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An elegant solution to all the male crisises, embryonic sex selection. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-y-chromosome-is-dysgenic
Men commit far more crime than women, they are more prone to diseases and they live shorter lives.
There may be more variation in men's IQ scores and they are more common in STEM, so we would certainly need some men for new discoveries and the like but what is the need for 1:1 sex ratio?
Most people don't work on intellectual tasks in civilization which need constant innovation and incredible time spent on them with a singular focus. Most jobs are mundane and of maintaince variety. We can just have few men which work on hard research type jobs where vast majority of population is women. Maybe with lack of men female researchers would lead. Besides if super intelligence arrives we may not need men working at these jobs at all.
This would solve the incel problem since men are rarer, this would solve the problem of dangerous men preying on women.
Note I am not serious here, but talking about this hypothetical seems like fun. It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.
Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.
Edit: i am again restating that I am not seriously considering this. It's starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise.
The dystopian take: We are moving dangerously close to the most radical feminist fantasies with this. Keep in mind that feminism seemingly needs to treat men as the outgroup to function, and that most women still identify as feminist. We live in a democracy. Reducing the ratio of men to women means increasing the political power of feminists. That scares me, because there seems to be no end to the slippery slope that ideology is currently on. If something is wrong in society, they blame men. If that doesn't solve it, then they blame men more. Increase their power and reduce the ability of men to organize against it, and we could see some truly dystopian shit.
Why not bar men from high-paying positions entirely? Birth just enough of them so there are people to do the hard and risky jobs, and let everything else be done by women. One man can impregnate hundreds of women after all, so even gradually reducing the male:female ratio to less than 2:10 should be more than sufficient to keep up the population. Any male politician speaking out against this trend can be efficiently cancelled by hordes of women and watch himself slowly lose influence.
You also mention that men are more common than women in STEM. But for several fields this is not true. Women outnumber men quite heavily in medicine and biology for instance, and if you look at science fields overall, women actually outnumber men overall. Also note that the link I have here is 6 years old. As far as I know, women have only moved further ahead of men in the past years. In spite of this, there is still a broad push to get even more women into higher education. I fail to see how a version of the current landscape actually dominated by women would not just result in women dominating academia completely. I can already see the argument: Men is only X% of the global population, so there should at most be X% men in any given degree. Of course if the male percentage is lower than X (or 0) this just goes to show that women are better.
Finally, I think you are misdiagnosing the incel and broader dating problems of modern societies. The culture promotes hedonism, women are taught to fear men, people spend less time in-person socializing than ever, and the way that men are encouraged to act is unattractive to women. Nothing about reducing the ratio of men to women actually fixes any of this. The addictive and convenient nature of social media and gaming means they will continue to be picked over social interaction. Men will still be brought up anxious and scared of approaching. Demonizing men will only be easier as you meet them less. Maybe women will lower their standards purely due to a lack of options, but I honestly wouldn't count on it. That seems more like a male thing to do.
Just in general, screwing with the ratio of men to women seems like a Chesterton's fence of monumental proportions. No one predicted that the one child policy of China and the resulting increase in the proportion of men would turn out as disastrously as it did, even though it seems obvious now. Your experiment would probably result in some very interesting insights into the human mind, whilst similarly blowing up society in spectacular and unexpected fashion.
Fun to think about though.
That's more than twice as generous as Sally Miller Gearhart's proposal to maintain the proportion of men at 10% of the human race.
It's actually only 60% more generous.
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What? If men become scarce, then women will become desperate for men. That would increase mens' power, not decrease it.
The actual problem with the proposal is that this kind of society wouldn't actually be a feminist utopia. For one, women's hypergamous instinct is based on positional status, so making all the men tall or handsome doesn't do anything. There's nothing inherently short or ugly about Western men today. If they don't see the low-status men around, then the rest of men won't actually look high status! There's nothing to compare them to!
Indeed, even if the men are all the same (zero variance whatsoever), it seems unlikely this would make women happy. The purpose of hypergamy is to have a higher status partner than all your friends. If all the men are the same it might as well be a society without any men at all!
So the only thing that would happen is women will become desperate because men have more options. So the women will feel even worse than they do now! In addition to getting pumped and dumped, they will be getting dumped by actual losers! This will not feel like a feminist utopia at all!
It would seem women desire a male slave class.
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No, it doesn't. In fact, it's the reverse.
Remember, men provide, women select.
