“Maybe he just enjoys being single,” I said.
“Oh, no,” came the reply. “He wants to get married. He’s tried everything: dating clubs, church groups. Nothing seems to work.”
“Well, maybe he’s ugly or has some kind of psychological problem. Or maybe he doesn’t make enough money.”
“No, no, and no. There’s just not a lot out there for someone in his age bracket.”
I often hear this kind of remark nowadays. Yes papa, there are too many single men. This is a recent problem and one that surprises older men who grew up when bachelorettes outnumbered bachelors at all reproductive ages:
The period from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s was one in which there was a shortage of males at median age of first marriage. From the perspective of sexual selection pressures, this period was one of diminished levels of competition among males for qualities sought by females because there was an abundant supply of females. Similarly, females were less able to be “choosy” because there was a shortage of males. (Pedersen, 1991).
For men, this was a great time to be alive. It wasn’t the music that made the times so great. It was the abundance of young nubile women and the lack of competition from other men.
Then things changed:
Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sex ratios tipped over from male scarcity to parity and then to a relative excess of males. In 1991, plurality of males is clear in the age combinations when first marriage normatively occurs, and this situation will persist through the end of the century. (Pedersen, 1991)
This male surplus varies by age bracket. When Davis and van den Oever (1982) examined the ratio of single men to single women in nine developed countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary Japan, Norway, and Yugoslavia), they found male surpluses up to and into the early 30s:
Single Males per 100 Single Females, by Age Bracket
15-19 years old ----- 114.3
20-24 years old ----- 168.1
25-29 years old ----- 177.6
30-34 years old ----- 133.2
35-39 years old ----- 103.2
40-49 years old ------ 55.7
50-59 years old ------ 39.5
60-74 years old ------ 32.4
Has the marriage market since improved for men? I found only one recent article on this subject, and it described the situation in Germany:
In Germany, single men above the age of about 30 years are confronted with a lack of single women in their age-group (Martin 2001: 310). This “marriage squeeze” rises to the age of 45, decreases slightly after this, but remains intact up to beyond 60 years. (Glowsky, 2007)
For Germany at least, there are now more single men than single women at all reproductive ages, and even beyond. How did this situation come about?
There are two major reasons. One is that far more males are living to adulthood. In European populations, about 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. But this male surplus used to disappear by the age of marriage because more boys than girls fell victim to infantile mortality and then to high-risk behaviors (accidents, alcohol, fights, wars, etc.). Since 1945, war has killed off much fewer young men. We have also greatly reduced male mortality at work and on the road.
By now, however, death rates have fallen so far that nearly everybody survives to age 50 (89.8 percent of white males and 94.7 percent of white females, according to the 1980 US life tables). This being true, there is no longer room at young ages for differential mortality to make an impact, and such improvements as are made must be mainly among males. (Davis & van den Oever, 1982)
The birth ratio of about 105 males to 100 females is thus persisting well into adulthood. Indeed, by the 1980s many Western countries had managed to preserve it through all reproductive ages. In Norway, for instance, 30-39 year-olds still had a sex ratio of 106.4 at the 1979 census (Davis & van den Oever, 1982).
The other reason is that divorce laws have been liberalized throughout the Western world. It is now much easier for older men to re-enter the marriage market and marry younger women.
In general, not only are grooms somewhat older than their brides at first marriage, but after divorce or widowhood a larger proportion of men than women remarry and, when they do, they tend to marry women younger than themselves by a margin wider than in their first marriages. With this source of distortion added to the sources already described, imbalances in the sex ratio of the married and unmarried in some age groups become spectacular. (Davis & van den Oever, 1982)
These two reasons—reduction of male mortality and liberalized divorce laws—account for the growing excess of single males over single females at all reproductive ages. Nonetheless, this male surplus might still translate into a smaller one on the marriage market. Men are likelier than women to end up in jail, in psychiatric institutions, and on skid row. As far as the marriage market is concerned, such men don’t exist. The rate of homosexuality is also higher among men than among women (3-5% versus 1%).
On the other hand, two other factors would magnify this male surplus. First, women are likelier than men to get child custody when relationships break up. Women are also much likelier to have children on their own. In either case, some of them never return to the marriage market and the others are ambivalent about having more children. Thus, if we look only at single childless males and single childless females, the male surplus becomes even larger.
Second, there has been an increase not only in serial polygyny (an older man divorces and remarries with a younger woman) but also in concurrent polygyny (a man monopolizes more than one woman at any one time). This phenomenon is hard to quantify because it takes place among purportedly ‘single’ people and thus flies under the radar of most statistics. But it is showing up in a sex reversal of STD infection rates, notably with respect to chlamydia—the most common sexually transmitted disease. Among Hispanic Americans, the traditional pattern still holds true: the rates are 7.24% of men and 4.42% of women (Miller et al., 2004). These polygynous males still have to make do with a smaller number of prostitutes and ‘loose women.’ Among Euro-Americans, however, the pattern has reversed: the rates are 1.38% of men and 2.52% of women (Miller et al., 2004). This is also the pattern among African Americans and is apparently due to young women being targeted by a smaller subpopulation of older polygynous men (Auerswald et al., 2006).
Is the same thing happening in the Euro-American population? Some young men think so, such as this commenter at In Mala Fide:
Today, the top 60% attractive women delay marriage while having casual sex with the top 20% of players, men like Mystery who do nothing to benefit society. This gives men either a powerful incentive to become players or a powerful incentive to play video games and view porn.
Using myself as an example, I have a good job, but no wife, no girlfriend, and no children, which has alienated me from society. Sixty years ago, I would have been married and a pillar of the community. Today, I have no respect for women or societal institutions, don’t vote, don’t go to church, and don’t donate money to charity. I save most of my money for retirement and spend the rest on hookers.
In reading the other comments at In Mala Fide I see a generation gap. Older men tend to be disbelieving. They either tell the younger commenters to stop being “losers” or suggest they join dating agencies or attend church. Yet all dating agencies now have more male than female members, except in the 40+ bracket. From personal observation, I see the same pattern among singles at local churches.
So what is to be done? One problem is getting our intellectual and political elites to react. I suspect one reason they don’t is that many are beneficiaries of the existing system, i.e., older men who have remarried with younger women. Our elites are also generally committed to social libertarianism, this being now true as much for the political right as it is for the political left.
I used to be something of a libertarian. No longer. The sexual marketplace does not function like the marketplace of goods and services. Increasing the demand for young single women will not increase the supply. Nor will this market failure go away if “losers” attend special seminars or get special coaching. Nor will it go away on its own. This is a real problem and one that will likely get worse. Yes, if nothing is done we will have a society where marriage is unattainable for over one third of all men.
What would I recommend? First, if we’re going to extend the sex ratio at birth to the age of 50 and beyond, we should try to keep it as close to parity as possible. The least coercive way would be to pay surrogate mothers to have daughters who would then be put up for adoption. Given the number of people who wish to adopt, this would pose no problem. Is this playing God? Perhaps. But we began playing God by cutting male mortality to levels that had never before existed.
Second, we should tighten divorce laws. No-fault divorce would be allowed only when both spouses request it or when there are no children. Otherwise, one would have to show just cause and child custody would normally be split 50:50.
Third, polygynous men should be publicly identified. While polygyny itself would not be criminalized, the public would be free to discriminate against such men in employment and housing. Repeat offenders would be barred from most forms of social assistance. In this, the goal would be to return such men to the margins of society where they belong.
And if we do nothing? “Let them eat porn?” The social costs may be greater than we think. A surplus of single males tends to make societies less stable and more prone to violence (Pedersen, 1991). Such individuals are likelier to agitate for war or revolution, since they have little stake in the existing order. This is a subject that has attracted notice with the so-called ‘bare branches’ of China and India, yet similar regions of ‘bare branches’ are also becoming noticeable throughout the Western World, particularly outside major cities.
How will things pan out? I don’t know. I hope this is not one of those situations where the pressure will just build up and up until the lid blows off.
References
Auerswald, C.L., S.Q. Muth, B. Brown, N. Padian, & J. Ellen. (2006). Does partner selection contribute to sex differences in sexually transmitted infection rates among African American adolescents in San Francisco? Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 33, 480-484.
Davis, K. & P. van den Oever. (1982). Demographic foundations of new sex roles, Population and Development Review, 8, 495-511.
Glowsky, D. (2007). Why do German men marry women from less developed countries? SOEP papers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research #61
http://www.dix.de/soeppapers
Miller, W.C., C.A. Ford, M. Morris, M.S. Handcock, J.L. Schmitz, M.M. Hobbs, M.S. Cohen, K.M. Harris, & J.R. Udry. (2004). Prevalence of chlamydial and gonococcal infections among young adults in the United States, JAMA, 291, 2229-2236.
Pedersen, F.A. (1991). Secular trends in human sex ratios: Their influence on individual and family behavior, Human Nature, 2, 271-291.
96 comments:
1) Free markets don't even work for their intended purpose, so I wouldn't expect it to quite work in reproduction/pairing either.
2) Are male/female birth rates stable? I would expect a slight bias toward more male births in the past few decades, because nutrition status of females (which is indicated by elevated estrogen level from body fat and insulin) will bias her toward conception from a Y sperm, as the Y sperm swims relatively poorly compared to the X. More estrogen -> more cervical mucous -> more male pregnancies.
3) I think a large part of the problem is that a subset of males today are even more poorly socialized in past. This may be related to the increase in autistic spectrum disorders (very subsyndromal symptoms can perhaps lead to poor social development in normal males). Or, perhaps, overexposure to porn and other forms of psuedosocial experiences (television movies) have ruined them, to the point where they don't even consider normal girls and are just interested in women who are, to be honest, out of their league.
SO they sit there at home pining over the actresses they can't have because they aren't interested in them, meanwhile ignoring all the more average girls who are in their league if only they would pursue them.
This makes sense considering that so many of these types of guys spend all their time reclusive online whining about "women"... that sort of delusional anger does not come from a mind fully grounded in reality.
The numbers presented certainly don't show an increase in the number of involuntarily celibate or unattached men. Marriage rates do not include cohabitation, dating, and casual relationships.
More plausibly, the increase in serial monogamy has actually psychologically benefited men at the expense of women. And, indeed, men have become slightly more satisfied with their lives, compared with women, over the same time frame.
Also the bare branches hypothesis is wrong: men are more uncivilized when eligible women outnumber eligible men, so men can "get away with" boorishness (e.g. the inner city, college campuses), because single women are more at the mercy of men. When there is a surplus of men, men have to bend more to female demands (i.e. more financial and emotional investment for sex).
Single Males per 100 Single Females, by Age Bracket
35-39 years old ----- 103.2
40-49 years old ------ 55.7
Why was there such a sharp drop between those two age brackets? Divorce and remarriage with younger women cannot explain all of that. Did the older cohorts perhaps participate in the WW2?
The birth ratio of about 105 males to 100 females is thus persisting well into adulthood. Indeed, by the 1980s many Western countries had managed to preserve it through all reproductive ages. In Norway, for instance, 30-39 year-olds still had a sex ratio of 106.4 at the 1979 census (Davis & van den Oever, 1982).
That Norwegian male surplus seems to be too large to be solely due to the birth ratio. Perhaps sex-biased immigration and/or emigration explains it?
But we began playing God by cutting male mortality to levels that had never before existed.
Didn't deaths in childbirth balance out the higher male mortality in the past?
I would add two other factors:
Men usually marry younger women. When population was growing, that meant that there were more relevant females than men. If pop growth was 2% per year, there would be 108 20 year old women for every 100 24 year old men. Population growth is now stagnant or negative, at least among whites in most countries.
In the US and UK, at least, lots of women are obese now. Many men would prefer porn and pizzas for one to an obese woman.
I like how anon implies it's the women's "fault" men don't want them (and would rather watch porn and eat "pizza"; note the double implication that the second use of a woman is to cook food).
Really I think the biggest factor is that young men, like most of the western media saturated world, have a distorted view of reality secondary to weak family/social structures and artificial worlds of television, movies internet. They not only have poor social skills and are very emotionally immature but they also aren't particularly interested in real people, when porn stars and fantasies are easier (and more familiar).
Then there are websites for the female equivalent of a media/porn brainwashed male... e.g. www.sugardaddy.com (where young women sign up believing a "sugar daddy" will swoop her up, shower her in riches and save her from any work or growing up... in reality, the website is just for prostitution and the women wind up getting used).
Young men AND women are growing up with a very distorted view of women, sexuality, society. Because of media they develop into quasi-adults who view others as tools to satisfy their needs. They aren't interested in real relationships or real people. Men don't want a woman who is much less attractive than megan fox or any other sexualized actress. Women don't want a man who isn't a professional or a millionaire. We're all delusional. We'll all end up alone and nursing our narcissistic rage.
.. pressure will just build up and up until the lid blows
Not a chance.
The sex ratio after WW1 in Germany should have meant the (surviving) men were well satisfied but the proportion of young (men) to old (men) was unprecedentedly high; and what followed? Sex ratios, no matter how extreme, in a small and ever dwindling cohort like young Germans today will not affect the direction of society
Childless women in six EU countries.
Its the Wooo,
Sex ratio at birth shows some variation over time. In England, it rose from a low of 103.7 in 1900 to a high of 106.2 in 1941. No one seems to know why, but the rise might be an adaptive response to the mass-killing of young males in 1914-1918.
Jason,
I didn't present marriage rates. I presented ratios of single males to single females. To be honest, I don't follow your criticism. I'm sure polygynous men are happy with their lives. I doubt that the same holds true for those men who get left with no mates at all.
Before the 1970s, eligible women outnumbered eligible men in all European societies. Frontier areas and European colonies were the major exceptions, and these were the same areas where European men were the most violent. Why was the Wild West so violent? And why was New England so peaceful?
