I think your premise is onto something, but you fundamentally fail to understand how the male status paradox works. It is a big mistake to assume that because male lottery winners go on to have families more than female lottery winners, that means that more men will have families if all the men won the lottery. That is the opposite of how the male status paradox works. Male lottery winners have more children because they become individually higher status among men. If you made all men have the lifestyle of lottery winners, then something else would become the marker of status and no one would have more children.
There is plenty of evidence for this- larger gender wage gaps do not lead to higher TFR in the developed world. For example, South Korea has by far the largest gender wage gap in the developed world. This is not making women become enamored with the provider capacity of Korean men.
It does nothing to simply make men collectively higher status vs women. Iran gives men massively more economic and legal power than women, and this does not create a higher TFR. Status by its nature is something that discerns winners from losers and rewards winners only. All men can't be winners.
Instead of trying to make men look like collective winners vs. women, we have to use policy to incentivize having children and disincentivize not having children. It's another mistake to assume that policies that give men the wealth needed for family formation will lead to family formation instead of world travel and whatnot. The US has a very high living standard compared to almost anywhere, but also has a birthrate that isn't particularly impressive these days. You can't give men wealth and assume they will build families. You still need a carrot and stick around the family building.
Your lottery argument proves less than you claim. The study found that wealth increased men’s marriage formation and fertility. It did not establish that the effect operated only through rank among men, nor did it test what would happen if men’s economic security improved more broadly. “It is all positional” is your interpretation, not a finding of the lottery study.
Not all men can rank above one another, but most young men can simultaneously have steadier employment, better jobs, and higher socioeconomic status than the average woman. Improving those conditions doesn’t require making everyone a lottery winner, and would make men more marriageable.
Direct evidence contradicts the idea that only individual rank matters. A study found that trade shocks which disproportionately reduced young men’s employment and earnings also reduced marriage and fertility in affected communities. These were group-level economic losses, not merely individual men losing rank to other men. See: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180010
The reverse pattern appears as well. Kearney and Wilson found that fracking booms increased earnings and employment opportunities for less-educated men and raised both marital and nonmarital birth rates, although not marriage rates. Again, this was a broad labor-market improvement affecting many men at once. See: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article/100/4/678/58504/Male-Earnings-Marriageable-Men-and-Nonmarital
South Korea does not prove your point either. Its 29.3% headline gender wage gap is an unadjusted comparison among full-time workers across the labor market. Among recent university graduates, however, one study estimates a conditional gap of only 4.3% during 2008–19, falling from 5% to 3%, with most of Korea’s wage gap emerging later in working life (https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03153). It is therefore a poor proxy for the relative economic position of young men and women at family-forming ages. Korea shows that a large overall wage gap is not sufficient for high fertility; it does not prove that young men’s social status relative to women is irrelevant to marriage rates or fertility.
Iran is not a clean counterexample either. Male legal privilege does not necessarily translate into better economic or dating market prospects for ordinary young men. Women’s share of Iranian university students rose from about 28% in 1991 to 58% by 2006, meaning that women’s educational standing relative to men improved sharply even while the formal legal system continued to favor men. When women are as educated or more educated than men, men become less desirable partners to them, regardless of whatever legal privileges they might have.
Iranian evidence also suggests that sex-specific economic opportunities can affect family behavior. A restriction on female public-sector hiring reduced women’s college attendance by an estimated 11.4 percentage points. The more exposed cohorts also showed higher marriage and motherhood rates by ages 20–21. The study is observational and cannot prove that the policy increased completed fertility, but it does undermine the categorical claim that differences in relative social status between men and women cannot affect family formation. See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272723000786
National wealth does not tell us whether men at family-forming ages have secure jobs, affordable housing or enough stability to get married. “America is rich” is not evidence that increasing young men’s status relative to women would have no effect.
I do not think either of your studies indicate that individual rank wasn't the core issue in the long term. It is the case that sudden economic booms can correspond with short term increases in TFR- we saw this in many places in eastern europe and central asia after the Society Union fell. However, what happens after a few years is that the standard of living expectations adjust to higher standards and then people no longer feel financially secure enough to as many children, or they want to do other things with the money they have and the TFR falls back down.
As for your trade shocks issue, that could be in part individual rank as the communities were still within a wider nation and among other men who were not directly a part of those impacted industries. It can't only be individual rank or else overall TFR would never move.
You say- When women are as educated or more educated than men, men become less desirable partners to them, regardless of whatever legal privileges they might have-- Women are more college educated overall compared to Iran and more college educated than men among Saudi natives, Emerati, Israelis, Israeli ultra orthodox and the TFR among all of those groups is at least 2x as high as Iranians. However, Saudi natives and Emeratis are only a small percentage of their total national populations, and they are essentially the wealthiest demographic within their broader nations, hence the men should appear as much higher status than all the surrounding laborers that predominate their societies. The Israeli ultra orthodox have a reverse correlation with household income and TFR, where higher household income correlates with lower TFRs. They have one of the world's highest TFR in major part because they have refused to tie male status to make earning capacity. For them male status is defined by Torah literacy instead, and this seems to work like gangbusters for TFR.
Look at this seriously- The Israeli Ultra Orthodox are the ultimate counter example to your claim about women being more educated and it reducing the desirability of men. The Israeli Ultra orthodox have the highest gender disparity in the world in educational attainment with about half of Haredi men not even having an elementary school level education and 38% of Haredi women having a college education and Haredi women being expected to be family breadwinners, which is especially important in the US where the families do not receive state sponsored Torah study stipend. Yet they have a TFR above 6 in the US and Israel just the same. This shows that tying male status to something other than gainful employment and education that leads to gainful employment is A LOT more powerful for fertility than somehow making men more comparatively educated than women.
You actually concede the central problem with your original argument when you say, “It can't only be individual rank or else overall TFR would never move.” Exactly. Your original claim was that status is inherently zero-sum, so making men collectively better off cannot increase fertility because the same men remain above and below one another. Once you concede that broad conditions can move aggregate fertility, the question becomes whether men's economic circumstances (both relative to women and absolute) are one of those conditions, and not whether relative rank exists.
And the evidence isn't limited to temporary booms. Brazilian trade liberalization caused disproportionately large employment losses for men, and the fertility effects persisted for roughly 20 years, and a study identified declining employment among young men as an important channel. South Korean men who entered the labor market during the Asian Financial Crisis subsequently experienced persistent reductions in employment, earnings, marriage and fertility. Those are long-run life-course effects, not a few years of TFR moving before people's expectations “adjust.” See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3161625 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32989344/.
Your attempt to reinterpret the Autor-Dorn-Hanson result as male rank relative to unaffected men elsewhere is possible, but it isn't what the study identifies. The authors looked at gender-specific labor-demand shocks to examine how changes in the economic position of young men relative to young women in the same local markets affect marriage and fertility. They found that shocks reducing men's relative earnings reduce both. Saying the men might instead have been comparing themselves with men somewhere else in America is an additional hypothesis for which you've supplied no evidence. If any group-level finding can always be redescribed afterward as status relative to some larger comparison group, then the status theory becomes very difficult to falsify.
I agree that Haredim are a real counterexample to any universal rule that women being more secularly educated than men must produce low fertility. But they are a very poor analogue for an open dating/marriage market. 95% percent of married Israeli Haredim have another Haredi spouse, marriage commonly occurs through an organized matchmaking system, marriage and family are central religious obligations, and prolonged singlehood and defection carry intense social stigma. An educated Haredi woman who intends to remain Haredi therefore is not choosing from the same broad pool of similarly educated men that she would encounter in an open marriage market like the US. She is overwhelmingly choosing within a community where men systematically pursue religious rather than secular education.
The Gulf comparison shifts the goalposts a bit. You started with men’s status relative to women, but when Saudi and Emirati fertility does not fit that story, you switch to native Arabian men’s status relative to migrant laborers. Yet those migrants are largely outside the same dating/marriage market, which is heavily structured by nationality, religion and tribal background, so it is not obvious why their presence should make Saudi or Emirati men more desirable to native women. And in Saudi Arabia specifically, citizens are not a small minority anyway; foreign nationals are only a little over 40% of the population.
Saudi Arabia itself does not show that rising female education and employment are irrelevant to fertility. Saudi fertility has declined substantially over time as women have become more educated and, more recently, much more economically active, factors that research associates with later marriage and lower fertility (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110569016301613). So female advancement appears to be putting downward pressure on Saudi fertility too.
More importantly, Saudi Arabia is hardly a clean comparison with Iran on men's economic prospects. Saudi men are much better positioned economically than Iranian men. In 2024, Saudi GDP per capita was about $35,100 versus roughly $5,200 in Iran, while inflation was about 1.7% versus 32.5%. Saudi male unemployment among citizens was 4.3% in Q4 2024, and the government there provides dedicated subsidized financing to help young men meet marriage costs. See: https://my.gov.sa/en/content/youth
So, Saudi Arabia's higher fertility is much more compatible with those downward pressures from rising female education and employment being partly offset by the country financially helping young men get married, alongside these men being more "marriageable" due to better absolute economic conditions, than it is with a story about Saudi men outranking migrant laborers.
In addition to Joe's comment about South Korea's gender wage gap being misleading, note that South Korea has the 2nd highest female tertiary educational attainment level in the world at around 80%. The OECD average is around 57%, and the US is 63%. This is compounded by South Korea's obsession with educational credentialism as a status marker. So if you have a society like South Korea that is uniquely focused on educational attainment for status, the very high female educational attainment will have an even more pronounced effect on gender relations.
It's really about *sexual autonomy* - the ability to be able to pursue one's own impulses and preferences in sexual strategy. Making all women into losers relative to men doesn't actually cater to female preferences - it just truncates female choice by making them more likely to *need* a male.
If this is really about children - I'm much more amenable to punishing people with no children than forcing women to be more dependent. If it comes down to that, I'd much rather be successful and have a choice between paying higher taxes or whatever and purchasing sperm than have no choice but to be shackled to some asshole I'm not interested in for life.
(Happily married to a literal house husband for 15 years for the record so I would say I don't have unrealistic standards on what male success looks like. But *I* chose him, and this immensely matters. And, no, I didn't make him do this. He chose to stop working himself. I would not care if he worked or made more money than me).
One carrot was that for most men, sex was available only upon a commitment to marriage, which couldn't be easily undone by either party. And sex reliably led to children if the wife (not necessarily the husband) wanted them. Even with The Pill, it was she, not he, who decided if she took it. The problem as I see it is that women, even trad wives who stay at home, don't necessarily want children anymore and want to do other things with their husband's wealth. And that is just fine for many husbands. He's happy to travel the world with her, childlessly. If she changes her mind later, it's often too late for her.
And since unmarried men can easily get sex without the commitment to marriage, they don't need to commit in order to have sex. (This applies only to the men who would be good marriage material. The unattractive men can't get sex and they can't get married, as two sides of the same coin.) Women who consent to pre-marital sex in that circumstance will usually take diligent measures to avoid conception and birth unless they are going to let the state take on the role of husband/provider. So it's not only low-status men we should be deterring from fathering children. It's low-status women we should be deterring from conceiving them. The latter is the more efficient policy choice I should think.
How to get a high-status woman, the kind who is attractive to high-status men, to want to have children early in life when she has the best chance of actually succeeding? No one seems to know, because the state carrots and sticks so far haven't worked.
One carrot was that for most men, sex was available only upon a commitment to marriage, which couldn't be easily undone by either party.-
I agree. And I think this is a core reason why patriarchy is not effective at raising fertility in a modernized economy. There are today several countries with information economies or industrialized economies that are still deeply patriarchal such as India and Iran. And we see that their patriarchal mores do not succeed at keeping TFR up. However, their patriarchial social and familial institutions do succeed at the thing they were always designed to do which was to keep sex limited to marriage. And because of that they keep marriage rates hgh and marriage controlled by the families rather than the individuals. This doesn’t lead to high TFRs anymore because birth control exists and there is no material reason to have many children anymore.
What these places need to do is tie social benefits to having a child rather than the act of getting marriage. It doesn’t make much sense to allow access to sex after one produces a child, but we must find a a way of tying other desirable benefits to having a child, not getting married itself.
Great article. Another classic 'Hanania says the stuff that's implied by the principles but nobody else has the balls to say'. We'll see if it gets taken up by the tech right, there are enough people paying attention to you at this point.
As someone who grew up with a lot of (frequently hostile) feminism, MRA doesn't really give me the 'ick' the same way--they were always on my case, why shouldn't I get on theirs? But I'll take your word for it it does to other people. The religion thing makes total sense though--see, it's not that I'm a loser begging for special privileges, the guy in the sky said I had to have them!
