In their seminal work, Too Many Women?(1983), Guttentag and Secord developed a matrix to describe social behavior under different sex ratio conditions and disparate male or female structural power regimes. I believe the model is a good tool to show us where we’ve historically been as a society; it also shows us the mechanism by which we’ve come to our current state of debauchery.
The authors’ argument rests on the assumption that male structural power is universal. Structural power is defined as the political, legal, and economic structures of society and the ability to influence and shape social customs and practices. It is true that men have always held structural power in every society (the authors found one obscure society that exhibited female structural power somewhere in Africa), but given that structural power is a continuum, power shifts have consequences for society.
Guttentag and Secord’s Power Matrix:
| Gender Holding Dyadic Power | Male Structural Power | Female Structural Power |
| Males (Low sex ratio) | Sexually permissive society with familiar roles | Traditional society with reversed roles (EROS) |
| Females (high sex ratio) | Traditional society with familiar roles | Sexually permissive society with reversed roles (LIBERTINIA) |
Besides structural power, dyadic power influences social behavior in men and women. Men are said to hold dyadic power when there are fewer of them relative to women – when the sex ratio is low. Women hold dyadic power when the sex ratio is high. Dyadic relationships adapt to underlying structural regimes. When men have dyadic and structural power we expect sexually promiscuous behavior and lower fatherly investment in offspring. Since men have more readily available options, society is more sexually promiscuous as men have less incentive to settle down. Conversely, when there are more men than women, men seek to maintain relative order in society. They punish sexual promiscuity and extol the virtues of marriage and monogamy. In traditional society – and in accord with Guttentag and Secord’s matrix – men use their structural power against the backdrop of dyadic power to shape social behavior.
As with all such models, there are inflection points at which an unusually high sex ratio becomes social dynamite. The Middle East has high operational sex ratios meaning that there are many more single men than single women. It is feared that China and India may face similar problems associated with extreme high sex ratio societies. Idle male hands can lead to gang activity, social unrest, or anarchy.
Conversely, Guttentag and Secord show that feminism has historically arisen during periods of low sex ratio (more women than men). Given their greater numbers and discomfort with misogynistic social behavior, women gather to act against the status quo. Since women are valued lower relative to times of female dyadic power, they adopt progressive means to correct the imbalance. Also, to protect against Cad-like behavior, women develop strategies to prevent investing sexually in men who don’t plan on investing in any children that might come out of those relationships. College campuses were hotbeds of feminism and the 1950s and 1960s helping spark the recent female power coup.
Guttentag and Secord laid out a dichotomy, mainly as a thought experiment, describing what would happen under female structural power. They called these two hypothetical worlds LIBERTINIA and EROS. LIBERTINIA had a high sex ratio and exhibited sexually permissive behavior and reversed gender roles. EROS had a low sex ratio and a sexually prudish society – also with reversed gender roles.
I’ll accept prima facie that gender roles have changed. While they haven’t reversed, they’ve definitely become more obfuscated and hazy. A recent Time magazine article laid out all of the equitability women have gained since 1972. Men have taken on formerly feminine roles, and women have taken on traditionally masculine ones. Many pieces of research have shown this, and mounds of anecdotal evidence (ask your parents or watch TV shows from 40 years ago) support this claim. According to Guttentag and Secord’s matrix, the only societies that had reversed gender roles were those with female structural power. We can at least say that society has tilted away from strictly patriarchal towards the feminine on the structural power continuum.
I titled this piece “Slouching Towards Libertinia†because I think that’s where we are effectively headed. While the United States’ sex ratio isn’t as low as it was in the 1950s and 1960s (during the spark of the Sexual Revolution) we have an effectively high sex ratio society with increasingly gynocentric structural power. While it could be true that there are more women than men, this point is merely academic – our society functions as if it has a high sex ratio as I’ll show below. I don’t argue that we exist under a matriarchy, but social democracy – according to the natural law that majority rules – is largely gynocentric. In past patriarchal societies, women had no avenues to structural power. Modern society is unique in this regard; we are also unique in that we are closer to LIBERTINIA than any society in the past.
