Two girls for every boy
(This is an expanded and edited better version of a comment that I emailed to the thread "Readers on College".)
Lately, there has been a huge brouhaha about how female students are taking over the American colleges and universities so that the disparity between sexes is now 58-42 for women, and keeps increasing. Some commentators and bloggers (especially those on the conservative side) consider this to be a bad thing with negative consequences on society whereas some others (especially those on the leftist side) don't really believe this disparity really exists and even if it does, consider it to be socially harmless. I am not as optimistic, since among my various reads I have the African-American women's magazine "Essence". Between the lines and sometimes quite explicitly this magazine offers a good perspective on what happens when there are twice as many female college graduates as there are male graduates, and women still want to marry up.
However, there is one highly visible effect that the heavy feminization of colleges will necessarily cause but which doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet anywhere else. This effect should be obvious to anyone who has read the excellent article "Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions" (pdf) by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs. Or "I am Charlotte Simmons", which brilliantly depicts how various interchained power hierarchies which rank people in different ways interact in an environment where it is unacceptable to even mention the existence of those hierarchies.
This highly visible effect of feminization of colleges is simply the enormous liberalization of sexual mores on campus between the students.
Now, for some reasons that I can't quite comprehend, modern feminists often like to pretend, against the common sense and the everyday experiences of most women who have any looks at all and every man who does not belong to the top 5% or so of men, that on average, women want to have casual sex with men just as much as men want them. After all, men and women are exactly alike anyways, right? The nagging fact that no real culture does even remotely function as if this claim was true is explained away with the evil patriarchy that prevents women from acting on their desires by labelling them as sluts.
The feminists reading this will probably therefore happily conclude that since increasing the number of women leads to a more liberated sexual environment, this somehow proves their claim to be correct. But in fact this claims proves the exact opposite, namely that women are the constraining factor on how much sexual activity takes place, which in turn implies that they want sex less than men. (*) Based on this, I predict that American college campuses will take a turn depicted in Charlotte, and this turn will not exactly be perceived as positive among the majority women.
When women are a minority, their basic sociobiological strategy of requiring commitment for sex works very well. Men have to compete for women's attention strictly in women's terms. And even if some women do desire casual sex, short-term relationships and one-night stands, they know that if they appear to be looking and available, they will immediately get dozens of hopeful men hitting on them. Even if the women were secure in their physical safety, it is still emotionally draining to constantly have to see those looks on all those men's faces and keep turning down losers and low-status men. As a result, the women who are a minority dress quite conservatively and to an outside observer, would appear to have almost no visible sex drive at all. The end result makes conservatives and traditionalists happy since everyone behaves virtuously: women by choice, men by necessity.
However, when women become a significant majority, the same strategy no longer works at all. For some mysterious reason, men just don't seem as interested in commitment. There is now much more casual sex available to them when the numbers of women increase, since women are the constraining factor on how much casual sex takes place. When they are a majority, women find themselves in an unnatural situation in which they actually have to compete with other women for the commitment and attention of good males. Any woman can still decide to settle and pair up with the nerdy omega-male Adam of Charlotte, but who gets to monopolize the muscular winner alpha male JoJo? And there are not too many ways that this competition can take place: most likely, it is a race to the bottom on who puts out the easiest. A woman who wants to wait a few months before starting sexual activity will probably find herself without a boyfriend at all, or settle for a far worse man than what she could have monopolized in an enviroment where both sexes are equally numbered. Of course, there are other forms of how this competition can take place between women, but they are all somehow about being in some way pleasant to men.
For this reason, my bet is that there isn't much support for equalizing the sex ratio among the men who are currently in college. Heck, a sex ratio of 80-20 would probably sound even better to the ears of most male students. (Few of them would, of course, imagine themselves as being the marginal males who then don't get in the university in the first place.) I guarantee that the brainy men are very happy about the current situation, especially if they are at least little athletic in addition to being brainy enough to get accepted to the hallowed halls. (In Charlotte, consider Hoyt and especially JoJo, or imagine of how much worse Adam would have fared in a school where most students were men.) Besides, most college men are quite happy to sacrifice their blue-collar bound brothers since at least the brainest men don't exactly remember the masses fondly from the high school.
