Its 3014, and we have achieved gender equality…

" They far outnumber the women who get pregnant and give the baby away (although I know some of them too). "

Abortion surely plays a part here?

This is a really interesting discussion. Has anyone read A Woman on the edge of time? Some of the ideas on here are visualised in the book. There the 'Utopia' has three parents per child who volunteered. Any one person could be parents of a number of children with a number of different combinations of parents. The child is created and born in an incubator (not something I am putting forward btw. It was the only part of the utopia I didn't agree with). Another big thing was sexuality. It was very very fluid. Lots of same sex relationships as well heteronormative ones. It was also difficult to tell men and women apart visually because everyone wore all types of clothes and had all types of hairstyles.

So women without partners get pregnant because they are brainwashed by ideas of Feminity? But pair bonding - being someone's wife, that is 'inevitable'?

So the MRA idea basically. There is something wrong and unnatural with women who want to reproduce without a male owner.

Agree there will probably be some relationship abuse, or just relationships breaking down naturally, but I was trying to suggest the resident parent wouldn't predominantly be female if there was gender equality.

Same sex parents I think there's already some evidence that they have more equal relationships than hetero couples, and we already have a model of sperm and egg donors that gay couples make work for them, although I guess being an egg donor is always going to be rarer than being a sperm donor because it's a harder process to put your body through.

I'm not convinced there will be many women who will choose to be lone parents (I mean become pregnant as a single person, not those who start off in a couple) in a world that doesn't hold motherhood up as the epitomy of femininity. It's such hard work, I think fewer people overall will choose it as an option if its easier to avoid (just think about the percentages of female graduates in their 40s who now don't have kids). Maybe that view says more about me and my lack of broodiness!

Oh yes guilt is a totally conditioned feeling. I don't imagine that animals ever feel guilt, though they clearly feel happy, sad, scared, surprise, excitement etc.

Even with 100% failsafe contraception that every single person has access to and no moral problem with using, the planned, pair-bonding theory doesn't apply to relationships which turn abusive after the pregnancy (I'm assuming that there will still be relationship abuse but hopefully it will be less gendered and less accepted or thought of as some kind of milestone to be got over) or some other reason that the relationship breaks down.

Also, some people may choose to have children alone or in a same sex relationship necessitating an extra biological parent (assuming we haven't figured out asexual/homosexual reproduction - maybe we will have and so that would be moot!) or have a co-parenting relationship which is not a romantic relationship, where you share childcare but don't necessarily live together. I always think that that would be a great setup - perhaps that will be more popular in the future once we've got away from this idea that children are magically better off in a two-parent household with married parents. I find that having another adult to share childcare with is much better and preferable for those adults, provided they support each other but it doesn't matter to the children as long as they are loved and their parent(s) isn't/aren't overwhelmed by having to care for them.

If in 1000 years time we have 100% effective contraception and women aren't subjected to the conditioning that wanting children is an essential part of being a woman maybe there will be fewer accidental pregnancies (1/3 of all pregnancies at the moment) and so pregnancy will inevitably be planned and part of a pair bond.

Single parents would be male and female since there would be no social expectation for women to do the bulk of the childcare, male and female violence levels would be equivalent (don't know if it would reduce overall, maybe female violence would increase while male violence decreased? But whichever, those parents who society decided shouldn't be allowed access to their children would be equally likely to be male or female), and women would be as likely to die or abandon their children as men.

I do think those feelings that you mention Buffy are more than conditioning. It makes sense on an animal/evolutionary level for somebody if not everybody to have strong protective urges and an emotional need to be close to small babies. The mother is necessarily going to be around when the baby is born, so it makes sense that she has these urges and needs far more strongly than anybody else, although in general we are programmed to see babies as vulnerable, cute, nice, unthreatening. For the survival of the species we instinctively want our children with us and I think that probably is stronger in women than in men although obviously individuals may vary.

when i was a waitress we used to joke about customers coming and messing up our lovely clean restaurant

is it yes, minister where there is a hospital that fully-staffed administratively but not open to patients and it is the best-run hospital according to measurements (may have misremembered)

I don't think it is a derail. Society treats children (the actual way society reproduces itself) as an inconvenience in the reproduction of society.

