Infantilism

Ross Douthat, "More Babies, Please". December 1

APOLOGIES for treading ground that Roy has already stomped much more efficiently, but yesterday, when my neighbor tossed the Times over the back fence it landed with such a resounding thud I knew I had to check out Douthat first thing.

Reader, is there any question that the whole right-wing "birthrate" thing is the Anti-Fluoridationalism of the 21st century? The most hopelessly bent, the most recursively insane, the signature folly of a parade of fools? They can't keep race out of it, the way their intellectual forebears couldn't keep backwoods theology out of dental hygiene. They can't keep Catholic theology out of it, even though most of 'em aren't Catholic.

They can't quit talking about it. Which, y'know, to each his own kink:

IN the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition.

So right off the bat: 1) Where are these debates occurring, let alone recurring? 2) Assuming they are, who is saying our great reliance is babies? I thought it was the fact that God needs us around to help with Armageddon?  That, and the superiority of Coca-Cola™ to all other beverages.

It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility. But compared with the swiftly aging nations of East Asia and Western Europe, the American birthrate has proved consistently resilient, hovering around the level required to keep a population stable or growing over the long run.

Okay, so the debate is being held in the sort of circles where Europe is referred to as "swiftly aging." I guess that's why I missed it.

America’s demographic edge has a variety of sources: our famous religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), our willingness to welcome immigrants (who tend to have higher birthrates than the native-born).

Thanks for explaining the non-solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist.

And it clearly is an edge. Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and workers and entrepreneurs, and relatively youthful populations speed economic growth and keep spending commitments affordable. Thanks to our relative demographic dynamism, the America of 50 years hence may not only have more workers per retiree than countries like Japan and Germany, but also have more than emerging powers like China and Brazil.

Not that this means Social Security and Medicare aren't doomed, mind you. Ya ever notice how, when the likes of Douthat wants to insist on innate ethical superiority of US Americans, they head right for that abiding human-heartedness which they, politically, fight against tooth and claw?

If, that is, our dynamism persists. But that’s no longer a sure thing. American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered. Last week, the Pew Research Center reported that U.S. birthrates hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2011, with just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. (The rate was 71 per 1,000 in 1990.) For the first time in recent memory, Americans are having fewer babies than the French or British.

Pretty impressive for swiftly-aging nations.

The plunge might be temporary. American fertility plummeted during the Great Depression, and more recent downturns have produced modest dips as well. This time, the birthrate has fallen fastest among foreign-born Americans, and particularly among Hispanics, who saw huge amounts of wealth evaporate with the housing bust. Many people may simply be postponing childbearing until better times return, and a few years of swift growth could produce a miniature baby boom.

Well, I think that's summed up the recurring debate nicely. We'll just wait and see.

Among the native-born working class, meanwhile, there was a retreat from child rearing even before the Great Recession hit. For Americans without college degrees, economic instability and a shortage of marriageable men seem to be furthering two trends in tandem: more women are having children out of wedlock, and fewer are raising families at all.

Thank God. For a minute there I thought realization that this was a non-debate over an imaginary issue which could go one way, or the other, was going to remove every opportunity for priggery.

Finally, there’s been a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans told Pew that children were “very important” to a successful marriage; in 2007, just before the current baby bust, only 41 percent agreed. (That trend goes a long way toward explaining why gay marriage, which formally severs wedlock from sex differences and procreation, has gone from a nonstarter to a no-brainer for so many people.)

I'm gonna go waaaay out on a limb here, without even Pew to guide me, and suggest that The Childless Trend has convinced exactly zero percent of the population to change its attitude on gay marriage from "nonstarter" to "no-brainer".

Government’s power over fertility rates is limited, but not nonexistent. America has no real family policy to speak of at the moment, and the evidence from countries like Sweden and France suggests that reducing the ever-rising cost of having kids can help fertility rates rebound. Whether this means a more family-friendly tax code, a push for more flexible work hours, or an effort to reduce the cost of college, there’s clearly room for creative policy to make some difference.

So by the tenth paragraph we get around to mentioning that the non-story of a vapor argument having two nonexistent sides really has nothing much to do with political policy, and more to do with Douthat's recollection of the political ploys of his parents' generation, when Republicans sought to convince the white Middle Class it was discriminated against at every turn. A condition for which the solution, if I recall, was to vote Republican, and have Middle Class economic prospects shrink like a bar of soap for forty years.

Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Well, it really is too bad, then, that the Republican party has spent 170 years championing unfettered corporate rapine, exploitative labor practices, and the demise of the family farm to multi-mega agribusiness. In fact, y'know, it's too bad that the standard "conservative" solution to our problems involves correcting what "conservatives" did a half-century previous, now that they've seen the light.

Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/DouthatNYT.

And, Ross, I invite you to get a real job for a couple years, and copulate to your heart's content.

Over The Hump

Jessica Grose, "The Shame Cycle: The new backlash against casual sex". March 3

OKAY, before you say anything: it's Spring Training. Shagging fungos, a few limber-up tosses against the side of the barn, snorting at the latest Slate XX Factorish idiocy; get the juices flowing (oh, sorry) without any real exertion. Cycle of Life. Cycle of Shame. Vortex of Stupid.

Needless to say, Ms Grose, I'm not a member of your generation, with its hook-ups and its iPods and its apparently inability to write 800 words without referencing a plotline from Sex and the City, or some other piece of pop-culture flotsam, as though it were more real than what's real. I'm old. I've made it through five decades without confusing Universal Truth with the contents of your diary, and, forgive me, I intend to continue.

