On the Effects of Sex Ratios

I love that title. That and the URL Blogger will generate from it should bring me lots of hits from Google searches. :-)

This is another in a series of posts exploring the sociology of the breakdown of families in America.

An area's Sex Ratio is defined as (# of men / # of women). If there is a high sex ratio, there are many more men than women, if there is a low sex ratio, there are many more women than men. The sex ratio of a nation, state or city has several effects, as I have learned from reading The Marriage Problem.

Simply put, women want marriage, men want sex. That may fly in the face of modern, politically correct thought, but it's born out by statistics. When there are more men than women, women are more valued and have greater leverage. They have an easier time getting what they want and the marriage rate is higher. When there are more women than men, the marriage rate is lower. When women have more bargaining power, there are more marriages.

Yesterday, I posted a quiz question asking, "Which state was the first to give women the vote?" We've got a lot of educated readers, because you all got it right. The answer was Wyoming. In fact, the first 11 states to give women the vote were all frontier states where the sex ratio was very high, that is, there were many more men than women. How is it that women, being such a small minority in these states, managed to get the vote there first?

Simple answer: they were more valued.

Though the political movement for women's suffrage was based in the East, the eleven states that had, by the end of 1914, granted women the vote were all in the West. Indeed, wild, boisterous Wyoming led the pack by extending the suffrage in 1890. Sophisticated easterners argued for suffrage, but primitive westerners did it. The reason, in most cases, was the belief that if women could vote they would help civilize the territory. As Alan Grimes put it, "Men conquered the wilderness, women made it habitable."

Here's another tidbit.

Southern and gold rush Americans elevated decent women onto a pedestal, defending their honor and attacking detractors with grim determination. In Yellowstone City, the law once imposed the death sentence on anyone insulting a respectable woman.

This deferance towards women was an American trait; the Chinese laborers in these territories treated their women like property. As an aside, this fact is left out of my daughter's social studies texts as they strive to show what beasts white men were to everyone else.

Drawing now from Boys Adrift as it talks about the growing number of men still living with their parents well into their 20s and 30s, we find that in modern America, the sex ratio is artificially low. By that, I mean that there are more women than men and many of those women are artificial.

Traditionally, one of the factors driving Western society has been the fact that women prefer successful, affluent men over men who are less successful. Because men understood that women would be reluctant to marry men who couldn't comfortably support a wife and children, men were motivated to be successful. That simple mechanism has suffered a double whammy in the past forty years. First, sex has been divorced from marriage. Second - and here's what's really disturbing to those of us in the over-thirty crowd - sexual satisfaction has been divorced from women altogether. If you don't work with today's teenage boys on a regular basis, you may not understand the extent to which pornographic images of women have replaced the real thing. In the general population, the best estimates are that roughly 70 percent of college-age men now use pornography regularly.

In the Old West, women were scarce and highly valued. In modern America, there is an endless supply of women, even if terabytes of them are not, in fact, real. Women, being plentiful, have less leverage over men, particularly when it comes to marriage. The decay of our sexual morality has removed still more of their leverage over men.

The result? Fewer marriages to begin with and more divorces in those that do get married. The family is much, much weaker.

More on this in subsequent posts.