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I keep engaging with the gender wars/fertility crisis topic even though its slowly driving me mad. But its too important to ignore.
Actual title of a paper published today in the Cambridge Press, by a Norwegian research team:
Toward individualistic reproduction: Solving the fertility crisis could require a further marginalization of men
Not paraphrased or exaggerated. Apparently published by a team of two males and a female. I don't even mean to attack the authors, the paper doesn't seem to be 'slanted' in its presentation... and this implied solution just appears to be the sort of blunt facial honesty that Norwegians are known for. I'm not attacking this paper.
We had the discussion just yesterday where a German Police Chief (himself male) says women should avoid relationships with men for their safety. My commentary is on the larger cultural trend.
Now, the paper itself draws some specific conclusions using data from the last ten years. (i.e. when the gender wars really accelerated) From a twitter thread:
Women's freedom is strongly correlated with declining fertility.
About 60% of female sexual partnerships are with the 10% most promiscuous men. I have to interpret "most promiscuous" as "most attractive," because very, very few men are able to be promiscuous without being hot. Likewise, this looks VERY suggestive of a broader 80/20 rule in place.
Women can't all form relationships with this top 10%... so more women are single... so they are less likely to have kids.
Ultimately they suggest that solving the TFR crisis means getting single women to have more kids. Hence the 'marginalization' of men.
This paper so readily confirms almost everything I've talked about in here I'm worried its designed precisely to trigger confirmation bias in me, specifically. Read it and decide for yourself, I guess.
As I've said, going off of the last 10-20 years of data:
Women probably only view about 20% of men as 'people' worthy of attention.
Women who got to college and enter careers tend to have the highest standards... regardless of their own suitability as a mate.
Lotharios exploiting the current gender dynamics for low-commitment sex are a problem.
Of course I note that every single bit of this is explained by shifts in female behavior, which is to say there's not much shift in men's behavior, so the overt focus on men's alleged failures seems... odd.
I do not find it pleasant to believe all these statistics and their implied conclusions, but no matter how much I ask for challenges, every bit of data just adds on to the pile of confirmation.
I'll throw out hope spot because there is a small bit of data that contradicts the overall narrative... South Korea is actually seeing a bump towards increased fertility!. I am watching this very keenly to determine if there is much hope of pulling out of the spiral.
I've genuinely got very little new to say on this topic. Its beaten to death. Its a bloody pulp, we're standing ankle-deep in the putrid mix of entrails of this topic as the waterline slowly rises every day. I've very interested in workable solutions, though.
I am a very reasonable person. I do not get angry at mere insults easily. Call me whatever you want to my face, your words have no power. But what sets me off is when someone pisses on my leg and tells me its raining, when I can look up and see there's not a cloud in the sky. "Men are horrible, and it is socially good and necessary to marginalize them." The insinuation against my person doesn't bug me. Its the blatant lie contradicted by all available information. It is simply false (especially in the West). It is epistemic malpractice. And it seems intentional and malicious, on some level.
Every. single. day. I am faced with a loud cultural message that (unattractive) men are expendable, mostly unwanted, dangerous, useless, and generally deserve to be lonely, poor, and depressed. And, as a kicker, that 80% or so of men are unattractive to women, so its the majority of them who are marked for evolutionary failure.
Today its this paper.
Yesterday its Mr. German Policeman.
The week before it was that Manosphere documentary.
Last year it was that British Miniseries.
It is a neverending cascade. And of course there's zilch, zero, nada content produced in the mainstream that examines if female behavior is becoming more toxic and suggesting intervention.
Me, I have the mental fortitude to put all this in context and ignore it as an influence on my individual behavior. I have my internal locus of control and the self-confidence to believe I will succeed anyway.
Yet there's millions of young males who are vulnerable to this message, and it is killing them, metaphorically and often literally, and nobody with any authority is doing anything about it or even talking about it without also piling on with the exact same rhetoric.
I simply don't see how one can claim that there's any true 'Patriarchy' in the Western World when government officials, scientific papers, nationally broadcast documentaries, and general everyday people can happily proclaim that men ought to be marginalized for everyone's good if they can't accept a lot in life that amounts to being a second class citizen in their own country... while women are elevated to the level of landed aristocracy on their backs.
Meanwhile the main voices speaking on the other side are inherently outsiders like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I don't even think we have a matriarchy to be clear, it really does just seem like society is organized around the "women are wonderful effect" and the average person is psychologically incapable of deviating from this programming.
Where does this end?
I was intrigued, so I clicked through. This statistic appears to be derived from randomly-chosen men's self-reports of the number of their sexual partners on the GSS. It also appears that the sexual-behavior portions of this survey are entirely self-administered.
So I guess if you believe guys are always scrupulously honest about their sex histories, and there's no way that 10% of men, filling out a survey in the privacy of their own home, would ever vastly over-report their number of partners for the lulz?
Oh so we'd expect most surveys on the topic to be an over-report on the men's side.
Okay.
Interesting that young men are claiming fewer sex partners and less sex, recently.
What changed? Why'd they suddenly stop overreporting?
By your logic, the sex recession among men is EVEN WORSE THAN IT SEEMS from this data.
(women remain more steady on this, btw)
I have yet to see a SINGLE data point that goes against the "lots of women are actually hooking up with relatively small portion of men" talking point. And the dating apps seem to have exacerbated it.
China saw it as such a huge problem so they've taken drastic action.
Yeah I've discussed this before too.
I've analysed this NSFG data myself and found different results for past-year sexlessness and virginity in the 2022-23 wave. Lyman Stone, the author of that article, has admitted there was some kind of coding mistake made. You'll notice the same widening gap doesn't appear for the 'past 3 months' measure. The sample was also smaller than usual due to being limited to offline respondents in the post-COVID survey for consistency with prior waves, so the sex gap wouldn't likely be statistically significant. I'll also note that this gap only beginning to emerge post-COVID doesn't seem consistent with the narrative that the sexual revolution or dating apps enabled this dynamic. The small gap that does exist can be explained by age gaps in relationships as well as a slight male surplus among young adults.
Data showing similar sex partner distributions for men and women isn't sensational and lacks the same emotional pull or viral potential. Hopefully with how pervasive this narrative has become this data will slowly begin to get more attention.
The idea that dating apps are facilitating sexual inequality hinges on women swiping right on fewer profiles and fewer of men's swipes resulting in matches. What this doesn't take into account is 1. the skewed sex ratio on dating apps, and 2. how the swipes are distributed. However, a lower rate of right-swipes doesn't seem to mean that these swipes are more concentrated on the most desirable profiles, and matches actually tend to be very close in terms of within-sex desirability. Moreover, looking at actual outcomes like dates and sexual encounters, we see no population-level sex imbalance, and sexual partner data post-dating apps don't show increasing concentration among the most promiscuous men, nor do we see the expected divergence in heterosexual men and women's STD rates.
I appreciate that you're bringing some actual data and nuance.
But its still slamming headfirst into the reports that half of young men just... aren't dating.
And that the average # of sexual partners reported by females (prior to marriage) has climbed over decades... even as marriage rates fall. Women are clearly having more sex with a variety of men.
This can still all track if the average man is having more sex than they used to. But that doesn't appear in any data, although we can see signs that some small subset of men are getting laid a ton. Women are not having sex with a random selection of the male population. There's a lot of overlap in who they're having sex with.
Whether this rises to an 80/20 ratio is debatable, but I don't think you can look at one of those guys in the 50% of non-daters and say with a straight face "statistically, you're having sex somewhat regularly."
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