One disadvantage, though, of having lots of low-status men who *don't* form families is that they tend to get into trouble--street crime, political movements, etc. They often wind up serving as cannon fodder in wars. This is probably a huge reason behind the rise of right-wing populism in the past few decades.
From the evolutionary point of view for the low-status male, it makes perfect sense--if society does not provide you the means to attract a mate, it makes sense to cause trouble to overthrow it, or at a lower level try to take resources (or a mate) by force.
As for getting high-status males to have kids once they've paired off...can't help you there. I do wonder if this is kind of the idea behind going after sex tourism and age gaps and other things high-status older men do to trade on their higher status, trying to force them to pair off instead of screwing around. Of course, an ugly old guy who starts a family with his Seeking Arrangement would be producing some of those kids you want (though perhaps with a higher autism risk).
Correction: Lots of low status men who don't form families tend to get into trouble whenever they DON'T wind up serving as cannon fodder in wars. They don't get into trouble IF they wind up as cannon fodder in wars.
And when the Royal Navy (and other navies) stopped taking enemy ships as prizes, the proceeds of which would be distributed lawfully and systematically to the crews in Admiralty Prize Court, made sea life less attractive to sailors, especially for those were high enough in the pecking order, such as skilled bosun's mates who would go aloft in the rigging, to get a slightly larger share. Of course the Admiral of the port where the warship had sailed from got the biggest share, ahead even of the sea captain, but even a tiny share was a king's ransom to a lowly sailor.
I'm genuinely stunned that ISIS legalizing sex slavery didn't cause en-masse male conversions to Islam.
Islam understands more than any other religion that pleasing the penis is the purpose of a man's life.
Pretty much every pro male policy I can think of comes down to sex.
Like revoking (or lowering) age of consent laws, legalizing child porn, making it difficult or impossible for women and girls to testify in rape/molestation cases, banning divorce, legalizing concubinage/sex slavery etc.
The areas they operated in were largely Muslim already, and the non Muslim populations still suffered sex selective population losses in the civil war lol
"killing" implies that ISIS men had no agency but they were happily fighting for ISIS. They were more enthusiastic about fighting and even dying for the Caliphate than most any Western man is about his own country.
And sex slaves were definitely a motivator. Guaranteed access to sex with hot girls and women is the #1 way to motivate men to do anything you want them to. They'll line up around the block for a chance at nubile virgin pussy (and ass and mouth).
The United States is very unlikely ever to re-institute a draft, or even fight in a future war where heavy casualties among infantry can be expected. The other guy's infantry will be slaughtered instead.
I think the point is you *might* want to get rid of poorly educated low-status men who aren't sexually attractive to women and who will dangerously resent never having the opportunity to have sex. Depends on how choosy women are. I knew several guys -- maybe most of them -- in my high school class who, looking back on it, probably never mated, especially once manufacturing jobs in my small city of auto parts factories evaporated. What would they offer a woman? With too many of them hanging around idle and resentfully horny they become dangerous. Every society finds that. Leads to insurrection if some demagogue has money to pay them to cause trouble.
You can make a just-so story about anything. I can say we need to preferentially hire for women because male partners are more likely to be severely abusive so women need independence. I could say that we need to preferentially hire women to counterweight the pervasive history of sexism. I could say we need to prefentially hire women because they're less aggressive and often miss jobs they are most qualified for because they don't push for more.
It's best to just stay out of things and let markets decide. Thinking you know better than the market has been the failure of countless governments.
Your stupidity is painful. You are comparing a possible increase in domestic abuse to a confirmed decrease in fertility - which is more damaging to a country?
It's not confirmed that affirmative action for men would actually increase fertility. That's speculation on Hanania's part. Plausible, but not particularly more plausible than abuse increasing
”At the very least, we can say job preferences in favor of men are much easier to rationally justify than discrimination going in the other direction. Here, we can add that men who face financial difficulties in life are more likely to abuse drugs, suffer depression, and commit suicide, so even if we didn’t care about marriage and babies, there are other reasons to make policy with the idea that jobs matter more to men in mind.”
The AA for women is based on reaction to actual historical discrimination. That's the rational justification for AA at least true till a decade or 2 ago. This is much different then discrimination for men so they can get sex. We are not giving women stuff to get prettier so they can attract more men.
And the richer women marriages being more unstable seems to be strongly driven by even the men acting crazier when their wives earn more and even data shows men aren't comfortable not being the breadwinner, but they don't want to be sole breadwinners either.
And you are missing the part where it's not just that they are just attracted to richer men, it's also that a lot of these good traits are often very correlated, smart people are more likely to be richer, less violent and riich people more likely to be hardworking. Poor talented artists are not doing very bad with women too, smart not so rich men too. It's possible that action wouldn't increase coupling much (not just because it clearly diminishes status of such wealth as you mentioned) because the other correlated traits would cause problems.
What if there wasn't actually a discrimination. But that decisions were made on the possibility of a woman getting pregnant and then no longer working?
Yeah that's a dumb logic. That was indeed not why rhey were discriminated against, it was because they thought "women too dumb". There's also always possibility a man falls sick, or dies and in the past the chance of sickness and death was even higher.
I disagree. Pregnancy imposes real costs on the wage economy. Employers should rationally discriminate against people who impose those costs on them.
There is a reluctance to hire young women into high-commitment fields like surgical residencies because of the near-certainty that the woman will take time off to have a baby or two. While she's off, someone has to fill in for her in the operating room, on call -- which particularly annoys the lesbians and the men who are expected to do extra call --, and doing surgical consults in the hospital and outpatient clinic. In reality no one will fill in -- faculty will just have to work harder on clinical work and let their research activities slip and the other residents will be told they'll be one person short for six months. Unlike careers that are made of interchangeable workers doing low-value work, like HR, insurance, education, and factory work, you can't just "slot in" a random surgeon to cover a mat leave and then terminate her when (if) the woman on leave comes back to work. And the pool of people available to fill mat leaves are the sub-optimal workers anyway, because they couldn't get full-time jobs. In low-value work it may not matter if the person doing it temporarily is sub-optimal but in medicine it does.
Even if the woman works straight through her training racing against her biological clock, Departments are still reluctant to take her on because for sure she'll leave them a man short now that she's deferred pregnancy for so long. Departments considering hiring a woman when they expand the practice find themselves eye-balling the candidates to suss out whether they look like mom material. "Are you married?" And of course once the first woman joins the Department, they can't even talk about doing that out loud.
It's bullshit, it was never the major reasons women were discriminated against, it was always the dumb 'they aren't as smart as men" thing. You can literally see how women even in sub shaharan africa and most of Europe history have always worked, and not just "in the home". It's pointless to have this discussion. Cause it's based on a strawman of what their motivation were, it doesn't even track with historical data. And even current data we have.
You used surgery as an example as if your point of pregnancy being an impediment would be any less of an hindrance to any of the other fields women have now come to dominate. If anything, I'd say surgery is one of the places its even easier to take breaks.
One way to know it was completely based on prejudice is that even if priced in, as it currently is, it would never be so absolute if it was just pregnancy they were worried about. And single women and women that stopped having kids would have more options but that was not the case. The market currently penalizes women for pregnancy and motherhood. That is what it would look like if "the discrimination was actually pregnancy being priced it". Before much of the formal economy, most women (safe the upper class), worked and not just "a5 home", they worked in processing, markets that took them away from home as well.
And most of the historical discrimination we are talking about wee based on the wrong prejudice snd even the right prejudice didn't actually stop most women from working pre formal economy. They weren't thinking like insurers
There is always a multitude of probabilities. You just have to think as an insurer, at what price you want to insure against probability A, B or C. Once you do that, the gap disappears. At 25, chances of sickness and death with a high human capital white collar job are not high.
It's bullshit, it was never the major reasons women were discriminated against, it was always the dumb 'they aren't as smart as men" thing. You can literally see how women even in sub shaharan africa and most of Europe history have always worked, and not just "in the home". It's pointless to have this discussion. Cause it's based on a strawman of what their motivation were, it doesn't even track with historical data. And even current data we have.
One way to know it was completely based on prejudice is that even if priced in, as it currently is, it would never be so absolute if it was just pregnancy they were worried about. And single women and women that stopped having kids would have more options but that was not the case. The market currently penalizes women for pregnancy and motherhood. That is what it would look like if "the discrimination was actually pregnancy being priced it". Before much of the formal economy, most women (safe the upper class), worked and not just "a5 home", they worked in processing, markets that took them away from home as well.
This overplays the gap between men and women when it comes to seeking high status partners. Most men don't want to marry someone who is much lower status than them either.
Most kidding aside, I actually have not encountered this in the USA .. maybe in England and probably in Asian cultures .. but the typical American male fantasy, everything else being equal, methinks runs towards rescuing or introducing a gal into a better world than the one she is perceived to be in..
China, amongst many nations and cultures, does not recognize the concept of "gold-digger". (Indeed Japan does not have a direct word for 'romantic love', and it was not historically a consideration in marriage arrangements - thus also the accompanying lesser stigma of extra-marital relationships.). Just injecting a bit of uninvited culturally diversity into the debate.
I think this doesn't follow the "ick" reflex in women back to source enough. At core, what both men and women want is *sexual autonomy* or the freedom to follow their own impulses about what the best sexual strategy is for themselves. Men want to be free to like big boobs, dammit, and women want to be free to not get saddled with losers, dammit. There's two problems here:
1. While men/women are actually mostly cooperative when it comes to sexuality and child rearing, their evolutionary preferences tend to make some nebulous percentage of the interaction (say, 20%) *competitive.* This is also actually true for female/offspring. It's *mostly* cooperative - both the mother and child have lots of reasons to cooperate for the survival of the child. But at the end of the day, the child doesn't care about things like its mother's future fertility prospects. It will demand as much attention as it can get from her - its preference is she die for it and not her hypothetical future offspring. This is why a teenager is disproportionately more willing to like throw a baby in a dumpster or some other kind of dramatic infanticide in bad circumstances - she is making an evolutionary bet on her 20+ years of remaining fertility. The infant would clearly prefer she sacrifice her whole future for it. This is also why an infant will scream at the mere fact that its mother isn't in eyesight - it would rather her be sleep deprived but present to protect it than comfortable while putting it at 2% more risk.
2. Men are more evolutionarily equipped to *force* women to accept the crap end of the bargain in that 20% competition space to cater to men's preferences. We (women) get the raw end of the deal on pregnancy/lactation and on this front as well.
It's not just that women find status sexually attractive. They want to be able to *choose* status. Meanwhile, this creates anxiety in men who are paranoid that women with choice will jump ship for a higher status male so they are motivated to use coercion to make sure women remain in a state of dependency. *Limiting female choice* has been an explicit part of the male sexual strategy for ages. Women are naturally leery of this. It's not just ick over losers. It's ick over any system that seems like it would try to force us to choose losers.
I don't have a magical solution to this from the point of view of macro goals like family formation or decreasing loneliness. I also have no issues getting rid of affirmative action or disparate impact type laws. I can tell you that anything that's really about trying to compel female *dependency* again and stripping women of our right to choose our partners (which is what the right actually wants) will have me joining the bra burners and advocating every woman sterilize herself out of spite.
My proposed truce is to let men be horndogs, normalize male beauty preferences, fine, whatever. Let everyone be really paranoid about being skinny all the time as one example This really fucking sucks if you are female. Trying to look 23 for the maximum amount of time possible is a complete drag. In return, screw anything (legally and culturally) which is designed to compel women into states of dependency. Trading the stupid beauty rat race for the status rat race seems fair to me.
There's a fundamental flaw in your premise about sexual autonomy, though you're hardly alone and this is common in all discussions about this topic.
Namely, it misconstrues male sexual autonomy as being equivalent to female sexual autonomy and doesn't recognize that while female sexual autonomy has historically been suppressed, so has male sexual autonomy. Furthermore, while female sexual autonomy is increasingly liberated and encouraged in many societies, male sexual autonomy is still fundamentally suppressed in these same societies.
So what is male sexual autonomy? Female sexual autonomy fundamentally may be about free choice in sexual partners, but that is not what male sexual autonomy fundamentally is about. In sexual species throughout the animal kingdom, male sexual autonomy involves the natural right to initiate violent force against other males for territory and breeding rights therein.
Now under civilization, this fundamental aspect of male sexuality and autonomy is suppressed: men are denied the right to initiate individual violent force in order to maintain a state of peace and protect positions of authority and status held by elite males.
