How A Shortage of Men Affects Dating in College & Church

How a shortage of men leads to a hook-up culture in colleges. The quoted text is from this article by Richard Whitmire [Microsoft Word File]. Read his associated blog post here.

Last year, the writer Laura Sessions Stepp created a stir with her book Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, which described what the author says is lost as young men and women move away from traditional romantic relationships and toward fleeting sexual encounters. Not only are women gambling with their health, argues Stepp, but they are making decisions they will regret in future years. The hookup culture could leave them bereft of the skills to build real relationships later in life. Whether Stepp is "retro," as some of her critics charged, may be less important than the fact that the hookup culture shows no signs of reversal.

One key element to the pickup culture, however, remains unreported: American colleges are undergoing a striking gender shift. In 2015 the average college graduating class will be 60-percent female, according to the U.S. Education Department. Some colleges have already reached or passed that threshold, which allows anecdotal insights into how those imbalances affect the pickup culture. What can be seen so far is not encouraging: Stark gender imbalances appear to act as an accelerant on the hookup culture.

Biologists and social scientists can't be surprised by that observation. In the animal kingdom, it is well known that whichever sex is in short supply has the upper hand.

College campuses are not immune to such laws of nature, something I glimpsed while doing research into why boys are lagging in literacy skills and college attendance. In 2006 I visited James Madison University, a public university with 17,000 students. At the time, women made up 61 percent of the campus population.

As a result of the rising gender imbalances, the university has become "female centric." But while women may run the clubs, dominate in classes, and generally define the character of the university, the law of supply and demand rules the social scene. That's why the women are both competitive in seeking men and submissive in lowering their standards.

Men at the university don't dispute what the women say. "Since there's such an overwhelming number of girls, they have such competition between each other to get a guy," a male junior admitted. "The guys here aren't stupid. They're plenty aware of that and know that girls have to get into a fight over them, instead of what's normal with guys courting girls."

Does this mean that college campuses with a shortage of women will be more prone to have a traditional courting culture? Or are there spill-over effects from nearby colleges? (At male-heavy Virginia Tech, guys would simply go over to Radford to get a better ratio.)

Read the whole thing and be sure to check out the author's blog, WhyBoysFail.com.

What About Churches?

To a certain extent, you should also expect to see a similar effect in religious groups where women nearly always outnumber the men. Certainly a counter effect is in play where most large religious groups have more traditional sexual mores than the average of the population. On the other hand, this may explain why many singles groups I've seen at churches have so little relationship activity taking place. If there's an environment with 50 women and 25 guys, it's unlikely the guys will feel overly motivated to fight over the women with quite the vigor the women might prefer. However, for men devoted to their religion, they less likely to lower their sexual mores in the same way college students do.

Assuming levels of religious devotion are positively correlated with strict sexual mores, it seems like this would lead to several effects:

1) Men who have less devotion to their religion will find lower-cost substitutes and date outside the religion and/or less devoted women.

2) Men who have more devotion may pay the high price to date devoted women, but in lower quantities than either gender would prefer, leading to low rates of traditional courtship.

3) Women with less devotion may lower their standards and date men outside the religion and/or men with less devotion.

4) Women with higher levels of devotion will maintain their high price in a market with an oversupply of similarly high-priced competitors.

It seems like this scenario would cause less devoted people to leave the group in the long-run, with the religious sexual mores having a similar effect to a price-floor for highly devoted people. This would lead to an excess supply of highly-devoted women charging "high prices" in the dating market, leading to lower levels of courtship than would exist at the "optimum".

This describes what I have seen in many Christian groups. Could it be that the maintenance of high levels of sexual mores actually leads to an underprovision of dating? (Note: I'm not arguing for a change, just observing effects.) In the long-run, this may actually serve as an incentive for religiously devoted people to stay married once they get married and help partially explain why people with high levels of church attendance have lower rates of divorce. Paradoxically, what's bad for dating could actually be good for marriage. This phenomenon may also explain why many women at Christian colleges scramble to try to get their "Mrs. degree" before they graduate.

(HT Todd Zywicki)