This is just a continuation of a Watercooler thread that has grown less watercoolery.
Hello. I’d like to point out some things from your last message:
Some men do force women to have children. They exercise this power in both aggressive and more subtle ways. Some women are effectively held captive within their homes and compelled physically to submit to sex, and receive beatings if they attempt to escape from the clutches of the male who controls them. In other cases, women are compelled to have children they might not want because they are dependent on a sexually needy male for both physical and economic protection.
This is highly offensive and islamophobic.
but instead will be a function of how frequently they are compelled to submit to their husbands to satisfy his cravings.
I’d like to point out that ideas about men being sexual predators while woman being asexual do not have any basis in science. Woman watch porn just as often as man do. They have the same sexual cravings as man do. And as a matter of fact, woman get much more pleasure out of sexual intercourse than men. Ideas about “men think about sex all the time” are refused by scientist and are part of pop-science made to draw readers to the article. Also, 40% of domestic violence is directed towards men and 60% towards woman, not 99-1%.
There are also places in the world such as Estern Europe and South America where dating roles are reversed compared to USA, meaning woman try to pick up man and man refuse and play hard to catch. The fact that woman play hard to catch in the dating sphere of one’s own country says nothing about levels of sexual craving present in woman compared to man.
According to buddhism, woman are just as sexual as men.
Since I said not a single word in any of my comments about Muslims, Islam or Islamic doctrine, your comment does not seem to be in any way logically connected with the previous discussion.
Interesting. But since I never described women as asexual, this claim has no logical relevance to the preceding discussion.
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You don’t need to say anything directly. Check the meme
Interesting. But since I never described women as asexual, this claim has no logical relevance to the preceding discussion.
Well, it was implied by the fact that woman are supposedly forced to compel to their husbands wishes and satisfy their desires, like sexual interaction is a 1-way thing. And if this would be so, then education of men would be needed not of woman in such a situation.
The human overpopulation problem will luckily get fixed by itself most probably. It will take another century in africa, but it already got fixed pretty much everywhere else including the muslim world.
This problem is not solved by education but by economic development. As long as there will be low economic development there will be high fertility rates. http://www.newenglishreview.org/Ibn_Warraq/Demographics:_Why_Islamic_Societies_are_Dying/
It is impossible to accurately predict demographic growth, and it’s almost impossible to predict economic development. But what happened in last decades with fertility rates in the muslim world should give us reasons of hope regarding Africa problem. Islam is a religion that highly promotes creation of children and even they are expected to eventually end up in the same dangerous situation as Europe. Only USA is for some reason safe from this problem.
If you are asking why this is a problem, it is because developed countries help other countries through their innovation, their support of reforms, human rights, democracy, etc. They are the leaders of this world. They might do mistakes from time to time but it’s not like we have better guys to replace the US and EU leadership. Cutting your population in half means cutting your economy and military in half, it means cutting your importance in half. And it’s a bad thing for the world that Europe population will be cut in half very soon.
The meme communicates nothing of relevance to the question. You just seem to be free-associating from this discussion to some of your other gripes.
As I said in the previous post, some women are so compelled.
Yes, I agree, but also think both have been found to play a role. The availability of birth control in itself is helpful. Since women bear almost the entire physical, bodily burden of reproducing the human species, they should have available to themselves all of the safe means of preventing pregnancy that are on offer.
Of course, sexual abstinence is one means of preventing pregnancy. But in patriarchal societies, that is often not a viable option, since women who might otherwise prefer a life with no children, or very few children, are compelled to accept marriage in order to provide for their own basic economic needs. If the opportunity to lead a holy life is also closed off because of conservative religious establishments who are in league with the patriarchy determined to control the economic and reproductive lies of women, the viable alternative choices for women are reduced eve further.
I really did not think that calls for women to receive education would be such a sore spot.
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Nobody in the thread has argued for cutting the population in half.
The point I am trying to make is that this map of fertility rates:
Is not because of patriarchical societies or lack of education of woman. It’s because of low economic development. The lower, the worse. African countries are not more patriarchal than countries in the middle east.
And education doesn’t happen because of “calls for awareness”, it happens because of money. And for that, you need economic development witch brings a different way of life. Even if some would gather up a huge sum of money through donations for african countries education (witch is impossible to do anyway) that would help with nothing because that’s not the reason people make a lot of children, their way of life is the reason. In tribal societies, you need many children to provide for you when old especially since there is no pension system. Educating people in Mali (educating about what, by the way ?) will not change anything if everybody around them is having 8 children and their way of life, their economic and social factors dictate that having 8 children is beneficial for them in that situation.
Only way to reduce this situation is through economic development. Even if one does not want to reduce their fertility rates at all (such as Turkey or Iran or Europe for example) that will still happen without them wanting it to happen. That will still happen counter to all the religious or state education/indoctrination that is advising them otherwise.
You can’t tell people “have more children” or “have less children” and change anything with that. Otherwise both depopulation and overpopulation problems would have been easily solved long ago.
I really did not think that calls for women to receive education would be such a sore spot.
The problem is the wrong diagnostic to the overpopulation problem and lack of understanding about how it works. It’s not caused by the society being patriarchal or not, by man forcing woman to have more children due to their incredible sexual libido and lack of condoms. Therefore the whole analysis and conclusion is wrong because it’s built on wrong premises.
The previous thread began with a post about one author’s set of proposals for for addressing climate change. The list contains 100 items, most of which are indeed calls for various kinds economic capital development and structural economic transformation.
I have to disagree with you. This has been studied before, and the availability of birth control and reproductive education does indeed reduce family size. That suggests that family size is not simply a function of economic circumstances and the economic organization of society, but that many women are having more babies than they want to have, and spontaneously reduce their family sizes when given a chance to do so.
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This thread has got absolutely nothing to do with the Buddha’s teachings and as such has been locked.
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