The "No-Sex" Class: Confusing Economic Contingency With Biological Imperatives Part #24,277
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution reviews, or at least views, someone named F. Roger Devlin's" Sexual Utopia in Power (pdf, sorry), originally published by William Regnery II's paleoconservative Occidental Quarterly -- text in italics are Cowen's quotes of the original article. (Italics are Cowen's)
Yes, men are also, to their own detriment, continually surrounded with images of exceptionally attractive women. But this has less practical import, because—to say it once more—women choose.Or:
The decline of matrimony is often attributed to men now being able to “get what they want” from women without marrying them. But what if a woman is able to get everything she wants from a man without marriage? Might she not also be less inclined to “commit” under such circumstances?
This essay is not politically correct and at times it is misogynous and yes I believe the author is evil (seriously). The main behavioral assumption is that women are fickle. So they are monogamous at points of time but not over time; Devlin then solves for the resulting equilibrium, so to speak. The birth rate falls, for one thing. The piece also claims that the modern "abolition" of marriage strengthens the attractive at the expense of the unattractive. Some of you will hate the piece. I disagree with the central conclusion, and also the motivation, but it does seem to count as a new idea. If you're tempted, read it.
Read the quote in context here.
Devlin's *very* disapproving article claims that sexual utopia for women is choosing the best possible man with the result that if they can't hook up with James Bond (his example) or maybe Donald Trump then no other men will have sex unless a) she chooses, no doubt resentfully, to "settle" for less or b) he resorts to date rape. Oh yeah, and all that con-sarned emancipation just makes things worse, including requiring more date rape, because men are deprived of all those more traditional, genteel economic forms of extortion.
The semi-predictable comments are peppered with people asking what exactly Cowen might consider evil. I'm not sure of that but *I* think the guy's evil in Hannah Arendt's sense that actions taken from banal assumptions can lead to horrific results. One banality he adheres to is mistaking for "instinct" or "genetics" women's perfectly rational partnership decisions in the face of traditionally and often legally-mandated economic distortions... or that men's equally rational (though more odious) decisions made from the traditionally up-hill side of those market distortions should be mistaken for unconscious and uncontrollable biological mandates.
It seems to me that the real "sexual revolution" derives from three points beginning back maybe 250 years: a) medical advances, especially the discovery of hygiene, leading to lower death rates among women and children with the result that b) women have more time in terms of diminished child care and more predictably long life span to take advantage of education leading to c) increased social productivity and overall higher standards of living. The resulting virtuous cycle leads to all sorts of other innovations such as markets for brute-strength-mitigating automation, demand for unnecessary-pregnancy-reducing medical advances like contraception instead of once extremely risky after-the-fact abortion**, and then finally the simple, innovative question that started becoming unavoidable in the late 1950s or 1960s: why should a man and a woman working side by side producing the same output be paid differently?
In economic terms the answer to that last question is "there's no good reason at all." Devlin answers that women *have* to be paid less than men, preferably far less, because otherwise men won't have the kind of leverage we need to get laid. Except for James Bond and, I guess, Donald Trump.
I'm not an economist but I'm guessing an economist like Tyler Cowen would say anyone who thinks we should return the entire social organization of the economy to the productivity levels of the 1950s just so Devlin can get laid is evil.
Also, wow does Devlin have a low opinion of men or what? Virtually none of us will never be interesting to potential partners without some form of bribery, fraud, extortion, or force? Really? Sh'yeah and people say *feminists* are the problem!
Point: surprising how even highly libidinous women are interested in men who are so busy trying to bribe, extort, defraud, or force them to do something they'd... enjoy doing with someone who wasn't being an asshole. Maybe the trick, therefore, isn't to make it *easier to be assholes,* it's to *stop being assholes.*
Point: You don't have to read very far into Devlin's paper before he pretty clearly articulates the conditions that impose the "no-sex" class designation on women. What's less clear is why he so thoroughly approves of this in the face of all the misery he fairly accurately describes for both women and men.
[** This doesn't mean abortion is bad, wrong, old fashioned, or anything else. Just that before contraception there wasn't much alternative. --fl]
Oh no... somebody wants to impose social and economic sanctions just for the sake of male libido! Gee, if it's really all that vital, I've got an even better solution. Force most of the male population to have a sex change! That way, all those former guys will have tons of other women who will sleep with them - each other. And technically, it won't even be "male" libido anymore, so as a bonus there will be much less of it to deal with. And then the real women can just kill each other over who gets to sleep with Bond and Trump, because after all, they don't really matter.
