I wonder why the source you cited mentions one's thirties as the time to get ahead in one's career. In my experience one's twenties are just as bad, and if you have kids in your teens then you miss your education. There's really no time in a woman's reproductive life when it's convenient to take off time for kids.
When I had my first kid at 24, I was making more than my husband (though we both made very little). I quit that job because it was not enough to pay for daycare, and I wanted to breastfeed. When I was 26, he started a graduate degree, and I had another baby. When I was 29, he got a professional job using that degree, and I had another baby. When I was 31, he was getting raises, and I had another baby. Unsurprisingly my hourly pay is about 1/5 of his. It would be easy to switch which of us is the breadwinner, except that my earning potential can't compare, and these kids are too expensive for me to take 15 years catching up.
Your conclusion is dead on. I was a Catholic feminist for some years until I realized, we would never be equal without birth control. As long as the vast majority of women were constantly engaged in having children, no amount of theoretical equality would allow our voices to be heard to a comparable degree.
I think artificial wombs would be great. Though men on twitter love to cheer for them because then they "wouldn't need women for anything." I'm kinda baffled that they think they need us now. They aren't acting like we provide something valuable and have negotiating power because of it. This kind of guy hates us even while cheerfully using as much of women's free labor as he can get.
> I think artificial wombs would be great. Though men on twitter love to cheer for them because then they "wouldn't need women for anything."
One of Lois McMaster Bujold's least-appreciated novels is "Ethan of Athos." The premise was that after a working artificial womb was invented, a whole bunch of angry Men Going Their Own Way took a bunch of artificial wombs and gamete cultures, and rather than sitting around whining, the men _went_. And settled a backwater planet.
Now fast-forward a couple of hundred years. The planet is still inhabited only by men, and they still see women as some of abstract, semi-mythical danger. But since artificial wombs don't take care of child care, the men had to build a whole new culture of fatherhood and childrearing _without_ a gendered division of labor. And in Bujold's hands, this becomes an interesting thought experiment...
I feel like the bit about "patriarchy" is missing something about how patriarchies aren't generically rule by *men* but rule by *fathers* (and husbands). Which is to say it's not great for children either! (Or unmarried young men, who may still be subject to their father's rule, but obviously women have the worse situation there in that they likely only get a choice of tyrants.)
Yeah. You can see how the meaning's morphed naturally, but it is a bit awkward that a word meaning "senior male gets to boss everyone else around, including other adult men" has now come to mean "most CEOs and politicians are male, and the world was designed around men in various ways". Both bad, but one's worse, and confusing them is unhelpful.
It's still a rule by some men at the expense of other men (as well as at the expense of women). It's just that the Patriarchs are no longer determined by blood relation.
True dat. But I think the two main things making the old way a capital-P Patriarchy are a) families being run by patriarchs and b) the assumption that a woman should obey her husband.
Argh! Love your blog, don't love the perspective in this post. Factually and game theory wise, most of the foundation is fair enough.
But it MATTERS whether the things that only females can do (gestating, birthing, breastfeeding), or are biologically wired to more often prefer to do (childrearing), are inherently awful, or have the potential to be awesome.
It's one thing if they're inherently awful. Then all you can do is avoid them with contraception and abortion, or outsource them to the underclass with surrogacy, night nurses with formula, and daycare.
It's another thing if they have the potential to be awesome. I say potential, because anything can be ruined in part or full by coercion, extreme poverty, social disapproval, or just a bad personal fit. And sure, menstrual cramps are no picnic (nor are headaches, but I enjoy what my head can do). But many people are personally well suited to motherhood, and it is usually an awesome experience if they have the following privileges:
A good spouse
Autonomy to choose if/when to have kids
Disability leave during the hardest parts of pregnancy
A respectful and affordable birth team
A year of paid maternal leave or the ability to live on the spouse's income
Reasonably feminist civil rights and custody laws (unlike they have in China)
The general approval of society
I think that most mothers who have those privileges love it with a passion. Heck, I think that most mothers do lack one or more of those privileges and still love it on net, just with more reservations. The #1 thing that both men and women say gives meaning to their life is family.
Moloch tries to squeeze us into situations that make it harder to enjoy having a family. Every time I hear the statistic that 25% of mothers in the US go back to work within two weeks of having a baby, I want to vomit. I'm not sure I would want another baby if I were forced to do that. Much (most?) suffering surrounding motherhood is more due to lacking the privileges above than from motherhood itself.
I think it's disappointing, even infuriating, to look at the thing that gives most humans so much fulfillment, the thing that's often the best experience of someone's life and totally unreplaceable, and to say "looks risky, isn't easy to tax, let's socially disincentive this." Further, I think it's anti-feminist to specifically rob FEMALES of the thing in life that gives us even higher heights of meaning and embodiment and passion than males. Why are women, and the things women like, the problem we should scour away?
On net we've made life so much better for women and mothers (and men and fathers and children) over the centuries. The sex realist game theory foundation is there, but the whole point of society is to be less unforgiving than nature. I think collectively giving up on motherhood at this point, giving up on the female body and this unique and primal experience, would be a huge injustice to women. In comparison to the strides feminists have already made, it looks easy to expand access to the few things above. Let's not give up now.
I also have thoughts about society supporting people in vulnerable but contributory roles. When you're pregnant or birthing or carrying around a baby, you are vulnerable. You can't defend yourself as well against an attacker. You can't hold down the average paying job as well. You can't even do traditional women's work like cooking as well then as when you are childfree. You're vulnerable, and others have to support you in a variety of ways. Time to get cast away on the iceberg, right? Not in a healthy society.
You know who else is vulnerable and needs others to support them in a variety of ways? Most white-collar workers. Whether you are Johannes Kepler in 1600, or a modern scientist at a lab nowadays, you would probably starve if dumped in the wilderness. You probably work a lot of overtime, and someone else probably cooks your food and does most of your other human activities for you. If your telescope gets stolen, or the government cancels all the grants in your field, you won't be able to do your important and specialized work. You have chosen to focus on your area of comparative advantage. Your ability to do so safely and happily depends on your family and society being supportive and stable.
It's similar for mothers (and their babies). It may be natural, but in some ways it's also like being the specialized worker, the top of Maslow's pyramid, the proverbial pencil or root beer that depends on a vast trade network. They're all vulnerable - but worth investing social technology in protecting.
