Castration Culture
Robot Baby Brainwashing and the War on Motherhood, Midwifery, and Natality
I wrote this as a direct follow-up to The Natality Pill, but it is a stand-alone piece that requires no prior reading. I believe it addresses some of the major concerns raised by critical readers of The Natality Pill, wherein I used the term “castration culture” without really unpacking how or why I use this term—is this just fear-mongering or over-generalizing? Is it just figurative, or actually literal? With that said, I will not here address the YouTube comment section dumpster fire on that post’s related video. They say, “How dare you suggest life is worth living? That’s your opinion. You cannot possibly know the suffering that your child will face, and that baby cannot consent to being brought into this world so it is unjust.” This is Thomas Ligotti in a nutshell. I’m sure I’ll eventually feel inspired to write a direct response to his metaphysical-ethical anti-natalist ideology head on, but that will not be any time soon. I’m more interested in the class formation, educational infrastructure, and general culture that produces a world wherein, on the one side, guys are volunteering the extinction of humanity en masse, while childless women choosing isolation get celebrated by the New York Times. Personally, I think they are all only symptomatic useful idiots and victims of our culture of castration.
Fear and Loathing in Human Development Class
My wife Ann grew up in a stable middle-class home. Her mother was a teacher at the elementary school she attended. Good public schools, well-funded, the kind that people have in mind when they say we need more education “to address poverty.”1
Ann took a human development course in high school. You might think a course called “human development” would teach students something about what it means to grow up, find purpose, and build a life. It did not. Instead, Ann was handed a robot baby.
The doll was programmed to cry at intervals throughout the night. If she didn’t respond fast enough, points were deducted. If she held it wrong, points were deducted. If she failed to simulate the correct caregiving response within two minutes, the sensor logged a failure. The program was originally called “Baby Think It Over.” They’ve since rebranded it “RealCare Baby 3,” which is a cleaner name for the same thing: a device engineered to simulate a particular version of parenthood, i.e. only the burden with none of the benefits.
The message of this class was clear: parenting is a nightmare and motherhood is slavery. Ann reports that, at the time, she really enjoyed the in-class component because they would just watch episodes of Supernanny (meaning she could do homework for her other classes). I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Really? Isn’t that the show where a credentialed professional nanny intervenes in households where children are out-of-control nightmares?” Ann chuckled, “Yes, exactly.” Over the following weeks we kept coming back to this.
We care about natality, not for the standard Peter Thiel reasons (i.e. the "more babies" pronatalism of Silicon Valley, where billionaires fund fertility technology start-ups, screen embryos for IQ, and treat children as investments in one's genetic legacy or as a hedge against civilizational collapse), but for the reason that bringing life into this world is the most tried and true path to learning how to love and take responsibility. This matters at the level of our lived experience, and it also has huge ramifications for broad-based legitimacy for large-scale structural change that would be intergenerational and sustainable.
As we have both become increasingly natality pilled, it has become impossible not to notice the ubiquity of anti-natalist cultural programming.
It turns out that Ann's human development class was no anomaly. Seventy percent of school districts in the United States use infant simulators.2 As for Supernanny, it is sold as a teaching resource for these classes. Teachers purchase worksheets on Teachers Pay Teachers to pair with episodes. The pedagogical framework is clear: children are not in crisis, they are the crisis.
Human development teaches that the issue is not that parents have been systematically deprived of timenergy and ripped from meaningful contexts of family and community to work full time for the corporate machine; the issue is not that women, especially, have been robbed of their traditional wealth of knowledge (more on that below). No, the takeaway is that parenting is a problem to be managed by experts. The job of a student in such a class is to develop a strong aversion to parenthood itself, not to mention literal babies. Ann, for one, never held a real infant until the age of twenty-two. She reports that her peers were likewise estranged from newborns, and that babies were made, by both this class and related cultural messaging, into something “awkward and embarrassing” rather than what they actually are, “little bundles of human potential in the most precious and vulnerable stage of their lives.”
What the course did not teach: that the overwhelming majority of people who have had children report it as the most meaningful experience of their lives.3 That it makes your heart bigger. That it shows you how to love in a way nothing else can, while simultaneously holding you to a standard of responsibility that transforms who you are.4 That in study after study, on deathbeds and in retrospect, family is what people name as the thing that mattered most, and failing to prioritize it is the regret that cuts deepest.
Instead, the message was: children are a nightmare. Don’t do this to yourself.
Ann’s entire peer group absorbed this message. Already in the latter half of her twenties, Ann should not be the first of her graduating class to get married and start a family. Instead, the norm is one of indefinite deferral, or the total foreclosure of any such family-centric future. Time after time on our podcast, Ann has reported that all but one of her friends wants to have children—and that friend is a lesbian who prioritizes her career first anyway.
It must be stressed that these are not economically desperate people. These are women from comparably comfortable homes with educated parents. Today, the women from those circles openly express disdain towards children; it is common to hear, “I hate children.” “Oh wow, I didn’t know they made humans that tiny.” Or the more personalistic comments: “I could never do that to my body” or “my body could never handle that.” Or, “I love myself too much” or “I already don’t get enough sleep—there is simply no way I could ever…” These women are rapidly approaching their thirties with no personal plans in place for a family while expressing open hostility to the thought.
