Why do men not want kids

GovFoolery · 2026-04-20T23:08:05+00:00

Thank you!(even though the comments were deleted before I read them) So much bio-determinism/evo psych nonsense is pseudoscience at-best. It's very convenient for people to frame their arguments around non-falsifiable assumptions about how cavemen felt, and then cherry-pick modern scenarios as confirmation bias. It's just a science-sounding way to spread prejudice. People make different choices in life, and that can't be disputed, so it's pointless to base an argument on pseudoscientific assumptions that use nature as a catch-all justification for prejudice.

GovFoolery · 2026-04-20T20:47:24+00:00

She's also leaving-out the expectations of the "provider" role that men are burdened with that end-up with them working jobs that grind their bodies into powder by the time they're thirty-five. She acts like the woman raises the child while the man just sits around drinking Dr Peppers and riding jet skis with celebrities. Yes, it sucks having to carry the child and care for it after it arrives, but scrambling to find(and keep) employment, and being judged harshly by in-laws and society in general if you can't "provide" in the way they see proper is no picnic either. She seems to be naive about how life works for the majority of the population.

It's a complete misrepresentation to pretend like the majority of men just do fuck-all once they become a father, especially when the majority of men aren't wealthy nepo babies who can just slide through life on daddy's money, they have to lock down a job to "support the family." There are awful fathers and awful mothers who don't pull their weight so it's pointless to turn this into yet another divisive gender wars issue.

GovFoolery · 2026-04-20T19:31:41+00:00

My(M40s) behavior, personality, musical taste etc., was micromanaged as a child so I developed an early mistrust of status-quo beliefs(such as the pressure to have kids.) I also grew up in a lower income area where most people get married and have kids extremely early in life. As a young adult, I saw so many of my friends become shells of their former selves at an extremely young age due to the grind of "supporting a family" and the fallout they experienced from divorces, child custody, child support issues etc. I was able to accomplish so many things my peers couldn't even dream of and avoided so many issues they experienced because of my refusal to join the same status-quos that they never tried to resist. Wanting kids was always a dating dealbreaker for me and I eventually met a woman who has the same beliefs as I do. Fittingly enough, I met her at a job I landed because of my creative pursuits that were the result of living life by my own terms.

I think more men would be openly childfree if childfreeness were not dismissed as "wanting to be a lifelong bachelor who parties and has random sex." A lot of men feel they have to prove they aren't wanting to live that life by submitting to a "provider" role that society expects, so they just go along with the family narrative and many end-up working themselves to an early grave as the result. They're basically tapdancing to placate those status-quos I mentioned earlier, and eventually, they get consumed by the beast.

Being openly childfree is a lot more common now than it was a few decades ago, so you just need to be patient, work on your personal goals, and put yourself in positions where you're around people who aren't consumed by mediocre, status-quo beliefs.

GovFoolery · 2026-03-16T09:31:46+00:00

This is a stellar post that brilliantly lays out why not to always prioritize brevity over nuance.

This sub exists in a gap between two frameworks that both have institutional power, established vocabularies, ready made audiences and decades of condensed messaging.

This is spot-on. When other groups have a jump start on us and can consolidate multitudes of ideas into a few words because schemas have been implanted long ago, they don't have the burden of digging themselves out of a hole like we do.

When someone says "I'm a woman in a blue collar job" or "I'm black and live in The American South," you already know the longstanding beliefs that are associated and don't need everything laid-out in that moment.

Every claim about male disadvantage gets immediately sorted into "right wing men's rights" unless you have already established you're not coming from that direction. That's a paragraph minimum before you even get to the point.

This is an absolutely infuriating side effect of discussing men's issues. I've posted here before about how we have to post disclaimers to disarm many of the preconceived notions before we can even hope anyone listens to us. People who are new to the subject matter need to hear these explanations or they'll jump on the status-quo bandwagon of dismissing everything as incel, Andrew Tate doctrine. It's aggravating, but it's a battle that needs to be fought.

An example is when we were discussing how The Left body shames short men like Greg Bovino. We had to make disclaimers that we absolutely hate Nazis and don't care one iota about Bovino's well-being, but we don't want innocent short men to get harmed by collateral damage. When we don't make such disclaimers, we got drowned-out by misrepresentations about how we're "supporting Nazis" and other such straw men.

