and others who insist solutions must be systemic.
My sense is that fertility now is sort of like climate change 40ish years ago, where we are waking up to the problem and brainstorming solutions but a viable path out seems speculative and impossibly far away. If things follow on a parallel track, then, the problem will be much worse in 40 years and locked-in to get worse still in the near future, but some combination, unforeseeable today, of technological and social changes will at least have us on a realistic path to an eventual solution, and even to a future world much more congenial than the world before we had the problem. This is far from a guarantee, but it is the way I would bet.
I sense a lot of "fertility collapse is caused solely by the thing I'm obsessed with" takes in these comments. I mean we got one guy unironically attributing the entire problem to bad posture! In truth, it's very obviously the case that there is no single cause here.
I see a parallel transnational force that is part of it: violent, brutal porn that the majority of men are streaming every single day. No woman wants to have a child with such a man. It's not just economics.
All else being equal, the more powerful trends tend to be in some large amount dictated by the economics of supporting a family. In many cases, the economics are no longer there, and the costs have only risen over time. Adam Smith said it best when he wrote the Wealth and Poverty of Nations. The cost of labor needs to be able to support a couple and at least several children. In many places the cost is borne on the family, and in general wages in shrunken disadvantaged markets are less.
Couple that with almost a centennial of products that come and go but were claimed safe, but turned out at semi-regular intervals to be toxic. Such as endocrine disruptors, talc (baby-powder), etc. You've got multiple forces aligning against having children; and that's not even getting into the existential threats of AI, not AGI but existing AI which through sufficient disruption can sieve and destroy the remaining small market sectors we have now away from the factor markets to the billionaires.
If the economy stalls, we all go down together. People can't buy food and other things if they can't work in the first place because there's little work to be found. These are inevitably the consequences of bad policy over the last 30-50 years, and very predictable. Mises wrote a lot about the structural issues of centrally planned economies.
Whether it occured from corruption for personal interest, misguided naivete, or something more sinister is immaterial. These things don't happen overnight. People have been warning for decades, and its always been ... yeah yeah sure. With the implication being, its not happening, or the more common there is plenty of time... until there isn't.
Don't even get me started on the companies who match people up for dating intentionally with poor matches to avoid disrupting their own business model.
This was a good read and compelling, but it seems odd to me that there's a total absence of reference to contraception. Seems to me the obvious elephant in the room.
Ah I caught it on the reread, but I guess it seems off to bury it in a throat clearing sort of way, coupled with various other social corollaries. My admitted intuition is that that alone would be pretty explanatory, especially in the way it permeates culture and the shape of human life, and the sudden "bottoming out" doesn't seem to me to require something *more* new than that. Contraception's widespread introduction anywhere in the world is in living memory, but in many places much more recent. It doesn't seem like it would be surprising that the cultural ripple effects from something like that would take a few generations to set in, with cumulative effect. And coupled with the Baumol pressures you articulated, it just doesn't seem so mysterious to me. Seems more parsimonious too.
I didn't intend it as throat-clearing -- it's one of the factors (along with education and urbanization) that is well-understood and much-discussed. The pill has been around for 60 years, and widespread promotion of contraception in the developing world was a major undertaking decades ago. I just don't think there's much more to say about it.
I think most people assumed for a long time that the routine availability of contraception would lead to lower aggregate fertility -- indeed, in some contexts that was explicitly the goal. But most people did not assume that fertility would keep dropping the way it has, well past replacement to levels well below the family size that most women claim to want. That result dos require an additional explanation -- or so it seems to me.
I agree that most people didn't assume that (though certainly some did), but it seems in retrospect like a sort of wishful thinking. And on some level I think the search for some other mysterious factor with more explanatory power seems a continuation of the same wishful thinking.
When sex, and everything that drives us to have it and the shape it places on our lives, is almost entirely set apart from childbearing, right down to how it's thought of and spoken of almost all the time, how could that not just have deeper and deeper consequences in every generation? And it's barely been more than half a century, it's not some crazy length of time.
Why is there any other explanation required? Stated preferences seem to me to have very little to say about how things come about, except to reveal that we are as a whole unsatisfied with the fruit they have born.
I don't know if you've read Christine Emba's "Rethinking Sex" but in the entire book bemoaning how terrible the sexual landscape is, how the social bar of expectations is basically on the floor, not once did she mention contraception.
