Decadence, the Corruption of Status Hierarchies, & Female Hypergamy
A Response to Rob Henderson’s Article “All the Single Ladies”

3,000 words

In the comment section responding to my essay “Hooking Up,” I found a reference to an article called “All the Single Ladies” by journalist Rob Henderson. I am grateful—it is a fascinating piece for any observer of the contemporary sexual scene. The gist is that women in the world of higher education are having extreme difficulty finding suitable mates due to their numerical predominance on campuses. Just as my own writings have described, a situation has developed where too many women are chasing too few men. But Henderson’s article will find more favor with many readers since it expresses strong sympathy for the ladies’ predicament—and perhaps not so much for the men. A deflater of female pretentions must swim against a strong current originating in the male protective instinct. Skeptical as my observation of female behavior have made me, however, I do not actually enjoy seeing women lonely and miserable. The coeds described in Henderson’s article have never done me any harm, and I would like to help a few of them understand the situation in which they find themselves. That situation has been a long time in the making, however, and clarifying it will require a somewhat lengthy argument.

Henderson’s Article

Let us begin with a brief summary of the main points Henderson makes in “All the Single Ladies.” He begins by noting that “women, on average, prefer educated men.” Two of the strongest predictors of how many responses a man’s online dating profile receives are years of formal education and income. A controlled experiment holding all other factors constant found that women were 91 percent more likely to hit the “like” button for a man with a master’s degree than a bachelor’s. In that minority of marriages where the wife has enjoyed more formal education than her husband, the husband almost always (93 percent of the time) earns more money. If a man trails a woman in both education and income, his chances of finding acceptance from her approach zero. Men looking for a woman, on the other hand, care far less about either education or real or potential earnings.

From the point of view of economic rationality, a highly credentialed, high-earning woman should have less need of finding those same traits in a husband. But women’s sexual instinct does not obey the principle of economic rationality: the more a woman has achieved herself, the greater the stress she places on finding a mate of higher achievement still. This means, of course, that the dramatic expansion in academic and professional opportunities for women in recent decades has led to proportionately massive female loneliness and sexual frustration.

There are 5.5 million college-educated women between the ages of 22 and 29 in America today vs. only 4.1 million men. That translates into four women for every three men in this dating pool, or an excess of 1.4 million women. The resulting competition for scarce men leads to bad behavior among the men on campus, who find themselves able to pursue short-term relationships and sexual variety. Women at institutions of higher education will often engage in sex with such men simply for the chance to be in their company, but they do not necessarily enjoy it very much. Indeed, in what may sound like a paradox, women actually have more sex rather than less in environments where they outnumber men: it just tends to be lousy sex.

On STEM-heavy campuses like Caltech men still outnumber women and continue to court them by seeking to demonstrate commitment. But such campuses are getting rarer. A girl from heavily female-dominant Sarah Lawrence College is quoted as saying: “One of my friends was dumped by a guy after they’d been hooking up for less than a week. When he broke up with her, the guy actually used the word ‘market’—like the ‘market’ for him was just too good.”

This is, of course, the sort of thing that drives the editors at Chronicles into a frenzy. But women press their advantage in the battle of the sexes just as strongly as men wherever conditions permit. It is not a matter of these men being fiends: a whole system of perverse incentives has somehow arisen, and correcting it is going to require more than simply denouncing or punishing men. Indeed, traditional morality placed less emphasis on exhorting men not to accept sex in such situations than on commanding women not to provide it. That Sarah Lawrence coed simply learned the hard way why this used to be done.

Feminism is big on campuses where women outnumber men. The men cannot be relied on, so women respond by trying to become “strong and independent,” as the cliché runs: in Henderson’s words, they seek to “reduce their social, economic and political dependence on men.” In societies with an excess of men, on the other hand, the men are more interested in trying to adapt themselves to women. The men are dependable, so women depend on them. The author does note one supposed drawback, however: “women in such societies were more likely to be cast in stereotypical gender roles.”

Later in the article, the author broadens his scope from the campus to the wider society. Here there exists no shortage of men: as of 2022, there were 1.048 boys born for every girl in the United States. As parents used to assure their romantically forlorn offspring: “For every girl there is a boy.” Off campus we find plenty of unattached young men; the difficulty is that the frustrated coeds described above would never consider them as possible mates due to their lack of education or earning power. What are these young men doing with themselves?

