Transcript
00:00:00- Why is it the case that having this conversation
00:00:03is so unpopular on the internet
00:00:05and immediately gets thrown the right wing,
00:00:09conservative, misogyny, the fascism?
00:00:13Why do those arguments get thrown around so quickly?
00:00:16- I think people understand correctly
00:00:21that there can be, there certainly can be,
00:00:25and often in fact, there is a tension between
00:00:29sustainable fertility rates and the gender egalitarianism
00:00:34that I think most of us cherish, right?
00:00:37That like, I'm not like a radical left feminist,
00:00:41but like, I do want my wife to be able to vote
00:00:43and own property and have the right to like,
00:00:46the police hear her out if I'm beating her or something.
00:00:48Like I'm, you know, like little e egalitarian in that sense.
00:00:53And a lot of people fear, very sincerely,
00:00:58they say, well, I do worry about low fertility,
00:01:00but I would never say so publicly because, you know,
00:01:06I stand with women and the pronatalists
00:01:09want to force women to stay barefoot
00:01:11and pregnant in the kitchen.
00:01:12And I mean, I'm sympathetic to that.
00:01:16And unfortunately, some varieties of pronatalism
00:01:18have tended to play into that.
00:01:20The reality, and there's genuine tension.
00:01:24I mean, it is true that a lot of the most sexist countries
00:01:26in the world have the highest birth rates.
00:01:28It is true that within society,
00:01:30people with more traditional gender attitudes
00:01:32have higher birth rates.
00:01:34These are all true things.
00:01:35There's real tension between certain gender models
00:01:38and high fertility.
00:01:40Now, does it have to be intrinsic tension?
00:01:42Can we find a way through it to the other side?
00:01:44I hope so.
00:01:45And I think that's what you all have talked about as well,
00:01:46is that you want your progressive friends to be having kids
00:01:49so that their values can survive in the future too.
00:01:54And so I think there's a lot of people who feel,
00:01:58rightly or wrongly, feel trapped
00:02:00between two things they want, okay?
00:02:02They don't love the idea of a low fertility future,
00:02:04but they also feel like they don't have an option
00:02:07other than to like, well, if a low fertility future
00:02:09is the only way to protect the fact that I'm a woman
00:02:13and I basically want to have rights,
00:02:15then screw fertility, who cares?
00:02:18Or trust that it'll get solved somehow,
00:02:22just don't think about it.
00:02:23So, and I think on some level,
00:02:26pronatalists have not always done a great job,
00:02:29and I probably count myself in this to some extent,
00:02:31of trying to communicate that yes,
00:02:36right now, feminism broadly construed
00:02:40as pretty strongly negatively correlated with fertility.
00:02:43It is, on almost any metric.
00:02:45But we don't know that it has to be.
00:02:50We don't know that there's not a future version
00:02:53of feminism that's pronatal.
00:02:55We don't know that such an ideology couldn't be invented.
00:02:58The problem is, most of the people who self-identify
00:03:01as feminists won't even try.
00:03:03So they won't even try to come up with a version
00:03:05of the ideology that's pronatal.
00:03:07So, and there are people who are,
00:03:09like Leah Sargent has a great book on this where she's trying.
00:03:13So I would say, I agree with what a lot of you are saying,
00:03:20but I'm a little more sympathetic to people who feel
00:03:24between a rock and a hard place.
00:03:26- Well, I think the other point here is that,
00:03:28it's obvious what you need to give up now,
00:03:30and it's not obvious what the costs will be in future.
00:03:33And for the most part, you're not gonna pay them, right?
00:03:35And if you're not intending on having kids,
00:03:37or if fewer people around you are intending on having kids,
00:03:40then you're not even attached to people
00:03:42who might be having to pay them.
00:03:43So it's having to give up something that you want
00:03:45in order for something that you're being told
00:03:47that future people need.
00:03:49We're not good in a society of doing that at the moment,
00:03:51at the old staving off of the very gratification.
00:03:54- Imagine you really value gender egalitarianism,
00:03:56and then you have daughters,
00:03:57and then you learn that the future is going to be one where
00:04:00like all the crazy far right people had all the babies
00:04:04and they're gonna outvote you,
00:04:05and now your daughters live out Handmaid's Tale.
00:04:07Okay, like this, as silly as that sounds
00:04:09to like my rational brain,
00:04:11I personally know people who really think
00:04:13that's what's going to happen.
00:04:14That any kid they have is just going to be
00:04:16like governed by zealots.
00:04:18And so they're like, well, I don't want that for my kid.
00:04:20I'm not going to have-
00:04:20- Yeah, but if feminists stop having kids-
00:04:22- I know.
00:04:23- There won't be no feminists left.
00:04:24- This is why I'm like, be the change you wish,
00:04:26only you can prevent forest fires.
00:04:28- This is the gap, the mean change,
00:04:30the mean children by ideology.
00:04:32Conservatives at 1.67,
00:04:35which has actually gone up since the 1980s,
00:04:38and liberals from 1.29, which was nearly the same,
00:04:411.44 to 1.29, 1980 conservative to liberal,
00:04:45to now 1.67 to 0.87.
00:04:49So yeah.
00:04:50- It seems to be the case from well put together surveys
00:04:55that let's say 90% ish of people at some point in life
00:04:59either have or want kids.
00:05:01- Yeah.
00:05:02- That's not all right wingers.
00:05:0390% is pretty much everybody.
