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Not a particularly compelling one. I don't know any women who would settle for being part of a harem in favor of being married to a comparatively lower status man.
I think there's this imagination that all the instances of Man not having sex have been replaced 1:1 with woman having sex with Chad.
I think reality is more like: both the man and the woman in the equation are picking a more convenient way to pass the time and unwilling to make themselves uncomfortable to find a partner.
Your competition isn't Chad, it's Netflix.
Lemme help you out here:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-the-name-love/202006/why-sugar-daddy-relationships-are-the-rise
Do you ever wonder how Leonardo DiCaprio is able to just keep dating a series of young women? Why do they put up with being his arm candy for a few years rather than marrying a 'lower status' man?
Surely a factor. However, I don't think it obviates the fact that women can leverage their sexuality to their advantage from an early age.
Especially if women have virtually no obstacles to finding a partner of virtually any age or description if they so desire, whereas an average man is going to have to leap through a dozen hoops just to get considered.
Consider:
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/age-gap-dating
And when it comes to actual marriages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_disparity_in_sexual_relationships#Statistics
Approximately 8% of married couples feature a male who is 10+ years older than the female. For the reverse: 1.7%. A 4x disparity.
This really, REAAALLLY strongly implies that the group that is least able to find partners is young males, and possibly older females.
And that likely means a large disparity in who is having sex, with a certain subset of the population likely have none at all, despite wanting to.
Because Leo was in Titanic and gives them a ladyboner. I imagine that's also the reason Leo goes after a particular demographic-he finds them attractive. I assume that most of those partners will eventually end up married.
And yet they... don't. So either they have very particular preferences, they aren't motivated to call your bluff, or there are some obstacles that you don't see, such as social consequences.
Young men will eventually become old men, old women were once young women. Have people become less patient?
Many many do. This is why the term "Sugar Baby" is now mainstream. This is why Onlyfans is a multi-billion dollar company
And the larger point is they have this as an option.
Many men don't even have the option.
I already did this discussion here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/120/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/18954?context=8#context
But the point is, you're expecting young men, who are at their horniest and least capable of making good judgments at this age, to be able to wait a decade before they can have a chance at having a committed partner.
That is, you're saying that the very guys who need some kind of healthy outlet for their sexual and other impulses are finding it increasingly difficult to obtain a healthy outlet, and saying this won't show substantial behavioral effects?
In my experience the majority of young men don't profess a desire for a committed partner, young women do. Maybe that's changed since I was a young man.
Hyperbolic. Plenty of young men end up in relationships.
Also, while I agree that OnlyFans probably isn't a healthy outlet because of the parasocial aspect, there are plenty of others like pornhub, Literotica, HBO, and the power of imagination.
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I think you’re right that women aren’t consciously joining “harems”, but the competition isn’t just Netflix, it’s Netflix+Tinder hookups when they get sufficiently lonely, as a replacement for relationships.
And who do they go for on tinder? The same guys as all the other single women. It’s not a “harem” because they don’t know or have a reason to care about other girls the guys might be getting with, but to lonely single men, the effect is the same.
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