Hoping to get to Louise Perry's book soon ("The Case Against The Sexual Revolution"). She does not claim to be a Christian, or religious at all, so I'm intrigued.
Like, even wrt Iran (the "literal theocracy"), Tehran had a major campaign after the Iran-Iraq war to limit family sizes and promoted contraception (with even quasi-religious justifications) and has only recently done an about-face.
Given that the effect you're describing seems more or less impermeable to every sort of public policy strategy, and transcends every cultural particularity, it seems obvious to look at contraception as the genie that can't get back in the bottle regardless of public policy as a culprit, no?
One of those things that seems either unthinkable or unavoidable, with little room in between.
Yes, Iran made very conscious efforts to reduce fertility; so did Indonesia. But Saudi Arabia didn't, so far as I know; indeed, information about contraception is not widely available in Saudi Arabia and only a small minority of married women use it. Yet Saudi fertility has also dropped dramatically in recent years.
You may be right; I can't prove you aren't. But if the mere existence of reliable contraception is enough to put humanity on a glide path to extinction, then I'm not sure what we're supposed to do. It's a bit like saying that the invention of nuclear weapons makes a civilization-ending nuclear war inevitable, or that the development of artificial general intelligence will inevitably lead to a super intelligence that wipes out humanity. Those also may be true, but the nuclear genie is already out of the bottle and if the AGI genie exists (still to be determined), it's inevitably going to come out as well.
So, not unthinkable, but probably unavoidable if your hypothesis is correct.
All fair. I figure utility in the "what do you do with this?" sense is a bad criteria for trying to figure out what's true. I certainly don't have any suggestions of what to do, but I that's partly because I don't have a lot of doubt about causes.
Admittedly I, like Douthat, am Catholic, and with respect to nuclear war or AGI (though I don't think that one's a real possibility), or even with demographic decline, at a certain point I leave it to providence. I don't suspect there's any mess we can make that God can't make some good use of. Appreciate your responses here and your taking the time. Thanks again for writing.
"something new has happened in the past few years to cause the bottom to fall out in country after country, both developed and middle-income."
IMO it's pretty simple -an epidemic of lumbar flexion due to smartphone use. The correct posture is caused by sleeping on the chin/ribcage, and keeping the chin up (most importantly), shoulders up and forward, and tailbone up and back throughout the rest of the day. This also explains the Israeli exception. The Middle East has some experience with lumbar hyperflexion due to its writing direction -East Asia none at all.
I see Egypt on the chart, but where's the rest of Africa?
Glancing at the first TFR map that pops up on Google, it does seem like it is the developed world. Perhaps development is not all it is cracked up to be.
Banning contraception and pornography is a good first step. Banning usury---for the knock-on effects across the economy---is the next. These aren't really simple solutions considering how radical they are, but I do think they would be a good solution to a great many ills.
For a woman with an education, marriage and childrearing is a very raw deal. Give up your autonomy and ability even to schedule a trip to the gym in exchange for tasks that would bore a lobotomized ape in service to your actual children plus the 200+ pound toddler who shares your bed but not the housework.
If you want fertility to rebound -- and given what humans are doing to the ecosphere that's actually a terrible idea -- get men to get off their lazy asses and HELP.
The problem is not that women's work is unfulfilling but that industrialization alienated workers from labor itself. When the means of production was local, it was very possible to have tasks divvied up between men and women---perhaps men would do sowing and harvesting and women the threshing and brewing, while children would feed the chickens, gather the eggs, and maybe milk the cow. A gendered world is inevitable in a peaceful world. However, it is not tyrannical---so long as it is extremely local.
Happy marriages always find duties in the house that the man does and those the wife does; happy societies are the same. The fact of pregnancy demands it. The demands of pregnancy demand it.
No, a gendered world is ALWAYS tyrannical because women always get the shit end of that world. Pregnancy is always dangerous and always utterly miserable, which is why it should be something exclusively and entirely in the control of the person risking it. Giving men any power over women at all will lead to women dying. The only way to avoid that is to make the world free of gender. Men are tyrants by nature.
