'Analysis of dating app behavior shows that women like about 14% of male profiles, whereas men like 46% of female profiles. The result is that a small percentage of men receive the vast majority of female attention. The top 10% of men get over half of all likes. The bottom 50% of men get about 5%.'
What is often left out is that the same Hinge data showed a comparable skew among women, even if it was slightly lower: the top 10% of women got 46% of the likes and the bottom 50% got 8%.
A recent study showed that while women received far more swipes, they didn't swipe up more in terms of within-gender desirability (measured by swipes received) than men, and matches actually tended to be closely matched in desirability.
This is consistent with studies on traditional dating sites: while men cast a wider net by sending far more initial messages, there was a similar desirability gap between the sender and recipient for both sexes, and a similar effect of desirability on replies received.
The dating app argument tends to start and end at the observation of imbalanced swipe rates, but swipes alone provide zero information on who is matching, exchanging messages, going on dates, or engaging in actual sexual acts through them.
The match rates cited here are as a percentage of likes rather than total swipes. Looking at the same source that this and commonly cited swipe rates are taken from, while the median man received an average of 1.1 matches per day, the median women received 2.75. This seems like a pretty big disparity until you realize that with roughly 3x as many men using dating apps, women will naturally receive around that many more matches than men on a per capita basis.
We can go further and look at actual outcomes to find that there is also basically no difference in how many men or women in the population actually meet up with people through dating apps:
'Despite this, many men and women still find success on Tinder. According to one survey, more than 20% of millennials surveyed reported meeting someone off of Tinder. Men were more likely to use the app as well as more likely to have met someone from Tinder.'
Other outcome-based measures such as on the percentage of people who had sex with someone through a dating app in the past year, those who have dated someone through online dating, numbers of relationships started through dating apps, and the number of unique dates men and women have had through dating apps, show near perfect parity.
It's a popular notion that dating apps have facilitated 'hook-up culture', but in reality very few heterosexual hook-ups occur through them. One study found that only 20% of Tinder users had a one-night stand through it, and most of them had only one. It took about about 300 matches on average for either a one-night stand or a long-term relationship to come from it.
We don't have to limit our analysis to dating apps, either. We can look at population-level sexual behaviour to see if this is having the predicted effect. This narrative predicts increasing sexual inequality among men, but if we look at the top 20% of men in terms of sexual partners, we see no rise in their share of partners over time. Likewise, the 95th and 80th percentiles in lifetime or past-year sex partners aren't reporting more partners over time. Sexual partner distributions remain virtually identical between young men and women.
Moreover, we don't need to rely solely on self-reported sexual partners, as we can look to STD trends and observe no disproportionate rise among women compared to heterosexual men. Both of their STD rates have moved in tandem, contrary to what the narrative that a small percentage of men are increasingly monopolizing sexual opportunities would predict.
I don’t think the data support the claim that concentration at the top of the sexual-partner distribution has remained flat over time. A peer-reviewed CDC analysis using NSFG data finds statistically significant increases in lifetime opposite-sex partners among men in both the top 20% (12 → 15) and top 5% (38 → 50) between 2002 and 2011–2013, while the number of partners in the past year remained unchanged (Harper et al., 2017; see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10926320/pdf/nihms-1969556.pdf
The authors explicitly interpret this divergence as a shift in timing, not increased annual concurrency—consistent with delayed commitment among high-desirability men. I graphed this here: https://imgur.com/a/oDLEL0d
Notably, the male distribution becomes increasingly right-skewed over time: the upper tail pulls away while the median remains flat. By contrast, women’s partner distributions remain broadly stable across the distribution. This is exactly what a delayed-commitment mechanism would predict—high-desirability men accumulating more lifetime partners by remaining in the mating market longer, while typical men and women see little change.
Relatedly, as you noted, roughly 20% of Tinder users report at least one one-night stand through the app. This is not trivial and is consistent with a right-tailed distribution in which a relatively small subset of men account for a large share of short-term encounters; no evidence is offered that these encounters are evenly distributed.
And you’re right that online dating research shows both men and women pursue partners about 25% more desirable than themselves (Bruch & Newman 2018). But the filtering process is asymmetric: men initiate over 80% of contacts, women reply to fewer than 20%, and women are far more selective at the attention stage—liking roughly 14% of profiles versus men’s 46%. (from the same study) The result is a gendered attention skew in which a small fraction of men receive a disproportionate share of female-initiated interest, even when final matches are assortative.
The ~3:1 male-to-female ratio on dating apps doesn’t normalize this dynamic; it reflects it. A market where many more men remain actively searching suggests prolonged search and delayed exit into stable relationships. At the same time, that aggregate male surplus coexists with concentrated female attention on a subset of high-desirability men, creating local female-biased markets with reduced intrasexual competition. Sex-ratio research predicts this response: in female-biased markets, men defer long-term commitment in favor of short-term mating (Kruger & Schlemmer 2009; Royal Society).
I'm familiar with this study, and I've frequently seen it cited as evidence of the dating app effect, despite the final survey wave being in 2011-13, before they had gained any real popularity. Of course if the narrative were true, the concentration should have only intensified in the subsequent years, but this isn't what we see. In the four NSFG surveys conducted since then, the number of sex partners reported by the 95th and 80th percentile has not risen, but in fact declined in the most recent waves (2017-19 and 2022-23) after remaining more or less stable in between.
Moreover, if you look at the table in the Harper study, you'll see that the apparent rise in the 95th percentile seems to be largely confined to Hispanic men who basically caught up to the rest. For Non-Hispanic White men, the partner count rose only slightly from 40 to 44.
While this is typically framed as evidence of a zero-sum redistribution producing incels, the same surveys don't show a notable increase in sexlessness among men across this period (0.4%), and in fact the mean lifetime partners reported by men increased from 8.61 to 9.85.
I also found a different lower confidence interval to them that rendered the difference nonsignificant (you can also see another mistake they made with the 80th percentile of NHW men reporting 123 partners in 2002).
I will note that this analysis isn't ideal for testing this hypothesis, as it aggregates a broad age range of 15-44. The upper percentiles in sex partners are disproportionately driven by older men, meaning changes in sexual behaviour among the youth won't be fully reflected. However, even when restricting analyses to younger age brackets, the predicted rise in upper-tail concentration fails to materialize.
'Relatedly, as you noted, roughly 20% of Tinder users report at least one one-night stand through the app. This is not trivial and is consistent with a right-tailed distribution in which a relatively small subset of men account for a large share of short-term encounters; no evidence is offered that these encounters are evenly distributed.'
The key point is that there is no evidence for a gender asymmetry. A similar percentage of women have had a sexual encounter through dating apps and a similarly small subset of women accounts for a similar share of short-term encounters. Promiscuity is confined to a small minority of heterosexuals of both sexes, maybe 5% at most.
'The result is a gendered attention skew in which a small fraction of men receive a disproportionate share of female-initiated interest, even when final matches are assortative.'
This is basically what I said at the outset: while women receive a lot more attention overall (much like they're more frequently approached and asked out offline), in terms of the within-gender skew, it's comparable, with matches being largely assortative. This goes against the idea that average or below women are routinely matching with and dating the most desirable men.
'The ~3:1 male-to-female ratio on dating apps doesn’t normalize this dynamic; it reflects it.'
Dating apps are high-sociosexuality environments. A skewed gender ratio should be expected simply based on differences in sociosexuality. Additionally, it's an appealing alternative to in-person approaches for many men, as it mitigates much of the anxiety of approaching and pain of rejection.
'At the same time, that aggregate male surplus coexists with concentrated female attention on a subset of high-desirability men, creating local female-biased markets with reduced intrasexual competition. Sex-ratio research predicts this response: in female-biased markets, men defer long-term commitment in favor of short-term mating (Kruger & Schlemmer 2009; Royal Society).'
You say that female attention is concentrated on a minority of men, but online dating and dating app research consistently shows that the degree of concentration is relatively comparable across the sexes. Like I said, the median man and woman get about the same number of matches after adjusting for the gender ratio - the average woman isn't consistently matching with the top 5% of men. Swiping on fewer profiles doesn't mean only swiping on the same few profiles, nor does it mean matching with them. So dating apps are closer to 'male-biased markets', as the gender ratio would suggest (assuming this framework meaningfully applies to a weird online environment). Though since they tend to attract people of a higher sociosexual orientation, dating app users do report more sex partners. One study (Botnen et al., 2018) found that this wasn't the case after controlling for sociosexuality, suggesting they're not in themselves facilitating higher levels of casual sex.
First, thank you for the substantive critique — this is exactly the kind of empirical pressure-testing I was hoping for, and you’ve clearly done serious work engaging the survey literature.
That said, I think we need to acknowledge a fundamental limitation at the outset: we do not have high-quality data on this question in the post-2013 period. NSFG response rates fell sharply after 2013, dropping from roughly 60+ percent in earlier waves to about 23 percent in 2022–2023. The GSS experienced a more gradual erosion, culminating in a severe collapse to roughly 17 percent in recent waves. In addition, age brackets and survey modes changed across periods. Taken together, this represents a substantial methodological discontinuity. Under those conditions—especially for questions involving right-tail behavior—I’m hesitant to update priors based on apparent changes in survey estimates.
So, without good direct data, it's worth stepping back and asking what we'd expect in the first place—and whether the indirect evidence we do have aligns with that expectation.
The prior is straightforward: dramatically expanding the visible mate pool and reducing search costs to near-zero should produce some increase in concentration, at least in attention and access. This follows from basic search theory and from the well-documented tendency toward female selectivity in species with asymmetric parental investment. And the indirect data we have—rising young male sexlessness, widening gender gaps in singlehood—is consistent with exactly that expectation. Anecdotal evidence points in the same direction as well: platform-level matching patterns, common user experience on dating apps, and widely observed asymmetries in attention. Anecdotes don’t establish magnitudes, but they are informative about mechanisms, especially when they align closely with theory.
On sexlessness specifically: you argue that surveys show no notable increase among men, citing a roughly 0.4-percentage-point change. But this result relies on the 15–44 age aggregation—which you yourself note is not well suited to testing this hypothesis, since changes among younger cohorts are diluted. When we examine the age groups actually relevant to the mechanism, the picture looks very different. A peer-reviewed analysis of NSFG data (Ueda et al., JAMA Network Open, 2020) found that past-year sexlessness among 18–24-year-old men rose from 18.9 percent to 30.9 percent between 2000–2002 and 2016–2018. Among women of the same age, there was no statistically significant increase. Similar patterns appeared among 25–34-year-olds: significant increases for men (7.0% to 14.1%), with smaller increases for women. This pattern—rising male sexlessness with no corresponding increase among women—is exactly what the model predicts if expanded perceived access to higher-desirability men causes women to delay pairing with less desirable alternatives. The timing is at least consistent with the dating app hypothesis, with the sharpest increases occurring in the post-smartphone era.
Some additional indirect evidence consistent with increased asymmetry in mate access and relationship sequencing under expanded choice:
The gender gap in young-adult singlehood widened, with about 60 percent of men ages 25–29 single versus 47 percent of women (BGSU, 2019–2021).
Taller men cycle through more sequential long-term partners, not merely more sexual partners (Nettle, 2002).
Men rated above average in physical attractiveness are more likely to cohabit without transitioning to marriage (French et al., 2014; Add Health).
None of this is definitive. There is no clean way to decompose how much of the observed delay in pair bonding is attributable to expanded choice and skewed preferences versus broader cultural or economic forces. Also, even if we allow that perceived access to a pool of higher-status men contributes to a delay in pair bonding, it's unclear how much of that, if any, would directly translate into sex that would show up in surveys.
Better data could well show that you are 100% correct. But given degraded survey evidence on one side, and on the other a combination of robust theoretical priors, pre-collapse data showing rising young male sexlessness, widening gender gaps in singlehood, and peer-reviewed findings on sequential partnering by male desirability—I don't see a compelling reason to update strongly in the opposite direction.
'That said, I think we need to acknowledge a fundamental limitation at the outset: we do not have high-quality data on this question in the post-2013 period. NSFG response rates fell sharply after 2013, dropping from roughly 60+ percent in earlier waves to about 23 percent in 2022–2023. The GSS experienced a more gradual erosion, culminating in a severe collapse to roughly 17 percent in recent waves.'
When you say the GSS experienced more gradual erosion until recently, are you assuming that the decline in response rates was roughly uniform in severity from 2013 to 2022-23? The main decline occurs in 2022-23. For men, response rates were 78% in 2002, 75% in 2006-10, 72.1% in 2011-13, 67.1% in 2013-15, 63.6% in 2015-17, and 61.4% in 2017-19. So it was pretty gradual until the sharp drop in the most recent survey.
The response rates from 2002 to 2011-13 fell by 6.1%, yet this didn't stop the observed rise in partner counts from occurring. If that change is to be taken seriously, I see no reason not to take the change between 2015-17 and 2017-19 or the lack of an increasing number of partners reported by the upper percentiles post-2013 just as seriously. The 95th percentile analysis is limited by the fact that lifetime partners caps at 50, but reported partners dropped below that in 2013-15 and 2017-19.
