Before We Begin — Where We Left Off
Part Ten took the warning at the centre of this series — that a woman who breaks the rules damages her own life — and treated it as what it claims to be: a prediction. Then it checked it.
The result was untidy, and that untidiness was the finding. The warning is four claims, not one, and they do not stand or fall together. The health claim is true: exposure to infection rises with partners, dose for dose, in every society on Earth. The regret asymmetry is real, moderate in size, and survived the hardest cultural test anyone has run. The wellbeing claim reverses direction depending on what the woman believes, which means it belongs to the belief rather than to the act. The marriage-market claim does not travel at all — it is enormous where the community punishes and absent where it does not, which makes it a penalty rather than a consequence. And the divorce association, the oldest finding in the field, has never been explained by anybody, including the researcher who produced the best-known version of it.
Underneath all of that sat one thing I kept running into and could not fix. The research asks what happens to a woman. The warning is issued to a woman. And the data that would let anyone ask the same question about a man was, again and again, simply never collected. The American survey behind the headline divorce numbers does not carry equivalent information on men’s premarital behaviour. That is not a finding about men. It is a hole where the finding should be.
So this part goes and looks at the half nobody studied.
I want to be exact about why, because there is a lazy version of this argument and I am not making it. The lazy version says: the rules are unfair to women, therefore we should talk about men to even things up. That is a political move, not an intellectual one. The reason to look at men is different and much stronger. If you want to know whether a rule aimed at women is correct, you have to know what happens to the people it is not aimed at. Otherwise you have a claim with no comparison group, and a claim with no comparison group is not a finding — it is a description of one population, dressed as a discovery.
How this document is built
Six kinds of box, each doing one job, each looking different so you can see at a glance what you are about to read. If you have read earlier parts, skip ahead.
The first explains a hard word the moment it appears.
Comparison group: the people you measure your group against. Without one, a number means nothing.
If I tell you that thirty per cent of women in some category divorced, you have learned almost nothing until I tell you what share of some other group did. Thirty against six is a large finding. Thirty against twenty-eight is not a finding at all.
Why it matters here: for the central question of this series, the natural comparison group is men — and for a great many of the claims, nobody assembled it.
The second takes a number too big or too abstract to picture and turns it into something with a body.
India has somewhere in the order of thirty million more men than the marriage market can pair off over the coming decades, concentrated in the north and north-west.
Thirty million is the population of a large country. Picture every man in Malaysia, or in Australia and New Zealand together, arranged into one queue for a thing that will not arrive. Chapter Five is about that queue, and about the fact that it is almost never discussed as something happening to them.
The third shows the actual evidence behind a claim, and then says what it cannot show.
Much of this part rests on censuses and court judgments rather than on surveys, and that changes what can be trusted.
A census counts whether a man aged fifty has ever been married. He cannot misreport that in the way a survey respondent can misreport a partner count, and nobody has a reputational stake in the answer.
A Supreme Court judgment is a public document stating, in the state’s own words, what a law was for. When a court strikes a law down and explains what it was actually doing, that is an institution testifying against itself — the most useful kind of evidence there is.
What neither can do: tell you what anybody felt, or what happened in households where nothing was recorded.
The fourth is for places where informed people genuinely disagree. Each side gets its best case.
A question, then the sides, then a verdict that does not claim more certainty than exists.
Its strongest case, put the way its best advocate would put it, with the evidence it actually has.
The same, with equal care. If a position sounds foolish here, I have failed to understand it, not proved it wrong.
What would settle it: the evidence that would decide it. Sometimes nothing available would.
The fifth is the signature of this series. It digs out what both sides are assuming without noticing.
Not caveats. Unexamined premises sitting underneath an argument everybody is having. Five in this part, and the last is turned on this document and on the series around it.
The sixth closes every chapter in the plainest words available.
Six boxes. Word explains. In Real Terms converts. How We Actually Know This shows the evidence. The Argument gives every side its best shot. The Hidden Assumption digs underneath. Remember This closes the chapter.
Simple words, serious content, nothing left out.
Two warnings specific to this part
The first is about me, and it inverts the warning I gave in Part Ten. There I said the risk was writing about women’s lives from outside them. Here the risk runs the other way: I am a man writing about men, and the temptations are self-pity and self-flattery. There is a whole genre that takes the true observation “men suffer under these rules too” and rides it to the conclusion that men are the real victims. I am not writing that. The men in Chapter Five have genuinely bad outcomes and did not choose them; the men in Chapter Four are carrying out the enforcement; frequently they are the same men, and both facts have to stay on the page at once. Where I catch myself sliding towards the comfortable version, I say so.
The second is about what this part is not. Nothing here argues that the rules should be aimed at men instead. Chapter Nine asks what the evidence would target if evidence were choosing, which is a different question from what anybody should do — and the last Hidden Assumption in this part is about why the difference matters more than it looks. A document that ended by proposing better rules for controlling somebody would have learned nothing from the ten parts before it.
1The Half Nobody Studied
Before asking what happens to men, ask why nobody asked. The answer is not a conspiracy. It is something much more ordinary and much harder to correct.
1.1 — A hole shaped like a question
Part Ten reported a table of divorce rates by the number of sexual partners a woman had before marrying. It is the most-quoted finding in this whole area. When I went to find the equivalent table for men, it was not there, and the reason given by the researcher who produced the women’s version was that the survey does not carry full data on men’s premarital sexual behaviour.
That is worth stating slowly, because it is easy to skim past. The largest and best-funded national survey of family formation in the richest country on Earth, run by a federal statistics agency across decades, at a cost of many millions, asked women in enough detail to build a partner-count table and did not ask men in enough detail to build the same one.
Nobody decided to hide anything. Survey questionnaires are finite, every question costs money, and questions get included when somebody can say why the answer matters. For decades, the answer to “how many partners had she had before marrying?” felt like it obviously mattered, and the answer to “how many had he had?” felt like an odd thing to want to know.
That is the whole mechanism. Not suppression. A question that only feels natural in one direction.
It is not true that nothing is known about men. Some surveys do ask, and ask well. Britain’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles has surveyed men and women in comparable detail since 1990. Several smaller academic studies collect matched data on both.
So the picture is not blank. It is patchy in a patterned way: where a question is about the consequences of sexual behaviour for marriage and family, the female data is deep and the male data is thin. Where a question is about sexual behaviour as public health — infection, condom use, testing — the male data is often as good, because the funding came from a different place and asked a different thing.
What that tells you: the gap tracks the purpose of the research rather than any difficulty in collecting it. Men were asked about their partners whenever somebody wanted to trace an epidemic. They were not asked whenever the topic was whether the behaviour ruins a life.
1.2 — What you can and cannot read off a rule
Now the assumption underneath the whole subject, and the one this part exists to examine.
Here is a move that everybody in this argument makes, on every side, usually without noticing.
The traditionalist says: the rules govern women’s sexual conduct more tightly than men’s because the consequences differ — she can become pregnant, she carries the child, her body is at greater risk, so of course the rule falls on her. The critic says: the rules govern women more tightly because men wanted control over paternity and inheritance. These sound like opposite positions. They share a premise. Both are explaining the asymmetry of the rule by pointing at some asymmetry in the world.
There is a third possibility neither considers, and it does not require anybody’s intentions to be bad. A rule may fall on the party who can be made to comply.
Consider how enforcement actually works. To police a woman’s sexual conduct, a household needs to know where she is, who she is with, and when she comes home — and in most societies it already has that, because she lives inside a structure built to know. To police a man’s sexual conduct you would need to follow him into a labour market, a city, a workplace, a road, a set of relationships with people your household has no contact with. One of those is cheap and one is nearly impossible, and the difference has nothing to do with pregnancy, paternity or virtue.
So the asymmetry of the rule is evidence about at least three things at once — the difference in consequences, the interest of whoever wrote it, and the cost of enforcement — and no society has ever had to separate them, because all three pointed the same way.
The general form: inferring a difference in nature from a difference in treatment. It runs through every field. Which jobs each sex held was read as evidence of aptitude. Which patients received painkillers was read as evidence of pain. In each case the treatment was doing something else, and the inference from treatment to nature ran backwards for a century.
Why this one matters for the rest of the part: if the rule fell where it was enforceable rather than where the harm was, then the whole body of evidence about women is answering a question that was never really being asked — and the men in the following chapters are not an afterthought. They are the control condition.
1.3 — What this part will and will not claim
Three things I am not going to argue, so you can hold me to it.
Control condition: in an experiment, the group that does not get the thing being tested, kept there so you can see what would have happened anyway.
Without one, you cannot tell an effect from a background. If a hundred treated patients recover, that is either a miracle or completely unremarkable, and the only thing that decides which is how many untreated patients recovered.
Why the word belongs in a chapter about men: for the central claim of this series, men are not a side topic. They are the group that shows what happens anyway — and that group was never assembled.
I am not going to argue that men suffer equally. In Chapter Five you will meet men with genuinely bad lives produced by this system, and the bad lives are real. They are also not symmetrical with what Chapters Eight and Nine of Part Ten described, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.
I am not going to argue that the consequences of sex are physically identical for men and women. They are not, and Chapter Six goes through exactly how they differ, including in a direction most people do not expect.
And I am not going to argue that the rules should be pointed at men. Chapter Nine asks what the evidence would point at, which is a genuine and answerable question, and it is not the same as a proposal.
Picture a doctor investigating a disease that appears in a village. She surveys every woman in it in enormous detail — symptoms, diet, history, exposure — and asks the men three quick questions on the way out.
She then reports that the disease is associated with something in the women’s histories.
She may be right. But she cannot know, because she has no idea what the men’s histories look like, and the one design that would have told her whether the association is about the disease or about being a woman in that village is the one she did not run.
That is the state of this literature. Not wrong. Unable to be checked.
That is the hole this part is walking into. The next chapter goes and sees what is actually in it.
The best-known findings about sexual history and marriage have no male comparison group, because the survey that produced them did not ask men in equivalent detail.
The gap is not a conspiracy. It is a question that only felt natural in one direction, repeated across decades of questionnaire design.
The gap is patterned. Where the research was about infection, men were surveyed properly, because the funder wanted to trace an epidemic. Where it was about whether the behaviour ruins a life, they were not.
Everyone explains the asymmetric rule by pointing to an asymmetric fact — different consequences, or male interest in paternity. Both may be true. Both miss a third possibility: the rule fell on the party who could be made to comply, because policing a daughter is cheap and policing a son is nearly impossible.
