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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 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!
It's complete bullshit. For one, it's not even happening now, when mate choice is a thing, but more importantly, mate choice being "a thing" is completely novel; historically, marriages were decided by the families of the prospective spouses, not the spouses themselves, and this is true across cultures and time, as far as we're able to find in the record. Sexual selection was not a thing for humans; there are animals that evolved sexual selection, and we know how they behave, and what they look like. They do not look and behave like humans ever have.
2 and 3 do not describe the world we live in at all. There's about as many Zoomer girls as Zoomer men, and WAAAAAY more girls in college than men. We would not see the current iteration of #MeToo at college campuses if it were all about whether there were more women then men. College behaviors are in fact the opposite of what we would expect to have seen, given how gender imbalances have historically played out before the "Woke" era. Normally, too many women chasing too few men do result in debauchery and lower standards, yet that is not what we are seeing.
Modern sexual norms are downstream of a few things, chiefly increasing narcissism as a result of social atomization (along with an economy that profits greatly from it), decades of "sexual harassment" propaganda that prime women to see all male interest as inherently hostile, and social media giving a megaphone to the craziest of crazies who escalate all interactions to the most extreme (I'm thinking of nonsense like a redditors advising a mother it's actually a good thing her 4 year old son didn't want to be hugged by grandma, because nothing is more vitally important than "consent").
Most (but not all) traditional cultures required parental permission for first marriage, but that is a world away from young people having no say and not being able to act on their preferences at all, particularly when it comes to the second marriage that typically happens in a woman's 20s (turns out hunter-gatherers have lots of 'divorce'). But even for the first marriage, vetoes, elopement, affairs, divorce and remarriage all allow people to express their mate choices. If our ancestral environment didn't involve individual mate choice, then we wouldn't have evolved (strong and specific) mate preferences.
And I'm not sure what you mean when you say 'it's not happening now'. I mean, the older man-younger woman pairing is literally universal. There are absolutely no human cultures where the typical relationship involves a younger man and an older woman. None at all.
Please explain to me how you think the second half of your comment relates to the first. Women, as a rule, are not marrying older men. Even fewer men are marrying older women, how does this prove, to you, that younger women prefer older men?
Source desperately needed. We do not have record of this behavior in examinations of hunter-gatheres, it doesn't appear in oral traditions/myths. For the love of God, this behavior doesn't even show up in our simian relatives; has the whole community just replaced historical fact with blatant bullshit read on jimdotblog's website?
They are, in literally every human society and every country we have records for.
Firstly, the fact that the trend is so universal suggests that it has deep evolutionary roots, rather than simply being contingent on unique circumstances in any given culture. Plus, women say that they prefer older men in all surveys, in all studies of dating apps and so on.
Divorce was found in 65.8% (125) of the 190 hunter-gatherers groups collected in Apostolou (2007).
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