Vaniver comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong

74 Post author: Yvain 19 January 2014 02:51AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 28 January 2014 01:17:18AM *  6 points [-]

A comment like that comes from a person who isn't even trying to imagine himself in a place of someone who is actually going to conceive and carry to term all those as many as they can children.

While I understand the sentiment here (and I know a number of women who share it), I'm not sure this is correct. I was under the impression that eugenic impulses and pro-natalism were close to evenly split among the genders, and if there was an imbalance, it was that women were more likely to be interested in having babies and in having good babies. It may be easier to convince the marginal man than the marginal woman that they should have children, because the marginal man might have lower cost to do so, but that doesn't imply that the arguing is mostly being done by men. (And if this particular argument looks focused on men, well, baiter did just look at the survey results!)

A woman who reads this will correctly conclude that this isn't a place where she is considered a person.

"Considered a person" is a phrase that can mean a lot of things. I think the meaning you're going for here is something like "bodily autonomy is respected," but one of the other ways to interpret it is something like "desires are validated." And I think that being harsh to natalism is one way to invalidate the desires of a lot of people, and I suspect that burden falls disproportionally on women.

Consider this baby announcement, where a significant portion of the response was 'your baby is off-topic,' which reminded me of rms. I don't think that LW should have sections for people to talk about anything people want to be on-topic; I think specialization is a good idea. But I think that viewing these sorts of impulses and arguments as explicitly or implicitly anti-women is a mistake: imagine being one of James_Miller's students who thought it was really sweet and humanizing for him to include a relaxing, personally relevant picture on the final exam, and then coming to LW and discovering that a highly upvoted response to that is 'well, don't satisfy those values, that would be condescending.' Well, thanks.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 February 2014 05:32:16PM 2 points [-]

A comment like that comes from a person who isn't even trying to imagine himself in a place of someone who is actually going to conceive and carry to term all those as many as they can children.

While I understand the sentiment here (and I know a number of women who share it), I'm not sure this is correct. I was under the impression that eugenic impulses and pro-natalism were close to evenly split among the genders, and if there was an imbalance, it was that women were more likely to be interested in having babies and in having good babies.

FWIW, the percentage of people who have no children and don't want any is pretty much the same among cis women (39/124 = 31.5%) as among all survey respondents, and so is that of people who don't have children and are uncertain (38/124 = 30.6%).