The Mating Game Has Changed, and You Won't Believe How
For better? For worse? It depends on what you want.
Posted Oct 26, 2015
Source: El Nariz/Shutterstock
Yes, the matinggame is changing. Dating is on the ropes. But more, the whole mating repertoire is shifting. Coyness is, well, not quite a crime (thank you, Andrew Marvell), but not a fashionable feint either, and certainly not an inherent attribute of females. And no, this has nothing to do with the Internet. It has to do with numbers. It turns out that they have changed a whole lot more than you might suspect, and probably without your awareness.
The way people match up varies according to how many partners they sense are available—no surprise there. And the number of men, and especially quality men, is declining relative to the number of women, especially for those of college age, when people are primed for pairing off, in the moment and as they march through post-college life. You’ve seen the headlines: Men are falling behind women by almost every measure there is—school completion rates, number of graduate degrees, labor force participation. It especially matters at college, where men and women are housed together in a more or less closed community. For every 60 women now at college, there are 40 men—that's 50 percentmore women than men.
The gender ratio tends to be closer to 50-50 at highly selective schools—with an excess of applicants they can draw deeper into the pool to balance their classes. The gender mismatch at such schools is not one of numbers but, at some point, of quality. Complaints of college women that men “act like they’re in high school” or “don’t have it together” are not sour grapes or losers’ laments; they reflect a true and growing reality.
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Schacht studied a homogenous population in southwestern Guyana whose members, in search of work, moved to several geographically dispersed communities that consequently varied naturally in gender composition. There, he observed, the sex roles and mating efforts of men and women were not tethered to biology but instead varied significantly depending on numbers of the opposite sex. Mating dynamics are mating dynamics, and the same dynamics, Schacht says, likely apply on college campuses—and in other populations where males are in short supply, such as older adult communities.
The findings, Schacht reports, “reject simplistic labeling of reproductive roles by gender based on inherent sex differences.” In fact, there’s evidence from many studies that testosterone levels—which prime males for mating competition, or something—vary tremendously based on situational factors. They dip significantly, for example, among new fathers.
Women are not destined to be coy or passive in the mating game. When they are the more numerous sex, they engage in sometimes fierce competition among themselves for the few available mates. Exhibit A might be Schacht’s home base, Utah, dominated by the Mormon Church. Such is the nature of Mormonism that men are apt to leave it while women are more likely to convert to it, and stay Mormon. That gives the community a strongly female-heavy sex ratio. It also gives Utah a wildly disproportionate rate of plastic surgery procedures—with higher rates of breast implants, nose jobs, all kinds of facial surgery, and Botox injections, even among college students.
The Mating Game Has Changed, and You Won't Believe How
For better? For worse? It depends on what you want.
Posted Oct 26, 2015
Source: El Nariz/Shutterstock
Yes, the matinggame is changing. Dating is on the ropes. But more, the whole mating repertoire is shifting. Coyness is, well, not quite a crime (thank you, Andrew Marvell), but not a fashionable feint either, and certainly not an inherent attribute of females. And no, this has nothing to do with the Internet. It has to do with numbers. It turns out that they have changed a whole lot more than you might suspect, and probably without your awareness.
The way people match up varies according to how many partners they sense are available—no surprise there. And the number of men, and especially quality men, is declining relative to the number of women, especially for those of college age, when people are primed for pairing off, in the moment and as they march through post-college life. You’ve seen the headlines: Men are falling behind women by almost every measure there is—school completion rates, number of graduate degrees, labor force participation. It especially matters at college, where men and women are housed together in a more or less closed community. For every 60 women now at college, there are 40 men—that's 50 percentmore women than men.
The gender ratio tends to be closer to 50-50 at highly selective schools—with an excess of applicants they can draw deeper into the pool to balance their classes. The gender mismatch at such schools is not one of numbers but, at some point, of quality. Complaints of college women that men “act like they’re in high school” or “don’t have it together” are not sour grapes or losers’ laments; they reflect a true and growing reality.
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Schacht studied a homogenous population in southwestern Guyana whose members, in search of work, moved to several geographically dispersed communities that consequently varied naturally in gender composition. There, he observed, the sex roles and mating efforts of men and women were not tethered to biology but instead varied significantly depending on numbers of the opposite sex. Mating dynamics are mating dynamics, and the same dynamics, Schacht says, likely apply on college campuses—and in other populations where males are in short supply, such as older adult communities.
The findings, Schacht reports, “reject simplistic labeling of reproductive roles by gender based on inherent sex differences.” In fact, there’s evidence from many studies that testosterone levels—which prime males for mating competition, or something—vary tremendously based on situational factors. They dip significantly, for example, among new fathers.
Women are not destined to be coy or passive in the mating game. When they are the more numerous sex, they engage in sometimes fierce competition among themselves for the few available mates. Exhibit A might be Schacht’s home base, Utah, dominated by the Mormon Church. Such is the nature of Mormonism that men are apt to leave it while women are more likely to convert to it, and stay Mormon. That gives the community a strongly female-heavy sex ratio. It also gives Utah a wildly disproportionate rate of plastic surgery procedures—with higher rates of breast implants, nose jobs, all kinds of facial surgery, and Botox injections, even among college students.
The Mating Game Has Changed, and You Won't Believe How
