Single Young Child-Men

No one who knows me will be shocked if he sees me apply an economic analysis to this phenomenon: young men act like pigs because the law of supply and demand changed the incentives on their behavior.

Once it was, in the name of freedom and women’s equality, stigmatized rather than lauded for women to remain chaste until marriage, the supply of available demimondes and nymphs increased. A similar cultural shift away from duty-based morality toward moralities based on enlightened self interest ushered in intellectuals (ranging from the sincere to the truly strange) who then supported  the pursuit of unenlightened self-interest. A decline in religious sentiment and a general contempt for marriage and family formed an coincidence of interests, a meeting of minds, so to speak, between the Hugh Hefner like exploiters of women and the Gloria Steinem like defenders of women’s equality: both hated each other, but both were allied against marriage.

It is marriage and childrearing, more than any other single factor, that turns boys into men.

When marriage is optional, and man can philander or move in with concubines without benefit of marriage, moving out whenever his enlightened or unenlightened self-interest might prompts him, then manhood is optional as well. Since they have the advantages of marriage, the bed, without the commitments of marriage, the ring, and since they have the advantages of manhood, a job, without the commitments of manhood, a household to mind, a township to serve, why should these boy-men not beguile away the hours playing online games?

It is a question of economics. There was a time when womankind acted as a monopoly. All women cooperated in keeping the price of the marriage bed high; the price was the marriage ring. Any women who did not cooperate was ruthlessly ostracized, and, in earlier times, faced legal and not merely social penalties. Removing those penalties breaks that monopoly and cheapened the value placed on virginity, and therefore cheapens the esteem paid women. In terms of game-theory the price to be paid for refusing the advances of a suitor who wishes a prenuptial roll in the hay is higher because the other women in competition, who are will to provide that service without asking for marriage in return, are now numerous rather than rare, now the norm rather than scarlet-lettered freaks.

Back when women were inferior, they were honored and respected as superiors. Now that they are the equals of men, they are treated with contempt as inferiors. Make of that what you will.