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I wrote this as a response to Degrowther back in July. I left it as a draft, because it's a bit incendiary and might upset somebody's apple cart, but I stumbled across it today and realized it was worth saying.
In a healthy culture, there wouldn’t even be such a gulf between folks with and without kids. But we don’t have a healthy culture, so here we are.
In a healthy culture, childless folk can exercise the parenting impulse by being mentors and teachers and good influences in the lives of others' children.
This reminded me of a story from my lived experience. Nota beni, we're childless and will remain so.
Several years ago, we had a friend who was down on her luck and living with her mother a few doors away from us. This friend ended up stealing from us after drinking way too much of my wine and smoking way too much of my tobacco, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Being poly, there was also some romantic / sexual interest there. We were planning on her moving in with us. This chick was a divorcee with three kids. She didn't have custody, but they spent weekends with her. One of those weekends, she and her kids were hanging out at our apartment. We ended up catching cold from one of them.
I mentioned this offhand to somebody in my social circle, and his response was, "What was your friend's kid doing at your apartment? Are you some kind of pedo?"
The moral of the story is that if you're a male in this society and you take the least interest in others' children, some people are going to conclude that you're a molester. This culture isn't just "not healthy". It is deeply deranged and suffering mass psychosis.