Two out of every three school districts in the United States have adopted a curriculum that simulates parenthood as an ordeal. Yet the facts seem to show that the program does not work at reducing teenage pregnancy. A 2016 study conducted in Western Australia with roughly 3,000 teenage girls found that the program actually increased teen pregnancy rather than reducing it.5
Even if it did reduce teenage pregnancy though, there is the more concerning issue: it fosters a culture of figurative and literal castration.
“Castration” is such a harsh word to generalize to an entire culture, but this is the stronger claim I wish to argue. It will require some heavy-lifting from me in this piece to show that Ann’s experience is no anomaly, nor is this simply a wrong turn made in the last decade—this trajectory was chosen by a self-conscious technocratic elite over a hundred years ago.
To unpack this, we should start by asking what kind of civilization designs a program to simulate its own reproduction as a nightmare and then deploys it across the majority of its schools? What institutional logic produces this? That question has a history.
The Role of 20th Century Progressive-Managerialism
The progressive managerialism of the early twentieth century was not shy about its commitments. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Eugenics Record Office. The Carnegie Institution bankrolled the research facility at Cold Spring Harbor. Eugenics was not a fringe enthusiasm. It was the mainstream scientific consensus of the credentialed progressive class, published in peer-reviewed journals, taught at elite universities, and funded by the same foundations that were simultaneously professionalizing medicine, redesigning public education, and building the institutional architecture we still inhabit.
These institutions were built at the convergence of three forces, none of which required secrecy because all three were spoken aloud.
The first was profit. Every domain of knowledge that had previously been transmitted between women, within families and communities, represented an untapped market. Midwifery becomes obstetrics. Breastfeeding becomes formula. Parenting became reliant on the greatest commodity of the early 20th Century: credentialed expertise.
The separation of women from their traditional domains of knowledge did not just displace them. It created entire industries where none had previously existed, each one requiring professional gatekeepers and institutions—each of these increased corporate capital while at the same time working in the service of state expansion.
The second was labor supply. Capital has always sought to expand the labor pool and drive down wages. Women pulled into the industrial workforce represented a massive new supply of cheaper labor, which simultaneously lowered the bargaining power of men and, over time, made the single-income household structurally impossible. This was a recruitment drive dressed as liberation.
There was a predictable and compounding effect on worker power: the more people competing for the same jobs, the less leverage any of them had. The traditional demands of organized labor, higher pay and shorter hours, became harder to win when the workforce was doubled. Of the three classical demands of working people, higher pay, shorter hours, and safer conditions, only safe conditions tended to be honored with any permanence—thanks to litigation culture, not unions. The other two traditional demands, when won at all, were only ever temporary, soon revoked by the next restructuring.6
The addition of women to the workforce fractured worker solidarity in a subtler way. When men and women within the same household are competing in the same labor market, the household itself becomes a site of market logic rather than a refuge from it. In Haven in a Heartless World (1977), Christopher Lasch argued that the family had become the last institution capable of resisting the total colonization of life by market forces, precisely because it operated on a logic of love, obligation, and intergenerational commitment rather than efficiency and exchange. The progressive project, as Lasch documented it, was to dismantle that haven: to professionalize parenting, to medicalize childhood, to replace the authority of mothers and fathers with the authority of experts, therapists, and state institutions. The family was under siege not because it had failed, but because its success as a site of non-market life made it an obstacle to total market penetration.
The third force was eugenics. Progressives of the early twentieth century openly believed that poverty was a biological problem. The logic was explicit: if the wrong people are reproducing too freely, the answer is not to improve their conditions but to reduce their numbers. Birth control, sterilization campaigns, and the cultural stigmatization of lower-class fertility were all components of the same program.
No one articulated this more clearly than Lothrop Stoddard, Harvard PhD and author of The Revolt Against Civilization (1922), a work that was canon at the American Birth Control League, which would later become Planned Parenthood. His books were bestsellers, praised by a sitting president.7 In his preface, Stoddard announced that “the momentous biological discoveries of the past generation have revealed the true workings of those hitherto mysterious laws of life on which, in the last analysis, all human activity depends,” and that therefore “all political and social problems need to be re-examined.”8 This was not presented as conservative reaction but as scientific advance. The Great War had provided proof of concept: the Army Intelligence Tests administered to 1.7 million soldiers had demonstrated that populations could be sorted, graded, and managed according to innate capacity. “Before the war mental engineering was a dream,” Stoddard observed. “To-day it exists, and its effective development is amply assured.”9 The goal was explicit: a “Neo-Aristocracy” that would harmonize democracy and aristocracy into “a higher synthesis” through biological selection, replacing the old aristocracy of birth with a new aristocracy validated by science.10
Stoddard advocated birth control legislation specifically to suppress reproduction among what he called the “underclass” while encouraging it among the professional and upper classes. This was not a marginal position. It was the published, funded, and institutionally supported consensus of the same class that was redesigning American medicine, education, and public life. They wrote the code on which so much of today’s anti-natalist programming operates.
