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What percentage of women can land a relationship with a high-quality man? Which apparently means a man who earns enough to support a household; who substantially helps with the kids; who has the time and money and inclination to go out on vacations and parties. To say nothing of at least half a dozen other attributes (willing to marry early and for life, attractive, etc) that are probably relevant.
Now, I'm not saying this in a "men need to step up" kind of way. It just doesn't seem accessible to the bulk of women today, and if that's the trade you're offering women, they'll implicitly calculate the risks and decide what path to take based on that.
This is a function of how many high-quality men there are, which is probably somewhat a function of how many men are raised in intact families and instilled with the necessary discipline, commitment, and common sense needed to maintain a family from an early age. And having family resources on tap in a pinch is probably a major help too.
In olden times, a father might not have let his daughter be married off to a guy who didn't have the proven resources to support her! It seems like we've removed this kind of guardrail and haven't replaced it with anything, thus leaving it to the women herself to correctly ascertain the quality of her suitor. Which is a task she may not be well adapted for.
Bit of a feedback loop, in that respect. Men raised by single mothers, in particular, are less likely to become 'high quality men' later in life, and will certainly be at a deficit when it comes to their assets. More intact families = more high quality men. More high quality men should, likewise, correlate with more intact families.
I am.
At the very least ensure there's a Basic Life Script for them to follow which gets them some kind of reward for making reasonable sacrifices along the way and shouldering the responsibility of creating a family.
It feels like we're in the middle of oscillating social defections where both men and women are refusing to 'improve' for the other sex because they perceive the other sex isn't willing to improve for them. Men, for example, perceive that many women aren't good at cooking, aren't willing to clean, and may decide to divorce them on a whim and take away their children and wealth. Women perceive that many men are childish and just want a live-in maid/mother substitute who will basically care for them while they indulge in meaningless hobbies. They're both right to an extent.
Men aren't willing to step up and sacrifice their independence for a woman with zero domestic skills or willingness to help maintain a household. A guy may as well get a male roommate if that's all a woman will provide.
Women aren't willing to learn domestic skills for a guy who isn't going to handle his own business, support her, raise her status, and execute on all his husbandly duties. She may as well be taking care of a child in that case.
I think that men are going to have to start making the first move here in asserting higher standards across the board, but if women don't reciprocate, what other options do men have?
It's a pile of complicated, interacting feedback loops.
I wonder if the initial solution might be less providing a happy path through a Basic Life Script and more curtailing a bunch of the dead end paths young adults find themselves on. A Basic Life Script requires things the government can't provide (at least directly). But there are lots of things in the modern world that are literally engineered to pull people on valueless, counterproductive paths. For men, video games, porn, gambling. (Elsewhere IIRC you mentioned social media for women, which I think would also qualify.) Limit those dead ends, and you might divert people who whose lives are degraded by them toward paths that lend themselves to the Basic Life Script.
Now that I go back and read your comment from a couple months ago, I realize that you basically said all that.
Yep. I've commented on the Superstimulus issue. Superstimuli are much more prevalent now than ever before, I don't think anyone can deny that. Livestreaming platform Twitch (a Gen Z staple) has been informally taken over by people pushing gambling websites or e-prostitutes hawking their wares. EVERY mainstream game played by literal twelve-year-olds has some kind of subtle or not-so-subtle gambling mechanics in them.
I think its fair to say that Gambling is more ubiquitous, drugs are more potent (and, potentially, deadly), porn is more mainstream, and outright scams are a constant danger. Hell, FOOD is more delicious and probably more fattening with sugar being in basically EVERYTHING. And getting sucked down any of those rabbit holes can be nigh impossible to escape, because they're much better adapted at keeping victims trapped than we are adapted to escape.
"Who would win, a literal child whose brain hasn't even developed higher reasoning, with a smartphone and internet access, or a remorseless, massive corporation that has spent millions upon millions of dollars optimizing its products and services for extracting money from every single person it gets its clutches on?"
Yeah, if we can, we should be trying to snip off the major downside risks that can ruin a guy if he strays just a little from the Basic Life Script at a young age.
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