Status Updates From Sex and destiny: the politi...

'Subsidising childbirth does not work as a pro-natal measure because governments can seldom afford to do it at a high enough level to attract any but the unemployed and nobody wants the children of the unemployed. Most people do not refuse to go home and bear children because there is no money in it, but because there is little satisfaction in it, and governments cannot provide that.'

When Greer's good, she's great.

It is indeed a sinister astigmatism that can affect men of science so that looking hard at suffering mankind they see not the frustration of genetic potential but deficiency in the genetic potential itself.

Everybody who has ever lived under the yoke of Family has at some time longed to escape from it: the most passionate hatreds have been hatched within it as well as the most enduring love. But Family is a slow-growing thing, its roots sunk in a time beyond the individual's remembrance. Where the doctrine of instang gratification is preached it must wither.

The killing of a new-born child is deeply repugnant to modern sensibility, or is thought to be. We assume that we have this reverence for human life because our moral sensibility is more elevated, whereas we simply lack the concept of a collective good to be served by our difficult choices in such matters.

The contraceptive pill is available in Italy only as a treatment for menstrual disorders, and produced by a firm in which the Vatican is a major shareholder; those with wit to invent the right story for the doctors may use it as a contraceptive. It is probable that the function of the stem pessary was just as open a secret.

Slow progress . My brain’s feeling useless today

The chip on Greer's shoulder is proving that non-Western societies didn't languish in an anti-scientific vacuum when it came to fertility and motherhood. Practices survive because they came with their own benefits, regardless of whether the receivers could explain them. Lindy. Overcorrects — "the west only has disembedded scientific rationality, the rest embedded superstitions that simply wórk".

Chapter 2 done 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼 basically talked ab how many human systems including morality r based on fertility & eugenics n stuff Quite interesting but some of these word choices r so serious for what like i just want to understand why r we using words like nulliparae rn

It’s so good

The rich Caucasians of the developed world are the most mobile people ever known on earth; we have already given more than we shall ever get in the way of exterminating disease. Whether it is half-treated in the American ghetto or untreated as among the Maria Gonds, gonorrhoea has been an agent of genocide.

1st essay reminds me of Polanyi. In TGT, he emphasizes that social development isn't just 'line goes up/down'; a society's production process is always embedded in a variegated systeem of social cogwheels turning each other. Install a new production mode incompatible with current meaning-giving rituals, and society will fracture. Until embedded in new ritual practices that is.

The baby who brings its mother new prestige, new leisure, prettier clothes and better food is vastly more lovable than the baby attended by loneliness, drudgery and anxiety. If mothering is not positively reinforced, women will cease to do it, whether contraception and abortion are legal or illegal, easy or dangerous.

I like it so far she is talking about the relationship between industrialization in the west and the isolation of motherhood and the indoctrination of newborns into consumerism this is lit 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