JL,
I don't think WWII accounts for the drop. (I've seen the same drop in recent American data). Keep in mind that 40 years of age is perceived as the final deadline for having children. I suspect that some men ignore 40+ women for this reason.
The Norwegian sex ratio at birth is within the range we see for European populations.
I don't believe that female mortality at childbirth used to balance out higher male mortality at all ages. There was a book called "Too Many Women?" which found that European societies were historically characterized by an excess of eligible females. This female surplus made possible the longstanding practice of sending single girls to convents.
Anon,
Yes, that's one of the two reasons. Essentially 20 to 50 year old men are competing for a smaller pool of 20 to 40 year old women.
Tod,
I don't follow you. The problem arises when large numbers of men cannot enter into a sexual relationship (be it marriage, common-low union or whatever). After WWI, there was a severe shortage of eligible men. This shortage was less severe in the following generation, but it has only been since the late 1970s that we've actually had a male surplus. Think of a remote mining town and extrapolate those conditions to the whole of the Western world.
"I didn't present marriage rates. I presented ratios of single males to single females."
I don't know how 'single' is coded here. Are cohabitating people "single"? Serious daters? Casual daters?
In any case, the main point is not if men are unattached, but if they are involuntarily unattached. You -- and a number of vocal people on the Internet -- are claiming this is increasingly the case. I doubt this is true. The data you have presented do not show this.
"To be honest, I don't follow your criticism. I'm sure polygynous men are happy with their lives. I doubt that the same holds true for those men who get left with no mates at all."
So where is the data showing an increased/increasing number of men "left with no mates at all"? That is my criticism.
What we see instead is more relationship churning. A higher number of shorter term relationships through life. As my link suggested, this "serial monogamy" is actually better for male mental health. And male mental well-being increased during the same time frame.
In short, where is the evidence of a dream deffered? And where is this rising frontier violence from a new underclass of sexually excluded men?
It's not happening.
The violent men in society are still the ones who have more sexual partners.
Frontier areas and European colonies were the major exceptions, and these were the same areas where European men were the most violent.
Peter, I know my comment was counter-intuitive, so I’ll elaborate. The conventional (“bare branches”) assumption is that social violence will increase when the number of men increases relative to the number of women. The reasoning behind this assumption is that there will be more aggressive male competition over the smaller number of women.
But this assumption is wrong: social violence actually decreases when there are more men in a society (and less women).
The first reason for this is sexual economics: men and women have different, but overlapping, biological sexual strategies. Men have a greater desire for relatively uncommitted--low investment sex with a larger number of partners, and women for committed--high investment sex with a high quality partner. When there are more men and fewer women in a society, women hold more power over the sexual marketplace and men conform more to female preferences. Men must wait a longer amount of time, and invest more in commitment and resources before women “green light” sex. In short, men act more like DADS. If a man does not behave in this manner, the woman has plenty of other options, and can more easily reject the man for someone more in alignment with her preferences.
But when there are more women and fewer men in society, men wield more power over the sexual marketplace and women conform more to male preferences. This means men can wait a shorter amount of time, and invest less in commitment and resources before women green light sex. In short, men act like CADS. When a man does not behave how a woman wants there are few other options for her and she can less easily reject him for someone else.
This was all established with the work of Guttentag and Secord.
Of course, on the surface this indicates why men would treat women better, but does not describe why men would also be nicer to other men. The reason is that the two behaviors are biologically related. Men are biologically primed (on a continuum) as DADS or CADS. CADS are biologically primed to seek out numerous sexual partners and this involves lower trust and agreeability, emotional callousness, lower (verbally biased) IQ, physical aggressiveness, lower work ethic/conscientiousness, and higher time preference. DADS are biologically primed to invest in a single partner and this involves higher trust and agreeability, emotional sensitivity, higher (quantitatively biased) IQ, muted aggression, higher work ethic/conscientiousness, and lower time preference. (I don’t think Rushton has put all the pieces together yet, but he’s definitely moving in that direction.)
This sexual programming is genetically and ecologically determined (with genes more important). When there are an abundance of women, or environmental cues of instability, men are canalized into CAD programming (“mating effort”) – which is more prone to general violence. (The sex ratio in southern latitudes is itself a directed biological “push” into mating effort over parenting effort.)
[Continued due to comment word limit]
The decrease in social violence with increased numbers of men has been empirically supported by evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber. Firstly by showing that male-biased sex ratios predicts significantly less violence in a cross-national comparison. Secondly by showing that violence was related to sex ratio and singleness ratio across 100 years of data from the US, England, and Scotland. More baby boys and more single men were predictive of less violence.
You might say sexually deprived men are well-behaved, socially beneficial men.
I don’t know how frontiers, etc, fit into this. It’s possible that the dynamics are different after a certain extreme point (e.g. one woman to ten men). But I’m inclined to think that it’s mostly or all the result of frontier men, etc, being more genetically prone to violence compared with “New England men.” (e.g. Chinese coolies were not prone to violence, despite extreme sexual deprivation). Either way, I don’t think it pertains to the sex ratios we are discussing here.
A final note: Barber does note that polygamous societies are more violent. But this is different than the sex ratio question. And, further, developed nations are not polygamous in the manner defined by his data.
Men in polygamous societies are doubly disadvantaged if they are genetically programmed as CADs, and yet have few real sexual opportunities.
Anon 2, there may be an element of truth to the assertion that modern men are corrupted by porn and media portrayals of women who represent an unrealistic standard, but it's also true that there's an obesity epidemic. In 1999-2000, a hefty (no pun intended) 25.8% of women age 20-34 were obese. I'm sure it's only gotten worse since then. I didn't bother to look up stats for previous generations, but I'm sure it's uncontroversial to state that they were much lower. So a realistic standard 20 years ago is now, to some degree, an unrealistic standard
The fact is that a lot of guys prefer porn to obese women. I remember one time when some relative of my roommate's got him and his friends to hang out with some women who turned out to be obese. These were the kind of guys who regularly have year-long dry spells, but they still ran from these women because they were fat.
Whether you blame the men for being too picky, the women for not taking care of themselves, or whomever, the fact remains that this effectively makes the pool of women smaller for these men - this wouldn't show up in the statistics Frost used, but would make the situation worse than the statistics would show.
Anon 2, there may be an element of truth to the assertion that modern men are corrupted by porn and media portrayals of women who represent an unrealistic standard, but it's also true that there's an obesity epidemic. In 1999-2000, a hefty (no pun intended) 25.8% of women age 20-34 were obese. I'm sure it's only gotten worse since then. I didn't bother to look up stats for previous generations, but I'm sure it's uncontroversial to state that they were much lower. So a realistic standard 20 years ago is now, to some degree, an unrealistic standard
The fact is that a lot of guys prefer porn to obese women. I remember one time when some relative of my roommate's got him and his friends to hang out with some women who turned out to be obese. These were the kind of guys who regularly have year-long dry spells, but they still ran from these women because they were fat.
Whether you blame the men for being too picky, the women for not taking care of themselves, or whomever, the fact remains that this effectively makes the pool of women smaller for these men - this wouldn't show up in the statistics Frost used, but would make the situation worse than the statistics would show.
Peter,
You have put another nail in the coffin of the ridiculous feminist claims that the sex ratio in places like China and India represent murderous make discrimination against females. Not very sensible at all, really.
You say:
Sex ratio at birth shows some variation over time. In England, it rose from a low of 103.7 in 1900 to a high of 106.2 in 1941. No one seems to know why, but the rise might be an adaptive response to the mass-killing of young males in 1914-1918.
Male fetuses are lest robust than female fetuses. Improved mother health and nutrition leads to more of those less viable fetuses achieving a birth event. I would look for a reduction of the male/female ratio in the ages to 0 to 5 to test if that hypothesis is correct.
Jason Malloy says:
This sexual programming is genetically and ecologically determined (with genes more important). When there are an abundance of women, or environmental cues of instability, men are canalized into CAD programming (“mating effort”) – which is more prone to general violence. (The sex ratio in southern latitudes is itself a directed biological “push” into mating effort over parenting effort.)
This seems far too complicated to me. Do you have any evidence from, say China, that in periods of oversupply that males have behaved as if their testosterone levels were lower? I used to think that there was some sort of master switch that changed behavior in females from sluttish to prudish based on the presence of a father (Harpending and etc) but now think it has more to do with genes passed to them from their mothers and fathers.
Furthermore, I would expect that when females are in oversupply they have to accede to male demands for casual sex, which seems to be exactly how modern females behave.
Of course, we could always posit that there has been an increase in the fertility of people with low time preference and IQ, leading to more females who simply are not genetically predisposed to making careful choices, but I would imagine that, given the cost to females of poor matings, they would always be ultra choosy within the range of choices available.
(Given that governments distort the unemployment data they publish, have you considered ...)
I was trying to make the argument that high sex ratios of the unmarried are produced by factors that also mitigate political instability. Post WW1 (surviving) German men might have enjoyed favourable ratios of eligible women but that didn't pacify them because so many were young.
Todays Germany - population median age 43 and rising - is going to have political turmoil?;
Gunnar Heinsohn will be surprised.
The reason for the most intense competition for eligible women being seen in Germany is likely because the older men re-entering the marriage market are a particularly large proportion of German males, a result of falling birthrates peculiar to German speaking counties.
Only in countries where the men are too old to cause trouble do they face intensified competition for eligible women.
Viking Age Triggered by Shortage of Wives?
"An intriguing archaeological clue is that much of the bounty plundered from Britain -- particularly from monasteries -- wound up later in the graves of Viking wives. The items included precious metals, fine cloth, jewelry and other handicrafts.
Barrett's analysis of Nordic historical records found that Scandinavian men often served as warriors, frequently forming "military brotherhoods," until they were able to marry and establish their own households, which were key to prestige and power.[...]Barrett points to the wish of disadvantaged young men to acquire resources necessary to set up a family as crucial," he added. This is the 'marriage imperative"
Do you have any evidence from, say China, that in periods of oversupply that males have behaved as if their testosterone levels were lower?
I already linked to two papers with this kind of evidence. One a comparison of all countries, and one a comparison of changes within 3 different nations over a 100 year span. An additional analysis for the US found that more men meant less rape.
Also please read the Guttentag and Secord book for the evidence of sex ratio on the sexual marketplace and general DAD behavior.
Data from China, however does not support the same pattern.
Also testosterone is the primary switch for DAD vs CAD development. Testosterone leads to all the CAD traits listed above.
Just being around women raises male testosterone; so ecological female abundance biologically decreases male monogamous-paternal orientation. (See also.)
Jason said:
Also please read the Guttentag and Secord book for the evidence of sex ratio on the sexual marketplace and general DAD behavior.
The problem with sociologists is that they are ideologically wedded to extreme environmental causes and typically reject genetic causes totally :-)
Have you considered African Americans? Given that pre-natal medical care is so good in the US, and infant mortality is very low, absent other problems, we should see a larger male/female ration among African Americans, but crime is still rampant among African American males.
You also say:
Just being around women raises male testosterone; so ecological female abundance biologically decreases male monogamous-paternal orientation. (See also.)
But in any western society males are always around females, and especially so in modern offices.
Null-A,
African-Americans, and blacks internationally, fit the pattern I'm describing perfectly. The sex ratio is female biased for blacks starting at birth and this disparity increases over the life span for both biological and social reasons (e.g. higher male mortality and incarceration rates).
Sub-Saharan Africans (not including bushmen and pygmies) are a good example of a population genetically predisposed toward CAD life history.
But in any western society males are always around females, and especially so in modern offices
OK. This doesn't contradict me. Workplace integration probably biologically affected males.
The Kanazawa paper shows an extreme example, but one prediction is that men are more likely to have higher T and be divorced or single in proportion to the number of young females at their workplace.
Dr. Frost's conclusion that more modern Western men are single because they are celibate contrasts with my impression that more men are single because "they are getting the milk for free". (i.e. modern social/economic conditions have favored male-typical sexual preferences, and changed/reduced the significance of marriage and strict monogamy.)
To the extent that both conclusions may be true, I think the latter phenomenon is more important.
Sex ratio is a seperate issue. I don't think it has a huge impact, but to the extent it has an effect on society, it is likely opposite to the one Dr. Frost proposes.
Jason,
You're arguing that the excess of single males over single females is illusory because many single males are in common-law relationships.
Think for a minute. If a single male is in a common-law relationship, the same must be true for his female partner. If you exclude the two of them, the operational sex ratio doesn't change.
Or are you arguing that many single males are in polyandrous relationships (perhaps without knowing it)? Undoubtedly many are. But this simply reinforces my point.
Jason, do you hang around with young single men? I do, and I meet a lot who have no women in their lives. Zero. Nada. These are guys with good jobs and no psychological problems. Their only 'fault' is that they're too ordinary.
I understand your point that a male surplus will result in a more stable, family-oriented society where men will want to settle down and invest in long-term relationships (as opposed to sowing their wild oats). This argument was prevalent in the 1980s when the operational sex ratio began to change from a female surplus to a male surplus.
Among the proponents of this argument were Guttentag and Secord, when they wrote their book "Too Many Women?" in 1983. They were careful to point out, however, that this benign view of male surplus was based on cross-cultural and cross-historical analysis of societies where women were forbidden to behave promiscuously. If women are allowed to be promiscuous, and if the marriage market is biased in their favor, they too will postpone commitment and try to play the market as long as possible. They too will "sow their wild oats."
Would you like some quotes from their book?
"Remember that the background conditions under which imbalanced sex ratios have had their effect have been relatively constant from the time of classical Greece until the advent of the twentieth century. Earlier we called attention to the importance of the fact that structural power -- economic, political, and legal -- has invariably been in male hands. This condition has prevailed in every high and low sex ratio society that we have examined in detail. What this means is that sex ratio imbalances might well have radically different effects in a society where women had appreciable structural power."