This has been mirrored in every job I've had. Patients - an inconvenience to the smooth running of health care services and the work of health managers, customers - an inconvenience to shop managers. Students , the public and research - an inconvenience to the administration of universities.

sorry, that's another derail from me. a personal frustration!

i agree with that too

one of the reasons why i'm struggling in my current job is with the constant measurement - weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual dashboards, forecasting, projections, percentage increases, efficiences etc. i could piss off every single person i come into contact with as long as i met the targets and i would be deemed to have had a successful year come performance review. but that's not a longterm, sustainable way of doing business

Yes, I think part of it is capitalism. I'm not saying we're going to abolish capitalism, but I think that any future system under which gender equality is going to increase is going to have a much more mixed system of governance, valuing time and resources and types of exchange.

i do agree btw

it's inevitable under this particular kind of "short-termist" capitalism isn't it? anything that is not contributing to the bottom line is a cost

I think it is absolutely possible for women to not be oppressed. But men need to acknowledge and get over their envy of women's reproductive capacity so that they can stop trying to diminish and control women.

When I look at MRA sites it is absolutely clear (to me at least) that this is what it is all about.

But society seems to want to skirt around the issue by constantly making out that women having kids is an inconvenience to society, rather than society has made motherhood and the very existence of children an inconvenience to society's (men's) aims. And I'm not even sure what these aims are - getting drunk, shuffling bits of papers around, white water rafting? What is it that society thinks it is doing that young children and their care stand in opposition to? I think the Scandinavian countries are going in the right direction on this - all of society becoming more about children and the vulnerable. Not all this huffing and puffing over kids and why can't they just be hidden behind a curtain or something so their parents can get on with important work.

it's a cunning trick, isn't it? socialising women into believing that only a defective woman wouldn't want children, and that the difficult/tedious/time-consuming aspects of childrearing should come naturally to her, and yet that men are the ones who need to be coerced or tricked into impregnating women

It is also surely clear that there are whole societies set up with no heterosexual pair bond in childcare. Children are raised by mother plus others - be that socially her own mother, sister, brother, friend etc. But there is not, as far as I know, any example where mothers as the norm give up newborn babies.

So while it is possible that you could separate mothers from newborns and construct society that way, in our own society you would be coming up against a hugely entrenched belief system. Many people believe the mother newborn dyad is innate, and that it would be cruel and abusive to separate them (indeed that dyad has special protection in universal human rights). I think challenging that belief brings up a lot of fear in many women, and they would rather not be feminists than believe their right to their newborn is under threat. So is it possible or desirable to challenge that belief?

Heteronormativity, on the other hand, I am quite happy to challenge.

Buffy, I was very clear from the start that it could be argued that women should be socially conditioned to not want to spend any time whatsoever with the children they have given birth to.

Who gets to bring up children and why would then be decided for other reasons - love comes through care as you have explained would be an example. Clearly you don't need to have been pregnant to really love a child, or even have any kind of biological connection to it.

But I then think you have to explain why women would want to get pregnant at all? What would they be doing it for? Would they be compensated for this activity? What would the risks to them be under this new reproductive system?

It is very clear that there are lots of men prepared to be bio fathers but who do not want to be social fathers - sperm donors, one night stands where the woman maybe getting pregnant matters not one way or the other to the father, absent fathers who have kids by three different women on purpose and no real intention of seeing any of them, men with kids and wives who have another child by another woman that they have never seen and don't plan to. I know all these men. They far outnumber the women who get pregnant and give the baby away (although I know some of them too). Do you really believe the number of bio mothers and fathers who aren't bothered about a relationship with their child is the same?

And as you only need one sperm donor to impregnate hundreds of women, women can have kids without a social father. Any fertile woman can have a baby. Many fertile men who want children cannot have them because no fertile woman will agree to the pregnancy.

Bertie, I think childcare and parental benefits are improving across Europe. I'd like to see them transferable to any childcare provider. So if a brother wants to look after his nephew under 3 three days a week, he should also have an automatic right to part time work. If agrandmother looks after a child 5 days, childcare tax credits should go to her, and so on.

Minipie, define childcare. Reception class? Nursery class? Care for infants paid for through the childcarecomponent of tax credits? Which one would you like to deny to the children of single mothers?

We no longer live in a society where single mothers are denied free or heavily subsidised childcare, but provision could be improved.

The idea of the heterosexual pair bond for childcare is not universal and is dwindling in our society.

It is of course punitive to deny mothers childcare if it denies them job opportunities and pushes them and their children into poverty. It is one of the reasons the global poor are mostly female.

If only they'd all found the right man and married him. That would solve all the problems of the world.