How Will We Survive the Sex War?

Throughout history, the happy convergence of men and women — and their by-product, children — has driven human civilisation. No less than Freud saw this need for family as intrinsic: “Eros and Ananke [love and necessity],” he writes in Civilisation and its Discontents, “have become the parents of human civilisation too.”

Yet today we are lurching towards a society where sexual intimacy and family life are being undermined at the most basic levels. The impact can be seen in shifting dating patterns and declining rates of marriage, family formation and childbirth. And this is no longer a Western disease; a majority of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level; by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to experience population decline.

To some extent, the roots of this war between the sexes is economic, exacerbated by the global “cost-of-living” crisis stemming from house price increases relative to incomes, higher energy and food costs. With hopes of a steady career and home ownership fading, many young people now choose to, or are forced to, adopt a lifestyle incompatible with marriage and family.

“Many young people now choose to, or are forced to, adopt a lifestyle incompatible with marriage and family.”

This is most evidenced in the West by the rapid shift away from not only family but heterosexual engagement overall. But in East Asia, the breakdown in male-female relations is if anything, starker. In Japan, for instance, the harbinger of modern Asian demographics, one in four people in their twenties and thirties are virgins. Indeed, the Japanese even have a term — herbivores — for the passive, desexed generation of young men.

So too with China, which, despite once being renowned for its strong familial culture, is now home to 200 million unmarried adults. Once virtually unimaginable, the proportion of adults aged 17-36 living alone in China has risen to nearly 70%. Marriage and childbirth, notes one Chinese Gen Z, have become “almost synonymous with the stress of life for us young people”.

And this does not simply represent a demographic crisis — but inevitably a political one too. We cannot know the political implications of the current war of the sexes in societies such as China and Russia, where civic life is strictly controlled. But in the US, new fractures are becoming more pronounced. Most obviously, women, particularly single women, now provide the base for progressive politics. Similarly in Canada, according to a 2020 poll, women favoured the Liberals by two to one while men slightly tilted to the conservatives.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: Scene from The Philadelphia Story, a 1940's romantic comedy, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.