Why Putin’s Desperate Push for More Russian Babies Will Fail
I placed parts of the following article in bold-faced type.
Too often, a lot of people, religious conservatives in particular, shame people who cannot or do not marry and have children, whether it’s by circumstance or choice.
Too many religious conservatives, and a lot of progressive secular culture for many years, implied or outright stated if an adult didn’t marry (or have children) that there was something “wrong” with them, they were a loser, not a “true” adult, or were being selfish.
It is just quite irritating and insulting how so many people in many cultures the world over don’t treat adult singleness (or being childless or childfree) with respect.
Complementarian Christians in the United States have often tried to sell a “fairy tale” view off marriage, that if you just trust God, God will send you a great soul mate, and you will find nothing but happiness as a result.
(Those same Christians, though, will tell Christian women married to abusive Christian husbands that they cannot divorce their abuser!)
Christians also set up unrealistic expectations for sex in marriage. At least while I was growing up, and into the 1990s, a lot of Christians sold this bogus view that if you just hung on to your virginity that God would not only send you a great spouse, but you’d have regular and fantastic sex.
But witness those of us who remained sexually abstinent and yet still remain single, or those who married but ended up in sexually unsatisfying marriages.
I’m not opposed to Christians advocating for a traditional, Christian sexual ethos, but they need to stop making grand, sweeping claims and promises claiming that you will have a rosy (marital) future if you just remain chaste – because often, those promises do not come to pass.
I am not Russian, but if gender roles and gender expectations in Russia are anything like I’ve grown up with in the United States, it sounds like (based on a quote by a Russian woman I’ve included below) as though Russian culture – like American culture, especially Christian complementarians – expect women to place every one and every thing as a priority over what they, the women, want.
I am so tired of cultures the world over expecting that women defer to men generally, to what governments want, etc.
(Link): Why Putin’s Desperate Push for More Russian Babies Will Fail
Anna Nemtsova
Mon, September 6, 2021
Russia is facing a dire demographic crisis, and it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
The country’s dramatic natural population decline in the past six months—more than double the rate from the same time period last year—is so severe that it prompted President Vladimir Putin to come out with a rallying cry in support of larger families last week. “A strong family bringing up two, three, or four children,” he said, “should be the image of a future Russia.”
Realizing this goal will be a Herculean task, for many reasons. No matter how conservative the country is made out to be on state television, the States Statistic Service reports that as of 2020 73 percent of Russian marriages ended in divorce, with 48 percent divorcing before having children.
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