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Occasionally we are told that there is an epidemic of "male loneliness" or "male sexlessness" - an increasing number of young men are going long stretches of time with few or no sexual partners. But why is this a problem? Why should anyone care except for the sexless males themselves?
Evolutionarily, men have always been the disposable gender - the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female. In fact, depending on which estimate you go with, the average male is still significantly more likely to reproduce in a first world Western country today than he would have been historically. So why is there such concern over this particular dip in fertility?
You might say that a high number of sexless males is more likely to lead to violence and social instability - but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale. It's never been harder to imagine actual widespread social unrest occurring in the modern West, given how thoroughly people have been anesthetized with material abundance and cheap entertainment. (This question has been raised a few times recently, about the possibility of the culture war "going hot" over the Trump verdict or the border crisis or whatever - I am of the opinion that no, it won't "go hot", and such a development is essentially unthinkable at this point). Plus, certain MENA societies provide a case study in how you can have a resilient social order where the majority of women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless - these may not be pleasant places to live, but the society is capable of reproducing itself all the same.
It matters because married men work harder and follow society’s rules. And that matters a lot; the vast majority of the productive labor to sustain our prosperity is gendered male. When they do less of it, it’s bad for everyone.
Or to put it more starkly but still perfectly accurately: You are free not to care about these men. And they are free not to care that you would prefer that they didn't engage in mass shootings, serial killings, and rapings against the people you care about.
@Primaprimaprima, do you feel comfortable expressing this argument when there's a lone wolf mass shooting (that is, not gang-related), which are almost exclusively committed by maladjusted and love-challenged men? Not asking as a gotcha, just genuinely curious. Are they just the acceptable and not particularly appreciable collateral damage of male disposability to you and not worth the general outpouring of rage and emotion that generally accompanies them? Have you expressed this opinion to any "normies", and how did they respond?
I don't think rambling on about mass shootings or serial killings is the big issue.
I think slacker men is the big issue. Men do the vast majority of productive labor that generates and sustains our society's prosperity- that prosperity which keeps us from living in primitive savagery- and efforts to get women to do it have failed. Marriage incentivizes men to actually go do that labor instead of playing videogames and masturbating all day.
In a primitive society, you can motivate people by the threat of starvation instead, but ours is far too prosperous for starvation or even extreme boredom to be a credible threat. Getting men to do the unpleasant work that needs doing- which women mostly won't do- to run a complex society when they can fuck off to watch netflix is an important problem to solve, and 'your woman and kids depend on you' is the best way to solve it.
That’s just one aspect of it. Whenever this subject comes up here, a bunch of posters are always eager to point out that A) young, aggressive, unattached men are the sole threat to any social order but B) demographic implosion means that this group is relatively much smaller than in earlier times. Which is basically true. But the reality is that social stability doesn’t just stem from the absence of destabilizing factors and an aging population. It’s not only that men in general need to be productive for society to prosper, it’s that they need to be invested in society’s future to the extent that they’re willing to take up arms to defend it, as members of the army, the police, a militia, a vigilante group, a posse etc. In a demographically imploding society, it’s true that there are relatively few people threating the existing order, but there’ll also be few people willing to uphold it, so the demographic effects cancel each other out. And anti-social, unattached men, by definition, will not be invested in upholding the existing social structure.
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