Without the comparison group, a claim about women is not a discovery. It is a description of one population wearing the clothes of a finding.
2What Actually Happens to a Man
The evidence is thinner, but it is not empty. And where it is strongest, it points somewhere nobody expects: the sex whose conduct is unregulated is the sex with more to lose if marriage fails.
2.1 — On the thing everybody wants to know, we mostly do not know
Start with the question Part Ten answered for women. Does a man’s number of premarital sexual partners predict whether his marriage lasts?
The honest answer is that the evidence is thin. The limited work that exists points in the same direction as the female findings and generally reports weaker associations, and every piece of it comes with the same caveat: the male data was not collected as carefully, so the comparison is not clean.
I am not going to build anything on that. A weak finding from a thin dataset is exactly the kind of thing this series is supposed to refuse to inflate, and it would be very easy to inflate it in either direction here — into “so it damages men too, and the rule is just badly targeted”, or into “so it does not damage men, and the rule is pure control”. Neither is supported.
What can be said is narrower and more useful. On the market claim — that a sexual history damages your prospects — the asymmetry is not subtle and does not need a survey to detect. In no society that I can find has a man’s number of previous partners been treated as a defect that reduces his value in a marriage negotiation. In many, including large parts of India, it is not asked about at all. Part Ten established that the marriage-market penalty for women does not travel across societies. For men, in most places, it does not exist to begin with.
2.2 — Regret, read from the other side
Part Ten reported the regret asymmetry: women more often regret what they did, men more often regret what they did not do. That was presented, correctly, as a finding about women. Turn it over.
It says that a substantial number of men are carrying regret about opportunities they passed up. That is a real reported cost, it appears in the same studies, and it is almost never discussed, because a regret about not having had sex reads as comic rather than serious.
I want to be careful about the weight this bears. Regretting an encounter you had and regretting one you did not are not equivalent injuries, and treating them as equivalent is one of the moves I warned about in the front matter. But the finding is in the data, and the reason it never gets quoted is worth noticing: the same research is cited constantly for its female half and essentially never for its male half.
2.3 — The same moderator, in both sexes
The wellbeing research from Part Ten was not a study of women. It included men, and the moderating effect worked the same way for them: people comfortable with casual sex reported higher wellbeing after it, and people uncomfortable with it reported lower, regardless of sex.
That is a genuinely important result and it usually gets reported as a fact about women. What it actually shows is that the mechanism is not sex-specific at all. It is about the fit between what a person does and what a person believes — and the reason it produces more distress in women, on average, is that more women hold beliefs the behaviour collides with. Which is a fact about what each sex was taught, not about what each sex is.
2.4 — Who actually needs marriage
Now the part of this chapter that should reorganise how you read the rest of the series.
All-cause mortality: the chance of dying from anything at all in a given period. It is the bluntest health measure there is and the hardest to fake, because a death gets recorded whatever anybody believes about it.
Why researchers reach for it: every softer measure — happiness, wellbeing, self-reported health — depends on what people say. Death does not.
Across a very large body of research in many countries, married people live longer than unmarried people. That much is well known. The part that is less known is the size of the difference by sex.
The advantage is consistently larger for men. Married men do markedly better than unmarried men on mortality, on physical health, on mental health and on measured loneliness. Married women also do better than unmarried women, but by a smaller margin, and on some measures the gap narrows to very little.
This finding rests on administrative records rather than surveys — national death registers linked to marital status, followed across whole populations for decades, in many countries independently.
Why that is strong: nobody is reporting anything. A death certificate and a marriage register are produced by institutions for their own purposes, and neither has a stake in this question. When Scandinavian registry data, American cohort studies and British records all produce the same pattern, the pattern is not a survey artefact.
What it cannot show: which way it runs. Registry data records who was married and who died. It does not record whether marriage protected them or whether the men who were going to do well were the ones who married. That is the argument below, and it is not settled.
Before the argument, the size of the thing being argued about.
Follow a large group of men and a large group of women from middle age. In study after study, the unmarried men fall behind the married men by a wider margin than the unmarried women fall behind the married women.
Put it in the ordinary furniture of a life. When a marriage ends, a woman more often keeps the friendships, the family contact, the routines of care and the habit of asking for help. A man more often discovers that his social world ran through his wife, and that when she left, it left.
The institution that the rules exist to protect is the one that men need more. Everything else in this series is about arranging a woman’s conduct to secure it.
That comparison only holds, of course, if marriage is doing the work rather than merely marking the men who were going to do well anyway — which is exactly what is in dispute.
This is the same methodological fight as Part Ten’s Chapter Three, arriving from the other direction, and it deserves the same scepticism.
The plausible mechanisms are specific and testable rather than vague. Married men drink less, take fewer physical risks, are more likely to attend a doctor when something is wrong — largely because someone notices and tells them to. They have a person who registers a symptom, books an appointment and asks whether they took the tablet. They also have a social world maintained on their behalf. Studies that follow the same men through a marriage ending find their health measures deteriorate afterwards, which is hard to explain by selection alone, because the selection already happened.
The men who never marry are, on average, poorer, less educated, in worse health and more likely to have a serious illness or addiction before any of this begins — and Chapter Five shows that in India the men who cannot marry are drawn overwhelmingly from the bottom of the class structure. So the comparison is between two different populations, exactly as in Part Ten. The health advantage may be mostly the entry requirement, not the benefit. And the deterioration after divorce could as easily reflect what caused the divorce as what followed it.
What would settle it: studies following the same individuals across changes in marital status while measuring health before, during and after — some of which exist and support a genuine protective effect, though not the whole of the raw gap.
Why people care so much: because if marriage genuinely protects men more than women, then the standard story — that marriage is an institution men designed for their own benefit and women should be sceptical of — is at minimum incomplete. And if it is mostly selection, then the men at the bottom of Chapter Five are being counted as evidence for something they are actually the victims of.
2.5 — The Indian numbers, handled carefully
There is an Indian statistic that circulates constantly in arguments about men, and because it is real and is usually misused, it belongs here rather than being left to the internet.
India’s national crime statistics record substantially more male than female deaths by suicide — roughly seven in ten of all recorded suicide deaths are male — and married men are the largest single category in the tables.
Both of those are true, and both are routinely stretched into a claim they cannot support. Married men are the largest category partly because married men are an enormous share of the adult male population; a raw count is not a rate, and comparing a count to a count tells you about population size as much as risk. Recording is also uneven: female suicide in India is widely believed to be under-recorded, and deaths that would be classified as dowry-related, as accidents or as illness elsewhere in the file affect both columns.
What survives all that is still substantial. India has among the higher male suicide rates in the world, the rate is highest among men of working age, and financial distress and family problems appear repeatedly among recorded causes. That is a real and large harm falling on men, it has almost nothing to do with anybody’s sexual conduct, and it is worth stating precisely rather than either amplifying it or waving it away.
On whether a man’s partner count predicts his divorce, the evidence is too thin to build on — and it is thin because the data was not collected, not because the answer came back negative.
On the market claim, the asymmetry is stark. A man’s sexual history is not treated as a defect in a marriage negotiation in any society I can find. For women, Part Ten showed that penalty exists and does not travel. For men it mostly does not exist at all.
The wellbeing moderator works identically in both sexes. The mechanism is the collision between behaviour and belief, not anything about being female. More women hold the colliding beliefs, which is a fact about teaching.
Married people live longer, and the advantage is consistently larger for men — on mortality, health and loneliness. How much is protection and how much is selection is disputed; the pattern is not.
Which produces the fact this part keeps returning to: the institution these rules exist to protect is the one men need more, and it is women whose conduct is arranged to secure it.
3Does the Double Standard Still Exist?
Ask the experiments and the answer is surprisingly weak. Ask a village in Haryana and it is not even a question. Both of those results are real, and understanding why they differ tells you what the standard actually is.
3.1 — What you are trying to measure
Everybody knows what the sexual double standard is. Almost nobody can say what would count as evidence for it, which is why the research has been such a mess.
The sexual double standard: judging the same sexual behaviour more harshly in a woman than in a man.
Why it is hard to measure: it can live in at least four separate places, and they can disagree. It can be in what people say they believe. In how they rate a described person. In who they actually choose as a friend, a partner or a spouse. And in what a community does — the gossip, the withdrawn match, the violence.
A study measuring one of those four is not measuring the others, and the finding “there is no double standard” almost always means “not in the one we measured”.
3.2 — The experiments, and the surprise inside them
The standard design is a vignette. Give people a short description of a person — name, age, a stated number of sexual partners — and ask them to rate that person on things like decency, intelligence, desirability. Then run the identical description with the name and pronouns switched, and compare.
If the double standard is what everyone assumes, the woman should be rated much more harshly than the man for the same number.
She often is not.
Across a substantial run of these studies, mostly with Western student samples, researchers have found the effect to be much weaker than expected, absent altogether in several, and in some cases running in the other direction. What shows up reliably is a single standard applied to both: people rate a person with a high partner count more negatively regardless of sex.
This result has been replicated enough that it cannot be dismissed, and it is used constantly by people who want to argue the double standard is a myth. So it needs to be taken seriously, and then examined.
The vignette method has one genuine strength and one crippling weakness, and both matter here.
The strength: it is a true experiment. The only thing that differs between conditions is the sex of the person described, so any difference in ratings is caused by that. Almost nothing else in this field can say that.
The weakness: it asks people to make a judgement, on paper, knowing they are being observed, about a stranger who does not exist. Every one of those conditions works against finding a double standard. The participant knows what the study is about within seconds. Nobody they know will hear the answer. Nothing follows from it.
What the design therefore measures well: what people are willing to say when they know they are being watched. What it cannot measure: what a community does when a real woman’s real conduct becomes known, which is the thing everybody actually means.
3.3 — Where it shows up instead
Change the measure and the picture changes.
When researchers stop asking for ratings and start asking about actual social choices — who would you want as a friend, who would you introduce to your family, who would you want as a long-term partner — the effects get larger. Studies of this kind have found that both men and women prefer sexually restrained peers, and, strikingly, that this holds even among people who are themselves sexually permissive. A person can hold a permissive attitude about their own life and a restrictive one about who they want around them.
The other place it shows up is in language, and this is not a soft observation. There is a dense vocabulary of insult for a sexually active woman in English, in Hindi, in Punjabi, and in essentially every language I can check. The male equivalents either do not exist, or exist as compliments, or exist as mild jokes. A vocabulary is a piece of evidence: languages develop precise words for distinctions that a community needs to make often.
