A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Egg Freezing and the 'Mating Gap' (2023) | Hacker News Reader

A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Egg Freezing and the 'Mating Gap' (2023)

blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu

12 pointsjohntfella24 comments

> The statistics are striking. In the U.S., according to Inhorn’s reporting, “59.5 percent of students enrolled in college in 2020-21 were women, as opposed to only 40.5 percent who were men. This was an all-time high for women but a generational decline for men. Of the one and half million fewer students who enrolled in college in 2021 compared to the previous five years, 71 percent of the decline occurred among men.

That is pretty crazy. I guess that equality thing is working out rather well for women.

> Eighty-two percent of the women in Inhorn’s sample were single, “with no partner in sight” (p. 19). In their own words, they were using egg freezing to “buy time” and hold onto their dream of heterosexual marriage with biologically related children. These women were a notably high achieving group: one-third of her sample had attended an Ivy League institution and nearly 80% had advanced degrees.

It seems like the central question is: why do they lack a partner? Some possible explanations could be:

1- They are too picky

2- They are undesirable to potential partners

3- They are unwilling or unable to mingle with potential partners

The author of the article seems to blame men for not being interested in these high-performing women (i.e. reason #2 above), while Inhorn seems to suggest some balance between #1 and #2.

While I don't belong to the cohort under discussion, I used to be very focused on my career and would not have been able to find a partner had I not met my wife in college.

In other words, I don't think reason #3 should be dismissed without further data, although personally I suspect reason #1 is also much more common than #2.

If you follow the dating statistic of women going for the top 20% of men, it makes sense that 80% of women would be left with no long-term partner.

You can interpret that however you like (natural selection, being picky, 80% of men not being high enough quality, etc.), but the raw statistics are there.

I know a bunch of women at ivy league universities that can't find a partner and would say it is definitely mostly (1). The article seems to put its main focus on men feeling their manlihood threatened if the woman has a more accomplished career, but I'd point out that these women perceive a significant social pressure that they're able to find a man that is more accomplished than them.

In fact I'm in that kind of position myself, and it doesn't feel threatening to me at all.

I think all three contribute, not necessarily equally. Anecdotally, I'd probably weight it at 2:1:1, but I imagine it varies a lot by individual and location.

Picky? Thou dost protest too much

-American women are winning hard at college

-Chinese men once said in a survey that they feel threatened by high achieving women

-Therefore men as a group are most at fault for the decline in marriage and TFR

Has anyone written on this issue dispassionately? The marriage/reproduction rate for the entire developed world is cratering and we get “blessed” with a choice of three explanatory viewpoints: incel, femcel, purely economic factors

I do believe economic factors are the single largest culprit, but there’s obviously more to the story when you look at the U-shaped income/TFR curve or the utter failure of nearly all family-formation economic policies across the globe.

This baby brained “men bad” or “women bad” discourse belongs in the dumpster.

> Has anyone written on this issue dispassionately?

Chris Williamson of the Modern Wisdom podcast has interviewed many public intellectuals from different sides on the subject in a fairly even-handed way.

I'm currently reading Mary Harrington ("Feminism against Progress") and Louise Perry's ("The Case Against the Sexual Revolution") books on the subject, and find them fairly convincing.

> This baby brained “men bad” or “women bad” discourse belongs in the dumpster.

Amen.

> This baby brained “men bad” or “women bad” discourse belongs in the dumpster.

A thousand times this.

More women are entering education. Good for them. Good for us all.

Plumbers, Truck drivers, Electricians, etc command 6 figure incomes and are mostly debt-free for choosing to take a different route to success and stability.

Also, men just aren't approaching anymore becasue it's too socially and financially risky to do so. School, Work, Church and now the Gym are off limits. So what are the options available for women to meet the smart, ambitious, moral, fit and attractive men?

There hasn't been enough women pushing back against the toxicity from their vocal minority. So some "good" men have decided to quiet quit.

They don’t according to BLS but I’ll take your word for it. I agree with everything after it though

plumbers https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers...

truck drivers https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/h...

electricians https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electric...

