Can Gender Norms Please Everyone?

Tove K has doubts

Tove K, one of the writers on Substack who I find most interesting, recently put up a particularly provocative post.

Many people were genuinely unhappy together in the system before the sexual revolution. Many people are genuinely unhappy now. 

Men and women are natural enemies. Not-all-men and not-all-women. In any given moment, a certain share of the population forms happy couples. But how many? 30 percent? 50 percent? 70 percent? That depends on definitions. What is clear is that no system for human relationships has yet allowed the vast majority of people to be happy together. 

She says that men naturally prioritize sexual novelty, while women are naturally very selective in choosing a mate. Men can be fine with making a minimal commitment and investing little in a relationship, while women naturally want to maximize the resources that the partner contributes.

But these are only general tendencies, not uniform differences. Tove K illustrates this with overlapping normal distributions.

Society can never make those two curves overlap completely. What it can do, is to make them overlap more or less. People's mating strategies are affected both by their innate psychological disposition and what society tells them is feasible. If society encourages men and women to meet in the middle ground, more people will do so. If society encourages people to be true to their own feelings and inner dispositions, the divide between men and women is likely to increase. If people are not even trying to get along, fewer will.

She says that the sexual norms that prevailed prior to the sexual revolution forced people to the middle ground. But now the greater emphasis on individualism and sexual gratification allows both men and women to revert to their natural mating strategies. She illustrates this with curves that have moved apart, overlapping less. The result is fewer successful relationships.

In our current hyper-individualistic society, people are supposed to be true to their feelings when choosing mating strategies. So many high-status men are honest about wanting to have several sexual partners. On the other side, many women are honest that they only want a partner who can truly meet their needs. Both sexes have pulled away in their respective directions and the middle ground where they can meet has shrunk.

She writes,

There will always be some women who earnestly love to have casual sex and some who earnestly want to condition sex with investment. The different interests of those two groups somehow need to be balanced, just as other opposing interests in society.

The old norms were very hostile toward women who earnestly enjoy casual sex. For example, I have written before that I believe that laws against abortion were part of the effort to discourage women’s pursuit of casual sex. Pregnancy outside of marriage was a sign of sexual laxity, and forcing the woman to carry the baby to term was a form of punishment. Once the sexual revolution hit, and women were no longer frowned upon for having premarital sex, the support for laws against abortion collapsed.

But there are trade-offs, as Tove K points out. Norms against casual sex will make some women unhappy. And if you discourage women from having casual sex, you are bound to make it harder for men to have casual sex. So not everyone was happy before the sexual revolution.

The norms that do not discourage casual sex have an adverse effect on the women who naturally want to have a committed man for a partner. They end up discouraging men from compromising away their desire for sexual novelty while discouraging women from compromising away their desire for the highest-status mate.

There are people today who would be happier if the sexual revolution had never taken place. But there were people who were unhappy with the old norms, also. There is no perfect set of norms that will make everyone happy. Tove K challenges feminists is to face up to this situation.

The sooner we can talk about the fact that different women have different interests, the better.

substacks referenced above:

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Most couples just can't be happy