Crowstep
1d ago
There's the famous statistic that at one point 17 women reproduced for every man. But if you trace down that claim, it's likely that such an event happened during our hunter gatherer past, not during civilization
My understanding is that it was during the bronze age, not among hunter-gatherers. And that it was driven, not by massive harems, but by warfare.
The men of one village/clan (who mostly share Y chromosomes due to their shared kinship) attack another clan/village, kill the men and take the women as war-brides. This wipes out the Y chromosomes of the conquered group but not the mitochondrial DNA from the women. The newly expanded clan branches off, forming new villages. So successful male genetic dynasties expand while unsuccessful ones are wiped out. Over time, you get the 1/17 ratio showing up in the genetic data.
It's not as if a typical family structure was one patriarch and 17 wives. More like one man with a wife from his own clan, plus maybe a slave-wife from a conquered clan.
Although you're absolutely right that polygamy is unstable, it also leads to lower birth rates. A polygamous man may have very high fertility, but his 2nd+ wives have lower fertility than if they'd just married monogamously.
Crowstep
1d ago
but we've had several posters talk about how younger women tend to stick together and just spend time with each other at bars/clubs/events in a way that wasn't necessarily true in the past.
I guess that's what I'm skeptical about. I was hitting on girls 15-20 years ago, and women going around in groups was normal then too. The old pickup guys designed strategies around it. The image of a young woman sitting at a bar waiting for men to hit on her was just a thing that happened on TV. Women, agreeable as they are, are more likely to say 'I'm just here to hang out with my friends' to a guy they're not interested in, rather than be truthful and say that they would be interested if he were better looking or more charismatic. So the guys on this forum are getting rejected, which is obviously frustrating, and taking the reasons women are giving literally, which is the classic male-female communication failing.
There doesn't seem to be good data from significantly far in the past but this source suggests that the decline in singles looking for love has been driven mostly by men, between 2019 and 2024.
Crowstep
1d ago
This conversation doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. I don't see a productive way to reconcile data with your 'lived experience'.
But I will address your last part:
a guy who argues a lot on the internet
That's everyone on this forum, including you.
and has gotten bitter about it
Bitter about what?
and this is driving your white knighting of women and attacks on young men.
My interest isn't in white knighting women. It's in lowering the temperature on the gender war. I'm happily married with kids and I want that for everyone. I think the decline is socialising, coupling, marriage and birth rates are all tragedies and so I argue (with data) against moralistic positions that blame either sex for what is clearly a technological issue. On this forum, that manifests as arguing with incels who think that the coupling decline is driven exclusively by women being bitches or being too picky, on Reddit it manifests as arguing with feminists who blame men for being misogynists or manchildren.
'Women and men have different media habits' is obviously not the key part of your argument that I'm addressing, it's that the coupling recession is the fault of women and not the fault of men, contrary to all the actual evidence that both sexes are retreating from the social sphere. The reduction in people coupling up isn't driven by men getting rejected and women doing the rejecting, it's driven by the men and women who aren't going outside at all.
Because from the perspective of forming a relationship, staying at home scrolling Instagram and staying at home playing video games are exactly the same.
I do try and steer away from Bulverism, but this really seems like you're just a guy who has gotten rejected a lot and is bitter about it, and this is driving your explanation of why coupling is decreasing. Am I wrong?
Crowstep
2d ago
Do you have any evidence for your description, beyond your own impression of what you've seen? Because by definition, you are not meeting either the men or the women who are not going out. And would I be right to assume that you belong to one of the groups you are talking about (i.e. men who go out to meet women and get rejected)? Because you can see how that might colour your perceptions.
Because come on, it would be a remarkable coincidence if this civilisation-destroying technological combo (the internet plus smartphones) had massive effects on women's approach to dating but no effects on mens' approach to dating whatsoever, and in spite of all the evidence showing that it is affecting both sexes in more or less the same way and in the same magnitude.
Crowstep
2d ago
That isn't borne out by the data. Women socialise in person more than men (although both are seeing massive declines), and screen time is essentially the same for men and women. Among young single people, men are slightly more likely to be 'looking' (67% vs 61%) but I would imagine that reflects the more passive nature of female romance.
Crowstep
2d ago
It's worth pointint out that it's not not 'our society' (western, anglophone), it's every society. People are just socialising less in person in every country on the planet.
So any advice has to start with this, go outside and talk to people in person.
Crowstep
5d ago
Better than LLMs trained exclusively on Reddit groupthink, that's for sure.
Crowstep
5d ago
Lebanon might pay a very high price for being such a divided society, but for the one guy that gets a guaranteed government office because he's a specific minority, it's a pretty good deal.
Except there aren't any countries, past or current, where Jews have benefitted from the kind of ethno-religious power sharing that we see in Lebanon or Singapore.
Crowstep
5d ago
Can anyone point to a historical (right- or left-) populist movement in a culturally Christian country that didn't eventually turn anti-semitic?
Do the mid-century fascists count as populist? Because if so, the Italian and Spanish fascists weren't antisemitic, as I mentioned. But why are we limiting ourselves to the past? How about basically all the national populist parties in Europe right now? Reform UK isn't antisemitic. The National Rally in France isn't antisemitic. Fidesz in Hungary isn't. Not Brothers of Italy. Nor, of course, is the MAGA movement.
by somewhere around 10x
I would love to see your workings-out for this claim.
There is a long history of homogeneous societies turning on Jews because domestic politics required a scapegoat.
That's pretty much it. They are a market-dominant minority that are distinctive enough to be considered an outgroup but not so distinctive to be considered a fargroup.
Crowstep
5d ago
What does that mean even mean for 'the Jews' to advocate for it? Do they have an international spokesman? Did they take a vote?
Unless of course you mean that you can cherry-pick some examples of left-wing American Jews and conclude that all leftist politics is an invention of the ethnic group you hate?
Crowstep
6d ago
That doesn't make sense. Western countries post-WW2 were much less hostile to Jews than Western countries now. Multiculturalism means a) more Muslims and b) more other foreigners who don't feel post-war guilt about the Holocaust. Aliyah from countries like France is going up as they become more multicultural, as French Jews flee their new Muslim neighbours.
After the establishment of Israel, Middle Eastern Jews fled (or were expelled from) ethnically and religiously diverse countries in order to move to Israel. Diversity means more ethnic conflict overall, which means more ethnic scapegoating of rich groups (i.e. Ashkenazim). Whereas a tiny Jewish population in a homogenous country are much less of a threat.
It's a mistake to overinterpret what happened in Germany. Hitler's rise was driven by Germany's humiliation in WW1, the Treaty of Versailles, and the growing threat of Communism. Other fascist regimes like Italy or Spain were fine with the Jews. Antisemitism was just an idiosyncrasy of Hitler, not a law of history.
It's frustrating to read about 'fascism' as if the sample size is enough to draw conclusions from. There were a handful of self-avowedly fascist regimes in 20th century Europe, and that's it. Even using the present tense to talk about fascism is misguided, because there are literally no governments that describe themselves as fascist, nor have their been for eighty years.
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