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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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You're a little off track, my comment wasn't about fertility per se it was about gender balance. Related, and I can see where you jumped off, but not the same. The Asian countries outlined combine a pervasive social bias against females with modern freedoms, which suppress fertility, lead to sex selective abortion, and gendered immigration patterns. My example of Singapore was meant to show that tension: Singapore under LKY and his successors wants to have talented students, male and female, travel abroad for university education they see this as a net beneficial policy; but they disproportionately lose female university students to emigration abroad. Similarly, if you have a pervasive bias against female children, the scientific/medical base to test for gender early, and abortion on demand to abort female children, you get pervasive sex selective abortion, which drives the gender imbalance to unworkable levels. If you provide women with modern escape hatches from patriarchal expectations, you can't expect them to choose child rearing, they'll utilize the escape hatches to get away. If you need the escape hatches in order to operate as a modern economy for various reasons, then it's the patriarchal expectations that are going to have to shift.
China used to have high fertility, but when exposure after birth was the only method to cull female children it was much less common and the gender balance stayed pretty average. With early testing and abortion available, there are 120 male births for every 100 female births. That represents a society in a severe state of dysfunction, regardless of fertility levels.
Further, on the subject of Fertility:
Feminism suppresses fertility from pre-feminist norms, but it seems clear that the worst places to be are the halfway houses of East Asia: feminist enough to remove patriarchal restrictions, insufficiently feminist to remove patriarchal expectations. It's a uniquely toxic mix. Highly feminist countries have sub replacement TFRs, but South Korea is at half of Germany. That's not a minor gap, that is huge. That's the difference between a society slowly shrinking, in a way that is likely sustainable with moderate assimilable immigration, and a society in free fall. China is still higher but significantly lower than the West, and those numbers are widely believed to be massaged.
I don’t think you can separate China’s possibly uniquely bad gender ratio at birth from its possibly uniquely bad One Child Policy. If that policy had never been implemented, I’m guessing you’d see a much smaller gender disparity. The problem is that they kept a patrilineal society but forbade parents from having multiple children, when if they wanted to adopt the latter policy, they needed to first take an axe to the former tradition. Of course Chinese parents want a boy; it’s how their family line is passed down! Sure, they’ll happily have a girl as a second or third child, but if that option is closed off to them, they’ll settle for just one boy. If anything, I’m surprised the ratio isn’t even more skewed.
Here's the thing: India is nearly as bad on a national level, and on in certain localities as bad or worse, without the one child policy. The throughline isn't the one child policy, it is female children being devalued (such as through strict patrilineal descent or dowry traditions). The one child policy might have made the issue more acute, but it did not create the issue single handed.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/03/02/son-preference-and-abortion/#:~:text=Over%20time%2C%20the%20Indian%20government,the%20sex%20of%20the%20fetus.
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What about Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, etc?
It's seems more like tfr correlates with being a poor, unstable, agrarian shithole than it does with patriarchy.
Iran is a victim of its own highly successful population control policy.
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Iran has a flourishing feminist movement, see the huge protests last year and in 2017 over hijab-wearing. True, the state does suppress feminism in Iran but their suppression efforts clearly aren't sufficient. Plus there's a very substantial presence of women in higher education:
UAE and Kuwait have all kinds of weirdness with regard to demographics because of the large non-citizen population. Plus UAE, Saudi Arabia and so on apparently rank rather highly in these gender equality statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Inequality_Index
I would not classify Iran or even Saudi Arabia as an actual patriarchy like Afghanistan. True, the real patriarchies tend to be poor, unstable agrarian shitholes today.
It's also surprisingly irreligious. Especially for a nominal theocracy, which I suppose explains in part the insecurity of its ruling elite.
I know quite a few Iranian immigrants. One is a practicing Muslim, goes to mosque, etc.
All the others, as best I can tell, are non-religious. They also all drink alcohol and the women don't cover their hair. So Muslim cultural norms didn't stick.
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This was and still is a very curious thing to me. I have three friends with east Asian wives, one from Korea, one from China and one from Japan. Their wives are all middle or upper middle class and they have all married either laterally or downwards (especially lookswise), but all seem exceptionally happy with their husbands, who are not really exceptional people.