I kiiiinda agree here, partially because I was lucky enough to get genetically favourable "female embodiment" experience and so far (up to mid menopause) have mostly ON BALANCE enjoyed being a female mammal, by a fairly broad definition of "enjoyed". Probably more than I enjoyed most social/psychosocial aspects of being a woman (luckily or not nobody ever forced me to be a girl).
So I think that much of the problems that Ozy describes could be solved -- FOR WOMEN / FEMALES WHO WANT TO PRODUCE CHILDREN -- by treating that, socially, as an important, at least mid-level status, well paid job, not something you "suspend" your actual proper job to indulge in. Especially as so sooooo much paid work (including many "career jobs") is utterly bulshit.
> Further, I think it's anti-feminist to specifically rob FEMALES of the thing in life that gives us even higher heights of meaning and embodiment and passion than males. Why are women, and the things women like, the problem we should scour away?
Don’t agree with calling it ‘things women like’ or specific to females and so on, but thank you, this really brings up something important I was missing!
It wouldn’t surprise me if even in the transhumanist transition future, it’s to any extent more common among women (and possibly to any extent more common among people who in our society would be assigned female at birth) to have a greater level of attachment to pregnancy and breastfeeding and so on. And it’s unquestionable that pregnancy and breastfeeding and so on are *associated* with women, both historically and in our society. Thus, treating it as only a burden to be gotten rid of is gonna be sexism/misogyny. And no matter how robust an opt-out is provided, continuing to societally disadvantage *pregnancy and breastfeeding* is gonna be sexism/misogyny. (devaluing and disadvantaging something associated with women; disproportionally disadvantaging women.) Fighting that disadvantaging must continue to be part of the work of feminism.
I mean Ozy never really said that? He said childbirth, the sickness of menopause and pregnancy and the fact that you're not fertile for long sucks, and that we should ideally science our way out of these things. Do you disagree?
He said that pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding suck so irredeemably that we should stop doing them and science our way to artificial alternatives. I disagree.
TBC I don't mean that women should be obligated to use artificial wombs, formula that is better for babies than breastmilk, etc. once they're developed (any more than they are presently obligated to use birth control or epidurals).
Thanks for clarifying that artificial alternatives wouldn't be mandatory. I still disagree that developing them should be the top priority of feminism.
I think there's more benefit to be had in prioritizing access to the privileges I listed, so that women can enjoy pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and childrearing to their fuller potential.
Something I didn't mention before is that there are lots of hormonal and neurobiological changes that happen as a result of gestation, birth, and breastfeeding that make each of those as well as childrearing more enjoyable. If you miss out on the earlier steps, you are less prepared for and have less capacity to enjoy the later ones, especially when they're new. Being an adoptive parent is honorable but difficult.
Then there is the effect on the baby of missing out on all those developmentally normal environments and bonding opportunities.
I'm skeptical that we can ever develop artificial gestation, birth, formula, and childcare that replicate the benefits the maternal body and brain evolved to provide. Maybe if humans, breastmilk, etc. ever get so polluted with chemicals far more toxic than the artificial alternatives have, those could become best in comparison. But only if the situation were extremely dire. We're not there.
Again, I think we're much closer to being able to clear away some of the barriers to motherhood being able to really shine in its natural awesomeness than we are to being able to synthesize a better alternative from scratch. I think feminism should prioritize the former.
I would agree with you if we could reasonably limit childbearing to, say, the 1 in 10 women who are most enthusiastic about having children. But if we would like humanity to have a stable population size, then *most* women need to have children. "Most" is a demographic that includes an enormous number of ambitious women, women who love their jobs, women who find taking care of a baby mind-numbingly boring, women who like their kids but would rather watch them more like fifteen hours a week, women who hate breastfeeding, women with terrible experiences of pregnancy for medical reasons, women who view pregnancy as a burdensome imposition necessary in order to have a child, etc.
My goal is not to ban pregnancy or breastfeeding. My goal is to offer women more options.
Is there even anything feminist about this? It posits that the solution to female oppression is not the transformation of society, but the transformation of womanhood, which is to say that the solution to female oppression is the erasure of femininity. It mistakes KPIs like wage equality for the real goal, which should be for the women to live free, fulfilling lives.
the advancement of uterus transplants could also be amazing, i think. There are so many trans women who would literally kill to be able to become pregnant, and plenty of trans men who would do anything to get rid of their uterus. I hope that not only can we give the option of rearing children to all people, but also HOW to do it.
> Speech-recognition software is 70% more likely to accurately transcribe male voices than female voices. The reason speech-recognition software does worse on female voices is that the training corpuses mostly involve male voices.
> Edit, July 2020: Hello! This blog post has been cited quite a bit recently so I thought I’d update it with the more recent reserach. I’m no longer working actively on this topic, but in the last paper I wrote on it, in 2017, I found that when audio quality was controlled the gender effects disappeared. I take this to be evidence that differences in gender are due to differences in overall signal-to-noise ratio when recording in noisy environments rather than problems in the underlying ML models.
(Though that blog post / paper actually never claimed that speech-recognition software was 70% more likely to accurately transcribe male voices than female voices, just that "if you pick a random man and random woman from my sample, there’s an almost 70% chance the transcriptions will be more accurate for the man" which is a pretty different use of 70%.)
> Until 2011, there was _no_ female crash test dummy used to test crashes-- the crash test dummy was a median male, at an average male height and weight and with male muscle-mass proportions.
> NHTSA officials say they've used the female dummy in federal compliance crash tests since 2003, mostly to ensure air bags' safety. (...) However, those compliance tests gauge only whether a vehicle meets the government's minimum safety standards. Consumers can't readily see those results, and it's the star-rating tests that reveal how one vehicle's crash protections compare to another. (...) Even when not required in government tests, auto manufacturers have long used different dummies — including the female dummy and a larger 95th percentile male dummy — in internal tests.
(Incidentally, this bit from that article seems bad: "The female dummy is not put in the driver’s seat on the frontal crash test [for star-rating purposes], he said, because men drive more and die in greater numbers than female drivers.")
