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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14944 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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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. Women prefer to marry slightly older men, and men slightly younger women
  2. With a growing population, there are more young women competing for a smaller pool of slightly older men. In a shrinking population, the reverse is true
  3. More women leads to more sexual competition between women, and therefore looser sexual norms. Fewer women leads to stricter sexual norms by the same mechanism

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!

If Aria is right, then we're soon in line for a marriage boom.

I'm not saying there's nothing to this hypothesis, but:

With a growing population, there are more young women competing for a smaller pool of slightly older men. In a shrinking population, the reverse is true

There are various countries with populations that are shrinking faster than the U.S.' and in fact have not seen a marriage 'boom.'

I think the missing line of argument is "and women are restrained from simply sharing a single, older, high value man." i.e. the underlying culture enforces monogamy.

To me the seemingly 'obvious' factor is whether women receive enough material wealth to be intentionally 'selective' and thus little pressure to settle down. Women will marry to ensure they have resources for themselves and their kids. If they can get the resources independently of the spouse they can simply opt not to choose a spouse. There is an increasing body of research on this point. Give men more resources relative to women = more families and kids. Give women more resources, the opposite.

tl;dr gender and age ratios will likely play a role, but you still have to incentivize women to actually pick and settle down for it to matter.

you still have to incentivize women to actually pick and settle down

Incentivize them how?

You say that "culturally enforcing monogamy" is equivalent to women being "restrained"; ok, by what mechanism will you restrain them?

Reduce the size of the government. That's it. Women are both disproportionately employed by it and get a lot of handouts. Never going to happen though.

Reduce the size of the government. That's it. Women are both disproportionately employed by it and get a lot of handouts. Never going to happen though.

The US government workforce is 55% male, compared to 53% of the country's overall workforce. Government workers are disproportionately men, not women.

Is that federal workforce only or all state/county/local workforces as well?

Fully agreed for Germany. Cut academic, buerocratic and corporate sinecures enabled by government regulations and spending so women need to get actual jobs to be economically independent. Cut public welfare so they can't just fallback onto being paid for existing.

That'll force women to actually work for a living or else depend on marriage again, will force men to work for a living instead of becoming parasitic hedonists, and will dissuade welfare migrants to boot. Win-win-win.

As I often say:

Return to 1993.

Make it harder in general to attend college, which will incidentally make it harder for women to go to college, as a natural effect of making it harder to obtain funding for unprofitable degrees.

Women with college degrees are more arbitrarily selective of their mates, have more debt (and pick degrees that pay less), are are generally more liberal which correlates strongly with 'anti-male' sentiment. This is not universally true, but the impact is too large to ignore.

Fewer women going to college means, on the margins, more of them are likely to seek marriage.

Remove the economic privileges that make it preferential to hire women over men, we'd simply expect men to gain back more resources, which, as per the aforementioned studies, would mean more marriage, more families.

I see no reason not to do this because women themselves have only gotten increasingly miserable since 1993. THEY THEMSELVES are not any happier than they were back then, so something clearly went wrong.

You say that "culturally enforcing monogamy" is equivalent to women being "restrained";

Point of fact: this restrains BOTH Genders.

Again, I've said it before:

No sex before marriage solves the problem for both sides.

We could try making marriage a stricter, more meaningful contract again, too.

But nobody has a single hangup about restraining male behavior. There'd be little pushback if you wanted to pass a law that made it legal for women to unilaterally kick their husbands out of the house for alleged abuse, but specifically banned men from doing the same. This is the whole issue.

We're already restraining male behavior... why it it somehow beyond the pale to discuss restraining ladies?

I've brought this point up before with... oh it was YOU, SPECIFICALLY. 1 year ago. We are not making progress, it seems.

More educated women have higher marriage rates.

I'm sympathetic on a societal level to the broader goal- we do not need more BA's in psychology. But it's very obviously not the solution to this specific problem.

I wonder if you are reversing cause and effect. University is really the only organic in person dating scene left. Dating at work is at best uncouth these days.

Fewer women going to college means, on the margins, more of them are likely to seek marriage.

College-educated women are the only ones who are still getting married. The collapse in marriage has been among women (and men) who didn't go to college. College-educated women born in 1980 ended up having the same marriage rate as women born in 1940.

