In 1960, the fertility rate in America was 3.65. At that time, Canada, today a feminist paradise (or liberal hellhole, depending on who youâre asking) had a higher birth rate than America, making it marginally more conservative. It was a different time.
The dramatic decline in fertility between 1960 and 1980, despite the introduction of millions of high fertility Mexicans, was due to a sexual revolution.
Personally, I endorse this. Iâm all for this. But it is a real thing, and a painful thing, and something which has deep implications.
The standard conservative solution to this problem is that âmen should act like men again.â If men would âman up,â be stoic, work hard, stop crying, stop expressing their emotions, then those men (us, you and me, collectively) would âleadâ America back to the promised land of patriarchy and higher fertility.
If men would âman up,â then we would fight in wars, shoot guns, work a âreal job,â like in a factory, smoke cigars, and be physically fit. We would be emotionally reserved, controlled, masculine, stern, authoritarian, and all of that together would command the respect of women. Women would then bow down at our feet and act like a housewife from 1960, because women follow men. If you act like an alpha male, women will worship you, and the whole natural order will come back. But itâs on men to take the first step.
The conservative thesis blames the collective behavior of women on the collective behavior of men. Men got lazier, weaker, and less deserving, so women stopped having sex with them, started taking birth control, stopped having kids, started going to college, and stopped respecting me.
On the other hand, you have the MGTOW thesis, which blames the collective behavior of men on the collective behavior of women: it was women who decided to become whores and sluts and abandon the family, so itâs all their fault.
Both of these theses together ascribe moral agency to collectives at the level of gender. If you take both of them together, you get something like the Spenglerian theory of degeneration, which posits that civilization gets bad due to some kind of biological clock. Then you have the Rob Henderson luxury beliefs thesis, which states that when people get rich, they get crazy.
I disagree with all of these. There was no collective decision on the part of men to become weak, and no collective decision on the part of women to become sluts. It wasnât a conscious decision from the bottom-up, that you can solve through hectoring and harassment. It was a change in incentives from the top-down.
The biggest change in the 1960s was to open up the universities to women. Women, on average, are better at studying, test-taking, box-filling, form-filing, and all the secretarial skills needed to succeed in academia. As women flooded into universities, the myth that âmen are smarter than womenâ began to deteriorate, and with it, the female dating pool began to shrink.