Not gonna accuse you of being merely gender dysphoric, but I think you do have some gender dysphoria talking. I’m the eggs producing sort as you said it (cis woman), and I like my biology; this is the one I want. Better birth control is good. I’d like a longer fertility window (though I do worry about second order effects. Kids at 40 means very very few kids are going to meet their grandparents or vice versa. Kids at 50 makes it nearly zero.) Though too I kind of suspect that’ll just partially move the career thing to a different time. Of course, I support artificial wombs.
But knowing your disability justice aware background, I have to say I think you’re coming at this from a pretty curism angle. Even though so much of your post is discussing problems that are *completely* societally caused. Makes me worry that in your imagined future with artificial wombs and full transhumanist transition, those who go for in vivo children are still gonna be left behind. There’s obviously a lot of good in that future; let’s not do that to it. For that matter, that’ll still ultimately make for a choice that isn’t truly free. And even in the best of circumstances, we’ve got a while left till that future. No one should have to have a biology they don’t want, but I don’t want a different one. I want to be treated right with the one I’ve got. And I don’t think I’m the only one.
That all sounds about right to me. Biology matters, and slipping ever-so-slightly more free of the tyranny of the worst parts of biology is something we should all agree on.
Thanks for this. I made many of the same points in a post about why the "fertility crisis" (not that I think there is one) is inevitable once women have some control over their lives/bodies, merely for the simple reason that nature dealt women a shit sandwich by imposing massive physical costs on them for reproduction, while the "cost" to a male is simply an orgasm. I set forth in detail the real physical costs of just one baby and asked men how much they'd have to be paid to go through those exact items. I got hundreds of likes from women, and dozens of comments from very angry men saying that I was a socially useless woman responsible for the downfall of society who was irrelevant, merely for pointing this irrefutable biological fact that none of them bothered arguing with (because of course, you can't). Of the few men who DID answer the how much would you have to be paid question in good faith, many said it was close to or more than a million dollars. That tells you everything you need to know right there.
I think it goes a bit far – men have no evolutionary incentive to want women to be pregnant *in general*, just to be pregnant with their kids or those of their male relatives. It may be fun to go "haha, women aren't biased due to biology, *men* are biased due to biology" but it's still a rude and dubious argument.
I'm a childfree woman who thinks other people's kids are adorable (including when they're crying on airplanes) and clearly superior to animals, and I don't think this is that rare. …I also think that plenty of mothers had access to contraception, chose to have children anyway, and then also chose to be poor parents, and it's reasonable to be displeased with those choices.
You mix a couple sociological sex-based risks (custody and child support, dating, year of breastfeeding, etc) in with the biological ones.
(Also, fun biology notes: Men can induce lactation. If you want to argue that men should induce lactation so that, after the woman is responsible for carrying the child, they can be responsible for nursing the child, that would not be insane. It is *also* possible for women to survive carrying abdominal pregnancies to term and produce healthy offspring, with medical help, and abdominal pregnancy is considered a potential model for male pregnancy – if you want to get really edgy, you can argue that men should have spare embryos implanted in the peritoneal lining. The uterus exists in significant part to protect the mother from the baby!)
I would encourage you to read the many comments if you think men don't have an irrational incentive to want women pregnant in general. It's a tribal species. There are dozens of comments from men saying all women should have all rights removed, to be enslaved, and to ban birth control if they dare to not have as many babies as men want. I'm guessing you probably don't wade into waters with right leaning men often if you don't think this is a VERY common reaction. That's who I was writing to. Of course the vast majority of women want kids. But they do DO not want as many as right wing men from the US to Afghanistan want them to have, which is basically infinity til their bodies give out. If you have not been exposed to this line of thought, count yourself lucky, they are all over Substack!
Can confirm. I've been on a lot of these blogs and, yeah, they try to live up to the worst stereotypes of manospherians. (Of course, there are feminist blogs that spend all their time going on about how bad men are...except maybe one the author saw sometime, and he's probably gay.)
I actually don't think it's about pregnancy per se though. It's more about antifeminism...one of the major points of feminism is abortion rights, so if you want to be as antifeminist as possible, it's the job of *all* women to get pregnant, constantly. "Your Body, My Choice" was of course an inversion of "My Body, My Choice"... I doubt Nick Fuentes or Andrew Tate really wants to impregnate every woman he sees. I think it sort of starts as trolling and pandering to guys looking for something edgy and dangerous that will horrify their mom and/or high school teacher, and they wind up believing it.
Admittedly my estimate was affected by my net worth! Which probably ties into feminist critiques of access to resources and who becomes a sex worker and so on…
Do any statistics exist on societies with no artificial birth control, but also *no* external pressure on women to have PIV with a bio-penis? Because you say,
| “In the absence of contraception, a sexually active adult woman will spend most of her reproductive years pregnant or breastfeeding, bearing one child every two to four years”
But that’s inaccurate. I strongly suspect that that number is for sexually active adult women whose sexual activity involves significant amounts of PIV with a bio-penis. (to my knowledge, PIV with a strap-on is perfectly safe from a pregnancy standpoint, and remains so if the strap-on is worn by an individual in possession of a bio-penis.) And while of course, many women enjoy PIV with a bio penis and should be freely able to have it without risking effects they don’t desire, my knowledge of the world suggests to me that the amount of PIV with a bio penis women were having was not in very many cases mainly caused by their desire to have it.
I think many of the issues described in "Invisible Women" is a more general problem with blindly doing things based on population-level statistics. It's true that, in many of these cases, the issue was a gender-based bias in the test sample. But, in general, each time we try to develop a single "general solution" to individual problems, we are going to run into problems with completely disregarding the tails of the probability distribution. Things developed for the "average person" is considered successful because it works X% of the time across a population, not because it has an X% chance of working for an individual. It's not like men with small hands will be able to play piano optimally either.
"Until 2011, there was no female crash test dummy used to test crashes-- the crash test dummy was a median male, at an average male height and weight and with male muscle-mass proportions."
Oh for god's sake. 2011? Was that the year they discovered that children sometimes are moved around by car, too?
I will be honest: I view much of this pretty intensely and viscerally negatively. I also have major doubts that much of this is going to actually happen, or be used for the imagined uses.
I would predict that if the artificial womb does indeed exist, it will be an device used by the elite and with little path to broader use, and society will be further dominated not by people who eliminate some of the challenges to reproduction but those who reproduce in spite of the challenges.
