Lyman Stone

The rise, however, is not nearly as steep, and not nearly as sex-specific, as my prior data showed, because my prior data included an error on my part. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. On the plus side, this is why you tweet findings early in the research process!

I should add here that @Noahpinion suggests porn drives these trends. I am inclined to agree somewhat! Porn may enable men to be more comfortable not having a sexual partner. Lacking a partner means they don't benefit from the civilizing effect of woman.

Broadly speaking, human society has developed such that the opposite sex is an important part of a given person's development. You learn a lot by having human relationships with different types of people, whether those relationships are romantic or otherwise.

But I want to jump back here: I had some people give me flak for sharing results that were off-the-cuff, and which got picked up by some incel groups. That response is silly. *the point* of going to twitter with this stuff is to get feedback. And I got very good critique!

"But won't somebody believe something wrong from your erroneous first result?" Oh no someone will be wrong on the internet. What will we ever do.

At the end of the day, sharing with twitter gets 10x as much feedback as you can get any other way.

I'm getting flak about the "civilizing effect of woman" line. The flak perplexes me. Is it a surprise to anyone that a committed relationship with a woman tends to make men better? This is a pretty solid empirical fact: marriage reduces numerous high risk behaviors.

I don't think there's a serious empirical debate about the positive effect of these relationships on men. There may be some debate about effects on women.... But I think the revealed preference of most of womankind is that they believe committed relationships benefit them too?

I just don't see what's controversial about saying the sexes are better off together, and in particular that the male tendency toward risky behavior and aggression is GREATLY reduced by having a stable female partner (and children).

Single men have a tendency to do risky, unusual, and often very bad stuff. Single men have very high crime rates. Single men are also extremely economically productive in many cases! They're a crazy bunch! And yeah they benefit from stable female partnership!

I believe it's likely women benefit too, but being a male I am uniquely cognizant of the benefits to men of female partnership, and I'll be honest I do think men are more changed by marriage than women: and again, I think the data bears that out.

The big change for women that has effects comparable to marriage for men is, of course, childbearing. But for men, it's companionship. So if you find the idea that men lacking female partnership might tend towards anti-social behavior to be offensive.... Uh, okay?

If you think "toxic masculinity" is a problem, then *by definition* you are making a formally similar argument that what men need in their life is the influence of the feminine. Now, there are some differences in these arguments.... But in the externals, they're very similar.

So, yeah, women do have a civilizing influence on men. That's good. Lacking stable female partnership, many men do tend towards risky and aggressive behavior. I'm not blaming women for this of course; its the individual person's responsibility to account for their own actions!