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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33259 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Male and Female obesity rates are pretty similar roughly 40% in both but severe obesity is 7% in men and 12% in women so there's some difference there.

Men & Women are identify as homosexual at very similar rates. Every woman in a long term relationship is one less man in a long term relationship.

If the pool of potential mates for men is much smaller isn't that offset by being marriageable for 3x as long? Under your marriageability assumptions men's set of marriageable mates at age 18 is all women 29 to -14 (43 birth cohorts) since many women will become 18 over their time in the dating pool? Women's set at age 18 is all men aged 50 to 9, or 41 birth cohorts. It's true that in any given moment there are more men competing for women, but women are competing against women who will enter the pool in the future. The 29 year old trying to get a 30 year old guy to commit is implicitly competing with the 20 other cohorts of women who will turn 18 over his lifetime.

Also what percent of men make enough money to support a family? In 2016 the 50th percentile income for a 35 year old male was ~50k, 33rd percentile was 30k. It's not a "good deal" to keep yourself chaste and attractive so you can snag a guy making that much.

I think the core of it is that you're demanding the old bargain where women provided sex, domestic labor and paternity certainty in exchange for men who would "protect and provide". Well in a modern society male protection isn't particularly necessary, and the gender wage gap isn't huge and largely accounted for by women choosing more flexible careers so they can do childcare labor for their husbands, or jobs that pay less but that they find self actualizing. You can't demand an attractive, young, chaste wife with similar social background when she can earn 70-85% of that income and do whatever she wants.

Well in a modern society male protection isn't particularly necessary

Of course it is; it's just socialized. Who provides protection for women in modern society? Cops and soldiers. Who are those? Men. How do they get paid? Taxes. Who produces most taxable income? Men.

In other words, men are still providing protection for women, but now we do it collectively rather than individually, and we don't get any benefit out of it.

Same thing with women's so-called economic independence, which is heavily reliant on welfare, alimony, child support, affirmative action quotas, and anti-discrimination laws. Working men are still supporting women, but now we don't get anything in return.

You can't demand an attractive, young, chaste wife with similar social background when she can earn 70-85% of that income and do whatever she wants.

Unless of course she wants babies, which is kind of the whole point. That's the missing enticement.

Society is well on it's way to providing this without the need for women to actually have to put up with a man.

IVF is popular here and with rationalist but have you actually talked to women about it? It seems unlikely to me that it'll catch on all that much, your average straight woman that wants a baby without a man attached will probably try and get it done the old fashioned way. It is not a pleasant process.

The actual stats tend to elucidate the situation pretty clearly:

https://twitter.com/pewresearch/status/1623352132375302144

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/02/08/for-valentines-day-5-facts-about-single-americans/

63% of 18-29 year old men report being single.

47% of 18-29 year old women report being single.

So what explains this 16% difference other than some portion of those younger women dating older men?

I dunno what you want to make of that other than, for some reason or confluence of reasons, males 18-29 are simply having a harder time finding relationships.

You can grant that younger men will have the hope of eventually finding a younger woman when they get older, but those men are still losing years, possibly over a decade, they could be building wealth and raising kids with a committed partner.

We'd expect certain effects on the margins, at least, from such a shift.

The massive irony on top of all this is that despite all the advantages and privileges that have been obtained by/granted to women in the last few decades, women are less happy than they used to be:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w29893

Using data across countries and over time we show that women are unhappier than men in unhappiness and negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used – anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger – and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep. Women are also less satisfied with many aspects of their lives such as democracy, the economy, the state of education and health services. They are also less happy in the moment in terms of peace and calm, cheerfulness, feeling active, vigorous, fresh and rested.

Suffice it to say, women have gotten everything they allegedly want and have more financial and social freedom than ever before (overturning of Roe notwithstanding) and... they are overall miserable.

I don't know if this:

the old bargain where women provided sex, domestic labor and paternity certainty in exchange for men who would "protect and provide". Well in a modern society male protection isn't particularly necessary, and the gender wage gap isn't huge and largely accounted for by women choosing more flexible careers so they can do childcare labor for their husbands, or jobs that pay less but that they find self actualizing. You can't demand an attractive, young, chaste wife with similar social background when she can earn 70-85% of that income and do whatever she wants.

Is true if women are actually less happy than they were before. Maybe the failure to find a husband, even if it means 'settling,' is a psychological detriment. Maybe the stresses that come with having to provide for oneself simply wear harder than you'd expect.

Perhaps (I'm going on a limb here, admittedly) there are still psychologically and emotionally fulfilling factors in life that cannot be easily replaced simply by higher income and wealth.

So what explains this 16% difference other than some portion of those younger women dating older men?

One other nudge is that basically every year, 5% more males are born than females, and by early twenties, there are still ~4% more 'excess males' (funny word choice in that PDF, with different contexts). By age 40 it's down to more like 2% more men still alive than women.

63% of 18-29 year old men report being single.

47% of 18-29 year old women report being single.

So what explains this 16% difference other than some portion of those younger women dating older men?

Soft polyamory, FWB, Situationships, etc.

One lying fuckboi can quite easily have 3 women believing they have a boyfriend. Hell, nowadays it's not even about lying, it is about making vaguely boyfriend-like noises and the women will round it up to boyfriend in their head (and maybe on a survey).

On the flip side, a lot of young guys will be sleeping with a girl regularly, hanging out together constantly, escorting her to weddings/holidays/etc, and say "we haven't defined the relationship yet..."

So I suspect some percentage of this is essentially a bad survey question and imprecise language.

One lying fuckboi can quite easily have 3 women believing they have a boyfriend. Hell, nowadays it's not even about lying, it is about making vaguely boyfriend-like noises and the women will round it up to boyfriend in their head (and maybe on a survey).

This is seemingly borne out in another thread:

https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1625485234824261632

Where you can see that in the 18-25 demographic there's about 42% of women that claim zero sexual partners, about 43% that claim one sexual partner, and then looking at the male side, there's ~12% claiming at least 3 partners a year. Although one suspects the guys claiming 100 sexual partners a year are... exaggerating.

This would be relatively consistent with a view that many women are opting out of sex for want of a worthy partner and some smaller percentage of men are locking down multiple women from that remaining pool.

https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1625485234824261632

When I see gaps like that, I always wonder if there is a Clintonian problem with defining sexual partner, that breaks down strongly on gender lines. The classic anecdotal examples are something like, a Babtist "virgin" at Liberty University whose nickname in high school was the Headmaster; and a college boy who claims he got laid when he prematurely ejaculated on the dance floor.

I wonder if it is a broader phenomenon, where men are consistently personally including activities that many people wouldn't include objectively (cybersex for example), while women are constantly excluding "last name sex" activities that most people would objectively include like oral sex or manual sex. Have you ever seen data on that?

I'd actually assume gays could heavily skew this data. 100 is not impossible for some.

It's two sexual encounters with a novel partner per week. Some straight guys at the peak of their game who travel a lot could manage that, but distributionally, we're probably talking fairly out there in the long tail (e.g. wealthy airline pilot with a taste for prostitution). For gay guys, traveling a lot would also help, unless you live in NYC, Miami, SF, etc., but it's not nearly as extreme an outlier. There's also some difference between 100/year at a person's promiscuous peak, and 100/year averaged over a period of years, which is why frequent travel is a relevant variable--past a certain point, you need to go farther afield to find the low-hanging fruit, which is almost certainly more time/resource efficient than investing in a metaphorical ladder to pick the less accessible partners.

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