Oppression of males is the gender oppression of the future
Convincing men to choose a high-investment reproductive strategy is the key to raising fertility.
During the course of my life, I have thought a lot about gender equality. How to attain it? How much of it is desirable? How much of it can there be, before nature sets the limit? In recent years I have come to realize that those questions are not very relevant. In this now, gender equality is imploding because gender equal culture doesn't make many enough children to sustain itself.
For that reason, my interest has shifted from gender equality to gender inequality. Some kind of gender inequality seems to be the future. The foremost question is which kind.
At first sight, it looks like the more gender inequality, the better for fertility. Niger, the most fertile country of the world, is not well-known for its gender equality. However, looking closer into the matter, the picture gets more complicated, and more interesting. Fertility rates are falling worldwide, also in countries infamous for their gender inequality. For example, Iran has a fertility rate of about 1.7 and Saudi Arabia about 2.2. That indicates that gender inequality in itself is not a magic wand to make people have children. Also, when people from gender unequal cultures immigrate into Western societies, their fertility tends to fall very quickly: Their children often have as low, or even lower fertility than the host population.1
For example, Somalia has a fertility rate of about 7. Somali women who immigrated to Norway in the last century had a fertility rate of almost 4.5, more than any immigrant group. The daughters of those immigrants, however, had a fertility rate of less than 2.2
In other words, high fertility cultures from the Third World don't thrive in conjunction with the First World. When Muslims move to the Western world, most of them can't, or won't, persuade their children to form big families themselves. For an average Muslim, emigrating to the West is a bad way of having many grandchildren. Although living standards are higher in the West, most Muslim cultures are unable to channel the riches into raising grandchildren.
Resilient traditions
Most traditional societies can only remain traditional in isolation from modernity. As soon as a modern lifestyle becomes available, their members are pulled into it. Their traditions are not strong enough to resist such a force.
However, a few traditional communities have co-evolved with mainstream Western society. They have found ways to take advantage of the economic opportunities of a modern society without getting caught in the pattern of small families. With fertility rates around 6, the Amish and the Ultra-Orthodox Jews are on the way to conquering America: The Amish are taking over the countryside, the Ultra-Orthodox Jews the cities.
Why do these communities thrive in contact with mainstream American society, while most traditional societies disintegrate in just a generation or two? I have come to think of a possible explanation: It is all about males.
In general, traditional religion has a tendency to be very female-focused. When I lived in Syria I regularly saw couples where she was dressed in black head to toe (eyes included, so she saw the world through a black veil), while he was dressed like any Westerner, in long pants and t-shirt with short sleeves. In such couples, she quite obviously sacrifices more for her religion than he does for his.
In general, the upholding of dress codes seems to fall disproportionately on females. I once visited a part of Dubai City populated by guest workers. The males mostly wore Western clothes. The females looked like they were taken from a gallery of Asia's cultures. As if the upholding of tradition quite literally rested on the shoulders of women.
Mainstream American Christians are disproportionately female-focused in another way: They are extremely interested in reproduction. The American abortion debate entirely revolves around what females should be allowed to do when they get unintentionally pregnant. Women are asked to, or ordered to make sacrifices for morality and religion. Men are passed to the shadows.
Focused
In general, modern religion and traditions tend to be a bit female-focused. However, I think that the three high-fertility minorities in the US; the Amish, the Hutterites and the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, are less so. None of them let males off lightly.
Amish and Hutterite men stand out compared to the rest of the population in dress and hair style. An Amish man can't go anywhere without being instantly recognized as Amish.
In his memoir Growing up Amish, Ira Wagler explains how he had to re-make his appearance to fit in when he ran away from the Amish for the first time as a 17-year-old.
“My lodging for the night secured, it was time to venture out and buy some clothes. My shirts were fine, I figured. But I really wanted to get rid of those barn-door pants.”
Soon enough, he was recommended a pair of jeans, which he thought fit perfectly.
