The Art of Manliness - #173： Date-onomics -- How Skewed Sex Ratios on College Campuses Are Affecting Courtship and Marriage

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast in the past few

00:00:18.660 decades there's been a lot of ink spilled about the changing mores in the world of romance in

00:00:22.840 the western world a lot of social critics have been sounding alarm about the hookup culture

00:00:26.780 the declining rates of marriage and the rise of cohabitation there's often times a lot of the

00:00:32.800 reasons put out there why these shifts are happening is you know changing values in the

00:00:37.120 western world well my guest today on the podcast has just published a book where he says it's not

00:00:41.820 so much changing values as changing demographics that's underlying the shift in dating in marriage

00:00:47.340 behaviors his name is john berger he's the author of the book datanomics how dating became a lopsided

00:00:52.120 numbers game and today on the podcast we discuss the research that john highlights in his book about

00:00:57.300 how sex ratios that is the number of men to women or women and men can affect dating behavior mating

00:01:03.260 behavior in men and women it's a really fascinating discussion about dating so if you are in the dating

00:01:09.560 world right now you're going to find a lot of insights even if you're not you might find some

00:01:13.300 insights as a parent that you've probably seen and you've wondered why what's going on here now you'll

00:01:18.180 understand maybe have a new way to look at what understand what's going on so without further ado

00:01:23.060 datanomics with john berger

00:01:24.900 john berger welcome to the show brett thanks for having me on you just published a really interesting

00:01:40.680 book it's called datanomics and it takes a really interesting approach to dating and love life and

00:01:47.740 romance and marriage it takes a looks at demographics and almost takes it like a economic approach and

00:01:55.700 so this led you to these interesting sociological even uh darwinian theories about how sex ratios or

00:02:04.880 demographics can affect i guess we'll call it mating behavior or dating behavior so how what are some

00:02:12.120 these theories about how sex ratios can affect how men and women uh mate or partner up well so there's

00:02:20.080 been a surprising amount of social science and behavioral science on gender ratios um and actually

00:02:28.440 most of it kind of grew out of of animal studies out of zoology so zoologists who who've looked at

00:02:35.820 species that are nominally monogamous or at least monogamous during mating season one of the

00:02:41.800 things that they found is that the odds of the of the male abandoning his feet or his female mate

00:02:50.220 tend to rise and fall depending upon the prevailing sex ratio in the mating population

00:02:56.960 um so sociologists and psychologists kind of use the the animal research to look at human behavior

00:03:05.540 and what they found is that when men are the ones in oversupply the whole dating culture is more

00:03:12.820 likely to emphasize monogamy and courtship and romance and marriage rates are higher that kind of

00:03:18.580 thing but when women are in oversupply um the dating culture does not emphasize monogamy there's kind of a 1.00

00:03:27.020 more freewheeling sexuality um marriage rates go down divorce rates go up out of wedlock births go up

00:03:35.540 and basically the whole culture becomes more sexualized because men are in no rush to settle

00:03:42.200 down right so this kind of this is where the economics sort of angle comes in at it right so

00:03:46.920 i guess when there's more women available there's more opportunity for men like there's really no 0.99

00:03:51.000 reason to settle down and you can cast your wild oats right there's more of a you're more for men 0.65

00:03:56.760 there's more in their self-interest to do that than to settle down with just one woman

00:04:00.200 right no exactly so and and i should i should preface this by saying overall in the u.s

00:04:07.880 there are just as many women as men um the the problem i write about in the book specifically refers

00:04:15.500 to college educated people right so this is what you mean by the man deficit right right so so the

00:04:21.780 obviously the u.s is not china we're not india um there isn't like this this structural imbalance

00:04:29.300 where you actually have more men than women overall because of female infanticide or sex 0.96

00:04:35.880 selection or things like that uh overall you know our our numbers are about the same the problem is

00:04:42.060 that women have been have been attending college at a much higher rate than men going back you know

00:04:48.360 like for the past 10 years it's been four women graduating for every three men 20 years ago it was 0.96

00:04:55.840 about five women for every four men so basically for millennials you have about 35 percent more 0.97

00:05:03.060 female college graduates than male college graduates and this might not matter if we were all more 1.00

00:05:10.240 open-minded about whom we date and marry but at the same time this has happened there's been an

00:05:16.040 increase in what sociologists uh like to call assortative mating which is a fancy way of saying we tend to 1.00

00:05:22.600 marry our own type um in other words college grads tend to marry other college grads and and and people

00:05:29.640 have become more rigid about this over time you know the the odds of a college grad marrying a non-college

00:05:36.680 grad are lower today than any point over the past 50 years so for men this kind of i guess you could

00:05:46.000 call it classism or closed-mindedness it doesn't really penalize them because there's such a big

00:05:52.720 oversupply of women but for women for college educated women it has two effects one by limiting 1.00

00:05:59.960 their dating pool to only college educated men they're making it statistically harder for them

