Despite Birth Rate Concerns, GOP Stays Laser-Focused On Helping Men Become More Repulsive To Women
And in so many ways!
Some interesting news coming out of South Korea this week — Kim Hee Soo, the governor of the southern Jindo county in South Jeolla province, was booted out of his own party for suggesting that the nation “import young unmarried women” from other countries like Sri Lanka and Vietnam in order to marry “young men in rural areas” of South Korea and have their babies.
The Democratic Party of South Korea announced on Monday that they had voted him out, on account of how insulting and dehumanizing his comments were to Sri Lankan and Vietnamese women, not to mention women everywhere.
It occurred to me that, had this happened in the Republican Party of the United States, the only internal outrage that would result would be over the fact that they don’t want any more immigrants and also want to maintain racial purity for white folks. Certainly, no one would be ousted. Jordan Peterson once suggested a “redistribution” of women in order to prevent incels from committing mass murders and became even more popular on the Right afterwards.
The birth rate has been a hot topic of conversation lately on the Right, as it dovetails nicely with the white supremacy and their “women need to get back to the kitchen” jags they’ve also been on. Our declining population would, of course, be a non-issue if we allowed more people to stay here and to come here; the reason this is unacceptable to the Right is because what they really want is more white people. They are very obsessed with “preserving the culture,” which does not seem like a thing they should be in charge of, given that they think Kid Rock is the pinnacle of it.
This week, Fox News published an op-ed from Peggy Nance — the president and CEO of Concerned Women for America and upholder of the proud Conservative tradition of traveling around the country telling other women to stay home — titled “What Usha Vance’s pregnancy news tells us about men and women in America.”
Second lady Usha Vance’s announcement of baby number four was delightful and refreshing news. Having four children in the U.S. is not the norm these days. Across the U.S., women are having fewer children, or none at all. As a parent myself, I hope Vance’s news will encourage more women to do the same.
A woman’s decision to have children is often seen as a personal lifestyle choice. However, this decision also affects the nation: without enough births to maintain its population, a country struggles to sustain its economy, communities and culture.
But that is where the discussion of Usha Vance and what is absolutely her “personal lifestyle choice” to have another child ends. Indeed, she doesn’t even get mentioned again until the very last sentence. Rather, Nance uses Vance’s pregnancy to blame the lack of pregnancies on … men watching porn.
The reasons women give for avoiding motherhood are real: children and childcare are expensive; many careers demand total availability during a woman’s prime fertility years. Often, the culture treats motherhood as a professional liability rather than a benefit to society.
But there is another factor few are willing to say out loud — one that affects women long before they ever consider having children. Increasingly, women are not delaying motherhood because they do not want families: they are having trouble finding men who are ready to build one.
Modern dating is broken, and pornography has played a devastating role. Millions of men now habitually consume pornography. Barna Group data from 2024 found that 78% of U.S. men (ages 13–65) consume pornography “to some extent.” But this is not harmless entertainment. Many studies have shown that heavy pornography consumption distorts expectations, damages emotional intimacy, reduces motivation and undermines real-world relationships.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s it.
People’s choices on whether or not to have children are their own. However, I am going to need to point out here that not only do Republicans oppose practically every policy on earth that would make it easier for people who want children to have them — subsidized child care, subsidized health care, subsidized college, raising the minimum wage, lowering housing costs, ending at-will employment so people feel secure in their jobs, cutting the work week down, encouraging businesses to allow people to continue working remotely, and, of course, parental leave — they are also working pretty damned hard to make both young men and marriage as repulsive to women as humanly possible.
Now, MAGA has won the hearts and minds of many men across the country by advocating for a future that is, in many ways, pretty much the past. They want to get women out of the workforce and back to the kitchen, popping out babies as young as possible, and they have made that clear. They talk about how the country needs to get rid of “no-fault divorce” so that women can’t divorce their husbands unless they can prove that they were abusive or adulterous (it will, of course, be quite difficult to hire a PI to prove adultery with no money of their own).
