Single Men Don't Fear Marriage

There is a common assumption in modern American culture about single men. They're all immature boy-men who flee from commitment like Japanese extras from Godzilla. But a new study appears to put the lie to this sterotype, showing American men want families just as much as their female counterparts.

Single men are, on the whole, as likely to want to get married as single women, the survey found. They are more likely than women to be open to dating people of a different race or religion, more prone to falling in love at first sight, more eager to combine bank accounts sooner and more likely to want children. (That distant choking sound you hear is thousands of women finding this news hard to swallow.)

...Men's greater inclination toward parenthood, however, seems to hold across every age group. While more than half the single men ages 21 to 35 wanted kids, only 46% of the women did. After that, the difference widens further, and not just out of biological reality. Only 16% of childless women in the still fertile years from 35 to 44 wanted kids; 27% of the men did. Plus, more women than men were prepared to say definitively that they were skipping parenthood.

Hat tip to CRChair for this article. It makes this single man feel better that he is not alone.

This one's for Shadowmom

From TheDogHouseDiaries.com.

Stress leads to more baby girls?

Here is one of those facts that appears to e widely-known, but had somehow passed me by. Societal stress leads to more baby girls born, while male fetuses are spontaneously aborted.

IT HAS been known for a while that stressful conditions such as famine result in more girls being born than happens in good times. The shift in the sex-ratio is tiny—around 1%—but in a large population that is still noticeable. A possible evolutionary explanation is that daughters are likely to mate and produce grandchildren regardless of condition, whereas weedy sons may fail in the struggle to have the chance to reproduce at all. In hard times, then, daughters are a safer evolutionary bet. Regardless of why the shift happens, though, it has long been argued that the moment when it happens is conception—or, more probably, implantation. A womb exposed to stress hormones, runs the hypothesis, is less likely to accommodate a male fetus.

One wonders what the current Recession is doing to the future demographics of the nation. Will a shift in gender numbers change attitudes of the culture in general?