I’m not suggesting all the tensions between India and China can be attributed to spare men. Ladakh is close to the headwaters of the Ganges: not a location India wants to see under Chinese control. But unlike Dark Ages Scandinavia or medieval Portugal, modern nations can’t just send their spare men off on expansionist wars — although there are reports that China is using Uighur women like Viking men would have used captured Saxons.
And men who cannot demonstrate their masculine worth by forming and supporting a family will look for other opportunities to prove themselves. The prospect of two nuclear-armed superpowers squaring up within a political climate shaped by angry young men should worry us.
Angry incels closer to home should worry us too. Tempting though it may be to imagine that in the West progressive values have somehow abolished our evolved tendencies to intrasexual and inter-sexual competition for the best mates, evidence suggests otherwise.
Although the sex ratio in the liberated West is the normal 105:100, today this isn’t translating straightforwardly into family formation. As women have become more educated and economically independent, researchers hoped hypergamy would fade away, with women becoming more willing to ‘marry down’. It would make sense: after all, a woman doing well in a demanding career might in theory have an easier life if she married a self-employed plasterer whose flexible schedule would let him deal with school runs and appointments.
But after hundreds of thousands of years of evolving to prioritise mates with resources and status, it seems that many women still prefer to seek the ‘best’ potential partner. One recent US study showed that even where women are more educated than their partners, they’ll still show a preference for men who earn more than them. That is, high-flying women will disregard the plasterer and pursue an equally high-earning husband.
To compound the problem, social norms in favour of monogamous marriage have loosened over the decades since the 1960s — but this hasn’t made women less choosy about their partners. The number of American men under 30 who have never had sex tripled between 2008 and 2018 — but hasn’t risen nearly as rapidly for women. The only plausible explanation is that women are still having sex, but they’re competing for a smaller pool of desirable men and leaving the rest on the shelf.
You only have to look at online dating advice for American men to see this at work: “Show her you aren’t the average video game playing, cheap beer drinking, couch potato loser she wants to avoid,” advises one article on cultivating the ‘Alpha male persona’.
So even with normal sex ratios, our culture is creating a sort of flotsam of sexual no-hopers, composed of those males who simply aren’t impressive enough to attract anyone even for a fling, let alone a committed relationship. The grievances of this sexual underclass are creeping into our politics, as Angela Nagle argued in Kill All Normies: “Sexual patterns that have emerged because of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and a growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order. Their own anxiety and anger about their low-ranking status in this hierarchy is precisely what has produced their hardline rhetoric about asserting hierarchy in the world politically when it comes to women and non-whites.”
In case anyone is tempted to dismiss this as harmless losers posting misogynistic memes, remember incels go on actual killing sprees. And there’s considerable overlap between the ‘redpilled’ community of sexually frustrated anti-feminists and the far-right more generally. As in the Nien uprising, ‘bare branches’ make for ugly politics.
Bare branches also make for enthusiastic terrorists. ISIS used sexual slavery as a key plank in its recruiting pitch for foreign fighters. Like the ‘Wikings’, men who don’t have many prospects at home will take considerable risks if they think it’ll get them laid, and (again like the actual Vikings) never mind whether the girls are willing or not. Conversely, settling down de-radicalises: according to research by the Institute of Family Studies, people with children are less likely to express views consistent with white identity politics. Likewise the Saudi Arabian deradicalisation programme essentially involved getting extremists married, and has proved very effective.
It’s difficult to tackle this subject without yourself getting accused of being ‘redpilled’ or a men’s rights activist. But it’s surely possible to discuss the political and social problem of spare men without believing that the solution is to force unwilling women to have kids with them.
And addressing this problem should absolutely be seen as a feminist project. Being consigned to a life of hopeless, low-status singledom makes men more violent, sexually dangerous and politically disruptive. This is not an excuse, but it is a reality. It’s straightforwardly in women’s interests to improve the lot of our own burgeoning plague of Wikings.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe