I doubt that this will ever work in countries other than China because women (and marriage) in other countries are mostly protected by law, while in china, women are not so well protected. Also, culturally speaking, a divorced woman is very hard to get marriage in China. While a divorced man is easy. In society, People think that "divorce" somehow depreciated the value of a woman, while "divorce" means nothing (sometimes positive thing) for a man. Also, after marriage, Chinese woman will not focus mostly on work or career promotion but rather on family, so in the long term, they are
1) financially attached to the husband
2) emotionally attached to the husband.
This makes them want to "fix" the marriage rather than abandon it, even if the fix is superficial and (maybe) temporary.
But as more and more young women (born after 80s and 90s) are married, this kind of issue may be mitigating. Because young women tend to be much well-educated and wealthy
All things being equal, yes women would have the upper hand.
But cultural norms warp things a little more. The cultural tendency is for a man to marry down, and a women marry up in social level terms.
Which means there's a layer of women near the top who can't find a husband. Particularly in professional careers. And the lowest social rung of men have no women to marry down.
This asymmetry means there's a band of powerful and successful women who don't normally find husbands. They become China's "leftover women", who have basically given up on the idea of marriage beyond the age of 27. One recent solution here is these women look abroad for suitable husbands. Despite being negged annually, the social stigma of not marrying up takes many options away from women.
I always find it strange how we make it seem like mate criteria is sacrosanct and beyond critique.
I get that norms are strong. But in tech, we are constantly asked to question norms all the time and at times, deliberately counterbalance them. Surely we should also question social norms that inform our thinking in finding a mate? Especially if the person is having trouble finding someone suitable.
If I were to say to you I had trouble finding a woman, I don't think people here would say, "hey you should look at dating someone overseas." I think people might suggest opening my scope to other ethnicities/body types/meeting opportunities.
China's "leftover women: [the phrase] is part of an orchestrated state campaign to push “high-quality” women into marriage and having children. The phenomenon of “leftover women” was actually created by the Chinese government through a “very aggressive state media campaign.”
The problem has been named and created, whereas the initial reality was different.
No, because even though there may be fewer young, attractive women due to the policy there are still hardly any wealthy, single men, comparatively speaking.
"One response to marital infidelity is divorce. But divorce can be costly, especially for women. Aside from the social stigma that falls more heavily on women, family property and finances in China tend to be registered in the husband's name. A divorced woman can find herself homeless, adding to the pressure of taking measures to save the marriage."
"70% of women think that men should only get married after buying their own housing properties" according to a 2011 survey. The survey also shows "that about 80% of the single women interviewed think that it's reasonable for men to only consider a relationship if they receive a monthly income of above 4,000 yuan" (http://www.womenofchina.cn/html/womenofchina/report/136873-1...)
Reducing that number to 0 percent and getting people to want income responsibility and property shared between man and wife in a 50/50 way would help towards making divorce outcomes equal.
It seems that marriages in capitalist societies are inherently unstable. If rights are equal, then women are incentivised to divorce to "cash in" the value of their husband. If the rights are unequal, then men are incentivised to divorce to "trade up" to a more attractive wife.
It's only agrarian societies that manage to make husband and wife dependent enough on each other that divorce is a bad option for everybody.
> If rights are equal, then women are incentivised to divorce to "cash in" the value of their husband.
This only applies if earning potential between women and men is wildly disparate. When women can and do earn as much as men, the "cashing in" factor largely goes away.
it's interesting that in the west, divorce usually means the women gets half the networth of the man, in which case, it's the man who normally don't want to divorce.
Yeah. I'm not sure what decade these people are living in. If you're worried about marriage because you think your wife is going to divorce you and take half your money, you could choose a spouse with her own source of good income.
That limits your choices quite a bit. For example there are a large number of attractive women with terrible incomes and/or no savings, for which "scoring a successful man" may be a "valid" mating strategy
If you select someone as your mate who is mostly interested in you for your money, then you should expect that they will take a big chunk of your money if you divorce. I don't mean this in a "you deserve it" kind of way, but in a "this is the relationship you agreed to" way.
If your mate is with you for your money and you are with them for their youth and looks, then assuming you stay with them long enough that after a divorce much of their youth and good looks are gone, why shouldn't they get some of your money? You got their most valuable assets.
Another point that is missing here is, in many cultures, women are reluctant to consider any fault in their husbands. Cheating? Fault of the mistress. Domestic violence? Fault of herself. Coming from India, I have seen this happening countless times where women would never see anything wrong with their spouse even in worst cases.
This may seem horrifying but it is often a result when women are brought up to be good obeying wives, be great mothers and religiously do household duties.
Hard to believe this is something more than 'wannabe business PR' plus movie PR.
China female/male ratio is heavily unbalanced. There is a LOT men on market for women to choose. Also almost no foreign woman marry chinese man, on the contrary to the chinese women marrying a lot of foreigners.
1+2 means china is a market where men are at bad position and women has plenty of fish to choose from. Opposite situation which would create such services as described in the article.
According to 2012 figures from the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s sex ratio at birth (the number of boys born for every 100 girls) was as high as 118.
This is the logical conclusion if you don't understand another country and solely base your analysis on data.
All you said in regards to male/female ratio is true, and single women have lots potential mates to choose from.
Unfortunately, the mistress situation is still common, due to a variety of issues around limited supply of wealthy men, divorce laws favouring the wealthy, societal stigma against divorced people, social norm of judging men by success and women by look, etc, etc.
Not all those issues are female-centric, but combined, they make it acceptable (while still looked down upon, if advertised) for some women to be a mistress of some powerful man, and powerful men to have mistresses.
