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Notes -
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
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:
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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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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