Indeed, the fact that women overtook men in college enrolment in the 1980s mean that graduate women must have been marrying down educationally to make the maths work.

Wage hypergamy is real, educational hypergamy doesn't exist (any more).

True but the remaining non-collegiate population is increasingly only the dregs. The point is more that 'people who would otherwise get productively married and churn out more people are wasting 4 years getting a useless degree'

Which is arguably a bad thing, but empirically isn't causing falling marriage rates.

Remove the economic privileges that make it preferential to hire women over men

Sure, I'm down with that.

No sex before marriage solves the problem for both sides.

Ok but like, how? How is that a workable policy proposal? How are you going to enforce that? "Cultural norms"? How do you intend to put that particular genie back in the bottle?

I frequently run into this same frustration any time I'm talking to someone who wants to turn back the clock to before the sexual revolution. They have many goals they want to achieve, but are somewhat shy about detailing how they intend to actually go about achieving them, outside of gesturing in an increasingly fervent manner that Something Must Be Done.

My impression from reading your (unrelentingly dour and pessimistic) dating posts over the years is that you're really chomping at the bit to implement some policies that would be broadly considered to be outside the Overton window (whether that be anything from making premarital sex illegal, all the way up to government-mandated breeding programs), but are perhaps a bit reticent to discuss them publicly. If that is the case, then my only advice to you is, discuss them! We are blessed to be on one of the few public forums where radical ideas can actually receive a fair and rational hearing. (It might help you release some tension too, you always seem really wound up in these dating posts, jeez.)

You're already on record as supporting the death penalty for men whose (consensual!) sexual behavior you disapprove of. That's pretty extreme. What principle of bodily autonomy do you hold to, then, that would prevent you from supporting forced marriages for women, especially considering that such an arrangement would be done in the service of ameliorating such a dangerous impending social catastrophe?

We could try making marriage a stricter, more meaningful contract again, too.

See above. Stricter how? Who enforces it?

We're already restraining male behavior

Restrained in the sense that a prospective employee is restrained relative to large corporations, I suppose. But that's just what you get with a free market.

There'd be little pushback if you wanted to pass a law that made it legal for women to unilaterally kick their husbands out of the house for alleged abuse, but specifically banned men from doing the same.

Really? I think there would be considerable pushback against a law that is that explicit about stating that female abuse doesn't happen and that only men can be abusers. I realize there is a sizeable contingent of feminist legal theorists who functionally believe this, but I doubt your hypothetical law passes anywhere in the U.S. At most, they try to write the definition of "abuse" in such a way that it's much more difficult to accuse a woman of it, and even that would be tough.

You can make a reasonable case that this is already de facto the law in most of the US (and the UK, and presumably most of western Europe) because of the way police and courts enforce facially gender-netural laws. If cops and judges who deal with domestic violence are exclusively trained in the feminist Duluth Model then the law as enforced will reflect that.

Duluth Model

A wikipedia article that, as far as I can tell at a skim, does not actually explain the model itself.

Edit: This is more direct: Anti-Femicide laws. Not exactly making it lawful for women to abuse men, but instead imposing extra penalties if the man is the abuser and the woman the abused. With a sufficient rebalancing of penalties between the gender neutral law, and the "bonus" punishment for Male on Female crime, your exact scenario could come true. Anti-femicide laws are not merely something on the feminist wishlist, but exist on the books in several countries.

Ours is an age of menstrual breaks, of hygiene products being tax exempt, if they are only used by the fairer sex. Men do not think they will find themself in a situation where a woman might abuse them, as they generally do not view women as a threat in a sense that current laws ban.

Here subsequent radicalizations of feminism play contradictory roles: if men and women are equal, a man abusing a woman, and a woman abusing a man are both likely scenarios, and the possibility of the latter one is what feminism at that stage paid lipservice to and went against the traditional grain. More extreme feminism that emerged later, that men can't be victims, can be viewed as a return to a previous value system, but when promulgated in a society that now treats women as legally no inferior to men, clearly reduce equality.

I think there would be considerable pushback against a law that is that explicit about stating that female abuse doesn't happen and that only men can be abusers.

