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I guess I gotta drop a post from elsewhere here:
The population of females aged 18-29 in the U.S. is approximately 23.3 million (as of 2016)
Remove the obese ones (Almost 40%, apparently, so we’ve already DRASTICALLY cut down the field).
Remove the lesbians.
Remove the prostitutes, porn stars, strippers (Onlyfans counts for these purposes).
Remove the single mothers.
If you care to, remove the ones with an N-Count above, say, 5.
I’m inclined to also account for the prevalence of certain mental illnesses, but lets leave that aside for now.
Maybe we even choose to leave in the ones who have incompatible political views.
And then tally up the ones who are left that are NOT currently in committed, long-term relationships.
Suddenly the number of ‘marriagable’ women who might be geographically accessible to most men looks a LOT more constrained. “Plenty of fish in the sea,” but barely any that are safe to eat.
I can put numbers to each of the above if that helps.
Like, the statistics bear out two things:
The average woman is pickier than ever while bringing fewer things 'to the table' for the male than ever.
Women are ALSO more likely than ever to terminate the relationship, EVEN AFTER many years of marriage and multiple children.
So there's a relatively small pool of marriageable woman who are what would be considered 'wife material', and every single male, from ages 18-50, is competing for this pool. So men are exposing themselves to the same old risks (woman leaving at any time) for less possible reward.
All that a male can do is work as hard as possible to increase his competitive advantage and thus his odds of success. Which is something of a red queen's race since all other guys are competing just the same.
He can't do anything to increase the number of marriageable women, can he?
So it certainly does imply that women's behavior is at issue here.
Sure he can. He can change his standards. There's no, like, Law Of Nature that makes it impossible to marry women with the characteristics you describe in the first half of your post. Indeed, I imagine a large number of women in those categories (lesbians excepted) end up married to men at some point in their life. I don't understand why this complaint isn't isomorphic to a conventionally unattractive woman complaining about how she can't get a 6/6/6 man to settle down with her. If you have set your standards such that no one whom you would date would also date you, that seems like a you problem.
A natural result of women's improved social and economic standing. As their alternative to being in a relationship improves some people are going to choose that option instead of forming a relationship they may otherwise have. When one's negotiating position is better, one can get a better deal.
It's also kind of amusing to me to complain about women's pickiness given the acknowledgement in this comment that your own criteria would exclude a large number of women from your marriage pool.
I think this overstates the degree of agreement on what constitutes "wife material" among men aged 18-50. I suspect many men in this group will end up happily married to women who don't fit your described criteria of "wife material."
I am not going to disagree with you on this point, but I think that there are in fact many men who will make sub-optimal choices. We know what the statistics are when it comes to smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol, but both men and women continue to pick those habits up. Some of them may end up happy, and some of the people who smoke a pack of cigarettes a day won't get lung cancer. But that doesn't actually mean that non-smokers are idiots who passed up a happy, consequence-free life of nicotine-usage when they don't pick the habit up.
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The ways this can go wrong are numerous, not the least of which is her refusing to perform any cooperation in the relationship and divorcing him to take the kids and money anyway.
The bet is not just about the upside. A guy lowers his standards and accepts a less happy relationship and STILL doesn't get to count on loyalty, cooperation, and stability since the current rules say "she can leave whenever she wants."
So we're in a situation where the guy's risk/reward calculation is impacted by the fact that
A) There are fewer women who want to settle down, and
B) There are fewer women who are worth risking a long-term commitment with, and all the guys are fighting for them anyway.
Yes, because there are obvious reasons why those categories increase the risk associated with giving commitment. Obesity leads to health issues and possible complications in pregnancy. That's a financial, emotional, and eventually health risk. Various mood and psych disorders contribute to marital dysfunction, and likewise increase chances of divorce. If she's a single mother you're going to expend resources raising a kid that isn't yours, with no guarantees that you'll get to have one of your own. AND she's already demonstrated a certain amount of poor judgment if she picked a guy who wouldn't commit and had his kid.