Stated preference: what a person says they want or believe, when asked.
Revealed preference: what their actual choices show they want.
Why the distinction matters here: on the sexual double standard, stated and revealed preferences come apart sharply, and they come apart in a predictable direction. People state something close to equality and choose something considerably less equal.
This is not lying. Most people are not aware of the gap. It is why an experiment that asks and an observation that watches produce different answers about the same population.
Which is why the two sides of the following argument can both cite good evidence and reach opposite conclusions. They are not reading the same instrument.
Both sides here have real evidence, and the disagreement is largely about which measurement counts.
The best-controlled evidence available says so. Vignette experiments are the only true experiments in this whole field, they have been run many times by many groups, and they mostly find a single standard rather than a double one. Attitude surveys have moved enormously across two generations. Behaviour has converged: the partner-count gap between young men and women has narrowed sharply. Continuing to assert a double standard while the direct experimental evidence says otherwise is treating the conclusion as unfalsifiable — every null result gets explained away as the wrong measure.
Look at what the null results actually establish: that people will not say it on a form. Meanwhile the choice-based measures find it, the vocabulary retains it, and the consequences remain wildly asymmetric — nothing that happens to a man’s reputation resembles what happens to a woman’s when an image circulates. And a global claim cannot rest on Western student samples. In much of the world the standard is not a subtle attitudinal effect at all; it is a marriage market, a set of laws and, at the far end, a body count. A finding from a psychology department in a rich country is evidence about that department’s country.
What would settle it: studies that measure consequences rather than opinions — what actually happens to matched men and women after the same information about them becomes public. Almost nobody runs these, because they are hard, slow and unpleasant.
Why people care so much: because “it does not exist any more” is the strongest available argument that no reform is needed, and “it is as bad as ever” is the strongest available argument that nothing has been achieved. The truthful answer — much weaker in one place, unchanged in another — is useful to neither.
3.4 — India, where there is nothing to measure carefully
In the Indian case the experimental subtleties are beside the point, because the standard is not an attitude that has to be teased out of a rating scale. It is written into the structure Part Ten’s Chapter Eight described.
A family’s standing is damaged by a daughter’s rumoured conduct and is not damaged in the same way by a son’s. A marriage negotiation prices one and does not ask about the other. The verification procedures that exist — the ones India’s Supreme Court has had to prohibit — were built to check a claim about a bride, and there has never been an equivalent examination of a groom, in any community, at any point in the record.
Here is the whole chapter in one comparison. Two families are negotiating a marriage. Somebody mentions that the prospective bride was seen with a man two years ago.
Now run it again with the sexes swapped: somebody mentions that the prospective groom was seen with a woman two years ago.
You already know that the first conversation can end the match and the second one usually does not begin. You did not need a study, and that is the finding. A standard so widely known that no evidence is required to establish it does not need to appear in a vignette experiment to be operating.
So the answer to the chapter’s question depends entirely on where you ask it, and any single number offered for the whole world is measuring one room.
The double standard can live in four different places — what people say, how they rate, who they choose, and what a community does — and a study of one is not a study of the others.
In Western vignette experiments, the effect is much weaker than expected and often absent. That is a genuine, replicated finding and people who care about this subject should stop denying it.
But those experiments measure what people will say when observed. On social choice, on language, and on consequence, the asymmetry persists — including among people who are themselves sexually permissive.
Stated and revealed preferences come apart here, predictably and in one direction. Most people are not aware of the gap.
And in societies where marriage is arranged between families, none of this is subtle: one side of the negotiation is priced and the other side is not asked.
4Who Actually Enforces It
The standard picture is men controlling women. Watch who actually does the daily work of enforcement and the picture does not survive contact — which tells you something important about how the system is built.
4.1 — The picture everyone starts with
Ask almost anyone — a defender of the rules or a critic — who enforces them, and you get some version of the same answer. Men. Fathers, husbands, brothers, village councils, priests. The rules exist because men want them and men apply them.
The critic says this to indict. The defender says a softer version of it — that men have a duty to protect the family’s standing. Both agree on the mechanism.
Now go and look at an actual household.
4.2 — The daily work is done by women
The enforcement that matters most is not dramatic. It is continuous, small and domestic: what she wears, where she goes, who she talks to, what time she is home, whether she has a phone and who can see it, whether she may take a job in another city.
Nearly all of that is administered by women. The mother-in-law is the central figure in the Indian household on exactly these questions — research on contraceptive use in north India repeatedly finds that her stated view predicts a young wife’s behaviour better than the wife’s own stated preference. Mothers police daughters. Aunts report on nieces. Sisters-in-law monitor each other. Friends withdraw from a girl whose reputation has become risky to share.
The comparative case that makes this unmistakable is female genital cutting.
Female genital cutting: the removal or alteration of parts of a girl’s external genitals for reasons that are not medical. It is practised across a belt of Africa and parts of Asia and the Middle East, usually on girls before adolescence, and it causes lasting physical harm.
Why it appears in this chapter: it is the single clearest test of who enforces these rules. The practice is arranged by women, performed by women, and defended by women, in societies where men frequently do not discuss it at all.
Whatever that practice is, it is not a case of men physically imposing something on women — and any theory of enforcement that cannot accommodate that has a hole in it.
The evidence here is mostly ethnographic — researchers living in and observing households over long periods — supported by household surveys that ask who decides what.
What ethnography is good at: seeing the enforcement that never becomes an event. No survey captures a look across a room, a phone quietly checked, a rumour passed between two aunts. These are the actual mechanism and they leave no record unless somebody is sitting there.
What it is bad at: scale and generalisation. A study of forty households in one district is a study of forty households in one district. When many such studies from different regions report the same structure, that convergence is the evidence — not any one of them.
Where the survey data supports it: household decision-making questions in India’s large health surveys consistently show older women, not only men, holding authority over younger women’s health and mobility decisions.
4.3 — What men do instead
This does not mean men are absent. It means their role is different in kind, and it has two parts.
The first is policing each other. A great deal of male behaviour around women’s conduct is performed for other men — the reputation of a brother who “cannot control” his sister, the standing of a husband whose wife works late, the ridicule available to a man judged insufficiently vigilant. The pressure a man feels to restrict a woman is frequently pressure from other men about himself.
The second is the far end. When enforcement becomes physical, it becomes male. The beatings, the confinements and the killings are overwhelmingly carried out by fathers, brothers, cousins and husbands.
Even there the pattern is not what it looks like. Case studies of honour killings across South Asia and the Middle East report repeatedly that the act is often assigned to a younger male relative — sometimes a minor — and that female relatives are frequently among those who decided it should happen. A killing that is planned by a household and executed by its most legally expendable member is not a man acting on his own impulse. It is an organisation allocating a task.
Think of it as a firm rather than a family, for one paragraph, because the shape becomes visible.
The shareholders are the household, whose standing is the asset. The middle management, doing daily supervision, is the senior women. The enforcement, when it is needed, is delegated to a junior male — often the one with the least to lose in court and the least standing to refuse.
Now ask the question that shape makes obvious: who in that structure is choosing? The mother-in-law enforcing a rule she suffered under at twenty. The nineteen-year-old brother handed an instruction and a knife. Neither of them designed this. Both of them are running it.
Which raises the question that this chapter cannot avoid, and that I do not think has a clean answer.
This is one of the hardest questions in the whole series, and I do not think either answer is fully right.
A mother-in-law restricting her daughter-in-law is making a calculation and she is not confused about it. She holds real authority, she has interests of her own — the household’s standing is her security in old age, and her son’s marriage is her asset too — and she acquired that authority by surviving the system. Denying her agency is a way of preserving the belief that only men act. It also gets the politics wrong: any attempt to change this that assumes women will welcome it will fail, because a substantial share of enforcement will be defended by the women doing it.
What she has is authority over other women within a structure she cannot alter, granted in exchange for maintaining it. That is not agency in any strong sense; it is a position in a hierarchy that pays in status. Notice its limits: she may restrict a daughter-in-law’s movement and cannot touch her son’s conduct, cannot leave the household, and loses everything if the family’s standing collapses. A person who can only exercise power downwards and only in one direction is being used by the arrangement, however sincerely she believes in it.
What would settle it: nothing measurable. “Agency” is not a quantity. But there is a partial empirical test available: watch what happens to enforcement when the underlying incentive is removed — when a family no longer needs the marriage market, or when a woman’s security no longer runs through her son. Where that has happened, enforcement has weakened, which is at least consistent with the second reading.
Why people care so much: because if women are agents here, then this is not a conflict between the sexes and cannot be framed as one — and both the feminist account and the men’s-grievance account lose their simplest version at the same moment.
Underneath that argument, both sides are taking something for granted, and it is the thing this chapter exists to name.
Every account of these rules — the critical one and the defensive one — links the benefit to the enforcement. Men benefit, so men enforce. Or: the family benefits, so the family enforces. The reasoning feels so natural that nobody states it.
But this system separates the two completely. The benefit accrues to the household’s standing. The daily work is done by senior women. The legal risk is carried by junior men. Three different parties, none of whom holds all three positions.
Once you see that, several things stop being puzzling. It stops being puzzling that women defend practices that harmed them — they are not defending a benefit, they are occupying a post. It stops being puzzling that a nineteen-year-old goes to prison for a decision taken by people who never touched anybody. And it stops being puzzling that the system survives generation after generation without anybody designing it: a rule that distributes its costs across people who cannot combine, and its benefits to an abstraction that cannot be argued with, is extremely hard to dismantle.
The general form: assuming the beneficiary is the enforcer. It is one of the most reliable errors in political analysis. The people who administer a border, a prison, a debt collection or a caste boundary are almost never the people the arrangement is for — and confusing the two produces campaigns aimed at the wrong party, which then fail and are read as proof that the system is popular.
What follows for this series: “the rules about women” is not a phrase describing something men do to women. It describes a machine with roles in it, and almost everyone reading this occupies one.
The next chapter follows the machine’s output twenty-five years downstream, to the men it produced and nobody planned for.
The daily enforcement — clothes, movement, phones, curfews, who may work where — is administered overwhelmingly by women on women. The mother-in-law’s view predicts a young wife’s behaviour better than the wife’s own stated preference does.
Men’s role is different in kind: policing each other about their vigilance, and carrying out enforcement at the far end when it becomes physical.