Monogamy correlated with higher latitudes because women can't obtain sufficient calories for themselves and their offspring at higher latitudes. They required provisioning by male mates. This was environmentally imposed monogamy. Most advanced civilizations derived from populations who had undergone this environmentally imposed monogamy and implemented socially imposed monogamy once the caloric surplus of civilization obviated the necessity of monogamous male provisioning.
Civilization reproduces the more benign low latitude environment in which women can more easily support themselves and offspring without male provisioning and thus express more polygynous preferences that are latent or suppressed in harsher higher latitude environments.
The foundation of civilization is defense of territory in exchange for those individuals giving up their sovereignty. Man submits his will to a “higher power” and suppresses his sexuality: his natural right to violent force.
In this contract the individual male "losers" are put at reproductive risk by the female’s polygynous instincts to mate with the high status males in her environment, and a submissive man, civilized man, "loser" man — is rejected so she can find the non-losers.
The compromise of the social contract therefore allowed the creation of a pseudo-natural environment in which men as a class had status, in exchange for suppressing their sexuality. With the liberation of female sexual autonomy and continued suppression of male sexual autonomy, this tacit contract has been breached, the foundation shattered.
So if the source of the "ick" reflex in women is the suppression of female sexual choice, the source of the discontent, frustration, "ick" among men is the continued suppression of fundamental male sexuality by the State in an environment in which societies increasingly restore and encourage female sexual autonomy.
You seriously need to read more about social animals if you think male reproductive strategy is reducible to violence enacted against other males. Social animals have many "digressions" (as Richard Dawkins put in) in behavior that only lossily point towards gene replication via sexual reproduction. It's *not* just "strongest male beats other male over head and mates with the females." The closest thing to true baseline "sexual autonomy" for males is not about challenging other males - it's about promiscuity. Challenging other males is a digression away from the core goal of mating which is what directly leads to gene replication. Males employ many other strategies besides just violence to "sow oats," some of which are much more economical than fighting other males.
Within social animals:
There are males that compete almost entirely by display. There are males whose entire strategy is basically rape. There are for wont of a better term "trickster" males that sometimes fool females into mating with them and are sometimes mated with willingly under some "alpha's" nose and that sometimes render a female incapable of mating with another male after mating with him (there are various species that basically clog up the female's reproductive track until the sperm has time to fertilize the egg). There are ways that *both older females and males* police sexual choice of both younger females and males and compel them to help rear young that aren't theirs (and even this can be very different in operation - see the difference in naked mole rats and wolves). There are species where male relatives band together and form coalitions.
The more social and complex the organism, the more diverse and sophisticated the song and dance around sexual reproduction.
I'm not really interested in summarizing a bunch of books here but some that certainly lay out some of what I'm saying:
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Evolutionary psychologist/anthropologist)
Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Willliams (evolutionary psychologist)
Basically anything by the primatologist Frans de Waal
*Edit* The underlying 20% "competition" is between female choosiness and male promiscuity. (The shorthand for this is sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive, but really pregnancy/lactation/helpless offspring are really expensive). This "picky female" dynamic is also one of the engines of sexual selection which can lead to things like A) male deer who develop ludicrous antlers and who fight each other half to death during the rut or B) elaborate plumage and song of male birds or C) displays of resource sharing/acquisition. As it turns out, most social mammals (especially highly intelligent culturally plastic ones) can display components of all three strategies at once.
Pair-bonding happens in various species as well. It's sometimes seasonal and sometimes true monogamy.
Pretty much none of these behaviors are unique to "higher latitude" human civilizations.
To that end, my proposed truce *does* explicitly endorse male reproductive strategy by normalizing male promiscuity and focus on youth and beauty. It just removes, yes, specifically the force card, but that was *never* the only strategy males had. And I actually don't really care if you want to reinstate legalized dueling or something either. I'm also fine with getting rid of mandatory alimony and child support payments.
I'm familiar with the literature on social animals. Sociality almost always involves the suppression of sexuality to varying degrees. In wolf packs, breeding is monopolized by the dominant breeding pair(s), and sexuality in subordinate males and females that are not direct offspring is suppressed. In the extreme case, you have the eusocial insects in which sexuality is suppressed altogether at the genetic level among virtually all of the individuals who are sexless components of the hive colony as drones, workers, soldiers, etc.
This is no less the case in human sociality, and in its most complex forms such as civilization, which is fundamentally founded and maintained on the violent suppression of individual males, who have a natural right to violence in a state of non-civilization. See Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization to get a sense of how this natural right was expressed before complex civilizations established a monopoly on violence. Human male sexuality involved males or groups of related males (which is important as kinship coefficients were very high compared to later civilizations) enacting violence against other males to dominate territory and breeding rights therein.
When civilizations are established, there's a tacit bargain that's made for men giving up their sexuality in exchange for the state's monopoly on violence. Some degree of patriarchy is established by suppressing female sexual autonomy as well because males are put at reproductive risk by giving up their sexual autonomy.
My only point is that this basis of civilization is generally not recognized or is just denied altogether. It's assumed that until recently, there was a one-sided suppression of female sexual autonomy throughout all of history by all civilizatios for reasons of irrational sexism. And just as the suppression of female sexual autonomy evokes a visceral "ick" among women, there's a corresponding visceral discontent and "ick" among men who are expected to continue to submit to the state, society, dominant social mores, to work and fight and die in wars, etc., particularly as female sexual autonomy is increasingly liberated and valorized while male sexual autonomy is still expected to be suppressed to maintain civilization.
Thankfully for those who wish to suppress male sexuality, there are technological methods in the form of virtual distractions such as the internet, video games, pornography, that seem effective at distracting men enough to keep violent outbursts and revolt to a minimum. And there are no longer groups of barbarian pastoralists outside of civilization like the Indo-European tribes and such that were around historically that would be ready to destroy and take over civilizations that gelded their males. And there will be even greater, more effective technological means in the future. AI, robots, artificial wombs, genetic engineering, etc. may enable them to expunge male sexuality altogether and convert humanity into some kind of eusocial species.
I'm perfectly willing to negotiate or compromise. Just not to be told what to do based on something something some ancient book said or bad evo psych generalizations about how women are really more like children than adults. I haven't had any trouble finding men who agree to this basic arrangement, and I'd say I'm much more tolerant than typical of all kinds of stereotypical male behavior, especially male nerd behavior. (Yes, put your action figures in a glass display in the living room - I don't care. Play video games for 15+ hours a day for a week and keep a huge porn collection. I don't care. My taste in men actively runs towards "losers" on some metrics - I prefer intelligent sensitive interesting nerds. Being boring or shallow is a much worse offense than being poor).
But beyond all that, this just re-emphasizes what I said. *People want to be free to choose* something as important as who they have to put up with 50+ years.
I don't mean "wouldn't want to live with you" in an unkind or hurtful way, or suggest that it would in any sense be your fault. I actually think I'd quite like you in small, regular doses even without the truce proposal. Your arguments really are unimpeachable.
I'm happily married to a woman who was fulfilled by her career and got head-hunted more often than I did....and who doesn't look any more like she did at 32 when we met...and neither do I.
Sincerely wishing you every happiness and joy. Don't ever change, unless you want to.
You’re right that religion is genius but wrong about the mechanism.
Religion creates special jobs and status for men, so they have meaning and purpose they might not otherwise have, but the activities are gentle and pro-social - getting together with other men to chant poetry, reading ancient books.
Charedi women think studying Talmud is an incredible superpower. Also because of strict gender segregation, they have no idea what their husband's social status is just so long as he can keep it together at home.
Women having a preference for higher status men means that the marginal rate of partnership might go up, but I have doubts it would change the numbers enough to make a big difference. Across the world when women do not need men to survive, they choose to be alone. The only exception, as you noted, is when religion is embedded deeply into society - I figure that reflects how in their culture a woman's status is more linked to her motherhood.
I can put it simpler this way: a man rarely ever has a dream of success that doesn't involve him having a family at some point. A high earning lawyer would prob consider himself missing something or a failure without a wife to go with it. For women in the USA that's just different. I know lots of career women who are in their late 20s like me, and they could give a damn if they end up with a husband or family at the end.
Come back and tell us how you feel at 42 when your looks are fading and the cats aren't doing it for you anymore.,,,,and the high status men you might deign to date on the singles cruise are all chasing (successfully) women in their 20s like you are now, but won't be then.
40 - female, house husband, no kids, and 2 cats - no regrets. I was willing but ambiguous about kids and he was a hard no about it. I would have probably been solidly "yes" to having kids if said house husband would have been willing to completely invert the gender roles and do all the "nurturing" from infant to 5 and/or we were rich enough to afford like live in staff. Or if I could have ordered an undamaged 5 year old from the factory. Babies and toddlers completely suck and I've felt this way my whole life.
This is a real tension. Women *do* want male companionship. And while most women do instinctively tend to like babies and children, they also have a natural reservation about committing to them until ready. Your body has to basically brainwash you into loving your infant (which is not a person in any meaningful sense of the world for months to years after birth) as much as you do. Your body evolutionarily wired to flood you with hormones and such when an infant born. There is a real difference in signing up to be someone's companion and signing up to be something's slave for 1-4 years. I'm not willing to pay the drudgery price to get companionship. In the end, yes, I'd rather be alone.
I just want raise a fly in the ointment with regard to medicine and candidate sex selection.
Women tend to drop out fields when they have kids, either entirely or down to a part time level. Normally this isnt a great issue i lose sweat over but for medicine given the high lead times to make new doctors and small candidate field I think it merits a discussion.
I dont have solutions at least not palatable ones but if women drop out of the work force and this happens in all fields including medicine, And we are short doctors and medicine requires a high degree of societal investment and slots for medical school are very limited this sums up to at least having a discussion.
There are pressure values we can turn, like getting the AMA out of the way of putting caps on the number of new doctors. But the issues still remain that if we invest 12+ years to get a doctor through med school and they are doctor for say 3-5 years then stop, thats a problem. at the very least they shewed up a seat that could have gone to some one else who wouldn't have stopped being a doctor so early.
Saying its matter of personal choice doesn't make this stop being an actual problem.
The American Medical Association doesn't dictate the supply of new doctors. This is a common canard but it's untrue, The AMA is just a professional lobby group (concerned with "docs and dough") with no mandate to set standards or numbers.
Number of residency slots in the US is set by the Congress because they are funded by the Graduate Medical Education unit of Centers for Medicare Services (i.e., the federal government) The idea is to give reasonable hope to all graduands of US medical schools that there will be a funded (salaried) residency somewhere in America for them to compete for, which of course they need to complete in order to get a licence to practice. (An MD degree by itself doesn't give you anything. It's really just the halfway point on an 8-year, or longer, journey after an undergraduate degree.) But on the other hand, the government knows that all those residency grads will be billing Medicare (and the insurance companies) for the patient care they do. Controlling the number of funded residency slots is the main choke point the government has available to impose controls on its future costs, not just its salary obligations to the residents, which are trivial in comparison. Med school graduates who go abroad to do their residencies, because they couldn't get a GME-funded spot, have great difficulty in being competitive in the job market on return to the US, tending to do jobs in underserviced areas or specialties that more successful graduates don't want to do. (Grads who apply to foreign residencies are competing against that country's own medical grads who also expect to have first crack at their domestic residencies, just as American grads do.)
Medical school enrolments are set by the individual university medical schools themselves in concert with national accrediting organizations -- the Liaison Committee on Medical Education in the case of MD programs; the DO has its own accreditor -- that look at the ability of the school and its affiliated teaching hospitals and clinics to teach a given number of medical students effectively. Since medical education is very expensive and requires substantial government support, state governments (which fund universities, even private schools for such expensive programs as the MD) exert controls too on the schools' wishes to expand their classes. You'd have to look at the membership of these accrediting organizations to see if officers of the AMA are represented on them to gauge accurately if these accreditors are captured or influenced in any way by the AMA. Only a minority of doctors are members of the AMA; it is entirely possible that no one on the LCME would be even an AMA member, much less an officer with nobbling power.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (not an arm of the AMA) has no authority to set numbers of med students or residents. It does publish workforce studies that the schools and governments can use to decide about adjusting the size of classes to meet projected future demand for doctors. Recently the AAMC has called for the schools to increase class sizes by 30%, which has happened. This call reflects the lower productivity of the now-heavily feminized profession, with its tendency to work fewer hours when "full-time", to do less-intensive, wellness-oriented "frill" work instead of caring for the demanding sick, to go half-time, and to quit altogether. But it's still up to Congress to fund the residency slots that these grads will be competing for.
