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发帖数: 21367 | 1 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-sin
In societies where men heavily outnumber women—in what’s known as a “high
-sex-ratio society”—women are valued and treated with deference and
respect and use their high dyadic power to create loving, committed bonds
with their partners and raise families. Rates of illegitimacy and divorce
are low. Women’s traditional roles as mothers and homemakers are held in
high esteem. In such situations, however, men also use the power of their
greater numbers to limit women’s economic and political strength, and
female literacy and labor-force participation drop.
One might hope that in low-sex-ratio societies—where women outnumber men—
women would have the social and sexual advantage. (After all, didn’t the
mythical all-female nation of Amazons capture men and keep them as their sex
slaves?) But that’s not what happens: instead, when confronted with a
surplus of women, men become promiscuous and unwilling to commit to a
monogamous relationship. (Which, I suppose, might explain the Amazons’ need
to keep men in slave quarters.) In societies with too many women, the
theory holds, fewer people marry, and those who do marry do so later in life
. Because men take advantage of the variety of potential partners available
to them, women’s traditional roles are not valued, and because these women
can’t rely on their partners to stick around, more turn to extrafamilial
ambitions like education and career. |
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