Young prudes

January 2022. TikTok had chosen its villain of the week. West Elm Caleb was a six-foot-four mustachioed lothario who had strung along several different women. They took to TikTok to tell their matching stories of being made Spotify mixtapes and then being ghosted and were outraged to discover a pattern. He became an avatar for hitherto suppressed rage as people uncovered his precise identity and tried to get him fired. A dating app even took out a billboard about him.

Cads are nothing new. What was new is that these women felt they had been morally wronged. In millennial culture, ‘fuckboys’ are generally considered to be an amoral force of nature, the bridge trolls you pay to participate in 2010s sex positivity. The view from the Huffington-Post-iverse was that they were probably better people than the so-called nice guys who can’t get laid. The kids have a different view. Polling says that young people today are less likely to have sex on a first date or a one-night stand, and are more interested in marriage.

The younger generation’s reaction against casual sex has puzzled older commentators. Much like the rise of the New Right, the arc of history was not meant to bend like this. But the rise of prudishness was to be expected. From the Second World War, up to the 1990s, American dating markets had too many women. I think this is a partial explanation for why the sexual revolution happened. Now, they have too many men.

The standard story of the sexual revolution is that we invented the contraceptive pill, unleashed it upon the white-picket-fence nuclear families of postwar America, and – depending on your politics – either liberated or destroyed them with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s a neat story, but it doesn’t quite fit the facts. By the time the pill was approved in 1960, premarital sex had been on a steady, multi-decade rise in America. By 1953, half of women reported having had premarital sex. And contraception is popular in lands untouched by the sexual revolution. Condoms, the pill and sterilization are all widely available in India, but only 3 percent of unmarried women will admit to having had sex. Abortion and contraception have been widely practiced in Japan since the 1950s, but they still haven’t had a pro-casual sex revolution either.

At the start of the early twentieth century, middle and upper class courtship was managed by an arcane system of courting etiquette and socially filtered matchmaking by elders. Most people in Western culture expected to marry for love, but male-female socializing was chaperoned, and respectable young women were only introduced to men within their social class. This changed in the roaring twenties as dating trickled up from the working classes, who moved to cities for work and didn’t have their mothers around to issue invitations or parlors to host in.

When dating first arose, America had too many men. Mass immigration meant that in 1920 there were 104 men for every 100 women. So for dating’s first two decades, women had the upper hand. Men took them out dancing, paid for their milkshakes, and everyone got married a little younger. Free from parental watchfulness some ‘necking and petting’ was known to happen, and the amount of premarital sex rose, but it remained a minority pursuit rather than an expectation.

After the Second World War, for the first time in its history, the United States had surplus women. Because couples consistently opt for relationships where the man is slightly older, a high birth rate can create a false shortage of men. From the end of the Second World War until 1961 every cohort of babies was bigger than the one before: 3.7 million were born in 1950, 3.8 million in 1951, and 3.9 in 1952. The average age gap between couples was two years meaning there were only 1.85 million boys born in 1950 for the 1.95 million girls born in 1952, creating an oversupply of 105 women for every 100 men a couple of years older than them. So from the 1940s through to the 1990s, Americans experienced a dating market with a false shortage of men.

Even before we had reliable contraception, the number of women having premarital sex tripled. Only one in seven women from the 1920s had sex before marriage. Half the youth of 1950 did. Of course, sex without commitment or reliable contraception could have been devastating but shotgun marriages rose substantially. A sixth of first borns to married couples in the early 1960s were the product of premarital shenanigans (versus a twelfth in 1920). 

The male shortage had a big impact on Asian marriage markets too. In India, dowries (payments from the bride’s family to the groom’s) rose in the decades following the Baby Boom, tripling from 1930 to 1975. Now sex selective abortion has inverted the sex ratio – there are 13.5 million 24-year-old men for the 12.3 million 19-year-old women – and so, running counter to the long tradition of dowries bride buying has become a problem in the most sex-skewed parts of India.

Similarly, the arranged-marriage-based ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in the United States grows by about four percent a year, leading to what they call a ‘shidduch crisis’ (shidduch being the name for their system of matchmaking). For every 100 men who are 22, they have 112 women who are 19. Nose jobs are becoming a popular present for girls before they get matched. Tellingly, the Hasidic parts of the community, where men and women typically enter shidduch at the same age, have no similar crisis.

The cleanest evidence comes from college campuses, which provide us with hundreds of micro dating markets with wildly different sex ratios. Women on more female-skewed college campuses go on fewer dates and are less likely to have a boyfriend but more likely to be sexually active. They also think less of men.

Perhaps, having cooked up a theory, I’m just seeing it everywhere. I’m overinterpreting stats like they’re a Rorschach test. But the data lines up. Birth rates in America rose up to 1961, giving us increasing sexual liberty up to the 1990s. Then, up to the mid-2000s, they fluctuated around four million a year, giving us stable norms up to the 2010s. After that, birth rates fell from the mid-2000s onward. For current young people, that means there are 104 20-year-old men for every 100 18-year-old women. Effectively, we’re back to the pre-War gender skew.

Just like the 1960s, we’re headed for society-wide upheaval as we renegotiate sexual norms. Teenagers post viral videos shaming adults canoodling in the park, calling them disgusting and asking that they ‘think of the children’. Why Men Love Bitches, an early 2000s dating manual encouraging women to demand higher standards, has returned to the book charts after going viral on TikTok. The ‘Sprinkle Sprinkle’ method is a new dating trend that encourages women to use men for their money; girls who participate brag about their boyfriends paying the deposit on their apartments and about laughing if a man tries to split the bill on a date.

We’re already seeing a decrease in sex (casual or otherwise), which a lot of people attribute to smartphones. I think soon we’ll see people getting married sooner too. It’s only a matter of time before a West Elm Caleb-style reckoning comes for a man who drags his feet on proposing to his girlfriend. It’s happening in fits and starts, but I see a return to 1930s dating on the horizon.