Most are working, of course. But unfortunately, a growing number are unemployed or underemployed: “among never-married adults, for every 100 women, there are only 84 employed men. If all employed men were suddenly taken, every sixth woman would be partner-less.” And what do young men who are neither working nor in higher education do with their abundant free time? Mostly, they play video games. To a lesser but still worrisome extent, they view pornography. Average hours worked by men aged 21-30 declined by 12 percent between 2000 and 2015, and leisure increased proportionally. Around 75 percent of this leisure time is accounted for by gaming, which has become very big business. Young men are naturally interested in fighting and sex. Video games give them a risk-free virtual experience of combat, and can even provide a sense of accomplishment as players gradually improve their skills (although the skills are of little value outside the games themselves). And of course, porn offers fake sex. Both provide phony satisfaction of needs men have inherited from our evolutionary past, and so can be highly addictive for men with little else to do. Surveys of self-reported happiness indicate that at least when they are younger, these men are fairly content. As Henderson cautiously notes, however, such substitutes are unlikely to carry them through life.

So we have some college men gaining status and gathering harems while many noncollege men must console themselves with fake fighting and fake sex. “All the Single Ladies” closes by making a point I have been hammering away at for nearly twenty years now:

In a deregulated market, power laws dominate. At no point in history have all men in a given society been equally desirable. Today, though, the disparity between men is particularly pronounced. And the gap shows no sign of slowing or closing.

The reader of my recent essay “Hooking Up” will see that this description of contemporary sexual dysfunction partially overlaps with my own. The main differences are that I talk about what happens on campus, stressing the hierarchy of attractiveness (which for men includes status), whereas Henderson emphasizes campus sex ratios and the status and behavioral contrasts between men on and off campus.

My Response Part One: The Corruption of the Educational Status Hierarchy

As I see it, the major flaw in Henderson’s portrait of contemporary sexual mores is his disregard of a drastic equivocation contained in the term “education”—one with a strong bearing on its relation to status, and hence men’s sexual attractiveness. I understand education to refer primarily to three sorts of things: 1) the acquisition of knowledge and skills, 2) the training and sharpening of the mind both for its own sake and for the pursuit of external ends, and 3) the transmission of a cultural patrimony to the rising generation of a specific people.

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Education involves these goals at all levels, from the primary instruction offered to all normal children to the higher education traditionally provided only to the most promising young adults. The shift in the content of education from the primary to the tertiary level can be explained not only by the natural growth of the human mind as it approaches adulthood but also partly in terms of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Human beings’ most basic needs are physiological: food, warmth, sleep, and the like. When these have been satisfied, people go on to seek safety, then relations with their fellow human beings, then esteem and a sense of accomplishment. Once they have satisfied all these needs, they can concern themselves with higher yet more nebulous ambitions such as creativity, reaching one’s full potential, or self-actualization. Maslow’s hierarchy runs from needs that are urgent for all men yet concrete and well-defined, to immaterial and vague goals that are not particularly urgent for most of us most of the time. It is often represented as a pyramid, with a broad base gradually narrowing as one moves toward the upper levels. In healthy societies, the very peak of Maslow’s pyramid is so small that it is possible to name many of the men occupying it: names like Goethe, Pascal, Da Vinci, Leibniz, and Mozart.

Higher education is an elite enterprise concerned mainly with matters fairly high up Maslow’s pyramid, though the men occupied with it are not normally those at the very top. The character and quality of the higher education a nation provides for its young elites says much about it and is one of the best measures of its advancement.

We inhabitants of the West are living through a late phase of our culture, in a society gone flabby from prolonged prosperity. A leading characteristic of such phases is that Maslow’s pyramid becomes top-heavy: too many people are working on self-realization and not enough are growing turnips. Everyone forgets about the necessities of life to focus on luxuries. This results in an evolutionary mismatch. We are adapted to an environment where most people spend most of their time securing basic needs, and relatively little on creativity and trying to reach their full potential. When large numbers of people naturally suited to growing food and providing security are drafted into the world of higher education instead, strange things start to happen there, and the nature of education itself is inevitably and profoundly altered.

How does this process operate? The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre once drew a contrast between practices and institutions: practices are forms of human activity that provide social benefits, and institutions are human organizations created to foster, protect, and perpetuate such practices. For example, medicine is a practice which combats illness, thus extending and improving human lives. But medical practice would be unable to flourish for long without being embodied in institutions: primarily hospitals, but also including research laboratories, medical schools, etc.

The point at which MacIntyre was driving is that there exist ends or goods proper to practices themselves and ends proper to the institutions established to foster the practices—and these two sets of ends are not identical. They may even conflict. For example, the end pursued by the practice of medicine is the combatting of illness. Hospitals are set up to foster this practice. Yet those in charge of hospitals eventually and almost inevitably start making decisions with a view not so much to the quality of medicine being practiced there as to what is good for the hospital itself. Marble flooring might be installed, e.g., or a public relations campaign staged to increase institutional prestige and attract external funding—but without necessarily contributing anything to the curing of patients.

