Date-onomics Discussion: Consequences of the male/female imbalance on sex practices

[LancierDombre]

I finally began reading the book Date-onomics, which was promoted in a previous podcast here.

https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/45393-youtube-how-dating-became-a-lopsided-numbers-game/

 

I'm only about 1/3 through at this point, and there is a lot of interesting data here.  I'm still mulling it over but the data is the data and it is a useful thing to know.

 

One of the things that caught my attention was part of the analysis of how imbalances in the male/female ratio impacts sexual practices in humans.  Not surprisingly when there are more men than women, there is less casual sex, more long term relationships etc...  Conversely, when there are more women than men, relationships are less stable and even in relationships, sexual frequency increases.  None of that is terribly surprising but there was something that struck me as off and I wish they had gone more into it more.  They found that when men have the numbers advantage in the dating market, not only was there more sex - and more risque sex at that - but the length of sex and foreplay also increased.

 

From the text:

Clinical sex studies observed "a real increase in and diversification of erotic activity" as twentieth-century gender ratios began to skew female, they wrote.  "Coital frequency and length of intercourse have both increased substantially, as has length of foreplay."

 

The reason why that got my attention is because it seems that for all of my life I've been told by the media, society, books, women, etc... that men don't focus enough on foreplay, don't wait for women to enjoy themselves, and that we men just want to dive into things blow our load as quickly as possible.  I haven't found that to be the case in my own life - I think I spend a long time on foreplay and very much enjoy it - but I just thought I was atypical among men and that these complaints represented genuine female experiences and desires.  However, if it really were the case that men were the ones you just wanted to rush past foreplay, wouldn't we expect to see the length of foreplay and intercourse decrease?  And wouldn't we expect the length of foreplay and sex to increase as the frequency decreased as the dating market skewed so that there were more men than women?  Given this data, I'm starting to wonder how atypical I really am in this sphere.  I certainly wouldn't put it past the culture to have been telling me the opposite of the truth on this subject but I'm certainly open to other explanations.

 

Any thoughts?

[Matthew Ed Moran]

Through the r/K lens you could maybe see how less investment would be put into the actual enjoyment of sex. Variety would be the attractor, and getting the man in and out so you can concieve a child as quickly as possible would make sense from the woman's perspective if she tends towards R and can live off the state.

 

Good op

[LancierDombre]

Through the r/K lens you could maybe see how less investment would be put into the actual enjoyment of sex. Variety would be the attractor, and getting the man in and out so you can concieve a child as quickly as possible would make sense from the woman's perspective if she tends towards R and can live off the state.

 

Good op

 

Maybe, but how is that consistent with the data showing that there are more long-term relationships when women are in the minority?  That would be more K-selected than r-selected, unless we're assuming that there is a lot of cuckoldry going on.  That certainly could be the case but the evidence presented suggests the opposite.  If I recall the data from college campuses at least, when the campus has more men than women, hookup culture is almost non-existent and women tend to maintain their virginity for longer.

 

After thinking about it though, it could be that men are more anxious to inseminate their woman when they're at a disadvantage in the dating market.  They found that having fewer women around actually increases the amount of money that men spend and borrow, and cause men to act more competitively towards one another - for obvious reasons.  Perhaps there is an increase in the urgency men feel to complete insemination while they have the chance when there is a lot of competition, but when there are an abundance of females around men feel that they can take their time and enjoy more.

 

Does that hypothesis make sense to anyone else?

[Matthew Ed Moran]

 

Maybe, but how is that consistent with the data showing that there are more long-term relationships when women are in the minority?

I have to give it some more thought. I think r/K is important.

 

Have you considered calling in to Stefan? It would be an awesome call, I think.

 

So how have the gender ratios skewed towards there being more females? Is this because of war? I think Mello Mama has a point if the ratios are a product of some environmental change, then I think that would help with the r/K examination.

