They are obsessed with birth. The new conservatives like Trump, Milei or Víktor Orbán – guest of the Demographic Summit in Budapest, the largest world forum in defense of what they call the traditional family – want their governed to have children and are studying all kinds of measures to encourage it. With a very similar argument, dozens of influential Silicon Valley moguls encourage women to do so get pregnant as many times as they can. The latter, from Elon Musk to Sam Altman, They defend eugenics through gene editing (a practice currently banned in the United States) and, unexpectedly, they assemble some of their accelerationist and transhumanist ideas with the most reactionary doctrines regarding gender and family.
Thanks to people like JD Vance (who suggested that the votes of those with children count more), the unexpected alliance technology+trad (technological and traditional, that is, between technology gurus and conservatives and religious people) radiates his natalist ideas both from the most important offices in the United States and from the microphones of podcasts with more listeners. They are accompanied on this journey by millions of followers and hundreds of columnists who think the same way and who are very clear about what women should do: be wives and mothers according to the model of traditional wife. And what will happen to them if they are not listened to: they will become that oft-repeated caricature, barely an imitation of the idea of spinster– which includes cats, wine and lexatin.
It’s funny: there is no male equivalent (at least not as reproduced) for that parody. While all conservatives worried about the “demographic winter” are clear about what a family should look like and how women should behave, most of them have not defined the role that men should play within that structure or, rather, take it for granted. What parenting model are they presenting?
Writer Rebecca Solnit wrote in her latest book of essays, The unexpected path that “megamasculinity only likes the idea of protecting if it’s in action movie hero mode, that to protect one thing it has to blow up something else.” And there is something of this in the idea of fatherhood that the conservative international transmits on its channels. For example, one of the most popular memes in masculinized forums He argues that “hard times create hard men who give rise to times of prosperity; while weak, wealthy men, in turn, cause hard times”, until the cycle repeats. While the original meme alludes to the fall of the Roman Empire, this pattern is applied to everything from the entertainment industry to business cycles, and helps understand why, in seemingly troubled times, so many men believe they need to train the strongmen of the future who will get us out of all trouble.
“Not only is it avoidable that these mother/father models repeat themselves, but certainly if this did not happen it would be the most adaptive”
So both on TikTok and on Instagram, discipline, boxing, weapons and all those activities (like going fishing or watching football) become canonically masculine and show an involvement that is, at best, intermittent. What’s new then? It doesn’t seem like much, but since many of these stagings are ideological responses to universal impulses, it is worth analyzing them, avoiding essentialisms.
Heroism or vulnerability: the father in question
If the history of modern physics begins with a falling apple, that of psychoanalysis does so with something everyday like a narrowing sidewalk and the meeting of two gentlemen. Freud was walking with his father when he was insulted and pushed by another passerby. Jacob, this is the name of Sigmund’s father, did not respond to the attack – which was prudent in an era of rampant anti-Semitism. There the admiration and trust that the child had placed in his father figure collapses. The rest (Freud’s criticisms of the religion that places God the Father at the center and his theories on how children compete with their parents) is 20th century history.
“It is important to keep in mind that Freud’s theories have become quite obsolete and have very little scientific support,” Elena Varea, a psychologist and researcher at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid, tells ICON. However, his cultural influence remains enormous and many of the models he describes in his work, such as that of children defying their father (because they learned from him to be cruel), can be traced back to King Lear TO Succession. “Not only is it avoidable that these mother/father models repeat themselves, but certainly if this did not happen it would be the most adaptive thing. Our parents are the first individuals with whom we have an emotional and social relationship, so they are the first to show us how to manage our emotions, those of others and how to socialize. The more skilled they are in these areas, the better that child will surely know how to function in the world when he becomes an adult”, adds Varea.