Guttentag & Secord, Too Many Women? p. 233
"In contemporary society, all this has changed. Young single women are not confined to the home and have much experience with the opposite sex. They make their own decisions about male friends or the choice of a husband. Either party to a marriage can now get a divorce if they want one. These changes that free young single people to choose their own mates and loosen the marriage bond favor the gender that is in short supply. In a word, structural constraints that have in the past neutralized dyadic power, particularly that of women, have disappeared."
Guttentag & Secord, p. 239
Jason malloy said - men are more uncivilized when eligible women outnumber eligible men
Really?
"Selective killing of female newborns that led to a shortage of Scandinavian women in the first place, resulting later in intense competition over eligible women". The Vikings were a bunch of murdering gang rapists.
more men are single because "they are getting the milk for free"
As I understand it there aren't enough single women to go round. In reproductive success terms how would it pay off for women to supply no strings sex?
Peter says:
I understand your point that a male surplus will result in a more stable, family-oriented society where men will want to settle down and invest in long-term relationships (as opposed to sowing their wild oats). This argument was prevalent in the 1980s when the operational sex ratio began to change from a female surplus to a male surplus.
There are a couple of issues operating here.
Females perfer, all other things being equal, males from the upper half of the distribution.
I imagine that some 30% or so of males can only get sex by using prostitutes. This potentially leaves a lot of males without mates.
Males are very good at coalitional violence, and the less intelligent are more likely to be violent and unpredictable.
Any society with a large number of males who have missed out is asking for trouble. See for example, the boxer rebellion, which I think was largely caused by males lacking access to women, because wealthy men were taking multiple concubines.
BTW, I have ordered a copy of the Secord and x book from Link+.
I wonder if they have a procedure for determining whether or not individuals are selecting what life strategy to use based on the environment, or whether we are seeing the ratio of different genetic variants changing over time as the environment changes.
The first seems unlikely to me, as it is too complicated and requires an interesting range of mutations to arise and not be eliminated.
DR. FROST:
You're arguing that the excess of single males over single females is illusory because many single males are in common-law relationships
No, not really. Again, I am not clear how "single" is coded in your quoted stats. It seems to be talking about the difference between "married" and not "married". That doesn't include common-law relationships, but more importantly it doesn't include the spectrum of dating-type relationships, including hook-ups, which have replaced dating in college environments. (The average number of sexual partners acquired by both men and women during college is reported as 7. But most of these people describe themselves as “single”… and more of the men than the women [since the women are more likely to misinterpret intercourse as a gesture of commitment]. Would these “single” men view themselves as excluded “bare branches”?)
The key word in my first criticism here was involuntarily: "The numbers presented certainly don't show an increase in the number of involuntarily celibate or [involuntarily] unattached men."
Men can be unmarried because they can't find a partner, but also because they don't want a partner; preferring casual sex and revolving short-term relationships to marriage. Or simply because the needs for children, domestic specialization, or appeasing a religious community are not as strong as they were in years past.
Jason, do you hang around with young single men? I do, and I meet a lot who have no women in their lives.
Trading anecdotes is fruitless. Men and women of this age group are my peers, and the romantic lives of my friends and acquaintances run the gamut. Nothing unsettling. The only place I see an unusual surplus of lonely guys is on the Internet. Obviously this is not a random sample.
NULL-A:
“I imagine that some 30% or so of males can only get sex by using prostitutes.”
This is completely ridiculous. Is this is some kind of Internet sickness?
Look, the General Social Survey asks men and women how many sexual partners they have had in the last year. Here are the numbers for men and women born since 1973—that’s 36 and younger:
Male//Female
0: 15.2//12.6
1: 50.3//65.8
2: 12.7//12.4
3-4: 12.2//6.3
5+: 9.6//2.9
OK, a whopping 2.6% more men have had no sexual partners compared with women in the last year. The Seeds of Revolution?
Now let’s compare that with data from 20 years ago. Here are the numbers from the 1988-1990 GSS when respondents were 36 year old and younger:
0: 11.0//9.3
1: 58.9//75.2
2: 8.8//10.0
3-4: 12.4//4.2
5+: 8.9//1.3
So 20 years ago both young males and females were noticeably less promiscuous—with a considerable drop in people saying they only has 1 partner. Both men and women were slightly less likely to be celibate, and, most important the celibacy gap between men and women has not appreciably shifted.
In short, I’m not putting a lot of stock in this idea that a growing number of unfortunate men are being priced out of the sexual marketplace.
The argument that the fewer males are born the more violent does not make sense.
It would predict that if only one male were born he would be extraordinary violent.
Moreover, it does not even pass the smell test.
The single most important activity for males past puberty is mating effort, but in an environment where females are relatively plentiful, competing with other males becomes a non-issue.
Jason claims:
The sex ratio is female biased for blacks starting at birth and this disparity increases over the life span for both biological and social reasons (e.g. higher male mortality and incarceration rates).
Do you have the data? You can point me at it. I think that the steady medical improvements in the last hundred years or so, and the increasing access to society and benefits that African Americans have had mean that more African American male zygotes actually achieve birth. I think birth ratios have been improving.
Secondly, you seem to be confusing cause and effect. The fact that many African American males are incarcerated is due to their more violent natures, and this is, I think, due to violence.
These levels of violence are genetic and were required in a continent/environment where life was short because of disease and parasites.
TOD:
”. The Vikings were a bunch of murdering gang rapists.”
Your link is to a news article about a theory, and no data is provided that sex ratio was behind Viking ferocity. I do not find that theory persuasive.
I provided better data in support of my position, which is linked to a broader set of facts and observations.
“As I understand it there aren't enough single women to go round. In reproductive success terms how would it pay off for women to supply no strings sex?”
Men and women have the same amount of sex partners. Women are having more casual sex and short-term relationships because they are now financially independent, and schooling and career demands have delayed the feasibility of child rearing to a relatively late age.
NULL-A:
By the way, here is the data on large Black-White differences in sex ratio:
“The ratio of single men to single women is dramatically different by racial group. In 2004, the ratio of single men to single women aged 20-29 was 92:100 for blacks and 120:100 for whites (U.S. Census 2006a).”
"The argument that the fewer males are born the more violent does not make sense."
You'll have to be more specific in your criticisms. I explained why it does make sense, and provided data showing that the numbers go in the predicted directions
"It would predict that if only one male were born he would be extraordinary violent."
And if a pound of food a day makes you healthy, then 100 pounds of food of must make you really healthy?
C'mon. I can't think of any theory that works like this.
The single most important activity for males past puberty is mating effort, but in an environment where females are relatively plentiful, competing with other males becomes a non-issue.
No, actually "mating effort" is not always the strategy that leads to the most children for men.
I explained why this is false. Men have different biologically conditioned strategies for competing for mates. There is, e.g. direct competition, such as physical competition, which works better in environments where having low-investment offspring is more successful (CAD strategy), and then there is indirect competition, where being dutiful and cooperative with other men and women and having high investment offspring is more successful (DAD strategy).
Both strategies are a form of competition (with genetic "winners" and "losers"), and in environments with more men, direct competition is more likely to get men and/or their offspring killed.
To the extent that ecological conditions resemble the latter, men are programmed to shift their strategy accordingly.
Secondly, you seem to be confusing cause and effect. The fact that many African American males are incarcerated is due to their more violent natures
There is a feedback loop between environment and genes. Sending people to prison is a social custom that enhances the feedback loop:
Sex ratio at birth = more male crime = sending men to prison = even more unbalanced sex ratio = even more male crime.
Do you have the data? You can point me at it. I think that the steady medical improvements in the last hundred years or so, and the increasing access to society and benefits that African Americans have had mean that more African American male zygotes actually achieve birth. I think birth ratios have been improving.
Another feedback loop is probable, but the female biased sex ratio at birth for Af-Ams and black populations is genetically influenced. See here.
Jason said:
No, actually "mating effort" is not always the strategy that leads to the most children for men.
I explained why this is false. Men have different biologically conditioned strategies for competing for mates. There is, e.g. direct competition, such as physical competition, which works better in environments where having low-investment offspring is more successful (CAD strategy), and then there is indirect competition, where being dutiful and cooperative with other men and women and having high investment offspring is more successful (DAD strategy).
Mating effort is all behavior focussed on gaining mates. As you have so correctly pointed out it takes different forms in different groups.
Moreover, even in DAD societies, there is still competition, because while women have less variance than men, not all women are equal, and there is still an opportunity for some men in DAD societies to obtain multiple matings. Even worse is that some men are simply not going to obtain a mate.
I assure you that while the competition is less physical and might not result in the death or injury of the loser, the outcome is the same: His line is dead.
Jason, I know you can do better than this. The data on Af Am male female ratios (Paternal Effects on the Human Sex Ratio at Birth: Evidence from Interracial Crosses) shows the Af Am ratio being 1.033 for 2M live births.
I think we can make a good case that the male female ratio is improving with improved access to health care and maternal health and will continue to improve to caucasian levels.
In addition, I think that neither male nor female behavior in regards to mating is continuously changeable during
their life but rather follows trajectories that are at most established after puberty when the individuals have assessed the lay of the land.
Of course, you can argue that Af Am males assess their competitors both from their cohort and their seniors, and thus incarceration of older males affects their unconscious calculations, but I think that the primary determinant is their cohort.
Moreover, I think there is a spectrum of individuals, in that some individuals will strive more for additional matings than others.
Further, I think that you cannot simply assert that more males than females leads to a more orderly society under all circumstances, which is what you seem to be asserting.
I think it is pretty clear that among African-derived groups (recent) a larger number of males than females would be disastrous because of the excessive violence that will occur, but even among Asian and White groups, if females are allowed to follow their predilections (being second or third wife to a wealthier man) I can assure you that the losers in those groups will band together and cause all sorts of problems.
Monogamy can be thought of as a male pact to keep the peace by more evenly distributing access to women, and after all, elite males will always have access to multiple females.
NULL-A:
I assure you that while the competition is less physical and might not result in the death or injury of the loser, the outcome is the same: His line is dead.
Please don’t “assure me” of things I’m explaining to you! You were the one who stated that violent competition for mates was the only competition for mates that “makes sense”. I’m the one explaining how increased male competition doesn’t necessarily take the stereotypical physical form people assume it does.
When there are more men there is less violent competition for mates and more indirect competition for mates in the form of cooperative paternal behavior. "More competitive" men are those that can hold out longer and invest more resources for sex. Those are the men that reproduce and have surviving offspring.
Jason, I know you can do better than this....I think we can make a good case that the male female ratio is improving with improved access to health care and maternal health and will continue to improve to caucasian levels.
You didn't read my link. Sex ratio at birth was determined by the race of the father.
So please make your good case that improved maternal health care will change the race of the father. I know you can do better.
think that neither male nor female behavior in regards to mating is continuously changeable during
their life but rather follows trajectories that are at most established after puberty when the individuals have assessed the lay of the land.
This is contradicted by the second Nigel Barber paper linked above. Though I think most of the inter-individual differences are genetically, not ecologically, determined.
Further, I think that you cannot simply assert that more males than females leads to a more orderly society under all circumstances, which is what you seem to be asserting.
Nowhere did I assert or imply such nonsense. This kind of extrapolation almost always says more about the reader.
I linked to papers which showed a statistical relationship between sex ratio and behavior, both across time and populations. And I discussed a working scientific framework for interpreting this statistical relationship. That's it.
I think it is pretty clear that among African-derived groups (recent) a larger number of males than females would be disastrous because of the excessive violence that will occur
This is not obvious for the reasons I've repeatedly explained above. When men are abundant they compete indirectly to win the love of mothers, when men are scarce they compete directly to win the sex of tarts. I don’t know how to spell it out any clearer.
And, LO AND BEHOLD, the actual data shows that more black men relative to black women results in less violence.
I think we can make a good case that the male female ratio is improving with improved access to health care and maternal health and will continue to improve to caucasian levels.
Leaving aside the sad fact that you bloviated about maternal factors in response to the paper I linked showing maternal factors were unrelated to the sex ratio, can you please provide a reference for your claim of an "improving" US black sex ratio?
Because according to this paper the average sex ratio is identical for the black populations of Africa, Britain, and the US:
"As already noted in other instances,the sex ratio at birth in sub-Saharan African populations appears on the average lower than that of European and Asian populations. The mean value found in the DHS surveys (1.033) is consistent with other estimates for African populations: 1.033 in the United States (Khoury et al. 1984) and 1.043 to 1.027 in the United Kingdom (James 1984)."
Health care must have been worse for US and UK blacks than African blacks before 1984, right?
Yep, you are full of it, Null-A. It turns out the Black-White difference in secondary sex ratio has been almost exactly the same for generations:
"In general the sex ratio at birth for the population of the United States is usually regarded as approximately 106 for whites and 103 for Negroes; for example, during the period 1939-1941, the sex ratio at birth among the white population of one state was 106.2 and for Negroes it was 103.0. Thus, the proportion of males is somewhat greater for whites than for the colored population"
The paper linked in my previous comment with data from 1972-1979 lists the white ratio as 105.9 and the black ratio as 103.3. So that’s no change whatsoever over a 40 year period of intense social change for either blacks or whites.
A newer paper with B-W data from 2002 shows the numbers are now 105.0 for whites and 103.2 for blacks. So, if anything, the white sex ratio at birth has converged in the direction of blacks, and the black secondary sex ratio has been the same – almost to the decimal point -- for 70 years. The same average in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In the future please don't pull this kind of garbage. You "make a good case" with data, not cocky assertions.