Believe whatever you like. I prefer evidence. The AMA is mostly irrelevant today, except for the excellent suite of medical-scientific journals they publish (arms-length) under JAMA.
An equally potent force trying always to increase the number of residents is the very powerful teaching hospitals who use residents as cheap labour. (Cheap because their salary money comes from the government, not from the hospitals.) Having abundant residents allows hospitals everywhere to expand money-making clinical programs and help do the prestigious research that makes world-famous teaching hospitals world-famous. Also the more residency slots your program has, the more prestigious it is through reputation.
The other driver that Congress listens to are its constituents back home. Joe Sixpack whose kid gets into the state medical school doesn't want to be told that his kid might not get a residency slot in the US because Congress cut the number of slots to less than the number of med school graduates.
The original rationale for Congress cutting residency slots in the 1990s was that the country was going to have too many doctors driven by the narrow short-term interests of the teaching hospitals as above. To keep themselves busy, they would invent new things to do, and bill third-party payers for. It wasn't the AMA trying to keep earnings high through artificial scarcity, it was Congress trying to protect the economy in the public interest from runaway health spending. There is no other lever of cost-control available to the payers. Managed care was another such effort, which failed.
Thing is, if you are getting paid for providing a free service, there will never be enough of you to meet demand for that free service. No one knows what the "right" number of doctors is, because no one can make those doctors do what's really necessary in the eyes of society. There will always be a scarcity of primary care doctors (and cardiologists and neurosurgeons) in rural North Dakota and there will always be surplus of dermatologists in Brooklyn. But, contrary to what scarcity theory predicts, the derms in Brooklyn will still make a good living.
That one's kind of iffy because the empathy and emotional sensitivity the left loves to trumpet as the most important of all virtues are actually quite important in clinical medicine. Also there are areas like obstetrics and gynecology where women quite understandably want a female provider, and with the current concerns about child abuse fewer and fewer men are going to want to go into child-facing fields like pediatrics.
So there is an argument for having a good number of female doctors, though you probably also want enough male ones to encourage men to go to the doctor! 50-50 might be optimal here.
Women will resent being slotted into the "natural" women's work specialties because their being women's work makes them less well remunerated. Men have abandoned ob-gyn and pediatrics because women flowing into them downgraded them as good career choices. If they are pink-collar ghettos like nursing and the steno pool, men who have choices will do something else.
In the old days, obstetricians undertook to deliver the babies of their own private patients they'd been following through the pregnancy, no matter when the mum went into labour. A call at 3 a.m. from the hospital: Dr. Jones your patient is here in L & D and she's 8 cm and pushing, meant the OB pulled on his pants without waking his wife and drove in. But then the groups started covering for each other, much to the annoyance of pregnant women at first. You delivered your partners' patients when you were on call, they delivered yours when they were on call. This paved the way for OB to be colonized by women who could plan around it. Women were keen to induce and actively manage labour so they could get home to families. When men did it it was faintly disreputable. Nowadays OB-GYN is mostly infertility treatment, since so few women are having babies anyway, right?
Those virtues of empathy and emotional sensitivity became important in clinical medicine only because women transformed the expectations to play to their strengths. We used to call it "bedside manner". Nice to have but patients mostly considered it optional if the guy knew his stuff. No need to spend a lot of time talking about it. Just find what's wrong and fix it. An oversimplification but a grain of truth.
"Bedside manner" is important though. Studies show doctors with bad bedside manner are more likely to get sued for malpractice regardless of treatment quality.
Patients who think their doctor actually cares about them are probably more likely to comply with treatment regimens too.
I'm not saying women are inferior doctors, at least not in regards to patient care. I'm talking about staffing when a large portion of women opt to greatly reduce the amount of work performed once they have kids in a critical field. I'm also saying that after the amount of societal investment and the fact slots are limited to get into medical school to become doctor women opting out after few years once they finish training is a problem.
The tacitly pro male i'm making is that men will continue to be doctors and work full time hours (often more than full time hours) long after having kids. Women reason for reduce work after having kids is eminently understandable, i'm not really faulting them for it in general but i do think there should be some concern perhaps moral condemnation for specific fields/jobs.
Similarly not that this would likely happen but imagine a women who is 35 becomes president, then also has a kid. You can talk to me all you want about yass queen girl boss bullshit, they should resign. IS that a likely scenario? no but its to elucidate the point. More realistically is cabinet secretary like what happen with Buttigieg under Biden. Some positions you don't get to be human, some positions you have to be switched on because your responsibilities extend past your role as manger or individual contributor.
What you say is true. Male doctors often don't even notice that they've had children. They work long hours, just as any entrepreneur who eats what he kills has to do in building up a career. The secret to success in medicine, as in so much in life, is to be available. As soon as you signal that you work only when you want to, not when the patient/customer wants you to, you're done. You're doing women's work. I know in the US, many doctors are now salaried production workers, especially in the female-heavy primary care specialties. Women's work.
Increasingly, even younger male doctors say they want "work-life balance." In their residencies they had mandated limitations on the hours they could work and things like paid maternity leave, knowing that "Someone Else" -- usually faculty -- would slot in to do their work when they were "off". So they get the idea that they can expect the same thing out in the real world of practice. Which they can't, unless they pay someone to spell them off. But economically that doesn't work. If you're earning less because you work fewer hours, where are you going to find the extra money to sell your on-call nights and weekends to someone else? And what if there is no "Someone Else" who's willing to practice that way, slotting in and out of other people's time off, instead of developing his own practice?
I do think there culture issues in hospitals arround long hours. We dont let truck drivers drive for more than 11 hours for obvious safety issues, but every hospital doctor i have talked has said and endorsed working 24 hours straight.
If its a staff issue this brings it back arround to female doctors dropping out.
A truck driver can stop his truck at 11 hours and rest. "Just in time" delivery will just have to wait. Or another driver can take over and take the load of soybeans or car parts the rest of the way. When you are looking after a sick patient, continuity is important in and of itself. Handing off to another doctor who doesn't know that patient's course during the 11 hours you were looking after her is itself dangerous. That danger has to be balanced against the danger that a tired doctor will miss something, especially with a new patient who appears during that 24 hours on duty. No easy answer.
The famous Libby Zion case was as much about poor supervision by faculty of inexperienced resident trainees making decisions that were beyond their achievement level as it was about fatigue per se.
The reality is that out in the real world of practice, there will be times when a doctor just has to work until the patient's condition has stabilized enough that he can grab an hour of sleep. (One nice thing about medicine is that it's the only career where you're allowed to sleep on the job! As long as the nurse knows where to find you, you're good.) If there is no one else to take over -- and there may not be -- he can't just leave a sick patient and turn off his pager because he's hit the legislated work-hour limit. There was a cultural attitude that if you can't live that way, don't go into medicine. One book that influenced a lot of us in high school, both toward and away from a career in medicine was Dr. William Nolen's "The Making of a Surgeon" (1968.)
The "voltage drop" in doctor-to-doctor handover, so important for female satisfaction in medicine (and younger male doctors too) has been looked at. One example: I didn't know this till I read the article in a medical journal (JAMA) but many hospitals allow anesthesiologists, usually women these days, to leave at 5 p.m. during a cardiac surgical case that goes longer than expected and have a second anesthesiologist take over, just as nurses do. (The surgeon of course works right through until the case is finished. The senior residents might be left to close up.) Long difficult cases are often stormier than straightforward short ones. The study found that 30-day surgical mortality was higher in the patients who had handovers during their anesthetics than those where the same anesthesiologist (and surgeon) had stayed with the case until it was finished. This was just observational and not a randomized experiment but it would be interesting to know if the hospital read this as a safety signal and put in a rule that said No Handovers. Finish what you start.
This isn't a knock against women, just against the idea that you can mandate work rules in patient care as if the work was factory work that has no history embedded in each task. Other observational studies suggest that female surgeons are more attuned to subtle signs of deterioration in their patients post-operatively and "rescue" their patients sooner. These findings come from studies of large administrative databases so we don't know *why* this is, or how they do it, but it suggests that there might be something in female attentiveness and communication style that protects patients, especially female patients, when they start to go sour.
The hand off issues is documentation issues and Comms issues, If there is some critical aspect that isnt captured in reporting or easily highlighted in a chart and filled in with experience thats a controls issue. Im not saying hand offs are smooth all the time but i think the risk calculations needs to favor doctors getting rest after 12 or 16 hours, exceptions for hot cases ofcourse
The irony of writing a post about how men need more and better jobs, but concluding it with "This post is sponsored by Mechanize [whose corporate mission is to take jobs away from humans]".
I think there are enough arguments in this article against job favoritism by sex (for either males or females) and other demographics that the answer to the question of preferential job treatment for men is a clear "no." Give jobs to the most qualified people and stop worrying about trying to produce more babies. Continuous population increase is unsustainable in the long run anyway. If we have a temporary downturn in population size, so be it--this happens in the rest of the animal kingdom all the time.
Because in the West cats are culturally feminized and dogs are culturally masculinized. The West is actually something of a weird outlier in its dog over cat preference. Most other places tend to consider dogs dirty and cats clean so they skew to a cat preference. (No dog in this race, tee hee. I have had both dogs and cats and tend to like animals in general).
Really? You’ve rarely heard the argument that “men should get preferences in jobs, and probably other things that involve material status like inheritance”?That argument has been the status quo for most of history. It is, in fact, true that not allowing women to have bank accounts/credit cards/jobs increases the status of men. It’s just that most of us decided that the financial subjugation of women is bad. Even if undoing women’s rights would unequivocally boost the fertility rate, the majority of normal people don’t think that’s a worthwhile trade. Do most men these days even want a woman who only stays married to them because she has no other options financially?
I think most of us probably do. Simply because if she can leave easily she'll take at least half of the assets and much of our future income stream. If this doesn't amount to a heck of a lot, she won't leave just to get it unless she has her own employment to sustain her.
Good article, this idea is worth you further exploring. One way to get the low hanging fruit on this concept is to deregulate and stop the massive government funding of education, healthcare, and public sector jobs - most of which primarily create jobs for women while being bad for the economy as well.
I had a similar idea with a male family member in a firefighter union. Yes, he gets paid disgusting amounts of taxpayer money to mostly sit around and then mostly be an EMT even when there is a 911 call. But he also uses the money to support a child and a family. Obviously there should be a cost-benefit to this analysis but it’s worth thinking balancing anti-market raises to male status and family formation.
I think this argument has the basic reality inverted. Men are not going to college, pursuing high paying career fields, and grinding as independent content creators on the side to attract potential mates, while failing. They are not doing this and actually are engaging in less status-motivated behavior than women (hence the college graduation splits). It is questionable to me how many young men want the dynamic where the man provides and leads while the woman nurtures in the first place.
Young men have by and large bought into an egalitarian relationship script where they want as much leisure time, capacity to 'talk about their feelings', and autonomy over how their kids are raised, as their wives do. Insofar as hypermasculine male archetypes like the 'bad boy' or the 'frat bro' have gained popularity, this stems from the fact that these are the rare type of men that let women inhabit the feminine role without objecting in romantic relationships. This status quo puts women in a precarious position, who for a myriad of reasons cannot outright say 'we wish men would celebrate their traditional gender role more as we innately find it to be attractive'.
I think your premise is onto something, but you fundamentally fail to understand how the male status paradox works. It is a big mistake to assume that because male lottery winners go on to have families more than female lottery winners, that means that more men will have families if all the men won the lottery. That is the opposite of how the male status paradox works. Male lottery winners have more children because they become individually higher status among men. If you made all men have the lifestyle of lottery winners, then something else would become the marker of status and no one would have more children.
There is plenty of evidence for this- larger gender wage gaps do not lead to higher TFR in the developed world. For example, South Korea has by far the largest gender wage gap in the developed world. This is not making women become enamored with the provider capacity of Korean men.
It does nothing to simply make men collectively higher status vs women. Iran gives men massively more economic and legal power than women, and this does not create a higher TFR. Status by its nature is something that discerns winners from losers and rewards winners only. All men can't be winners.
Instead of trying to make men look like collective winners vs. women, we have to use policy to incentivize having children and disincentivize not having children. It's another mistake to assume that policies that give men the wealth needed for family formation will lead to family formation instead of world travel and whatnot. The US has a very high living standard compared to almost anywhere, but also has a birthrate that isn't particularly impressive these days. You can't give men wealth and assume they will build families. You still need a carrot and stick around the family building.
