[RickS]

There's a lot to unpack in that comment, and I'm not going to take a swing at much of it, except to say that you should be careful of confusing visibility with reality. Both the haves and the have nots are equipped with increasingly large megaphones (instagram, et al). Most people are regular, and guys have been "taking" other guy's girls since we were beating each other with sticks. The idea that this phenomenon is new or unnatural aims to make it easier to paint as unfair, and for the plaintiff to claim victimhood. Watch out for that. Lots of lonely guys trying to deflect blame away from their own shortcomings. It's not intellectually honest.

Anyway, I think the issue is one level up from that: Economic uncertainty in general, rather than strictly social/reproductive uncertainty. The former invites the latter.

[coop-throwaway]

Never before could a woman open an app and literally have hundreds of men at her door within minutes (all while men struggle to get a single match). This has created such an imbalance that the women are able to reject roughly the bottom 80% of men leaving most men struggling to get the attention of the bottom 20% of women.

And yes, there are lots of men with shortcomings, physical ones, that have rendered them out of the modern dating pool whereas in the past they would have met an equivalent woman. That's no longer the case as that equivalent woman can demand a much higher quality man -- there's an unlimited supply of men to pick from.

[lsc]

I think it is worse (and better) than it seems when you assume that your competition is other men.

It's not that you have to prove yourself better than other men; you have to prove that being with you is better than being alone.

Harder than that, you don't only have to prove yourself, you have to continue to remain better than being alone.

(I mean, I'm typing this from a male perspective, because that's what I know, and because I think that men have always had more freedom to 'opt out' than women, meaning that women having this power to 'opt out' is a relatively new phenomena, but I imagine that this cuts both ways)

Emancipation, I think, is a social good... and yes, that means we all will spend more time alone, but being alone is dramatically better, in my experience, than being in a bad relationship, even if it's dramatically worse than being in a good relationship. But maintaining a relationship is difficult, and now that most people have the option of saying "I'd rather be alone" many of them do, at least some of the time.

[mannigfaltig]

The statistics in this article contradict what you say: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/moneybox/2015/05/sex_hist...