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Do we have solid statistics supporting this?
Subjectively, I agree. This phenomenon matches what I see among friends and myself. If you hop into polyamorous communities, the modal complaint is a man frustrated that his partner is far more successful than him while he hasn't had any. And it's consistent with the experiences of incels.
But we're pretty lacking when it comes to good statistics about it. There's a now-deletes Hinge post which calculated the Gini coefficients of match distributions (heterosexual women live in a romantic Denmark; heterosexual men live in South Africa). But that is pretty early in the process, just a casual blog post about online dating, and deleted anyway. (Other OLD "studies" are even worse, with the infamous OkCupid post being a solid candidate for the Worst Ever.) There's also the GSS data that show growing proportions, of young women (around 20%) but especially young men (around 30%), who haven't had a sexual partner in the last year. This is better, but suffers from coarse data and small samples.
There's a lack of interest in looking at this too deeply, though. What do we do if we find out this is in fact happening or even accelerating? As you point out, it's an article of faith that a monogamous relationship is in the cards for everyone who wants one. But if it's a myth, what could we do for the men left holding the shit end of the stick, to either arrest the trend or make up for it? Should we? With an increasing remote possibility of a loving relationship, do those men have any incentive to support and engage in society?
I am convinced that having a large cohort of men who simply fail to launch is a very bad outcome, both for them and for society at large.
There was a survey posted in the subreddit 1-2 years ago. The proportion of Finnish young men who've had more than one sexual partners in total has contracted drastically in the past 20 years. (Can't be bothered to dig it up, sorry.)
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Couple this with our society's deepening political and ideological polarization, the dwindling reserves of social trust, and reduction in economic opportunity and you have all the ingredients for civil unrest. Hell, maybe we're already seeing the first symptoms in the form of the BLM riots and the Proud Boy/antifa larping. God forbid they stop looking like larpers and start looking like the IRA.
I'm old enough to remember the late 2000s and the countless public intellectuals pointing to polygyny and economic inequality in the Muslim world as the primary drivers of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.
See also Eric Hoffer
I wouldn't be surprised if we saw an increase in mass shootings, terrorism, and pockets of radicalism. But those are all really blips in the statistics sensationalized by the media and not relevant for the average experience of most people.
The bigger risk is simply checking out of society. You'll end up with social and economic barbells of men, not necessarily overlapping: an elite class of men, and a broader underclass, while women fall into a more typical Gaussian distribution. Which also suggests that means and medians will be increasingly irrelevant when looking at population statistics.
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