w00t w00t booyah

I perceive am absurdly strong trend driving younger teen girls toward an emphasis on their fertility, on the importance of having a boyfriend, of being infatuated rather than thoughtful, of being "impulsive" enough that they end up getting pregnant (cf., the whole Twilight craze.) The whole red state idea of babies having babies so they end up being forced to grow up together as a couple because they have *no* choice--well, that trend is being pushed even though (as you pointed out) the economics of that class of blue collar skills won't work at all. The whole rightwing push to remove women's reproductive rights and their access to medical care strikes me as totally bizarre, given the counter-pressures at work. Politics seems to love the model of the Handmaid's Tale, which ought to make all of us want to puke.
And the zeitgeist! I am seeing fashion designs and dolls and pictures of models who have enormous hips and thighs and tiny little heads and tiny little upper bodies, and spindly arms. They look like a nightmare out of old-skool Golden Age SF where the mothers are basically reduced to brooding pods and nothing more.