00:06:05.240 to find a match but but they're also kind of um giving those college college grad men too much leverage

00:06:14.120 and they're kind of giving them the ability to act badly because these guys know they're in in high

00:06:20.180 supply i'm sorry high demand yeah so i mean there's a lot to unpack there so i mean why have fewer men

00:06:27.400 been going to college in the world why have more women going to college than men is it a matter of is it 1.00

00:06:32.620 economics where it's i mean men could um there's more of a payoff to just go to work right away than to

00:06:38.000 go to college or is it just the changing the economy what's going on there well you could talk

00:06:44.560 to you could interview 10 people on this and you might get you know 10 different answers i'll give

00:06:48.940 you my answer but i'm going to preface it by saying yeah there are other thoughts on this but i i don't

00:06:54.360 think it's the economy um i think this basically boils down to some child development issues which we all

00:07:02.000 need to focus on more so if we had this conversation in the 50s the numbers would have

00:07:08.300 essentially been reversed um it would have been about 60 men in college for every 40 women and 1.00

00:07:15.040 obviously you know 50 years ago there were different things going on that you know the college

00:07:20.600 the school public school curricula kind of um uh advantaged boys and discriminated against girls and

00:07:29.700 certainly colleges when it came to admissions um were clearly discriminating against female 1.00

00:07:35.080 applicants because there was this this silly embedded idea out there that women only went to college to 1.00

00:07:40.960 get their mrs degree um and the the passage of title nine in the 70s leveled the playing field

00:07:48.340 and it made discrimination in in education illegal um so over time that leveled the playing field and

00:07:57.060 and by the early 80s we got to 50 50 when it comes to college enrollment um so the question is how do we

00:08:05.420 get from um equal numbers of men and women attending college in the early 80s to 35 percent more women than

00:08:14.420 men today and my argument is that the old discrimination that used to exist um against women it kind of

00:08:23.040 obscured a fundamental biological truth and that is that boys brains lag about a year behind girls

00:08:31.380 brains when it comes to intellectual and social maturity and if you if you're a parent we all kind of

00:08:39.080 intuit this and feel this i mean if i mean my i have teenage boys and hopefully they won't listen to

00:08:47.100 this but maybe they they probably know it as well i mean if you if you are around teenagers you kind of

00:08:53.340 know that a 16 or a 17 year old girl is essentially a young woman while a 16 year old boy

00:09:00.760 is still very much a boy and um and this comes out in in education and researchers and and neurologists

00:09:12.320 who've studied this will tell you that um a the boy of the brain of say a 10 year old girl um is

00:09:21.280 close to that of an 11 year old boy when it comes to development and brain development so the boys are

00:09:27.780 like lagging a year behind the girls and that's why when it comes to actual school work and college 0.98

00:09:34.980 preparation the girls are better at it gotcha so the more more boys aren't going to college they're just 0.94

00:09:40.820 not ready for it right well they're they're falling behind in school so 70 of high school

00:09:47.900 valedictorians last year were girls girls get better grades they have fewer behavioral problems

00:09:53.400 when it comes to school so when it comes to you know primary and secondary education boys are falling

00:10:01.140 behind and the fact that they're falling behind one of the consequences is that girls are attending 1.00

00:10:06.900 college at a higher rate gotcha gotcha that makes sense um so we i guess one of the solutions and

00:10:11.660 we'll get to that i guess we probably better talk about at the end is uh possibly holding boys back

00:10:15.980 in school yes right we'll talk more detail about that in a bit but um let's go back to this

00:10:21.180 assortative mating because i think it's interesting because yeah there's a lot of there's been a lot of

00:10:24.380 writing uh ink spilled about this topic that the rich are marrying the rich while the poor are

00:10:29.220 marrying the poor where there was a time in our country's history where there's a lot more

00:10:32.460 uh inter i guess cross social um relationships but i think it's interesting it wasn't wasn't that

00:10:38.700 like primarily men who would marry like college educated men who would marry women who didn't

00:10:43.980 have a college education and i guess is it like women are there's something going on there either 1.00

00:10:48.940 because we're conditioned socially where there's this tendency not to want to marry quote unquote down

00:10:53.940 right well i i think the trend has been that way for both men and it's for both men and women okay

00:10:59.840 so so men are less likely to marry down i don't love that i hate that phrase but i guess like it's

00:11:05.120 the only way to right convey it um men are less likely to a college educated man is also less

00:11:12.680 likely to marry somebody lacking a college degree compared to 50 years ago but as i said that that

00:11:19.100 the man who who is close-minded about dating he's not penalized in the same way the woman is because

00:11:27.820 the supply of college educated women is so great right so so the the trend has been the same for men

00:11:33.320 and women in terms of of of this increase in the sorts of mating um it just affects the women 1.00

00:11:40.100 differently gotcha so um where are i mean you talk about there's pockets in the country where

00:11:46.420 this man deficit is pretty extreme what are some of those pockets and maybe you can highlight some