Your lottery argument proves less than you claim. The study found that wealth increased men’s marriage formation and fertility. It did not establish that the effect operated only through rank among men, nor did it test what would happen if men’s economic security improved more broadly. “It is all positional” is your interpretation, not a finding of the lottery study.
Not all men can rank above one another, but most young men can simultaneously have steadier employment, better jobs, and higher socioeconomic status than the average woman. Improving those conditions doesn’t require making everyone a lottery winner, and would make men more marriageable.
Direct evidence contradicts the idea that only individual rank matters. A study found that trade shocks which disproportionately reduced young men’s employment and earnings also reduced marriage and fertility in affected communities. These were group-level economic losses, not merely individual men losing rank to other men. See: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180010
The reverse pattern appears as well. Kearney and Wilson found that fracking booms increased earnings and employment opportunities for less-educated men and raised both marital and nonmarital birth rates, although not marriage rates. Again, this was a broad labor-market improvement affecting many men at once. See: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article/100/4/678/58504/Male-Earnings-Marriageable-Men-and-Nonmarital
South Korea does not prove your point either. Its 29.3% headline gender wage gap is an unadjusted comparison among full-time workers across the labor market. Among recent university graduates, however, one study estimates a conditional gap of only 4.3% during 2008–19, falling from 5% to 3%, with most of Korea’s wage gap emerging later in working life (https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03153). It is therefore a poor proxy for the relative economic position of young men and women at family-forming ages. Korea shows that a large overall wage gap is not sufficient for high fertility; it does not prove that young men’s social status relative to women is irrelevant to marriage rates or fertility.
Iran is not a clean counterexample either. Male legal privilege does not necessarily translate into better economic or dating market prospects for ordinary young men. Women’s share of Iranian university students rose from about 28% in 1991 to 58% by 2006, meaning that women’s educational standing relative to men improved sharply even while the formal legal system continued to favor men. When women are as educated or more educated than men, men become less desirable partners to them, regardless of whatever legal privileges they might have.
Iranian evidence also suggests that sex-specific economic opportunities can affect family behavior. A restriction on female public-sector hiring reduced women’s college attendance by an estimated 11.4 percentage points. The more exposed cohorts also showed higher marriage and motherhood rates by ages 20–21. The study is observational and cannot prove that the policy increased completed fertility, but it does undermine the categorical claim that differences in relative social status between men and women cannot affect family formation. See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272723000786
National wealth does not tell us whether men at family-forming ages have secure jobs, affordable housing or enough stability to get married. “America is rich” is not evidence that increasing young men’s status relative to women would have no effect.
I do not think either of your studies indicate that individual rank wasn't the core issue in the long term. It is the case that sudden economic booms can correspond with short term increases in TFR- we saw this in many places in eastern europe and central asia after the Society Union fell. However, what happens after a few years is that the standard of living expectations adjust to higher standards and then people no longer feel financially secure enough to as many children, or they want to do other things with the money they have and the TFR falls back down.
As for your trade shocks issue, that could be in part individual rank as the communities were still within a wider nation and among other men who were not directly a part of those impacted industries. It can't only be individual rank or else overall TFR would never move.
You say- When women are as educated or more educated than men, men become less desirable partners to them, regardless of whatever legal privileges they might have-- Women are more college educated overall compared to Iran and more college educated than men among Saudi natives, Emerati, Israelis, Israeli ultra orthodox and the TFR among all of those groups is at least 2x as high as Iranians. However, Saudi natives and Emeratis are only a small percentage of their total national populations, and they are essentially the wealthiest demographic within their broader nations, hence the men should appear as much higher status than all the surrounding laborers that predominate their societies. The Israeli ultra orthodox have a reverse correlation with household income and TFR, where higher household income correlates with lower TFRs. They have one of the world's highest TFR in major part because they have refused to tie male status to make earning capacity. For them male status is defined by Torah literacy instead, and this seems to work like gangbusters for TFR.
Look at this seriously- The Israeli Ultra Orthodox are the ultimate counter example to your claim about women being more educated and it reducing the desirability of men. The Israeli Ultra orthodox have the highest gender disparity in the world in educational attainment with about half of Haredi men not even having an elementary school level education and 38% of Haredi women having a college education and Haredi women being expected to be family breadwinners, which is especially important in the US where the families do not receive state sponsored Torah study stipend. Yet they have a TFR above 6 in the US and Israel just the same. This shows that tying male status to something other than gainful employment and education that leads to gainful employment is A LOT more powerful for fertility than somehow making men more comparatively educated than women.
You actually concede the central problem with your original argument when you say, “It can't only be individual rank or else overall TFR would never move.” Exactly. Your original claim was that status is inherently zero-sum, so making men collectively better off cannot increase fertility because the same men remain above and below one another. Once you concede that broad conditions can move aggregate fertility, the question becomes whether men's economic circumstances (both relative to women and absolute) are one of those conditions, and not whether relative rank exists.
And the evidence isn't limited to temporary booms. Brazilian trade liberalization caused disproportionately large employment losses for men, and the fertility effects persisted for roughly 20 years, and a study identified declining employment among young men as an important channel. South Korean men who entered the labor market during the Asian Financial Crisis subsequently experienced persistent reductions in employment, earnings, marriage and fertility. Those are long-run life-course effects, not a few years of TFR moving before people's expectations “adjust.” See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3161625 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32989344/.
Your attempt to reinterpret the Autor-Dorn-Hanson result as male rank relative to unaffected men elsewhere is possible, but it isn't what the study identifies. The authors looked at gender-specific labor-demand shocks to examine how changes in the economic position of young men relative to young women in the same local markets affect marriage and fertility. They found that shocks reducing men's relative earnings reduce both. Saying the men might instead have been comparing themselves with men somewhere else in America is an additional hypothesis for which you've supplied no evidence. If any group-level finding can always be redescribed afterward as status relative to some larger comparison group, then the status theory becomes very difficult to falsify.
I agree that Haredim are a real counterexample to any universal rule that women being more secularly educated than men must produce low fertility. But they are a very poor analogue for an open dating/marriage market. 95% percent of married Israeli Haredim have another Haredi spouse, marriage commonly occurs through an organized matchmaking system, marriage and family are central religious obligations, and prolonged singlehood and defection carry intense social stigma. An educated Haredi woman who intends to remain Haredi therefore is not choosing from the same broad pool of similarly educated men that she would encounter in an open marriage market like the US. She is overwhelmingly choosing within a community where men systematically pursue religious rather than secular education.
The Gulf comparison shifts the goalposts a bit. You started with men’s status relative to women, but when Saudi and Emirati fertility does not fit that story, you switch to native Arabian men’s status relative to migrant laborers. Yet those migrants are largely outside the same dating/marriage market, which is heavily structured by nationality, religion and tribal background, so it is not obvious why their presence should make Saudi or Emirati men more desirable to native women. And in Saudi Arabia specifically, citizens are not a small minority anyway; foreign nationals are only a little over 40% of the population.
Saudi Arabia itself does not show that rising female education and employment are irrelevant to fertility. Saudi fertility has declined substantially over time as women have become more educated and, more recently, much more economically active, factors that research associates with later marriage and lower fertility (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110569016301613). So female advancement appears to be putting downward pressure on Saudi fertility too.
More importantly, Saudi Arabia is hardly a clean comparison with Iran on men's economic prospects. Saudi men are much better positioned economically than Iranian men. In 2024, Saudi GDP per capita was about $35,100 versus roughly $5,200 in Iran, while inflation was about 1.7% versus 32.5%. Saudi male unemployment among citizens was 4.3% in Q4 2024, and the government there provides dedicated subsidized financing to help young men meet marriage costs. See: https://my.gov.sa/en/content/youth
So, Saudi Arabia's higher fertility is much more compatible with those downward pressures from rising female education and employment being partly offset by the country financially helping young men get married, alongside these men being more "marriageable" due to better absolute economic conditions, than it is with a story about Saudi men outranking migrant laborers.
In addition to Joe's comment about South Korea's gender wage gap being misleading, note that South Korea has the 2nd highest female tertiary educational attainment level in the world at around 80%. The OECD average is around 57%, and the US is 63%. This is compounded by South Korea's obsession with educational credentialism as a status marker. So if you have a society like South Korea that is uniquely focused on educational attainment for status, the very high female educational attainment will have an even more pronounced effect on gender relations.
It's really about *sexual autonomy* - the ability to be able to pursue one's own impulses and preferences in sexual strategy. Making all women into losers relative to men doesn't actually cater to female preferences - it just truncates female choice by making them more likely to *need* a male.
If this is really about children - I'm much more amenable to punishing people with no children than forcing women to be more dependent. If it comes down to that, I'd much rather be successful and have a choice between paying higher taxes or whatever and purchasing sperm than have no choice but to be shackled to some asshole I'm not interested in for life.
(Happily married to a literal house husband for 15 years for the record so I would say I don't have unrealistic standards on what male success looks like. But *I* chose him, and this immensely matters. And, no, I didn't make him do this. He chose to stop working himself. I would not care if he worked or made more money than me).
Ya status is a zero sum game.
One carrot was that for most men, sex was available only upon a commitment to marriage, which couldn't be easily undone by either party. And sex reliably led to children if the wife (not necessarily the husband) wanted them. Even with The Pill, it was she, not he, who decided if she took it. The problem as I see it is that women, even trad wives who stay at home, don't necessarily want children anymore and want to do other things with their husband's wealth. And that is just fine for many husbands. He's happy to travel the world with her, childlessly. If she changes her mind later, it's often too late for her.
And since unmarried men can easily get sex without the commitment to marriage, they don't need to commit in order to have sex. (This applies only to the men who would be good marriage material. The unattractive men can't get sex and they can't get married, as two sides of the same coin.) Women who consent to pre-marital sex in that circumstance will usually take diligent measures to avoid conception and birth unless they are going to let the state take on the role of husband/provider. So it's not only low-status men we should be deterring from fathering children. It's low-status women we should be deterring from conceiving them. The latter is the more efficient policy choice I should think.
How to get a high-status woman, the kind who is attractive to high-status men, to want to have children early in life when she has the best chance of actually succeeding? No one seems to know, because the state carrots and sticks so far haven't worked.
One carrot was that for most men, sex was available only upon a commitment to marriage, which couldn't be easily undone by either party.-
I agree. And I think this is a core reason why patriarchy is not effective at raising fertility in a modernized economy. There are today several countries with information economies or industrialized economies that are still deeply patriarchal such as India and Iran. And we see that their patriarchal mores do not succeed at keeping TFR up. However, their patriarchial social and familial institutions do succeed at the thing they were always designed to do which was to keep sex limited to marriage. And because of that they keep marriage rates hgh and marriage controlled by the families rather than the individuals. This doesn’t lead to high TFRs anymore because birth control exists and there is no material reason to have many children anymore.
What these places need to do is tie social benefits to having a child rather than the act of getting marriage. It doesn’t make much sense to allow access to sex after one produces a child, but we must find a a way of tying other desirable benefits to having a child, not getting married itself.
No, because children aren’t the point. Families are.
Why? Because it is families that actually raise, coach, and train children. Simply popping out a child doesn’t solve any problems.
Great article. Another classic 'Hanania says the stuff that's implied by the principles but nobody else has the balls to say'. We'll see if it gets taken up by the tech right, there are enough people paying attention to you at this point.
As someone who grew up with a lot of (frequently hostile) feminism, MRA doesn't really give me the 'ick' the same way--they were always on my case, why shouldn't I get on theirs? But I'll take your word for it it does to other people. The religion thing makes total sense though--see, it's not that I'm a loser begging for special privileges, the guy in the sky said I had to have them!
One disadvantage, though, of having lots of low-status men who *don't* form families is that they tend to get into trouble--street crime, political movements, etc. They often wind up serving as cannon fodder in wars. This is probably a huge reason behind the rise of right-wing populism in the past few decades.
From the evolutionary point of view for the low-status male, it makes perfect sense--if society does not provide you the means to attract a mate, it makes sense to cause trouble to overthrow it, or at a lower level try to take resources (or a mate) by force.
As for getting high-status males to have kids once they've paired off...can't help you there. I do wonder if this is kind of the idea behind going after sex tourism and age gaps and other things high-status older men do to trade on their higher status, trying to force them to pair off instead of screwing around. Of course, an ugly old guy who starts a family with his Seeking Arrangement would be producing some of those kids you want (though perhaps with a higher autism risk).
Great job!
Correction: Lots of low status men who don't form families tend to get into trouble whenever they DON'T wind up serving as cannon fodder in wars. They don't get into trouble IF they wind up as cannon fodder in wars.
