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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15718 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?

As I often say:

Return to 1993.

Make it harder in general to attend college, which will incidentally make it harder for women to go to college, as a natural effect of making it harder to obtain funding for unprofitable degrees.

Women with college degrees are more arbitrarily selective of their mates, have more debt (and pick degrees that pay less), are are generally more liberal which correlates strongly with 'anti-male' sentiment. This is not universally true, but the impact is too large to ignore.

Fewer women going to college means, on the margins, more of them are likely to seek marriage.

Remove the economic privileges that make it preferential to hire women over men, we'd simply expect men to gain back more resources, which, as per the aforementioned studies, would mean more marriage, more families.

I see no reason not to do this because women themselves have only gotten increasingly miserable since 1993. THEY THEMSELVES are not any happier than they were back then, so something clearly went wrong.

You say that "culturally enforcing monogamy" is equivalent to women being "restrained";

Point of fact: this restrains BOTH Genders.

Again, I've said it before:

No sex before marriage solves the problem for both sides.

We could try making marriage a stricter, more meaningful contract again, too.

But nobody has a single hangup about restraining male behavior. There'd be little pushback if you wanted to pass a law that made it legal for women to unilaterally kick their husbands out of the house for alleged abuse, but specifically banned men from doing the same. This is the whole issue.

We're already restraining male behavior... why it it somehow beyond the pale to discuss restraining ladies?

I've brought this point up before with... oh it was YOU, SPECIFICALLY. 1 year ago. We are not making progress, it seems.

There'd be little pushback if you wanted to pass a law that made it legal for women to unilaterally kick their husbands out of the house for alleged abuse, but specifically banned men from doing the same.

Really? I think there would be considerable pushback against a law that is that explicit about stating that female abuse doesn't happen and that only men can be abusers. I realize there is a sizeable contingent of feminist legal theorists who functionally believe this, but I doubt your hypothetical law passes anywhere in the U.S. At most, they try to write the definition of "abuse" in such a way that it's much more difficult to accuse a woman of it, and even that would be tough.

I think there would be considerable pushback against a law that is that explicit about stating that female abuse doesn't happen and that only men can be abusers.

How many male jurors pushed back against the Clancy verdict?

I don't think there would be any pushback; I think men would actively welcome this.

There was no Clancy verdict. One of three men, and none of the nine women, objected to the otherwise-unanimous vote of not guilty by reason of insanity.

So 66% of men, n = 3, agree that female abuse is literally beyond their ability to comprehend.

(And the 33% was of a particular demographic whose women are stereotypically maximally hostile to men.)

No, 11 of twelve jurors voted that she was too crazy to go to a women’s medical prison, and should instead be held in the state’s long term women’s mental hospital against her will. There is likely no actual difference between the two facilities, and it seems worth noting that everyone agrees she is actually crazy.

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