You may or may not be familiar with The Federalist, a right-wing online magazine founded by Ben Domenech, co-founder of RedState. It's considered a moderately influential purveyor of conservative "politics, policy, and culture," and particularly wins reactionary hearts with its ongoing anti-LGBT advocacy. MediaMatters sums them up pretty well.
I'm not going to link to the site and give it traffic, but you might be entertained to read some of their current front-page headlines:
- Woman Demands Doctors Sever Her Spinal Cord To Align Body To Mind, ‘Same As A Transsexual Man’
- Women Hockey Players Shouldn’t Earn What The Men Do Until Their Audiences Are Equal
- We Need To Admit That Men Need Sex More Than Women Do
- Why Practicing Catholics Definitely Have The Best Sex
And conservatives wonder why women don't vote for them. Hmm, such a puzzle.
This article however cries out for a little commentary: “Why Men and Women Can Never Be ‘Just Friends’”:
The latest numbers on American birth rates are in, and they yield only one reasonable conclusion: All of us need to start having more babies or else the upcoming demographic tsunami will consume our nation, cripple our social programs, and leave us with a future so bleak that our only source of joy will be the moment we’re chosen to receive the sweet, fatal kiss of the Obamacare Death Panels, the Trumpcare Firing Squads, or the OprahCare Hemlock Squadrons.
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt (not always wise when examining the statements of right-wingers) and assume he was being "amusing" about that last part (and much of the rest of the article).
But what's his solution to the problem of a decreasing US birthrate? (Not that everyone would consider it a problem in our over-populated world.)
For men and women to stop being friends.
Every year, countless young men find themselves trapped in the Friend Zone, a prison where women place any man they deem worthy of their time but not their hearts, men they’d love to have dinner with but, for whatever reason, don’t want to kiss goodnight.
Being caught in the Friend Zone is an inarguable drag on fertility rates, as a man who spends several years pledging his heart to a woman who will never have his children is also a man who most likely won’t procreate with anyone else during that time of incarceration....
For the Friend Zone to be destroyed, women must accept the following truths: you don’t have any guy friends and, in fact, you can’t have any guy friends.
Being that this is from a right-winger, he has to of course view everything from the perspective of a business transaction:
[If he's spending time with you] why is an average man giving his business to you? It’s not because he wants your friendship. It’s because he wants to convince you to open up the supply chain of a romantic relationship to him, and he foolishly believes he can do so by being a loyal friendship customer. “Pay my dues in the Friend Zone,” he thinks, “and one day she’ll promote me to boyfriend.”
His solution to the underpopulation problem is for women to stop being so picky and just accept any reasonable men who want them, and to start having lots and lots of babies.
So get brave. Get married. Get pregnant a bunch of times and give birth to a bunch of beautiful little future taxpayers.
On the other hand, here's a solution that I'll bet Mr. Matchmaker wouldn't find quite as palatable: stop deporting all those nice young Latino and Muslim men and women and children and instead let them come in and have a path to citizenship and become beautiful little future taxpayers.
It's almost like making abortion more difficult, contraception more expensive, higher education less affordable, and deportation in vast numbers of non-whites with higher birth rates than whites somehow has some kind of design behind it...