If this data isn't enough to warrant reconsideration, I'd still think the absence of a notable rise in male sexlessness between 2002 and 2011-13 would be something that deserves explanation if the rise among the 95th percentile is supposedly due to sexual opportunities being taken from less desirable men.
The switch to a multi-mode design is also limited to the most recent survey. While there is a substantial difference in reported sexual behaviour by mode in 2022-23 - which could be due to differences in sample composition or social desirability bias, and somebody has speculated it may be related to a monetary incentive along with the ability for respondents to skip most questions by reporting no sexual experience - the number of partners reported by the 95th percentile nonetheless only changes marginally when restricting the sample to offline respondents.
In my analysis, I restricted the age range to 15-44 to maintain consistency with earlier waves.
I've also examined the NHANES, GSS, and YRBS data; all fail to show the expected pattern. Instead they tend to show a decline in sexual partners reported by the most promiscuous men, consistent with the more recent NSFG surveys.
In my original post I also mentioned STDs as an alternative way of testing this narrative that largely bypasses concerns around self-report bias. Do you not think that the fact that heterosexual men and women's STD rates have moved in tandem post-dating apps counts as evidence against it?
'The prior is straightforward: dramatically expanding the visible mate pool and reducing search costs to near-zero should produce some increase in concentration, at least in attention and access.'
This assumes that there was a pre-existing between-sex asymmetry in sexual behaviour to intensify. If we look at this study of adolescent sexual networks from 1993-95 for example, there is little evidence for stronger within-sex inequality among males compared to females:
'This follows from basic search theory and from the well-documented tendency toward female selectivity in species with asymmetric parental investment.'
I could just as easily make a theoretical argument grounded in the vulnerability and prolonged dependency of human infants that the species will tend towards long-term monogamous pair bonding and overall restricted sexuality among women, rather than women all throwing themselves at a minority of men who often won't be able or willing to split their parental investment across numerous offspring.
Few women seem inclined to opt into polygyny when given the option. As they become more educated and autonomous, polygyny levels tend to decline, as we're seeing now in SSA. In most MENA countries, despite being legally permitted, polygamy is practiced at a very low rate - typically around 1%. Polygyny also tends to correlate quite strongly with arranged marriage, another indication that female preferences aren't the main driver.
'And the indirect data we have—rising young male sexlessness, widening gender gaps in singlehood—is consistent with exactly that expectation.'
The rise in sexlessness among adolescents and young adults doesn't appear to be gendered. The GSS provides little evidence for a male-specific increase in the post-2018 surveys:
'The gender gap in young-adult singlehood widened, with about 60 percent of men ages 25–29 single versus 47 percent of women (BGSU, 2019–2021).'
First, this doesn't show an increasing gap: 59% of men were single in 2019, rising to 60% in 2021, while 46% of women were in 2019, rising to 47% in 2021.
Second, singleness here is defined as not cohabiting or married. If there were a widening gap here, it'd suggest actual polygamy with multiple female partners coresiding with the same man. Generally, the narrative is that women are unwittingly sharing them: they *think* they're in an exclusive relationship, but *actually*...
The stat most often cited in support of this narrative comes from the 2022 Pew survey. Other sources don't replicate the large 29% gender discrepancy among 18-29s, but show gaps in the range of 10-15%. Moreover, the only category that plausibly allows this dynamic to operate is the 'non-cohabiting committed relationship' category, yet even in the anomalous Pew survey, 3/4ths of this gap is driven by a higher cohabitation and marriage rate among young women, and no other survey shows a non-cohabiting relationship gap as high as 8%. A survey with a much larger sample size, while not including a non-cohabiting relationship option, indicates that cohabiting young women were highly overrepresented in the Pew survey.
'Anecdotal evidence points in the same direction as well:platform-level matching patterns'
I'm not sure what this refers to that hasn't been addressed.
'common user experience on dating apps'
The argument isn't that it's not harder for men to find matches. I'm not sure what kind of user experience conflicts with anything I've said.
'widely observed asymmetries in attention'
Again, I feel like this has been addressed already.
'they are informative about mechanisms, especially when they align closely with theory.'
They also seem to align perfectly well with what I've said, and I don't see how these observations conflict with any of the data I've presented.
'On sexlessness specifically: you argue that surveys show no notable increase among men, citing a roughly 0.4-percentage-point change. But this result relies on the 15–44 age aggregation—which you yourself note is not well suited to testing this hypothesis, since changes among younger cohorts are diluted. When we examine the age groups actually relevant to the mechanism, the picture looks very different.'
A large shift in sexlessness among the youth over this period should still presumably cause a bigger shift than observed in the broader age group, as there are as many under-30s as over-30s. But the reason I highlighted this negligible rise as well as the increase in mean lifetime partner counts was mostly to illustrate that the surveys don't provide evidence for the zero-sum redistribution idea.
Looks like I'll have to split this comment in two.
'A peer-reviewed analysis of NSFG data (Ueda et al., JAMA Network Open, 2020) found that past-year sexlessness among 18–24-year-old men rose from 18.9 percent to 30.9 percent between 2000–2002 and 2016–2018. mong women of the same age, there was no statistically significant increase. Similar patterns appeared among 25–34-year-olds: significant increases for men (7.0% to 14.1%), with smaller increases for women.'
This study uses GSS data, not NSFG. If we look at the surveys after 2018 (2021, 2022, 2024), there is no difference in the sexlessness rates between 18-24 men and women:
'Taller men cycle through more sequential long-term partners, not merely more sexual partners (Nettle, 2002).'
I've looked quite extensively into the effect of height, and it's consistently very small across different outcome measures: sexual partner count, sexual activity, relationship status, and fertility. In this study, the difference in the number of relationships between the bottom and top height quartiles is about 0.1 and only marginally statistically significant. The same study also shows that the top height quartile reports about 0.1 fewer children than the others.
But yes, because there seems to be a small effect of height on both sex partners and relationship status (typically around a 0.05 correlation), it's reasonable to expect an effect on number of long-term partners. Most sex partners tend to be long-term partners, so this is largely the same question asked in a different way. This effect is driven more by very short men than it is by tall men, however.
Moreover, I found no evidence that the effect has increased following the introduction of dating apps, whether measured by sex partners or likelihood of being in a relationship.
'Men rated above average in physical attractiveness are more likely to cohabit without transitioning to marriage (French et al., 2014; Add Health).'
I checked out the paper and honestly the result doesn't seem very compelling. The effect is small and only marginally significant (p < 0.1). From what I can tell, the authors report this finding as 'statistically significant' without specifying or justifying the use of an unconventional threshold.
I'd also add that if anything, there is a stronger effect of attractiveness on women's than men's dating experience, but it seems quite similar:
I respectfully disagree, and believe that the evidence overwhelmingly weighs against this narrative.
With respect to the most promiscuous men, we have multiple datasets showing no rise in reported partners post-dating apps, but rather a decline. I'm not aware of any datasets that show the opposite pattern.
With respect to sexlessness, the increase appears similar across sexes. The male sexlessness narrative was largely driven by statistical noise in the 2018 survey resulting from a small sample size after stratification. The NSFG, with a sample size over 10x larger for 18-29 year olds, didn't show the same male-driven spike. The YRBS, with an even larger sample size of adolescents, shows a similar trend for both sexes. There is also European data I could point to.
With respect to singleness, we have two Pew surveys showing a widening of the gap from 2019 to 2022, but then we have other sources like the American Perspectives Survey showing a similar narrowing of the gap from 2020 to 2022. The GSS also seems to show a narrowing of the gap from 2018 to 2024, with the smallest gap on record in 2024, but it would be mistaken to make much of this - just as it is for the Pew survey. Another survey with a larger sample size than Pew conducted in 2023 showed a singleness gap of 8%. The Pew survey is a massive outlier, which is precisely why it's the one everybody knows about.
With respect to dating apps, all available data on actual outcomes such as dates and sexual encounters show no meaningful gender imbalance.
And as I see it, the STD trends seen in both the US and EU CDC are the final nail in the coffin.
I do agree that the narrative aligns with many people's perceptions surrounding dating apps, that it has emotional resonance with people, and it is an interesting coincidence that a couple of outlier surveys happened around the same time as online discussion around these issues was beginning to ramp up. But this narrative has gotten a lot of mileage out of a select few highly viral stats, while other, oftentimes more reliable data simply lacks the same viral reach.
To the extent that sexlessness is rising, it seems more parsimonious to say it's part of a broader shift in behaviour away from in-person socializing and risk-taking behaviours like alcohol consumption.
Again though, I appreciate the engagement, as it's difficult to find anyone that can give a substantive or effortful response to what I've presented.
Thanks for the careful response — and you’re absolutely right Ueda et al. (2020) use GSS data rather than NSFG. That’s my mistake on the data source, and I appreciate the correction.
That said, the substantive finding I was relying on remains unchanged. The result is still a peer-reviewed, age-specific analysis drawn from a period when response rates were materially higher than in the post-2019 waves. Specifically, Ueda et al. find a large increase in past-year sexlessness among 18–24-year-old men between the early 2000s and 2016–2018, with no statistically significant increase among women of the same age, and smaller but still gender-skewed increases among ages 25–34. Whatever one thinks of later waves, that pattern exists in the pre-collapse data.Explanations based purely on reduced socialization or lower risk-taking don’t obviously account for why the effect would be so asymmetric by sex.
Which I think takes us back to the central unresolved issue. Much of the evidence you’re relying on consists of comparisons across survey regimes with drastically different response rates, survey modes, and age-bracketing schemes. Those are precisely the conditions under which subgroup and right-tail inference is weakest.
Moreover, even if we accepted the convergence in the post-2018 data at face value, interpreting it is difficult because multiple trends are moving simultaneously. As you note, reduced socializing and lower risk-taking are real and likely relevant. I don’t reject these, and in fact I think they likely interact with mating-market dynamics rather than substitute for them. In the pre-2018 data we see a distinctly gendered pattern, with male sexlessness rising sharply while female sexlessness does not. One plausible interpretation is that as matching becomes more asymmetric and frustrating, different groups respond differently—some men are increasingly excluded, while some women respond by delaying, disengaging, or opting out altogether. We see versions of this dynamic more clearly in other contexts, such as South Korea’s 4B movement, where disengagement from dating and marriage appears to rise alongside perceptions of a dysfunctional mating market. That doesn’t contradict the asymmetry mechanism; it looks more like a downstream response to it. Although really, I don't think we can make definitive inferences from the drastically changed surveys.
Given the scale of the response-rate collapse and the methodological changes in the post-2019 surveys, I don’t see how it’s reasonable to say that the evidence “overwhelmingly weighs against” this narrative. At most, I think it’s fair to say the evidence is mixed and low-power. Much of what’s doing the work on the negative side consists of comparisons across survey regimes with sharply different response rates, modes, and age aggregation choices—precisely the conditions under which subgroup and tail inference is weakest.
By contrast, the indirect evidence we have that is drawn from higher-quality data — pre-collapse age-specific survey analyses, long-running measures of relationship timing and singlehood, and peer-reviewed work on how desirability affects relationship sequencing — tends to line up in the same direction. None of these are dispositive on their own, but taken together they are at least consistent with asymmetric access and delayed exit dynamics rather than a clean null. Similarly, on height and attractiveness, I don’t dispute that estimated effects are modest, but modest effect sizes aren’t a rebuttal to the mechanism. Skewed preferences can operate by excluding or disadvantaging a lower tail and by altering relationship sequencing rather than producing large cross-sectional differences in partner counts.
On STDs specifically, I think this objection rests on a misunderstanding of the mechanism I’m proposing. My model is not primarily about increased concurrency or harem-style concentration; it’s about serial monogamy with extended search periods and delayed commitment. Modest increases in sequential partnering among higher-status men would not be expected to generate divergence in population-level STD rates. STD transmission is highly sensitive to concurrent partnerships and dense overlapping networks, not to changes in the number of partners spread sequentially over time. Serial monogamy largely insulates partners during the relationship, and small shifts in lifetime partner accumulation among a subset of men are effectively noise in aggregate STD dynamics. To produce the kind of divergence implied by the STD argument, one would need very extreme concurrent concentration. In short, STD surveillance is not a sensitive instrument for detecting right-tail changes driven by serial monogamy or left-tail exclusion from the dating market.
So, I don’t think we’re actually that far apart on the underlying facts. Where we differ is in epistemic weight: how much confidence to place in post-2019 surveys conducted under severe response-rate deterioration versus earlier age-specific results collected under more stable conditions, and what priors to bring to a matching market characterized by expanded choice and selective preferences. Given those constraints, I think the balance of the available evidence—particularly the higher-quality pre-collapse data and the consistent indirect indicators—leans toward increased asymmetry in early-adult mating outcomes, especially in who receives repeated relationship opportunities and who exits the market earlier, rather than toward a flat or neutral effect. I remain open to being proven wrong by better data, but I don’t see the current evidence as sufficient to justify a confident null, let alone an “overwhelming” rejection.
In any case, I've genuinely appreciated this exchange — it's rare to get such well-researched, good-faith pushback, and it's sharpened my thinking on where the evidence is strong versus where I'm leaning on priors. I've subscribed to your Substack.