If you go over to what was formerly Twitter, you will see endless amounts of tweets proclaiming #RepealThe19th, from MAGA conservatives arguing that everything would be better if women lost the right to vote.
It’s not a very good deal for women. It never was. That is why we pushed for change in the first place. The fact is, even many Republican women have dreams and goals for themselves beyond cooking and cleaning for a husband and children and may not be quite as keen as men are to go back to the 1950s (or back to before before 1919). MAGA mouthpieces have tried to counter this by endlessly blathering on about how terribly unhappy feminism and the sexual revolution have made us all (without asking us about that, natch), and how we’d be so much happier fulfilling our “natural” role as wives and mothers … but they haven’t gotten too many takers. Even the TikTok tradwives make a lot of money and often end up being the (sourdough) breadwinners in their families. This was a whole ass plot point on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Hell, even some far-right, anti-feminist women have ended up learning the hard way that there is an actual reason why women didn’t want to continue being Stepford Wives.
Aside from the whole “wanting to take away our rights and trying to make us all make the same choices for our lives, that just so happen to benefit men a lot more than they benefit us” thing, there’s also the “culture.”
I mean, the Right likes to talk about “culture,” right? So let’s talk about culture. Let’s talk about the culture the Right has created, about the Groypers, about the Manosphere, about Elon Musk, about Andrew Tate and so on. These are people who openly hate women. In the latter case, it’s someone who openly admits to abusing women and encourages other men to do the same.
He’s a big celebrity in Penny Nance’s world! He’s someone whom members of the Trump administration have advocated for, someone who is giving romantic advice to Barron Trump. And he is is currently facing charges in several countries for sex trafficking.
As much as not all women want to be housewives, I can pretty much guarantee that almost no women want a guy to pretend to be madly in love with them for the purpose of getting them to move to Romania and become a webcam girl for them. Is that something Peggy would be into? Were she single, would she want to date or marry someone who admired him?
As a Concerned Woman for America, she’s very “concerned” about people watching porn, but is she “concerned” that one of the people having the most influence on young men is a man who forced women into it? Probably not, and if she did, she’d never say anything about it because it would not go over very well.
There is a reason why the denizens of 4chan are famously “involuntarily celibate.” Yet that sort of worldview, that kind of vulgar, 14-year-old edgelord behavior, that kind of outright misogyny and racism is becoming the norm for many men on the Right, largely because of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Donald Trump says horrible, demeaning things to women, and many young men have chosen to follow in his footsteps. Go over to what used to be Twitter and it’s the same kind of grotesque cesspool that 4chan used to be.
It’s been a well-known fact for some time now that young women are getting increasingly liberal while young men are getting increasingly conservative. Since Republicans love talking about “biology” (at least the simplistic version of it they learned in sophomore year of high school), let us note that, if we’re talking about procreation, they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them. So pushing them further and further to the Right until they sound like a Klansman on the Jerry Springer show is … well, it’s not going to help.
Seventy-seven percent of women on the Coffee Meets Bagel app say they wouldn’t date a Trump supporter. We have seen endless, endless articles over the last decade all about how no one wants to date Trump supporters, and how women, in particular, do not want to date Trump supporters.
And if they don’t want to date Trump supporters, they will probably be even less inclined to marry them and have their babies.
Now, I am not saying that this is the whole reason for low birth rates. Frankly, I don’t actually care about low birth rates, because not only am I aware that overpopulation is a serious problem globally, I cannot think of anything that is less my business than whether someone chooses to have a child or not.
That being said, if that really is their big concern, they may want to take a step back and consider that encouraging men to be repulsive to women on every possible level just might not be the way to go.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
"A woman’s decision to have children is often seen as a personal lifestyle choice. However, this decision also affects the nation: without enough births to maintain its population, a country struggles to sustain its economy, communities and culture."
Honestly, this doesn't sound better in the original German.
Meanwhile, the likes of Fuentes and Tate have been proclaiming that recreational p-in-v-sex is gay.
How is that not knocking your panties right off you, ladies?