[It] provocatively explores how changes in technology and American society more broadly have reshaped intimacy in recent decades, creating a world in which sex is low-effort and abundant, marriage is late, and relationships tend to be fleeting.Nobody mentions a pressing issue for most developed societies: a disasterously low birthrate. Current “western” mores don’t succeed in the simple continuation of humanity; other problems seem somewhat less pressing by comparison.
Regnerus believes, in essence, that cheap sex has removed one of the chief incentives for men to grow up, resulting in the plague of perpetually adolescent men that have become a fixture of the American dating landscape.
The contemporary relationship market is producing two things in great abundance: highly educated single women and less-educated, low-status single men.
Single college-educated women are among the most liberal constituencies in America and are becoming more so. A recent study by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute found that 41.1 percent of collegbe freshmen women consider themselves liberal or far-left, the highest percentage ever recorded — and with the largest-ever gender gap.
At the same time, unattached, low-status men are a nightmare for civilization. They are more likely to kill, rape, steal, drink, and use drugs, and they provide ideal recruits for extremist movements of all kinds, whether fascism and communism in 1930s Berlin or ISIS and the alt-right today.
As Ed West and others have suggested, much of contemporary political extremism is, among other things, an exaggerated form of stereotypically feminine (in the case of the far left) and stereotypically masculine (in the case of the far right) behavior.
This column at a website called Armed and Dangerous might be a good companion read to the above, dealing with the same issues at a more colloquial level.
