feminine-genius

International clichés

Kay S. Hymowitz has a brilliant piece in Front Page Magazine, concerning the feminist imperialism that has altered the lives of women worldwide.   

Yes: Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not just Warsaw. Conceived and raised in the United States, Carrie may still see New York as a spiritual home. But today you can find her in cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and you’ll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and thirties, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships. Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now flat.

She outlines the demographics and what the numbers bespeak, and how morals have changed radically from the days of the first well-known SYF, Mary Richards (remember, who worked for Lou Grant...?)

By the late 1990s, the SYF lifestyle was fully globalized. Indeed, you might think of SYFs as a sociological Starbucks: no matter how exotic the location, there they are, looking and behaving just like the American prototype. They shop for shoes in Kyoto, purses in Shanghai, jeans in Prague, and lip gloss in Singapore; they sip lattes in Dublin, drink cocktails in Chicago, and read lifestyle magazines in Kraków; they go to wine tastings in Boston, speed-dating events in Amsterdam, yoga classes in Paris, and ski resorts outside Tokyo. “At the fashionable Da Capo Café on bustling Kolonaki Square in downtown Athens, Greek professionals in their 30s and early 40s luxuriate over their iced cappuccinos,” a Newsweek International article began last year. “Their favorite topic of conversation is, of course, relationships: men’s reluctance to commit, women’s independence, and when to have children.” Thirty-seven-year-old Eirini Perpovlov, an administrative assistant at Associated Press, “loves her work and gets her social sustenance from her parea, or close-knit group of like-minded friends.”

Sure sounds similar to this July’s Time story about Vicky, “a purposeful, 29-year-old actuary who . . . loves nothing better than a party. She and her friends meet so regularly for dinner and at bars that she says she never eats at home anymore. As the pictures on her blog attest, they also throw regular theme parties to mark holidays like Halloween and Christmas, and last year took a holiday to Egypt.” At the restaurant where the reporter interviews them, Vicky’s friends gab about snowboarding, iPods, credit-card rates, and a popular resort off the coast of Thailand. Vicky, whose motto is “work hard, play harder,” is not from New York, London, or even Athens; she’s from the SYF delegation in Beijing, China, a country that appears to be racing from rice paddies to sushi bars in less than a generation—at least for a privileged minority.

With no children or parents to support, and with serious financial hardship a bedtime story told by aging grandparents, SYFs have ignited what The Economist calls the “Bridget Jones economy”—named, of course, after the book and movie heroine who is perhaps the most famous SYF of all.

No wonder birth rates are plummeting. These women are sexually available, hard-pressed to find husbands, even less willing to cash it all in for diapers and personal oblation.

To keep a population stable, or at its “replacement level,” women must have an average of at least 2.1 children. Under the New Girl Order, though, women delay marriage and childbearing, which itself tends to reduce the number of kids, and sometimes—because the opportunity costs of children are much higher for educated women—they forgo them altogether. Save Albania, no European country stood at or above replacement levels in 2000. Three-quarters of Europeans now live in countries with fertility rates below 1.5, and even that number is inflated by a disproportionately high fertility rate among Muslim immigrants. Oddly, the most Catholic European countries—Italy, Spain, and Poland—have the lowest fertility rates, under 1.3. Much of Asia looks similar. In Japan, fertility rates are about 1.3. Hong Kong, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, at 0.98 has broken the barrier of one child per woman.

You knew that already. What to do, short of wishing that a Y2K bug demolishes the viral culture, we must pray like mad and put it in God's hands. He loves these girls -- every one. We must, also. Our motherly ethos -- physical and spiritual is diminishing, but not extinguished. There were so few women under the cross, but they have nourished the world for two millennia. Let's simply do our small part in faith.

Germany hits record low

Germany is realising that it is hitting a dead-end when it comes to replacing its population. The number of new births for 2005 was the lowest since 1946 (a time when real anxiety over post-war conditions may have caused couples to postpone having children).

Last year, only some 676,000 children were born in Germany according to German daily Die Welt which cited forecasts by the Federal Statistics Office. That pushed the birth rate to its worst low in 15 years: in 2004, the number of newborns amounted to 706,000. That's all still significantly less than the 922,000 births in the post-war year of 1946.

"That's dramatic, we're running into a dead end," Michael Hüther, director of the Cologne-based Institute for the German Economy told the paper.

While all of Europe is facing the same trend, Germany is significantly worse off than the rest.

According to Eurostat, the EU statistics office, there were 8.5 births per 1000 inhabitants in Germany in 2004 -- making it the country with the lowest birth rate in the entire European Union. Countries such as France and Britain boasted birthrates -- at 12.7 and 12.0 respectively in the same year -- that exceeded German levels by more than 50 percent.

For years, politicians and demographers in Germany have warned of the dangers of a falling birth rate and ageing population. In recent months in particular, the subject has raced to the top of the political agenda and been the focus of heated debates over family-friendly and childcare policies.