The ones who came back got better marriage prospects as war heroes and historically would bring back slaves, including sex slaves.
Banning slavery, looting and war rape has unironically made the armed forces less attractive than ever for men.
And when the Royal Navy (and other navies) stopped taking enemy ships as prizes, the proceeds of which would be distributed lawfully and systematically to the crews in Admiralty Prize Court, made sea life less attractive to sailors, especially for those were high enough in the pecking order, such as skilled bosun's mates who would go aloft in the rigging, to get a slightly larger share. Of course the Admiral of the port where the warship had sailed from got the biggest share, ahead even of the sea captain, but even a tiny share was a king's ransom to a lowly sailor.
ISIS was keeping the old ways alive, but the US military - that defender of female sexual leverage - had to get involved.
I'm genuinely stunned that ISIS legalizing sex slavery didn't cause en-masse male conversions to Islam.
Islam understands more than any other religion that pleasing the penis is the purpose of a man's life.
Pretty much every pro male policy I can think of comes down to sex.
Like revoking (or lowering) age of consent laws, legalizing child porn, making it difficult or impossible for women and girls to testify in rape/molestation cases, banning divorce, legalizing concubinage/sex slavery etc.
The areas they operated in were largely Muslim already, and the non Muslim populations still suffered sex selective population losses in the civil war lol
Well, weren't they busy killing all the men in the process?
"killing" implies that ISIS men had no agency but they were happily fighting for ISIS. They were more enthusiastic about fighting and even dying for the Caliphate than most any Western man is about his own country.
And sex slaves were definitely a motivator. Guaranteed access to sex with hot girls and women is the #1 way to motivate men to do anything you want them to. They'll line up around the block for a chance at nubile virgin pussy (and ass and mouth).
You seem like a good argument that the human race disappearing is not without its advantages
Well, good point.
Ironically my own years fearing the draft as a youngster make me very unwilling to send other people to die as cannon fodder in wars.
The United States is very unlikely ever to re-institute a draft, or even fight in a future war where heavy casualties among infantry can be expected. The other guy's infantry will be slaughtered instead.
I think the point is you *might* want to get rid of poorly educated low-status men who aren't sexually attractive to women and who will dangerously resent never having the opportunity to have sex. Depends on how choosy women are. I knew several guys -- maybe most of them -- in my high school class who, looking back on it, probably never mated, especially once manufacturing jobs in my small city of auto parts factories evaporated. What would they offer a woman? With too many of them hanging around idle and resentfully horny they become dangerous. Every society finds that. Leads to insurrection if some demagogue has money to pay them to cause trouble.
porn ? onlyFans ? prostitution ?
Modern world is already over stimulated
Does the tech right still pay attention to hanania?
You can make a just-so story about anything. I can say we need to preferentially hire for women because male partners are more likely to be severely abusive so women need independence. I could say that we need to preferentially hire women to counterweight the pervasive history of sexism. I could say we need to prefentially hire women because they're less aggressive and often miss jobs they are most qualified for because they don't push for more.
It's best to just stay out of things and let markets decide. Thinking you know better than the market has been the failure of countless governments.
Your stupidity is painful. You are comparing a possible increase in domestic abuse to a confirmed decrease in fertility - which is more damaging to a country?
It's not confirmed that affirmative action for men would actually increase fertility. That's speculation on Hanania's part. Plausible, but not particularly more plausible than abuse increasing
Again, you miss the point. Why do you even bother reading at all? How much time do you waste trying to make yourself feel smart?
You should make your writing clearer then.
”At the very least, we can say job preferences in favor of men are much easier to rationally justify than discrimination going in the other direction. Here, we can add that men who face financial difficulties in life are more likely to abuse drugs, suffer depression, and commit suicide, so even if we didn’t care about marriage and babies, there are other reasons to make policy with the idea that jobs matter more to men in mind.”
The AA for women is based on reaction to actual historical discrimination. That's the rational justification for AA at least true till a decade or 2 ago. This is much different then discrimination for men so they can get sex. We are not giving women stuff to get prettier so they can attract more men.
And the richer women marriages being more unstable seems to be strongly driven by even the men acting crazier when their wives earn more and even data shows men aren't comfortable not being the breadwinner, but they don't want to be sole breadwinners either.
And you are missing the part where it's not just that they are just attracted to richer men, it's also that a lot of these good traits are often very correlated, smart people are more likely to be richer, less violent and riich people more likely to be hardworking. Poor talented artists are not doing very bad with women too, smart not so rich men too. It's possible that action wouldn't increase coupling much (not just because it clearly diminishes status of such wealth as you mentioned) because the other correlated traits would cause problems.
What if there wasn't actually a discrimination. But that decisions were made on the possibility of a woman getting pregnant and then no longer working?
Yeah that's a dumb logic. That was indeed not why rhey were discriminated against, it was because they thought "women too dumb". There's also always possibility a man falls sick, or dies and in the past the chance of sickness and death was even higher.
I disagree. Pregnancy imposes real costs on the wage economy. Employers should rationally discriminate against people who impose those costs on them.
There is a reluctance to hire young women into high-commitment fields like surgical residencies because of the near-certainty that the woman will take time off to have a baby or two. While she's off, someone has to fill in for her in the operating room, on call -- which particularly annoys the lesbians and the men who are expected to do extra call --, and doing surgical consults in the hospital and outpatient clinic. In reality no one will fill in -- faculty will just have to work harder on clinical work and let their research activities slip and the other residents will be told they'll be one person short for six months. Unlike careers that are made of interchangeable workers doing low-value work, like HR, insurance, education, and factory work, you can't just "slot in" a random surgeon to cover a mat leave and then terminate her when (if) the woman on leave comes back to work. And the pool of people available to fill mat leaves are the sub-optimal workers anyway, because they couldn't get full-time jobs. In low-value work it may not matter if the person doing it temporarily is sub-optimal but in medicine it does.
Even if the woman works straight through her training racing against her biological clock, Departments are still reluctant to take her on because for sure she'll leave them a man short now that she's deferred pregnancy for so long. Departments considering hiring a woman when they expand the practice find themselves eye-balling the candidates to suss out whether they look like mom material. "Are you married?" And of course once the first woman joins the Department, they can't even talk about doing that out loud.
It's bullshit, it was never the major reasons women were discriminated against, it was always the dumb 'they aren't as smart as men" thing. You can literally see how women even in sub shaharan africa and most of Europe history have always worked, and not just "in the home". It's pointless to have this discussion. Cause it's based on a strawman of what their motivation were, it doesn't even track with historical data. And even current data we have.
You used surgery as an example as if your point of pregnancy being an impediment would be any less of an hindrance to any of the other fields women have now come to dominate. If anything, I'd say surgery is one of the places its even easier to take breaks.
One way to know it was completely based on prejudice is that even if priced in, as it currently is, it would never be so absolute if it was just pregnancy they were worried about. And single women and women that stopped having kids would have more options but that was not the case. The market currently penalizes women for pregnancy and motherhood. That is what it would look like if "the discrimination was actually pregnancy being priced it". Before much of the formal economy, most women (safe the upper class), worked and not just "a5 home", they worked in processing, markets that took them away from home as well.
Glad you are so sure of yourself. I like confidence!
You need to differentiate between wrong prejudice and right prejudice. Like I said before, think as an insurer.
And most of the historical discrimination we are talking about wee based on the wrong prejudice snd even the right prejudice didn't actually stop most women from working pre formal economy. They weren't thinking like insurers
There is always a multitude of probabilities. You just have to think as an insurer, at what price you want to insure against probability A, B or C. Once you do that, the gap disappears. At 25, chances of sickness and death with a high human capital white collar job are not high.
It's bullshit, it was never the major reasons women were discriminated against, it was always the dumb 'they aren't as smart as men" thing. You can literally see how women even in sub shaharan africa and most of Europe history have always worked, and not just "in the home". It's pointless to have this discussion. Cause it's based on a strawman of what their motivation were, it doesn't even track with historical data. And even current data we have.
One way to know it was completely based on prejudice is that even if priced in, as it currently is, it would never be so absolute if it was just pregnancy they were worried about. And single women and women that stopped having kids would have more options but that was not the case. The market currently penalizes women for pregnancy and motherhood. That is what it would look like if "the discrimination was actually pregnancy being priced it". Before much of the formal economy, most women (safe the upper class), worked and not just "a5 home", they worked in processing, markets that took them away from home as well.
This overplays the gap between men and women when it comes to seeking high status partners. Most men don't want to marry someone who is much lower status than them either.
Unless they are cute.
Being physically attractive is high status though.
Sure, but you can very attractive and upper class or very attractive and lower class.
Most kidding aside, I actually have not encountered this in the USA .. maybe in England and probably in Asian cultures .. but the typical American male fantasy, everything else being equal, methinks runs towards rescuing or introducing a gal into a better world than the one she is perceived to be in..
Nah. Just makes her a gold-digger.
China, amongst many nations and cultures, does not recognize the concept of "gold-digger". (Indeed Japan does not have a direct word for 'romantic love', and it was not historically a consideration in marriage arrangements - thus also the accompanying lesser stigma of extra-marital relationships.). Just injecting a bit of uninvited culturally diversity into the debate.
Ivy grads marry Ivy grads
And proceed to not procreate (I mean, they BOTH have too much invested to volunteer to stay home with the kids) .. a dying species.
For men, there is a difference between mate and marry.
Lmao men will definitely marry a lower status woman if she is good looking. Same for women. Women seek men they actually like once they have money.
I think this doesn't follow the "ick" reflex in women back to source enough. At core, what both men and women want is *sexual autonomy* or the freedom to follow their own impulses about what the best sexual strategy is for themselves. Men want to be free to like big boobs, dammit, and women want to be free to not get saddled with losers, dammit. There's two problems here:
1. While men/women are actually mostly cooperative when it comes to sexuality and child rearing, their evolutionary preferences tend to make some nebulous percentage of the interaction (say, 20%) *competitive.* This is also actually true for female/offspring. It's *mostly* cooperative - both the mother and child have lots of reasons to cooperate for the survival of the child. But at the end of the day, the child doesn't care about things like its mother's future fertility prospects. It will demand as much attention as it can get from her - its preference is she die for it and not her hypothetical future offspring. This is why a teenager is disproportionately more willing to like throw a baby in a dumpster or some other kind of dramatic infanticide in bad circumstances - she is making an evolutionary bet on her 20+ years of remaining fertility. The infant would clearly prefer she sacrifice her whole future for it. This is also why an infant will scream at the mere fact that its mother isn't in eyesight - it would rather her be sleep deprived but present to protect it than comfortable while putting it at 2% more risk.
2. Men are more evolutionarily equipped to *force* women to accept the crap end of the bargain in that 20% competition space to cater to men's preferences. We (women) get the raw end of the deal on pregnancy/lactation and on this front as well.
It's not just that women find status sexually attractive. They want to be able to *choose* status. Meanwhile, this creates anxiety in men who are paranoid that women with choice will jump ship for a higher status male so they are motivated to use coercion to make sure women remain in a state of dependency. *Limiting female choice* has been an explicit part of the male sexual strategy for ages. Women are naturally leery of this. It's not just ick over losers. It's ick over any system that seems like it would try to force us to choose losers.
I don't have a magical solution to this from the point of view of macro goals like family formation or decreasing loneliness. I also have no issues getting rid of affirmative action or disparate impact type laws. I can tell you that anything that's really about trying to compel female *dependency* again and stripping women of our right to choose our partners (which is what the right actually wants) will have me joining the bra burners and advocating every woman sterilize herself out of spite.
My proposed truce is to let men be horndogs, normalize male beauty preferences, fine, whatever. Let everyone be really paranoid about being skinny all the time as one example This really fucking sucks if you are female. Trying to look 23 for the maximum amount of time possible is a complete drag. In return, screw anything (legally and culturally) which is designed to compel women into states of dependency. Trading the stupid beauty rat race for the status rat race seems fair to me.
There's a fundamental flaw in your premise about sexual autonomy, though you're hardly alone and this is common in all discussions about this topic.
Namely, it misconstrues male sexual autonomy as being equivalent to female sexual autonomy and doesn't recognize that while female sexual autonomy has historically been suppressed, so has male sexual autonomy. Furthermore, while female sexual autonomy is increasingly liberated and encouraged in many societies, male sexual autonomy is still fundamentally suppressed in these same societies.
So what is male sexual autonomy? Female sexual autonomy fundamentally may be about free choice in sexual partners, but that is not what male sexual autonomy fundamentally is about. In sexual species throughout the animal kingdom, male sexual autonomy involves the natural right to initiate violent force against other males for territory and breeding rights therein.
