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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25369 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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If I had to give a tl;dr answer to "Why are women not getting married and therefore (unless chavettes who are happy to reproduce while single) not having children they want?" it would be a lack of marriageable men. Below-average men are in a much worse state than they used to be, and in a worse state than below-average women - the women who are being asked to lower their standards and settle really are being asked to make (and largely refusing to make) compromises on e.g. employability that their mothers didn't have to.

Why 90-100 IQ men are worse husbands in 2025 than they were in 1955 is a more complex question, which involves some or all of changes in education, blue-collar job markets, working-class male institutions, and gender roles.

But the key point is that this is a problem that lives in the interface between men and women - the problem is that respectable working class and marginal working class women are unwilling to settle for the actually available men. In a sense it doesn't matter if the men got culpably worse, the men were damaged by bad public policy, or the women got pickier - the point is that (given the continued existence of monogamy norms and the unwillingness of the political right or the median voter to subsidise bastardy more than we do already) the first step in raising fertility is to unf*ck the marriage market in a way which changes both sexes' behaviour.

There is a separate problem with middle-class and above women marrying too late to complete their desired family size, and ending up with 1 kid instead of 2 or 2 instead of 3 because of age-related infertility. Again, fixing this - i.e. getting professionals to marry earlier - is about changing social norms in a way which changes both sexes behaviour, not about blame placing.

This seems to echo in a series of comments left by another regular visitor on a social conservative blog in 2012 (emphasis mine):

...In the United States, the highest educated social class is mating fairly effectively based on assortative mating. But, and I emphasize this, a main part of this is that women in this group are generally selecting mates based more on beta success/responsibility factors than on alpha sexiness factors, across the board. There is a mercenary character to some of the marriages, and a dull one to others, and in some ways many of these marriages resemble those of the 50s (this has been remarked in commentary about them as well), although the women in them are much more educated and many of them have careers which rival or even exceed those of their husbands. Affairs are rife in this group, but divorce is not common. Costs too much in terms of lifestyle for most of them and is bad for the kids. Again probably not so different from 50s sytle.

Below this, you see things basically falling apart, and to a greater degree the further down you go. The main reason for this is twofold. The first is that the further down the pole you go, the less likely a woman is to choose her mates with an emphasis on the beta side rather than the alpha side. There's poorer decisionmaking and judgment in general, and more thugspawn as a result. The second reason, which is closely related to the first, is that, again, the further down you go, the fewer guys there are who have significantly successful beta aspects, so that even if women wanted to choose on this basis, the pickins are slim, so to speak. Marriage in these social classes seems pretty much doomed to a slow death, it seems to me, for these two reasons, both of which are quite change resistant....

...In the shrinking middle, you have a fast deteriorating situation when it comes to mate finding. Again, this is to some degree based on what is happening economically and socially in this group. In general, it is in this group that the women tend to want a balanced mix of alpha and beta (whereas in the higher group it's leaning beta, while in the lower it's leaning alpha) -- sexiness and success, in other words. And this is hard to come by, because it's a mix that isn't very common in men. So what we see is that marriage is quickly eroding in this group as the women are becoming as advanced if not more so in terms of success as the men are, but want an alpha/beta mix for a mate, and simply can't find the guys -- because very few of them, in fact, exist. They tend to be either more sexy than successful, or more successful than sexy, bit not "Goldilocks" men, as it were.

Yes, hypergamy feeds into this as well, but the odd thing is that the most educated women, who are in the smallest hypergamy pool, are not having issues finding mates. It's the women in the next tier or two below them who are...

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