| Men have the power to put a stop to this, but are more interested in proving their manhood instead.
A safe and effective male contraceptive is going to change the dynamics of the current situation in some funny ways. A "marriage strike" can be tolerated so long as government continues to enforce child support obligations. Women may not find it desireable, but it is tolerable. You are suggesting that men take this a step further and go on a "conception strike," thus placing the continuation of the society itself in peril. This would indeed get government's attention, but probably not in the way you expect. There are hints in the debate over paternal DNA testing that government is less interested in tying child support obligation to biological parenthood than to men as a class. Were there to become available a cheap and effective male contraceptive, such that men with something to lose economically could take themselves out of the target environment (a much more likely form of 'conception strike,' in my view, than the widespread adoption of celibacy which you seem to be suggesting), I believe government's response would be to begin supporting the children of single mothers via the tax system. There would always be loser men out there who had nothing to extract in terms of child support who would be willing to serve as society's studs. All you'd have is bunch of frustrated, celibate males who got dinged anyway in the form of higher taxation. My hunch is that what is going on is not fixable, at least not in a democratic society. This is a classic "tragedy of the commons" phenomenon in which it is in each person's individual short-term interest to continue pushing the society incrementally towards collapse. It is now in every man's short-term individual interest to avoid marriage. It is in every woman's short-term individual interest to seek ever-more onerous government intervention to extract child support from men, married or not. The whole thing just goes click-click-click like a ratchet, one baby and divorce at a time, toward a place no one wants to go. It is easy to see how short-term political considerations and the application of endless band-aid fixes will take this society from where it is now toward nearly universal single parenthood by women, supported through the tax system by a government that has to become ever-more draconian in its collection methods, as men quietly opt out of the society altogether because it has nothing for them. That's not politically stable and it won't last all that long, but for the decade or two before it is overthrown, the government we have now is likely to become men's worst nightmare. At the time it will look to people like the only way, but it wasn't the only way. It's just that the choices to go another way had to have been made about twenty years ago. It's too late now, we're going this way. |
We are probably going to find out in not too many years whether you are right, and I suspect that we are going to find out that men's pre-marital sexual behavior has zero to do with whether government seeks to remove adult males from those human families they do manage to form.