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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!
Wealth inequality and declining marriage means there are far more Peter Pan boys who are older. And in my experience most 20 something girls don’t have major issues dating as high as 50 especially since men are aging slower than ever due to fitness culture etc. Wealth inequality my gut says is increasing available male to female ratios far more than population pyramids.
I would still argue that less sex is more due to fewer relationships + lower social skills.
Citation needed.
The average married couple in the US are two years apart, and that gap has been narrowing for decades with no sign of going back.
When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes. I don’t know anyone in same-age relationships. My date today I have 20 years on.
My best guess is this has something to do with who gets married today. Probably some kind of k-shaped market. Amish-Mormon-Orthodox Jew have high early marriage rates along with other religious.
Maybe the dating and marriage markets are different.
Either that or Miami is super skewed.
I'm a vibes enjoyer too, but surely in this case the data is straightforward and accurate whereas your anecdotes are just your own personal bubble.
I like the Bezos quote when it applies to messy data with lots of confounders, especially when the data is polluted by political bias.
I don't think that's the case here. One shouldn't just pop this quote out anytime you are surprised by data that conflicts with your priors. What possible reason would there be for this data to be incorrect?
I think this is the key issue. When any research comes out from an institution which has been captured by the Left; and that research happens to support the Leftist narrative; and it contradicts my general observations and experience, I tend to go with my own observations and experience.
As far as age gap marriages go, my general observation is that as far back as I remember, they've always been pretty unusual. And they still seem pretty unusual. I'm talking about large age gaps, like 10 or 20+ years.
As far as same age marriages go, the data here seems to say that in the last 50 years, the average gap has gone from 3 years to 2.2 years. That's not really enough to be very noticeable.
At the same time, in my general experience, most women in their 20s are open to dating men 10, 20, or even 30 years old, provided that the man is otherwise attractive to them (which is kind of a big "if").
Anyway, my instinct is that recent technological changes (social media; easy availability of pornography; smartphone dating apps etc.) are the main drivers behind any recent changes in dating and mating patterns.
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