Great article. Mormonism does that to some degree by keeping young people in religious education throughout their lives and sending young people (especially men) on 2 year proselytizing missions. It’s very common for men to come out of that wanting to get married and have kids. A large amount of that is based on theology that prioritizes family and having children above all else.
A big obstacle to men committing is surely due to the judicial undermining of masculine authority in the feminist era. Why become a father when you stand to loose every thing in female initiated divorce. Effective contraception has enabled women to become hypergamous.
30 %of males between 18 and 30 haven't had any relationship with a member of the opposite sex in the past year whereas it's half that figure for women.
The key phrase was seeking commitment from "desirable males" .The dating apps and social media have caused a huge increase in hook up culture with females dating out of their league and refusing to settle for their equals in looks. While mass immigration has skewed the sex ratio even more. Along with a" refugees welcome here "sentiment from those young women it makes marriage and child rearing so much less likely to happen.
Although there have been a number of voices casting doubts on the veracity of the survey from a few years back that claimed that males in the 18 to 30 age group were half as likely to be in a relationship/having regular intimacy than their female peers it hasn't really been debunked either
If you look into that pew research data you're referencing, most of the gap between young men and women is from more women reporting cohabitation with a romantic partner. Which would point to women dating older not sharing men
I believe that the flak the people give women for doing what they do is a misunderstanding that you explain quite well - women follow incentives to their logical end, and whether they are happy with them does come from male leadership in relationshipsand in society.
Modernity is blamed for moral dissolution, but in your examples, you highlight that strictness in moral upbringing of males produces desired results in women - perhaps our moral efforts should go towards shaping men more?
Of course, female education and the incentives in society should be aligned with male moral education and for women's benefit, as in effect it addresses the old feminist trope of men being unrestricted agents of selfishness, but rather they come under strict moral code that then redirects their energies towards women in a healthy way.
I have been slowly trying to formulate some ideas I have about how the sexual revolution has been worse for men than for women. Women tend to conform to men, and a lot of the things men think are women’s choices are actually women responding to what men seem to want.
I’m Gen X so perhaps I am too old to see the current trends, but all my girl friends in High school (except for the one who became a lesbian), wanted to be wives and mothers, not career women.
The messaging to men in tv, movies, and books since the 60’s has been that male status is how many women want to sleep with him. There are few examples of a husband with many children being a role model.
I suspect that men benefit from very structured instruction in courtship and marital responsibilities.
"I have been slowly trying to formulate some ideas I have about how the sexual revolution has been worse for men than for women."
Is _worse_ the important thing? I think there are lots of valid critiques of the sexual revolution, e.g. "things that are bad now", some that affect men and some that affect women. And I think this even though I think we should never go back.
But something that has frustrated me is seeing these kinds of discussions break down into a "who's more oppressed" pissing contest, as if all cultural changes we make are going to be weirdly zero sum, so the most important thing is to figure out who is screwed over more.
It’s more in my thinking. That the impact for men has been more subtle, because men have been told they are supposed to be hedonistic when they are young. That that is their natural state. Whereas, women were told they were free to indulge men’s hedonistic tendencies, and that somehow that would make them happy.
Women, in general, will go where the men are, and conform to what the men want, usually in an often subconscious attempt to elicit marriage.
All of this stuff seems to be self correcting in the more recent generations.
There is a conservative critique of the sexual revolution that roughly says: "the sexual revolution and birth control really enabled men to act even more like cads, and this sucks for any women whose preference is for men to not act like cads." I am sympathetic to this view (albeit I am sane washing it slightly) but I consider the "solution" ("ban births control, obvs.") to be a response that's way worse than the disease.
That conservative critique, I think, is weak in that it fails to acknowledge that women can have their own preferences, and if women's preferences were more libertine/sex positive (these descriptions suck, I'm being lazy in not coming up with a better term) the old pre-birth control world sucked. In other words, that critique fails to acknowledge the libertarian benefit of the sexual revolution.
I think this is my version of this message being sent to men: we are told that we are just dumb simple creatures who like having sex, and that we do not have complicated emotional lives like women. Therefore if we have negative feelings (of some unspecified nature because we're not going to be able to name them with any degree of specificity) then the problem is probably just that we're not having sex enough, and we can then move on to figuring out who is to blame.