“For the first time ever, I was not conscious that I was any different from anyone else around me, because I wasn’t—except for my haircut. But I would get that taken care of soon enough.”3
Also the Ultra-Orthodox Jews have distinct dress codes on the male side. Although dress codes vary and distinct clothes are not compulsory, in general it is easier to spot an Ultra-Orthodox man on the street than an Ultra-Orthodox woman.
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Women are following modesty rules. But judging from these images, they are also following mainstream aesthetics. The men, on the other hand, follow an opaque code of aesthetics that is probably only comprehensible to insiders.
But it is mostly in the realm of education that expectations for the sexes differ: Boys study significantly more religious issues than girls. Their schedule is also stricter with longer hours.
In a book about Ultra-Orthodox Jews4, I read the casual remark that among Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Lakewood, New York, high school for boys starts at 7 am and ends at 10 pm. I asked a member of the Lakewood community and he stated that the real times are 7.30 am to 10 pm. Also, there are breaks, for example a long lunch break with time to go home for lunch or engage in a game of basketball, he pointed out.5
But in any case, the schedule is very demanding. An important part of the school day is about discussing religious matters. The boys themselves choose their discussion partners. To me as an outsider from the Christian world, it sounds like a confirmation camp that just goes on and on, year after year.
After their high school years young men commonly continue their religious studies and discussions, from about 7.30 am. to 6 pm. That kind of life doesn't even end with marriage, which tends to take place when men and women are around 20. Married young men can get a stipend for their religious studies and the wife is supposed to be the breadwinner of the family. Children are supposed to be born shortly after marriage. They often go to daycare.
In other words: Ultra-Orthodox Jews are educating their daughters to become both mothers and breadwinners and their sons to discuss religious texts throughout their teens and beyond. That way, the daughters are encouraged to make closer contact with mainstream society at earlier ages than the sons. In their early 20s, men are encouraged to spend their entire days in religious education. Meanwhile, their female peers are either educating themselves for the secular labor market or are providing for their families through participating in the secular labor market, if they are not home taking care of children. Ultimately, the men also enter the labor market and start providing for their families. But in many cases, they are doing so years later than their wives.
Taming the wild
To an outsider, the extreme amount of religious study Orthodox Jewish men go through seems wasteful. I think that might be a mistake. Those graduates from religious schools succeed in producing what counts in today's cultural evolution: Children.
As a side note, many of those men are doing remarkably well financially when they finally leave their religious schools and set out to work in branches like real estate and accounting. That, if anything, should put mainstream education into question: In effect, graduates of religious education are a kind of control group that shows what happens when intelligent young men do not attend mainstream university. The success of that control group is a strong indication that much of the function of the mainstream university system is, in fact, religious. But that is another blog post.
Well-behaved Ultra-Orthodox boys and young men spend almost all the time they have studying. Amish young men do the opposite: They are forbidden from formal studying from the age of 14, since that might lead to pride. Instead they work, and work and work and work, because making a living without electricity, cars and a varying collection of other modern machines takes a lot of work. Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jews might not seem to have very much in common, which makes it all the more remarkable that both groups manage to produce four times more children than mainstream society.
At first sight, mainstream Western society is rational and efficient and Ultra-Orthodox and Amish societies waste human energy. But what if it is exactly the activities that look like waste of time that makes the Amish and the Orthodox Jews have many children? I suspect that we have lost a piece of knowledge that some other societies have retained: That good fathers don't come for free. Shaping them is actually very costly. Men don't become monogamous and caretaking just from being left in freedom. They become so through a hugely costly process of cultural conditioning.
Leaders and followers
Empirically, keeping males in a traditional, religious lifestyle seems more difficult than keeping females in traditional, religious lifestyles.6 The Mormons retain many more females than males7. Hutterite groups struggle with male defection, especially the most traditional-minded8.
Also in mainstream Western society, women appear more prone to adopt the dictates of society than men. Women go to university, our de-facto houses of worship, at significantly higher rates than men. Women have also adopted Woke ideology, our modern religion, to a much higher degree.