The Church theory of why Western Civilization is W.E.I.R.D. has largely been discredited for several reasons. First of all, most of the distinctive values of The West was already present among the Pagan Gemanic and Celtic tribes of Europe for thousands of years before Jesus was even born. Norms such as an aversion to Cousin Marriage and Normative Monogamy were already dominant amongst those peoples and it was only AFTER Christianization that Cousin Marriage and Polygamy became somewhat more culturally acceptable in Western Europe. Also, having a Concubine wasn't taboo nor socially penaltized among the Nobility of Europe during the Middle Ages at all.
This reflects a real debate, but it overstates both the strength of the evidence and the degree of scholarly consensus. The Church/WEIRD thesis is contested, not “largely discredited,” and remains an active area of peer-reviewed debate.
It’s a very interesting topic, but full dive into the aDNA literature would have taken the article too far afield; the focus was on a broader historical pattern. Recent aDNA studies are interesting but not dispositive: they rely on limited samples and indirect inference, and speak to aggregate mating patterns rather than legal rules, elite strategies, or institutional enforcement.
In any case, the precise origins matter less than the outcome. Whether the Church institutionalized an existing pattern or formalized it more aggressively, the resulting kinship regime—weak extended kinship, nuclear households, and individual-centered social organization—was historically unusual, sharply distinguishing the modern West from most human societies. And it now appears to be eroding. That’s worth grappling with regardless of how the historiographical debate ultimately resolves.
Author here - if you want to play around with what it would take to solve the fertility crisis - how you can make societies compatible with having children - I'm working on a policy simulator here: https://www.TFRsim.com/ (still a work in progress!)
The immigration section relies on the danish data for the net present value of immigration by region. As well as for 2nd and 3rd generations. So, economically yes.
It doesn’t take into account any type of Garret Jones concerns about cultural/political impact.
Regional background for immigrants is a tolerably good proxy for genetic ability, although that can vary depending on how selective you are, but I was talking about eugenic effects in the broader sense (i.e, who is having the kids and what are their genetic endowments, in any given generation)
If you play around with the immigration tab, you’ll see I tried to capture the fertility/ economic impact of selective/ less selective immigration. And how effects continue, per the danish literature for 2nd and 3rd generations.
I’ve also tried to model crowding out impacts on native fertility.
I got to 2.1 with a budget surplus of $353 billion, but boo hoo it gave me an F for “soft authoritarianism.” I’m the _fertility czar_ . I’m _supposed_ to exercise soft authoritarianism, that’s why it’s not called the “fertility suggester.” Every single one of these policies has been tried, and every single one of them didn’t work in the real world except the one that wasn’t on the list—increased status for mothers: giving out medals for Hero of Socialist Fertility or membership in the Sororitas Fecunditas. If you make motherhood more aspirational than the corner office, more women will strive for the former than the latter.
Wait, was I supposed to strive for >hard authoritarianism<? Put me back in coach, I can get those numbers up! Where’s the bias? What are the presuppositions?
First, this is amazing as a way to think about the problems, and a big salute for making it!
Some notes for improvement/factors you haven't considered:
-The "Federal Housing Program" is based on the idea that the housing units would be paid for by the federal government. There should be a similar policy called something like "Maximize YIMBY", which just involves (through the states, or the feds leaning on the states with funding) removing all legal barriers to private housing construction. This gets the benefit of vastly increasing the housing supply without the feds having to pay for it.
-As noted in another reply, you need to consider that not all fertility is equal in terms of propagating good genes and good memes that produce GDP and tax revenue. This is relevant for quite a few policies; for example, France's tax policy may affect quality of future humans much more than quantity. Even the student loan forgiveness idea is like this: those with student loans are disproportionately those without rich parents and thus with lower average genetic & memetic quality.
-I'm not sure if this assumption is included in a way I can't see, but do you consider the fact that population decline means more natural resources and housing per person and that slightly raises GDP/capita?
-Do you consider how subsidizing childcare distorts the market's determination of which people should be working and thus lowers GDP? This is like how capital gains tax distorts capital allocation.
-The "Child Weight" slider on "Family Tax Quotient" doesn't move for some reason. I turned everything else off and it still doesn't work.
-Regarding the Childlessness Tax, either that doesn't belong in the "restricts reproductive autonomy" category, or a bunch of the other policies do; mathematically, a tax exemption for people who have children and a special tax on people who don't are the same thing. I agree that they're perceived differently based on framing, so they should indeed have different effects on political feasibility, but in terms of ethics you need to take another look at that.
-Maybe have some policy allowing Medicare to limit treatments that fail cost-effectiveness in terms of quality-adjusted life years (yes, unironic death panels).
-Does your carbon tax policy consider the economic effects of mitigating climate change? I realize that would have to be tied into the energy policies of China and India, but since that's the whole point of the policy, and climate change will certainly have economic effects, that should be included.
-A more subtle point: I'm not sure that handling political feasibility in terms of things that the Democrats or Republicans strongly object to is the right model. Historically, grand compromises were how legislation got passed, because of the filibuster. But if the filibuster's days are numbered, a more practical model for political feasibility might be based on the opposite: having policies that either D or R like but not a mixture!
-If the immigration/year slider is taken to 0, all the dashboard parameters become NaN. Might be a divide-by-zero.
-Another radical idea: the limiting factor in reproduction is women, not men. In the hypothetical limiting case of a female-only society, the replacement TFR would be 1, not 2. This suggests the possibility of using fertility-treatment subsidies or broader child-benefit policies to incentivize female over male babies and thus skew the live-birth ratio towards girls. This would have benefits aside from lowering replacement TFR: women commit much less violent crime, and it would improve overall ability to find romantic partners, which also indirectly increases fertility (since women are bi at higher rates than men, if there are surplus women more bi ones can pair off with other WLW; surplus fertile women can pair with older men; and immigrants skew male).
I think immigration might work if we only import women to marry with the non high-status men, like "passport bros" are doing. I've heard South Korea was facilitating this.
There are hundreds of millions of women who wouldn't object marrying a "loser" from 1st world country. Also they can divorce the loser after they get citizenship and independence in destination country.
Because, going by her other comments, Kat is a bitter misandrist motivated by vengeance and threatened by the idea of men having options outside of her control.
One other consideration—-the simple expense of raising children to Western WIERD standards. I mean all the schooling and activities and living standards that have become a baseline expectation in WIERD culture. I have two childless daughters and one with three in LA who had to work full time as an engineer while raising three kids. Boy is she struggling.
Excellent essay. Implies that a philosophy of female independence (solipsism), extending to female dominance in many cases, will shortly be extinguished?
Spot on article and analysis! Very informative and well done. The only thing I really disagree with is in your opening:
“No one announced this revolution. There was no manifesto, no movement, no moment when the old order ended and the new one began.” This is arguably inaccurate.
Feminism announced this revolution. The Feminist that started this revolution had help from globalist money that launched this movement bringing in Marxism under the guise of feminism along with the financial backing from the Rockefeller foundation, Ford Foundation, and CIA along with
satanism, homosexuality and transgenderism ideologies mixed into the feminist movement.
Kate Millett an American feminist, author and artist. She is the founder of the National Organization for Women her sister Mallory was invited to one of the first meetings that established the National Organization for Women. This is a feminist group that has been around since the start of the feminist movement and it’s propaganda that fundamentally pioneered the feminist movement. At the meeting they gather around a large table or a round table if you will, with Kate Millet as the spokesperson and chairperson. She opened the meeting with the following back and forth recitation:
“Why are we here today”? Asked Kate Millet”. “To make Revolution”. Answered the feminist committee. “What kind of revolution?” “The cultural revolution”. “How do we make cultural revolution?” “By destroying the American family.” “How do we destroy the American family?” “By destroying the American patriarch.” “And how do we destroy the American patriarch?” “By taking away his power.” “And how do we do that?” “By destroying monogamy.” “And how do we destroy monogamy?” “By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, profligacy(I added) and homosexuality.” The meeting continue on with a long discussion on how to advance theses goals by establishing the National Organization of Women. The leader sister Mallory can be quoted saying “It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of western civilization and society.”
Where is the source for this supposed discussion? I'm having some trouble believing that the CIA, Rockefellers and International Marxism were all on the same page for much of anything.
Kate Millett was one of the key authors and influencers of the second wave of the women's movement. In this video, I provide a brief biographical sketch along with some critical thoughts.
Imagine that? Crazy isn’t it? Finding the truth so hard to believe when we live in the 21st century, an age of endless archival data where information is just at our fingertips and all we have to do is reach out for it and do the leg work research but for some reason we can’t? Because of inherent and biased scotoma’s that have tainted our cognitive intellectual ability to believe and observe facts. Somethings “so hard to believe, find, and understand yet, a simple search on the world wide web (biased google for that matter) can quench your thirst. It’s not the fact that you have trouble believing. No. It’s the fact that you’re too torpid to do so.
Google A.I.: Yes, the Ford Foundation is a major funder of feminism and gender equality, pledging significant multi-year commitments (like $420M in 2021) to support women's rights organizations, combat gender-based violence, promote economic justice for women, and strengthen feminist movements globally, including seed funding for initiatives like the Black Feminist Fund. Their strategy integrates gender justice across various programs, funding grassroots efforts, research, and policy work to challenge systemic inequality.
Google A.I.: Yes, Rockefeller-affiliated foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Rockefeller Family Fund actively fund feminist initiatives, focusing on advancing women's leadership, economic justice, gender equality, and supporting women's studies and grassroots activism, often through large-scale programs like the $1 billion Gender Fund and by supporting organizations advancing women's rights globally. Their involvement has shaped fields like women's studies and reproductive health advocacy, supporting transformative change by linking gender equality to broader issues like climate and economic justice, say Rockefeller Foundation spokespersons and Rockefeller Family Fund.
“A very small number of men control all the money and the ideas”: Women Revolutionize Population Programs in the 1970s
Marxism and feminism intersect in Marxist feminism, a theory linking women's oppression to capitalism, arguing patriarchy and capitalism mutually reinforce each other through unpaid domestic labor and women serving as a reserve army of labor, with liberation requiring a class struggle to overthrow capitalism, not just reforms within it. While Marxism focuses on class exploitation, feminism highlights gender power structures, but Marxist feminists see the economic base (capitalism) as the root cause, viewing women's emancipation as tied to broader socialist revolution, not just equal rights under capitalism.
Marxism opposes that the patriarchy is the 'root' cause of such oppression. The root cause is the division of labour between men and women which creates an economic rift between them. That division of labour created the patriarchy and the patriarchy still persists today because it is within the interest of petty bourgeois men to maintain it.
The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. - F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Marxism seeks to 'emancipate' women by creating a genuine economic equality between men and women, which requires the destruction of this division of labour, and will ultimately, result in the abolition of contemporary monogamous marriage. It needs to be said though, that although Marxism seeks towards this end, this end is inevitable. Class conflict, and this is in fact class conflict, must and always be resolved.
The democratic republic does not do away with the opposition of the two classes; on the contrary, it provides the clear field on which the fight can be fought out. And in the same way, the peculiar character of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the necessity of creating real social equality between them, and the way to do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society. - Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
I suggest reading that book in its entirety. It's free on Marxists.org
There are definitely modern books on feminism and Marxist(ism).
No, sir or ma'am, I did not ask to be buried in an unsolicited wall of text linking to other walls of text that might or might not be related to your claims. That's a good way to either put someone off and/or get blocked. I asked for a link to the specific source to the specific discussion that you alleged took place where Kate Millett explicitly said her goal was to destroy the american family.
When you knock on someone’s door, you cannot control how they answer. Regardless of what you asked for you received what you did not have included what you asked for. I will not apologize because how I answered your challenging curiosity didn’t make you “feel” good.
Funny (not), you came to me seeking knowledge. Supporting cited evidence. And in return, your rebuttal is ungrateful tone policing. Not that I am surprised at all. Now, imagine blocking someone who you went to. That’s called cognitive dissonance. No you did not just ask: “I asked for a link to the specific source to the specific discussion that you alleged took place where Kate Millett explicitly said her goal was to destroy the american family.” You specifically challenged me, making a passive objection stating: “ I'm having some trouble believing that the CIA, Rockefellers and International Marxism were all on the same page for much of anything.” So, I did you the ultimate favor of not only sourcing my claims. But also placing the answer to your question in a single self post as the last post in my first reply to you to quell your inquiry.
If you wanted me to actually read something, "Chapter 5 of the End of Woman by Carrie Gress" would have been sufficient, and that was not mentioned anywhere in either of your replies. I was not 'tone policing'. I was asking you to (A) respect my time and (B) converse like a normal human.
"The freedoms are real and worth having. But a system can be freer and also more fragile. The question isn’t whether the old constraints were good. It’s whether the new equilibrium can sustain itself."
The problem will resolve itself. Our civilization will disappear, it's that simple. Those who do not adopt our “modern” way of life will remain because they will continue to reproduce.
There's a pretty good chance the pension system will collapse, but I don't think that's a civilisation-killer by itself. At some point people will have to get wise to kids being a necessary investment in your own retirement and your society's future, the only question is how much damage is done before that happens.
