Paragon Fury said:
Its kind of funny; I remember reading a piece while in college about how if the gender ratios got to be in favor of women to any significant degree, then culture/society would likely become even more hypersexualized and fixated on what men like then it is now, because women would be forced to win the attention of something much scarcer than it is now (barring of course, any technology that actually made men unneeded or unwanted).
Well, I mean, to some extent that would probably happen. Some amount of women would be willing to complete for the scarce partners, some, probably more like most, would likely decide "fuck it" and not try, which means the competition goes down, blah blah blah.
Basically, how important are men to women anyway? Changing the ratio of men to women destroys so much of the basic assumptions on which our gender dynamics are built, traditions and societal obligations mostly will not survive the transition. So there are only 3 things a man can uniquely provide at first glance: sex, impregnation, and possibly romance/companionship. Anyone who wants a male partner after the manpocalypse is looking for some combination of those.
In a world like our own filled to the brim with porn and sexy toys, sex is not going to be a huge motivating factor. We can satisfy ourselves in other ways. Some might seek it out occasionally as a novelty, but most wont want to deal with the efforts that they would have to go to to be chosen as some guy's permanent partner. Even if we assume only 2 out of every 10 women are actually interested in such a partnership that means women have to be roughly twice as desirable to get the same quality of partnership. That is a situation with a massively diminishing return on investment. So sex is a motivator, but not a terribly strong one. We are very quickly going to cap out on how far women are willing to go for that.
Second, we have impregnation. Artificial insemination seems like the obvious solution here. Of course, men might not want to donate sperm, but there are ways around that. Such as appealing to greed. A guy might be able to give a sperm sample to a fertility clinic for a good amount of money, and women seeking to have a child might pay some money to be impregnated. A single sperm sample can impregnate several women. I mentioned the 10 to 1 rule in my last post, it is conceivable that this could be achieved with a single sperm sample.
Last we have romance and companionship. Frankly, you can get companionship from a gender you are not sexually attracted to and like sex there exist plenty of tools to get romance even without a partner of any sort. Romance novels, for example. You would likely see a large rise in non sexual unions among women. I mean, really, you can get almost everything from a really good friend that you can get from a sexual partner, to some degree even romance.
Essentially, in practical terms and divorced of tradition and our current societal values, women can replace men with a combination of porn, sex toys, artificial insemination, romance fiction, and female companionship. We don't need any space age shit, this is all current technology. We could have done this back in the 70's and our ability to replace men is only getting better as time goes on. It's not perfect yet, but it gets the job done. And a world like this would make creating higher quality replacements a real industry. How long before we develop perfect or even superior replacements in one or more of these fields? Cloning with genetic mixing, for example, would eliminate the need for men to impregnate women. Or sex bots. All we need to do is fool our animal brains into being satisfied. That isn't very hard, and you would easily be able to build a "man" to your specification. We are getting really damn close to both anyway and we don't even need them! We are already developing these technologies largely for the hell of it.
I really don't think the competition for men will be as fierce as you or the writer of that paper would like to imagine.
Now, there would be one more motivating factor. Status symbols. Men are rare, that makes them valuable. Having a man might be seen as a status symbol, especially if he is exclusively yours. You might see a sharp rise in trophy husbands among the rich and social elite.
The question is where does the equilibrium end up at? You are almost certainly going to get a situation where the men get to choose from more desirable partners than in the current environment, whatever "desirable" means to that particular man. You will also likely get to sleep around a bit without any real social judgement.
But that all is very different from political power. And I don't mean just who gets to be president or something, I mean on every level of society. Women will become the default just by virtue of outnumbering men 9 to 1. Everything shifts to the default assumption of appealing to women, men are an after thought. Going forward the vast majority of everything is created by women and for women. Every academic field of every academic study is female dominated. Every job of every type, from soldiers to athletes to politicians, are female dominated. Everywhere in the world. And women get 9 out of every 10 votes, or at least make up 9/10ths of the voice of the people. Men become a special interest group. I honestly cannot fathom how this would not result in a massive political shift of power away from men towards women.