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Notes -
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.
Ultraconservative religion tends to push average age at marriage down for men as well as women, because 'no premarital sex' is a heck of a motivator for twenty-one year old young men.
Not to mention the older you get, you slowly age out of everything in general. A lot of the things I used to be obsessed with as a teenager and young adult just no longer have the appeal they used to, for me. I still have a good amount of kick left in me but the range of things I spend my time on anymore has narrowed considerably. The girl I’m currently seeing I used to be something of a mentor to when she was younger and I tutored her in science class in school. Our peer groups were proximate to each other and although she’s younger than me, she isn’t that much younger. The only issue is she’s unsure if she wants children, and that’s the ultimate deciding factor for me.
Marry her and she'll decide she wants a baby.
What makes you confident? She is really into me and we’ve known each other since we were kids.
Make her mom friends, give her the commitment she craves, her 'maybe' which isn't a no will turn into a yes. Isn't this the girl that doesn't want to use birth control? Sometimes in unprotected sex these things just happen.
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Most women who sincerely don’t want children will say so outright. IME “unsure if she wants kids” is distinct from “doesn’t want kids” and usually really means “does want kids, but is scared of it, and so only with a guy she very much trusts to support her and do it right”. The flip from “no” to “yes” is different from the flip from “maybe” to “yes”, to put it another way. The biological clock is a real phenomenon too, not sure how old you and she are but generally it seems to kick in by the late 20s or early 30s. It’s a judgment call though, and of course depends on the individual and your impression of her.
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Yeah I know a few friends in their early-mid thirties who tried the 'get married and she'll flip on it' where No turned into 'maybe I guess' but somehow never turned into actually trying to have a child.
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