It's true: all the best men are taken
"Fifty-nine per cent of women offered a single man were interested in pursuing a relationship. When the man was attached, 90 per cent said they were up for the chase. Men were keener on pursuing new mates overall, but didn't mind whether their target was unattached or not.
Burkley and Parker speculate that single women may be more drawn to attached men because they've been "pre-screened" by other women and found to be satisfactory as a mate."
Jason Malloy
Your example of an high operational sex ratio is inner city college campuses, these terribly violent places or hotbeds of radicalism are they?
One man on a desert island with a bunch of women might be boorish - not have to mind his manners - but he would have little reason to be aggressive or disruptive. Lets say 100 people on a desert island of who only six were female, would a system of democratic government be sustainable?
(At London zoo in the 20's a group of 100 baboons had only 6 females; guess what happened.)
Nigel Barbour
"The first point to make is that most violent crime involves young male perpetrators on male victims. The violence is thus between potential competitors over women (1). Such violence can prove deadly. In their study of homicides in Detroit, Canadian researchers found that the leading cause of homicides was seemingly unmotivated aggression that police classify as "trivial altercations." For instance, two men accidentally jostle each other in a bar, there is a scuffle, and someone gets fatally stabbed. Men who lose face in such encounters fall in the pecking order and become less desirable as dates. In trivial altercations, men are indirectly fighting over women."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Where does white skin come from?
TOD:
“Your example of an high operational sex ratio is inner city college campuses, these terribly violent places or hotbeds of radicalism are they?”
Men who go to college are less genetically violent, so all things are not equal. A prediction is that college campuses with more female biased sex ratios are more violent than campuses with less female biased ratios. Care to place your bets now?
College campuses fit the predictions of sex ratio and sexual behavior as discussed by Guttentag and Secord.
“One man on a desert island with a bunch of women might be boorish - not have to mind his manners - but he would have little reason to be aggressive or disruptive.”
A single man on a desert island would behave according to his personal disposition. I have no data or body of theory to evaluate the unique scenario. We do have data and a body of theory to evaluate the consequences of ordinary sex ratios on ordinary social environments. Why not discuss that?
“At London zoo in the 20's a group of 100 baboons had only 6 females; guess what happened.)”
No. I’m trying to have a scientific discussion. You can talk about that with someone else.
And that Nigel Barbour (sic) quote? I’ve been linking to Nigel Barber throughout this thread. Perhaps you should actually read his papers on the relationship between violent crime, sexual behavior, and the sex ratio.
It's not just a random idea, it's a network of observations that fit together. You have to sincerely consider all the data points and how they relate to each other to "get it."
James Q. Wilson -- one of the smartest social scientists out there -- on the book "Bare Branches":
"The authors neglect one offsetting benefit of having more young men than young women. In the U.S., a high sex ratio is statistically associated with high rates of marriage and low rates of illegitimate births. This argument, first made by Marcia Guttenberg and Paul Secord and amplified in other studies--and in my book, "The Marriage Problem"--arises from the laws of supply and demand.
If there are a lot of men for young women, then the women will trade sex in exchange for what they value, which for most women is a stable relationship--that is, marriage and two-parent child care. But if men are scarce and women abundant, then women will lose their bargaining power and exchange sex for whatever is available: one-night stands, illegitimate children or even prostitution. In the U.S., African-Americans have a very low sex ratio, and the consequences of that fact are obvious...
Ms. Hudson and Ms. den Boer acknowledge the work of Ms. Guttenberg and Mr. Secord but choose to ignore it, along with the work of other scholars who have continued research into sex ratio and marriage. "We thus disagree" with these analyses, the authors write, but do not explain why."
Where men are scarce - and women are less fussy as a result - the men should have less reason to fight (fighting is all about getting women according to Barber). Why is it that where promiscuity is common so is violent behaviour? I don't think that it's because a scarcity of men means men can get sex whatever they do, and hence are able to follow their inclination and fight for fun. Fighting hurts!
The post was talking about the danger of the men who are left out becoming disaffected and altering the social and political homeostasis of a society. Civilized behaviour does exclude criminal violence but it includes collective action such as radical populist movements so even if you're right instability could result. I don't know how likely that would be in the Western countries considering the large proportion of middle age men but the basic idea makes sense
Jason,
If there are more single males than single females, only one of two things can happen:
a) some males will not have stable sexual relationships with women (visits to prostitutes don't count).
b) some males will have to share access to women, i.e., polyandry.
You try to resolve this Gordian knot by saying that many men are in fluid relationships with women. Undoubtedly many are. But doesn't this amount to informal polyandry?
Also implicit to your argument is the assumption that many men are only interested in sex and have little or no interest in family formation, i.e., many men are 'cads' and not 'dads'. Undoubtedly this is true. It would be nice if these 'cads' ended up being the surplus males. Indeed, this is the case in many culture areas. In Latin America, 'cads' typically have to make do with a smaller population of prostitutes and loose women.
This pattern, however, is dependent on restricting women's sexual freedom, particularly by stigmatizing those who consort with 'cads'. Guttentag & Secord make this point in their book.
In modern Western societies, informal polyandry no longer involves 'cads' consorting with a smaller population of stigmatized women. It typically involves a 'cad' who fathers a child by a woman and then disappears. A 'dad' then comes into the picture to provide the parental care that the 'cad' will not.
Jason, do you recognize that predispositions to 'caddism' and 'daddism' are at least partly genetic? If so, what will be the long-term consequences?
On another note, you refer to the the General Social Survey to prove that only 15% of all men did not have sex within the last year. First, it's been shown that this kind of self-report exaggerates male sexual activity. Lifetime number of sexual partners, for instance, is typically inflated by a factor of two.
Second, 'having sex' includes visits to prostitutes. What interests me is the proportion of single men who had a girlfriend over the past year. That figure is probably closer to one in two.
TOD:
Where men are scarce - and women are less fussy as a result - the men should have less reason to fight (fighting is all about getting women according to Barber).
If you aren't going to actually read Nigel Barber, then perhaps you shouldn't try and explain him to someone who has.
Fighting is ONE male strategy for competing for women. It is a more successful strategy for competing for women when there are LESS men. Pleases listen this time when I explain why:
1) Men and women have different, but overlapping innate mating preferences. Women prefer a committed, cooperative relationship with a high quality man who will invest in her offspring and not defect at a critical period. Men prefer relatively uncommitted sex with a large number of women. The reason for this is that men have a chance at winning the "reproductive lottery," while women do not. It's possible for a man to have kids from 1000 different women, but not possible for a woman to have 1000 children. Women want DADS, and men want to be CADS.
This is premise 1. If you have problems with premise 1, please reference your specific problems with premise 1.
This is standard evolutionary psychology. It is supported by a great deal of evidence.
2) The operational sex ratio determines who has more sexual market power, men or women. When women are more abundant, men have more sexual market power, and have more ability to become CADS, as their preferences dictate. When men are more abundant, women have more sexual market power, and have more ability to choose DADS as their preferences dictate.
This is premise 2. If you have problems with premise 2, please reference your specific problems with premise 2.
This is simple supply and demand. There are literally 100s of papers supporting this since Guttentag and Secord. Here is a recent one from 2009 looking at college campuses. On campuses with more female biased sex ratios, women are more likely to have sex, but less likely to be in relationships or go out on dates. And they are less likely to feel men are trustworthy.
3) A CAD mating strategy is directly competitive with other men, while a DAD mating strategy is indirectly competitive with other men. The virtues of a good DAD are signaled to a woman over a long period of evaluation and these include patience, sensitivity, loyalty, dutifulness, stability, and cooperativeness. These traits signal to the woman a man who has the ability to accrue resources and who will share them with her and her offspring, and not defect on her. A prospective mate who fights with other men does not display these traits and is therefore not selected by the woman.
The virtues of a good CAD must be signaled to a women over a short period of evaluation, and these include physical robustness, attractiveness, athleticism, “flashiness” and creative expression (improvisational facility with words, music, humor etc), risk taking, dominance, and popularity with other women. (Traits like social status are obviously boosts for both DADS and CADS, but testosterone signals like, e.g. muscles or good looks, can actually be a handicap for DADS, as they are (accurate) physical evidence the man might not commit).
This is premise 3. If you have problems with premise 3, please reference your specific problems with premise 3.
4) OK, so let’s review how the above three premises fit together: When men are more abundant, women hold more sexual market power, and are able to choose men good at being DADS for reproduction. Men who act like DADS are more likely to reproduce. Men are “more competitive” (more likely to win the competition) when they act like DADS. Men who physically fight and win physical fights do not make good DADS and are “less competitive”. They are less likely to be chosen by women for reproduction.
This is the case in the modern United States. Men who are less law-abiding and more promiscuous have fewer children.
When women are more abundant, men hold more sexual market power, and act like CADS. Not only do women have a smaller pool of DADS to choose from, but they trust men less to become DADS, and must make their reproductive decisions at an earlier age, when they are healthier, so they rely on quick honest signals of genetic fitness in their partners, like athleticism, sexual prowess, virility, and youth. Men who physically fight and win physical fights are demonstrating their superiority in these traits and are “more competitive”. They are more likely to be chosen by women for reproduction.
This is premise 4. It is a summary of how premises 1-3 logically relate to each other. If you have problems with premise 4, please reference your specific problems with premise 4.
Thanks.
PS – Here is the latest Nigel Barber paper from 2009, updating his international analysis from 10 years ago with an even better data set: Countries with fewer males have more violent crime: marriage markets and mating aggression.
Women tend to get pregnant in an attempt to formalize a casual relationship, hence we should see an increasing number of pregnancies in educated women.
How explain the increasing number of educated women who are not reproducing with a DAD or anyone else, (i.e. not reproducing at all). Look at the graph of childlessness linked to above. Things have gone furthest in Germany where "among women over the age of 40, 26 percent of women with a higher degree had no children"
DR. FROST:
"You try to resolve this Gordian knot by saying that many men are in fluid relationships with women. Undoubtedly many are. But doesn't this amount to informal polyandry"
No, it amounts to promiscuity/serial monogamy.
More chimp-like then gorilla-like.
"Also implicit to your argument is the assumption that many men are only interested in sex and have little or no interest in family formation, i.e., many men are 'cads' and not 'dads'. Undoubtedly this is true."
Well then what part of my argument is false?
Explicit to my argument is that men, on average, are benefiting from modern sexual arrangements at the expense of women. At least in the sense that conditions are conforming more to what more men would choose voluntarily.
This is contrary to claims that more men are feeling "left out". I don't believe this, but if it is true, it is only a slight effect on the margins, with more men "benefited" in the greater middle.
The real concern is that more additional women than men are probably feeling "left out" and disenfranchised by modern sexuality. Both at the margins and in the middle.
"On another note, you refer to the the General Social Survey to prove that only 15% of all men did not have sex within the last year. First, it's been shown that this kind of self-report exaggerates male sexual activity. Lifetime number of sexual partners, for instance, is typically inflated by a factor of two."
I have to go through this same discussion with every person whenever I bring up an inconvenient fact out of the sexuality literature (Which is pretty much every time I bring up any fact from the sexuality literature). I’ve read these studies, so please don’t do this. There are good reasons for believing that lying on surveys about sexual partner numbers is minimal for both men and women, and most common in very young samples.
The ‘bogus pipeline’ reporting condition, which psychologically smokes out survey respondents by hooking them up to a lie detector, finds that both men and women underreport their sexual partner numbers off of the lie detector, and that women are more dishonest.
I find this line of argumentation unconvincing. The General Social Survey numbers above do not reveal a rise in sexually excluded men over the last 20 years.
"Second, 'having sex' includes visits to prostitutes. What interests me is the proportion of single men who had a girlfriend over the past year. That figure is probably closer to one in two."
No, what interests you is if the single men wanted a girlfriend. This is exactly how you framed it in your post: ““Maybe he just enjoys being single,” I said. “Oh, no,” came the reply. “He wants to get married. He’s tried everything: dating clubs, church groups. Nothing seems to work…I often hear this kind of remark nowadays. ””
The General Social Survey asks about prostitution. The numbers predictably show this is not an appreciable factor at all. The men having sex in the numbers above are having it with voluntary partners. According to the GSS, for those born since 1973 , 79% of the men were in a romantic relationship with the last person they had sex with, and 92% of the women.
So your one-in-two guess was way wrong.
TOD:
"Women tend to get pregnant in an attempt to formalize a casual relationship, hence we should see an increasing number of pregnancies in educated women."
Educated women are genetically predisposed toward high investment reproductive strategy, and have a greater chance to and inclination for securing DADS, which is what they do. Divorce and single motherhood are rarest, and increasingly rare, among educated women.
"How explain the increasing number of educated women who are not reproducing with a DAD or anyone else, (i.e. not reproducing at all)"
I could expend a lot of words on this topic -- there are multiple interrelated causes. Put very succinctly, this is high investment biology interacting with modern economic conditions.
Women with high investment genotypes are predisposed toward later reproduction, when resource conditions are optimal. But now the idea of "optimal resource conditions" is so ridiculously inflated that many women are nearing or past menopause when they finally feel conditions are suitable for reproduction. (See my comments and links on status indifference. Also see the beginning segment of Idiocracy, which satirizes this.)
This is why birth rates have dropped lowest in modernized East Asian countries. East Asians have the highest investment reproductive genotype, and therefore are most sensitive to resource conditions in relation to reproduction.
When there are more men and fewer women in a society, women hold more power over the sexual marketplace and men conform more to female preferences. Men must wait a longer amount of time, and invest more in commitment and resources before women “green light” sex. In short, men act more like DADS. If a man does not behave in this manner, the woman has plenty of other options, and can more easily reject the man for someone more in alignment with her preferences.
One would think that with "men [having] to bend more to female demands (i.e. more financial and emotional investment for sex)" educated women especially will be having their requirements for a high investment DAD met.