I think this points in one direction: It is men that are leading and women who are following. More men break loose from tradition and stake out new directions. More women follow their cultures. If their culture tells them to marry early and have many children, they will strive for that. If their culture tells them to go to university and think very, very carefully before having children, they will do that.
But women are not only obedient followers of cultural dictates. They are also perceptive followers of men around them. Jon Birger’s Date-o-nomics and his predecessor Marcia Guttentag’s Too Many Women demonstrate that when there are more females than males in a dating pool, women tend to offer more casual sex and dress more sexually provocatively. Also at Christian universities, where official culture values modesty and chastity, hook-up culture seems to be rather widespread. That is, when females are in a numerical disadvantage and need to compete intensely with each other, they tend to adapt to what men like. Also if the things men like are against official ideals.
Sarah Hrdy's sociobiological books about motherhood start from a slightly different angle, but they come to similar conclusions. Hrdy's view of female strategies builds on one basic principle: Women will seek out whatever paternal investment they can get. If men offer life-long and supportive marriage, women will take that offer. If men are unreliable and only willing to support women for a shorter time, women will instead go for serial relationships with a number of men. I think one of the main messages of Sarah Hrdy's Mother Nature can be summarized into one sentence: women get slutty when men are unreliable. Which is more or less what Jon Birger and Marcia Guttentag say too: When men are in a numerically advantageous position, they become unreliable. And women respond to men's lack of reliability through competing more intensely for men's attention.
The variable sex
Thinking a bit about it, what Sarah Hrdy, Jon Birger and Marcia Guttentag are actually saying is that males are the variable sex. Men have two reproductive strategies between which they alternate; a high-investment, female-like reproductive strategy and a low-investment strategy that reminds of what most male mammals are up to. Meanwhile, human females only have one reproductive strategy: Very high-investment.
Expressed in mathematical terms: Male reproductive strategy is the variable. Female reproductive strategy is just a function of that variable. Depending on circumstances, males will adjust their reproductive strategies. Females will not do that. They will always try to coax men into investing as much as possible in their children. Their methods will follow the behavior of the males. But their objective will always be the same: To obtain as much investment as possible from as genetically desirable men as possible.
From this follows a simple conclusion: Societies that want their citizens to invest their time and energy in raising children, need to focus on their male populations. Among males, some individuals are made for high-investment parenting and some are made for low-investment. But many, probably most men, are somewhat adaptable. Depending on their environment, they will choose between high-investment and low-investment strategies.
It is males who have a choice, so it is the males who set the agenda. Females adapt and make the best of the situation. Thereby, in order to make humans invest in children, nudging males into a high-investment strategy is crucial.
The cloistering of females is out
If the above is true, why have so many societies spent so much resources on controlling females? If male chastity is more difficult to attain than female chastity, why have so many societies focused more on female chastity than on male chastity?
Because of intra-male competition. Women as a group will go nowhere from their role as wives and mothers, if such a role is on offer. But they will strive for the best possible deal with the best possible man. And that is a huge problem for men in simple societies, who want as many attractive women as possible for themselves. For those men, forcing women into submission so those women can't seek the best deal for themselves is perfectly rational behavior.
In other words: Under primitive circumstances, human males oppress human females for the same reason that baboon males oppress baboon females: In order to maximize their own reproductive opportunities. Scaring a woman into being one's wife is simply a way of getting an (additional) wife.
Scaring other men into giving up their wives is another well-known way of getting another wife. And, as I wrote about in my post Violent enough to stand still, this makes cooperation between men difficult. Whatever society that can gather men into an army in spite of these differences of opinion will win the wars. If cloistering the females makes cooperation between men easier, then that is the rational way forward.
At some point, however, when population increases enough for land to become scarce, men will compete less over women and more over resources (I wrote about that in The price of a woman). Women will be increasingly irrelevant to conflicts between men, which decreases the incentives to oppress them. On the whole, classical gender oppression, where males control particular females, is a remnant from the time when females were one of the most important resources.
