Via Steven Landsburg:
China has one of the highest male-female sex ratios in the world. That means women can afford to be picky.
Here are the requirements listed by a female graduate student seeking a mate on the Chinese equivalent of match.com:
- Never married
- Masters degree or more
- Not from Wuhan
- No rural I.D. card
- No only children
- No smokers
- No alcoholics
- No gamblers
- Taller than one hundred and seventy-two centimeters
- More than a year of dating before marriage
- Sporty
- Parents who are still together
- Annual salary over fifty thousand yuan
- Between twenty-six and thirty-two years of age
- Willing to guarantee eating at least four dinners at home per week
- At least two ex-girlfriends but no more than four
- No Virgos, no Capricorns
In big cities it is fact the opposite – women outnumber men and so the MEN are choosy.
The demographic reality – more men than women – that you write about above and that does have a huge effect in the countryside is masked by another effect that is often over looked: there are far more job opportunities for women in cites: maids, waitresses, prostitutes, etc. and so what you get in reality is a vast countryside denuded completely of women where, when they return from the cities, they can be as choosy as they want. But in the cites (and it’s one of the reasons they leave) it’s very hard to find a husband because there are just too many women competing for a much smaller pool of men.
The personals/match.com post is written by a college girl who’s requirements will change once she gets out of college and experiences reality. It shouldn’t be taken as an example of an accurate assessment of the dating market.