No Sex and the City

Why is nobody getting laid?

the gang when i call j d vance’s book “hitlerbilly elegy”

Gender is on everyone’s mind at the moment - it seems to be one of the defining features of our current political landscape, for instance. The Vice President elect of the United States, J.D. Vance, has followed redpill sex trafficker Andrew Tate on Twitter X the Everything App. Men and women seem politically to be further apart than ever. It’s a central topic of modern geopolitics. One of our central topics of conversation right now is the decline in marriage rates and the rise of childless single women (expressed, as expected, in extremely offputting ways).

Longtime readers of this blog will remember my multiple attempts at tackling the issue, and I was on a podcast before the holidays to talk about the topic too, so I’m just circling back to a major question: what’s going on with straight people?

What’s the deal with carriage food?

Back in the 1910s, a common joke about dating was that “a man arrives to pick up a woman for a date. When she meets him at the door, he takes off his hat, but she puts hers on”. This was outrageously funny - the joke was that the man expected to “call” on the woman, and thus took off his hat to talk with her indoors, while she expected an “outdoors” date, and therefore put on her hat.

The point here isn’t to show off my knowledge of turn-de-siecle Seinfeld bits, it’s to point out that dating and social norms are extremely intertwined. Back in the olden days, for which the starting point is pre-industrial society: in it, everyone had to work in order to eat, resulting in sky-high labor force participation for men, women, and children. In fact, the only time in American history when more women were in the labor force other than the present was the Revolutionary Era.

The main concept to understand this is that households, as a group, can either produce goods and services they consume themselves, or they can purchase it from others. Purchasing things requires labor in a job outside the home, while producing them requires labor in the home. The choice they make for each good and service (food, childcare, cleaning, etc.) depends on the relative cost and benefit of outsourcing versus specializing - and a key cost is opportunity cost, that is, the income lost by choosing to work at home, or the delicious home cooked meals they’ve missed out on because everyone has an office gig.

In fact, looking across contemporary societies, we see that there is a clear link between economic development and female labor force participation: the more developed a country, first female labor force participation drops (as industrial employment crowds out subsistence farming), but later it rises with education and a transition to a services economy. Of course, men moving to manufacturing is not a law of nature, and this shift was largely mediated by culture and cultural norms - in societies that prize adherence to “order” and collective harmony, wealth has only entrenched the patriarchy as a constraint on female employment (see: the Gulf States).

Generally speaking, certain cultures allow for bigger changes in the political order than others, such that ”trad” societies tend to be extraordinarily tightly knit and repressively conformist. These societies are also not good places to live in, for women or for anyone: American states that banned cousin marriage are richer than those who didn’t, for instance, since cousin marriage is usually a tool used to control women financially by their extended family groups, such that when Indian women received improved rights to ownership and inheritance, intra-family marriage rates ballooned. Another instance of more traditional societies favoring men comes from Malawi: experimental evidence finds that, when referrals and references for employment matter, women are disadvantaged versus men, who are overwhelmingly likelier to vouch for a man versus a woman.

So, why did women rejoin the labor force in the mid 20th century? The main reason was a transition from an industrial economy to a services economy, which led to an increase in market wages for women, especially since their own educational attainment grew. Because women caught up to men in terms of education (and then surpassed them), there was relative parity in human capital between the spouses, which drastically increased the opportunity cost of having a “second husband” (qualifications wise) just siting around at home baking apple pies. This also provoked cultural changes: reforms that raised the education levels of Turkish girls resulted in lower approval of consanguineous marriage. While it may be surprising that men would support women’s education, there are two factors that explain this: first, women having more education, and thus higher earnings, appears to increase their value in cultures where it is common to pay “bride prices” to marry a woman. Likewise, while it is true that men would desire their wives to have fewer rights, they also would desire their daughters to have more rights. And of course, we cannot discount the importance of feminist activism and organizing.

As a result, women’s economic lives saw generational changes: while in the 1940s and 1950s there was a “career or family” mindset that established a dichotomy between the two, these women were followed by the “job then family” generation whose careers were short-lived. These were succeeded by the “family then career” moms, who took a hiatus from work from childbirth to grade school to look after the kiddos. Currently, women are in the “career and family” generation, and have been for a while. You can see this, for instance, in the growing share of women who retain their own last names after marriage, mainly to maintain a continuous register of their own achievements outside the home.

In addition, there were a variety of social and cultural changes that shifted expectations of what women could and could not do - for instance, World War Two pushed women into the workforce, which raised male support of female employment for the next generation. Another such example were changes in expectations: in the 1950s and 60s women indeed showed much less interest in a career than they do presently - surveys, for instance, show that the main reason why women attended college was to find a (successful) husband, rather than a career of their own. At the same time, the returns to getting a husband through an education were higher than the results of getting a job through an education. Secondly, there were a variety of changes in the legal and political framework of the United States, such as the repeal of bars on married women working in the 1950s, equal pay legislation in the 1960s, or changes to “biopolitics” like the legalization of no-fault divorce, abortion, or the birth control pill. Appliances becoming cheap and accessible, thus lowering the actual labor required at home and thus decreasing the opportunity cost of joining the labor force, didn’t hurt.

