Opinion

SEX AND THE WORLD

After my Lot Airlines flight from New York touched down at Warsaw’s Frédéric Chopin Airport a few months back, I watched a middle-aged passenger rush to embrace a waiting younger woman – clearly her daughter. Like many people on the plane, the older woman wore drab clothing and had the short, square physique of someone familiar with too many potatoes and too much manual labor. Her Poland-based daughter, by contrast, was tall and smartly outfitted in pointy-toed pumps, slim-cut jeans, a cropped jacket revealing a toned midriff (Yoga? Pilates? Or just a low-carb diet?), and a large, brass-studded leather bag, into which she dropped a silver cellphone.

Yes: Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not just Warsaw. Conceived and raised in the United States, Carrie may still see New York as a spiritual home. But today, you can find her in cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul and Dublin, and you’ll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and thirties, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships. “Sex and the City” has gone global.

The globalization of the SYF reflects a series of stunning demographic and economic shifts that are pointing much of the world – with important exceptions, including Africa and most of the Middle East – toward a New Girl Order. It’s a man’s world, James Brown always reminded us. But if these trends continue, not so much.

Three demographic facts are at the core of the New Girl Order. First, women – especially, but not only, in the developed world – are getting married and having kids considerably later than ever before. According to the U.N.’s World Fertility Report, the worldwide median age of marriage for women is up two years, from 21.2 in the 1970s to 23.2 today. In the developed countries, the rise has been considerably steeper – from 22.0 to 26.1.

In America, that change took about a generation to unfold, but in Asia and Eastern Europe, the transformation has been much more abrupt. In today’s Hungary, for instance, 30 percent of women in their early thirties are single, compared with 6 percent of their mothers’ generation at the same age. In South Korea, 40 percent of 30-year-olds are single, compared with 14 percent only 20 years ago.

In the newly global economy, good jobs go to those with degrees, and all over the world, young people, particularly women, are enrolling in colleges and universities at unprecedented rates. Between 1960 and 2000, the percentages of 20-, 25-, and 30-year-olds enrolled in school more than doubled in the U.S. The majority of college students are female in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Norway, and Australia, to name only a few of many places, and the gender gap is quickly narrowing in more traditional countries like China, Japan and South Korea. In a number of European countries, including Denmark, Finland and France, over half of all women between 20 and 24 are in school.

Adding to the contemporary SYF’s novelty is the third demographic shift: urbanization. By the mid-1990s, in countries as diverse as Canada, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and Russia, women were out-urbanizing men, who still tended to hang around the home village. When they can afford to, these women live alone or with roommates. Belgians, notes University of Maryland professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, have coined a term – “hotel families” – to describe the arrangement.

Combine these trends – delayed marriage, expanded higher education and labor-force participation, urbanization – add a global media and some disposable income, and voilà: an international lifestyle is born. One of its defining characteristics is long hours of office work, often in quasi-creative fields like media, fashion, communications and design – areas in which the number of careers has exploded in the global economy over the past few decades. The lifestyle also means whole new realms of leisure and consumption, often enjoyed with a group of close girlfriends: trendy cafés and bars serving sweetish coffee concoctions and cocktails; fancy boutiques, malls, and emporiums hawking cosmetics, handbags, shoes, and $100-plus buttock-hugging jeans; gyms for toning and male-watching.

Japan presents a striking example of the sudden rise of the New Girl Order outside the U.S. and Western Europe. Between 1994 and 2004, the number of Japanese women between 25 and 29 who were unmarried soared from 40 to 54 percent; even more remarkable was the number of 30- to 34-year-old females who were unmarried, which rocketed from 14 to 27 percent. The New Girl Order may represent a disruptive transformation for a deeply traditional society, but Japanese women sure seem to be enjoying the single life. One of them, 37-year-old Junko Sakai, wrote a best-selling plaint called “The Howl of the Loser Dogs,” a title that co-opts the term makeinu – “loser” – once commonly used to describe husbandless 30-year-olds. “Society may call us dogs,” she writes, “but we are happy and independent.”

But as with any momentous social change, the New Girl Order comes with costs. The globalized SYF upends centuries of cultural traditions. However limiting, those traditions shaped how families formed and the next generation grew up. So it makes sense that the SYF is partly to blame for a worldwide drop in fertility rates. And that, ironically, will likely spell the SYF lifestyle’s demise. As Philip Longman explains in his important book “The Empty Cradle,” dramatic declines in fertility rates equal aging and eventually shriveling populations. Japan now has one of the oldest populations in the world – one-third of its population, demographers predict, will be over 60 within a decade.

The final irony is that the ambitious, hardworking SYF will have created a world where her children, should she have them, will need to work even harder in order to support her in her golden years.

Excerpted from the current issue of City Journal.