In my opinion, the women being a majority of university students is not as big a problem as it sounds. If more women want to step up and advance some science, good for them. The pace in which science advances can never really be too fast. But of course, especially the marginal women who get in with the increased freshman intake tend to populate the intellectually fluffier fields (for example, those that were originally designed to be an amusement for the young idle rich) whereas men tend to major in more reality-based fields, to borrow the favourite term of the Left. These men then don't have to suffer from feminism and other forms of leftism nearly as much as you would expect from the overall numbers, since feminists are pretty rare in any reality-based fields that have objective standards. Since feminism is essentially an extreme form of social constructionism, its mindset is 180 degrees opposite to the mindset needed in, say, the hard sciences.
(*) A moment later, I came up with a simple practical experiment which would immediately prove which side is right. At the end of the school year, conduct a study among the university students that contains the question "During the past year, how many one-night stands have you had with other students of this school?" (Note the last six words of the question: they are absolutely essential.) For each school, compute the average answer for women. Then compute how this school average correlates with the percentage of female students in that school.
Now, if the feminist side is right, there would be a zero or even negative correlation between the average number of one-night stands the female student has and the percentage of female students at the school. The correlation would in fact probably be slightly negative because in schools that have lots of male students, female students would be more likely to find a partner they like, and hence would generally have more sex and more partners. And if this indeed turned out to be the result of the study, I would immediately admit that everything what I wrote above is total bullshit and completely wrong, and in fact, my whole thinking has been out of whack for a long, long time.
But if I were right, a strong positive correlation between the average number of partners and the percentage of female students would emerge, for the reasons that I explained above. And even though correlation is not causation, as everyone quickly learns on the Internet, correlation requires an explanation. And more importantly, it invalidates all worldviews that predict that no such correlation would exist.
Lately, there has been a huge brouhaha about how female students are taking over the American colleges and universities so that the disparity between sexes is now 58-42 for women, and keeps increasing. Some commentators and bloggers (especially those on the conservative side) consider this to be a bad thing with negative consequences on society whereas some others (especially those on the leftist side) don't really believe this disparity really exists and even if it does, consider it to be socially harmless. I am not as optimistic, since among my various reads I have the African-American women's magazine "Essence". Between the lines and sometimes quite explicitly this magazine offers a good perspective on what happens when there are twice as many female college graduates as there are male graduates, and women still want to marry up.
However, there is one highly visible effect that the heavy feminization of colleges will necessarily cause but which doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet anywhere else. This effect should be obvious to anyone who has read the excellent article "Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions" (pdf) by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs. Or "I am Charlotte Simmons", which brilliantly depicts how various interchained power hierarchies which rank people in different ways interact in an environment where it is unacceptable to even mention the existence of those hierarchies.
This highly visible effect of feminization of colleges is simply the enormous liberalization of sexual mores on campus between the students.
Now, for some reasons that I can't quite comprehend, modern feminists often like to pretend, against the common sense and the everyday experiences of most women who have any looks at all and every man who does not belong to the top 5% or so of men, that on average, women want to have casual sex with men just as much as men want them. After all, men and women are exactly alike anyways, right? The nagging fact that no real culture does even remotely function as if this claim was true is explained away with the evil patriarchy that prevents women from acting on their desires by labelling them as sluts.
The feminists reading this will probably therefore happily conclude that since increasing the number of women leads to a more liberated sexual environment, this somehow proves their claim to be correct. But in fact this claims proves the exact opposite, namely that women are the constraining factor on how much sexual activity takes place, which in turn implies that they want sex less than men. (*) Based on this, I predict that American college campuses will take a turn depicted in Charlotte, and this turn will not exactly be perceived as positive among the majority women.
When women are a minority, their basic sociobiological strategy of requiring commitment for sex works very well. Men have to compete for women's attention strictly in women's terms. And even if some women do desire casual sex, short-term relationships and one-night stands, they know that if they appear to be looking and available, they will immediately get dozens of hopeful men hitting on them. Even if the women were secure in their physical safety, it is still emotionally draining to constantly have to see those looks on all those men's faces and keep turning down losers and low-status men. As a result, the women who are a minority dress quite conservatively and to an outside observer, would appear to have almost no visible sex drive at all. The end result makes conservatives and traditionalists happy since everyone behaves virtuously: women by choice, men by necessity.