One may even see parallel paths with transhuman artificial wombs, abortion, contraception, and free love on one side, and cishuman augmentation, renunciation, stress response fertility modulation, and rigorous monogamy on the other. My prediction would be that the latter carry the day (and would dominate the Third World).
I also would note that there seems to be a huge difference between patriarchy as practiced by largely Christian societies, and by places that treated women as property, had polygamy, male mystery cults, socially sanctioned gang rape as punishment, etc. This rises to the level of, in my view, being hard to even call them the same time. (This is also something where "Judeo-Christian" may be a meaningful term as this often seems even more advanced among rabbinical Judaism than historical Christianity.)
Related to this, I think about 1. The contrast between British and American radfems, and 2. The accepting-dependence-and-biological-limitations-as-they-exist feminism concept of Other Feminisms / Leah Libresco (?)
Patriarchy as practiced by Christian societies seems to involve a solid amount of interfering with girls' educations and future options by forcing them to raise siblings, beating of children, promotion of the idea that one's virginity is more important than one's life, discouraging women from finding loving partners after leaving abusive husbands, etc.
This is all ignoring stuff I haven't seen evidence that Christian writers *support*. If I went there, I could go on all day. I'm also assuming you want to declare the FLDS not real Christians.
I am not disagreeing even slightly (see also: machismo BS culture in my wife's family), however, I think there's a very real distinction.
Possibly it's because of Christianity killing the harem meme? Or because the ancient societies that became Western Christendom didn't have it and Christianity solidified not having it?
"We often hesitate to say that something is unfair for women unless there is some specific (probably male) malefactor whom we could in principle convince not to do that."
This is very tangential to the main point of the essay (which I loved!) but I noticed that this is a sentiment I've only ever heard while living in California.
My joking hypothesis is that the weather is too nice there: Californians aren't used to having problems that no one is at fault for, whereas anyone who has ever had to live through a winter is familiar with the concept.
It is obvious to me, and i waited to see if someone else wrote it for me, but alas, that making pregnancy breastfeeding etc voluntary is a way to make it more high-status and supported. so it's not trade-off, quite the opposite.
the low status assign to female activities is a result of game theory and BATNA. so if we will change it (and wait for social norms to change) then we will see how child-rearing jobs change to be low supply and high demand, and their market-clearing value will rise.
of course, we will need to prevent the attempt to force women back to their place, and to make us take the worse deal by force. you can see it with all the conservatives that try to solve the low fertility crisis by forbidding women to do things that are not motherhood, instead of making motherhood the better option. i remember only one post on who to make motherhood the better options by paying women more, and the different between someone who think there is a real problem and try to solve it, and someone who written the bottom line in advance was really clear.
but, if we will weather that, we can get to the future that value and support mothers, and other care workers.
and i just see no such a way without changing the basic game theory of the situation. we need to change the BATNA, and it mean to make sure there are other options.
First of all, very nicely done and argued. Frankly if I were a bit more rational I'd start calling myself a feminist.
A couple of nitpicks:
"patrilocal residence, patrilineal descent, male-biased inheritance of significant property, and ideologies of male dominance"
So...um, 2.5 out of 4 no longer obtain? Modern Western society is neolocal, sorta-patrilineal in terms of names, usually has evenly partible inheritance as an average, and ideologies of male dominance...depends on whether you're in SF or Alabama. Modern wokery is an ideology of female dominance or at least moral superiority and was influential through 2024 and still obtains in universities, legacy media, publishing companies, etc.
"Anecdotally, young men often go through life assuming that sex is a fun recreational activity, much like tennis, and like tennis it would be a horrific injustice if it sometimes resulted in an eighteen-year three-hundred-thousand-dollar commitment to raising a vulnerable human. Young women don’t. Sexually active women know the fear that their period has come late"
This was basically true for a long time, though now young men are starting to feel 'the cold spike of fear' Ezra Klein cheered on.
Pianists, speech-recognition software, car crashes, farm equipment... OK, but men still die sooner. Part of that's biological and part of it's just male risk-taking (which is partly biological, of course), but I do wonder if those examples are partially cherry-picked and there aren't other examples of double standards that favor women for protective reasons (I'm thinking of 'women and children first). Others may have other ideas about how you could 'average over everything' in some kind of objective way.
"Inexplicably, actually existing radical feminists generally seem to have concluded that the root of patriarchy is that some people like BDSM porn."
OK, I haven't laughed that hard in ages (leading to some funny looks at work). In some alternate plane of existence, Louise Perry screams.
I could say more about the secret preference of many feminists for being the sub as a reason they haven't gone after kink harder...but that is my conspiracy theory alone.
But, the oral contraceptive being a bigger deal than anything else? Yes, I agree. (You probably ought to toss labor-saving devices like the washing machine in there, housework used to be a lot more time-consuming, but you're not *wrong*.)
I do think artificial wombs would help. Like, I think the maternal instinct is stronger in women and you wouldn't see it all go away, but I bet a lot of things that are now 75-25 would become 65-35, and so on.
One thing I should add, though, is that childrearing is more pleasant than a lot of actual jobs for a lot of people. Like, maybe it's not as much fun for intellectual women as being a lawyer or doctor or author, but being a waitress...? a nurse's aide...? a maid...? I could easily see cleaning the house you live in for a guy you love being preferable to cleaning ten houses you don't live in for a guy who doesn't give a rat's ass about you, or preparing food for your children in your own kitchen being preferable to preparing food for a hundred angry customers in someone else's kitchen. Not that those are the only two options, and you still run into the 'not having your own money' problem, but I can definitely see why the 'tradwife' thing might be preferable to the corporate jungle or the blue-collar grind.
Anyway, well said, from your ideological opponent. I take a break from my hamster wheel to raise my glass of elderberry juice to you.
I wonder why the source you cited mentions one's thirties as the time to get ahead in one's career. In my experience one's twenties are just as bad, and if you have kids in your teens then you miss your education. There's really no time in a woman's reproductive life when it's convenient to take off time for kids.
When I had my first kid at 24, I was making more than my husband (though we both made very little). I quit that job because it was not enough to pay for daycare, and I wanted to breastfeed. When I was 26, he started a graduate degree, and I had another baby. When I was 29, he got a professional job using that degree, and I had another baby. When I was 31, he was getting raises, and I had another baby. Unsurprisingly my hourly pay is about 1/5 of his. It would be easy to switch which of us is the breadwinner, except that my earning potential can't compare, and these kids are too expensive for me to take 15 years catching up.
