Popular culture likes to teach women and, by association, unenlightened men that there is an innate biological clock inside each woman that slowly ticks down to a magical period where her maternal instincts at long last predispose her to wanting a child. Perhaps, not so surprisingly, this coincides perfectly with the Myth of Women’s Sexual Peak as well as conveniently being the age demographic just post or just prior to when most women hit the Wall.
The concept of a biological clock sounds very convincing on the face of it – it’s “biological”, and when it comes to feminine social conventions, nothing convinces women more than their bodies, their selves. In girl-world biological reasonings are always suspicious rationales for men’s bad behavior, but when applicable to women, biology is “Mother Nature”, and you don’t argue with that bitch.
Unfortunately, and as fate would have it, the hard science of biology often tends to crash headlong into feminine social conventions. Lo and behold Many Women Underestimate Fertility Clock’s Clang. Who’d have thought? It would appear the cold hard science of women’s actual fertility window doesn’t exactly coincide with the articles of faith that feminine primacy is teaching them.
A new survey finds a big disconnect when it comes to fertility. The age women think they can conceive a baby is far different from what their bodies are actually capable of. This poses an increasing problem, as more women wait longer than ever to have children.
What’s the chance a 30-year-old can get pregnant in one try? Many thought up to 80 percent, while in reality it’s less than 30 percent. For a 40-year-old, many assumed up to a 40 percent success rate. It’s actually less than 10 percent. And when you keep trying? The survey finds many think you can get pregnant more quickly than it actually happens. It also shows many women underestimate how successful fertility treatments are.
Not only is the myth of the biological clock inaccurate in terms of when a woman should get pregnant, it’s dangerously misleading in the odds of becoming pregnant.
“The first thing they say is, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me this?'” says Barbara Collura, who co-authored the survey and heads Resolve, the National Infertility Association. She laments that no federal agency pushes this issue, and neither women nor their OB-GYNs tend to bring it up. Though, Collura admits that fading fertility is a hard message to deliver.
“Let’s be honest, women don’t want to hear that they can’t have it all,” she says. “We can have a great job, we can have a master’s degree, we don’t need to worry about child-bearing because that’s something that will come. And when it doesn’t happen, women are really angry.”
I wont argue that women actually possess maternal instincts, I will argue that their understanding of when they manifest has been deliberately distorted by a feminine-centric cultural influence. If women are “angry” about the revelation their inability or difficulty to conceive in their post Wall biological conditions presents, their anger is misdirected. Rather than come down from the heady pedestal of ego-invested female empowerment psychology, they’ll blame men for not being suitable fathers, or lacking a will to “play-by-the rules” and satisfy the dictates of the feminine imperative by whiling away their time in porn and video game induced comas.
“I just feel like it’s something else they lump onto women that we have no control over,” says filmmaker Monica Mingo, who’s blogged about her decade-long effort to conceive. She says the real issue is society at large, which is pushing back the age people are expected to settle down and have kids. Mingo didn’t even meet her husband until she was 32.
“You tell us your fertile years rapidly decline in your mid-20s,” she says. “Well, if I’m not dating anyone, and I want to have a family, what’s that information going to do for me?”
Well for one thing it might force you to come to terms with the course you want to set for your future life with an informed choice, rather than blaming it on so-called “Kidult” men when you do realize you want kids. I guess that’s asking too much when you’re in your prime party years at film school. Sorry Monica, time’s up, and you did have control over it in your pre-Wall years. All the haggard ghosts of feminism are cackling heartily around the cauldron of boiling good intentions in hell.
What were seeing here is a collision of hypergamy and feminine primacy smashing against the harsh reality of biology. The feminine imperative needs to create a new social convention to make this incongruent reality agree with its doctrine. It’s been done before with the convenience of Sexual Fluidity. Blame men for not living up to the tenets of the “having it all” ideology and create a convenient new social convention that shames men in its retroactive resolution of the problem it caused itself.
