Sterile Polygamy

Description

Aporia:

“t we’ve invented a new mating system. It has the sexual inequality of polygamy with fertility closer to a celibate religious order. The harem without the children. The monastery without the prayers.

No one announced this revolution. There was no manifesto, no movement, no moment when the old order ended and the new one began. The Pill arrived. Women entered the workforce. Divorce was destigmatized. Dating apps were launched. Each change seemed incremental and was framed as expanding freedom, which it did. But the cumulative effect was far from positive. We still use the old words — marriage, dating, relationship — the way Russians kept calling their country the Soviet Union for months after it had ceased to exist.

…

As late as the 1950s, an unmarried man would be passed over for promotion. Such a man was seen as unstable, unserious. Then there was the most powerful incentive of all: sex. For most of history, premarital sex was genuinely difficult to obtain. Women who had it faced social ruin. Men who wanted regular access had one reliable path: marriage. Women traded sexual access for commitment. Men traded commitment for sexual access. Neither side could easily defect.

The Pill broke the incentives driving these cultural institutions. Now, sex could be reliably separated from reproduction. The downstream cultural attitudes survived, mostly, for another generation or so. They’re now passing away.

Marriage has become optional in a way it never was before. This is genuine progress — I wouldn’t suggest returning to a world where women needed husbands to survive. The freedoms are real and worth having. But a system can be freer and also more fragile. The question isn’t whether the old constraints were good. It’s whether the new equilibrium can sustain itself.”

(https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/sterile-polygamy)

Statistics

A global unraveling of fertility

“In the United States, the share of young adults aged 18-29 reporting no sex in the past year doubled between 2010 and 2024 — from 12% to 24%. The increase was driven by men. At the 2018 peak, 28% of men under 30 reported no sex in the past year, compared to 18% of women.

On dating apps, women’s average match rate is 31%; men’s is 2.6% — a 12-fold difference. The most desirable men receive overwhelming attention while the majority receive almost nothing.

In South Korea, the 4B movement (no dating, no sex, no marriage, no childbirth) has contributed to the lowest fertility rate ever recorded: 0.72 children per woman. Deaths outnumber births. In Japan, 40% of never-married adults aged 18-34 have never had sex. The population is projected to fall from 124 million to 87 million by 2070.

If you’re older than 45, you likely live in a world where people still got married. The figures above may feel like dispatches from another planet. They’re not. They’re dispatches from the other half of your own country. Among women born in 1980, 71% of college graduates were married by 45. Among those without degrees, it was only 52%. Marriage has become a luxury good. And all groups are converging toward the same destination: below replacement fertility.”

- Aporia [1]