But in fact educated women increasingly feel their partners are not ones they want a permanant relationship with. Highly educated women should be attempting to transform a casual relationship into a long term one through an 'accidental' pregnancy. (If a surplus of men leads to those men following a DAD strategy especially appealing to educated women and there is as much casual sex as you say). The figures for childlessness suggest that educated women are not having these trivial sexual relationships and find men's behaviour towards them is very much CAD.
If a man does not behave in this manner, the woman has plenty of other options, and can more easily reject the man for someone more in alignment with her preferences
Few women have a preference for ending up childless.
TOD:
"One would think that with "men [having] to bend more to female demands (i.e. more financial and emotional investment for sex)" educated women especially will be having their requirements for a high investment DAD met."
Educated women are much more likely to secure high investment partners and have stable marriages than less educated women. This is not the reason their fertility rate is lower than that of less educated women.
Your comment is a confusing rejoinder to my 4 premise post, because you don’t make it clear how you think what you are saying applies to sex ratios at all.
One of my 4 premises was not that highly educated women should be able to land a rich, handsome husband and have 14 children, or that some marmosets in a zoo in 1850 should have been nicer to each other.
You are not a pleasurable person to have a scientific discussion with.
Dr. Frost:
From my response above, I should have said More chimp-like thAn gorilla-like. I need to start reading over my posts.
Also RE: prostitution. The GSS shows that only 2.0% of the men born since 1973 visited a prostitute in the last year.
The vast majority of men that visit prostitutes are CADS (many of them married) who have had more voluntary sex partners than average as well, not involuntarily celibate males. Even with the false assumption that half (or even all) of the 2.0% of young men who visited a prostitute did so as a last refuge, it doesn't come close to supporting your intuition that there are lots of sexually excluded males hiding somewhere in (or evading) the data.
In fact, prostitute use among men dwindled after 1970, and has continued to decline. (Looking at both age and cohort. e.g. men who were 30 and under in 2000 were less likely to have ever paid for sex than men who were 30 and under in 1980).
Twice as many men born before 1973 -- 4.0% -- visited a prostitute in the last year than men born after, even though young men have higher sex drives. So if prostitute use is evidence of males being sexually excluded, then sexual exclusion must actually be decreasing.
Early hominids were 'chimp like' (i.e. the promiscuous multi-male multi-female group). Modern humans are predominantly monogamous multifamily structure. An intermediate step in the evolution of pair bonding was the modal composition exemplified by the Hamadryas and - especially - Geleda baboons (i.e. multiharem, some males are unmated). Surely you can see the relevance.
Low fertility is indeed explicable by a high investment strategy . However I am wondering how it is that 26% of the best educated highest quality women can be ending up childless; in genetic terms they might as well be putting a gun to their head. Is it just coincidence that (aging) Germany is where the greatest excess of unmarried males and high rates of childlessness are found among the most educated women?
How does the explaination for educated women's high and still rising rates of childlessness relate to operational sex ratios?
"Divorce laws have been liberalized throughout the Western world. It is now much easier for older men to re-enter the marriage market and marry younger women".
Men are reluctant to marry older women and the younger women are increasingly taken by remarrying older men.
"Who Pays for Sex?", by Dr Helen Ward, was published in the British Medical Journal in 2005. It ... found that the proportion of British men paying for sex had increased, from 5.9 per cent in 1990 to 9 per cent in 2000. The largest group of the men were in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties and living in London"
TOD:
Surely you can see the relevance.
No, I can't. I can see you don't have a paradigm to discuss this issue with me properly. If your hypothesis is that male-biased sex ratios lead to more violence, then please state that explicitly, and discuss the data and theory behind that hypothesis -- as I have been doing. Articulate why your hypothesis has a stronger theoretical and empirical backing. That is how a scientific discussion progresses.
Not by anecdote and insiniuation.
"How does the explaination for educated women's high and still rising rates of childlessness relate to operational sex ratios?"
State your hypothesis.
I don't see it as very relevant to my understanding of the issue. But to the extent that more men lead to higher investment reproductive strategies, then male-biased ratios will lead to greater childlessness; since I see childlessness as a consequence of high investment reproductive strategy in the novel modern economic environment. (i.e. female education and labor force participation).
RE: the prostitution paper. Trends may be different in the UK and in the US. Nevertheless, the paper suggests a rise in UK CADishness, not UK sexual exclusion. The typical man in the paper had high numbers of voluntary sex partners and was divorced:
"Men who paid for sex were more likely to report 10 or more sexual partners in the previous 5 years; only a minority of their lifetime sexual partners (19.3%) were commercial [...]
This behaviour is more common in men who live in London, who are in their late twenties and early thirties, and who are currently single, with the highest proportion in men who have been previously married. We have shown that men who pay for sex have other risks for STI, including higher numbers of partners and being more likely to meet new partners abroad. "
Also male biased sex ratios probably increases female childlessness on the right tail of the bell curve (among highly educated females), but probably decreases male childlessness on the left tail of the bell curve (among low education males), because male biased sex ratios increase male labor force participation and incomes.
I doubt that's a wash. At the international level, at least, the richer countries have lower birth rates (i.e. more childlessness) and more male-biased sex ratios.
Excess males do not lead to humans shifting towards chimp like mating behaviour with no strings sex ("promiscuity/serial monogamy") The reason why is that human mating behaviour is more like that of certain baboons than chimps.
Male-biased sex ratios in humans lead to unprecedentedly high numbers of men with no mate We know this results in violence in the baboons whose mating system is most similar to our own. In humans there might be increased political instability rather than violence. As the current excess of males is unprecedented I don't think anyone can be sure what will happen.
I doubt very much that there are fewer men visiting prostitutes. It is certainly not true that there are fewer prostitutes.
TOD:
” Excess males do not lead to humans shifting towards chimp like mating behaviour with no strings sex”
No it does not. And nowhere in my four premises did I state that it did. In fact I repeatedly said exactly the opposite: male-biased sex ratios lead to more monogamous breeding.
You are conflating different issues/trends under discussion. Most likely on purpose, to be a troll.
To repeat myself: "Sex ratio is a separate issue. I don't think it has a huge impact, but to the extent it has an effect on society, it is likely opposite to the one Dr. Frost proposes"
“We know this results in violence in the baboons whose mating system is most similar to our own.”
So let me get this straight: I just explained to you that men are less violent when they have less sexual market power because females have greater choice and choose less violent men because such men are more likely to invest heavily in their offspring, and you tell me this is wrong because Geleda baboons – a sexually dimorphic (males are twice the weight of the females), polygynous primate species with no paternal investment whatever – win access to mates through violence.
And you don’t see any logical holes here? None? Interesting.
“I doubt very much that there are fewer men visiting prostitutes. It is certainly not true that there are fewer prostitutes.”
I just provided data that fewer men are visiting prostitutes in the US.
Prostitution typically decreases with both national wealth and [concomitant] sexual libertarianism:
Prostitution is more common in poor than in rich countries. For instance, the Global Program on AIDS/World Health Organization estimated the proportion of men using prostitutes in any given year to be 11 percent in the Ivory Coast, 10 percent in Lesotho, 8 percent in Togo, and 13 percent in Kenya. This can be contrasted with, for instance, a French study that estimated that 3.3 percent of French men had visited a prostitute in the past five years (Carael et al. [1991] and de Graaf [1995], both cited in Atchison et al. [1998, p. 184]). Prostitution has seen a secular decline in rich countries. For instance, while the Kinsey study, conducted in 1938–47, concluded that about 70 percent of the American white male population will ultimately purchase sex from a prostitute, the incidence among men surveyed in the NHSLS was 18 percent (Kinsey et al. 1948; Sullivan and Simon 1998).
Here's the flip side to all this:
Growing numbers of Western men are actually beginning to realize that marriage is the equivalent of a death-sentence for the average male, and more and more Western men are shying away from relationships with Western women, who are proving themselves to be increasingly demanding, critical, pretentious, "entitled", hostile, aggressive - essentially everything a man DOESN'T want in a potential mate.
Jason Malloy said
"' Excess males do not lead to humans shifting towards chimp like mating behaviour with no strings sex'
No it does not. And nowhere in my four premises did I state that it did. In fact I repeatedly said exactly the opposite: male-biased sex ratios lead to more monogamous breeding"
Sorry JM I thought that you were the one who said this:-
"What we see instead is more relationship churning. A higher number of shorter term relationships through life. As my link suggested, this "serial monogamy" is actually better for male mental health. And male mental well-being increased during the same time frame."
A higher number of shorter term relationships throughout life; I would really like someone to tell me what that means if not more promiscuity. I wasn't the one who brought up primates or suggested a similarity between chimp mating habits and societies with an excess of men.
"DR. FROST:
'You try to resolve this Gordian knot by saying that many men are in fluid relationships with women. Undoubtedly many are. But doesn't this amount to informal polyandry'
No, it amounts to promiscuity/serial monogamy.
More chimp-like then gorilla-like"
Jason Malloy also said
"Educated women are much more likely to secure high investment partner"
Lets look a little closer at chimp mating habits.
"The salient points are (1) that females become more selective in their mating around ovulation and (2) that high-ranking males have a substantial reproductive advantage according to paternity tests."
To me chimps are (as you yourself suggest) the primate whose sex lives are most similar to your theorised mode of mating behaviour in a human society with an excess of unmated men.
And the way high ranking male chimps get sex?
"The females most often do not go willingly, often returning to the group with injuries from the high-quality consort male."
Geledas are far closer to humans.
Even though they live in large multi harem groups the bachelor Geleda baboons only try and take over a harem if the females are showing signs of disinterest in their male. Geleda mating is not settled by males fighting. When there is a challenge the male rushes around each one of his females grooming her, if the females prefer the challenger he wins and the incumbent gives up.
When there are more men and fewer women in a society, women hold more power over the sexual marketplace and men conform more to female preferences.
In courtship yes but men - unlike chimps - do not use force on females, they compete with other men for status in various ways. That's the kind of competition that will be intensified and leave a lot of very alienated men frantic for status. They're the ones who are likely to try and alter society and change the rules of the game.
"In a recent survey of 11,000 men, the British Medical Association found that ... single university graduates more likely to have paid for sex than married men and non-graduates".
Scale of Prostitution in Europe: How many Sex Workers?
"In some Northern European countries the ratio of prostitutes per 1,000 population is between 1and 2"
Highly educated women are likely to end up childless because their preferred mates - high status men - are marrying less educated but younger women especially in their second marriages.
Re. Sex ratio and German politics after WW1. If Heinsohn is right about disaffected young men being the cause of political instability then what did they have to be angry about in 1930 as regards sex ratios. Could it be a shortage of females born from 1914 onwards
The variations of human sex ratio at birth during and after wars, and their potential explanations .
Jason,
If single men are sexually involved with a smaller number of women, we're talking about informal polyandry.
The only men happy with this situation are people, like yourself, who think it will make men more sexually responsible and likelier to commit. Undoubtedly it will. The downside is that it will have the reverse effect on women.
Please don't tell me that women are naturally monogamous. Women are probably more predisposed to monogamy, but this behavioral response is conditional on being in a parenting relationship. In recent times, contraception and voluntary childlessness have leveled the behavioral playing field.
P.S. I've seen higher statistics for male visits to prostitutes. Are most of these men cads? I think most of them were until the mid-1990s. The profile of 'Johns' has changed substantially in recent years.
TOD:
”I wasn't the one who brought up primates or suggested a similarity between chimp mating habits and societies with an excess of men.”
I did not say that male-biased sex ratios lead to promiscuous, chimpanzee style mating. I said exactly the opposite: Male-biased sex ratios lead to more monogamous breeding. I apparently wasted a lot of words trying to explain this to you.
You are conflating two separate topics under discussion. The first was whether sexuality has become more promiscuous or more polygamous. The second was whether sex ratios increase or decrease violence.
Dr. Frost is saying that the sexual landscape is changing us into a polygamous gorilla-like society and that the sex ratio is one force that will exacerbate this.
I am saying that the sexual landscape is turning us into a promiscuous chimp-like society and that the sex ratio will ameliorate this.
To the extent that sexuality has become more promiscuous I am not saying that is a consequence of the sex ratio. I’m saying that the sex ratio is one countervailing trend that we should expect to ameliorate, instead of exacerbate, the situation.
”That's the kind of competition that will be intensified and leave a lot of very alienated men frantic for status. They're the ones who are likely to try and alter society and change the rules of the game.”
The data shows that excess males compete in pro-social ways, such as working harder and holding down jobs. You can speculate they will do something crazy, revolutionary, or violent, but this is not something with much empirical backing. As James Q. Wilson notes in the review of Bare Branches above, we have a much more reliable empirical picture of how sex ratios affect things like unemployment and single parenthood than things like political movements.
Dr. Frost:
” If single men are sexually involved with a smaller number of women, we're talking about informal polyandry.”
This is incorrect, because polyandry refers to a concurrent relationship. We’re talking about promiscuity and serial monogamy.
“The only men happy with this situation are people, like yourself, who think it will make men more sexually responsible and likelier to commit. Undoubtedly it will. The downside is that it will have the reverse effect on women.”
What situation? The high sex ratio? You are incorrect. High sex ratios lead to less female promiscuity, less single motherhood, and less divorce.
” Please don't tell me that women are naturally monogamous. Women are probably more predisposed to monogamy, but this behavioral response is conditional on being in a parenting relationship.”
The behavioral response is certainly modified by ecological conditions, but, as a biological universal, women experience many more negative emotions in response to uncommitted sexual relationships than men. All relationships are reproductive relationships as far as our evolved emotional circuitry is concerned.
This is just as true for women who have consciously decided to delay childbearing for career and education: women on college campuses have a revealed preference for committed relationships over casual sex.
