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Notes -
When genetic modification of humans is discussed, it is typically in the context of individual modification/augmentation. Whether in early embryonic stages or on fully developed people via gene therapy techniques, the goal is normally to modify outcomes for the specific individual in question.
Probably the reason we don’t discuss society-wide modification much (except in the context of huxly-esque dystopias) is that its proximity to eugenics makes it unpalatable to western society’s current ethics framework. But thinking in the longer term, I find it highly unlikely that future societies wouldn’t utilize this tool given the potential advantages it offers, especially in terms of group cohesion. This of course comes with the caveat that modeling the large scale implications of a small genetic change would be next to impossible. There would likely have to be a lot of trial and error, with some of the errors being quite horrific.
So in this context, I was thinking about what we could potentially modify that would have an out-sized impact on society with relatively little change on humans’ current genetic makeup. And the answer that seemed the most interesting is to modify the rate at which men are born relative to women. What would a society with far fewer men than women look like? As far as I can tell, there is very little data to go on (maybe USSR after ww2?). There are examples where there are fewer women than men (ex china), but I’ve struggled to find the opposite. Also, most scientific literature about “gender imbalances” is mostly just ideological fluff.
So anyway, the question I guess is what does this look like, and does it actually lead to a more stable/cohesive society.
Arguments in favor:
Arguments against:
-Susceptibility to military conquest by external groups with more balanced gender rations assuming this isn’t implemented everywhere.
Edit: Formatting
If we are thinking of crazy evopsych hacking, why don't we just make women ever so slightly less hypergamous/choosy and less neurotic and ever so slightly more horny?
I think significantly less men would be incels. Just do it enough that men don't entirely lose their drive to build and make things to impress hot chicks (progress civilization), but rather just ease the pressure just a little so it isn't straight up impossible like it is nowadays.
women have to be choozier because they get more risks from casual sex (pregnancy, infections) and physically weaker with less ability to flee if something isn't going right.
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I didn't love FarNearEverywhere's comment at first, but after reading through it, I think she's right. The elements that cause the dating market to be so asymmetric are legion, and not reducible to "women are less horny." If you wanted to somehow genetically engineer things so straight relationships look more like gay ones, you would have to alter the biology of women so throughly that the human species would be unrecognizable.
The solution to dating asymmetry is, and has always been, and indeed was, monogamy as an enforced social ideal, and norms and values that cultivate satisficing and not perfectionism when it comes to settling down. That doesn't mean pushing people to settle with an abusive alcoholic, but it does mean encouraging people to settle down with a homely, but kind and nurturing partner instead of chasing after hotness or status. It also means holding people to their vows, and leading people to see re-investment in their relationship rather than divorce as the solution to cooling off romance or non-abusive problems in a relationship. These are the conditions under which actual love can flourish, and furthermore I think they make both men and women much happier than the current situation, on net. The women get commitment and the men get regular sex.
That goes for men as well as women. Find your 5/10 sweetheart and marry them, damn it.
Genuinely, thank you for giving my comment the benefit of the doubt.
Now, as regards women and horniness: there was (may still be) a common belief that the reason women became prostitutes or fallen women was precisely that - horniness. They loved sex, wanted sex, and couldn't control their animal appetites, which is why they became pregnant outside of marriage and were ruined for anything afterwards but engaging in sex work. Thomas Hardy wrote a satirical poem about the contrast between the ruined girl whose life was vastly improved by her fall and her still 'innocent' friend from the country, but even there reading between the lines, it's all depending on her being young, pretty, and free with her favours (in a discriminating way; sleeping with men who can keep her, not just giving it away). That is not a long career and her easy life, unless she's very lucky and very careful, will vanish with her youth:
"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —
"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.
— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —
"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.
— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'
And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now
Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —
"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.
— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —
"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.
— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —
"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.
— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —
"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.
Men did not value those women. They may sleep with them, but few (some may do) would boast that "my girlfriend's a whore". They might boast that a whore is so infatuated with them, she's in love with him or thinks of him differently to her other clients, but that only reflects credit on the man. He's so good in bed/so handsome and dominant and charming that he can satisfy the hyper-horny appetite of a whore and make her fall for him rather than the other way round, the traditional way of wily hyper-horny women getting men to fawn on them.