Now under civilization, this fundamental aspect of male sexuality and autonomy is suppressed: men are denied the right to initiate individual violent force in order to maintain a state of peace and protect positions of authority and status held by elite males.
Monogamy correlated with higher latitudes because women can't obtain sufficient calories for themselves and their offspring at higher latitudes. They required provisioning by male mates. This was environmentally imposed monogamy. Most advanced civilizations derived from populations who had undergone this environmentally imposed monogamy and implemented socially imposed monogamy once the caloric surplus of civilization obviated the necessity of monogamous male provisioning.
Civilization reproduces the more benign low latitude environment in which women can more easily support themselves and offspring without male provisioning and thus express more polygynous preferences that are latent or suppressed in harsher higher latitude environments.
The foundation of civilization is defense of territory in exchange for those individuals giving up their sovereignty. Man submits his will to a “higher power” and suppresses his sexuality: his natural right to violent force.
In this contract the individual male "losers" are put at reproductive risk by the female’s polygynous instincts to mate with the high status males in her environment, and a submissive man, civilized man, "loser" man — is rejected so she can find the non-losers.
The compromise of the social contract therefore allowed the creation of a pseudo-natural environment in which men as a class had status, in exchange for suppressing their sexuality. With the liberation of female sexual autonomy and continued suppression of male sexual autonomy, this tacit contract has been breached, the foundation shattered.
So if the source of the "ick" reflex in women is the suppression of female sexual choice, the source of the discontent, frustration, "ick" among men is the continued suppression of fundamental male sexuality by the State in an environment in which societies increasingly restore and encourage female sexual autonomy.
You seriously need to read more about social animals if you think male reproductive strategy is reducible to violence enacted against other males. Social animals have many "digressions" (as Richard Dawkins put in) in behavior that only lossily point towards gene replication via sexual reproduction. It's *not* just "strongest male beats other male over head and mates with the females." The closest thing to true baseline "sexual autonomy" for males is not about challenging other males - it's about promiscuity. Challenging other males is a digression away from the core goal of mating which is what directly leads to gene replication. Males employ many other strategies besides just violence to "sow oats," some of which are much more economical than fighting other males.
Within social animals:
There are males that compete almost entirely by display. There are males whose entire strategy is basically rape. There are for wont of a better term "trickster" males that sometimes fool females into mating with them and are sometimes mated with willingly under some "alpha's" nose and that sometimes render a female incapable of mating with another male after mating with him (there are various species that basically clog up the female's reproductive track until the sperm has time to fertilize the egg). There are ways that *both older females and males* police sexual choice of both younger females and males and compel them to help rear young that aren't theirs (and even this can be very different in operation - see the difference in naked mole rats and wolves). There are species where male relatives band together and form coalitions.
The more social and complex the organism, the more diverse and sophisticated the song and dance around sexual reproduction.
I'm not really interested in summarizing a bunch of books here but some that certainly lay out some of what I'm saying:
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Evolutionary psychologist/anthropologist)
Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Willliams (evolutionary psychologist)
Basically anything by the primatologist Frans de Waal
*Edit* The underlying 20% "competition" is between female choosiness and male promiscuity. (The shorthand for this is sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive, but really pregnancy/lactation/helpless offspring are really expensive). This "picky female" dynamic is also one of the engines of sexual selection which can lead to things like A) male deer who develop ludicrous antlers and who fight each other half to death during the rut or B) elaborate plumage and song of male birds or C) displays of resource sharing/acquisition. As it turns out, most social mammals (especially highly intelligent culturally plastic ones) can display components of all three strategies at once.
Pair-bonding happens in various species as well. It's sometimes seasonal and sometimes true monogamy.
Pretty much none of these behaviors are unique to "higher latitude" human civilizations.
To that end, my proposed truce *does* explicitly endorse male reproductive strategy by normalizing male promiscuity and focus on youth and beauty. It just removes, yes, specifically the force card, but that was *never* the only strategy males had. And I actually don't really care if you want to reinstate legalized dueling or something either. I'm also fine with getting rid of mandatory alimony and child support payments.
I'm familiar with the literature on social animals. Sociality almost always involves the suppression of sexuality to varying degrees. In wolf packs, breeding is monopolized by the dominant breeding pair(s), and sexuality in subordinate males and females that are not direct offspring is suppressed. In the extreme case, you have the eusocial insects in which sexuality is suppressed altogether at the genetic level among virtually all of the individuals who are sexless components of the hive colony as drones, workers, soldiers, etc.
This is no less the case in human sociality, and in its most complex forms such as civilization, which is fundamentally founded and maintained on the violent suppression of individual males, who have a natural right to violence in a state of non-civilization. See Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization to get a sense of how this natural right was expressed before complex civilizations established a monopoly on violence. Human male sexuality involved males or groups of related males (which is important as kinship coefficients were very high compared to later civilizations) enacting violence against other males to dominate territory and breeding rights therein.
When civilizations are established, there's a tacit bargain that's made for men giving up their sexuality in exchange for the state's monopoly on violence. Some degree of patriarchy is established by suppressing female sexual autonomy as well because males are put at reproductive risk by giving up their sexual autonomy.
My only point is that this basis of civilization is generally not recognized or is just denied altogether. It's assumed that until recently, there was a one-sided suppression of female sexual autonomy throughout all of history by all civilizatios for reasons of irrational sexism. And just as the suppression of female sexual autonomy evokes a visceral "ick" among women, there's a corresponding visceral discontent and "ick" among men who are expected to continue to submit to the state, society, dominant social mores, to work and fight and die in wars, etc., particularly as female sexual autonomy is increasingly liberated and valorized while male sexual autonomy is still expected to be suppressed to maintain civilization.
Thankfully for those who wish to suppress male sexuality, there are technological methods in the form of virtual distractions such as the internet, video games, pornography, that seem effective at distracting men enough to keep violent outbursts and revolt to a minimum. And there are no longer groups of barbarian pastoralists outside of civilization like the Indo-European tribes and such that were around historically that would be ready to destroy and take over civilizations that gelded their males. And there will be even greater, more effective technological means in the future. AI, robots, artificial wombs, genetic engineering, etc. may enable them to expunge male sexuality altogether and convert humanity into some kind of eusocial species.
I like your argument but, damn!, I sure wouldn't want to live with you.
I'm perfectly willing to negotiate or compromise. Just not to be told what to do based on something something some ancient book said or bad evo psych generalizations about how women are really more like children than adults. I haven't had any trouble finding men who agree to this basic arrangement, and I'd say I'm much more tolerant than typical of all kinds of stereotypical male behavior, especially male nerd behavior. (Yes, put your action figures in a glass display in the living room - I don't care. Play video games for 15+ hours a day for a week and keep a huge porn collection. I don't care. My taste in men actively runs towards "losers" on some metrics - I prefer intelligent sensitive interesting nerds. Being boring or shallow is a much worse offense than being poor).
But beyond all that, this just re-emphasizes what I said. *People want to be free to choose* something as important as who they have to put up with 50+ years.
I don't mean "wouldn't want to live with you" in an unkind or hurtful way, or suggest that it would in any sense be your fault. I actually think I'd quite like you in small, regular doses even without the truce proposal. Your arguments really are unimpeachable.
I'm happily married to a woman who was fulfilled by her career and got head-hunted more often than I did....and who doesn't look any more like she did at 32 when we met...and neither do I.
Sincerely wishing you every happiness and joy. Don't ever change, unless you want to.
You’re right that religion is genius but wrong about the mechanism.
Religion creates special jobs and status for men, so they have meaning and purpose they might not otherwise have, but the activities are gentle and pro-social - getting together with other men to chant poetry, reading ancient books.
Charedi women think studying Talmud is an incredible superpower. Also because of strict gender segregation, they have no idea what their husband's social status is just so long as he can keep it together at home.
The perfect arrangement
Women having a preference for higher status men means that the marginal rate of partnership might go up, but I have doubts it would change the numbers enough to make a big difference. Across the world when women do not need men to survive, they choose to be alone. The only exception, as you noted, is when religion is embedded deeply into society - I figure that reflects how in their culture a woman's status is more linked to her motherhood.
I can put it simpler this way: a man rarely ever has a dream of success that doesn't involve him having a family at some point. A high earning lawyer would prob consider himself missing something or a failure without a wife to go with it. For women in the USA that's just different. I know lots of career women who are in their late 20s like me, and they could give a damn if they end up with a husband or family at the end.
Come back and tell us how you feel at 42 when your looks are fading and the cats aren't doing it for you anymore.,,,,and the high status men you might deign to date on the singles cruise are all chasing (successfully) women in their 20s like you are now, but won't be then.
40 - female, house husband, no kids, and 2 cats - no regrets. I was willing but ambiguous about kids and he was a hard no about it. I would have probably been solidly "yes" to having kids if said house husband would have been willing to completely invert the gender roles and do all the "nurturing" from infant to 5 and/or we were rich enough to afford like live in staff. Or if I could have ordered an undamaged 5 year old from the factory. Babies and toddlers completely suck and I've felt this way my whole life.
This is a real tension. Women *do* want male companionship. And while most women do instinctively tend to like babies and children, they also have a natural reservation about committing to them until ready. Your body has to basically brainwash you into loving your infant (which is not a person in any meaningful sense of the world for months to years after birth) as much as you do. Your body evolutionarily wired to flood you with hormones and such when an infant born. There is a real difference in signing up to be someone's companion and signing up to be something's slave for 1-4 years. I'm not willing to pay the drudgery price to get companionship. In the end, yes, I'd rather be alone.
Akshually, Data doesn't support your theory.
Women don't need sex like men do. Biotruth 101 man
I just want raise a fly in the ointment with regard to medicine and candidate sex selection.
Women tend to drop out fields when they have kids, either entirely or down to a part time level. Normally this isnt a great issue i lose sweat over but for medicine given the high lead times to make new doctors and small candidate field I think it merits a discussion.
I dont have solutions at least not palatable ones but if women drop out of the work force and this happens in all fields including medicine, And we are short doctors and medicine requires a high degree of societal investment and slots for medical school are very limited this sums up to at least having a discussion.
There are pressure values we can turn, like getting the AMA out of the way of putting caps on the number of new doctors. But the issues still remain that if we invest 12+ years to get a doctor through med school and they are doctor for say 3-5 years then stop, thats a problem. at the very least they shewed up a seat that could have gone to some one else who wouldn't have stopped being a doctor so early.
Saying its matter of personal choice doesn't make this stop being an actual problem.
Good argument except....
The American Medical Association doesn't dictate the supply of new doctors. This is a common canard but it's untrue, The AMA is just a professional lobby group (concerned with "docs and dough") with no mandate to set standards or numbers.
Number of residency slots in the US is set by the Congress because they are funded by the Graduate Medical Education unit of Centers for Medicare Services (i.e., the federal government) The idea is to give reasonable hope to all graduands of US medical schools that there will be a funded (salaried) residency somewhere in America for them to compete for, which of course they need to complete in order to get a licence to practice. (An MD degree by itself doesn't give you anything. It's really just the halfway point on an 8-year, or longer, journey after an undergraduate degree.) But on the other hand, the government knows that all those residency grads will be billing Medicare (and the insurance companies) for the patient care they do. Controlling the number of funded residency slots is the main choke point the government has available to impose controls on its future costs, not just its salary obligations to the residents, which are trivial in comparison. Med school graduates who go abroad to do their residencies, because they couldn't get a GME-funded spot, have great difficulty in being competitive in the job market on return to the US, tending to do jobs in underserviced areas or specialties that more successful graduates don't want to do. (Grads who apply to foreign residencies are competing against that country's own medical grads who also expect to have first crack at their domestic residencies, just as American grads do.)
Medical school enrolments are set by the individual university medical schools themselves in concert with national accrediting organizations -- the Liaison Committee on Medical Education in the case of MD programs; the DO has its own accreditor -- that look at the ability of the school and its affiliated teaching hospitals and clinics to teach a given number of medical students effectively. Since medical education is very expensive and requires substantial government support, state governments (which fund universities, even private schools for such expensive programs as the MD) exert controls too on the schools' wishes to expand their classes. You'd have to look at the membership of these accrediting organizations to see if officers of the AMA are represented on them to gauge accurately if these accreditors are captured or influenced in any way by the AMA. Only a minority of doctors are members of the AMA; it is entirely possible that no one on the LCME would be even an AMA member, much less an officer with nobbling power.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (not an arm of the AMA) has no authority to set numbers of med students or residents. It does publish workforce studies that the schools and governments can use to decide about adjusting the size of classes to meet projected future demand for doctors. Recently the AAMC has called for the schools to increase class sizes by 30%, which has happened. This call reflects the lower productivity of the now-heavily feminized profession, with its tendency to work fewer hours when "full-time", to do less-intensive, wellness-oriented "frill" work instead of caring for the demanding sick, to go half-time, and to quit altogether. But it's still up to Congress to fund the residency slots that these grads will be competing for.
