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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!
The problem with this argument is that we aren't seeing the now-scarce Zoomettes getting what they want.
The problem with the dating market in 2026 is that it does not clear, not that it is clearing at a price that young men don't like. Both sexes think it sucks, and there are people of both sexes who want to match with MMV peers and are unable to. Most people of both sexes still want marriage, but marriage rates are low and falling. This is a disaster, not a shift in power in the battle of the sexes.
The normie view on what is wrong seems fairly clear - that the main socially acceptable way of meeting strangers as potential dates (subscription-funded dating apps) does not work.
I know a couple who met on a dating app which then failed almost immediately because it’s customers were all getting in serious relationships and canceling their subscriptions.
A new economic model is necessary, because dating apps are designed to not work- because otherwise they’ll go under.
I personally think this is a place for a public option to step in, and I say that as a libertarian. Society has a vested interest in solving this problem. One of the sole purposes of governments is to solve collective coordination problems. This is absolutely a collective coordination problem. There is just no profit mechanism for a private company to match people well, it destroys their usebase, and I don't think there is a solution to that, one that also doesn't act as a roadblock to users joining in the first place.
Obviously the traditional approach is to do this at the local community, but that ship has been sailing for awhile now. It's hard to create local communities that last if nobody is getting married and starting families. It also requires members with social prestige/authority in the community to organize it, and so runs afoul of the same problem third-spaces do, too many free-riders not enough organizers. And lastly it ignores the simple fact that we are just that much more socially atomized in this day and age.
Hell I'd make the app/algo if anyone knows a hookup to the FedGov to get it funded
How much funding would you think it needs? Duolicious is AGPL.
It's not the app, it's the users, community and proximity.
I've been kicking around an idea for an affinity dating app. It would be a value added service to an existing group or 3rd place.
Remember how 'The Facebook' or Yak were originally affinity sites for students in a specific school.
There are already broad vertical segmentation in dating apps, ChristianMingle, Jdate, FarmersOnly. None of these vertical segmentors vet or onboard their users through existing communities or 3rd spaces.
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Seems there's a market for a company whose whole MO is to pair people up. There are evidently millions of people who want this but can't get it. Profit opportunity! It's no more difficult to monetize than wedding planners. Wedding planners too face the prospect of people no longer needing their services. It's one-and-done in theory. But it's a business form that persists.
Wedding planners are essentially connecting couples with event vendors in a way that's aesthetically pleasing, and while the couple goes away the vendors stay in their "toolkit" to be used for the next couple. The planner is going to be generally capable of creating another copy of whatever events they've done in the past, so if a couple likes a wedding the planner previously did, they will be interested in hiring the planner. It's also pretty easy to evaluate: did you or did you not think the wedding looked nice?
A matchmaker is connecting two people with each other, and both sides of that go away: if you see them pair up Matthew and Laura, that doesn't mean that they can produce another Matthew on demand, or that if they could Matthew would be a good match for the next customer. And because it's symmetrical and relational, it's kind of weird to evaluate: the ideal matchmaker for me would produce someone I think is way better than I would have been able to otherwise get, but does that mean he's a bad matchmaker for that person, or are we just relying very heavily on subjective criteria (so she also values me higher than she would have been able to otherwise get)?
Network effects apply differently here too: vendors are happy to give a planner their contact information, because worst case scenario they just don't get any jobs from the planner. But the first person signing up to a matchmaker is getting access to a completely empty Rolodex and a long wait, and unless the matchmaker gets very lucky the second person is going to have a similar problem. Before you start getting any real matching capability they're going to have to have a lot of people paying for nothing.
I guess they'd just have to work for free (while spending for advertising to build out the list) for a while, but those people are also going to be dropping off their contact list as they play the field and occasionally find something on their own while waiting for a call.
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Just administer a college requirement that for a passing grade you’re obliged to attend a campus party serving massive amounts of alcohol to every student. There will be a pregnancy boom in the country in no time at all. There are lots of obvious solutions to these problems that governments are too limp wristed to shove down the throats of their populations. Jim had an interesting view on this question recently. When the point came where communities collapsed and third spaces dissolved, that meant that the attendant social controls that went along with them got washed away.