Women being less choosy and more horny, therefore more willing to have sex from the get-go with a guy, more willing to date guys, and so on will lead to the culture of whores, and the despising of such women by the very men who want more sex. Then the competition will be for the rare women who aren't giving it up on the first date and haven't had a boyfriend for every month of their life since puberty.
Prostitution has been the social escape valve for sexual pressure of men who can't get married, or don't have access to a regular source of sex. But prostitutes, in the main, have never been regarded as high-status women. Very few men want to settle down and marry an ex-prostitute and have a family with her (citation needed, I know, I know). Well-off men could have concubines and other marriage or established relationships in societies which catered for that, but promiscuity in women in the main was never highly regarded.
That well may change, but it's not just genetic engineering to get women to be just the right degree of horny - not too much, so they're not sleeping around like sluts, and not too little, so they'll match men's sexual appetites - that will need to be done to make whore culture acceptable to all.
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Oh, you mean "riding the cock carousel" and other such charming descriptions?
Men don't want women to be horny. Let me refine that: men don't want women to be horny except for them in one particular instance, and not other men. Men don't want women to dump them, but neither do they want women to be clingy when the man wants to dump her.
There's a long tradition of poetry along the lines "sleep with me; if you don't, you're a frigid bitch who hates men and loves to make them suffer and if you do sleep with any man who asks you, you're a whore and a slut. Just sleep with me when I want, then go away when I'm tired of you".
Marvel's To His Coy Mistress: you don't wanna die a virgin, do you? Sleep with me!
Even Donne got on the Bitch Ridin' The Cock Carousel wagon:
The Sexual Revolution was supposed to be about "now women can be horny too, without blame or the double standard". What are the results? Unhappy men claiming they can't get a girlfriend and that women can have all the sex they want, and are all sleeping around with the alphas while not giving them the time of day.
I think you would have to do a lot of re-tooling of both the physical set-up and the mental attitudes; you'd need to have women getting aroused as easily and quickly as men do, and orgasming from the same sort of stimulation, and not so fertile as to make it risky that they'd easily get pregnant, who are willing to just have casual fun with any guy that asks, don't have emotional attachments from that casual sex, and are approachable by all.
Of course, once women start being approachable by all men and stop being hypergamous, then some men will complain about the whores and sluts who're willing to just hop into bed with any guy, no discrimination or standards. It's a double bind!
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Alternatively, just make the men better.
"Better" doesn't really mean anything here, though. The whole point of the discussion is explicating the what and how of what "better" even means in terms of genetically engineering people for the sake of society.
E.g. we could genetically engineer men to enjoy being celibate to make them "better." This would obviously reduce a lot of the suffering that men are going through, but most women probably wouldn't find it appealing if almost every man they met had basically no sexual desire. Then again, perhaps it would make it easier for women to find the few high status males with mutations that countered the genetic engineering, which would benefit them greatly. But if the few high status males are so rare that each woman has to share a man with a million others, then that would be unsatisfactory. So perhaps we could also genetically engineer the birth sex ratio to be heavily weighted towards males, so that we have roughly the same amount of females and of high status male mutants, along with a 99% population of male volcels.
However, I'm not sure what a world where 99% of the population are volcel males would look like, what kind of political influence they would hold, and what they would do with it. They'd likely be far less productive than a similar population of standard issue males, but if we're in this fantasy scifi world, that productivity might not matter a whole lot.
We already know what a world where a significant chunk of volcel males looks like. They have little political influence; too busy with the video games and porn to acquire money or power. (Also, they were told wanting women was bad, and unfortunately for women by and large listened.)
Again, this is already true. Actually, by that token, since Western society considers the definition of "better men" to be "women", you're going to get a heavy female-weighted genetic engineering demand in areas where that's more locally true, and a more even distribution where that isn't.
Sure, it'll probably even out eventually because increased competition for men means women lose relative power over men- but I don't think the ideal gender distribution in a hyperfeminine world is anywhere near the 50/50 it is when the power of men-as-class and women-as-class are more balanced (by the chance circumstances of the local economy).
