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The "simp" problem is hard to quantify.
I've come to believe that a lot of it isn't really Western Men obsessed with female validation. Thanks to the internet, its actually millions upon millions of third world males obsessed with bobs and vagene. But for the receiving woman... attention is attention. Money still spends.
I also note how many prominent 'male feminist' types keep getting outed as wanton sex pests and then devoured by the very mob they courted. We are selecting for guys who are able to avoid that trap.
Men really could use a better, coordinated method of keeping each other from pedestalizing women who don't give a crap about them, and, ideally, ostracizing the guys who defect hard and try to become good 'allies' as a means of gaining sexual access.
These sorts of Third World males select into red pill and Andrew Tate fandom more likely. Obsession with vagene + low patience for Western women's complaints is already pushing you into "misogynist" spaces that are pre-discredited.
I also see no reason to doubt that there aren't Western simps driving this because you see it in other cases, e.g. all of the celebrities crying and taking responsibility after George Floyd's death, and all of the stuff significantly less famous people did in its wake. All of the people "listening and learning" show the same outgroup preference simps do.
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I would say that American society was very gynocentric in the 20th century, i.e. pre-Internet.
Most importantly, the trend of forcible transfers of wealth and social status from men to women was in place long before the Internet. The idea that men suck; that women don't need men; etc. was also well established by then. The taboo against saying anything negative about women as a group wasn't firmly established yet, but it was still floating around.
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