Even the lethal end is organisational rather than impulsive. The act is often assigned to the most legally expendable member of a household, and women are frequently among those who decided it.
So the system separates its parts: the benefit goes to the household’s standing, the work is done by senior women, the legal risk is carried by junior men. Nobody holds all three.
Which is why it is so durable. A rule whose costs fall on people who cannot combine, for the benefit of an abstraction that cannot be argued with, does not need anybody to defend it.
5The Men at the Bottom
A preference for sons produced a shortage of daughters, and the shortage is now producing millions of men who will never marry. Almost every word written about them is about what they might do, and almost none about what is happening to them.
5.1 — The missing women
In 1990 the economist Amartya Sen published an essay pointing out that in several countries there were far fewer women alive than the biology of birth and survival could account for. Women live longer than men where both are fed and treated equally. Across much of South and East Asia, they did not outnumber men. Sen’s estimate of the shortfall ran to more than a hundred million.
The causes are unglamorous and cumulative: daughters fed less, taken to a doctor later, and — from the 1980s, once ultrasound became cheap — not born at all.
Sex ratio at birth (SRB): the number of girls born per thousand boys. Left alone, nature produces about 950 — slightly more boys than girls, everywhere, consistently.
India’s national figure has run below that for decades. In the most recent official sample data, several states report figures below 900, and Bihar’s fell from 964 in 2020 to 897 in 2023.
Why it matters: a ratio below the natural rate is not a curiosity of statistics. It is a count of girls who were expected and did not arrive, and every one of them is a woman who will not be in a marriage market twenty-five years later.
The point of this chapter is not to re-argue that. It is to follow the arithmetic forward, because the consequence lands about a quarter of a century after the cause, and it lands on men.
5.2 — The queue
If a generation is born with too few girls, then when that generation reaches marrying age some men will not marry. Not “will marry later” — will not marry, ever.
This is one of the few areas in the series where the evidence is close to arithmetic rather than statistical inference.
A census counts how many people of each sex are alive at each age. It is not a sample and not a self-report of anything sensitive. Nobody misreports their sex to a census-taker.
From that you can compute directly how many men of marriageable age face how many women, and project it forward — because everybody who will be thirty in twenty-five years has already been born and already been counted.
Analysis for the United Nations Population Fund in India projects that men who never marry will rise from about 4.5 per cent in 2010 to about 12.6 per cent by 2040, before falling back to around 8 per cent by 2050 as the improvement in the sex ratio after 2004 works through. Around five per cent never marrying is normal in any population, so anything above that is the squeeze itself.
What this cannot tell you: what those men’s lives will be like. The count is solid; everything downstream of it is inference.
The pressure is not spread evenly. It concentrates in the north and north-west, in the states that practised sex selection hardest. In the 2011 census, across Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, about 76 per cent of men aged 20 to 24 were unmarried against about 34 per cent of women of the same age. Lifelong bachelorhood among men over fifty ran at about 2.1 per cent nationally, at 3.8 per cent in Uttar Pradesh, and in some districts studied closely it reached seven or eight per cent.
5.3 — Which men
Here is the part that is almost always left out, and it changes the subject.
The men who do not marry are not drawn at random. When women are scarce, families choose, and they choose upwards. The men left over are the poorest, the least educated, the landless, the ones with a disability, the ones from the lowest-status households.
China’s figures show this with brutal clarity. In its 2010 census, among men in the relevant age band, around 38 per cent of those who were illiterate had never married, against under 3 per cent of those who had completed junior middle school. The same man’s marriage prospects are decided by his schooling and his family’s land, not by anything he did.
Take a hundred men in a north Indian district where the ratio is bad. Perhaps twelve of them will never marry. Those twelve are not twelve men chosen by chance from the hundred — they are, very nearly, the poorest twelve.
Now put that in a life. In a society where marriage is close to compulsory, where an unmarried adult man lives in his parents’ house indefinitely, where there is no independent social role for him, and where his standing among other men depends on being a householder, he does not simply lack a wife. He remains, socially, a boy, for the rest of his life.
Punjabi has a word for him — chhada. Haryanvi has malang. Chinese has bare branches: a limb of the family tree that will not fork. None of these words is neutral, and none of them is kind.
What follows is documented and grim. Some of these men remain dependent on ageing parents who expected to be supported and instead go on supporting. Some marry across enormous distances — brides brought from poorer eastern states into Haryana and Punjab, often without a shared language, with the local terms for them, paro and molki, carrying their own contempt. Some of those marriages are ordinary and some involve payment, deception or trafficking. And a large number simply live out a diminished version of the life they expected, without an event ever occurring that anybody would record.
5.4 — What the literature asks about them
Now look at how this subject is discussed.
The best-known book on it is called Bare Branches, published in 2004 by Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer, and its subtitle names the frame: the security implications of Asia’s surplus male population. It estimated roughly 16.5 million surplus men aged 15 to 35 in India by 2006 and projected 28 to 32 million by 2020, and it argued that large numbers of unmarried, low-status young men make societies more violent and more prone to authoritarian rule.
This is a genuine empirical dispute with real evidence on both sides, and it matters because the answer determines whether these men are treated as a problem to be managed or as people with a bad outcome.
Young, unmarried, low-status men are the most crime-prone demographic in every society ever measured, and marriage is one of the most reliable predictors of a man desisting from crime. Make that group much larger and you should expect more crime. There is direct evidence: economists studying China found that the rise in sex ratios accounted for a substantial share of the increase in crime there over two decades. Historical cases point the same way. This is not a slur on the men involved; it is a claim about what happens to any large population of people with no stake in the existing order.
The correlations are confounded by everything that travels with them — poverty, unemployment, weak policing, rapid urbanisation, regions that were already violent. Scarcity of women can also raise their value and improve their position, which is the opposite prediction, and in some places that is what has happened. And the historical examples are selected after the fact: societies with surplus men that stayed peaceful do not get written about. Predicting mass violence from a demographic ratio has a poor record, and it has repeatedly been used to justify treating a whole category of poor young men as a threat before any of them has done anything.
What would settle it: the next twenty years in India, which is a natural experiment nobody chose. The peak of the squeeze arrives around 2040 and the cohorts producing it are already alive and counted.
Why people care so much: because “surplus men are dangerous” is one of the very few arguments against sex selection that has ever moved a government. Appeals to the value of daughters largely did not. A security threat did.
That last sentence is worth stopping on, because it is the whole chapter, and neither side of the argument above noticed it.
Read the literature on these men and count the questions. Will they commit crimes? Will they destabilise the state? Will they push up trafficking? Will they support authoritarian politics?
Now count the studies asking what it is like to be one of them. There are a few, mostly ethnographic, mostly Indian, and they are a rounding error beside the security literature.
Both sides of the argument above share this. The alarmed side says surplus men are dangerous. The sceptical side says they are less dangerous than claimed. Both are answering a question about the rest of us. A man who will spend his life in his parents’ house, without the only adult status his society offers, has a bad life whether or not he ever hurts anybody — and that fact appears in this literature almost exclusively as a variable predicting something else.
Notice too what it took to get anybody to act. Decades of arguing that daughters have worth did not move policy far. The argument that finally reached governments was that a shortage of women would produce a surplus of dangerous men. So even the campaign to save girls ended up being conducted in the currency of what unmarried men might do to everyone else.
The general form: a group whose suffering is discussed only as a hazard it poses. Unemployed young men, migrants, the mentally ill, the urban poor — each is studied intensively, and the research question is almost always what they will do rather than what is happening to them. Sympathy is available; it just has to arrive dressed as risk assessment.
And the connection to this series is direct. The rules about women produced these men. A preference for sons, enforced through daughters, made a generation with too few girls in it — and the cost landed, twenty-five years later, on the poorest sons.
That is the demographic bill. The next chapter turns to a physical one, where the direction of the harm is even clearer and the rule is aimed even further from its source.
A preference for sons produced a shortage of daughters — Sen’s missing women, and, once ultrasound was cheap, sex ratios at birth far below the natural rate. Several Indian states now report under 900 girls per thousand boys.
Twenty-five years later that arrives as a marriage squeeze. Men who never marry are projected to rise from about 4.5 per cent in 2010 to about 12.6 per cent by 2040 in India, against a normal baseline near 5 per cent.
The men left out are not chosen at random. When women are scarce, families choose upwards, so the unmarried are the poorest and least educated. In China’s 2010 census, around 38 per cent of illiterate men in the relevant band had never married, against under 3 per cent of those with middle schooling.
In a society of near-universal marriage, such a man does not merely lack a wife — he never acquires adult standing. Punjabi calls him chhada, Haryanvi malang, Chinese a bare branch.
And almost every word written about him asks what he might do to the rest of us. The rules about women made these men, and even the campaign to save the girls had to be argued in the currency of the danger their absence would create.
6The Vector
Part Ten found one claim in the warning that was straightforwardly true: infection. This chapter follows that claim to its source, and the source is not her.
6.1 — The asymmetry that runs the other way
Part Ten established the one physical fact everybody accepts. Exposure to sexually transmitted infection rises with the number of partners, dose for dose, in every society. Persistent infection with certain types of human papillomavirus causes virtually all cervical cancer, which kills something in the order of seventy-five thousand Indian women a year.
It also noted, at the end of that chapter, the fact that undoes the rule built on it: a woman’s exposure depends on her partner’s history as much as her own. Married Indian women with one lifetime partner develop and die from this disease.
That sentence deserves a chapter rather than a line, because it is the clearest case in the entire series of a harm whose control point is male and whose rule is female.
Transmission network: the map of who could have passed an infection to whom. Infections do not spread through a population evenly; they spread along the connections that exist.
Core group: the small number of people in a network with many connections. Because infections travel along links, a person with many partners is both far more likely to acquire something and far more likely to pass it on — so a small group can account for a very large share of all transmission.
Why it matters: this is one of the oldest and best-established findings in epidemiology, and it has a blunt implication. If you want to reduce infection in a population, the efficient place to act is the core group. In heterosexual transmission, that group is disproportionately male, because male partner counts are higher and more unequally distributed.
6.2 — What it does to men
Before the argument about her, the plain facts about him, which most people do not know.
The same virus that causes cervical cancer in women causes cancers in men — of the throat and tonsils, of the anus, of the penis. These are less discussed and not rare. In the United States, HPV-associated cancer of the throat in men has risen to become the most common HPV-associated cancer of all, overtaking cervical cancer, largely because cervical screening has been catching the female cases early for decades and no equivalent screening exists for the male ones.