They’re (not) eating cat

There is, in a sense, a total and complete breakdown of dating and relationships, at roughly the same time as women’s entry into the labor force - inevitably manifesting as a gendered backlash. But I think that people get this precisely backwards, either through careless analysis or plain old motivated reasoning.

The decline in fertility is, I think, closely linked to the decline in marriage rates - people áre just getting married way less often, largely because of decreased frequency of dating, sex, and socialization altogether. I’ve touched upon this over and over again, so to summarize, there is a well-documented link between marriage and fertility, so there’s fewer stable family units churning out little tykes. If you look at the US specifically, birth rates fall across income, wage, and age groups, and this is due to both lower marriage rates and fewer children per marriage.

One interesting data point is that cutting the child allowance in 2014 resulted in lower fertility, but only for couples with children - as in, people went from planning on two to staying at just one, rather than from one to zero. This can help the picture to start clearing up: the issue isn’t necessarily culture (the most conservative countries in Europe don’t have substantially higher birth rates), but rather the much less glamorous topic of money. If you examine the original Baby Boom of the 1950s to 1970s, there were three major factors pushing birth rates up: a soaring economy, increasingly convenient technologies for parents, and cheap and abundant housing.

Incomes have grown, but with one caveat: a growing and growing share of earnings has gone to things like housing and childcare, which makes up a large chunk of the pay-productivity gap, since total compensation for workers has largely tracked productivity. So people are actually making more money, but take home pay is just not growing very much either. Parenting, meanwhile, has become really difficult and expensive, with increasing status competition in South Korea leading to declining fertility: parents want their kids to participate in the best extracurriculars, go to the best schools, get the best grades, and go on to the best careers. Because this is incredibly expensive, fertility falls, especially for poor and middle class families. The fact is that parenting is getting more and more demanding, leading to affluent parents doing more and more while poorer parents fall behind. Lastly, housing: back in the days of the original Baby Boom, most societies had abundant quantities of housing for their population, resulting in lower rents and lower mortgage payments. However, most developed nations have stopped building new housing, leading to soaring burdens to secure stable dwellings, with clear implications for fertility: places that built more housing also had bigger baby booms, homeowners have higher fertility rates than non-homeowners, there appears to be a stable, negative relationship between the share of income devoted to rent and the fertility rate of a society, finally, if you look at Brazilians who get free housing in lotteries, they tend to have more children compared to people who don’t - but they have equal incomes and, we can assume, values. So waht’s the deal?

Well, I think that the issue here is that people just have higher expectations. People want to be financially stable, they want to have their own home, and they want to be secure in their careers. There’s a Dutch IVF study finding no gender wage gap among women who have or don’t have kids, and the likeliest explanation seems to be that highly planned pregnancies happen at optimal times - when the women are already stable and secure in their work life. But much more importantly, they have higher standards for their partners: while most people seem to want to get married and have children, but while women are all in (just look at Charlotte in Sex and the City), men are less likely to be “fully committed”. As a rule, when women’s wages are higher, they expect more from their partners, not just in terms of money but also in terms of actual quality of a match. Given how bad the dating scene is for women, it is not surprising that women aren’t settling, especially considering that even men who say they want an equal partnership are remarkably sexist. It just seems that men aren’t bringing enough to the table for women to be interested in marrying them. To use another Sex and the City example, you can take Miranda: she’s a successful lawyer who gets pregnant from a hookup with Steve, a bartender. Steve is not a good partner or parent, yet Miranda gets into a serious relationship with him just because she fears she’ll be judged for being a single mom. In the reverse situation, Miranda could have stayed home and provided free domestic labor and childcare - meanwhile, the modern equivalent to Steve could provide a mountain of old Mountain Dew cans and thousands of dollars in DraftKings debt.

This obviously explains the rise of single motherhood: while having a single mother is disadvantageous to children, and the communities with the highest number of single mothers also have the highest disapproval of them, an increasing share of births are happening out of wedlock, mainly because, once again, the guys who get a woman pregnant are just bad dudes who wouldn’t be good fathers. Without the same stigma, and honestly, the economic pressures to settle down, women just opt out of getting hitched to guys who are known to be unreliable.

Interestingly enough, however, the marriageability of men is not related to how much money they make: when men have higher earnings, marriage or fertility rates don’t seem to go up much. That more educated men also have more progressive values could help explain the seeming “hypocrisy” of marriage-agnostic liberal elites having high marriage rates: they simply like their dating pool more. One additional factor pushing only elites to pair up is the high cost of housing: in case of divorce, the two partners get half a house, which is not enough to buy two smaller houses.

