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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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