Wealth, greed, bodily autonomy, control.

First, you need to go read this post by Lori Green.

Second, I hope if you are a straight cis man and a) none of what follows applies to you, you will not take it personally; or b) some of what follows touches a nerve, that you sit with the discomfort for a bit and examine why that is.

CW: mention of suicide both there and in this post; mention of miscarriage here; rape; depression.

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The springboard for her post is learning about the South Korean 4B movement (see the Wikipedia article here), wherein participants refuse to date men, have sex with men, marry men, or produce and raise children (at all).

To Western eyes and minds, this probably comes across as too extreme (never mind too ambitious, and utterly heteronormative), but considering how stringently conservative South Korean society is, it makes sense. And when you look at the theocratic fascistic dictatorship the Republicans hope to enshrine in the U.S., you realize a movement such as this is not really that extreme. (footnote ¹)

As Lori says:

Each generation has been given less and less. College costs are out of control. The housing market is a shell game. Wages haven’t gone up but groceries and gas have. Women have to work. Stay at home moms are rare because nowadays most homes can’t survive on a single salary. Women have to work and if they have babies, they have to raise their children and take care of the home and do all the labor and even typing that out is exhausting. … Women need partners, not overgrown children who demand sex. … Single women live longer, happier lives. Married men live longer, happier lives. Married women don’t. 

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I saw a headline a couple of weeks ago (Business Insider, or WSJ, or some other capitalist rag) about how corporations are already worried that population will stop increasing by the end of this century.

Who cares that we cannot feed the over 7B people already on Earth, because the 1% (and it’s actually probably a far smaller percentage, all told) refuse to share even 1% of their obscene wealth with the starving people of the world–never mind disease, war, climate disasters, etc; the planet is not expanding, and as it warms, the habitable regions shrink–; if there are fewer people born, there are fewer future workers and fewer future consumers, and people like Bezos and Zuckerberg cannot, absolutely cannot, deal with the idea of a cap on their wealth–no matter that they could live literally forever and still remain obscenely wealthy until their last day, just on the interest of what they already have.

And this doesn’t even touch on the white supremacist “replacement theory” bit that demands that more white people be forced to bear more white babies to ensure that “the superior race” remains in a position of armed power over non-white people.

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Logically, people who can are opting to burden themselves a bit less: when you don’t have children, you have that little bit less responsibility and that little bit smaller debt. (Not getting pregnant also eliminates a host of potential health risks, and another host of permanent negative changes to the pregnant person’s body, even with healthy pregnancies and ‘easy’ labors–ask me how I know.)

If you have an uterus and you marry, you may not be allowed to make that choice for yourself–by law, by social mores, by religious demands (this already happens in the U.S.! and not just in “those backwards red states”! look around you, for the love of sanity); and so, not marrying at all is a safer choice.

When you can get pregnant, and date and have sex with someone who can impregnate you, you are risking getting pregnant, and therefore risk being forced to carry that pregnancy to term–and if the Republicans and Evangelicals have their druthers in the U.S., you also risk being forced to marry whoever impregnated you, whether either of you wants to or not.

So when you actually think about it, giving relationships with straight cis men a pass entirely is eminently sensible for people who can get pregnant.

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And that’s even before you consider the burden of marrying and living with a straight cis man who has been indoctrinated, by osmosis if not direct intent, into certain expectations of labor division–both physical and emotional.

Lest we forget, having sex is one of those things that straight cis men tend to expect from women, especially those they are married to–Rebecca Watson discusses sex strikes as means to effect political change, and how they work (or not) and why, here.

I commented there that:

It will always be bitterly funny to me that the same people who say sex workers will burn in hell, are all in favor of women “submitting to their husbands” regularly and properly, and bear him “as many children as God wills”–in other words, paying with their bodies for the privilege of being married to him. Also: the situation in which Agunahs find themselves, where they can’t get a divorce unless their husbands grant it to them? That’s essentially what the theocrats in the Republican party want: a country in which men will decide for women, again, what they can do with their lives–in the name of “freedom”, to make it even more disgusting.