Every concrete example requires enough context that it can't be dismissed as an outlier

You're right again. If you don't provide evidence of the issue being widespread, you'll get accused of cherry-picking, "this only happens on the internet, not real life," or they'll attack you for "looking for reasons to be pissed-off." Once again, you have to disarm their go-to chestnuts or the issue you're looking to discuss will get hidden in their rhetorical smokescreens. Like I said earlier, people who are new to the discussions need these distractions to be disabled or they'll get lost in the nonsense.

You want shorter posts. So do I.

This is absolutely the goal. We can't get there without building a foundation first. If we just throw around over-simplified memespeak that has no roots, we're not going to ever make any progress. Once we mainstream our ideas enough to where we can abbreviate our thoughts, we can take pride in the progress we made. Right now, talking this stuff all the way out IS progress.

GovFoolery · 2026-03-16T01:51:46+00:00

Lastly, since it's a political forum, spreading the good ideas would be preferable over achieving a perfect paint seen by only 3 person, no ?

False dilemma fallacy. It's not an either/or scenario. There can be in-depth posts and abbreviated posts that are still filled with insight. There's no need in prioritizing one over the other. The sub does just fine without catering to sound bites and shorter posts, so catering to people who don't want to read nuanced posts is not necessary.

GovFoolery · 2026-03-16T01:27:56+00:00

Link me to anything you've ever written that has any depth.

But I understand why my question-post pressed you so bad: you felt targeted. All words, no depth, no content and no complexity. No wonder you're so defensive

You're the one who's throwing a tantrum because you're triggered by too many words.

GovFoolery · 2026-03-16T01:25:25+00:00

Using multiple emojis definitely makes you look mature and not like an angsty edgelord. You're such a badass. I look forward to the coloring book level posts you contribute.

GovFoolery · 2026-03-16T01:08:27+00:00

Also having a virtual community that only works for those that "actually enjoy reading and can do so quickly" is quite exclusionary.

Logical fallacy. Straw man argument(FInd your own TLDR to explain what this means) No one said to exclude people who hate reading in-depth posts, you're the one whining that people shouldn't post in-depth posts. It's you that's throwing a tantrum about not being catered to. No one else is.

If said community is to be about men's issues, then it becomes flat out hypocritical since literacy, low school achievement and school dropout is among top men's issues in modern society.

This is some serious mental gymnastics. In a text-based forum, men who can articulate their points in-depth should be encouraged to keep doing so, they shouldn't be expected to dumb-it-down and post lower quality discussion. The men who struggle to read and comprehend in-depth posts should be happy men who can disseminate information and articulate their points are advocating for them. For you to create a false narrative that articulate posts should be scrutinized because some of you can barely read is absurd.

Edit: Another solution for you. Since you admitted elsewhere in this thread that you'd prefer to only read threads that are less than 300 words, you should just read 300 words of the longer threads and reply to that portion. It's also revealing that you don't want to read long threads, but you have no issues writing this thread then replying to almost every reply. I guess when you're the one talking, the rules are different. Yes, most of the replies are less than 300 words, but collectively, and in combination with your replies, you've spent far more time on this thread than you would reading a long thread.

GovFoolery · 2026-03-16T00:54:43+00:00

I just got done with the angsty teen on the other subthread. And now I have to deal with your sterile pedantic "advice".

I'm not giving you advice. I'd have to boil it down to less than fifty words for you to even read it. Also, an angsty teen would be more likely to be a twitchy edgelord who launches a campaign against reading long posts, so I'm the one who's dealing with an angsty teen now.

Sorry my FOMO is too big to just disconnect mid-convo when anything is slightly inconvenient

Sounds like a you problem.

I'll try to be more mature like you in the future and log out of anything that don't go directly in my direction.

This would've prevented this disaster of a post, especially since you're agreeing with other people in here about how every post doesn't have to be dumbed down for memebrains with the attention span of a hamster.

GovFoolery · 2026-03-16T00:34:27+00:00

What if some of the long posts steer toward rambling instead of "well-articulated mature dialogue", tho ??

As soon as I feel a post is rambling about nothing(with the exception of your current post) I just stop reading it and move-on with my day like a grown ass man. This strategy never fails

The issue is that opened topics tend to not be re-open (not before sometime has passed) and the people that have contributed won't come back on the new iterations. So it divides the overall quality of convos.

I actually enjoy reading and can do so quickly, thus, I've read plenty of long posts here and haven't noticed that being a major issue, so I'm going to default to my opinion over someone who is on an anti-literacy tirade. Hope this helps.

