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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!

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?

‘The US government workforce’

I suspect those employed by governments at all levels have a gender ratio determined by whether there’s more teachers or cops.

Yes, good point. The indoors government workforce at state/county/local levels is probably majority women, but the outdoors workforce (law enforcement of all stripes, maintenance/utility types, etc.) are majority male, so it is likely more even than it would seem.

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