Things many eyes have seen

Recently, I rewatched Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, a movie about an archeologist who robs tombs with a gang of merry cronies and sells them to a coporate buyer. A leading theme (among other things) the clash between the economics of a new world with the culture of the past - a common theme in Rohrwacher’s filmography.

Beyond harping on about my favorite movie, the reason I’m bringing this up is that the growing pains of economic change can profoundly affect culture. Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin’s most recent paper is about this: when economic change outpaces cultural progress on feminism, fertility plummets. Why?

Once again, because men do not have the economic standing to pressure women into sexual submission: women are economic winners of the service economy, and men economic losers, resulting in a substantially weaker hand at bargaining. In an economy where service sector knowledge jobs and soft skills are king, women thrive, while men lag behind - scarred by austerity, deindustrialization, and lagging educational progress. At the same time, women experience higher satisfaction with their careers than men, meaning that the other side of the “career versus family” tradeoff is increasingly attractive.

In one such example, when Saudi women were first allowed to drive, their husbands responded by allowing them to do so, but curtailing their rights elsewhere, and securing the man’s social dominance. Likewise, Indian couples where the woman has better employment prospects, education, or income than her husband suffer much higher rates of domestic violence, and even in Western countries, couples have lower marriage satisfaction and higher rates of divorce when the woman earns more than the man. Swedish women who win the lottery are significantly more likely to get divorced than comparable women who don’t win, but only if the marriage was unhappy or there were significant financial disparities between partners. In extreme examples, when Rwandan women are able to get paying jobs, domestic violence rates decrease, since they are able to leave their partners instead of suffering in an abusive relationship.

There is also another set of issues facing marriage rates: marriage usually tends to economically punish women. Households appear to maximize the earnings, not of the couple or even of the breadwinner, but of the man specifically. Women are tasked with the vast majority of housework regardless of who is the breadwinner, and handling the majority of chores is associated with lower earnings. In this sense, while motherhood explains the majority of the gender wage gap, marriage is still correlated with a decline in income even without children. This helps explain why gay men earn less than straight men, but gay households earn the same, or why there’s a lesbian “wage premium”.

So overall, economic change seems poised to push women into the workforce and out of the home, damaging fertility. This becomes even more serious when considering that economic deprivation radicalizes men, especially on issues of gender: across Europe, there is a strong association between male job insecurity and sexism, and European regions where unemployment has increased see men have a higher rate of agreement with the statement “women’s advancement and opportunities came at men’s expense”. Chinese men who suffer more economic deprivation also score higher on indicators of hostile sexism. Likewise, British men who grew up in high-deprivation, high-unemployment regions report feeling more hostile to feminist and progressive attitudes. Male joblessness, as a whole, is leading to economic resentment and to hostile sexism.

This comes from a fairly simple association: being a man carries a certain degree of status, and in our culture that abhors being “a loser”, men who struggle economically also may desire to profit from the patriarchy instead of losing its benefits. When status is threatened, backlash is born. Feminist marches in Spain, for instance, propped up support for far right parties among men. I’ve previously brought up how Zygmunt Bauman pointed out that men lost their role as “the provider” and women gained meaning not just from the home, but from work and consumption as well, and this continues to be crucial: we have not expanded “new sources of meaning” to men.

Nonetheless, the silver lining is that there seems to be just a massive mixup: men dont’ want to lose even more status by being seen as “weak” by supporting feminism, so they double down, and women don’t want to alienate men - they either pretend to embrace their ideology, or just shun them. For example, in Saudi Arabia, husbands are actually supportive on average of their wives working outside the home, but publicly voice opposition in order to secure the approval of other men, while women tamp down their labor market ambitions due to believing that other women have more conservative aspirations. Similarly, Qataris express disapproval of women taking paid work, especially when they will be working closely with men, but this is mainly out of concern for other people’s opinion, particularly within their extended family. And in America, women who are single and partnered answer surveys regarding their labor market ambitions similarly when responses are private, but single women answer more conservatively when they think their male colleagues will be aware of the answer - especially if the colleagues are also single.

Conclusion

So, what do we do? A lot. First, obviously, fix the economy, including building more housing - to lower its cost, boost fertility, and also allow men to transition into blue collar construction jobs. Second, DEI for men to go into “Pink collar” jobs, like nursing and teaching - both for their sake and for the sake of boys. And lastly, normalize men leaning out of the workforce to become stay at home dads in cases where it’s convenient. Of course, another cultural promotion effort would be to go one step further: by some measures, lesbian relationships produce more successful children than straight relationships, so a results-oriented utilitarian family agenda should prioritize turning Gen Z’s wide pool of bisexual women away from men. Since other research shows very few differences between kids from straight and gay families, so this couldn’t hurt.