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I'm feeling rather insane right now so I'll post a screed.
Do you ever feel like there are just... too many men on this planet? Not humans. Just men, in particular.
Humans are like 1.05 males: females at birth, so there's a natural imbalance. I can only assume this was balanced in the past because males died more: from war, or hunting animals, or just generally taking more risks.
None of that happens now, in our ultra-safe modern feminized society. So we just have a bunch of surplus males sitting around.. doing nothing... simping for women. Taking up body building, or feminism, or prostitution, or onlyfans, or whatever else will give them a drop of female attention.
Everybody knows "Ender's Game," but did you ever read the sequels? It has one (Speaker for the Dead) where they find an alien race that can only reproduce through a chemical change caused by war. That's... how I feel. Like, our species basically requires war in order to sort out our psychology. Otherwise there will be this latent male aggression caused by intra-sexual competition, and it won't end until we have some stupid fucking war over nothing, just to reduce the surplus male population.
There's too many dicks on the dance floor
One of the most striking things reading Takaki's Strangers From a Different Shore, a history text on Asian immigration to the United States from the 1800s to 1980 or so, was that the first wave of Chinese immigrant laborers to the western continental US largely just...died out for lack of wives. Most of the early Chinese immigrants were men, who came over planning to earn money working on construction or mining or in service industries, earn money, and return to China or import a bride. While some brides were successfully imported through various means, the crackdown on Chinese immigration meant that vastly fewer brides ever made it over than were needed, and the realities of exploitation and debt left most Chinese laborers unable to afford to return to China successful. American women mostly disdained to marry Chinese men, for a variety of reasons, and interracial relationships were rare*.
As a result, most of these thousands of men lived out their lives in America and simply died, never having any long term romantic partners, only the occasional mining camp prostitute. An entire population and subculture, it existed and died out, failed to reproduce itself. Contemporary accounts and census figures back up that the Chinese population dipped for a period, before immigration resumed. Chinese-Americans who grew up during that period, the children of the handful of couples who successfully imported brides, report the shade-like presence of these aging men in the Chinese community, dozens of honorary uncles all childless and often filled with regret. White society barely noticed them: after all they didn't have any children or any power of money or language or politics. Politically, legally, and socially, it was possible to just eliminate these men from the "dating" pool.
Another anecdote, reading Lee Kuan Yew's From Third World to First at the moment, he talks about Singaporean students traveling overseas, and disproportionate numbers of Singaporean women bringing back foreign husbands. Talking to Singaporean friends of mine, they corroborated this: Singaporean girls who study in the US are more likely to stay in the USA, and more likely to marry an American either way. Singaporean boys are more likely to stay in Singapore or return to Singapore, because of the social privileges accorded to sons. College educated women find that Singaporean men mistreat them, they don't want a woman who is smarter than they are, they want a submissive wife; as a result women choose other options. Singapore's particularly bad gender balance, despite being a fully formed and wealthy state with sovereignty, is determined in part by this social reality. This is a problem that Singapore must combat to maintain its population. The way the country treats its women, and the way other countries treat their women, makes maintaining the culturally and intellectually open society that Singapore's success was built off of a direct trade against their gender ratio.
The striking point being that the gender balance is socially determined. Thousands of Chinese immigrant men weren't the victims of a gender imbalance per se, though at that time in the West there probably were factually too few women for the white population. Singapore's choices around foreign education weaken its gender balance because of fetishes formed ten thousand miles away. These thousands of men were marked for sad single ends because of a social construct around their race. Society chooses how to distribute women, not in a command economy sense necessarily, but in a broad preferences sense. No matter how bad the percentages are in aggregate, some men will be marked for success and others for failure.
Inasmuch as gender balance is a dial worth playing with, the obvious levers at the national level in a first world context to pull aren't killing off men. They are abortion and immigration. Sex selective abortion is a major issue among certain communities, and should be wildly illegal. In China the ratio of births is 120:100, in parts of India it is little better. While it is less common in the US as a whole, it does happen in some immigrant communities.
Open immigration policies equally lead to gender imbalances, immigrants are more likely to be men. Privilege female immigration significantly more highly, and it isn't hard to improve the balance quickly in the United States or the UK or France. Import Venezuelan or Burmese women by the boat load.
For that matter, first world men have the personal option under the current law to import wives quite easily. The fact that they don't is largely a social choice those men are making. They don't face a material gender imbalance, they choose to face one for the sake of social structures.
These social structures also probably have much more to do with your dating pool than do population level statistics. Middle class American men want equally middle class American wives, shunting aside the opportunity to date poorer or immigrant women. Men often want women less educated and successful than they are, leaving educated women on the shelf. Manage how your society treats women, and you will face fewer parents seeking to have sons instead, you will attract more women from abroad, matchmaking will be easier among your population on class/education/social bases. Social constrictions create the gender imbalance as experienced in day to day life, be ready to violate or manage them and much of the problems melt away.
So in the long run, I do not think we face terminal societal decline as a result of these problems. Historically, societies have dealt with worse, they simply sentence some men to misery, and because the kind of men who can't get a girl are disproportionately "losers" in other ways to begin with it doesn't tend to have much impact on history. The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves. The wealthy West, by comparison, is doing a great job. We don't need a war, we just need better marriage norms, and the courage to address our problems.