In my view, this message is totally wrong, and because it is wrong, the "solutions" one comes up with for men (using that framing) are wrong.
You are deluding yourself about women’s nature. I personally know many libertine women. They always start crying about how the man they are sleeping with won’t marry them.
I'm not making a statement about "women's nature."
I am suggesting that human behavior is often pretty diverse and varying, and a social change that makes a wider variety of behaviors socially acceptable is almost by definition going to make _some_ people's preferred behavior more acceptable.
Of course there are outliners, but the sexual revolution lifted up the most reviled of male sexual behaviors as normative, wreaking havoc on our culture. Prior to the pill, a male that had premarital sex was expected to marry any girl who he knocked up. Those men that didn’t were considered the most detestable of men and socially reviled.
Women in that time used the shotgun wedding to their advantage, though entrapping men into marriage is a horrible way to start married life.
Are there female outliers that just want casual sex? Probably. But we see the rise of many strange practices because MOST women don’t. The kind of valadation that most men experience from being granted sex by a female. Is not equivalent for women. That sense of acceptance and validation for normative females is achieved thru marriage.
The Romance genre, has a very hard rule, no matter if it’s an inspirational Amish romance, or the spiciest sex littered story, the story must have a HEA (happily ever after, this means marriage, never ever does it mean we had sex until we got tired of each other and moved on).
You are right. It should be higher among citizens. But it is surprisingly difficult to find a figure for only citizens or even statistics of the age and sex of non-citizens.
Provide the visible possibility of successfully attaining a viable career and a partner.
Today young men have been visibly locked out of this by unemployment, useless uni degrees and housing unaffordability on the economic side. Socially a huge proportion of women are explicitly hostile toward men as are pretty much all institutions.
The feminist movement is happy about this because they have the same family-suppression agenda as the overall left. But there are plenty of "good women", someone like Emily W King. I can't see any solution to the happiness of both sexes other than return to socially-normative of monogamy. J Peterson used a very unfortunate term of "forced monogamy", it actually doesn't need to be forced.
Seems from what you describe that strong cultural pressure and expectations are driving the high fertility rates, and that these sub-cultures remained impervious to the parent culture because they're so isolationists. This doesn't seem contingent on any particular exceptional demand from males, except to stay shielded from modern people's ideas and do what they're told.
We can look beyond cults and also observe developed or developing countries with superior fertility rates. While rates are broadly falling globally, they're healthier in a few places.
Like all philosophers, your analysis is biased towards your own idiosyncratic view. You are viewing gender relations through the lens of only a woman and not as a man.
> Meanwhile, human females only have one reproductive strategy: Very high-investment.
This is objectively false, and every single single mother disproves this point. Sperm banks cement it as false.
Women have two mating strategies, outlined by dating app data:
- Short term: the sexy son hypothesis. If a woman is impregnated by a promiscuous man, then her promiscuous son will spread her genes. That's why only 6' tall white blonde men with blue eyes can donate sperm (look up sperm donation demographics)
- Long term: everything you said
Here's the kicker **women do not engage in short-term mating strategies in tribes.** Meaning, when women are Jewish or Amish, they will almost never engage in short-term mating strategies, so your hypothesis is too narrowly focused on these groups instead of the wide expanse of human sexuality.
The reason women do not do this is because they will be shamed by other women in their tribe for not being married with child. The moment that your community exceeds Dunbar's number, the ability for women to be shamed by their tribe diminishes and single motherhood increases.
So, if you want to increase fertility, you must oppress women such that they are still demonized into not having a child outside of wedlock, which requires keeping your community small until you can split the community through mitosis. If women have too many children in one community, short-term strategies develop and the community collapses.
Women who opt for short-term mating and hope it will result in a sexy son still have a very high-investment strategy, because they will have to care for that sexy-son-to-be until he is grown-up. They only have a low-investment strategy by proxy.
One reason why women choose short-term mating strategies is that there are few men who offer long-term strategies around. But you are right that only oppressing males and not oppressing females at all does not make sense. Both sexes have impulses that fit in badly in society.