How many male jurors pushed back against the Clancy verdict?

I don't think there would be any pushback; I think men would actively welcome this.

I am increasingly disappointed how often argumentation (really just kneejerk snap responses) here resembles the same level of reflection and analysis found on /r/news. Much has been written in the "State of the Motte" thread that has already been said, including the pros and cons of moving off reddit, but the worst of it is this kind of "Durkahurk somethingsomething-current-news-cycle NUh-uuuuuHHHHHHHH!" response. These have largely replaced long effortposts when people would at least bother to pretend the capability to consider the thoughts being thought by people who are not them. To be clear, the latter still exist, but I think it's not a coincidence that the signal-to-noise ratio keeps going down, while some people persist in complaining that we put too much value on "moar words."

I don't have an archive link handy, but IIRC, it has been shown that the average comment back in the slatestarcodex containment thread days was considerably worse than today.

Not that we can't strive to be better.

If you need me to bring further receipts for the claim, I can take the time to do that; I feel as if I've been running a little hotter in that respect than usual lately.

However, as far as "no pushback against law that states female abuse doesn't happen", this one is honestly pretty clear. So's the "male statutory rape victim forced to pay child support" one. So was the UK rape law that, for quite some time, was written so that only men could even be guilty of the crime (it requires anatomy women do not possess). Canada, too- "we'll change the law so men accused of rape can't as easily gather evidence of the women collaborating to frame the guy" actually happened, again with zero pushback.

I think men are obsessed with Protecting Women; I think women are happy to say "thank you very much" and pocket the resulting political power differential while at best simply looking the other way when women abuse men (from women's perspective). The female jurors are, as I recall from previous threads on the subject, literally on record stating that Protect Women is why they voted that way.

These have largely replaced long effortposts when people would at least bother to pretend the capability to consider the thoughts being thought by people who are not them.

I've tried, I just get downvoted without engagement. And yes, I'm frustrated by the fact nobody wants to bother to ask then, what's in your head?; it is present here, it is present there, it is present everywhere.

(Perhaps the men and women getting married are doing so simply because they are, on average, the only human beings on the planet capable of asking at least their life partner that question merely at a higher than average base rate. Education predicts that much, at least.)

Okay, bring receipts for the claim that there would be no pushback to a law the explicitly allows a woman to kick a man out of a shared household for abuse, but does not allow a man to kick a woman out of a shared household for abuse. A law literally written that way, with language that makes it black and white that it only applies in one direction.

"Lindsey Clancy" and "Child support laws" are not receipts.

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There was no Clancy verdict. One of three men, and none of the nine women, objected to the otherwise-unanimous vote of not guilty by reason of insanity.

So 66% of men, n = 3, agree that female abuse is literally beyond their ability to comprehend.

(And the 33% was of a particular demographic whose women are stereotypically maximally hostile to men.)

No. 2 men out of 3 in a jury of 12 were convinced to say that there was at least reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy was legally sane when she murdered her kids. While I disagree with these men (and the 9 women), this is not such an obvious thing as to be equivalent to "female abuse is literally beyond their ability to comprehend"

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My tongue's partially in my cheek because... that's approximately how the law works (in Florida!) already.

A husband is ALLOWED to seek a domestic violence injunction but far and away in my experience its the wives/girlfriends getting them. In Miami-Dade County its about 73% women filing for them. In terms of who gets them granted its 80+% women.

And the effect of getting filing an injunction is that the other person can't come near the 'alleged victim' which means... they have to leave the house, and can't even talk to the alleged victim.

So this isn't quite the exact law I'm talking about... but nobody seems to question the one we have on the books, as applied.

Okay, sure, but I'm very intentionally questioning the assertion you actually made, that no one would push back on a de jure law that only applies in one direction. That it de facto heavily benefits one sex over the other isn't surprising, but, you know, 27% of filings and 20% granted being men is a minority, but it's not nothing, or even statistically insignificant.

And, courts unfair to men women never held responsible yadda yadda whatever, but men are more often the ones being removed for physical abuse? I am shocked. To the degree these court orders are weaponized (a push or a slap becomes "threatened my life"), I would be very surprised if men aren't doing that just as often.

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