Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

There have been several wars where the slaughter of men was so extreme that the countries involved would have collapsed if the women were slaughtered as well, because the population could not have rebounded.

I heard long ago (sorry, no reference) that the average French soldier was a couple inches shorter in WW2 than in WW1, which was attributed to the male slaughter (though I suspect that food shortages were a more likely cause).

In France and Germany, after WW1 and WW2, it became commonplace for the women to marry foreigners and old men. I don't know if that happened in Britain as well.

Baby booms are common after the end of terrible wars. I read once that people were copulating in the streets of London after the WW1 armistice was declared.

View on HN

The USSR faced significant challenges to their social fabric following WW2 (The Great Patriotic War) that last to this day. About 14% [0] of their total population was killed in the war. As mostly men were killed over women, that means about 1/5 to 1/4 of all males died in the conflict, all about the age where they were about to reproduce and have/start families. This affected Soviet society in very drastic ways. The edits of 1936 and 1944 outlawed abortion, made divorce very difficult to achieve (including fines), provided for paid maternity leave, and increased payments to unwed mothers [1]. They even gave out medals for mothers of 10+ children with monetary rewards [2].

Anecdotally, from friends of mine who are Russian women, there was such a durst of men that keeping any man became a very large challenge. This shock to the marriage markets fundamentally changed the culture. To this day, with Russian male life expectancy still low [3], Muscovite women will 'dress to the 9s' at all times, as a matter of course. The saying is akin to: "any man is a good man, as long as he's your's"

The changes that WW2 gave to the Russian family still echo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#USSR

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_in_the_Soviet_Union#Fam...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=male+life+expecatny+russia&o...

While I suspected this happened in the USSR, I had no information. Thanks for it!

How would that work? If there were 80 women left and only 20 men would the expectation really be that the remaining men knock up 4 women each? That doesn’t seem like it would ever fit our social norms and seems like a completely unimportant point.

In 1871, only 12% of Paraguayans were male due to massive losses in war. Women were happy to share men in order to have babies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9hg68w/in_18...

> Women were happy to share men in order to have babies.

That not supported by your source.

My answer is perhaps too facetious, but I think mostly supported by the link. In particular:

So, what about dating? It's not difficult to see a continuation of pre-war Paraguayan society in this regard. Back then, there were less men than women. After the war, this was still the case. Women were still commonly the head of the family and births out of wedlock were a common occurrence, something that was also the case in the pre-war society.

There is essentially no research into the exact numbers and status of these children born out of wedlock. All that's really known is there was essentially no stigma at this time due to being born out of wedlock:

This is unfortunately where, as Pottshast herself points out, documentation fails us. We don't know. In fact, the documentation in general considering how many of these children were born is not entirely known. With the mother being the identifiable stable force in the family, it seems that identity was tied to the mother rather than the father as in the case of children born out of wedlock. A lack of stigma could therefore be seen as a continuation of pre-war Paraguayan society.

Social norms tend to get suspended when mugged by reality. In your scenario, given no other supply of men (foreigners, old men) I would expect polygamy to become tacitly acceptable.

Nah. It works by men having much better negotiating positions in relationship, men being able to cheat and women tolerating that else he leaves. Or by boy putting girlfriend into situation where she either have sex or he leaves for another. That sort of thing.

People respond to incentives, both genders.

Men outside of mandatory service ages can father children.

As I mentioned, that indeed does happen. But there are downsides to that, too. Older fathers are a risk factor for abnormalities in the offspring.

The young, rich and well-connected won't get drafted or will get perpetual deferments. I'm certain they will be willing and able to play their part.

the social dynamics of mating would change a lot in that scenario, along with social norms. when the supply for a male partner to procreate with drops that drastically, while the demand from women remains the same, things we consider "normal" would change to reflect those new pressures.

Certainly this would be less of a stigma considering 75% of men would be gone.

War baby booms have nothing to with population variations.

It’s all about being away from loved ones and cut off from sex for long periods of time. This is readily observed in both male and female behavior. I am basing this upon myself and the hundreds of people I have personally worked with during my four military deployments.

I think it's deeper than that. It's not just the soldiers who feel the urge to procreate at the end of wars. And it has been quite common during wars for soldiers to have readily-available sex (that the term 'camp follower' exists would seem to illustrate this point.)

But it seems to be a natural human tendency to want to create new life in response to the threat to existing life. I always liked the line from Rent, "The opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation" because it captures that peace is the neutral territory between the destruction of war and the creation of trying to fix what was broken. When the pendulum swings towards war, its return path will swing past peace and towards reconstruction, in all its forms.

How the heck would men dying make the next generation of men shorter?

Armies typically have minimum (and sometimes maximum) heights, to ensure soldiers will fit into uniforms and standardized gear. The US Army, for instance, has had a minimum height for men of 5' 0" for a long time.

If those who are drafted are killed in really vast numbers, a disproportionate share of the children in the next generation will be fathered by men who were not drafted, including those who were too short.

Aside from that, height has a selective disadvantage during times of trench warfare. You don't want to be a 7' tall man trying to duck in a 5' trench.

Is it possible that taller men were selected for the first war? (I have no particular position on this, but if we're asking the question, let's think seriously about it.) World War I and II were about 20 years apart, so it seems just barely plausible that, if soldiers from the first war did not pass on their genes, and taller men were selected as soldiers, then the average height might have decreased based on genetic factors alone.

That was the theory. The fittest were selected for combat, and as they got ground into hamburger the less selective the drafting went.

For a similar example, initially WW1 pilots were selected from the nobility. Once those got massacred, the various Air Forces had to abandon that idea, and allow commoners in. The subtext of the movie "The Blue Max" was about that transition.

(The life expectancy of a British WW1 RAF pilot was 6 weeks. There's also a movie about that, "The Dawn Patrol".)

This also happened to the officers, which ended the notion of officers being restricted to nobility.

Easy - kill more tall men than short men. The offspring of the remaining men will be shorter.

It's like how fishing for big fish makes the remaining fish population shrink over time.

Foreign countries had lack of men too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com