Dropping birth rates seem to follow moderate wealth and education of broad segments of the population more than female empowerment. FFS, Saudi Arabia's total fertility rate has dropped from 7.3 to 2.3 since the late 1970s, and they're hardly a shining beacon of female empowerment. Iran's is under 2.0.
If anything, given similar circumstances, female empowerment seems to slow the drop of the birth rate: Within Western Europe, it is strongly traditional countries like Italy, where the overwhelming majority of children (in the 75-80% range) are still born into traditional families, to married couples, where women tend to lay down work for at least a few years, which have the lowest total fertility rates in the 1.3 children per woman range. Countries like Sweden or Iceland, with strong measures to empower women and far less importance assigned to traditional family arrangements (in both countries, majorities of children are born out of wedlock - which doesn't have to mean they grow up without a father, just that their parents never bothered to get married which they may consider a useless formality), we find around 1.9 children per woman - about 50% more.
tl;dr: reality just knocked on the door to call out your BS for BS…
What's more, the lowest total fertility rate of any country in the world is found in South Korea - also the OECD country with the highest gender pay gap.
Good points.
My guess is that what we are calling female empowerment is probably in the interacting mix of relevant factors. For example increased education and earning power is, for women, empowering.
I think the death of civilisation RVonse is concerned about (he can correct me if I'm wrong) is
'not enough white people'. Which I think is a slightly different (if possibly in some ways related*) death of civilisation concern to metaphor's, which, in its broadest sense might be called
'men losing out' (with feminists and especially radical feminists as the main culprits, but also what is called woke or leftist/progressive culture and politics generally).
* perhaps as in
"man, especially white man, is under attack". This may be extended to include straight and cis-gendered, but isn't always.
Now, that may or may not be true (I think it is to some extent, and I also think that it's partly male or white fragility) but the point is that some see themselves as defending themselves against perceived threats and unfairnesses. Some of it is, imo, about male or white insecurity (obviously, the latter extends to concerned women also). My own view is that this is to at least some extent justifiable and understandable (while also imo being exaggerated) and that not acknowledging or addressing it sufficiently or even dismissing it more or less out of hand, as some tend to do (I don't mean you), is not helpful, generally.