I read somewhere (NYTimes?) that in spite of fertility declines, we are not seeing more single child families. Society is becoming split between families with and without multiple children. This may be more of a developed-country phenomenon but it would be interesting to dig into the numbers at the distribution of children per family. One child is actually a fairly efficient way to experience parenthood with many fewer costs - however, there is also a sense that it isn't great to be an only and so they are in a sense "protecting" the child from that fate by just not having him/her. This data bite struck me, because it seems like having a huge chasm between lots of people with no kids and then a bunch of people still having families with multiple children could be really bad for society. I think we already see this with comparisons between pets and children. Soon it will be between robots/AI and pets and children. The expectation of level of control you will have over your life and environment falls through the floor with multiple children and I think contributes to an impatience with children in public spaces, and lack of interest in subsidizing them, as well. How can we build ties between the childless and families with multiple children? How can we develop these bonds? This kind of binary could create problems at work, and social lives outside of work could become quite distinct. There is a lot to chew on here.
Yes, I've heard that as well, though I am not sure it is quite that simple. The percentage of families with large numbers of children dropped significantly when the Baby Boom ended. Those numbers have probably ticked up recently, but from a very, very low base.
Similarly, the percentage of families who have only 1-2 children rose appreciably, but I think that transition mostly happened decades ago. The rising ages of first marriage and first pregnancy inevitably limit the number of children a woman is likely to have.
Recent trends that have dropped fertility further include the dramatic drop in teenage pregnancy and the rise in the number of women who choose to have no children. The latter is what you're focusing on, and I agree with you that if that division tracks other major cultural divides, it could have very negative social consequences.
I will note though that, historically, a significant minority of women chose not to have children (or simply were never able to marry). It's just that, generally, they had siblings who married and had children, and so remained part of an extended family. Obviously, that's still going to be the case to a significant degree, but the question is how powerfully mitigating those extended family ties remain.
Though social media tend to get blamed for everything these days I tend to concur with your belief that it has depressed fertility rates. If you live in a large house with plenty of available bedrooms, you’re probably more inclined to reproduce than if you live in a small house that already feels crowded. Social media tend to make us all feel a bit crowded. If you own a cell phone or a computer, it’s difficult to sit quietly in your house without feeling as though millions of people are breathing down your neck. I’m 65, so maybe this is just one crotchety old technophobe’s opinion. But I actually like my cell phone and my computer, and I appreciate the internet a great deal. But every day I get notifications from various social media websites that some friend of mine is celebrating a birthday or anniversary or has posted photos of his new grandson. Then I get to feeling that I ought to at least “like” this tidbit of information. I’m home alone quite a bit, and happily so, but since the advent of Facebook and all its spin-offs I never really feel entirely alone. My world feels somewhat crowded. I imagine that if I were of childbearing age this sense of an overcrowded world might suppress my interest in adding more people to it.
Well, I think you hit at least part of the nail (or one of the nails) on the head... children as a luxury. But not just in cold hard terms of "uncompensated labor" as you put it, but also the opportunity "cost" of having children vs. engaging in what we have now in the west in the past 20 or so years which is a lifestyle of fairly incredible luxury. A childless yuppie in the right industry these days can basically live like the royalty of yesteryear and deciding to have children is mindfully giving that up.
I have children, but, I say this with as much modesty as possible, I belong to a wealthy family. My material needs are met, I have a level of autonomy that few have, but even I feel the stress and the pressure of having multiple children... I cannot even fathom what it's like these days for working parents.... and I 100% understand why people are just opting out of that, especially in the west
what *really* blows my mind is that fertility is plummeting even in places where that wealth is not present...
but in general at least in our own society... I think things are just wound way too tight. People have choices and they're making them. We are distant from any possible solution. I feel like this requires reform at almost every level of our society.
Two things:
1. It seems important that a bunch of developed countries' TFR dropped below 2 in the interwar period, aka before modern contraception, and then rose back above it in the postwar baby boom. I got this stat IIRC from the MoreBirths Twitter account, which speculates that labor saving household machinery and expanded housing supply helped raise the postwar birth rate-- consistent with your Baumol story.
2. In general there are a lot of parallels to climate change, another very complicated "success problem" of modernity, where the problem takes many decades to really bite and solutions likewise take decades to really work. You have denialists insisting that this is not really a problem and the people who say so are pushing an extreme political agenda, and doomers who say that modern society is done for and the future belongs to the Amish. You have personal-sacrifice people trying to do their bit and others who insist solutions must be systemic.
