I try to think laterally as much as I can, and there's been something eating at me for some months now. Over the course of the last hundred years or so, we've seen a massive transition from the rural environment into the urban environment. This has led to the fracturing of family structures that have have served humans for tens of thousands of years, and has had enormously detrimental effects for both men and women.

Humans are social animals, but our social interaction seems to be capped at the dunbar number - a setpoint of around 150-200 people that our brains can handle knowing socially before old acquaintances start getting written over.

Most of us probably realize that we spend our time in communities that are significantly larger than this dunbar number, but there is little hard evidence that the creeping dysfunction between men and women can be directly tied to urbanization. The social density in which we spend most of our lives (number of people in a given space) creeps up constantly, especially as the millenial generation finds themselves living in communal housing conditions for much longer than previous cohorts.

So where does this leave us, exactly? It's worth considering that there's something about the way that we have organized society that is actually propagating bad behavior on both sides - and that the only way forward is to understand why these underlying things are occuring, and doing something to change the organization of society.

Some interesting behavioral studies in the 1970s looked at this kind of thing - especially the effects of social density on sexual behavior, reproduction, and male hierarchies - but there has been little follow up on these studies. Mostly because they're enormously difficult, hard to control, and require an experimenter that is so well-versed in rodent behavior as to be nonexistent in our academic, grant driven world.

There's a write up of the first rat utopia experiments here for anyone who is interested - but it's really getting me thinking hard on how the divide between genders might come down to the fact that the last hundred years of increased social density has seriously disrupted our sense of communities and relation to one another.