The problem is that treating the average person as a rational agent does not work.
Government incentives do not work, and a large proportion of people do not function with a long-term perspective. We are seeing this now in other areas.
It seems that collectively we are more sensitive to deep intergenerational narratives enforced by social pressure that interact with material constraints and enablers (technologies, for example the pill, the printing press in its day, etc.).
That is why the only developed nation with a birth rate above replacement is Israel. The mandate to populate the Promised Land continues to be powerful today and is combined with the material threat of annihilation that is perceived on a daily basis (not as a long-term horizon), so that it even has power among those who are not believers. (I say all this without being a believer myself and without entering into an assessment of the conflict in that region; I am simply focusing on observing the factors that may be contributing to Israel's high birth rate).
Our societies are now devoid of powerful intergenerational narratives that promote birth rates. In fact, the various variants of the current narrative and its subcomponents work against it.
It does not have to be a total collapse, but rather a slow decline punctuated by a few more abrupt falls, as happened with the Roman Empire, where the population was gradually replaced by another type of population that could not sustain the previous civilizational structure.
(Among other things, he points out that Israel's fertility is a lot less exceptional when you break down its internal demography by ethnic and religious background, and that Hungary's fertility incentives are targeted at mothers and not fathers, so I'm not sure to what extent government incentives here are necessarily futile so much as miscalibrated. But clearly the insular religious communities have a huge head-start.)
What if Middle Easterns stagnate their countries in purpose?
Most people think that the reason why the majority of the populations in these countries are trapped in the middle ages is due to their own incompetence or their disability to "see any better". But what if their leaders are perfectly capable of improving their countries but they dont do it because they became aware that as soon as a country industrializes and the quality of life of their citizens improve, they stop reproducing and they lose human capital?
Put yourselves in the shoes of the leaders of Pakistan, Irak or Yemen:
"Our greatest rivals have been pampering their own populations for a long time, their women dont want children and no dutchman or austrian is willing to join the battlefields and fight for their country anymore. On the other side, we got millions of derprived Allah's soldiers willing to die for our objetives, therefore we have the opportunity to take action"
"We must prevent any kind of western hedonist life-improver that stagnates our amounts of human capital. When finally we reach our maximum carrying capacity and our servants severely outnumber the amount of hedonist westerners, its time for the attack"
And it actually has sense when you think about it. A society that only makes up 10% of the world and whose majority of members are what Rudyard labeled as "Champagne upper class chatting classes", is severely endangered when there is a massive civilization of fundamentalist savages that outnumber them breathing down their necks. Its like a matter of Eloi vs Morlock
If an European from 1900 woke up in 2023, he wouldnt be proud about the fact that the European societies have massive levels of development in comparation to the rest of the world, instead, he would he horrified at how middle easterns and subsaharans have severely outnumbered Europeans and are marching down towards Europe carrying machetes and reproducing into oblivion while the average European is naive and sedated.
Its like being a narco, they dont enjoy their wealth and luxury knowning that their great amount of enemies are waiting for the smallest chance to get rid off them, and the current status of Europeans in the world resembles those white and rich minorities of South Africa, Rhodesia, Haiti... that realized the consequences of their actions when it was too late.. but at least white south africans managed to fleed to Australia or UK when things went down the drain, but where the whites will scape this time? To Belarus? The party is over now
Dont forget:
"Those puny ants outnumber us 100 to 1. If they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life"- A Bug's Life
The average westerner keeps thinking that these peoples arent a threat because they are too "dumb and incompetent" and in their wishful thinking, they imagine that africans and middle-easterns will wipe out themselves through wars and famines so they are nothing to worry about.
But they think wrong, westerner's arrogance and lack of self-awareness is the path of doom that we already saw several times before in history. And arabs/persians/subsaharan are very aware of this.
1. The notion that Middle Eastern countries are backward on purpose (even in Afghanistan) is clearly false and ridiculous. Most Middle Eastern countries are backward due to lower average levels of IQ and other traits needed for a first world country to exist.
2. Every Middle Eastern country had Industrialized since the late 19th century with Western Colonialism. Once a nation Industrializes there's no going back no matter what cultural norms they have.
3. Oil-Sheikah nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar also debunk that stupid theory. Both are Fundamentalist countries yet both of them are among the earliest countries in the region to embrace Modern living standards as soon as they could.
4. The whole theory assumes that all Muslim countries are a single socio-cultural-political entity (the myth that there exists an "Islamic World") and they all are at war with the West (which is nothing more than "Clash of Civilization" nonsense).
5. With the exceptions of Syria and Afghanistan, every Middle Eastern country has below replacement fertility also.
It's a myth that launched several crusades and substantially motivated the colonisation of africa and the americas, which makes it real enough to matter in my book.
"Christendom" isn't the reason why the Crusades nor Western Colonialism happened. The vast majority of the Crusades consisted of Christian on Christian violence for largely Secular reasons, and European Colonialism was driven the ideals of the Enlightenment and Eurocentrism, not Christian faith
Quite a lot of colonialism took place before the Enlightenment ever happened, although I'll happily concede non-religious motives were in the mix, but "the vast majority of crusades were Christian on Christian"? You'll have to explain that a little better.
I liked this article so much that I posted it in its entirety, linking of course to the original here, along with my comments, on my Substack. If that is inappropriate, let me know and I'll take it down.
“In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh asks: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” We followed certain rules: individual freedom; romantic love as the basis for marriage; the right to delay childbearing; the dissolution of social pressures that channeled people toward family formation. But they are what brought us here: to a mating system selecting itself out of existence.”
Wise words. Your essay is the *most complete* and thoughtful on the subject I’ve ever encountered. Bravo!
There's a strange issue of fog as far as the social science analysis of such things happening.
The overall recession in sex and couple formation throughout the developed world is well established across a number of datasets. That phenomenon is fairly well confirmed. It's also pretty well understood why it's happening, a rather open and shut case in social science.
The "soft harem" narrative, that is of an endemic phenomenon of many men being locked out of intimacy due to high status men hoarding many partners, whether that be explicitly LTR polygamy, situationships, or casual FWBs, is not reflected in the data, as relentlessly written about in https://substack.com/@thenuancepill/posts
Yet as a matter of "lived experience" it's happening enough, and being observed enough, that it's openly discussed as an endemic phenomenon.
Personally, for the majority of my adult life I was concurrently sleeping with more than one woman, and the majority of my friends were as well. And I'm not a Chad, just a tad above average in sex appeal, so I was honestly surprised by nuancepill's findings that the data does not reflect a sharp rise in de facto polygamy in the population data.
I also don't generally buy the "social media misinformation" narrative, that is very rarely a real factor. People are certainly more often observing this to happen anecdotally and then extrapolating to society as a whole. This suggests self-selection bias, which suggests a subpopulation milieu wherein it's happening, but not enough to change the population statistics.
Perhaps then this is a phenomenon that's prevalent only in the most "culture forward" places, Tier 1 Urban centers and top level universities. These milieus are media-salient, while numerically insignificant in population aggregates. Which suggests that whereas "soft harems" may grow over time, it's far less of an urgent concern, especially when it comes to the fertility collapse, than the overall drop in enthusiasm for sex and couple formation by the population.
Philosophy of Science First Principles wise: one of the significant distinctions between physics and engineering compared to the social science is whether the ontology of the statistical models match the mechanism of the system. That is, in the first case hypotheses tests are done on simulations with differential equations with mechanistic forces on the right hand side, and in the latter, a generalized linear model has nothing to do with the mechanisms of a human dynamically interacting in the social world. Because it doesn't lock in mechanism, social science research doesn't generalize, or in other words, replicate.
One solution to this is by finding preponderance of evidence across layers of abstraction. This problem also features in medicine - equations barely cover a small part of biological domain knowledge, and you're dealing with open systems, i.e. not causally closed. So the classic example of preponderance of evidence across multiple layers of abstraction is smoking's health ills - population cohort studies together with biophysical models and in vitro experiments confirming the general conclusion of tobacco smoking being detrimental to healthspan and lifespan.
Similarly, in social science, a population based survey sample is never by itself a useful description of a real social phenomenon. However, it can still be useful to present a general picture of observed patterns, and thus for population-based considerations and decisions like demography and fertility policy.
Lived experience suffers from self-selection bias as far as generalizing. But for an individual in a similar cultural milieu and personality profile as the interlocutor, it can be useful.
Evolutionary explanations become "just so" when there's no data confirmation the stressors and behaviors occur in sufficient ecological relevance. But together with the other levels of abstraction, they add mechanism, and thus mitigate the replication/generalization issue.
The "sex recession" conjecture is well established across all layers of abstraction - population based statistics, reasonable evolutionary explanations, and hermeneutically compelling narratives for eschewing mating and reproduction in the memescape for both genders.
The "soft harem" conjecture is disharmonious across social science's levels of abstraction. Thus, it is not relevant towards demography at the present time. But it may be relevant for some individuals as far as their life choices, and it may be a macro-factor in the long run.
'Analysis of dating app behavior shows that women like about 14% of male profiles, whereas men like 46% of female profiles. The result is that a small percentage of men receive the vast majority of female attention. The top 10% of men get over half of all likes. The bottom 50% of men get about 5%.'
What is often left out is that the same Hinge data showed a comparable skew among women, even if it was slightly lower: the top 10% of women got 46% of the likes and the bottom 50% got 8%.
A recent study showed that while women received far more swipes, they didn't swipe up more in terms of within-gender desirability (measured by swipes received) than men, and matches actually tended to be closely matched in desirability.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0327477
This is consistent with studies on traditional dating sites: while men cast a wider net by sending far more initial messages, there was a similar desirability gap between the sender and recipient for both sexes, and a similar effect of desirability on replies received.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aap9815
The dating app argument tends to start and end at the observation of imbalanced swipe rates, but swipes alone provide zero information on who is matching, exchanging messages, going on dates, or engaging in actual sexual acts through them.
The match rates cited here are as a percentage of likes rather than total swipes. Looking at the same source that this and commonly cited swipe rates are taken from, while the median man received an average of 1.1 matches per day, the median women received 2.75. This seems like a pretty big disparity until you realize that with roughly 3x as many men using dating apps, women will naturally receive around that many more matches than men on a per capita basis.
We can go further and look at actual outcomes to find that there is also basically no difference in how many men or women in the population actually meet up with people through dating apps:
'Despite this, many men and women still find success on Tinder. According to one survey, more than 20% of millennials surveyed reported meeting someone off of Tinder. Men were more likely to use the app as well as more likely to have met someone from Tinder.'
https://www.thebolditalic.com/the-two-worlds-of-tinder/
Other outcome-based measures such as on the percentage of people who had sex with someone through a dating app in the past year, those who have dated someone through online dating, numbers of relationships started through dating apps, and the number of unique dates men and women have had through dating apps, show near perfect parity.
It's a popular notion that dating apps have facilitated 'hook-up culture', but in reality very few heterosexual hook-ups occur through them. One study found that only 20% of Tinder users had a one-night stand through it, and most of them had only one. It took about about 300 matches on average for either a one-night stand or a long-term relationship to come from it.
https://nuancepill.substack.com/p/have-dating-apps-ruined-dating
We don't have to limit our analysis to dating apps, either. We can look at population-level sexual behaviour to see if this is having the predicted effect. This narrative predicts increasing sexual inequality among men, but if we look at the top 20% of men in terms of sexual partners, we see no rise in their share of partners over time. Likewise, the 95th and 80th percentiles in lifetime or past-year sex partners aren't reporting more partners over time. Sexual partner distributions remain virtually identical between young men and women.
Moreover, we don't need to rely solely on self-reported sexual partners, as we can look to STD trends and observe no disproportionate rise among women compared to heterosexual men. Both of their STD rates have moved in tandem, contrary to what the narrative that a small percentage of men are increasingly monopolizing sexual opportunities would predict.
https://nuancepill.substack.com/p/the-chad-myth
I don’t think the data support the claim that concentration at the top of the sexual-partner distribution has remained flat over time. A peer-reviewed CDC analysis using NSFG data finds statistically significant increases in lifetime opposite-sex partners among men in both the top 20% (12 → 15) and top 5% (38 → 50) between 2002 and 2011–2013, while the number of partners in the past year remained unchanged (Harper et al., 2017; see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10926320/pdf/nihms-1969556.pdf
The authors explicitly interpret this divergence as a shift in timing, not increased annual concurrency—consistent with delayed commitment among high-desirability men. I graphed this here: https://imgur.com/a/oDLEL0d
Notably, the male distribution becomes increasingly right-skewed over time: the upper tail pulls away while the median remains flat. By contrast, women’s partner distributions remain broadly stable across the distribution. This is exactly what a delayed-commitment mechanism would predict—high-desirability men accumulating more lifetime partners by remaining in the mating market longer, while typical men and women see little change.
Relatedly, as you noted, roughly 20% of Tinder users report at least one one-night stand through the app. This is not trivial and is consistent with a right-tailed distribution in which a relatively small subset of men account for a large share of short-term encounters; no evidence is offered that these encounters are evenly distributed.