A counterexample for your thesis is the worldwide Sikh population, which also puts much more emphasis on males in terms of dress and ritual but has the lowest birth rates of all the religions in India
The big difference is that both the Amish and Ultra-orthodox heavily straitjacket their young men until they get married (young) and sex/porn/OF just aren't options for these young men unless they leave their religion/cult, which means ostracization from the only world they've ever known (which is why 90% or so never leave. All (young) men want sex (or to actually, to get off), but the ultra-orthodox boys are confined in yeshivas until they get married young. The Amish boys work in their little world until they get married young. The Amish do get a rumspringa to try living a way outside of their strict world, but 90% choose to return to the fold because trying to make it in the outside world without an education and being ostracized from your family and entire life you have known kind of sucks.
I don't think causality is in that direction. All cultures that engage males don't become highly fertile. A culture that strongly encourages its members to reproduce is the most fundamental prerequisite. To take a obvious example: No matter how many sacrifices Shakers required from men (abstaining from sex is quite a sacrifice), they didn't have children anyway.
Rather, my thesis is that asking women to have many children is pointless, because women will do what men reward them for doing. For that reason, numerous cultures that tell their female members to prioritize childbearing have low birth rates. No matter how much Catholic women are told to avoid contraception - they use it anyway because both society at large and men reward them for doing so.
The reason there is a focus on restraining females is because there is no point in “restraining” men when they already hold zero power in the dating world. There is nothing there to restrain. Women are the gatekeepers - they hold all the power in the dating world. They and *only* they decide when sex happens, when relationships happen, when marriage and kids happen - men have no say at any point in this process.
The majority of men are already ready and willing to commit to a monogamous relationship and have a large family - it’s just that these men are treated like a subhuman underclass to the average modern female, who feels entitled to having a top 1% man commit to them. Ignoring the effect of the vast proliferation of female hypergamy throughout the world in the social ills we’re seeing today is a comically inept oversight.
Well, I can say three things to this. First of all, it's pretty clear that it's the majority of men Tove is discussing. If 27% of men under thirty are virgins, that may be sad, but it isn't the majority. And while some of them may be attractive and virtuous people, it does stand to reason that many of these men aren't going to make very good spouses.
Secondly, if only 27% of men are virgins, there's a case to be made that they're actually lucky; my reading of the scientific literature is that over the course of our evolutionary past mitochondrial DNA was passed on at twice the rate of Y-chromosomes: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/21/11/2047/1147770
This is consistent with men delaying reproduction, or simply dying without offspring, as the default state of affairs across the history of our species.
But thirdly, you really just seem obnoxious. My responding to you at all is a deliberate mistake which I'm making anyway, knowing that I don't care whether you'll learn anything from what I just told you, and having no interest in whatever response this mistake will earn me. :p
Academic studies of Chassidic, even the accurate, valuable ones, rarely contain this insider, intuitive knowledge.
During Hurricane Sandy I had the Sociologist Jonathan Boyarin (a refugee from the Lower East Side) for a Shabbos meal & he had a keen understanding of the subtle sociological issues/questions to ask {e.g. Who would/could you make a shidduch with [arrange a marriage] outside your own Chassidus [Chassidic group/community with it's own Rebbe (leader)] and why?}
I'm genuinely surprised at the lack of anthropological texts about Orthodox Jewish communities. There are a number of good books about the Amish and about the Hutterites too, and that is how I know them. When it comes to the traditional-minded Jews I only find scraps of information here and there and rely a lot on first-hand informers like you. It is unexpected, but also a bit exciting.
Great article. Mormonism does that to some degree by keeping young people in religious education throughout their lives and sending young people (especially men) on 2 year proselytizing missions. It’s very common for men to come out of that wanting to get married and have kids. A large amount of that is based on theology that prioritizes family and having children above all else.
A big obstacle to men committing is surely due to the judicial undermining of masculine authority in the feminist era. Why become a father when you stand to loose every thing in female initiated divorce. Effective contraception has enabled women to become hypergamous.
Then we are living in the future.
30 %of males between 18 and 30 haven't had any relationship with a member of the opposite sex in the past year whereas it's half that figure for women.
