Crowstep
3hr ago
And now the girlbosses aren't getting married, because Plain Jane doesn't want to settle for Plain John and is unhappily seeking her spot in Mr. Chad's harem.
That isn't true. The marriage rate for graduate women (a reasonable proxy for 'girlbosses') has been increasing since the 1980s, and has only declined by 10% from 1968 to today (85% to 75%). The collapse in marriage has been among lower class women.
The bottom 80% of the male population isn't getting 80% of the female attention. They're getting ~5% of it.
I'm not sure how you're measuring 'sexual attention' but if we define it as 'having sex' then this obviously isn't true. 20% of men having 95% of sex is an insane figure. According to the GSS, the most promiscuous 20% of sexually-active, never-married young men have about 50-60% of the sex. And more to the point, the figures are the same for women. Basically, there are a subset of promiscuous men and women who have sex with eachother, while the less promiscuous majorities of both sexes have less sex.
Lyman Stone explains what's going on with male sexlessnes:
The rise of young male sexlessness isn’t about Chads and Stacies; it isn’t primarily about Tinder or Bumble; it’s not mostly about attitudinal shifts in what women want from relationships; and it’s not mainly about some new war between the sexes. It’s mostly about people spending more years in school and spending more years living at home. But that’s not actually a story about some change in sexual politics; instead, it’s a story about the modern knowledge economy, and to some extent exorbitant housing costs. As such, it’s no surprise that rising sexlessness is being observed in many countries. This, in turn, suggests that finding a solution to help young people pair up may not be as easy.
Crowstep
3hr ago
I could give my long, comprehensive argument (with stats!) showing that men are by and large the same as they've ever been, but women as a group have elevated their expectations while simultaneously becoming less appealing as mates.
Please do, because from what I can see in this comment, and the one you've linked, you haven't presented any actual evidence. Just a just-so story that doesn't match the data at all. To pick out an illustrative sentence:
It is a blackpill, but there is not a single piece of evidence really contradicting it. A man who is the combination of 'average' height, 'average' salary, 'average' talent, fame, renown, and 'average' physical strength will not get female attention under modern circumstances.
Among men between the ages of 22-34, 90% have had sex ever and 75% have had sex in the last year. There has been a big rise in sexlessless starting in 2014*, but even then, the average young man is definitely getting female attention. The article also demonstrates that while there is a gap in male a female rates of sexlessness, this is not driven by promiscuous men hogging all the women.
*Which happens to be the year after smartphone penetration crossed the 50% marker, I think this is related.
Crowstep
4hr ago
The risk I see with 'make marriage a much stronger contract' social engineering is that even more people opt out of it. Marriage has already become an elite institution, with the commensurate dysfunction among the lower classes who aren't getting married.
Marriage worked better when everyone did it, because it reinforced the norm. The collapse of that norm is tragic, but making marriage even more exclusive and difficult is going to collapse it further.
Crowstep
1d ago
The supreme Court handles a tiny minority of disputes that are interesting to legal nerds.
Didn't they abolish segregation, mandate the legalisation of gay marriage, mandate the legalisation of abortion (before later returning that power to the states), abolish affirmative action in colleges and mandate that states allow individuals to carry guns? Those seem pretty political and sigificant to me. Certainly they seem like things that should have been decided by elected representatives or by referendum.
Crowstep
1d ago
I think if there's one thing the US constitution doesn't need, it's another veto point. Congress has basically abandoned legislating, leaving actual lawmaking to the Supreme Court and the Presidency. It doesn't need another thing stopping it from doing its job.
Crowstep
2d ago
What boggles my mind about this is the numbers. Minnesota only has about 90,000 Somalis, less than 2% of the state's population. And yet they've seemingly managed to embezzle at least $8 billion. Somalia's GDP is only $12 billion. If we assume that all the fraud was done by Somalis, that's $880,000 dollars per person. Just absolutely industrial levels of fraud.
Crowstep
3d ago
I'm pretty sure that men get specifically respiratory diseases worse than women. Like how women get worse migraines/headaches. This article suggests that men with pneumonia are more likely to die than women with pneumonia, and mentions that it has something to do with the male immune system.
Crowstep
3d ago
Mostly consumables (food, drinks etc). My wife insists on doing stockings for eachother so that's pretty easy. Plus I bought her a voucher for a massage place.
Crowstep
6d ago
It's a combination of things:
- It's easier for manufacturers to put in everything they want to in a bigger frame, especially batteries and cameras
- Modern phones are mainly used for media consumption, which is better with a bigger screen
- For a lot of people, the phone is the main computer, rather than a laptop or desktop.
- Once you've switched to using a phone two handed, then increasing the size doesn't matter much beyond that point
I'm a fellow small phone lover, but I recognise that we're a minority. Most people, when given the choice, choose the bigger phone. That's why the iPhone Mini flopped so hard. Even Apple couldn't make small phones work commercially.