However, when women become a significant majority, the same strategy no longer works at all. For some mysterious reason, men just don't seem as interested in commitment. There is now much more casual sex available to them when the numbers of women increase, since women are the constraining factor on how much casual sex takes place. When they are a majority, women find themselves in an unnatural situation in which they actually have to compete with other women for the commitment and attention of good males. Any woman can still decide to settle and pair up with the nerdy omega-male Adam of Charlotte, but who gets to monopolize the muscular winner alpha male JoJo? And there are not too many ways that this competition can take place: most likely, it is a race to the bottom on who puts out the easiest. A woman who wants to wait a few months before starting sexual activity will probably find herself without a boyfriend at all, or settle for a far worse man than what she could have monopolized in an enviroment where both sexes are equally numbered. Of course, there are other forms of how this competition can take place between women, but they are all somehow about being in some way pleasant to men.
For this reason, my bet is that there isn't much support for equalizing the sex ratio among the men who are currently in college. Heck, a sex ratio of 80-20 would probably sound even better to the ears of most male students. (Few of them would, of course, imagine themselves as being the marginal males who then don't get in the university in the first place.) I guarantee that the brainy men are very happy about the current situation, especially if they are at least little athletic in addition to being brainy enough to get accepted to the hallowed halls. (In Charlotte, consider Hoyt and especially JoJo, or imagine of how much worse Adam would have fared in a school where most students were men.) Besides, most college men are quite happy to sacrifice their blue-collar bound brothers since at least the brainest men don't exactly remember the masses fondly from the high school.
In my opinion, the women being a majority of university students is not as big a problem as it sounds. If more women want to step up and advance some science, good for them. The pace in which science advances can never really be too fast. But of course, especially the marginal women who get in with the increased freshman intake tend to populate the intellectually fluffier fields (for example, those that were originally designed to be an amusement for the young idle rich) whereas men tend to major in more reality-based fields, to borrow the favourite term of the Left. These men then don't have to suffer from feminism and other forms of leftism nearly as much as you would expect from the overall numbers, since feminists are pretty rare in any reality-based fields that have objective standards. Since feminism is essentially an extreme form of social constructionism, its mindset is 180 degrees opposite to the mindset needed in, say, the hard sciences.
(*) A moment later, I came up with a simple practical experiment which would immediately prove which side is right. At the end of the school year, conduct a study among the university students that contains the question "During the past year, how many one-night stands have you had with other students of this school?" (Note the last six words of the question: they are absolutely essential.) For each school, compute the average answer for women. Then compute how this school average correlates with the percentage of female students in that school.
Now, if the feminist side is right, there would be a zero or even negative correlation between the average number of one-night stands the female student has and the percentage of female students at the school. The correlation would in fact probably be slightly negative because in schools that have lots of male students, female students would be more likely to find a partner they like, and hence would generally have more sex and more partners. And if this indeed turned out to be the result of the study, I would immediately admit that everything what I wrote above is total bullshit and completely wrong, and in fact, my whole thinking has been out of whack for a long, long time.
But if I were right, a strong positive correlation between the average number of partners and the percentage of female students would emerge, for the reasons that I explained above. And even though correlation is not causation, as everyone quickly learns on the Internet, correlation requires an explanation. And more importantly, it invalidates all worldviews that predict that no such correlation would exist.
Hi- Interesting stuff. Question about this phrase, second to last paragraph: "in schools that have lots of male students, female students would be more likely to find a partner they like, and hence would generally have more sex and more partners."
Isn't your basic premise that as the female side of the ratio increases, the enumber of sexual partners goes down, not up? Am I misunderstanding something?
Posted by RovingInternetWanderer | 7:19 AM
You are misunderstanding something. The second to last paragraph is written with the assumption that the feminist side is correct, and the quote that you wonder about is an implication of their assumptions.
Posted by Ilkka | 8:26 AM
But the fact remains that even with all the numbers supposedly in his favor, Adam was still a virgin at the end of "I Am Charlotte Simmons". Most likely he will remain so beyond his graduation as his contacts with women after that point will increasingly become adversarial--as competitors for jobs, economic and political power, rather than social, as in school.
Posted by Anonymous | 5:52 PM
I read the "Sexual Economics" paper by Baumeister & Vohs referred to herein. Nothing new there to report. What, that sex is a man's and not a woman's need? Every man knows that. No feminist will ever admit that. There isn't a female ALIVE between 15-40 who cannot find a partner on demand. No man can do that.
The flaw in the B&V argument is the definition of "sex" as a female resource when in fact it is their limited reproductive capacity that is desired, and B&V simply gloss over this. The problem for women is that resource has a very limited shelf life and goes stale really fast--peaking between ages 17-23.
Further information on this subject may be obtained from Ms. Maureen Dowd c/o The New York Times.
Posted by Anonymous | 8:11 PM