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Young Prudes: Are sex norms mostly a manifestation of sex ratios?
Aria Shrecker of Works in Progress puts forward an interesting hypothesis. What if the sexual revolution of the 1960s was driven not (primarily) by the pill, but by a growing population?
The thesis rests on a few key points:
1 is fairly uncontroversial, 2 is a mathematical derivative of 1. The only part of contention is whether 3 is true, and if so, how strong the effect is.
There is definitely a correlation between the ratio of men to women at US colleges and its sexual culture. And the mechanism is pretty intuitive. This would also explain the current sex-negative turn among young people. There are fewer 21 year-old zoomettes than there are 23 year-old zoomer boys, and so with the 'upper hand', the young ladies are turning the sexual culture towards their preferences.
The greatest weakness in the hypothesis is that it predicts that a higher male:female ratio should increase commitment (marriages, having children, buying houses together) and all those things are declining. Of course, its possible that atomisation caused by smartphones is simply too strong of an effect and swamps the influence of sex ratios. Peter Foreshaw Brooks points this out in his review of her article.
If Aria is right, then we're soon in line for a marriage boom. Watch this space, folks!
Is this strictly a byproduct of age or down to the material advantages males get from those extra years? Obviously impractical to conduct an experiment but I'd be skeptical it's purely just age and I'd argue there's now a raft of financial, educational and professional reasons why there's now a shortage of 'guys who are doing slightly better than their female peers'
The Haredi are an interesting example. Haredi women complain about the lack of young men to marry in their fast-growing population, even though the men are just going to study the Torah while she earns the money. The Haredi women have no instrumental reason to prefer slightly older men, he's not going to be the main breadwinner regardless of whether he's 19 or 22.
I mean, I do think the deep evolutionary reasons women prefer older men and men prefer younger women are the obvious breadwinning ability/fertility thing, and obviously women do express a strong, explicit preference for men who earn more money than they do. At the same time, I think in an AI utopia where we all live on UBI you'd still see the familiar age pattern. Men and women do seem to have preferences for relative youth/age qua themselves.
For Haredim specifically, that mandatory stupid haircut/beard combo they all have probably looks awful on someone who can't quite grow a beard yet.
Jewish people are one of the most unattractive populations I’ve ever looked at. I don’t blame their people for wanting to culturally defect and intermarry into other groups. I would too. Personally I love me some of my own people, but I find a lot of ethnic women attractive.
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