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You are wrong about the changes in the second sexual revolution; it began with protests by male college students against being banned from female dorms. Before the first sexual revolution young men's sexual opportunities were limited to prostitution or after marriage(at which point one would no longer be considered a 'young man'- and the average age for which was almost certainly older than you expect. Even when teen marriage happened, it was a girl thing). Between the two it came with the subclause that non-occult sexual acts required marriage. Young men wishing to sow their wild oats benefitted greatly.
And what happened thereafter to the marriage rates, marriage age, and birth rate?
Uh no it was about 21 for men during the USA baby boom, what are you talking about? In antiquity is was also around 21. Do you think 22 year old men are middle aged?
On X they're calling this capeshit history. That means it's storybook fantasy. A neat, little, visual, graspable event « kicked off » everything. Oh boy! It's like a little modern Homeric myth! When the reality is what happened is some esoteric cohort effects caused peoples' instincts to shift and so on.
Yes, male age at marriage reached a temporary minimum in between the two sexual revolutions. But we actually have male age at marriage data about as well as could ever be expected, and historical male ages at marriage tended to be late twenties or early thirties. Moralists just before the first sexual revolution recommended 25+, Romans talked about 30 as ideal and normative- and what data exists suggest these were, broadly, reflecting general norms.
Marriage rates declined with the second sexual revolution. That's bad. But the norms in between the two sexual revolutions were not durable or sustainable.
You are way off, sorry. None of this is true.
You're just making that up.
Shame on him for not pre-emptively sourcing you, but greater shame on you for replying with "nuh uh". @hydroacetylene is in fact correct.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demographic-economics/article/marriage-age-ushape/F94BC91AFF2CF4A9B5031C52476B06D9
(U shaped marriage age)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern
(Late age of marriage for bothe men and women in europe)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_and_Days
(Late Recommended age of marriage for men)
...
Argue a priori, argue a posteriori, or ask for sources. Don't "nuh uh."
Age of first marriage for men until recently didn't get much above 25, with about a 4 year age gap. Now it's over 30 with a 2 year age gap. The current situation is much more different from the historical norm than the 1950s nadir at about 22 with a slightly over 2 year age gap.
no but you see this is good because young men expecting to have sex with young women (to say nothing of the opposite) even in the confines of a marriage is bad
imagine having sex with women that are actually young, couldn't be me, i hagmax like Ben Franklin
if we could we'd push age of marriage up to 40, 50, 60 because they'd be more mature then and more cognizant of the risks, that would be good
especially because most of us are already unhappily married and we want to help our kids avoid that, but we have no idea how to do that so we just tell them to delay it and they trust us, dumb fucks
imagine marriage was an important part of living life, and imagine that you'd ever want to maximize the amount of fulfilling life time you (or others) will get
Oh, drop it. Marriage rates declined because with the sexual revolution, now you could shack up with someone without benefit of clergy, and if old squares called it "living in sin" and clucked disapprovingly at you, you could bask in the moral glow of superior enlightenment. Finding out if the two of you were compatible, especially sexually, was important before you embarked on anything as serious and important and long-term as marriage. Better to break up early than get married and then repent at leisure.
Now we have people living together for years, practically married, even having children together, but never tying the knot. Then there are late break-ups and both men and women complain about having to get back into the dating scene. Women complaining that they've been with their boyfriend for five/seven/ten years but he never mentions marriage at all.
Even before that, marriages were often delayed due to money. You can't marry unless you can support a wife and multiple children, and for a lot of men, even men in what we would consider the professions, that took a long time - there's even a painting about it! Certain entities such as the East India Company would forbid their employees from getting married before the age of thirty, in order to ensure there were no distractions from putting all the man's energy into the job. A lot of people never had the chance to marry at all, due to poverty; if you weren't the eldest son (who would usually inherit the farm or the shop or whatever property there was) or the eldest daughter (who had the best chance of getting a dowry), then you had little to no chance of marriage at all (unless you were from a rich enough family that could support multiple children's marriage portions).
Are you married right now? Were you a virgin before marriage, or if unmarried, are you still a virgin? Because if the answer is "no, I'm not married and I am sexually experienced", then you have had the best of both worlds and the advantages of Free Love that past generations struggled for. You have had the fruits of the sexual revolution but appetite always wants more.
Marriage rates have been declining because the floor for a successful marriage has risen to the point that it excludes a lot of people and no-fault divorce in an environment of higher financial stakes has done the rest. We got a break from that in the '60s because wages for young men rose dramatically, and gradually petered out over the next 20 years, which is why you don't have any historical data to look back on (the SR tends to confound traditionalists; they only have the one lens to look through).
Before, this was mostly solved by men having all the money and women having none of it with a soft ban on obtaining any of it outside that context (and where soft bans didn't exist the constraint was mostly just called "the reality of non-mechanized work"). This worked OK, but it's a compact that didn't survive automation, specifically the line shaft.
Indeed, which is why young men can't marry now (and you lose a lot of the stability from dual-income being functionally mandatory). And yes, we could simply make it legal for young men to accumulate an attractive surplus, but by the time the effects of that have propagated the young men will be middle-aged.
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