Goodness I feel flattered. I dont even think I explained myself as well as i could have i was so pissed off from seeing another post or comment hand-wringing about population rates in rich industrialized countries for the umpteenth time. this was actully why i felt the need to take a break from hexbear. and i mean im glad i did ive been touching grass more then ever before and am pissed off over internet things far less (still way too often). actually, i would not have seen this comment so quickly if not notified by my friends. anyway thanks for all the love in this thread yall, very sweet, i shall be off though as the edibles are kicking in and i need to lay down immediately.

I think declining birthrate ( without doing some malthusian eugenics shit) isn’t necessarily a bad thing long term.

Yeah the position a lot of people have on here with regards to birthrates, the position that Othello was calling out, where people think that if you improve “material conditions” more women will start having children, is just not compatible with reality.

In reality, the poorest countries with the worst education have the highest birthrates, while the wealthiest countries with good education have the lowest birthrates. I’ve also gotten into this in previous comments as well. As materialists, our positions should be based in reality and not vibes, and the reality is very clear on this.

My wife’s dad is one of 18 kids. That’s unthinkable. My dad is one of like 8 kids, also a unimaginable number of kids. Both were basically in farm country. The conditions under which they had those kids were wildly different then the conditions we live in now. My wife has a degree, her grandmothers didn’t, my wife’s mom is a veteran and the primary breadwinner in the house, also not true of her mother or mother-in-law. They didn’t have those opportunities.

How is someone supposed to achieve any of that if they are literally pregnant for almost 15 fucking years straight? At the time that they were having kids women had only just gained the right to have a fucking bank account. Oral birth control was only just becoming available in 1960. So much of a womens life was under direct control of their husbands. No fault divorce wasn’t a thing until 1969. 1970 Reed v Reed ended will discrimination. My youngest uncle was born around the time that women could finally get lines of credit (1974), meaning up until then they couldn’t legally own a house. I could go on, or you can just look at the timeline of rights: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women’s_legal_rights_in_the_United_States_(other_than_voting)

It’s so painfully obvious that it was the lack of independence within the social system that lead to “high birth rates” and that when given the opportunity to do anything other then pump out kids, women chose to not pump out kids.

The entire line of attack on women from the right is centered around reversing the rights they have gained. The goal of that line of attack is to get the birth rate to rise again. Abortion rights is the beachhead, no fault divorce is being whispered about by some right wing psychos. If it was money that made the birthrate go up then that’s how they would solve it. The fact that these rights are under siege is evidence that they believe this will make birthrates to up. They’ve said as much as well. It’s not theory or speculation.

I remember a conversation I had with a friend who’d been getting really into Hardcore History and wanted to talk some cool ass history with me, the history minor

We got on the topic of how the aztecs had instituted a sort of doctrinal loophole saying that women who died in childbirth also got to go to the Valhalla-equivalent that was normally for men who died in combat. I laughed and said “well yeah, I can imagine plenty of women didn’t want to risk their fucking lives by having kids back then, makes sense that there would be a lot of reluctance towards childbirth that they’d try to address with a little media campaign.”

This friend got really upset with me and claimed that I was projecting modern attitudes (woke wasn’t really a big term yet) onto the past. I wanted to smoke his weed so I didn’t start an argument but the patriarchy detector was beeping like crazy

MUCH LOVE TO OTHELLO

honestly i love love/loves pronouns, it makes everything sound scottish to me

when it actually is the opposite

… This wasn’t widely understood here?? Even Reddit of all places knows this

A c/bestofhexbear submission imo superb post.

So proud to have Othello as my friend.

all timer post, didn’t get enough attention.

I think it’s mostly that, but a bit of the other- a lot of people actually want to have 1 or 2 kids and literally can’t because they can’t afford it, or can’t even socialize or date in the first place because they cant afford it. But yeah people don’t come into money and prosperity and decide to have 12 children.