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since the allegation is hypergamy is based on a relative metric, it doesn't matter how much better men are as a group
When it comes to hypergamy, men being “better” as a group (or not) does matter.
With regard to sexual and relationship dynamics, hypergamy is relative between men and women. If Becky perceives her boyfriend/husband Brad as her “better,” her hypergamous instincts can be satiated.
It’s polygyny, the degree of winner-take-all-edness, the distribution of women to men, the tendency of women to want the same men (female mate-choice copying), that’s zero-sum and relative within men. It’s not clear ex-ante to what extent men being “better” as a whole would aid with polygyny.
Brad could be taller, stronger, smarter, richer, and more dominant than Becky and satisfy her hypergamous instincts, but still lose her to Chad due to polygyny. If he were shorter, weaker, poorer, or less dominant than Becky, he likely wouldn’t have stood a chance with her in the first place before polygyny came into play.
Excellent encapsulation of the root problem.
And this is exactly what the concept of non-family arranged marriage has tried to solve for thousands of years. You (women) get to be the sexual selectors and a pick a mate. No one can force you, and men must compete. But once the choice is made, you have to stick with it so that society doesn't collapse in on zero-sum Chad-The-Warlord mating patterns.
This is the reason conservatives, like me, point to no-fault divorce as so incredibly damaging. It means mating patterns revert back to a situation that was worse for 99% of men and >50% of women (i.e. most of everybody). Stable marriages make stable communities with longer term outlooks. This is a great way to build society. Fluid marriages with easy opt-out clauses as well as a material incentive in many cases create a constant state of next-optionism and institutionalized anxiety. It's easy to see why your average secular-humanist married couple are neurotic basket cases. They are dealing with the >50% odds that the person they wake up with and go to sleep with will leave them and, maybe, take half of their stuff at any moment.
I see the polyamory movement as a weird cope to some basic realities. They're smart enough to accept human nature, but not pro-social enough to understand the value of discipline and final choice in marriage. So, they settle for what becomes a shared Chad-harem and a weak peace. I don't see how polyamory works out for your median non-Aella woman, however, as mate stealing just becomes (covertly) more acceptable and thus favors inherently more manipulative and anti-social women.
From the men I've seen in polyamorous relationships, I wouldn't describe them as Chad's. Do you have any examples?
I've seen serial monogamous, polygamous, or monogamous relationships (where the man is a rake or cad) where the man might be reasonably described as a Chad.
You've stumbled upon the correct answer.
The Poly relationships aren't full of Chads .... the Chads are sleeping with the women in the Poly relationships outside of the poly relationship. The guys in poly relationships (willingly) are there for the classic beta support role. Chad - external to the poly system - has all of the "fun"
This sounds correct to me.
Chad doesn't want to be in the poly relationship with her 'boyfriend' or the less attractive girl.
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Thank you for this explanation.
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Wouldn't it just be easier (and less fraught) to decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives? My understanding is that they tend to increase neuroticism and at least for some women decrease libido.
Have you seen some of the hysteria over the restriction of abortion access? Then you want to make it more likely to get pregnant? That's the problem here: for abundant sexual access outside of marriage, you have to prevent pregnancy. To prevent pregnancy, you need contraception. If you decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives, then your alternative is "the woman who has had three or four abortions by the age of twenty-four", and using abortion as the main method of birth control isn't the greatest idea. Even medical abortion, because if you're going to be using drugs to provoke abortion, you may as well use drugs to stop conception in the first place.
But then, as you say, widespread use of hormonal contraceptives may decrease libido and so make sex less likely to happen. So it's which do you think is the lesser of two evils here: pregnancy prevention and less sex, or lots of sex and lots of unplanned pregnancies?
Anyone fucking around, please wear condoms. This pill or multiple abortions talk is really missing the king of birth control for people jumps from one partner to another.
I've thought that PrEP will usher a wave of increased STD rates as it gives gay guys an excuse to not use condoms. They are ignoring the fact that HIV is merely one STD among many.