Many examples could be cited of how what is good for institutions may be given priority over the needs of the practices they were established to foster, but the principle aim of institutions considered as such is usually growth. The bigger the hospital becomes, the more people it can employ and the greater the rewards available to them. Examples of absurdly unjustified institutional growth are easy to find. Here is just one: in 1914, fewer than 4400 men administered the Royal British Navy, the largest in the world; by 1967, over 33,000 men were being paid to administer a Navy that had largely ceased to exist. This did nothing for British Naval power, obviously, but it benefited the administrators themselves.

Education is obviously an important human practice in the sense intended by MacIntyre. The goods or ends it pursues are mainly the three already stated: the acquisition of knowledge, the improvement of the mind, and the transmission of a cultural patrimony. The great European universities were established during the Middle Ages as places where a few men could cultivate rational debate, be trained in canon law, and study the works of Aristotle. The first scholars often literally did not have a roof to protect them from the rain. Gradually, universities acquired better physical endowments, but for centuries academic life remained the preserve of a small minority. In early America one had to demonstrate mastery of Greek and Latin before being admitted to a college. As late as 1910, only six percent of Americans graduated from secondary school, to say nothing of higher studies.

The first seven decades of the twentieth century witnessed reckless, headlong growth in educational institutions. This required drawing in students ever lower down the hierarchy of natural gifts. First attendance and then completion of secondary school became nearly universal. Then, following the Second World War and the GI Bill, tertiary institutions simply exploded. By 1975, 27 percent of men and 22.5 percent of women were earning bachelor’s degrees (up from 7.5 percent and 5 percent respectively on the eve of the war).

Enrollment plateaued soon after because a minimum IQ of about 115 was still considered necessary for a young person to derive much benefit from a college education. But even that weak standard has been eroding in recent years. A recent meta-analysis found that while the average American undergraduate in 1960 had an IQ of 120, the figure has now sunk to 102, equal to that of the average white American. There is no longer anything “higher” about higher education. Obviously, instruction has had to shift accordingly. As the late columnist Joe Sobran famously quipped: “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching Remedial English in college.”

Worthwhile learning has been replaced in part by frivolous classes in basket weaving, but often the new substitutes are worse than any frivolity: the students are indoctrinated in pernicious ideological fixations such as antiracism, feminism, post-colonial theory, etc. A powerful factor favoring this shift is precisely the lower intelligence of undergraduates. The ideological courses are far simpler in content that genuine academic study and almost impossible to do badly in unless a student is reckless enough to dispute the ideas presented. Why should a mediocre student risk his grade point average trying to master formal logic, particle physics, or the history of the Protestant Reformation when he can take oppression studies and get an easy “A”?

The scholarship produced by academics has gone through a similar change. This may have begun in schools of education, where young doctoral candidates have long occupied themselves with such weighty matters as the best way to arrange tables and chairs in an elementary school lunch cafeteria. But the nonsense has spread throughout the humanities and social sciences, and is now threatening STEM education.

Evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton recently did a short video on a completely unremarkable young female academic who just received a doctorate from Cambridge University with a dissertation entitled Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. According to Dutton, the

thesis shows how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse, the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates, in structuring our social world. The broad aim is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression.

Essentially, what the young lady did was read some feminist novels by Virginia Woolf, note all the passages referring to odors, and then fit them into a ready-made interpretive scheme built around the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.

I have not read her dissertation, so it is just possible I am being unfair—although I doubt it. It hardly matters, however, for I only mention this young woman as a convenient example. Whatever the qualities of her work, most academic dissertations are now every bit as pointless and absurd as what I have just described. This particular thesis achieved notoriety only because the author bragged about her accomplishment online and was met with gales of scorn from the general public. Dutton claims that hers is far from the worst dissertation he has heard about. For comparison he mentions Dr. Desiree Odom’s A Multiple Marginalized Intersectional Black Lesbian Leader: A Critical Feminist Autoethnographic Narrative. In plain English, this woman wrote a doctoral thesis on herself.

Some legitimate and worthwhile learning and scholarship still goes on within universities, but it is under threat due to a kind of Gresham’s Law of the intellect whereby bad scholarship drives out good. In sum, the utopian attempt to extend the benefits of higher education to the general public has led to a catastrophic decline in the practice of education itself. And we must bear in mind that the very attempt was only made possible by the unexampled material prosperity of America and other Western nations, i.e., their success at securing the more urgent needs farther down Maslow’s pyramid.

To be continued.