“In LIBERTINIA, most women are libertines. They frequently move from one brief liason to another; at best, they practice serial monogamy. Women often have more than one man. At the same time, they havea relatively low regard for men. Generally they exploit them when they can, usually treating them as mere sex objects. In fact, sexual morality is weak for both sexes. Women in particular see marriage as having a lot of disadvantages, and often will live with a man without marrying him if they can. Many children are born illegitimately. While most men would prefer to get married, they are not averse to having sexual relationships before marriage. What often happens, however, is they get attached to their female partner, and she uses the attachment to exploit them.
Both men and women more often remain single, marrying only at later ages if at all. Families tend to be unstable and frequently break up in divorce after a few years. Men do not expect a wife to remain with them throughout their childbearing years, and LIBERTINIA has a large number of single-parent families headed by men. Often men make desperate attempts to hold on to the women they have a relationship with, making sacrifices in order to please their female partner and catering to her needs.â€
Just as theory predicts a rise in feminism during low sex ratio scenarios with male structural power, LIBERTINIA with its high sex ratio and female-skewed power structure predicts the same thing for men:
“But other men respond to the situation by agitating for economic and sexual independence in an effort to achieve an adequate standard of living and a satisfactory social status without being dependent on a woman. These men have organized extensively and have developed a radical masculinist literature. Their protest takes a variety of forms, ranging from those stress equal rights and male dignity, through those who rebel against housework and childrearing, to those who emphasize their hatred of women and praise homosexuality.â€
While the men of The Spearhead and other like-minded internet outlets don’t fit this to a T – we don’t militantly argue for homosexuality or rebellion against child rearing – men have banded together on the Internet to craft a more masculinist dialogue. Since our society is still patriarchal – albeit at its historical nadir – things haven’t become quite as extreme as in LIBERTINIA, but our posture is bad.
We are approaching the feminist promised-land of LIBERTINIA through two mechanisms: feminism and egalitarianism.
During the 1960s, feminism did its trick. While men still hold most of the economic power and political power; they are merely behaving according to a feminine agenda. Legislation has benefited women and minorities most in the last 40 years. They have been given economic power not only by their entrance into the workforce, but also because a swollen bureaucracy tends to employ women more than men. While I can’t definitively say that women have structural power over men, they have much more than they did 100, 50, 40, 30, 20 years ago.
A large part of the underlying power structure of any society is its culture. In America, women are pedestalized compared to men. Their issues are forthright; men’s are placed on the back burner. Anything that is overly masculine is derided as meat-headed, bigoted, or out-of-touch. Men in traditional roles have utterly no voice in popular culture. They aren’t advertised to. Movies aren’t made for them. Their songs aren’t on any popular radio channels. To have a stake in popular culture – to have a voice – men have to kowtow to women. In short, culture has become androgynous; men have to either adapt to that or drop out. While men have forever catered to women’s needs as part of the seduction process, they have never been as structurally marginalized as in current society.
LIBERTINIA can only be discovered and developed in a high sex ratio society. Its sister colony – EROS – is the name on the sign when there are more women than men. But I’d argue that, regardless of the actual number of men and women, we are in an effectively high sex ratio society. The whole thrust of a high sex ratio society is that in it, women embrace a coupling strategy for mates when attempting to procure resources. The “attraction†of a woman to a “Dad” is the provision opportunities he offers – his investment in her and her progeny.
According to Moore, Cassidy, Law, Smith, and Perrett’s paper The effects of female control of resources on sex-differentiated mate preferences:
“Woman’s ability to control resources may cue a strategy in which she does not need to seek resources through a long-term social mate, and thus she can elevate her preference for indicators of good genes.â€
When women don’t need a beta provider – because they have one already – they seek traits that indicate genetic fitness. They become increasingly hypergamous. Women are able to satisfy their economic needs through their surrogate husband – the government. They don’t need men for what they’ve traditionally needed us for – financial support – while we still need them for what we’ve traditionally needed them for – a warm hole. The government, therefore, serves to artificially increase the sex ratio. Not only that, but as Nettle and Pollet found in their research Driving a Hard Bargain: Sex Ratio and Male Marriage Success in Historical U.S. Population, rates of marriage decrease as the sex ratio increases. This is counter to what we’d expect under high sex ratio regimes. Guttentag and Secord didn’t account for the fact that women become much choosier when they effectively have more options. As I’ve said before – choosy women choose alphas.