I mean, is it really all that much more ridiculous of an idea than Devlin's?
Please tell me you were using "real women" ironically.
A utopia/dystopia in which lots of people were trans would be REALLY interesting.
Yes, I was. Probably. What I meant to imply was that a man who was forced to become a woman when he didn't really want to wouldn't be a "real woman". I mean no disrespect to trans folks.
"What's less clear is why he so thoroughly approves of this in the face of all the misery he fairly accurately describes for both women and men."
This is exactly what I don't understand!
[Exactly! Some of the later commenters at Marginal Revolution were opining that the alternative to the status quo would be... fundamentalist-Mormon polygamy! Which seems like exactly the *opposite* of what you'd get with further *autonomy* and independence. Heck, even the idea that "every man wants to marry a virgin" has it's foundation in contingent-on-the-status-quo assumptions that women are incapable of supporting their own children. #%@#$%~ Thanks, Christina. --fl]
Funny, I was just thinking how similar it was to the anti-polygamy arguments I've seen. I wrote about it here:
http://lettersfromgehenna.blogspot.com/2008/06/dangerous-woman-shortage.html
fl, I keep saying, this complaint is about the life of a low-status man in a high-status area, or that of a man who failed to fulfill the expectations of the middle class. Sites like JDatersanonymous.com are filled with the incomprehension and caustic bitterness of a community where expected social climbing and hypergamy became the norm, and many, many men are in effect "priced out" of the marriage market within their ethno-religious community, and are marrying American non-Jews in record numbers and proportions and at later ages (because of the relative UNattractiveness of these men to Jewish women in their teens, 20s, early 30s.). So while I think that you "get it", I think you are also telling men like me that we're collateral damage of the Sexual Revolution, and I hope that a très vive discussion ensues if/when some of the dissenters from Cowen's place eventually find your post. Granted that they're bitching about their insufficient compliance with patriarchy meaning failure to achieve their aspirations with the opposite sex ( high social status = more sex partners), I find it HILARIOUS that patriarchy-compliant women are essentially punishing ME for lack of compliance with patriarchy.
Yowch! That PDF should have a prominent "may make your eyes bleed" warning.
A lot of men seem to have some sort of learned helplessness when it comes to making themselves sexy and navigating social situations. I think this is a holdover from pre-sexual-revolution times, where men could resort to coercion instead of having to use sexiness. Devlin's comments seem like the result of learned helplessness. He doesn't have the faintest idea how to make himself sexy to women, or indeed how to interact with women like a normal human being.
I love Nightfall's suggestion.
P. Burke,
You come close. It IS a form of learned helplessness, but it's because the standard for "sexiness" is set (at least in urban areas) by party girls. Most of the men who experience this learned helplessness learn it by trying to seduce by gaining simple rapport ("You come here often?"). Add in nerd-culture and nervousness, and you have a legion of men who are treated as asexual and continually quite cruelly rejected by women of all descriptions. ("We have so much in common! We both like WoW, the paintings of Magritte and the music of Dupré. Why doesn't she like me?") Because she fell in lust with the Alpha Male who gets to play Dupré's stuff on the college organ at the annual concert, dear son.
They quite reasonably conclude that masculinity is performative, and entire subcultures that purport to teach men the art of seduction arise. Rinse and repeat. You do come very close, P. Burke, but you won't like their conclusion ("You're not being patriarchal ENOUGH!").
In my experience with unsuccessful nerdy men, the thing they are lacking is not patriarchal assholedom, it's social skills---the kind of stuff Pepomint described in those sex party pointers that Figleaf linked to. That's almost always the problem with guys who say "We have so much in common!.... Why doesn't she like me?" It's not that they come off as "too nice" and therefore asexual, it's that they don't understand how to signal sexual interest without being creepy and desperate about it. The solution isn't to be an asshole; it's to be an assertive person who can communicate their desires in a way that's not scary.
It bugs me: I can see a niche for something like the seduction community; something that teaches clueless men (and one would hope women) about assertive social interaction. But why does the thing that actually exists have to be so full of creepy men who don't see women as human? Why does it have to be geared toward the bar pickup scene, which is a goddamn abomination? If I think too hard about it, I start to hate everything.
"Caution: Devlin article may result in delayed-onset brain pain." Ow.
