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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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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".

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.

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.