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Yeah except this falls apart when men aren't also allowed to improve and be given a second chance. Because a significant portion of men, probably a majority, will fail this torturous mind game at some point. This level of sabotage against men leaves only a small portion of successful men. This is how you end up with the implicit polygynyous relationships of today.
The deck is completely stacked against (young) men now. In the past, there were social conventions and explicit courtship rituals even a social inept but otherwise good man could follow and be reasonably successful. Now it's the wild west, men have no idea that there are no rules, no guidance, the publicly acceptable advice is sabotaging you and you don't even know it, you as a young man assume all the social risk and put at the mercy of a woman's reaction who can utterly destroy you. This is not a stable arrangement.
This arrangement isn't even good for women in the long run either, because it sabotages the formation of long-term stable relationships which both men and women benefit from.
Maybe with respect to a specific woman but there are a lot of fish in the sea.
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I don't disagree.
By and large, that seems to be the arrangement preferred by women relative to the available alternatives, going by their revealed preferences. A significant portion of women seem to prefer sharing a top man over having a sub-par specimen for themselves. And of course, having the option to utterly destroy a man who slights them.
That's what (non-top) men think is best for them and for society. They are probably right. Alas, we live in a longhouse.
Which women? Where? Based on what empirical evidence?
This seems to be one of those things - it has plenty of counterparts on the SocJus side of things - that's said because it follows from a theory someone is attached to, not because of any particular evidence that it's true. Outside of a very small number of poly arrangements, in which men at the top of the attractiveness scale aren't that overrepresented based on the ones I'm familiar with, I can't think of any cases where this is true. Yeah, it would logically follow if a lot of the ideas that float around the "manosphere" were true, but so much the worse for those ideas. But it's not something I actually see happening at any significant scale.
If I'm right, a small number of men should have a lot of sexual partners and a much larger number of men should have very few. Women should be somewhere in the middle and a lot of them should go without sex for longer periods of time despite having every opportunity to do so. This matches my general observations in my social circle, but I am not sure how I would go about finding statistics that aren't hilariously skewed by social desirability bias working in different directions for men and women.
What should we observe if your model were right and how would we find out?
Bit late, but:
I mostly see people monogamously pairing off. There's a small number of eternal singles, mostly men, but the norm is long(ish)-term serial monogamy. Getting a new partner generally involves the guy sticking his neck out to much greater extent than the girl but the gender balance isn't off by that much. Almost no-one in my social circles has multiple partners on the regular (even the theoretically poly people have mostly broken down into straightforward two-person relationships).
There's certainly nothing I'd be tempted to describe as "women... sharing a top man". Which for that matter, seems largely absent from your description of the state of play, as well; and this is especially true when you fill the ellipsis back in, because I certainly can't think of anything that could plausibly be described as an active preference for this on the part of women, even of the revealed variety. As has been pointed out before, ideas often assumed here, like that and the whole "alpha fucks, beta bucks" notion, IME exist primarily in the minds of incels and MRAs, and hardly at all in real life.
It's possible my crowd and I are older than the people you have in mind, but the pattern doesn't change that much when you go back to our teens and twenties. Far more frequent changes of partner, certainly, and more (but still not all that many) actively poly arrangements, but only one that I would be tempted to describe using anything close to the text I quoted.
Ah, I think the issue is a loose use of terminology on my part. I certainly didn't want to insinnuate that poly relationships are becoming anything other than fringe any time soon. But an arrangement where a large portion of women seek out only the top portion of men for sex or relationships and otherwise stay single would satisfy my description of "rather share a top man over having a sub-par specimen for themselves".
From my observation, all the good men are paired off, the loser men stay single, and the women who didn't snatch a good man get a cat rather than one of the loser men. I exxegarate, but there is a pattern.
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