I'm Dr Orion taraban and this is psych hacks Better Living Through psychology and the topic of today's short talk is women are making Society polygamous now this is obviously a very provocative title but that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't true and I hope to back it up with some evidence and arguments in this episode I will say at the outset that I don't think this movement is intentional that is I don't think that women are consciously attempting to accomplish this purpose this is an epiphenomenon that emerges out of the data on Mass kind of
like how a wave emerges out of the movements of individual particles none of which are particularly wave-like none of the molecules has any awareness that it is contributing to the wave but the wave arises out of the molecules nonetheless this is the mystery surrounding individuals and populations the two are obviously connected but it's impossible to see how unless you take a wide enough Vantage and of course before I lay out my arguments please be sure to like this episode And subscribe to this channel it takes less than a second costs you nothing and it's also
a way for you to be a part of something much larger than yourself so do the thing now to understand why this is happening why women are making Society polygamous you have to first understand that women today are absolutely crushing it well there was a gender gap that clearly favored men 50 years ago we now have a gender gap that clearly favors women and in many domains the size of this gender gap is larger than the size of the gender gap that we had a half century ago probably for the first time in human history
in most western societies childless women under 30 are earning more than childless men under 30. women are graduating from high school from College from gross from postgraduate institutions at a significantly higher rate than men in fact at a nearly two to one ratio the very well so hooray women that said all this success does come with an unintended consequence with respect to the dating market and before the women complain well who cares about dating let me just say that you should care about dating Because unless you want to go back to your father choosing your
husband for you this is pretty much the only Pathway to long-term relationships marriage and children which are things I often hear women caring about so problems with dating will have important Downstream consequences so what is the unintended consequence in order to understand it you first have to appreciate that women tend to date hypergamously for those of you have never heard this term before hypergamy is the tendency to date across and up status hierarchies to put it simply women want a man who is at least as good as her if not better and better of course
is how women choose to Define it because it's for the cat to decide which milk is good however with respect to some very obvious metrics women tend to marry men who are older taller stronger higher status and higher earning and here's the rub if women are outperforming most men and women continue to date hypergamously then voila you have an increasingly shrinking pool of men that the majority of women would even consider as candidates for dating and mating and that's bad for women because fewer eligible men significantly increases the intra-sex competition for a dwindling pool of
potential mates and it's also bad for most men because most men are just flat out being disqualified from the sexual Marketplace on the other hand if you are a top 10 percent man a top five percent man wow is it a time to be alive and why is that because all of these beautiful high achieving intelligent successful women are competing for you one of a smaller and smaller subset of men and the men at the top of these status hierarchies are just having a lot of sex with a lot of different women and this phenomenon
is accelerating at a fantastic rate in the last 10 years the number of sexual partners that the average man has had has remained the same however over that time according to the General Social Survey the number of men under 30 who had no sex in the past 10 years in the past year has tripled from 10 percent to nearly 30 percent this means that one in three one in three young men have absolutely zero presence in the sexual Marketplace on the other hand only roughly one in six went in that age group reported the same
thing this creates a correspondence of roughly five women for every four men and that assumes an even distribution across the remaining participants which is absolutely not the case the top performing men are not only having more sex with more women they're having a lot more sex with a lot more women what does this mean well if you put two and two together it means that Society is becoming increasingly polygamous in which a smaller and smaller subset of men are enjoying a larger share of the sexual access to all women to put that five to four
ratio another way this means that 20 percent of women under 30 are currently in a polygamous relationship whether they're aware of it or not this situation is not conscious or intentional but the data back it up and just to be clear this is not something men are doing this is not something that men are forcing on women why well in the first place you have to remember that more men are getting less sex than they had 10 years ago so if this is a conspiracy on the part of men they're doing a really bad job
of it and in the second place women are Gatekeepers of sex these women are not having sex with a smaller subset of men against their will it's the women who are functionally voting with their feet that it's either these men or no men at all for me thanks and what's the likelihood that any one of these top men who now have historically unprecedented sexual access to women what's the likelihood that one of these top men is going to exclusively commit to any one of these women I would say that it becomes increasingly smaller so this
is one of the unintended consequences of women's recent success and what are the solutions well we know that there are several bad or unlikely ones including reactionary social movements that relegate women to traditional gender roles or asking women to date and mate with men who are less desirable to them I mean neither of those things are going to happen so to be honest the best solution that I can come up with is to really support men like to support men with at least as much Vigor and enthusiasm as we currently support women so that the
pool of desirable men continues to grow rather than shrink for many years to come you can be the judge of How likely that will be anytime soon what do you think let me know your thoughts in the comments below and thank you for listening
