Reform candidate calls for young girls to be 'educatd'

[QuirkySquid]

Ahh wondered when the Epstein, Thiel & Musk breeding programme would arrive in the UK. To the surprise of nobody, it arrives via Reform.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-matt-goodwin-gorton-denton-children-women-b2918340.html

Because it's a woman's role to be a mother and a man's to be a provider?

Absolutely spot on.

Those risks really do not rise much between teenage years and the average age of first baby at around 29.
The scientific reality is there’s really not much benefit to a girl having a baby at 21 and a woman having a baby at 29/30.
There are ideological benefits to certain groups, but no scientific reason.

And post 29?

We are mammals, we have a window of fertility, we are mortals with limited lifespans, subject to mortal vulnerabilities, and choices are limited.

Some men wish to have women breed according to their schedule, and some men wish to stop women from breeding while talking about sexual freedom and surrogacy.

Girls and women deserve clear, factual information that is in their best interests. Unfortunately every fucker wants to sell us their version of reality for their own reasons.

Yes.

So women need to start having more kids but if you do have kids don't be expecting hard working tax payers to finance your choices...

Love the comment about authoritarian due to childless women - the bloke may as well just say ‘women know your place, on your back or in the kitchen’ - what a hideous load of mysoginistic freaks they have - more fool the women too who vote for this-

This really could do with more amplification.. In general I feel. there are loads of great things about being a mum. The multi tasking with everything is exhausting.

' You don't have a window into these mens minds'
No but they are telling us?
Literally telling us they are thinking about younger women than them having children? That usually means having sex?
Not telling older men they are concerned about male infertility and impotence which of course they know affects older men? Why would they envisage older men as the fathers?
Not saying ' you both need a good wage to bring up kids'
Expecting women to do more and more on.less and less.
They want to cut the minimum wage.
How much more of a window do you need?

This needs repeating. Having children is exhausting.

Plus, from a woman’s perspective, there are many studies that find women performing more childcare, doing the bulk of the minutiae of family decision making, as well as more of the housework. Yet, the onus is also on women to work full time as soon as mat leave is finished.

Options are limited. The mother must not be a SAHM (torn to shreds by MN posters for not returning to work when the DH leaves her 20 years later and she’s impoverished). She must not work part time (thus contributing unequally to the household). If she works part time and the couple split bills equally, but keep the rest to themselves and the DH is the higher earner, she’s screwed financially. If she has children younger, then grandparents are also both still working so no help there.

The financial reality for many mothers is they have to work full time being exhausted by the workload, often without extended family help, stick their babies and infants in suboptimal yet expensive childcare or risk being penniless in older age. Telling them to have babies when young is not going to help.

This narrow, uninformed, and poorly thought out Reform ‘policy’ is emblematic of everything wrong with Farage and the coterie of followers he attracts. Genuine issues are reframed as particular ‘problems’ with ridiculously naive and simplistic soundbite solutions that will do absolutely nothing to address the underlying issue. Probably done deliberately to trick voters into thinking these are easily solvable rather than challenging and difficult issues to address.

And don’t you just love the ‘have more kids younger’ whilst planning to cut minimum wage, make healthcare a ‘pay in system’ , get rid of the ECHR and probably bang goes a lot of maternity rights with that - this isan incels charter, determined to make women of child bearing years very very dependent on whatever largesse a bloke can offer them . No doubt to be totally lapped up by older blokes whose wives have been stuck in this way, or dumped them or indeed the rather odd women who do indeed think it’s a woman’s place to have that pinny on and be pandering and grateful to any bloke out there

@Shortshriftandlethal you’re absolutely right to say that Change is not always for the better and sometimes you end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater but I think calls for reflection on where we are today will go unheeded.

The mostly men and some women who comprise the financial and political elite have no incentive whatsoever to pause for reflection. They are fantastically wealthy thanks to the current economic system, which necessitates two working parents to achieve a comfortable lifestyle. Hell, increasingly, two working parents are required simply to pay bills and exist.

When you reference your parents lifestyle, many families had just one car, didn’t go abroad for holidays, didn’t have the latest extremely expensive technology etc. If we stopped consuming, our economy would collapse.

Reform see the problem as women choosing not to have babies younger. I see the problem as our current economic system and structures. Not impossible to change, but highly unlikely under Reform given Farage is one of the financial (lower) elite who’s hugely benefiting from the current system and connections to the financial upper elite. For example, his enthusiastic support for and from digital currency traders.

Change is unlikely from any party given the influence of donors and lobbyists.

We had no car when I was growing up and certainly never holidayed abroad.

I think Reform are a right mess of contradictions and disparate groups with quite distinct gripes and aims. I suspect the working class contingent is being used. A useful idiot. But labour are not interested in representing those same people.

Yes but we do know about the menopause. It isn't taboo. It isn't taboo that you become fertile when you start having periods (you can be fertile before actually). And it's well known that fertility declines as you age. None of those issues are taboo, or hidden.

Reform are trying to pull their usual trick of "we are the only ones willing to discuss this difficult issue. What do you mean you disagree with our solution/angle? At least we're talking about the taboo subject/biological reality"

It's patronising and manipulative.

Well you see, woman should also be very careful in who they select as a partner. If the father of a child isn't willing/able to support said child the mother beast some responsibility

But obviously not TOO picky or they won't be getting preggers fast enough.

The inherent contradiction in accepting the fact that clearly some men aren't ready/ideal father's but that not picking them also means some women won't pick anyone (because women and men are about 50/50) has wooshed past their heads. And that's in a world that assumes every woman wants/is suited to be a mother.

