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The coming Ukraine/Russia baby boom?
There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:
Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.
It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern femininist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.
You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.
Nearly all nations had a baby boom after WWII. And this wasn't merely making up for lost time. In the United States, the fertility rate peaked at 3.74 children/woman in 1957. Even Russia had a fertility rate near 3 despite a ridiculously lopsided gender ratio where more than 80% of men born in 1922 didn't survive until 1946.
So anyway... I predict that Russia and Ukraine will experience a similar (but smaller boom) in the decade following the end of the war.
This doesn't sit right with me.
Fundamentally, men must compete for access to women, while women act as gatekeepers. It's simple supply and demand. Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. The biological essence of being a male is having to continually prove yourself under adverse conditions, so when men start complaining that women's standards are too high because feminism gave them naughty ideas, it comes off as a cope. Rather than standards being too high, it's more likely that women are setting the standards exactly where they need to be (or at least relatively close, anyway), in accordance with many millennia of evolutionary adaptation to precisely this task. Yes, it's a hyper-competitive environment, but there are plenty of men who are succeeding. Lots of men are making money and having sex and having kids and generally living very productive lives. If you can't do the same, that's on you.
Not to say that biological organisms are incapable of going wrong, of course. If there is such a severe mismatch between women's standards and men's capabilities such that the birth rate plummets to zero, then it's more plausible to say that that's simply the race/species reaching the natural end of its lifecycle, rather than putting the blame on any one particular event/ideology/movement/etc. Perhaps the industrial/digital environment of modern first world countries is simply poisonous to the type of organism that we are. If it is, then we will decline naturally, possibly to be replaced by a more virile form of life that has a longer future ahead of it, and there is little that can be done as a matter of conscious will to arrest this trajectory.
Historically women did not act as gatekeepers. Marriages we're arranged by the parents either directly or by making sure that your daughter only ever came in contact (socially) with acceptable matches.
Also the dynamics of saying No were different back in the day. Bachelorette status meant living at home under the parental yoke without any particular ability to earn funds independently.
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Hasn't that really only been the case in (relatively) recent agricultural communities? Human sexual dynamics evolved during a period of time in which we were primarily hunter gathers, after all.
Nobody really knows what those societies were like since they predate writing. Our best guesses come from the handful of remaining hunter gatherer tribes which are all, by definition, extremely unusual in not having settled down or been wiped out.
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Agricultural and hunter-gatherer populations are definitely different enough to suggest that there's a genetic difference driven by evolution.
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If you're arguing that genes don't care about human happiness and that eventually (hundreds or thousands of years from now) maladaptive cultures like feminism will die out and be replaced by adapative ones like Hassidic Judaism, then yes, I agree.
But unlike my genes I do care about human happiness, and I think that feminism is working out very badly for women.
If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why, rather than just shrug and say "another person weeded out of the gene pool".
I mean, you buried it in your post: equal rights came without equal responsibilities.
Now that men and women are equal, should it not be equally valid to say "another woman weeded out of the gene pool"? If we're judging each gender by their own standards, women had it far easier than men and they're still failing, so why shouldn't men rejoice the same way women do when this happens to a man? They have equal rights, they can take equal lefts.
Not that I think that's a helpful way to look at things, but the only people who can meaningfully change this for women are other women. Do I think that'll happen? Well, maybe; men have largely adapted from losing 200,000 years of biological supremacy overnight by comparison and I see no reason women should not be similarly adaptable after losing their edge to video games and porn.
To clarify, I was saying "another woman weeded out the gene pool". And, yes, people do celebrate that. I'm conflicted whether to celebrate too or feel sorry for the catwomen. A little bit of both I suppose, but my largest reaction is to want the people who have no role in the future to have no role in decision making today.
I think that in any stable system, there will be as many unmarriageable men as there are unmarriageable women, and I don't think that's a big deal. I think the reasons those people remain unmarriageable are intractable, and that their not reproducing is going to have a non-trivial eugenic effect on the populations over which it applies (lower base rate of mental illness, less tolerant of selfishness).
I'm not as certain; a lot of parents get at least a little stupid when it comes to dealing with the most expensive luxury items they will ever purchase.
Then again, non-parents (especially non-parent women) are somehow even more risk/human-dignity averse when it comes to other people's children (which is why the education system is the way that it is), so maybe it'd still be an improvement.
