North Korea Leads the Way
The marital drafting of women is inevitable
China has already taken steps to make marriage easier and divorce harder. Now North Korea has upped the ante, at least on a local basis, as one city party committee has begun giving women over the age of 28 the choice to either enter into an arranged marriage or be assigned to manual labor:
North Korean officials in Nampo are forcing unmarried women over 28 into arranged marriages, declaring that remaining single is a “non-socialist act” that shirks patriotic duty.
A source in South Pyongan province told Daily NK recently that the party committee of Nampo “recently began arranging forced marriages of women over the age of 28, regarding the act of remaining unmarried despite reaching marriageable age a non-socialist phenomenon.”
The Nampo party committee ordered the city people’s committee and Socialist Patriotic Youth League to actively participate in encouraging young men and women to marry.
The city’s party committee stated that “marriage and childbirth are not private decisions but a question of patriotism, and refusing to marry appears to be a refusal to perform the role a woman should play for the fatherland.” They threatened to “make an organizational issue of people who don’t get married.”
This means young people who intentionally remain single, particularly young women, face political and social disadvantages.
Specifically, the city’s party committee reportedly pressured those refusing marriage by threatening to add their names to labor mobilization lists and classify them as volunteers for work in rural communities, mines, or long-term construction projects.
In response to the Nampo party committee’s policy, the district of Waudo has been arranging forced marriages of unmarried women over 28 since March 19.
Neighborhood watch unit heads and Socialist Patriotic Youth League officials in the district are arranging marriages after compiling lists of unmarried women over 28. Women who refuse are classified as eligible for labor mobilizations as “shirkers of their socialist duty.”
Now, it might be easy to dismiss this as the deranged act of the most outdated regime on the planet. North Korea is, after all, very, very far from pretty much anyone’s idea of an ideal society.
The problem with dismissing it is this: the policy is going to work. Not only that, but the policy is going to work much, much better than the liberal democratic ideal is working in South Korea, which has the lowest birthrates in the world, at 0.72 per woman in 2023, which is barely one-third of the replacement rate of 2.1 per woman.
The media and the women themselves, both being incapable of grasping the concept of either “the future” or “inevitable consequences,” tend to laugh this off as an unfortunate result of the combination of free will, human rights, and female empowerment.
On a rainy Tuesday afternoon, Yejin is cooking lunch for her friends at her apartment, where she lives alone on the outskirts of Seoul, happily single.
While they eat, one of them pulls up a well-worn meme of a cartoon dinosaur on her phone. "Be careful," the dinosaur says. "Don't let yourself become extinct like us."
The women all laugh.
"It's funny, but it's dark, because we know we could be causing our own extinction," says Yejin, a 30-year-old television producer.
Neither she, nor any of her friends, are planning on having children. They are part of a growing community of women choosing the child-free life.
In other words, they’re happy being social parasites, as they are literally worth less than nothing by every material metric. Statistically on average, they won’t even contribute in taxes what they consume in government benefits over the course of their lifetimes.
The South Korean government knows this, and has been trying to reverse the course, but to no avail:
Couples who have children are showered with cash, from monthly handouts to subsidised housing and free taxis. Hospital bills and even IVF treatments are covered, though only for those who are married.
Such financial incentives have not worked, leading politicians to brainstorm more "creative" solutions, like hiring nannies from South East Asia and paying them below minimum wage, and exempting men from serving in the military if they have three children before turning 30.
Unsurprisingly, policymakers have been accused of not listening to young people - especially women - about their needs.
But if you read the piece, the cause of the problem is obviously two-fold.
Women’s education
Women’s employment
In fact, the more educated and the more employed women are, the more the birthrate plunges. In Seoul, the birthrate is now 0.55 per woman.
What we’re now seeing is an A-B test write large. Which Korean society is going to subsume the other, the one that educates and employs its women, or the one that forces them to get married by the age of 28 or be sentenced to a life of manual slave labor? Obviously the latter.
Which means that Western societies, and Westernized societies face a very important choice over the next 20 years. Either stop subsidizing the education and employment of young women or face eventual military defeat and occupation by authoritarian societies that treat women as public property. Either way, some form of marital draft is inevitable.
Both Russia and China are actively working on this problem. The USA, the UK, and the EU observably are not. Which does not bode well for the likelihood of the survival of the latter into the 22nd century.
Minji says she is grateful she has agency. "We are the first generation who get to choose. Before it was a given, we had to have children. And so we choose not to because we can."
Which, obviously, is why that choice cannot be permitted to the women of future generations in any society that intends to survive. Now, you may well find the concept of limiting women’s access to education and employment, much less an age-related marital draft, unthinkable, or unlikely, or even impossible. But remember, I pointed out the inevitability of falling US marriage rates due to increased female enrollment in higher education more than 10 years before anyone else noticed there was a problem.
Women actively choosing to not have children is far more destructive than many in the West realize, especially at the individual level where there are fewer stats and obvious societal implications.
There's a local middle-aged woman who had decided not to have kids. Became an animal horder, filling both inherited houses with cats and dogs. Dozens of the animals were found dead. In a pile inside one of the houses. The combined stench of death and waste was so bad, police could smell it from outside the houses. Full hazmat.
Demons love to fill a void.
I’ve watched this play out up close. A colleague (early thirties now) grew up the “poor friend” among Vegas casino heirs, US-born to immigrant parents, insecure about her looks, not promiscuous. In her late teens she dated a wealthy, foreign classmate who strung her along for six years without marriage. After she left him at 26, she assumed that independence, a solid career in commercial real estate, and a high income would attract the most desirable men.
Instead, I witnessed her slide into the standard single-girl cycle (lower sexual standards, dating brokers or douchey frat bros who had something to prove) and then wondered why none ever wanted to commit.
I told her bluntly, through the sociosexual lens: the men she’s going after (top earners/top status) usually choose young and early; the “pond” she’s fishing in is mostly commitment-averse, and the ones that share her values have already been spoken for. Her best real shot in landing a values-aligned man is someone who did commit, was taken for granted by his wife, got cheated on, and is now divorced, but still wants a family and a wife. She was sad when I told her this, but agreed. She even shared with her other perpetually single “boss girl” friends that they’d “missed the boat” on meeting the right guys.
One more data point: shortly after becoming single, she had instant chemistry with a man, but they didn’t last. She found out that he was also talking with another girl (they were not yet exclusive) and broke it off. He ended up continuing to date the other girl who was an unemployed, supposedly “crazy” girl, and they have stayed together for nearly four years.
After the first year or so, she couldn’t process why he stayed with the “crazy” girl when she was such a catch. She secretly hoped they would break up, and he would come back to her. She couldn’t understand why someone would want to be with a girl who offered “nothing” to a man while she was educated and successful.
I told her it’s simple. She doesn’t understand men, and what they want. Men are easy. They just want someone who is pretty and kind. That’s it. The metrics she was using to grade herself were not the factors men use. That’s why it doesn’t make sense.
A bit of a success epilogue. She is currently dating a man (probably delta but successful and attractive). They live in the same apartment complex and saw each other for over a year. Eventually, she was brave enough to leave a note on his windshield expressing her interest in him. They’re together to this day. Thankfully, she stepped out of her comfort zone and took the initiative, because he stated that he always noticed her but assumed she was out of his league and wouldn’t be interested in him.
Ultimately, this anecdote shows that women may not be disinclined in pursuing a family. It’s just that, like my friend, they equate education and employment as the two key factors to their success in landing the most high quality mate.