As I've come to understand it this does not have to do with fetishization as much as with just how badly these women have been treated by their previous Asian boyfriends and the general expectations on them from their prospective in-law families and society in general. From the perspective of a decent Swedish guy, the standards for being a good partner seem astonishingly low – to the point where failure almost seems to require an active effort.
It just seems so unsustainable for them. It's not like we're perfect or giga-cucked over here but it's still a walk-over, at least in the mind of these particular women. They just want to be treated with respect by their partners, be able to work after having children and not be treated as pseudo servants/slaves by their in-laws. I've had a bit of hard time really believing this, could it really be that bad?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps my friends' wives have a overly negative view of their home societies and that's why they ended up with western husbands. Or maybe it's a combination.
Like I've said on here before, there's a sort of misery porn/revenge porn set of texts up on Youtube (see this for sample), and while it's ostensibly set in America, it's pretty clearly Japanese in inspiration (with some copy-cat other East Asian versions).
Granted, this is all exaggerated in the style of romance novels, but still: the expectations to make the set-up even remotely credible are:
(1) Your mother-in-law will probably be a thundering bitch who expects you to be a housemaid for her because 'that's how it's always been'; when you marry into a family, you now have to serve that family like your own parents
(2) This even extends to 'hand over your money'
(3) Husbands will likely be momma's boys who don't stand up to defend you, or check out because they don't want to deal with drama, they're too busy working
(4) Husbands will often not come home because they're attending drinking parties with clients/co-workers; this is normal
(5) Husbands will often not come home because they're working so much overtime so they stay in a hotel; this is normal
(6) Grandchildren are mandatory, you'll get a lot of abuse from in-laws if you don't do your Womanly Wifely Duty and pop out a sprog. Also it better be a son, because girls aren't good enough
(7) You get it in the neck whether you're a stay-at-home wife (lounging around living off husband's hard-earned money, plus lots of free time so you must obey mother-in-law's commands) or a working woman (not pulling your weight doing chores at home because that's the wife's job)
(8) Divorce seems to be way easier, it's just a matter of filling out forms and dropping them off, and divorce is a threat often wielded by the husband/mother-in-law
There does seem to be a cultural assumption that the in-laws have way more interference in the lives of married couples and that you don't get the cops/outsiders involved even in cases where we in the West would say "that's abusive". The role seems to be: be successful (there's a ton of snobbery around education and being a middle-school/high-school dropout or not going to the right kind of university), get a rich husband, run the house on a budget while keeping up standards, provide grandkids, and be at the beck and call of your in-laws for pretty much everything.
As I said, a lot of this is clearly (I hope!) exaggerated, but the background cultural setting that makes this plausible even as wish-fulfilment fantasy seems to indicate that married life for Asian women is more limiting in many ways than their Western counterparts.
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Pity Skookum got banned, this would've been a data point contrary to his narrative of "women married to ugly (but caring and attentive) men are literally more miserable than women married to men who beat them".
To play Skookum's advocate, men's looks work quite different than women's, and asian men got the shortest of sticks on that account. A rugged, average height westerner will easily beat out the average asian moonface manlet in terms of looks. Sorry if someone feels insulted, I'm exaggerating for emphasis, but asian women are often quite open about western men being far more attractive than asian men.
They certainly are, but I'm pretty sure Skookum is a white guy, and rugged enough that his powerlifting PRs are better than mine.
Yeah I guess this point might actually go against him personally, but it still means his general argument might still be correct.
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In America there seems to be a bit of a stereotype among hispanic women that their menfolk are alcoholics who sometimes beat their wives and cheat on them at any opportunity, and thusly you see a lot of good looking latinas with white guys who are schlubby and not particularly well off. I don't think this is a great description of the typical hispanic man, although alcoholism, adultery, and spousal violence are probably more common in that community I don't think it's an 'everyone' problem as opposed to a 'higher per capita rate' problem. What matters is that senoritas seem to believe it.
It's very possible that the same thing is going on with oriental women; there's a stereotype of husbands/boyfriends letting their mothers treat girlfriends/wives like shit, and it doesn't matter that it isn't the typical case, what matters is they believe it.
