According to evolutionary theory, sexually reproducing animals can invest more in parental effort (providing for offspring) or mating effort (pursuing copulations). The advantage of the first strategy is that the success one's offspring is enhanced; the advantage of the second is that one can potentially produce many offspring with little effort per child.
This theory would expect sex differences in the strategy taken, and it also predicts that some men will chase skirts while others will focus on being family men. Since evolutionary theory sees competition as fundamental, we would also expect some men to fail at either strategy.
Recently, there was a discussion about whether the losers feel so aggrieved that they might, like the poor, act out with violence and begin to organize politically to gain sexual equality.
This sounds like joke, but a recent analysis of high school data, motivated by the discussion, concluded that sexual inequality is a myth. It's funny how analysts can so easily dismiss hypotheses derived from the only theory of humans we know is true with one cherry-picked data set of high school kids, many of whom are not mature enough to have even entered the "sex market," but hey that's the state of contemporary social science.
I will avoid cherry-picking by doing what I always do -- relying on the General Social Survey to answer empirical questions.
The focus seems to be young men, so I limit the analysis to those ages 18-30. Here are estimates (N = 3,201):
First, trends seem pretty stable for the past four decades, but, do you see sexual equality here among men? I don't. If we remove the gay men, 12.7% of men ages 18-30 had ZERO partners last year; 60.2% had one; 14.2% had two; 9.5% had three; 6.5% had four; 7.0% had 5-10; 1.8% had 11-20; 0.5% had 21-100; and 0.1% had 100+ (if you believe them). If this looks equal to you, you can borrow my glasses.
What emerges here and typically with other data (unlike others, I don't ignore the body of research) is what we could call the "Sexual 1 Percenters." Many men have zero partners, while others have dozens. And even the difference between 0 and 1 is enormous enough.
Massive inequality! But liberals, the implacable enemies of inequality, yawn because the affected group are men.
UPDATE: Another approach appears to be to look at these kinds of numbers, and to simply deny there is inequality there. I will use this strategy the next time an employee complains that my salary is double his. My response will be, "For all intents and purposes, Tom, we make the same."
Showing posts with label Sexual Inequality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sexual Inequality. Show all posts
Friday, November 30, 2018
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