You can do without a car (depending on where you live). You can't really do without secure/stable housing. Or rather you can't blame parents for not wanting their children to do without that. It currently isn't viable for everyone to have secure and stable housing for their children. Policies like better rent control would help that (but possibly have knock on effects). Likewise, it's not selfish to want to have savings or some kind of a safety net so that if something goes wrong your children aren't suddenly plunged into poverty. It's hard for lower income families to build that up.
Many of the benefits people are on attempt to mitigate those issues (both in work and out of work benefits) though they do so only partially. Reform have stated they want to slash those so there would be less mitigation than before.

If you don't have children you are selfish and materialistic. If you do have children but fall on hard times (job loss, child with additional needs needing more care, disability, death, landlord selling up) you are feckless and should have planned ahead to avoid your children suffering or being reliant on the statem

I don't disagree with the need for structural changes to support motherhood, our society leaves women to sink or swim after they have children and gives little to no recognition of the fact that women are working themselves to exhaustion trying to provide care for children and relatives while also holding down a job. Women are routinely being expected to take on the elements of social care that the state has decided it can no longer supply.

Men are still not expected to be serious 50/50 responsible parents by our workplaces and society, as a lot of MN AIBU posts will attest, and there doesn't seem to be much government policy beyond the joke that is UK paternity leave to address this problem.

My point of disagreement was the sci-fi theorising that Reform wants to pair up young women with old men as some sort of prime concern. To me that just felt like projection rather than genuine speculation.

100 agree. If the government don't start to help those who would like to have children financially, at a younger age, then we'll all be saving our eggs for when we're in our 50's and have finally afforded a home.

I don't think it's completely out there though... I don't mean individual men in the Reform party all have dodgy intentions. But the likes of Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, Peter Thiell have been banging this drum for a while now. It always made me uncomfortable. But when you actually did get to see some of their emails it turns out that yep, they are actually very very creepy people with very unwholesome views on young women. Bannon especially.

I don't think Farage is the same actually. But Reform and the rest of the alt right have been bankrolled by those people and been echoing their talking points for a while now. So we can question those talking points.

On a more basic level it is just very hard for a middle aged man to start taking an "interest" in teenage and young women's reproduction status and future fertility without it coming of as creepy. There was an attempt to argue the people calling it creepy were brainwashed by feminism or something. But that's not it. It's a very normal instinctive reaction. Even if the individual men doing it mean no harm and genuinely have young women's interests at heart, I don't think telling people that icky feeling is wrong is helpful. (There are parallels here to a certain progressive movement as well).

As a rule of thumb. If you wouldn't be OK with a random 40+ year old man saying it to your teenage daughter at a party, why would you be OK with someone saying it just because they are bankrolled by Steve Bannon, or a member of MAGA or a member of Reform or a social media star. It doesn't make them any more authoritative on women's issues. And I would be icked out by a random man trying to tell my teenage daughter she is reaching peak fertility. Best case scenario it's socially tone deaf.

I wonder if they've considered educating boys about doing a fair share of domestic work and childcare.

That might have an impact of the birth rate.

Farage knows, because he's said so, that women with children earn less and are treated less well in the workplace. Typical of men in power that they would want to push more women into that position without redressing the balance first.

Well yes all that follows and Indeed not warning the women that their sexual drive or fertility may not be matched by the older men with money. I mean its not something one can absolutely generalise about but they didn't write folk songs about it for nothing.

Quite.

Do we train women to going back to putting up, shutting up and living less than happy lives with no choice about it?

Or do men do something as a sex class about staying in a long term, successful marriage that a woman wants to be part of and finds fulfilling?

Start with tv programmes, dramas and sit coms that show successful men who are not lousy partners and fathers as a major character and plot point, and where it's not supposed to be funny that a man is a man-child and can't parent his children, that have values to aspire to.

I think calling it a sci-fi projection is a bit far fetched given what men vocalise in their preference for young women and not settling down too young themselves as they want to establish their career. They're not proposing any practical economic changes to support two young people to have a children together, so I don't think it's unreasonable for any woman to read between the lines that they want to encourage young women to procreate with men who can afford to settle down which, because they don't want to change the status quo, is probably going to be an older man. This has been a thing throughout history and it's only in recent decades people are starting to see through it and find it kind of gross if someone's grandmother and grandfather were 20 off years apart and she was married off and bearing children before her prefrontal correct had developed and that young girls and women are comfortable seeing older men hitting on them for the creeps they are.

It's not even men in this case. Not as a general class
It's a sub group of older, richer men who have decided that women are to blame for falling birth rates. Absolutely you can make a case about some young (and not so young) men not wanting to "take responsibility" in their lives. But equally, it's a tough world out there and I don't think young men in particular are at fault if they want to think about building a decent career before starting a family. Or if they don't want to start a family at all. Just as young women aren't at fault
The key issues are both increased personal choice (good) and economic/housing/social factors that work against people wanting children (good).
I think that there is a certain amount of deliberate rage bait in the way Goodwin etc phrase their arguments that is trying to turn it into yet another round of the gender wars. They want to appeal to the incel mindset that women are to blame for men's loneliness blah blah blah. But equally I think they would be quite happy if the response was a knee jerk "men are the ones to blame" rather than people seeing this is specifically some (mostly powerful) men shit stirring in a really creepy way.

@OpheliaWitchoftheWoods Indo agree with your more general point about portraying men as capable of being more than man children and encouraging positive examples of masculinity. I just think that in the case of Goodwin it's actually
even simpler than that.