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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16705 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!

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.

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.

(perhaps besides the military?)

I mean, the status of serving in the military is clearly not what it used to be, at least in America. People will still go "thank you for your service" and let them board airplanes earlier, but:

  • Every military action America takes is seen as evil by a pretty sizable subset of the population, so even if they're not willing to go after the individual soldier, there's always kind of a backhanded "you're a tool for the evil empire"
  • Secondary to this, wars are a lot less total than they used to be, so actually fighting the war has you second-guessing what the eventual perception of your actions are going to be. WW2 and back, "blowing up this thing that belongs to the enemy" was uncontroversially good because the bad guys were the bad guys, now it's "let's hope this doesn't end up in the ICC".
  • Media portrayal of the military has gone way downhill: sometimes they'll at least get to showcase the cool equipment, but "PTSD-haunted danger to himself and others" is a way more common trope than "dashing young lieutenant". The upper echelons are portrayed as out-of-touch plot barriers, and the organization as a whole is often portrayed as wildly incompetent (although to be fair a lot of this is just necessary to get the plot to work, i.e. every zombie movie). I can't remember the last time I've seen "the military comes in and saves the day" as a plot device, though admittedly my media consumption is unusual so I could have missed a few.
  • Online sentiment tends to land somewhere between focusing on the idiocy of the lower ranks (Hellcats at 183% APR, Jackass stunts) or complaining about how people working for the military are enabling genocide/oppression/what have you.

Whether these things are improvements in how we think about the world is debatable (certainly there was a lot more nuance to war than perhaps the public was appreciating, and we do have rather a lot of PTSD-haunted veterans), but it's clearly a loss in status to the people serving.

Any Michael Bay film? Top Gun: Maverick? That bizarre Battleship movie?

Militarist aesthetics aren’t at all dead. Just much much more likely to draw hecklers, which are in turn made much more visible by the usual social-media shitstorms.

Yeah that's fair, it's certainly hyperbolic to say NOTHING supports the military, but I think it's massively down and accelerating downward.

  • Michael Bay definitely has some pro-military stuff, but it's certainly headed downhill: Ambulance has a down-and-out Marine protagonist, 6 Underground has vigilantes doing what the military won't (with a PTSD sniper), 13 Hours is all private and foreign militaries, and the last Transformers has both good and bad military.
  • Top Gun 100%, but it's also Hollywood failing to create anything new and rehashing a 1986 movie. I guess props to them for not subverting the themes of the original movie, good chance that would have cost them at the box office but I don't know why I'd expect that to stop them.
  • Battleship is a 14 year old movie.

These are all ongoing trends and it's not like there's a cliff after WW2, but the original premise was that we have damaged all status-granting institutions for men and I definitely think the public perception of the military is damaged.

I'd refer to an older comment by @Lewyn:

The original Michael Bay Transformers is exactly this type of period piece. It encapsulated everything about that era of early-2000s American culture; military dudebro Call of Duty aesthetics, jingoistic patriotism, frat boy humor, etc. That type of theming was dead and buried by the 2010s, but is maybe making a resurgence now. I remember hating it at the time, but it does feel nostalgic to see now with how different everything became.

(emphasis mine)

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