In Los Angeles County, a Texas-shaped wedge that covers the coast from Long Beach to Santa Monica and is America’s most populous, the fertility rate for educated young white women in 2024 was functionally zero: of an estimated 80,000 to 85,000 such women (some college education, ages 20 to 24), there were 293 births — around six babies per 1,000.
This stunning statistic comes to us courtesy of a viral essay by Costin Alamariu, a Yale-educated Right-wing philosopher and eugenicist, who is interested in the problems of breeding “high human-capital” individuals. Alamariu writes in a distinctive typo-larded and grammatically scrambled style, under the nom de plume Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, and has been one of the influential figures in the rise of hyper-masculinism and the return of biological vitalism on the Right. (Men of the Bronze Age don’t use spellcheck, get it?)
BAP believes that egalitarian, collectivist, female-led torpor has been the human norm since prehistory — echoing Camille Paglia’s statement that “if civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts” — and that Western civilization has been a fluke, the fragile accomplishment of the violent seizure of power by a naturally (genetically) excellent male-warrior-aristocrat class. Such rule is inherently patriarchal, violent, expansionist, racialist, and misogynist, he believes — but it has been responsible for the flowers of human culture, from technology to the Renaissance. Our current “gyno-gerontocracy” — rule by women and old people — hello, Biden-Harris ticket — represents a return to the droopy baseline. BAP is pessimistic that the state of affairs can be changed, but the solution, as he sees it, is selective breeding of elite humans.
But how to persuade the high-human-capital women, who BAP believes are responsible for the population drain in the upper echelons, to have more sex and more babies?
The answer is turning “the anxious professional female” on to penis-worship, the celebration of male beauty, and pagan-style orgiastic sex cults. The non-fertile female type, he says, is one we’re all familiar with: “an intelligent, articulate woman, not bad-looking has a series of monogamous relationships, often including cohabitation…. None of these ‘work out,’ none result in children. At some point she realizes she’s 44 and childless. Why … I’m not sure even she knows.”
What these ladies need is not “reason, civic consciousness, and state law,” but an “obscure or even occult” remedy: an inspiration to penis-worship, and an increase of ecstatic sexuality, sexual frenzy, fuck-craziness, glamor and vigor. “Impregnation and births come from the erect phallus, and from … the male instinct and male sexual desire,” he writes. Only hot young men can “reignite fertility” in young women, using the device endowed to them by nature.
As an anxious professional woman of somewhat this demographic, I have no love for the individualism and nihilism of the manosphere, but: this is an excellent idea.
The lack of frenzied penis-worship among women is a huge social problem. Any sexual encounter that inspires truly sincere frenzied penis-worship, might, given the mystical properties of sexuality, melt the ice between the genders that is at least in part responsible for the population collapse. It might also be a gateway to the kind of thinking that values children.
BAP’s concern is less narrow than perhaps it seems. Even non-eugenicists are aware that we are experiencing a global population decline, with fertility in the United States at 1.6 births per woman, part of a downward trend that’s visible everywhere in the world outside of Sub-Saharan Africa (and even there, rates are on a downward trajectory).
These trends cut across cultures and income levels and aren’t hugely impacted by family-leave policies or the other factors we tend to fight about, like a society’s relative liberalism versus conservatism and religiosity. One driver is science — obviously, in a world with universal contraception, no one has to get pregnant anymore; and rising infertility is also an issue — but another is that people are remaining single (fertility among married people is also declining, but much less precipitously). People can’t find partners they like, and even if they do, they make a rational cost-benefit analysis that chooses known goods such as money and travel and organic cocktails over potential goods, such as the happiness they might experience having children.
BAP is correct that the conventional wisdom on how to reverse these trends is inadequate and somewhat circular — it has been observed that people who are married and religious have more children, but that doesn’t mean that promoting marriage and religion (for the purpose of promoting more children) will have any influence on people who don’t want children in the first place. And he is also correct that the shift would have to bring men and women together, and must take place in the spiritual, not the material realm. His reliance on the “occult,” which I’d interpret as mystery or the transcendent, is apt.
Unfortunately, he’s also a nihilist hyper-individualist who worships technology, hates women, and sees no inherent value in human life; so there are some flaws in his social reasoning. He has a glimmer that something transcendent is needed, but his best idea on how to inspire “veneration” of the penis and how to “valorize” male beauty is … government sponsored PR campaigns. Just imagine: We’ll text you a picture of a penis if you text us a six-digit code. He admits, reluctantly, that female consent is necessary. But his suggestion for what might inspire women to go wild is porn-brained … an orgy. It’s a popular female fantasy, according to PornHub and Allure magazine, which published an article entitled “Yes, Your Gangbang Fantasy is Normal” in 2018. But it certainly isn’t a popular female activity. (He might also consider that whatever Allure magazine is selling young women, the Right shouldn’t be.)