That doesn't mean that all kinds of gender equality is becoming irrelevant. Rather, it looks like gender-inequality is shifting shape. From the confinement and physical control of women, to the discrimination or even exclusion of women in certain parts of society. While only simple, high-mortality societies have strong incentives to treat women like cattle, all societies need to invest more in transforming males into good husbands than into transforming women into good wives. Discriminating against women is a perfectly rational way of doing that. It is a way of directing the resources for socialization to where they are best needed: On the male side.
It is rather logical: If women are following cultural dictates and male preferences anyway, then societies should be better off directing their resources to the male side while taking women for granted to a certain degree. For that reason, I believe that it is the discriminatory type of gender inequality that belongs to the future. From the point of view of society as a whole, imprisoning women is pointless. But directing more attention to males than to females still makes sense.
Make men great again
There is an inherent contradiction in the complete, equal-opportunitues gender equality: Because of their dual mating strategies, men need culture more than women. A vast majority of women will be high-investing mothers also without culture. A majority, or at least a big minority of men, need a certain type of culture in order to choose to be high-investing fathers.
Females are more willing and also sometimes more capable adherents of culture. So if males and females are allowed to compete fairly over who is the most adapted to cultural norms, females tend to win. We are seeing that in today's Western society. Although men still excel in technical and scientific pursuits to a higher degree than women, women are taking over occupations that build on following social norms.
That way, females take over important parts of society. Meanwhile, we are subservient to men in one important area: reproduction. In theory, women can have children without fathers present. Technically, we can use men as sperm donors and raise children cooperatively. A bit like most female herd mammals are doing. The problem is, we don't seem to have the mindset. The female mind doesn't revolve mainly around raising children - it revolves at least equally much around romance and love. As long as our mental worlds and our social instincts revolve around men, we will be prisoners of men. No matter how much we take over society, powered by our superior adaptability; as long as we adapt to them, the men will somehow rule the show anyway.
The crucial question is: What does it actually take to convince/nudge/oppress men to choose high-investment mating strategies and become family men? Does it require a decade of confirmation camp, like among the Ultra-Orthodox Jews? Or the absence of more or less all other opportunities, like among the Amish? Is there any other way to oppress, or inspire, men to be family men? Can it be done to a lower cost in terms of individual freedom, productivity and gender equality?
Let us hope so. And at the same time, let's get used to the idea that on the population level, good fathers don't come for free.
See for example this study for a summary of research. Rene Desiderio, The Impact of International Migration on Fertility: An Empirical Study, 2020, https://www.knomad.org/sites/default/files/2020-01/Migration%20Fertility%20Paper%20(2019%20Update_World%20Bank)_final_-converted.pdf
Jostein Grytten, Irene Skau, Rune Sørensen. Fertility and immigration: Do immigrant mothers hand down their fertility pattern to the next generation? Evidence from Norway, 2024
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X2300120X}
Ira Wagler, Growing up Amish, 2011, 37 percent of e-book
Ali Botein-Furrevig, Heart of the Stranger - A Portrait of Lakewood's Orthodox Community, 2013
Jon Birger, Date-o-nomics, 2015, 57 percent of e-book
Jon Birger, Date-o-nomics, 2015, 56 percent of e-book
Rod Janzen and Max Stanton, Hutterites of North America, 2010, 68 percent of e-book
Interesting piece, but I think I disagree with the main idea. It is not clear to me why you suggest that increasing male investment in offspring is the key variable in increasing fertility. Modern western societies with low birthrates do not have an epidemic of unattached women and uncommitted men. Men in rich societies are plenty committed! The difference is not primarily that there are dramatically fewer committed couples, the difference is that the committed couples have dramatically fewer children.
I think that the key variable is something that you allude to: women in westernized societies are socialized to value their careers above having a large family. Women among the high fertility religious subgroups you discuss are socialized to prioritize having large families. It is as simple as that.
The attitude of the men is mostly irrelevant as long as they are willing to commit sufficiently to support the women having their big family.
As an Orthodox Jew, I overall agree with your facts though disentangling causes & effects is hard.
A small quibble:
"If the above is true, why have so many societies spent so much resources on controlling females?"
Because it's much easier than controlling males.