00:11:51.320 of the stories you've heard uh of i don't know what you want to call it but just debauchery or just

00:11:57.100 like you know uh men who are just going out and just basically having a great time while it's

00:12:02.100 really hard for women yeah well let's start with the geography so i have to admit when i began work

00:12:08.680 on the book um i thought my research was going to end up someplace different from where it did

00:12:14.240 initially i assumed what i call the man deficit was some kind of of a phenomenon unique to

00:12:21.400 big cosmopolitan cities like new york or la or or chicago or london places like that what was so

00:12:29.900 interesting was that that this is not a big city phenomenon and in fact the the man deficit in say

00:12:38.080 montana is bigger than it is in new york city so um and actually there are lots of rural states where

00:12:44.360 that the the the dating market is much more lopsided than what you find in in big cities so

00:12:49.800 montana has 52 percent um more college grad women than men who are age 22 to 29 um oklahoma it's 45

00:13:01.200 percent uh texas 40 percent west virginia 61 percent so new york state it's 30 percent which is still big

00:13:09.700 but um you know what's interesting is that some of these more rural states the the the dating market

00:13:17.240 is even more lopsided when it comes to college educated people than than in new york or california

00:13:23.320 interesting so to your your your question about behavior um let me just say from the start that i'm i try

00:13:35.980 hard in the book and when talking about the book not to come across like the morality police yeah i

00:13:42.100 noticed that you did a good job with that yeah i mean i'm not you know i'm not um i'm not trying to

00:13:47.080 shame people about their sex lives or say that only men are into the hookup culture or no men want to

00:13:54.120 get married or women can't enjoy you know enjoy sexual freedoms i mean i really i'm not even endorsing

00:14:00.240 marriage for that matter so i i you know i when i talk sometimes when i tell these stories it makes

00:14:09.120 it sound like i'm judging these people for their sex lives and i'm really not i'm just trying to

00:14:14.580 explain why the world is the way it is sure okay so but but it is clear to me that that in

00:14:21.720 in in dating markets where men have all the leverage um the men become pickier and they become

00:14:31.800 uh less inclined to settle down and the women sensing that they're at a disadvantage um

00:14:42.040 and i don't know whether this is conscious or subconscious but but the whole dating climate

00:14:48.360 and sexual climate becomes looser because the men are the ones who are essentially making the rules

00:14:56.020 um so yeah i interviewed plenty of of women who felt like they were being used and taken advantage of 1.00

00:15:06.420 uh by uh by men who only wanted to sleep with them and then after a date or two you know they never

00:15:13.140 heard from them again um or from men who kind of felt like um you know they didn't have much success

00:15:22.040 dating wise in high school or college and suddenly things are going pretty well for that for them in

00:15:27.920 the late 20s and of course they're going to be in no rush to settle down because they finally have a chance

00:15:33.100 to do what they always wanted to do so i would i would hear you know stories like that if you want more

00:15:38.320 you want me to go into more more details no i mean i think we can begin to kind of people get the

00:15:43.060 general idea um i think it's interesting too but you talk about you go into depth about campuses

00:15:49.080 colleges yeah right and this was sort of i mean it is sort of controversial there's all this um in the

00:15:53.960 past year or so a lot of this uh a lot of controversy about you know the rape culture that exists on

00:15:59.900 campuses and there's uh i guess there's some folks out there they're making the case that

00:16:05.240 because that there are more women on college campuses than men it's sort of i don't want to 1.00

00:16:11.440 say it promotes it but it encourages more like looser sexual mores and then you get something that

00:16:17.340 looks i don't know if you want to say that it's that's the rape culture but it kind of promotes

00:16:20.680 that in a way well i mean that's my argument and that now that there's been there's been a ton of

00:16:27.360 research on how sex ratios affect or correlations between gender ratios and rates of sexual

00:16:35.240 assault and all these studies what they point to and it sounds counterintuitive but what they point

00:16:42.940 to is that um when men are scarce um rates of sexual assault are higher and it doesn't make sense

00:16:53.120 when like you why would you why you know why would there being fewer men lead to more rapes

00:16:57.680 but what seems to be happening is that men um value women less and protect them less when women are in

00:17:06.620 an oversupply you know and there was a fascinating study that came out of china uh it was done by an

00:17:12.560 economist at columbia university and she looked at crime rates in china as china's overall

00:17:19.180 gender ratio among young people began to skew more and more male for you know for well-known reasons

00:17:26.880 um and what she found is that um most types of crime as the population became disproportionately male

00:17:36.120 most types of crime went up and that kind of makes sense because men are more prone to criminality so

00:17:42.720 when it came to property crimes or or murder or things like that the crime rates went up as as as

00:17:51.280 uh the male population grew in relation to the female population the only type of major crime where

00:17:57.760 there was a a um a significant decline was sexual assault um that so as the as in china as the

00:18:07.320 population became more male it actually became safer for women when it came to sexual assault 0.77