If less providers, selectors are now competing with each other and don't get to be as picky, (and each individual provider becomes more important), so the political power of selectors in aggregate decreases (a "seller's market"). If more providers, selectors get to be pickier (and providers are competing with each other more) so the political power of selectors increases (a "buyer's market").
This is socio-economics 101.
Right now, even with a rough 50/50 split, men are in surplus due to automation that uniquely affects that gender, and have been for the last 100 years- hence they have no power -> feminism. Communism is the same way, for that matter; too many (male) Russians and too little economic opportunity to sustain a democracy. Implications for China are obvious.
If we were able to automate women out of their jobs just as hard as we did men at the opening of the 20th century, or experienced a massive war where 20% of Western men were wiped out, politics would shift for a generation. As they had from 1945 to about 1990, which is also the reason you don't notice that 2020 is, socioeconomically, closer to 1900 than 1960 because the socioeconomic problems were merely hidden for that generation, and now that the surplus (in power for providers/sellers/men) is all gone they've come back with a vengeance.
It doesn't matter if they do or not. By increasing the number of women, and by lowering their political power without being able to partner up, you've increased the number that will settle to match the number of men. And that, empirically, is good enough.
if you want someone you know despises you and only settled for you because the alternative was poverty, sure. You're still going to have adultery and affairs and all kinds of shenanigans, because you might be able to make Miss Susan marry Mr Thomas, but if Mr James is hotter or even just nicer to her, things will happen. Marriages where one party is lording it over the other that "I could have had my pick of anyone, I could have done better than you!" tend not to be the happiest. Maybe she'll just let it be water off a duck's back and put all her efforts into the kids while ignoring you. Maybe the Golden Age of British Murder will get a resurgence and there will be a lot of "suddenly, widows".
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@Bombadil is concerned, AIUI, about the possibility of a majority-feminist democracy removing a bunch of legal rights from men. You're using economic theorems that are founded on the assumption that both the buyer and seller are free citizens - that they have the option of walking away status quo ante. A slave can't walk away; his master (or, I suppose, mistress) can unilaterally torture him if he does not accept the deal, which tends to make his bargaining position pretty awful (and let's not get into the abuse of psychiatric drugs to remove his ability to refuse).
I personally, upon reading @Testing's OP, had more immediate/prosaic concerns, although still based on the "one person, one vote" point; the sex disparity in attitudes to liberty is huge (note that it mostly persists even for Red-coded oppression; this isn't just an artifact of the majority of women being Blue Tribe), and I'd worry about all the usual failure modes of hewing the legs from under liberty as a societal principle (including economic stagnation, for starters).
Sure they can. But they don't, partially because there's no better deal to be found elsewhere. (Related: why don't women leave abusive husbands in 1860?)
The thing about one's group being in deficit is that it increases the benefits to defectors. Usually this means "pays a [higher/lower] wage if one is a [buyer/seller]", but it can be other things too, in particular political power.
For the last 100ish years, men have been the defectors, paying women higher and higher socioeconomic wages. They couch this in moral terms, but fundamentally it's just business, just like anti-slavery efforts (and democracy more generally) were back in their day.
Make the economic situation dire enough and people will literally fight to make themselves slaves. Communist countries are a pretty good object lesson in how that works.
We can debate the point that men are completely unnecessary in modern society (which is, in fact, a reasonable question to ask- as automation mostly replaces men, including suicide drone swarms); if they are, this won't work for exactly the reasons you stated. But if they are vital, then my point holds; I'll point to Western gynocracies' obsession with mass male immigration as a suggestion that they are.
Yes, I'm fully aware of the track record of Western governance over the last 30 years.
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I don't see how a critical mass of women can't just force the men to do the essential job that require muscles. Guns are the great equalizer, so if you just don't give guns to the men (or let gunmen be the only high-status job available), you can force the new underclass to do hard labor through regulation. It wouldn't have to be total slavery either. Just make it so that producing goods is the only viable path forwards.
I guess I will have to concede that very specific jobs cannot be relegated to an underclass though. Your military and emergency services would probably still require men, and those men would likely have a lot of bargaining power.
Women that are both psychologically and physically fit for a job involving subjugating men through overwhelming violence appear to be very rare, even with guns as the equalizer. I suspect the number of men such a society could control would be too low to do all the hard labor, or else it would be the men in the military who would be the actual slavedrivers.
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