Okay, we deal in different spheres, then. My homies found it impossible to act when, early on, in their teenage years, women went limp in their arms and expected to "be taken." While this kind of passive-aggressive signaling is easier for a teenage girl than asking for sex, it has the effect of "I'm saving myself for an asshole who doesn't seek explicit consent." Later, they found themselves incapable of triggering attraction by being their bright, cynical, funny, nutty selves. You wind up with a bunch of non-well-adjusted guys who are very adept at being the "Let's Just Be Friends" friend simply because they compartmentalize sufficiently and actually DO value the women they *aren't* sleeping with. The problem is that it takes so very, very long to get sufficiently Zen about Play that you wind up with the "This THING is broken, it won't do what I want" and "Do X, Y, Z, get pussy" of certain aspects of The Seduction Community.
The SC is the way it is because of the dehumanizing situation in which men are compelled to initiate but find themselves being arbitrarily rejected. It takes a LOT of mojo to accept that the problem is a concatenation of effects of incomplete information (flaws in presentation, time constraints, where your audience's situation may limit your influence) rather than women simply being Evil Incarnate. A lot of the stuff in the SC deals with process rather than identity and energy flows rather than pain BECAUSE men who see themselves as "losers who can't get laid" rather than people doing something ineffective in an effort to master a comprehensible process hate themselves, blame women, and get stuck in their pain.
Although I must admit to a bit of Schadenfreude due to my sardonic recognition that WOMEN control the mores of the bar pickup scene, that "goddamn abomination." It's the angst of having one's own consent status set to "Permanent 'No"" by others whose mores you don't admire. They're not aliens, they're just people whose attraction process remains knowable but INACCESSIBLE to YOU. I mean, I deal with the SPECIFIC issues of lower-social-status "invisible" (often disabled) men, and I can tell you that what tames the more introspective street harassers is BOREDOM with being ignored. I suppose the SC cultivates a similar obliviousness to being rejected, in that it becomes simply boring. And women become non-humans to the extent that you can see the "reject" program running robotically...one example, someone who brings up her "boyfriend" one minute into the conversation with you when you've seen her laughing and flirting with other men and the "boyfriend" nowhere in sight that evening is reacting to too much interest expressed too soon. Avoiding one's own autopilot response of "this sexbot is malfunctioning" is vital. Eventually, you learn to gracefully and honestly preempt HERS.
What we desperately need is a vanilla hetero dating scene that's humane for both men and women. I've been thinking how lucky I am: I kind of ran away from the "normal" dating world and discovered my local BDSM scene, where the men typically treat me like a person instead of a vending machine. But that's not a solution for everybody. It was only sheer coincidence that I thought whacking people with stuff was rewarding in its own right.
I'm not sure you can have a humane dating scene without the ability to kick people out for creepy behavior, though.
Although I must admit to a bit of Schadenfreude due to my sardonic recognition that WOMEN control the mores of the bar pickup scene, that "goddamn abomination."
Well, feel your Schadenfreude if you want to, but I'm not seeing how it makes much logical sense. I neither contribute to nor benefit from the fact that bar pickup scene is a goddamn abomination. Maybe other people who are female do, but they're not identical to me merely in virtue of having the same biological sex.
One last thought: reading "I'm not interested in sex with you" as a personal affront benefits nobody.
Ah, BDSM. Negotiation, negotiation, negotiation. Although I rather like the French author Michel Houellebecque's take on the Parisian sex club: "Of course, there were always chicks who laid like carpets. But for that, you needed a real orgy, and there, entry was ah, SELECTIVE." I think single men face a similar chicken-and-egg problem in the vanilla world: you have to keep the predators away, which means men have to initiate without being predatory. All of this gets read as "entitlement", while I tend to think of fl's 60s-inspired attitude as wishful thinking. Fl reads the paradigm as "other leverage" needing to be brought to bear, whereas the SC takes it as "what you're doing makes women not-fuck you." The men who come to the SC read their experience as "you are unfuckable." Process vs. Identity.
And really, hearing from a (het, presumably, since you are concerned about how men treat you, showing that you engage with men) woman that the BDSM community brought her the respect she wanted is not earth-shatteringly new. But I refer you to Houellebecque (_Elementary Particles_, again) on the subject of the sex beach at Cap d'Agde: "For those too ugly or disfigured, there were again only the pleasures of solitary masturbation, with the exception that here it was tolerated in public with a sort of bemused indulgence."
Can you state the point of the whole Hollbecque thing in plain English? I'm not getting anything that makes sense, or anything that resembles my experience (probably I'm too unsophisticated and un-French).
And really, hearing from a (het, presumably, since you are concerned about how men treat you, showing that you engage with men) woman that the BDSM community brought her the respect she wanted is not earth-shatteringly new.
