>A lack of equal male partners, rather than career or educational ambitions, is why more women are trying to prolong their fertility
>Selfish career-driven women. Gullible dupes of the fertility industry. Victims of the patriarchy. When leading anthropologist Marcia C Inhorn first embarked on her decade-long study of why women freeze their eggs, the popular narrative was largely one of derision.
>“There was a lot of either blaming women or saying that they’re naïve, stupid and so forth,” says the Yale professor, from a red armchair in her home in New Haven, Connecticut.
>Meanwhile, in academic circles, egg freezing was – and still is – often seen as a calculated act by women to hack their fertility by prolonging it through medical intervention, “as if this was something very intentional that women were doing in this kind of planned, almost fisherperson, narrative”, says Inhorn.
>This argument was so compelling that it formed one of her initial hypotheses: “Is it career and educational aspiration that’s driving the turn to egg freezing?”
>But when she started speaking to women, it became almost immediately clear that in fact it was something – or someone – else driving the globally expanding trend, which in less than a generation has gone from unheard of to, in some circles, almost ubiquitous.
>etc
If these women really want children and families, why aren't they fond of the egalitarian thing and go for men who could be good fathers and house husbands without being their intellectual or financial equals? It's been the norm for men to marry younger, healthier, and less intelligent women with which to raise healthy babies since the dawn of our species. Women can now do the same, so have we reached equality or can we become even more equal? I don't see anything wrong with being a house husband and taking care of the kids while my woman is at work.
If you keep waiting for the perfect partner, you'll end up with no partner. It's always been that way.
What I'm reading into it is that for many women, freezing their eggs will only draw out the illusion that the perfect lad will come after all. But it isn't just the eggs that are aging. Having a few of them ready to go in a freezer somewhere doesn't solve your problem.
I don't really see anything in the article that talks of the fluffy man waiting at home with a cup of tea and the kids occupied. Technically I might well be such a man as I struck a career with a better work/life balance but I've consistently dated women richer than me without much issue. My flaw being that I'm more of an ugly bore.
It talks instead of women in their late-30s who are fed up with the blokes on offer. It's not particularly vicious by the standards of the Grandium and, having read previous work by the author (which focuses on the US), the issue is particularly pronounced in areas of the US where the men are outright lazy unambitious arseholes in post-industrial communities where the women simply view it as better to not have them in their lives. It's about not being a manchild ultimately and while that correlates with lots of money it certainly doesn't stop someone getting their leg over with passions.
>Then there were those who simply didn’t want to. “I learned the term ‘the Peter Pans’, you know the men who will never grow up. They may be educated men who have money and so forth, but they want to play around and have a lot of fun and may not partner at all, or may not partner well into their 40s and 50s,” she says.
It's strange that I can recognise myself in this deep-down but on a conscious level want the opposite. I think like most blokes, deep-down I want to screw hordes of women and only want to settle down with someone I really know is right. The problem is that we then approach things the opposite to women where we really evaluate continuing the relationship after we've been fucking for awhile whereas birds tend more to click with you pretty early on and then end up disappointed.
>>40216 >If you keep waiting for the perfect partner, you'll end up with no partner. It's always been that way.
You can reverse that though, you get the partner but then you're trapped in an exhausting marriage. Go out to Lidl on a Monday afternoon and ask yourself how many people in the shop you'd be able to build a happy marriage with.
I reckon if we ever unlock biological immortality and stay young forever we might end up with a population crash as people deduce that everyone around them is a cunt and they have forever to wait it out until that fact improves. I have more faith in humanity than I'm perhaps letting on but I understand that a marriage is basically a decision that will impact you in some way forever.
>More than 150 interviews later, her research – the largest anthropological study to date into why women freeze their eggs – concluded that it was men, not women, who were the problem. The biggest driving factor for women in the US was a shortage of suitable educated men, a problem which she terms in her forthcoming book, Motherhood on Ice, the “mating gap”.
I call bullshit. It's not our fault if women's standards are too high. And that's not even considering the fact that boys and young men aren't falling behind in academic education because they're lazy sods, but because the education system systematically disadvantages them.
Also, many women who are less educated take for granted or at least expect highly educated men of high social status to marry down. I know there's still that whole bit about men being the provider and breadwinner, but why should men settle for less when a lot of highly educated women think a plumber is beneath them.
And if you are highly trained and expect to find somebody within those circles, then that narrows your pool of potential mates to begin with. For both genders actually, as only about 22 percent of adults over the age of 25 in the UK have a university degree. But not only that, but as a single woman, by the time you've finished all your degrees and have climbed up the career ladder to where you can afford to settle down comfortably, you'll probably be pushing 30, if you're not over already, at which point you are competing with younger women, who have a much bigger chance of attracting successful 30something men.
You're essentially pricing yourself out of the market. And it's not men's fault if you go down that road.
I'm not saying don't become a high professional career woman. But if you want that for yourself and you want to be married with kids as well, then start looking early while you're still at university, or be ready for compromise.
If all women hate one man, that man's probably a cock. If a woman hates all men, she's probably mental. I think that since society still has certain ideals about women raising the kids, but now women have to get jobs too, maybe that is now too much pressure and too much effort, and it's just not worth it to go through all that. Also, look at the planet: we're full. It's not like there is any pressure to continue the human race single-handedly, while in the past I guess that might have been the case, what with all the polio and bubonic plague.
It's true that most of my friends don't have kids, but that's because people with kids don't have friends. If this academic has made such an egregious sampling error, I'm going to develop some longstanding issues of my own. I hope she cooks better than she researches. But from a more honest angle, I think my first point about employment being better than childrearing and the two together not being worth it, is the most likely explanation.
>>40213 I think this completely missed the point
Its more expensive than ever to raise children here and I assume the USA is not much different, a womans expectation to maintain the same living standards and be there to care for their children is perfectly reasonable, but to achieve that means their partner needs to be on a much higher income to support a wife and children.
The conclusion from this survey should not be "woman aren't having children because their standards are much higher than they used to be", it should be "women aren't having children because a median salary cannot support a family like it used to"
Womens standards have not gone up at all, what has changed today are still hoping the the ideal nuclear family that their parents and grandparents in the boomer generation and to a lesser extent in generation x had, an ideal that
Pretty much what I'm always saying about feminism having being a bourgie ideology captured by capital since the very start. It has not liberated women, it has only put them in the same shackles as men.
This is as a few of you have pointed out, a primarily material issue of the discrepancy between the nature of our work, our levels of qualification and specialisation, our productivity as workers, and the lifestyle this ultimately affords us and our hypothetical families. You can spin it as a confusing and controversial mess of gender standards and expectations if you want, but that will only ever be assumption and assertion. The hard economic facts however, paint a picture.
Anyway now for the sexist bit to piss fisherlad off- Women don't know what they want, you can ask them, but their answers are meaningless because what they think they want is often entirely unrelated to what they really want. So this survey doesn't really tell us a lot.
There are some things we just need to accept about human nature and stop lying to ourselves about- One of them is that women always desire a man who is a provider. Much like men always desire a woman who is nurturing and kind, women ultimately always seek a man who can give them what they can't get, and do things for them they can't do. That doesn't necessarily mean financially, that's just the most base form of "providing" in today's world; but it is always true.
Trouble is in letting the tail of capitalism wag the dog of society, the case is often that men don't have anything else to provide, other than their value in hard currency as a unit of production.