Once again, you have to be careful here Rollo. That NPR article has nothing but anecdotal evidence of a few women with fertility problems – there is nothing to indicate that is a widespread phenomenon. The million dollar question here is how often does a 40 year old woman who wants to have a child fail to concieve, even with fertility treatments, etc. Nothing in that article answers that question. Furthermore, a lot of women who want to have women when they are young and cant must wait until they are older to be able to afford fertility treatments anyway,… Read more »
According to a fertility clinic in Boca Raton, Florida, “Age is the most important factor affecting [in vitro fertilization] success rates. For women under 35, pregnancy rates are about 30% per cycle plummeting to approximately 5% by age of 43. For women over 40 undergoing IVF at BocaFertility, most of the successful pregnancies occur between the ages of 40 and 42. A significant drop in live birth rate is noted in women over the age of 43 with no births occurring beyond age 45.” http://www.bocafertility.com/infertility_over_40.aspx It should be noted those numbers are for the Boca Raton clinic, so while nationwide… Read more »
The age group 40-42 has a 23% success rate, or a 77% failure rate, depending on how you look at it.
I am in complete awe at the first comment. How can any educated person not understand that THE number one determining factor regarding fertility is a woman’s age. You chances of getting pregnant and delivering a live child even with IVF are less than 5% after age 40. Less than 5%. Any other factor pales in comparison. It is a matter of very simple biology. Women are born with their complete egg supply. By age 40, those eggs have aged at the same rate as the woman in whose ovaries they are stored. Ask absolutely ANY medical doctor, anywhere in… Read more »
Should read “women who want to have children”. Sorry.
Irony: a feminine-centric culture has destroyed embedded cultural knowledge about fertility, wrecking birth rates and dreams of family in SWPL women throughout the developed world. Perfection: first-world rates of resource consumption are already sky-high. More kids would worsen that. The system is self-regulating. Perhaps it can be seen as a supreme elegance and preternatural wisdom of the interconnected, interdependent systems that make up the biosphere. Complexity cannot continue to stack unabated, marginal returns on investment diminish rapidly once certain thresholds are reached. Our society reached those thresholds decades ago. We are now on the back side, the downward slope, of… Read more »
Just 2 cents:
“Why didn’t anybody tell me this?”
“…the real issue is society at large…”
Pathetic, as usual.
They NEED someone serving them any information on a silver plate. They do not make any effort. Children, stupid children.
We see why women in (voting) power destroy societies, they create a government in their image, treating people like children.
And how much info we men have about our biology? Aside the distorted and feminist indoctrination.
Wow, now that was an ass kicking.
This comment says it all…..
“She says the real issue is society at large, which is pushing back the age people are expected to settle down and have kids.”
Note the word “EXPECTED”. Living your life by what is expected of you is the fastest road to becoming a sheep. Unfortunately all too many people these days let the media program their thoughts and behaviors.
The social contract between the genders? Torn up by women. The standard life script? Re-written by SWPL women who have the resources to pursue fertility treatments.
The so called biological clock is more like desperation, a now or never sort of thing.
The real biological clock is when these woman are young, and wanting to bed the more-alpha-possible men. That IS what their body is telling them to do. Not for fun, but for procreation.
So then it’s our job as strong men to find the hottest young thing you can & knock her up. For real. Gotta make beautiful babies. Heheh.
I don’t want to beat this drum too hard because I’ve said this in a few other places, but the best book to read for men or women, about female fertility, is “Taking Charge of Your Fertility.” It’s about the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), but so much more. I bought it because I wanted to ditch hormonal birth control; making me too nutty and unpredictable. Since reading this book, I became aware of my past emotions and disappointments; empty-womb syndrome really is true. The let-down of not getting pregnant after feeling so sensationally sexy during the ovulation period is completely… Read more »
Well, now, this certainly makes a strong case for older men wanting to date/marry younger women, doesn’t it? After all, we want kids, too, and when we have established ourselves to the point where we are able to properly raise and take care of them, it just makes sense to improve our odds as much as possible. But hey, ladies, that’s not our fault. Biology uber alles. “a collision of hypergamy and feminine primacy smashing against the harsh reality of biology” The feminists and empowered wymyn made their cold and lonely beds, and can now lie in them. Let them… Read more »
Too bad women have a hard time understanding logic cause I would love to throw these fertility statistics in the faces of all of these 30+ women who complain that older men only want to date younger women.