Stoddard said civilization must manage the "The Under-Man” who he defines as “the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives."11 His popular eugenic programme was here stated plainly: "(1) a larger proportion of superior persons will have children than at present; (2) that the average number of offspring of each superior person will be greater than at present; (3) that the most inferior persons will have no children; and (4) that other inferior persons will have fewer children than now."12 Birth control was central to this project. Stoddard looked forward to the day when "public opinion acquires the racial view-point" and "the present silly and vicious attitude toward birth control will be abandoned, and undesirable children will not be conceived."13 The enforcement mechanism would be cultural as much as legal: "In a society animated by a eugenic conscience the begetting of unsound children would be regarded with horror, and public opinion would instinctively set up strong social taboos."14
The explicit eugenics language has long since been scrubbed from our institutional vocabulary. Yet the structures built during that period remain intact, and their anti-natalist imperative persist in the institutional unconscious. This is not about individual intentions or a conscious plan on the part of today’s elite, nor is it some secret conspiracy. Those who argue that “rape culture,” “patriarchy,” and “white supremacy” are prolific today and baked “systemically” into the very bones of our society should be the first to accept this. Well, anti-natalist eugenics are, I claim, more powerful forces in institutions today than the residue of patriarchy or lingering effects of past racism.
The robot baby program is not explicitly eugenic. It’s hard to imagine that anyone in the school district thinks of it that way. However, it descends from the same institutional logic, built by the same class of professionals, funded by the same network of foundations, and oriented toward the same outcome: discouraging reproduction among the populations these institutions were designed to manage.
There is a final structural consequence that is tricky to talk about, but we have to go there: when a culture successfully suppresses family formation among its native working class, when it hollows out the household and extends adolescence into the thirties, when it teaches women that corporate employment is liberation and that children are an obstacle to self-realization, the birth rate drops.
When the birth rate drops, capital does not simply accept a smaller labor pool. It is imported. Immigrant labor is cheaper, less organized, and arrives without the inherited expectations, legal protections, or cultural memory of what workers in the previous generation were able to demand. Thus the cycle completes itself: the culture that persuaded its own working class not to reproduce replaces them with a workforce even more vulnerable to exploitation. Conspiracy theorists always take this too far. This need not be a conspiracy by or against any particular group. It is the logic of capital doing what it always does: finding the cheapest, most compliant labor supply available, and then fostering a culture that ensures that this supply never dries up.
The prolonged adolescence that DINK culture celebrates as self-discovery, the permanent youth that it sells as freedom, the arrested development that it mistakes for sophistication: all of this serves the machine.15 A twenty-something with no dependents, commitments, or horizon beyond personal consumption is the ideal labor unit. Disposable. Flexible. Grateful for whatever is offered. A person with a family, a household, a mortgage, a community, a set of obligations that cannot be renegotiated by HR, that person has demands. That person needs higher pay and shorter hours. That person is expensive and difficult. The culture of castration is, at bottom, a culture designed to produce workers who will never become that person.
What Professional-Managerialism Did to Motherhood and Family
Women were the primary healers and birth attendants for 99.9% of human history. Midwifery was transmitted between women, within families and communities, as embodied knowledge passed from mothers to daughters. This was not primitive or backward—it was empowering. Women are the gatekeepers into the realm of the living. They are, traditionally, masters in the realms of nurture and care.
Yet women were, in the United States of America, separated from this inherited knowledge and, for the first time in human history, banned from the activity they had always taken pride in doing. This only became something celebrated by second wave feminists much later when professional academics rationalized the estra. In the beginning, this separation of women from nurture was driven purely by the logic of capital.
This took place at the beginning of the 20th Century, with the rise of progressive-managerialism. It was done under the pretense of lowering child and mother mortality. Yet a 1912 Johns Hopkins study showed that American doctors were, on average, less competent than the midwives they were working to replace.16 The two leading causes of maternal and infant death at the time, puerperal sepsis and neonatal ophthalmia, were both easily preventable by techniques well within the grasp of any midwife: hand-washing and eye drops, respectively. The obvious solution, which had been adopted in England, Germany, and most of Europe, was to upgrade midwifery through training. Midwifery became an established, independent, respected occupation. In England, 80% of all births are still delivered by midwives, often in the peaceful setting of the mother’s home.
So why did the opposite happen in America? Under intense pressure from the medical profession, bankrolled by Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, state after state passed laws outlawing midwifery and restricting the practice of obstetrics to licensed physicians. Infant mortality actually rose in the years immediately following these laws.17 The ban on midwives had nothing to do with competence or safety. It had everything to do with monopoly-moguls eliminating competition, consolidating institutional control, and creating a market where one had not existed.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English laid this out in Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (1973), and the pattern they identified has only intensified. The professionalization of birth was not a triumph of science over superstition. It was the same institutional move that the Carnegies and Rockefellers were making across every domain of American life in the early twentieth century: replace the people’s knowledge with expert knowledge, replace empowering practice with credentialed gatekeeping, and build giant institutions that make the population dependent on professionals for things they had always previously done for themselves.