Feminism has done its job so effectively that monogamy and marriage are merely words. Adultery is scarcely punished. We live in an effectively hypergamous society. In a traditional low sex ratio society, hypergamy wasn’t as strong a force because women, seeking to secure whatever mates they could, didn’t worry as much about marrying up. They took what they could get; any parental investment or indicators of committment were more readily accepted. The guys that were most sought after merely slept around with minimal investment.
As noted above, it isn’t for the companionship that women alter their sex strategy; it’s for shekels. In a situation where the government does away with the problem of obtaining shekels by making it easier for women, the sex ratio for all intents-and-purposes increases. Mix this with increased female structural power and we get a situation where society is sexually promiscuous and gender roles are reversed.
Western culture is slouching towards LIBERTINIA. This is not a nice place; before its discovery on Earth, it was thought that LIBERTINIA was located in the northwest corner of Hell. Sexual promiscuity abounds and there is very little investment in society. Unfortunately, it was an inevitable outcome of ever-encroaching female structural power. While I won’t go so far as to advocate against female suffrage, womens’ ability to vote and their higher overall numbers vis a vis men made it such that – left unimpeded – power will always march in their direction. Second-wave feminism was the catalyst that sparked the fire in an attempt to overthrow the patriarchy. Given the trend towards chaos that all systems exhibit, disbursement of power to the less dominant factions of society implies that the former patriarchy’s power is greatly eroded. As part of the pogrom, the formerly less-dominant – women and minorities – are given unmeritocratic stakes in society. As such, women are propped up and provided for at the expense of one super-alpha man – a conglomeration of lots of disparate beta males – the USG. This man, this Khan, is able to provide for many without giving any of the commensurate spoils that normally went with beta male provision to the actual financiers – the everyman. The sex ratio is inordinately higher than it would be according to actual male/female body counts. According to Guttentag and Secords highly instructive – albeit limited – dichotomy, Western society slouches towards that perilous state: LIBERTINIA.
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{ 34 comments… read them below or add one }
Some time ago, I posted my views on this topic in the Novaseeker blog, based on my experience of having lived in several societies and mating systems. I was amazed how much my views are similar to those of a book, I haven’t read.
Now I am late for work but I would like to elaborate on that later.
As you will see in my analysis:
higher percentage of desirable men = female’s dyadic power
low percentage of desirable men = male’s dyadic power.
traditional attitude by women = male structural power.
modern attitude by women = female structural power.
Anyway this is the post I sent to the Novaseeker blog:
Having lived in several societies, I think that there are two factors to be taken into account.
1. Percentage of desirable men
2. Women’s cultural attitude.
As for the first one, it has to be said that the percentage of desirable men is product of two factors: number of men and average expectations by women.
As for the second one, there is two women’s cultural attitudes. In traditional attitude, women are trained to be good wives and mothers, their sexuality is tamed and are taught to be “good girls” and follow ethical considerations. In modern attitudes, women are taught to follow their hearts and have fun.
So there are four possible combinations.
1. High percentage of desirable males with a traditional attitude by women. This leads to traditional monogamy. Most women get married and stay married. The 50′s, if you will. It was the model in my native Spain where I was born.
2. Low percentage of desirable males with a traditional attitude by women. This leads to traditional adultery. Most men are married and have mistresses to absorb the excess of females. Mistresses would like to be married but they get what they can. This is the model in Central America now, where I live.
3. High percentage of desirable males with a modern attitude by women. This leads to serial monogamy. Women have relationships that leave where the novelty wears off (about 4-7 years, according to the traditional female cycle). This could be the model prevalent in older American women. Older American women have lower expectations about men than younger ones (in part, because of maturity, in part, because they receive alimony and child support so poor males are not undesirable anymore). This way the percentage of desirable males increases.
4. Low percentage of desirable males with a modern attitude by women. This leads to poliginy. Some alphas have harems, some betas are celibates. The 20% of men mate with the 80% of women. This is the model in younger American women, with their unrealistic expectations from men.
So, as you see, the important thing is not the number of men but the number of desirable men. The American culture has changed from a traditional attitude for women and realistic expectations of men to a modern attitude for women and unrealistic expectations for men.
That is, it has changed from the combination 1 to the combination 4, from monogamy to poliginy.
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Great article. Great comment.
