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

&gt; <i>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.</i><p>That is pretty crazy. I guess that equality thing is working out rather well for women.

<i>&gt; 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.</i><p>It seems like the central question is: why do they lack a partner? Some possible explanations could be:<p>1- They are too picky<p>2- They are undesirable to potential partners<p>3- They are unwilling or unable to mingle with potential partners<p>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.<p>While I don&#x27;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.<p>In other words, I don&#x27;t think reason #3 should be dismissed without further data, although personally I suspect reason #1 is also much more common than #2.

-American women are winning hard at college<p>-Chinese men once said in a survey that they feel threatened by high achieving women<p>-Therefore men as a group are most at fault for the decline in marriage and TFR<p>Has <i>anyone</i> written on this issue dispassionately? The marriage&#x2F;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<p>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&#x2F;TFR curve or the utter failure of nearly all family-formation economic policies across the globe.<p>This baby brained “men bad” or “women bad” discourse belongs in the dumpster.

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.<p>Also, men just aren&#x27;t approaching anymore becasue it&#x27;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?<p>There hasn&#x27;t been enough women pushing back against the toxicity from their vocal minority. So some &quot;good&quot; men have decided to quiet quit.

From a guy&#x27;s perspective, it feels like if you don&#x27;t have hobbies (or the right hobbies) and you don&#x27;t want to drink at a bar, you really don&#x27;t have many options. For women I must imagine it must be quite similar, if you don&#x27;t have hobbies that involve both men and women meeting in person, and you don&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;ve never done it because it&#x27;s too expensive and I would feel too awkward. Let&#x27;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!

I&#x27;m not sure why the author chose to couch the entire issue in these terms...<p>&gt; Pushing hard to advance one’s career during one’s 20s and 30s does not cost men the opportunity to father children<p>You can easily make the argument that people in their 20&#x27;s and 30&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;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.

Does anybody have a link for &quot;Gootman 2012&quot;. IIUC, this is the citation for (27) &#x2F; &quot;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). &quot;<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=P5uUEAAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA275&amp;lpg=PA275&amp;dq=%22because+they+have+excelled+beyond+expected+measures+and+Chinese+men+feel+threatened+by+these+women%E2%80%99s+overachievement%22&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=9vGzuUWD8T&amp;sig=ACfU3U3IyHtSgB1v5hDyigoqfWzvxUX1Vw&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwi2pPWA9L2HAxXbD1kFHaR5DZ0Q6AF6BAgLEAM#v=onepage&amp;q=%22because%20they%20have%20excelled%20beyond%20expected%20measures%20and%20Chinese%20men%20feel%20threatened%20by%20these%20women%E2%80%99s%20overachievement%22&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=P5uUEAAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA275&amp;lpg=...</a>

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.<p>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.<p>Life is choices. Choices are hard. We are all privileged in variable ways and it will always be hard to measure equality. I don&#x27;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&#x27;re gonna have to solve without a Key Result.