And you’re right that online dating research shows both men and women pursue partners about 25% more desirable than themselves (Bruch & Newman 2018). But the filtering process is asymmetric: men initiate over 80% of contacts, women reply to fewer than 20%, and women are far more selective at the attention stage—liking roughly 14% of profiles versus men’s 46%. (from the same study) The result is a gendered attention skew in which a small fraction of men receive a disproportionate share of female-initiated interest, even when final matches are assortative.
The ~3:1 male-to-female ratio on dating apps doesn’t normalize this dynamic; it reflects it. A market where many more men remain actively searching suggests prolonged search and delayed exit into stable relationships. At the same time, that aggregate male surplus coexists with concentrated female attention on a subset of high-desirability men, creating local female-biased markets with reduced intrasexual competition. Sex-ratio research predicts this response: in female-biased markets, men defer long-term commitment in favor of short-term mating (Kruger & Schlemmer 2009; Royal Society).
Thanks for the response.
I'm familiar with this study, and I've frequently seen it cited as evidence of the dating app effect, despite the final survey wave being in 2011-13, before they had gained any real popularity. Of course if the narrative were true, the concentration should have only intensified in the subsequent years, but this isn't what we see. In the four NSFG surveys conducted since then, the number of sex partners reported by the 95th and 80th percentile has not risen, but in fact declined in the most recent waves (2017-19 and 2022-23) after remaining more or less stable in between.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9R3h!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7becec15-98a8-46ab-85c1-8315ed47c2bd_900x600.png
Moreover, if you look at the table in the Harper study, you'll see that the apparent rise in the 95th percentile seems to be largely confined to Hispanic men who basically caught up to the rest. For Non-Hispanic White men, the partner count rose only slightly from 40 to 44.
While this is typically framed as evidence of a zero-sum redistribution producing incels, the same surveys don't show a notable increase in sexlessness among men across this period (0.4%), and in fact the mean lifetime partners reported by men increased from 8.61 to 9.85.
I also found a different lower confidence interval to them that rendered the difference nonsignificant (you can also see another mistake they made with the 80th percentile of NHW men reporting 123 partners in 2002).
I will note that this analysis isn't ideal for testing this hypothesis, as it aggregates a broad age range of 15-44. The upper percentiles in sex partners are disproportionately driven by older men, meaning changes in sexual behaviour among the youth won't be fully reflected. However, even when restricting analyses to younger age brackets, the predicted rise in upper-tail concentration fails to materialize.
'Relatedly, as you noted, roughly 20% of Tinder users report at least one one-night stand through the app. This is not trivial and is consistent with a right-tailed distribution in which a relatively small subset of men account for a large share of short-term encounters; no evidence is offered that these encounters are evenly distributed.'
The key point is that there is no evidence for a gender asymmetry. A similar percentage of women have had a sexual encounter through dating apps and a similarly small subset of women accounts for a similar share of short-term encounters. Promiscuity is confined to a small minority of heterosexuals of both sexes, maybe 5% at most.
'The result is a gendered attention skew in which a small fraction of men receive a disproportionate share of female-initiated interest, even when final matches are assortative.'
This is basically what I said at the outset: while women receive a lot more attention overall (much like they're more frequently approached and asked out offline), in terms of the within-gender skew, it's comparable, with matches being largely assortative. This goes against the idea that average or below women are routinely matching with and dating the most desirable men.
'The ~3:1 male-to-female ratio on dating apps doesn’t normalize this dynamic; it reflects it.'
Dating apps are high-sociosexuality environments. A skewed gender ratio should be expected simply based on differences in sociosexuality. Additionally, it's an appealing alternative to in-person approaches for many men, as it mitigates much of the anxiety of approaching and pain of rejection.
'At the same time, that aggregate male surplus coexists with concentrated female attention on a subset of high-desirability men, creating local female-biased markets with reduced intrasexual competition. Sex-ratio research predicts this response: in female-biased markets, men defer long-term commitment in favor of short-term mating (Kruger & Schlemmer 2009; Royal Society).'
You say that female attention is concentrated on a minority of men, but online dating and dating app research consistently shows that the degree of concentration is relatively comparable across the sexes. Like I said, the median man and woman get about the same number of matches after adjusting for the gender ratio - the average woman isn't consistently matching with the top 5% of men. Swiping on fewer profiles doesn't mean only swiping on the same few profiles, nor does it mean matching with them. So dating apps are closer to 'male-biased markets', as the gender ratio would suggest (assuming this framework meaningfully applies to a weird online environment). Though since they tend to attract people of a higher sociosexual orientation, dating app users do report more sex partners. One study (Botnen et al., 2018) found that this wasn't the case after controlling for sociosexuality, suggesting they're not in themselves facilitating higher levels of casual sex.
First, thank you for the substantive critique — this is exactly the kind of empirical pressure-testing I was hoping for, and you’ve clearly done serious work engaging the survey literature.
That said, I think we need to acknowledge a fundamental limitation at the outset: we do not have high-quality data on this question in the post-2013 period. NSFG response rates fell sharply after 2013, dropping from roughly 60+ percent in earlier waves to about 23 percent in 2022–2023. The GSS experienced a more gradual erosion, culminating in a severe collapse to roughly 17 percent in recent waves. In addition, age brackets and survey modes changed across periods. Taken together, this represents a substantial methodological discontinuity. Under those conditions—especially for questions involving right-tail behavior—I’m hesitant to update priors based on apparent changes in survey estimates.
So, without good direct data, it's worth stepping back and asking what we'd expect in the first place—and whether the indirect evidence we do have aligns with that expectation.
The prior is straightforward: dramatically expanding the visible mate pool and reducing search costs to near-zero should produce some increase in concentration, at least in attention and access. This follows from basic search theory and from the well-documented tendency toward female selectivity in species with asymmetric parental investment. And the indirect data we have—rising young male sexlessness, widening gender gaps in singlehood—is consistent with exactly that expectation. Anecdotal evidence points in the same direction as well: platform-level matching patterns, common user experience on dating apps, and widely observed asymmetries in attention. Anecdotes don’t establish magnitudes, but they are informative about mechanisms, especially when they align closely with theory.
On sexlessness specifically: you argue that surveys show no notable increase among men, citing a roughly 0.4-percentage-point change. But this result relies on the 15–44 age aggregation—which you yourself note is not well suited to testing this hypothesis, since changes among younger cohorts are diluted. When we examine the age groups actually relevant to the mechanism, the picture looks very different. A peer-reviewed analysis of NSFG data (Ueda et al., JAMA Network Open, 2020) found that past-year sexlessness among 18–24-year-old men rose from 18.9 percent to 30.9 percent between 2000–2002 and 2016–2018. Among women of the same age, there was no statistically significant increase. Similar patterns appeared among 25–34-year-olds: significant increases for men (7.0% to 14.1%), with smaller increases for women. This pattern—rising male sexlessness with no corresponding increase among women—is exactly what the model predicts if expanded perceived access to higher-desirability men causes women to delay pairing with less desirable alternatives. The timing is at least consistent with the dating app hypothesis, with the sharpest increases occurring in the post-smartphone era.
Some additional indirect evidence consistent with increased asymmetry in mate access and relationship sequencing under expanded choice:
The gender gap in young-adult singlehood widened, with about 60 percent of men ages 25–29 single versus 47 percent of women (BGSU, 2019–2021).
Taller men cycle through more sequential long-term partners, not merely more sexual partners (Nettle, 2002).
Men rated above average in physical attractiveness are more likely to cohabit without transitioning to marriage (French et al., 2014; Add Health).
None of this is definitive. There is no clean way to decompose how much of the observed delay in pair bonding is attributable to expanded choice and skewed preferences versus broader cultural or economic forces. Also, even if we allow that perceived access to a pool of higher-status men contributes to a delay in pair bonding, it's unclear how much of that, if any, would directly translate into sex that would show up in surveys.
Better data could well show that you are 100% correct. But given degraded survey evidence on one side, and on the other a combination of robust theoretical priors, pre-collapse data showing rising young male sexlessness, widening gender gaps in singlehood, and peer-reviewed findings on sequential partnering by male desirability—I don't see a compelling reason to update strongly in the opposite direction.
'That said, I think we need to acknowledge a fundamental limitation at the outset: we do not have high-quality data on this question in the post-2013 period. NSFG response rates fell sharply after 2013, dropping from roughly 60+ percent in earlier waves to about 23 percent in 2022–2023. The GSS experienced a more gradual erosion, culminating in a severe collapse to roughly 17 percent in recent waves.'
When you say the GSS experienced more gradual erosion until recently, are you assuming that the decline in response rates was roughly uniform in severity from 2013 to 2022-23? The main decline occurs in 2022-23. For men, response rates were 78% in 2002, 75% in 2006-10, 72.1% in 2011-13, 67.1% in 2013-15, 63.6% in 2015-17, and 61.4% in 2017-19. So it was pretty gradual until the sharp drop in the most recent survey.
The response rates from 2002 to 2011-13 fell by 6.1%, yet this didn't stop the observed rise in partner counts from occurring. If that change is to be taken seriously, I see no reason not to take the change between 2015-17 and 2017-19 or the lack of an increasing number of partners reported by the upper percentiles post-2013 just as seriously. The 95th percentile analysis is limited by the fact that lifetime partners caps at 50, but reported partners dropped below that in 2013-15 and 2017-19.
If this data isn't enough to warrant reconsideration, I'd still think the absence of a notable rise in male sexlessness between 2002 and 2011-13 would be something that deserves explanation if the rise among the 95th percentile is supposedly due to sexual opportunities being taken from less desirable men.
The switch to a multi-mode design is also limited to the most recent survey. While there is a substantial difference in reported sexual behaviour by mode in 2022-23 - which could be due to differences in sample composition or social desirability bias, and somebody has speculated it may be related to a monetary incentive along with the ability for respondents to skip most questions by reporting no sexual experience - the number of partners reported by the 95th percentile nonetheless only changes marginally when restricting the sample to offline respondents.
In my analysis, I restricted the age range to 15-44 to maintain consistency with earlier waves.
I've also examined the NHANES, GSS, and YRBS data; all fail to show the expected pattern. Instead they tend to show a decline in sexual partners reported by the most promiscuous men, consistent with the more recent NSFG surveys.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RvM6!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb4a1b96b-353b-400e-ba02-5ab3cb588b7f_900x600.png
In my original post I also mentioned STDs as an alternative way of testing this narrative that largely bypasses concerns around self-report bias. Do you not think that the fact that heterosexual men and women's STD rates have moved in tandem post-dating apps counts as evidence against it?
'The prior is straightforward: dramatically expanding the visible mate pool and reducing search costs to near-zero should produce some increase in concentration, at least in attention and access.'
This assumes that there was a pre-existing between-sex asymmetry in sexual behaviour to intensify. If we look at this study of adolescent sexual networks from 1993-95 for example, there is little evidence for stronger within-sex inequality among males compared to females:
https://people.duke.edu/~jmoody77/chains.pdf
Somebody manually counted the node connections, and it was quite balanced, with if anything slightly more females with high partner counts:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8bAr!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb826587e-7fdb-444c-9278-795594dbfa3b_640x509.png
'This follows from basic search theory and from the well-documented tendency toward female selectivity in species with asymmetric parental investment.'
I could just as easily make a theoretical argument grounded in the vulnerability and prolonged dependency of human infants that the species will tend towards long-term monogamous pair bonding and overall restricted sexuality among women, rather than women all throwing themselves at a minority of men who often won't be able or willing to split their parental investment across numerous offspring.
Few women seem inclined to opt into polygyny when given the option. As they become more educated and autonomous, polygyny levels tend to decline, as we're seeing now in SSA. In most MENA countries, despite being legally permitted, polygamy is practiced at a very low rate - typically around 1%. Polygyny also tends to correlate quite strongly with arranged marriage, another indication that female preferences aren't the main driver.
'And the indirect data we have—rising young male sexlessness, widening gender gaps in singlehood—is consistent with exactly that expectation.'
The rise in sexlessness among adolescents and young adults doesn't appear to be gendered. The GSS provides little evidence for a male-specific increase in the post-2018 surveys:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Egd6!,w_720,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F513aa6c8-95ed-4921-9deb-6604e08c2a06_1080x795.png
The YRBS shows similar trends among both male and female adolescents:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eElv!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc6766ccb-e95f-4947-a208-cd0aa6b909e5_1800x900.png
The NSFG, with a far larger sample size, didn't show a specifically male-driven rise across the same period that the GSS did:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!G0Ou!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe944f8d4-7433-4873-b3d0-f3ac2eb56407_900x600.png
Regarding widening singleness gaps, you cite:
'The gender gap in young-adult singlehood widened, with about 60 percent of men ages 25–29 single versus 47 percent of women (BGSU, 2019–2021).'
First, this doesn't show an increasing gap: 59% of men were single in 2019, rising to 60% in 2021, while 46% of women were in 2019, rising to 47% in 2021.
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/brown-manning-relationship-status-trends-age-gender-fp-21-25.html
Second, singleness here is defined as not cohabiting or married. If there were a widening gap here, it'd suggest actual polygamy with multiple female partners coresiding with the same man. Generally, the narrative is that women are unwittingly sharing them: they *think* they're in an exclusive relationship, but *actually*...