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So, basically, what you’re saying Chuck, is that vast swaths of the male population have been disposessed, disempowered, and heartbroken…social structures which maintained order have been smashed…the stability of the governing bodies have been weakened…leding ultimately perhaps to a catastrophic implosion of the entire society…
…so that FeministX can have the luxury, every weekend or so, of spending a couple hours tied-up and ball-gagged by a sadistic sociopath as her muffled screams fill the four walls of her condo.
Yeah, I’d say that’s a fair trade!
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“has high operational sex ratios meaning that there are many more single men than single women”
“periods of low sex ratio (more men than women)”
Which is it?
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That last paragraph, as written, really needs a lot more specific citations for the various references being made. As it is they seem almost out of context.
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powerhouse state of the sexual union address.
as i’ve written before, the best answer to all this change for men is to give women exactly what they are rewarding — and give it to them good, long, and hard — game. we are entering the epoch of the pua. eventually the pendulum will swing back, when male investment in society is so low that the government no longer has the funds to act as super provider beta. we are already seeing hint of this in our growing national debt. soon, we will see it in, i predict, plummeting marriage and childbirth rates, and rising rates of bastardy.
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This is a disturbing article- not because it is a threat, but because it is a very good descriptor of what is going on. I’m not sure I agree with every point, but it definitely has the majority covered. We seem to have become a very brittle society, and there is tremendous danger to life and limb, not just from random shootings or low-level criminality.
Right now we see the impulsive sorts acting out- the Sodinis, the Chos, the Hassans. What happens when we start seeing not just desperate, but calculating and patient members of that discarded male 80% lashing out?
One lone man with a gun can do a lot of damage, but what about one lone man with access to a water treatment plant and a big vat of ricin brewing up? How about one guy with some thermite, bolt cutters and a map of several major power substations (go look at lead times for transformer production)? How about some out of work gasfitters and some sour gas wells near populated areas? Some unemployed and angry civil engineers and a bunch of under-maintained bridges?
During the Second World War, various industries were rated as critical- hence why hundreds of bombers were shot down striking ball-bearing factories over Germany, and why later on all the refineries got blown sky high. Every civilization has chokepoints, and the men who run them know best how to strangle them.
It’s all fine and dandy for the aristocracy to ignore the average joe, or to belittle him, or to put him out of work and into misery- right up until one of the really motivated and intelligent ones strikes back. Then what? I would rather not see such destruction. The problem is that I don’t seem to have much voice to help- and what we need is a restoration of dignity for the men who make this society work.
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@D’Mas
Where can someone, say, purchase some thermite?
Just kidding FBI, just kidding! Any agent reading this probably agrees with our movement anyways. Any government spooks out there want to give us a shout out! Anyone….anyone at all…come on. You’re the only one monitoring this website, so no one else will know. I know they wouldn’t put a team on us…would they? Welmer, delete this if you think I’m being to provocative.
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“The Middle East has high operational sex ratios meaning that there are many more single men than single women. “
This statement appears to contradict your table. Is a preponderance of men a low sex ratio or a high sex ratio?
“While I can’t definitively say that women have structural power over men”
Depends on the sphere you are talking about. In the “helping” professions (e.g. social services, etc), women staff those jobs. So women are in structural control of many aspects of society; while not total control, their presence brings much influence and control with it.
Moreover, as you pointed out, women have their interests advanced in government by women themselves (structural power) and by apex-dwelling males (structural influence) who exploit the males-on-top, females-in-the-middle, males-on-bottom hierarchy to their advantage at the expense of bottom-dwelling males.
“While I won’t go so far as to advocate against female suffrage,”
Why not? The evidence abounds that female suffrage was a terrible idea. That is, if freedom and justice and individual rights are your concern. Female suffrage translates directly into female structural power…which is something that neither men nor women want, right?
“we don’t militantly argue… for…rebellion against childrearing”
Pfft. Tell that to the commenters of my last column.
“One lone man with a gun can do a lot of damage, but what about one lone man with access to a water treatment plant and a big vat of ricin brewing up?”
It’s not the lone wolf crackpot we should be worried about. we’ll always have those. What I’m concerned with isn’t the person who means society harm, but the rest of the male population. Will they act to stop said lone wolf crackpot? Or will they sit by the sideline? Invested males prevent the crackpot from doing harm. Uninvested males do nothing.
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I take your point…but was the how-to manual necessary?