Until very recently, “marital rape” didn’t even exist as a legal concept in the U.S., and it’s still not acknowledged in much of the world:

“Historically, in much of the world, rape was seen as a crime or tort of theft of a man’s property (usually either a husband or father). In this case, property damage meant that the crime was not legally recognized as damage against the victim, but instead to her father or husband’s property. Therefore, by definition a husband could not rape his wife.” (From the Wikipedia article here–don’t read if you have a weak stomach.)

This is relevant because Republicans have already made it clear that they want to eliminate no-fault divorce, that they want to eliminate anticonceptives, and eventually restrict the vote to cis men. Yes, it sounds made up, but it’s not (see Project 2025 over at Wikipedia)

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There’s a paragraph in Lori’s post that hit me squarely in the face:

(M)en take to social media or regular media and complain about male loneliness and male suicide rates because women are no longer willing to give up their own lives to improve a man’s life. And the obvious solution of teaching men personal responsibility and helping them get the emotional growth necessary to live as a single adult isn’t being discussed enough, because men are never responsible for their own unhappiness.

Several decades ago, a year or so after my first pregnancy and ‘easy labor’ and birth of a very healthy (and large) baby, my then-husband convinced me to go see a psychologist.

My firstborn had not slept more than a few minutes in a row (and I had the charts to prove it) for months, and in fact, did not sleep through six hours at night until close to his second birthday; I was exhausted and, unbeknownst to me, living with undiagnosed postpartum depression. (footnote ²)

So you may think that was why I was there, to get help from a medical professional.

Turns out, I was there to have a medical professional tell me that I was making my then-husband mentally unwell, because I wasn’t performing motherhood, housewifery or femininity properly.

For context, this was 1989, not the 1950s.

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Between my two successful pregnancies I fell and had to have x-rays taken to determine whether I had actually broken a few bones. Shortly after, not having had a period for a bit too long, a pregnancy test came positive. A few weeks later, I miscarried.

My then-husband blamed me for ‘killing’ the embryo, saying that if I hadn’t been clumsy, if I hadn’t fallen, I wouldn’t have needed x-rays and therefore not miscarried.

At the time, I didn’t know that anywhere between 10 and 15% of pregnancies result in spontaneous miscarriage, generally due to abnormalities during conception or early development (footnote ³), and that therefore nothing I could have done would have prevented that pregnancy loss. (Nevermind the assumption that I fell on purpose or some shit, even though we were not actively trying to get pregnant and I didn’t know yet I had conceived.)

My marriage to this cis man had not been coerced, and I was able to get a no-fault divorce about a decade after the wedding. There were other ties (two shared offspring) that were not severed for many years after that, but I did not date or flirt, or even thought of sex for a good few years after the divorce.

Because I was eventually able to choose to have my tubes ligated (a whole other story of misogyny–see short version as part of this post), I eventually chose to have sex with men again (what with being a straight cis woman who’s attracted to pretty masculine cis men, that’s pretty much the field for partners for me), and to be in a couple of relationships.

Today I’m single, and while that also means extra financial precarity, and not being able to share a lot of my day to day struggles (or joys), at this point I’m convinced I dodged a bullet in not marrying again.

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¹ Just in the past few weeks: attacks on IVF, the declaration that if Trump wins in November they’ll enact a federal abortion ban, and the fact that several high visibility Republicans–including two SCOTUS justices–believe that contraception pills are abortifacients, seeking the death penalty for pregnant people who abort or miscarry, and so on.

² Many more people than you think can suffer from postpartum depression (see here), not just months but some times years after giving birth (study here), even when they appear to be functioning ‘normally’–they may be going to work, show up for social functions, etc., while struggling with unaknowledged, debilitating mental health issues that society tells them are a) all in their heads (really) and b) trivial. Please do be kind to new parents; you really have no idea what they’re going through at any given moment, even if you have had children–their experience isn’t yours (see footnote ⁴)

³ There is a reason they are called embryos up until about week 12 of gestation–they are not ‘unborn babies’, they are clumps of dividing cells, which often fuck up and fail.

⁴ You don’t know whether the baby angelically sleeping when you see them during the day keeps them awake all night long; you don’t know if they are having trouble nursing or bottle-feeding the baby; you don’t know whether they suffered pregnancy or labor complications that left lasting damage to their bodies. You can’t know, and you shouldn’t need to know in order to give them the grace of kindness.