If you really want to get rid of high birthrates, there is a simple, sure-fire solution which wouldn't infringe on people's rights of having children.

End welfare.

It is a worldwide metric that those in lower income brackets have more kids. Its this way in America to Africa. When the poor are subsidized, they continue to have babies and grow the population. Likewise, in countries with less poverty, you generally find lower birth rates.

When you end welfare and government subsidies, you have 2 responses from those that have tons of kids: Either they will have less, as there are fewer incentives in social democracies to have children, or in very poor countries, they will have to either have fewer mouths' to feed, or simply go the way of Darwin and die. Its very harsh, but would fix our overpopulation problems, as you usually see overpopulation in very poor countries.

Damned British, ruining everything!

And I'm wondering how freaky these dildos and other sex toy were...

Actually thinking about it, maybe this repression is leading to all the (what I find) weird sexual things that have occurred in Japan (I don't remember all the details, but it was in a thread posted here I believe, something like a guy marrying his pillow, or males would rather have sex with a cartoon character than a real female, something like that). Maybe society has hammered into their heads that they shouldn't correlate sex with females, so not they're looking at other outlets...

Makes sense, but now you've got me wondering if the issue of sex is ever exploited in elections...

I think you're oversimplifying this. Welfare is just one of the causes, and only in certain countries (how much could the state possibly be halping families in Africa?). The lack of education (especially regarding safe sex and family planning), an economy based on farming and conservative religous dogmas are also reasons why underdeveloped countries tend to have high birth rates (it should be noted that countries in Africa also have the highest mortality rate in the world, so if they didn't have so many kids they'd probably all die out).

Yes, ending welfare would regulate population growth in low income brackets....by making mortality rates sky rocket. Poor people don't have kids because they think "Well gaw-dam, I'll just shift the burden onto tax payers to subsoodize my love of babies!" they think "fuck condoms, I can't afford birth control pills, responsibility be damned" and then pop out kiddies.

In third world countries they die of malnutrition, or disease, but in first world countries we (or at least some demographics) find wagging our finger at parents of dying children and saying "Well maybe if you weren't so dumb, little timmy wouldn't be starving to death" to be distasteful.

As a society we have to ask ourselves "At what point are we willing to let our citizenry die slow painful deaths that we as a society can prevent by being mandated to sacrifice some of our excess". For some people, that threshold is alot lower than others. Ironically the demographics with the ideology that proclaim undeserved kindess, forgiveness, and grace seem to also have a disproportionately large overlap with the group that says "It's my money, go tell your own family why you're diseased and starving. Hint: It's because you're stupid and lazy." But honestly, I see that as a result of politics and culture, rather than a result of religious belief. And that's a whole different topic.

Either way, removing welfare, and letting nature run it's course may be a pragmatic solution to overpopulation, however also a morally abhorrent one. Regulating child birth is unpalatable, but millions of dead, diseased, or starving children is drastically more so. Hard decisions have to be made at some point, and how we as a species handle this is going to speak volumes about how far we've come.

Well the dildos were called harigata, and the women used them to pleasure themselves. The woman's role was to pleasure the man (except for the courtesans, who could expect pleasure), so if most women wanted to recieve pleasure they had to do it themselves (sometimes during sex men would use these on the women, if they couldn't get it up, or if they were too small).

Another sex toy was konomi-shinju, which was essentially anal beads, which both men and women used.

And finally the only other one I know of is kimitsu-kawa, the cockring, used by men obviously.

The problem with repressing sex is that it leads to weird behaviours and dysfunctions. The irony is that repressin is the best way to fetishize sex, as at some point people will take it no longer, and you'll have all sort of exhibitionist behaviours.

Just remember....I talking about government welfare. Not ending charity wholesale.

My argument is that government one-size-fits-all, top-down welfare is causing the problem, not helping the poor. Helping the poor needs to be done on an individual, private, case-by-case basis. If and when that happens, customized care can help those that are needy and are truly deserving of assistance, rather than the metric simply being set at a certain level of income multiplied by the number of children you have.

If you put it in the hands of individuals and charities that can........*gasp* discriminate against abusers of the system, you will have less people popping kids out for welfare, which will correlate to lower birth rates, and other benefits to the system.

i assure you there are plenty of generational welfare families that are completely aware that they get tons more cash the more children they have. 

I agree. Even a 2 child policy worldwide would be great and would limit the population.

I'd say already massive countries like China, India, Pakistan, etc. should have a 1 child policy and lower population countries could do the 2 child policy.

Population is peaking anway. The only area that is left to boom in population by the traditional population curve is Africa. Generally it goes

high death rate, high birth rate (which is stable) -> high birth rate low death rate (population boom due to medicines) -> low birth rate low death rate (as a country develops birth rate drops naturally).

In fact China's population is meant to peak in the next couple of decades.