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Jabherwochie,
Thermite is easily made- it’s basically just rust and aluminum in the right measures. I remember kids in my junior high making it up and doing stupid things with it (along with one kid who made a tri-iodide compound which fortunately wasn’t pure enough to cause trouble).
The thing is that I don’t want those “man-caused disasters” to take place. I want to prevent them, because I like having safe drinking water, electricity and all the comforts of civilization. That’s also why I’m on sites like this- there’s another “man-caused disaster” in the making, and that’s the destruction of a once great civilization by a handful of ignorant fools who are trying to be lords over us serfs. They will destroy all those good things we enjoy just like a nuclear exchange would- only they’ll take more time doing it.
Elusive Wapiti,
I definitely worry about the man sitting on the sidelines, too, but what happens when the lone crackpot factor just becomes too big? Maybe I need to re-phrase what I’ve said. If there are too many angry men willing to act, then we don’t have lone crackpoints, we have a revolution- and if that revolution has a “man on a white horse” to lead it, look out. In many ways, we are in a pre-revolutionary state at the moment (this was alluded to in the description above).
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dragnet,
That was all stuff that came off the top of my head, and given how distant I am from any of those facilities, think of how many ideas the angry dude there could figure out. If anything, bringing these to the forefront allows us to examine them, prepare for them, and work to mitigate them. For example, we can work towards greater stockpiles of electrical generation and delivery spares- this is useful not just for attacks, but also in case of large solar flares like the one in 1989 that caused major disruptions on the Eastern Seaboard.
Welmer, if you feel I am out of line with my comments, please delete them. I do not want to cause trouble for this site, because it serves an important purpose for evaluating and understanding the world we live in.
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I think this misses the desire to steal everything from lesser males that basically IS America Culture. To cover for this, mad stuff like below has to be screamed at volume:
at
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/11/major-hasan-stereotypes-and-dual.html
Technically, Hasan wanted out of the army. Had he been let out of the army, none of this would have happened. He was even willing to give money to be let out the army.
Thus I posit the ‘theory’ that the ‘reward’ of not being big-boss’s slave would have stopped him from killing those people.
I wonder if anyone will be stupid enough to tell me I’m wrong.
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“Conversely, Guttentage and Secord show that feminism has historically arisen during periods of low sex ratio (more men than women). ”
Correction: more women than men.
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Comment_Whatever:
He joined up of his own free will, didn’t he? Knowing what the terms were? Is he a man capable of making decisions, or is he a child whose sworn word can’t be taken seriously?
“Wanting to be let out” isn’t sufficient excuse in this case. If nothing else he could’ve just gone on hunger strike or something. Getting kicked out isn’t HARD, if you really want it. However he wanted mutually contradictory things. That’s his problem, not ours.
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D’Mas,
“I definitely worry about the man sitting on the sidelines, too, but what happens when the lone crackpot factor just becomes too big? Maybe I need to re-phrase what I’ve said. If there are too many angry men willing to act, then we don’t have lone crackpoints, we have a revolution- and if that revolution has a “man on a white horse†to lead it, look out.”
Yep, that’s a problem. Methinks that the two are related, in that the same phenomenon that leads guys to not care about bad acts committed in their midst–disinvestment–also tends to create an environment in which bad actors are bred. Idle hands being the devils playground and all that.
This discussion reminds me about how Glenn Sacks has been getting beat up lately for allegedly justifying what Sodini did. He didn’t. What he did do was warn others the conditions are such that we may be growing many other Sodinis.
The lesson that the wider culture needs to absorb is that the male sex, the first sex, was given the gift of motion, of energy, of life force, of creation. Men and men alone were given this gift. Men give some of their energy to a woman to make a child, share that gift with her to make a home, and also share that gift with the wider community to create a civilization. This energy needs to be constructively directed, and when it’s not, it sometimes shoots out in unproductive ways. Thus the energy of uninvested men may be hazardous to the wider society as a whole.
I doubt we will ever see female variants of Sodinis or Hasan in appreciable numbers. Not because women are saintly; far from it. Rather, it is because women will almost always be invested in society, because they nurture the next generation.
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These problems are very prevalent in the Anglosphere.
In fact, I would dare say that our society is pretty well on its way out.
Such situations, when you add the growing male unemployment have always justified massive emigration.
