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I'm no anthropologist but my gut sense is that manhood initiation rituals are much more significant to a man's place within the male social order and the vetting of prospector suits for a maiden was primarily women's work. In more patriarchal societies the former might be downstream of the latter, but they might also be completely disjoint.
I expect this is because in public male social contexts men bear the brunt of the social cost, probably more so in the west. Look no further at the semantic creep of cuckoldry and the degree of blame that gets heaped on men when their girl is faithless.
How exactly? I'm not sure there was ever an example of a man who was ever vetted as a marriage prospect but somehow not vetted as a member of the male social order. Also, a woman generally couldn't get married without her father's de facto approval.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Such a Facebook group wouldn't get anywhere because men wouldn't assist one another in such ways at all? Or something else?
I specifically meant initiation/manhood rituals might be disjoint from the betrothal process. I do agree that men will also screen suitors, but it is the women around the bride to be that initially select suitors, aiming to weed out the lechs, cheats, gamblers, liars, creeps etc. AWDTSG groups are analogous to this latter process in that the daters are seeking judgement from other women.
I believe men are much less likely to want to subject themselves to the possible public humiliation of dating a known tramp.
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It’s kinda both. Part of the vetting of men by other men is to make sure that the man in question has the basic traits of a man. The biggest complaints I see from women are things that men used to teach each other about life.
Some of the bigger complaints I see from women:
1). He has no sense of direction in his life. If he has a job, it’s a minimum one, and he has no concrete plan to change that. Not looking for something better, not going to a career focused training program, just working for almost nothing and not caring much about it.
2). Very often having very childish interests. Heavy gaming (like more than 20 hours a week), anime/sci-fi fandom to the point of obsession. No real hobbies or interests outside of those things. In food, tastes are also rather childish— chicken tenders, pizza, instant ramen, macaroni and cheese, no vegetables or fruits.
3). Have no idea how to properly keep up an apartment. The apartments are messy and sometimes furnished only with a bed, a TV gaming system, and cheap furniture.
4). They don’t seem to understand basic adult interaction or if they do, they understand it in a very shallow way. They don’t accept a no in many cases, and assume that if they just keep following the woman around that they’ll eventually say yes. They don’t understand social cues and therefore tend to overstay their welcome in social situations. Because of their narrow interests (see 2) they often cannot have a conversation about things outside of this. They don’t really understand planning social events either.
5). A lot of these men seem to expect a wife to come along and essentially mother them. Take over the cooking and cleaning that he doesn’t want to do. Introduce him to her social circles and teach him how to behave properly. Give them an external push to fix their career path.
Most women don’t want this. They rightly expect to find a man they can partner with who is and behaves like an adult. They want someone with real interests and hobbies they can share that aren’t “consume media products”. They want a man who is in the path to career success and can thus at least help to provide for future children. They don’t want to adopt their husband as a child and manage him like a child.
Men used to teach this kind of stuff in male only spaces. They used to teach each other to strive for success, to take risks. They used to teach each other to adopt more adult interests and hobbies and to understand basic adult interaction. A big issue here is the decline of male-only activities and spaces. It’s almost impossible for men to create the social dynamics that allow them to teach boys to “man up” if women and girls are allowed in. (The reverse is true as well, as women also need those female only spaces for proper female socialization). The reason is that a lot of the things that need to be taught to make a man out of a boy are things that offend women or sound mean. (Again being fair, the stuff women do to make girls into women are likely to offend male sensibilities as well). Men need to be cajoling each other to high achievement, to teach them how to get a woman interested, and to teach them to behave properly around women. When women invade those spaces, it becomes almost impossible to teach boys to be men. The over-competitive nature of boys sports also cuts down on that a venue for socialization for a lot of boys.
I think this is assuming a lot more development on the part of the 'average male' in history than existed. 3 and 5 both absurd when for a lot of human history the idea of a single male living space/doing meaningful household beautification chores was very rare, same going for stuff like childrearing. I've got a baby and my wife's Southeast Asian older family members are absolutely amazed that I participate in stuff like doing nappies/feeding the baby/proactively doing infant tasks, and even current generations have a greater expectation of it being women/nannywork.
4 I'd agree with, but I think digital communication changes the vibe with being 'overly persevering' since every attempt at communication gets rendered onto the permanent record, and if you've originally met through a dating app you're probably not getting the incidental contact to allow for old-fashioned prolonged pursuit. Online dating makes things way more cut-and-dry. I'd also assume 'Understand planning social events' probably code for woes in getting actual dates out of Online Dating that aren't 'meet me at 3AM', but that's its own tangled metagame of both sides being so unimaginably flaky that trying to perform great romantic gestures gets squeezed out of you pretty quick. Also the literal matchmaking of these things means that the most attractive guys (and therefore the ones that get the most mindshare) are happy to throw out the most casual non-date invitations since they've got economics on their side.
I think the main dynamic shifts are that women's liberation/financial equalization has made it less of a matter of just rolling with the above manchild since it was the only path to leaving the family home and having some independence in life, and that the mainstreaming of Online Dating has absolutely torched a bunch of key social feedback loops.
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When shorn of the pejoratives, this sounds like women want:
And...yes...I don't doubt it. But these aren't qualities that men can pick up by being in male only spaces. These are marks of successful, intelligent, popular men. Either these women want a man ten years older than they are, or they want a top-tier man, in which case they'd better be top tier themselves.
(And this goes the other way too. There are loads of girls who can't talk to people, have incredibly vague life plans, and spend their lives looking at girly stuff on instagram that men find baffling and off-putting.)
In practice, most of these are 'virtuous circle' things. People with more career opportunities have more career direction, people with more social experience have better social antennae, people pick up hobbies from friends, people who are sought out by the opposite sex understand the opposite sex better. And everyone else, sooner or later, finds themselves outside the circle of lamplight eating chicken tenders or browsing tik-tok makeup videos in a messy apartment because they're not going to manifest 1-5 into being by sheer force of will and they know it. They no longer have access to the virtuous circles, and from where they are (tired from working 9 hours at a bad job, shy, or poor) the activation energy is higher than anyone can reasonably ask of them.
This state of affairs results not particularly from a lack of male-only spaces but from modern society being mostly opt-in. There are no longer mandatory social occasions like church, balls, or village meetings, there is no longer a madatory social group (extended family living nearby) and there is no longer mandatory (arranged) courtship. We could resurrect these things, and I think we should resurrect these things.
In particular, I think that we should implement mandatory balls or some other speed-dating method, held regularly. Young men and women would be required to attend these, and it would be made clear that their lives would be made very difficult as they approached 30 unless they married. I think a lot of the men you complain about would buck up their ideas pretty quickly if they were actually in regular contact with women who cared, and vice versa for the women.
TLDR: what you describe is not a failure of mentorship, or of moral fibre, but of good defaults and of easy opportunities.
EDIT: which isn’t to say that mentorship isn’t a good thing we should have more of. Only that I don’t think it’s the reason for our problems or the main thing we need to solve them.
I mean this is putting it a lot stronger than OP did. Its more a question of direction of travel than anything else - no-one's expecting Wildean wit or an appreciation of avant-garde jazz, but you know just pick up a book or go to a museum sometimes. Most people aren't that well read or informed so it really wouldn't take much to be comparably so.
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