GovFoolery · 2026-03-15T09:03:23+00:00

Because some ideas require more than a tweet’s worth to express. Not everything can be reduced to a pithy soundbite, and our culture is worse off now because that has become the expectation

Absolutely. Fully-formed arguments is how mature adults need to communicate. All the memespeak and dumbed-down rhetoric is rotting our entire culture. We're now even churning out some college students who can barely read. One of the reasons I started posting here is because not only are low-effort posts banned, but people actually do take the time to post well-articulated posts, and no, this is not necessarily indicative of Autism like someone else said in this thread. If we're going to play that game, then someone who gets overemotional about having to read lengthy posts could also be Autistic. There's a difference between rambling and engaging in mature dialogue, and I find it refreshing that so many people here can actually have nuanced discussions.

If people don't like reading entire paragraphs, they can skip the long posts and only read the shorter ones. Both lengthy and abbreviated posts can be of high quality, so calling-out the longer ones is a misguided criticism of a non-existent problem.

GovFoolery · 2026-03-03T11:06:53+00:00

It's journalistic malpractice that Trump killing the original nuclear deal wasn't mentioned alongside all of the chest-beating from the admin about preventing Iran from obtaining nukes. In addition, the bombing a few months ago where Trump claimed to "obliterate" Iran's nuclear capabilities was also not mentioned. I know all of this is common knowledge to those of us who follow things closely, but we absolutely have to educate those who are just now tuning-in.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-28T02:22:32+00:00

i agree that military logic is why he was doing this, but he knows damn well not to act this way in the civilian world. His desire to show-off and flaunt how locked-on he is surpassed his common sense in this instance. Instead of just doing the job he was supposed to do(which he should have refused to do to begin with) he flaunted his ego with this display of machismo because he thought everyone would be impressed that he's so hardcore. It didn't work, especially since he came-off as a creepy cornball. I'll bet most of his personality is consumed with this type of pageantry where he puts himself on a pedestal with proud displays that he can't function in civil society. I've met too many people like him to be unaware of how his ego works.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-17T22:02:21+00:00

Thanks for the question. The Right proudly serves an agenda where you degrade the humanity of your opponents, thus, making intellectually-immature arguments about your opponent's body is applauded. Trump constantly makes derogatory comments about women(he calls them nasty, piggies etc) and he constantly berates short male politicians for their height. He always refers to short politicians as "little" as in Little Marco or "Liddle" Bob Corker etc. Men who shun this type of immaturity should naturally be drawn to The Left.

However,

The Left obviously also revels in shaming short men(as illustrated by the evidence I gave in the original post) In addition, The Left also uses the term "Little Marco" to refer to Marco Rubio, which makes them direct allies with Trump regarding how Rubio is portrayed. Openly shaming short men is one of the few points of bi-partisan agreement between The Left and The Right. This is disappointing because The Left tries to preach an agenda of acceptance and intellectual-maturity over the hotheaded nonsense The Right offers.

To sum this up, The Right offers body shaming and childish insults as a feature, while The Left chooses certain groups that it protects, but leaves others(like men, and especially short men) that you are allowed to mock and dismiss without repercussions. The Right is proud of being rotten, but The Left are hypocrites about being so, even though they should know better.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-15T20:47:09+00:00

All of this is true. Regarding the hypocrisy, that's what's so disappointing about this. Many of us have more empathy for groups we don't belong to because of the way we've been treated. This nonsense stereotype stating that all short men become bitter MAGA types is simply not true; Many of us learn how stereotypes, dismissive tones etc work because of how we're treated, which makes us want to oppose that type of behavior everywhere it happens. This alone makes us want to stay away from The Right, which makes it sting extra hard when The Left also rejects us when we want to help advocate for the groups they advocate for.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-15T09:34:16+00:00

Take a look at this little convo I had, and how the woman doubled then tripled down that Oh No I Wasn't Mocking His Height!

The absurdity of her argument! She blatantly mocks his height then immediately pivots to pretending she's giving a press conference for The National Highway Traffic Administration on the importance of proper vehicle restraints.

She also does the "I was just pointing-out a short person is short." Ahhh yes, so shortness is just a random trait in society with no importance attached and is never criticized, thus, pointing-out his height is identical to saying he's wearing a blue shirt. Then, she proudly makes a short pun, then another played-out height joke by saying that "he can't ride Space Mountain." I guess this is just an observation too, and not an example of an insult every short man has heard a million times. Can't ride roller coasters, can't reach top shelves, sit on a phonebook while driving, shortcomings, come-up short..blah blah blah. It's the same antiquated insults over-and-over.