We are already witnessing an increasing number of men leaving for other pastures. It’s almost as if the male of Western civilization is migrating to other areas of the world. Where they go, expect civilization to flourish.
I think we will see more and more of this phenomenon, together with the advent of the “Mail Oder Wife”.
As things are going, there is no possible turning back: we have already passed that point of no return.
What’s left for men in our society looks more and more like crumbs of dry bead.
Only the non-invested male will passively remain.
(There is a tribe in China, the Mosai, who are a true matriarchy and as you would expect, males in that society are completely passive. People live in deep misery, but women can have sex with every man in the tribe).
This is not the picture I have in my mind of the American male.
When the deck of cards is so bluntly against men, men will probably do one of two things: emigrate or lay down on their back, offering their throats. The second option is hardly a nice future for men, or is it?
For those in doubt about emigrating, I did it once and it was a very rewarding decision I took in my life.
I would strongly recommend to ALL young men to seek solace outside the Anglosphere. There is a life outside the Anglosphere…
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Elusive Wapiti:
A preponderance of men is a high sex ratio society. More men than women gives women dyadic power.
I didn’t get to put it in, but Islamic societies are completely different from Western culture in that they have male structural power. You’d expect to see “normal” gender roles across society with changing sexual behaviors in countries with different sex ratios. The patriarchy is so strong that you won’t witness women behaving like sluts and such, but you would see men changing their behaviors in order to woo women depending on the underlying sex ratio.
Rollory, I’m so glad that we have moved past the “Al-Queda” excuse for what happened. That’s so very big of you.
Rollory said:
Or maybe we didn’t.
What mutually contradictory things did Hasan want? To both get out of the army AND not go to Iraq to kill fellow Arabs? Where exactly is Hasan’s contradiction?
As for the fact that ‘He PROMISED!”. The “WE GOT HIM!” attitude that it implies very much reminds me of a modern woman’s attitude towards marriage.
Also, I don’t much believe the claims of Rollory to piousness. And ‘keeping his word’.
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What about teh womyn?
Going to be funny watching how this all turns out.
I agree with the above, don’t backpedal on suffrage. It was, and always will be, a terrible idea that will destroy any democracy that tries it. Women are by their very nature socialist, which is fine for them, but destroys men and civilization.
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Outstanding piece.
However, can Libertinia last? Do you think it will self-correct due to the enevitable declining birth rates associated with a free-wheeling society where women seek pleasure and fulfillment and are too busy to bother having 2.1+ children? I have to wonder if the dying Libertinia won’t eventually collapse as more patriarchal regimes move in and exploit a society ruled by office-bound feministas who rule by consensus.
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Jack:
Thank you.
And I pondered that as well. I think Libertinia is just a new dynamic in an old pattern: the cyclicality of human power structures. Libertinia is an experiment that will come to pass. Like communism and fascism, (democracy as well?) we are gaining information and experience under these types of regimes. But like communism and such, women won’t want to relinquish power so readily.
But you bring up a very good point that I don’t yet have the answer for. Perhaps there are some Futurologists who can answer that. Maybe Mencius Moldbug can.
Good point. It looks like Europe is already beginning to see Islam slowly invade them and take-over. Unless Russia needs to swallow the continent for it’s own survival.
What can a matriarchy do agaisnt that?
We won’t be spared, either, as China may look at us with gusto and saliva. Such a wealthy territory will be up for conquest sometime in the future.
The West, in its entirey, will soon be ready for a take-over by the largest powers of today: Russia, China and the Muslim world.
Which master would you prefer?
I heard that Russian women are beautiful..
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These are contradictory statements. Satisfying your economic needs through government involves stealing from your neighbors. Women still need men for financial support, but they aren’t willing to let men escape from bondage by refusing to marry or father children. Hence the existence of government transfer payments, which allow women as a class to take from men as a class, either in benefits or employment in unproductive and worthless jobs. It further insulates women from their bad choices, since no individual woman need be bound by the ability of their chosen man to support them.
I’ve seen welfare and child support receiving women argue, with zero sense of self-consciousness, that they were “independent women”. What disgusted me more than the women themselves was the total lack of any challenge to such self-serving lies.
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This is a great article, Chuck. There are a few of what I think are typos in terms of the ratios and so on, but I think this, with some adjustments, should be a major keeper article for this site.