Crowstep
9d ago
Nothing at all. But socializing more won't change the basic mathematics of the situation. No matter how much people socialize, there will never be enough 8/10 men to marry all the 5/10 women who want to marry them.
Then how on earth did people get married during the Baby Boom, and other periods of near-universal marriage? How was it possible if female pickiness is so strong that the US reached replacement TFR in 2007? 5/10 women do, in fact, marry 5/10 men. They always have and they always will.
Birth rates in the US have been on a downward trend since the late 1950s. There have been small ups and downs, but the biggest drop (by far) took place between 1960 and 1980.
Actually, US birth rates have been on a downward trend since 1800 (in fact earlier, but those are the earliest modern records go). The Baby Boom was a temporary abberation, not the historical norm. But between 1975 and 2008, birth rates were going up. I think it's reasonable to conclude that they would have continued going up if it weren't for smartphones, social media and the internet, so I think it's more practical to focus on fixing the social damage done by those things than by bitching about women being too picky or fantasising about war rape.
What I mean by "hypergamous" is that man is a naturally tournament species just like most other species of apes. In the absence of economic and social constraints, what you would see is that the top roughly 20% of men would mate polygynously with substantially all of the women.
And yet somehow such a society has never emerged at any point in history or anywhere in the world. Even in societies that tolerate polygyny, it is outcompeted by monogamy. That is why only about 2% of humans alive today live in polygamous households.
Crowstep
10d ago
Did you ever read Scott's essays Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled which describe the broad atmosphere of online feminism in the late 2000s/2010s?
Yes I did, and they are excellent essays. But to explain the coupling and birth rate collapse on the excesses of anglosphere feminism is parochial. Coupling is down everywhere. I mean literally across the entire world. Since 2010 birth rates are down in Mongolia, Russia, Nigeria, Japan, Egypt, Brazil. Name a country that isn't Israel and you can be almost certain that its birth rates have been dropping recently.
Mongolian shepherds aren't coupling up less because they are worried about getting Me Too'd. They're coupling up less for the same reason as everyone else. It's obviously the phones.
Crowstep
10d ago
I tend to doubt it. If you are a 5/10 who will only marry an 8/10, the deck is going to be stacked against you no matter where you look.
Did you look at the link? Men and women are both socialising less. That's not my opinion, it's a fact. What about that fact do you doubt?
I am pretty sure that in recent years, it's become much more socially acceptable and economically feasible for a woman to live her life alone without a husband. You disagree?
Yes I disagree, the birth rate collapse started around 2010, before then, birth rates were going up. Has the world really changed that much in 15 years? I'm not talking about the 1950s here.
I would say it's similar to obesity. People have always had the propensity to pig out on unhealthy, addictive foods, but in the last 30 years such foods have become widely available. Analogously, women have always had hypergamous instincts, it's just become much more socially and economically feasible to act on those instincts.
What's hypergamous about sitting at home, alone, scrolling for hours and hours?
The addictive digitisation of life has harmed everyone, and it has harmed the ability of men and women to socialise and couple up. To blame that on women's hypergamy* is like blaming inflation on greedy corporations.
*Incidentally, I'm not sure you can describe women's dating preferences as hypergamous. Women prefer men who are taller and earn more than they do, and men prefer women who are younger and more beautiful than they are. In that sense, both men and women are 'hypergamous' but about different things. But regardless, assortative mating is extremely strong. Rich men don't marry beautiful young waitresses, they marry women of their own age and their own class. The beautiful waitresses marry handsome working class men.
Crowstep
10d ago
Why do you only focus on women though? It takes two people to form a relationship. Neither men nor women are socialising much in person, and yet you blame the resulting lack of coupling as exlusively the fault of women, as if our hypothetical twenty-something woman is somehow obliged to break into the apartment of the modern porn- and video game-addicted young man and drag him down the aisle?
Crowstep
10d ago
Or is it because neither she, not her would-be suitor, are going outside?
Women have always had higher standards than men, and yet the fertilty collapse is (very) recent. In the 2000s, birth rates in the western world were going up, not down.
'Women be too picky' explanations have the same problem as 'people be too lazy' explanations for obesity. You can't simply point to an eternal characteristic (women are picky, people are lazy) and use it to explain a time-restricted phenomenon. You have to explain why the characteristic matters now when it didn't matter in say, 2005.
Crowstep
12d ago
I stumbled across a twitter thread on the idea that SIDS is a conspiracy and actually just a way of covering up infanticide. I can't say whether I believe it not, but the story was at least internally consistent.
This study suggests that about 10% or less of SIDS cases are infanticide.