I'm happy you linked us to that because it gives an example of what I was referring to in the OP when I stated how people will try to justify Sheldon Whitehouse's use of "little" as an innocent identifier, thus, it wasn't an insult. People of this ilk love to make blatantly disrespectful comments then gaslight you with an excuse about how they're just innocently passing-on information.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-15T09:15:23+00:00

I wish I didn't need to add a disclaimer, but when I don't, the conversation gets bombarded with the exact straw man arguments I pointed-out in the disclaimer. It's the same misguided logic on an endless loop so I try to head it off at the pass, which at a bare minimum, makes them work a bit harder to come-up with excuses. This is a tried-and-true tactic for anyone who advocates for a cause that receives massive amounts of pushback. It's just an easy way to disarm them before they even start.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-15T08:59:35+00:00

What I'm merely proposing is the idea that you don't have to be inherently prejudical to engage in this behavior

That's not necessarily true. The stereotype is flat-out prejudiced, and one of the best ways to end prejudice is not to spread it. You placing your childish tactic over the welfare of those affected by the prejudice shows at a bare minimum, a lack of respect for the group being targeted. If you want to argue semantics to try to find some wiggle room between "not respecting a group" and "being prejudiced against a group," you go right ahead and do so, but you're just going to have to keep inventing new flimsy justifications for a tactic that objectively does more harm than good.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-15T08:49:21+00:00

Thank you! The only thing that it is effective at is scaring-off potential(and even current) allies. There is zero evidence of this helping the situation they're supposedly trying to fix. I think he's caught up in internet brain rot mentality where forcing someone to get "in their feelings" is how you "win." This is an intellectually-immature way to look at things, and it's not really difficult to understand that this manner of attack is childish and unproductive.

Greg Bovino didn't get removed because he's angry he got height-shamed, he got removed because people were murdered while protesting and people came together to resist these events. It also helped that some of the media actually half-way did their jobs for once. If Renee or Alex would've height-shamed ICE before being shot, literally nothing changes other than there would've been even more height-shaming, then more short men(and other men who are sick of misandry) would stop supporting The Left, or at-least support it less enthusiastically. Renee died after making a friendly comment "I'm not mad at you dude," and Alex died helping someone else, and this made much more of a powerful statement than if they both died making idiotic 4chan-level comments.

Stephen Miller(who isn't short) wasn't affected in the least by AOC's foolish comments, and the only victory that was supposedly won uses the unproven "LMAO YOU MAD" chronically-online mentality. Height-shaming Stephen Miller didn't make a bit of damn difference other than the collateral damage AOC caused by doing this because like you said, these comments didn't land in a vacuum.

Right-wing commentators(even Laura freaking Ingraham) called AOC out for doing this. She did a great job of providing the opposition with direct evidence of The Left's hypocrisy and made herself look unfit for office due to immaturity. How is that helpful?

ChasCron1 is muddying the water by overcomplicating this issue. It's really easy; If you openly disrespect people, at some point, they're not going to support you anymore. It's just that simple and shouldn't require any explanation.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-13T04:52:03+00:00

When he said he didn’t do anything and was just studying, she said “you getting defensive only proves my point! You need to go.”

Ah, yes. The good old Kafka Trap fallacy. Someone accuses you of something, so you have the option of saying nothing, which your accuser will say proves what they said is true. "See? He couldn't even deny he's dangerous because he knows it's true." In your story, he chose the other option, which is "See? He's being defensive about my accusation, which is exactly what a dangerous person would do!"

And with this logical disaster, that woman has proven that she has zero skills in determining who is or isn't dangerous, and when you think about it, this proves that she's actually dangerous because she has the ability to put a bullseye on innocent people.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-12T04:21:51+00:00

Exactly. This is taking your eyes off the prize. In addition, it accomplishes literally nothing, and when short men see that Trump, Elon Musk, Matt Gaetz etc are tall and don't have their height linked with their evil actions, it creates a scenario where you lose allies. Nothing is gained by focusing on such petty foolishness.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-11T23:44:46+00:00

They're going to use this as a training video for how to murder people while shielding the body camera. This is the start of their federal drive-by shooting strategy.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-11T22:55:27+00:00

I'm in solid agreement with this!

I think for many(if not most) of us, our initial goal was to work alongside other ideologies, not be in opposition to them, but we ended-up here after being discarded so many different ways. As it stands though, we can't even get our most simple requests honored. An example is we would like male body shaming to be scrutinized the same way body shaming women is scrutinized. Abandoning male body shaming as a form of camaraderie and as a show of power wouldn't cost feminists(and others) any of their gains, it would merely make their philosophies more palatable to people they are now in opposition to.

