@olamundo @freemo I can’t help but feel like people talking all about how pressured they are to have sex (in totally unquantifiable ways) are just trying to make themselves feel better about people who can’t get any. “Oh no, I’m not ignoring their problems, and only thinking of myself. Actually, those people should consider themselves lucky!”
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@cy @olamundo Who said anything about being pressured to have sex being an issue?
The part I find counterproductive and even puzzling in terms of human nature, is that without an element of sex any such venture would seem insufficient to both you and the child.
My concern has more to do with the odditiy of seeing sex as a requirement for raising a child than any concern about pressuring two people to have sex if they happen to have a child. Typically people wouldnt respond by pressuring them to have sex at all, the response would be more like "Is it right to raise a child in a loveless marriage, your hurting the child staying with someone you dont love", implying romantic love. If anything they would be discouraging the relationship from continuing in that scenario rather than pressuring the people couple to have sex to legitimize it (which isnt how most people would approach it I dont think).
Reading through the thoughts here, I think there is a large emotional component of parenting that's being ignored out of naivete. And it's not just that there are hormones and biological mechanisms that reprogram parents brain in the run-up to the birth (though there is that, and probably similar mechanisms that we don't know of).
But ignoring that, as you alter your life for a newborn and then care for the child, your internal, life-narrative starts to define your self by that child. It's utterly unlike getting a hamster one day and similar but infinitely more than getting a dog. (But also, like not because the average response isn't the same as an individual response. So of course there are individuals who don't develop this attachment for various reasons.)
@musingsole @freemo @olamundo I’ll be honest with you, if my parents had treated me like a hamster, and didn’t worry so much about being proper empathetic hard working devoted parents attentively raising me as carefully and correctly as possible, I probably wouldn’t be as fucked up as I am today.
> Can human beings that do/don't love each other romanticly, that do/don't have sex with each other, take care of another human being that may be or not be the offspring of said human beings?
That's obviously true in countless variations. But it's also an abnormal situation by it's nature. Any particular arrangement after the average situation of parents raising their own children would itself be so minuscule of a statistic that it's broadly only worth talking about at a societal level under one category: orphans. And orphanages certainly exist that are staffed by individuals who would otherwise be strangers. Though no one seems to be advocating these situations as an ideal childhood.
@musingsole @freemo @olamundo Orphans have the problem that exploitive parents looking for slave labor or unwilling fetish fuel like to snatch kids up in bulk. Not really a fault of the orphanages, who try pretty hard to ensure parents are legit with the extremely limited budget that they have. More funding to child protective services would really help there, more than going after orphanages I think.
What we need is not more parents snatching kids out of orphanages, but more oversight and checks to the power parents hold over their children. You shouldn’t have the power to abuse children and get away with it, not even if you try to call it “raising your own children” to scare people away from saving them from you.
Either that or orphanages designed to raise children themselves, not just temporarily house them until some rando comes along looking for more fodder to feed to their death bondage cult they call Christianity. At least for orphanages, there’s some public oversight.
@musingsole @freemo @olamundo Honestly, I believe orphans have way, way less of a chance of being molested than people raised by their own family. The vast majority of kid diddling happens between family members, because pedos can’t just snatch kids from orphanages. They have to be filthy rich first, with connections to the underworld, and pay out the ass to the slave traffickers who find it easier just to scoop up poor kids in Asia, than trying to fool CPS.
It’s a lot easier to just “be a parent” and then nobody ever checks to see if you’re too hands on in your sex ed.
@freemo @olamundo Well, I agree. And I’m certainly full of respect for people who can adopt, who aren’t just trolling for victims they can abuse without consequences. Honestly I do suspect there are some anti-neglect instincts about biological offspring, but very weak in humans. So there is a (very weak) argument for people to raise a child because they had sex. Mostly people just need the freedom to do it, and oversight and education to make sure they’re not doing anything horribly wrong, whether their child is a product of their sex, or not.