The current raft of regret seems to be a response to the Girls Gone Wild archetype of the late '90s and early aughts. Ariel Levy described the new era's version of sex positive in Female Chauvinist Pigs, "a tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular." We were supposed to dance on tables like Paris Hilton and wear ass-baring chaps and hump the floor like 22-year-old Christina Aguilera did in her "Dirrrty" video, or at least find that sort of thing appealing, otherwise we were marmish prudes. We were supposed to go to strip clubs and wear Playboy necklaces around our necks—as Sex and the City star Carrie Bradshaw did.

Okay, hold up. You were "supposed to" ? I find this omnipotent They--ubiquitous Corrupter of Teenage Morality and Denier of Jonah Goldberg the Right to Dislike Negroes in Print--to be a major puzzlement, since I can't find hide nor hair of Them (although you and Douthat occasionally link to Feministing as though you think it's part of Their legal team), but you can't walk ten paces without tripping over someone They've corrupted. Yet no one ever seems to blame Christina Aguilera personally, nor her handlers, marketers, and puppeteers; they're engaging in commerce. They aren't They.

Who made you or anyone else watch, let alone like it, emulate it, accept it as anything other than Yet Another Consumerist Shitwad somebody hurled at you in hopes of making a buck? Nobody taught you to duck? Fer chrissakes, you were not a bobbysoxer forced to choose between Race records on the wireless and polite society, nor an Ur-feminist told to go fetch the coffee. You didn't suddenly find yourself in a world torn apart by global war, with centuries of racial and sexual prejudices crumbling around you, if not threatening to fall on your head. You found yourself in front of the teevee watching music videos and celebrity trash news. Christina Aguilera did not rise naked from the Sea; she came from the New Fucking Mickey Mouse Club. That wasn't enough to tip you to something?

Nothing--certainly not They--kept you from ignoring all that, as much as humanly possible. Nothing kept you from recognizing the cheap and tasteless for the sideshow it is. I realize that almost no one escapes unscathed; I myself once owned a paisley tie. But please, really, Paris Hilton made me do it? Then you fucking deserved whatever it was, and a horsewhipping after. Count your blessings.

But after a while, we did not really want to do any of those things anymore, as Tina Fey explained in an interview with Vogue earlier this year. We have been handed "a sort of Spice Girls' version of feminism. We're supposed to be wearing half-shirts and jumping around. And, you know, maybe that's not panning out." Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis was put in jail. Christina Aguilera married a nice Jewish boy and had a baby. She's been replaced on the pop charts by 19-year-old virginal chanteuse Taylor Swift, who sings chaste love songs about Romeo and Juliet. Paris Hilton is rarely in the tabloids and we haven't seen her nether regions in years. Finally, the fictional Carrie Bradshaw is wed and living a New York domestic fantasy.

Jesus Christ, Tina Fey is fucking forty years old; if she's jumping around in half-shirts and sleeping with drunken soft-drink reps there's something wrong with her the Spice Girls didn't have anything to do with.

So maybe no one's said this to you before, for some reason, but you're getting older. You're turning middle-aged. See if you can't do so with a little more grace and self-awareness than you evinced when turning into a sexual being. They made you dress like Mel C.; now they want you to be Taylor Swift (and look, ixnay on the Romeo and Juliet crap. Swift was a talented youngster snapped up, sadly, by the Country Music and Sausage industry. This means the odds are almost prohibitive that she'll remain chaste and virginal until her first album that doesn't meet expectations. Knock fuckin' wood, but ask Tanya Tucker. Ask the Chaste-Until-Marriage Britney Spears). Cover your ears. Avert your gaze. Go read a book that isn't a memoir or thinly-veiled novel about yourself.

But mostly, stop this:

After all, Klausner is a feminist who doesn't believe there is anything wrong with casual sex.

Kate H. Millet, I don't think there's much if anything wrong with 98% of the items on the Psychotropic Substances Act of 1978, either, but it doesn't mean I think they should be freely handed out to grade schoolers, nor that everybody who ever eats peyote will enjoy a technicolor dreamtrip to the stars. "Not believing there's anything wrong" with something is a far cry from insisting that Nothing Can Ever Gro Wong. Believing that traditional matrimony and gender stereotyping have been employed to bully and subjugate Women is not the same thing as deciding every female nurse is a tool of the Patriarchy, every woman lumberjack a lesbian, and the best thing one can do about it is sleep with anything with a pulse. Some might think all those things, but attributing that to Feminism just because you can't tell the difference between Paris Hilton and a real person is just full of it.

And for the life of me, I don't understand why. If an aging demirep decides to make a few bucks writing the autobiography of her cervix, what are her options? If she's a terrific writer she might get published. If she's got the goods on George Clooney or Eliot Spitzer, or, preferably, a half-dozen assorted, she will get published. Otherwise she hangs it on Society and schlepps it around. So what? She had it both ways (sorry, again), but only one of her gets to cash the royalty checks. The fact that Sadder But Wiser, Inc., gets the book deal doesn't mean the Happy Sluicer had the weaker argument.

Fer chrissakes, the fact that some woman somewhere slept with a bunch of losers at the behest of E! doesn't begin to counteract the number of people kept in loveless or brutalizing marriages this week by the Church. What Feminism fought to provide you is the right to choose for yourself. And you took the opportunity to watch some teevee?

I Refute It Thus, Motherfucker.