Crowstep
12d ago
they can't find a man to impregnate them
Yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. Young people are failing to couple up which has caused the recent birth rate collapse. But that's not a unilateral decision on the part of any individual woman or man. It's a coordination problem. Leaving aside the fact that blaming 'women' is incoherent because 'women' cannot make a collective decision as billions of autonomous individuals, you seem to be ignoring the fact that it takes two people to have a baby. The average young woman wants to get married and have children, but no woman can do that on her own. She needs to find a man who wants to do the same, and do it with her. The coordination mechanisms we used to have for this (in person socialising in most societies) have broken down, so the birth rate has collapsed.
Blaming individuals for systemic problems, or blaming one sex for a problem that involves both sexes, is a lazy copout.
Crowstep
12d ago
We were picking out clothes for her and her younger sister at Walmart. I was partly amazed at just how low in price some items could get. $3 t-shirts seems a little crazy to me. The most expensive item was a $12 sweater made of a fluffy white material.
One of Gwern's ordinary life improvements since the 90s was that clothing is now 'too cheap to meter'.
Crowstep
12d ago
That's false. According to surveys, women still want to have children. If every woman had as many children as she wants, every country barring a few would have above-replacement fertility.
But young people aren't coupling up, and that's obviously not 100% women, how could it be? That would have to mean that young men are asking out as many women as they always have, but the women are all saying no for some reason.
In reality, both men and women are socialising much less, and the effect is more pronounced among men than women.
Crowstep
13d ago
The fact that a band like Kneecap can name themselves after a torture procedure and have backing from the country's elites is pretty remarkable to me as someone not from the country
I interpret their name as a straightforward imitation of the violence (real or bragged about) in hip hop culture generally, plus the obvious fact that the IRA used to kneecap people.
As to why they have backing from the country's elites, I'd say this article puts its well:
This is Kneecap: they steal valour from physical-force republicanism to give their bien-pensant ‘West Brit’ views the lick of radicalism. They pull on a balaclava to hide the truth that their every utterance is likely to get the Trinity grads at the Irish Times rattling their jewellery in vociferous agreement.
It’s the performative nature of Kneecap’s radicalism that endears them to so many bourgeois youths in Britain and Ireland. I would wager that a majority of the people leaping up and down at Kneecap gigs as they rap ‘Brits Out!’ and ‘Fuck Israel!’ are kids of privilege. Indeed, the Irish Times published a piece earlier this year titled: ‘A middle-class millennial at a Kneecap gig: am I just cosplaying at republicanism?’ Yes, you are. But you’re not alone. Disguising milquetoast guff in radical garb is all the rage. So where posh young Brits will don Novara Media’s 25-quid earrings that say ‘Literally A Communist’ before wanging on about how fucking dumb ‘the gammon’ are, Kneecap fans will pull on a t-shirt featuring a Mick in a balaclava before wringing their untoiled hands over how pitiably traumatised the Irish are. Everyone hides their class prejudice behind class politics these days.
They express quintessentially bourgeois views with a fake veneer of working class radicalism.
Crowstep
13d ago
You frame it as if the birth rate collapse is being caused by women choosing not to have children.
It's not, mothers are still having as many children as they did in the 1970s. The issue is that fewer women are becoming mothers. And it's not because they are choosing not to. Childless by choice women have always existed, but they've always been a tiny proportion.
The birth rate collapse is happening because young men and young women are not coupling up any more.
And given that men make up 50% of the non-forming couples, I think we are perfectly entitled to talk about it.
Crowstep
14d ago
What does that have to do with my sister's predeliction for books about terrorists or the popularity of true crime podcasts?
Crowstep
14d ago
I'm not talking about relationships or anything like that. I'm talking about a woman thinking about, say, a burglar entering her house or a mugger accosting her on the street. Men fantasise about how they would fight off the assailant in those situations, women fantasise (arguably more realistically) how they would escape him.
You seem to be talking about why women enter into relationships with (more or less) violent men, which is a completely different context and timescale.
Crowstep
14d ago
A podcast I'm listening to quoted a study which basically said you should triple the modern murder rate in order to translate it into the equivalent rate in the 1960s.
Crowstep
14d ago
One of the main themes, I think, would be that Married Woman True Crime pathology is an extreme form of the same pattern in trash romance novels; the danger is the attraction.
I assume that women like True Crime for the same reason that men like fantasising about how we'd win a fight. Some profound evolutionary instinct to prepare for violence. But whereas men fantasise about how to confront violence, women fantasise about how to escape it.
My sister reads books about terrorists. She's not doing it because she has the hots for Osama Bin Laden.
I agree with your overall comment, but I've got to jump in here. 'Settle or starve' has never been the choice women had to make in the west. Not when we were hunter-gatherers (meat would shared within the band), not after the shift to agriculture (women can grow crops and make textiles for sale, hence the word 'spinster'), not after the industrial revolution (where there was ample factory and domestic work). Never.
Indeed, 'settle or starve' suggests that widows (who made up a huge percentage of women in societies before modern medicine) would just starve to death, which they didn't. People only starved to death during famines, when everyone was starving to death.
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