Your conclusion is dead on. I was a Catholic feminist for some years until I realized, we would never be equal without birth control. As long as the vast majority of women were constantly engaged in having children, no amount of theoretical equality would allow our voices to be heard to a comparable degree.
I think artificial wombs would be great. Though men on twitter love to cheer for them because then they "wouldn't need women for anything." I'm kinda baffled that they think they need us now. They aren't acting like we provide something valuable and have negotiating power because of it. This kind of guy hates us even while cheerfully using as much of women's free labor as he can get.
> I think artificial wombs would be great. Though men on twitter love to cheer for them because then they "wouldn't need women for anything."
One of Lois McMaster Bujold's least-appreciated novels is "Ethan of Athos." The premise was that after a working artificial womb was invented, a whole bunch of angry Men Going Their Own Way took a bunch of artificial wombs and gamete cultures, and rather than sitting around whining, the men _went_. And settled a backwater planet.
Now fast-forward a couple of hundred years. The planet is still inhabited only by men, and they still see women as some of abstract, semi-mythical danger. But since artificial wombs don't take care of child care, the men had to build a whole new culture of fatherhood and childrearing _without_ a gendered division of labor. And in Bujold's hands, this becomes an interesting thought experiment...
One of my favorite books!
I feel like the bit about "patriarchy" is missing something about how patriarchies aren't generically rule by *men* but rule by *fathers* (and husbands). Which is to say it's not great for children either! (Or unmarried young men, who may still be subject to their father's rule, but obviously women have the worse situation there in that they likely only get a choice of tyrants.)
Yeah. You can see how the meaning's morphed naturally, but it is a bit awkward that a word meaning "senior male gets to boss everyone else around, including other adult men" has now come to mean "most CEOs and politicians are male, and the world was designed around men in various ways". Both bad, but one's worse, and confusing them is unhelpful.
It's still a rule by some men at the expense of other men (as well as at the expense of women). It's just that the Patriarchs are no longer determined by blood relation.
True dat. But I think the two main things making the old way a capital-P Patriarchy are a) families being run by patriarchs and b) the assumption that a woman should obey her husband.
Argh! Love your blog, don't love the perspective in this post. Factually and game theory wise, most of the foundation is fair enough.
But it MATTERS whether the things that only females can do (gestating, birthing, breastfeeding), or are biologically wired to more often prefer to do (childrearing), are inherently awful, or have the potential to be awesome.
It's one thing if they're inherently awful. Then all you can do is avoid them with contraception and abortion, or outsource them to the underclass with surrogacy, night nurses with formula, and daycare.
It's another thing if they have the potential to be awesome. I say potential, because anything can be ruined in part or full by coercion, extreme poverty, social disapproval, or just a bad personal fit. And sure, menstrual cramps are no picnic (nor are headaches, but I enjoy what my head can do). But many people are personally well suited to motherhood, and it is usually an awesome experience if they have the following privileges:
A good spouse
Autonomy to choose if/when to have kids
Disability leave during the hardest parts of pregnancy
A respectful and affordable birth team
A year of paid maternal leave or the ability to live on the spouse's income
Reasonably feminist civil rights and custody laws (unlike they have in China)
The general approval of society
I think that most mothers who have those privileges love it with a passion. Heck, I think that most mothers do lack one or more of those privileges and still love it on net, just with more reservations. The #1 thing that both men and women say gives meaning to their life is family.
Moloch tries to squeeze us into situations that make it harder to enjoy having a family. Every time I hear the statistic that 25% of mothers in the US go back to work within two weeks of having a baby, I want to vomit. I'm not sure I would want another baby if I were forced to do that. Much (most?) suffering surrounding motherhood is more due to lacking the privileges above than from motherhood itself.
I think it's disappointing, even infuriating, to look at the thing that gives most humans so much fulfillment, the thing that's often the best experience of someone's life and totally unreplaceable, and to say "looks risky, isn't easy to tax, let's socially disincentive this." Further, I think it's anti-feminist to specifically rob FEMALES of the thing in life that gives us even higher heights of meaning and embodiment and passion than males. Why are women, and the things women like, the problem we should scour away?
On net we've made life so much better for women and mothers (and men and fathers and children) over the centuries. The sex realist game theory foundation is there, but the whole point of society is to be less unforgiving than nature. I think collectively giving up on motherhood at this point, giving up on the female body and this unique and primal experience, would be a huge injustice to women. In comparison to the strides feminists have already made, it looks easy to expand access to the few things above. Let's not give up now.
I also have thoughts about society supporting people in vulnerable but contributory roles. When you're pregnant or birthing or carrying around a baby, you are vulnerable. You can't defend yourself as well against an attacker. You can't hold down the average paying job as well. You can't even do traditional women's work like cooking as well then as when you are childfree. You're vulnerable, and others have to support you in a variety of ways. Time to get cast away on the iceberg, right? Not in a healthy society.
You know who else is vulnerable and needs others to support them in a variety of ways? Most white-collar workers. Whether you are Johannes Kepler in 1600, or a modern scientist at a lab nowadays, you would probably starve if dumped in the wilderness. You probably work a lot of overtime, and someone else probably cooks your food and does most of your other human activities for you. If your telescope gets stolen, or the government cancels all the grants in your field, you won't be able to do your important and specialized work. You have chosen to focus on your area of comparative advantage. Your ability to do so safely and happily depends on your family and society being supportive and stable.
It's similar for mothers (and their babies). It may be natural, but in some ways it's also like being the specialized worker, the top of Maslow's pyramid, the proverbial pencil or root beer that depends on a vast trade network. They're all vulnerable - but worth investing social technology in protecting.
I kiiiinda agree here, partially because I was lucky enough to get genetically favourable "female embodiment" experience and so far (up to mid menopause) have mostly ON BALANCE enjoyed being a female mammal, by a fairly broad definition of "enjoyed". Probably more than I enjoyed most social/psychosocial aspects of being a woman (luckily or not nobody ever forced me to be a girl).
