Episode 72: No Future? The Birth Rate Collapse

Women in greater and greater numbers are choosing not to have children. We discuss the reasons why, both material and ideological, and how the internet, particularly apps like TikTok, have removed the mystery of different lifestyles and bashed down the once private walls of the nuclear family. Online, the Red Pill 'no eggs' rhetoric attempting to shame women into attaching themselves to a man, is failing because it's like playing on a social chess board from 1953. We think through the contradictions of people like Jordan Peterson encouraging femininity, housewifery, and for women to be stay-at-home mothers, whilst also criticising the 'devouring mother', when those are exactly the conditions that set it up. Also, the contradiction of giving only carrots and never metaphorical sticks to boys and then wondering why young men don't feel the need to accomplish anything or graduate into full adulthood, like getting a job and moving out of the parental home, in order to bag a wife or serious girlfriend.
This episode also includes wider discussion of men in crisis, how romance culture today is dead, dating apps as a form of ruthless shopping, how relationships now start with a sexual encounter, and women coming off birth control in large numbers. We contest Louise Perry's comments about the welfare state reducing the birth rate, instead putting forward an analysis of how the unrestrained market has ripped through everyone's lives, ensuring very few young people are financially secure enough to have a baby. Plus, globalisation meaning the nation state is less relevant, the Victorian culture in UK schools, Michael Hudson's book 'Super Imperialism', and confusion around the 4B movement in South Korea, where many online seem to think 4B caused the birth rate to drop, when in fact it was the effects of neoliberal economics, which the 'Sampo' generation of the early 2010s came to represent, well before 4B.