00:18:12.860 and again the argument is that that when when men when women are scarce men treat them better and i know

00:18:19.720 it sounds awful in some ways but that seems to be what the science indicates it's interesting and i

00:18:25.540 think it's interesting you'd highlight there's college counselors or you know people on on can

00:18:31.280 universities who are aware of this research but they can't talk about it because of title nine and

00:18:36.580 that's kind of the the gist that i got from the book look i mean i do think that there's a there's a

00:18:41.060 a fundamental awareness that there's a correlate i mean not everybody but i do think

00:18:46.200 people on college campuses and i i quote a um a student like a student counselor a psychologist at

00:18:56.200 nyu and and certainly in her own in her research she's aware that there's a correlation between

00:19:02.540 um increasingly lopsided gender ratios on campus nyu has 50 percent more women than men

00:19:09.420 uh and the hookup culture uh and the hookup culture i you know i don't want to push this too far and say

00:19:16.300 that the hookup culture is the same as the rape culture because it's it's different um um but i i think

00:19:24.220 i i think that the the the lopsided gender ratios kind of uh contribute to similar things so in with the 0.95

00:19:34.360 hookup culture it it um it it basically gives men more leverage and allows them to um uh to to de-emphasize 0.76

00:19:49.420 commitment in favor of opportunity so to speak and then when it comes to rape i i do believe that um

00:19:57.240 that you know i i had one woman in new york when she was taught she wasn't talking about sexual assault

00:20:04.700 but she made a comment that i found um uh perfect you know moving in some ways she she told me a lot

00:20:13.640 of men don't view don't view women as people uh when she was complaining about her dating situation

00:20:19.620 and i kind of feel that's what's going on when it comes to sexual assault that that um that women 1.00

00:20:25.660 have been devalued in some way in the minds of men on these campuses and that that is contributing

00:20:31.500 to um to sexual violence on college campuses now i i'm not like excusing it i don't think it's

00:20:41.020 inevitable i do believe if we if colleges you know we're a little more i think colleges should be

00:20:47.920 looking at this topic and investing it investigating it and talking about it and i believe if we focus

00:20:53.300 more attention on it and and and shine the spotlight on it the behavior would change because

00:20:59.800 that's what happens i mean if you unless you talk about it you're not going to be able to change the

00:21:04.500 behavior right so the idea you kind of made the case that you know by talking about it maybe you'll

00:21:08.460 have more women decide to go to colleges where there are more men right and sort of everything 0.97

00:21:13.740 was sort of even out eventually wasn't that kind of right well yeah i mean that's part of it but i also

00:21:17.820 think yeah it's more than that so i mean the the the human brain this is a a different example but

00:21:25.480 the human brain is also hardwired to uh we have we have an extreme panic reflex and um we tend to fear

00:21:34.540 the unknown and that's because the human brain evolved at the time when escaping bad weather or

00:21:40.360 escaping um uh wild animals or a unfamiliar tribe or something like that that it was in the it was

00:21:48.660 in humans best interest to in terms of self-preservation to escape so we have kind of a an exaggerated

00:21:55.880 panic reflex now so you could if i wanted to or somebody could make the argument that racism

00:22:03.080 is kind of hardwired into our brains because we're pre-programmed to fear the unknown well the reality

00:22:11.100 is that you know that that you know humans learn and we have an ability to kind of overcome um our our

00:22:18.780 kind of natural inclinations and and and when it comes to issues of race and ethnicity i think this

00:22:24.760 is a good example of that that that that we don't give in to kind of our worst instincts and we we learn

00:22:30.440 from them and i kind of feel like something similar could happen on college campuses if we were more

00:22:36.560 up front and and kind of confronted the fact that these gender ratios do tend to devalue women so i

00:22:45.760 think it's interesting in the book you talk about the sex demographic problems that are unique to two

00:22:51.340 specific religious groups uh mormons and jews first i mean why did you or not just jews it's orthodox

00:22:58.400 jews let's get specific here um how did you uncover these two why did you highlight these

00:23:04.680 two groups are they just microcosms of that illuminate the general issues that are coming up

00:23:09.420 with uh skewed sex ratios well this was actually the last chapter i wrote but it happened to be

00:23:14.440 it turned out to be my favorite um so you know as i was writing and researching the book i would have

00:23:20.200 people come up to me and people either so people i interviewed for the book or just friends and

00:23:24.880 family who i talked to about the book they would say things like well you know with the hookup culture

00:23:30.920 and people not getting married in in as great numbers as they used to couldn't it just be the

00:23:37.520 times have changed couldn't it be that that sexual mores have changed and that's why there's more of a

00:23:43.340 hookup culture and that argument always irritated me because the thing is sexual mores do not change for

00:23:51.120 no reason you know like that like there's there seemed to be this this notion out there that all

00:23:58.540 these kind of social values and and sexual mores kind of inevitably moved from from conservative to

00:24:09.480 libertine over time and i don't agree with that i think i think there's always a root cause behind why

