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Notes -
We've run this experiment for about 30 or so years.
That is, we tore up any laws or social norms that might be considered restrictions on women's liberty (Even WITHIN the marital relationship!), gave them 'equal rights' to every legal benefit they could want, we have every single cultural institution, Academia, Corporations, Social Media, Hollywood, all telling them they never have to settle.
Then the few guardrails that remained (i.e. religion) have been pushed aside, so that women genuinely do not have ANY pressure on them to live up to ANY standards, whatsoever.
And what we see is that women have more mental illness, are more medicated than ever, have more radical politics than ever, are less healthy than ever, they have more sex partners yet fewer children, and self reported happiness is lower than ever.
Don't know what to tell you man, women are miserable under this current state of affairs, too. And they tend to blame men, despite having been given all the agency they could possibly want.
Solutions that DON'T directly restrict sexual liberties could involve removing the direct incentives to put off relationship formation and simply reinstate the cultural 'guardrails' that at least give them a path they can follow that tends to create healthy outcomes.
Surely we can put some 'pressure' on women to settle down earlier without making it a legal mandate?
Sure, but that relies on men wanting to settle down earlier, and in the halcyon days before liberalisation as described, men saw marriage and fatherhood as traps, as women trying to net a husband and tie a man down. Jokey references such as "the old ball and chain" may have been jokes, but also were a cultural assumption that wives were shackles (literally) on a man's freedom - to have sexual experiences, to travel, to drink/smoke/have fun, to enjoy being a bachelor.
The movement towards Free Love and Sexual Liberation was two-pronged; men wanted to be free of obligations as much as women wanted the sexual freedoms of men. The (to my ears) rather whiny lyrics of the 70s hit Lydia express this: the guy wants to be free but also wants a no-strings-attached woman and place to crash when he wants/needs it.
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