Reacting To “45% Of Women Will Be Single & Childless By 2030”

a growing number of women are choosing not to have kids and as a result are advancing in their careers and using their wealth to buy property and travel more this is an article by Bloomberg I think came out of their business week Edition Ashley mararo isn't married and doesn't have kids and she has a message for women just like her you can still have it all I love my life and feel very fulfilled says marara who froze her eggs in 2018 to keep her options open the 43 year old feels a deep sense of satisfaction

from her job as a sales representative for a maker of medical devices which brings her into contact with patients and she relishes all of the lifestyle and financial freedoms that come with being a single Child free woman in a well-paying job mararo who was married for four years before getting divorced in 2008 enjoys an enviable degree of financial Independence the West Village resident owns her own apartment she bought in 2019 for around 900 000 and then renovated and in June she closed on a summer home in New Jersey's Long Beach Island with her sister Christina

who's a few years older and also single with Nokia kids Ashley figures she's taking 10 trips in the last 12 months and often friends with a large group of about 25 people who were largely unmarried and don't have children those trips at 43 sound like they suck I do not want to go on that trip frankly yeah so everything you just described there is kind of like a a symptom of what I would call The Wider amazing crisis and it seems to be like a cultural kind of prioritizing of the male default of economic success

the kind of girl boss lean in kind of culture seems to be set up as what uh the vision for success for women tends to be and yet you have a lot of even corporate Giants kind of getting in on this um a few years ago you had Morgan Stanley the investment bankers put out a report that forecasts that 45 of prime working age women between the ages of 25 and 44 will be single and childless by 2030 the largest share in history and it's not entirely obvious to me that this is in women's best

interest I mean I'm pretty libertarian in my sensibilities about you know freedom of choice for whatever someone wants to do with their life and but it it seems to me like a you can see the kind of corporate interest in opening up more worker drones for 60 hour work weeks and you know the the workplace now women are crushing it it's a brain-based economy rather than a Brawn based economy so that that seems to be in their interests and it's weird it's like it's almost like Huxley and it's like Brave New World have you read

that Chris yes yeah so it's very Huxley and it's like um this kind of hedonistic life of going on lots of trips having very atomized type of sex single Hood will be on the rise you won't get attached to any one person you'll own nothing and you'll be happy that that kind of thing and it seems a little bit dystopian to me um to kind of you know to hurtle towards that uh dystopian Vision but uh that that's the the modern amazing crisis we find ourselves in and uh yeah that that's where we are why

do you think this male default has come about because it's something that I've noticed as well the typically masculine traits are the ones that would have been held by men the conscientiousness disagreeability the Casual Sex the ability to move on and not really catch feels and not be emotional to focus on possessions and drive fast cars what what is it that's causing that to be imbibed by women and also pushed to them by culture so actually women are generally a bit more conscientious than men and but yeah I agree with you that it's kind of

flipping to that default and I think it is just a an organic backlash to kind of uh what we might describe as the historic oppression of women socioeconomically uh you know it's kind of a leaning into that freedom almost at too fast a pace it's like one speed go foot to the floor on girl bath mode um and you know you have the corporate Giants kind of playing into that and uh yeah it's just a kind of a situation where for the first time maybe in history men and women aren't relying on each other as

obviously as in the past um and yeah that it's kind of more individualistic kind of world now we're kind of uh you know atomized and away from our kin in big cities across the world which is very evolutionarily novel and so yeah I think it's just a an ordinary uh somewhat expected backlash to maybe the oppression of the past like the uh child of the Christian parents that moves out and immediately gets a nose piercing and a bunch of tattoos and swings back the other way okay continuing on with that article single women without kids

had an average of 65 000 in wealth in 2019 compared with 57 000 for single child-free men single women without kids 65 000 57 000 for single Child free men so we already have something there that kind of pushes back against the commonly held uh world view uh the difference is for single mothers the figure was only seven thousand dollars Parenthood was losing its appeal even before covid-19 U.S birth rates have been falling for the past 30 years in 1990 there are around 71 births per year for every thousand women aged 15 to 44 by

2019 that had dropped to 58 so from 71 to 58 which is a pretty big drop some women opting not to have kids are enjoying an enviable degree of Financial Freedom she's got all of her different houses the childless life does have its drawbacks people who are single and Child free pay more in taxes and housing is a lot harder to afford than one income than two especially with home prices and rents at record high and mortgage rates on the rise so that's the problem that Bloomberg can find with potentially going to your grave with

no one else that's part of your genetic kin there to to see you is the fact that you're going to pay more in in taxes and housing is more difficult to afford yeah it's very corporate kind of language isn't it that the main concern would be how do we get around that that one stumbling block of the taxes um but I was glad that she did at least highlight uh the idea of buying a house on a single income because that's something I always highlight for in sales that that's a double Kwame kind of a

circular punishment it's hard to get a house uh if you're a single man on one income and a lot of incels are on lower income or no income at all and you almost need to be part of a good learning household to get a mortgage so without the house you can't get the girlfriend without the girlfriend you can't get the house so it feels like a little bit of a circular punishment for incels there um but yeah that's a you can hear the corporate language dripping in in in that account it's it really does rile

me up man the fact that women who choose to be mothers are being seen as second-class Rubes that have been I don't know gazumped into taking a role that was just some ancestral old version of what Womanhood was supposed to be you can go out and be a boss you can get over your last boyfriend by getting under your next one like all of this sort of rhetoric to me doesn't sound massively empowering Louise Perry's book case against the sexual Revolution is phenomenal at this like Loveless sex is not empowering and teaching women that they

should be able to try and compete with men on having Loveless sex only one gender is going to win that right it's not going to be the women men are going to continue to run through girls when they can and leave them behind and I don't know I just feel like there needs to be the push battle the swing back against past disadvantages that women have had is not making women's lives any better I think that you can comfortably say that enabling women to earn more in the workplace was fantastic the vote the pill the

washing machine all of this stuff like things that genuinely liberated women from the previous constraints that they had were Worthy I struggle to see how encouraging women to see the new pair of Gucci shoes that they've got that they buy from a job that they hate to impress people that they don't like as being the highest point of contribution of their life and that the mothers are somehow second-class citizens yeah yeah and it certainly is like it almost seems like a concerted war on motherhood even last week there was a an article or over the

weekend in the New York Times about the myth of the maternal Instinct and it talked about how uh you know this this is a man-made phenomenon culturally kind of a cultural script that we all buy into and people were just highlighting how ridiculous this is now I think there might be a little bit of I can give a little bit of a charitable interpretation to that article uh in that the myth of maternal Instinct isn't just one thing so maternal instinct is probably more accurate so maternal instincts could sometimes depending on the age of the

woman uh her marital situation or socioeconomic stages that maternal Instinct might even be infanticide so you know it's a it's a suite of instincts that are kind of activated in in different situations like all of our evolved psychology it's not it's not just on or off it's just in which environment it comes uh on play as I said over dinner the other evening that is way way too much of a charitable interpretation that person that wrote that article doesn't even know what you're on about and you've extrapolated out this it speaks to your good nature

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