00:24:15.520 why why our values why our mores change and the reason i began to look at religious groups is

00:24:22.080 because i wanted to see if i could find a religious group that had um an imbalanced gender ratio um and i

00:24:30.700 could show that despite the fact that this group was rooted in very conservative values that gen that

00:24:37.460 lopsided gender ratios were affecting marriage or affecting behavior in these communities the same way

00:24:44.460 it affects um secular people on the upper east side of manhattan um so i i began to look at the agenda

00:24:55.520 ratios within um religious communities and one of the things i found is that while um pretty much all

00:25:03.600 religious groups have slightly more women than men because men tend to fall away from organized religion

00:25:09.640 at a higher rate um mormons particularly mormons in utah tend to have a particularly lopsided gender 0.98

00:25:16.200 ratio uh one of the studies out there indicated that there are um three mormon women for every two

00:25:24.300 mormon men in the state of utah it's a little less imbalanced outside of utah but but um but in utah

00:25:32.020 it's very lopsided so i began exploring how this affects dating and marriage and as i was working on

00:25:39.560 and i actually got a call from a hedge fund manager who wanted to interview me about a job and i

00:25:44.180 explained that he was a friend of a friend and i explained to him that i was working on this book

00:25:47.780 and i told him about the mormons and he he paused he said huh that sounds a lot like the shidduk crisis

00:25:55.180 and i mean i'm jewish but obviously not jewish enough because the shidduk crisis refers to a marriage

00:26:01.100 crisis within the the orthodox particularly the ultra orthodox um community um within you know

00:26:09.940 the ultra ortho it's a orthodox jews are not the majority of jews in the in the u.s but they're a

00:26:16.060 very tight-knit group um and there's a they have their own marriage crisis and it's in in their case

00:26:22.480 it's also because of of lopsided gender ratios although it's not that overall there are more

00:26:28.620 women than men it's that you have 18 year old men 18 year old women marrying 22 year old men 0.82

00:26:34.860 and because they're the orthodox birth rate is so high each one-year age cohort um has more people

00:26:43.560 than the one that preceded it so there are more 18 year olds than 19 year olds more 19 year olds and

00:26:48.880 20 year olds and so on and so on so if you have 22 year old men marrying 18 year old women there

00:26:54.300 aren't going to be enough women i'm sorry they're not going to meet up men um and and that's why you 0.99

00:26:58.940 have this imbalance in the orthodox community and for both mormons and orthodox jews this oversupply of

00:27:06.300 women has created problems it's it's basically um created a sense of entitlement among the men 1.00

00:27:13.360 and it's created a sense of competition among the women yeah i mean you talked about something i guess 0.75

00:27:19.800 because these are fairly conservative religious groups i mean they're not they're not uh the men

00:27:24.860 aren't uh having sex all the time they're probably i guess they're putting off marriage longer than

00:27:29.920 the norms would would would want them to hold off marriage yeah i i i don't get the sense that

00:27:36.240 you know that uh good mormons in salt lake city are spending a lot of time on tinder

00:27:40.660 or kind of watching explicit rap videos or things like that um so it's not it's not pop culture that's

00:27:50.420 affecting sexual mores in in utah or in um in in ultra orthodox neighborhoods in brooklyn or or other

00:28:01.560 parts of the country but uh you did notice some of the behavior that you see that's being that people

00:28:07.020 have noticed that's changed in these two communities amongst women so the men are you know they're

00:28:10.740 putting off marriage and i guess the women are getting more competitive so i guess you talked

00:28:14.280 about in utah there's um a lot of plastic surgery amongst women yeah so there's there's a um 1.00

00:28:21.020 a a consumer review site that's kind of like the leading online review site for plastic surgery and and

00:28:30.840 they did a survey a couple years ago and they found that on a per capita basis salt lake city leads the

00:28:36.680 nation in breast augmentation yeah which is which is you know to somebody who's not from utah and who's

00:28:43.620 not mormon i mean to me that's like confounding and baffling because the idea of mormons rushing out

00:28:51.540 to get breast augmentation it just doesn't mesh with with what the rest of us think of that community 0.61

00:28:59.320 as being so so kind of buttoned down conservative right i mean it's a i mean it's a

00:29:06.680 i don't know if there's a way to prove this scientifically but i do have a sense that um

00:29:12.200 you know women in utah are already above average in terms of attractive right it's that whole like 1.00

00:29:19.800 swedish decennia they came over the pioneers i don't know maybe i'll get in trouble for saying

00:29:24.620 that right my sense so so if you're you know it's already a very competitive marriage market for

00:29:32.380 women so i just think there's this added pressure on women to um to do everything they can to improve

00:29:40.840 their marriage odds and i spoke to to to women mormon women in utah who were telling me when they go to a

00:29:47.260 singles event you know it's it's very common for there to be twice as many women as men um which is 0.73

00:29:54.940 even worse than the numbers i you know i've um cited from that trinity college study and this