The key phrase was seeking commitment from "desirable males" .The dating apps and social media have caused a huge increase in hook up culture with females dating out of their league and refusing to settle for their equals in looks. While mass immigration has skewed the sex ratio even more. Along with a" refugees welcome here "sentiment from those young women it makes marriage and child rearing so much less likely to happen.
what hookup culture? most young women don't have sex either
Although there have been a number of voices casting doubts on the veracity of the survey from a few years back that claimed that males in the 18 to 30 age group were half as likely to be in a relationship/having regular intimacy than their female peers it hasn't really been debunked either
If you look into that pew research data you're referencing, most of the gap between young men and women is from more women reporting cohabitation with a romantic partner. Which would point to women dating older not sharing men
Maybe dating and sharing older men.
but no one doubts that people of both genders have a lot less sex than they used to in the past
What if we just rooted more without all the religious stuff?
I believe that the flak the people give women for doing what they do is a misunderstanding that you explain quite well - women follow incentives to their logical end, and whether they are happy with them does come from male leadership in relationshipsand in society.
Modernity is blamed for moral dissolution, but in your examples, you highlight that strictness in moral upbringing of males produces desired results in women - perhaps our moral efforts should go towards shaping men more?
Of course, female education and the incentives in society should be aligned with male moral education and for women's benefit, as in effect it addresses the old feminist trope of men being unrestricted agents of selfishness, but rather they come under strict moral code that then redirects their energies towards women in a healthy way.
I have been slowly trying to formulate some ideas I have about how the sexual revolution has been worse for men than for women. Women tend to conform to men, and a lot of the things men think are women’s choices are actually women responding to what men seem to want.
I’m Gen X so perhaps I am too old to see the current trends, but all my girl friends in High school (except for the one who became a lesbian), wanted to be wives and mothers, not career women.
The messaging to men in tv, movies, and books since the 60’s has been that male status is how many women want to sleep with him. There are few examples of a husband with many children being a role model.
I suspect that men benefit from very structured instruction in courtship and marital responsibilities.
"I have been slowly trying to formulate some ideas I have about how the sexual revolution has been worse for men than for women."
Is _worse_ the important thing? I think there are lots of valid critiques of the sexual revolution, e.g. "things that are bad now", some that affect men and some that affect women. And I think this even though I think we should never go back.
But something that has frustrated me is seeing these kinds of discussions break down into a "who's more oppressed" pissing contest, as if all cultural changes we make are going to be weirdly zero sum, so the most important thing is to figure out who is screwed over more.
Thank you for your insight.
It’s more in my thinking. That the impact for men has been more subtle, because men have been told they are supposed to be hedonistic when they are young. That that is their natural state. Whereas, women were told they were free to indulge men’s hedonistic tendencies, and that somehow that would make them happy.
Women, in general, will go where the men are, and conform to what the men want, usually in an often subconscious attempt to elicit marriage.
All of this stuff seems to be self correcting in the more recent generations.
There is a conservative critique of the sexual revolution that roughly says: "the sexual revolution and birth control really enabled men to act even more like cads, and this sucks for any women whose preference is for men to not act like cads." I am sympathetic to this view (albeit I am sane washing it slightly) but I consider the "solution" ("ban births control, obvs.") to be a response that's way worse than the disease.
That conservative critique, I think, is weak in that it fails to acknowledge that women can have their own preferences, and if women's preferences were more libertine/sex positive (these descriptions suck, I'm being lazy in not coming up with a better term) the old pre-birth control world sucked. In other words, that critique fails to acknowledge the libertarian benefit of the sexual revolution.
I think this is my version of this message being sent to men: we are told that we are just dumb simple creatures who like having sex, and that we do not have complicated emotional lives like women. Therefore if we have negative feelings (of some unspecified nature because we're not going to be able to name them with any degree of specificity) then the problem is probably just that we're not having sex enough, and we can then move on to figuring out who is to blame.
In my view, this message is totally wrong, and because it is wrong, the "solutions" one comes up with for men (using that framing) are wrong.
You are deluding yourself about women’s nature. I personally know many libertine women. They always start crying about how the man they are sleeping with won’t marry them.
I'm not making a statement about "women's nature."
I am suggesting that human behavior is often pretty diverse and varying, and a social change that makes a wider variety of behaviors socially acceptable is almost by definition going to make _some_ people's preferred behavior more acceptable.
