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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
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.
My first thought was whether a fixed one-time price model might be salable to users. "It's expensive up front, but we'll keep supporting you until you find The One" might work. But I could also see other changes to the normal model being necessary.
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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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