00:30:02.380 effect on women isn't just having affecting mormon women but you talk about in the orthodox jewish 0.74

00:30:07.500 community uh there's this pressure to lose a lot of weight and so there's um eating disorders

00:30:13.040 problems there's eating disorders and plastic surgery so so we'll start i mean the

00:30:17.860 in the ultra orthodox community um typically they're using matchmakers to pair young men and

00:30:28.360 women for marriage and they're not exactly arranged marriages but they're kind of guided you know i mean 0.93

00:30:36.020 people can say no obviously um and nobody's there are no shotgun weddings but but but the tradition is

00:30:42.500 to use matchmakers to kind of pair young men and women for marriage and one of the expectations for

00:30:49.520 the women is that they will provide a resume um which which the men can look over and 20 years ago the

00:30:57.280 resume was pretty mundane it included things like you know who your parents are who your grandparents

00:31:03.020 were you know if you if if you had a great grandparent who was a famous rabbi that would actually

00:31:08.200 improve your odds your your your um your standing in the marriage market actually still does um but

00:31:15.220 but but most of most you know may ask like your religious background things like that how religious

00:31:20.520 you are and what what branch of orthodox judaism you come from nowadays these resumes um you know a lot

00:31:29.080 of the women include glossy glamour photos with the resumes and one of the questions or a couple of the

00:31:36.080 questions the women are expected to answer is not only their own um dress size or weight but the the young 0.88

00:31:45.200 men want to know the dress size of their moms too and that's because they want to be able to project 0.99

00:31:51.680 after she has five or six kids is she going to be able to keep her figure and you know i mean it's it's funny

00:31:59.220 in some respects but it's it's sickening in in when you think about it because these are not 22 or 23

00:32:07.720 year old women who are going through this which would be bad enough these are 17 and 18 year old young

00:32:13.020 women who are expected to appear as marriageable as possible um at a very young age when this is when 1.00

00:32:21.100 this should not be what they're worried about and as you said there is this problem of uh of anorexia

00:32:28.500 within the orthodox community um and the plastic surgery thing is out there as well so there was a

00:32:36.420 an author um uh a woman who wrote a uh she writes a lot of jewish religious books and she wrote a

00:32:45.860 column for a jewish newspaper um basically urging the parents of young women to invest in plastic surgery

00:32:55.620 in order to um to improve their their daughter's marriage odds and i mean i i in the book as you may

00:33:05.900 recall i i ripped into this author um and she was really mad at me after the fact and she emailed me

00:33:12.460 and called me all sorts of names and one of her arguments in response was well i arranged plastics or i

00:33:19.500 arranged nose jobs for a bunch of these girls for free and wouldn't you know it some of these 1.00

00:33:25.040 18 year old girls wound up getting getting married after i got them nose jobs and like i'm thinking to 0.99

00:33:32.040 myself like i mean it it drives me bonkers that she she thinks this is rationalizing the objectification

00:33:40.460 of of of young women but that seems to be the culture interesting i mean were you in your research

00:33:46.840 you able to uncover like are these two groups doing anything to solve this problem are they

00:33:51.280 taking proactive steps or are they just like well it's just the way it is yeah i mean i i think there

00:33:55.620 are definitely components or elements in both communities who realize what's going on so so for

00:34:00.400 mormons um you know i i don't think you would get any leaders in the church to admit this but i i do

00:34:07.800 believe that one of the motivations when they lowered the mission age um i think it was you would know

00:34:14.660 bearer than me but it used to be used to be 19 used to be 19 and now it's what 17 or 18 18 18 um i think

00:34:21.900 what was happening so the age in which young men are most likely to become apostates or to leave

00:34:27.520 organized religion is in their late teens and early 20s and for mormons that's a problem because that's the

00:34:35.280 exact time when they go on mission and there's no doubt there are plenty of um young men who would

00:34:42.140 rather get on with their lives either education or work rather than take two years off to do mission

00:34:48.620 plus the mission as you know is expensive i mean it's the missionaries and their families pay for

00:34:53.900 the mission not the church um so uh now again you would know better than me but certainly 30 40 years

00:35:02.800 ago i think there was less pressure on on lds men to to go on mission you could you could skip a mission

00:35:11.480 and um there wouldn't necessarily be a huge stigma attached to it it wouldn't be a great thing but but

00:35:18.120 you could still have a leadership role in the lds church if you had not been a missionary nowadays

00:35:23.660 there's a lot of social pressure as you know to go on mission and you'll see mormon blogs with

00:35:29.800 young women debating whether it's okay to marry or date a non-rm which non-returning missionary um

00:35:35.960 in this so this social pressure on the men who forego missions i think has has increased the

00:35:43.760 the um the apostasy rate among men and because if they stay in the church there's a stigma attached to

00:35:52.580 them and i think this kind of incentivizes them to leave but but getting back to the point about the