The stat most often cited in support of this narrative comes from the 2022 Pew survey. Other sources don't replicate the large 29% gender discrepancy among 18-29s, but show gaps in the range of 10-15%. Moreover, the only category that plausibly allows this dynamic to operate is the 'non-cohabiting committed relationship' category, yet even in the anomalous Pew survey, 3/4ths of this gap is driven by a higher cohabitation and marriage rate among young women, and no other survey shows a non-cohabiting relationship gap as high as 8%. A survey with a much larger sample size, while not including a non-cohabiting relationship option, indicates that cohabiting young women were highly overrepresented in the Pew survey.
https://nuancepill.substack.com/p/is-there-a-single-young-male-crisis
'Anecdotal evidence points in the same direction as well:platform-level matching patterns'
I'm not sure what this refers to that hasn't been addressed.
'common user experience on dating apps'
The argument isn't that it's not harder for men to find matches. I'm not sure what kind of user experience conflicts with anything I've said.
'widely observed asymmetries in attention'
Again, I feel like this has been addressed already.
'they are informative about mechanisms, especially when they align closely with theory.'
They also seem to align perfectly well with what I've said, and I don't see how these observations conflict with any of the data I've presented.
'On sexlessness specifically: you argue that surveys show no notable increase among men, citing a roughly 0.4-percentage-point change. But this result relies on the 15–44 age aggregation—which you yourself note is not well suited to testing this hypothesis, since changes among younger cohorts are diluted. When we examine the age groups actually relevant to the mechanism, the picture looks very different.'
A large shift in sexlessness among the youth over this period should still presumably cause a bigger shift than observed in the broader age group, as there are as many under-30s as over-30s. But the reason I highlighted this negligible rise as well as the increase in mean lifetime partner counts was mostly to illustrate that the surveys don't provide evidence for the zero-sum redistribution idea.
Looks like I'll have to split this comment in two.
'A peer-reviewed analysis of NSFG data (Ueda et al., JAMA Network Open, 2020) found that past-year sexlessness among 18–24-year-old men rose from 18.9 percent to 30.9 percent between 2000–2002 and 2016–2018. mong women of the same age, there was no statistically significant increase. Similar patterns appeared among 25–34-year-olds: significant increases for men (7.0% to 14.1%), with smaller increases for women.'
This study uses GSS data, not NSFG. If we look at the surveys after 2018 (2021, 2022, 2024), there is no difference in the sexlessness rates between 18-24 men and women:
https://sda.berkeley.edu/sdaweb/analysis/exec?formid=tbf&sdaprog=tables&dataset=gss24rel1&sec508=false&row=sexfreq%28d%3A0%29&column=sex&filters=age%2818-24%29%2Cyear%282021-2024%29&weightlist=compwt&columnpct=on&design=complex&cflevel=95&weightedn=on&color=on&ch_type=bar&ch_showpcts=on&ch_color=yes&ch_width=600&ch_height=400&ch_orientation=vertical&ch_effects=use2D&decpcts=1&decse=1&decdeft=3&decwn=1&decstats=2&csvformat=no&csvfilename=tables.csv
'Taller men cycle through more sequential long-term partners, not merely more sexual partners (Nettle, 2002).'
I've looked quite extensively into the effect of height, and it's consistently very small across different outcome measures: sexual partner count, sexual activity, relationship status, and fertility. In this study, the difference in the number of relationships between the bottom and top height quartiles is about 0.1 and only marginally statistically significant. The same study also shows that the top height quartile reports about 0.1 fewer children than the others.
But yes, because there seems to be a small effect of height on both sex partners and relationship status (typically around a 0.05 correlation), it's reasonable to expect an effect on number of long-term partners. Most sex partners tend to be long-term partners, so this is largely the same question asked in a different way. This effect is driven more by very short men than it is by tall men, however.
Moreover, I found no evidence that the effect has increased following the introduction of dating apps, whether measured by sex partners or likelihood of being in a relationship.
https://nuancepill.substack.com/i/145462849/has-the-effect-of-height-increase-over-time
https://nuancepill.substack.com/i/144327550/have-dating-apps-amplified-the-effect-of-height
'Men rated above average in physical attractiveness are more likely to cohabit without transitioning to marriage (French et al., 2014; Add Health).'
I checked out the paper and honestly the result doesn't seem very compelling. The effect is small and only marginally significant (p < 0.1). From what I can tell, the authors report this finding as 'statistically significant' without specifying or justifying the use of an unconventional threshold.
I'd also add that if anything, there is a stronger effect of attractiveness on women's than men's dating experience, but it seems quite similar:
https://nuancepill.substack.com/i/147841942/how-physical-attractiveness-predicts-dating-experience-and-relationship-status
I respectfully disagree, and believe that the evidence overwhelmingly weighs against this narrative.
With respect to the most promiscuous men, we have multiple datasets showing no rise in reported partners post-dating apps, but rather a decline. I'm not aware of any datasets that show the opposite pattern.
With respect to sexlessness, the increase appears similar across sexes. The male sexlessness narrative was largely driven by statistical noise in the 2018 survey resulting from a small sample size after stratification. The NSFG, with a sample size over 10x larger for 18-29 year olds, didn't show the same male-driven spike. The YRBS, with an even larger sample size of adolescents, shows a similar trend for both sexes. There is also European data I could point to.
With respect to singleness, we have two Pew surveys showing a widening of the gap from 2019 to 2022, but then we have other sources like the American Perspectives Survey showing a similar narrowing of the gap from 2020 to 2022. The GSS also seems to show a narrowing of the gap from 2018 to 2024, with the smallest gap on record in 2024, but it would be mistaken to make much of this - just as it is for the Pew survey. Another survey with a larger sample size than Pew conducted in 2023 showed a singleness gap of 8%. The Pew survey is a massive outlier, which is precisely why it's the one everybody knows about.
With respect to dating apps, all available data on actual outcomes such as dates and sexual encounters show no meaningful gender imbalance.
And as I see it, the STD trends seen in both the US and EU CDC are the final nail in the coffin.
I do agree that the narrative aligns with many people's perceptions surrounding dating apps, that it has emotional resonance with people, and it is an interesting coincidence that a couple of outlier surveys happened around the same time as online discussion around these issues was beginning to ramp up. But this narrative has gotten a lot of mileage out of a select few highly viral stats, while other, oftentimes more reliable data simply lacks the same viral reach.
To the extent that sexlessness is rising, it seems more parsimonious to say it's part of a broader shift in behaviour away from in-person socializing and risk-taking behaviours like alcohol consumption.
Again though, I appreciate the engagement, as it's difficult to find anyone that can give a substantive or effortful response to what I've presented.
Thanks for the careful response — and you’re absolutely right Ueda et al. (2020) use GSS data rather than NSFG. That’s my mistake on the data source, and I appreciate the correction.
That said, the substantive finding I was relying on remains unchanged. The result is still a peer-reviewed, age-specific analysis drawn from a period when response rates were materially higher than in the post-2019 waves. Specifically, Ueda et al. find a large increase in past-year sexlessness among 18–24-year-old men between the early 2000s and 2016–2018, with no statistically significant increase among women of the same age, and smaller but still gender-skewed increases among ages 25–34. Whatever one thinks of later waves, that pattern exists in the pre-collapse data.Explanations based purely on reduced socialization or lower risk-taking don’t obviously account for why the effect would be so asymmetric by sex.
Which I think takes us back to the central unresolved issue. Much of the evidence you’re relying on consists of comparisons across survey regimes with drastically different response rates, survey modes, and age-bracketing schemes. Those are precisely the conditions under which subgroup and right-tail inference is weakest.
Moreover, even if we accepted the convergence in the post-2018 data at face value, interpreting it is difficult because multiple trends are moving simultaneously. As you note, reduced socializing and lower risk-taking are real and likely relevant. I don’t reject these, and in fact I think they likely interact with mating-market dynamics rather than substitute for them. In the pre-2018 data we see a distinctly gendered pattern, with male sexlessness rising sharply while female sexlessness does not. One plausible interpretation is that as matching becomes more asymmetric and frustrating, different groups respond differently—some men are increasingly excluded, while some women respond by delaying, disengaging, or opting out altogether. We see versions of this dynamic more clearly in other contexts, such as South Korea’s 4B movement, where disengagement from dating and marriage appears to rise alongside perceptions of a dysfunctional mating market. That doesn’t contradict the asymmetry mechanism; it looks more like a downstream response to it. Although really, I don't think we can make definitive inferences from the drastically changed surveys.
Given the scale of the response-rate collapse and the methodological changes in the post-2019 surveys, I don’t see how it’s reasonable to say that the evidence “overwhelmingly weighs against” this narrative. At most, I think it’s fair to say the evidence is mixed and low-power. Much of what’s doing the work on the negative side consists of comparisons across survey regimes with sharply different response rates, modes, and age aggregation choices—precisely the conditions under which subgroup and tail inference is weakest.
By contrast, the indirect evidence we have that is drawn from higher-quality data — pre-collapse age-specific survey analyses, long-running measures of relationship timing and singlehood, and peer-reviewed work on how desirability affects relationship sequencing — tends to line up in the same direction. None of these are dispositive on their own, but taken together they are at least consistent with asymmetric access and delayed exit dynamics rather than a clean null. Similarly, on height and attractiveness, I don’t dispute that estimated effects are modest, but modest effect sizes aren’t a rebuttal to the mechanism. Skewed preferences can operate by excluding or disadvantaging a lower tail and by altering relationship sequencing rather than producing large cross-sectional differences in partner counts.
On STDs specifically, I think this objection rests on a misunderstanding of the mechanism I’m proposing. My model is not primarily about increased concurrency or harem-style concentration; it’s about serial monogamy with extended search periods and delayed commitment. Modest increases in sequential partnering among higher-status men would not be expected to generate divergence in population-level STD rates. STD transmission is highly sensitive to concurrent partnerships and dense overlapping networks, not to changes in the number of partners spread sequentially over time. Serial monogamy largely insulates partners during the relationship, and small shifts in lifetime partner accumulation among a subset of men are effectively noise in aggregate STD dynamics. To produce the kind of divergence implied by the STD argument, one would need very extreme concurrent concentration. In short, STD surveillance is not a sensitive instrument for detecting right-tail changes driven by serial monogamy or left-tail exclusion from the dating market.
So, I don’t think we’re actually that far apart on the underlying facts. Where we differ is in epistemic weight: how much confidence to place in post-2019 surveys conducted under severe response-rate deterioration versus earlier age-specific results collected under more stable conditions, and what priors to bring to a matching market characterized by expanded choice and selective preferences. Given those constraints, I think the balance of the available evidence—particularly the higher-quality pre-collapse data and the consistent indirect indicators—leans toward increased asymmetry in early-adult mating outcomes, especially in who receives repeated relationship opportunities and who exits the market earlier, rather than toward a flat or neutral effect. I remain open to being proven wrong by better data, but I don’t see the current evidence as sufficient to justify a confident null, let alone an “overwhelming” rejection.
In any case, I've genuinely appreciated this exchange — it's rare to get such well-researched, good-faith pushback, and it's sharpened my thinking on where the evidence is strong versus where I'm leaning on priors. I've subscribed to your Substack.
The Church theory of why Western Civilization is W.E.I.R.D. has largely been discredited for several reasons. First of all, most of the distinctive values of The West was already present among the Pagan Gemanic and Celtic tribes of Europe for thousands of years before Jesus was even born. Norms such as an aversion to Cousin Marriage and Normative Monogamy were already dominant amongst those peoples and it was only AFTER Christianization that Cousin Marriage and Polygamy became somewhat more culturally acceptable in Western Europe. Also, having a Concubine wasn't taboo nor socially penaltized among the Nobility of Europe during the Middle Ages at all.
This reflects a real debate, but it overstates both the strength of the evidence and the degree of scholarly consensus. The Church/WEIRD thesis is contested, not “largely discredited,” and remains an active area of peer-reviewed debate.
It’s a very interesting topic, but full dive into the aDNA literature would have taken the article too far afield; the focus was on a broader historical pattern. Recent aDNA studies are interesting but not dispositive: they rely on limited samples and indirect inference, and speak to aggregate mating patterns rather than legal rules, elite strategies, or institutional enforcement.
In any case, the precise origins matter less than the outcome. Whether the Church institutionalized an existing pattern or formalized it more aggressively, the resulting kinship regime—weak extended kinship, nuclear households, and individual-centered social organization—was historically unusual, sharply distinguishing the modern West from most human societies. And it now appears to be eroding. That’s worth grappling with regardless of how the historiographical debate ultimately resolves.
Yes. I've read a biography of Voltaire and I had the impression that it was common among the nobility to have both a spouse and lover.
Author here - if you want to play around with what it would take to solve the fertility crisis - how you can make societies compatible with having children - I'm working on a policy simulator here: https://www.TFRsim.com/ (still a work in progress!)
That was pretty fun.