Mental illness is weeded out, but it has average heritability, and high IQ is weeded out, and it has high heritability so decreasing IQ will dominate.
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Non-parent women can be quite risk tolerant when it comes to other people’s children for social engineering experiments in the interests of being decent people on the right side of history. Risk-seeking, even.
Out of the four combinations of parent/non-parent and men/women, non-parent women are the most ardent supporters with regard to minor LGBT+ exposure and subjecting Asian/white children to more “diverse” schooling. Other people’s children, by definition.
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Trust me, I do too. But nature doesn't. Our hopes and dreams have to be tempered by reality.
Well, this sounds like a slightly different complaint than what we had at the start. This is less about women's standards/status being too high and more like women just opting out of the game altogether.
And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.
Yeah but for a male the process of going from the computer lifestyle to adequately interfacing with dating is likely going to equate to making a bunch of lifestyle changes and grinding away at social experience to be anywhere near competitive in the market. For a girl, you create a dating app profile and you can be awash in suitors within 3 hours unless you are like bottom 2 percentile attractive.
I spent about a year on the dating app grind recently enroute to finding a longterm partner, and to get to the point where I was getting consistent positive attention took about 6 month of self improvement between weight loss, social learnings etc and that's as a 6'4, high-earning white guy with low-moderate aspergers tendency. The NEET version of myself is likely still floundering around. I ended up going on about 70 first dates during that year (50~ of which came after I was 'reasonably attractive'), and it's pretty striking to me how many of the women I met who I didn't end up with seem to be still stuck in an endless singleton rut years after the event. Most of these women are attractive, intelligent, had good jobs, 25-30 years old, reasonable educations and ostensibly want kids/commitment yet I believe they are their own worst enemies in a lot of ways.
While filtering out "inadequate" suitors on the dating app (and I can bet there are many) might be easier than changing your lifestyle to adequately date, I don't believe it's no effort. Too many posters give off this "just get a good partner sis" message when they describe women's dating prospects, whereas "just clean up and be confident bro" doesn't work quite as well.
I've got close single female friends. They vigorously filter people who'd frankly be good enough for longterm partnership every week for all sorts of reasons. The majority of the women I met through the apps who I still have on social media are conspicuously single and/or making no progress towards their stated goal of settling down and having kids based on their stories and these aren't clubthots, majority are UMC, educated sensible women. Their main reasons for rejection all verge more around 'he was boring' or 'I did not feel he was my soulmate and my very being was electrified to be around him'. Admittedly feminine sexuality is a lot more 100-0 than male sexuality, but the current state of affairs is a vigorous own goal caused by that.
I agree on the advice criteria since, despite being significantly more difficult to achieve, 'just clean up and be confident bro' is way more actionable advice than 'stop looking for Mr. Perfect' but on the other hand I feel like the average male would be able to solve the dating woes of most women within a week if a freaky friday situation occurred.
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This is a frequent subject of contention between me and a particular friend. He maintains that heightened rates of male romantic lonliness are almost entirely due to women refusing to date anyone who isn't in the top e.g. 20% of looks/status/earning power (take your pick), whereas it seems absurd to me to ignore the fact that so much more of people's free time is spent in isolation rather than in social settings where men and women are likely to meet and hit it off.
Can you be more explicit about your point of contention with your friend? It seems to me like those things can both be true, and in fact reinforce each other. When people are meeting in person at social settings with a healthy gender ratio, two things happen. First, you just meet a lot more single people of the opposite gender. But also, the women are a lot more friendly and responsive. They'll talk to you, give you their number, maybe go on a date with you, just because "hey, why not, this guy seems nice." Whereas if you meet through something like online gaming, social media, or dating apps, they just get swamped with so much male attention from thirsty simps that they all have their guard up, and shut down any guy who they don't absolutely love.
They're absolutely not mutually exclusive - the point of contention is whether or not supposed female hypergamy accounts for the majority of the changes we're seeing in the dating landscape (my friend's POV is that it does).
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Presumably, female standards are higher than male standards due to hypergamy. Also, men can marry later and still have a high chance of being fertile.
That said, I don't think women are to blame here. People are attracted to who they are attracted to. In fact, I think feminism hurts women more than men.
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