This is the formation of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) applied to motherhood. This is alienation on a whole new level.18 The same forces that de-skilled advanced workers and replaced them with college-credentialed petty elites also de-skilled mothers and replaced them with obstetricians, pediatricians, lactation consultants, sleep trainers, and eventually, robot baby simulators in public school classrooms.
Everything Precious Melted Into Air
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx famously wrote that, with the rise of capitalism:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned
This much we can all agree on. Where Marxists really lose the plot is when affirming the rest of that sentence:
and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
That is exactly what never occurs. Nobody is compelled to face with sober senses the real conditions of life or relations with one’s kind — we are instead compelled to do quite the opposite. The only exception are those hard-nosed realists who say, “This is good, actually” because they think it will, by Marx’s logic, lead to something better. This is how left activists become the shocktroops and chief rationalizers of anti-civilizational forces.
Rather than coming to our senses, we are addicted to the ideology and mode that melts everything precious into air. What could possibly be more precious than the relationship between a mother and her child?
The institutionalized and institution-building de-skilling that alienated women from traditional roles and knowledge did not stop with birth. We are all the products of a culture that extracted nurture from homes and outsourced it to institutions that have extended their control to every domain of maternal competence:
Breastfeeding: practiced by all human beings for the entirety of our existence as a species, it was systematically displaced by formula marketed as modern, scientific, and convenient. Gabrielle Palmer documents in The Politics of Breastfeeding how the formula industry captured the medical establishment, funded research that minimized the powerful benefits of breastfeeding, and created a culture of shame and confusion around the most basic act of nourishing a child.19
Jennifer Grayson, in Unlatched, traces how breastfeeding went from universal practice to cultural controversy—and who profits from that controversy.20 The answer, as always, is the industry that sells the replacement. This is not just about cost effective efficiency freeing up women to work, it is about an industry that has undermined the most natural and nurturing act that unites us with all mammalian species; it is about the extraction of value and empowerment for the sake of profit, despite the rise in health risks. Babies raised on formula are more likely to suffer from allergies and be susceptible to diseases. How convenient for the healthcare industry.
Birth itself: Jennifer Block’s Pushed documents how modern maternity care systematically prioritizes institutional convenience over the mother’s experience and autonomy.21 Scheduled inductions, routine interventions, skyrocketing C-section rates. The documentary The Business of Being Born captures the same trajectory from a different angle: the medicalization of a process that women’s bodies are designed to carry out, repackaged as a medical emergency requiring hospital infrastructure, specialist teams, and enormous expense.
I have been, for the last 8 weeks, been attending, with my wife, a “birthing class” in which we are taught the kinds of knowledge that women were systematically separated from at the beginning of the previous century. A fact shared there is one also raised in the above resources, and it is one that the hospital industry should be ashamed of: Women are supposed to move around during child birth, this is natural and good. Instead, for the sake of the convenience of doctors, mothers are made to lay on their back and push. This leads to serious complications for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that lying on her back closes the pelvis instead of opening it.
Co-sleeping: practiced by the majority of human cultures across all of recorded history, and in most of the non institutionalized-world today, sleeping with one’s baby has been pathologized in America as dangerous and irresponsible. The anti-co-sleeping campaign serves the crib industry, the bassinet industry, the $400 smart-bassinet-with-an-app industry. It also serves a deeper function: it communicates to new parents that their instincts are dangerous, that proximity to their own child requires technological mediation, and that they cannot be trusted to sleep next to the being they just brought into the world.
The pattern across all of these cases is the same: replacing nurture, empowerment, and intimacy with commodities and attachment issues. Now come the substitutes: binkies, bouncers, jumpers, underpaid and overworked childcare personnel, or the tablet/TV screen. Each is a product that replaces a present parent. Each is marketed as making her life easier, which is to say: she can’t do this without us.
The apparatus creates the overwhelm and then sells her the solution. First they professionalize everything she used to know how to do, then they tell her that without our products and professionals, she will fail. Then, when the whole thing predictably feels impossible, the culture says: “See? Children are a nightmare. You’d be crazy to do this—and if you do, you better prepare yourself to be constantly reliant on experts.”
They say that “hell has no fury like a woman scorned” but I don’t think the system is prepared for a generation of new mothers coming into the knowledge of what was done to their own mothers and grandmothers by a system that prioritized business expediency over the health, comfort, empowerment, and intimacy of mothers. Judging by Ann’s own rage about this situation, and the other women I have met through the midwifery collective and the birthing class, I suspect there will be more than hell to pay in terms of institutional reforms.
Anti-Civilizational Counter-Culture
The fear propaganda is not confined to schools and hospitals. It has become the background noise of the entire anti-civilizational counter-culture. My guess is that most of my readers are millennials who are numb to most of this and who, more importantly, have not been exposed to the worst of it. So let me share some of that with you. Living with and learning from a woman who is natality-pilled in the midst of the most anti-natalist generation in human history, I hear about examples every day.