Of course there are outliners, but the sexual revolution lifted up the most reviled of male sexual behaviors as normative, wreaking havoc on our culture. Prior to the pill, a male that had premarital sex was expected to marry any girl who he knocked up. Those men that didn’t were considered the most detestable of men and socially reviled.
Women in that time used the shotgun wedding to their advantage, though entrapping men into marriage is a horrible way to start married life.
Are there female outliers that just want casual sex? Probably. But we see the rise of many strange practices because MOST women don’t. The kind of valadation that most men experience from being granted sex by a female. Is not equivalent for women. That sense of acceptance and validation for normative females is achieved thru marriage.
The Romance genre, has a very hard rule, no matter if it’s an inspirational Amish romance, or the spiciest sex littered story, the story must have a HEA (happily ever after, this means marriage, never ever does it mean we had sex until we got tired of each other and moved on).
I would argue women also have a low-investment strategy available to them thanks to the welfare state. Good article though.
>Saudi Arabia about 2.2
This is overall number including their imported serfs. Fertility among citizens is higher. Even among college educated women.
You are right. It should be higher among citizens. But it is surprisingly difficult to find a figure for only citizens or even statistics of the age and sex of non-citizens.
The answer to the final question is...
Provide the visible possibility of successfully attaining a viable career and a partner.
Today young men have been visibly locked out of this by unemployment, useless uni degrees and housing unaffordability on the economic side. Socially a huge proportion of women are explicitly hostile toward men as are pretty much all institutions.
The feminist movement is happy about this because they have the same family-suppression agenda as the overall left. But there are plenty of "good women", someone like Emily W King. I can't see any solution to the happiness of both sexes other than return to socially-normative of monogamy. J Peterson used a very unfortunate term of "forced monogamy", it actually doesn't need to be forced.
>>J Peterson used a very unfortunate term of "forced monogamy", it actually doesn't need to be forced.
Yes. Just stating that dating around or having multiple serial relationships actually is not a sign of success would take us a long way.
Seems from what you describe that strong cultural pressure and expectations are driving the high fertility rates, and that these sub-cultures remained impervious to the parent culture because they're so isolationists. This doesn't seem contingent on any particular exceptional demand from males, except to stay shielded from modern people's ideas and do what they're told.
We can look beyond cults and also observe developed or developing countries with superior fertility rates. While rates are broadly falling globally, they're healthier in a few places.
I always enjoy your takes on religion. I'd be interested to hear your take on my religion, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, Mormon).
Mormons aren't really high fertility any more.
Not as much, but still above average.
I am catching up on your writings and see that you speak a lot on the topic actually.
Like all philosophers, your analysis is biased towards your own idiosyncratic view. You are viewing gender relations through the lens of only a woman and not as a man.
> Meanwhile, human females only have one reproductive strategy: Very high-investment.
This is objectively false, and every single single mother disproves this point. Sperm banks cement it as false.
Women have two mating strategies, outlined by dating app data:
https://graphpaperdiaries.com/2018/10/21/judging-attractiveness/
- Short term: the sexy son hypothesis. If a woman is impregnated by a promiscuous man, then her promiscuous son will spread her genes. That's why only 6' tall white blonde men with blue eyes can donate sperm (look up sperm donation demographics)
- Long term: everything you said
Here's the kicker **women do not engage in short-term mating strategies in tribes.** Meaning, when women are Jewish or Amish, they will almost never engage in short-term mating strategies, so your hypothesis is too narrowly focused on these groups instead of the wide expanse of human sexuality.
The reason women do not do this is because they will be shamed by other women in their tribe for not being married with child. The moment that your community exceeds Dunbar's number, the ability for women to be shamed by their tribe diminishes and single motherhood increases.
So, if you want to increase fertility, you must oppress women such that they are still demonized into not having a child outside of wedlock, which requires keeping your community small until you can split the community through mitosis. If women have too many children in one community, short-term strategies develop and the community collapses.
Women who opt for short-term mating and hope it will result in a sexy son still have a very high-investment strategy, because they will have to care for that sexy-son-to-be until he is grown-up. They only have a low-investment strategy by proxy.