🍼 Fertility Policy Simulator
🏆 The Coalition Builder
📈 TFR: 2.12
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
💰 Fiscal: +$73B
🏛️ Feasibility: C
💵 GDP 2075: $90T (+20%)
10 policies • 3 taxes • 5 reforms • 1.0M/yr immigration
tfrsim.com
👆 See my full package:
https://tfrsim.com
Does it factor in genetic effects too?
The immigration section relies on the danish data for the net present value of immigration by region. As well as for 2nd and 3rd generations. So, economically yes.
It doesn’t take into account any type of Garret Jones concerns about cultural/political impact.
Which Garret Jones is this?
Regional background for immigrants is a tolerably good proxy for genetic ability, although that can vary depending on how selective you are, but I was talking about eugenic effects in the broader sense (i.e, who is having the kids and what are their genetic endowments, in any given generation)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garett_Jones author of The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left.
If you play around with the immigration tab, you’ll see I tried to capture the fertility/ economic impact of selective/ less selective immigration. And how effects continue, per the danish literature for 2nd and 3rd generations.
I’ve also tried to model crowding out impacts on native fertility.
Okay, so... I take it you're not modelling the effects of eugenic/dysgenic fertility more broadly?
Awesome!
I got to 2.1 with a budget surplus of $353 billion, but boo hoo it gave me an F for “soft authoritarianism.” I’m the _fertility czar_ . I’m _supposed_ to exercise soft authoritarianism, that’s why it’s not called the “fertility suggester.” Every single one of these policies has been tried, and every single one of them didn’t work in the real world except the one that wasn’t on the list—increased status for mothers: giving out medals for Hero of Socialist Fertility or membership in the Sororitas Fecunditas. If you make motherhood more aspirational than the corner office, more women will strive for the former than the latter.
Wait, was I supposed to strive for >hard authoritarianism<? Put me back in coach, I can get those numbers up! Where’s the bias? What are the presuppositions?
First, this is amazing as a way to think about the problems, and a big salute for making it!
Some notes for improvement/factors you haven't considered:
-The "Federal Housing Program" is based on the idea that the housing units would be paid for by the federal government. There should be a similar policy called something like "Maximize YIMBY", which just involves (through the states, or the feds leaning on the states with funding) removing all legal barriers to private housing construction. This gets the benefit of vastly increasing the housing supply without the feds having to pay for it.
-As noted in another reply, you need to consider that not all fertility is equal in terms of propagating good genes and good memes that produce GDP and tax revenue. This is relevant for quite a few policies; for example, France's tax policy may affect quality of future humans much more than quantity. Even the student loan forgiveness idea is like this: those with student loans are disproportionately those without rich parents and thus with lower average genetic & memetic quality.
-I'm not sure if this assumption is included in a way I can't see, but do you consider the fact that population decline means more natural resources and housing per person and that slightly raises GDP/capita?
-Do you consider how subsidizing childcare distorts the market's determination of which people should be working and thus lowers GDP? This is like how capital gains tax distorts capital allocation.
-The "Child Weight" slider on "Family Tax Quotient" doesn't move for some reason. I turned everything else off and it still doesn't work.
-Regarding the Childlessness Tax, either that doesn't belong in the "restricts reproductive autonomy" category, or a bunch of the other policies do; mathematically, a tax exemption for people who have children and a special tax on people who don't are the same thing. I agree that they're perceived differently based on framing, so they should indeed have different effects on political feasibility, but in terms of ethics you need to take another look at that.
-Maybe have some policy allowing Medicare to limit treatments that fail cost-effectiveness in terms of quality-adjusted life years (yes, unironic death panels).
-Does your carbon tax policy consider the economic effects of mitigating climate change? I realize that would have to be tied into the energy policies of China and India, but since that's the whole point of the policy, and climate change will certainly have economic effects, that should be included.
-A more subtle point: I'm not sure that handling political feasibility in terms of things that the Democrats or Republicans strongly object to is the right model. Historically, grand compromises were how legislation got passed, because of the filibuster. But if the filibuster's days are numbered, a more practical model for political feasibility might be based on the opposite: having policies that either D or R like but not a mixture!
-If the immigration/year slider is taken to 0, all the dashboard parameters become NaN. Might be a divide-by-zero.
-Another radical idea: the limiting factor in reproduction is women, not men. In the hypothetical limiting case of a female-only society, the replacement TFR would be 1, not 2. This suggests the possibility of using fertility-treatment subsidies or broader child-benefit policies to incentivize female over male babies and thus skew the live-birth ratio towards girls. This would have benefits aside from lowering replacement TFR: women commit much less violent crime, and it would improve overall ability to find romantic partners, which also indirectly increases fertility (since women are bi at higher rates than men, if there are surplus women more bi ones can pair off with other WLW; surplus fertile women can pair with older men; and immigrants skew male).
See here for a child-friendly alternative: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
I really enjoyed reading this article!
I think immigration might work if we only import women to marry with the non high-status men, like "passport bros" are doing. I've heard South Korea was facilitating this.
Interesting proposal
—NC
LOL
What South Korea has done so far has really worked, so this should too!
Nobody wants losers. That's something men don't want to hear.
There are no "passport bros." Those are sex tourists who are prey for gangs to drug and rob them.
They deserve it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/11/colombia-dating-apps-tourist-deaths
There are hundreds of millions of women who wouldn't object marrying a "loser" from 1st world country. Also they can divorce the loser after they get citizenship and independence in destination country.
Why do they "deserve it"?
Because, going by her other comments, Kat is a bitter misandrist motivated by vengeance and threatened by the idea of men having options outside of her control.
One other consideration—-the simple expense of raising children to Western WIERD standards. I mean all the schooling and activities and living standards that have become a baseline expectation in WIERD culture. I have two childless daughters and one with three in LA who had to work full time as an engineer while raising three kids. Boy is she struggling.
Excellent essay. Implies that a philosophy of female independence (solipsism), extending to female dominance in many cases, will shortly be extinguished?
Good point 👌
Spot on article and analysis! Very informative and well done. The only thing I really disagree with is in your opening:
“No one announced this revolution. There was no manifesto, no movement, no moment when the old order ended and the new one began.” This is arguably inaccurate.
Feminism announced this revolution. The Feminist that started this revolution had help from globalist money that launched this movement bringing in Marxism under the guise of feminism along with the financial backing from the Rockefeller foundation, Ford Foundation, and CIA along with
satanism, homosexuality and transgenderism ideologies mixed into the feminist movement.
Kate Millett an American feminist, author and artist. She is the founder of the National Organization for Women her sister Mallory was invited to one of the first meetings that established the National Organization for Women. This is a feminist group that has been around since the start of the feminist movement and it’s propaganda that fundamentally pioneered the feminist movement. At the meeting they gather around a large table or a round table if you will, with Kate Millet as the spokesperson and chairperson. She opened the meeting with the following back and forth recitation:
“Why are we here today”? Asked Kate Millet”. “To make Revolution”. Answered the feminist committee. “What kind of revolution?” “The cultural revolution”. “How do we make cultural revolution?” “By destroying the American family.” “How do we destroy the American family?” “By destroying the American patriarch.” “And how do we destroy the American patriarch?” “By taking away his power.” “And how do we do that?” “By destroying monogamy.” “And how do we destroy monogamy?” “By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, profligacy(I added) and homosexuality.” The meeting continue on with a long discussion on how to advance theses goals by establishing the National Organization of Women. The leader sister Mallory can be quoted saying “It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of western civilization and society.”
Where is the source for this supposed discussion? I'm having some trouble believing that the CIA, Rockefellers and International Marxism were all on the same page for much of anything.
The Luciferian Agenda of the Women's Movement
Kate Millett was one of the key authors and influencers of the second wave of the women's movement. In this video, I provide a brief biographical sketch along with some critical thoughts.
https://youtu.be/qT2xfz5y1Ug?si=pZKR4xKceeEa2Iic
Imagine that? Crazy isn’t it? Finding the truth so hard to believe when we live in the 21st century, an age of endless archival data where information is just at our fingertips and all we have to do is reach out for it and do the leg work research but for some reason we can’t? Because of inherent and biased scotoma’s that have tainted our cognitive intellectual ability to believe and observe facts. Somethings “so hard to believe, find, and understand yet, a simple search on the world wide web (biased google for that matter) can quench your thirst. It’s not the fact that you have trouble believing. No. It’s the fact that you’re too torpid to do so.
Who Pulls The Strings of Feminism?
https://mensrights.com.au/uncategorized/who-pulls-the-strings-of-feminism?print=print
Who Really Funded Feminism and Why?
https://menaregood.substack.com/p/who-pulls-the-strings-of-feminism?r=184bqb&triedRedirect=true
Mallory Millet, sister of feminist Kate Millett, exposes the damage left in feminism’s wake
https://womenformendotorg.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/mallory-millet-sister-of-feminist-kate-millett-exposes-the-damage-left-in-feminisms-wake/
Kate Millett obituary
Radical feminist writer best known for her pioneering 1970 book Sexual Politics
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/07/kate-millett-obituary
Gloria Steinem and the CIA
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88-01315R000300380009-2.pdf
THE FEMINIST WAS A SPY
https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/feminist-was-spy
When the C.I.A. Duped College Students:
A Friend of the Devil
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/a-friend-of-the-devil
Two-faced relationship between CIA and feminism
https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/two-faced-relationship-between-cia-and-feminism/amp
Google A.I.: Yes, the Ford Foundation is a major funder of feminism and gender equality, pledging significant multi-year commitments (like $420M in 2021) to support women's rights organizations, combat gender-based violence, promote economic justice for women, and strengthen feminist movements globally, including seed funding for initiatives like the Black Feminist Fund. Their strategy integrates gender justice across various programs, funding grassroots efforts, research, and policy work to challenge systemic inequality.
Changing the Game for Women and Girls
https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/big-ideas/the-future-is-hers/changing-the-game-for-women-and-girls/
Ford Foundation Commits $420 Million to Tackle Gender Inequality Around the Globe Post COVID-19
https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/news-and-press/news/ford-foundation-commits-420-million-to-tackle-gender-inequality-around-the-globe-post-covid-19/
Ford Foundation Supports Launch of First Global Fund Addressing Key Issues Facing Black Women
https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/news-and-press/news/ford-foundation-supports-launch-of-first-global-fund-addressing-key-issues-facing-black-women/
Investing in Change: Why We Must Support Women and Gender-Diverse Leaders
https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/stories/investing-in-change-why-we-must-support-women-and-gender-diverse-leaders/
The Growing Movement to Make Global Philanthropy More Feminist
https://time.com/7006985/feminist-philanthropy-melinda-gates-buffett-ford/
Google A.I.: Yes, Rockefeller-affiliated foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Rockefeller Family Fund actively fund feminist initiatives, focusing on advancing women's leadership, economic justice, gender equality, and supporting women's studies and grassroots activism, often through large-scale programs like the $1 billion Gender Fund and by supporting organizations advancing women's rights globally. Their involvement has shaped fields like women's studies and reproductive health advocacy, supporting transformative change by linking gender equality to broader issues like climate and economic justice, say Rockefeller Foundation spokespersons and Rockefeller Family Fund.
“A very small number of men control all the money and the ideas”: Women Revolutionize Population Programs in the 1970s
https://resource.rockarch.org/story/women-activism-reproductive-health-philanthropy-1974-world-population-conference-bucharest/
Rockefeller Funding of Extremist-Feminism
https://medium.com/@babyawenue7/the-rockefellers-a-prominent-american-family-known-for-their-influence-in-various-sectors-had-a-159531c0623f
ELEVATING FEMINIST LEADERSHIP AND THOUGHT ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY
https://www.rbf.org/news/elevating-feminist-leadership-and-thought-international-womens-day
John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Statesman and Founder of the Population Council
https://www.prb.org/resources/john-d-rockefeller-3rd-statesman-and-founder-of-the-population-council/
Gender Equality
https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/bellagio-breakthroughs/gender-equality-issue/
Telltale Words:
Depoliticizing the Women’s Liberation Movement
https://www.bu.edu/wgs/files/2013/10/Hanisch-Telltale-Words-Depoliticizing-the-Womens-Liberation-Movement.pdf
The Ms. Foundation: A Case Study in Feminist Fundraising
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/2021-05/Ms-Foundation_KDM.pdf
Our Work: Economic Justice for Women
https://www.rffund.org/economy-justice-for-women
Marxism and feminism intersect in Marxist feminism, a theory linking women's oppression to capitalism, arguing patriarchy and capitalism mutually reinforce each other through unpaid domestic labor and women serving as a reserve army of labor, with liberation requiring a class struggle to overthrow capitalism, not just reforms within it. While Marxism focuses on class exploitation, feminism highlights gender power structures, but Marxist feminists see the economic base (capitalism) as the root cause, viewing women's emancipation as tied to broader socialist revolution, not just equal rights under capitalism.
Marxist feminism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_feminism
Marxist Feminism Theory
https://www.simplypsychology.org/marxist-feminism.html
Marxism opposes that the patriarchy is the 'root' cause of such oppression. The root cause is the division of labour between men and women which creates an economic rift between them. That division of labour created the patriarchy and the patriarchy still persists today because it is within the interest of petty bourgeois men to maintain it.
