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You have some degree of a point here. If it was phrased only as average, then maybe the math-inclined females answering the survey thought it meant mean and went from there. (Though again I think if you explicitly specified median you'd still get the exact same results).
Really though, and your post is valuable for having brought this to my attention, the appropriate criticism is that to call them "statistically illiterate" is simply an irrelevant dig that doesn't really cut to the actual heart of the issue: Men are fair (at least as regards this subject of evaluating the distribution of characteristics). Women are equivalently not.
In the sense of "fair" as a uniform probability distribution, I agree. And I think this creates enough social problems / advantages to think about. On the problem side, men often have a feeling of being valued only for what they do and provide in romance, which can create the feeling of being exploited. (The male counterpart of objectification, perhaps.) On the advantageous side, for most men, they must achieve something to be regarded as attractive; moreover, the more they achieve, the more opportunities they have; for mentally healthy men at least, this can serve as a motivation.
The problem is that when female hypergamy is left totally unchecked (as it is now), the standards become so high that you can't meet them simply by being a hard-working guy with reasonable achievements. And even if you can, that takes time. Meanwhile the alleged prize waiting for you at the end of the tunnel already has a bodycount of 20 with guys who were born with a better jawbone or a few more inches of height. Not worth it.
It's a much better incentive structure to do what has always been done throughout history: Give men a reasonable wife early, and then make them work and follow society's rules to keep access to her. After all, it's been shown that humans tend to be more loss-averse than risk-tolerant, more motivated by the threat of losing what they already have than gaining something new (a phenomenon documented heavily in the psychological tricks used by mobile games).
It's really not that hard for men to get laid in the modern world, even if you're not good looking, and women tend to be more interested in getting married than men. Most ugly guys I know as friends have long-term girlfriends, but these are the types of guys I'd be interested in having as friends, whereas there are plenty of non-ugly guys I wouldn't be interested in having as friends and who don't (I don't say can't) get laid, largely it seems because of their neuroticism.
However, I agree that earlier marriage (at least involving men who grow up quickly - get a good job, a good trade, and have a reputation as a moral law-abiding god-fearing citizen) would be good. Promiscuity should be a reward of status for successful, artistic, or high-born men, like the old days.
Unfortunately statistics suggest your anecdotes are wrong.
Are you aware of the 2023 Pew Research survey that found 63% of young men aged 18-29 to be single?
I am normally somebody who advocates for careful skepticism of Reddit-style "Source sweaty?" link-mining, but the fact that even a single survey from a relatively reputable organization was able to derive this result is objectively insane and I believe likely automatically renders false your assertion that there aren't that many lonely men these days.
Do you really think every guy in this 63% is an unreasonable neurotic mess? And even if they are, isn't it society's fault if 63% of men have become such neurotics that they can't find a relationship?
In my experience, this strongly reverses once you go under a certain age (an age at which most people period would have been married not too long ago).
No, but I also I don't think every guy in the 63% is willing to get laid with any woman. If anything, you have to be a neurotic mess to want to sleep with ANY woman.
I'm not saying that young men have it easy in dating (quite the opposite) but that's not because it's impossible for them to get laid (with women - obviously it's easy for them to find some man willing to pound their ass) but rather it's because dating is a matching problem where relatively few people want to match with young men, especially the neurotic ones - which is a high proportion of young men.
At that age, I would imagine we are talking about lizardman constants for both men and women, in terms of their desire to marry?
Well of course not. It's just that, if they hew close to your average man, then we know from surveys such as the famous OKCupid one that they judge the desirability of women fairly on gradual normally distributed gradient curve, rather than, like women, fallaciously thinking that most men are below the median (a statistical impossibility) and only expressing that the top 20% of men have even remotely any significant desirability.
You're saying that the only young people who would want to marry are within the lizardman constant? I disagree.
Also, I don't know why you're so obsessed with neuroticism. Yes, young people are neurotic... young people. You don't think young women are just as neurotic as young men? You ever met any? It's just that that's another thing they easily get away with in our modern feminine-supremacist society/dating system.
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