My own view on the sex ratio is that, as you say, it needs to be read against other factors. Most of the sex ratio advocates today say that there is a high sex ratio (more men than women). If you add onto that the governmental “Khan”, then it gets even higher, and I think that’s a great way to look at it. The effective sex ratio is high, no matter what. But of course the high sex ratio is supposed to, in and of itself, predict more monogamy and stability in relationships (because women are supposed to prefer monogamy and stability (itself dubious when assumed to apply under all conditions) and can “enforce” this preference when they are the buyers in a market that is flooded with men) — which is not what we are seeing. Some of the advocates of the high sex ratio theory say that if the sex ratio were lower, we would be seeing even more wild sexuality, but this seems counterintuitive under the current conditions (again because female preferences seem to have changed due to their environment and prioritized “needs”), and the matrix you set out above encapsulates the situation quite well, and precisely because the sex ratio must be viewed together with other factors — specifically female structural power. Whether you view that as pure economic power/independence (a traditional view) or as finsal says in terms of women’s general mate selection attitudes, either way you get to a situation where there is something on the female side that is much more than counterbalancing what the high sex ratio theory predicts — namely which leads to a twilight between serial monogamy and polygyny (Robert Wright thinks these are, in effect, the same thing and says as much in “The Moral Animal”) –> a world characterized by briefer and less stable relationships between men and women as women race to get the best genes/most attractive men as partners (if even sexual partners) because they do not *need* men for provision and so on.
It needs to be said that there are quite a few women who do not behave according to this matrix. For example, the demographic of two college educated people have higher than average marital rates and much lower than average divorce rates. This is not a big demographic, and it’s likely driven by the higher marginal cost of divorce for these couples in terms of combined consumption and lifestyle, but it points out that small demographics, which have some different socio-economic profiles and “needs” or “possibilities” can end up with different behaviors. But for many people who are not in this demographic (and a good number who are), the analysis above applies in spades. It is simply what is happening. As Jack points out, it is likely not sustainable, but in my view it’s also likely not to change in the near term. There is absolutely no structural incentive for it to change from the perspective of women. We’re slouching alright .. perhaps even more than slouching.
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I read the Guttentag/Secord book back in 1987 and wondered why my social life was so empty when I was ostensibly the beneficiary of the low sex ratios of the early Baby Boom cohorts. Although I can’t disagree with the evidence they presented, there’s just one thing wrong with their analysis: the balance of dyadic power is ALWAYS in women’s favor, no matter what the sex ratio.
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Really? So do you think that in a society where women were dependent on men economically and polygyny was highly socially shamed, that a high sex ratio would give dyadic power to women? In such a scenario all women *need* a mate to survive, and polygyny is not accepted — that doesn’t seem to indicate that women in such a scenario would have a high dyadic power.
I think that the test can’t be “when all things are equal”, because that has not until recently obtained. When all things are equal socioeconomically, I would agree that the sex ratio is not determinant of relative sexual power between the sexes, because women have structural power when all is equal (for the simple fact that, in material terms, when women do not need men for finances, they seek men that can provide other needs — such as sexual/emotional satisfaction/excitement/fulfillment … something which is the province of relatively few men). So if we look at things when all is equal, then, yes, women have the results that dyadic power gives them in a high sex ratio setting. If women do not have those other powers, however, a higher sex ratio setting doesn’t help them that much, other than meaning fewer of them will go mateless.
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Even Islamic countries are changing. Our popular culture is infecting their young and soon enough they will eat of the poison fruit we have been consuming for decades.
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Nova:
I’m glad you liked it man. As you may remember, I was pretty hardcore “sex ratio explains everything” when I first started writing on the subject. Your insight on my blog to some of my posts and some comments by roissy helped me put sex ratio in proper perspective. I also think it was sestambi who recommended the book a while back.
As far as the typos, yes there are some. I accidently submitted it without doing final proofing and such. The gist of the article remains the same though.
Bob Smith:
“These are contradictory statements. Satisfying your economic needs through government involves stealing from your neighbors.”
I don’t see how they’re contradictory. The government is a huge aggregation mechanism for “stolen” transfer payments from individuals. Since men have traditionally earned more money and pay most of the taxes, it is their money that is used to support government spending. Individual (perhaps beta) men don’t get the glory that traditionally went with being a provider. The government gets that glory and serves as an alpha behemoth.