 

My first thought is that war would select for R and also decrease the number of men in society. With the state and fiat money, there is the illusion of unlimited resources. This all seems to select for R, which would explain higher number of sexual partners, and maybe it would also explain length of foreplay, since R tends to have an elevated sex drive.

 

Does that make things any more clear?

[LancierDombre]

Have you considered calling in to Stefan? It would be an awesome call, I think.

Thanks, I'll consider it. I'd like to mull it over a bit more myself first though.  I may also need to follow up on my last call with Stef first though.  (3rd call https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/46039-podcast-fdr3158-the-forced-redistribution-of-p00ntang-call-in-show-december-21st-2015/) For reasons described in the thread I probably won't know until next weekend.

 

So how have the gender ratios skewed towards there being more females? Is this because of war? I think Mello Mama has a point if the ratios are a product of some environmental change, then I think that would help with the r/K examination.

There are two ways in which the gender ratios are being skewed in the US:

1) For various reasons, some parts of the US are more attractive to men (like Silicon Valley) and other are more attractive to women (like New York City)

2) Women attend college at a higher rate than men and hypergamy causes college educated women to not consider relationships with men who don't have a college degree. 

 

There is also a third issue in that there are almost twice as many gay men as lesbians, so areas with a large gay population tend to overstate the effective male-to-female ratio from the perspective of a heterosexual woman.

 

Also there are religious communities like the Mormons in Utah or Orthodox Jews that effectively create man shortages within their communities.

 

My first thought is that war would select for R and also decrease the number of men in society. With the state and fiat money, there is the illusion of unlimited resources. This all seems to select for R, which would explain higher number of sexual partners, and maybe it would also explain length of foreplay, since R tends to have an elevated sex drive.

 

There might be something to this actually.  War isn't the cause of the male shortage in most of these cases, but it could be that a constant male shortage creates an unconscious trigger in both men's and women's minds that cause an r-shift.  And that could have evolved because if there were a consistent shortage of men around, that would have been an indicator of war and the need to make lots of babies.

 

As mentioned before, the book shows that when men are in the clear majority they spend more money, take out more loans, and are less risk averse. It also talks about experiments in which women are shown pictures with different gender skews, it affects how they rate the attractiveness of men immediately afterwards - if they saw pictures with majority men first, they rated the males as less attractive; if they saw pictures with majority women first, they labeled the males as more attractive.  It's conceivable that it could have other effects on female and male behavior too (i.e. r-shift).

 

Edit:

 

I just realized another connection to r/K theory here.  According to Date-onomics, feminist tendencies increase when there is a perceived male shortage too.  This is even seen in the Mormon church.  A large number of Mormon men leave the church now at around 18 or so - presumably because they don't want to go on a mission.  This has resulted in a huge male advantage among the remaining Mormon men in good standing on the dating market.  Men - especially top men - will hold out for a long time waiting to find the perfect wife because there are so many options.  In Mormonism, you're supposed to marry young and a woman's primary duty is as a wife and mother.  The women who don't manage to get married young, are overwhelmingly supporters and activists of feminist reform in the church.

 

I read a quote from a Mormon man and a Mormon feminist woman side-by-side that seem really revealing.  The man said that part of the reason it took so long for him to settle down is that most of the women who were still singe had become so liberal, and he was a conservative.  The woman was talking about how much she hates the Mormon church for being so sexist and that's why she's part of the campaign to allow women to be leaders in the church, etc...  I'm an atheist, so I don't really have a dog in this fight and I'm certainly no expert on Mormon doctrine, but when I read this woman's complaints I couldn't help but think:

Women have the advantage in Utah among non-Mormons, you clearly don't actually have faith in Mormonism anymore, so why don't you just vote with your feat and leave instead of trying to shove your shit down the actual believers throats?

A bit off topic, but reading this book certainly hasn't done much to change my judgmental views on feminists, that's for sure.

