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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!
I read an argument that reducing syphilis deaths with penicillin was as or more important in creating the necessary basis for the sexual revolution. Syphilis used to be a big killer. HIV and other STDs becoming more prominent later led to restrictiveness again. I also heard that it was somewhat similar back when syphilis was first imported from the New World, it prompted crackdowns on licentiousness.
Anyway, we could compare to other times in history where there was a growing population and consider sexual norms then. Population growth was very high in colonial era North America (higher than the 1960s) but sexual norms were very restrictive back then. The Gaza strip had fairly high population growth more recently but it's not exactly a paradise of free love. There are many counterexamples.
It's possible that this effect contributes but it seems marginal compared to ideological, economic, technological and social factors in the 1960s or today. 1 and 2 might be real. But there's no reason to believe they're strong effects. A marriage boom seems unlikely, marriage rates have been falling for the last few decades.
Also, 'women getting more bargaining power' might just mean they fuck Chad rather than marry. 'Men getting more bargaining power' might mean that they form harems, that's what they might want as individuals. Marriage is a social innovation, it's not inherently natural. Plenty of tribes do without it (though their achievements are few, which is why they remain tribes). It's more likely that marriage rates are mainly a social/legal construct, not so much about demographics. In the extreme end, like when the Soviet Union had lost so many men and had a surplus of women, they had to have weird marriages/de factor polygamy. But normal circumstances probably don't have much effect.
Shouldn't we be seeing a second sexual revolution with the availability of PrEP?
that only applies to one particularly limited subset of the population. virtually meaningless to women directly, at least in Western countries.
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