One reason why women choose short-term mating strategies is that there are few men who offer long-term strategies around. But you are right that only oppressing males and not oppressing females at all does not make sense. Both sexes have impulses that fit in badly in society.
A counterexample for your thesis is the worldwide Sikh population, which also puts much more emphasis on males in terms of dress and ritual but has the lowest birth rates of all the religions in India
The big difference is that both the Amish and Ultra-orthodox heavily straitjacket their young men until they get married (young) and sex/porn/OF just aren't options for these young men unless they leave their religion/cult, which means ostracization from the only world they've ever known (which is why 90% or so never leave. All (young) men want sex (or to actually, to get off), but the ultra-orthodox boys are confined in yeshivas until they get married young. The Amish boys work in their little world until they get married young. The Amish do get a rumspringa to try living a way outside of their strict world, but 90% choose to return to the fold because trying to make it in the outside world without an education and being ostracized from your family and entire life you have known kind of sucks.
Do the Sikh do anything like that to their boys?
I don't think causality is in that direction. All cultures that engage males don't become highly fertile. A culture that strongly encourages its members to reproduce is the most fundamental prerequisite. To take a obvious example: No matter how many sacrifices Shakers required from men (abstaining from sex is quite a sacrifice), they didn't have children anyway.
Rather, my thesis is that asking women to have many children is pointless, because women will do what men reward them for doing. For that reason, numerous cultures that tell their female members to prioritize childbearing have low birth rates. No matter how much Catholic women are told to avoid contraception - they use it anyway because both society at large and men reward them for doing so.
Humorous idea on first glance, but severely misdiagnoses the problem. “Oppress men so they stop being so promiscuous,” when this graph exists? https://www.kvakil.me/posts/2022-05-15-young-male-virgins-washington-post.html
The reason there is a focus on restraining females is because there is no point in “restraining” men when they already hold zero power in the dating world. There is nothing there to restrain. Women are the gatekeepers - they hold all the power in the dating world. They and *only* they decide when sex happens, when relationships happen, when marriage and kids happen - men have no say at any point in this process.
The majority of men are already ready and willing to commit to a monogamous relationship and have a large family - it’s just that these men are treated like a subhuman underclass to the average modern female, who feels entitled to having a top 1% man commit to them. Ignoring the effect of the vast proliferation of female hypergamy throughout the world in the social ills we’re seeing today is a comically inept oversight.
Well, I can say three things to this. First of all, it's pretty clear that it's the majority of men Tove is discussing. If 27% of men under thirty are virgins, that may be sad, but it isn't the majority. And while some of them may be attractive and virtuous people, it does stand to reason that many of these men aren't going to make very good spouses.
Secondly, if only 27% of men are virgins, there's a case to be made that they're actually lucky; my reading of the scientific literature is that over the course of our evolutionary past mitochondrial DNA was passed on at twice the rate of Y-chromosomes: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/21/11/2047/1147770
This is consistent with men delaying reproduction, or simply dying without offspring, as the default state of affairs across the history of our species.
But thirdly, you really just seem obnoxious. My responding to you at all is a deliberate mistake which I'm making anyway, knowing that I don't care whether you'll learn anything from what I just told you, and having no interest in whatever response this mistake will earn me. :p
Academic studies of Chassidic, even the accurate, valuable ones, rarely contain this insider, intuitive knowledge.
During Hurricane Sandy I had the Sociologist Jonathan Boyarin (a refugee from the Lower East Side) for a Shabbos meal & he had a keen understanding of the subtle sociological issues/questions to ask {e.g. Who would/could you make a shidduch with [arrange a marriage] outside your own Chassidus [Chassidic group/community with it's own Rebbe (leader)] and why?}
I noticed that Professor Moshe Krakowski wrote powerfully about this here.
https://www.commentary.org/articles/moshe-krakowski/new-york-times-slander-hasidim/
I'm genuinely surprised at the lack of anthropological texts about Orthodox Jewish communities. There are a number of good books about the Amish and about the Hutterites too, and that is how I know them. When it comes to the traditional-minded Jews I only find scraps of information here and there and rely a lot on first-hand informers like you. It is unexpected, but also a bit exciting.
Invoking Tyler Cowen's Second Law: A literature exists for everything.