00:35:59.440 mission age i think if you can i think if the if young men begin their mission before they start

00:36:05.620 work or before they begin school maybe they're they're more likely or less likely to forego a

00:36:12.120 mission and based on the missionary numbers i i think there definitely are a lot more young men

00:36:18.860 doing missions now than there were before the um yeah there was a big bump yeah right afterwards so

00:36:24.960 what about in the um the orthodox jewish community so uh what's so fascinating about the orthodox

00:36:32.000 community is that there's this natural control group um so for about half the orthodox community

00:36:39.160 there's this significant age gap um between the sexes of marriage you have 18 19 year old young women

00:36:46.720 marrying men who are 22 23 or 24 and that's because the young men don't get married until they finish 0.69

00:36:54.920 um attending yeshiva which is a jewish seminary and maybe there's a year of religious study in

00:37:01.220 israel involved as well so until they're done with their religious studies they typically don't get

00:37:06.160 married however there is a segment of the orthodox community known as hasidic jews who don't do this

00:37:13.400 basically everybody gets married at age 18 and in the hasidic community there is no shudda crisis

00:37:20.000 um you know the and when you talk to hasidic jews about this supposed marriage crisis and this

00:37:26.160 oversupply of women that they have no idea what you're talking about and that's because that they 1.00

00:37:32.240 are they're um you know the men and women are marrying at the same age and i think in the non-hasidic

00:37:39.480 um orthodox community i think some of the rabbis have realized what's going on and they understand

00:37:46.160 that this basically boils down to a demographic problem that there are just more 18 year old

00:37:52.360 women than 22 year old men and they've been they've been trying to encourage um men to marry women their

00:38:01.040 own age um and there have been some incentives put in place to do that i don't know how much success

00:38:08.240 it's having and my own take on this and i'm you know i'm not i'm not a highly religious person and i'm

00:38:14.920 sure an orthodox rabbi would would offer up many reasons why my suggestion is is wrong but it's my 1.00

00:38:23.820 belief that it would be an act of kindness if um orthodox rabbis would uh basically um refuse to

00:38:33.020 marry off women until they turn 20 or 21 or 22 because that would allow some of the the older women have 1.00

00:38:42.060 yet to find their match to to get married and it would it would and also there shouldn't be this

00:38:47.340 this pressure on 17 and 18 year old young women or girls to appear marriageable um and i think i think

00:38:55.080 it would be healthier if if the community would just sort of say look let's push back the age of

00:39:01.360 marriage particularly for women gotcha so i know your book's primarily descriptive you're describing

00:39:06.360 things that are going on but you do make some prescriptions based off of the data some

00:39:11.280 suggestions you know as i was reading this look i'm i'm a father of a girl she's only two but when

00:39:17.920 i was reading i was like i was getting like really depressed for her it's like man that's that's a

00:39:21.500 rough world you're going into and and i don't want her to have to go to these crazy extremes that you 1.00

00:39:25.680 highlight in the book you know of having to like be really hyper sensitive about how you how she looks

00:39:31.220 and just decided to go through all this rigmarole with guys who are kind of flaky yeah so i mean any

00:39:35.460 advice for parents out there who have daughters that they can help prepare them for a fulfilling

00:39:41.420 romantic life and eventually a family life without all the stress that a lot of women are facing today 1.00

00:39:47.180 well i mean this is advice i guess for for the women themselves as well as for the parents and i think

00:39:54.000 one of them would be to um uh to kind of consider geography when you're um when you're settling down

00:40:04.420 so um there are certain cities like providence rhode island or new york city that are just particularly

00:40:11.080 bad for women um and there are other cities like seattle or or san francisco or san jose or san diego 0.84

00:40:19.460 where where the demographics are more women friendly now the obvious caveat is that most 0.96

00:40:26.080 people are not going to like plan their whole lives around gender ratios so right this is like

00:40:32.500 advice i think if you had a daughter who was just graduating from college this this coming may or

00:40:37.280 june i think that's the kind of thing you might want might want to be on her checklist if she's

00:40:42.200 marriage-minded uh but again i'm not assuming everybody is marriage-minded um another thing to keep in

00:40:48.600 mind would be um if you do want to get married and you put a high priority on on marriage and becoming

00:40:56.860 a mother um there's an advantage to getting serious about dating earlier rather than later so i i guess i

00:41:06.320 i interviewed and i know a lot of women who decided to put all their their focus on career in their 20s

00:41:14.020 and early 30s and figured they would just meet somebody at at 32 or 33 and i'm certainly not

00:41:20.200 saying that that's a bad idea if if you're career-minded i mean it's a great idea if you're

00:41:26.220 career-minded the the problem is that if you start out in a lopsided dating pool um the numbers move

00:41:34.220 against you over time which is why holding out becomes a bad strategy so i assume you and most of

00:41:41.900 your listeners probably played musical chairs as a child right yeah so as you may recall in the first

00:41:47.460 round of musical chairs i mean there's one fewer chair than players but but really in the first round