You seem to agree with that. I’m curious what is contradictory.
Comment — That was me and it was not mad. In fact, Hassan did not want out of the Army, he wanted out of being assigned to Afghanistan, on account of being Muslim. He could have and did not resign and repay the Government for his education and training. His money (he made over 100K as a Major) went to jihadist causes and he had extensive contacts to 9/11 plotter mosques and Imams, including emails and attendance to known (absconded) jihadi Imams.
Muslims face even more, because of polygamy, social stresses. This produces a group of illiterate tribal leaders/chiefs with access to “equalizing” technology like nukes. There is no bargain, deal, rhetoric, agreement, or posturing that can keep tribal leaders with nukes from nuking weak targets.
China has a long-running (centuries) and brutal suppression of Jihad/Islam inside its territory, with various rebellions breaking out every century or so. IT has not had serious AQ terrorism attempts because the Chinese would soon flatten Islamabad, Riyadh, and Tehran. This is why planes fly into NYC skyscrapers and not Shanghai ones.
Hassan did not want out of the Army, he wanted a continuance of special privileges he enjoyed for being Muslim. He killed when found out he could not get his way and would get a Jihad out.
America has long stood for beta male cooperation and suppression of Alpha male influence, from the Shay’s Rebellion to Andrew Jackson to the settlement of the West. The PC nannyism that shoots through American life is part and parcel of female hypergamy expressed against their real enemies: Beta Men. In alliance with Alpha-heriditary men like Ted Kennedy and Bill O’Reilly. Unfortunately studied weakness wrt Muslims at home and abroad has consequences (no matter how much it disempowers Joe Average which is the point). One, it creates Hassans who act with impunity (creating powerpoints of Jihad and terrorism with no consequence, emailing AQ with no consequence) up to where they kill people. Two, it creates a massive incentive for illiterate/narrow-experience tribal/factional leaders to nuke America to get concessions, money, and men, ala Danegeld.
Paying the Vikings off only led them to settle there. It is the same with nuclear armed Muslims.
Even Muslim peoples are experiencing how modern technology (pill, condom, anonymous urban living) create a “woman shortage” for them. Polygamy making it worse. Sayid Qutb, the founder of modern Jihad, Mohammed Atta, and Hassan all tried and failed to find a “proper Muslim wife,” were raised in a hot-house of female power (by illiterate, cowed/weak and cozening mothers) with no independent male role models who were neither Big Men nor cowed slaves. Few men can play the Big Man role, among the requirements a generous, caring attitude towards subordinates and considerable patronage and warmth.
Qutb, Atta, and Hassan had available to them a number of Western women, but found them both intimidating in open sexuality and unsuited to be the type of women their mothers were (basically illiterate, cowed but cozening housebound wives). Muslim society is tearing itself apart, no less than Western ones, over changing sex roles, particularly as they get wealthier and women improve their literacy, earnings, life expectancy, and freedom. Mauritania and Niger are dirt poor and Muslim, yet are absent from Jihad. Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan are middling to wealthy places far better than Niger, yet are dominant in Jihad as are Western Muslims from the Midlands and East London.
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Nova–
A scenario where women need mates to survive demonstrates male structural power, not dyadic power.
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Pretty enlightening post Chuck. Not much that I can add, only a few thoughts about a particular section.
And anything that’s overly feminine is seen as a weakness, less than, or irrational.
SERIOUSLY??? You honestly believe that men aren’t advertised to or than movies aren’t made for them? “Axe” anyone….what about any action or Seth Rogan movies?
Yeah, pretty random stuff to comment on, it’s just that they really stood out to me.
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– Families tend to be unstable and frequently break up in divorce after a few years. Men do not expect a wife to remain with them throughout their childbearing years, and LIBERTINIA has a large number of single-parent families headed by men. Often men make desperate attempts to hold on to the women they have a relationship with, making sacrifices in order to please their female partner and catering to her needs—
This is a hilarious theory. Child care was, is and would be the dominion of women. Look at all the mammals around..they surely do not have a “patriarchy”.
And women using men as sex objects is plain daft. A promiscuous women would risk spoiling her egg with a low-quality sperm. This would also reduce their worth in the eyes of alpha men.
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