So I think that much of the problems that Ozy describes could be solved -- FOR WOMEN / FEMALES WHO WANT TO PRODUCE CHILDREN -- by treating that, socially, as an important, at least mid-level status, well paid job, not something you "suspend" your actual proper job to indulge in. Especially as so sooooo much paid work (including many "career jobs") is utterly bulshit.
> Further, I think it's anti-feminist to specifically rob FEMALES of the thing in life that gives us even higher heights of meaning and embodiment and passion than males. Why are women, and the things women like, the problem we should scour away?
Don’t agree with calling it ‘things women like’ or specific to females and so on, but thank you, this really brings up something important I was missing!
It wouldn’t surprise me if even in the transhumanist transition future, it’s to any extent more common among women (and possibly to any extent more common among people who in our society would be assigned female at birth) to have a greater level of attachment to pregnancy and breastfeeding and so on. And it’s unquestionable that pregnancy and breastfeeding and so on are *associated* with women, both historically and in our society. Thus, treating it as only a burden to be gotten rid of is gonna be sexism/misogyny. And no matter how robust an opt-out is provided, continuing to societally disadvantage *pregnancy and breastfeeding* is gonna be sexism/misogyny. (devaluing and disadvantaging something associated with women; disproportionally disadvantaging women.) Fighting that disadvantaging must continue to be part of the work of feminism.
I mean Ozy never really said that? He said childbirth, the sickness of menopause and pregnancy and the fact that you're not fertile for long sucks, and that we should ideally science our way out of these things. Do you disagree?
He said that pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding suck so irredeemably that we should stop doing them and science our way to artificial alternatives. I disagree.
TBC I don't mean that women should be obligated to use artificial wombs, formula that is better for babies than breastmilk, etc. once they're developed (any more than they are presently obligated to use birth control or epidurals).
Thanks for clarifying that artificial alternatives wouldn't be mandatory. I still disagree that developing them should be the top priority of feminism.
I think there's more benefit to be had in prioritizing access to the privileges I listed, so that women can enjoy pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and childrearing to their fuller potential.
Something I didn't mention before is that there are lots of hormonal and neurobiological changes that happen as a result of gestation, birth, and breastfeeding that make each of those as well as childrearing more enjoyable. If you miss out on the earlier steps, you are less prepared for and have less capacity to enjoy the later ones, especially when they're new. Being an adoptive parent is honorable but difficult.
Then there is the effect on the baby of missing out on all those developmentally normal environments and bonding opportunities.
I'm skeptical that we can ever develop artificial gestation, birth, formula, and childcare that replicate the benefits the maternal body and brain evolved to provide. Maybe if humans, breastmilk, etc. ever get so polluted with chemicals far more toxic than the artificial alternatives have, those could become best in comparison. But only if the situation were extremely dire. We're not there.
Again, I think we're much closer to being able to clear away some of the barriers to motherhood being able to really shine in its natural awesomeness than we are to being able to synthesize a better alternative from scratch. I think feminism should prioritize the former.
I would agree with you if we could reasonably limit childbearing to, say, the 1 in 10 women who are most enthusiastic about having children. But if we would like humanity to have a stable population size, then *most* women need to have children. "Most" is a demographic that includes an enormous number of ambitious women, women who love their jobs, women who find taking care of a baby mind-numbingly boring, women who like their kids but would rather watch them more like fifteen hours a week, women who hate breastfeeding, women with terrible experiences of pregnancy for medical reasons, women who view pregnancy as a burdensome imposition necessary in order to have a child, etc.
My goal is not to ban pregnancy or breastfeeding. My goal is to offer women more options.
Is there even anything feminist about this? It posits that the solution to female oppression is not the transformation of society, but the transformation of womanhood, which is to say that the solution to female oppression is the erasure of femininity. It mistakes KPIs like wage equality for the real goal, which should be for the women to live free, fulfilling lives.
Bingo.
the advancement of uterus transplants could also be amazing, i think. There are so many trans women who would literally kill to be able to become pregnant, and plenty of trans men who would do anything to get rid of their uterus. I hope that not only can we give the option of rearing children to all people, but also HOW to do it.
> Speech-recognition software is 70% more likely to accurately transcribe male voices than female voices. The reason speech-recognition software does worse on female voices is that the training corpuses mostly involve male voices.
I think this one turned out to not be true. Googling that fact, I click through a blog post about the "invisible women" book to get to this blog post https://makingnoiseandhearingthings.com/2016/07/12/googles-speech-recognition-has-a-gender-bias/ which on the top says
> Edit, July 2020: Hello! This blog post has been cited quite a bit recently so I thought I’d update it with the more recent reserach. I’m no longer working actively on this topic, but in the last paper I wrote on it, in 2017, I found that when audio quality was controlled the gender effects disappeared. I take this to be evidence that differences in gender are due to differences in overall signal-to-noise ratio when recording in noisy environments rather than problems in the underlying ML models.
(Though that blog post / paper actually never claimed that speech-recognition software was 70% more likely to accurately transcribe male voices than female voices, just that "if you pick a random man and random woman from my sample, there’s an almost 70% chance the transcriptions will be more accurate for the man" which is a pretty different use of 70%.)
> Until 2011, there was _no_ female crash test dummy used to test crashes-- the crash test dummy was a median male, at an average male height and weight and with male muscle-mass proportions.
Also I think this one should be qualified to talk about some particular tests? According to washington post https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/female-dummy-makes-her-mark-on-male-dominated-crash-tests/2012/03/07/gIQANBLjaS_story.html
> NHTSA officials say they've used the female dummy in federal compliance crash tests since 2003, mostly to ensure air bags' safety. (...) However, those compliance tests gauge only whether a vehicle meets the government's minimum safety standards. Consumers can't readily see those results, and it's the star-rating tests that reveal how one vehicle's crash protections compare to another. (...) Even when not required in government tests, auto manufacturers have long used different dummies — including the female dummy and a larger 95th percentile male dummy — in internal tests.
(Incidentally, this bit from that article seems bad: "The female dummy is not put in the driver’s seat on the frontal crash test [for star-rating purposes], he said, because men drive more and die in greater numbers than female drivers.")
I can't believe it's actually called hoe culture.
I know this is a silly comment on a serious post, but come on. There has to be a better name for it.
This is not a coincidence etc.