Therefore there is a universal biological basis for the effects of sex ratio on society, and we shouldn't expect it to disappear (or reverse) with female economic integration, as predicted by Guttentag and Secord.
For example, the low secondary sex ratio in Sub-Saharan Africa and the tropics, where women also have a large degree of economic independence from men, is a genetic adaptation to promote polygynous low investment breeding.
P.S. I've seen higher statistics for male visits to prostitutes. Are most of these men cads? I think most of them were until the mid-1990s. The profile of 'Johns' has changed substantially in recent years.
As noted above, the GSS shows a decrease in prostitution use among younger cohorts. One large population that is likely missing from the GSS, however, is Spanish-speaking immigrants. Most of these prostitute users are single, poor, younger, and unmarried, and do not fit the CAD profile. This is a genuine example of sexual exclusion from an unbalanced (immigrant) sex ratio combined with lack of cultural libertarianism (CAD genotypes, low cultural libertarianism, and male-biased sex ratios all independently promote prostitute use).
This is not an effect of the secular sex ratio trends discussed in your post, but of immigration, and needs to be considered for data that may include this population.
By the way, another Data Point of Great Acrimony: the number of men who consume pornography has also not increased over the last 25 years.
Female chimps are coerced by high ranking males. Unlike Geledas, gorillas do not live in multi harem groups. I don't see the relevance to humans.
"To the extent that sexuality has become more promiscuous I am not saying that is a consequence of the sex ratio. I’m saying that the sex ratio is one countervailing trend that we should expect to ameliorate, instead of exacerbate, the situation"
You cite James Q. Wilson who says areas with the lowest proportion of men have the most social pathologies. True enough, but social pathologies tend to remove men by death or imprisonment. Clearly areas with social pathologies will always have a shortage of men; how could it be otherwise?
"Sexually deprived men are well-behaved, socially beneficial men.
That makes sense only when there are enough women for almost all the men, because the few men who lose out in the competition for women will tend to have non-competitive natures. It is not obvious to me why that will still hold true when there is an unprecedented scarcity and many men with competitive natures will be going without.
Prostitution and the sex discrepancy in reported number of sexual partners
"heterosexual men underreport contact with prostitutes.
A buffered interaction between sex ratio, age difference at marriage, and population growth in humans, and their significance for sex ratio evolution
"The presence, in man, of a significant high sex ratio at birth (Mb) is a biological fact, and its evolution is not satisfactorily explained by differential mortality of males.
Such a high sex ratio could have evolved primarily as a buffering interaction between growth rate or increase of human population (Rb) and age difference at marriage (d)[...]The buffered system herein described evolved in growing populations. In declining populations it causes a cumulative maximal increase of d"
TOD:
"I don't see the relevance to humans."
The relevance is that promiscuity is not polygamy. The two mating systems are orthogonal and very different. That's it. That's as far as the analogy goes.
"Clearly areas with social pathologies will always have a shortage of men; how could it be otherwise?"
It's good to know I'm now clearly right at this advanced stage in the discussion. But if you are insinuating male-biased sex ratios are only a consequence of mating behavior (including violence) and not a cause, then you are wrong for logical and empirical reasons.
To take one example, the sex ratio of different immigrant groups has predicted their social pathology. Groups with many males and few females resulted in more family formation and harder working males.
”That makes sense only when there are enough women for almost all the men, because the few men who lose out in the competition for women will tend to have non-competitive natures.”
Again, this is a false understanding of what ‘competitive’ means. Violent men become less violent where female choice reigns precisely because they are ‘competitive’ (in the biological sense, not the conscious sense). A person who is “competitive” at Scrabble learns to play the game so he can win, he doesn’t whip out a knife and kill everyone in the room. That may describe something, but not being "competitive" at the game Scrabble.
”It is not obvious to me why that will still hold true when there is an unprecedented scarcity and many men with competitive natures will be going without.”
See above. The higher the scarcity of women the more violence will become a losing reproductive strategy.
The secular sex ratio trends we are discussing are not “unprecedented”. See the immigrant paper I linked above. 1.05 is nothing compared with, say, 1.50. Yet even under the extreme ratio the social dynamics are what I am describing.
Percentage of whites who never married, by sex (2006 vs. 1970).
" In 1970, 6.9% of men aged 41-45 were never married, compared to 5.1% of women. This is not a very big difference, and can be entirely explained away if you believe that 2.6% of men are homosexual compared to only 1.1% for women.
In 2006, 16.7% of men aged 41-45 were never married, compared to 10.6% of women. The unmarried gap has increased from 1.8 percentage points to 6.1 percentage points.
This indicates that most omega males born between 1925 and 1930 were able to find wives. But omega males born between 1961 and 1966 wind up never being able to find a wife. In modern times, women would rather become the second trophy wife of an older alpha male or never marry at all, than settle for an omega male
An alternative explanation is that men don't need to get married in 2006 because women are willing to give them premarital sex. In 1970, a man had to marry in order to get a woman to put out".
Prostitution and the sex discrepancy in reported number of sexual partners
"After adjusting for these prostitution-related factors, the ratios for the sex discrepancy in the reported number of sexual partners hover slightly above and below 1 (see Table 1), indicating that prostitution can account for essentially all of the disparity"
I very much doubt that fewer men are watching porn. It is certainly not true that there are fewer performers or productions.
A person who is “competitive” at Scrabble learns to play the game so he can win, he doesn’t whip out a knife and kill everyone in the room. That may describe something, but not being "competitive" at the game Scrabble.
And if he loses every game does he continue to play scrabble?; or does he find a game that gives him a chance to win.
The higher the scarcity of women the more violence will become a losing reproductive strategy
Whaterever the form a successful strategy for winning the competition for women takes, the higher the scarcity of women the more losers there will be. Losers who will realize their strategy is not a winning one - for them at least.
Its the age structure of the population that counteracts the disruptive effect of excess men.
Jason Malloy,
I think I have a problem with premise 1):
1) Men and women have different, but overlapping innate mating preferences....
Doesn't mating involve reproduction?
I take your point to be that where the sex-ratio favors the women, they will choose DADS. Doesn't this assume that sex and reproduction are linked? That the procreative aspect is necessarily part of the mating? What if they're not linked? What if the procreative aspect can be separated out? Would that change, even temporarily, who the women would choose?
The problem with this analysis is that it does not reflect what is actually happening in the marketplace. Yes, there are a lot of short-term relationships happening == serial monogamy. But, the women are not choosing DADS as their serial monogamous mates, by and large. The reason for this is that these couplings are presumed to not be reproductive in nature. The pill, abortion rights, the decline of female slut shaming, the rise of female economic independence -- all of these impact female sexual choice, particularly depending on the nature of the relationship in question. A University of Michigan study from a few years ago concluded that women prefer CADS for short-term relationships and DADS for long-term relationships. This reflects the reality of the dating market in the 20s (when men and women alike are in short-term mode), which favors CADS, regardless of the overall sex ratio. Women are not using this sex ratio advantage to "demand" DAD behavior among prospective sex partners, at least not before they start to husband hunt in the late 20s and early 30s. It's that differentiation in partner preference displayed by women (CADS for short term, DADS for long term) that is leaving quite a few men in their 20s high and dry, while other men have access to more women than they can manage, because they typify the kind of guy women prefer for a short-term thing.
http://news.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news-2/Dads-and-cads-3A-U-M-study-tests-female-preferences-for-partners-5208-1/
In light of Novaseeker's comment, I think I can be more precise.
1) Men and women have different, but overlapping innate mating preferences....
When?
CHRISTOPHER:
”I take your point to be that where the sex-ratio favors the women, they will choose DADS. Doesn't this assume that sex and reproduction are linked? That the procreative aspect is necessarily part of the mating? What if they're not linked? What if the procreative aspect can be separated out? Would that change, even temporarily, who the women would choose?”
As I said above, all sex is reproductive sex as far as our evolved sexual instincts are concerned. As I explained in premise 3, under conditions where women are not able to secure, or do not need, parental investment, they are more likely to select the best CADS based on honest signals of genetic fitness (e.g. athleticism, attractiveness) or other quickly processed signals of successful CAD behaviors (e.g. popularity with other women)
NOVASEEKER:
.”The problem with this analysis is that it does not reflect what is actually happening in the marketplace. Yes, there are a lot of short-term relationships happening == serial monogamy. But, the women are not choosing DADS as their serial monogamous mates, by and large.”
DADS and CADS are not two separate species, but a continuum of male behavior. The paradigm I’m discussing only requires that women desire sex within the context of committed relationships more than men. It does not require a certain magnitude. As long as women, on average, will trade any differential degree of “quality” for commitment, then their scarcity in the marketplace will give them greater power to demand and obtain that commitment.
” Women are not using this sex ratio advantage to "demand" DAD behavior among prospective sex partners, at least not before they start to husband hunt in the late 20s and early 30s”
Except that they are. Even in college – late teens/early 20s. You are making a faulty inference from secular trends. A relative difference is not an absolute difference. Even in environments where women are relatively promiscuous, they are not as relatively promiscuous as men. It might be hard to see at a distance, but women, on average, routinely trade a little bit of “quality” in their mates for a little bit of commitment – even when their overall preferences have shifted more towards “quality”. We can see this by observing how their choices differ as a function of expanded (more men) or limited (less men) mate choice options. If women always wanted the CADiest males available, then they should pick more CAD-like males when there are more men, because there are more likely to be a selection of sexy Ultra-CADS. But if women value some degree of commitment, then they should pick less CAD-like males when there are more men, because there are more likely to be men who are both sexy and committed. And the latter is what we see: women choose less CAD-like men when given the option.
"Even in environments where women are relatively promiscuous, they are not as relatively promiscuous as men"
Promiscuity in a set of men does not equate to the whole class. Distribution fallacy.
A lot of meaningless tossing around of meaningless numbers, thus approximating the traditional discussion of just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Not too many posters seem to have any clue what is happening with men and women, preferring to play with statistics, and advanced debating techniques.
1. Rutgers U does an annual paper on men and women. Way back in 2004 22% of all single men said they had no intention of every marrying. There is no reason to believe this percentage has dropped, or in fact has not exploded.
2. If you check it out, men and women raised by the increasing number of single mothers (unwed; divorced; etc) behave differently than those raised by two parent families. Their marriage and divorce patterns are different, and around 85% of all men in prison came from single moms.
3. As one person said, men are increasingly aware that marriage is a 40% chance of destroying their lives, with child support based on imaginary incomes, in many cases lifetime alimony, and adulterous women get treated like victims. Not to mention false sex abuse charges, false DV charges and more. Sure sounds like something every man seeks with every pore of his body.
5. UK census bureau reported that one million male Brits are missing and their location is unknown. My niece in Mexico City can tell you where a lot of them are, but not the whole million. I am sure from all these meaningless postings you are not capable of understanding that.
The men who prefer video games to divorce slavery are at times accused of being Peter Pans. So, Peter Pan spends his days fighting crocodiles and pirates, and when he is all hot and sweaty and victorious, Tinker Belle says, "Come with me to the shady arbor by the pool and I will make you feel all better."
I think you guys should stop imitating Tom Gradgrind and actually listen to men.
Anonymous age 67
Number of Marriages per 1,000
Unmarried Women Age 15 and
Older, by Year, United States:
1960 73.5
1961 72.2
1962 71.2
1963 73.4
1964 74.6
1965 75.0
1966 75.6
1967 76.4
1968 79.1
1969 80.0
1970 76.5
1972 77.9
1975 66.9
1977 63.6
1980 61.4
1983 59.9
1985 56.2
1987 55.7
1990 54.5
1991 54.2
1992 53.3
1993 52.3
1995 50.8
2000 46.5
2004 39.9
Notice that the sharp drop from 1995-2004 coincides with the rise of the Men's Rights Movement, The Internet, and alternative non-MSM.
Considering it is women who complain that they cannot find a man, that men encourage each other to not marry, and the fact that the marriage rate continues to rapidly drop and the number of marriages continues to slowly drop, it is reasonable to conclude that men are avoiding marriage, and women want them to step up to the altar/alter.
Anonymous age 67
Peter Frost,
The reason why there is a large number of single men in ther teens and 20s in the Western world is not due of a sex ratio imbalance of more boys than girls being born (In many ways, what you said is a big pile of bullshit), it is because the vast majority of women in their teens and 20s (around 80-95% of the female population of teens and 20s) are chasing after and sleeping with the minority of single men in their teens and 20s e.g. the bad boys and thugs, while giving the majority of men in their teens and 20s (the "nice guys") the "friend zone" and save them for later when they (the majority of Western Women in their teens and 20s) hit their 30s and they start looking for a "nice guy" to put a wedding ring on their finger.
What has caused this situation in the Western World lays at the feet of 40 years of modern feminism (both second and third-wave) with modenr feminism destroying the rleations between both genders in the form of no-fault divorce and the financially crippling repercussions that affect men the most (thank you Anonymous age 67), pro-female/anti-male legislation (e.g. sexual discrimination and harrassment laws), high levels of misandry in Western popular culture (e.g. the Western media lionising women while demonising men at the smae time) etc etc. As a result, the majority of Western Women has massive entitlement complexes and view the majority of Western Men as worthless and only useful as walking ATM machines and sperm donors.
If you and the other comment posters can understand what I and Anonymous age 67 have said, then good for you. Modern feminism has got a lot to answer for the current shit state of affairs in the Western World.
Jason seems to think there are a lot of young women out there looking for the "DAD" archetype, and presumably unable to find one.
Well as far as the "DAD" archetype goes, I'm the perfect match. I'm a single white male, 27 years old, I have a stable six-figure income, and I'm a millionaire. I went to a top school on the East Coast and won a bunch of computer and math competitions as a kid. I'm in reasonable physical shape. I am multitalented in other areas: I cook, I play the piano, I do improv comedy.
