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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 USSR in 1950 had about a 4-5 male-female ratio because of the war. So if this theory of male-female ratios being the dominant factor in explaining the sexual revolution is true, one might expect the USSR to have experienced a stronger sexual revolution than the US did. And from what I can tell based on ChatGPT-ing, that did not happen. The USSR did have a sexual revolution after the war, but it was not stronger than the one the US had.
That said, there is another factor to be considered: the USSR had a more socially conservative government than the US did, and one more willing to meddle in sexual matters. So it is possible that the government's attitude suppressed what would otherwise have happened in the USSR. However, if the government managed to suppress it than maybe the male-female ratios are not as strong as what the theory holds.
According to the results of the 1959 census the (male-to-female) sex ratio among people aged 35-50 was 4:7 so I'm guessing the ratio in 1950 was more imbalanced than 4:5. To the extent that this did not result in a sexual revolution, I think it can also be explained (outside of the regime's totalitarian nature) by the fact that a man shortage was hardly an unknown phenomenon even before the war and that Soviet Russia already underwent a sexual revolution during her earlier history. There is an excellent article about this in The Atlantic from 1926.
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