What's Your Quota?

While they rarely like to admit it, feminists maintain a fallback position very much in keeping with patriarchal protectionism of helpless damsels. Backed into a corner, occasionally one will drop the modern human rights facade and retrench in a classic "soldiers for Hynkel!" stance that women must be favored over men due to their reproductive bottleneck role, much as in Heinlein's quote from three posts back. The principle runs that any society must privilege gestators or dwindle out for low birth rates, thus men must play our primordial role in surrendering our own well-being to women's demands. Men are more conveniently disposable.

 

Skipping past the fact that overpopulation has done far greater harm than underpopulation for at least two centuries now, if your life is an order of magnitude more important than mine because you can incubate parasites, then I have to ask: what's your quota? How many kids're ya gonna shit out? How many jugs of milk will you be excreting per month? How many hours of day-care will you provide per day? How many old-timey cloth diapers will you scrub?

 

And more importantly, who shall enforce that and how? Because we accept without question that our various governments should force men to play out their traditional role as protectors and providers, by being hired for hazardous manual labor, charged more for health or education, through conscription and alimony and shotgun weddings and a myriad other honored institutions, not lurking beneath society's seamy underbelly but all lauded as civic responsibility. And we have no trouble putting an exact monetary value on how much a man owes a woman per month for having ejaculated into her a decade past.

 

I've heard a lot of outrage over the past couple of years from self-appointed left-wingers about the deprivation of abortion rights, and I agree. It is ethically indefensible to force bearing unwanted children, much less to fabricate so much human suffering in the lives of those unwanted children. But I do have to note you yourselves could've tried balancing the equation in the other direction for decades beforehand: stop calling it "a woman's" right to choose and admit no-one, female or male, should have ever been condemned to raise unwanted offspring.

 

"Yes to financial abortion" - would that footnote have been so hard to tack onto your placards?

Just for starters.