I was stunned to read this from Time Magazine:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in May that births to unmarried women have reached an astonishing 39.7%. How much does this matter? More than words can say. There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers’ financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation’s underclass.

I checked it out at the CDC; it isn’t a typo:

The trend in unmarried childbearing was fairly stable from the mid-1990s to 2002, but has shown a steep increase between 2002 and 2007. Between 1980 and 2007, the proportion of births to unmarried women in the United States has more than doubled, from 18 percent to 40 percent.

Iceland (66 percent), Sweden (55 percent), Norway (54 percent), France (50 percent), Denmark (46 percent) and the United Kingdom (44 percent) all have higher proportions of births to unmarried mothers than the United States. Ireland (33 percent), Germany and Canada (30 percent), Spain (28 percent), Italy (21 percent) and Japan (2 percent) have lower percentages than the United States.

Another tidbit:

The highest rates of out of wedlock births are in D.C. (59%) and Mississippi (54%) and the lowest rate is in Utah (20%).

The new equilibrium we are moving toward seems a very different world. Women free to pick a dad without expecting him to stay as a long term helper probably pick sexier men. This should create more inequality in male access to women for sex and kids, and give men more free time to compete to be the few super-sexy super-dads.

Women would get to have kids fathered by sexier men, but at the expense of raising those kids with less male help. More men would be sex-failures with more free time to pursue long-shot plans to reverse their fortunes, and without wives to moderate them. How many of those plans will be peaceful?

I guess this helps somewhat to explain the explicitly sex-aggressive men I see more of these days. When I wrote:

If you don’t signal your continued love she may well conclude that your love has in fact changed.

“Master Dogen” responded:

Hanson … seems to be thoroughly trained in thinking that the best way to long-term health in a relationship with a woman is to signal “caring more than everyone else” and “giving gifts,” etc. This, of course, is the constant position of a supplicant. … I advocate a very different way of dealing with a woman … So let’s assume you are an alpha, and you’ve trained your woman to supplicate you rather than the other way around. … You must continue signaling your dominance: gently pull her hair when you go in for a kiss, raise you voice sternly when she steps out of line, flirt shamelessly with other women in public.

I might not like it, but I can’t argue that the future doesn’t hold a lot more of this.

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