sespursongles:

I got a handful of comments like these on my post about Tolstoy because I dared to say he “forced” his wife to have 13 children:

I know when a post gets to 15k notes you’re going to get annoying comments, but I’m really baffled by these people who genuinely believe that women want to be impregnated every year for 25 years, and that it would happen in a world where women aren’t a) completely at their husband’s mercy, unable to make decisions about their body, or b) brainwashed from infancy on into thinking that birthing chidlren is their only source of worth. For Sophia Tolstoy we have passages from her diaries where she mentions her attempts to make herself miscarry, but even if we had no “proof”, does anyone really believe families with 10+ children would be common if women were free? If men weren’t able to, and obsessed with constantly inflicting PIV on their wife whether or not she wants it? It’s men who display this solipsistic “I must amass more and more and more children / money / etc, and fuck everyone else” mentality in every area of their life. There’s an ex-Quiverfull woman who said “The quiverfull movement claims to welcome every child, but it never allows you to be happy with just what you have already. [It reaches] the collectors’ mentality which bespeaks more of greed, grabbing for every child you can. Satiety and peace are foreign to it.” That’s a male mentality which you find everywhere when you start to look. I also commented on it in my post about transhumanism, “the extremely male contempt for boundaries or limits of any kind.”

Just look at the evolution of the birth rate as women manage to wrangle more bodily autonomy; they tend to go from having 10 kids to having 1.5-2 as soon as they gain a modicum of independence and ownership of their bodies (and then governments have to launch pathetic campaigns to try and convince women to have more kids, like Italy did two years ago with dystopian slogans like “Your fertility is a common good.”)
“Do you have any sources to support your dubious claim that this woman who was continuously impregnated from age 19 to 44 didn’t want her 13 kids?” My source is the fact that if women wanted to be broodmares, you would see a historical trend of increasing family sizes as women slowly acquire more freedom from men (I mean both concrete material freedom, and freedom from male bullshit polluting their minds, eg religious doctrines like the quiverfull thing.) The exact reverse trend being true, I’ll venture a guess that the mindless obsession with reproducing as many times as you possibly can regardless of the consequences on your loved ones and the world at large, is an extremely male mindset that women have been fighting with homemade miscarriages & contraceptive methods for centuries.

Anyway, most of the tags on that post are along these lines so it’s ok: