Why Do Feminists Keep Claiming Women Lack Agency?

It's too common anymore to think it's anything but intentional: a feminist sees an outcome in the world she doesn't like, and then blames this state of affairs on men, i.e. the patriarchy. Differences in the numbers of men and women in STEM fields? Didn't get the job she wanted? Must be men. Income inequality between spouses? Men again (never mind that women have demonstrably higher income standards than readily exist in the real world).

So now Ellen Lamont in The Atlantic has discovered (again) that the New Feminist Woman has largely not arrived on the scene. Surprise, surprise: women want men to pay for things, among other unapproved behavior (emboldening mine):

And yet in a throwback to an earlier era, many women I spoke with enacted strict dating rules. “It’s a deal breaker if a man doesn’t pay for a date,” one woman, aged 29, told me. A 31-year-old said that if a man doesn’t pay, “they just probably don’t like you very much.” A lot of men, they assumed, were looking for nothing more than a quick hookup, so some of these dating rituals were tests to see whether the man was truly interested in a commitment. A third woman, also 31, told me, “I feel like men need to feel like they are in control, and if you ask them out, you end up looking desperate and it’s a turnoff to them.”

On dates, the women talked about acting demure, and allowing men to do more of the talking. Women, they said, were more attractive to men when they appeared unattainable, so women preferred for the men to follow up after a date. None of the women considered proposing marriage; that was the man’s job. “I know it feels counterintuitive … I’m a feminist,” the first woman said. “But I like to have a guy be chivalrous.”

As ever, the problem with such articles is the lack of actual data rather than anecdotes. Yet finally, we are talking about women's choices as much as men's. Do they not matter? Are we talking about equal outcomes or equal opportunities?

Whaddya Know: American Women “Marrying Down” In Terms Of Education

A terrific new study out from the Institute for Family Studies, showing that college-educated women, contra the suppositions from Dateonomics, are actually marrying “down” in large numbers in terms of education. It’s not yet large numbers, but the trend is undeniable:

Of particular interest is the 23-32 group of women on the right side. Just under 40% of women with a bachelor’s degree are marrying men without one, which is astonishing. Of course, given the tiny number of marriages occurring among millennials, this could easily be the product of a systemic bias problem:

That is, the relative few women marrying men without college degrees are marrying from the cream of the blue-collar or undegreed ranks. It does not seem a scalable trend.

A Girl's Gotta Have Her Standards

Ahem:

These synthetic husbands have an average income that is about 58% higher than the actual unmarried men that are currently available to unmarried women. They also are 30% more likely to be employed (90% vs. 70%) and 19% more likely to have a college degree (30% vs. 25%). Racial and ethnic minorities, especially Black women, face serious shortages of potential marital partners, as do low socioeconomic status and high socioeconomic status unmarried women, both at the national and subnational levels.

More Obvious Stuff On Sexual Attraction And Marriage

• "Why Aren't More Wives Outearning Their Husbands?" asks Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. The distribution of the wife's share of income has a hard break around 50%, as shown here, with a significant disparity on the right side. This is not a normal distribution (emboldening mine):
  
  
  
  
  

  This drop-off is simply too steep to be explained by randomness or classical economics. If men and women were forming marriages without concern for relative incomes, we'd expect a smoother distribution curve...
  
  In a cool new paper, Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan, and Emir Kamenica pose a theory that some people might find controversial but others might find intuitive: What if there's a deficit of marriages where the wife is the top earner because -- to put things bluntly -- husbands hate being out-earned by their wives, and wives hate living with husbands who resent them?
  
  If this were true, we would expect to see at least three four other things to be true. First, we'd expect marriages with female breadwinners to be surprisingly rare. Second, we'd expect them to produce unhappier marriages. Third, we might expect these women to cut back on hours, do more household [chores], or make other gestures to make their husbands feel better. Fourth, we'd expect these marriages to end more in divorce. Lo and behold (as you no doubt guessed), the economists found all of those assumptions borne out by the evidence.

  The assumption that women have nothing to do with these choices is a peculiar one, especially considering the next item...
• "Different impacts of resources on opposite sex ratings of physical attractiveness by males and females", Guanlin Wang, et al., Evolution and Human Behavior, March, 2018, pp. 220-225. Abstract:

  Parental investment hypotheses regarding mate selection suggest that human males should seek partners featured by youth and high fertility. However, females should be more sensitive to resources that can be invested on themselves and their offspring. Previous studies indicate that economic status is indeed important in male attractiveness. However, no previous study has quantified and compared the impact of equivalent resources on male and female attractiveness. Annual salary is a direct way to evaluate economic status. Here, we combined images of male and female body shape with information on annual salary to elucidate the influence of economic status on the attractiveness ratings by opposite sex raters in American, Chinese and European populations. We found that ratings of attractiveness were around 1000 times more sensitive to salary for females rating males, compared to males rating females. These results indicate that higher economic status can offset lower physical attractiveness in men much more easily than in women. Neither raters' BMI nor age influenced this effect for females rating male attractiveness. This difference explains many features of human mating behavior and may pose a barrier for male engagement in low-consumption lifestyles.

Being Links I Found Interesting

• The NYT Fails Sexual Units Reduction: Of course this NYT piece focusing on activities smartphones keep people from doing has some spectacularly crazy numbers, but what everyone keeps talking about is the claimed 16,000 times you might engage in sex over the course of a year. This is based on a lovemaking session lasting 5.4 minutes (5:24), which seems terribly ... brief. Some math:
  
  
  16,000 sex events/year * year/365 days * 24 hours/day/16 waking hours/day * day/1,440 min = 1 sex event/22.9 min
  
  That, of course, is a prodigious pace for any man. The human post-coital refractory period averages around a half hour for men, with younger men having times around 15 minutes, and men in their 70s around 20 hours. A gifted few are capable of zero-duration times, but such superhuman feats require a Hugh Hefner at his peak level of dedication to the task. (Women may or may not have such a period, but it seems unlikely they would engage in such extended bouts.)
• Godfrey Elfwick is back!
• New Jersey, New York, and Illinois are the top three states people are moving away from, per United Van Lines' annual survey. Vermont, Oregon, and Idaho are the top three inbound.
• "Achievement motivation" may explain part of the gender wage gap, but only a small (5%) part.
• Women's marches in Eureka, CA and New Orleans have been canceled, the former because 80% white Eureka has too many white people marching. A long-form article at Tablet suggests the real problem is funding.

The New Feminist Woman Isn't On The Scene Yet: Marriage, Divorce, And Income

• Married Men Outearn Single Men And Women As A Whole (St. Louis Fed Study). Translated, women are pretty comfortable letting their mates bring home the bux, and are good at choosing ones who can.
• Men Without Full-Time Jobs Are 33% More Likely To Divorce. Highlights:
  
  • "Two thirds of divorces are initiated by women, even though their chances of remarrying are slimmer than their ex-spouses’.
  • "These days guys who have jobs have a predicted divorce probability in the next year of 2.5%, whereas the same guys who do not have a probability of 3.3%."
  Presumably, this means that women kick men out, or the men are so abysmally unhappy that they file for divorce themselves.

On Female Preferences In Men's Earning Power

I have for a while repeatedly gone back to a 2014 Pew Research study (usually via this HuffPo story) showing that 78% of women polled want a spouse with "a steady job". I've pretty much read that as meaning women are much more interested in male earning power than any other attribute of a potential spouse. But it came up in conversation yesterday on Twitter that maybe this is a weak interpretation:

"A steady job" is not necessarily the same as high earning power.
When the question is phrased as "have/make a decent amount of money," the results are different:https://t.co/8YpmtD7RnP

— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) November 20, 2018

This is a pretty good point, and the YouGov survey she links to puts money far down the list of women's concerns (last, by volume):

While I think this is an important distinction, it's also important to know what women do rather than say. And while I cannot make any unambiguous claims here, it seems there is a gap between what women claim they want, versus who they actually end up marrying — or even dating. I've previously covered the latter in the context of Tinder, a male-centric dating site that reduces its users to a photo and a swipe — the "hot or not" visual approach that men use as a first-cut means to assess women. That men can get away with this is largely due to demographic influences: women only infrequently marry down in either earning power or educational status, creating an artificial shortage of "eligible" men. More, a marginally-employed husband increases the annual divorce risk by one-third, and an unemployed husband increases the risk of either partner dissolving the marriage (emboldening mine):

We noted the asymmetric nature of gender change, such that, despite increases in women’s employment, there is little toleration for men not remaining employed breadwinners. A deviation from this norm appears to make either partner more likely to leave.
...
Consider this broad-brush interpretation of our findings: men’s nonemployment increases divorce because it violates norms, while women’s employment increases divorce by providing a way to support oneself outside marriage for women deeply unsatisfied with their marriages, not because it violates norms. Both of these effects probably emanate from the greater change in women’s than men’s roles; women’s employment has increased and is accepted, men’s nonemployment is unacceptable to many, and there is cultural ambivalence and lack of institutional support for men taking on “feminized” roles such as household work and emotional support. Women’s employment is translated into exit rather than voice in many cases because the changes that would most increase women’s marital satisfaction would entail men “feminizing” their roles in a way that many are still ambivalent about and institutions don’t support. Men’s breadwinning is still so culturally mandated that when it is absent, both men and women are more likely to find that the marital partnership doesn’t deserve to continue.

It's probably worth a deeper dive into the US Census Bureau's Current Population Survey to see how these numbers are affected by recency of marriage.

Revisiting Tinder: The Even Worse News For Unmarried Young Women

David M. Buss in Edge has a thought-provoking essay about the dating crisis among educated young women, something I've treated elsewhere recently. Largely manufactured by women's dating preferences (and a reduction in the number of young men coming out of universities as a fraction of the whole graduate population), he has a take on it that I didn't really appreciate: the nature of male sexuality means such young women face competition from below their own socioeconomic level as well:

Additional elements of the mating mind exacerbate it. A key cause stems from the qualities women seek in committed mateships. Most women are unwilling to settle for men who are less educated, less intelligent, and less professionally successful than they are. The flip side is that men are less exacting on precisely these dimensions, choosing to prioritize, for better or worse, other evolved criteria such as youth and appearance. So the initial sex ratio imbalance among educated groups gets worse for high achieving women. They end up being forced to compete for the limited pool of educated men not just with their more numerous educated rivals, but also with less educated women whom men find desirable on other dimensions.

But wait: Susan Patton's much-smirked-at advice to apply effort to find a husband while one is in college has some sensibility behind it, too? Because,

The depletion of educated men worsens when we add the impacts of age and divorce to the mating matrix. As men age, they desire women who are increasingly younger than they are. Intelligent, educated women may go for a less accomplished partner for a casual fling, but for a committed partner they typically want mates their own age or a few years older, and at least as educated and career-driven. Since education takes time, the sex ratio imbalance gets especially skewed among the highly educated—those who seek advanced degrees to become doctors, lawyers, or professors, or who climb the corporate ladder post-MBA. And because men are more likely than women to remarry following divorce and to marry women increasingly younger than they are—three years at first marriage, five at second, eight at third—the gender-biased mating ratio skews more sharply with increasing age.

Yikes. That's pretty fearsome odds, but on the other hand, one wonders just how much women past a certain point in their lives might want to quit the game altogether, or bat for the other side (i.e. take up lesbianism).

Tinder Is A Symptom

The Washington Post today has a terrific article on how Tinder is a consequence of an enormous and largely underreported gender imbalance in college-educated young people. I knew it was big, but these numbers go way beyond anything I had imagined (emboldening is all mine):

As I argue in “DATE-ONOMICS: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” the college and post-college hookup culture is a byproduct, not of Tinder or Facebook (another target of modern scolds), but of shifting demographics among the college-educated. Much as the death toll of WWI caused a shortage of marriageable men in the 1920s, today’s widening gender gap in college enrollment has created unequal numbers in the post-college dating pool.

