Originally Posted by
Lurker27
I'll take a crack at it:
Biologically, there exists asymmetric risk for sexual activity, between men and women. This is because the investment a man makes in procreation is extremely low, whereas it is a massive demand on a woman's resources. I think this is pretty uncontroversial, but if you don't believe me, ask my 8-months pregnant wife.
This is coupled to the fact that women are fundamentally the limiting reagent in making more humans. The number of males in a population is, in fact, irrelevant as long as it exceeds zero and sufficient water and zinc supplements are readily available. To wit: genetic analyses based on mitochondrial DNA suggest that we have, on average, twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. Meaning that only about half as many men were reproductively successful as women.
This biological construct maps (historically) onto social constructs in different ways. First, and most obvious, is that the relative scarcity of females creates a power discrepancy with regards to mate selection - this is the basis for the "female gatekeeper, male conqueror" model of sexual interactions. The male is winning the affections of the female. This also shows up in psychological literature as the matching principle (external values, such as financial success, in males being matched by physical desirability in females). Obviously this model has some toxicity in a gender neutral society, but it is/was rooted in biological pragmatism, and path dependencies are a bitch.
The other implication of the sexual asymmetry is that males are more likely to engage in dominance hierarchies, with the dominance hierarchy representing an avenue for future reproductive success. This implies the assumption that women value whatever the parameters of the male dominance hierarchy are as a proxy for reproductive fitness.
What I think is interesting, and feeds into the progressive/conservative dichotomy, is that the Sexual Revolution completely upends the basis of the biological assumption. In the past 60 years, women have access to reliable birth control, and have reached close to educational and fiscal equality (fiscal depending on how you control for job factors such as seniority and maternity periods.). Put succinctly, Free Love is about gratis, not libre.
In short, this submarines the systems in which a man can be considered reproductively attractive by engaging in purely male pursuits (without regard to whether they've pleased a woman). I suspect that this is Gordon's charge for the F-250s parked on either side of his miata. His belief might be that the truck is a symbol of engagement in a male dominance hierarchy that has no relevant in a modern sexual marketplace, in which value is determined almost entirely by the quality of interaction between the 2 parties.
This may seem obvious, but the psychosexual circumstances around couples have been previously indicated first by social interactions, and then by interpersonal compatibility - couples generally met through church, mutual friends, parental arrangements, etc. Some of these are still popular vectors, but the elephant in the room, and the power in the space, is now online dating. Essentially a pre-screen of personal compatibility, coupled with double opt-in selection. (See also Black Mirror Season 4: Hang the DJ). Clearly, the outward desirability of new systems that are less entrenched in biological motivators seems to work for at least some fraction of the population.
What's interesting to me, at present, is how these systems interact with and affect each other. Anthropological research suggests stable coupling times of 7 years for raising kids - I think it's a somewhat open question whether pairwise lifetime bonding is always natural in humans, and it may come down to individual disposition. (For my opinion, you can reference ryanandkaitlin100years.com) If males are predisposed to seek multiple couplings to maximize genetic success (the average successful male historically having a partner number of ~2), then the sexual revolution, by creating less female cost for sex, makes sex a more readily available commodity. In short, sex is cheaper than it's ever been. The general trend seems to suggest a rise in # of sexual partners before stable coupling, with delayed marriage and childbirth trends.
Ultimately, how these trends interact with happiness is a metric of their utility. I think that it's entirely possible that coupled with social media, the sexual marketplace could swing too far to serve women well (men, who cares). Happiness trends since the 2007 introduction of the smartphone are highly troubling, particularly for young women.
I hope that I haven't outed myself in some way as a bigot (or have been influenced by erroneous sources), but I suspect that we're not on an ideal course wrt the sexual marketplace for the happiness of women in particular. I do NOT think that a return to any kind of patriarchy is productive. One technological solution that explicitly places the power with females is Bumble. Higher adoption of similar systems (as opposed to Tinder, which tends to encourage a screening -> pooling approach) might increase the coupling satisfaction of women without constraining their matches negatively.