I used to work at a garden centre. The "place where we keep the hoes" was a running joke.
It seems that “horticultural society” is sometimes used. Example:
https://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/richerson/BooksOnline/He4-95.pdf
But that’s also a somewhat unfortunate search term because it can be confused with a gardening club.
"You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."
Not gonna accuse you of being merely gender dysphoric, but I think you do have some gender dysphoria talking. I’m the eggs producing sort as you said it (cis woman), and I like my biology; this is the one I want. Better birth control is good. I’d like a longer fertility window (though I do worry about second order effects. Kids at 40 means very very few kids are going to meet their grandparents or vice versa. Kids at 50 makes it nearly zero.) Though too I kind of suspect that’ll just partially move the career thing to a different time. Of course, I support artificial wombs.
But knowing your disability justice aware background, I have to say I think you’re coming at this from a pretty curism angle. Even though so much of your post is discussing problems that are *completely* societally caused. Makes me worry that in your imagined future with artificial wombs and full transhumanist transition, those who go for in vivo children are still gonna be left behind. There’s obviously a lot of good in that future; let’s not do that to it. For that matter, that’ll still ultimately make for a choice that isn’t truly free. And even in the best of circumstances, we’ve got a while left till that future. No one should have to have a biology they don’t want, but I don’t want a different one. I want to be treated right with the one I’ve got. And I don’t think I’m the only one.
That all sounds about right to me. Biology matters, and slipping ever-so-slightly more free of the tyranny of the worst parts of biology is something we should all agree on.
Thanks for this. I made many of the same points in a post about why the "fertility crisis" (not that I think there is one) is inevitable once women have some control over their lives/bodies, merely for the simple reason that nature dealt women a shit sandwich by imposing massive physical costs on them for reproduction, while the "cost" to a male is simply an orgasm. I set forth in detail the real physical costs of just one baby and asked men how much they'd have to be paid to go through those exact items. I got hundreds of likes from women, and dozens of comments from very angry men saying that I was a socially useless woman responsible for the downfall of society who was irrelevant, merely for pointing this irrefutable biological fact that none of them bothered arguing with (because of course, you can't). Of the few men who DID answer the how much would you have to be paid question in good faith, many said it was close to or more than a million dollars. That tells you everything you need to know right there.
You're talking about this post, right?
https://kryptogal.substack.com/p/the-fertility-crisis-is-inevitable
I think it goes a bit far – men have no evolutionary incentive to want women to be pregnant *in general*, just to be pregnant with their kids or those of their male relatives. It may be fun to go "haha, women aren't biased due to biology, *men* are biased due to biology" but it's still a rude and dubious argument.
I'm a childfree woman who thinks other people's kids are adorable (including when they're crying on airplanes) and clearly superior to animals, and I don't think this is that rare. …I also think that plenty of mothers had access to contraception, chose to have children anyway, and then also chose to be poor parents, and it's reasonable to be displeased with those choices.
You mix a couple sociological sex-based risks (custody and child support, dating, year of breastfeeding, etc) in with the biological ones.
(Also, fun biology notes: Men can induce lactation. If you want to argue that men should induce lactation so that, after the woman is responsible for carrying the child, they can be responsible for nursing the child, that would not be insane. It is *also* possible for women to survive carrying abdominal pregnancies to term and produce healthy offspring, with medical help, and abdominal pregnancy is considered a potential model for male pregnancy – if you want to get really edgy, you can argue that men should have spare embryos implanted in the peritoneal lining. The uterus exists in significant part to protect the mother from the baby!)
I would encourage you to read the many comments if you think men don't have an irrational incentive to want women pregnant in general. It's a tribal species. There are dozens of comments from men saying all women should have all rights removed, to be enslaved, and to ban birth control if they dare to not have as many babies as men want. I'm guessing you probably don't wade into waters with right leaning men often if you don't think this is a VERY common reaction. That's who I was writing to. Of course the vast majority of women want kids. But they do DO not want as many as right wing men from the US to Afghanistan want them to have, which is basically infinity til their bodies give out. If you have not been exposed to this line of thought, count yourself lucky, they are all over Substack!
Can confirm. I've been on a lot of these blogs and, yeah, they try to live up to the worst stereotypes of manospherians. (Of course, there are feminist blogs that spend all their time going on about how bad men are...except maybe one the author saw sometime, and he's probably gay.)
I actually don't think it's about pregnancy per se though. It's more about antifeminism...one of the major points of feminism is abortion rights, so if you want to be as antifeminist as possible, it's the job of *all* women to get pregnant, constantly. "Your Body, My Choice" was of course an inversion of "My Body, My Choice"... I doubt Nick Fuentes or Andrew Tate really wants to impregnate every woman he sees. I think it sort of starts as trolling and pandering to guys looking for something edgy and dangerous that will horrify their mom and/or high school teacher, and they wind up believing it.
Admittedly my estimate was affected by my net worth! Which probably ties into feminist critiques of access to resources and who becomes a sex worker and so on…
Do any statistics exist on societies with no artificial birth control, but also *no* external pressure on women to have PIV with a bio-penis? Because you say,
| “In the absence of contraception, a sexually active adult woman will spend most of her reproductive years pregnant or breastfeeding, bearing one child every two to four years”
But that’s inaccurate. I strongly suspect that that number is for sexually active adult women whose sexual activity involves significant amounts of PIV with a bio-penis. (to my knowledge, PIV with a strap-on is perfectly safe from a pregnancy standpoint, and remains so if the strap-on is worn by an individual in possession of a bio-penis.) And while of course, many women enjoy PIV with a bio penis and should be freely able to have it without risking effects they don’t desire, my knowledge of the world suggests to me that the amount of PIV with a bio penis women were having was not in very many cases mainly caused by their desire to have it.
I think many of the issues described in "Invisible Women" is a more general problem with blindly doing things based on population-level statistics. It's true that, in many of these cases, the issue was a gender-based bias in the test sample. But, in general, each time we try to develop a single "general solution" to individual problems, we are going to run into problems with completely disregarding the tails of the probability distribution. Things developed for the "average person" is considered successful because it works X% of the time across a population, not because it has an X% chance of working for an individual. It's not like men with small hands will be able to play piano optimally either.
"Until 2011, there was no female crash test dummy used to test crashes-- the crash test dummy was a median male, at an average male height and weight and with male muscle-mass proportions."
