My arithmetic skills are admittedly not extraordinary but surely these numbers don’t work? How many single women can there possibly be to make such a difference?
Single Numbers
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
My arithmetic skills are admittedly not extraordinary but surely these numbers don’t work? How many single women can there possibly be to make such a difference?
Clarissa's Blog 
“How many single women can there possibly be to make such a difference?“
A lot. US population of women aged 15-44 in 2023: 65,544,454 [US Census Bureau].
Depending on age group, between 32% and 41% of them are unmarried, which includes both the unpartnered looking for a partner and those not looking, and the partnered but unmarried. Now, the math is not so easy to do because of the distinct variables involved, but it is still a lot of people.
If you consider that women register and vote at higher rates than men (so-called gender gap in voter turn-out), and that women tend to favor Democrats overall and younger women even more so, there you have it.
The absurd thing – or maybe not so absurd, depending on viewpoint – is that policies resulting from women’s electoral choices have tended over the past 40 years to benefit women in higher social class groups and not women overall.
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The following is for people who want to think about the numbers in the tweet:
For the purposes of approximation, suppose that equal numbers of people are married and unmarried. This would mean that married men, married women, single men, single women are all equally numerous. Assume further that each group is equally politically active, and there are no independents or undecided. Then the first three groups give a 30+14+7 = “51%” tilt in favor of Republicans, and the final group gives a “37%” tilt in favor of Democrats.
But for the actual final percentages, one should divide these numbers-in-quotes by four, since each group is only a quarter of the voting population. So the pro-Republican tilt would be 12.75%, the pro-Democrat tilt would be 9.25%, for an overall 3.5% lead for the Republicans.
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I don’t know about the numbers, but the rest jibes with cultural trends, more generally.
Marrieds and single men are also the ones showing up at church. Single women not so much.
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I must be a real outlier because I’m single, a lifelong celibate and a devout Catholic who goes to church every Sunday and teaches Sunday school, and I’m probably more conservative than many guys I know. Then again, my parents are Cuban immigrants and it’s in my DNA to be conservative, I never went through a liberal phase. It would be interesting to see a study comparing American women from a similar background to me and regular American women
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I’m puzzled by it myself, as I took up churchgoing when I was young and single. I flirted with libertarianism in my youth, but never had any attraction to what the Democrats were selling. One barely tolerates the Rs.
Reckon we’ll ever get a political party that represents our interests?
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I used to be a libertarian myself until I realized a lot of libertarians were assholes who hate people, they’re edgelord types who secretly hate everyone and want to rule over everyone else. I can’t be a liberal and MAGA Republican types come off as ignorant cultists who think Trump is a messiah, this is why I’m independent
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Exactly.
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The regime knows this, which is why they keep pumping bullshit studies to encourage women not to marry and have kids.
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Read a tween book to review this week.
Started out promising. Girl power. Agency.
But even in 2014, the “happy ending” for a girl is: abandon all family, friends, tradition, obligations, previous promises, and responsibility, and go adventuring. Being a youth book, it does not, of course, explore what that looks like in ten, twenty, forty years.
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Published in 2014, and even then it wasn’t edgy. That propaganda’s been pervasive for a long time.
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That’s exactly it, this is a philosophy of life that sets people up for subsequent misery.
As a former classmate at Yale told me, “you spend years working on bringing the revolution closer and then suddenly everybody who was in the fight with you has jobs and kids, and you are left with nothing. That’s why revolution never actually happens.”
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It raises an interesting question: is pop literature upstream or downstream of culture? This is clearly part of a larger effort to propagandize the youth so they’ll be good little customers for life. Never grow up. Never have a family. Never be responsible for anyone but your own self, unless it’s pets you can buy stuff for.
But also, I’m watching a non-trivial slice of millenials and Zs peeling away from that, and going hard for early marriage, traditional roles, lots of kids, homeschooling, mini-farming, and traditional religion. They’re like the new hippies, but since they were raised in an atheist culture, rebellion=religion. If there was anything in the culture preceding that… I haven’t seen it. I’m curious to see whether culture will catch on and start reflecting it, and where that culture will be emerging, because it’s pretty clear that legacy media, corporate retail, big publishing… will be the last to catch on.
My guess is… once the motif starts showing up in literature, it’s old news. And perhaps that is the difference between propaganda and art. Propaganda is a top-down attempt to push change. It’s upstream. Art is downstream, and a reflection of cultural phenomena.
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