Welcome to the First Things podcast.

This is Rusty Reno at the editor's desk.

And I have with me, Scott Yenner, the author of a recent article, Antinatal Engineering

in the May 2023 issue.

Scott is a professor of political science at Boise State University in Idaho

and senior director of state coalitions at the Claremont Institute.

Welcome to the podcast, Scott.

Thanks for having me on. Rusty. It's always a pleasure.

In many ways, this piece, antinatal engineering, is a kind of case study in what you outline

in your earlier article on the sexual counter-revolution, which is to say the way in which

being male and being female can be sort of tracked along certain grooves by

cultural messaging. So I really appreciate a great piece. So why focus on South Korea?

Well, I was following the news a little bit and I saw a couple things happen at the same time in South Korea.

The first thing I saw was that the South Korea Supreme Court essentially banned or got rid of South Korea's ban on the importation of sex dolls.

And second, like in the same week that South Korea had hit an all-time

low in total fertility rate, under 0.8, it was something like 0.78 or 0.79, children per woman.

And I'd never seen anything that low. I mean, East Asia had been low and I was like, well, I wonder if these things are related. So I started popping around the

internet and I found this large anti-feminist movement that was up and running in South Korea.

And I'm like, well, this seems like pretty late for this, for such a movement. And I just started, you know, poking around to see what

had happened in South Korea. And it ended up being just a very interesting history that

South Korea went from being the most fertile or fecund,

you know, what is now modern state in 1960, where the total fertility rate was six per woman.

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