BOSTON — Richard Whitmire, author of “Why Boys Fail,” has an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal based on findings of a recent Pew Research Center report:
Rachel Downtain is a telecommunications project manager who says her friends would describe her as tall, slender, fit and active. Not someone you’d think would fail to find a mate. Yet, of late, Ms. Downtain has been sifting through sperm-donor Web sites. This is not her first choice for how to start a family, but at 35 she says she’s quickly running out of options…
A sea change in relationships is taking place as everyone adjusts to the new reality of women being better educated and in some cases more preferred than men in the workforce. Especially unsettling to some men is their role as second-best earner in the family. As the Pew report documents, 22% of men with “some college” are now outearned by their wives, up from 4% in 1970…
… social scientists agree that the education mismatch Ms. Downtain experiences with men is a significant player behind the increase in college-educated women choosing single motherhood…
“In situations where there are fewer women than men, you see long-term monogamy,” said David Geary, curators’ professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri and author of “Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Difference.” “If a woman doesn’t like what a man is doing, she can dump him and get someone else…”
The situation in the U.S. is far more benign, though here, too, it is the sex in short supply—in the pool of the college-educated—that makes the rules. Women are feeling the pinch from years of gender imbalances on college campuses, where today nearly 58% of all bachelor’s degrees and 62% of associate’s degrees are earned by women. Given that women prefer to find a well-educated, reliable earner as a husband, this creates a simple math problem. Well-educated women can’t find enough equally or better-educated men to marry.
Couple the education gap with the current economic “man-cession”—as many as 80% of the jobs lost in the recession were held by men—and the dilemma for single women becomes even worse. Today, more and more well-educated women have to ask themselves: Am I willing to “marry down”?
Lonely Girl
Women are approached, hit on, and flirted with every day of their adult lives. If a woman is single and does not want to be, then she is too picky. She always had choices available. Conversely, a man needs to work to gain the interest of a woman unless he looks like a model or is wealthy. To be blunt, a woman can have a sexual partner with little effort; a man can have a dry spell for weeks or months.
However, it is natural that women are inherently pickier — they only have 240 good chances to have a child throughout their lives. (Hypothetically, one fertile egg per month between the ages of 16 and 36.) Subconsciously, women do not want to waste their precious-few eggs. Men, on the other hand, can create children any day of the month, and well into middle– and old-age.
Women in Love
If a woman like Ms. Downtain is single and desperate enough to have a child through a sperm bank, she only has herself to blame for limiting her choices in partners much too strictly. Women have the desire to “date up” and find a protector-provider mate as a result of evolutionary psychology, but the modern world — one in which women are increasingly more educated and successful than men as one unintended consequence of feminism — is now wrecking havoc with their innate motivations and needs.
Women Alone
Now, the other major point of the opinion column:
A more worrisome issue arises when men take advantage of their relative scarcity by making life miserable for would-be girlfriends. Why settle down when you are a guy and the supply of eligible women appears to be unlimited? The female students hate such a situation, which is one reason admissions offices end up accepting male applicants who are less academically qualified than their female counterparts. Their goal is to avoid the dreaded 60/40 gender imbalance on campus that everyone agrees is a threshold not to be crossed. Those gender preferences, which colleges rarely discuss, have become common among private, four-year colleges (and recently caught the attention of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which has launched a probe into admissions discrimination against women).
When I was an undergraduate at Boston University from 1998 to 2002, many girls would use the phrase “BU-cute” — meaning that they were dating guys they normally would not because there were relatively-fewer heterosexual men on campus. The laws of markets, supply versus demand, and game theory do exist in all aspects of life.
Looking for a Boyfriend
Whitmire’s point on men also brings another economics term to the discussion: cost-benefit analysis. I doubt that single men are taking “making life miserable for would-be girlfriends.” Rather, they are choosing to opt-out of institutions like marriage and long-term relationships because having a spouse is increasingly viewed as a raw deal for men. In the event of divorce, a man will probably lose half of his assets — even if his wife earns as much or more than he does — and likely be unable to see his children often. Men are scared of being chained to a woman who may — right after the wedding — turn into a shrew or barely want to have sex. Why not just live in “Guyland” and have casual sex with young women from bars until you are old? Why deal with the insanity and game-playing involved with dating women? Remember: Women want marriage more than men; women need to give men a reason to get married.
It’s sad, to say the least, because marriage is something spiritual, beneficial, and life-affirming in many different ways. But this is the modern, Western world in all it’s sad glory. It’s also one reason why I’m now glad to live in Jerusalem, where people are more traditional.
Related: Critiques of Feminism: Arguments Against Feminism Essay. Hat tip: Dr. Helen.
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