He is aware that carrying a baby to term will take a high toll on the woman … so he suggests government payments of $500,000 per birth. This is less tepid than the current $2,200 child tax credit, but hardly represents the lost income possibilities for a high-human-capital earner. And he makes no provision for the dads sticking around: $500,000 goes even less far over 18 years if you aren’t receiving childcare. Essentially, he’s writing a polemic on fertility, while holding all the cultural attitudes that have created the fertility crisis: he has no interest in actual children, believes that a woman’s “reluctance at being impregnated and taking a pregnancy to term” is entirely rational, and suggests that maybe the kids could be given away to government-sponsored daycares in order to not inconvenience the parents as they individualism-maxx their way towards eternity. Universal Pre-K and younger is already the socialist-mediocre ideal — he is no different.
“The lack of frenzied penis-worship among women is a huge social problem.”
These are problems of the manosphere overall: in response to the excesses of toxic feminism, its adherents have adopted an equal and opposite kind of toxic masculinism that attempts to rehabilitate masculine vice without adopting any form of masculine virtue. Husbandry, paternity, nurture, protectiveness, loyalty, self-mastery, responsibility, legitimate authority, generosity, self-sacrifice, gentleness-in-strength, are all either unknown or unnecessary. BAP, who prescribes pregnancy and “creampie” porn for his utopia is either unaware or doesn’t care that virility originally meant resisting the urge to live full time in the goon cave.
To accomplish BAP’s goal more realistically, and for everyone, not just the elite, the manosphere would do well to consult two books on sexuality and fertility penned by women outside the mainstream feminist orbit. The first, Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography, published in 2013, supports BAP’s intuition that a kind of mystic-ecstatic sexual pairing is the key to female creativity and happiness. The second, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, published in 2024 by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, is a serious scholarly work by a Catholic economist and mother of eight, which sheds light on the reasons women might become hyper-fertile.
Wolf’s Vagina starts with the author’s personal story of how a pinched pelvic nerve from a degenerative back condition interfered with her orgasms and also drained her life of creativity and meaning. Her journey toward recovery set her off on a deep dive into female sexual biology and the science of female pleasure, which brought her to some startling — though highly speculative — conclusions: that women are more “animal” and more sexual than men; that the seat of a woman’s selfhood and soul is her sexuality; and that her creative powers are fundamentally tied to having good sex.
She based some of this on her discovery of the pelvic nerve, which, “like most women,” she had known nothing at all about before her injury. Beneath the superficial organs we are all familiar with, lies a tangled, complex, multiply branching, and “completely unique for every individual woman” (emphasis hers) network of nerves that originates at the sacral vertebrae, swirls throughout the pelvis, and laces densely around multiple locations (walls of the vagina, clitoris, cervix, perineum and anus). It’s well-known to neuroscience, she discovers, that variations in female orgasms (clitoral, vaginal, both-at-once) as well as the level of difficulty in attaining them, depend largely on the arrangement and density of these nerves. (A world of Freudian theory about the female orgasm, defeated in a single blow.) To have good sex with a woman, in other words, you must know her as an individual; you must be paying attention; it is a relational as well as a physical act.
The male pelvic nerve, on the other hand, is vastly smaller and simpler, is basically the same for all men, and is arranged in a grid.
“He’s writing a polemic on fertility, while holding all the cultural attitudes that have created the fertility crisis.”
Next, Wolf discussed the role of the autonomic nervous system, which controls what our bodies do beyond our conscious control, and regulates many of the other biological processes of female arousal besides brute stimulation. Science, she says, has proved that the “activation” of this system depends on how women feel — along an axis of safe, valued, relaxed, not-in-danger, etc. The “activated” ANS produces arousal and causes women to release euphoric affection-and-emotion chemicals, much more intensely than men do. It also has profound effects on the brain, including “deactivating centers for behavioral regulation,” changing responses to pain, and producing altered states of consciousness: when the ANS is fully activated, “one could say that [the woman] actually becomes, biochemically, a wild woman.”
The ANS arousal process is similar in men but again is vastly less sensitive and complex — and less responsive to touch and more to “words of respect and appreciation.” (Pro tip: “men’s physiological distress levels in relationship conflicts” also lower in response to such words.)