00:05:07I think the issue here is that the left
00:05:11have found it more challenging because of the frictions,
00:05:15with some of their traditional beliefs
00:05:18to come up with a narrative here that enables them
00:05:21to come up with some form of voice.
00:05:23And I think people on the right,
00:05:25and I will say also, I'm not pro-natalist.
00:05:27That surprises a lot of people.
00:05:29I'm a researcher.
00:05:30I call myself pan-natalist.
00:05:32And a pan-natalist is someone who supports people
00:05:36to have the kids they want to have,
00:05:37but also respects people who choose not to.
00:05:40- Oh, we do too.
00:05:41It's great.
00:05:42- Okay, I think that's pan-natalism.
00:05:43- I would call that pro-natalism, but-
00:05:44- Yeah, no, we only want people who like kids to have kids.
00:05:47- I think pro-natalism, to me,
00:05:49is interpreted rightly or wrongly
00:05:51as people who would encourage others to have kids.
00:05:56And I would encourage people to think about it.
00:05:58I don't know if that's a new-
00:05:59- That is a fetish on the left.
00:06:00That is all these women who'd be like,
00:06:01"Oh, Mr. Trump, don't send me
00:06:02"to the Mar-a-Lago breeding pens."
00:06:05Why are they wearing those "Handmaid's Tale" costumes?
00:06:07'Cause it is, it's hot.
00:06:09When you look at what women read in romance novels,
00:06:12"Don't breed me, sir."
00:06:14This is, it's not real.
00:06:16No one is asking progressive women to have kids.
00:06:18When you look at far-right conservative men
00:06:21who are marrying women,
00:06:22they're marrying women from Latin America.
00:06:25They're marrying women from Eastern Europe.
00:06:26They're not marrying progressive white women.
00:06:29There's that "Return to Land" colony in the Ozarks.
00:06:33It's for whites only,
00:06:34and they have to keep saying to the men,
00:06:35"Sorry, you have to actually marry a white woman
00:06:38"if you want to come here."
00:06:39And they can't get any men
00:06:40who are far-right conservative white nationalists
00:06:42who have married white women
00:06:44because they're not there.
00:06:45I'm just saying, this is fake.
00:06:47This whole like, "Pronatalism, we want you to have kids."
00:06:49No, don't have kids.
00:06:51If you want kids, have them,
00:06:52but otherwise you can just not inherit the future, all right?
00:06:55Because they've screwed it.
00:06:57They've screwed it.
00:06:57This is a toxic culture.
00:06:58We have to wash our hands of it.
00:06:59We have to take to the stars and leave them behind.
00:07:01That's it.
00:07:02So I think, so I would, what you call pannatalism.
00:07:06Yeah, I would, that's how I would describe pronatalism, okay?
00:07:09I don't think pronatalism means
00:07:11forcing people to have unwanted children.
00:07:12I think it means pronatalism, pro meaning in favor of,
00:07:17natal meaning births.
00:07:18It means you're in favor of births.
00:07:20In practice, I would say you're a pronatalist
00:07:22if you support actually doing things
00:07:24that helps people actually have more kids.
00:07:26- I think the problem with that, Simone,
00:07:28is that it's all well and good kind of victim blaming people
00:07:32and saying, "You believe in ideology that's self-defeating.
00:07:35"Because of your belief in it,
00:07:36"you have been psy-opt or gaslit into not wanting something
00:07:41"or having a life that doesn't permit you to have this thing,
00:07:46"despite the fact that 90% of women have or want kids."
00:07:52So it seems to me that I understand
00:07:56if you've been in the trenches
00:07:57as you and your husband have for a long time,
00:07:59that you go, all right, I'm fucking done.
00:08:02I can't, the project to try and change hearts and minds,
00:08:05I've kind of lost faith in that.
00:08:07I get it.
00:08:08I understand why you might be exhausted at doing that.
00:08:10But that is condemning a huge swath of women
00:08:14who are left of center.
00:08:16- And men.
00:08:16- And men.
00:08:17Yeah, of course.
00:08:18Because for each, you know, the two to tango.
00:08:20Like you are condemning those people
00:08:23to kind of be at the mercy of an ideology
00:08:25that you think is bad.
00:08:27And I don't know, I would like to think
00:08:30that we can try and sort of stir the pot
00:08:32to bring some of the silt up and go,
00:08:34"Hey, maybe what you believe is good in many ways
00:08:39"for the world, but also perhaps it's got some side effects
00:08:42"that even the people that are espousing it
00:08:45"aren't going to embody."
00:08:46Like these people are endorsing beliefs
00:08:48that they don't embody and they're leaving you behind
00:08:50and it would be important to get you on site.
00:08:52One of the things I worry about if you say like,
00:08:54"Hey, if you're on the left
00:08:55"and you don't think that kids are good, go fuck yourself
00:08:58"'cause my kids are going to inherit the earth."
00:09:00Like I get it, but that's not actually what would be true
00:09:05if you were to continue to try and do the hearts
00:09:08and minds change thing.
00:09:10And again, for every step that you take forward,
00:09:13there's 10 people saying you're trying to take rights away
00:09:17for handmade stuff, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:09:20And I get why that would be exhausting,
00:09:22but I think trying to work out how to bring people into this,
00:09:27because if you really care about birth rates overall,
00:09:30you should be trying to get as big of a bucket as possible
00:09:32to scoop everybody up in.
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