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There's a fair criticism of pickiness, and not to put unspoken words in your mouth but if you're implying it, you're only implying it, that the righties wouldn't want the chainsmoker at the bar. A lot of those young men are picky, but it's turnabout from the woman being more picky. Not to cast blame here because there isn't blame, the behavior from both sexes results from society. But blaming society is also a folly, might as well blame the sun for rising, for the good it can do to change it.
You're right and you're wrong. We're in the most narrow slice between past and future where you will approach rightness. Some of these men couldn't get dates if they were born 10 years earlier, or 20, 30, 40, 50--except far enough back and then things change, because dating is a hyper-modern activity, as is equally the degree of autonomy that men and/but far more women, have in romance. Go far enough back and dating doesn't exist, it's courtship, a bit farther back and courtship lands between betrothal and marriage. Farther back and it's pure arranged marriage, and far enough back and it's men dragging women and girls away from the primitive domiciles of their slain husbands, brothers, and fathers.
That violence is so relevant. Most men never reproduced, each of us is the legacy of those few who had many wives and many children. Because those were the traits of our most ancient forefathers, this urge courses through our veins. We're happier and better as couples, but even while you are (I assume) a married man, and to cast no aspersions, I assume you still notice the beautiful waitress, or young woman at the gym or working as a paralegal. You're not blind, you appreciate it viscerally because it's biological. Or maybe you're better than me, which I probably believe myself; wiser, more mature, and you actually don't really think about it. Still you would understand generally men are like this, even the most faithful of husbands.
Most women did reproduce, but up until the 20th century, pretty much no women anywhere on Earth -- not enough to change the behavior of the sex -- had a choice in who would be the father of their children. Men ravished, women were ravished. This is our nature, it is what our environments selected. There was never environmental pressure nor enough advantage conferred for men, as a sex, to apprehend some ineffable and holistic quality of "wife and mother material" beyond the purely physical. She's young, she has wide hips and nice breasts, good enough. Equally, there has never been a reason for women to acquire the mirror of that trait, just as men didn't get to reproduce, women didn't get to choose not to.
Then very, very suddenly, for the first time in the history of our species, most women became the ones who chose. I don't like a lot of the points I could branch to from here, but what is certain is that no less than 50% of women simply lack the good judgment to make that decision, and oh boy is that rate identical for men. See I don't think the damage is autonomy itself, not dates, not those men who can't get dates. The damage comes from a beast of many facets, all of them culture, but the cruelness in its eyes is named fictive love and soulmate. Women look for it, men look for it, who gets it?
Based on divorce rates, the answer seems to be not very many.
Do you seriously believe this? Have you read what people in those eras write? Let’s stay recent, if patriarchal. Tolstoy is exquisitely clear that, in the upper classes of the time, courtship was expected to be somewhat mutual. Marriages where the woman was unenthusiastic went much worse. You see echoes of this in Austen, or Dickens, or any of the other 19th-century European authors of note.
OK, how about further back? Maybe the age of chivalry? Wait a minute, isn’t the model of chivalric love a man trying his utmost to get a woman to cheat - where she can say yes or no? Sounds a lot like she’s controlling who she has kids with, and indeed genetic testing has started to indicate that female infidelity is truly a woman’s way to choose when more traditional methods are removed from her. And that’s not just the West - circa year 1k in Japan the courtly literature is clear on infidelity or intrigue driven by women’s desire.
Obviously there were major cases of rape or abduction. They matter. But women’s choice has been a driving factor in sexual selection for forever. Why else do you think teenage boys so actively, so instinctively, try to impress the girls around them? It sounds like your impression is based less on actual people and more on some BAP fantasy of the Real Gritty Past. And I hope you see how that ignorance could seriously mislead you.
Have I read what life was like for the aristocracy? Have I read the sort of fictions I close that comment with criticizing? Would I have been spared your angle of comment had I instead written "dating sucks because of love stories"?
You quote my answer, there were not enough instances and nothing close to enough time to see the skill evolved. Like those noble women whose "myriad" options were noble men, so past number and time the third hindrance was the scope too limited for beneficial selectivity. Beneath the nobles the true stock of humanity experienced life exactly as I described. The fifteenth century peasant girl did not exert a meaningful control on the father of her children; nor for the those girls in sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And whatever controls they may have exerted they were still nothing compared to when the phenomenon of autonomy and variety of selection emerged in full in the twentieth century.
A genetic inclination and justification for infidelity is a very sharp argument. I worry that whatever research comes from highly motivated reasoning.
Why do young men jockey for status? We can consider chimps where we understand we're seeing juvenile displays of fitness targeted not really at a particular female but the cohort, or we can consider Alexander, where we understand we're seeing juvenile displays of the coalescing inclination, desire and ability to subjugate.
I need only gesture vaguely at the world to support my thesis, short as it is, as there is no shortage of evidence on the lack of skill in the human female to select good mates. This is a qualitative judgment, the man who propagates has succeeded in the eyes of nature, but this is also a quantitative judgment, evolutionarily a single child is as good as none. I accounted for the potential flaw in my thesis in taking the kindest interpretation for the decline: that men and women equally lack acumen in mate selection, that we are equally to blame and equally blameless. I took this interpretation as acknowledgment of my ignorance, because despite the evidence, I may be wrong, and this is how. It is exactly how, for given all evidence, there is no alternative. Either both sexes lack the skill, or only one, and as the defining graph of post-industrial civilization is female liberation, if it is one, we know which.
I'll finish by speaking to my cohort. The woman who was the queen of my class in my large high school, as lovely a person as she is beautiful to this day, is a single mother with a single son, never married, her bastard's father in the picture briefly. I don't think if she chose better she would have chosen me, I only had eyes for her best friend anyway (who's living her best life with her "roommate"). I have no resentment except a fateful sort about the tragedy that is her life as it could have been. Socially, today, one child is more than good enough, she should have several, and were our world better she would have been swiftly taken with a man of due quality and spent her years since as the happy stay-at-home-mom. Incidentally and I find joyfully, this is exactly what happened with the third in that trio of friends: Queen, Sappho and Blessed. Blessed eloped the summer after we graduated, we now live in the same neighborhood and this time of year I can count on regularly seeing her walking with her growing flock and oh, how she emanates life. That is a woman who could choose a man. If only it were all so easy.
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Violence was only a factor in deciding mates in inter-tribe conflicts. Within tribes itself, women will have enough social capital and there would be courtship rituals to have a choice in selecting their own mates. Even in cultures where women are considered to be less valuable than men, they still some some amount of social capital, and especially did so historically because a lot more social cohesion was required for human survival and thriving. People would know everyone else in their tribe intimately. Each woman would typically have many siblings (and brothers) and a father and uncles for her protection. Rape was recognized as a crime and morally wrong inside tribes, it was only not recognised as morally bad when done to your outgroup.
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