In 2012, 34 percent more women than men graduated from American colleges, and the U.S. Department of Education expects this gap to reach 47 percent by 2023. The imbalance has spilled over into the post-college dating scene. According to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are now 5.5 million college-educated women in the United States between the ages of 22 and 29 vs. 4.1 million such men. In other words, the dating pool for straight, millennial, college graduates has four women for every three men. No wonder some men are in no rush to settle down and more women are giving up on what used to be called “playing hard to get.”

Wow. Jon Birger's piece comes in response to a Vanity Fair essay, "Tinder And The Dawn Of The Dating Apocalypse", which posits that the Internet itself is to blame for this state of affairs. But Birger's got it right: men wouldn't be in this position if there weren't a "surplus" of women. And I use those scare quotes for a reason, because men in their twenties are, as ever, in a slight surplus as of the last census (about 51% of that age group, PDF). For all the talk of equality, women still gravitate toward men making more money than themselves, and of higher social status. Marrying down is just not something one does.

In that light, there is another dating crisis, but one that doesn't get nearly as much attention: that of the displaced males without college educations (and consequently, with little hope of earning a decent living) who have silently been erased from this picture. Young women still value male financial contributions above any other single criterion in a potential mate. If young women have it hard in the dating game, at least they can pay for cat food. Meanwhile, a generation of young men lies ignored.

Everything Is Bullying

I ran into Julia Shaw's two year old essay on why marrying young was a good idea (at least for her):

Marriage wasn’t something we did after we’d grown up—it was how we have grown up and grown together. We’ve endured the hardships of typical millennials: job searches, job losses, family deaths, family conflict, financial fears, and career concerns. The stability, companionship, and intimacy of marriage enabled us to overcome our challenges and develop as individuals and a couple. We learned how to be strong for one another, to comfort, to counsel, and to share our joys and not just our problems.

Marriage, as she sees it, is a strength in her own life. So, go, her, though it appears her marriage just proves a rule from recent research that there's considerable evidence that marrying or cohabiting before age 23 is likely to result in a breakup, while marriages/cohabitations set up after that age are statistically much stronger. But mostly, what I wanted to treat was Amanda Marcotte's predictably silly reaction to Shaw's essay, and in particular, this:

Not that any of this matters anyway. Watching conservatives desperately try to bully women into younger marriage with a couple of promises and a whole lot of threats is highly entertaining but clearly not persuasive.

The word I take issue with there is "bully". How is Shaw "bullying" anyone? Is she harassing Marcotte, or anyone else for that matter? Or is it simply that arguing in favor of a life you have led and love that has brought you happiness you wish to share with others amounts to contradicting Marcotte's third-wave feminist narrative, and thus wrongthink? Feminism has become totalitarian and expansionist in its dotage, as witness this cartoon about makeup (!); "the personal is the political" is really just another way of saying, "get in line, you".

Why I'm Not Celebrating Obergefell

My Facebook timeline is awash with people who have chosen to rainbow-ize their profile pictures in solidarity with yesterday's momentous Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. In truth, I'm very happy for my gay and lesbian friends, who may now enter into marriage in all fifty states. And yet, the truth also is, I don't feel much like celebrating with Andrew Sullivan, who posted his first entry after announcing his retirement from blogging back in February. For all that the profoundly conservative gay marriage movement has succeeded in extending acceptance to homosexuality, I find the manner with which it was accomplished to be deeply troubling, and for reasons that Sullivan orbits but never quite touches on:

I remember one of the first TV debates I had on the then-strange question of civil marriage for gay couples. It was Crossfire, as I recall, and Gary Bauer’s response to my rather earnest argument after my TNR cover-story on the matter was laughter. “This is the loopiest idea ever to come down the pike,” he joked. “Why are we even discussing it?”

Those were isolating  days. A young fellow named Evan Wolfson who had written a dissertation on the subject in 1983 got in touch, and the world immediately felt less lonely. Then a breakthrough in Hawaii, where the state supreme court ruled for marriage equality on gender equality grounds. No gay group had agreed to support the case, which was regarded at best as hopeless and at worst, a recipe for a massive backlash. A local straight attorney from the ACLU, Dan Foley, took it up instead, one of many straight men and women who helped make this happen. And when we won, and got our first fact on the ground, we indeed faced exactly that backlash and all the major gay rights groups refused to spend a dime on protecting the breakthrough … and we lost.

