[maxbond]

I do actually want children. I think it rather undermines your claim that I was putting words in your mouth when you first put words in mine, and then immediately transition to a justification of your view that relationships are principly about raising children.

What you said was that social pressure for women to get married young was justified because that was when they had the best chance of giving birth to healthy children, and that their "greatest value" was their youth and beauty. "Baby machine" is a fair summary of what you've expressed - you're deemphasizing their agency in making decisions about their lives and emphasizing their beauty and fertility, describing them as if they were an object which suited a purpose.

[cstrahan]

FWIW, I didn’t read what GP wrote as being prescriptive nor “justification”, but rather an observation of the statistics involved in heterosexual males selection of dating/marriage prospects.

I hate the idea of anyone feeling inferior or less worthy due to not being chosen by someone else.

At the same time, we can speak objectively about what one group of people statistically find desirable in another group. I mean, we could also choose to not speak of it — but for many there is utility in understanding (and thus speaking of) what is desired by others: if you know what they want, you can decide if it’s worth making choices that would satisfy those desires, and you can also be realistic about how likely you are to satisfy those desires as a function of time and other variables.

As a heterosexual man, I can speak of the opposite side of the coin: over 99% of women I have seen on online dating apps clearly state that having kids is a must — my not wanting kids by that logic makes me unsuitable as a dating prospect. I could be upset: “how dare they see me as some sort of sperm dispensing machine?!” But the reality is that they don’t harbor any ill intent, they just simply want kids and that means I’m not a good choice to satisfy that desire.

[maxbond]

Certainly it is normal & healthy to communicate what you're looking for in a relationship upfront, and to respond to that blamelessly as you suggest. I'm not convinced in the utility of using statistics to derive dating advice, I think by and large there's a huge diversity in what people are looking for and the best advice is to work on being a healthy and realized person and being patient with finding a partner, but I wouldn't suggest it simply shouldn't be discussed.

I don't understand how you can read the comment as being purely descriptive, when it makes categorical statements about people's "value" with a postscript about how these "truths" are too hot to handle. If it were simply about following the facts wherever they lead, surely there wouldn't be a need to preemptively declare that anyone who disagreed did so irrationally, and surely it wouldn't have been categorical without making room for nuance or disagreement.

In my mind, if you feel moved to discredit anyone who might disagree with you before they've had a chance to join the discussion, you're probably not neutrally sharing a simple factual observation. That's a strong indication that you're making a statement about how you think things should be, not how they are objectively. It doesn't matter so much when people disagree with you about something objective, they're simply wrong and the truth will win out. It's when you want them to behave in a certain way that disagreement is difficult to tolerate.

[cstrahan]

> I don't understand how you can read the comment as being purely descriptive, when it makes categorical statements about people's "value" [...]

I touched on this in a later response under your initial comment in this thread, but the tl;dr was that I interpreted their use of the word "value" being the same as its use in economics: something is said to be "valued" if it is desired/sought after, and whether that should be the case or how we feel about it is an orthogonal concern (though certainly not any less deserving of discussion itself).

> [...] with a postscript about how these "truths" are too hot to handle. If it were simply about following the facts wherever they lead, surely there wouldn't be a need to preemptively declare that anyone who disagreed did so irrationally, and surely it wouldn't have been categorical without making room for nuance or disagreement.

I think I see where you're coming from now. I suspect difference in interpretation is a consequence of differences in our individual priors: I have seen countless times that people will conflate mentioning of a statistic with support for that statistic being what it is -- there is, after all, the proverbial saying "don't shoot the messenger". So I can sympathize with (what I interpret to be) a preemptive "I know some of you are going to take what I've written uncharitably and/or irrationally, so fire away" -- which isn't to say that I think that's a productive way of communicating, but I see the rationale behind that (as misguided as it may be) just as much as I can see the rationale behind giving someone the finger, or cussing someone out, letting out a frustrated sigh, or any other emotionally motivated outburst. (I didn't take what was originally written to mean "if you disagree, it's because you're being irrational")