Yet I have not had a steady girlfriend in approximately the last 2 years. Now that doesn't mean I haven't had sex, mind you. But we're talking about one-night stands, mostly with fairly screwed-up low-quality girls, not even really reaching the point of what you might call a "short-term relationship" or "casual dating."
(Before my ex who I broke up with 2 years ago, I had never previously had a girlfriend and was a virgin.)
I've had at least 25 first dates since the beginning of 2009. I've lost count of the total. There are at least a decent number of those girls who I would have been interested in dating. Maybe they weren't the best girls in the world, but there were a good number who would have been suitable partners for a LTR.
But virtually none of these girls would appear to have been interested in pursuing a LTR with me. They were happy to go on a date, maybe two dates, and then I was promptly ignored. I turned down a few of them (probably the only one who seemed interested in dating me was overweight and not all that interesting/smart), but in general they rejected me, not the other way around.
Now I'm pretty scared of marriage due to divorce theft and no-fault divorce, but if those problems were fixed, then it might be OK.
Possible conclusions:
1. I have a lot of competition. These girls have tons of options, because there are a lot more single guys than single women. See the map: http://www.xoxosoma.com/singles/
2. There's something wrong with me that makes me highly unattractive. I'm not entirely sure what it is. I have some theories (e.g. my lack of dating experience), but they're mostly speculation.
3. There's nothing really wrong with me, but I'm just not what these girls are looking for. For example, if a girl is looking for a tattooed rock guitarist with a motorcycle, I'm not the guy for her.
4. I'm doing something wrong. I should be meeting girls somewhere other than bars and online. I'm not sure where that is. My workplace is virtually all-male, my friends are virtually all-male, and their social circles don't contain single women.
I'm inclined to think that there is probably at least a little truth to all 4 of these.
Now here's the thing. I know a decent number of guys who are doing *much worse than me* dating-wise. Some of them have literally given up.
There's definitely a problem. What's not clear to me is whether decreasing the sex ratio would help DADs more or CADs more, and whether it would cause more DADs to behave like CADs.
But I *definitely* don't see the dating market among 20-something women penalizing CADs in any significant way. There's no stigma. If anything, the guy who sleeps with a lot of women is considered cool (to guys) and desirable (to women).
And the latter is what we see: women choose less CAD-like men when given the option.
Really?
The LA area has the largest sex ratio in the United States. According to your theory, it should provide the best environment for women to enforce their preference for less CAD-like men. Do you really believe that is what is happening in LA?
lordzorgon,
Check out this following links, it will help you better understand why the majority of guys in their teens and 20s in the Western World are single while the majority of girls in their teens and 20s don't want us (except for when they hit thier 30s and want to sucker/"nice guy" to fund their retirement from their 10 years of sport sex and partying) and only go for a minority of men in the same age bracket...
http://no-maam.blogspot.com/2008/03/love-is-for-suckers-blood-suckers.html
http://no-maam.blogspot.com/2008/02/male-and-female-equal-but-different.html
http://no-maam.blogspot.com/2008/02/questionators-should-women-have-right.html
Like I have said, there is no "surplus" of men in their teeens and 20s. The problem is due to modern feminism making the vast majority of Western Women in their teens and 20s into promiscious whores that have sex with a minority of men and "save" the majority of men in their teens and 20s for later when they hit their 30s, especailly after they have used them as a non-sexual "friend" throughout the man's teens and 20s.
ANON:
” Promiscuity in a set of men does not equate to the whole class. Distribution fallacy.”
Nowhere did I say or imply that all men or all women are exactly alike. Though I realize you can never have an adult discussion about race or sex differences without someone reading it into your argument so they can interject with their awesome brilliance.
LORDZORGON:
”Jason seems to think there are a lot of young women out there looking for the "DAD" archetype, and presumably unable to find one.”
No, I explicitly did not say this. I said nothing about the absolute level of female preference. I certainly did not say women prefer a DAD “archetype”. The secular female preference has drifted more towards CAD-like traits. (e.g. attractiveness is more important to females now than in the past). I am speaking of a relative female preference for commitment vis a vis men. Females are never as promiscuous as men (as a group) prefer, therefore when male scarcity puts females at a sexual market disadvantage, females give in to male sexual pressures more easily.
I am sorry for your romantic frustrations, but they really don’t have any relevance to scientific discussion.
NOVASEEKER:
”The LA area has the largest sex ratio in the United States. According to your theory, it should provide the best environment for women to enforce their preference for less CAD-like men. Do you really believe that is what is happening in LA?”
There doesn’t seem to be one person here who is able or willing to think quantitatively or empirically.
As I stated in the last Thursday’s post: “A new analysis of almost 700 zip codes in the 10 largest American cities [including LA] in the 2000 census shows that standard sex ratio theory is still correct: more men = more marriage.”
Roughneck: I've already read all that stuff. I got pretty deep into the PUA scene and have backed off in more recent times.
I don't agree with your remark that "there is no "surplus" of men in their teeens and 20s." The Census data is pretty clear on this; I think it's something like 106:100 M:F in the 20-24 age range.
Now that *by itself* is probably not enough to make a gigantic difference in the dating market. But it does give women at least modestly more bargaining power to get whatever it is they want out of men.
Also, the surplus of young men is higher in a lot of places; and the various other factors discussed in the original post, such as the "older men dating younger women" phenomenon, can further increase the practical ratio.
As a man, it would benefit me to live in an area with a much lower sex ratio. In the city where I live, it is approximately 135:100 in the 25-29 age group, according to Census data.
In NYC proper, on the other hand, the Census data shows that it's 95:100 in that same age group.
If we subtract out the married folks (which still doesn't include almost-practically-married folks in committed relationships, remember) we get 154:100 in my city and 104:100 in NYC.
Now it could be worse. I could be in the San Jose, CA metro area, where the sex ratio after subtracting married folks is 157:100 (121:100 for the whole population).
But still, just think: if you paired off every single unmarried 25-29 female with an unmarried 25-29 male here, fully 35% (54/154) of the 25-29 men would inevitably be left out.
That doesn't strike me as healthy for society in the least.
Jason: I actually agree with some of what you are saying. Clearly, bargaining power is important. We don't want the sex ratio to be, let's say, 50:100; that would clearly be unhealthy. But would a sex ratio of 200:100 be healthy, either? I find that doubtful. Even if it had some positive effects, on net, such a society would have a lot of unhappy men.
I can fully believe that there might even be a positive link between sex ratio and marriage. At the same time, that seems a far cry from saying that a higher sex ratio would be a *good thing*. As the OP explains, young men often already face an extremely high sex ratio in the dating market. Add to that the additional market power women get out of the divorce laws and you've got a pretty massive unbalance.
And it's not clear that women are using their market power in a way that is beneficial to our society as a whole. If they are using their market power to extract money out of hapless "beta providers" they marry, while sleeping around with "alpha badboys", and the beta providers have so little bargaining power that they can't do much of anything about any of this, that would certainly be an unhealthy outcome. And that seems to be the narrative that a lot of guys think the US urban dating market has degenerated into.
Or, to throw out another narrative that's fairly common: if women are letting their bodies go and becoming obese, knowing that they'll still be OK in the dating market despite this, or that their husbands won't leave them because of this, then that would also be unhealthy.
Women have gained a massive amount of bargaining power over men in the last few decades. Men are understandably unhappy about that.
It would take a fairly compelling argument to convince me that the ideal sex ratio is not ~103:100 (perfectly compensating for homosexuality).
Using Jason's premise, post WWI and WWII should have been an absolute promiscuous sex fest due to the reduced sex ratio.
I can imagine those frisky Russian babuskas swinging from the rafters....
ANON:
"Using Jason's premise, post WWI and WWII should have been an absolute promiscuous sex fest due to the reduced sex ratio. I can imagine those frisky Russian babuskas swinging from the rafters..."
And that's exactly what the empirical evidence shows:
"The Soviet Union suffered devastating population losses during World War II... [resulting] in a drastic change in sex ratios among the population surviving the war ... I use this large, exogenous change to identify the effects of unbalanced sex ratios on marital, fertility and health outcomes among women in the Russian and Baltic republics in the postwar period. The results indicate that women in cohorts or regions with lower sex ratios experienced lower rates of marriage and fertility, and higher rates of out-of-wedlock births, abortions, and deaths from abortions than women in cohorts or regions less affected by war deaths. Men in cohorts with high sex ratios invested in more human capital than men in low sex ratio cohorts."
A similar analysis shows the same thing for post war Germany.
So African American's behaviors are the result of a low sex ratio? Makes sense.
I am more than my sex drive.
It's absurd to make claims that the boxer rebellion occurred because of sexual deprivation or that a lack of available women will lead to revolutions.
It's dehumanizing oversimplification.
I come a little late to this discussion, but I wanted to share my thoughts as a single 29-year-old male who's done a lot of research on the science of male/female sexual behavior.
I am currently single, as are a lot of other guys I know in the younger age bracket (20-35), confirming the main hypothesis of this blog. Girls are very hard to come by these days for some reason, and most of the mating places (bars/clubs/lounges) have almost no available females. I agree with the 27-year-old guy who posted above about his situation, I'm in exactly the same boat.
However, I had a very good period around 2006. I serially dated 4-5 girls that year and also remember getting lots of eye contact in clubs and bars. Girls seemed to be everywhere and they even seemed to initiate contact themselves a lot of the time. That was a pretty exciting time for me.
Out of curiosity I browsed some statistics to see what, if anything, was special about the year 2006 (and end of '05), but the sex ratio of young people at that time was the same as always, so it couldn't be that.
However, I did discover that a Baby Boom happened in 2007, which was documented in the media (it's called "the boom of '07" or something similar). Supposedly, the babies born in '07 were conceived in '06, and that coincides exactly with the level of female interest and activity that I observed in 2006!
Just why this Baby Boom occurred (along with the corresponding female interest in guys and sex that preceded it) is unknown, but there could be two reasons. Either there were more women, or the women were simply more interested in mating than they are now. I believe both ideas are plausible but the second one makes more sense.
In 2008 (officially in '09) we entered a Recession, and it's possible that women forego mating opportunities when it's a bad time to conceive. There may be an evolutionary mechanism that triggers women's desire to mate at a time that's best for having kids. The bad economy could affect that, just like seasons do. For example, more women give birth in the Spring and the Summer, which corresponds to conception the preceding Fall. Therefore, it's reasonable to expect that men would have more mating opportunities in the Fall than other seasons.
What all this means is that males experiencing dating difficulties should not necessarily blame the sex ratio but rather the current time period. It could be that they're on the receiving end of most women's decision to postpone mating and flirting until a more favorable time (in this case, possibly, until the economy improves). Just an idea.
Jason Malloy wrote: “the main point is not if men are unattached, but if they are involuntarily unattached. You -- and a number of vocal people on the Internet -- are claiming this is increasingly the case. I doubt this is true.”
40.5% of never married US men age 20-59 have not had sex in the last year, and 23.7% of men age 20-29 have 0-1 lifetime sex partners. The notion that 40.5% of never married men would be voluntarily celibate strains credulity, especially considering the large numbers of never married men and the younger skew.
Never married US men, by age:
20-24: 78.8%
25-29: 49.2%
30-34: 29.6%
35-44: 17.9%
45-54: 9.7%
Sexual frustration is epidemic and not limited to a few vocal Internet nerds. It’s easy to understand why some people are surprised by this because:
22.7% of US men age 20-29 already had 15 or more lifetime sex partners;
29.6% of never married US men had 2 or more sex partners in the last year;
41.6% of widowed/divorced separated US men had 15 or more lifetime sex partners; and
36% of widowed/divorced separated US men had 2 or more sex partners in the last year.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad384.pdf
http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-30.pdf
I apologize if these points were already made. I did not take the time to read all the comments.
I object to the implied premise that anyone is entitled to the availability of a particular kind of relationship. While it may be sad to hear stories of viable parents not finding mates, the planet is not underpopulated. This is not a problem which needs to be solved at this time.
I also object that no mention was made of the possibility of women having multiple husbands.
Open borders don't exist in the USA.
Many single latinas looking for US citizens to marry would solve the single male problem. America is a rich country. Any American male can find a single woman from a LATIN American country. However, open borders in the USA does not exist. Latinas do not come to the USA without having a man to take care of them first.
Actually eligible men outnumber eligible women. Women tend to be more uncivilized than men. There's more men than women in the world on average and up to the early to late 50s there's still more male surpluses and females are scarce on average. Females are unsocialized. They'd rather look at guys' privates in porn and focus more on male celebrities than real life guys because typically females aren't allowed to court males. Also, there's more single, eligible males in the USA and Canada than single, eligible females. Women can never get away with boorish, aggressive and bad behavior, there's always verbal and physical abuse, especially from their partners.
I know you are an expert in sexual selection, so I wanted to raise some questions about the male excess.An imbalance between the proportions of men and women in the population creates an opportunity for stronger sexual selection? Sexual selection is expected to act more strongly on the surplus of men because women choose men more attractive?
I am a single 34 year old guy and I know a lot of friends and fellows who have not any women in their lives either. It is difficult to find girlfriend or wife in the current situation if you're not an alpha male. I think there are several issues that affect the vast majority of men, ie men beta,
When there is a surplus of men, women actually benefit from increase the restriction of men’s sexual freedom and also women are going to increase their standards.
This is a current scenario where men lower their mating options under duress due to the social situation,
1-Effective and widely available contraceptives (the Pill, condom, and the de facto contraceptive abortion).
2-Easy peasy no-fault divorce.
3-Women’s economic independence (hurtling towards women’s economic advantage if the college enrollment ratio is any indication).
4-Rigged feminist-inspired laws that have caused a disincentivizing of marriage for men and an incentivizing of divorce for women.
I can be plausibly argued that feminine hypergamy drives a number of gender dynamics. There is a man-woman double standard, and there is one major factor which keeps it alive: men and women have completely different (romantic/sexual) circumstances. To put it simply, women, and society as a whole, does not value male sexuality as much as female sexuality [Eggs are more valuable than sperm.]. Currently the average man can not mate with an average women as easily as before the sexual revolution. With this being established, it is usually impossible to rationally consider mating and sex an even exchange. It becomes a zero sum game due to the circumstances of our interactions.
Most women don’t consider your average guy to be attractive enough to mating (at least not without a lot of effort/charm on his part), but then make ridiculous claims like “all women are beautiful in the own way”. Most men will say that your average girl is pretty cute (regardless of her personality or willingness to work for it), most women say average girl is good looking (in one way or another), but nobody thinks much of average man, based on his looks alone. If you go to a typical bar or club, you will likely see a number of men trying to get a partner and a much smaller number of women shooting most of those men down. This is repeated, bar after bar, city after city. The women who do relation with guys tend to pick the most attractive men in the establishment (even when the women are only of moderate attractiveness).
Men compete with all men and for all women while women compete only for certain types of men, those who represent scarce goods and those of high rank, physical attractiveness, social status, success, etc.
There is a matter to consider: a man understood before what is his mate value through the rejections of the women he seeks. Instead, a woman can take a long time to understand what is her mate value because alfa men access to have sex with her (the male casts seeds and does not mind spending the night with women of lower attractiveness than him). This results is that many women spend much of their youth pretending to alfa men, aspiring to have a monogamous relationship with them (and make them suppliers) to finally meet the inevitable disappointment. So we could say, “Well, is part of the process of sexual maturation of every woman”, but I fear that this maturation process has dangerous side effects that are harmful to women and beta men with those who in the future will a stable relationship: anger, cynicism, emotional manipulation of the couple cuz she has been manipulated by the alpha males in the past.
At least before the invention of the pill, when sexual repression was much older, women could not offer sex to keep high-ranking males. In fact, she barely even had sexual freedom was the parents who decided who was getting married. But today sex is cheap to offer, and alfa males want sex, they offer sex to see if he hold, and at first it seems that they care, they are fooled into believing that they have eating out of his hand, but no …
In short, I mean that they can be more difficult to distinguish the boundary between “man for sex” and “man for relationship” … Since the “man for sex” never given as outright rejection as women give men.
The ideas are indisputable from an evolutionary standpoint:
1. – Men have better access to record its range from successive rejections / acceptances which are subjected by women.
2. – Women, sexual repression environments are not lost and have no choice but to resort to the method of trial and error to figure out where they fit in the hierarchy of achievement, social and attractive, ie acquired by comparison and through successive disappointments.
3. – All women competing for phenotype (genes) of the best, but men plans (copulate without costs) and women (make parental investment) sooner or later come into conflict of interest. The conflict naturally exists not for short-term relationships where both interests merge, for those where the appeal is found divided between the two partners or those who choose celibacy.
4. – The losers in this conflict agonistic may eventually find a male household with whom constitute a family but is likely to drag a grudge too long and to the men who defraud similar to that present sex offenders to which the forced sexual deprivation could displace the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Unlike other species, the ornament, ornaments, colorful feathers and demonstrative acts which are characteristic of males, whereas in the human species
beauty is mainly women’s heritage. This difference is very important to understand how our species have been distributed the roles of sexual rivalry and competition.There is a correlation between the ornament, colorful, flashy songs or tails and the difficulty with which males access to females. To make the simple argument we can conclude that more competition among males for females more visual or acoustic demos will come into play as a means of courtship. In this sense, it is true that females are, in most species, a community asset to be protected and that males compete and even: derive their aggression towards themselves to earn their right to play. What is a mystery is the reason that in humans this distribution of roles is set upside of all creatures known, at least among mammals, being as it is the ratio between male and female stable around 50% How can we explain this reversal in roles demonstration? Is the male a community asset to protect our species? Among the species where the female chooses the male it is usual to be the males who flaunt, while in those species where the male chooses, ostentation is included in agonistic competition between males. This paradigm of ethology, makes one wonder who chooses whom, in our species?
According to ancient evolutionary and anthropological research denoted that physical attractiveness was more important for women in humans due to:
1 – “Increased parental investment in children by men – corresponds with less emphasis on male attractiveness on the part of women.” Today is suppressed due to contraception and not raising the projected need for women to get sexual and romantic partners suppliers but have no need to seek parents.
.
2 – “Narrow age range of optimum fertility in women – corresponds to a greater emphasis on youth and women to lower incidence by the age of these men.” Fact that this is being degraded due to the modern phenomenon of “cougars” (women over thirties who prefer relationships with men younger than them) attractive young guys and a desire to enjoy the best features of the alpha males, at its peak of beauty and sexual potential). This aspect can be explained by evolutionist biology based on this hypergamic search has purely reproductive from concept without meaning. The man is fertile during his lifetime.
It was argued that in humans the “reproductive value of a female can be assessed more accurately by their physical appearance than the reproductive value of a male”, leading to a greater emphasis on attractive women. This is a reasonable argument, no doubt, and compute partially by less emphasis on men attractive.
Due to changes in sexual revolution and the surplus of men, we have a current scenario women are more selective than men, especially those in reproductive age. Uphold my argument in various researchs. Leonard Lee, George Loewenstein Dan Ariely (Journal of Psychological Science) developed a regression model (logistic) was performed with the members’ decision on whether or not to accept the request appointments with other members as the dependent variable and a lot of variables predictors. The results showed that males were more likely to accept a request that involves pairing, men are less selective than women. Also in terms of probability, boys were 240% more likely to say “yes” to any appointments than women.
In another series of recent studies, researchers tested the hypothesis match with people who know through social networking sites (Taylor, Fiore, Mendelsohn, and Cheshire, 2011). They used a mixture of study and laboratory studies of people registered with dating websites online. In the research of Taylor et al found that women Cheshire:
They found that women:
•tended to communicate with more popular men on the site, where popularity was defined as men who received high levels of inbound communication
•tended to contact men who were of higher attractiveness then themselves They found that men:
•communicated with popular and unpopular women irrespective of their own sense of self-worth (out of their league behavior).
Hitsch (2010) had already concluded that the women’s team is not strategic (ie by homogamy) when the number of possible partners is large (internet, modern globalized society, human large environments, large-scale urban populations, etc) and costs or finding or rejection are low. We should also define the concept of self-perception and self-evaluation of women, who have less imprecise mechanisms men, what makes most women overestimate their aesthetic appeal. They have no courtship-rejection procedure we employ men.
I think there is reason to believe that women give less importance to physical attractiveness in any case is otherwise. Since we are mammals and the female is the one selected in our species, we must act accordingly believe that unless there is a compelling reason to the contrary. I think it’s the culture that shaped the idea of women underestimate the importance of male attractiveness. It is false.
My reasons for this belief are:
1-Women Are More Beautiful Than Men
More neotenized faces are the most attractive and women are have more neotenous traits in relative to men: more delicate skeleton, smoother ligament attachments, smaller mastoid processes, reduced brow ridges, more forward tilt of the head, narrower joints, less hairy, retention of fetal body hair, smaller body size, more backward tilt of pelvis, greater longevity, lower basal metabolism, faster heartbeat, greater extension of development periods, higher pitched voice and larger tear ducts.
The rating of attractiveness in women is higher than men. Both quantitatively and qualitatively. The percentage of beautiful women in the world is much larger than men and the rating of female beauty is clearly higher than men.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201101/women-are-more-beautiful-men.
-Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa suggests, according of generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis (gTWH) that women are more beautiful than men.
‘Feminine hypergamy’ is seeing moderately attractive men or those of average attractiveness as ‘sub-par’. This was most clearly demonstrated by the analysis of attractiveness ratings done at OK Cupid (http :/ / blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating-).
(I think you could extrapolate to other walks of life human social statistics because the sample is very large). It includes several aspects, but is worth mentioning that according of women’s rating the 80% of men are below the average level of physical attractiveness. It seems that when following perceptive of women, most men do not have even a minimally acceptable physical as potential partner.
-http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-differences/201105/men-are-rated-less-facially-attractive-women
- There is an investigation that I once read that concluded that there is a higher correlation between the phenotype of the offspring and the parent in the phenotype of the mother. Whereupon the father’s appeal to run in place of the mother. It means following this element of reasoning, a woman seeks partner attractive as possible for their children to inherit the father’s phenotype.
it is true that women are not only attracted by the external image and the woman gives importance to social status. Studies of Kenrik Douglas, David Buss, etc. that bear this and other analyzes such as Alan Feingold It follows that men give more importance to women and their partner spectrum they diversify their attention to several attributes. Anyway status is certainly more than money, in fact the aesthetic itself confers social status, to rank individuals and provide different opportunities in social and sexual life.
a- At present the framework of women not in the same level of economic dependence in the past, have sufficient financial resources need not stop the security that a man can provide. Most women have entered the labor market and even a higher proportion of females forming in universities, which ultimately gives them better job positions with better salaries. The situation is being reversed and women end up having higher socio-occupational status than men. Thus the economic or status parameter is omitted or mitigated, and partner requirements are addressed primarily women to seek more primary, ie physical attractiveness or phenotype.
The single most underappreciated fact about gender is the ratio of our male to female ancestors. While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.
1.The women do not have to do anything to play but just wait, do not need to implement any special initiative, while the male has to compete with other peers and hope that some women find him attractive, different from the rest of males (it is sexual selection), but nonetheless it is predictable that at least 40% of males of our species are sexually deprived, have relationships with fewer partners and less frequently than they wish and even : many people spend their lives in a chaste involuntary celibacy
2. Polygamy is the worst stage for the beta male, because if a man or group of men account for a large group of females, there will always be a number of deprived males, as occurs in several species from the elephant to the gorilla. In our species there is hardly any official polygamy but successive monogamy are actually disguised polyginy: most of alpha individuals (those who hold more power or some feature that makes them attractive) females are available varied throughout his life, while others look askance accumulated bitterness and hatred.
3- Female infidelity. Very similar to the sparrows and introduces another element to consider in this game seems nonlinear chairing human sexual behaviour in light of adjustments before us: most of our ancestors were women who mated and became pregnant by men who are not necessarily our ancestors “political” which could explain the contradictions found in the coexistence between mitochondrial Eve and Y-Adam chromosomal paramount. It is assumed that 10% of us do not have the biological father we attribute. Or put another way: if all men bearing one chromosome chromosomal And this does not necessarily indicate our father’s paternity, while women in mitochondrial DNA points in the direction of a mother-daughter linearity irrefutable.
All these facts make evolutionary predict that males of our species:
1. Men suffer devouring jealousy more than females and that will cause greater psychopathology than women (Wilson and Daly, 1982). Their characteristics are delusional jealousy sexual themed (of infidelity), while women are always an emotional and not rely so severe pathologies.
2.implemented strategies intended deception and loitering, i.e. to avoid the burdens of progeny or emotional commitments for life. Women on the other hand can “desire to be deceived” (delusion) as a genetic diversification strategy.
3. Monogamy would be as beneficial for men as for women, favouring both males and women beta, ie those who do not earn enough to hypergamy attractive.
4. sexual violence will always be more intense from man to woman and to proceed somewhat more deprived men of our species.
5. Higher number of women specializing in short-term sex of a commercial nature (prostitutes) and higher number of gay men (that homosexual women).
6. The humans would essentially polygamous and monogamous but optionally with a certain amount of extramarital mating opportunistic likeness of monogamous birds. But another possibility is a restricted polygynandry a multiple marriage between females and males as sexual partners presumably quoted combined with a marginal monogamy in the lowest social rank and around that core polygynandry dominant. Promiscuity tolerated around this nucleus and subsequent sperm competition may have created the conditions for building evolutionary large penises with plunger form and testicles in coexistence with small, since the human would not involve the production of supernumerary sperm as chimpanzees.
The main element of the sexual interaction is physical attraction:
Scientists premised homotypic preference (individuals prefer partners of similar attractiveness to their own) for a long time until empirical research proved that people prefer individuals of high attractiveness rather than that similar to their own [Walster et al. 1966, Huston 1973]. Further support for this comes from blind dates [Asendorpf et al. 2011, Back et al. 2011] and internet dates [Hitsch et al. 2010, Shaw Taylor et al. 2011], where highly attractive participants are universally preferred. Strategic behaviors were not found in participants of blind dates [Kurzban & Weeden 2005, Todd et al. 2007, Luo & Zhang 2009, Asendorpf et al. 2011, Back et al. 2011] and internet dates [Hitsch et al. 2010, Shaw Taylor et al. 2011, but see Lee et al. 2008]. Courtship thus may not be strategic when the number of prospective partners is large and costs o searching or being rejected is low [Hitsch et al. 2010].
"And if we do nothing? “Let them eat porn?” The social costs may be greater than we think. A surplus of single males tends to make societies less stable and more prone to violence (Pedersen, 1991). Such individuals are likelier to agitate for war or revolution, since they have little stake in the existing order. "
How about that these men deserve consideration just like anyone else? Why only think of them as potential agitators? You write like single men are a scourge on society that must be contained.
If you were writing about single women suffering due to lack of mating opportunities, you would never talk like this. Single women are at risk of mass passive aggressiveness and collecting cats thereby creating a health hazard.
"Single women are at risk of mass passive aggressiveness and collecting cats"
That doesn't too dangerous for me...
you do know the technology exists to fabricate dreams and visions.
sukinixon1234.blogspot.com
7.16.16
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