The Loathing of Fertility is the Longing for Death

we have the latest update on the score in the big eros vs thanatos game

The effacement of women’s bodies is changing from a cultural signal to a battlefield maneuver. The acceleration of the presence of men as dominant participants in women’s sports, the growing intensity of casually monstrous blue zone attacks on families and parenting, the emergence of drag queens — men playacting as women, burlesque cartoons about sexual identity — as The Most Important Symbol Ever (and something children should definitely see)…

…and now this:

RNZ @radionz

#WATCH RNZ's Jordan Dunn captured the moment that Posie Parker was escorted away from the rally. The counter-protest crowd gathered in Albert Park this morning before Parker's speech, and made a cacophany of noise to drown her speech out. 🔗 rnz.co.nz/news/national/…

That’s footage from a Let Women Speak event in Auckland, New Zealand, where women arguing that “women” are “adult human females” were physically attacked by a mob of “transwomen” — by men — and their allies. It’s very progressive when men dressed as women silence women and hurt them. More here, also linked above.

In the opening paragraph of this post, you may have thought that one of the things I mentioned was different than the other things — that the blue state assault on families and parenting isn’t specifically gendered, and is equally an assault on the role of mothers and fathers. And it is. But.

It seems to me that the very very strange thing breaking out all over the world — or all over the Anglosphere, because I don’t see Nigeria and Peru and Singapore going all-in on transgendered everything — is loaded with subtext about a febrile loathing for fertility. In policy, we’re incentivizing childlessness, and disincentivizing childbearing. Birthrates are declining sharply, and were declining even before the mRNA injections, while blue state governments work on laws that tell would-be parents their children can vanish from their custody on political pretexts. Who has the future children while the state says that hey, nice family you have there, be a shame if something were to happen to it?

I suspect the reason so much hate and rage is being directed at women is that their bodies can produce babies, which means that the hate and rage is being directed at the future. Peachy Keenan, who’s all over this stuff in multiple forums, wrote recently about Hicklibs on Parade, describing “how deeply the postmodern, anti-human gender ideology has penetrated into what we used to call ‘middle America’”:

In Plano, Texas last fall, an “all-ages” drag brunch attracted some unwanted attention from people who thought they lived in a conservative state. At the brunch—which was held at Ebb & Flow, an eatery in an upscale strip mall—a buffoonish man in a dress wearing cat ears sings, “My p*ssy good, p*ssy sweet, p*ssy good enough to eat,” while flashing his underwear.

In the video from the event, a four-year old girl stares in shock as the “drag” performer twerks and grinds for the ladies in attendance. 

The people in the crowd watching this man systematically strip away a little girl’s innocence look like nice friendly Texans; plump grandmas and families and the types you’d run into at the local Costco. They are not hipsters; they are not edgy. They look normal! 

This is what makes all of this so striking. These slightly downmarket Texan and Midwestern prairie home companion women have, historically, been the only thing holding this rickety old country together.

Read the whole thing, but the casual embrace of men’s bodies as a performative version of women’s bodies, and so the turn against fertility, is no longer entirely a blue zone phenomenon, and appears to be emerging in some of the same places that got crushed in the opioid crisis.

I think, and I can neither prove this nor yet fully articulate it, that the growing sexlessness and childlessness of performatively oversexed Western cultures…

Decade at Bernie's

…emerges from the thing we don’t want to talk about, which is simply that we know we’ve failed at the task of stewardship. We know we drove the wheels off our prosperous and strong countries. We know that the future isn’t looking great. Our one go-to trick in the face of failure is printing more money; we can’t make stuff or run stuff, but here’s a couple trillion extra to get the country through the year. The stimulus package, the last great American product. So everywhere you look, women are also men, and men are also women, and the type of body that makes the future is dishonored and emptied.

We hate fertile bodies because we hate the future, because we damaged the future with ideological madness and endless corporate-state rent seeking and moral emptiness.

James Howard Kuntsler:

The transgender movement has crystalized into the Party of Chaos’s favored instrument for enforcing its ethos of unreality on a population obdurately stuck on thinking in categories, on making hateful distinctions between things. Better to live in a protective miasma of undifferentiated sensation than a cruel state based on pattern recognition where one is incessantly prompted to understand how objects and life-forms around us differ, where things begin and end, and what all that means relative to your own ideally amorphous existence.

Nina Power:

Our becoming-same has culminated in a hostile takeover of women by men, to the extent that our presence in language is erased: “Woman” becomes “body with vagina,” and “mother” becomes “birthing person.”

To be continued — and, let us hope, clarified. But first, I’m going to be entirely offline for several days. Details to follow. I’m sorry to post this and then vanish from the discussion, but I’ll be back.