My sense is that fertility now is sort of like climate change 40ish years ago, where we are waking up to the problem and brainstorming solutions but a viable path out seems speculative and impossibly far away. If things follow on a parallel track, then, the problem will be much worse in 40 years and locked-in to get worse still in the near future, but some combination, unforeseeable today, of technological and social changes will at least have us on a realistic path to an eventual solution, and even to a future world much more congenial than the world before we had the problem. This is far from a guarantee, but it is the way I would bet.
I sense a lot of "fertility collapse is caused solely by the thing I'm obsessed with" takes in these comments. I mean we got one guy unironically attributing the entire problem to bad posture! In truth, it's very obviously the case that there is no single cause here.
I see a parallel transnational force that is part of it: violent, brutal porn that the majority of men are streaming every single day. No woman wants to have a child with such a man. It's not just economics.
Yes.
All else being equal, the more powerful trends tend to be in some large amount dictated by the economics of supporting a family. In many cases, the economics are no longer there, and the costs have only risen over time. Adam Smith said it best when he wrote the Wealth and Poverty of Nations. The cost of labor needs to be able to support a couple and at least several children. In many places the cost is borne on the family, and in general wages in shrunken disadvantaged markets are less.
Couple that with almost a centennial of products that come and go but were claimed safe, but turned out at semi-regular intervals to be toxic. Such as endocrine disruptors, talc (baby-powder), etc. You've got multiple forces aligning against having children; and that's not even getting into the existential threats of AI, not AGI but existing AI which through sufficient disruption can sieve and destroy the remaining small market sectors we have now away from the factor markets to the billionaires.
If the economy stalls, we all go down together. People can't buy food and other things if they can't work in the first place because there's little work to be found. These are inevitably the consequences of bad policy over the last 30-50 years, and very predictable. Mises wrote a lot about the structural issues of centrally planned economies.
Whether it occured from corruption for personal interest, misguided naivete, or something more sinister is immaterial. These things don't happen overnight. People have been warning for decades, and its always been ... yeah yeah sure. With the implication being, its not happening, or the more common there is plenty of time... until there isn't.
Don't even get me started on the companies who match people up for dating intentionally with poor matches to avoid disrupting their own business model.
This was a good read and compelling, but it seems odd to me that there's a total absence of reference to contraception. Seems to me the obvious elephant in the room.
What did you think "the rise of women’s ability to control their own fertility" in the second paragraph of the piece was referring to?
Ah I caught it on the reread, but I guess it seems off to bury it in a throat clearing sort of way, coupled with various other social corollaries. My admitted intuition is that that alone would be pretty explanatory, especially in the way it permeates culture and the shape of human life, and the sudden "bottoming out" doesn't seem to me to require something *more* new than that. Contraception's widespread introduction anywhere in the world is in living memory, but in many places much more recent. It doesn't seem like it would be surprising that the cultural ripple effects from something like that would take a few generations to set in, with cumulative effect. And coupled with the Baumol pressures you articulated, it just doesn't seem so mysterious to me. Seems more parsimonious too.
I didn't intend it as throat-clearing -- it's one of the factors (along with education and urbanization) that is well-understood and much-discussed. The pill has been around for 60 years, and widespread promotion of contraception in the developing world was a major undertaking decades ago. I just don't think there's much more to say about it.
I think most people assumed for a long time that the routine availability of contraception would lead to lower aggregate fertility -- indeed, in some contexts that was explicitly the goal. But most people did not assume that fertility would keep dropping the way it has, well past replacement to levels well below the family size that most women claim to want. That result dos require an additional explanation -- or so it seems to me.
I agree that most people didn't assume that (though certainly some did), but it seems in retrospect like a sort of wishful thinking. And on some level I think the search for some other mysterious factor with more explanatory power seems a continuation of the same wishful thinking.
When sex, and everything that drives us to have it and the shape it places on our lives, is almost entirely set apart from childbearing, right down to how it's thought of and spoken of almost all the time, how could that not just have deeper and deeper consequences in every generation? And it's barely been more than half a century, it's not some crazy length of time.
Why is there any other explanation required? Stated preferences seem to me to have very little to say about how things come about, except to reveal that we are as a whole unsatisfied with the fruit they have born.
I hear you -- and, as I say below, I can't prove you wrong.
I don't know if you've read Christine Emba's "Rethinking Sex" but in the entire book bemoaning how terrible the sexual landscape is, how the social bar of expectations is basically on the floor, not once did she mention contraception.