GOOD POST, thanks for the share

deleted by creator

Removed by mod

UNLIMITED REPORTS ON THE 1ST WORLD (hexbear)

Hell yeah, I might even start reporting my own posts when I go in the self crit “where did I go wrong/could’ve phrased this better/could’ve developed this point in a more dialectical manner” sessions

Thank you for saying this sneak, I present femme but I don’t see myself as any gender (I’m agender). I wouldn’t be posting in womenby because I don’t see myself as a woman, and I found it questionable having that plus menby it felt a bit strange seeing that split like that and back to the binary imo which I feel excludes me, I don’t think enbies should be in the gender box but that’s me. But I’ll continue to post in the trans mega as is the norm

I guess I assumed that /c/womenby does already include all enbies and not just “femme enbies”, so then does the creation of /c/menby require an exodus of “masc enbies” to a different comm? Why are we doing gender segregation for enbies?

Why would it “require” an exodus or do gender segragation? It’s not as if anybody is running a secret database of the AGAB of neopronoun users on hexbear and bans them for posting in the wrong com (not to mention that pronouns aren’t surefire indicators of gender). I know a lot of transmasc enbies who get massive dysphoria from being lumped in with fem people, being treated as “women light” etc. A lot of transmasc nonbinary people are very close in gender identity and presentation to men, if they do not downright use a label like “nonbinary trans man” for themselves, not to mention that their lived experience is usually much more marked by struggles with toxic norms of masculinity than with (trans)misogyny. Over here in Germany, whether transmascs even want to be included in the FLINTA acronym (women, lesbians, nonbinary, trans, inter and agender) is a recurring point of debate in trans spaces because the label in practice is often used as a more inclusive form of saying “women only”.

ofc individual attitudes to this can vary a lot. A lot of the transmac nonbinary people i know are staunch feminists, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they feel at ease in a “no men allowed” space. I think it’s a good thing when they have the option to discuss masculinity with other transmascs and cis men, and i think many of them have valuable perspectives that cis men could benefit from.

agree its kind of a far from ideal setup

yeah this has kinda been a problem for me my whole life tbh. i’ve spent like 15+ years in trans communities and reinventing the gender binary is something i’ve seen happen repeatedly, with enbies just kind of expected to go along with whatever is the opposite of their assigned gender. tho these comms aren’t trans exclusive they do kind of have the same effect of just recreating the gender binary, and splitting up the enby community along birth assignment lines.

i also think it misunderstands the reason to make a group for women and enbies - to be clear i think this comm in particular is fine. it’s just somewhat undermined by the existence of c/menby. given that we live in a patriarchy, women and nonbinary people have legitimate reason to organise with each other against patriarchy n misogyny. such a group for men and enbies just doesn’t make sense. we should not exactly be organising against women. and yeah, i know c/menby is not (supposed to be) anti-woman, it’s (supposed to be) for them to educate themselves. but in that context, enbies are politically aligned with women and should be actively included in the space rather than just passively jammed in.

we should keep c/womenby, change c/menby to just like c/men(i’ve reconsidered my name recommendation, see edit) or something to that effect, if it can be maintained as a space for deconstructing patriarchy rather than generating toxic masculinity, and maybe a nonbinary space of our own.

EDIT: I think the community should be called c/deconstructing_masculinity to make it harder for it to turn into a breeding ground for misogyny.

thanks to the mods, and also to all the people having struggle sessions and putting in real life force (energy, time, wellbeing, etc.) into educating their comrades, I see you, appreciate you and commend your effort o7

just want to echo this – I don’t often have the bandwidth to engage, and I really appreciate everyone who puts forth that emotional and intellectual labor. ❤️ thank you very, very much.

I run an inclusive space for everyone who is not a cis man and we use the terminology “people of marginalised genders”. It’s clunky but it works. We started out with something similar to “womenby” but we got a lot of criticism for being exclusionary.

I guess I would tentatively suggest one group for all marginalised genders and a separate comm for discussion of masculinity.

a bunch of theory posted to c/womenby!