William Costello

The other idea could be that it's just a naturally kind of cycling back and forth that this unique spike in sexlessness for young men wasn't any major artifact at all and it's kind of evening out.

I can't recall the exact statistic now, but I know that it's reversed and that women have overtaken, that there's more sexist women.

Not necessarily.

So, you know, I've spoken about that statistic on podcasts before as one kind of data point in what we call the larger mating crisis.

But to think about it as a mating crisis, the evidence of young men reporting having sex within the last year, I don't think it's the best evidence of any phenomenon.

You can still have this mating crisis with a lot of dissatisfaction with the mating market from both sexes, for men and for women.

And there's still a

So, for example, new Pew research showed that upwards of 30% of men just simply aren't even seeking romantic relations at all, even for casual sex.

They're just backing out completely.

Yeah.

So it's kind of just pointing to this having sex one time within the last year isn't necessarily the greatest kind of metric.

OK, so the mating crisis can be traced back to an essay my supervisor wrote in 2016.

So my supervisor is Dr. David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin, an evolutionary psychologist.

And he wrote this essay saying the mating crisis among educated women.

He talks about this mismatch between women beginning to outpace men in educational settings.

So he used the University of Texas at Austin as an example where women are beginning to outpace men in education at rapid rates.

It's called the pink campus.

And I know you've had Richard Reeves on to talk to you in the podcast, and he lays out all of those statistics in his book of boys and men.

Now, when you combine this socioeconomic success of young women in recent decades with their evolved mate preference for an equal or higher status mate, it just simply means that there's a skew in terms of the lack of eligible men that are out there.

And when you have a skew in a mating market like that, so fewer eligible men for women to compete for, the market favors the scarcity.