Throughout history... from the stone age, to the Victorian era.. Men worked.. they provide.. and they pursue... Details changed throughout history.... At the most basic level, this has not changed.....Fundamentally, "the work, provide, and pursue" remains for men..
This is accurate. The fundamental premise remains, but this model is being challenged.
Men work, provide, and pursue.
Men are still pursuing more than ever. I believe men are now having to put more effort into pursuing than ever before.
Pursuing does look different now than it did in the past for men.
In the 2010s-2020s, pursuing has shifted more towards tech-based methods. More of pursuance occurs on swipe apps and social media platforms than ever. A lot of men like the idea of being able to sit at home in more comfortable clothing and pursue from behind an electronic screen with swiping and sending text-based messages. From the 1970s-2000s, when men wanted to pursue when lacking social circle introductions, it looked and felt different. Men would have to leave their homes, get dressed and look presentable, drive/take public transportation, park a car (if driving), and often spend money in a nightlife venues (and sometimes in a non-bar effort). That feels like a lot more effort, though the inefficiencies of tech-based dating for most men make the older school way less of an effort. There's an illusion of efficiency in sitting at home, swiping, and sending text-based messages. The problem is that response rates are so low for most men. When most men use swipe apps, they typically get matches on less than 1% of their right swipes. Even with their matches, few turn into dates. It's inefficient. However, for the 90th percentile + of men, the amount of matches and first dates they can get from swipe apps exceeds what they could get solely from real life efforts. For them, the efficiency is real and not an illusion. Additionally, sending DMs on Instagram is only more efficient and effective for a small percentage of men.
The male whose SMV is based primarily around providing is nearly extinct in the United States (likely true in other Western nations too). There's not much of a need for a provider male anymore with women having more education and working opportunities. When women had few working opportunities, the provider male had value to a woman. Now, women have both education and working opportunities or government benefits to replace any value that a provider male would have had in the past.
There are statistics that fewer prime age working men (25-54 years old) are actually working. Many 25-54 year old men have dropped out of the work force due to a lack of sex. Why bother to work if the pursuance of vagina isn't going well? Although the basement dwelling Millennial/Gen Z lower tier beta/omega exists and has grown in size, it is still a smaller subset of men. The typical man still works to live and works in order to try to attract women. In real life, this is the run of the mill beta male who struggles to attention from women. Every white collar office with more than a handful of employees has at least one of these betas. Some of these betas can be found in more blue collar/manual labor jobs too.
At the most basic level, women get pursued, and they picked ONE guy.. and they stayed with that one guy. Why did they pick that one guy? Because the pill did not exist.. because there was a high chance they did not survive if they picked the wrong guy... or their life would be very rough.. Women did not "date around".
However, it is different for women. No where in time was it ok for women to sleep around especially before the pill or efficient ways of preventing pregnancy. What was common throughout history, women picked one guy when they were young.. That has changed. It has fundamentally changed women.. .which has also changed men but only in the respects of relationships, but not in the most simplistic way. That is what I meant when I said it is the women's choices that has lead to the situation we are in now... not men's choices.
The birth control pill and feminism have changed how women behave in life. This ended up changing the mating market as a whole.
Second Wave Feminism (1960s-1980s era feminism thought) and the birth control pill emerged around the same time but didn't have immediate impact. The changes were longer term and gradual. Women also started to pursue higher education and careers more, as I'll get into below. Both Second Wave Feminism and birth control affected this.
Before the birth control pill, women could not managed their own birth control. Male condoms existed prior to the birth control pill's invention in 1960. Other birth control options have become available to women besides the hormonal birth control pill.
The mentality that women have around their use of birth control was different in the 1960s-1970s than it has been in recent decades. In the earlier days, birth control was less of a motivator for promiscuity that it has been recently. Women were still getting married earlier in life and had more modest partner counts in those days. Birth control was utilized as a shorter term solution for a woman who did intend to have a monogamous marriage with children. In the late 1960s-1970s, there was a small percentage of women was promiscuous and into the "free love" concept, but that was less of the norm. Even in the 1970s, 10-20 years after the invention of the birth control pill, most women were getting married around ages 21-24 with less than 2 sexual partners. That isn't happening now.
Second Wave Feminism promoted female independence. Independence was to be achieved through white collar careers. More and more women started getting bachelor's and advanced degrees so that they wouldn't need to depend on any one male. Over time, this postponed marriages and reduced female fertility. While women were postponing marriages, they weren't postponing sex. Women decided to still have sex but in less committed arrangements before an eventual marriage. These less committed arrangements did create the reality of increased lifetime partner counts, both for women who eventually married and for women that never married.
