Originally Posted by
Skeptic Ginger
I can't.
That's not surprising.
In a normally functioning market, the value of a good increases if it becomes more scarce. So from a purely market perspective, one might expect that if women become more scarce, their value as sexual partners should increase, and this should give them more bargaining power.
But sexual relations are not simply another market. Women are not always granted bargaining power over their own bodies. Whatever sexual market value increase might be occurring because of the gender imbalance, women are not the beneficiaries.
Instead, the extreme mismatch between sexual supply and demand creates a whole host of social pathologies which end up hurting women. Large groups of young men with little prospect for sexual pairing misbehave. They don't start treating women better in hopes of wooing them, they start treating them worse out of resentment. The same effects can be seen in polygamous societies: high-status men with multiple women reduce the available pool for low-status men, creating the same effect that a gender imbalance does. It's no coincidence that polygamous societies are horrible places for women. China and India are on the road to reproducing some of those pathologies.