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I was motivated to write this post after reading someone's comment that all this misogynist propaganda in the West is a form of population control by governments.
Side note: I almost didn't want to use the word empowerment here, because it's been so co-opted by the sex trade to justify abuses of women. Here I mean increasing women's education, supporting their careers and financial independence, ending male violence against women, and getting women into positions of power in government and business.
I was just reading a website about overpopulation in the UK, which suggested that empowering women and girls was the no 1. way to control the population and therefore combat climate change. The reason being that women who have financial independence and choices generally choose to have less children.
Thinking about this, the spread of misogynist propaganda that we see on YouTube and other social media, the rise of the infamous male podcasters, and the ubiquitous aggressive pornography- this could be seen as a way to make relationships with men not just unattractive to women but downright impossible. The lax approach to fighting this misogyny by governments could be another form of population control.
However, at the same time we are seeing a crushing of social welfare programs in many Western countries; property, energy and rent prices increasing; and wages remaining stagnant. The UK government has also cut funding for domestic abuse services and rape crisis centres, which only leaves more women trapped with abusive men. All these things combined are in total opposition to supporting women's independence.
My question is, why are Western governments allowing misogyny to flourish in our cultures, refusing to address social inequalities and the remaining gender inequalities- when the empowerment of women would be one of the best strategies to solving the problems in front of us and improving our society? It seems like there is no cohesive strategy to do so, and different policies and statements from politicians are totally conflicted.
You can probably tell from my post that I am quite young and feeling completely frustrated and pessimistic about our political landscape. I did canvass for the Labour Party in the last election and so many people seemed angry and close-minded about the possibility of anyone else's quality of life improving.
This is an interesting take but I have a slightly different, equally dark, perspective on why this is the way it is.
I work for government and sit in meetings listening to them having absolute meltdowns over the decline in population. Both government and big business entire focus is built on growth. Government wants the growth of their tax payers, business wants the growth of their profits. Both require more people, not less. Depopulation advocates exist but they don't have the influence that the growth oriented policy makers have. Government needs more working tax payers to pay for the older, retired people who no longer pay taxes because they use up a lot of the tax base for support.
Why does the US government decline to implement female, child and family friendly policies? I have read official documents and heard elected people say and read their comments in public about this. Most of this goes back decades so please don't ask for receipts. I don't have them. The blanket reason is racism. They believe whites should be the dominant population, the rich, ruling elite.
Providing women with paid maternity leave, equal pay, and something like kinder geld, a monthly government payment to parents with children of any income level would encourage people to have more children. The US politicians specifically declined doing this because they couldn't deny women of color access to such benefits. They stated, out loud, that they wanted such benefits to only go to white people having white babies. Due to discrimination laws, they couldn't find a way to legally do that. For clarity, much of this was said in the 80's during Reganomics. The tax cuts Regan gave to the rich were part of this ideology. Give tax breaks to the rich who in the 1980's were almost exclusively white men, and they accomplished their goal.
So instead, they encourage a toxic culture to force women to depend on men or low paying jobs. Women are deliberately underpaid for their work. They want women of color to have to work to survive and to have to accept low pay. They want white women to depend on white men's work to survive and live well. They figure if they can push white women into depending on white men, then white women will birth more white babies.
The reasons why laws exist protecting women from violence yet go unanswered in law is because they pick and choose who to hold accountable. Violence against women is used as a means of systemically controlling women. We are no longer legally dependent upon men. We are no longer property of men. So we have to be subdued by men in some other way.
The rich elite only want to become more rich and more powerful. They know the eventuality of and are prepared for a depopulation event. They don't want to depopulate just yet because they want to get a little richer. They all believe that we have not reached our maximum population threshold yet and they have no desire to gradually decrease the population with controlling the birth rate. I think they all believe there is more time, and climate collapse is an event that is outside their lifetime.