Hoping to get to Louise Perry's book soon ("The Case Against The Sexual Revolution"). She does not claim to be a Christian, or religious at all, so I'm intrigued.
Like, even wrt Iran (the "literal theocracy"), Tehran had a major campaign after the Iran-Iraq war to limit family sizes and promoted contraception (with even quasi-religious justifications) and has only recently done an about-face.
Given that the effect you're describing seems more or less impermeable to every sort of public policy strategy, and transcends every cultural particularity, it seems obvious to look at contraception as the genie that can't get back in the bottle regardless of public policy as a culprit, no?
One of those things that seems either unthinkable or unavoidable, with little room in between.
Yes, Iran made very conscious efforts to reduce fertility; so did Indonesia. But Saudi Arabia didn't, so far as I know; indeed, information about contraception is not widely available in Saudi Arabia and only a small minority of married women use it. Yet Saudi fertility has also dropped dramatically in recent years.
You may be right; I can't prove you aren't. But if the mere existence of reliable contraception is enough to put humanity on a glide path to extinction, then I'm not sure what we're supposed to do. It's a bit like saying that the invention of nuclear weapons makes a civilization-ending nuclear war inevitable, or that the development of artificial general intelligence will inevitably lead to a super intelligence that wipes out humanity. Those also may be true, but the nuclear genie is already out of the bottle and if the AGI genie exists (still to be determined), it's inevitably going to come out as well.
So, not unthinkable, but probably unavoidable if your hypothesis is correct.
All fair. I figure utility in the "what do you do with this?" sense is a bad criteria for trying to figure out what's true. I certainly don't have any suggestions of what to do, but I that's partly because I don't have a lot of doubt about causes.
Admittedly I, like Douthat, am Catholic, and with respect to nuclear war or AGI (though I don't think that one's a real possibility), or even with demographic decline, at a certain point I leave it to providence. I don't suspect there's any mess we can make that God can't make some good use of. Appreciate your responses here and your taking the time. Thanks again for writing.
As a solid Protestant, I gotta say the riches of Theology of the Body / Humanae Vitae are vastly underrated outside Catholicism.
"something new has happened in the past few years to cause the bottom to fall out in country after country, both developed and middle-income."
IMO it's pretty simple -an epidemic of lumbar flexion due to smartphone use. The correct posture is caused by sleeping on the chin/ribcage, and keeping the chin up (most importantly), shoulders up and forward, and tailbone up and back throughout the rest of the day. This also explains the Israeli exception. The Middle East has some experience with lumbar hyperflexion due to its writing direction -East Asia none at all.
I see Egypt on the chart, but where's the rest of Africa?
Glancing at the first TFR map that pops up on Google, it does seem like it is the developed world. Perhaps development is not all it is cracked up to be.
Banning contraception and pornography is a good first step. Banning usury---for the knock-on effects across the economy---is the next. These aren't really simple solutions considering how radical they are, but I do think they would be a good solution to a great many ills.
For a woman with an education, marriage and childrearing is a very raw deal. Give up your autonomy and ability even to schedule a trip to the gym in exchange for tasks that would bore a lobotomized ape in service to your actual children plus the 200+ pound toddler who shares your bed but not the housework.
If you want fertility to rebound -- and given what humans are doing to the ecosphere that's actually a terrible idea -- get men to get off their lazy asses and HELP.
The problem is not that women's work is unfulfilling but that industrialization alienated workers from labor itself. When the means of production was local, it was very possible to have tasks divvied up between men and women---perhaps men would do sowing and harvesting and women the threshing and brewing, while children would feed the chickens, gather the eggs, and maybe milk the cow. A gendered world is inevitable in a peaceful world. However, it is not tyrannical---so long as it is extremely local.
Happy marriages always find duties in the house that the man does and those the wife does; happy societies are the same. The fact of pregnancy demands it. The demands of pregnancy demand it.
No, a gendered world is ALWAYS tyrannical because women always get the shit end of that world. Pregnancy is always dangerous and always utterly miserable, which is why it should be something exclusively and entirely in the control of the person risking it. Giving men any power over women at all will lead to women dying. The only way to avoid that is to make the world free of gender. Men are tyrants by nature.
I'd be curious to read your thoughts on the book Gender, by Ivan Illich. For me, it punctures a lot of the myths surrounding labor and gender.