[Frosty]

One of the things that caught my attention was part of the analysis of how imbalances in the male/female ratio impacts sexual practices in humans.  Not surprisingly when there are more men than women, there is less casual sex, more long term relationships etc...  Conversely, when there are more women than men, relationships are less stable and even in relationships, sexual frequency increases.  None of that is terribly surprising but there was something that struck me as off and I wish they had gone more into it more.  They found that when men have the numbers advantage in the dating market, not only was there more sex - and more risque sex at that - but the length of sex and foreplay also increased.

 

From the text:

Clinical sex studies observed "a real increase in and diversification of erotic activity" as twentieth-century gender ratios began to skew female, they wrote.  "Coital frequency and length of intercourse have both increased substantially, as has length of foreplay."

 

The reason why that got my attention is because it seems that for all of my life I've been told by the media, society, books, women, etc... that men don't focus enough on foreplay, don't wait for women to enjoy themselves, and that we men just want to dive into things blow our load as quickly as possible.  I haven't found that to be the case in my own life - I think I spend a long time on foreplay and very much enjoy it - but I just thought I was atypical among men and that these complaints represented genuine female experiences and desires.  However, if it really were the case that men were the ones you just wanted to rush past foreplay, wouldn't we expect to see the length of foreplay and intercourse decrease?  And wouldn't we expect the length of foreplay and sex to increase as the frequency decreased as the dating market skewed so that there were more men than women?  Given this data, I'm starting to wonder how atypical I really am in this sphere.  I certainly wouldn't put it past the culture to have been telling me the opposite of the truth on this subject but I'm certainly open to other explanations.

 

Any thoughts?

 

I get confused at the numbers advantage part, by advantage they mean here that men are actually less in number thus lowering supply and increasing value. As you would expect the frequency of sex would increase for women to secure their men in a market where they have a disadvantage, and generally need to please their men with longer sex with more foreplay.

 

I think modern men like foreplay just as much as women, you're right that there is an old trope that men kind of don't know what they're doing but I think that is something that's rapidly changing, men can get easy access to understand biology with the internet, porn has widened the average persons understanding of sex. You can literally just google sex education and watch hours and hours of informative and educational youtube videos covering all aspects of sex, the anatomy and how to please each other.

 

There's loads of negative stereotypes and memes about men that circulate in society that just aren't true, a lot of them result from people (normally women) shaming men loudly in order to get men to act in ways which benefit the women. For example take dead beat dads, turns out most men pay their child support but you actually flip the stats around to women having to pay men who have custody and you finder a greater percentage of women who don't pay, yet there's no "dead beat mom" meme in society.

 

One things I've learned from the mens rights movement sphere and MGTOW is that mens depiction in media and entertainment tends to be pretty awful, the kind of bumbling dad figure who is essentially useless and is constantly propped up by the intelligent and sassy wife. All part of a wider narrative that straight (normally white) males are kind of histories punching bag, that you can more or less represent them arbitrarily negatively and we just take it.

 

In a balanced sexual relationship men are just as much the receivers of foreplay as women are and so it makes sense that they'd want long and satisfying sessions of diverse sexual activity. I know that I do.

[LancierDombre]

I get confused at the numbers advantage part, by advantage they mean here that men are actually less in number thus lowering supply and increasing value.

 

Adamantly, this is awkwardly worded on my part, but you are correct.  In the dating market, the advantage goes to the group that's in the minority.

 

That is really interesting and I'm not sure whether I doubt it. But I do wonder whether there are other coincidental factors. Maybe they solved for them. What was the timeframe when this was occurring?

 

I haven't forgotten about you but the passage that I quoted is all that's said in the actual text.  There's a bibliography but it's in alphabetical order and isn't organized by chapter so it's difficult to identify the exact source for some of this.  So for all I know, the source study was done poorly.  Since it wasn't essential to the overall argument he was making in that section I wouldn't doubt it.

 

I think I may have caught him overstating the implications of some OkTrends data which he uses to make the case that 35-year-old single women are just as attractive as 25-year-old single women and that there isn't a cadre of 20-something men who are starved of female companionship.  I will tell more when I have more time to look into it.

[luxfelix]

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