You are in fact very right, but there is one critical issue here. If we are talking about marriage. Culturally there is a "lifespan" of value to both genders. A Man's valuable lifespan can be well over 20 years, from age 20 all the way to age 40.While a woman's valuable lifespan maybe only less than 10 years, from 20 to 30.
This is because of the "stake" people are seeking when looking for a marriage between genders. Women are seeking wealth, social status, personality and whatever it may take to maintain a stable marriage ( family).
While men, in most cases, are looking for prettiness, good-looking or whatever superficial. This kind of value lifespan and marriage purpose mismatch is the whole problem of marriage issues in China.
A divorced, less pretty (compare to those in 20s), mid-aged woman is very hard to find another marriage. Even if they did not even marry before, it is still hard for them.
A lot of women in China who are well-educated, well-paid, in their 30s still have problems in finding partners (This is what Chinese society called sheng nu, or "women that left behind":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_nu).
Statistically speaking, women are indeed more than men, but the mating process is not statistic.
>Statistically speaking, women are indeed more than men, but the mating process is not statistic.
Now it would be fascinating if people could generate probability distributions that accurately describe social-economic systems/relationships like what I would say that you accurately describe quantitatively.
it's not that simple. in china's current materialistic society you have a small pool of rich men with a lot of woman chasing after them. the majority of rich businessman do in fact have mistresses and their wives do take drastic measures to get them back.
The culture of a place plays much more important role that mere ratios of men/women.
Besides, it's not like this is for the general population. Mistresses are a common trait in the upper classes -- which, in a huge place like China, are still in the tens of millions...
while the skewed sex ratio is true, lumping all of China together is misleading. The sex ratio is quite balanced in cities, for example, meaning that women living in cities don't quite enjoy the advantage.
According to the article, this is mostly men who are trying to status-signal by having a mistress; it's not Average Joe who's keeping a mistress on the side.
Either a good is fungible or it isn't (well, a good has an elasticity, it's not binary of course), it doesn't depend on the supply. Consumer choices are a function of elasticity and location on the supply/demand curve (and many more things ofc, but that's not relevant for this point). In other words, supply nor demand are a component of fungibility.
Books, Music, Movies, TV, etc are all treated as fungible commodities due to the wide range of options. In much the same way that Meat and Coal have a wide range of quality and unique traits, but again the market has no problem dealing in bulk purchases.
Granted, this often breaks down such as with the last mortgage crash but no abstraction is actually true.
But how many of these men are actually desirable by the women?
The services in the article cost upwards of $10k which means the woman in this case might be married to a rich high status man, which is arguably difficult to come by.
If you are a women age 28 married to a high status man for say six years, you probably want to keep that man instead of trying to find another one.
What's the point though? Wouldn't the husband just end up with a different mistress?
I mean they do not resolve the problems in the marriage that led to the situation. Do these women believe it's a one time thing? or that that specific mistress is special?
The distinction is probably lost, but a mistress is someone the husband has emotional feelings for (and what scares the wives is their ability to manipulate their husbands). It takes time to find someone like that and build up a new side relationship. It could happen again, but they're hoping not quickly.
This is different from sleeping with escorts and other transactional women, which a lot of wives are comfortable with and attribute it to the way business works (taking clients out drinking, etc.).
> Weiqing eventually ended the affair, she said, by persuading the other woman to take a higher-paying job in another city. “I don’t care how that woman is living now,’’ Ms. Wang said. “I just feel relieved that my husband is back.’’
This makes me sad because the issue is not "fixed", it's just lost one of its symptoms.
If you speak to enough people who have been married for a "long time" you realize they have been through some really hard stuff. It takes an extreme amount of work and forgiveness from both sides. I can't picture success with just one party being interested in staying together.
But how will this work in, say, LA or New York? A friend of mine in NYC had a lovely wife who divorced him after discovering his serial philandering. He said there were young women throwing themselves at him all the time. (He's wealthy.)
The stigma isn't as strong here as it is in China, either. And he ended up paying for the divorce.
On the other hand, she's not as well off financially as she had been. It was emotionally difficult for her as well, but the root of that problem was deeper than the symptom.
I doubt it would work in the US, too. Not only is the stigma against divorce now almost non-existent, we have no-fault divorce law. And people marry and divorce at a higher rate than ever before. It's easy come, easy go. And I would say that our system has a lot of bad effects, too: broken homes and single-parent childrearing are crippling our social structure.
What's amusing about that? Divorce can be devastating to a person's physical and mental health as can many other social problems. So it seems logical to me that the CDC tracks this.
Not that sure about that. For every vagina there has to be corresponding dick for the whole cheating thing to work. So I guess cheaters are roughly equal between sexes.
>So I guess cheaters are roughly equal between sexes.
For it to be cheating you need to be married (or in an exclusive relationship) in the first place. If the other party is not, then they're not cheating anyone themselves.
So, if it mostly happens between married men and unmarried women, for example, cheaters don't have to be "roughly equal".
Well, for one they can't cheat their wives, because they don't have any.
As for cheating with married women, in China woman's infidelity is much lower than that of married men infidelity.
"In a representative sample of urban Chinese – 3.9% of married women and 20.6% of married men reported to have the experience of extramarital sex in the past year".
So just because each dick needs a corresponding vagina (and vice versa) doesn't mean that infidelity between sexes is equal. There are other factors in play too.
Laugh; "mistress disspelling" is a time-consuming and expensive remedy which focuses on the symptom of the infidelity. After weeks and months of manipulating the mistress, assuming it works, the husband may just find another one. Back to square one.
What if he already has several? Do you hire three counsellors with three strategies to dispel all of them? That's going to get really expensive, fast.
But as more and more young women (born after 80s and 90s) are married, this kind of issue may be mitigating. Because young women tend to be much well-educated and wealthy