Read that twice. The reason the male cancer overtook the female one is not that men are more exposed. It is that somebody built a screening programme for women and nobody built one for men.
There is no reliable screening test for throat cancer. There is no equivalent of a cervical smear. Which means that for men, the only available protection is the one that comes before exposure.
6.3 — Vaccinating boys
Vaccination programmes generate unusually good evidence, because they are rolled out on dates, to defined age groups, and the outcomes are recorded by cancer registries that exist for other reasons.
What the record shows: countries that began vaccinating girls saw infection rates fall in boys too, without vaccinating them — because a virus that cannot find a host in half the population circulates less in the other half. That is herd protection, and it is measured rather than theorised.
What it also shows: the protection is partial and uneven. It depends on high coverage among girls, and it does nothing for men whose partners were not vaccinated — including men whose partners are men, who get no herd benefit from a girls-only programme at all.
Which is why a number of countries — Australia, the United Kingdom and others — moved from vaccinating girls only to vaccinating both sexes. India’s programme has so far focused on girls.
Which is a defensible decision, and a contested one. It is worth setting out properly, because it is the rare case where the abstract question of this part comes with a budget attached.
This is a real policy dispute among people who agree on all the biology, and it is a useful corrective to anyone who thinks “target the men” is obviously free.
India has a limited health budget and enormous unmet need. Every rupee spent vaccinating a boy is a rupee not spent reaching a girl who has not been vaccinated at all — and the disease that kills tens of thousands a year is cervical cancer. Standard health economics is unambiguous here: while coverage among girls is still far from complete, extending to boys is a poor use of scarce money, because the girls-only programme already delivers most of the male benefit through reduced circulation. Do the thing that saves the most lives per rupee, and come back to boys when coverage is high.
The cost calculation assumes the male cancers are a rounding error, and the American data shows they are not — they are now the largest HPV cancer category there, and India has no screening for them either. Herd protection also collapses exactly where coverage is weakest, which is the poorest districts where the girls are least likely to be reached. And there is a structural point beyond the arithmetic: a girls-only programme teaches, in the most concrete way a state can, that this is a female disease and a female responsibility — which is the same lesson every other institution in this series is already teaching.
What would settle it: Indian data on male HPV-related cancers, which is thin, and on actual coverage achieved among girls, which is measurable and improving.
Why people care so much: because this is one of the few live decisions where the abstract question this part is asking — whose conduct and whose body does an institution act on — has an immediate answer with a budget line attached.
6.4 — Why no rule was ever built here
Now the question this chapter exists for.
If a woman’s risk of the most lethal sexually transmitted harm depends substantially on her husband’s history, and if the efficient point of intervention in any transmission network is the person with the most connections, then a society genuinely organised around protecting women’s health would have built its rules around male conduct. None has.
It is worth being precise about what “none” means, because it is not quite true that nothing has ever been aimed at men. Public health has done it repeatedly and successfully — condom promotion, partner notification and treatment, and, in the largest example, the trials that established that male circumcision substantially reduces female-to-male transmission of HIV, which led to programmes across southern and eastern Africa reaching millions of men.
So male-directed intervention is not impossible and not ineffective. It has simply always been medical rather than moral. Societies have been perfectly willing to ask men to take a pill, use a barrier, attend a clinic or undergo a procedure. What no society has done is build a norm around male sexual conduct with anything like the weight, the surveillance and the punishment attached to the female version.
Set the two interventions side by side in a single household, and ask which one anybody has ever heard proposed.
Intervention A: the daughter’s movements are monitored, her phone is checked, her marriage is arranged early, and her conduct is discussed by the extended family. Cost to the family: nothing. Cost to her: much of her twenties.
Intervention B: the son is vaccinated at eleven, taught to use protection, and told that his conduct will determine the health of a woman he has not met yet. Cost to the family: one clinic visit and a conversation. Cost to him: essentially nothing.
Intervention B is cheaper, easier, less intrusive and better targeted at the actual transmission point. It is also the one that has never been a rule anywhere.
Almost never, at least. India did have one law that named male sexual conduct, and what happened to it is the next chapter.
The one physically true claim in the warning has a control point that is not the woman it is issued to. Her risk of cervical cancer depends on her partner’s history as much as her own.
Infections spread along networks, and the efficient place to act is the small group with many connections — which in heterosexual transmission is disproportionately male.
The same virus causes cancers in men. In the United States, HPV-related throat cancer in men has overtaken cervical cancer as the most common HPV cancer — because somebody built a screening programme for women and nobody built one for men.
Vaccinating girls protects boys too, through reduced circulation, but unevenly. Several countries have moved to vaccinating both; India’s programme so far focuses on girls, and there is a serious health-economics case for that sequencing.
Male-directed intervention is not impossible — public health has done it repeatedly. It has just always been medical rather than moral. No society has ever built a norm around his conduct with the weight it puts on hers.
7The One Law That Named Him
India did have a criminal law about male sexual conduct. When the Supreme Court struck it down in 2018, it explained what the law had actually been protecting — and the answer was not the wife.
7.1 — What Section 497 said
From 1860 until 2018, India’s penal code contained an offence called adultery. On its face it was a law aimed squarely at men. Read it carefully and it is one of the most revealing documents in this entire series.
The offence was committed by a man who had sex with another man’s wife, knowing she was married, without the consent or connivance of her husband. He could be imprisoned for up to five years.
Four features of that sentence are worth separating.
The wife could not be punished. Not as an offender, not even as an abettor. The law said so explicitly.
The husband’s consent was a complete defence. If he permitted it, no crime had occurred. The same act, with the same people, was either a five-year offence or entirely lawful depending on what one man had agreed to.
A wife could not prosecute her husband. If he had an affair, she had no remedy under this section at all — nor could she prosecute the woman he had the affair with.
Only the aggrieved husband could bring the case.
Chattel: an item of movable property. A thing that can be owned, damaged and compensated for.
Why the word appears here: it is not my characterisation. When India’s Supreme Court struck this law down, it said in its own reasoning that the provision treated a wife as the property of her husband — that the offence was framed as an injury done to him by another man, using her.
What that means concretely: the law was not indifferent to the wife’s consent because it did not care about consent. It was indifferent because her consent was not the consent that mattered. The consent that mattered belonged to her husband, and the law said so in plain words.
7.2 — What the court said
In Joseph Shine v. Union of India, decided in 2018, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court struck the section down as unconstitutional.
The reasoning is the useful part. The court held that the provision violated equality, that it rested on the idea of the wife as her husband’s possession, and that a law which made a woman’s sexual autonomy contingent on her husband’s permission could not survive the constitutional guarantee of dignity. It noted the absurdity that the husband’s consent converted a crime into a non-crime.
A constitutional judgment is an unusual and valuable kind of evidence for a series like this one.
Almost everything else here is inference — reading a purpose off a pattern of behaviour, which is exactly what the Hidden Assumption boxes keep warning about. A judgment is different: it is the state, in writing, explaining what one of its own laws was doing, in a document with legal consequences, after adversarial argument in which the government defended the law and lost.
What it establishes: that the reading offered in this chapter is not a critic’s interpretation. It is the finding of the highest court in the country that wrote the law.
What it cannot establish: what the law meant to people who lived under it for a hundred and fifty-eight years, or how often it was used, which is a separate and much thinner record.
Here is the point for this part. India had exactly one criminal law that named male sexual conduct as an offence. It turned out, on inspection, to be a law about property, in which the harm was done by one man to another man, and the woman was the site of the transaction rather than a party to it.
That is the pattern this chapter is about, and it recurs. When you find a rule that appears to govern men’s sexual behaviour, look at who is entitled to complain. Almost always it is another man.
7.3 — The exception that is still standing
Now the law that has not been struck down.
India’s rape provision contains an exception: sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, where she is not below the specified age, is not rape. The exception was carried over into the new criminal code that replaced the colonial one.
The litigation history is worth setting out plainly, because it is still running. In 2017 the Supreme Court removed the exception where the wife is between fifteen and eighteen. In May 2022 the Delhi High Court delivered a split verdict on the exception as a whole — one judge holding it unconstitutional as a violation of bodily autonomy, the other holding that within marriage sexual relations are a legitimate expectation. The matter went to the Supreme Court, petitions were clubbed, and hearings began in January 2024.
In October 2024 the Union government filed its affidavit opposing removal, arguing that criminalising marital rape would be excessively harsh, that it could destabilise the institution of marriage, and that the court should defer to Parliament — noting that Parliament had chosen to retain the exception both in 2013 and when drafting the new code. After the retirement of the Chief Justice who had been hearing it, the case was postponed. As of early 2026 it sits before a reconstituted bench with no verdict date. India remains one of a few dozen countries that have not criminalised marital rape.
Put the two laws in this chapter next to each other.
Section 497, now gone: a man who slept with another man’s wife could go to prison for five years — unless that man agreed, in which case nothing had happened.
The exception that remains: a man who has sex with his own wife without her consent has committed no rape.
Line those up and one principle explains both. In each case the question the law asks is not did she agree. It is which man was entitled to decide. The first law protected the husband’s entitlement against outsiders. The second protects it against her.
They look like opposite laws — one punishing sex, one permitting it. They are the same law, seen from inside the marriage and from outside it.
7.4 — The order to return
One more provision belongs here, because it is still in force and most people do not know it exists.
Indian matrimonial law allows a court to order the restitution of conjugal rights: if one spouse has withdrawn from the society of the other without reasonable excuse, the other may petition, and a court may order them to return.
On its face this is perfectly gender-neutral — either spouse may petition. Its history is not. In 1983 the Andhra Pradesh High Court struck it down as a violation of privacy and dignity, holding that a decree transferring the choice of whether and when to have sex from the person to the state was intolerable. Within a year another High Court disagreed and the Supreme Court upheld the provision. It has been challenged again and the challenge is pending.
Gender-neutral on its face: a law written without naming a sex, which therefore appears to treat both equally.
Why the phrase needs a box: a law can be perfectly neutral in its words and fall almost entirely on one sex in its operation, because the world it operates in is not neutral. A rule that either spouse may be ordered to return to the other lands very differently on the spouse who has somewhere else to go and the spouse who does not.
The general lesson, which applies well beyond this: the text of a rule and the incidence of a rule are different objects, and only one of them can be read off the page.