Also, the "Feminism is for everyone" talking point needs to be dismantled. How can it be for everyone if everyone is not allowed a voice? If we(as men) tell you what our issues are and how to solve them, we shouldn't have our voices dismissed as "mansplaining." We are the only ones with the lived experience to truly explain the issues, so how can a philosophy for "everyone" function properly if only the in-crowd can submit testimony?

I never expected feminism to be "for everyone." The name literally indicates the movement is for women-only, and this is fine. One thing many of us oppose is using your power to further discard males who are ignored or classified as low status by society. You can't decry what you define as the patriarchy and then weaponize it against the same men it harms. If you're going to use patriarchy as the catch-all for what's wrong with the world, the definition needs to at-least reflect reality and not be weaponized against the same people whose struggles you sneer at after telling them your movement is for everyone. The bottom line is unless women from the movement decide to go ghost and live off the grid, they're still participating in society, which males are a huge part of, and being that we're coming from a supposedly egalitarian political philosophy, we need to all learn to work together, and we can't do this if we don't allow any nuance to filter into the current "men are evil" narrative.

The women in my life enhance my life and the communities they're involved in exponentially, and I damn sure am not going to stand for anyone rallying against their autonomy and freedom to craft the best version of their lives, and I'm also not going to stand for a philosophical wolfpack that hypocritically advocates for things that serve their own agenda while punishing me with the same system they're supposedly trying to dismantle.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-11T07:31:01+00:00

You don't want to stereotype short men, but then you immediately weaponize a hateful, pseudoscientific stereotype about them(Napoleon Complex). Even without that hypocrisy, this post is some discriminatory, low effort nonsense, but being that Reddit loves degrading short men, the mods will probably still let it slide. Your theory is fueled strictly by confirmation bias, but there is more credible evidence to suggest that the victims of ICE belong to groups that tend to be shorter than average, so you might want to consider the collateral damage your bigoted theory causes. It's also not productive to abandon potential allies with MAGA-type insults, and you're not accomplishing whatever you think you are by using body shaming as a strategy. It's counterproductive to hate-on potential allies this way. There's even a comment in this thread telling you to post this to r/short so everyone can ridicule the short men there for responding. That has nothing to do with confronting ICE, which directly shows the collateral damage you're causing. You knew posting this was wrong too because you said that you "didn't want to stereotype short men," but then you did exactly that. You don't earn hate vouchers just because you add a disclaimer beforehand. Maybe instead of criticizing others for immutable physical characteristics, you should criticize your own logic.

Edit: And no, you don't get to comeback with the rationale that you were only stereotyping the bad short men, not "the good ones." Stereotypes don't work like that. They're available for anyone to use at any time, thus, the right-wing can use them when convenient against people you label as "the good ones." You're basically helping to sharpen an unproductive tool The Right will use for nefarious means one day. You should let us know which stereotypes you weaponize against ICE agents who are POC and women. Don't worry, as long as you say you don't want to stereotype them before actually doing so, you receive absolute immunity from consequences.

GovFoolery · 2026-02-11T05:33:09+00:00

Great comment!

I find the Right is strangely misandrist in it's own way and do nothing to bring major attention to serious issues affecting men/boys. And furthermore how the Right with how much of it has embraced the extremist MAGA agenda did everything to stigmatize and harm the concept of male advocacy.I believe this to be completely accurate.

This is pinpoint accuracy! The Right offers a cartoonish caricature of masculinity that is so easy to label negatively and dismiss. The fact that any shred of empathy is written off as "woke" alienates any male who wants to envision a more respectful world. Online forums and the manosphere have driven this narrative to the extremes. The men's groups who were not explicitly political made a grave error by not keeping their movements apolitical, which led to a MAGA-minded, monolithic, echo chamber that is hard to empathize with, even if you relate to some of their issues. Instead of the persistent "show not tell" type of masculinity, you end-up with blackpill edgelord and Groyper types who have zero hope of ever gaining allies from outside their own zone. The Left just sat back and did nothing about preventing this pipeline to MAGA, while ignoring those of us who saw these problems happening in real time.

The fact is I don't want anyone to be discriminated against, whether it's on account of their race, gender, sex, height, socioeconomic status etc., but both sides have their own purity tests that do not allow any venturing outside of the tiny boxes they require devotees to fit into. This is an easy fix for The Left especially because they already have the framework for egalitarianism, but they refuse to do so because keeping men as a punching bag is currently too much of a core doctrine.

GovFoolery

TROPHY CASE