The argument that there is a shortage of available women (as though women were a commodity) relies on assumptions that just aren’t true. In a mostly-monogamous (including serial monogamy), mostly-straight society, for every man who does not have a partner, there is a woman who does not have a partner.
There is no shortage of available employers either!
A man being desired by other women is intrinsically sexy to women. Consider what this means if you take a laissez-faire approach to the sexual marketplace.
CharlieSheen is making a bad case for what he’s making a case for.
Simply because the distribution of men and women without partners is equivalent between the genders doesn’t mean the history of men and women is equivalent. Every child must have a male and a female parent, generally speaking; it doesn’t follow that parentage is equally distributed among men and women. Every woman could have one child and 80% of men could have none, simply if the 20% of men have on average five children. Similarly, it doesn’t follow from “Men and women lack partners in equal number” that “Men and women have equal relationship opportunity.” The median man could have 1 relationship in his entire life, and the median woman could have 5, at the same time; the means/averages must be the same, but the distribution doesn’t.
That doesn’t resolve the issue; relationship hours can be unevenly distributed as well. Take five men and five women; one man can have ten relationship-hours, four can have zero, and all five women can have two.
The idea of hypergamy can be loosely summed up thus: Women have higher expectations than men.
Which implies, in a more connotation heavy manner, that the average man is less attractive to the average woman than the average woman is to the average man.
I’m not sure that hypergamy is strictly necessary, even presuming the phenomenon (uneven romantic/sexual opportunity distribution) it attempts to explain. Men having higher variability of attractiveness would produce the same phenomenon.
Yes, relationship hours are of course unevenly distributed—but in this case, there would still be forty available female relationship-hours, to the forty available male relationship-hours.
This sounds like saying that wealth is of course unevenly distributed, but the set of people whose height in inches is an even number has the same amount of wealth as the set of people whose height in inches is an odd number. Which is probably true, but also completely irrelevant for any discussion about inequality of wealth. You can always define two groups using some criteria that makes them come out the same, but the point isn’t to compare arbitrarily defined groups, it’s to compare indviduals.
The complaint is typically phrased in terms of mens’ sexual access to women. If you missed the bit where CharlieSheen mentioned the PUA community, well, I guess I’ll agree with him that you should read Roissy. You’ll find it very enlightening about what that community thinks.
As an individual problem, as I note elsewhere, it just doesn’t seem to be much of a problem in practice, and in the sorts of cases where it is a problem (traditional polygyny; places with sex-selective abortion), liberals do tend to object.
His claim, since you seem to have missed it, is precisely that they are unevenly distributed; that the distribution is closer to the “One man with 10 hours, four with 0, five with 2” than to “Five men and women each with two hours.”
In fact, however, marriage (and other monogamous relationships) are quite common, so the distribution is not really much like that.
And even though it was claimed that liberals don’t have a problem with some males getting an unfair amount of the relationship-hours, it seems that liberals really strongly dislike PUAs. There are a number of reasons for this, but in many cases, the underlying reason is probably actually a fairness concern (in the “why don’t I get any?” sense, rather than the abstract sense). And if PUAs are correct that nonconsensual touching is a competitive advantage, then indeed liberals are consistent in that they attempt to regulate this.
Finally, as noted, liberals tend to oppose traditional polygyny, which is another case of uneven distribution.
Marriage is getting less common. I don’t know the statistics for monogamous relationships in general over the last thirty years, but in the 1960′s and 1970′s, the trend definitely shifted to more relationships, which permits Charlie’s position, although it obviously doesn’t prove it. (Searching “mean relationships men women” didn’t provide any useful evidence as to whether his position holds.)
I don’t particularly care to get into the color politics. I wasn’t attempting to prove anything, I was trying to explain what Charlie’s position was, because you didn’t seem to be catching it.
Marriage rates have basically collapsed among lower SES African Americans in the US and dropped significantly for all other classes as well. In addition to this the number of relationship hours one can expect from a marriage is that the average age of marriage is getting higher and higher for women.. In addition to this divorce rates are high and mostly driven by women, for example:
Evidence is given that among college-educated couples, the percentages of divorces initiated by women is approximately 90%.
Both also speak of a probably lower quality of relationship hours as does a lower satisfaction with marriage than in the past.
I’m also not particularly into color politics; as noted, I don’t fit easily into Haidt’s dichotomy, and I suspect that most of Less Wrong also doesn’t.
