No, because women can get their sexual needs more or less without trouble. A male sex robot owned by a woman would make me feel the same way though, similar to the man’s-arm-shaped pillows. It is sad, because they can’t get a their emotional needs for intimacy fulfilled and are resorting to hollow physical proxies

Then for people who are struggling & can’t afford to produce one “high value” child they make a logical choice to do it later when they have more resources. Since humans are complicated they can create other values they see are more valuable then children or decide to do something later until having children is no longer a possibility.

In your language, we would expect people in the first sentence to revert to K type parents. If they do not, they simply fall into the category described by your second sentence.

And in rich countries, who are the people still having many children? The poor, uneducated, rural, religious/conservative segments of the population, who believe in some way or another that raising a child struggling in poverty is preferable to not having children at all.

Sounds like a pretty big cope. Sex isn’t about cumming. It’s about emotional connection with another human being. Being unable to get fulfillment of this basic human need is sad and lonely. This is why fleshlights have a stigma that beating your bishop the old fashioned way doesn’t - every healthy teenaged boy spanks it on the reg. But actually purchasing a device speaks to a level of hopelessness at obtaining actual sex that is sad, which implies a failure to be attractive, which is itself unattractive.

If that were true, we would expect richer countries to have higher birth rates. Instead, we see roughly the opposite trend. The richer a country gets, typically, the lower the birth rate. You can’t tell me that a teacher and a data entry clerk in Virginia are less economically capable of raising children than subsistence farmers in Malawi, no matter how high the rent in Virginia is.

If you want to see high income places with high birth rates, then you end up in very traditional/religious cultures, like Mormons and the Arab petro-states, where women face extremely high cultural pressure (if not force/violence) to be child-bearers.

I’d really like to see the evidence for this statement, since it really seems like this trend is just an extension of the phenomenon we see in poorer countries: when you give women education, opportunities, and birth control, fewer of them will have children. It stands to reason that the more education, the more opportunities available, and the more freely accessible birth control is, the fewer women will have children.

Me, but I have no dogs and don’t play video games.

This seems true only on short time scales, and in corporate work structures. On long time scales and with more collaborative, voluntary work structures, a group of people working together and supporting each other will almost certainly outperform a disorganized collection of non-communicative individuals. We can see this is true because, yaknow, society exists.

You would be categorized in the study as “childless” - wanting children but being unable to have them - and thus would not be part of the headline statistic.

I mean, why would anyone want to live in Venezuela as a life choice? Typically, those who would really like to leave don’t have the means to, and those who have the means to leave don’t have a real reason to. This current shake up is concerning, but you have to also understand that most people’s lives don’t revolve around the actions of the federal government. They revolve around the social connections they’ve made, the physical things they own or have built, and the places that they know and call home. Leaving means losing all of those things. And my perspective, as a blue tribe member in the US, is that most of my friends are watching this unfold with a worried grimace, but with an assumption that we’ll oust the dumbass from office in the next election and begin the work of rebuilding what he broke. In the meantime, they are worried about raising their kids, fixing up their houses, building their businesses or advancing in their careers, going on dates and finding partners, staying fit and healthy, and all the other things people really tend to spend their time thinking about.

I said some, since I didn’t feel comfortable giving even general statistics here.

Prostitution should be legal and regulated, which would significantly lessen incidents of abuse of women.

Do porn stars and prostitutes like their jobs? Some of them do. For some it is just a job. For some, they hate it, but it is their best option for making money. In all these cases, this is not different than any other job, and I don’t see a problem with that. Only if there is real significant coersion does it become problematic to me.

There’s a difference between “I wish I had the privileges and expectations of being a boy” and “I wish I had a penis”

An addiction is when your habit starts having significant negative impacts on your life. So, for example, if you are choosing to stay home and watch porn instead of going to work, buying groceries, go out with friends, or sleep with actual women, then yes, you have a porn addiction.

If you jerk off on a Tuesday night before you go to bed… that’s fine. Watch porn, or don’t, it doesn’t matter. If you enjoy your life more when you don’t watch porn for whatever reason, that’s fine too. You do you. But regularly watching porn isn’t an addiction any more than regularly grabbing a beer with friends on a Friday night makes you an alcoholic.

Also, yes, there is a problem of the exploitation of women in some porn. Some porn studios do take advantage of women. But women aren’t “humiliated” simply by being in porn. There is nothing wrong with a woman willingly engaging in any kind of sexual act in front of a camera, whether it’s plain ol missionary or an interracial CNC gangbang. Many women enjoy making porn and sharing it - just peruse FetLife and you can see tons of porn made completely for free, just for fun.

Like, really. Unless it’s a problem, it’s not a problem.

I mean, whether or not OP does the job literally doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. They are easily replaceable, and will be replaced if they refuse the work or cause too much trouble. The project will continue as planned, with the smallest increase in cost allocated to finding OP’s replacement. The only difference in outcome is that OP doesn’t get paid and loses professional reputation which will make it harder to get jobs in the future.

Instead of martyring themselves for literally no benefit and just ending up poor and miserable, OP should focus on taking care of themselves and taking actions that can actually make a difference.

Big shout out for enumerating questions. Makes it clear you need an answer for each one. Makes it easier to follow up if you need more info on a particular question. Makes it easier to pester the person with “hey, I need an answer to 2 by EOD or project deadlines will be significantly impacted” (copied to your PM).

People’s poor reading comprehension is annoying. But the right move is to do everything you can to get the answers you need, creating a polite paper trail as you go. Usually the other person will get you the info you need sooner if you pester them enough, with the implied threat that you are building a case against them if the project is delayed. Because if they don’t answer your questions in a timely fashion when you do everything possible to get the answers you need, it is their fault.