Oh for god's sake. 2011? Was that the year they discovered that children sometimes are moved around by car, too?
I will be honest: I view much of this pretty intensely and viscerally negatively. I also have major doubts that much of this is going to actually happen, or be used for the imagined uses.
I would predict that if the artificial womb does indeed exist, it will be an device used by the elite and with little path to broader use, and society will be further dominated not by people who eliminate some of the challenges to reproduction but those who reproduce in spite of the challenges.
One may even see parallel paths with transhuman artificial wombs, abortion, contraception, and free love on one side, and cishuman augmentation, renunciation, stress response fertility modulation, and rigorous monogamy on the other. My prediction would be that the latter carry the day (and would dominate the Third World).
I also would note that there seems to be a huge difference between patriarchy as practiced by largely Christian societies, and by places that treated women as property, had polygamy, male mystery cults, socially sanctioned gang rape as punishment, etc. This rises to the level of, in my view, being hard to even call them the same time. (This is also something where "Judeo-Christian" may be a meaningful term as this often seems even more advanced among rabbinical Judaism than historical Christianity.)
Related to this, I think about 1. The contrast between British and American radfems, and 2. The accepting-dependence-and-biological-limitations-as-they-exist feminism concept of Other Feminisms / Leah Libresco (?)
Patriarchy as practiced by Christian societies seems to involve a solid amount of interfering with girls' educations and future options by forcing them to raise siblings, beating of children, promotion of the idea that one's virginity is more important than one's life, discouraging women from finding loving partners after leaving abusive husbands, etc.
This is all ignoring stuff I haven't seen evidence that Christian writers *support*. If I went there, I could go on all day. I'm also assuming you want to declare the FLDS not real Christians.
I am not disagreeing even slightly (see also: machismo BS culture in my wife's family), however, I think there's a very real distinction.
Possibly it's because of Christianity killing the harem meme? Or because the ancient societies that became Western Christendom didn't have it and Christianity solidified not having it?
"We often hesitate to say that something is unfair for women unless there is some specific (probably male) malefactor whom we could in principle convince not to do that."
This is very tangential to the main point of the essay (which I loved!) but I noticed that this is a sentiment I've only ever heard while living in California.
My joking hypothesis is that the weather is too nice there: Californians aren't used to having problems that no one is at fault for, whereas anyone who has ever had to live through a winter is familiar with the concept.
It is obvious to me, and i waited to see if someone else wrote it for me, but alas, that making pregnancy breastfeeding etc voluntary is a way to make it more high-status and supported. so it's not trade-off, quite the opposite.
the low status assign to female activities is a result of game theory and BATNA. so if we will change it (and wait for social norms to change) then we will see how child-rearing jobs change to be low supply and high demand, and their market-clearing value will rise.
of course, we will need to prevent the attempt to force women back to their place, and to make us take the worse deal by force. you can see it with all the conservatives that try to solve the low fertility crisis by forbidding women to do things that are not motherhood, instead of making motherhood the better option. i remember only one post on who to make motherhood the better options by paying women more, and the different between someone who think there is a real problem and try to solve it, and someone who written the bottom line in advance was really clear.
but, if we will weather that, we can get to the future that value and support mothers, and other care workers.
and i just see no such a way without changing the basic game theory of the situation. we need to change the BATNA, and it mean to make sure there are other options.
First of all, very nicely done and argued. Frankly if I were a bit more rational I'd start calling myself a feminist.
A couple of nitpicks:
"patrilocal residence, patrilineal descent, male-biased inheritance of significant property, and ideologies of male dominance"
So...um, 2.5 out of 4 no longer obtain? Modern Western society is neolocal, sorta-patrilineal in terms of names, usually has evenly partible inheritance as an average, and ideologies of male dominance...depends on whether you're in SF or Alabama. Modern wokery is an ideology of female dominance or at least moral superiority and was influential through 2024 and still obtains in universities, legacy media, publishing companies, etc.
"Anecdotally, young men often go through life assuming that sex is a fun recreational activity, much like tennis, and like tennis it would be a horrific injustice if it sometimes resulted in an eighteen-year three-hundred-thousand-dollar commitment to raising a vulnerable human. Young women don’t. Sexually active women know the fear that their period has come late"
This was basically true for a long time, though now young men are starting to feel 'the cold spike of fear' Ezra Klein cheered on.
Pianists, speech-recognition software, car crashes, farm equipment... OK, but men still die sooner. Part of that's biological and part of it's just male risk-taking (which is partly biological, of course), but I do wonder if those examples are partially cherry-picked and there aren't other examples of double standards that favor women for protective reasons (I'm thinking of 'women and children first). Others may have other ideas about how you could 'average over everything' in some kind of objective way.
"Inexplicably, actually existing radical feminists generally seem to have concluded that the root of patriarchy is that some people like BDSM porn."
OK, I haven't laughed that hard in ages (leading to some funny looks at work). In some alternate plane of existence, Louise Perry screams.
I could say more about the secret preference of many feminists for being the sub as a reason they haven't gone after kink harder...but that is my conspiracy theory alone.
But, the oral contraceptive being a bigger deal than anything else? Yes, I agree. (You probably ought to toss labor-saving devices like the washing machine in there, housework used to be a lot more time-consuming, but you're not *wrong*.)
I do think artificial wombs would help. Like, I think the maternal instinct is stronger in women and you wouldn't see it all go away, but I bet a lot of things that are now 75-25 would become 65-35, and so on.
One thing I should add, though, is that childrearing is more pleasant than a lot of actual jobs for a lot of people. Like, maybe it's not as much fun for intellectual women as being a lawyer or doctor or author, but being a waitress...? a nurse's aide...? a maid...? I could easily see cleaning the house you live in for a guy you love being preferable to cleaning ten houses you don't live in for a guy who doesn't give a rat's ass about you, or preparing food for your children in your own kitchen being preferable to preparing food for a hundred angry customers in someone else's kitchen. Not that those are the only two options, and you still run into the 'not having your own money' problem, but I can definitely see why the 'tradwife' thing might be preferable to the corporate jungle or the blue-collar grind.
Anyway, well said, from your ideological opponent. I take a break from my hamster wheel to raise my glass of elderberry juice to you.