*Interesting contrast: Takaki talks about Filipino men being considered a crisis because they were TOO seductive, too smooth. Newspapers and politicians wrote screeds against the menace of Filipino men seducing white women. Takaki, of course, being an Asian and a liberal, is willing to say directly and quote sources that Filipino men were simply "great lovers" or "more attractive and stylish" or "more attentive" than white men; while he is totally unwilling to state that Chinese men died out because they were ugly or weren't great lovers, inasmuch as this was perceived it was the result of racism.
China used to have very high fertility. As did Japan, India, South Korea and so on... How did they become so populous in the first place if mistreating women lowers fertility? They used to treat their women far worse than they do now. See footbinding, see women being legally property in Japan until 1945... I got into a big argument with some people over whether South Korea is a feminist country, despite gender equality being written into its constitution and an actual govt ministry supporting it... anyway it's indisputable that it's much more feminist now than ever in the past.
Mistreating women is not the cause of low fertility, indeed it's the opposite. If you look at the literature, female education immediately appears as a primary reducer of fertility.
There's a certain kind of mistreatment of women that results in very high fertility - the kind where there are actually intense, binding social expectations about their role in the family, limited education and serious patriarchal norms. Binding social expectations, backed by credible threats of violence. Label this 'actual patriarchy' - Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, pre-1945 Japan and so on. Actual patriarchies have very high fertility, even in harsh conditions Japan was at 4.0 in 1943 and 1944 despite total war, total mobilization, millions of men at the front...
Then there's a kind of mistreatment of women that results in very low fertility, the kind you're talking about. Men not wanting highly educated wives, or viewing women in their 30s as undesirable, or expecting them to leave the workforce once they marry. These aren't binding social expectations, not like in actual patriarchy. You can see that the women choose to ignore them, like you say they have other options. It's paper-mache patriarchy. There's no actual effort to suppress female education like there is in Afghanistan, not in South Korea. In paper-mache patriarchy you see these materialistic efforts to increase fertility by giving a token payment, you see feminist groups that aren't suppressed by the state, you see lip-service to gender equality, laws against gender discrimination. You see lots of men who are unhappy with feminism and hold patriarchal views yet these views are not actually enforced and implemented.
I also note that fertility is not very high in the richest, most feminist states like Sweden. They're around 1.8 which is better than South Korea but probably propped up by births amongst non-assimilating migrants. Canada is at 1.5, Finland 1.4, Germany 1.6... Feminism clearly doesn't raise fertility.
Real pathways to raise fertility:
I quite enjoyed this recent piece from the vice president for economic and social-policy studies at The Cato Institute, Alex Nowrasteh. Specifically this bit:
Even the Mormons are falling below replacement rate, though for all I know that is due to secularization. A "return to patriarchy" could work if it specifically limits women's opportunities, but part of Nowrasteh's point seems to be that with the luxury of ubiquitous electronic entertainment, even excluding women from the workforce would likely be insufficient to push the opportunity cost balance back toward fecundity.
Nowrasteh's proposal is deregulation to reduce the cost of raising children, but in my experience children are already pretty affordable--at least until they get to college! Rather, the benefits of having children are often poorly communicated or even perhaps outside the Overton window, and when they are understood those benefits still take decades to really come to fruition. Having a close-knit family is an extremely effective risk-mitigation strategy on numerous fronts, but it takes a lot of work to build such a thing, and it takes a lot of cultural input to get people believing it's even possible.
This just leads to a massive drop in household formation where a man and a woman who both have a job they like decide to keep everything casual and live separately to avoid these massive taxes instead of moving in together. Of course, this lack of household formation will probably lead to lower birthrates too.
Yeah, what should be taxed is obviously childlessness.
"We'll tax and tax people until we get the results we want!"
A popular view. Not one I'm fond of and I really doubt it is good for anything other than making "vices" too expensive for most people. I don't think we can tax our way into broad positive social changes such as boosting fertility rates.
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Which leads to a drop in fertility as couples are now unable to save enough to become comfortable financially with having a child. Yes, I know, you work around this one by putting age limits on the tax. But at some point in the epicycles you should probably figure you've got a wrong approach.
None of this will work because the amount of taxation which would make it worthwhile to have a kid isn't viable; you'll drive a massive black market instead. The problem is on the other end -- children are too expensive for too long, both in financial and non-fungible terms.
We could change the social norms so that kids are allowed to mostly roam free, from a much younger age, instead of being in paid and adult-chaperoned activities all the time. That would also probably have the effect that some of the males get killed off from taking dumb risks, and more teenage pregnancy. Not sure if that's a good thing but... it does solve the fertility drop.
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Mormonism is not what it was. See 'jump humping' and 'soaking' for example.
Good point. Now I think about it, even if you did have an actual patriarchy, modern contraception might result in your male household heads deciding to have fewer children and spend more on luxuries. You'd probably need to suppress contraception too, which is not that hard considering you've already launched a cultural revolution to get there in the first place.
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I remember proposing something similar in one of the previous discussion threads, capping total hours worked at 20 hours per week per adult person in a household and uncapping them after the second (60) and the third (80) minor dependent.
Yeah, this is the ‘best’ (most efficient) option since it makes living on your own dependant on marriage for most young people.
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