00:41:52.800 like everybody gets a chair except for the kid who's not paying attention right yeah um but in the last

00:41:58.180 round of musical chairs you have a 50 chance of losing the game and that's kind of what happens in

00:42:04.760 dating so i'm just going to use round numbers if you start out with a dating pool that has 140

00:42:10.700 women and 100 men which is 1.4 women for every one man it's it starts out lopsided but it gets worse

00:42:20.420 over time so once half of those women once 70 of those women marry 70 of the men the remaining dating 0.74

00:42:28.480 pool becomes 70 single women versus 30 single men which is a greater than two to one ratio so i think

00:42:37.380 this explains why in cities like new york and la and chicago we all know these fabulous women in 1.00

00:42:45.060 their 30s who who can't seem to meet a decent guy and it's it's not because they're not attractive or

00:42:52.240 they're not good company or anything like that it's because the demographics have moved against them

00:42:57.400 so so this is a long-winded way of me saying you know get serious about dating a little bit younger

00:43:02.660 it doesn't mean you have to have kids i mean i got married in my when i was 24 and i didn't have

00:43:07.180 kids until i was 30 yeah but um and then finally um and this gets back to what we talked about earlier

00:43:16.200 i i think we all need to be more open-minded when it comes to educational background um you know they

00:43:23.640 the the the idea that that a college degree makes you a better husband or a better wife i mean i i don't

00:43:31.060 think that's true um and i think we need you know we need to get past this idea that we can only date

00:43:38.640 or marry people who are just like us um and in fact you know not long after the book came out i got

00:43:44.780 a um i got a a twitter message from a woman who told me she met her husband of four or five years

00:43:54.320 um after she unchecked the college graduate box on her online dating site interesting

00:44:00.380 so yeah it's kind of help your daughters realize you can marry a firefighter who doesn't have a 0.52

00:44:06.000 college degree but he's a good solid dude exactly gotcha so uh as i was reading this too i mean it

00:44:12.400 seems like the man deficit if you're a man you're a young guy in your 20s even you know in your 40s

00:44:17.120 it sounds like uh it could be an unmitigated boon for you if what you're looking for is just as

00:44:22.120 many sexual relationships as you as possible but it seems like the downside would be that there

00:44:27.160 there are guys who might be you know they want to settle down they have that in mind but

00:44:31.960 they it could cause them to be too picky and they eventually just don't settle down because

00:44:37.280 they're trying to maximize wife i guess material has i don't know that's kind of a dumb way to put

00:44:42.360 it is that a problem with i have a friend who wrote a a much uh talked about story for the new

00:44:49.120 york times a couple weeks ago about this very topic and he's uh he's a a manhattan man in his

00:44:55.960 early 30s in his i'm sorry his early 40s who um you know he's been enjoying the single life for a

00:45:02.020 while but now all of his friends are married and he's kind of feeling lonely so there is this kind

00:45:08.220 of issue of of men who don't know when it's time to time to stop so i mean what are you suggestions

00:45:15.240 for them just kind of they have to decide like okay i'm going to get married by this age and so

00:45:19.600 they can get out of that loop of trying to maximize i don't know i i don't know i i tried i tried

00:45:27.460 carefully i'm not assuming everybody wants to get right or everybody's heterosexual or right certain

00:45:33.720 no doubt marriage is not for everyone you know i mean i i acknowledge that so some of these guys might

00:45:40.720 be better off never getting married some women may be better off never getting married too but 1.00

00:45:46.840 i i guess what i would say is that if you do want to get married someday um and you're with somebody

00:45:57.180 who truly makes you happy and who you know you're compatible with um you know don't treat the

00:46:05.140 relationship casually just because you know that there are many more fish in the sea

00:46:08.960 that makes perfect sense common sense advice there so john this has been a really fascinating

00:46:14.620 conversation and we could there's a lot more we could talk about but i know you have to go

00:46:17.920 um where can people learn more about your book well um my uh my website is uh dateonomics.com

00:46:27.560 d-a-t-e-o-n-o-m-i-c-s.com um the books available for sale at all your local um booksellers bookstores

00:46:36.780 online at amazon and lines of double.com um if you google me or the book title you'll find

00:46:44.500 speeches and interviews and news stories and like awesome well john berger thank you so much for your

00:46:50.120 time it's been a pleasure thanks brett my guest there is john berger he's the author of the book

00:46:54.440 datanomics and you can find out more information about the book at datanomics.com and you can find

00:46:58.180 it on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness

00:47:05.820 podcast for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at

00:47:09.340 artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy this podcast i'd really appreciate it if you give us a review

00:47:13.380 on itunes or stitcher as always appreciate your support and until next time this is brett mckay

00:47:17.680 telling you to stay manly

00:47:19.420 you

The Art of Manliness - January 29, 2016

#173： Date-onomics -- How Skewed Sex Ratios on College Campuses Are Affecting Courtship and Marriage

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