So a guy can choose to widen his criteria and accept a woman that has certain, I'll use the term 'baggage,' and if it ends up not working out for him, what is he left with? How much risk is it reasonable for him to accept in exchange for possible upside?
"Marriagable" women imply that the risk/reward calculation goes in her favor. There's not going to be as many as factors like this become more prevalent.
So why is the marriage rate so low now?
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2020/4/marriage-rate-blog-test
Why are fewer people getting married at all, much less "happily" married?
I realize at some point this is a question of probabilities but it seems to me all the downsides you list about non-"marriagable" women also apply to "marrigable" women. They can tick off all your boxes and still "divorc[e] him to take the kids and money." Or still be lacking in "loyalty, cooperation, and stability." Even "marriagable" women can "leave whenever she wants."
I'm very confident that women also believe they have compelling reasons for having the standards they do.
If a guy marries a woman without any 'baggage' and it ends up not working out for him, what is he left with? I don't see how the woman's prior "marrigability" is relevant to this question.
It is up to each of us to decide that for ourselves. On the one hand, if one takes too much risk one may find oneself in a bad relationship. On the other hand, if one is too risk averse they may be without any relationship at all.
This depends entirely on the particular individuals weight of the factors in question.
Because increased social, legal, and economic equality mean women are less and less dependent on marriage as an institution to provide for themselves. When you drastically improve people's alternative to X (as has happened for women over the last century with respect to marriage) then fewer of them will choose X.
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Male and Female obesity rates are pretty similar roughly 40% in both but severe obesity is 7% in men and 12% in women so there's some difference there.
Men & Women are identify as homosexual at very similar rates. Every woman in a long term relationship is one less man in a long term relationship.
If the pool of potential mates for men is much smaller isn't that offset by being marriageable for 3x as long? Under your marriageability assumptions men's set of marriageable mates at age 18 is all women 29 to -14 (43 birth cohorts) since many women will become 18 over their time in the dating pool? Women's set at age 18 is all men aged 50 to 9, or 41 birth cohorts. It's true that in any given moment there are more men competing for women, but women are competing against women who will enter the pool in the future. The 29 year old trying to get a 30 year old guy to commit is implicitly competing with the 20 other cohorts of women who will turn 18 over his lifetime.
Also what percent of men make enough money to support a family? In 2016 the 50th percentile income for a 35 year old male was ~50k, 33rd percentile was 30k. It's not a "good deal" to keep yourself chaste and attractive so you can snag a guy making that much.
I think the core of it is that you're demanding the old bargain where women provided sex, domestic labor and paternity certainty in exchange for men who would "protect and provide". Well in a modern society male protection isn't particularly necessary, and the gender wage gap isn't huge and largely accounted for by women choosing more flexible careers so they can do childcare labor for their husbands, or jobs that pay less but that they find self actualizing. You can't demand an attractive, young, chaste wife with similar social background when she can earn 70-85% of that income and do whatever she wants.
Of course it is; it's just socialized. Who provides protection for women in modern society? Cops and soldiers. Who are those? Men. How do they get paid? Taxes. Who produces most taxable income? Men.
In other words, men are still providing protection for women, but now we do it collectively rather than individually, and we don't get any benefit out of it.
Same thing with women's so-called economic independence, which is heavily reliant on welfare, alimony, child support, affirmative action quotas, and anti-discrimination laws. Working men are still supporting women, but now we don't get anything in return.
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Unless of course she wants babies, which is kind of the whole point. That's the missing enticement.
Society is well on it's way to providing this without the need for women to actually have to put up with a man.
IVF is popular here and with rationalist but have you actually talked to women about it? It seems unlikely to me that it'll catch on all that much, your average straight woman that wants a baby without a man attached will probably try and get it done the old fashioned way. It is not a pleasant process.