Chappell Roan, on the Call Her Daddy podcast (the girl boss version of Joe Rogan Experience), told millions of young women: “All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I don’t know anyone who’s happy and has children at this age.”22 Roan said she has not met a single parent with “light in their eyes.” She is a twenty-seven years old from Missouri, the daughter of a woman who had her at twenty-two. Roan doesn’t know how her mother managed. Honestly, I agree. It’s hard to imagine how many women are able to continue on under such extreme levels of alienation. The anti-natalist ideology is not the primary mover here, but it functions to rationalize our experiences in a way that serves the institutional logic in its own service to capital. This ideology has done its work so thoroughly that a woman one generation removed from a semi-functioning family can no longer imagine how it was possible.
Roan is no anomaly. She is a representative of castration culture. Its influencer pipeline is saturated with anti-natalist content: “I wouldn’t bring a child into this world.” “You must hate your body if you get pregnant.” “I would never carry a man’s child, you must hate women if you do that.” These are not fringe takes from obscure corners of the internet—these reels always had the support of millions before they ever reached my wife. They circulate as common sense among Ann’s peers on TikTok and Instagram. They are, in aggregate, a cultural curriculum more powerful than anything taught in the classroom, because they come wrapped in the aesthetics of authentic self-expression and personal empowerment.
With all this said, we haven’t even addressed the issue that presses itself in on women from all sides: Beauty standards. The standard feminist story about beauty standards is that they are unrealistic expectations set by “the male gaze.” What gets left out is that these standards are set by the gaze of certain kinds of male.
This narrative reduces men to our worst archetypes, while simultaneously hiding the real culprits: industries that prey on the insecurities of women, and fashion standards set by childless perverts in the service of corporate capital. You may have heard bits and pieces of this critique here or there, often pushed by “body positivity” activists who tend to shill for Big Fat. What’s missing from these critiques is the most important and damning level of the critique: These so-called “beauty standards” are anti-mother.
Mainstream Hollywood is and always has been quite capable of celebrating yet critiquing the unrealistic and overly sexualized beauty standards. Yet you will not find the growing anti-capitalist feminist tendency of critique capable of sitting with the ultimate point—how this is anti-natalist. The most powerful recent movie on the subject of beauty standards was The Substance.
Tony Chamas, in his recent piece "The Age of Sexual Capital," uses The Substance alongside the viral looksmaxxing figure Clavicular to map what sociologists Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz call "pharmacopornographic capitalism."
Tony's core insight is that the obsession with appearance is not vanity but a rational response to a system where youth and attractiveness function as depreciating capital. What makes Clavicular significant is that he represents this logic jumping the gender line.
What makes capitalist society different from all previous class societies is the prospect of social mobility. The dream of increasing one's power and moving up the hierarchy distinguishes it from hereditary aristocracy. This makes people more “status anxious” than ever before. One’s brand image has become more important than ever in attaining power.23
The beauty trap that was once sold primarily to women, the idea that your market value is your body and your body is an investment portfolio requiring constant optimization, is now being sold to young men with a layer of testosterone on top. Bone smashing, unregulated drugs, surgical self-transformation: these are young men who have absorbed the premise that sexual capital is the path to the Good Life. They are not chasing love directed toward family. They are chasing the accumulation of desirability as an end-in-itself.
Tony's analysis is sharp and correct, but its focus brackets out the most important level of analysis and consequently shares a blind spot with the best feminist critiques of beauty culture. What they all miss is that what suffers the most under the oppressive weight of these beauty standards: motherhood, in and for itself.
Consider what the film never names and no critic I’ve encountered has thought to highlight: before Elizabeth Sparkle loses her job, before the serum, before any of it, she is already living alone and childless. In our culture of castration, this is treated as the invisible default, the unmarked background condition of a successful woman’s life. The entire horror of the film is organized around the terror of aging out of desirability, not the deeper horror of one’s final three decades spent in isolation. The reason that the loss of being desirable is existentially annihilating for Elizabeth is that she has nothing else: No family. No children. No intergenerational life that would give her a relationship to the future independent of her market value. If Elizabeth had built a family, the loss of her career and her youth would be painful but survivable. Instead, her identity was tied to a market whose demand she has lost.
This is also, ultimately, the trajectory that Clavicular and the looksmaxxing boys are on. They have internalized the same lie that destroyed Elizabeth Sparkle, just a generation earlier and from the male side. The lie is not “you should look good.” The lie is that sexual capital is what matters most, that desirability is the highest aim, that love is something you win by optimizing yourself for the market rather than something you build by binding yourself to another person and to the future. Castration culture sells this lie to women through beauty standards and to men through looksmaxxing, and in both cases what it forecloses is the same thing: the possibility that your life could be organized around something other than your own depreciating value.
The Substance is not, finally, a film about beauty standards. It is a film about what happens when you follow every instruction of the Liberal Rumspringa and arrive, at the end of it, alone and childless. Thus, even when the dominant visual culture becomes self-critical, its definition of beauty remains defined as not looking like a mother.
