Inductivist

Writing about sexual inequality among males got me wondering about the bottom line: Are men who have no partners unhappy? 

As we discussed before, the General Social Survey asked people how many sexual partners they had in the past year. They also asked if the person was generally very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days.

The graph shows that men with at least one partner tend to be happier. Specifically, 32% with at least one partner is very happy, compared to only 23% of those with no one.

On the other extreme, 19% of the celibate guys were not too happy, while the number for the other group was only 11%.

So having a sex partner is associated with happiness. We just don't know what's causing what. I like to think that sex is not as important as elite culture assures us it is, but it could be the driving force here.

On the other hand, unhappy people might have less luck finding and holding on to partners. I suspect more and more that personality traits, which are grounded in brain wiring and are due to a large extent to genes, explain a lot.  It might be, for example, that people who score high on negative emotionality are more likely to find themselves alone. 

According to evolutionary theory, sexually reproducing animals can invest more in parental effort (providing for offspring) or mating effort (pursuing copulations). The advantage of the first strategy is that the success one's offspring is enhanced; the advantage of the second is that one can potentially produce many offspring with little effort per child.

This theory would expect sex differences in the strategy taken, and it also predicts that some men will chase skirts while others will focus on being family men. Since evolutionary theory sees competition as fundamental, we would also expect some men to fail at either strategy.

Recently, there was a discussion about whether the losers feel so aggrieved that they might, like the poor, act out with violence and begin to organize politically to gain sexual equality.

This sounds like joke, but a recent analysis of high school data, motivated by the discussion, concluded that sexual inequality is a myth. It's funny how analysts can so easily dismiss hypotheses derived from the only theory of humans we know is true with one cherry-picked data set of high school kids, many of whom are not mature enough to have even entered the "sex market," but hey that's the state of contemporary social science.

I will avoid cherry-picking by doing what I always do -- relying on the General Social Survey to answer empirical questions.

The focus seems to be young men, so I limit the analysis to those ages 18-30. Here are estimates (N = 3,201):



First, trends seem pretty stable for the past four decades, but, do you see sexual equality here among men?  I don't.  If we remove the gay men, 12.7% of men ages 18-30 had ZERO partners last year; 60.2% had one; 14.2% had two; 9.5% had three; 6.5% had four; 7.0% had 5-10; 1.8% had 11-20; 0.5% had 21-100; and 0.1% had 100+ (if you believe them). If this looks equal to you, you can borrow my glasses.

What emerges here and typically with other data (unlike others, I don't ignore the body of research) is what we could call the "Sexual 1 Percenters." Many men have zero partners, while others have dozens. And even the difference between 0 and 1 is enormous enough.

Massive inequality! But liberals, the implacable enemies of inequality, yawn because the affected group are men.

UPDATE: Another approach appears to be to look at these kinds of numbers, and to simply deny there is inequality there. I will use this strategy the next time an employee complains that my salary is double his. My response will be, "For all intents and purposes, Tom, we make the same."

Based on 185 studies (43k men), this meta-analysis documents the 1972-2011 drop in total sperm count among men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The decline was almost 60%.

The authors do not speculate about causes, but a GQ writer thinks it's due to an increase in plasticizers which are known to disrupt fetal testosterone (T). Perhaps it's due to increasing obesity which lowers T. The authors controlled for increasing age, so that doesn't appear to be the reason.

Anyway, I'm interested in the consequences. Assuming that a sperm count is a proxy for prenatal and adult T, young men strike me as being less masculine than in previous generations. They are certainly not shorter or smaller, but they seem more effeminate. And I'm not talking about dress or tastes. I mean in their faces and in their mannerisms.

According to the General Social Survey, the percent of men reporting they have sex exclusively with other men rose from 2.2% in the 1980s to 3.2% in this decade. This, of course, could be due to a greater willingness to admit the behavior, but there is a theory of homosexuality that claims it is due to inadequate prenatal T.

Subtracting out the 1984-94 gang wars and crack epidemic, the US homicide has declined since the late 1970s. Declining T? I'm just thinking out loud -- I might be crazy -- but it's an interesting idea.

UPDATE: By the way, the GQ author thinks the collapse in sperm count points to the end of the human race.

Here's a new study on the impact of testosterone (T). In a placebo-controlled experiment of 243 men, giving a dose of T increases preference for status brands over brands of similar perceived quality but lower status. T also makes men have more positive attitudes toward high-status goods, but does not affect how they feel about power-enhancing or high-quality goods.

Interesting how T makes us like status, not power. I guess the difference is that power is not necessarily socially-approved, but status is. 

This study did not include women, but it appears that T makes men more concerned with rising in the social hierarchy, and we signal our position through status goods. This has gotten to be a more subtle game as elites have embraced the t-shirts and shabby jeans of the working man, but our nature cannot escape hierarchy. 

In his book Men in Groups, Lionel Tiger (damn, I wish I could have cool animals for my first and last names--Tiger Woods, eat your heart out) hypothesized that men who are attached to male groups will have greater reproductive success than isolated men. Even if a guy is not dominant, being a part of a group will enhance his attractiveness since he is perceived to have greater access to resources and protection.

Men who participated in the GSS were asked: 1) the number of close friends they have at work, and 2) the number of children they have (n = 136). The correlation between the two for guys who are old enough to have completed their families but are not yet retirement age (45-64) is .19. It is small but statistically significant. Men with more friends at work do tend to have more kids. (Work is not generally an all-male group, but it does tend to be dominated by men and is thus "male" in that sense). 

UPDATE: I thought men with many friends at work might earn more due to connections which, in turn, would lead them to have more kids since they could better afford them, but the impact of friends on family size is not reduced when income is entered into an OLS regression model.  

Growing prissiness among American men? I looked at the General Social Survey to see if hunting is on the decline and if males hunters differ from other guys in IQ. Here are the numbers (total sample=11,659):


Percent of men who hunt
1977 34.1
1987 25.1
1996 27.8
2006 18.9


It sure is in decline. Is this a sign of a increasing prissiness among American men? Perhaps the couch is more comfortable and the Xbox safer and less work?


Mean IQ

Whites
Hunters 95.4
Non-hunters 100.8

Blacks
Hunters 86.6
Non-hunters 90.9

For both races, hunters are 4 or 5 points less intelligent. I don't imagine this was always the case: who hunted more than aristocrats? Is it a growing refinement of the right half of the bell curve? Once again, who was more refined than aristocrats? The American Male has morphed from Jim Bowie into David Bowie. (The singer got his name from the Alamo hero, by the way).