In fact, we lost and lost and lost again. Much of the gay left was deeply suspicious of this conservative-sounding reform; two thirds of the country were opposed; the religious right saw in the issue a unique opportunity for political leverage – and over time, they put state constitutional amendments against marriage equality on the ballot in countless states, and won every time. Our allies deserted us. The Clintons embraced the Defense of Marriage Act, and their Justice Department declared that DOMA was in no way unconstitutional the morning some of us were testifying against it on Capitol Hill. For his part, president George W. Bush subsequently went even further and embraced the Federal Marriage Amendment to permanently ensure second-class citizenship for gay people in America. Those were dark, dark days.

I recall all this now simply to rebut the entire line of being “on the right side of history.” History does not have such straight lines. Movements do not move relentlessly forward; progress comes and, just as swiftly, goes. For many years, it felt like one step forward, two steps back. History is a miasma of contingency, and courage, and conviction, and chance.

Which is to say, what it really took, frankly, was this:

Gay marriage is nearly as accepted as heterosexual marriage, and among millennials, the numbers are an avalanche, approaching 80%. It is popularly accepted as a right, and therefore acceptable to defend. Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion for the majority cited four major reasons for accepting the plaintiff's case: individual autonomy, right to intimate association, safeguarding children and families, and marriage as a foundation of American social order. But ironically, it's Justice John Roberts who chooses deference to politically expressed preference in social order. "It can be tempting for judges to confuse our own preferences with the requirements of the law."

It is ... about whether, in our democratic republic, that decision should rest with the people acting through their elected representatives, or with five lawyers who happen to hold commissions authorizing them to resolve legal disputes according to law.

 Which is to say, we have a Supreme Court Chief Justice who believes that rights are subject to popular review. The same man who, in Obergefell, wrote "this Court is not a legislature" only the day before in King v. Burwell felt it meet to substitute policy aims over the literal text of the Affordable Care Act — i.e. to act exactly in the place of a legislature. And if Obamacare isn't exactly popular, it's apparently not unpopular enough for the Republicans to deliver a viable alternative — or for the Court to overturn it. In both cases, Roberts counsels deference, which is to say, he advocates for a kind of slow-motion, legalistic mob rule. For anyone familiar with the historical treatment of homosexuals, Jews, blacks, gypsies, and any other hated minority, that is a deeply terrifying prospect.

Correlation != Causality: Porn And Marriage

I've already had several people post this Washington Post Wonkblog piece about porn and marriage which asserts that young men aren't getting married because they are consuming more porn, and thus no longer need women, or something:

Broadly, higher Internet usage was associated with lower marriage rates. But pornography use in particular was more closely linked to those participants who were not married than any other form of Internet use, including regular use of financial websites, news websites, sports websites, and several others. The opposite, for comparison, was true for religious website use, which was positively correlated with marriage.

"The natural reaction might be to dismiss the findings as confirmations of an obviousness", they continue, "that men who are married tend to look at porn less frequently precisely because they are married." Well, duh, but maybe we could lift a finger to see, perhaps, why young men might be unmarried? That, of course, is a question the Wonkblog probably doesn't want answered truthfully, because of their political biases.

Asking young women what they want in a potential mate, a poll by the Pew Research Center in September revealed that 78% want a man with a stable job; no single answer by men was even close to that high. That is to say, young women — despite years of feminist action — overwhelmingly value men for their economic contributions. So why might young men, particularly young and poor men, not be getting married? The answer is obvious if you look at youth labor participation, with some observers speculating that structural youth unemployment may well be permanent. While it's been hotly debated whether Obamacare and a recent minimum wage step increase have contributed toward this, it is incontestable that youth unemployment remains stubbornly high. If young men, especially young men without college degrees, are to marry, their job prospects must improve, and dramatically.