My wife has been going through the bodily changes of her first pregnancy and has, in part, felt the implied judgement of our cultural moment, which she calls the return of anorexia chic. As Ann wrote in "On Getting Bigger While the World Gets Smaller":
"Never before have we lived in a society that is so anti-children, motherhood, and families. As the global birth rate falls and anorexia-chic makes its way back into style, I can't help but feel that it is not only anti-woman, creating harmful expectations on the ideal body or what should matter in life, but it is anti-mother."24
Exercise and diet advertising now present the notion that the postpartum “bounce back” is a (nearly) moral obligation. The woman whose body shows evidence of having carried and nourished life is a woman who has failed to maintain herself. However, this is not just about individual choices. It is about the fact that pregnant mothers today find themselves without the rich and supportive contexts and structures that were guaranteed by all traditional societies across the world and throughout history. This is where Ann gets the most personal:
"What is horrible, painful, and difficult is being so isolated from the other women in my life, of feeling like I am changing in a way that they not only will never understand, but that they don't really care to understand because we're all just making our individual choices, and this is one they have entirely written off."
The overwhelming response Ann received after publishing this was absolutely clueless. Instead of rightfully seeing her experience as a self-aware critique of the structures, or lack thereof, in our society, they acted like this was something she was experiencing—like it’s just a subjective reflection based in a subjective choice. What they miss is that she’s simply waking up to the reality, and it’s anti-mother.
If you haven’t already been noticing, you may now begin. Mom-bodied women are almost entirely invisible in mainstream American film and television. The only reliable exception are older black women who are shown to have maternal bodies on screen (what’s up with that?). White women, even when playing mothers, never appear mom-bodied. Roseanne Barr is the only exception I can think of and her show was built around the comedic premise that her family was a mess. The message is consistent: the body that has given life is the body the culture tells you to erase.
Anger is no solution, but we should nonetheless feel some outrage about this. It is time for men to step up in opposition to Big Beauty.
What About Political-Economy?
There is a critique that comes from a more materialist direction that deserves to be addressed directly. At least one third of my readers will hold this position, as have many of my collaborators or fellow travelers over the last ten years. The argument goes: it’s not the ideology or culture, it’s the economics. People aren’t choosing to avoid family, they’re priced out of it. Until single incomes can raise families and the overhead for family formation drops, talking about cultural attitudes is tilting at windmills.
This is partially correct and I have also written about it at length: the theft of timenergy by a job-centric society is the structural precondition for everything I’m describing.25 The material conditions are obviously brutal: housing has become unaffordable relative to income, the age of first-time homebuyers has reached record highs, childcare costs now exceed mortgage payments in most states, and this generation enters adulthood saddled with student debt at levels unimaginable to their parents.26 I say this is “partially correct” because it misleads us. The material constraints are the most important issue, but they cannot be changed by focusing on political economy. (I will follow this with a deeper dive into this subject in No War But Culture War.)
The point is that the material and the cultural are not two separate problems. They are the same process viewed from different angles. Which came first, girl boss feminism or women being torn from their homes and put into factories? Engels was writing about absentee mothers and fathers already in the 1840s. Capital needed cheaper labor. Women were that cheaper labor.
Bringing women into the workforce drove wages down through competition, which then required dual incomes, which then made the single-income family structurally impossible. The ideology of liberation came after and in service of this material transformation. Louise Perry documents exactly this in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: the sexual revolution was sold as freedom, but its primary beneficiaries were (the worst form of) male sexual interests and their intersection with market interests—not women’s flourishing.27
The ideology doesn’t originate from working people. Nobody struggling to make rent on 40k a year is waxing poetic about the freedom of childlessness. The ideology is generated by and for the PMC (Professional Managerial Class), the credentialed stratum that emerged in the early twentieth century as a buffer between capital and labor (I’ve got a deeper dive on this coming soon in Why I Am Not Anti-PMC). It is peddled through institutions: universities, hospitals, media outlets, and public schools. It rationalizes a mode of production that is anti-family by design, and then its consequences filter down to people like me, my wife Ann, and the majority of our friends and family. We never signed up for it, yet we unconsciously adopted it.
Barbara Ehrenreich, who already played such a significant role in this piece, returns here at the end with another crucial contribution in her Fear of Falling. She shows how the Professional Managerial Class doesn’t avoid family because it can’t afford children. Rather, it avoids family because its consumption expectations rise faster than its income while at the same time competition for its position in the relations of production becomes all the more fierce. The better off you are, the more afraid of falling you become. Every rung on the ladder makes the drop look further.28
So the PMC leans into individual careerism and away from family, not out of material desperation, but because its idea of what “affording it” means has been inflated beyond anything any previous generation would have recognized as reasonable. Yet they still reap the benefits of the relatively stable homes they grew up in—homes that are themselves increasingly hollowed out. This is crucial: even the most “privileged” homes have been reduced to functional roommate arrangements without intergenerationality or non-instrumentalized relationships or timenergy. When people disparage the family or the institution of marriage, it is important to remember that the “thing” against which they rail is, in almost all cases, the product of this over-a-century long project of progressive-managerialism and its ideological shocktroops systematically depleting the cultural conditions of flourishing, love, and nurture.