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And if we nip the whole chain you lay out in the bud at this stage?
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That is probably the problem here. Most of the rest of the bind that your comment presents seems to go away.
Arguably, "solving" that "problem" is about an order of magnitude more difficult than developing the types of genetic engineering tech being talked about here. The latter is just technological progress. The former is a political revolution in a way that is basically intolerable to both women and to the men most positioned to make any sort of change in society.
Cultural progress is harder to predict, and can be much swifter than genetic or technological progress (at least historically; we are in an incredible moment of rapid technological progress, and it would be difficult to construct an explicit metric for this). Especially if genetic engineering is on the table, I don't see why it is necessarily impossibly more difficult to affect people's senses of "intolerability" either as an aside/effect or as a goal. Literally the original subcomment in this subthread is:
That's a fair point, that one could genetically engineer people's sense of "intolerability." I do think there would have to be some sort of significant political/religious will behind developing and executing that kind of genetic engineering at a population level which would also of course be required for things like making women less hypergamous, etc. or changing birth sex ratios. I suppose my belief is that the political/religious force required to develop and implement the genetic engineering to make women more tolerant of losing abundant sexual access outside of marriage would be significantly more than what's required to implement the genetic engineering to make them slightly more male-like in their sexuality.
But you are correct that accurately predicting cultural progression is very hard. My own belief is probably mostly informed by my own lifetime experience of noticing how cultural progression always seems to go. But that's anecdotal and should be valued as much.
If you think it's political/religious force that is important, then, stupid question here, but can't we just futz with that with our magic futzing machine? I was viewing some commentary on the recent paper claiming that there was a developing left/right divide between men/women, and one of the hypotheses was concerning the role of "religiosity", particularly among women. To the extent that we think we could plausibly target hypergamy/neuroticism/hornyness, plausibly one could hypothesize target "religiosity" or other factors that people associate with other cultural/political beliefs.
Moreover, the neuroscience literature has already identified plausible candidates for receptors and genes that relate to pair bonding, some of which even have animal analogs (e.g., there are two closely-related species of voles, one of which pair bonds strongly, and the other which doesn't nearly as much) or which seem to be correlated with measures of "relationship quality" in humans (it would take me a while to dig up some cites; I read this wayyy back in grad school). We could conceivably target something along these lines. Seems like we can think incredibly broadly; we really are considering quite a magic futzing machine.
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Well, how are you going to square the circle? You want women to be more sexually active, but sexual activity brings with it the possibility of pregnancy. If you don't want pregnancy, you need contraception. If you're using contraception, so the OP argument goes, then that decreases libido, so women are not as sexually active.
You have to make a choice: women who are horny enough to sleep with you, but they end up with ten babies because of that, or women who don't have ten babies but are not horny enough to sleep with you. Or the third possibility: no hormonal contraceptives, lots of sex, but also no pregnancy because abortion as birth control.
(I'm approaching this from a non-moralising stance because I'm not going to argue religion here, just plain secular modern attitudes where 'sex is fine, contraception is fine, abortion is regrettable but on the whole fine').
IUDs, condoms, etc. Anything but the pill really. An unusually easy to square circle.
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You could just ditch the whole modern set of sexual ethics, you know.
And I imagine this is precisely why Scott Alexander is fond of saying "society is fixed, biology is mutable." That "just" conceals a lot of the teeth-pulling involved with that course of action.
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That is a particular form of a moralized stance. You have chosen a specific set of morals to adopt. You also now make no mention of marriage, which was in your original comment.
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Here's my solution to whatever gender-angst people have:
make real estate cheaper (there's a correlation between Republican-voting areas and areas where young people can easily buy starter homes). Decrease building regulations as well
make having children easier by decreasing regulation : transform the Child Protection Services into an anti-nosy-senior-at-the-window enforcement force, somewhat in the spirit of the ACAB movement, stop regulating day-care businesses, get rid of carseat laws etc, and allow freedom of association. If the child dies he dies, but at least let them live a little.
get rid of sex discrimination laws as well. No more wasting 10 years in med school if you're only going to stick to being a doctor for 5 years, no more maternity leave, no more 'unsafe work environment'
relax domestic violence laws enforcement as well. Bring back some gravity to the concept of 'who you share a bed with', it's not other grown-ups' business to rescue you from all your bad choices
As a starting point (new platform for Mr 'Grab them'), mandate that any public figure or organization that publishes some kind of feminist statement, in general 'in support of women', for example this, should be labelled 'SIMP' for say a year (on their press release, any media, on their products, etc). Like a bud light halo. Any woman aspiring to some kind of important position should first be asked about her family and how she expects to continue being a mother or a grandmother while focusing on important position.