Well, gee, I didn't realize it was supposed to be earth-shatteringly new. It was really just the lead-in to the main thought, which was, "might BDSM be a good model for how to make the vanilla dating suck less"? I guess you think the answer is "no", but I'm not sure what your objection is.
Houellebecque makes the point (although he's more into the new-age-hippie-group-sex thing) that pairing up within alternative communities is still (as far as het sex goes) vanilla pairing up. The math geek who can't get normal rapport because he keeps using equations is the only one who has a freakout at The Retreat, but the protagonist (Bruno) whose main problem at that time is a lack of physical attractiveness combined with a normal libido, flails his way into a relationship. He is described by his girlfriend, Christine, as "egotistical and gentle."
In short, vanilla dating is (for a lot of people) a play party where you don't get to play, because every woman is looking for THE BEST PARTNER possible, and not play as such. I've done various extremely vanilla paradigms, from the cocktail mixer to speed-dating, from the play party perspective of "watch and wait/approach those available/ask before everything" and the only result was that (of approximately 500 encounters I initiated) I got TWO positive responses. Oddly, they were both geeks, but only the one in a subordinate hierarchical position was strongly attracted to me, while the go-getter (at my own level) working on her future (instead of quietly nuturing her students, as I do) found me too esoteric. So I think status and the communication of status trumps "play" there in a way that makes BDSM an unhelpful paradigm.
Thanks, that makes more sense. I do think more women would be interested in casual sex if there were more venues where the men weren't creepy wolf animals. There probably still wouldn't be enough women to ensure that all the low-status men got all the attention they wanted, but it would at least be an improvement over the status quo.
I was recently accused of being one of those hairy-legged freaks who wants the future to be full of genderless androgynous people. I denied it at the time ("There's room for many genders!", I said), but it's starting to look more and more attractive.
Interestingly enough, Renegade Evolution has a post up right now about how BDSM/swing/play party situations seemed to have MORE unpleasant episodes of male entitlement attached, in her experience. A lot of criticism of the male mentality of "You did A, B, C with X, Y, and Z, now why not ME?" I think there's a blurring of issues surrounding how men hear "No" in our culture, because in a situation in which all but the most attractive men continually initiate and are continually rejected, men hear that as "Not YOU, not ever, no way no how." Bear in mind that a 2% success rate for asking for a phone number is considered a normal return for someone in The SC. The blithe ("Suck it up. Deal.") responses in Ren Ev's comment boxes left me devoutly wishing that women would have to deal with a vital area of their lives where they would have to approach 49 people and be judged and rejected for even ONE positive response that would only START them on the road to POSSIBLY getting what they wanted.
One time you commented "I'm talking about the fact that they're entitled, not whether it's fun for them to be entitled". The fact that men are entitled becomes women's problem in a really big way, which is what Whiskey and Cassius Cobalt outline. Short of re-educating men to regard their OWN default setting as a "justified 'No'"--which is what Mackinnon, Dworkin, Jensen intended--I think we're talking about harm mitigation, rather than whether it's "fun" for women that lots and lots of men are frustrated. And that runs into the issue that straight men DO NOT want to BE Robert Jensen or John Stoltenberg, the utopian ideal.
ReCaptcha "Post imaginary". If only.
Incidentally, I use vital to mean "no real alternative or substitute", so don't come back at me with the creative writing example because work for $ is fungible in a way that heterosexual sex is not.
Is there any field of human endeavor besides marriage in which straight men can act as a gatekeeper class for straight women? And since studies show that men benefit MOST from marriage, isn't a potential gatekeeper role meaningless?
"...men hear that as 'Not YOU, not ever, no way no how.'"
I agree, 100%, that that's how men *hear* it. Which would be the entire point of my contention that the dominant "no-sex" class worldview is the creation of men. The difference, though, is that I think a lot of men hear that as *blame* when *I* think it's great because if *we're* responsible for it then we don't need to ask anyone *else* to undo it for us.
figleaf
I think Devlin is at least partly right. Nightfall makes the fundamental assumption error of nearly all women. That a large group of men, priced out of relationships, won't make society and specifically women PAY in form or another. This has never been borne out by history. Ever.
In some cases (Wikipedia's cite for Fletcher Christian and Pitcairn Island), men simply resort to murder to kill the socially dominant men and make sex slaves out of the women. This happens in closed systems like Pitcairn Island fairly often (ironically, Bligh's followers mostly lived. All of Fletcher's but one were murdered by each other!)