“There are many mental health problems related to the inability to meet the requirements of normative masculinity, combined with the difficulty of coping with them”
The Italian essayist Luigi Zoja wrote Hector’s gesture (Toro, 2018) that “the father should be the one who teaches the son to be in society, just as his mother taught him to be in his own body” and these words condense a good part of what renewed conservative parenting aspires to be: training for an increasingly competitive society immersed in a perpetual crisis. “It is problematic to essentialize the biographies of men and women in this way, because it gives a charter to certain activities and positions as if they were immovable,” comments Alfredo Ramos, doctor in Political Sciences and author of Piercing masculinities (2024, Bellaterra Editions). “It is also problematic that this figure of the father is consolidated with a heroism based on battle and conflict and closely linked, later, to risk and the need for control. There is nothing inevitable in this model, but if we present things as essential it is easier to reclaim places to which we must return because they ensure the order we have lost.”
Faced with all these individualistic models, Ramos claims the “dimension of vulnerability”: “It is the most productive if we want to think about other forms of parenting. For me, a vulnerable father who makes his child vulnerable or helps him to be so allows him to have a life in which bonds, emotional connections, affections, care, a certain form of attention and the valorization of other ways of being that are not the canonical ones are valued… That is, he gives him many positive things and that he will miss at various moments. moments of your life if they are strangers to you.” Varea agrees and adds that because we need each other, “for these interconnections to work as best as possible, it is essential to show our emotions and understand those of others.”
Money, fishing and boxing: anything but worrying
In Return to Reimsthe French philosopher and writer Didier Eribon takes stock and reflects on his origins and childhood. Some of the episodes he remembers with greatest intensity concern his father, his irascibility and the activities through which he tried, clumsily but well-intentioned, to get in touch with the family: «When he was driving, if he took a wrong turn or missed an exit, he would start screaming as if his life and ours depended on it. But when we dedicated ourselves to fishing, his favorite pastime, he became a different man. and techniques, he gave us advice and, throughout the day, we commented on what was happening or what wasn’t happening.”
Outdoor activities like fishing are back in fashion and this is something that is noticeable in both forums Americans AS Spanish where some users boast of having spent “a man’s afternoon” with their children collecting firewood or of being prepared for an apocalyptic situation like the one described in the novel The roadby Cormac McCarthy. “I wouldn’t denigrate these activities by just considering them of tough guys because I feel like I’m simplifying them. I think that in many cases they are models of transmission, moments in which necessary and valid bonds or knowledge are consolidated”, warns Ramos. “For me the problem continues to have to do with the fact that only that type of repertoire exists for imagining situations of complicity with one’s children”.
Varea believes that “there is a part of insecurity in this type of man who represents such an ancient masculinity. In recent decades, social and working models have changed a lot thanks to the achievements of women outside the home, both in rights and in insertion into the workplace. This has left some men a little disconcerted about what their role is in society because they are no longer providers on whom the whole family depends economically. However, changing our beliefs is a very complicated process because some go hand in hand with the construction of our own identity”.
This role of the father as provider is another of those that reappear and now, in some spaces populated by investors and cryptobrosit is considered mandatory for a father to be able to generate the necessary money “out there” so that his wife can stay at home to take care of their children. In a way, it’s the old complex that you see A story from the Bronxthe film in which an honest bus driver played by Robert DeNiro feels guilty for not being able to offer his son the life of luxury that his friendship with the neighborhood gangsters offers him, but adapted to a context of housing crisis and stagnant wages.
Today, for figures from the neoconservative universe such as Simone and Malcom Collins (two influencers natalists who dress their children like Tyrolean peasants), that a woman can stay at home is a status symbol, even if, paradoxically, the women who spread these messages dedicate as many hours to creating content as they do to any conventional job. And what does the data say? Are these family models, so little new in reality, contributing to increasing birth rates? It seems not. According to a study titled Children and macroeconomicsby Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin, the countries with the lowest birth rates in the world are those where gender equality and shared care have not developed as rapidly as their economies. In this way, rich but conservative countries such as Japan and Italy have fewer births than equally rich but more egalitarian countries such as Great Britain or France.
So, as recent phenomena as heteropessimismmen perhaps hear the wrong message and that to be a father it is not enough to contribute money and go fishing on Sunday. In many cases, even this will not help them lead a full life. For Ramos “there are many mental health problems related to the impossibility of meeting the requirements of normative masculinity, plus the difficulty of dealing with them. Breakdown is a common experience in male biographies, because masculinity is organized around an ideal that is impossible to satisfy.”