These facts of biology suggested to Wolf a particular kind of lovemaking — slow, attentive, exploratory, particular — that will produce intense attachment and emotion, and also a kind of transcendent bliss. The BAP dream is real, but it’s achieved through actual human intimacy, not at the orgy.
Women are even programmed, Wolf said, by the balance of chemicals released by pressure against the cervix (penetration) to get the greatest reward through the agency of “the other,” meaning a man and his penis. Penis-worship thus is hard-wired and doesn’t need the PR campaign — it needs only the functioning penis and a man who knows what to do with it. Wolf argued that it was a mistake of second-wave feminism to suggest that women could do without men: we are unhappy and incomplete without them, biologically. (This book marked the end of her acceptance in the feminist mainstream.)
As a feminist in the era of contraception, Wolf did not connect the relationship-building and female-creativity-stoking properties of sex with procreation, nor did she ask what the hormonal and chemical effects of specifically procreative sex might be. In the 2020s, we might extrapolate that these effects exist, thanks to the research of Sarah E. Hill on how hormonal birth control changes not just women’s bodies, but their minds and life-choices, as well. Might the vaginally fulfilled woman Wolf described, experiencing her natural reproductive cycle, spread her creative urges more widely, and wish to create not just art, but life? Might the feelings such as love and appreciation for the other experienced in this kind of ideal union make her less selfish, less individualist, and more open to caring for a child, both spiritually and biochemically?
Some indications that it’s possible come from economist Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. The author and her research team performed the first qualitative study of American women who have more than 5 children (around 5% of the population), operating on the essential insight that “if a phenomenon is sufficiently consequential, then its absence must be consequential” — if most women have low fertility, studying those who don’t have low fertility will tell us something about how to cure the disease. She notes that the cure for smallpox was discovered when it was noticed that some people — dairymen and milkmaids — were immune to it. (The milder cowpox virus provided immunity to smallpox, and was crucial in developing the vaccine.)
Pakaluk and her team visited 55 college-educated women of varied socioeconomic status across America, conducting interviews that might provide insights into their motivation, and a clue into what’s lacking in the culture at large. The author chose women who would describe their child-bearing as purposeful, because she was looking for the reasons behind the choice; and she picked college-educated women because she wanted subjects to be facing the modern dilemma in which “education raises the opportunity cost of forgoing the labor market to have children.”
Pakaluk finds variation, of course, but also deep similarities. Some of the women she interviewed grew up in big families and always knew they wanted to have a large family; others, like the Hannah of her title, quoted in chapter two, say they could never have imagined having so many, and invoke the mystical and spiritual to explain their reasoning. “People think on a rational level, and I think maybe a little bit more super-rational thinking has to infiltrate the masses to know that things are possible, like the possibilities of expansion in your life,” Hannah says.
The women in this cohort describe the choice to have many children as a rejection of selfish individualism: “a deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood,” Pakaluk writes. Some work, some don’t, but all are making “costly personal sacrifices” — because they seem worth it. These women believe they are getting more than they are giving up. They value the children themselves, and the expansion of heart and soul they experience by being mother to many. The many voices in the book all converge on this theme: nothing is as good — we just fell in love with babies.
Most women in this day and age won’t recognize this. Motherhood is hard, and hard to adjust to when you are raised with careerist expectations of status and success. New York Magazine’s The Cut recently shared with us, “Stories from Real Women Who Regret Having Children” — and I’m quite sure none of them were making it up. However most modern women are also, in some sense, resisting: trying to “keep my identity,” hold onto “me time,” make sure “nothing changes.” They don’t do motherhood the way the pronatalists Pakaluk interviewed do: fully accepted, as a “vocation” and a “calling,” and a place to find an identity rather than lose one.
Unhappy mothers may also be stopping too soon. Pakaluk discovered that having a lot of siblings benefits the family in unexpected ways. In larger families, the necessity for everyone to pull together, teaches children responsibility, is a natural corrective for selfishness, and gives them a sense of purpose as well. With just one or two: you get brats. New babies, for 20% of Pakaluk’s interviewees, are discovered to solve emotional or other family problems.
Moreover, despite our careers and fully maximized lives, we are also experiencing an epidemic of specifically female unhappiness, which may be related to lack of childbearing. Women’s rates of happiness have been declining since 1970, “both absolutely and relative to men,” Pakaluk reports. At the same time, we are having fewer children overall, and fewer than we say we want.
So here’s a different, more radical, less modest proposal: for happiness and fulfillment, women need men, and a lot of babies. The solution to the fertility crisis is overcoming 100 years of feminism and taboo, and telling them so.