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The actual stats tend to elucidate the situation pretty clearly:
https://twitter.com/pewresearch/status/1623352132375302144
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/02/08/for-valentines-day-5-facts-about-single-americans/
63% of 18-29 year old men report being single.
47% of 18-29 year old women report being single.
So what explains this 16% difference other than some portion of those younger women dating older men?
I dunno what you want to make of that other than, for some reason or confluence of reasons, males 18-29 are simply having a harder time finding relationships.
You can grant that younger men will have the hope of eventually finding a younger woman when they get older, but those men are still losing years, possibly over a decade, they could be building wealth and raising kids with a committed partner.
We'd expect certain effects on the margins, at least, from such a shift.
The massive irony on top of all this is that despite all the advantages and privileges that have been obtained by/granted to women in the last few decades, women are less happy than they used to be:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29893
Suffice it to say, women have gotten everything they allegedly want and have more financial and social freedom than ever before (overturning of Roe notwithstanding) and... they are overall miserable.
I don't know if this:
Is true if women are actually less happy than they were before. Maybe the failure to find a husband, even if it means 'settling,' is a psychological detriment. Maybe the stresses that come with having to provide for oneself simply wear harder than you'd expect.
Perhaps (I'm going on a limb here, admittedly) there are still psychologically and emotionally fulfilling factors in life that cannot be easily replaced simply by higher income and wealth.
One other nudge is that basically every year, 5% more males are born than females, and by early twenties, there are still ~4% more 'excess males' (funny word choice in that PDF, with different contexts). By age 40 it's down to more like 2% more men still alive than women.
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Soft polyamory, FWB, Situationships, etc.
One lying fuckboi can quite easily have 3 women believing they have a boyfriend. Hell, nowadays it's not even about lying, it is about making vaguely boyfriend-like noises and the women will round it up to boyfriend in their head (and maybe on a survey).
On the flip side, a lot of young guys will be sleeping with a girl regularly, hanging out together constantly, escorting her to weddings/holidays/etc, and say "we haven't defined the relationship yet..."
So I suspect some percentage of this is essentially a bad survey question and imprecise language.
This is seemingly borne out in another thread:
https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1625485234824261632
Where you can see that in the 18-25 demographic there's about 42% of women that claim zero sexual partners, about 43% that claim one sexual partner, and then looking at the male side, there's ~12% claiming at least 3 partners a year. Although one suspects the guys claiming 100 sexual partners a year are... exaggerating.
This would be relatively consistent with a view that many women are opting out of sex for want of a worthy partner and some smaller percentage of men are locking down multiple women from that remaining pool.
When I see gaps like that, I always wonder if there is a Clintonian problem with defining sexual partner, that breaks down strongly on gender lines. The classic anecdotal examples are something like, a Babtist "virgin" at Liberty University whose nickname in high school was the Headmaster; and a college boy who claims he got laid when he prematurely ejaculated on the dance floor.
I wonder if it is a broader phenomenon, where men are consistently personally including activities that many people wouldn't include objectively (cybersex for example), while women are constantly excluding "last name sex" activities that most people would objectively include like oral sex or manual sex. Have you ever seen data on that?
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I'd actually assume gays could heavily skew this data. 100 is not impossible for some.
It's two sexual encounters with a novel partner per week. Some straight guys at the peak of their game who travel a lot could manage that, but distributionally, we're probably talking fairly out there in the long tail (e.g. wealthy airline pilot with a taste for prostitution). For gay guys, traveling a lot would also help, unless you live in NYC, Miami, SF, etc., but it's not nearly as extreme an outlier. There's also some difference between 100/year at a person's promiscuous peak, and 100/year averaged over a period of years, which is why frequent travel is a relevant variable--past a certain point, you need to go farther afield to find the low-hanging fruit, which is almost certainly more time/resource efficient than investing in a metaphorical ladder to pick the less accessible partners.
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