All three of these provisions are now history, or contested, or quietly in force. Which leaves an obvious question that Indian legislators have in fact been asked directly.
This is a live Indian question, not a hypothetical. A parliamentary committee reviewing the new criminal codes recommended re-introducing adultery as a gender-neutral offence. The government did not include it.
The Supreme Court’s objection was to the property structure, not to the idea that breaking a marital promise is a serious wrong. Rewrite it so that either spouse can commit the offence and either can complain, and every defect the court identified is gone. Marriage is a contract the state already regulates in a dozen ways; treating its most fundamental breach as legally weightless sends a message about how much the institution is worth. And a neutral law is precisely the thing this chapter says has never existed — a rule that names male sexual conduct without routing it through another man’s entitlement.
Prison is for harms the state must prevent, not for private betrayals with a civil remedy already available: adultery remains a ground for divorce and is weighed in maintenance and custody. Criminalising it invites the state into bedrooms and hands an enormous coercive threat to the more powerful spouse in any marriage — which in India, overwhelmingly, is the husband. A gender-neutral text does not produce gender-neutral prosecutions when one party controls the money, the house and the family’s willingness to take a complaint seriously. Neutrality on paper, as the previous box says, is not neutrality in incidence.
What would settle it: the record of countries that do have gender-neutral adultery offences — who actually gets prosecuted under them. That evidence exists and is not much cited by either side.
Why people care so much: because this is the test case for the whole chapter. It asks, directly, whether a society is willing to write a rule about male sexual conduct that is not really a rule about another man’s property. India got as far as a committee recommendation and stopped.
So the law has never managed to name him except through another man. The next chapter asks whether that is because his conduct cannot be changed, which is the reason usually given.
India had one criminal law naming male sexual conduct: Section 497. Under it, the wife could not be punished, could not prosecute her husband, and the husband’s consent was a complete defence — the same act was a five-year offence or entirely lawful depending on what one man had agreed to.
When the Supreme Court struck it down in 2018, it said in its own reasoning that the law had treated the wife as her husband’s property. That is not a critic’s reading. It is the state testifying about its own statute.
The exception that remains says a man’s sexual intercourse with his own wife is not rape. It was retained in the new criminal code; the government’s 2024 affidavit opposed removing it; as of early 2026 the case sits with no verdict date.
Line the two up and one principle explains both. Neither law asks did she agree. Both ask which man was entitled to decide — the first protecting that entitlement against outsiders, the second against her.
Whenever you find a rule that appears to govern men’s sexual conduct, look at who is entitled to complain. It is almost always another man.
8Fixed or Adjustable
Every version of these rules is designed around one assumption: that male behaviour is weather and female behaviour is a choice. It is worth checking, because the historical record on male behaviour is not what the assumption predicts.
8.1 — The premise underneath everything
You have heard it in the form of advice. Men are like that. That is how they are. You cannot change them, so you must be careful.
It is offered as realism, and it is doing an enormous amount of work. Every rule in this series follows from it. If male sexual behaviour is a fixed feature of the world, then the only adjustable part of the system is what women do — where they go, what they wear, when they are home, whom they may meet. The whole architecture of restriction is a rational response to a constant.
So the question is straightforward and answerable. Is male sexual behaviour a constant?
8.2 — What the record actually shows
Start with the strongest version of the claim, because there is real evidence for part of it.
On measured sexual desire, the sexes do differ. A large review of this literature concluded that men, on average, report wanting sex more frequently, think about it more often, masturbate more, and score higher on measures of willingness to have sex outside a relationship. This is one of the better-replicated findings in the field and I am not going to pretend it away.
But notice the gap between that finding and the conclusion drawn from it. The finding is about average reported desire. The conclusion is about whether behaviour can change. Those are different claims, and the second does not follow from the first.
The best evidence on whether male behaviour is fixed does not come from psychology. It comes from history, where the same population can be observed across centuries and the behaviour is recorded for other reasons.
Take homicide, which is overwhelmingly a male behaviour everywhere and always. Historical criminologists have assembled European homicide rates from court and coroner records running back to the medieval period. The rate fell from something in the order of thirty to fifty deaths per hundred thousand people a year to roughly one.
That is a fall of something like ninety-five to ninety-eight per cent, in the most violent behaviour there is, in the sex supposedly incapable of change, without any alteration in human biology. It happened through law, policing, the state’s monopoly on force, and — this is the part that matters here — a change in what other men considered acceptable.
Why this evidence is strong: nobody was reporting anything, the records were kept for administrative reasons, and the trend is visible independently in several countries with different legal systems.
Once you look, the examples are everywhere, and several are within living memory.
Secular trend: in statistics, a long-run movement in a population measure across decades or centuries — as opposed to a short-run fluctuation. Nothing to do with religion; the word here just means “over the long term”.
Why it matters for this chapter: almost every claim that some human behaviour is fixed is made by someone looking at a short window. Widen the window and behaviours that felt permanent turn out to have moved a great deal. The argument about whether men can change is really an argument about how far back you look.
Duelling. An entrenched practice of male honour, backed by the certainty that a man who declined was finished socially. It was regarded as impossible to abolish. It is gone, and it went within a couple of generations.
Buying sex. In much of Europe and America a century ago, visiting a brothel was an ordinary and widely tolerated part of many men’s lives. Today, in the same countries, it is a minority behaviour, and in several it is a criminal offence to purchase.
Drink-driving, seatbelts, smoking, workplace violence. All male-skewed, all deeply entrenched, all changed dramatically within a few decades by a combination of law, enforcement and social disapproval.
Condom use. When HIV made it urgent, campaigns aimed squarely at male behaviour produced large, fast, measurable change across very different societies.
A man in London in 1350 lived in a society where his chance of being murdered was something like thirty or forty times what it is for a man in London today, and nearly all of that risk came from other men.
Nothing about male bodies changed in the seven centuries between. What changed was law, policing, and what men expected of each other.
Now hold that beside the sentence you cannot change men. The behaviour in question — killing people — is more strongly male, more intensely felt, and far more consequential than anything discussed in this series. It went down by roughly ninety-five per cent.
None of which settles the question, because there is a serious version of the other position and it deserves stating properly.
Both sides accept the psychological finding. They disagree about what it licenses.
The sex-drive finding is robust and it is not small. Men also commit almost all sexual violence, in every society measured, which is not a socialisation artefact that varies away. A rule-maker facing a genuine average difference in urgency and a genuine asymmetry in physical risk is not being sexist by taking it into account; they are being accurate. Designing a system around the way people actually are, rather than the way one would prefer them to be, is the definition of practical wisdom — and a society that pretends the difference does not exist will get women hurt while it waits for men to be re-educated.
The whole argument slides from “men want it more” to “men will act on it regardless”, and that step has no support. Every behaviour listed above was more male, strongly felt, and changed enormously. Homicide is the extreme case: the most male behaviour there is, and it fell by about ninety-five per cent. Desire is not the variable in question — conduct is, and conduct has always responded to law, enforcement and the opinion of other men. What the “realism” position actually assumes is not that male behaviour cannot change but that nobody will make it, which is a prediction about political will dressed up as a fact about human nature.
What would settle it: it is largely settled. The open question is not whether male sexual conduct can shift — the twentieth century answered that repeatedly — but how much, how fast, and at what cost, and those are ordinary policy questions rather than facts about nature.
Why people care so much: because “you cannot change men” is the load-bearing beam. Remove it and every restriction in this series stops being an unavoidable adaptation and becomes a choice about who should be inconvenienced.
And underneath that argument, both sides are doing something they have not noticed.
Look at the structure of the argument above rather than its content. One side says male conduct is a constant and female conduct must adapt. The other says male conduct is malleable and should be changed. They are arguing about a fact.
They are not. They are arguing about which variable to hold still, and that is a decision, not a discovery.
Every system with two variables in it requires somebody to pick which one is the constraint. In every other domain where male behaviour proved costly, the choice went the other way without anybody agonising over it. Nobody responded to duelling by advising young men to avoid giving offence. Nobody responded to drink-driving by telling pedestrians to stay off the roads at night. Nobody responded to workplace deaths by advising workers to be more careful around unguarded machinery — that was in fact tried, for about a century, and was eventually recognised as a way of avoiding the cost of guarding the machinery.
In each of those cases, the party whose behaviour was costly was the party asked to change. In this one, uniquely and consistently across almost every society on Earth, the party asked to change is the other one.
The general form: the variable nobody proposes to move becomes the constraint, and the constraint is then mistaken for a law of nature. It is one of the most powerful moves in politics precisely because it never has to be argued for. Once something is treated as fixed, every subsequent discussion is about how to accommodate it, and the accommodation looks like realism rather than like a choice that was made.
What I am not saying, and want to be exact about: that changing male conduct would be easy, or that it would work quickly, or that anyone living inside the current arrangement can act as though it had already happened. Chapter Nine of Part Ten established why that last one matters. What I am saying is narrower and harder to escape. The fixity of male behaviour is not an observation. It is the one thing in this entire system that has never been put on the table.
Which sets up the last question of this part: if it were on the table, where would the evidence point?
Every rule in this series rests on one premise: that male behaviour is weather and female behaviour is a choice.
The psychological part of the claim is real. Men do report higher average sexual desire on essentially every measure, and that finding is well replicated.
But the inference from that to fixed conduct is unsupported, and history contradicts it flatly. European homicide — the most male behaviour there is — fell by something like ninety-five per cent. Duelling vanished. Buying sex went from ordinary to marginal. Drink-driving, smoking and condom use all shifted enormously within decades.
None of that required male biology to change. It required law, enforcement, and a change in what men expected of each other.
So the two sides are not arguing about a fact. They are arguing about which variable to hold still — and in every other domain where male conduct was costly, the answer was to move it.
9If the Evidence Chose
Take the goals the traditional rules say they are for. Then ask, goal by goal, whose conduct the evidence would actually target. The answer is consistent enough to be uncomfortable — and what it reveals is not what I expected when I set the test up.
9.1 — Setting the test up honestly
This is a diagnostic, not a proposal. The question is: if you accepted the traditionalist’s own stated objectives, and you were allowed to point a rule at either sex, which way would the evidence point you?
Counterfactual: a claim about what would happen under conditions that do not hold. “If she had taken the earlier train, she would have arrived on time.”
