Even if these guys did want to settle down, to be honest, there’s no one for them because the women are matching or exceeding their immature behavior.
Now IMO despite these women actually being portrayed in much media, all of the “I’m a hot mess” authors, comedians, I think STILL women are not looked upon as “immature” the way that men are. I think the women ARE actually immature by any objective sense, but there’s a disconnect between what women are currently doing and our historical expectations, so they’re default looked upon as more mature and less problematic, even if their questionable behavior exceeds that of men.
Shaming by attractiveness to women. Women aren’t my moral arbiters.
My comment was in reference to Amy Schumer, Lena Olin, etc. Also characters on sitcoms like Friends and How I Met Your Mother. I would in fact argue that none of these women or women in other entertainment are really shown as being particularly more mature than men. Typically they engage in behavior as equally immature.
However, I do think that there is a disconnect between these sorts of behaviors and the overall opinions of most people on the maturity level of women. Women’s behavior will be excused more or explained away, said that men acted this way for decades and now it’s our turn, without having any impact on perceived maturity level.
I’ve only passing familiarity with the shows mentioned but my impression has been that the women characters are not held up as so much more “mature” or “better” than the men are. That’s usually the married sitcoms with the man child husband and the patient wife. The male fantasy that our infantile behavior will be tolerated answered with unconditional love and acceptance.
In any case reality is something else.
FWIW my use of “maturity” is pretty judgement free. A ten year old is no worse of a person than a twenty year old or a fifty year old. They are however at different life stages with different tools and different interests dealing with different issues.
Many boys 15 to maybe 21 have always been looking for the secret for “scoring with the girls” as a status item. The developmental phase associated with that mind set is IMHO prolonged for the Millennials and beyond relative to earlier generations.
The point I’m trying to make is that the more current shows that don’t hold up the women as being better are more accurate, but I’m not sure that has filtered down to most people’s sociological views, which are more rooted in the older model of “doofus husband, tolerant wife.” Earlier eras didn’t have so many doofus husbands, that was a more recent development.
Let’s just be honest, most sex comes down to “I’m so horny” for either gender. Women don’t choose the good guys, they don’t have to choose the good guys. But let’s not pretend that they choose the good guys either. Wearing makeup and revealing clothing works for women. Is that lying to men? In a way, yes, but I think that’s fair game. Men get farther by talking a good game. Is that lying to women? Partially, yes, but that’s also fair. Sex is about as elemental and crass as it gets in life.
How do you define this group? As opposed to “bad boys”? Or by definition the group that includes yourself?
My WAG is that women choose men they find attractive out of the pool available to them, if any in that pool are attractive to them. Probably attractiveness isn’t 100% correlated with some abstract definition of being good. Or looks 100% either. It varies person to person of course. (FWIW my wife says she fell in love with my bushy curly hair, and that it was, as my avatar illustrates, false advertising.)
Kids in general from 15 to 21 are figuring out a lot of stuff related to sexuality and social status.
Young adults 22 or so and older (basically college graduates who are entering the “real world”) are figuring out different things related to adulthood like career, whether they want a family and so on.
A number of factors IMHO happened for Gen X and Millennials that led to a so-called “prolonged adolescence”. Economic factors like difficulty starting a professional career, high costs of living, and student debt contributed. Another major contributing factor is that a lot of young people simply don’t want to settle down with a house, mortgage, wife and kids. At least not right away. For a lot of them, maybe never. Sure it works out for a lot of people. But for other people, those things can be a prison.
I don’t think it’s “immature” for someone to not immediately want to saddle themselves with a bunch of responsibilities after graduating college and starting their career.
My personal observations are that the latter group is working on the former issues more commonly now. Issues like career and deciding whether or not they want a long term partnership let alone family are not being addressed until later. Again this is not “immature” in a negative way per se. It’s just spending more time in an earlier phase. Judging if that is or is not a good thing is a different discussion. My slight bias is to consider it more of a good thing than not. There’s no current reason to rush.
You may have different personal observations. I have no data to offer at this time.
I’d widen that range to about 13-early thirties. Somewhere around there, the pool of available women drops off dramatically (most are married or crazy at that point), and the men are too old to hang out at the typical young-person bars and venues anymore. So they tend to get out of that game.
I think a lot of that is actually an outgrowth of women’s-lib type stuff.
Women have long been expected to put their careers on hold because of kids, etc… and then suffer whatever career penalties and setbacks there are as a result of that. And there used to be a lot of social pressure to get married much earlier than there is today as well. So in Gen-X anyway, being the first real generation born after all the feminist/women’s lib stuff, a lot of women hit their 20s and decided they were going to spend the next decade NOT being married or having kids and concentrating on their careers/having fun. Then they settled down in their late 20s or early 30s and did the whole traditional family thing.
Men on the other hand, didn’t really see much change; there was always an expectation that we’d concentrate on our careers just like our fathers and grandfathers did. And there was less pressure to get married as well. So the men just went along with it all- concentrated on career and partied. I wouldn’t call it immaturity, just different circumstances. I think a lot of people are better off overall having had that decade to be themselves/find themselves without having been burdened/pinned by marriage and children right out of college/high school. I know I am for sure.
The men are affected by the fact that they are participating in this lifestyle for a longer period.
The higher status men probably aren’t affected too much. The ones that still want to get married young can probably find women who still want that. The ones that don’t still have plenty of serial dating options during this period.
The lower status men have likely been affected the most. More people are on the market at any one time. A lower status man is always going to be competing with the high status men that are just playing the field or between relationships. So if a woman goes on a dating app, some of these men are always out there, and the lower status men come across as less appealing. Whereas in the past that’s all that would have been out there for unattached women, so their status would have increased by comparison.
Often one route for the lower status men is single moms, and some of them have always taken that route. Though as family dynamics continue to become more fluid, the lower status men are probably less appealing even in this context. Because, again, there’s at least some high status men that are available for these roles as well.
So I think that the number of men in this sort of situation, and the amount of time they spend there, has vastly increased.
Are there women perceived as low status? Yes, but they are far fewer in number than low status men as far as desirability of the two genders is concerned.
So maybe the irony is that in transitioning to a more equal relationship dynamic (everyone can do what they want as they are able) we’ve also transitioned to more unequal outcomes, at least for some of the participants.
I would say that it had something to do with the following.
1 The internet/www really took off in the mid 1990s.
2 What were fringe interests got a lot of publicity and promoters, who had been denied access to other media, were able to get an audience.
3 In the case of seduction, that promoter was Ross Jeffies - who sold courses to thousands, some of whom became promoters themselves.
4 The promoters were selling a story of personal transformation based on the idea of secret knowledge - NLP. hypnosis, persuasion, pyschology applied to the problem of seduction.
5 By the late 1990s/ early 2000s, this culture had reached the mainstream - Tom Cruise playing a Jeffries character in Magnolia.
6 The same techniques of persuasion etc were, in my opinion, used to market the courses.
Some of the books work. Charles Manson used techniques learned from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People to build a cult.
Some of the women remained obsessed with Manson for many years after his imprisonment.
Most people that used that book just wanted to fit in socially and make friends. Fitting in socially and teamwork at the work place is important for career advancement.