In other cases, you have a society that looks like South Central LA, or the white British underclass described by Theodore Dalrymple ("Life at the Bottom") or the extreme -- Liberia and other West African nations that have "weak" polygamy. Much of the ME instability is driven by the reality of polygamy -- for every man like Osama bin Laden with four wives, there are three men with none. Who are ready fodder for suicide bombings or even just general warfare (where any man may take a sex slave). China's aggressive behavior and essentially, colonizing of Tibet and likely other areas to provide wives for the 100 million or so men in the "bare branches" should give anyone pause for the social consequences of too many men with no women in their lives. It ALWAYS ends in misery all around.
Let's review: men with wives and particularly wives and DAUGHTERS cannot afford to allow expressions of misogyny and wills stamp it out at every turn. Men unconnected to women will express it and act on it. What, women will continue to NOT sleep with them? Wyoming gave women the right to vote in the late 1860's, elected female judges and legislators, and refused to join the Union unless their women retained the right to vote. Not because they were feminists but because it was in their own interests. Of their nuclear family, the basis for the West's comparative advantage.
Without intermediating institutions, like churches, grandmothers ("give that nice young boy a chance, forget that bad boy") and the like, in an atomized, highly mobile, anonymous urban society, women choose on short-term testosterone and status and not much else, in the main, which leaves the nerdy/nice guy who gets ahead in the workplace by teamwork, playing by the rules, not showing up other people, avoidance of peacock behavior, etc. in the lurch.
[Half-Sigma on his blog discusses the film "Crossing Delancy" with Amy Irving. Fascinating. As is the role played by the grandmother who constantly urges clueless Irving's character to give nice deli owner Peter Riegert a chance, even if he's not the dashing literati of her dreams. That's modern relations between the sexes in a nutshell, except minus the grandmother.]
The few socially dominant men are shared by most of the women. Made worse by the Pill and Condom, reducing the need for a woman to carefully assess a man's character. There seems to be some evidence to suggest that frequent partners (shocking I know) reduce in particular a woman's ability to bond to a mate, though it also has effects on men as well in that area. Celebration and promotion of single motherhood only makes this worse. Allowing women to choose the "bad boy" who could be variously a street thug for a woman in South Central LA or a starving musician for a West Side Lawyer without any serious consequences.
The old model of the West's relations between the sexes was considerable freedom for women, much higher than other societies. Muslim ambassadors to the Court at Vienna were shocked by the Emperor himself stopping, and bowing to ordinary ladies crossing the street in front of his horse. Hardened Crusaders, themselves thugs in armor, were scandalized by the appalling treatment of women in the Levant. But this freedom of movement and choice (most women had a say in at least rejecting suitors) came with a price. Women were expected to marry, even the most powerful man could have only one wife at a time, there were no great harems in the West, and masses of men could be mobilized to defend, well, at base their families. Any ordinary man could expect to get married. Today? Many are priced out of it, lacking status/power/prestige. Devlin IS correct, women in the main WILL only "marry up" social-economic status-wise.
The fundamental prosperity of the West is built not on a few "Big Men" having a harem (which essentially is what we have in weak form today in many urban centers) but massive amounts of nerdy ordinary guys having families and making things. Airplanes, Printing presses, firearms, the bomb, DNA sequencers, the like. All of which are continually improved by men (it's mostly men who are fascinated by tools) on their own account or that of their families, paternity assured, making better and better tools. Engineers and technicians in other words, along with scientists. Given women's well known dislike of intelligence (a good proxy for lower testosterone) lack of mediating institutions is a disaster. "Nerd" for women will send them running for the exits.
[Expecting tool-focused men to suddenly change and become peacocking social animals is like asking most women to look like a Supermodel. It simply is not possible. Neither is built for that, bio-evolutionary-wise.]
I think women, ought to at a minimum, expect lots of open misogyny. No real effort to defend them against attack. In other words, the values and attitudes of your average gangsta rap video. I see this as the inevitable consequence of far too many unattached men. There isn't much at this point that can be done about it. Women will just have to get used to it I expect.
For a simple, Hollywood example of what Devlin is talking about, I suggest the following models:
Crossing Delancy, excellent dynamics of the woman chasing the high-powered literary guy and neglecting good guy Joe Average.
Gilmore Girls: both women reject ordinary joe suitors in favor of rich, handsome, but womanizing aristocrats with inherited wealth and a booze problem.