The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. - F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Marxism seeks to 'emancipate' women by creating a genuine economic equality between men and women, which requires the destruction of this division of labour, and will ultimately, result in the abolition of contemporary monogamous marriage. It needs to be said though, that although Marxism seeks towards this end, this end is inevitable. Class conflict, and this is in fact class conflict, must and always be resolved.
The democratic republic does not do away with the opposition of the two classes; on the contrary, it provides the clear field on which the fight can be fought out. And in the same way, the peculiar character of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the necessity of creating real social equality between them, and the way to do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society. - Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
I suggest reading that book in its entirety. It's free on Marxists.org
There are definitely modern books on feminism and Marxist(ism).
THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE
OF MARXISM AND FEMINISM
TOWARDS A MORE PROGRESSIVE
UNION
https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~hoganr/SOC%20602/Hartmann_1979
Feminism and Marxism
https://pols.sites.haverford.edu/studentvoices/feminism-and-marxism/
MARXISM AND FEMINISM
https://marx200.org/en/marxism-think-one-two-many-marxes/marxism-and-feminism/index.html
Marx on Gender and the Family: A Summary
https://monthlyreview.org/articles/marx-on-gender-and-the-family-a-summary/
Marxist Feminist Theory: A Review, A Critique, and an Offering
https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=greatplainssociologist
STUDY OF WOMEN, GENDER, & SEXUALITY: FACULTY PUBLICATIONS
Marxist and Socialist Feminism
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/swg_facpubs/15/
Shall I provide more?
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
-George Orwell
'The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.'
-George Orwell
No, sir or ma'am, I did not ask to be buried in an unsolicited wall of text linking to other walls of text that might or might not be related to your claims. That's a good way to either put someone off and/or get blocked. I asked for a link to the specific source to the specific discussion that you alleged took place where Kate Millett explicitly said her goal was to destroy the american family.
When you knock on someone’s door, you cannot control how they answer. Regardless of what you asked for you received what you did not have included what you asked for. I will not apologize because how I answered your challenging curiosity didn’t make you “feel” good.
Funny (not), you came to me seeking knowledge. Supporting cited evidence. And in return, your rebuttal is ungrateful tone policing. Not that I am surprised at all. Now, imagine blocking someone who you went to. That’s called cognitive dissonance. No you did not just ask: “I asked for a link to the specific source to the specific discussion that you alleged took place where Kate Millett explicitly said her goal was to destroy the american family.” You specifically challenged me, making a passive objection stating: “ I'm having some trouble believing that the CIA, Rockefellers and International Marxism were all on the same page for much of anything.” So, I did you the ultimate favor of not only sourcing my claims. But also placing the answer to your question in a single self post as the last post in my first reply to you to quell your inquiry.
If you wanted me to actually read something, "Chapter 5 of the End of Woman by Carrie Gress" would have been sufficient, and that was not mentioned anywhere in either of your replies. I was not 'tone policing'. I was asking you to (A) respect my time and (B) converse like a normal human.
I am blocking you now.
"The freedoms are real and worth having. But a system can be freer and also more fragile. The question isn’t whether the old constraints were good. It’s whether the new equilibrium can sustain itself."
The problem will resolve itself. Our civilization will disappear, it's that simple. Those who do not adopt our “modern” way of life will remain because they will continue to reproduce.
There's a pretty good chance the pension system will collapse, but I don't think that's a civilisation-killer by itself. At some point people will have to get wise to kids being a necessary investment in your own retirement and your society's future, the only question is how much damage is done before that happens.
The problem is that treating the average person as a rational agent does not work.
Government incentives do not work, and a large proportion of people do not function with a long-term perspective. We are seeing this now in other areas.
It seems that collectively we are more sensitive to deep intergenerational narratives enforced by social pressure that interact with material constraints and enablers (technologies, for example the pill, the printing press in its day, etc.).
That is why the only developed nation with a birth rate above replacement is Israel. The mandate to populate the Promised Land continues to be powerful today and is combined with the material threat of annihilation that is perceived on a daily basis (not as a long-term horizon), so that it even has power among those who are not believers. (I say all this without being a believer myself and without entering into an assessment of the conflict in that region; I am simply focusing on observing the factors that may be contributing to Israel's high birth rate).
Our societies are now devoid of powerful intergenerational narratives that promote birth rates. In fact, the various variants of the current narrative and its subcomponents work against it.
It does not have to be a total collapse, but rather a slow decline punctuated by a few more abrupt falls, as happened with the Roman Empire, where the population was gradually replaced by another type of population that could not sustain the previous civilizational structure.
Arctotherium did an excellent article on this topic recently, though I don't know if you've seen it before? https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/communist-pro-natalism
(Among other things, he points out that Israel's fertility is a lot less exceptional when you break down its internal demography by ethnic and religious background, and that Hungary's fertility incentives are targeted at mothers and not fathers, so I'm not sure to what extent government incentives here are necessarily futile so much as miscalibrated. But clearly the insular religious communities have a huge head-start.)
I hadn't seen it. Thanks for the link, I'll read it.
The old WhatifAltHist subreddit discussed similar matters before it was banned.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatifalthist/comments/179h5ki/what_if_middle_easterns_stagnate_their_countries/
What if Middle Easterns stagnate their countries in purpose?
Most people think that the reason why the majority of the populations in these countries are trapped in the middle ages is due to their own incompetence or their disability to "see any better". But what if their leaders are perfectly capable of improving their countries but they dont do it because they became aware that as soon as a country industrializes and the quality of life of their citizens improve, they stop reproducing and they lose human capital?
Put yourselves in the shoes of the leaders of Pakistan, Irak or Yemen:
"Our greatest rivals have been pampering their own populations for a long time, their women dont want children and no dutchman or austrian is willing to join the battlefields and fight for their country anymore. On the other side, we got millions of derprived Allah's soldiers willing to die for our objetives, therefore we have the opportunity to take action"
"We must prevent any kind of western hedonist life-improver that stagnates our amounts of human capital. When finally we reach our maximum carrying capacity and our servants severely outnumber the amount of hedonist westerners, its time for the attack"
And it actually has sense when you think about it. A society that only makes up 10% of the world and whose majority of members are what Rudyard labeled as "Champagne upper class chatting classes", is severely endangered when there is a massive civilization of fundamentalist savages that outnumber them breathing down their necks. Its like a matter of Eloi vs Morlock
If an European from 1900 woke up in 2023, he wouldnt be proud about the fact that the European societies have massive levels of development in comparation to the rest of the world, instead, he would he horrified at how middle easterns and subsaharans have severely outnumbered Europeans and are marching down towards Europe carrying machetes and reproducing into oblivion while the average European is naive and sedated.
Its like being a narco, they dont enjoy their wealth and luxury knowning that their great amount of enemies are waiting for the smallest chance to get rid off them, and the current status of Europeans in the world resembles those white and rich minorities of South Africa, Rhodesia, Haiti... that realized the consequences of their actions when it was too late.. but at least white south africans managed to fleed to Australia or UK when things went down the drain, but where the whites will scape this time? To Belarus? The party is over now
Dont forget:
"Those puny ants outnumber us 100 to 1. If they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life"- A Bug's Life
The average westerner keeps thinking that these peoples arent a threat because they are too "dumb and incompetent" and in their wishful thinking, they imagine that africans and middle-easterns will wipe out themselves through wars and famines so they are nothing to worry about.
But they think wrong, westerner's arrogance and lack of self-awareness is the path of doom that we already saw several times before in history. And arabs/persians/subsaharan are very aware of this.
That theory makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
1. The notion that Middle Eastern countries are backward on purpose (even in Afghanistan) is clearly false and ridiculous. Most Middle Eastern countries are backward due to lower average levels of IQ and other traits needed for a first world country to exist.
2. Every Middle Eastern country had Industrialized since the late 19th century with Western Colonialism. Once a nation Industrializes there's no going back no matter what cultural norms they have.
3. Oil-Sheikah nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar also debunk that stupid theory. Both are Fundamentalist countries yet both of them are among the earliest countries in the region to embrace Modern living standards as soon as they could.
4. The whole theory assumes that all Muslim countries are a single socio-cultural-political entity (the myth that there exists an "Islamic World") and they all are at war with the West (which is nothing more than "Clash of Civilization" nonsense).
5. With the exceptions of Syria and Afghanistan, every Middle Eastern country has below replacement fertility also.
Yeah, thanks for typing that up. I was going to make most of the same point.s
> "The whole theory assumes that all Muslim countries are a single socio-cultural-political entity"
I don't see how that's essential to the argument either way, but don't people talk about 'Christendom' the same way? (Or used to, at any rate)
"Christendom" is a myth too. The whole idea of your religion being your primary cultural identity is a Modern Post-Colonial delusion.
It's a myth that launched several crusades and substantially motivated the colonisation of africa and the americas, which makes it real enough to matter in my book.
"Christendom" isn't the reason why the Crusades nor Western Colonialism happened. The vast majority of the Crusades consisted of Christian on Christian violence for largely Secular reasons, and European Colonialism was driven the ideals of the Enlightenment and Eurocentrism, not Christian faith
Quite a lot of colonialism took place before the Enlightenment ever happened, although I'll happily concede non-religious motives were in the mix, but "the vast majority of crusades were Christian on Christian"? You'll have to explain that a little better.
Someone hasnt taken his nuance pill yet
We unintentionally created Digital Serial Polygamy.
I liked this article so much that I posted it in its entirety, linking of course to the original here, along with my comments, on my Substack. If that is inappropriate, let me know and I'll take it down.
Excellent read. Thank you.
“In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh asks: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” We followed certain rules: individual freedom; romantic love as the basis for marriage; the right to delay childbearing; the dissolution of social pressures that channeled people toward family formation. But they are what brought us here: to a mating system selecting itself out of existence.”
Wise words. Your essay is the *most complete* and thoughtful on the subject I’ve ever encountered. Bravo!
There's a strange issue of fog as far as the social science analysis of such things happening.
The overall recession in sex and couple formation throughout the developed world is well established across a number of datasets. That phenomenon is fairly well confirmed. It's also pretty well understood why it's happening, a rather open and shut case in social science.
The "soft harem" narrative, that is of an endemic phenomenon of many men being locked out of intimacy due to high status men hoarding many partners, whether that be explicitly LTR polygamy, situationships, or casual FWBs, is not reflected in the data, as relentlessly written about in https://substack.com/@thenuancepill/posts
Yet as a matter of "lived experience" it's happening enough, and being observed enough, that it's openly discussed as an endemic phenomenon.
Personally, for the majority of my adult life I was concurrently sleeping with more than one woman, and the majority of my friends were as well. And I'm not a Chad, just a tad above average in sex appeal, so I was honestly surprised by nuancepill's findings that the data does not reflect a sharp rise in de facto polygamy in the population data.
I also don't generally buy the "social media misinformation" narrative, that is very rarely a real factor. People are certainly more often observing this to happen anecdotally and then extrapolating to society as a whole. This suggests self-selection bias, which suggests a subpopulation milieu wherein it's happening, but not enough to change the population statistics.
Perhaps then this is a phenomenon that's prevalent only in the most "culture forward" places, Tier 1 Urban centers and top level universities. These milieus are media-salient, while numerically insignificant in population aggregates. Which suggests that whereas "soft harems" may grow over time, it's far less of an urgent concern, especially when it comes to the fertility collapse, than the overall drop in enthusiasm for sex and couple formation by the population.
Philosophy of Science First Principles wise: one of the significant distinctions between physics and engineering compared to the social science is whether the ontology of the statistical models match the mechanism of the system. That is, in the first case hypotheses tests are done on simulations with differential equations with mechanistic forces on the right hand side, and in the latter, a generalized linear model has nothing to do with the mechanisms of a human dynamically interacting in the social world. Because it doesn't lock in mechanism, social science research doesn't generalize, or in other words, replicate.
One solution to this is by finding preponderance of evidence across layers of abstraction. This problem also features in medicine - equations barely cover a small part of biological domain knowledge, and you're dealing with open systems, i.e. not causally closed. So the classic example of preponderance of evidence across multiple layers of abstraction is smoking's health ills - population cohort studies together with biophysical models and in vitro experiments confirming the general conclusion of tobacco smoking being detrimental to healthspan and lifespan.
Similarly, in social science, a population based survey sample is never by itself a useful description of a real social phenomenon. However, it can still be useful to present a general picture of observed patterns, and thus for population-based considerations and decisions like demography and fertility policy.
Lived experience suffers from self-selection bias as far as generalizing. But for an individual in a similar cultural milieu and personality profile as the interlocutor, it can be useful.
Evolutionary explanations become "just so" when there's no data confirmation the stressors and behaviors occur in sufficient ecological relevance. But together with the other levels of abstraction, they add mechanism, and thus mitigate the replication/generalization issue.
The "sex recession" conjecture is well established across all layers of abstraction - population based statistics, reasonable evolutionary explanations, and hermeneutically compelling narratives for eschewing mating and reproduction in the memescape for both genders.
The "soft harem" conjecture is disharmonious across social science's levels of abstraction. Thus, it is not relevant towards demography at the present time. But it may be relevant for some individuals as far as their life choices, and it may be a macro-factor in the long run.