Why it is a legitimate tool and not a rhetorical trick: every causal claim is secretly a counterfactual. Saying a drug works means that without it the patient would have done worse. You cannot say anything about causes without describing a world that did not happen.
What it cannot do: a counterfactual tells you what would follow from a change. It does not tell you the change should be made, and this chapter keeps those two apart deliberately.
Two things make this a fair test rather than a trick. First, I am using their goals, not mine — stability, children, health, order, and her own long-term wellbeing. Second, the answer is allowed to come back “her”. On one goal it does.
Section 9.5 explains why answering this is not the same as recommending anything, and the last box in the chapter explains why the exercise may be less devastating than it looks — and more.
9.2 — Goal by goal
Goal one: marriages that last. The evidence linking a woman’s premarital partner count to divorce is real, unexplained by any mechanism anybody has tested, non-linear, and established almost entirely in one country. Set against that, the best-established predictors of a marriage ending are infidelity, violence, problem drinking and financial irresponsibility — and in the reasons women give for leaving, across many countries, those dominate. Every one of them is overwhelmingly male conduct, and each has a clearer causal story than anything in Part Ten’s Chapter Two. The evidence points at him.
Goal two: knowing whose child it is. Here it points at her, and I am not going to soften that. Paternity certainty is affected directly and only by female sexual conduct. This is the one goal on the list where the traditional target is the arithmetically correct one.
But follow it one step further, because the step is remarkable. Reliable paternity testing has existed since the 1990s and now costs less than a week’s groceries. The entire apparatus described across eleven parts of this series — the surveillance, the early marriage, the confinement, the examinations, the violence — exists to solve a problem that has had a cheap, precise technical solution for thirty years. No society has retired the apparatus. That is not a failure to notice. A rule that survives the disappearance of its stated purpose was doing something else as well.
Goal three: healthy women. Chapter Six settled this. Her infection risk depends on his history as much as her own, transmission concentrates in the people with the most connections, and the cheap interventions — vaccination, screening, barrier protection, treating the partner — are medical rather than moral. The evidence points at him, and at a clinic.
Goal four: less sexual violence. Not close. Sexual violence is committed overwhelmingly by men, in every society ever measured. A rule aimed at reducing it that governs women’s clothing and movement is aimed at the party who is not doing it.
Goal five: social order. Chapter Five is the answer. The largest current threat to social order attributed to this domain is a surplus of unmarried men — and that surplus was manufactured by a preference for sons, enforced through the elimination of daughters. The disorder was produced by the rule.
Goal six: her own long-term happiness. Part Ten’s Chapter Five found that the wellbeing damage tracks the collision between a woman’s behaviour and the beliefs she was taught. The intervention that would reduce it most is not a change in her conduct. It is a change in what she was taught — which means the rule is generating a substantial share of the harm it cites as its justification.
9.3 — The scoreboard
| Stated goal | Where the evidence points |
|---|---|
| Marriages that last | Him. Infidelity, violence, drinking and money have clearer causal stories than her partner count, which nobody has explained. |
| Paternity certainty | Her — the one case where the traditional target is correct. But a cheap test has existed for thirty years and no society retired the apparatus. |
| Healthy women | Him, and a clinic. Her risk runs through his history; vaccination and screening beat conduct by a wide margin. |
| Less sexual violence | Him. Not close. |
| Social order | The rule itself. Son preference produced the missing women, and the missing women produced the surplus men. |
| Her own happiness | What she was taught. The damage tracks the collision with installed belief, not the behaviour. |
Six goals. On four the evidence points at male conduct. On one it points at the rule as the cause of the problem. On one it points at her, and that one has been technically solved since before I was born.
Suppose you accepted all of that. The next question is whether the alternative is achievable, and this is where the traditionalist case is stronger than the scoreboard suggests.
Male conduct has been changed repeatedly, at scale, in living memory: drink-driving, smoking, workplace safety, condom use, buying sex, and — over centuries — homicide by something like ninety-five per cent. None of it required biology to change. It required law, enforcement and a shift in what men expected of one another. There is no reason in principle why sexual conduct should be the one male behaviour immune to the mechanism that moved all the others, and the assumption that it is has never been tested because it has never been tried.
Chapter One already gave the answer: rules fall where they can be enforced. Every male behaviour on that list was changed by a state — with police, courts, breath tests, inspectors, taxes and licensing. A household cannot do any of that. The rules in this series are administered by families, and a family can supervise a daughter in its own house and cannot supervise a son in a city two hundred kilometres away. So “aim it at men” is not a redesign a family can adopt; it is a demand for state capacity that mostly does not exist, and in its absence the actually available choice is between restricting the daughter and doing nothing.
What would settle it: cases where the state has aimed at male sexual conduct at scale. A few exist — the Nordic laws criminalising the purchase of sex, HIV-era campaigns, workplace harassment law — and their results are mixed but not nothing. The evidence base is thin because the attempts are few.
Why people care so much: because if the constraint is enforcement rather than nature, then the rules about women are not a considered response to how the world is. They are what a household does when it cannot reach the person actually causing the problem.
9.4 — Why none of this is a recommendation
I said in the front matter that nothing here argues the rules should be pointed at men. Here is why, and it is not modesty.
A rule aimed at men would still be a rule that controls people’s sexual lives through surveillance, shame and punishment. This series has spent eleven parts documenting what that costs the people inside it. Concluding “so do it to the other half” would mean I had described a machine in detail and then asked to run it, which is not an argument, it is a change of seat.
The test in this chapter is diagnostic. It asks whether the rules track their stated goals. They do not — not on four of six, and on a fifth the rule causes the harm. What that establishes is not a better target. It establishes that the stated goals are not what is selecting the target, and that is a finding about the rules rather than a plan for new ones.
I built this chapter as an audit. I took the stated goals, checked whether the rules hit them, found they mostly do not, and treated that as a serious criticism.
That framing assumes the rules are attempts — that somebody aimed at those goals and missed. It is the assumption inside every sentence of this part, including the ones I was pleased with.
Now apply the ordinary test. If a system misses its stated target consistently, across thousands of years, on four continents, under every religion, in every economic arrangement, and misses in the same direction every single time — always allocating control to the same party — at what point do you stop calling it a miss?
A mechanism that fails randomly is broken. A mechanism that fails in one direction, reliably, for millennia, is working. And if it is working, then “badly aimed” is not a bug report. It is a description of the specification, and I have spent nine chapters writing a very careful complaint to a manufacturer who built exactly what was ordered.
There is a second half to this, and it is about me rather than the argument. This whole part asks: whose conduct should the rules target? Notice what that question concedes before it opens its mouth. It accepts that somebody’s conduct is the thing to be targeted, and that the interesting problem is aim. A man writing eighty pages arguing that the rules should really be about men is still a man writing about who the rules should be about — and Chapter Four established that being the enforcer, the beneficiary and the designer are three different jobs. I have quietly taken the third.
The general form: treating a persistent, patterned failure as error rather than as function. It is the most common mistake in institutional analysis and the hardest to see from inside, because the correction always looks constructive. A prison that does not rehabilitate. A test that does not measure aptitude. A market that does not clear. In each case decades are spent proposing improvements before somebody asks what the thing is actually for.
Where that leaves this part: everything in it stands as evidence. The scoreboard is real, the six goals are theirs, and the arrows point where I said. What does not stand is my framing of it as a system that could be corrected by better aim — and that framing was mine, not the evidence’s.
So the part ends one step short of where I intended it to, which is the honest place for it to stop.
Take the traditionalist’s own six goals and ask whose conduct the evidence would target. On marriages lasting, health, sexual violence — him, and not narrowly. On social order, the rule itself is the cause: son preference made the missing women who made the surplus men.
On her own happiness, the damage tracks what she was taught, so the rule generates a share of the harm it cites as justification.
On paternity, the traditional target is arithmetically right — and a cheap, precise test has existed for thirty years, and no society retired the apparatus. A rule that survives the disappearance of its purpose was doing something else too.
Why the rules land where they do is enforcement, not nature. Every male behaviour that ever changed at scale was changed by a state with power over strangers. A household can reach a daughter and cannot reach a son.
And the assumption underneath my own chapter: I treated the mis-aiming as a mistake. A system that misses in the same direction for thousands of years is not missing.
10An Honest List of What We Do Not Know
Two lists, as in every part. What is genuinely unknown, and why — which is usually the more interesting half. Then what is solid enough to build on.
10.1 — Genuinely unknown
Almost everything about men’s sexual histories and their marriages
This is the largest gap in the part and the reason the part exists. Whether a man’s premarital partner count predicts his divorce, his marital satisfaction or anything else is not known with any confidence, because the surveys that answered the question for women did not ask men in equivalent detail. The reason we do not know is not that researchers looked and found nothing. It is that the question felt natural in one direction and strange in the other, for decades, across many questionnaires.
How much of men’s marriage advantage is protection and how much is selection
Married men live longer and are healthier than unmarried men, by a wider margin than the equivalent gap among women. Whether marriage causes that or healthier men marry is disputed, with most researchers holding that both operate. The reason we do not know: the experiment cannot be run, and the men who never marry differ from the men who do in every measurable way before anybody marries anyone.
Whether the double standard survives where it matters
Vignette experiments find it weak or absent in Western student samples. Choice-based measures find it. Nobody has systematically measured consequences — what actually happens to matched men and women after the same information about them becomes public. The reason we do not know: that study is slow, expensive and unpleasant to run, and no funder has wanted it.
Whether the women who enforce these rules are agents or instruments
Both readings fit every fact in Chapter Four. The reason we do not know is not missing data — it is that “agency” is not a quantity and cannot be measured. There is one partial empirical handle: watching what happens to enforcement when the underlying incentive disappears. That evidence is fragmentary.
What life is actually like for India’s surplus men
We can count them precisely and we know very little else. The literature asks what they might do; a handful of ethnographies ask what is happening to them. The reason we do not know: research funding for this population has come almost entirely from security and demography, and both fields ask about risk rather than experience.
Whether surplus men actually destabilise societies
The crime finding from China is credible; how far it generalises is contested, and the catastrophic versions of the thesis are not supported. The reason we do not know: the natural experiment is running now, in India, and its peak arrives around 2040.
What a serious attempt to change male sexual conduct would achieve
Chapter Eight established that male behaviour in general is highly changeable. It did not establish how far sexual conduct specifically would move, because almost nobody has tried at scale. The Nordic laws on purchasing sex are the closest thing to a test and their results are genuinely mixed. The reason we do not know: too few attempts, and most of them recent.