These numbers are alarming the country's leaders, who call the trend a "free fall." They can ill afford monetary incentives with the financial problems Germany suffers. All that couples need is trust -- which comes from knowing God. Oremus.

An absolute "must read"

On the run, but you cannot miss this by Jennifer Roback Morse. More later, but here's a tidbit:

I submit that this view of sex is at the root of the West’s demographic death spiral. Sex is naturally a force for sociability. Consumer sex inverts the whole natural order of sexuality. Instead of drawing us out of ourselves and into relationship with others, we turn sex inward, on ourselves and our own individual pleasure. The natural purposes of sex, both procreation and spousal unity, have become strictly optional. We think we are entitled to have sex with someone we’re not married to, or not even in a relationship with. And we have created a conspiracy of silence around the sad fact that no one really wants to be on the receiving end of this “use and be used” culture.

Motherhood, fatherhood, oxytocin, essential role of women in fighting Islam and demographic demise. It's all there in an easy dose.

Prosperity is killing the family

Women in South Korea have prioritised several monumental things above motherhood, such as this:

At 26, Park Su Mi is a well-educated bride-to-be who's decided she and her husband will have just one baby. That would make them an average couple in South Korea, which now has the lowest birth rate in the world.

"My mother says more than two children would be better, but I don't want to give my future to my children. I want to enjoy my life," Park said.

South Korea's rising prosperity gives young women choices and powers their mothers and grandmothers never had. But a declining birth rate has made the country an "aging society." In another generation, South Korea will become a "super-aged" society, where more than 20 percent of the population is older than 65.

Add to that the premium on education:

A dedication to work spreads to children as well. It's not uncommon for school children to spend an extra eight or nine ours a day with tutors or at private prep schools where students cram for college entrance and career examinations.

"Their zeal toward education is abnormal," said Jonathan Kim, a Korean-American who is a professor at Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. "And it is so, so expensive. They don't trust public education anymore. So once school is over in the afternoon, they put children in private education institutions, and that drains a lot of economic power from homes. They cannot afford to have two children."

Learning English has become so important that thousands of Korean couples live apart so one parent can enroll their son or daughter in schools in the United States, Canada, Australia or other countries while the other parent stays behind working in South Korea.

There is a dearth of child-care, men are busy with their own careers keeping them out of the home, women marry later, everyone is strapped for time, divorce is rising making the gamble of children too risky, and the entire society is rushing blindly over a cliff. Prayers that they wake up before it's too late.

Will Europe enter rehab?

In Twelve Step programs, the first thing you have to do is admit that you have a problem. It just may be that Europe is willing to admit that much, given the latest "green paper" presented by to the European Commission, which is taking six months to study challenges such as demographic changes. Conclusion? Europe needs more children.

The aim of the meetings is to confront the ensuing economic crisis caused by a decline in Europe’s work force, which is set to decrease by 20.8 million the next 25 years. The Green Paper, released March 16, starts by noting that European society is no longer conducive to child-rearing and states that in 2003 the natural population in Europe rose by only 0.04pc.

The paper also states that the fertility rate everywhere is below the threshold needed to renew the population, approximately 2.1 children per woman... But authors of the paper say there is a significant gap between the number of children people would like to have (2.3), and the number they actually have (1.5), attributing this to factors such as difficulties in finding a job, expensive housing, and a lack of incentives, such as family benefits, parental leave, and child care.

They then ask the essential question “What value do we attach to children? Do we want to give families, whatever their structure, their due place in European society?"

What an opening! We see a Europe that has looked at its situation, is asking the right questions, and a Pope whose very name indicates that he wants to help rebuild Christendom and save the cradle of western civilisation. This is not a time for hand-wringing, but great hope. And how many thousands of young people will flock to Cologne next week to hear that very message? People young enough to make a difference in this exact problem? God is so very generous. Exciting times!

Who knew ... ?

Who knew that England's Prince Philip opened his country's first Family Planning centre in 1969?

In 1967 [Jean Medawar] became the second chairman of the FPA after the death of Margaret Pyke, and the following year she co-founded the Margaret Pyke Centre for Study and Training in Family Planning (officially opened by Prince Philip in 1969) and the Margaret Pyke Memorial Trust. When the centre invited the prince back to its reopening in 1995 he was said to have remarked: "It is difficult to refuse an invitation from Jean Medawar."

It would seem counter-intuitive to work on diminishing the number of your subjects, but such thinking doesn't usually make sense.

Otherwise, no one compares to the London Telegraph for fascinating obituaries. Prepare to enjoy many on this site. As for dear, confused Jean, RIP.

Contraception Run Amok

Sadly, we see where the contraceptive mentality has taken the western world, primarily Europe. Germany is simply one country with the same symptoms: underpopulation heading to crisis within forty years.

"German women have fewer children than just about anyone in the world," according to a study by the Berlin Institute for World Population and Global Development that was released last April. "The average number of 1.37 is hardly sufficient to keep the population stable. At least 2.1 children would be needed to meet this goal."

These facts hardly make at dent at the United Nations, still peddling the overpopulation myth, which trickles down to school curricula almost everywhere.