This is a weirdly-specific example. Why do you assume carseat laws have anything to do with people choosing whether or not to have kids?
Anything that would justify fining / arresting / causing trouble / calling CPS on parents is part of the environment that makes it harder for people to have children and more children when they already have 1.
I don't know what the ratio of calls to CPS / calls to CPS for parents who are actually abusive is but it is way too high in my opinion.
Anybody who has been around in a Western country in the past three years should know that governments will come up with crazy rules that make no sense and cause way more trouble to enforce than they actually help.
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It's become a meme, maybe originally from this study.
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I think the actual probable alternative to hormonal contraceptives is just...other contraceptives.
Not that I really think lots of sex and lots of unplanned pregnancies would be the end of the world – I'm fundamentally more of a "babies good" person, and I don't have any particular reason to want people to have abundant sexual access outside of marriage. But, realistically, I imagine that a random draconian ban of hormonal contraceptives tomorrow* would probably result in a slight uptick in babies and a large uptick in alternative methods of birth control. Copper IUDs, for instance, are much more effective than birth control pills, and other more temporary contraceptive methods are relatively reliable.
*to be quite clear, I'm not saying that would be a good idea. But perhaps a less bad idea than genetically modifying women.
Yeah, but hormonal contraception became popular because mechanical forms of contraception are often uncomfortable (I understand some men complain about condoms), ineffective, or even hazardous (the Dalkon Shield). Implants work well but they're hormonal. The female condom never really became popular. The Holy Grail is some form of contraceptive for men to take, but that's slow going and a different problem to blocking the female reproductive cycle.
Moi aussi, but we're dealing here with the modern problem of "Good God, I don't want to go back to the bad old days of having to marry the first woman who'd have me, just so I could have sex". People (men) want sex, they want it most when they're at their maximum horniest (young and full of hormones) and they don't want to 'save it for marriage' or 'only ever had one sexual partner, my spouse'. Porn also has a part to play in that, as does "what do you mean you only ever had vanilla missionary sex, you poor boob?" for both men and women is the attitude of the enlightened and liberated today. You have magazines teaching teenage girls how to have anal sex, we're not putting the genie of 'sexual liberation' back in the bottle of 'no sex outside of marriage'.
Why not? Sure, it wouldn't be easy, but I don't see it being impossible. If nothing else, a total collapse of industrial civilization and global reversion to pre-1700 technology levels would indeed put the proverbial genie right back; which establishes that it's at least possible. Sure, "turning back the clock" would probably require some pretty strong measures to pull off, but I figure a determined, non-democratic far-Right government could probably accomplish quite a lot toward this end.
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This sort of gradual change to existing tendencies, that merely tweaks existing circuitry in a direction that the basic design space clearly already supports, is supposed to be exactly the sort of thing blind idiot evolution is good at trying and fixing in the event of success. If your proposed change is in fact not civilisation-breaking, shouldn't we observe it in at least some stable subpopulation on earth?
Underlying material conditions are changing way faster than evolution can keep up with though. Even if current settings are fine for a preindustrialized civilization, and evolution in theory would adjust for this in time, it hasn't had time to do that yet.
It seems like traits like the ones mentioned should be selected for within a mere couple of generations though. If the slightly-too-neurotic and slightly-unhorny women aren't having children, then the problem is self-solving. Seems like a waste of resources to gene-engineer away a problem that is on its way out.
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Two problems there. 1) The unforeseen consequences of modifying human psychology are very difficult to speculate about. 2) The engineering required to do this would be many orders of magnitude more difficult.
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