Bridging the mating gap between men and women

 

I would not ordinarily read Motherhood on Ice by Marcia Inhorn, as I have bigger fish to fry like picking up quantum programming or maybe signing up for a ChatGPT prompt engineering course but I've already written a number of articles on this blog on egg-freezing and the book came under strong recommendation from my sociologist buddy.

For a married guy who is not vested in technology, but actually has two ex-eggs running around the house, the book is too much information for a dude to process. Not only do I need to be introduced to egg-freezing technology, I have to read sob stories from very successful professional women, who lay much of their dating woes on men. Ultimately, egg freezing is not so much about single female professionals, but it is also about the fathers, ex-husbands and boyfriends who often have to pay for the procedure. However, I did come off a bit more positive about approving this technology broadly here, but it would not fulfil the wishes of many professional women in Singapore because the problem is that men have better things to do, and, thanks to dating apps, younger women to date. Egg freezing is, therefore, more akin to insurance, something that gives professional women some peace of mind. It will not arrest the decline of our fertility rate.

If egg freezing is going to be more like insurance, then we can expect the medical industry to sell it as a form of female empowerment or a passport to focus on a woman's career. This is while some branches of feminism are actually against egg freezing, and in the sample, almost no one froze their eggs for career reasons.

The big elephant in the room, according to anthropologists is the mating gap. The pool of eligible, educated and egalitarian men is very rare and, channelling the other book I read Generations, adults are taking a long time to get their shit together. 

This leaves two groups of people on the shelves - professional women and low-status men. 

So every society has an imperative to change the way humans mate and get professional women to marry and form families with blue-collar men. 

In this case, anthropologists are warming up to the idea of mix-collar marriages. Now we have Phds lamenting the idea that if RGS marries an ITE guy, she is labelled as "settling". 

This is something as a blogger I'm really proud of as I have been blogging about this issue for years.

Some kind of agency needs to be launched, in fact, a whole of government effort, should be launched to address this mating gap. My projection is that we have to admit men into more degree programs, failing which, we need to make viable better non-degree tradesmen paths for men. Maybe even cut NS down to 1.5 years and pay NS men's Army regular salaries. 

My money is on Singapore succeeding in this effort after a few GST rises.

I think the bigger challenge is getting white-collar women to accept blue-collar men as life partners.

The idea of a dating agency that caters to professional women and blue-collar men has been mooted by anthropologists, but when I broached the idea with friends, both men and women are disgusted by the idea as we are an Asian after all and female hypergamy / male hypogamy is still largely the norm. Even guys who, on the surface, fantasise about the great life as a househusband, they get upset when I say what if their daughters support their husbands financially. One reply from a guy is that if his daughter does this, it would mean his failure as a father. This sums up most men in Singapore, they actually want some degree of financial independence, but get angry when their daughters provide for it some another guy. 

I think this mixed-collar dating agency catering to professional women - working-class men is currently the best idea there is. It may take a generation for a mindset change to come about, but we need a catalyst to generate some positive stories about these marriages. It may take a few high-CEP scholars to succeed in coming up with a first attempt. 

How do we sell this to blue-collar men? Off the top of my head, I would sell it this way - they just need to show up for a buffet spread where some mysterious women might try to engage in conversation with them. This sounds so good, even professional men want to do this ( but they are not invited )

I leave it to fine brains who read this blog to brainstorm ideas on how to sell this to professional women. 

This is too hard for me, let me get back to my Quantum computing texts.