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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!
If everything else were equal, sure, but that’s really not the case at all. The shift in the social status of the average man vs woman skews the comparison (with no numbers to back it up). We systematically damaged or destroyed every status granting or meaning generating institution for men and half heartedly replaced them with therapy culture (perhaps besides the military?). If women are after relative status, we shifted the entire bell curve effectively reducing the population. I largely agree with your hypothesis if not your prediction.
Did we? And by we I mean humanity. Because marriage is collapsing in basically every country on earth. That points to something that has affected everyone, not just Anglo or western countries. I think smartphones (or more broadly digital entertainment) are a better explanation than wokeness or whatever.
As best I can tell, cultures that explicitely and successfully reject American cultural products have kept marriage rates up. In a very real sense, America is the global monoculture, where even domestically-produced cultural products in foreign countries are still influenced by America and American values. To paraphrase (ok, bastardize) Chairman Mao, what we see in China, Korea, Japan, France, England, etc. is "Americana with Chinese/Japanese/insert country here characteristics"
I'm not so sure. Scott made the pretty strong case that what people are usually talking about when they describe something as 'western' (or in your case 'American') is really just modernity, which was summoned up in the west first but isn't of the west. Spending ages in education instead of getting a job at 14 and getting married a few years later is certainly a modern thing, but I'm not sure its western. My grandmother left school at 14, after all.
And in terms of developed countries, America actually has pretty high marriage rates and (until very recently) quite high birth rates. How can you blame America for lowering marriage and birth rates in Europe and East Asia when America has higher birth and marriage rates than those places and has done for decades?
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Interestingly, there are secular normie exceptions to the declining marriage rate- basically all of them are towns where some external economic shock(commonly oil) raises young male wages by a factor of a million without affecting female wages very much.
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