Sex and the City: Men are like shoes, fashion accessories!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy (and other women) share the sexy vampire Spike, even though he rapes Buffy, she still loves him. She might even love him because of that. Buffy NEEDS the violent thug guy.
Chuck: Nerdy guy without much prospects career wise has zilch luck with women, until a sexy secret agent poses as his girlfriend. But isn't really interested in him.
All of these point to the major changes noted by Devlin: short term criteria used by women to evaluate mates/boyfriends. Such as how "hot" they are, how physically dominant (Buffy, Chuck's secret agent pretend girlfriend), how rich and breezy they are (Gilmore Girls, Sex and the City), how status laden they are (Gilmore Girls, SaTC, Crossing Delancy).
I don't much like Devlin's political philosophy, but he does at least have some essential points. Most men are priced out of relationships or marriage. Women are hypergamous and make without mediating institutions, bad choices on short-term criteria for the most part. Modern society has not found a way to pair up men and women with few left alone. Leaving a lot of unattached men around is not my idea of smart or healthy.
They won't become gay. They will make trouble. Count on it.
[Hi Whiskey,
My big concern is that each of those examples occurs in *fiction,* which is influenced by the dominant women as the "no-sex" class paradigm wherein women aren't interested in sex and are therefore willing, or not, to trade sex for valuable-enough *other* considerations (for example the Donald Trump model) or for someone who demonstrates sufficient earned or natural worthiness (for example Devlin's also-fictional James Bond.) And so in *that sense* Devlin's essay works perfectly as an explanation of that *fictional universe.* The real universe looks a lot more like women as human beings and therefore a) first-person interested in sex but also b) substantially put off by manipulation as if they are objects or, I think more accurately, *objectives* of someone else's desire.
My preferred explanation for the dynamics between men and women comes not from fiction but from retail sales wherein you know that if you step into a Best Buy or, even more directly, a car lot, then you'll be approached by someone who, no matter how genuinely interesting, charming, or helpful they might be want only one thing from you. And on the sometimes-it-even-happens-that-way occasion when a used-car salesman *really is* interested in you as a human being instead of a potential customer the dynamics of the situation (you on the car lot, for instance) is going to color not only his behavior towards you but also your underlying suspicion of him such that you'll still be aware of that "salesmen want only one thing" dynamic and they'll be aware of that "customers aren't really naturally interested in cars" dynamic from *their* perspective.
Devlin didn't discuss gender relations in terms of sales-person/shopper and therefore he doesn't just *drastically* miss the point, he only offers his idea of how the narrative arc of the fictional universe should be rewritten. But remember, it's *still dramatic fiction!*
Thanks,
figleaf
Women are hypergamous and make without mediating institutions, bad choices on short-term criteria for the most part.
You know what? Men make bad relationship choices for the most part too.
I watched a British documentary once about how scientists were studying the dating process. They found that people date based on criteria that have nothing to do with what works for long-term relationships. (For example, women are extremely likely to date men who are exactly five inches taller than they are. Likewise, men prefer women who are inversely gender dimorphic; basically meaning very feminine looking if they are masculine looking, androgynous if they're also androgynous, and averagely feminine if they're averagely masculine.) And then if the dating goes to an actual relationship it is based on criteria which have nothing to do with their "dateability" nor anything to do with what would make things work in the long-term. And then if the relationship actually lasts, it's due to yet another set of factors not selected for at either of the earlier stages.
It's almost like human relationships were designed to fail horribly... and perhaps that's the point. Before people were aware that sex caused pregnancy, and even for awhile after, children were raised by the tribe as a whole rather than by two parents. By making permanent romantic relationships difficult, it would result in having multiple partners over the course of one's life, helping to avoid inbreeding in small groups. Dunno, I'm probably wrong, this is just a spur-of-the-moment theory.
But while my first post was kind of-tongue-in-cheek, maybe it would help to skew the gender ratio, nonetheless. Free male-to-female sex changes. Help lesbians to artificially conceive - after all, their children won't have Y chromosomes. Might put things back into a more natural balance. After all, we no longer have the male population being culled by tribal warfare, mammoth tramplings, smilodon maulings, a 30% murder rate (mostly male-on-male), or frequent miscarriages which somehow rarely affect female fetuses. The question is, would a more "natural" ratio actually be beneficial in some way, or would it just screw things up? Even if it would make things better, would people actually want to?
Yowch! That PDF should have a prominent "may make your eyes bleed" warning.
Those who enjoy such eye-bleeding observations of disturbing realities will probably also like my new blog which discusses among other topics the lost boys and human brood parasites.