Many women, and probably many of the same women who try in many ways to get pregnant in their 30’s and 40’s, already got pregnant in their teens and 20’s but they “got rid of it then” and so yet again most women want what they cannot have. Therefore, for some their career is their baby. I’m not going to get married or have children, and I’m not into politics, so it doesn’t bother me what other people personally do anyway.
When I sit in the tube in London on my way to university I see lots of adverts for some of the many fertility clinics. So, it seems it is very much marketed to career women.
Here is an interesting chart: http://www.babycenter.com/0_chart-the-effect-of-age-on-fertility_6155.bc
Excellent blog along with dalrock, roissy, xsplat. If you can could you also make a post of Asian women and Western men.
“Sorry Monica, time’s up, and you did have control over it in your pre-Wall years. All the haggard ghosts of feminism are cackling heartily around the cauldron of boiling good intentions in hell.”
Amen.
“All the haggard ghosts of feminism are cackling heartily around the cauldron of boiling good intentions in hell.”
That is powerful poetry, sir.
Don’t bet on lack of fertility… Long ago when I was a lot younger than I care to admit to for various reasons, I became involved with a married woman, who at 46, was sure she couldn’t conceive. Fast forward six months, and she was three month’s pregnant – now this was before DNA testing was practically given away in a box of Cracker-Jax so there is no evidence the child was mine. But after almost ten years of trying with her husband, she hooks up with me and in a few months – she’s preggers. Since then, I’ve read… Read more »
[…] me for belaboring the point, but there are no accidental mothers. Consider fertility statistics and that it takes a considerable amount of negligence for a woman to miss several pills on a […]
While I’m sure my opinion won’t be popular around here because of what it ultimately concludes, I do agree that there’s no biological clock. I think the bio-clock is a media invention, nothing more. I think hypergamy is a media invention. I think alphas and betas are media inventions. I think most of the terms people cling to when trying to shove human behavior into tidy little boxes are media inventions. “Media” when I use it is a wide-reaching term, and includes the blogosphere. Many people hate feminism, and chafe against the word even being mentioned. For someone like me,… Read more »
[…] continue along you can see that the peak years for women’s SMV tops out at around 23 years. Fertility, desirability, sexual availability and really overall potential for male arousal and attention […]
[…] for as long I’ve been writing about gender issues (10+ years). These analyses range from the biological consequences to the insidious, life-damaging punishment a socialized feminine primacy (feminism) […]
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[…] 3. Rollo Tomassi writes about social conventions colliding with the realities of biology: […]
This is fantastic to say the least.
So, as I understand here, there is actually a biological clock. It’s just that women are not aware of it and have in turn believed the “social bio-clock”?
[…] note that this phase conveniently coincides with the social convention of women’s mythical biological clock. (more on this […]
Another good post. Our media has certainly had a hand or two in convincing both sexes (but women in particular) that just about anything is possible in one lifetime. You can have a perfect marriage, 4 kids, a PhD, and a lucrative/well paying career all by the time you’re 35! Yeah…no. I’m sorry, some people may be able to do this, but they’re so rare you’d have better luck finding a flying pig. Decisions *have* to be made, preferably before/at age 25. You want to dedicate your life to learning and get a PhD? Have at it! Prefer the “home… Read more »
Everybody knows that a woman’s fertility peaks in the early twenties
Wow. This article, this blog, and those who agree with you are fucking disgusting. “The rational male”? Try “The sexist piece of shit”. You’re scum, a whiny MRA misogynist. You’re not a woman, so stop pretending you know anything about us. The world would be so much better for everyone if you and your bigotry would disappear.
@An actual rational person
I would say that you just proved everything this post stated about women being clueless about their fertility, and being in denial about it. Exactly which points that were raised are “disgusting?” More importantly, which points are scientifically questionable or unsound?
Hurling insults does not alter reality. Reality does not care about your opinion.
I am sorry, but when are men going to wake up and realize they have biological clocks too and that sperm mobility, sperm production and quality of sperm start going down at age 30 and take a steep decline at 40? Further more, men increase their chances of producing autistic offsetting by a 3-fold after age 40 and see a 6-fold increase in having schizophrenic offspring by reproducing after 50. Nature favors the young producing with the young, so the old, middle-aged losers who want 15-year-old brides need to get over themselves. And here is a fun fact: 80% of… Read more »
Source?