The argument that there is a shortage of available women (as though women were a commodity) relies on assumptions that just aren’t true. In a mostly-monogamous (including serial monogamy), mostly-straight society, for every man who does not have a partner, there is a woman who does not have a partner.
You are missing the point.
There is no shortage of available employers either!
A man being desired by other women is intrinsically sexy to women. Consider what this means if you take a laissez-faire approach to the sexual marketplace.
CharlieSheen is making a bad case for what he’s making a case for.
Simply because the distribution of men and women without partners is equivalent between the genders doesn’t mean the history of men and women is equivalent. Every child must have a male and a female parent, generally speaking; it doesn’t follow that parentage is equally distributed among men and women. Every woman could have one child and 80% of men could have none, simply if the 20% of men have on average five children. Similarly, it doesn’t follow from “Men and women lack partners in equal number” that “Men and women have equal relationship opportunity.” The median man could have 1 relationship in his entire life, and the median woman could have 5, at the same time; the means/averages must be the same, but the distribution doesn’t.
Ah, I see. You and CharlieSheen think that the unit is one relationship, while I think the unit is one relationship-hour.
That doesn’t resolve the issue; relationship hours can be unevenly distributed as well. Take five men and five women; one man can have ten relationship-hours, four can have zero, and all five women can have two.
The idea of hypergamy can be loosely summed up thus: Women have higher expectations than men.
Which implies, in a more connotation heavy manner, that the average man is less attractive to the average woman than the average woman is to the average man.
I’m not sure that hypergamy is strictly necessary, even presuming the phenomenon (uneven romantic/sexual opportunity distribution) it attempts to explain. Men having higher variability of attractiveness would produce the same phenomenon.
Yes, relationship hours are of course unevenly distributed—but in this case, there would still be forty available female relationship-hours, to the forty available male relationship-hours.
This sounds like saying that wealth is of course unevenly distributed, but the set of people whose height in inches is an even number has the same amount of wealth as the set of people whose height in inches is an odd number. Which is probably true, but also completely irrelevant for any discussion about inequality of wealth. You can always define two groups using some criteria that makes them come out the same, but the point isn’t to compare arbitrarily defined groups, it’s to compare indviduals.
The complaint is typically phrased in terms of mens’ sexual access to women. If you missed the bit where CharlieSheen mentioned the PUA community, well, I guess I’ll agree with him that you should read Roissy. You’ll find it very enlightening about what that community thinks.
As an individual problem, as I note elsewhere, it just doesn’t seem to be much of a problem in practice, and in the sorts of cases where it is a problem (traditional polygyny; places with sex-selective abortion), liberals do tend to object.
His claim, since you seem to have missed it, is precisely that they are unevenly distributed; that the distribution is closer to the “One man with 10 hours, four with 0, five with 2” than to “Five men and women each with two hours.”
In fact, however, marriage (and other monogamous relationships) are quite common, so the distribution is not really much like that.
And even though it was claimed that liberals don’t have a problem with some males getting an unfair amount of the relationship-hours, it seems that liberals really strongly dislike PUAs. There are a number of reasons for this, but in many cases, the underlying reason is probably actually a fairness concern (in the “why don’t I get any?” sense, rather than the abstract sense). And if PUAs are correct that nonconsensual touching is a competitive advantage, then indeed liberals are consistent in that they attempt to regulate this.
Finally, as noted, liberals tend to oppose traditional polygyny, which is another case of uneven distribution.
Marriage is getting less common. I don’t know the statistics for monogamous relationships in general over the last thirty years, but in the 1960′s and 1970′s, the trend definitely shifted to more relationships, which permits Charlie’s position, although it obviously doesn’t prove it. (Searching “mean relationships men women” didn’t provide any useful evidence as to whether his position holds.)
I don’t particularly care to get into the color politics. I wasn’t attempting to prove anything, I was trying to explain what Charlie’s position was, because you didn’t seem to be catching it.
Marriage rates have basically collapsed among lower SES African Americans in the US and dropped significantly for all other classes as well. In addition to this the number of relationship hours one can expect from a marriage is that the average age of marriage is getting higher and higher for women.. In addition to this divorce rates are high and mostly driven by women, for example:
Both also speak of a probably lower quality of relationship hours as does a lower satisfaction with marriage than in the past.
They have animal models of everything now!
Thanks for the explanation.
I’m also not particularly into color politics; as noted, I don’t fit easily into Haidt’s dichotomy, and I suspect that most of Less Wrong also doesn’t.
Again in the modern marketplace every desirable employee has an employer who would love to hire them!