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If women have a civilizing effect on men, shouldn't a higher woman/man ratio lead to greater civilizing on men? Also, I'd guess that, in this kind of society, most of the things you described, e.g. promiscuity, less stable marriages, and bastards, wouldn't really be considered misbehavior; because of the way the numbers add up, society would have to create systems that account for these things and integrate them into the way society functions. Rootless lives among underclass men, I could definitely see being an issue, but I wonder how much that rootless living will be correlated with antisocial behavior in this kind of setting. I honestly don't know how much competition for women (both in terms of extra resources and in terms of criminality actually making one more attractive) drives the antisocial behavior of underclass men now; if it's significant, then we could see more rootless underclass men but less bad behavior from them in aggregate (depending on the ratios).
When I say that women civilise men, I mean within marriages. My expectation is that a higher female to male ratio would lead to fewer marriages as more men play the field as they do at college campuses with similarly lopsided ratios.
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No because men would have enormous power over women as they become scarce.
Have you ever seen what relationships are like at an engineering or nursing school?
One of the eeriest things for me was reading about how the gender ratio at colleges alters people's dating experiences in profound ways, and realizing that huge amounts of people's dating behaviors really were influenced by market dynamics.
Do you have a link to this? I would like to read it.
this isn't really "data" but anecdotes from this thread say no: https://allnurses.com/does-dating-get-easier-male-t698798/ just the usual stuff about "just be confident," "it'll happen when it happens," "don't date your coworkers," "I'm too busy to date," and my favorite "all my female coworkers already have boyfriends and babies."
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It depends on if it's the presence of women that's civilizing, or competition for women. If it's the latter, less intense competition would lead to more brutish behavior.
It's neither. It's the romantic entanglement and love for women (and the children they bear) that has the civilizing influence. The traditional courtly ideal of love is a man winning the affection of a particular virtuous woman by cultivating and demonstrating virtue.
And the reality's not far off: give a man a woman who loves him and through her give him children, and suddenly he is concerned with the good not only of himself, but of his wife and children, and thus he takes fewer risks, he thinks more about the future, and is connected directly to the interests of women and children (from which he might otherwise be alienated by his age and sex). It is one thing to think of women and children indirectly. It is another to love them. "The married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife."
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Good point. My intuition says that competition for women has, if anything, the opposite effect, and I think criminal behavior of single and married men bear this out, though I have no idea if anyone's done any studies with proper controls.
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