A warning to ladies, ignore me and string me along in your prime….. i will not feel obligated to play nice to you in mine. Just as it was easy for a teen/early 20s girl to say the right things to milk me and my friends for money/time/support and string us along when they had no real intention of dating, I have found it is quite easy for me to say the right things to 30 year old women and string them along. I am living off 2 different attractive and slim women (top 10% in looks for their age)… Read more »
Oh, I forgot to mention a juicy detail, I even used one of the girls AMEX points for the plane ticket for a trip to Thailand with my buddy. She was cool with it as long as I did’t tell her about the details and was smart about using protection and made sure nobody knew I went other then this friend which was outside of her social circle. I even used the exact bills she gives me for my spending money to exchange for baht which I paid the girls with.
[…] for this consolidation is further compounded by the misconceptions most women hold about the Myth of the Biological clock, but in biological terms she’s well past the years of her prime fertility window and […]
@NoBioClock That’s absolutely fine that you don’t want children. In fact, you’re doing all of us a favor by removing yourself from the gene pool. This is why feminism will die out in a few generations. Your way of thinking will die with you and your kind. Your genes will disappear and be removed from the gene pool. And look at the ones having children and are raising families. They’re incredibly conservative and religious. There’s a reason societies like this collapse. Look at Rome. Eventually, the pendulum will swing the other way and patriarchal attitudes will prevail once again putting… Read more »
“Nature favors the young producing with the young, so the old, middle-aged losers who want 15-year-old brides need to get over themselves.”
Wrong. Nature favors 40+ year old men like Roissy.
[…] too is the convenient timing of the myth of the biological clock and the social conventions structured around it to provide a woman with the maximum amount of time […]
[…] options on the other hand are slightly varied and she’s nearing 30 so the clock is ticking as they say. So pump out a kid or 2 and from there she has the option to be a stay at home mum, […]
Women can thank feminism and the “Sex and the City” philosophy for telling them that they can “have it all”. No one can have it all. But women will continue to live in this false reality and then find someone to blame when things don’t pan out. Women can have children when they get older. But, we have the data to back up facts that show women waiting to have children does nothing but increase their odds of problems developing (versus having kids in their 20s). It’s not voodoo or something else made up by men….these are facts. This information… Read more »
I hate everything you’re saying, but “All the haggard ghosts of feminism are cackling heartily around the cauldron of boiling good intentions in hell.” Is perhaps one of the funniest I have read in years. Well done.
[…] the Myth of the Biological Clock I detailed the misconceptions women hold with have with regard to their own capacity of having […]
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[…] of women finding themselves unable to command the male attention they did in their youth, but nothing could be further from the truth. While pre-menopausal women do in fact experience a spike in their testosterone levels and a […]
this is a new comment in an old post, but when it comes to professional black women… here’s the reason they wait so late to try and conceive:
“i was waiting for jesus to send me a signal… to tell me that it was time to become a mother.”
when one of my plates said this, i said: “jesus isn’t managing your life by the minute… bc if he’s gonna tell you when to get pregnant, he HAD to be telling you to suck cock & to do anal.”
confused look.
anger.
yelling.
tears.
asked me to leave. LOL.
[…] probably because at this age her clock is ticking and she doesn’t have time to “waste” on flings that would won’t lead to commitment, so she […]
[…] Myth Of Biological Clock – can’t have babies late. […]
Fertility rapidly decline at 24-26? I find that bs. Most sources say after 30 or 35. Some sources say men prefer women in their early twenties and some say mid twenties.
@Heaven
Why would it be bullshit?
They’ve been having periods and dumping eggs for ten years by 24-26
By mid 30’s they’re almost all gone, and what’s left are rotten.
In contrast men create new speed every 48 hours
You’re aware men have a biological clock too, aren’t you?
@Lina
No I wasn’t, thank you for pointing it out.
Please explain the implications of that..?
I think a great option is freezing your eggs in your 20s or 30s (even older if you didn’t take action before). That option has been available since decades ago. The best you can do is having a decent amount of eggs frozen. So, if you got 6 eggs to freeze in your first cycle, don’t go comfy and settle for that. You must undergo several rounds so that you get more eggs frozen than the ones you will ever need. This due that in IVF treatments some eggs can be lost when thawed, others at some point of the… Read more »