I stand corrected. Thank you

No worries. Roughly $60,000 all around. BLS says one thing. Online another. I haven’t really asked too many IRL - guess it’s good I don’t need too many

From a guy's perspective, it feels like if you don't have hobbies (or the right hobbies) and you don't want to drink at a bar, you really don't have many options. For women I must imagine it must be quite similar, if you don't have hobbies that involve both men and women meeting in person, and you don't want to go to bars, in what context are you going to meet someone? Something something dating apps, something something third places. I also feel like for the more awkward/introverted guys (myself included), if I went to a bar (by myself) every Friday night and got a jack and coke and just sat there I would spend a whole lot of money talking to no one. Who knows, maybe I would, I've never done it because it's too expensive and I would feel too awkward. Let's say you go once a month. Thats 12 times a year, not too many times when you think about it. And if I went with friends, well, I feel like I would just talk with my friends!

> if I went to a bar (by myself) every Friday night and got a jack and coke

At 30 I had a fulltime job, an apartment, and I worked out regularly. And I was chronically single.

So I quit my job, started doing CrossFit every day, and started going out (acro yoga, goth clubs, blind dates with friends of friends), getting new friends with attractive female friends, expanding my network through the people I dated, getting regular female training partners to normalise interaction with attractive women.

I hooked up with a lot of people, sometimes dating too many people, annoyingly honest about polyamory, and eventually I entered a relationship with an emotionally intelligent, attractive woman who didn’t know I was really an insecure geek on ’roids (metaphorically speaking).

Getting back a job in software and my personality gradually reverted until the relationship fell apart. Decided I should be brutally honest about who I am, met my wife (friend of a friend) 8 months later.

I'm not sure why the author chose to couch the entire issue in these terms...

> Pushing hard to advance one’s career during one’s 20s and 30s does not cost men the opportunity to father children

You can easily make the argument that people in their 20's and 30's are hesitant to start families due to the high cost of housing, healthcare and childcare. But the idea that there is an army of otherwise-eligible men who are simply too damn ambitious to start families? That rings completely false to me.

It's funny because they go on to offer many of the real problem with forming families and gender relations. Maybe that first part about men and their supposedly irrepressible protestant work ethic was just to soften up men reading the article.

> the idea that there is an army of otherwise-eligible men who are simply too damn ambitious to start families

Sounds like a platonic fantasy of 1950's USA. Not a thing that is now or ever has been real.

There's heaps and scads of other reasons that young people aren't having kids, or are delaying until later in life. Pretty much if someone ever tries to build an argument around "people in this category all think and behave a certain way and there can be no other explanation", you can be fairly confident that that person is an idiot.

> Pushing hard to advance one’s career during one’s 20s and 30s does not cost men the opportunity to father children

I think this statement is arguably quite false. As you approach your mid to late 30s, your opportunity to find a suitable mate shrinks quite significantly.

Perhaps not as significantly as a woman, but a significant amount nonetheless.

Does anybody have a link for "Gootman 2012". IIUC, this is the citation for (27) / "In China, many highly educated women are being rejected as marriage partners “because they have excelled beyond expected measures and Chinese men feel threatened by these women’s overachievement” (p. 275). "

[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=P5uUEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA275&lpg=...

> Gootman, Elissa. 2012. “So Eager for Grandchildren, They’re Paying the Egg-Freezing Clinic.” New York Times, May 14. www. nytimes . com.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/us/eager-for-grandchildre...

Doesn't seem to be the right one

Or have a look yourself: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzacecba6ppllyfzzmbvabwq4lw6bghz5y...

Edit2: Nvm, its actually this:

> Gutmann, Matthew. 2019. Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short. New York: Basic Books.

https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzacebzuepxfhcozr33yxo5zfj...

Funny mixup. Chapter 1 [27] is Gootman 2012, Last chapter [27] is Gutmann 2019.

Oh boy, life is hard. So much of these arguments feel like the fallout from attacking social and philosophical human problems with Objectives and Key Results or something. As though if we can just push the number of people identifying as female in higher education up that will unlock the next level OKR for increasing pay, and that will make people identifying as female equal in a socially capitalist society.

Except, biologically female people still carry very different burdens when it comes to human reproduction. So probably, the next OKR will be to develop a vat that simulates uterus so we shall all be free of the tyranny of our bodies and everyone will be exactly the same as everyone else.

Life is choices. Choices are hard. We are all privileged in variable ways and it will always be hard to measure equality. I don't know how to help someone who has a PhD from Yale find a partner who they would perceive as their equal. Nor do I know how to force CIS people identifying as male how to choose partner that has more education than them. Some problems we're gonna have to solve without a Key Result.

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