The true incidence of male sexual violence
Reported figures in every country are a fraction of survey estimates, and survey estimates vary with how the question is asked. India’s recorded numbers are widely regarded as a severe undercount. The reason we do not know: reporting depends on what happens to the person who reports, which is exactly what this series has been about.
One item on that list is a different kind of absence from the others, and it is the one this part was built around.
Most gaps in research exist because something is hard to measure — a feeling, a private act, a long-run outcome. The absence of male data on premarital sexual history is not like that. It is no harder to ask a man than a woman. Britain’s national survey has asked both, in comparable detail, since 1990, at no special difficulty and no special cost.
So this gap is not a limitation of method. It is a record of what was considered worth knowing. And unlike most gaps, it can be closed at any time by anybody willing to add a page to a questionnaire.
Treat it, then, the way Part Nine treated a missing census and Part Ten treated a missing count of killings: an absence that could be filled and has not been is itself a finding, and what it is evidence of is the shape of the question rather than the difficulty of the answer.
10.2 — Solid
The male comparison data was not collected
The American survey behind the best-known findings on premarital partners and divorce does not carry equivalent information on men. This is stated by the researcher who used it. It is a fact about the dataset, not an inference.
Men gain more from marriage on health and mortality
Married people live longer than unmarried people, and the gap is consistently larger for men, across many countries, using administrative records rather than self-report. How much is protection and how much is selection is disputed; the pattern is not.
The male marriage-market penalty does not exist
In no society I can find is a man’s number of previous partners priced as a defect in a marriage negotiation. Part Ten established that the female version of this penalty is real and does not travel across societies. The male version does not appear at all.
The double standard is weak in Western vignette experiments
Replicated many times by many groups. People rate high partner counts negatively for both sexes. This is a genuine finding and should not be denied by anyone who wants to be taken seriously on this subject.
It persists in choice, language and consequence
Studies of who people want as friends and partners find it, including among people who are themselves permissive. The insult vocabulary for sexually active women exists in every language checked and has no male equivalent of comparable force. And in societies where marriage is arranged between families, one side of the negotiation is priced and the other is not asked.
Daily enforcement is administered largely by women
Clothing, movement, phones, curfews and contraception are supervised by senior women in the household. In north India, a mother-in-law’s stated view predicts a young wife’s contraceptive behaviour better than the wife’s own stated preference. Lethal enforcement is male, organisational, and frequently delegated to the most legally expendable member of the household.
The sex ratio produced a marriage squeeze, and it lands on the poorest men
Census counts, not estimates. Men who never marry in India are projected to rise from about 4.5 per cent in 2010 to about 12.6 per cent by 2040 against a normal baseline near 5 per cent. In China’s 2010 census, around 38 per cent of illiterate men in the relevant band had never married against under 3 per cent of those with middle schooling.
A woman’s infection risk runs through her partner’s history
Biology, not statistics. Transmission concentrates in people with many connections. The same virus causes cancers in men, and in the United States HPV-related throat cancer in men has overtaken cervical cancer as the most common HPV cancer — because screening exists for one and not the other.
India’s one criminal law on male sexual conduct was a property rule
Under Section 497 the wife could not be punished or prosecute, and the husband’s consent was a complete defence. The Supreme Court struck it down in 2018 and stated in its own reasoning that the provision had treated a wife as her husband’s property. The marital rape exception was retained in the new criminal code; the government opposed its removal in 2024; the case remains undecided.
Male behaviour changes
European homicide rates fell by something in the order of ninety-five per cent from the medieval period to the modern one. Duelling disappeared. Buying sex went from ordinary to marginal. Drink-driving, smoking and condom use shifted enormously within decades. None of it required biology to change.
Unknown: nearly everything about men’s sexual histories and their marriages; how much of men’s marriage advantage is protection; whether the double standard survives in consequences; whether the enforcing women are agents; what life is like for surplus men; whether they destabilise anything; and what a serious attempt to shift male sexual conduct would achieve.
Solid: the male comparison data was never collected; men gain more from marriage on health and mortality; the male marriage-market penalty does not exist; the double standard is weak in Western vignettes and persists in choice, language and consequence; daily enforcement is largely administered by women; the sex ratio produced a squeeze that lands on the poorest men; her infection risk runs through his history; India’s one law naming male sexual conduct was a property rule, by the Supreme Court’s own account; and male behaviour changes, enormously, when a state decides it should.
One absence is unlike the rest. The male data is no harder to collect than the female data — Britain has collected both since 1990. A gap that could be closed by adding a page to a questionnaire, and has not been, is a record of what was thought worth knowing.
The honest summary of this part: on almost every question the series has asked, the comparison group exists, is reachable, and was never assembled — and the one thing everybody treats as a fixed feature of the world is the one thing nobody has ever tried to move.
Sources & further reading — Part 11
Timeline
A century and a half of law and research about men’s sexual conduct, and what each was really protecting.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1860 | The Indian Penal Code is enacted. Section 497 makes adultery an offence a man commits against another man’s marriage. The wife cannot be punished, cannot prosecute, and the husband’s consent is a complete defence. |
| 1955 | The Hindu Marriage Act includes restitution of conjugal rights: a court may order a spouse who has withdrawn from the other to return. |
| 1983 | In T. Sareetha, the Andhra Pradesh High Court strikes restitution down, holding that transferring the choice of when to have sex from the person to the state is intolerable. |
| 1984 | Another High Court disagrees and the Supreme Court upholds the provision. It is still in force. |
| 1990 | Amartya Sen publishes his estimate that more than a hundred million women are missing. In the same year Britain runs the first of its national sexual behaviour surveys, asking men and women in comparable detail — the comparison the American data still lacks. |
| 1999 | Sweden criminalises the purchase of sexual services while leaving the sale legal — the first state to aim this law at the buyer rather than the seller. |
| 2001 | A large review concludes that men report higher sexual desire than women on essentially every measure — the strongest evidence for the premise Chapter Eight examines. |
| 2003 | Long-run European homicide series are assembled from court and coroner records, showing a fall of roughly ninety-five per cent from the medieval period — the strongest evidence against the conclusion drawn from that premise. |
| 2004 | Bare Branches estimates India’s surplus men at 16.5 million aged 15 to 35, projected to 28–32 million by 2020, and frames the question as one of security. |
| 2005–07 | Randomised trials in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda establish that male circumcision substantially reduces female-to-male HIV transmission, leading to programmes reaching millions of men. Male-directed intervention proves both possible and effective — and medical rather than moral. |
| 2011 | India’s census records that across Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, about 76 per cent of men aged 20 to 24 are unmarried against about 34 per cent of women. |
| 2013 | Economists link China’s rising sex ratios to a substantial share of its increase in crime. Australia extends HPV vaccination to boys. |
| 2017 | In Independent Thought, India’s Supreme Court removes the marital rape exception where the wife is between fifteen and eighteen. |
| 2018 | Joseph Shine v. Union of India strikes down Section 497, the court stating in its own reasoning that the provision had treated a wife as her husband’s property. |
| 2019 | The United Kingdom extends HPV vaccination to boys, following the evidence on male cancers and uneven herd protection. |
| 2022 | The Delhi High Court splits one to one on the marital rape exception. The Supreme Court stays a Karnataka ruling and the petitions are clubbed together. |
| 2023 | A parliamentary committee reviewing India’s new criminal codes recommends re-introducing adultery as a gender-neutral offence. The government does not include it. |
| 2024 | Hearings on the marital rape exception begin. In October the Union government files its affidavit opposing removal, calling criminalisation excessively harsh and urging the court to defer to Parliament. |
| 2026 | After a change of Chief Justice the case is postponed. As of early in the year it sits before a reconstituted bench with no verdict date. |
| Next | Part Twelve starts here. |
Glossary
Every hard word used in this part, in plain English.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| All-cause mortality | The chance of dying from anything at all in a period. The bluntest health measure there is, and the hardest to fake — a death is recorded whatever anybody believes. |
| Bare branches | The Chinese term for men who will never marry or have children — a limb of the family tree that will not fork. Punjabi has chhada; Haryanvi has malang. |
| Chattel | An item of movable property. Used by India’s Supreme Court, in effect, to describe how Section 497 treated a wife. |
| Comparison group | The people you measure your group against. Without one, a number is a description of one population rather than a finding. |
| Core group | In epidemiology, the small number of people in a network with many connections, who account for a disproportionate share of all transmission. |
| Ethnographic research | Studying a community by living in it and observing over long periods. Good at seeing enforcement that never becomes an event; bad at scale. |
| Gender-neutral on its face | A law written without naming a sex. It can still fall almost entirely on one sex in operation, because the world it operates in is not neutral. |
| Herd protection | The reduction in infection among unvaccinated people caused by vaccinating others, because the infection circulates less. Partial, and weakest where coverage is lowest. |
| Izzat | A household’s collective public standing, damaged by a daughter’s rumoured conduct and not in the same way by a son’s. |
| Marriage squeeze | What happens when one sex outnumbers the other at marriageable age, so a share of the larger group cannot marry at all. |
| Missing women | Amartya Sen’s term for the shortfall between the number of women alive in a population and the number that equal treatment would produce. |
| Reading down | When a court narrows a law’s application rather than striking it out entirely — as with the marital rape exception for wives aged fifteen to eighteen. |
| Restitution of conjugal rights | A court order requiring a spouse who has left to return. Struck down by one Indian High Court in 1983, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1984, still in force. |
| Revealed preference | What a person’s actual choices show they want, as opposed to what they say when asked. |
| Section 497 | India’s adultery offence from 1860 to 2018. A man committed it against another man’s marriage; the husband’s consent was a complete defence. |
| Sex ratio at birth | Girls born per thousand boys. Nature produces about 950. Several Indian states report under 900. |
| Selection effect | When people ended up in a group for reasons that also affect the outcome, so you are comparing different kinds of people rather than the same people in different conditions. |
| Sexual double standard | Judging the same sexual behaviour more harshly in a woman than a man. It can live in what people say, how they rate, whom they choose, and what a community does — and those can disagree. |
| Stated preference | What a person says they want or believe when asked. Often diverges from revealed preference, in a predictable direction. |
| Transmission network | The map of who could have passed an infection to whom. Infections spread along connections, not evenly. |
| Vignette study | An experiment in which people rate a described person, with one detail varied between conditions. A true experiment, and it measures what people will say when they know they are watched. |