“If they had a girlfriend they liked, but someone else came along who was a little smarter or prettier, a little more this or that, it was easier for them to call it quits because they had other options,” Birger explains.īut despite these stark numbers and sobering (yet familiar) stories, the joy of reading Date-Onomics comes, in part, from the fact there is something so satisfying in knowing you’re a bit fucked, but it’s not your fault. These men have the problem-or, really, the luxury-of the “paradox of choice.” It’s harder to commit to just one lady because they believe another woman will always be a little better. “I think some thought that they were so special that they had just become really good catches, and that’s why they had so many options.” Yeah, right. “I didn't get the sense they were all being Machiallevian about it,” he says.

When I speak with Birger, he assures me they weren’t all as bad as Hendriks. In short, he is a total asshole who plays off the insecurity of the numbers games to solely satiate his sexual desires. Hendrik not only engages in the delights of not texting one-night-stands and ditching women who don’t immediately agree to have sex with him, but also loves playing women off each other by insulting others to manipulate them into feeling special.

Then there’s Jason Hendriks, the pseudonym given to a 34-year-old on the Upper East Side of Manhattan who is a “little pudgy and not the world’s sharpest dresser,” by Birger’s account. One woman recalls a boyfriend who felt entitled to grope her friend right in front of her because he thought he deserved a threesome. They take advantage of their rarefied status by holding off settling down and enjoying the market of riches-and Birger’s book includes colorful anecdotes. The gap’s impact on dating for straight, single women is exacerbated, Birger explains, because men with college degrees are consciously or subconsciously aware that they are in scarce supply. Fort Lauderdale has 71 percent more female college grads than male between ages 22-29, followed by Providence, which has 60 percent more. Not for nothing are there 39 percent more women ages 22 to 29 with college degrees in Manhattan than men in the same bracket, with a gap of 100,000 between female and male college degree holders under the age of 35 in the entire city.Īnd while the land of Sex and the City is tough for single women seeking college-educated men, it’s hardly the worst. He crunches data from the National Center for Education Statistics (and includes very helpful charts in the appendix) showing that 1981 was the last year that more men than women graduated from a four-year undergraduate program. This conclusion that people should lay off of feminism as the culprit for hook-up culture is not the focus of Date-Onomics, but a rewarding one for anyone tired of hand-wringing about whether feminism “hurts” women.īirger focuses on the admittedly (by his own account) limited college-educated set and adroitly outlines that the disparity has been building for decades, but without us ever fully recognizing its influence. are both rooted in a statistical over-supply of women,' writes Birger. 'The sexual revolution and the hookup culture. Further research showed that societies tended to skew away from monogamy when men were in scarce supply. Guttentag and Secord noticed there was an over-supply of young, single women when the Women's Liberation movement and the sexual revolution blossomed. But we’ve never really looked hard at the demographics-which may provide a far better, more concrete answer.īirger points to a relatively overlooked book, Too Many Women?:The Sex Ratio Question, which was written by professors Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord, and published in 1983. We’ve argued about hookup culture and whether it brought the death of monogamy and marriage, and about whether feminism and sexual liberation-giving women control over their reproductive health and sexual expression, while freeing them from the confines of a virgin ideal-could be considered the cause. Recent debates about dating and sex have been seriously lacking in data. If we assume these women will want to marry college-educated men-a desire that Birger convincingly argues should and will change-there’s simply not enough men to make all those trips down the aisle a reality. The current college class breakdown of women to men is 57:43, which means that there will be about one-third more women than men with college degrees when graduation arrives. The “man deficit” is real for the graduate set. In his book, Birger eloquently explains, in terms that even the non-statistically-literate can comprehend, that the gender ratios of college graduating classes in the past few decades reveal that there really aren’t enough single guys.

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