The girl I’ve been spending time with is still a holdover of the previous era, much like I am. She’s very Catholic (naturally not the I don’t believe in sex before marriage necessarily but absolutely the “I don’t believe in birth control type.” She was very hesitant to take Plan B after we had sex a few times recently and felt very shameful for using it, and I may go back to using condoms.) Plus she’s a paralegal and knows quite a few things about the law, and she’s very intelligent. You don’t encounter a lot of people like that here anymore. I’ve been in group settings with others in the past where the topic of relationships have come up and when I express my views I’ve got replies back from women who say, “It’s like you’re from another world…”, and I’m just thinking to myself, “What? Reality?” There was a place and time in this country where my views weren’t considered abnormal or strange. What’s changed has been two primary things: people’s value systems and lifestyle inflation. That’s what’s causing the crisis IMO.
My value system is completely indifferent to the existence of social media; and my lust for material consumption and flashy distractions haven’t hit steroidal levels yet. So trying to ‘technology your way out’ of this problem is only going to produce very limited results at best. It’s not going to buck the larger trend, short of coercion. You’ll see pockets of people who have the right approach to things, but those who are already caught up in the popular anti-natalist wave of “live life only for today,” are a hopeless lot and won’t be reached.
smh my head when hoeflation has progressed enough such that a girl who merely feels bad about taking Plan B after getting rawdogged a few times too many could very well be considered a TradCath relic.
Reminds me of how abortion has been decriminalized/legalized in several LatAm countries despite their supposed Catholicism. Hoeflation > Religion. Islam in Arab countries perhaps remains the exception.
Turkish girls are known for the anal sex loophole. A lot of them hoe it out from the ass so they keep their hymen intact for their husband on the wedding day. Yeah. I was surprised when I was told that too. It’s apparently some kind of standard knowledge leaked from the “girl code.”
In my girl’s case, we’d had sex before a long time ago when she was in her 20’s, and she’d had a couple relations with others before that, so she knows she can’t hold me to a higher price and demand commitment if she’s given it away at a lesser cost to worse people. That’s one reason (among several) why I say she’s an intelligent girl. Because she’s very aware of how people will read her behavior and she’s incredibly perceptive. If I look to a model of pure moral consistency from a woman, I’ll never find it for the rest of my life and neither will most men. Can’t hold someone to a standard I won’t hold myself to. And she isn’t a hoe. She’s only had two serious relationships in her life and has never had sex outside of it (except with me and that was after she’d broke up).
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Singapore is trying the state-run dating app.
I'm not really convinced that it'll solve the fundamental matching problem between men and women on dating apps, but having the capability to efficiently verify identities and having actual incentives to get people matched and off the app do seem like significant benefits over the status quo.
So is Japan and Korea to my knowledge. I hope America will do it before we approach the TFR they are at.
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A cursory read of it has me liking their take quite a bit. There’s an artificial scarcity approach to it that seems to lend itself to encouraging its user base to invest the time in getting to know someone. Much better than Chuck Schumer’s approach, instead demanding infinity immigrants to make up the difference and destroy communities in the process.
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Partisan governments deciding who gets dates is just speedrunning civil conflict. Is this intentional?
Why does the government need to decide who gets dates? It's not like they can't opensource the algorithm and the methodology. This isn't going to be "Here's your certified date, go on it or you will be fined" or anything They just need to run the app and maintain it.
If they want to decide who gets dates, they're not going to do that. I'm skeptical that a general public who would otherwise be interested in the app would balk at it being closed-source.
The mechanism probably looks more like "when you're a disfavored group, the partners you want to date and who would be interested in going on a date with you are on the app, but the app won't match you with them". So favored groups get easy access to their desired partners, disfavored groups have to try and use other channels. There's a limit to how much this will work if the desirable partners aren't happy with their dates, but there's probably a fair bit of thumb that can be put on the scale.
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So what? Youtube doesn't fine you for not watching videos, but if you piss them off they'll make sure no one sees yours.
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