They know there won't be just one big event unless we are hit by an asteroid or have a nuclear holocaust. All the science points to diseases and natural disasters getting worse as the climate destabilizes and population grows too high. Starvation and loss of habitable places to live will reduce the population. Pandemics will be more frequent like the one we just had. They let it run wild on purpose. They knew the majority of deaths would be among the elderly and those who are less likely to have adequate medical care. The people with insufficient access to medical care are usually poor people of color who suffer in higher numbers from preventable diseases that make them more vulnerable to death from illnesses like flu, pneumonia and now covid.
They are perfectly fine with poor people being killed by floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, wild fires etc. that often impact the poor disproportionately. Land that is deemed unfit for development is often opened for development of "affordable" housing, knowing that the working poor, often people of color will be living there. The areas are unfit for development because they are often in a flood plain or the land is contaminated. They are okay with killing off the people that they under pay to work because they believe they will keep reproducing while denying them access to reproductive health care. They will die young with the denial of basic health care.
They are playing the long game. They want a population of slaves. If they continue to make us suffer, they will get that. They want women to be dependent upon men for cheap labor or reproduction. They want to restore the inequities of old for their benefit.
When women have access to a better life that they can achieve for themselves, we decentralize men and childbearing. Many of us still want to have children, but we postpone it and have 1 or 2 instead of 4 or 5. I think they really want to force us back to having 4-5 and no autonomy, no happy self-fulfillment. They want us to serve men and live at their pleasure.
Your question " when the empowerment of women would be one of the best strategies to solving the problems in front of us and improving our society?" I wondered this forever too. Just from observation and life experience, I believe they don't care. They don't want to share power. They are greedy and they hate women. Yes, if they eliminate isms and stop discriminating against people based on sex, race, economics etc. the world would be better and we would naturally gravitate toward conditions that make the environment stable. I don't believe in mythical ideas of good and evil but this dilemma makes me consider the existence of evil. It's absolute greed and self-promotion.
Oh damn. I think you really hit on something here. The easy (and no less correct) answer to the question about why governments dont support the empowerment if women is: misogyny. And I think you laid it out: Governments are male institutions. The men in charge dont want us to be empowered for our own sake, because they hate us. And even in cases when our empowerment would benefit the greater good - like controling population growth - the thought of harnessing women's empowerment is still not appealing to them, nor does it probably even cross their minds as an option. If governments wanted to control population growth, they see an easy and desirable means to do so by abusing women so that we no longer want to/can have children. That doesnt sound far-fetched to me.
Because they don't give 2 shits about us. Look what's going on in the US and our reproductive rights.
I HAVE BEEN WONDERING THE SAME THING
This topic is touched on in Prey by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (that the West is so fearful of being considered racist it is allowing the erosion of women's rights under the pretense of tolerance)
There are also loads of people pointing out the Wests self loathing that's leading to self destructive behavior (they tend to be moderate conservatives fyi- I enjoy them)
All the recent woke political movements of the last 10 years are examples of the West's self loathing pushing us to condemn our entire history and rewrite it while overlooking every positive change the West made and how that has had a GOOD net global impact
One word: necropolitics
I agree. Our economy, laws, and social norms have made a perfect storm for the rampant abuse of women. I myself stayed way too long with a man child covert narcissist abuser because on top of his financial abuse and pushing me to be dependent on him, I just straight up couldn't afford the rents that landlords are demanding now to leave. Yet pay isn't catching up. Why is having basic shelter considered some sort of LUXURY now while it's illegal to be homeless? It's astounding to me that people aren't in the streets over this. 🪓
As you're young, I don't want you to be desolate. We need many young women like you to join forces so we can find alternative modes of living when our governments inevitably let us down. But all I can say is that this is a feature, not a bug. Men do not want to relinquish control of us, no matter the cost. Look at countries where the population is high like India and you will see that in those countries they keep women locked away and uneducated on purpose so they can breed workers and a neo-slave class. The wealth will be hoarded by the 1%-3%. This is intentional for the purpose of capitalism. Capitalism cannot survive without slave labor and the unpaid domestic martyrdom of women. If either of these two things fall the whole system will collapse. So they will never get rid of it, even if it leads to our total destruction. The only way around this is for women to form communities with each other, and only selectively breed with HVM. Build close friendships, invest in yourself and your career.