And this is why my script defending reproduction will appeal to the male age 18-25 demographic.
Oh, I'm not so foolish as to think that I can say, Hey, guys, here's a movie about babies, you're gonna love it. But since I was in school... which is a while ago... we've been on about overpopulation. On and on and on. We don't *approve* of people who have babies. Maybe if they are financially comfortable and they only have a couple of children we find reproduction tolerable. But old style ideas about virility? Oh... just *try* that one, and get back to me.
And while dooms-day population scare mongering as been the message du jour for at least 20 years we've waged a war, of sorts, on teen pregnancy. As a whole, humans are a blight on the earth, as *individuals* children ruin your life.
Is this not what we've been telling kids ever since we discovered that the sexual revolution meant teenagers getting knocked up? But what can they possibly have heard except that *they* should never have been born?
The truth is that what young people are told in school is not true. This is a quote from the article I linked above.
"What we really need to do is start thinking about controlling our population before it's too late," he said Monday. "It's already too late, but we're not even thinking about it. We're just mindlessly rushing ahead breeding our brains out."
Far from breeding our brains out, people have bought the hype about over population, and more importantly, bought as truth the idea that having children ruins your life.
People *aren't* breeding.
The US is barely hanging on to a replacement fertility rate while Europe is trying to extinct itself.
My script is a science fiction story about a clash of cultures. One is like ours. The other views children as contributers rather than consumers, as a valuable addition, respected, rather than dismissed... *capable* of understanding the big picture and acting in the interest of their people rather than social nuisances. It will appeal on a primal level to the alienation that young men feel.
Plus, they get to steal a super-secret military spaceship.
What's not to like about that?
Related: Link to the Y Files discussing Pianka. As always, far more intelligent and thorough than I can produce.
Related: This whole thing brings to mind S.M.Stirling's Draka. Particularly this book which features a willing human accomplice to Draka domination for the vision of a future of a world without the cancer of humanity. I *hated* that book when I read it. (The Draka are not very nice.)
Oh, I'm not so foolish as to think that I can say, Hey, guys, here's a movie about babies, you're gonna love it. But since I was in school... which is a while ago... we've been on about overpopulation. On and on and on. We don't *approve* of people who have babies. Maybe if they are financially comfortable and they only have a couple of children we find reproduction tolerable. But old style ideas about virility? Oh... just *try* that one, and get back to me.
And while dooms-day population scare mongering as been the message du jour for at least 20 years we've waged a war, of sorts, on teen pregnancy. As a whole, humans are a blight on the earth, as *individuals* children ruin your life.
Is this not what we've been telling kids ever since we discovered that the sexual revolution meant teenagers getting knocked up? But what can they possibly have heard except that *they* should never have been born?
The truth is that what young people are told in school is not true. This is a quote from the article I linked above.
"What we really need to do is start thinking about controlling our population before it's too late," he said Monday. "It's already too late, but we're not even thinking about it. We're just mindlessly rushing ahead breeding our brains out."
Far from breeding our brains out, people have bought the hype about over population, and more importantly, bought as truth the idea that having children ruins your life.
People *aren't* breeding.
The US is barely hanging on to a replacement fertility rate while Europe is trying to extinct itself.
My script is a science fiction story about a clash of cultures. One is like ours. The other views children as contributers rather than consumers, as a valuable addition, respected, rather than dismissed... *capable* of understanding the big picture and acting in the interest of their people rather than social nuisances. It will appeal on a primal level to the alienation that young men feel.
Plus, they get to steal a super-secret military spaceship.
What's not to like about that?
Related: Link to the Y Files discussing Pianka. As always, far more intelligent and thorough than I can produce.
Related: This whole thing brings to mind S.M.Stirling's Draka. Particularly this book which features a willing human accomplice to Draka domination for the vision of a future of a world without the cancer of humanity. I *hated* that book when I read it. (The Draka are not very nice.)
Comments
My baby sister (31 year old university instructor) says that her friends aren't having kids. (She'd like to but it's not working out.) She's about as liberal Democrat as anyone but this is what she sees. People her age are not having children, and she blames their parents for years of "don't expect to get pregnant and bring the kid home for me to raise" and "having a baby will ruin your life" rhetoric. And now they are 30 years old and the message meant for their teen years has stuck. The parents didn't want grandkids and they aren't getting grandkids.
I graduated high school with the firm belief that having more than one or two children was blatantly immoral. The whole earth was going to be over run by the plague of humanity and we'd never be able to feed us all.
If you look back at where all this came from it goes right to Eugenics and the purpose of trying to convince people with bad genes (evidenced by poverty and moral weakness, which were believed to be genetic) to stop breeding so much. Planned Parenthood started as an only thinly vieled racist motivated crusade to keep the wrong sorts of women from having so many children.