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Just world fallacy. I suppose men like dating younger women because they realize they’ll treat them better and are better lovers?
The somewhat feminized characteristics of asians (shorter, socially reserved, small round features) creates an imbalance in the desirability of their men and women (works opposite in blacks), reflected in the singaporean student imbalance.
White men are just more attractive. So when your asian gf tells you how happy she is to be with you and how great you treat her, remember that to her you’re like a girl with big tits.
Yes? I mean, it obviously isn't the only reason, but there are far, far more 20-somethings who are eligible and without serious emotional baggage than there are 40-somethings. It's the superior dating pool if you want those types of things.
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And I'm totally fine with that.
I know, it's great. But let's not pretend it's because we're such great and magnanimous lovers.
I'll have you know I'm a decent lover, and spent 3% of this month's salary on her latest birthday present.
Joking aside, I see your point.
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There is a difference between hooking up with someone and maintaining a happy long term relationship.
The perceived 'leagueness' influences satisfaction with the relationship.
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I wouldn't say they have an overly bad view of their home countries, but perhaps are high percentile of sensitivity to those kinds of slights. In the same way that white people in the USA vary in their sensitivity to wokeness, and Black people vary in their sensitivity to racism. Some barely notice it, some are driven to distraction or change careers or migrate. Women with strong senses of independence will migrate out.
I briefly dated a girl who was born in Egypt but grew up in Bahrain. She left the country because she couldn't stand the repressive Islamic theocracy (IIRC, it's still the case that a rapist can escape punishment if he agrees to marry his female victim, something Morocco outlawed in 2014). But the departure of one woman chafing against the restrictions imposed by the society just means that the society is very slightly more conservative and tolerant of repression than it was prior. It had never occurred to me before that evaporative cooling of group beliefs applies just as much on a national level as with religions, cults, political organisations etc.
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That's probably true but to me they still seem fairly submissive though, especially the Japanese woman. They really aren't asking for much independence. I guess they just took the chance when they saw it, I doubt they would have migrated on their own.
Curved against their home culture?
For reference, I have a very close friend who is precisely that: a highly educated female expat from an East Asian tiger economy. She left largely, consciously, because of things like civil rights and feminism. At the same time, when I observe how she acts, she is significantly more family oriented, more submissive to her husband and her family, than I would expect from an American woman of her class and education and cultural affectations.
That's the arbitrage that is so often talked up among the mail-order-bride market boosters: she feels like she is getting significant extra freedom from her husband, her American husband feels like he is getting an amazing wife and highly supportive partner. Where so often in a dual-income marriage between equals, both feel that they're getting a terrible bargain and insufficient support/freedom from their partner.
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I think the social expectation of siding with your wife over your mother makes a pretty big difference; women treat each other much worse than men do and husbands generally love their wives, and even western mothers in law aren't exactly known for being easy to deal with.
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very interesting post. Thanks for making this much effort in response to what was admittedly an insane late-night screed.
Appreciate it! Though mine was just Tumblers clicking into place of reading for a year, on a hangover rainy Sunday.
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Not according to this, at least in the US:
Of course, "open" is always a relative concept...
I don't think that data covers illegal immigration, though I was also wrong about that statistic: Women are 46% of the illegal immigrant population (estimated). I would have guessed 60% or more were male based on my experiences in agriculture and construction. So you're right, I was wrong about the USA. Looking at the numbers, I do wonder to what extent American feminism is a structural advantage relative to other first world countries when attracting high education immigrants.
I was thinking more of EU countries in the Syrian crisis, where two thirds or more were male. Bringing hordes of young men into a country will throw things off in a hurry.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian crisis, which led to a refugee influx to (the rest of Europe) positively dwarfing the 2015-2016 influx, was mostly women and children.
I just checked the stats for Finland at the end of 2021 (ie. before the war kicked off bigly in Ukraine), and out of the 442 290 born outside of Finland, 230 138 were men and 212 152 were women. So 52 % men, a slight advantage but not a major one.
Well, in case of Ukraine man covered by draft were mostly banned from leaving country.
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