thoughts on gender ratio & social dynamics

we're assuming heterosexuality here

it is obvious if you think about it that most ppl spend most of their time in social spaces where their gender is in the majority and the other gender is in the minority. but i think most ppl don’t think about it & that gender ratio has a lot of like underutilized explanatory power.

i’m going to follow the established precedent of using “high” to describe a gender ratio w more men & “low” to describe a gender ratio w more women.

after a relatively sheltered/insulated childhood, i first spent a lot of time in extremely low gender ratio social spaces (artsy/literary) & have now spent a lot of time in extremely high gender ratio social spaces. the low gender ratio scenes came first for me; when i started hanging out in high gender ratio spaces, i was surprised that a lot of the things i thought were true about women and men were more usefully described as truths about the majority gender & the minority gender.

(it’s worth saying that i spent more time in low-ratio spaces when i was younger & more time in high ratio spaces more recently. if it had gone the other way around, some of these observations could have been explained as the results of my aging/diminished attractiveness to men.)

(it’s also worth saying that i am talking specifically about groups that have members of both genders. groups that are just women function very differently than low-ratio groups, & i hear reports that the same thing holds for groups of men, mutatis mutandis.)

interruptions/attention

recently, after mostly being in high-ratio spaces for a while, i was hanging out w a friend in her low-ratio home social scene, a group that cares a lot about things like art & social justice. i was weirded out by noticing that the very few men there, interrupted women all the fucking time. i had gotten used to high-ratio norms which were more interrupty in general but also put noticeably more weight/attention on my words than men’s words.

im not the only one to notice this:

in the first couple of months i spent in high-ratio groups, i had consistently felt surprised by how much attention my words were paid, until some combination of adjusting my way of speaking & sheer habituation made me comfortable again, and then the norms in low ratio spaces surprised me.

in my friend’s social group, there was a lot of talk about how men tend to talk over women. not just the women but the men talked about this—including, surreally, the particular men who were doing most of the interrupting & talking over women. maybe it helped? maybe the men in that group would have interrupted even more without that kind of discourse in the air? but i couldn’t help finding it really funny that despite talking about this problem much more than my high ratio groups, they couldn’t do anything about it.

mate poaching

when i moved from low ratio spaces to high ratio spaces, i was very surprised by seeing men trying to (and sometimes succeeding in) stealing other men’s girlfriends/wives. i had almost never seen that before, but i had seen a lot of women engaging in mate poaching. the reasons for this are pretty obvious… i still think it’s true that women are more likely to want a man semi-because he has a partner already & on the other hand men go after partnered women in spite of their partner

competition

another pretty obvious one. in low ratio spaces i saw a lot more competition between women, especially competition for male attention. in high ratio spaces i see a lot more competition between men, especially for women’s attention. in the last section i mentioned that i’m pretty sure women are still more mate-poachy in general; im not sure yet which gender is more competitive, if either.

publicly indicating a privileged relationship

the heading of this section is kind of clumsy, sorry. i’m not sure how else to describe it.

when i was younger (& more habituated to low ratio spaces) i always thought of women as more clingy & territorial than men. i would notice stuff like women at parties initiating more touch with their boyfriends than vice versa, especially in group conversations, & i noticed that when a couple got introduced to someone new, it was more often the woman who would mention the relationship than the man. it wasn’t limited to established relationships either; i noticed that when people were flirting w each other or starting a relationship, the woman would often initiate tests of how willing the man was to acknowledge a privileged relationship between them in public, if that makes sense.

in high gender ratio spaces it’s the other way around. men act more territorial & do more to make it seem to the group like there is a private relationship between you.

the most unsettling or disorienting part, i guess, is that in low-ratio spaces, men only do stuff like that when they’re fairly committed to a woman; in high-ratio spaces, men will be very territorial around women whom it’s obvious the man does not particularly like & only wants to hook up with.

the upshot

the average man that women spend time with, spends more time with women than the average man does, & the same with genders reversed. i think this explains a lot of the disagreement between men & women about what men & women are like.