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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").
Are you sure about this?
You can observe this behavior by going into a normal office where women outnumber men; I'll caveat this with allowing that if you're looking at turbolib areas, like the Bay Area, this might not hold. But women chasing too few men definitely means they lower their standards of acceptable behavior. Steve Sailor had a good article pointing out observations among Black women, who famously are the least likely to date outside their race, but also hold to the normal trend of educated women not marrying "down"; Black women with a degree wildly outnumber Black men with a degree, and Black women are reduced to putting up with lack of committment, having to turn a blind eye to blatant cheating (or just outright acceptance of soft harems), physical abuse, mooching, etc.
For the sake of clarity I'll outline what I think are observable facts.
It's true that women greatly outnumber men on most college campuses but when looking at society as a whole we see that men are slightly outnumbering women which is a historically abnormal state of affairs as the death rate of young men is usually higher than that of their female peers. In such a situation women are increasingly prone to socially developing a sense of overall male sexual threat as the average level of male thirst keeps rising. I agree with the argument that this is a big driver of third-wave feminism. To the extent that your argument about college girls not actually engaging in debauchery and lowered standards is true, and I think there is truth to it, this seems to be one important cause of it.
I'd refer back to an observation that is supposedly backed up by evo psych research: 1. when (eligible) women start to outnumber men in their social circle for whatever reason, they start engaging in an escalating sexual competition for male attention and resources; this appears rather self-evident 2. however, such competition stops making sense when the sex ratio becomes too lopsided - I can't exactly tell where that point is but maybe a ratio of 130:100 or 140:100 is already there. It gets to a point where sexually unattractive men start propositioning women for casual or commitment-free sex which in turn induces nausea among women and compels them to end the sexual rivalry for male attention. I think it's entirely plausible that at least some college campuses have already entered this phase, which in turn does underpin your argument.
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