Pro-choice culture, in this broader sense, doesn’t just refer to abortion access. It refers to the reduction of family to a mere “choice,” and a foolish one at that, unless you are completely, unassailably financially secure. Yet who in the history of the world has ever been completely secure? The economic calculus that our culture applies to family formation is the inhuman logic of capital sold to us as humanitarian compassion and capitalist realism. It is pure machine ideology. It treats the decision to bring a child into the world as a cost-benefit analysis rather than as a response to something deeper, older, and far more meaningful and precious.
The person who waits for financial security before committing to someone is, in practice, letting the framework of consumer society dictate the sequencing of their life. As Brad Wilcox documents in Get Married, married couples actually build wealth more effectively than single people.29
The materialist sequencing is exactly backward. Yet how will anyone ever know this if the only voices in their life are telling them that children are hell, that their body will be ruined, that their freedom will be gone, and that the responsible thing to do is wait until conditions are perfect.
Conditions will never be perfect. That is the point. The ideology of perfection-before-commitment is a death-trap leading to figurative and functional, if not literal, castration.
To bring this to a close: the same institutional logic that outlawed midwives in 1910 now hands your daughter a robot baby in 2025 and calls it “education.” The same forces that needed women in factories a hundred and fifty years ago now need them in cubicles. She is now sold the soul-crushing servitude of corporate “bullshit jobs” as “liberation.”30 The same Professional Managerial Class that bankrolled the de-skilling of workers bankrolled the de-skilling of mothers. And the culture that results from all of this does not need your conscious buy-in. It just needs to remove the scaffolding and let you conclude, on your own, that building something was never realistic.
This is the first of the follow-up pieces to The Natality Pill, which is the personal version of this argument. If you haven’t read it, here it is:
In Listen, Liberal Thomas Frank tells the story of how Democrats lost the respect of your average working class voter. Under Clinton, the new solution to poverty became “education.” Implied by this is always the notion that, if you are struggling financially, it’s because you either 1. did not do well in school, or 2. your school was under-funded. This really solidified something that had already been growing in the United States, i.e. education as meritocracy.
Realityworks, the Wisconsin-based company that manufactures the RealCare Baby simulators, reports that more than 70% of U.S. school districts use their products, with programs in over 90 countries worldwide. See "Realityworks Unveils RealCare Baby 4: A Next-Generation Infant Simulator for Education," press release, July 25, 2025; "Eau Claire-based Realityworks' RealCare Baby Is Used in 70% of U.S. School Districts," Volume One, August 21, 2025, https://volumeone.org/sites/school/articles/2025/08/27/369603-eau-claire-based-realityworks-realcare-baby-is.
Tim Carney, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be (New York: HarperCollins, 2024). Carney’s data on deathbed regrets is among the most clarifying material available on where our priorities actually land in the light of hindsight.
I’m basing this off of personal reports first and foremost, but will also include some data that backs this up. Experientially, over the last twenty years, roughly 9 out of 10 parents tell me the same thing, that having a child taught him or her how to love, grow up, and take responsibility. The only exceptions to this have been either lifestyle addicts who habitually neglected their children and now feel wretched about it, or the kinds of moms who complain about their children and loss of freedom to score points in certain hyper-blue progressive urban circles.
Sally Brinkman et al., “Efficacy of infant simulator programmes to prevent teenage pregnancy: a school-based cluster randomised controlled trial in Western Australia,” *The Lancet* 388, no. 10057 (2016): 2264–2271. The study followed roughly 3,000 girls and found that those in the simulated infant parenting program had higher rates of pregnancy and birth than the control group.
When I say “restructuring” think of what Weber called “rationalization.”: the systematic replacement of traditional, craft, and community-based practices with efficiency-maximizing institutional procedures. In the corporate context, this means buyouts, mergers, and the mass layoffs that follow as roles and functions become redundant. Grossman, in The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System (1929), describes this process precisely: crises are overcome "by the same methods of rationalisation, by a process of fusion and concentration, and increases in the productivity of labour through technological renovations." In Marx's framework (Capital, Vol. 3, Chapters 13-15), these restructurings function as counteracting tendencies to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Capital's drive to replace living labor with machinery pushes profits down over time; restructuring temporarily restores profitability by eliminating redundant workers and cheapening the elements of production. The issue is that each round of rationalization raises the bar for the next, which is why the gains for workers (higher pay, shorter hours) won are always temporary, revoked by the next cycle of consolidation. For a contemporary treatment, see Ted Reese, The End of Capitalism: The Thought of Henryk Grossman (London: Zero Books, 2022). I interview Reese here:
Warren G. Harding: “Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard's book on The Rising Tide of Color . . . must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts." Warren G. Harding, Address of the President of the United States at the Celebration of the Semicentennial of the Founding of the City of Birmingham, Alabama, October 26, 1921 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921).
Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), vii.
Stoddard, Revolt Against Civilization, 73.
Stoddard, Revolt Against Civilization, 263.
Stoddard, Revolt Against Civilization, 23.
Stoddard, Revolt Against Civilization, 240 (Stoddard is quoting Paul Popenoe and Roswell Johnson, Applied Eugenics).
Stoddard, Revolt Against Civilization, 251.
Stoddard, Revolt Against Civilization, 251.
When I say “machine” I think of first the techno-capital-state-institutional-matrix. Neil Postman’s Technopoly is really good here. More recently, I’ve been reading Paul Kingsnorth who, half the time, makes me feel like I’m hearing my own thoughts said back to me but better. Once I’ve had time to really digest his Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, which will require re-reading in a seminar with members at Theory Underground, I look forward to writing works that engage more explicitly with his project.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: The Feminist Press, 1973; rev. ed. 2010). The Johns Hopkins study and the history of midwifery’s suppression in America are documented in detail.
Ehrenreich and English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses. A study of infant mortality rates in Washington state showed an increase in the years immediately following the law forbidding midwifery.
Whenever I use the term “alienation” I am primarily drawing from Estranged Labor, a foundational document by Karl Marx. As a non-Marxist, I am very selective about those aspects of his project that I draw on for inspiration; however, I am indelibly shaped by my appreciation for his Estranged Labor. In this short work he unpacks the way that waged-labor in industrial society separates the worker from first the product of his labor, second from the knowledge necessary for its production, third from his species-being which goes beyond survival and includes the liberal arts (as a form of “spiritual nourishment” for understanding the world) and fourth, from his fellow man. [Apply this to the part this is footnoting in response to] You can see me give a lecture Introducing Marx here:
Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts Are Bad for Business (London: Pinter & Martin, 1988; rev. ed. 2009). Palmer traces how the formula industry captured the medical establishment and displaced breastfeeding as a cultural norm.
Jennifer Grayson, Unlatched: The Evolution of Breastfeeding and the Making of a Controversy (New York: Harper, 2016). Grayson documents the transformation of breastfeeding from universal practice to cultural battleground.
Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007). Block documents the systematic prioritization of institutional convenience over maternal autonomy in American obstetric practice.
Chappell Roan, interview on Call Her Daddy podcast, aired March 2025. Roan also said “They’re in hell ‘cause they love their kids,” but the framing of parenthood as hell circulated as the dominant takeaway across social media.
David McKerracher, Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy (Foreword by Slavoj Žižek) (Boise, ID: Theory Underground Publishing, 2023). Timenergy is not just free time. It is large, reliably repeatable blocks of time-with-energy. Without it, the Good Life is structurally foreclosed.
In 1984, a new home cost 3.6 times the median household income; by 2023, that ratio exceeded 5.3 times nationally, and in coastal markets like San Jose and San Francisco it surpasses 11 times. See "Not Your Parents' Housing Market: 4 Signs Buying a Home Has Gotten Harder," NewsNation, August 20, 2025, https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/parents-housing-market-4-things-have-changed/. The median age of first-time homebuyers has risen from the early thirties in the 1980s to a record high of 38 in 2024. See National Association of Realtors, "2024 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report." Childcare now averages $13,128 per year nationally, a figure that rose 29% between 2020 and 2024, outpacing inflation by 7%. In 45 states, the cost of childcare for two children exceeds the average mortgage payment; for single parents, it represents 35% of median income. See Child Care Aware of America, "Child Care in America: 2024 Price & Supply," November 2025, https://www.childcareaware.org/price-landscape24/. Meanwhile, the average 1996 graduate left school with $12,750 in student debt ($26,069 adjusted); today's average exceeds $40,000, and 84% of Gen Z borrowers report delaying major life investments, including homeownership and family formation. See "Student Loan Debt by Generation," Education Data Initiative, November 2024, https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-generation.
Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022). Perry argues that the sexual revolution primarily benefited men seeking commitment-free sex and market forces seeking an expanded labor pool, not women’s autonomy or flourishing.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989). Ehrenreich’s analysis of Professional Managerial Class anxiety, and how rising consumption expectations produce a class that is too afraid of downward mobility to take risks on anything that doesn’t serve career advancement.
W. Bradford Wilcox, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (New York: Broadside Books, 2024). Wilcox documents that married couples build wealth more effectively than single individuals, cutting against the widespread assumption that financial independence must precede commitment.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). Graeber's thesis is that a significant and growing percentage of jobs in the modern economy are, by the admission of those who hold them, pointless. These are not the dirty, difficult, or dangerous jobs that keep civilization running. They are administrative, managerial, and supervisory roles that exist primarily to justify themselves and reproduce the institutional apparatus that created them. The relevance here is direct: the economy that pulled women out of the home and sold it as liberation did not pull them into meaningful work. It pulled many of them into precisely the kind of soul-crushing make-work that Graeber documents, jobs that offer neither the dignity of genuine craft nor the fulfillment of caregiving, only a paycheck and the slow erosion of timenergy.
The feel of pulse on this one is STRONG