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Notes -
Thesis (not a terribly original one, but here it goes) as food for thought / discussion fodder:
The online proliferation of the man vs bear in the woods meme, plus similar earlier social media phenomena with a feminist message are, in reality, generalized and simplified expressions of women's overall frustration and latent anger directed at the loss of manhood initiation rituals that characterizes modern post-patriarchal atomized societies; namely, the current social reality is that adolescent boys and young single men are no longer vetted by fathers, elders, brothers, uncles and other pre-vetted eligible men before they are, in effect, released into their wider social circle from the family environment, which makes it rather difficult and risky for single women to separate eligible men from ineligible men.
What kind of rituals do you think were there for confirming "eligibility", and what was the cutoff point? Are we talking "bullet ant mittens"?
It is my impression that many obviously "ineligible" (by modern and premodern standards) men successfully reproduced in the premodern era, because opportunities for women to be anyone but a wife were either incredibly scarce or worse than a subpar husband.
Before the Sexual Revolution became the new norm*, it was not standard practice to hit on girls outside your social circle as a single man. In fact, the unstated consensus was that your relatives or friends will introduce you to some girl in their social circle, thereby vetting you for her sake, and sort of vetting her as well, although that wasn't seen as equally important, I think. This is how rank-and-file people paired up.
Mandatory military service, hard physical labor, service in the Boy Scouts, boarding school, time spent in all-male environments in general were all social norms throughout the West for large numbers of men. This had the aggregate effect of toughening men up to a degree, which served to at least partially offset/balance the effects of hypergyny / female hypergamy on the mating market.
There was social consensus that masculinity is an ideal and is clearly defined. This wasn't undermined by any social institution. Boys were expected to assume this role, with sticks and carrots put in place accordingly.
Feminists will happily complain that patriarchal societies enact slut-shaming, which is more or less true. What is left unsaid is that there existed the parallel practice of cad-shaming. Both single men and single women lived under the surveillance and control of their social circle to a degree.
"Eligible" in this context means "eligible for marriage or at least long-term commitment" i.e. "to be considered as a future husband". Which means a couple of things: not addicted to any substance, not a gambler, not a domestic abuser, not a rake, not a violent thug etc.
*So sometime between 1970-1980, depending on social circumstances. That was the cutoff point, I think.
There were actually two sexual revolutions. One just after WWI, where a greater degree of free choice, longer period of courtship, smaller age gaps, and other things we associate with the west as opposed to other cultures today became the norm, and a second one where people admitted to having fornicated.
For pre-first sexual Revolution courtships, read a little house on the prairie. One of the books is functionally the story of how it went down(I remember the story of my great-grandparents, who were on the very tail end of this system). A minority of conservative Christians want to bring the system back, but as any of them could tell you, it’s not working very well.
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