That doesnt really alter my point. Supply is constrained on two fronts artificially via residencies and raw tallent.
Also im pretty sure ama lobbies congress to restrict residency slots as well.
Believe whatever you like. I prefer evidence. The AMA is mostly irrelevant today, except for the excellent suite of medical-scientific journals they publish (arms-length) under JAMA.
An equally potent force trying always to increase the number of residents is the very powerful teaching hospitals who use residents as cheap labour. (Cheap because their salary money comes from the government, not from the hospitals.) Having abundant residents allows hospitals everywhere to expand money-making clinical programs and help do the prestigious research that makes world-famous teaching hospitals world-famous. Also the more residency slots your program has, the more prestigious it is through reputation.
The other driver that Congress listens to are its constituents back home. Joe Sixpack whose kid gets into the state medical school doesn't want to be told that his kid might not get a residency slot in the US because Congress cut the number of slots to less than the number of med school graduates.
The original rationale for Congress cutting residency slots in the 1990s was that the country was going to have too many doctors driven by the narrow short-term interests of the teaching hospitals as above. To keep themselves busy, they would invent new things to do, and bill third-party payers for. It wasn't the AMA trying to keep earnings high through artificial scarcity, it was Congress trying to protect the economy in the public interest from runaway health spending. There is no other lever of cost-control available to the payers. Managed care was another such effort, which failed.
Thing is, if you are getting paid for providing a free service, there will never be enough of you to meet demand for that free service. No one knows what the "right" number of doctors is, because no one can make those doctors do what's really necessary in the eyes of society. There will always be a scarcity of primary care doctors (and cardiologists and neurosurgeons) in rural North Dakota and there will always be surplus of dermatologists in Brooklyn. But, contrary to what scarcity theory predicts, the derms in Brooklyn will still make a good living.
That one's kind of iffy because the empathy and emotional sensitivity the left loves to trumpet as the most important of all virtues are actually quite important in clinical medicine. Also there are areas like obstetrics and gynecology where women quite understandably want a female provider, and with the current concerns about child abuse fewer and fewer men are going to want to go into child-facing fields like pediatrics.
So there is an argument for having a good number of female doctors, though you probably also want enough male ones to encourage men to go to the doctor! 50-50 might be optimal here.
Women will resent being slotted into the "natural" women's work specialties because their being women's work makes them less well remunerated. Men have abandoned ob-gyn and pediatrics because women flowing into them downgraded them as good career choices. If they are pink-collar ghettos like nursing and the steno pool, men who have choices will do something else.
In the old days, obstetricians undertook to deliver the babies of their own private patients they'd been following through the pregnancy, no matter when the mum went into labour. A call at 3 a.m. from the hospital: Dr. Jones your patient is here in L & D and she's 8 cm and pushing, meant the OB pulled on his pants without waking his wife and drove in. But then the groups started covering for each other, much to the annoyance of pregnant women at first. You delivered your partners' patients when you were on call, they delivered yours when they were on call. This paved the way for OB to be colonized by women who could plan around it. Women were keen to induce and actively manage labour so they could get home to families. When men did it it was faintly disreputable. Nowadays OB-GYN is mostly infertility treatment, since so few women are having babies anyway, right?
Those virtues of empathy and emotional sensitivity became important in clinical medicine only because women transformed the expectations to play to their strengths. We used to call it "bedside manner". Nice to have but patients mostly considered it optional if the guy knew his stuff. No need to spend a lot of time talking about it. Just find what's wrong and fix it. An oversimplification but a grain of truth.
"Bedside manner" is important though. Studies show doctors with bad bedside manner are more likely to get sued for malpractice regardless of treatment quality.
Patients who think their doctor actually cares about them are probably more likely to comply with treatment regimens too.
I'm not saying women are inferior doctors, at least not in regards to patient care. I'm talking about staffing when a large portion of women opt to greatly reduce the amount of work performed once they have kids in a critical field. I'm also saying that after the amount of societal investment and the fact slots are limited to get into medical school to become doctor women opting out after few years once they finish training is a problem.
The tacitly pro male i'm making is that men will continue to be doctors and work full time hours (often more than full time hours) long after having kids. Women reason for reduce work after having kids is eminently understandable, i'm not really faulting them for it in general but i do think there should be some concern perhaps moral condemnation for specific fields/jobs.
Similarly not that this would likely happen but imagine a women who is 35 becomes president, then also has a kid. You can talk to me all you want about yass queen girl boss bullshit, they should resign. IS that a likely scenario? no but its to elucidate the point. More realistically is cabinet secretary like what happen with Buttigieg under Biden. Some positions you don't get to be human, some positions you have to be switched on because your responsibilities extend past your role as manger or individual contributor.
What you say is true. Male doctors often don't even notice that they've had children. They work long hours, just as any entrepreneur who eats what he kills has to do in building up a career. The secret to success in medicine, as in so much in life, is to be available. As soon as you signal that you work only when you want to, not when the patient/customer wants you to, you're done. You're doing women's work. I know in the US, many doctors are now salaried production workers, especially in the female-heavy primary care specialties. Women's work.
Increasingly, even younger male doctors say they want "work-life balance." In their residencies they had mandated limitations on the hours they could work and things like paid maternity leave, knowing that "Someone Else" -- usually faculty -- would slot in to do their work when they were "off". So they get the idea that they can expect the same thing out in the real world of practice. Which they can't, unless they pay someone to spell them off. But economically that doesn't work. If you're earning less because you work fewer hours, where are you going to find the extra money to sell your on-call nights and weekends to someone else? And what if there is no "Someone Else" who's willing to practice that way, slotting in and out of other people's time off, instead of developing his own practice?
I do think there culture issues in hospitals arround long hours. We dont let truck drivers drive for more than 11 hours for obvious safety issues, but every hospital doctor i have talked has said and endorsed working 24 hours straight.
If its a staff issue this brings it back arround to female doctors dropping out.
A truck driver can stop his truck at 11 hours and rest. "Just in time" delivery will just have to wait. Or another driver can take over and take the load of soybeans or car parts the rest of the way. When you are looking after a sick patient, continuity is important in and of itself. Handing off to another doctor who doesn't know that patient's course during the 11 hours you were looking after her is itself dangerous. That danger has to be balanced against the danger that a tired doctor will miss something, especially with a new patient who appears during that 24 hours on duty. No easy answer.
The famous Libby Zion case was as much about poor supervision by faculty of inexperienced resident trainees making decisions that were beyond their achievement level as it was about fatigue per se.
The reality is that out in the real world of practice, there will be times when a doctor just has to work until the patient's condition has stabilized enough that he can grab an hour of sleep. (One nice thing about medicine is that it's the only career where you're allowed to sleep on the job! As long as the nurse knows where to find you, you're good.) If there is no one else to take over -- and there may not be -- he can't just leave a sick patient and turn off his pager because he's hit the legislated work-hour limit. There was a cultural attitude that if you can't live that way, don't go into medicine. One book that influenced a lot of us in high school, both toward and away from a career in medicine was Dr. William Nolen's "The Making of a Surgeon" (1968.)
The "voltage drop" in doctor-to-doctor handover, so important for female satisfaction in medicine (and younger male doctors too) has been looked at. One example: I didn't know this till I read the article in a medical journal (JAMA) but many hospitals allow anesthesiologists, usually women these days, to leave at 5 p.m. during a cardiac surgical case that goes longer than expected and have a second anesthesiologist take over, just as nurses do. (The surgeon of course works right through until the case is finished. The senior residents might be left to close up.) Long difficult cases are often stormier than straightforward short ones. The study found that 30-day surgical mortality was higher in the patients who had handovers during their anesthetics than those where the same anesthesiologist (and surgeon) had stayed with the case until it was finished. This was just observational and not a randomized experiment but it would be interesting to know if the hospital read this as a safety signal and put in a rule that said No Handovers. Finish what you start.
This isn't a knock against women, just against the idea that you can mandate work rules in patient care as if the work was factory work that has no history embedded in each task. Other observational studies suggest that female surgeons are more attuned to subtle signs of deterioration in their patients post-operatively and "rescue" their patients sooner. These findings come from studies of large administrative databases so we don't know *why* this is, or how they do it, but it suggests that there might be something in female attentiveness and communication style that protects patients, especially female patients, when they start to go sour.
The hand off issues is documentation issues and Comms issues, If there is some critical aspect that isnt captured in reporting or easily highlighted in a chart and filled in with experience thats a controls issue. Im not saying hand offs are smooth all the time but i think the risk calculations needs to favor doctors getting rest after 12 or 16 hours, exceptions for hot cases ofcourse
Japan had implicit preference for males in medicine for years. It got recently busted not too long ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/10/betrayed-victims-of-tokyos-medical-school-scandal-react
The irony of writing a post about how men need more and better jobs, but concluding it with "This post is sponsored by Mechanize [whose corporate mission is to take jobs away from humans]".
It's literally a job offer.
I think there are enough arguments in this article against job favoritism by sex (for either males or females) and other demographics that the answer to the question of preferential job treatment for men is a clear "no." Give jobs to the most qualified people and stop worrying about trying to produce more babies. Continuous population increase is unsustainable in the long run anyway. If we have a temporary downturn in population size, so be it--this happens in the rest of the animal kingdom all the time.
Those childless cat ladies have enormous power in politics.
I'll argue that the left has had sway for about 80 years, it's time for a new approach.
I don't know why cats catch strays here, in my experience those women have dogs.
Because in the West cats are culturally feminized and dogs are culturally masculinized. The West is actually something of a weird outlier in its dog over cat preference. Most other places tend to consider dogs dirty and cats clean so they skew to a cat preference. (No dog in this race, tee hee. I have had both dogs and cats and tend to like animals in general).
Really? You’ve rarely heard the argument that “men should get preferences in jobs, and probably other things that involve material status like inheritance”?That argument has been the status quo for most of history. It is, in fact, true that not allowing women to have bank accounts/credit cards/jobs increases the status of men. It’s just that most of us decided that the financial subjugation of women is bad. Even if undoing women’s rights would unequivocally boost the fertility rate, the majority of normal people don’t think that’s a worthwhile trade. Do most men these days even want a woman who only stays married to them because she has no other options financially?
I think most of us probably do. Simply because if she can leave easily she'll take at least half of the assets and much of our future income stream. If this doesn't amount to a heck of a lot, she won't leave just to get it unless she has her own employment to sustain her.
Good article, this idea is worth you further exploring. One way to get the low hanging fruit on this concept is to deregulate and stop the massive government funding of education, healthcare, and public sector jobs - most of which primarily create jobs for women while being bad for the economy as well.
I had a similar idea with a male family member in a firefighter union. Yes, he gets paid disgusting amounts of taxpayer money to mostly sit around and then mostly be an EMT even when there is a 911 call. But he also uses the money to support a child and a family. Obviously there should be a cost-benefit to this analysis but it’s worth thinking balancing anti-market raises to male status and family formation.
I think this argument has the basic reality inverted. Men are not going to college, pursuing high paying career fields, and grinding as independent content creators on the side to attract potential mates, while failing. They are not doing this and actually are engaging in less status-motivated behavior than women (hence the college graduation splits). It is questionable to me how many young men want the dynamic where the man provides and leads while the woman nurtures in the first place.
Young men have by and large bought into an egalitarian relationship script where they want as much leisure time, capacity to 'talk about their feelings', and autonomy over how their kids are raised, as their wives do. Insofar as hypermasculine male archetypes like the 'bad boy' or the 'frat bro' have gained popularity, this stems from the fact that these are the rare type of men that let women inhabit the feminine role without objecting in romantic relationships. This status quo puts women in a precarious position, who for a myriad of reasons cannot outright say 'we wish men would celebrate their traditional gender role more as we innately find it to be attractive'.
I get the point about preferences, but what are we to think of this:
"For women ages 25 to 39, higher incomes are associated with higher marriage rates."
https://ifstudies.org/blog/high-earning-women-are-more-likely-to-marry-
Are they marrying even richer men?
marriage has collapsed for lower income/ class women in America.
always. why wouldn't they be?